The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  As I write the introduction to this third edition of The Magic World of Orson Welles, the centennial is approaching, scheduled to be celebrated by retrospectives, conferences, and memorial events at New York’s Film Forum, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and the city of Woodstock, Illinois, where Welles attended school as a boy. Chuck Workman’s documentary Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles had its first theatrical run in late 2014 and will appear in many venues during the centennial. The revision and expansion of my book has been prompted by these events. If I were writing it entirely anew, it would no doubt turn out differently in some ways. (At the very least, the title would be different; the one it has, which sounds to me like an old Mantovani record album, was Oxford’s idea—I proposed Bright Lucifer, but Oxford vetoed anything that might require a subtitle.) I nevertheless agree substantially with what I first wrote. I’ve been content to make several corrections and additions to the main text and to compose this introduction, which offers new information, expands on some major themes, and comments on Welles’s career from a twenty-first-century perspective.

  In addition to its close stylistic analysis of the films, one aspect of my book that most pleases me is its discussion of politics, which had not been emphasized in earlier writings about Welles. His political attitudes were complex and, like most people’s, contradictory. As I’ve tried to show, he was a social progressive but also a critic of modernity—an artist who commanded the twentieth century’s new media but who was romantically nostalgic for the past. He was a champion of equality for blacks and Latinos, but where women were concerned he was sometimes retrograde. His mother was an outspoken leader of the suffragist movement, and he became the father of three daughters, yet he was a womanizer who in the 1950s told French writer Maurice Bessy, “‘I hate women, but I need them. . . . Women block all conversation. That dates from the day they won the right to vote. They should have stayed slaves’” (quoted in Bessy, Orson Welles, 71).

  Welles was nevertheless an important public spokesman for the left in the 1930s and ’40s, and it is significant that he became an émigré from the United States during the Cold War. It now seems much clearer to me than when I first wrote this book that his departure was motivated not only by Hollywood’s dislike of his films but also by the political climate in the country at large. He had enjoyed his most dazzling success in the Roosevelt years, and the seven pictures he directed in Hollywood between 1941 and 1950 (one of them the incomplete It’s All True) were an outgrowth of his Popular Front activities in the previous decade. The decline of his Hollywood fortunes was obviously related to his unorthodox film style, his so-called highbrow interests, and his need to remain independent, but these problems were exacerbated by the death of Roosevelt and the postwar reemergence of the American right wing. Beginning as early as Citizen Kane and continuing until 1956, Welles was closely observed by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which compiled roughly two hundred pages of reports about him. For nearly ten years FBI operatives tracked his political activities, personal finances, and love life, following up tips from industry insiders, the American Legion, isolated crackpots, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who worked for the Hearst press. In 1945, near the outset of a Red Scare that would influence Hollywood for the next decade, the FBI designated him a Communist and a “threat to the internal security” of the nation (see Naremore, “The Trial: The FBI vs. Orson Welles,” and Naremore, Invention without a Future, 201–204).

  As the war came to an end, a purge of American leftists was in the offing. Welles had campaigned for FDR’s fourth term, and over the next few years he would become involved in the newly formed United Nations and Louis Dolivet’s Free World Society, meanwhile writing a syndicated, increasingly political column for the New York Post. But by the early 1950s, as the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the McCarthy era dawned, and at about the time when Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey became expatriate directors, Welles was in Italy and North Africa making Othello. At this point an anonymous informant sent the FBI a photo of Welles dining with Palmiro Togliatti, the legendary head of the Italian Communist Party, along with a message in French saying that the photo ought to be brought to the attention of the State Department with the aim of having Welles “brought before a court in charge of prosecuting actors suspected of Un-American activities and perhaps even excluded from Hollywood.” But the investigating agent concluded that Welles was being “bled white” financially, had never actually been a member of the Communist Party, and was no longer any particular threat.

  Welles did not return to America for a significant length of time for almost a decade. In 1953 he was briefly in New York to act in Peter Brooks’s TV version of King Lear (he also played Lear on stage, seated in a wheelchair because of a broken leg), and in the late 1950s he returned to the United States for a longer period, performing a magic act in Las Vegas; making guest appearances on TV; filming a TV pilot (“The Fountain of Youth”); and writing, directing, and acting in Touch of Evil. He then began filming Don Quixote in Mexico and returned to various European locations for another decade. From approximately 1968 until his death, he divided his time between Hollywood and Europe, making guest appearances on the Dean Martin television show, trying unsuccessfully to launch a talk show, and filming a number of mostly incomplete pictures. Late in his career he encountered tax problems in the United States because of money he had earned in Europe, but in 1976, after a routine security check for the Carter White House, the FBI cleared him of the old charges of subversion. By that time he had become a pioneering independent director/producer whose career made hash of highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow distinctions. As Michael Anderegg puts it, most of Welles’s post-Hollywood work was an attempt to “drive his gypsy wagon outside the great hall of the culture industry” (Orson Welles, Shakespeare, 57). And although he had been more obviously political during the period of the Popular Front and the Roosevelt administration, he remained an opponent of the right wing. “I’m in no conflict with society,” he said in 1981. “I’m in conflict with the Reagan administration” (Drössler, Unknown Orson Welles, 108).

