502 See, for example, Richard Gregory, Mirrors in Mind (London: Spektrum, 1998).
503Rosenbaum in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 472.
504Wood (1990), 181. See also Naremore (1989 ed.), 275; Cooper (2000), 197.
505 Naremore (1989 ed), 275; Wood (1990), 195.
506Moreau, American Film Institute address, 9 Feb 1975.
507Thomson (1998), 322. He gave a more sympathetic view in Thomson (1996), 251-252.
Orson’s continuing feelings for Rita thwarted a potential affair with Corrine Calvet. The 22-yearold French starlet had recently arrived in Hollywood under contract with Paramount. She closely resembled Rita Hayworth, a point that the studio’s makeup artists immediately enhanced. While partying with Errol Flynn’s crowd she met Orson and they began dating. She was enthralled. So, when on their second or third dinner at a private club (probably Sam Spiegel’s) with private rooms upstairs, Miss Calvet wanted him. Unfortunately, when during their candlelight dinner he whispered bluntly, “I want to make love to you,” she blurted out, “You want to make love to me or to Rita?” Orson was silent. Calvet said, “Let’s go,” and touched his hand. But it was too late. He looked somber and sad and, reaching for her wrap, said only “I’ll take you home.” Not another word was said until they met years later in Venice.508
* * * Beginning in April Orson's old friend and political mentor, Louis Dolivet, began getting much unwelcome and startling publicity when a column in the Washington Evening Star alleged he'd served in Europe as an important secret agent of the Communist International.
Like Orson's future fictitious character of Gregory Arkadin, Dolivet had a great secret based on a lie. He’d claimed on his 1940 American visa to have been born in France. But investigations on behalf of his estranged American wife essentially confirmed the newspaper story and much more. The family lawyer had hired a highly qualified investigator, Ladislas Farago, a recent U.S. Navy Intelligence analyst with excellent contacts in five intelligence services, one American and four European. His sources agreed that Dolivet was an agent of Soviet Intelligence. The man’s dossiers revealed that he’d been born Ludovic Brecher in Galicia when it was part of the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents had brought him to Rumania whence, as "Udeanu" he moved alone to Switzerland. There he became involved with the group headed by the leading Swiss Bolshevik, Léon Nicole. After Nicole's puny uprising failed in late 1932, Dolivet was expelled next year, going to France. There, by 1935, he'd become closely associated with the Communist-led “Popular Front”, the left-wing struggle against the rising fascism of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. In 1935 he was made head of the Rassemblement Universelle Populaire (RUP), a thinly camouflaged Communist propaganda organization in Paris. He had been under the secret control of Willi Münzenberg, German Communist and leading propagandist until the latter broke with Stalin in 1937, was expelled from the Party in 1938, and assassinated in France in 1940. When Münzenberg had phased out in 1937, Dolivet’s control passed directly to Otto Katz, a Soviet NKVD (the later KGB) agent who had been Münzenberg’s case officer all along. Through the intervention of Pierre Cot, Dolivet was granted French citizenship in 1937. Two years later the new French government started proceedings to revoke that citizenship. Dolivet was serving in the French Air Force in 1940 when France surrendered to Nazi Germany whereupon he fled to Marseilles where the American consul got him on a ship bound for the USA.509
Although the full details of Dolivet’s involvement with Soviet Intelligence await the release of additional Russian files, recent research confirms that he had been a Communist activist by 1933 in Switzerland and a knowing and willing agent of Soviet Intelligence from at least as early as 1935 through the end of World War II and probably until 1952 when the Stalin-inspired show-trials in Czechoslovakia ended with the execution of Otto Katz, Dolivet’s main mentor throughout.510
508 Corinne Calvet, Has Corinne Been a Good Girl? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 3-4.
509Straight (1983), 252-258; Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg (Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 1974); Patrick Marnham, The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost (London: Murray, 2000, index under "Dolivet" and "Katz"; Dallin (1955), 311.
