Orson Welles: Hello Americans (45 page)

His columns had occasionally touched on artistic matters, as distinct from showbiz gossip: he reports an almost surreal occasion in Los Angeles when a young woman had leaped up and danced at the side of the stage when Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra
played Mendelssohn’s Overture to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
;
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elsewhere he writes about Eisenstein’s
Ivan the Terrible
, just released in America – ‘it’s the darnedest thing you ever saw’ – and
ventures
some rather searching observations on film in general.
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He imagines that critics and audiences in the English-speaking world – ‘accustomed as they are to the pallid stylessness of the “realistic”
school’ – are likely to be impatient, even moved to giggles by the antics of Ivan and his friends. ‘This is because the arts and artists of our theatre have been so busy for so long now teaching their public to reject anything larger than life unless it be stated in the specific language of glamour and charm.’ He offers a very surprising analysis of what is wrong with the film: it is ‘what goes
sour with the work of any artist whose bent is for eloquence. Eisenstein’s uninhibited preoccupation with pictorial effect sometimes leads him, as it has led others who work with the camera, into sterile exercises, empty demonstrations of the merely picturesque.’ The striking similarities between Eisenstein’s work and Welles’s own, both in framings and in montage, had clearly not occurred to him.
‘The Russians go out for the effect itself – and when they find what they’re after – they manage moments of an exclamatory and resonant beauty on a level of eloquence to which our school cannot aspire. When the Russian method fails it is funny; it falls flat on its bottom and we laugh. When Hollywood fails, it falls flat, the result is merely dull and we yawn. The star in a Russian studio,’ he continues,
still apparently blissfully unaware of any concordance between his subject and himself, ‘is the director. When his camera performs as a principal actor, we are offered great cinema. But when that camera dominates the action at the expense of the rest of the performers, it’s as tiresome as any star hogging close-ups or taking pleasure in the sound of his own voice.’ Because of inferior equipment,
the Russian camera must assert itself by what it selects and the manner of selection. ‘The Hollywood camera spends its time lovingly evaluating texture, the screen being filled as a window is dressed in a swank department store.’ So often in the years to come, Welles was to be working with inferior equipment; his cinema became entirely one of selection. He makes another observation of some
profundity: ‘When the American movie-maker becomes aware of a discrepancy between his film and the appearance of life, he corrects the difference in favour of “realism”. The search for the direct and the literal produces some of our best effects’ – a path that Welles was rarely to follow.

In one of the columns, seeking to combine his political and show-business interests, he writes about Jack
Benny’s black side-kick, his butler Rochester, a much-loved feature of the radio show.
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Benny is on tour, doing public performances of the show in variety
houses
around the country. But he has not taken one of the show’s most popular characters with him, for the simple reason that Rochester is black. Welles writes an open letter to his old chum Benny, urging him to take Rochester with him on
the road and defy the racists. The column must have been cleared with Benny, with whom Welles had always been (and remained) on the very best of terms. But it is a superb peg on which to hang Welles’s indictment of American attitudes on race; it is exceptionally vivid; he speaks in his own voice, always a good idea in a column. In fact, it feels as if it really might be a letter: direct and personal.
From the
Post
’s point of view it was also about show business and roped in one of the most famous names in America. And it pleased Welles’s bosses.

Replying to Welles’s letter, Bob Hall of the
Post
, obviously shaken by Welles’s genuine dismay at his proposal, assures him that he doesn’t want a gossip column from him, but believes that Welles should use the fields ‘in which you are a recognised
authority’, citing the column about Jack Benny as the perfect way to deal with a political point:
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‘through reference to situations and people with which you are thoroughly familiar and – what is more important from a columnar viewpoint – with which readers know you are thoroughly familiar. That gives you prestige from the first word you write, and it puts you in a columning position which few
can touch.’ It is not a bad point. Hall’s letter was soon followed by one from Ted Thackrey stressing the importance of the column being personal, and not a mere mouthpiece for political positions. He takes it very seriously. ‘Without question, the daily task of poking into one’s own subconscious and dragging out the mass of intertwined thought and emotion, and setting it forth for public gaze,
is for most of us the most severe possible drain upon energy and psyche,’ Thackrey writes.
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‘The material which pours from you instantly, apparently almost instinctively, will be likely to be truer, warmer and more convincing than anything gathered in your behalf by others.’ He urges Welles to dismiss any organising and fact-collecting staff he might have, and inverts Welles’s argument about
not patronising his readers:

Only one sentence in your letter proved really disturbing to me … this was the suggestion that you prefer to write for the small, select, few ‘serious’ thinkers possessed of very special knowledge and by implication of some special kind of brains. If this were really so, you could not possibly think of a newspaper,
or
any other general, means of communicating in a
democracy as your medium … if by any chance you do feel that there is a gulf between you and the average man who walks the streets which cannot be reached by common words, then, and only then, I should urge you by all means to abandon writing.

The question of Welles’s relationship to his audience – whether readers, listeners or film-goers – is a central one in his career: his lifelong belief
that he had something to say to the broad mass of mankind. The common touch was always to elude him, but by no means for want of trying.

Also central to his life was the question of his relationship with his fellow-workers. Thackrey touches astutely on that, too. ‘When you do resume your daily writing,’ he ends his letter, ‘I would counsel only one constant, patience, patience, and above all,
patience with your fellow-craftsmen … whose opinions are, by the very nature of things, certain to be representative and therefore a clue to the unfinished business always ahead of us all.’ He ends ‘with all our affection and confidence’, which clearly he genuinely feels. This remarkable letter – a lesson from an older man advising a younger who is clearly overwrought and has misjudged the whole
situation, but who is not to be punished for it – must have been a shocking one for Welles to receive. In the gentlest possible terms, Thackrey is saying to Welles: if you’re going to come and do our job with us, then do it properly. It’s not a game, a hobby, an indulgence; nor do you have any God-given right to do it: it’s a job, one you have to work at, like any other, despite your – as he says
elsewhere in the letter – ‘unusual talents’. It has a certain family resemblance to letters that Welles received from time to time from his guardian Dadda Bernstein and his old headmaster, Skipper Hill.

Something in the now thirty-year-old Welles still inspired a certain kind of paternal concern in older men, and by contrast with his violently rejecting attitude towards authority figures, he
received the letter with a sort of gratitude. ‘For three weeks,’ he replied to Thackrey, ‘I’ve been trying to find some answers to your letter – it was a very kind and wise letter.’
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He attempts to redefine his position about his readers. ‘All I meant was I wanted to write a column for the people who read editorials; that I didn’t care about the fans … but the sum of my breast-beating letter
was simply this: you are unhappy with my work and I think it’s the best I can do. Therefore why not drop me quietly overboard? I still think you ought to. Maybe,’ he ponders, stating what to someone
else
might have been an obvious truth, ‘the only way to do a good column is to do nothing else.’ But of course he can’t afford to do that. ‘Maybe if I spent half of five days on a single Saturday piece,
the result would better deserve your confidence and your news space. I do so much value your friendship and Dolly’s [Dorothy Schiff, Thackrey’s wife, and owner of the
Post
], I so much wanted to do everything you believed I could do … maybe if I do quite well I’m not letting you down as much as if I continue poorly – please tell me how I can be fairest to you.’ Here is yet another Welles, boyish
and rather touching. A week later he wires Thackrey:
HOW WAS LAST COLUMN? DID IT HAVE ENOUGH PERSONALITY? IS IT IN THE DIRECTION YOU HAVE INDICATED? MUCH LOVE.
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The column had indeed changed somewhat; Welles’s own voice became clearer and more confident, without losing its political edge. He ranged further than he had: from time to time he managed a mention of Hollywood, though in far from gossipy
vein.

