by Simon Callow
Meanwhile, in the production office, a sheriff deputed by the IRS was waiting to impound Welles’s entire salary for the film against outstanding tax. The producer, Darryl Zanuck, had the onerous task of breaking the news to Welles – especially tricky because they needed the actor to do some dubbing on the scene he had filmed the previous day, the all-important final peroration. Welles took it surprisingly calmly, then went with the producer, director, editor and camera crew into the viewing theatre, where they looked at the rushes of the scene they had shot the day before. Welles had been sitting alone near the front of the theatre, with everybody else ten rows back. The screening came to an end:
He rose from his seat looking like an Old Testament version of God in all His wrath. ‘That is the worst film I have ever seen in my life,’ he declaimed. ‘It is a disgrace. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for being associated with it!’ There seemed to be small black clouds, with little flashes of forked lightning, roiling about his brow as he stepped into the aisle and started to pace. His voice supplied the necessary thunder. ‘It is a total disaster from beginning to end. I am shocked and dismayed by what I’ve seen,’ he roared. We sat there immobile, hypnotized.
Then he attacked Fleischer: how could he have selected such poor angles? Didn’t he know better than to show him in a chest-size figure that made him look like a character in a Punch-and-Judy show? Couldn’t he see that the American flag behind him in the rear of the courtroom distracted from his speech? It was the camera-man’s turn next. ‘Hardly pausing for breath,’ reported Fleischer, ‘heaping acid invective and vile criticism on our heads . . . he finally stormed out of the theater.’ They ran after him, finally tracking him down back in the viewing theatre, where he did the dubbing ‘in a cold fury’, perfunctorily but efficiently. Then it came to the final twenty seconds, where there was a clearly audible camera hum on the soundtrack. ‘I refuse to loop this scene,’ said Welles. ‘This is a matter for the Screen Actors’ Guild,’ he said. ‘And with that,’ says Fleischer, ‘he left and never came back. He got on a boat and went to China’ (where he proceeded to torment Lewis Gilbert, the director of Ferry to Hong Kong, who described it as his ‘nightmare film’, entirely because of Welles’s intransigence).29 Even Fleischer, who had had a stimulating, enjoyable time with Welles on Compulsion, was astonished that ‘he was willing to harm the picture as well as himself by walking away from the opportunity to make it right. For all his brilliance, his genius, his intellect, he was at this moment an immature, unreasonable juvenile, cutting off his fake nose to spite what? Himself? Me? The movie business that wouldn’t let him direct? It didn’t make sense to me then and it doesn’t make sense to me now.’ Fleischer wondered whether ‘maybe, just maybe, it’s the basic genetic, tragic flaw that brought this movie giant down’.
A few weeks later, Welles wrote to Fleischer apologising for his behaviour on the last day of the film, asking for his ‘forgiveness and understanding’.30
It is worth relaying this incident, firstly because it is one of many, many similar scenes throughout Welles’s career as a film actor; and secondly because Fleischer is a friendly witness, admiring and sympathetic – to a remarkable degree, in that he worked with Welles again, on Crack in the Mirror, on which Welles again behaved very, very badly. ‘You think you did a great job on Compulsion, don’t you?’ he said to Fleischer one Saturday evening after shooting a scene in Crack in the Mirror. ‘You’re taking a lot of credit for very little. All you’ve got is one outstanding performance that made you and the whole picture look good.’ ‘Orson,’ replied Fleischer:
‘I want to tell you something. I think it’s one hell of a fine picture and I’m proud of it. I’ve never been proud of a picture before, but I am of this one. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m not going to let you spoil it for me.’ We stared at each other, then he said quietly, ‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I apologize.’
He behaves badly; he apologises. It is a recurring pattern, though he rarely apologises to anyone without power. Mostly what is at issue is a matter of status. He is being humiliated, diminished, disregarded in some way. The offender seems not to understand who or what he is; the offence, in essence, is lese-majesty. Like many another analyst of Welles’s career, Fleischer sees Kane as the root of the problem: ‘The magnificent achievement of Citizen Kane and its disappointing aftermath must have been like a worm constantly and painfully eating away at his insides.’ Welles, he says, was like a king in exile ‘who still considered himself king’.
