Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Hearst and his men had gone too far, finally. He had succeeded only in arousing public interest in Welles and Citizen Kane by methods of vilification transparent even to his natural supporters. Schaefer was finally able to convince his board that they must take advantage of the overwhelming amounts of increasingly positive publicity; Rosamond Gilder later observed that ‘William Randolph Hearst served as voluntary press agent in the largest unsought publicity build-up since Gone with the Wind.’ Inspired by a four-page spread in Life magazine detailing the technical innovations of Citizen Kane, Schaefer announced the release of the picture for the beginning of May 1941, the week, as it happens, of Welles’s 26th birthday. There would be four premières, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. The advertising campaign was immediately mounted, underlining in extravagance everything that had gone before. This is publicity about publicity: ‘America’s most talked-about man presents long-awaited film debut marked by unique story, clever technique, brilliant acting.’ Even balder: ‘THE MOST TALKED ABOUT PICTURE IN YEARS! Nothing deleted! Nothing changed! So different it’s best to see it from the beginning. I HATE HIM! I LOVE HIM! HE’S A DIRTY DOG! HE’S A SAINT! HE’S CRAZY! HE’S A GENIUS!’ It was Kane they were describing; but it might as well have been Welles. The posters stress his fine manly posture and noble – if false – profile.

  The trailer, however, has great playful charm. Welles never appears, but is omnipresent as the narrator: a joke – a rather knowing one – in itself. Shot by Toland at the same time as the film, it is a miniature documentary, almost an introduction to the cinema, in the manner of the opening section of the unfilmed Heart of Darkness. The scene is an empty, moodily lit sound stage. A voice – guess whose? – calls for lights. Lights are snapped on. ‘Get me a mike.’ It swings in on its boom. ‘Thank you,’ says the director-as-God. ‘How do you do, ladies and gentlemen,’ God continues, unseen. ‘This is Orson Welles. I’d like you to meet the actors.’ Cut to the chorus girls from the Inquirer part scene. ‘I’m just showing you the chorus girls for ballyhoo. Still, what lovely chorus girls they are.’ Cut back to the darkly lit soundstage. Joe Cotten is standing in the shadows. ‘Light!’ cries God. There is light, by which Joe is dazzled. ‘Smile,’ says God. And he does. One by one the cast, in their street clothes, are introduced – ‘you don’t know Dorothy Comingore, but you soon will; we’ve caught Ruth with her hair up: smile for the camera Ruth!’ – and each is disposed of with a rapid wipe, which introduces the next: Erskine Sandford with a parrot on each shoulder, Agnes Moorhead (‘the best actress in the world’) and finally, Everett Sloane, who appears at the other side of the studio at a canter, running straight into his own reflection. ‘You see, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all done with mirrors.’

  ‘What’s the film all about?’ asks God. ‘It’s a modern American story about a man called Charles Foster Kane.’ A montage of the characters in extreme close-up talking about Kane – spluttering, smiling, grimly denouncing – is rounded off by Welles (still unseen) saying: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I can’t imagine what you’ll think about him, but you’ll have a chance to find out when Citizen Kane comes to this theatre.’ Teasing, charming, completely original, it is a sort of conjuring trick: without his face appearing once on the screen, Welles entirely dominates its five minutes’ duration. The approach is entirely characteristic; Welles seeks to fascinate the audience with the process. Now they’re actors, now they’re the characters: magic! Sloane seems to be running towards us: he’s actually running into a mirror, as you see when I move the camera. The film appears to be taking place in real life: actually, it’s shot in a studio. The voices are transmitted by microphones, the faces lit by lamps. To describe what Welles is up to here as Brechtian is too stuffy. Nor is it Pirandellian; there is no metaphysical dimension to it. It is, to be precise, a trick.

