Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Nonetheless, he well understood that virtue, commitment and a good heart alone would not suffice. He needed a mentor in the rigours of political analysis, and in 1943 he found him. Welles, messianic on the subject of education, was always willing to submit to a teacher. He had done so with Hilton Edwards, he had done so with Marc Blitzstein, he had done so with Gregg Toland. Authority was a different matter: at that he always bridled ferociously, consumed with haughty rage and insensate stubbornness. But when he needed or wanted to learn something, he was an apt and voracious student. The moment he met Louis Dolivet at the house of the actress (and heiress) Beatrice Straight, whom Dolivet was shortly to marry, Welles knew that this man was altogether his superior as a political thinker and willingly became his apprentice. Dolivet, enormously tall, commanding, newly arrived from France with all the prestige of his work with the Free French clinging to him, had reached America in a manner worthy of a sub-plot in Casablanca. Having joined the French Air Force, he was forced to surrender with his unit; somehow he got to Marseilles, where the American consul put him on board ship for the United States. On the voyage he had broken his hip; limping off the boat, he was immediately put in touch with Michael Straight (Beatrice’s brother, lately of the State Department and now editor of the journal his parents had founded, the New Republic). Straight put him up, and it was through him that he met Beatrice.

  Dolivet’s credentials were extraordinary and impeccable: since 1930 he had been the director of the Rassemblement Universel Pour la Paix in France; in 1937 he had been the leading orator at a huge anti-Hitler rally at the Peace Pavilion in Paris. His analysis of events was sophisticated and subtle; his internationalism highly articulate. If he preferred to remain silent about his earlier years – a subject, he claimed, too painful for discussion – what of it? The important thing was the coming political battle to be fought. In 1942, no one, of course, knew that Michael Straight had been (and probably still was) a key member of the communist cell at Cambridge that also comprised Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby (which was how Dolivet had been given Straight’s name as a contact), nor that Dolivet himself was in fact Ludovicu Brecher, born in Polish Galicia and brought up in Romania. These things were only discovered in 1947, by a private detective hired by the family when the marriage to Beatrice had collapsed and he refused to divorce her. That same year, Dolivet would be denounced in the Washington Evening Star as an agent of the Communist International (along, of course, with many others, some rightly and some wrongly). In 1949, he left the United States for France, having finally agreed to a divorce; the same month he was denounced by Representative Jenison at the House Un-American Activities Committee. These revelations then took a turn for the tragic when his and Beatrice’s young son drowned (they were by then already divorced). He tried frantically to get back to America but failed, as did his distraught attempts to instigate an autopsy, whereupon he disappeared from sight for some years, only to turn up, seemingly out of the blue, as producer of Welles’s film Mr Arkadin. His own story is as Wellesian as anything in that movie, but of course, in 1942, when Dolivet and Welles fell into conversation about the subject that excited Welles more than any other, he seemed exactly the right man at the right time. Dolivet assumed, in fact, something of the character of a father-figure for him.

  From the moment of his arrival in America, Dolivet had been busy creating the International Free World Association, in the name of which he mounted rallies, staged conferences and published the magazine Free World, ‘A Monthly Magazine devoted to Democracy and World Affairs: under the aegis of the International Free World Association for Victory – for World Organisation’. The honorary board included Einstein, Mme Chiang Kai-shek and Count Sforza; the editorial board Michael Straight and Dolivet; and the first number had an introduction by Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State. It contained pieces by, among others, Welles’s old mentor, Archibald MacLeish. Michael Straight was a remarkably well-chosen connection: recently employed in Roosevelt’s office, and now Washington editor of the New Republic. Dolivet was very persuasive, and the most distinguished names vied to contribute both to the magazine and the conferences. The writers Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell all wrote pieces for Free World; as did the politicians Jan Masaryk, Tito and de Gaulle. As its formal title, ‘The Price of Free World Victory’, indicates, Wallace’s speech hailing the century of the common man had been delivered at a Free World Conference. Whatever complex transactions may have occurred between Dolivet and his supposed Soviet masters, the programme of the Free World Association, with its four key phrases – international democracy, political democracy, economic democracy, association of nations – was straightforwardly social democratic with a particularly international bias.

