Orson Welles: Hello Americans (40 page)

This illness was the blackest of misfortunes for me because it stole away so many days from the campaign. I cannot think I have accomplished a great deal but I well know that this is the most important work I could ever engage in. Your wonderfully
thoughtful and generous message reached me at exactly the moment when the doctors and I had decided that I couldn’t do anything but get worse. Your wire changed my mind.

Welles was up and on his feet for the final week of the campaign, and on the eve of the election he spoke of Roosevelt more personally than usual, in strikingly emotional terms: this is the vocabulary, not of politics, but of
hero-worship:

At such a time as this none of us, however he intends to vote, can fail to think of our President without some feeling of tenderness and affection.
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In days of darkness and in nights of doubt he has borne heavy burdens – he has borne them without murmur or complaint. Abused as none but the great are abused, reviled and rejected by many of the rich and powerful in his own land,
he has never faltered in his faith – his faith in the limitless capacity of the people, in the ultimate and perfect justice of the people’s will. I’m sure that tomorrow the people he believes in will show their confidence in him.

Meanwhile, Welles’s attacks on Dewey became wilder:

Some years ago, I put on a show of acts of magic and prestidigitation for the amusement of the armed forces stationed
in southern California. The public was very kind to my few acts … but within the past few months, the starch has been taken out of me. A show has been making the rounds of the country, headed by a far greater illusionist, trickster and conjuror than I can ever hope to be: I admit it: I yield the palm to the master illusionist, the Republican candidate for president, Thomas E. Dewey. There has
been nothing like it before. The acts are stupendous; the deceptions colossal; the cast takes in some of our biggest industrialists, our most unyielding politicians. To the old tricks of the trade a new repertory has been added. The illusions are almost (but not quite) convincing.

The press followed him closely. At another meeting of the Independent Voters’ Committee for Arts and Sciences for
Roosevelt, when Welles happened to scowl, a news photographer obligingly caught it on camera. ‘You can sell that to the Hearst press at a premium,’ Welles quipped.
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‘It shows me in my angry Communist mood. And this’ – he said, smiling – ‘is my
benevolent
Communist mood.’ He told the newsmen how happy he was that writers and artists were becoming increasingly interested in politics. He had persuaded
the independent producer, Walter Wanger, he told them, to buy Howard Fast’s biography,
Citizen Thomas Paine
, for him to turn into a movie, but didn’t yet know how; otherwise he was engaged in ‘educational stuff’ and editing
Free World
. ‘I’m doing a lot of research,’ he said. ‘I spent a deal of last year learning, not doing.’ He’d done nothing to earn a living, except occasional guest appearances,
since the
Almanac
went off the air a month or two before. ‘Pictures? I’ve done nothing but turn them down. They don’t do very good pictures today, I find.’ The question arises: did Welles never want to work again as an actor – or, indeed, director? For the time being, a certain part of his nature – the articulator, the teacher, the spokesman – was satisfied. His passionately held convictions mattered
more to him than any mere film, part or play. He had made a desultory attempt for the producer Billy Rose to mount a play,
Emily Brady
by the humorist and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. Rose had rather wittily created the Rosebud production company to present it, but Welles – having offered a key role to his old colleague Walter Huston and been turned down –
immediately
concluded that the
play was impossible to cast, and sent a telegram to Stewart withdrawing from the production. Stewart replied with a sharp dig at Welles’s magical activities:
I AM AFRAID I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
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ONE DOESN’T SAW A WRITER IN TWO SO CONVENIENTLY. ON ANY BASIS OF RESPECT FOR EITHER ME OR MY PLAY I THINK YOU OWE ME SOMETHING MORE THAN A TELEGRAM.
But with the world on the brink of
Götterdämmerung
, Welles
really had no interest in the theatre.

