Happy Birthday, Orson Welles

Much of the Welles story is difficult to put together because he himself was such a teller of tall tales. You know, he went to Morocco when he was 16 years old and the stories he told of his time there, hanging out with a sheik in a freakin’ tent and chillin’ with the Arabs smoking a hookah pipe in the mountains, stuff like that, have just grown in the telling. Then there are times, like Welles’s sojourn in Ireland as a teenager (which really is an amazing story) when he basically strolled into an audition at the up-and-coming Gate Theatre (which had set itself as a rival to the dominant Abbey) and got a part. Welles made it seem, in his letters home, and then later in his life, that he was given a lead INSTANTLY. That’s not quite how it went, but he did, indeed, take the Ireland theatre world by storm as a teenager. He was the toast of Dublin at age 17. This cannot be disputed. The truth is crazy enough without embellishment.

But for Welles, truth was never as interesting as fantasy, and he is at his best when he can project himself into his own fantasies. Isn’t that what Citizen Kane was all about, and War of the Worlds? If you build it, he will come. “Here is my fantasy/nightmare/dream. I request that you participate in it, willingly or no.” Welles was an old-fashioned showman, a purveyor of tricks, and then (in the case of War of the Worlds) acting baffled and “aw, shucks, sorry I freaked you all out” when he was found out. It was brilliant.

Then there is the famous Cradle Will Rock experience (which John Houseman describes so wonderfully in his own memoirs), the voodoo Macbeth done in Harlem with all black actors in the 1930s (which Welles directed at age 22), the Mercury Theatre, the War of the Worlds broadcast, the precedent-breaking deal with RKO which led to Citizen Kane … and then, of course, the craziness of the newspaper war Hearst launched against Welles and RKO because of Citizen Kane, virtually killing the film. Not to mention the following events, the tragedy of the botched Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’s insane time in Rio during World War II, and etc. etc.

Simon Callow’s two-volume biography (and there will, apparently, be a third volume, and I’m waiting for it like a lunatic) is fantastic (if, perhaps, a bit TOO detailed, and I can’t believe I’m saying that, but Callow is so obsessed with his subject that he devotes 10 pages to analyzing a paper Welles wrote as a schoolboy. I appreciate obsession, don’t get me wrong, and God forbid if I ever wrote a book about Dean Stockwell or Mickey Rourke or Gena Rowlands – because I find literally everything about these people interesting. Give me a grocery list scribbled by them, and I’d include it in the book. So I sympathize with Callow). Regardless, one of the spectacular things about Callow’s biography is this level of detail, yes, but also the theatrical background from which Callow comes. He doesn’t just list events. He talks about them in their artistic context. People who don’t know about Welles may just think of “War of the Worlds” or “Citizen Kane” when they hear his name. But there is so much more. Callow analyzes Welles’s production values, his script adaptations, Callow is unafraid to criticize Welles, and he does it as a fellow actor/director. I love that aspect of the books. Why was Welles’ voodoo Macbeth so groundbreaking? And Callow doesn’t just stay on the surface of that incredible event (black actors, mostly non-professional, the Great Depression, Harlem location), but Callow looks at Welles’s adaptation, what he chose to cut, how he rearranged things, and whether or not, in Callow’s estimation, it was successful. Welles saw Shakespeare not as a great man to be revered and feared – but as a guy who wrote awesome plays that could certainly stand to be mucked up with a bit. Callow then uses said adaptation to make theories about where Welles was at that time. What interested him? Let us look at what he chose to cut, and speculate on why he felt that had to go?

David Thomson, in his gigantic Biographical Dictionary of Film, has an enormous entry on Welles, and he closes it with:

In his last years, Welles did more commercials, he narrated documentaries, he attempted to launch fresh projects and to complete old ones. He appeared in It Happened One Christmas (77, Doald Wyre), The Muppet Movie (79, James Frawley), and Butterfly (81, Matt Cimber). But none of those matched his provocative role as the wise man in the back row of the theatre in his friend Henry Jaglom’s Someone To Love (87). In short, he presided over the special chaos of his life as it closed, apparently seeking help and friends, yet secretly sealed against trespass. His unfinished films are now seeing the light of day – even pieces of It’s All True. But so little about the life and work of Welles is all or anywhere near true. He inhaled legend – and changed our air. It is the greatest career in films, the most tragic, and the one with most warnings for the rest of us.

