December Talking Meme: Orson Welles
Dec. 14th, 2013 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThere are generally two schools of thought among the media regarding Orson Welles ("only two?" he'd have said and been mock-dissappointed): he's either the Wunderkind, the wonderboy of stage and film who created one perfect movie and then squandered his promise on self indulgence, cameos in other movies and weird projects of his own, or he's the life long patron saint of independent cinema, whom Hollywood never forgave for Kane (because of all the Heart trouble it caused) and sabotaged ever after, while he heroically took on any number of jobs in order to get his own movies made outside the studio system. Basically: it's all Orson's fault, or it's all Hollywood's fault. It won't surprise me that I'm a firm believer of "neither" or "both/and" - which is why Simon Callow is my favourite biographer of his -: I find most (not all: Confidential Report/Mr. Arkadin has the parable of the frog and the scorpion that subsequently was declared folklore, but you can keep the rest of the film) of the movies directed by Welles fascinating, some of them I love (my favourite isn't Citizen Kane, btw, though I do love it - depending on my mood, my favourite is either Othello or Touch of Evil, with Chimes at Midnight on a regular second spot). As far as Orson Welles as an actor in other people's films is concerned, he's not one who can disappear into a character - not physically: as a voice actor, he could, and of course the radio was for quite a while his favourite medium. If you have the time, check out some of the Mercury Radio productions which are available on cd; while Welles' voice was one of the most instantly recognizable in any medium, he really is amazingly flexible with it, and knew it, and had a serious case of "let me play the lion, too", which is he usually has more than one part - notoriously Dracula and Van Helsing in the radio Dracula, for example. But on film, where he has to use his entire body, the character has to fit, or he sticks out like a sore thumb. (Otoh if a part fits, you get Harry Lime in The Third Man.)
What makes Welles such a great director is that combination of extremely visual imagination, the ability to find poetry and expression via images which was already there long before he ever went to Hollywood. Here's the description Norman Llyod, who played Cinna the poet in the production of Julius Caesar Welles directed at age 22, gave of the key scene in which the mob, coming directly from Caesar's funeral and Antony's speech at same, seizes on a poet who happens to bear the same name as one of the conspirators:
Orson would argue with you as he ate, and you got angrier. I thought we'd reached an impasse. But no - he went my way. And when he went your way! - I played the first part of the scene fro pantomimic comedy. Gut a lot of laughs. Just becoming aware of this crowd and thinking they had recognised me as a celebrity. Stuffed my pockets with these poems. He seized that right away. They moved in to kill - I was playing it as the poet laureate. He moved these guys in one by one - and the lighting was fantastic - blood red - the set was red too. The way he moved me - there were laughs, and then the laughs got chilly. Taking out these poems. Orson's direction: the last thing I scream is THE POET. Rush down the ramp - I just disappeared - just this hand, bathed in red light.
You can see why film and Welles were made for each other to the same degree that Welles and the microphone were. And not just in the case of Citizen Kane, where he had all the budget and all the experts at his disposition, but also in a much later film like The Trial, where he used the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris which wasn't a railway station any longer and not yet the museum for Impressionistic art, and made it into a fantastic surrounding for Kafka's story as if it was an expensively built film set. Or Othello, which took four years of filming - because he had to stop whenever he ran out of money - and was made at dozens of different locations but nonetheless give the impression of taking place in only one fantastically beautiful yet coldly claustrophobic citadel. He's also able to coax great performances out of most of the actors he used (not all: if a character is a spoiled brat like George in The Magnificent Ambersons, it needs a charming actor to make the audience believes that people put up with and love him as long as they do, and Tim Holt never manages that), and these included both actors who first achieved fame via him (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead) and actors who were already famous when they worked for him, though not necessarily in the type of part he gave them (true for both Anthony Perkins and Romy Schneider in The Trial, and famously for Rita Hayworth in Lady from Shanghai). A great many of Welles' films are based on books, and as an adapter he was, depending on your point of view, fearless or ruthless. Or is "iconoclastic" the best word? In any case, he tended to use his book sources as basic structures from which to develop the themes he was interested in, be they a trashy pot boiler like the novel Touch of Evil is based on or William Shakespeare ("...and damned be he who first calls hold, enough"). Chimes at Midnight takes bits and pieces from Richard II and Henry V in addition to huge chunks from the two Henry IV plays - and presents the net result of a life time of wrestling with these particular plays, more about that later - , unabashedly throws out anything Welles wasn't interested in, and the end result, several decades onwards, makes far newer screen productions like The Hollow Crown look tame by comparison. Just two examples of what Welles does there as a director/adapter: Henry IV, Part I early on has Hal reveal in monologue ("I know you all...") to the audience that he's actually not the dissolute party animal his father assumes he is but plans to ditch all his disreputable friends and this entire life style as soon as he's king, so that the contrast between his old and new self will be all the more impressive and effective. The Hollow Crown does what a great many screen adaptions do with theatrical monologues; it makes the scene a voice over, i.e. Hal's thoughts while he walks around the scenery. Chimes at Midnight, by contrast, makes the radical change to let Hal say this, out loud, to Falstaff directly, with Falstaff not sure whether or not this is one of the emotionally brutal games these two play with each other. (The hypothetically unspoiled audience can't be sure, either.) This makes it a lead up to the "Banish old Jack, and banish all the world"/"I do, I will" scene between them later and avoids the artifice of either monologue to the audience or voice over.
The other example from the same film is the way Welles stages the battle of Shrewsbury. Subsequently often imitated, among others by Kenneth Branagh in his Henry V, but never as effectively, because unlike Branagh, who can't resist resolving the whole thing in a Te Deum and triumph, Welles' staging of the battle sequence (via cinematic trickery, because he did not have the money for mass scenes) brings the whole muddy, gory business of medieval warfare across as a devastating indictement. If you get technical, it's all done via some clever cuts, but that's not how it comes across. Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, both of whom did have masses at their disposal, can only weep in envy.
As a person, Orson Welles, like some of his films, seems to have been a fascinating mess, often managing to be infuriating and charming at the same time (which makes it unfortunate that many a biopic recreation gets the temper tantrums but none of the charm), and an example of a certain type of brilliant child who interacts near exclusively with adults with the result that in some ways, he's older than his years while in others, he never, ever grows up (which gets more obvious once he's at last physically aging). Which is why the two following testimonies about Welles from the same decade of his life - his 20s - are by no means mutually exclusive. Firstly, here's the stage manager from the Mercury, Harold Teichman:
"When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like rehearsing from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damm stage-hands overtime, full speed ahead. And when he was tired, he would say, 'All right, children.' Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children."
Secondly, here's his first wife, Virginia Nicholson, who after a brief marriage divorced him and married Charlie Lederer next, with Welles promptly going on to charm her second husband and inviting himself over to breakfeasts and dinners with them, in conversation with her and Welles' daughter:
"We couldn't stay mad at Orson, you see. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm...' My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. 'Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated towards one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only 16. My God, Orson and I never even WENT to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me.' She gave her husky, ironic laugh. 'But when it came to their personalities, they couldn't have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn't have Orson's crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.'
