Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  He is first discovered, immediately after we have seen the half-naked extras twisting and shouting in the summer sunshine, sitting – as Welles sometimes sat on his own sets – in a sort of meditative trance, almost comatose, eyes glazed, communing with his inner world, script in hand, wearing a huge black trench coat in the middle of the baking Roman countryside. Finally he murmurs a phrase: ‘The crown.’ This is taken up by assistant directors, runners, gaffers, grips, prop men, even the extras: ‘The crown! The crown!! The crown!!!’ As the world of the film springs to life around him, Welles continues to sit, semi-glazed, in which state he is approached by a reporter, with whom he deals in a playfully provocative manner, much as Welles himself dealt with reporters. He allows the hapless man only four questions: the first is ‘What is this project trying to express?’ ‘My intimate, profound and traditional Catholicism,’ replies Welles, with a ghost of a smile, his eyebrows delicately expressing the absurdity of his reply – he, a notorious Marxist. Welles was not a Marxist, of course; Pasolini was. Welles was not a Catholic (though he sometimes whimsically claimed to have been brought up as one); Pasolini, naturally, had been, and expressed profound respect for the Bible narratives, as – of course – did Welles. ‘What do you think of Italy?’ asks the journalist, for his second question. ‘The most illiterate masses and the most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe,’ says Welles, and the remark could so easily have come from his own mouth. ‘What d’you think of death?’ quizzes the journalist. ‘As a Marxist I never give it any thought,’ says Welles-Pasolini. The journalist has used up three of his four questions. Finally he asks, ‘What do you think of our great director, Fellini?’ Again you can see Pasolini and Welles simultaneously in the wicked reply: ‘He . . . dances.’ Pause and then, definitively: ‘He dances.’

  The journalist starts to go. The Director calls him back: ‘I am a force of the past,’ he says, explaining to the baffled hack that the words are from a poem in which the poet describes certain ancient ruins whose style and history no one understands any more, and certain hideous modern buildings that everyone, alas, understands perfectly well. He reads from the printed screenplay of Pasolini’s film Mamma Roma, which contains a number of Pasolini’s poems; the ecstatic words – Italian Whitman – conveying a dynamic sense of the past, an urgent sense of loss, an insistent longing for wholeness, which must have echoed powerfully for Welles himself, ‘the man of many nostalgias’:

  Tradition is my only love. I come from ruins, churches, altarpieces, forgotten hamlets in the Apennines and the foothills of the Alps where our brothers dwelled. I walk the via Tuscolana like a madman, the Appian Way like a dog without a master. I behold the twilight and the mornings over Rome, over Ciocaria, over the world like the first acts of post-history, which I witness by privilege of birth from the furthest edge of some buried past age . . . and I . . . wander, more modern than any modern, in search of brothers who are no more.

  The Director asks the journalist whether he’s understood a word of what he’s just said. ‘Write this down,’ he says. ‘You understand nothing because you’re an average man, right? But do you know what an average man is? He’s a monster. A dangerous criminal, a conformist, a colonialist, a racist, a slave trader, a political cynic.’ The Director idly asks the journalist whether he has a heart condition, then explains his question: if the journalist dropped down dead, it would be good pre-publicity for the film. ‘You don’t exist anyway. Capital acknowledges the existence of labour only insofar as it serves production. And the producer of my film is also the owner of your newspaper. Good-bye.’ Welles puts on his spectacles; rising from his chair, he turns its back towards us. On it is written ‘Regista’ – ‘Director’. He reverts to his catatonic-laconic style of directing – ‘Nail them to the cross. Leave them nailed down. Unnail them’ – until he finally tears himself away to dally with the beautiful people who have come to witness the filming. With no particular enthusiasm, he goes to the cross to direct the man whom he doesn’t yet know is dead; his manner when he realises what has happened is wonderfully complex and ambiguous. Together with his Hastler in The Trial, this performance seems to betoken a new style of playing for Welles, which is highly personal and compelling in an entirely novel way: there is a certain mystery about it, a held-back quality, which speaks of depths rarely touched upon in the rest of his work as an actor (always excepting Harry Lime). It is spellbinding rather than dominating; it seeks neither to charm nor to impress. Welles has finally arrived at the sort of acting he always admired, but which he almost never achieved on film: he uses himself, imposing nothing, simply being, thus harnessing the force not only of his personality, but of his prodigious inner life.

