by Simon Callow
The band worked well with him; their spot became a weekly feature. There was some dissension within the band as to who was the leader. Then, on the morning of the show of 19 April, Jimmie Noone dropped dead of a heart attack. Welles, again at his inspired best, ad-libbed a tribute. For once he seems genuinely moved. ‘Jimmy died suddenly last night,’ he continues, ‘and now, in his honour, his friends are going to play one of his works.’ The band, tearful, plays ‘Blues for Jimmie Noone’ or ‘Jimmie’s Blues’, Noone’s latest opus; the audience is palpably moved. After Noone’s death, the jazz spot continued with Wade Whaley and then others, including Zutty Singleton’s Swing Combo. Welles was quite right; no one else on radio was giving space to this kind of music, and many in his audience knew nothing of it. His enthusiasm, boyish but deeply informed, his eloquence and generous sympathy are all as infectious when listened to today as they must have been at the time. If he could have found a structure that accommodated that, then he would have been onto an absolute winner.
John McMillan understood this. He was leaving Compton’s and, in his parting letter to Welles – after telling him that he had wired New York to ‘relax and leave us be on this show’ – McMillan urged him to use himself, ‘the warmth of your personality’, rather than rely on formulas.8 The show, he says, has improved enormously, but still has a long way to go. ‘I know that you can do anything in the world with this show,’ he tells Welles, ‘if you only have the courage to believe in yourself’ – on the face of it an extraordinary thing to say to Orson Welles, who seemed to embody the concept of self-assurance. McMillan continues in a vein somewhat surprising in the executive of an advertising agency: ‘Very frankly, Orson, the idea and ideal of the programme as we discussed it and planned it – the deep, almost religious belief, which I am sure you share, that there can be a synthesis between what is good and what is popular – that millions of people like good things if they are only made free of their fear of liking’– everything, in fact, that the jazz sections of the show had so brilliantly evinced – ‘all this goes far deeper with me than any business considerations …’ It is clear from the quiet, regretful tone of McMillan’s letter that he feels in some measure disappointed, that he has believed what Welles told him about his hopes for the programme, and that Welles has let them both down. ‘You have come a long, long way from the first broadcast,’ he concludes. ‘But I am absolutely certain that the best programme we have had in this series to date represents only a fraction of the potential of which this programme is capable.’
If McMillan’s tone was that of a wise housemaster, a sterner, sharper report was to come. A month later, Dick Compton himself wrote a letter to Welles’s agent William Collier of the William Morris agency, bluntly stating its theme: ‘To renew or not renew?’ Both the agency and the client, Socony-Vacuum, were wholly in agreement that the gas and oil business peculiarly required ‘big-time, night-time, highly legible, highly visible radio’, they had accordingly been willing to experiment, to spend money.9 What had been the results? Poor, from the beginning, with the Hooper rating over ten weeks showing no improvement whatsoever. To be fair, the Serious Spot had been highly successful – the John Donne sermon and a scene from Cyrano de Bergerac had been ‘inspiring in their rendition’. Compton was not alone in feeling this: Eddie Cantor, then close to the height of his fame, had written to the embattled Welles that his dramatic reading of ‘The Ballad of Bataan’ was ‘the finest thing I have heard since the advent of radio’. But the rest of the show, insists Compton, was a disappointment – above all, the comedy. Welles had told Compton over lunch one day that he still felt he had to achieve greater familiarity with ‘the comedy form’. He had stated ‘most frankly’ that he felt ‘nowhere near the mastery of the comedy form that he felt with the dramatic form’. This was Welles’s first venture in ‘the comedy form’, says Compton, and then he fires off a series of highly pertinent questions:
Does he like to work in that form? Does he feel that he can express himself adequately to the public in that form? Does he feel that he wishes deeply to study that form and put against it the same time and kind of effort which he has put against his undoubted mastery of other forms? Does he feel that because the comedy form, when successful, more consistently than any other form tends to draw a large audience; that he, over the years, wishes to use that vehicle as a means of reaching and influencing larger numbers of the public?
