Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  A couple of nights after this review appeared, Tynan went backstage to say hello to Welles and was astonished to be turned away. ‘Welles uttered one word with a bellow that shook everything in the room that was made of glass,’ wrote Tynan’s then-wife Elaine Dundy: ‘Out!’35 Like many a critic before him and since, Tynan failed to understand that his darts, so blithely fired off, actually drew blood.

  He and Welles knew each other: Welles had written the ‘Introductory Letter’ to Tynan’s bobby-dazzling first book, He that Plays the King: Tynan, he wrote, had ‘materialized out of a puff of Paris fog, handed me the manuscript of this book and before vanishing somehow bamboozled me into reading it and writing this’. He must be, said Welles, ‘some sort of a magician’ – praise indeed, coming from Welles. Tynan, twenty-three at the time, had been obsessed by Welles since boyhood, an obsession that lasted for the remaining thirty years of his brief, brilliant life, and produced some of the most vivid, contentious writing ever penned about Welles. Aged fourteen, he had written to a friend, after seeing Citizen Kane on the first day of its release in Birmingham, that he was ‘dazzled by its narrative virtuosity’ and its ‘shocking but always relevant cuts, its brilliantly orchestrated dialogue, and its use of deep focus in sound as well as vision’;36 the following year, after seeing The Magnificent Ambersons, he wrote to Welles, who – astonishingly – replied to him, explaining that the studio had cut it without his consent. ‘The picture suffered from all this meddling, but your letter’, Welles added gracefully, ‘makes me feel the result perhaps wasn’t as disastrous as I’d feared.’ But it was Kane that had knocked Tynan sideways: he saw the film five times during its week-long run, once with his eyes shut to prove to himself that the soundtrack was expressive enough to be listened to in its own right.

  The impact of Welles on the young Tynan gives a vivid sense of what he meant to that generation: the exhilaration, the youthful confidence, all the rules stood on their head. At the end of 1943, now sixteen, Tynan wrote about Welles in his school magazine, under the heading ‘The New Playboy of the Western World’: ‘He is a gross and glorious director of motion pictures, the like of which we have not seen since the great days of the German cinema; he reproduces life as it is sometimes seen in winged dreams . . . watch him well, for he is a major prophet, with the hopes of a generation clinging to his heels.’37 On Tynan’s bedroom wall hung photographs of Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Charles Baudelaire, Sit Henry Irving, Walt Whitman – and Welles; he affected a new pose: ‘arrogance, bass voice, hanging lower lip. Which reads o-r-s-o-n.’38

  Tynan was a natural idolater and, like most such, he was harsh on his gods, as Welles discovered a week after the opening of Othello at the St James Theatre, when ‘Orson Welles as I see Him’ appeared in a magazine called The Sketch. Discernible through the curlicues of the young Tynan’s verbal embroideries is a sharp, cruel snapshot of Welles in full flood at thirty-six:

  In these lean years he has fattened and, in repose, resembles a landed whale. The body slumps like an inflated embryo; the eyes glower without meaning; the nose is a button; the head tilts sumptuously back as if reclining on a houri’s shoulder. One’s impression is of a becalmed luxury liner. But speech transfigures him: the pedigree mane of the fighting bull bristles, and he lunges forward, breasting his paragraphs like a surf-rider, bouncing over your interpolated breakers of ‘But – ’ and ‘Don’t you think – ’ ‘Negro actors are all untalented,’ he will assert: ‘They’re musicians, but nothing else. Paul Robeson was just Brian Aherne in blackface.’ A minute later: ‘There’s no problem about The Cocktail Party; it’s a straight commercial play, with a comic climax that Saki used and Evelyn Waugh used – the surprising martyrdom of a well-bred lady in exotic surroundings.’ What does he read most? ‘You’ll think me pompous, but P.G. Wodehouse. Imagine it: a benign comic artist in the twentieth century. Nothing about personal irritations, the stuff Benchley and Dorothy Parker write about: simply a perfect, impersonal, benevolent style.’ Shakespeare: ‘I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some funny coincidences to explain away . . .’39

