Orson Welles: Hello Americans (23 page)

The letter Welles received early in May 1942, while he was in the midst of crisis in Rio, is quintessential Dadda. Welles had called him on his birthday: ‘You have made me happy beyond words. I felt like embracing the janitor, the garage man, the garbage collector, the whole world,
except the Japs and Hitler! Today, Monday, still back at the office and still happy. Let the old flat smelly feet come in for treatment, what do I care about their feet – I got your call today and their feet will not smell so badly.’ He asks coyly about Welles’s love life: ‘so you hear no more from “a certain party”?’ (a reference, presumably, to Dolores del Rio, from whom Welles had drifted apart
during his long absence) and proffers homely advice: ‘please don’t stir up the embers. When the fire dies out, it shows there was little fuel.’ He relays the RKO gossip – all of which is startlingly precise and accurate – and even goes to the heart of the studio’s chief anxiety about the material Welles was shooting: ‘your mixing of the black and the whites cannot be accepted by Iowa, Missouri,
not to mention all the people the other side of the Mason Dixon line’. Everyone is convinced, he informs Welles, that Koerner will not renew his contract, then he helpfully recounts a meeting he has just had with Charlie Chaplin, who also, it appears, has strong views on Welles. ‘He like everyone else thinks you have no appreciation of the value of money! Ever hear that before? He thinks you are a
great artist, though still young in your conception of human emotion. He had much to say about
Kane
which he was crazy about, with only the above reservation, of emotional value. He believes in you 100%. I do wish that you could form some sort of alliance with him. You would complement each other.’ Presumably he was fully aware of the
Landru
debacle. Dr Bernstein presses his advantage, probing
Welles’s weaknesses with surgical skill: ‘You need mature minds in your associations, not mere “bulk”.
The
trouble with your associates has been that you have no respect for them. Most of them have need of you either financially or to help them climb. They therefore all flatter you, try to read your mind, and agree with you without giving you an honest opinion.’ Then he goes for the jugular: ‘I
except Jack Houseman. He is the one person I am sorry you broke with.’

Of all names to taunt Welles with, Bernstein unerringly selects the one that is calculated to drive him into paroxysms of rage – Houseman, who had given him all his early opportunities, but whose attempts to rein him in had provoked Welles’s undying hostility. ‘I know that you do not like to face reality when it comes to business,
and so your affairs are generally in a muddle,’ Dr Bernstein continues unrelentingly. ‘I wish too that you would have a little confidence in me. I guided
you
in a way which I have never regretted. And you
STILL
need a guardian! The proof of this is that you have little to show after all your tremendous success. You are now a man, and I am talking to you man to man. I am alarmed when I think of
the mercenary people who surround you – Moss – his lawyer, and others who have sucked you dry.’ It requires an effort of imagination to envisage anybody talking to Welles in these terms and getting away with it, but his two surrogate fathers, Skipper and Dadda, hold a critical key to Welles’s psychology. A considerable part of him remained emotionally immature, even dependent: he was writing to and
communicating with both these men until the day they died, accepting without complaint their steady stream of alternating cajolement and exaltation. To these semi-familial figures may be added that of Arnold Weissberger, the canny lawyer who was the engineer of the superb contract that brought Welles to RKO in the first place, and who had saved his bacon more than once. Welles’s personal finances
were looking shaky: Weissberger was having difficulty in raising royalties on
Native Son
; the Internal Revenue Service was about to move on the Mercury Theatre’s outstanding Social Security contributions, as well as Welles’s back taxes. ‘A three-fold attack by the State, the Federal government against you personally and the Federal government against the Mercury, would not be a very good idea
at this time.’
⁹
The spread in
Life
magazine had been valuable, Weissberger says, but urges him to get Herb Drake to engender some publicity ‘to counteract the flood of rumours about your relations with RKO’. Apart from an equivocal Phil Reismann and a deeply embattled George Schaefer (who had relented to the extent of authorising a final final allocation of $30,000 to complete shooting on
It’s
All True
), Welles was
without
support in Hollywood. Koerner’s RKO was close to washing its hands of him, and his operation in Rio was grinding to a halt. A crowing Lynn Shores laconically wired Walter Daniels of the front office:
OUT OF FILM AND OUT OF MONEY.
¹⁰

