Orsoniana
Some weeks ago 
rozk linked to a trailer for a new movie called Me and Orson Welles, which from the looks of it is about Zac Efron's character having a romance with Claire Dane during the legendary Mercury production of Julius Caesar (which they appear to be recreating very faithfully going by the glimpses in the trailer). Christian McKay is Orson Welles, looking slightly too old for Welles in his early twenties (this was long pre-Kane) but otherwise very much like the original did. Which is as good a reason as any to give you my opinion on movie recreations of Welles, and a choice collection of favourite descriptions by contemporaries who had interestingly ambivalent relationships with him.
So: as far as cameo appearances are concerned, Vincent D'Onofrio as Orson Welles in Ed Wood is great, and the one scene in which Our Hero, about to gain immortality as the declared worst director of all times, meets his idol in a bar and bonds with Orson about money men and actors, is just fun. Welles also shows up, sort of, cameo-ish in Heavenly Creatures where the two teenage heroines regard him as "the most hideous creature alive" and have sexual fantasies about him in which he chases and ravishes them in Harry Lime get-up (and in black-and-white); you can tell Peter Jackson had fun with that as well.
Then there are the movies in which Welles is an actual main character, and which deal with his productions. For example, Tim Robbins' Cradle will Rock is a good ensemble movie set around the story of the Federal Theatre Project in the 30s and the production of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle will Rock (produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles), and it captures a lot of the spirit of time, but the presentations of Welles and Houseman both are disappointingly one dimensional. This Welles has all of the temper tantrums and none of the charm and talent that made people put up with said tantrums to begin with, not to mention the genuine passion he had for the theatre.
And then there's my favourite, RKO 281, about the production of Citizen Kane. It takes some liberties with history - the biggest one is inventing a meeting between Welles and Hearst early in the movie in order to give Welles some animosity towards Hearst, when in fact as far as we know they never met until after the film was shot. (And for that post-Kane meeting we have only Welles' account, which is in fact used for the film's next-to-last scene, down to Orson saying "Kane would have taken the tickets"; if it didn't happen, it's a good story and a downright irresistable one if you want to shoot a picture about Citizen Kane.) But it still gets everyone and everything involved - Welles, Hearst, Mankiewicz, Marion Davies, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood of that era - and manages to work both if you're familiar with the story it tells, and the film it's told about (in which case you can play "spot the famous Citizen Kane shot this scene pays homage to"), and if you're not. The characters are three dimensional; if you think Hearst comes along as too harmless, bang comes along a scene where he casually threatens and humiliates L.B. Mayer by invoking the antisemitism of the time. And here, Welles' outbursts, when they occur, serve another purpose than fulfilling the "temperamental director" cliché; you can tell scriptwriter John Logan has read Simon Callow's The Road to Xanadu, because the movie relationship with Hermann Mankiewiczs encapsules the pattern Callow sees in young Orson forming intense emotional bonds with and then destroying reprobate father figures while also flirting with them, the fearlessness married to a self destructive streak a mile wide, and the ongoing question "what if I'm really a fraud?" Liev Schreiber has more regularly handsome features then Welles (who described his face once as that of a "depraved baby"), but the resemblance is still remarkable, and he has the mannerisms down as well as the charm, the unrelenting drive to create, the intensity and the capacity for cruelty. Lastly, given that Mankiewiczs, much like his younger brother Joe, was one of the wittiest scriptwriters of 30s and 40s Hollywood, it's good to know Logan's script delivers the quick repartee as well. And of course the film as a dream cast - in addition to Schreiber as Welles, there's James Cromwell as Hearst, John Malkovich as Hermann Mankiewiczs, Roy Scheider as RKO studio executive George Schaefer and Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies. (An especially tricky job because with her you have both Davies' own films and Dorothy Cunningham's performance as Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane to compare.) All of which makes RKO 281 my favourite filmic recreation of Orson Welles so far.
Now, about those quotes, which are from Run-through by John Houseman, and All for Hecuba and Put Money In Thy Purse by Micheál MacLiammóir.
