Orson Welles: Hello Americans (46 page)

There is chilling prescience in Welles’s analysis of the situation: some months earlier, reporting from Bretton Woods, he had written: ‘We are the world’s greatest production
plant and the largest creditor nation.
⁵⁹
Without sensible economic agreements between England and the US, Mr Luce’s prediction of the American century will come true and God help us all. We’ll make Germany’s bid for world supremacy look like amateur night. And the inevitable retribution will be on a comparable scale.’

IN ADDITION TO
the newspaper column, Welles had continued throughout 1945 to pursue his political interests, preparing for a new radio programme in which he was actively encouraged to address current affairs, making speeches across the country, and editing
Free World
magazine; for a while he was authorised correspondent for the Rio newspaper O
globo
. In fact,
Welles was one of a number of contributing editors to
Free World
under the general supervision of Dolivet, and could be relied upon to run up a piece on pretty well any subject of current concern. A typical wire from Dolivet requesting an editorial reads:
EITHER LATIN
AMERICA OR PALESTINE WITH EMPHASIS BRITISH OR OTHER MANDATES NO LONGER CAN BE KEPT AS EXCLUSIVE PRIVILEGE OF RULING NATION;
¹
Welles
chose Latin America. The cover of the Special Peace Issue of the magazine, devoted to fears about the bomb and other chemical means of warfare, carried the headline
FROM MARTIAN BROADCAST TO ATOM BOMB
and focused specifically on Welles’s own history,
²
recalling the
War of the Worlds
panic. ‘Among the closing lines of Mr Welles’s broadcast was this one: “We annihilated the world before your very
ears.” By now the gigantic hoax can become a terrible reality and the author is writing in deadly seriousness about the important decisions humanity has to make since the mastery of atomic energy.’ Welles’s piece itself ends with a curious rhetorical flourish, which might have worked as oratory, but whose grandiloquence seems rather overwrought on the page:

The alternative to Chaos is grander
than all dreams, and we are greater than our dreams. We, the living, are the ancestors of a people who will be, truly, men like Gods. We will not fail them. Among all creatures, the human has the marvellous bent for the art of survival. The universe is none too big for him. Man is no puny thing. He is greater than all his tools. He burned himself with the first fire, but there came a day when he
built a forge
and
he made a plow. Today man turns the key in the last padlock of power. Tomorrow he will be worthy of his freedom.

Elsewhere he takes a slightly more pugnacious tone. ‘We know that for some ears even the word “action” has a revolutionary twang, and it won’t surprise us if in some quarters we’re accused of inciting them.
Free World
is very interested in riots.
Free World
is interested
in avoiding them. We call for action against the cause of riots. Law is the best action, the most decisive.’
³
His conclusion reverts to the cause that he espoused above all others throughout his career as a commentator, and indeed throughout his life, with truly admirable tenacity, lending his name and his authority to it whenever he could, often at considerable danger to himself. ‘This is our
proposition: that the sin of race hate be solemnly declared a crime.’ He was something of a beacon to his fellow-liberals, and his presence on various progressive platforms was perpetually in demand. At the beginning of 1944, Will Rogers Jr had written to Welles asking him to be the narrator for
We Will Never Die
, a concert protesting against Nazi slaughter of the Jews, assuring him:
YOUR APPEARANCE
WILL MAKE PROFOUND IMPRESSION
.
⁴
In similar vein, though with a slightly different catchment area in mind, Ray Pierre of
Glamour
magazine asked Welles to write a piece on tolerance in society. ‘We are in complete sympathy with everything you have been saying in your lectures and your column in the
New York Post
… we feel that your name as well as your point of view would strike home with our young
women readers – a pretty wide audience that sadly needs your message.’
⁵

