by Simon Callow
Several notices felt obliged to compare the production (and the play) with Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, which had opened the night before. ‘Rhinoceros’, said the Observer, ‘proved a sad disappointment, and The Caretaker the most dazzling evening to reach the London theatre this year . . . the fault is not Ionesco’s and certainly not Olivier’s. I suspect Orson Welles.’45 The production had its fans – ‘Orson Welles, as producer and designer, uses the full vocabulary of the theatre in a way that makes the average director’s pidgin-language seem pitifully inexpressive,’ said Queen magazine. ‘We see the ground convulsed by the charges of a herd of rhinoceroses below the stage, tearing up banisters that suddenly disappear down the stair-well and so arousing the blood of a watching bourgeoise that she leaps down the well with a cry to join them, landing astride the back of a rhinoceros whom she recognises as her husband.’46 On balance, though, Welles did not come out of it smelling of roses. In particular, he was thought not to have solved the great technical challenges, notably the on-stage rhinocerisation of John. ‘We only get an impression of Jekyll becoming Hyde in the old stock-company manner,’ said J.C. Trewin, ‘and taking a quite unconscionable time about it.’47 The acutest of the reviewers, Philip Hope-Wallace, of the Guardian, put his finger on the consequences of Welles’s transposition of the action to England: ‘a distinguished cast’, he said, ‘have become, in their Englishing, puppets from a little revue, mere types whose transmogrification into pachyderms carries no pathos or comic force. Moreover, the stilted, stylised, speedy playing takes all the edge off the horror. We ought to feel in the first act that we are dealing with “real” people. We feel no such thing.’48 There was worse, much worse.
They cried all the way to the bank. Tickets, already at a premium, were now impossible to get, except on the black market. ‘Sixteen shilling stalls for Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court are being offered for two guineas,’ lamented the Evening Standard.49 Interest was unflagging: the Standard itself carried a three-part serialisation of Ionesco’s original short story, while Robert Robinson had a facetious piece in the Sunday Graphic under the heading ‘WHO IS IONESCO?’ Something about the tiny dramatist really got under the skin of the British press. ‘I met a man’, wrote Robinson, ‘who thought IONESCO was what the top bank of his typewriter keyboard spelled. I met another who said, Ionesco, ah yes, I did the bathroom with it. And yet a third who said, “Wait, wait, don’t tell me, it’s an anagram” . . . I am left wondering why meaningless has become so popular.’50 But popular it was.
A transfer was inevitable, though Olivier was getting little pleasure from doing the show. They were just about to announce a limited run at the Strand Theatre in the West End, nearly three times the size of the Royal Court, when Vivien Leigh unleashed a bombshell, which instantly made international headlines: she was prepared, she said, to give Olivier a divorce so that he could marry Joan Plowright. It was the first time Plowright had been named in this context. The next day, therefore, Rhinoceros was all over the papers again; if anybody had failed to notice its existence before, they knew about it now. It did 99 per cent of its business during its eight-week run – better business, astonishingly, than The Entertainer, which was very good news for Welles, who was in some of his direst financial straits for a long time.
In the second week of rehearsal for Rhinoceros he had gone to see Pieter Rogers in his office at the Royal Court. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I can’t cope.’ He dictated a letter to be sent to one of his creditors: they were literally at the door. ‘But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go running to George or Oscar or Cecil Tennant and say Orson’s having terrible financial troubles, because I’m sure they’d already been told that by Orson.’51 Shortly afterwards, Welles was served with a bankruptcy petition filed against: ‘George Orson Welles, actor, of South Eaton Square, formerly of Brown’s Hotel, Dover St.’ Bringing up the rear, Edwards and MacLiammóir, who were faced with piles of unpaid (and unpayable) bills from Chimes at Midnight, had instructed a new solicitor, Terence de Vere White, to pursue Welles; the new man proved unrelenting. Welles wrote a six-page letter to Edwards justifying his position. This letter was really, he said, in an uncomfortable covering note, written for the solicitor’s eyes. ‘I hope you’ll appreciate . . . how impossibly difficult it is to write about money differences with a friend, without seeming unfriendly. Do please understand that I have no wish but to be very fair – even less than fair in my own behalf, and more than fair in yourself – if that should be necessary to the preservation of our own relationship.’52
