Orson Welles: Hello Americans (4 page)

In May of 1941, he entertained an idea of some promise. Mercury registered a brace of titles,
The Life of Desiré Landru
and
Bluebeard
, which
related to the same idea. Dick Wilson, Mercury’s manager, had read some articles about the notorious serial wife-killer, and enthused Welles with the subject; Welles conceived the remarkable notion that Charlie Chaplin would be ideally suited for the part of the murderer (a bold and, as it turned out, very shrewd idea). Meeting Chaplin by chance at supper in Hollywood, Welles had proposed that he
should write and direct a film in which the great
comedian
would play the part of Landru. He had a brilliant title:
The Lady Killer
. Chaplin was interested, but on reflection decided that he preferred to direct and write the film himself, as was his wont; he had, after all, more or less invented the category of actor-writer-director-producer of which Welles was the newest example. He proceeded
with due propriety, being very careful about matters of copyright, having recently had his fingers burnt in an ugly dispute. A document was accordingly drawn up in July in which Welles stated: ‘I hereby sell, assign and transfer to you my original story of Henri Desiré Landru, conceived by me originally for you, and also my original title for the subject … for the sum of $5,000 which you agree to
pay me concurrently with the signing of this agreement.
⁷
You shall have full and complete rights in and to the idea and may use the same without limitation or restriction.’ The agreement also sought to involve Welles artistically in the film:

I agree that at such reasonable times as you may request, I will read and criticise such scripts as may be prepared by you or for you based upon said idea
or referring thereto; provided I am able to do so without serious interference with my own work, and I will offer suggestions to you with reference to such scripts, which said suggestions and all ideas that may be embodied therein shall, of course, be included in the grant hereinabove provided for, without additional compensation. You agree that in any photoplay made by you based on said idea,
I shall be given screen credit.

The agreed formula for this was typed out: the phrase ‘Suggested by Orson Welles’ was deleted and replaced with (handwritten) ‘Based on an idea by Orson Welles’. (When Chaplin finally made the film, some six years later, this agreement would come back to haunt him: perhaps thinking that the $5,000 had been quite enough reward for a suggestion over supper, he omitted
Welles’s credit. Interestingly, Welles, veteran of so many authorship disputes, instructed his lawyers to sue unless the matter was rectified. It was.) But in May 1941, it was simply one of many ideas Welles threw out like so much spume as he sailed forth on the high seas of his imagination.

A further clutch of titles from that year were to have more concrete results: notably a project initially
dubbed
Pan-America
, which rapidly metamorphosed into
It’s All True
, a compendium movie in four sections whose titles were
Jam Session, Love Story,
Bonito
the Bull
– also known as
My Friend Bonito
– and
The Captain’s Chair
. The project was typical of Welles’s desire to break away from the established format of movie-going. It also exemplifies his conviction that certain very interesting ideas,
though lacking the potential for full-length features, are nevertheless well worth realising. Above all, though still very loose in conception, it expressed a central part of Welles’s personal political philosophy: his insistence that there was more to American life than the narrow norms and gauzy escapism of white Anglo-Saxon existence as promoted by Hollywood. American life in its totality was what
he wanted to address. His own inclination to the heterogeneous, his appetite for the unofficial, his desire to escape the bourgeois confines of his own class, all informed his desire to dramatise unseen America, North and South. Two of the original stories (
Bonito
and
The Captain’s Chair
) were written by Robert Flaherty, the director-poet of
Nanook of the North
and
Man of Aran
, in which latter
film Welles imaginatively claimed to have done some extra work as a fifteen-year-old during his boyhood sojourn in Ireland; the director was something of an idol of his. Flaherty’s two stories are radically different.
Bonito
concerns bull-fighting, an abiding fascination of Welles’s since his boyhood stay in Seville, and is set in Mexico;
The Captain’s Chair
, which in Flaherty’s story takes place
in the Arctic, was to be relocated to Hudson Bay, so the two films would encompass the alpha and omega of America’s experience of itself.
Love Story
by John Fante (author of a recently acclaimed novel,
Ask the Dust
) told of the courtship of his immigrant parents, a tale of love triumphant, in which the traditions of the lovers’ country of origin – Italy – are awkwardly transposed into their new
American life. (An important part of the premise for
It’s All True
was embodied in its title. ‘All the stories we do for Welles are supposed to be
true
stories,’ wrote Fante.
⁸
Love Story
, as it happens, was not, but he persuaded his mother to sign a document for RKO saying that it was.) The final sequence,
Jam Session
, which before long became
The Story of Jazz
, was to follow jazz from its African
roots to its central place in modern American music, asserting its origins in the real lives of the people who created it.