He was very clear about what concerned him. Addressing a group of journalists, the surprised recipients of a weightily considered summary of his political philosophy, he assured them that he was not running for office and expected no special or personal rewards for his efforts. ‘It is precisely for this reason that I think you may respect me enough to want
to hear me out.
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I am a serious student of world affairs and the editor of a serious magazine on that subject.’ He insisted that he was nobody’s lobbyist, simply democracy’s friend. ‘Communism,’ he says, ‘has never been an issue in this country. Liberalism, on the other hand, has been an issue in every American election since the days of Jefferson. The Republican strategy makes it important to
say again that liberalism and Communism are not partners. They are competitors. I am an American liberal and I am jealous of the prestige of Communism as a world idea.’ His view of the relationship between communism and what he calls liberalism is possibly a little rose-tinted, but is the result of mature reflection: ‘We need not fight Communism; our duty is to compete with it and so live to see
Communism out-rivalled by our democratic achievements. As to foreign policy, I believe that it must remain in essence an extension of the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, who believes that America with England and Russia and all other freedom-loving governments are entered upon a wholesome rivalry to do good.’ He concludes with a quite unexpected goal: ‘To realise peace on earth, to ease the burdens
of man and to secure for him a free and friendly world where he may finally realise his divinity’. This exalted vision seems to echo back to the intense conversations he and George Fanto had had on the beach at Fortaleza in the far north of Brazil, with their intimations of numinosity. It was rare for Welles to express himself in this manner, but a Blake-like sense of the perfectibility of man
is consonant with everything else we know of Welles’s world-view, closely associated with his frequently demonstrated sense of paradise lost, of a vanished realm of natural decency, generosity, benevolence. The reverse of this, of course, is a sharp sense of the malign and poisonous forces of the
post-lapsarian
world. He never expressed himself less than lovingly about his fellow-human-beings
– in general. Individuals were another matter.

He shared in the general jubilation at the largely favourable outcome of the presidential election, and was swift to analyse the significance of the result in
Free World
; for him – perhaps a little surprisingly – the crucial issue had been race. ‘The racist and all the other liars failed.
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Their argument may have been heard by ears that never heard
such arguments before, but the arguments have been answered by ballot. The people have discredited the racist advertisements. The lies of reactionaries were blown to bits on November 7th.’ The other great success of the campaign, he claims, was the Labor movement, with its ‘new capacity for politics and vitality which leaves no doubt of labor’s future as an influence in the largest affairs of
the government’. And he notes that the Republican campaign has been a failure in spite of the fact that at least six times more was spent on it than the Democrats could afford. This, he insists, proves beyond doubt that ‘the majority of our people are in the broadest and best sense of the word, progressive’. He allows himself a personal reminiscence:

Among the politically unsophisticated, your
Editor discovered the most wholesome, whole-hearted understanding of Roosevelt’s contribution to the beauty and security of American life, and an equal understanding of the basic assumptions of Roosevelt’s liberalism. Your editor comes out of this campaign convinced that liberalism is no longer a small voice. It is loud and sure. In 1944 it can be heard above all other voices in our nation. We are
sure that the next four years are going to be great years … as world citizens we march into the first days with the most perfect pride.

The rhetoric betrays the influence of his mentor Dolivet, whose idiom it closely resembles. Welles’s general enthusiasm for the election result was enhanced by the receipt of a drolly phrased letter from Roosevelt himself (which appears to have been the standard
letter of thanks to his supporters in the entertainment world, but which Welles took very personally): ‘Dear Mr Welles, I may be a prejudiced spectator who had a special interest in the action but I want to thank you for the splendid role you played in the recent campaign.
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I cannot recall any campaign in which actors and artists were so effective in the unrehearsed realities of the drama of
the
American
future. It was a great show in which you played a great part. Very sincerely yours Franklin D. Roosevelt.’ ‘Dear Mr President,’ replied Welles, ‘You cannot know how your marvellously thoughtful and very kind letter was appreciated.
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I count my small part in this last campaign as the highest privilege of my life, and our visit on the train as the richest experience. Rita joins me
in wishing you the compliments of the season.’ He signs himself with a rather striking adverb: ‘Yours truthfully, Orson Welles.’

