Orson Welles: Hello Americans Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Simon Callow

  Praise

  Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface

  PART ONE

  TARZAN TRIUMPHS

  CHAPTER ONE: Orson Ascendant

  CHAPTER TWO: Pampered Youth

  CHAPTER THREE: The Best Man in Hollywood

  CHAPTER FOUR: Carnival

  CHAPTER FIVE: Only Orson and God

  CHAPTER SIX: Pomona

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Turning a Bad Koerner

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Four Men on a Raft

  CHAPTER NINE: Look Who’s Laughing

  PART TWO

  PLAIN TALK BY THE MAN FROM MARS

  CHAPTER TEN: Ceiling Unlimited

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: It All Comes Out of the Tent of Wonder

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Unrehearsed Realities

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Actor Turns Columnist

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: An Occasional Soapbox

  PART THREE

  WELLESCHMERZ

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The S. T. Ranger

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Full, Complete and Unrestricted Authority

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Wellesafloppin’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Officer X

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: If I Die Before I Wake

  CHAPTER TWENTY: The Forces of Darkness

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Welles of Onlyness

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Charm’s Wound Up

  The Stage Productions

  The Radio Broadcasts

  The Films

  The Writings

  The Records

  Picture Section

  References

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Simon Callow is an actor, director and writer. He has appeared on the stage and in many films, including the hugely popular Four Weddings and a Funeral. Callow’s books include Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor, a highly acclaimed biography of Charles Laughton, and Love is Where it Falls, an account of his friendship with Peggy Ramsay.

  ALSO BY SIMON CALLOW

  Being an Actor

  Shooting the Actor

  Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

  Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

  Love is Where it Falls

  ‘Callow’s riveting and superlative biography satisfies at every level, and I for one cannot wait for the next volume’

  Literary Review

  ‘The research is breathtaking. The book is bursting with details, references and anecdotes’

  The Times

  ‘Such is Callow’s sympathetic absorption in the mass of material, which he handles with a light and ironic touch, that I found myself utterly hooked … As an actor himself Callow writes illuminatingly about Welles’ performances’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘This is a bitter-sweet book: we say goodbye to the very best of company but we also look forward to Callow bringing that company back to life in his third volume’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘Superb … One of the very best things I’ve seen on Welles … written with Callow’s customary brio and crammed with useful information. I was surprised by how much it contains that I didn’t know … above all, I was impressed by Callow’s generosity of spirit and balanced judgement of Welles … a biographical masterwork’

  Jim Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles

  ‘Callow’s finely-balanced judgement, enhanced by his own observations as an actor, ensures that this not only ranks as one of the best Welles biographies, but of film biographies full-stop’

  Empire

  ‘This is an attractive and persuasive view of an ocean-sized talent for which there is still no finished map. One can only hope that Callow continues the voyage’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘The facts of this remarkable period [in Welles’ career] are well established, but Hello Americans offers a novel lens through which to view them afresh’

  Sight and Sound

  ‘Almost every page throws up nuggets of interest … This is a rich, meaty and ultimately rewarding banquet’

  Scotsman

  ‘Admirably level-headed’

  New Statesman

  ‘A universal story of hubris, wasted talent, and celebrity achieved at much too young an age’

