Orson Welles: Hello Americans (30 page)

Both series continued till the end of January 1943, and both were solid successes for Welles, much appreciated by his sponsors and fellow-broadcasters, though they scarcely answered the pressing questions concerning his future or his financial security. Worse, they failed
to attract the audiences that had been hoped for, and at the beginning of 1943, he was dropped from them.
NATURALLY WE ARE UPSET
, cabled the I-AA’s representative.
¹⁰
WE FEEL THAT THE SERIES HAS DONE A GREAT AMOUNT OF GOOD.
And no doubt it had. They – and other ventures like them – are representative of a vital and now largely submerged aspect of Welles, what might be called the Todd legacy, dinned
into him (as it would continue to be for the rest of his life) by Skipper Hill, but also so clearly a part of his mother’s heritage: the belief that an enlightened approach to education was the linchpin of life, and that without it there could be no democracy, no progress and, ultimately, no happiness. Perhaps only an autodidact could feel these things quite so passionately. Perhaps, too, only
an autodidact could quite so shamelessly show off as. he did on
Information Please
, a radio quiz in which Welles not only answered every single one of his own (rather difficult) questions, but was also audibly champing at the bit to answer everyone else’s.

Another persistent facet of Welles’s cornucopian nature was his longing to’ be funny, and his perfect willingness to undermine his own dignity
in order to do so. Shortly after his return from Brazil, his dismissal from RKO and the ruin of all his dreams, he was to be found on a comedy half-hour shrieking away at the microphone in a riotous send-up of
Les Misérables
, one of his earliest, finest and most serious achievements on radio. It was as if he been oppressed by the seriousness all along, and needed to let off steam. Or perhaps he
felt that if he were too serious, he would not be loved. The symptoms of the latter syndrome were to be seen throughout the rest of his career, in many bizarre manifestations.

As for film,
Journey into Fear
was still, as far as Welles was concerned, unfinished. He had secured RKO’s agreement to allow him to do a final cut on the film. The letter authorising this was cold and not without a certain
grim satisfaction: ‘You will go to Hollywood to arrive there not later than October 23rd 1942 to do re-editing on
Journey into Fear
,’ wrote Peter Rathvon, the new head
of
the studio.
¹¹
Welles must finish within fourteen days; there would be no retakes except one additional scene, to be shot in one day, using only Joseph Cotten and an extra. Then came the really bitter medicine: ‘Your work at the
studio shall be under the supervision of Mr Charles Koerner. The cutters, cameraman and others whose services shall be used shall be people assigned by Mr Koerner.’ Welles was thus answerable directly to the man who had destroyed George Schaefer, who had determinedly extirpated Mercury from RKO, and who had declared personal war on Welles himself. In a sense, it was better than nothing: had he
had even that amount of time and those meagre facilities with which to work on
The Magnificent Ambersons
, it might have been a very different film.

Welles devoted his allotted fortnight to cleaning up the final reels of
Journey into Fear
, this cliff-hanging sequence, as Banat pursues his quarry across the rain-spattered facade of the hotel, remains the most successful in the film. It is impossible
to tell what Welles might have achieved with the movie had he been given a proper post-production period: again, with the dissolution of his team, he was effectively working with one hand tied behind his back. The contribution that might have been made by special effects and an interesting (as opposed to merely generic) score was potentially enormous: had Bernard Herrmann, for example, an absolute
master of suspense and exotic effects, written it rather than poor old Roy Webb, he might have taken the film to a different level of finish and wit. As it is, Webb did a decent workmanlike job; it is honourably competent, the last thing one expects or wants from a Welles film. At least one executive at RKO had faith in it: Al Galston of the sales department sent a telegram to Welles saying:
WE BELIEVE YOUR REVISED
JOURNEY INTO FEAR
WILL BE ONE OF THE BIG BOX OFFICE GROSSERS OF THE YEAR.
¹²
Alas, it was not to be.

Whatever the ill will between Welles and RKO, Hollywood at large had not dismissed him; he was still a huge figure in the landscape. But what to do with him? In 1942, the producer David O. Selznick was planning another of his grandiose literary adaptations; unlike his
recent triumphs,
Gone with the Wind
(1939) and
Rebecca
(1940), this one was to be drawn from a truly great source,
Jane Eyre
. He decided that Welles should play Jane’s moody employer, Edward Rochester. Welles had known the producer since they had dined together after a performance of
Doctor
Faustus
in 1936, when Selznick had offered him the job of head of his story department (Welles slyly suggested
that his then business partner, John Houseman, might be better at it). As was his wont, Selznick sought to throw every particle of talent he could muster at the project.
Jane Eyre
was the dream of the English-born director Robert Stevenson, who had been under contract to Selznick for some time without actually making a film for him. His biggest success in America had been
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
; he had just completed a decent and financially productive French Resistance movie,
Joan of Paris
, for RKO, and was preparing to join the Forces himself as soon as
Jane Eyre
was shot. Selznick had equipped him with an army of writers, including Aldous Huxley and John Houseman, now indeed (just as Welles had suggested he should be seven years before) part of Selznick’s permanent staff.

Selznick
was not, in fact, technically speaking, the producer of
Jane Eyre
: having packaged the film, he had sold it to Twentieth Century Fox, who appointed William ‘Bill’ Goetz – another son-in-law, like Selznick himself, of Louis B. Mayer – as producer, but Selznick kept a sharp eye on the production from beginning to end. It was Selznick’s idea to cast Orson Welles as Edward Rochester to Joan Fontaine’s
Jane; he may have hoped that some of Welles’s genius would rub off on Stevenson. Such was his regard for Welles’s work as a director that he had begged RKO to deposit a copy of Welles’s original cut of
The Magnificent Ambersons
with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a tantalising prospect that, needless to say, never materialised. Selznick had long admired him as an actor and thought him,
with some reason, peerless as a director of dramatised novels on radio; he had vexed Alfred Hitchcock during preparations for
Rebecca
by constantly referring to the version of the novel that Welles had just made for
The Campbell Playhouse
: ‘if we do in motion pictures as astute a job as Welles did on the radio,’ he had told Hitch in one of his celebrated memos, ‘we are likely to have the same
success the book had and the same success that Welles had.’
¹³

From Welles’s point of view,
Jane Eyre
was from the start a questionable enterprise, compromising as it did his status as a so-called quadruple-threat. His profile as producer-director-writer-actor had been perceived by his advisors (and to an extent by him) as being the
sine qua non
of his reputation. In the end, financial considerations
– the money he owed RKO, his alimony, his tax arrears, the extravagance of his lifestyle – demanded that he accept
the
job, but he and his representatives did everything they could to protect his position. Anxious that Welles might be mistaken for a mere actor, Herb Drake told
Look
magazine that Welles was only doing
Jane Eyre
‘in the interest of Uncle Sam’s tax department’, demonstrating a dangerous
contempt for acting on Welles’s part. Perhaps Welles thought that by affecting to despise his job, he would win public sympathy; the opposite is invariably true, as in the case of Marlon Brando’s similar statements of some twenty years later. Why should anybody want to pay money to see someone do something for which they have contempt? Welles’s attorney Loyd Wright took issue with Twentieth
Century Fox’s proposed contract, insisting that ‘he must not deviate from his well-earned position, that of a recognised independent producer’, even if he was only to act in the film, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its physical realisation.
¹⁴
Wright suggested a credit for him:
PRODUCTION DESIGNED BY ORSON WELLES.
Merely acting in a film was clearly regarded by Welles and his team as a dire
demotion: how could he, who had done every job on a movie, simply take direction from some lesser mortal?

Selznick was aware of the anomaly and, when he wrote to Goetz telling him that he’d like to be present at a forthcoming casting meeting for
Jane Eyre
, he added, ‘I should like also to urge you to have Orson there, because I know few people in the history of the business who have shown such
talent for exact casting, and for digging up new people.’
¹⁵
There was from the beginning some confusion about exactly what Welles would be doing on the film, a confusion that Welles did nothing to dispel. This was a pattern that would be repeated many times throughout his career: the creation of a suspicion that he might have had something of a guiding hand in the realisation of another director’s
film. In the case of
Jane Eyre
, the impression is even more insistent because, in addition to the casting of three of Welles’s actors – Erskine Sanford, Eustace Wyatt and the great Agnes Moorehead – two of his key collaborators worked on the film: Bernard Herrmann (a great deal of the music, as it happens, is recycled from Herrmann’s score for Welles’s radio version of
Rebecca
); and, no doubt
to Welles’s considerable displeasure, John Houseman. In the event, Houseman – to the relief of both himself and Welles – was not present at any point during either filming or the pre-production period.

