Orson Welles: Hello Americans (35 page)

With one charming exception, this did not involve film. His career in celluloid was, to say the least, desultory. MGM was trying to push him into playing the tiny part of the Prince of Wales in
Mrs Parkington
opposite Greer Garson, which he successfully (and wisely) resisted; Darryl Zanuck was similarly rebuffed
when he tried to persuade Welles to appear in
The Keys of the Kingdom
. Welles was planning an educational 16mm colour film, but this, like most of his educational projects, came to nothing. Mercury Productions continued essentially as his private office, engendering projects and acquiring rights. One of the more promising of the projects was Saint-Exupéry’s just-published
The Little Prince
, which
Welles, seeking to maintain the book’s enchanting relationship between word and image, envisaged as part live action, part cartoon. This was not a new genre: Walt Disney had mixed forms several times, and indeed Welles approached him with a view to collaboration on
The Little Prince
, only to have his overtures rebuffed. Disney is said to have smilingly observed that there was only room for one
genius in his studio – no doubt a reference to the widely publicised R
KO
debacle. This is to be regretted, because Welles’s was a witty and playful approach to a masterpiece whose later filmic incarnation as a plodding, over-reverential musical was something of a catastrophe. Welles’s interest was serious: he paid the substantial sum of $12,500 for the rights after reading the American translation
in proof, plus an option advance of $ I,250, and actually wrote a first draft screenplay (later he tried to buy the stage rights too, another enticing prospect that came to nothing). The extant screenplay is one of the innumerable discarded torsos that constitute such a large invisible proportion of Welles’s output; even at times of apparent inactivity, his industriousness was never less than
prodigious. Welles was many things, but he was no slouch.

The most significant project on which he worked, the most properly Wellesian in its scope and the one that came surprisingly close to being made, was Tolstoy’s vast epic
War and Peace
. There is a certain magnificence about attempting to film a novel of such density, with its complex and challenging analysis of war, in the midst of the
greatest embroilment in human history. The idea was the result of the exuberant encounter between two fearlessly ambitious figures, Welles himself and Sir Alexander Korda. Korda (born Sandór Laszlo Kellner in a Hungarian
shtetl
) had renamed himself after the Latin phrase that headed his film reviews when he was a
young
journalist in Vienna:
Sursum Corda
– Lift Up Your Hearts – which was pretty
much the effect he had had on the British film industry. Denied continental outlets during the war, he was starting to spread his net wider, concentrating in particular, very successfully, on co-productions with American companies.
Lady Hamilton
and the Lubitsch masterpiece
To Be or Not To Be
were among the results. Korda had met Welles on the celebrity circuit; the two showmen instantly took
to each other. Korda liked his artists flamboyant, a quality in which Charles Laughton – with whom he had worked on three films, two completed and one abandoned – had been disappointingly deficient. Welles’s contagious breadth of enthusiasm was far more congenial to him than Laughton’s intense searching and agonising.

Building on the meeting he and Welles had had after Welles’s return from Brazil,
Korda sent the temporarily fallen hero a telegram suggesting that they work together:
War and Peace
was the outcome. Welles was off like a greyhound out of a trap: he would produce, direct, write and play the central character. Korda announced the film as part of his ten-year, £35m package to secure the future of British film. The prospect of working for an independent producer, especially one
who was not based in Hollywood, was exhilarating for Welles, and he set to with a will. Or at least he intended to: by mid-1943 he was apologising to Korda for being so heavily involved in radio work, but was still raring to go, he insisted:
WOULD LIKE START WORK WITH WRITERS HERE OR MAKE SHORT TRIP LONDON THEN POSSIBLY MOSCOW.
⁸
Clearly his experience in Brazil had done nothing to discourage Welles
from impossible trips in wartime conditions; naturally he was eager to make a personal demonstration of the Soviet–American friendship that he had so often endorsed from the conference platform. Korda, with his incomparably wide circle of international acquaintances, had mentioned the project to his friend Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, then rather busy himself – ‘personally, I am up to my
neck in very difficult and serious work, filming two series about the life of
Ivan the Terrible
’.
⁹
Eisenstein had already, with Vsevolod Pudovkin, offered Korda some thoughts (now lost, alas) on how to shoot the great novel. But the great film-maker encouraged Korda’s project, revealing his own remarkable ability to be au fait with gossip on the other side of the world, as it must have appeared:
‘It seems that from the very start you have insured the success of your undertaking by engaging Orson Welles for the production and for the role of Pierre Bezhukov. I think that here your brilliant intuition
will
bring excellent results,’ he wrote in his very good English. ‘Curiously enough, Orson Welles seems to me as one of the most interesting and promising figures of the Western Cinema, although
I know almost nothing about him (two or three comments about
Citizen Kane
, two or three stories about radio activity and I believe a photograph of him with a beard, sitting at table in “Brown Derby”). Would like to learn more of him in order to check up on my own intuition.’

