by Simon Callow
Fearing capitulation, Pritt points a finger at Hollywood: ‘as far as the producers are concerned, a grave mistake has been made and must be corrected. The mistake was bringing Orson Welles to Hollywood. It was known that Orson Welles had too many ideas of his own; it was known that his sympathies were with the opponents of either alien or native fascism. To bring such a man into a studio and give him an open hand was to court disaster. And if the result has been a picture that displeases Mr Hearst, it’s only what might have been expected. Throw him to the MGM lions. So say the Hearst stooges. But what of the others … the case of Orson Welles and Citizen Kane must not be judged by a frightened or conniving Hollywood autocracy but by the people who pay the admissions: not by the Jew-baiting, Red-baiting studio vigilantes but by those who carry the weight of the little golden calf labelled Box Office: not by a bellowing old tyrant but by those ultimately responsible for having made the movies a mass entertainment. Theirs, as always, will be the final verdict.’ Pritt’s last words proved prophetic; the immediate effect of his article, however, was further to polarise the situation, establishing Welles as a threat not merely to Hearst, but to Hollywood and those who ran it, the producers. Whether this was a great help in getting Citizen Kane released is to be doubted, but it can hardly be said that the role of producers’ scourge was thrust upon Welles. In this same month of February he published in Stage an article of such direct provocativeness to the Hollywood establishment at the very moment when he most needed it that it can only be concluded that his judgement was severely distorted by the anxiety and pressure under which he was labouring.
‘This article,’ Welles wrote, ‘will probably make me no friends in Hollywood, but I haven’t been making friends there at a rapid rate, and since my recent lectures on the motion pictures, it would be hard to say how I could make any new enemies. This is because I have proposed and contracted to do more work on a movie than anyone on the regular assembly line of the industry is allowed to do, and as though this weren’t enough, for some time I didn’t make the movie.’42 Clearly having decided that nothing was any longer to be gained by defence, he opts to attack, starting with an easy target – the critics – then moving on to a taboo one: his fellow artists in Hollywood. ‘Its inhabitants, deeply tanned but unresigned to the sunshine and the flowers, all confidently expect to take the next boat home – to write a novel, play another part on Broadway, resign, or commit suicide. But if nobody lives here, nobody leaves.’ Why? he wants to know. The movies offer limitless opportunities: ‘the actor is just now in possession of the means to act without the need to project. The close-up is the first new thing he’s had to play with since he took off his mask three thousand years ago and added his face to his voice.’ (He seems to have forgotten radio; moreover, didn’t he announce before shooting Citizen Kane that he was going to eschew close-ups – as he largely does?) Writers, too, should rejoice: the dramatist ‘mostly impotent,’ he says, ‘since the invention of the novelist’ – poor Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neill and Büchner! – ‘has a new dimension now, a new thing to write besides words – he is again capable of poetry.’ Composers are fortunate, too: ‘a public is drafted for serious music, whose composer … now finds himself unbelievably with a paying job and availed of a fresh and flexible narrative form.’ Finally he comes to directing. In movies, it becomes ‘a major art’. A new art in the theatre, its importance was exaggerated, ‘and still is’. ‘But if an actor can do without a director, a camera can’t. Call directing a job if you’re tired of the word “art.” It’s the biggest job in Hollywood (it should be anyway, and it would be, if it weren’t for something called the producer). If you don’t like artists, call a movie director a craftsman. He won’t mind. He’s the world’s happiest man, and if he isn’t, it’s because there are producers in the world.’
