by Simon Callow
He was also, he said, at work on a screenplay entitled Caesar! in which his Third Man co-stars Trevor Howard and Alida Valli would play, respectively, the title role and Calpurnia; the film would be directed, he claimed, by Hilton Edwards, but if Welles was simply producing it, he had a very hands-on conception of what that meant. He planned to shoot the film in Eur, the spectral, unfinished development built in the south of Rome in 1942 to celebrate twenty years of Mussolini’s Fascist rule – an inspired location, with its sterile faux-Roman streetscapes defying all attempt at animation; accordingly he and Oberdan Troiani, his cameraman from Othello, conducted a thorough recce, with Troiani taking copious photographs. Nothing, alas, came of the project, though Welles was to return to Julius Caesar again. Around the same time he signed a contract with Olympic Films in Rome to produce, direct and star in two films to be made in Italy in both English and Italian. The first was to tell the story of Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, silversmith and rakehell; the other was Operation Cinderella, about a Hollywood crew dividing an Italian village when it descends on a location near Naples to shoot a Renaissance film: denounce it though he might, Hollywood was never far from Welles’s mind, the demi-paradise from which he had been ejected. Screen tests were done for Cellini, casting allegedly complete. He had a co-writer for Cinderella, Piero Rognoli, but he was disinclined to work on the screenplay, preferring to entertain visitors and backers by acting out scenes from the movie under arc lights magically rigged up in the garden of his house. The production company paid him 50 million lire, but it all came to nothing.
Needing yet more money, he accepted a dreadful part in a dreadful film, on which he behaved dreadfully. The film was Trent’s Last Case, from the crime classic by E.C. Bentley, and the producer/director was Herbert Wilcox, neatly described by Michael Kustow as ‘the middle-class master of British cinema but a commanding figure in the demoralised post-war industry’.7 Wilcox had bought out what was left of the long-term contract Korda had with Welles, out of which only The Third Man had resulted – a triumph, of course, but one too time-consuming and tiresome for Korda to risk repeating. As it happens, Wilcox and Welles had met in Hollywood: Wilcox by chance had seen some of the Kane rushes, and had sought Welles out to tell him what a huge success he would have. ‘That’s the first kind word I’ve had in Hollywood,’ Welles told him. ‘I’ll do anything for you, if you ever want me to – for nothing.’8 In fact, Wilcox paid him handsomely to play the murder victim, Sigsbee Manderson, which he does in a classic Welles make-up – aquiline nose, thin lips, staring, almost puppet-like eyes. To characterise the menacing nature of his relationship with his wife (played by Margaret Lockwood) Welles kisses her with alarming force: like Eartha Kitt, she ended up with bruised lips, but, unlike Miss Kitt, she accepted it philosophically. ‘The scene came out alright on the screen,’ Miss Lockwood, then reigning queen of British film, told Peter Noble, ‘so I guess I shouldn’t complain.’9 The film was a considerable box- office success on both sides of the Atlantic. He made a second film, Three Cases of Murder, for Wilcox, who described the experience of working with him with surprising candour: ‘As an artist Orson is a superman but as a person he is too beset by abstractions and he tries to do too many things to have any satisfactory human relationships. It’s difficult to like Orson,’ Wilcox told Noble, ‘because he does his best to make you actively dislike him.’10
If this was indeed his objective, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams on his next film, L’Uomo, la bestia e la virtù. The screenplay was drawn from the Pirandello play of the same name; Welles was cast as the Beast – Captain Perella, a coarse Neapolitan sea-captain. Perella comes home to his wife (Virtue), who, unknown to him, is pregnant from another man (the Man); they gull him into having sex with her so the child can be passed off as his. The film was essentially a vehicle for the Neapolitan comic genius Totò, who plays the prissy professor, Paolino di Vico, with whom the wife is having the affair; the wife herself, Assunta, was played by the distinguished French actress Viviane Romance, more usually to be found playing femmes fatales. The film was directed by Totò’s regular director, Steno; together they had made some of the most successful films in the history of the Italian cinema. Welles was of course familiar with Pirandello’s work, having written a screenplay freely based on the great Sicilian writer’s masterpiece, Enrico IV, with its unsettling interrogation of illusion and reality, madness and sanity. L’Uomo, la bestia e la virtù is a very different kettle of fish, a sexy comic fable, almost like something out of Boccaccio, and Welles, who bravely insisted on playing the part in Italian, entered into it with some commitment, devising an extraordinary make-up for himself, perhaps Neptunian in intention, but satyr-like in effect, with tumbling brown locks, arched eyebrows and curly beard. He essays an Italian body-language, too, with much gesturing of hands; only the presence of Totò, one of the cinema’s supreme masters of physical expression, in the league of Keaton or Chaplin, slightly undermines his authenticity. It’s a big, spirited performance, a remarkable physical transformation, made all the more complete because in the end they dubbed him, so the voice that emerges from his lips is not one of the most instantly recognisable vocal instruments of all time, but that of a rough Italian sailor.
