Orson Welles: Hello Americans (31 page)

It is worth noting that at this stage Welles had never been directed by anyone else on film – indeed, he had hardly been directed by anyone else in any medium, at least since his youthful days at the Gate and the slightly later period with Katharine
Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. It must have been a hard adjustment for him, one that he did not handle with grace. It signals the beginning of his essentially awkward relationship with the film community: if you hired him as an actor, you got so much more – more perhaps than you wanted. It is fair to observe that, in this particular case (perhaps unbeknown to Fontaine), he had been involved in
both the screenplay and the casting, so it is hardly surprising that he expected to be treated differently from everyone else. But this behaviour (no doubt exaggerated by Fontaine, though
there
are plenty of comparable reports, then and later) suggests a childish determination to demonstrate his importance. It also marks the beginning of the long sulk that so often coloured his work in other men’s
films: they won’t let him make his own movies, so he’s damned if anyone else is going to enjoy making theirs.

This attitude was not, however, inflexibly maintained: ‘Orson couldn’t keep up to the position he assumed,’ wrote Fontaine. ‘He was undisciplined, always late, indulged in melodrama on and off the set.’ On one occasion he failed to show up on time for a photo-shoot: ‘He’d been lying in
the bath sulking because I didn’t trust him to show up on time.’ This aspect of Welles – the infantile tyrant – is widely attested, and coexists with the passionate and high-flown broadcaster, the political writer, the master-craftsman and the inspiring leader. They were all Welles, and the different personae could succeed each other with bewildering speed, or could indeed be on display simultaneously.
At the time, Welles was having an affair with Lena Horne, who was singing in a nightclub on Sunset Strip, and he liked to report his wilder activities to Fontaine while they were shooting. (Shorty Chirello, Welles’s chauffeur-valet, confided in her that in fact Welles sat in bed every night with a tray, ‘which didn’t jibe at all with Orson’s version of his nocturnal exploits’. For once, Welles’s
version of his own life may be more reliable than his chauffeur’s.) Despite everything, Fontaine realised, he wanted to be liked. Eventually she warmed to him. Moreover, she noted that, despite all Welles’s peacock displays, Stevenson quietly and slowly regained the directorial reins. With filming completed, however, he joined the army and Welles was presumably able to assert his authority
in the editing suite.

Whatever the truth of this, the film – though certainly dominated by Welles’s startling interpretation of the character of Edward Rochester – is not especially Wellesian in style; indeed, to a large extent it is actually opposed to his aesthetic. The very opening of the film, showing a bookshelf laden with great tomes of the past, proudly declares itself a literary adaptation,
which might be thought to have been anathema to the radical educationalist in Welles. The film ends with a photograph of a bound copy of the novel with the slogan ‘Buy yours in the theatre’. The cinema as a route to literature, not an art form in its own right. If Welles stood against anything as a movie-maker, that was it. The cinematography, by the distinguished cameraman George Barnes (who
had just shot
Rebecca
for Hitchcock), is of great refinement of tone, softly focused, evocative and painterly in a way that Welles and Toland – formerly
Barnes’s
assistant – had utterly set themselves against in
Citizen Kane
;
The Magnificent Ambersons
, too, though aspiring to a period look, uses depth of focus and a kind of energy in the camera movements to engage the viewer critically with the
way in which the story is being told. Barnes’s work in
Jane Eyre
, by contrast, contrives to create a world in which the viewer can forget that he or she is watching a film and simply marvel at the expressive beauty of the pictures. In his own films, Welles did everything he could to prevent this. It is not a style ideally suited to Welles’s talents as a performer. Indeed, it may be argued that
Welles’s acting is always at its best with the cinematographic style that came to be associated with his name – one of unexpected angles, sudden distortions, epic perspectives (the style Carol Reed adopted for
The Third Man
, in which Welles gives arguably his finest performance). The performance he chooses to give in
Jane Eyre
is on the brink of the grotesque, in much the same manner as his aged
Kane: curiously doll-like, strapped into corsets, a great beak of a nose imposed on his own, his facial skin pulled back by the gum of his wig. Interestingly, the image he creates is not unlike the one he invented for himself as a thirteen-year-old playing Richard III. He wears the make-up, which reproduces Brontë’s ‘stern features and a heavy brow … gathered eyebrows’, like a mask, affecting a
highly theatrical, consciously stentorian vocal delivery; his British accent is not that of an English squire, but of an English actor (sometimes tipping over into the lordly Anglo-Irish tones of his youth in the Dublin theatre); it is part of a theatrical gesture. His Rochester is an impersonation, not an interpretation; with Welles, the outside never goes in.

This is by no means to say that
the performance is uninteresting: on the contrary, Welles sees the character as a kind of tortured monster, physically strange, clumsy, only half-human. It is exactly the sort of line on the character that another actor, Charles Laughton, might have taken. Had Laughton done so, he might well have created an equally extreme physical life, but he would (at his best) have transfigured the portrait,
touching some universal chord, provoking pity as well as terror, giving us the man within. With Welles, the interpretation is an idea, put on (like a suit of armour), very striking, very powerful, but merely a thing manipulated by the actor, and thus incapable of moving us. It betrays, as much of his acting does, the influence of German Expressionism, the most theatrical of all filmic styles. This,
his first conscious bid for movie stardom, was not a promising calling card; the gesture is so extreme
that
he only suffers by comparison with the rest of the acting in the film, which in its straightforwardly realistic manner is excellent, ranging from the childish charms of Elizabeth Taylor and the remarkable skill of the teenage Peggy Ann Garner (as the young Jane), through the stalwart and
strikingly accurate character work of Henry Daniell and the human warmth of the Abbey Theatre veteran Sarah Allgood, to the uptight vulnerability of Joan Fontaine in one of her best roles. In this company Welles seems distinctly out of place. So, it might be argued, is Edward Rochester, but Welles’s massive presence and anguished histrionics have a distinctly unbalancing effect on the film.
Jane
Eyre
was not released till 1944, a long year after
Journey into Fear
finally hit the screen in February of 1943; as far as the public was concerned, they scarcely knew what to make of him as an actor. Up to that point Orson Welles’s performances on film had consisted of the many-faceted but not necessarily many-layered Charles Foster Kane, and the preposterously corny Colonel Haki. The release
of
Jane Eyre
as something of a moment of truth for him as an actor.

Welles moodily told Robert Stevenson that the notices he received for the performance had been ‘the worst accorded to an American actor since John Wilkes Booth’.
¹⁷
On the whole, in fact, the reviews were baffled, as well they might have been, though respectfully so. The
Hollywood Reporter
detected ‘certain over-emphases that
are occasionally offensively flamboyant and approximate’,
¹⁸
while
Variety
noted Welles’s ‘declamatory delivery’.
¹⁹
Only James Agee in the
Nation
really took the gloves off, describing Welles’s ‘road-operatic sculpturings of body, cloak and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly.
²⁰
It is possible to enjoy his performance as dead-pan parody;
I imagine he did.’ Unkindly, Agee adds that he might have enjoyed it himself, ‘if I hadn’t wanted, instead, to see a good performance’.

Friends were not much more supportive. Welles was not encouraged by receipt of a telegram from Micheál macLiammóir praising him for his performance of Mr Rochester as Count Dracula, though that sharp little sally has a bit more in it than pure malice: Welles’s
performance is indeed in his line of tortured monsters, of which his radio Dracula is the most remarkable. The problem is that his desire to provoke pity is a notion, an intellectual ambition: he does not take the steps necessary to effect it in the viewer, such as connecting with his own experience or allowing his imagination to engage at a deep (as opposed to a merely pictorial) level. Welles
defended
himself on curious grounds: ‘There are about eight or nine parts that every individual actor can really play and the Rochester role is one of my eight or nine,’ he told an interviewer.
²¹
‘I don’t agree with those sedulous character actors who study and “live” a role for seven months in advance of playing it. If they have to work at it that long, it’s a sure thing they aren’t fitted for
it. They can only … detract from the true possibilities of the role … if the role doesn’t fit the actor then he’s false no matter if he lived it 100 hours a day, and no matter how great his talent for mimicry. I’m striking a blow for realism.’ Realism was not a characteristic that either the press or the public were much inclined then – or ever – to associate with the name of Orson Welles, and his
comment suggests that self-knowledge continued to elude him.

