Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  His departure was without the slightest vestige of the glory he had dreamed of. Louella Parsons, William Randolph Hearst’s avenging angel, gloated that despite Schaefer’s having violently denied – when questioned by representatives of Hearst Newspapers in the east – that he had any intention of leaving his post, ‘the moment Schaefer’s resignation was received it was accepted’, adding coyly, ‘far be it from me to hazard what changed his mind, in such a hurry’.32 The aggression of her report, though hardly unexpected, is still shockingly unconcealed. The ‘dispossession of Orson Welles, moon-faced boy wonder,’ she says, was because ‘the space was urgently needed for those engaged on current productions’ (Tarzan Triumphs, as it happens, a Sol B. Lesser production); the order was made by ‘the able Charles Koerner’. Her report only mirrored the brutal urgency of RKO itself. The day after Schaefer’s resignation, senior executive Ross Hastings wrote a brisk and chilling little document to the able Koerner, describing ‘what is necessary to terminate further operations by Mercury Productions’;33 most employees, he noted, had no contracts and could be terminated immediately. Twenty-four hours after Hastings’s memo was written, jack Moss, Herbert Drake and five secretaries left the lot, taking with them, according to the New York Times, ‘the Mercury files, a mimeograph machine and a few other “meager” possessions’.34 ‘Like Leonardo da Vinci evicted from a draughty garret,’ said Herb Drake a little unconvincingly. They moved to an embattled position in the Hollywood Hills north of the Trocadero nightclub, ‘to await the return of their leader from Brazil’ late that month. ‘A telephone with a long cord was brought out into the back garden,’ the New York Times informed its readers, ‘so that a faithful hench-woman can sit on the grass and answer Mercury Productions whenever it rings.’ Cocking a parting snook at their former bosses, Jack Moss took the bronze fittings (‘material no longer available because of the war’) from the famous steam-bath installed when Mercury first arrived on the lot, thus rendering it useless, as a hapless RKO-Pathé executive, intent on a little soothing rehydration, discovered. Spirits were schoolboyishly high among the evicted Mercurians. JUST TURNING A BAD KOERNER, someone wrote up on the wall of their temporary office: ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELLES, riposted RKO. The whole thing had the feeling of a prank. Meanwhile, the fate of three films remained in the balance.

  On 1 July, all remaining Mercury Productions staff were thrown off the lot; the same day, the able (and infinitely crafty) Charles Koerner gave a dinner for the main It’s All True crew on their return from Brazil: ‘I agree with Phil that on the whole they are an exceptionally fine group of capable men. I am positive that in the final analysis they will be able to do a very fine salvage job.’35 Welles was now history as far as Koerner was concerned, and he was already busy trying to make the best of what he considered to be a bad job. His strategy was to separate Welles’s collaborators from him. ‘Meltzer is on his way home and I understand he in turn had a falling out with Welles and we should have no trouble in putting him to work for us.’ Meltzer had produced a memorandum for the front office that was uncharacteristic almost to the point of parody, doing a hard Hollywood sell on the Urca sequence, listing the performers:

  GRANDE OTELO: He is a natural actor, natural comic and all in all spells ‘Sure-fire’ at the Box Office.36

  LINDA BATISTA: Best ‘sambista’ in the world. Better singer than Carmen Miranda, but she eats too much, is therefore fat. Spell ‘Sock!’ at the Box Office.

  PERY MARTINS: Biggest child discovery since Jackie Coogan. If he could speak English he would be worth millions to any studio, and is clever enough to pick up a Shakespearean vocabulary within 20 or 30 minutes. Spells ‘Wow!’ at the Box Office.

  EMILINHA BORBA. Urca star … white brunette, sells herself and her song competently, spells ‘Wowser!’ at the Box Office.

  ELADYR PORTO: A buxom morena. Works on radio and makes records. Her figure spells ‘Socko!’ at the Box Office.

  HORACINA CORREA: Flashy Negro wench. Now featured at the Urca in a number with Otelo. Turns in for us probably the best performance of any of the singers. Has a tremendous personality. Best described as a young Ethel Waters.

  Phil Reismann, it appears, had a plan, too: perhaps, he suggests, they could bring over some of the Brazilian writers who had worked on the picture and get them working on the material. Anyone, in fact, other than Welles.

