Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Immediately they hit on the idea of using Hearst as their central character, all Welles’s separate needs fell into place: a great theme, one which, because of Hearst’s extraordinary career, encompassed a substantial amount of recent American history; a great role for him; and an original cinematically exciting method, barely explored as yet, of telling a story. It is hard to exaggerate the relief and excitement that he felt once the idea had crystallised. As 1939 drew to an end, he had again – in the nick of time – been saved by the bell. Still expecting to shoot The Smiler with a Knife, with which Mankiewicz had been unenthusiastically tinkering, Welles was desperate to get cracking on the new idea.

  The pressure on him mounted. Herb Drake’s great publicity coup, the lavishly illustrated three-part series in Saturday Evening Post (HOW TO RAISE A CHILD) had just appeared. What would normally have been a triumph was, in the circumstances of Welles’s continuing non-productivity, something of an embarrassment. The tone of the articles verges on the satirical, as the authors solemnly catalogue their subject’s legendary doings. ‘He talked like a college professor at two. At three, he looked like Dr Fu Manchu and spouted Shakespeare like a veteran. At eight he started making his own highballs. He was leading man for Katharine Cornell at eighteen. Today, at twenty-four, he has the most amazing contract ever signed in Hollywood.’ And nothing to show for it, the subtext loudly whispered. He must start work immediately, and when he did, it had better be good. Mankiewicz had expressed willingness to work on the idea, but (perhaps mischievously; he knew all about the recent supper at Chasen’s) specifically requested Houseman to join him as collaborator on the initial stages. Without hesitation, Welles took a plane to New York to have lunch with the man at whom he had only ten days earlier hurled several, flaming dish-warmers. Equally unhesitatingly, the target of those dish-warmers, only a week after severing their working relationship, agreed, over that lunch, to come and work on the new screenplay. Things couldn’t move fast enough for Welles. He knew he was on to the most tremendous subject anyone could hope to find, and they had hit on a brilliant and original way of telling it.

  A bald summary of Hearst’s life reads in itself like the treatment for a movie. Heir to a mining fortune, after a profligate youth he had sought elected office without ever once coming close; abandoning the ballot box, he had used his fortune to buy up a chain of newspapers, through whose pages he then promoted his political beliefs. Like Oswald Mosley in England (the model for The Smiler with a Knife) he had rapidly developed from a progressive to a fascist, consorting with Hitler and Mussolini; as a man, he had developed from a high-spirited anti-authoritarian prankster (he had been business manager of the Harvard Lampoon) into a crusty and pompous reactionary, using the American League of Decency to disseminate his anti-communist, pro-family views in twenty-eight newspapers, thirteen magazines and on two radio stations. In rather naked contrast to this, he lived, very publicly but unreported, with his mistress Marion Davies. Just as he attempted to control American public opinion by sheer will-power and money, he attempted to turn Davies from a delightful and accomplished comedienne into the biggest star in Hollywood. Buying a studio in which to make starring vehicles for her, orchestrating frenzies of excitement at their premières, and then having them reviewed in apocalyptic terms, he succeeded only in making the films, Miss Davies, and himself ridiculous. His Spanish-gothic folly, San Simeon, built as temple to his love, was a bizarre aberration of the otherwise impeccably tasteful Beaux-Arts architect Julia Morgan, an extraordinary operatic creation, crammed with art works cheaply bought from impoverished European noblemen arranged in a sequence of enormous rooms without regard to period or style. An art lover’s Disneyland, it is impressive only as a monument to its creator’s will. In San Simeon, he arranged a succession of fêtes galantes, fancy dress balls and banquets to divert his beautiful captive, now middle-aged and drinking heavily. The photographs of these sumptuous events reveal the vast sums spent on them. Marion cavorts charmingly as Marie-Antoinette or Columbine, while Hearst, small-eyed and large-bodied, peers anaemically out of his pachydermatous frame, ludicrous in lederhosen.