The formal letter written for White’s eyes is familiar in tone from the letters Welles had written to Edwards and MacLiammóir after Othello: a catalogue of misunderstandings; of excessive generosity on his, Welles’s, part; of unthinking greediness on Edwards’s part. He notes that he has lost upward of £8,000 on Chimes at Midnight, whose whole raison d’être, he says, was to help Dublin Gate Productions through a difficult spot. ‘I’ve told you the awful total of my losses on Chimes. This all comes out savings, and really scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The only money I’ve earned for six months is some three hundred and fifty pounds for directing Rhinoceros. (Please note how much poorly I was paid for directing Olivier in London than you were for directing me in Dublin!)’ It turns out, in fact, says Welles, on close examination of the figures, that – amazingly! – it is he, Welles, who is owed money, not the other way round. He proposes to send £500, not as payment, but as a loan, bearing in mind Edwards’s and MacLiammóir’s admittedly worse situation; and in closing, he reminds Edwards that he, Welles, was responsible for him getting the part of the Prophet Samuel in David and Goliath. Above all, he requests that they call off their legal eagle, as Welles calls him. ‘What sincerely frightens me is that if I’m forced to deal with him, my only adequate defence must be costly to you and dangerous to a friendship which I value more than I can possibly say.’ The whole episode is a dreadful warning about the pitfalls of entering into a business partnership with friends. The combination of Edwards and MacLiammóir’s unworldliness and Welles’s fecklessness was more or less fatal to the relationship – a resolution was never achieved. Friendship was a difficult thing for Welles to maintain at the best of times; his essentially restless nature forbade the element of constancy that is friendship’s sine qua non.
The prospect of the transfer of Rhinoceros was encouraging, though scarcely the answer to all his problems; what he needed was a couple of fat film roles. Welles had avoided the Royal Court during the run there; his presence at the technical rehearsal for the transfer was token, a condition of his being paid. They had lost two actors en route to the West End: Alan Webb, who was replaced by Michael Gough; and Joan Plowright, for obvious reasons. Olivier feared that if she and Olivier appeared in the play together, there might have been protests during the show: divorce was still regarded as the devil’s work by many people in the Britain of 1960. Plowright was replaced by the up-and-coming Maggie Smith (sufficiently unknown to be described in the newspapers as ‘the twenty-five-year-old daughter of an Oxford pathologist’);53 she had scored a success at the Old Vic in What Every Woman Knows and a revue called Share My Lettuce. Her only recollection of Welles is of him sitting in the stalls, his long legs and large feet draped over the seats, shouting out instructions and swigging from a hip flask. Both Welles and Ionesco were disappointed when Olivier limited his commitment to the eight-week run at the Strand; attempts were made to lure another star. For a while it seemed as if the great English comedian Tony Hancock – an inspired idea for Bérenger – might take over, but he finally declined; then, casting their net rather wider, they toyed with the idea of the baby-faced slapstick comedian Charlie Drake. These ideas came from Welles, whose knowledge of British comedians was encyclopaedic. But no one wanted to follow Olivier. And so Rhinoceros came to an end.
It is impossible to know what the production might have been like if it had been conceived, executed and produced in calmer
circumstances, because those circumstances were virtually unknown to Welles – were, indeed, possibly anathema to him. Despite its financial success, it was a wretched experience for virtually everyone involved in it. The unhappy stage manager had suffered a nervous collapse after the first night and been replaced; the actors never grew into their roles. And – though they maintained superficially cordial relations to the end – Welles was deeply shocked by his experience of Olivier. ‘I’ve never known so monstrous and cunning and stupid an ego, except Chaplin’s,’ he told Kathleen Tynan in 1983. ‘Very similar. And both, you know, tremendous figures in the 20th Century. And both curiously old-fashioned and peasant-like . . . but Chaplin didn’t use people. Chaplin simply demolished them. Larry’s more Machiavellian, you know.’54
And it is true: Welles was not like them. He never demolished or outwitted anyone. The only victim of his outbursts was himself. He lacked the will to power that both Chaplin and Olivier so overwhelmingly possessed, the instinct that told them they would not survive unless they had wiped out the opposition. Welles was, in a sense, more innocent than either man, or perhaps more aristocratic: he expected that things would come to him as of right; they knew that they would have to fight all the way for what they wanted. Welles relied on adrenalin and natural genius; they knew that work – fanatical and often repetitive work – was the way to succeed. Uncertainty was intolerable for them: the terrifying possibility of failure led them to take swift remedial action. Unlike Olivier, Welles could live with constant change; indeed, he could not live without it.
