Orson Welles, Volume 3 Read online

  By Simon Callow

  BEING AN ACTOR

  SHOOTING THE ACTOR

  CHARLES LAUGHTON: A DIFFICULT ACTOR

  ORSON WELLES: THE ROAD TO XANADU

  ORSON WELLES: HELLO AMERICANS

  LOVE IS WHERE IT FALLS

  MY LIFE IN PIECES

  CHARLES DICKENS AND THE GREAT THEATRE OF THE WORLD

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Simon Callow

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK

  978-0-698-19553-0

  Version_1

  For Sebastian Fox, my beloved, who made all this possible.

  In memory of the secretaries who survived to tell the tale, Ann Rogers (1907–2004) and Rita Ribolla (1908–1986).

  During the prolonged applause when the curtain fell, one did ungratefully feel that one was watching a jet-propelled vampire take a bow, surrounded by the pale husks of his victims. The show is, in fact, a one-man band; and as all the world’s a stage, it didn’t seem odd to wonder why Mr Welles hadn’t run for president instead . . . is he just a circus figure – a strong man, say, or an illusionist?

  Anonymous reviewer at the first night of Welles’s Othello at the St James Theatre London, 1951: Third Man into Moor

  What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? –

  If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,

  Translucent mould of me it shall be you!

  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!

  Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!

  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself,

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  from Walt Whitman, A Song of Myself

  CONTENTS

  By Simon Callow

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface: A Word of Explanation

  CHAPTER ONE: The Most Beautiful Baby of 1947

  CHAPTER TWO: Blessed and Damned

  CHAPTER THREE: Der Dritter Mann Persönlich

  CHAPTER FOUR: Citizen Coon

  CHAPTER FIVE: Man of Mystery

  CHAPTER SIX: Reason Not the Need

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Scorpion and the Frog

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Most Telegenic Character

  CHAPTER NINE: Call Me Ishmael

  CHAPTER TEN: Around the World Again

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Schizo King

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Orson Welles, Television Needs You

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Venice of America

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Return of Awesome Welles

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Everyone Loves the Fellow Who’s Smiling

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: More Rhino Roars

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Welles on Trial

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Let’s Have a Brainwash

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Fathers and Sons

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Genius Without Portfolio

  Photographs

  Orson Welles’s Performances as an Actor

  The Stage Productions

  The Films

  Television Productions

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PREFACE: A WORD OF EXPLANATION

  WHEN, IN 1989, my English publisher Nick Hern and I approached that splendid elder-statesman of American publishing, Aaron Asher, with a proposal to write a biography of Orson Welles, I said to him that I thought it would have to be in three volumes, the third of which, I suggested, should be a novel. He looked at me, pityingly, and said, ‘If you are very lucky, you will be allowed to write this biography in two volumes, neither of which will be a novel.’

  After I had written and delivered the first volume, The Road to Xanadu, which culminated in the release of Citizen Kane, I hit a rock. It was clearly going to be impossible to write the remaining forty-two years of a life which consisted of a continuous volcanic eruption of films, plays, radio programmes, journalism, painting and political interventions, without resorting to the one-damned-thing-after-another school of biography – a method I had specifically set out to avoid. With wonderful nonchalance Dan Franklin, by then my publisher at Jonathan Cape, accepted my proposal of writing a second volume which would cover exactly five years of Welles’s life – five years packed with adventures and experiments in various media, but focusing above all on politics. This book was called Hello Americans, the title of one of Welles’s many radio series in which he valiantly sought to interest the nation in its history and its place in the world. The third and final volume would trace Welles’s life from 1947 when, at the end of those five largely unsuccessful years, he seemed to throw in the sponge, and stomped off to Europe. There, on and off (but mostly on), he spent the next twenty years of his life. He then returned to America, where he passionately pursued a number of projects which never reached completion – the only two films he finished from then until his death in 1985 were both in fact made in Europe.

  Knowing that I had this difficult Wellesian period in my sights, friends sympathised with me – ‘how sad it is,’ they said, ‘such a terrible decline.’ But I have never shared that view. Welles did it his way. If he had modified his behaviour – if he had trimmed his sails, if he had pulled in his horns – he could have made many more films. But he would not then have been the force of nature that he was. He would just have been another film-maker. As it was, this period in Welles’s life left behind him at least two films, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, that are remarkable by any standards, plus extraordinary work in several other media – but above all I looked forward to tracing that arc as Welles struck out towards the unknown region.

