Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Back to RKO, where Welles’s recently-appointed agent, Albert Schneider of Columbia Management, was playing a brilliant game of brinkmanship. He was able to do so, since his client (though certainly in the long run determined to make films) was in mid-1939 frantically trying to get Five Kings into town; this was both more real and more pressing to him than dealing with Hollywood. A glimmer of possible backing for Five Kings enabled Schneider to cable Schaefer: ‘new developments regarding welles make it impossible for him to consider films at this time’. Like any suitor, Schaefer became more ardent with every rejection, until finally, backed by Arnold Weissberger’s legal brilliance, the masterly Schneider secured a contract for his client (in the form of Mercury Productions) the like of which no one in Hollywood has ever had before or since – not financially (the $150,000 he was to earn for each film was not an uncommon fee, and somewhat less than the highest fliers, Hitchcock or Wyler, might expect) but in terms of control. ‘I didn’t want money; I wanted authority,’ said Welles, years later. He was to act in, write, direct and produce a film a year. To his ‘profession of actor-director’ he had added not only writing but producing. This was another sensational development. There was some controversy during this period about what was called ‘the one-man show’ film: the movies of Capra and Preston Sturges were supreme examples; Walt Disney’s, of course, even more so. Chaplin and now Welles were the only actors to be included in this category; the crucial element in their one-man showmanship being that they produced their own films. In other words, they were responsible for every aspect of the picture, from beginning to end; they were, to translate a later phrase of film theory, the ‘authors’ of them, not merely supervisors of the actual shooting. This has now become the standard definition of the director’s role: he will involve himself at every level; it is his film, even though he is not nominally the producer.

  Directors in Hollywood in 1939 had a much less exalted function, and were expected to fulfil the requirements of the front office in terms of casting, design, even the manner in which the film was lit and shot. Studios had a ‘look’, a set of values which the director was expected to reproduce. David O. Selznick – an independent producer who nevertheless exerted total control over his own pictures – and Alfred Hitchcock, for example, had a classic producer–director relationship in their work on Rebecca: scarcely a page of the screenplay goes uncommented on by Selznick. He is particularly fierce about what he calls ‘movie-ization’ of the original. This sort of relationship is what Welles wanted above all to avoid. Pathologically resistant to authority imposed from above, he was intent on creating (in whatever medium) the equivalent of a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk: something using all the means of expression at his disposal which he would then personally unify into a piece of work bearing the unmistakable imprint of his own personality. It may be no good, he was often to say, in one form or another, of his work, but at least it’s mine. More than anything else, more than any idea or concept, more than any human feeling or interpretation of experience, this is what Welles stood for: the insistence on imprinting his own personality on his work. It had been true in the theatre; it was true on the radio; it would most certainly be true in movies. And he had the contract to make it possible.

  The all-important feature of that famous contract was the sensational phrase ‘The distributor shall be entitled to confer with the producer on the final cutting and editing of each of the pictures prior to the delivery thereof, but the control of such cutting shall vest in the producer.’ Everything in the history of Hollywood during the previous twenty years had been directed towards devolving power into the hands of the studio bosses. This centralisation was not to last for even so much as another decade, but in 1939 it seemed as if the moguls’ success in consolidating power was unassailable, and the approval of the final cut was the symbolic embodiment of that power. Schaefer surrendered it to Welles, a stranger in Hollywood who had never directed a movie in his life before. The moguls must have heard the tumbrils rolling.

