Orson Welles: Hello Americans (47 page)

The first show opens with great directness, but the sudden intimacy – instead of being engaging – is almost oppressive, a far cry from the infectious actor-managerial introductions to the Mercury Theatre on
the Air riding on the adrenalin of Bernard Herrmann’s souped-up version of the opening bars of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, or the bright and breezy welcomes to
The Orson Welles Almanac
. ‘Hello,’
¹²
he says, ‘this is Orson Welles,’ and it is as if he has phoned you personally. ‘I’ve come to call, I’ve come to visit with you at this time for a few minutes and, with your permission, every
week have a little conversation and talk
about
this and that. I’m going to speak my mind about the news. And, you know, we don’t have to agree on everything to be friends. This is a free country after all. I’m no more of an expert than you are, I haven’t got a stable of spies working for me in Washington or Hollywood, though I’ve got a whole lot of interesting friends and I meet a lot of people.’
As a point of fact, he did, as it happens, have a network of informants in Washington (though not in Hollywood); Geneva Cranston and her associates had been hired again to keep Welles
au courant
with events. He defends the right of actors to have a voice of their own, adding that he personally broadcasts because ‘a few people are doing a lot of harm to the things I believe in and love and want
to serve. I don’t believe I speak for a minority.’ He speaks, of course, of a Free World. ‘You may find me on an occasional soap-box but you may be sure that I’ll be speaking in behalf of those notions drafted into our constitution and our Bill of Rights. I’ll try to have a story for you each week, I’ll tell you about a new film, and then I’ll say something about the trouble in Korea.’ The sponsor
says ‘a few interesting words’. The new film he plugs is Robert Siodmak’s
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry
, featuring Geraldine Fitzgerald whom he first met, he reveals, when they made their debut in the same theatre in Dublin. She may not have the starring role, he says, because ‘the people who push the buttons and push people around in Hollywood may not have decided that she is a star yet,
but she’s a real actress’. The film is a mystery story, he tells us, a better one than the week’s other mystery story: ‘Frankly,’ he asks, ‘who cares whether Herr Schikelgruber is dead or alive?’ He reports that he’s off to see a bull-fight across the border, in Mexico, ‘with Jo and Lenore Cotten and my wife’. There is much mention of Rita Hayworth, though their relationship, as we have seen, was
by now in rapid free-fall. He speaks of bull-fighting uncomfortably and defensively, knowing that most of his fellow-Americans find it repugnant, admitting that he’s tried it out in Mexico and Spain – ‘pre-Franco, of course’ – and ‘recounting a long and unamusing story about a legendary bull-fighter of his acquaintance, who was locked out of his hotel room in downtown LA wearing only his towel.

One senses that all this is an obligatory prelude, a mere hors d’oeuvre to the political meat. The moment Welles reaches this section, his tone changes into one of rising emotionalism containing more than a hint of hysteria; we have already heard a touch of it in his references to Hitler and to Hollywood; indeed, it would be hard to say which of the two he regarded as posing the greater
threat
to mankind. Speaking of Korea, he analyses American policy lucidly enough, comparing it to its approach to Italy: ‘suppressing Communism by suppressing Democracy’. This, he says, his voice beginning to strangle with outrage, is ‘Simon-pure baloney. We are using Japan to protect Korea from the Koreans. We cannot fight Communism, we can only compete with it.’ By now he is standing four-square on the
soapbox that he prophesied at the beginning of the programme. America, he continues, ‘is committed to moral as well as economic leadership. We are the bearers of man’s brightest torch. This is a great moment, the greatest moment in history.’ After this grand peroration, he signs off, hoping ingratiatingly that the audience will want to make hearing the programme a weekly arrangement, and ending
with the time-honoured and always faintly improbable formula, ‘I remain Obediently Yours, Orson Welles.’

