Orson

Somebody once told Orson Welles he looked like a Roman emperor. "You mean I look sensual," he corrected.

There is something of the Roman emperor about Welles. There's a pagan zest in his devotion to profane pleasures like 75¢ cigars, flowing silk cravats, dozens of oysters, two-inch steaks, Dolores Del Rio, Rita Hayworth and Eartha Kitt.

But he is a good deal more than a sensualist. Actor, director, producer, magician, newspaper columnist, radio commentator, playwright, novelist, editor of Shakespeare: his restless creativity darts in and out of enterprises so fast it's almost impossible to keep up with him. Unfortunately, he's erratic. Like the little girl with the curl, he's either very, very good or he's horrid. But horrid in the grand manner, for Welles is never mediocre.

This running to extremes is also true of his audiences. Very few people can take Orson or leave him alone. They either intensely admire or intensely dislike him.

For the record, George Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on May 6, 1915, and made his theatrical debut at age 10 in Marshall Field's window in Chicago, playing Peter Rabbit. Two years later, he was staging JuliusOrsonCaesar at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, playing Marc Antony, Cassius, and the Soothsayer. At 16, he ran off to Ireland to paint pictures, ended up in Dublin penniless, and glib-talked his way into a juicy role with the famed Gate Theatre.

He was in his late teens when he took a job chuckling sardonically over American airwaves as "The Shadow." By the time he reached his early twenties, he was staging Caesar again, this time in modern dress as one of many chores for the WPA's Federal Theatre. On this occasion, he played only one role: Brutus – in a blue serge suit. Right about this time he began to stick the "Mercury Theatre" label on all pies in which he had a finger. Then, on October 30, 1938, Mars attacked the Earth.

It was a pleasant autumn evening. The kids were roaming the streets in Halloween attire. Grown-ups, fiddling with their radio dials, found a program of Latin music and settled back to listen to the familiar melody, "La Cumparsita." After a few bars, however, an announcer cut in: "Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin ... Professor Farrel of the Mount Jennings Observatory reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars, and moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity ... We now return you to the music of Ramon Raquello ..."

But Ramon was to be interrupted soon again for an interview with a Princeton, New Jersey, astronomer, and a broadcast from a farm in Grovers Mill, also New Jersey, where a "meteorite" thirty yards in diameter had fallen. Radio listeners leaned forward in their chairs when they heard the announcer break off his smooth commentary to exclaim. "Just a minute! Something's happening ... The top is beginning to rotate like a screw! Something's crawling out ... it's large as a bear and glistens like wet leather. But that face. It – it's indescribable! It's coming this way –" The radio audience heard a crash, then dead silence. Finally a studio announcer told them that "due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grovers Mill."

That was enough for many New Jersey listeners. Families piled into cars and fled in panic. Some stayed to hear more: a State Militia officer ordering the territory under martial law, news of eight battalions wiped out by a heat ray, bulletins reporting more Martian landings in Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis.

And some even stayed long enough to hear the commercials and Orson's bland reminder that they were listening to a special Halloween broadcast of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Three results of the broadcast were a scholarly Princeton University treatise on mass hysteria, an FCC ruling on over-realistic radio shows and overnight fame for our boy.

The Mars affair made enough noise to attract Hollywood. In 1941, RKO tempted Orson with an offer to write, direct and star in his own film. Orson yielded to temptation and went West, taking with him such little-known Mercury Theatre players as Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead.

Some movie moguls took a dim view of putting an entire film into the hands of a precocious smart-aleck who had never seen a sound stage. But Welles showed them that a fertile imagination is just as valuable as years of experience. He thought up new film techniques, revived some old ones, borrowed discriminately from here and there, and turned out a movie masterpiece called Citizen Kane. Visually, it was a thing of bold contrasts, inquisitive camera angles and razor-sharp montage. It was the story of a millionaire's son who created a publishing empire only to see it partially crumble, attempted unsuccessfully to build a political career and, finally embittered, retired and died alone in a gloomy palace upon a man-made mountain. Louella Parsons saw the film before its release and ran, horrified, to her boss with shouts of "Libel!" Her boss listened to her description of the movie and immediately got in touch with RKO. "Shelve Citizen Kane," he demanded, "or I'll kill every RKO ad in every one of my papers!" RKO politely refused, and though Welles insisted Citizen Charles Foster Kane was fictional, it is interesting to note that the film was never advertised, reviewed or even mentioned in any of the newspapers owned by Louella's boss, Citizen William Randolph Hearst.