  My book could also have said a bit more about Welles’s many talents and involvement with media other than film. In 1925, when he was ten years old, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, printed a story about him headlined “A Poet, Artist, Cartoonist, and Actor.” (He had also been a musician, an art he largely abandoned.) In the 1930s a lecture he was booked to give at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago was almost canceled by a major snowstorm that caused most ticket holders to stay home. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he reportedly said to the small audience. “My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear on stage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?” By the end of his life, he could have listed even more of his selves: actor/producer/director of film and television; orator; journalist; educator; raconteur and interview subject without equal. (If there are talk shows in the afterlife, there should be one involving him, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.)

  Publicity and news items about Welles in the 1940s tended to emphasize his Renaissance-man achievements and ability to master all the arts and crafts in the making of motion pictures. One of the most widely circulated advertisements for The Magnificent Ambersons, for example, featured a caricature by show-business cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, who depicted Welles as a human octopus—one of his eight hands giving a thumbs up, another giving direction to an actor, another panning the camera, another wielding a pen, another designing costumes, another constructing a model of the Amberson mansion, and two others typing a script. Inevitably, such exaggerations created a backlash. Critic Manny Farber, who didn’t like Ambersons (he later changed his mind) described the film derisively as “Orson Welles’s latest I did it.”

  But Welles was in fact multitalented, a conceptualist and manager of a theatrical and cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk. Of all his artistic abilit
ies, only his writing has led some critics and scholars to doubt him. The fact that he wrote is beyond dispute. His lectures and journalistic essays, for instance, would make a large and highly readable book. He claimed to have written pulp fiction in his youth, none of which has been discovered. He disavowed the only published novel that bears his name, Mr. Arkadin (historians agree the novel was ghosted by Maurice Bessy, although actor Robert Arden swears he saw Welles writing it), but he certainly did write the screenplay for the film of Arkadin, along with scores of other original screenplays, many of which were unproduced. Most of the radio, film, and television dramas for which he took credit as a writer are collaborations, adaptations, or brilliantly edited versions of classics—although some of the adaptations, such as The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, are radically different from their sources. The debate over his writing, however, has focused not on these things but on his two most famous achievements: The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane.

  Howard Koch’s The Panic Broadcast (1970) reproduces the full script of the Mars invasion radio show, which Koch claims to have authored alone. “At the time I was a young playwright doing my first professional job,” he says in the introduction to his book, “which was writing the radio plays for the Mercury Theatre’s Sunday evening programs sponsored by CBS . . . built around the name and talents of Orson Welles” (12). According to Koch, a day came when John Houseman gave him a copy of H. G. Wells’s novella and instructed him to dramatize it in the form of radio news bulletins. He thought the idea had no merit, but was told that it was Welles’s favorite project. Koch followed orders, and at the end of each writing day, with the assistance of what he calls his “girl Friday,” he sent a “batch of fifteen or twenty pages” to Welles and Houseman, who made “criticisms and suggestions.” These and all other pages were submitted repeatedly for “the revisions and the revisions of the revisions,” which were supervised by his two bosses (12).

  Even if we accept this account completely, it gives fragile evidence of Koch’s authorship. The basic idea of using news bulletins, which made the broadcast sensational, was entirely Orson Welles’s, and during the revision stage Koch acted in part as amanuensis for Welles and Houseman. Anyone who has heard a recording of the entire broadcast must realize that the second half, which switches to a conventional first-person narration, is pretty lame writing. Everything depends on the manipulation of sounds, silences, and accurate vocal imitations of radio news bulletins in the first half of the program, which were not only Welles’s idea but also his responsibility as “orchestrator” of the broadcast. On the morning after the show, when news headlines screamed panic and the world press converged on CBS, it was Welles, not Koch or Houseman, who took public responsibility. Nobody on the Mercury staff objected. Fortunately, most of the mail Welles received was supportive. There were, however, angry responses, the most vituperative of which came on November 1, 1938, from probate judge A. G. Kennedy of Union, South Carolina: “I would not insult a female dog by calling you the son of such an animal. Your conduct was beneath the social standing of and would be unbecoming and below the moral perception of a bastard son of a motherless whore. . . . You, if you were not a carbuncle on the rump of degenerate theatrical performers, would, as an effort toward making partial amends for your consummate act of asininity, never again appear on the stage or before the radio, except for the purpose of announcing your withdrawal” (Welles mss., correspondence, Lilly Library).