Welles was clearly a prodigy of some kind, albeit a messy one. As a young boy, he was already on his way, and he was lucky enough (or persistent enough) to find mentors who could push him further and further along. He was doing summer stock as a teenager, appearing in Shakespeare, and he was also a student at an elite boy’s school which had a stellar drama department. Welles remained connected with that school all his life. He did not forget his influences, and he did not forget where he came from (although he also would speak of things in retrospect and always put HIMSELF at the center of everything. It reminds me a bit of how Howard Hawks talked. Every great idea in Hollywood, every unpredictable yet ultimately successful casting decision was originally Hawks’ idea, according to Hawks. It’s kind of endearing. It makes it hell on a biographer, but still: these men were storytellers and artists. If you’re looking for literal truth, I don’t know why you would look for it in show business and the people who practice it!)

Welles went to Ireland as a teenager, as I mentioned – and became highly involved in the Gate Theatre, which still exists, run by a fascinating guy named Micheál MacLiammóir. Look him up. Guy has as much interest as Orson Welles, and just as intense a reinvention of self. Welles was one of the most self-regarding of all artists, it was about the power of his personality – it always was – and how his voice (no surprise that Welles made his real mark in radio) could bring his personality (and others) to life. MacLiammóir’s stories of Welles’ first audition for them (“There’s an American teenager in the lobby … he says he wants to audition … what should I tell him?”) are laugh-out-loud funny. MacLiammóir in one of his autobiographies (he wrote several, and rightly so – what a life!!) describes being told about the American teenager in the lobby who was saying he was a lead actor at the Guild Theatre in America (none of it true) and that he wanted an audition. MacLiammóir says sure, send the kid in. In walks Orson Welles. MacLiammóir describes what happened next:

‘Is this all the light you can give me?’ he said in a voice like a regretful oboe. We hadn’t given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, in spite of his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one’s lips. One wanted to say, ‘Now, now, really, you know,’ but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, something much more.

Isn’t that absolutely gorgeous? “He was real to himself …”

Here is a photo I found that I love from 1950 – of Eartha Kitt, MacLiammóir, and Welles. The two stayed friends their whole lives. And it wasn’t an easy friendship – I suppose it never was with Welles – but they remained colleagues and collaborators til the end.

Welles’ journey in the 30s, with the Federal Theatre Project, is well known. He hooked up with another young ambitious guy, John Houseman, and they began to put together projects, the first of which was what is now known as “the voodoo Macbeth” – a Macbeth put on entirely with black actors, mostly non-professional, at a big theatre in Harlem. Welles set the Macbeth in Haiti, with a stage full of crazy voodoo goddesses in headdresses, massive crowd scenes, drum beats – Welles was always about creating an impression, rightly or no. You can see clips of the voodoo Macbeth on Youtube, I think – and I’ve seen clips of it in the documentary I have about Welles at home. It may be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing – all style, no substance – hard to say – but it was a giant hit and it put Welles on the map. White people were flocking to Harlem to see the production. Black people came out in droves. It electrified the New York theatre world. If I could have a time machine to go back and see certain productions, Welles’s “voodoo Macbeth” is in my top 5. (If you must know, Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Chicago in 1945 is # 1).

Welles’ notoriety grew with the shutting down of The Cradle Will Rock (go read Houseman’s memoir for an account – that was the excerpt I posted of his book) – and eventually he and Houseman decided to strike out on their own and form the Mercury Theatre. The Mercury put on stage productions – Doctor Faustus and others – they got a deal for a weekly radio show where they would read classic literature, all adapted by Welles (did the man ever sleep?) – and of course, eventually, the “War of the Worlds” craziness came out of that – which then led to Welles being famous not just in New York but around the world. Hollywood took notice and pretty much air-lifted the entire Mercury Theatre company (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, and all the rest) to do basically whatever the hell Orson Welles wanted. And what he wanted to do was a fictionalized life of William Randolph Hearst. The envy in Hollywood was intense. Who is this Orson Welles character and why was he given such a deal, while I slog along in my ridiculous contract having to do whatever the studio says?? There was never a lot of good will towards Welles.