  In one edition, Dolivet offers an apologia for Soviet Russia. ‘Despite being a political dictatorship [it] cannot be compared in any way to the totalitarian regimes in the Axis countries.’3 The Soviet Union, he insists, views aggression or domination of other countries as being counter-revolutionary. It has achieved economic democracy and is determined to pass ‘from a temporary period of dictatorship to democratic socialism and Communism’. It was helping to win the war and had behaved well except for Finland, which it only invaded because of Hitler. This analysis may have come from a somewhat roseate perspective, but it was one shared broadly by the Left; it is scarcely insidiously propagandistic. It would have been familiar to Welles and indeed essentially reflected his own view. In fact, Dolivet’s contribution to Welles’s political education was less concerned with his intellectual position than with his polemical skills. This meant, above all, being prepared in argument. Welles’s natural instinct was rhetorical: engendering emotion through cumulative oratorical effects. Dolivet taught him how to debate, in print and on his feet. The habit of research was not alien to Welles, but had hitherto been pressed into service in the process of creating radio programmes or as background to a film. Dolivet, no mean dialectician, taught Welles to provide himself with the ammunition required to advance his case. Barbara Leaming recounts a somewhat brutal example of this teaching, when Dolivet and Welles went together to Washington. The older man was to deliver a speech to a group of Roosevelt’s aides. At the last moment Dolivet asked Welles to deliver the speech for him, which he did, of course, with effortless brilliance. Dolivet then abandoned him to answer questions from the assembled aides. Welles floundered badly. Learning reports him returning to his hotel room weeping tears of humiliation. The lesson was well, almost too well, learned.

  In due course Dolivet appointed Welles one of the team of editors of Free World, and the articles he filed were often fact-filled to a fault, though the rhetorical instinct died hard. Many of them were adapted from his speeches, and his oratorical flourishes can still be detected. Most often, though, the tone is the familiar energetic banality of political journalistic discourse everywhere, in every age: the heavy irony, the sententious summaries, the triumphant pile-up of facts. The effect is somewhat numbing. Welles’s first piece was, naturally enough, about inter-American affairs:

  The Good Neighbor policy is not a sales campaign for the United States.4 There has been too much of ‘selling’ the purity and warmth of our friendship. It was an easy mistake for us to fall into since the force of Axis propaganda has attacked that friendship … in spite of all the dictators supporting it, in spite of its stumbling caution, its blind snobbishness, in spite of itself, the Good Neighbor policy is an anti-fascist alliance, a community of nations bound together in the name of democracy. As such it is a preliminary sketch for world organisation. A good start, full of meaning for the future, was made the day our guns underwrote democracy in Uruguay. The big stick is a weapon of international thuggery. Our friends have reminded us that it is also the tool of the policeman’s trade.

  Inevitably, these vigorous and heroically certain pronouncements – perfectly sound in themselves – turn Welles into a soap-box sophist. There is no question whatsoever
that Welles was utterly sincere in this manifestation. His political position was consistent, passionately expressed and (thanks, no doubt, to Dolivet’s instruction) factually accurate. He was also astonishingly industrious in pursuit of his mission, employing (at considerable personal expense) a small army of researchers, chief among them the uncommonly well-informed Miss Geneva Cranston (Lamont’s smarter younger sister perhaps). What is perplexing is how lacking in individuality his utterances are: perhaps inevitably, since he seeks to speak on behalf of The People, and consciously seeks to spell out the issues involved.

  Impatient, perhaps, with the constraints imposed upon him, Welles sometimes breaks loose from this straitjacket, and then the rhetoric pours out in unstoppable torrents. An article entitled ‘The Unknown Soldier’, for example, which had its origins in an earlier speech about winning the peace, finds him in full flood. Someone, Welles reports, has put a cigar into the mouth of a statue to the Unknown Soldier. What sort of man could do such a thing, he asks?

