Orson Welles: Hello Americans (3 page)

In this volume, as in the previous one, I have focused on why and how Welles made his films, and why they turned out the way they did. I have not attempted frame-by-frame analyses of the work, an enterprise which has been superbly undertaken elsewhere.

It remains for me to thank those whose unstinting generosity
and input have so richly fed the present volume: Charles Higham, Richard France, James Naremore, Robert Fischer-Ettel, Kent Hägglund, René Hagenhauer, Alcides da Costa. I am deeply
indebted
, too, to the work of the Wellesian scholars: the endlessly perceptive Jonathan Rosenbaum, and the quite phenomenally industrious Bret Wood; a fuller list of individual acknowledgements will be found at the
end of the book. During the fifteen years since I started work on Welles, so many of those who not merely helped but also befriended me have disappeared from our lives; I think especially of George Fanto, Welles’s cameraman on
It’s All True
(and
Othello
), and Dick Wilson, who was pretty well the first witness I cross-examined and whose generosity not only to me, but also to Welles’s posterity
in preserving the Mercury archive, is memorialised elsewhere in this volume. Beyond his great gifts as a film-maker, Welles was a phenomenon, a remarkable member of the human race, and I have been especially grateful for the testimony of those who made him more vivid as a man. I hope I have been able to do justice to what I have been told.

For the paperback edition,
I have incorporated a number of factual corrections furnished me by my friends and colleagues Kent Hägglund, Charles Higham, Miles Kreuger, Sam Leiter and François Thomas. My deep gratitude to each of these gentlemen for sharing the fruits of their long years of immersion in Welles’s life and work; the precision and generosity of their contributions means that the present edition owes even more to
their work than the first one did. One or two reviewers of the book also made useful suggestions which I have gratefully incorporated, though I was amused to note that many of them thought that the punning chapter titles were my own invention: it may be worth noting that they all derive from contemporary articles on Welles, who seemed to inspire journalists to uncommon heights of playfulness.

THE LOS ANGELES
premiere of
Citizen Kane
on 2 May 1941 was one of the greatest and most brilliant occasions Hollywood had ever mounted: a celebration of cinematic audacity, a slap in the face for William Randolph Hearst and his cohorts in the press and within the industry who had sought to suppress the film, and a very public vindication of RKO’s controversial championship
of Orson Welles. The film’s not quite twenty-six-year-old director-writer-producer-star had, it seemed, confounded his critics and laid down a marker for what would surely be a spectacular career in motion pictures.

As it happens, Welles would never again know anything remotely like the premiere of
Citizen Kane
, nor ever again direct a film like it. Indeed, no film of his ever again had a premiere,
even on the most modest scale.
Kane
proved to be the end of a chapter, not the beginning of one, though Welles would have been forgiven for not knowing so at the time. Just before the film’s release there had been a black few months when it seemed that it might never be seen – might indeed be physically destroyed – a prospect that drove him back, filled with rage against Hollywood, to the theatre,
where he staged the most radical play he ever directed,
Native Son
; and to radio, where he wrote, directed and performed the most politically provocative programme he ever produced,
His Honor the Mayor
. But in May 1941, he appeared poised to resume his self-appointed task of transforming the movie industry. The reviews for
Citizen Kane
had almost unanimously acclaimed him as the most original,
the most intelligent, the most important film-maker of the day – perhaps of all time. Such big talk is always dangerous to the recipient, particularly when (as all too soon proved the case) the acclaim is not matched by box-office performance. But for the time being, as far as Welles knew, his situation could scarcely have been better; he and his Mercury unit within RKO were raring to go, smiled
on by company president George J. Schaefer, who had, at a shaky moment in the company’s fortunes, risked everything in backing
Kane
against powerful and ruthless forces, and who now felt triumphantly vindicated.

