Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  He and Welles were, Heston felt, getting closer and closer: this was their baby. After shooting the complex scene with the bugging device in the water, they cracked open a bottle of brandy and drank it in the car outside Welles’s house. ‘We more or less agreed on partnership,’ confided Heston to his diary, ‘which seems a very exciting prospect to me.’16 Welles suggested an eco-apocalyptic novel, Earth Abides, which interested Heston, but at that point, had Welles wanted to direct the Los Angeles telephone directory, Heston would have agreed to be in it. Welles was reaching parts of him that no other director had. ‘My son took his first steps one year ago today,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and I almost feel I’m only beginning to do the same [as an actor] on this film. Orson is certainly the most exciting director I’ve ever worked with . . . God, maybe it will all begin to happen now.’17

  The last shot was, unusually, the last shot of the film, Quinlan’s watery death; they finished filming at dawn. It was 1 April. The schedule was a mere week behind, and they were a nugatory 3 per cent over budget. Welles and Heston had a celebratory drink or three in the trailer, then took the last magnum of champagne with them and found a place that would provide them with bacon and eggs to go with it. ‘It was a hell of a picture to work on,’ Heston noted. ‘I can’t believe it won’t be fine.’ Then they had a steak and watched Lady from Shanghai on TV. ‘It’s good,’ noted Heston, ‘but not as good as ours, I think.’18 This was the apogee of their relationship, the consummation of the romance of film-making; it was also the end of the good news for Touch of Evil.

  As early as 7 March, three weeks after filming had begun, Welles had shown Heston two or three reels of roughly cut-together footage. Welles had just fired his cutter, but ‘even mis-edited’, said Heston, ‘it looked special’. Now, after the briefest pause, Welles set to work in earnest with his new editor, the experienced and amenable Virgil Vogel, whose last job as an editor this was to be; he had just begun to direct, which he went on doing for the rest of his life. Welles never visited the cutting room, but saw cut scenes on the big screen, after which he would issue detailed notes. Some of these dictated notes survive, showing the needle-sharp detail in which he worked:

  Dub the line ‘I told you I brought you up here for a reason’. One light flash too many in my trip towards Tamiroff with the stocking before I choke him. I suggest we cut Janet. It’s just a little long – my trip from the bed to Akim to choke him. After first shot of Tamiroff dead – use the same piece of Janet that is there now, but before she rises. Then return to his face blown up so that the eyes are even bigger for a flash. Then repeat moment of her and have her rise screaming. Shot of the old lady talking and the people shouting: all that must be before the entrance of Chuck Heston and the car. There should be absolutely no jeering at the girl once Chuck Heston comes in.19

  Welles next briefly met Henry Mancini, then under contract to Universal, to talk about the score. Welles’s presence on the Universal lot ‘that gave you Bonzo, Francis the Mule, Ma and Pa Kettle, countless horrible horse operas, and all those awful Creature pictures that Herman Stein and I scored’ seemed wildly incongruous to Mancini, who had read the impressively detailed three-page letter Welles had written for Joseph Gershenson, the head of the music department, outlining his expectations of the score. The letter made it clear that he didn’t want any scoring at all as such – ‘that is to say, underscore,’ as Mancini put it, ‘the disembodied music that comes from nowhere behind a scene to enhance or establish mood’. All the music, Welles said, had to be what was technically known as source music, occurring naturally within the action, from a visible source – a juke-box, an orchestra, a radio or, indeed, a player-piano; it should be a mixture of rock and roll and Latin jazz, where needed, to capture the feeling and effect of a modern Mexican border town. As it turns out, this is exactly what Mancini had planned to do, which was just as well, since he got very little out of the meeting arranged with Welles, who, in cape and hat and furiously smoking a long Montecristo cigar, was already in high dudgeon with Zugsmith. ‘It seemed,’ said Mancini, ‘as if doom, the wrath of hell, was invading the music department.’ At the height of his rage Welles snapped around, looked at the composer, pointed a long finger at him – he had met him just half an hour earlier – and said from a great height, ‘Who’s he?’ Mancini put his head down and got on with his work.20

