Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (96 page)

In December, RKO delivered the worst financial blow to Orson, when the studio departments reported their official cost projection for producing
Heart of Darkness
: an estimated $1 million. Orson’s initial contract with the studio had called for him to direct two films, each budgeted at half that outlay: $500,000. Studio president George Schaefer had kept an open mind as Orson hatched his ambitious plans for
Heart of Darkness.
But $1 million for one picture was a Rubicon that the studio rarely crossed, and it was an even more alarming figure for a serious, artistic film by a first-time director—given the loss of the European market.

Orson had long since abandoned his hopes of shooting
Heart of Darkness
in a real jungle. “I lost my battle to go to the swamps and do it in a real place,” Welles said later. “That was at the height of the period when nobody left the studio. The studio had to have
control
—as it was called—the famous
studio control
. . . . Well, I was more a victim than an authoritative pro like [Howard] Hawks would have been, because I was the stage actor and director
who didn’t know what he was doing.”

Schaefer said that RKO might be able to float the film’s budget if Welles could find a way to shave $50,000 to $100,000 off the $1 million projection. Orson proposed using special effects rather than constructed sets for certain scenes, but that would require him to shoot the mattes and miniatures first, postponing the work with the actors for months while the special effects footage was prepared and photographed.

In early December, Orson met with Schaefer in New York to work things out. Orson suggested moving
The Smiler with the Knife
, which could be budgeted at less than $500,000, ahead of
Heart of Darkness.
As a cost-saving (and face-saving) gesture, Welles offered to direct and act in
The Smiler
without a salary, taking only his contractual 20 percent share of profits.

A grateful Schaefer tore up Welles’s two-picture contract and rewrote it for three pictures, so that Orson would have two paying jobs on the back end of the deal. Welles could still direct
Heart of Darkness
down the road, along with a third picture for RKO, the subject of which would be determined later. Only later did Orson realize that his 20 percent share of profits would not be paid until
after
the studio had earned back the budgets of both
The Smiler with the Knife
and
Heart of Darkness
, which would be jointly accounted. As usual, however, Welles did not dwell on his money.

RKO announced the postponement of
Heart of Darkness.
“I did a very elaborate preparation” for the Joseph Conrad film, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich wistfully, “such as I’ve never done again—never could. I shot my bolt on preproduction on that picture. We designed every camera setup and everything else—did enormous research in aboriginal, Stone Age cultures in order to reproduce what the story called for. I’m sorry not to have got the chance to do it.”

Welles never wasted something he could reuse, however, and Peter Conrad is not the only authority to have noticed him “by stealth, distributing [parts of
Heart of Darkness
] through other films—
Citizen Kane
,
The Lady from Shanghai
,
The Third Man
,” continuing until forty years later, when he smuggled references to it into his script for
The Big Brass Ring.

Although Orson had made his script and production budget deadlines on time—and the film’s downfall was, at least in part, due to political circumstances beyond anyone’s control—the postponement, combined with the announcement that Orson Welles had been re-signed to direct
three
RKO pictures, escalated the mockery from his ill-wishers in the business and the trade press. The
Hollywood Reporter
predicted that the deal would fall through without Welles’s “ever doing a picture.”
The Smiler with the Knife
was jokingly referred to as “Mr. Welles’s latest forthcoming picture.” Columnist Jimmie Fidler cracked: “Ha! They’re saying Orson Welles has increased his production schedule. Instead of
not
making three pics for RKO, he’ll
not
make five!” Spotting Orson at an event, Ed Sullivan described him as “chic in a silver fox beard trimmed with old RKO scripts.” Hedda Hopper weighed in: “Looks like the only hair-raising pictures Orson Welles made out here are the stills showing him wearing a beard.”

