Orson Welles: Hello Americans (43 page)

Welles was absolutely fearless in taking the opposing view to that of the majority of his readers. Noting the anniversary of Emmeline Pankhurst’s imprisonment, he even dares to
suggest that being a law-abiding citizen might be a relative concept: ‘Mrs Pankhurst and her lady friends broke the law as well as the windows, but the millions of women who now enjoy the vote are grateful for that little insurrection, and it would be difficult to show that the suffragettes displayed any subsequent criminal tendencies … I say hooray for Mrs Pankhurst.’
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This must have been particularly
striking in a mildly Democratic but distinctly mainstream newspaper, and in a column that continued to offer its readers homely advice on how best to cook roast potatoes (‘Rub bacon fat on before baking. For mashed potatoes add a small amount of baking powder’).
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Most startling, writing about Richard Wright’s autobiography
Black Boy
, which had just appeared, Welles says that ‘it should be sent
in a plain wrapper to every living soul who ever claimed to “understand” the Negro … the Negro isn’t somebody to be studied, he’s somebody to be saved …
most
of those who “understand the Negro” will also tell you that you don’t “understand conditions in
the
south”.
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These citizens,’ he goes on, ‘should be tied down with banjo strings, gagged with bandannas, their eyes propped open with melon
seeds, and made to read
Black Boy
, word for word.’ The underlying sentiments are unexceptionable, but the strain of violence is disturbing, somehow in excess of his own experience of the iniquities he denounces. Some personal, irrational rage of Welles’s own seems to have attached itself to the cause. In fact the column (as columns will) was revealing rather a lot about their author. The burden
of filling the space day-to-day compels the writer to dip rather deeper than he may intend into the bran-tub of his own psyche. The
Orson Welles Almanac
provides an almost stream-of-consciousness account of his preoccupations, prejudices and passions – as well as, it may be added, an entirely fascinating and unexpectedly comprehensive account of the preoccupations, prejudices and passions of the
time in which he was writing.

His colleagues and employers watched his evolving self-invention with anxiety. ‘I know that Orson can do this job as he can do anything else he sets out to do,’ a manager from the
New York Post
syndicate wrote, ‘and we have to give him a sufficient period in which to find himself.’
²⁷
The questions ‘Who Is Orson?’ and ‘What to Do with Him?’ remained as pressing as
ever. Even his researcher, Geneva Cranston, was on hand with advice: Welles, she says, should avoid giving the impression that he even contemplates competing with Leonard Lyons. Welles is ‘the fantastic Mars genius who did such a wonderfully dynamic and intense job on the [Roosevelt re-election] campaign … being this phenomenally intelligent and versatile young chap he should have causes, give sharp
views, get on a limb occasionally, cause controversy, making it imperative that everybody read him before going on to the cocktail party – in order to argue violently about his clearly stated position on things’.
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Cranston was responsible for a great deal of the material in the column, and its tone was largely set by her and others. ‘People have heard Hitler mention plans to erect a Statue of
Liberty as his number one post-war aim,’ runs one of her submissions to him (not, in fact, used).
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‘But there’s much more to it than choosing a site, Adolph. To begin with, France may not suggest helping you with your little project.’ This is the characteristic tone of many of the ‘Almanac’ columns; it would be hard to say whether the writer was Welles or Cranston. The FBI was, of course, convinced
that Welles’s ghost-writers were communists: ‘Ghost writer … is a member of the CP …
Almanac
is written by Communist who also wrote
This Is My Best
.’
³⁰
The fascination of the FBI with Welles’s
authorship
of his own work, long before the critics started asking questions about it, is richly ironic.

In truth, things were not going well with the column. Jackson Leighter, Welles’s manager, valiantly
assured Ted Thackrey of the constantly improving response to the column, as Welles moved way from reporting and editorialising towards a more personal style. Then, in a little bit of a giveaway, he suggested that Thackrey might like to buy a small magazine for Welles along the lines of
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
or – in England – Claud Cockburn’s
The Week
– which of course would have been the perfect
medium for his purposes, though financially rewarding neither for Welles nor for his proprietor;
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it would also have forfeited the mass audience that had always been Welles’s target. The figures were inarguable, however: subscribers to the syndicate were cancelling left, right and centre. The vision of riches beyond the dreams of avarice vanished: from now on, Welles would earn only his $300
per week for writing the column, a derisory reward for the time and labour involved – time during which he could have been earning large sums in either radio or film. But the column mattered deeply to him. It was an article of faith that it was possible to reach the general public with progressive views that essentially, he believed, reflected their own values. He had simply not found the right approach:
the medium, not the message, was at fault.

To whip up interest, he started to look for controversial subjects, and found one in an unexpected place: the numerous German-language newspapers that proliferated, particularly in Welles’s own Mid-West. He found that they continued to take a broadly pro-Nazi line. The column he wrote about them provoked angry responses, as had his earlier assertion
that the Founding Fathers of the United States had been torn between adopting German and English as the official language. He quoted the official Soviet newspaper,
Izvestia
: ‘These German newspapers which live on the hospitality of the American people are being given active support by the reactionary trio of Hearst, Patterson and McCormick.’
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His contempt for the two newspaper proprietors was
well established; Patterson was a right-wing columnist who had declared the newly instituted midnight curfew a curtailment of Americans’ liberty. ‘I guess I don’t get around enough because I don’t happen to know that kind of people,’ writes Welles, disingenuously. ‘If you’re acquainted with somebody like that, please tell him that while he’s pouting about being properly entertained after midnight,
tell them …’, and Welles lists the heroic and selfless activists of the
war
effort, children, blinded veterans and so on. It is a little surprising to find him claiming not to know anybody who demands to be entertained after midnight. Everything anyone knew about him might have suggested that he might have been exactly such a person himself. Sometimes he literally seems to forget who he is.

After three months the column itself underwent a change of identity, scrapping the tenuously maintained pretence of the ‘Almanac’ format, and becoming
Orson Welles Today
, a straightforward political commentary. The first column under the new name was a fairly opportunistic response to a brouhaha that Noël Coward had brought on himself with publication of his war journal
Middle East Diary
, in which
he had singled out a young Brooklyn serviceman for showing outward signs of discomfort when all around were being bravely stoical. Welles was stung into action by reports that Coward had been visiting hospitals, introducing himself to the patients and leaving then with the regal words, ‘All right – go ahead.’ Welles bridled angrily at this, creating an imaginary GI called Brooklyn Joe:

I’ve read
most of Noël’s book
Dear Middle East Diary
(or whatever it’s called) and some of Joe’s letters back home.
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Both want the whole damn mess finished up as soon as possible. But Joe wants to get back to Brooklyn and Noël wants to get back to 1928. There’s another important difference. Joe’s been spending a lot of time where it’s muddy and unpleasant and Noël … well, Noël’s done everything Noël could
do in this war – everything except the easiest thing which was to be a little generous to some very gallant gentlemen who happened to be foreigners … but Noël is a small town boy, and there is no provincialism like that of the international set … between Joe and Noël looking at each other in the hospital is a difference greater than race or class, graver than any insult or injury, real or imagined.
Joe and Noël belong in two different worlds, all right, but they also belong in different wars.

It’s pretty nasty, a reflection of Welles’s anti-imperialist views (which frequently surfaced in the columns in attacks on Churchill’s Toryism), but a curiously cheap way of whipping up sentiment; for the most part, liberated from the obligation to be ingratiating, Welles pursued an increasingly hectoring
manner in the column, often falling into the conventional rhetoric of the Left.

Perhaps this was not unconnected to developments in his own political life, which had now taken a more practical turn. Louis Dolivet had laboured long and hard to identify his Free World Association with the idea of a United Nations Organisation; at the end of April, the San Francisco Conference was convened to progress
the work of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and bring the Organisation into existence.
Free World
– and Welles in particular – insisted that the UNO was the world’s only, and last, chance for a better world. ‘Remember that there is no choice between Plan “A” and Plan “B”,’ he wrote in a column.
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‘There is only the choice between Security Organisation Number One … and World War Three.’ In
Shaping
Tomorrow’s World
Dolivet had defined
Free World
’s position, acknowledging America’s inevitable re-eminence in the post-war world. Warning his readers of the dangers of world control or world domination through financial or economic means, he observes, ‘there is no doubt that this leadership idea could degenerate later into imperialistic tendencies, or could be considered such by other nations’.
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Dolivet sharply states the difficulty with American liberalism: ‘whenever one injustice is committed, the American liberals stand up as one man in defence of the victim. They have, by doing this, written glorious pages in the history of freedom. But once this particular fight is over, they disappear nobody knows where. The man in the street who was moved and convinced by their arguments writes
letter after letter. He offers to join, but nobody is there to reply. They are organising committees for the best causes in the world, but the committees disappear as rapidly as they come.’ Dolivet organised a pre-conference forum in Washington, spread over several Sundays, with further sessions in Hollywood.

Welles, whom Dolivet had been diligently preparing for the event, was installed as ‘Moderator
of broadcasts and mass meetings’; he duly wrote to Roosevelt on behalf of
Free World
(on behalf, in fact, of the world, he said) to ask, a little fawningly, for a message for the forum: ‘Personally it would make me most happy and I know of nothing that would make me more grateful than a direct message from the President to the people of the world.’
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Roosevelt, in response to this impassioned
appeal, wrote back (with due approval from the State Department):

April will be a critical month in the history of human freedom, It will see the meeting in San Francisco of a great conference of the United Nations – the nations united in this war against
tyranny
and militarism.
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At that conference, the peoples of the world will decide, through their representatives, and in response to their
will, whether or not the best hope for peace the world has ever had will be realised. Discussions by the people of this country, and by the peoples of the freedom-loving world, of the proposals which will be considered at San Francisco, are necessary, are indeed essential, if the purpose of the people to make peace and to keep peace is to be expressed in action.

This was exactly what Welles believed
and what he wanted Roosevelt to say. The forum duly took place; the participants in the broadcasts he chaired included the US Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, the prominent Soviet apologist Ilya Ehrenburg, the British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Atlee, former Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov (his analysis of the German threat now amply verified), the war journalist William L. Shirer
and the liberal columnist Sam Grafton. Blue Network claimed a listenership of 500 million. Welles’s sense of being, if not centre of the stage of history, at the very least in the wings, was overpowering; he grew a beard as a mark of his seriousness, and maintained a relatively low-key presence, stage-managing the event rather than producing it. He was also editor of the daily newspaper published
by Free World at the San Francisco United Nations Conference. ‘This newsletter,’ he wrote in the first edition, ‘is particularly important because, unfortunately, the daily newspapers in San Francisco which will be the first contact every morning of the foreign delegates with American public opinion will be largely unfree, if not hostile, to the idea of true world co-operation … the San Francisco
conference is without doubt the major political event of our time.
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All those who are not engaged in direct fighting or war work must give the fullest amount of their time to facilitate a successful conclusion of the United Nations.’ It is the familiar voice of political activism; Welles deeply felt the importance of the Conference, with reason, poised as the world was between the possibility
– the tenuous possibility – of a more hopeful future and a past in which global nightmare had been so narrowly averted. The war was not yet over, but the outcome was a fairly safe bet.

At the Conference, as he reported to the readers of
Orson Welles Today
, he had seen the footage of gas chambers and concentration camps, and struggled to give a calm account of it: ‘The heaped-up dead in evidence.
³⁹
The burdened ovens. The ingenious machinery for the gift of pain. The eyeball blinking in the open
grave
… Patton and Bradley, their eyes choked full of this. Eisenhower, moving slowly, with immense dignity, through the long tableau. A huge black anger knocking with heavy blows on the commander’s heart.’ He cannot pretend to any objectivity about the Germans, ‘the solid citizens. They are dressed
like people. You recognise the costumes … these creatures are less alive than the dead they have been called to view and bury.’ In the film, they are required to go and look at the evidence of the horrors that their fellow-countrymen have perpetrated: