But for Orson, experimentation in political filmmaking was of secondary importance to improving his Hollywood reputation. At least it was the latter that he talked about when to his co-workers he stressed the importance of finishing the picture on schedule and under budget. After Amhersons, Hollywood thought Orson made movies that were too long and too slow. Thus The Stranger was preedited. That is, editor Ernest Nims cut what he considered to be extraneous elements from the script before Orson started shooting. Orson knew that accepting these cuts early on meant saving money. Nims recalls Orson's having basi-

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cally agreed to most of the suggested cuts in the interest of showing that he could work quickly and efficiently. But Orson tells quite another story. Says Orson of Nims: ''He was the great supercutter, who believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the story. And since most of the good stuff in my movies doesn't advance the story at all, you can imagine what a nemesis he was to me." Even with the preediting, there were further cuts afterward, and these Orson says he vehemently protested. "I fought him tooth and nail all through it and won in the case of The Stranger, except that he took out everything which is interesting in the great long sequence in Latin America before we even get to that village, which was very strange." These lost scenes would have shown Orson's fleeing Nazi in Latin America prior to going into hiding in the small town in the United States, where most of the film is set. "You don't know what it was like on the screen!" says Orson. "And I have to this day a deep wound in my leg where I stepped on a baby's coffin in one of the scenes—^the wood cut into my leg—and it always reminds me of what was lost from that movie. At least they kept the story—" which was more than RKO did, Orson thinks, with Ambersons.

How then is one to reconcile these two apparently contradictory views of Orson's attitude toward the editing of The Stranger? Orson was probably far more malleable on this particular project than he realizes. He was making the picture to make himself marketable, and at the time it appeared that Nims's suggestions would help do just that. As it turned out, however. The Stranger did not particularly enhance Orson's reputation in Hollywood—and its failure to do so could only have made him resent its artistic failure all the more. Nor on some subliminal level could Orson fail to blame himself for having largely submitted to all the external constraints that were imposed on him. These resentments focused on Nims—^the "supersurgeon," as he calls him— who for Orson came to embody what he perceived as Hollywood's inclination to hack apart his films. Nor, one suspects, are Orson's retrospective comments on the editing of The Stranger uninflected by his subsequent encounter with Nims, more than a decade later, on Touch of Evil, when the film was taken away from the director's control and given to the editor to cut as he wished.

Any resentment that Orson may have felt while making The Stranger he seems mostly to have repressed or concealed at the time.

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Says production manager Jim Pratt: "I'd say that during The Stranger he was about as well balanced as he ever was in his career in the business. . . . There have been a few authentic geniuses in our business— not many—^but he's one of them, that's for sure, if you could have harnessed him so as to avoid the excesses. In other words, there has to be an editorial function. There has to be someone who finally says no, that's as far as we're going to go, and so on. Whether they're right or they're wrong, there has to be this kind of a situation." But Orson did not allow himself to be "harnessed" in all things. Although a doctor arrived two or three times a week to give him shots to help him lose weight, he typically devoured double portions of his meals at the studio commissary. Orson spent most nights in a suite of rooms he had taken over at the Goldwyn studios where he was shooting The Stranger. There was little time to go home when, besides quickly making a movie, he was writing a daily column, doing a weekly radio show, and— a new addition—^actively working on the concept for a projected stage production of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. Another advantage of the suite was, of course, that Orson could discreetly meet girls there. Just before shooting had started, Rita had thrown Orson out of their house on Carmelina Drive after an argument over his extramarital affairs. "When I was thrown out of the house by Rita the first time," Orson recalls, "I went and lived with Sam Spiegel." Shortly thereafter Rita allowed him to come home, but because of the continued tension between them he felt much more comfortable living at the studio. Rita would visit there when she could, mostly in the evening, although she too was busy, having just begun work in September on Gilda in which she starred opposite Glenn Ford.

In this period, Orson was torn between needing to pursue the other women who were so easily available, and not wanting Rita to be hurt by what he was doing. His constant fear of publicly embarrassing her made him susceptible to a blackmailer who threatened to accuse him of attempted rape. The incident was supposed to have taken place in a car Orson was driving. In September, Orson had acquired his first driver's license even though, as he says: "I don't drive well. I pay no attention, but I love to drive fast, very fast. It's the only thing that keeps me from being bored." The night in question he had gone to pick up a script from a Hollywood nabob, who in turn asked Orson to drive his typist

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home. " ^Certainly,' said I," Orson recalls. "And she got into my car. And they'd been drinking a bit, and she slumped to the side of the car, and I started across town. In Beverly Hills, you know, they have those big bumps to stop you from going fast. And I hit one and the car door opened and she fell out. . . . And so I stopped the car and tried to find her. And she hadn't been hurt, but she could be heard running through the underbrush of the Hollywood villas, you know, calling for help, as though she'd been raped. Very ugly girl—." After searching all about for her in vain, finally Orson gave up and drove back to tell the nabob what had happened. When he got there, there she was. *'So I said, 'I suppose you don't want to drive with me anymore,' " Orson says. '' *I apologize. I didn't close the door strongly enough.' Anyway, that was the end of that and I went home. The next morning I went to my office . . . and they said, 'There's a lawyer out there who wants to see you.' And I said, 'Oh.' And in came the lawyer who said, 'Mr. Welles, I wonder how much your wife. Miss Hayworth, would like to read in the newspaper that you attempted to rape my client and that she had to throw herself out of a moving car.' And I said, 'I wouldn't like that at all.' And he said, 'Well, that'll be $20,000.' And I paid him and never drove again. . . ." As far as having given up driving was concerned, Orson had no regrets: "I was a very bad driver and I needed the first excuse to tell myself, like knocking off liquor because you don't know how to drink, you know. ... So then I never drove another inch. ... I never minded at all. I was delighted to give up driving. I only drove because I was made to by public opinion." And what of the blackmailer? Did he regret having paid her off? "I couldn't bear to let Rita read that," says Orson. "And no use saying how ugly the girl is!"

By contrast with his messy and confused relationship with Rita, production on The Stranger went without a serious hitch. In the end, as Pratt happily points out, "It was on schedule and under budget.'^ Pratt routinely interceded with the actors to get them to work overtime without complaint, so that Orson could keep to his schedule. But Orson sometimes had to make concessions to keep the cast happy. Thus when Edward G. Robinson (who played the investigator searching for Orson's Nazi) protested that Orson was persistently shooting his bad side, Pratt convinced Orson that it would be wise to photograph what the actor was absolutely convinced was his good side. There was also a curious concession to Loretta Young (who played the innocent young

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American who marries the Nazi). In a scene that did not find its way into the finished film, she was to meet the handsome mystery man for the first time as she prepared to enter church one Sunday, and to walk off with him into the woods instead of attending Mass. But as a devout Catholic, Miss Young was greatly dismayed at the idea of being shown onscreen cutting church, so Orson changed their meeting to another day of the week when she was simply out walking her dog. Loretta Young also objected to members of the cast and crew swearing on the set. Because nothing much could be done about people's natural tendency to utter an offending word or two now and then, she set up a "swear box" to which anyone who did had to contribute a quarter for charity.

Since the principal point of The Stranger was to show that Orson could keep himself in check, no wonder it is his least personal film. Perhaps things had gone too smoothly. Missing was the disjunctive cinematic style that Orson had made his signature in Kane. Orson tried to compensate for his new picture's essential impersonality by imbuing it with private allusions that no one but his intimates could possibly get. In fact he had originally hoped to shoot The Stranger on location at Todd, and to use one of the current Todd Troupers as Loretta Young's little brother. At length, neither idea worked out. But the boys' school where the Nazi teaches history is clearly modeled on Todd, down to the name of one of its beloved staff members. Coach Roskie, appearing on a sign in the gymnasium. And in his jaunty schoolmaster's outfit—^his tweed jacket and V-neck—Orson even looks a bit like Skipper, as, one suspects, he was supposed to. But gratuitous personal touches like these could not make The Stranger a personal film. Often in his career after Kane other men have tried to repress Welles's films by cutting and reworking them, but still they are his, unmistakably so. The difference in the case of The Stranger is that this time he had agreed to repress himself.

"I was ready never to act again," says Orson of the difficult period after the unsatisfying experience of making The Stranger. Having scrupulously kept his self-assertive instincts in check (except in his philandering), he felt restless, unfulfilled. He kept thinking of Roosevelt's suggestion that he run for senator. ''Imagine the great orator he would have been in the Senate!" says Louis Dolivet. But if he were going to pursue this path, it seemed to Orson that he probably should have

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started a bit earlier and run for office in 1944. ''If I had run at the last Roosevelt campaign," he says, "even at my age I had a very good chance." On January 14, 1946, Time magazine reported: "In California, where anything can happen, Orson Welles—who has impersonated William Randolph Hearst, campaigned with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and sawed his wife in half—^thought of running for the U.S. Senate." Today, Orson explains that the main reason he finally decided against running on the West Coast was Alan Cranston, who discouraged him. "He was a power in California politics," says Orson of Cranston. "He knew everybody and everything, and was the smartest fellow behind the scenes in Sacramento." But when Orson went to see him he was instantly disappointed. "He told me I couldn't win. I know why he didn't want me to win: because he wanted to be senator, that's why. He said that I would carry northern California, but I could never carry Los Angeles because of the strong Communist objections to me. There was an element of truth in it. None of the left wing in Beverly Hills or Bel Air would have voted for me. There were a lot of card-carrying fellows— never forget that—and I was very much not of their group. They were older and jealous of a younger and at that time extremely visible American celebrity. Just plain old Hollywood envy!"

Convinced that because of this important opposition he could never carry southern California, Orson briefly thought of establishing residency in New York, then settled on the idea of possibly running in Wisconsin, the state of his birth. But the problem that faced him there was Joseph McCarthy. "Joe McCarthy had the dairy people behind him and there was no way to beat him," says Orson. Some of Orson's political cronies advised him to go up against McCarthy nonetheless. "I didn't," Orson says wistfully. "And that's how come there was a McCarthy. It's a terrible thing to have on your conscience. I was convinced that I wouldn't beat him." He feared that if he lost his first race, he would be finished in American politics forever. "It isn't like England, where you can go and contest two or three seats and make your name and then finally go to one that you can win," says Orson. "It doesn't work like that, you see."

It also seemed to Orson that his faltering marriage to Rita was a serious impediment to realizing his great dream of running for president some day. "Like a thousand other people I thought it might be a possible future," he says. "But I had this lingering conviction that having

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been divorced and having been an actor was perhaps an insurmountable objection to ever getting into the Oval Office"; he now laughs uproariously in light of Ronald Reagan's having succeeded in surmounting both these obstacles to win the presidency. Although Orson did not expect his marriage to break up in the very near future, he sensed that Rita would eventually leave him. "Rita was very unhappy, and I didn't believe that she was going to stay with me," he says. "I didn't see it coming soon, but I thought that she was somebody who would finally break down in one way or another. Then my substitute, you see, for public office was education. That's when I went to all the big foundations and said that I would give up all acting and so on and use my skills for popular education to try to rejuvenate the idea of a civilized generation of students, and nobody was remotely interested. But Rita was absolutely willing to give up everything for it. And I thought she'd be happier in education than she would in Washington. She didn't like to be left alone and I knew that a junior senator or congressman doesn't have much home life." Finally, of his unrealized political ambitions Orson sighs: "It was just a big missed boat." As to why, after failing to sell his educational program, he did not resume his quest for public office, Orson says: 'T didn't run away from it. There was just nowhere to go—^that was really it." At the time, returning to the New York stage, where he had known tremendous success in the past, seemed the most prudent course to follow. It was time to assert himself again.

In the months of the 1984 presidential campaign, Orson keeps receiving letters signed *^Nancy** and invitations to one Republican shindig or another — but nothing from the Democrats, who appear to have forgotten how vigorously, and effectively, Orson campaigned for Roosevelt.

'^Roosevelt used to put me on prime time, and I wasn't running for anything, " says Orson.

**Why did Roosevelt think it would be effective to have somebody who wa^ a non-candidate do it?*'

''All the more so, he thought. It's a concerned citizen and a popular artist who is going to say it better than anybody in the political world. He was responsible for the kind of space and time that they gave me. Now, even though Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty are sitting at Gary Hart's side, they're not heard from. "

"Why not?" I ask. (At this point, Gary Hart is still a serious contender for the Democratic nomination.)

"Have you noticed that they're not heard from?" says Orson.

"Yes, I read in one story that they were working on the cutting of a Hart commercial."

"Well," says Orson, "they're doing that kind of thing, but they also both want to be president. "

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**Both of them?" I gasp — Beatty doesn't amaze me, but the idea of Nicholson does.

*'0h sure," says Orson, ^'and so does Robert Redford, and so does the chunky fellow who's the head of the Screen Actors Guild."

'^Asner?"

"Asner," says Orson, "//e seriously wants to be president."

But apparently with Warren Beatty it is more than just a case of his simply wanting to be president: 'Warren deeply and profoundly believes that he will be president," says Orson.

''He really believes it?" I ask.

"Yes," says Orson, "he told me that."

"Do you think he ever could be?"

"No," says Orson. "Not a chance."

Our conversation returns now to why Hart hasn't made much use of his movie-star supporters like Beatty and Nicholson.

"They would like to be used," says Orson, "but there has grown up this tight little group of experts on campaigns — and they won't give Warren or Jack five minutes on the six o'clock news, ever, because he's getting in the way of their man."

"Every second of that five minutes," I begin.

"Has to be their man," Orson finishes my thought. "And they aren't doing his man any good, because what they need is their man. They don't want him to look like another Hollywood" — by which Orson means that since the Republicans already have a former movie star in office, the Democrats must somehow maintain their distance from Hollywood.

"The strength that they have," he says of the Democrats, "is that they are not from Hollywood. In other words, these two poor movie stars" — he means Beatty and Nicholson — "are down there hoping somehow to get afoot into the door of the American political process, and they should be told that the scene is hopeless. The last thing you want is a candidate who is chummy with the superstars and Hollywood. "

Does this mean that Ronald Reagan has eliminated the possibility of another actor's being elected president in the near future?

