The Magic World of Orson Welles Read Free Page A

and he became the father of three daughters, yet he was a womanizer who in the 1950s told French writer MauriceBessy, “‘I hate women, but I need them. . . . Women block all conversation. That dates from the day they won the right to vote. They should have stayed slaves’” (quoted in Bessy,
Orson Welles
, 71).
    Welles was nevertheless an important public spokesman for the left in the 1930s and ’40s, and it is significant that he became an émigré from the United States during the Cold War. It now seems much clearer to me than when I first wrote this book that his departure was motivated not only by Hollywood’s dislike of his films but also by the political climate in the country at large. He had enjoyed his most dazzling success in the Roosevelt years, and the seven pictures he directed in Hollywood between 1941 and 1950 (one of them the incomplete
It’s All True
) were an outgrowth of his Popular Front activities in the previous decade. The decline of his Hollywood fortunes was obviously related to his unorthodox film style, his so-called highbrow interests, and his need to remain independent, but these problems were exacerbated by the death of Roosevelt and the postwar reemergence of the American right wing. Beginning as early as
Citizen Kane
and continuing until 1956, Welles was closely observed by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which compiled roughly two hundred pages of reports about him. For nearly ten years FBI operatives tracked his political activities, personal finances, and love life, following up tips from industry insiders, the American Legion, isolated crackpots, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who worked for the Hearst press. In 1945, near the outset of a Red Scare that would influence Hollywood for the next decade, the FBI designated him a Communist and a “threat to the internal security” of the nation (see Naremore, “The Trial: The FBI vs. Orson Welles,” and Naremore,
Invention without a Future
, 201–204).
    As the war came to an end, a purge of American leftists was in the offing. Welles had campaigned for FDR’s fourth term, and over the next few years he would become involved in the newly formed United Nations and Louis Dolivet’s Free World Society, meanwhile writing a syndicated, increasingly political column for the
New York Post
. But by the early 1950s, as the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the McCarthy era dawned, and at about the time when Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey became expatriate directors, Welles was in Italy and North Africa making
Othello
. At this point an anonymous informant sent the FBI a photo of Welles dining with Palmiro Togliatti, the legendary head of the Italian Communist Party, along with a message in French saying that the photo ought to be brought to the attention of the State Department with the aim of having Welles “brought before a court in charge of prosecuting actors suspected of Un-American activities and perhaps even excluded from Hollywood.” But the investigatingagent concluded that Welles was being “bled white” financially, had never actually been a member of the Communist Party, and was no longer any particular threat.
    Welles did not return to America for a significant length of time for almost a decade. In 1953 he was briefly in New York to act in Peter Brooks’s TV version of
King Lear
(he also played Lear on stage, seated in a wheelchair because of a broken leg), and in the late 1950s he returned to the United States for a longer period, performing a magic act in Las Vegas; making guest appearances on TV; filming a TV pilot (“The Fountain of Youth”); and writing, directing, and acting in
Touch of Evil
. He then began filming
Don Quixote
in Mexico and returned to various European locations for another decade. From approximately 1968 until his death, he divided his time between Hollywood and Europe, making guest appearances on the