  Part Three

  QUADRUPLE THREAT

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hollywood/Heart of Darkness

  ‘JUST SIGNED!’ screamed RKO’s ad in the trade press. ‘Orson Welles … – brilliant actor and director, to make one picture a year … and WHAT a picture is planned for his first!’ Hollywood failed to be set alight; was, in fact, highly sceptical, not to say resentful, from the beginning, not only at the presumptuousness of this outsider from the theatre being given the run of the coop, but at the bombardment of publicity which accompanied him. Hollywood’s feelings about him are brilliantly embodied in the Pat Hobby story, ‘Pat Hobby and Orson Welles’, which Scott Fitzgerald wrote for Esquire magazine shortly after Welles’s arrival. Hobby is a washed-up screenwriter. ‘“Who’s this Welles?”1 Pat asked of Louie, the studio bookie. “Every time I pick up a paper, they go on about this Welles.” “You know, he’s that beard,” explained Louis. “Sure, I know he’s that beard, you couldn’t miss that, but what credit’s he got? What’s he done to draw one hundred and fifty grand a picture?”’ Unable even to get onto the studio lot to scrounge some lunch, Hobby broods darkly about Welles. ‘Welles was in; Hobby was out. Never before had the studio been barred to Pat and though Welles was on another lot it seemed as if his large body, pushing in brashly from nowhere, had edged Pat out the gate … Orson Welles had no business edging him out of this. Orson Welles belonged with the rest of the snobs back in New York.’ Hobby finally gets a lift from Mr Marcus, a mogul, and begs him for a pass to the studio lot. Marcus is on his way to meet ‘this new Orson Welles that’s in Hollywood’. ‘Pat’s heart winced. There it was again – that name, sinister and remorseless, spreading like a dark cloud over all his skies. “Mr Marcus,” he said so sincerely that his voice trembled, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this Orson Welles is the biggest menace that’s come to Hollywood for years. He gets a hundred and fifty grand for a picture and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was so radical that you would have to have all new equipment and start all over again like you did with sound in 1928.”’ He had entered Hollywood’s collective subconscious, a real bogeyman.

  Who needed him? was the widespread reaction. Hollywood was, in 1939, at its dazzling zenith. The system had perfected itself under those thugs the moguls, who somehow, despite their artistic intellectual, moral and social inadequacies, had got something very right. The most remarkable actors, writers, designers, technicians and craftsmen in the world had been lured into their gilded prisons in Hollywood and given the wherewithal to practise their skills in almost ideal circumstances. For this privilege, their loss of artistic and personal freedom seemed a small price to pay. Both the industry and its leaders were, with rare brave exceptions, happy with the status quo; it was working – why fix it? Then along comes Welles: Mr Fix-It in person. Welles later stated that established directors like Ford and Wyler had been pleasant to him; it was the producers who caused all the trouble ‘because if I could do all those things, then what is the need for a producer? It exploded the Thalberg myth, who is in my view the biggest villain in the history of Hollywood. Because he erected the myth of the producer and everybody believed it.’ This belief confirmed Welles’s loathing of authority, but the truth is that initially, at any rate, the industry felt threatened at every level, and insulted. Why should someone – a twenty-three-year-old someone – with no experience of film-making whatever be extended conditions that were denied to the cream of the movie community? CAN IT BE THE BEARD? one periodical satirically enquired, while Gene Lockhart, jester laureate of the Hollywood Masquers’ Club, wrote a savagely funny ditty which encapsulated the scorn and dislike that Welles provoked, providing him with a nickname which stuck like a limpet.

  LITTLE ORSON ANNIE2

  Little Orson Annie’s come to our house to play

  An’ josh the motion pitchurs up and skeer the stars away

  An’ shoo the Laughtons off the lot an’ build the sets an’ sweep

  An’ wind the fi
lm an’ write the talk an’ earn her board-an’-keep;

  An’ all of us other actors, when our pitchur work is done,

  We set around the Brown Derby bar an’ has the mostest fun,

  A-listenin’ to the me-tales ’at Annie tells about,

  An’ the Gobblewelles’ll git YOU

  Ef you DON’T WATCH OUT!

  This is concentrated malice, and it was not the only instance. It might have destroyed a less determined man. Welles’s uncommon gift of fearlessness – his sheer courage – was sorely strained throughout his time in Hollywood; whatever black moods he may have endured privately, he never gave any public impression of being in the least daunted, which is the more remarkable since he had, up to this point, very little experience of being publicly disliked or disapproved of. Now his every action, public or private, was scrutinised in a far from friendly spirit. Hollywood noted immediately that he came unaccompanied by his wife. Fooling no one, Welles airily claimed that Virginia was allergic to Californian life. In fact, their marriage had irretrievably collapsed under the weight of his compulsive fornication, to the extent that they had secretly filed a separation suit. Hollywood knew that it was over, but what, Hollywood wanted to know, had taken its place? Hollywood abhors a sexual vacuum.