"I think it's almost impossible for another actor to be president, certainly for fifteen years," says Orson. "That's what Fve carefully told Warren, Jack, and the Chunky Man."

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**A lot of people take Warren Beatty seriously/^ I say, *'but I can't imagine Jack Nicholson.''

**No, no, never, " says Orson. *7 think he sees himself as Harry Hopkins. "

*To Warren's president?*' I ask.

'^Warren or whoever gets it," says Orson. **And you see they've all missed it, because there's only going to be one actor to be president, and the right one — as I kept telling him, he would never listen to me — was Gregory Peck. Bad actor, but he'd be a hell of a president, you know."

''Great for the role," I agree.

*'Sure," says Orson, ''and his heart is politically in all the right places, you see. I kept nagging at him but he wouldn't do it."

"So Ronald Reagan got it," I say.

"That undoes it all," Orson groans. "It had to be a second-rate actor."

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CHAPTER 28

Citizien or America

Rita's announcement came as a great shock to Orson. He had flown to New York to talk to Cole Porter, who was going to do the music and lyrics for the adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, which Orson saw as his triumphant return to Broadway. But Orson's excitement was greatly diminished when he heard the startling news that Rita had told the press that she and her husband were separating. Rita found herself left alone too much of the time, and with Miss Haran gone, there was no one to keep reassuring her of Orson's devotion, peculiar as it may have been. For all Orson's talk of finding a way to avoid their being apart so often, he was indefinitely off on his own again. Having made her unhappiness public, Rita was waiting until she finished Gilda before repairing to Palm Springs for a recuperative vacation.

Orson decided that it was probably best not to contact Rita, whom he still loved very much. He had to admit that at this point she had good reason to be dissatisfied with their relationship. He was brokenhearted, but also strangely relieved that the difficult marriage was over at last. "I could have patched it up in a day," he says, ''but I had reached the end of my capacity to feel such total failure with her. I had done everything I could think of and I didn't seem to be able to bring her anything but agony." He suspected that it would always be the same between

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them, and that as much as he loved Rita he would never be able to make her happy. ''I really thought that maybe somebody else could make her happy, because I could see that there was no way I could, except to give her some moments of joy during the week. I was going to come home every night for the rest of my life to a woman in tears. I felt so guilty —and I adored her! Oh, it was awful!"

Back in Hollywood to put some finishing touches on The Stranger, he refrained from calling Rita as he longed to do. With Christmas approaching he was terribly lonely and depressed, but at the same time he could not bear to see his friends, or to spoil their holiday with his dark mood. ''I went to Mexico to be not in the Christmas world," he says of his sudden departure from Los Angeles. *'I checked into this hotel, which had been built when the hemp industry was enormous, and each room had its separate swimming pool." But however much he craved solitude, Orson was not destined to spend the holiday alone. ''In the hotel, a marvelously distinguished old gentleman, as you find only in magazine stories, came up to me and said, 'You are alone, Senor Welles. We recognized you. May we invite you to come to the country for our Christmas?' And I said yes. We got on a little tiny train with the narrowest gauge you've ever seen in your life, exactly like something in Turgenev. Here were all these aunts and uncles and little cousins and all that, and we went through the jungle in this tiny train. When we got off, we all got on donkeys and went on through the jungle till we came to the great hacienda of this fellow." In the preparations for the Christmas feast, Orson was called upon to help. "I was given a matador's sword, and I killed the bull," he recalls. "They made a great stew of that, and after drinking all through the night, next morning we had this marvelous meal." Sensing that Orson wanted to be alone for a while, the Mexicans gave him a horse and directions to the Mayan ruins about five miles away. "I climbed to the top of the biggest pyramid, and sat there on Christmas day, all alone in the ruins of the Mayans. I've never been so happy in my life."

In January, after stops in Havana and Miami, Orson went on to New York where he learned that, although he had not expected her to move so quickly, Rita had instructed her lawyer to proceed with the divorce. In anticipation of a settlement between them, the lawyer had requested Orson's financial statement, but Orson wanted to stall the proceedings however he could. In particular there was the touchy matter of the

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$30,000 that Rita had loaned Orson in the course of their marriage, and that she wanted back now. She asked that at the very least he agree to a schedule of payments, but he was about to launch an expensive new show, and was reluctant to part with any cash at all.

Finally Rita's lawyer threatened that if some amicable settlement could not be reached soon, she would bring suit. By and by it was decided that since Orson and Rita had contributed equally to the purchase price of the house in Carmel, the proceeds from its sale could be used to pay off Orson's debt. Although Rita was not seeking alimony or a substantial settlement, she did want some financial provision to be made for her and Rebecca in the event that she stopped working. Rita also felt that she had a community interest in Orson's profits from The Stranger, as well as in the potential profits that might accrue from the stories to which Orson had purchased rights in the course of their marriage. Negotiations resulted in Rita's agreeing to relinquish her claim to any profits from The Stranger in exchange for half of Orson's interest in Around the World in 80 Days. As it turned out, had the papers ever been finalized, this would have been a terrible deal for Rita. After all the haggling back and forth, Rita seemed to hesitate, and Orson did nothing to encourage her to bring matters to a conclusion. Meanwhile, she had moved out of the big house on Carmelina to a smaller one, which she rented in anticipation of buying and decorating a home of her own.

Orson moved out of his costly quarters at the Waldorf Towers to a much less expensive apartment on East End Avenue to which Rita had shipped a trunkful of his clothing and magic equipment. The prospect of financial commitments to two ex-wives made Orson at least temporarily eager to economize. But still he felt like a veritable spendthrift beside one of his New York cronies of the period, drama critic George Jean Nathan, whom Orson fondly recalls as "next to Chaplin, the tightest man who ever lived." At that time, Orson tended to run into Nathan at "21," where both of them were regulars. To illustrate how cheap Nathan really was, Orson likes to tell the following wicked and outrageous joke about him: Nathan resided across the street from the famed Algonquin at the Hotel Royalton because it was cheaper. After years of not being tipped, a disgruntled room-service waiter would "piss a bit in Nathan's tea each morning." Day by day—Orson says—the waiter increased the amount till finally he was serving Nathan all piss. Once,

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when Nathan was dining at "21"—Orson recalls—^the critic exploded over the tea he was served, ''Why can't anybody else make tea like they do at the Royalton?"—at which everyone else dissolved into laughter, because Nathan was perhaps the only person left in New York who hadn't heard about the waiter's revenge.

Money was much in Orson's thoughts now as he tried to put together a rather costly production of Around the World in 80 Days. That January, Mike Todd, a successful Broadway producer since 1936, had agreed to back Orson's writing and directing the show (in which he did not initially plan to appear). The contract gave ''full, complete and unrestricted authority" to Orson, who was expected nonetheless to consult with Todd on expenses. Orson conceived Around the World as a zany extravaganza on the order of his early Horse Eats Hat —^but on a much grander scale. Beginning in London in 1872, where Phileas Fogg bets that he can go around the world in eighty days, the show would follow his fantastic journey from one colorful locale to another until he reached England again. There is every reason to suppose that the vast proportions of the production were an antidote to Orson's having kept himself so strictly in check with The Stranger. Paid $2,000 weekly as an advance against royalties that would accrue to him after the show opened, Orson was well into rehearsals and about to begin out-of-town tryouts when suddenly, unexpectedly, Mike Todd withdrew, saying he had run out of cash. Orson's flamboyant idea of rigging up a gushing oil well on stage was said to have been the deciding factor for Todd. Orson was aghast. He had been counting on his spectacular return to the New York stage to be the massive success that had been stubbornly eluding him lately. Now he was faced with yet another disappointment; he feared that his reputation, let alone his spirits, might not be able to stand this setback. Not for one moment had it occurred to him that Todd was considering pulling out. At this point, Orson would probably have been wisest to abandon the idea of opening in New York in the spring of 1946. Had he postponed it until the fall, as Cole Porter advised him to, he almost certainly would have been able to replace Todd with another backer. But Orson felt compelled to assemble the cash himself immediately. And although they certainly may have appeared so, his motives were not entirely irrational.

For in the meantime, Orson had struck a deal (or thought he had) to direct Charles Laughton in the premiere of the English version of Ber-

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tolt Brecht's Galileo, for which rehearsals were set to begin August 1. Orson had thrilled to the idea of working closely with Brecht, whose radical theories of acting and staging came as a revelation to him in his preparation for the production. Although Brecht had been a name he had heard from both Hilton Edwards and Marc Blitzstein, Orson had never paid much attention to his essays. But when he studied them now, he was intrigued by Brecht's notion of an alienated style of acting whereby, instead of identifying with the character he is playing, the actor views his role critically, from a distance (much as Orson may be said to have done in Kane). Along the same lines, in the sort of theatrical performance Brecht envisioned, instead of becoming emotionally involved in the dramatic action, the spectator would maintain his own critical distance, all the better to form his own judgments. Having gone so entirely against the grain in making a naturalistic film like The Stranger, Orson was especially eager now to put Brecht's antinaturalist theories into practice. Although eventually he would not get to work with Brecht as he had anticipated doing, Orson's study of Brecht's theatrical theory in this period would bear a decisive—^and entirely unexpected—^influence on the next film he would make in Hollywood, and on much of his work in film thereafter.

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, had caused Brecht to re-think substantially the character of the scientist in Galileo, the first version of which he had written in German in 1938 and that, in collaboration with Laughton, he had been slowly translating into English since December of 1944. For Brecht, the "atomic age" had been initiated the day Hiroshima was hit. It seemed inevitable to Brecht that since Galileo was "the founder of modern physics" the fact of Hiroshima should somehow be worked into the play, and this he and Laughton did in their translation. Putting off Around the World until the fall might mean forfeiting the opportunity to work with Brecht, something Orson was determined to avoid at all cost—although he could not then have even remotely suspected just what that cost would be.

To open the ill-fated show that spring, Orson acquired cash by all possible means. In exchange for Orson's promise to make a picture for him that summer, Harry Cohn lent Orson $25,000. And in hopes of getting a film or perhaps a London production out of it, Alexander Korda invested $125,000. Once, to meet a payroll, Orson even had to

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borrow $4,000 from Shorty. To make matters worse, the immense sums of money Orson regularly put into the play were ultimately disallowed by the Internal Revenue Service as business expenses; instead Orson was forced to take them as a personal loss. Without these anticipated deductions, Orson suddenly found himself owing a tax debt that would take years to escape—and which, at length, would be the major inducement for Orson to remain in exile from his own country for as long as he did.

The money from Harry Cohn had arrived at a moment when, at the Opera House in Boston for the first tryout, what Orson called ''this damn costly behemoth of a spectacle" seemed on the verge of collapsing altogether. Even with Cohn's help, opening night in Boston was a grand disaster. Nothing —^lights, props, scenery—^was as it should have been. ''Is this London?" one actress proclaimed as the stage hands fumbled with a succession of backdrops, none of them London. "Yes, this is London, all right," answered an actor, standing incongruously before a vast image of the Rocky Mountains—a surrealistic mixture typical of the evening's sustained incompetence. Fearful that there was not enough cash to pay the actors, Orson fled during the abortive performance, feeling, as he said later, "like a man wanted by the police." When he woke up the next morning he realized that he had not bothered to undress. At the second performance, Orson turned up onstage when his Phileas Fogg, Arthur Margetson, fell ill with a heart ailment. The budget had not provided for understudies. No sooner had Margetson returned that week than Orson had to fill in as Passepartout, whose lines he seemed to know even more imperfectly than he had Phileas Fogg's. When Margetson ribbed him onstage by exclaiming "Passepartout, you don't know what you're talking about!" a frazzled Orson responded "You've never said a truer word!" Later Orson called his precarious performance that night "among the most remarkable audacities ever perpetrated in the American theater."

Stops in New Haven and Philadelphia followed, during which Orson managed finally to tame the "behemoth" before taking it to the Adel-phi Theatre in New York in May of 1946. Along the way, the production had gained a new cast member, Orson himself, who had decided to play Fogg's pursuer, Dick Fix—and for which he accepted the minimum Equity wage of sixty dollars weekly (a mere formality since he was consistently putting many times as much of his own money into the

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show). But although all thirty-four scenes ran fluidly one into the other, and although this time Passepartout did know what he was talking about and London was really London, and although the preview and first-night audiences seemed perfectly, pleasantly dazzled by it all, the critical reception was, with a few exceptions, rather poor. Wrote Robert Garland in the Journal American: "With countless interludes, and twice that many characters, with magic, movies and music thrown in for no good reason, it is a show shown by a show-off, full of sets and costumes, signifying nothing in particular." In the New York Post Vernon Rice wrote: "Seldom has Welles been accused of understatement, but this time he can be charged with making one when he calls his work an 'extravaganza.' There is hardly a word descriptive enough to fit this musical fare. It is mammoth, it is gigantic, it is lavish. It is also dull."

Orson, in defense, used his weekly spot on the air for Lear Radios to blast the critics, whom he claimed had been "outvoted by the paying customers." He railed against the unreasonable power of a handful of critics swiftly to close a show: "Displease more than three of these powerful personages," said Orson, "and no matter what the paying audience thought of your show, it's a lifeless corpse by the second edition." Reminding the critics of what had happened in 1936 to Percy Hammond after he panned the Harlem Macbeth, Orson pointed out that "my voodoo friends are still in New York. I can always get them together for a special event like this one . . . I'm not threatening you, I just thought I'd mention it." Having suffered when he had not pleased the general public, Orson felt it unjust that this time the critics weren't giving him credit for doing just that. "It's entertaining, and it gives the audience a lot of fun," Orson told the press, referring to the unmistakably enthusiastic response of the first few evenings' audiences. "But what did the critics do? They handled it as though it was an Ibsen play." Orson felt as if somehow he were eternally being criticized for having been too serious or else, as now, not serious enough.

But Orson was very serious about keeping the show running. It was inordinately expensive, however, and although it had its cultists who, as they had with Horse Eats Hat, bought tickets night after night. Around the World needed packed houses to continue. To raise additional money, Orson had added another radio commitment to the Lear broadcasts. The Mercury Summer Theatre. But finally nothing could save the show, which closed early in August. "Tragic news," Cole Porter called

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it, adding that Orson had "made more than human efforts to keep our poor httle show running so long."