He seems to be coming to the heart of his tirade. But no, he has a few more targets in his sights: agents, for example. ‘It’s always Christmas morning for the percentage boys … the majority of ankles into which these artists’ representatives have clenched their parasitic teeth belong to people who need agents as much as a street-car needs an attendant stationed on its step to announce that for a fare the street-car will carry passengers along the track … your agent needs the goodwill of the studios more than you do, so he can’t afford to fight for you as hard as you could.’ This leads directly to the main target: ‘He’s either afraid of getting in bad with a producer, which makes him useless to you, or he’s useless to you because he’s in bad with a producer … only a little less superfluous than the agent and almost as successful, unlike certain others among Hollywood’s middle-men (the publicity man and the columnist, for example) the producer is not a necessary evil. He’s unnecessary and he’s evil … in England, a producer is a man who stages a play; on Broadway, he’s a man who finances a play; in Hollywood he’s a man who interferes with a movie. I say nothing against the executive head of any studio. I wouldn’t if I dared.’ He then dares; he can’t resist. ‘Several studio executives are seriously ignorant and some are absolutely foul. A lot of them are just old-fashioned smalltime showmen who got in cheap on a new thing that turned out to be a sure thing and were shrewd enough to hang on … let them die rich. They found more gold than they earned, but it’s all theirs. None will outlive the boom, and nobody wants them to.’
Hollywood had made Welles feel small: this is his revenge. ‘Like the writer – the actor and the designer of sets, and the composer of music, the cameraman, the wardrobe man, the make-up man – all are subjects of his undeniable highness, the Hollywood producer.’ All his rage against Houseman was now transferred to more general authority figures. Did he think that he would get the rest of Hollywood on his side by abusing producers? Was he waging a democratic crusade? Far from it. ‘Please understand, I think a movie needs a boss.’ The argument shifts. ‘There has never been a motion picture of consequence that has not been, broadly speaking, the product of one man. This man has been the producer, could be the writer, has been and usually should be the director. Certain pictures are rightly dominated by their stars or even their cameraman. The dominant personality is the essential of style in the motion picture art. When it is absent, a motion picture is a mere fabrication of the products of various studio departments from the set-builder to the manufacturer of dialogue, as meaningless as any other merchandise achieved by mass production.’ It is as if he were terrified that someone might say that Citizen Kane wasn’t his doing. ‘Let’s have more dominant personalities in the picture business and let them dominate all they want to, but let them be the personalities of those who really make the pictures. What we can do without is the dominating personality of a high-salaried official with nothing to do but dominate, and no other talent.’
The puzzle of this sustained outburst is that Welles was one of the few people in the history of Hollywood never to have had to submit to a producer in any way. Schaefer had been heroically supportive from the beginning of their association, only hesitating when it seemed the budget might be out of control; even then he was exceptionally flexible. He never imposed himself for one moment in the sphere of artistic decision-making. Part of Welles’s attack may be an anticipation of submission on the part of individual producers to Hearst’s tactics, though Hearst’s target was not them so much as the studio heads. Whatever his purpose, it can scarcely have been served by this rant. He leaves ‘this sketchy discussion of the motion picture producers’ feeling it essential ‘to point out that being a motion picture producer myself, I am utterly without bias on the subject. I must further admit that producers, agents and other personal grudges are merely contributors like myself to what’s wrong with Hollywood which is, finally, absolutely and simply the scarcity of good movies. There have been, I anticipate the answer, four or five pictures recently of truly adult excellence, but Hollywood makes almost six hundred feature pictures a year, and every year for almost twenty years has presented a public with at least a couple of pictures good enough to ma
ke it look as though Hollywood had come of age.’
