Orson Welles, Vol I (80 page)

It is difficult to imagine the state of mind which led Welles to embark on this particular lunacy. Floored by
Five Kings
, he might have been expected to retreat and review his situation. Instead, he leaped off in
an altogether unpredictable direction. Obviously, he thought it would make money. Equally obviously, only someone seriously out of touch could possibly think that. Melodrama, whether spoofed or not, was quite dead by 1939. The 1920’s sense of liberation from the values of the Victorian and Edwardian past from which they had just emerged made parodied melodrama (as in
The Drunkard
, or the Grand
Guignol seasons in Paris, London and New York) naughtily daring: sending up Mummy and Daddy. By the thirties, the thrill had long passed. Vaudeville itself was now in terminal decline. Most of the great houses had been converted into cinemas showing films starring those troupers who had so recently topped the bill live. In its great days, vaudeville had lured the biggest stars of Broadway to perform
twenty-minute digests of their hits; but the age of these ‘tab’ versions (tabs being the curtains in front of which they were played) was over, too. Besides, when Alla Nazimova and other great stars had brought their trimmed-down triumphs to the vaudeville stage, they were exactly that – triumphs that were closely associated with them. Had Welles concocted – as had originally been requested –
a twenty-minute version of
The War of the Worlds
, the box office would have been mobbed.

There was another factor, never to be discounted with Welles: sentimentality. He had accompanied his father to the great Chicago vaudeville theatres (including, of course, the Palace) as a child at exactly the moment of its greatest peak in the mid-twenties, when, as he often recalled, Houdini, W.C. Fields
and George M. Cohan were topping the bill. He would go backstage with his father, whose intimate relationship with the chorus girls led to introductions to the stars. This was the magic of the theatre for Welles – not Broadway, still less the Mercury. So, as he told Barbara Leaming, he was thrilled to have his own dressing room ‘with three rooms and bathrooms and
a grand piano’.
⁴¹
The interesting
phrase that he uses elsewhere recurs in his conversations with Leaming: ‘it’s
real
stardom in vaudeville.’ The sense of having actually arrived – of being
someone
– remained as elusive as ever, this quixotic venture having simply added to the humiliation already inflicted in ample measure by
Five Kings
. Of course, both ventures (despite some marginal reporting in the New York press) had taken
place out of town, and concerned a small section of the population: theatre-goers.

The wheels of celebrity grind surprisingly slowly; to the world at large – excluding the theatre-going public of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh, and not many of them – he was the young man made up to look like God Almighty on the cover of
Time
magazine, the triumphantly audacious perpetrator of
The War of the Worlds
and the suave frontman and leading actor of
The Campbell Playhouse
. More distantly, he was the head of something called the Mercury Theatre, which had done
Julius Caesar
in jackboots – still was doing
Julius Caesar
in jackboots, for all they knew. While Welles was crawling round the cities of the East Coast and the Middle West, his theatrical dreams collapsing all around him,
on the other side of the country, unbeknown to him, the moguls of Hollywood were trying to figure out how best to deploy his talents.

There was no lack of interest in him. Far from it: from as early as
Julius Caesar
the New York office of RKO had noted that he was ‘such a brilliant talent that he cannot be ignored’. The studios’ overtures suggest that they were uncertain of how to use him.
In 1937, David O. Selznick, having seen
Doctor Faustus
, invited him to head his story department, a bold and imaginative notion which Welles naturally, and rightly, turned down because, he wrote to Selznick, it would not ‘represent a step toward my ultimate aim: my profession of actor-director’. Warner Bros were equally uncertain as to what kind of an actor he was: that same year of 1937, they
approached him about playing a role in
The Adventures of Robin Hood
: either Friar Tuck or King Richard – which is like wondering if an actor would be better as Hamlet or Polonius. The offer was turned down on financial grounds, but Welles had no intention of joining the ranks of young hopefuls in Hollywood; above all, he was not going to mortgage his soul to a studio. The contract system was now
at its height; those few actors who had attempted to defy it had been cast out of the celluloid Garden of Eden. Hollywood represented in his eyes an abject deal; you surrendered your freedom – as an artist, as an individual – for gold, whether you were an actor, a director or a writer, and he was all three. As far as
he could see, in 1937 the only place where he could exercise his ‘profession
of actor-director’ was the theatre. Nothing less would satisfy him. In motion pictures, the only practising member of that profession was Charles Chaplin, who was a case apart. Erich von Stroheim, the only other serious contender, had been effectively debarred from directing since the débâcle of
Queen Kelly
ten years earlier, his career an awful example of the punishment meted out to those who
refuse to compromise artistically – or financially. Small encouragement there. Above all, Welles was nervous of the figure of the producer, controlling, authorising, permitting, refusing. This was merely Houseman writ large. He was all for father-figures, until they told him what to do. Then he was off. So he held the moguls at arm’s length, while graciously allowing himself to be, from time to time,
screen-tested.