One of the best of his
Post
columns, ‘His Gorgeousness, the Bey of Beverly Hills’, in which he invents a producer who sums up everything he despises, is a devastatingly frank attack on the system Welles so hated and to which he was nonetheless still somehow indivisibly attached.
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‘The sleep of the great man is guarded by private police, he has worn only a small percentage of his shirts,
his race horses are happier than his lady friends and almost as numerous. Yet he is a man of simple tastes. Look at his movies and you’ll see what I mean.’ One day a female tourist asks Gorgeous George, ‘Why don’t you make better movies? Why are they getting worse and worse instead of better and better?’ He murmurs, ‘Unions,’ but she continues unstoppably, ‘I think it’s because you make too much
money, or rather, because you don’t lose enough to learn anything.’ A fascinating complaint from Welles, who knew all about losing money for studios. ‘Silence followed this, only broken by the tiny patter of dropping options all over the valley.’ The female tourist resumes, ‘I’m tired of your telling us that we have 12-year-old minds. America is now the strongest nation the world has ever known,
and the movies are a greater power than the atomic bomb. If you deserve exclusive rights to this whole empire of ideas, why don’t you prove it by growing up a little? The army is not supposed to be a place you join for artistic freedom, but your people have produced better pictures in uniform than you ever let them make on your lot.’ Welles then advances an argument very familiar in the late twentieth
century, but an outrageous one for 1945: ‘Every other big business spends lots of income on
research
. You make your artists experiment on the job. If what they try doesn’t work, you ground them. And they don’t get to try much. The old stuff still sells, because there isn’t anything else on the market. That’s why I think you need a few more flops, even a little competition.’ The right to fail,
a phrase coined by George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the mid-nineteen-fifties, was an idea whose time had most certainly not yet come in Hollywood, 1945; would indeed never come to Hollywood in any period. In Welles’s column, the tourist woman, disappointed, leaves. Gorgeous George, the Bey of Hollywood, changes the subject. ‘I have it on the best authority,’ he says, chillingly,
‘that there never was in Europe during the occupation – what you’d call a real underground.’ The piece is powerful, precise and of course quite suicidal – the last line above all.

Considered as journalism, however (especially by the criteria of Ted Thackrey and Bob Hall), it was exactly what was wanted: intelligent, trenchant criticism, on a subject on which Welles could easily be counted an
expert; it was controversial, but not hectoring. Subsequent pieces, if not so directly personal, were similarly individual: a strong pro-union piece, rather clumsily dramatised, contained a charming (and accurate) description of Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles, which suggests a hitherto unsuspected power of observation in Welles, though his evocation of this working-class playground teeters
dangerously on the brink of contempt: this is not precisely the popular culture that Welles wished to endorse:

Clifton’s. A marvellous place where birds sing over chronic organ music as homey and dreary as the complaint of a vacuum sweeper.
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There is a tame waterfall and free birthday cakes. The food is free, too, if you can’t afford to pay, and you may take your tray into a place called Tropical
Hut, where, the sign says, it rains every fifteen minutes. The customers are mostly farm folks, visiting or moved out to California with just enough for their old age. When they’re finished eating they walk round under the neon trees and read the poetry and philosophical maxims, bronze samplers studding the bright plaster walls. The ladies are given leis of paper flowers to ear around their
necks, and at five o’clock there is community singing. I don’t imagine they expect much more from Heaven.

Prelapsarianism, so central to Welles’s world-view if it concerns elderly vaudevillians or holiday hotels in Illinois villages, does not necessarily embrace other people’s innocent delights.

In another column, he invents a supposedly anti-union Aunt Lou, disturbed by the rash of strikes
that preceded the general peace. ‘It’s always “Labor trouble”,’ writes Welles, ‘never “management trouble”.
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Aunt Lou, the men and the women on the picket lines aren’t deliberately conspiring against our personal comfort. Because they want a better livelihood doesn’t mean at all that they’re plotting the overthrow of prosperity … but keep your hat on, Aunt Lou. It’s been worse before, and it’s bound to get better.’ But his primary concern is with foreign policy. Again and again he comes back to the
question of America’s power in the world; in an Open Letter to Jimmy Byrnes, now Secretary of State, whom he has consistently attacked, Welles attributes Russia’s current anxieties to the failure of America and Britain to impose a tough peace on Germany, leading the Russians to believe that ‘we’re figuring on the possibility of going to war again – and not with Germany’.
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It is the first frost
presaging the start of the Cold War, and Welles contemplates the loss of all the hopes of which he and his colleagues in the Popular Front had dreamed: ‘From where I sit, Mr Secretary, it looks to me like Russia is wrong about a lot of things, but I do think – and most of my neighbours agree with me – that since we carry the biggest stick in the world, we could afford to speak a trifle softly. You
don’t have to shout, Mr Secretary, you can lower your voice for a minute. Our back isn’t against the wall. We’re big and strong and rich but we can afford to make a few more friends in the world if we want to influence people.’