There was an active move on Welles’s part, or that of his representatives, to secure a formal credit for him as producer of
Jane
Eyre
,
a move that Selznick equally actively resisted. ‘I don’t believe
Orson himself would any more think of taking this credit, once he had all the facts and understood what he might be doing to Stevenson, than he would think of taking directing or co-directing credit,’ he wrote to Goetz. ‘Actually, direction or co-direction credit would be no more damaging to Stevenson in this case than production credit for Orson, for the latter places Stevenson in the position
of simply having carried out Orson’s plans, than which nothing could be more inaccurate.’ Selznick had already conceded Welles first billing over Joan Fontaine (an undisputed star since
Rebecca
), because an acting-only credit would ‘reduce’ him from his status as a producer-director-actor-writer. For him to have associate producer status would thus be ‘a double injustice – to Stevenson, and to
Joan’s status as a star of the first magnitude … I do not think that he will want anything that is not his due, at the expense of another man for whom he has professed – very sincerely, I am sure – great admiration.’ Interestingly, only a few weeks after sending this to Goetz, Selznick wrote to Joe Schenck of Twentieth Century in very different terms, agreeing to Welles receiving credit as producer,
while Fontaine gets first billing. Among the various practical reasons he cites, there is, he says, ‘general disbelief’ that they would not give first billing to Fontaine, ceding second billing ‘to a man who, whatever his prestige, is clearly not in the same category as a star’.
¹⁶
Conversely, it was thought absurd to lose the prestige of Welles’s name as producer in the credits; in their eyes,
his stature was clearly unaffected by the RKO debacle. Stevenson, Selznick continued, was going into the army, so Welles’s credit would not damage him; the publicity department, meanwhile, had reported that ‘there can be no wide-spread belief that Mr Stevenson is not the director of the film in every sense of the word’. So much for appearances. More significantly from Welles’s perspective, Selznick
reports that they have just learned that ‘Welles did a great more producing on the picture than we had previously known. We have been informed by people from your studio that Mr Welles worked on the sets, changes in the script, in casting, among other things,
and that he had charge of the editing
.’

All of this is extraordinary, but what is conveyed by the last phrase (my italics) is simply sensational.
To edit another man’s movie is to cut his balls off, as Welles had better reason than most to know – to edit creatively, that is, rather than merely functionally. In the technical sense, moreover, at this point Welles was scarcely the master of editing that he later became, having only directed
Citizen
Kane
(largely edited in the camera) and
The Magnificent Ambersons
(on which Welles’s editing
contribution amounted to precisely three days – and nights – in Miami). And yet:
he had charge of the editing
. The letter ends: ‘please understand that we are in no sense pressing this [the suggestion that Welles should receive a credit as producer], and are extending it purely as a courtesy to 20th Century-Fox’. For whatever reasons, it never happened: Welles received no producer credit, and
he had to settle for second billing to the star.

On the set, however, he hardly comported himself as a mere actor, according to Joan Fontaine’s perhaps not entirely objective account. ‘Orson Welles was a huge man in 1943. Everything about him was oversize, including his ego,’ she wrote in her autobiography,
No Bed of Roses
. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson:
Jane Eyre
was simply a medium
to show off his talents.’ She describes how, on the first day of filming, the cast and crew were assembled at one o’clock; at about four, the stage door suddenly burst open and Welles whirled in, accompanied by his doctor, his manager, his secretary and his valet. ‘Orson strode up to a lectern … placing his script on it and standing before our astonished group, he announced to the director and cast,
“Now we’ll begin on page four!”’ Stevenson – ‘slight, timid, gentlemanly’ – was ‘suddenly demoted to director-in-name-only’. The journalist Sheilah Graham wrote a profile of Welles during the making of the film, in the course of which she reported that ‘Welles has four secretaries, two offices, and is making a government “short” in between takes of
Jane Eyre
. At the same time he is scripting one
broadcast a week and cutting
Journey into Fear
. Also.’ she added, with casual savagery, ‘he is directing the director of
Jane Eyre
on how to direct.’