The architecture of the show had not been well planned, Compton says. It needed clearer direction – that is to say, control. Welles’s appearances outside the studio must be controlled, too. More time needed to be spent. In the end, it was a question of Welles’s attitude:
Now, we realise that this is quite an extraordinary letter to write about a package show. It contravenes every article in the constitution of package show producing … we and our client hope that you will receive it in the spirit in which it is written and we wish to state that spirit explicitly. It is this: we believe that we have the essential ingredients of a highly successful show. We hope to achieve a highly successful show, and having achieved it, to stay with it for years and years. We do feel, however, that the success for which we are reaching can only be achieved by more detailed and effective supervision and by a closer spirit of cooperation between everybody connected with the show.
It is entirely characteristic of the extremes so often simultaneously present in Welles’s life – one foot in heaven and the other in hell – that on the very day that he received this chastening tutorial from the head of an advertising agency on the obligations of being the host of a comedy show, a letter arrived from Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury, one of the two or three most powerful men in the country, to confirm that they wanted Welles to spearhead the radio campaign to launch the desperately needed Fifth War Loan Drive. ‘I am sure you will be very helpful to us,’ wrote Morgenthau, adding words that must have been music to Welles’s ears: ‘this will give you an opportunity to put your talents to better use in the war effort than you have been able to do thus far.10 The job that lies ahead of us is tremendous.’ Official confirmation arrived by the same post: ‘You are hereby appointed a consulting expert in the office of the secretary, War Finance division, with compensation at the rate of $1.00 per annum.’
Welles immediately hurled himself, as only he could, into the task of producing the broadcast, which would come first from Texarkana, in Texas, and would then be repeated in Los Angeles and Chicago. Whipping up a storm of energy and excitement, he contacted the participants personally: included in an impressive group were the composer Aaron Copland, the poet Carl Sandburg, the man of the theatre Oscar Hammerstein II and the conductor Leopold Stokowski. WON’T YOU PLEASE WRITE US A PRAYER OR A DEDICATION?11 he wrote to Sandburg. I DON’T NEED TO TELL YOU WHAT ABOUT. Old colleagues were roped in: I WOULD LIKE MUSIC FOR THIS TO BE NOT INCIDENTAL BUT OF EQUAL IMPORTANCE, Welles wired Bernard Herrmann. I WILL BE VERY UNHAPPY IF YOU CAN’T TAKE PART IN IT. MY DEAREST LOVE TO YOU AS ALWAYS.12 Naturally Herrmann replied by return: DELIGHTED … ARRIVING HOLLYWOOD JUNE 5.13 It was just like the old days: adrenalin overriding everything. But despite the exhilaration, there as no doubt in Welles’s mind of the seriousness of the undertaking, or of the gravity of the hour. Suddenly he was at the heart of great events: Fred Smith of the Treasury Department, who had been instrumental in approaching Welles, warned him to eschew levity in the broadcast: it might be the second or third day of invasion, or perhaps its eve. BE SURE TO KEEP TEXARKANA SHOW POINTED YO JUSTIFYING COSTS OF INVASION, Smith wired him, ESPECIALLY IN BLOOD, signing himself off somewhat incongruously LOVE AND KISSES FRED;14 even the politicians started talking showbiz under the influence of Welles’s expansiveness.
