Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  For his part, Welles felt frustrated by the limiting demands of commercial production: when he insisted on the artist’s right to experiment, he was not speaking idealistically; he was very precisely stating the only conditions under which he could work. He made his films, as he had made his theatre, on the floor, in the heat of the moment. As he worked, the full possibilities of what he was making revealed themselves, and only then; It’s All True was the ultimate instance of this. Nothing could be more inimical to an industry operating within the confines of the studio system. For some film-makers this system was a perfect set-up, allowing them the stability to pursue their own dreams. A Hollywood film-maker who had exactly the same idea as Welles was Charles Chaplin, who set no limit on the amount of time and money he would spend on a film. But he owned his own studio, and was – at least at this point in his career; it would not always be so – guaranteed huge ticket sales on the strength of his name alone. Welles was in no such position, and never would be. The balance sheet was still formidable: Kane an acknowledged work of inspirational brilliance; The Magnificent Ambersons, even in mutilated form, recognised as an astonishing achievement for such a young film-maker (‘Although The Magnificent Ambersons seems to lack pertinence now,’ said the New York Times, ‘it has integrity and sincerity of purpose. Mr Welles has grown much in a short while; he may yet assume the full stature that can be his’).43 It’s All True remained a mystery, and Journey into Fear was yet to be seen. Nobody was underestimating Welles, but he was already thought of as somebody who might not be his own best friend.

  A curious postscript to the Brazilian adventure is a persistent rumour that the copy of The Magnificent Ambersons – the answer print that RKO had shipped out to him in Rio – is still there. David Kamp in the magazine Vanity Fair traced its progress through the man who was the head of Cinedia, Adhemar Gonzaga, a film collector ‘before it was common to be so’.44 Gonzaga got to know Welles, of course, in 1942. When Welles left, Gonzaga wired RKO to ask what he should do with the copy. They telegraphed him, telling him to destroy it; he duly replied: PRINT DESTROYED. But was it? Gonzaga’s daughter, now head of Cinedia, has searched for it but found nothing, though she points out that it may be in there somewhere, mis-filed. Josh Greenberg went to Brazil in 1994 and 1996 and found nothing, but he did meet a man who claimed to have seen it in the nineteen-sixties, after which it disappeared. ‘We pursued some leads, even talking about tracking it through gypsies,’ says Greenberg, ‘but after that we kind of ran out of leads.’ In 1984 Fred Chandler broke the news to Welles that all the cut footage was gone. ‘He broke down and cried in front of me. He said it was the worst thing that had happened to him in his life.’ Welles did no such thing at the time, but his life was before him then, and he may not have grasped what he was losing when he broke with RKO.

  Part Two

  PLAIN TALK BY THE MAN FROM MARS

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ceiling Unlimited

  TO ALL INTENTS and purposes, Welles the director withdrew from Hollywood in August of 1942. He had many plans for films; none of them would fall within Hollywood’s remit. He was now, in effect, an independent film-maker, a very exposed position in 1942. His passion to communicate was undimmed; he was brimming with ideas about society and about life. In particular, he was full of what he had seen and understood of South America, and was as eager as ever to make his contribution to hemispheric unity. But first there was the small matter of making a living. For this he naturally turned to his first big source of income, radio – the medium of which he had unquestioned mastery and for which he commanded substantial fees. Although he was under financial pressure, his idealism as usual came to the fore. He had made two highly praised broadcasts from Brazil, the first called Pan-American Day, the second a celebration of President Vargas’s birthday, both of which had been enthusiastically received in North America. This was the vein – informative, celebratory, progressive – that he sought to mine in the work on which he embarked on his return, although the very first programme was a somewhat uninspired remake of The Hitch-Hiker, one of his big successes on the Lady Esther programme. He also participated in a number of shows in the Cavalcade of America series, ‘radio’s class act’, as Arthur Miller put it in his memoir Timebends, a cut above the regular patriotic broadcasts, which he dismisses as ‘more like yelling than writing’.

