Orson Welles: Hello Americans (21 page)

The freely expressed love with which Welles showered his collaborators was as fulsomely returned. The degree of it
is striking, uncommon even today, in our much more touchy-feely world,
even
in show business; in 1942 it is almost shocking, and rather touching, especially since they are all men. It has nothing to do with sex, but it is remarkably intimate. ‘I love you, more than I even realised. And I miss you like the devil,’ Norman Foster wrote to him in one of their exchanges.
⁹
‘Jesus, what a letter. All
I really wanted to say was that I miss you very much, and love you very much, and that I have been happier since I’ve been with you than ever before, and that if you’re going to stay down there long, I’m going to bum my way down too.’ Welles’s reply to this exuberant letter of Foster’s shows him unexpectedly subdued, private and vulnerable: ‘At dinner tonight I complained to Bob and Dick that nobody
I loved had written me since I left. This observation was followed by a lengthy and morose silence. We finally paid the check and came home where I found your letter.’
¹⁰

John Berry, later a film director in his own right, but then touring
Native Son
around America, wrote to Welles at about the same time: ‘I think constantly of being with you and there is nothing I would rather do than work with
you. This is a thing that becomes more obvious every time I see the work of the so-called “artistic theatre” directors’
¹¹
(he names Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis). ‘Not only is the theatre dead this season, it is spinning in its grave. So if I may say it, how wonderful it would be if you came back and did a show.
Five Kings
is always in my mind – sometimes I even dream of it – I loved it more than
anything you ever did.’ And a couple of days before, the hard-bitten Phil Reismann had wired Welles:
NEVER REALISED I WOULD MISS ANY MALE COMPANION AS MUCH AS I HAVE MISSED YOU SINCE I LEFT RIO STOP YOU SORT OF GROW ON ME LIKE A WART.
¹²
With his male collaborators – especially those ten or more years older than him – Welles was at the same time one of the boys, an inspiring leader and a vulnerable
youngster. He was able to be simultaneously father, brother and son to them. He looked after them; he relied on them; he looked up to them. He made his working partners feel they were all in it together and that heaven and earth were there for the winning. Everything, in fact, that Foster meant by being a Mercury jerkery.

On 6 May 1942, his twenty-seventh birthday, Welles was inundated with affectionate
telegrams, from Dadda Bernstein, Jo Cotten
(BIRTHDAY GREETINGS TO AN OLD FRIEND FROM AN OLD MAN),
Herb Drake (
SO ITS YOUR BIRTHDAY WHAT WILL YOU THINK OF NEXT
), various telegrams from actors and twenty-seven kisses from Dick Wilson’s wife, Catherine. There was a telegram from George Schaefer, too, with a not entirely light-hearted message:
DEAR
ORSON MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY I KNOW YOU HAVE
MANY PROBLEMS BUT BE YOUR AGE
. The real world was not half so nice. Just three days after Foster’s loving letter to Welles, Reg Armour sent a memo to Jack Moss refusing to authorise retakes for
Journey into Fear
. ‘We have now finally decided to complete the picture with the film we have on hand without incurring any further expenses of any nature whatever.’
¹³
A few days later, Charles Koerner,
furious that Everett Sloane and Eustace Wyatt had been brought in from New York for reshoots, decreed that every penny by which
Journey into Fear
exceeded its budget was to be deducted from Welles’s salary cheques. At this point, that amounted to some $150,000. But Welles, oblivious, continued to offer new solutions to the problem of the ending:
HAVE VERY SWELL NEW FAST CHEAP JOURNEY FINISH
, he
wired Jack Moss exuberantly a month after Armour’s official termination of reshooting.
¹⁴

All this while
The Magnificent Ambersons
was being hacked up by a bunch of amateurs and studio journeymen. Welles had never ceased to engender new proposals to overcome what everyone told him were the film’s shortcomings. Robert Carringer, who has closely analysed Welles’s proposals, rightly observes that
some of his suggested cuts seem more brutal than any of the studio’s, and his belief that the answer to the film’s problems was a cheery end-credit sequence is bewilderingly irrelevant, the merest rearrangement of deckchairs on the
Titanic
. In any case, it appears from a shocking but unverifiable anecdote of Cy Enfield’s that even the Mercury office was unable to deal with his flood of suggestions.
Enfield was employed as a dogsbody by Jack Moss because he knew magic, and Moss wanted him to teach him a few tricks to impress Welles on his return:

A telephone with a private line had been installed in Moss’s office in the Mercury bungalow that had a number known only to Orson in Brazil. For the first few days he had discussions with Orson and tried to placate him: then they had started arguing
because there were more changes than Orson was prepared to acknowledge. After a few days of this, the phone was just allowed to ring and ring. I conducted many magic lessons with Moss when the phone was ringing uninterruptedly for hours at a time. I saw Jack enter carrying 35 and 45 page cables that had arrived from Brazil; he’d riffle through the cables, say, ‘This is what Orson wants us to
do today,’ and then, without bothering to read them, toss them into the wastebasket.

Whatever the truth of this dark little story (and since a number of thirty- and forty-five-page cables survive, along with the replies to them, there seems to be a grain of truth in it), Moss – along with Robert Wise, Joseph Cotten and Freddie Fleck, the assistant director – was certainly a central figure in
the reshaping of
The Magnificent Ambersons
. As we have seen, Welles reposed an astonishing amount of artistic authority in the hands of this failed conjuror-turned-business-manager. The little Mercury team he led was under immense pressure from Schaefer and, increasingly, Koerner, first of all to lighten the tone and secondly to shorten the film. Each of the team, in his own way, was trying to
preserve the essence of Welles’s work, but they started from the premise that serious surgery was required. Jo Cotten had expressed his dismay when he saw the film at the first preview (which, with two cuts, was essentially the film that Welles and Wise had put together) and sought to mitigate what he regarded as its gratuitous sombreness. The focus of their anxieties was on the bitter, ironic end
of the film, and especially on the element that so strongly reinforced this bleakness, the brilliantly crafted score provided by Bernard Herrmann.

Herrmann was not the man for artistic compromise; not the man, indeed, for compromise of any sort. He was scarcely capable of calm conversation under the most easy-going circumstances: his biographer Steven Smith quotes an interview that Herrmann gave
to a journalist called Zador, who transcribed it meticulously; it gives a fine flavour of his temperament:

ZADOR:

Did you find [Welles] easy to get along with?
¹⁵

HERRMANN:

I always find difficult people easy to get along with. I only find glad-Harrys difficult and vacuous. Nice guys are difficult. It’s because they’re a bunch of empty-heads, that’s why they’re nice guys! They pretend to be
nice guys, but it’s a disguise. They’re not nice. They’re vicious, vindictive people who try to make sure that anything good
HASN
’
T
GOT A CHANCE!

ZADOR:

Then Orson Welles, who’s a difficult person, gave you a chance …

HERRMANN:

HE DID
N
’
T
GIVE ME ANY CHANCE
! I gave
HIM
a chance! I had a job and he was just an actor who we used … what the hell … he didn’t give me any
JOB.

ZADOR:

Well, for
Citizen Kane
and
Magnificent Ambersons
…

HERRMANN:

He didn’t give me a job. It was his advantage to have me do the music for him! He didn’t give me a job or a break or anything … for chrissakes, what’s working in there, an accounting department?

ZADOR:

Did you select the various passages to be scored?

HERRMANN:

Yes, I do that. It’s my profession and not theirs.

ZADOR:

Well, you’re sure
good at it.

HERRMANN:

WELL THAT
’
S
MY TALENT. WHADDYA THINK I NEED SOME HALF-WIT TO TELL ME WHAT HE THINKS
… I like music that is proud of itself. I don’t like a guy who says, ‘It’s a good idea, but it’s too good for those creeps who come in and look at a movie, so I’ll debase it.’

ZADOR:

Well, that’s not always done by choice.

HERRMANN:

NO
! It is done by choice. You don’t
have-ta
do it!
You say, I’m not your man, get somebody else. Don’t tell
ME
that he has to make a buck – look what Schubert put up with.

