Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  It is a cause of great sadness that not a single one of the many projects that Welles and Korda so enthusiastically planned together – most of all, perhaps, War and Peace – should have come to fruition. With Welles’s imagination and Korda’s contacts, their combined temperaments might have led to remarkable work. Korda was the sort of producer – mercurial but effective – with whom Welles might conceivably have worked harmoniously. It was clearly not for want of trying, as their voluminous correspondence and Korda’s considerable outlay of funds testify, though for a man like Korda who thrived on constant contact and exchange of ideas, Welles’s elusiveness, which increased with every passing year, was a serious obstacle to a relationship, MY TIME IS GETTING SHORT,46 the older man wired Welles. I WAS UNSUCCESSFUL IN CONTACTING EITHER YOU OR WILSON NEITHER DID HE CALL ME AS AGREED STOP ALL THIS IS EXCEEDINGLY ODD AND QUITE A NOVEL EXPERIENCE FOR ME. By the time of that telegram, however, Welles was fully immersed in a very different sort of film from any he was planning with Korda.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  If I Die Before I Wake

  THE IMPULSE TO make The Lady from Shanghai was by no means purely artistic. Pressing financial demands were the motor for Welles’s involvement in the film: he had received a substantial advance from Harry Cohn, who (unlike Korda) expected something concrete and immediate in return for it. He also owed money to Rita Hayworth, to whom he was still married, though they had led separate lives for nearly a year (she had been involved with the singer Tony Martin) – to say nothing of the maintenance for their daughter Rebecca that he had consistently failed to pay. In fact, in late 1946 his financial affairs were in a state of near-collapse, due to a combination of reckless expenditure and absolute indifference to bookkeeping. Messrs Nichols and Phillips, who had the unenviable task of supervising Welles’s financial affairs, wrote to him in the hope of getting a signature for a Treasury form for $10,191.29, which would absolve his IRS debt, and are eloquent on the subject:

  May I direct your attention to a number of detrimental factors encountered: 1. you did not keep books for three years;1 2. inability of your office staff to locate and deliver me the working appeals and other details relative to 1941 and 1942 returns; 3. tens of thousands of dollars of deductions claimed are based upon amounts listed in loose-leaf single entry accounts, many items being in round hundred and thousand dollar amounts bearing no relation to any specific thing … many of the accounts apparently represented the commingling of expenditures for personal and business purposes.

  There follow six more points of equal severity. Then, in the final paragraph, a cri de coeur. ‘an undue amount of time has been expended by the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the writer in the examination of your income returns for the three years …’ The letter ends with the recommendation that Welles should pay the $10,000 and run. How he must have loathed that wagging finger, but it must have been borne in even on him that his self-induced financial chaos was forcing him to do things that he did not really want to do. His radio work had come to an end; his newspaper work had never made him any money (indeed, had cost him a great deal in researchers), and his final withdrawal from it – or its from him – had been gently confirmed by an elegant letter to Dick Wilson from Welles’s old publisher on the New York Post, Ted Thackrey, stopping the weekly $100 which, through an oversight, they had been paying: ‘I have written to Orson that, as nearly as I can figure it, he owes the Post approximately 54 columns, advance payment having already been made, and that we will be happy to receive them some time in the next century’.2

  Otherwise, Welles was maintaining establishments in New York and – on and off – Los Angeles, paying alimony to his first wife Virginia and maintenance for their daughter Christopher. His losses on Around the World dragged heavily on him; making cash was now a matter of primary urgency, and Harry Cohn of Columbia was offering rather a lot of it: $2,000 a week for a twelve-week shoot and $100,000 if Columbia’s expenses were covered, plus 15 per cent of the producer’s profit. It is perfectly understandable that Welles would work for Cohn; as he was to remark some years later, the cherry-pickers go where the cherries are. What is more surprising is that that graceless and unforgiving mogul, with whom Welles had fallen out so comprehensively and so publicly – the man he still referred to as the Beast of Gower Gulch – should want to employ him.

