Orson Welles: Hello Americans (32 page)

In the five shows in which he deputes for Benny, Welles acquires Benny’s entourage, including the outrageous black manservant Rochester, but of course plays himself – or rather, as before, the
public perception of himself. It is startling how much older he seems than in his earlier incarnation of only three years earlier. The crisp, brisk, flamboyance of the 1940 ‘Orson Welles’, precocious actor-manager, has been replaced by a rather sombre, moody figure, pompous and tyrannical: The Genius. ‘Quiet on the set!’
²³
one of the characters regularly exclaims, ‘Mr Welles is about to Direct!’
– or Explain! – or Emote! Benny’s normally frisky entourage is cowed into servility, swiftly silenced if they make a suggestion of any sort, and reduced to monosyllables in the sections when they act in the film that ‘Mr Welles’ is purportedly making. ‘I call my film quite simply
The March of Destiny
,’ ‘Mr Welles’ says, ‘and it deals with everything that ever happened.’ There is immense emphasis
on his genius: ‘Phil,’ he tells one of his henchmen, ‘you’re a genius, and I ought to know.’ But genius evidently has its disadvantages. ‘Sometimes,’ he muses gloomily, ‘I wish I weren’t perfect, so people could differ with me.’ He performs a striking and elaborate send-up of the standard commercial plug for Grapenuts with epic grandiosity, but whichever way you slice it, it’s still a plug. The
studio audience is obediently appreciative, though naturally there are none of the huge extended laughs that Benny regularly coaxed out of his audiences. Part of the problem is that, unlike the Jack Benny character, which is preposterous and bears no relation
to
the real man or his career, this ‘Orson Welles’ is uncomfortably close to the real one: are we laughing at or with him? It sometimes
feels self-serving. At least one person of considerable influence, however, was very impressed. After the first show in which Welles deputised for Benny, William S. Paley (boss of CBS) telegrammed him to say:
NOW THAT YOU HAVE QUALIFIED AS A COMEDIAN OF NO MEAN STATURE WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN DOING YOUR OWN COMEDY SHOW ON A REGULAR WEEKLY BASIS.
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It was some time before this new idea came
to fruition, but the seed was sown.

While edging towards comedy, Welles had by no means abandoned his more serious ambitions for radio, and did not hesitate to advance his radical political views. ‘I know that you agree with me that radio has a very definite responsibility in the matter of the current race riots,’ he wrote, as a member of a committee of Writers’ Mobilisation, to Davidson Taylor
at CBS, ‘and the growing tension in many of the industrial communities between black and white, whites and Mexicans and other minority groups.’
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He was trying to persuade the company to produce a script called
Snowball
, written, as it happens, by Howard Koch, with whom he was now back in partnership, despite the rupture of their relationship over Welles’s claims to have written the script for
The War of the Worlds
broadcast, though Koch was unquestionably its author. For
Snowball
, Welles had assembled the talented cast of Gary Cooper, Jo Cotten, Canada Lee, Walter Huston ‘and your obt. servt.’. Taylor’s reply presaged a long and ultimately frustrated struggle on Welles’s part to put race relations at the centre of public debate. CBS had broadcast an Open Letter on ‘the Negro Problem’,
which had been very successful. But, Taylor tells Welles, ‘You may not know the difficulties it caused.’
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The issue of race, despite the extraordinary advances achieved by the National Association for the Promotion of Colored Peoples, was still, in America in 1943 and for many years to come, an explosive one; courage and tenacity were called for even to raise the matter. Welles had both qualities
in overplus, and no lack of candour – not always of the most diplomatic variety. Taylor says that he’ll consult their educational advisor, Lyman Bryson, to which Welles replies:

Mr Bryson and I are not strangers.
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We keep bumping into each other on the platforms of women’s clubs, and for your friendly ear I can’t help but remark that this ‘Director of Education Department’ speaks, like Gratiano,
‘an infinite deal of nothing’.
He
is persuasive in Lyman Bryson’s behalf, and cosily certain of the success of his moral crusade within CBS. He has mastered the fashionable idioms of the intellectual caste and exhibits everywhere that sort of sprightly serenity so often confused with open-mindedness. I shudder to think that this dollar-book scholar, this luncheon sage, is the man to decide whether
the negro problem is to get another half hour on the network. But then this is a world to shudder in – Burn this. Fond regards.

The object of Welles’s contempt wrote a letter to him shortly afterwards, saying, not unreasonably, that ‘We cannot with much hope of success do two smashes on the same question so close together if we hope to carry the network along with us.’
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They are anxious, he
insists, ‘above all to use broadcasting to the very limit of its social value’, but explains that they simply cannot get the affiliated stations to carry the programmes. ‘We are hoping to attack other social questions dramatically and to increase the willingness on the part of the general public to face these difficult and violent matters with reasonableness.’ The solution is time and patience. This
would not do for Welles, whose admirable passion in the matter – in any matter about which he felt strongly – could not tolerate a softly-softly approach: his gut inclination was to storm the citadel. In the end, this would prove to be his undoing as a political figure, resulting in fireworks, certainly, but not the general conflagration he so ardently desired.

Welles was accepting more and more
invitations to speak publicly. The war was the inevitable theme, often within the context of broadcasting or the movies. He spoke loftily and passionately, using all the skills of rhetoric that were central to his own acting, allowing his extraordinary vocal instrument free rein, and his audiences were greatly stirred. At first, he spoke as any committed actor might have spoken, with more ardour
than analysis, appealing principally to the emotions: ‘I am sorry to have been advertised as a speaker,’ he said when he appeared with Charles Chaplin at a meeting billed ‘Artists’ Front to Win the War’.
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‘I have nothing to say to you which you don’t know … but I am here on this platform and I’m speaking to you because I must: because even if I’m not the best man for the job, there isn’t anyone
in these United States who hasn’t the right to speak up about the war.’ This is Orson as Everyman, a favourite manifestation of his. ‘As it happens we approve of our leadership. We endorse it … this isn’t a protest meeting … finally this is a people’s war – on all fronts – a people’s war and we’re all
in
it. Just that.’ Later, he spoke more articulately and with more precision, addressing the
Adult Education Conference on the subject of ‘New Techniques in Mass Education’: ‘All educators, whether they like it or not, are in the amusement business, and all movie makers and radio broadcasters are educators,’ he told the conference.
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‘In this shrinking new world of ours, adult education must first enlist in the war against provincialism. Exactly as long as the proposition that all men
are created equal is a faith real enough for men to die for it, educators, which means every one of us in possession of the instruments of education, are sworn to the tremendous task of telling people about each other – about their works which are called wisdom and culture.’ His commitment to pan-Americanism was undiluted. It was, he insisted, ‘a requisite for our victory … and making the dream of
inter-American unity come true is less a job for diplomatists than it is for educators. The United Nations are fighting for a united mankind …’ Narrowing his scope, he describes, as an example of the educational value of celluloid, the possibility of filming – for the benefit of medical students – great surgeons performing operations; then he expands again into a resounding peroration: ‘with the
present development of communications, I don’t think there will be a spot on the globe that will long be what we now call remote. There will be no more frontiers. The new elements of mass education will be to the dark places of the human mind as bright sunlight is to the crawling things under a lifted stone. The vermin and bacteria of intolerance cannot survive in the bright gleaming light of understanding.’
He knows, he says, that he sounds as though he is talking about the millennium: ‘I am, and I believe that it has a very good chance of happening in your lifetime or mine.’

The speech was a great success, and there were many requests for a transcript. One letter told him that ‘We admired tremendously your broad views and
complete
understanding of the problems of adult education and your very practical
theories for solving them.’
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He was clearly possessed by the idea that fundamental change in society was a real possibility; the thinking of the Popular Front informs his every phrase. Welles had been radicalised; politicisation was not far behind. It is worth noting here that if it is a little unusual for a movie director or actor of his stature to have appeared in radio comedies, or to have
written popular columns for tabloids, it is virtually unheard of for one to have become an orator of a decidedly political bent while remaining a practising artist. The political community was delighted: his celebrity would be a tremendous
boost
to their appeal. Both his endorsement and his oratory were widely sought by the many committees and councils, anti-fascist, pro-second front, pro-labour,
pro-education, to which the war had given a new sense of relevance. He was so much in demand that he sometimes felt hounded. On one occasion he wrote to a certain Helen Bryan, who had reproached him for cancelling an appearance, that ‘stage and screen performers of progressive persuasion are so frequently exploited that many of them have been forced into retreat or at least political seclusion.
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I hope I am made of somewhat sterner stuff, but I understand the attitude of these men and women and after our “misunderstanding” I must confess it is a temptation to sympathise with them.’