The head of RKO’s music department, the lustrously named Constantin Bakaleinikoff, had already had an incendiary encounter with this uniquely rebarbative individual at the beginning of work on
The Magnificent Ambersons
, trying to push him away from quoting the music of Waldteufel,
which was still in copyright, towards that of Johann Strauss, which was not. Herrmann immediately referred the matter to Welles, who just as swiftly issued a curt memo: ‘Use
Toujours ou jamais
as directed by Herrmann.’
¹⁶
At Welles’s behest, he was given unique freedom within the music department; he was in fact almost entirely independent from it. Amongst other things, he had the right (shared
by Korngold, for example, but by very few others) to orchestrate his own music, which he did to revolutionary effect, scarcely endearing himself to the studio orchestrators in the process. The score he wrote for
The Magnificent Ambersons
was even more striking than that for
Citizen Kane
in its interaction with the dramatic life of the film. Since the film itself was destroyed, we can
never
know
exactly how the score might have worked, but fortunately the music was not destroyed, and the highly sophisticated compositional procedures that Herrmann employed can be heard.

The Waldteufel waltz, or part of it, is used as a paradigm of the Ambersons themselves. It is first heard gently and delicately on muted solo violin joined by harps; then, in richly enhanced form, even plusher than in
the original orchestration, it reaches its apotheosis in the chain of period dances that accompany the ball. From then on its increasingly rare appearances are fragmentary and often dissonant as the Ambersons’ world breaks up. The future, so inimical to the Ambersons, is evoked in music (as Kathryn Kalinak notes in her elegant analysis of the score) made of short, non-melodic phrases, often highly
chromatic and devoid of harmonic support; the instrumentation is increasingly percussive. The score contained an entirely characteristic instruction from Herrmann to his brass players for the scene in which George Minafer meets his comeuppance: ‘cup mute more nasal; mechanical; reed-like; music should sound like [the] character’, which is as good an example as may be found of Herrmann’s absolute
engagement with the specific work in hand. The gleeful music of the sleigh ride in the snow scene wholly eschews the generic, presenting an a-thematic impression of perpetual motion: ‘absence of melody, gravitation towards atonality, repetition of key motifs, and unusual instrumental colour’, as Miss Kalinak says.
¹⁷
It was not this sequence, of course, with which the revisionists took issue: it
was the grim, spare music of the final reels of the film, music of alienation, of despair, of failure – a long, bleak organ solo under the garden scene, a murky elegy in the old people’s home, with harsh brass and edgy strings, and finally a sombre, Mahlerian threnody for the end titles, reprising the earlier love music in anguished form, topped off with a bitter, ironic allusion on vibraphone to
Waldteufel’s genial little waltz tune:
Toujours ou jamais
, indeed.

This is music of quite uncommon imagination, but it is undeniably sombre, as both Herrmann and Welles intended it to be. This is the element that had to be extirpated, and, after Pomona – the watershed of catastrophe for
Ambersons
– extirpated it was. More than half of all the music Herrmann had written was replaced by anodyne
schlock, all golden harmonies and surging emotions, imbecilically replicating the feelings of the characters on the screen. It was written by RKO’s resident composer, Roy Webb, the sort of stuff he ran up by the yard. It is a musically incontinent ramble, garrulous where Herrmann was terse (and, as often, daringly silent),
designed
to put a smile on the audience’s face where none belonged. Herrmann
was neither consulted about this nor informed of it; the moment he did find out, he demanded that his name be removed from the credits. At first RKO resisted, but studio executive Gordon Youngman was clearly shocked by is forthrightness – as who would not be. ‘Am convinced,’ he wrote in a memo, ‘in view of man’s temperament he will bring injunction proceeding and cause all other trouble he can.
¹⁸
His theory is that statement is made score is by BH while it is not entirely so and that this is deception to public and injurious his reputation.’ Herrmann passionately urged the studio to reconsider the desirability of making cuts in the film. He won the battle for his own integrity, though the battle for that of the film was lost. If he felt betrayed by Welles, whose job it was to shield him
from this sort of thing as he had so often done in the past, he never said so; but this is what happens when the director is absent. Had some of Welles’s other collaborators been equally obdurate,
The Magnificent Ambersons
might exist in something like its original form, though it is equally true that RKO, and especially Charles W. Koerner, had long ago made up their minds to cut it down to size,
in every sense.