Orson Welles: Hello Americans (36 page)

Welles approached the
Wonder Show
, as he approached everything he cared about, with lavish inventiveness and
imagination and very little preparation. It had taken seventeen weeks ‘and several dollars’ to get the show together; friends and colleagues, regardless of experience or qualification, were summarily roped in. They included, among the cast of twenty, Joseph Cotten (Jo-Jo the Great, the Weird Wizard of the South), Agnes Moorehead (as Calliope Aggie), Gus Schilling, Shorty Chirello (his valet, in
charge of Hortense the Goose), Lolita Leighter (his general manager’s sister) and an unidentified individual known as Death Valley Mack; Phil Silvers, Rags Ragland and Paul Stewart roared away as barkers out front on the bally walk; while among the backstage workers were Jackson Leighter; Welles’s guardian, Dr Bernstein; and his secretary Shifra Haran. The show was on a stupendous scale: ‘The tent,’
reported
Collier’s Magazine
, ‘which has a picturesque midway, replete with lurid and wondrous posters and a calliope which gets its notion of noise from Orson himself, seats 1,100 servicemen and 400 suckers … the carnival spirit is everywhere evident.’
¹³
How delighted with that comment Welles must have been. ‘Cursed with the ambition that has been the despair of himself and everybody around him,’
the reporter acutely noted, ‘Welles has improved on the old magic-show formula and has streamlined it to the point where it combines the features of a three-ring circus and a phantasmagoria.’ It Was a
favourite
formula of Welles’s:
Horse Eats Hat
, albeit on a slightly less extravagant scale, had been just such a combination;
The Mercury Wonder Show
would not be his last essay in the form. ‘From
the moment the show opens,’ the magazine reported, ‘the stage is a-flutter with chickens, geese, ducks, rabbits, and bare-legged chorus girls and it remains in more or less that state during the entire evening.’ Now and then Welles would dive into the audience to pull a watch out of someone’s collar or a serviceman up onto the stage, ‘and altogether the art of mystification is splendidly embroiled
with the patter of little feet’.

Welles had twenty-three changes of costume over the course of the evening, covering his head with turbans, shawls, silk hats, tricornes and – somewhat alarmingly – surgical masks, ‘all in the cause of thaumaturgy and total war’. Mostly he was to be found, cigar in mouth, wearing a striped, tent-like garment and fez and ‘a bewildered, slightly bitter expression’,
reported
Vogue
, noting that ‘though he does the magic, the pulling of white chickens out of a hat, the coin and the handkerchief and the string tricks … he hasn’t got the Merlin’s spiel that the true magicians use who know that every trick will work.
¹⁴
He doesn’t know positively.’ It all adds to the charm of his performance, remarks the unnamed reporter, adding, with throwaway perceptiveness,
‘there is always something unpolished about the Welles performance, as though he were groping, pugnaciously, through to new paths with his own peculiar energy, his own extravagant way of messing up the slick, the precious, carefully thought-out and spinsterish’. This remarkable analysis of the curiously unfinished feel of all of Welles’s work – not merely as a performer – is a key to everything he
ever did; the adverb ‘pugnaciously’ is particularly well noted.
The Mercury Wonder Show
was a classic example of his determination to unsettle expectation, an unrelenting bombardment of the audience with an absolute indifference to polish or decorum. Under the headline ‘Welles’s Wonderland’
Collier’s Magazine
broke down one of the show’s items into its component parts: ‘The Witches’ Farmyard,
an incredible mixture of
sortilège
not to be duplicated in the history of thaumaturgy, presents: Bovine Obedience; At the Shooting Gallery (including Marksmanship reward); Evaporation in the Mystic Dairy; The Dalai’s Milk Pail (direct from Tibetan lamas); The Flight of the Hare; Fowl Elusive;
La Rapière du Diable
; A Voice from the Dead; Faster than Light or the World Famous Balsamo’s Secret; and
the Casket of Count Cagliostro.’ Free or not, it was certainly value for money: in addition to The Witches’ Farmyard,
the
playbill announced The Haunted Aviary, The Miraculous Chicken Farm, Dr Welles Presents His Experiments in Animal Magnetism (All Nature Freezes at His Glance), Pekin Service, The Secrets of the Sphinx, Chained in Space and Scenes from a Hindoo Marketplace; during the intermission
there was a wild animal show, in which the big cats Jackie the Lion, Satan the Tiger and Dynamite the Black Leopard – more accustomed to appearing on sound stages than under a tent – were put through their paces; and the climax was provided by the Grand Finale Voodoo (‘A re-enactment of Mr Cotten’s interesting experiences with witch doctors in Africa’).

