Orson Welles, Vol I (84 page)

At first, to protect Gibbons, their relationship was conducted clandestinely; always a bonus for Welles. When not alone with her he fraternised with the Hollywood outsiders, attending (Frank Brady tells us) a ‘forbidden’ book launch, that of Aldous Huxley’s
After Many a Summer
, unmistakably based on the life of the key host and hostess of Los Angeles high society, the
newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, the comedienne Marion Davies. Only those who did not wish to dine, or who were no longer invited to dine, at Hearst’s Spanish gothic folly San Simeon on the coast near Santa Barbara appeared at the Huxley launch; Welles fell in with this crowd.

None the less, Welles was keenly aware of the need, not merely to fight back, but actively
to improve his image. Under Drake’s brilliant tutelage, he now started to cultivate the Hollywood media. In practice, this meant those arch-rivals, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, queens of poolside gossip, both of whom he now courted assiduously and with due care not to favour one above the other. To be caught in the crossfire between them could be fatal, as he was later to discover. His fabled
charm worked its familiar magic on them. ‘Too bad Orson Welles isn’t an Englishman,’ wrote Hopper (by far the sharper of these two weird sisters) in September of 1939. ‘If he had been, Hollywood would never have given him such a run-around. We reserve that for our own citizens. Mr Welles doesn’t scare easily and I’m thinking he’ll make
Hollywood sit up and beg for mercy.’ A month later, Parsons
was writing: ‘If Mr Welles makes a great picture, I’ll be the first to say so … we cannot deny that Mr Welles is a brilliant young man.’ Drake’s counter-campaign was beginning to take. He identified an insatiable interest in the legends surrounding ‘the Christ Child’, and, having issued a summary of the salient miraculous events for the attention of editors, he applied to Dr Bernstein for more.

Even that arch-idolator had become aware of the absurdity of some of what was written. ‘As for the chronological story of Orson the thing which is definitely known is the fact that he arrived in Kenosha on the 6th of May 1915. On the 7th May, 1915, he spoke his first words, and unlike other children who say commonplace things like “mamma” and “pappa”, he said “I am a genius.” On May 8th, 9th
and 10th, 1915, little was heard about him in THE PRESS, but on May 15th he seduced his first woman. After that date, things happened fast since the Rajah of Geek came through Kenosha in the guise of a Fuller Brush man and gave Orson a brush which he uses as a beard and set out on his theatrical career playing, as you and the whole world knows, Peter Rabbit.’
²¹

Welles continued to be in close
contact with Bernstein (still, after all, his legal guardian for another two years) and the Hills. Roger and he were still business partners in the Mercury Shakespeare on discs; their plan to bring out a fourth (
Macbeth
) to add to the already available
Caesar, Twelfth Night
and
Merchant of Venice
was to engender correspondence throughout the next eighteen months. Hill had, in his own sphere, been
passionately promoting Welles: in a circular for
Everybody’s Shakespeare
(now, seemingly, called
Orson Welles’s Shakespeare
) he writes under the headline
THE FOREMOST NAME IN AMERICAN AESTHETIC LIFE TODAY:
‘I have seen no movement appear upon the education horizon comparable in immediate importance and in future hope to the instantaneous success and worldwide acclaim of Orson Welles and his Elizabethan
offerings. Hailed throughout the press as the white hope of the American theatre, Orson Welles’s destiny is, to my mind, of even greater magnitude than this. He is also the white hope of the American classroom. The contagious enthusiasm for great literature which should be part of every student’s heritage is today woefully lacking.’ The Mercury can be persuaded out on the road, he says,
if only there are enough postcard requests to him to do so. ‘I have told Orson that he owes it to himself and that he owes it to America to found a truly National Theatre – to spend at least six months out of each year carrying his
stimulating offerings to aesthetically undernourished students and adults throughout the length and breadth of our country.’ Welles had, apparently, promised that the
1938 tour would last till the following winter. Hill’s final sentence explains the momentary coolness between them since Welles had taken up residence in Hollywood. ‘The young man who finds no temptation in fabulous movie offers can be persuaded I hope not to confine his performances to the few large cities that can offer long and completely underwritten performances.’

