Orson Welles: Hello Americans (19 page)

Phil Reismann, back at his desk in Hollywood, tried to give Welles a broad hint of the way things were developing for Schaefer at RKO.
BE SURE AND LEAVE HIM A REASONABLE OUT
, wired Reismann,
AS CONFIDENTIALLY HE HAS HAD TERRIFIC PROBLEMS WITH BOARD AND I MEAN TERRIFIC
.
¹⁶
There was a new pressure, Reismann told him: Columbia was shooting a film called
Carnival in Rio
in the first or second week in April. Apart from Schaefer, Reismann was the only real friend Welles had at RKO; Koerner was now moving in on the Mercury’s financial affairs. In a memo to Jack Moss he berates him in schoolmasterly
terms for overspending by $3,500 on Haki’s new last line and other retakes for
Journey into Fear
. As far as that film was concerned, Welles was still
convinced
that he needed a better last appearance and telegrammed Norman Foster to that effect, urging him to come to Rio to shoot it. Astonishingly he adds:
TELL JACK ITS MORE IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO COME TO RIO THAN BOB WISE,
suggesting that Welles
still failed to grasp the importance of his personal involvement in the reworking of
The Magnificent Ambersons
.
¹⁷
Brazil seems to have, changed his perspectives.
ALL EXPECTATIONS SURPASSED AND EVERY DAY BRINGS A NEW EXPECTATION,
he wired exuberantly to Phil Reismann.
¹⁸

George Schaefer’s anxieties spill over in yet another minatory cable, this time more personal:
I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE THAT I AM
PERSONALLY ON THE HOOK FOR THE WHOLE SOUTH AMERICAN VENTURE … CLEARLY OUTLINED TO MY BOARD THAT CERTAIN EXTENT (OF GOVT FUNDING) DID NOT PERMIT US TO ALLOT FOUR MEN TECHNICOLOR.
¹⁹
He no longer attempts to conceal from Welles the growing amount of animosity he inspires:
IT WOULD CAUSE YOUR MAN FRIDAY TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF PERSONAL EMBARRASSMENT AND EVERYONE IN PARTICULAR TAKING KEEN DELIGHT THAT
YOU HAD NOT LIVED UP TO WHAT I HAD EXPECTED AND WHAT I HAD STATED WOULD BE DONE.
The attempts at humour, and the fatherly concern for Welles’s professional standing, continue to modify Schaefer’s rising panic. By contrast, other executives of RKO were taking action without troubling to consult Welles, or indeed Schaefer. From the beginning of April, by decree of Reg Armour, all funds were to be
administered from Hollywood on a weekly basis. Cash flow immediately became difficult; Shores started cancelling shooting days because of lack of money, telling Dick Wilson that ‘he neither wished to go to jail or to go through another day like yesterday’.
²⁰
Welles furiously cabled Schaefer:
THESE COMMITMENTS VALID AND AS PRODUCER I SHOULD BE CONSULTED BEFORE THEIR VALIDITY IS QUESTIONED
.
²¹
He
insisted that if he did not hear from Schaefer personally in these matters, he must hear
FROM WHOMEVER IS ISSUING THE ORDERS
.

It is clear that he had no grasp of the real position. His daily battles with Lynn Shores were more real to him. They continued unabated, to the extent that Dick Wilson wrote a frank memorandum for RKO’s head office entitled ‘On the Lynn Shores matter’, little knowing
that head office was 100 per cent united behind Shores and must have laughed hollowly on receipt of Wilson’s complaints.
²²
The memorandum discloses the childishness of behaviour on both sides. From the start, Wilson says, Shores has over-stated the poor morale on the film. Resentful of the work he
has
had to do, he has voluntarily taken on more of it, for which he demanded and got more money.
He is temperamental: once, after being kept waiting for half a hour, he walked off the set; Welles phoned him again and again till 3 a.m., but he ‘absolutely and profanely’ refused to come back. Shores has freely expressed his dislike of Bob Meltzer, and has openly stated that Welles doesn’t know what he is doing. He constantly states, says Wilson, that the film is ‘nothing but a Goddam nigger picture’
and that they ought to drop the whole thing; he is particularly opposed to the
jangadeiros
sequence, asserting that ‘nobody wants to look at a bunch of niggers’. Just to be helpful, the cameraman Harry Wild told Shores that Welles considered him a spy and a double-crosser (which of course is precisely what he was). When confronted with this, Welles told Wilson that he had a ‘sincere and basic
dislike’ for Shores and ‘that type of man’ and that, if and when he had a dinner for the group, he was going to invite everybody but him. They could think what they wanted; Shores was to be the fall guy for everything he could pin on him. Wilson disagreed (silently), feeling that Shores could do them a great deal of harm; but nothing would have discouraged Welles. If he disliked someone upon whom
he depended, he was constitutionally incapable of dealing cleverly with them.

