by Simon Callow
By late November of 1950 Welles was confident enough in what he was doing with Othello to call a press conference – ‘in fluent and picturesque Italian’, according to Corriere della Sera9 – to announce the film. It was, he said, ‘another Shakespeare, this time closer to the time and spirit of the play. Perhaps Othello will be less Shakespearean than Macbeth, but it will be more Elizabethan,’ adding, in a sly autobiographical joke about his own experience in Italy, that it described ‘the conflict of a brutal, instinctive foreigner and Venetian power and culture’. He took pains not to be overweening. ‘I don’t know if I have got it right this time either. Or even if there is a right way. I don’t make films, I carry out experiments. Everything I do is experimental.’ This particular experiment, he said, would be released in June 1951; shooting for his next film, Ulysses, would commence shortly. This was a standard ploy of Welles’s: he never announced a finished project without announcing at least one more to follow it.
In fact Othello was far from finished. Never mind the editing, there was yet more shooting to do. In December 1950, Fay Compton, defying a sceptical agent and paying her own way, got herself to Venice, as requested. To her amazement, she was put up at the five-star Bauer Grünwald Hotel. Welles gave her a terrific greeting. ‘Impression I get’, she wrote in her diary, ‘is that Orson more inconsiderate than before – keeping up till all hours to shoot his own close-ups and everyone being on call at all hours all the time. But as usual extremely nice and most considerate to me.’ Her agent – the very powerful Al Parker – had sent him several cables and letters that were, she felt, unnecessarily rude, though ‘O takes it very well.’ On several nights she went to the studio to dub her part; one night she read the part of Iago off camera for Welles. The equipment was so poor that they could only dub when they were not shooting on one of the two stages. ‘Suzanne and I trying to remember what we did 14 months ago,’ she wrote. ‘Following day sound has been traced and sorted. Mistakes such as Willow Song in Cyprus scene!! Do song all over again. Hope with success.’
The reason for these blunders was that Welles’s American editor, Lou Lindsay, with whom he had worked on Macbeth, had now gone, and the new cutter was reaching the end of his tether – was, as Compton put it, ‘obviously going mad!’ The vast cache of three years’ intermittent filming was in a state of complete disorder; only Welles knew what he needed. Sometimes they were simply unable to find what they had shot. One afternoon Welles suddenly asked for a repeated shot of Emilia. ‘So make up and dress once more.’10 Finally, as a preparation for his dubbing of Cloutier, he asked Compton to make a tape of the part of Desdemona, which she did the day she left, 14 December. To her astonishment, before she went, she was paid in full, including the return fare that she had paid out of her own pocket. A couple of days later everyone else went home for Christmas – the third Christmas of shooting.
At the beginning of 1951, Welles was working full-time on cutting the film: a rabid dog had bitten him, which confined him to Italy, curtailing the habitual multiplicity of his activities. He had been editing Othello intermittently from the beginning of shooting, with an international assortment of editors, among them the Frenchman Jean Sacha, the Italian Renzo Lucidi and the Hungarian Jenõ Csepreghy, otherwise known as John Shepridge; in Venice in December 1950, as Fay Compton tells us, he had been working with the American Lou Lindsay. Apart from the vast quantity of disparate material that he had to organise into coherent and expressive form, he was faced with the problem of half a dozen different emulsions of the film itself, none of which matched: he had got stock from wherever he could, especially at the beginning of the shoot. The sound was an almost total write-off; Cunningham’s magnetic tape, still in its infancy, proved almost entirely unusable. A massive programme of dubbing was now unavoidable, a dreary prospect in many ways, but with the redeeming possibility of improving or changing performances. Actors were yanked in from all over the world to redo their dialogue; when they couldn’t come or when Welles thought their work could be improved upon, he did it himself; thus Bob Coote, who had so irritated Welles with his typically English negativity about everything, is unmistakably voiced by his director, with the result that the character Roderigo becomes even more of a puppet than usual.
