Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The persistent comparison with Toland was inevitable, not least in terms of experience. Cortez had never shot an A-feature before, while Toland was veteran of a dozen superb mainstream films made by masters – Hawks, Wyler and above all Ford; Cortez’s last three films had been Moonlight in Hawaii, Bombay Clipper and Eagle Squadron, not films that will be found in the Hollywood Hall of Fame. What is remarkable about Cortez is that neither his confidence nor his artistry had been affected by the dull screenplays he had been called on to shoot. He continued to develop, quietly, almost unnoticed. Welles also took no account of the fact that shooting Citizen Kane was in a sense a less demanding job than shooting The Magnificent Ambersons. Kane is to a large extent about myth and a man’s relationship with his own image. The screenplay and the subject called for stylised imagery and conscious visual metaphor; the bolder the solution, the better. Bold solutions, once conceived, are always easier to implement. The Magnificent Ambersons is about the disintegration of a class; it had to be detailed and textured and real, which is a different and in some ways more difficult challenge, both for Welles and for Cortez (and, indeed, for the actors). Creating the illusion of reality is inevitably much more laborious and more expensive; the cost of the sets had been staggering. The sort of trompe l’oeil approach in which Welles and Toland had so revelled in shooting Kane had no place here; Toland’s adrenalised camera alone would have had been entirely inappropriate. In much the same way, the cunning use of existing sets in Citizen Kane, the brilliant optical sequences, were irrelevant to The Magnificent Ambersons and Welles’s approach to it. But Welles seemed unwilling to accept the price of the approach that he himself had adopted. He wanted Cortez’s results by Toland’s methods.

  Part of Welles’s frustration was due to the fact that he was not acting in the movie. His staggering energies were not fully used. To demonstrate his frustration with the slowness of Cortez’s modus operandi, he used the gaps between takes to have Jack Moss ostentatiously teach him new conjuring tricks; his general demeanour became more and more explosive, though he managed, as usual, to maintain good relations with his cast. Dolores Costello as Isabel Minafer (his second choice after Mary Pickford) proved a little disappointing because, Welles told Bogdanovich, ‘she was quite unfocused – nothing naughty; just not wanting to be an actress’.18 He had supposed that she might have been interested in the process of filming; not a bit of it. For his Major Amberson, Richard Bennett, his affection was limitless, though the old chap was unable to remember a single line of his part (this had been a problem for him on stage: as early as 1935 he had been replaced on Broadway for not knowing his text). On the set of Ambersons, Welles was very happy personally to feed him each of his fines off-camera, one by one; his tenderness for old troupers – especially old men – must surely be associated with those childhood years during which he had looked after his drunken father. Welles’s feelings for Anne Baxter were tender in a different way: their working relationship somehow survived an incident in a car when, seriously the worse for wear, he had made a determined lunge for the nineteen-year-old actress: he, and Baxter’s brassiere, ended up in the gutter. His physical appetites remained enormous: though he no longer needed to appear slim as he had for Kane, he continued to take amphetamines, as well as ingesting his habitually vast quantities of alcohol and food.

