Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (117 page)

At one point Welles quoted from
Two Gentlemen of Verona
(“I’ll be as patient as a gentle stream”), and Hill swiftly matched him with a snatch of
Othello
(“What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”)—the kind of erudite quotation-trading the friends had been doing for more than fifty years.

“Is work on ‘The Magic Show’ more encouraging?” Hill asked.

“There is a bright spot on the horizon,” replied Welles. “I’m about to wrap it up, actually. A few more camera set-ups and a slight bit more editing, and that’s it, except—”

“Except what?”

“Except I’m tempted to add a new close: the teleportation of a human being along a fiber-optic cable from Los Angeles to New York,” said Welles.

Hill reminded him that he’d been working on “The Magic Show” for fifteen years.

“The only real troubles have been the perennial ones of finding money and time,” Welles sighed. “But it’s been more a labor of love than one of necessity. My ‘Magic Show’ troubles pale when I think of Okito, who was one of the greatest magicians. He invented one of my favorite tricks, the floating ball. He opened his act by plucking a duck from a cloth. Before making its entrance, the duck is secured in a bag between Okito’s legs. At a command performance before the Kings and Queens of Denmark and Holland, the duck somehow extricated its head out of the bag, and grabbed, with exceeding force, the very unsuspecting magician under his robe. Over the years, whenever I begin to believe I have troubles, I think of poor Okito. He’s been on my mind a great deal in recent years. But today, there’s no duck under my djellabas and the horizon is bright.”

Welles always spoke optimistically about the future, and he did so tonight. He had a good role in a new picture coming out soon, called
Someone to Love
, which was the second time Orson had acted for his friend the independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom. (He had also played a magician in Jaglom’s 1971 film
A Safe Place.
) Oja Kodar also had a role in
Someone to Love
, which doubled his pleasure. Welles had improvised some dialogue for his character, a mentor to Jaglom’s character and a philosopher on life and love, and he was proud of his work.

Orson had reason to believe, he said, that his good luck was returning. He’d heard from an East Coast producer who was interested in putting up finishing money for either
King Lear
or “The Dreamers”—the latter his adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short stories, for which he had shot a few scenes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He promised to send Hill a “revised script” of “The Dreamers.”

“Luck plays such a large part in our life,” Hill remarked.

“Everything to do with an artistic career, from the fellow who eats live lizards for a living to Michelangelo, depends on an element of luck,” Welles said, as modest in private as he had been in public. “There’s nobody who isn’t beholden to luck.”

As the call wound down, Welles urged Skipper to come and visit him. He had not seen Hill for several years and had been trying to entice him to travel west. “I fear that, if you wait too long, your trip will be to deliver my eulogy,” Welles said.

“I think of you as immortal,” returned Hill warmly.

“Maybe in your eyes, but not in the eyes of my doctor,” stated Welles. “But thank God this shipwreck is too busy to be destroyed, let alone sink.” He finished with a passage from
Cymbeline
: “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered,” he said.

“Good night and good luck,” said Hill.

“Good night, Roger.”

Talk shows like Merv Griffin’s treated Orson royally in a way official Hollywood never had. Orson liked to quip that Hollywood had given him only “half an Oscar,” for cowriting
Citizen Kane.
But that wasn’t quite true: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences board of governors also voted Orson an honorary Oscar in 1971 for “superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures.” But Welles sent a friend, director John Huston, who was currently acting for him in “The Other Side of the Wind,” to appear instead, accepting the award on his behalf. A maverick filmmaker himself, Huston praised Welles’s career eloquently in his introduction, ending with the ringing assertion that Orson “is truly that most difficult, unforgivable, and invaluable of God’s creations: a man of genius.”

Since Orson was busy “filming abroad,” Huston told the Academy (and the global television audience), he would accept the Oscar in a special two-minute film clip, the medium he loved most. In fact, Welles was living then in a bungalow in the nearby Beverly Hills Hotel, and he watched the “live” telecast with Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, and Bogdanovich’s girlfriend, actress Cybill Shepherd. Huston said he promised to bring the Oscar to Welles in Spain. Orson yelled good-naturedly at the TV set, “Yeah, bring it right over, John!”

Orson was more inclined to accept the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award on February 9, 1975, because the event was produced by George Stevens Jr., the institute’s founder. The AFI was dedicated to film education and preservation, a cause Welles believed in, and Stevens’s father was George Stevens Sr., Ashton Stevens’s nephew, who had welcomed Welles so warmly to RKO in 1939.

As the hour grew late, Welles turned to his typewriter, working fitfully on several projects. Oja Kodar’s nephew, Aleksandar, was asleep in the attic. Professor Howard Suber of UCLA was later told that Orson spent the night drafting his first college syllabi and lectures; other people say he was toiling on the script for “The Magic Show,” developing his plans for a cross-country fiber-optic teleportation sequence. Knowing Welles, he probably spent time on both, and other projects too. He moved restlessly from one piece of work to the next, keeping to his small downstairs back bedroom, wearing “one of his enormous hooded bathrobes,” in the words of Bart Whaley in his self-published
Orson Welles: The Man Who Was Magic
, “as ever living in the present and planning the future.”

Sometime after midnight, Welles “left his battered mechanical typewriter and went to the adjoining bathroom,” wrote Whaley, who for his account interviewed Freddie Gillette in 1992. “Returning to his high hospital-type bed, he evidently found it too difficult to climb up into. Managing to clutch a pillow, he lay on the floor, and tucked the pillow under his head.”

Orson’s “wonderful booming voice,” in the independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom’s words, was discovered by Jaglom on his answering machine when he came home in the early morning. Jaglom had told Welles his mother was undergoing a delicate operation in a hospital. “This is your friend,” the wonderful booming voice said on the recording. “Don’t forget to call your mother first thing in the morning, find out what the results of her operation are, then call and tell me.”

His last known words, expressing concern about someone else’s mother, were like a faint echo of Rosebud. When the chauffeur arrived at Welles’s house at 10
A
.
M
. on Thursday, October 10, he found Orson slumped and dead on the floor. One of the first people arriving at Welles’s address, after hearing the news on the radio and television, was Orson’s longtime friend Paul Stewart, the actor who played Raymond, the character who discovers Kane’s body in
Citizen Kane.

“A man is not from where he is born,” Welles said once, “but from where he decides to die.” He had lived, it turns out, “seventy years of a man’s life,” words that reverberate from
Citizen Kane.
That film, among all his works, was mentioned in front-page headlines and television and radio broadcasts around the world. “Orson Welles, Film Genius, Entertainment Boy Wonder,” read the
Boston Globe
’s headline reporting his death.

Citizen Kane
alone would have ensured his place in cinema history. In 1997, an American Film Institute jury of 1,500 “film artists, critics and historians” ranked the picture as the greatest American film of all time. It achieved the same ranking in the same survey in 2007.

For fifty years,
Kane
also took the top slot in
Sight and Sound
’s decennial worldwide poll of “critics, distributors and selected academics and professions”—until 2012, when Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
finally displaced it.
Vertigo
’s winning margin—191 votes to 147 for
Citizen Kane
—was doubtless bolstered by the magazine’s generous expansion of its voting pool that year, from 145 in 2002 to 846 in 2012. (The totals came from the cumulative tally of films cited in top-ten lists of favorite or best works submitted by each of the participants.) It couldn’t have helped
Kane
that, the year before, the influential critic David Thomson had wondered in print in
Sight and Sound
whether Welles’s first picture deserved to hold the top spot forever. “If
Citizen Kane
wins again in 2012, it would be understandable yet depressing,” Thomson wrote.