Fleischer describes another incident: an even more extreme manifestation of this sense of outraged dignity. Welles was on the set, about to commence his cross-examination of Diana Varsi as Ruth Evans. The unit publicity man walked onto the set. Welles caught sight of him, ‘a tall, blond fellow in his thirties,’ says Fleischer, ‘with a puffy face. He was a tasty dish to set before the king.’ Welles roared at him: ‘What are you trying to do, ruin me, you incompetent nitwit?’ He had told the man to cancel his appointment with the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, which the publicist had done, but an hour later. Welles was bellowing now:
‘An hour later! You called her an hour later! It should have been done immediately. Have you no comprehension of urgency or priority? Didn’t this seem important to you? What you did was totally irresponsible, inefficient, and lazy! Did you have the sense to send her flowers? Can’t you think for yourself, you witless oaf, or has your calling destroyed your brain? Are you so unqualified that you have to be told how to do your job? An ape could be trained to do it better. All you’re doing is keeping a monkey out of work.’
The publicity man finally managed to call out in some anger, says Fleischer, tears running down his face, ‘You’re not a very nice person, Mr Welles!’ ‘Don’t you tell me what kind of person I am,’ bawled Welles. ‘Look to yourself, you nincompoop. You are an irresponsible and unreliable fool whose inadequacy is equalled only by his ineptness. You are a member of an overpaid and under-talented profession, and I want you to leave this stage and never show your face around me again.’
At which point, says Fleischer, Welles seamlessly went into the cross-examination of Varsi:
It was a tour de force for Orson, a display of dazzling virtuosity. He had shown us a flash of royal purple. The whole thing, from start to finish, was a bravura performance. He had captured us, manipulated us, and finally entertained us, if you can call the spectacle of a Christian being eaten by the king of beasts entertaining. When he reached his last line, ‘No further questions,’ he knew he had us in the palm of his hand. He turned and sailed off to his dressing room like a mighty dreadnought under full steam and never looked back. Curtain.
This is the behaviour of a man in hell – behaviour stemming from impotent rage at his situation, behaviour of which, only minutes later, he must be profoundly ashamed, knowing that its assertion of power and vitality provides a temporary and meaningless rush of adrenalin, at the expense of someone utterly unable to defend himself. It is the eternal recourse of the bully, and it is ugly, irredeemably ugly. Whether it is, as Fleischer claims, the manifestation of ‘a tragic genetic flaw’ is another matter. But it is to be doubted, even if it were, whether that was what – in Fleischer’s phrase – brought ‘this movie giant down’. The reason Welles never again worked in Hollywood as a director is not that he was ungovernable, but that the work he produced failed to fit into any of the categories that sales departments could market. Once his creative juices were stirred, he was incapable of working formulaically: he had to follow his impulses.
Touch of Evil was so nearly a great cop movie, but it had Welles’s stamp all over it, to a degree that alienated the average viewer. ‘I did it my way’ might as well have been the epitaph of his career as much as his proudest boast. Acting in other men’s films, however much he might rewrite the dialogue or try to influence the camera angles, could only be frustrating. With rare excep
tions, pretty well every time Welles appeared in another man’s film, it turned ugly. The best plan was to squeeze his role into the shortest possible time, so that he had no opportunity to indulge in the full horror of his situation. ‘You know,’ he said laughingly to Fleischer on the set of Compulsion, ‘you’re being very lucky with me on this picture.’ ‘Really?’ asked Fleischer. ‘How come?’ ‘You’ve only got me for a short time,’ Welles said. ‘If I’m on a picture too long I get bored. Then I can cause problems.’
After Ferry to Hong Kong, in which Welles appears in a self-designed make-up apparently representing W.C. Fields as Quasimodo and sporting an enterprisingly ‘off’ British accent, he turned up in David and Goliath, a ludicrous Franco-Italian co-production in which he plays a raddled King Saul, alongside a Yugoslavian beefcake David and an Italian circus giant called Kronos as Goliath. Welles bashfully confessed to Peter Bogdanovich that he had directed his own scenes, but presumably (to judge from them) this would merely have involved the most perfunctory indication of where the cameras might be. Welles’s performance is broad, in every sense, though it is worth noting that neither in this role nor any of the many other comparable parts in which he is accused of chewing the scenery does he raise his voice. Like the great Victorian stars, he speaks slowly and softly, creating time and space around himself. It is unquestionably ham, but it is very thinly sliced.
