Orson Welles: Hello Americans (22 page)

Previews continued, with rather more encouraging responses, at Inglewood, then, after substantial recutting and some reshooting, at Long Beach. But for every comment saying, ‘new style of direction is very fascinating’, there were three saying, ‘it would take an IQ of 120 or more to really enjoy it’, ‘75 minutes of gloom and camera acrobatics’ or, rather more bluntly ‘much too
boresome’. The feeling was not entirely negative, but neither was it positive. Mark Robson commented that ‘it reached a point where we had to pick up the film at the booth, people were waiting for us as if they were going to beat us up. They were so angered and annoyed.’ All the brutal surgery had scarcely altered the general reaction. The same phrases recur, as if they were part of a popular critical
vocabulary. The overall gist is highly consistent – the film is: a) out of tune with the country’s mood; b) too arty; c) too dark. The actors most often praised are now Costello, Cotten, Holt and the artist endearingly referred to in one questionnaire as ‘Fanny Moorehead’. Clearly something even more radical was called for. In the absence of Welles’s personal presence, Moss and his team sought
some kind of lodestone, some point of reference for what they were trying to do, and they came back, perhaps inevitably, to the novel, and above all its end, that curious modulation into mysticism that seems so out of line with the realism of the rest of the book,
with
the characters as we have come to know them and with Tarkington’s solid prose style; he seems to abandon the grand themes he has
so powerfully pursued in favour of unearned extra-terrestrial uplift. Welles’s final scene, his single most creative contribution to the screenplay, is equally out of line with the rest of the book, but it progresses the characters much more satisfyingly, providing a vivid final illustration of the Ambersons’ terminal decline; and it is cinema, not literature. This was the scene that particularly
stuck in the audience’s craw, and so Jack Moss – book-keeper, office manager, sometime conjuror – took pen and paper and adapted the scene with which Tarkington had ended the book and then directed Anne Baxter, Jo Cotten and Agnes Moorehead in it, finally ensuring the obliteration of Welles’s vision.

That was on 19 May. The same day, a thousand miles away, in Rio de Janeiro, while filming a reconstruction
for Orson Welles’s film
It’s All True
, showing the triumphant arrival of himself and his fellow
jangadeiros
in the capital to deliver their famous petition to President Getúlio Vargas, Mandel Olimpio Meira, the great popular hero known as Jacaré, drowned.

WITH BITTER TIMING,
the day before Jacaré drowned, the
Life
magazine photo-spread shot during the Carnival, at the very beginning of the Brazilian escapade, three long months earlier, finally appeared under the jaunty banner ‘
Life
Goes to a Party in Rio’. For the group of film-makers still slogging it out in Rio, the party had long been over. The bonhomie and cross-cultural
excitement of Carnival had been replaced by exhaustion, frustration and resentment; relations between the film and the community had cooled. The official attitude to the film that Welles was making, despite various broadcasts in which members of the Brazilian government (including Vargas himself) had participated, had abruptly changed in the face of his determination to show the reality
of Brazilian life, giving due prominence to the 70 per cent of the population who were working-class and black. The popular press had become equally disenchanted with the image of their city that Welles was filming. He was showing things that they preferred not to be reminded of, things they lived with, but which were not for general consumption. ‘Each time the robust and handsome fiancé of Del
Rio points his camera at the so-called “picturesque” spots of the city we feel a slight sense of uneasiness,’ observed
Rio Cine-Radio Jornal
.
¹
Instead of filming ‘the lovely edge of the lake, where there is so much beauty and so many marvellous angles for filming’, Welles was promoting the shabby image of the
malandro
, ‘a good-for-nothing in a striped shirt, dirty straw hat over his eye, who comes
in dancing an out-of-joint samba’. He seemed intent on shooting ‘scenes of the hills, of no good half-breeds … and the filthy huts of the
favelas
… dances of Negroes covered with
aracatu
feathers, reminiscent of the temples of the African wilds, as though our not always edifying street carnival were not already sufficient’.