It is one of the many
uncommon aspects of Welles’s life that he, a grown and famous man, should remain in constant contact with these two openly adoring and demanding older men, neither of whom was either his father or his lover. He remained highly responsive to both of them, affectionate and considerate, even through the more tedious of Dr Bernstein’s demands, and even at times of greatest pressure. Bernstein was invited
by Welles to California; he came (‘I have never been happier in my life’) for a stay at the Château Marmont, then, returning to Chicago, he decided that he should settle in Los Angeles for good, partly to be close to ‘Pookles’. In order to do so, he asked Welles for a yearlong loan to establish him; the letter is couched in Bernstein’s usual terms of emotional blackmail: ‘I never stood in your
way and never imposed on you and will not start now. But I know that you are in a position to help me without a great sacrifice on your part … you can imagine how unhappy this writing makes me and what a battle it was to decide to do this. But I am driven to distraction and have no alternative … lovingly and distractedly, Dadda P.S. Whatever you decide will make no difference in my feelings for
you.’
²²
Then, handwritten, he adds: ‘you have helped many stranded actors who meant nothing to you. I hope that I mean more than they did to you.’

It worked, of course; he moved to California, where Welles, in addition to helping him financially, attempted to get him employed as RKO’s medical consultant. Failing in that, he used him as his personal physician; accident prone as Welles was,
this kept Bernstein busy until he was accepted by the California Medical Board as a regular practitioner. He was, at any rate, (and despite the occasional whimsy) an excellent source for Herb Drake, who had secured a major coup for Welles: a three-part series on him to be written by
Saturday Evening Post
’s star reporters Fred Smith and Alva Johnston, who needed all the colourful detail they could
get. Drake wrote to Bernstein asking for childhood pictures of Welles,
especially those relating to ‘the fabulous Dick Welles’ about whom, he says, Alva Johnston wanted to do a separate article, shamelessly adding that the doctor would be the next subject.

Welles, meanwhile, had submitted his 19 November Final Shooting Script to the Hays Office for their comments. ‘We are happy to report,’
wrote the secretary, Joseph H. Breen, ‘that the basic story seems to meet the requirements of the Production Code.’ There were minor cavils: in the introductory prologue ‘some censor boards may delete scene of gun being fired … many censor boards will delete scene in death chamber.’ Racial issues seemed to concern them above all: ‘care will be needed with the costumes of all natives … there must
be no suggestion of nudity, of course, and the breasts of the women must be covered at all times … the same care should apply to heads on poles, etc … please take care to avoid any inference of miscegenation.’ Blasphemy was, of course, out of the question (‘the expression “Thank God” must be changed’) and, interestingly, they warn that the British Board of Censors will not like the portrayal of Kurtz
as being partially insane, not the burial service. With these few reservations, Welles had the go-ahead from that troublesome quarter. There now seemed no further obstacle; shooting could at last begin, silencing the still virulent scepticism. The war in Europe, however, began to loom larger with every passing day. Schaefer became more and more nervous about the film, urging Welles to drop the
overt political parallels (the very possibility which had at first recommended the project to him); Welles immediately agreed. Too late; the final blow, in December, was the costing estimate for the Final Shooting Script: $1,057,761, more than double the agreed figure.

A great deal of the expense was due to the particular requirements of the subjective camera: in order to preserve the continuity
crucial to the notion, Welles wanted to maintain enormously long takes over considerable distances. The only solution to this problem was the elaborate technique of feather wiping: the camera is locked off at the end of a shot; the next shot resumes at the same place, and the camera moves off again. As Robert Carringer describes it: ‘if Marlow was standing on the deck of a boat that had just
docked, his eyes would pan to the side of a building on the shore. The pan would continue in the new shot and come to rest as Marlow engaged in conversation.’
²³
A concomitant of this method was that the special effects would have to be created before principal photography began; Vernon Walker’s department estimated twelve or fourteen weeks for this work. This meant, as Carringer points out, delaying
the start
of shooting till March at the earliest; the actors would have to be laid off till then. Schaefer and a desperate Welles met in New York to discuss the situation. Welles brought with him a script he had been working on alongside
Heart of Darkness: The Smiler with a Knife
, from a thriller by the Anglo-Irish poet C. Day Lewis under his nom-de-plume Nicholas Blake. Based squarely on the
English fascist Sir Oswald Mosley and his plans for a coup, it was witty, topical – and cheap. He could make it, Welles assured Schaefer, while the Special Effects for
Heart of Darkness
were being prepared, for as little as $400,000. He would take no salary, just a cut of the profits; this was agreed.