  Welles continued supervising the editing, consciously creating a nightmarish atmosphere, disjunct, jagged, menacing, arrhythmic. He alternated leisurely long sequences with abrupt ones, sometimes – as in the scenes in the motel – suspending linearity altogether. After nearly two months he took a brief leave of absence at the beginning of June to go to New York, to do a few conjuring tricks for a very large sum of money on the Steve Allen Show; while he was gone, Virgil Vogel was replaced by Aaron Stell, until recently a television editor. Stell asked to be allowed to do his own cut without supervision from Welles, who agreed, while continuing to dub the film with his usual creativity. ‘Orson continues to amaze me with the ideas he has,’ wrote Heston in his diary. ‘He created a climax for me in the bar scene that wasn’t in the printed footage, simply having me dub a speech in four little places. Whatever happens, I am in his debt.’21

  Meanwhile, Welles and Heston were still looking for a new project to work on together. Welles proposed Conrad’s Lord Jim and the recent British novel The Singer Not the Song (again set in Mexico) as possible projects; then, towards the end of June, Welles had a more concrete suggestion, a reversion to an old project: he had drummed up some cash, including $25,000 from Frank Sinatra, to make a television special from Don Quixote and asked Heston to play the title-role; Heston was sorely tempted, although he had already signed to make his next film, The Big Country, for William Wyler. Meanwhile, in mid-July, Aaron Stell’s cut of Touch of Evil was shown to the studio executives, who were unimpressed with it. Ernest Nims, Welles’s editor on The Stranger and now head of post-production at Universal, was called in to fix it with Virgil Vogel. This was ominous news for Welles: Nims, under direct instructions from Sam Spiegel, had shortened The Stranger by a crucial twenty minutes – the key twenty minutes of the film, Welles believed, rendering it fatally incoherent. But he was by now urgently trying to assemble his team for Quixote and urging Heston to come to Mexico with him. Heston’s agent, Herman Citron, thought the whole thing was madness, ‘and so do I, really,’ wrote Heston in his journal. ‘But Orson is impossible to resist, especially with a part like this.’22

  Welles had a madcap plan whereby the Quixote cast and crew could all enter Mexico on tourist permits, then pay a fine when they were found out. Eventually Heston conceded that it would be impossible: he wouldn’t be able to get his passport back in time to return for shooting on The Big Country, so Welles went off without him, leaving detailed instructions with Nims for the work on Touch of Evil and firing off a letter to Edward Muhl complaining that the film had been ‘jerked away’ from him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Return of Awesome Welles

  AFTER BEING briefly reunited with the wonderful equipment and superb technicians of a major Hollywood studio, as well as reacquainting himself with the concept of budgetary and time constraints, Welles found himself, with Don Quixote, back to the freedom and uncertainty of independent film-making. He had, it is true, a producer – the Russian émigré Óscar Dancigers, who had given Luis Buñuel, in flight first from Falangist Spain and then from neurotically anti-communist post-war America, a career in Mexico – but his relationship to Welles was purely that of a facilitator. Welles’s approach to Quixote was radical: he determined to improvise the movie, which would mostly be shot on silent 16mm equipment; in fact, he would be reverting to the shooting style of the great silent-film comedians.

  The scenario had changed since the tests he had shot in Paris two years earlier for Don Quixote Passes By, the aborted thirty-minute film he was going to make for CBS. In the new version Welles would appear, a
s himself, in conversation with a young American girl called – nudge, nudge – Dulcie. Welles would tell her the story of Quixote and Sancho Panza, whom she would then meet, later relaying her adventures back to Welles. As Dulcie, Welles cast Patty McCormack, fresh from her stage and screen triumphs in The Bad Seed, laden with nominations (Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress) and a coveted prize: the Milky Star Award for Best Juvenile. Akim Tamiroff came straight from Touch of Evil to play Sancho Panza, the role he was put on earth to play, while as Quixote – in the absence of Mischa Auer, who was otherwise engaged in Europe – Welles cast Francisco Reiguera, a Spanish actor and writer who had been in Hollywood as early as 1917, but had returned to Spain, only to leave it again after the triumph of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. If Tamiroff was born to play Panza, then Reiguera was Quixote: emaciated, intense, otherworldly.

