Orson Welles, Vol I (82 page)

His involvement with the radio programme continued hectic and combative: Diana Bourbon, as imperious as her name suggests, proved a formidable sparring partner, one of the few people who treated him as
an equal (‘Now listen dear’ a typical letter starts). She took no nonsense from him: ‘Why did you two lice can
Mr Chips
?’
⁸
she wrote to Welles and Houseman. ‘You were all agog to do it last year when it didn’t mean much. Now that it’s real box office you turn it down.’ Complaining about the sloppiness, incomprehensibility and expensiveness of one broadcast (
Algiers
), she wrote to the Campbell’s
front-man Ernest Chappell, in a letter also sent to Welles, ‘They tell me you had 9 native musicians and a girl singer. Is Orson paying for these or did you get an okay direct from Ward? Look Chappie, dear – one thing I want to warn you about. Orson is a very fascinating personality. He sings a siren song to anybody who listens to him. Keep your feet on the ground, a firm grasp on your common sense
and
DON’T LET HIM HYPNOTISE YOU
!’ Welles liked Bourbon personally, even enjoyed their jousts, but her interventions were exactly what he most detested: she was telling him what to do. The sooner he could get out of it the better, to enjoy his new freedom in Hollywood as his own master, choosing his own scripts, making his own experiments, choosing his own actors.

‘Now listen dear,’ she wrote,
in an effort to get him to face the realities of his situation. ‘We are not advocating a star-spangled month of January just for the sake of spending money or making agents happy. We are doing it in a desperate attempt to save you and to save your show … who will you take? Who – of comparable box-office stature? I don’t give a god-damn whether they’re great actresses. We’re past the point where
we can consider that.
ARE THEY BOX OFFICE
? Will the public – a large and sizeable proportion of the illiterate, tasteless proletariat that is the radio audience
of America tune out Charlie McCarthy simply and solely because they
NEVER
miss
ANYTHING
their darling does? I don’t care who you choose. But tell me
SOMEBODY.
Don’t just waste time by telling me who you
WON’T
have. Tell me who you
WILL.
Who you
WANT
to
HAVE
?’ ‘Welles was famous, terribly famous and highly regarded,’ Paul Stewart told Francois Thomas. ‘So much so that the guests, and they were great stars, were more terrified of broadcasting than of anything else. They had no experience of it. One week, a great star came on the show, and he sacked her. It was unbelievable: we had to call the sponsor and they gave her an enormous
sum for the period, $5,000, unheard of. He rehearsed her, and then sacked her. It was terrible. He did it decently, apologising, privately first and then in front of other people, saying that it was entirely his fault, that he’d made a mess of the casting, and had been misled by others. It was not funny at all.’ Compromised by celebrity casting and the increasingly recycled nature of the material
(
It Happened One Night, Broome Stages, Only Angels Have Wings, The Citadel
and
June Moon
being typical fare), the programmes had fallen into an unremarkable routine level, half drama, half chat-show, reflecting Welles’s waning enthusiasm for the medium. Still, Welles wrote a defiant telegram to Diana Bourbon, stating his credo: ‘please remember that whatever gives our format individuality beyond
regular interest attaching itself to our guest is my own extremely personal rather particular style which must needs express authentically my own enthusiasm and tastes’.
⁹
Welles’s Playhouse ended in March of 1940, after prolonged squabbles throughout his first year in Hollywood; but that was the credo which alone kept him going through the dark months ahead.