Within days, Welles had a request for Smith: NOW HERE’S A JOB FOR YOU AND I MEAN A JOB.15 WE NEED A TWO-LINE MESSAGE FROM EISENHOWER AS FOLLOWS: QUOTE WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING. OUR TERMS ARE ON THE RECORD – UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. WE WON T TAKE ANYTHING LESS AND THAT’S WHAT WE’RE GOIN
G TO GET UNQUOTE. THE MESSAGE NEEDN’T BE LONGER THAN THIS AND MAYBE EISENHOWER WILL AGREE TO THOSE EXACT WORDS. A week into the job, and Welles is writing dialogue for the Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces; ten days earlier he had been enduring lectures from Dick Compton about ‘the comedy form’. And the day before he was ordering conjuring tricks, including a real skull for a talking-skull act. Such was the helter-skelter of Welles’s life. ‘Today we talk of the sacrifices we are called upon to make,’ he wrote to the War Finance Committee, giving a sample of his script.16 ‘Sacrifices? Hardly! The real sacrifices were made at the birth of our nation more than 160 years ago. More truly we are permitted great privileges. Living in a democracy is truly a great privilege, and the opportunity to help perpetuate and extend that privilege is a far greater privilege.’ Fred Smith, with his better informed view of the realities of the war, suggested that Welles add a description of the desperation and determination of the enemy, and the probable deaths that America would endure during the invasion. Emphasise the need for support from behind, he said, from the home country; and of course that is what Welles did. In its own small way, producing the broadcast was like waging war: getting all the participants into the studio at the same time was a massive physical operation, which then had to be repeated twice. Welles and everyone involved was aware that it mattered; the broadcast – though perhaps somewhat hampered by over-solemnity – is impressive for its sense of urgency and sincere patriotic commitment, no doubt connected to the fact that the massive D-Day operation had taken place a mere six days before, on 6 June. The broadcasts succeeded beyond all expectation in the task of raising money, and it was understood that Welles was more responsible than anyone for that result. His particular gifts for shaping and synthesis were well noted. ‘I want you to know,’ Morgenthau wrote to him, ‘how much I appreciate your help in Texarkana, Los Angeles and Chicago.17 The material you prepared for me is by far the best I have ever had. I am particularly impressed by the way you caught what I was trying to say and brought it back to me in a way that could not have been improved on.’ There was a slightly ugly moment when the War Finance Committee quibbled over payments for the Texarkana broadcast, despite Fred Smith’s clear statement to Welles that they had lots of money and it was his to command, but the moment soon passed.
In all the excitement, the demise of The Orson Welles Almanac went almost unnoticed. The grapevine knew of it before the participants. ‘It was a business decision,’ wrote Dick Compton, ‘and as you know business decisions are often tinged with personal regret.’18 There was ugliness there, too: NBC raised an invoice to Welles, charging him for ‘repainting dressing room defaced by you’.19 Asked for clarification, NBC cited ‘drawings or caricatures on the walls of the dressing room occupied by Mr Welles, and from the evidence unearthed it is our conclusion that they were drawn by Mr Welles himself’. Orson the bad boy had evidently not quite got it all out of his system in Brazil; he finally coughed up the $250 demanded. Despite ending on this curiously silly note, the whole Almanac episode is not without significance. Compton had, in his tight-lipped way, spoken the truth – what he quaintly insists on calling ‘the comedy form’ on radio did, ‘when successful’, tend more consistently than any other form to draw a large audience. Did Welles want that audience? Compton and his client wanted to achieve a highly successful show ‘and having achieved it, to stay with it for years and years’. Did Welles, or did he not, wish to use that successful vehicle ‘as a means of reaching and influencing larger numbers of the public’? The answer had, of course, to be: ‘not in that form’. His dreams of establishing himself as a comedian had proved hopeless – humiliatingly so; his educational aspirations were confined to the Serious Spot, which, though he knew he could certainly pull it off, he must also have known inevitably ended up as a mere plummy interlude between the gags; while his hopes of introducing genuinely political elements would never get past the sponsor.
He therefore abandoned his attempt to reach a mass audience. In doing so, he also abandoned the vast bulk of his income: in 1944, his radio earnings amounted to the enormous sum of $170,000 (he earned an additional $10,000 for the Texarkana broadcast, so patriotism did not go unrewarded). Thus liberated, Welles turned increasingly to his consuming interest of the period – politics – which he pursued on twin tracks: his growing contribution to Dolivet’s Free World Association as speaker, writer and editor; and his increasing involvement with the campaign to re-elect Roosevelt. The two activities were not necessarily wholly compatible; Free World maintained a healthily critical attitude to the President. Welles’s new commitment to Roosevelt was something of a conversion, partly brought on by his contact with government at the highest levels, partly by his conviction of the danger of anyone other than Roosevelt being elected, but above all by the intoxicating sense that he might actually be involved in the great task of remaking the world when the war was won. Increasingly, he embraced the role of spokesman, effortlessly commanding the appropriately stentorian tones: ‘To the fighting armies of the united nations, and to the courageous underground, We, the Free World Association of Hollywood,’ he said at the Association’s rally, ‘offer this solemn pledge: We will exert ourselves to the utmost in the support of this war and toward the fulfilment of its high purpose. All attempts at betraying the American democratic system we will rigorously expose – and we will combat unflinchingly every effort to weaken the authority of the people by divisions of race or of sect or of class … we the Free World Association of Hollywood invite all men and women enlisted in the cause of freedom to join with us now.’20
This relatively new manifestation of Welles’s persona naturally attracted ironic comment: earlier in the year, Time magazine had mocked one of his speeches, and he had wired them a dignified defence of his right to be taken seriously:
We filmmakers realise our community is a gorgeous subject for satire.21 We grant, or anyway most of us do, that we are the world’s funniest people. You can write more jokes about us than you can about plumbers, undertakers or Fuller brush salesmen. Hollywood is guilty of deliberate withdrawal from the world. It seeks to entertain and we suspect that the success of that withdrawal is what makes Hollywood funny. But let Time magazine view with alarm or point with pride but not laugh off Hollywood’s growing recognition that every movie expresses or at least affects political opinion. Moviegoers live all over the world, come from all classes, and add up to the biggest section of human beings ever addressed by any means of communication. The politics of moviemakers therefore is just exactly what isn’t funny about Hollywood. Time mentions room temperature burgundy and chopped chicken liver as though these luxuries invalidate political opinion. Time, whose editors eat chopped chicken liver and whose publishers drink room temperature burgundy, knows better.
