Simon Callow
ORSON WELLES
Hello Americans
528pp. Cape. £25.
0 224 03853 2
Citizen Kane, one of the most famous films in cinema history, was a box office flop. On release in April, 1941, it ran in New York for a feeble fifteen weeks and in much of the American heartland it never opened at all. “It may be a classic”, a South Dakota movie-theatre manager grumbled, “but it’s plum nuts to show your showgoing public.” His complaint was uneasily close to what many of the Hollywood movie moguls were beginning to conclude about the twenty-six-year-old Orson Welles, Citizen Kane’s brilliant but high-maintenance director: he may be a genius, but let some other studio handle him.
It is hard not to take the standard view that before Citizen Kane almost nothing in Welles’s dazzling stage and radio career went wrong, and that afterwards little if anything went right. Welles, it is true, lost control of the few Hollywood films that he managed to finish. He acted, memorably if grudgingly, in others’ pictures in order to pay for his own, most of which he prospected but never began. In his huge, honeyed-ham voice he also made television ads for fish fingers and Paul Masson wine. He demeaned himself as a wizardly buffoon on chat shows, putting up with Johnny Carson’s fat jokes. (At his heaviest he weighed more than 400lbs.) To put on record his own account of what had gone wrong, Welles endlessly talked about himself to interviewers and movie buffs, wittily and inventively.
None of this stock account is strictly false. The problem is what it presumes and what it leaves out. Failed promise and squandered talent are treacherous themes. It is not just that they prod readers to tell biographers, “You try”, but that they focus unduly on might-have-beens. Too much written about Welles treats him as the counterpart of Charles Foster Kane, his megalomaniac press baron who rockets up and plummets down, without our finding out why. This idle approach maps the enigmatic fall of Kane onto the puzzling failures of Welles and then asks, fruitlessly, was Hollywood or Welles to blame?
Simon Callow avoids these snares of Orsonology as sure-footedly in Hello Americans as he did in The Road to Xanadu, his volume on the earlier part of his subject’s life. This sequel takes readers through 528 pages but Welles only up to 1947. Its fullness nevertheless matches the crowded abundance of Welles, who pursued projects – films, plays, politics, journalism and beautiful women – many at a time. Detail is occasionally dense, but Callow is too good a storyteller and too shrewd an observer to let the narrative flag for long. The end of the book invites not “Ouf!”, but “What happens next?”. As a stage and film actor, Callow understands both crafts and can explain them well.
On arriving in Hollywood from New York, where mould-breaking Shakespeare theatre productions had won Welles a name, and his 1938 Martians-are-here radio play, The War of the Worlds, made him famous, he knew nothing about film. He did, subsequently, listen to a few pros but was only really apprenticed to himself. His methods excited cast and crew when they worked, but exasperated when his experiments simply wasted time. Callow illuminates his subject’s singular screen style, replete with intricate shots which draw attention to themselves without revealing how they were done. Welles who had been a child conjuror, revelled not only in the realism of the camera but also in its magic.
Callow is good on the American context of the radical causes for which Welles campaigned – Spanish Republican refugees, the United Nations, civil rights in the American South and Henry Wallace’s third-party run for the White House as a left-wing progressive in 1947–8 – and for which the Hearst press and FBI wrongly called him a Communist. Written sources, such as studio memos and telegrams, production notes, press reviews, radio transcripts and personal letters, are used to effect. Callow’s greatest asset however, is intelligent and generous judgement, whether of Welles or his art and the industrial conditions of its making. His subject had canyon-sized faults, which reservoirs of charm failed to conceal. These included not merely the egoism and manipulativeness that frequently come with great ability, but an unprofessional reliance on his own “buzz” in a shared enterprise where grind and method count as much as flair.
Welles pushed away people who might have steadied him: John Houseman, his former partner in the Mercury Theater Company; the patient George Schaefer, production head at RKO, who invited him to Hollywood but despaired when, as he saw it, Welles put directorial freedom before the studio’s commitment to serious film. Callow appreciates Welles’s post-Kane film work without neglecting its flaws or denying Welles’s own share of responsibility for the shambles in which studios tended to release what he had shot. The culprit was not inevitably crass commercialism but often an absent Welles, who had already sped off towards his next project, leaving editing and sound, for which radio had sharpened his ear, to underinstructed colleagues.
Callow ended his first volume with the post-completion travails and eventual release of Citizen Kane by a shaken RKO, which was losing money, in today’s values, at around $100 million a year. William Randolph Hearst, the ageing but still feared right-wing mogul who virtually everyone assumed was the model for Kane, had encouraged his journalists to mount a vicious campaign to kill the film. Schaefer had only just managed to persuade RKO’s board members, who had seriously thought of having the negative burnt, to stand firm. It had been an “ugly and frightening” experience – for everyone, that is, but the unpuncturable boy wonder.
Hello Americans opens with a compelling account of the politics and betrayals behind Welles’s next project, It’s All True, an unfinished documentary, also for RKO, which brought Welles face to face with the kind of life he had barely imagined, in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil’s poor north-east, where raft fishermen were protesting against their conditions. A calamitous shoot, in which the fishermen’s leader drowned, hastened Schaefer’s fall and Welles’s departure from RKO. As a farewell gesture, Schaefer’s successor approved the burning of fifty-five minutes’ worth of trims and out-takes from Welles’s lost masterwork, the 130-minute version of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), his renowned depiction of the decline of a patrician Midwestern family. Into the furnace went, by repute, one of the loveliest unbroken takes ever filmed of a ball scene.
A different flawed gem was The Lady from Shanghai, which Welles, who had begun to call himself “a migrant worker”, made for Columbia in 1947. A noir thriller which starred himself and his estranged second wife, Rita Hayworth, it sparkled with sharp-edged flashy support performances and bravura scenes contrived to puzzle and disconcert, much like his more fully realized Touch of Evil (1958).
Welles’s dislocated plots and frequent reminders that you are watching a film bring Brecht to mind. Brecht and Charles Laughton – the subject of an earlier biography by Callow – had asked Welles to join them in directing The Life of Galileo in 1945. Welles, though, respected Brecht’s words no more than he had those of Shakespeare; joint ventures were all but unendurable to him, and for all his nonconformist elan, he was an American populist, not a European Marxist: a ringmaster who wanted to bring the big top to the people rather than the people to the art house. Instead of Galileo, he embarked on a touring musical extravaganza, Around the World in Eighty Days, with lyrics by Cole Porter.
Hello Americans ends with Welles’s withdrawal from Hollywood, to begin a twenty-five-year “exile” in Europe. In the 1950s, new wave cinéastes took inspiration from his camera-conscious, anti-classical style and from his exalted vision of the film director’s commanding role – as did a later generation of independent American movie makers, trained in film schools.
Forty years ago, the American critic Andrew Sarris wrote that if, after Citizen Kane, Welles’s career was in fact a decline, it was never decline pure and simple. Callow puts this same point more positively. After his meteoric twenties, Welles’s creative life involved a “sustained falling apart”, which he nevertheless turned into an “experimental voyage of discovery”. This is an attractive and persuasive view of an ocean-sized talent for which there is still no finished map. One can only hope that Callow continues the voyage.