Though they were both acknowledged titans, Olivier, in the world’s eyes, was the successful one, ascending to ever greater heights; Welles was the ruined, chaotic, wilful one, a wreck. Olivier was a titan, Welles the Titanic. It was, after all, Olivier – not Ionesco, and certainly not Welles – whom they had flocked to see. In his memoir, Confessions of an Actor, Olivier writes about Rhinoceros and his performance in it, and describes the brouhaha surrounding the production. Remarkably, though not entirely surprisingly, he never even mentions Welles’s name. Likewise Ionesco, who saw the production twice – the last night and the first – and who describes many of the productions from the play’s first year (French, German, Italian and American), makes no reference whatever to a production in which the man playing the leading part was the actor generally considered the greatest in the English-speaking world, and the man directing it was – well, Orson Welles.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Welles on Trial
WELLES TURNED forty-five in 1960. By chance, at this climacteric, he was subjected to a great deal of very close scrutiny, in the newspapers and on television. It was time, it was clearly felt, to reopen the inquest on Welles. He seemed, to many people, to be a great deal older than he was. Precocious in everything, he already had the demeanour of a gnarled veteran, a battered warrior, a boxer on the ropes. Physically, he was in poor shape: it was about now that the battle for his waistline was lost; Welles, said Tynan, was now ‘perilously fat’.1 Though his status as a celebrity never faltered, his standing as a creative artist was low in the English-speaking world: his last four films as a director, Macbeth, Othello, Mr Arkadin and Touch of Evil, had been patronisingly dismissed and all had failed at the box office; his returns to the theatre, apart from the brief triumph of Moby-Dick in 1955, had been unsatisfactory in different ways: The Blessed and the Damned a patchy mess, King Lear an out-and-out disaster, Chimes at Midnight a succès d’estime seen by a mere handful of people in Ireland. His production of Rhinoceros, though a commercial success, was, by and large, disliked by the critics. It had been a protracted and very public fall from grace. The story of his supposed dégringolade had supplanted the earlier one of his prodigiousness: he now embodied the very idea of failure; this story only grew more fascinating to newspaper editors as the achievement of Citizen Kane, twenty years earlier, was more and more widely acknowledged, routinely topping international polls as the greatest film ever made. This complicated kind of fame – fame, not popularity – was one that translated into neither ticket sales nor job offers, except in the sphere where he least welcomed them: movie roles. These trickled in at a rate of two or three a year, in ever more obscure international co-productions, in which his various transformations – Tartar warlord, Venetian Renaissance historian, grotesque sea-captain – became increasingly preposterous.
However, quietly, steadily, an alternative narrative was gaining currency. In Europe – especially in France – Welles was regarded as self-evidently one of the greatest film directors of all time, a key artist of the twentieth century. The young cinéastes of Cahiers du Cinéma, soon to generate the nouvelle vague, were hypnotically fascinated by him, analysing every frame of his films with a forensic obsessiveness that kept him on the hop when he was interviewed by them. He hugely enjoyed the game of matching, and even exceeding, their speculations as to what he had meant by each cadre, every découpage. In effect, the inspired improviser who had made the films was a different man from the erudite panellist now discussing them; François Truffaut, one of the most acute of the Cahiers group, remarked that Welles’s films were shot by an exhib-itionist and cut by a censor; he might have added that they were then explained by a philosopher.
