Orson Welles, Vol I Read online

  Contents

  COVER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BY SIMON CALLOW

  DEDICATION

  TITLE PAGE

  PREFACE: Orson Welles and the Art of Biography

  PART ONE: PRODIGY

  CHAPTER ONE: Kenosha

  CHAPTER TWO: Chicago

  CHAPTER THREE: Todd

  CHAPTER FOUR: Ireland/Jew Süss

  CHAPTER FIVE: Hiatus/Everybody’s Shakespeare

  CHAPTER SIX: Wonder Boy of Acting/Romeo and Juliet

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Woodstock/Romeo and Juliet Again

  PART TWO: WHITE HOPE

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Houseman/Panic

  CHAPTER NINE: FTP/Macbeth

  CHAPTER TEN: Horse Eats Hat/Doctor Faustus

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Cradle Will Rock

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Mercury

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Caesar

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Shoemaker’s Holiday/Heartbreak House

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Theatre of the Air

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: War of the Worlds/Danton’s Death

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Campbell Playhouse/Five Kings

  PART THREE: QUADRUPLE THREAT

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Hollywood/Heart of Darkness

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Mank

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Shooting Kane

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Waiting/Native Son

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Release

  PICTURE SECTION

  THE STAGE PRODUCTIONS

  THE RADIO BROADCASTS

  THE FILMS

  REFERENCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PICTURE CREDITS

  INDEX

  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 and a highly acclaimed biography of Charles Laughton.

  BY SIMON CALLOW

  Being An Actor

  Shooting The Actor

  Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

  Orson Welles: The Road To Xanadu

  TO CHRISTOPHER

  AND IN MEMORY OF MICHEÁL MAC LIAMMÓIR (1899–1978)

  AND

  JOHN HOUSEMAN (1902–1988)

  With apologies to John Livingston Lowes (author of the original Road to Xanadu) for cheek in borrowing the title of his Coleridgean masterpiece. Coleridge would perhaps have approved of a little creative theft.

  Simon Callow

  ORSON WELLES

  The Road to Xanadu

  PREFACE

  Orson Welles and the Art of Biography

  If you try to probe, I’ll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I’m like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I’m a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and Christian mystics, I think the ‘self’ is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am … Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man – and not the contrary.

  Orson Welles to Jean Clay, 1962

  OW: What’s all that, for God’s sake? You look like a one-man filing cabinet.

  PB: Research.

  OW: Throw it all away, Peter – it can only cripple the fine spirit of invention.

  Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles, 1992

  OW: I don’t want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don’t think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully – not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews.

  KT: How do you reconcile that with –

  OW: For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don’t. Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognise them.

  Kenneth Tynan, The World of Orson Welles, 1967

  A question mark hovers over practically every aspect of Welles’s life and work. This is the more surprising since he is among the most fully documented artists of the twentieth century. The source of confusion is, almost without exception, Welles himself (an alternative title for the present volume might be, to adapt the title of the first full-length biography, The Fabulist Orson Welles); but he has been eagerly abetted in the construction of his personal myth by legions of interviewers, profile-writers and biographers, all, like him, unable to resist a good story. The result is that he now appears awesome but inexplicable, like an abandoned but world-famous monument in the middle of the jungle – the scale of it! the confidence of the people who built this! why was it abandoned? why was the right wing never completed? Welles himself, in his later interviews with Leslie Megahey for the BBC and Peter Bogdanovich for the book This is Orson Welles, assumed a charming tone of mellow bemusement at the events of his life, as if they were mysteriously beyond analysis, a sort of cosmic aberration.

  The curious thing is that the real story, though sometimes less sensational, is so often more remarkable than the extrapolations. I have, I believe, been able to uncover quite a large number of missing details in Welles’s life. My task in writing this study, however, has been as much to re-evaluate the known facts as to establish new ones. A great deal of the groundwork has been done by previous biographers, each with his or her own special area: Charles Higham, whose reconstruction of Welles’s family tree is a virtuoso feat of research; Barbara Leaming, who got Welles’s final version of his life from the horse’s mouth; and Frank Brady, who spoke to many of Welles’s associates now dead. Their work has been exhaustive; somehow the facts thus established fail to add up to a life-like image of the man – or of any man.

