Welles's memoir in Paris Vogue - an excerpt from his autobiography

[Christopher]

Here is the beginning of the autobiography that Welles abandoned after the first chapter, remarking that he found it extremely difficult to write about himself and much preferred to write about all the fascinating people he had known, beginning, as you will see, with his father and mother. The following excerpt appeared in the original English in the 1983 December/January issue of Paris Vogue under the title "My Father Wore Black Spats." An editorial footnote identifies it as "the first unedited chapter of an autobiography that Orson Welles is currently writing." I am posting now the first section, "My Father Wore Black Spats," and I will continue with the next one, entitled "A Brief Career as a Musical Prodigy" in my next post.

My Father Wore Black Spats
(by Orson Welles)

His shoes were made for him in London and his hats in Paris. When he traveled by train he carried his own bed linen and a small Persian prayer rug for his feet. His cigars, from a private selection in Havana, traveled first to England, where they were allowed to "breathe" in bond for two years before going on to join him wherever he might be. His cigarettes, of Virginia tobacco "straight cut," were beautifully made with an untreated paper so that when he ws not quite sober enough to remember to keep puffing, they went quietly out like one of his cigars. Thus he lived to a great age before setting himself on fire. This happened in a mid-Western village in a small hotel which he had purchased with a view to enjoying, for a month or so each autumn, the simple pleasures of rural America. For the rest of the year he mainly commuted between his houses in Jamaica and Peking -- these being the last of the pleasant places on earth where dozens of skilled domestic servants were available and cheap.

What he liked best, I think, were the sea crossings: the long freedom from lands in which he felt himself increasingly diminished. There was no more welcoming spot for my father than the bar of a nice, old-fashioned ocean liner: the creaking of leather in the cradling seas, the cards he played so masterfully, and a captive audience for his stories.

As for the spats, they were appreciated by the sort of gentleman who never traveled without his valet, and who had yet to acknowledge that the motor car had already purged the streets of the nuisances of the horse. Spats were mauve, dove gray and even white. That the spats of my father were black should explain why -- although his chosen way of life might strike a modern reader as a touch on the flamboyant side -- he would be pained to learn that he could never give such an impression. He hoped to be mistaken for one of those he most admired: some sober figure in the world of high finance, and not the idle, hedonistic London clubman he despised, -- and so closely resembled.

The country hotel, in a horse and buggy village called Grand Detour, was his final self-indulgence. He did nothing to modernize it besides erecting an improved version of the classic smokehouse for ham and sausage, wild turkey, Eastern oysters and Western trout. In a separate bake house beaten biscuits and corn bread were produced in the early mornings by a black specialist imported from the south.

There was venison, wild duck, and much other game in season. The terrapin came live to us from Maryland, and the wild rice from an Indian reservation where my father claimed to have been inaugurated as an honorary brave. But under his management this was not a welcoming hostelry. As far as possible, guests came by invitation only: a few writers my Godfather George Ade, for instance, Booth Tarkington, and some old sports from Broadway. The wooden-legged dragon who kept the gates went by the name of Olie (Rattlesnake Oil) Emery, in semi-retirement after a long career as a feathered red-skin in middle-Western medicine shows; and on the stormiest nights the weariest of lost travelers were seldom accommodated.

We'd just returned from China, and there was a nice Christmassy fall of snow on the ground the night of the fire. To my great regret I was not present, having been packed off to boarding school for what was to be the last of my three years of formal education. The few old cronies my father had invited were yet to arrive, and most of the hotel staff had been given the night off to go to Dixon, six miles away, for the movie show.

I used to hate the Dixon movies. In the exciting spots the film invariably got stuck in the projector; and in the back rows the male teen-agers made rowdy noises during the love scenes. Dixon just then was Ronald Reagan's town. We never met. He moved in slightly older circles (as he does today). But he would have been a member of the boys' choir in the movie house. I believe it was in Dixon that our President formed his basic image of that peculiarly innocent America to which he would like us all to return. Dixon had the kind of main street we used to see in a Hollywood studio, with hitching posts, barber poles and a wooden Indian in front of the cigar store. Norman Rockwell. Grand Detour was Mark Twain. Anyway, that six-mile distance was too much for the Dixon Fire Department which arrived only in time to preside over the smoking ruins of what had been America's most exclusive hotel. There was some concern for old Rattlesnake, but he had been spared, having spent the evening in dalliance with a lady called Easy Emma in a ruined barn down by the river where, some years earlier, John Deere had forged the first steel plow.

