The original Desdemona is no more

[Harvey Chartrand]

Betsy Blair has died at the age of 85. Best known as Marty's shy girlfriend in the 1955 hit movie with Ernest Borgnine, Blair was Orson Welles's original choice for the role of Desdemona in his film version of Othello. In her 2003 memoir entitled "The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood, and Paris", Ms. Blair revealed that she was the original Desdemona in Welles' Othello, but after a year of filming she was replaced by Suzanne Cloutier. I wonder if any of Betsy Blair's footage survives in the final cut of Othello. More than likely, I would presume. I was surprised to discover while reading her obit that Ms. Blair was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, Harvey, according to the obituary I read, Ms Blair, who had become a considerable star in her own right, following MARTY, attempted to join the Communist Party in Hollywood, but the leadership rejected her because she and husband Gene Kelly were too prominent! The Studios blacklisted her anyway, for the attempt, and she broke up with her husband of sixteen years after a time, and moved to Europe. Her work there on OTHELLO must have been among her first.

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

Why did Welles recast the role of Desdemona a year into production on Othello? Betsy Blair was an exceptional actress and beautiful in a less conventional way than Suzanne Cloutier... which perhaps would have made Ms. Blair a more suitable choice for the part. Perhaps, like Everett Sloane (Welles's first Iago), she grew weary of the open-ended, stop-and-start nature of the film's chaotic production... and backed out. Interesting that Ms. Blair remained in Europe and went on to star in Il Grido (The Cry) directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Welles's least favorite director), as well as a contemporary version of Othello – All Night Long, with Welles's protégé Patrick McGoohan as Johnnie Cousin, a talented and manipulative drummer (shades of Iago) who attempts to draw a newlywed jazz diva (Marti Stevens) into his band, ultimately pitting her against her jealous husband, Othello-like jazzman Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris). Ms. Blair plays Cousins' somewhat retiring wife Emily.

[tonyw]

I think some footage of her does survive in OTHELLO but she is in long shot. Blair also appeared in UK television, once opposite Rod Steiger in DEATH OF A SALESMAN. His energetic performance revealed a different type of Willy Loman who could have reached the heights of Madison Avenue had he wanted to!

[Alan Brody]

I think it's in the Rosabella documentary that Welles's DP on Othello tells how he convinced Welles that Betsy Blair was too plain-looking for the part of Desdemona. One can't help but think that it would have been a far different film in many ways if she had played the role.

[mido505]

Betsy Blair was actually Welles' third choice to play Desdemona; his first choice, Lea Padovani, was an Italian actress with whom Welles was having a tempestuous affair at the time. This is the famous masochistic affair, mentioned in several Welles biographies, during which Welles claimed that he learned "the depth and keenness of lovemaking", and that "during the nine months that I spent with her I paid for everything that I'd ever done to women for twenty years."

According to every Wellesian's favorite biographer, Charles Higham, who interviewed Padovani extensively, Welles and she were engaged to be married. Unfortunately, Padovani was having a simutaneous affair with another man, a member of Welles' personal staff, who had a "terrible physical hold on her". This other lover eventually demanded that Padovani leave Welles; she broke off the engagement during a "hysterical" row with Welles, after which she fled her director-lover and the Othello set.

Padovani spoke very little English; Welles had her coached extensively, with the intent of getting her lip movements phoneticaly correct, so that he could dub her part later with a more experienced English actress. Interestingly, after Padovani left Welles, she appeared on the London stage in a production of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tatoo, acting almost continuously in English for over three hours.

Next up for the part of Desdemona was Canadian actress Cecile Aubrey, with whom Welles had just acted in The Black Rose. Aubrey, a strikingly natural beauty with a powerful instinctive talent for acting and as flimsy a grasp of the English language as Padovani lasted exactly two days before fleeing for a French production of Bluebeard.

After an unsuccessful series of auditions with various actresses, Betsy Blair was recommended to Welles by director Anatole Litvak, for whom she had just acted in a small but vivid part in The Snake Pit. Welles eventually decided to dismiss Blair when he determined that she was too "cool", "fragile", and "modern looking" for his conception of Desdemona. Blair's standing was not helped by the fact that Welles' Iago, Micheal MacLiammoir told the director that Blair "had a face like a golf ball".