Citizen Kane which, naturally, got its props eventually – was barely seen at the time, because William Randolph Hearst sparked a war against the studios, saying that he would instruct every one of his papers to BURY the movie, or ignore it completely … if it were to go forward. Nobody wanted to alienate William Randolph Hearst. Citizen Kane was given a premiere, but that was pretty much it. It would be decades before anyone could see it again.

And so Welles made enemies from the get-go, and in a funny way, his career never really recovered its luster – although he would make some pretty damn fine movies (The Magnificent Ambersons comes to mind – although that film was so butchered by the studio that Welles, 40 years later, still couldn’t talk about it without welling up with tears. I love that movie, but it is truly a tragedy what was done to it – and, seen in the light of retrospect, you can see the viciousness of the studio heads, sticking it to their young prodigy who had already caused so much trouble … There is something personal in their attack on Welles. Well, you know how mediocrity hates genius! They set out to destroy him. Welles never really recovered emotionally from what was done to him with Magnificent Ambersons.)

That’s a sketch Welles did, around age 13, of a young William Shakespeare.

In 1937, the Mercury Theatre put up a now-famous (and famous almost instantly) modern-dress production of Julius Caesar. Again, where the hell is my time machine? It was a terribly uneasy time in the world at large. The cataclysm was already happening elsewhere in Europe, and the mood was very very tense. Welles decided to set Julius Caesar in fascist Italy. This was not necessarily a new or an original idea, many companies had been doing putting classic works in a fascist European setting – however, many of these were out of New York, and so word would not have reached Welles about them. It appears to have been original to Welles, or perhaps just an expression of the universal mood at the time. Welles’ gift was never, by the way, in being original. It was in being able to take the dream that was in his own head and create it out in the world in whatever production he was involved in. He was never strictly an innovator, although much of cinematography as we now know it imitates what was done in Citizen Kane, with the deep-focus, and the shot angles. But much of that was Gregg Toland’s contribution, not Welles’s. Welles’s contribution was in believing in the sheer size of the project, and making it happen. He was a showman of the old school, a PT Barnum, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t genius. He played tricks. There’s a reason why this guy was obsessed with magic for his entire life, and even put together a magic show in Hollywood with an all-star cast, including his future wife Rita Hayworth. Welles had no reverence for Shakespeare. No, he had something better: he had love and passion. Shakespeare was just a fellow showman, as far as Welles was concerned, another practical man of the theatre. Welles chopped scenes up, deleted characters, he rearranged the order if it suited him – pulling things forward when normally they happened at the end, whatever … You can tell that he would be a movie director, which is more of a non-linear medium (or can be, with its potential for flashback, or dreams, etc.) With Julius Caesar, Welles kept the stage huge and black with billowing black curtains. Most of the characters wore the black military uniforms of Mussolini’s jackbooted thugs, and there was an intense air of uneasiness and violence around the production. People were blown away by it. It seemed to speak directly to their time, directly to what was going on in Europe. It took New York by storm. Voodoo Macbeth had been earlier that year – so to then come out so quickly with this Caesar so soon after, so different from the Macbeth, and Welles was only 23 ‘ years old. Unbelievable. Unprecedented. The voodoo Macbeth was all about the spectacle. It was all about crowd scenes, and traffic control, and creating an impression of madness, noise and chaos. The Caesar was about giant empty cold spaces, and human beings dwarfed by the surrounding atmosphere, the black of their costumes blending into the black of the drapes so that their white faces shone out, in a tiny frightening way, as though they had pin-spots on them at all times. Such a different conception, look, feel … from what he had done only 8 or 9 months previous.

Here is a series of images from Welles’ Caesar, including some of his sketches for the costumes, setting, and lights (he did everything … the whole production was in his head). I also included a Hirschfeld cartoon of the time.

