The Magic World of Orson Welles (24 page)

“I'm convinced everybody should be interested in politics,” Welles declared at the outset. “The disaster of America in the 1920s was that everybody left the practice of politics to the politicians.” Even so, he approached the topic somewhat cautiously. His
Post
columns began under the title “Orson Welles's Almanac,” borrowing their name and format from Welles's radio show of that season, and were at first characterized by a cheerful, homey tone. Random, chatty observations on the day's news were interspersed with playful astrological forecasts. (“We are glad to report that planetary aspects today favor thoughts which can be turned into money”), household hints (“Cut string beans with scissors”), and notes on the books Welles had been reading. The columns also contained items about celebrities: Welles attacked Westbrook Pegler, “whom Mr. Hearst pays to seek for the truth or something,” and defended Frank Sinatra against Pegler's innuendoes; he wrote an open letter to Jack Benny, who had been unable to take Eddie Anderson along on troop shows because of segregation in the army; and he spoke disparagingly of Noel Coward, whom he accused of perpetuating an anachronistic, British public school snobbery. Within a few months, however, Welles had become less discursive, more like a straightforward editorialist. His style remained fairly
witty and ironic, but there was an urgency in his voice. On April 13 FDR died, and the title of the columns changed immediately to “Orson Welles Today,” in keeping with a growing seriousness of purpose.

After Roosevelt's death, Welles announced to his readers that the president had written him a personal note only a few weeks before, saying, “April will be a critical month in the history of human freedom.” Indeed signs of the Cold War were appearing everywhere. The battle against Germany and Japan, which Welles portrayed as the common man's struggle against fascism, was in danger of betraying its ostensible ideals; VE Day left Welles uneasy because he felt that the spirit of Hitler was only dormant, surviving through the old device of the Red Scare. (Aspects of this theme were, of course, explored in
The Stranger
, the film Welles was making at the time, where he plays a Nazi criminal hiding in a New England town. Only when the criminal is discovered and killed does a real VE Day come to the fictional Harpur, Connecticut.) “We've been on the move for quite a time now,” he wrote, “along a road that's taken us from North Africa . . . to Yalta. The next objective is San Francisco [and the United Nations conference]—and we'd better continue along the same road without a stop. Otherwise we'll find out to our everlasting sorrow that we didn't take the ride at all. We were taken for it.”

Welles's columns provided documentary evidence, if any were needed, of his essential liberalism and his intense concern with political affairs. His chief themes were the need to perpetuate New Deal social legislation and the necessity of translating the Allied victory over Germany into a world democracy. He argued for a fair working relationship between labor and capital but believed government price regulations should continue after the war; he inveighed against a “certain sort of businessman” who “openly favors a certain percentage of postwar unemployment,” saying that such types “don't want any percentage of government control over their affairs. They want to be free as buccaneers, free to encourage a little convenient joblessness.” He supported the basic structure of American government and encouraged the two-party system, but at the time he hoped aloud that Henry Wallace would be the next president. When Truman entered the White House, Welles was cautious: “We must reconcile ourselves that the new President will, at least temporarily, do no more than consolidate the social gains of the past twelve years. . . . Harry Truman prides himself in knowing what the little fellow's thinking about. . . . Okay. But if the little fellows of America want to press forward for a better world in the century of the common man, they'll have to let our new Chief Executive know about it again, again, and again.”

Though Welles repeatedly commented on domestic affairs, his chief concern from the first column to the last was American foreign policy. The
San Francisco assembly was his major preoccupation, and he also attended the Pan American War and Peace conference in Mexico City, writing for several days about the meeting. (It is an interesting coincidence that in the next year
The Lady from Shanghai
would be filmed partly on location in San Francisco and Mexico.) At the conference, which was sponsored by Welles's old patron Nelson Rockefeller and which has been described by historians as one of the first symptoms of Cold War politics, speakers rose again and again to utter revolutionary slogans and discuss economic reform; nevertheless, Welles noted a reluctance to get down to “brass tacks.” He remarked on the dark history of pseudo-revolutions in these countries (“Very few of them succeeded without the help of a couple of North American companies you could name”) and was struck by the blatant ironies of the conference itself, where the US “State Department millionaires” made official deals with so-called revolutionary heads of state, many of whom were also millionaires. Most of all he was troubled by divided feelings about the true progressives; he wanted the South Americans to join the war against the European fascists, but he knew that US economic colonialism had made the Latin left as naturally suspicious of the States as the Irish were suspicious of England.