Welles' actual childhood, with an overabundance of parent figures to impress and dazzle, has some very murky question marks. He was his parents' second son, but the first one, his older brother, was deemed first dull and uninteresting by their mother and then later put into a mental institution by their father for, as far as anyone can ascertain, no greater crime than being somewhat slow. (He never hurt anyone.) You can bet Orson took being brilliant and charming the adults very serious indeed. His mother Beatrice died when he was eight, leaving Orson to be raised by her alcoholic husband Richard and her former lover Maurice Bernstein. And then you have a variety of stories about Orson, at age ten, being hit upon by a lot of the men either Dr. Bernstein or his father socialized with. Welles in old age told these stories for comic effect, every time with a quick escape on his part, but biographer Simon Callow is sceptical:
No matter how fast-talking and apparently assured, no ten-year-old simply makes an Errol Flynn-like getaway from a fate worse than death, and then as a good laugh about it afterwards. A ten-year-old, confused by having two fathers, neither of whom is entirely satisfactory - the real one a drifting alcoholic, the other a cloying old fuss-budget with a somewhat religious attitude to one's recently deceased mother - may be on the look-out for other, better fathers, and in so doing may offer himself as vulnerably and in need of protection. He may even become aware of the fact that he's sexually attractive to certain older men, and playing with fire, may use his sexuality to secure their interest. Or he may accept their attentions, and later claim that he had avoided them successfully. Finally, if he is simply very unlucky, he may find himself again and again in situations where men force themselves on him.
By the time teenage Orson met father figure No.3, his ideal one, the headmaster of Todd, his school, Roger "Skipper" Hill, he did employ flirtation as a default mode, and was lucky that Hill was a genuine nice guy, no irony of the word "nice" intended, who went on to be an ersatz father figure to Orson's daughter as well, outlive Orson and hold the speech at his funeral. Here's Welles, much later in life, talking to his daughter, still crushing on his former headmaster:
"Do you know what my greatest coup was at Todd?" my father asked me with shining eyes. After an expectant pause, he answered his own question:"Winning Skipper's love. I was just a kid in knee pants and Skipper was a married man in his mid-thirties, but it was what the French call un coup de foudre. We were fatally attracted to one another, you see. The difference in our ages didn't matter, because Skipper was always younger than me. He had the kind of youth I never had."
Skipper and Maurice Bernstein didn't get on too well, but one thing they agreed upon was that Richard Welles, the actual biological father and by then an alcoholic in the late stage, was no good for Orson. Which led to 14 years old Orson telling his father he didn't want to see him again when Richard W. showed up drunkenly at Todd's, and when Richard Welles died none too much later, it led to a life long conviction on Orson's part that he was guilty of patricide. Also to a life long obsession with Falstaff, Hal and Henry IV. It's telling that even at age 20, when you'd think he wanted to play Hal the first time he tried to master the Henries (this resulted in one of his rare early flops), he played Falstaff instead. (By the time of Chimes at Midnight, of course, he was old enough (and wide enough) for Falstaff.) He always sounds hostile when talking about Hal in interviews, and because in addition to the ego Welles was capable of considerable self loathing (take Touch of Evil; he was already portly in real life at the time, but not nearly to the degree yet Hank Quinlan is in the film, because Welles was determined to look as disgusting as possible as Quinlan, and of course Quinlan gets the "your future is all used up" scene with Tonya/Marlene Dietrich), it's tempting to read the ongoing awareness into this that in real life, he'd been Hal, and no matter how often he tried to revive his father as Falstaff, it wouldn't change a thing.
Mind you, the Wellesian habit of simultanously looking for father figures and flirting with them before arguing with them and having dramatic fallouts went on for quite a while. At 16, he showed up in Ireland and secured his first job as an actor by auditioning for the two leaders of the Gate Theatre, Hilton Edwards and Michéal MacLiammoir, a couple romantically and professionally, who went on to became his theatrical godfathers, so to speak, with despite stormy ups and downs having a life long relationship. This is MacLiammor's memorable description of sixteen years old Orson strolling into their lives:
(...) Hilton walked into the scene doch one day and said, "Somebody strange has arrived from America; come and see what you think of it."
"What," I asked, "is it?"
"Tall, young, fat: says he's been with the Guild Theatre in New York. Don't believe a word of it, but he's interesting." (...)
We found, as he had hinted, a very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerfull lips, and disconcerting Chinese eyes. His hands were enormous and very beautifully shaped, like so many American hands; they were coloured like champagne and moved with a sort of controlled abandon never seen in a European. His voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a leader, a man of power; it bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor; he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent patience as though here was our chance to have something beautiful at last - yes, sir - and were we going to take it? Well, well, just too bad for us if we let the moment slip. And all this did not come from mere youth, though the chubby tea-rose cheeks were as satin-like as though the razor had never known them - that was the big moment waiting for the razor - but from ageless and superb inner confidence that on one could blow out. It was unquenchable. That was his secret. He knew he ws precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth (...).
'I've just told Mr. Edwards some of the things I've done Mr. MacL'moir," he said, "but I haven't told him everything; there would be be time. I've acted with the Guild. I've written a couple of plays. I've toured the States as a sword-swallowing female impersonator. I've flared through Hollywood like a firecracker. I've lived in a little tomato-coloured house on the Great Wall of China on two dollars a week. I've wafted my way with a jackass through Connemara. I've eaten dates all over the burning desert and crooned Delaware squaws asleep with Serbian raphsodies. But I haven't told you everything. No; there wouldn't be time."
And he threw back his head and laughed, a frenzy of laughter that involved a display of small white teth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perfplexed knitting of the sparse darkly coloured brws and a totally unexpected darting fourth of a big pale tongue. The tongue vanished almost at once and he frowned.
"Don't you want to see what I can do?" he asked.
I emerged from the jungle whence he had dragged me and said: "Why not?"
(...) "Is that all the light you can give me?" he said in a voice like a regretful oboe.
We hadn't given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, despite his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one's lips. One wanted to say, 'Now, now, really you know,' but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, much more.
"That's alright," Hilton shouted, "come down and talk."
And the young man unfolded himself from the floor and came to meet us with a grin that showed suddenly how very young he was.
"Terrible, wasn't it?" he asked.
"Yes, bloody awful," Hilton answered. "But you can play the part. (...) That is, if you'll make me a promise. Don't obey me blindly, but listen to me. MOre important still, listen to yourself. I can help you how to play this part, but you must see and hear what's good about yourself and what's lousy."
