Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (89 page)

Meeting with Schaefer and other RKO officials, Orson ran through a list of projects that interested him. He proposed a film about Cyrano de Bergerac, the lovelorn, nasally endowed dramatist and duelist; this prospect had the advantage of an already completed script by Ben Hecht, based on Edmond Rostand’s classic 1897 play. The independent producer Walter Wanger had paid for Hecht’s script, but then developed qualms; now other studios were pursuing the property. A film about Cyrano would allow Orson to exploit the Paris settings left over from
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, while exploring the backstage world of French theater; it would also give him a chance to wear an outsize nose. Welles assured RKO that he could revise Hecht’s script quickly, getting a running start on his January 1 deadline for finishing his first film. “He even offered to put up some of his own money if RKO’s bid for the script was lower than competing offers,” according to Frank Brady.

The studio officials thought there were too many unknowns. Wanger might demand too much money for Hecht’s draft. Or the script might be inferior; that could be why Wanger had fumbled the project. Or a bidding war might rekindle Wanger’s interest in the script, causing him to pursue it himself after all. RKO and Welles might invest a lot of time and money and find themselves out in the cold.

One of Welles’s great strengths in meetings like these was his ability to rattle off endless story possibilities with the speed and knowledge of an auctioneer. He carried around a mental trove of favorite stories he knew from boyhood, or had encountered in previous iterations on the stage or radio. Now he proposed an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1897 novella
Heart of Darkness
, about an English ivory trader, Marlow, who travels up the Congo River in search of the mysteriously evil Mr. Kurtz. Orson loved Conrad’s novella, told in a frame-flashback, with its unforgettable last glimpse of Kurtz dying with the enigmatic phrase “The horror! The horror!” on his lips. “The story is marvelously interesting,” Orson told Peter Bogdanovich, with “one thing which is in
Kane
, and which is a thing I like very much in pictures, the search for the key to something.”

Orson envisioned setting an RKO film version in the present day, opening it in New York harbor with Marlow as an American dispatched to the Congo in search of Kurtz on behalf of his trading company. He told Schaefer and the studio officials that he would craft “a kind of parable of fascism” in the script, drawing parallels between Kurtz and contemporary European dictators.

Serendipitously, he reminded the studio executives,
Mercury Theatre on the Air
had performed a version of
Heart of Darkness
on the Sunday following “War of the Worlds,” squeezing it into one half of the hour-long program. John Houseman, now part of the RKO family, was available to convert the radio script into an upgraded screenplay. All this Welles announced “without consulting me,” Houseman later wrote irritably.

Orson had his admirers and detractors among the RKO brass, but the studio that gave birth to
King Kong
had a soft spot for jungle pictures. Schaefer, the studio boss, defended Welles against doubters who thought
Heart of Darkness
might be
too
literary and
too
expensive for his directing debut. “This is what was said about all of Welles’s productions,” Schaefer said, “and look what happened with the Voodoo
Macbeth
and
War of the Worlds.”

Schaefer thought Conrad’s reputation would make
Heart of Darkness
particularly attractive in Britain, the second most lucrative market after the United States. He gave Orson the go-ahead to draw up plans and projections. The studio would commission the Gallup organization to explore the viability of both
Cyrano de Bergerac
and
Heart of Darkness
, surveying a cross section of moviegoers to test their interest in adaptations of these literary works, but such surveys were standard practice, and RKO was free to ignore the findings. (As the studio did, after the poll ranked both titles near the bottom of a list of prospective projects.)

Delighted, Welles put Houseman to work on the concept of a fascist parable, which Schaefer had approved. Houseman began applying himself “like a little soldier” to the
Heart of Darkness
script and other duties, Orson wrote to Virginia, somewhat condescendingly.

The masterstroke that helped win over Schaefer was Orson’s idea that he would play both leads: Marlow and Kurtz. In this approach, the audience would never see Marlow clearly; the camera would move subjectively through Marlow’s scenes with very few cuts, the lens revealing only the character’s viewpoint, while now and then glimpsing his furtive shadow or distorted image. The “camera eye” (or “camera ‘I,’ ” as Orson put it), represented just the kind of original thinking Schaefer was expecting from his new employee, though it would call for unusual measures in the writing, preparation, and filming.