  Welles had selected scenes from the novel, which the actors rehearsed, but only, he said to André Bazin, so they would know their characters. ‘Then we went out into the street and we played, not Cervantes, but an improvisation backed up by these rehearsals, by the memory of the characters.’1 It is astonishing that Welles was able to give himself over to this other world, a sportive world of children and innocents and madmen, while the dark vision of life that he had so fervently and imaginatively fashioned for Universal International only a few months earlier was laid out on the slab, being nipped and tucked by mere journeymen, dutifully enacting the will of their ignorant masters. But Welles had been ensorcelled by Cervantes’s world, and when he tore himself away from it at the end of August to return to Hollywood, to view what Nims and company had done with Touch of Evil, he hastened back as quickly as he could, promising to send notes on what he had seen. The notes never arrived, or perhaps they were never sent.

  By now, having done as much on Quixote as he wanted to do for the time being, Welles refocused on Touch of Evil. As if waking up to reality from a dream, he took stock of the situation, suddenly appalled about what was happening to his film. He refused to take calls from the studio, or even from Heston. He finally came back to California at the end of October, eight crucial weeks after he had departed. Eventually he left a message for Edward Muhl, promising to have a talk with him ‘in a couple of days’. Anger and pride possessed him; but he was behaving tactically, too, as he saw it. As far as he was concerned, he was now at war with the studio bosses. But this was a war he could never win, as he might have known from previous experience.

  Meanwhile Heston saw the result of Nims’s work, a rough-cut which, he felt, had ‘flaws’; nonetheless, he said, ‘there are some truly marvellous things in the film. Orson’s enormous talent is evident throughout.’2 Rick Schmidlin, who masterminded the superb restoration that a retrospectively remorseful Universal paid for, forty years later, came to the conclusion that Nims thought he was doing Welles a favour; in fact, what he was really doing was destroying him. ‘The Stranger was Welles’s most commercial film,’ said Schmidlin, ‘and I think Nims was trying to give Welles another commercial film, but it didn’t work because Nims didn’t have Welles’s blueprint in mind.’3 Nor, of course, did Welles himself, till he saw the work in front of him. He sent Muhl a letter detailing everything he thought was wrong with the rough-cut. The studio, for its part, wanted some reshoots, for the sake of clarity. Welles met Heston and told him he was happy to do retakes, ‘and do them free as well’,4 then wired Muhl to tell him that he would be available every night to work with Nims; Muhl wrote back by return to say that Nims would be available any night Welles chose to stop by.

  This seems not to have happened. Welles wrote to Heston that he had had no response from Muhl to his offer to do reshoots. Everything now depended on Heston, said Welles: would he agree to do reshoots with someone else directing? ‘Your position is really quite strong,’ continued Welles, ‘since you accepted the picture only on condition that I directed it and you will be entirely in your rights if you insist that since I am not available, the studio must abide by that condition.’ On his original copy of the letter, Heston scrawled ‘NOT TRUE’ against Welles’s claim that he had only accepted to do the picture if Welles directed it; he had simply suggested Welles as director, and Universal had agreed. Welles pressed on: he saw that Heston was his only chance. ‘You have a financial interest in the film and it would be foolish not to protect that interest. I have made a very generous offer to Muhl and it can only be turned down arbitrarily with a self-admitted attitude of ill-will.’ If Muhl says no, then ‘I would have to insist on having my name as director and author removed from the credits and would have no choice but to conduct an intensive publicity campaign explaining my own position.’ This being the case, he adds, Heston has urgent financial reasons ‘to require that the film be completed by the man with whom you contracted to make it’. He ends, ‘Love, Orson’.5

  Heston understandably began to squirm under this pressure. Welles was beginning to thrash around. He thought he could outwit the studio because they were stupid, and because he was in the right. But, from the studio’s point of view, he wasn’t. They commissioned him to make a commercially viable piece of popular entertainment: he wanted to make a work of art. They had no objection to art, as long as it sold. But in Welles’s case, as far as they could see, artistic simply meant obscure. The more creative he got, especially in post-production, the further down the drain their profits went. This was vexing to Universal, because they liked what he had done, in general. But he seemed to them to be perversely determined to make it inaccessible, even clumsy – to make it look as if it had been ineptly made. From their point of view. They wanted to helped him, and help the film. But time was money, and they were already vastly over their post-production budget. On 11 November Heston realised that, paid or unpaid, ‘it becomes obvious that they really don’t want Orson to do the work for whatever reason. Partly, I suppose, because of the 300 G overage on the budget. Partly because they don’t like the way he made the film, I suppose.’ After a conversation with his agent about the retakes, it became apparent to Heston that ‘my legal position is that I have to do them anyway, which gets me out of a horny dilemma, but doesn’t please me’.6