This embarrassment of a film was quickly eclipsed by the success of Compulsion, for which he shared the Best Actor Prize at Cannes with Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman; Welles delivers the courtroom summing-up speech like a great operatic scena, with a remarkable dynamic range and a masterful command of pace, powerfully dominating murmurs and protest from the public gallery, sinking to great inward intimacy in his addresses to the judge. It is rhetorical, properly so, and in the same way that Darrow’s great original summing-up was, but there is no doubting the character’s sincerity – or, indeed, Welles’s. Commonly cast as thugs, tyrants and villains, he is generally called on to express the opposite of his own views. Welles could readily identify with Wilk/Darrow’s anti-capital-punishment sentiments, which chimed exactly with his statement of what he calls ‘the classic liberal tradition’ in his 1958 interview with Bazin and Bitsch. The speech struck such a chord with the public that it was released separately on a bestselling 45 rpm extended play record, which must be the last time such a thing occurred with a Hollywood movie.
The principal reason Welles had made David and Goliath, apart from the substantial emolument, was to avail himself of the loan of equipment from the film company (the fragrantly named Beaver-Champion Attractions Inc.), so that he could shoot more of Don Quixote, which was in a state of continuous evolution; the new material was shot in Manziana, just outside Rome, where Welles was giving his King Saul at Cinecittà. Quixote had by now become what it would be for the rest of his days: Welles’s creative lifeline, the repository of his artistic conscience. He had to answer to no one for it. He could shoot it in his own good time, following the implications of the story, the better he understood it; he could endlessly experiment with editing. Whenever he made a decent killing with a part, a sizeable portion of it was invested in Quixote – his notebook, his diary, his cinematic letter to himself.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Everyone Loves the Fellow Who’s Smiling
WHEN HIS sense of self-esteem was running low, Welles generally turned back to the theatre. He had been in discussion with Hilton Edwards for some time about possible collaborations with the Gate Theatre; they had continued these discussions when they worked together in the dreaded David and Goliath, in which – no doubt at Welles’s suggestion – Edwards had been engaged to play the Prophet Samuel, which he does with appropriately vatic intensity, like something out of an illustrated Victorian Old Testament, the pseudo-biblical phrases rolling nobly off his tongue. He must have felt that the end result was not entirely satisfactory, since his performance is credited to one Edward Hilton. But at least it gave him a chance to nail Welles down to a commitment for the coming season.
The relationship between Welles and Edwards was complex and deep. Visiting Welles in Dublin, Richard Fleischer was astonished to see the overweening Welles – the terror of stills photographers and press representatives everywhere – reduced to a schoolboy in Edwards’s presence. Edwards was Welles’s first and only master in the theatre, and Welles constantly looked for opportunities to work with him; Edwards, for his part, saw Welles as an extraordinary, world-beating personality and a fountain of almost too many wonderful ideas, but a constant source of stimulation. Over the now thirty-five years of their friendship, they had endured a number of challenging experiences – above all, the financial meltdown caused by Edwards’s and MacLiammóir’s participation in Othello and the general chaos that prevailed on The Blessed and the Damned – but when Welles called for him, Edwards always answered, most recently on Moby-Dick in London. They were chums, comrades-in-arms. The relationship between Welles and MacLiammóir was, on both sides, much more ambivalent, Welles believing that MacLiammóir (whom he freely admitted was a great actor and an extraordinary creative personality) held Edwards in a witch-like spell, while MacLiammóir was darkly suspicious that Welles used Edwards for his own selfish purposes. It is not entirely fortuitous that the deal for Welles’s latest venture with the partners was finally sealed while MacLiammóir was away in America playing Don Pedro to John Gielgud’s Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing on Broadway.