Welles continued to work on
War and Peace
, or at least to plan for it (no portion of a screenplay exists); in interviews,
he claimed to have asked Shostakovich, then very much the outstanding Russian composer of the day – his ‘Leningrad’ symphony recently rushed out of Russia on microfilm to be played in every concert hall in the free world – to write the score. But somehow, nothing happened with the film. Partly this was to do with a liver complaint, which had felled Welles for some weeks over Christmas and the New
Year; partly to do with the sheer difficulty of accomplishing such a vast project in wartime. His energies meanwhile had been diverted into a project very dear to his heart, scarcely on the scale of
War and Peace
, but rather easier to realise.

Seeking to make a personal contribution to the war effort, he turned to the theatre, and to his first love – vaudeville preceding even his passion for
Shakespeare. He had lately given some expression to this love in his radio comedy shows, but had already indulged it as far back as 1936 with
Horse Eats Hat
, his surreal take on
An Italian Straw Hat
at Project 891, its cast crammed full with out-of-work music-hall entertainers; and, in the same year, with
The Great McCoy: His Wonder Show of 1936
, a gala
jeu d’esprit
staged to raise money for the
theatre. Central to Welles’s feeling for vaudeville was his passion for illusion, and specifically for magic, which he loved immoderately, both as spectator and as practitioner. Like Charles Dickens, he was obsessed by mastering its skills; he subscribed to all the trade magazines and was a dedicated member of, among other organisations, the Los Angeles Society of Magicians, the International Brotherhood
of Magicians, the Society of Amateur Magicians, the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians and Bert Wheeler’s Circle of Magic. This was no passing enthusiasm, but a lifelong commitment: in his first production for Unit 891,
Doctor Faustus
, he had made extensive and startling use of magic, but that was just the beginning. Over the years he disbursed sizeable sums on tricks; his correspondence of
the early forties reveals him putting in large orders at least once a month, often more: within five weeks
in
May/June of 1944 he submitted urgent demands for
The Art of Illusion, U-Namit-I-Find-It, Something Borrowed, Something New
and complete courses in stage hypnotism, the
Hypnotic Rigid Test, Hypnotic Influence
and
Hypnotism on Animals
; to his considerable, and somewhat petulantly expressed,
chagrin he was unable to get hold of the Edwards Magnetic Wand and the Frank Kelly Gimmic Cup, which, he insisted, should match the Petrie Lewis shell wand. On the other hand, he was able to acquire the Squirmy Worm rope, whose tricky wrigglings he managed, in the fullness of time, to master. But it was not as a technician that he shone: his personality was the real magic. For him, there was poetry
in the very names of these ingeniously devised tricks, and it is touching to find him poring over the instruction leaflets, like any child with his magic set.

In fact, childhood – the scene of his first exposure to magic, on his father’s trawls through the vaudeville theatres of Chicago, often dropping in on Harry Houdini backstage, he claimed – is the key to Welles’s understanding of magic.
At a highly impressionable age he had seen Howard Thurston perform the Levitation of Princess Karnac. Thurston had passed the hoop around the floating princess in question to prove the absence of wires, rods or sheets of glass. He then came down to the footlights and implored the audience to be as quiet as possible, because ‘the slightest noise might have a dangerous effect on the princess’.
¹⁰
They all knew, he says, that Thurston was lying, because they knew that the machinery wouldn’t budge. ‘But we couldn’t see the machinery – Thurston had shown it couldn’t be there so we gave up. It wasn’t a puzzle any more – it was magic. In the precise meaning of the words it was marvellous and wonderful. Nobody made a sound. ‘Like Dickens, Welles longed to reproduce in his audiences the innocent
awe of his own first infant experiences in the theatre. ‘Magic is pure theatre and a good magician does more than he pretends – not less,’ he said. ‘The transformation of an audience of grown-ups into as many little children is the best trick there is and no one’s explained how it’s done.’ In a phrase that resonates with profound echoes across the whole of his career, he wrote of the conjuror, in
his introduction to Bruce Elliot’s book
Magic as a Hobby
, that ‘he’ll fail to amuse if he doesn’t amaze’. A real magician’s task, he continues, is ‘to abolish the solution, the very possibility of
any
solution in the minds of those he seeks to amuse’. In magic’s Golden Age, he adds (there is always a Golden Age with Welles), ‘magicians offered. laughter as part of the show but never permitted
disenchantment.
For
a marvellous hour or two they elevated their most adult audiences to the status of delighted children.’ Lamenting the decline of magic into entertainment for jaded sophisticates – ‘Wizards of today … work their wonders in the frowsty hubbub of the cabaret, competing with bad whisky for control of the beholder’s mind’ – he notes that ‘the children are all home asleep, and of
course the children are magic’s source and meaning, magic being, after all, no more than a formal and serious approach to the serious business of playing with toys’.

It is striking to find a man who saw childhood as a prison from which he longed to escape so warmly extolling the condition. The truth is that Welles had indeed bypassed his own childhood, but had immediately begun to wonder whether
he had not forsaken Eden for something far less precious: mere adulthood, the world of knowing and understanding, the sphere of will. Magic – proper magic, as he saw it – represented that blissful lost kingdom. It is noteworthy, too, that, proclaiming himself ‘one of that dwindling and gloomy body of cranks who wishes magic could have been kept a mystery’, he stresses that there should be no possibility
of the audience analysing the tricks, just as he hated any analysis of himself or his work: mysteries that must not be probed, like the mysteries of his own life – the mysteries of personality, of talent, of creation. He sought to purvey astonishment and delight, unquestioned as to methods or motives: making himself omnipotent – like the child-conjuror who seeks to strike his audience of
family and friends dumb with awe – he requires a trusting public, who will not merely suspend but altogether banish disbelief. ‘If astonishment and delight won’t bring an audience into a playhouse any more, then of course something is rotten in the state of the Union, and it isn’t only magic that is doomed.’ In truth, Welles was never a very skilled magician, mainly because (as his magic supplier
in the nineteen-seventies, Richard Bloch, observed) he was unable to stop himself trying to improve the tricks, but also because – which is perhaps only to say the same thing from another angle – his personality overwhelmed the magic, as it overwhelmed everything else to which he turned his hand. Richard Himber (the Richard Bloch of the early forties) had written Welles a note accompanying a trick
he was supplying: ‘with my lousy presentation, the audience used to gasp, but with the way you present tricks, you will probably have to have a doctor round to revive the fainting women when they see how you crush this bag into your pocket’.
¹¹
It didn’t quite work out that way.

Welles had made his first tentative appearance in the guise of conjuror in 1941, with his then girlfriend Dolores del
Rio as his lovely assistant (he sawed her in half); but now, in 1943, he felt ready to offer himself in that guise to a wider public in a show specifically staged for servicemen under a circus tent on the MGM lot on Cahuenga Boulevard; such members of the general public who came along would have to chip in with a few dollars. ‘It’s taken me a lot longer than I hoped to grow up to be a magician.’
¹²
he wrote in the exuberant publicity blurb for
The Mercury Wonder Show for Service Men
, as he called his entertainment. ‘Many things have interfered with my career. This week it really started though.’ Despite the adjacent red-and-gold circus ticket wagon, the purpose of the presentation was by no means to make money (merely not to lose any would have been an unforeseen bonus; it had cost $40,000
– $26,000 of which was contributed by Welles personally). During the day, to promote the show he talked on local radio programmes, visited women’s clubs, addressed shipyard workers and wrote guest newspaper columns; there was some competition for audiences even when the seats were free.