The film’s critical success was a much-needed boost for Schaefer, who was determined, against the advice of the hard-headed businessmen who had hired him in 1938, to make RKO Hollywood’s
artistic leader. With some imagination, he had contracted, albeit with notably less generous deals than Welles’s, outstanding talents like Pare Lorentz, the sturdily original director of the documentary
The Plow that Broke the Plains
, and Jed Harris, Broadway’s most admired (and most feared) director. From the start, Schaefer’s artistically ambitious policy had surprised and alarmed his board,
but he had convinced them of the efficacy of his business plan, founded on the establishment of independent units within the RKO fold. Schaefer’s background was in sales, and sales is what RKO expected. At Paramount, he had driven his team, as Betty Lasky put it, ‘like a Prussian riding master’; at United Artists, where he had been before his RKO appointment, he was known as ‘The Tiger’.
¹

In
his dealings with distributors and the press over
Citizen Kane
, Schaefer had certainly justified that sobriquet, displaying the fierce tenacity of an animal protecting its young. In his personal dealings with Orson Welles, however, it was the reverse: he had become, to the astonishment of his colleagues, a doting parent. The tiger turned pussycat. His sponsorship of the twenty-six-year-old still
known, more or less ironically, as the Boy Wonder had been a personal gamble, incurring many enmities and not a little ridicule. Welles as head of Mercury Productions dealt directly with Schaefer and was answerable only to him. From Welles’s point of view, this relationship with an older man, like so many in Welles’s early life, was of a curious intensity, emotional and tender: boyishly trusting,
vulnerable, sometimes hot-headed on his part; protective, solicitous, occasionally strict on Schaefer’s. This ‘big, robust bulldog’ of a man (Lasky’s phrase; obviously he made a powerful, if zoologically complex, impact on his beholders) vied with Welles’s former headmaster ‘Skipper’ Hill and his official guardian Dr Maurice Bernstein in absolute and very public devotion to him and his talent.
²
‘Thank you Orson Welles!’ read Schaefer’s unprecedented personal message in the colour supplement of the
Hollywood Reporter
at the time of
Kane
’s release. ‘Your triumph is one of the greatest accomplishments in motion picture history, and proof that America is still the land of opportunity, where there will always be room for those with dreams and the courage to bring them to reality.’
³
In
the
light of such unqualified and highly visible support, why would Welles, as he contemplated his next moves, not have expected absolute support from Schaefer in whatever he chose to do? And he was not wrong. What he misjudged was the strength of the older man’s position.

Despite the noisy acclaim for
Citizen Kane
, Schaefer, in May 1941, was particularly vulnerable. Those he had personally appointed
to crucial positions – the heads of programming and of studio – had failed to deliver the results he needed: their activities in 1939–40 left the company $1.25m in the red. In February of 1941, Schaefer had personally taken charge of the whole studio, a decision that led to widespread firings and walk-outs. ‘I just had a hot tip,’ quipped Garson Kanin, directing the current Ginger Rogers vehicle
for the studio, ‘that R is pulling out, leaving the company only the KO.’
⁴
There were vigorously denied rumours that Joseph Kennedy, recently relieved of his controversial position as ambassador to Britain, might be called in to mount an investigation of the company’s corporate structure, possibly even to take it over; maybe, it was suggested, he had an option to acquire a major slice of the company’s
stock. The independent production units – ‘top-bracket specialists’ – of which Welles’s Mercury unit was one (and a very expensive one at that) were failing; while even critical successes like William Dieterle’s
All That Money Can Buy
had done poor business. In April of 1941, while
Kane
was still in limbo, Schaefer had signed a deal with the most dynamic of the independent producers, Sam Goldwyn;
the deal brought prestige, but was scarcely going to produce any financial windfalls. In renegotiating Welles’s contract, Schaefer had offered him the same generous financial terms as before, but with one highly significant omission: Welles no longer had absolute approval of the final cut. He was also informally given to understand that budgets were to be very tight.

