Happy Birthday, Orson Welles

Much of the Welles story is difficult to put together because he himself was such a teller of tall tales. You know, he went to Morocco when he was 16 years old and the hung out with a sheik in a freakin’ tent, chillin’ with the Arabs smoking a hookah pipe in the mountains, stuff like that, he probably participated in at least one revolution, no doubt. Then there are other stories which clearly actually occurred, like Welles’s sojourn in Ireland as a teenager, when he basically strolled into an audition at the brand-new Gate Theatre (which had set itself as a rival to the dominant Abbey) and got a part in an upcoming production. 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. The truth is crazy enough without embellishment. But the embellishments are fun too, with a storyteller like Welles.

For example, his anecdotes about meeting Winston Churchill.

But for Welles, truth was never as interesting as fantasy, and he was at his best when he willfully projected himself into his own fantasies. Not everyone has the confidence to do such a thing. Isn’t that what Citizen Kane was all about, and War of the Worlds? “Here is my fantasy/nightmare/dream. I request that you participate in it.” Welles was an old-fashioned showman, a purveyor of tricks, and then (in the case of War of the Worlds) he would act baffled and “aw, shucks, sorry I freaked you all out” when the curtain was drawn back and he was revealed. It was brilliant.

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

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

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

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

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

Welles was clearly a prodigy of some kind. 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, encourage him. He did summer stock as a teenager, appearing in Shakespeare plays, and he was also a student at an elite boy’s school that had a stellar drama department. Welles remained connected with that school all his life.

Welles went to Ireland as a teenager, as I mentioned, and became highly involved in the Gate Theatre, which still exists. At the time, it was run by a fascinating guy named Micheál MacLiammóir. Look him up. MacLiammóir is just as interesting as Orson Welles, and had just as intense a reinvention of self. Lies/truth were blended, the fantasy was preferable to reality, and so why not just step into the fantasy of one’s self?

MacLiammóir’s stories of Welles’ first audition for them are laugh-out-loud funny. MacLiammóir, in one of his autobiographies (he wrote several) describes being told “There’s an American teenager in the lobby … he says he wants to audition … what should I tell him?” … This “American teenager” claimed he was a lead actor at the Guild Theatre in America (none of that was true). He was basically standing out there denanding an audition. MacLiammóir said sure, send the kid in, and in walked Orson Welles. MacLiammóir describes what happened next:

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

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

Here is a photo I found that I love from 1950, of Eartha Kitt, MacLiammóir, and Welles. MacLiammóir and Welles stayed friends their whole lives. 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 set in Haiti, put on entirely with black actors, mostly non-professional, at a big theatre in Harlem. Welles filled the stage with crazy voodoo goddesses in headdresses, massive crowd scenes, drum beats; you can see clips of the voodoo Macbeth on Youtube. 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 flocked to Harlem to see the production (and that was when the press really took notice). But the black community came out in droves as well. The “voodoo Macbeth” electrified the New York theatre world. If I could have a time machine to go back and see certain productions, Welles’s “voodoo Macbeth” is in my top 5.

Welles’ notoriety grew with the shutting down of The Cradle Will Rock, 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 also got a deal for a weekly radio show where they would read classic literature, all adapted by Welles (did the man ever sleep?).

Here’s an excerpt from This is Orson Welles, a book-long interview between Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. Here, they address “radio acting”.

PB: How about radio acting, Orson – would you say that it’s similar to the acting required for movies? I mean, in the sense that —
OW: That you don’t have to make yourself heard in the gallery? The famous difference between stage acting and acting for the camera? It’s all nonsense, you know. There’s just good acting and bad.
PB: You don’t believe in playing down for the camera?
OW: You can play up for the camera. With enough energy behind it, you can’t ever go too high. When it looks like you’re pushing – well, then it’s because you are pushing. It’s because you can’t get up there without pushing.
PB: But surely there’s a limit, Orson. The camera isn’t a theatre.
OW: The camera is an eye. And an ear. It takes you where it’s put. The theatre is where you get put.
PB: OK, but are you saying it’s impossible for acting to be too broad in front of the camera? That there’s no such thing as hamming?
OW: Hamming is faking. It’s opening a bag of tricks instead of turning on the juice. The right actor – the true movie actor – can never be too strong. What he must not be is too broad. What you’re after isn’t spread. You don’t want to smear it all over the screen like pancake batter. Big acting isn’t wide. It’s sharp, pointed, vertical. Power, real explosive power, but never the explosion. The real stuff doesn’t diffuse, it stays right on target. Hamming has no target, its only aim is to please. You can tell an actor from a whore only if he’s totally in the service of his material. The public’s pleasure and approval are incidental rewards.
“Playing down to the camera”? Never play down. Up is your direction. You shouldn’t play to the camera at all. A camera isn’t a girl. It isn’t a mirror to pose in front of. Ham actors are not all of them strutters and fretters, theatrical vocalizers – a lot of them are understaters, flashing winsome little smiles over the teacups, or scratching their T-shirts. Cagney was one of the biggest actors in the whole history of the screen. Force, style, truth, and control – he had everything. He pulled no punches; God, how he projected! And yet nobody could call Cagney a ham. He didn’t bother about reducing himself to fit the scale of the camera; he was much too busy doing his job. Toshiro Mifune: his movie performances would register in the back row of the Kabuki.
PB: But, Orson, don’t you think there’s still something called movie acting?
OW: There are movie actors. [Gary] Cooper was a movie actor – the classic case. You’d see him working on the set and you’d think, “My God, they’re going to have to retake that one!” He almost didn’t seem to be there. And then you’d see the rushes, and he’d fill the screen.
PV: How do you explain that?
OW: Personality. I wouldn’t presume to explain that mystery. It always matters more than technique.