The piece that Welles wrote for Pierre, ‘Mrs Wentworth,’ is one of his most extended pieces of political journalism; read by him, in a voice of sweet reason, its impact would have been overwhelming, though it is powerful enough on the page. ‘Mr Thomas Martin Wentworth is a popular member of his country club. Mrs Wentworth
is perfectly charming, and so are the children. Dinner at the Wentworths if not exactly an event is a delightful way to spend an evening as you probably know. The wines are pleasant, the food excellent, the conversation sufficiently diverting to stave off bridge and home movies. But you must be careful what you say to Mrs Wentworth: she comes from the south …’
⁶
Welles then reveals that she has
a black half-brother. ‘The difference in skin pigmentation will surely seem to the students of this era in centuries to come the quaintest of all possible reasons why a sister should expect her brother to step off the sidewalk and avert his eyes when
she
appears before him … our textbooks and our teachers are careful not to give “offence” to Mrs Wentworth. Our movies and our radios religiously
avoid the very stuff which alone can save the Wentworth young …’ The husband is tolerant:

What in God’s name does Mr Wentworth have to tolerate? The fact there are people different from himself alive in the world … no, in Mr Wentworth’s little world, there isn’t anybody to ‘tolerate’ except Mrs Wentworth. If she has read these words to this bitter end, I know she will be screaming now that I’m
one of those Communist Yankee agitators who doesn’t know ‘conditions’. Dear Mrs Wentworth, I’m half a southerner and despite the fact that I
do
know ‘conditions’, I’m not even a quarter Communist. I believe our American system can work. But it won’t until you, Mr Wentworth, and you, Mrs Wentworth, sit down and shut up long enough to let our educators teach your children how wrong their parents
are.

The curious touch of menace, of a veiled threat, is characteristic. (His casual claim to be half-Southern is another charming piece of self-fabulism. There are so many halves to Welles that by this stage he must have added up to several people – a whole family, perhaps.) His anti-racism led him to become spokesman for the Citizens’ Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth, to
combat anti-Mexican agitation stirred up in, among other places, the Hearst press, which had been instrumental in drawing attention to the celebrated Sleepy Lagoon incident in August 1942, when seventeen young Mexican-Americans had been arrested for murder. Two of the defendants were beaten up by the police; they and the others were convicted. Welles wrote a simple but eloquent preface to a pamphlet
published by the otherwise unknown Mercury Printing Press; in October 1944, thanks in large part to Welles’s agitation, the court overturned the convictions. He was, in this as in so many other areas of his life, apparently fearless; everything he did or wrote was duly recorded by the FBI, which was scandalised to note that Welles was going to make three short films for the Mercury Theatre, to
be shown throughout the country in public schools, ‘on the contribution of the Negroes to American music and letters’.
⁷

He pursued a heavy programme of public speaking. This was not a purely idealistic enterprise: his highly successful anti-fascist lecture tour at the beginning of the year had earned him 70 per cent of the gross
over
$300, so financial necessity and political progressiveness
were not mutually exclusive. But welcome though the emolument undoubtedly had been, it was not the driving motive: he derived great personal satisfaction from addressing large numbers of people on what he rightly regarded as urgent themes, relishing the directness of communication and the chance to sway people’s opinions; naturally he was powerfully thrilled by the contact with large crowds, sometimes
as many as 5,000 strong. He was Charles Foster Kane, but on the right side. The impact he made was immense. The celebrated educationalist, Helen Keller, both deaf and blind, had written to Welles that her assistant ‘had your speech put into Braille for me and I have read it over and over. It startles me with the thunder of a waking social conscience … your spirit of prophecy inspires working
faith.’
⁸
Welles had been introduced to her and displayed the courteousness that was habitual to him when dealing with older people. ‘It is delightful to recall the knightly gallantry with which you guided me through the surging crowd at the stage entrance. And there was in me an emotion too deep for words as I sensed their huge love pressing round us and hands touching us lightly but eloquent
in their dumbness.’ She sensed in him a kindred spirit. ‘There is nothing like the affection of a great crowd, and I know neither you nor I would change it for any earthly treasure – except their increased welfare and happiness.’