  It was not just his wife from whom he was estranged. His relations with Houseman had cooled to freezing point; none the less, always ready to give the thing one last try, when Welles asked him to Hollywood, Houseman followed. RKO’s contract, after all, was with Mercury Productions, and in letter, if not in spirit, that still meant him. Renting an expensive house in the university area of Brentwood, Welles installed them in some style. His curious ménage (which did nothing to allay prurient speculation) consisted of a tiny Irish chauffeur whom he nicknamed Alfalfa, Charles, a supercilious and indolent French butler, and a maid; Houseman, Bill Alland and Dick Baer formed the Mercury contingent. There were also, says Houseman, ‘a full contingent of slaves, from whose presence Orson seemed to derive security and comfort in a strange and hostile town’.3 This was an expensive set-up, and Welles had very little income: the RKO money was due in instalments, most of it on completion. Naturally spendthrift, he now became reckless, as if to demonstrate his status. Made to feel small by Hollywood, he spent like a big shot, behaving as if he were already a great success. His reputation as an inordinate personality preceded him; instead of downpedalling this reputation, he defiantly played up to it, to the despair of Arnold Weissberger, who had now taken on the thankless task of being his financial adviser. He and Richard Baer, the Harvard graduate who had been stage managing and playing bit parts at the Mercury and was now Welles’s personal assistant, tried to keep the spending under control. Left to himself, Welles was perfectly capable of buying a plane to get back to New York, believing that this represented a saving.

  Weissberger wrote to Baer, ‘Orson does not think of his income in concrete terms in relationship to his expenditures. He does not ask how much he can spend in the light of his income but spends without regard to his income and then has payments arranged for as best can be done.’4 There was throughout the Hollywood period, an army of minders in Los Angeles and New York trying to contain his excess. Now, at the beginning of his sojourn, the expenditure was focused on riotous living at Brentwood. ‘Rumours,’ wrote Houseman, ‘began to circulate about the strange all-male population of the house in Brentwood.’5 It was because of those rumours, rather than simple professional hostility, that Welles was accosted as he sat one evening in the Brown Derby restaurant. The interestingly named cowboy actor Big Boy Williams (later one of the ‘Bad Men of Tombstone’) came up to his table, and accused him of being a ‘queer’: at the climax of their altercation, the cowboy picked up a knife and sliced off Welles’s tie.

  Big Boy and Welles had it out, according to Welles, in the car park (curiously, in later tellings of the story, he names Ward Bond, the rather more distinguished actor, later hero of Wagon Trail, as his symbolic castrator); but the suspicion and hostility were not going to go away easily or quickly. He attempted some clumsy gestures at reconciliation with the film community, but these were not successful: when he threw a party, no one, it is said, came. He was photographed with Shirley Temple, but this was regarded as patronising. Wisely, he hired a personal press representative, the shrewd and witty Herbert Drake, until then Drama Correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, a seasoned newspaperman with sterling contacts. Drake could not make Welles liked or even respected, but he could at least ensure that he was heard on his own terms. This he did; there was an unparalleled outpouring of articles and items over the next couple of years which matched every snide report with another startling fragment of the hagiography that Drake was busily recycling, not shaming to add colourful details of his own. Referring privately to him as ‘the Christ Child’, he nosed out and fleshed out a great deal of what became the standard Welles legend. This was not simply promotion; it was a necessary antidote to the dominant anti-Welles outpouring of the Hollywood press. And it was not difficult: liked or loathed, Welles was always news.

