Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Laughton was free in the autumn, not the spring, so Welles and Dick Wilson, now returned from the military and enthusiastically reviving the long-dormant Mercury Productions, agreed – against the better judgement of both Mike Todd and Cole Porter – to advance Around the World (as the show was to be called) to an April out-of-town opening, and both shows were duly announced. This meant a great deal of intensive work at a time when Welles was heavily involved in the thankless task of editing The Stranger, while still making his weekly broadcast, writing the last of the newspaper columns and contributing weighty articles to Free World. Dolivet never ceased pressing Welles to do more work for the organisation, and to take the idea of himself as a potential candidate more seriously. Welles was by no means inactive politically – in November he had fired off a telegram in support of a World Peace Rally, in celebration of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the establishment of the Soviet Union, again unhesitatingly allying himself with a dangerously unpopular cause: OUR CHOICE IS SIMPLE.7 THE END OF WAR OR THE END OF THE WORLD. THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF THE SOVIET UNION OF RUSSIA ARE MEANT TO BE FRIENDS. IT IS UP TO THEM TO CRUSH ALL CONSPIRACIES AGAINST THAT FRIENDSHIP.

  But by the end of the year Welles needed to take stock. His marriage to Rita Hayworth had broken down completely and he spent Christmas of 1945 in the Mexican jungle, as far from family and friends as he could manage. On Christmas Day he found himself, he told Barbara Leaming, on top of a pyramid that he had climbed and sat there ‘all alone … all alone in the ruins of the Mayans. I’ve never been so happy in my life.’ Despite the shades of Rider Haggard, so familiar from his Moroccan yarns (he even killed a bull, he says: ‘they made a great stew of that’), there is a ring of truth to the claim that Welles wanted to be alone for a moment. His habitual craving for stimulation occasionally (as it had done a couple of years before, in Fortaleza) gave way to a need for self-communion – nothing analytical, nothing, strictly speaking, religious: just stillness. The second he returned to the United States, Rita Hayworth started divorce proceedings against him; among other things she wanted repayment of the $30,000 he owed her. All he could offer was a half-share in Around the World. The lawyers duly set to work, though Hayworth betrayed no very great urgency in the matter.

  Welles quit Los Angeles, returning to New York to live, moving to East End Avenue and working on Around the World. All through the first months of that year he was also active again on the speech-making circuit, generally on the Free World platform, passionately analysing the Yugoslavian situation, unemployment, world peace, on a tide of ringing phrases: ‘Peace is possible without appeasement … if the United Nations fulfil the purposes which brought them into partnership, war as a threat or a fact will be outlawed. Outlawed as a crime by the courts and councils of a militant peace. And more effectively outlawed as a possibility by the logic of history.’8 His standing at these gatherings was enormous, in sharp contrast with the slightly humiliating status of his career. Here he was needed; here he could make a difference. NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO ABOLISH THE POLL TAX IS EAGER TO HONOR YOU AT THE FESTIVAL OF FREEDOM, said a telegram early in the New Year.9 THE PEOPLE OF CHICAGO ARE EAGER TO ACCLAIM YOU. Another telegram, this one from Tacoma, read: CITY BEING VERY BACKWARD NEEDS OUTSTANDING NATIONAL FIGURE TO BE AWAKENED TO A SPIRIT OF BROTHERHOOD BETWEEN RACES AND CREEDS.10 They wanted him to address the local people, no fewer than 150,000 of them, at a Brotherhood Rally. YOUR APPEARANCE WOULD TREMENDOUSLY STRENGTHEN DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT IN A COMMUNITY WHICH NEEDS IT BADLY. Welles scrawled YES on the telegram and a week later he was giving the people of Tacoma a talk entitled ‘Brotherhood or the New Hell’. The subject was one by which he became increasingly obsessed: the atomic bomb.

