Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Hungry little trouble

  Damned in a bubble

  Yearning to be

  Be or be free

  All that you see

  Is all about me.

  One of the intelligent Negro girls turns into Helen of Troy, who, after a long chunk of Marlowe, becomes his wife in modern times:

  FAUSTUS: You know, there’s some nice operas about me, too. I’m getting famous darling.

  He goes to the club.

  HELEN: I’ll leave the light on in the hall.

  FAUSTUS: Is your love strong enough to save me?

  HELEN: No, I can’t save you. You’d better let out the cat.

  He is unfaithful to her, and begins to devote himself to his inventions.

  FAUSTUS: The god I serve is mine own appetite.

  CHORUS: Don Giovanni Faustus loved the ladies

  Made him a bargain to go down to Hades

  Lived him a life compounded of sin

  Went to perdition but couldn’t get in.

  FAUSTUS: I want to go to the moon.

  A group of curiosity-seekers, ‘such as form in front of a prison before an execution’, arranges itself across the stage. They discuss Faustus and his culpability. One of them has a package that ticks. Helen (Faust’s wife) says that it’s one of his inventions:

  HELEN: He was not evil. Evil is evil things. Hunger is evil and disease. He only wanted time to fight them. He isn’t ready to die . . . he hated death and darkness: is that wicked? He made weapons to use against them – I know, I know, he also made weapons to use against himself . . .

  The chorus then comments, in some rather flat Eliotese:

  CHORUS: In the absence of Heaven as a tragic fact

  We in this terrible century cannot laugh

  At blessedness. It is not to be mocked.

  Heaven’s an old joke with its harps and halos

  But even we must respect the state of grace.

  Faustus shouts out Marlowe’s great desperate cry to the universe: ‘Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven . . . I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!’ At the end, the bell having tolled twelve, and as Helen reprises her odd little ditty ‘Hungry little trouble / Damned in a bubble’, Faustus addresses the audience in Welles’s words:

  I refuse to be insane. I share that common dignity

  I do not claim the sanctuary of the madhouse.

  I hold myself responsible. Do not think

  I stumbled into the pit. I dug it myself.

  Go home now and pray for the damned.

  Pray for the living souls removed

  From the community of life.

  Pray for the free man who damned himself.

  Go in haste for damnation is contagious.

  And the Voice from the beginning leaves us with Marlowe:

  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight

  And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough,

  That sometime grew with this learned man.

  Faustus is gone . . .

  Terminat hora diem, terminat author opus.

  All the lights dim except for one, which focuses on the ticking package we have seen several times already. ‘The theatre is filled with the sound of slow ticking.’ Like many in 1951, and for some time to come, Welles was deeply disturbed by the atom-bomb and its fateful possibilities; but the piece is infused with a more general sense of melancholy, not to say pessimism, which MacLiammóir so acutely perceived: the sense of ‘foreboding and damnation’ that is quite profound with Welles, an underlying apprehension, so precociously present in Bright Lucifer, of a fundamental wrongness, a lurking evil, an Original Sin, perhaps, which dogs so many of his characters – the source of the guilt that Welles always insisted was unassuageable, which had to be acknowledged and faced, not expunged. But Time Runs is too leaky a vessel to contain any real response to this idea. No doubt the stage production created a certain atmosphere: ‘He plays beautifully with light,’ said Le Figaro, ‘a real head-banger for the chief electrician, and he creates a diabolical rhythm which does credit to Welles the stage director, proving himself a rival for any of our stage Titans.’ But it is a poor piece of writing, a reminder that Welles always worked best with existing structures and stories: here he is trying to create something that has the freedom and spontaneity of jazz, and he fails.

  He rapidly lost interest in the show, no doubt discouraged by the poor houses. Francis Koval interviewed him for Sight and Sound one evening: ‘that night the curtain rose twenty minutes late in the Paris theatre where Orson Welles was the main attraction . . . the angry audience, stamping their feet impatiently, fortunately never suspected that my own dinner-table interview with Welles had been the cause of that delay’.27 Around the same time Welles was visited backstage by the noted English journalist and photographer Daniel Farson:

  People drifted in and out. One man announced, ‘I’m the only person I’ve met who likes the first play better than the second.’ ‘That’s the way it is,’ said Welles in the sing-song voice of Kane. ‘Some people enjoy the first play, some the second. No one enjoys them both.’ The man and the two women with him laughed sycophantically, but the mood changed when the man asked how the play was doing. ‘Since Korea, you know, the theatres are half-empty.’ Welles disappeared behind a screen, emerging in his underclothes with a glass of champagne. Another young man came in, examined the bowl of roses and the empty magnum. ‘A pity they’re so faded,’ Welles said of the first, and, ‘A greater pity that the champagne has faded too.’ He flashed a smile and walked out.

