Orson Welles: Hello Americans (50 page)

The very particular political melancholy that is engendered by disappointment
in the leader of the party you support had descended on Welles. A subsequent
New York Post
column, also written during the shoot of
The Stranger
, describes lessons he is taking to learn to drive, but his intention is not purely anecdotal. He reveals an unexpected longing for some kind of meaning to life. He has been for a drive with ‘some daredevil instructor’ who gave him his licence, ‘laughing
heartily as he filled it out. He must have thought I was kidding, or else the man was floundering in hysteria … all I know is that it’s now perfectly legal for me to drive. I only wish I could.’
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(This is no columnist’s invention: Welles was wholly ignorant of the art of driving a car, but was nonetheless so impatient behind the wheel that the smallest journey was a threat to pedestrians, passengers,
fellow-drivers and above all himself. Shifra Haran recollected that he was so eager to arrive that he would quite unconsciously put his foot over hers on the accelerator when she was driving.) After he received his licence, he continues, the car broke down. ‘I did whatever it is I do to a car to make it stall.’ He didn’t know where he was, then spotted the spire of the set for
The Stranger
. He
asked a passing child if the church belonged to the movies, but she didn’t know. ‘I figure that the child and I, and maybe you, need something we can rely on,’ he ends on an unaccustomed note. ‘Something that won’t be torn down to make room for a new movie, but it had better be something as good as churches have been when they were good.’

THE TRUTH IS
that Welles’s mind was already turned away from Hollywood, even before he had completed shooting
The Stranger
. He had determined on a return, in the grandest possible style, to the stage: the old standby. It was like a parental home to him, where he could always be sure of a welcome. And if he was returning to the theatre,
let it be to the theatre theatrical – that, it seems, was his thinking when he decided to do a version of the much-adapted Jules Verne novel
Around the World in Eighty Days
. He himself had already adapted it twice, once on radio and once as a screenplay for George Schaefer in 1941, when they were still thrashing around for a film with which to follow
Citizen Kane
. The novel had the advantage,
apart from anything else, of being out of copyright; moreover, the two previous film versions had been as long ago as 1914 and 1916, so he would be in a good position to transfer his efforts (if successful) to the screen.

The new stage show would be a love-letter to the almost forgotten genre of Musical Extravaganza, a form of theatre of which Welles can have had only the most slender personal
experience. Perhaps in Chicago in the early nineteen-twenties there may have been some residual traces of it, but essentially it was a species of entertainment that had died out by the end of the First World War, due to its extraordinary demands in terms of backstage crew, of which large armies were required, and whole acres of painted scenery, which were heavily dependent on intensive skilled labour.
In theory, it was a form of theatre that should have been anathema to Welles the Expressionist and Welles the master of agit-prop. But the theatre of Orson Welles was a broad church. A not insignificant side of him longed, as we have so often seen, for sheer escapism in the theatre, not of the romantic variety, but of the thrills and spills, gasps and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ kind: he required his
timbers to be shivered, his withers to be wrung, his heart to be lodged more or
less
permanently in his mouth: he wanted, in short, to become a child again. ‘If astonishment and delight won’t bring an audience into a playhouse any more,’ he had written in his introduction to Bruce Elliot’s
Magic
, ‘then of course something is rotten in the state of the Union, and it isn’t only magic that is doomed.’
The genre of extravaganza embraced many theatrical delights: vaudevillian comedy, romantic interest, lovely leggy girls, spectacle, livestock, costumes, scenery, special effects. He would have it all, and more.