The studio made appointments with department heads for sessions in which Welles could explore his ideas for camerawork, production design, costume, editing, and so forth. RKO delegated an employee of the story department, Miriam Geiger, to create an informal guide to standard camera shots, movement, and juxtaposition for Welles, although
Too Much Johnson
and even
The Hearts of Age
demonstrated that he had long since transcended the basics of camera language and editing technique.

A veteran continuity or script girl, Amalia (“Molly”) Kent, was also assigned to help Orson with the pagination and budgeting of his first script for the studio. “Welles found Kent’s work so valuable,” wrote scholar Robert L. Carringer in
The Making of Citizen Kane
, “that he insisted on her for all his subsequent projects while at RKO. She would see a script completely through its written development, then serve as continuity supervisor during the shooting.”

By the end of Welles’s first week at RKO, his coterie of assistants, secretaries, and transplanted Mercury staff had begun to multiply like rabbits. Herbert Drake and William “Vakhtangov” Alland checked into the Chateau Marmont before moving to the Brentwood mansion with Welles and Houseman in late July. Arnold Weissberger was in and out of Los Angeles attending to contract minutiae (the final form would be signed later in August) and conferring with Orson’s agent Albert Schneider. Welles handed out assignments to everyone on the staff. Richard Baer, for example, was dispatched to libraries and museums to compile a portfolio on the jungle habitat, to enhance the verisimilitude of the planned film of
Heart of Darkness.

To his joy, Welles learned that he could order up almost any film in the world: an RKO picture from the studio vaults, a loaner from another studio, even an obscure foreign film could be tracked down and shipped to Hollywood for his pleasure and study, to be screened at any time of day or night. He made lists of the pictures he wished to see; lists of ideas for the script, and visuals for its key scenes; lists of other possible subjects for the second film on his contract.

“I am learning thousands of things about the moving picture business every day,” Orson wrote to Virginia in Ireland, with a humility that was rare in his public persona, “and I am tremendously impressed by the efficiency and cooperativeness of moving picture people.”

On the last Saturday afternoon of July, at the end of his first full week in Hollywood, Orson attended an exclusive lunch and tea at the home of English author Aldous Huxley, who lived in nearby Pacific Palisades. Huxley had turned forty-five earlier in the week, and the lunch was one of several fetes celebrating both his birthday and his latest novel,
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,
which he’d just completed.

The astronomer Edwin Hubble and Huxley’s fellow English expatriate, the writer Christopher Isherwood, were sprinkled among the picnic guests, along with show business luminaries such as Lillian Gish, Paulette Goddard, and Charles Chaplin—Hollywood’s previous model of a powerful, truly independent actor-writer-director-producer, though skeptical columnists rarely raised his name in connection with Welles. Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes, who helped to facilitate Orson’s invitation, were also present. Goddard brought an eight-pound English cake, MacArthur a case of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge.

The talk that afternoon dwelled on Hitler’s depredations in Europe—at least until Chaplin delighted the group by performing his hilarious balletic globe dance from
The Great Dictator
, his mistaken-identity comedy about a Jewish barber who looks like Hitler (with Chaplin in both roles). Chaplin and Goddard had been filming
The Great Dictator
for months.

Huxley teased the crowd with hints about his new novel, whose main character was inspired by William Randolph Hearst. The rich and powerful publisher was well known in Hollywood, where his movie company, Cosmopolitan, produced vehicles for the deft comedienne Marion Davies, his mistress. Huxley’s novel was set partly at a castle-like estate mimicking Hearst’s grand castle, San Simeon, and involved a millionaire and his mistress.

The tea-party picnic was the kind of sophisticated, artistic gathering that made Welles feel almost at home in Hollywood, despite the blazing sun and the canyon vistas beyond the Huxley garden, which also made the place slightly surreal.

Attending significant industry events, parties, and premieres was part of the job in Hollywood, and the next weekend, the first Saturday of August, Orson attended his first such diamond-encrusted gala. The literary and artistic elite he encountered at Huxley’s tea were a minority at this glittering occasion: a joint birthday party for mogul Jack Warner of Warner Brothers and actress Dolores Del Rio.

