Blunt,

There's a key issue here that Jeff stated.

Beatrice has no legal standing for the protection racket she's been running.

Time Warner and Universal are risk averse, major corporations.
Shaking them down with a nuisance lawsuit is no different than what unethical attorneys do to insurance companies on behalf of phony victims.

The difference is that in this case, the lifetime output of the Greatest Artist of the 20th Century is being held up at gunpoint.

I know that sometimes you react strongly to posts that disagree with you, and I mean no disrespect. Your comments are usually spot on. But in this case I think your missing the wood for the trees.

Thomas A. White is an ambulance chaser, and he is using hold-up tactics, bullying and intimidation to get his client money any way he can. The fact that he got one studio to settle out of court and pay big bucks in a recent suit -- can't remember which one -- sets a precedent, and it is now likely other studios will follow suit. Most studio moguls don't want the bad publicity, and it is easier to settle and silence Beatrice, all of which Thomas A. White knows very well and is using like blackmail. He is not even a qualified lawyer, but he has taken similar actions in representing the estate of Fred Astaire. His main argument is that the estate forever owns "intellectual property rights" and is therefore entitled to
its cut.

As for the mysterious 1944 document that gives Beatrice rights to the royalites of CITIZEN KANE, Stefan Drossler of the Munich Filmmuseum (whom I met with yesterday) is certain that it doesn't exist. Apparently, he asked Oja Kodar about it, and she is also convinced that the document is a myth Beatrice will not be able to substantiate in court -- if it ever gets that far, and if Thomas A. White running the show, it probably won't.

i react strongly to posts that disagree with me? i thought i had kept that in check since i adopted this new indentity? i only react strongly to glenn because he's fun to disagree with, but i'll keep an eye on that.

i'm not on the side of the estate. i was a long time ago but they have behave badly.

I also at one time emphatized with Beatrice's dilemma, but I am now appalled by the monster she has created in "The Orson Welles Estate" and the damage it is doing to her father's legacy. Even if she is giving too much lattitude to her lawyers, as some people think, she is the one who is ultimately responsible and the only one who can rein them in.

Ya I have to toss my hat in the ring for people who were insupport for Beatrice for five mintunes before she turned all Norman Bates on us. Heck I am still waiting to buy tickets to that Orson Welles museum she promised the Academy all those years ago. What a sad sad woman...

Rob

It sure was an eye-opener when Beatrice put the Academy Award up for auction since her rationale for taking it away from Gary Graver had been that it belonged in the still non-existent Orson Welles Institute.

now i've been very anti-Beatrice in the past but thinking about it now i'm wondering, does anyone know exactly how involved Beatrice is in these lawsuits?... i'm not making any excuses or anything but for years i hated The Rolling Stones because their litigious nature and what their lawyers have done to small bands like Carter USM and to a lesser extent The Verve (who i never liked anyway)... but recently i heard that the stones themselves have nothing do with these cases and it's their representation that does it all on their behalf... of course they should realise what's going on and put a stop to it, but could Beatrice, busy running her cosmetics business, not pay too much attention to these cases or simply just be the victim of bad advice?

It's a shame no one can get an interview with her... i wonder if that's her idea, or her representation 'protecting' her?...

Didn't someone from wellesnet meet with Beatrice once and say there didn't appear to be a hint of evil about her?

just some thoughts,
max!

Beatrice did start her own line of cosmetics before her father died, but once she became involved in all the litigations surrounding the Orson Welles Estate, she was unable to keep her own business going and shut it down a number of years ago. In view of the increasing number of law suits she is instigating these days, I would be very surprised to learn that she is once again "a cosmetics executive." It sounds very good when she has to appear in public, but I wager it no longer has any basis in fact.

she is such a knock out. on the othello disc, everything about her, inside and out, seems beautiful. then you hear about all this stuff and you wonder what is going on, and is she doing it?

phew this took some hunting down!!!

Wellesnet post by RKelly Oct 18 2002:



complete thread

Reading all this stuff about Beatrice and her association with Thomas White has brought one thing to mind: how grateful we should be that White hasn't been able to pimp Welles appearances in any grotesque post-mortem commercials, a la Fred Astaire dancing with a Dust Devil (Robin Astaire is another White client), and John Wayne doing beer ads. Fortunately, Welles' movie roles make such a thing rather difficult. I'm trying to figure out which Welles film would lend itself most easily to such a treatment, but coming up with little at the moment, thankfully, aside from ones that would be utterly hilarious in their wrongheadedness.

