Orson Welles: Hello Americans (6 page)

When, some years after his rejection by Isabel, the widowed Eugene
turns up again, filled with plans for the development of his new automobile, George is dimly aware of the fact that he represents an entrepreneurial spirit that is inherently inimical to the caste interests of the Ambersons, but also that there is some unfinished emotional business with his mother. Meanwhile George himself has fallen blindly, hopelessly in love with Eugene’s daughter, Lucy, who
– though she never reveals it – has fallen equally deeply in love with him. Lucy knows at a profound level that George would not make a good husband for her, unequipped as he is to survive in the modern world; she constantly puts off his offer of marriage. When Wilbur, the father George has scarcely been aware of, dies, Eugene – now a highly successful industrialist – declares his love for Isabel
and asks for her hand, which reduces George to incoherent rage; he forces her to refuse, taking her away from her only hope of happiness (to say nothing of his own, in the shape of Lucy), and embarking with her on unending pointless travels rather than submit to his rival. In effect George kills his mother by refusing to acknowledge that she is ill; ever after, he is racked by guilt. All this is
paralleled by the desperate passion of Wilbur’s sister Fanny for Eugene, which, denied expression, turns to mischief.

After Isabel’s death, the flimsy financial foundations of the Ambersons give way completely and George is finally forced to become a realist; he and Fanny take rooms in a boarding house while he works as an explosives supervisor. The town, meanwhile, has changed beyond recognition:

the town was growing and changing as it had never grown and changed before. It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky. Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the run … a new Midlander – in fact a new American – was dimly beginning to emerge … they were optimists – optimists to the point of belligerence
– their motto being ‘Boost! Don’t knock.’ And they were hustlers, believing in hustling and in honesty because both paid. They loved their city and they worked for it with a plutonic energy which was always ardently vocal …

The book takes off into overt symbolism when George is knocked down in the street by the very thing that has blighted his life: an automobile hits him, running over him as
he stands idly dreaming of Lucy in a carriage. In his hospital bed, he is obliged by circumstances to think for the first time about life; he finally understands that his determination to preserve the rigid patterns of his class is pointless, coming to the conclusion – ‘somehow … vaguely but truly’ – that ‘nothing stays or holds where there is growth’. His generosity and sense of responsibility towards
his aunt, which have never faltered, only become stronger. The book’s final resolution is effected by a somewhat unsatisfactory contrivance, a gauche mystical intervention,
deus ex machina
, wherein Eugene, who has sworn never to speak to George again, visits a clairvoyant, whose spirit guide, Lopa, tells him that Isabel wants him to visit the boy; he does, and finds Lucy at the bedside. Reconciliation
all round.

This was the wide-ranging novel that Welles had squeezed into sixty minutes of radio in 1939, and it was a recording of this that he played to George Schaefer in the spring of 1941, when they were urgently looking for Welles Project Two. Welles later claimed that Schaefer fell asleep while listening to the discs of the radio transmission and, hearing the show today, his slumber is
pardonable. Not that the show, and particularly Welles’s performance as George, is anything less than deeply felt; on the contrary, it is the barely contained emotionalism that becomes monotonous, especially in the context of the dying fall of the Ambersons’ inexorably dwindling fortunes.
In
his introduction to the programme, Welles calls the novel ‘the truest, cruellest picture of the growth
of the Middle West and the liveliest portrait of the people who made it grow’, but the cruelty and the liveliness are both subdued in this radio version, with distinctly stagy and rather stiff performances. An elderly, quavery Walter Huston plays Eugene; his wife Nan Sunderland plays Isabel on a single note of gracious pathos. For Welles’s own performance as George he uses his uncomfortable upper
register, and seems constantly on the brink of hysteria. It is not good acting, but it seems to be strongly felt; the scene with his mother is distinctly overwrought, unlike anything Welles ever did, on film or on radio – almost out of control. The result is alienating rather than affecting. It is as if the actor’s identification with the brattish, arrogant boy whose comeuppance forms the narrative
spine of the novel is too strong; he is unable to present the character. Welles’s great skills as an actor lay in the realm of the rhetorical, in which the actor is absolutely in command of himself and his material; when he touches the personal, which he does rarely, he seems to lose his judgement, and so it is here. His narration, except for the opening, is uncharacteristically leaden, too, intending
to be elegiac, but instead becoming simply morbid; the adaptation omits the character of Aunt Fanny, which might have varied the emotional palette a little. The great success of the production is, as so often with Welles, in the texture, the virtuoso use of evocative sounds, the integration with the music, in which Bernard Herrmann uses some of Welles’s favourite waltzes by Waldteufel with
impeccable timing and ingenuity. The sudden bustle of group scenes is exhilarating; the opening narrated sequence (using almost exactly the same text as subsequently appears in the film) is immensely engaging and elegant. But, in the end, even these elements are overcome by the sickly, turgid tone, as of a grief imperfectly discharged.