Altogether, 1944 ended on a cheerful note for him. He had been engaged on extremely favourable terms by the
New York Post
as a syndicated daily columnist, and on 17 December, Rita Hayworth had given birth to a daughter whom they named Rebecca (not after the Daphne du
Maurier book that Welles had twice performed on radio, but after the Jewish heroine of Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
, which Hayworth – always desperate to catch up on her husband’s omnivorous reading habits – had rather impressively just finished). Welles drew a sketch with stars to celebrate the baby’s arrival and put it on that year’s Christmas card. It was the most personal endorsement Rebecca Welles
would ever receive from her father, although the event elicited telegrams of congratulation from Mrs Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, which most certainly endorsed
him
; not many actor-directors might have expected their baby’s birth to be welcomed by both the President’s wife and the Vice-President. In his message, Truman said, ‘I know she can’t help having a grand career with the support she will
have from her parents’ – a prediction that proved sadly untrue at any level.
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WELLES SHOWED AS
little interest in the birth of his new baby as he had in the birth of Christopher Welles six years earlier. In fact, Christopher’s principal significance in his life was as an occasion for acrimonious disputes over alimony, which finally ended up in court; his pleas of poverty got him off the hook. (In a piquant turn of events, Virginia
Welles’s new husband was the screenwriter Charles Lederer, who happened to be the nephew of Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s mistress; Christopher accordingly spent occasional weekends in San Simeon under the roof of the man who had done everything in his power to destroy her father and his precocious masterpiece.)

Meanwhile Welles’s relationship with Rita Hayworth had reached a watershed
of sorts. They had been together for nearly eighteen months, during which time the exhilaration of Welles’s initial triumphant conquest of one of the supreme sexual icons of the day – one who proved, if anything, more passionate in the bedroom than his fantasies had imagined – had inevitably been tempered by day-to-day reality. He discovered that the sultry goddess of the screen was in person
sweet-natured and homely, which was delightful and touching, but that she was also immensely needy, which was less so. It was something of a novelty in a relationship for Welles, who had hitherto been the one requiring attention, consideration and support – all of which Dolores del Rio had provided in abundance. Not that Hayworth was ungiving emotionally: on the contrary, she idolised Welles, which
was by no means the thing he most wanted; indeed, it was perhaps the thing he least wanted. The feeling of being looked to for everything, of being looked at to the exclusion of all else – in extreme close-up, so to speak – was displeasing to Welles. The inherent feeling of responsibility oppressed him and made him feel exposed; his shiftiness under that all-loving, all-needing gaze was immense.
Educating Rita soon lost its charm for him; she was not an apt pupil, and he longed for the conversation of his intellectual equals.

It soon dawned on Welles that there was something beyond mere common insecurity in his wife’s incessant demands for attention; he swiftly apprehended the degree to which she had been damaged by the two successive evil geniuses in her life, her sexually abusing father
and her pimping first husband, to whom might be added, on a non-sexual level, the obsessive control exercised over her by Harry Cohn, who was still her unrelenting employer. She wanted above all to find a man whom she could trust; the one she chose was as far from the ideal in that regard as could be imagined. From the very beginning of their time together, her jealous suspiciousness of Welles
was overwhelming, which inevitably impelled him to justify her suspicions; before long – particularly after she had become pregnant – he was vigorously playing the field, leaving her alone with the baby he thought would satisfy both her domestic and her loving impulses. In fact, Hayworth had two rivals for his attention: other women (sometimes lovers, like Judy Garland, but most often prostitutes);
and his work, which now comprised writing a daily newspaper column, starting two new radio series in quick succession, pursuing a political career as a prominent supporter of the newly re-elected Roosevelt, editing
Free World
magazine, working under Dolivet for the organisation, planning theatre productions and, finally, acting in the one film a year he was prepared to make to earn some serious
money.