Welles’s two long interviews with the magazine are wonderfully entertaining reading, and again offer a glimpse of his matchless conversation, ranging widely over history and philosophy, delighting in off-the-cuff definitions and provocative paradoxes. The man who emerges from these interviews is a master of self-expression and a model of intellectual self-confidence, which placed him in a different league from pretty well any other American film-maker. In fact young American cinéastes, in a host of small magazines, were beginning to offer their own revisionist views of Welles’s position in cinema history. Not yet thirty, Andrew Sarris, fresh from a year in Paris hobnobbing with the Cahiers crowd, had thoroughly absorbed the auteur theory and, as early as 1956, had, under its influence, written a path-breaking essay about Citizen Kane and its creator with the suggestive title ‘American Baroque’ – exactly what the Italian critics had said of Welles (but in their case it was an insult). Welles was becoming an emblematic figure, a rallying point, in a way that no other American film-maker ever had, or ever would again. Already, at the age of forty-five, he had become a cause as much as a creator. The elegant cultural commentator Parker Tyler, in his puckish essay ‘Orson Welles and the Big Experimental Film Cult’, analysed Welles’s paradoxical significance within the avant-garde film-making community:
Simply what he is and has been makes Welles the quintessential type of Big Experimental Cult hero – always achieving failure yet bringing it off brilliantly, decking it with eloquence and a certain magnificence; fusing in each film the vices and the virtues appropriate to them. Welles is the eternal Infant Prodigy, and as such wins the indulgence of adult critics and the fervid sympathy of the younger generation, which sees in him a mirror of its own budding aspirations and adventurous near-successes.2
In 1959, an anonymous writer in Contact magazine wrote what amounts to an elegy for Welles, seeming to accept that he had been destroyed by the System. But if he was no longer a major force, he remained a continuing source of inspiration:
His contribution will continue through the men he trained and influenced. If he was abused unnecessarily by those who looked with disdain upon imagination in the cinema and if he was therefore canonised by those who defend the abused, Orson Welles was not responsible for either the abuse or the defense. His interest was in making films. Yet history has given him a special place because he stood in the middle of a battle of ideals. And he will probably be remembered as the man who gave his life to introducing novelty to a mundane industry of the arts, and, through his baptism of fire, became a saint for the cinema.3
Perhaps the most significant event in the growth of an alternative American view of Welles was the season mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961 by the twe
nty-two-year-old actor-turned-film programmer Peter Bogdanovich; in the accompanying booklet, The Cinema of Orson Welles, Bogdanovich roundly asserted that though Welles had made just seven pictures that could fairly be called his own, there was a personal unity in his work that could only be found in the work of ‘the very greatest poets of the cinema’. You could enter a Welles film at any point, he said, and know who had made it, not simply because of ‘his darkly lyric imagery, his mysterious, brooding sense of the evil in the world, his remarkable technical ingenuity and originality, his witty, probing dialogue, or indeed his own physical presence as an actor’, but because of what Bogdanovich calls ‘the profound theme that runs through all his work, man as a tragic victim of the paradox between his sense of morality and his own dark nature’.4 Welles’s essential themes have always been and no doubt always will be the subject of debate; what Bogdanovich was saying, just as Sarris had said before him, was that as a film-maker Welles had a voice that was entirely uncorrupted by the formulaic, the routine, the conventional: he wholly lived up to the magisterial apophthegm he had enunciated to André Bazin: ‘I believe a work is good to the degree that it expresses the man who created it.’5
In Britain there had always been an undertow of respect for Welles, starting with the very first monograph ever written about him – a surprisingly shrewd and remarkably accurate little book, given that its author, Roy Alexander Fowler, was a teenager writing in wartime Britain and that the book was published in 1946, when Welles himself was just thirty, and only Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Stranger had been released. Since then, the British Film Institute’s journal Sight and Sound had maintained a steady output of articles and analyses of Welles’s work in which he was taken very seriously; and a younger generation of British film-makers, members of the Free Cinema and British New Wave schools, cheered him on as an iconoclast and renegade from the Hollywood system. Nor was he neglected by the arts establishment: at the BBC he had a crucial admirer in Huw Wheldon, who one week in March 1960 programmed a mini Welles festival, which consisted of showings of Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, preceded by an hour-long interview of Welles by Wheldon on Monitor, BBC television’s cultural flagship. It was heralded by a laudatory piece in the BBC’s mass-circulation magazine Radio Times by the documentary film-maker Lindsay Anderson, already an Oscar-winner (for Tuesday’s Child), a member of the Free Cinema movement, and before long to be a major film-maker in his own right. His article is ringingly headed ‘He Asked the Impossible’.6 All of this, in Britain in 1960, was tantamount to canonisation: even Wheldon – normally rather probing – was reverent in the presence of Welles. In the interview Wheldon gives Welles the chance to tell his story, which he does with inimitable charm, in a tone very different from the one he uses for Bazin and Bitsch and company at Cahiers. There is not a trace of anything highbrow in the air; he presents himself as a straightforward chap who likes to tell a good yarn. He dismisses what he calls ‘the aesthetics of the cinema’: ‘I regard the whole bag of tricks of the cinema as being so petty and so simple and so uninteresting essentially. It’s what a film says rather than a question of cinematic style and plastic shrinery, you know all this kind of special language that these people talk about in the cinema clubs; and I feel myself tremendously at odds with cinema clubs as much as with Hollywood.’7