The money he had had to pour into Around the World when Mike Todd walked out had made it impossible for Orson to pay the first installment of the $197,500 for It*s All True, for which he had given RKO a promissory note. Thus RKO successfully moved to foreclose on the chattel mortgage they held on the Brazilian footage, which had been put into storage in a Salt Lake City vault. Orson would never have another chance to retrieve and edit it. As if all this were not enough, there came a third misfortune when, suddenly, Brecht and Laughton announced that they had appointed, of all people, Mike Todd to produce Galileo. For Orson it was the bitterest stroke of all. In correspondence with Orson, Laughton accused him of ''inevitable procrastination," a particularly unjust charge considering the immense personal and financial risks Orson had taken in order to be free to do Galileo in the fall as scheduled. And now Brecht had secured the services of the man whom Orson held responsible for having brought him to the edge of economic ruination.

It was only natural that Orson would angrily resist Laughton's suggestion that he direct the play with Mike Todd producing. Still Laughton said he hoped that Todd and Orson could work out their differences. Never having "spoken ill" of Orson, or so Laughton claimed, Todd had said only that he was rather "afraid" of him. But Orson was adamant. There was no question of his working with Todd, who had contributed to Orson's losing—as he put it with great bitterness— "more money than I'll be able to make for some time." Besides which, never would Orson have undertaken so immense a financial burden had he not been absolutely determined to do the Brecht play, which he had planned to begin rehearsing in Los Angeles that August. But now this would be impossible. Orson would have even more cause for bitterness when, shortly thereafter, on the basis of Todd's inept ideas for the play, Brecht decided against his doing Galileo —so that Orson's angrily pulling out had not been necessary after all. Nor could Orson fail to resent that, a decade later, Todd went on to make a great fortune from producing the film version of Around the World in 80 Days —^the very property that, because of ensuing complications with the tax authorities, had financially done Orson in for some years to come.

Galileo, Around the World, the South American footage, and the

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Post column—^all these had ended in disappointment. Orson's sense of loss in this period was compounded by still another: Lear Radios' decision in July of 1946 not to take up their option on Orson's fifteen-minute weekly broadcast, principally because they objected to what they perceived as his stubborn insistence on political themes. It was the same old litany. Although the sponsor had fled, ABC agreed to continue the show on a sustaining basis until a new sponsor was found (which never happened). Instead of the $1,700 weekly salary Orson received from Lear Radios, however, he now grossed a pathetic fifty dollars per show. Orson was advised that if he wanted to continue as a political commentator he needed somehow to convince listeners of his credibility, indeed of the special interest of what he had to say. This obviously he had not yet done. An analysis of his previous shows, in which he talked about current politics with occasional digressions to his personal experiences, suggested that he had actually alienated the mass audience by intermittently describing a glamorous life they could never hope to lead, in honeyed words they could never hope to speak. The consultant who was brought in to scrutinize Orson's show argued that Orson had to persuade listeners of his moral courage, of his willingness to say what others dared not say—^and to say it plainly, so not to intimidate them with his verbal virtuosity. Quite simply, Orson scared people—^and in ways more subtle than his Martian broadcast had done.

Then, at long last, and with a topic no one else dared discuss on the air, Orson discovered his natural voice as a political commentator. He found a way of effectively communicating, of powerfully dramatizing, his beliefs. Knowing Orson's sustained commitment to racial justice, and hoping for some publicity, the NAACP had sent him an affidavit signed by a black veteran, Isaac Woodard Jr., who had served for fifteen months in the South Pacific and earned one battle star. Just after his discharge, Woodard had been the victim of an unprovoked police beating in South Carolina on February 12 that had left him blind. Only after several hours had passed did he receive medical treatment—^but it was too late. On Sunday July 28, 1946, two days after Orson had first laid eyes on Woodard's testimony, listeners to his Sunday radio show heard him begin, 'Td like to read you an affidavit." Orson brilliantly dramatized the case by inserting himself into it as a character who directly addressed the unidentified police officer responsible for blind-

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ing the black veteran: "Wash your hands, Officer X," Orson bellowed. "Wash them well. Scrub and scour." Orson turned the case into a public mystery, which in turn he promised to solve. "We will blast out your name. We'll give the world your given name. Officer X. Yes, and your so-called Christian name." It was a stunning use of the potential of radio: the audience could not but have been titillated by the knowledge that the faceless Officer X was listening to all this at the very same moment as they. Most important—Orson used the opportunity dramatically to create himself as the voice of moral authority—all the more awe-inspiring for being perfectly disembodied: "Officer X—after I have found you out, I'll never lose you. If they try you, I'm going to watch the trial. If they jail you, I'm going to wait for your first day of freedom. You won't be free of me. . . . You can't get rid of me. . . . Who am I? A masked avenger from the comic books? No, sir. Merely an inquisitive citizen of America."

From week to week the drama persisted as Orson reported new developments in the case, which, as a result of the attention he had given it, had aroused nationwide concern. To those who asked what business it was of Orson's to speak openly of America's racial tensions, let alone to rout out Officer X, he replied: "God judge me if it isn't the most pressing business I have. The blind soldier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn't. I have a voice on the radio. He hasn't. I was born a white man and until a colored man is a full citizen like me I haven't the leisure to enjoy the freedom that colored man risked his life to maintain for me. I don't own what I have until he owns an equal share of it. Until somebody beats me, and blinds me, I am in his debt. And so I come to this microphone not as a radio dramatist (although it pays better), not as a commentator (although it's safer to be simply that). I come, in that boy's name, and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I come with a call to action."

Orson's passion brought forth equally strong reactions from his listeners. There was a spate of hate mail directed at him: "Please don't come to Georgia," wrote one listener, "we don't think it would be very healthy for you down this way." From Chicago: "I called up the Radio Station and they tel [sic] you are a Jew, which doubtless accounts for quite a bit in your broadcast." But the drama also aroused an ongoing search for the man responsible for blinding Woodard. The investiga-

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tion was a dramatic device that Orson had used most effectively in the past—^in particular, with Kane. Now Orson liked to include up-to-the-minute bulletins from the NAACP investigators—greatly to the consternation of the ABC censors, who repeatedly had trouble getting a finished script to vet even two hours before air time. Orson, however, was exhilarated by the sheer theatricality of improvising, of reworking at the very last minute.

His efforts finally paid off when, that September, the Department of Justice brought charges against the officer who had admitted beating Woodard. The NAACP wired Orson to tell him that, as a result of his broadcasts, he more than anyone else was responsible for the Justice Department's having moved in the case. But there was another way in which this had been a triumph for Orson. More than ever before he had spoken directly to the mass audience from whom he had felt himself cut off, and whom he had been longing to reach. Although he claimed not to be speaking as a "radio dramatist," it was precisely because of the drama with which he infused his broadcasts that they were so extraordinarily eloquent. This being so, the Woodard broadcasts constitute an important and little-known instance of the art of Orson Welles. They also mark the virtual conclusion of Orson's career as a political commentator on radio. For that September, Orson received word that ABC could no longer continue his show on a sustaining basis. His final broadcast was scheduled for October 6, 1946. Assured and reassured that his getting kicked off the air had nothing to do with the national race controversy he had created, Orson suspected otherwise, especially in light of the country's general swing to the right after Roosevelt's death.

One quite positive result of the Around the World calamity (although Orson did not regard it as especially fortunate at that time) was his owing a picture to Harry Cohn, who had lent him $25,000 for the show. The film that resulted. The Lady from Shanghai, is an extraordinary artistic achievement that, unfortunately, has not found its proper place in film history. With Cohn's approval, Orson had secured the rights to Sherwood King's novel If I Die Before I Wake in hopes of turning it into a suitable screenplay. Thus began what would be Orson's fourth finished picture: The Lady from Shanghai. Orson would pay back his loan out of the money he earned for the picture: $2,000 weekly (for a total of $24,000) plus an additional $100,000 if, and

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only if, it made enough money at the box office to cover Columbia's expenses. Finally, he was entitled to fifteen percent of the picture's ultimate profits. It was not a very good deal for debt-ridden Orson, since his only up-front money was the weekly salary. At the time of the loan, Orson had agreed to make a movie for Cohn that summer, but his appearance in Around the World —^which he had planned solely to direct—^meant that shooting on Cohn's picture could not actually start until October of 1946. If Orson seemed especially eager to finish the film as quickly and as cheaply as possible, it was because, in the meantime, he had had what he considered to be an attractive offer to make three pictures for Alexander Korda in England, for each of which he would receive $75,000 plus a percentage of the gross. Orson was particularly inclined to accept the offer because of the sunny opportunity it afforded to work abroad, where, after the series of dismal disappointments with which he had met recently in the States, he hoped he might fare somewhat better. That September he contracted to start shooting for Korda January 1—"He was an absolutely superb man!" says Orson—so there was little time to lose on the picture he owed the less-appealing Harry Cohn.

The schedule called for Orson to have finished shooting the film for Cohn on December 23. From the first, however, there was substantial disagreement, as Cohn balked at Orson's idea to shoot on location in New York. A number of meetings at Columbia resulted in Orson's scouting locations in Mexico and San Francisco. Nor was Cohn receptive to Orson's plan to cast a young French girl he'd met and been intrigued by as the female lead. So intrigued had Orson been that, in time, he personally put her under contract (not to the studio, but to him) and paid for English lessons. Cohn left the girl's private tutoring to Orson. It was Rita whom the mogul already had firmly in mind to star opposite Orson in The Lady from Shanghai. There was a certain irony in Cohn's seeking to reunite the couple now, when in the past he had sought to keep them apart. But their appearing together would be splendid publicity for the film—^which on account of Rita's participation would have to be far grander in scale than Orson had initially envisioned. Cohn was sure things were really finished between them, and so they seemed to be. Although Orson and Rita were still married, when Orson went out to California to discuss The Lady from Shanghai, there had been no question of his staying with her. Rita was just then settling

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into a lovely new home on Rockingham Road in Brentwood that had been smartly appointed by Wilbur Menefee. A Columbia set director, Menefee's services had been provided as a bonus from Harry Cohn, who could only have been delighted by Rita's setting up her own establishment.

On arrival in Los Angeles, Orson had checked into the Bel Air Hotel, where he fully expected, and Cohn expected him, to remain. But Rita had other ideas. After Orson had accepted her starring in The Lady from Shanghai, she suddenly called Menefee to say that Orson would be staying with her presently. Nor did Orson find himself relegated to a guest room. Rita explained to Menefee that while the bed he had made for her was absolutely perfect for one person, something much larger would be necessary for the two of them (especially considering Orson's bad back).

Orson had never stopped loving her. Remembering vividly the many nights he had found her in tears when he came home (even before their marriage had begun to go awry), Orson was filled with sadness and guilt when she suddenly told him now, "You know, the only happiness I've ever had in my life has been with you." It seemed to him to be a terrible commentary on Rita's experience: "If that was happiness," he says, "imagine what the rest of her life had been." He felt himself again wanting to protect her, to give her whatever small measure of happiness he could. Although at first he had been apprehensive about Rita's starring in his picture, he saw now that it meant a great deal to her. She hoped Orson's directing her might cause people to take her acting seriously, to treat her as more than just a love goddess. The cynics who speculated that the Welleses' reunion was a mere publicity stunt were wrong. Unintentionally, Harry Cohn had played Cupid. Hundreds of Orson's books arrived at Rockingham Road, where a room was quickly converted into his private study. Although as Orson says, Rita wanted the part in The Lady from Shanghai as a chance to do some serious acting, another of her motives must have been the possibility of reconciling with Orson. After all, as if anxious not to make a final break, she had persistently hesitated to complete the property settlement her lawyers had taken such trouble to draw up.

When they went to shoot on location in Acapulco, Orson gave Rita a lavish birthday dinner—complete with an orchestra and two singers—

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at the Hotel De Las Americas. One of the guests there was Errol Flyiin, on whose famous yacht, the Zaca, the film was being shot. Orson recalls that it was with Flynn on the Zaca that he first tried cocaine. The experience thrilled him beyond his expectations. Orson muses that if he had had another life to live he might have given himself over to cocaine. But knowing that this was his only life, he figured that he had better abstain, which from then on he did. The trip to Acapulco was not entirely pleasant; one by one, the members of the company were stricken with dysentery. Worst of all, one of the technicians had died of a heart attack shortly after arriving—an event that cast a general gloom over the days that followed. Nor could Orson devote himself entirely to Rita, for seven-year-old Christopher Welles was there too. Since he had not spent much time with her for a while, Orson had sent for his first daughter, who arrived in Acapulco with her nanny. Christopher was not always well behaved. Once while Orson was shooting, she threw a tantnun, stamping her feet and crying that she wanted to be in the movie too. Finally Orson had had enough. Indeed, she could be in the movie, he promised. She was to play a little American girl, a brat eating an ice-cream cone. Then handing her a cone, he instructed her to begin eating it. *'Okay! Ready! Action! Camera!" he shouted, as the cameraman pretended to film her.

Shortly after the shooting in Acapulco was over, Orson and Rita took a week's break in Mexico with Skipper and Hortense Hill. It was like old times. Skipper had brought with him a tiny plane in which he and Orson flew above the coast, while the women waited below. Orson had taken to wearing the Navy pea jacket and T-shirt that were part of his costume as the handsome Irish rogue he played in the film. He had not looked so fit in a long time, for he had spent many hours in the steam and massage rooms at the Biltmore Baths in New York in hopes of retrieving the proper figure for a dashing romantic lead. Perhaps he looked the part a bit too much. Passing through customs at Tijuana, Orson was harassed by an MP who apparently mistook him for the sailor he was dressed as. And because Orson had gone through a wrong door, he found himself hit in the stomach with a nightstick, then further manhandled by three additional MPs who had heeded the whistled summons of the first. The MPs never found out who the victim of their bullying was, for Orson refrained from complaining to the authorities lest he encourage rumors that he had been drunk.