  The man thus being exiled from his own work was, meanwhile, in a place that might have seemed to belong to a different planet, or maybe a different universe, from that of Melrose Avenue and the palace revolutions of RKO, the schoolboyish hijinks of the Mercurians and the spitefulness of the press. He was suddenly perfectly focused – perhaps for the first time in five months – pursuing a vision of extraordinary purity.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Look Who’s Laughing

  WELLES HAD NOT left Rio de Janeiro in an atmosphere of serenity. WELLES GROUP LEFT NORTH OKAY WITH FINAL GESTURE THROWING FURNITURE ETC OUT APARTMENT WINDOW TO AVENIDA CAUSING NEWSPAPER SCANDAL, Lynn Shores wired Phil Reismann.1 The scandal was real enough: on 14 June A Noite, under the headline ORSON WELLES ANGRY, reported that ‘it was about 5 o’clock in the p.m. when disinterested passers-by on avenida Atlantica noticed that from the sixth floor from the window were coming chairs, clothes, empty bottles and other objects that were breaking up on the public street.2 It looked like a quarrel of a badly behaving couple.’ The incident immediately became notorious, widely and increasingly imaginatively reported; cartoons were legion. Welles, trail-blazer that he always was, seems here to be anticipating rock stars of more recent times. Various explanations for his behaviour have been advanced, not least by himself, some of which are marvellously inventive; he told Peter Bogdanovich that it was a protest against the wear-and-tear charge for the apartment. The Mexican ambassador had visited him and urged him to give them something to really charge for. ‘And he threw a small coffee table out of the window.3 So I took a chair and threw that, and we started throwing everything out … it was a great joke, we were howling with laughter.’ In another version, Welles claimed that he suddenly noticed that the crockery in the apartment was Japanese, so out of the window it went, ‘while an increasing crowd of cariocas gathered round to cheer’. Such incidents lose something in the retelling, and the humorous conceit does not survive the impact of the furniture on the heads of passers-by, as proved to be the case here. The aftermath rumbled on unpleasantly for some time, providing ample grist for Lynn Shores’s mill. By then, the tiny Welles group was in Fortaleza, and the serious work of shooting was under way.

  Welles seems to have been oblivious of what was happening in Hollywood. If communications were poor in Rio, they were primitive in Fortaleza, though an occasional telegram could be got through. From time to time he fired off telegrams to Phil Reismann denouncing Lynn Shores and denying the damage to the apartment: SHORES AGAIN SERIOUSLY SABOTAGING ME DELIBERATELY COMPLICATING CONFUSING EXAGGERATING SITUATION REGARDS MY APARTMENT STOP TERRIBLY CONCERNED MUST INSIST YOU COME MUCH LOVE.4 Again he asked for more money to shoot in Fortaleza. But he was pissing in the wind: no one in Hollywood was listening to him any more. Reismann was explicit: ABSOLUTELY NO MORE MONEY AVAILABLE FROM THIS END STOP SHORES HANDLING THIS UNDER INSTRUCTIONS FROM STUDIO BEST REGARDS YOURSELF AND GANG.5 On the day Schaefer resigned, Welles telegrammed Reismann: SHORES NOW SUCCEEDED GETTING PROCESS SERVED ON ME RIO STOP THIS CRIMINAL SABOTAGE SINCE I COMPLETELY WILLING PAY RENT DAMAGES STOP PLEASE HELP STOP PICTURE HERE REALLY WONDERFUL.6 He had no idea how completely he had queered his pitch with virtually anyone of the slightest influence; he clearly still thought that someone cared about what he was doing. In fact they were simply waiting more or less impatiently for his return, so that they could finally get rid of him, while salvaging something – anything – from the material he had shot. In his despatches to Reg Armour, Shores continued relentlessly detailing the problems he had inherited from Welles and Dick Wilson (who was in Fortaleza): the rights to the songs, thirty-six b
y more than a dozen authors, were a mess; the apartment required an expenditure of $1,100 damages, $1,000 back rent and a fee to break the lease; the Urca claims were mountainous: ‘The office is haunted daily by various members of the Urca – musicians, principals and so forth – looking for the elaborate bonuses that Welles had promised them … there are so many promissory deals engineered by Welles hanging fire here that I may have to get measured for a bullet-proof vest if things get any tougher.’7

  Shores had managed to get the equipment out of the country:

  As no one has particularly thanked me for it, I want to say that I think I did a masterful job … in pushing them out as fast as I did I had two ideas in mind, one to get them back for you to use and save expense, but the major thought was to get everything to hell out of here before Welles figured out another idea of prolonging the agony and shooting more stuff. I can safely say the only way we stopped him was that we ran out of film. Before he could think up a good proposition in black and white we had everything broken down and sealed in the customs house where he couldn’t touch it.