It was at exactly that point that Jacaré drowned. There have been innumerable conflicting versions of the events of 19 May; what follows
is drawn directly from the daily report, under the usual heading,
WELLES ACTIVITIES.
Its veracity can scarcely be doubted, and nothing so well conveys the immediacy and horror of what happened. At 7.30 a.m. on the Tuesday morning, the report states, the unit went to the location at Barra Da Tijuca: there was a heavy mist, so the
jangada
was tied to the launch with two ropes. All four
jangadeiros
rode on the raft as it was towed into Guanabara Bay and past the spot chosen for the day’s shooting. For some reason, Jacaré ordered the launch to go still further; despite the mist, people on shore could see what was happening and tried to attract the
jangadeiros
’ attention, to get them to stop. Welles ordered two of the drivers to go ahead and signal to them, which they did by taking their shirts
off and waving them; seeing this, Jacaré ordered the captain of the launch to approach the coast. At exactly that moment, a tremendous breaker caught the launch and the tow lines broke, freeing the
jangada
, which rolled over. Two of the
jangadeiros
, Jeronimo and Jacaré, started to swim to the shore. The other two, Tátá and Manuel Preto, stayed close to the raft, and managed to turn it upright.
Jeronimo caught hold of the
jangada
’s rudder and, since he was nearest, the other two pulled him aboard. They heard Jacaré’s calls for help, but by the time they went to look for him, he was gone. A second breaker righted the launch and the captain took it out of danger, whereupon the drivers took off their shoes and dived in; the
jangada
turned over again, and once more the
jangadeiros
were thrown
into the water. The chauffeurs pulled the three surviving
jangadeiros
out of the water by rope; they were taken to Joá, and the drivers returned to tell Welles and the company what had happened. Lynn Shores and Dick Wilson were also informed, and they called the harbour police. Welles returned with the three
jangadeiros
to the Filumense
clube
and then to the Palace Hotel, and spent the rest of
the day with various newspapermen in conferences with Assis Figuereido, Phil Reismann, Lynn Shores, Dick Wilson, Bob Meltzer and Fernando Pinto, president of the
jangada clube
in Fortaleza. The mood was sombre: death had come to the party.

The shock was immense, and not only in Brazil. The story of the
jangadeiros
created a considerable sensation. The incident made the front page of the
New York
Times
:
LEADING BRAZIL RAFTMAN DIES STARRING FOR MOVIE
– an interesting turn of phrase: not
in
but
for
the movie.
¹¹
It also reported an incident that was to become part of folklore, though the evidence for it is slender: Jacaré, the
Times
said, was ‘tipped from his raft today during the filming of a battle between a shark and an octopus. The fisherman swam away from the fighting monsters into a
whirlpool, where he was drowned.’ The Brazilian press was considerably less inclined to mythologize, sharply aware as they were of the bitter ironies of the situation: ‘They got drunk with the fame,’ proclaimed a leader in
Aino Da Noite
:
¹²

Confused with rich presents, going back to Ceara, they could find no fun in their obscure work. Never again did they go back to their
jangada
, to earn their
daily bread with their simple boat. The big city, the news in the press and the chance to be movie actors, gaining abundant and easy luxuries, killed the simple impulse of their triumphal trip. This is the way the
jangadeiros
ended. Jacaré died at the edge of the beach, in an adventure without grandeur … they should have stayed on their own sand dunes, in their small houses made of Carnauba straw,
without ever glimpsing the seductions of Babylon, without ever meeting the American movie men. They should have stayed there far away, as
jangadeiros
, in the land of Itacema, without ever meeting Orson Welles.

A somewhat disingenuous piece – if the
jangadeiros
had never left the land of Itacema, they would never have made their heroic journey, they would never presented their petition to President
Vargas, and they would never have been the subject of a film; Welles had little to do with it. He was, of course, racked with guilt. Prominent Brazilians hastened to comfort him in his distress: Antonio Ferreira assured him that he still had Brazil’s support.