  Such was my plan. But I was baulked by Welles himself. His prolificity during these years was so immense, the circumstances surrounding every venture (successful or unsuccessful) on which he embarked were so complex and extraordinary, and the ambitiousness of his approach to each was so unfettered, that had I attempted to encompass nearly forty years from 1947 till his death, the book would have run to considerably more than a thousand pages; just lifting it without an osteopath in attendance would have been risky. It has therefore seemed entirely logical to end this third volume with Chimes at Midnight, the film widely thought to be Welles’s masterpiece and unquestionably his most personal work. It is also a culmination of his work in the theatre, to which – with his production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros – he finally bade farewell after an epoch-defining quarter of a century of provocative activity. This leaves a fourth – and truly final – volume to deal with his last two decades of unceasing exploration and experimentation, most of it in conjunction with a collaborator who was also his muse and his mistress, who inspired him to venture into territories w
here he had as yet never been.

  The present volume is called One-Man Band for obvious reasons. Frustrated in his dealings with every studio he ever worked for, Welles made a full declaration of independence with his film of Othello, taking on more and more of the functions associated with film-making: raising the money, designing, editing, sometimes even shooting scenes himself. He only ever worked for a Hollywood studio – with its clearly demarcated roles and its hierarchical structure – on one more occasion after his self-exile; otherwise, he was free. But with that freedom came the possibilities of chaos, and chaos (or something very like it) was the element in which he moved for most of his remaining career.

  It is a life like no other, and as before I have tried to give an impression of what it was like to live that life, and to have been part of it, to be plunged into what Micheál MacLiammóir so drolly called the Welles vortex. Welles packed more living into his life, pursued more professions, thrust out in more directions and formed more intense relationships than any twenty men put together. It is this life that has interested me, of which the making of movies was such a central and integral part, more than the finished results, remarkable as they often were. This sets me apart from many students of Welles for whom Welles the auteur is their sole focus. Welles would not have understood that, or approved of it. ‘I’m profoundly cynical about my work and about most works I see in the world,’ he told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1958. ‘But I’m not cynical about the act of working on material . . . it’s the act that interests me, not the result; and I’m taken by the result only when it gives forth the odour of human sweat or human thought.’ He considered all of his work to be, as he said again and again, simply a series of experiments. His work was central to his life; each one of his major films emerged out of quite extraordinary personal circumstances and were made in the most extraordinary conditions, to the degree that the making of them is almost as fascinating as the films themselves. And that, too, would have seemed just as it should be to Welles.

  He was a quintessential romantic artist: for him the experience of making his essentially subjective works – whether for the cinema or the theatre – was an end in itself. Truffaut liked to quote Welles’s comment that he believed that ‘a work is good to the degree that it expresses the man who created it’. And the process of creation, for him, was impossible without inspiration. Craft, skill, intelligence, planning, all admirable in themselves, were nothing without inspiration. Sometimes it came to him and sometimes it didn’t. But he was always trying to provoke it, in himself and in his collaborators: always trying to storm the citadel of creativity. The romantic approach to art is as much about the artist’s experience as it is about the audience’s. The classical artist tries to create something objective – objectively true, objectively beautiful – and he or she is governed by a conception of fidelity: to the material, to the form and to the audience. The romantic is inspired by the idea of freedom: freedom of expression, freedom of feeling, freedom from the audience’s expectations. The romantic artist says: ‘Take it or leave it; this is what I feel, believe, want. Share it.’ The classical artist says: ‘This is a distillation of what I have understood. Use it.’ The romantic artist is a child still, the classical artist, grown-up, for better or for worse, in both cases. Welles was not Michelangelo, he was Leonardo (to whom he did in fact compare himself, with all due modesty); Leonardo who, in the end, didn’t care whether The Last Supper lasted; all he wanted was the experience of having painted it. Welles told André Bazin and Charles Bitsch in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma:

  We professional experimenters have inherited an old tradition. Some of us have been the greatest of artists, but we never made our muses into our mistresses. For example, Leonardo considered himself to be a scientist who painted rather than a painter who was a scientist. Don’t think that I compare myself to Leonardo; I’m trying to explain that there’s a long line of people who evaluate their work according to a different hierarchy of values, almost moral values.

  Occasionally (perhaps quite often) what happened with Welles on the location or in the rehearsal room was more remarkable than what ended up on the screen or on the stage. Sometimes, the process itself revealed the inadequacy of the material, human or otherwise, and he lost interest. His procedures were all his own, and they rarely fitted in with anything that a production manager or a studio executive had planned. In a sense, this approach of his was at core innocent, resembling the delight a child takes in inventing, in pretending, in transforming the materials at hand into projections of its imagination. But with the innocence of childhood sometimes came its tantrums, its evasions, its cruelty, its destructiveness. That such childlike elements were connected to a highly sophisticated, well-stocked and subtle brain is equally striking.