  All this was going on on Hollywood’s doorstep, a couple of hours’ drive up the coast. It was an irresistible subject; why had nobody attempted it before? The reason was simple: they had not dared to. Though financially weaker than he had been, Hearst was still not an enemy anyone in Hollywood wanted to take on. Mankiewicz dared; he was aching to bring all his bile to bear on this embodiment of everything he despised: ‘a great WASP institution’, as Welles later characterised Mankiewicz’s delineation of Kane. Curiously enough, Mankiewicz’s own politics were not very far from those of Hearst: starting as a radical (in the early thirties he had written an anti-Hitler screenplay, Mad Dog of Europe, which the largely Jewish Hollywood establishment suppressed), he became increasingly anti-communist and isolationist, believing that they (the Establishment: the Pentagon and the armaments industry) were lined up behind war for their own purposes. He started declaring that the Nazis were right about the over-dominance of Jews, though at the same time, with entirely characteristic perversity, sponsoring many Jewish émigrés as they arrived in America. Mankiewicz’s grouse against Hearst was not political; it was personal. He loathed tycoons of any persuasion; his screenplay of two years before, John Meade’s Woman, had been a savage assault on one. Entirely lacking power himself, he detested those who had it. American, as he and Welles decided to call their screenplay (the very title an allusion to Hearst’s newspapers), was to be his revenge on the pack of them.

  He, Welles and Houseman had many discussions in Hollywood, poring over the almost-too-rich material, establishing a structure which included a summary of the leading character’s life in the form of a newsreel; an idea which Welles had earlier planned to use in The Smiler with a Knife. That project, in the mounting excitement over the new screenplay, was quietly abandoned due to ‘casting difficulties’; Heart of Darkness was shelved, too. Neither these nor any other that Welles had contemplated could begin to compare in cinematic potential to Mankiewicz’s idea, and none of them could give him the opportunities he was ideally equipped to take advantage of. He knew it. A contract was drawn up with Mercury Productions by which Mankiewicz was to be paid $1,000 a week. As often, he was to have no credit for his work, a small matter to him, screenplay doctor extraordinaire, but a large one to Welles, ‘actor-director-producer-writer’. The publicity surrounding the prodigality of Welles’s talents, and the subsequent and ever-increasing sniping about it, meant, he felt, that for him to acknowledge co-authorship would be a public humiliation; his contract with RKO precisely stipulated that the screenplay would be written by him.

  So Arnold Weissberger took particular care to insert a clause in Mankiewicz’s contract stating that ‘All material composed, submitted, added or interpolated by you under this employment agreement, and all results and proceeds of all services rendered or to be rendered by you under this employment agreement, are now and shall forever be the property of Mercury Productions Inc who, for this purpose, shall be deemed the author and creator thereof, you having acted entirely as its employee.’ A similar clause was to be found in the contracts of writers on Campbell’s Playhouse; it was an understanding that Welles was known as the author, just as politicians’ speeches, though rarely written by them, are deemed to be theirs. Welles had, in fact, he said, created a rudimentary script, three hundred pages of dialogue with occasional stage directions under the title of John Citizen, USA (which continued for a while to be the RKO project title). This he handed to Mankiewicz before he started work. Mankiewicz may or may not have read it; certainly no one else has ever seen it.

  Mankiewicz’s contract contained a further stipulation: that he would keep dry. It was partly to guarantee this that Houseman accompanied him to the little village of Victorville. But Mankiewicz also needed a collaborator of some sort. It was not in his nature to write alone. Without peer as a screenplay doctor, he had more difficulty initiating wor
k. Carefully avoiding any suggestion that he actually wrote any of the screenplay (although he says that the NEWS ON THE MARCH section was his special responsibility), Houseman describes his work with Mankiewicz: that of any editor, responding, disagreeing, arguing, suggesting. When they had had their daily editorial session, he would withdraw. While Mankiewicz wrote, still in his plaster cast stretching from his navel to his toes, Houseman rode in the surrounding hills; their relationship was one of the utmost cordiality. Houseman glowingly describes their routine, the spartan living, the visits to the Green Spot for the permitted one drink a day. Houseman was drawn to Mankiewicz, as he was always drawn to self-assured but somehow incomplete people. He describes their friendship, which lasted over thirteen years till Mankiewicz’s death, in almost identical terms to those in which, three years earlier, he had described his relationship with Welles: ‘he was, variously, my collaborator, my father, my wayward son, my counsellor and a source of inexhaustible stimulation, exasperation and pleasure.’5