Edwards and MacLiammóir gave Welles all the theatrical education and training he ever received. MacLiammóir's descriptions of him through the years (to be found in his memoirs, All for Hecuba, and in his diaries from the shooting of Othello - where Welles had cast him as Iago -, Put money in thy purse, are a great mixture of affectionate and barbed. Take his description of the aftermath of Orson's stage debut:
"When Orson came padding on to the stage with his lopsideded grace, his laughter, his softly thunderous voice, there was a flutter of astonishment and alarm, a hush, and a volley of applause. That, of course, was at the end of each act, and when the play was over and Hilton and he took their curtains together, and Hilton said some words of praise and introduction, Orson swelled visibly. I have heard of people swelling visibly before, but Orson is one of those who really do it. The chest expands, the head, thrown back upon the round, boyish neck, seems to broaden, the features swell and burn, the lips, curling back from the teeth like dark, tropical plants, thicken into a smile. Then the hands extend, palms open to the crowd, the shoulders thrust upwards, the feet at last are satisfied: they remain a little sedately; that they should realize him like this merits a bow, so slow and sedate the head goews down and quickly up again, up higher than ever, for maybe this is all a dream, and if the eyes are on the boots, blood rushing to the ears, who knows that sight and sound may not double-cross and vanish like a flame blown out, and Orson be back at school again, hungry, unsatisfied, not ready yet for the world? NO, the people are still there, still applauding, more and more and more and more and back goes the big head, and hte laugh breaks out like fire in the jungle, a white lightning slits open across the sweating chubby cheeks, the brows knit in perplexity likea coolie's, the hands shoot widely out to either side, one to the right at Hilton, the other to the left at Betty, for you don't mean to say all this racket is for Orson? What about Hilton and Betty? And anyway there's Ashley Dukes, and there's a man called Feuchtwanger, isn't there? But whoever it's all about it goes on and on, then trickles back a little like a sea slowly receding, receding, curling away like a fire burning out, fading inexorably, emptying itself hollow; and God Damn that stage manager anyway. Couldn't he easily steal a couple more of them before the thing dies down? Take that curtain up again, you silly son of a bitch; to taste the last, to drain it dry, no meat left clinging to the bone: no, no! listen! three pairs of hands keep on, then two, then six, then sixty, and then - ah! then the whole house again, and up goes the curtain once more and the light shoots likea rainbow through the eyes and the unappeasable head rears up round as a cannon ball: no bowing now, no boot-licking booby tricks, let them have me as I am and so. And so. And the jaws snap, crunch, and then the foolish curtain closes down again. For the last time. The last time."
It's perhaps a little unfair - I mean, the boy was 16, of course he was eager for applause, especially since he had been conditioned from childhood that you were either spectacular or you were nothing. But what's also very noticable is the physicality of the description, which is there in John Houseman's memoirs of meeting Orson Welles (by then 19) as well. Houseman, whose partnership with Welles went on to become of of the classic odd yet incredibly effective couple combinations that made the Mercury theatre one of the most outstanding of the 30s, saw him as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, and was swept away:
"That glossy and successful evening was marked for me by one astonishing vision: not Miss Cornell's fervent Julient, not Edith Evans' admirable Nurse, nor Basil Rathbone's polite, middle-aged Romeo, nor Brian Aherne's Mercutio exubarantly slapping his yellow thighs - those were all blotted out by the excitement of the two brief moments when the furious Tybalt appeared suddenly in that sunlit Verona square: death, in scarlet and black, in the form of a monstrous boy - flat-footed and graceless, yet swift and agile; soft as jelly one moment and uncoiled, the next, in a spring of such furious energy that, once released, it could be checked by no human intervention. What made this figure so obscene and terrible was the pale, shiny child's face under the unnatural growth of dark beard, from which there issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him. "Peace! I hate the word as I hate Hell!" cried the sick boy, as he shuffled along, driven by some irresistable interior violence to kill and soon himself, inevitably, to die.
And then he met the man/boy off stage as well:
"It was always a shock to see Welles without the makeup and the false noses behind which he chose to mask himself. When he walked into the bar, with his hair combed, in a sober, dark suit, I did not know him for a moment; then, as he moved toward me, I recognized the shuffling, flat-footed gait, which I had found so frightening in Tybalt and which was really his own. I could see his features now, finally: the pale pudding face with the violent black eyes, the button nose with the wen to one side of it and the deep runnel meeting the well-shaped mouth over the astonishingly small teeth. Against the darkness of the wooden table I was conscious once more of the remarkable hands - pale, huge and beautifully formed, with enormous white palms and incredibly long, tapering fingers that seemed to have a life of their own - and the voice that made people turn at the neighboring tables - startled not so much by its loudness as by its surprising vibration. We had one old-fashioned and then another while I told him about our project and give him a copy of the play and my telephone number. Afterwards I walked across town with him towards Grand Central Station, then watched him vanish with astonishing speed, into the tunnel leading to the Westchester commuter trains. After he he had gone, I was left not so much with the impression of his force and brilliance as with a sense of extreme youth and charm and of a courtesy that came very close to tenderness.
Welles himself once described his face when young once memorably as "that of a depraved baby"; he was vain in other areas, but never about his looks. (Incidentally, the only film in which he didn't bother with some fake nose or other make up alterations is The Third Man; all the others, including Citizen Kane, show him looking other than he did at the time. It's perhaps not surprising, given how his own relationships with parent figures had gone, that once he had children of his own he still remained in that alternatingly flirting and arguing mode. The son of his long time mistress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who was in all likelihood his son as well, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, describes the Orson Welles he remembers from his childhood thusly:
He was glorious at that time, forty years old, tall, broad, dressed in black, starting to be heavy but not nearly with the weight which must have partly killed him. A big head with glossy black hair, alert amused brown eyes under the broad forehead, with his enveloping, welcoming seductive voice. But there was something else to him, a kind of emanation of energy and intelligence, curiosity, and originality.
While Welles' oldest daughter, Chris, had one of many arguments with her mother about him that culminated in this exchange:
No one knows better than I how seductive Orson can be. (...) He can make you believe you're the most important person in the world to him and he can't live without you. Then the next thing you know, he's fallen in love with somebody else.'
'But he's not in love with me,' I protested. 'I'm his daughter.'
'The trouble is that Orson has no idea how to be a father. Does he behave like a father when you're with him?'
'Well...' I hesitated. 'Daddy treats me like an equal, but I can't say he always behaves like a father.'
'At least you see that much. (...) I'll just say this for now: as long as you think you really matter to Orson, you're in for a lot of heartache and dissappointment.'
If he made a mess of being a father, he was far better as a friend. His life long friendship with Joseph Cotten is interestingly unlike the roles they play in films because Cotten in both Citizen Kane and The Third Man is the disillusioned friend, while in real life he remained in firm I <3 Orson mode throughout (given that Cotten, unlike Welles, went on to have a steady Hollywood career and never lacked employement, it's also interesting that Welles never seems to have as much as needled him about that; for a man easy to cry "betrayal" he also was amazingly handwaving about the fact Cotten played in the fake happy ending the studio shot for Ambersons behind Welles' back). Marlene Dietrich at a time when she was the adored superstar and he was the already unreliable not-anymore-Wonderboy played in Touch of Evil free of charge because of their lasting friendship, and unlike his fictional counterpart in Me and Orson Welles, the real life actor who was a boy worked with Welles in Julius Caesar, Arthur Anderson, had only fond memories of him:
"Whatever truth there may be in descriptions of George Orson Welles as self-absorbed, autocratic, skittish, undependable and unreasonable, it is also true that he showed only kindness to me." (When Welles played Lear in old age on stage:) "I snagged a job as an extra, as I wanted the satisfaction of working with him once more.
