City of Nets (77 page)

And John Garfield went on writing his confessions for
Look.
He wrote sixteen pages, then began calling friends, trying to find somebody to talk to. He went to a baseball game with Howard Lindsay, the playwright, and then made a date to come to Lindsay's house for an evening of poker. Oscar Levant was there, and Lindsay's collaborator, Russel Crouse. Garfield drank a lot and lost a lot of money. They talked about Odets's HUAC testimony. Garfield wandered off into the night. He didn't eat or sleep that day or the next.

Hildegard Knef, the young German actress who was returning home after the second of her unsuccessful encounters with Hollywood, accidentally met Garfield in the lobby of her New York hotel, the Plaza. She recalled him as “a chain smoker with a suit like an unmade bed.”

“Name's Garfield,” he muttered, as she remembered it. “Saw you in
Decision before Dawn.
Liked it.” And then, inevitably: “You doing anything? I'd like to talk. Haven't worked for a while. Feel alone.”

Miss Knef said that she had to go to a party that Spyros Skouras was giving in her honor at the “21” Club. “He rubbed his stubbled chin,” she noted. “ ‘You're on the way up, eh? How long you have to listen to his bullshit?' ”

She invited him to come to Skouras's party, but he demurred. “Me?” he said. “I'd love to see their faces.” They agreed to reach each other by telephone—she was scheduled to fly home to Germany the following morning—but when he called her and they brought the telephone to her table, the ceremonies were still going on.

“Can you get away?” Garfield asked. “I feel like the ceiling is coming down around my ears.”

Miss Knef said the festivities would go on for another hour or two. Garfield said he would call again. Skouras urged her to invite her friend to join the party, but she only shrugged.

At 1
A.M.
Garfield called again, and his voice was thick from liquor. “I have to see you,” he said, “gotta talk, walk, speak. Hurry it up.”

“Another hour,” she said. But when she called him at the end of another hour, there was no answer, and so she boarded the early morning plane for Frankfurt.

Garfield had gone to see a new friend, Iris Whitney, who had an apartment on Gramercy Park. They went out to dinner. They sat in the park. Garfield said he felt sick. Miss Whitney took him home and put him to bed. There later were entirely unsubstantiated rumors that he died in the midst of wild fornications. Perhaps. But the official version is, for once, more plausible—that after three days of anxiety, drinking, sleeplessness, and wandering through the wreckage of his life, John Garfield simply collapsed. Miss Whitney put him to bed with a glass of orange juice on his night table. When she woke up the next morning, she found the orange juice untouched and Garfield dead.

 

The process of expulsion worked in a variety of ways, some political, some nonpolitical, some financial, some moralistic, some a mixture of things. Where, after all, are the dividing lines?

Consider the case of Orson Welles. If the House Un-American Activities Committee had really been trying to extirpate all manifestations of liberalism, as most Hollywood liberals devoutly believed, it would surely have subpoenaed Welles. He had campaigned ardently for Roosevelt, and his newspaper columns and radio shows made him one of Hollywood's most audible supporters of the New Deal heritage, of civil rights for blacks, and peaceful relations with the Soviet Union. Welles had talked of running for Congress and may well have dreamed of bigger possibilities. Frank Fay, an alcoholic vaudevillian who had recently made a comeback in a play called
Harvey,
attracted attention in the fall of 1947 when he told an interviewer that Welles was “red as a firecracker.”

The HUAC investigators were not particularly interested in Welles, however. They preferred certifiable Communists who would noisily deny their communism and could then be prosecuted, or else certifiable ex-Communists who would grovel and plead for forgiveness. Welles's complicated finances, on the other hand, seemed to be of considerable interest to the Internal Revenue Service. Welles had deducted as business expenses all the thousands of dollars that he had put into
Around the World in Eighty Days,
and the IRS now challenged those deductions. It is difficult to prove instances of the IRS acting for political reasons, but President Roosevelt had long since inaugurated a policy of asking the Treasury to investigate the taxes of anyone he felt like harassing, a list of victims that ranged from Father Coughlin to Mo Annenberg to the
New York Times.
President Truman's concern for civil liberties was not notably superior to that of his predecessor, and it was remarkable how consistently the tax investigators concentrated their attentions on outspoken liberals. Welles might indeed have tried to evade some of his taxes, and so might Charlie Chaplin, and so might Ronald Reagan, who was then still regarded as a liberal, and so might such free spirits as Preston Sturges and William Saroyan, but while the IRS pursued all these, it seemed considerably less interested in the returns of conservative icons like Walt Disney or Cecil B. DeMille.