In reality, retreat or political seclusion was not an option for Welles in 1943. On the contrary, the scope of his public utterances was getting wider. At a rally at the Lewisohn Stadium in Upper Manhattan,
his fellow-speakers were Paul Robeson and Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Henry Wallace, no less. Welles gave an address with the resonant title ‘Moral Indebtedness’.

My part in this free meeting is just this: it is to say that to be born free is to be born in debt; to live in freedom without fighting slavery is to profiteer.
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By plane last night I flew over some parts of our republic where American
citizenship is a luxury beyond the means of a majority. I rode comfortably in my plane above a sovereign state or two where fellow countrymen of ours can’t vote without the privilege of cash. Today I bought my lunch where Negroes may not come, except to serve their white brothers, and there I overheard a member of some master race or other tell those who listened that something must be done to
suppress the Jews. I have met Southerners who expect and fear a Negro insurrection. I see no purpose in withholding this from general discussion. There may be those within that outcast 10 per cent of the American people who someday will strike back at their oppressors. To put down the mob, a mob would rise. Who will put down that mob?

He was careful to identify his political position, which was
a sensible precaution. The FBI and its informers, now hot on his trail, had no doubt as to where Welles’s sympathies lay, even though they could never quite pin anything on him. ‘The scaly dinosaurs of reaction,’ Welles said, ‘will print it in their papers that I am a Communist. Communists know otherwise. I am an overpaid movie
producer
with pleasant reasons to rejoice – and I do – in the wholesome
practicability of the profit system … surely my right to having more than enough is cancelled if I don’t use that more to help those who have less. This sense of humanity’s interdependence ante-dates Karl Marx.’ Describing the war as ‘the current plot against liberty’, he avers, in classic Popular Front phraseology, that ‘when all the fascist armies have formally surrendered, the end of fascism
will still be out of sight’. As so often in his speeches, he consciously used the references of his profession – ‘This world fight is no melodrama. An armistice is no happy ending’ – and concluded with some ringing curtain lines: ‘The people well know that Peace is harder won than war … none of us will live to see a blameless peace. Our children’s children are the ancestors of a free people. We
send our greetings ahead of us to them. To history yet unmade our greetings. To the generations sleeping in our loins, be of good heart, our children! The fight is worth it.’

The response to this speech was enormous, both from individuals and from organisations. Identifying herself as a black woman, Muriel Miller wrote to say that she honestly felt ‘that it was one of the most tremendous talks
of all time and regret that it was not broadcast for the nation’;
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another member of the audience testified to Welles’s perhaps unexpected seriousness: ‘You were confronted by almost insuperable conditions.
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The audience had been exhausted by an intolerably long program. What they had been led to expect from you was more entertainment and they were not in a mood for more entertainment. The manner
in which you were introduced was no help. – And yet you prevailed, and delivered an address that was a masterpiece of genuine eloquence, intensely and convincingly personal, but with the speaker standing behind rather than in front of his message.’ Someone else told him that, as a political speaker, ‘you’re a red-hot potato’.
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The Packinghouse Workers, perhaps surprised to find such a glamorous
figure so wholeheartedly adopting a radical line, praised him for his ‘liberal and courageous remarks’, adding that ‘we wish you to know that we deeply appreciate your comments and your position regarding the common men and women in America’.
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His words had redoubled their enthusiasm ‘in their fight for a free and liberal labor movement in America’. Polly, of the United Automobile Aircraft and
Agricultural Implement Workers, obviously had her doubts: ‘I’d give anything to know if you really believe what you so convincingly said – please tell me and the big fraudulent “ego” bubble of the paltry press will be burst in the hearts of all your
avid
followers who will see you in a true light for the first time.’
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Nevertheless, she still signed off ‘Fraternally yours’. The
Trade Union Press
headed its report:
PLAIN TALK BY THE MAN FROM MARS
.
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There were many requests for copies of the speech, not least from the Vice-President; before long it was printed as a pamphlet by the Chicago United Nations Committee to Win the Peace.