The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  Captivated by the moving music, Welles frequented the Urca Casino, befriending Grande Otelo and other Afro-Brazilian musicians and artists performing there. He became hungry for knowledge about the country and hired researchers to provide him with information on subjects from mining to native costumes to slave revolts. When he had to leave Rio for Buenos Aires to accept an award for Citizen Kane and give an inaugural address to the newborn Argentine Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he made the trip short. Back in Rio, he lectured on subjects from Shakespeare to the use of poetry in playwriting. He partied with the Rio business and social elites, charmed the wives of diplomats and Vargas’s daughter, Ella. “AMERICAN LEGEND LOVES BRAZIL, AND BRAZILIANS LOVE MR. ORSON WELLES,” read a typical newspaper headline. If Welles and Rockefeller had stopped there, the tale would have had a happy ending.

  The movie Welles envisioned about Latin America, however, It’s All True, exploded his relationship with Rockefeller and went to the heart of questioning exactly what a Goodwill Ambassador was supposed to do. Neither Disney nor Welles took a penny for the job, although they were giving up income they might be earning at home, so they were not beholden to Rockefeller for compensation. But how closely they were bound to the CIAA’s interpretation of good propaganda was an open question.

  Orson Welles wanted to make a film that would elicit feelings that people both north and south might share, using real events, a Pan-American epic to demonstrate common dreams and emotions, a spur to mutual understanding. Where could he start?

  Before coming to Brazil, Welles had begun a film called My Friend Bonito about a Mexican boy who raises a calf and struggles to save it from the bullring. Based on the true story of a bull freed by audience acclamation in Mexico City’s Plaza El Toreo in 1908, the film had already started production, and some scenes had already been filmed in pueblos that looked little changed from the turn of the century. Instead of a feature film, “My Friend Bonito” could be a segment of the Pan-American opus, he thought.

  In the December 21, 1941, issue of Time magazine, Welles found inspiration for another segment. Four impoverished fishermen had just made an epic voyage from Fortaleza, on the hump of Brazil, to Rio, sailing for sixty-one days on an open raft called a jangada, navigating only by their own experience of sky and sea. With the raft captain Manoel Olimpio Meira, called “Jacaré” after his native village, a natural leader who learned to read at night school, the crew represented thousands of hardworking but indigent jangada fishermen without healthcare, schools, or death benefits, laboring for middlemen who took half the catch for themselves. The fishermen presented their plight to President Vargas, and in the face of headlines about the sixteen-hundred-mile voyage, he quickly signed a law allowing jangada fishermen to join the Seamen’s Union, with benefits. Whether Vargas acted to boost his populist image or because he wanted to correct an injustice didn’t matter to Welles, to whom the raft captain Manoel Jacaré was a heroic figure. The extraordinary episode would anchor a segment Welles called “Jangadeiros.”

  Welles decided the opus would begin with “My Friend Bonito” and “Jangadeiros” in evocative black and white, and burst into color with the capstone of the film, the desired grand “Carnaval.” Alongside his Goodwill Ambassador duties, Welles started the Rio extravaganza segment as soon as he arrived. From the beginning, however, nothing was easy about filming in Brazil.

  On February 8, 1942, when the Pan Am Clipper and a U.S. Army bomber landed Welles and his crew of forty at Rio, the Mardi Gras festivities were already under way. Carnaval is like a tidal wave—it doesn’t stop for anyone—and there was no time to scout locations or even to get oriented to the new place. Lighting equipment hadn’t arrived, so the crew borrowed airplane landing lights from the Brazilian army to illuminate the nights, when much of the action took place. “Carnaval”—the Portuguese spelling—would be the first Technicolor film shot on location outside the United States, with the vibrant colors seen in Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz given a new dimension in the streets and glittering dance clubs of Rio. But Technicolor cameras were a burden, too; Hollywood crews were unaccustomed to working abroad with any kind of equipment, let alone the heavy thirty-five-millimeter cameras required by the new process. One crew member griped in a letter to RKO headquarters of “the hot weather, the bad food and the impossibility of operating in an efficient Hollywood manner.”