  Here in the desert, with Houseman as a catalyst, Mankiewicz found his form again. As they worked, they developed a sort of schoolboyish attitude to their employer, Welles. ‘Sadly,’ Welles wrote to Bogdanovich, ‘the closer Jack got to Mank, the further Mank moved away from me.’6 He became ‘Maestro, the Dog-Faced Boy’ and they took naughty pleasure in slipping elements from his life and his character into the screenplay. (It is above all this, Pauline Kael maintained, that deprived Mankiewicz of his proper acknowledgement for his work. ‘As a result of Mankiewicz’s wicked sense of humour in drawing upon Welles’s character for Kane’s, his own authorship was obscured. Sensing the unity in Kane and Welles, audiences assume that Kane is Welles’s creation, that Welles is playing “the role he was born to play”,7 while scholars, seeing the material from Welles’s own life in the movie, interpret the film as Welles working out autobiographical themes.’) Welles believed that Houseman used his time in Victorville to poison Mankiewicz against him. ‘When Mank left for Victorville, we were friends. When he came back, we were enemies. Mank always needed a villain.’8 It is not to be doubted that Houseman was perfectly capable of trying to suspend the mutual admiration society which Welles and Mankiewicz had established; it is none the less equally true that Welles was again speaking autobiographically when he speaks of Mank’s ‘need for a villain’. For him Houseman filled this role. ‘I have only one real enemy in my life that I know about,’9 Welles told Meryman, ‘and that is John Houseman. Everything begins and ends with the hostility behind the mandarin benevolence.’ This is palpably untrue, since Houseman withdrew from Welles’s life just at the moment that he became hugely successful; Welles engineered his subsequent downfall all on his own.

  Now running Campbell’s Playhouse without Houseman – who had resigned from it after their bust-up in Chasen’s – Welles was heavily involved in the radio programmes and left his collaborators to get on with producing the first draft. He would pay the occasional visit to Victorville; pages would be sent to him in Hollywood. The script was constantly amended according to his input; Houseman describes their struggles integrating his latest thoughts into the structure, which none the less remained firmly in place: the death of the central figure, followed by the newsreel of his life and the investigation of his final word, Rosebud. Cheering though the work on the script was, Welles was now in serious trouble financially. In addition to his own extravagant life, he had to pay alimony to Virginia, their divorce (on the grounds of his mental cruelty) having gone painlessly through – in Reno – in February of 1940. ‘He’s a genius and sometimes works around the clock without sleep,’ she gallantly explained. ‘He has no time for marriage and a family.’ The settlement, as well as providing for maintenance for Virginia and Christopher, additionally determined that he must take out $100,000 life insurance cover, half to benefit Virginia, half Christopher. It was all adding up; and there was no income to meet it. Campbell’s Playhouse had now finally come to an end, for good, Ward Wheelock having decided that the battle to get Welles to keep the sponsor sweet was too troublesome; that had been his only regular salary. Jane Eyre, starring Madeleine Carroll with Welles as Rochester, was the last programme. He was due no more money from RKO until the commencement of shooting, so he gladly embraced the notion that Albert Schneider (still at Columbia Management) came up with: a tour on the burgeoning lecture circuit. Since at this moment Welles’s celebrity was the only area of expansion in his life, Schneider sought to exploit it. A LECTURE RECITAL BY ORSON WELLES the posters said. DIRECTOR-STAR OF THE MERCURY THEATRE, PRODUCER, WRITER, ACTOR – FOR RADIO, THEATRE, MOTION PICTURES.