RKO was immediately alerted to what had happened by a blunt telegram from Lynn Shores:
WHAT AMOUNT WE COVERED IN STATES SETTLEMENT ANSWER
IMMEDIATELY
.
¹³
It transpired that the studio had cancelled the policy that would have covered Jacaré; RKO was obliged to pay his family something between $2,000 and $3,000, as opposed to the $10,000 that the policy would have given him. But there could be no question of cancelling the filming of
Four Men on a Raft
in Fortaleza, said Reismann. Welles was ‘working
like
a dog’.
¹⁴
They now had a rigid
deadline to finish the Rio sequence. ‘I have come to the conclusion that this is the only way to handle Orson, otherwise he has a very bad habit of putting off his daily work as long as possible.’ As the activities reports reveal, whenever he wasn’t shooting the remains of the Urca Casino material, he was working on the script for the Fortaleza sequence. Reismann reports that Dick Wilson had
estimated a further expenditure of $32,500, but he, Reismann, reckons another five or six thousand. He immediately placed $10,000 in Dick Wilson’s personal account, which would provide one Mitchell camera, 40,000 feet of film and a local cameraman: the utter minimum.

Lynn Shores put this into effect. His reports continued to bridle at Welles’s capriciousness, noting that although Reismann was
doing a good job keeping Welles under control, ‘he still stays awake nights trying to think up fast ones … he has the boys up at 4 o’clock every morning shooting sunrise for no reason except he himself stays up all night and seems to want company around 4 o’clock in the morning’.
¹⁵
There may be a certain element of truth in this; more importantly, Welles was becoming ever more exploratory in cinematic
terms, still assembling material for some as-yet-unarticulated response to the extraordinary culture and country in which he found himself, now personified in his mind by the drowned
jangadeiro
. Reismann reported that Welles had many problems in Rio, ‘but it all gets back to the main difficulty’ – the core friction between the RKO and Mercury factions within the unit.
¹⁶
To the crew, filming seemed
interminable, but Welles – despite the letter from Schaefer – appeared to feel no real pressure to leave. Reismann believed that Welles planned to stay in Brazil until 1 August, ‘the reasons for which I will tell you when I see you’. (Shores, the eternal grouse, ends a letter dated mid-June, ‘Best wishes for a merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.’)
¹⁷

Despite the catastrophe of Jacaré’s death, life
had gone on: even Welles was starting to think of life beyond
It’s All True
. The day after the accident, he received another award for
Citizen Kane
at the Museum Nacional de Belas Artas, and wrote to Katharine Cornell in reply to a telegram from her that yes, of course he’d love to play Vershinin to her Masha, but when? Herb Drake, back in Hollywood, was actively planning for Welles’s return:
‘You have got to come home the right way, hugely, not sneak in on a plane.
¹⁸
You must return with trumpets and banners because the campaign needs a good hot fillip of the old Welles personality (with quotes).’ There have been two other Welles pictures to keep alive ‘and the
RKO
anti-Welles battle to fight. (It has never been so virulent.)’ He is nonetheless confident that ‘a real bang-up arrival’
can focus the limelight on Welles. He outlines a four-point plan, including stops in Miami, Washington, New York, Chicago. Then he should arrive in Los Angeles ‘on a tidal wave of wire stories and throw a party before the studio issues its own story. There is a widespread, nurtured campaign to prove you have been spending too much time and money in Brazil, that
Ambersons
is no good and
Fear
ditto.’
Koerner has made a personal visit to William Wilkerson of the
Hollywood Reporter
. ‘The heat is definitely on. The RKO executives have been as busy as Goebbels putting the pan on your pictures and on you.’ There is, Drake tells him, a problem in stressing the pan-American cooperation angle: ‘Disney took the cream off the idea. However, if someone in Washington will come out with a thank you statement
to you, you will return a conquering hero.’

This now became a major preoccupation: Berent Friele was wheeled out yet again to affirm the importance of Welles’s contribution. He telegraphed Phil Reismann:
FACT IS THAT ORSON IS DOING AN OUTSTANDING JOB IN BRAZIL WHICH DESERVES GREATER RECOGNITION IN UNITED STATES
.
¹⁹
The Brazilian division duly reported that Welles’s knowledge of Brazil and its
customs would be invaluable even after his return, adding, somewhat mysteriously, ‘as can be seen, it is already possible to measure the success of his being here in many obvious ways, and to look forward to the important reinterpretation of it for other purposes and compound interests at a later time’.
²⁰
In the absence of a completed film or a clear sense of what any such film might be like,
the nature of his contribution was indeed somewhat in the realm of the mystic. Meanwhile the apparently interminable casino sequence had been completed (at a total cost of $17,000, by no means a large sum for a comparable sequence shot in Hollywood) and the crew finally planned their return, while preparations were made for the departure north of the tiny core team that would shoot the Fortaleza footage.