Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Despite the indignity of being called a bearded nonconformist, Orson half-enjoyed the notoriety and fitted in well with the studio regimen throughout the fall. Again and again, he proved equal to the personal and professional hurdles strewn before him. He pushed Heart of Darkness ahead of the agreed-on timetable, solving numerous problems as they arose, dealing shrewdly with concerns that were standard for every Hollywood project.

  After Orson tossed out Houseman’s draft of the script, he started in on the rewrite himself. Writing in late September to Leonard Lyons at the New York Post, Herbert Drake described Welles’s progress. Borrowing from the methodology that had served him well in creating his radio adaptations, Welles had taken a copy of Joseph Conrad’s novella and pasted every page of it into a large portfolio, Drake said. Then he went through the novella page by page, scratching notes in the margins, crossing out unnecessary scenes, inserting others he concocted, delineating those that would be preserved or modified. By the end of September, Orson had executed a 254-page scene-by-scene breakdown of the new scenario, incorporating his preliminary camera movement and shot notes.

  “Supplementing this was a discussion of each character in which he not only described the physical appearance of the actor or actress but went into details about their past life and their future,” Drake informed Lyons. “Supplementing the whole thing was a sketchbook which consisted of alternate pages of description of each scene and a line drawing.”

  After the breakdown, according to Drake, Welles produced a rough script of between seven hundred and eight hundred double-spaced typed pages. These had to be reduced to somewhere between 100 and 120 pages (film running times were estimated at a rate of one minute of screen time per page). Constant interruptions, including his weekly trip to New York, slowed the script work, but progress was steady nevertheless. George Schaefer, whose opinion Orson valued, pointed out the “excess of dialogue” in some scenes, and felt the parallels with contemporary politics were too explicit. “When Kurtz begins to talk of dictators in Europe, you are tying in one world with another world,” Schaefer wrote. “At that point it loses something.”

  HONESTLY AGREE WITH ALL POINTS IN YOUR LETTER, Orson wired the RKO studio chief. URGE YOU TO BURN THAT SCRIPT, AND BELIEVE THAT REWRITES AND REVISIONS UNDERWAY WILL ACCOMPLISH EVERYTHING AND MORE.

  One budget item that worried studio officials was Welles’s initial demand for three thousand black extras for a spectacular scene in the jungle, in which the natives would be seen bowing down to the evil Kurtz. The day costs were one concern, but so was the challenge of rounding up so many black extras when the studios had only several hundred local black performers on its books. Moreover, Orson insisted he wanted native extras with “very black skin,” in his words. If the extras were too light-skinned, he said, he would have to coat their bodies with black greasepaint. Under pressure from the studio, Welles kept reducing the number of extras, finally dropping it to eight hundred—a financial as well as a creative compromise.

  To properly convey the jungle atmosphere, Welles argued for shooting parts of Heart of Darkness in a tropical climate. RKO was reluctant. In those days, location filming was restricted to rural studio ranches; anything farther afield was frowned on because of the vicissitudes of weather, and the enormous expense entailed in flying a professional cast and crew into distant territories. But the studio did agree to dispatch a second unit to the Florida Everglades, operating on Welles’s instructions, for test photography of the wilds in late September. If the studio ultimately rejected extensive location filming (which it did), the second unit footage would at least assist the design and effects departments (which it did).

  Before long, Orson’s Mercury players from radio and stage started arriving at RKO for testing and contract rituals. Some, like John Emery, who was touring through Los Angeles with the Lunts in Taming of the Shrew, just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Everyone was anxious for Welles to direct something besides a camera audition—a scene with setups, lighting—“really just seeing what would happen with me in a movie studio with a camera,” in his words. Orson was every bit as anxious.

  Several days of preliminary photography were set—probably beginning on October 18—for the first motion picture sequences Welles would direct in Hollywood. According to Frank Brady, Welles planned footage of a few available actors “in costume and makeup, with himself marvelously disguised as Kurtz.” There would also be “actorless rehearsals involving only the moving vision of Marlow-camera, such as a pan shot across a process screen, registering the hill and settlement.” Orson had talked RKO officials into letting him try shots with a makeshift handheld camera, “which was unheard of then,” in Welles’s words.