The difficulties Welles found at Mexico City were symptomatic of conflicts he saw everywhere, especially inside the United States. Always there had been a disparity between American ideals expressed abroad and the actual treatment of minorities at home, but toward the end of the war this disparity was becoming especially acute:

Internationalism [Welles wrote] can't be preached in a new government level and practiced on the old states' rights basis. The inconsistencies are just too glaring. . . . Thus, an Atlantic Charter is perused by foreigners with one eye on a lynching in Arkansas. A Crimea communique is studied in reference to a Detroit race riot. A declaration at Mexico City stirs memories of a place called Sleepy Lagoon. . . . That's the connection between the hand of American friendship extended to Haile Selassie, to Farouk of Egypt, to the leader of Saudi Arabia—and the noose around a Negro's neck in Alabama.

Such inconsistencies were enough to belie the country's claim to “moral leadership” at international meetings:

No moral position taken by us against Col. Perón has any meaning for Spanish-speaking America until we break with Gen. Franco. . . . Our attitude towards the policy of the good neighbor matches the rest of our foreign policy. But it doesn't match at all the high principles by which we would justify our leadership in the Americas. We have armed dictators, strengthened unnecessarily the
political hand of high churchmen, and everywhere underrated the Democratic aspirations of the people.

The new, more liberalized economic arrangements being made for the world were also being threatened by official hypocrisies. Welles was especially concerned about the fate of the Bretton Woods proposals, which would slash interest rates and allow all countries to borrow from a world bank “without secret, war-breeding deals.” The Bretton Woods idea was aimed at preventing the rise of speculators like the “match king” Ivar Kruger, who had grown rich after the first world war, but it was being opposed in this country by Senator Taft and the Republican right wing—or, as Welles put it, by “that little Wall St. camarilla who once did so very well by floating foreign loans at fat fees.” Taft had wanted to substitute another plan, whereby the United States and Great Britain would reach an agreement on the dollar and the pound, extending credits to other countries. What they offered, Welles remarked, was “the old ‘key' notion and currency gag—and behind this gaudily altruistic façade one notices that something is missing. Something called the Soviet Union.” Even the British, Welles noted, were to become “junior partners in the firm, playing an emphatically minor role, and one bound to get smaller through the years.” Welles shuddered at what might result:

We are the world's greatest production plant and the largest creditor nation. Without sensible economic agreements between England and the U.S., Mr. Luce's prediction of the American century will come true, and God help us all. We'll make Germany's bid for world supremacy look like amateur night, and the inevitable retribution will be on a comparable scale.

The mounting anger one senses in Welles's comments about reactionary politics is reflected also in his remarks on current literature and the arts. For example, he wrote at length in praise of Mexico's three famous muralists, Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, but of the three he much preferred Siqueiros because of his manifestly committed, revolutionary subject matter: “It would be easy to denounce Siqueiros as a blind slave, but he is doing the most adventurous and independent work in the world of art. As for his unshackled comrades, Rivera is decorating night clubs, and Orozco is depicting democracy as raddled and bedizened.” Somewhat later, in a brief note on John Hersey's
A Bell for Adano
(about to be filmed by 20th Century-Fox), Welles wrote that the popularity of the book was disturbing because of the way it ministered to America's complacent moral superiority: “For those who thought Mussolini was only funny, and who never heard of Mazzini or Garibaldi, for those who like to think that America has a monopoly
on the democratic faith, ‘A Bell for Adano,' I'm afraid, will be most reassuring.” On the other hand, Richard Wright's
Black Boy
needed more readers. White citizens who claimed to “understand the Negro” should be “tied down with banjo strings, gagged with bandannas, their eyes propped open with watermelon seeds, and made to read ‘Black Boy' word for word.” (Coincidentally, about a year later Welles became involved in a controversy with these same white citizens. On his New York radio show in late July 1946, he reported that black army veteran Isaac Woodward had been taken from a Greyhound bus in Aiken, South Carolina, beaten by police, and blinded. The mayor of Aiken and the local Lions Club denied any knowledge of the incident and threatened to sue, but the issue was never joined.)