  How did this come about? Welles and Pasolini got on wonderfully well, though Pasolini spoke no English, and Welles only a little Italian. ‘He sensed that [Pasolini] was a great personage,’ said Bini, ‘but I can’t say he understood much.’8 The cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, said of Welles that ‘he did everything Pier Paolo told him to, without argument ever, or attempting to change anything’.9 From the beginning, with Accatone, Pasolini had worked with amateur actors: ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he told James Blue. ‘I didn’t tell them anything. In fact, I didn’t even tell them precisely what characters they were playing. Because I never chose an actor as an interpreter. I always chose an actor for what he is. That is, I never asked anyone to transform himself into anything other than what he is.’ He approached Welles in the same way:

  He played himself. What he really did was a caricature of himself. And also because Welles, in addition to being an actor, is also an intellectual so I used him as an intellectual director rather than as an actor. Because he’s an extremely intelligent man, he understood right away and there was no problem. He brought it off well . . . it was a very brief and simple part, with no great complications. I told him my intention and I let him do as he pleased. He understood what I wanted immediately and did it in a manner that was completely satisfying to me.10

  According to Bini, Pasolini offered every one of his subsequent films to Welles: each time Welles toyed with the idea, but he never accepted. La Ricotta was a one-off, a superb and happy conjunction of his own and Pasolini’s artistic and intellectual universes. One might quarrel with Pasolini’s view that Welles caricatures himself in the film: he did that in many of his film performances, but not here. Here he subtly and wittily comments on himself, and on the position and function of the director.

  Interestingly, Pasolini and his producer, Bini, fell out over La Ricotta. Unnoticed by Bini, Pasolini had named one of the more unsavoury characters after a local public prosecutor with whom they had clashed. The film was duly banned, and Bini had to pay an enormous fine – nearly $1 million in current terms. ‘At least Pasolini could have warned me, no?’ said Bini plaintively. The matter was resolved very elegantly when Pasolini wrote a poem for Bini about what he calls the father-producer, who, Pasolini concedes in the poem, was on this occasion right, but who is at heart a mercenary. Bini was delighted with the poem; and he and Pasolini continued to make films together. Too bad Welles never wrote John Houseman a poem.

  Back, then, to Welles’s main focus: raising finance for Chimes at Midnight. It is evident that he was hoping to raise a sizeable chunk of money – inevitably period films cost more. The costumes (often for large numbers of people), the settings, the props involved in re-creating another world do not come cheap. And, unlike Othello’s Mediterranean setting, this is a northern world, in which people are apparelled to the gills. Very little money – very little interest – was forthcoming.

  In June of 1964, in the midst of working on the screenplay, Welles wrote to Keith Baxter, ‘Why don’t we go quietly ahead sometime this year with our own family-sized production of Chimes? There probably wouldn’t be sixpence in it for any of us, but it would certainly be fun and, I think, worthwhile . . . what are your plans?’11 Baxter needed little persuading: he had had a highly successful career si
nce the end of Chimes at Midnight in Dublin, ‘but there was never any doubt’, he wrote, ‘that the handle which first opened all the doors was the name of Orson Welles’; he remained passionately keen to be in the film. He heard nothing, and then a sensational telegram arrived in late September of that year: ‘HAVE JOHN GIELGUD AS THE KING STOP MARGARET RUTHERFORD AS MISTRESS QUICKLY STOP JEANNE MOREAU AS DOLL TEARSHEET STOP AM PLAYING FALSTAFF STOP PLEASE COME LOVE ORSON.’ Baxter was on the next flight out. When he arrived at Welles’s villa, he was taken aside by Ann Rogers, who was now in residence in the villa, along with Paola, Beatrice, the German governess and a parrot. ‘He’s with the producers,’ she whispered. ‘They’ve been here all morning. I think the film is cancelled.’