  Linwood Dunn, who was RKO’s expert on the optical printer and a special effects wizard (he had helped to create King Kong and the illusion of a leopard frolicking with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby), was on hand to supervise the visual tricks. One scene showed “the boat and wharf in miniature, combined with rear-screen projection,” in Frank Brady’s words, while the actor Everett Sloane, Orson’s longtime radio colleague, spoke directly into the camera as though he were speaking to Marlow. The recently signed Robert Coote was among the players in another “big scene,” Welles recalled, “Coote and two or three other people.” (Coote would be left behind by the time of Citizen Kane, but Welles remembered him for Roderigo in his 1952 film of Othello.)

  “How did it look?” Peter Bogdanovich asked about the preliminary footage.

  “I don’t know,” Welles replied. “I guess it looked all right.”

  Orson sounded dissatisfied—then, and at the time. He thought the experimental filming was a “dud,” according to Brady, and called “for more precision on everyone’s part: the camera operators, the miniature technicians, the actors and himself.”

  While the test footage fell short of Orson’s highest expectations, the experience of taking charge on a Hollywood set and commanding the actors and camera was exhilarating. “Had my first night with the movie cameras a few hours ago,” Welles wrote in a memo of October 18, 1939, that he dashed off to publicist Herbert Drake, “and I am wildly enthusiastic about this business.”

  His dreams of returning to Broadway with Five Kings were quickly fading away.

  In November, Welles had to buckle down to the writing in order to have a proper shooting script ready by Thanksgiving at the latest. The final draft would have to go through censorship channels at the Production Code office and be cost-estimated by the studio departments. Although special effects and postproduction would lag behind, the cameras had to roll by December 1 at the latest in order for Orson to make his January 1, 1940, deadline for completing his first film.

  Herbert Drake, who liaised daily with Orson, kept Dr. Maurice Bernstein apprised of the pressures he was under. “The demands on Orson’s time are enormous,” he reported. “The Budget Department is after him all the time. The assistant director demands his attention. I am always heckling him for the newspaper boys. Houseman requires all of his attention for the radio scripts, and on top of it all he [Orson] is rewriting the movie to tighten it up and shorten it a little, and directing the actors in tests.”

  Orson’s weekly flights to the East Coast may have been taxing, but they also served to give him much-needed “alone time.” Throughout his life—whether stranded in a tepee in the Wisconsin backwoods, sailing on a freighter around the Iberian Peninsula, or flying eleven thousand feet above the clouds—Orson needed such moments of peace and solitude to draw from the deep wellspring of creativity that would sustain him for the rest of his life.

  He began his draft of the Heart of Darkness script in singular fashion: after the appearance of the RKO logo, with its beeping radio tower perched atop a rotating globe, the screen would fade to black, and his radio voice would come in. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Orson Welles. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to look at for a while. You can close your eyes if you want to, but pleas
e open them when I tell you to. . . . First of all, I am going to divide this audience into two parts—you and everybody else in the theater. Now, then, open your eyes.”

  As Welles narrated, “the camera would adopt the points of view, successively, of a bird in a cage, a condemned man about to be electrocuted and a golfer driving a ball,” as Robert L. Carringer wrote in The Making of Citizen Kane. “Then it would take Welles’s point of view from the screen, looking into a movie audience made up entirely of movie cameras. In the final shot [of the opening], an eye would appear on the left side of a black screen, then the equals sign, then the pronoun ‘I.’ The eye would wink, and a dissolve would lead to the opening shot of the film.”

  After that, the script got even more inventive, with many “experimental tableaux,” in Frank Brady’s words, and mobile camera scenes that would run as long as twelve minutes on the screen without a cut. Welles planned to shoot the long takes fluently with a newly fashioned “gyroscopic camera,” while incorporating a device he called a “feather wipe,” which, as Carringer explained, “involved panning the camera to a stationary point, repositioning the camera but directing it to the same point, then continuing the pan in a new shot.” (RKO technicians were busy trying to keep up with Orson’s ideas, devising equipment that could do what he wanted.)