By June 1945, Welles was writing from San Francisco, where it was becoming increasingly apparent that the UN would become a battleground of Cold War animosities. The American government was already extending official courtesies to known fascists like Nicholas Horthy of Hungary, and the conference itself was rife with backstage politics. Welles could sense a growing propaganda effort against the Russians:

We are still building our Bulwarks against Bolshevism. The phony fear of Communism is smoke-screening the real menace of renascent Fascism. The red bogey haunts the hotel lobbies and the committee rooms. Near the cigar stand at the Fairmont, Senator Vandenberg growls sarcastically about the ‘benediction of Yalta.' . . . Averell Harriman has been talking up the Polish problem to selected groups of reporters in off-the-record cocktail parties. . . . The [anti-Stalin] gossip mill works full time . . . and Rep. Clare Luce declares war on the Soviet Union by radio.

There is a fatalistic note to these lines, which appeared very close to the end of Welles's tenure as a columnist. He had begun his first column by writing about FDR's inaugural and expressing hope for the UN, but within six months Roosevelt was dead, liberalism was on the wane, and the new international organization seemed doomed by internecine conflict.

If I have dealt at length with such matters, it is because Welles's tendency to become involved in controversy, together with his repeated criticism of public life in 1945, has an interesting relationship to his subsequent films. I do not mean that his movies became mere vehicles for ideas, although it is true that his thrillers are filled with topical political references and moral arguments. I mean, rather, that the mood and style of his later projects were
indirectly affected by his alienation from the movie colony and society at large; that the frenzy and unorthodox form of his work for the next ten years may be seen as partly a response to the growth of reactionary politics in the country and can be related not only to Welles's working conditions but to his growing dissatisfaction with American life.

The continuity between Welles's politics and his situation in Hollywood is fairly easy to detect if one simply considers the few remarks about movies in his columns. “I love movies,” he says at one point. “But don't get me wrong. I hate Hollywood.” Clearly it had become impossible for him to continue working as an independent, and his sense of dislocation from the industry had coincided with a rise of conservatism in the nation. Welles pointed out that the same money-men who were undermining a liberal foreign policy and arguing for an “acceptable” rate of unemployment were also consolidating their hold on the entertainment business; very soon, he suggested, they would control television communications: “Receiving sets in New York are so adjusted that you can get only ten television broadcasting studios instead of being able to dial anything you want. . . . It's a neat trick, but it shouldn't fool anybody.” As for the movies, they had long been dominated by a handful of big operators, in roughly the same way as legitimate theater had been dominated in the years before the Depression. “I think Jack Warner makes the best movies in town,” Welles declared. “But the views of Jack and Harry Warner towards distribution are a good deal less liberal than those expressed in their product. . . . Jack claims that one of his theatres will play one of my pictures as quickly and cheerfully as it will give the time to one of his. I say that's spinach, and I say to hell with it anyway.”

Welles had comparatively few observations about the industry product, but on the few occasions when he did turn to specific films, he heaped scorn on Hollywood's establishment. Several times he voiced support for “little” films, and twice he used space in the column to recommend William Castle's
When Strangers Marry
. (Within a year Castle himself became Welles's associate producer on
The Lady from Shanghai
.) Welles liked the film because it had the gritty, unpretentious virtues of an intelligent B production, making it a perfect foil to the middlebrow sanctimoniousness of Hollywood's award-winning movies: