Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (97 page)

“I am fond of Orson still,” he finished, “and I retain much of my admiration for his talent: but our partnership is over for good and with it an exciting chapter of my life. It has been very wonderful and very painful and I am very glad that it is ended.”

The famous Mercury Theatre (and film) partnership had “ended.”

But not quite, not yet, and not in this fashion: once again, Houseman’s action-packed account, which burnished his own integrity and advanced his theme of Welles gone amok, looks different when measured against other versions of the events.

Orson told Barbara Leaming that he had realized, long before the Chasen’s showdown, that Houseman was miserable in his subordinate position. (“He was working for me,” Welles said. “That’s why he hated me so.”) Houseman was no longer as useful to the radio show either, and the top salary he was drawing was needed elsewhere.

Houseman himself had other irons in the fire. On Mercury time, he was preparing a stage play that Howard Koch and John Huston were writing about Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Orson knew about the play, which was announced a few weeks later, in the
New York Times
on January 22. According to that story, Houseman “is not associated with Mr. Welles in the latter’s controversial film activities,” but the producer denied that there had been any “formal parting” with Orson, and said that the Wilson drama “may or may not be a Mercury Theatre offering” in the fall.

Though he mentioned Welles’s four-page telegram in
Run-Through
, Houseman did not quote its contents, nor did he give the date of his longhand letter to Virgil Thomson, which could only have been written weeks or months after his letter to Orson. In later court testimony involving
Citizen Kane
, Houseman gave a different account of “the night of the flaming Sternos”; he told the court under oath that the objects Orson hurled in his direction that night at Chasen’s were flung “not at me but around the room.” And Simon Callow, in his intriguing section on “the night of the flaming Sternos,” points out that Houseman’s original typed letter to Welles was “subtly different” from the version excerpted in the producer’s memoir, and that the letter to Virgil Thomson also was “rewritten for publication.” In his memoir, Houseman edited out several damning self-criticisms that appeared in his original letters—including this from his letter to Orson: “I have found myself accepting this new position of mine not always with good grace, and I have found myself far too frequently buttressing my position with a kind of cynical, destructive passivity.” And he omitted this particular sentence, which undercuts his supposedly concurrent letter to Virgil Thomson: “I do not consider this a divorce from the Mercury.” As Callow noted, Houseman’s memoir also misrepresented Welles’s progress on his film projects. “He was wrong about the amount of work Welles had done,” Callow wrote.

By the time of the final confrontation at Chasen’s, it seems, both men were seeking an excuse to sever ties. According to Callow, “Houseman had been looking for an occasion to precipitate their rift, and the meal at Chasen’s had served well for the purpose.” According to Welles, the impetus was his. “The whole purpose was to get Houseman to quit and go back to New York,” Welles insisted to Leaming. “It was a total piece of theater. I didn’t throw the Sterno within ten feet of him. He’d been sitting at that dinner table cutting me up for an hour, but I didn’t get mad. I thought, ‘I’ve just got to get him away.’ I couldn’t say, ‘You’re not working for me anymore’ after all our time together and all. So that’s why I turned over the table. It was cold-hearted. It wasn’t a big end of it [the relationship]; it just got him off salary for a while.”

Welles’s time and money pressures intensified as the holidays approached. December marked the fifth anniversary of his and Virginia’s formal marriage ceremony in 1935. In the week before Christmas—the week of “the night of the flaming Sternos”—Virginia flew to Chicago, spending time with her parents while waiting for a flight to Reno, Nevada, where she intended to live temporarily for six weeks, the prescribed state residency for a divorce decree. Chicago reporters recognized Virginia and extracted a terse interview from her before she left. “This is no new story,” she said. “We have been separated for a year.”

Arnold Weissberger, who understood Orson’s financial morass better than anyone else, urged his client to leave the Brentwood mansion for a more affordable house in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. Orson said he would think it over.

Herbert Drake redoubled his efforts to point out that Welles was working “practically all day and night” and to get good publicity to offset the items about Orson’s divorce that were sweeping the press. Drawing on Dr. Bernstein’s dubious version of Orson’s life story, Decla Dunning wrote the most extensive profile yet of Welles in the
Los Angeles Times
, telling readers that the controversial tyro was “distressed by stories of his whimsies, his temperament, his thunderous anger and sullen silences.”