His most pressing concern, of course,
was to decide on a subject for his first film. He had been contracted to make two films, the first to be delivered ‘no later than January 1st, 1940’. One of RKO’s few remaining contractual rights was that of story approval; intensive consultations with Schaefer had produced a list of potential titles of which the favourites for Welles were
Heart of Darkness
(which he had included in a recent triple
bill for the Mercury Theatre of the Air) and that old ignis fatuus of stage actors,
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Like Charles Laughton, Welles was convinced that the adventures in rhyming couplets of the nasally challenged Gascon would make a successful English-language film; Schaefer and his advisers were less convinced. Out of deference to Welles, to show very clearly that they were not interested in
simply imposing their will on him, they decided to put it to the test. The Gallup
organisation was commissioned to poll the relative popularity of various projects. Their results were unequivocal: to the question ‘Which would make best movie?’
Northwest Passage
was chosen by 44 per cent,
Rebecca
28 per cent,
Grapes of Wrath
25 per cent; both
Heart of Darkness
and
Cyrano
were chosen by 3 per cent.
(The services of Dr Gallup were further employed to discover what the public thought about Welles himself, and the results were gratifying: only 36 per cent of those questioned liked him; but – a sensational figure – 91 per cent knew who he was; and only 2 per cent, reassuringly, were against his beard.) Perhaps encouraged by these findings Schaefer backed Welles to do
Heart of Darkness
, despite
the unequivocal verdict of the market researchers, because Welles had convinced him that it would be cinematically experimental and could be made political and controversial. Although Schaefer had no intention of losing money from whatever Welles finally came up with, he saw clearly that there was no point in trying to get a merely well-made film out of him. He needed something that would trade
in on his notoriety – that would be distinctively Wellesian: flamboyant, ambitious, and controversial, without being too nakedly theatrical (as
Cyrano
could certainly have seemed). The RKO board, meanwhile, had other ideas: they were still pressing Welles to film
The War of the Worlds
, but Schaefer saw that as merely réchauffé. If, as Welles promised,
Heart of Darkness
would be innovative and
provocative, as well as being Prestige Work, then he would back it. It would define the new RKO as nothing else could.

So Welles set to work on making a screenplay out of Conrad’s dense, mysterious, endlessly resonant story of Charlie Marlow’s search up river in quest of Mr Kurtz, the trader turned God. It was a challenge that few experienced writers would have dreamt of taking on. Welles
asked Houseman to do a treatment for him, but he gave up almost immediately, finding the undertaking both impossible and pointless. ‘Orson, who was beginning to have his own doubts about the project,’
¹⁰
wrote Houseman, ‘had the satisfaction of feeling that he had, once again, been betrayed.’ Houseman returned, sulkily, to New York to run the radio show; their only contact was when Welles made
his weekly journey east. In his work on the screenplay, Welles proceeded slowly and methodically, pasting the pages of the novel into large scrapbooks, making drawings and notes on every phase of the story. He had Richard Baer conduct a study of tribal anthropology which ran to 3,000 pages, meanwhile conducting a self-education in film-making wherever he could get it. Amalia
Kent, an experienced
and quick-witted continuity supervisor, was seconded to brief him on screenplay form, while Miriam Geiger taught him the essential grammar of film-making; her hand-made lexicon of lenses and shots is, even today, a model of simplicity and clarity. Thus instructed by these two ladies, he put their lessons into practical effect in his script, as well as everything that he learned from the RKO technical
departments. Wide-eyed, he toured the mediaeval manor that was a Hollywood studio in 1939 – like Todd School writ large – meeting the craftsmen, taking note of the capacity of the workshops, examining the contents of the wardrobe and property departments. It was now that he made his justly famous remark about a studio being the best electric train set a boy ever had: he was powerfully struck
by the comparison with the bloody-minded willpower and dogged ingenuity that he, Houseman and Jeannie Rosenthal had needed to make anything happen in the theatre at all. His passionate technical curiosity was answered to his total satisfaction; he had films run for him night after night, returning again and again to the recently completed
Stagecoach
to study its narrative mastery. He would ask
a different technician each time to watch it with him, asking ‘How was this done? And why?’ It was, he said, like going to school. No one could have been a better student. For once, he prepared everything as thoroughly as could be.

