The Sheila Variations

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

The second volume of Callow's huge Orson Welles project (excerpt and discussion of the first volume here), this takes us through a chaotic (or, more so than usual) period in Welles' life. He had been brought to Hollywood in the wake of the War of the Worlds brou-haha, and had been referred to left and right as the "boy genius". His first movie - Citizen Kane - which took on William Randolph Hearst, a thing you just didn't do - was a debacle. Time has vindicated the film but nobody saw it when it first came out, because it was not distributed widely. It was buried, for fear of unleashing the wrath of Hearst himself. In this second volume, we see Welles trying to pick up the pieces. He went back to New York and did theatre, he directed his second film - The Magnificent Ambersons - World War II broke out, and he was sent down to Rio de Janiero to film Carnival, as a way of promoting friendship between Brazil and America.

That turned into a complete runaway train, along the lines of Francis Coppola filming Apocalypse Now for two years, with no end in sight. Welles had the time of his life in Brazil, and yet the memos flying back and forth from the studio to Brazil and back speak to the increasing anxiety of the bigwigs at what their "boy genius" was really doing down there. You can start to feel the larger forces of "the industry" at work. Because there is nothing more fun in Hollywood than pulling someone DOWN whom you have once built UP.

Volume II is more upsetting than Volume I, because, in a way, you can feel his demise approaching. And you wonder what that will mean for him, how he will handle it.

He was not just a victim of circumstance, of course. He could be wild and uncontrollable, and many times he didn't understand (or didn't want to understand) the rules of the game. Perhaps he understood the rules, but he had always felt that the rules didn't really apply to him. And for so many years they DIDN'T. I mean, if you spend your teens and early 20s having the most extraordinary journey of anyone ever, where you repeatedly do the impossible and are praised for it, you certainly can't be blamed for having an expectation that the rest of your life will go like that. Orson Welles was a giant man, a big lumbering man - but inside, he could be quite immature. He liked to party, to eat, to drink. He didn't really have discipline, he liked to work when HE wanted to work, and when he wanted to party - well, let's all party. He would have spurts of unbelievable productivity - it's like he never slept - and he had entire productions of things trapped inside his head, so when he would go to direct them - out it would all come. Set design, lighting, costumes, blocking - he had it ALL inside his head. Amazing imagination.

But let's talk about Callow's book for a moment. Volume 1 ends with Citizen Kane in 1941. Volume 2 goes from 1941 to only 1947. It is almost 450 pages long. This gives you some idea of the level of detail Callow goes into that I mentioned before. He seems incapable (and this is not quite a criticism) of discerning what is more important than something else. Volume 2 covers only six years. Orson Welles died in 1985! Of course Callow had to push it to three volumes, but judging from the first two - he might have to push it to 5, 6 volumes. There are times when I do think: "Okay ... I don't need to know anymore about this particular topic, thank you very much ... let's move on ..." But I cannot help but be awed at the amount of work he has done, and, frankly - although I knew the major events of Welles's life, Callow's book shows me that I didn't know the half of it. What happened between is given as much face-time as the big famous moments. I enjoy Callow's thoroughness. One of the reasons I enjoy it is because his writing is so good. You can hear his voice, first of all - it gives the book an almost warm feeling. You are in the presence of a guide, a guide who knows more than you do, but who can spin a yarn in a way that you want to keep listening. Callow analyzes everything. He, an actor, knows that much of what happens in an actor's life is the downtime, so he doesn't skip over it. But still: just know going in: This book is 444 pages long and it covers only six years.

To be honest, I don't care if it does go to 6 volumes. I'd read them all. It is a bit much, excessive, really ... but then again: I think Welles warrants that. It's a singular type of career, its own thing ... nobody else had a journey like his ... there is nothing in it that is similar to anybody else's. And THAT is worth noting at length. Which, God love him, Callow does.

I do think the strength in the books - and why they will last, and why they are important - is because of the analysis of events, not just the telling of them. Callow analyzes things. He looks at Welles's work, and is not such a fan that he cannot discern what doesn't work. But he doesn't ever just stop with "this doesn't work" - he goes into WHY. Now that, for me, is like blood to a vampire. I want MORE of that in these types of biographies, not less.

While Welles was whooping it up in Brazil, he left his film The Magnificent Ambersons in the hands of the editors at the studio, a tragic mistake. Famously, the film was butchered, and all of the existing prints - of Welles's version of it - were destroyed. A horrible loss. One which Welles never recovered from. His spirit was broken, in a way, by that experience.

He went on, though, and made Lady From Shanghai, a film I adore - with his then-wife, the troubled Rita Hayworth (whom he made a blonde).

The excerpt I wanted to choose today (and again: there are so many! I didn't know what to pick!) - has to do with Welles' filming of Jane Eyre, with Joan Fontaine as Jane. Welles played Mr. Rochester. It was a troubled shoot, and it showed one of Welles's weaknesses: he wasn't directing the film, and so all of his energies had to go into his acting - but he found that to be boring and frustrating. It was not in his nature to just be an employee. He was meant to LEAD. So without that "leader" role ... who would he be? The situation at that time, in Hollywood, was not set up to congratulate and reward "auteurs" and the guys who did end up making names for themselves as personal film-makers (John Ford, Howard Hawks, others) - were company men, and able to work within the system. They loved the system. Hawks has said he never did a damn thing he didn't want to do. I believe him. But for Welles, it was more difficult. He had a problem with authority - unless it was him in charge. You can see the ego at work here, the ego that had served him so well up to that point - making it possible for him to break barriers and do the impossible ... but now it's starting to harm him. You can feel it happen in the book. You want to quietly pull him aside and speak with him seriously ... but alas, it is already too late.

Dying for the next volume to be published, Mr. Callow, even if it's a 700 page book about a two-week period. Let's get a move on.

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

Whatever the ill will between Welles and RKO, Hollywood at large had not dismissed him; he was still a huge figure in the landscape. But what to do with him? In 1942, the producer David O. Selznick was planning another of his grandiose literary adaptations; unlike his recent triumphs, Gone With the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), this one was to be drawn from a truly great source, Jane Eyre. He decided that Welles should play Jane's moody employer, Edward Rochester. Welles had known the producer since they had dined together after a performance of Doctor Faustus in 1936, when Selznick had offered him the job of head of his story department. (Welles slyly suggested that his then business partner, John Houseman, might be better at it). As was his wont, Selznick sought to throw every particle of talent he could muster at the project. Jane Eyre was the dream of the English-born director Robert Stevenson, who had been under contract to Selznick for some time without actually making a film for him. His biggest success in America had been Tom Brown's Schooldays; he had just completed a decent and financially productive French Resistance movie, Joan of Paris, for RKO, and was preparing to join the Forces himself, as soon as Jane Eyre was shot. Selznick had equipped him with an army of writers, including Aldous Huxley (not hitherto noted either for his expertise in the work of the Brontes or for his skill as a screenwriter) and John Houseman, now indeed (just as Welles had suggested he should be seven years before) part of Selznick's permanent staff.

Selznick was not, in fact, technically speaking, the producer of Jane Eyre: having packaged the film, he had sold it to Twentieth Century Fox, who appointed William 'Bill' Goetz - another son-in-law, like Selznick himself, of Louis B. Mayer - as producer, but Selznick kept a sharp eye on the production from beginning to end. It was Selznick's idea to cast Orson Welles as Edward Rochester to Joan Fontaine's Jane; he may have hoped that some of Welles's genius would rub off on Stevenson. Such was his regard for Welles's work as a director that he had begged RKO to deposit a copy of Welles's original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a tantalising prospect that, needless to say, never materialised. Selznick had long admired him as an actor and thought him, with some reason, peerless as a director of dramatised novels on radio; he had vexed Alfred Hitchcock during preparations for Rebecca by constantly referring to the version of the novel that Welles had just made for The Campbell Playhouse: 'if we do in motion pictures as astute a job as Welles did on the radio,' he had told Hitch in one of his celebrated memos, 'we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had.'