It is clear from the radio production that the subject was
perilously close to Welles’s own heart and experience. The death scenes, in particular, are dwelt on with positively Victorian emotionalism; mortality was an uneffaceable component of Welles’s mental landscape, the deaths of both his parents – and especially, perhaps, that of his mother, when he was nine – branded on his consciousness. The sense of guilt and shame that so informed his early manhood
no doubt contributed to his obvious identification with the character of the intolerably arrogant and selfish (if bewildered) George Amberson Minafer. There were other points of contact, too. In his imagination, the Welleses of Kenosha had been a family like the
Ambersons;
and indeed, the Gottfredsons, his paternal grandparents, had known a certain magnificence in their big, ugly mansion in Kenosha,
though their wealth was scarcely on the scale of Tarkington’s heroes. Welles always claimed that his father had been Tarkington’s best friend, and that the character of Eugene Morgan (‘a mechanical genius’, according to the novel) was based on the happy-go-lucky, modestly inventive secretary of Badger Brass, but no evidence for this claim exists. Nor does it matter, one way or the other; what
is significant is that Welles believed it to be true, and wanted it to be true, and his conception of Gene Morgan is certainly an idealised version of his father. The general tone of lament for a vanished Golden Age – for what he calls ‘the Merrie Englands’ – was from an early age central to Welles’s inner life; this feeling too was associated in his imagination with his father and with what Welles
fondly recollected as a semi-feudal existence in the tiny Illinois retreat of Grand Detour, where Richard Welles for a while ran a hotel. The pull of the past was a mighty one for Welles, which partly accounts for the immense force of his thrust towards the future.

Robert L. Carringer, in a celebrated, if somewhat tortuous, essay ‘Oedipus in Indianapolis’, makes an explicit autobiographical connection
between Welles himself and George Amberson Minafer. There are certain trivial similarities that are quite striking – George, like Welles himself as a boy, is known as Georgie; at school, as with Welles at Todd, ‘they did not like him – he was too arrogant for that – but he kept them in such a state of emotion that they thought more about him than they did about all of the other [ten] pupils’.
George has an overwhelmingly intense relationship with his mother, as did Welles, and endures a heart-rending death-bed scene, as did Welles. But all resemblances stop there. Beatrice was tough and demanding, refusing to indulge her son, to the point of watching with equanimity as he climbed out onto the ledge of a fifth-floor window to throw himself off rather than take his piano lessons. All
Welles’s memories of her indicate a severity in her demeanour and an expectation, indeed an insistence, on her part that Welles would distinguish himself in her eyes. This is the precise opposite of the infinitely idolising indulgence, at whatever cost to herself, her health or her happiness, that the novel’s Isabel Minafer so doggedly displays towards her only son. No doubt there may have been
some element of Oedipal outrage for the young Orson when Beatrice Welles began her affair with Maurice Bernstein, just as George Minafer reacts so traumatically when Eugene Morgan begins to court Isabel; but in Welles’s case it soon modified into something considerably more
complex,
as Dick Welles slipped away into alcoholic absence and Bernstein became the boy’s de facto parent.

Carringer insists
that Welles’s affectionate accounts of his father – ‘Dickensian caricatures’ – mask violent hostility towards him, and that what drove Welles was ‘a furious need to prove himself in the eyes of a man who was no longer there’. This is a surprising analysis. In an important sense Dick Welles, like. Wilbur Minafer, was no longer there long before his actual death; as with Wilbur, it was his death
that gave him real significance. Welles was certainly deeply guilty about Dick Welles’s subsequent lonely, booze-sodden death after he had abandoned him at the behest of Skipper Hill and Dr Bernstein, but he hadn’t disappointed his father: his father had disappointed him, and Welles had rejected him in favour of Hill. In the short autobiographical sketch entitled ‘My Father Wore Spats’ published
in
Vogue
towards the end of his life, Welles memorably states without further elaboration that he killed his father. Carringer dismisses this statement as melodramatic. Obviously it is not literally true, but it seems a clear indication that guilt (not revenge) was the fuel of Welles’s psyche, although it is certainly possible that the guilt bred a degree of resentment. The stories that he told
about his father, and his conception of Eugene Morgan, amount to an idealised reinvention of a man who, good-humoured to a fault, had frittered away on booze and girls the large sum of money that had come to him by a combination of solid clerkship and good luck. (Interestingly enough, Dick Welles’s modest contribution to the progress of engineering science had been the development of a headlight,
and in Tarkington’s novel, it is as a result of being unwisely invested in a company manufacturing headlights that the last dribble of the Ambersons’ fortune dries up.)

