Orson Welles, Vol I (95 page)

Fearing capitulation, Pritt points a finger at Hollywood: ‘as far as the producers are concerned, a grave mistake has been made and must be corrected. The mistake was bringing Orson Welles to Hollywood. It was known that Orson Welles had too many ideas of his own; it was known that his sympathies were with the opponents of either alien or
native fascism. To bring such a man into a studio and give him an open hand was to court disaster. And if the result has been a picture that displeases Mr Hearst, it’s only what might have been expected. Throw him to the MGM lions. So say the Hearst stooges. But what of the others … the case of Orson Welles and
Citizen Kane
must not be judged by a frightened or conniving Hollywood autocracy but by the people who pay the admissions: not by the Jew-baiting, Red-baiting studio vigilantes but by those who carry the weight of the little golden calf labelled Box Office: not by a bellowing old tyrant but by those ultimately responsible for having made the movies a
mass
entertainment. Theirs, as always,
will
be the final verdict.’ Pritt’s last words proved prophetic; the immediate effect of his article, however, was further to polarise the situation, establishing Welles as a threat not merely to Hearst, but to Hollywood and those who ran it, the producers. Whether this was a great help in getting
Citizen Kane
released is to be doubted, but it can hardly be said that the role of producers’ scourge
was thrust upon Welles. In this same month of February he published in
Stage
an article of such direct provocativeness to the Hollywood establishment at the very moment when he most needed it that it can only be concluded that his judgement was severely distorted by the anxiety and pressure under which he was labouring.

‘This article,’ Welles wrote, ‘will probably make me no friends in Hollywood,
but I haven’t been making friends there at a rapid rate, and since my recent lectures on the motion pictures, it would be hard to say how I could make any new enemies. This is because I have proposed and contracted to do more work on a movie than anyone on the regular assembly line of the industry is allowed to do, and as though this weren’t enough, for some time I didn’t make the movie.’
⁴²
Clearly
having decided that nothing was any longer to be gained by defence, he opts to attack, starting with an easy target – the critics – then moving on to a taboo one: his fellow artists in Hollywood. ‘Its inhabitants, deeply tanned but unresigned to the sunshine and the flowers, all confidently expect to take the next boat home – to write a novel, play another part on Broadway, resign, or commit
suicide. But if nobody lives here, nobody leaves.’ Why? he wants to know. The movies offer limitless opportunities: ‘the actor is just now in possession of the means to act without the need to project. The close-up is the first new thing he’s had to play with since he took off his mask three thousand years ago and added his face to his voice.’ (He seems to have forgotten radio; moreover, didn’t he
announce before shooting
Citizen Kane
that he was going to eschew close-ups – as he largely does?) Writers, too, should rejoice: the dramatist ‘mostly impotent,’ he says, ‘since the invention of the novelist’ – poor Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neill and Büchner! – ‘has a new dimension now, a new thing to write besides words – he is again capable of poetry.’ Composers are fortunate, too: ‘a public
is drafted for serious music, whose composer … now finds himself unbelievably with a paying job and availed of a fresh and flexible narrative form.’ Finally he comes to directing. In movies, it becomes ‘a major art’. A new art in the theatre, its importance was exaggerated, ‘and still is’. ‘But if an actor can do without a director, a camera can’t. Call directing a job if you’re tired of the
word “art.” It’s the biggest job in Hollywood (it should be anyway, and it would be, if it weren’t for something called the producer). If you don’t like artists, call a movie director a craftsman. He won’t mind. He’s the world’s happiest man, and if he isn’t, it’s because there are producers in the world.’