  Staying “terribly loyal to Conrad,” in Welles’s words, while thumbing his nose at Hollywood conventions, the script preserved Kurtz’s interracial romance with his mistress, an enigmatic native woman (“a real black type,” Orson wrote). Welles wrote exciting scenes involving a great fire, an apocalyptic storm, a deadly stampede of animals and Africans.

  Even biographer Simon Callow, often measured about Welles’s work, described the Heart of Darkness shooting script as “a fearless, provocative and immensely talented achievement.” When it arrived at the Production Code office, well before Thanksgiving, it was passed with “minor cavils,” according to the censors’ report. Chief among them were the film’s treatment of natives—care should be taken with their costumes; there should be no hint of nudity, no implications of “miscegenation”; and so on. How Welles would have dealt with these thorny issues will never be known; surely they would have posed problems for RKO. But the film Orson envisioned was intended not for the Deep South, where undoubtedly it would be banned in part if not altogether, but for the major cities of the Northeast and Midwest, the awards circuit, and the fast-disappearing European market.

  Never was Welles more productive than in the months of October and November 1939. As he completed the shooting script, though, he was also wavering in his determination to play both Marlow and the evil Kurtz. “I decided I was a little too obvious for Kurtz, and it should be a more romantic kind of personality, less of a heavy man—even a young heavy man,” he recalled. “I think it should have been a more surprising person as Kurtz than I would have been.”

  At the same time, to keep up with the fine print in his contract, Orson initiated a second project that was intended to follow Heart of Darkness. He had considered and floated several prospects before settling on a new English thriller: The Smiler with the Knife, by Nicholas Blake (the pen name of the English poet Cecil Day-Lewis). Someone in the RKO story department, prodded by studio president George Schaefer, may have guided Welles to the galleys of this suspense novel, published in the first week of November. Its topical plot concerned the wife of an English detective, who agrees to infiltrate a secret right-wing conspiracy threatening to take over the government of Great Britain.

  Orson saw The Smiler with the Knife as another cautionary tale about the spread of fascism. His script would relocate the story to the United States, turning it into an American political parable. The wife of the English detective would become a madcap American heiress recruited by her father-in-law, a federal secret agent, to join the organization of a right-wing playboy industrialist who is active in the aviation industry. (“Welles told me he modeled this character after Howard Hughes,” Carringer wrote. “This is the source for the puzzling claim in Welles’s film F for Fake that Hughes was his target before Hearst.”) The thriller would also incorporate elements of screwball comedy, with a cross-country chase sequence touching down at the Todd School.

  Some of these ideas would be recycled in The Stranger, but as both Carringer and Brady pointed out, The Smiler with the Knife also informed the not-yet-conceived Citizen Kane. Orson described one character in the script as “a great newspaper publisher, also to be avoided in dark alleys.” And there was “a newsreel sequence based on ‘The March of Time,’ showing the decaying world situation,” Brady wrote. “As the segment ends, the camera tracks back from a movie screen in the film to show the young couple [the heiress and her husband] seated in a smoky theater.”

  Joseph Cotten was penciled in as the fascist playboy; Orson would direct and play the lesser but showy role of the heiress’s husband. The starring part of the heiress was intended for an established leading lady who could pull off screwball comedy, such as Orson’s friend the platinum blonde actress Carole Lombard, a queen of the RKO lot.

  After the more costly and challenging Heart of Darkness, an inexpensive thriller with comedy was instantly attractive to the studio. Quickly writing a synopsis and scenes, Orson had a rough half-script ready for Schaefer by the end of November. The studio chief loved the basic idea—Lombard’s involvement went a long way toward convincing him—and he met with Arnold Weissberger in New York to incorporate Smiler with the Knife into Welles’s contract.

  Both men wanted to extend Welles’s completion deadlines, and the financial details of payouts and percentages had to be adjusted in the contract. The original document was so confusing that it was revised and annotated almost monthly. Welles did not receive an actual salary until a picture went into production, and RKO paid out a lump sum to Mercury in stages of about $100,000 per film, which was billed back to the production budget. Welles—now it was always Welles, not Houseman—dispersed the money, according to the Mercury’s needs.