Dolivet hadn’t revealed these autobiographical essentials to either his wife, actress Beatrice Straight, or his brother-in-law, Michael Straight, who was himself already loosely entangled in another Soviet intelligence web. But even if Orson had known any of this background before he read it in the papers in 1947, it’s likely that he’d have dismissed it as mere red-baiting gossip. After all, many refugees from Hitler’s Europe had survived by fabricating their biographies. Indeed Orson might well have thought “so-what” — after all Dolivet and his Free World association were America’s and Britain’s ally against the Nazi German enemy. In fact, this was precisely the reason that Dolivet’s Free World activities were also being secretly infiltrated and backed by agents of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS = “M.I.6") –- a fact that would not become public until after Orson’s death.511
Still, Orson was now warned about Dolivet. A wiser man might have avoided any further contact with such a shadowed character. But, a decade hence, as we’ll see, Orson would let Dolivet back into his world one last time and pay a high price for his trust. Then Dolivet’s true story would prove even more sinister than Orson had been ready to credit.
THE JAZZ MAN April wasn’t a good month for Orson. If the news about Dolivet was disturbing, the release that month of the film New Orleans must have been a bitter disappointment. It was the last sad gasp of Orson’s original plan in 1941 to do a movie on the history of jazz, the untitled project that eventually came to be known as The Story of Jazz. At that time he’d hired novelist Elliot Paul to write the script. Paul did a rough draft together with three unproduced scripts (written in September 1941 for Orson’s weekly CBS radio show, Orson Welles’ Almanac).512
We’ve already seen how Orson’s long love affair with jazz music had begun in 1936 in connection with his stage production of the black Macbeth. Now, eight years later, in early 1944 his radio Almanac show, was stuck with CBS's regular studio musicians. The Lud Gluskin Orchestra was competent and popular but hopelessly conventional. So Orson decided that he would close each show with a guest-star jazz group. In those days jazz was a daring sound to radio listeners. Indeed it was an unfamiliar sound to the overwhelming majority of Americans unless they were from Louisiana, active performers in the world of popular music, or Negro, particularly older ones.
The movie seemed promising in the pre-production stage. It had a basically authentic and fairly strong script by Elliot Paul and Dick Irving Hyland, based on a story by Paul and Herbert J. Biberman, which in turn was based largely on Orson’s original draft concept. Signed on were Louis Armstrong, Meade Lux Lewis, Kid Ory, and the Woody Herman big band. Billie Holiday had even recorded some songs for it in Hollywood the previous September-October. But this promise of a nearly definitive feature film story of jazz was rapidly belied by pressure from United Artist executives to rewrite the script to tell a wholly conventional tale of a troubled young white opera singer in which Billie Holiday plays her maid and New Orleans become mere background.513
510 Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (New York: The Free Press, 1994), index under Dolivet; Allen Weinstein & Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999), 55, where name is garbled from successive transliterations to “Dolliway”. On his three-way relationship with Cot and Jean Moulin see Pierre Péan, Vies et Morts de Jean Moulin (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
511 British Security Coordination, The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-1945 (New York: Fromm International, 1999), 61, 62, 70-71, 308.
512Wood (1990), 14, 176-179 . These scripts are now in the Lilly Library. See the forthcoming biography of Elliot Paul by Arnold Goldman.
Ors
on's 4th and 5th shows featured the King Cole Trio, a jazz group Orson had admired since first hearing them live three years earlier when their blues rendition of "It Can't Be Love" had inspired an ironic moment in Citizen Kane. Now, for Orson’s show, they performed straight jazz with "Hit That Jive Jack" and "Solid Potato Salid".
