Orson Welles: Hello Americans (15 page)

Whether or not an article or a book on Samba would be necessarily true in all its details, it would at least make enough of a stir to serve as a focal point for a real clash between the various claims and theories. In the absence
of such a focal point, it’s necessary to create one if you want to find out anything. One way to do this is the way you outlined: see as many people as will respond, ask as many questions as possible, and stir up a maximum of contradiction. Since no two people agree entirely, this is comparatively easy. After a while … you find yourself with a residue which might be called The Truth about Samba.

An anonymous piece on the samba schools, the
escolas
, suggests a more passionate view: ‘The rivalry of different schools has its roots in old Portuguese dances, in which Moors and Christians sparred … to obtain … victory, the poor washerwoman or cook gets herself into debt for the whole year … the samba school is a world for psychologists: the father, who drivels with joy at seeing
his
daughter
half-dressed in front of the floats; the jealous sweetheart who takes shots at anyone who makes a remark to the leader of the
cordão
; the mother who works day and night on her daughter’s fancy dress so that she can shine in the ballrooms of the “United Heart”.’

The idea of the samba begins to pervade all the discussions. Phil Reismann, in a letter to Jock Whitney immediately after the shooting
of Carnival had ended, takes credit for pushing it to the fore. ‘[Welles] will carry a story through the carnival film and an idea which I gave him showing the birth of the Samba in the hills of Rio and carrying it right down through the carnival using this as a thread to tie up all of his action.’ On the face of it, this idea was perfectly within the terms of Welles’s brief. The specific remit
of the I-AA’s Motion Picture Division was ‘to remove sources of irritation and misunderstanding in the US as when our motion pictures burlesque Central and South American characters’;
Girl of the Rio
and
Cuban Love Song
were particularly glaring examples of this. The Brazilian division had already made documentaries such as
Americans All
and
Good Neighbor Family
, but no Latin Americans had been
involved in their production. The I-AA wanted a film that avoided the crude ethnic stereotypes, but nonetheless promoted a positive, ‘colourful’ image; if it helped to promote tourism, so much the better (the year before, 700 Americans had come to Rio for the Carnival, in ‘a swirling four day and four night bender of lights, noise, tinsel and music, that makes New Orleans Mardi Gras look like a
meeting of the Modern Language Association’). The trade cut both ways: Latin America was an important market, now that a large part of the European one had for all practical purposes disappeared. The origins of the I-AA give a clue to its policy. Roosevelt had created its immediate predecessor, the revealingly named Office of Commercial and Cultural Relations with the Americas, after reading a paper
on ‘Hemispheric Economic Policy’ from Nelson Rockefeller’s informal think-tank on Latin America, the so-called
junta
, created in the wake of the left-wing Mexican government’s expropriation of all foreign oil holdings in 1938. Rockefeller had become convinced during his travels on behalf of Standard Oil in Latin America (where he was dubbed ‘El Principe de Gasolina’) that instability in the region
was a threat to his family’s oil holdings and that economic prosperity was the only effective means of protecting foreign investment. This form of ‘missionary capitalism’, in Darlene Rivas’s suggestive phrase, informed all the activities of what soon became known as the
Office
of Inter-American Affairs, whose declared aim was not to build up a large government organisation, but to handle as many
activities as possible through private organisations – hence the initial approach to RKO to make the propaganda film they wanted. It was a delicate mission, which Welles, now that he was fully intellectually and artistically engaged, was about to sabotage.

