Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Nobody seemed to want it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Most Telegenic Character

  DESPITE THE somewhat mixed impression made by his Othello at the St James Theatre, Welles continued to have a very high profile in Britain; he had made a powerful impression as a guest star in a couple of unremarkable British films for Herbert Wilcox and remained a very big beast on the international scene. In mid-January of 1955 he was invited to appear on a somewhat gladiatorial BBC programme called Press Conference: ‘personalities who make the news answer questions impromptu from men who write the news,’ the announcer tells us, in her cut-glass accent. Previous victims had included Sir Anthony Eden, shortly to succeed Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. It was Welles’s first appearance on British television, and the larger public’s first experience of his unique personal charms. It was, indeed, Welles’s first appearance as himself on television anywhere, the forerunner of the hundreds and hundreds of interviews in that medium that he would give over the next thirty years. He proves to be an absolute master of the situation, wittily and gracefully deflecting the distinctly boorish questions of a team made up of star British journalists of the time: John Beavan, Elizabeth Frank, René MacColl, William Hardcastle.

  ‘Why have you avoided television when you’ve seized every other medium?’ asks one of them. ‘Just a question of terror,’ Welles replies, irresistibly wrinkling his brow. ‘Can it be good?’ ‘It is already very good, as interesting as the cinema is today. I think we’re going to find new forms in television, and revisit old forms, to rediscover the story-teller, for example. I do feel that television is going up a blind alley when it makes imitation movies.’

  They ask him about his career – ‘your amusing and wonderful life’, as MacColl superciliously calls it – but he brushes it aside: ‘I’m not very interesting on the subject, you know.’ He’s terrified, he says, about what they’ll think about Othello when it comes out. He talks about the as-yet-unreleased Mr Arkadin: ‘It’s in that dangerous condition when in the morning I think it’s splendid. In the evening, I wonder.’ He describes it as ‘a tragedy, with melodramatic and comic adornments. It isn’t a thriller. Oh, that makes it sounds as if it isn’t thrilling – I’m doing a rather poor job of selling it here.’ He talks about his desire to return to politics – ‘Adlai Stevens is a distant relative. But I kept quiet about that during the recent campaign. I figured it was the least I could do to help the Democratic party’ – and about his conviction that the police are destroying civil liberties all over the world, a comment that caused a considerable stir in the newspapers.

  Asked about his favourite actresses, Welles quite surprisingly nominates Greta Garbo. Then something electrifying happens. One of the journalists wonders whether what he calls ‘the quiet school of acting’, as personified on the English stage by Sir Gerald du Maurier, isn’t going out of fashion. ‘It can’t go out of fashion,’ says Welles, ‘as long as there’s that’s machine there’ – and he points to the camera, staring straight into the lens with a look so frank, so intimate, so playful and so seductive that he seems to leap straight into one’s front room, and television suddenly becomes the most brilliant form of communication ever invented. Sixty years later, one feels in direct personal contact with the man; in the background his prickly interlocutors are by now visibly purring with pleasure, vanquished by his charm.

  He made another conquest on the programme. It was produced by an ex-BBC publicity officer-turned-producer, Huw Wheldon, who was in time to become one of the commanding figures in British arts broadcasting. Welles had played his usual hide-and-seek games with Wheldon prior to the programme, not showing up till the last possible moment; when he finally did, they calmed themselves down by drinking a great deal of Scotch whisky. Welles was entirely unimpaired by it, but the moment the cameras started to roll, Wheldon says he knew he had made ‘a first-rate error’. The panel was ‘wrong’, he said, in a letter to his father written the next day. ‘I had forgotten that, theatricality or no, unreliability or no, [Welles] was a big man . . . a really outstanding man, a singular & a great person, whose stature would not respond to the twittering tempo of what I had set up.’1 He was doing, he continued remorsefully, ‘a shoddy injustice to one of the most remarkable people I have ever met’.

