Orson Welles: Hello Americans (62 page)

Otherwise, Welles was maintaining establishments
in New York and – on and off – Los Angeles, paying alimony to his first wife Virginia and maintenance for their daughter Christopher. His losses on
Around the World
dragged heavily on him; making cash was now a matter of primary urgency, and Harry Cohn of Columbia was offering rather a lot of it: $2,000 a week for a twelve-week shoot and $100,000 if Columbia’s expenses were covered, plus 15 per
cent of the producer’s profit. It is perfectly understandable that Welles would work for Cohn; as he was to remark some years later, the cherry-pickers go where the cherries are. What is more surprising is that that graceless and unforgiving mogul, with whom Welles had fallen out so comprehensively and so publicly – the man he still referred to as the Beast of Gower Gulch – should want to employ
him.

From a purely commercial point of view, Welles – despite the respectable showing of
The Stranger
at the box office, largely thanks to the presence in it of Loretta Young and Edward G. Robinson – had fallen drastically in critical standing: the film had been released during the last month of the run of
Around the World
without fanfare, without interest and for the most part without honour,
suffering from being released in the same week as the British compendium movie,
Dead of Night
. Contrasting the two films, Hermine Rich Isaacs in
Theatre Arts
commented that
Dead of Night
started leisurely, until the plot closes in ‘as the audience is caught in the grip of a series of horror tales each one more terrifying than the one which precedes it’.
³
Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist was praised
as ‘an almost unbearable performance’ (exactly what Welles’s Rankin should have been). The first half of
The Stranger
, by comparison, ‘pursues its ominous course with the tension of a taut rubber band’, but, ‘its mystery solved in mid-passage’, it works
its
way home by a tortuous route of none too surely contrived melodramatic and psychological devices which make demands of the players ‘far beyond
their capacities’. Not a triumph, then. For his part, Cohn had recently had a string of successes, not least with the films that Rita Hayworth made for him,
Gilda
being the most recent and the most successful. His output had been distinctly classy by comparison with that of many other studios; he was not, however, noted for his enthusiasm for experiment.
The Stranger
was Welles at his most mainstream,
but the reputation of being a whizz-kid, a wunderkind and so on still clung to him, and no sensible producer would have expected the expected from him. Possibly the failure of his marriage with Rita Hayworth had reduced the jealous hostility that Cohn had felt towards Welles at the time of the wedding. He had extended the advance to Welles with the encouragement of Hayworth, and saw some
publicity value in a reunion – on screen, at any rate – of the couple whose private shenanigans had provided so many column inches over the years.

Welles’s first suggestion was his version of
Carmen
, but ‘raw sex’ was not the image Cohn wanted for his star. Welles was at something of a loss until he came across R. Sherwood King’s 1938 thriller
If I Die Before I Wake
. Welles later spun various
fables about how he came to choose the material that became his film for Rita, all of them expertly exploded by Charles Higham. It was scarcely as fortuitous as Welles suggested: the book was not unknown. Indeed, the actor Franchot Tone seems to have had an interest in it: when Welles urgently needed a copy, it was to Tone that he applied. But long before that, before Welles and Hayworth were married,
William Castle, a B-movie director whose film
When Strangers Marry
Welles had once praised in his
New York Post Almanac
, had given a copy of the novel to Welles, thinking that it would make a good movie, and Welles had shown immediate interest in appearing in it. ‘Dear Bill,’
⁴
he wrote to Castle, ‘about
If I Should Die
– I love it. It occurs to me that maybe by saying I had ideas for it, you’d
think my ideas are creative. Nothing of the sort. What I’m thinking of is a practical use Mercury could find for the property. I have been searching for an idea for a film, but none presented itself until
If I Should Die
. I could play the lead and Rita Hayworth could play the girl. I won’t present it to anybody without your OK. The script should be written immediately. Can you start working on
it nights?’ Welles adds a postscript to the letter that is not only instructive about his relationship with Hayworth at the time, but also gives a vivid impression of the way in which he bound to him with hoops
of
steel those whom he wished to use. ‘Give Rita a big hug and kiss and say it’s from somebody who loves her very much. The same guy is crazy about you and you won’t ever get away from
him.’ It would be a strong man who could resist such force-nine charm.