Callow devotes an entire chapter to Caesar, going into detail Welles’ own thought process, his adaptation, the casting of the roles, the rehearsals. It’s a 40 page chapter. This is not a book for those who just want the author to get on with it already. To Callow, there is nothing to “get on with”. It is the journey. Let us now look at the fascinating composition Welles wrote when he was 10, and see what it might reveal about his concerns. Let us devote an entire chapter to his burgeoning interest in magic and what that signifies. Let us try to piece together his trip to Ireland through letters and diaries and interviews and let us do it over the course of 30 pages. He skips over nothing. Actually, if he skips over anything, it is Welles’s personal life – which is actually a lovely change! Welles’s personal life was always on the backseat to his career, so it takes a backseat in the book. Good.

Callow leaves no stone unturned. He is able to speak about the craft of acting openly, without shame or embarrassment (lots of biographers do not know how to talk about acting – even when their subject was an actor, the writer gets baffled when they try to describe what the subject was doing you can tell they are out of their league). Simon Callow takes acting seriously, sure, but he also knows the buffoonery and fun of a rehearsal process and how ridiculous it can be. He knows how to talk about all of it. He takes his obsession to the most logical conclusion (three volumes), and there isn’t one page that isn’t interesting or illuminating.

Get cracking on volume III, Callow. I demand it.

In honor of Orson Welles, one of our most complex and tragic cinematic figures, here is Callow’s writing on Julius Caesar, from 1937. And a big montage of young Orson from his New York days, into the Citizen Kane days below the jump.

Happy birthday, Orson!

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow

By 1937, though he didn’t go so far as to propose changing the title, he had come to the conclusion that Brutus was very much the central figure of the play. The Mercury, the weekly bulletin that was in effect Welles’s mouthpiece, stated: ‘As those familiar with the play are aware, Julius Caesar is really about Brutus.’ Welles himself added: ‘Brutus is the classical picture of the eternal, ineffectual, fumbling liberal; the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn’t know how and gets it in the neck at the end. He’s dead right all the time, and dead at the final curtain. He’s Shakespeare’s favourite hero – the fellow who thinks the times are out of joint but who is really out of joint with his time. He’s the bourgeois intellectual who, under a modern dictatorship, would be the first to be put up against and wall and shot.’

He had concluded that the play was ‘about’ the anguish of the liberal in an age of dictators. This emphasis meant that a great deal of the political complexity of the play was sacrificed in order to focus on one man’s dilemma. The version Welles fashioned by no means fulfilled Houseman’s claim for the production that ‘the stress will be on the social implications inherent in the history of Caesar and on the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surrounds a dictatorial regime’ or indeed Welles’s own claim at the same time that ‘it’s a timeless tragedy about Caesarism and the collapse of democracy under Caesarism.’ Lepidus was axed entirely; Octavius and Antony downgraded, and the mob, so graphically individualised by Shakespeare, relegated to a largely choric function – in the text, that is.

Its function in the staging was heightened, streamlined; but it became a many-headed hydra, losing the dynamics of individuals in a crowd. ‘Here we have true fan psychology,’ he told The New York Times. ‘This is the same mob that tears the buttons off the coat of Robert Taylor. It’s the same mob, too, that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It’s the Nazi mob anywhere.’ Significantly Welles’s version starts, not with the scene analysed by a million schoolchildren (‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’) but with Caesar silencing the crowd. ‘Bid every noise be still!’ We are in the presence of the Great from the start; there is no context. Rome is its leaders; a distinctly bourgeois reading of history.

Whatever the interpretation, the result was nothing if not effective; a great deal of the Mercury version, in fact, was devised for no other reason than to generate theatrical excitement. The text gives every appearance of having been shaped to accommodate the production, rather than the other way round. His adaptation is exactly comparable to those reviled eighteenth-century adaptors, Garrick and Cibber, his purposes exactly the same as theirs: to exploit the possibilities of their stage-craft and to fit the play to the temper of the times. ‘In drastically cutting the last twenty minutes of the play,’ wrote Hank Senber in The Mercury, ‘Welles was working to clarify the personal aspects of the tragedy and to liberate the play from such concessions to Elizabethan tastes as drums, alarums and mock battles on stage.’ And of course, those things did look and sound ridiculous when the warriors in question were wearing long black leather overcoats and jackboots. Welles certainly wasn’t going to lose the stunning effectiveness of the uniforms because some of the play didn’t fit. Cut it! The lurid theatricality of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler was an essential element in choosing the context for the play, and the physical look of the production was absolutely clear in Welles’s mind from the beginning. There seems, however, to have been some conceptual confusion. If the play – or at any rate the production – is a critique of Caesarism, what does Antony represent? He, surely, is the demagogue, not Caesar; he’s Hitler, he’s Mussolini. Is Caesar then Hindenburg? Somewhat defensively, Welles told The Mercury: ‘I produced the play in modern dress to sharpen contemporary interest rather than to point up or stunt up present-day detail. I’m trying to let Shakespeare’s lines do the job of making the play applicable to the tensions of our time.’ It was a general feeling of contemporaneity that he was after; not a blow-by-blow parallel.

His absolute certainty about the physical realisation of the concept made his collaborators’ work quite cut and dried. Jeanne Rosenthal wrote: ‘Welles dictated very clearly and exactly the kind of look he wanted the production to have, a very simple look, based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. The patterns implied in the Nuremberg “festivals” were in terms of platforms, which were the basis of the scenery, and light which went up or down. The uplight was really taken from the effect the Nazis achieved.’ (And which Houseman had used before in Panic.) Welles described his concept of the physical production in The Director in the Theatre Today the following year: ‘I wanted to present Julius Caesar against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color of red that had certain vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act: that was my conception of the production.’ Welles’s visual confidence is rare among directors. His own skills as a graphic artist, coupled with his experience in designing and building for the Todd Troupers and the Gate Theatre, made him a daunting prospect for a designer. Young Sam Leve, fresh from triumphs with the Federal Theatre Project and the Yiddish Art Theatre, in his own words ‘oozing imagination’, found that Welles was uninterested in his suggestions. In order to get them even considered, he had to convey them to Houseman, who might, if he liked them, pass them on, a ‘humiliating process’ for the young designer, in his own words. However, when Welles asked him for sketches, from the hundreds Leve would produce, on Leve’s admission he would unerringly choose the best, dismissing the less good ones: ‘Sam, you can do better than that.’ The two men were exactly the same age, but as usual Welles immediately and automatically assumed command.

‘At the Mercury,’ wrote Jean Rosenthal, ‘nobody else had any identity for him at all. You were production material. If he liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals – with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to his feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.’ And fun: ‘the initial stages of anything with Orson were immensely entertaining, which carried everything along … he never counted the cost of anything to himself or to anyone else.’ Rosenthal, who became one of the crucial figures in the development of American theatre lighting before her early death in the sixties, was keenly aware of the growth of the power of directors, and identified Welles as one of the first to dominate every single aspect of a production. Rosenthal avoided confrontation with Welles, but he never doubted her strength, demanding much of her within a framework of respect. Her final judgment, though, on her work with him is a chilling one: ‘I do not think Orson made the utmost use of his collaborators’ talent, although he often inspired their achievements. He did make the utmost use of his talents at the beginning, but perhaps his lack of respect for others accounts in some measure for the ultimate dissipation of his multiple talents.’

For the time being, the actors were not complaining. Few of them would have been aware of his psychological baggage. What they saw was a man with very determined ideas putting them into practice with a disarming combination of ruthless drilling and amiable anecdotalising, plus a good deal of horseplay. Exuberant, in some ways still a very young man, almost a boy, he dictated the pace and regularity of work according to his personal mood. ‘When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like sleeping, we didn’t rehearse. If he felt like rehearsing from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damn stage hands’ overtime, full speed ahead,’ according to his then stage manager Howard Teichmann. ‘He was a brilliant, inventive, imaginative director … in a class all by himself. He would sit generally at a table in the centre aisle behind the table, and he would have a microphone on the table. And he would whisper his directions into the microphone. This table also served as his dining table. When he was hungry, he would send people out and they would bring in the steaks and the french fries and the ice cream and pots of coffee a foot and a half high, which he would consume with great relish. And when he was tired, he would say, “All right, children.” Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children.’