  This is partly because they have focused exclusively on Welles himself. As an antidote to this, I have tried to put him back into the context from which he wrenched himself. There are a number of individual studies of specific areas of Welles’s life (Robert Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane is an excellent example) which have identified important collaborators hitherto hidden from history. This identification of the supporting cast has been my guiding principle at all times. Cleaning the canvas, as it were, I have aimed to reveal the surrounding figures and Welles’s connection with them. Welles often declared himself opposed to the use of close-ups in cinematography; it was, he said, both undemocratic and unaesthetic to exclude the rest of the world to the advantage of a single figure in it. His biographers have been uninhibited by any such considerations, and have thus, whether they like Welles or not, sustained the myth he created of himself. The most important element of this myth was his originality. Welles was undoubtedly a most unusual individual, but he did not drop from Mars. His psychology, though complex, conformed to recognisable patterns; his career, while exceptional, was formed by the circumstances of his times and the conditions of his profession. I have tried at every turn to find out what else was going on while the famous events of his life were unfolding, what other people in the same sphere were up to, and what they thought of him – to restore, in short, a little of the texture of real life to the curious tissue of miraculous tales and genre scenes which pass for biography in Welles studies.

  Many of the most often repeated incidents seem to be borrowed from children’s Lives of Christ (a figure, incidentally, who held a life-long fascination for Welles). A version of Christ Among the Doctors can be found in the opening chapter of pretty well any Welles
biography you care to open; as can the image of the master who sprang fully formed from his mother’s womb, an essential element in any artist’s biography, according to Kris and Kurz in Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, a book filled with resonance for the Welles scholar.

  This approach is not designed to deny the charm or the creativity of the legends, simply to examine their origins and contrast and compare them with what actually happened, in an attempt to determine what Welles was like in the world, what impact he made on his associates and his times, and how – day by day – he went about the jobs of directing, writing and acting. Hitherto, the only credible representations of him have been those offered by John Houseman in Run-through and Micheál Mac Liammóir in All about Hecuba and Put Money in thy Purse. Both men engaged deeply with Welles and were beguiled and frustrated by him in equal measure. Their distinctly different views of him, though highly personal, are based on close observation and intense engagement, and written with precision and insight; both men were denounced by Welles, their witness called into question. I was lucky enough to know them personally and what they told me about Welles has been the starting point for my book, which is thus simultaneously a synthesis and a deconstruction.

  It has been a question of asking, not simply is this true or false? (although sometimes that has been useful) but what does this mean? Even the recent past is another country, and the milieus in which Welles moved, social, theatrical, and political, should not be taken for granted. They did things differently there. I have looked at the often astonishing events of his life and tried to renew the surprise contained in them – the actual events rather than the ones he imagined. (Of course the reasons why he felt impelled to reinvent his life, and the specific details he chose to invent, are always revealing.) The hardest-bitten and least friendly of Welles’s biographers have been mysteriously inclined to swallow his most improbable confections, and have failed to ask the most elementary questions. Somehow, like Hitler’s captors in George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., they have been bewitched by their subject’s silver tongue. One of the features of myth – one of its purposes, perhaps – is to discourage speculation: to create a framework in which everything is so extraordinary that nothing is questioned. Disbelief is automatically suspended.

  I have challenged him and the record; I have questioned everything. I cannot pretend, of course, to have found all the answers, but I hope to have traced a credible path through his history, a path recorded not merely on his personal map, but on the larger one of his period and world. To this end, I have spoken to a large number of people who worked with him or knew him up to and including the making of Kane, which is as far as the present volume goes: schoolfriends, teachers, fellow actors, fellow directors, stage managers, assistants, secretaries, press agents. I have been in correspondence with yet more; as I have with some of the large army of Welles scholars, who have with astonishing generosity shared their researches in specific areas. I list all of them in the acknowledgements, but I must here name Andrea Nouryeh, whose as yet unpublished work on the Mercury Theatre is definitive, exhaustive and revelatory; Richard France, author of the only full-length study of Welles’s work in the theatre, who supplied me with many of his original documents; and James Naremore, whose The Magic World of Orson Welles is the single indispensable volume on Welles. I have visited all the places in which Welles lived and the buildings in which he worked (when they still stand). Above all I have closely examined his own words, in letters, pronouncements, speeches, articles and, particularly revealing, in his unfilmed screenplay, The Cradle Will Rock, a dramatisation of the events surrounding one of his most famous productions. He was not – though he would have loved to have been, or to have been thought to have been – a natural writer, but he was a very characteristic one. The style was the man.