Later that summer, against
this financial background, and shortly after
Kane
’s rip-roaring premiere, Schaefer unveiled a new team. It was a surprising one. As head of production, he appointed Joseph Breen, the fiercely Roman Catholic former director of the industry’s morality watchdog, the so-called Hays Code Administration Office; while head of ‘A’ pictures was Sol Lesser, who will inevitably go down in history as producer
of the
Tarzan
series rather than as the organiser of several valiant, if controversial, attempts at salvaging Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s abandoned American masterpiece,
Que Viva Mexico!
In July, Breen gave his first press conference to
announce
the new programme. He made a point both of confirming Welles’s importance to the company – ‘the Wizard of RKO’, Breen called him – and at the same
time suggesting a new direction for his work: his new three-picture deal would include ‘a Mexican picture’ and another, unnamed, ‘which will not follow the pattern of shocking Hollywood’.
⁵
Finally, said Breen, there was the possibility of a film of Eric Ambler’s highly successful bestseller
Journey into Fear
. Despite the ringing endorsement, it was a slightly foggy announcement, which failed to
offer a satisfactory answer to the pressing question: whither Welles?

Welles and Schaefer both knew that the success of
Citizen Kane
had been a close-run thing. The quest to determine what to follow it with would be every bit as urgent and as full of anxiety as it had been in the desperate two years after Welles’s arrival in Hollywood and his discovery in Herman Mankiewicz of an ideal collaborator.
Both Welles and Schaefer were sharply aware that they needed to succeed
Kane
with something different: they were not going to follow ‘the pattern of shocking Hollywood’. Both of them had been taken aback by the virulence of Hearst’s response to the film that he insisted was his portrait. Not only had the studio bosses been threatened with exposure by Hearst’s hit-woman, Louella Parsons, but so
(far more dangerously from Schaefer’s point of view) had majority shareholders of RKO. Parsons had threatened Nelson Rockefeller, art-loving head of Standard Oil, and an early and enthusiastic supporter of Schaefer’s recruitment of Welles, with exposing supposed dirt on his father, John D. Rockefeller, Junior; David Sarnoff, head of RCA, a co-founder of RKO, had been similarly menaced. It had been
an ugly and frightening experience, one that Welles was intent on not repeating. For all his radicalism, and his pleasure in cocking a snook at vested interests, Welles had no desire to destroy his future. Nor did he wish to be typecast as a controversialist. He was determined not to be confined to one persona, one genre, or one career. With the harrowing and health-wrecking period in limbo before
the release of
Citizen Kane
behind him, his sense of illimitability had returned in full force. He was ready to reinvent himself.

The search for new subjects was in play, on all fronts. The next period of Welles’s working life, from May 1941 to July 1942, and the termination of his contract with RKO, resembles one of his own films in the multiplicity of its narratives. There was never a moment
during this time when he was not engaged, full-time, on at least three absolutely separate projects, to say nothing of
innumerable
extra-curricular activities. On a purely quantitative level, his productivity is almost impossible to grasp. Finding himself in command of substantial (if finite) resources, and driven by the need to compete with himself, the word ‘genius’ still echoing unendingly
and tauntingly in his ears, Welles’s personal dynamo, fuelled by a characteristic mixture of idealism and sheer raging appetite – greed, to put it less politely – generated waves of simultaneous activity whose breadth of address is surely without parallel in the annals of Hollywood. That the breadth should sometimes be at the expense of depth is scarcely surprising. Under his inspiration, and with
the swaggering sense of having just pulled off the most audacious coup imaginable by the skin of their teeth, the high-spirited young men of the office of Mercury Productions started generating ideas for films with unstoppable energy: they were registering so many titles that by the end of the year Breen had delicately to enquire whether they really wanted them all, since RKO was only allowed to
register a hundred a year.

Welles was an early sufferer from the condition that the Yugoslavian film-maker Dusan Makavejev has described as
projectitis
.
⁶
His fertility in engendering ideas was astonishing. He was able to conceive an entire film within minutes; in the incubator of his mind, the germ of the idea rapidly grew to full-fledged maturity, demanding to be announced immediately. Once
exposed to the light of common day, the project would, generally speaking, and in the nature of things, almost immediately expire. In 1940, Welles told the press that he was going to film the
Life of Christ
, though he modestly demurred from saying who would be playing the title role; in 1942, he proclaimed that he would be filming
Mein Kampf
. This time no inhibition prevented his claiming the
part of Hitler. Of neither project, divine or diabolic, was another word ever heard. Some forty or so other properties were considered, encompassing the peaks of world literature, from Balzac to Mark Twain, and all, for one reason or another, discarded.