  All this is uncommon, and needs facing head-on. Welles often behaved very badly – at work and in life – and it simply will not do to pretend that this behaviour was the fabrication of gossips or enemies. Nor is it acceptable, it seems to me, to insist that omelettes cannot be made without the breaking of eggs. One cannot simply brush this side of his nature aside as if it were irrelevant or beneath discussion, for it explains a great deal of what it was like to be around Welles, and also a great deal of what it was like to be Welles. And that has, from the beginning, been my quarry: not in order to judge him, but to describe him, as one might wish to describe any great natural phenomenon. Because Welles was, indeed, phenomenal, not to mention extraordinary, egregious, unprecedented. What Kenneth Tynan said of Welles early in Welles’s career remains a central insight: ‘A fair bravura actor, a good bravura director, but an incomparable bravura personality.’

  In the twenty-five years since I started writing, Welles studies have gone through a huge revolution. In 1989 he was a prisoner of two different guerilla factions: the semioticians, blissfully deconstructing him to the point at which he would no longer have recognised himself; and the demeaners, led by the late Charles Higham, determined to give Welles his comeuppance. A new genre emerged throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the form of books by professional critics who sought to understand themselves better through their examination of Welles’s place in their lives. But in recent years, something far more interesting has started to happen: individual studies of the making of the films, free from either personal animus or theoretical bias, drawing on direct documentary evidence. Supreme among these books is Orson Welles At Work (2008), by the French scholars François Thomas and Jean-Pierre Berthomé, which is quite simply the most illuminating book about Welles to have appeared since Richard France’s The Theatre of Orson Welles (1977), a similarly detailed account of what Welles actually did, as opposed to simply what he produced. An even more recent book, Alberto Anile’s Orson Welles in Italy (2013), surveying both his professional and his personal experience in that country, has shed brilliant light on one of the most revealing and intriguing periods of Welles’s life by carefully examining contemporary newspaper reports and interviewing the people who worked with him. My debt to both of these books is immense.

  I have been inestimably helped in understanding what was going on in Welles’s life by the existence of diaries – some published, some not – kept by key participants in the making of Welles’s films, notably Micheál MacLiammóir’s two diaries, Charlton Heston’s published diary and his memoir, and Keith Baxter’s memoir, which is a primary source for information about Chimes at Midnight on stage and on film. In addition, I have been given free access to the unpublished diaries of two of Welles’s secretaries – Ann Rogers and Rita Ribolla – and the actress Fay Compton (Emilia in Othello). George Fanto, Welles’s cameraman on Othello, allowed me to read his unpublished memoir of working with Welles. I have also conducted over a hundred interviews with those who knew Welles intimately, starting in 1989; as far as I know, many of the interviewees spoke only to me, and many of them are now dead. From all of this abundant material I have tried as faithfully as possible, using a polyphony of voices,
to bring Welles and his world to life. Nobody who ever met Welles doubted that they had encountered someone exceptional, and, to an unusual degree (perhaps paralleled only by the case of Dickens), people were moved to capture him in words: in letters, in interviews, in journals. It is to these testimonials that I have most frequently turned, more than to critical studies or film histories. They have often identified the connective tissue in events that have seemed otherwise isolated and illogical, and through their words things that seemed impossible or absurd began to make sense. Reading these accounts, I have begun to sense the existence of a continuous Welles, not one that simply staggers from one anecdote to another. The technique I have applied in trying to organise all this material may perhaps be compared to the way in which Welles edited his films: I have juxtaposed and woven together images, incidents, phrases, seeking (sometimes by means of echoes, sometimes sharp contradictions) to give an impression of how Welles moved through life. The greatest challenge has been to deal with the simultaneity of his activities. A month of Welles’s life is worth a year, maybe a decade of anyone else’s. He always seems to be, in Stephen Leacock’s immortal phrase, galloping off in all directions, whether in pursuit of a woman, a film, a theatre company or a history of world economy; he’s always editing, directing, acting, designing, screenwriting, making a speech, painting; in one moment paying loving homage to a long-forgotten style, in the next forging an entirely radical new one.

  I have not attempted to psychoanalyse Welles, though the temptations are immense – why all those false noses? What was it about those enormous cigars? Why did he grow to such unfeasibly huge dimensions? I have not attempted it, because it is beyond my competence to do so, but also because I want to know what he was, rather than how he became that. The man has been my quarry, but unlike Ahab I have not sought to kill him or to stuff him, rather to capture him alive and kicking.