Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  After he and the rest of the crew left Fortaleza, they returned to Rio via Recife and Bahia, where they shot various sequences. Welles then planned to take in various other Central American countries on his way back to Hollywood. Lynn Shores, naturally, was against both of these ideas, claiming that ‘the Co-ordinator’s office bluntly told me over the telephone that they did not relish the idea of Welles coming back to Rio at all and the sooner he got out of here the happier they would be’.13 The detour to Recife and Bahia inflamed Shores even more. He wired Phil Reismann: PROMPT ACTION NECESSARY YOUR END RECALL WELLES TO STATES IF IN ACCORD PLEASE APPLY ALL PRESSURE AND ADVISE COORD OFFIC OR MYSELF;14 Reismann refused because it would have established contact with Welles. The situation could scarcely have been uglier, until, that is, Lynn Shores decided unilaterally to take out an advertisement in Aviso stating that RKO refused to accept responsibility for ‘any act done by Mr Welles in Brazil’:15 for this he was reproved, somewhat half-heartedly, by Walter Daniels at RKO, but not before the local newspapers – no doubt tipped off by Shores – reproduced a Hollywood Reporter article revealing that Mercury Productions had been expelled from the RKO lot.

  Welles arrived in Rio on 22 July, spending five days there before embarking on his South American Grand Tour, conquering adoring and wondering new communities in, among other places, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, leaving Lynn Shores behind to carry on the mopping-up operation. The Welles team had no doubts about Shores’s malign intentions. ‘Shores and gang,’ George Fanto, still in Fortaleza, wrote to Dick Wilson in his as-yet-imperfect English, ‘prepared a last dirty trick very unpleasant for Orson while friends and press appeared to show their appreciation for Orson.16 From Shores injustified actions against Orson it is quite clear that he did everything as to make our expedition a failure.’ He describes an incident in which his assistant had an accident with the camera, after Welles had left, damaging the camera a little. ‘But Shores already tried to make the allusions that Orson gave orders to brake it. So don’t let anybody be wise on you.’ Despite Shores’s vilifications and the newspaper reports he engendered, Welles was as well received as ever by the intellectual community, who continued to view the Giant Boy – a Rio journalist’s phrase for him – as a fabulous curiosity, an improbable phenomenon, both physically and mentally.

  He found a particularly fervent admirer in Ray Joseph, RKO’s man in Buenos Aires, to whom he gave a blow-by-blow account of the whole It’s All True saga, firing the first salvoes in a war of justification. Shocked by what Welles told him, Joseph agreed to write Welles’s side of the story. The project was ‘hazed with more rumours than a senatorial cloakroom,’ wrote Joseph.17 Welles explained away ‘some of the fancy yarns brewed up’. He didn’t deny, said Joseph, that there had been ‘harsh cablese Western Union between Rio and RKO’s office in Radio City’, but insisted that reports had been exaggerated. There was never any question of his going there for four weeks. Nine months was always the intended period; he was to take as long as he needed. The budget was left open. He did not over-stay his time; such budget over-shoot as there might have been, he maintained, was because the budget for ‘a film called It’s All True’ was tacked onto ‘the Brazilian film’. The film itself, Welles roundly declared, was in splendid shape. ‘He believes one more sequence will be necessary for the film, which he describes as not just one picture but as an evening at the movies.’