  When Princeton sociologist Hadley Cantril wrote an academic study of the panic broadcast in 1940, he credited Koch as the sole author of the script. Welles wrote to Cantril on March 26, 1940, strongly objecting. Koch, he said, “was very helpful in the second portion of the script and did some work on the first, most of which was necessary to revise.” He noted that several people had contributed, including John Houseman, Paul Stewart, and “other members . . . in our writers department.” But, he added, “The idea for the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast and the major part of its execution was [sic] mine . . . I have always worked with a fairly large complement of writers, but the initial emphasis and attack on a story as well as its ultimate revised form have in almost every instance been mine, and I have always chosen to assume responsibility . . . whether good or bad” (correspondence, Lilly Library). Cantril was unmoved, and on April 6 Welles sent him a Western Union wire, demanding an errata slip for the book: “I repeat: War of the Worlds was not written by Howard Koch. . . . Can see no conceivable reason for your steadfast refusal to believe War of the Worlds was not only my conception, but also, properly and exactly speaking, my creation.” Cantril responded by saying that Koch and his secretary had offered legal affidavits to prove Koch’s authorship. Welles replied, “Mr. Howard Koch, according to your letter, volunteers affidavits . . . I can produce affidavits to the effect that Mr. William Alland wrote it” (correspondence, Lilly Library). But nothing changed, and as of 1970 Koch was still claiming to be the author.

  The more notorious challenge to Welles’s credentials as a writer originates with Pauline Kael’s essay in the New Yorker and later in The Citizen Kane Book, in which she argues that Herman Mankiewicz was the single author of the Kane screenplay. I’m astonished that credence is still being given to this argument, even after Robert L. Carringer in 1978 provided incontrovertible evidence that Welles not only cowrote Kane but also contributed some of the screenplay’s best moments (see Carringer, “Scripts of Citizen Kane”). I’m equally astonished that Kael is still being treated as the sole author of her essay, because it is now well known that virtually all of her research came from Professor Howard Suber at UCLA, to whom she gave no credit or acknowledgment.

  On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that Herman Mankiewicz disliked Welles, of whom he once remarked, “There but for the grace of God goes God,” and he probably spread word around Hollywood that Welles had stolen screen credit. On August 26, 1940, roughly two months after Mankiewicz was hired as a writer, Mercury publicist Herbert Drake sent a memo to Welles concerning an interview for Louella Parson’s column, in which Welles said he was writing Kane. Mankiewicz, Drake explained, “threatens to come down on you as a juvenile delinquent credit stealer beginning with the Mars broadcast.” Drake went on to paraphrase Mankiewicz, who had announced that “he has you by the ----s,” and “unless you behave” he plans to “1) take an ad in the trade papers, 2) send a story over the wire services, and 3) permit Ben Hecht to write a story for The Saturday Evening Post” (Welles mss., correspondence, Lilly Library). Later the same day, Drake reported with conciliatory but condescending news that Mankiewicz “approves very much of what you are doing from an aesthetic point of view, but wonders if the public will understand it.” A week later Drake explained that “the last thing [Mankiewicz] wants is for us to write any stories indicating he is the author of Citizen Kane.” But on the next day, Welles received a letter from Arnold Weissberger, his lawyer and financial advisor: “I have reason to believe that Mankiewicz is going to cause trouble with the screen credit for the writing of ‘Citizen Kane.’” Weissberger quoted from the contract Mankiewicz had signed, which Weissberger had written, and concluded that the Mercury could distribute credit as it saw fit. Two days later, on September 9, Weissberger wrote to Richard Baer of RKO: “Mankiewicz is claiming that he wrote the entire script, and he will probably take the position that Orson had not contributed even 10%.” On September 18 Weissberger informed Welles that he was checking with the Screen Writers Guild and RKO’s legal counsel in order to determine the Mercury’s rights. The guild had nothing relevant to say, but on September 23 Weissberger told Welles that RKO had confirmed that the Mercury “can give or withhold credit in its discretion.” He added, however, “I do not suppose that you intend not to give Mankiewicz any credit. On the other hand, the fact that you have the power to exclude him from credit under his agreement can be used by you tactfully to indicate that your allowing him to have credit is a matter of good will on your part” (correspondence, Lilly Libra
ry).

  The incessant need to come to Welles’s defense over the credits of Kane as they appear on the screen has become tiresome. I bring up this old quarrel not because I believe Welles was a truly great writer—he wasn’t, and neither was Mankiewicz. Nor do I believe Welles and Mankiewicz wrote every word of the film. We know, for example, that at Welles’s request John Houseman wrote the French libretto of Susan Alexander’s opera debut. However, Welles was a very good writer; his films originated as words, and his writing, which was always transmogrified by his work as a director, was a motivating force and crucially important part of his ultimate aims as a filmmaker.

  At bottom, Welles could be described as more theatrical than writerly. Nearly all of his radio, film, and television dramas have a flamboyantly theatrical aspect, and as an actor he tended to play what he called “king” types from the old-fashioned theater. We have little documentary evidence of his stage acting, but his performances in film usually depend upon his big, theatrically trained voice (his first word on screen is a whisper, but it sounds cavernous) and his clever but intensely projected expressions and postures. The actors in the films he directed behave in similar fashion, with more theatrical force than we expect in movies, because he insisted that stage and film performance could be equally big or projected, the only difference being that the stage actor should aim broadly across an auditorium while the film actor should aim at the eye of the camera.