Orson Welles, Vol I (102 page)

Authors: Simon Callow

Alas, the prophecy was not accurate. Schaefer was to some extent still baulked by the continuing efforts of the Hearst organisation. Spyros Skouras of 20th Century Fox had refused to
take the movie for his theatres; many other theatres submitted to RKO’s muscle and accepted it but never showed it. In the cities business was good initially, but quickly slid even in New York, where it closed after fifteen weeks. In the regional theatres, despite a special low-price launch, things were much worse. Among exhibitors, the picture became a byword for disaster. Charles Higham quotes
the report of the manager of the Iris Theatre of Velva, North Dakota: ‘Stay away from this. A nightmare. Will drive ’em out of your theatre. It may be a classic, but its plum “nuts” to your show-going public.’
²³By the end of the year it had closed everywhere, not to be seen widely again in America till RKO sold its library to television; the renewal of interest in the film caused by this persuaded
RKO to revive it in movie theatres, where it consolidated its influence but still failed to make money. Even its fiftieth anniversary comeback was disappointing; but its influence – or more precisely, its inspiration – had by now grown to stupendous dimensions. In Europe, it became a virtual textbook for the new criticism; in England, famously, the movie magazine
Sight and Sound
polled its readers
to discover that
Citizen Kane
was the most popular of all films, a position it has never lost. Among the cognoscenti, that is; seeming prohibitively avant-garde to ordinary film-goers in 1941, it now seems dreadfully old-fashioned to them. Virtually every film maker to whose work the public flocks, however, has been in some way affected by its example. It is the supreme expression of the legend
of Orson Welles; no one has ever been able to see the film without thinking about him, frame by frame, whether to curse him or to bless him. His young self has been trapped in it, like a fly in amber.

Citizen Kane
, as well as being the first, is also the last fully achieved, uncompromised work of Welles’s career – except, perhaps, for
Moby Dick
, which ran to rather poor business for three
weeks in London, in 1955. Welles had done
Kane
exactly the way he wanted to, under ideal conditions; it failed commercially, despite the biggest brouhaha in the history of the cinema. In the wake of that failure, the nightmare that he had striven so hard and, he thought, so successfully to avoid became his fate for the rest of his career: interference, containment,
manipulation, limitation. It
is a melancholy truth that he had, by May of 1941, at the age of twenty-six created a body of work in several media that he would never surpass: in the theatre, in radio, in book illustration, in film. In each of these spheres, he had made his mark as an innovator, although it is closer to the truth to say that he was an inspired consolidator; his work was an end, rather than a beginning. Certainly
it proved so for him. Denied by temperament and circumstances the opportunity to develop his work, every new venture was conceived, produced and finally delivered in such a constant glare of publicity that it was never possible for him quietly to cultivate his talent. Driven from within to achieve ever more, his work in all the areas in which he was employed had been amazingly accomplished for
one so young; it did not, however, contain the seeds for future development. The same may be said of his personality, equally completely formed at an uncommonly early age. In fact, the work is the personality, the personality the work to an alarming degree. His creations have no autonomy; they are but his creatures. The first person singular, whether frankly and formally, as in much of his output,
or simply in applause-seeking virtuosity of execution, is unavoidable. It was not a question of early maturity, either in his work or his being, as of forced growth. Thus he and his work of this period are brilliant but somehow lacking in illumination; full of flavour, but unnourishing. This was exceptionally stimulating both for his collaborators and his audiences; but only briefly. There is about
both man and work a drive and a barely controlled feverish energy that suggests that the centre cannot hold, that things will fall apart.

The remaining forty-five years of Welles’s life are a sort of sustained falling apart in which, Lear-like, as his world crumbled further and further around him, and as his own behaviour became more and more extravagant, he was vouchsafed extraordinary insights.
Mocked by a world in which he was famous for fish-fingers and sherry, fatness and a cameo role in a film directed by somebody else, denied access to the means of production, he began to explore his medium further and further, no longer exclusively – or at all – interested as he had been in his earlier years, in results. Still reluctant to go within, to examine himself, he produced, in more
and more original forms, a body of wildly uneven work that could never have been predicted from his early efforts. His engagement with his own personality led to the complete abolition of the dividing wall between himself and his creations; but he came increasingly, as he and his legend, the legend of the self-destroyed artist, grew
to monumental dimensions, to display himself as a phenomenon.
He became a figure of pity and terror. He had no castle, no baronial mansion: the world was his Xanadu; he roamed its corridors, looking for money with which to make films, but also, beyond that, for the chances which he had lost. Eventually, he found an extraordinary benevolence towards life, coming finally to smile even on his younger self, that self preserved for ever in
Citizen Kane
.

Welles was not unduly daunted by the commercial failure of
Citizen Kane
. He had projects by the dozen: not one but three South American films in a sort of compendium form under the title
It’s All True
, an adaptation of an Eric Ambler novel,
Journey into Fear
, and Booth Tarkington’s Mid-Western family saga,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, all three of which he started shooting in the fall. He started
a new radio programme,
Orson Welles’s Almanac
, consisting of adaptations of short stories, skits and poems.
The Magnificent Ambersons
and
Journey into Fear
completed principal photography, and Welles left the United States to begin shooting
It’s All True
, now under the aegis of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs. This meant that he was out of the country for the Oscars ceremony.
He received nominations in four categories: as producer, as director, as actor and as co-writer, along with Mankiewicz, who had decided to stay at home.
Citizen Kane
itself was nominated in nine categories.

Each announcement of the film’s name was greeted with hostility: boos, hisses, jeers. John Ford’s
How Green was My Valley
swept the board.
Citizen Kane
won in one category alone: screenplay.
When the award was announced, Mankiewicz was cheered to the echo, drowning out Welles’s name. ‘Mank, where’s Mank,’ the cry went up. It has been computed that if the voting rules were the same then as they are now,
Citizen Kane
would have won the award for best film; for obscure reasons, the extras’ union voted conclusively against Welles (why? He had hired 796 of them on
Kane
). Notwithstanding,
the mood at the ceremony was strongly against Welles. They had had enough of him, Welles the boy wonder, Welles the genius, Welles with an opinion about everything, Welles the cause célèbre, Welles the scourge of Hollywood, Welles the pundit, and now finally, Welles, director of the greatest film ever to come out of Hollywood.

Welles telegrammed Mankiewicz a high-spirited message from Rio:
‘heres what i wanted to wire you after the academy dinner colon you can kiss my half stop i dare to send it through the mails
only now that i find it possible to enclose a readymade retort stop i don’t presume to write your jokes for you but you ought to like this colon dear orson colon you dont know your half from a whole in the ground stop affectionately orson’.
²⁴Mankiewicz, indulging in a
little esprit de l’escalier, had a joke of his own, the acceptance speech he never made: ‘i am very happy to accept this award in mr welles absence because the script was written in mr welles absence’.
²⁵