My Life in Pieces (49 page)

The Mercury had one last gasp:
Five Kings
, Welles’s adaptation of the Shakespeare History Cycle, a second crack of the whip at the grand scheme that dwindled into
Winter of Discontent
at the Todd School. This was planned to be on two evenings, the first centring on Falstaff, the second on Richard III, both of whom, it is perhaps unnecessary to report, were to be played by Welles. In the event, only the first, Falstaff, half was produced, and then in nightmarish circumstances of primitive technology, manic rewriting and exhausted performers. But the play was very dear to Welles, and he not only had the set put into store for many years in the belief that he would revive the show, he also retained his Falstaff beard when he went to Hollywood, which he did in 1940; he was known, for his first few months there as ‘the Beard’. Ironically, Hollywood had only seemed to really wake up to his potential when his fortunes were at their nadir. After the demise of
Five Kings
, he had quixotically embarked on a tour of the Orpheum Circuit’s music halls with a cut-down version of William Archer’s hoary melodrama
The Green Goddess
; the only noteworthy aspect of this bizarre venture was the use in it of film (something he had already attempted in
Too Much Johnson
) but the few people who paid to see him were profoundly baffled by what they saw, and unable to believe that they were witnessing the work of a man who had only eighteen months before been acclaimed as perhaps the most exciting talent ever to be produced by the American theatre.

Once he arrived in Hollywood on the contract of his – or anyone’s – dreams, he discovered film and the potential of RKO Studios’ craftsmen, and from then on the theatre was always essentially second fiddle to his cinematic aspirations. However, the theatre was deeply ingrained in his heart, and for at least another twenty years, he continued to return to his first love, with varying degrees of success, but always with imagination and originality. In 1942, for example, while desperately waiting for the release of
Citizen Kane
, he produced on Broadway a dramatisation of Richard Wright’s uncompromising novel
Native Son
; his use of sound and light, the claustrophobic atmosphere he evoked and the overwhelming performance that he elicited from Canada Lee in the central role, allied to his deeply felt radicalism in matters of race, created an overpowering impression of urban angst. Four years later, at the polar opposite of the theatrical spectrum,
Around the World
, his
hommage
to the spirit of the
nineteenth-century spectacular theatre, with a Cole Porter score, was a piece of sheer theatrical ebullience, panned by the critics (‘Wellesafloppin’!’) but today still admired by those who saw it for its dazzling effects and sheer élan. The next year, he staged
Macbeth
again, this time in a severely Scottish and pagan setting, in Salt Lake City, prior to filming it in a version which suggests that Welles’s visual conception was curiously old-fashioned, with something of the feel of the Beerbohm Tree production at Her Majesty’s Theatre some fifty years earlier.

Four years later again, in 1951, he came to London to act in and direct
Othello
, under Laurence Olivier’s management; he had just finished shooting his magnificent flamboyant film of the same play. The stage version, by contrast, was sober in the extreme, with his own somewhat somnolent performance at the centre;
Citizen Coon
, Kenneth Tynan called it. By contrast with the reckless freedom of his early stage productions, and indeed with the radical recasting of the texts for his cinematic versions, Welles seemed increasingly to see the theatre as a rather serious place, at least where Shakespeare was concerned. His next theatrical outing, however, was a piece of sophisticated boulevard, a double bill titled
The Blessed and the Damned
, premiered at the Edouard VII in Paris, consisting of
Time Runs
, a version of the Faust story with Eartha Kitt as a particularly seductive Helen of Troy, and a rather dubious satire on Hollywood,
The Unthinking Lobster
. He then took
Time Runs
on tour in Germany with a second half consisting of a thirty-minute version of
The
Importance of Being Earnest
(with himself as Algernon and Micheál mac Liammoír as Jack), and various Shakespearean scenes. The tour was bedevilled by Welles’s frank dislike of his German hosts and his authorship of an number of hostile newspaper articles on the post-war persistence of Nazi sympathy.