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It was a pity that the short vacation had ended with so stressful an incident. Orson had enough on his mind already. Even as he filmed The Lady from Shanghai, he was planning the pictures he was to make for Korda. First he would do Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, he told himself, then Carmen with Paulette Goddard. But early that fall, Korda had excitedly wired him that he had secured the rights to Oscar Wilde's Salome. Since there was a problem with prior registration of the Stevenson book, why not start with Wilde? Orson agreed at once, but sorely wanted Olivier to play Herod. According to Korda, however, the role Olivier really longed to do was not Herod, but Cyrano. This news of course triggered Orson's memories of his own abortive Cyrano project: it was this that he wanted to do as his second picture, although Korda tried to coax him back to the idea of Carmen. But what really was the point of their haggling over Orson's second picture when his first had yet to be made? To this end, Korda had dispatched a scenarist to accompany Orson on the Mexican shoot. It is difficult to say where Orson possibly found the time to work with Korda's man, but before long there was a script, to which eventually Orson hoped to append a version of Wilde's The Happy Prince. Although Orson had initially hoped to cast Vivien Leigh as Salome, he was unable to, and his thoughts strayed to the young French actress still under contract to him at $350 weekly. Korda, however, had his own obscure young actress in mind; but on seeing her photograph, Orson protested that she lacked the "quality of [the] perverse little girl, which Salome must have." This heated transatlantic exchange seemed pointless when it became obvious that Orson would not be finished with The Lady from Shanghai in time to start Salome on January 1, so the project was postponed until at least the spring of 1947.

A strike at Columbia had inevitably held things up, as had Rita's state of exhaustion, which culminated in her collapsing on the set in December. Lovely as she may have appeared in the publicity photos showing Orson clipping her trademark long red tresses in preparation for the film (in which she wore her famous hair short and tinted blonde), behind the scenes her poor health kept her from working to capacity, much to the detriment of the picture's shooting schedule. Both Orson and Rita were ill that Christmas of 1946. Indeed it was necessarily a lean holiday for debt-ridden Orson, who had to repress his lavish generosity. Instead friends received only a program for the de-

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funct Around the World and the message: "This is a souvenir of the expensive reason why the (otherwise dehriously happy) O. Welles family cannot this year wish you Merry Christmas with flowers or anything except this." Orson had not allowed his abysmal finances to keep him from giving Rita, among other things, four sheer nightgowns from Saks, a sheer half-nightie and a negligee-nightgown from Juel Parks, a sterling-silver milk jug for her bedside, and an ounce of a very expensive Egyptian perfume, however.

If Orson had given Rita exactly what she wanted that Christmas, he did not do the same for Harry Cohn, who had expected a finished film. Nor was Cohn satisfied when he did get the picture, rather belatedly, in March of 1947. By then The Lady from Shanghai was $416,421.92 over budget. Even worse, as Orson suspected, Cohn could not understand the movie, which, as if in reaction to The Stranger, was probably Orson's most disorienting to date. Gravely disappointed at not having been able to work with Brecht, Orson had, by way of compensation, made a film that very subtly embodied key principles of Brechtian theatrical theory: most notably the actor's distance from his role, which also prohibits the spectator's identification with the action. Orson's having recently read and assimilated Brecht in preparation for their collaboration explains the peculiar presence of the otherwise incongruous (and hitherto mysterious) Chinese theater sequence toward the end of The Lady from Shanghai. In that sequence, Orson's sailor boy, Michael, while fleeing from the police, slips into the auditorium of a Chinese theater, where a performance is under way onstage. If at first Michael seems distinctly out of place among the entirely Oriental audience, the other members of the audience seem surprisingly unfazed by his presence—even when he is joined by the femme fatale Elsa (Rita Hay worth). In a celebrated essay on Chinese acting (published in English translation in 1936) Brecht had argued persuasively that the Chinese theater epitomized his theory of '*the alienation effect." Because of the alienated style of acting employed in Chinese theater, *'the audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at the event." But, most ironically, this is exactly what Michael has come to this particular Chinese theater to be: an unseen spectator. In light of Brecht, the auditorium of a Chinese theater is the last place the fugitive should have picked in which to hide.

Brecht's essay also explains why, when Michael and Elsa talk rather

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loudly and conspicuously to each other, no one turns around to hush them, for according to Brecht, since it prohibits passive identification with the action onstage, the alienated acting of the Chinese theater is perfectly tolerant of interruptions and disturbances. Whereas in a typical Western theater the spectators would undoubtedly be furious if the illusion onstage were violated by fellow members of the audience, according to Brecht this would not be so in the Chinese theater, where neither the actor nor the spectator is in a trance. Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in the sequence occurs when police storm the theater. Brecht writes that the Chinese actor occasionally looks directly at the audience, even as he continues his performance—^and so it is in this sequence when the police arrive. The Chinese actor onstage casts them a curious glance but continues acting. In a desperate attempt to remain an unseen spectator, the fugitive puts on a performance of his own, as he and his companion lock in a lovers' embrace intended to conceal them from the police. In the heat of its pretend passion, it is quite a different sort of performance from the coolly distanced one that continues onstage. Brecht argues that the Chinese actor's performance is never "heated"—as this mock-lovers' parody of onscreen romance surely is. In fact. The Lady from Shanghai generally maintains so rigorous a distance from the emotions it depicts that an amorous embrace like this can perhaps only be parodic.

In a sense the Chinese theater sequence illuminates the distinctly odd—almost chilly—^acting style that permeates the film as a whole. Under Orson's careful direction, so strangely distanced are the performances in general that, in what has often been taken as a major artistic defect of the film, it is rather difficult for audiences to identify with them. "The artist's object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience," writes Brecht of the Chinese actor—a notion that might equally apply to the singularly strange performances one discovers in The Lady from Shanghai. The Chinese theater sequence is then Orson's distinctly ironic indication that this strangeness is hardly ineptitude (as many spectators, critics among them, have mistakenly presumed) but fully intentional: an exploration of the artistic possibilities of the sort of alienated acting that is so clearly antithetical to the naturalistic style that Hollywood held to be the norm, and that Orson had used rather uncritically in The Stranger. If The Lady from Shanghai has been generally underrated in film history, it is in part because its

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expressly Brechtian aspirations have been consistently overlooked. An awareness of the filmmaker's subtle application of Brechtian theory makes it possible historically to assimilate this major film as it has not been in the past.

Harry Cohn was surely no connoisseur of film style, so that Orson ascribes much of the mogul's agitation to his utter incomprehension of the picture's "shock effects": ''The shock effects were unknown movie devices at that period," says Orson. "They'd had them earlier and they had them later to some extent, but that was the period when movies were at their most homogenized. And of course that would have had to do with it." In a memo to Cohn, Orson suggested that he had hoped for "something off-center, queer, strange"; to give the entire film a "bad dream aspect." "Our story escapes the 'cliche'," he warned, "only if the performances and the production are original, or at least, somewhat oblique. " To keep the film "from being just another whodunit," Orson argued, would require the "quality of freshness and strangeness** with which he had tried to imbue it. Queer? Oblique? Strange? To Harry Cohn these were pejorative words. But influenced as he was by Brecht's way of thinking, Orson saw strangeness as a criterion of artistic value precisely as Brecht did. Orson's repeated reference to strangeness in the memo to Cohn is further evidence of how much Brecht's theories were on his mind at this time. (Not that he expected Cohn to recognize the allusion!)

Brecht is generally thought to have acquired this privileged term in his theoretical vocabulary from the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky's key concept of estrangement (ostraneniye) in art, whereby the artist views things from a new, and therefore especially revealing, angle. But so entirely new is this angle that the spectator may take some time to adjust himself to its utter strangeness. (Much as the spectator of the famous hall-of-mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai finds himself initially unable to gauge just where the characters are—or, more important, who has shot whom. Showing the climactic chase to the death in the multiple and fragmented images of a 'crazy house' hall of mirrors in an amusement park was Orson's original — and, quite Hterally, oblique —^way of imbuing the cinematic convention of the chase sequence with what is here its eloquent strangeness.) For Shklovsky, and in turn for Brecht, the process of estrangement applies both to form and to content: that is, it is not simply reality (content)

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that is viewed afresh in the successful work of art, but art (form) itself. The artist must do away with artistic cliches, stale modes of perception, by inventing forms capable of viewing the world in original, oblique, perhaps somewhat startling ways. These ideas, which Orson had assimilated through Brecht, are clearly echoed in what had been his hopes for The Lady from Shanghai as he expressed them in the memo to Cohn.

For all the impossibility of communicating his ideas to Cohn, Orson says, "I had a curious respect for him." Notwithstanding Cohn's ensuing efforts to ruin his picture, Orson found himself terribly amused by something Cohn said of their unhappy business relationship: " 'Well, it's taught me one lesson,' " Orson recalls Cohn's having said. " 'Never have a leading man who's the director, 'cause you can't fire the director!' " "I kind of liked him for it," says Orson of Cohn's quip. "I always had a soft spot for him at his worst. He always struck me as funnier than he was frightening. You know Billy Wilder's great joke—^the greatest Hollywood one-liner ever made—Cohn had this huge funeral. Nobody ever had such a big turnout as for Harry Cohn. Billy Wilder says, 'Well, give the people what they want!' " The basically negative reaction of the preview spectators confirmed Cohn's dismay with Lady from Shanghai. It was Pomona all over again. Says Orson: "All the changes that were really made were made after the preview with this terrible woman that he brought in. ... I sat with him and said yes to everything she said. And then when I was alone with her I fought like a tiger and lost most of the battles." Orson attributes her apparent compulsion to alter the footage, even when he was clearly able to show her that something was best as it was, to her sense of herself as having been hired for the film "to show that she'd made it different." Although the preview spectators had indicated that they liked the music Orson had temporarily affixed to the film, the studio somewhat perversely concocted an entirely new score that, according to Orson, has "nothing to do with what's going on. It's as though you were playing a radio while you were sitting and watching the movie, playing Muzak or something." Although Orson had hoped to have some input in the selection of the music, this the studio flatly denied him: "See, I wasn't even there when they scored it!" Given Orson's antipathy to what he considered to be Disney's kitsch tendencies, it is not surprising that when he complained to Cohn about the new score he explicitly evoked Disney. Thus,

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of the music that now accompanies a shot of Rita Hayworth diving, Orson lamented that it might be more suitable for ''a prat-fall by Pluto the Pup, or a wild jump into space by Donald Duck"—^but not for The Lady from Shanghai. In retrospect, Orson points out that all in all the studio's approach to the film he had turned in was to ''pay no attention to what the director says, which of course has been the rallying cry of this town since the beginning of celluloid, you know. The director is the big boss until the picture is over and then see what you can do to screw him up!" Fortunately, the mutilation of Lady from Shanghai was far less extensive than that of Ambersons had been. ''He took about twenty percent off the picture," Orson says of Harry Cohn's handiwork. "It's about twenty percent less than it would have been, maybe a little more—

Orson suspects that, in addition to wanting to eliminate some of the film's more blatant shock effects, Cohn may have had another reason for cutting up his film. ''This was a Rita Hayworth picture," says Orson, "and Harry Cohn felt a tremendous proprietary sense for Rita. And I think part of all that was to try to make it something that wasn't my picture. No matter what. I think that's part of the explanation." If Orson's having lost artistic control of yet another film left him understandably disappointed, Rita was in even gloomier spirits when she realized that the public had not taken her appearance in the film as seriously as she had hoped: "I thought she was great in it," says Orson, "and she was proud to be in it and all that. And then everybody treated her as though she'd been slumming, you know, and so they didn't give her that satisfaction!"

One bit of secret satisfaction that Orson had from his film was artistically settling a score with a powerful political enemy of his: '*He always called everybody 'fella,' " says Orson of Nelson Rockefeller, "and I used that for Glenn Anders in Lady from Shanghai. In fact Glenn Anders was doing kind of a parody of Nelson Rockefeller and Glen looked a little like him, so it was perfect!" The character Anders plays in the film is a duplicitous villain—a lawyer, actually—who bullies Orson's naive Irishman (whom he persistently calls/<?//a) into a scheme that will presumably benefit the sailor boy, but that, at length, nearly destroys him, exactly as Orson perceived Rockefeller to have done to him: "I thought he was the one who really let me down. Because the movie companies you expect to, but I really didn't expect to be scuttled

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by him." Nor does the sailor boy in Lady from Shanghai expect to be scuttled by the Rockefeller look-alike to whom he plays the ''fall guy." There is even an explicit reference to Fortaleza in The Lady from Shanghai, when Michael describes having been fishing there and the sharks' devouring each other precisely as the lawyer and his equally grotesque partner (as played by Everett Sloane) do. Rockefeller, Fortaleza, sharks—^these allusions suggest that The Lady from Shanghai contained within it Orson's ironic meditation on what he rightly considered the most terrible episode in his career. Hence the film's underlying theme of guilt and innocence: as The Lady from Shanghai ends, the sailor boy, having been proved innocent of a crime he did not commit, contemplates his still somehow being considered guilty. This was Orson's present plight as he saw it: widely thought to be wasteful and rebellious, it seemed to him that he had vindicated himself with the footage he had brought back from Rio and, more important, with his concession to Hollywood, The Stranger.

CHAPTER 29

Desperate Adventure

"In his best vein he can make Ernest Hemingway seem like a Vassar girl in a daisy chain," asserted Orson in trying to persuade Harry Cohn to bankroll a picture that he wanted to direct based on Prosper Merimee's Carmen. Since Merimee's name was sure to mean nothing to Harry Cohn, who would have automatically associated the title Carmen with its opera, Orson described the French writer as "the James Cain-Raymond Chandler of his time." It was not what he called "the operatic dilution" that Orson wanted to do onscreen, but what he saw as "the original melodrama of blood, violence, and passion." The rhetoric of his sales pitch to Cohn suggests that for once Orson really knew his audience. By now he had figured out that the money men liked their narratives quick and simple—Whence his strategic description of Carmen as "a fast-moving story, hard-boiled and modern." And figuring that Cohn was always alert to new uses for Rita, Orson pointed out that Carmen was "a great star vehicle"—^there was no need to name the star he had in mind. But when in 1948 Rita did indeed appear in a Columbia picture called The Loves of Carmen^ Orson would not be the director. Harry Cohn's dissatisfaction with The Lady from Shanghai put an end to his willingness to invest in Orson, who was forced to look for cash elsewhere.