At the very last moment my father (the suspected arsonist) emerged from the flames dressed only in his night shirt, carrying in one hand an empty parrot cage and in the other, a framed, hand-tinted photograph of a lady in pink trights (an ex-mistress fondly remembered) named Trixi Friganza.

My mother was the "Trixi" who became his wife: Beatrice Ives well-born, and comfortably wealthy until the day when Grandfather Ives announced that he had somehow managed to lose the last of his coal mines. After this Miss Ives -- already a gifted concert pianist -- went to work as a "typewriter" (as stenographers were then called) to pay for the completion of her musical training. She was a celebrated beauty, a champion rifle shot, a highly imaginative practical joker, a radical and suffragette who held, after her marriage, political office, and even did a little time in jail.

Why did she marry my father?

Much the older of the two, he was, in fact, an Edwardian bon vivant who picked most of his ladies from the musical comedy stage. He had a famous name because of a cigar. The "Dick Welles" cigar was a cheap and popular smoke named for a horse which had won the Kentucky Derby. The horse had been named for my father. Apart from this one doubtful honor, Dick Welles was mildly notorious as a man about town who dabbled in many enterprises including the six-day bicycle race which he brought to America. He had himself cut quite a figure as an international automobile racer. A wagon and carriage works belonged to one of his crazy aunts and here he had built some of America's first cars. Because he was a friend of the novelist Booth Tarkington, it has long been a family assumption that the author had my father in mind when he created the character which I will always think of as the Joseph Cotten role in "The Magnificent Ambersons."

Unlucky in the field of industry, my father invariably recouped his business losses at the gaming tables. He broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and was a bit ashamed of it. In his passport he described himself as an inventor. He actually got a sort of aeroplane off the ground quite shortly after Kitty Hawk. Perhaps the most original of his creations: to this day, it remains the only flying machine specifically designed to keep the motor at all times safely on the ground.

My mother played the kind of music and liked the kind of people he abhorred. She was even, among so many other things, a scholar of East Indian literature. What could he have made of that? Both were great charmers -- that must have been it. A strange marriage all the same. My paternal grandmother put a curse on it.

The ballroom on the top floor of the old woman's house had, at some remote period, been mysteriously converted into an enormous indoor miniature golf course full of wooden hills and nasty little sand traps, still partly covered with rotting green paper. Crowning the highest of the hills there had been erected, at a later date, what was unmistakably an altar. Representing some more recent epoch in Grandmother's spiritual progress, it was no place for Christian sacraments. The feathers of many birds long dead lay all about the golf course, and the altar itself was deeply stained with blood. This dreadful woman -- dwarfish, obese and evil-smelling -- was a practicing witch.

On the occasion of her son's funeral, celebrated in that huge house of hers (where my mother had never been allowed to enter) this hellish creature managed to sandwich some obscure passages into the ordinary protestant serevice, so that the wretched, weak-willed minister was confused enough to read out during the ceremony several of the more bizarre invocations employed by Madame Blavatsky, and great, reeking dollops of Aleister Crowley.

I was in no condition to interfere, being convinced -- as I am now -- that I had killed my father.

(I'll try to wirte about this later.)

TO BE CONTINUED IN MY NEXT POST

[Glenn Anders]

Magnificent, Christopher!

From a former post, you suggest that you believe Welles was something of a fabulist, and the evidence here, as some elsewhere, suggests that he was. Thinking about what you reproduce for us, I don't know about the houses in Jamaica and Peking, but the other accomplishments, habits, and tastes of Dick Welles seem reasonable enough, given the time, his background, and family traditions.

[Today, I have an old friend, the scion of a "Down East" family, as long of white hair and beard as a Biblical prophet, who walks about the town where he lives in a long violet robe, wearing one green sock (starboard) and one red sock (port). That may sound crazy, but he is perfectly competent, a distinguished academician, who has raised two families, is married now to a third wife, a woman forty years younger than himself, and is sane in all other regards.]

I can see how Welles might have wanted to believe what his father told him, all he was told about him. What magic for a young boy, who had not learned yet the World's judgments upon us. Echoes of these stories are scattered all through his works. If they were not true, and he found them not to be true, he wanted them to be true, and made them so.

He would not have been the artist he became without them.

Often, it is not what is true, but what we want to be true which counts. Look at what supposedly sober, sane Americans have been led to believe, today!

