The Magic World of Orson Welles Read Free Page B

Dean Martin television show, trying unsuccessfully to launch a talk show, and filming a number of mostly incomplete pictures. Late in his career he encountered tax problems in the United States because of money he had earned in Europe, but in 1976, after a routine security check for the Carter White House, the FBI cleared him of the old charges of subversion. By that time he had become a pioneering independent director/producer whose career made hash of highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow distinctions. As Michael Anderegg puts it, most of Welles’s post-Hollywood work was an attempt to “drive his gypsy wagon outside the great hall of the culture industry” (
Orson Welles, Shakespeare
, 57). And although he had been more obviously political during the period of the Popular Front and the Roosevelt administration, he remained an opponent of the right wing. “I’m in no conflict with society,” he said in 1981. “I’m in conflict with the Reagan administration” (Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 108).
    My book could also have said a bit more about Welles’s many talents and involvement with media other than film. In 1925, when he was ten years old, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, printed a story about him headlined “A Poet, Artist, Cartoonist, and Actor.” (He had also been a musician, an art he largely abandoned.) In the 1930s a lecture he was booked to give at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago was almost canceled by a major snowstorm that caused most ticket holders to stay home. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he reportedly said to the small audience. “My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear on stage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?” By the end of his life, he could have listed even more ofhis selves: actor/producer/director of film and television; orator; journalist; educator; raconteur and interview subject without equal. (If there are talk shows in the afterlife, there should be one involving him, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.)
    Publicity and news items about Welles in the 1940s tended to emphasize his Renaissance-man achievements and ability to master all the arts and crafts in the making of motion pictures. One of the most widely circulated advertisements for
The Magnificent Ambersons
, for example, featured a caricature by show-business cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, who depicted Welles as a human octopus—one of his eight hands giving a thumbs up, another giving direction to an actor, another panning the camera, another wielding a pen, another designing costumes, another constructing a model of the Amberson mansion, and two others typing a script. Inevitably, such exaggerations created a backlash. Critic Manny Farber, who didn’t like
Ambersons
(he later changed his mind) described the film derisively as “Orson Welles’s latest I did it.”
    But Welles was in fact multitalented, a conceptualist and manager of a theatrical and cinematic
Gesamtkunstwerk
. Of all his artistic abilities, only his writing has led some critics and scholars to doubt him. The fact that he wrote is beyond dispute. His lectures and journalistic essays, for instance, would make a large and highly readable book. He claimed to have written pulp fiction in his youth, none of which has been discovered. He disavowed the only published novel that bears his name,
Mr. Arkadin
(historians agree the novel was ghosted by Maurice Bessy, although actor Robert Arden swears he saw Welles writing it), but he certainly did write the screenplay for the film of
Arkadin
, along with scores of other original screenplays, many of which were unproduced. Most of the radio, film, and television dramas for which he took credit as a writer are collaborations, adaptations, or brilliantly edited versions of classics—although some of the adaptations, such as
The Lady from