Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (88 page)

SEVENTY YEARS
IN A MAN'S LIFE

CHAPTER 17

July–December 1939

“The Greatest Railroad Train a Boy Ever Had”

The week Orson arrived in Los Angeles, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for a special emergency session of Congress to deal with the developing war crisis in Europe.

William Wellman’s
Beau Geste
was previewed at the Carthay Circle, Frank Capra’s
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
was in the cutting room at Columbia, and Ernst Lubitsch was directing
Ninotchka
at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. All three directors had careers stretching back to the silent era. “Need Fresh Pix Directors,” read the headline of an article in that week’s
Variety
, which began, “New directorial talent today stands as picture industry’s most pressing need.”

Three days after his arrival, Orson posted his first letter to Virginia (“My Dearest One”), care of Geraldine Fitzgerald and her husband at their country home in County Kildare, Ireland.

“Well, Hollywood turns out to be just exactly like Hollywood,” he began chirpily. This was his first Saturday night in Los Angeles, Orson reported, and he was keeping a low profile. “Still incognito,” he had spent all his time thus far dealing with “enormous quantities of rigmarole” involving his contract. “Today at lunch I signed,” he announced—a tentative pact, to be formalized later. After the weekend, he would pay his first visit to the RKO studio.

“After a good deal of scurrying around the countryside in an open Cadillac,” Orson wrote, “I finally found a nice house—not a piece of cheese-cake—very tastily designed and decorated with pool and bathhouse, together with terrific Capehart hook-up throughout, some [Auguste] Rodin drawings, and a Lincoln [automobile] thrown in.
³⁶
Pretty cheap considering.”

The address was 426 N. Rockingham Drive in Brentwood. North of Sunset Boulevard and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Brentwood was an exclusive preserve, inhabited almost entirely by Hollywood royalty. Greta Garbo’s estate adjoined Orson’s new address, and Shirley Temple was his closest neighbor. The new tenant could move in at the end of the month. “I am tolerably certain you will adore it,” Orson wrote to his wife, promising to have a fence built around the swimming pool before Christopher arrived with her nanny from New York.

“Hollywood, as I predicted, is not a nice place to go out in,” Orson informed Virginia. For the first few days he kept close to the hotel, he wrote, although he did venture out to see the new movie
Clouds over Europe
, starring Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, on nearby Sunset Boulevard. The Chicago columnist Ashton Stevens was in Los Angeles, visiting his ailing older brother, the actor Landers Stevens; and Orson and Ashton dined together, with Welles listening as intently as ever to the older man’s advice. The newsman urged him to look up his nephew George Stevens, a top RKO director currently shooting the new Carole Lombard picture
Vigil in the Night.

Orson wrote to Virginia that he hadn’t yet seen “your friends here like [Herman] Mencowitz”—the worse-than-usual spelling was a joke—“and Burgess [Meredith] . . . because I haven’t been out.” There was still no hint of discord between the couple in these letters of July and August. Thinking of Virginia in Ireland, Orson wrote, “my emotions are mixed and complex. . . . First of all, I miss you, and then I envy you. I would love to see Ireland again, much as it scares me. . . . Please have a wonderful, wonderful time, and let me hear from you soon.”

On Monday morning, Welles, Houseman, and Richard Baer trooped over to the RKO studio at Melrose and Gower in Hollywood, where executives greeted them with smiles and open arms. They were given the keys to the kingdom: a grand tour, introductions to department heads, and new offices already bearing their nameplates. Later in the day, the VIPs made an excursion to the RKO ranch in Encino, where
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
was being filmed. It may have been here, at the RKO ranch, observing Van Nest Polglase’s lavish reconstruction of fifteenth-century Paris, with thousands of extras waiting around for a nod from director William Dieterle—a onetime Berliner who had acted under the great Max Reinhardt—that Welles made his famous exclamation about filmmaking: “It’s the greatest railroad train a boy ever had.”
³⁷

The notion that Orson felt isolated in the “strange and hostile town” of Hollywood, as John Houseman put it, is a simplification. Hollywood was only partly strange and partly hostile.

Another member of the Welles family, Orson’s older brother, Richard, had preceded him to California, living in the state, off and on, since 1935. Still a flibbertigibbet, thirty-four-year-old Richard held mysterious jobs that kept him shuttling between southern and northern California. Soon he would move to Los Angeles. He and Orson rarely spent quality time together, but when Arnold Weissberger began crafting a new tax profile for Welles to accommodate the RKO contract, he noted that Orson had long provided his brother with a monthly stipend.

Wherever Orson went, he saw old friends and forged new relationships. Burgess Meredith was on the Culver City lot at the same time as Welles, playing George in the screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men.
(“His first real Hollywood break,” Orson wrote to Virginia, “and I am very happy for him.”) At the Warner Brothers soundstages in Burbank, Vera Zorina was working in
On Your Toes
: her first picture with top billing. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were in Los Angeles trying out their new courtroom drama
Ladies and Gentlemen
, directed by MacArthur and starring his wife, Helen Hayes.

On the night after his first day at RKO, Orson and Houseman went with Welles’s agent, Albert Schneider, and Schneider’s wife to see Hecht and MacArthur’s premiere at the Biltmore. They were “appaled [
sic
] at the thousands of people and klieg lights, the photographers taking pictures in the aisles,” Orson wrote to Virginia. The opus itself suffered from “an overabundance of Ben Hecht philosophy,” while MacArthur’s direction was “often excellent but never consistently adept,” and costar Herbert Marshall, whom Orson normally liked, came off as “simply foolish and flat.” Hayes drew Orson’s only glowing notice.

