by Simon Callow
Welles, as it happens, was not around to comment on the furore; he had done a runner, slipping out of the country in mid-October, leaving behind him no forwarding address, and only three more episodes. Dolivet, raging impotently, had taken to communicating through his accountant, who passed on the message that Welles must complete the series as per the contract or buy Dolivet out of his Filmorsa contract. Response came there none.
‘Revisiting Vienna’, the final programme (the sixth of the announced thirteen), was transmitted in December. It is a shoddy piece of work, shamelessly trading on Welles’s Third Man connection, opening and closing with Anton Karas playing the zither in the Stube he had bought on his profits from the film, with a dreadful daub of the stubbled Harry Lime fleeing the cops on the wall behind him. Then Welles freely associates, to no discernible purpose, in front of first the newly rebuilt Wiener Staatsoper, then the Hotel Sacher, at which point the true theme of the episode emerges – cakes, at every mention of which (and there are many) Welles’s eyes fill with yearning. The scenes in the kitchen of the Café Demel are semi-pornographic, Welles drooling over the rows and rows of glistening newly made Torten. He interviews the septuagenarian patronne, and here the dialogue becomes really steamy. Like someone at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting – ‘my name is Orson Welles and I’m a cakeaholic’ – he confesses that ‘if there was any hope for my figure I said good-bye to it in Demel’s’. It’s a feeble, if pawkily charming end to a series that offered Welles remarkable opportunities, but with which he quickly grew impatient. The Dominici Affair and the two Basque films are genuinely interesting experiments in very different genres, which point to real possibilities that he chose not to explore. Instead he retreated, as so often in his life, to the theatre, back to New York, his first theatrical stamping ground, the scene of his earliest and in some ways his greatest triumphs.
He left behind him the torso of his third British television venture of 1955, Moby-Dick: The Movie, on which, astonishingly, he was engaged at the same time as trying to throw together Around the World with Orson Welles. Filming the Melville book was part of the deal he had made with Henry Margolis and Martin Gabel in order to get the play on at the Duke of York’s. It would be the opposite of Huston’s pulverisingly literal version (then still unreleased), and would reproduce something of the physical intensity and abrupt cuts that had made the stage show so startling – like reading Melville by lightning. Most of the shooting took place over the space of a week at the old Scala Theatre in Fitzrovia and at the Hackney Empire (featured by Welles in his London episode of Around the World with Orson Welles, no doubt in a break from filming Moby-Dick) and featured most of the original cast, including Kenneth Williams, whose entry in his diary for the last night of the stage show was entirely consistent: ‘Last 2 shows of this ghastly play. Party after, onstage. Awfully drear.’6 A week later, he and his fellow-actors were in front of the cameras, without Joan Plowright (Welles cast a young black lad in the part) and with Christopher Lee, still on the bottom rung of his profession, as a new recruit. Welles seems to have had no clear plan for shooting. ‘Action,’ Lee overheard him say to the cameraman, who replied, ‘Mr Welles, I haven’t got a set-up yet.’7 ‘Find one and surprise me,’ snapped Welles. He was as responsive as ever to the inspiration of the moment. At the Empire one day, a maintenance man opened the sun-light at the top of the building. ‘The effect was startling,’ wrote Peter Sallis:
It was Wagnerian. This great shaft of incandescent light shining down from this circular hole in the roof on to the stalls below. It was as if somebody had turned a searchlight on its head. Orson stopped. He stopped everybody, and without issuing any instructions or any particular note, he started to go round grabbing up wooden chairs and tables and things, and placing them in the centre of this beam of light, right over the stalls. It was clear what he was up to, and we all helped him and finally built this kind of trestle table, and then he got Gordon Jackson and me to go through both our parts in this shaft of light.8
Welles shot a great deal very quickly, but nothing on himself. At the end of the week’s shooting he gave himself over to Around the World with Orson Welles, though sometimes he managed to combine the two projects. Patrick McGoohan was sent to complete a sequence for Moby-Dick and came across Welles in the studio surrounded by models, ‘little bits of Paris and Madrid and Barcelona’, according to Peter Sallis, against which he filmed his pieces to camera.