He seems to be coming to the heart of his tirade. But no, he has a few more targets in
his sights: agents, for example. ‘It’s always Christmas morning for the percentage boys … the majority of ankles into which these artists’ representatives have clenched their parasitic teeth belong to people who need agents as much as a street-car needs an attendant stationed on its step to announce that for a fare the street-car will carry passengers along the track … your agent needs the goodwill
of the studios more than you do, so he can’t afford to fight for you as hard as you could.’ This leads directly to the main target: ‘He’s either afraid of getting in bad with a producer, which makes him useless to you, or he’s useless to you because he’s in bad with a producer … only a little less superfluous than the agent and almost as successful, unlike certain others among Hollywood’s middle-men
(the publicity man and the columnist, for example) the producer is not a necessary evil. He’s unnecessary and he’s evil … in England, a producer is a man who stages a play; on Broadway, he’s a man who finances a play; in Hollywood he’s a man who interferes with a movie. I say nothing against the executive head of any studio. I wouldn’t if I dared.’ He then dares; he can’t resist. ‘Several studio
executives are seriously ignorant and some are absolutely foul. A lot of them are just old-fashioned smalltime showmen who got in cheap on a new thing that turned out to be a sure thing and were shrewd enough to hang on … let them die rich. They found more gold than they earned, but it’s all theirs. None will outlive the boom, and nobody wants them to.’

Hollywood had made Welles feel small:
this is his revenge. ‘Like the writer – the actor and the designer of sets, and the composer of music, the cameraman, the wardrobe man, the make-up man – all are subjects of his undeniable highness, the Hollywood producer.’ All his rage against Houseman was now transferred to more general authority figures. Did he think that he would get the rest of Hollywood on his side by abusing producers? Was
he waging a democratic crusade? Far from it. ‘Please understand, I think a movie needs a boss.’ The argument shifts. ‘There has never been a motion picture of consequence that has not been, broadly speaking, the product of one man. This man has been the producer, could be the writer, has
been and usually should be the director. Certain pictures are rightly dominated by their stars or even their
cameraman. The dominant personality is the essential of style in the motion picture art. When it is absent, a motion picture is a mere fabrication of the products of various studio departments from the set-builder to the manufacturer of dialogue, as meaningless as any other merchandise achieved by mass production.’ It is as if he were terrified that someone might say that
Citizen Kane
wasn’t his
doing. ‘Let’s have more dominant personalities in the picture business and let them dominate all they want to, but let them be the personalities of those who really make the pictures. What we can do without is the dominating personality of a high-salaried official with nothing to do but dominate, and no other talent.’

The puzzle of this sustained outburst is that Welles was one of the few
people in the history of Hollywood never to have had to submit to a producer in any way. Schaefer had been heroically supportive from the beginning of their association, only hesitating when it seemed the budget might be out of control; even then he was exceptionally flexible. He never imposed himself for one moment in the sphere of artistic decision-making. Part of Welles’s attack may be an anticipation
of submission on the part of individual producers to Hearst’s tactics, though Hearst’s target was not them so much as the studio heads. Whatever his purpose, it can scarcely have been served by this rant. He leaves ‘this sketchy discussion of the motion picture producers’ feeling it essential ‘to point out that being a motion picture producer myself, I am utterly without bias on the subject.
I must further admit that producers, agents and other personal grudges are merely contributors like myself to what’s wrong with Hollywood which is, finally, absolutely and simply the scarcity of good movies. There have been, I anticipate the answer, four or five pictures recently of truly adult excellence, but Hollywood makes almost six hundred feature pictures a year, and every year for almost
twenty years has presented a public with at least a couple of pictures good enough to make it look as though Hollywood had come of age.’

This was clearly a good moment at which to leave Hollywood for a little while. Supper at Chasen’s was likely to be somewhat strained should he bump into a fellow producer – or an agent, for that matter, or indeed anyone not connected with those four or five
pictures of truly adult excellence. Welles’s attack on producers found vocal support in the crusading press: in his piece
HEARST OVER HOLLYWOOD
in
The New Republic
, Michael Sage bluntly asked
‘Will Hollywood stand up to William Randolph Hearst over the matter of Orson Welles’s film
Citizen Kane?
… many people find it hard to believe the producers really intend to defy the lord of San Simeon.’
⁴³
Scorning the neutral position of the Hays Office, ‘which is supposed to defend the interests of RKO as well as the other companies’ Sage was reminded of ‘the sterling fortitude displayed by the late Neville Chamberlain when Hitler trampled Czecho-slovakia’. Dangerously shifting the dispute from Hearst versus Welles into Welles versus Hollywood (dangerously for Welles, that is), Sage observed that
‘Hollywood is oozing with synthetic geniuses; an authentic one would be a menace. Welles did no boot-licking. He defied the Hollywood caste system, ate with his aides and was even seen publicly with people who made less than $1,000 a week. Instead of casting shopworn stars he brought his Mercury Players from New York for the picture. Now, in certain quarters,’ continued Sage, ‘he is the greatest
villain in Hollywood. Instead of praising him for his forthright determination to make an interesting character study, even if it did offend Hearst, instead of condemning the effrontery of anyone who tries to suppress a creative work, some leaders of the industry say privately that Orson Welles must be stopped. Whether they will join hands with William Randolph Hearst remains to be seen.’ Hearst,
meanwhile, continued to focus the attack on Schaefer, blowing up a little local dispute over rights into front page news (
RKO BROKE CONTRACT
!).

