Orson Welles: Hello Americans (2 page)

In approaching the rest of Welles’s life, I had no intention of reverting to the synoptic method inevitably adopted by the writers of most
one-volume biographies (many of which, I hasten to say, are nonetheless full of exceptional interest and insight). But to write in the same sort of detail about the remaining forty-five years of Welles’s life – during which time, as I said in
The Road to Xanadu
, he had become a one-man diaspora, hurling himself across the globe, exploring virtually every performance art known to man (he even staged
a ballet,
The Lady in the Ice
), was a logistical impossibility. I spent some of the years between the publication of the first book and the one you have in your hands trying to devise cunning postmodern structures that would enable me, as I kept telling interested parties, to adopt a cinematic – perhaps even, I modestly suggested, a Wellesian – approach, offering first a panoramic wide-shot, giving
an overview of a whole decade, say, and then suddenly swooping in for a close-up examination of a particular event or period. It all sounded very brilliant, but in the end I couldn’t come up with a structure that actually made sense. Nor, in truth, did I want to. It seemed to me that the only way I could even attempt to do justice to the wonderful singularity of my subject was to focus ever
more closely on the individual strands in the increasingly complex fabric of his life.

In particular, I was fascinated by the years between
Citizen Kane
and
Macbeth
, a period in which, even by his standards, Welles extended himself in a remarkable number of new directions with an intensity and almost a desperation that reveal him in an entirely unfamiliar light. Here the biographical enterprise
was not to dispel myths, but to reconstruct a part of his life that has very nearly disappeared without trace, warranting references of only a few paragraphs here or there in most accounts. I was concerned to try to do justice to the political pursuits that so engaged him during the nineteen-forties, and to trace in some detail his evolving relations with Hollywood, including the nightmarish catastrophe
of his
Brazilian
film,
It’s All True
. The difficulty remained, however, how to write at such exhaustive length and still encompass the rest of his life in a second and final volume. It seemed clear that what was needed was a separate volume which focused on these few but astonishingly abundant years. A very close examination indeed was possible: his life during this period is prodigiously well
documented, to the degree that it can be determined with some precision exactly what he was doing every day of his life for nearly five years. As I studied the material, it became increasingly clear that it could go a long way to answering the most persistent question asked about Orson Welles: what went wrong after
Citizen Kane
?

I began to see that Welles’s departure from his own country in 1947,
for what was in effect an occasionally interrupted exile of a little over twenty years, was a critical break in his career, releasing him to develop into the sort of artist he essentially was. It also signalled the end of a period of intense engagement with the culture from which he had sprung. During the period from the premiere of
Citizen Kane
to the beginning of his extended European sojourn,
he had continued to try to grapple unequally with Hollywood, but he also – passionately, persistently and with huge expenditure of time and money – came back to the question of what it was to be an American, assessing the results of what he called ‘our American experiment’. He was not, of course, the only person doing this at the time. America’s involvement in the war brought into sudden focus
the matter of how it would deal with the rest of the world after victory; it also transformed the situation of the black population, who for the first time found that they had some bargaining power, which in turn compelled the white population to reconsider its own position. They were, to put it mildly, stirring times. But Welles, more than most of his contemporaries, seemed driven to find a satisfactory
answer to the issue of how Americans were to live.

He did this directly in his speeches, in his radio commentaries and in his political and popular journalism. He did it, more subtly, in his films of the period,
The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear, The Stranger
and
The Lady from Shanghai
, each of which presents a problem in American life, and he did it in the unfinished
It’s All True
, which seeks to redefine the parameters of being American. (As it happens, one of the original titles of
Citizen Kane
was
American
.) Finally, he did it in his wholehearted embrace of American popular culture, in the vaudevillian extravaganzas
The Mercury Wonder Show
and
Around the World
, and in his really very serious attempt to become
a
radio comedian in the mould of Jack Benny. In giving my
study of these years the name of one of his radio programmes of the period, I am suggesting that his work of the time was an extended attempt to address his audience as fellow-citizens. Eventually, he gave up what seemed to him a doomed struggle to get America to listen to him. In a sense, the book might have been called
Goodbye, Americans
, which is certainly what he was saying in 1947; significantly,
the film he left behind him was
Macbeth
, his first film not to have a single American character in it, or any American resonance.