  From a purely commercial point of view, Welles – despite the respectable showing of The Stranger at the box office, largely thanks to the presence in it of Loretta Young and Edward G. Robinson – had fallen drastically in critical standing: the film had been released during the last month of the run of Around the World without fanfare, without interest and for the most part without honour, suffering from being released in the same week as the British compendium movie, Dead of Night. Contrasting the two films, Hermine Rich Isaacs in Theatre Arts commented that Dead of Night started leisurely, until the plot closes in ‘as the audience is caught in the grip of a series of horror tales each one more terrifying than the one which precedes it’.3 Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist was praised as ‘an almost unbearable performance’ (exactly what Welles’s Rankin should have been). The first half of The Stranger, by comparison, ‘pursues its ominous course with the tension of a taut rubber band’, but, ‘its mystery solved in mid-passage’, it works its way home by a tortuous route of none too surely contrived melodramatic and psychological devices which make demands of the players ‘far beyond their capacities’. Not a triumph, then. For his part, Cohn had recently had a string of successes, not least with the films that Rita Hayworth made for him, Gilda being the most recent and the most successful. His output had been distinctly classy by comparison with that of many other studios; he was not, however, noted for his enthusiasm for experiment. The Stranger was Welles at his most mainstream, but the reputation of being a whizz-kid, a wunderkind and so on still clung to him, and no sensible producer would have expected the expected from him. Possibly the failure of his marriage with Rita Hayworth had reduced the jealous hostility that Cohn had felt towards Welles at the time of the wedding. He had extended the advance to Welles with the encouragement of Hayworth, and saw some publicity value in a reunion – on screen, at any rate – of the couple whose private shenanigans had provided so many column inches over the years.

  Welles’s first suggestion was his version of Carmen, but ‘raw sex’ was not the image Cohn wanted for his star. Welles was at something of a loss until he came across R. Sherwood King’s 1938 thriller If I Die Before I Wake. Welles later spun various fables about how he came to choose the material that became his film for Rita, all of them expertly exploded by Charles Higham. It was scarcely as fortuitous as Welles suggested: the book was not unknown. Indeed, the actor Franchot Tone seems to have had an interest in it: when Welles urgently needed a copy, it was to Tone that he applied. But long before that, before Welles and Hayworth were married, William Castle, a B-movie director whose film When Strangers Marry Welles had once praised in his New York Post Almanac, had given a copy of the novel to Welles, thinking that it would make a good movie, and Welles had shown immediate interest in appearing in it. ‘Dear Bill,’4 he wrote to Castle, ‘about If I Should Die – I love it. It occurs to me that maybe by saying I had ideas for it, you’d think my ideas are creative. Nothing of the sort. What I’m thinking of is a practical use Mercury could find for the property. I have been searching for an idea for a film, but none presented itself until If I Should Die. I could play the lead and Rita Hayworth could play the girl. I won’t present it to anybody without your OK. The script should be written immediately. Can you start working on it nights?’ Welles adds a postscript to the letter that is not only instructive about his relationship with Hayworth at the time, but also gives a vivid impression of the way in which he bound to him with hoops of steel those whom he wished to use. ‘Give Rita a big hug and kiss and say it’s from somebody who loves her very much. The same guy is crazy about you and you won’t ever get away from him.’ It would be a strong man who c
ould resist such force-nine charm.

