Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
By Simon Callow
Viking, 640 pages, $29.95
For most people, telling a lie is an admission that they do not feel equal to a situation. But Orson Welles, actor and director of genius, was not most people. When he lied, it was quite often so that a situation might live up to him. Upon his arrival in Ireland at 16, for example, he added three years to his age, gave himself a fictitious resume and applied for work at The Gate, Dublin’s avant garde playhouse. The director, Hilton Edwards, and star player, Micheal MacLiammoir, who in later life acted Iago to Welles’ film Othello, were not fooled, as Simon Callow, citing MacLiammoir’s memoirs, demonstrates:
“Hilton walked into the scene dock one day and said, `Somebody strange has arrived from America; come and see what you think of it.’
” `What,’ I asked, `is it?’
” `Tall, young, fat; says he’s been with the Guild Theatre in New York. Don’t believe a word of it. . .’ “
And yet, when Welles, however improbable, auditioned, he swept his onlookers away. His intensity of manner and beautiful voice secured a major role. And on opening night, playing a caddish aristocrat 35 years his senior, he scored an authentic triumph.
“He took his final curtain call to a roar of acclaim,” Callow writes. For if Welles went into the performance, as he said, “in the bliss of ignorance, like a baby on a trapeze,” he came out of it not simply an actor but a sensation. “I have never achieved such an ovation,” he recalled. Callow adds, “And for once, this may be the unvarnished truth.”
Welles’ earlier lie had simply brought his credentials into accord with his sense of his own powers. For Welles, with his immense capacity for work and equally large capacity for self-promotion, not to mention, as Callow says, a huge courage that led him to follow his artistic ideas into uncharted territory, seems from the first to have crowded everyone else off the front page.
But for someone so well-known, so young–23 when he panicked the nation with his “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938, 26 when “Citizen Kane” was released–Welles retained something mysterious, unknowable. He possessed a strange quality of assurance, of having his finger on a thread that led him out of a maze of choices–if not in life, at least in art. In theater and in film he knew what he wanted before he had any right to know–when he was ridiculously inexperienced and unproven. His vision of a production was so strong that lighting, sets, costumes, the approach to a role, all derived from a central conception.
He was 21 when he astonished New York critics and audiences with an all-black “Macbeth,” given a sensual, tropical flair with costumes of the Caribbean islands and a restless undercurrent of voodoo drumming. In the 1930s, when newspapers were full of jocular, unselfconscious racism, Welles was introducing himself to the world capital with the dramatic equivalent of a dive off a 400-foot platform into a wet sponge. And it worked. The show was written about, discussed, sold out.
Most important, John Houseman afterward attached himself to Welles. He was, in Callow’s words, “addicted to the adrenalin Welles engendered and impelled toward the great fame and theatrical excitement that he knew were beckoning.”
Becoming the follower of someone 12 years his junior, was, Houseman said, “the price I was willing to pay for my participation in acts of theatrical creation that were far more stimulating or satisfying that any I felt capable of conceiving or creating by myself.”
This was a wise humility. Their first Mercury Theater season together engendered four hit plays, and if the genius was Welles’, the organization, tact, firm attachment to reality and much of the creative work were the older man’s.
While the theater won Welles glory, it did nothing for his income, most of which came from radio. That voice, velvety, powerful, capable of force or exquisite modulation, and in which, as Callow rightly observes, “you can hear the smile,” was soon earning Welles $1,000 a week. That amount would translate today into an income of about half a million a year. It was worth even more to Welles, in earning the actor a national following. He was soon offered his own show on CBS radio.
He agreed, adding the weekly broadcast to his other commitments, now so pressing that he slept in theaters, traveled around Manhattan by ambulance and ate and drank his way steadily through rehearsals, regulating his energies by an intake, according to Callow, of brandy and amphetamines, neither of which, at this stage, seemed to have much effect on his robust health.
The truth about the “War of the Worlds” broadcast is that Welles had gone into it with no expectation of spooking anybody, and bored by its story of a Martian invasion, which seemed to him dated. It was Houseman who instructed the writer to modify the story by giving it the format of a series of news bulletins. But after it caused America to jump out of its skin with fright, Welles, whose voice was identified with the broadcast, became news.
But even as the subject of this biography grows more visible, he grows more remote. Callow is a witty and feeling biographer, and, like Welles, an actor, yet his view still remains largely outside his subject. We get the feeling that Callow’s sympathies are often with dedicated theater professionals who learn their craft, rather than with the moon-faced, monstrous boy wonder who gobbled up the profession whole, before moving on to Hollywood.
In fact, this is a wonderfully readable, sharp, shrewd and evenhanded biography but not an intimate one. We have a great deal of information about what people thought of Welles and the effect he produced. Callow also offers a fascinating, 130-page analysis of the making of “Citizen Kane” that is like a whole book in itself. But there is surprisingly little about what Welles himself thought of the life he led.
It is not quite clear if this is because documentation is lacking, or if Welles was simply working too hard for introspection, or if his numerous public commitments left no time for a private life. In any case, Welles moves from obscurity to fame, marries and divorces, conquers radio and Broadway and seeks his fortune in Hollywood in the period covered by this volume, the first of a two-volume life. But we never know, except by inference from his actions, how he felt about what he did.
Callow’s strengths as a biographer–his encyclopedic grasp of sources and keen sense of personality–emerge most clearly when he focuses upon Welles’ professional persona. He is particularly shrewd analyzing Welles’ comments during a BBC broadcast.
“I have a kind of personality which requires that I play certain kinds of parts. . . ,” Welles said. “There used to be a form, a division of actors in France, in the Comedie Francaise, who were called king actors. And I’m a king actor, maybe a bad one, but that’s what I am, you see. And I have to play authoritative roles.”
Welles then refers to an even shrewder remark by Francois Truffaut. “Trauffaut was quite right when he says about me that I show the fragility of the great authority, and that’s the thing I do.”
Callow adds, “(It is) a key to all of Welles’s acting; his power, while undeniable, seems assumed, put on–like a false nose–and thus vulnerable.”
Welles reminds us, in other words, of the humanity and fallability of the great man, in the face of which the attempt at greatness itself looks futile or foolish. The whole passage serves as a reminder that Welles’ largeness of scale and Callow’s detailed analysis make an unusually successful partnership on the page, leading to a further paradox. Like almost all current biographies, this one is too long, but it makes the reader crave another volume.