That's what I gather from this first section of Welles' autobiographical essay.

I look forward to the next installment, as I'm sure others here do.

Thank you, Christopher.

Glenn

[ToddBaesen]

Christopher:

Many thanks for tranlating and posting this piece.
I'm looking forward to part two...

[Christopher]

Glenn, Thank you for your post. I will respond after I have posted the remainder of the autobiographical fragment Welles published in Paris Vogue. And, Todd, it is not my translation from the French but Welles's own words which Paris Vogue published exactly as he had written them. Here it is for the enjoyment of all.

A Brief Career As a Musical Prodigy
(by Orson Welles)

Violinist, pianist...child conductor...

This last was pretty much of a fake. By the time I was seven I was reading through the scores and waving my little baton in the presence of such people as Heifetz, Casals, Schnabel, Wallenstein and Mischa Ellman, when they gathered informally in chamber groups in my mother's house. Her own professional life was frustrated by long illness, but just about everybody was in love with her, so the celebrated musicians, when they came to visit and play, were kind enough to pretend that the midget Von Karajan in front of them was not (as I must truly have been) a damned nuisance.

I find it strange that my mother indulged me in this since she indulged me in nothing else. She was not the musical version of a stage mother, but was simply resolved that whatever I did had to be good if it was to be done at all, and I was made to practice hours on end every day.

Once, distracted to the point of madness by endlessly repeated musical scales, I attempted suicide.

What I really wanted to end, of course, was not my life but the scales, and I did place myself in a position of imminent peril on the outside of one of those railings in the Ritz some two and a half stories above the Place Vendome. I hung there listening to the wretched spinster lady who'd been engaged to supervise my practice calling hysterically for my mother in an adjoining room.

Pause... Then my mother's voice: "Well," she said, "if he wants to jump, let him jump."

The truth is her heart was in her mouth. She knew her son, and knew that stepping off into space would have appealed to me for its gaudy element of melodrama and pathos. ("Now they'll be sorry.") She also imagined that a child could have no significant sense of the reality of death. But in this she was mistaken. I knew very well that she was going to die, and how real that would be, and how very soon it would happen. Whenever she left me, the moment the door had closed, I would burst into tears, afraid that I would never see her again.

But she was certainly right about that business of mine out on the balcony. If I'd heard her rushing toward me the excitement might well have been just enough, and I wouldn't be here now remembering it. Later, my mother told me that she stood still all that time in the hall outside the room with the piano. By the sheer force of her formidable character she persuaded the spinster lady to muffle her whimpering... Then, finally, there came to her ears the sound she'd been waiting for:

"Do-re-mi-fa-sol..."

My mother had won. She was, in all things, as tough-minded as she was loving-hearted.

The last time I was allowed to visit her... It must have cost great effort and much pain to have let me find her sitting up in bed. And how much like her it was to have arranged it so that our farewell in that black room was made to seem like the high point of my birthday party. I heard that cello voice: "Well now, Georgie-Porgy..." I'd just learned that I'd been baptized "George" -- that Orson was a mere middle name, and had reacted tragically to the revelation. My father had said, "Hell, we had to call you 'Orson' -- every damned pullman porter in the country is named 'George'." My gangsterish little friends in the neighborhood had taken up the maddening chant:

"Georgie-Porgie, puddin' and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry!"

The first line of the hateful couplet seemed to sum up the chubby little grub I knew myself to be, but I rather liked the part about kissing girls. Mother, who knew about that awful jingle, was teasing me -- as she so often liked to do.

Then I heard her again, a voice in the shadows, speaking Shakespeare:

"These antique fables apprehend,
More than cool reason ever comprehends."

The quotation, spoken consolingly, came from her choice of a primer when she was first teaching me to read. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is not the easiest way to start spelling out one's first written words, but "Why," she demanded, "should a person at his most impressionable age be shovelled into the sordid company of 'Auntie's Nice Kitty-Cat,' and 'Little Sister's Silly Red Ball'?" I was marinated in poetry, and to learn right at the beginning, "a sense of awe, delight and wonder."

And now she was holding me in one of her looks. Some of these could be quite terrible. I'd seen my father wither under them into a crisp, brown winter's leaf.

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact."

Those great shining eyes looked dark by the light of the eight small candles. I can remember now what I was thinking. I thought how green those eyes had always been when it was sunny.

Then -- all tenderness, and as if speaking from an immense distance:

"A lovely boy, stol'n from an Indian king,
Who ever had so sweet a changeling...?"