  Farson, an acute observer and commentator, describing him (as, inevitably, the French had done) as a monstre sacré, acutely remarked that Welles possessed all the qualities of the breed in abundance: ‘gusto, a strange retention of innocence, and a grand irreverence. And, of course,’ he added, ‘the brilliance.’ Farson wanted to know if Welles ever wanted to return to the United States. ‘After an embarrassing silence, he said, “It seems so blunt to say just ‘no’. Anyhow, not for the moment.”’28 Farson had obviously touched a nerve. And, indeed, the last line of Welles’s curriculum vitae in the theatre programme at the Édouard VII states baldly: ‘1947: He comes to Europe, where he has remained ever since.’

  Welles’s relationship with Eartha Kitt during the run of the show suffered from the presence, first in town and then in the stalls, of her on–off boyfriend, the great Josh White, guitarist, singer, civil-rights activist – a man after Welles’s own heart, with whom he had been associated politically, standing side-by-side with him on many a Popular Front platform, and someone who, like Welles, had been, in the expressive FBI phrase of the time, a ‘Premature anti-Fascist’. Now White was just a rival, so when Welles came to the great scene from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus that begins, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’, he seized Kitt’s face and on the line ‘Make me immortal with a kiss’ sank his teeth into her lower lip so fiercely that it bled. Afterwards she hurled her tiny body at his vast bulk, punching and kicking, but it made no impact. ‘Why did you do it?’ she asked. ‘Oh, I was just in that mood,’ he told her, and walked off. White overheard what had happened, but Welles was already in his chauffeur-driven car and sped off. After that, Kitt refrained from her nightly visits to his dressing room, ‘though I missed the old yell of “Kitt, are you ready?”’29 Welles meanwhile spent his days working on a screenplay about sexual obsession; he called it Lovelife.

  The show closed early at the Édouard VII. Now, dragging his ever-bewildered colleagues from the Gate Theatre with him, Welles suddenly plunged into a six-week tour of Allied-occupied Germany with a new show cobbled together from fragments of The Blessed and the Damned and pretty well anything else he could think of on the spur of the moment. The primary objective was, of course, to make money, but there was another reason: Welles’s political self, largely dormant during his
Italian sojourn, had suddenly reawoken and he enthusiastically accepted an offer from France Dimanche to write a series of articles on the situation in post-war Germany. This would be a return to the glory days of his syndicated column for the New York Post, sending despatches from South America and the lynching belt of the United States, and he took it very seriously indeed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Citizen Coon

  MACLIAMMÓIR, HIS sulk over, now joined them. The show they took with them to Germany in August 1950 was a sort of buffet of dramatic titbits devised by Hilton Edwards: very sensibly, The Unthinking Lobster had been dropped altogether and Time Runs substantially cut and rearranged for three actors and a small chorus, drawn from the young American actors in The Blessed and the Damned, who also doubled as stage management and wardrobe assistants. George Fanto, fresh from filming Othello, joined them as ‘factotum, collector, disburser, paymaster, interpreter, agent’, as well as designing the lighting for the show – an ambitious forty-eight lighting cues in all. In what MacLiammóir called the ‘mixed salad’ that followed, he and Welles and one of the kids performed a surreally compressed version of The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Welles got the chance to play Lady Bracknell, or at least to speak the best of her lines in the mouth of Algernon Moncrieff; MacLiammóir played Jack Worthing, and young Lee Zimmer played both of the butlers. This was followed by the death of King Henry VI (MacLiammóir) from Part Three of the play of the same name, with Welles as the murderous Richard of Gloucester, a part he had last played at the age of fifteen, in Winter of Discontent, his own adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. For the tour, he wore, said MacLiammóir, ‘the largest Hump ever seen outside the deserts of Arabia or the Zoo’. Eartha Kitt sang sultry songs from Time Runs, with Welles doing soliloquies from Marlowe’s play, after which he performed magic tricks, introduced by MacLiammóir in German.