As Welles had admitted, acting in film was a minor element in his life, which was stirring in all sorts of other directions. Many of these departures had considerable significance for his immediate and not-so-immediate future. Whatever his success or failure in any one arena, the scale of Welles’s celebrity was such that new ventures
were always easy to come by, new spheres always waiting to be conquered. Leonard Lyons, his old admirer on the
New York Post
, asked him to write a guest column for the paper, and Welles obliged with gauche charm. ‘This may be the last time I write a column, but it isn’t the first.’
²²
In the piece he recounts the – largely true – story of his infant journalism, when he was the eight-year-old opera
critic for the
Highland Park News
. Then he tells a sweet, if slightly less convincing, story about his time as ghost writer for a drunken movie critic ‘in a city which shall be nameless – and a newspaper which should be’. He wrote the reviews, he says, never having seen the movies in question. Then one day the movie didn’t show up, but his review came out nonetheless. He claims, too, to have written
pulp fiction in Ireland – ‘I never was much good at it; it’s a great art’ – and rounds the piece off with a long and somewhat inconclusive story about Edgar Wallace, which feels like padding, adding, as a final tag, a teary compliment to Leonard Lyons for writing about him ‘when I needed it’. Pleasant enough stuff, but not promising for a future as a columnist. The tone of voice is archly orotund,
like a well-oiled after-dinner speaker (‘Memory’s treasure trove yields up another wistful bauble in the episode of …’). No doubt the piece served its purpose – a stopgap while the resident columnist was on holiday – but it scarcely suggested a future in column writing. Before long, however, that is exactly what Welles pursued with almost desperate fervour.

For the present, he was immersed in
another novel enterprise, substituting for an indisposed Jack Benny on his eponymous show. Welles’s passion for vaudeville in general, and comedians in particular, was one of the great constants of his life: in the late 1960s he was to be found happily fooling around in front of a camera with some of the bright young things of British comedy of the day, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was
a taste he had acquired in childhood as he trailed around the vaudeville houses of Chicago with his stage-door Johnny father. To his unconcealed delight, in March of 1940 – a full year before
Citizen Kane
was released – Welles had been invited to be the guest star on Benny’s show. He plunges into the proceedings like a great big dog jumping into a river and emerging, dripping but triumphant, with
a stick between its jaws. He is hugely game and quite fearless, cracking himself up shamelessly and stumbling charmingly over his script. He is not especially funny, but he is utterly engaging. The persona created for him in the show is an exact reflection of the public’s perception of him at the time: precocious (he left high school at five, Benny says: even his diapers had cuffs) and extravagant,
a sort of deranged actor-managerial-megalomaniac. He runs three careers simultaneously, and sounds veddy, veddy British, dictating notes on several topics to his various secretaries – a private one and another who is ‘right out in the open’ – speaking to London on the phone while being measured by his fussy tailor. Benny and the rest of the team constantly refer to the Welles legend (‘scared
anyone today, Orson?’). The plot of the episode concerns Benny’s dream of being a great actor, to realise which he takes lessons from Welles (‘with his technique and my feeling for the finer things, I could really go places’). Welles duly rehearses Benny in a scene from
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
– in the film of which, as it happens, Charles Laughton had recently had an overwhelming success,
playing the part originally offered to Welles – and this gives Welles a chance to do his brilliantly observed and extremely funny impersonation of the very grand Sir Cedric Hardwicke (Frollo in the movie). It’s all high-spirited and droll, with Welles bearing the brunt of most of the jokes.

Since this romp, three years earlier, Welles’s career had experienced spectacular vicissitudes; Benny,
meanwhile, remained (as he had been for nearly a decade) the biggest radio star in America, and probably the world. His show was built around the minutely detailed character he had invented for himself – musically incompetent, curmudgeonly, prissy verging on camp – and he played his
live
audience like the violin he was supposedly incapable of mastering, with freedom, elegance and hair’s-breadth
timing. (The most famous and best-loved of his exchanges involved Benny being held up by a robber. ‘Your money or your life’, the robber demands. Long silence from Benny, which provokes a huge laugh from the audience. When it eventually subsides, the robber repeats his demand. Another even longer laughter-filled pause from Benny, who finally says, ‘I’m thinking it over.’) Every part of the exchange
depends on the audience’s familiarity with the Benny persona, whose very facial expressions the listeners could vividly imagine. The idea of actually standing in for this comic genius, as opposed to simply making a guest appearance on his show, would have been nerve-rackingly daunting to anyone with an iota of self-doubt. It is a considerable tribute to Welles that Benny was prepared to entrust
the show to him (with the sponsor, Grapenuts, clearly being equally confident in his abilities), and a measure of Welles’s fearlessness and supreme self-confidence that he accepted the invitation at all.