  Citizen Welles, he has been dubbed by more than one writer. No doubt the sobriquet is ironically intended, a droll reference to his most famous film, but among the many matters on which Welles can be faulted, at this period of his life his commitment to the well-being of his fellow-human beings shines brightly. He no longer sought election (IMPOSSIBLE TO CONSIDER ENTERING ACTIVE POLITICAL LIFE THIS YEAR,11 he had replied to Lloyd F. Saunders’s suggestion that he stand as a Congressional candidate); he was no longer being paid to speak. He simply wanted to rally his fellow-Americans. In later life he was inclined to suggest that politics was his hobby, something he pursued as others may follow the horses or their football team, but the record is indisputable: for many years Orson Welles unstintingly and tirelessly gave himself to the cause of radicalism; few actors or directors – certainly in the English-speaking world – have given more practical proof of their profound belief in democracy. In some curious way he had a greater clarity about politics than he did about his work, although he never understood the strategies of power, any more than he did in his own industry. That the causes for which he fought – anti-racism, international cooperation, trade unionism – were under siege through much of that time is a mark of his courage and prescience. The gap between his public compassion and his private carelessness did not go unnoticed, however. ‘Dear Orson,’12 wrote the photographer Brent Gallagher:

  I listen with interest as you defend the people’s interest against abusers or unscrupulous wielders of power. I’m not complaining about being paid nothing for photographing Caesar … I’m not complaining about non-payment for the Five Kings series … but when in my absence during the war, you borrow these negatives to dress up your movie studio, you fail to pay even the token charge of $10 each for the five used that I suggested, you fail to return the negatives, and you refrain from answering letters from me or my counsellor, well, I just wonder from what source you draw all that righteous indignation. Respects.

  More cheering was a letter from Marc Blitzstein, in the world premiere of whose ambitious Airborne Symphony Welles had taken the spoken role of The Monitor. ‘I can’t say it any better than I did;13 you’ve grown up; and I seem to be grateful and proud about it, as well as pleased. The way you rubbed yourself out in behalf of the work, and the way your stuff came shining through, made me realise it. The wrong people will, as before, hate us both, have already evidenced their hatred; and that makes us both happy. – The voice would have been something by itself. But the spirit! Thanks, baby – Marc.’ Welles recorded the piece some twenty years later under its original conductor, Leonard Bernstein, and it is Welles at his incomparable best, superbly spoken, perfectly phrased, informed with genuine passion (the recording was made at the height of the Vietnam War, an event Blitzstein was happily spared). The narration is in the vein of Ceiling Unlimited and no one will ever fulfil its aviation rhetoric more inspiringly than Welles:

  Laugh it off.14

  This little thought knocks out a mountain range,

  Tears up the jungle. This notion eats oceans,

  Puts the desert in its vest pocket,

  Has geography for tea.

  The barriers to the other side of the world –

  They can pack it up now and call it a day

  He continued to apply himself to his theatrical extravaganza. His previous adaptations of the Verne novel gave him something of a head-start, though he knew that whatever he put down on paper would be the merest discussion document. With Mike Todd and the $40,000 in cash that he had put up behind him, Welles stinted nothing; spectacle was the name of the game. He had his model before him: the original Paris production, only two years after publication of the novel, had transferred to New York the following year, in 1875; it employed more than 275 people and cost more than $50,000. ‘The scenery and mechanical effects are ingenious on a grand scale of magnificence.15 Europe has been ransacked for novelties.’ Welles intended to match that show, thrill for thrill, spill for spill.

  Following Verne fairly systematically, Welles’s script took Phileas Fogg and his man Passepartout from London via the English Channel, Paris, the Spanish border, Barcelona and the Mediterranean to Suez, thence to the Great Indian Forest, the Pagoda of Pilagi, a jungle encampment in the Himalayas, a street of evil repute in Hong K
ong, an Opium Hell in the same city, the China coast, Yokohama, and the Oka Saka (sic) circus. That was Act One. Act Two took place largely in America: San Francisco, the Rocky Mountains, Medicine Bow, the peak of Bald Mountain, the Frozen Plains of the West, New York Harbour and then jail again, before ending up where they had begun, in the ‘London Whist Club’, a substitute for Verne’s Reform Club. Many of the transitions would be shown on film on a huge movie screen that would be flying in and out, but there were still at least fifteen entirely different locations. To design this terrifying ‘behemoth of a spectacle’, Welles engaged a very young Robert Davison, whose previous stage experience had been confined to doing the sets and costumes for Comedia Balletica for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo; before that he had worked in Hollywood on large-scale projects for, among others, Vicente Minnelli, but had never had sole charge of any of them. Alvin Colt, equally young, though very much taller (six feet six inches), whose job as costume designer was hardly less demanding (there were more than 300 of them, almost all involved in very quick changes), had also come from the world of ballet. His mentor, the visionary Russian émigré painter Pavel Tchelitchew, had been close to Welles at the time of the Mercury’s first seasons. Nelson Barclift, ‘a young hopeful’ (ex-leading dancer in Lady in the Dark; assistant choreographer on the GI show This Is the Army during his five years’ military service), was responsible for what Variety referred to as the ‘terp staging’; he had been Cole Porter’s suggestion. It was not a heavyweight team; none of them, indeed, had been responsible for a major musical show, any more than Welles had. But that was his way. Experience was not a priority as far as he was concerned: he valued enthusiasm, eagerness, invention. He also had a taste for old pros, and to stage the Oka Saka ballet at the end of Act One, he engaged one of the most exotic and in his time idolised performers of the twentieth century, the man known as Barbette.