But if bourgeois opinion was turning against Welles, the film’s day-to-day
relations with the black working-class population whose lives he sought to celebrate were not of the best, either. The extras
were
largely drawn from their ranks and proved to be only intermittently interested in the process of filming. Day after day was written off because they failed to show up, or drifted off in the course of filming. The
Diary of Welles Group Activities
to 27 April is a dismaying
record of days lost due to weather, religious festivals, Welles’s illness, Welles’s absence and above all, at the beginning, lack of equipment, which had taken two whole weeks to clear customs; but highest on the list of causes of days lost was ‘no-shows of extras’, disastrous for continuity. Welles was particularly piqued by this behaviour, and would often walk off the set when it occurred.
Even on his birthday, 6 May, when there was to have been a party after shooting, the report tersely recorded: ‘rehearsal, shooting Urca; wrap 1 a.m. Loss of time because of non-attendance and lateness of extras and singers’;
²
the following day: ‘more problems with extras etc. Welles stays up finishing designs for decoration that night and morning because of limited budget and project’s inability
to contract’. In some cases there was open hostility: ‘our period of wholehearted co-operation was over,’ wrote Dick Wilson.
³
‘We were being greeted in the streets with jeers, and – in the case of our shooting of the coloured people – with beer bottles.’

Work had been proceeding erratically for all the reasons detailed above, but now, in mid-May, after another long period of drift, Welles was
enthusiastically at work on the
jangadeiros
sequence. His personal relationship with the fishermen was warm, the story was heroic and clearly defined, with none of the attendant complications of personnel and staging involved in the nightclub sequences or the reconstruction of the Carnival, though even here there were logistical difficulties. The first Sunday they had attempted to shoot the arrival
of
jangadeiros
in Rio, the crew on half the boats grew impatient and sailed away in the middle of the most difficult portion of the work. ‘No threats, bribes, or payments could hold them. A whole shooting day was lost and a long period of preparatory work went for nothing. This has occurred many many times with varying degrees of disaster in the course of production,’ ended the exasperated report.
⁴
Welles’s own crew were scarcely happier. When the schedule was given to Harry Wild, ‘he blew up completely’, refusing to shoot on a Sunday, Dick Wilson reported to the Office of Inter-American Affairs. ‘He didn’t feel well from the previous night’s shooting, saying that it was very dangerous, everyone had got sick, the men had openly rebelled against him about picking up the cables covered with
garbage and slop. People had gathered around him and threatened him etc.’ His general complaint was
that
they had no one in authority with them. ‘The men are talking night and day,’ Wild said, ‘about how slow we were working and that they would never get home.’ Even the casting department, Wilson noted, was deeply unhappy, due to ‘a conflict of personalities’. A disaffected film crew is like its
naval equivalent; mutiny is never far away.

Welles was under pressure from every angle, personal and professional. Phil Reismann had been despatched to Rio by George Schaefer to bring things to a swift conclusion; he brought with him a letter from Schaefer so severe that he felt the need to forewarn Welles:
I HAVE NEVER READ ANYTHING AS STRONG IN MY LIFE AND MY REASON FOR SENDING THIS CABLE IN
ADVANCE IS TO PLEAD WITH YOU TO FINISH UP AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE TO AVOID CLOSING OUT THE PRODUCTION COMPLETELY BEFORE IT IS FINISHED.
⁵
Reismann at least remained loyal to Welles; or so it seemed. The minutes of a conversation about Welles between Reismann and Reg Armour from that same week suggest the levels of duplicity that were at work in the Borgia Palace that RKO had become:

PR:

[Welles]
is a tough baby – he has done a magnificent job of selling himself to Nelson Rockefeller.
⁶

RA:

George [Schaefer] will lose his job out of this … I think Orson wants to stay out of the country … he wants to duck military service.

PR:

I think I could get the authorities to take him off our hands.

The Mercury office itself was not free from infection.

PR:

Have you talked to Moss at all?

RA:

They’re beginning to rat on Welles … they say ‘we told Welles so and so – and now we’re being disloyal to him – but we’ll do it’.

Reismann had not misled Welles about the severity of Schaefer’s letter, the culmination of a series of missed phone calls and enraged telegrams. But the letter Reismann finally delivered to Welles ten
days
after it had been written was different in tone and intent
from the calls and the wires. It was a soberly comprehensive indictment from the quarter from which he least expected it.

