Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Welles continued to work on War and Peace, or at least to plan for it (no portion of a screenplay exists); in interviews, he claimed to have asked Shostakovich, then very much the outstanding Russian composer of the day – his ‘Leningrad’ symphony recently rushed out of Russia on microfilm to be played in every concert hall in the free world – to write the score. But somehow, nothing happened with the film. Partly this was to do with a liver complaint, which had felled Welles for some weeks over Christmas and the New Year; partly to do with the sheer difficulty of accomplishing such a vast project in wartime. His energies meanwhile had been diverted into a project very dear to his heart, scarcely on the scale of War and Peace, but rather easier to realise.

  Seeking to make a personal contribution to the war effort, he turned to the theatre, and to his first love – vaudeville preceding even his passion for Shakespeare. He had lately given some expression to this love in his radio comedy shows, but had already indulged it as far back as 1936 with Horse Eats Hat, his surreal take on An Italian Straw Hat at Project 891, its cast crammed full with out-of-work music-hall entertainers; and, in the same year, with The Great McCoy: His Wonder Show of 1936, a gala jeu d’esprit staged to raise money for the theatre. Central to Welles’s feeling for vaudeville was his passion for illusion, and specifically for magic, which he loved immoderately, both as spectator and as practitioner. Like Charles Dickens, he was obsessed by mastering its skills; he subscribed to all the trade magazines and was a dedicated member of, among other organisations, the Los Angeles Society of Magicians, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Society of Amateur Magicians, the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians and Bert Wheeler’s Circle of Magic. This was no passing enthusiasm, but a lifelong commitment: in his first production for Unit 891, Doctor Faustus, he had made extensive and startling use of magic, but that was just the beginning. Over the years he disbursed sizeable sums on tricks; his correspondence of the early forties reveals him putting in large orders at least once a month, often more: within five weeks in May/June of 1944 he submitted urgent demands for The Art of Illusion, U-Namit-I-Find-It, Something Borrowed, Something New and complete courses in stage hypnotism, the Hypnotic Rigid Test, Hypnotic Influence and Hypnotism on Animals; to his considerable, and somewhat petulantly expressed, chagrin he was unable to get hold of the Edwards Magnetic Wand and the Frank Kelly Gimmic Cup, which, he insisted, should match the Petrie Lewis shell wand. On the other hand, he was able to acquire the Squirmy Worm rope, whose tricky wrigglings he managed, in the fullness of time, to master. But it was not as a technician that he shone: his personality was the real magic. For him, there was poetry in the very names of these ingeniously devised tricks, and it is touching to find him poring over the instruction leaflets, like any child with his magic set.

  In fact, childhood – the scene of his first exposure to magic, on his father’s trawls through the vaudeville theatres of Chicago, often dropping in on Harry Houdini backstage, he claimed – is the key to Welles’s understanding of magic. At a highly impressionable age he had seen Howard Thurston perform the Levitation of Princess Karnac. Thurston had passed the hoop around the floating princess in question to prove the absence of wires, rods or sheets of glass. He then came down to the footlights and implored the audience to be as quiet as possible, because ‘the slightest noise might have a dangerous effect on the princess’.10 They all knew, he says, that Thurston was lying, because they knew that the machinery wouldn’t budge. ‘But we couldn’t see the machinery – Thurston had shown it couldn’t be there so we gave up. It wasn’t a puzzle any more – it was magic. In the precise meaning of the words it was marvellous and wonderful. Nobody made a sound. ‘Like Dickens, Welles longed to reproduce in his audiences the innocent awe of his own first infant experiences in the theatre. ‘Magic is pure theatre and a good magician does more than he pretends – not less,’ he said. ‘The transformation of an audience of grown-ups into as many little children is the best trick there is and no one’s explained how it’s done.’ In a phrase that resonates with profound echoes across the whole of his career, he wrote of the conjuror, in his introduction to Bruce Elliot’s book Magic as a Hobby, that ‘he’ll fail to amuse if he doesn’t amaze’. A real magician’s task, he continues, is ‘to abolish the solution, the very possibility of any solution in the minds of those he seeks to amuse’. In magic’s Golden Age, he adds (there is always a Golden Age with Welles), ‘magicians offered. laughter as part of the show but never permitted disenchantment. For a marvellous hour or two they elevated their most adult audiences to the status of delighted children.’ Lamenting the decline of magic into entertainment for jaded sophisticates – ‘Wizards of today … work their wonders in the frowsty hubbub of the cabaret, competing with bad whisky for control of the beholder’s mind’ – he notes that ‘the children are all home asleep, and of course the children are magic’s source and meaning, magic being, after all, no more than a formal and serious approach to the serious business of playing with toys’.