  Fortunately not. Welles had first attempted to set up the film in Yugoslavia; this failed. Then he found some Spanish money from a company called Producciones Cinematográficas MD; this fell through. Finally he met a producer, a thirty-something young man called Emiliano Piedra, who wanted Welles to direct Treasure Island for him and play Long John Silver. Welles saw his chance and agreed to do it, but only if he could shoot Chimes at Midnight at the same time, sharing some of the locations and doubling up some of the cast. Only a deeply inexperienced producer would have agreed to such an insane scheme; but Piedra did. He had exactly one producing credit to his name, an early spaghetti-western called Badmen of the West. Welles, of course, had been there before, twenty years earlier: The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear were shot side-by-side, but then he had the weight and resources of RKO behind him; and Journey into Fear was, nominally, at any rate, directed by somebody else.

  It is impossible to be certain whether Welles thought he could actually bring this off, and whether it was more than an elaborate ploy. There is no question that he loved Treasure Island, as he loved all such stories; it was, indeed, the subject of only the second broadcast of the Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air a quarter of a century earlier, one of the most spirited of that great series. ‘I don’t care how young you are,’ says Welles in his irresistible introduction to the programme, ‘nothing charms, nothing ingratiates, nothing wins like a one-legged, double-barrelled buccaneer with a ring in his ear, a handkerchief on his head and a knife between his teeth.’ Welles then proceeds to play, with timber-shivering relish (if a somewhat indeterminate sense of geography – Essex? Hackney? Nova Scotia?), not only that very same double-barrelled buccaneer but also the cabin-boy Jim Hawkins, an imaginative doubling, which he was not proposing to repeat on film.

  The making of the film had every appearance of credibility. There was even a schedule memo for Treasure Island, meticulously typed up by Mrs Rogers, which has an unimpeachable air of authority about it:

  Treasure Island shoots Oct 5, Chimes at Midnight Oct 12. Oct 24th: boat sequence in Treasure Island finished. Crew works as 2nd Unit on Chimes at Midnight. Nov 26th the 2nd Unit begins shooting Treasure Island as well as Chimes at Midnight, and the boy playing Jim Hawkins returns to work. Dec 9th: on this day we begin shooting in Alberque both Treasure Island and Chimes at Midnight for a period of three days; then on Dec 23rd, 2nd Unit is disbanded. Chimes at Midnight is now virtually completed for its principal photography. Four days off, then Treasure Island resumes on Dec 27th, for six weeks. After which, pick-up shots for Chimes at Midnight in Avila.12

  Apart from its almost demented ambitiousness, there is a rather serious flaw in this schedule: very few of the actors contracted for Chimes at Midnight would be there for longer than a few weeks, and some of them only for a few days. Welles had not in fact mentioned the existence of Treasure Island to any of his actors: John Gielgud, who was only available for three weeks, was perfectly innocent of the fact that, as well as King Henry IV, he was slated to play Squire Trelawney; Tony Beckley had no idea that during his four weeks’ shooting he was down not just for Poins, but also for the treacherous Israel Hands; nor had Keith Baxter been told that he would be incarnating Squire Livesey. Fernando Rey, playing the Earl of Worcester, may or may not have been informed that he would be making an appearance in Admiral Benbow’s Inn. One actor was specifically hired for Treasure Island – McIntosh Ferguson, to play Jim Hawkins; there were rumours of the participation of Robert Morley and Hugh Griffith. And there was a director for the film – the second unit director for both films, but with special responsibility for Treasure Island. This was Jesús Franco, something of a buccaneer himself, a cinematic jack-of-all-trades who had been a composer, a screenwriter and an assistant director on more than twenty films, before graduating to directing; modelling his output on that of the Hammer House of Horror, he almost immediately scored a hit with The Awful Dr Orloff; by the time he encountered Welles he had ten films under his belt, including Vampiresas, Death Whistles the Blues and Symphony for a Sadist; when they met, he and Welles hit it off immediately.