The ballroom, garden, and grounds of Warner’s Brentwood estate were dressed like a Venetian carnival. Tap dancer Paul Draper and harmonicist Larry Adler entertained the hundreds of partygoers, including first-echelon directors (Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, Rouben Mamoulian, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang), top producers and studio heads (Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger), and the highest-paid actors and actresses in the business (Errol Flynn, Joan Crawford, and Claudette Colbert among them). Welles’s old friends Vera Zorina and George Balanchine were there, along with the ubiquitous Hedda and Louella.

Despite being a newcomer, Orson felt at ease in this glamorous Hollywood fishbowl. He was eager to meet Del Rio, who was celebrating her thirty-fifth birthday, which fell on August 3, the day after Warner’s.

A black-eyed goddess born into an aristocratic family in Durango, the Mexican actress had been in Hollywood since 1925. Some of the pictures she starred in were fluff, but Del Rio had also worked with respected directors. Welles recalled her vividly in
Bird of Paradise
, a steamy South Seas romance directed by King Vidor, which Orson enjoyed in the late summer of 1932, shortly before taking “Marching Song” to New York. In one famous scene from the movie, the actress was shown swimming, apparently nude. “That’s when I fell in love with her,” Welles recalled. “She was as
undressed
as anyone I’d ever seen on the screen, and
maddeningly
beautiful! I had some young lady in the back row with whom I was fumbling. It changed my life!”

Del Rio looked equally ravishing at the birthday party, in a white chiffon gown with rose stripes. A sophisticated woman who counted Mexican muralist Diego Rivera among her friends, Del Rio knew of Welles’s reputation in radio and theater. Their eyes met—“that sightless beautiful look of hers which was a great turn-on,” in Welles’s words. The two talked easily; she found him sweet, likable, and unpretentious. Del Rio, who frequently served as a tabula rasa for the men in her life, enjoyed listening to Orson almost as much as he enjoyed listening to himself.

The hundreds of guests dined buffet-style under tents until midnight, with another buffet at ten in the morning for those “who had enjoyed themselves too much to go home.” Two of the latter were Del Rio and Welles, who joined other revelers for a late-night dip in Warner’s swimming pool. “Oh, she swam beautifully!” Welles recalled.

Del Rio’s husband did not seem to mind. For nine years the actress had been married to Cedric Gibbons, the design and decor guru who supervised the look of the MGM studio’s pictures. Their marriage was childless, however, and rumored to be unstable. Perhaps this was because it was in some ways a sham: Gibbons’s “sexuality was questionable,” wrote Linda B. Hall in
Dolores Del Rio: Beauty in Light and Shade.

Though Orson wrote almost daily letters to his wife, Virginia, in Ireland, he mentioned neither Huxley’s lunch nor the lavish birthday party where he met the gorgeous Mexican actress.

Orson’s first days in Hollywood were smooth sailing. But the honeymoon ended abruptly.

Suddenly, he found himself beset by problems that were not of his own making: issues both personal and professional, some connected with his new career in film, but others emanating from New York and afar.

Though Welles apparently never expected it, Ward Wheelock, the New York advertising agent who represented the Campbell soup company, took umbrage at the fact that the star of his client’s radio program had decided to move to Los Angeles and go to work for a movie studio. When Arnold Weissberger proposed that
The Campbell Playhouse
shift its broadcasting operations to the West Coast, to accommodate Welles and the Mercury players joining him in California, Wheelock hotly refused. The New York and Broadway orientation of
The Campbell Playhouse
was a vital counterpoint to what the agency saw as its principal rival, Cecil B. DeMille’s
Lux Radio Theatre
, which was based in Los Angeles and featured Hollywood stars re-creating their movie roles for radio. Wheelock also resisted the idea of having the scripts for
Campbell Playhouse
written and rehearsed three thousand miles away from agency oversight. In the first week of August, he threatened an injunction against Welles and RKO, arguing that the studio had usurped the Campbell contract.