The catalogue of work contained in the preceding paragraph is enough to give a glimpse of the almost bewildering diversity of Welles’s output; many of these activities were pursued simultaneously. Virtually everything Welles ever did was done in the fullest glare of
publicity, and he was ceaselessly and increasingly mercilessly judged by a relentless press, which from early on had his scent in its nostrils. Even during the eighteen months of this period in which he did not act or direct, he was rarely out of the newspapers. I have tried to show what was actually going on behind the image of Welles that the press was busy manufacturing, generally abetted by
Welles himself. It is a period of his life strikingly characterised by bad luck, just as the period documented in
The Road to Xanadu
represented a phase of extraordinary and continuing good fortune. Of the earlier period, it may be said that Welles’s temperament capitalised wonderfully on the good fortune he experienced; of the later, that the bad luck exposed his weaknesses. It is without apology
that I write of Welles’s weaknesses. There is a faction among the supporters of Welles – the Wellesolators – who will hear no criticism of their hero. They seem to identify with him, to project themselves onto him. The Welles they have created is a fearless independent, punished by the world for being too talented, too original, too visionary. He is cinema’s sacrificial victim, too good to be
allowed to flourish. If only Welles’s sublime plans had not been viciously frustrated by the studio pygmies, they imply, the world would have been the better off by dozens of flawless masterpieces. They refuse to countenance any complicity on his part in what went wrong, and they are unable to see him for what he was – an individual of immense gifts, filled with contradictory and often self-defeating
impulses, a man who failed to find a way to put his gifts to their best use, one who had very little talent for having the enormous talent he possessed.

Some of Welles’s most fervent supporters are those who came
to
know him in later life; the directors Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom and the cinematographer Gary Graver are among the most notable of these. To them, Welles was mellow, wry and
wise, viewing the events of his life and career from a lofty position of irony, amused at the follies of the world. It is entirely understandable that, having fallen under the irresistible spell of this Orson Welles, they should wish to fight his corner, propagating his interpretation of what happened to him. But neither they nor he had troubled to look at the actual record, which is freely available
to scrutiny in the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana in Bloomington and in a number of individual archives spread across the libraries of America. Perhaps the most revealing source of all is the RKO archive, wherein are to be found not only Welles’s letters, telegrams and memoranda, but those of everyone else, both from the studio and from the Mercury offices, who was involved in the
breakdown of Welles’s Unit within RKO: executives, press representatives, production managers, writers, cameramen, secretaries, friends, enemies and those who crossed from one camp to the other. Particularly in the case of Welles’s great lost film,
It’s All True
, the record amounts to an account of almost Proustian detail, offering a picture of Welles at work and at play, inspired and indulgent,
deeply sensitive and grossly indifferent, mature and infantile, admired and despised, which provokes both admiration and compassion for a man in the grip of a temperament that was often fundamentally at war with his gifts.

It is, above all, a very human record. In this, it will not please the other faction of Orsonolators, the army of theoretical academics who have moved in on him like locusts,
seeing rich pickings in that very substantial body. For them he is a cornucopia, a gift from heaven; nothing that he did is less than profound from a phenomenological perspective. Whole conferences discuss his every filmed frame: their debates are polysemous, polyvalent, polymorphous, above all polysyllabic, although ‘debate’ is hardly the word for such one-sided activity. Fastidiously, they refuse
to attribute value, to assess worth; or rather, they see equal value and equal worth everywhere, converting everything into their hermetic formulas. Welles would have found their activities incomprehensible and intolerable; he told Peter Bogdanovich that ‘everyone under thirty-five has gone to film school and they’ve learned this terrible lingo. They don’t think, just repeat these terrible little
slogans.’ That was in the early nineteen-sixties. He was lucky enough not to live to witness the crimes against intelligibility committed in his name. ‘By enlarging
the
field of causal explanation beyond the studio career of Orson Welles (a sort of “zoom-out” and “rack focus” of historical procedure),’ writes one prominent Welles scholar:
¹