So to make it happen, in August of 1945 – just before the commencement of principal photography for
The Stranger
– he formed a partnership with a properly old-style impresario, Mike Todd
(born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen), then only in his mid-thirties, but already a byword for flamboyance and reckless enterprise, fresh from his triumphs with
Hot Mikado
(Gilbert and Sullivan jazzed), Cole Porter’s
Something for the Boys
and
Mexican Hayride
. Todd enlisted the composer of the last-named only modestly successful musical to provide songs and incidental music for
Around the World
and, after
agreeing to pay Welles $2,500 a week to write the show during the first few months of 1946, with a view to putting it on in the autumn of that year, left the co-authors to block out the plan for the script and music. His contract with Welles gave the author-director – there was no plan for him to appear in the show – ‘full, complete and unrestricted authority’; there had never been a contract
like it since his first contract with RKO. Porter, at a rather low point both in his career and his life, was cheerfully stimulated, excited to be associating himself with ‘the crazy and unusual production of the theatre – the kind of thing one dreams about but never quite dares to attempt … it’s because I’m bored.
¹
I want to do something “different”.’ He saw
Around the World
as ‘a drama with
music, too’, though as the programme note for the show pointed out, there is more music in
Around the World
than in most musicals. As well as a set of four songs, Porter had provided music for the filmed sequences, the chase, the circus, the magic show and other non-song sequences. After the initial meetings, Welles plunged into shooting
The Stranger
, taking occasional trips to New York to continue
his work with Porter.

At the same time – a sure sign that his adrenalin was beginning to flow again, bringing with it a renewal of his former intemperate appetite for work – Welles was becoming intrigued by the prospect of directing a play by the exiled German dramatist
Bertolt
Brecht, whom he had met in Los Angeles, where Brecht was part of the expatriate circle centred on Berthold and Saskia
Viertel’s salon in Santa Monica. It was there that Charles Laughton had met the playwright; they had taken a remarkable shine to each other, finding common ground in their love of Japanese art and a sense of the social purpose of the theatre – Brecht from a thoroughgoing Marxist perspective, Laughton from a passionate faith in the power of art to change people and, as he said to an approving Brecht,
a conviction that ‘I know what people are like, and I want to show them’. Welles and Laughton were acquainted too, and had circled round each other admiringly but suspiciously for some time. Laughton had been at the Los Angeles premiere of
Citizen Kane
, and had twice appeared as the guest on
The Orson Welles Almanac
; both had hurled themselves into wartime fund-raising activities on the radio
and on countless platforms. But where Welles was politically fearless and highly public, Laughton was furtive and private, partly because he was terrified of being exposed as a homosexual, but also out of a deep instinct to protect his inner life. As artists, they were polar opposites, Welles functioning on adrenalin and great sweeping gestures, Laughton toiling away on his inner processes before
gradually committing himself to the heroically ambitious performances for which he was widely admired as one of the greatest living actors – if not, perhaps, the greatest of them all. But just as Welles had passed through a period in the wilderness, artistically speaking, so Laughton had suffered a recent decline in his reputation as an actor since the sensational climax of his Quasimodo in
The
Hunchback of Notre Dame
some seven years earlier. After a run of undistinguished films, he was now universally referred to –. sometimes approvingly, sometimes not – as ‘a ham’. His slowly deepening relationship with Brecht had restored his joy in acting and his self-respect; they had been working together for some years on an English version of Brecht’s work-in-progress,
The Life of Galileo
, a
fruit of his exile. The play had already been done in Zurich, but Brecht was still developing what he wanted to say about the founder of modern physics and his vexed relationship with the Church of Rome. The unique praxis evolved by actor and author working together on the play, a method celebrated by Brecht in some beautifully personal poems, was all the more extraordinary in that they had no common
language: Laughton spoke no German, and Brecht could barely understand English. Nonetheless, Brecht felt able to judge the merits of the translation
that
Laughton, working from a literal version of the text, was offering him, and together, by some osmotical-dialectical process, they arrived at a play that satisfied them both.

The Augsburger Brecht and the Yorkshireman Laughton were both shrewd
and deep-thinking men, so when they decided to ask Orson Welles to direct
Galileo
, it was not done lightly. In December of 1945, Brecht noted in his diary that Laughton had read the play to Welles: ‘His attitude is pleasant;
²
his remarks intelligent.’ Laughton – who had checked out various possible directors, including, unimaginably, that epitome of Broadway elegance Alfred Lunt – wanted a sounding
board for his acting, feeling, as he said, that the nearer he got to rehearsals ‘the more scared I become of being directed by anyone but an actor’.
³
Welles immediately knew that he was being offered something remarkable, quite unlike anything else he had ever done: the play, suffused with Brecht’s premonitory anxieties about the development of nuclear weaponry, which Welles urgently shared, and
dealing profoundly with the question – so pertinent to Welles’s own experience – of the radical’s relationship with society, instantly inflamed his imagination. He started to think of staging solutions that would serve the play’s revolutionary nature.