With the new deal in place, he returned to Hollywood in mid-December of 1939. Houseman describes
a party in the Brentwood house at which Welles announced his good news and his bad news: the postponement of
Heart of Darkness
, and – as a consolation prize – the imminence of
The Smiler with a Knife
. The urgent question of the payment of the actors during the inevitable delay while the new project was set up was broached a couple of weeks later over a supper at Chasen’s; Richard Baer, Bill Alland,
Herbert Drake, Albert Schneider (now his personal manager) and Houseman were present along with Welles. The description of what he calls a ‘staff meeting’ provides a memorable set-piece in Houseman’s book. Waiting until the end of the meal before addressing the matter in hand, Welles – by now having consumed a great deal of wine, washed down with a comparable quantity of brandy – airily proposed
that the actors should be taken off RKO’s payroll and put onto that of the Mercury. Being told that there was no money for this, he accused Albert Schneider of ‘pissing it away’.
²⁴
Houseman, weary of sorting out Welles’s impasses, demanded to know what he was going to do. Welles wanted to know what
he
would do. ‘Tell them the truth for once,’ said Houseman. At which Welles roared like a gored
bull. ‘I never lie to actors!’ he howled, and then started to throw the contents of the table, including two dishes of flaming methylated spirits, at him. Houseman prudently withdrew, not just from the room, but from Los Angeles, and, he supposed, Welles’s life. Avoiding Welles’s calls and not responding to his telegrams, Houseman drove stolidly to New Mexico, where he wrote him a letter terminating
their working relationship – at least, on its present basis. ‘In the past year my position with you and the Mercury has become something between that of a hired, not too effective manager, a writer under contract and an aging, not so benevolent relative,’
²⁵
he wrote, in words subtly different from those he printed
in his memoir. ‘There seems to be some emotional thing between us, lately, which
instead of being helpful and fruitful merely succeeds in embarrassing and paralysing us both.’ Even though he had started the letter by saying that ‘nothing that has happened recently affects the very deep affection I have for you and the very real delight I have found in association with such a talent as yours’, and ended by saying ‘nothing would make me happier than, one day, again to produce plays
together’, his every word attests to the severance of the bond that had united them, their mutual dependence. ‘We have gone through too much together in the theatre and had too much joy of it for me to be willing to let our partnership follow the descending curve of misunderstandings along which I see it so clearly moving.’ They no longer complemented each other; indeed, the other’s very existence
was a sort of indictment. For Welles, Houseman was the living evidence of an earlier self, a self he had left behind, the boy he was; for Houseman, Welles had grown to a monstrous independence which made him feel dowdy, small, insignificant – and petty. ‘I have found myself accepting this new position of mine not always with good grace, and I have found myself far too frequently buttressing
my position with a kind of cynical, destructive passivity which I do not like any better than you.’

Once happy with the role of witty, deep-revolving Buckingham to Welles’s Gloucester, Houseman too might have cried: ‘And is it thus? Repays he my deep service/With such contempt? Made I him King for this?’ Not only had he ceased to be important in Welles’s life, Welles had now become so public
a figure that Houseman was no longer able to see the artist in him, and his association with Welles’s artistry was the elixir that made life worth living. In a letter to Virgil Thomson (also, interestingly, rewritten for publication in his memoir) he announces the break-up of their partnership, saying: ‘If an artist finds that public response can be stimulated by monkey shines (social and mechanical),
then the necessity for, even the interest in, creative work inevitably dwindles. That is the main reason why, for seven months now, a picture (under the most magnificent contract ever granted an artist in Hollywood) has been “about to be made,” talked of, speculated over, defended, attacked, announced, postponed, reannounced to the tune of millions of words in thousands of publications without
the picture itself (either on paper or even in Orson’s own mind) having got beyond the most superficially and vaguely conceived first draft.’
²⁶
He was wrong about the amount of work Welles had done; the reasons for the delay on the film are none the
less interesting: ‘the moment it gets made it enters the world of tangible-work-to-be-appraised instead of potential-work-of-a-genius-which-can-be-talked-conjectured
-about-written-about …’