  As is so often the case in these matters, Castle heard no more about it. And then one day, some three years later, when he was working at Columbia preparing his next B-movie, he was suddenly summoned to Harry Cohn’s office. ‘In an unusually expansive mood, Cohn announced he was taking me off The Crime Doctor’s Warning,’ wrote Castle in his autobiography, Step Right Up. Cohn told his secretary to hold all calls:

  and, all charm and smiles, called me by my first name. I started to worry. Cohn crossed the room and sat down beside me. ‘I just made a deal with Orson Welles to do a picture for us at Columbia. That boy’s a genius.’ He handed me a treatment and asked me to read it immediately. Glancing at the cover, I read, If I Die Before I Wake. ‘You know, Bill,’ Cohn continued, ‘it takes a genius like Orson Welles to find material like this. The dame being a murderess is a brilliant and original idea.’ Shocked, I sat frozen while Cohn informed me that he had given Orson the choice of anybody in Hollywood to be his associate producer and he had picked me. Furious, I reached Orson in New York. He excitedly told me how he had sold If I Die Before I Wake to Harry Cohn for $150,000. It was a package deal – Orson would produce, direct, write and co-star. I had paid $200 and Columbia had turned it down. ‘We’ll be working together, Bill. Isn’t that what we planned? Get to New York as quickly as possible so we can begin preparations.’

  Trying to rationalise that working with Welles in any capacity would be a great learning experience, Castle endeavoured to push aside his disappointment at not being able to direct. Welles told him that Cohn had agreed to let Rita Hayworth play the girl and that If I Die was to be one of the big pictures of the year. ‘If I had directed, it would have been an inexpensive $70,000-budget whistler. After a sleepless night, I decided to see what would become of If I Die Before I Wake in the talented hands of Orson Welles, the boy genius.’

  In fact, no explanation for the way Welles came across the book was required, since he was an insatiable consumer of thrillers; indeed, he always used to travel with a couple of trunkfuls of the stuff to get him through the sleepless nights. He often claimed that as a youth in Chicago he had written pulp fiction and been paid for it, so R. Sherwood King would have been a man after his own heart: ‘when Sherwood King had reached the mature age of 12,’ his publicity said, ‘he found a book, cover and all, which he had written so long before that he had already forgotten it: on the title page was The Adventurer by Sherwood King, author of The Island of Death.’ At fifteen, he wrote The Outlaws of the Air, in two volumes, 480 pages of closely packed text; he also supplied the advertisements for the book, one of which read: ‘Absolutely the most thrilling story ever published … you will read it over and over again. Sherwood King says of this novel: “I sincerely believe this is by far my best novel.’” A Mid-Westerner, he had attended Chicago Heights Police School, got a diploma and become a fingerprint expert; his first published book was Between Murders. If I Die Before I Wake is often dismissed (generally by those who have never read it), but this is unjust: though no masterpiece, it is a crisply written and not unintelligent piece of work. King worked on it for more than a year, he reported, doing his writing in a cheap Chicago boarding house – the sort of place ‘where the landlady gave literary teas each week to step up her income’. Like Scheherazade, King had to read out a chapter of If I Die Before I Wake each week in lieu of rent: if the results were liked, the rent continued to be waived; if not … ‘Needless to say,’ in the words of the blurb, ‘King stayed for the year.’

  *

  The novel has substantially the same plot as the film, but it is worth describing it in a little detail, since Welles’s departures from it and his inventions around it are significant. His changes are in structure, in location and above all in the two central characters. In addition, the book has what might be called, even in such an essentially unpretentious work, a metaphysical undertow that deeply influenced the film Welles made, and which is contained in the title, drawn from the child’s prayer ‘Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep;/If I should die before I wake …’ Sleep is the book’s central image. As in innumerable thrillers of the forties and fifties, the central character is in a state of increasingly perplexed bewilderment as events seem to entangle him in thickets of incomprehension. King goes one step further: his hero, Larry Planter, is perceived to be (and perceives himself to be) in a state of slumber; the plot administers a series of shocks to him, but it is not until the end of the novel that he feels himself to be fully awake. ‘Bannister was right,’ he tells Elsa, quoting her husband. ‘I’d been asleep before. You woke me up. Now I’m living. Now I’m alive!’ The Lady from Shanghai is similarly permeated with a sense of somnambulism, the hero walking dream-like through his life as if in complete ignorance of the forces that shape it, passing through nightmare into some kind of freedom, the freedom of being awake.