  The crew – or most of them – couldn’t wait to get home. Even Shores, reporting everything to his Hollywood masters, had to admit that the revulsion and the weariness were not universal: ‘70% of them were very happy on going home, the other 30% tried to figure out a way of staying as long as possible’.8 The appearance at precisely this moment of an article by Frank Daugherty in the Christian Science Monitor, quoting Herb Drake as saying, ‘Orson is making this picture without anyone from Hollywood around to watch,’ could not have been more ironic.9 ‘Mr Welles’s picture will at least border on the documentary,’ the Monitor continues. ‘It should mark a new and interesting phase of Hollywood development.’ And so it might have done, had there been a limitless supply of time and money from some kindly benefactor. RKO, after the aberrant indulgences of George Schaefer, had made it clear that it was not in the business of philanthropy; both time and money had run out, to say nothing of goodwill.

  As it happens, the risky strategy of simply shooting until the nature of the film eventually declared itself – a strategy followed by certain more recent documentary film-makers – was finally about to pay off. In Fortaleza, wind-whipped and sun-scorched, Welles was gravely welcomed back into the community of the jangadeiros without reproach and with the active participation and support not only of the three survivors of the disaster at Barra Da Tijuca, but also of members of Jacaré’s own family. There, denied the fleshly distractions to which he was so susceptible, with no lectures to give or awards to receive, with neither recalcitrant Technicolor cameramen, nor pesky production managers, nor feckless urban extras coming and going at will, Welles – supported by his own tiny group of friends, who pitched in whenever necessary, and one very inventive professional cameraman picked up in Brazil – worked with undeviating singleness of purpose to realise a vision of the lives of the fishermen unlike anything else in his output. Had he shot nothing else in his life, the surviving fragments would have marked him out as a supreme artist in film. The story was simplicity itself, a record of the diurnal round of the community: the fishermen prepare their craft, they arrange their nets, a wedding takes place. What is exceptional is the grave beauty that Welles and his cameraman achieve, recalling the work of his hero, Robert Flaherty, though in its epic sky-filled framings, with its tiny human figures and occasional extreme close-ups, it evokes even more strongly the manner of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, whose work Welles at that time claimed not to have seen (which is perfectly possible). Particularly striking is the resemblance to Eisenstein’s abandoned masterpiece, Que Viva Mexico!, of exactly ten years before, which Welles had almost certainly never seen.

  There is a superficial parallel between the two adventures: both brilliant directors seeming to come adrift in South America; both sponsored by a man (Upton Sinclair in Eisenstein’s case, Schaefer in Welles’s) absolutely convinced of their genius; both accused of monstrous over-shooting and reckless disregard for finance; both prevented from completing their work. The differences are, notwithstanding, considerably more significant, starting with an essential disparity of temperament – Eisenstein cerebral and sanguine, Welles sensuous and moodily capricious – and continuing with their fundamentally contrasted approaches. Que Viva Mexico! was a carefully constructed, fully conceived screenplay, consisting of a series of carefully wrought episodes designed to cover the whole span of Mexican history, relating the heroic past to the dynamic present; Eisenstein knew exactly what he wanted, and was prepared to wait for it (they filmed for more than a year). It’s All True was an improvised compendium, a ‘magazine’, as Welles said, loosely related sections evoking the feel and texture of life on the sub-continent. Both films, as it happened, came to a climax at Carnival, but the Mexican Day of the Dead offers a very different image from the sensuous seduction of the samba. Welles’s purpose, as we have seen, was in a sense to lament the transformation of the Carnival into something respectable; Eisenstein’s sequence, in which a small boy removes his death-mask and smiles cheekily, celebrated the vitality of reborn Mexican society.

