Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  ‘How dare you interrupt me,’ Welles said imperiously, ‘while I’m talking to the director? Your pictures aren’t worth looking at, anyhow. You attach too much importance to them, as though they were works of art. Well, there’s no art to taking snapshots. Anybody can do it. All you need is a camera, and if you take enough pictures one of them is liable to turn out all right by sheer chance. Now leave us alone,’ and he dismissed him with a wave of his hand. ‘Good God, Orson,’ I said, ‘you treated that poor guy as though you were royalty.’ ‘I am royalty!’ replied Welles.8

  And of course he was; but, as Fleischer did not fail to point out, royalty in exile, royalty dispossessed: his regal outbursts were impotent, his victims unworthy of him.

  Welles’s social life was pretty rackety, slightly on the fringes of the beau monde. He began to create his own circle, among them a Pole named Michał Waszyñski (or Michael Washinsky as he was more commonly known), whom Welles had met on Black Magic, where he performed the much-needed function of interpreter. Washinsky was exactly the sort of person with whom Welles liked to surround himself: born in a Polish shtetl, as a young man he moved to Berlin and became assistant to the director of Nosferatu, the great F.W. Murnau, returning to Poland where he soon became the most prolific Polish film director of his time, shooting, it was said, one in every four films made in that country. Among them was The Dybbuk, the greatest of all Yiddish films. After the invasion of Poland, Washinsky escaped to Białystok, where he directed in the theatre, highly successfully; as soon as the Polish army was formed, he joined it, taking part in the Battle of Cassino, which he filmed for the army. At the end of the war he stayed in Italy, where he directed three films, after which he joined the mayhem on Black Magic, as an interpreter. And he and Welles instantly became bosom pals, both highly inventive fabulists, mirror images of each other, according to Washinsky’s biographer: deep down, Welles longed to be a Jew from central Europe, a wandering artist with a mysterious past, while Washinsky had reinvented himself as a Catholic nobleman, universally known as The Prince and fraternally embraced as such by aristocrats. Washinsky knew everyone and could get hold of anything, and seems to have made it his business to make life very comfortable for Welles, one way and another.9

  Welles meanwhile had acquired the unhelpful reputation in Rome of being a jinxed person – iettatore. During the filming of Black Magic the Zoppé Circus, a troupe of pyrotechnically brilliant acrobats, had pitched their tent outside the Scalera Studios, and Welles, bored with usurping Ratoff, felt irresistibly impelled to make a film of them, so he prevailed upon the production manager to set up a little shoot for him. During filming an accident occurred: while one of the Zoppé girls was flying on the trapeze, a rope broke and she fell in the middle of the track. The press reported it as an example of the sort of chaos Welles brought with him – somewhat unfairly, since, as he pointed out, she survived unharmed. This little impromptu shoot is an example of what was to become an ever more crucial part of Welles’s modus operandi, one which, since Brazil, he had had little chance of practising: using the camera as a sketchpad, catching the fleeting moment, following his impulse, wherever it might take him. He claimed that Korda had asked him to make a film set in a circus, and that this Zoppé sequence would fit into it, somehow, somewhere. And who knows? It might well have done. More importantly, it kept Welles’s directorial hand in, however briefly.

  His projects for Korda having by this point all slipped away, he was actively looking for ways of getting Othello off the ground. Despite Macbeth’s continuing ill-favour, he was still interested in the idea of filming specially mounted stage productions, so he responded warmly to a suggestion from Bob Breen of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), which had produced his Macbeth on stage, that he might like to do something with them for the second Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama, in August 1948.10 This seemed an ideal way to make the film, at much-reduced costs: $718,580 for the film, they reckoned, plus $64,000 for the play. In Hollywood it could not have been filmed for less than $2.5 million. They tried to involve Korda, who, under the terms of his contract with Welles, was already underwriting his living expenses in Italy to the tune of 3 million lire, but Korda declined, sceptical of the quality of what they would achieve for the money. Welles and Wilson forged ahead, nonetheless. On 1 March 1948 Welles was announced to play in Othello from 23 August to 4 September, performing at the city’s oldest and most beautiful theatre, the Royal Lyceum; the Old Vic Company had graciously withdrawn its offering to allow Welles’s production to take place. ‘ORSON WELLES WILL BE FESTIVAL STAR,’ rejoiced the Scotsman in a banner headline. ‘His Othello will be eagerly awaited.’ ‘This year’s Festival more than ever deserves the title International,’ said the Glasgow Daily Record, ‘with the inclusion of an American company in Othello with Orson Welles in the title role.’ His career up to that point was excitedly recapitulated by local journalists; possible problems about paying for the visit were publicly agonised over, since Scotland had no dollars with which to pay the bills.