  Throughout his life, Welles hit certain people with the force of a hammer blow – Roger Hill, John Houseman, George Schaefer, Richard Wilson, George Fanto – people who immediately saw beyond his external bravura and did everything they could to serve his genius, wayward though it might be. He did not always treat them well, but for the most part they remained devoted. Wheldon immediately joined their ranks: ‘being in a room with Orson Welles,’ he said, ‘was like sharing a room with a cathedral’. From the time of Press Conference forward, he was Welles’s doughtiest champion at the BBC, and indeed not much later produced for it one of the most engaging and original items in Welles’s entire output, Orson Welles’s Sketch Book. ‘The BBC have captured Orson Welles, one of the world’s foremost personalities,’ rejoiced TV Mirror, ‘for six 15-minute programmes in which the ebullient young American actor-writer-producer will talk about everything from ballet to bullfighting, from magic to murder, illustrated by his own sketches, drawn while you watch’:2 a perfectly reasonable summary of the programmes, but one that barely begins to convey the charm and ease – the playful complicity – of Welles’s performance.

  The set-up is very simple: Welles, formally dressed in dinner jacket and bow tie, is seen sketching a head – perhaps his own? – then he scratches it out. But in the first programme, in a typically Wellesian gesture, he starts out by disavowing the device:

  I hope you haven’t gathered from the title of this that you’re in for a televised art exhibit. The sketchbook part of it is frankly just a prop. A prop is a stage term . . . there are props in real life. We put our hands to our face, light a cigarette, that sort of thing. In other words a prop is what it means in the dictionary: it is something to prop ourselves with. It is a crutch, something to lean on. So the sketchbook is exactly that – it is a prop. It is something for me to turn to when I lose the thread and something for you to look at beside my face which ought to come as a nice break in the horrid monotony.

  Seamlessly he starts story-telling: about his early days in Hollywood, about his time at the Gate, all the old stories, honed and refined. But his telling of them is self-deprecatory, confessional, wry. He chats inconsequentially away, but the effect is hypnotic, like a magician’s patter. He amuses himself, eyes twinkling, brow irresistibly dimpled. His intelligence is palpable, and he addresses his audience as similarly intelligent equals. There is in fact a faint whiff of deviltry in the air: like a fireside chat with Harry Lime. One doesn’t believe a word of it, but one simply has to watch him. This is Welles’s fabled table-talk in particularly pure form: the presence of other people in the studio – an interviewer, a fellow-guest – would have diluted the experience. It is his gift for instant intimacy that is so remarkable, as it had been on radio, and as it reportedly was in life. A crucial part of his brilliance is to appear to be talking very personally to each viewer. ‘Mr Welles treated the cameras as old friends,’ remarked the Daily Telegraph. ‘In a quiet and casual manner, he gathered his audience around his feet as if he were at their fireside and proved that the art of story-telling can remain unaffected by the mechanics of television.’3

  He improvised these pieces, always arriving at his conclusion at exactly the last possible second; the sketches were really introduced because, as he tells us, the cameramen had to change the film every few minutes. He plays with an almost 3-D effect when he reaches over to place the sketch on its stand – you feel as if it might poke you in the eye – but once again, as he had done in Press Conference, he reserves his most startling effect for a look into camera. After describing the impact on him of his first exposure to the Dublin public, at the Gate Theatre, he says: ‘But on that first night I mad
e a discovery. I learnt that an audience can be a fierce creature which can turn suddenly dangerous.’ And he looks at us, the viewers, straight into our eyes, as if he could discern the danger out there: far into the back of our brains he looks, quietly alarmed at what he sees. Then he lets us down gently:

  That fierceness is generally in defence of the fragile miracle which is expected every evening in the theatre. The audience defends that miracle, the artists preside over it, nobody performs that miracle, everybody contributes to it and above all it must not be treated lightly. Respect in the presence of that miracle is part of the normal respect of the professional for his job.

  Not, it has to be said, that respect for the ‘fragile miracle’ was something for which he had been specially noted when he himself appeared in the theatre. But by the time he has finished his first Sketch Book, we are eating out of his hand.

  It is a real kind of wizardry, a very particular kind of charisma. And of course it is Welles unadorned, unhampered by his having to play a character – although one may presume that his persona is indeed a characterisation, a very conscious self-presentation; needless to say, this Welles was not available twenty-four hours a day. Even here, though, he is ahead of us, deftly pulling the carpet from underneath our feet. ‘You may have wondered why I look so peculiar on the television,’ he says at the beginning of the second Sketch Book, ‘and it’s partly, I must confess to you, the fact that you see my nose as it is. In most of the films that I appear in I put on a false nose, usually as large as I can find.’ He draws no conclusion from this, and offers no explanation for it, though it could certainly be said of him as an actor that he suffers from a kind of inverse Pinocchio effect: the larger his nose, the less truthful he becomes. But this Welles – button-nosed Welles, vulnerable, human Welles – in this Welles we trust. As the Sketch Books progress, he becomes less boyishly bashful and more explicitly political. He returns to the anxieties about the police state that he had expressed in Press Conference:

  We are told we should co-operate with the authorities. I don’t want to overthrow law. On the contrary I want to bring the policeman to law. Obviously individual effort won’t do any good. There is nothing the individual can do about protecting the individual. I should like it very much if somebody would form a great big organisation for the protection of the individual. They’d have offices at every frontier. That way when we get to frontiers and are asked to fill out a form we can say no. And they would say ah but it is the regulations and we would say very well see our lawyer because if there were enough of us our dues would pay for the best lawyers. We could bring to court these invasions of privacy.

  This was bold stuff for anxiously conformist 1950s Britain, when policemen were still ‘bobbies’ helping old ladies across the road, and when most people believed that the great big organisation for the protection of the individual that Welles was proposing already existed: it was called the State. In another episode he recounts the story of Isaac Woodard, the black soldier blinded by a policeman (‘Officer X’) in a state in the deep south of America. He ranges over an almost promiscuously wide range of topics, opining engagingly on whatever topic comes to him, sometimes treading on dangerous ground, as when he meditates on national characteristics:

  We think the English are cold, of course they aren’t. We think they are sane. Of course they aren’t exactly sane, they are wonderfully mad and a people of genius. They pretend to be sane to conceal from the world their immense plans and schemes. And we think the Italians are lazy. Imagine! The Italians lazy! They work like beavers, they like work. When I lived in Rome, I had some people build a wall for me. They worked all week and then on Sunday they brought their wives to show them the wall they were building. It was a very exciting thing to show off the work they were involved in. The Germans are supposed to be phlegmatic. I don’t know how we can think of the Germans as being phlegmatic after what we have been through in the last fifteen years but we still do. And we think Americans are silent. Silent! Look at me! Fifteen minutes’ uninterrupted talk.

  In his sixth and final Sketch Book, Welles abandons any pretence of sketching because, as he tells us, the programme is being transmitted from a studio, in real time, so there is no need to provide a cover for reel-changes. He’s no longer wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie; instead he affects tweeds. He’s just come from lunch in the country with the Oliviers, he tells us, where the talk turned, inevitably, to actors and acting, and he reads out an amusing letter by Mrs Siddons about the audience in the theatre. All this is a shameless but irresistible device to enable him to talk about the play he’s currently doing, Moby-Dick, which opened only a few days earlier. Playing to this lively and exciting West End audience, he says, has been a wonderful experience – a public that likes the theatre for its own sake and likes acting for its own sake. As he drives to his theatre every night, he says, he passes in front of a statue of Sir Henry Irving, which stands in front of a hotel called the Garrick Hotel. ‘Now there isn’t a city in the world where there is a statue to an actor and a hotel named after an actor right next to each other. That is nice for an actor as it makes you feel you are in a profession that is taken seriously and gives pleasure and interest to people.’ He is of course word-spinning. But he never falters, never hesitates. Sometimes he takes a moment to think about what he’s saying, but even that is charming: one seems to see inside his mind. And then – twinkle, twinkle, little Orson – he’s off on the next perfectly formed sentence, which turns out to be part of a perfectly formed paragraph.

  He signs off this final episode with a valediction that is unquestionably heartfelt, but still playful: the magician insisting on the transparency of his procedures. He’s actually just filling in time, he tells us:

  I have been watching the clock and I see that I have about 40 seconds to say goodnight to you in those remaining seconds that I have. What a privilege and pleasure to be speaking on the television in England. Because here I am talking to you and before I began to speak not only did I have no idea what I was going to say but neither did the BBC. I might have founded a new religion or attempted to overthrow your government. You don’t know what I might have done.

  What he says is no more than the truth: there was no medium in America in 1955 for which that would have been true.

  And how nice it was of you just to let me talk to you and how grateful I am for that experience and for playing in your theatre and how much I look forward to the resumption of all these experiments next year if I may please. Goodnight.

  Neither experiment was resumed. He never acted on the English stage again after Moby-Dick, and Orson Welles’s Sketch Book was not recommissioned, though it had been an immense success, and remains a remarkable example of what television can do. ‘If Orson Welles were to join one or other of the two main political parties, I guarantee that some 15 minutes of him on television would sway the electorate for his side,’ proclaimed the London Evening News. ‘This is by way of saying that Mr Welles is the most telegenic character who has ever appeared on our screens.’4

  Talking heads had not been unknown on British television heretofore, but they were stiff affairs, essentially lectures. No one before Welles had understood the essential characteristic of television, its intimacy. It went into people’s homes, as radio had done before it, but with the additional dimension of a personal presence. It was First Person Singular in three dimensions and could – and should – be a real encounter, even if, in Welles’s hands, a gratifyingly subversive one. Having instantly mastered the form, Welles’s enthusiasm for the programme quickly evaporated and he became restless. At some point during recording for the show, he found that he’d run out of ink for his sketch, whereupon he threw down his pen in irritation. Wheldon left the control gallery to propitiate him, but by the time he reached the set, he was told that Welles had left for Paris: the charming ironist encountered by viewers had become a petulant child. By the last programme, which went out live, Welles was
seemingly already bored with the limitations of the Sketch Book format. Before long, however, he would take the lessons he had learned from it and weave them into something much more complex.

  Meanwhile, the programme’s success led to another televisual venture for him, this time for a new and rival broadcaster. After years of resistance, Parliament had finally conceded that the BBC’s monopoly should be challenged by some enlivening commercial competition; 22 September 1955 was the day designated for the launch of the new channel, and among the glittering offerings on that momentous day would be the first of Welles’s new programmes, which were to be called Around the World with Orson Welles, thirteen half-hour programmes commissioned by Associated-Rediffusion, the company to which the franchise for London and the south of England had been awarded by the newly convened Independent Television Authority. ‘ORSON WELLES WILL STAR FOR RIVAL TV,’5 shouted the headlines. His every move was news.

  He was even briefly back on radio. The latest venture of the roguish radiophonic impresario Harry Alan Towers was a highly successful series of Sherlock Holmes adaptations starring the patrician duo of Sir John Gielgud, as Holmes, and Sir Ralph Richardson, as Watson. For the last episode, ‘The Final Problem’, Towers asked Welles to appear as the dastardly Professor Moriarty, pushing Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, which he did with commendable elegance and restraint. On the day of the recording he took the two knights out to lunch. ‘Orson was so avuncular and shouted and laughed so loud the whole restaurant was staring at us,’ recollected Gielgud. ‘It was just like two little boys at Eton who had been taken out at half-term by their benevolent uncle.’6