Carringer also makes great play of the parallels to
Hamlet
in the central relationship of the novel, and marvels at the fact that Welles never took the central role in that play (though he had played both the Ghost and Claudius
when he was, respectively, sixteen and seventeen, to Micheál macLiammóir’s Prince). Although Welles certainly airily mentioned that he should have left Hollywood after
Citizen Kane
and played Hamlet on Broadway, this can be nothing but shorthand for saying that he should have pursued a serious career as a classical stage actor. Of all great Shakespearean roles, Hamlet is the least suited to his
particular gifts, physical and temperamental. The character’s mercurial thought processes, his indecisiveness and vulnerability, his neurotic sensibility, and above all his restless self-questioning, would have been very elusive for Welles, a natural
King
actor, as he said of himself, not a Prince actor at all. It is true that Tarkington draws attention to an aspect of Hamlet in the character
of George Amberson Minafer; he has him, indeed, consciously – self-consciously – quoting the play. But his point is not that George identifies with Hamlet (as well he might), but that there is an element in his behaviour that is play-acted. After his first confrontation with his mother, he puts on his long black dressing-gown. He glimpses himself in the mirror. ‘Happening to catch sight in his pier
glass of the picturesque and medieval figure thus presented, he paused to regard it; and something profoundly theatrical in his nature came to the surface. His lips moved; he whispered, half-aloud, some famous fragments: “’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,/Nor customary suits of solemn black” … no less like Hamlet did he feel and look as he sat gauntly at the dinner table with Fanny to partake
of a meal throughout which neither spoke.’ The ‘something profoundly theatrical in his nature’ is a crucial insight into George’s behaviour: he is enacting a role – the role of a gentleman, as he understands it – as a purely cerebral imperative, in defence of a code that only he seems to recognise. Earlier, he has spoken of the importance of ‘being’ over ‘doing’; he sees himself as a kind of
totem of his tribe, the living embodiment of its values. In so doing he cuts himself off from everything that sustains human life: love, work, the future. This, more than any centrally unresolved Sophoclean or Shakespearean conflict, is at the heart of George’s profoundly negative journey through life, until comeuppance teaches him sanity.

It is worth dwelling on these matters, because
The Magnificent
Ambersons
is a book that mattered greatly to Welles at many levels. The film that he made from it is a problem film, perhaps for that very reason, and Carringer is absolutely right to say that this is by no means only as a result of what the studio did to it before it was released. It is a measure of Welles’s complexity both as man and artist that he should decide not only to take on such charged
and difficult material at such a critical moment in his own career, but simultaneously to work full out on two other films as different from it as can reasonably be imagined: a witty and radical political thriller and a wildly ambitious pan-American compendium film. Perhaps to focus on
The Magnificent Ambersons
to the exclusion of anything else would have been simply too disturbing, too painful.
All of which may well explain why he chose not to appear in the film, although he liked to say that it was simply because he was too fat. Of equal significance, he knew that he would be speaking the narration, which would form such an important part of the film’s effect;
and
George Minafer could scarcely be the narrator. In fact, for George he cast an actor as different from himself as could be
imagined, Tim Holt, noted for his appearances in cowboy films. Welles was certainly familiar with the actor’s work in at least one film, John Ford’s
Stagecoach
, which had been his celluloid bible in learning the rudiments of his craft as a film-maker; he claimed to have watched it more than a hundred times. He may also have seen him playing a spoiled rich boy in Gregory La Cava’s
Fifth Avenue
Girl
of the same year. There is no question that Holt is the actor Welles wanted for the part: he was booked as soon as the project was given a start date; none of the Mercury regulars was even considered. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that Holt was ‘extraordinary … one of the most interesting actors that’s ever been in American movies, and he
decided
to be just a cowboy actor’, which is a most
generous view of the talents of a serviceable actor, the apogee of whose career was his appearance as Humphrey Bogart’s dogged, conscientious sidekick partner in John Huston’s
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
in 1948.
²
Disappointed by his experience of acting (perhaps understandably: his last film was
The Monster that Changed the World
), Holt retired from the profession at the age of forty until
making an ill-judged comeback in
This Stuff’ll Killya
. But Welles clearly felt that he was the embodiment of his conception of George Minafer.