"I Began at the Top and I've Been Working My Way Down Ever Since!"
the mythical, magical Orson Welles
“Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past, “our songs will all be silenced. But what of it? Go on singing!”
Orson Welles, F For Fake (1973)
THERE ARE artists who are born bursting with talent and energy, exploding with ideas and the drive to create. Orson Welles was such an artist; an extrovert, a showman, a magician; a charismatic ringmaster brimming with confidence. His charm was not infallible, and he was sometimes denied the resources to make what could have been a cavalcade of important, ground breaking and influential films, but he was indefatigable, dying of a heart attack in 1985 whilst sitting at his typewriter, working on a new script. It was a poignant yet oddly fitting end to a fabled life. As the saying goes, if Orson Welles had not existed, someone would have had to invent him.
George Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1915. His parents were Richard Head Welles, a self-described inventor who, according to his son, was rather more successful at gambling than at business, and Beatrice Ives Welles, who died of hepatitis when Orson was eight. According to her adoring son she was a suffragette, a pacifist, a concert pianist, a “violent radical”, a beauty and a crack shot; in a word, extraordinary. She certainly produced an extraordinary child.
In 1926 Orson became a student at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. There he joined the school theatre company. It was the first step in a six-decade career spanning theatre, radio, television and film. There seemed to be no activity connected with his projects in which he would not involve himself; performing, writing, directing and even procuring costumes. He was multitalented and driven, and no matter what frustrations he faced in getting his movies made, relentless in the pursuit of his goals. He once said that he would have been more successful had he remained in theatre, gone into politics or become a writer, but when he fell in love with movies he never looked back. He lamented that his career had been 2% movie-making and 98% hustling, and although his obsession with film continued until the end of his life, cinema was not his first love, creatively speaking.
At age fifteen he travelled to Ireland in search of adventure. In his semi-documentary film F For Fake, an exploration of fakery, trickery and forgery, he tells the story of the summer he spent on the Emerald Isle. He bought a donkey and cart, paints and canvasses and travelled about, sleeping under the cart at night and trading his paintings for food from the Irish farmers. By the time he arrived in Dublin he had run out of both paint and money, and had to auction the donkey. Showing the kind of resourcefulness that he would later put to use in his film career, he secured an acting job at the Gate Theatre in Dublin by claiming to be a famous New York star when he had never, in fact, acted professionally. He began smoking his trademark cigars to appear more mature, and although only just sixteen, he told his new employers that he was twenty-five. In F For Fake he observes:
That’s how I started - began at the top and I’ve been working my way down ever since!
A wry, self-deprecating remark and not at all true. I used to bemoan the fact that the short-sighted parsimony of money men deprived us of who knows what wonderful films by this supremely talented and boundlessly creative auteur, but as he himself admitted, in matters of creativity, the most blissful accidents can sometimes be born of hardship. Whilst shooting The Trial (1963), Welles’ adaptation of the novel by Franz Kafka, he received word that there was no money to build sets for vital scenes. Ever adaptable, he used the Gare d’Orsay in Paris as a location, and was very pleased with the results. He also showed his quick-witted ability to improvise during the making of Othello (1952). Two reels of film were shot in a Turkish bath in Morocco when the Italian producer went bankrupt, leaving the actors without costumes. They were wrapped in towels and filming continued.
On returning to the US from Ireland, Welles expected to continue his stage career in New York, but was not prepared to wait in line for acting opportunities. Diverted by other pursuits he wrote science fiction and detective stories, and travelled to Seville where he tried his hand at bullfighting. On his return he met Thornton Wilder1 at a party in Chicago. Word of the young actor’s success in Dublin had reached his homeland, and through this chance encounter with Wilder, Welles joined Katharine Cornell’s2 repertory company. At age eighteen his theatrical career was back on track.
Welles the wunderkind had no problem finding work, and his career went from strength to strength. In 1936 he directed a cast of African-American actors in a New York production of Macbeth, whose opening night at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem drew huge crowds. He co-founded the Mercury Theatre repertory company and gained notoriety and, it must be said, publicity, for the infamous radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, broadcast on 30th October 1938. The dramatisation caused widespread panic, convincing many US citizens that the country was experiencing a genuine alien invasion. Here’s some archive film of the press conference that followed, with Welles engaging in some damage limitation.
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