Orson Welles: Hello Americans (61 page)

The event nevertheless had a considerable long-term effect. Among other things, it
politicised Judge Waring, who became a close associate of the NAACP; he lived to be the first judge of modern times formally to declare segregated schooling unequal.
The
path to racial integration, the bare minimum for civilised inter-racial relations, was a long and stony one, and one that has perhaps not ended, but the Woodard case was a valuable step along it. His testimony illustrated as vividly
as anything could have done that the issue was, above all, one of the right to respect. The whole incident had begun in the bus when the driver had cursed him for making him stop so that Woodard could use the toilet. ‘Talk to me like I’m talking to you,’ the mild Woodard had said. ‘I’m a man just like you.’ It was for this outrage that the driver reported him to the police. And when he got
off the bus at Batesburg to meet ‘someone I want you to see’, and Shull had hit him on the head with his blackjack, Woodard answered the question as to whether he’d been discharged from the army with the single word ‘Yes’. ‘Don’t say yes to me,’ Shull had said, ‘say yes sir.’ And then, enraged by Woodard’s impertinence, he laid about him again with renewed vigour.

Welles did not often speak of
his involvement in the case, but some years later, in London in 1955, he recounted the story on his television programme
Orson Welles’s Sketch Book
. And having recounted it, he observed:

We’re told that we should co-operate with the authorities.
³⁶
I’m not an anarchist. I don’t want to overthrow the rule of law, on the contrary, I want to bring the policeman
to
law. Obviously individual effort
won’t do any good. There’s nothing an individual can do about protecting the individual in society. I’d like it very much if somebody would make a great big international organisation for the protection of the individual. It would be very nice to have that sort of an organisation, be nice to have that sort of card. I see the card as fitting into the passport, a little larger than the passport, with
a border around it in bright colours, so that it would catch the eyes of the police. And they’d know who they were dealing with … and it might read something as follows. ‘This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race.’

This mellow and rueful tone was not available to Welles in the forties. Too much was still at stake.

His last
Commentary
for ABC was on 1 September; a few days
before saw the beginning of a campaign to keep him on the air. The Hollywood Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, whose board included Olivia De
Havilland,
Lena Horne, Linus Pauling, Dore Senary, Frank Sinatra (the vice-chairman) and F. Y. Harburg, took an advertisement saying,
‘ORSON WELLES NEEDS HELP
! He’s doing a terrific job in the matters of minorities and
race relations …
HE’S DOING THAT JOB FOR US!
But – because of his strong & fearless attack – the enemies of freedom are attacking
him
!
YOU NEED ORSON WELLES AND HE NEEDS YOUR HELP
!’
³⁷
Not everyone was sad to see him go. Yet another lost radio listener and his family wrote to him: ‘We, the People, have been listening to him “tell us off” for some time now. Now it’s time for we, the people, to tell
Orson Welles off and set him down a peg or two and get him down off his high horse. He’s been needing someone to give him a piece of our minds and now I think he’s getting it as he deserves.’
³⁸
But there was support, some of it in verse: ‘You mustn’t quit – don’t quit, fight one more round/When things go wrong, as they sometimes will/When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill/When the funds
are low and the debts are high/And you want to smile but you have to sigh/When care is pressing you down a bit/Rest, if you must – but never quit’
³⁹
– words he might well have taken heart from over the next forty years of his life.

The
Commentary
of 1 September was not only Welles’s last appearance in the series, but very nearly his last appearance on American radio, the medium in which he had
earned a living for most of his professional life, and which he had loved in so many and various ways – some admittedly not wisely, but too well. He had understood its possibilities from the moment he started to work in it; he had brought what he learned there to the theatre and to film. Latterly, he had seemed to lose his youthful interest in it as a medium
per se
; he had become captivated rather
by its possibilities as the most direct means of conveying his ideas, unmediated by production of any sort, to the American people. It was a very pure form: just his voice and the listener’s ear.