  Welles’s conversation, says Tynan, has ‘the enlivening sciolism of Robert L. Ripley’s “Believe it or Not”; he has a wonderfully catalogued library of snap judgments.’ So far, so amiable. Then comes the summing up, another of the premature obituaries Welles had been receiving at regular intervals since Kane:

  Since Citizen Kane his search for new openings has been somehow desultory. His affection for Europe has qualified, dimmed, even muzzled his earlier forthright certainties; and he may develop into an uproarious armchair voyeur. As with Coleridge, a blockage of undigested experience has dammed up creativeness; only the tonic bile of criticism filters through to us. The changed Welles is a connoisseur – that social, wine-wise, stomach-sensitive creature without whom art could never be understood, but by whom it is so rarely hammered out. In broadening, he has become flattened; possibly the blind, instinctive upper-cut of theatrical effectiveness is even now beyond his reach. To his friends he overflows and is Johnsonian; but that contemporary who said that Welles is ‘necessarily careless’ of his genius may not have been wholly wrong.40

  Tynan had clearly not seen him in action on the set of Othello in Mogador or Venice. It is characteristic of many of Welles’s commentators that they select one or other of the many Welleses as quintessential, but the mystery of the man is that all the Welleses coexist; all are true. Welles himself was no doubt irritated by the latest verdict from this young whippersnapper whom he had encouraged, but it was something else earlier in the piece that really upset him, and was still upsetting him thirty years later: the phrase ‘blubber shoulders’. Welles told Tynan’s widow, Kathleen, ‘That made me a permanently fat man. I’d been in training, I ate nothing. I thought if I have “blubber shoulders” after what I’ve been going through, to hell with it!’ Their friendship survived, mostly because Tynan wanted it to: as Kathleen Tynan notes, her husband was in search of a father figure, a father whom he could use as a punchbag without fear of forfeiting his love.41

  This was not at all pleasing to Welles, who spent a great deal of his life avoiding the responsibilities of fatherhood, both actual and projected. He absolutely refused to extend paternal leadership to his company at the St James Theatre. Despite better-than-average notices, morale generally dwindled; Welles seemed increasingly uninterested in the play or the part, and had little contact with the actors. Sometimes there were confrontations. One night Welles hurled the bag of coins that Othello throws at Emilia so vigorously that it hit Maxine Audley in the face, drawing blood. After the curtain had fallen, she marched over to him and slapped him as hard as she knew how, ‘and everybody in the theatre came and shook me warmly by the hand and said, “we’ve all been longing to do that”’. The following day Welles called her to the stage before the performance and, without a word of apology, set about analysing what had gone wrong. ‘He had me come on with a handful of coins, he made the gesture of throwing and as he threw I raised my hand and dropped the coins. He wanted that gasp from the audience. And it got the gasp,’ she said, admiringly. ‘He made it into a conjuring trick.’42

  One night with Gudrun Ure, he struck her hard across the face with a parchment; a few nights later he struck her with it three times in a row, reducing her to tears. ‘We got to the curtain and, all smiles, he came down and he said “that was just great” and I looked at him and I said “Orson you shouldn’t do that, that is very bad” and he said “but why?” and I said “if you don’t know, I can’t tell you”. But it was just disastrous, just no comprehension of what was wrong with it.’ The actors never saw him before or after the show: instead he gave them audible directions during it: ‘Quicker, quicker. Get ON with it. Move left. Stop. Quieter.’ His own performance was increasingly slapdash and mechanical. Once – and once only, according to Gudrun Ure – he focused himself; he had spotted Laurence Olivier at th
e back of the stalls. ‘And it was marvellous. Never again.’43

  His energies and his focus were elsewhere. He struck a new deal with Harry Alan Towers, the producer of The Adventures of Harry Lime, to remake a radio series called Secrets of Scotland Yard, to which Towers gave the new name The Black Museum. Welles would simply introduce the fifty-two programmes, for which Towers would pay him ‘quite a substantial amount of money for a comparatively short period of his time’. The contract was signed in the back of a cab after the second night of Othello. Welles was not in a good mood: he had read most of the notices by now. ‘He muttered to me in the taxi “Have you got the contract, Harry?” and I said “Yes” and held it out to him together with the pen. He signed it with the comment “Lower than this I cannot stoop.”’44 The money, paid up front – though Towers inevitably spent the following year chasing Welles around Europe to record his contributions – was immediately ploughed into yet more editing of Othello, specifically on the soundtrack.