Phil Reismann’s letter to Whitney reported that ‘the important and welcome surprise to me is Welles’s frame of mind, his willingness to forget
that he is a motion picture producer alone, and that he has an important mission to perform’. Welles unquestionably believed that, but Reismann’s suggestion of the history of the samba itself as a possible spine for the Carnival section of the movie (if it was his suggestion) opened up innumerable avenues of interest to Welles, who sensed an opportunity to do something revolutionary, striking
a blow for popular culture at the same time as creating a new kind of film, far beyond the scope of the ramshackle compendium he had originally talked about in Hollywood, and way beyond the travelogue envisioned by Harry Hopkins. To focus on the samba’s origins in Rio’s
favelas
, the shanty towns with their largely black population huddled together on the hillside in apparent squalor just beyond
the smart centre of President Getúlio Vargas’s capital city with its aspirations to Parisian elegance, would inevitably involve an exploration not only of the city’s underbelly, but also of its African element. Neither the Office of Inter-American Affairs nor the Brazilian government was in the least interested in any such exploration. But Welles was compulsively drawn to this other Rio, where he
was more and more often to be found, visiting the
escolas de Samba
, dabbling with the musical instruments, hanging out with the players, far from the posh salons of the cultural attachés; he gave in to the Cheapside part of his nature, his somewhat romanticised sense of a life without constraints or obligations, which seemed to him more real than the bourgeois world from which he came. As always,
popular music enchanted and transported him. He was understandably greeted with open arms by the
favelistas
, ignored and despised as they were by the middle classes, who were somewhat embarrassed by their existence. ‘To give you some idea of Welles’s popularity,’ wrote Reismann, ‘he seems to be especially great with the masses; he has mingled with them and danced with them, and wherever we go
in the car, the children yell out his name and applaud.’ In making the film, it was to these people that he felt his principal loyalty – to them and to those popular heroes, the boatmen, who had travelled on their
jangadas
from their home
in
the far north of Brazil’s vast domain to deliver to the President himself their petition, and whose story the government was so keen to have told. Increasingly,
that modern Homeric epic began to assume equal narrative importance in Welles’s mind to the Carnival and the history of the samba.

The government of Getúlio Vargas was a highly significant factor in the situation with which Welles was dealing. On the face of it, this remarkable and somewhat paradoxical figure would scarcely seem likely to feature on a list of Welles’s political heroes: President
since 1930, when he had been imposed by the army, he governed by decree, until four years later the Constituent Assembly, under the army’s influence, officially increased his formal powers. In 1937 Vargas had used the excuse of an imaginary communist uprising to declare a state of siege, imposing a new constitution, declaring in Brazil what he called
Estado nôvo
– the new state – which was essentially
a totalitarian corporate state, heavily centralised, rigidly policed, highly undemocratic. Nonetheless, he was the most popular leader the country had known since the reign of Pedro II in the previous century. Champion of the urban middle and lower classes, he stood against the hitherto all-powerful coffee barons and their rural, semi-feudal empires. Before the creation of the
Estado nôvo
, he
had endeared himself to his countrymen and women by instituting the secret ballot, vastly expanding the electorate (giving women the vote for the first time), enacting substantial social-security legislation, establishing a minimum wage and initiating a vigorous programme of industrialisation; he remained on good terms with the labour movement even after 1937, though political unrest was widespread.

Vargas continued to press forward with his modernising programmes during the internationally tense period of the European war. Skilfully, he avoided committing himself to either Axis powers or Allies: his essential sympathies might have been assumed to lie with the fascists (the population of Brazil, moreover, has always had a very strong German component), but he was mindful of his relationship
with his Latin American neighbours, as well as with the United States. He had personally expressed his support for
It’s All True
when it was first mooted, and had caused the full (if sometimes ineffective) weight of the government Motion Picture Division under Assis Figuereido to be thrown behind it; a couple of weeks after Welles’s arrival, Vargas had personally hosted a reception for him in
Petropolis, at which he expressed his delight that the
jangadeiros
’s story would be told. He had his own purpose
in
encouraging the film: he saw it as an advertisement for his modern Brazil, where even illiterate fishermen in the far north could be unionised and receive benefits. And he could show off his capital, Rio, in a permanent state of reconstruction, the rival of any European city with
its fine hotels, its parks and its massive boulevards. The geographical heart of the Carnival, the old Praça Onze, had indeed recently been swept away and replaced, somehow inevitably, by Avenidad Getúlio Vargas. Grande Otelo’s samba in the 1942 Carnival, which became the
enredo
, the featured song of the year, lamented this:

They’re closing down

There will be no more samba school

The shanty
towns cry

Favela, Salguiero

Marquera, Estaçao Primera

Put away your instruments

The samba schools won’t be parading today.