The agency was surprisingly delighted with this rather curious show, as was Lear, who wrote to congratulate them on it, at the same time congratulating himself: ‘I’ll bet it is an interesting experience for Welles to have a sponsor who isn’t messing with his show.’
¹³
It must have been, but
it didn’t last long. By the third programme it was already thought advisable to preface the show with a disclaimer to the effect that ‘Mr Welles brings his views and opinions which are not necessarily those of Lear Radios.’
¹⁴
Welles was now broadcasting from his home in Brentwood, an unprecedented arrangement, and apologised in advance for possible irruptions from the cocker spaniel or the eight-month-old
Rebecca. His tone is somewhat less intense and somewhat more unguarded than in the first programme: he tells his listeners that the London conference of prime ministers was ‘a wash-out’; that ‘the honeymoon is over for Truman’; and that the movement towards independence in India is too slow. Palestine, he says, is not accepting enough of the Jews of Europe, while the British are starving
more than they did in the Blitz. In the story slot, he provides a long and reverent retelling of
Bonito the Bull
as a peace-offering to those of his listeners whose sensibilities were offended by his earlier mention of bull-fighting. The Flaherty story makes for a very sweet bedtime story, but the general tone of the show is even less clear than that of the launch programme. Welles now does something
that he had never done before at the microphone: he dictates to the listener, instead of inviting him or her in. He does to the microphone, in fact, exactly what he later accused Laurence Olivier of doing to the camera: he tries to dominate it.

Something was clearly not working; from the beginning, listener
figures
were poor. Welles’s political analyses were those of his newspaper column (which
was still running) and, in slightly simplified form, of his editorials in
Free World
; they were clear and, with hindsight, more often than not accurate. But whatever he might like to think, they were not those of the majority, and the querulousness that crept into his expression of them was an unconscious acknowledgement of this. He sought in his tone to imitate a hoped-for sense of outraged radicalism
that was alien to most of his listeners, who might perhaps have responded to a more calmly reasoned discourse. The soapbox was not, as he had promised, occasional; it was his permanent base, and the snippets of movie reviews and anecdotes of the famous were ill-concealed attempts to sugar the pill of hard political lessons.

Even more problematic, the programmes were not engaging in radio terms;
they made uncomfortable listening. By November of 1945, two months into the series, William Lear was writing to Welles that he and his colleagues were deeply distressed at the ratings remaining so low ‘despite the arrival of the good listening season’. He was glad to note less political commentary and more entertainment, but remained disappointed with the show by comparison with ‘the audition record’.
He had, he said, been hoping that ‘somewhere along the line you would come up with a whopping new idea – an unorthodox experiment perhaps – or a unique story technique’. He begs Welles to ‘strike a new and unusual radio chord’. What he (and no one) fully grasped was that, in both radio and newspaper journalism, Welles had ceased to be interested in form and was concerned only with content.
He felt the eternal passion of the newly converted (whether religiously or politically) that these matters were too important for subtleties of expression: they were self-evident truths, which needed only to be clearly stated to secure the conversion of the listener or reader. Lear and Thackrey of the
Post
were still thinking of Welles as the Boy Wonder, and were surprised and disappointed when
he wasn’t able to come up with dazzling tricks. They required him to create special excitement; they did not expect or want him to be a political guru, but nor did they expect him simply to be efficient, like everyone else. His job was to startle, to amaze. ‘
Étonne-nous
, Orson!’ was their constant cry. They would not, in fact, let him grow up.

That it was perfectly possible to combine mature
liberal views with experimentation was proved by the work of Welles’s great contemporary, Norman Corwin, but in his own radio work Welles, it seems, was now impatient with artistry: what he wanted were
facts
and analysis, leading to action. He wanted politics, but he lacked the stamina for the democratic process: when Senator Hiram Warren Johnson died in August 1945, leaving a vacancy, Welles
– who had been privately assured that he would be the next senatorial candidate from California – decided against running, promising that he would do nothing to oppose the Democratic candidate’s senatorial ambition ‘inasmuch as [he] felt that Carlson would be far the better candidate’.
¹⁵
What Welles wanted was direct access to the people, whether through the press or on radio. He pursued the radiophonic
path for nearly another year, rising to extraordinary heights of demagoguery, before finally admitting defeat. Meanwhile – mostly from sheer financial necessity – he picked up the pieces of the God-given career he seemed almost completely to have abandoned: that of actor-director.

DURING THE FIFTEEN
months of his absence from film, Welles had tried wherever possible to put his talents at the service of his ideals – recording, for example, a series of great democratic speeches for Decca. His attempt to record the Bible (the Mercury Bible, it would have been) never quite got off the ground. His proposal was scorned as both intellectually unstimulating
– ‘its attempt to tie in with present history was nothing more than the average minister does every day of the year’ – and formally conventional: ‘with Welles’s great flair for the imaginative, and his undisputed originality … he might have done a more inspiring job’.
¹
What finally scuppered him was that the project needed the approval of the clergy, but ‘reservations have been expressed about
Orson’s personal life’. He was damned both ways: too shocking in life, not shocking enough in art.