  In Fortaleza, however, the two films (and perhaps the two men) came to resemble each other. Welles’s response to the simple life of the jangadeiros was one of respect, exhilaration, envy. George Fanto, the remarkable lone cameraman, with his single camera, was a Hungarian who, as a result of various upheavals, found himself in Rio, and he formed an intimate and intense friendship with Welles. It reveals him in an unaccustomed light. It is always well to remember that aspect of Welles’s disposition to which he so strikingly confessed in an interview with Kathleen Tynan: ‘I’m a total chameleon and a hypocrite, and if I like somebody, I pretend to be what I think they want me to be.10 I have no integrity in that respect … I don’t stand on my opinion, unless somebody’s arrogant, who isn’t a close friend of mine. I only argue with negative opinion.’ But here in the north, he spoke to Fanto about the earth, about the rhythms of nature and, above all, about God and Christ, in whom, he told Fanto, he had absolute faith.11 That he seems never to have spoken to anyone else in these terms proves nothing: his was an inclusive nature, but also a curiously shy one. He would scarcely have spoken in these terms to someone who he felt might mock him. Here in Fortaleza, too, Welles seems to have lost his natural impatience. He hired a young local photographer called Chico Albuquerque who, nearly fifty years later, remembered Welles’s generosity: ‘he taught me everything I know about framing’.12 Albuquerque became one of the greatest South American photographers; his photographs of the jangadeiros immortalise a now-vanished world. In the extant rushes, Welles works with his amateur and uneducated cast with the greatest tenderness; in some unedited sequences, his long tapered fingers can be seen gently adjusting the actors in the frame. In Rio he had learned, for the first time since he made Hearts of Age as a schoolboy, to work with non-professional actors on film, and here in Fortaleza he encourages them to give performances like no other in any of his movies: still, intense, natural, the very opposite of the sort of high-spirited, adrenalin-fuelled, verbally exuberant inventiveness that characterises the acting in the rest of his output. It does not, in fact, seem to be acting at all.

  Seen in the context of the rest of the Four Men on a Raft material assembled in the released reconstruction of It’s All True by Richard Wilson and his colleagues, the impact of this material is redoubled, in deliberate contrast to the material shot in Rio of the jangadeiros arriving at the end of their heroic voyage. Fortaleza is presented as a world of work rituals, of crosses and processions, of lean, muscular men and modest, vibrant women. The fishermen take to the sea with canny watchfulness, the epic wide-shots of the ocean emphasising the simplicity and vulnerability of the tiny jangadas. Even when conditions are inclement, they maintain a steady focus; the film unflinchingly shows them in relation to the empty vastness all around them. Then, when they reach their destination, the whole energy of the movie changes: bravura shots introduce Rio in all its c
osmopolitan diversity, the smooth Carioca beach-lizards reacting to the arrival of the primitive barques manned by the four fishermen with their little white helmet-like hats, interlopers from another age, another world. Power-boats cut a swathe through the water around the jangadeiros. Suddenly the formerly sky-filled frame becomes crowded. Aeroplanes swoosh about overhead. The effect is almost as shocking to the audience as it must have been to the jangadeiros when they first sailed into the great port. The style of the film changes with the kind of society shown.

  What is remarkable in the development of Welles’s work is that he deals here for the first time with an open-air world, a natural world a million miles away from the largely interior worlds of Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear, and that he does it with absolute confidence and authority – an authority, however, that does not proclaim the identity of the director; it is, in so far as such a thing is ever possible, an objective world. His discovery of this manner of film-making arose because of circumstances – adverse circumstances, in fact. The lack of money and equipment, the unavailability of Technicolor (which he insisted right up to the last minute was essential to Four Men on a Raft) and the relative simplicity of his surroundings taught him a new approach to filming, which he rapidly mastered; no one ever learned faster than Welles. His constant protests at not being allowed to experiment are the cry of the autodidact who has some catching up to do. His education – both as a film-maker and as a man – was always conducted in public. To some extent this was inevitable. The luxury of self-discovery readily available to the artist in most other spheres – painting, writing and even, to a lesser extent, the theatre – is unavailable to the film-maker, except on the smallest scale, and Welles was never going to function in that way. Even when his films are short, they are big.