While in New York, Welles also learned that Virginia had met with Arnold Weissberger to initiate divorce proceedings. Under prompting from her father in Chicago, who had never warmed to Welles and suspected his son-in-law of salting away money from his inheritance and Hollywood windfalls, Virginia sought steep terms Orson could not easily afford: several thousand dollars monthly in alimony and child support, or 50 percent of his annual income, whichever was greater. As a footnote, Virginia presented a $500 bill for personal items purchased at Orson’s insistence—such as the Parisian gowns—for which she had never been reimbursed.

Returning to Hollywood from New York, Orson had mixed emotions about the postponement of
Heart of Darkness
and the imminent end of his marriage to Virginia. The geographical and emotional distance he put between himself and his wife over the summer had become an unbridgeable gulf. Divorce would be a mercy for the couple. And while
Heart of Darkness
had temporarily fallen through, he thought he could launch the less demanding
Smiler with the Knife
expeditiously after the first of the year. Now he could even shave his beard, which had recently assumed “Assyrian proportions and type,” in the words of columnist Sidney Skolsky.

One of the first things Orson did on returning to Hollywood, late in 1939, was narrate a voice-over for RKO’s adaptation of an adventure classic,
The Swiss Family Robinson.
Orson did it as a return favor to a friend, scenarist Gene Towne, who had been helpful with advice on
The Smiler with the Knife. Swiss Family Robinson
was Towne’s first picture as a producer, and it was also Orson’s first true “appearance” in a Hollywood production. Despite his growing financial woes, Orson accepted only a nominal fee of $25, which he donated to charity.

Facing an intense month of work on the script for
The Smiler
over the holidays, he turned to Herman Mankiewicz. Once the king of Hollywood screenwriters, Mank was still out of work, “discredited at all the studios,” according to his sympathetic biographer Richard Meryman, and subsisting on his paychecks from the Mercury.

“For Herman, a self-destructive personality, who worried that he was a washed-up hack,” wrote Meryman, “the chance to deflate this boy wonder was irresistible.” Mank shifted his habitual animus onto Orson, determined to show him up at the movie script game, arguing over every word Orson had written. “He destroyed my confidence in the script,” Welles recalled, “sneering at everything I did, saying, ‘That will never work.’ ” But Orson enjoyed butting heads with superior intellects, and little by little he regained his equilibrium with Mank.

Meanwhile, Herbert Drake and the RKO publicity department were launching a rearguard action against the poisonous barbs flung at Welles, persuading Edwin Schallert to write in the
Los Angeles Times
that the script for
The Smiler
was nearly ready for filming to begin, and that the production was expected to go before the cameras by the end of January. “Working practically day and night,” Schallert reported, Welles may well be “the hardest worker in Hollywood.” “Practically day and night” was not strictly true—Orson was visible attending premieres and parties for
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
,
Of Mice and Men
, and
Gone With the Wind,
among other occasions, often with the married actress Dolores Del Rio as his companion. But she always appeared to go home alone at the end of the evening, and Orson returned to Brentwood to work until dawn.

Compounding the pressures of time and money was a problem left over from the postponed
Heart of Darkness
: Orson had enticed more than a dozen Mercury players to Hollywood, welcoming them with an extravagant party, then stowing them in his mansion and various other places while helping them land spot acting jobs to keep them busy and solvent. In December, the radio series shifted to the West Coast for most future broadcasts; that eased Orson’s logistics and opened up more radio work.

But now that
Heart of Darkness
had been replaced by
The Smiler with the Knife
as his first project, Orson was confronted with a smaller budget and a smaller cast to fill. Some of the transplanted actors, such as Orson’s Harlem friend Jack Carter, would not be transitioning to
The Smiler.
And even the actors who were promised a part in
Smiler
now looked at weeks or months of waiting before their work (and paychecks) would begin. Hollywood actors routinely coped with such vicissitudes, but the Mercury players were new to film, and Orson felt responsible for them.

