The Magic World of Orson Welles (3 page)

My book could also have said a bit more about Welles's many talents and involvement with media other than film. In 1925, when he was ten years old, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, printed a story about him headlined “A Poet, Artist, Cartoonist, and Actor.” (He had also been a musician, an art he largely abandoned.) In the 1930s a lecture he was booked to give at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago was almost canceled by a major snowstorm that caused most ticket holders to stay home. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he reportedly said to the small audience. “My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear on stage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?” By the end of his life, he could have listed even more of
his selves: actor/producer/director of film and television; orator; journalist; educator; raconteur and interview subject without equal. (If there are talk shows in the afterlife, there should be one involving him, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.)

Publicity and news items about Welles in the 1940s tended to emphasize his Renaissance-man achievements and ability to master all the arts and crafts in the making of motion pictures. One of the most widely circulated advertisements for
The Magnificent Ambersons
, for example, featured a caricature by show-business cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, who depicted Welles as a human octopus—one of his eight hands giving a thumbs up, another giving direction to an actor, another panning the camera, another wielding a pen, another designing costumes, another constructing a model of the Amberson mansion, and two others typing a script. Inevitably, such exaggerations created a backlash. Critic Manny Farber, who didn't like
Ambersons
(he later changed his mind) described the film derisively as “Orson Welles's latest I did it.”

But Welles was in fact multitalented, a conceptualist and manager of a theatrical and cinematic
Gesamtkunstwerk
. Of all his artistic abilities, only his writing has led some critics and scholars to doubt him. The fact that he wrote is beyond dispute. His lectures and journalistic essays, for instance, would make a large and highly readable book. He claimed to have written pulp fiction in his youth, none of which has been discovered. He disavowed the only published novel that bears his name,
Mr. Arkadin
(historians agree the novel was ghosted by Maurice Bessy, although actor Robert Arden swears he saw Welles writing it), but he certainly did write the screenplay for the film of
Arkadin
, along with scores of other original screenplays, many of which were unproduced. Most of the radio, film, and television dramas for which he took credit as a writer are collaborations, adaptations, or brilliantly edited versions of classics—although some of the adaptations, such as
The Lady from Shanghai
and
Touch of Evil
, are radically different from their sources. The debate over his writing, however, has focused not on these things but on his two most famous achievements:
The War of the Worlds
and
Citizen Kane
.

Howard Koch's
The Panic Broadcast
(1970) reproduces the full script of the Mars invasion radio show, which Koch claims to have authored alone. “At the time I was a young playwright doing my first professional job,” he says in the introduction to his book, “which was writing the radio plays for the Mercury Theatre's Sunday evening programs sponsored by CBS . . . built around the name and talents of Orson Welles” (12). According to Koch, a day came when John Houseman gave him a copy of H. G. Wells's novella and instructed him to dramatize it in the form of radio news bulletins. He thought
the idea had no merit, but was told that it was Welles's favorite project. Koch followed orders, and at the end of each writing day, with the assistance of what he calls his “girl Friday,” he sent a “batch of fifteen or twenty pages” to Welles and Houseman, who made “criticisms and suggestions.” These and all other pages were submitted repeatedly for “the revisions and the revisions of the revisions,” which were supervised by his two bosses (12).

Even if we accept this account completely, it gives fragile evidence of Koch's authorship. The basic idea of using news bulletins, which made the broadcast sensational, was entirely Orson Welles's, and during the revision stage Koch acted in part as amanuensis for Welles and Houseman. Anyone who has heard a recording of the entire broadcast must realize that the second half, which switches to a conventional first-person narration, is pretty lame writing. Everything depends on the manipulation of sounds, silences, and accurate vocal imitations of radio news bulletins in the first half of the program, which were not only Welles's idea but also his responsibility as “orchestrator” of the broadcast. On the morning after the show, when news headlines screamed panic and the world press converged on CBS, it was Welles, not Koch or Houseman, who took public responsibility. Nobody on the Mercury staff objected. Fortunately, most of the mail Welles received was supportive. There were, however, angry responses, the most vituperative of which came on November 1, 1938, from probate judge A. G. Kennedy of Union, South Carolina: “I would not insult a female dog by calling you the son of such an animal. Your conduct was beneath the social standing of and would be unbecoming and below the moral perception of a bastard son of a motherless whore. . . . You, if you were not a carbuncle on the rump of degenerate theatrical performers, would, as an effort toward making partial amends for your consummate act of asininity, never again appear on the stage or before the radio, except for the purpose of announcing your withdrawal” (Welles mss., correspondence, Lilly Library).