This was clearly a good moment at which to leave Hollywood for a little while. Supper at Chasen’s was likely to be somewhat strained should he bump into a fellow producer – or an agent, for that matter, or indeed anyone not connected with those four or five pictures of truly adult excellence. Welles’s attack on producers found vocal support in the crusading press: in his piece HEARST OVER HOLLYWOOD in The New Republic, Michael Sage bluntly asked ‘Will Hollywood stand up to William Randolph Hearst over the matter of Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane? … many people find it hard to believe the producers really intend to defy the lord of San Simeon.’43 Scorning the neutral position of the Hays Office, ‘which is supposed to defend the interests of RKO as well as the other companies’ Sage was reminded of ‘the sterling fortitude displayed by the late Neville Chamberlain when Hitler trampled Czecho-slovakia’. Dangerously shifting the dispute from Hearst versus Welles into Welles versus Hollywood (dangerously for Welles, that is), Sage observed that ‘Hollywood is oozing with synthetic geniuses; an authentic one would be a menace. Welles did no boot-licking. He defied the Hollywood caste system, ate with his aides and was even seen publicly with people who made less than $1,000 a week. Instead of casting shopworn stars he brought his Mercury Players from New York for the picture. Now, in certain quarters,’ continued Sage, ‘he is the greatest villain in Hollywood. Instead of praising him for his forthright determination to make an interesting character study, even if it did offend Hearst, instead of condemning the effrontery of anyone who tries to suppress a creative work, some leaders of the industry say privately that Orson Welles must be stopped. Whether they will join hands with William Randolph Hearst remains to be seen.’ Hearst, meanwhile, continued to focus the attack on Schaefer, blowing up a little local dispute over rights into front page news (RKO BROKE CONTRACT!).
Welles showed a complete print of the film to Houseman, who was passing through. Over supper, Houseman handed him a play, the outcome of his first purchase for United Productions, that company set up with such flourish the previous May. With the première of Citizen Kane still in abeyance, and feeling daily less comfortable in Hollywood, Welles leaped at it. Back, then, to Broadway; the sooner the better.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Waiting/Native Son
THE PLAY was Native Son, adapted by Paul Green and Richard Wright from the latter’s novel, published with sensational success at the beginning of 1940. Wright records in a narrative of Zola-like realism the journey of a frustrated young black man in Chicago’s South Side to the electric chair. Finding work as a chauffeur, he kills first, accidentally, the daughter of the philanthropist for whom he works, then his girlfriend. In his cell, waiting to die, he realises that he has achieved a sort of freedom for the only time in his life. ‘I didn’t want to kill! But what I killed for, I am! It must have been pretty deep to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder … I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.’ Houseman and Mankiewicz had read the novel while they were working on Citizen Kane in Victorville, later giving it to Welles; like most of the novel’s first readers in spring of 1940, they were overwhelmed not only by its unrelenting power but by the urgency for all Americans of what Wright was saying. ‘A blow at the white man,’1 as Irving Howe wrote, ‘the novel forced him to recognise himself as an oppressor. A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognise the cost of his submission … the day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed for ever.’
Wright had created in his central character, Bigger Thomas, a complex emblem of a life stunted and finally wrecked by social conditions, but he had done so without crude determinism and with no vestige of sentimentality. Bigger, like Büchner’s Woyzeck, embodies the uncomprehending destruction of the potential of a whole section of humankind; as Wright put it to Houseman in a letter, ‘Bigger Thomas is not presented in Native Son as a victim of American conditions of environment; neither is he presented as a boy destined to a bad end by fate … here is a human being trying to express some of the deepest impulses in all of us through the cramped limits of his life. The emphasis was upon the impulse, upon the boy’s feelings.’2 Understandably eager though Welles, Houseman and Mankiewicz were to do something with this extraordinary material, and despite Wright’s own description of his novel as ‘a special première given (for the reader) in his own private theatre’, it is to be doubted whether Native Son, depending to a considerable degree on the thought-by-thought reconstruction of Bigger’s mental processes, was really susceptible to dramatisation. Houseman was convinced that it was, however, and found Wright equally enthusiastic.
Their correspondence reveals the seriousness and passion with which Houseman had returned to the stage, his frustration and humiliation in Hollywood way behind him. He had skilfully persuaded Wright that his novel had a place in the theatre, then set about allaying his doubts. ‘I realise the limitations of the stage and screen in America,’ wrote Wright, anxious that any play from his material should be done ‘in a light that presents Bigger Thomas as a human being?’ The idea of purveying more negro stereotypes was abhorrent to him: ‘To stage or screen Native Son in the old way means nothing to me.’ Houseman wrote back: ‘Please believe that both Welles and I understand fully the way you feel about your book.’3 He and Welles, he continued, ‘were convinced that the material was capable of extension and development in the dramatic form’, an extension, he claimed that ‘would not merely illustrate and narrate your story, but give it that particular heightening and tension that make the drama with all its current sluggishness and inertia, still the greatest medium in the world’. The theatre was the only place for it. ‘The chances of it being shown on the screen in a final form that would give you as an author any pleasure at all are virtually nil. The theatre, however, in the hands of a few people, is still a free medium in which a serious artist can express himself directly and courageously to his audiences.’