Houseman, who was Welles' partner during his New York years when they created some of the most famous theatre productions of the day, wrote his memoirs long after their spectacular break-up, but the description he gives of Orson Welles is as fascinated as ever, and precisely because of his ambivalence far more vivid than, say, the sedate murmurs of an uncritical admirer like Peter Bogdanovich. Here's his description of the first time he saw Welles, who wasn't yet twenty and played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet:
That glossy and successful evening was marked for me by one astonishing vision: not Miss Cornell's fervent Julient, not Edith Evans' admirable Nurse, nor Basil Rathbone's polite, middle-aged Romeo, nor Brian Aherne's Mercutio exubarantly slapping his yellow thighs - those were all blotted out by the excitement of the two brief moments when the furious Tybalt appeared suddenly in that sunlit Verona square: death, in scarlet and black, in the form of a monstrous boy - flat-footed and graceless, yet swift and agile; soft as jelly one moment and uncoiled, the next, in a spring of such furious energy that, once released, it could be checked by no human intervention. What made this figure so obscene and terrible was the pale, shiny child's face under the unnatural growth of dark beard, from which there issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him. "Peace! I hate the word as I hate Hell!" cried the sick boy, as he shuffled along, driven by some irresistable interior violence to kill and soon himself, inevitably, to die.
And then he meets the man/boy off stage as well:
It was always a shock to see Welles without the makeup and the false noses behind which he chose to mask himself. When he walked into the bar, with his hair combed, in a sober, dark suit, I did not know him for a moment; then, as he moved toward me, I recognized the shuffling, flat-footed gait, which I had found so frightening in Tybalt and which was really his own. I could see his features now, finally: the pale pudding face with the violent black eyes, the button nose with the wen to one side of it and the deep runnel meeting the well-shaped mouth over the astonishingly small teeth. Against the darkness of the wooden table I was conscious once more of the remarkable hands - pale, huge and beautifully formed, with enormous white palms and incredibly long, tapering fingers that seemed to have a life of their own - and the voice that made people turn at the neighboring tables - startled not so much by its loudness as by its surprising vibration. We had one old-fashioned and then another while I told him about our project and give him a copy of the play and my telephone number. Afterwards I walked across town with him towards Grand Central Station, then watched him vanish with astonishing speed, into the tunnel leading to the Westchester commuter trains. After he he had gone, I was left not so much wiht the impression of his force and brilliance as with a sense of extreme youth and charm and of a courtesy that came very close to tenderness.
You could be forgiven for thinking someone is describing the first encounter with the love of his life here. Two people who met Welles even earlier than that and did not break-up with him through the decades of his life afterwards, though their relationship with him had very tumultous ups and downs, were Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, who headed the Gate Theatre in Dublin and were looking for someone to play the Duke in their production of Feuchtwanger's Jew Suess when in came sixteen years old Orson (who had never played outside of school productions before, though he lied about this) to audition. MacLiammóirs description of that first encounter is one of the all-time great theatrical history set-pieces:
(...) Hilton walked into the scene doch 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, but he's interesting." (...)
We found, as he had hinted, a very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerfull lips, and disconcerting Chinese eyes. His hands were enormous and very beautifully shaped, like so many American hands; they were coloured like champagne and moved with a sort of controlled abandon never seen in a European. His voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a leader, a man of power; it bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor; he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent patience as though here was our chance to have something beautiful at last - yes, sir - and were we going to take it? Well, well, just too bad for us if we let the moment slip. ANd all this did not come from mere youth, though the chubby tea-rose cheeks were as satin-like as though the razor had never known them - that was the big moment waiting for the razor - but from ageless and superb inner confidence that on one could blow out. It was unquenchable. That was his secret. He knew he ws precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth (...).
'I've just told Mr. Edwards some of the things I've done Mr. MacL'moir," he said, "but I haven't told him everything; there would be be time. I've acted with the Guild. I've written a couple of plays. I've toured the STates as a sword-swallowing female impersonator. I've flared through HOllywood like a firecracker. I've lived in a little tomato-coloured house on the Great Wall of China on two dollars a week. I've wafted my way with a jackass through Connemara. I've eaten dates all over hte burning desert and crooned Delaware squaws asleep with Serbian raphsodies. But I haven't told you everything. No; there wouldn't be time."