By the time Lady from Shanghai was finished Orson also had to look

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for someplace else to live, since his and Rita's attempted reconciliation had gone awry. Not that they had not earnestly tried to repair their marriage. As late as January of 1947, they had both applied for passports in anticipation of Orson's working for Korda in England that spring. Planning to accompany her husband for a month or longer, Rita had scheduled meetings with several British producers to explore the possibilities of working in films there. Orson had also requested passports for Christopher and her governess so that they might join him in London for a holiday.

But none of this was to be. The old problems with Rita began almost the moment they had finished working together on Lady from Shanghai. As her director, Orson had been focused on her in the single-minded way she liked—^but when that attention ceased, so did their marital happiness. Rita accused Orson of seeing other women, and Orson felt as helpless and guilty as he had in the past. Once again, his bewildered response to her seemingly uncontrollable jealously was to do exactly what she accused him of: to turn to other women. When she decided to go through with the divorce once and for all, he did nothing to stop her. He could not bear to have caused so much pain to a woman he had loved so much.

In March, Korda wired him that it would not be possible to begin Salome April 1 as they had planned. A somewhat startled Orson learned that, at the very earliest, he might be able to start shooting at the end of July. Once again, just when everything had seemed so promising, the ground had fallen out from under him. The studio had taken over—^and torn apart—^his brilliant new film. Korda had told him not to bother coming to London for a time. And he had lost Rita.

After Rita threw him out, Orson installed himself in a beach house next door to the palatial Marion Davies estate, where his first wife, Virginia, and her husband, Charles Lederer, were living. In the past, earnestly trying to protect the best interests of Virginia and, particularly, of Christopher, Lederer had had angry run-ins with Orson, whom he accused of not living up to the divorce settlement. Now, in the unlike-liest of turnarounds, Orson and the witty, intelligent Lederer became great chums. Lederer even jokingly admitted to Orson that some of his original animosity toward him had been resentment of Virginia's famous first husband: the abstract villain who had so shamed his Aunt Marion. ''I liked them together," says Orson of the Lederers, with

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whom he entered into a friendly relationship that he describes as a ''strange design for living at the beach." There was an occasional awkwardness, however, particularly when Aunt Marion came to call. ''You see, he'd have Marion Davies for dinner," Orson recalls. "Virginia would say, 'Now you stay away. Don't be seen.' And so I'd come up to the window where their dinner table was, with my coat collar up as though it were snowing outside, and just stare in at them eating."

Korda's postponement of Salome made Orson think of two other offers he had had recently but not considered seriously. One was a proposal from the British producer Sidney Bernstein to direct a film of King Lear (a play Orson had vainly hoped to do one night a week with his Around the World cast); the other was an inquiry from the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) in New York about Orson's directing something at the Utah Centennial Festival in Salt Lake City. ANTA wanted him in May, however, and by then of course he had planned to be abroad doing Salome. Luckily, Utah was persistent, and suggested that he stage Lear as one of the festival's four productions. This fortuitous pair of offers suggested distinct possibilities to Orson, especially now that he would not in fact be starting Salome in April as he had anticipated. As a film director it had been Orson's custom to rehearse his cast extensively before shooting. Now it occurred to him to adumbrate the movie he might make of Lear with a stage production in Salt Lake City. The concept posed both practical and aesthetic problems: it would be exceedingly difficult and expensive to haul Orson's production across the ocean. And Orson would have to decide which, if either, of the two productions should take precedence. Obviously he was not about to inform Utah that its production was basically a dress rehearsal for a film; or London, that its was to be a bit of canned theater. Saying that the two productions fed into each other would not be entirely honest. Before he knew much about film, it had seemed perfectly acceptable to Orson to film a theatrical performance (and to claim it was di film) —but not so now. Initially it might have seemed that Orson was disposed to regard the theatrical production as the more important of the two, since he decided to focus his energies on the Utah festival, although he accepted their offer with the stipulation that it was Macbeth that he do, not Lear. This particular play had worked so well in his New York directorial debut that it seemed lucky to him, and luck was what he needed to execute his rather complicated

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and ambitious plans for this new production. For if one had thought that Orson was abandoning the idea of doing a Shakespeare film, one would have been wrong. The coincidence of the two offers had given him an interesting idea. He would rehearse and run his play in Salt Lake City and film it, shortly thereafter, not in London, but in Hollywood. Having worked out his concept onstage, he would be able to work with unusual economy in Hollywood. Hence the raison d'etre of Orson's fifth finished picture: to show once and for all that Hollywood could actually earn a profit on serious film fare.

Orson's pitch to Harry Cohn about the "strong commercial aspects" of Carmen epitomized his determination to sell Hollywood on the potential profitability of quality pictures. Even if at first there was only a small serious audience for this Macbeth, the film would have been made cheaply enough to make money nonetheless. This was to be precisely the sort of cinematic experiment Orson had protested the money men were not willing to back. Perhaps if they saw that an experiment like this could be profitable, they would change their minds. In addition, Orson would be able to free himself from his reputation for profligacy and wastefulness—^for just now Harry Cohn was making much ado of Orson's having gone wildly over budget on The Lady from Shanghai. Not that Orson planned to repress his own artistic inclinations as he had in The Stranger. Within the very strict limitations of time and budget he imposed upon himself, he would make a Macbeth absolutely as expressive—^and eccentric—as he wished.

Orson did not, however, delude himself into thinking that his Macbeth would be a work of art of the magnitude of Kane. This time, his aspiration was more modest, more practical, than anything he would have conceived of doing when he had first come to Hollywood. Now, having lost his innocence, Orson had accepted the necessity of the Hollywood director's paying as much attention to economics as to self-expression. Hollywood had not been willing to invest in a Shakespeare picture since the disaster of Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935. But the healthy box office for Olivier's Henry Fin 1944 made it quite feasible for Orson to seek money for his Macbeth. Olivier had shown that the movie audience would come out for the Bard. Otherwise Orson probably would not have dared to hope for Hollywood backing, which, at length, he found in perhaps the least likely of places: Republic Pictures, known mainly for horse operas starring the likes of

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Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Johnny Mack Brown. "I went there because I figured it would be cheaper," says Orson. ''Everybody would be used to working faster." For their part. Republic was not especially interested in Orson's rather high-toned project of somehow raising Hollywood's cultural level; but if he could indeed make Macbeth as cheaply as he genuinely seemed to want to, and if perhaps he could reach a hitherto untapped film audience in the process, he might succeed in finding a new way for Hollywood to make money—and that seemed appealing. And although there was abundant laughter in Hollywood at the very idea of Orson's having wound up at a plebian studio like Republic, Orson thought it ideal for his experiment.

Thus, he was in the very best of spirits as he embarked upon his pair of Macbeths^ the leads of which would appear in both, while the rest of the cast would be different in Salt Lake City and Hollywood. He had to move quickly now. The Utah production was set for May, and Orson's proposed twenty-one days of filming would start that June. Orson cast himself as Macbeth—after all, he had played it in black-face when, in Indianapolis, Jack Carter's replacement had taken ill—and, when neither Geraldine Fitzgerald nor Tallulah Bankhead was available for Lady Macbeth, he settled upon Jeanette Nolan, with whom he had first worked on radio's March of Time. Orson explained that the entire production would be delivered in a Scottish burr, a challenge he knew would particularly delight the versatile Miss Nolan who loved to mimic dialects. Two of his more curious casting decisions were made for the small parts of the film version: Shorty was Macbeth's ''personal attendant," Seyton—a role that he could play from life; and Christopher was MacdufTs son. Little Christopher had harped on his giving her a role during the film's preparations until finally Orson relented, but since there were no parts for little girls, he explained, she would have to play a boy. That was all right with Christopher, who received one hundred and fifteen dollars weekly.

Having rehearsed his principal actors in Los Angeles, Orson took them to Salt Lake City, where they were joined for further rehearsals by the locals from the university, who rounded out the cast. But for Orson the Utah festival production was itself only a foreshadowing of the movie. However warm its reception, Orson could not help but regard it critically in terms of the screen images it would yield. Thus, for instance, Orson decided to change entirely the costume Dan O'Herlihy

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had worn in Utah as Macduff, which made his "pot belly" much too prominent. Something of an expert on this particular problem, Orson recommended a heavy corset and padding in O'Herlihy's upper chest and shoulders to compensate for what Orson complained of in a memo as "no muscles whatsoever." Furthermore, Orson lamented of O'Her-lihy that "after one step he starts to crack at the seams"— a problem Orson hoped to solve with a costume specially designed "so that he can't bulge or sag." And as fo/ Roddy McDowall as Malcolm, Orson noted that his costume "should suggest the young prince rather than the third page boy from the left. That's what he looked like in Salt Lake City."

When Orson began shooting late in June of 1947, the talk at certain Hollywood dinner parties often strayed to whether he would stick to his $884,367 budget and his twenty-one-day schedule. The precedent of The Stranger notwithstanding, the odds were against him. Orson worked relentlessly to finish Macbeth on time and, as it turned out, substantially under budget. He only seemed to let up for the revivifying massages of a powerful chap named Abdullah. For Christopher, these were hardly the idyllic hours with Daddy she had hoped for. Orson was much too preoccupied to keep her from becoming frightfully bored on a hot indoor set that reeked of urine from the picture's horses. Fortunately, there was a little boy actor with whom she could steal away to watch the B Western being shot on the next set. At which miraculous vision Christopher mused about why her father couldn't be making an interesting movie like that.

"I had Duke Wayne on the set all the time, all through Macbeth, watching!" says Orson, who was not unaware of, or unamused by, the incongruity of his own presence at Republic. "I had only one day with a big extra call," he begins a joke he likes to tell about his experience at Republic. "So I did two things. I had two cameramen dressed up as extras, with cameras, moving around among them. And then, when they had to charge the castle, which they were loathe to do because it required a little energy and moving, I shouted 'Lunch!' And what you see when everybody charges the castle is everybody running off to eat lunch. They were special Republic extras who hadn't been asked to do anything, you know, in forty years. 'Lunch!' "

The president of Republic Pictures Corporation, Herbert J. Yates, could not fail to be impressed by Orson's achievement in Macbeth, and

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wrote to tell him so, once shooting was done. Indeed never in his thirty-four years in show business had he been so impressed as by Orson. The entire film industry had been watching Orson's experiment, Yates told him, and he had proved an "inspiration" to them all. Yates congratulated Orson on having "demonstrated beyond a doubt" that a "superior product," as Yates called it, could be made economically and profitably. And in case Orson did not already know it, Macbeth was, Yates assured him, "the greatest individual job of acting, directing, adapting and producing that to my knowledge Hollywood has ever seen."

All that remained was the post-production work. But surely there would be no problem given the impeccable manner in which Orson had handled himself thus far. And surely after working under such intense pressure to finish filming Orson deserved the therapeutic trip to Europe that he planned to take during the preparation of the rough cut. That trip was not all pleasure though; one stop on his itinerary was London, where he would see Sir Alexander Korda to discuss the pictures that they still anticipated making together, although by now it was Cyrano they particularly wanted to do first. In London, Korda told Orson that Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson would be thrilled to have Orson Welles join them on the London stage. "They would just love it!" Orson recalls Korda's having told him. "It would be like the three musketeers!" Today Orson is dubious that he would have received as warm a welcome from Olivier and Richardson as Korda imagined: "You know," says Orson, "Korda in his innocence—and he had a big slice of it because he was so in love with actors and impressed by them in a way that only Middle Europeans are—^kept saying to me, 'You must come to work with Larry and Ralph, who will be delighted to give you the great roles! They're doing too many things anyway. They will want you here!' W^ant me! I've listened to the stories from them—how they were fighting each other for the next play, but he really believed they would just say, 'Oh, how marvelous! Now we have Orson!' I would have been tripped up with piano wires by Larry the first night!"

Eager to work with Korda, Orson was not very encouraging to the representatives of director Gregory Ratoff, who approached him to star in a movie titled Cagliostro (Black Magic) to be filmed in Italy. Even if Cyrano or any of the other projects he discussed with Korda did not materialize, surely Orson's having been an "inspiration" to the rest of

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Hollywood would get him other directing jobs, and directing was what he mainly wanted to do. It looked as if, with Macbeth, Orson had finally changed his image—or would, once the post-production work was finished, and he planned to take care of that the moment he returned from Europe.

But Orson had not been back in the States for long when Republic began to suspect that something was amiss. The editing seemed to drag on in a sluggish manner, and Orson appeared not to be spending as much time at the studio as the management felt he should have. To make matters worse, it seemed that Orson was leaving for Europe again. His dismal finances, and Korda's further postponement of Cyrano, had led him to change his mind about Cagliostro after all, in preparation for which flamboyant role he swiftly undertook a regimen of fencing lessons. But instead of all this parrying and thrusting they heard about. Republic wanted him to finish cutting his film. Before he left for Italy, Orson did have time for a brief affair with twenty-one-year-old Marilyn Monroe, who was still an obscure Hollywood starlet. One night at a crowded Hollywood party, Orson had repaired to an upstairs bedroom with Marilyn, to whom he was making love when a jealous husband, mistakenly thinking that his wife was inside with Orson Welles, banged open the door. The raving brute threw a solid punch to the side of Orson's head before discovering that he had made a terrible mistake.

When, having wrapped up his fencing lessons and his affair with Marilyn, Orson departed for Rome, he left his latest partner, Richard Wilson, behind in Hollywood to supervise post-production on Macbeth. Republic was thrown into a fit of agitation. It was almost as if, in some subliminal way, Orson had felt compelled to repeat the grave mistake he had made in leaving Ambersons unfinished in the hands of Jack Moss. If Orson had proceeded blindly in taking off for Rio when he had not completed Ambersons, and if he had lived to regret his error in doing so, this time he certainly should have known better. Having worked so feverishly to come in on schedule and under budget, both of which he had unquestionably succeeded in doing, why possibly would he want to blow it all now? The fact was that, as far as Orson was concerned, Macbeth was in a sense finished—^not as a film of course, but as an experiment. In Macbeth Orson had never intended to make a great film; just to prove a point, to show what could be shot quickly and

Barbara Learning

cheaply. Having come in on schedule and under budget, he had fully worked out the artistic problem he had set for himself, and that was that. Since his experiment had involved the efficient shooting of a quality picture, he really saw no reason why the post-production work he had planned could not be left to other hands in his absence. It was only natural that Republic should see things differently. The studio took no comfort in Orson's intention to put the finishing touches on Macbeth in Italy once the basic post-production work was finished; they wanted him to finish it now.