After the premiere, Welles went with Hayes and MacArthur to his first Hollywood gala, hosted in the actress’s honor by Norma Shearer at the Café Trocadero, the Sunset Strip nightclub near the Chateau Marmont. Orson said a warm hello to actor Franchot Tone, an old friend from New York, who was escorting Loretta Young. Among the guests were Janet Gaynor and her fiancé, costume designer Gilbert Adrian; Jack Benny and George Burns, whom Orson knew from radio; and the MGM boss Louis B. Mayer and a bevy of actresses under contract to MGM, including Hedy Lamarr and Greer Garson. “You can just imagine how many wonderful, wonderful people I met and talked with,” Orson wrote.

The important (and self-important) screen industry columnist Hedda Hopper, whose home paper was the
Los Angeles Times
, spotted the newcomer and made a beeline over to him. “Orson Welles, properly bearded, wide eyes bulging, looked like a bird in its first peek at a big, juicy worm,” she wrote cleverly in the next “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” which was widely read both locally and nationally. “Says he’s scared of Hollywood—likes the town. If he doesn’t make a success of film it will be fun anyway.”

At least that was a positive mention. Herbert Drake, the Mercury’s new publicist, had not yet arrived from New York, and Drake and the RKO publicity staff were anxious to shape and control Orson’s press image. Hollywood was rife with columnists, and the pecking order among them had to be observed. Now that Welles had encountered Hopper, however accidentally, they would have to offer an equivalent “exclusive” to her competitors, especially her chief rival, Louella O. Parsons, who reigned over the
Los Angeles Examiner
, the Hearst morning daily.

It was important that the “gossip queens,” as Hedda and Louella were dubbed in the industry, should
like
Orson. Their likes and dislikes could determine ticket sales around the world. Louella had the statistical edge, as her column was carried in many more newspapers—more than four hundred at its peak. And Louella’s annoyance at her competitor Hedda’s scoop was obvious in her first column devoted to the young arriviste at the end of his first week in town.

The twenty-three-year-old “genius” (Parsons put quotes around the word, setting a pattern others would follow), with his “superior attitude,” had “condescended to honor Hollywood with his presence.” Louella was particularly rankled by his “record-breaking” contract, which she complained gave Welles “carte blanche” in a city where such privileges were rarely granted even to proven veterans. “He stars, produces and directs his first picture without a soul to say aye or nay. When you consider that the boy who threw the country into a panic with his Martian farce has never had one minute’s movie experience, such a contract baffles science. No other man or woman has been able to wangle such a ticket from our film producers.

“I can well understand the bitterness of some of our actors who have had years of experience,” Parsons continued. “No such privileges have been extended them.”

Months later, when Louella finally got an exclusive interview with Welles, however, she fell victim to his charms. Knowing that the influential Hearst columnist hailed from Dixon, Illinois, Orson regaled her with memories of nearby Grand Detour, and soon enough Louella was putty in his hands. In the column she wrote reporting their interview, Parsons removed the quotation marks from “genius,” and assured her readers that Orson was “indeed a brilliant youth.”

Orson had developed a sophisticated understanding of newspaper folk since boyhood, from his first press interview at the age of ten to his years in the company of grizzled columnists and newsmen in Chicago. Critics could be dangerous; columnists, on the other hand, had an allotment of space to fill, and they had no reservations about dropping a mention to serve a performer’s publicity purposes. Orson knew the columnist breed well; he had mixed comfortably with the worst of them in New York. One “big enemy” was the Hearst papers’ Broadway columnist, Lee Mortimer—a notorious right-winger, later a champion of the blacklist—“who used to print awful things about me every day,” Welles told Henry Jaglom. “And I always greeted him effusively so that he would think that I’d never read a word he wrote.” The
New York Daily Mirror
’s columnist Walter Winchell was also a “terrible” man in many ways, Welles told Jaglom, “but I was very fond of him, because he had great charm. And he was such an egomaniac that it was funny to be with him.”
³⁸

Hedda and Louella were like weather vanes, and it was foolhardy to try to control the weather. They also held sway over dozens of other lesser Hollywood columnists, who followed their shifting allegiances religiously, echoing them as closely as possible. Louella’s skeptical first column about Welles set the pattern for a chorus of remarks about the “boy genius,” his exorbitant salary (often conflated with his unit production budget), his Bunyanesque size, and, especially, the novice’s “four-way” power, as writer, producer, director, and star.
³⁹
The week following his arrival in Hollywood, RKO offered the first sit-down interview with Orson to Edwin Schallert, the dean of local film critics at the
Los Angeles Times
, and even Schallert marveled at the “all-encompassing contract,” which made Welles “perhaps the first ‘free man’ in movieland, not bowing to anyone of necessity though he may always do this on grounds of politeness.”

The rest of Orson’s first week in Hollywood was devoted to more substantive matters. The subject of his first film had to be decided, and a series of studio meetings were held to sift the options. One faction within RKO felt that Welles should capitalize on his reputation for “War of the Worlds” by directing a screen version of the H. G. Wells story, but George Schaefer fought the idea off. “The only way I was able to secure Orson originally,” Schaefer told executives, “was because of my sympathy with his viewpoint that he did not want to go out, and be tagged and catalogued as the ‘horror’ man. . . . He was anxious to do something first, before Hollywood typed him.” Schaefer convinced his officers that Welles’s first picture ought to be “serious” and artistic, a film that would put Orson in line for critical praise and industry awards. The studio president was confident that he could promote domestic exhibition to the hilt, while international revenue for an acclaimed film would balance out RKO’s investment.