Orson Welles: Hello Americans (57 page)

He ends on a note of genuine personal disappointment. ‘He could take nothing from
Galileo
but me. This, for whatever it matters, he most assuredly has done. I’m the best man to stage the play, but I’m far – very far – from indispensable. I cannot but acknowledge that I need
Galileo
far
more than
Galileo
needs me. For my last word, take my oath that while I look forward to its production with all the bitter jealousy a thwarted producer can suffer, it is also with the highest hopes a most admiring friend can enjoy’

Game, set and match to Welles in the epistolary tournament. His restrained irony and eloquence and dignity make the other two look rather shabby, his generosity both
sincere and nobly expressed. But he ended up not directing
Galileo
, so he was in fact the loser. It is impossible to calculate how his life might have changed had he created for the play the sort of astonishing production that – as he and Dick Wilson both said – he was peculiarly equipped to do, especially if it had had at its centre a great performance by Laughton. Brecht’s American reputation,
too, might have been transformed, as might Laughton’s somewhat faltering standing as an actor. In contemplating what might have been, however, one has to wonder about the degree to which Welles would have been able or willing to deal successfully with either Laughton or Brecht, with their very particular and very different demands, however ‘shitty’ he might have forced himself to be. Laughton’s
attitude to Welles was always uneasy. Powerful, rich and famous though he might have become, his cautiousness, intellectual inferiority complex and slow-moving cussedness remained intact. He was daunted and a little panicked by the whirlwind that was Welles. What position could Laughton adopt in relation to him? He could be neither teacher nor pupil, his preferred relationships. Welles
would
simply
make him feel dull and old, leaving him blinking foolishly as Welles performed his verbal, artistic and actual conjuring tricks, not knowing quite how he did it but vaguely suspecting a fraud somewhere. Moreover, Laughton demanded patience and empathy from a director, qualities of which Welles had rather short supplies. Welles had never directed a major actor, with all the profound sense of
self-protection proper to them; and Laughton was not only profound, but fathomlessly subtle. In sharp contrast to Welles, adrenalin was the least of the elements of his work process; small wonder that when he came to direct his own first film,
The Night of the Hunter
, he had as happy an experience with the meditative, art-loving cinematographer Stanley Cortez as Welles had had a miserable and
frustrating one. Laughton’s stubbornness would no doubt have set in at an early stage, and he was not easily to be railroaded; more than one distinguished director in his past had been reduced to impotent despair.

As for Brecht, he was to be messed with at one’s peril, although the two men did have something in common: a relaxed attitude to authorship. Both understood the word in the spirit of
a Renaissance painter’s workshop: the name on the title page represented the joint labours of a team of contributors under the general guidance of the designated author. Whether Welles would have allowed the boot to be on the other foot for once, and would have been happy to have subsumed his contributions under Brecht’s name, is an interesting question. Certainly Brecht would have tolerated no
co-credit. In conversations with Barbara Leaming and Peter Bogdanovich, Welles describes Chaplin and Olivier, two of the biggest beasts in the jungle (and with both of whom he had damaging encounters from which he emerged the loser), as possessing at their core a kind of peasant cunning; and to some extent, and in different ways, both Laughton and Brecht had this quality: it was the thing that had
brought them together and kept them together – a certain caution, a shrewdness, a cogitating tenacity. Welles entirely lacked this quality, preferring to throw himself at a problem – to throw his resources at it – personal, financial, energetic. He rarely emerged the winner in his dealings with skilful operators, especially those who played a long game.

In the event, after much toing and froing,
during which both Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman were considered and dismissed as potential directors, Joseph Losey was given the job on the clear understanding that he was very much the lesser of the triumvirate – triumvirate because Todd, too, had fallen out with Brecht and
Laughton
when they refused to countenance his notion of hiring the furniture and costumes from MGM. It was another year
before the play reached the stage, and when it did, it was at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, and the producer – to Welles’s infinite vexation – was his old adversary and former colleague, John Houseman, whose path he seemed inevitably to cross. The play was a
succès d’estime
, albeit of a rather sober kind, which left its audiences thoughtful rather than excited – not at all the sort of experience
Brecht must have had in mind when he decided that the director of
Around the World
was the ideal man to stage his play.

