Bookplanet: biography of Orson Welles, the best movie director until Bergman (in my humble opinion)

The KO blow from RKO
Review of Orson Welles: Hello Americans
by Simon Callow
Philip French salutes the second part of Simon Callow's majestic life of Orson Welles, which charts the director's loathing for Hollywood after the release of Citizen Kane

Eleven years have passed since the publication of The Road to Xanadu, the first volume of Simon Callow's life of Orson Welles. This second part confirms that, when completed, his project will not only be the best book on Welles but also one of the great biographies in the field of cinema and the performing arts. By then, it will be as long as the splendid three-volume autobiography of Welles's closest associate and subsequent adversary, John Houseman, who figures so prominently in The Road to Xanadu.

Callow's first volume covered Welles's life from his birth into a well-off Midwestern family in 1915 and his precocious boyhood and adolescence. After achieving fame in the radical New York theatre of the late 1930s and attaining national notoriety for his sensational radio production of The War of the Worlds, this 'boy wonder' was given a contract by RKO to work in Hollywood with an unprecedented degree of creative freedom. The book ended with the making of Citizen Kane, not just a remarkable directorial debut, but one of the greatest films of all time, the controversy it aroused and its relative failure at the box office.

Hello Americans picks up the 26-year-old Welles in 1941. Covering six extraordinary years, it addresses 'the most persistent question asked about Orson Welles: what went wrong after Citizen Kane?' There is no simple answer. From the start, Callow dismisses as glib and untrue two frequently advanced explanations. The first is that Welles was self-destructive, the second that he was the victim of a conspiracy on the part of unimaginative, envious and vindictive studio heads and their contacts in the press.

The book begins with Welles doing a familiar juggling act: directing his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, appearing in and supervising an adaptation of Eric Ambler's Journey Into Fear on an adjoining sound stage, preparing to go to Latin America to make the State Department-sponsored It's All True (the Mexican section of which he was handling by remote control) and writing and presenting a weekly radio show.

He gave a hostage to fortune by leaving for Brazil when Ambersons went into postproduction. While he attempted by phone, cable and an unreliable postal service to work on it, others took over. A catastrophic sneak preview in Pomona (accompanied by the brash Betty Hutton musical The Fleet's In) gave his enemies in the RKO front office the chance to reshoot the end and to cut it down to fit a double bill. This crucial absence after the principal shooting of a movie, accompanied by lengthy instructions from afar as to how his film should be edited (which were largely ignored), was to persist with all his subsequent Hollywood pictures. Was he merely impatient to move on or was he so afraid of making something imperfect that he sought both an alibi and the chance to be exonerated by posterity?

Meanwhile, the ill-planned South American adventure became increasingly chaotic. Endless reels of film were shot at the Rio carnival and in the city's slums. But nothing came of the proposed movie until some of the material was assembled after Welles's death, hinting at what might have been. His voracious, lifelong appetite for work, food, sex, new experiences and fresh excitements came to the fore in Rio. According to one witness, Welles, while looking at some footage his team had taken during the carnival, pointed to a row of chorus girls and said : 'I fucked her and her and her.'

In addition to the filming, he was making regular broadcasts, giving lectures and becoming an expert on Latin American politics and culture, which would lead to Hello Americans, the radio series on Pan-Americanism that gives this book its title. But Callow intends the name to convey more than this. He believes that a crucial connection between everything Welles did at that time was his deep concern for what it means to be American. Thus his eventual departure from the States for Europe was a gesture of great profundity, at once tragic and defiant. In dealing with this bizarre excursion to South America, Callow brilliantly sifts conflicting evidence from various sources to produce a vivid, lucid narrative out of this complex affair.

Welles returned from Brazil to find himself frozen out of RKO, where the joke 'All's well that ends Welles' circulated, and he was not to direct another film until after the war ended. But he remained very much in the public eye, starring in a single movie a year to make money, staging a celebrated magic show in Los Angeles to entertain the troops, appearing on radio, and writing newspaper columns.

In dedicating himself to politics and the war effort, he unwisely expressed contempt for Hollywood and belittled his profession. Nevertheless, he kept a foot in showbusiness, becoming guest presenter of Jack Benny's radio show (where he mocked his own public persona) and marrying the most beautiful and desirable woman in Hollywood, Rita Hayworth. The marriage soon went sour, the neglect being entirely on his part. But after the failure of his Broadway musical extravaganza, Around the World in Eighty Days, landed him in debt, he exploited Hayworth by persuading her to appear with him in the thriller The Lady From Shanghai. Columbia boss Harry Cohn, one of Welles's bêtes noires, would never have financed it without her. Their marriage in many ways resembles that between Arthur Miller (whose career as radio playwright was encouraged by Welles) and Marilyn Monroe (who was briefly Welles's lover in her pre-starlet days).

His interest in politics, as Callow demonstrates, was serious, idealistic and well-informed. When he became an associate editor of the influential liberal journal Free World, its founder, Louis Dolivet, appeared to be grooming him to be the first secretary-general of the United Nations. There was talk of him running for the Senate as Democratic candidate for California or for his home state of Wisconsin, where he would have been up against Joseph McCarthy. He was later, in a vainglorious way, to blame himself for the election of McCarthy. His own dreams of greatness encouraged him to believe he could even become President. Certainly, he was close to the White House, and when his hero Franklin Roosevelt died, it was Welles the CBS network called on to give the first eulogy.

But he was too much of a loose cannon and too lacking in guile to sustain a political career, and, for all his claims to be speaking for the people and the common man, too remote from the public. In 1945, with a reckless disregard for his political future, Welles courageously took up the case of a black ex-GI who'd been blinded by a racist cop in South Carolina shortly after being demobbed and he became a hero for blacks and liberals. Bringing the white lawman to justice became a passionate cause. But his broadcasts on the subject had the Deep South up in arms, attracted hate mail, brought accusations of communist propaganda (the story had initially appeared in The Daily Worker), and brought an abrupt end to his programme and his radio career.

Many of Welles's admirers are besotted apologists. Callow is clear-eyed about the behaviour of this self-aggrandising egotist, but he's never smugly censorious. He brings his own experience as an actor and director to bear on Welles's films and performances and there is here some of the most vivid and instructive writing on the craft of movie and stage acting I've ever read. 'The truth is,' he observes, 'that on screen Welles was an extraordinary presence, but rarely an engaged actor.'

The book concludes with Welles deeply in debt, estranged from Truman's America, disgusted with Hollywood and going into what was to be an almost permanent exile in Europe. He left behind him a messy version of Macbeth, which wasn't released for another three years, and a long trail of unrealised projects, among them a life of Christ, a film of Mein Kampf and a version of War and Peace. Saddest of all, perhaps, is that he wasn't able to accept the invitation of Bertolt Brecht and Charles Laughton to direct the American premiere of Galileo.

Three pages from the end, there's a heartbreaking story. In July 1948, Richard Wilson, Welles's right-hand man for more than a decade, informed the absent Welles that the New York warehouse that had been storing the props and scenery from the Mercury Company's great prewar plays, including those from the voodoo Macbeth and the anti-fascist modern-dress Caesar, hadn't been paid the $100-a-week storage fee for several years. They were thus about to sell the stuff off and indeed they did so. Simon Callow doesn't underline the significance of this. He expects us to recall the end of Citizen Kane, when the detritus of Kane's life, ending up with the Rosebud sledge, is tossed into the furnace and it all goes up in smoke into the sky above Xanadu.