As is so often the case in these matters, Castle heard no more about it. And then one day, some three years later, when he was working at Columbia preparing his next B-movie, he was suddenly summoned to Harry Cohn’s office. ‘In an unusually expansive mood, Cohn announced he was taking me off
The Crime Doctor’s Warning
,’ wrote
Castle in his autobiography,
Step Right Up
. Cohn told his secretary to hold all calls:

and, all charm and smiles, called me by my first name. I started to worry. Cohn crossed the room and sat down beside me. ‘I just made a deal with Orson Welles to do a picture for us at Columbia. That boy’s a genius.’ He handed me a treatment and asked me to read it immediately. Glancing at the cover, I read,
If I Die Before I Wake
. ‘You know, Bill,’ Cohn continued, ‘it takes a genius like Orson Welles to find material like this. The dame being a murderess is a brilliant and original idea.’ Shocked, I sat frozen while Cohn informed me that he had given Orson the choice of anybody in Hollywood to be his associate producer and he had picked me. Furious, I reached Orson in New York. He excitedly told me
how he had sold
If I Die Before I Wake
to Harry Cohn for $150,000. It was a package deal – Orson would produce, direct, write and co-star. I had paid $200 and Columbia had turned it down. ‘We’ll be working together, Bill. Isn’t that what we planned? Get to New York as quickly as possible so we can begin preparations.’

Trying to rationalise that working with Welles in any capacity would be a great
learning experience, Castle endeavoured to push aside his disappointment at not being able to direct. Welles told him that Cohn had agreed to let Rita Hayworth play the girl and that
If I Die
was to be one of the big pictures of the year. ‘If I had directed, it would have been an inexpensive $70,000-budget whistler. After a sleepless night, I decided to see what would become of
If I Die Before
I Wake
in the talented hands of Orson Welles, the boy genius.’

In fact, no explanation for the way Welles came across the book was required, since he was an insatiable consumer of thrillers;
indeed,
he always used to travel with a couple of trunkfuls of the stuff to get him through the sleepless nights. He often claimed that as a youth in Chicago he had written pulp fiction and been paid for
it, so R. Sherwood King would have been a man after his own heart: ‘when Sherwood King had reached the mature age of 12,’ his publicity said, ‘he found a book, cover and all, which he had written so long before that he had already forgotten it: on the title page was
The Adventurer
by Sherwood King, author of
The Island of Death
.’ At fifteen, he wrote
The Outlaws of the Air
, in two volumes, 480
pages of closely packed text; he also supplied the advertisements for the book, one of which read: ‘Absolutely the most thrilling story ever published … you will read it over and over again. Sherwood King says of this novel: “I sincerely believe this is by far my best novel.’” A Mid-Westerner, he had attended Chicago Heights Police School, got a diploma and become a fingerprint expert; his first
published book was
Between Murders. If I Die Before I Wake
is often dismissed (generally by those who have never read it), but this is unjust: though no masterpiece, it is a crisply written and not unintelligent piece of work. King worked on it for more than a year, he reported, doing his writing in a cheap Chicago boarding house – the sort of place ‘where the landlady gave literary teas each
week to step up her income’. Like Scheherazade, King had to read out a chapter of
If I Die Before I Wake
each week in lieu of rent: if the results were liked, the rent continued to be waived; if not … ‘Needless to say,’ in the words of the blurb, ‘King stayed for the year.’

The novel has substantially the same plot as the film, but it is worth describing it in a little detail, since Welles’s
departures from it and his inventions around it are significant. His changes are in structure, in location and above all in the two central characters. In addition, the book has what might be called, even in such an essentially unpretentious work, a metaphysical undertow that deeply influenced the film Welles made, and which is contained in the title, drawn from the child’s prayer ‘Now I lay me
down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep;/If I should die before I wake …’ Sleep is the book’s central image. As in innumerable thrillers of the forties and fifties, the central character is in a state of increasingly perplexed bewilderment as events seem to entangle him in thickets of incomprehension. King goes one step further: his hero, Larry Planter, is perceived to be (and perceives himself
to be) in a state of slumber; the plot administers a series of shocks to him,
but
it is not until the end of the novel that he feels himself to be fully awake. ‘Bannister was right,’ he tells Elsa, quoting her husband. ‘I’d been asleep before. You woke me up. Now I’m living. Now I’m
alive!’ The Lady from Shanghai
is similarly permeated with a sense of somnambulism, the hero walking dream-like
through his life as if in complete ignorance of the forces that shape it, passing through nightmare into some kind of freedom, the freedom of being awake.