Of course, eventually, the “War of the Worlds” radio show happened in 1938 (post about that here), 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. 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.

And what did Welles want to do with his new opportunity? He wanted to do a film that was a fictionalized life of William Randolph Hearst. It was a choice so self-destructive one cannot deny the suspicion that it had to be somewhat deliberate on Welles’ part.

Citizen Kane got its props eventually (understatement), but was barely seen at the time, because William Randolph Hearst, as would be expected, launched a war against the studios, saying he would instruct every one of his papers to BURY the movie, or ignore it completely, if it were allowed to open. Nobody wanted to alienate William Randolph Hearst. Citizen Kane was given a premiere, but that was pretty much it. It would be decades before anyone could see it again.

And so Welles made enemies from the get-go, and in a funny way, his career never really recovered its luster, although he would make some very fine movies (The magnificent 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. There is something personal in the studio’s attack on Welles’ work. Well, you know how mediocrity hates genius! Welles never really recovered emotionally from what was done to him with Magnificent Ambersons. It remained a phantom of great-ness in his mind’s eye, the symbol of all he had lost.)

But for his birthday, which is today, I’d like to jump back in time, pre-Citizen Kane, to another one of his Mercury Theatre New York productions, the 1937 Julius Caesar production. Richard Linklater’s film Me and Orson Welles takes place during the 1937 Julius Caesar.

Again, when Time Travel becomes legal, I know exactly where I’m going.

In 1937, the Mercury Theatre put up a now-famous (and famous almost instantly) modern-dress production of Julius Caesar. 1937 was a terribly uneasy year. The cataclysm was already happening elsewhere in Europe, the mood was very very tense. Welles decided to set Julius Caesar in fascist Italy. This was not necessarily a new or an original idea, many companies had been doing putting classic works in a fascist European setting. However, many of these productions were out of New York, and so word would not have reached Welles about them, or reached New York audiences. It appears to have been original to Welles (but take that speculation with a grain of salt, Welles being the ultimate trickster).

Side note: Welles’ gift, by the way, was not about being original. It was in being able to take the dream that was in his own head and create it out in the world in whatever production he was involved in. He was never strictly an innovator, although much of cinematography as we now know it imitates what was done in Citizen Kane, with the deep-focus, and the shot angles. But much of that was Gregg Toland’s contribution, not Welles’s. Welles’s contribution was in believing in the sheer size of the project, and making it happen. He was a showman of the old school, a P.T. Barnum, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t genius. He played tricks. There’s a reason why Welles was obsessed with magic for his entire life, and even put together a magic show in Hollywood with an all-star cast, including his future wife Rita Hayworth. Welles had no reverence for Shakespeare. No, he had something better: he had love and passion. Shakespeare was just a fellow showman, as far as Welles was concerned, another practical man of the theatre. Welles chopped scenes up, deleted characters, he rearranged the order if it suited him, pulling things forward when normally they happened at the end, whatever.

With Julius Caesar, Welles kept the stage empty and black with billowing black curtains on the edges. Most of the characters wore the black military uniforms of Mussolini’s jackbooted thugs, and there was an intense air of violence around the production. Audiences were stunned by it. It seemed to speak directly to their time, directly to what was going on in Europe. It spoke their deepest fears. Welles’ Caesar was about giant empty cold spaces, human beings dwarfed by the surrounding atmosphere, the black of their costumes blending into the black of the drapes so that their white faces shone out. Such a different conception, look, feel from the “voodoo Macbeth,” which had only been 8 or 9 months before.

Here is a series of images from Welles’ Caesar, including some of his sketches for the costumes, setting, and lights). 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”. He skips over nothing. Actually, if he skips over anything, it is Welles’s personal life, a lovely change! Welles’s personal life was always on the backseat to his career, so it takes a backseat in the book. Good.

Callow speaks 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).

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

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.