  With the dinner-table scene in the can, the snow scene was the next great sequence that he and Cortez attempted. For absolute verisimilitude, Welles had hired the same ice-plant in downtown Los Angeles at 6th and Pedro Streets that Frank Capra had used for Lost Horizon; there would be nothing artificial in the film, not even the actors’ breath standing on the air. Welles insisted on real snow, too, so the art department supplied a panorama of the snow-covered Indiana countryside by feeding 5,000-pound cakes of ice into a cruncher. Cortez used massive arc lights of 500 and then 1,000 watts to create the glare of the winter sun; in the cold of the ice-house the bulbs kept shattering. Welles strode around this icy universe that he had summoned up in a leather suit and a hat with a pompom, swigging brandy – when he was there, that is. His other projects, including the weekly Lady Esther Show, meant that he was a frequent absentee; on such occasions he would record his instructions to the actors and crew on disc. Campbell Dixon, visiting Hollywood for the London Daily Telegraph, had hoped to interview him. ‘There I was to meet him and watch the young maestro at work. And but for players catching cold, and the frozen oil stopping the camera, and Mr Welles being absent for reasons unknown, I would have.’19 Instead, Dixon had to resign himself to being photographed with ‘the furred survivors’ as consolation. The furred survivors themselves – the actors – were close to mutiny: the cold, the smell of dead fish, and finally the infernal playback, which was again attempted and again disastrous, and again abandoned (at least on this film; it was an idée fixe of Welles’s and lived on to torment actors on more than one of his other films). In the event, all the sound on the film had to be post-synched. When Welles heard the dialogue for the sleigh-ride scene, which had been recorded in a sound studio, he told Stewart, ‘Jim, it’s too static.’20 Stewart dubbed it all again. Again Welles found it too static. Finally Stewart re-recorded it once more, with the actors standing on a shaking platform, and this at last found favour with Welles. Meanwhile, Ray Collins succumbed to pneumonia.

  *

  Through all this, Welles continued to co-direct Bonito the Bull at long distance and with high exuberance. CROSBY IS INDULGING IN TOO MUCH REFLECTOR, he wired José Noriega.21 KISS NORMAN ON ALL FOUR CHEEKS. LOVE ORSON; he joshingly complained that Norman Foster’s new wife Sally was coming between them. High-spirited though his missives were, they contain precise and detailed instructions: RETAKE HEAD-ON CLOSE SHOT OF LITTLE BOY SITTING ON GATE AND GETTING OFF STOP THE BACKGROUND IS TOO FUZZY STOP CROSBY’S TEXTURE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT HE TENDS IN THIS DIRECTION AND MUST BE WATCHED.22 Sharp definition was the core of the celluloid aesthetic that Welles and Toland had evolved. ALSO LET US HAVE SOME CLOSE-UPS OF HAMLET REACTING TO BRANDING OF BULL WITH SMOKE FROM BRANDING CROSSING FILM STOP ALSO A COUPLE OF SIMILAR SHOTS OF OTHER CHARACTERS INVOLVED IN BRANDING STOP EXTREME CLOSE-UPS I REPEAT EXTREME EXTREME CLOSE-UPS OF SWEATING FACES, SMOKE OF BURNING FLESH YUM YUM STOP I CAN’T STAND IT STOP WHY DON’T I HEAR FROM YOU STOP I CAN’T STAND IT STOP SALLY HAS COME BETWEEN US STOP ORSON. Foster replied in similarly exuberant vein: SENOR ORSON WELLES DEAR PATRON WILL MAKE BRANDING SHOTS WITH SIZZLE DESPITE TREMENDOUS ODDS … SALLY HAS NOT COME BETWEEN US BONITO & HAMLET HAVE LOVE – NORMAN.23

  Despite the characteristic hilarity and excitement that Welles generated among his collaborators, filming was very tough. The bull-fighter, Solorzáno, was temperamental, as were the rancheros and indeed the bull itself. The shoot was physically dangerous on several levels. One of the fighters got badly gored; then his brother was held up by gangsters, stripped and had his face slashed with a machete. ‘Several times we’ve been afraid we were going to be held up,’ wrote Foster.24 Noriega wrote to Welles proposing to shut the film down over the winter, to resume in February or March, at which point Welles would take the helm to shoot the bull-fight sequence and the scene in which Bonito gets away and rampages through the village. Welles wrote back to reassure them of ‘how really and truly beautiful and important is the picture you’re making.25 I hope you believe me.’