Most sensational of all, perhaps, was the
appearance of Rita Hayworth as the Girl with the X-Ray Eyes, and who, in The Flight of Time, was made by Welles to disappear from the Death Casket after he had sawn her in half. Hayworth was the new woman in Welles’s life. His relationship with Dolores del Rio, whom he was set to marry until her divorce had been temporarily held up, had inevitably deteriorated during his Brazilian sojourn; swept
away by the erotic possibilities of Rio de Janeiro, he had stopped returning her calls. On his way back to the United States he had met up with her in Mexico City, where they had something of a reconciliation. With characteristic magnificence, she had thrown a party for him to which she invited the ambassador of every South American country, plus, for good measure, Pablo Neruda and Diego Rivera.
But even this formidable love offering, appealing equally to Welles’s political passion for Good Neighborhood and his personal enthusiasm for South American art, was to no avail. He had already fallen in love with another Latin American beauty (born Margaret Cansino and renamed by her first husband, who also shrewdly encouraged her to dye her hair auburn), whose picture Welles had seen on the cover
of
Life
magazine – upon which, it is reported, he had immediately decided that he would marry her. The same decision had no doubt been taken by millions of young men all over the world, but Welles was in a position to do something about it. The first step in this direction, as we have seen, had been to invite her to appear with him on radio just before he left the country to start shooting
It’s
All True
; on his return from Brazil he had engineered another meeting, and another, and, in the fullness of time, he had become her lover (to the considerable chagrin but with the gentlemanly acquiescence of Victor Mature, Welles’s predecessor in this capacity). Now here he was, sawing her in half on Cahuenga Boulevard: being publicly bisected was clearly something of an
occupational
hazard for
Welles’s mistresses. The press already knew all about their relationship, swiftly dubbing them Beauty and the Brains. Hayworth was by now deeply in love with Welles – the first man, she said, ever to take her mind seriously – and happily participated in the high-spirited romp he had devised. Less happy was Harry Cohn, the flint-hearted head of Columbia Studios to whom Rita Hayworth was exclusively
contracted, and whom she had neglected to notify of her involvement in the show. After the heavily publicised first night, he threatened to sue her for breach of contract (she was filming
Cover Girl
with Gene Kelly during the run of
The Mercury Wonder Show
) unless she withdrew, so she bitterly pulled out, though she watched the show from the wings every night of its run. Marlene Dietrich gamely
stepped into her shoes for the rest of the season; her current beau, Jean Gabin – to add to the starry hugger-mugger – helped out backstage on props.

Welles was scarcely going to take Cohn’s behaviour lying down. The night after the opening, at the point at which Rita Hayworth should have been sawn in half, Welles made a speech that (‘in the continued absence of Miss Hayworth’) he made every
night thereafter. Rita Hayworth, he said, had rehearsed for sixteen weeks, but ‘Miss Hayworth also works for motion-picture studios, and motion-picture studios are very odd.
¹⁵
Columbia Pictures in the person of Harry Cohn – and I feel it is only fair to name names – has exercised its prerogative by insisting that Miss Hayworth withdraw from the show. This is trebly unfortunate, and I want to tell
you that if any one of you feels that the absence of Miss Hayworth in any way spoils your evening, you have only to go to the Box Office and your money will be refunded and we hope you will remain as our guest for the rest of the evening. We had hoped that reason might prevail, but Mr Cohn is adamant, a chronic condition with that gentleman.’ He then added, in an aside, ‘Needless to say, I shall
never appear in a Columbia Picture.’ In terms of a career, these are not wise sentiments to be airing publicly (though as it happens, in accord with the rest of his complex relationship with Hollywood, Welles’s prediction turned out to be false, and within three years he was not only appearing in a Columbia Picture, but writing and directing it too).