From Welles's point of view, Jane Eyre was from the start a questionable enterprise, compromising as it did his status as a so-called quadruple-threat. His profile as producer-director-writer-actor had been perceived by his advisors (and to an extent by him) as being the sine qua non of his reputation. In the end, financial considerations - the money he owed RKO, his alimony, his tax arrears, the extravagance of his lifestyle - demanded that he accept the job, but he and his representatives did everything they could to protect his position. Anxious that Welles might be mistaken for a mere actor, Herb Drake told Look magazine that Welles was only doing Jane Eyre 'in the interest of Uncle Sam's tax department,' demonstrating a dangerous contempt for acting on Welles's part. Perhaps Welles thought that by affecting to despise his job, he would win public sympathy; the opposite is invariably true, as in the case of Marlon Brando's similar statements of some twenty years later. Why should anybody want to pay money to see someone do something for which they have contempt? Welles's attorney Lloyd Wright took issue with Twentieth Century Fox's proposed contract, insisting that 'he must not deviate from his well-earned position, that of a recognised independent producer,' even if he was only to act in the film, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its physical realisation. Wright suggested a credit for him: PRODUCTION DESIGNED BY ORSON WELLES. Merely acting in a film was clearly regarded by Welles and his team as a dire demotion: how could he, who had done every job on a movie, simply take direction from some lesser mortal?

Selznick was aware of the anomaly and, when he wrote to Goetz telling him that he'd like to be present at a forthcoming casting meeting for Jane Eyre, he added, 'I should like also to urge you to have Orson there, because I know few people in the history of the business who have shown such talent for exact casting, and for digging up new people.' There was from the beginning some confusion about exactly what Welles would be doing on the film, a confusion that Welles did nothing to dispel. This was a pattern that would be repeated many times throughout his career: the creation of a suspicion that he might have had something of a guiding hand in the realisation of another director's film. In the case of Jane Eyre, the impression is even more insistent because, in addition to the casting of three of Welles's actors - Erskine Sandford, Eustace Wyatt and the great Agnes Moorehead - two of his key collaborators worked on the film: Bernard Herrmann (a great deal of the music, as it happens, is recycled from Herrmann's score for Welles's radio version of Rebecca); and, no doubt to Welles's considerable displeasure, John Houseman. In the event, Houseman - to the relief of both himself and Welles - was not present at any point during either filming or the pre-production period.

There was an active move on Welles's part, or that of his representatives, to secure a formal credit for him as producer of Jane Eyre, a move that Selznick equally actively resisted. 'I don't believe Orson himself would any more think of taking this credit, once he had all the facts and understood what he might be doing to Stevenson, than he would think of taking directing or co-directing credit,' he wrote to Goetz. 'Actually, direction or co-direction credit would be no more damaging to Stevenson in this case than production credit for Orson, for the latter places Stevenson in the position of simply having carried out Orson's plans, than which nothing could be more inaccurate.' Selznick had already conceded Welles's first billing over Joan Fontaine (an undisputed star since Rebecca), because an acting-only credit would 'reduce' him from his status as a producer-director-actor-writer. For him to have associate producer status would thus be 'a double injustice - to Stevenson, and to Joan's status as a star of the first magnitude ... I do not think that he will want anything that is not his due, as the expense of another man for whom he has professed - very sincerely, I am sure - great admiration.' Interestingly, only a few weeks after sending this to Goetz, Selznick wrote to Joe Schenck of Twentieth Century in very different terms, agreeing to Welles receiving credit as producer, while Fontaine gets first billing. Among the various practical reasons he cites, there is, he says, 'general disbelief' that they would not give first billing to Fontaine, ceding second billing 'to a man who, whatever his prestige, is clearly not in the same category as a star'. Conversely, it was thought absurd to lose the prestige of Welles's name as producer in the credits; in their eyes, his stature was clearly unaffected by the RKO debacle. Stevenson, Selznick continued, was going into the army, so Welles's credit would not damage him; the publicity department, meanwhile, had reported that 'there can be no wide-spread belief that Mr Stevenson is not the director of the film in every sense of the word'. So much for appearances. More significantly from Welles's perspective, Selznick reports that they have just learned that 'Welles did a great more producing on the picture than we had previously known. We have been informed by people from your studio that Mr Welles worked on the sets, changes in the script, in casting, among other things, and that he had charge of the editing.'

All of this is extraordinary, but what is conveyed by the last phrase (my italics) is simply sensational. To edit another man's movie is to cut his balls off, as Welles had better reason than most to know - to edit creatively, that is, rather than merely functionally. In the technical sense, moreover, at this point Welles was scarcely the master of editing that he later became, having only directed Citizen Kane (largely edited in the camera) and The Magnificent Ambersons (on which Welles's editing contribution amounted to precisely three days - and nights - in Miami). And yet: he had charge of the editing. The letter ends: 'please understand that we are in no sense pressing this [the suggestion that Welles should receive a credit as producer], and are extending it purely as a courtesy to 20th Century-Fox.' For whatever reason, it never happened: Welles received no producer credit, and he had to settle for second billing to the star.

On the set, however, he hardly composed himself as a mere actor, according to Joan Fontaine's not entirely objective account. 'Orson Welles was a huge man in 1943. Everything about him was oversize, including his ego,' she wrote in her autobiography, No Bed Of Roses. 'Orson's concern was entirely for Orson: Jane Eyre was simply a medium to show off his talents.' She describes how, on the first day of filming, the cast and crew were assembled at one o'clock; at about four, the stage door suddenly burst open and Welles whirled in, accompanied by his doctor, his manager, his secretary and his valet. 'Orson strode up to a lectern ... placing his script on it and standing before our astonished group, he announced to the director and cast, "Now we'll begin on page four!" ' Stevenson - 'slight, timid, gentlemanly' - was 'suddenly demoted to director-in-name-only.' The journalist Sheilah Graham wrote a profile of Welles during the making of the film, in the course of which she reported that 'Welles has four secretaries, two offices, and is making a government "short" in between takes of Jane Eyre. At the same time he is scripting one broadcast a week and cutting Journey Into Fear. Also,' she added, with casual savagery, 'he is directing the director of Jane Eyre on how to direct.'

It is worth noting that at this stage Welles had never been directed by anyone else on film - indeed, he had hardly been directed by anyone else in any medium, at least since his youthful days at the Gate and the slightly later period with Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. It must have been a hard adjustment for him, one that he did not handle with grace. It signals the beginning of his essentially awkward relationship with the film community: if you hired him as an actor, you got so much more - more perhaps than you wanted. It is fair to observe that, in this particular case (perhaps unbeknownst to Fontaine), he had been involved in both the screenplay and the casting, so it is hardly surprising that he expected to be treated differently from everyone else. But this behaviour (no doubt exaggerated by Fontaine, though there are plenty of comparable reports, then and later) suggests a childish determination to demonstrate his importance. It also marks the beginning of the long sulk that so often coloured his work in other men's films: they won't let him make his own movies, so he's damned if anyone else is going to enjoy making theirs.