But it is also true that, by 2012, the greatness of
Citizen Kane
was taken for granted among even some of the elder statesmen among Welles experts. Peter Bogdanovich, for instance, declined to participate in the
Sight and Sound
poll that year. “Of course, I didn’t know at the time that
Vertigo
was going to win,” Bogdanovich wrote later. “Personally, it has never been my favorite Hitchcock.” James Naremore voted in the poll—not for
Vertigo
, but not for
Citizen Kane
either. Naremore chose
Touch of Evil
as his Welles selection for the top ten. “I was annoyed by Thomson’s
Sight and Sound
essay and could sense which way the wind was blowing,” Naremore explained. Even as dedicated a Wellesian as Joseph McBride split hairs in withholding his vote from
Citizen Kane.
“It pained me not to vote for
Kane
, which was my cinematic textbook and still is my touchstone,” said McBride, who has written three books about Welles, “but I voted for
The Magnificent Ambersons
and
Chimes at Midnight
, which I think are even better, as did Welles himself.”

Hitchcock directed more than fifty pictures. (
Vertigo
was number nine on the AFI’s 2007 ranking.) Welles completed only about a dozen. Yet Welles ranked third in the number of votes attracted by
any
director in the
Sight and Sound
poll—behind only Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard—with several of his films drawing votes, and five firmly lodged in the top 250 of all time.
Touch of Evil
, his film noir gem from 1958, ranked fifty-sixth.
The Magnificent Ambersons
, even truncated, ranked eighty-first.
Chimes at Midnight
was number 154.
F for Fake
was 235. Welles was also represented by films in which he “merely” acted, with
The Third Man
part of a three-way tie at seventy-third place.

Sight and Sound
also conducted a separate poll in which film directors voted for the greatest and their favorites. Among the 358 filmmakers participating were Bong Joon-Ho from South Korea, Faouzi Bensaidi from Morocco, Jiri Menzel from the Czech Republic, Paul Greengrass from the United Kingdom, Luis Miñarro from Spain, Manuel Ferrari from Argentina, Pema Tseden from Tibet, Shinji Aoyama from Japan, and Martin Scorsese from the United States. All these and other contemporary directors voted for one or more Welles pictures—there were even scattered votes for
Mr. Arkadin
—and in the end Welles placed two films in the directors’ top hundred:
Touch of Evil
in a four-way tie at twenty-sixth; and
Citizen Kane
number three, behind
Tokyo Story
and
2001: A Space Odyssey.
(
Vertigo
, the top Hitchcock film, was number seven.)

Welles remains a lodestar for fans, critics, and scholars, as well as filmmakers. And, like Jimi Hendrix, whose recordings continue to emerge decades after his death, Welles keeps delivering. In 1992, Spanish filmmaker Jesus Franco released a compilation of his
Don Quixote
footage, though many Welles purists found it a bastardization. Two cinephiles, Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel, worked with Richard Wilson to restore Orson’s equally quixotic 1942 film
It’s All True
, shot in Brazil, for a 1993 documentary. In 1999 George Hickenlooper made
The Big Brass Ring
, drawing on Welles and Oja Kodar’s script, as rewritten by F. X. Feeney and Hickenlooper. In 2013, his long-lost
Too Much Johnson
footage was unearthed in Italy; the 1938 slapstick comedy footage toured film festivals after a crisp restoration, stunning audiences with its beauty and vitality. (“Deep focus, daring forms of blocking,” said James Naremore. “It pretty much knocked my socks off.”) The Munich Film Museum has compiled footage from several uncompleted Welles films, including
The Dreamers
,
The Magic Show
, and his one-man
Moby Dick.

And even “The Other Side of the Wind” may yet find its way through its legal and financial welter. In October 2014, the
New York Times
reported on the front page that a deal had been reached to hand over to a Los Angeles production company the 1,083 reels of negatives sitting in a warehouse in a Paris suburb. Peter Bogdanovich and Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, who has worked often with Steven Spielberg and who began his career as a line producer on “The Other Side of the Wind,” would oversee the editing of the film, based on Welles’s surviving notes. The main character in the story echoes Hemingway, and the inspiration for the script can be traced to Welles’s tussle with Hemingway in 1937; the film is also said to mark one of the most overt explorations of homosexuality in Welles’s oeuvre. The cast includes Bogdanovich, John Huston, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, and Dennis Hopper. “Cinema buffs consider it the most famous movie never released,” wrote the
Times
, “an epic work by one of the great filmmakers.”