Shores’s behaviour was in fact far worse than Wilson knew. On his own initiative, Shores had directly contacted Dr Alberto Pessao of the Press and Propaganda Department of the Brazilian government, to warn him that Welles was continuing to concentrate on ‘the negro and low class element’ in and around Rio, adding that
the scenes filmed in the Teatro Republica were all ‘in very bad taste. This letter,’ he concludes, ‘is personal and I feel that I am expressing the feelings of the majority of our working crew here in Rio.’
²³
He is anxious, he unctuously claims, about the effect the footage will have on ‘the good relations existing between our country and yours … I am holding the negative of this film and not
shipping it through for development until I can perhaps have a talk with you on this subject to be sure that I am not unduly alarmed over its possible consequences.’ The immediate outcome of this breathtaking act of disloyalty was a visit to Wilson from Dr Pessao, who courteously regretted the shooting in the
favelas
: ‘Mr Welles knows what to do with his own picture, but here it is not like in
the U.S., where you can show everything including ugly things.’
²⁴
He quoted the Prefutura of Rio, who had said, ‘We are trying so hard to change the condition of the
favelas
, it isn’t
characteristic
of Brazil.’ Wilson replied, somewhat disingenuously, that ‘Very possibly that was exactly what Mr Welles wanted to show – how beautiful and modern Brazil is.’ The Rio newspapers were full of it, too:
‘
CARIOCA CARNIVAL IS GOING TO BE VERY DARK ON THE SCREEN
’ complained
A Noite
.
²⁵
RKO was even more perturbed, on purely commercial grounds. Reg Armour of the finance department reported to Phil Reismann that the production department had informed him that out of 67,000 feet of 35mm film, plus fifty-nine rolls of 16mm, only two reels could be used ‘for entertainment purposes in this country’. Technicolor,
he said, had heightened the effect of dark-skinned Brazilians. ‘There is much footage showing people of the negroid type either dancing with or in close proximity to people with lighter skins, and this in our opinion will seriously militate against the showing of this film in certain sections of this country, particularly the South.’

Armour was equally implacable on the matter of the budget:
unless Welles could shoot the Urca Casino sequence for nothing, he said in an internal memorandum, it would be better to shoot it in Hollywood – for technical reasons, apart from anything else. So far the Rio sequence had cost $241,000; he calculated that a further $288,000 was needed to complete it, adding up to $529,000, even without the Mexican sequence; with that and post-production (which might
involve reshoots) the total cost of the film would be $1.3m – as much as
Citizen Kane
. Both
The Magnificent Ambersons
and
Journey into Fear
, he claimed, ‘are destined to end up in the red’;
Citizen Kane
itself would at very best only break even. ‘If Welles keeps on the way he is going, he can very easily wreck this company and it would be my recommendation that his operations as far as RKO is
concerned be brought to a termination immediately.’ Armour was a quintessential corporation man: sound money was his only criterion, and he was still quaking with rage and disapproval fifty years later when he was interviewed for a BBC documentary on RKO. ‘I cannot understand his wanton waste of money,’ his 1942 memorandum continued. ‘Welles for all his failings is a very capable producer-director
and his record to date in Rio, in our opinion, shows that he has not made an effort to lick the story problem or place his activities on a basis where the corporation has a chance of breaking even.’

Armour and many of his colleagues at RKO felt that Welles was deliberately and consciously dragging the company to ruin – and their living with it. One of Schaefer’s increasingly desperate telegrams
said that he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that
Welles
had:
NO REALISATION OF MONEY YOU SPEND AND HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO RECOUP COST.
It is hard not to agree that Welles had come to believe that
It’s All True
was a project whose importance was beyond financial computation; from an artistic and cultural point of view, this may or may not have been the case, but it reveals a deep ignorance
of, and indifference to, the realities of the company’s parlous position.
WHEN I FINISH THIS PICTURE YOU WILL SEE WHAT I MEAN,
Welles cabled.
UNLESS I CAN FINISH FILM AS IT MUST BE FINISHED FOR ENTERTAINMENT VALUE THE ENTIRE EXPENDITURE OF TIME AND EFFORT WILL BE TOTAL LOSS.
Schaefer slammed back:
THIS IS OUT OF ALL PROPORTION TO WHAT WE EVER ESTIMATED AND WE CANNOT GO ALONG ON THAT BASIS EVEN
IF WE HAVE TO CLOSE DOWN SHOW AND ASK YOU TO RETURN … THERE ARE SOME DEVELOPMENTS THAT LOOK VERY UNPLEASANT IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

But Welles was now fully adrenalised and nothing was going to stop him. ‘The seasons change but Orson goes on forever,’ wrote Tom Pettey. ‘You think you know Orson. Well wait until you see him directing a color scene in a low key. Man, that’s something. This is the first
week he has done any directing at all and he’s busy making up for lost time. He has a caned-bottom rocking chair which is liable to turn over at any moment, loose bowels and the disposition of a teething baby – and that’s in the mornings … members of the crew have been known to dash out of the place and race down six flights of stairs to the bar to calm their shattered nerves,’ continued Pettey.
‘I think you had better order a couple of beds for the fellows in a first-class madhouse if they ever return. Shores and Wilson,’ he added, ‘have so many worries and troubles that they practice voodism and chatter in gibberish.’

Welles was anxious that the outside world should give due weight to what he was doing. Incensed by a slighting reference to the film – ‘our work and mission here’, as
he put it – in a recent edition of
Time
magazine, he angrily cabled Herb Drake to get Jock Whitney or Nelson Rockefeller to write a letter in his support. Meanwhile Dick Wilson had asked Berent Friele of the I-AA office similarly to endorse the importance of what he was doing in Brazil, which Friele duly did, in the most fulsome terms (despite an earlier anxious private conversation with Wilson).
Friele details Welles’s ambassadorial contribution, citing interviews, receptions, galas, awards, speeches and high-level meetings with politicians, artists and scientists. ‘The fact that Welles is enough of an authority on so many subjects has been of much fundamental value to the work
done
here aside from the picture.’ The range of extra-curricular activities that Friele describes (quite apart
from the film) is almost bewildering: in March alone, Welles gives a lecture on ‘The Brazilian Subject in Motion Pictures’; a month later he gives the first of four lectures (Literature, Painting, Graphic Arts, Music) on ‘The Development of Art and Literature in America’. Brazilians, says Friele, were impressed by his trip up north (a journey rarely made by visitors to the country), and by the
friendships Welles had struck up there; the visit to Buenos Aires, where he received an award for
Citizen Kane
, had been a huge success from the point of view of international relations. He had made two highly successful broadcasts from Rio,
Pan-American Day
and a curious programme celebrating Getúlio Vargas’s birthday, both forerunners of the
Hello Americans
series he would later develop.

The
Vargas broadcast is Welles’s love-letter to Brazil. It comes from the Urca Casino, where he has been filming – ‘one of last truly gay places in the world’. He introduces the bands, translates the samba
Todo es Brazil
(‘Everything is Brazil’), his voice throbbing, and finally delivers a paean to the achievements of modern Brazil – all thanks, he says, to Vargas. ‘There has been no American visitor,’
says Friele, ‘who has understood the country, its people and its problems so quickly and so well as Welles.’ ‘What energy, what vitality, what ubiquity is in this great Brazilian!’ wrote the poet and cinéaste, Vinicius De Moraes (later inspiration of
Orfeu Negro
). ‘Brazilian, yes; Orson Welles is beginning to know Brazil, or at least an important side of the soul of Brazil, better than many sociologists,
novelists, critics and poets. His vision is at times raw, but he never sins through injustice. Knowing better than anyone how to understand our character, our foibles, our easy-going ways, our so-to-speak “negative” qualities … Welles has felt Brazil and the Brazilian people in a deeper, richer way than the vast majority of foreigners who have lived among us.’ He is still the darling of
the intellectuals. This urban, canapé-nibbling, cocktail-sipping Welles is a very different Welles from the one his film crew knew. There is no contradiction here. There are at least as many Welleses as there are Charles Foster Kanes; the problem was to find time for them all. It was congenial to Welles during a great deal of his time in Brazil to fulfil what he thought of as his mission as a roving
polymath, interpreting North America to the South, and vice versa. What, in time of war, could be more important than hemispheric solidarity? Was it not government policy, specifically endorsed by Roosevelt and even more explicitly
by
his Vice-President, Henry Wallace, to whom Welles was if anything even closer, politically? And no doubt the work he was doing
was
valuable, in its way. But it was
not the primary purpose for which he was there, as he suddenly seemed to realise after his return from Buenos Aires, when
It’s All True
seemed at last to come into focus for him; thereafter, he devoted himself exclusively to filming it.