And he threw back his head and laughed, a frenzy of laughter that involved a display of small white teth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perfplexed knitting of the sparse darkly coloured brws and a totally unexpected darting fourth of a big pale tongue. THe tongue vanished almost at once and he frowned.
"Don't you want to see what I can do?" he asked.
I emerged from the jungle whence he had dragged me and said: "Why not?"
(...) "Is that all the light you can give me?" he said in a voice like a regretful oboe.
We hadn't given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrng from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, despite his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one's lips. One wanted to say, 'Now, now, really you know,' but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, much more.
"That's alright," Hilton shouted, "come down and talk."
And the young man unfolded himself from teh floor and came to meet us with a grin that showed suddenly how very young he was.
"Terrible, wasn't it?" he asked.
"Yes, bloody awful," Hilton answered. "But you can play the part. (...) That is, if you'll make me a promise. Don't obey me blindly, but listen to me. MOre important still, listen to yourself. I can help you how to play this part, but you must see and hear what's good about yourself and what's lousy."
Edwards and MacLiammóir gave Welles all the theatrical education he ever received; they were basically his godfathers. MacLiammóir's descriptions of him through the years sometimes read barbed and irritated, sometimes charmed and affectionate, and sometimes both at the same time. A good example of that is his rendering of Orson on the night of his stage debut:
"When Orson came padding on to the stage with his lopsideded grace, his laughter, his softly thunderous voice, there was a flutter of astonishment and alarm, a hush, and a volley of applause. That, of course, was at the end of each act, and when the play was over and Hilton and he took their curtains together, and Hilton said some words of praise and introduction, Orson swelled visibly. I have heard of people swelling visibly before, but ORson is one of those who really do it. THe chest expands, the head, thrown back upon the round, boyish neck, seems to broaden, the features swell and burn, the lips, curling back from the teeth like dark, tropical plants, thicken into a smile. Then the hands extend, palms open to the crowd, the shoulders thrust upwards, the feet at last are satisfied: they remain a little sedately; that they should realize him like this merits a bow, so slow and sedate the head goews down and quickly up again, up higher than ever, for maybe this is all a dream, and if the eyes are on the boots, blood rushing to the ears, who knows that sight and sound may not double-cross and vanish like a flame blown out, and Orson be back at school again, hungry, unsatisfied, not ready yet for the world? NO, the people are still there, still applauding, more an dmore and more and more and back goes the big head, and hte laugh breaks out like fire in the jungle, a white lightning slits open across the sweating chubby cheeks, the brows knit in perplexity likea coolie's, the hands shoot widely out to either side, one to the right at Hilton, the other to the left at Betty, for you don't mean to say all this racket is for Orson? What about Hilton and Betty? And anyway there's Ashley Dukes, and there's a man called Feuchtwanger, isn't there? But whoever it's all about it goes on and on, then trickles back a little like a sea slowly receding, receding, curling away like a fire burning out, fading inexorably, emptying itself hollow; and God DAmn that stage manager anyway. Couldn't he easily steal a couple more of them before the thing dies down? TAke that curtain up again, you silly son of a bitch; to taste teh last, to drain it dry, no meat left clinging to the bone: no, no! listen! three pairs of hands keep on, then two, then six, then sixty, and then - ah! then the whole house again, and up goes the curtain once more and the light shoots likea rainbow through the eyes and the unappeasable head rears up round as a cannon ball: no bowing now, no boot-licking booby tricks, let them have me as I am and so. And so. And the jaws snap, crunch, and then the foolish curtain closes down again. For the last time. The last time.
It's perhaps a little unfair - I mean, the boy was 16, of course he was eager for applause, especially since he had been conditioned from childhood that you were either spectacular or you were nothing (Welles' older brother Richard was put in an asylum for, as far as one could tell, for no greater offense than being slow at school; you can bet Orson took being a miracle child very seriously after that one). But that doesn't mean it's inaccurate, even though it did cause Welles to throw the book against the well when reading it, as he told MacLiammóir later. Flash forward to two decades later. It's shortly after WWII, Orson has left the US for good and has decided to to film Othello. With his two Gate Theatre godfathers, Edwards as Brabantio and MacLiammóir as Iago.