That monstrously money-consuming spectacle was now coming to the end of its rackety life. The notice to close went up on 27 July.
DEAR ORSON,
Cole Porter, who was present at neither the first nor the last night of the show, wired Welles a couple of days later:
YOUR TRAGIC NEWS
ARRIVED THIS MORNING STOP ALL MY SYMPATHY GOES OUT TO YOU FOR HAVING MADE MORE THAN HUMAN EFFORTS TO KEEP OUR POOR LITTLE SHOW RUNNING SO LONG YOUR DEVOTED COLE.
³⁴
For him there were no hard feelings, only pleasant memories; unlike Welles, Porter had lost little in the venture, and – perhaps reinvigorated by his exhilarating contact with the young master at his most exuberant – shortly afterwards
started work on the show generally considered to be his masterpiece,
Kiss Me, Kate
. For Welles, of course,
Around the World
had been nothing less than a financial catastrophe, causing him to mortgage his future, at the same time creating tax problems for himself that would not be resolved for many years, and then only partially. The running costs were a staggering $27,000 a week: the best weekly
figure – and there were few other weeks as good – had been $ 24,000. The show finally closed on 3 August, having lasted, as maliciously predicted by Irving Cahn, quite a few days less than Phileas Fogg’s little trip. Welles was left with nothing to show for it but the 10,000 specially printed souvenir programme books, a mere handful of which had been sold; the publisher gave them to him for nothing,
and later that year he sent them out as Christmas cards.

Over the next few months there were desperate attempts to take the show elsewhere: enlisting first Alexander Korda (with whom Welles was currently trying to set up a number of films), then the great showman Charles B. Cochran – who had so ardently desired to transfer the Mercury
Julius Caesar
to the Royal Albert Hall,
³⁵
no less – but he
was unable to convince them that London, or indeed Australia, would take to the show that Broadway had so expensively rejected. Dick Wilson wired Cochran with the suggestion
that
Around the World
might be suitable for the pantomime season, offering him costumes and scenery valued at $130,000 (which would cost $10,000 to transport) and Welles, who could stay in the show till 15 January. Cochran
replied:
REGRET IMPOSSIBLE SECURE ANY LONDON THEATRE FOR AROUND THE WORLD AT CHRISTMAS. FURTHERMORE
, he added, a little tartly,
CANNOT AROUSE ANY INTEREST IN PROPOSITION WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN OFFERED FOR SOME TIME BY KORDA.
That same Korda – who shared Welles’s belief that if you said a thing often enough it was bound to happen – had been making some rather large promises: ‘I thought,’
³⁶
Dick
Wilson wrote plaintively to Korda’s number two at London Films, ‘he said he would have the necessary permits and have the theatre lined up in a couple of days.’ Through Korda, Welles had attempted to meet Rex Harrison, with a view to inveigling him into playing Fogg; but it all came to naught.

A month later the set was still languishing at the Adelphi Theatre; finally, at considerable expense,
it was moved out and into storage, where it stayed until it was eventually scrapped. The same fate had befallen the set of an earlier beloved behemoth of Welles’s,
Five Kings
, of a revival of which Welles continued to dream, until one distant day it mutated – the idea, if not the set – into
Chimes at Midnight
, first, unhappily, on stage, and finally and gloriously on film. No such apotheosis lay
in store for
Around the World
, although the memory of a gallant folly lingered. ‘The show flopped,’
³⁷
wrote Stanley Kauffmann in his
New Republic
obituary of Welles, ‘but sometimes I meet someone who saw it. Immediately we start to bore everyone in the room by reminiscing about it.’ But nostalgia was the last thing Welles was feeling by the time the curtain finally fell on
Around the World
. In
its last days he had embarked on a crusade that engaged him as passionately as anything in his life ever had – or ever would.