This too was abandoned when Welles returned to America in October 1955. The footage went missing almost immediately, though there are persistent rumours of sightings. It represents another path not followed by Welles: the reimagining of a stage show in film terms, much more radical than the attempt he made in Macbeth, where the film was shot under strict studio conditions and its physical realisation was utterly different from the stage production. With Moby-Dick it seems that, in an attempt to convey the physical excitement of the show, Welles intended to push his improvisational approach even further than he had on Around the World with Orson Welles. He came back to the material – to Melville’s novel, at any rate – twenty-five years later when he shot a number of sequences, including Father Mapple’s sermon. That attempt too was abandoned; his confrontation with the great white whale never found celluloid form. For the time being, he went back to another of his lifelong obsessions, King Lear, a play which embodied in particularly stark form many of the ideas that preoccupied him throughout his life: the corrosiveness of power, the death of innocence, the fragility of hope, the reality of evil. The truncated television version had been a huge success for him; now he wanted to crown that with the play in the theatre. As an actor, he felt that it was a role he had to undertake, and on stage – the role of roles, the one he was born to play, the one with which he most identified. By pleasing (or perhaps ominous) coincidence, his new young wife was just about to give birth to a baby girl, making him, like Lear, a father to three daughters.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Schizo King
WELLES HAD been very eager for the baby (named Beatrice, after Welles’s mother) to be born on American soil, which she was, on 13 November 1955, and was thus, as he had intended, a fully fledged American citizen. This may have betokened a genuine nostalgia for his homeland; Europe had been proving increasingly frustrating and he seemed to be pursuing a sort of scorched-earth policy there, burning bridges behind him with reckless abandon.
His return home had been provoked by an offer from the dynamic Jean Dalrymple of New York’s City Center, a public theatre which had since 1943 pursued its mission – very much in the spirit of the old Federal Theatre Project – of bringing the best in the performing arts to the people at reasonable prices. Welles had supported it in the past, taking part in galas and fund-raisers for it, and so when, in early 1955, it found itself in one of its regular financial crises, Dalrymple took herself off to Europe to persuade Welles to stage Moby-Dick Rehearsed there – a rather brilliant idea: the huge flamboyant auditorium would have been a ideal setting for Welles’s dazzling experiment in physical theatre. To make the offer more attractive, Dalrymple proposed that he should do the show in repertory with King Lear, the play, after all, that the Moby-Dick company was supposedly touring. But Gabel and Margolis didn’t want to do Moby-Dick at the City Center, they wanted to do it on Broadway. Instead, though José Ferrer had done a slapstick version of the play at the City Center a few years earlier, Welles proposed to do Ben Jonson’s Volpone in tandem with Lear. Fourteen Lear copies of each play were duly sent out from London to New York. Twelfth Night seems to have been in the air too. Another play that occurs frequently in Ann Rogers’s memos about the City Center season is The Cherry Orchard – an astonishing thought, though what is The Magnificent Ambersons but American Chekhov? All Welles’s talk about wanting to start a theatre company had been deeply sincere, although England was clearly no longer the chosen location for it: the London season, with Dietrich in The Sun Also Rises and a play by Wolf Mankowit
z, had gently faded away.
Henry Margolis, despite having lost his investment on Moby-Dick and not even having a film to show for it at the end, as promised in the contract, continued to indulge his romance with the theatre by investing in the proposed season. Perhaps a little perversely, considering that this was his comeback to the American stage, Welles planned to surround himself with a largely British company. While he was shooting Around the World with Orson Welles and the Moby-Dick film he had gathered together a cast of good young actors – Sheila Burrell, Jack May, Edgar Wreford, Hazel Penwarden and (the most interesting of them all) Donald Pleasence, who was slated to play the Fool in Lear – but he neglected to make any arrangements for their American work permits. Once Welles had returned to America, Mrs Rogers negotiated a volley of rapidly crossing transatlantic telegrams, silograms and cables, trying to establish the actors’ legal right to work on the New York stage. Welles had also asked his recent Starbuck, Patrick McGoohan, and the London-based Canadian actor John Colicos to join the company. They were constantly being put on red alert, then stood down, with Welles becoming more and more impatient and the actors more and more frustrated. ‘I refuse to be a puppet, to be hung up by a string,’ McGoohan furiously told Ann Rogers, ‘and, when I am wanted, to be dusted off and used, even if I am only an actor.’1 In the event, neither he nor any of the other British actors made the transatlantic journey; at the end of November the US immigration office refused them visas on the grounds that they fell short of being ‘of distinguished merit and ability’,2 which was a little humiliating for them and, indeed, for the actors by whom they were eventually replaced, who now knew that they were certainly not first choice. So Welles’s bold new venture was mired in controversy from the start, with vigorous protests from the indigenous acting community, who were unimpressed by his argument that ‘I wanted to prime the pump with actors who had been doing Shakespeare for years.’3
Even without that unfortunate start, his return to the New York stage after a nine-year absence – though unquestionably Big News – was scarcely the Return of the Prodigal. He, and everyone else, was very much aware that he was on probation. The influential critic Walter Kerr, writing in Theatre Arts in 1952, while Welles was in Europe, had set the tone in a savage and widely read piece headed ‘Wonder Boy Welles’, which summed up what many people in America thought about him: ‘Orson Welles once made a picture – The Magnificent Ambersons – about a boy who got his comeuppance,’ wrote Kerr. ‘Mr Welles’s own comeuppance is now a matter of record.’4 At thirty-six, Welles had been through at least three careers, he said: spectacular success in theatre, in radio and in films.