  Miller was one of Cavalcade’s regular writers, and had been given sufficient latitude by CBS to write a play about the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juárez – in verse. Arriving at Studio 8-A with his script, ‘I heard a tremendous but vaguely familiar baritone-basso voice,’ he recollected. ‘I saw that the cast wore expressions of real anxiety, some with eyes lowered to avoid looking at the giant orator, who, I now realised, was Orson Welles.’ Welles was railing at the programme’s historical advisor. ‘It is a TRAVESTY, I tell you,’ he raged, ‘a LIE, a purposeful and contemptible distortion of KNOWN FACTS in order to justify the unforgivable!’ The hapless advisor was either drunk, Welles roared, or corrupt; the historical incident in question had been dramatised as a great American success in Latin America, ‘when in reality it had been a catastrophe and a disgrace’. The rehearsal collapsed, which is when Miller entered, Juaréz script in hand. Welles demanded to see it. Finding that it was in verse, he immediately became fascinated, and started to read it out loud with other Mercury stalwarts, ‘ringing out the syllables like a rebuke to the professor’. Miller slipped into the booth and listened ‘amazed at Welles’s genius with the microphone; he seemed to climb into it, his word-carving voice winding into one’s brain. No actor had such intimacy and sheer presence in a loudspeaker.’ The earlier fracas was by now quite forgotten. ‘After the reading I came out of the booth and he pulled me to him in a loving embrace, and I went home on the IRT in triumph.’

  The impression Miller gives of a king returning to reclaim his empire – ‘he already had his loose and wicked belly laugh and the noble air of a lord’ – is not inappropriate: here was a realm in which Welles was absolute monarch. With Cavalcade of America, he vigorously imposed himself on a series that, as Miller points out, was already well established. He brought his characteristic energy and intelligence to the presentation, creating a surprising narratorial presence, both impatient and easily wrong-footed and far from omniscient. In Admiral of the Ocean Sea (about Columbus, later published as Columbus Day) his slightly pompous narrator has his dignity punctured by the interventions of a sassy young girl who turns out to be rather smarter than he is; Welles’s experiments with narration would never cease throughout his career. Here, too, his passion for dramatising information, and his commitment to an enlivened educational process, is demonstrated in the way the historical facts are personalised, made vivid and accessible. The episode was partly written by his old chum, Bob Meltzer, but Welles’s influence is everywhere.

  As usual, the programme was very much made on the floor. William S. Paley, powerful head of CBS, the company that broadcast Cavalcade of America, writing to Welles to tell him that he had been ‘magnificent’ in the broadcast, added, ‘You probably heard from my secretary that I was very upset when I learned you had not appeared for the dress rehearsal.1 I probably also made some impetuous remarks to her. Little did I know how easy it was for you to do a superb job with so little preparation.’ The sheer aliveness of the show in question is remarkable even now. A few months after making it, Welles gave a speech on education in which he affirmed the strength of his enthusiasm for the medium: ‘The radio is realising its potency as a teacher,’ he announced, adding a sly dig at Hollywood, ‘and the movies are so good nothing can stop them, not even the movie makers, who have certainly tried.’2 He praises radio for imparting information ‘in these war times … clearly and loudly and effectively’. He asks his audience to contemplate the extension of this idea into all phases of education, which, he says, ‘would be like asking you to look upon the limits of the universe … there will be no more frontiers. We’ll most of us live to see the last
of the frontiers – and they’ll be frontiers of the mind.’ He reiterates the time-honoured ‘efforts of education’, as he puts it: instructing, enlightening, acquainting, informing, enthusing, inspiring, elevating. He insists that new means for transmitting the spoken word ‘bring education’s ultimate aims within the limits of human possibility. Yes, I’m talking about the millennium,’ he concludes. ‘If we don’t reach now for its approximation, we shall certainly be faced with the facts of chaos. It’s our fight – education’s fight – and the time is now.’ Welles’s insistence on the primacy of education (he who had had so little of it) is striking.