I recall reading somewhere that Padovani is in a few long shots of the final version of Othello; I have heard nothing about any remnants of Blair's performance.

[mido505]

From Frank Brady's Citizen Welles: "Orson's determined arrogance of editing seemed to know no bounds in Othello. Instead of reshooting the long or medium shots taken with Lea Padovani, he simply included them, hoping that the audience would not notice a body shape, even a face, different from the "real" Desdemona."

This seems pretty conclusive, except that Welles' greatest biographer, Charles Higham, states that "not a foot" of Othello had been filmed until Welles assembled his cast in Mogador, Morocco, a location with which he had become enamored during the shooting of The Black Rose. The first scene filmed for Othello was the infamous costumeless murder of Roderigo in the Turkish Bath, for which Ms. Blair was present, by her account and others. So perhaps Brady was mistaken, and it was Blair and not Padovani who is seen in those long and medium shots. In leafing through my various Welles biographies, I can find no evidence that any scenes of Padovani and the mysterious now-forgotten Italian Iago who preceded MacLiammoir in the part were committed to celluloid.

There are some reports that Everett Sloan was Welles' original choice for Iago. If so, he seems to have bowed out fairly early, as Sloan is not even mentioned in this regard in several bios.

According to Brady, that is not Cloutier's voice as Desdemona in the finished film; he redubbed the part with Scottish actress Gudrun Ure, who later played Desdemona to Welles' Othello in his 1951 stage production at the St. James theater in London. A notoriously tough cookie, dubbed "The Iron Butterfly" by Welles, who had failed to seduce her, Cloutier had been unavailable to do some minor redubs of her part, for which Welles hired Ure. Finding Ure's readings superior to Cloutier's, and in a puckish mood, Welles decided to have Ure redub the entire role. "Wouldn't it be fun to dub her completely?" Welles asked his horrified editor, Bill Morton. "I can't wait to see what Cloutier's reaction will be when she attends the premiere and finds out it's not really her, at least not her voice, and in many shots not her body--on the screen."

That being said, it must be mentioned that Welles and Cloutier remained close friends until the end of Welles' life. It was she to whom he entrusted a significant portion of the negative of Don Quixote for safe-keeping.

[Glenn Anders]

I would submit that a major problem with OTHELLO, reasonably THE major problem, is that he never found a satisfactory Desdamona. He needed an actress, for his purposes, who could project blonde innocence, but at the same time a latin Renaissance passion which would stimulate both sides of Othello's nature. Of the actresses Welles had available to him, Lea Padovani was clearly the best fit, who brought the added advantage of appealing to Welles' id. After she had put him through the wringer, he seems to have wandered on the rebound from actress to actress, never again finding the right mix for his leading lady.

My guess is that Betsy Blair was not "too modern" but too plain, too "American girl next door," at least. In the sexist view of the time, she also appeared, at 28 or so, almost over the hill in the part. Cecile Aubrey, on the other hand, was about 20, perfectly ripe, but she did not stimulate the necessary animal eroticism. Lea Padovani, though about the same age as Miss Blair, was Italian, and seems to have had animal eroticism to spare.

Suzanne Cloutier, again about the same age as Betsy Blair and Lea Padovani, was the best compromise Welles could come up with. His nagging dissatisfaction with the casting, fueling his natural need to experiment, may have been an additional factor in his circus editing and dubbing of the part.

Betsy Blair showed up some three years later in a BBC Production of Othello, as Bianca. And twelve years after that, she appeared in a modern jazz version of the play. She clearly got some mileage out of the experience, if not an air plane ticket!

Glenn

[mido505]