What did she mean? Was I, indeed, a changeling? (I have, in later years, been given certain hints...)

Mother had told me that because it was just six o'clock in the morning: time for everyone to start work in the factories, whistles and bells had all started blowing at once, like heralds, at the moment of my birth.

"This stupid birthday cake," she said, "is just another stupid cake; and you'll have all the cakes you want. But the candles are a fairy ring. And you will never again in your whole life have just that number to blow out." She was a sorceress. "You must puff hard," she said, "and you must blow out every one of them. And you must make a wish."

I puffed very hard. And suddenly the room was dark and my mother had vanished forever.

Sometimes, in the dead watches of the night, it strikes me that of all my mistakes, the greatest was on that birthday just before my mother died, when I forgot to make a wish.

[Glenn Anders]

Christopher: I had read bits of this one, but never the whole thing, of a piece.

Again, how fabulous and poignant Welles is.

Biographers have derided the idea that great concert musicians sat around praising him, but seems to me, a great pianist was quoted, after hearing Welles, as saying, had he continued his musical education, he might have become a piano prodigy of the highest order.

Welles' account of a childhood suicide does seem a little too much, but it must have been tough for a lonely little boy living in that contentious household. Was the "spinster" piano teacher one of the models for Aunt Fanny? I wonder.

He does not mention Richard Ives Welles, his older brother who had "a nervous breakdown," and who had to be an influence on him then, and in his later life and work. Simon Callow brings Richard Welles up in The Road to Xanadu, but I am surprised to see that he does not appear at all in Hello Americans.

Lines from the affecting deathbed scene, I've read before, Christopher. Beautiful, mysterious, tragic stuff. And very insightful. I wonder if it has ever been determined that someone other than Dick Welles fathered Welles?

Most biographers write that Beatrice Welles died just after Orson Welles' ninth birthday. Yet he has eight candles on the cake. Perhaps a lapse in memory.

And that final sequence: the candles flickering, her eyes so large with death that he forgets to make a wish, and then literally: "Fade to black." It is a superb example of elegant, deeply emotional prose writing.

Thank you, for this second installment, Christopher, and if there is more, and you have time to record it for us, I'm sure we would appreciate it.

Glenn

[Christopher]

I wish there were more, but that's all there is, alas. As I said in an earlier post, Welles found it very difficult to write his memoirs. He said that the only reason he attempted it was that his old friend, Roger "Skipper" Hill, had been urging him to do it -- but by the time Welles began, he had only a few more years to live and he was already very ill.

I could point out a number of discrepancies and improbabilities in this autobiographical fragment, but I think that would spoil it, don't you? The essence of Welles shines through his lyrical prose -- his special brand of humor, his little-boy lovability, his vulnerability and sly self-knowledge as when he describes his faked suicide attempt on the balcony (which incidentally could not possibly have been in Paris, but what does it matter?)

I'm glad you enjoyed these pieces. I find them more revealing about Welles than if they had been entirely factual.

[ToddBaesen]

Having digested part one of the Vogue piece, I was astonished to see that it really forms the basis of a great movie script. Whether it's an accurate story of Welles early years in Wisconsin and Ill. or not, seens secondary to what Welles probably really had in mind. Namely, a treatment for a screen story. It would certainly make for a great movie. Among the cast of characters we could see not only the young Orson, but a young Ronald Reagan, as well as an old Witch who happens to be Orson's Grandmother.

Reagan seems to have been particuarly on Welles mind in the 80's when he wrote the piece, as he was in the screenplay for THE BIG BRASS RING. In both pieces it's clear he can't stand what Reagan stood for, both as a boy in Dixon, and later as President.

Also it's facsinating to see all the references to THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS: Orson's Grandmother (who he apparently found abhorrent) has a ball room on the third floor of her castle/mansion, just as in AMBERSONS, the friendship between Booth Tarkington and Richard Welles, and of course, the fact that Dick Welles was in the auto headlight biz that eventually goes into bankrupcy.

Quite marvelous material, so thanks again for posting it, Christopher!

[Harvey Chartrand]

All the more baffling then that Welles would abandon AMBERSONS for a carnival in Rio. Perhaps AMBERSON's subject matter brought back too many bad memories and Welles felt the need to escape into an exotic frivolity. The consequences of this trek south were of course disastrous for him and for world cinema.
Or maybe Welles just couldn't focus on one project at a time. He admitted late in life that he lacked discipline... All these years later, it just seems like a terribly immature and irresponsible thing for him to do.
These memoirs read like fiction to me. Welles had embellished these stories of his childhood so often that they were told for the truth. He may not have been consciously fibbing, but a better title for this autobiography might have been: IT'S ALL NOT TRUE.