Orson on the phone: voice not changed at all. He said the same of me: we expressed emotion and revived memories of last farewell on quay-side at New York fifteen years ago. SAid I was very ill; he said the trip and the sight of him would cure me. Said I was very old; he said so was he. (Forgot to point out that Othello was supposed to be.) Said I'd never played Iago, he said he'd never played Othello. SAid I had put on weight; he said so had he, and that we'd be two Chubby Tragedians together and that he was going right out to buy yards of cheese cloth. Said I didn't think I'd be any good on movies; he said I was born for them. (Good God!) Said I didn't see myself as villain, he said unmentionable word and that I was patently villainous in all eyes but my own and Hilton's. All this confusing but intriguing.
Naturally, Welles lured him into the job.Well, first he lured him to Paris for the casting.
Indulged in much hugging and dancing around discreet olive-green and dull-gold suite, then settled down to some fine à l'eauch by log fire. No bridging of the years seemed necessary; exactly as he used to be, perhaps larger and more, as it were, tropically Byzantine still, but essentially the same old darkly waltzing tree, half banyan, half oak, the Jungle and the Forest lazily pawing each other for mastery. I said incredulously that most people changed some way or another as life flowed by, and he said that only applied to NICE people, and that lousers like us never changed at all whether it was 1934 or 1949 or Dublin or Chicago or Paris. (...) Dinner presided over by Orson (very excitable) in hotel dining room. Table set about with young ladies, English, AMerican and French, all of them seemingly convinced they were going to play Desdemona. Orson, rolling his almond eyes hypnotically around the table, explained, in ENglish, his ideas about CAssio, of whom he has a poor opinion, pointing out snobbish attitude to Iago and insufferable treatment of poor Bianca.
"And a nice girl too," he said, "a nice, good girl: now you KNOW she was good," and he rolled his eyes more than ever, so all the young ladies hastily assumed expression of Tarts with Golden Hearts in case the quest for Desdemona might prove in vain.
Iago, he went on to say, was in his opinion impotent; this secret malady ws, in fact, to be the keystone of the actor's appraoch. Realised, as the talk grew more serious, that I was in agreement but felt no necessity to assume appropriate expression so just sat there looking pleasant. (Sudden hideous thought: maybe pleasant, slightly doped expression, habitually with me during meals, IS the appropriate one for suggestion of impotence and this is why O., who has watched me consume several meals, thinks me so made for the part? Must remember to sound him on this and prove him mistaken!)
Because Othello as all Welles projects post-Kane had finance problems, which meant he usually took acting parts in other people's movies and thusly financed shooting his own with a lot of interruptions, there was a lot of travelling to Mogador, Rome and Venice and back to Dublin, whenever there was some cash and Welles could get the actors together again. Here's MacLiammóir arriving in Mogador early on (as opposed to the luggage with everyone's costumes except the women's and Iago's; the rest of the costumes were still in Rome):
Orson rose thunderously from hordes of tumultous diners and swept towards me waving his napkin like a flag and crying, 'Welcome, welcome, dearest Micheál!' then, folding me in bear-like embrace, stopped dead suddenly to say: "Hey! what have you been doing? You've put on about six pounds. God dammit, I engaged you to play Iago and here you come Waddling In To Do It!" (...) Finally it is made clear that while my clothes for Iago may be in a fit condition to wear in a few days time, no such hopes are entertained by local tailor about Othello's, Roderigo's or Cassio's. Orson in despair as sequences for the arrival in Cyprus with which he wanted to start shooting all include, inevitably, these people.