  They need not have worried. Just ten weeks later the visit was making headlines again: ‘FESTIVAL BLOW ORSON WELLES NOT COMING TO EDINBURGH’.11 Welles and Wilson had decided they had too much on their plates to go straight from a theatre show into film production; fictitious difficulties over the building of the non-existent set were proffered as reasons for the withdrawal of the production, and not entirely believed. The City Fathers were far from pleased; they had already sold 61 per cent of the tickets. Edinburgh had to console itself with the transfer of a sell-out Broadway production of Medea: directed by John Gielgud, it starred the Scottish actress Eileen Herlie, which was not without a certain irony for Welles, since it was his determination to cast her in the proposed film of Salome that had caused his fallout with Korda and the demise of the project. The cancellation of the Edinburgh Othello also spelt the end of Welles’s uneasy association with ANTA. If he was going to have anything to do with an American National Theater – and he never entirely stopped dreaming about it – it would be on his own terms, and it would have nothing to do with what he considered the sort of worthiness embodied by ANTA.

  In truth, putting Othello on stage was never a high priority for Welles; it was always Othello the movie that interested him. He was now newly focused on the film because he had fallen overwhelmingly in love with a brilliant twenty-eight-year-old Italian actress called Lea Padovani, and he was determined that she would play Desdemona to his Othello. Striking rather than conventionally beautiful and somewhat on the short side, Padovani had had a huge success on stage in Rome with Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, and Welles had immediately been besotted by her. He courted her unrelentingly, appearing every night at the stage door. But she was impervious to his blandishments. The more she refused him, the greater his conviction that his life was meaningless until he had conquered her. For a self-confessed Don Juan, for whom the chase was all – mere possession an anticlimax – this tactic of Padovani’s was triumphantly successful; Welles remained besotted for a full year, humiliating himself ever more deeply. He told his friend Alessandro Tasca that he had always known that one day something of the sort would happen to him, ‘but I never thought it would happen when I was young’.12 ‘For him,’ Padovani said years later, ‘love was a delirium. He followed me everywhere, sat in his car under my window just to see me for a few moments.’ This, it appears, was an entirely new experience for Welles.13 ‘Up till now,’ he told his biographer, Barbara Leaming, ‘I’d only ever thought of women as pleasure, like a glass of wine when you’re thirsty, or a dish when you’re hungry.’

  Padovani broke off her engagement to a young Italian actor, and she and Welles flew to Venice to announce their engagement, stage-managed by the veteran socialite Elsa Maxwell: ‘BOY WONDER AND CREATOR OF MARS INVASION TO MARRY UNKNOWN ACTRESS,’ said the headline. Despite these public avowals, their relationship was unconsummated. It was nothing but turbulent, made worse, Wel
les believed, by their having no language in common. He went back to the United States for a month, partly out of frustration; on his return to Europe he spent a few days with Rita Hayworth, first in Cannes, then at Cap d’Antibes, during which, according to Welles, she begged him to resume their relationship. But Welles only had eyes for Padovani and, when he got back to Rome, he announced that he would be filming Othello with her as Desdemona; he would finance the film himself, he said. He wrote to Roger Hill back at the Todd School for any reels of film he could spare, black-and-white. And then he moved out of the Excelsior Hotel into a splendid mansion, the Casal Pilozzo in Frascati, just outside Rome, with the still-unconquered Padovani and her immediate family.