  Very probably the man with the cigar was one of those prefabricated pagans who rode the joyless carousel of the twenties and thirties.5 One of those, you know, who doubted if anything is ever really bad, or really good. If he’s alive he may have changed his mind. It’s possible he’s found something bad enough to fight. He may even think that something good is real enough to defend … we have this to be glad of: those who are of little faith, the blasphemers, experts in chaos, or the sick in spirit, those who can’t, who won’t affirm the plain magnificent decency of human folk, all such as in this brightening world are rallied in the shadows now under the banners of despair. Defeat is their profession and their destination.

  In purely personal terms, there is something almost desperate about this hymn to decency and to the light, from a man whose work depicts – even celebrates – the exact opposite. Is it an ache to be normal? To be freed of the inky fluid always threatening to engulf him? Or is it simply a part that he’s playing: the orator of the people? His longing to be Henry Wallace? ‘Even when the world is free, we’ll know we’ve just begun. “Here it is. Here is the peace,” we’ll say, standing in the midst of it like ploughmen content with the good order of their fields: standing together, since Mankind will be every man’s family when the tools of war are put away for good … then the abundance of the human spirit will be ready for harvest and the children will see that even final peace is merely history’s first date.’ This odd kind of prose-poetry, pastoral-historical, like a Soviet-realist canvas backed with appropriately uplifting music, seems incongruous coming from the mouth of Orson Welles, the familiar denizen of the bars and the clubs, the brothels and the dives, the cosmopolitan sophisticate, the rumbustious actor-manager; it is without equivalent anywhere else in his output, although the jangadeiros sequence of It’s All True contains an element of it: the yearning for the simple life of community, of decency, of neighbourliness, that Edenic ache again, which he had carried with him since those boyhood days in Grand Detour, Illinois. It was, too, very important for Welles to feel that what he did mattered that he was part of the big world, that he had some influence.

  Perhaps somewhere behind this slightly strained emotion was embarrassment concerning the fact that he was still a civilian. In the early 1940s he had done everything he could to get out of fighting in a war in which he did not then believe. Now it was a rather different story. It is uncertain if he actually wanted to enlist or not, but it was unquestionably the case that here he was, very conspicuously still at home and in civvies while most of his contemporaries – Dick Wilson and Bob Meltzer among them – were in uniform and directly involved in fighting the war. The press delighted in making merry of him, and he regularly rose to the bait. In May of 1943, when he was summoned for a medical, he was met at the clinic by a gaggle of curious newsmen. He testily informed them that in the same post he had received one letter summoning him for induction and another telling him that he was ‘an essential worker in an essential industry’ and thus exempt from conscription. He had decided to destroy the second letter, and here he was, ready to be examined. He further informed the assembled pressmen that he had taken off the back brace that he had worn for the previous six months, and then disappeared into the consulting room. Emerging shortly afterwards, he told them that he’d got a 4-F rating, declared unfit to serve (as on his earlier exemption) on the basis of bronchial asthma, flat feet and a scoliotic spine. ‘I got a tip,’ he said, frankly enough.6 ‘There was a smear campaign in the making against the motion picture industry in conjunction with its men in the draft. It came to me that I’d better not louse up myself and the movie industry itself by taking advantage of that deferment … I went down there to get in the army, of my own free will, and they threw me out.’ He wrote to Robert Stevenson, Jane Eyre’s director, briefly on leave in London, that he envied him tremendously: ‘the fool who makes a deliberate choice of the cozy life in these times is a damned fool.7 When it isn’t a choice, you’re damned anyway, as I am, and I’m not too sure about the fool part of it either.’ He compensated for his frustration by hurling himself ever more energetically into the war effort at home.