Your point is an excellent one, Glenn, and I would urge you to take that insight to the next level, into territory only explored (invented?) by revered Welles biographer David Thomson, possibly risking Tony's wrath in the process, and ask whether Welles' struggle in casting (conceiving?) Desdemona perhaps mirrored a deeper struggle within Welles' psyche as he attempted to assimilate the insights about woman and Woman as revealed to him through the works of author Robert Graves. Clinton Heylin believes that Welles first became aquainted with Graves' works, and Graves' conception of the White Goddess around the time of the filming of The Lady from Shanghai, the first of Welles' films in which a female character is elevated into a complex archetype, dominating and controlling not only the film's mis-en-scene, but the narrative as well. The great problem in grappling with the Triple Goddess in her three aspects of Maiden/Mother/Crone is in assimilating the inumerable and often conflicting aspects of the goddess into a grand integrated whole. It is obvious from Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons that Welles held a fully formed archetypal conception of the Goddess in her aspect of Mother from an early age; but the dominance of this aspect of the archetype on his psyche seems to have led to a problematic lack of understanding of the other aspects, both in Welles' life and in his art. Elsa Bannister is Welles' first attempt to rectify this failure of understanding, and if Elsa is ultimately a negative figure, she is also the first unmistakeably tragic female character in a Welles film, as she genuinely seems to want to escape her poisonous nature and the degraded world that it engenders, only to find out that it is too late.

Welles next gives us the monumental monster Lady Macbeth, who embodies the most horrifying aspects of the Triple Goddess, aspects that Graves refused to deny or minimize. Once again we have a female character dominating the narrative, while behind her, pulling the strings and cackling away, are the three witches who really run the show. How I wish that Welles had succeeded in casting Agnes Moorehead in the role, as this Lady Macbeth is the ghastly mirror image of the good mother Mrs. Kane.

For Othello, Welles seems to have wanted to give us an image of woman as the ideal of purity and goodness. However, based on his enlarged understanding he seems to have rejected the more simplistic and virginal version of this archetype common to the culture, and best demonstrated by D. W. Griffith and his muse, Lilian Gish; there had to be an element of sensuality lurking under the surface, or Othello's passion for Desdemona would make no sense. Hence Lea Padovani, a sensual dark lady whose hair Welles had dyed blonde, as he had dyed Rita Hayworth's hair for Lady from Shanghai. Welles may have engaged in his degrading affair with Padovani as an abasement and atonement for his sometimes horrendous treatment of the women in his own life; certainly, he emerged from this episode mature enough to attract and marry the divinely aristocratic Paola Mori, who presided over Welles' greatest period of artistic attainment, until Oja Kodar crashed the party.

I suspect that the "too modern", "plain", "American girl next door" Betsy Blair was simply not grand enough for Welles' conception; he wanted a goddess. He got one in Suzanne Cloutier, but not the one he expected; she was an ice princess, the "iron butterfly", sublimely hermetic in her magisterial self-absorption, immune to his ministrations and unattainable. Cloutier is in her own way magnificent, but she does lack that requisite sensuality, and it unbalances the film.

Welles' next production, Mr. Arkadin, is an anomaly in his artistic progression, in that it lacks a strong central female character, but certain of its themes, while muted, are relevant to my argument. Although some critics believe Arkadin holds incestuous feelings towards his daughter, I disagree. Arkadin denies his daughter any sexuality; his death results from his refusal to see Raina as a fully formed woman. The approved boyfriend is a sexless British twit; Arkadin loathes Van Stratten because he sees himself in the younger man, a penniless adventurer seeking to attain status by sexually servicing a woman of power, as he had Sophie so many years ago. Because Arkadin, the master manipulator, can only conceive of sexuality as a degradation, as a mode of manipulation, he must deny sexuality to Raina, who is his image of purity and goodness. Sophie, by the way, is the Triple Goddess as crone, withered and diminished, but still wielding an uncanny power from her Mexican exile.

Welles would go on exploring various facets of the Triple Goddess in a series of films of extraordinary power, until he finally achieved the fully integrated image he had been seeking in the character of Tanya, as played by goddess Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil. After that, it was all down hill.

[The Night Man]

Interesting, mido. But sorry to say I don't find this line of thought very convincing.

Still, it's nice to see someone attempting a more searching investigation of Welles' work. Bravo for that.

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you, mido505: You've said it almost all -- brilliantly!

Upon examination, it may not be so much that Welles gained his understanding of The White Goddess entirely from Robert Graves, but that their thinking ran in parallel. [Graves' work was, of course, fuller, richer and more prolific on the precise subject in question.]