In the face of his marital breakup, which she downplayed, Dunning emphasized what a loving father Orson was. “When it comes to holding the center of the stage, he bows to only one other individual, his 18-month-old daughter,” Dunning wrote. Her piece perpetuated the “carte blanche” canard, calling “the unprecedented elasticity of his Hollywood contract a subject of controversy.” But Orson was not anti-Hollywood, as the PR campaign insisted. “I’ve been a movie fan all my life,” Welles was quoted as saying, and it was true.

“He has stirred public imagination to the extent that people may like or dislike him, resent or admire him, but not ignore him,” Dunning concluded in her flattering profile, timed for release on the last weekend before Christmas. “He won’t be able to slip by under par. He has to be good. And he is quite sure, with his unfailing optimism, the unquenchable, yet inoffensive ego which have marked his past ventures, that he will be.”

On December 23, Orson was photographed at the annual Screen Actors Guild holiday party, slender and smiling, his beard trimmed but not yet shorn, sharing a table with Dolores Del Rio, Fay Wray, and Cary Grant. Del Rio was personally popular with Hollywood columnists, and it helped Orson now that their romance could be out in the open. If it was a romance: Del Rio still denied that it was, and after the parties she still went home to her husband.

Toward the end of the Screen Actors Guild party, Orson found himself in a corner standing next to sixty-four-year-old D. W. Griffith, the pioneer of the silent picture era. Griffith was all but washed up in Hollywood: he was then working as an adviser to Hal Roach, who was producing the prehistoric epic
One Million B.C.
, but Griffith hadn’t directed a full feature since 1931.

Orson never wavered in his admiration for Griffith, whose faults—the old-fashioned David Belasco touches and Victorian melodramatics, even the race prejudice of
The Birth of a Nation
—Welles preferred to see as unfortunate by-products of their time. Asked by
Cahiers du Cinéma
in 1964 what directors he revered besides John Ford and Jean Renoir, Orson said that his answer was not going to be “very original,” and that his idols were always the “same ones.” “The one who pleases me most of all is Griffith,” Welles said. “I think he is the best director in the history of the cinema.”

Welles edged into a conversation with Griffith, trying “to express what the older man meant to him and the art of film,” as Frank Brady wrote. Uncharacteristically, Orson found himself hemming and hawing. Aware that Griffith might have read the nonsense published about the “boy wonder” having a “carte blanche” contract, he imagined the pioneer disapproving of this young whippersnapper. “We stared at each other across a hopeless abyss,” Welles recalled.
⁴⁶

Perhaps, too, Welles saw in Griffith a presentiment of his own future in Hollywood. “There was no place for Griffith” in the film industry by 1940, Welles said years later. “He was an exile in his own town, a prophet without honor, a craftsman without tools, an artist without work.

“No wonder he hated me.”

On Christmas Eve,
The Campbell Playhouse
broadcast its final episode of 1939 from the studios of KNX in Los Angeles. The production was “A Christmas Carol,” and Lionel Barrymore played Scrooge, just as Orson had promised when Barrymore was ill the year before. With Orson narrating, the cast included one newcomer—the young actress and Radio Guild activist Georgia Backus—along with longtime Mercury “henchmen” (Decla Dunning’s word) George Coulouris, Ray Collins, Everett Sloane, Erskine Sanford, and Frank Readick.

After the broadcast, Orson headed to a nightclub to spend Christmas Eve with Richard Baer. When the two men bumped into a young fellow with a hard-luck story, Orson opened his wallet and offered him the contents: a grand total of $31. Welles promised the fellow “a couple more payments,” Baer wrote ruefully to Arnold Weissberger.

’Twas not a season to be very jolly. But celebrating the New Year was a long-standing Welles tradition, and Orson attended Errol Flynn’s annual holiday bash on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills. Among the glamorous revelers that night were Dolores Del Rio and her husband, Cedric Gibbons. Orson’s date was Richard Baer.