Welles liked film work. He immediately made another picture, The Magnificent Ambersons. It and Kane remain his two finest cinematic essays. Along about this time, he met up with a beautiful creature named Dolores Del Rio, and soon had her stripped down to a leopard skin for a sensational dance sequence in his movie, Journey Into Fear. This began a pattern of casting his current flames in his current productions.

In 1943, for instance, he combined business with pleasure by touring Army camps with Rita Hayworth. It was a magic act billed as "The Magnificent Orson – Alive," and he titillated the (concluded on page 50) Orson (continued from page 16) GI's by, among other things, sawing Rita in half. Rita's beau, Victor Mature, threatened to do the same to The Magnificent Orson if he didn't stop travelling around with his girl. Orson solved everything by marrying Rita.

The last thing the two of them did together before going their separate, sensational ways was The Lady From Shanghai. They filmed it during a vacation to South America. It was Rita's first and last appearance as a blonde and gave Orson the money to pay off a debt. "The only thing I learned from that picture," Orson said afterwards, "was how to photograph a sexy girl singing a song."

In 1946, with the help of a Jules Verne novel and music by Cole Porter, he bombed Broadway with a stunning extravaganza called Around The World. It was the last big thing he did before skipping the country. For several years, the only news the U.S. had of him came from stray bits in the gossip columns: "Orson is vacationing on the Riviera with the Darryl Zanucks" . . . "Orson is rumored to owe Uncle Sam back taxes" . . . "Orson is slated to play the film life of King Farouk" . . . "Orson is damned if he'll play King Farouk" ...

Actually, he was keeping pretty busy by writing plays and novels, broadcasting a kind of British "Dragnet" called Black Museum, filming Othello in Africa and Italy, appearing on the stage all over Europe (he speaks six languages), and accepting small but flashy parts in good British films like The Third Man and shoddy British films like Trent's Last Case and Return to Glennascaul. In Paris, he made the acquaintance of an ex-Katherine Dunham dancer named Eartha Kitt, and was so impressed by her that he cast her as Helen of Troy in his version of the Faust legend. Eartha was likewise impressed. To this day, her sloe eyes glaze as she declares, "He's the most fascinating man I've ever known."

Welles believes in "the complete human being" and is a champion of the individual. He says, "A man should be allowed to be crazy if he wants to be, to stay in bed one morning if he finds it good, or thumb his nose at a sacred image." Having thumbed his nose at a great many sacred images, himself, he speaks with the voice of authority. He's a professional non-conformist. Even his physical person is a defiance of tradition. Shakespearean actors are usually lean, raw-boned characters with Roman noses. Orson is undeniably a Shakespearean actor but he's a big beefy guy with a button nose and the face of a diabolic cherub.

Welles is devoted to the classic authors, but he is seldom content to leave them intact. He slashed Julius Caesar from a five-act tragedy to a one-act cyclone, then blithely added lines snitched from Coriolanus. On the other hand, he crammed hunks of Henry IV, Henry V and Lord knows what else into an evening's potpourri called Five Kings. He has done Macbeth as a jungle melodrama with a Harlem cast, and as a surrealistic smorgasbord of a film spoken in a Harry Lauder-type Scotch dialect. The Faust he did with Eartha was pasted up out of odd scraps of Milton, Dante and Marlowe.

Just last October, Welles dashed in and out of the country long enough to play King Lear on TV. Decked out in $75 gloves, real seaweed and a Santa Claus beard, he was his old booming, bug-eyed self, but he was also deeply moving and (to quote the script) "every inch a king." In a time when lesser actors speak knowingly of "restraint" and "underplaying" to rationalize their own inhibitions, Welles is not afraid of bigness and flourish. He belongs to a vanishing species: the heroic actor.

What's next on the agenda for Orson? Admirers of his early promise look for a return of the old fire, mellowed by age and experience. They pin their hopes on his excellent TV Lear and await the release of Othello with their fingers crossed. He was last seen hot-footing it into Canada, his portfolio bulging with unrevealed plans. When he was in New York for Lear, he mentioned his French novel, titled X, which he wants to film in Spain, Italy, Tangier, Germany and Mexico. Has Canada been added to the list?

Only The Shadow knows.

1950: Orson's "Faust" puzzled Paris with its mixture of Milton, Dante, Marlowe and Eartha Kitt. In Germany, the real Faust's home, he called the show "An Evening With Orson Welles."