‘There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Orson was the big star,’ said Teichmann. ‘He was a year or two older than I am, and he was slim, with a big head and round cheeks and very boyish. And “boy genius” was a term if he didn’t create, he didn’t fight it off … You had to be a certain kind of personality to work with Orson. You either had to worship him or you had to meet him on an equal level, or you had to crumble. And a great many people, you know, would end up with ulcers and he was a great one for giving them. He loved everybody, but, boy, he was tough. “Who me, tough? I’m a pussycat.” You know, that was his thing … he played people off against each other.’ His manner was calculated to be humorously high-handed, shouting out admonitions – ‘shame on you!’ a favourite – if the actor’s work wasn’t to his liking. He was not averse to having a whipping boy: young William Alland, later famous as the producer of The Creature of the Black Lagoon, and known to movie buffs as the shadowy reporter in Citizen Kane, had, when the Mercury was being set up, more or less thrown himself at Welles’s feet, and that’s more or less where he stayed, as actor, stage manager, gofer and pimp. Welles would roar his name o ut, abusing and cajoling him. It was good-humoured, but only just: a throw away from bullying. If you weren’t on the receiving end, it could be fun; to Peg Lloyd it was cheap: ‘he seemed a prep school boy with the cheap humour that preppies have. A genius preppy, that’s what he was: the ringleader of the bullies on the corner.’

Rehearsals for Julius Caesar took place, initially, not in the theatre (the stage was still being reconstructed) but in an abandoned movie studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, ‘the place where the movie industry began’ in the words of Elliot Reid. Under a couple of worklights, while the incessant rain dripped into strategically placed buckets and the plaster tumbled from the roof, Welles arranged his cast on the platforms which Sam Leve had found in an old Shubert warehouse, and which were the essential element of the set that he and Welles had devised. There were four platforms: the first fourteen foot deep (the downstage playing area), the second a narrow high step, the third an eight foot deep plateau, the last a narrower platform rising to a total height of six and a half foot above stage level; there were two flagpoles on either side of the stage. Within this framework, Welles laboured to create the images that he had in his mind. Despite the great informality with which he worked, the stories and the atmosphere of wild, almost boyish fun that he engendered, he was always straining towards a specific and precise visual notion, what Norman Lloyd (playing Cinna the poet) described as ‘the shot’. ‘Every scene had to have a production idea. Is it a shot? Is there something interesting in it?’ He improvised the physical action, constantly altering the moves to achieve the desired shape; the scene wasn’t worked out in advance, in the Reinhardt manner, every eyebrow, every sniffle planned. But the effect was much the same: there was no discussion of character or motivation, simply a dedication to discovering what Brecht had called the ‘gestus’, or gesture, of the scene.

Debate over his methods constantly raged amongst the company, though rarely to his face. Moody, sardonic Coulouris (who during breaks from rehearsal would throw tennis balls against the wall, muttering ‘Be a singer, be a singer! Don’t be an actor! Acting’s horrible’) openly challenged Welles, but he became, Jaques-like, a sort of licensed melancholic within the group. For the most part the actors worked happily at the service of Welles’s invention. Nor was he intent simply on imposing his ideas on them. Norman Lloyd reports Welles as saying, ‘I may not be able to direct actors very well, but once an actor gives me something, I know how to stage it.’ Lloyd himself fretted over the absence of any sort of methodology, feeling that the essence or the truth of the scene was sometimes sacrificed to effect; he was none the less delighted by the opportunities Welles’s staging afforded him. Welles’s instinctive sense of how to release an actor and a scene in physical movement was the equal of his English contemporary, Tryone Guthrie, with whom he shared a revulsion for dealing with the inner life of the character, or indeed, the actor. ‘Your problem!’ Guthrie would briskly tell his actors as they wrestled with difficulties of this kind; the phrase could just as easily have come from Welles.