He intended, it is almost superfluous to say, to seize both Conrad and the cinema by the scruffs of their respective necks, and to leave both transformed out of
recognition. As far as Conrad is concerned, the initial pull of the story on Welles is clear to see. It had great personal resonance for him; many of its themes continued to fascinate him for the rest of his life. His work on the story, moreover, fed in various subtle and subliminal ways into his first complete film. The central figure of Kurtz is an epitome of the ambiguity of greatness, or, more
precisely, of greatness gone wrong; this was an obsession of Welles’s from the first, starting with the brilliantly wicked hero of his teenage play
Bright Lucifer
and the charismatically inspired but wrong-headed John Brown of
Marching Song
. It is, in essence, the figure of Faust, the over-reaching genius, willing to trade for passing pleasure – mere material gratification – what it is that truly
makes him great. ‘Both the diabolic love,’ says Marlow of Kurtz, ‘and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.’
¹¹
And again ‘I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith and no fear, yet struggling
blindly
with itself.’ It is above all his emptiness that defines Kurtz: ‘there was something wanting in him – some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency, I can’t say.’ He is a hollow man (the announcement of his death being the celebrated epigraph, of course, of T.S. Eliot’s poem,
The Hollow Men
): ‘the wilderness echoed loud with him because he was hollow at the core.’ This hollowness, this absent centre, is common to many American heroes (Gatsby a noted instance); it seems to have rung a bell with Welles himself, as, of course, did the ‘magnificent eloquence’ of Kurtz.

‘Of all his gifts, the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his
ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.’ The uncanny power of the voice, the diabolical seduction of words, was a magical attribute with which Welles was entirely familiar. Formally speaking, too, there are aspects
of Conrad’s tale which intrigued Welles: Marlow is an ‘unreliable narrator’ – we are never entirely sure whether what he tells us is absolutely true. One of the many reflections that
Heart of Darkness
provokes is on the nature of story telling: an enormous story within a story, it casts a peculiar and bewitching spell. Story telling, its power and its dangerous seduction, profoundly fascinated
Welles. And one of the most compelling aspects of the story Marlow tells is that its hero dies with a mysterious phrase on his lips.

So much for Conrad. Welles determined to make explicit what he found buried in the story. He would bring it up to date, relocate it (to South America) and identify Kurtz for what so obviously he was: a fascist. Possessed by perverted eloquence, fathomlessly corrupt
yet worshipped as a god, threatening with his primitive emotionalism the very basis of civilisation, what else could he be? Conrad offers a hint of Kurtz’s political activity (‘He had been writing for the papers and he meant to do so again “for the furthering of my ideas. It’s a duty”’); Welles made the hint a fact. ‘The picture is, frankly,’ he wrote in a memo to Herb Drake, ‘an attack on
the Nazi system.’
¹²
He felt a need to give Marlow a character, lacking, he believed, in the book: ‘He is willing to tell you how he murdered his wife but seldom volunteers his name. Being lonely, he protects himself from the spirit of loneliness, by candour. You are immediately in his confidence but he never gives you intimacy.’ Further, he decided that
Kurtz and his fiancée (whom he named Elsa;
she is known only as the Intended in Conrad’s text) should be gripped by overwhelming lust for each other. At a certain point during the evolution of the script, Herb Drake issued a synopsis of Welles’s treatment to the publicity department of RKO. It gives some indication of Welles’s eagerness to be all things to all men.

‘The story,’ says the memo, ‘is of a man and a girl in love. They are
separated by his career at the moment and the girl is coming to find him. The man is exploiting the river as a trader and as an explorer and is the head man of a whole company that is doing this in the name of a non-named foreign government. Girl goes to help rescue him, since he has gone beyond the point reached by any of his assistants and has been missing for some months. There is a hell of
an adventure going up the river. The action takes place largely on board a rusty steamwheel paddle steamer and at the stations of the trading Co. along the shore. There is an unhappy ending which we won’t need to mention, man dies and the girl goes away unfulfilled. There are cannibals, shootings, petty bickering among the bureaucrats, native dances, fascinating light-colored native girl who has some
connection with our hero. There is a jungle in flames and heavy storms of a spectacular nature … it all builds to a terrific climax …’
¹³
Worried, perhaps, that someone at the publicity department may actually have read the original story, he adds: ‘While he is changing the locale … and adding characters and moving the girl from Europe to the river, Welles is in no way violating Conrad. His feeling
is that his treatment of
Heart of Darkness
is completely in the Conrad spirit and represents what the author would desire done in a film if he were alive today,’ which is what they all say.