  He had reason to be exhilarated by the progress on The Magnificent Ambersons, too. They had filmed the ball sequence in the Ambersons’ mansion, which, as planned and shot, he described to Barbara Leaming as ‘the greatest tour-de-force of my career’.26 In this pivotal section of the film, the camera – as if it were itself a guest – glided from room to room of the great house, apparently without cutting, eavesdropping on conversations, plunging into the middle of a dance, stopping for a moment on the stairs to take in the whole scene in all its splendour, luxuriantly surveying the Ambersons at their most magnificent. It is the crucial (and more or less the only) demonstration of their sumptuous wealth in the f
ilm, the glory from which everything else is a decline. Welles intended it to be much more than simply a piece of virtuoso shooting: the point of it was to express the seamlessness of the life that George Minafer believed would endure for ever, but which would so shortly be unravelled. That long, long tracking shot was to be the cinematic metaphor for the smoothly sustained elegance of upper-middle-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is a brilliantly conceived idea, but whose was it? Cortez, not an unduly boastful man, claimed it was his. He told at least two different versions of the story, however: in the first, he claims to have suggested it to Robert Wise before he was part of the project, when he was simply watching Welles rehearse on the set. ‘Orson must have overheard.’27 In the second, he claims to have suggested it in the course of planning how to shoot the party scene: he thought of it, he said, as ‘a symphony of movement, noise withstanding’. This is almost exactly the phrase that Welles himself used: he wanted, he said, ‘a symphonic effect’. As so often in the practical and pragmatic arts of theatre and film, it scarcely matters who had the idea: making it work was the point, and here Cortez and Welles collaborated to brilliant effect, Welles superbly choreographing the actors, Cortez solving the technical logistics. In his stockinged feet – Cortez had him remove his shoes – the operator of the hand-held camera (a Mitchell equipped with periscopic finder and a thirty-one-inch lens) padded upstairs, through doors and across rooms with the heavy camera. Walls flew in and out as the camera and the actors wove their way through. Some rooms had mirrors, which had to be turned around on cue and turned back on a second cue, according to Cortez. Unsurprisingly, the sequence took nine ten-hour days to shoot; the crew consisted of nearly a hundred men, a huge number for the period. It took epic forces to shoot Tarkington’s understated literary saga.

  After this triumph of cinematic audacity, Welles shot the scene in the kitchen between Fanny and George. Agnes Moorehead gave an account of working with him that illuminates the way he collaborated with actors. She felt that the scene, as written and played, needed something more. Welles accordingly encouraged her to improvise, he would then shape the results, and then they would improvise more, and Welles would make further suggestions ‘while poor Tim Holt,’ remembered Moorehead, ‘eats more and more cake and turns green’.28 This was how Welles had always liked to work in the theatre. ‘From a little over a minute, we had ad libbed until the scene was almost four minutes in length. And the effect was like peering through or listening at a keyhole because Fanny was suddenly stripped of her pretensions and her sad truth revealed. And that was what it was like to work for Orson.’ The scene is devastating, for exactly the reason she gives; the ugly nakedness of the character’s need is simply shocking. It is, in fact, considerably more powerful than the equivalent scene in the novel; it may indeed be that her great performance is in danger of over-balancing the film (as the character very nearly over-balances the book). Fanny’s neurotic and irrational journey through the novel offers a jagged and tragic counterpoint to the stiff upper lips more generally on display. Her terror of being abandoned and her desperate attempts to claw back some sort of support haunt and disturb almost disproportionately: in a sense, the film becomes about her; she is seen to be the family’s sacrificial offering. It is a supreme example of an actor’s creativity, as much Agnes Moorehead as Fanny Minafer, and greater than either.29

  George Schaefer, who with certain selected executives had been shown about an hour’s worth of the footage, immediately saw the power of her work: AGNES MOORHEAD DOES ONE OF THE FINEST PIECES OF WORK I HAVE EVER SEEN ON THE SCREEN, he wired Welles. EVEN THOUGH I HAVE SEEN ONLY A PART OF IT, continued a clearly relieved Schaefer, THERE IS EVERY INDICATION THAT IT IS CHUCK FULL OF HEART-THROBS, HEARTACHES AND HUMAN INTEREST. (‘Unlike Citizen Kane’ is perhaps the grateful subtext.) Schaefer was struck by the ‘startling’ technique of the film and insisted: I AM VERY HAPPY AND PROUD OF OUR ASSOCIATION. Joe Breen, head of production, ‘hastened to thank you, to congratulate you, and to tell you that I have not been so impressed for years … though you know me to be a chronic kicker, in this instance I have nought but praise – from my heart.30 – God love you’ (the final phrase, from the devoutly Roman Catholic Breen, was considerably more than a form of words). And one of the younger vice-presidents, Phil Reismann, a drinking pal of Welles’s, said exactly what Welles wanted and needed to hear. ‘This film will be one of the outstanding pictures of the year … produced with an intelligence that only a few people in show business are gifted with.31 I am certain that it will be a commercial success.’