I have tried to show how the impossibility of a single
filmic representation can serve as a refractory surface against which a series of analogies, paradigmatic shifts, and disarticulations located within distinct yet convergent planes of historical actualisation come into view. It is in turn, across the strata of this unstable causal field (the discontinuities of which have been reconciled or reduced within the binary logic of the dominant supratext)
that the reconstitution of the various ontogenetic stages of
It’s All True
(planning, production, dispersion) can be sketched.

The author of this remarkable passage, which, as far as I am aware, has not yet been translated into English, is a serious researcher who no doubt has much to tell us about Orson Welles, but we will never know what it is. The same author, Catherine Benamou – who, it must
be stressed, has read wider and deeper than anyone alive into the
It’s All True
material – justifies Welles’s fanciful claim to have appeared as an extra in Robert Flaherty’s film
Man of Aran
during his Irish sojourn in 1931 with the remarkable phrase: ‘what matters is the homage Welles rendered to Flaherty in this claim, not its “truth”.’
²
In the Lewis Carroll world of the structuralists, of
course, there is no such thing as truth: there is merely ‘truth’.

My view is different. It seems to me that there is a plain, if many-layered, truth to be told. Orson Welles was a real man, if an exceptional one, confronting real and recognisable problems, making real and very human mistakes with real consequences. He sought to make his way in a world that often failed to accommodate his temperament;
for the most part he refused to accommodate the world. He therefore needed to make a world of his own, a context in which he could flourish. His personality, like that of most human beings, was complex and often contradictory, but, unlike most human beings, he pushed these contradictions to such extremes that it sometimes seems that he had no centre at all. It sometimes seemed that way to
him, and he sought many antidotes to eliminate the sense of a vacuum at the core; the most frequently deployed of these antidotes was the most effective of all, more reliable than alcohol, food, sex or love: work. He never ceased to want to tell stories in ever newer ways. There is a widely held view that Welles was self-destructive. A recent writer has suggested that what he said
about
John Barrymore
was in fact autobiographical: after the supreme performance Barrymore gave at the dress rehearsal of his first
Hamlet
, ‘the rest of his life,’ says Welles, ‘was anti-climax’:

There wasn’t anything left to do except go on imitating, as accurately as possible, that one great evening … the truth is that after that dress rehearsal, Jack began to fear that he couldn’t do anything else as good again.
I think he was afraid to find out for certain, so he set about destroying himself, as publicly and as entertainingly as possible … he used to tell me that he hated theatre. But he couldn’t kid either one of us. We spent hundreds of hours together, planning the production of a dozen plays. And I began to guess that what he hated was the responsibility of his own genius. Jack wanted to keep it a
secret from both of us.

To apply this to Welles is sheer romanticism.
Citizen Kane
is not perfect; Welles did not feel daunted by it. Unlike Barrymore, he was driven by a desire to transform the medium in which he worked, both in terms of its form and its content. His ‘incomparable bravura personality’, as Kenneth Tynan described it, was often a burden to him; it is no accident that amnesia features
so strongly in his output.
³
But at core he was an artist; the problem was to find the way in which he could be true to his own art. That search was to occupy him for the rest of his life, a never-ending quest to tell the stories he wanted to tell in the way he wanted to tell them. In doing so, he left an astonishing corpus of work, some of it successful, some not, but all of it vital. If you attempt
a different genre with each venture, you will not always master it.
Citizen Kane
was
sui generis
, a form of which Welles was of course the undisputed and never successfully imitated master. In seeking new forms he was not avoiding responsibility to his own genius: he was trying to find out what precisely it was, and to fulfil it as best he could. This is, it seems to me, a tale of heroism, not
of self-destruction, and it will occupy the third and final volume of this Life.