Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The search for new subjects was in play, on all fronts. The next period of Welles’s working life, from May 1941 to July 1942, and the termination of his contract with RKO, resembles one of his own films in the multiplicity of its narratives. There was never a moment during this time when he was not engaged, full-time, on at least three absolutely separate projects, to say nothing of innumerable extra-curricular activities. On a purely quantitative level, his productivity is almost impossible to grasp. Finding himself in command of substantial (if finite) resources, and driven by the need to compete with himself, the word ‘genius’ still echoing unendingly and tauntingly in his ears, Welles’s personal dynamo, fuelled by a characteristic mixture of idealism and sheer raging appetite – greed, to put it less politely – generated waves of simultaneous activity whose breadth of address is surely without parallel in the annals of Hollywood. That the breadth should sometimes be at the expense of depth is scarcely surprising. Under his inspiration, and with the swaggering sense of having just pulled off the most audacious coup imaginable by the skin of their teeth, the high-spirited young men of the office of Mercury Productions started generating ideas for films with unstoppable energy: they were registering so many titles that by the end of the year Breen had delicately to enquire whether they really wanted them all, since RKO was only allowed to register a hundred a year.

  Welles was an early sufferer from the condition that the Yugoslavian film-maker Dusan Makavejev has described as projectitis.6 His fertility in engendering ideas was astonishing. He was able to conceive an entire film within minutes; in the incubator of his mind, the germ of the idea rapidly grew to full-fledged maturity, demanding to be announced immediately. Once exposed to the light of common day, the project would, generally speaking, and in the nature of things, almost immediately expire. In 1940, Welles told the press that he was going to film the Life of Christ, though he modestly demurred from saying who would be playing the title role; in 1942, he proclaimed that he would be filming Mein Kampf. This time no inhibition prevented his claiming the part of Hitler. Of neither project, divine or diabolic, was another word ever heard. Some forty or so other properties were considered, encompassing the peaks of world literature, from Balzac to Mark Twain, and all, for one reason or another, discarded.

  In May of 1941, he entertained an idea of some promise. Mercury registered a brace of titles, The Life of Desiré Landru and Bluebeard, which related to the same idea. Dick Wilson, Mercury’s manager, had read some articles about the notorious serial wife-killer, and enthused Welles with the subject; Welles conceived the remarkable notion that Charlie Chaplin would be ideally suited for the part of the murderer (a bold and, as it turned out, very shrewd idea). Meeting Chaplin by chance at supper in Hollywood, Welles had proposed that he should write and direct a film in which the great comedian would play the part of Landru. He had a brilliant title: The Lady Killer. Chaplin was interested, but on reflection decided that he preferred to direct and write the film himself, as was his wont; he had, after all, more or less invented the category of actor-writer-director-producer of which Welles was the newest example. He proceeded with due propriety, being very careful about matters of copyright, having recently had his fingers burnt in an ugly dispute. A document was accordingly drawn up in July in which Welles stated: ‘I hereby sell, assign and transfer to you my original story of Henri Desiré Landru, conceived by me originally for you, and also my original title for the subject … for the sum of $5,000 which you agree to pay me concurrently with the signing of this agreement.7 You shall have full and complete rights in and to the idea and may use the same without limitation or restriction.’ The agreement also sought to involve Welles artistically in the film:

  I agree that at such reasonable times as you may request, I will read and criticise such scripts as may be prepared by you or for you based upon said idea or referring thereto; provided I am able to do so without serious interference with my own work, and I will offer suggestions to you with reference to such scripts, which said suggestions and all ideas that may be embodied therein shall, of course, be included in the grant hereinabove provided for, without additional compensation. You agree that in any photoplay made by you based on said idea, I shall be given screen credit.