The week before Christmas, John Houseman drove from New York to California. He felt as irrelevant as ever in Hollywood—“I had little to say about Welles’s film activities,” he wrote, “yet I remained president of the Mercury and Orson’s partner”—but he joined the Mercury’s West Coast team for a celebratory year-end summit at Chasen’s, the chic Hollywood eatery. Besides Welles and Houseman, the attendees included Albert Schneider, Herbert Drake, Richard Wilson, William Alland, Richard Baer, and “our new California secretary (a dark girl with wonderfully long, narrow crimson nails),” in Houseman’s words.

After steaks and too many drinks, Orson got down to business discussing the emergency: RKO had sent word that actors’ salaries would not be paid until a final script, budget, and schedule had all been authorized. In the interim, Orson declared, it was the Mercury’s sacred duty to carry the actors out of reserve funds. When Schneider lamely informed him that there
were
no reserve funds, Welles exploded.

“He had absorbed more than his normal quantity of alcohol,” Houseman wrote in
Run-Through.
“His eyes were bloodshot, his face damp and white.”

Orson turned to Houseman, pointedly asking, “What would
you
do?”

“Tell them the truth for once,” the producer replied.

Orson took the bait angrily. “I don’t lie to actors,” he declared, according to Houseman. “I’ve never lied to an actor in my life! You’re the one who lies! That’s why they hate you! You’re a crook and they know it! Everybody knows it! Everybody!”

Houseman had reached his personal “Götterdämmerung,” as he put it. He stood up, collected his belongings, and started for the door. Welles picked up one of the “burning Sterno dish heaters” on the table and hurled it after him. “It missed me by a yard and landed at the foot of a drawn window curtain behind me. Another flaming object flew by me.”

Returning to his leased apartment, Houseman took to bed. A knock came on the door—it was “the girl with the red nails”—but he refused to answer. Later came Orson himself, ringing the doorbell, to no avail. At dawn, “a four page telegram” from Welles was delivered by hand. That afternoon Houseman got into his car and headed east, he said, listening on the car radio to “the last
Campbell Playhouse
I had written.”

Stopping in a small town in New Mexico, he composed two letters. “The first, formal and typewritten, was to Orson.” Houseman excerpted the formal letter to Orson in his book: “Nothing that has happened recently affects the very deep affection I have for you and the delight I have found in my association with such a talent as yours,” the letter began. “What happened the other night merely brought to a head a situation I have seen growing worse for some time—the situation of my false position with the Mercury. . . . It is true that in the past year my position with you and with the Mercury has become something between that of a hired, not too effective manager, a writer under contract and an aging, not so benevolent relative.

“Besides which, there has been something between us, lately, which instead of being intense and fruitful merely succeeds in embarrassing and paralyzing us both.”

But it wasn’t quite a high-principled resignation. While insisting that “the present situation is hopeless and must be changed at once for both our sakes,” Houseman signed the letter “Love,” and concluded with, “Let’s have dinner together” the next time Welles was in New York.

His second letter, “in longhand,” flew to composer Virgil Thomson in Paris. This too was excerpted in Houseman’s memoir. “I have decided to end my association with Orson,” Houseman told Thomson, putting a more conclusive spin on the news. Reviewing the history of the Mercury, Houseman wrote that it was a chronicle of “failures that were sometimes honorable, sometimes idiotic and ignominious—but constant and uninterrupted.” Too often, according to the letter, “feelings of grandeur and what-is-expected-of-the-Mercury completely supplanted the simple desire to put on a good show. I allowed Orson (and the fault is mine as much as his, since by failing to control and influence him, I was betraying my most useful function in the Mercury) to use the theatre as an instrument of personal aggrandizement.”

Orson’s publicity-mongering was a thorn in his side, Houseman continued in his letter to Thomson, “snowballing to the point where Orson has become a public figure only less recently and massively projected into the news and the national consciousness than Franklin D. Roosevelt, N. Chamberlain and A. Hitler. This new fame has grown in inverse proportion to the success of our recent artistic endeavors. It is unrelated to our work. In fact, it is just about fatal to our work. It is an appetite that grows as it is fed: in a creative artist, it becomes a compensation and a substitute for creation. . . .