By RAY KELLY
A letter tucked inside a book at the Lilly Library at Indiana University sheds new light on several film and stage projects Orson Welles was weighing while living in Europe in the early 1950s.
Liana Meeker, a catalog specialist at Lilly Library, found the signed, two-page typed letter on Welles stationery folded inside a copy of Whit Masterson’s Badge of Evil, which she was processing. (The book was the basis for Welles’ 1958 film Touch of Evil).
How the letter ended up in the book is unknown, said Craig S. Simpson, Lilly Library Manuscripts Archivist.
“It was just a random item found in a random book,” he said. “One of the fun elements of our job!”
The March 11, 1953 letter was addressed to “Dearest Lennie” and was certainly directed to longtime friend and columnist Leonard Lyons. (Welles had used the same salutation in other letters to Lyons.)
Welles wrote asking for a plug in the newspaper for an Italian comedy he was appearing in, L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù (Man, Beast and Virtue). Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, the film cast Welles as man with a cheating wife who has become pregnant during his absence.
He acknowledged he was not handing his longtime friend earthshaking news for his popular column. “Please do not tell me that is something less than the hottest news of the week – because I already know that.”
Welles also noted that United Artists was set to distribute his Othello, which had won the Palme d’Or at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.
He mentioned three other projects on the drawing board:
- I Confess (The Prisoner) — Welles said that Laurence Olivier had asked him to co-star with him in a Bridget Boland play he referred to as I Confess. Welles would play a character based on Hungarian Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty. The anti- fascist and communist cardinal was jailed by pro-Nazi forces during World War II and later tortured and sentenced to life in prison by the Soviet-backed government in 1949. He was freed in 1956 and granted political asylum in the United States. Olivier would play the communist interrogator.
- Attila the Hun — Welles had been asked to direct and star in a film production of Attila the Hun, based on the exploits of the 5th century warrior. (“One of those three ring Quo Vadis affairs to be made in Italy.”)
- Moby Dick — Welles revealed he was considering a one-man show of him reading Moby Dick. The production would be launched in London before coming to New York. “My intentions are very serious and I may very well be breaking it on a short English provincial tour very shortly.”
Of the three potential projects, Attila the Hun never materialized and Boland’s play was staged as The Prisoner in 1954 without Welles or Olivier. Alec Guinness took on the role of the cardinal and appeared in the 1956 motion picture of the same name.
Welles proceeded with Moby Dick, but not as a one-man show. His adaptation of the Herman Melville novel was staged as Moby Dick Rehearsed with a cast that included Patrick McGoohan, Kenneth Williams and Joan Plowright at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London in June 1955. In his final years, Welles shot a one-man version of readings from Moby Dick with cameraman Gary Graver.
The Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington and the University of Michigan Library Special Collections in Ann Arbor boast the two largest repositories of Welles papers in the world.
The recently found letter will be filed at the Lilly Library with miscellaneous items pertaining to Welles with no clear provenance.
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