This attitude was not, however, inflexibly maintained: 'Orson couldn't keep up to the position he assumed,' wrote Fontaine. 'He was undisciplined, always late, indulged in melodrama on and off the set.' On one occasion he failed to show up on time for a photo shoot: 'He'd been lying in the bath sulking because I didn't trust him to show up on time.' This aspect of Welles - the infantile tyrant - is widely attested, and coexists with the passionate and high-flown broadcaster, the political writer, the master-craftsman and the inspiring leader. They were all Welles, and the different personae could succeed each other with bewildering speed, or could indeed be on display simultaneously. At the time, Welles was having an affair with Lena Horne, who was singing in a nightclub on Sunset Strip, and he liked to report his wilder activities to Fontaine while they were shooting. (Shorty Chirello, Welles's chauffeur-valet, confided in her that in fact Welles sat in bed every night with a tray, 'which didn't jibe at all with Orson's version of his nocturnal exploits.' For once, Welles's version of his own life may be more reliable than his chauffeur's.) Despite everything, Fontaine realized, he wanted to be liked. Eventually she warmed to him. Moreover, she noted that, despite all Welles's peacock displays, Stevenson quietly and slowly regained the directorial reins. With filming completed, however, he joined the army and Welles was presumably able to assert his authority in the editing suite.

Whatever the truth of this, the film - though certainly dominated by Welles's startling interpretation of the character of Edward Rochster - is not especially Wellesian in style; indeed, to a large extent it is actually opposed to his aesthetic. The very opening of the film, showing a bookshelf laden with great tomes of the past, proudly declares itself a literary adaptation, which might be thought to have been anathema to the radical educationalist in Welles. The film ends with a photograph of a bound copy of the novel with the slogan 'Buy yours in the theatre'. The cinema as a route to literature, not an art form in its own right. If Welles stood against anything as a movie-maker, that was it. The cinematography, by the distinguished cameraman George Barnes (who had just shot Rebecca for Hitchcock), is of great refinement of tone, softly focused, evocative and painterly in a way that Welles and Toland - formerly Barnes's assistant - had utterly set themselves against in Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons, too, though aspiring to a period look, uses depth of focus and a kind of energy in the camera movements to engage the viewer critically with the way in which the story is being told. Barnes's work in Jane Eyre, by contrast, contrives to create a world in which the viewer can forget that he or she is watching a film and simply marvel at the expressive beauty of the pictures. In his own films, Welles did everything he could to prevent this. It is not a style ideally suited to Welles's talents as a performer. Indeed, it might be argued that Welles's acting is always at its best with the cinematographic style that came to be associated with his name - one of unexpected angles, sudden distortions, epic perspectives (the style Carol Reed adopted for The Third Man, in which Welles gives arguably his finest performance). The performance he chooses to give in Jane Eyre is on the brink of the grotesque, in much the same manner as his aged Kane: curiously doll-like, strapped into corsets, a great beak of a nose imposed on his own, his facial skin pulled back by the gum of his wig. Interestingly, the image he creates is not unlike the one he invented for himself as a thirteen-year-old playing Richard III. He wears the make-up, which reproduces Bronte's 'stern features and a heavy brow ... gathered eyebrows,' like a mask, affecting a highly theatrical, consciously stentorian vocal delivery; his British accent is not that of an English squire, but of an English actor (sometimes tipping over into the lordly Anglo-Irish tones of his youth in the Dublin theatre); it is part of a theatrical gesture. His Rochester is an impersonation, not an interpretation; with Welles, the outside never goes in.

This is by no means to say that the performance is uninteresting; on the contrary, Welles sees the character as a kind of tortured monster, physically strange, clumsy, only half-human. It is exactly the sort of line on the character that another actor, Charles Laughton, might have taken. Had Laughton done so, he might well have created an equally extreme physical life, but he would (at his best) have transfigured the portrait, touching some universal chord, provoking pity as well as terror, giving us the man within. With Welles, the interpretation is an idea, put on (like a suit of armour), very striking, very powerful, but merely a thing manipulated by the actor, and thus incapable of moving us. It betrays, as much of his acting does, the influence of German Expressionism, the most theatrical of all filmic styles. This, his first conscious bid for movie stardom, was not a promising calling card; the gesture is so extreme that he only suffers by comparison with the rest of the acting in the film, which in its straightforwardly realistic manner is excellent, ranging from the childish charms of Elizabeth Taylor and the remarkable skill of the teenage Peggy Ann Garner (as the young Jane), through the stalwart and strikingly accurate character work of Henry Daniell and the human warmth of the Abbey Theatre veteran Sally Allgood, to the uptight vulnerability of Joan Fontaine in one of her best roles. In this company Welles seems distinctly out of place. So, it might be argued, is Edward Rochester, but Welles's massive presence and anguished histrionics have a distinctly unbalancing effect on the film. Jane Eyre was not released till 1944, a long year after Journey Into Fear finally hit the screen in February of 1943; as far as the public was concerned, they scarcely knew what to make of him as an actor. Up to that point Orson Welles's performances on film had consisted of the many-faceted but not necessarily many-layered Charles Foster Kane, and the preposterously corny Colonel Haki. The release of Jane Eyre was something of a moment of truth for him as an actor.

Welles moodily told Robert Stevenson that the notices he received for the performance had been 'the worst accorded to an American actor since John Wilkes Booth'. On the whole, in fact, the reviews were baffled, as well they might have been, though respectfully so. The Hollywood Reporter detected 'certain over-emphases that are occasionally offensively flamboyant and approximate', while Variety noted Welles's 'declamatory delivery'. Only James Agee in the Nation really took the gloves off, describing Welles's 'road-operatic sculpturings of body, cloak and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly. It is possible to enjoy his performance as dead-pan parody; I imagine he did.' Unkindly Agee adds that he might have enjoyed it himself, 'if I hadn't wanted, instead, to see a good performance.'

Friends were not much more supportive. Welles was not encouraged by receipt of a telegram from Micheál MacLíammóir praising him for his performance of Mr Rochester as Count Dracula, though that sharp little sally has a bit more in it than pure malice. Welles's performance is indeed in his line of tortured monsters, of which his radio Dracula is the most remarkable. The problem is that his desire to provoke pity is a notion, an intellectual ambition: he does not take the steps necessary to effect it in the viewer, such as connecting with his own experience or allowing his imagination to engage at a deep (as opposed to a merely pictorial) level. Welles defended himself on curious grounds: 'There are about eight or nine parts that every individual actor can really play and the Rochester role is one of my eight or nine,' he told an interviewer. 'I don't agree with those sedulous character actors who study and "live" a role for seven months in advance of playing it. If they have to work at it that long, it's a sure thing they aren't fitted for it. They can only ... detract from the true possibilities of the role ... if the role doesn't fit the actor then he's fake no matter if he lived it 100 hours a day, and no matter how great his talent for mimicry. I'm striking a blow for realism.' Realism was not a characteristic that either the press or the public were much inclined then - or ever - to associate with the name of Orson Welles, and his comment suggests that self-knowledge continued to elude him.

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

The first volume of actor/writer Simon Callow's gigantic Orson Welles project. Volume II came out last year, and there will be a third and final volume. I am blown away by what he has done here. I am blown away on so many levels. This is not a surface biography. This does not just deal with events, although it certainly does do that as well, in intimate detail. This is a highly articulate book of analysis, and I just have to say: To anyone who is interested in Hollywood, Orson Welles, the craft of acting, the craft of directing, Shakespeare, the history of America, movies in general ... these books are MUST-HAVES.

There are times when you can tell Callow is so in love with his subject that he goes on for what I think is too long ... but that's part of the beauty of these books. Callow is under a spell. He is under Orson Welles' spell. He does not judge one thing to be more important than another. A play that Orson Welles wrote when he was 14 years old gets just as much face-time as his Voodoo Macbeth, one of the most important moments in American theatre. (Let's not forget that as a mere teenager he published a book - in conjunction with his acting teacher at school, Roger Hill, called Everybody's Shakespeare - Three Plays Edited for Reading and Arranged for Staging, which showed Welles' early theories as a director, and adaptor). I mean, there is a lot to discuss there - Welles was a prodigy.

(That's him at school.)

This is probably why there needs to be three volumes.