  I have also closely studied the newspapers, because, paradoxically, that is where Welles’s real life was. He was unable to resist a fix of publicity; merely to see a reporter’s notebook was to unleash his powers of invention. He publicly constructed himself, from the earliest age – my first press clipping is headed ACTOR, POET, CARTOONIST – AND ONLY TEN – in a medium that he courted and denounced in equal measure; and the press returned the compliment. Together they concluded a sort of Faustian pact wherein Welles was meteorically advanced by sensation-hungry newspapers, to whom he pandered shamelessly, until at the height of his fame he fell foul of them; saddled with a preposterous reputation and a personality drawn by him and coloured by them, he found himself unemployable, his work overshadowed by his everexpanding Self. Even his body became legendary, out of control; whatever his soul consisted of protected from the world by wadding. Locked in a personal relationship as complex and curious as that of Lear and his fool, Welles and the newspapers needed and abominated each other in a co-dependency that only his death dissolved. It is no coincidence that his most famous work is the apotheosis of the newspaper film.

  His death provoked an orgy of journalism. The main questions asked of him when he died were: what went wrong after Citizen Kane?; and why did he get so fat? This book, the first of two, tries to answer the question what went wrong before Citizen Kane? To the second question – by no means a foolish or shallow one – there is no simple answer, but I hope that by the end of this volume, enough of Welles’s temperamental imperatives will have been revealed for his phenomenal physical expansion to seem, at the very least, unsurprising. The word phenomenal in this context is not used loosely (by the end of his life his bulk warranted an entry in The Guinness Book of Records) and it is one that recurs at every stage of this study. He made himself into a phenomenon – courted phenomenality with brilliant determination – and it is as such that he must be considered. This is a terrible burden both for an artist and for a human being; neither the work nor the man can fully be separated from this alternative self. That, of course, was his purpose: to put himself and his work beyond criticism, so that both became merely manifestations of his legend.

  This is an interesting but dangerous ploy, a life strategy (in the phrase of the pop psychologists) fraught with danger – principally the danger to the private self and its sources of nourishment for both work and life. Personality and art become a series of diversions, a continuous and costly firework display, momentarily dazzling but swiftly self-consuming – an auto-da-fé felo de se. In Welles’s case, the fireworks were uniquely brilliant; the bonfire of his vanities made a gorgeous blaze, casting lively, lurid shadows in all directions. The cost to him, and the question of whether things could have been otherwise, are the real subjects of this book.

  It is hard to resist comparison with that other O.W. whose famous phrase about putting his genius into his life, his talent into his work could equally be applied to Welles; as with Wilde, however, it was not so much that his life was a work of genius as that his life story has the quality of a work of fiction – as if he himself were the creation of a novelist of extravagant invention, his story deliberately shaped into an exemplary pattern – a warning to us all, perhaps. The similarity between Wilde and Welles is not merely accidental, a question of initials, a congruity of flamboyances, but chillingly precise in one particular: both men set out to conquer the world by seeking to master the instruments of publicity; both became its servants – perhaps, if it is not too melodramatic a phrase, its victims.

  Part One

  PRODIGY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kenosha

  THE ROAD to Xanadu begins in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The incongruity of his birthplace is commented on again and again in accounts of Welles. Every country has its joke towns, good for an easy laugh, and if Kenosha is not quite in the league of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or Normal, Illinois, it is still sufficiently redolent of boondockery to seem to mock the very idea of aspiration in its sons and daughters. ‘Orson is frightened to death of being thought ordinary in any way,’ wrote Herbert Drake in an article entitled ‘Orson Welles – Still a Four-Ply Genius’ (he was thir
ty-two years old at the time). ‘He is annoyed at his parents to this day because he sprang yelling into the world in prosaic Kenosha, Wisconsin.’ To which Welles replies: ‘I never blamed my folks for Kenosha – Kenosha has always blamed my folks for me.’

  And it is true; Kenosha always felt slighted by Welles, but Welles expressed himself – not unaware of the incongruity – very warmly towards his origins. Wisconsin (along with Indiana and Illinois) embodies the very notion of the Mid-West, that decent, solid, flat heartland of America, from which everything of value in the national life has, according to some theories, sprung – created by men and women desperate to escape its cosy embrace. How could Orson Welles – immoderate and cosmopolitan, opposite qualities to those of the Mid-West – have anything to do with little old Kenosha, Wis? In fact Kenosha is neither little nor old, and though Welles was born there, of parents who were native Mid-Westerners, his stay was brief: before he was four he and his family had moved the barely sixty miles to Chicago, Illinois, still the Mid-West, in fact its capital city, but a planet apart. Kenosha, Wisconsin was none the less the scene of his earliest experience, and his family – mother and father, uncles, aunts, grandfather and grandmother – were prominent and engaged participants in its intense life. Welles’s statement that he had never disowned Kenosha was true. He felt immense yearning for what he came to think of as its vanished charm, while ceasing himself to belong to it in any detectable form.