Orson sat on the edge of the stage in a ballroom where we were rehearsing. I approached him and said, “Hello, Orson. Do you remember me?”
“Please help me,” he said. “I’m so tired.”
“Arthur Anderson. I was your Lucius in Julius Caesar.”
“Of course, dear boy. How good to see you.”
When I reported for the next rehearsal, I had been upgraded to the role of First Knight, and given lines taken away from another actor, who I am sure cordially hated my guts.
And of course there was a reason he could get an ensemble of actors available to him for four years when making Othello whenever he had cash, despite all their other obligations and need to make a living in non-Wellesian jobs. Here's MacLiammoír again, giving a good impression of what it must have been like to be friends with Orson Welles in his later day incarnation as globetrotting post war actor/director, somewhere between Don Quichotte and Falstaff:
Orson on the phone: voice not changed at all. He said the same of me: we expressed emotion and revived memories of last farewell on quay-side at New York fifteen years ago. Said I was very ill; he said the trip and the sight of him would cure me. Said I was very old; he said so was he. (Forgot to point out that Othello was supposed to be.) Said I'd never played Iago, he said he'd never played Othello. Said I had put on weight; he said so had he, and that we'd be two Chubby Tragedians together and that he was going right out to buy yards of cheese cloth. Said I didn't think I'd be any good on movies; he said I was born for them. (Good God!) Said I didn't see myself as villain, he said unmentionable word and that I was patently villainous in all eyes but my own and Hilton's. All this confusing but intriguing.
Naturally, Welles lured him into the job.Well, first he lured him to Paris for the casting.
"Indulged in much hugging and dancing around discreet olive-green and dull-gold suite, then settled down to some fine à l'eauch by log fire. No bridging of the years seemed necessary; exactly as he used to be, perhaps larger and more, as it were, tropically Byzantine still, but essentially the same old darkly waltzing tree, half banyan, half oak, the Jungle and the Forest lazily pawing each other for mastery. I said incredulously that most people changed some way or another as life flowed by, and he said that only applied to NICE people, and that lousers like us never changed at all whether it was 1934 or 1949 or Dublin or Chicago or Paris. (...) Dinner presided over by Orson (very excitable) in hotel dining room. Table set about with young ladies, English, American and French, all of them seemingly convinced they were going to play Desdemona. Orson, rolling his almond eyes hypnotically around the table, explained, in English, his ideas about Cassio, of whom he has a poor opinion, pointing out snobbish attitude to Iago and insufferable treatment of poor Bianca.
"And a nice girl too," he said, "a nice, good girl: now you KNOW she was good," and he rolled his eyes more than ever, so all the young ladies hastily assumed expression of Tarts with Golden Hearts in case the quest for Desdemona might prove in vain.
Iago, he went on to say, was in his opinion impotent; this secret malady was, in fact, to be the keystone of the actor's approach. Realised, as the talk grew more serious, that I was in agreement but felt no necessity to assume appropriate expression so just sat there looking pleasant. (Sudden hideous thought: maybe pleasant, slightly doped expression, habitually with me during meals, IS the appropriate one for suggestion of impotence and this is why O., who has watched me consume several meals, thinks me so made for the part? Must remember to sound him on this and prove him mistaken!)
Put Money In Thy Purse also gives a great example of Welles' talent for improvisation. Here's MacLiammóir arriving in Mogador early on (as opposed to the luggage with everyone's costumes except the women's and Iago's; the rest of the costumes were still in Rome):
Orson rose thunderously from hordes of tumultous diners and swept towards me waving his napkin like a flag and crying, 'Welcome, welcome, dearest Micheál!' then, folding me in bear-like embrace, stopped dead suddenly to say: "Hey! what have you been doing? You've put on about six pounds. God dammit, I engaged you to play Iago and here you come Waddling In To Do It!" (...) Finally it is made clear that while my clothes for Iago may be in a fit condition to wear in a few days time, no such hopes are entertained by local tailor about Othello's, Roderigo's or Cassio's. Orson in despair as sequences for the arrival in Cyprus with which he wanted to start shooting all include, inevitably, these people.
But this is where the winged gorilla is entitled to respect as well as to that jocular interest he can so easily inspire in the ignorant and impressionable public. He has decided to open fire with the camera on the attempt on Cassio's life and on the subsequent murder of Roderigo by Iago, and as these incidents usually take place in a street, he has emerged from a sleepless night with the idea of making the murder happen in a steam-bath, with M. and B., God help them, stripped and draped and turbaned in towels. This, as well as dealing with the clothes question until it can be settled, effective and sinister twist of the bloody business of Act Five Scene One with which he is opening.
For all that Welles was ruthless/fearless with his literary sources, and could be cynical in conversation, he was amazingly idealistic in his politics. One of his earliest works for the Federal Theatre Project in the early 30s was the all black Macbeth (Welles transported the action of the play to Haiti), which made his name as a director, true, but also started a life long passion to fight against racial discrimination. In the 40s, he was constantly on the air in both others and his own radio shows, and racial equality was a constant subject. He worked with the NAACP in the case of Isaac Woodard, a black soldier who after being discharged had gotten viciously beaten by (white) police and lost his eyesight because of it. Welles was outraged (both by the callousness of the authorities towards Woodard and the lack of consequences for the cops) and kept bringing the case up. His air sponsors threatened to withdraw if he didn't stop with the "negro talk"; he didn't, and they did. Callow also quotes some of the letters Welles got as the result of a broadcast in which he had said there was no reason why a black man and a white woman should not marry, and it's chilling to read them because they are basically disappointed fan mail and the racism is so completely taken for granted: "My dear Mr. Welles, you are not advocating inter-racial marriage between the Whites and Negroes, are you, Mr. Welles? Your commentary last Sunday, July 7th, would lead one to believe that you are. It is very difficult for me, who have believed in you so much, to believe that a man possessing the intelligence that I have credited you with possessing (...) would lend his time and talents to championing such an unworthy cause. No, Mr. Welles, I am not prejudiced against the Negroes, but the Negro, as a race, is mentally incapable of taking a place alongside the white man. He is not competent to make intelligent decisions for himself. (...) Your young daughters are growing up, Mr. Welles - your own lovely little daughters - Christopher and Rebecca - and it will not be many years before they too shall be attractive young women, like myself. How will you feel then, if Negro men whistle at them? Undress their slim bodies, join their eyes? Try to pick them up in cars? Would you consent to your lovely daughters being touched by Negroes? God knows, surely, you couldn't!"
Not by coincidence, Welles switched the ethnicity of the pairing in Touch of Evil so that instead of an American man and Mexican woman, as in the book, hero and heroine in the film are a Mexican man and an American woman. Temper throwing egotist and unreliable charmer that he was, he had his convictions, and he stood by them through his life. I'll leave the last word to another director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who because of their illegitimate son/father relationship had his ups and downs with Orson Welles:
His great bold multicoloured glorious banner had become more tattered, battered, and threadbare as the years went by; but still he'd stood there, his first on the staff, stout of girth, full of dreams, wise but not jaded, the inheritor of his past, and the tempestous child of his unique imagination; and now 'dead at seventy'. How could I explain my feelings about this man?