‘Of each spectacular success he has made an equally spectacular mess. His fourth career – that of international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been – has occupied him for the past five or six years, and threatens to become the only one by which he will be remembered and dismissed.’ He also seems to have fallen into the unattractive habit of explaining to the press, in pained tones, that a good many of these debacles were caused by mechanical breakdowns, hostile environment factors, evil spirits, or just about anything except his inability to assay, and make judicious use of, his own personal equipment . . . even those of us who do remember the good, the promising, the exciting things about Orson Welles are not much inclined to say so any more. We have a feeling that our earlier enthusiasm may not have been justified, that we may have been taken in.
Welles was not without talent, Kerr concedes, as director, producer and scenarist:
In fact, the only thing that was ever seriously wrong with Orson Welles was his unfortunate notion that he was an actor. Everybody’s talent stops some place, and Welles’s covers a lot of ground before it gets winded. But it does stop. It stops somewhere just short of the footlights.
If Welles were willing to throw in the towel as an actor, Kerr concludes, ‘it’s my guess that he could find plenty of work to occupy him in the American theatre. There is some possibility that he will return to this country soon . . . and it will be nice to see him back, provided,’ he viciously concludes, ‘we don’t have to see him.’
The publicity that greeted Welles’s return, four years after Kerr’s hatchet job, was immense, but scarcely bedecked with bunting. ‘WELLES IS BACK IN FULL CRISIS’, cried the New York Herald Tribune. ‘Orson Welles is jittering from one end of his vast bulk to the other because he opens on Thursday at the City Center.’5 Welles was ready to come back to New York, reported Don Ross, to establish a repertory theatre like his old Mercury Theatre, ‘which flourished here in 1937 and 1938 and greatly added to the joy of life’. But, asks Ross bluntly, ‘does New York want Mr Welles to return?’ Welles’s company, he said, would do plays by the Greeks, Shakespeare, Molière, the dramatists of the Restoration and the nineteenth century, plus ‘some new plays by people like Christopher Fry and T.S. Eliot’. It would be theatre of poetry, Welles said, instead of prose. ‘In New York there is the theatre of prose and music, but the theatre of poetry is incidental and accidental, rather than being a part of the city’s life.’ It would be non-profit-making, absorbing part of the Broadway theatre and the best of the people working in the off-Broadway theatre. Who would pay for it? wonders Ross. ‘The foundations and the dough boys are interested,’ Welles replies vaguely.
‘Of course,’ he added, ‘I can louse the whole thing up with a bad King Lear.’ Lear was his favourite part, he confessed, which he had been waiting to play all his life. ‘He is 40,’ Ross drily observes. This was, Welles said, the most important show of his life, and he hated having to open in the biggest town in the world without more time for rehearsal. The plan had originally been to tour King Lear, and it would tour if it succeeded at the City Center. Ross seems lightly sceptical of the whole enterprise. Welles’s $3 million deal with CBS, he reports, has fallen through, due, ‘some say’, to his ‘whimsical demands’. Some people, Ross continues, regard Welles as ‘a ticking time-bomb’; but the man before him in his hotel suite – vodka glass in hand, with pretty young Mrs Welles gliding about, and Snowflake, their little Maltese dog, wagging its tail – ‘does not tick’. And at Schumer’s Rehearsal Hall ‘the actors say he does not tick. Maybe’, Ross concludes, clearly disheartened, ‘he never did.’ The World-Telegram was equally miffed: ‘Orson Welles has been back from Europe for five weeks, and the town has not exploded, burned down or disintegrated.’ Welles wryly says that he never was that kind of fellow. It was all made up by newspaper and magazine writers; he has never been temperamental. ‘The bondage of what used to be written about me is over now.’