Barbara Leaming claims that Welles had absorbed Brecht’s theories, and that they profoundly influenced all of his subsequent work. There seems
to be little evidence for this, though he was what might be called a spontaneous Brechtian. The famous and much-misunderstood
Verfremdungseffekt
was second nature to Welles: he too wanted to make the audience assess what they saw on stage in a critical spirit, rather than encouraging them to empathise with the characters; his work, too, was designed to appeal to the brain rather than the heart.
And he shared Brecht’s faith in The People. Equally passionately, he longed to break the mould theatrically, and
Galileo
was clearly the play with which to do it, demanding the kind of anti-theatrical theatricality he had stumbled on when he was forced to stage Marc Blitzstein’s
The Cradle Will Rock
without decor, lights or a normal theatrical environment. ‘Dear Charlie,’
⁴
he wrote to Laughton,
‘I’m much encouraged to note from your thoughts about scaffolding etc that we’re thinking along identical lines. My God how I wish there were some kind of brand new place for us to play our play in!! … lacking it, of course, we’ll have to work a little magic and somehow make the Shubert rat-traps
seem
new … with something that makes it clear we’re only pitching our tents.’ He was reaching out
for something new in his own work. But though he loved the play, Welles was by no means
overawed
by the playwright. ‘Brecht was very very tiresome today,’ he told Laughton, ‘until (I’m sorry to say) I was stern and a trifle shitty. I hate working like that.’ Welles was unaccustomed to dealing with living authors in the theatre, especially ones who happened to be superb directors themselves. Nor
was he prepared to succumb to the alternation of ruthless high-handedness and manipulative charm by which Brecht enslaved his collaborators, and he was determined to make that clear from the beginning. He was more than capable of matching Brecht’s ruthlessness, going straight for the jugular. ‘I said to him one day,
⁵
while we were talking about
Galileo
,’ Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, ‘that he
had written a perfect anti-Communist work [and] he almost became aggressive. I said, “But this church you describe has to be Stalin and not the Pope. You have made something resolutely anti-Communist.”’ Welles relished this sort of intellectual rough-house, and suspected that Brecht did too. ‘Brecht had an extraordinary brain. You could tell he’d been educated by the Jesuits – he had the kind of
disciplined brain characterised by Jesuit education. Instinctively, he was more of an anarchist than a Marxist, but he believed himself a perfect Marxist.’ Welles dealt equally breezily with that other product of a Jesuit education, Charles Laughton: ‘So you find my confidence in my own charm overbearing,
⁶
do you?’ he wrote to Laughton. ‘Then go fuck yourself! Love Orson’ – leaving Laughton, no
doubt, blinking and speechless, though perhaps just slightly exhilarated, too.

Laughton was free in the autumn, not the spring, so Welles and Dick Wilson, now returned from the military and enthusiastically reviving the long-dormant Mercury Productions, agreed – against the better judgement of both Mike Todd and Cole Porter – to advance
Around the World
(as the show was to be called) to an April
out-of-town opening, and both shows were duly announced. This meant a great deal of intensive work at a time when Welles was heavily involved in the thankless task of editing
The Stranger
, while still making his weekly broadcast, writing the last of the newspaper columns and contributing weighty articles to
Free World
. Dolivet never ceased pressing Welles to do more work for the organisation,
and to take the idea of himself as a potential candidate more seriously. Welles was by no means inactive politically – in November he had fired off a telegram in support of a World Peace Rally, in celebration of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the establishment of the Soviet Union, again unhesitatingly allying himself with a dangerously unpopular cause:
OUR CHOICE IS SIMPLE.
⁷
THE END OF
WAR
OR
THE END OF THE WORLD. THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF THE SOVIET UNION OF RUSSIA ARE MEANT TO BE FRIENDS. IT IS UP TO THEM TO CRUSH ALL CONSPIRACIES AGAINST THAT FRIENDSHIP.