Orson Welles: Hello Americans (44 page)

The Military Police are gentle with the
herrenvolk
. You realise that they need to be or they would strike them down, each with a single blow …
one place of torture, you will learn, was camouflaged as a madhouse. Here the most grisly of all Grand Guignol conceits was realised: here the wardens were the lunatics. You watch the chief of these being interviewed in the newsreel. The subject is poison. He is very businesslike. Between phrases he touches his upper lip with a fat lizard’s tongue. The frown is professional. He is the man of science
called for expert consultation, only the poison gives him away. And his chin. It is wet with drool … the newsreels testify to the fact of quite another sort of death, quite another level of decay. This is a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage. For some years now we have been calling it Fascism. The stench is unendurable.

Welles was a gifted reporter, as these and other despatches
make clear, a better (or at any rate more compelling) reporter, perhaps, than he was an analyst. He saw the world around him, and he dramatised it. When he was unable to do so, his writing became conventional, his more politically tendentious reports from the Conference – on Japan, on unemployment – lacking the vividness of his personal reportage.

Then quite suddenly he was knocked sideways by
an event that devastated him, both personally and politically. On 12 April 1945, during a short recuperative break in Warm Springs, Georgia, Franklin Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral haemorrhage. America – and indeed the world – was aware that the President was in poor health, though Welles had given a broadcast a few weeks earlier reporting him to have been in fine fettle: ‘Mr Roosevelt isn’t
29 years old, but he’s tougher than I am.’
⁴⁰
The President’s sudden demise so soon after re-election and his recent highly publicised participation
in
the Yalta Conference was nonetheless a considerable shock: military victory, of which he was widely felt to be the principal architect, was within sight; and those like Welles and his political allies who dreamed of a new dispensation once hostilities
ended were terrified that Harry Truman, the conservative backwoodsman and political fixer with no discernible radical tendencies who now became President, would allow the golden chance to slip through his fingers, squandering Roosevelt’s hard-won achievements. In the slogan of the time, the winning of the peace was every bit as important as the winning of the war, and Welles had the darkest
suspicions of the forces of reaction within his own country and in the world at large. On a personal level, he had been profoundly impressed by his contact with the elegantly charismatic Roosevelt and flattered by the great man’s playful suggestion that Welles himself should run for the highest office. When Kathleen Tynan asked him if he regretted not becoming President, Welles said, ‘No, not for
a moment.
⁴¹
It’s no fun. Roosevelt was the last one to have fun – but to do that, you’d have to be Roosevelt.’ Welles responded to a kind of gallantry, a certain patrician insouciance in Roosevelt that fully activated, as few men did, his considerable capacity for hero-worship. He gave free rein to his feelings when, remarkably, he was called on by CBS to record an immediate response to the President’s
death.

His eulogy begins with an account of Moses bringing his people to the Promised Land. ‘Today another servant of the Lord and of his people entered history.
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He’s gone. We can’t believe it but he’s gone. The dark words throw their shadow on the human race; Franklin Roosevelt is dead. His, the Mosaic tragedy of looking upon a land to which he’s led a hopeful people – even to its borders
– and which he may not enter. The land is neither Canaan nor Utopia. It is called Democracy.’ Using quotations from Roosevelt himself as headings for his subsequent paragraphs, Welles continues: ‘Only a little while ago he wrote this to me: “April will be a critical month in the history of human freedom.”’ Welles recalls ‘the tremendous labours of an American president, of a commander-in-chief, of
the master architect for an abundant world’. The speech ends: ‘Two days before he was elected for his last term of office, he asked me to read these words by the Apostle Paul: “My brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his Might … take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.”’ Welles’s address was simply phrased, simply delivered, dignified by
biblical echoes and cadences, and it moved America.
He
does not overstate his personal relationship with Roosevelt, but it is striking evidence of the unique position he occupied in American public life, despite his current lack of professional profile. Which other actor/director could possibly have discharged such a task? And who could have done it with such distinction? He may have been in the
wilderness, but his presence there was highly conspicuous; when the occasion demanded it, as here, he was able and qualified to speak for America.