As for the stage, he was still in demand, particularly on what would now be known as the fringe, or off-Broadway: the Theatre Guild offered him the part of jealousy-maddened Leontes in
The Winter’s Tale
, while James Light of Readers’ Theatre suggested that he do
Tamburlaine the Great
for them, an
inspired idea that would have provided a fine sequel to his
Dr Faustus
, a play in which his rhetorical gifts – indispensable in Marlowe, if of limited value in Shakespeare – would have found their perfect fulfilment; had they also wanted Welles to direct it, he would surely have done that particularly well, too. He was, both as artist and as man, perfectly Marlovian, a born over-reacher. Shakespeare
was on offer, too. The designer Oliver Smith and his partner Paul Feigay, who had just produced the Bernstein-Robbins smash hit
On the Town
, were keen for Welles to direct and star in
King Lear
. He turned them all down, but his mind was clearly turning towards the stage again, nearly four years after his sensational production of
Native Son
. ‘No matter how bad the Broadway stage gets,’ he told
the
New York Times
, with an implicit dig at Hollywood, ‘it will always represent a great art form.’ He wanted to write a book about the theatre, he said,
but
when a potential publisher asked for some advance material, none was forthcoming and negotiations petered out.

Meanwhile, Welles’s unique position in the profession was being acknowledged from an illustrious and wholly unexpected quarter:
the curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art, the formidable Iris Barry, had written to him to say that ‘we should like to organise a one-man exhibition here on the work of a living American artist who has been active both in the theatre and in film … and we would like that one man to be yourself’.
²
By that definition, he was indeed the ideal and – until the rise of Elia Kazan and the Method
directors – perhaps the only serious candidate for such an accolade. But it is still worth remembering that Iris Barry’s letter arrived just four days after his thirtieth birthday, on 6 May 1945; and that he had been inactive both in theatre and in film for some three years – as a director, at any rate, the capacity in which he was being fêted. He responded to the Museum’s demand for material with
swift excitement, immediately assembling and despatching a substantial batch. Then there was no more. A year later they were still asking him if he had anything else. The prospect of such concentrated exposure and analysis may have seemed rather daunting; perhaps it was best to leave the aura of retrospective glory unexamined. The sense of Welles’s limitless but somewhat undefined promise persisted:
the
Writer’s Yearbook 1946
, at any rate, was confident of the future: ‘He is a potential master and will make the greatest contribution to society.’

So far as film was concerned, Welles was scarcely Hollywood’s forgotten man – his public profile had never been higher – but he seemed to make strenuous efforts actively to distance himself from it. In every interview, and in every medium at his
disposal, he had fearlessly and even recklessly criticised it and its product, attacking both producers and directors, demanding a new dispensation. ‘Pictures are in a bad way. They need revitalising,’ he had written in a formal statement in the
New York Times
. ‘They have no Toscaninis. We should have theatres financed by the Government for private film experimentation and a chain of adult theatres
free from Hays Office Code censorship. Films dealing with serious and important subjects should be produced even if the big boys have to be taxed for them.’ His proposals, eminently attractive though they might have been from a Utopian perspective, were scarcely likely to find any direct practical response, at the same time alienating anyone who might be in a position to employ him; it often
seemed to be more important to him to be right than to be
employed.
In fact, short of financing a movie himself (which, given his track record, was a rank impossibility), his only hope was to find an independent producer, a breed that did not exist in the Hollywood of the mid-forties (with the exception of Capra and Chaplin, both of whom produced only their own work). Korda would seem to have
been an ideal partner, but since the demise of their plan to shoot
War and Peace
, their relationship had drifted somewhat. But then Welles fell in with a man – a bargain-basement version of Korda, in many ways – who was embarking on a career that would in the fullness of time result in his being first a pioneer and finally the prince of independent production. Sam Spiegel, like Korda, had been
born in a
shtetl
. After various continental adventures, a brief sojourn in Hollywood and a spell in Palestine, he had served – somewhat to his own surprise – as head of Universal’s European operation in Berlin until Hitler’s assumption of power, at which point he moved to Vienna. In 1939 he returned to Hollywood, where he had earlier worked as a story translator in the nineteen-twenties. His first
film as a producer, using the transparent alias of S. P. Eagle, had been the enjoyably European
Tales from Manhattan
.