When Princeton sociologist Hadley Cantril wrote an academic study of the panic broadcast in 1940, he credited Koch as the sole author of the script. Welles wrote to Cantril on March 26, 1940, strongly objecting. Koch, he said, “was very helpful in the second portion of the script and did some work on the first, most of which was necessary to revise.” He noted that several people had contributed, including John Houseman, Paul Stewart, and “other members . . . in our writers department.” But, he added, “The idea for the ‘War of the Worlds' broadcast and the major part of its execution was [
sic
] mine . . . I have always worked with a fairly large complement of writers, but the initial emphasis and attack on a story as well as its ultimate revised
form have in almost every instance been mine, and I have always chosen to assume responsibility . . . whether good or bad” (correspondence, Lilly Library). Cantril was unmoved, and on April 6 Welles sent him a Western Union wire, demanding an errata slip for the book: “I repeat: War of the Worlds was not written by Howard Koch. . . . Can see no conceivable reason for your steadfast refusal to believe War of the Worlds was not only my conception, but also, properly and exactly speaking, my creation.” Cantril responded by saying that Koch and his secretary had offered legal affidavits to prove Koch's authorship. Welles replied, “Mr. Howard Koch, according to your letter, volunteers affidavits . . . I can produce affidavits to the effect that Mr. William Alland wrote it” (correspondence, Lilly Library). But nothing changed, and as of 1970 Koch was still claiming to be the author.

The more notorious challenge to Welles's credentials as a writer originates with Pauline Kael's essay in the
New Yorker
and later in
The Citizen Kane Book
, in which she argues that Herman Mankiewicz was the single author of the
Kane
screenplay. I'm astonished that credence is still being given to this argument, even after Robert L. Carringer in 1978 provided incontrovertible evidence that Welles not only cowrote
Kane
but also contributed some of the screenplay's best moments (see Carringer, “Scripts of
Citizen Kane
”). I'm equally astonished that Kael is still being treated as the sole author of her essay, because it is now well known that virtually all of her research came from Professor Howard Suber at UCLA, to whom she gave no credit or acknowledgment.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that Herman Mankiewicz disliked Welles, of whom he once remarked, “There but for the grace of God goes God,” and he probably spread word around Hollywood that Welles had stolen screen credit. On August 26, 1940, roughly two months after Mankiewicz was hired as a writer, Mercury publicist Herbert Drake sent a memo to Welles concerning an interview for Louella Parson's column, in which Welles said he was writing
Kane
. Mankiewicz, Drake explained, “threatens to come down on you as a juvenile delinquent credit stealer beginning with the Mars broadcast.” Drake went on to paraphrase Mankiewicz, who had announced that “he has you by the ----s,” and “unless you behave” he plans to “1) take an ad in the trade papers, 2) send a story over the wire services, and 3) permit Ben Hecht to write a story for
The Saturday Evening Post
” (Welles mss., correspondence, Lilly Library). Later the same day, Drake reported with conciliatory but condescending news that Mankiewicz “approves very much of what you are doing from an aesthetic point of view, but wonders if the public will understand it.” A week later Drake explained that “the last thing
[Mankiewicz] wants is for us to write any stories indicating he is the author of
Citizen Kane
.” But on the next day, Welles received a letter from Arnold Weissberger, his lawyer and financial advisor: “I have reason to believe that Mankiewicz is going to cause trouble with the screen credit for the writing of ‘Citizen Kane.'” Weissberger quoted from the contract Mankiewicz had signed, which Weissberger had written, and concluded that the Mercury could distribute credit as it saw fit. Two days later, on September 9, Weissberger wrote to Richard Baer of RKO: “Mankiewicz is claiming that he wrote the entire script, and he will probably take the position that Orson had not contributed even 10%.” On September 18 Weissberger informed Welles that he was checking with the Screen Writers Guild and RKO's legal counsel in order to determine the Mercury's rights. The guild had nothing relevant to say, but on September 23 Weissberger told Welles that RKO had confirmed that the Mercury “can give or withhold credit in its discretion.” He added, however, “I do not suppose that you intend not to give Mankiewicz any credit. On the other hand, the fact that you have the power to exclude him from credit under his agreement can be used by you tactfully to indicate that your allowing him to have credit is a matter of good will on your part” (correspondence, Lilly Library).

