My Life in Pieces (48 page)

Feeling the absence of an opportunity to address the whole cast the way I would have done in the theatre, I sat down and wrote a three-page document describing how I was going to approach the piece, and why. I detailed the style that we’d evolved, and the way in which we were going to shoot the film. Walter and I, in conversations in London, had decided on a manner, partly borrowed from John Ford but with reference to Eisenstein, of extreme close-ups and wide shots – tableaux shots, we called them – that we hoped would created the fairy-tale atmosphere. I also suggested the acting style that was called for. Too often in the theatre as well as on film, STYLE is something created by the production or by the design, but not actually embodied in the playing. I asked the actors to eschew psychological complexities and to accept a world in which things happen because they do. This document I distributed to everybody in the growing army which constituted the film: grips, gaffers, best boys, props people, set decorators, carpenters, accountants, secretaries, sound operators, caterers, security men, press officers, actors. I wanted everybody to know why we were here, and what we were trying to achieve. People were appreciative. I had no idea whether it would make the slightest difference.

My townspeople had been recruited by the appalling but necessary method called, surprisingly cheerfully by the participants, the cattle call. This was arranged by the local casting director – our second, after the first had been sacked by Ismail for dilatoriness (‘Tell her to get out! This is not Hollywood! Tell her to sit in the Ganges!’). An ad was placed in the
local newspaper showing a Walker Evans photograph over a caption saying: ‘
Can you look like this?
’ They had turned up in their hundreds, all in some sort of costume acquired from the local Goodwill Store. We selected them by appearance alone, and then slowly discovered more about them, and whittled our group down to thirty, each of whom I spent a half an hour or more with, getting them to invent names, characters, relationships and life stories for themselves. This they did with astonishing speed and imagination and emotional power – astonishing considering that hardly more than two or three of them were professional actors. They were pastry chefs and cabinetmakers and farmers and psychiatrists and, in one case, a Professor of English literature. They came up to Willieville where they were ensconced in a large barn, converted into a series of cubicles, each one furnished – I insisted on this – with a large mirror. Across the road, there was another large barn, in which Christopher, who was in charge of costuming the townspeople, had set up shop. Here he established The Wheel of Fashion, in which each day the group would receive their costume from the sad, tattered garments of the people of Carsonville and pretend to be the delighted recipients of a game show prize; here too, they would have a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette or two, and unburden their hearts.

Two days before we started shooting, Sam Shepard, with whom I had just had a long and enthusiastic phone call from Greece, where he was filming, fell ill, and withdrew from the part of Marvin Macy. We continued our preparations, but with heavy spirits. Ismail seemed, briefly and for the only time in all our acquaintance, to despair, and I sank down even further. It seemed that the entire film would collapse, and then: ‘Simon! Wonderful news! Keith Carradine will play the part.’ He had read the script and decided to rearrange his life to be with us.

We started shooting on a Thursday, without Vanessa. She was due on the Saturday, so we began with a key scene, that of the arrival of Cousin Lymon, one of our boldest visual statements, and a test of the actors’ abilities to endure the slow and intense poetic playing that I was sure the film needed. Once the first shot was set up, I found myself unable to shout ‘Action!’ I left it to Walter, who was operating the camera as well as directing the cinematography. By the second shot, I found my voice, and Ismail appeared with a tray of sweetmeats, telling everyone to ‘Eat! Eat!’ It was, he said, a tradition, to celebrate the beginning of the film and draw down the gods’ benevolence. Quite which Hindu god was the god
of film-making this devout Muslim never quite explained, though I noticed that he had a highly ecumenical approach to religion in general. On arrival at Willieville, he discovered that some of Willie’s staff seemed to have some traces of 1960’s pantheism, ‘but now,’ he said, ‘they have become converts to me.’

