The survival of the fattest
Gabriele Annan
ORSON WELLES: THE ROAD TO XANADU by Simon Callow Cape, £20, pp. 578 The Xanadu of the subtitle is the name of Citizen Kane's monstrous Californian castle in Orson Welles's film. I think `adrenalin man' would give a better clue to this huge, incomplete Ozymandias of a biography, in which the word adrenalin occurs all the time. It applies, of course, to Orson Welles, but Simon Callow must have lashings of the stuff himself. How else could he have written 578 pages on the first third of a man's life, all in high-speed, cliché-free, vivid, witty prose, packed with esoteric research and studded with inven- tive expressions like 'verbal monosodium glutamate' — which wouldn't be a bad description of his own style. The 578 pages take you to 1941, when Citizen Kane was released. It had been delayed for a year by the machinations of the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who saw it as an unflattering, communist-inspired portrait of himself. Opinion polls show that over the years serious film buffs have rated Citizen Kane the most important film ever made. Welles was 25 years old when he conceived, co-wrote, produced, directed, and played the lead in it; he had never set foot in a film studio before. But in spite of its succes d'estime it failed at the box office. Welles had 45 years more to live, and
in the wake of that failure, the nightmare he had striven so hard and, he thought, so suc- cessfully to avoid became his fate for the rest of his career: interference, containment, manipulation, limitation.
Orson Welles was brought up in Chica- go. His father was a rich, alcoholic wimp, his mother a forceful, culturally ambitious musician. She died when Orson was nine, and, according to one of Callow's bouts of rather predictable psychoanalysis, left him with a desperate need to live up to her ambition. By the following year he had become an infant prodigy: 'Cartoonist, Actor, Poet — and only 10', according to a newspaper headline. Six years later his father died, and his mother's former lover became his legal guardian. He was already his `Dadda'. Callow shows how Welles, for all his gigantic size, drive and will-power, always needed father-figures and always found them. Dadda was followed by Roger Hill, the headmaster of his progressive boarding school. Todd was a place 'not unlike Dartington Hall' and sounds pure bliss. The boys never stopped acting, play- ing music, painting murals. Welles took the lead in everything. The theatre became his passion, and Todd his surrogate home, to which he loved returning.
At 16 he hopped over to Ireland and got the directors of the Gate Theatre to audi- tion him. Michael Mac Liammoir and Hilton Edwards didn't believe his tales of professional experience; but they were bowled over, not so much by his acting, as by his voice and personality. They gave him a big part, Jew Siiss's ducal patron in Feuchtwanger's" play. Callow, himself a director, actor, and theatre theoretician, gives a telling account of the Gate style: expressionistic acting combined with futur- istic direction and design.
This, of course, was the trend all over Europe. It seemed dangerously innovative only in the English-language theatre, and it happened to suit Welles's personality. Back in America, he managed, by means of his irresistible charm and chutzpah, to engi- neer a chain of introductions from Thorn- ton Wilder through Alexander Woollcott to Katherine Cornell (`almost unheard of now, advancement through personal rec- ommendation was one of the principal ways in which the theatre functioned'). Cornell's was the most prestigious company on Broadway, and 'in one of the most extraordinary breakthroughs in theatre history' she offered the 17-year-old Welles three fat parts in her next season: Octavius in The Barrens of Wimpole Street, March- banks in Shaw's Candida, and Tybalt. The risk did not pay off. Cornell's partner hated Welles's "hammy ways"! ' And Welles, `buzzing with the avant-garde influences and full-frontal assault he had known at the Gate', hated the company's restrained naturalism. In any case, acting wasn't so much what he wanted as directing — total control.
After that the road to Xanadu leads to the most important of all the father figures, John Houseman. Welles first captivated and then exploited him for the next ten years. Houseman was a cosmopolitan connoisseur, impresario, and producer, who had put on the breakthrough black Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The New Deal Negro Theatre Project — whose purpose was to give work to out of work black performers and technicians — asked him to do a pro- duction in Harlem. He chose Macbeth, with Welles — now pushing 20 — to direct it. Set in 19th-century Haiti and played by actors who had never spoken Shakespeare, it was a sensation mainly because of Welles's avant-garde stage effects. After Macbeth, Houseinan and Welles founded the Mercury theatre and put on a modern- dress, fascist Julius Caesar, with Welles as Brutus. Callow calls these productions `concept theatre', meaning a staging in which the director imposes an (arbitrary) concept on a play instead of teasing out the author's intentions. It generally makes `Yours disgusted, East Grinstead' critics very tetchy, but when it's stunningly theatrical — as in Welles's case it was the audience can love it.
Light years away from most showbiz biographies (practically none of Welles's women are even named), Callow's book justifies its length by throwing in concepts like 'concept theatre' and a lot of esoteric information. He dissects, for instance, the structures of different performance milieux — Broadway, the Irish theatre, American summer stock, and Hollywood; and he explains the methods and techniques of stage, radio and film production. Welles rampaged through them all, and Callow follows him — clear, fascinating and super- humanly knowledgeable.
He defines Welles's 'outrageous charm — compounded of trust and demand, con- fidence and challenge.' But he also disman- tles him:
Welles was not . . . a great innovator at all; he was a great fulfiller . . . [with an] innate mastery of the skills of the theatre . . of its hokum .. . and all the whorish skills involved. He was a showman, not an ideas man, let alone an idealist. He didn't really care about the New Deal or blacks, and certain- ly not about communism. He had no com- mitment even to art. And when he acted, his characters had no heart. His phenome- nal energy was fuelled by drink, amphetamines and gargantuan helpings of food. In his long decline he got fatter and fatter, adrenalin man into Michelin man. He came to display himself as a phe- nomenon — 'the self-destroyed artist — a figure of pity and terror'. Callow's book is Act I of the tragedy.
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