  That night Franco read the script Welles had given him; the following day Welles told him he’d reread it and that it was ‘junk’. Instead he gave Franco a copy of the novel – ‘the best script ever written’ – and told him just to go and shoot exteriors. In fact they did considerably more than that: they followed the schedule memo, beginning with all the scenes on board the Hispañiola (in reality a boat built for Samuel Bronston’s John Paul Jones five years earlier). They started with a couple of days at the then barely cultivated Bay of Calpe near Alicante, including a scene featuring young Fergusin as Jim Hawkins, Beckley as Israel Hands and Welles himself as Silver, but, according to Franco, Welles was nervous of the boat, so in the end it was just Fergusin and Beckley who shot: the material still exists, in sumptuous Technicolor, and is energetic, with Beckley a bearded and wild-eyed Hands, unrecognisable from his slim and sardonic Ned Poins. After the second day, the Hispañiola sailed off for a fortnight of location shooting, after which it disappeared into a cinematic Bermuda triangle, taking Treasure Island with it. By then the tornado that was Chimes at Midnight was blowing at full force, and it never let up till Christmas.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Fathers and Sons

  WELLES NEVER germinated a project more deeply, or over a longer period. Chimes at Midnight was, as he told his old friend Alessandro Tasca, the film’s executive producer, ‘the picture he had in his heart’. From his days at Todd as an infant Reinhardt, to the last days of the Mercury Theatre, to his return to Ireland – that is to say, from Winter of Discontent in 1929, to Five Kings in 1939, to Chimes at Midnight on stage in 1960 – this was the story that, Ancient Mariner-like, he had to tell: the story of a surrogate father and son, of profound friendship and deep rejection, of trust given without qualification and betrayed without sentiment. Welles’s story was not merely personal; it embodied, for him, the human situation: above all, it was about mankind’s universal and central experience, the loss of innocence. Nothing stirred him, moved him or grieved him more, and he strove, over more than thirty years, to find the perfect form in which to tell that story, a form that could encompass both the personal and the universal. The circumstances in which he filmed were almost perversely difficult (to say nothing of the surreal dimension of the phantom film of Treasure Island) and yet for once everything, or nearly everything, worked in his favour. Heart and mind, form and content, casting and location, technology and manpower – all meshed perfectly.

  He worked for many months on the screenplay; in the midst of that work, in July of 1964, his former guardian, Dr Maurice Bernstein, died after a fall from a ladder while pruning a tree. They were still in regular contact. Bernstein was one of Welles’s two surrogate fathers: since childhood, even before his father’s death, Welles had always called him Dadda. Welles’s mother had been Bernstein’s lover after she broke up from Welles’s father, and perhaps even before. Dadda’s various ménages were deeply unstable as he moved from mistress to mistress – sometimes, it seemed, for financial rather than erotic or amorous reasons. Money, as it happens, was often a vexed issue between Dadda and Welles: Welles always felt that Dadda had
cheated him over his father’s inheritance, due when he was twenty-one and never fully paid; once Welles went to Hollywood, Dadda never ceased begging him for financial help (though he was a highly successful physician in Los Angeles), or indeed giving him pointed advice about how he should conduct himself, both professionally and personally. And yet the love Welles felt for him was deep, and when Ann Rogers brought him the news of Dadda’s death, he withdrew to a dark room and did not emerge for two days. Strict, fussy, demanding and emotionally invasive, Dadda was nothing like Welles’s own father; their relationship was immensely complex. It was Dadda who first attached the dread word ‘genius’ to the young Orson, who encouraged journalists to write about him, who planted ideas of future greatness in his head; he seems to have been obsessed by the boy, as well as having intensely proprietorial feelings about him. He was both loving and exigent, strict but adoring, a stifling combination containing within it strong elements of emotional blackmail, of love conditional on certain behaviour. And Welles, though diligent about keeping in touch and always punctilious in observing Christmas and birthdays, seems to have experienced claustrophobic feelings around him. And now his grief at Dadda’s death was such that he needed to lock himself away in a darkened room.