Orson Welles: Hello Americans (24 page)

In Hollywood, all those many hundreds of miles away, the Mercury office was fighting a rearguard action to protect what was left of
Journey into Fear
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
. Herb Drake, with his usual sharp grasp of the situation, had written to Schaefer urging him to mount a vigorous press campaign on behalf of
Ambersons
. ‘About a year ago you came to the rescue of
Citizen Kane
with an
exciting advertising insert in the trade papers.’
²¹
The same situation now exists, he says, with
The Magnificent Ambersons
. ‘Not enough press people have seen the film yet to counteract the
irresponsible
chatter of the anti-Ambersons element.’ He knows what they’re up against: envy and resentment. ‘There is always a ready audience for anti-Welles talk. The current belief is that Welles has muffed
his opportunity and that he is a flash in the pan and does not justify RKO’s faith in his talents … only a statement on the picture’s great worth from the very top can untie our hands and allow us to get the picture the attention it deserves. A powerful trade ad from you will set us right with the rest of the press.’ Welles found himself again in the extraordinary position of begging the studio
to back its own movie; this time, it didn’t happen. Jack Moss was fighting a different battle, desperate to end the constant process of trimming, nipping, tucking, adding and subtracting, which had now been going on for nearly three months. The latest preview at Long Beach (which included his own new rewritten ending) had been, he told George Schaefer, ‘amazing and gratifying’; at private screenings
critics from
Life, Time
and
United Press
had ‘unanimously rave[d]’, vindicating, he said, Schaefer’s judgement and faith. ‘I cannot stress too urgently, George, the deep belief that the picture should be left as it is since we have had such phenomenal luck with last previews and critical showings. We have expended so much work and time and care and together have fought this problem through. I
ask you to review this message and make your final consideration an all-round agreement not just with me but with unanimous opinion. May I hear from you?’

Small hope. That same day, Charles Koerner had written to Schaefer detailing further proposed changes to
The Magnificent Ambersons
, stating bluntly, ‘we will eliminate the so-called kitchen scene’, the astonishing scene between Fanny and George
Minafer on which Welles and Moorehead had lavished so much attention
²²
and Tim Holt had turned green from eating too many cakes. As it happens, the scene was not removed, but others were, despite protests from the Mercury office. Ross Hastings checked with Reg Armour whether RKO was required to give notice before completing the final cutting of
The Magnificent Ambersons
and shipping the picture
‘in a form not approved by Mr Jack Moss’.
²³
With evident satisfaction, Armour replied: ‘No notice is necessary … after the first rough-cut and the first sneak preview, RKO has the right to have Mr Welles cut the picture as RKO directs.
²⁴
Because of the fact that Mr Welles is not present to cut the picture as directed, I think RKO is justified in having the picture cut as it desires.’ The front-office
men who had loathed Welles from the very beginning now had their revenge, and it was sweet. Jack Moss was forced into whimpering, abjectly begging Schaefer to leave well alone:
I AM ENTITLED TO BETTER CONSIDERATION AND CERTAINLY A REPLY.
I
’
LL PUT IT THIS WAY: I BEG YOU TO CONSIDER MY COMMENTS REGARDING THE CHANGES IN AMBERSONS.
²⁵
When Schaefer, instinctively the most courteous of men, did reply,
he apologised, offering his illness as an excuse, and politely passed Moss on to Koerner. Gordon E. Youngman, hearing of this exchange, wired his colleague Ned Depinet to get hold of Moss’s original telegram:
PLEASE TRY TO FIND IT IN SCHAEFER
’
S
FILES AND BE SURE PRESERVE AS PROBABLY STRONG EVIDENCE IN CASE IF WE EVER HAVE WELLES LAWSUIT
.
²⁶
Koerner himself had already written that same day to Schaefer
discussing various further changes he planned to make to the movie. In a chilling note, he informed the man he was about to replace: ‘Wise tells me this in no way will hurt the picture and will fit in that spot to really clean up the scene.’
²⁷
The studio’s chief executive, the company president and the film’s editor were blithely determining the film’s final form without reference to its director
at all. This of course was the common experience of many (perhaps of most) Hollywood directors, but it was the mould Welles was supposed to have broken. For Schaefer, at least, things had come to a sad pass. He wrote a troubled, uncomfortable letter to Reg Armour – the person on whose ears his request was least likely to fall favourably. ‘I think it important, in the scheme of things, that you
save the extra negative and positive cuts that we made on
The Magnificent Ambersons
.
²⁸
Some day someone may want to know what was done with the original picture Welles shot.’ Still saddened by the waywardness of his protégé, and hopeful that he might one day be taught the error of his ways, he adds, ‘it might be a good idea to put all cuts together and show him all the useless material he shot
and the improvement that was made by the elimination’. There is no suspicion whatsoever in his mind that the film as directed by Welles, even though less commercial, might actually have been better than the one he and his partners in crime had cobbled together.