While he was giving his
Commentaries
– indeed, while he was still doing
Around the World
seven times a week until it closed – he was also producing, directing and acting in weekly instalments of the
Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air, but any resemblance to its great namesake of the late thirties was largely coincidental. Many of the shows were reprises of former programmes.
Around the World
was, as we have seen, a shambolic ghost of the previous incarnations of the same story;
Abednego
a much less vivacious version of the original in the
Hello Americans
series. Significantly, the most distinguished
of them –
The Moat Farm Murder
, about a murder in
rural
England – was not written by Welles, but by Norman Corwin, the other most vital force in American radio, who (unlike Welles) had continued to explore its potential, creating some of the most remarkable wartime programmes. The music to
Moat Farm
and to several other of the shows was by Bernard Herrmann, who continued to bring his very particular
sense of the contribution of music to the dramatic soundscape. But there is no question that Welles’s heart was no longer in it. There was an entire absence of the electricity of the original Mercury Theatre on the Air and
Campbell Playhouse
shows, where the narrative was brilliantly framed, every scene illuminated by some startling detail, each performance freshly imagined and the whole event
welded together at white heat by the inexhaustible energy and imagination of Welles himself, throwing himself into the leading role with reckless bravura.

His Summer Theatre version of
Moby-Dick
– again not by him, but by his friend Brainerd Duffield,
⁴⁰
and originally intended (as Welles rather oddly informs us) for performance by Charles Laughton on disc – is adequate as an adaptation, but utterly
without imagination in conception. Welles adopts a voice at once rough and tremulous and has a number of mighty outbursts, but the listener is never taken inside his head or inside Melville’s world; the narration by Ishmael is perfunctory and the eponymous whale is barely evoked at all. Only Herrmann’s music, full of strange harmonics and intimations of majestic movements of the ocean, brings
tension or exerts any kind of spell, which is all the more surprising since
Moby-Dick
– ‘certainly the greatest novel written on American soil’, as Welles describes it – was a lifelong obsession of his, which would finally result in a play on the London stage widely considered, by himself among others, the finest piece of theatre he ever created. The last in the Mercury Summer Theatre series sponsored
by Pabst (which nobly confined its plugs to the beginning and end of the programmes) was
King Lear
, but again inspiration runs low, and Welles’s own performance is a preview of the sonorously sleepy performance of the part he was to give on television in 1953, itself replicated by all accounts in his stage production of three years later. No, radio was no longer his playground: he had moved on.
Or rather, back – back to film.

Welles’s cinematic plans were plentiful and ambitious, especially his plans with Alexander Korda. For those, Welles was looking to his three-picture contract with Korda which was to start in January of 1947, with a film of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Master of Ballantrae
, of which he had not so long ago done a spirited radio
adaptation
in the
This Is My Best
series.
As we have seen, for Welles adapting something on radio had often been the first step on the path to a future film; Stevenson was a favourite author, another of his enduring boyhood tastes. On this occasion, alas, it was not to be, the difficulties proving insuperable, but his plans for a version of Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé
were, by September of 1946, very well advanced. His adaptation was predicated
on the extraordinary, notion of merging that quintessentially decadent play with Wilde’s great children’s story,
The Happy Prince
; Wilde himself was to be a character in the film, in a framing sequence set in a Paris café. Vivien Leigh was Welles’s ideal for the psychotic princess; he was keen to cast her partner (and his rival) Laurence Olivier as Herod. ‘If Larry wishes to play Herod,’
⁴¹
wrote
Dick Wilson to Korda, ‘Welles will play anything that Larry doesn’t want to play.’ Cocteau’s designer Christian (Bébé) Bérard was to design the sets and costumes. Korda, asking for preliminary sketches and designs,
⁴²
wired back that Bérard might not be available; would Cecil Beaton, who was under contract to him, do? No, wired back Welles, he wouldn’t: if Bébé was busy, what about Tchelitchew,
⁴³
Welles’s old sparring partner from the early days of the Mercury, a major and still somewhat shocking figure in contemporary art? And so they bubbled on, everything seeming possible. They planned to film
Cyrano de Bergerac
(something of an
idée fixe
with Korda, who had already tried to set it up once with Charles Laughton in the title role), but it fell through, at which Welles declared himself
COMPLETELY HEARTBROKEN
.
⁴⁴
But there was always
Carmen
, in Welles’s own version, which retained Merimée’s original framing device of a report on the death of Don José by a representative of the central government, and whose theme would be, in Welles’s words, ‘sex in the raw’. No wonder the devoutly Roman Catholic Joseph Breen, Welles’s old boss at RKO and present head of the Hays Office, would not
extend his approval, any more than he had accepted
Salomé
(‘We regret having to report unfavourably on this well-known play’).
⁴⁵
Welles’s preferred Carmen was Paulette Goddard, but the film, he warned, would only work if they could shoot in Spain and the South of France; this was fine by Korda. Neither
Carmen
nor
Salomé
was filmed.