The incessant need to come to Welles's defense over the credits of
Kane
as they appear on the screen has become tiresome. I bring up this old quarrel not because I believe Welles was a truly great writer—he wasn't, and neither was Mankiewicz. Nor do I believe Welles and Mankiewicz wrote every word of the film. We know, for example, that at Welles's request John Houseman wrote the French libretto of Susan Alexander's opera debut. However, Welles was a very good writer; his films originated as words, and his writing, which was always transmogrified by his work as a director, was a motivating force and crucially important part of his ultimate aims as a filmmaker.

At bottom, Welles could be described as more theatrical than writerly. Nearly all of his radio, film, and television dramas have a flamboyantly theatrical aspect, and as an actor he tended to play what he called “king” types from the old-fashioned theater. We have little documentary evidence of his stage acting, but his performances in film usually depend upon his big, theatrically trained voice (his first word on screen is a whisper, but it sounds cavernous) and his clever but intensely projected expressions and postures. The actors in the films he directed behave in similar fashion, with more theatrical force than we expect in movies, because he insisted that stage and film performance could be equally big or projected, the only difference being that the stage actor should aim broadly across an auditorium while the film actor should aim at the eye of the camera.

As a man of the theater, Welles was also in a very fundamental way a magician, and most of the theater, film, and television shows he directed have a spellbinding quality, making use of black art, mirrors, trap doors, hypnotic lighting, and various sorts of camera trickery. Where his work as an actor is concerned, one place where this tendency is especially evident is Gregory Ratoff's somewhat campy but enjoyable film
Black Magic
(1949), a few scenes of which Welles also directed. Welles stars as the eighteenth-century mountebank Cagliostro, who brings Marie Antoinette's entire court under his hypnotic spell. He's repeatedly seen from a low angle, towering over the other players, wearing black tights and earrings, flashing his eyes, giving full vent to quasi-Shakespearian rhetoric. He must have relished playing an egomaniacal, carnival-show actor who makes everybody believe he has magical powers. The movie even gives him a chance to exhibit a few sleight-of-hand effects unaided by camera or cutting.

Welles has often been described as a magician, but in an equally important sense he was also a pedagogue. This attribute was probably rooted in the tutelage he received from his mentor Roger Hill at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. At age nineteen he collaborated with Hill on
Everybody's Shakespeare
(1934, reissued in 1939 as
The Mercury Shakespeare
), a series of three books for young people, containing abridged “acting” texts of
Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night
, and
The Merchant of Venice
. Hill wrote an introduction containing a brief biography of the Bard; a commentary on the quartos versus the folios; and a series of notes on plots, chronology, Elizabethan grammar, and arguments over who actually wrote the plays. Welles contributed an essay titled “On Staging Shakespeare and Shakespeare's Stage” and illustrated the books with almost five hundred charming sketches in charcoal and pen-and-ink. These slender volumes are now extremely rare. I have a copy of
Julius Caesar
, given to me as a gift. On the inside of the front cover is a stamp saying it belongs to “Miss Burke's School.” Below the stamp are the signatures of eight children—all girls—who checked it out from the school library in the 1950s and '60s.