But this is where the winged gorilla is entitled to respect as well as to that jocular interest he can so easily inspire in the ignorant and impressionable public. He has decided to open fire with the camera on the attempt on Cassio's life and on the subsequent murder of Roderigo by Iago, and as these incidents usually take place in a street, he has emerged from a sleepless night with the idea of making the murder happen in a steam-bath, with M. and B., God help them, stripped and draped and turbaned in towels. This, as well as dealing with the clothes question until it can be settled, effective and sinister twist of the bloody business of Act Five Scene One with which he is opening.
rozk linked to a trailer for a new movie called Me and Orson Welles, which from the looks of it is about Zac Efron's character having a romance with Claire Dane during the legendary Mercury production of Julius Caesar (which they appear to be recreating very faithfully going by the glimpses in the trailer). Christian McKay is Orson Welles, looking slightly too old for Welles in his early twenties (this was long pre-Kane) but otherwise very much like the original did. Which is as good a reason as any to give you my opinion on movie recreations of Welles, and a choice collection of favourite descriptions by contemporaries who had interestingly ambivalent relationships with him.
So: as far as cameo appearances are concerned, Vincent D'Onofrio as Orson Welles in Ed Wood is great, and the one scene in which Our Hero, about to gain immortality as the declared worst director of all times, meets his idol in a bar and bonds with Orson about money men and actors, is just fun. Welles also shows up, sort of, cameo-ish in Heavenly Creatures where the two teenage heroines regard him as "the most hideous creature alive" and have sexual fantasies about him in which he chases and ravishes them in Harry Lime get-up (and in black-and-white); you can tell Peter Jackson had fun with that as well.
Then there are the movies in which Welles is an actual main character, and which deal with his productions. For example, Tim Robbins' Cradle will Rock is a good ensemble movie set around the story of the Federal Theatre Project in the 30s and the production of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle will Rock (produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles), and it captures a lot of the spirit of time, but the presentations of Welles and Houseman both are disappointingly one dimensional. This Welles has all of the temper tantrums and none of the charm and talent that made people put up with said tantrums to begin with, not to mention the genuine passion he had for the theatre.
And then there's my favourite, RKO 281, about the production of Citizen Kane. It takes some liberties with history - the biggest one is inventing a meeting between Welles and Hearst early in the movie in order to give Welles some animosity towards Hearst, when in fact as far as we know they never met until after the film was shot. (And for that post-Kane meeting we have only Welles' account, which is in fact used for the film's next-to-last scene, down to Orson saying "Kane would have taken the tickets"; if it didn't happen, it's a good story and a downright irresistable one if you want to shoot a picture about Citizen Kane.) But it still gets everyone and everything involved - Welles, Hearst, Mankiewicz, Marion Davies, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood of that era - and manages to work both if you're familiar with the story it tells, and the film it's told about (in which case you can play "spot the famous Citizen Kane shot this scene pays homage to"), and if you're not. The characters are three dimensional; if you think Hearst comes along as too harmless, bang comes along a scene where he casually threatens and humiliates L.B. Mayer by invoking the antisemitism of the time. And here, Welles' outbursts, when they occur, serve another purpose than fulfilling the "temperamental director" cliché; you can tell scriptwriter John Logan has read Simon Callow's The Road to Xanadu, because the movie relationship with Hermann Mankiewiczs encapsules the pattern Callow sees in young Orson forming intense emotional bonds with and then destroying reprobate father figures while also flirting with them, the fearlessness married to a self destructive streak a mile wide, and the ongoing question "what if I'm really a fraud?" Liev Schreiber has more regularly handsome features then Welles (who described his face once as that of a "depraved baby"), but the resemblance is still remarkable, and he has the mannerisms down as well as the charm, the unrelenting drive to create, the intensity and the capacity for cruelty. Lastly, given that Mankiewiczs, much like his younger brother Joe, was one of the wittiest scriptwriters of 30s and 40s Hollywood, it's good to know Logan's script delivers the quick repartee as well. And of course the film as a dream cast - in addition to Schreiber as Welles, there's James Cromwell as Hearst, John Malkovich as Hermann Mankiewiczs, Roy Scheider as RKO studio executive George Schaefer and Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies. (An especially tricky job because with her you have both Davies' own films and Dorothy Cunningham's performance as Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane to compare.) All of which makes RKO 281 my favourite filmic recreation of Orson Welles so far.
Now, about those quotes, which are from Run-through by John Houseman, and All for Hecuba and Put Money In Thy Purse by Micheál MacLiammóir.
