Orson Welles: Hello Americans (72 page)

Before shooting on
Macbeth
began, in the middle of June 1947, Welles (unable to attend in person) had contributed a recorded speech to be played at a
Voice of Freedom
lecture: there had been a phenomenal rush on tickets, ‘largely because your name topped our list of speakers, even though we most
honestly noted that it was Orson Welles in transcription’.
¹²
It is a remarkable theatrical image, a paradigm of the medium itself: a recording about the threat to radio played to an audience listening to him, not in the flesh, but exactly as they would listen to the radio. It is also a historical moment, a last testament to the importance and seriousness of radio on the very brink of the television
age. It must have made then – and makes today – remarkable listening. The speech is obviously improvised, freely associating and more than a little overwrought, signalling that what Welles has lost is far more than
a
secondary career. Beyond that, it tells us a great deal about Welles’s state of mind in the months before he left America. ‘The people is heroic and suicidal,’ he says.
¹³
‘The people
is everybody. This grand, mind-staggering “we” – yes! It is all of us – all and every one of us.’ A highly charged emotional vibrato informs his voice. ‘A government dedicated to the sanctity of the unpopular, a reputation thoughtfully attuned to the unimportant vote. Which guards as national treasures the minorities.’ He senses that everything in which he and his fellow-radicals believed – the
old Popular Front, Roosevelt – is falling apart while they look on powerlessly:

We the people, where are we headed now? Backwards. We have become the pilots of suicide. Fearful, perversely fearful of our scheduled but rejected greatness: when the ideal dies so dies the civilisation which was supported by it. It may be that this ideal of ours is only hibernating. But there are no signs of a spring.
The Roosevelt Democratic Party was not a political party – it was a way of life for most of us who work for a living – the good cheer for most Americans born into darkness … that way has become a conspiracy: we stand accused of every black brand of disloyalty. We are no longer spokesmen because we cannot speak. Not one of us is small or casual enough to escape attention.

It is strange, almost
moving, to hear Welles speak of himself as small. ‘Ours was an argument which carried its own eloquence. They kicked us off the air, the old, old interests of aggregated wealth. It is radio and this strange new medium of radio silence that is the subject. The Truman doctrine was not handed down from some tablets of the law. FDR won his campaigns – all of them – on the air. Freedom of assembly – airtime
was our meeting hall and we are now denied its use – a killing censorship or else collaborate or else it was all very pleasant and urbane.’ He becomes less controlled; the suspicion grows that he may be in his cups, as he tells his audience:

Free speech has been politely and unobtrusively murdered – we had nothing to lose but our microphones. Your obedient servant as a result of his efforts as
a radio commentator has been successfully muffled now even in his old profession of radio actor. Not that he hasn’t had some offers. The radio you know is always available if you’ll promise never to use the radio to say anything. A big, big manufacturer of breakfast food, for instance,
sent
out a feeler lately. Five broadcasts a week at big, big money might be mine if I would undertake to deal
exclusively with (what I must take to be unconscious irony) the ‘human interest side’ of the news. There was an even longer string than that attached to it. The proposed contract covered not only air-time, but all my waking time. Every public utterance was to be checked for content with a special board of advertising agency ideologists. In a word, they were putting up a heap of dough to buy outright
a man’s long-term opinion … it’s more than possible that radio is happier without me, but I
can
speak for my fellow spokesmen and I do. They were most necessary debaters. The debate was most necessary. Now the debate is closed. It must be opened. And now thank you and until the next time – until our American radio is free again …

He ends, particularly poignantly, with his customary valediction:
‘I remain as always – obediently yours.’

