Orson Welles, Vol I (81 page)

The all-important feature of that famous contract was the sensational phrase ‘The
distributor shall be entitled to confer with the
producer on the final cutting and editing of each of the pictures prior to the delivery thereof,
but the control of such cutting shall vest in the producer
.’ Everything in the history of Hollywood during the previous twenty years had been directed towards devolving power into the hands of the studio bosses. This centralisation was not to last for
even so much as another decade, but in 1939 it seemed as if the moguls’ success in consolidating power was unassailable, and the approval of the final cut was the symbolic embodiment of that power. Schaefer surrendered it to Welles, a stranger in Hollywood who had never directed a movie in his life before. The moguls must have heard the tumbrils rolling.

‘J
UST SIGNED
!’ screamed RKO’s ad in the trade press. ‘Orson Welles … – brilliant actor and director, to make one picture a year … and
WHAT
a picture is planned for his first!’ Hollywood failed to be set alight; was, in fact, highly sceptical, not to say resentful, from the beginning, not only at the presumptuousness of this outsider from the
theatre being given the run of the coop, but at the bombardment of publicity which accompanied him. Hollywood’s feelings about him are brilliantly embodied in the Pat Hobby story, ‘Pat Hobby and Orson Welles’, which Scott Fitzgerald wrote for
Esquire
magazine shortly after Welles’s arrival. Hobby is a washed-up screenwriter. ‘“Who’s this Welles?”
¹
Pat asked of Louie, the studio bookie. “Every
time I pick up a paper, they go on about this Welles.” “You know, he’s that beard,” explained Louis. “Sure, I know he’s that beard, you couldn’t miss that, but what credit’s he got? What’s he done to draw one hundred and fifty grand a picture?”’ Unable even to get onto the studio lot to scrounge some lunch, Hobby broods darkly about Welles. ‘Welles was in; Hobby was out. Never before had the studio
been barred to Pat and though Welles was on another lot it seemed as if his large body, pushing in brashly from nowhere, had edged Pat out the gate … Orson Welles had no business edging him out of this. Orson Welles belonged with the rest of the snobs back in New York.’ Hobby finally gets a lift from Mr Marcus, a mogul, and begs him for a pass to the studio lot. Marcus is on his way to meet ‘this
new Orson Welles that’s in Hollywood’. ‘Pat’s heart winced. There it was again – that name, sinister and remorseless, spreading like a dark cloud over all his skies. “Mr Marcus,” he said so sincerely that his voice trembled, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this Orson Welles is the biggest menace that’s come to Hollywood for years. He gets a hundred and fifty grand for a picture and I wouldn’t be surprised
if he was so radical that you would have to have all new equipment and start all over again like you did with sound in 1928.”’ He had entered Hollywood’s collective subconscious, a real bogeyman.

Who needed him? was the widespread reaction. Hollywood
was, in 1939, at its dazzling zenith. The system had perfected itself under those thugs the moguls, who somehow, despite their artistic intellectual,
moral and social inadequacies, had got something very right. The most remarkable actors, writers, designers, technicians and craftsmen in the world had been lured into their gilded prisons in Hollywood and given the wherewithal to practise their skills in almost ideal circumstances. For this privilege, their loss of artistic and personal freedom seemed a small price to pay. Both the industry
and its leaders were, with rare brave exceptions, happy with the status quo; it was working – why fix it? Then along comes Welles: Mr Fix-It in person. Welles later stated that established directors like Ford and Wyler had been pleasant to him; it was the producers who caused all the trouble ‘because if I could do all those things, then what is the need for a producer? It exploded the Thalberg
myth, who is in my view the biggest villain in the history of Hollywood. Because he erected the myth of the producer and everybody believed it.’ This belief confirmed Welles’s loathing of authority, but the truth is that initially, at any rate, the industry felt threatened at every level, and insulted. Why should someone – a twenty-three-year-old someone – with no experience of film-making whatever
be extended conditions that were denied to the cream of the movie community?
CAN IT BE THE BEARD
? one periodical satirically enquired, while Gene Lockhart, jester laureate of the Hollywood Masquers’ Club, wrote a savagely funny ditty which encapsulated the scorn and dislike that Welles provoked, providing him with a nickname which stuck like a limpet.