The following night, he was called on to pay more formal tribute: his speech on that occasion was both more considered and more overwrought. ‘Something is on its way on a slow train from Georgia … tonight we do it reverence, this lifeless relic of
our living history, this dear memento. Tomorrow these tears should celebrate the thing, the great and nameless thing which gives it meaning. This thing is the American truth which Franklin Roosevelt stood for – truth – you’ll remember – held to be self-evident. We dare not lag behind, you and I – we must keep up with it – for it goes marching on. Franklin Roosevelt needs everything you have to give
him but your tears.’ With some audacity Welles managed a plug for his organisation. ‘We must move on beyond mere death to that free world which was the hope and labour of his life. Something is on its way from Georgia to the Capitol, but Franklin Roosevelt never left your home.’
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After this emotional climax, life, as Welles had said, went on. The Free World Forum continued, as did
Orson Welles
Today
. But his radio career – ironically, in view of his recent universally regarded broadcast tributes to Roosevelt – almost immediately suffered a humiliating setback. His relationship with the medium of which he was acknowledged to be supreme master, and which was also his most dependable source of income, had rapidly declined since the unhappy experience of
The Orson Welles Almanac
. Early
in 1945, he had recorded a series of eight programmes of political commentary under the sponsorship of Eversharp razors, but they had never been broadcast. He then embarked on a series called
This Is My Best
, sponsored by Cresta Blanca wines, a return to the format of his glory days, the Mercury Theatre on the Air and
The Campbell Playhouse
, though significantly, at thirty minutes, half the length
of either of those programmes. As before, they consisted of literary adaptations, with a couple of original scripts thrown in: the classics were
The Master of Ballantrae
and
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
; there were two new pieces of no great account and a very mild satire on Hollywood bureaucracy and, finally, Walt Disney’s
Snow
White
. In fact, none of it was of any great account, not even the
opening show,
The Heart of Darkness
, which had had such a key place in Welles’s development, and of which he had already made a striking version. He incorporated various elements of his unfilmed screenplay into the new version, but in radiophonic form they are somewhat limp, Welles’s own performances as both Marlow and Kurtz (a double that would have featured in the film as well) were sleepy.

The impression throughout the programmes is that Welles was essentially uninterested in making them – not least, no doubt, because he was not officially their director. There had been difficulties during the planning stages: Wayne Tiss from the advertising agency wrote to Jackson Leighter that there had been constant tension between Don Clark, the nominal director, and Welles, culminating in a flare-up.
‘I am going to ask that you be as cooperative with Don Clark as you can,’ wrote Tiss lamely (‘never otherwise,’ Welles had scrawled in the margin, ‘even when Clark was
very
drunk’), proposing the very awkward (and clearly inaccurate) billing ‘
This Is My Best
produced in co-operation with Orson Welles’;
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cooperation was the one thing not on offer. Welles had tried to change the format agreed with
the client and failed, not perhaps the best state of mind in which to embark on a series. The end came swiftly and without ceremony. Welles wrote to a friend at the advertising agency lamenting that he had been sacked from
This Is My Best
– which was ‘
my best
in every sense of the word’ (an egregious piece of self-delusion).
⁴⁵
He claims that there had never been an ugly word, and yet now he’s
fired. ‘When an office boy is fired, he gets a note about it. I have yet to receive any sort of note. When a stenographer is let go, she’s called in by regular custom, and given some sort of explanation. I’ve been given no explanation, and after calling repeatedly to ask for one, at least by phone, Wayne Tiss told my agent to request me not to ring him any more, because he wouldn’t be at home to me.’
Welles describes the incident that precipitated the sacking: after reading through
Don’t Catch Me
, a version of the novel by Richard Powell to which he had the screen rights and of which he had already co-authored a screenplay, he realised that it wouldn’t work, arguing with ‘X’ who was drunk (presumably Don Clark) that they should substitute Ferenc Molnár’s
The Guardsman
, with himself and Rita
Hayworth. Rather surprisingly the client refused to accept this dream package, even though the agency agreed with Welles. ‘Three hours later Bob Braun’ – from Welles’s agency William Morris – ‘
came
on the set and told me I was fired.’ He had tried to address rumours – since ‘e
ven my agent has been given no reason why I’m fired
’ – on the question of music, of casting, and so on:

You must understand
that words have been put into my mouth I never spoke. Lies have been told. Somebody, for his own purposes – in the interests of his own career – has treated me very, very shabbily. There may be two sides to every argument – but there wasn’t an argument – I was sentenced without trial. Speaking of trials, my lawyers assure me I’d win a suit if I brought it against your people, but I think you
know that I’m not that kind of a person. I think you know, too, what this affair has cost me in the radio business. The cost to my own feelings is the most painful part of it all.

The incident was humiliating. How could the noble orator who had moved the nation to tears at the time of Roosevelt’s death only weeks earlier be thus summarily executed, dismissed from a rather unremarkable series
and reduced to nearly incoherent pleading with the agency? Clearly there is more to the story than Welles repeats; but equally clearly the company had had enough of him and felt it was simplest to release him. The supreme master was easily dispensable.

The
New York Post
was kinder and more patient with him, but here too Welles was perceived as a problem, and the terms in which the problem was
posed pierced him to the core. Robert Hall from the
New York Post
syndicates division wrote to him pointing out the relative failure of the column with the general reader, even after revamping it as
Orson Welles Today
. ‘Editors did not expect that your column would be regularly on politics and international affairs, for frankly in the public consciousness you are not known as a political writer.
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The average reader knows Orson Welles as one of the leading actors and producers of this century. Why don’t we, as a new lead, attempt to capitalise on this? If you gave us more Orson Welles reporting of contacts in Hollywood, radio, theatre etc. – with an occasional political piece – I believe we could go to town.’ It is extraordinary that the paper had allowed him his head to such a degree
on political matters; but the alternative notion that Welles might like to provide an insider’s gossip column was humiliating and repugnant to him. ‘Frankly I haven’t recovered from the shock of your letter,’ Welles replied to Hall.
⁴⁷
‘I haven’t found it easy to adjust to the fact that the column is a flop. Strangely,
I
hadn’t suspected it.’ He offers to give up the column. ‘Under any circumstances
the column costs me many times as much money as you pay me for it. I’ve thrown over really big financial opportunities in order to serve it loyally and with my best efforts. It takes a huge daily toll, it calls for enthusiasm and love and energy, all of which (no matter how disappointing you find the results) it’s had from me in full measure. Since your letter, those necessary qualities have
been very hard to come by.’ He is shaken by the lack of confidence in him that Hall expresses: ‘it was generally believed when we commenced this undertaking that if it failed, it would be because I lost interest in the job. An assumption very flattering to me, as it turns out, since I’ve lost no interest, only readers. From here on in, getting that piece off is the toughest, most thankless day’s
work I’ve ever been faced with.’ Above all, he resents the insult to his readers. ‘You say that you want me to write about political matters no more than once a week, and to spend the rest of my wordage on Hollywood and personalities. Of course this would build an audience, but Bob, it wouldn’t be the audience I want to address. There is a serious public. I believe that time could teach that public
to take me seriously. You don’t agree. – Where do we go from here?’

Halls’s proposition was impossible. Welles doesn’t point out the obvious contradiction: an insider who attempts to write a column about his colleagues very swiftly becomes an outsider, shunned by those colleagues and therefore bereft of stories. Moreover, Welles didn’t care to move in those sort of Hollywood circles. His interests
at this stage were divided between the political and the sexual: he spent his time on
Free World
, at the pan-American conferences and in the house of the producer Sam Spiegel, where there was always a ready supply of call-girls of every shape, size and hue. Otherwise, you might find him in a jazz club or at a magic show. But he was not to be found in the habitual purlieus of the movie community;
to all intents and purposes, though he continued to live in Los Angeles, he was scarcely part of Hollywood at all and had no gossip to report.