Political despair is a powerful emotion. Perhaps most bitter to endure is the sense that the party that one would naturally support is betraying its own ideals. It is a kind of stalemate: there is nowhere to go. Truman, with his shady antecedents deep in the bowels of the southern Democratic machine, seemed to be betraying every aspect of his legacy from
Roosevelt, alienating many of his own supporters to such a degree that an overwhelmingly Republican Congress had just been voted in. Welles’s favoured candidate, Henry Wallace, Vice-President before Truman outmanoeuvred him for the job, was regrouping; his cause was as yet a somewhat unpopular one, though he spoke with peerless eloquence for the radical Left, even talking of founding a new party
‘to let the people of the world know that those who believe in peace and understanding still have some means of expression.
¹⁴
It would provide the evidence that the United States had not gone completely imperialistic and psychopathic’ But Welles was not at his side. It fell to Katharine Hepburn to speak on Wallace’s behalf, seizing the opportunity to denounce the House Un-American Activities Committee,
presently investigating the communist influence in Hollywood; in the words of Gordon Kahn, she ‘literally seared the ears off the [right-wing] Motion Pictures Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals’. The temperature of the Cold War was plummeting, exactly as predicted in Welles’s
Almanac
and in the pages of
Free World
, the threat of nuclear war an ever-growing possibility, but Welles
was silent.
¹⁵
His response to the idea of involvement in political activity,
once
unquestioned, seemed to falter. He told the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons (whose members included Eleanor Roosevelt):
TERRIBLY SORRY BUT MY MONEY IS ALL SPENT IS THERE ANY OTHER WAY I CAN HELP BEST WISHES
.
¹⁶
And when he was asked to speak against a proposed broadcasting bill in terms he would have been
unable to resist not so very long ago –
THE MIGHTY ‘WE’ LIKE YOU WOULD FOCUS ATTENTION OF NATION ON EVILS OF BILL REACTIONARIES TRYING TO RUSH THROUGH QUIETLY SINGULAR CONTRIBUTION TOWARD RETAINING AT LEAST SEMBLANCE OF FREEDOM OF AIR BILL WOULD COMPLETELY WIPE OUT
– he replied that he was in the midst of filming
Macbeth
and could not write anything new.
¹⁷
For most people, this would have been
a perfectly straightforward response, but it was quite out of character for the Welles of the early nineteen-forties. Something had died in him. That thing was hope.

As far as film was concerned, his confidence that he could persuade anyone to let him make the films he wanted to make – the films that were needed for the coming dark hours – had disappeared. He wrote to Louis Dolivet at the end
of 1946 to inform him that ‘after weeks of haggling begging bargaining and generally busting my neck’, he was unable to get their ‘atomic bomb picture’ off the ground.
¹⁸
‘I must report that this industry is even worse than I thought it was.’ Perhaps Europe – the Europe of Ophüls, de Sica, Renoir – would have a more sophisticated response (both political and literary) to his cinematic vision; it
would also be considerably cheaper to film there. In America, even the films he had managed to get made were released without fanfare, or sometimes not released at all. Harry Cohn had inexplicably held up distribution of even the mutilated and musically bastardised version of
The Lady from Shanghai
for at least six months; it would be another six months before it was seen. Almost equally significant
for Welles was the industrial unrest in Hollywood, from which he had suffered personally during the shooting of the Crazy House sequence: he, one of Labor’s most outspoken supporters, had been picketed, hectored, denounced by union members. This was a strictly personal matter: Welles had taken it upon himself to do the job of qualified men. Like many of us, he was something of a political nimby,
an enthusiastic proponent of the right to strike if it was in factories in Delaware or railroads in the south-west; not so welcome if it interfered with one’s own work.

More threateningly, he had also suffered sharply from the growing
power
of the right wing within the film craft unions: in September of 1946, before shooting on
The Lady from Shanghai
had begun, the
Hollywood Reporter
approvingly
noted – under the headline
HOLLYWOOD STARS ARE BLASTED AS ‘REDS’ BY AFL OFFICIAL
– that Matthew Woll, a vice-president of the American Federation of Labor, the dominant force in American unionism, had threatened the motion-picture industry in his union’s paper,
American Photo Engraver
, with a ‘league for political decency’ and a nationwide picketing of movie-houses ‘unless the movie industry takes
steps at once against many high-salaried stars and script-writers who are part of a Communist fifth column in America. Hollywood today,’ wrote Woll, ‘is the third largest Communist centre in the United States.’
¹⁹
As an egregious example, he singled out Welles alongside Edward G. Robinson, Myrna Loy, Burgess Meredith, James Cagney and Lionel Stander, among several others. In a comprehensive and
not unsophisticated denunciation of the creative community, he continued:

Ashamed of the meaningless roles in which they are cast, oppressed by a sense of guilt because of their swollen incomes, smarting under the taunts of superior but non-Hollywood intellectuals, these world-savers in greasepaint find refuge in the Communist Party or its peripheral organisations. Somehow, playing at revolution
seems to justify the possession of a swimming-pool and improves the taste of Astrakhan caviar and the feel of Russian sables. Ill-equipped either by experience or learning, these light-minded mimes imagine they are doing something for the oppressed of the world. Actually they are permitting themselves to be used as window-dressers for the most tyrannical political system in the world today, a
system which crushed all human liberty and all human dignity.