The Smiler with the Knife
had a shorter shelf life than anyone expected. In mid-January, Orson’s quick-and-easy substitute for
Heart of Darkness
suffered a crippling blow when Carole Lombard begged off. Already overcommitted for the year, she could not—or would not—squeeze in another starring role for RKO. And Orson was stuck with his deadlines.

Though some accounts say Lombard vetoed Orson as a director, Welles himself insisted otherwise. “We became tremendous friends,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, “saw a great deal of each other, and performed many practical jokes. And she was all
for
me. She simply couldn’t get released” from productions already scheduled. Another RKO leading lady might have leaped at the chance to play the “madcap heiress” who infiltrates an American fascist movement, but the rush job under a first-time director found no takers among the studio’s top tier. “Rosalind Russell may well have turned me down,” Welles said. “I seem to remember somebody did.”

Orson’s fallback choice was Lucille Ball, his first publicity “date,” who had recently worked her way up from uncredited glimpses and lesser roles to leads in low-budget pictures. A dozen years before she entered the television pantheon as the producer-star of
I Love Lucy
, Orson was a lone voice hailing Ball as “the greatest female clown around,” he recalled. “She would have been just superb in this picture.” To RKO, however, Ball was simply a B player without box office clout. “Imagine how idiotic they were,” Welles said. Though her name was dangled in public, by mid-January the
Los Angeles Times
confirmed that Ball had “no chance” of landing the part. Orson tried to wangle Dita Parlo or Uta Hagen for the lead, but RKO was no more enthusiastic about either of them—they were not marquee names. Though choices were announced for the supporting cast—Vladimir Sokoloff, Robert Coote—without a star the film’s momentum stalled.

If
Heart of Darkness
had been completed, or
The Smiler with the Knife
launched, the three-part profile of Welles that started in the January 20, 1940, issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
would have been a well-timed publicity coup. By now, Mercury’s publicity man, Herbert Drake, was doing the kind of thing Dr. Maurice Bernstein once did, in this case supplying the reporters—Alva Johnston and Fred Smith—with a steady stream of colorful anecdotes, as well as Orson’s letters and newspaper clippings from Bernstein’s scrapbook. While the tone of the
Saturday Evening Post
article was patently tongue-in-cheek (“He talked like a college professor at two. . . . At eight, he started making his own highballs”), later pieces cribbed from it, and Welles spent a lifetime rebutting its effusions. In 1970, when David Frost asked Welles whether it was true that at age ten the “child genius” engaged “in a critical analysis of
Thus Spake Zarathustra
,” Welles sighed. “I’m an anti-Nietzsche fellow and certainly never wrote that. It sounds like one of those stories . . .”

The article mostly focused on his boyhood and his youthful conquest of New York. His nascent career in Hollywood and his two unfilmed projects were scarcely mentioned. When Hedda Hopper mocked the
Saturday Evening Post
series, reminding her readers that Welles still wore the beard from his first unproduced film project, Welles invited her to lunch to win her back. He assured her he was trimming his beard “scientifically an inch a day,” and that he was still looking for a leading lady for
The Smiler with the Knife.
When was Orson going to direct one of his three promised pictures? “When I’m good and ready,” he declared, but charmingly. Orson invited Hopper to join his radio series one of these days and see how well he directed
her.
Hopper readjusted her thinking: “Orson Welles, as I said months ago, has a shrewd head on those shoulders and I think he’ll make the critics eat their words. And I for one hope he does.”

Regardless of the troubles he was having mounting his first two projects, Orson was still on the hook to find a third story RKO would approve to follow
The Smiler with the Knife
and
Heart of Darkness.
In interviews and studio meetings after the first of the year, he revived the possibility of
Cyrano de Bergerac
; he talked about directing the first screen
Macbeth
since Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s silent version in 1915; he floated a
Pickwick Papers
starring W. C. Fields. But the kinds of established literary properties Orson loved faced the most stubborn opposition from some RKO studio officials, for whom familiarity with a title bred contempt. George Schaefer was open to
Macbeth
, sensing the publicity value of revisiting the Harlem production, but Shakespeare was an uphill slog with other studio muck-a-mucks. Orson was unable to overcome the persistent doubts about
Cyrano
, and the splendid notion of Fields as Mr. Pickwick was scuttled by the comedian’s firm contract with Universal.