  If anything, it is a bit of Chinese opera. The dragon thrillingly devours the stage; a switch is thrown and you see twenty men dressed in black holding aloft a lot of colourful fabric and ribbon and painted papier-mâché; another switch is thrown and there the dragon is again, ten times as terrible and beautiful as life. The charm of Welles’s trailer is that he, the magician, like many youthful conjurors, is keen to demonstrate how the trick works; otherwise how will you know how clever he was? The poster campaign was more traditional; the focus was directly on Welles. The central image was of him as the twenty-five-year-old Kane, arms outstretched (Welles had protested when the image of the older Kane was used: ‘a pretty serious mistake by way of exploitation’). The key slogan blazed everwhere answered the question supposedly on everyone’s lips: IT’S TERRIFIC!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Release

  MEANWHILE, HAVING at last achieved a release date for his film, Welles collapsed. Dr Dudley Bumpus’s medical exam of 24 April reports his chief complaint: ‘Attacks of knife-like pain behind the sternal notch with sensations of smothering.’1 The physical examination (which records his height as 72 inches, three and a half inches shorter than his usual reported height, and his weight as 218 lbs: 15½ stones) further reveals scoliosis of the spine, and spina bifida occulta. ‘These congenital anomalies of the spine give rise to backache resulting from trauma.’ In addition he has ‘a very marked degree of pes planus [flat foot: everted] which accounts for the great amount of foot and ankle trouble which you experience.’ Dr Bumpus discovers tenderness over the duodenum. ‘There is nothing very serious with the heart action but you cannot afford to abuse that organ because of a tendency to be susceptible to damage.’ It must have been a relief to discover that, despite a vast alcoholic intake, coupled with regular infusions of benzedrine and amphetamines, the sorely abused organ in question was holding up so well. The report was doubly reassuring to Welles; not only did it explain the great physical discomfort that he had experienced in his corsets, and the continuing weakness in his ankles, it also offered perfect grounds for him to avoid being drafted. The Roosevelt government had slowly, and by means of an elaborate lottery system, been conscripting able-bodied men into the armed forces in anticipation of America’s entry into the war. Since the inception of this drive, Welles and Arnold Weissberger had anxiously tried to find ways by which Welles could avoid being recruited. Weissberger sent him a letter of congratulation in October of 1940 on being 5,283rd in the draw. By April of 1941, however, the prospect was not so distant: despite his later claims that he was deeply disappointed not to have fought in the war, he, Dick Baer and Arnold Weissberger were frantically looking for ways to get him out of it. Bumpus’s diagnosis of pes planus ensured that Welles need never get into uniform. For the present the good doctor proposed that ‘you get away from Hollywood for at least 60 days and follow a strict diet’. With the New York première of Citizen Kane fixed for May 1st, the advice was only partially effected, though he did manage to get away for a fortnight; he was scarcely going to be absent from one of the longest-awaited events in the history of film.

  In newsreel footage of the various gala openings, Welles appears in glowing good health and, as well he might, triumphant, surrounded by his Hollywood stalwarts, actors, mostly, and a few directors, as well as the usual group of gala folk. John Barrymore was his guest in New York; they had become a sort of unofficial double act on the Rudy Vallee Show in which they were billed as THE TWO GREATEST SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS IN THE WORLD TODAY (Barrymore: ‘Orson Welles?! He’s an exhibitionist, a publicity seeker, a headline hunter, a cheap sensationalist … why, he’s another John Barrymore!’)2 At the New York première, Welles told Bogdanovich, Barrymore, to Welles’s immeasurable delight, informed a reporter who had asked him why he was there ‘you might say I’m a relative,’3 continuing with perfect dead-pan, ‘I think it’s time the public heard the truth – Orson is, in fact, the bastard son of Ethel and the Pope.’ Over Barrymore, as he spoke, and over the milling crowds and the limousines and the police escorts, loomed the marquee of the Palace Theatre on Broadway, with Welles, legs akimbo, arms outstretched, reproduced ten
times over, each representation larger than the one in front of it, till Kane seems to stretch backwards to the crack of doom, IT’S TERRIFIC, the slogan cried, above the last and largest Kane, and above that, written with electric bulbs in letters six foot high

  ORSON WELLES

  The whole carnival was repeated in Los Angeles, where he appeared, finally fully public, with Dolores del Rio (her divorce now through) at his side. According to Welles himself, the only one of the premières that was not triumphant was the one in Chicago, where ‘no one came’. He had wanted to bring del Rio to what he still regarded as his hometown, but it proved a damp squib. He had outgrown the Mid-West, and the Mid-West wanted none of him. Roger Hill did his best, mustering a chorus of Todd-ites headed by his own fifteen-year-old son, singing

  Happy Birthday to you4

  Felicitations we strew

  On our dear friend Orson

  From the boys old and new

  Let the Hearst face turn blue

  Shouting red bunk at you

  Those who know you Orson

  Know you’re white through and through.

  Of course, by then Welles knew that he had the thing in the bag. The reviews, written days, in some cases weeks before, appeared after the New York opening, and they could scarcely have been more satisfactory; the whole thing was a publicist’s dream come true. There was surprisingly little resentment of the hype; many of the critics even managed to top it.

  ‘Last Wednesday afternoon, I went to see a picture that had the most terrific critical build-up of any picture ever made,’ wrote Sidney Skolsky in the New York Post. ‘After seeing the picture, I felt that everything that had been said was an understatement.’ The Hollywood Reporter, which had so publicly urged Schaefer to ditch Welles altogether, made a complete recantation on its front page: ‘Mr Genius comes through; Kane astonishing picture.’5 Bosley Crowther in The New York Times also cried vindication: ‘Now that the wrappers are off, it can be safely stated that the suppression of this film would have been a crime … Citizen Kane is far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood … he has made a picture of tremendous and overpowering scope.’6 Other reviewers spoke of Citizen Kane as being the culmination of movie history, the summation of all that had gone before – and, at the same time, as a revolutionary work. ‘Welles has built new thresholds for the films,’ said Schallert in the Los Angeles Times. ‘He dares to see that things are done with the camera which most picture-makers would shun as bad technique and these lend a fascination unparalleled to many of the scenes.’ ‘Citizen Kane is a great motion picture,’ cried the dramatically repentant Hollywood Reporter.

  A certain uneasiness began to spread among reviewers even among those who had cheered loudest first, as the waves of hyperbole became tidal. After all, to call Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made is like saying that Love’s Labour’s Lost or maybe Titus Andronicus is the greatest play ever written. ‘Perhaps,’ said the Nation, hedging its bets, ‘when the uproar has died down, it will be discovered that the film is not quite as good as it is considered now, but nevertheless, Hollywood will for a long time be in debt to Mr Welles.’7 There are two contradictory myths about the reception of Kane: that it was ecstatically acclaimed, and that it was a critical flop. The response, taking in both extremes, was more complex, and it evolved by stages. Bosley Crowther returned to the fray two days after his initial notice in The New York Times: ‘Now that the returns are in from most of the local journalistic precincts and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane has been overwhelmingly selected as one of the great (if not the greatest) motion pictures of all time’8 he finds himself asking ‘is it a great picture – saying “great” with awe in one’s voice? And does it promise much for the future of its amazing young producer? We, a minority feline, are not altogether certain.’ Acknowledging the film’s technical brilliance (‘he has made use of all the best devices of pure cinema which have been brought out through the years. And he has invented a few of his own’) Crowther was ‘inclined to suspect that the enthusiasm with which Mr Welles made the film – the natural bent of a first-class showman toward eloquent and dramatic effects – rather worked against the logic of the story … unquestionably, Mr Welles is the most dynamic newcomer in films and his talents are infinite. But the showman will have to acquire a good bit more discipline before he is thoroughly dependable. When he does – and let’s hope it will be soon – his fame should extend to Mars.’ It was not simply that the film was too clever by half (though this opinion began increasingly to be expressed); there was something wrong at the heart of it.