  The agreed formula for this was typed out: the phrase ‘Suggested by Orson Welles’ was deleted and replaced with (handwritten) ‘Based on an idea by Orson Welles’. (When Chaplin finally made the film, some six years later, this agreement would come back to haunt him: perhaps thinking that the $5,000 had been quite enough reward for a suggestion over supper, he omitted Welles’s credit. Interestingly, Welles, veteran of so many authorship disputes, instructed his lawyers to sue unless the matter was rectified. It was.) But in May 1941, it was simply one of many ideas Welles threw out like so much spume as he sailed forth on the high seas of his imagination.

  A further clutch of titles from that year were to have more concrete results: notably a project initially dubbed Pan-America, which rapidly metamorphosed into It’s All True, a compendium movie in four sections whose titles were Jam Session, Love Story, Bonito the Bull – also known as My Friend Bonito – and The Captain’s Chair. The project was typical of Welles’s desire to break away from the established format of movie-going. It also exemplifies his conviction that certain very interesting ideas, though lacking the potential for full-length features, are nevertheless well worth realising. Above all, though still very loose in conception, it expressed a central part of Welles’s personal political philosophy: his insistence that there was more to American life than the narrow norms and gauzy escapism of white Anglo-Saxon existence as promoted by Hollywood. American life in its totality was what he wanted to address. His own inclination to the heterogeneous, his appetite for the unofficial, his desire to escape the bourgeois confines of his own class, all informed his desire to dramatise unseen America, North and South. Two of the original stories (Bonito and The Captain’s Chair) were written by Robert Flaherty, the director-poet of Nanook of the North and Man of Aran, in which latter film Welles imaginatively claimed to have done some extra work as a fifteen-year-old during his boyhood sojourn in Ireland; the director was something of an idol of his. Flaherty’s two stories are radically different. Bonito concerns bull-fighting, an abiding fascination of Welles’s since his boyhood stay in Seville, and is set in Mexico; The Captain’s Chair, which in Flaherty’s story takes place in the Arctic, was to be relocated to Hudson Bay, so the two films would encompass the alpha and omega of America’s experience of itself. Love Story by John Fante (author of a recently acclaimed novel, Ask the Dust) told of the courtship of his immigrant parents, a tale of love triumphant, in which the traditions of the lovers’ country of origin – Italy – are awkwardly transposed into their new American life. (An important part of the premise for It’s All True was embodied in its title. ‘All the stories we do for Welles are supposed to be true stories,’ wrote Fante.8 Love Story, as it happens, was not, but he persuaded his mother to sign a document for RKO saying that it was.) The final sequence, Jam Session, which before long became The Story of Jazz, was to follow jazz from its African roots to its central place in modern American music, asserting its origins in the real lives of the people who created it.

  The project as a whole was, in fact, a perfect manifestation of the artistic ideals of the Popular Front, a loose grouping of radical but non-doctrinaire writers, actors, singers and directors, of which Welles was a prominent and growingly articulate (if non-aligned) supporter; he enthusiastically endorsed its radical social-democratic policies, ‘forged around anti-fascism,’ as its historian Michael Denning says, ‘anti-lynching, and the industrial unionism of the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organisations]’. Denning cites Ballad for Americans as sung by Paul Robeson as the anthem of the movement, its lyrics defining the nation as ‘everybody who’s nobody … Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek and Turk, and
Czech and double Czech American’. Robeson’s words celebrate the multifariousness of America; they include rather than narrow down. This ideology was precisely what Welles wanted to embody in It’s All True.