  Spectator

  Illustrations

  1. RKO studios, 1945.

  2. George Schaeffer, Dolores del Rio and Orson Welles at the Los Angeles premiere of Citizen Kane, May 1941.

  3. A brief break in filming The Magnificent Ambersons.

  4. Stanley Cortez with Ann Baxter, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, shooting in Los Angeles.

  5. Welles in conference with Jack Moss.

  6. The poster for The Magnificent Ambersons, drawn by Norman Rockwell.

  7. The poster for The Journey into Fear.

  8. Rio Carnival, February 1942.

  9. Welles being interpreted. It’s All True.

  10. Welles on the beach in Fortaleza.

  11. Welles framing a shot in Fortaleza for Four Men on a Raft.

  12. Jangadeiros, photographed by Chico Albuquerque.

  13. Welles in Fortaleza lining up a shot for Four Men on a Raft with George Fanto, photographed by Chico Albuquerque.

  14. Welles on the air.

  15. Welles co-starring with Jack Benny.

  16. GIs queuing for The Mercury Wonder Show.

  17. Bill of fare for The Mercury Wonder Show.

  18. Orson the Magnificent in The Mercury Wonder Show.

  19. Rita Hayworth with Orson Welles and George ‘Shorty’ Chirello.

  20. Shooting The Stranger.

  21. A scene from Around the World.

  22. Orson Welles as Dick Fix, scandalising Julie Warren as Mary Muggins.

  23. Al Hirschfeld’s pen and ink with multimedia depiction of Around the World in Eighty Days.

  24. Lady from Shanghai still.

  25. Isaac Woodard with other members of the Blind Veterans’ Association.

  26. Woodard with Walter White.

  27. Woodard at a press conference, July 1946.

  28. The newly-blonde Rita Hayworth with Welles.

  29. Welles shooting The Lady from Shanghai in Catalina.

  30. Michael O’Hara takes a tumble in The Lady from Shanghai.

  31. The famous climax of The Lady from Shanghai.

  32. Welles and Jeanette Nolan on the Republic lot for Macbeth.

  33. Welles surveys Macbeth.

  34. Filming Macbeth.

  35. Welles’s sketch for the film of Macbeth.

  36. Macbeth on stage: Salt Lake City.

  37. Welles at a rehearsal of Macbeth in Salt Lake City.

  Picture credits

  1 & 2 Courtesy of Marc Wanamaker, Bison Archives; 6 The Magnificent Ambersons © RKO Pictures, Inc. Licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved; 7 Journey into Fear © RKO Pictures, Inc. Licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved; 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 34 Copyright Getty Images; 10 Courtesy of Film Society of Lincoln Center; 12 & 13 Copyright Chico Albuquerque; 23 Copyright Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd, New York, www.alhirschfeld.com: 35 Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; 24, 29, 30, 31 The Lady from Shanghai © 1948, renewed 1975 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

  The author and publishers have made every effort to trac
e and contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to correct any mistakes or omissions in future editions.

  TO PAULA LAURENCE (1916–2005)

  Helen of Troy to Welles’s Faustus, and this book’s guardian angel.

  SIMON CALLOW

  Orson Welles

  Hello Americans

  Preface

  FROM THE MID-NINETEEN-FIFTIES Orson Welles was working on a version of Cervantes’s great novel Don Quixote, snatching days where he could, borrowing equipment, staging sequences, slowly assembling his footage. Young actors grew old, old actors died. And still he shot, quietly pursuing his private passion, never with a thought to completion, or, God forbid, to showing it to anyone. And over the years, whenever they came across him, people would ask Welles the question, ‘When are you going to finish Don Quixote?’ Finally, out of amused exasperation, he changed the title of his film to When are you going to finish Don Quixote? Sometimes, in the over ten years since the publication of The Road to Xanadu, it has occurred to me to call its successor When are you going to deliver Volume Two?

  I hasten to disclaim any larger similarities between myself and Welles, but it has seemed to take an awfully long time to determine what would be the most useful way to continue the investigation into one of the most extraordinary figures of twentieth-century art begun in the earlier book. The problem is a simple one: The Road to Xanadu took 600 pages to cover Welles’s first twenty-five years, culminating in the release of Citizen Kane. He was professionally active for only seven of those twenty-five years, and I devoted most of my pages to a close scrutiny of the legendary work that he did in the theatre and the radio of the nineteen-thirties – Unit 691, the Mercury Theatre, the Mercury Theatre on the Air: Dr Faustus, Julius Caesar, The War of the Worlds – ending with an account of the depressing period in limbo in Hollywood before the making of Kane and its subsequent delayed release. It was, I believe, the unusually detailed examination of the work and the circumstances that gave rise to it, as well as the attendant myths that surrounded everything to do with Welles, that gave the book its value. The patina of legend – placed there partly by Welles, partly by various interested parties who sought to prove their own points of view, and mostly by journalists happy to be handed colourful copy on a plate – had often obscured what was really remarkable about the man and his achievements, at the same time presenting a false image of his work in the various media in which he was engaged – theatre, radio, cinema. Only the closest scrutiny, it seemed to me, could restore the living reality, both of Welles and his world. The context was almost as important as the event. And that meant time and space; it meant length. My publisher was kind enough to see the point of this, as he showed by commissioning a two-volume biography.

  In approaching the rest of Welles’s life, I had no intention of reverting to the synoptic method inevitably adopted by the writers of most one-volume biographies (many of which, I hasten to say, are nonetheless full of exceptional interest and insight). But to write in the same sort of detail about the remaining forty-five years of Welles’s life – during which time, as I said in The Road to Xanadu, he had become a one-man diaspora, hurling himself across the globe, exploring virtually every performance art known to man (he even staged a ballet, The Lady in the Ice), was a logistical impossibility. I spent some of the years between the publication of the first book and the one you have in your hands trying to devise cunning postmodern structures that would enable me, as I kept telling interested parties, to adopt a cinematic – perhaps even, I modestly suggested, a Wellesian – approach, offering first a panoramic wide-shot, giving an overview of a whole decade, say, and then suddenly swooping in for a close-up examination of a particular event or period. It all sounded very brilliant, but in the end I couldn’t come up with a structure that actually made sense. Nor, in truth, did I want to. It seemed to me that the only way I could even attempt to do justice to the wonderful singularity of my subject was to focus ever more closely on the individual strands in the increasingly complex fabric of his life.