[Glenn Anders]

Harvey: Your remark about THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS bringing back "too many bad memories" to Welles may be a valid insight. He seems to dwell on the emotional and physical mark of primal experiences in childhood through much of his work. Childhood is the archetypal world, the essential "golden age" to which there can be no return.

Additionally, I might add this observation: THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS had gone into production during a period when America was bombed into a war far more clearly than geopolitical foolishness in which we are now engaged. Unlike the aftermath of 9/11, which became in "the war on terror" or "the long war," a process of "swatting flies," as Our President put it at one point, World War II concentrated the attention of almost the entire World on several centers of Fascism, major nation states with recognizable military forces and industrial capacity which had boldly attacked their neighbors for hegemonic gain, and in the process, produced as close to concentrated Evil as we have seen in the modern era. Welles, a child of World War I, must have been torn by this huge event. The fact that he would not or could not serve in the Military must have made him frantic to do his part in some capacity in that Hemingwayesq time. He does not seem to have hesitated a moment when offered the South American project by the State Department.

Finally, as to the Brazillian misadventure, a 26 year-old young man landing in Rio at Carnival, hailed as "the revolutionary of the movies," might well have been swept away by the diversity he always championed, and the sheer hedonism of the moment, which contrasted greatly from America, where races and religions were still segregated, sexual puritanism was the public stance, and you couldn't buy a loaf of bread, far less a bottle of beer, in most cities on Sunday afternoon.

There can be no doubt that the mistakes he made in South America blighted Welles' career, but the larger cause to which he enlisted himself dwarfed the artistic one in his mind. As fate and wild oats cast on the Amazon would have it, neither one came to satisfactory fruition.

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn:

I'm just chiming in, but Callow says Welles got the invitation to go to Brazil 3 days after Pearl Harbour- on Dec 10th, 1941, and it took him just 24 hours to make up his mind. And the previous May, Welles's draft status had been reported in a Hollywood rag.

As for the social differences, as usual you have put it succinctly; I would only add the suggestion of reading Robert Stam's "Orson Wells, Brazil and The Power of Blackness" from the 1989 special issue of Persistence of Vision; there is a whole section on It's all True, which was the first I think to reveal systemic racism as one of the foundations of the RKO decison-making regarding Welles's time in Brazil; it seems that Welles really went over the edge when he filmed in the favelas, the slums of Rio, tracing the story of the samba essentially to the poor blacks. Interestingly, I don't believe any of this footage has suvived, and the nefarious Lyn Shores, RKO's spy down south, secretly complained to the Brazilian government by letter that Welles was "exploiting" the blacks, and doing so in "bad taste" by filming in the favelas. Here's another stunning quote from Callow:

(A Reg Armour of the finance department of RKO had written a memo while Welles was still in Brazil):

"Technicolour, he (Armour) said, had heightened the effect of dark-skinned Brazilians. 'There is much footage showing people of the negroid type dancing or in close proximity to people with lighter skins, and this in our opinion will seriously militate against our showing of this film in certain sections of this country, particularly the south'".

"...in close proximity to..." Now there's a telling phrase. It seems that if Welles had shot a travelogue featuring "light skinned" Brazilians, or at least cinematically segregated the races, he might have had more support from the head office. Perhaps RKO just didn't know what they were getting into when they accepted the Brazilian project: how did they expect to film Carnival with no blacks? And no mixing of the races while parading and dancing?

Perhaps they just didn't know that Brazil had had black slavery too.

It seems "It's All True" would never have been allowed to live up to it's title: it was a project doomed from the start, at least with Welles as a director.

[Roger Ryan]

As Glenn and Tony have pointed out, there are a number of factors for the failure of the "It's All True" project which were probably not anticipated by Welles when he made his decision to go to Brazil. Having been recently told by the studio that his "Ambersons" footage looked marvelous and being given the chance to do the kind of social/political project he was always keenly interested in, it's not surprising Welles made the choices he did.