Yeah Jeff, I would hate to see Welles' suffer the humiliation of appearing in some dumb TV ad hocking wine or something. Oh wait ...

It's one thing to willingly choose to do an ad, but another to be cut out of one of your movies after your death and plopped into an ad for something.

Jeff,

You make a valid point. But it could also be argued the other way. At least Fred Astaire bears no responsibility for what has been done to his image after his death. Welles' appearances in TV ads and on talk shows, however, have been cited by many of his detractors as proof of his artistic decline.

JBrooks

jbrooks: There was no "artistic decline," I think we agree. There was a financial decline and a physical decline, and they led to the impression left by the commercials.

On the point: I think that the matter of Beatrice Welles is rather simple, which means complicated -- as family relationships are.

We must start with the name Beatrice. She was the closest and most beloved of Welles' children, the one he spent the most time with in a stable family, the one he was personally close to. Her name stands for beauty in the Western World, and both her grandmother and aunt were named Beatrice.

When I was able to observe her at close hand at appearances in San Francisco when the Restored OTHELLO was released, I had the same impression that rkelly had in his more substantive interview. Beatrice Welles, in her early thirties, was beautiful, warm, vibrant, and very interested in preserving and extending her Father's reputation.

What happened?

I may be repeating myself, in part, but it is fairly clear. Beatrice had been close to her father, much closer than any of his other children, had gone on location with him, was part of the family he maintained in Las Vegas. As a teenager he found her a way to keep in touch with what youth was thinking. In her early 20's, she traveled with the Rolling Stones and the Osmonds, and wrote articles for the London Times. She interested Welles in Rock n' Roll, and influenced him to record with a group called the "manowar's." [Admittedly, that did not help his reputation much either.]

But at the same time there had to be a knowledge that her Father had this other life of her Father, this parallel life in LA with Oja Kodar, who became an increasing factor in her life as she grew older. So a kind of understandable jealousy is one motivation for her behavior.

That jealousy is exacerbated by the fact that when Welles died, he left his larger estate to her mother, Paola Mori Welles, but all his personal artistic projects and possessions, including a house in LA, to Oja. One stipulation in the will, however, stated that should Paola die, everything went to Oja. It was this condition that Paola contested immediately. Unfortunately, little more than a year later, Paola did die, in a car accident, two days before she was to sit down to sign an amicable settlement with Oja.

It must be from this unsettled legal basis, which must have festered on for some time, that most of Beatrice's seemingly bizarre actions grow.

Finally, as someone as close to her father as she appears to have been, she must have been keenly, heartbreakingly, aware of the remarks and attitutes about her Father, the kind of insensitive remarks about his weight and abilities and failures, his objectification, which are repeated daily here.

Frank Brady sums it up in an anecdote. He writes, in Citizen Welles, that Beatrice saw Orson Welles most of the time not as a famous Icon, but as an ordinary beloved model of a man and father, who discussed with her and her mother "routine familly business . . . the purchase of a new car, weekly household chores, personal goals and problems . . . . "[p 592] She deeply resented the attitude of the public that he was simply an object or character, someone not quite real.

She told Brady that one evening (when I assume she was in her teens), she and her father were walking through the lobby of the MGM Grand, when a tourist pointed to her father and cried: "Look, that's Orson Welles!" A crowd surrounded them (probably ignoring and half crushing her), and began to shake his hand, to paw him as if he were not quite real; "just a statue or a hologram of the real Orson Welles. 'I wanted to tell them to stop that,' Beatrice recalled later. 'I wanted to say that he's a real person and you don't rudely point at people as if they weren't there.'" While she accompanied him often, she "felt that one incident was able, more than anything else to illustrate the agony she sometimes experienced because of her father's fame.'" [pp 592-593]

I think that observation is an insight into Beatrice's psyche; we can see echos of that incident in her resentment at what she feels is her exclusion from her Father's affairs; she who, having lost both Mother and Father within a year, had to lay his ashes to rest in that ancient Spanish bull ring.

As with the key to the life of Charles Foster Kane, the answer is simple and complex.

Many thanks here to maxrael and Christopher.

Glenn