  Bob Meltzer was producing radio programmes now, and he roped Welles into a new show sponsored by the aviation giant, Lockheed. Its purpose, one of simple propaganda, was to boost morale within the industry in order to underpin the vast increase in productivity that war demanded. Arthur Miller was again to be the writer. In preparing his outline, he paid unforced tribute to Welles’s unrivalled authority at the microphone: ‘I didn’t know until Jack told me over the phone last night that I was to draw up a format,’3 he wrote to Welles. ‘I’ve been thinking about it today, however, and I feel sure of one thing: we don’t need one. Your voice is a format. The only two things that must be heard at the beginning of the show every week are your voice and Lockheed Vega … your voice, if I may say so, portends much. It and Lockheed Vega identify the show, along with the title. That’s all a format can do, portend and identify.’ Welles had named the programme Ceiling Unlimited, a perfectly Wellesian concept, although one not without a certain irony, coming from the man notorious (if inaccurately so) for introducing ceilings into movies. The sponsors had not been keen on the title at first, noted one magazine, ‘then genius won’.4

  At the same time as Welles was working on the Lockheed show, he was planning his pan-American series, Hello Americans; the first programme of each series was broadcast on consecutive nights. This pattern persisted over the thirteen weeks of the season: it was Welles wall-to-wall on the airwaves, and the press was all over him again, if with an appreciably greater level of gentle mockery than in the past. ‘It is the first time a major airplane manufacturer has bought network time for weekly coast-to-coast broadcasts. Even the producer is unique – Orson Welles who at 27 has been in the Boy Wonder class since his broadcast of an imaginary invasion from Mars threw large chunks of the populace into a panic.’ There were, Newsweek reported, problems in pinning Welles down to work on scripts. ‘Harried angry executives complained they couldn’t get in touch with him; he offered to talk business any midnight at “21”, Hollywood’s favourite New York night-spot.’ With a touch of unkind glee, the article notes that he may not be free to do the programme for very long: he might be drafted, despite his obsolete classification 1B for ‘a combination of spinal displacement, heart murmur, and flat feet’. Everything was known about Welles, absolutely everything; the smallest embarrassing physical shortcoming was not allowed to remain private.

  As far as Ceiling Unlimited was concerned, Welles’s involvement in it had certainly brought up the temperature on what might otherwise have been a worthy, though scarcely exciting, show. Before broadcasting had begun, Welles and entourage had swooped down on the Lockheed plant, where he told the startled workers (perhaps a little to their alarm) that if the show wasn’t a triumph, it would be his fault; he then swept off again. The first programme, Newsweek opined – not without a certain smirking superiority – was ‘all Welles and a yard wide’.5 In his preparation for the shows, he had immersed himself in the history and literature of aviation, reading, among others, Saint-Exupéry, and over the programmes he returns again and again to a bracingly lyrical celebration of flight, often with a touch of fierceness, quite fitting to wartime. Interviewing Leonardo da Vinci, he tells him, ‘We’ve given your bird a great heart and we’ve given her claws too, machine guns and cannons.’ There was, as Newsweek observed, ‘plenty of opportunity for the booming Welles voice to declaim’. ‘O Flying Fortress,’ he addresses the aeroplane, in his most inspirational manner, ‘O living answer to the eyes of nations, the free people wait and watch the sky for your coming: the people enslaved pray for your coming. Fly well!’ It wasn’t all uplift, though. All the facets of his radio persona are there to be heard: the sonorous, the skittish, the flatteringly charming, the sternly hortatory. He presents himself as the listener’s intelligent, playful, modest friend, nonetheless able and willing to state great and important truths – a self-amused patriot who happens to have a silver tongue, an aristocratic Everyman. The oxymoron is part of the piquancy of the Wellesian persona, the grandee with a racily popular touch.

  An extraordinary amount was packed into the fifteen minutes of Ceiling Unlimited. For Hello Americans (twice the length), he had a ready use for the huge volume of research that he and his fellow-workers had done in Brazil. He wrote to Nelson Rockefeller, whose Office of Inter-American Affairs was involved in sponsoring the programmes, describing his many-pronged assault on the airwaves: ‘The best good-will propaganda is to sell South America to North America.’6 The pan-American cause, with its inclusiveness, its celebration of diversity and its challenge to the values of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, was something to which Welles felt deeply attracted. His enthusiasm for it impressed his colleagues: ‘Orson is working harder on this series than anything he’s ever done before,’ Jack Moss wrote to the I-AA, clearly struck by the focus and commitment of his often wayward boss.7 ‘I would like to say,’ wrote Jackson Leighter of the Motion Picture Society for the Americas, for whom Welles had narrated a film about Mexico, ‘that in all my dealings with artists, I have never found anyone who lends so willingly his time and talents as you do, and surely I can say without being fulsome, that no other artist has so much to offer in the work we are endeavouring to do.’8

  Each week Hello Americans profiled another country. The Americans of the series’ title were roundly pronounced to be the inhabitants of both North and South. Welles constantly sought the most vivacious method of presentation, not dissimilar to the Ceiling Unlimited formula, interviewing the great dead as if they were alive, evoking the country in question in sounds and atmospheres, dramatising the historical while never forgetting the present reality: conquistadores rub shoulders with civil engineers. The first episode was devoted to Brazil and was, naturally, among the richest of the programmes, drawing particularly on the samba material so prodigally amassed for It’s All True. Welles brings a certain wildness – more than a touch of the spirit of the Carnival – to his approach. This exuberance is vividly conveyed by Bret Wood in his description of an early sequence in the first episode. It sounds a little quaint now, and it is to be feared that it may have sounded somewhat quaint even then; Welles’s populism, though entirely genuine, never altogether loses its self-consciousness. But there is no denying its charm. ‘One first hears the rhythmic beat of jungle drums,’ writes Wood.9 ‘This is soon joined by other instruments, polished and allowed to flourish in a lively orchestral rendition of the samba. Welles calls out, “Dig that rhythm, you cats, that’s the Amazon and the Conga talking!”’

  Both series continued till the end of January 1943, and both were solid successes for Welles, much appreciated by his sponsors and fellow-broadcasters, though they scarcely answered the pressing questions concerning his future or his financial security. Worse, they failed to attract the audiences that had been hoped for, and at the beginning of 1943, he was dropped from them. NATURALLY WE ARE UPSET, cabled the I-AA’s representative.10 WE FEEL THAT THE SERIES HAS DONE A GREAT AMOUNT OF GOOD. And no doubt it had. They – and other ventures like them – are representative of a vital and now largely submerged aspect of Welles, what might be called the Todd legacy, dinned into him (as it would continue to be for the rest of his life) by Skipper Hill, but also so clearly a part of his mother’s heritage: the belief that an enlightened approach to education was the linchpin of life, and that without it there could be no democracy, no progress and, ultimately, no happiness. P
erhaps only an autodidact could feel these things quite so passionately. Perhaps, too, only an autodidact could quite so shamelessly show off as. he did on Information Please, a radio quiz in which Welles not only answered every single one of his own (rather difficult) questions, but was also audibly champing at the bit to answer everyone else’s.

  Another persistent facet of Welles’s cornucopian nature was his longing to’ be funny, and his perfect willingness to undermine his own dignity in order to do so. Shortly after his return from Brazil, his dismissal from RKO and the ruin of all his dreams, he was to be found on a comedy half-hour shrieking away at the microphone in a riotous send-up of Les Misérables, one of his earliest, finest and most serious achievements on radio. It was as if he been oppressed by the seriousness all along, and needed to let off steam. Or perhaps he felt that if he were too serious, he would not be loved. The symptoms of the latter syndrome were to be seen throughout the rest of his career, in many bizarre manifestations.

  As for film, Journey into Fear was still, as far as Welles was concerned, unfinished. He had secured RKO’s agreement to allow him to do a final cut on the film. The letter authorising this was cold and not without a certain grim satisfaction: ‘You will go to Hollywood to arrive there not later than October 23rd 1942 to do re-editing on Journey into Fear,’ wrote Peter Rathvon, the new head of the studio.11 Welles must finish within fourteen days; there would be no retakes except one additional scene, to be shot in one day, using only Joseph Cotten and an extra. Then came the really bitter medicine: ‘Your work at the studio shall be under the supervision of Mr Charles Koerner. The cutters, cameraman and others whose services shall be used shall be people assigned by Mr Koerner.’ Welles was thus answerable directly to the man who had destroyed George Schaefer, who had determinedly extirpated Mercury from RKO, and who had declared personal war on Welles himself. In a sense, it was better than nothing: had he had even that amount of time and those meagre facilities with which to work on The Magnificent Ambersons, it might have been a very different film.