I can't buy into this idea that Welles was disturbed by the subject matter of "Ambersons" since it supposedly stirred up uncomfortable childhood memories. Clearly the whole lost innocence and loss of one's mother theme is stronger in "Kane" where Welles himself is front and center (did Welles' "aversion" to this subject compromise his first film, too?). Both of the Paris Vogue articles are awash in Tarkington-style observation which suggests that Welles still found the approach he took with "Ambersons" appealing forty years later, even if he had to fib a little to put his musings in a similar light.

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: You are certainly right about the mistaken judgment of RKO Executives on the racial makeup of Brazil in allowing Welles to go down to shoot IT'S ALL TRUE! They probably expected something upbeat (perhaps it might have been), and felt that Welles had a good understanding of "exotic" subjects and climes. Walt Disney made the picture the wanted, a truncated live action/cartoon feature: SALUDOS AMIGOS in the same year, 1942. [Sort of . . . Hello Americans . . . Get it?] Welles pointed out the racism of the head office people in discussing IT'S ALL TRUE with Peter Bogdanovich in This Is Orson Welles. He was a good deal more explicit about their language.

We should always remember that IT'S ALL TRUE started out to be a history of the positive influence brought to bear by African-American and South American music upon our shared cultures.

I don't understand your point about his decision to go to South America for the State Department in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, nor his ambivalence to the Draft. I based my remarks on Page 38-39 of Callow's Hello Americans.

My conclusion is identical to your own: "He does not seem to have hesitated a moment when offered the South American project by the State Department." I was speaking only to the contradictions in his motivation.

Roger: While agreeing with your insights, I did not mean to imply "that Welles was disturbed by the subject matter of 'Ambersons' since it supposedly stirred up uncomfortable childhood memories." But he clearly saw George "Georgie" Minefer as himself, and the death of George's mother, at an older age than Beatrice Welles, echos the sentiment expressed in the second installment of Welles Memoir from Paris Vogue. The household and family -- the old mansion, the dominant mother, the relegated father, the after-the-fact suitor, the crazy grandmother or aunt -- bear resemblance to his own, which he often made reference to. Finally, the new ending which he gave to Tarkington's novel was certainly downbeat, reflecting the end to which his family had come: A beautiful, headstrong mother dead when he was nine from a wasting disease (the whispers would have been of something other than hepatitis); a womanizing father dead of alcoholism when he was fifteen; a brother suffering from mental disease (which in those days would have been considered "to run in the family").

Finally, Todd: Would not that first episode that Christopher has posted for us make a superb screenplay, perhaps the third of a trilogy, had events not crashed in, and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS been released as Welles would have had it? You are right.

Standing alone, such a film might have been a rival to O'Neil's A Long Day's Journey into Night.

It might have established Welles, without cavil, the "Shakespeare of American Movies."

It was not to be.

Glenn

[Roger Ryan]

Glenn - My response was not directed at you exclusively. I was thinking more of Robert Carringer's essay "Oedipus in Indianapolis" where the author argues that Welles was incapable of completing "The Magnificent Ambersons" properly because of childhood traumas and dysfunction. According to Carringer, it's the same reason he never played Hamlet on stage or screen. Silly stuff in my opinion.

As you say, Welles' fascination with the themes found in "Ambersons" is on full display in the Paris Vogue articles. Welles was fond of saying that Tarkington based the character of Eugene Morgan on Richard Welles, but I get the sense in the Vogue articles that Welles is deliberately recasting his life experience to mimic the characters and situations found in Tarkington's novel in order to juice up the drama. Again, it's further proof that this kind of material was not particularly vexing to Welles.

[Glenn Anders]

I agree. As Sigmund Freud said back in Welles' youth: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn:
I'm sorry I was obtuse; I meant to support your claim that Welles was under a lot of pressure to do something for the war effort, and that the timing of the letter regarding Brazil was ...timely.

Roger:
I'm with you on the Oedipus nonsense: the single silliest piece i've ever read on Welles is "Oedipus in Indiana". Carringer is a good researcher, but just an amateur when it comes to "dime-store psychology", as Welles would call it. I agree completely with your assessment that Welles was using the Ambersons atmoshpere to give his memoir texture and colour. And of course, Welles was obsessed with "fin-de-siecle" periods, hence his love for Cervantes, Shakespeare and Tarkington. This kind of melancholic reverie appealed to him enormously, and may be the single most clearly identifiable and common thread in all his work. I believe it's fair to say he was influenced by his childhood (who isn't?) but influence is a far cry from unconsciously/ consciously expressing childhood traumas, to the point that they control one's art.