Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  During the period in which the Sketch Book was being transmitted, Welles rather suddenly married Paola Mori at the splendid Caxton Hall in the City of Westminster – not only the site of many glitzy show-business weddings, but also the starting place of one of the greatest of the suffragette protests. The spirit of Mrs Pankhurst seems not to have infected Paola. ‘I will organise Mr Welles as soon as I marry him,’ she told a reporter. ‘We understand each other so well that if we go to a restaurant, we can sit and eat without uttering a word, perfectly happy.’ Welles silent at the dinner table is a difficult image to conjure up. Welles, for his part, said: ‘I take marriage seriously. I am sure I’ve found the right girl for me. She knows how to soften my rough edges, a gift more precious than gold.’

  The wedding took place just two days after Welles’s fortieth birthday; the two events may have been connected in his mind. The ceremony, which lasted all of twenty minutes, appears to have been somewhat precipitately arranged: Paola called Mr Prince, the registrar, at 7 a.m. on 8 May 1955 and asked if they could be married at 8.30. ‘I changed out of my golfing clothes,’ said the imperturbable Mr P, ‘and back into my office dress. I was in Caxton Hall in time to greet the pair as they came up the back door.’ Peter Brook and his wife, Natasha Parry, a close friend of Paola – she was staying with Natasha’s parents – were up at the crack of dawn to witness the wedding; the earliness of the hour may have been not unconnected to the bride being some four months pregnant. Nonetheless there were two press photographers present, at whom Welles, twitching the collar of his brown tweed jacket, ‘scowled happily’.7

  There was no question of a honeymoon. At the time of the wedding Welles was in the midst of preparing for his stage version of Moby-Dick, a project that had been long brewing with him.

  His first attempt at it had been in 1946, when he planned a version of the novel on disc, to be adapted by his chum Brainerd Duffield, with Charles Laughton as Captain Ahab; this never happened, but that same year Duffield readapted the material into a thirty-minute radio play for Welles’s final American radio drama series, Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air. Welles played Ahab, blustering and roaring above the ocean to rather generalised effect. The performance (and indeed the broadcast) is all lungs and no heart, perhaps because even while recording the radio version he had started to conceive of a much more interesting way of doing it. He now saw it as an oratorio, as he put it, with a large chorus and orchestra, and singing and dancing. Shortly after the broadcast Duffield produced a remarkable outline of the show Welles had in mind, under the fanciful heading Antepast (= antipasto, a starter or taste-tickler).8 The document is reminiscent, in its prancing erudition and cheeky showmanship, of the glory days of the research unit of the Mercury Theatre and its successor at RKO.

  Recognition and acceptance of the work of a great creator seldom come in his own generation and usually only after the passage of considerable time. Melville, the untimeliest of the American Titans, has only lately been properly appraised. A multiple personality, driven by neuroses to create works of libidinal intensity, he was inevitably rejected by the chill philistinism of his age. The novels of his maturity are grandly symbolical, allegorical, full of fantasies and abstractions. He enunciated Freudian truths in an era which made prudery a fetish. He renounced the sterile and spurious orthodoxies of Victorian tradition and entered a realm of the pure irrational. His theme, the apocalypse and doom of civilisation, was unwelcome and he lived and died a magnificent failure.

  Who exactly, one wonders, is speaking? And who, precisely, are we talking about?

  The document discusses Captain Ahab, the figure by whom Welles had for so long been obsessed. ‘He is of course the externalisation of Melville’s own inner conflicts.’ How one loves that ‘of course’.

  He is one of the strongest images in all literature. His ego passes from the objective world into the unconscious and back to the outer world. He ranges from the narcissist reveries of twilight consciousness through physical activations of trag-melodrama [sic], arriving by spiritual transit at the eventual apotheosis. His quest is involved with the basic rhythms of the universe, the rhythms of life and death.