With deference to The Night Man's skepticism notwithstanding, you and the perceptive Clinton Heylin may not be the first or only ones to detect the influence of Robert Graves upon Orson Welles -- nor do we have to depend upon the prodigious insights of David Thomson -- but I would go further to suggest that nearly every Welles' film presents a bewildered search for an understanding of women. The problem for Welles and his male characters is that they want the maiden and mother but reject what they perceive as the crone [i.e., the witch, the independent woman]. Hence, without going through the whole canon you have covered so admirably, let me just add CITIZEN KANE' s Susan Alexander, who passes from Graves's stations of Maiden to Crone without passing through motherhood. Why? We surmise that having been abandoned by his own mother, having lost his socially contracted first wife and mother of his child, then the child, Charles Foster Kane attempts to literally create a maiden (child) goddess by projecting Susan, his "find," within a grueling education for that role of Goddess: a series of ill-conceived grand opera productions. When Susan Alexander Kane, the second Mrs. Kane, turns on him and his conception, becoming the cold "crone" he saw last most fearfully his beloved mother sent him away. Charlie Kane is left, besides his recognition of loss, with nothing of real worth but the potent memory of Rosebud.

It is a judgment upon men, American materialism, and perhaps as he was wont to prophesy, upon Welles himself.

I would hazard, too, that Isobel and Fanny Minafer fulfill similar Gravesean functions in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

[My derided theory that Welles' version of . . . AMBERSONS is really about Aunt Fanny may be still rattling around here somewhere. Do we not see the maiden, the mother and the crone in that film?]

Glenn

[mido505]

Thank you, Night Man, for your kind comment. I am pleased that you appreciate my efforts, even if you don’t agree with my conclusions.

And thank you Glenn, for once again enlarging the discussion and pointing us all in fresh new directions. I think your insight that “nearly every Welles film presents a bewildered search for an understanding of women” is fantastic, particularly as your choice of the word “bewildered” really nails the tone that Welles seems to be striving for in these films, particularly in the performances of his protagonists, whether played by himself or others. All anyone needs to do is remember the expression on Mike O’Hara’s face for most of the running time of The Lady From Shanghai in order to confirm the truth of that observation.

I might go as far as to say that nearly every Welles film presents a tragic passage from a warm, life-affirming, woman-centered, almost matriarchal culture, to a cold, mechanistic, ruthless male-centered culture that slowly grinds the life out of everything within it. Battle of Shrewsbury, anyone? Rosebud represents that lost world, so does the Amberson mansion during the ball; there is the Boar’s Head Tavern in Chimes at Midnight and Tanya’s bordello in Touch of Evil. Sometimes, as in Kane, or Ambersons, or Chimes, the film is specifically about the transition; in other films, such as Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, The Trial, and Touch of Evil, the transition has already occurred, and the world is a cesspool. I do not think it a coincidence that the most degraded images of women in Welles’ pictures occur in the films where the transition is almost complete.

I would like to read your theory, Glenn, about Ambersons being “really” about Aunt Fannie, because you are right. Aunt Fannie is not a goddess, like Isabel Minafer, she is a lesser figure, but she has a place in the world over which the goddess rules. When the goddess, and her world, dies, Aunt Fannie is cut adrift, left to wander, an increasingly marginalized and ineffectual figure, until, in the original conception, she fades away in a cheap boardinghouse, rocking, rocking, while the Two Black Crows natter in the background. God, what a desecration that tacked on studio ending is.

In my previous post, I stated, apropos my theory, that after Touch of Evil, it was “all down hill” for Welles. I would like to amend that statement. Certainly, Welles never again gave us an image of woman to equal the resplendent Tanya. Perhaps Welles realized that, after Dietrich, there was nowhere to go but down. There are two half-hearted attempts, in Miss Burstner, and Doll Tearsheet, both portrayed by Jeanne Moreau, but neither portrayal rises above the quotidian (imagine Dietrich in both roles to see more clearly what I mean); and Welles, perhaps sensing the dimunition, shifts his focus in The Trial and Chimes at Midnight to the triumph of the world where a goddess is simply not possible (although she never quite disappears. If you are looking for the real goddess in Chimes, I have two words for you - Mistress Quickly).

But Welles did revisit the goddess in all her magnificence one more time, very obliquely, in his justly celebrated paean to Chartres cathedral in F for Fake. Welles calls Chartres “a celebration to God’s glory, and the dignity of man” and hopes that “it might be just this one anonymous glory, of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand, choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose, when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been , to testify to what we had within us to accomplish…” All this may seem magnificently conventional to the casual viewer, except that, once we dig a little bit into the historical quagmire, we discover that Chartres was less a monument to the glory of God than to the glory of Mary, the Virgin, the Blessed Mother, or, to put it more concretely, the Christian version (transformation?) of the Great Mother herself, the White Goddess. Notre-Dame, the prenom to all the great French cathedrals, means "Our Lady". "Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres" translates as "The Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres".