Welles was cast in the film at the last moment by Carlo Ponti, who co-produced the film with Dino De Laurentiis; he was paid 3 million lire a day, three times what Totò himself was earning, though there was no question on the set who was the star. ‘He was always addressed as your Highness,’ Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. As a matter of fact, the comedian, born in a shabby suburb of Naples, was perfectly entitled to being so addressed, since he was, technically speaking, not only an Imperial Highness, but also – in a list of titles which reads like the dramatis personae of an early Shakespeare comedy – a Palatine Count, a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, the Exarch of Ravenna, Duke of Macedonia and Illyria, Prince of Constantinople, Cilicia, Thessaly, Pontus, Moldavia, Dardania, Peloponnesus, Count of Cyprus and Epirus, Count and the Duke of Drivasto and Durazzo. The joke pretty quickly wore thin for Welles, who was annoyed by the long hours imposed by the director, by the permanent presence on set of Viviane Romance’s Egyptian-born husband supplying his wife with constant rewrites, and by the sheer indignity of having to act in a vehicle conceived for an Italian clown and bearing daily less resemblance to anything which might have come from the pen of Pirandello. For the most part Welles sat on the set, unapproachable and tetchy; everything, it seemed, was a problem.
At this point, he discovered that his contract contained a penalty clause: he was entitled to a handsome supplement whenever shooting overran. So he began to take longer and longer over his make-up, particularly his beard, interrupting shots to keep making small adjustments to it. It didn’t take Ponti long, after paying the penalty once or twice, to realise what Welles was up to; soon they were openly at loggerheads, Ponti refusing to pay the overtime. One day, three days before the end of the shoot, Welles snapped, called the producers and walked out, leaving his bags at the hotel, along with a letter in which he thanked Steno and the screenwriter, Lucio Fulci, ‘followed,’ said Fulci, ‘by a series of Sons of a Bitch and Fuck You’s for the producers’.11 Welles’s remaining scenes were shot from behind with a body double; they auctioned his bags.
It was, notes Anile, the end of Welles’s turbulent six-year-long relationship with the Italian film industry. He now had burned his bridges as an actor; as a director he was unbankable. The following year, as if symbolically, Scalera, having failed to convince the authorities that Othello was an Italian film, went into receivership.
But if it was the end of Welles’s professional life in Italy, it was the beginning of a personal relationship which would endure, with vicissitudes, to the end of his life. Sometime in 1952, Welles had seen and been smitten by a darkly pretty twenty-four-year-old actress called Paola Mori, and before long they were closely involved. His feelings for her were romantic and highly charged; th
is, he felt, was The One. ‘Friend,’ he said to a perceived rival, the actor Walter Chiari, ‘leave her alone. You’re just toying with her. I need her . . . I love her.’12 Mori’s family home at the Villa Fregene, near the Roman seaside, became his base. Mori had been born in Italian Somaliland, where her father was a colonial official; her mother was the Contessa di Girifalco. During the Second World War, when British Somaliland invaded its Italian neighbour, Paola, her sister and her mother were interned for a year (during which time Paola learned rather good English). Shortly after, the family was reunited in Italy, and they went to live in Fregene. With her simple strength and innate distinction, Paola was something new in Welles’s life: a restraining, calming influence – up to a point. She acted as a very necessary buffer between him and the world. He was becoming more and more impatient with his life, a state of mind which tends to be self-generating. The wry resignation, the amused self-knowledge he demonstrated in interviews, was rarely glimpsed by those who worked with him, though he was still able to command the loyalty and even the love of his colleagues. The divine furor was so palpable, his passion to create, to make something new, something exciting, something beautiful, in addition to his obvious skill and inspiration, outweighed for many of his actors and technicians the impatience, the surliness, the bullying, the impulsive and contradictory instructions. As often with Welles, one senses something archaic about him. He behaves like some great tribal chieftain, a warlord of art, riding roughshod over the niceties of conventional behaviour, sometimes sulking in his tent, sometimes rousing his people to great heights, now making huge strategic decisions off the cuff, now mysteriously absenting himself. The egotism is so massive that it becomes epic, universal. We may try to psychoanalyse Welles, but perhaps it is better to accept him as a phenomenon, unparalleled, a law unto himself – because he accepts no other law. Like Oscar Wilde he is an antinomian, born for the exception, not for the rule. Boundaries, definitions, limitations are unknown to him, and intolerable. ‘What’s worth fighting for?’ he wrote in a magazine article that year. ‘A flag? A class? An idea? A system? No, only man, with his variety and his complexity, his sheer limitlessness, is worth fighting for.’ This is both very modern and very ancient, sentiments that would not have been strange to Walt Whitman.
In April of 1953, as it happens, Welles was invited by the BBC to record extracts from Walt Whitman’s A Song of Myself from his sprawling masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. Welles and Whitman are a perfect match: the poet’s unconfined metre suits Welles wonderfully, the ecstatic rhetoric, the emotional resonance, the exploratory, celebratory self-intoxication, can never have been better realised. The poem must have struck profound chords with him: again and again, as he reads, Whitman seems to speak for Welles.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Or:
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab, my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Might not Welles just as well have cried out:
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
The BBC recording is the zenith of his poetry reading, not merely sonorous but deeply felt, a perfect congruence of reader and poet.