  Not the sort of stuff that could be readily encompassed within a thirty-minute radio drama. ‘Because of the novel’s content, fraught as it is with intangibles, with non-literal sequences, any ordinary representational form is out of the question.’ Welles – ‘not the least energetic of Melville’s admirers’ – has imagined ‘an oratorio production of real vitality and function’. The entire theatrical vocabulary, it seemed, would be deployed to give the work its fullest voice and expression. Melody, symphonic and choral, movement, dance-gesture, light and colour – all would blend in patterns to kindle the spectator’s latent responses. ‘Now, with the creative intelligence of Welles as producer and star, an original score especially composed by Bernard Herrmann, and words contrived from Melville by Brainerd Duffield, the project is a challenge of significant force and potentiality.’ No kidding. It was nothing if not ambitious, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a Reinhardtian epic, a piece of total theatre, the Living Theatre’s Frankenstein avant la lettre.

  Twang of harpoon!

  says the script.

  AHAB: The jaw! The jaw! Oh!

  MEN: Cries of terror.

  Music. Crunching as boat is splintered. Churning of water, tremendous shimmering climax, diminishing into a series of harp glissandos, leaving gentle bubbling of water then deep rippling chorus suggesting the engulfed ship.

  There are Dances, there are Hymns, there are big formal groupings; the proposal even supplies a breakdown of musical leitmotiven (including one, piquantly enough, for Rose-bud, the fragrant ship which the Pequod at one point encounters).

  It is perhaps unsurprising to find Welles in 1946, just on the point of creating his mega-vaudevillian Broadway musical Around the World, thinking of Moby-Dick in equally spectacular terms. However, the description of the stage itself – the schema, as the proposal, highfalutin to the last, insists – indicates a different kind of scenic vocabulary, one less immersive than suggestive:

  At center back, a bare-boned structure to represent the ship. Ladders lead to a railed deck. A bowsprit pointed toward the audience. A mast, ropes, and crow’s-nest near the masthead. The stage is otherwise unfurnished. A long row of steps along the apron which will sometimes accommodate singers. An orchestra. A cyclorama.

  In fact, apart from the last three items, the design as such is not a million miles away, in its essentials, from Welles’s London Moby-Dick of eight years later, though that was performed not in the sort of epic space that the Antepast seems to envisage, but in a tiny West End theatre.

  The show that the proposal describes had been commissioned by a formidable consortium consisting of the San Francisco Theatre Association, in conjunction with Alexander Korda, the Comédie-Française and the great London impresario C.B. Cochran, all of whom were poised to receive it at the end of 1947. Welles nonchalantly deferred it – on account, he said, of the large amount of rehearsal it would take – to April 1948 in London and the following month in Paris. This was the last that was heard of Moby-Dick until 1955, by which time Welles’s thinking about it had undergone a 180-degree revolution.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Call Me Ishmael

  IT IS not entirely clear when Welles came back to the idea of Moby-Dick. He may well have been prompted by John Huston’s invitation to him in 1954 to play Father Mapple in his film of the novel. Huston had expressed an interest in Welles for the role of Ahab, the part for which nature seemed to have intended him, but the producers, the Mirisch brothers, were never going to approve of him, not least on commercial grounds; instead they imposed the clean-cut, chisel-jawed Gregory Peck on Huston. By way of consolation, Huston threw Welles the tasty morsel of Mapple, whose stupendous sermon on the subject of Jonah and the whale is one of the great set-pieces of the book. Huston and his screenwriter, R
ay Bradbury, had failed to reduce the great sermon to a filmable length, so he asked Welles to undertake the job, which he did with his usual brilliant editorial instinct. He was booked for a single day at Shepperton Studios, for which, to the astonishment of the British press, he was paid a rumoured £2,000 (‘I got more than £2,000,’ he told the stunned Press Conference team, ‘and I will take less’; in fact he was paid $10,000).

  On the day of shooting, once he had struggled up to the top of his marine pulpit, Welles told Huston that he was as nervous as he’d ever been. ‘Would you like to rehearse?’ asked Huston. No, replied Welles, but could he have a drink? Huston provided a bottle of brandy ‘for him to visit’, and then they went for a take.1 Welles was word-perfect and pitch-perfect. They did another take, for good luck, but it was the first that they used. The performance is one of Welles’s most successful on film; Melville and Welles are as good a match as Whitman and Welles. He is somehow inside the rhetoric: his mastery of the phrasing is absolute and his vocal attack superb, triumphing over the cinematic inertness of the sequence as shot by Huston’s cameraman, Oswald Morris. Welles’s self-designed, highly sculpted make-up on this occasion works brilliantly too, the high brow, severe nose and out-jutting beard lending his features the quality of an engraving or a woodcut. In his performance one has a glimpse of the film of Moby-Dick that Welles might have made. ‘Orson’s performance was so nearly flawless’, wrote Huston, ‘as to make me optimistic about the rest of the shooting. I should not have been.’2 The film, which took three years to make, was not a success at any level: artistic, critical or financial.