From the moment Welles shot his first professional film – as part of his 1938 Mercury Theatre production of Too Much Johnson – he had been intoxicated with the infinite possibilities of editing. Although desperately keen to get Othello into circulation, he rejoiced in the new freedom he had created for himself: no producer breathing down his neck, no studio apparatchik reporting back on him, no hidebound editor trying to impose rules on him. He had a taste of this on the final version of Macbeth. Now he was absolutely in charge, for the first time. And because of the astonishing amount of material they had shot, he had plenty with which to follow his inspiration; he was free to fine-tune it in a way he had not been able to do since Kane. In the process he became aware of what he felt was still missing, and he wanted to change his approach to certain things, particularly regarding the part of Desdemona. So back to Mogador they went in April 1951, just Welles and Cloutier and a camera crew of one: George Fanto. ‘Suzanne coped well with the harsh realities of the Spartan military outpost,’ Fanto wrote in his memoir. ‘Without fuss she acted in love scenes with Welles/Othello in parts of the decaying fortress of Mogador which was used as latrine by the natives. Cloutier deserved much credit for us being able to finish her sequences in five weeks within the allotted budget.’ On the last day of Othello she told David Robinson, ‘I had to be script, make-up, messenger; Fanto producer and business manager.’ Eventually, it was done. ‘I shall never forget Orson’s face when we did the last shot, and it was the end at last,’ said Cloutier. ‘We all cried.’11
Back to the editing suite in Rome, where he worked with Renzo Lucidi. ‘There is always a better way’ was Welles’s endlessly repeated mantra, as they picked and unpicked sequences – always, it seemed to Lucidi, ending up with their first ideas. On and on they toiled, to the point where, by the end of the summer, they felt it was ready for submission to that year’s Venice Film Festival; on the strength of the film having been accepted, Orson Welles Productions, a new outfit conjured into being by the endlessly versatile Fanto, did a deal with Loew’s International Corporation for the remaining 50 per cent of US and Commonwealth rights. Welles said he needed 100 million lire to complete the movie, which was a little alarming since the deal was signed on 24 August and the film was due to be shown in Venice on 1 September.
CHAPTER FIVE
Man of Mystery
WHILE THE negotiations over the distribution rights for the film of Othello were taking place, Welles was in London, where he had been engaged by Laurence Olivier Productions (LOP) to direct and act in a production of Othello the play, to be presented at the magnificent St James Theatre, where Olivier and his then-wife Vivien Leigh were triumphantly ensconced in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in repertory with Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Olivier’s invitation was perhaps a little surprising. ‘You’re going to play Othello?’ an incredulous John Gielgud said to Welles, bumping into him at a party. ‘In London? On stage?’
Welles was scarcely a Shakespearean novice, of course. All of theatrical London knew about the Fascist Julius Caesar of 1937, which had hit the front pages of the world’s newspapers and which the great British impresario C.B. Cochran had unsuccessfully tried to bring to the Royal Albert Hall just before the war. No, what was really surprising about the invitation was that Welles’s Macbeth had recently opened in England to villainously bad reviews, which had invariably contrasted it unfavourably with Olivier’s Hamlet, and Welles, as we have seen, had taken this very badly. The two men had known each other since the late 1930s, when they had appeared together on radio under Welles’s direction in a very jolly version of P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste as part of the Campbell Playhouse season of adaptations, but since then Welles’s standing in the world had been
steadily slipping, while Olivier’s rose inexorably. He had become a major film star with Rebecca and Wuthering Heights, returning to England in the early years of the war, where, in collaboration with Ralph Richardson, he had turned the Old Vic into the forum of the nation, earning himself the title of the world’s greatest classical actor, and a knighthood.
This was the man who now invited Welles to perform one of the most daunting roles in the Shakespearean canon. The deal had been brokered by Sandor Gorlinsky, the theatrical agent, who having seen The Blessed and the Damned in Paris the year before had clearly not rated its chances in London, but wanted to do something with Welles: Othello must have seemed like an obvious choice. There was great interest in London in the film’s progress, into which British actors like Robert Coote and Fay Compton had disappeared for long periods, coming back with hair-raising stories of madness and mayhem; and in April 1951, while Welles and Suzanne Cloutier were shooting the very last shots of the film in Mogador, Picture Post had featured the film on its cover, with a splendid, lavishly illustrated four-page spread inside, in which it was revealed that the film might not be seen ‘for some months’ (five years, as it turned out).1 Othello was, said the Post, more ambitious than Macbeth. ‘It is the first film since Citizen Kane that Welles has made as he wanted to, free from the dictates of Hollywood policy. Though it was made economically, he had to fight hard to get the money. It is an indication of his faith in it that he contributed to the budget himself from salaries earned acting in other films.’ This unaccustomedly warm and enthusiastic piece was accompanied by superb photographs, further whetting the appetite of the British public for the already legendary, though as yet unseen, film.
Welles made his first appearance on the British stage in June 1951, at the London Palladium not in blank verse but on a variety bill, in a tribute to the late great comedian Sid Field, in the congenial company of the Crazy Gang, Judy Garland (an old girlfriend of Welles’s), Danny Kaye, Peter Ustinov (now married to Suzanne Cloutier), his new boss, Laurence Olivier, and, in drag, Richard Attenborough, Jack Buchanan and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Welles’s contribution was to saw Elizabeth Taylor in half. A few days after the gala came the widely reported announcement that ‘Sir Laurence Olivier will present Third Man star Orson Welles in Othello’. There was rivalry between this production and the Old Vic’s forthcoming version of the play. Theatre World humorously invited Welles to withdraw in favour of the Old Vic, quipping that ‘two blacks don’t make a white’. It was not the first racist gag that would be bandied about on the subject of the play. ‘Meanwhile,’ burbled Theatre World, ‘we are curious to see the film he has made of it. We have recovered sufficiently from his film of Macbeth to stand it.’
He was suddenly everywhere in England: the radio series The Adventures of Harry Lime, with Welles in the title-role and directing, was about to start transmission with huge success on the BBC. In the pre-credit sequence, Karas’s familiar little zither tune clattered away until a gunshot rang out. Those who knew how much Welles detested the tune might have surmised that he had killed Karas, but no: ‘That was the shot that killed Harry Lime,’ Welles would say. ‘He died in a sewer beneath Vienna, as those of you know who saw the movie The Third Man. Yes, that was the end of Harry Lime . . . but it was not the beginning. Harry Lime had many lives . . . and I can recount all of them. How do I know? Very simple. Because my name is Harry Lime.’
Welles had been persuaded to revive the character with whom his name was now so annoyingly synonymous by an extremely sharp operator called Harry Alan Towers, another of those shady figures to whom Welles was ineluctably drawn, and who were ineluctably drawn to him. Ten years after their collaboration, Towers was arrested, charged with operating a vice-ring at a New York hotel; his girlfriend, in her statement to the FBI, claimed that Towers was a Soviet agent responsible for providing compromising information on individuals for the benefit of the USSR. Later he was linked with a vice-ring at the United Nations; for some years he produced soft-porn films. That was a little way in the future. At this earlier, less steamy point in his career, Towers – through his irresistibly named company, Towers of London – had cannily bought the rights to the character of Harry Lime from Graham Greene, and offered Welles a great deal of money to appear in and direct a series of fifty-two episodes recounting Harry’s early escapades.
At no point did Welles think of The Adventures of Harry Lime as anything other than a way of making a quick buck, though his performance is effortlessly charismatic: he remained an incomparable radio actor, engaging, witty, suggestive, with an extraordinary gift of creating instant intimacy with the listener. He usually wrote the introductory sequences himself. This Harry – affable, worldly-wise, wry, of course – is a much less hard-edged one than Greene’s. The scripts were the work of a team of writers that included Welles’s screenwriter for the long-since-abandoned Ulysses, Ernest Borneman, who had the rare distinction of having finally received all the money Welles owed him. Welles expended very little time and thought on the series, but some episodes interested him more than others and he would tinker with them; in some cases, they acquired lives of their own. One, ‘The Dead Candidate’, he turned into a screenplay called VIP, which he unsuccessfully tried to sell to Korda; his Paris friend Maurice Bessy later novelised it under the name Une Grosse Légume. Another, ‘Greek Meets Greek’, was one of the sources for Welles’s film Mr Arkadin. Another fifteen were turned into short stories, three of which bear Welles’s name, though it is unclear whether he actually wrote them.
He recorded several shows a day, sometimes as many as ten, urging on his little company of actors on to sharp and creditable accounts of their various shady characters. They often recorded in Paris, and the atmosphere was uproarious, with everyone playing two or three parts, while Welles bawled out colourful commentary on their work. As a young actress, Elaine Dundy often appeared on the programme; once Welles, after quickly casting the episode from the available pool of actors, proposed that they record the script without rehearsing, without even a read-through, which was splendid until she came to a point where she was about to have to play a scene with herself. ‘This is ridiculous,’ Welles roared at the producer in the sound booth. ‘Where are all the other actors?’ ‘Don’t you remember, Orson?’ replied the producer. ‘You sacked them all at lunchtime.’2
Though he did it for money, Welles loved the genre: all his life he travelled with a suitcase full of pulp fiction, thrillers, gangster stories, crime stories, which he consumed at a rate of two or three a day. He claimed to have written these kinds of stories for cheap magazines as a teenager in Spain. Narrative (and narrative is everything in these kind of yarns) was Welles’s obsession. Asked by Leslie Megahey what was most important to him as a film-maker, he replied: ‘Story, story, story.’3 These little potboiling tales were almost pure narrative, and they had to grip from beginning to end; what anyone thought of them afterwards was neither here nor there. It was a very particular skill. ‘He was always critical of the writers,’ Towers said,
‘and on occasions he suggested to me that maybe he would write some of the scripts. He asked me how much we paid and I told him, and a few weeks later six scripts arrived and I paid him. And the shows were, I wouldn’t say that much better, but Orson was happy and I was happy, until I had a ring at my doorbell one morning and was confronted by a gentleman called Mr Ernest Borneman, who was complete with carbon copies of Mr Welles’s scripts which he told me he had written and for which he hadn’t been paid. That same afternoon I was in the studio with Orson and mentioned this occurrence; Orson looked me straight in the eye and said “Don’t pay him, they were very bad scripts.”’4
Popular though they were, The Adventures of Harry Lime was a mere sideline for Welles. The programmes were made whenever he had the time to do them. They went out every week for a year, so they had to be sure that there was always at least one episode in hand. But the main business was Othello. He was making the programme throug
hout the pre-production, the rehearsals, the tour and the London run of the play. For once he had strong back-up in the form of Laurence Olivier Productions, who were particularly skilful at casting. Welles had only two requirements: he wanted actors who had not been in the play before – who, ideally, had not acted in Shakespeare before; and he wanted them to be short. And indeed all of his leading actors were small of stature. The Australian actor Peter Finch, whom Olivier had just directed in Daphne Laureola, was asked to play Iago; he was not tall. Gudrun Ure, invited to play Desdemona, was a discovery of Olivier’s from the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow and was positively tiny. Maxine Audley (5' 1''), who had been appearing with Olivier and Leigh in the two Cleopatra plays, but chose not to go on the forthcoming US tour with them, was cast as Emilia. Small she might have been, but she had a guilty secret: not only had she played in Shakespeare (most recently Charmian in Antony and Cleopatra), she had actually played the part of Emilia before, which she took considerable pains to conceal from Welles. It is notable that none of these three principals remotely resembled the actors who played the equivalent roles in the film. No doubt Welles was trying to reconceive the play for the theatre. Indeed, his approach in the film was so fundamentally cinematic that it was irrelevant to any imaginable production of the play. It would have been like trying to put Citizen Kane on stage.
The designer he was given was one of the most admired in the British theatre, John Gielgud’s favoured collaborator, Margaret (‘Percy’) Harris, of the famous design team known collectively as Motley; she was noted for the exquisite simplicity of her work, its clarity and lightness and elegance – not, perhaps, especially Wellesian qualities. In fact, his notion for the setting was very straightforward: he wanted a great brown velvet cloth, which would extend to the top of the proscenium arch and divide the stage into two halves; the action would be played in whichever half was exposed, while the scene-change took place behind the curtain. Apart from that, the design elements were very simple: a rostrum, a window, a drape, a few columns, to be realigned for each new scene.