Southern California was home to the Jazz Man Record Shop. Located on Santa Monica Boulevard near the Sunset Strip, it had been founded in 1938 by David "The Jazz Man" Stuart. It was not only the world's first jazz-only record store but Stuart was such a purist that he wouldn't even carry Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, not even their fine small-combo jazz records like Goodman's Trio and Shaw's Gramercy Five. This policy carried over to Stuart's recording label, which issued Jazz Man Records #1 in 1942 with San Francisco's Wally Rose on ragtime piano. Jazz Man soon followed with records of New Orleans' black trumpeter Bunk Johnson and Frisco's own Lu Watters's all-white Yerba Buena Jazz Band.514
By 1940 Stuart had also begun broadcasting his jazz records daily over a local station, making him one of the world's first hot jazz disc jockeys. (My father, Lloyd Whaley, didn't begin broadcasting his own large jazz collection until the late 1940s when he did so on weekend nights in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
Miss Marili Morden was Stuart's partner (and briefly his wife) at the Jazz Man shop where she also handled bookings for local jazz musicians. In 1940 she'd booked blues-jazz guitarist T-Bone Walker into the big-money whites-only El Trocadero nightclub on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. There the black Texan proved an instant and spectacular draw. She then moved him to Billy Berg’s Trouville Club at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood. But T-Bone's fans from the downtown allnegro Little Harlem club in Watts, were being shunted up to the balcony (“nigger heaven” the whites called it). When Marili saw this, she told Berg he'd do better business with an "everyone welcome" policy. So Berg's became the first white nightclub in the Los Angeles area to integrate its audience. Berg's success quickly opened up LA's night spots to the benefit of most concerned.515 But racial integration wasn’t working as smoothly in the nite clubs on Central Avenue in the black ghetto of Watts.516
Orson, as one of this early wave of local white jazz aficionados, had discovered Jazz Man and one day in February (1944), went to the shop on a mission. By this time Dave Stuart had left the shop and his wife to run a Hollywood art gallery. So Orson asked sole-owner Marili to put together a band of traditional New Orleans players for his show. She chose among those who were in town and available, which was easy because most locals were only semi-employed. She collected a distinguished crew of Dixieland musicians: Tailgate trombonist Kid Ory was at age 57 the oldest of the group. Trumpeter Papa Mutt Carey had been working the railroad as a Pullman porter; clarinetist Jimmie Noone had been playing at the Streets of Paris club in Hollywood; guitarist Bud Scott; bassist Ed Garland; and pianist Buster Wilson. Drummer Zutty Singleton, drawn from Berg's Trouville Club, was at 45 the group's youngster. All seven were black and all from Louisiana except the Georgia-born Wilson and all had been full-time pro jazz musicians in the 1920s. And, as all had worked together before at one time or another, they were now ready to play with minimal rehearsal.517
513 Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), 427-429;. Nicholson (1995), 152-155. The movie is available on DVD.
514On jazz in LA in those days see particularly Richard Bock, William Claxton, Nesuhi Ertegun (editors), Jazz West Coast (Hollywood: Linear, 1955).
515Helen Oakley Dance, Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 49-54.
516Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: Universory of California Press, 1998), 101-102, 309.
The group was an instant success and Orson kept them on for the rest of the show's run. Their 6th show was scheduled for April 19th. That morning, four days short of his 49th birthday, overweight Jimmie Noone had a heart attack at home and died. He was replaced on that broadcast by Wade Whaley. Orson prefaced their performance with a moving eulogy to Noone followed by the band's version of "Tin Roof Blues", a sad lament highlighted by Mutt Carey's wailing trumpet. When the piece ended Orson raised his hands as a signal for the audience to remain silent. He then read the Lord's Prayer and the show silently went off the air. But the audience sat in stunned silence. One person would recall, "I really learned what the blues were all about."518
Wade Whaley, who'd retired from music to work a local shipyard, had lost his touch and so was let go after that one show in favor of the great and incomparable Barney Bigard.519 Bigard recalled of Orson that:520 “He loved jazz and had a great knowledge of it. We used to go up to his house after the broadcasts and he would tell me things about my career that I had forgotten myself.”
Bigard had prior commitments that pulled him off the show toward the end. So Ory asked Joe Darensbourg, a jazz clarinetist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to take over for the final show or two. So Darensbourg, a 39-year-old Cajun of French descent on both sides of his family, integrated the band.521
Dave Dexter, one of the few early knowledgeable American writers on jazz musicians, recognized Orson’s contribution:522 “Welles, who knows, loves and respects the real jazz with a sincerity which is wonderful to encounter, scorned existing California race prejudice in order to make the group a regular weekly feature of his program.”
San Francisco Examiner music critic Phil Elwood wrote the somewhat hyperbolic liner notes for the "air checks", that is, recordings taken directly off the air, that were released 31 years later. He concluded that these:523
Ory broadcasts ... brought authentic New Orleans jazz into millions of homes, for the first time. What Ory and his bandsmen thought was to be a one-night gig turned out to be the lighting of a fuse that ultimately detonated the traditional jazz explosion that was heard 'round the world.