  By the end of 1939, Welles had cost RKO about $106,000—near the agreed-on amount set aside for the Mercury unit’s first production, and not an exorbitant start-up cost. True, no finished scenes had yet been shot; no production was yet under way. But Schaefer had a strong shooting script for Heart of Darkness in hand, along with about half the script of The Smiler with the Knife. Schaefer recognized that Welles was working hard, and he was pleased by the test sequences he’d watched for Heart of Darkness. In only four months, Orson had his first film project ready to go. Pundits be damned: Welles was a prize employee.

  “Schaefer was enthusiastic about the work you are doing,” Weissberger reported to Orson after his meeting with the studio president, “and is apparently wholeheartedly behind you. He told me that he had instructed the crew never to say that anything you wanted done could not be done until every possible means had been exhausted. He said that in most cases it turned out that what you wanted could finally be accomplished.”

  CHAPTER 18

  November–December 1939

  The Hardest Worker in Hollywood

  Orson’s letters to his wife in Ireland fall off in September 1939. His letters suggest she wrote back to him less frequently than he wrote to her. They tried to connect by phone, but that was tricky to arrange. Virginia, in her subsequent divorce petition, listed the date of their final separation as August 1—perhaps the day she originally intended to return to the United States, but did not.

  From sympathetic friends in New York and Los Angeles, Virginia heard that her husband had been spotted frequently in the company of the beautiful actress Dolores Del Rio. The Los Angeles Times ran a photograph of Welles, Del Rio, and Lili Damita—with Orson looking boozy and beaming—at “one of the gayest tables” at the Cocoanut Grove club one night in early September. Louella Parsons also spotted the couple out and about, reporting that Welles had “gone Hollywood with a vengeance,” often “Troccing it” (at the Trocadero) with Del Rio, Damita, and Errol Flynn.<
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  Such items bothered Del Rio more than Orson at the time, and she went directly to Parsons in mid-October to deny the rumor that she and husband Cedric Gibbons were “planning a divorce” because of her infatuation with Welles. Yes, she and Welles had attended the opening of the Los Angeles concert season at the Philharmonic Auditorium, but only because Gibbons had been detained at MGM. “I asked Mr. Welles to take me,” Del Rio informed Parsons. “When Cedric works I have always gone out with other escorts—with his permission of course. I am heartsick over the rumors.”

  Orson nightclubbing with another woman was one thing; Virginia was used to that sort of column item from New York. More unsettling were the items saying that Orson had gone on another spree of Alfred Lunt–style dandyism, adopting a healthy diet (only “boiled food”), attending classical concerts, and sneaking off with Del Rio to foreign films such as Julien Duvivier’s La Fin du Jour at the Esquire, when he could watch anything he wished at RKO. Virginia had been her husband’s loyal muse in New York. Now it appeared that Del Rio had stepped into her shoes as Orson’s West Coast soul mate.

  The rumors were burning in Virginia’s ears by the time she returned from Ireland on the S.S. Manhattan in the fourth week of October. The New York Times ran a homecoming picture of “the wife of Orson Welles,” identifying her as “actress Anna Stafford.” According to the paper, she and other “notables,” including her friend Geraldine Fitzgerald, who joined her on the voyage, had been “marooned” in Ireland longer than anticipated because of the war in Europe, which delayed her safe passage home.

  This was Sunday, October 22, the day Orson was in New York preparing the weekly Campbell Playhouse broadcast. Yet it does not appear that Welles was at the docks to sweep his wife into his arms; the newspapers do not mention his presence. He was busily engaged with all-day rehearsals before two performances for the East and West coasts. This week it was a version of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, which Orson had reset in the Deep South. Helen Hayes, again his star, always recalled that particular show because “I got the impression that we sounded like an Amos ’n’ Andy broadcast,” and “I was finally moved to protest.” Orson put her down “firmly,” she recalled. “This is the way I want it, and this is the way we are going to do it!” he declared.