What makes Welles such a great director is that combination of extremely visual imagination, the ability to find poetry and expression via images which was already there long before he ever went to Hollywood. Here's the description Norman Llyod, who played Cinna the poet in the production of Julius Caesar Welles directed at age 22, gave of the key scene in which the mob, coming directly from Caesar's funeral and Antony's speech at same, seizes on a poet who happens to bear the same name as one of the conspirators:
Orson would argue with you as he ate, and you got angrier. I thought we'd reached an impasse. But no - he went my way. And when he went your way! - I played the first part of the scene fro pantomimic comedy. Gut a lot of laughs. Just becoming aware of this crowd and thinking they had recognised me as a celebrity. Stuffed my pockets with these poems. He seized that right away. They moved in to kill - I was playing it as the poet laureate. He moved these guys in one by one - and the lighting was fantastic - blood red - the set was red too. The way he moved me - there were laughs, and then the laughs got chilly. Taking out these poems. Orson's direction: the last thing I scream is THE POET. Rush down the ramp - I just disappeared - just this hand, bathed in red light.
You can see why film and Welles were made for each other to the same degree that Welles and the microphone were. And not just in the case of Citizen Kane, where he had all the budget and all the experts at his disposition, but also in a much later film like The Trial, where he used the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris which wasn't a railway station any longer and not yet the museum for Impressionistic art, and made it into a fantastic surrounding for Kafka's story as if it was an expensively built film set. Or Othello, which took four years of filming - because he had to stop whenever he ran out of money - and was made at dozens of different locations but nonetheless give the impression of taking place in only one fantastically beautiful yet coldly claustrophobic citadel. He's also able to coax great performances out of most of the actors he used (not all: if a character is a spoiled brat like George in The Magnificent Ambersons, it needs a charming actor to make the audience believes that people put up with and love him as long as they do, and Tim Holt never manages that), and these included both actors who first achieved fame via him (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead) and actors who were already famous when they worked for him, though not necessarily in the type of part he gave them (true for both Anthony Perkins and Romy Schneider in The Trial, and famously for Rita Hayworth in Lady from Shanghai). A great many of Welles' films are based on books, and as an adapter he was, depending on your point of view, fearless or ruthless. Or is "iconoclastic" the best word? In any case, he tended to use his book sources as basic structures from which to develop the themes he was interested in, be they a trashy pot boiler like the novel Touch of Evil is based on or William Shakespeare ("...and damned be he who first calls hold, enough"). Chimes at Midnight takes bits and pieces from Richard II and Henry V in addition to huge chunks from the two Henry IV plays - and presents the net result of a life time of wrestling with these particular plays, more about that later - , unabashedly throws out anything Welles wasn't interested in, and the end result, several decades onwards, makes far newer screen productions like The Hollow Crown look tame by comparison. Just two examples of what Welles does there as a director/adapter: Henry IV, Part I early on has Hal reveal in monologue ("I know you all...") to the audience that he's actually not the dissolute party animal his father assumes he is but plans to ditch all his disreputable friends and this entire life style as soon as he's king, so that the contrast between his old and new self will be all the more impressive and effective. The Hollow Crown does what a great many screen adaptions do with theatrical monologues; it makes the scene a voice over, i.e. Hal's thoughts while he walks around the scenery. Chimes at Midnight, by contrast, makes the radical change to let Hal say this, out loud, to Falstaff directly, with Falstaff not sure whether or not this is one of the emotionally brutal games these two play with each other. (The hypothetically unspoiled audience can't be sure, either.) This makes it a lead up to the "Banish old Jack, and banish all the world"/"I do, I will" scene between them later and avoids the artifice of either monologue to the audience or voice over.
The other example from the same film is the way Welles stages the battle of Shrewsbury. Subsequently often imitated, among others by Kenneth Branagh in his Henry V, but never as effectively, because unlike Branagh, who can't resist resolving the whole thing in a Te Deum and triumph, Welles' staging of the battle sequence (via cinematic trickery, because he did not have the money for mass scenes) brings the whole muddy, gory business of medieval warfare across as a devastating indictement. If you get technical, it's all done via some clever cuts, but that's not how it comes across. Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, both of whom did have masses at their disposal, can only weep in envy.
As a person, Orson Welles, like some of his films, seems to have been a fascinating mess, often managing to be infuriating and charming at the same time (which makes it unfortunate that many a biopic recreation gets the temper tantrums but none of the charm), and an example of a certain type of brilliant child who interacts near exclusively with adults with the result that in some ways, he's older than his years while in others, he never, ever grows up (which gets more obvious once he's at last physically aging). Which is why the two following testimonies about Welles from the same decade of his life - his 20s - are by no means mutually exclusive. Firstly, here's the stage manager from the Mercury, Harold Teichman:
"When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like rehearsing from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damm stage-hands overtime, full speed ahead. And when he was tired, he would say, 'All right, children.' Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children."
Secondly, here's his first wife, Virginia Nicholson, who after a brief marriage divorced him and married Charlie Lederer next, with Welles promptly going on to charm her second husband and inviting himself over to breakfeasts and dinners with them, in conversation with her and Welles' daughter:
"We couldn't stay mad at Orson, you see. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm...' My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. 'Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated towards one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only 16. My God, Orson and I never even WENT to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me.' She gave her husky, ironic laugh. 'But when it came to their personalities, they couldn't have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn't have Orson's crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.'
Welles' actual childhood, with an overabundance of parent figures to impress and dazzle, has some very murky question marks. He was his parents' second son, but the first one, his older brother, was deemed first dull and uninteresting by their mother and then later put into a mental institution by their father for, as far as anyone can ascertain, no greater crime than being somewhat slow. (He never hurt anyone.) You can bet Orson took being brilliant and charming the adults very serious indeed. His mother Beatrice died when he was eight, leaving Orson to be raised by her alcoholic husband Richard and her former lover Maurice Bernstein. And then you have a variety of stories about Orson, at age ten, being hit upon by a lot of the men either Dr. Bernstein or his father socialized with. Welles in old age told these stories for comic effect, every time with a quick escape on his part, but biographer Simon Callow is sceptical:
No matter how fast-talking and apparently assured, no ten-year-old simply makes an Errol Flynn-like getaway from a fate worse than death, and then as a good laugh about it afterwards. A ten-year-old, confused by having two fathers, neither of whom is entirely satisfactory - the real one a drifting alcoholic, the other a cloying old fuss-budget with a somewhat religious attitude to one's recently deceased mother - may be on the look-out for other, better fathers, and in so doing may offer himself as vulnerably and in need of protection. He may even become aware of the fact that he's sexually attractive to certain older men, and playing with fire, may use his sexuality to secure their interest. Or he may accept their attentions, and later claim that he had avoided them successfully. Finally, if he is simply very unlucky, he may find himself again and again in situations where men force themselves on him.