Back in London, where he resided for some years in the Fifties and Sixties, he created his version of Melville’s masterpiece,
Moby Dick
, at the intimate Duke of York’s Theatre, in 1955. It was a triumph, critically, and his innovations of lighting, of musical integration, and of the Pirandellian framework (
Moby Dick
is being rehearsed by a group of actors), were greatly admired by his contemporaries. However, it ran for no more than three weeks at a substantial loss. Welles had lost some of his pull at the box office. The following year came his disastrous experience with
King
Lear
at the City Center in New York. His spraining not one but two ankles certainly looked like carelessness and resulted in his playing the role in a
wheelchair; but this was the only innovation in the production of the slightest interest. There was widespread dismay at what was perceived to be the decline of a once-great talent.
Lear
had been planned originally as part of a season to include
Volpone
with Jackie Gleason as Mosca; the chimera of an American National Theatre led by Welles once again – for ever this time – disappeared.

Late in 1959, Welles, all of whose waking and most of whose dreaming moments were spent engendering plans for films or plays, returned to his earlier obsession,
Five Kings
, and the role of Falstaff which meant so much to him. He also returned to his old partnership with Hilton Edwards from whom, in 1931, he had learned so much of his stagecraft. Together they put together the text which he now called
Chimes at Mid
night
, a title reflecting his increasing melancholy about human affairs. Always precocious, he had settled, at the age of forty-five, into a sort of autumnal mood; his belief that the rejection of Falstaff signalled the death of Merrie England lent his interpretation a profoundly elegiac dimension. His physical bulk had now passed the point of simple fatness and had begun to become something of a phenomenon; this was, of course, no drawback in playing the part of Sir John Falstaff, which he did with some distinction, though the production itself, staged by Hilton Edwards on an impossibly overstrained schedule, was something of a flop
d’éstime
both in Belfast and Dublin where the reviews were respectful but failed to sell tickets. Welles’s work on the part and the text, however, bore glorious fruit in the film of the same name which, three years later, he started to make, taking with him from the original production only Keith Baxter, his dazzling Hal.

There was to be one last theatrical venture, the same year as the stage version of
Chimes at Midnight
, 1960. Oscar Lewenstein invited Welles to direct Laurence Olivier in the English-language premiere of Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros
at the Royal Court. As was his wont, he designed the play and created both the lighting and the sound plot, and as a physical achievement, the show was something of a triumph. His work with the actors was less happy, however, culminating in Olivier’s exclusion of him from the final rehearsals. The first night was given an added surreal dimension – as if that were necessary – by the spectacle of Welles, on a primitive walkie-talkie, padding around the tiny theatre in Sloane Square, adjusting the sound levels in that uniquely audible voice. It is a curious end to a career in the theatre which had provided some of the most
compelling productions of the century, and offered the promise of something quite exceptional which never quite materialised. It is a history, like much else about Welles, awe-inspiring, baffling and hilarious by turns.

After my near
débâcle
with the Laughton biography, I went about my
work with due diligence. I had been preparing for months, made all the
contacts I needed, and secured appointments with all the relevant
archives, including the great Lilly Library at Bloomington, Indiana. During
the time of
Shirley Valentine
on Broadway, I went round all Welles’s old
theatrical associates – actors, designers, stage managers, secretaries, pub
licists – asking about their time with him in great detail. And a number
of them said to me, ‘Why just write about Orson’s theatre? You’re doing
the work for a full biography. Write it – and we might recognise Orson
from its pages. Because the Orson that people have written so far bears
no resemblance to the man we knew.’

The ‘authorised’ biography by Barbara Leaming had appeared, with
wonderful timing for her, four years earlier, just before Welles’s death.
Although I had no intention of writing a book about him at the time, I
happened to review the book for the
Sunday Times
, in 1985. It is the first
of many many hundreds of thousands of words I have written on the
subject.

When Orson Welles died, it was as if he had been relieved of some terrible burden, as if he could rest at last. Like a Flying Dutchman or a Wandering Jew, he had seemed condemned to roam the world expiating a nameless curse. From time to time he would appear on the world’s stage, a living ruin, his preposterous girth somehow the embodiment of all the unrealised projects, genius turned into lard. Ancient Mariner-like, he seemed, with his wonderfully humorously haunted eyes, to be catching our gaze and saying, ‘Look what happened to me,’ as if the wind had suddenly changed and he’d stuck like that.

