Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (92 page)

The show was a headache in other ways. Diana Bourbon proved more assertive than Ward Wheelock ever was, badgering Orson constantly to consider actors and stories she preferred to his selections. The agency controlled the purse strings, so he had to listen, but he and Bourbon tangled incessantly over the gray areas in every creative decision. Bourbon sent a stream of memos to West Coast representative Ernest Chappell, warning him against Orson’s seductive personality (“He sings a siren song to anybody who listens to him”) and offering unvarnished critiques of the
Campbell Playhouse
shows after they were broadcast.

On October 8, for example, the series offered “Algiers,” with Orson as the French jewel thief Pepe le Moko, who is hiding out in the Casbah—a role made famous by Charles Boyer in the 1938 movie. Orson’s romantic interest in the show was Paulette Goddard, as the character Hedy Lamarr played in the film. Ray Collins was the detective Slimane, played onscreen by Joseph Calleia. After the broadcast Bourbon sent a corrosive memo complaining that Collins had given an inadequate performance; that the sound effects were “overproduced”; and that Welles had spent too much time in his after-show banter plugging Goddard’s next picture, Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator.
“We’re not in the business of giving away free commercials,” Bourbon lectured.

Welles dictated an eight-page reply, furiously defending Collins as “wonderful,” adding, “I must protest against aesthetic discussion between you and Chappell about performances by actors, over whose efforts mine is the sole authority.” He said he was not crooning siren songs to Chappell. “Any ‘siren song’ I’ve sung in New York you can lay down to my very real affection for you,” Orson wrote to Bourbon. “I’m not a wheedler or charmer. My fault as a personality, as you must know, is that I am somewhat arbitrary by inclination and often unreasonable. I have complete control and absolute jurisdiction over almost every point brought up in your letter to Chappell. I rejoice at criticism but I do not and I will not submit to unreasonable interference.” As for
The Great Dictator
, he said, he had plugged it simply because “I wanted to plug it.” And “please remember,” Orson finished with dignity, “that whatever gives our format individuality beyond regular interest attaching itself to our guest is my own extremely personal rather particular style which must needs express authentically my own enthusiasm and tastes.”

Orson chafed at Bourbon’s micromanagement, but he strove to react responsibly. Sometimes he was defiant and outraged; at other times he tried to be diplomatic. Some shows were personal triumphs, such as the October 22 presentation of “The Magnificent Ambersons,” a rough draft for the future film, with Orson playing the spoiled, tragic George Amberson Minafer. But too many were battles royal, and the fun and joy of the Campbell series were soon bled out of it.

Hollywood had greeted Welles politely, if not warmly, on his arrival in the summer. By September, though, the camps had begun to form. The inflated references to his contract took their toll, as did frequent mentions of his “innumerable yes-men” (by columnist Jimmie Fidler), the “strolling players from New York” always trailing him (by Sidney Skolsky), and his pack of “stooges” (by E. V. Durling). Offbeat publicity events staged by RKO (such as a press party at Shirley Temple’s house where he and the child star played croquet) vied with columns like Jack Sher’s reporting his tantrums.

In his first interview with the
Los Angeles Times
, Welles spoke less about film than about theater, insisting that the money he earned in Hollywood would be invested in “the further development of the Mercury Theatre.” His attachment to theater made him seem almost averse to motion pictures. More than once Welles floated the likelihood of rejoining Broadway after he finished his first picture, as soon as January 1940, and producing
Five Kings
and other favorite plays such as
Peer Gynt
,
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
, and
The Playboy of the Western World.

Orson had arrived in Hollywood with a beard he’d been cultivating for Falstaff and
Five Kings
, and now he continued to grow it for his role as the evil Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness.
The press seized on his beard, without always explaining the reasons behind it, and many columnists treated it as satirical fodder. F. Scott Fitzgerald was not alone in referring to Orson as “That Beard,” as he did in his short story “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles” in
Esquire.
(“What’s he done to draw one hundred and fifty grand a picture?” Pat Hobby complained.) Even the
New York Times
dubbed Welles “the bearded bogeyman of Hollywood.”