TWO DAYS BEFORE
Welles put up the sign backstage at the Adelphi Theatre giving his
Around the World
company a week’s notice, he received a letter from Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; they had an urgent matter on which they wanted to communicate with him. The following day White, the executive secretary of the organisation,
visited him in his dressing room with Oliver Harrington, famous in the black community as creator of the radical cartoon Bootsie in the
Pittsburgh Courier
, but now starting his new job as publicity director for the NAACP. The story they brought Welles cannot have been unknown to him, because a fortnight earlier Harrington had secured headlines for it in the left-wing press to which Welles subscribed,
and which – not least because of the incessant search to find material for his weekly
Commentary
programme – he studied assiduously. His old rag the populist
New York Post
had carried a front-page story, but it was the
Daily Worker
’s headline that put the story as succinctly and as shockingly as possible:
SOUTH CAROLINA COP GOUGED OUT EYES OF NEGRO VET WHO FOUGHT IN PACIFIC;
¹
in a boxed inset
was the phrase
GET THAT COP!

The story had first broken in the
Lighthouse and Informer
, South Carolina’s leading black paper, after which the NAACP had taken it up, approaching the War Office for redress. It was the rejection of responsibility by the War Office’s legal department on the grounds that Sergeant Isaac Woodard Junior, the veteran in question, had been officially discharged (albeit
only five hours earlier) that provoked the NAACP’s release of the material to the major newspapers; and it was the determination of White and Harrington to secure not only justice for Woodard, but also maximum publicity for the cause, that led them to Welles. Welles’s access to the airwaves, however relatively small his listenership, meant the possibility of a nationwide campaign. They, like everyone
else, never ceased to think of him as the man who brought America to a standstill with
The War of the Worlds
– radio’s Barnum and Bailey, its unparalleled
showman.
They also knew him and profoundly respected him for his absolutely consistent and unwavering support for racial equality, not merely as an ideal, but in professional and personal practice, from as early as the Harlem
Macbeth
ten years
before, through his constant sponsorship of black jazz musicians, his plan to film the life of Duke Ellington, and the rumours of how he had intended in
It’s All True
to feature the black population in the Rio de Janeiro
favelas
. He was, in a way that few of even his most liberal colleagues were, genuinely ‘colour-blind’.

Welles had long anticipated the growing demand among black people for equal
opportunities and rights and constantly – in speeches, in articles and on radio – warned of the lurking dangers of the continuing privation and humiliation of a large section of the populace. The war, as he frequently observed, had changed everything; black servicemen had seen a world in which racial prejudice was not institutionalised, and had fought side by side with their white companions-in-arms,
experiencing a proximity and a parity, almost a camaraderie, that they would never have known at home, especially if they came from the South. Moreover, the particular circumstances of war had given black activists at home a lever with which to extract concessions; the establishment in 1941, under threat of a mass protest in Washington, of the first all-black flying squadron, the 99th Pursuit
Squadron, at Tuskegee in Alabama (lyrically celebrated on the Broadway stage the following year in ‘Flying Man’ from Oscar Hammerstein’s
Carmen Jones
), was a giant first step towards self-respect. Similarly, but more sombrely, the return from war of veterans accustomed to being treated at the very least as human beings – and no longer prepared to tolerate their former servility – had given rise
to a series of incidents of which the Isaac Woodard story was not necessarily the worst, but was certainly the most poignant. The NAACP, keenly aware of the historical moment, was understandably eager to make the very most of it, and looked to Welles to fan the flames.

They knew that he was fearless. After a recent
Commentary
(7 July 1946) in which he had mildly suggested that, on the face of
it, there was no reason why a black man and a white woman might not get married – a broadcast for which he had received the enthusiastic support of Negro organisations – he had received a letter from a young woman in Los Angeles, Mrs Edna Fraser, which showed something of what he was up against; what they were all up against.

My dear Mr Welles
²