  As if in mockery of this boast, he became involved, just as he was about to set out on his travels, in an unseemly exchange with the sociologist Hadley Cantril over that perennially sensitive matter in his life, authorship. Cantril, having completed his survey of The War of the Worlds panic, wanted to publish Howard Koch’s script alongside it in a single volume, and asked Welles to endorse the book. Welles’s impassioned reply took Cantril by surprise. Welles complained of ‘an error so grave, and in my opinion so detrimental to my own reputation that I cannot in all fairness speak well of it until some reparation is made’.10 This was the attribution of the script to Koch. He does not regret, he says, the exclusion of himself as dramatist, so much as he regrets the absence of any mention of the other people who ‘as it happened in this particular broadcast were of much greater service’; these include, he says, John Houseman, ‘my partner in all Mercury Theatre enterprises and my chief collaborator’, as well as the other members under him in the writers’ department. This was a new slant: collective authorship; his acknowledgement of Houseman’s input is remarkable and unlikely to have been made under any other circumstances. He expands: the idea for The War of the Worlds broadcast was his; Koch was ‘very helpful’ in the second portion of the script and did some work on the first, most of which, he says, it was necessary to revise. His advice, he says, ‘both legal and in the fields of publicity and personal relations’, is unanimously to the effect that the reference to the broadcast script as the ‘Howard Koch dramatisation’ is ‘something worse than merely untrue’. Every one of his collaborators, including the actors, brought more to the programme than Koch. Finally he comes out into the open: ‘I do strongly feel that you have unwittingly implied a slur on my position as the creator and responsible artist of my broadcasts.’ It had by now become essential to him (in his own mind, at any rate) to maintain his position as Renaissance Man. Under constant pressure from a carping, mocking press, he dreaded being found out as less than what he claimed to be. This is not vanity; it is terror.

  Cantril, wiser than Solomon, suggested an ingenious formula: ‘Script ideas and development by Orson Welles assisted by John Houseman and Mercury Theatre staff and written by Howard Koch under the direction of Mr Welles.’11 Welles blasted back with a telegram by return of wire: ‘your suggested revision for the second printing is far too elaborate and incorrect a statement stop i repeat war of the worlds was not written by howard koch’.12 In his earlier letter he had suggested an erratum slip, an idea to which Cantril had not warmed. ‘Think how much more unfavourable an impression your book will make as it now stands and try to conceive the effect on my professional prestige and position in the theatre world. Can see no conceivable reason for your steadfast refusal to believe The War of the Worlds was not only my conception but also, properly and exactly speaking, my creation. Once again, finally, and I promise for the last time, Howard Koch did not write The War of the Worlds. Any statement to this effect is untrue and immeasurably detrimental to me.’

  Cantril replies citing affidavits and a telegram from Houseman’s secretary at the time saying that Koch dictated the script to her from a manuscript in his own handwriting, and that Houseman and Paul Stewart made only minor corrections in it. ‘In view of all the evidence we have from him,’ Cantril ends, ‘I find no other alternative than to acknowledge him as writer but not as creator.’ Welles blasts back with
the magnificently seigneurial statement that ‘I should most certainly think that the word of the producer-director-star and star of the broadcast which is the subject of your book would hold more weight with you than the word of one of the authors employed by him at the time.’ Cantril has resorted to underlings, Welles continues. ‘I cannot understand why you have so steadfastly refused to believe me. Mr Howard K. did not do the actual writing of The War of the Worlds script. He only did some of it.’ He adds ‘my interest in this matter is not to receive credit. My only interest, like yours, is accuracy,’ rather spoiling his objective stand by adding ‘I’m sure you can appreciate the untold damage done to my professional reputation that the publication of this book in its present form will create. I know that you will understand that I cannot permit this to occur.’

  The note of desperation is explained by his public standing at that moment. Citizen Kane was not even at first draft stage yet, and like all such things, a tremendous gamble. It could have gone either way. He was surfing on a tidal wave of publicity which threatened to engulf him, since there was nothing visible to justify it; his most recent work in the theatre had passed either unnoticed or unloved, his radio programme, though commanding solid audience figures, generated little excitement. None of his Hollywood projects had materialised. The War of the Worlds was, in effect, his only real claim to widespread fame: it was the reason that he was in Hollywood at all, the real reason that he had been able to negotiate the famous contract, the only living proof of his multi-faceted genius. The revelation that he had not actually written it would deprive his image of one of its crucial dimensions, making him look a fraud; the discovery that the whole thing had been an accident would have finished him off for good. Or so it seemed from his pardonably paranoid position. He lost this battle; the book (The Invasion from Mars) duly appeared with Koch credited as author of the script. In the event, no one except Welles even noticed; the legend was undented. The level of his anxiety about all this, however, is a good index of quite how vulnerable he felt in April of 1940.