Meanwhile, his absence from screen and stage had not gone unnoticed. While The Orson Welles Almanac was still running, Hedda Hopper had written a ‘Whither Welles?’ piece; it well expresses the general bafflement about his career. Welles had sent her one of his comically blustering letters of complaint concerning something she had written about Rita Hayworth earlier in the year: ‘I send you herewith a number of ancient Irish Curses, all unprintable, eve under the audacious banner of your own by-line.22 You were my family’s only syndicated friend and now you are publicly on the side of the Savage of Gower Gulch [Harry Cohn]. This is to remind you that the good God sees everything that we do, and that it is never too late to repent. I’m still a watery-kneed invalid, but I’m just strong enough to raise a palsied fist and shake it in your direction … I remain, wounded but adoring, yours always’– a remarkably playful letter to have written to a woman who, with her co-harpy, Louella Parsons, had done everything she could to have Citizen Kane not merely suppressed, but physically destroyed.
Under the heading GENUS GENIUS, Hopper reports on Welles’s present situation, his abandonment of War and Peace and his radio show.23 Helpfully, she tells him that he’s not a comedian and should give it
up and attempt another War of the Worlds. New laws introduced after that show, he solemnly tells her, mean that no such thing could ever be done again. What about his proposed reading of the Bible with symphony orchestra? ‘Those who were interested in the Bible before,’ says Welles, who must have been enjoying himself enormously, ‘think it’s too slow now.’ He recounts yet again the legend of his career, with the usual imaginative touches, and, specially for her, adds a brilliant new detail: he bumped into Gordon Craig when he was fifteen, he tells her, in the American Express office in Paris, and immediately fainted at his feet, whereupon he was taken home by Craig, who taught him stage design and took him to Florence to meet all the great artists (Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca and Benvenuto Cellini, one presumes). Daringly, Hopper mentions Citizen Kane and, even more daringly, acclaims it: he got more praise for it, she asserts, than people who had been producing for years; then – more and more daring – she mentions the great beauty of the footage from It’s All True, which she has evidently seen. ‘If by some miracle he can get hold of it and make it a successful picture,’ she says, risking the displeasure of some powerful figures in the industry, ‘he will have justified himself and made liars of those who defamed him. I don’t think Orson is the greatest actor we’ve ever had. In fact,’ she goes on, in her artless way, ‘I don’t think he’s a great actor. There’s very little warmth in him on screen. He doesn’t stir you the way Frank Sinatra does. But I do think he’s a great producer.’ She trails his lack of a producing credit on Jane Eyre, but he won’t be drawn on that subject, and describes his domestic contentment. It is a curious, elegiac piece, almost compassionate, halfway between an obituary and a doctor’s report. ‘How many folks do you know who, at the age of thirty’ – he had actually just turned twenty-nine – ‘have done so many things? All the ingredients for greatness are there, but will he ever reach the goal he’s striving for? Only time will tell. But to me, Orson Welles has only scratched the surface of Orson Welles.’ It is an unexpectedly interesting summary, all the more so for its naivety; in fact, like virtually everybody else, including some very sophisticated people, Hopper quite genuinely didn’t know what to make of him. His new-found political activities, increasingly high in profile, only further confused the picture.