  Born Vander Clyde at Round Rock, a few miles from Austin, Texas, this highly original travésti high-wire artist had turned himself into a severely androgynous figure, beautiful but forbidding, who became the star turn of the Casino de Paris, courted by high society, photographed iconically by Man Ray, hauntingly filmed by Cocteau in Le Sang d’un Poète. ‘He walked the tightrope high above the audiences without falling,’ Cocteau wrote of him, ‘above incongruity, death, bad taste, indecency, indignation.’ In 1929, he momentarily lost his foothold and fell to earth, smashing his teeth and scarring his face. Appearing in his own country at Loew’s State, he caught a chill, and woke one morning to find himself physically locked. Operations followed; he had to learn to walk from scratch. Apart from a brief appearance in Billy Rose’s prodigious Jumbo, his career as a performer was over; thereafter he trained circus performers, and when Welles found him, he had been arranging the aerial ballet in John Ringling North’s Circus. Barbette was rather different from the sort of old vaudevillians and broken-down thespians whom Welles usually liked to cultivate, but he appealed to Welles’s sense of the exotic; the aristocratic froideur that only a Texan drag-artist could muster certainly added a touch of class to the proceedings: at the height of his fame he travelled with twenty-eight trunks, a maid, ‘and a maid to help the maid’.16

  As for the performers, Welles knew that it was his own presence as director – and the show qua show – that would sell it, not the actors, and the group he assembled accordingly lacked any great names or, it would appear, talents. Among them were a couple of old chums (Brainerd Duffield, who had done some radio writing for Welles, and Stefan Schnabel, the great pianist’s son, a real Mercury veteran from the first theatre season and innumerable broadcasts); a boyfriend of Cole Porter’s (Jack Cassidy); two more or less winsome juveniles as Princess Aouda and Passepartout – Pat Passepartout in this version (Mary Healy and Larry Laurence, a young Italian crooner who, under his original name of Enzo Stuarti, later had a brief moment of glory in the charts); seasoned character man Alan Reed as Detective Inspector Fix; and the dependable Anglo-American actor Guy Spaull in a variety of roles. Most of them doubled, trebled, even quadrupled parts. For the rest, there was a very large ensemble of singers, dancers and acrobats: a total cast of well over fifty. Welles left his key piece of casting till remarkably late in the day: three days before rehearsals were due to begin he went to the first night of Little Brown Jug at the Martin Beck; liking the work of one of the leading actors, Arthur Margetson, he went backstage and on the spot offered him the role of Phileas Fogg, which Margetson was pleased to accept, since the play in which he was appearing proved a distinctly flawed vessel, running for only three more performances. A dry, witty performer, with a background in revue and high comedy (his great success in his native London had been Let Us Be Gay), Margetson had exactly the qualities Welles needed from his leading man, even if in life he was inclined to be tiresomely fussy; at an early point in rehearsals Welles renamed him Shirley, and Shirley he remained to the end.

  The lateness with which casting was completed may have been due to a shock that Welles had just received. His old-style producer had just done a very old-fashioned thing: he pulled out at the last moment. Todd claimed that it was because Welles insisted on having an actual derrick on stage from which at a certain climactic moment he would spray the entire cast with oil. ‘I’ve decided I simply can’t afford you,’17 said Todd. ‘The show is yours from this moment on.’ On another occasion he claimed that he withdrew because ‘part of luck is a pet superstition: I have to have a script,18 even a bad one. Here it was, two weeks before rehearsals and Orson was still ad-libbing the script.’ Welles replied to these accusations with some dignity: ‘It became apparent that,19 among other things [Mr Mike Todd] was in no position to provide finances [so] I was forced to take over the responsibility of this myself.’ Any, and probably all, of the above explanations seem perfectly feasible: no doubt Welles did want a cast-spraying derrick, no doubt his script was in a permanent state of flux, and no doubt Mike Todd did run out of cash; he shelved several shows at about the same time: ‘the Todd casualties of ’46’ as Welles called them. Todd did not seem to require his investment back, but Welles somehow had to find the rest.