  It is curious that Welles should have chosen to mount a long-distance propaganda counter-offensive, rather than simply going to Hollywood to defend himself. It is even more difficult to understand how it was that Welles felt able to mosey back to Hollywood by means of this huge cultural and geographical detour. Possibly he truly believed that the quality of the material he had shot would be acclaimed – once he returned and it could be put into context – as masterly, and that all would be forgiven. In the case of Four Men on a Raft, it is just possible that some such sequence of events might have occurred. But by now the head of the studio for which he worked had been ousted, specifically on account of his activities; his production unit had been very publicly ejected from the lot, under ignominious circumstances; and his current activities were a laughing stock in the press: ‘the movie that Welles, the incredible, has been shooting all over South America,’ reported the Daily News, ‘is entitled It’s All True.18 One man was killed in its filming, while Welles tore out the wall of the State Theatre in Rio for one scene, and shanghaied startled passers-by as extras for others. Some of it is in color, some in black and white and only a small portion of it is in Hollywood.’ Yet, despite Herb Drake’s good advice to come home ‘with trumpets and banners’, Welles chose not to take the first available flight back to Miami and thence to Los Angeles, but to cool his heels in Rio for a few days, then spend nearly a month roaming South America as a self-appointed goodwill ambassador. This is one of the most remarkable of Welles’s absences, which were increasingly to characterise the pattern of his life, withdrawal at a critical moment. The definition of the psychiatric term ‘fugue’ or, more technically, ‘psychogenic fugue’, seems appropriate here: ‘a sudden and unexpected leaving of home with the person assuming a new identity elsewhere’. Of course, Welles was not, strictly speaking, adopting a new personality, but retreating into an old one, one in which he was not required to deliver results, but simply to emanate charisma, for which he would be warmly acclaimed. In this environment, simply being Orson Welles was more than enough. In Hollywood, it no longer sufficed.

  Typically, he turned the story of his missing month into a comic escapade, a deliciously absurd anecdote. He had ‘a marvellous three-week trip among head-hunters’, he told Peter Bogdanovich, many years later;19 he was pretending to be a leprosy doctor because there was only one free seat on the plane, and a young Jesuit priest had congratulated him on the release of The Magnificent Ambersons – ‘and that was the first word I’d heard of it’. There are enough little smatterings of truth in this account to give it an aura of authenticity – and no doubt Welles did take a brief trip up the Amazon at some time during those three weeks of sub-continental peregrinations, and no doubt he was mistaken for a doctor at one point (as he told a friend at the time), but his acquaintances in the intellectual communities of Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago and Bogotá, where he spent most of his time, might have been surprised and a little hurt to find themselves described as ‘head-hunters’. The detail of his three-week Wandermonat, though amusing, is scarcely the point. What is extraordinary is that he should even have contemplated going up the Amazon to look at head-hunters or sipping cocktails and munching canapés with the gilded intellects of South American café society when his life was falling apart. It is inconceivable that no one in the Mercury office had thought to tell him that The Magnificent Ambersons had been released, or that his colleagues had been ejected from their suite at RKO. He knew very well that he and It’s All True were in deep trouble. Instead of facing it, he chose to play truant.

  A week before Welles’s return to North America, The Magnificent Ambersons – the film Welles and all his associates believed would eclipse Citizen Kane – had been released to an incurious world, mutilated, on a double bill with the Lupe Velez vehicle Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost. There was no fanfare of any sort: ‘[RKO] didn’t even hold a cocktail party for the critics,’ said Herb Drake. The symbolism was not lost on the press. ‘A spanking is an inspiriting thing,’ said Time.20 ‘Last week [RKO] rubbed it in by premiering The Magnificent Ambersons at two local movie houses with a Lupe Velez screechie. From a studio where good pictures have been even scarcer than United Nations victories, these goings on were high low comedy.’ The reviews themselves, as it happens, were for the most part good, though Bosley Crowther in the New York Times (not yet the only opinion-forming newspaper in the city, but highly influential) wrote the words RKO had, since Pomona, dreaded seeing in print: ‘Welles has a picture that’s distinctly not attuned to the times … the focal point of the
emotion is so inconsequential as to be ludicrous.21 With a world inflamed, nations shattered, populations in rags, with massacres and bombings, Welles devotes 9,000 feet of film to a spoiled brat who grows up as a spoiled spiteful young man.’ The film’s underlying theme, the development of the automobile and the mixed blessings that it brought – the critique of Fordism, potentially a great American theme – must indeed have seemed bizarrely irrelevant at a time when the United States was gearing itself up for massive production of mechanised transportation of every kind. The Herald Tribune had its reservations about the film, but nonetheless insisted that it was ‘packed with cinematic power … The Magnificent Ambersons is a lot of motion picture.22 It is only a pity that it is always going off at loose ends.’ The Times returned to the picture the following week, again noting the unhappy timing: ‘In a world brimful of momentous drama beggaring serious screen treatment, it does seem that Mr Welles is imposing when he asks moviegoers to become emotionally disturbed over the decline of such minor league American aristocracy as the Ambersons represented in the late Eighteen Seventies.’23