The project as a whole was, in fact, a perfect manifestation of the artistic ideals of the Popular Front, a loose grouping of radical but non-doctrinaire writers, actors, singers and directors, of which Welles was a prominent and growingly articulate (if non-aligned) supporter;
he enthusiastically endorsed its radical social-democratic policies, ‘forged around anti-fascism,’ as its historian Michael
Denning
says, ‘anti-lynching, and the industrial unionism of the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organisations]’. Denning cites
Ballad for Americans
as sung by Paul Robeson as the anthem of the movement, its lyrics defining the nation as ‘everybody who’s nobody … Irish, Negro,
Jewish, Italian, French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek and Turk, and Czech and double Czech American’. Robeson’s words celebrate the multifariousness of America; they include rather than narrow down. This ideology was precisely what Welles wanted to embody in
It’s All True
.

It was instinctive for him to align himself
with the underdog. Inspired by the example of his socially conscious mother, Beatrice – head of the Kenosha School Board and energetic cultural missionary – he had from childhood been imbued with the tenets of radical social action; while from his stage-door-Johnny father, Dick, who revelled in the louche company of variety artists, jazzmen, conjurors and chorus girls, he had acquired a taste for
diversity in his human contacts. His political education proper had started in the mid-thirties with the left-wing playwright and poet Archibald MacLeish, when the very young Welles appeared in MacLeish’s anti-capitalist play
Panic
; it continued with his passionate friendship with the Marxist composer Marc Blitzstein, whose frankly syndicalist musical
The Cradle Will Rock
Welles, then working
with the Federal Theatre Project, had staged in defiance of a government prohibition, in the process losing his job. Although he was never tempted to join Earl Browder’s Communist Party of America, he made common cause with it, introducing a New Masses concert, participating in the Workers’ Bookshop Symposium and backing the American Student Union’s Peace Ball; along with the radical academic F. O.
Mathiessen and the innovative music producer John Hammond, he was on the high-profile Citizens’ Committee against the deportation of the Australian longshoreman union activist, Harry Bridges. The dramatist Clare Luce Booth (author of
The Women
and wife of Henry Luce, proprietor of
Time
magazine) had brusquely dismissed Welles as ‘part of the whole Broadway-Browder axis’.
⁹
Her husband’s support
of
Citizen Kane
– in some ways a quintessential Popular Front movie – had more to do with his desire to lock horns with a rival press baron than to endorse either the film or Welles’s political position. As Welles became increasingly outspoken, he would have occasion to attack Luce’s own political platform with some vigour, but that time was not yet.

Nor was it time for
It’s All True
in the form
in which it was
first
conceived. Like every other Mercury project of the period, it was in constant evolution, changing in response to the needs of the studio and to the degree of Welles’s personal involvement in it, jostling for attention with all the other projects. Mercury was less a unit within RKO than a laboratory in a state of ceaseless experimentation, a heuristic enterprise in quest of
what might prove ultimately to be interesting, rather than an organisation narrowly dedicated to the achievement of a particular result. Writers were attached, researchers commissioned, composers hired. Welles had the autodidact’s passion for accumulating information, and the prodigy’s sense of unlimited possibilities. He saw himself as engaged on a mission. Radio and film, he said, were ‘a modern
form of education … to dramatise the art of imparting knowledge, so that people will listen to what I have to say politically’.
¹⁰
He believed messianically in the importance of what he was doing, and had to an exceptional degree the ability to convince his collaborators of its importance, too. Mercury Productions was, they all felt, the workshop of the coming dispensation. He strode around his
little empire, like a Pharaoh or a Caesar, a Rameses or a Napoleon, building a new world of the imagination, supervising, inspiring, cajoling, charming, berating. His brain was working at full stretch during every waking moment, and the hours of sleep were few, for him or for his collaborators.