  As Welles and his crew tried to cope with disorienting new ways, a terrible human tragedy occurred. In May 1942, Manoel Jacaré willingly accepted Welles’s invitation to fly to Rio with his men from the jangada to reenact their December arrival on the raft. On a calm day when a small number of the crew was filming, the jangada inexplicably turned over. Three of the men survived, but Jacaré, the captain and charismatic activist, drowned. Welles was devastated. He made sure money reached Jacaré’s widow and ten children. But nothing, it seemed, could assuage his feelings of guilt. Voices in the press blamed him for the death of the man who had become a national hero.

  And trouble kept coming from RKO, and from certain Brazilians. They were alarmed about the places Welles frequented and friends he made, like the composer Herivelto Martins, whose “Golden Trio” included the prominent black singer Nilo Chagas, and Otelo Grande, who also was black. The RKO representative on the trip complained to the home office in a letter that Welles “ordered day and night shots in some very dirty and disreputable nigger neighborhoods throughout the city.” A few days later, the representative reported, “We had a very full week as far as shooting goes. However, the stuff itself is just carnival nigger singing and dancing, of which we already have piles.”

  By day, Welles visited the favelas of Rio to film with Martins and Grande, and he drank with them long into the night. At a party at the Urca Casino, he asked for his friends and was told they were not allowed inside the casino for the social event. Welles searched nearby bars until he found Martins and Otelo Grande. “We drank until three o’clock in the morning,” Grande told a Welles biographer. He said Welles told them, “Tonight we drink black beer.”

  * * *

  The longer he spent in Rio, the more Orson Welles believed that the music that inspired, inflamed, and lifted Carnaval was born from the favela experience, resonating with African rhythms, just as jazz had been born in the black neighborhoods of New Orleans. Lourival Fontes and his Department of Press and Propaganda and the U.S. Embassy looked askance at Welles spending so much time in the shantytowns.

  “The carnival for him was essentially a black story—a story of Brazilian music started in black communities in the slums,” said Richard Wilson, Welles’s assistant director, in a 1993 documentary about the abortive making of It’s All True. But the black face of Brazil was the last thing that official Brazil, and the glamorous women and men who had been consorting with Welles, wanted to see representing their country before the world, and they made their displeasure known to U.S. diplomats.

  By April 1942, Grande Otelo and others were filming on newly built soundstages in Rio, re-creating pieces of the music and life of the carnival for splicing into the documentary-style footage crews had captured on arrival. Every week, Welles sent the reels of raw footage to the studio. He was enthusiastic about “micro-sequences” that opened windows on “carnival’s myriad forms of human interplay,” showing how the spirit of the celebration brought people of different colors and different economic classes together, a metaphor for Pan-Americanism.

  Away from the filmmaking, fears crested that Welles had gone dangerously off track. His movie was lionizing Latin Americans who were working class, the jangadeiros, and the Afro-Brazilians of the favelas. “The Brazilian establishment started to boycott the film and influenced RKO to do the same,” said Wilson. The studio cut funds and stopped sending raw stock.

  It is difficult to believe that Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney, or RKO, did not know what they were getting when they recruited Orson Welles to make a film in Brazil. From the beginning of his career, black
culture and labor rights had figured in his work. At age twenty, Welles directed the “Voodoo Macbeth” as it is commonly called, a version of Shakespeare’s play with an entirely African American cast, the locus changed from Scotland to the Caribbean, with Haitian vodou replacing Scottish witchcraft. “Voodoo Macbeth” threw a spotlight on African American theater and marked its director as an unpredictable genius. He produced a stage adaptation of Native Son, Richard Wright’s coming-of-age novel about a poor black youth growing up in Chicago. He directed The Cradle Will Rock, the Brechtian opera by Marc Blitzstein about union organizing, religious hypocrisy, and corporate greed in “Steeltown, USA.” The New York Times called it “the best thing militant labor has put into the theatre yet.”