Houseman, who was Welles' partner during his New York years when they created some of the most famous theatre productions of the day, wrote his memoirs long after their spectacular break-up, but the description he gives of Orson Welles is as fascinated as ever, and precisely because of his ambivalence far more vivid than, say, the sedate murmurs of an uncritical admirer like Peter Bogdanovich. Here's his description of the first time he saw Welles, who wasn't yet twenty and played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet:
That glossy and successful evening was marked for me by one astonishing vision: not Miss Cornell's fervent Julient, not Edith Evans' admirable Nurse, nor Basil Rathbone's polite, middle-aged Romeo, nor Brian Aherne's Mercutio exubarantly slapping his yellow thighs - those were all blotted out by the excitement of the two brief moments when the furious Tybalt appeared suddenly in that sunlit Verona square: death, in scarlet and black, in the form of a monstrous boy - flat-footed and graceless, yet swift and agile; soft as jelly one moment and uncoiled, the next, in a spring of such furious energy that, once released, it could be checked by no human intervention. What made this figure so obscene and terrible was the pale, shiny child's face under the unnatural growth of dark beard, from which there issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him. "Peace! I hate the word as I hate Hell!" cried the sick boy, as he shuffled along, driven by some irresistable interior violence to kill and soon himself, inevitably, to die.
And then he meets the man/boy off stage as well:
It was always a shock to see Welles without the makeup and the false noses behind which he chose to mask himself. When he walked into the bar, with his hair combed, in a sober, dark suit, I did not know him for a moment; then, as he moved toward me, I recognized the shuffling, flat-footed gait, which I had found so frightening in Tybalt and which was really his own. I could see his features now, finally: the pale pudding face with the violent black eyes, the button nose with the wen to one side of it and the deep runnel meeting the well-shaped mouth over the astonishingly small teeth. Against the darkness of the wooden table I was conscious once more of the remarkable hands - pale, huge and beautifully formed, with enormous white palms and incredibly long, tapering fingers that seemed to have a life of their own - and the voice that made people turn at the neighboring tables - startled not so much by its loudness as by its surprising vibration. We had one old-fashioned and then another while I told him about our project and give him a copy of the play and my telephone number. Afterwards I walked across town with him towards Grand Central Station, then watched him vanish with astonishing speed, into the tunnel leading to the Westchester commuter trains. After he he had gone, I was left not so much wiht the impression of his force and brilliance as with a sense of extreme youth and charm and of a courtesy that came very close to tenderness.
You could be forgiven for thinking someone is describing the first encounter with the love of his life here. Two people who met Welles even earlier than that and did not break-up with him through the decades of his life afterwards, though their relationship with him had very tumultous ups and downs, were Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, who headed the Gate Theatre in Dublin and were looking for someone to play the Duke in their production of Feuchtwanger's Jew Suess when in came sixteen years old Orson (who had never played outside of school productions before, though he lied about this) to audition. MacLiammóirs description of that first encounter is one of the all-time great theatrical history set-pieces:
(...) Hilton walked into the scene doch 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, but he's interesting." (...)
We found, as he had hinted, a very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerfull lips, and disconcerting Chinese eyes. His hands were enormous and very beautifully shaped, like so many American hands; they were coloured like champagne and moved with a sort of controlled abandon never seen in a European. His voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a leader, a man of power; it bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor; he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent patience as though here was our chance to have something beautiful at last - yes, sir - and were we going to take it? Well, well, just too bad for us if we let the moment slip. ANd all this did not come from mere youth, though the chubby tea-rose cheeks were as satin-like as though the razor had never known them - that was the big moment waiting for the razor - but from ageless and superb inner confidence that on one could blow out. It was unquenchable. That was his secret. He knew he ws precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth (...).
'I've just told Mr. Edwards some of the things I've done Mr. MacL'moir," he said, "but I haven't told him everything; there would be be time. I've acted with the Guild. I've written a couple of plays. I've toured the STates as a sword-swallowing female impersonator. I've flared through HOllywood like a firecracker. I've lived in a little tomato-coloured house on the Great Wall of China on two dollars a week. I've wafted my way with a jackass through Connemara. I've eaten dates all over hte burning desert and crooned Delaware squaws asleep with Serbian raphsodies. But I haven't told you everything. No; there wouldn't be time."