This gravitas offensive reached its apogee on the Ed Murrow Show, where a mellow, sweetly reasonable Welles, after introducing his wife and showing pictures of his baby, was seen padding about in his suite at the Sulgrave Hotel, clutching what appear to be designs for King Lear, answering Murrow’s friendly questions with due deliberation, in his own good time.6 This is no Wonder Boy, but a paterfamilias, a good-humoured sage who has been around a bit. ‘Is it nice to be home?’ asks Murrow. ‘It’s wonderful to be home,’ purrs Welles, talking about the lure of the theatre, how he can’t live without it, ‘even in the years when I’ve slummed with other mediums’. Would he describe himself as unpredictable? ‘I’d describe show business as unpredictable, Ed.’ Politically, he sees himself as ‘very much for individuals and opposed to conformists, members of a gang’. Murrow wants to know whether Welles thinks television has lived up to its potential. ‘Well, no, I don’t, Ed. It’s a medium maybe as important as the printing press when it popped up on the cultural horizon. I think there are new forms that haven’t even been attempted on television and that it’s solidifying and crystallising too quickly.’ ‘Muscle-bound in its infancy?’ asks Murrow. ‘Yes,’ replies Welles, with an irresistible smile, ‘middle-aged when it’s still young.’
This much-admired and much-commented-on interview nearly never happened. Welles wanted to do it after the show had opened, but Mu
rrow went out live at 10–10.30 p.m., before Lear’s final curtain fell; moreover, he felt that his room at the Volney Hotel was not big enough. Finally, Henry Margolis, with great good grace, vacated his own very large suite at the Sulgrave and handed it over to Welles and family. Not, however, before the newspapers had got wind of his elusiveness: ‘it’s not unusual for us to begin working on a subject’s home on Monday for a Friday telecast,’ someone from CBS told the New York Herald Tribune. ‘What is unusual is to have a subject who doesn’t know where he lives.’7
In Welles’s universe, even giving an interview became fraught with complexity. Richard Maney, the press officer on the show, remarked that Welles always brought ‘excitement and confusion with him wherever he went’. There was no lack of excitement around King Lear, and a fair mount of confusion. It was publicly launched by no less illustrious a personage than Mayor Wagner, who, with Welles at his side on the stage of the City Center, announced both King Lear and Volpone. A day or two later Welles and Jackie Gleason, who was riding high on the huge success of The Jackie Gleason Show, had a long dinner at Toots Shor’s Restaurant, during which they argued over which of them should play Volpone in Jonson’s play and which Volpone’s sidekick Mosca; the excited producers called Maney and told him to write a press release. ‘It doesn’t matter who’ll write the press release,’ said Maney. ‘Who’s gonna write the retraction?’8 Shortly afterwards, Volpone disappeared without trace.
Ironically, it could well have been that Volpone might have proved a better calling card than King Lear. Welles’s plans for it seem highly entertaining: he commissioned a score from Marc Blitzstein, which was ‘really a kind of musical,’ said the composer, ‘with songs, numbers, dances, production-pieces. The harpsichord is the centre of the instrumental ensemble.’ Blitzstein had taken Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale as his model: ‘gay, tart, heartless, brilliant, juicy, stylish, popular-venetio-serenadeo pieces’.9 It is unclear how much of the text Welles would have retained, but on the face of it, Jonson, with his brilliant virtuoso language and his archetypal characters, would have been right up his street; and Jonson was a novelty in New York, which – despite Welles’s apparent belief that the city was bereft of the bard – had seen rather a lot of Shakespeare lately, not least a warmly received production of King Lear four years earlier, directed by the man Welles thought of as his nemesis, John Houseman, with a company made up (as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out) largely of ex-Mercury actors.