Later that same year, Welles was invited by the Edinburgh International Festival (which clearly bore no grudges for the shenanigans over Othello five years earlier) to deliver a lecture. To accompany it, he showed the first reel of Othello and the last of Macbeth. The lecture was entitled ‘The Third Audience’; in it Welles edged a little closer to television, announcing that ‘movies are dying, dying, dying.’13 The problem, he said, was that between the minority avant-garde and the mass-market (‘the sixty million people’), there was a gap. ‘We have to find a way of making films – and here television may help us – by which, if two million people see them, we have a return for our money; which involves the creation of a true international audience and a struggle,’ he declared, reverting to his Popular Front rhetoric of the Thirties and Forties, ‘with the mysterious national forces in the world which call themselves governments.’ He did not, he said, blame Hollywood; that would have been old-fashioned. Rome had turned itself into a small Hollywood, and England had fallen flat on its face trying to do so. Then, in an aside, he made one of his calculated provocations, a hand-grenade lobbed lightly into the conversation; it must have played very well in Scotland. ‘England,’ he said, ‘is the only film industry without a tradition.’ Hitchcock, Korda, Powell, Thorold Dickinson, all casually thrown onto the scrapheap by Welles. ‘They were making films in Stockholm, Budapest and Copenhagen forty years ago, but they were not making them in London.’
By way of introduction to the extracts from Macbeth and Othello, he said, ‘I do not know whether a happy marriage can exist between Shakespeare and the screen. I certainly know that I did not succeed in making one.’ But he defended the attempt as a means of getting away from banality. ‘There are many questions that cannot be discussed in front of sixty million people’, he said, and returning to ‘our classics’ was a way of addressing them. He excused his Macbeth on the grounds that it was shot in twenty-three days and should have been judged accordingly, as ‘a kind of violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play’, while Othello was a ‘free and vigorous’ adaptation of the play, comparable in its freedom and vigour, he said, to what Verdi and his librettist Boïto had done with it. Then, finally, he turned to television, ‘an exciting thing because it is in the hands of the first generation’. But it could never, he said, be a substitute for film: ‘it will never give the director the scope that the film camera can give him. Television,’ he said, ‘is an actor’s medium . . . but the great power of film, the use of image as such, will always belong to the cinema.’ This is the same Orson Welles, of course, who, only three years earlier, had told Francis Koval how absurdly film critics overrated the image. Does he contradict himself? Very well then, he contradicts himself.
Welles would soon be finding out at first hand about the medium he had so far held in such scant regard. But meanwhile, there was another unknown medium to be cracked: ballet. Welles had in his time been a great connoisseur of ballerinas, but not necessarily because of their terpsichorean gifts. No doubt he was charmed when, at supper one night early in 1953, Roland Petit, the brilliant showman-choreographer who created the Ballets de Paris, asked him to make a piece for one of the company’s stars, Colette Marchand, for their forthcoming season in September at the massive Stoll Theatre off Kingsway. Welles was to design the set and costumes and devise the scenario; Petit would choreograph, to a score by the precociously gifted Jean-Michel Damase. The basic idea came quickly: Welles had been reading a book about the murals in the caves of Lascaux in south-western France – only opened to the public five years earlier – and had become fascinated by the idea of the mammoths depicted in the paintings whose bones were embedded in the surrounding ice. He imagined a young woman similarly frozen; she is discovered and put on display in a fairground. A young man falls in love with her, which melts the ice, liberating her; she kisses him, whereupon he in turn freezes. It is another of those riddling fables scattered throughout Welles’s oeuvre. In his programme note for the London season, he described it as ‘a kind of parable showing that two people are never in love with each other to the same degree’, which may have been sobering for Paola Mori to read.
A certain amount of mystery surrounded the project. The company’s press release announced Le Loup, with a libretto by Jean Anouilh and a score by Dutilleux, which became one of Petit’s biggest
triumphs and ‘another by Orson Welles’. Making up the quadruple bill were two more short ballets, Gosvsky’s La Perle and the satirical romp Deuil en 24 heures. ‘Nothing is yet known about Mr Welles’s ballet,’ said the release, ‘not even its title.’ Welles himself seemed a little vague about the whole project. The young designer Richard Negri was seconded to help him realise his ideas. Welles was in ebullient form – ‘umpteen activities going on and constantly interrupted by phone calls from all sides of the globe’, according to Negri14 – and he and Petit worked very happily together. His set was on a grand scale, consisting of huge sacking drapes with paintings of mammoths in fluorescent paint which, with the use of black light, would appear spectrally in the dark, while a great canopy would sweep up to reveal the block of ice containing the girl, who, nestling on a black velvet ledge, appeared to be suspended inside it. Both the tripods supporting the drapes and the concealing canopy were vast. The engineering problems posed by this were handed over to Negri: ‘The whole lot was left entirely on one’s plate.’ He found a specialist in stage effects, and together they laboured day and night in a tiny room in the Stoll; they were still working when the curtain was due to go up on the first night, which it finally did half an hour late. ‘From Orson Welles’, wrote Dance and Dancers,