And he threw back his head and laughed, a frenzy of laughter that involved a display of small white teth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perfplexed knitting of the sparse darkly coloured brws and a totally unexpected darting fourth of a big pale tongue. THe tongue vanished almost at once and he frowned.
"Don't you want to see what I can do?" he asked.
I emerged from the jungle whence he had dragged me and said: "Why not?"
(...) "Is that all the light you can give me?" he said in a voice like a regretful oboe.
We hadn't given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrng from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, despite his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one's lips. One wanted to say, 'Now, now, really you know,' but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, much more.
"That's alright," Hilton shouted, "come down and talk."
And the young man unfolded himself from teh floor and came to meet us with a grin that showed suddenly how very young he was.
"Terrible, wasn't it?" he asked.
"Yes, bloody awful," Hilton answered. "But you can play the part. (...) That is, if you'll make me a promise. Don't obey me blindly, but listen to me. MOre important still, listen to yourself. I can help you how to play this part, but you must see and hear what's good about yourself and what's lousy."
Edwards and MacLiammóir gave Welles all the theatrical education he ever received; they were basically his godfathers. MacLiammóir's descriptions of him through the years sometimes read barbed and irritated, sometimes charmed and affectionate, and sometimes both at the same time. A good example of that is his rendering of Orson on the night of his stage debut:
"When Orson came padding on to the stage with his lopsideded grace, his laughter, his softly thunderous voice, there was a flutter of astonishment and alarm, a hush, and a volley of applause. That, of course, was at the end of each act, and when the play was over and Hilton and he took their curtains together, and Hilton said some words of praise and introduction, Orson swelled visibly. I have heard of people swelling visibly before, but ORson is one of those who really do it. THe chest expands, the head, thrown back upon the round, boyish neck, seems to broaden, the features swell and burn, the lips, curling back from the teeth like dark, tropical plants, thicken into a smile. Then the hands extend, palms open to the crowd, the shoulders thrust upwards, the feet at last are satisfied: they remain a little sedately; that they should realize him like this merits a bow, so slow and sedate the head goews down and quickly up again, up higher than ever, for maybe this is all a dream, and if the eyes are on the boots, blood rushing to the ears, who knows that sight and sound may not double-cross and vanish like a flame blown out, and Orson be back at school again, hungry, unsatisfied, not ready yet for the world? NO, the people are still there, still applauding, more an dmore and more and more and back goes the big head, and hte laugh breaks out like fire in the jungle, a white lightning slits open across the sweating chubby cheeks, the brows knit in perplexity likea coolie's, the hands shoot widely out to either side, one to the right at Hilton, the other to the left at Betty, for you don't mean to say all this racket is for Orson? What about Hilton and Betty? And anyway there's Ashley Dukes, and there's a man called Feuchtwanger, isn't there? But whoever it's all about it goes on and on, then trickles back a little like a sea slowly receding, receding, curling away like a fire burning out, fading inexorably, emptying itself hollow; and God DAmn that stage manager anyway. Couldn't he easily steal a couple more of them before the thing dies down? TAke that curtain up again, you silly son of a bitch; to taste teh last, to drain it dry, no meat left clinging to the bone: no, no! listen! three pairs of hands keep on, then two, then six, then sixty, and then - ah! then the whole house again, and up goes the curtain once more and the light shoots likea rainbow through the eyes and the unappeasable head rears up round as a cannon ball: no bowing now, no boot-licking booby tricks, let them have me as I am and so. And so. And the jaws snap, crunch, and then the foolish curtain closes down again. For the last time. The last time.
It's perhaps a little unfair - I mean, the boy was 16, of course he was eager for applause, especially since he had been conditioned from childhood that you were either spectacular or you were nothing (Welles' older brother Richard was put in an asylum for, as far as one could tell, for no greater offense than being slow at school; you can bet Orson took being a miracle child very seriously after that one). But that doesn't mean it's inaccurate, even though it did cause Welles to throw the book against the well when reading it, as he told MacLiammóir later. Flash forward to two decades later. It's shortly after WWII, Orson has left the US for good and has decided to to film Othello. With his two Gate Theatre godfathers, Edwards as Brabantio and MacLiammóir as Iago.