  It was instinctive for him to align himself with the underdog. Inspired by the example of his socially conscious mother, Beatrice – head of the Kenosha School Board and energetic cultural missionary – he had from childhood been imbued with the tenets of radical social action; while from his stage-door-Johnny father, Dick, who revelled in the louche company of variety artists, jazzmen, conjurors and chorus girls, he had acquired a taste for diversity in his human contacts. His political education proper had started in the mid-thirties with the left-wing playwright and poet Archibald MacLeish, when the very young Welles appeared in MacLeish’s anti-capitalist play Panic; it continued with his passionate friendship with the Marxist composer Marc Blitzstein, whose frankly syndicalist musical The Cradle Will Rock Welles, then working with the Federal Theatre Project, had staged in defiance of a government prohibition, in the process losing his job. Although he was never tempted to join Earl Browder’s Communist Party of America, he made common cause with it, introducing a New Masses concert, participating in the Workers’ Bookshop Symposium and backing the American Student Union’s Peace Ball; along with the radical academic F. O. Mathiessen and the innovative music producer John Hammond, he was on the high-profile Citizens’ Committee against the deportation of the Australian longshoreman union activist, Harry Bridges. The dramatist Clare Luce Booth (author of The Women and wife of Henry Luce, proprietor of Time magazine) had brusquely dismissed Welles as ‘part of the whole Broadway-Browder axis’.9 Her husband’s support of Citizen Kane – in some ways a quintessential Popular Front movie – had more to do with his desire to lock horns with a rival press baron than to endorse either the film or Welles’s political position. As Welles became increasingly outspoken, he would have occasion to attack Luce’s own political platform with some vigour, but that time was not yet.

  Nor was it time for It’s All True in the form in which it was first conceived. Like every other Mercury project of the period, it was in constant evolution, changing in response to the needs of the studio and to the degree of Welles’s personal involvement in it, jostling for attention with all the other projects. Mercury was less a unit within RKO than a laboratory in a state of ceaseless experimentation, a heuristic enterprise in quest of what might prove ultimately to be interesting, rather than an organisation narrowly dedicated to the achievement of a particular result. Writers were attached, researchers commissioned, composers hired. Welles had the autodidact’s passion for accumulating information, and the prodigy’s sense of unlimited possibilities. He saw himself as engaged on a mission. Radio and film, he said, were ‘a modern form of education … to dramatise the art of imparting knowledge, so that people will listen to what I have to say politically’.10 He believed messianically in the importance of what he was doing, and had to an exceptional degree the ability to convince his collaborators of its importance, too. Mercury Productions was, they all felt, the workshop of the coming dispensation. He strode around his little empire, like a Pharaoh or a Caesar, a Rameses or a Napoleon, building a new world of the imagination, supervising, inspiring, cajoling, charming, berating. His brain was working at full stretch during every waking moment, and the hours of sleep were few, for him or for his collaborators.

  In the summer of 1941, while It’s All True was in the forefront of Welles’s mind, Duke Ellington, involved in the triumphant run of Jump for Joy in Los Angeles, suddenly found himself swept up in the Orsonic tornado. A message came to him backstage: he was to meet Welles at RKO the following morning at nine. Ellington was on time (‘I’ve never been anywhere else on time in my life’);11 Welles was an hour late. When he finally arrived, not allowing the by now thoroughly grumpy musician to draw breath, he plunged straight into an account of his impressions of Ellington’s show ‘from the first curtain to the last curtain, blow by blow, every number, every sketch, all of it coming out of his mind without notes – and he saw it once! It was both a review and a mass of suggestions. It was the most impressive display of mental power I’ve ever experienced – just pure genius.’ There and then, Welles asked him to do The Story of Jazz. ‘I want it to be written by Duke Ellington and Orson Welles,’ he said, ‘directed by Duke Ellington and Orson Welles, music written by Duke Ellington.’ Ellington’s reminiscence ends with a detail that gives an idea of the lordly munificence that would contribute to Welles’s undoing. ‘You’re on salary at a thousand dollars a week,’ he told Ellington, ‘and if you don’t take it, you’re a sucker!’ ‘I accept,’ Ellington replied. ‘In the end,’ he confesses in his autobiography, ‘I took $12,500, for which I wrote a total of 28 bars.’