The song perfectly embodies one of Welles’s central themes, the disappearance of paradise – in this case not the gracious life of
The Magnificent Ambersons
, but the people’s pleasures. This theme would feature strongly in the film that was forming in his mind.

This was
not, of course, a theme that Vargas or his government wanted aired. As time went on, it became apparent that what Welles intended to film was very different from what any of his three masters – the I-AA, RKO and the Brazilian government – expected from him. For the moment, Welles was smiled on, and by way of return was happy to write to Getúlio Vargas to inform him that he would be doing a series
of broadcasts from Brazil in which he intended to tell the story of
The March on the West
, ‘a true civic epic of your great political movement’, an extraordinary piece of ideological flexibility on his part, but one that was certainly in accord with US government policy – that is, to encourage Brazil by all means to declare war on Germany. The tension was at its height during the spring and summer
of 1942: Catherine Benamou reports that during the period of the shooting of
It’s All True
, more than fifteen Brazilian vessels were torpedoed by Axis forces.

Meanwhile Welles and the crew, having captured the actual Carnival from every possible angle, now set about the task of reconstructing large portions of it, in the hope of creating a coherent narrative. The central sequence of the Carnival
section was to be
the
famous entertainment at the Urca Casino, which required restaging, relighting and strenuous organisation both of the performers and the audience. In effect, they found that they were now filming a musical, another form of which none of them had the slightest experience. Moreover the weather had turned. Distracted by social and formal engagements and absorbed in plans for
the larger movie he was evolving, Welles himself seemed to be only partly focused on the work in hand. ‘On location 8 p.m., waited for Mr Welles until 9.30 p.m.’ is a fairly typical entry in the daily log of activities. Surprisingly, Lynn Shores, the production manager, was entrusted with responsibility for taking a large number of shots, mostly process and montage, but sometimes more than that. Unsurprisingly,
he was not best pleased. On one occasion, having been told that Welles wanted to take certain shots, Shores secured, with some difficulty, the army searchlights they had just returned; Welles never showed up. Shores shot anyway (‘neither Harry Greene nor myself had the vaguest idea of exactly what he was after’); the following day Welles phoned to tell him to carry on for the next two
days, which he did. At no point, Shores said, did he or anyone else know what they were shooting or why:

I will not go into detail of my various attempts at trying to pin Welles down as to future plans. In a vague way he has given me to understand that we are to travel over most of South America with the Mercury Players, various units of Technicolor and black and white, radio set-ups, goodwill
speeches, and general messing around for the next two or three months … it has become a horrible nightmare to me personally. I am carrying not only the working but the personal problems of practically twenty-seven individuals, each one with an axe to grind and a grievance of some sort at every hour of the day.

He works, he says, twenty-hour days. Welles, it appears, wants him to carry on shooting,
and will continue to want him to carry on shooting because of the radio shows he is planning. If so, Shores fulminates, he wants a new deal.

While Shores and the crew were baffled and resentful (Duke Greene, the Technicolor cameraman, was drinking heavily and ‘certainly does not make for N American goodwill in Rio’, according to a memorandum), Welles himself was investigating the Brazilian cinema;
he saw some shorts that contained, according to Tom Pettey, ‘ideas he might wish to look into’.
²³
At the same time,
the
Brazilian cinema was investigating Welles; and it liked what it found.
Kane
was given a special showing in Rio; Welles got awards for best actor, best director, best picture. At supper with some journalists afterwards he was told that it was he who had really been King of the
Carnival in Rio, and that ‘no other personality from the United States, especially from Hollywood, had won so many friends in Rio’.
²⁴
A group of artists and intellectuals gave a dinner in his honour, a
Homenagem a Orson Welles
: he was, they declared, ‘the outstanding figure in the motion picture world’ (he had at this point completed exactly one film). He gave every appearance of exhilaration
in his reports back to George Schaefer.