  Welles’s relationship with Huston was largely amicable, but inevitably complex. Every relationship with Welles was complex, but this one was especially so, because Welles had known and deeply loved Huston’s father, the great actor Walter Huston – the father who had abandoned Huston at an early age; they later had a reconciliation, but Welles’s almost filial devotion to Walter was a complication for Huston, Jr. He was nine years older than Welles, but their lives and careers were oddly parallel. Their first films appeared in the same year, 1942, but The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane had very different trajectories: Kane failing commercially and leading in short order to the demise of Welles’s Hollywood career, The Maltese Falcon a commercial triumph, leading on to so many job offers for Huston that he never got round to making the planned sequel to the film.

  Welles came to direct his only Hollywood box-office success, The Stranger (1945), because Huston stepped down to direct another movie. He liked and respected Huston, though he was not, in Welles’s view, a specially gifted director; Huston saw Welles as a self-defeating genius. Both men were flamboyant hell-raisers, but Welles’s was infinitely the more complex and contradictory personality. The strikingly parallel lines of their careers would from time to time converge, right to the very end, when Huston played a character very like Welles, in Welles’s last, unfinished film.

  Huston was pretty well fearless, but he would never have dreamed of trying to put Moby-Dick on stage. For Welles, it was a challenge he must face. The version he finally brought to fruition – Moby-Dick Rehearsed – is an exercise in pure theatre, celebrating the artifice and imaginative scope of the stage, presenting the piece as a rehearsal-room run-through of a dramatisation of the novel, given by an American nineteenth-century theatre company. It is by far his most successful attempt at playwriting, filled with the contradictions that make him such a distinctive figure. It is a bold and experimental approach to putting an epic novel on stage, which at the same time celebrates the vanished world of the old-time actor-manager; it is an attempt to address one of the densest, most resonant works in all of American literature, while striving to be thrillingly entertaining. It is breathtakingly spectacular, using the simplest of means; grittily realistic and a triumph of illusion.

  The prologue to the play sets up the basic premise: an actor-manager, variously referred to as the Old Man and the Guv’nor, has decided to try out an adaptation of Moby-Dick written by his son, also an actor, who will play Ishmael. The acting company – who are playing King Lear by night – are far from enthusiastic about the play, which they have now been rehearsing for some time. There is much banter between the actors, especially about the young actor-adapter. ‘The Guv’nor should never have allowed you to go to university. God deliver the theatre from educated actors!’ Welles, of course, never went to university, and had all the autodidact’s scorn for those who did. The theatre, he believed, was not about imparting knowledge or telling people what to do. ‘My god, gentlemen, how would you like to listen to uplifting lectures from your cook?’ cries the Guv’nor (Welles’s part, needless to say). ‘When it is theatre – the theatre is poetry. True, when we do chestnuts like Spartacus or The Bells, we don’t speak it, but we try to make it. After all, that’s our profession; one in which nothing is absolutely required except an actor – and of course he only needs an audience.’ One of the younger actors chips in: ‘and when the audience decides it doesn’t need us – ’ ‘Boy, they NEVER need us,’ roars the Guv’nor. ‘Nobody ever needed the theatre, at all, except the people up on the stage. Did you ever hear of an unemployed audience?’

  Having asserted his authority, he instructs the company to run through the show: no props, no costumes and no stopping, unless and until they break down. ‘Or until our friends out there decide they’ve had enough. This time we’re asking for quite a bit of extra co-operation from them,’ he says, peering out into the auditorium. And then he makes a Shakespearean allusion, which tells us what he’s up to: the novel may be Victorian, but the stagecraft is Elizabethan:

  Piece out our imperfections with your mind;

  Think – when we speak of whale-boats,

  whales and oceans,

  That you see them –

  The actors rush about getting ready. ‘What exactly do you want me to DO?’ begs the most serious actor in the company. ‘DO?’ bellows the Guv’nor. ‘Stand six feet away and do your damnedest!’ The overhead work-light suddenly switches off; the actress plays ‘hurry music’ on the harmonium, there is a flurry of efficient chair-moving and other preparations; then – at a signal from the stage manager – the movement freezes and, after a short silence, the play begins. One of the actors plays a mouth-organ, and the stage manager reads out the stage directions.