Not that he was uninterested in the movies. Despite his avowed commitment to the theatre, his statements on the subject were becoming gloomier and gloomier, while he began to speak more and more warmly about film. ‘The theatre has lost its narrative style,’
⁴²
he jotted down in his
Lecture Notes on Acting
of 1938. ‘The novel took over,’ he somewhat questionably continued. ‘The
novel exhausted itself and the movie took over from there. The movies can do narrative, character, ideas, mood – unquestionably the most flexible form imaginable.’ He was coming round to it, no question. At one of the early peaks of the Mercury’s success, he had announced the filming of all the productions, and of course
Too Much Johnson
had given him a practical taste of the excitement that filming
can bring. He simply wanted it on his terms. His continuing resistance to all blandishments made the Hollywood headlines.
ORSON WELLES GIVING METRO THE PIX CHILL,
⁴³
reported
Variety
at the end of 1937. Successful tests had caused MGM to tender him ‘a juicy offer’ drooled
Variety
, with ‘company toppers seeing strong possibilities. Player, however, prefers the legit and nixed offers that would bring
him permanently to Hollywood.’ Welles, the report continued, had even held out against an offer of a contract which would release him for a few months every year for stage work. He said he ‘preferred it the other way round, a few months for pictures and the remainder of his time on the stage’.

The studio that pursued him with the greatest ardour was RKO, fittingly enough, since its existence
– its very name – was the outcome of a liaison between the interests of radio and celluloid, which Welles, in turn, was ideally placed to embody. Radio-Keith-Orpheum was the brainchild of David Sarnoff, head
of the Radio Corporation of America. It was Sarnoff who created the slogan ‘A Radio Picture’ which appeared under the logo of a radio transmitter prefacing every RKO film. Eager to link up
his sound technology with movies as they rushed headling into talkies, he had bought into the Robertson-Cole Film Company, at the same time acquiring the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit of vaudeville theatres for conversion into cinemas – a brilliant manoeuvre, linking technology with production and production with distribution.
A TITAN IS BORN,
said the headlines. However, as Richard Jewell observes
in
The RKO Story
, the new company failed to develop either a guiding philosophy or continuity of management for any length of time. ‘As a result, RKO’s films tended to reflect the personality of the individual in charge of the studio at any given time – and since this time was always short, a dizzying number of diverse individuals became involved in RKO’s creative affairs over the years, and the
pictures never evolved an overall style unique to the studio.’ In the late thirties, RKO’s latest ‘individual in charge of the studio’, George J. Schaefer, had instituted radical and ambitious changes in policy, seeking to turn it into a ‘prestige’ studio. Welles, in one form or another, was a catch he was determined to net.

Schaefer enters Welles’s life in around 1938; as one of the most
important instruments of his destiny, he is worth a little consideration. Fifty years old when he took over RKO, he had been in the business for twenty-five years, almost as long as it had existed. Starting as Louis J. Selznick’s secretary, he was, said his obituary in
Variety
, ‘the last of the old line of top-flier industry chieftains who were the architects of the distribution system’. Sales
were his sphere, and he was as successful in building them as anyone in Hollywood; as general manager and vice-president of United Artists, his work in selling their output in 1938 ensured that he alone of the senior management survived Sam Goldwyn’s putsch of that year. Wisely, he took his leave of the organisation to take over from Leo Spitz – once Capone’s lawyer – as Corporate President (business
head) of RKO. ‘A bulldog of a man,’ as
Variety
said, ‘who was often referred to in fear and admiration as The Tiger’, Schaefer made it clear that he wanted total control, soon ousting Pandro S. Berman, one of the master producers of the age, and taking over as production chief himself. He proved to be no crass front-office man. If anything his plans erred on the side of art: embarking on a huge
spending spree, he bought up as many literary properties, stars and directors as he could, often in one-sided deals which disadvantaged the studio. Similarly (since he had no artistic ambitions himself) he
encouraged the development of unit production, engaging independent producers like Sam Goldwyn and Erich Pommer to work under RKO’s banner. It was a dazzling burst of confidence from a studio
which – only just about to emerge from receivership – had had a rocky, if intermittently glorious, history. It was as part of that surge of expansion that Schaefer courted Welles.