Orson on the phone: voice not changed at all. He said the same of me: we expressed emotion and revived memories of last farewell on quay-side at New York fifteen years ago. SAid I was very ill; he said the trip and the sight of him would cure me. Said I was very old; he said so was he. (Forgot to point out that Othello was supposed to be.) Said I'd never played Iago, he said he'd never played Othello. SAid I had put on weight; he said so had he, and that we'd be two Chubby Tragedians together and that he was going right out to buy yards of cheese cloth. Said I didn't think I'd be any good on movies; he said I was born for them. (Good God!) Said I didn't see myself as villain, he said unmentionable word and that I was patently villainous in all eyes but my own and Hilton's. All this confusing but intriguing.
Naturally, Welles lured him into the job.Well, first he lured him to Paris for the casting.
Indulged in much hugging and dancing around discreet olive-green and dull-gold suite, then settled down to some fine à l'eauch by log fire. No bridging of the years seemed necessary; exactly as he used to be, perhaps larger and more, as it were, tropically Byzantine still, but essentially the same old darkly waltzing tree, half banyan, half oak, the Jungle and the Forest lazily pawing each other for mastery. I said incredulously that most people changed some way or another as life flowed by, and he said that only applied to NICE people, and that lousers like us never changed at all whether it was 1934 or 1949 or Dublin or Chicago or Paris. (...) Dinner presided over by Orson (very excitable) in hotel dining room. Table set about with young ladies, English, AMerican and French, all of them seemingly convinced they were going to play Desdemona. Orson, rolling his almond eyes hypnotically around the table, explained, in ENglish, his ideas about CAssio, of whom he has a poor opinion, pointing out snobbish attitude to Iago and insufferable treatment of poor Bianca.
"And a nice girl too," he said, "a nice, good girl: now you KNOW she was good," and he rolled his eyes more than ever, so all the young ladies hastily assumed expression of Tarts with Golden Hearts in case the quest for Desdemona might prove in vain.
Iago, he went on to say, was in his opinion impotent; this secret malady ws, in fact, to be the keystone of the actor's appraoch. Realised, as the talk grew more serious, that I was in agreement but felt no necessity to assume appropriate expression so just sat there looking pleasant. (Sudden hideous thought: maybe pleasant, slightly doped expression, habitually with me during meals, IS the appropriate one for suggestion of impotence and this is why O., who has watched me consume several meals, thinks me so made for the part? Must remember to sound him on this and prove him mistaken!)
Because Othello as all Welles projects post-Kane had finance problems, which meant he usually took acting parts in other people's movies and thusly financed shooting his own with a lot of interruptions, there was a lot of travelling to Mogador, Rome and Venice and back to Dublin, whenever there was some cash and Welles could get the actors together again. Here's MacLiammóir arriving in Mogador early on (as opposed to the luggage with everyone's costumes except the women's and Iago's; the rest of the costumes were still in Rome):
Orson rose thunderously from hordes of tumultous diners and swept towards me waving his napkin like a flag and crying, 'Welcome, welcome, dearest Micheál!' then, folding me in bear-like embrace, stopped dead suddenly to say: "Hey! what have you been doing? You've put on about six pounds. God dammit, I engaged you to play Iago and here you come Waddling In To Do It!" (...) Finally it is made clear that while my clothes for Iago may be in a fit condition to wear in a few days time, no such hopes are entertained by local tailor about Othello's, Roderigo's or Cassio's. Orson in despair as sequences for the arrival in Cyprus with which he wanted to start shooting all include, inevitably, these people.
But this is where the winged gorilla is entitled to respect as well as to that jocular interest he can so easily inspire in the ignorant and impressionable public. He has decided to open fire with the camera on the attempt on Cassio's life and on the subsequent murder of Roderigo by Iago, and as these incidents usually take place in a street, he has emerged from a sleepless night with the idea of making the murder happen in a steam-bath, with M. and B., God help them, stripped and draped and turbaned in towels. This, as well as dealing with the clothes question until it can be settled, effective and sinister twist of the bloody business of Act Five Scene One with which he is opening.