The novel plunges the reader straight into the plot without preparation: ‘“Sure,” I said. “I would commit murder. If I had to, of course, or if it was worth my while.’” Handsome young Larry Planter, after years as a sailor on tramps and an
unsuccessful spell as a writer, has become chauffeur to the crippled lawyer Mark Bannister, whose wife, the lovely Elsa, is fifteen years his junior and deeply unhappy. Larry also drives Bannister’s partner, Lee Grisby, and it is Grisby who in the opening chapters makes the shocking proposal to the young man that for $5,000 he should allow himself to be framed for apparently murdering him: Grisby
wants to leave his wife and escape to the South Seas. He also wants, he tells Larry, to kill Bannister to claim the insurance. All of this, which is transferred directly to the film, is held back in Welles’s screenplay until nearly halfway through. This was no doubt a wise decision: in the novel the crime has been committed and Larry is arrested and imprisoned by the end of the second of the book’s
five parts; for the rest of the novel he is either in court or in prison, which would make for very static cinema. In his screenplay, Welles adds a prologue in which his hero – transformed into Michael ‘Black Irish’ O’Hara and endowed with a line in Irish philosophical whimsicality – picks up a young woman (Elsa Bannister) in a buggy in Central Park at night. After they travel together for a while,
Elsa goes off alone and is chased by muggers. Michael rescues her and delivers her back to her car, but refuses her suggestion that he should come and work for her and her husband on their yacht,
Circe
. The following day, Bannister seeks him at the Seamen’s Hall and, after much alcohol, passes out, obliging O’Hara to take him on board the yacht, where Elsa and others persuade him (against all
his instincts) that he should take the job. In the novel, Larry’s recruitment is much simpler. He simply swims up by accident onto Bannister’s beach: the crippled lawyer, impressed by his youth, good looks and ‘such a marvellous physique’, offers him a job as his chauffeur. It is one of several more or less explicitly homoerotic passages in the book (‘I looked at him; he was taking me in, “Man, but
you’ve got a build,” he said’) that have no counterpart in the film.

Needless to say, Welles’s decision to make Michael O’Hara captain of the Bannisters’ yacht opens up the action in many ways. While
If I Die
is set entirely on Long Island, where the Bannisters live, the
Circe
is able to travel, and she does – to Acapulco, for a picnic, enabling Welles to introduce the South American flavour
he so loved; it also offers all the visual delights of a ship at sea and the fascinations of life on board ship, cabins and decks and steering wheels. In
The Lady from Shanghai
the Bannisters actually live in San Francisco, the most photogenic of cities, and one that credibly and naturally provides the film’s two huge visual climaxes, one after another: the Chinese Opera and the Crazy House. Welles’s
geographical scheme is immensely ambitious, from the New York of the beginning to the jungles and the beaches of Acapulco, and to San Francisco and its exotic amusements, which include an aquarium. In narrative terms, Welles chooses to speed up O’Hara’s arrest – he runs straight from the pretend murder of Grisby into the police’s arms – and allows him, by somewhat improbable means, to escape
from the courtroom, where he has just been found guilty, into the Chinese Opera, and from there to the Crazy House, which he then walks away from. In
If I Die Before I Wake
all the main twists of the plot are conveyed to Michael in his cell – the last cliff-hanging sequence actually takes place in the condemned cell, where Bannister taunts him with a detailed description of what will happen when
they administer the electrodes before going away. At the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, just before he goes to the electric chair, Elsa breaks into the cell to tell him that Bannister has killed himself, and therefore can never admit that he killed Grisby; but hard on her heels is the kindly detective who has always believed in Larry, who arrests Elsa for all three murders: Grisby, Bannister
and the butler Broome. In
The Lady from Shanghai
Elsa, abandoned by O’Hara, famously dies in the Hall of Mirrors; in the novel she takes her chance with a jury. At the end, Larry (like Welles’s O’Hara) can make no sense of what has happened to him, and withdraws, in his case to Tahiti.