  The review in Henry Luce’s Time magazine, by contrast, was a Mercury dream come true, on every count; indeed, Jack Moss wired Welles – still in South America – to that effect: TIME THE MAGNIFICENT REVIEW FOR AMBERSONS WONDERFULLY ALSO BEAUTIFULLY SPANK RKO FOR RECENT ACTION.24 It was in fact less a review than an assault on RKO:

  The Magnificent Ambersons is a magnificent movie.25 It is also Round Two of the Orson Welles v Hollywood set-to. The upstart young producer-director-author-actor won Round One in a walk with his first picture, Citizen Kane. Ambersons is not another Citizen Kane but it is good enough to remove Director Welles for keeps from the one-picture-prodigy class. Despite … faults, Ambersons is a great motion picture, adult and demanding. Artistically, it is a textbook of advanced cinema technique … side-lighting creates a visual suspense in the very act of clarification … 350 [sic] degree turn-around in the ballroom … gives the narrative subtle, succinct meaning.

  The anonymous reviewer, noting that Hollywood ‘fears and hates the heavy-faced, heavily talented youngster’, declared him vindicated. Hollywood ‘gave much of the credit for Kane to cameraman Gregg Toland who photographed it. Stanley Cortez photographed Ambersons and it has all of Kane’s rich technique. Hollywood is now confronted with the painful necessity of admitting that Outsider Orson Welles is its most important and exciting cine-maestro.’ The article continued with a precisely accurate account of Welles’s ousting from RKO, quoting in definitive form what Welles purportedly said when told that Mercury had been thrown out: ‘Don’t get excited. We’re just passing a rough Koerner on our way to immortality.’

  All of this press coverage took place while Welles was in Fortaleza. His bust-up with RKO was still hot news. The New York Times article headlined WELLES VERSUS HOLLYWOOD AGAIN, telling its readers that there have been measured statements on both sides, added that ‘Hollywood is hopefully awaiting the fireworks which are regarded as inevitable when Welles himself gets home.’26 He did not return direct to Hollywood, instead preferring to head for New York and his old chums after his pan-American detour. When he did, he was profiled by Theodore Strauss in the New York Times. ROLLING UP FROM RIO, the headline stated, DESPITE A SEA OF TROUBLES, ORSON WELLES REMAINS HIS IRREPRESSIBLE SELF.27 Strauss found him in his old stamping ground, ‘21’, with his drinking pal Burgess Meredith; from time to time during the conversation various distinguished figures came up to make cameo appearances: the critic George Jean Nathan and the maverick Anglo-Hungarian producer, the newly knighted Alexander Korda, among them. Welles, says Strauss, was chortling ‘like a Katzenjammer kid’. He was in expansive mood. ‘New York? Why, in Rio they told me in New York people are fighting over sugar. Imagine! I had visions of people storming warehouses, riots in the streets, a whole epidemic of tabloid sugar murders,’ he tells Strauss, whereupon ‘the young gargantuan broke into explosive laughter … Orson Welles, after half a year below the Equator, was back, healthy, hulking and at the moment hilarious.’ Strauss recapitulates the story of Welles’s falling-out with RKO: The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles says, was completed ‘without too frequent recourse to his advice as producer’; ditto Journey into Fear. He expresses some uncertainty over what he’ll do with the Brazilian material: maybe complete it with Bonito the Bull and a North American sequence. ‘Mr Welles was back and come hell or high water, he was enjoying his homecoming. Even the most casual onlooker could see that, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Mr Welles was, happily, intact.’