By the time teenage Orson met father figure No.3, his ideal one, the headmaster of Todd, his school, Roger "Skipper" Hill, he did employ flirtation as a default mode, and was lucky that Hill was a genuine nice guy, no irony of the word "nice" intended, who went on to be an ersatz father figure to Orson's daughter as well, outlive Orson and hold the speech at his funeral. Here's Welles, much later in life, talking to his daughter, still crushing on his former headmaster:
"Do you know what my greatest coup was at Todd?" my father asked me with shining eyes. After an expectant pause, he answered his own question:"Winning Skipper's love. I was just a kid in knee pants and Skipper was a married man in his mid-thirties, but it was what the French call un coup de foudre. We were fatally attracted to one another, you see. The difference in our ages didn't matter, because Skipper was always younger than me. He had the kind of youth I never had."
Skipper and Maurice Bernstein didn't get on too well, but one thing they agreed upon was that Richard Welles, the actual biological father and by then an alcoholic in the late stage, was no good for Orson. Which led to 14 years old Orson telling his father he didn't want to see him again when Richard W. showed up drunkenly at Todd's, and when Richard Welles died none too much later, it led to a life long conviction on Orson's part that he was guilty of patricide. Also to a life long obsession with Falstaff, Hal and Henry IV. It's telling that even at age 20, when you'd think he wanted to play Hal the first time he tried to master the Henries (this resulted in one of his rare early flops), he played Falstaff instead. (By the time of Chimes at Midnight, of course, he was old enough (and wide enough) for Falstaff.) He always sounds hostile when talking about Hal in interviews, and because in addition to the ego Welles was capable of considerable self loathing (take Touch of Evil; he was already portly in real life at the time, but not nearly to the degree yet Hank Quinlan is in the film, because Welles was determined to look as disgusting as possible as Quinlan, and of course Quinlan gets the "your future is all used up" scene with Tonya/Marlene Dietrich), it's tempting to read the ongoing awareness into this that in real life, he'd been Hal, and no matter how often he tried to revive his father as Falstaff, it wouldn't change a thing.
Mind you, the Wellesian habit of simultanously looking for father figures and flirting with them before arguing with them and having dramatic fallouts went on for quite a while. At 16, he showed up in Ireland and secured his first job as an actor by auditioning for the two leaders of the Gate Theatre, Hilton Edwards and Michéal MacLiammoir, a couple romantically and professionally, who went on to became his theatrical godfathers, so to speak, with despite stormy ups and downs having a life long relationship. This is MacLiammor's memorable description of sixteen years old Orson strolling into their lives:
(...) Hilton walked into the scene doch one day and said, "Somebody strange has arrived from America; come and see what you think of it."
"What," I asked, "is it?"
"Tall, young, fat: says he's been with the Guild Theatre in New York. Don't believe a word of it, but he's interesting." (...)
We found, as he had hinted, a very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerfull lips, and disconcerting Chinese eyes. His hands were enormous and very beautifully shaped, like so many American hands; they were coloured like champagne and moved with a sort of controlled abandon never seen in a European. His voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a leader, a man of power; it bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor; he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent patience as though here was our chance to have something beautiful at last - yes, sir - and were we going to take it? Well, well, just too bad for us if we let the moment slip. And all this did not come from mere youth, though the chubby tea-rose cheeks were as satin-like as though the razor had never known them - that was the big moment waiting for the razor - but from ageless and superb inner confidence that on one could blow out. It was unquenchable. That was his secret. He knew he ws precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth (...).
'I've just told Mr. Edwards some of the things I've done Mr. MacL'moir," he said, "but I haven't told him everything; there would be be time. I've acted with the Guild. I've written a couple of plays. I've toured the States as a sword-swallowing female impersonator. I've flared through Hollywood like a firecracker. I've lived in a little tomato-coloured house on the Great Wall of China on two dollars a week. I've wafted my way with a jackass through Connemara. I've eaten dates all over the burning desert and crooned Delaware squaws asleep with Serbian raphsodies. But I haven't told you everything. No; there wouldn't be time."
And he threw back his head and laughed, a frenzy of laughter that involved a display of small white teth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perfplexed knitting of the sparse darkly coloured brws and a totally unexpected darting fourth of a big pale tongue. The tongue vanished almost at once and he frowned.
"Don't you want to see what I can do?" he asked.
I emerged from the jungle whence he had dragged me and said: "Why not?"
(...) "Is that all the light you can give me?" he said in a voice like a regretful oboe.
We hadn't given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, despite his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one's lips. One wanted to say, 'Now, now, really you know,' but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, much more.
"That's alright," Hilton shouted, "come down and talk."
And the young man unfolded himself from the floor and came to meet us with a grin that showed suddenly how very young he was.
"Terrible, wasn't it?" he asked.
"Yes, bloody awful," Hilton answered. "But you can play the part. (...) That is, if you'll make me a promise. Don't obey me blindly, but listen to me. MOre important still, listen to yourself. I can help you how to play this part, but you must see and hear what's good about yourself and what's lousy."
Edwards and MacLiammóir gave Welles all the theatrical education and training he ever received. MacLiammóir's descriptions of him through the years (to be found in his memoirs, All for Hecuba, and in his diaries from the shooting of Othello - where Welles had cast him as Iago -, Put money in thy purse, are a great mixture of affectionate and barbed. Take his description of the aftermath of Orson's stage debut:
"When Orson came padding on to the stage with his lopsideded grace, his laughter, his softly thunderous voice, there was a flutter of astonishment and alarm, a hush, and a volley of applause. That, of course, was at the end of each act, and when the play was over and Hilton and he took their curtains together, and Hilton said some words of praise and introduction, Orson swelled visibly. I have heard of people swelling visibly before, but Orson is one of those who really do it. The chest expands, the head, thrown back upon the round, boyish neck, seems to broaden, the features swell and burn, the lips, curling back from the teeth like dark, tropical plants, thicken into a smile. Then the hands extend, palms open to the crowd, the shoulders thrust upwards, the feet at last are satisfied: they remain a little sedately; that they should realize him like this merits a bow, so slow and sedate the head goews down and quickly up again, up higher than ever, for maybe this is all a dream, and if the eyes are on the boots, blood rushing to the ears, who knows that sight and sound may not double-cross and vanish like a flame blown out, and Orson be back at school again, hungry, unsatisfied, not ready yet for the world? NO, the people are still there, still applauding, more and more and more and more and back goes the big head, and hte laugh breaks out like fire in the jungle, a white lightning slits open across the sweating chubby cheeks, the brows knit in perplexity likea coolie's, the hands shoot widely out to either side, one to the right at Hilton, the other to the left at Betty, for you don't mean to say all this racket is for Orson? What about Hilton and Betty? And anyway there's Ashley Dukes, and there's a man called Feuchtwanger, isn't there? But whoever it's all about it goes on and on, then trickles back a little like a sea slowly receding, receding, curling away like a fire burning out, fading inexorably, emptying itself hollow; and God Damn that stage manager anyway. Couldn't he easily steal a couple more of them before the thing dies down? Take that curtain up again, you silly son of a bitch; to taste the last, to drain it dry, no meat left clinging to the bone: no, no! listen! three pairs of hands keep on, then two, then six, then sixty, and then - ah! then the whole house again, and up goes the curtain once more and the light shoots likea rainbow through the eyes and the unappeasable head rears up round as a cannon ball: no bowing now, no boot-licking booby tricks, let them have me as I am and so. And so. And the jaws snap, crunch, and then the foolish curtain closes down again. For the last time. The last time."