  In particular, I was fascinated by the years between Citizen Kane and Macbeth, a period in which, even by his standards, Welles extended himself in a remarkable number of new directions with an intensity and almost a desperation that reveal him in an entirely unfamiliar light. Here the biographical enterprise was not to dispel myths, but to reconstruct a part of his life that has very nearly disappeared without trace, warranting references of only a few paragraphs here or there in most accounts. I was concerned to try to do justice to the political pursuits that so engaged him during the nineteen-forties, and to trace in some detail his evolving relations with Hollywood, including the nightmarish catastrophe of his Brazilian film, It’s All True. The difficulty remained, however, how to write at such exhaustive length and still encompass the rest of his life in a second and final volume. It seemed clear that what was needed was a separate volume which focused on these few but astonishingly abundant years. A very close examination indeed was possible: his life during this period is prodigiously well documented, to the degree that it can be determined with some precision exactly what he was doing every day of his life for nearly five years. As I studied the material, it became increasingly clear that it could go a long way to answering the most persistent question asked about Orson Welles: what went wrong after Citizen Kane?

  I began to see that Welles’s departure from his own country in 1947, for what was in effect an occasionally interrupted exile of a little over twenty years, was a critical break in his career, releasing him to develop into the sort of artist he essentially was. It also signalled the end of a period of intense engagement with the culture from which he had sprung. During the period from the premiere of Citizen Kane to the beginning of his extended European sojourn, he had continued to try to grapple unequally with Hollywood, but he also – passionately, persistently and with huge expenditure of time and money – came back to the question of what it was to be an American, assessing the results of what he called ‘our American experiment’. He was not, of course, the only person doing this at the time. America’s involvement in the war brought into sudden focus the matter of how it would deal with the rest of the world after victory; it also transformed the situation of the black population, who for the first time found that they had some bargaining power, which in turn compelled the white population to reconsider its own position. They were, to put it mildly, stirring times. But Welles, more than most of his contemporaries, seemed driven to find a satisfactory answer to the issue of how Americans were to live.

  He did this directly in his speeches, in his radio commentaries and in his political and popular journalism. He did it, more subtly, in his films of the period, The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear, The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, each of which presents a problem in American life, and he did it in the unfinished It’s All True, which seeks to redefine the parameters of being American. (As it happens, one of the original titles of Citizen Kane was American.) Finally, he did it in his wholehearted embrace of American popular culture, in the vaudevillian extravaganzas The Mercury Wonder Show and Around the World, and in his really very serious attempt to become a radio comedian in the mould of Jack Benny. In giving my study of these years the name of one of his radio programmes of the period, I am suggesting that his work of the time was an extended attempt to address his audience as fellow-citizens. Eventually, he gave up what seemed to him a doomed struggle to get America to listen to him. In a sense, the book might have been called Goodbye, Americans, which is certainly what he was saying in 1947; significantly, the film he left behind him was Macbeth, his first film not to have a single American character in it, or any American resonance.

  The catalogue of work contained in the preceding paragraph is enough to give a glimpse of the almost bewildering diversity of Welles’s output; many of these activities were pursued simultaneously. Virtually everything Welles ever did was done in the fullest glare of publicity, and he was ceaselessly and increasingl
y mercilessly judged by a relentless press, which from early on had his scent in its nostrils. Even during the eighteen months of this period in which he did not act or direct, he was rarely out of the newspapers. I have tried to show what was actually going on behind the image of Welles that the press was busy manufacturing, generally abetted by Welles himself. It is a period of his life strikingly characterised by bad luck, just as the period documented in The Road to Xanadu represented a phase of extraordinary and continuing good fortune. Of the earlier period, it may be said that Welles’s temperament capitalised wonderfully on the good fortune he experienced; of the later, that the bad luck exposed his weaknesses. It is without apology that I write of Welles’s weaknesses. There is a faction among the supporters of Welles – the Wellesolators – who will hear no criticism of their hero. They seem to identify with him, to project themselves onto him. The Welles they have created is a fearless independent, punished by the world for being too talented, too original, too visionary. He is cinema’s sacrificial victim, too good to be allowed to flourish. If only Welles’s sublime plans had not been viciously frustrated by the studio pygmies, they imply, the world would have been the better off by dozens of flawless masterpieces. They refuse to countenance any complicity on his part in what went wrong, and they are unable to see him for what he was – an individual of immense gifts, filled with contradictory and often self-defeating impulses, a man who failed to find a way to put his gifts to their best use, one who had very little talent for having the enormous talent he possessed.