  So this was Welles’s tactic: no tidal wave of wire stories, as Herb Drake had recommended, no party before the studio issued its own story. Just a good-natured shrug and then back to business as usual. Life would resume, he seemed to be saying, as if the whole RKO interlude had never happened. He had already – almost from the moment he stepped off the plane – started making various appearances, including one in the radio propaganda feature Men, Machines and Victory, and was the guest of honour at a meeting to raise money for Russian War Relief. These two activities – political activism within the framework of the war, and serious public-service broadcasting – would dominate his professional life for some time. For the moment, as a film director, he had burnt the one bridge he had.

  In fact, It’s All True gnawed at his brain throughout the coming period, and indeed for many, many years after that. Welles knew that there was the seed of something exceptional in that material, and he was no doubt right. It had long outgrown its original purpose of fostering hemispheric unity – Brazil had now joined the war on the side of the Allies, anyway, in the very month of August in which Welles returned to the United States – but in his work on the origins of the Carnival and the controversial filming in the favelas, in the Urca Casino sequence, and above all in the jangadeiros section, which had brought forth from him such epic visual poetry, he glimpsed something wonderful and utterly original. He came to believe that in some ways the work was cursed, and often told a story about the macumbas who had come to him on one of the many occasions when filming was suspended for lack of money; Welles was fascinated by their voodoo-like sect, and used them in several sequences. During his discussion with them, he had been called away to talk to head office, and when he came back, the macumbas had gone, leaving only the screenplay on the table, impaled by a needle to which a piece of wool was attached. ‘That was the end of the film,’ Welles said.28 ‘We were never allowed to complete it.’ (The events of the story in fact happened to Richard Wilson, but Welles annexed them to himself as somehow expressing a deep truth.) Nonetheless, both he, and, to a lesser extent, RKO, attempted for some time to find a way to convert the huge amount of footage into a viable film. The Office of Inter-American Affairs issued a statement in September referring to the dispute between Welles and RKO and claiming that everything possible was being done to resolve it; they hoped to accomplish this within thirty days. ‘If RKO does not wish to continue the production, which may require additional expenditure of upward to a half a million dollars,’ the statement continued, ‘it is our hope that another major studio will assume responsibility for the completion of the picture under Mr Welles’s supervision.29 It is the government’s wish that the picture be completed with all possible speed and that its production be of a quality that will accomplish the Co-ordinator’s purpose and be satisfactory to the Brazilian government and its people.’

  RKO quite clearly did not want to continue with the production, though in view of the authority and prestige of the I-AA they gave an appearance of attempting to do so. Privately, their position was unchanged: ‘It appears that the indiscriminate mingling of blacks and whites in the Welles Brazilian film will be found objectionable south of the Mason-Dixon line in the United States and in a good many countries of Latin America,’ wrote William Gordon to Charles Koerner, noting that in a recent film Samuel Goldwyn had on these grounds deleted close-ups of the two coloured members of Gene Krupa’s band. Gordon, the self
-described expert on South American affairs, also notes that although Latin American countries are on the whole free of racial prejudice, they don’t want the world to think they are preponderantly black. ‘It is my studied opinion that the carnival film will propagate a contrary view which is apt to be greatly resented by those other countries.’30 Having drawn a blank with RKO, the I-AA next moved on to Twentieth Century Fox, who were interested in the film, but Welles was not interested in them. In an exceptionally revealing letter, he wrote to Nelson Rockefeller, ‘it is my definite feeling that any deal of the kind 20th can offer represents a serious mortgage on the coming years’ – that is, they would be offering him much less than his accustomed fee as director.31 ‘Money, for me,’ he added, ‘is no object as regards It’s All True and never has been any object.’ This was a frank admission of exactly what Schaefer and pretty well everybody else at RKO had been saying from the beginning. Rockefeller replied with a steely letter: