Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (102 page)

Campbell finally relented and gave Orson the chance to play Rochester. For the part of Jane, Orson turned to actress Madeleine Carroll, who had performed for him in broadcasts of “The Green Goddess” and “The Garden of Allah.” He got his wish to play Rochester again, claiming the role in Robert Stevenson’s atmospheric big-screen version of 1943, with Joan Fontaine as Jane. Orson preferred Carroll to Fontaine, whom he called “just a plain old bad actor,” in his conversations with Henry Jaglom. “She’s got four readings and two expressions.”
⁵⁰

Orson’s real interest in
Jane Eyre
was the opportunity to play Rochester: if he was given the chance to direct sixty films of his choice, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, not one of them would be
Jane Eyre.
Welles did so much script and production work on the 1943 film version, produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, however, that the studio offered him a credit as an associate producer. He declined.

“Parts of the film looked as though you had directed [them],” Bogdanovich said.

“Oh, I invented some of the shots,” Welles commented. “That’s part of being that kind of producer. And I collaborated on it, but I didn’t come around behind the camera and direct it. Certainly, I did a lot more than a producer ought to, but [director Robert] Stevenson didn’t mind that. And I don’t want to take credit away from him.”

Robert Coote and Edgar Barrier, among the actors Orson was courting for film work, were behind the mike for “Jane Eyre,” the last
Campbell
show of the season. But Coote and Barrier booked themselves up with Hollywood jobs too quickly afterward; neither would appear in
Citizen Kane.
Another player in “Jane Eyre” was George Coulouris, who took a role in the Warner Brothers melodrama
All This and Heaven Too
after seeing
Heart of Darkness
and
The Smiler with the Knife
fall by the wayside. But he remained Orson’s first and only choice to play Walter Parks Thatcher.

Every day and most nights Orson showed up at RKO, making sketches and preparations for
Citizen Kane.
And as usual he had a wealth of other activities and projects on his plate.

Orson spent a day with documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, who had impressed him with his films
Nanook of the North
(which Orson had seen with his mother in Chicago in 1922) and
Man of Aran
, documenting life on the Irish islands. Afterward, Welles announced plans to collaborate with Flaherty on projects set in the South Pacific and the arctic. (The projects didn’t work out as planned, but Flaherty did contribute story material and ideas to part of Welles’s uncompleted
It’s All True
in 1942.)

Orson also found time to make a test recording for a proposed new radio series featuring selected stories from the Bible. A throwback to his afternoon poetry recitals on radio in New York, the pilot episode was cobbled together with a few Mercury regulars, backed by a symphony orchestra; Orson narrated the origins of Adam and Eve. But the project found no takers and was stillborn.
⁵¹

Other Hollywood studios contacted Orson about possible acting jobs, and there was fleeting industry buzz that he was in line to play the acerbic critic Sheridan Whiteside—a character based on his early booster, Alexander Woollcott—in the planned screen version of the Kaufman-Hart play
The Man Who Came to Dinner.
But that film was a Warner Brothers production, and his home studio nixed the idea; his starring debut was reserved for RKO
.

In interviews, Orson was constantly spooling out plans for future projects; he even went so far as to register a few titles with industry groups, including a film based on
The War of the Worlds
and another focusing on the Borgias, a sweeping (if less likely) Hollywood subject reflecting his longtime fascination with the Italian Renaissance. And when he wasn’t talking with show business columnists, he was keeping up his profile in radio: in late March, for example, he repaid Jack Benny for his stint on
The Campbell Playhouse
by appearing on Benny’s own radio hour. He and Benny had an easy friendship. In 1943, when Benny fell ill, Orson hosted
The Jack Benny Show
for six weeks, performing some of his funniest bits as himself, spoofing his own genius.

Some of these activities might seem random, but Welles had to tread water while Mankiewicz was working on his draft of
Citizen Kane
, and the radio paychecks helped to replace his income from
Campbell Playhouse.
Albert Schneider and Herbert Drake were hard at work promoting Orson’s national speaking tour. “Lecture is informal,” Drake said, touting the tour in a telegram sent to Sam Zolotow at the
New York Times.
“Welles invites hecklers from outset . . . besides talking, reads speeches,
Hamlet
,
Richard III
, Congreve etc. . . . opens and closes with jokes.”