‘Here I am in New York,’
⁷
Schaefer wrote, ‘endeavouring against all odds to maintain the same confidence in you as I have had in the past. Facts and developments come so fast and are so overwhelming that it is no longer possible for me to maintain that frame of mind.’ He writes
of ‘the crisis which has arisen in my relationship with my company and my relationship with you … you were chosen,’ he says, ‘as the man in whom we could place our confidence’. But that confidence, he continues, detailing the delays, the mendacities and the rising costs, ‘has been betrayed. The thing that disturbs me more than anything else is that people in your unit don’t know from one day
to another what they are supposed to do, and that, to me, seems to be the crux of the situation.’ The Brazil sequence is, he says, only one section of
It’s All True
; the rest of it is equally unfinished. He’s looked at the
Bonito the Bull
material: they only have 40 per cent of what’s needed, though the accumulated expenses are $400,000 – ‘we are just pouring money down the drainpipe’. Welles
has his own writers (several of them) on the payroll, Schaefer says, but there has never been a script. ‘I was astonished to the point of thinking that even you would have the audacity to turn over such a disgraceful synopsis to Lynn Shores … how in the world with such an outline you expect Shores or even your own men to carry on and give any loyalty to this company and yourself is beyond me to comprehend.’
The whole thing, he says, is a catastrophe, quite apart from the financial aspect: Schaefer placed his confidence in Welles because of his ‘fervid desire’ to do something for his country. It could also have paved the way for future production by the industry in South American countries. ‘They will come to the conclusion that you, the one person in whom they have had confidence, have spoiled
all their future possibilities of motion picture production.’ Everyone, he says, admires Welles’s work as ambassador. ‘But, quite evidently, you have come to the conclusion that you are down there representing the Co-ordinator’s office and not RKO.’

The technicians all want to come home:

The way I feel right now, I am wondering if the boys will be out of the trenches by Christmas. If there are
any personal reasons why you want to stay down till August, or longer, at least get through with the picture, send the men back and stay as long
as
you wish. That is your personal affair … I am now again put in the painful position where I have to write you a letter which I never, in God’s world, thought I would have to write wherein I am begging you to fulfil in an honourable way your obligations
and not put such a terrific load on my shoulders. In respect to the latter, I think I have carried that load a long time.

He writes of
Citizen Kane
:

What it cost this organisation, and me, personally, never can be measured in dollars … the abuse that was heaped on myself and the company will never be forgotten. I was about as punch-drunk as a man ever was. I made my decision to stand by you
and I saw it through. I have never asked anything in return, but in common decency I should expect that I would at least have your loyalty and gratitude. To the extent that I have received it with respect to the Brazilian enterprise up to the present time, I would say it has merely been lip service.

He reviews Welles’s four films, all of them over budget. ‘It was one problem on
Citizen Kane
;
sickness on
Ambersons
; $150,000 over on
Journey into Fear
, now what is the answer in Brazil? Here was a real opportunity to show the industry that without adequate equipment and with a most difficult problem, you were able to come through.’ He is sending Phil Reismann to Rio: ‘I have instructed him that he must forget his friendship for you … he has the authority to stop production immediately
and call the whole production off and instruct everyone to return. That of course I would dislike to see – particularly because you left in a blaze of glory and made such a fine showing on your arrival. It would be painful to share with you the closing of the show and your instructions to return. Sincerely.’

This guilt-inducing battering was neatly backed up at almost exactly the same moment
by a letter from Welles’s ex-guardian, Dr Maurice Bernstein (‘Dadda’), his mother’s lover and the principal promoter of the infant Welles’s status as a prodigy. His relationship to Welles – now, after all, a world-famous twenty-seven-year-old millionaire, the white hope of the movie industry – remained what it had always been: nagging, loving, censuring, demanding, intensely emotional and comprehensively
invasive, resembling the music-hall idea of a Jewish mother, with a touch of nastiness all his own. ‘Did you get my birthday cable?
⁸
It was all we could send – just
love.
So far I have not received your promised compliance with my request’ – for $ 1,000 – ‘and I am hanging on to the last link now, so don’t wait too long it may break and I’ll sink!’ he writes, adding a hand-written account of how
his car needs new valves, $75 worth. ‘Not a good way to start the week and I will walk as long as my arches hold out. PS Did you notice how much it costs me to write to you? I have to go without my meager lunch to mail this.’ When not bombarding Welles with requests for money (he ran a very successful medical practice in Beverly Hills), he was blubbering over his former ward’s – very rare – letters,
passing on salacious gossip about Welles’s ex-wife, Virginia, or admonishing him for the flaws in his character.