He was clearly happy to be in harness again, and exhilarated to be able to speak of Welles and himself as ‘we’. ‘In producing, we have always had one other basic rule,’ he went on, ‘ – that our only reason for doing a show is that we were crazy about it, and that we have felt that in its particular field it was the best work we could produce with all our excitement, enthusiasm and resources, regardless of expediency, prudence or any other considerations. It is in this way that we have thought of Native Son.’ Of course Wright was persuaded. ‘Knowing what you and Welles have done in the past, I do believe you both could do a courageous job.’4 In June of 1940 Houseman was able to telegram Welles that the deal was closed; a $1,000 advance had secured the play for a year: ‘please inform our crippled and choleric partner stop’.5 (‘Eagerly await latest scenes and inspirations,’ he added; he was then still part of the writing team for Citizen Kane.) To Houseman’s regret, Wright had already agreed to collaborate with the playwright Paul Green should he ever choose to dramatise Native Son. Green was a somewhat anomalous figure, a white writer from the South who had, with his first, highly successful play In Abraham’s Bosom, presented a sympathetic account of black aspirations; soft-edged though it was, it was considered something of a breakthrough in 1927. It was not this play, however, which had recommended him to Wright. In 1936, as a writer attached to Chicago’s Federal Negro Theatre, Wright had arranged a staged reading of Green’s tough assault on the chain gangs, A Hymn to the Rising Sun; he had been impressed by its grim, poetic power, and its avoidance of stereotypes – more impressed than the black actors in Negro Theatre, who had refused to perform it. (‘This play is indecent. We don’t want to act in a play like this before the American public,’6 one of the actors said. ‘I lived in the South and I never saw any chain gangs. We want a play that will make the American public love us.’) In approaching Native Son, however, Green was determined to lighten up Wright’s terrible vision of black life; he wanted to add humour and charm. Above all, he w
anted to explain Bigger Thomas, to render him sympathetic. In his introduction to the novel, Wright had fiercely rejected the white sympathy that his first book had provoked: ‘When the reviews of Uncle Tom’s Cabin began to appear, I realised that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.’ He had not repeated the mistake in Native Son.
Green, the senior partner of the playwriting team, managed to push him a surprisingly long way in that direction as they worked on the adaptation. Wright went to stay with Green in North Carolina; the deep rift in their attitudes to the material was immediately revealed. Wright (the inventor of the phrase Black Power) saw Bigger Thomas’s act as positive; Green attempted, in Houseman’s words, ‘till the day of the play’s opening – through madness, reprieve, suicide, regeneration and other “purging” and sublimating devices – to evade and dilute the dramatic conclusion with which Wright had consciously and deliberately ended a book in which he wanted his readers to face the horrible truth “without the consolation of tears.”’ Wright was strangely quiescent during the collaboration; the rough working draft they produced was too long, stuffed with unnecessary scenes; the second version was shorter, but with a sentimentalised, hysterical ending. Houseman at first refused to produce it as it stood; then decided (with Wright’s collusion) to do it, simply changing the ending back to Wright’s original text ‘on my authority as producer’7 without telling Green. Wright (living in the legendary Brooklyn rooming house where W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Gipsy Rose Lee also lodged) worked on the script for three weeks with Houseman; most of what they did was concerned with restoring as far as possible Wright’s words. Green’s structure (in which the action is framed by Bigger Thomas’s trial) was sound and theatrically effective; this they did not touch. This version of the play is what Houseman handed to Welles in Los Angeles.