When the broadcasts ended the band managed to stay together, although now under the clear leadership of Ory, to the annoyance of Papa Mutt who considered himself the Kid's equal or better. But Ory asserted his new role by renaming the group Kid Ory's Creole Jazz Band. Jimmy Noone's "Tin Roof Blues", now renamed "Jimmie's Blues", became Ory's signature tune. And Orson remained a loyal fan.
517 Elwood (1975).
518Brady (1989), 370-371, with corrections from Elwood (1975).
519“Elwood (1975); Orson Horsin’ With Jazz”, Metronome, Vol.60, No.5 (May 1944), 13; Daniel Mark Epstein, Nat King Cole (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 116. Twelve numbers taken (“airchecks”) from the broadcasts from 15 Mar thru 12 Jul 1944 were issued in 1975 on Folklyric Records 9008 LP, somewhat mis- titled “Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band” .
520Barney Bigard, With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Clarinetist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 85-86.
521Darensbourg (1988), 100.
522Dexter (1946), 16, 170-171. Dexter, a wizard at spotting musical talent, became a deservedly successful recordc producer, particularly after signing the Beattles to their first American recordings.
523Elwood (1975).
Ory was suddenly doing well with one or two gigs weekly with the full band and four nights each week with a quartet at the Tip Toe Inn out on Whittier Boulevard in LA. Besides Ory, the latter group had Wilson on (piano), Darensbourg (soprano sax & clarinet), and Alton Redd (drums). Sometimes other musicians like the legendary but over-the-hill trumpeter, Bunk Johnson, would sit in. Regulars in the audience included Marili Morden of Jazz Man. She was accompanied by her new partner and soon-to-be husband, Nesuhi Ertegun. This precocious and eclectic 29 year-old elder son of the Turkish Ambassador to the U.S. was already a prominent jazz writer, future head of Crescent and Atlantic Records, creator of one of the world's finest collections of surrealist art, and in 1991 a posthumous Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. Darensbourg describes the establishment's ambience:524
The Tip Top [Toe] Inn was tough, you better believe it. It was a hangout for Mexican exfighters. It was more or l
ess exclusively Mexican; if anyone outside of a Mexican came in, even a Spanish guy, you could expect trouble. Look like there wouldn't be an hour pass without a fight would break out in the damn place.
That other regular, Orson Welles, fit in fine. By introducing jazz on his radio show Orson had produced much more than a footnote in the history of jazz, although that's the most his other biographers have appreciated, while garbling what few facts they did bother to report. Nor, conversely, was his contribution quite the turning point that Darensbourg and Elwood would later recall. The only dramatic up-turn was Ory's. In sum, Orson's contribution is a chapter, a small but important chapter about one of a handful of major actions that decade which, via radio, would jump-start the dixieland jazz revival throughout the West and thence into mainstream America. However, this revival was limited almost entirely to audiences of whites plus some young black musicians who came to hear and celebrate their pioneering brethren.525
Orson’s advocacy of jazz wasn’t just riding along with some popular white fad. He proved this by being among the handful of celebrities who would cheer jazz’s latest spin-off as revolutionary when the great majority of white music critics and promoters found it merely revolting. This emerging jazz form was Bebop or Bop as pioneered by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Charlie Parker, guitarist Charlie Christian, and singer Ella Fitzgerald.526
Black singer Herb Jeffries recalled Orson as one of the white regulars at “Brothers”, the weirdest late night spot in LA. The proprietor-bartender, known only as Brother, was one of the regular bartenders at the Dunbar Hotel, the main hostelry for visiting black entertainers. When the Dunbar’s bar closed at midnight, the legal wartime closing time, Brother would glide part favored customers and say, “Oh, see you later.” That was his coded invitation to drop by his integrated after-hours club, which he ran at his white house on East Adams Boulevard. There he would greet blacks like Herb Jeffries, Bobby Short, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and whites like orchestra leader Charlie Barnet, and actors Cesar Romero, Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth, and Orson Welles. He’d greet them at the front door in partial drag -– Chinese gown, mascara, and a little makeup — saying, “Hello, darling, how are you? Come in.” There they found softly lighted sitting rooms with pillows all around and quiet music from the piano while Brother and his staff would even sell breakfast with the booze until sunrise.527 I assume Orson was as disappointed as all the above named to see his grand conception end in 90 minutes of black-&-white junk.
Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1 Page 42