If he hadn’t intended the beard as a provocation, later he changed his tune. “You mainly kept the beard for its irritation value?” Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles.

“Let’s say,” Welles answered, “that I didn’t fancy the idea of collaborating with prejudice.”

As in New York, differences in cultural sophistication and political coloration helped define the factions squaring off for and against this newcomer to Hollywood. The relatively high-minded
Los Angeles Times
was officially friendly to Welles. The Hearst newspapers, the more flippant correspondents, and defenders of the film world’s status quo like the
Hollywood Reporter
were never less than wary of Orson, and often openly hostile. At the end of September, the
Hollywood Reporter
’s powerful publisher, W. R. Wilkerson, used his high-visibility column to blast George Schaefer for taking “too much of a gamble” on Welles “in these critical times.”

Orson wasn’t entirely innocent with regard to the widening schism between his defenders and his detractors. He and Diana Bourbon often crossed swords over the casting of guest stars—particularly leading ladies—on the radio show, and Orson’s private memos were full of unflattering opinions about prissy missies (in his view) such as Irene Dunne, whom Bourbon kept pushing for appearances on the
Campbell Playhouse.
Orson could be just as blunt in interviews, offering “candid, uninhibited opinions of everything,” in columnist Sheilah Graham’s words, after she spoke to “the bearded boy-wonder” for her syndicated column—and he cheerfully handicapped the leading ladies of Hollywood.

“There is no great actress of the screen,” Welles declared.

What about Bette Davis? Graham asked.

“She’s good,” Orson answered, “but not great in the sense that Helen Hayes is great. Garbo is the closest approach to a big personality here, but even she falls below the standard set by the men—with Spencer Tracy at the head of the procession.” Mickey Rooney (“the George M. Cohan of the future”) Orson ranked up there with Tracy, Chaplin, and Emil Jannings.
⁴²
But forget Katharine Hepburn, whom Welles had disliked since their appearance together in the radio adaptation of
A Farewell to Arms
: Hepburn is “an amateur who is talented, but even though she tries to be a professional for the next hundred years, she’ll still be an amateur. She embarrasses me.”

Such remarks, harsh toward individuals and sweeping in their preference for Broadway over Hollywood, did not endear Orson to many in the screen colony.

One night early in the fall, talk of “The Beard” and his contempt for certain leading ladies combined with rumors about the “all-male population of the house in Brentwood,” in the words of John Houseman, to spark a confrontation in which Welles was taunted as a “queer” by one of the screen community’s less desirable elements. According to Houseman, the incident occurred at the Brown Derby. Welles said that it was at Chasen’s, and the instigator was “Big Boy” Guinn Williams, a burly Western star who had been a rodeo performer before entering silent pictures. After slashing off Welles’s tie with a steak knife, Williams challenged Orson to a fight in the parking lot. “Good friends pulled us apart,” Welles remembered. “The whole thing was a formal affair, really, without much conviction on anybody’s part. Errol Flynn sicced him onto me.”

Flynn was “one of the leaders of the anti-Welles faction,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “Ward Bond was another.” Bond was a right-wing bully with a long memory; twenty years hence, he would get Welles blackballed from John Ford’s
The Last Hurrah
on political grounds.
⁴³
Flynn, on the other hand, was more rogue than ideologue, and in time Welles would easily win his friendship. After the tensions between them cleared, Welles went out often with Flynn, his wife Lili Damita, and her friend Dolores Del Rio. Ten years later, Flynn let Welles use his sailboat in
The Lady from Shanghai
, and late in Flynn’s life—in 1958—they appeared together in
The Roots of Heaven
, directed by John Huston.

The “barrage” of anti-Welles sentiment, according to columnist Graham, was “verbal and written.” Orson was well aware of all the jeering, she wrote, but it didn’t bother him much at the time. “I get a little sad sometimes when they print that I smashed a camera when I actually had posed for everything the cameramen wanted,” Welles told Graham. “But I really don’t mind.” (He would touch on the subject of friends versus stooges in
Citizen Kane
: “Maybe I wasn’t his [Kane’s] friend but if I wasn’t, he never had one,” says Jed Leland, played by Orson’s own best friend, Joseph Cotten, to the reporter searching for Rosebud. “Maybe I was what you nowadays call a stooge.”)