  It is striking to find a man who saw childhood as a prison from which he longed to escape so warmly extolling the condition. The truth is that Welles had indeed bypassed his own childhood, but had immediately begun to wonder whether he had not forsaken Eden for something far less precious: mere adulthood, the world of knowing and understanding, the sphere of will. Magic – proper magic, as he saw it – represented that blissful lost kingdom. It is noteworthy, too, that, proclaiming himself ‘one of that dwindling and gloomy body of cranks who wishes magic could have been kept a mystery’, he stresses that there should be no possibility of the audience analysing the tricks, just as he hated any analysis of himself or his work: mysteries that must not be probed, like the mysteries of his own life – the mysteries of personality, of talent, of creation. He sought to purvey astonishment and delight, unquestioned as to methods or motives: making himself omnipotent – like the child-conjuror who seeks to strike his audience of family and friends dumb with awe – he requires a trusting public, who will not merely suspend but altogether banish disbelief. ‘If astonishment and delight won’t bring an audience into a playhouse any more, then of course something is rotten in the state of the Union, and it isn’t only magic that is doomed.’ In truth, Welles was never a very skilled magician, mainly because (as his magic supplier in the nineteen-seventies, Richard Bloch, observed) he was unable to stop himself trying to improve the tricks, but also because – which is perhaps only to say the same thing from another angle – his personality overwhelmed the magic, as it overwhelmed everything else to which he turned his hand. Richard Himber (the Richard Bloch of the early forties) had written Welles a note accompanying a trick he was supplying: ‘with my lousy presentation, the audience used to gasp, but with the way you present tricks, you will probably have to have a doctor round to revive the fainting women when they see how you crush this bag into your pocket’.11 It didn’t quite work out that way.

  Welles had made his first tentative appearance in the guise of conjuror in 1941, with his then girlfriend Dolores del Rio as his lovely assistant (he sawed her in half); but now, in 1943, he felt ready to offer himself in that guise to a wider public in a show specifically staged for servicemen under a circus tent on the MGM lot on Cahuenga Boulevard; such members of the general public who came along would have to chip in with a few dollars. ‘It’s taken me a lot longer than I hoped to grow up to be a magician.’12 he wrote in the exuberant publicity blurb for The Mercury Wonder Show for Service Men, as he called his entertainment. ‘Many things have interfered with my career. This week it really started though.’ Despite the adjacent red-and-gold circus ticket wagon, the purpose of the presentation was by no means to make money (merely not to lose any would have been an unforeseen bonus; it had cost $40,000 – $26,000 of which was contributed by Welles personally). During the day, to promote the show he talked on local radio programmes, visited women’s clubs, addressed shipyard workers and wrote guest newspaper columns; there was some competition for audiences
even when the seats were free.

  Welles approached the Wonder Show, as he approached everything he cared about, with lavish inventiveness and imagination and very little preparation. It had taken seventeen weeks ‘and several dollars’ to get the show together; friends and colleagues, regardless of experience or qualification, were summarily roped in. They included, among the cast of twenty, Joseph Cotten (Jo-Jo the Great, the Weird Wizard of the South), Agnes Moorehead (as Calliope Aggie), Gus Schilling, Shorty Chirello (his valet, in charge of Hortense the Goose), Lolita Leighter (his general manager’s sister) and an unidentified individual known as Death Valley Mack; Phil Silvers, Rags Ragland and Paul Stewart roared away as barkers out front on the bally walk; while among the backstage workers were Jackson Leighter; Welles’s guardian, Dr Bernstein; and his secretary Shifra Haran. The show was on a stupendous scale: ‘The tent,’ reported Collier’s Magazine, ‘which has a picturesque midway, replete with lurid and wondrous posters and a calliope which gets its notion of noise from Orson himself, seats 1,100 servicemen and 400 suckers … the carnival spirit is everywhere evident.’13 How delighted with that comment Welles must have been. ‘Cursed with the ambition that has been the despair of himself and everybody around him,’ the reporter acutely noted, ‘Welles has improved on the old magic-show formula and has streamlined it to the point where it combines the features of a three-ring circus and a phantasmagoria.’ It Was a favourite formula of Welles’s: Horse Eats Hat, albeit on a slightly less extravagant scale, had been just such a combination; The Mercury Wonder Show would not be his last essay in the form. ‘From the moment the show opens,’ the magazine reported, ‘the stage is a-flutter with chickens, geese, ducks, rabbits, and bare-legged chorus girls and it remains in more or less that state during the entire evening.’ Now and then Welles would dive into the audience to pull a watch out of someone’s collar or a serviceman up onto the stage, ‘and altogether the art of mystification is splendidly embroiled with the patter of little feet’.