  Even in his first notice, Crowther had observed that the film fails ‘to provide a clear picture of the character and motives behind the man about whom the whole thing revolves … at the end, Kubla Kane is still an enigma – a very confusing one.’ If this was a flaw, he felt first time round, it was an unimportant one. ‘It is cynical, ironic, sometimes oppressive, and as realistic as a slap. But it has more vitality than 15 other films we could name.’ In the face of the subsequent hosannahs and halleluias, he came back to it with more concern. ‘Most people who have seen the picture so far have come away with the solid conviction that they have beheld the image of an unscrupulous tycoon. Yet at no point in the picture is a black mark actually checked against Kane … we are bound to conclude that this picture is not truly great, for its theme is basically vague and its significance depends on circumstances.’

  This emptiness at the centre – the undefined nature of Kane, despite his being, in Atkinson’s phrase, ‘a theatrical character presented with consummate theatricality’ – was felt by a number of critics. Rosamond Gilder wrote that ‘it is … when all has been told, the picture of a man who is not really worth depicting, and here is the film’s weakness. Citizen Kane depends for its importance on implications which are external to the movie itself … in the picture his sway over the multitude is hinted at but never demonstrated; and yet it is only this power that lends the man stature enough.’9 The English critic, James Agate, expressed the same feeling with characteristic directness: ‘Miss Powell talked of Charles Foster Kane as a “colossus.” I could see nothing of Miss Powell’s colossus … my colleagues will agree that to be the owner of a chain of drug stores ten thousand links long, with each link represented by a city and the whole stretching from Hollywood to San Francisco, does not make a man a colossus. I see no difference when the drug stores are newspapers having the greatest circulation in the solar system. It depends what he does with them, and Kane did nothing with his newspapers except increase the vulgarity of an already vulgar world.’10 From the other end of the political spectrum, the same complaint was lodged. ‘Not one glimpse of the actual content of his newspapers is afforded us,’11 wrote Joy Davidson in New Masses. ‘One or two advertised scenes of political relevance, indeed, appear to have been cut out of the picture. As a result the audience is left with a vast confusion as to what Kane stands for. This grotesque inadequacy in the midst of plenty keeps Citizen Kane from fulfilling its promises … the picture resorts to the trick of giving Kane a mysterious dying speech, supposed to be the “real clue to Kane,” the sentimental explanation of which is coyly delayed until the fade-out.’ Davidson, a feminist avant la lettre, interestingly criticises the film from another political standpoint: ‘Welles has not escaped one Hollywood convention, the smirking thesis that the important thing about a Hollywood figure is not how he treats his country but how he treats his women.’ Now, in the mid-nineties, it might be argued on the contrary that we see clearly from the way Kane treats his women, how he treats his country.

  It is interesting to note how early (this is the first week of its release) critics detected this hollowness in the film, the void at its centre. Twenty years later Welles made a revealing admission to Richard Meryman: ‘Citizen Kane was made in the most wildly fun-and-games kind of way. But f
rom the very beginning I felt it had a curious iciness at its heart. It has moments when the whole picture seems to me to echo a bit. I was always conscious of the sound of footsteps echoing in some funny way – a certain effect made by the proportions of certain chemicals.’12 The question, of course, is whether the coldness is thematic. ‘He couldn’t give love,’ says Leland. ‘He hadn’t got any to give.’ Or is it simply that such feeling as there might have been is submerged in technical rodomontade? Welles evidently felt so: ‘There are more conscious shots – for the sake of shots – in Kane than anything I’ve done since,’13 he told Bogdanovich. ‘I’ve tried to avoid that sort of thing since then.’ Joy Davidson (an enthusiastic supporter of the film, on the whole, for its essential progressiveness) was of the contemporary too-clever-by-half school: ‘far too many trick-camera angles, too many fantastic combinations of light and shadows indicating an incomplete translation of Welles’s famous stage technique into screen terms. Frequently he lets his showmanship run away with him, preferring to astound than to convince.’