Never was ruined greatness so visible. The other great
auteurs maudits
of this century, Abel Gance and D. W. Griffith, disappeared into silence and oblivion. Eisenstein, not without his troubles, simply died young. Not Orson. Every time he trundled insincerely through some commercial for
cheap liquor (he, the great
bon viveur
! He, to whom ‘commercial’ was a dirty word when applied to film) or one of the various mediocre manifestations of God with which he dignified other men’s nonsense, he sent a pang through the world’s heart. Poor Orson, we’d think.

Poor Orson. Pity, for the man who made
Citizen Kane
, at least three other masterpieces, and at least two lesser but exquisite short films? Pity, for the man who revolutionised radio, whose theatre productions have never been rivalled for audacity and innovation, whose acting performances in the few good films he made for other directors (
The Third Man
,
Compul
sion
) will never be forgotten? Yes, pity for what might have been: the very thing that haunted Welles himself. ‘Considering what I thought of myself at fourteen, I’m a mess,’ he admitted. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ is the unspoken question behind every utterance he ever made about himself, and it is inevitably the theme of Barbara Leaming’s book. ‘If only people knew the true story!’ is Orson’s constant lament, and this, up to a point, is it, the first biography to have been written with its subject’s active cooperation, laced, indeed, with many conversations with Welles and his various intimates.

In fact there are few surprises. The stories have been often told, generally rather better than here, although there is a more extensive treatment of Welles’s political activities than I have ever read before. (At one point he was quite seriously proposed for the Secretary-Generalship of the about-to-be-born United Nations.) The book originated in a
Playboy
profile, and it feels like it. Simple reportage, as of Welles’s return to Hollywood to receive his Lifetime Achievement Award, is well done, but historical reconstruction is not Leaming’s strong suit. Nor is she a stylist. She has a flat-footed way with an anecdote that threatens to turn even Orson into a bore. She is unable to give any impression of what the stage productions were actually like, how filming was conducted, even what his own performances were like. She never assesses him as an actor at all, Worse, she is unable to give the flavour of the man, let alone any account of the contents of his mind.

I suppose it is no accident that she is really viciously unkind to both John Houseman and Micheál mac Liammóir, who have left – Houseman in
Runthrough
and mac Liammóir in
All for Hecuba
and
Put Money in thy
Purse
– glorious accounts of Welles beside which her Orson is a frequently trivial dullard. The truth, of course, is that really only Orson himself could have written the extraordinary book needed. He actually
tells her the sort of book she should have written: an investigation à la
Kane
, probing him from every different angle, testing his account of himself against the others. And she should be in it, too, he says. Well, she is, but she doesn’t really engage; under his spell, no doubt, which is forgivable, but not very satisfactory.

Her strongest suit, surprisingly, is in what she disparages in herself as ‘pop psychologising’. Early on she correctly identities what she calls the key to Orson’s personality: ‘The past is more immediate to him than the present or any intervening period.’ To person after person, he is a boy all his life. ‘A monstrous boy’ (Houseman). ‘The boy wonder’ (Virgil Thomson). ‘The most talented fourteen-year-old I have ever known’ (Robert Arden). This boyishness is the glory of so much of his work, and a large part of the delight of the man himself: the sheer joyful high spirits of it all, the fun and celebration of the medium.

In another, darker sense, he remained a boy all his life, the son of the brilliant Beatrice and the drunken Dick Welles. ‘I always felt I was letting them down. That’s the stuff that turned the wheels.’ Children could be treated as adults ‘as long as they were amusing’. But when Beatrice died, he felt ‘shame’. And when Dick, drunk and desperate, died, alone because Orson had refused to see him until he sobered up, he felt terrible guilt: ‘I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it – how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.’ And this guilt somehow permeates his life. Miss Leaming is unable to refute Charles Higham’s thesis that Welles had a deep reluctance to complete anything. Time and again – on
The Magnificent Ambersons
,
Macbeth
,
The Lady from Shanghai
,
Touch of Evil
– he walked away from the film at a crucial moment, flung himself into something else, whether pleasure or work. Many of his personal relationships were similarly suspended – he just walked away from them.