It's perhaps a little unfair - I mean, the boy was 16, of course he was eager for applause, especially since he had been conditioned from childhood that you were either spectacular or you were nothing. But what's also very noticable is the physicality of the description, which is there in John Houseman's memoirs of meeting Orson Welles (by then 19) as well. Houseman, whose partnership with Welles went on to become of of the classic odd yet incredibly effective couple combinations that made the Mercury theatre one of the most outstanding of the 30s, saw him as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, and was swept away:
"That glossy and successful evening was marked for me by one astonishing vision: not Miss Cornell's fervent Julient, not Edith Evans' admirable Nurse, nor Basil Rathbone's polite, middle-aged Romeo, nor Brian Aherne's Mercutio exubarantly slapping his yellow thighs - those were all blotted out by the excitement of the two brief moments when the furious Tybalt appeared suddenly in that sunlit Verona square: death, in scarlet and black, in the form of a monstrous boy - flat-footed and graceless, yet swift and agile; soft as jelly one moment and uncoiled, the next, in a spring of such furious energy that, once released, it could be checked by no human intervention. What made this figure so obscene and terrible was the pale, shiny child's face under the unnatural growth of dark beard, from which there issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him. "Peace! I hate the word as I hate Hell!" cried the sick boy, as he shuffled along, driven by some irresistable interior violence to kill and soon himself, inevitably, to die.
And then he met the man/boy off stage as well:
"It was always a shock to see Welles without the makeup and the false noses behind which he chose to mask himself. When he walked into the bar, with his hair combed, in a sober, dark suit, I did not know him for a moment; then, as he moved toward me, I recognized the shuffling, flat-footed gait, which I had found so frightening in Tybalt and which was really his own. I could see his features now, finally: the pale pudding face with the violent black eyes, the button nose with the wen to one side of it and the deep runnel meeting the well-shaped mouth over the astonishingly small teeth. Against the darkness of the wooden table I was conscious once more of the remarkable hands - pale, huge and beautifully formed, with enormous white palms and incredibly long, tapering fingers that seemed to have a life of their own - and the voice that made people turn at the neighboring tables - startled not so much by its loudness as by its surprising vibration. We had one old-fashioned and then another while I told him about our project and give him a copy of the play and my telephone number. Afterwards I walked across town with him towards Grand Central Station, then watched him vanish with astonishing speed, into the tunnel leading to the Westchester commuter trains. After he he had gone, I was left not so much with the impression of his force and brilliance as with a sense of extreme youth and charm and of a courtesy that came very close to tenderness.
Welles himself once described his face when young once memorably as "that of a depraved baby"; he was vain in other areas, but never about his looks. (Incidentally, the only film in which he didn't bother with some fake nose or other make up alterations is The Third Man; all the others, including Citizen Kane, show him looking other than he did at the time. It's perhaps not surprising, given how his own relationships with parent figures had gone, that once he had children of his own he still remained in that alternatingly flirting and arguing mode. The son of his long time mistress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who was in all likelihood his son as well, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, describes the Orson Welles he remembers from his childhood thusly:
He was glorious at that time, forty years old, tall, broad, dressed in black, starting to be heavy but not nearly with the weight which must have partly killed him. A big head with glossy black hair, alert amused brown eyes under the broad forehead, with his enveloping, welcoming seductive voice. But there was something else to him, a kind of emanation of energy and intelligence, curiosity, and originality.
While Welles' oldest daughter, Chris, had one of many arguments with her mother about him that culminated in this exchange:
No one knows better than I how seductive Orson can be. (...) He can make you believe you're the most important person in the world to him and he can't live without you. Then the next thing you know, he's fallen in love with somebody else.'
'But he's not in love with me,' I protested. 'I'm his daughter.'
'The trouble is that Orson has no idea how to be a father. Does he behave like a father when you're with him?'
'Well...' I hesitated. 'Daddy treats me like an equal, but I can't say he always behaves like a father.'
'At least you see that much. (...) I'll just say this for now: as long as you think you really matter to Orson, you're in for a lot of heartache and dissappointment.'
If he made a mess of being a father, he was far better as a friend. His life long friendship with Joseph Cotten is interestingly unlike the roles they play in films because Cotten in both Citizen Kane and The Third Man is the disillusioned friend, while in real life he remained in firm I <3 Orson mode throughout (given that Cotten, unlike Welles, went on to have a steady Hollywood career and never lacked employement, it's also interesting that Welles never seems to have as much as needled him about that; for a man easy to cry "betrayal" he also was amazingly handwaving about the fact Cotten played in the fake happy ending the studio shot for Ambersons behind Welles' back). Marlene Dietrich at a time when she was the adored superstar and he was the already unreliable not-anymore-Wonderboy played in Touch of Evil free of charge because of their lasting friendship, and unlike his fictional counterpart in Me and Orson Welles, the real life actor who was a boy worked with Welles in Julius Caesar, Arthur Anderson, had only fond memories of him:
"Whatever truth there may be in descriptions of George Orson Welles as self-absorbed, autocratic, skittish, undependable and unreasonable, it is also true that he showed only kindness to me." (When Welles played Lear in old age on stage:) "I snagged a job as an extra, as I wanted the satisfaction of working with him once more.
Orson sat on the edge of the stage in a ballroom where we were rehearsing. I approached him and said, “Hello, Orson. Do you remember me?”
“Please help me,” he said. “I’m so tired.”
“Arthur Anderson. I was your Lucius in Julius Caesar.”
“Of course, dear boy. How good to see you.”
When I reported for the next rehearsal, I had been upgraded to the role of First Knight, and given lines taken away from another actor, who I am sure cordially hated my guts.
And of course there was a reason he could get an ensemble of actors available to him for four years when making Othello whenever he had cash, despite all their other obligations and need to make a living in non-Wellesian jobs. Here's MacLiammoír again, giving a good impression of what it must have been like to be friends with Orson Welles in his later day incarnation as globetrotting post war actor/director, somewhere between Don Quichotte and Falstaff:
Orson on the phone: voice not changed at all. He said the same of me: we expressed emotion and revived memories of last farewell on quay-side at New York fifteen years ago. Said I was very ill; he said the trip and the sight of him would cure me. Said I was very old; he said so was he. (Forgot to point out that Othello was supposed to be.) Said I'd never played Iago, he said he'd never played Othello. Said I had put on weight; he said so had he, and that we'd be two Chubby Tragedians together and that he was going right out to buy yards of cheese cloth. Said I didn't think I'd be any good on movies; he said I was born for them. (Good God!) Said I didn't see myself as villain, he said unmentionable word and that I was patently villainous in all eyes but my own and Hilton's. All this confusing but intriguing.
Naturally, Welles lured him into the job.Well, first he lured him to Paris for the casting.