  Scene: the wharf in Nantucket, the whaling ship Pequod in the background. The owner, Mr Peleg, discovered. Enter to him Ishmael.

  The actors go about their work on a more or less bare stage, using whatever means come to hand, improvising costumes and props, piling boxes on top of each other, swinging on the ropes hanging from the flies; the framing device is discarded until the very last seconds of the show, and a straightforward, pithy, hard-driven digest of the novel plays out in two acts, the first culminating in the spotting of the whale, the second in Ahab’s great cry, as he harpoons his quarry: ‘Stern all! The white whale spouts thick blood!’

  The dialogue is written in the sort of blank verse into which so much of Melville’s prose naturally falls. The play hurtles along, the only serious pause being for Father Mapple’s sermon, given in more or less the cut Welles made for Huston’s film. The parts are evenly divided; it is, with the exception of Ahab and Starbuck, very much a company piece, requiring a flexible and versatile ensemble. It is Melville fast and furious, not Melville mystical or even especially metaphorical. Needless to say, the chapter-long meditations on whaling have gone, as has the homoerotic intensity of the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. Welles tilts the relationship between Ahab and Pip, the cabin boy, to give it overtones of King Lear and his fool, as a gesture, presumably, towards the idea of the company performing the two plays in tandem in repertory. In effect, it has become a play about the corrosive power of obsession. There is no room for the sort of Freudian resonances envisaged in the proposed oratorio version. As a text, it is above all concerned to offer opportunities to the actors
– very much the sort of thing that the Mercury Theatre of old would have taken on with relish: a piece for performance.

  The play reached the London stage via the good offices of the writer Wolf Mankowitz, whom Welles had met in Paris and with whom he instantly hit it off. Mankowitz was another of those modern Renaissance men to whom Welles was naturally drawn: born into poverty in the Jewish East End, he had gone on to Cambridge as a student of the formidable F.R. Leavis, became a world authority on Wedgwood china and proprietor of an exclusive porcelain shop in Piccadilly, all the while writing highly successful novels, plays and screenplays mostly based on his early years in the East End; the year before Moby-Dick, Carol Reed directed A Kid for Two Farthings, adapted by Mankowitz from his own novel. He was witty, vivacious, erudite and deliberately provocative, and seems, until the Soviet invasion of Hungary, to have been a dedicated and recruiting member of the Communist Party; he ticked every one of Welles’s boxes.

  Their friendship was cemented one bibulous night in Paris when they ended up in the sumptuous apartment by the place de l’Opéra that Dolivet had hired for Welles during the editing of Mr Arkadin, and Mankowitz watched spellbound while Welles cut together the Don Quixote footage he had shot in the Bois de Boulogne. For a while Mankowitz took on himself – as so many had done, and would again give it – the task of giving Welles’s career the push that he himself seemed unable or unwilling to do. They determined to work together: Mankowitz had a business partnership with the theatre manager Oscar Lewenstein, who not so very much later would be instrumental in creating the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, which would change the face of the British theatre. Mankowitz suggested that he, Lewenstein and Welles should stage a season of plays: an adaptation of The Sun Also Rises with Marlene Dietrich, a play of Mankowitz’s for Welles and Akim Tamiroff, and Moby-Dick. And because Welles was yet again broke, Mankowitz suggested that he, Mankowitz, should serialise Mr Arkadin, not from the novel, but direct from the screenplay, for Paris-Soir and the London Daily Express, and did highly lucrative deals for both on Welles’s behalf; after which he took the idea of Orson Welles’s Sketch Book (a notion he claimed to have conceived)3 to Huw Wheldon, who was only too delighted to work with his idol and even secured a substantial advance from the BBC, ‘something they had never done before – or since’.