  The show was billed as An Evening with Orson Welles. It all sounds rather entertaining, an old-time Variety Bill, with Classical Recitations and Conjuring; it cannot often have happened, however, that the two were performed by the same man. First stop was Frankfurt, where a cocktail party was thrown for them in the gardens of the American Club. The poster, it seems, claimed that they would be performing Goethe’s Faust. Welles cleared up the confusion that had been caused. ‘No, not Goethe,’ said Welles, ‘just me’ – though that of course was not strictly true, either. The news hadn’t reached all of the audience that night: expecting Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, they were deeply bewildered by Eartha Kitt’s bluesy asides; nonetheless, the show played to good houses in a post-war Germany starved of contact with English-speaking culture.

  The minds of the principal performers were not entirely focused on the show, however. MacLiammóir, who had known Germany well before the war – had, indeed, with Edwards, brought back to Ireland news of the exciting developments in modern German theatre – viewed the current state of the country with apprehensive melancholy, fearing and assuming a lurch towards communism. Welles was keenly observing the scene too, and what he saw was quite the opposite. He saw – everywhere, it seemed to him – clear signs that Nazism, far from having been extirpated, was renascent. He and MacLiammóir and Fanto paid a rather moody visit to Hitler’s holiday hideaway at Berchtesgaden: ‘all is bright, shining, clean, picturesque and quaint,’ wrote MacLiammóir in Each Actor on His Ass. ‘It’s absolute Hell.’

  After Frankfurt, they played a profitable week in Hamburg, then moved on to Munich. Here Welles had been invited by Neo-Film Productions GmbH to produce a German film in Germany: ‘such a decision of yours’, they wrote to him, ‘would contribute more to an international understanding as it may be possible by many a politician or statesman’.1 Welles replied that only by shooting something would he be able to determine how well equipped the studios were, and so, to MacLiammóir’s mystification – ‘Orson suddenly smitten with barking decision to make short films of Importance and Henry and Gloucester’ – they were swept away after the show one night to the enormous Geisengeige Studios just outside the city and shot until dawn.

  ‘O. seemed happy about it and was, as always, at the top of his form when there are cameras about,’ wrote MacLiammóir, ‘especially in small hours of morning.’ But Welles found the facilities inadequate, so not only did he declare the short films to have been a waste of time, but he also declined the offer of making the proposed German film, which might have opened up all sorts of remarkable possibilities for him, both creative and financial. Welles’s increasing dismay at what he saw – or thought he saw – all around him in Germany had confirmed his dislike of the country. This feeling was by no means mitigated by his being besieged wherever he went by people who, spotting his unmistakable outline – Harry Lime being at least physically indistinguishable from Orson Welles – shouted, ‘Der Dritte Mann! Der Dritte Mann!’ at him. ‘O. gave them the famous Welles stare, which is something between that of a dying bull and a voodoo mask,’ observed MacLiammóir, ‘and said in firm and unfaltering English that nothing on earth was more nauseating to his soul than to be called The Third Man, and that the next lady who did so would unhesitatingly be put to death.’2 Even more vexing was the propensity of café bands to strike up Anton Karas’s maddeningly catchy little ‘Harry Lime Theme’ the moment Welles entered the place. ‘Graham Greene created him,’ said the American advertising campaign for The Third Man, ‘Carol Reed brought him to life . . . Alida Valli sought him . . . and Karas’s music followed him wherever he went.’ How right they were.