The concomitant of this external, linear approach was that if the scene was effective, it succeeded; if it wasn’t, it was nothing. Welles struggled for weeks with scenes which resisted his best efforts; this process continued up to the very opening. One such was the scene in which Cinna the poet is killed by the mob. There was from the start a disagreement between actor an director over interpretation, Welles seeing the poet as a version of Marchbanks, all long hair and floppy ties, Lloyd, playing the part, seeing him rather as the sort of man who wrote letters to The New York Times, a prototypical liberal, brilliantly able to see both sides of the situation, congenitally incapable of deciding between them; Archibald MacLeish, in fact. Lloyd hoped to achieve, as he says, an ‘essence’. ‘I thought you could say “this is what it is to not take a position.” ‘ Welles quickly gave in over the characterisation, because he was obsessed – ‘consumed’ is the word Lloyd uses – by an idea of how to stage the scene, a musical, choreographic conception of how to show a mob destroying an innocent man. First of all he needed more lines than Shakespeare had provided, so, after experimenting with improvisation, he drafted in a few from Coriolanus; then he enlisted Marc Blitzstein to orchestrate the voices using a beating drum to indicate the rhythm. Welles rehearsed ‘this goddam chanting and boom boom boom’ for over three weeks. Sometimes Blitzstein took over; neither of them spent any time on the characters or the acting as such.

As for Welles’s own performance, it was a low priority. A stage manager stood in for him throughout rehearsals. The result was that by the time of the dress rehearsal, he had barely acted with his fellow players (which can scarcely have helped them in creating their own performances); nor, never having run the scenes himself, was he very clear about where he should actually be standing. No one knew where he would be coming from or where he would be going to and he was frequently shrouded in darkness. To add to the uncertainty, he was very shaky on his lines, having scarcely uttered them during rehearsals. Throughout his career, on film and on stage, he was never entirely in command of his texts. He was not a quick study and rarely had the time or the inclination to ensure that the words were so securely lodged in his memory that they would spring spontaneously to his lips at the appropriate moment. Fortunately, he had considerable powers of iambic improvisation, and could sonorously if meaninglessly coast along for minutes at a time until a familiar line would, to the relief of the actor who was waiting for his cue, emerge. Since he had not rehearsed the part of Brutus, he had of course no opportunity to explore the character, to experiment with his approach, or to open himself to anyone else’s view of his work. He had decided at some earlier time who Brutus was – who his Brutus was – and simply slotted it in to the production. Brutus, he said on several occasions, was above all intelligent (the character description for Marcus Brutus in Everybody’s Shakespeare reads: ‘he is a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual’). It was Welles’s belief that he had a special gift for playing ‘thinking people’: not, as he expressed it in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, ‘that they’re thinking about what they’re saying, but that they think outside of the scene … there are very few actors who can make you believe they think … that’s the kind of part I can play.’

Happy the actor who knows his own gift. He has at least a chance, given a moderate amount of luck and a shrewd choice of work, of playing straight down the centre of the character to create a vivid and clear image of a particular human being. If he is struggling against type, to express things not in his personal experience or make-up, then he will almost certainly miss the core of the character, however interestingly he may embellish its surface. Though Welles was unquestionably intelligent, the most striking feature of his acting persona is not intelligence but power; he described himself, quite accurately, as ‘he who plays the king’. Curiously enough, his portrayals of ‘thinking people’ often lack intellectual conviction: what he demonstrates is thoughtfulness. Partly this stems from a lack of structure in his own thinking; mostly it derives from the simple technical fact of not having completely mastered the text, and thus the thought. Welles, instead of actually thinking, acts it. It would seem that what really drew Welles to the role of Brutus was not so much his cerebral nature, but rather his nobility: this dark, wild, immature, titanically possessed young man wanted to present himself as the very soul of dignity and responsibility. His method of doing so was – according to his own formula – simply to suppress the ignoble parts of himself. Easy.

This cavalier attitude to his own performance is partly explicable by absorption in other responsibilities; but there is a strong suggestion that he became involved in his other responsibilities in order not to have to immerse himself in his own performance. He didn’t want to evolve his performance; he didn’t want to talk about it, or think about it. In Lehman Engel’s acute words: ‘His own performances happened suddenly for good or ill. They were or were not at the very outset.’ In none of his utterances on the subject of acting does Welles ever speak of the work that goes into a performance. The assumption is that you can either play the part or you can’t; if you can, then that’s it: you play it. It is a complex matter: he seemed to want to be acclaimed for his acting, but not to have to work on it. He expected to be acknowledged as a major actor, while insisting that acting wasn’t a terribly important thing anyway.