By RAY KELLY
Simon Callow may have written more about Orson Welles than any other author – and he is not done.
Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band, the third in his planned four-book biographical series on the late actor-director, arrives in U.S. stores on April 5. (It was published in Britain on November 25, 2015 to rave reviews).
In addition to his work as an actor and director, Callow has written more than dozen books on subjects including Charles Dickens, Charles Laughton and Oscar Wilde.
Of Welles, Callow has remarked, “He wasn’t just a filmmaker, he was a theatre director, a painter of some distinction, he created a ballet, he was an inventor. He did at one point very shyly compare himself to Leonardo da Vinci. I think it’s a fair comparison. I think he was engaged in the same way that Leonardo was engaged, in that there seemed to be no limit to his great enquiry into the arts and no limit to his ambition.”
Now in the midst of a lengthy tour of the United Kingdom promoting One-Man Band, Callow graciously fielded questions by email.
The Road to Xanadu was published in 1996, Hello Americans in 2006 and now we have One-Man Band. How had your view and appreciation of Welles changed over the past 20 years?
Well, I’ve aged and so has Welles. The Welles of Volume 1 – in his childhood, youth and early twenties– dazzlingly successful at almost everything he turns his hand to – is very different from the Welles of Volume 2, reeling from the shock of being ejected from RKO and cold-shouldered by Hollywood. Volume 3 sees him desperate about his lack of opportunities and very angry at what has happened to him. By the end of One Man Band, he is entirely accustomed to failure and humiliation and increasingly shrewd about how handle himself. So he’s a very different man from the somewhat brattish, arrogant man-boy of the earlier period. Naturally, he seems to me to be a more sympathetic human being. In the meantime, of course, I have aged from 40 to 67: I was I suppose in my prime in 1989 and now… well, now I’m much more aware of questions of mortality and dwindling achievement than I was. Volume 4 will be out in 2019, by which time I’ll be 70, the age, of course, at which Welles died. I feel great compassion for him. I don’t think it was heartless of me to feel less compassion for him when he was younger: though he behaved badly towards people at all ages, it seems clear and seemed clear to many people at the time, that after his 30s, his bad behaviour was due to pain and rage on his part; when he was young his bad behaviour was just bad behaviour.
Many Welles scholars abhor my focus on his personal behaviour. But if you want to know why Welles’s life was the way it was, you have to take this into account. What goes around, I’m afraid, comes around.
Initially, the third book in your biographical series was expected to cover the remainder of Welles’ life. When did you realize it was going to take a fourth book?
I knew for sure at the beginning of 2015 that I was starting to gabble in my writing of the story because I was aware of just how much there was still to go. And I couldn’t let that happen because Chimes at Midnight needed space to breathe, and that it was beginning to feel like a climax. Moreover, I began to understand that Welles’s last twenty years needed a totally different approach and tone. They are in some ways the most fascinating years of his life. I want to go back to the sources. I now understand him so much better than when i did the initial research, conducted all those interviews. I want to re-interview a lot of people – though of course sadly many of them are gone – Gary Graver, most notably.
Volume 3 focuses on Welles’ self-imposed exile from the U.S. There has been considerable debate as to whether he left for financial reasons, greater artistic freedom or the Hollywood blacklist. What is your take?
Political despair, financial difficulty, artistic frustration: all of these. Harry Truman was quite a big factor: Welles loathed him, saw him as the betrayal of everything FDR had stood for. Disappointment with those whom you would naturally expect to support is a tough one. I think Welles felt the need to move on, brush the dust off his feet. I think he saw Europe as a new start. But that naïve, almost romantic view, quickly changed when he found that they weren’t prepared to take him at his own valuation. Welles’s pride was severely dented during these years. The Italians simply didn’t acknowledge his brilliance – they hadn’t seen Kane, of course, when he first went there, and when they did, it was in a mutilated copy. He very soon started attacking as a form of defence, and the rest of his time in Italy was endlessly turbulent, personally and professionally.
The title of your book reflects Welles’ work an independent filmmaker, a one-man band. How easily did he adjust to life outside of the Hollywood studio system?
He was naturally independent, but in my view he would have done much better had he been able to find a producer with whom he worked happily. Alessandro Tasca was such a one, as was Emiliano Piedra, but they were very much in his shadow. The relationship with Louis Dolivet soured immediately. Welles had deep difficulty with the concept of authority. But quite apart from these essentially emotional attitudes, he was painfully aware that Hollywood had the best equipment and best technicians. He ached to work with those cameras and those technicians. His joy at working with the Universal crew was palpable, and, alas, never to be repeated. And when he saw other directors provided with huge budgets and all the equipment they wanted, it enraged him
One-Man Band gives Welles theatrical productions in the 1950s and 1960s their proper due. How does Welles’ post 1930s theatrical work stack up against his earlier achievements?
On the whole, Welles’ theatre work, like his radio work, peaked in the 1930s and 40s, in the case of Native Son. Moby Dick (Rehearsed) was a rare exception, seemingly out of nowhere. The stage Othello was rather dull, by all accounts, as if he’d lost his theatrical flair, but four years later he came roaring back with a show that was at least the equal of the Faustus or the Caesar, the two great 30s productions.
You have hinted that your fourth and final Welles book might take the form of a novel. Why the departure?
I always wanted to write about the last years in some sort of experimental form – so much of what he did in those years was speculative and exploratory and resulted in fragments, that I thought it might be useful to really try to climb inside his mind. It’s a bold idea and I don’t know whether I can quite bring it off, but I would like to honour his own audacity in some way.
Watch this space.
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Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band is available online at Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.
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