  The novel plunges the reader straight into the plot without preparation: ‘“Sure,” I said. “I would commit murder. If I had to, of course, or if it was worth my while.’” Handsome young Larry Planter, after years as a sailor on tramps and an unsuccessful spell as a writer, has become chauffeur to the crippled lawyer Mark Bannister, whose wife, the lovely Elsa, is fifteen years his junior and deeply unhappy. Larry also drives Bannister’s partner, Lee Grisby, and it is Grisby who in the opening chapters makes the shocking proposal to the young man that for $5,000 he should allow himself to be framed for apparently murdering him: Grisby wants to leave his wife and escape to the South Seas. He also wants, he tells Larry, to kill Bannister to claim the insurance. All of this, which is transferred directly to the film, is held back in Welles’s screenplay until nearly halfway through. This was no doubt a wise decision: in the novel the crime has been committed and Larry is arrested and imprisoned by the end of the second of the book’s five parts; for the rest of the novel he is either in court or in prison, which would make for very static cinema. In his screenplay, Welles adds a prologue in which his hero – transformed into Michael ‘Black Irish’ O’Hara and endowed with a line in Irish philosophical whimsicality – picks up a young woman (Elsa Bannister) in a buggy in Central Park at night. After they travel together for a while, Elsa goes off alone and is chased by muggers. Michael rescues her and delivers her back to her car, but refuses her suggestion that he should come and work for her and her husband on their yacht, Circe. The following day, Bannister seeks him at the Seamen’s Hall and, after much alcohol, passes out, obliging O’Hara to take him on board the yacht, where Elsa and others persuade him (against all his instincts) that he should take the job. In the novel, Larry’s recruitment is much simpler. He simply swims up by accident onto Bannister’s beach: the crippled lawyer, impressed by his youth, good looks and ‘such a marvellous physique’, offers him a job as his chauffeur. It is one of several more or less explicitly homoerotic passages in the book (‘I looked at him; he was taking me in, “Man, but you’ve got a build,” he said’) that have no counterpart in the film.

  Needless to say, Welles’s decision to make Michael O’Hara captain of the Bannisters’ yacht opens up the action in many ways. While If I Die is set entirely on Long Island, where the Bannisters live, the Circe is able to travel, and she does – to Acapulco, for a picnic, enabling Welles to introduce the South American flavour he so loved; it also offers all the visual delights of a ship at sea and the fascinations of life on board ship, cabins and decks and steering wheels. In The Lady from Shanghai the Bannisters actually live in San Francisco, the most photogenic of cities, and one that credibly and naturally provides the film’s two huge visual climaxes, one after another: the Chinese Opera and the Crazy House. Welles’s geographical scheme is immensely ambitious, from the New York of the beginning to the jungles and the beaches of Acapulco, and to San Francisco and its exotic amusements, which include an aquarium. In narrative terms, Welles chooses to speed up O’Hara’s arrest – he runs straight from the pretend murder of Grisby into the police’s arms – and all
ows him, by somewhat improbable means, to escape from the courtroom, where he has just been found guilty, into the Chinese Opera, and from there to the Crazy House, which he then walks away from. In If I Die Before I Wake all the main twists of the plot are conveyed to Michael in his cell – the last cliff-hanging sequence actually takes place in the condemned cell, where Bannister taunts him with a detailed description of what will happen when they administer the electrodes before going away. At the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, just before he goes to the electric chair, Elsa breaks into the cell to tell him that Bannister has killed himself, and therefore can never admit that he killed Grisby; but hard on her heels is the kindly detective who has always believed in Larry, who arrests Elsa for all three murders: Grisby, Bannister and the butler Broome. In The Lady from Shanghai Elsa, abandoned by O’Hara, famously dies in the Hall of Mirrors; in the novel she takes her chance with a jury. At the end, Larry (like Welles’s O’Hara) can make no sense of what has happened to him, and withdraws, in his case to Tahiti.