The mixture of panic and contempt perfectly expresses the temper of the times, to which is added a naked loathing of the acting profession. ‘The sharpening conflict between loyal American patriots and the subversive members of Stalin’s fifth column in this country makes a show-down imperative. This conflict is well under way in the
American Labor movement.’ Woll’s attack is a vintage and chilling example of early Cold War rhetoric, confirming everything Welles had ever said about the right-wing influences in Hollywood. Woll’s clinching argument was exactly the point, from a diametrically opposed position, that Welles and his fellow Popular
Front
affiliates had been making for years: ‘The movies are not only a means of entertainment,
they are also an important instrument by means of which our youngsters are unconsciously influenced in their social and political thinking. If stars like Orson Welles,’ Woll ended, menacingly, ‘continue to flout American patriotism, then loyal Americans will stage a protest which these sponsors of totalitarianism will not soon forget.’

Three of the light-minded mimes in question responded to
the article. Myrna Loy – just months earlier acclaimed for her superb performance in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, a tireless worker during the war for the Red Cross, voted ‘Queen of the Movies’ a decade before and undentably popular ever since – denied everything. Edward G. Robinson responded with a magnificent philippic starting, ‘I shall continue in the future as I have in the past to contribute
as much of my time and energy as possible to the American democratic way of life’ and ending, ‘if you think I am guilty of treason, or engaging in subversive activities, then it is your duty, as an American, to report the matter to the authorities to take action against me. In other words,
PUT UP OR SHUT UP.’
²⁰
Welles denied nothing, and averred nothing, maintaining a position of legal formality.
‘I definitely intend to take some action as a result of the libellous statements made concerning me. I am today consulting with my attorneys to decide exactly what form this action will take.
²¹
I intend to protect my legal rights and protect my name against scurrilous attack by whatever legal means my attorneys advise, probably by lawsuit.’ A month later, the
Hollywood Reporter
withdrew its endorsement
of Woll’s statement; the following week it carried a front-page apology: after investigations by its own reporters, it declared that ‘a grave injustice has been done to Mr Welles’, Welles was again silent.
²²

By curious chance, the same edition of the paper in which Woll’s denunciation had first appeared carried a report in which Alexander Korda announced that Welles would start shooting
Salomé
in England in January of 1947; he already appeared to be distancing himself from Hollywood. The whole period in Hollywood was one of savage industrial conflict – union against studio, and union against union. The crafts unions were at war with each other, the right-wing IASTE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Operators) being violently opposed to the ultra-radical
CSU (Conference of Studio Unions), which was behind the jurisdictional strike by 400 AFL members that was bringing Hollywood close to a standstill – the same strike that Dick
Wilson
identified as holding up shooting on
The Lady from Shanghai
. ‘Shall the studios remain open or shall they be forced to close their doors?’ asked the
Hollywood Reporter
.
²³
In October 1946, Roach, Goldwyn and Republic
summarily dismissed all their CSU members. There was intimidation and hysteria; in November of the same year, IATSE took out a box-ad in the paper, offering a reward of $5,000 for information leading to the conviction and arrest of the parties responsible for the bombing of the home of one of its members. The SAG (Screen Actors’ Guild) was uncertain as to whether its members should cross the picket
lines; eventually – urged on by keynote speaker Ronald Reagan – it was decided that they should. Under the influence of the dapper reactionary Adolphe Menjou, SAG was moving rapidly rightwards; it took out a large advertisement claiming that a small percentage of the CSU did not want the strike settled and were simply trying to destroy the system. Things were moving away from the realm of the
idealistic politics that Welles had so eagerly embraced.