  Welles took particular pleasure in replacing Suzanne Cloutier’s voice with that of Gudrun Ure; he himself, having already revoiced Robert Coote’s Roderigo in its entirety, now dubbed some of Michael Laurence’s Cassio, Jean Davis’s Montano and even MacLiammóir’s – admittedly extremely imitable – Iago. All this was in preparation for the film’s world premiere in Rome on 29 November, followed by the Milan premiere the day after. Welles was on stage in London, and therefore not present, which was perhaps just as well, given the volatile nature of his relationship with the Italian press. There was nonetheless a certain fanfare around the openings – both charity galas – and in Rome an aeroplane blazoned the name of the film on the sky in vapour-clouds: there it stood for a glorious moment, till it dissolved into the empyrean, an all-too-precise metaphor for the film’s subsequent history. Even on this, its first outing, it disappeared without a trace after four days, being swiftly replaced by a whacky comedy with a resonant title: Mago per Forza – The Reluctant Magician.

  In its consideration of Othello, the Italian critical fraternity plunged in along sharply divided lines, their discourse far removed from the homespun commentary that the English-speaking press would offer. Much of the discussion hinged on whether or not Welles’s work could be described as baroque, a heinous offence for the neo-realist followers of Benedetto Croce. ‘The more baroque the artist, the bigger the effect and the less the substance,’ in the words of the great realist novelist Alberto Moravia.45 For the pro-baroque faction, Welles’s latest offering was a triumph, revealing him as ‘a follower of Tintoretto and El Greco, bringing together the rationalism of Pascal and the labyrinth of Theseus’;46 the hard left, meanwhile, toeing Moscow’s line, dismissed him for his formalism. There was general, if qualified, admiration for the film’s vitality: ‘a film’, said Oggi, ‘narrated with all the means that the cinema has at its disposal’.47 Welles’s scourge, Aristarco, the journalist he had taken to court but failed to prosecute, said the same thing from a different angle: Welles, said Aristarco, was ‘a hedonist, narcissistically indulging his extravagant camera positions, both as director and as actor . . . anxious to dazzle at all costs’, which gave the film ‘a revolutionary-seeming appearance without a revolutionary content’. It fell to Moravia to state the core case against Welles: ‘You could say that, like some fish, he is unable to plumb the depths but must stay close to the surface to breathe. Hence his need to make a big splash . . . it seems that Welles believes that the job of the artist is to dumbfound rather than win over and move. This is due to his inability to penetrate the depths of art or life.’48

  In one shape or another, from Citizen Kane to F For Fake, this was the accusation: all form and no content; all surface and no substance. Avoiding this framework of judgement altogether, Vittorio Bonicelli in Il Tempo, reviving a familiar comparison, daringly struck a heretical note: ‘there is more Shakespeare in the “arrogance” and “ribaldry” of Orson Welles than in the refined academic work of Laurence Olivier. (Here endeth my reputation.)’49 It is piquant that, at the time of this review, the ribald and arrogant Welles was acting under the management of the refined, academic Olivier; indeed, the programme for Othello at the St James carried an advertisement for the latter’s film of Hamlet.

  The run of the play was coming to an end, and Welles was keen to start re-re-editing the film in preparation for the following year’s Cannes Film Festival, into which it had been entered. He had no desire to embark on the stage production’s European tour, about which he had spoken so expansively in Newcastle. The company was scarcely heartbroken at the news; Laurence Olivier Productions, on the other hand, was less cheerful: they had hoped to recoup some of their losses on the show by taking it to New York. Othello in London ran for just eleven weeks: the average weekly income had been £1,500, average weekly expenditure £2,500. Lovat Fraser, the general manager for LOP, having sounded Welles out, quickly came to the conclusion that, Othello was ‘a thing of the past’ for him, and that he would not fulfil his obligations by playing in New York; shortly afterwards Fraser received a letter from Welles saying how much he wanted to do the show in New York and on tour in America, but that he was, alas, waiting on a film. At this point Olivier himself stepped into the discussion, and wrote to Welles, iron hand in velvet glove, in an entirely characteristic example of his silky determination, masked by faux-jocularity – a mode with which Welles would later, to his cost, become very familiar:

  Our dearest little boy, Viv and I have both been so dying to see you. I have been wanting to pick you up and hug you and swing you round and dance you up and down on my knee and even go bird-nesting with you to show you in some tiny measure how sweet and generous was your dear thought about that wonderful fridge in New York, for which I thought of you with gratitude every night of the God-damned run. We are simply longing to see you. When is this going to be possible please. – Now I have to write to you about a ridiculous business detail. Have you ever any intention of going to New York with Othello? Because if not, I think it would be a good idea for us to sell the costumes. We don’t want to do this if there is any likelihood at all of your being able to fulfil your promised intention of going to New York in the piece, because that will be our only possibility of our really getting our losses back. Have a think, dear chum, and let us know. We really long to see you; we really do. Always your devoted Larry.50

  Olivier’s steely focus, which had already won him the more or less uncontested title of the greatest actor in the world, was a quality entirely lacking in Welles, whose apparent self-confidence masked a disabling insecurity and an utter lack of guile, the quality he later described in Olivier as ‘peasant cunning’.51

  He had in fact long ago given up any idea of playing Othello in America: for Welles, the stage show was, as Lovat Fraser correctly divined, ‘a thing of the past’. After it closed, making way for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Welles went to Dublin to visit Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, and was greeted by a wholly unexpected storm of protest engineered by the Catholic Cinema and Theatre Patrons’ Association, loudly proclaiming Welles a communist – ‘Stalin’s Star’, shrieked the placards picketing the Gate Theatre when he attended a performance of Maura Laverty’s Tolka Row there. At the interval Welles’s jaunty wave to the picketers out of the window was greeted with outraged cries and shaken fists; fuel was added to the flames by the play’s author, whisky glass in hand, regaling the crowd with a spirited rendition of ‘The Red Flag’. At the end of the show Welles was called on to make a speech, and he spoke of how moved he was to be standing on the stage where he had made his debut twenty-one years earlier, and lamented – to loud applause – that the demonstration had interfered with ‘the tribute to so fine a play’.52 He departed by the fire-escape, leaving Hilton Edwards to calm things down by informing reporters (quite accurately) that, far from being a communist, Welles had spent his whole life trying to be a capitalist. The remark may have been tinged by a certain grim irony for him, since MacLiammóir
and Edwards were on the brink of bankruptcy, still struggling with debts incurred during their two years of working on Othello. This financial misunderstanding would simmer and bubble underneath the relationship for many years; to the bitter end, in fact.

  One of Welles’s many tokens of reparation was to have taken part, as promised, earlier in 1951, in a short film written and directed by Edwards and produced by MacLiammóir. Return to Glennascaul: A Story Told in Dublin, a charming and skilful ghost movie in its own right – it was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Short Film of 1954 – also functions as a kind of pendant to Othello. The film begins with Welles in silhouette, supposedly doing a take for Othello. The speech is carefully chosen: Othello as a teller of tall tales, describing his wooing of Desdemona with stories of his exotic experiences among the anthropophagi and ‘men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’. ‘Put your hat on straight, Mike,’ says a lightly bearded Welles, presumably to MacLiammóir, before the take, but he soon cuts himself off – ‘I can’t get this thing right, let’s break for lunch.’ The movie set is littered with arc lights, one of which catches him, his giant shadow showing him lighting a cigarette. The shadow-Welles turns to us, blacking out the screen, and introduces himself on the soundtrack as ‘Orson Welles – your obedient servant’, promising to tell us a story from ‘the haunted land of Ireland’, which ‘purportedly happened to me’. He has come to Dublin, he tells us, to talk Othello business with Hilton Edwards, ‘the producer and director of the film that follows’. He promises to disappear from the story very soon: getting back from the making of one movie, as he puts it, to the making of another – ‘my own’ – for which he is, ‘I’m afraid, still wearing my Othello beard’.