Little Orson Annie’s
come to our house to play

An’ josh the motion pitchurs up and skeer the stars away

An’ shoo the Laughtons off the lot an’ build the sets an’ sweep

An’ wind the film an’ write the talk an’ earn her board-an’-keep;

An’ all of us other actors, when our pitchur work is done,

We set around the Brown Derby bar an’ has the mostest fun,

A-listenin’ to the me-tales ’at Annie tells
about,

An’ the Gobblewelles’ll git
YOU

Ef you
DON’T WATCH OUT
!

This is concentrated malice, and it was not the only instance.
It might have destroyed a less determined man. Welles’s uncommon gift of fearlessness – his sheer courage – was sorely strained throughout his time in Hollywood; whatever black moods he may have endured privately, he never gave any public impression of being
in the least daunted, which is the more remarkable since he had, up to this point, very little experience of being publicly disliked or disapproved of. Now his every action, public or private, was scrutinised in a far from friendly spirit. Hollywood noted immediately that he came unaccompanied by his wife. Fooling no one, Welles airily claimed that Virginia was allergic to Californian life. In fact,
their marriage had irretrievably collapsed under the weight of his compulsive fornication, to the extent that they had secretly filed a separation suit. Hollywood knew that it was over, but what, Hollywood wanted to know, had taken its place? Hollywood abhors a sexual vacuum.

It was not just his wife from whom he was estranged. His relations with Houseman had cooled to freezing point; none
the less, always ready to give the thing one last try, when Welles asked him to Hollywood, Houseman followed. RKO’s contract, after all, was with Mercury Productions, and in letter, if not in spirit, that still meant him. Renting an expensive house in the university area of Brentwood, Welles installed them in some style. His curious ménage (which did nothing to allay prurient speculation) consisted
of a tiny Irish chauffeur whom he nicknamed Alfalfa, Charles, a supercilious and indolent French butler, and a maid; Houseman, Bill Alland and Dick Baer formed the Mercury contingent. There were also, says Houseman, ‘a full contingent of slaves, from whose presence Orson seemed to derive security and comfort in a strange and hostile town’.
³
This was an expensive set-up, and Welles had very little
income: the RKO money was due in instalments, most of it on completion. Naturally spendthrift, he now became reckless, as if to demonstrate his status. Made to feel small by Hollywood, he spent like a big shot, behaving as if he were already a great success. His reputation as an inordinate personality preceded him; instead of downpedalling this reputation, he defiantly played up to it, to the
despair of Arnold Weissberger, who had now taken on the thankless task of being his financial adviser. He and Richard Baer, the Harvard graduate who had been stage managing and playing bit parts at the Mercury and was now Welles’s personal assistant, tried to keep the spending under control. Left to himself, Welles was perfectly capable of buying a plane to get back to New York, believing that this
represented a saving.

Weissberger wrote to Baer, ‘Orson does not think of his income in concrete terms in relationship to his expenditures. He does not ask how much he can spend in the light of his income but spends without regard to his income and then has payments arranged for as best can be done.’
⁴
There was throughout the Hollywood period, an army of minders in Los Angeles and New York
trying to contain his excess. Now, at the beginning of his sojourn, the expenditure was focused on riotous living at Brentwood. ‘Rumours,’ wrote Houseman, ‘began to circulate about the strange all-male population of the house in Brentwood.’
⁵
It was because of those rumours, rather than simple professional hostility, that Welles was accosted as he sat one evening in the Brown Derby restaurant.
The interestingly named cowboy actor Big Boy Williams (later one of the ‘Bad Men of Tombstone’) came up to his table, and accused him of being a ‘queer’: at the climax of their altercation, the cowboy picked up a knife and sliced off Welles’s tie.