  An Evening with Orson Welles played half a week each in Düsseldorf and Bad Oeynhausen, the headquarters of the occupying British Army of the Rhine; finally, in early September, they arrived in Berlin, where Welles addressed a room full of German journalists, theatre and film critics – ‘the cream of Berlin’s “Chelsea Set”’, according to the Daily Telegraph. Welles refused to rise to the critical bait, preferring to make jokes, which only succeeded in baffling his earnest interviewers. ‘What is wrong with this country anyway?’ he asked. ‘They haven’t made a decent film since the war.’ ‘Are you planning to go to Hollywood, Mr Welles?’ ‘No, nor am I planning to die. But both are inevitable – and about as attractive.’ ‘What is wrong with the film industry as a whole?’ ‘It’s becoming increasingly nationalistic, more divided and less forceful. In Germany there is only slavish imitation of Hollywood.’ An American journalist asked, ‘You don’t like Hollywood, do you?’ ‘Did I say that? I like Europe and I’ve a lot more to learn here.’ ‘What do you think of yourself, Herr Welles?’ ‘That’s none of your business.’ ‘Have you a message for us?’ ‘Message? Who? Me?’3

  He certainly had a message for the readers of France Dimanche. His articles had been coming out at regular intervals during the tour and had caused quite a stir, which is exactly what they were intended to do. The following year he condensed the articles into a piece for the distinguished London magazine The Fortnightly Review, and in this form (under the title ‘Thoughts on Germany’) they constitute one of the most remarkable examples of Welles’s polemical writing, very much in the manner of his pieces from the mid-1940s in the New York Post and, later on radio, in the form of Orson Welles’s Commentaries. His starting point was the possible rearmament of Germany, and his analysis probing, if a little overheated:

  I was beginning to realise how times have changed. The Germans themselves have changed from a problem to a hope. Most of the other people who were saying that Europe must be saved from a strong Germany were saying that only a strong Germany can save Europe . . . we are preparing to encourage the Germans to fight (or at least impress the Russians). That makes sense. But to encourage fascism is something else. We now find ourselves faced with spending a great deal more than before to keep Germany – the part we are responsible for – from going communist. We came to make Germany free of Hitlerism; we’re staying to keep it free of Stalinism.4

  This was touc
hy territory, as he well knew. The idea that the victorious Allies were ‘encouraging Fascism’ was, in 1950, fiercely provocative, but provocation, as we have seen, was Welles’s key modus operandi.

  He begins his essay, as he often did in his New York Post columns, by way of an encounter with a powerful man, in this case the celebrated armaments manufacturer Fritz Mandl, then visiting from Buenos Aires, where he had been supplying munitions to the Argentinian dictator, Juan Perón. Welles happened to be sitting near him in a bar. The portrait he paints of Mandl is of a piece with the gallery of corrupt men-of-power central to so many of his films: Kane, Bannister, Arkadin, Quinlan, Clay.

  The eyes in the sharply-drawn, solid-looking head, are set in a questing expression. They are the eyes of a shrewd hunter, but you surprise in them a curious pallid emptiness – a dead spot. It as though the centre of a target were painted white, or like the vacuum in the heart of a tornado. It makes him look dangerous.

  Mandl, who was being fawned over by a group of bankers, was brooding out loud over the Third World War:

  Brooding is the word, not gloating. Zaharoff used to gloat. But then there were different wars and he never expected the Red Russians to win any of them. Mandl says they’re bound to win this next one.

  Welles had long been fascinated by Sir Basil Zaharoff, the so-called ‘Merchant of Death’, the famous arms dealer and arts philanthropist of obscure Greek origin, who had made millions out of the First World War. Mandl was a more thuggish variation on the same theme; both of them contributed something to Welles’s character Gregory Arkadin. Mandl was one of the most sinister figures of the Western Hemisphere, according to Ralph Bellamy in the Reader’s Digest: ‘Menace Number One to the peace of the Hemisphere . . . weapons of destruction fascinate [Mandl]’, sending him, Bellamy reports, into raptures over some new land mines ‘which tear off the feet of advancing soldiers’. Much of this, which Welles appears to have swallowed hook, line and sinker, was FBI propaganda. But sensational reports of Mandl’s social life were true enough – he was a compulsive womaniser, party-thrower and later alcoholic wife-beater, with connections at the very highest level. He had, famously, been married to Hedy Lamarr, star of the film Ecstasy, but she had run away from him. Much of this, too, fed into Welles’s film Mr Arkadin. In his ‘Thoughts on Germany’ Welles allows himself a moment’s contact with ‘the dead-eyed man’: Mandl’s cigar had gone out and Welles lit it for him. ‘He thanked me and we smiled at one another. After all, why not? We’ve got something in common; we’ve both been married in our time to movie stars.’ All of Welles’s mingled repulsion and attraction to power is to be found in that moment.