In Rome where he installed himself in grand style at the Excelsior, Orson seemed far more worried about the supply of false noses he had inadvertently left in Hollywood than about his unfinished picture. Until he received a package of noses from home he would somehow have to conserve the ones he had. Without Shorty there to attend to him, Orson was somewhat at loose ends, and frantically wired home that he could not find his Proloid diet pills or his Dexedrine, both of which Shorty was supposed to have packed for him. By return wire Dadda explained how Orson could get the pills in Rome until he received the supply that had been mailed to him. Orson was in control again by the time he began work on RatofTs Cagliostro. Evidently he was rather more in control than he was supposed to be. A visitor to the set one day was surprised to see Orson on top of a coach directing a grand mob scene populated by numerous extras in costumes. ''Where is Grisha?" inquired the visitor of the whereabouts of the Russian-born director. ''''There he is," called Orson, pointing to the mob of extras, a fully costumed Gregory Ratoff among them. An easygoing director who adored Orson, RatofiF seemed perfectly content to let his friend Orson take charge now and then.

Orson's particularly expansive mood in this period is indicated by a strange scene that occurred one afternoon in the lobby of the Excelsior, where Jackson Leighter heard him authoritatively lecturing a trio of stunned red-robed cardinals on, of all topics, Catholicism. When finally Orson had bid them farewell Leighter heard one of the cardinals mutter that somehow Orson knew more about Catholicism than they did! What these princes of the church could not have known was that back in the States, Catholicism had been one of the subjects on which Orson had paid his researchers to feed him raw data. Although no

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project had come of the information he had assimilated, his interlude with the cardinals had afforded him an excellent opportunity to invent himself in the unlikely guise of an ecclesiastical expert.

But, according to Orson, the cardinals were far from his most significant encounter with the Church while he was in Rome, for in his capacity as a famous actor and director he was granted an audience with Pope Pius XII. "Pope Pius XII had hands like lizards," Orson laughs. "They were as dry and hot as lizards. They gave off almost a palpable vibration—^he had such a strong papal personality!" But what did Orson and Pope Pius talk about? "I had forty-five minutes alone with him," says Orson. "He held my hand and never let it go. There we sat alone, and he said, 'Is it true that Irene Dunne is contemplating divorce? What do you think of Ty Power's marriage coming up?' All the hot stuff horn Hollywood is what we discussed."

Not all of Orson's Rome encounters were of a spiritual nature. "I was chased all over Italy by Charles Luciano—^known as 'Lucky' by ignorant newspaper readers," says Orson. But why would the famous gangland figure want to talk to Orson Welles? "In order to persuade me to make the true story of his life," says Orson. "He thought I should do it. I should write it and direct it and act it. I could elevate him to the proper position historically." But the sort of crime with which Orson was preoccupied at the moment was very different from Luciano's variety. In Rome, Orson had a gypsy girlfriend from the circus who was trying to break into movies. In exchange for his help, she taught him one of her best gypsy tricks. "She taught me how to steal a chicken and walk away with dignity," Orson recalls, "The only thing: you had to have a dress on. A live chicken with the feathers—^you keep it between your legs, and learn to walk in a dignified manner. It was one of the first things she'd been taught as a child, and she thought I should know it." Orson, however, refused ever to put on the dress she kept offering him, so his education in petty crime was incomplete: "I never tried it with a dress," he admits. "But I know all the moves."

As a foreign film celebrity Orson received many invitations during the making of Cagliostro, one of them to a dinner party given by a very wealthy young man, whom Orson describes as "the prince of evil in Rome." Orson points out that his decadent twenty-one-year-old host "used to shoot up through his gold lame trousers." "I accepted what I thought was an ordinary engagement," says Orson of having excused

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himself from his chicken-steaHng lessons to have dinner with the prince of evil and his aristocratic guests. And so it seemed—at least until they finished eating. ''After dinner, it was put to us, what exhibitions would we enjoy pour commencer?'* Exhibitions? Pour commencer? Orson wondered what was possibly coming next. ''Somebody said, 'Oh, it had better be pede because it's so much more visual!' " Orson recalls. Whereupon he discovered that besides giving his guests dinner, the young Italian aristocrat regularly entertained them with demonstrations of their most elaborate sexual fantasies.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the Republic management was absolutely enraged that he had been working on another director's picture when he should have been finishing his own. Orson simply did not realize the damage he was doing to himself by remaining abroad. Even if he had left part of the post-production work to the technicians but stayed in Hollywood, things would have gone more smoothly. But as it was, the studio even threatened to bill Orson for what they perceived as the costly delays his absence had caused. When Orson decided it was time to inspect the post-production work that had been done on the picture thus far, the studio initially hesitated to comply with his wishes. But Orson had his way, and on November 25, 1947, Republic dispatched to Rome the unfinished footage and the cutter who had been diligently working on it. Not until March 6, 1948, did the cutter return from what was to have been a short stay in Italy. To make matters worse. Republic heard that, having gone to Rome expressly to finish the film with Orson, the cutter had spent part of his time there working on Caglios-tro! No news could have infuriated the studio more than this. It seemed to Republic as if anyone who came even remotely within Orson's orbit lost all purpose and direction. Nor did it help that the film the cutter brought back with him still was unfinished. The work print reflected the changes Orson had supervised in Rome. But he had also sent notes for further changes to be made in Hollywood. The score for the picture presented another complication; Orson had originally had Bernard Herrmann in mind, but that deal fell through, and in Italy he had negotiated with composer Jacques Ibert to do the music as soon as he received a contract from the studio. On their part. Republic did not want to send him anything in writing until they received the music. The triumph Orson had scored in shooting Macbeth on schedule and under

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budget had degenerated into a failure to finish the picture, which in effect, finished him in Hollywood for years to come.

With the recent loss of his wife, and of his political career, there was nothing to keep Orson in the United States. During Cagliostro he— like others in the Hollywood film industry—^became tantalized by the distinct possibilities for shooting cheaply in postwar Italy. An Italian producer whom Orson had met when he was acting in Cagliostro had suggested directing Othello in Venice next. And since at first the producer seemed genuinely interested in bankrolling the picture, Orson saw it as an excellent backup in the event of Korda's putting him off again. "I had no intention of doing a movie of Othello until he began saying I should do it," recalls Orson. "I thought if this great producer wants to put up the money for Othello, I'll do Othello. "

But it finally appeared as if Orson would indeed make Cyrano for Korda now. In Paris Orson had mapped out the production with the celebrated art director Alexander Trauner. Says Orson: "We were going to do all the sets where I was shot with big doors and high door knobs, and so on—so I'd look very, very short, because I always thought that Cyrano should look up at everybody." As for the magnitude of the false nose he would wear in the part, it seemed he would need several different sizes: "I discovered a wonderful thing about Coquelin, who created the part, that nobody knows," recalls Orson, "which is that in every act his nose got shorter. Isn't that brilliant? Absolute genius! And so of course I was going to do that." But Orson's film of Cyrano was never to be. "We were within weeks of starting," he recalls. "We had sets built. We were finally going to shoot in Italy ... I was ready with everything, and then Alex came to me and said, *My dear fellow, I have not a sou of hard currency.' " Korda told Orson that he wanted to sell the property for the Hollywood version of Cyrano to star Jose Ferrer. "He owned the rights, you see," says Orson of Korda. "A butcher in Chicago sued Rostand, claiming that he had sent him the plot and that Rostand had stolen it from him. So that the rights to Cyrano, in America, belonged to the heirs of this butcher. And Alex had obtained these rights—" which made the proposed American film of Cyrano entirely dependent on Korda's selling them. "So I said, 'Of course that's all right, Alex!' " Orson sighs. "But my whole time with Alex was things like that. I kept doing projects for him, which /did not

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abandon but which he did. I didn't abandon one single project—^in each case he said he didn't have the money or it wasn't the right time and why not do something else?—but I didn't care, I loved him so!" Korda was the sort of magnificent dreamer Orson adored. '*He cost me years of my life and I can't hold a minute against him," says Orson, ''because every time he would start on a dream he not only sold me, but I knew he'd sold himself."

In addition to Cyrano and Othello, Orson thought of directing The Shadow and Moby Dick in Italy, but none of these projects had seemed a particularly good bet to the attorney back in the States to whom Orson had turned for financial counsel. To his dismay, Orson found himself advised to give up at least temporarily the idea of directing, at which labor he was unlikely to make as much sure money as he could acting in other men's movies. As an actor Orson could command about $100,000 a picture, which, even if the film flopped at the box office, subjected him to no financial jeopardy. As a director, however, he had to cope with deferred payments and precarious percentages. As a case in point, to date for Macbeth he had received only $50,000 for his work, whereas the remaining $100,000 for which he had contracted was deferred until the requisite profit percentage was reached (which of course might never occur). But Orson simply could not accept this practical advice. All that mattered to him now was to direct.

With Korda's Cyrano out of the picture, Orson turned to his backup project, Othello, but he could not depend entirely on the Italian producer who had suggested the film to him and whose investment in lire would have to be supplemented by American dollars. The American producer of Cagliostro had briefly shown some interest in Othello, but decided against backing any more pictures in Italy where the political situation worried him. To judge from what he said, it also looked like Othello could be a difficult project to sell to American backers who might think the black central character to be a box-office liability. It was no help either that Orson wanted to do another Shakespeare picture when there had been such widely conflicting reports about the job he had done on Macbeth. But it was precisely because of the very, very modest Macbeth he had been compelled to make in America that he wanted to do Shakespeare a little more grandly now, and the less-costly production conditions of postwar Italy encouraged him to try. Still, Macbeth loomed unfinished; so in April, a year after Republic had first

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excitedly announced his bold experiment, Orson returned to Hollywood to wrap up the post-production work, which had dragged on so interminably that, its strict twenty-one-day shooting schedule notwithstanding, the picture no longer proved what Orson had meant it to. On the contrary, Macbeth only seemed to confirm the deadly rumors of Orson's unreliability.

Orson had planned to return to Europe the moment he finished fine-tuning Macbeth, but he contracted chicken pox from his daughter and was not well enough to leave until June. ''I had a lot of fun with the chicken pox," says Orson, who recuperated in New York at the Waldorf, in the convivial company of Charlie Lederer, whose script for The Shadow Orson had hoped to direct. Orson recalls with glee that he and Lederer kept two producers "imprisoned in the Waldorf Astoria for three days by what we said was the Port Authority on the grounds that I was in quarantine." Nor was this the last of his pranks. As soon as he got to London from New York, Orson was scheduled to meet with Korda, who knew nothing of the children's disease that had befallen him. Orson says that when he was no longer contagious he "touched up all the sores and then arrived in London and kissed Alex on the lips." When, much to his horror, Korda noticed the strange speckles all over Orson's face, he nervously inquired about them—^to which Orson replied that "I didn't know what it was that I was suffering from."

Orson arrived in Europe intent on starting production for his film of Othello immediately, although without any American money behind him this seemed improbable. Never was he more determined to begin, however, than when he heard that another Othello film was already in the works in Italy. Although he had not wanted to take acting work simply to shore up his finances, this suddenly seemed like the best way to get the cash he needed for Othello. He'd done it before: putting his own acting money into It's All True when no one else would help. The modest sum Orson felt he needed to get started on Othello was $150,000—and he could easily make that much by appearing in a single picture. But Orson did not anticipate the horrors that lay ahead as he embarked upon financing his own film. The Italian backers were soon to back out. And his own money would disappear all too quickly into the production.

That summer, he asked Skipper Hill to send him some film stock

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with which to begin. There was something boyish and impulsive about the entire precarious project so that, for Orson, it was only natural to think of, and to appeal to, the Todd School when no one else was about to help. Todd, and Skipper Hill, were cherished symbols of security and rootedness to Orson—^he had even enrolled his daughter Christopher there, as the only girl in an all-boys' school, where she boarded with Skipper and Hortense.

When Orson went to Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera to talk to Darryl Zanuck about the acting work he needed to help finance his new film, he learned that Rita, whose divorce from him was not yet final, was vacationing there too. She had brought along Orson's former secretary, Shifra Haran, whom she had hired especially for the trip. The two of them were staying in a hotel on the hill above Zanuck's cabana—^where Orson was filled in on the details of Rita's menage by professional gossip Elsa Maxwell. (Miss Maxwell's claiming to be on the most intimate of terms with virtually everyone had moved Orson and Cole Porter to play a devilish prank on her. ''Cole Porter and I trapped her," Orson recalls. "We were both terribly fond of her. If you mentioned any name in the world, any famous name, she'd say, 'He's one of my most intimate friends.' And we said, 'We're going to get her on one that is so impossible even she is going to stop and gasp.' We set it up, a whole long conversation, and mentioned Mihailovic, the Partisan leader. She said, 'One of my most intimate friends,' and turned white, realizing that she'd gone too far.") It seemed that Rita had left their daughter, Becky, at home in the care of an elderly aunt and the Filipino houseman. Pookles, the cocker spaniel that Dadda Bernstein had given to Orson and Rita, was also left behind. On the trip one of Miss Haran's duties was to carry in her purse $10,000 in cash for Rita; another duty, which she shared with Rita's maid. Angel, was to try to lift Rita's spirits. For although Rita had had a great professional triumph with the film Gilda, she was prey to persistent depression: "Whenever she'd act kind of funny," says Miss Haran, "Angel and I would put on an act and we'd get her to smile and pull herself together." But it was not easy. As they left for New York by train, Rita's new picture. The Loves of Carmen, was about to be reviewed; when the train stopped in Kansas City, Miss Haran dashed out for the papers. Rita was used to the critics' making snide remarks about her acting, but this time, for a change, the reviews were quite kind to her. "You know.

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I always thought that if I ever got good reviews, I'd be happy," she told Miss Haran in a small, sad voice. "It's so empty. It's never what I wanted, ever. All I wanted was just what everybody else wants, you know—^to be loved."