  At the same time, Orson Welles might have been forewarned about Rockefeller had he considered the millionaire’s behavior toward another idiosyncratic artist, the muralist Diego Rivera. In 1932, Rockefeller persuaded Rivera, one of Mexico’s best-known painters and a favorite of Rockefeller’s mother, Abby, to create a huge mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center on the theme “Man at the Crossroads.” The work was meant to spark thinking, to look ahead at the scientific, industrial, and social potentials of the unfolding twentieth century, and Rivera worked on it for months. Rockefeller was uncomfortable when he saw that Rivera pictured Vladimir Lenin leading a workers’ May Day parade, and suggested he replace the revolutionary communist leader’s face with that of an ordinary laborer. Rivera declined, offering to add Abraham Lincoln elsewhere in the composition, but that was not enough for Rockefeller, who called the Mexican artist down from the scaffold. In 1934 Rockefeller ordered the work demolished.

  RKO fired Welles. As Welles saw the calamity in Rio, a cowardly Rockefeller had allowed the Brazilians and the RKO executives to scuttle It’s All True even before its reels had been edited into a proper picture. Rockefeller knew how the director felt about him, describing Welles later as “a brilliant, austere, somewhat pompous but greatly respected man who really hated my guts.” Welles expressed his opinion of Rockefeller in the 1947 noir thriller The Lady from Shanghai. He created the slimy, despicable George Grisby character as a rendition of the CIAA chief, complete with Rockefeller’s telltale faux-casual mannerism of calling everybody “fellah.”

  * * *

  Tantalizing bits of It’s All True remain. From “My Friend Bonito,” there are stark desert landscapes around the Mexican village where the boy raises his bull, footage of a timeless church and village, a remarkable sequence of the traditional rite of the blessing of the animals. The “Jangadeiros” segment, in a forty-minute version called Four Men and a Raft, shows the fishermen crafting their open vessel from tree to timber with handmade tools; they ride the waves in shots so layered and deep they look painted, not filmed. Almost all the “Carnaval” segment footage disappeared after being sent to RKO—Hollywood legend has it the studio dumped it into the Pacific. But Welles’s synopsis and notes, held at Indiana University, and descriptions in documentaries by crew and cast such as Richard Wilson and Grande Otelo, depict a tour de force that captured the grandest displays and smallest gestures of dancers, singers, and costumed celebrants, from shantytown pathways to luxurious dance palaces, all united and woven through with the music of samba, alive and unending. It’s All True may be one of the richest and most beautiful films never made.

  Twenty years before the civil rights movement in the United States, Disney’s sleek features ignored the presence of black and mixed-race Latin Americans. (His less-seen 1944 travel documentary, The Amazon Awakens, did show them.) For Welles, the black experience was the key to the Brazilian culture he wished to share.

  In a 1993 television documentary, an aging Grande Otelo said that his old friend Welles “showed Brazil as it really was. He came to love not only Brazil but all of humanity through the mixture of races he saw here.” Disney’s beauty shots and cartoon characters do not leave the audience with an impression of Latin cultural depth. But they were very entertaining, and made the people of Latin America look friendly.

  Millions saw the Disney version of the continent. For Rockefeller, that was good propaganda, and that was success.

  9.

  SPIES, MASTERS OF SPIES

  The espionage war in Latin America was a duel between two spymasters who could not have been more different. The enigmatic Admiral Wilhelm Canaris of the Reich’s intelligence agency, the Abwehr, was a cosmopolitan, skillful and daring. The FBI’s methodical J. Edgar Hoover, the stern face of U.S. crime-fighting, never traveled abroad but laid down an ultimately effective system of international G-men. Each managed hundreds of agents. For much of the war, the Germans held the strongest hand.

  In 1939 when Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, President Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest fear was that Nazi subversion in Latin America would threaten the security of the United States. However, no proper spy network existed to track Nazi activities in the region. William “Intrepid” Stephenson’s British Security Coordination (BSC), with its mission to convince Washington to join the war, to spread propaganda, and to gather intelligence in the Americas, was not established in its Rockefeller Center offices until May 1940.

  And the United States lagged behind in foreign espionage thanks partly to old-fashioned politesse. In 1929, U.S. secretary of state Henry L. Stimson shut down the U.S. Cipher Bureau, known as the Black Chamber. Forerunner of the National Security Agency, the Black Chamber had been in charge of breaking the diplomatic codes of other countries. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” Stimson declared.