  For a brief moment, to judge from a press release early in March, Welles’s friends Paul Feigay and Oliver Smith stepped into the breach, but Dick Wilson seems to have persuaded Welles to go it alone as ‘a Mercury offering’,20 in Dick’s words. But where would the money come from? Needless to say, neither Mercury nor Dick himself had any money themselves. Welles was heavily in debt to the woman who was about to be his ex-wife, and Lear Radios had just withdrawn their sponsorship of Orson Welles’s Commentary. ABC, the radio network, agreed to keep the show on the air, but Welles’s salary was reduced from $1,700 a week to $50. He had only one thing to sell: his soul. So he swiftly put in a few calls, the first of them to Alexander Korda, who gallantly bought the movie rights to Around the World for $100,000, which would tide them over for a little while. The asking price was a gentlemen’s agreement for Welles to direct four films for him. It still wasn’t enough; the costume houses were demanding advance payment for fabrics to the tune of $25,000, so Welles made a second and infinitely less agreeable call, this time to the man whom he had only recently referred to as the Savage of Gower Gulch, the man who prevented Rita Hayworth from appearing in The Mercury Wonder Show, the man he said would never employ him: Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Again, all Welles could offer him was the promise of a film – to star, needless to say, Rita Hayworth, who had just come to the end of her exclusive contract with Cohn. Welles offered him his treatment of Carmen, which was also one of the movies that he was discussing with Korda, but not quite in the same terms. ‘The theme of this picture is sex in the raw and this is the major opportunity …21 at this point we interpose the sexiest footage of the entire picture … Flesh and the Devil, purple passion, every attitude of amorous dalliance, the longest kisses the censors will allow.’ It was not Welles’s accustomed language, and it would not have been Welles’s accustomed film. That was no
t the point. The point was to get Cohn to cough up the dough: and he did. The show could go on.

  By now, of course, they were in rehearsal for Around the World. To Margetson’s surprise, Welles turned out to be highly liberal as a director. On the first day the cast had been called at ten; the whole vast company were there on the dot. ‘Orson made his entrance about ten-twenty,’ Margetson wrote in his unpublished memoir, Orson and I. ‘We timidly told him we didn’t care too much about 10 a.m. calls. And to our amazement, the Ogre replied, “Tell me whatever time you would like to be called and providing we get in eight hours a day (which is Equity maximum time of rehearsal) I will endeavour to oblige you.’” Whenever they started, rehearsals were wild, exuberant, laughter-driven affairs; Welles was, in Margetson’s spinsterish phrase, ‘on the water-wagon’, and full of energy and invention. ‘Orson made the whole thing seem so entertaining and effortless.’ The show contained a little over thirty minutes worth of film (Hyde Park, the Bank, a Hong Kong den, Fogg’s flat, the Whist Club, and on the boat), and Welles shot the footage in the rehearsal room. Just before they were to do the storm scenes aboard ship, at around eleven o’clock that evening, Margetson reported, a crate of whisky mysteriously entered the studio. Welles urged the three actors to drink heartily. ‘Alcohol!’ he cried, ‘Inside and out! I beseech you to take plenty of alcohol. Arthur, dear boy, please take another shot before your next shot.’ ‘Let’s face it,’ says Margetson, ‘he was being just a trifle Machiavellian as well as kind (he has a definite sadistic trait, anyway – though only in mild form).’ One of the actors, Larry Laurence, was, it turned out, unused to liquor; Mary Healy, from New Orleans, wasn’t; and Margetson had been drinking whisky all his life. The liquor was being ladled out in such bulk, however, that before long even he became very unsteady. Suddenly Welles threw a huge hogshead of water in his face. ‘It is a matter of record I took it all without so much as dislodging my monocle. Was it great acting? Or was I simply feeling no pain?’ To Welles all this was wildly entertaining: the fun and togetherness of the theatre; this is where he reclaimed the childhood he never knew.