  Clearly It’s All True, still in the impulsive stage, was unlikely to be the next Mercury production, not in its entirety, at any rate. One section of the compendium, however, stood on its own: Flaherty’s story of a boy who raises a bull for fighting, a simple tale that Welles in his narration was to place in an epic context: ‘This is the story of a little boy who loved a great fighting bull,’ the screenplay reads. ‘The boy’s name was Chico and the bull’s name was Bonito. As you probably know, a bullfight is not a contest between men and beast: it is a predestined tragedy. All bulls die, as all men die. Some men meet death ignominiously, while others die gloriously in battle. Like all brave bulls, Bonito was destined to fight and die in the Corrida de Toros.’ The final words of the script (by John Fante and Norman Foster) are very much in the spirit of the ebullient Mercury team: ‘The authors hope that somewhere in Mexico there can be found a bull so intelligent, so literate, and so movie-struck that he will perform the miracles that are required of Bonito in this script.’ It was intended that the film should be shot with Flaherty-like simplicity of means; Gregg Toland, Welles’s closest mentor and inspired collaborator on Citizen Kane, was to be cinematographer. But then Toland enlisted in the Navy’s photography unit, and Welles impulsively decided to shoot two other films, the already tentatively announced Journey into Fear and – something new – a remake of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, first filmed in 1924 under the suggestive title of Pampered Youth.

  Bonito was not shelved, however. Somewhat surprisingly, in view of the importance to him of his actor-writer-director-producer credit on Kane, Welles informally assigned the direction of Bonito the Bull (under his supervision) to the co-author of the screenplay, Norman Foster. He and Fante had both signed up earlier that year (for $300 a week) as part of the writing team for It’s All True. Foster had written for Welles before, contributing to the Mercury Theatre on the Air. He was a well-established journeyman film director, notably on the Charlie Chan and Mr Moto series, of which he had directed six each; some of his work rose above routine: Thank You, Mr Moto of 1938, as James Naremore points out, has considerable visual distinction of an unmistakably noir character. When he joined the Mercury group at RKO, he had just branched out, ethnically speaking, with Viva Cisco Kid and Ride, Kelly, Ride; in addition, he had the considerable advantage of speaking fluent Spanish. It wasn’t Foster’s track record, however, that got him the job; Welles simply took to him, which was the essential condition for being part of the team, more important even than having talent. Welles’s relationship with his collaborators was not unlike that of Bertolt Brecht with his. Like Brecht, he had no difficulty in sharing the artistic – and indeed the practical – work of creating a film (or mounting a radio show or putting on a play in the theatre). Also like Brecht, he was less enthusiastic about sharing the credit, but both men had the attitude of Renaissance painters; they maintained studios, in the painterly sense, where everyone was expected to pitch in, though there was no question of whose studio it was. In Welles’s case, he was also perfectly happy to help out with other people’s jobs, even with menial tasks – painting a wall or making a prop. And he was ready to thrash out a problem on the floor. He had no preciousness or anxiety as a
n artist, possessing immense innate authority – as he had from childhood, when he ruthlessly disciplined his troupe of fourteen-year-old thespians at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. He was wholly secure in his own work.

  There would certainly have to be some considerable division of labour of the workload he was lining up. RKO had now bought the rights in Journey into Fear for Welles from the writer Ben Hecht, who owned them. Hecht had already done a screenplay from the book; there had been fierce competition for the rights, with both Gary Cooper and Charles Boyer eager to play the central character. The plan now was for Welles to act in the film, opposite Michele Morgan, with the Englishman Robert Stevenson, fresh from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as director. This project was quite separate from the Mercury unit: David Hempstead was originally slated as producer. An internal studio deal was struck between Mercury and RKO that linked Journey into Fear with The Magnificent Ambersons: Welles would receive $20,000 (payable at $2,000 per week, a very substantial sum in 1941) to direct the latter, while his acting performance in the former would be given gratis. But by July, Welles had clearly become personally enamoured of the project. He no longer wanted to work on Hecht’s version, he informed Joe Breen, and was working with the writers on the new version they had made for Hempstead, since ‘my own conception of the picture is so thoroughly developed’.12 It thus became a Mercury project.