In fact, discussions had started in June of 1959, when Welles’s idea for a one-man show in which he would play Falstaff had evolved into the notion of a two-handed play, exploring the relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal. Welles had long been obsessed by the figure of Falstaff. Winter of Discontent, the adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III that he had staged at the Todd School as a schoolboy, had been intended as the first part of an evening whose second part would have culminated in Henry V; the central character of this part would have been none other than Sir John Falstaff, played by none other than Orson Welles, aged fourteen. Time and money ran out in 1929, but nearly ten years later Welles, now at the head of the Mercury Theatre, returned to the idea with a script called Five Kings, which was essentially Part Two of Winter of Discontent. Welles at last got to play Falstaff, but the production – heavily dependent on a capricious revolving stage – was not a success; nor was Welles’s Falstaff greatly admired. He refused to give up on it, though, insisting on putting the costumes and the set (all seventeen tons of it) into storage. After nearly ten years, it was clear that nothing was going to happen to it, and in 1946 Welles finally acceded to Dick Wilson’s request to be allowed to sell it off. But only a year later, he got wind of a production of a version of the Falstaff story by his old Mercury colleague Richard Baer and shot off a furious protest; Baer hastily wrote back to reassure him that his production was nothing to do with Five Kings: it was ‘a slight improvement on my own version which I did at Princeton as an undergraduate.’1
Falstaff was his, Welles felt, as of right; but unlike the other great characters he had attempted, he was not simply motivated by the challenge of cracking a huge role: his feelings for Falstaff were much more personal. Welles saw the fat knight as a member of an endangered and rapidly disappearing species: an individualist, a sensualist, a yea-sayer, representing Merrie England, that prelapsarian state of being of which the last traces had all but disappeared with the coming of industrialisation – which had, indeed, already begun to disappear in Shakespeare’s own time, as the all-encompassing Elizabethan state wrapped its tentacles around the nation and the old ways disappeared under the pressure of new laws, stricter controls. Falstaff is oblivious of the threat of this encroachment. He carries on regardless, devoid of the sense of guilt that haunts modern man; he is, in fact, essentially innocent. Welles goes one step further: he is not just innocent, he is good. And then Welles goes yet one more step. Falstaff is essentially motivated by love �
�� love of life, and, most poignantly, love of Hal. Inevitably, from Welles’s perspective, he will be betrayed.
It is a striking and an original reading of Falstaff, which almost completely omits the character’s comic dimension, seen by theatrical tradition as central; Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that he saw the character as ‘tragic’. In fact, he seems to have related to the play in an intensely autobiographical and highly complex way. Of course he identified with Falstaff, the man of insatiable appetite; but he connected equally strongly with Hal – Hal who uses life-embracing Falstaff to humanise himself, casting him as a warm, loving, permissive substitute for his cold, austere father. At the end of the play Hal rejects this ‘bad’ drunken father, just as Welles rejected his own ‘bad’ drunken father; Hal’s devastating words to Falstaff as he discards him – ‘I know thee not, old man’ – could just as easily have been uttered by Welles to his father Dick when, egged on by Roger Hill, he refused to meet him unless he stopped drinking; not much later, Dick died without ever seeing his son again. In ‘My Father Wore Black Spats’, the extraordinary autobiographical fragment he wrote for French Vogue towards the end of his life, Welles said: ‘I killed my father’,2 which is no more literally true than saying that Hal killed Falstaff, which Welles insisted he had.
All of this was swirling around inside Welles when he approached the character of Falstaff again, after a gap of twenty years. The plan was to do the two-handed play Welles and Edwards had been discussing at the Dublin Theatre Festival, in September of 1959, for two weeks; this was duly announced. The Dublin impresario and theatre producer Louis Elliman would produce it; Hilton Edwards would direct it; and one of the Gate’s regular designers, Molly McEwen, was to design it. When McEwan pulled out because of other commitments, Welles assumed responsibility for designing both costumes and sets. Welles was now back at home with Paola and Beatrice in Fregene. Edwards, obviously wishing to move things along, wrote to him, offering to sketch out a rough version of the play, which by now had grown again, evolving into a full-cast event that would comprise virtually all of Falstaff’s scenes from Henry IV, Parts One and Two shaped into two halves, linked by material from Henry V and Richard II. Welles, digging deeper into the material, was now ambitiously trying to encompass not just Falstaff’s story, but the birth of the modern political world – the triumph of realpolitik over the chivalric ideal.