Big Boy and Welles had it out, according to Welles, in the car park (curiously, in later tellings of the story, he names Ward Bond, the rather more
distinguished actor, later hero of
Wagon Trail
, as his symbolic castrator); but the suspicion and hostility were not going to go away easily or quickly. He attempted some clumsy gestures at reconciliation with the film community, but these were not successful: when he threw a party, no one, it is said, came. He was photographed with Shirley Temple, but this was regarded as patronising. Wisely,
he hired a personal press representative, the shrewd and witty Herbert Drake, until then Drama Correspondent of the
New York Herald Tribune
, a seasoned newspaperman with sterling contacts. Drake could not make Welles liked or even respected, but he could at least ensure that he was heard on his own terms. This he did; there was an unparalleled outpouring of articles and items over the next couple
of years which matched every snide report with another startling fragment of the hagiography that Drake was busily recycling, not shaming to add colourful details of his own. Referring privately to him as ‘the Christ Child’, he nosed out and fleshed out a great deal of what became the standard Welles legend. This was not simply promotion; it was a necessary antidote to the dominant anti-Welles
outpouring of the Hollywood press. And it was not difficult: liked or loathed, Welles was always news.

He was not helped in his attempts to become part of the motion picture community by his weekly journey to New York to transmit his
Campbell’s Playhouse
offering. These absences stressed his involvement with ‘the rest of the snobs back in New York’.
Welles had no desire to keep returning to
the East Coast; on the contrary, he was eager to persuade the agency, Ward Wheelock, to transfer the broadcasts to Los Angeles, particularly since he planned to use his regular
Campbell’s
actors in his films – whatever they turned out to be. The company was adamantly opposed to this (‘Wheelock says absolutely not,’
⁶
wrote the programme co-ordinator, Diana Bourbon. ‘Not being obstructive – he says
sponsor wouldn’t hear of it. They’re 101 per cent sold on the idea of establishing the
Playhouse
as the glamour market for Broadway, just as Hollywood Hotel in its day was the glamour market for Hollywood’). In fact, Wheelock was far from pleased with the RKO contract altogether, despite its extraordinary provision – yet another unique feature of that remarkable document – that ‘the actor may
be absent from the studio … during one working day each week in order that he may render services in connection with radio broadcasting.’ For a while it seemed as if they might take legal action: they had signed the RKO contract without consulting Wheelock; Welles desperately wired him that it was ‘irrevocable’ and absolutely within the terms of his original contract with the agency. In the event,
no action was taken, but they remained suspicious that Welles’s radio work would become marginal to his involvement in film. They were not altogether wrong.

Houseman sent a defensive telegram to Wheelock which is revealing in a number of ways, not least in giving an indication of how Welles intended to approach film-making: ‘practical considerations suggest enormous advantages to campbells
of present picture tie-up stop orson’s function as actor director master of ceremonies and narrator in this picture identical to his function on radio show so that picture will be in itself unprecedented and highly effective plug for campbell playhouse stop many radio stars have made appearances in pictures but no recognisable and complete radio show with its formula intact has ever before been made
into a motion picture’.
⁷
This is precisely how Welles approached his first screenplay. Houseman continues: ‘we were completely dissatisfied with last season’s publicity work on campbell playhouse stop orson has assumed expense of special public relations man [Drake] to make tremendous rko investment serve best interests of radio program’. Welles liked to suggest that he had strolled into Hollywood,
wide-eyed and a stranger to the ways of a wicked world, but, as this shows, he was acutely aware of the importance of publicity and image. Houseman insists that they will continue to stress the Broadway character of the radio show. If Wheelock will agree to move it to Los Angeles, they
will ship out at their own expense anyone needed for the show who was not in the film ‘during these few weeks
when we are shooting picture’. This telling last remark gives a clear indication of Welles’s innocence of the process of film-making. He believed that he could have it all: the radio programme, the film, and, of course, the theatre. He had already planned his return to the boards after the ‘few weeks’ of filming; it was a typically ambitious programme:
The Playboy of the Western World, Peer Gynt
and, he told Barbara Leaming, ‘something by John Ford’. He reckoned without the complexity of the work of film-making, and, more importantly, without the fascination it would exercise on him.