Her troubled state of mind manifested itself on the ocean liner from New York when everyone seemed to turn and look at her the moment she and Miss Haran entered the dining room. Rita found this kind of intense public scrutiny unbearable. This was her holiday, and it seemed not to have occurred to her that, on the ship, she would be instantly recognized. The captain's courteous invitation for Rita and Miss Haran to join him at his special tables-elevated slightly above the rest—^was an acute agony for Rita, whose new position in the dining room made her all the more vulnerable. But the first night she really had no choice but to accept. Not so afterward. "We never went back to the dining room because she couldn't stand being looked at," Miss Haran recalls. "We ate in the room. And then we would go walking when it was darkest, when there weren't too many people around. She was virtually a prisoner in her room."

In Cap d'Antibes, Rita was the object of quite another sort of attention—and this she did not find displeasing. In much the same way as Orson had seen and fallen for Rita in a magazine photograph. Prince Aly Khan had been obsessed with Gilda. Orson recalls that he had known the Muslim prince long before Rita did, since the two of them had played together as young boys on the Riviera. Just as Orson had had a party arranged where he and Rita might seem inadvertently to meet, now the Aly Khan asked Elsa Maxwell to arrange a gathering at Cap d'Antibes for which he secretly paid. Contrary then to the story that Elsa Maxwell had spontaneously played matchmaker between them, it was the Aly Khan who had deliberately engineered the meeting—although Miss Maxwell was only too willing to take credit. On this trip Rita was generally disinclined to accept any invitations to parties, for she was much too retiring to walk into crowded rooms where she knew no one. Still, since Elsa Maxwell was an old friend through Orson, Rita accepted this one invitation. She could not have suspected how much it would change her life. However richly he deserved his reputation as an international playboy, the darkly handsome thirty-eight-year-old eldest son of the Aga Khan was in his own way as sensitive and insecure as Rita. Because of his considerable fortune and position, Aly

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constantly perceived others as fawning on him in hopes of some reward. Distrustful of the motives of those around him, he despaired of finding anyone to talk to in a more than superficial way. Despite their material generosity with him, his father and stepmother appeared to withhold the personal warmth and affection that he longed for. Behind the public persona of the relentless womanizer there was a loneliness and a genuine need for love that Rita found immensely appealing. Not long after they met, she and Aly repaired to his French villa, the magnificent Chateau de I'Horizon, then set off for Spain together. "It should have been a summer romance that ended at the end of the summer," says Shifra Haran, who observed behind the scenes what the press could—^and did—only speculate about. Rita herself wondered whether it had in fact ended when as fall approached she set sail for New York on her way back to Hollywood, where she was expected to resume work at Columbia. But any doubts she may have had about her romance with Aly were instantly dispelled when he turned up in Hollywood in pursuit of her.

For Rita, Cap d'Antibes had been the start of a new romance, but although one evening Orson and Rita did indeed dine together, the Riviera had been strictly business for Orson. ''I had no time to swim," says Orson. ''I was moving around looking for money." Of Life magazine's having photographed him shirtless, however, Orson laughs: '*It was to enter into the spirit of the thing! It looked better than Swifty Lazar, who once came tiptoeing out to see me when I was in a bathing suit on the sands in San Sebastian. And there was Swifty and he had patent-leather shoes on! Now if you've never seen patent-leather shoes on the beach, your life isn't complete until you do!" But at Cap d'An-tibes, Orson's entering into **the spirit of the thing" (as he puts it) paid off, for Zanuck helped him get the movie roles he needed to pay for Othello. That August in Rome, Orson appeared as Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, a new Tyrone Power picture for Zanuck's 20th Century-Fox, for which he earned $100,000. From then on, Orson would appear in many of what were to him routine roles like this in which, generally, he invested very little of himself. In hopes of directing movies worthy of the name Orson Welles, he rented out that name and the familiar face and voice that went with it. Eventually this strategy would result in Orson's becoming distanced not only from some of his characters but from himself as well, since he spent so much

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time working on projects with which he did not identify, and that gave him so httle satisfaction.

Satisfaction was what he hoped to derive from the pictures he directed. Hence his perplexity when, that September, Macbeth was poorly received at the Venice Film Festival. He had, in fact, suspected that there might be a problem, and had withdrawn Macbeth from the official competition in which it had initially been entered: for Laurence Olivier's far costlier—^and more conventional— Hamlet was also to be screened at Venice, and alongside this film Welles's eccentric Macbeth, with its queer costumes and unabashedly makeshift settings, might look shoddy by contrast. But Macbeth was not supposed to look like Olivier's Hamlet. Orson had eschewed the polished, classical approach to Shakespearean production epitomized by Olivier's Hamlet in favor of the strangeness that had been his aim in Lady from Shanghai. The controversial barbarism of this Macbeth reflected both the severely limited means at his disposal and the determination to view the classic play from a new angle. Perhaps it was too new and startling for most viewers—^but Orson had never intended the film for a mass audience anyway (the limited potential audience had been a principal reason for making it so cheaply). Wrote Jean Cocteau: ''Orson Welles's Macbeth leaves the spectator deaf and blind and I can well believe that the people who like it (and I am proud to be one) are few and far between." By way of rationalizing the humiliating reviews, Orson told others, and perhaps himself, that there was much prior animosity against him among the Italian press corps who resented Gregory RatofTs having ejected reporters from the set of Cagliostro, and having steadfastly kept them from talking to Orson. To his friend Ratoff, Orson lamented that he was hated in Italy—^a state of affairs that seemed all the more painful since he had fled to Italy in hopes of starting anew.

The sound track—the Scottish burr in which the dialogue was spoken, and which Orson had chosen precisely for its marvelous strangeness—^became a subject of immense controversy for English-speaking reviewers who complained that they could not understand it. In response to the controversy about the sound track. Republic studios decided to redub the picture to get rid of the Scottish burr—they hoped, misguidedly, that doing so would make the picture suddenly accessible to a mass audience. But criticism of the notorious Scottish burr had merely indicated a more general feeling among the film's detractors

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that nothing in Welles's Macbeth quite made sense: for those who despised the film's eccentricities, the sound track was probably just the most obvious thing to complain about. Since Orson was hardly about to return to the U.S. to dilute his own picture at the very moment he was trying to get started on a new one, it fell upon Wilson to supervise the arduous reworking of approximately sixty percent of Macbeth's sound track. Later, Orson himself would fiddle with the track in London. This prolonged additional work on Macbeth further—and fully—obliterated any hope of the picture's serving as a model of efficient production. Who in Hollywood would possibly take a chance on Orson again after this?

But if he was a bit less hysterical than he might have been about the great disaster of Macbeth, it was because Orson's thoughts were just then on a homely Italian actress, with whom he had fallen madly in love. ''She had a face like a spoon," Orson recalls, ''but when she was young, in spite of her looks, she had a tremendous allure for men. I wasn't the only idiot. They really were falling all over themselves for her—^inexplicably, but they were." Like his many rivals, Orson was unfazed by her physical unattractiveness. "I was blinded, unable to see, " he recalls. "It was real low comedy and I knew it. I knew perfectly well that I was acting like an idiot. I couldn't help it! The reason is so egotistical and unspeakable. You see, I have been blessed by some kind of interior sexual mechanism, where if a girl is not ever going to say yes, something clicks, and I don't want it. This had given me the impression that no woman in the world would refuse me if I tried hard enough. You must understand, at this point I hadn't made it with her. It was the total novelty: I had everything to offer her and she wouldn't have anything to do with me. I couldn't cure myself. Charlie Lederer [to whom Orson had written letters about his unrequited love] told me that I should visualize her sitting on the toilet picking her nose. And I wrote him back and said, 'It's the most enchanting vision I've ever thought of!' "

For the first time in his life Orson took perverse pleasure in a woman's mistreating him. "She treated me like dirt," he explains, "and I had never had that experience. I think I turned, briefly, as one might turn into any sort of pervert, into some kind of masochist. I did all the jealous bits! I knew that she was humping away with other men, and

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there I was out in the garden looking at the window! And don't forget that I was in Hollywood during the war, when there was no competition! You know, there's nobody I missed. That's all I can tell you. I was the only man in Hollywood. So I didn't know what it was not to have a garland of beauties fighting for my attention. And here was this pockmarked little beast! So anybody who was talking to me during this period was talking to a madman.

"I took her to Venice, and we went to all the grand balls and the dinners, and all she did was snarl at everybody. Everybody hated her— except me. I probably hated her, but I didn't know what I felt except that I was going to get her into that bedroom or else. All this happened at a point when I was really reaching young middle-age or elderly youth—^I had my comic men's menopause ten years too early, like everything else!"

At the beginning, their relationship had been further complicated by neither one's being able to speak the other's language. "When I didn't know what she was shouting at me it was just marvelous Italian theater," says Orson. "She made scenes all over Italy. She didn't leave out a single province. The point is that my interest in her—^which is a mild word—^began when I didn't speak a word of Italian, and she didn't speak a word of English. But through the months, she learned English, and I learned Italian, and we discovered that we detested each other." What Orson did not know was that, even as he was madly pursuing her, she was regularly sleeping with a member of the film crew he had assembled for Othello. Ironically, this was the only other man besides Lederer to whom Orson had confessed his passion. He was also the first person to hear when at last Orson succeeded in getting her to bed. "I had one night with her," Orson says. ^^One night. In Venice. And it was not a night to remember—^but I did it! I'd finally climbed up to that balcony, you see. And the first thing I did was to run and tell him that I'd had victory, not knowing that he was the man. And he complimented me! What happened was that I slowly realized that she was going to bed with him all the time, and had been from the beginning. It slowly dawned on me that I was the biggest cuckold in Italy. And he was the man I used to confide in my difficulties with her. He'd hold my hand and encourage me." By the time Orson found out about his rival, however, he had fallen out of love. "I wasn't in love anymore," he recalls, "but I was stupefied by my own stupidity!" But having finally

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gotten what he'd wanted all along, a night with the woman whose face was like a spoon, did Orson have any regrets? "I had a role to play, and I was going to get in there, and I did," he says philosophically, ''but it wasn't worth it, believe me."

When Orson was still pursuing the elusive actress, and shooting a bit of (eventually discarded) footage for Othello in Venice, Alex Korda sent word that at last he had a project for him—^not to direct but to act in: The Third Man, to be directed by Carol Reed, and to co-star Joseph Gotten. David Selznick, who had the American rights to the picture, wanted Reed and Korda to use Noel Coward in the role of the enigmatic Harry Lime, but Reed held out for Orson Welles. Although the part was absolutely central to the film, it was quite small and would not require Orson to spend much time away from Italy. Orson was reluctant to break off his preliminary work on Othello, however, and as much as he adored him, he resented Korda's offering him acting work when all their previous deals for Orson to direct had fallen through. Still Orson badly needed the money to get on with Othello. Having decided that he had little choice but to take the acting job, Orson figured that, before he accepted, he would play hard to get. ''I knew I was going to do it," laughs Orson, "but I was going to make Alex pay for all those movies I hadn't done." So when Korda sent his brother Vincent to track down Welles and bring him back to London to sign the contract, Orson deliberately kept giving him the slip all over Italy. ''I thought if they really want me for this," says Orson, "they're going to have to chase me, and I'm going to make it just as unpleasant as possible." When at last Vincent Korda caught up with Orson, he loaded him into a private plane for London. Orson shared the back seat with Vincent's young son, Michael, and a magnificent basket of fruit that Vincent had prepared for his brother, and that Orson proceeded to wreck by taking one bite out of each fruit. "It was going to be offered as a great present," says Orson of his wicked little joke. "He'd gone and carefully picked each piece of fruit. It was too good to be true! I knew Alex wouldn't touch any of it if it had been bitten into!" When he finally signed Korda's contract in London, Orson's need for immediate cash to make Othello caused him to make a very bad deal. "I was given a choice between $100,000 or something like twenty percent of the picture," Orson recalls, "and I took the $100,000. Picture grossed, you know, something unbelievable. Because in America it was only a

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success, but in the rest of the world it was an absolute bombshell—^it was The Sound of Music, you know. There never was such a hit in twenty-five years as there was in Europe. I could have retired on that!"

As it happened, the night before Orson went to Vienna to appear as scheduled in The Third Man was also the night he finally got to sleep with the spoon-faced Italian actress he had been pursuing. He arrived in Vienna "still numb" from the experience, so that when he met the beautiful female star of The Third Man, Alida Valli, he barely seemed to notice her. "I'd lost my mind in some way," Orson admits. "I didn't see Alida Valli, the sexiest thing you ever saw in your life. It didn't even register with me that she was female. We had long conversations about Austria and all that—^instead of me leaping into action! Crazy! Completely mad! And I see her now and she excites me beyond words. I was right there—^next door to her in the hotel. Just a little knock on the door and, you know, borrow some salt. I see The Third Man every two or three years—^it's the only movie of mine I ever watch on television because I like it so much—^and I look at Alida Valli, and I say, 'What was in your mind when you were ten days in Vienna and you didn't make a move?' She drives me mad with lust when I see her in it!"

Orson did not wish to leave his pock-marked ladylove unguarded while he was in Vienna. She was about to go abroad to make a film of her own, and since there was no question of his accompanying her, Orson instinctively did what he always had in such circumstances: he wired Hortense Hill to come to Europe at his expense. It seemed to Orson that Hortense could always be counted on to watch over his women in his absences. The series of wires that Orson dispatched to Woodstock struck Skipper as "frantic." Hortense had only recently undergone an operation, which had left the Hills short of funds. But Orson sounded so genuinely "desperate" to Skipper that he borrowed the cash to get his wife over to Europe. Once she got there, however, Hortense disliked the spoon-faced actress as much as most other people did. Nor did she succeed in doing what Orson says he secretly hoped she would: "To try to persuade her what a wonderful fellow was.