Nothing gets short-shrift. Callow is not an uncritical eye, let me not paint it incorrectly. This is not a fanboy. This is someone who is obsessed. And I understand obsession. It is not about LOVE. It is about CURIOSITY that will never ever ever end. Even the bad moments, the awkward moments, the failures have their interests ... or, perhaps to a true obsessive, the failures are even MORE interesting, because then the character of the person you are obsessed with can truly be revealed. Who knows. Callow is unafraid to criticize Welles, and he does so in a voice that is truly his own. We all know Simon Callow's acting. He has a distinctive speaking voice, kind of snotty and humorous. You can hear that in the prose here. You know, he'll include an excerpt from one of Welles' schoolboy compositions and say, "This is dreadful stuff, really, but it has good energy." (or something like that). He does not think that by criticizing Welles he is diminishing him. He does not feel he needs to protect or defend Welles. On the contrary. Someone as complex as Welles deserves to be taken seriously, and deserves to have his work be looked at on its merits - without all the myth and legend and brou-haha that normally is erected around it. People tend to be positional about Welles, and that does diminish him. Callow does not go that route (and he is eloquent about his reasons for this in the introduction to the book.) He weighs in everyone else's opinions, but he is trying to get at the whole man, in all his infuriating excess, and shining brilliance and crashing failures. Callow is absolutely wonderful. I cannot get enough of these books and I am dying for volume III to come out. Good work, Mr. Callow. These are MAJOR contributions to the Welles library - major major biographies ... and you deserve every accolade you receive for these extraordinary books.

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, and Callow just throws his hands up trying to corroborate some of the stories. All he can do is tell what Welles told, and then get eyewitnesses, if possible ... but a lot of the times he just says, "We'll never know what really happened in Morocco." Then there are times, like his time in Ireland as a teenager (which really is amazing) when he basically strolled into an audition at the up-and-coming Gate Theatre (trying to rival the 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. Like - what??

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 - I mean, isn't that what Citizen Kane was all about, and War of the Worlds? If you build it, he will come. But still: Welles always had to embellish, even if the truth was already so fantastical it beggared belief! So Callow wades through all of Welles' elaborations, and tries to put together what really happened in Ireland, etc. He is a detective. This is never about tearing Welles down. This is not about, "See, Welles told us THIS happened, but now we know that THIS is what REALLY happened, so everything that Welles ever did can now be seen as suspect!" I hate that kind of biography. It seems to resent contradiction, it seems to resent life itself, with all its ups and downs. Biographies that praise consistency above all else are terrible. What - is the biographer always consistent in his own life? Does he never contradict himself? Is he not large, does he not contain multitudes? I've had people who read my blog who want to catch me in inconsistencies - it seems to be the #1 reason that some people read blogs. "You said THIS in 2003, and now you say THIS in 2007?" Well, first of all, get a life. And second of all, yes. Because I felt THAT way in 2003, and I feel THIS way in 2007. You've never changed your mind? What the hell is your problem? I am not thrown off by inconsistencies. At least not in a private citizen like myself or like Welles. We do want consistency in public figures, in politicians ... inconsistencies THERE should be analyzed and questioned, since these people are actually trying to LEAD us, and create LAWS, etc. that affect us. But a blogger like myself who writes about boys she kissed in 1988 and movie stars she loves? What is the point of playing "Gotcha" with someone like me? Retarded. The same goes for biographies. I think it is in the inconsistencies that you can actually approach the source of life. That's where the real good stuff is: the gap between reality and fantasy, the gap between what really happened and what we SAY happened: Isn't that when we really can see someone?

I have to say that there were times, reading both of Callow's books, that I actually felt exhilarated, and that is a rare sensation indeed when reading a book. I was exhilarated by the detail, sure ... of these famous events I have already heard so much about - the 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 - Welles directed it at age 22 - boy was a phenom ... the Mercury Theatre, the War of the Worlds broadcast, the precedent-breaking deal with RKO which led to Citizen Kane ... and I was also exhilarated by how in-depth Callow went! He really tries to understand, not just what happened - but where it came from, and also the source of the success. Why was Welles' voodoo Macbeth so groundbreaking? And let's not just stay on the surface (black actors, Harlem) ... but let's look at his adaptation of Macbeth, what he chose to cut, how he rearranged things (Welles saw Shakespeare not as a great man to be revered and feared - but as a guy who wrote some awesome plays and they could certainly stand to be mucked up with a bit) - and what the adaptation said 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?

Another reason why this massive biography of Orson Welles stands out is because Simon Callow is an actor. He writes like an actor. His concern is not intellectual, he is a man of the theatre - so he knows, in his bones, what an audition is like, what a first night is like, what rehearsals are like - but more than that: what the life of an actor really is all about. It's not fame, obviously, although it seems as though Welles HAD to be famous, there was really no other way. It is also the source of Welles' tragedy. But the life of an actor - trying to bring a text to life, and what that actually DOES to a person who lives that particular life. It's not a regular life. We all know that. It leaves wide swathes of space for creativity and fantasy - it HAS to. It's like the life of a writer which needs to leave wide swathes of space for solitude. Callow knows the camaraderie of being part of an acting company and his writing has ultimate authority. He also is a learned man of the theatre, having played Shakespeare and restoration comedy and every other thing for years - so he is on totally sure ground when he analyzes Welles' own interpretations of classic texts. He has that history at his command, which other biographers do not. Or if they do, it remains intellectual. When Callow says something like (and there's a certain phrase SOMEWHERE in these books that I am looking for, but I can't find it, so forgive the paraphrase), "This is one of the most difficult roles to bring to life in all of Western theatre, and it has sunk many an actor, from Olivier to Gielgud" - you know he speaks from deep experience. Perhaps he worked on that part and it sank him, too. Who knows. I LOVE that aspect of the book.

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.

While much of Welles' journey was well-known to me, there was much I didn't know. He 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. 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 MacLíammóir. 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. MacLíammóir'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. MacLíammóir 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. MacLíammóir says sure, send the kid in. In walks Orson Welles. MacLíammóir 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?

Here is a photo I found that I love from 1950 - of Eartha Kitt, MacLíammóir, 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. Amazing. If I could have a time machine to go back and see certain productions, "voodoo Macbeth" is in my top 5. (If you must know, Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Chicago in 1945 is # 1). But God, to see some of those productions!!

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. Amazing. 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.)

Anyway, there is obviously a lot to talk about when we talk about Welles. And this is only the first volume! The first volume of the book takes us up through the short-lived release of Citizen Kane. I was tormented as to what excerpt to choose! His time in Ireland? Voodoo Macbeth?

The book is so juicy, so unbelievably interesting on every level ... you just let the book fall open and you dissolve into the events on the page, it's that engrossing.

That's a sketch Welles did, around age 13, of a young William Shakespeare. And that leads me into the excerpt.

I decided to go with the excerpt of the Mercury Theatre's famous modern-dress production of Julius Caesar. Again, where the hell is my time machine? It was 1937 when that play went up. A terribly uneasy time in the world at large. The cataclysm was already happening elsewhere, and the mood was very very tense. Welles decided to set Macbeth 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. 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. Welles had no reverence for Shakespeare. Instead, he had something better: he had love and passion. Shakespeare was just a fellow showman, as far as he 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.) 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 freakin' 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 controlled chaos. The Caesar was about giant empty cold spaces, and dwarfed human beings - the black of their costumes blending into the black of the drapes - so that their white faces shone out, in a tiny frightening way ... 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.

The generosity of Callow stuns me. He 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. Bravo, bravo. THANK YOU, Mr. Callow, for these books and I cannot wait for volume III! Get cracking!

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.

The Books: "The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage" (Eli Wallach)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Eli Wallach will be 93 years old on December 7. His career has spanned 50 years. An inspiration to many young actors (including myself), he continues to work, although more sporadically, and he and his wife, Anne Jackson (they have been married since 1948), also do performances together, of scenes and poems interspersed with their humorous banter (they're wonderful together - I've seen the show) - they perform at churches, schools, synagogues, YMCAs, benefits and charity functions ... it's really old-school what they do, almost vaudeville. It's charming.