  From within Mercury came a shrewd and striking assessment of Welles’s work in progress: Herb Drake, the witty and worldly-wise publicist who had so cleverly handled the press over the campaign to get Citizen Kane released, wrote to Welles’s lawyer, Arnold Weissberger: ‘It is extraordinarily dramatic and beautiful to look at,’ adding that it was ‘full of Orson’s personal violence.32 As usual with Welles, the cast is perfectly co-ordinated, after all, we can always count on Orson being the puppet master.’ ‘Personal violence’ is a very acute description of the explosive energy of both the man and his work. If Welles was a puppet master, it was only with those who needed to be manipulated; as we have seen, with a powerful creative personality like Agnes Moorehead, he was as much midwife as martinet. ‘Orson is full of beans personally,’ Drake continues, ‘and seems happy with the picture.’

  At this point, on the morning of 7 December 1941, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s taskforce launched a first wave of 184 aeroplanes and then a second of 169 on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing 2,000, wounding 1,700 and sinking eight battleships. The United States government immediately declared war on Japan; Germany declared war on the US on 11 December, and the Second World War commenced.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Best Man in Hollywood

  ON THE AFTERNOON of 7 December, Welles was writing a letter to Norman Foster on the set of The Magnificent Ambersons. ‘First, thanks for your wonderful long letter, and if this reply doesn’t make much sense remember that I’m writing it on the set between takes … forgive me.’ He says that he knows and admires the bullfighter Perez, that they should keep hold of him in case Chucho (Solorzáno) stumbles again. There is a break, and then the letter continues: ‘My god three days have gone by since I started writing this letter. What did I want to tell you? I can’t really think. War has broken out and I have broken down. I think I’ll phone you. I send this on, as testimony, however feeble, of my good intentions as a correspondent. Also may I remind you that your heart is god’s little garden. Ever lovingly.’

  The pause in the letter signifies a turning point in Welles’s life. He was undoubtedly deeply shaken by the declaration of war. His social-democratic Popular Front allegiances were profoundly antifascist. In common with his fellow-liberals, though he held the warmest regard for Britain and its people in their current plight two years into their war with Germany, he had little sympathy with the British Empire and its perceived objectives; indeed, as reported by the FBI (which from now on took a lively interest in his activities), he had signed, as late as June of 1941, the call of the Fourth International Congress of the League of American Writers to keep out of the European War, ‘an imperialistic war for world markets and not a war to serve democracy’.1 But he had been convinced for some years, especially after the Spanish Civil War, of the urgent threat to democracy posed by Hitler, and was now increasingly inclined to the belief that the only way to stop him was by means of war. Like all radicals, Welles had been momentarily poleaxed by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939; like most liberals, he supported Roosevelt – in theory. As an employee of the Federal Theatre Project in the late thirties, he had, of course, been a direct beneficiary of New Deal policies, and he instinctively approved of Roosevelt’s determination to commit America to the war against fascism in the face of powerful resistance from the American Right, a resistance noisily promulgated by, among others, Senator Joseph Kennedy and his friends, wh
o were prepared to spend large sums of money to leave Germany alone. Welles’s support for Roosevelt was by no means unconditional, however. In accord with the rest of liberal opinion, he was somewhat suspicious of the President, distrusting his political subtlety and seeming indecisiveness; nonetheless, he endorsed Roosevelt’s support for Britain, his extension of Lend-Lease to Russia, his signing of the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, and the more or less clandestine preparations he had instigated for joining the fight against Hitler.