Journey into Fear
was equally embattled, although, as George Schaefer might say, ‘in the scheme of things’ it is hard to feel so deeply
about its fate. Koerner had confiscated the film from the Mercury office for re-editing. Moss appealed directly to him for its return: ‘The natural conclusion can only be: Mercury can go – fishing … I’ll not introduce any argument of rights, moral or legal.
²⁹
Courtesy alone should be enough to cause Mercury to be included in any function concerning
Journey into Fear
.’ Koerner replied with aristocratic
disdain,
brooking no further discussion: ‘Dear Jack, Believe me I realise your situation very definitely and clearly.
³⁰
Nevertheless, never for a moment can I imagine that RKO has at any time failed to extend every possible courtesy to Mercury Productions. In fact, the extent of RKO’s help to Orson Welles and Mercury Productions would in many circumstances be considered somewhat fantastic. In
regard to
Journey into Fear
, I simply followed definite and clear-cut instructions. There was no other alternative, and as far as I am concerned the matter is permanently closed. Sincerely CWK.’ Jo Cotten, with slightly more clout than Moss (apart from anything else, he was the screenwriter), now weighed in, vigorously defending ending the picture with the scene in the rain, sharply and accurately
delineating the arbitrariness of the studio’s judgements: ‘The editing and the cutting of the picture up to now has always been guided by audience reactions at the previews, and certainly we all know that the ending in the rain was more favourably received than any other ending ever screened.
³¹
Since we started out accepting the opinion of the public to guide us in our own opinions, let us stick
to this policy and not at this late date make the mistake of deciding that after all the audience is wrong.’ All such civilised interventions were pointless. For Mercury at RKO, the game was up; they could go, as Moss so pointedly put it, ‘– fishing’.

On 26 June, hopelessly outflanked, George Schaefer resigned from the presidency of RKO. His departure was a formality; he had been among the living
dead for some weeks. No mourners appeared. There is no record anywhere, in any document, letter, statement, interview, of one word of regret or condolence from anyone – let alone anyone at Mercury, least of all from Welles – at the forced departure of the man who had staked his career and his reputation on the great adventure that Welles’s three-year sojourn at RKO represented. But for him,
Citizen
Kane
might have been destroyed; but for him, indeed, it would never have been made. It is shocking that he received so little acknowledgement at the time, and continues to do so. Schaefer’s unstinting support of Welles gives the lie to the suggestion, widely promoted by certain of Welles’s apologists, that he was the victim of a cynical and ruthless studio system, which wanted to destroy him because
of his independence and originality. This was precisely so in the case of Charles W. Koerner, who was quite explicit to that effect, but the case of George J. Schaefer shows the other side of the coin. Having assiduously courted Welles, he instantly fell under the young wizard’s spell, immediately putting fabulous resources at his disposal with an absolute minimum of
restraint.
Schaefer believed
in Welles unconditionally and sought to incorporate him into the system, hoping with his aid to transform Hollywood (or his patch of it) from a mere money-making enterprise into a place that was both artistically enlightened and commercially viable. Together they would do it. He wanted, in a nutshell, an equal partnership with Welles, an astonishing initiative on his part, considering that he had
all the power in his hands. All he required from Welles – in addition to what he had to offer artistically – was a degree of responsibility for the consequences of his choices, and an acknowledgement that Schaefer was the head of a company that needed to make profits in order to survive.