It is a cause of great sadness that not a single one of the many
projects that Welles and Korda so enthusiastically planned together – most of all, perhaps,
War and Peace
– should have come to fruition. With Welles’s imagination and Korda’s contacts, their combined temperaments might have led to remarkable work. Korda was the
sort
of producer – mercurial but effective – with whom Welles might conceivably have worked harmoniously. It was clearly not for want
of trying, as their voluminous correspondence and Korda’s considerable outlay of funds testify, though for a man like Korda who thrived on constant contact and exchange of ideas, Welles’s elusiveness, which increased with every passing year, was a serious obstacle to a relationship,
MY TIME IS GETTING SHORT,
⁴⁶
the older man wired Welles.
I WAS UNSUCCESSFUL IN CONTACTING EITHER YOU OR WILSON NEITHER
DID HE CALL ME AS AGREED STOP ALL THIS IS EXCEEDINGLY ODD AND QUITE A NOVEL EXPERIENCE FOR ME.
By the time of that telegram, however, Welles was fully immersed in a very different sort of film from any he was planning with Korda.

THE IMPULSE TO
make
The Lady from Shanghai
was by no means purely artistic. Pressing financial demands were the motor for Welles’s involvement in the film: he had received a substantial advance from Harry Cohn, who (unlike Korda) expected something concrete and immediate in return for it. He also owed money to Rita Hayworth, to whom he was still married,
though they had led separate lives for nearly a year (she had been involved with the singer Tony Martin) – to say nothing of the maintenance for their daughter Rebecca that he had consistently failed to pay. In fact, in late 1946 his financial affairs were in a state of near-collapse, due to a combination of reckless expenditure and absolute indifference to bookkeeping. Messrs Nichols and Phillips,
who had the unenviable task of supervising Welles’s financial affairs, wrote to him in the hope of getting a signature for a Treasury form for $10,191.29, which would absolve his IRS debt, and are eloquent on the subject:

May I direct your attention to a number of detrimental factors encountered: 1. you did not keep books for three years;
¹
2. inability of your office staff to locate and deliver
me the working appeals and other details relative to 1941 and 1942 returns; 3. tens of thousands of dollars of deductions claimed are based upon amounts listed in loose-leaf single entry accounts, many items being in round hundred and thousand dollar amounts bearing no relation to any specific thing … many of the accounts apparently represented the commingling of expenditures for personal and business
purposes.

There follow six more points of equal severity. Then, in the final paragraph, a
cri de coeur
. ‘an undue amount of time has been expended by the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the writer in the examination of your income returns for the three years …’ The letter ends with the recommendation that Welles should pay the $10,000 and run. How he must have loathed that wagging
finger,
but
it must have been borne in even on him that his self-induced financial chaos was forcing him to do things that he did not really want to do. His radio work had come to an end; his newspaper work had never made him any money (indeed, had cost him a great deal in researchers), and his final withdrawal from it – or its from him – had been gently confirmed by an elegant letter to Dick Wilson from Welles’s
old publisher on the
New York Post
, Ted Thackrey, stopping the weekly $100 which, through an oversight, they had been paying: ‘I have written to Orson that, as nearly as I can figure it, he owes the
Post
approximately 54 columns, advance payment having already been made, and that we will be happy to receive them some time in the next century’.
²