  Welles had twenty-three changes of costume over the course of the evening, covering his head with turbans, shawls, silk hats, tricornes and – somewhat alarmingly – surgical masks, ‘all in the cause of thaumaturgy and total war’. Mostly he was to be found, cigar in mouth, wearing a striped, tent-like garment and fez and ‘a bewildered, slightly bitter expression’, reported Vogue, noting that ‘though he does the magic, the pulling of white chickens out of a hat, the coin and the handkerchief and the string tricks … he hasn’t got the Merlin’s spiel that the true magicians use who know that every trick will work.14 He doesn’t know positively.’ It all adds to the charm of his performance, remarks the unnamed reporter, adding, with throwaway perceptiveness, ‘there is always something unpolished about the Welles performance, as though he were groping, pugnaciously, through to new paths with his own peculiar energy, his own extravagant way of messing up the slick, the precious, carefully thought-out and spinsterish’. This remarkable analysis of the curiously unfinished feel of all of Welles’s work – not merely as a performer – is a key to everything he ever did; the adverb ‘pugnaciously’ is particularly well noted. The Mercury Wonder Show was a classic example of his determination to unsettle expectation, an unrelenting bombardment of the audience with an absolute indifference to polish or decorum. Under the headline ‘Welles’s Wonderland’ Collier’s Magazine broke down one of the show’s items into its component parts: ‘The Witches’ Farmyard, an incredible mixture of sortilège not to be duplicated in the history of thaumaturgy, presents: Bovine Obedience; At the Shooting Gallery (including Marksmanship reward); Evaporation in the Mystic Dairy; The Dalai’s Milk Pail (direct from Tibetan lamas); The Flight of the Hare; Fowl Elusive; La Rapière du Diable; A Voice from the Dead; Faster than Light or the World Famous Balsamo’s Secret; and the Casket of Count Cagliostro.’ Free or not, it was certainly value for money: in addition to The Witches’ Farmyard, the playbill announced The Haunted Aviary, The Miraculous Chicken Farm, Dr Welles Presents His Experiments in Animal Magnetism (All Nature Freezes at His Glance), Pekin Service, The Secrets of the Sphinx, Chained in Space and Scenes from a Hindoo Marketplace; during the intermission there was a wild animal show, in which the big cats Jackie the Lion, Satan the Tiger and Dynamite the Black Leopard – more accustomed to appearing on sound stages than under a tent – were put through their paces; and the climax was provided by the Grand Finale Voodoo (‘A re-enactment of Mr Cotten’s interesting experiences with witch doctors in Africa’).