You note, Glenn, correctly, that Graves was not the first to bring the White Goddess into prominence. In fact, I was first put on her scent, as it were, not by Graves, but, secondhand, by Gore Vidal, who for other reasons led me to Henry Adams, who turned out to be, among other interesting things, an early (late?) acolyte of Our Lady. Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, a brilliant study of the brilliant thirteenth century , in which he argues the Goddess, in her incarnation as the Blessed Mother was the central energy, or force, or animating principle of that society, which climaxed in the triumph of Chartres.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is an extraordinary work, but it is dense and technical and difficult to summarize. So instead, to bolster my point, I will quote somewhat extensive passages from the chapter “The Virgin and the Dynamo”, from The Education of Henry Adams, written in 1900. Then I will, blessedly, shut up.

Adams was writing during the Industrial Revolution, when his familiar world, and the world of his illustrious ancestors, was being upended (sound familiar?). Adams had attended the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and been astounded at the display; vast new forces, of electricity, of x-rays, and beyond, were about to change the world. The history-minded Adams looked at this staggering display and realized that the “nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediæval science, were called immediate modes of the divine substance.”

Adams saw society as being organized along a central dominating principle of force, whether that force be physical, such as electricity, or symbolic, such as the force represented by the cross. And between 310 and 1900 he saw in the medieval world of the thirteenth century the revival and triumph of the force of the goddess, a goddess that he found disturbingly absent in his beloved, and soon to be vastly changed, America:

“When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead….The knife-edge along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction. They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force;—at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either…The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental Goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was Goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund….

All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”

[Roger Ryan]

Without attempting to compete in the excellent analysis here, I'll only add that both Moreau in THE IMMORTAL STORY and Kodar in THE DREAMERS fit in quite well with the Graves theory and suggest that Welles did not abandon this theme in his late period work.

[Glenn Anders]

Roger: You have beaten me to a couple of fine observations. I doubt that, to his final day, Orson Welles ever abandoned his once unbridled romanticism. Certainly, your addition of Oja Kodar to his list of maidens and godesses is obvious and valid.

And mido 505, I am, for the moment, overwhelmed by your expanded analysis. Just let me suggest a rather harsh, different view of Welles' life and work -- but a fair one -- by Peter Conrad (author of Orson Welles: The Story of His Life):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2003/aug/29/4

Toward the end of his Guardian article, Conrad turns valedictorian and swings into line with our discussion.

And as for my idea about Aunt Fanny as the central figure in Welles' conception of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS as a film, here are a couple of URL's from the Wellesnet Archives which deal, in part, with our Gravesean subject and my theory:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=520&p=11874#p11874

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1244&p=10560#p10560

You will notice that among a number of excellent posts by others on the subject of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, I keep referring to my initial post about Aunt Fanny as the central character, but unfortunately, I didn't find the reference in the time my patience allowed me to look for it. [Still, I do seem to have a rather chilling prescience about the fate of Modern Aunt Fanny's.] That elusive post does exist, somewhere in a Golden Age Archives of Wellesnetmania. However, a lot of good give and take by better minds than mine is to be found in those threads I've listed above.

I'm going to have breakfast, mido505, and ponder your latest ideas.

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

What happened to our discussion of Betsy Blair and Othello?
To sweep her aside and dwell on Robert Graves and all this White Goddess malarkey is an insult to her memory.
This thread is supposed to be about the late Betsy Blair... and why things didn't work out for her in Othello. Michael MacLiammoir's adulatory comments about Ms. Blair are a revelation.

Check out this photo of her taken in 1962 with a very intense Patrick McGoohan and tell me Marty the Butcher wasn't a lucky guy! And that maybe Welles erred in dumping Blair for Suzanne Cloutier.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2146/229 ... 11.jpg?v=0

Blair also co-starred twice with Welles' best friend Joseph Cotten in The Halliday Brand (1957) and A Delicate Balance (1973).