  Hitler’s spies had no such compunctions.

  Canaris’s Abwehr agents met with their Japanese counterparts in Mexico in 1936. Three years later the Reich’s Latin American spy network was functioning on the ground.

  * * *

  Imagine a Mexico City salon on any given evening in the years before Pearl Harbor; well-dressed men and women speak a mix of Spanish, German, and English, drinking, laughing, occasionally whispering. Look around the room and you’d be unlikely to see American or British intelligence agents prying information from Mexican notables or foreign diplomats.

  But you would see others working on behalf of Canaris’s Abwehr, such as the vivacious blonde movie actress Hilda Kruger. In Germany, Kruger had been an intimate of Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister of propaganda. She headed for the New World after reportedly being pushed out of the picture by Goebbels’s formidable wife, Magda.

  Kruger stopped in San Francisco long enough to have an affair with an heir to a beer fortune and turn down his marriage proposal before continuing south to Hollywood, where she hoped to make a name for herself in American movies. Her poor English kept her from getting good roles, but in Hollywood she met billionaire oilman John Paul Getty, who became a frequent escort. They traveled together to Mexico City, where the glamorous German became the toast of the town. She also became the lover of more than one cabinet minister, including Miguel Aleman, who would be elected president in 1944. Pillow talk became reportable intelligence.

  Kruger’s fellow Reich spies were equally colorful. The Abwehr Mexico chief was tall, blonde Georg Nicolaus, code name “Max.” A son of the director of Deutsche Bank in Berlin, “Max” had worked in banking in Colombia and as an engineer in Ecuador, and spoke perfect Spanish. In Germany he trained in telegraph communication and chemical formulas to make explosives. In Mexico, however, Georg Nicolaus was not likely to receive orders to explode anything, as both Admiral Canaris and the German Foreign Office frowned upon violent covert actions that might undermine the neutrality of Latin nations. But his telegraph skills were well used.

  “Max” reached out deftly from Mexico City to connect with German spies throughout Central and South America. He also controlled two Abwehr agents in the United States, who culled openly available publications, translated and collated the information, and sent it to him for dispatch to Germany. Four additional contacts “north of the border,” “Max” told Berlin, provided him
with a stream of classified materials on U.S. bombers and fighter planes, on production levels of oil, aluminum, and steel.

  Friedrich Karl von Schlebrügge, code name “Morris” and second to Nicolaus, was a Prussian baron who had lived in Mexico for a year in 1938 pretending to sell sewing machines. In fact, the baron’s specialty was selling Swedish armored cars and tanks as well as communications wares for the Mexican military.

  “Morris” cut an aristocratic figure, with a monocle and a facial scar that looked like it came from a sword fight. He got to know Mexican officers well. He led a dive-bomber squadron for the Luftwaffe in 1939 during Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but given the need for spies with experience in the Western Hemisphere, Schlebrügge was quickly trained in communications and secret inks and sent back to Mexico. There he recruited two more agents who became important in gathering and sending intelligence: Walter Baker, a shipping company employee who provided itineraries of merchant ships, oil tankers, and warships at Gulf ports, and Carlos Retelsdorf, code name “Glenn,” a businessman with a powerful radio transmitter on his coffee farm in Veracruz that the spy network used to communicate with Germany.

  Edgard S. Weisblat, an elegant gentleman of Polish origin, was also in Mexico. He worked not for the Abwehr but for the Gestapo, the Reich’s feared secret police, one of its most capable agents. He posed as an entrepreneur who offered to build fast boats for Mexican national defense, a subterfuge that gave him cover to solicit photos and designs of marine equipment from U.S. and British companies.

  Hilda Kruger, “Max,” the baron, Weisblat, and dozens more agents in the network did their spying covertly, careful to avoid offending Mexican neutrality. Even Berlin’s ambassador Rüdt von Collenberg, although a public figure, was exceedingly discreet as he constructed a network of informants among businessmen, bank employees, and government functionaries, not all Germans but all sympathetic to Hitler’s Germany. Often, the same companies that financed the Reich’s war provided cover for agents in their Mexican branches: IG Farben, Bayer, BASF, Agfa, Hoechst.