As may be imagined,
The Mercury Wonder Show
attracted wide publicity, and the anomaly of the director of
Citizen Kane
metamorphosing into the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey rolled into one was lost on no one. Nor did anyone, least of all
the
trade press, think that it was an entirely innocent gesture. ‘The case of Orson Welles versus Hollywood (or vice versa) is still going on,’ said the
Hollywood Reporter
, ‘whatever beliefs to
the contrary might have been induced by the apparent calm which followed Mr Welles’s dissolution as a one-man band and his subsequent reduction to the status of actor and general handyman on
Jane Eyre
at Twentieth Century Fox.
¹⁶
It now develops that the canny Orson was biding his time.’
Collier’s Magazine
told its readers that he had forgotten the success of
Citizen Kane
‘and the harrowing and
beautiful experience in Brazil where he took eighteen billion feet of film and came out (not at his request) without a picture’, and was now taking simple delight in the large and rowdy crowds.
¹⁷
‘The applause is tremendous and the great Orson … beams gratefully and trembles with gratitude. But as he is bowing, he is also thinking. In his mind he is turning over an idea that will revolutionise
magic and pretty much everything else. “I haven’t quite got it,” he reports, “but if I do get it, it’ll be
big
.” He lowers his voice and looks round apprehensively. “It’s a disappearance act,” he says, “and when I perfect it, I’ll just give one wave” – he makes a vicious swipe with his hand – “and there goes Hollywood.”’

As a final slap in the face to Cohn (and Hollywood in general), on 7 September
1943, in a highly co-ordinated operation, he snatched Rita Hayworth away from the Columbia lot between scenes of
Cover Girl
, to get married in a local church. It was a tiny and very private ceremony. Dadda Bernstein and his wife Hazel were there; Joseph Cotten was best man; and the second Mrs Welles was back at Columbia before anyone had noticed her absence. When he did find out, Harry Cohn’s
rage was terrible, but there was nothing he could do. He exacted some petty revenge some years later, when he, Welles and Hayworth worked together; he had, just this once, been outsmarted, but in the end he held all the power and he knew it. Welles’s high-spirited defiance made little impact on him, nor indeed on Hollywood in general. Welles was still the resident
enfant terrible
, from whom bad
behaviour was positively expected; he was a colourful part of the landscape, but no longer a significant figure.

His profile in Hollywood at the time is perfectly embodied in the only film in which he was involved in more than eighteen months, which captures something of the charm of
The Mercury Wonder Show
, though little of its anarchy.
Follow the Boys
, directed by Eddie Sutherland, was a wartime
morale-raiser whose gung-ho working title had been
Three Cheers for the Boys
. Patriotic it may
have
been, but it was scarcely a charitable venture: Welles earned $30,000 for his five days’ work; George Raft, the link-man, earned $100,000 dollars, a cool sum for 1944. The film’s framework must have been highly congenial to Welles: it starts on the very last night of big-time vaudeville on the stage
of the about-to-be demolished Palace Theatre in New York, and traces the determined effort of a member of one of the acts (George Raft), rejected on physical grounds from enlisting, to make his contribution to the war. Welles is first seen at a mass-meeting of film-workers, sitting among his fellow-actors and entertainers, patiently waiting to learn how they can help the war effort. ‘I’m an amateur
magician,’ Welles pipes up, modestly, ‘perhaps I can help.’ He is next seen on a film set in Hollywood being called on the phone by George Raft. The call goes through to a man working on top of a telegraph pole. A bravura, comically over-the-top Wellesian overhead shot shows Welles himself and his many bustling assistants from the phone’s point of view; the instrument is then tossed down to
him; he takes the call with modest and witty charm and we cut to the theatre where the performance takes place. First a rabbit appears, then a puff of smoke, then Welles, dapper in tails, cigar in mouth: ‘That’s the first time you’ve ever seen a rabbit produce a magician,’ he says. There is much play with the cigar, which appears to be floating; a flock of pigeons is produced from behind a paper
screen. At this point, Marlene Dietrich appears in silhouette behind the screen, smoking a cigarette. As she emerges, Welles announces that she’ll be sawn in half and asks for volunteers to do the sawing; half the audience of GIs rushes forward. ‘Orson,’ says Dietrich with every indication of barely suppressed panic, ‘we haven’t rehearsed this. How does it work?’ Welles: ‘Don’t worry, it’ll kill you.’
He hums extravagantly as the men saw away at her; he produces a cigar from behind a volunteer’s ear, then lights it from a light bulb, which he tosses over his shoulder. He seems unnaturally energised. Finally, the men finish sawing. To her alarm, Miss Dietrich’s legs stand up and walk away from the rest of her; she then gets them back again. ‘How do I know they’re mine?’ she asks. ‘Don’t worry,’
says Welles, ‘I’ll hypnotise them.’ He and she lock eyeballs; he faints. End of sequence.