Welles showed a complete print of the film to Houseman, who was passing through. Over supper, Houseman handed him a play, the outcome of his first purchase for United Productions, that company set up with such flourish the previous May. With the première
of
Citizen Kane
still in abeyance, and feeling daily less comfortable in Hollywood, Welles leaped at it. Back, then, to Broadway; the sooner the better.

T
HE PLAY
was
Native Son
, adapted by Paul Green and Richard Wright from the latter’s novel, published with sensational success at the beginning of 1940. Wright records in a narrative of Zola-like realism the journey of a frustrated young black man in Chicago’s South Side to the electric chair. Finding work as a chauffeur, he kills first, accidentally,
the daughter of the philanthropist for whom he works, then his girlfriend. In his cell, waiting to die, he realises that he has achieved a sort of freedom for the only time in his life. ‘I didn’t want to kill! But what I killed for, I
am
! It must have been pretty deep to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder … I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things
hard enough to kill for ’em.’ Houseman and Mankiewicz had read the novel while they were working on
Citizen Kane
in Victorville, later giving it to Welles; like most of the novel’s first readers in spring of 1940, they were overwhelmed not only by its unrelenting power but by the urgency for all Americans of what Wright was saying. ‘A blow at the white man,’
¹
as Irving Howe wrote, ‘the novel forced
him to recognise himself as an oppressor. A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognise the cost of his submission … the day
Native Son
appeared, American culture was changed for ever.’

Wright had created in his central character, Bigger Thomas, a complex emblem of a life stunted and finally wrecked by social conditions, but he had done so without crude determinism and with no
vestige of sentimentality. Bigger, like Büchner’s Woyzeck, embodies the uncomprehending destruction of the potential of a whole section of humankind; as Wright put it to Houseman in a letter, ‘Bigger Thomas is not presented in
Native Son
as a victim of American conditions of environment; neither is he presented as a boy destined to a bad end by fate … here is a human being trying to express some
of the deepest impulses in all of us through the cramped limits of his life. The emphasis was upon the impulse, upon the boy’s feelings.’
²
Understandably eager though Welles, Houseman and Mankiewicz were to do something with this
extraordinary material, and despite Wright’s own description of his novel as ‘a special première given (for the reader) in his own private theatre’, it is to be doubted
whether
Native Son
, depending to a considerable degree on the thought-by-thought reconstruction of Bigger’s mental processes, was really susceptible to dramatisation. Houseman was convinced that it was, however, and found Wright equally enthusiastic.

Their correspondence reveals the seriousness and passion with which Houseman had returned to the stage, his frustration and humiliation in Hollywood
way behind him. He had skilfully persuaded Wright that his novel had a place in the theatre, then set about allaying his doubts. ‘I realise the limitations of the stage and screen in America,’ wrote Wright, anxious that any play from his material should be done ‘in a light that presents Bigger Thomas as a
human being
?’ The idea of purveying more negro stereotypes was abhorrent to him: ‘To stage
or screen
Native Son
in the old way means nothing to me.’ Houseman wrote back: ‘Please believe that both Welles and I understand fully the way you feel about your book.’
³
He and Welles, he continued, ‘were convinced that the material was capable of extension and development in the dramatic form’, an extension, he claimed that ‘would not merely illustrate and narrate your story, but give it that
particular heightening and tension that make the drama with all its current sluggishness and inertia, still the greatest medium in the world’. The theatre was the only place for it. ‘The chances of it being shown on the screen in a final form that would give you as an author any pleasure at all are virtually nil. The theatre, however, in the hands of a few people, is still a free medium in which
a serious artist can express himself directly and courageously to his audiences.’