Welles did not leave Hollywood in order to escape his tax problems, though the IRS did eventually follow him to Europe and did file liens against all his earnings in the U.S. Nor is there any clear evidence that Hollywood ceased financing Welles's films for political reasons. There were perfectly good business reasons why RKO went to court to claim all rights to
It's All True
for Welles's failure to repay a $200,000 loan, perfectly good reasons why Republic should be furious that Welles left
Macbeth
unfinished for more than a year after he had shot it. By then, by 1948, Europe was exerting its own attractions as a place to make movies. Hollywood producers had discovered that European film crews and locations could be hired cheaply, and European producers had money of their own to offer. Welles negotiated strenuously with Alexander Korda in London to make a film of Rostand's
Cyrano de Bergerac
and another of Wilde's
Salome.
He was less interested, but nonetheless interested, in a proposition from Gregory Ratoff, one of Zanuck's retainers, to come to Rome and star in a film about the eighteenth-century alchemist, magician, and charlatan known as Count Cagliostro.

So although Welles was not literally driven out of Hollywood, and certainly not driven out for political reasons, it just so happened that a number of circumstances in the fall of 1947 made Europe seem considerably more attractive than Hollywood. And so, when William Wyler invited Welles to his home to join in establishing the Committee for the First Amendment in defense of the Hollywood Ten, Welles was wary. He would be happy to support the committee, Welles said, but he had commitments in Europe. His only real commitment was in Hollywood, where
Macbeth
still needed redubbing, not to mention the negotiations over a new score by Jacques Ibert, but Welles seems to have felt an acute need to get away. Since Korda was now being evasive about any specific agreements, Welles signed to play Cagliostro.

He flew off to Rome in such haste that he left behind several “health belts,” which were supposed to enable a fat man to sweat off his fat. He also left behind some special makeup and a lot of false noses designed for his performance as Cagliostro. Welles seems to have suffered from a lifelong anxiety about his nose, a feeling that it was too small, too upturned, too cute, not serious. One of his lieutenants wrote to the Excelsior Hotel in Rome that a shipment of false noses was on the way, and that “the noses can be used seven or eight times if Orson is careful in removing them.” The lieutenant also sent a shipment of Dexedrine and Proloid.

They were much needed. While Welles spent the first months of 1948 acting in
Cagliostro,
he also devoted his evenings in Rome to re-editing and redubbing
Macbeth,
plus negotiating with Korda on
Cyrano,
plus starting work on what really obsessed him, his own production of
Othello.
Welles had no producer behind him, and consequently no funds for another Shakespeare film. He planned to finance the project with whatever money he could earn as an actor.

Then to Welles's hotel in Rome came a telegram from Rita Hayworth, asking him to come and see her on the Riviera as soon as possible. Their divorce would not become final until that November, and Miss Hayworth was quite openly having an affair with Aly Khan, but apparently she and Welles still cared for each other. “I couldn't get any plane, so I went, stood up, in a cargo plane, to Antibes,” Welles said later. “There were candles and champagne ready—and Rita in a marvelous negligée. And the door closed, and she said, ‘Here I am.' She . . . asked me to take her back. She said, ‘Marry me.' ”

Welles returned to Rome the next day and went back to work. Then Korda finally offered Welles an assignment, not to direct but to act in a film to be made by Carol Reed. With some reluctance, and mainly for the money, Welles agreed to play the relatively small part of a megalomaniac black marketer in
The Third Man.
He was more than reluctant. When he arrived on location in Vienna, where Reed planned to start by shooting the fugitive black marketer's flight through the city sewers, Welles shuddered at the smell, complained of having suffered the flu, and said he would have to cancel his whole appearance in the film. It took all of Reed's persuasiveness to cajole him into going to work. Reed even allowed him to rewrite parts of Graham Greene's splendid script, to expand the role of Harry Lime, and to let him proclaim, at the top of the Ferris wheel on the Prater, that richly Wellesian speech about how the age of the Borgias had produced Michelangelo and Leonardo while six centuries of Swiss democracy had produced only the cuckoo clock. The fugitive Welles was never better.

Welles was by now deeply involved in
Othello,
which he planned to start shooting with the $100,000 that he was being paid to act in a 20th Century–Fox epic about Genghis Khan,
The Black Rose.
He persuaded Micheál MacLiammóir of the Gate Theatre in Dublin to play Iago for mere promises of a salary, but he kept changing his mind about Desdemona. He started by filming a number of scenes with his current mistress, a minor Italian actress named Lea Padovani, but since she knew no English, her ability to perform Shakespeare was limited. Then he tried a young French actress named Cecile Aubry, who also spoke very little English but had already been hired for
The Black Rose,
so Welles thought she might like to join him in moonlighting on
Othello.
She lasted less than a week. Anatole Litvak, the director, wandered in and urged Welles to try his friend Betsy Blair, who had recently made a brief but striking appearance as a mute psychotic in Litvak's film
The Snake Pit.
As the new Desdemona, she too lasted only a couple of weeks. And now, in the spring of 1949, it was time to go to Morocco to start filming
The Black Rose.

If Welles's improvisations with
Othello
seem to border on the lunatic, an official Hollywood production like
The Black Rose
was hardly less erratic. This was the beginning of the era in which the Hollywood producers discovered not only that movies could be made more cheaply abroad but that their officially blocked foreign earnings could be spent in no other way. And so, with all the grandiosity with which they had become accustomed to ruling over the plywood-and-papier-mâché sets on their Hollywood back lots, they now invaded the bewildered villages and wildernesses of what had not yet been named the Third World. In the case of
The Black Rose,
which starred Tyrone Power, Zanuck had assigned the director Henry Hathaway to establish his headquarters in the Moroccan city of Meknès and to start shooting his tale of Genghis Khan in desert sites like the Tinrir Oasis.

The temperatures there reached 120 degrees. And the corporate logistics involved the transportation of not only the movie cameras and 150 tons of cable but also 12,000 arrows, shields, and bows. And four thousand Arab extras had to be prevented from stealing everything in sight while they moved from scene to scene. Orson Welles, as Bayan the Conqueror, wore a costume worthy of his title: a mink-lined Russian leather coat made of three hundred skins hanging from shoulder to foot, and a spiked Saracen helmet with a veil of chain mail. And all this in the sweltering Moroccan desert.

In the midst of all the corporate extravagances, Welles did his best to assemble his own forces. He cajoled MacLiammóir, his Iago, into flying from Dublin to Morocco to start shooting, and when there was no shooting to be done, because Welles was still playing Bayan the Conqueror out in the desert, he cabled MacLiammóir, “
I'M SO SORRY BUT . . . WHY DON'T YOU VISIT FEZ? RABAT? MARRAKECH?
” At the same time that Welles was assembling his unpaid performers for
Othello,
he was also sending off instructions to a Canadian named Ernest Borneman, whom he had installed in a villa outside Rome, on how to concoct a movie script from Homer's
Odyssey.
He also had to give a deposition in a New York lawsuit by Ferdinand Lundberg accusing him of plagiarizing Lundberg's biography of Hearst in the script for
Citizen Kane.

Welles finally assembled his penniless players in the Moroccan coastal town of Mogador, where he had found a fifteenth-century Portuguese fortress that struck him as a suitable place in which to recreate Shakespeare's concept of Cyprus. Welles made an attempt to borrow some costumes being used for
The Black Rose,
and when that maneuver failed, he decided to start his filming of
Othello
by shooting the murder of Rodrigo in a steambath, where no costumes would be needed. “We had to go to the public baths and walk in our nightgowns through the streets, and it was heavenly!” Welles dreamily told an interviewer. “I was convinced I was going to die. The wind blew all the time, which seemed to me associated with my death. And things were so terrible, there didn't seem to be any way out of it. And I was absolutely, serenely prepared never to leave Mogador.”