In his letters to Virginia, Orson showed genuine enthusiasm about RKO and Hollywood, though he recognized the divide between the many, many people he liked and admired, and the others. “The old-fashioned movie people who grew up with the industry and who know what makes a picture move on the screen are all very nice,” Orson wrote to his wife in Ireland. “There is nothing horrible about this town if you avoid the horrible people.”

RKO offered Orson a refuge as well as a workplace, with plenty of work always left to be done. At the end of August, RKO formally confirmed
Heart of Darkness
as the first Orson Welles production, and Orson started casting ahead of the final screenplay, as he had done in New York with his Mercury stage and radio shows. The script would be prodded and guided by the casting.

In late August, studio publicity revealed his first selection: Gus Schilling would play a German doctor in
Heart of Darkness.
Schilling’s name was almost completely unknown in the motion picture industry, except to frequenters of the downtown burlesque houses. Having proved himself to Welles in
Five Kings
, the rubber-faced comedian Schilling would now make his Hollywood debut in a dramatic role. “Orson Welles’s popularity in Hollywood is due for a decline,” warned columnist Jimmie Fidler, “when our local actors learn that members of his own Mercury Theatre troupe are slated for almost all the assignments in his first picture.”

Welles also thought of his old soul mate the strapping Harlemite Jack Carter, the Macbeth of his Voodoo
Macbeth
and the Mephistopheles of his
Faustus.
He cast Carter as the Steersman, the native African (“as proud as a wild, great beast” in the words of Welles’s script) who meets his demise in the story while guiding Marlow up the river. Anytime a black man was cast in a billed role in a major studio production, it was newsworthy during this era, when prejudice ruled the screen trade; and in this case it was all the more so because Carter’s was another name new to Hollywood.

Setting past misunderstandings aside, Orson reached out to Chubby Sherman and Norman Lloyd, both of whom agreed to come to Hollywood and play featured parts in
Heart of Darkness.
Welles signed George Coulouris, Ray Collins, John Emery, Everett Sloane, Erskine Sanford, Edgar Barrier, Frank Readick, and Vladimir Sokoloff for other speaking roles. Orson’s staff of assistants—his yes-men, stooges, and slaves—had to juggle the different schedules of all the incoming performers, arranging their various appearances on
The Campbell Playhouse
in New York around the studio’s needs for tests, contracts, and fittings on the West Coast.

Welles devoted part of every day to researching, interviewing, and testing actors for the dozens of parts. Conrad’s story had one significant female character—Elsa in the novella, who joins Marlow’s river journey—and Orson intended to build up her role in his script. Orson wanted Elsa to be played by a foreign-born actress: someone with an exotic aura but without Hollywood baggage. (This gave trade columnists another reason to snipe.) At first, Orson gave the inside track to the accomplished German actress Dolly Haas, who had only recently emigrated to the United States. He made a stab at Ingrid Bergman, who was new to Hollywood, but producer David O. Selznick, who controlled her contract, wouldn’t budge. Finally, after watching Jean Renoir’s
La Grande Illusion
, Edmond Gréville’s
Mademoiselle Docteur
, and Jean Vigo’s
L’Atalante
, he decided on an actress who appeared in all those films: German-born Dita Parlo, who was currently residing in Paris. He sent Parlo a telegram making an offer, she tentatively accepted, and he penciled her in for Elsa.

On and off the lot, Orson respectfully sought the advice of established Hollywood directors. Almost uniformly, to his surprise, this was one segment of the industry that reacted to him with graciousness. If the veteran filmmakers resented the “boy wonder” at all—his youth, the overblown talk of his golden contract—none of them showed it. Rather, they gave him useful tips and confidences. “Logically, they should have been envious and bitchy,” he recalled. “They were wonderful.”

W. S. Van Dyke, who was best known for his
Thin Man
comedies but whose long career harked back to the silent era, told Orson, “Just keep [the camera] close, and keep it moving.”

“Did you follow [that advice]?” Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles.

“Not really. I stay away from closeups when I can, you know—and when my actors are good enough.”