This continuing absorption in political life had at one point seemed a bond uniting Welles and Rita Hayworth (their Christmas Card for 1944 read ‘To the Spanish Republicans
and other anti-Fascist refugees, my wife and I send greetings. Will you join us? Just fill out the enclosed check and mail it to the joint anti-Fascist Refugee Committee immediately. Your donation will mean relief and rehabilitation for those first fighters against fascism. Thank you and the season’s greetings to all of you. Signed Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles’). But now it only served to
widen the rift between them, taking him away from her both emotionally and geographically. The FBI, which maintained a lively interest in Welles’s sex life, reported that when he was in San Francisco for the United Nations Conference he spent ‘considerable evenings engaged in extra-marital duties with [name deleted], former Main Street burlesque striptease artist, who recently promoted herself to
a higher type of night club appearances in the city. Also sometime ago when Welles appeared in San Diego in connection with a bond tour, he took some girl other than his wife, to be with him there.’
⁹
He absent-mindedly abandoned his elaborate considerateness for his
wife
. When her mother Volga Cansino, with whom Hayworth had such a dangerously complex and unresolved relationship, suddenly died,
Welles failed to return to Los Angeles for the funeral. His indifference to his new daughter was absolute, and when Hayworth occasionally joined him in New York or Washington, she found him wholly absorbed in conferences with his advisors. To remind him of her existence, she would throw explosive tantrums, which had the desired effect in the short term – he would disappear into the bedroom to comfort
her while his collaborators tiptoed embarrassedly away – but which in the only slightly longer term drove him further and further away from her.

The paradoxes of their unlikely relationship had started to manifest themselves very early: the more he embraced needy mankind, the less able he seemed to extend his concern to the individuals for whom he was personally responsible. Welles had been drawn
to Hayworth because of her sexually iconic quality; conquering her had boosted his image and his ego. He had courted her by gently penetrating beyond the goddess and the star and by urging her to reveal her private hopes, disappointments and dreams. She was attracted to him because he was the first man who seemed willing to listen to her and treat her as something other than a sex-object. Having
won her, Welles rapidly lost interest in the
Pygmalion
aspect of their relationship. Initially fascinated with the disparity between the potency of her image and her utter lack of inner confidence, between her public glamour and her private homeliness, he soon found the complexities of her character distinctly anaphrodisiac, her urgent demand for affirmation through sex the opposite of enticing.
Welles wanted to pursue, not to be pursued – least of all by his own wife. She thus found herself married to possibly the only heterosexual man in the Western world who did not want to go to bed with her. Hayworth’s former husband had encouraged her to advance her career – and thus their joint bank balance – by sleeping with other men as well as himself, a profoundly disturbing and damaging proposition;
Welles’s contribution to her battered psyche was that – having discovered, to his surprise, that she was at heart a housewife and a mother – he felt that providing her with a daughter had discharged his marital responsibilities. Being constitutionally incapable of doing anything that didn’t interest him, he largely absented himself from the relationship, which of course compounded her already
advanced feelings of abandonment. A further, and perhaps crucial, complication in their situation was that in business terms she was worth a great deal more than he was,
and
was infinitely more famous and popular. All the more reason to absent himself from her ambit, though he was not above borrowing large sums of money from her. As her cronies from the studios reported more and more of Welles’s
infidelities to her (including the semi-public liaison with Judy Garland, a surprising choice if it was complexity and emotional neediness that he was running away from), Hayworth began to drink heavily; often, inebriated, she would drive around the Hollywood Hills at reckless speeds, once with Welles (on one of his rare visits home) as her terrified passenger.

His real life was elsewhere, in
the bars and clubs, on the stump or editorialising. The new radio programme, frankly entitled
Orson Welles’s Commentary
, was his final attempt to find the radiophonic pulpit he had been seeking for some years now. Lear Radios, his new sponsor, had taken the precaution of having him record a sample programme, with which they were well pleased: ‘[an] expert blending of the humorous and the dramatic
with abundance of human interest,’
¹⁰
wrote William Lear, which gave promise of ‘something that radio sadly needs, namely, a new type of entertainment. I don’t know of anyone in the country better suited to supply such a need than you.’ Clearly Lear and the agency had the highest hopes for the programme: they were paying Welles the startling sum of $1,200 a week, rising to $1,700, for his ‘commentary
on affairs of national interest, books, plays, films, and relative subjects and personalities involved therein’.
¹¹
The programme precisely fulfilled this brief, and was something quite new in Welles’s use of the medium, his first solo broadcast, an exercise in minimalism alongside his ramshackle attempts at variety shows and his ambitious and sometimes radical literary dramatisations. This is
radio pared down to its bare essentials, designed as a nearly abstract exercise in his exceptional ability (in Arthur Miller’s words quoted earlier) ‘to seem to climb into’ the microphone.