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Like Jesus Christ, Richard Wagner and Judy Garland, Orson Welles has become a biography magnet: The man and his work are too big, unruly, and subject to myth to be contained in any single standardized view. And in any number of new books and DVDs, the views keep coming.
One of the great directors of American theater and cinema, Welles is as slippery a subject as an artist can be, partly because his celebrity, from his famous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 to his 1970s guest-hosting stints on “The Tonight Show,” gives you the illusion of having known him. In fact, his life had as many off-kilter angles as his classic film “Citizen Kane.”
Similarly, most of Welles’ significant life events have more alternative versions than his later, oft-re-edited films. He himself had no great attachment to facts. A modern-day fabulist, he knew just how far to stretch truth—often with the attitude that if it’s not true it should be—before his tales grew tall.
Exasperation over that side of his character was intermittently evident in the first volume of Simon Callow’s Welles biography “The Road to Xanadu” (Viking), published nine years ago. In his second installment, “Hello Americans” (Viking), Callow circumvents the Welles versions with documentation from elsewhere and finds the more prosaic truths easily as interesting.
Welles claimed that a disgruntled voodoo priest cursed his film “It’s All True” to oblivion; Callow shows that Welles did a dandy job of that himself. And when Welles told director Peter Bogdanovich that his film “Mr. Arkadin” was his most severely mauled, he maybe forgot, temporarily, about the 50 possibly great minutes lost from “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
Callow’s newer-found comfort with Welles liberates him from much of the kind of debate that sometimes made the first volume tedious. In contrast, “Hello Americans” is gripping, thanks partly to stellar writing, access to memos and telegrams, and the kind of insight into an artist that can come only from a fellow artist. Callow not only investigates all strands of Welles’ life—theater, radio, political activism, his marriage to Rita Hayworth, and his love of murder mysteries and magic tricks—but he also weaves them together. Does the world deserve biographies this good?
When you turn to “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?,” by the filmmaker’s longtime colleague Joseph McBride, you see why Callow’s second volume stops at 1947. What lies beyond—Welles’ departure from America and his nomadic years in Europe—is so complicated and strange that Callow may have decades of work ahead of him.
McBride’s premise is that Welles was an independent filmmaker at a time when models for such things didn’t exist much outside the pornography industry. And in his last 15 years, until his death in 1985, necessity drove Welles to shoot film after film—all still unfinished or unedited—with what resources he could find, sometimes with people on break from porn films.
In one case, he filmed in the confines of his own home. In another, he financed the still-unreleased “Other Side of the Wind” through the Shah of Iran, who fell from power during the film’s production, complicating ownership and rights. Raw footage was seized and probably lost by customs officers. The landscape wouldn’t be complete without a problematic Welles estate, which, in McBride’s view, is bedeviled by Beatrice Welles, the filmmaker’s daughter.
These books, plus the new Criterion DVD boxed set of “Mr. Arkadin,” released in April with three different cuts and multiple takes of Welles directing himself, demystify Welles, yet he is still a candidate for the pantheon of your choice. He looked like a biblical prophet, and seemed to perform cinematic miracles, from “Citizen Kane” (1941) to “Chimes at Midnight” (1967), often with no budget. Like Wagner’s, Welles’ art refracts politics and philosophies that are open to endless interpretation. Like Garland’s, Welles’ roller-coaster life was fueled by a self-destructive streak, but one harder to explain than hers.
It’s this sort of mess that fascinates onlookers, one generation after another. Will his late films ever come out? Will the unedited work print of “Ambersons” that Welles left in Brazil ever turn up? There’s even disagreement over the cause of Welles’ obesity. In McBride’s book, people spent night and day with Welles on movie shoots and never saw him overeat. Everything about him—his personality, his work, his life—is still fluid and open to one question after another.
That’s why Callow was right to dwell on a period of months in 1942 when Welles the director went from boy wonder to dead meat, between shooting “Ambersons” and his firing from the studio that made it, RKO. What happened in between was a pattern of abandoning his own films and disappearing at key moments that was repeated for the rest of his life.
Welles left “Ambersons” unedited when he was asked by the U.S. government to make a goodwill documentary that came to be titled “It’s All True” (no Wellesian irony intended), encompassing Brazil’s carnival season. Volumes are conveyed by the “Hello Americans” dust-cover photo: Welles holds a cigar in one hand and a drink in the other, with a Brazilian sex bomb on each arm.
Having developed intellectually and creatively at a young age, Welles had a sense of entitlement that allowed him to frequently go AWOL from the film, sometimes for radio and lecture purposes. He was also leading a proto-rock-star existence—steeped in alcohol, amphetamines, sex, and even an apartment-trashing incident in which, Keith Moon style, he threw his furniture out the window.
It’s well-known how “Ambersons”—a darkish parable about the industrialization of America that Welles considered superior to and more commercial than “Citizen Kane”—tanked during preview screenings in Welles’ absence. What’s not well-known is that anti-Welles factions set up “Ambersons” for failure by testing this sophisticated film in small-town California directly following the fluffy “The Fleet’s In.”
In his hubris, Welles tried to supervise editing by long-distance communication in wartime conditions while “It’s All True” was running up large bills with bad weather and undependable local help. Eventually, the RKO crew was called home from South America and Welles took to the hinterlands to document the lives of Brazilian fishermen, with a single silent-film camera and a recently emigrated Hungarian cameraman. Callow believes the distance from Rio nightlife allowed Welles to finish this section of the film and create something that, by itself, would ensure Welles an exalted place in American cinema.
You have to be skeptical, especially since the film lay dormant, out of Welles’ reach, for 50 years, until its rediscovery and assemblage in the early ‘90s. Then you see it, and every shot is visually astounding—and becomes even more so as the film nears its conclusion.
So it’s all true—that is, all the behavioral extremes. Welles could roll up his sleeves and paint flats all night for the next day’s shooting in “The Lady From Shanghai.” Or he could arrive as a mere actor for hire in “Jane Eyre” and arrogantly tell director and cast how the film would be made. He could turn millions of dollars into cinematic gold or be more brilliant on a dime. He could make movies on a tight schedule—and spend years in the editing room, redubbing voices and inventing new storytelling forms.
“Whenever Welles started work on something,” Callow writes, “he saw a better, a richer, a bolder—and almost certainly a more expensive—way of doing it.”
What arose were cinematic hybrids whose merits are elusive until restored to their intended forms. His pulp-fiction films—“A Touch of Evil” and “Mr. Arkadin”—had page-turner plots but characters of classical-theater stature. His classical-theater adaptations featured, among other things, a drunk and disorderly Macbeth. Just as important, this high/low art juxtaposition came with an artist’s prerogative to be ambiguous.
That’s fine for literature, but cinema is the most public and expensive art form. You can understand why the producers re-edited Welles. Fusions of such elements are so unusual that some of Welles’ films are still considered hard to parse. But with much of his personal and artistic story still unwritten, how could it be any other way?