He was at first reluctant to consider Welles’s directorial ambitions, seeking to win him with ever-better acting roles. First he offered him the part of Quasimodo in the forthcoming
Hunchback of Notre Dame
to be
directed by Dieterle; like Robert Morley before him, he turned it down, as he turned down
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
. The stakes were rising substantially, but Welles stuck to his guns. Actor-director or nothing. He was very careful, too, about the choice of parts. He would presumably have relished playing either Quasimodo or Jekyll/Hyde on stage; on screen he knew that character acting was only rarely
compatible with stardom. He had thought a great deal about the archetypal quality possessed by stars; he was not going to be the next Laughton or Muni, dependent on their vehicles. Schaefer’s board would have been only too delighted for Welles to fight
The War of the Worlds
all over again, but he wisely steered clear of that, too. Schaefer was sympathetic; Welles, he told the board, ‘does not
want to be the horror man’. MGM, also slightly nervous of offering him an assignment as a director, instead talked to him about being script consultant and leading actor in a film version of the FTP’s great success,
It Can’t Happen Here
; once war was engaged in Europe, the project folded because of nervousness about offence to Germany and Italy.

Back to RKO, where Welles’s recently-appointed
agent, Albert Schneider of Columbia Management, was playing a brilliant game of brinkmanship. He was able to do so, since his client (though certainly in the long run determined to make films) was in mid-1939 frantically trying to get
Five Kings
into town; this was both more real and more pressing to him than dealing with Hollywood. A glimmer of possible backing for
Five Kings
enabled Schneider
to cable Schaefer: ‘new developments regarding welles make it impossible for him to consider films at this time’. Like any suitor, Schaefer became more ardent with every rejection, until finally, backed by Arnold Weissberger’s legal brilliance, the masterly Schneider secured a contract for his client (in the form of Mercury Productions) the like of which no one in Hollywood has ever had before or
since – not financially (the $150,000 he was to earn for each film was not an uncommon fee, and somewhat less than the highest fliers,
Hitchcock or Wyler, might expect) but in terms of control. ‘I didn’t want money; I wanted authority,’ said Welles, years later. He was to act in, write, direct and produce a film a year. To his ‘profession of actor-director’ he had added not only writing but producing.
This was another sensational development. There was some controversy during this period about what was called ‘the one-man show’ film: the movies of Capra and Preston Sturges were supreme examples; Walt Disney’s, of course, even more so. Chaplin and now Welles were the only actors to be included in this category; the crucial element in their one-man showmanship being that they produced their
own films. In other words, they were responsible for every aspect of the picture, from beginning to end; they were, to translate a later phrase of film theory, the ‘authors’ of them, not merely supervisors of the actual shooting. This has now become the standard definition of the director’s role: he will involve himself at every level; it is
his
film, even though he is not nominally the producer.

Directors in Hollywood in 1939 had a much less exalted function, and were expected to fulfil the requirements of the front office in terms of casting, design, even the manner in which the film was lit and shot. Studios had a ‘look’, a set of values which the director was expected to reproduce. David O. Selznick – an independent producer who nevertheless exerted total control over his own pictures
– and Alfred Hitchcock, for example, had a classic producer–director relationship in their work on
Rebecca
: scarcely a page of the screenplay goes uncommented on by Selznick. He is particularly fierce about what he calls ‘movie-ization’ of the original. This sort of relationship is what Welles wanted above all to avoid. Pathologically resistant to authority imposed from above, he was intent on
creating (in whatever medium) the equivalent of a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk: something using all the means of expression at his disposal which he would then personally unify into a piece of work bearing the unmistakable imprint of his own personality. It may be no good, he was often to say, in one form or another, of his work, but at least it’s mine. More than anything else, more than any idea or
concept, more than any human feeling or interpretation of experience, this is what Welles stood for: the insistence on imprinting his own personality on his work. It had been true in the theatre; it was true on the radio; it would most certainly be true in movies. And he had the contract to make it possible.