In 2003, Wallach's agent called him and said that Clint Eastwood (his old colleague) wanted him for a small part in a movie he was directing. Wallach was nervous. He hadn't been in front of the camera in a while, at least not in a major motion picture, and he was old, and nervous about all sorts of things: remembering the lines, and also the possibility that his one scene would be cut (always a fear of any actor who plays only one scene in a film). I love how he describes his experience on Mystic River. It makes me love everyone involved - Eastwood, Kevin Bacon - for the respect they showed this giant figure of the American cinema, and how it all turned out:

I flew up to Boston on a Wednesday knowing nothing of the story or the script. I found that I was to play a liquor store owner. I memorized the three pages of dialogue that were given to me and prepared to act in the scene the following day. On Thursday morning I walked out to the set. Clint greeted me warmly. "I'm happy you agreed to do the cameo," he said, and told me that I'd be playing opposite two wonderful actors - Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne.

Clint waited patiently while the scene was lit, then walked over to me and whispered, "Any time you're ready, Eli." Not one word of direction was given. I felt relaxed and happy to be before the camera again. Bacon and Fishburne assured me that my scene would not be deleted in the final cut.

"You give us an important clue to the solution of the crime we're investigating," Kevin Bacon said.

It's a fantastic scene, I remember it well. One of the deals with this cameo was that Wallach would go uncredited, and that his name would not be used in any of the advertising. I think that was a smart move because I know that for those of us like myself - who love Eli Wallach, and who have been watching his movies since they were in their teens, who have the entire scope of his career locked in their brains forever - to suddenly see his twinkling mischievous face in the middle of that dark movie - was a wonderful surprise. It was like seeing an old friend. It really was. I remember feeling the audience around me respond to him. He has a couple of funny moments - not even lines that are funny, but the way he said the lines - and the audience, needing to laugh, was totally with him, every step of the way. It was beautiful to see him up there again.

In the old days of the studio system, character actors would work in movie after movie, essentially playing the same part, and it was very smart - because in that way the audience gets to identify with the person. They immediately think, "Oh. I know him. That's that guy. I love him." It is not a constantly rotating cast of people you've never seen before - there is the familiarity factor. Eli Wallach, in that moment in Mystic River was embodying what that old studio system used to be about. Even if people in the audience didn't know who exactly he was, they recognized him, they knew they had seen him somewhere before, and because of that - they warmed to him immediately.

Eli Wallach was born and raised in Brooklyn. His family was one of the only Jewish families in a primarily Italian neighborhood. I think it's interesting that Wallach played so many fiery Italians, onscreen and on Broadway, and if you think about it - even as a young man, he was an unlikely romantic lead. At least as far as his looks go. He was short, stocky, and not classically handsome. But women testify to his sex appeal time and time again in their own memoirs and autobiographies (Carroll Baker's comes to mind). He smouldered. He was one of those men who treated women with good humor and curiosity - which, naturally, made him a Chick Magnet. He wasn't cool or aloof, but emotional and impulsive - which really goes a long way to explaining his huge hit in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo (excerpt here) - where he played Alvaro, the hot and fiery truck driver who ends up shacking up with Serafina, the lonely sex-starved mystical widow who speaks mainly in Italian (played by Maureen Stapleton, in the role that made her a star). Talk about unlikely casting!! The story of how Stapleton got that part is one of those situations where an actress, in the audition process, just kept "showing up" - with all her talent and powers at full force - and they really had no choice but to cast her. Even though, on the face of it, she was all wrong. Stapleton had a plain face, a dumpy body, and wasn't seen as a romantic lead in any way, shape, or form. Stapleton said, in regards to her lack of beauty, "People looked at me on stage and said, 'Jesus, that broad better be able to act.'" I love her. God, I would have loved to see her in The Rose Tattoo!!

After Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her portrayal of Emma Goldman in Reds (well-deserved), she was asked if it was exciting to be acknowledged for her chops as an actress. She replied, "Not nearly as exciting as it would be if I were acknowledged as one of the greatest lays in the world." So you can see that Stapleton was perfect for Serafina, even if her looks weren't! Hilarious!

Wallach went to college in Texas and it was around that time that he started contemplating being an actor. It was really the only thing he wanted to do. He moved back to New York and studied acting at the famous Actors Studio, which helped him make all the contacts which would really matter to him in his career. He was one of those actors where it just as easily couldn't have happened, as could. He was on the cusp of the change in the acting world. If he had been a studio player in the 30s and 40s, he would have played crotchety small character parts (or, who knows, Bogart - with his shortness and his lisp and his toupee became a leading man - so I suppose anything is possible) ... but in the 50s, things were changing. A new style of acting was being practiced, made famous by people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Wallach was a part of that. Not to mention the fact that very early on, he got himself connected to Tennessee Williams, which was one of the most important relationships in his entire career.

Wallach did a bunch of plays in New York, one of the most formative being Tennessee Williams' short haunting play called "This Property is Condemned" (excerpt here). A young vivacious funny actress named Anne Jackson played the female lead (there are only two parts in the play). They hit it off. They hit it off so well that they moved in together (quite ahead of their time, in the 1940s!) and were married the following year. They have been married for 60 years. (So much for the old saying, "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free" huh?) Amazing. They are good friends. You can feel their friendship when you see the two of them now.

Wallach spent his days studying sense memory at the Actors Studio, and his nights playing small parts on Broadway. There are very funny moments in the book where he talks about trying to meld what he was learning at the Studio with the more practical concerns of being in a show that played 8 times a week. Once, he was so fired up from his own emotional preparation, that he just couldn't wait - and said his line onstage - cutting 14 lines of his co-stars. He was devastated. How do you combine the two - your own needs and the need of the play? He went to Lee Strasberg, his teacher, upset. "I was ready to say my line THEN ... what should I have done?" Strasberg thought a bit and then said, "Wait for your cue." hahahahaha

Eventually, the big break came, with The Rose Tattoo, and he got spectacular reviews, as well as winning the Tony Award for Best Actor. Eli Wallach, the Jewish kid from Brooklyn, was off and running.

He made his screen debut in another one of Tennessee Williams' projects - the highly controversial (as in condemned by the Catholic Church controversial) Baby Doll. This was a screenplay based on Williams' one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (excerpt here). I go into the differences between the two in that post, what was changed, altered. The movie is basically a comedy, albeit with its sicker elements (a grown woman lying in a crib sucking her thumb). In the play, she is obviously mentally disturbed, a stunted person who has the bodacious body of a full-grown woman - so she is treated like a sexual object when obviously, inside, she is about 10 years old. It is truly disturbing. In the play, Baby Doll (or "Flora") is ruined. In the film, she (played by Carroll Baker) is set free. It's still disturbing - obviously disturbing enough to cause the film to be protested widely upon its release ... but to see it now it's hard to imagine what the fuss was about.

Directed by Elia Kazan, they filmed on location (Kazan always liked to do that, he preferred it to using studio sets) - with locals as extras, which gives the film a true sense of place. Tennessee Williams called 27 Wagons a "Mississippi Delta comedy", which gives you some sense of where his mind was at - and I do think that Kazan and his cast (Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden) do capture that. Karl Malden is a ridiculous cuckolded figure, Carroll Baker is funny and sweet and unconsciously sexy, and Eli Wallach is manipulative and sexy).

Eli Wallach never stopped going back to Broadway, even though his film career had also taken off. He appeared in premiere productions of Teahouse of the August Moon, Mr. Roberts, Tennessee Williams' Camino Real and others.

He was part of the troubled cast for John Huston's The Misfits, and he traveled to the desert of Nevada for the shoot, with his family in tow. I think his daughters were just babies. The shoot ended up being long-drawn-out and very problematic - and Clark Gable would die months after completion. The entire production was shut down so that Marilyn Monroe could recover in the hospital from her exhaustion (brought on by insomnia and addiction to sleeping pills) - and everything was insane and chaotic. A wonderful book has been written about that shoot, called The Making of the Misfits (I posted about that here)

I think, though, of all the things Wallach will be remembered for, it will be for his participation in the "spaghetti Western" genre - his roles are beloved, and his characters are quoted wildly. Sergio Leone cast him in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - probably one of his best-known performances. Wallach had already been cast as a Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven, and there are funny stories about Wallach trying to figure out how to ride a horse, and all that, while on location. You'd never know he was a novice. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with those crazy close-ups, is a film fan favorite.

Eli Wallach's book is wonderful. It's not self-indulgent or badly written. He knows the power of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching anecdote. The book is full of them. It's a great mix of the personal and the professional - how he and Anne Jackson, who both had careers, made it work - or, let's say, just endured through it ... Jackson doing plays, Wallach doing movies, trying to raise a family and keep the household going. You really get a sense of the two of them. Funny story: When Baby Doll came out, he and Anne Jackson went to the premiere. Afterwards, he wondered what she thought.

As for my wife's review of the film, Anne sat next to me at the premiere. The moment I played my first scene with Karl Malden, she observed, "Never have two noses filled the screen so completely."

It's a real actor's book, because, in the end, Eli Wallach - with his diverse and sometimes bizarre career - was always all about the acting. He was not a huge star. Not like Brando or McQueen. He had leading roles, and was a "playah", as they say ... but he never was in that heady echelon of actors who become symbols or manifestations of a Zeitgeist, or what have you. So Wallach was always focusing, pretty much, on the job at hand. Each job has its challenges. It is the actor's job to make all of that comprehensible, to face each day with a problem-solving attitude, to look at a scene that might not be working and think to himself, "What can I do to make this happen?" Wallach's book is all about moments like that.

I knew immediately which excerpt I wanted to choose. Tennessee Williams had written a new play in the early 1950s. It was called Camino Real (excerpt here). One of Williams' most difficult plays, it predicts the experimental theatre of the 1960s, embodied by the work of Lanford Wilson (especially in his Balm in Gilead - excerpt here). It's surreal, not a strict linear play - it takes place in an imaginary place, an end of the road kind of place, and the stage is filled with people at all times: the misfits, the beggars and whores of the fringe ... not to mention cameos by fictional characters like Casanova and Lord Byron. These people all hover on "the Camino Real", a way-station for the lost of the world, the lonely ... I love the play. I understand why it is difficult to stage, and difficult for an audience to relate to ... and I actually have never seen it done, more's the pity. But I love it. It also has, in it, my favorite lines that Williams ever wrote:

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Wallach was passionate about Camino Real. He was cast as the lead - "Kilroy" (as in the grafitti messages of the time). To him, it was the most important project he had ever done, the one he was most passionate about. He turned down the role that Frank Sinatra ended up playing in From Here to Eternity (and won an Oscar for) in order to do Camino Real.

One of the reasons I love the following excerpt is because: Camino Real was not a hit. As a matter of fact, it was a flop. After the great run of hits Williams had written - Glass Menagerie (excerpt here), Streetcar Named Desire (excerpt here), Summer and Smoke (excerpt here) and The Rose Tattoo - all wonderful works, but with a more classical structure - Camino Real was seen as incomprehensible, self-indulgent, whatever. This was the typical story of Williams constantly being judged against his earlier work, as though he was supposed to just continue repeating himself. Williams was too good an artist for that. He is quite eloquent on that point. The critics were never kind to him after the 50s ... everything was like, "Well, this is no Streetcar Named Desire ..." and Williams would respond, "Of course it isn't. I was a younger man when I wrote Streetcar. I'm older now, I have different concerns and interests." God forbid he should try to stretch and grow as an artist. I think time has vindicated Camino Real. It is one of those plays that was ahead of its time. Its failure frightened Williams. He did "go back" to writing more traditional plays after that - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (excerpt here), Orpheus Descending (excerpt here), Suddenly Last Summer (excerpt here), Night of the Iguana (excerpt here), Sweet Bird of Youth (excerpt here) (I mean, honestly - even just writing all of that out right now gives me goosebumps) ... but I seriously think Camino Real is one of his best. That play haunts me. This past summer the director of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festiva (check out who's on their main page!) contacted me to write something about Camino Real for their catalog (Camino Real was one of the productions they were doing that summer). It was a thrilling opportunity for me, to write about that play for such an esteemed theatre festival!

Anyway, Eli Wallach's section in the book about Camino Real is my favorite part of all.

(That's Wallach and Jackson in a production of Major Barbara).

Onto the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Cheryl Crawford had fallen in love with Camino and was determined to bring it to Broadway, even though it seemed like quite a gamble. Camino was unlike any of Williams's other work. It was a fantasy set in a dirty plaza somewhere below the border. It was filled with gypsies, pimps, panderers, fascist police, and a host of legendary characters: Lord Byron. Margerite Gautier from Camille, the Baron de Charlus, Don Quixote. I was to play the role of Kilroy, an ex-boxer and ex-sailor who first appears at the top of a flight of stairs. On a crumbling wall, there is a message scrawled in chalk: "Kilroy is coming." Kilroy crosses out the word coming and replaces it with here.

I enjoyed working with Kazan; he often used sly means to build tension during rehearsal. One time during a rehearsal, he took me aside and told me to approach a group of strangers onstage. "You're alone and you're scared," he said, "so go on and make friends." Meanwhile, he told the actors playing a motley crowd of peasants, "Ignore this stranger; he's a gringo, and he has bad breath."

Kazan worked long and hard shaping Tennessee's play into a bold and startling fantastic extravaganza. Rehearsals were long and exhausting and yet strangely exhilarating. All of us in the cast felt we were embarking on a trip to a world we had never encountered before. Even though Camino was a fantasy, Kazan told us that the play would be stronger if each role was performed with a sense of truth.

For me, the play was very physically demanding. At one point, I had to jump offstage while police chased me, then run through the audience screaming, "Where the hell is the Greyhound bus depot?" I'd run up one aisle, then down another. People would have to stand to allow me to pass. Then I'd run up to the balcony, enter the box seats, climb over the rail, and jump directly onstage, just like John Wilkes Booth did after he'd shot President Lincoln. Once I was caught by the police, I was ordered to kneel onstage and a clown's hat was clapped over my head. Fastened to the hat were eyeglasses with long string attached to them; the nose was a red Ping-Pong-ball-shaped bulb.

"Light your nose," the policeman would say, and I would press the button to light my nose, which kept blinking on and off as the theater lights went down.

Audiences were puzzled by some of the scenes. And in early previews, many walked out. The play was savagely attacked by the critics. Leading the charge was Walter Kerr, critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who ended his review with a terse sentence: "Williams is our greatest playwright. And this is his worst play."

After the reviews had come out, Tennessee sat down and wrote a letter to Cheryl Crawford, the producer:

Dear Cheryl,
Whenever I talk about you I say, "Cheryl is a great fighter. She's always there when you need her." In China, in the old days, they used to give an old man an opium pipe. I suppose now they just shoot him. I think we should show fight in this situation. I'm enclosing a letter I just wrote to that critic Walter Kerr.

Dear Mr. Kerr,
I'm feeling a little punch drunk from the feared, but not fully anticipated attack at your hands and a quorum of your colleagues. But I would like to attempt to get a few things off my chest in reply. What I would like to know is, don't you see that "Camino" is a concentrate, a distillation of the world and the time we live in?

Mr. Kerr, I believe in your honesty. I believe you said what you honestly think and feel about this play. And I wouldn't have the nerve to question your verdict. But silence is only golden when you have nothing to say. And I still think I have a great deal to say.
Cordially,
Tennessee Williams

I don't believe Kerr ever answered Tennessee's letter. But there's one line in the play that affected Anne and myself so greatly that we decided to adopt it as our motto. "Lately," Lord Byron says, "I've been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single pure stringed instrument of my heart. For what is the heart, but a sort of instrument that translates noise into music, chaos into order. Make voyages, attempt them, there's nothing else." Anne and I decided that we would always make voyages and attempt them.

Camino's end came quickly, with a crisp closing notice posted on the backstage bulletin board. We had just completed our fifty-sixth performance. The closing of a play is like a death in the family, and it leaves a deep scar on an actor's ego. I remember packing up all my belongings in the dressing room, then walking out into the rainy night. "Why me?" I thought. I loved the cast, the writing, the direction, but thankfully Camino didn't die. Over the years, many regional theaters have given Williams's fantasy a second chance.

I've never regretted the choice of doing Camino Real instead of From Here to Eternity. To me, Camino was the greatest experience I had in the theater.

The Books: "Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth" (Lana Turner)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

You know, you can open up George Eliot's Middlemarch and find a gem of language on every page. Not an exaggeration. It's almost overwhelming that book, you want her to slow down ... because her genius is just too much, I am just a mere mortal, George, let me catch up! One of the things I like to do is just flip open Middlemarch to any page and read the first sentence that I see. It's amazing how often it's a really good one.

Well. Lana Turner's autobiography is the same way.

Is this the first time in the history of the planet that Lana Turner was compared to George Eliot? I hope so, because it's about time.

You literally cannot open this book without finding an awesome sentence. I'm not being sarcastic - although there is much to make fun of here as well. But why I think this book is so awesome is its complete and utter lack of irony (which is really quite refreshing) - not to mention its open-faced assumption that we will care about every detail. Of course we do, Lana! You're Lana Turner! Give us the dish! And boy does she ever. I suppose if you only looked at this book thru a cynical lens, you'd find it irritating and self-involved.

YOUR LOSS, cynics, YOUR LOSS.

It IS self-involved. That is the REASON it is so good. Also, I have to ask: Why are you reading the autobiography of a famous film star and looking for calm reasonable detachment? That's YOUR problem.

She appears to remember every outfit she has ever worn, first of all, in head-to-toe detail. She is open about her foolishness in love - and every date she has ever been on is accompanied by the memory of what she was wearing. She cared about being a good actress and improving at her craft. She knew she was lucky to be "discovered" - she was the original "sweater girl" -

and she knew she needed to continue to get better if she would have a long career (and boy did she ever). She couldn't seem to stay out of trouble, though. You want to shout at the pages, "LANA, TRY BEING SINGLE FOR, LIKE, ONE SECOND. JUST TRY." But no, not Lana. She is all about love. And her clothes.

Again, if you're reading my words and assuming I'm making fun of all of this, you've totally got me wrong.

I love this book. I love every single word. There are plenty of "great" books out there that DON'T have an awesome sentence on each page - but this one does. Lana Turner and George Eliot, man, holding hands across the centuries.

Let's do an experiment. I will let the book fall open five times - and I will type the first thing I see each time. Sentence, paragraph, whatevs.

No cheating allowed. I promise to play by the rules.

Ready? Let's go.

Viewers of The Merry Widow may have noticed that all during the picture I wore long gloves or a very wide bracelet, or I carried a fur piece on my wrist. Filming of the picture began only a few days after my suicide attempt, and my slashed wrist remained bandaged for most of the shooting. No one at MGM seemed to doubt that my injury was an accident. I was bouncing back quickly, partly because of my natural resiliency. But I also had help. His name was Fernando Lamas.

That is an absolutely PERFECT paragraph. Beginning writers should study it.

Next.

I wore a full-length white fox coat and a silky white lace dress over a nude-colored slip. Before the ball a limousine drove us to the White House, and we filed into the room where Roosevelt delivered his Fireside Chats to the nation. The President sat behind a desk and greeted each person in turn. Fascinated, I studied his lined, handsome face and the marvelous grin I knew from the newsreels. As I approached I saw a look of recongition in his eyes. He didn't wait for an aide's introduction. He just extended his hand and said, "You are Miss Lana Turner." All I could say was, "Yes, Mr. President." He gave me a long look that seemed to take in everything.

Of course he did, Lana. I adore you.

Next:

Poor Liza (Minnelli) got twenty-one stitches in her leg, and her face was badly scraped from hitting the cement. The messy situation got worse when Sid Luft came home. He wanted to sue me, but Judy well knew that Liza had been sternly warned about the wall and the dog. As for Lex, he was so attached to Pulco that he refused to give him up, and in all fairness, he did have good reasons for wanting Pulco at the house. I'd been receiving some strange threatening letters, some of them worrisome enough to report to the police. And there had been that kidnap threat against Cheryl some years back. I no longer went out publicly as much as I had before, and when I did it would be to someone's home. Seclusion became important to me and Lex, and Acapulco appealed to us more and more.

Look, little Liza, Lana warned you about the wall and the dog, mkay?

Next:

Artie wasn't always surly. Sometimes he actually enjoyed life. One night there was an MGM bash at Earl Carroll's, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Artie played the clarinet in the show, and I performed a dance number from Two Girls on Broadway. Phil Silvers did a comedy turn, and since he had no date, he tagged along with us after the show. At Artie's insistence, we headed home. I made drinks and went off to change. When I came back, Artie and Phil were smoking what they called "reefers". I'd heard of marijuana, of course, but I'd never seen it before. It was associated mainly with jazz musicians. Artie and Phil offered me some, and I said no.

Good for you, Lana. Good for you.

Next and last:

Our next stop was Rio, where we planned to arrive at Carnival time. I wasn't sorry to leave Buenos Aires. Argentina was torn by political strift. It was election time, and there were rough political rallies right in the plaza under our balcony. The Peronista guards would sweep into the crowd with their sabers drawn. It terrified and sickened me to see their battered victims, with blood streaming down their heads. Once, at three in the morning, someone threw a bomb into a service entrance of our hotel. The blast almost shook me and Sara out of our beds. For the rest of the night we sat up, terrified and shaking, in the living room of our suite. In Rio social life was far more pleasant. I had acquaintances there, who invited me to several posh parties. During Carnival the whole city throbbed with the seductive samba beat. We danced long and late. One night someone said, "Let's go into the streets!" Out there we were simply swept off into the crowds. Now it's forbidden, but at that time the men put a little perfumed ether on their handkerchiefs, which would be vaporized by the heat of their bodies. The air was sweet with intoxicating ether fumes. With that and the blaring wild music you just seemed to float on and on. In a seductive black satin halter dress, with flowers in my hair, I danced until dawn.

Of course you did, Lana. I wish I was there.

You know, I thought Don Delillo's supposed masterpiece Underworld was about 400 pages too long - but I wish Lana's book was 400 MORE pages long.

It's the lack of irony, like I mentioned - which gives it such a great zesty and ridiculous voice... and also the lack of self-consciousness. She does not come across as a dingbat, but she does paint herself in this way where you really can see her in all her self-dramatizing chaotic glory. It's self-serving, as all such books are ... but again - if she had laid down irony on top of her defensiveness, or even a sense of detachment or self-awareness- it would have been a terrible book. Here she is, and at times, it seems like she's putting her hands out up to heaven, shrugging at the reader, like, "How on earth can so much happen to one person?" (to paraphrase Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby) And I, the reader, looking on, feel like saying to her, "Lana, the reason so much happens to you is because you have atrocious taste in men and you leap right into intimacy without thinking: ' Hmmmm ... before I commit myself to this gentleman, let me ponder the ultimate question: will my daughter one day stab this man to death?' Just HOLD BACK a bit before you fall in love again, I beg of you Lana, please!!" But if she held back, she wouldn't be Lana, yo, so you just have to sit back and keep your mouth shut, shaking your head with fondness and yet also a bit of judgment. "Oh, Lana, Lana, there you go again ..."

I haven't even talked about her acting yet! Let me send you over to Alex's wonderful tribute piece - Lana Turner is one of her favorite actresses, and that's a wonderful post about why. Here is another insightful post about Lana Turner - a career deep and strange enough that it certainly deserves a second look.

Her star has faded a bit - she is now seen as a symbol of other things - but I've got to believe that someone whose career lasted that long (she may not have done a gazillion movies a year - but she worked steadily) had a hell of a lot of moxie, ambition, and ... maybe not smarts ... but survival skills. She started out as the "It Girl" because of how she looked in a sweater. "It Girls" are a dime a dozen. If you want to last beyond your big season of being the "It Girl", you need to have more going on than just looks, or luck. Will we ever have a Sienna Miller Blog-a-Thon day? Time will tell.

I am not saying I think Lana Turner is under-rated. I don't. I do think she might be remembered for the wrong reasons, and for those of you who haven't seen her big films, I suggest you go back and have a look. Because she has some damn fine moments when she is used well - when a director "gets" her - and I celebrate that part of her. I really like watching her act. It's a bunch of hoo-hah, really - breathy sleepy-eyed hoo-hah -but that's part of why I like it.

I think Turner is a great example of a woman whose personal life is what she is now remembered for, as opposed to her acting. I love it when people whine about how out of control celebrities are today. Seriously? TODAY they're out of control? Oh, really? Do you have any sense of history? Do you have any grasp on, oh, FACTS? Do you realize how much the studios controlled the publicity of their stars, so most of the really bad stuff was kept from the public? But also, gotta ask: it was better at WHAT point in history? The purer sweeter time of, oh, Fatty Arbuckle? The well-behaved proper time of, uhm, Lana Turner? Like THOSE times?

But oh well, some people just like to live in a fantasy that once upon a time things were BETTER than they are now, because then they always have something to bitch about!! But seriously, I do laugh sometimes when I hear that "now" celebrities are out of control. Dude. Google Lana Turner and check out what HER life was like, mkay? It makes it look like Lindsay Lohan was just blowing off some adolescent steam.

Lana Turner led one of the most exhausting public lives I can think of. I want to plead, Good GOD, woman, lie down!!

Or, you could give her the opposite advice as the wonderful Frank O'Hara does in his poem about her.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

(My friend Mitchell has actually done this piece as a dramatic monologue and it is so funny you stop being able to breathe by around line 6. Speaking of which, Ted just wrote a post on Frank O'Hara ...)

Great book. Compulsively readable, far better than many serious works of literature I know, and also a book you can keep going back to, over and over again. I first read it when I was 14 (and I was WAY too young for the salacious nature of much of it!) and have read it probably 6 or 7 times ever since.

So ... lie down, Lana, or get up, Lana, either way, we love you.

Here's an excerpt. I basically just let the book fall open and decided to excerpt whatever I saw first, because it was just too hard to choose.

I just love how she defends herself here, and then starts a new paragraph with 'But I did go out a lot." Again, I'm not making fun of her. I am truly delighted at how, in every moment, she appears to be truthful. Even if the truth of one moment totally contradicts the truth of the moment before. But then, after a paragraph about her going beyond the velvet rope to her table, blowing kisses to people, etc. - she takes the edge off of us thinking she takes herself too seriously by writing, "Silly, I guess, but fun."

Yes, Lana, it IS silly, but fun!

LOVE YOU, LANA, PLEASE GET UP.

Put down Don DeLillo and pick up Lana. DeLillo will be waiting for you when you're done. Lana's book is a must-read.

EXCERPT FROM Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

On New Year's Day, 1945, I became one of the most highly paid actresses in the world. My new contract paid me $4,000 a week, and by Hollywood ritual that meant it was time to buy a new home. I looked for a place in Bel-Air, a gracious section with handsome estates enclosed by Spanish-style adobe walls or ornate wrought-iron fences and sculptured hedges, and I found a lovely house hidden in the woods overlooking the ninth green of the Bel-Air Country Club. Sometimes golf balls smacked the windows or flew into the pool. Whenever I retrieved one I would fine the player a quarter for going out of bounds. It gives me a chuckle to remember those startled faces.

Now I was dating again. First it was Turhan Bey, an exotically handsome Turkish-Viennese actor. But when things turned serious, he introduced me to his mother, who seemed to dislike me on sight.

Once when I was dancing with Turhan at a party in Beverly Hills, Stephan appeared and tried to cut in. When I glanced at Turhan meaningfully he gallantly stepped aside to let Stephan take his place. I still wore Stephan's engagement ring, a three-carat diamond, which I'd had reset to my taste. Now Stephan told me he wanted it back.

"But it's been reset," I protested.

"I don't care. Give it back!"

He snatched my hand and yanked off the ring, then strode quickly away.

When Turhan saw me standing there, he asked me what had happened. I told him, then excused myself to recover. When I got back from the ladies' room, Turhan wasn't there, but everyone was rushing to the garden.

In the center of a knot of people were Turhan and Stephan, scuffling on the ground. the other guests pulled them apart before they could hurt each other. Thank goodness! But Stephan had dropped the ring and was searching frantically through the shrubbery.

The next day Anita May, who had given the party, called to say that her gardener had found the ring. I recovered it, but the story made the papers. The gossips inflated my connection with Turhan to the level of a grand passion. Those same busybodies linked my name to Rory Calhoun, Robert Hutton, and Frank Sinatra - the mention of Frank's name in this connection showed how little the gossips really knew about any of us. Yes, Frank had been a good friend for years, and I was close to his wife, Nancy. But the closest things to dates Frank and I enjoyed were a few box lunches at MGM. Despite our later differences of opinion about his relationship with Ava Gardner, I always found him warm and especially kind to me.

But I did go out a lot. The war had just ended, and the city was booming again. Affluence was in the air. Developers had bought up acres of land and dotted them with row upon row of small, brightly colored tract homes for returning servicemen. Almost overnight the orange groves and open spaces disappeared under the spreading blanket of suburbs, and the city got its first whiff of smog. But in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, Holmby Hills set high in the Santa Monica Mountains, prewar glamour and opulence were reborn, with a modern flair. The magnificent homes were palaces of glass that let the light stream in, not the tile-floored haciendas or Tudor manors of the past. Light - that's my strongest impression of that postwar time. After th elong years of blackouts and conservation, the city was adazzle with blazing bulbs, brilliant and glittering and fun.

And the men were home. They seemed to catch your eye everywhere you went, like the first greening after a thaw. How I'd love to dress up and go dancing with a handsome dark man. Ciro's was a favorite haunt. I'd walk up the steps and through the glass door, and pass the velvet rope that barred the less-fortunates. And the headwaiter would spring forward - "Ah, Miss Turner ..." and escort me in.

I had a special table right by the stairs so I could watch the comings and goings. I'd head straight there, never glancing right or left. And then, when I was seated, I'd give the room a long casing, bowing to this one or blowing that one a kiss. Silly, I guess, but fun.

Ciro's was designed for dramatic entrances and exits because a long flight of stairs led down to the tables and dance floor. And at the top of the stairs - that's where the stars stopped, to let everyone see them come in. It was all part of the game. Everyone would stare, and you knew you were making an Entrance.

I'd usually be dressed in something clingy, black or white, sometimes gold, occasionally red. I'd wear diamonds and a fur of some kind draped over one shoulder. Often white fur, my favorite. Maybe ermine or silver fox, the fashionable furs at that time. Or sable. I had beautiful sables. I'd have jewels in my hair, or flowers, and every hair in place.

But talk about an Entrance! Hedy Lamarr holds the record for that. One Entrance she made at Ciro's is a vision I'll neve