On April 3, shortly after the final
Campbell
broadcast, Orson opened the intended national tour at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, addressing a full house of more than two thousand. “The New Actor” was his topic, and although he spoke off the cuff from notes, his comments were serious and thoughtful. “The business of the actor is to increase the awareness of each person in the audience of his being alive,” Welles declaimed. “It is a great Christian and a great democratic obligation to remind them of themselves as a part of the human race.”

Interspersing his lecture with readings from Shakespeare, Welles addressed the Pasadena crowd for two hours “almost without pause,” according to press accounts. Later, he delivered “virtually a second lecture backstage” to “at least one hundred and fifty young students of the drama and some older ones,” who lobbed questions at him for another half hour. The audience got its money’s worth, and so did Orson—earning $1,000 to $1,500 per lecture—with Albert Schneider’s agency, Columbia Artists, taking a 25 percent commission. The Pasadena date was a dress rehearsal for a full itinerary—Kansas City, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and beyond—and Welles even volunteered to pay his own travel expenses in order to encourage further bookings.

The second lecture date on April 11 in Kansas City, however, backfired. The problem wasn’t the size of the turnout—there were nearly five thousand people, twice as many as in Pasadena—it was the reaction to negative comments Orson purportedly made about Hollywood during the lecture, which were sent out across the country by the wire services. “Of the movies,” the United Press quoted him as saying, “I will speak only in terms of contempt.” “The average American only goes to movies,” Welles supposedly said, “because it is better than drink.”

By the time Welles arrived back in Hollywood, a firestorm was raging. The United Press account—headlined “Hollywood! Orson Welles Does Not Approve of You!”—was excerpted over Radio KFI in Los Angeles, and Hedda Hopper commented acidly on the story in her column. Orson quickly took out a half-page advertisement in the
Hollywood Reporter
, insisting that he’d been “grossly misquoted,” and offering a recap of his lecture that was intended to correct the “misstatements.” He had been upbeat about Hollywood in his speech, he insisted, actually telling his audience: “A movie today is a better bargain for your money than a play. The motion picture medium is populated with ninety per cent of the world’s theater talent. It is healthier, livelier, more inventive. It has yet to discover its limitations.” His comment about speaking of Hollywood “only in contempt” had been nothing more than a misunderstood joke.

For many, the advertisement ended the controversy, but for a couple of weeks Orson’s alleged diatribe against Hollywood became grist for the mill of snide columnists and pundits not only in Hollywood but across the nation. The United Press kept feeding the story, asking other stars about Welles’s insult to filmdom. “He is just trying to imitate a Harvard undergraduate,” actress Ann Sheridan was quoted as saying. Some wouldn’t nibble. “I know it sounds awful screwy,” Pat O’Brien said, “but I met Orson once and he’s a really nice kid.”

Unhappy about the negative publicity, RKO pressured Welles to halt his lecture tour. Orson gave interviews to explain himself, telling Fredrick C. Othman in the
Hollywood Citizen-News
, “Every time I open my mouth, I seem to say too much.” He’d launched his lecture tour only to make a little extra money, he explained, having paid out $80,000 of his earnings toward Mercury’s debts and projects in the past year. “Everybody seems to think I’m on one of those salaries you read about,” Welles added. “RKO isn’t paying me a cent. I don’t get any money until I start making pictures.”

Welles was forced to cancel all the dates outside Los Angeles, where he saved face with two lectures at UCLA in May. Those lectures were more quietly successful, by all accounts, although Orson still couldn’t keep all his opinions to himself. When a questioner at UCLA asked what he thought about the recent Broadway hit
Key Largo
, Orson snapped, “Nothing in the world can induce me to see a Maxwell Anderson play, and vice versa.”

He had counted on the tour for cash to keep Mercury operations alive, but the controversy was “a really scurvy trick” played on him by irresponsible reporters, Herbert Drake wrote to Ashton Stevens. The effect was “really disastrous. . . . More and more it becomes apparent that the only thing Orson can do to keep these screamers quiet is to buckle down and do that movie.”

Even as the controversy about his contempt for Hollywood played out disastrously in public, privately another issue arose to blindside Orson, distracting his attention and threatening his reputation.

A new book due in stores, called
The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic
, analyzed the national reaction to the “War of the Worlds” broadcast. The author, Hadley Cantril, an associate professor of psychology at Princeton University (the home of Orson’s character in the broadcast), had sifted polling data and conducted interviews with the general public to study the spectrum of responses to the broadcast. Early on, Professor Cantril had corresponded with Welles, who referred him to John Houseman for background about the making of the program. As advertised on its cover, the book would also include the first publication of the “War of the Worlds” script.

In late March, Cantril sent galleys to Welles, hoping for his support with publicity when Princeton University Press brought out the book in mid-April. When Orson read Cantril’s prefatory material, however, he reacted with horror. Cantril thanked Howard Koch for his permission “to publish for the first time his [Koch’s] brilliant adaptation of the ‘War of the Worlds.’ ” And although the cover credit promoted “the complete script of the Orson Welles broadcast”—a more accurate description of the script, which had been transcribed from the broadcast—inside the book the phrase “script by Howard Koch” leaped out at Welles repeatedly.

Orson unleashed a volley of heated telegrams and letters to Cantril. Crediting Koch “to the exclusion of myself as the dramatist,” Welles wrote, was a “grave” error that would be “detrimental to my reputation” in radio and Hollywood. “The idea for the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast and the major portion of its execution was mine,” he insisted. “Howard Koch was very helpful in the second portion of the script [which centered on the character Welles himself played] and did some work in the first, most of which it was necessary to revise.” While he “always worked with a fairly large complement of writers,” Welles went on to explain, “the initial emphasis and attack on a story as well as its ultimate revised form have in almost every instance been mine.” Among the writers “of much greater service” than Koch to the ultimate “War of the Worlds” script were Houseman (“my partner” and “chief collaborator”) and Paul Stewart, who “also did a great deal of writing.” And there were indispensable contributions from the chief engineer John Dietz; CBS production executive Davidson Taylor (helpful with “news dispatches, mobile unit pickups, special interviews etc.”); and “my director of music,” composer-conductor Bernard Herrmann.

Professor Cantril was taken by surprise. Until that moment, on the eve of publication, he had had no idea that he might be transgressing by crediting the script to Koch. Cantril replied that he had affidavits and correspondence from Koch, Houseman, and Koch’s assistant Anne Froelick attesting to Koch’s authorship. “The testimony of Mr. Houseman is no more valid than that of Miss Froelick,” Welles replied testily, “for the simple reason that Mr. Houseman is about to produce a play by Mr. Koch on Broadway,” which Froelick was also involved in planning.

Cantril offered to add a last-minute errata sheet to
The Invasion from Mars
, affirming Welles’s overall supervisory authorship. But Orson insisted this was inadequate.

WAR OF THE WORLDS WAS NOT ONLY MY CONCEPTION
, Orson telegraphed to the professor,
BUT ALSO, PROPERLY AND EXACTLY SPEAKING, MY CREATION. VERY HAPPY TO HAVE ALL MY ASSISTANTS CREDITED BUT THIS IS MEANINGLESS WITH THE FINAL LINE “AND WRITTEN BY HOWARD KOCH.” ONCE AGAIN, FINALLY, AND I PROMISE FOR THE LAST TIME, HOWARD KOCH DID NOT WRITE ‘THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
.’

It was indeed the last time, because
The Invasion from Mars
was published as scheduled on April 15, with the full script of “War of the Worlds” permanently attributed to Howard Koch. Koch held the copyright according to the terms of his contract, and he would republish the script multiple times in the decades ahead. (As of this writing, it is still in print.)

The nuances of authorship were lost on reviewers, who routinely referred to the famous episode as “the Orson Welles broadcast” and rarely mentioned Koch. But it was an untimely defeat for Welles, already feeling beset and beleaguered in Hollywood while struggling to launch
Citizen Kane.
And he might have felt a premonition: the dispute over the credits for “War of the Worlds” foreshadowed the controversy over the writing of
Citizen Kane.