Welles, young and flushed with the sense of his own talents, paid lip service to these small qualifications,
seeing RKO as an inexhaustible milch cow. He rejoiced in Schaefer’s enthusiasm for him, and thought that by a combination of charm, bluster and a sly implication of complicity he could get exactly what he wanted, often saying one thing and doing the opposite, in the belief that he would always come up with the goods and that they would always be worth whatever they cost. But he was at the mercy
of the nature of his own talent, depending on adrenalin and inspiration to bring off his effects. He had enormous difficulty in engendering material: his real gift was for editing, interpreting, transforming. A screenplay only existed, for him, as a suggestion of a starting point, which would then acquire its character, its tone, its form and to a large extent its meaning from what he did with it
in the act of creation. He could never supply anything to order. But Schaefer, as a businessman – an investor, so to speak, in Welles – had to believe that he could. The aggrieved letter that Schaefer sent him in Rio was an acknowledgement that the two men were not, in fact, partners at all. The terrible phrase ‘lip service’ sums up the older man’s sense of betrayal and disappointment. Had Welles
been straight with Schaefer, had he listened to him, had he understood what a peerless and indomitable ally he had in him, had he grasped that there were limits to any enterprise funded by Hollywood, his history and that of Hollywood – to say nothing of that of George Schaefer – might have been very different. Instead of being remembered merely as
Citizen Kane
’s midwife (who then heroically saved
it from an untimely death), Schaefer might have been remembered – as he had dreamed of being – as usher-in of an altogether extraordinary period in the history of cinema.

His departure was without the slightest vestige of the glory he had dreamed of. Louella Parsons, William Randolph Hearst’s avenging
angel,
gloated that despite Schaefer’s having violently denied – when questioned by representatives
of Hearst Newspapers in the east – that he had any intention of leaving his post, ‘the moment Schaefer’s resignation was received it was accepted’, adding coyly, ‘far be it from me to hazard what changed his mind, in such a hurry’.
³²
The aggression of her report, though hardly unexpected, is still shockingly unconcealed. The ‘dispossession of Orson Welles, moon-faced boy wonder,’ she says, was
because ‘the space was urgently needed for those engaged on current productions’ (
Tarzan Triumphs
, as it happens, a Sol B. Lesser production); the order was made by ‘the able Charles Koerner’. Her report only mirrored the brutal urgency of RKO itself. The day after Schaefer’s resignation, senior executive Ross Hastings wrote a brisk and chilling little document to the able Koerner, describing
‘what is necessary to terminate further operations by Mercury Productions’;
³³
most employees, he noted, had no contracts and could be
terminated
immediately. Twenty-four hours after Hastings’s memo was written, jack Moss, Herbert Drake and five secretaries left the lot, taking with them, according to the
New York Times
, ‘the Mercury files, a mimeograph machine and a few other “meager” possessions’.
³⁴
‘Like Leonardo da Vinci evicted from a draughty garret,’ said Herb Drake a little unconvincingly. They moved to an embattled position in the Hollywood Hills north of the Trocadero nightclub, ‘to await the return of their leader from Brazil’ late that month. ‘A telephone with a long cord was brought out into the back garden,’ the
New York Times
informed its readers, ‘so that a faithful hench-woman
can sit on the grass and answer Mercury Productions whenever it rings.’ Cocking a parting snook at their former bosses, Jack Moss took the bronze fittings (‘material no longer available because of the war’) from the famous steam-bath installed when Mercury first arrived on the lot, thus rendering it useless, as a hapless RKO-Pathé executive, intent on a little soothing rehydration, discovered.
Spirits were schoolboyishly high among the evicted Mercurians.
JUST TURNING A BAD KOERNER,
someone wrote up on the wall of their temporary office:
ALL
’
S WELL THAT ENDS WELLES,
riposted RKO. The whole thing had the feeling of a prank. Meanwhile, the fate of three films remained in the balance.