"Indulged in much hugging and dancing around discreet olive-green and dull-gold suite, then settled down to some fine à l'eauch by log fire. No bridging of the years seemed necessary; exactly as he used to be, perhaps larger and more, as it were, tropically Byzantine still, but essentially the same old darkly waltzing tree, half banyan, half oak, the Jungle and the Forest lazily pawing each other for mastery. I said incredulously that most people changed some way or another as life flowed by, and he said that only applied to NICE people, and that lousers like us never changed at all whether it was 1934 or 1949 or Dublin or Chicago or Paris. (...) Dinner presided over by Orson (very excitable) in hotel dining room. Table set about with young ladies, English, American and French, all of them seemingly convinced they were going to play Desdemona. Orson, rolling his almond eyes hypnotically around the table, explained, in English, his ideas about Cassio, of whom he has a poor opinion, pointing out snobbish attitude to Iago and insufferable treatment of poor Bianca.
"And a nice girl too," he said, "a nice, good girl: now you KNOW she was good," and he rolled his eyes more than ever, so all the young ladies hastily assumed expression of Tarts with Golden Hearts in case the quest for Desdemona might prove in vain.
Iago, he went on to say, was in his opinion impotent; this secret malady was, in fact, to be the keystone of the actor's approach. Realised, as the talk grew more serious, that I was in agreement but felt no necessity to assume appropriate expression so just sat there looking pleasant. (Sudden hideous thought: maybe pleasant, slightly doped expression, habitually with me during meals, IS the appropriate one for suggestion of impotence and this is why O., who has watched me consume several meals, thinks me so made for the part? Must remember to sound him on this and prove him mistaken!)
Put Money In Thy Purse also gives a great example of Welles' talent for improvisation. Here's MacLiammóir arriving in Mogador early on (as opposed to the luggage with everyone's costumes except the women's and Iago's; the rest of the costumes were still in Rome):
Orson rose thunderously from hordes of tumultous diners and swept towards me waving his napkin like a flag and crying, 'Welcome, welcome, dearest Micheál!' then, folding me in bear-like embrace, stopped dead suddenly to say: "Hey! what have you been doing? You've put on about six pounds. God dammit, I engaged you to play Iago and here you come Waddling In To Do It!" (...) Finally it is made clear that while my clothes for Iago may be in a fit condition to wear in a few days time, no such hopes are entertained by local tailor about Othello's, Roderigo's or Cassio's. Orson in despair as sequences for the arrival in Cyprus with which he wanted to start shooting all include, inevitably, these people.
But this is where the winged gorilla is entitled to respect as well as to that jocular interest he can so easily inspire in the ignorant and impressionable public. He has decided to open fire with the camera on the attempt on Cassio's life and on the subsequent murder of Roderigo by Iago, and as these incidents usually take place in a street, he has emerged from a sleepless night with the idea of making the murder happen in a steam-bath, with M. and B., God help them, stripped and draped and turbaned in towels. This, as well as dealing with the clothes question until it can be settled, effective and sinister twist of the bloody business of Act Five Scene One with which he is opening.
For all that Welles was ruthless/fearless with his literary sources, and could be cynical in conversation, he was amazingly idealistic in his politics. One of his earliest works for the Federal Theatre Project in the early 30s was the all black Macbeth (Welles transported the action of the play to Haiti), which made his name as a director, true, but also started a life long passion to fight against racial discrimination. In the 40s, he was constantly on the air in both others and his own radio shows, and racial equality was a constant subject. He worked with the NAACP in the case of Isaac Woodard, a black soldier who after being discharged had gotten viciously beaten by (white) police and lost his eyesight because of it. Welles was outraged (both by the callousness of the authorities towards Woodard and the lack of consequences for the cops) and kept bringing the case up. His air sponsors threatened to withdraw if he didn't stop with the "negro talk"; he didn't, and they did. Callow also quotes some of the letters Welles got as the result of a broadcast in which he had said there was no reason why a black man and a white woman should not marry, and it's chilling to read them because they are basically disappointed fan mail and the racism is so completely taken for granted: "My dear Mr. Welles, you are not advocating inter-racial marriage between the Whites and Negroes, are you, Mr. Welles? Your commentary last Sunday, July 7th, would lead one to believe that you are. It is very difficult for me, who have believed in you so much, to believe that a man possessing the intelligence that I have credited you with possessing (...) would lend his time and talents to championing such an unworthy cause. No, Mr. Welles, I am not prejudiced against the Negroes, but the Negro, as a race, is mentally incapable of taking a place alongside the white man. He is not competent to make intelligent decisions for himself. (...) Your young daughters are growing up, Mr. Welles - your own lovely little daughters - Christopher and Rebecca - and it will not be many years before they too shall be attractive young women, like myself. How will you feel then, if Negro men whistle at them? Undress their slim bodies, join their eyes? Try to pick them up in cars? Would you consent to your lovely daughters being touched by Negroes? God knows, surely, you couldn't!"
Not by coincidence, Welles switched the ethnicity of the pairing in Touch of Evil so that instead of an American man and Mexican woman, as in the book, hero and heroine in the film are a Mexican man and an American woman. Temper throwing egotist and unreliable charmer that he was, he had his convictions, and he stood by them through his life. I'll leave the last word to another director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who because of their illegitimate son/father relationship had his ups and downs with Orson Welles:
His great bold multicoloured glorious banner had become more tattered, battered, and threadbare as the years went by; but still he'd stood there, his first on the staff, stout of girth, full of dreams, wise but not jaded, the inheritor of his past, and the tempestous child of his unique imagination; and now 'dead at seventy'. How could I explain my feelings about this man?
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Date: 2013-12-14 10:09 pm (UTC)I wonder if Wells ever felt there was conflict between his NAACP efforts and playing Othello himself.
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Date: 2013-12-15 09:23 am (UTC)Incidentally, also telling about the period and its casual racism: when Kenneth Tynan - most famous British theatre critici of his day, credited with discovering and championing John Osborne as a playwright, later went on to work, stormily, for Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre in the 60s - reviewed Othello, he titled the review "Citizen Coon". :(
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Date: 2013-12-14 10:13 pm (UTC)Funny enough, the other day I was looking up some things on the Internet about Betty Garrett, who was a first cousin of my grandmother. I knew she had been an MGM contract player in the 1940s and a television actress in the
1970s, but I only just found out that she worked at the Mercury with Welles. I found an interview clip where she talks about the Mercury:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4jWvImxGaE
(Including being at the theater rehearsing when the cops came looking for Welles during the War of the Worlds broadcast).
Not sure if you'll be able to get that clip to play, but if you can't a bit was transcribed at IMDB:
He had an unbroken string of successes. But unfortunately I joined the company just in time for the first flop, 'Danton's Death'. He was a genius, but in that one he let his genius get slightly out of hand. He loaded up the little theater with thousands of dollars worth of lights, and tore out the stage and put in elevator platforms, so all the actors were constantly moving up and down out of the depths. I remember we all had to make noises in the night, in addition to our roles. I did animal noises. Joseph Cotten had to do sex noises. Can you imagine? Joseph Cotten?
(Bonus fact: I never met Betty but when my mother was living in Washington, DC in the 1960s, Betty came to do a play at the Kennedy Center and during the visit gave Mom a box set of Lord of the Rings, which I think were the same ones I read as a kid...)
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Date: 2013-12-15 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-17 07:35 am (UTC)