We finished shooting that first night at 4 a.m., and, quaffing the champagne he had given me (thus, presumably, getting Bacchus on our side, too), I shed a little tear. The next day was almost second night in feeling, but after we finished, early, Ismail had arranged another propitiatory event: a family of Pakistani musicians had been summoned to play for us and as they sat on the porch of Miss Amelia’s house, chanting and playing their winding, ecstatic melodies under the epic and darkening Texan sky, it seemed that the ancient soul of an America that lived before the memories of men was called up, and that
The Ballad of the Sad Café
had found its proper home. Ismail turned to me and said, ‘This raga is 1,200 years old. The words are exactly the same as Carson McCullers’s: in love there is the lover and there is the beloved, and these two often seem to come from different countries.’ At the height of the musical ecstasy, Vanessa, impossibly tall and wearing dark glasses, arrived out of the dark, her blonde hair flowing over her shoulders.

The next day, Sunday, Vanessa tried on her costumes, and her creative process began, standing in front of the mirror, tugging at the clothes, violently rejecting some, inhabiting others as if she’d worn them all her life, snatching up hats, bits of cloth, bags, staring at her own image with the fierce eyes of an actor deciding whether she can believe in the dual image of herself and her character. We went back to the set to discuss hair. Vanessa had brought with her two wigs, made at her own considerable expense, and she and the film’s hairdresser started to shape one of them, hacking away at it, Vanessa urging him on. Again the sharp critical look in the mirror. She turned to Walter and to me and said: ‘Could you leave the caravan for a moment?’ When we went back she sat there, her shorn tresses on the floor, triumphantly gazing at her image, cropped, mannish, powerful, her blue eyes and blonde hair giving her the air of a Norse warrior. She stepped out of the caravan, into the sun, and stood there, laughing – roaring with the sheer joy of having refashioned herself into Carson McCullers’s Miss Amelia. Not, to be sure, the physical description of her from the book, but the very soul of her. She became the soul of Willieville, too, building her own garden, befriending
the mule, arranging her kitchen – and the soul of the film, permeating it with her poetic genius.

It took us eight weeks to film; it took another eight weeks to edit; sound editing and mixing took another five. The whole feeling and texture of the film depended on an actress’s ability to create a mythic figure at the centre of it. It owes everything to the courage and imagination and love of mankind of the exceptional creature that is Vanessa.

The foregoing, though all true, is highly selective. In many ways, making
the film was absolute hell. One day, when I was editing it (which was
the worst hell of all), Jim Ivory said I must write a novel about it. I fully
intend to.

The influence of Charles Laughton’s only film on
The Ballad of the Sad Café
is beyond
hommage
: it is, I’m afraid, sheer imitation. I console
myself with Picasso’s profound epigram: ‘To imitate others is necessary,
to imitate oneself, pathetic.’ Before directing
Ballad
, I had started work on
my next book, which was to be about Orson Welles’s theatre, stories of
which – especially the stirring early days at the Mercury – had inspired
me as a drama student. That’s the life for me, I had thought, working
twenty hours a day, under the charismatic leadership of a young genius –
stretching oneself and the theatre to the very limits, defying convention,
electrifying the audience, changing lives.

C
itizen Kane
was Orson Welles’s greatest triumph, of course, but in some ways it was his greatest scourge, almost obliterating his other, innumerable and diverse, achievements. Next in order of his achievements in the public view were the
War of the Worlds
broadcast (whose notoriety was a happy accident),
The Third Man
(which, of course, he didn’t direct and whose huge success at the expense of his own films profoundly irked him) and the Paul Masson advertisements, in which the great
bon viveur
, almost a parody of himself, endorsed a mediocre
vin ordinaire
in a thunderous purr which was widely and mockingly imitated. But before
Kane
and these other things came an extraordinary body of work almost unknown to the general public.

Above all, the hidden
oeuvre
is the theatre work. It was the theatre that was Welles’s all-consuming passion from his earliest years, fed by a
Shakespeare-worshipping mother, and nurtured by the childhood gift of a toy theatre. He had the extraordinary good fortune to go to a school whose educational philosophy was that learning was best done by doing. The young Welles was accordingly let loose on their brilliantly equipped theatre and lighting board, with an army of schoolboy-slaves at his disposal to build and paint sets and then to act as supernumeraries in his productions, in which, needless to say, he played all the leading roles – including, when he was not quite fifteen, Richard III in his own adaptation of the Shakespeare History Cycle which he titled
Winter of
Discontent
. He had intended to play Sir John Falstaff as well, but for once the Todd School put its foot down when faced with a probable seven-hour running time. Welles reluctantly confined himself to a ninety-minute canter through the career of the deformed Plantagenet.