  With one charming exception, this did not involve film. His career in celluloid was, to say the least, desultory. MGM was trying to push him into playing the tiny part of the Prince of Wales in Mrs Parkington opposite Greer Garson, which he successfully (and wisely) resisted; Darryl Zanuck was similarly rebuffed when he tried to persuade Welles to appear in The Keys of the Kingdom. Welles was planning an educational 16mm colour film, but this, like most of his educational projects, came to nothing. Mercury Productions continued essentially as his private office, engendering projects and acquiring rights. One of the more promising of the projects was Saint-Exupéry’s just-published The Little Prince, which Welles, seeking to maintain the book’s enchanting relationship between word and image, envisaged as part live action, part cartoon. This was not a new genre: Walt Disney had mixed forms several times, and indeed Welles approached him with a view to collaboration on The Little Prince, only to have his overtures rebuffed. Disney is said to have smilingly observed that there was only room for one genius in his studio – no doubt a reference to the widely publicised RKO debacle. This is to be regretted, because Welles’s was a witty and playful approach to a masterpiece whose later filmic incarnation as a plodding, over-reverential musical was something of a catastrophe. Welles’s interest was serious: he paid the substantial sum of $12,500 for the rights after reading the American translation in proof, plus an option advance of $ I,250, and actually wrote a first draft screenplay (later he tried to buy the stage rights too, another enticing prospect that came to nothing). The extant screenplay is one of the innumerable discarded torsos that constitute such a large invisible proportion of Welles’s output; even at times of apparent inactivity, his industriousness was never less than prodigious. Welles was many things, but he was no slouch.

  The most significant project on which he worked, the most properly Wellesian in its scope and the one that came surprisingly close to being made, was Tolstoy’s vast epic War and Peace. There is a certain magnificence about attempting to film a novel of such density, with its complex and challenging analysis of war, in the midst of the greatest embroilment in human history. The idea was the result of the exuberant encounter between two fearlessly ambitious figures, Welles himself and Sir Alexander Korda. Korda (born Sandór Laszlo Kellner in a Hungarian shtetl) had renamed himself after the Latin phrase that headed his film reviews when he was a young journalist in Vienna: Sursum Corda – Lift Up Your Hearts – which was pretty much the effect he had had on the British film industry. Denied continental outlets during the war, he was starting to spread his net wider, concentrating in particular, very successfully, on co-productions with American companies. Lady Hamilton and the Lubitsch masterpiece To Be or Not To Be were among the results. Korda had met Welles on the celebrity circuit; the two showmen instantly took to each other. Korda liked his artists flamboyant, a quality in which
Charles Laughton – with whom he had worked on three films, two completed and one abandoned – had been disappointingly deficient. Welles’s contagious breadth of enthusiasm was far more congenial to him than Laughton’s intense searching and agonising.

  Building on the meeting he and Welles had had after Welles’s return from Brazil, Korda sent the temporarily fallen hero a telegram suggesting that they work together: War and Peace was the outcome. Welles was off like a greyhound out of a trap: he would produce, direct, write and play the central character. Korda announced the film as part of his ten-year, £35m package to secure the future of British film. The prospect of working for an independent producer, especially one who was not based in Hollywood, was exhilarating for Welles, and he set to with a will. Or at least he intended to: by mid-1943 he was apologising to Korda for being so heavily involved in radio work, but was still raring to go, he insisted: WOULD LIKE START WORK WITH WRITERS HERE OR MAKE SHORT TRIP LONDON THEN POSSIBLY MOSCOW.8 Clearly his experience in Brazil had done nothing to discourage Welles from impossible trips in wartime conditions; naturally he was eager to make a personal demonstration of the Soviet–American friendship that he had so often endorsed from the conference platform. Korda, with his incomparably wide circle of international acquaintances, had mentioned the project to his friend Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, then rather busy himself – ‘personally, I am up to my neck in very difficult and serious work, filming two series about the life of Ivan the Terrible’.9 Eisenstein had already, with Vsevolod Pudovkin, offered Korda some thoughts (now lost, alas) on how to shoot the great novel. But the great film-maker encouraged Korda’s project, revealing his own remarkable ability to be au fait with gossip on the other side of the world, as it must have appeared: ‘It seems that from the very start you have insured the success of your undertaking by engaging Orson Welles for the production and for the role of Pierre Bezhukov. I think that here your brilliant intuition will bring excellent results,’ he wrote in his very good English. ‘Curiously enough, Orson Welles seems to me as one of the most interesting and promising figures of the Western Cinema, although I know almost nothing about him (two or three comments about Citizen Kane, two or three stories about radio activity and I believe a photograph of him with a beard, sitting at table in “Brown Derby”). Would like to learn more of him in order to check up on my own intuition.’