  He was not helped in his attempts to become part of the motion picture community by his weekly journey to New York to transmit his Campbell’s Playhouse offering. These absences stressed his involvement with ‘the rest of the snobs back in New York’. Welles had no desire to keep returning to the East Coast; on the contrary, he was eager to persuade the agency, Ward Wheelock, to transfer the broadcasts to Los Angeles, particularly since he planned to use his regular Campbell’s actors in his films – whatever they turned out to be. The company was adamantly opposed to this (‘Wheelock says absolutely not,’6 wrote the programme co-ordinator, Diana Bourbon. ‘Not being obstructive – he says sponsor wouldn’t hear of it. They’re 101 per cent sold on the idea of establishing the Playhouse as the glamour market for Broadway, just as Hollywood Hotel in its day was the glamour market for Hollywood’). In fact, Wheelock was far from pleased with the RKO contract altogether, despite its extraordinary provision – yet another unique feature of that remarkable document – that ‘the actor may be absent from the studio … during one working day each week in order that he may render services in connection with radio broadcasting.’ For a while it seemed as if they might take legal action: they had signed the RKO contract without consulting Wheelock; Welles desperately wired him that it was ‘irrevocable’ and absolutely within the terms of his original contract with the agency. In the event, no action was taken, but they remained suspicious that Welles’s radio work would become marginal to his involvement in film. They were not altogether wrong.

  Houseman sent a defensive telegram to Wheelock which is revealing in a number of ways, not least in giving an indication of how Welles intended to approach film-making: ‘practical considerations suggest enormous advantages to campbells of present picture tie-up stop orson’s function as actor director master of ceremonies and narrator in this picture identical to his function on radio show so that picture will be in itself unprecedented and highly effective plug for campbell playhouse stop many radio stars have made appearances in pictures but no recognisable and complete radio show with its formula intact has ever before been made into a motion picture’.7 This is precisely how Welles approached his first screenplay. Houseman continues: ‘we were completely dissatisfied with last season’s publicity work on campbell playhouse stop orson has assumed expense of special public relations man [Drake] to make tremendous rko investment serve best interests of radio program’. Welles liked to suggest that he had strolled into Hollywood, wide-eyed and a stranger to the ways of a wicked world, but, as this shows, he was acutely aware of the importance of publicity and image. Houseman insists that they will continue to stress the Broadway character of the radio show. If Wheelock will agree to move it to Los Angeles, they will ship out at their own expense anyone needed for the show who was not in the film ‘during these few weeks when we are shooting picture’. This telling last remark gives a clear indication of Welles’s innocence of the pro
cess of film-making. He believed that he could have it all: the radio programme, the film, and, of course, the theatre. He had already planned his return to the boards after the ‘few weeks’ of filming; it was a typically ambitious programme: The Playboy of the Western World, Peer Gynt and, he told Barbara Leaming, ‘something by John Ford’. He reckoned without the complexity of the work of film-making, and, more importantly, without the fascination it would exercise on him.

  His involvement with the radio programme continued hectic and combative: Diana Bourbon, as imperious as her name suggests, proved a formidable sparring partner, one of the few people who treated him as an equal (‘Now listen dear’ a typical letter starts). She took no nonsense from him: ‘Why did you two lice can Mr Chips?’8 she wrote to Welles and Houseman. ‘You were all agog to do it last year when it didn’t mean much. Now that it’s real box office you turn it down.’ Complaining about the sloppiness, incomprehensibility and expensiveness of one broadcast (Algiers), she wrote to the Campbell’s front-man Ernest Chappell, in a letter also sent to Welles, ‘They tell me you had 9 native musicians and a girl singer. Is Orson paying for these or did you get an okay direct from Ward? Look Chappie, dear – one thing I want to warn you about. Orson is a very fascinating personality. He sings a siren song to anybody who listens to him. Keep your feet on the ground, a firm grasp on your common sense and DON’T LET HIM HYPNOTISE YOU!’ Welles liked Bourbon personally, even enjoyed their jousts, but her interventions were exactly what he most detested: she was telling him what to do. The sooner he could get out of it the better, to enjoy his new freedom in Hollywood as his own master, choosing his own scripts, making his own experiments, choosing his own actors.