He left school at fifteen, taking a year off before a putative application to university; he spent the year in Ireland under the guise of a painting holiday but in fact was simply determined to act, even offering to learn Gaelic on the off-chance that he might get a job in the Irish-language theatre in the West. Instead, he ended up in Dublin where he blarneyed his way into the Gate Theatre, run by the great team of Micheál mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, and here, at the age of sixteen, he learned not only how to hold his own in a company of experienced and temperamental actors many years his senior, but also something of the very latest developments in lighting and staging, for the Gate was a daringly avant-garde theatre with a radically different policy to that of the Abbey, still then under the control of Yeats and Lady Gregory. When, after his sensational debut as Duke Karl in
Jew Süss
, the parts began to get smaller, he returned to Chicago, where he wrote two plays, one a fevered, semi-autobiographical piece,
Bright Lucifer
, the other a worthy account of the anti-slaver, John Brown. Time hanging on his hands, he also produced, under the aegis of his ex-headmaster and warmest admirer, Roger Hill, an edition of three of Shakespeare’s plays which they called
Everybody’s
Shakespeare
, furnished by the seventeen-year-old Welles with staging suggestions and a running commentary in dazzlingly cartoonic visual form; these highly original teaching tools were hugely successful and were still in use in the mid-Sixties.

Welles’s career as an actor took off when at the age of seventeen he joined Katharine Cornell’s immensely distinguished company, playing Mercutio to her Juliet. The performance was not judged a success (nor
was the production) and when he came to New York in a revised version, it was in the role of Tybalt, for which he received moderate acclaim. But his performance was seen by the thirty-year-old director, writer, producer and ex-corn merchant John Houseman, who knew the moment he caught sight of Welles that he had encountered his destiny. They began to work together, and as soon as Houseman was put in charge of the Negro Theatre Project, an offshoot of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, in 1936, he invited Welles, now twenty, to stage
Macbeth
for him in Harlem. Welles changed the play’s setting to Haiti in the reign of Jean-Christophe, creating a kind of barbaric cabaret which was an absolute sensation. Shortly after, he and Houseman together formed another branch of the Federal Theatre which they whimsically named Project 491; for it they staged
Doctor Faustus
, one of Welles’s most technically dazzling shows, the zany
Horse Eats Hat
(from
An Italian Straw Hat
) and
The Cradle Will
Rock
, Marc Blitzstein’s radical pro-union agit-prop musical. This proved too controversial for a government-sponsored project, and Welles and Houseman founded their own Theatre, the Mercury, which they inaugurated with a Fascist interpretation of
Julius Caesar
, whose fame spread across the Western world. This was followed by
The Shoemakers’ Holi
day
(riotous) and
Heartbreak House
(respectful).

On a shoestring budget, the Mercury was staking a claim to be the American National Theatre. Young actors were desperate to be part of it, and Welles, both as actor, but more particularly as director, was universally acknowledged as the White Hope of the American stage. He was now twenty-three. The second and last season of the Mercury however was something of a disappointment:
Too Much Johnson
never transferred to New York after a hilariously chaotic out-of-town try-out;
Danton’s Death
was beleaguered by technical catastrophe. Meanwhile the Mercury Theatre of the Air had begun its remarkable and innovatory seasons of classical adaptations; Welles quickly proved himself a master here, too. The broadcast of
The War of the Worlds
precipitated a panic which hit the world’s headlines; Hitler made reference to it in a speech to the Reichstag. Welles’s fame was now dangerously independent of his achievements, a self-generating phenomenon. While the brouhaha over the broadcast continued, the Mercury Theatre was quietly wound down, surviving only as a name for Welles’s producing company, to the eternal regret and occasional bitterness of a generation of actors who had been inspired by Welles to believe in the possibility of a kind of theatre which
was at once classic and radical, and a genuine alternative to the poetic social realism practised by the Group Theatre.