  Meanwhile, Edward Muhl replied to Welles in a letter whose tone, if a little weary, is measured and wry, and notably courteous in his rehearsal of the whole sorry saga. ‘There seems to be’, he says, ‘a disposition on the part of some of us involved in the matter of Touch of Evil to make a ponderous project out of the completion of the picture, whereas ordinary experience, many time repeated, indicates that this is no more than a simple matter of solving a series of not very intricate problems by the application of simple practical intelligence.’7 These remarks rather neatly sum up what divides Welles from producers in general. They see a set of ‘not very intricate problems’, which they have the wisdom and experience to settle effortlessly. Welles sees an opportunity to do something new, something beautiful, something that makes a contribution to the art of film and that doesn’t just reproduce the last successful movie.

  In his letter Muhl – who was not without a sense of humour – imagines a state of war over Touch of Evil, with the production of a great number of White Papers, which would serve as the basis for some youngster’s PhD thesis on ‘The Unfinished War between Orson Welles and Universal, 1956–1959’. He humorously notes that the cutting and finishing period on the picture is running second only to Jet Pilot (which, directed by Howard Hughes when he owned Universal, had taken seven years from start to release). The last day of shooting on Touch of Evil had been 1 April. After four months of editing, Muhl had asked, he said, to see the picture. On 22 July he received a communication from Welles in Mexico in which there was, as he puts it, ‘a muffled tone of anguish’ because Welles ‘felt that the picture had been jerked from his hands’. Muhl had replied to this letter on 24 July, suggesting that when Welles returned from Mexico they should have a talk, and at the same time informing him that he had assigned Ernest Nims as cu
tter, ‘to get the picture in absolutely final shape for preview’. Muhl had then asked Welles to say if he agreed with this or if he had an alternative suggestion. Welles, having seen the picture with Nims, said he would make a number of suggestions in writing and transmit them to Muhl. ‘You, or someone connected to you was notified approximately three weeks after this that those suggestions had not arrived.’ They had finally appeared on 4 November. Then, abandoning the tone of sweet reasonableness, Muhl’s letter cut to the chase: the film had now, with the substantial expenditure on editing, cost some $1,100,000: that is to say, $300,000 (roughly 30 per cent) over budget. He and his fellow-executives had ‘carefully’ screened the picture many times; some 60 or 70 per cent of Welles’s suggestions in his letter of 4 November had been implemented, said Muhl, as well as one of Heston’s.

  What they were now proposing, Muhl told Welles, was to shoot seven script-pages of additional film to ‘repair certain chaotic sections in the telling of this story which we believed was intended to be told’. First and foremost, they wanted to ‘straighten out and reduce the cryptic quality of the opening reels of the picture’ and to effect ‘other improvements’ that they felt were necessary. This, said Muhl, would cost $20,000, excluding dubbing. They would be getting another director to do it, he remarked, ‘so as to assure to as great an extent as possible, the obtaining of this needed material without, if possible, spending more than this allocated sum on a picture which is already over-priced’. The formal legalistic language sought to conceal the enormity of what he was proposing. ‘It is my definite feeling that this will not impair the fine creative contribution you have already made to the picture which I duly appreciate.’ What was he talking about? The entire picture was Welles’s fine creative contribution. ‘I would like you to go along with this plan sympathetically, if you possibly can, and give us any assistance that it is possible for you to give with the players or any other personnel involved. Upon the completion and incorporation of the material, I will be very pleased to show you the picture in the form which we consider complete, and to receive any editorial contribution you may wish to suggest, or, conversely, to amiably endure your criticism, however the situation may evolve.’ Muhl was addressing Welles like a liberal parent talking to a naughty child who has been grounded – this, to the director of Citizen Kane. Finally, stiffly, he added, ‘the foregoing is as nearly as it can be made to do, an honest statement of my feelings and I hope you respect it’. It was not a statement of feelings at all: it was a fait accompli.