In the summer of 1941, while
It’s All True
was in the forefront of Welles’s mind, Duke Ellington, involved
in the triumphant run of
Jump for Joy
in Los Angeles, suddenly found himself swept up in the Orsonic tornado. A message came to him backstage: he was to meet Welles at RKO the following morning at nine. Ellington was on time (‘I’ve never been anywhere else on time in my life’);
¹¹
Welles was an hour late. When he finally arrived, not allowing the by now thoroughly grumpy musician to draw breath,
he plunged straight into an account of his impressions of Ellington’s show ‘from the first curtain to the last curtain, blow by blow, every number, every sketch, all of it coming out of his mind without notes – and he saw it once! It was both a review and a mass of suggestions. It was the most impressive display of mental power I’ve ever experienced – just pure genius.’ There and then, Welles asked
him to do
The Story of Jazz
. ‘I want it to be written by Duke Ellington and Orson Welles,’ he said, ‘directed by Duke Ellington and Orson Welles, music written by Duke Ellington.’ Ellington’s reminiscence ends with a detail that gives an idea of the lordly munificence that would contribute to Welles’s undoing. ‘You’re on salary at a
thousand
dollars a week,’ he told Ellington, ‘and if you don’t
take it, you’re a sucker!’ ‘I accept,’ Ellington replied. ‘In the end,’ he confesses in his autobiography, ‘I took $12,500, for which I wrote a total of 28 bars.’

Clearly
It’s All True
, still in the impulsive stage, was unlikely to be the next Mercury production, not in its entirety, at any rate. One section of the compendium, however, stood on its own: Flaherty’s story of a boy who raises a
bull for fighting, a simple tale that Welles in his narration was to place in an epic context: ‘This is the story of a little boy who loved a great fighting bull,’ the screenplay reads. ‘The boy’s name was Chico and the bull’s name was Bonito. As you probably know, a bullfight is not a contest between men and beast: it is a predestined tragedy. All bulls die, as all men die. Some men meet death ignominiously,
while others die gloriously in battle. Like all brave bulls, Bonito was destined to fight and die in the
Corrida de Toros
.’ The final words of the script (by John Fante and Norman Foster) are very much in the spirit of the ebullient Mercury team: ‘The authors hope that somewhere in Mexico there can be found a bull so intelligent, so literate, and so movie-struck that he will perform the miracles
that are required of Bonito in this script.’ It was intended that the film should be shot with Flaherty-like simplicity of means; Gregg Toland, Welles’s closest mentor and inspired collaborator on
Citizen Kane
, was to be cinematographer. But then Toland enlisted in the Navy’s photography unit, and Welles impulsively decided to shoot two other films, the already tentatively announced
Journey into
Fear
and – something new – a remake of Booth Tarkington’s
The Magnificent Ambersons
, first filmed in 1924 under the suggestive title of
Pampered Youth
.

Bonito
was not shelved, however. Somewhat surprisingly, in view of the importance to him of his actor-writer-director-producer credit on
Kane
, Welles informally assigned the direction of
Bonito the Bull
(under his supervision) to the co-author
of the screenplay, Norman Foster. He and Fante had both signed up earlier that year (for $300 a week) as part of the writing team for
It’s All True
. Foster had written for Welles before, contributing to the Mercury Theatre on the Air. He was a well-established journeyman film director, notably on the
Charlie Chan
and
Mr Moto
series, of which he had directed six each; some of his work rose above
routine:
Thank You, Mr Moto
of 1938, as James Naremore points out, has considerable visual distinction of an unmistakably
noir
character. When he joined the Mercury group at RKO, he had just branched out, ethnically
speaking
, with
Viva Cisco Kid
and
Ride, Kelly, Ride
; in addition, he had the considerable advantage of speaking fluent Spanish. It wasn’t Foster’s track record, however, that got him
the job; Welles simply took to him, which was the essential condition for being part of the team, more important even than having talent. Welles’s relationship with his collaborators was not unlike that of Bertolt Brecht with his. Like Brecht, he had no difficulty in sharing the artistic – and indeed the practical – work of creating a film (or mounting a radio show or putting on a play in the theatre).
Also like Brecht, he was less enthusiastic about sharing the credit, but both men had the attitude of Renaissance painters; they maintained studios, in the painterly sense, where everyone was expected to pitch in, though there was no question of whose studio it was. In Welles’s case, he was also perfectly happy to help out with other people’s jobs, even with menial tasks – painting a wall
or making a prop. And he was ready to thrash out a problem on the floor. He had no preciousness or anxiety as an artist, possessing immense innate authority – as he had from childhood, when he ruthlessly disciplined his troupe of fourteen-year-old thespians at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. He was wholly secure in his own work.