  Cagliostro could scarcely have done better for himself. The mansion had but recently belonged to the former Fascist minister Giuseppe Bottai, who had built it on land on which the residence of the sister and nephew of the Emperor Trajan had stood. In the subsoil under the house were ancient cellars extending outwards for over a hundred yards; in their depths was an altar, with a tabernacle carved out of tufa soil. There Welles created his establishment, with Rita the secretary, Angelo the driver, Enrico the major-domo, and Enrico’s wife, Emilia, the cook. Harriet White Medin, hired to give English lessons to Padovani, was a regular visitor to the household and reported something like a reign of terror. ‘When he [Welles] bellowed his stomach would swell and his eyes would go up on the sides like a Chinese! Enrico, Emilia, Rita – everybody was going around with shaking knees because of Orson.’14 He had a penchant for creating madcap establishments of this sort – the first house he had in Los Angeles at the start of his contract with RKO was equally colourful. When he went away, which he often did, the household, which fluctuated in size according to whom Welles had invited, lived en prince.

  Among his guests left alone in the villa that summer of 1948 was Ernest Borneman, whom Welles had bumped into one foggy day by the Seine, and from whom he now commissioned a film treatment about Ulysses, a figure with whom the exiled, dispossessed Welles might have felt he had something in common. He had something in common with Borneman, too: the writer was the perfect paradigm of the sort of person with whom he liked to surround himself: polyglot, multidisciplinary, globe-trotting, people who had lived rich, complex, surprising, contradictory lives, but (unlike Welles) had not been widely recognised for it. Borneman was, inter alia, a crime-writer, film-maker, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, jazz musician, jazz critic, psychoanalyst, sexologist and committed socialist. Welles’s exact contemporary, he had been brought up in Berlin; as a lad he worked in Wilhelm Reich’s sex clinics as well as with a world-famous ethnomusicologist; at seventeen, he escaped from the country posing as a member of the Hitler Youth (though he was in fact a member of the Communist Party) and went to England where, although he arrived speaking no word of English, he was soon making his living as a journalist. In 1937 Borneman wrote one of the great classics of detective fiction, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, following it up with an Encyclopaedia of Jazz. Deported to Canada during the war, he went back to London afterwards to work for the BBC, which is when he met Welles and was inevitably recruited to his entourage. Leaving his well-paid job working for UNESCO, Borneman accepted Welles’s generous offer of $1,000 a week to work on Ulysses and duly appeared at the Casal Pilozzo with his wife, where he spent some time writing prolifically and happily enjoying the hospitality. There being no sign of any actual payment, he eventually sent Welles a telegram: ‘WHAT CAN MY WIFE AND I DO TO MAKE ENDS MEET?’ To this Welles replied with exquisite nonchalance: ‘DEAR ERNEST LIVE SIMPLY AFFECTIONATE REGARDS ORSON WELLES.’

  Such was life at the Casal Pilozzo under the reign of the Emperor Welles. When he was in residence, a critical figure in his entourage was the secretary. His favoured mode of letter-writing was rapid dictation; in addition he required someone to organise him. The burn-out rate of his secretaries was alarming: the speed of Welles’s thinking, the rapidity of his changes of plan, the general chaos of his affairs – added to the rages, abuse, raillery, sarcasm and overall outrageousness of his conduct towards them – meant that few could stand the pace. Over the years a small number of remarkable women managed to stay the course. In May of 1948 Rita Ribolla, a young Viennese woman formerly married to an Italian, was handed the poisoned chalice. A remarkable linguist and currently assistant to the director of an important government agency, she suddenly found herself at the centre of Welles’s operations, and since the personal and the professional were inseparable with him, that meant she was at the centre of his life. Sharp-eyed and sophisticated, she kept notes on her time with him, which give a startlingly vivid impression of what the thirty-three-year-old boy wonder was like, close up. He started as he meant to go on, when she first reported for duty at the Casal Pilozzo:

  At the far end of the terrace placed precisely in the centre between two enormous potted palms was a chaise longue. On it The Genius was reclining, draped in a flowing black robe, gazing into the setting sun. The butler theatrically announced me, he continued to gaze, I just stood there clutching the insignia of my trade. Finally the great man awoke out of his trance, turned to stare at us as if we were a mirage – then realisation must have dawned: through the orange and pink atmosphere came his voice – ‘Dear Jonathan, you are missing the loveliest view, delicious food, good wines and my stimulating company, come at once.’ Thus spake Zarathustra and turned back to the sunset. The butler had left and I stood there in the middle of nowhere and tried to think of a quotation which started with dear Jonathan and referred to view and food, then I noticed that my boss was trying to pierce me with his eyes. ‘Your memory must be extraordinary’ he said. ‘Not at all, I’m afraid.’ ‘Then why don’t you write down what I dictate?’ So that’s what the dear Jonathan was about: the beginning of a script, no doubt. But I was wrong, it turned out to be a cable ‘What Jonathan, please?’ ‘What d’you mean by what Jonathan?’ ‘Well, he can’t just be called Jonathan’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because people usually have a last name. What’s this gentleman’s surname?’ ‘My God, don’t you even know that?’ ‘How should I?’ ‘What kind of a secretary are you?’ ‘A new one.’ ‘Oh I see . . . it’s Jonathan Seigneur.’ I blushed, Seigneur was my secret screen idol and I’d never dreamt I could get so close to him. ‘And his address?’ ‘Don’t you even know that?’ ‘No.’ ‘Look it up in my address book.’ So I looked for the butler (not far, he was hiding behind the drapes of the French window and listening) and he in turn looked for the book and there I found the address and he went to resume his stand on the terrace. ‘Why haven’t you gone yet, I want it dispatched immediately.’ ‘May I please have some money to do it?’ ‘Money???’15

  Welles took Rita out for lunch the next day:

  He led me into the restaurant as if I were a precious porcelain figure, fussed over me like a passionate lover, managed to get the full attention of all waiters, ordered a meal which would have sufficed for a dozen hungry people and started out telling me some wonderful anecdotes. After the first course he changed to conjuring tricks. He oozed charm, ate an incredible amount of food, drank one glass of wine after the other. A one-time performance which held everyone (topped by me) spellbound. Hungry as I was, I could scarcely eat – just listen and laugh and wonder and be confused. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, after we’d finished our coffee. I smiled and nodded affirmatively. We sat and looked expectantly at each other. Was he not going to ask for the check? ‘Shall I ask for the check?’ I timidly inquired. ‘Of course.’ Check was placed before him. He shoved it over to me. Waiter tactfully turned away. Stared at check in utter embarrassment. ‘Something wrong?’ Then he leaned over and whispered ‘please leave a large tip for these nice waiters.’ Managed to control my voice and told him I had by far not enough money with me. Furiously he asked how I dared go out with him with not enough money. Explained that I had not expected to take him out, especially not for a meal of that kind. But he had by then stomped out. Waiter was a darlin
g and said I shouldn’t cry: they knew the Signore well, men like he were too involved with creating to be bothered by such minor matters as paying which was well understood by il Padrone who was very proud and pleased to have him patronise the restaurant and was sure he’d get his money one day, anyhow. Wiped off the blue mascara running down my red face, grabbed my purse and made a fast exit. Went home and straight to bed. The only place to hide in my misery.16

  And so it went on for three years, in a constant oscillation between delight and torment, between accusation and denial, sackings and resignations, affection and exasperation. Fascinated and appalled, Rita summed him up in a series of paradoxes: ‘He calls himself a plain, simple man, but is the ne plus ultra of eccentricity. A complete extrovert, he refers to himself as being primarily a thinker. He can run the entire gamut of moods and feelings in a matter of minutes. He expects to be understood without explaining, to receive without asking. But he is more of a giver than a taker. Time, money, distances mean nothing to him He does not accept no for a no, impossible for a fact.’17 It was a relationship that Welles seems to have needed. Throughout his life, certain people – normally assistants, stage managers, press officers – were appointed to the position of sparring partner or, in extreme cases, whipping boy or girl. Sometimes they fought back. There is something of Lear’s relationship to his fool about it: the king can behave foolishly, and the fool can assume regality. Welles dubbed Rita ‘Miss Mud’ or ‘Miss Glum’ and endlessly berated her for pretty well anything that happened, whether she was in any way involved with it or not. In these situations, Welles – at his best, brilliant, sophisticated, original, courageous – behaved like a monstrous adolescent or, more accurately, like a monstrous baby. And yet it was not mere caprice: there seems to have been some purpose behind all the posturing. It was a sort of test or challenge. How much would people put up with? What could he get away with? The bitch boy Eldred from Bright Lucifer, the spooky play the sixteen-year-old Welles wrote as some kind of self-exorcism, is somewhere there, lurking behind the civilised exterior, mocking, destroying.