  Most sensational of all, perhaps, was the appearance of Rita Hayworth as the Girl with the X-Ray Eyes, and who, in The Flight of Time, was made by Welles to disappear from the Death Casket after he had sawn her in half. Hayworth was the new woman in Welles’s life. His relationship with Dolores del Rio, whom he was set to marry until her divorce had been temporarily held up, had inevitably deteriorated during his Brazilian sojourn; swept away by the erotic possibilities of Rio de Janeiro, he had stopped returning her calls. On his way back to the United States he had met up with her in Mexico City, where they had something of a reconciliation. With characteristic magnificence, she had thrown a party for him to which she invited the ambassador of every South American country, plus, for good measure, Pablo Neruda and Diego Rivera. But even this formidable love offering, appealing equally to Welles’s political passion for Good Neighborhood and his personal enthusiasm for South American art, was to no avail. He had already fallen in love with another Latin American beauty (born Margaret Cansino and renamed by her first husband, who also shrewdly encouraged her to dye her hair auburn), whose picture Welles had seen on the cover of Life magazine – upon which, it is reported, he had immediately decided that he would marry her. The same decision had no doubt been taken by millions of young men all over the world, but Welles was in a position to do something about it. The first step in this direction, as we have seen, had been to invite her to appear with him on radio just before he left the country to start shooting It’s All True; on his return from Brazil he had engineered another meeting, and another, and, in the fullness of time, he had become her lover (to the considerable chagrin but with the gentlemanly acquiescence of Victor Mature, Welles’s predecessor in this capacity). Now here he was, sawing her in half on Cahuenga Boulevard: being publicly bisected was clearly something of an occupational hazard for Welles’s mistresses. The press already knew all about their relationship, swiftly dubbing them Beauty and the Brains. Hayworth was by now deeply in love with Welles – the first man, she said, ever to take her mind seriously – and happily participated in the high-spirited romp he had devised. Less happy was Harry Cohn, the flint-hearted head of Columbia Studios to whom Rita Hayworth was exclusively contracted, and whom she had neglected to notify of her involvement in the show. After the heavily publicised first night, he threatened to sue her for breach of contract (she was filming Cover Girl with Gene Kelly during the run of The Mercury Wonder Show) unless she withdrew, so she bitterly pulled out, though she watched the show from the wings every night of its run. Marlene Dietrich gamely stepped into her shoes for the rest of the season; her current beau, Jean Gabin – to add to the starry hugger-mugger – helped out backstage on props.

  Welles was scarcely going to take Cohn’s behaviour lying down. The night after the opening, at the point at which Rita Hayworth should have been sawn in half, Welles made a speech that (‘in the continued absence of Miss Hayworth’) he made every night thereafter. Rita Hayworth, he said, had rehearsed for sixteen weeks, but ‘Miss Hayworth also works for motion-picture studios, and motion-picture studios are very odd.15 Columbia Pictures in the person of Harry Cohn – and I feel it is only fair to name names – has exercised its prerogative by insisting that Miss Hayworth withdraw from the show. This is trebly unfortunate, and I want to tell you that if any one of you feels that the absence of Miss Hayworth in any way spoils your evening, you have only to go to the Box Office and your money will be refunded and we hope you will remain as our guest for the rest of the evening. We had hoped tha
t reason might prevail, but Mr Cohn is adamant, a chronic condition with that gentleman.’ He then added, in an aside, ‘Needless to say, I shall never appear in a Columbia Picture.’ In terms of a career, these are not wise sentiments to be airing publicly (though as it happens, in accord with the rest of his complex relationship with Hollywood, Welles’s prediction turned out to be false, and within three years he was not only appearing in a Columbia Picture, but writing and directing it too).

  As may be imagined, The Mercury Wonder Show attracted wide publicity, and the anomaly of the director of Citizen Kane metamorphosing into the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey rolled into one was lost on no one. Nor did anyone, least of all the trade press, think that it was an entirely innocent gesture. ‘The case of Orson Welles versus Hollywood (or vice versa) is still going on,’ said the Hollywood Reporter, ‘whatever beliefs to the contrary might have been induced by the apparent calm which followed Mr Welles’s dissolution as a one-man band and his subsequent reduction to the status of actor and general handyman on Jane Eyre at Twentieth Century Fox.16 It now develops that the canny Orson was biding his time.’ Collier’s Magazine told its readers that he had forgotten the success of Citizen Kane ‘and the harrowing and beautiful experience in Brazil where he took eighteen billion feet of film and came out (not at his request) without a picture’, and was now taking simple delight in the large and rowdy crowds.17 ‘The applause is tremendous and the great Orson … beams gratefully and trembles with gratitude. But as he is bowing, he is also thinking. In his mind he is turning over an idea that will revolutionise magic and pretty much everything else. “I haven’t quite got it,” he reports, “but if I do get it, it’ll be big.” He lowers his voice and looks round apprehensively. “It’s a disappearance act,” he says, “and when I perfect it, I’ll just give one wave” – he makes a vicious swipe with his hand – “and there goes Hollywood.”’