That November Rita's divorce from Orson became final. Having pursued Rita to America the Aly Khan had installed himself in a house across from hers; openly moving in with Rita and little Becky was cer-

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tain to stir up even more of a scandal in the press than the couple already had. In 1948, the fact that the Aly Khan was still officially married to someone else made his affair with Rita seem especially titillating. Reporters hounded them wherever they went, which was a source of immense agitation to Rita, so that Miss Haran was generally the one to show the prince around Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Rita was also unhappy with her part in Lona Hanson^ which Harry Cohn insisted she do next. Hoping to get away at least temporarily from both the press and Harry Cohn, Rita fled, with Aly and Miss Haran, to Mexico City. Much to Rita's horror, the desk clerk at the hotel at which they had reservations had sold the information about their secret arrival to the local papers, and the party had to slip away to another hotel. Only Rita and Miss Haran signed the guest register, so that if the reporters found them it would seem that the prince was not there. Several of Miss Haran's relatives, among them a rabbinical circumciser, aptly named David Klip, lived in Mexico City, but she had no time to contact them as she busied herself with supervising the hauling of a large bed into the room reserved for the lovers. Hours later, after midnight, in the tiny room where she had gone to bed herself. Miss Haran was abruptly awakened by the arrival of her local family members. When she inquired how they possibly knew she was there, they waved before her the front page of a newpaper proclaiming that Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan (whose real name was Shifra Haran) were in town. It certainly had not taken long for the press to find Rita and Aly at the hotel. An elevator operator and a maid were reporters in disguise, who thought they had uncovered the secret name of the man all the world knew as the Aly Khan, but who, they disclosed, was really Shifra Haran. With so much pressure on the relationship, it is not surprising that Rita's grave insecurities surfaced in an explosion of jealous rage when Aly spent ninety minutes at the manicurist. That he calmly told her where he'd been, and that Miss Haran had been with him all along, didn't placate Rita; as with Orson, she couldn't seem to bear their being apart, even for so short a time. The prince chose to disregard this bad omen.

On their return to Hollywood, Rita learned that Columbia Pictures had suspended her for not having shown up to make Lona Hanson, and so Rita and Aly moved on, staying in Hollywood only as long as was necessary to pick up Becky before they set sail for Europe on the Brit-

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tanic. On the day of departure, they arrived at the ship separately in hopes of throwing off the reporters and photographers; Rita wore a dark mink coat and looked terrified by the flashing cameras and persistent questions as she scurried up the gangplank clutching Becky's hand. She found some refuge from the press at the prince's great house in Ireland, where the weary travelers rested after the crossing, but her mercurial behavior perplexed the prince. He confided his anxieties to Miss Haran, who, since she had known Rita longer than he, might help him to make some sense of Rita's moods. In private this notorious international playboy revealed himself to Miss Haran as "shy, bashful, misunderstood"—^and quite unable to understand the woman he loved; but he took a warm and special interest in Orson's daughter. "The prince was wonderful to Rebecca, just wonderful!" says Miss Haran. "She needed someone."

Soon thereafter Becky and her father had a strained reunion in Paris at Orson's hotel, where Miss Haran (who accompanied Becky for the occasion) was startled by Orson's shabby, soiled, "down-at-the-heels" appearance. How different he seemed from the Hollywood days when she or Shorty had followed him about with spare shirts in case he wanted to change, which he sometimes did several times a day. She remembered him as impeccable, immaculate—so unlike the rumpled bo-hemian who ushered her into his suite. If at the moment he was not spending his money on new clothes, it was to put every last penny into Othello. But he had spent a good deal of money on presents for Becky, which filled the room. She took little interest in them, however, and she bawled uncontrollably while Miss Haran unbundled her from her rain clothes. Orson seemed unsure of what to say to her; for her part, the Aly Khan had already supplied her with more toys than she needed, so the gifts from Orson went unnoticed. At the end of this exceedingly awkward visit, as Becky started to bawl again the moment Miss Haran began to dress her, Orson threw the child a long glance and muttered, "Same as me—^no discipline! That's my trouble: I never had any either!"

What he did have at this moment was an obsession: to assemble and complete Othello. The footage he had shot earlier had to be discarded now that his lago, Everett Sloane, bailed out of the picture. Tormented by what he perceived as his own physical unattractiveness, Sloane maintained an ambivalent relationship with Orson, who had directed

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him in his greatest roles—Bernstein in Citizen Kane and Bannister, the crippled attorney, in Lady from Shanghai. Sloane bitterly resented his inability to be cast as the handsome leading man Orson typically portrayed, and this resentment of Orson would have made Sloane a natural lago to his Othello. But as it turned out, Sloane was disinclined to tolerate the sporadic manner in which Orson was apparently going to have to shoot Othello. To replace him, Orson asked Carol Reed's help in getting James Mason, who, years before, had followed Orson at the Dublin Gate. But Reed told Orson that Mason was entirely wrong for the part. Instead, he suggested that Micheal MacLiammoir might be the perfect lago for Orson. Orson was not so sure. He had not seen MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards since the Todd Summer Festival in 1934, and he had not forgotten his resentment at how shabbily they had treated him in Dublin and in Woodstock. Although they had been out of his life for a decade and a half, they were distinctly present in his thoughts, particularly because of All for Hecuba, the graceful memoir MacLiammoir had since written, and which Orson had hurled across the room when he got to its portrait of him.

Micheal dreaded seeing Orson too; all his worst fears of Orson's one day becoming his better had more than come true. Never had Micheal been more aware of his jealousy of Orson than when the film of Jane Eyre opened in Dublin at the same time he was appearing onstage there as Rochester. Two Jane Eyres and two Rochesters were more than Dublin needed. The competition from Orson had come as a devastating blow to Micheal who, as a passionate devotee of the Brontes, had been waiting all his life to play Rochester, which he did now in the manner of Sarah Bernhardt. Wherever he went in Dublin, Micheal was confronted with people who insisted on comparing his and Orson's performances. ''You know," says Orson, "Micheal told me he'd go into the restaurant and they'd say, 'Ah, you're not as good as Mr. Well-es. He's the man for the part, sir!' 'Oh well, he's a star of the fil-ums, sir. Ya can't go up against that!' "

Micheal had another reason as well for hesitating to accept Orson's invitation to Paris. Having recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and having put on a bit of weight, Micheal had for the most part lost his looks, and he shuddered to think of the screen test that Orson proposed. As it turned out, Micheal went to Paris, and Orson never did subject him to the ordeal of the screen test. Years before, when Orson

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had invited the Dubliners to Todd, it had been Micheal who talked a dubious Hihon into going. This time it had been Hihon who had gently persuaded him.

Although Welles and MacLiammoir had increased in girth since their last encounter in America, the subliminal tensions between them, and their efforts to mask those tensions behind a show of affection that, deep down, neither of them really felt, were quite the same as they had been before. "He was always on —^ferociously on —" says Orson of MacLiammoir, "not to show his jealousy about Hilton, you see. Because Hilton loved me—I think Hilton genuinely did—^at the moments when he was not under Micheal's influence." As in their youth, Orson was anxious to impress the Dubliners, and so—despite his struggle to raise money for Othello —^he spent vast sums in the costliest of restaurants, where time and again, Micheal, and indeed the rest of Orson's entourage, were his guests and his audience. "One did rather have to grit one's teeth as one came into a restaurant with him," says Orson of MacLiammoir, at whom people inevitably stared. Did Micheal intentionally make up his face to look a bright orange? Did he know that his toupee kept slipping off his head, or that his mascara was almost always running? "I told him he looked like an unemployed gypsy fiddler," Orson recalls, "and that he ought to try and pull himself together." As for the huge restaurant bills, Orson figured that in restaurants where they knew him he could always run up a tab, and that, at length, he could always earn enough quick cash by acting to pay off at least his most urgent debts. When he had spent money he did not really have on Hilton and Micheal in New York it had been to create in them, and perhaps in himself, the proper spirit; now, with Othello, he did not want his cast and crew to think that this was only a low-budget picture. The grand style in which they were treated set the tone for the comparable generosity of spirit with which it was hoped they would work.

Only Desdemona remained to be cast. By March when rehearsals began Orson had settled on a young French actress named Cecile Aubry, whom Henri-Georges Clouzot had been talking up. But after only three days of work on Othello, she announced that she was leaving to do another film. As Orson had as yet no contract with Miss Aubry, she was quite without obligation to him. Orson decided that even without a Desdemona (later he cast the Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier) he could start filming those scenes in which she did not appear. But dis-

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covering that he was without funds again, he went to London and hired himself out to the very same movie for which Cecile Aubry had decamped. In Henry Hathaway's The Black Rose, much to Orson's dehght, he would have to be thickly and laboriously made up to play a Mongol chieftain. As in Prince of Foxes, his co-star was Tyrone Power.

Before he had run out of money, Orson had already hired a crew to go with him to North Africa to begin Othello. Although he had postponed beginning his own film to act in The Bktck Rose in Morocco, some of the Othello crew showed up there anyway to be certain they got paid. ''So there was a whole crew for a movie that wasn't being shot!" laughs Orson. He put up his Othello cast at his own expense in a villa outside Rome until he returned.

Initially Hathaway was delighted at the opportunity to direct Orson: "I wanted Welles—^who wouldn't want Welles in a picture?" says Hathaway. ''He's a great actor and everything—^but he's only trouble." This trouble was perhaps the result of Orson's shifting back and forth between being the head of his own company and a member of Hathaway's, a transition he didn't always negotiate smoothly. "He doesn't like direction," says Hathaway, who was certainly not the sort of director to encourage Orson's taking over. Even at the dinner table Orson asserted himself in a manner that irritated Hathaway. "Welles would take over every time," complains Hathaway, who finally decided to set up a small table in a tiny room off the kitchen, where he and his wife, and Tyrone Power and his, could dine quietly. But it was not long before Orson figured out where they were and, leaving his own entourage in the dining room, went back to Hathaway's table to inquire if they were being served what he called "special food" there. "No," said Hathaway, "we don't want special food. We want quiet!" But this seemed to escape Orson, who was sure they were indeed eating better in the back room and not telling him, so the next night, when Hathaway arrived there, he saw that Orson had ordered two tables set up, one of them for him to hold court. Content to allow Orson to get all the "special food" he wanted, the Hathaways and the Powers returned to the main dining room.

On the set Hathaway bristled at what he perceived as Orson's resisting his directorial authority. Thus, Hathaway describes a scene in which he had trouble getting Orson to do what he asked. "We did it.

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and we did it, and we did it," recalls Hathaway of the many takes. "And finally he said to me in front of the company, 'Mr. Hathaway, I've played this scene every conceivable way that I know how to play it. I've played it fast. I've played it slow. I've played it loud, and I've played it soft.' And I said, 'Mr. Welles, you're a genius, but you've played it every single way but the way I've asked you to play it.' And he looked me straight in the eye and we went and did the scene and I printed it." All of which suggested that Orson knew exactly what the director had wanted all along, and exactly how to do it. "He's such a conniving bastard," says Hathaway. Orson's consolation for having had to postpone Othello to act in The Black Rose was the affair he conducted with the "great, tall, dark, tattooed creature," as he describes her, who had been provided by the production company to translate for him with the locals. After dinner, Orson and his six-foot Berber girlfriend could often be seen riding off into the mountains on burros.

To work out last-minute details on Othello, Orson had gone to Rome where, much to his surprise, he received word from Rita that she needed to see him. "She sent for me and asked me to take her back," says Orson. "She sent me a telegram in Rome. I couldn't get any plane, so I went, stood up, in a cargo plane, to Antibes." There, he says, he went straight to her hotel, where Rita was waiting. "There were candles and champagne ready—and Rita in a marvelous negligee," says Orson. "And the door closed, and she said, 'Here I am.' " Did Orson know that Rita was about to get married? "She didn't tell me she was going to marry him," says Orson. "She said, 'Marry me.' I didn't even know it was anything but a romance, one of those in-the-newspaper things." The next day Orson sadly returned to Italy. Having seen her like that, he realized that he still loved her, but that he could not bear to make her unhappy again.

Shortly thereafter word came that Rita had married Aly in the village of Vallauris, near Cannes. At Chateau de I'Horizon, where the reception was held, white flowers floating in the pool formed the intertwined initials M and A for Margarita and Aly. Although the couple would have preferred it otherwise, their wedding was copiously documented in the international press, who could not seem to take enough pictures. Wearing a blue Jacques Fath dress and a delicately floppy picture hat, Rita looked lovely as she cut the many-tiered wedding cake

Barbara Learning

with a great saber. And there in the pictures of the happy event that flashed around the world was Uttle Rebecca Welles, wearing a dotted organdy dress—and looking distinctly like Orson.

A month later, in June of 1949, Orson and his Othello company finally landed in Mogador on the northern coast of Morocco, where Orson had tramped about in his youth. To pay for costumes and sets Orson had been counting on the lire from the Italian backers. But Orson says: "When I arrived in Mogador I got a telegram that they'd gone bankrupt. And we didn't even have return tickets. Sixty people! No costumes, no money, no return tickets, nothing!" Looking around at the actors he'd brought with him to North Africa, Orson decided that "if I had them, I might as well shoot a movie. I had a wonderful cast. I couldn't just send them away." If he had, he points out, "I never would have forgiven myself."

Not without cause, Welles describes the films of his European period—of which Othello was the first—as a "desperate adventure." The first scene shot was to have been the killing of Roderigo. But the costumes did not turn up as expected, and Orson was forced to improvise by setting the action not in the street, where the actors would have to be costumed, but in a steam bath, where towels alone would do. Perhaps it was the unanticipated bankruptcy of the Italian backers, perhaps the need constantly to improvise, to make something out of nothing, that plunged Orson into the oddest of moods: "There was no hotel there," he recalls, "and we had to go to the public baths, and walk in our nightgowns through the streets, and it was heavenly! I was convinced I was going to die. The wind blew all the time, which seemed to me associated with my death. And things were so terrible, there didn't seem to be any way out of it. And I was absolutely, serenely prepared never to leave Mogador. I was sure they were going to carry me out dead." These dark premonitions notwithstanding, Orson describes his work in Mogador as "one of the happiest times I've ever known, despite all the struggle."

It was also a happy time for Micheal who, although Hilton had joined him in Morocco—"to keep him company and out of trouble," says Orson—discovered among the local population a great many masculine forty-five- and fifty-year-old men to his liking. Micheal's nocturnal activities did not escape the amused attention of Mogador's governor. "The governor of Mogador, an enormously sophisticated character, in-