Review of Orson Welles: Hello Americans!, Simon Callow, Cape, £25, pp507

Sunday Times [London], April 30 2006

That mercurial is a word that best describes Orson Welles as both artist and man should be no surprise. After all, he nominated the ancient Roman god known for swiftness, eloquence and cunning as patron of his various ventures: there was the Mercury Theatre, the Mercury Theatre on the Air, Mercury Productions, the Mercury Wonder Show, even a Mercury Printing Press. (More fleeting than usual, this existed only to publish his pamphlet in support of 17 young Mexican-American Los Angelenos wrongly convicted of murder in the Sleepy Lagoon incident in August 1942.) When interviewed by Hedda Hopper, Welles defended himself against her suggestion that he was a dabbler: “I’m no dabbler. Sometimes I wish I were. Dabblers have all the fun. But I’m constitutionally unable to do anything but take my jobs seriously.”

The problem is that Hopper was half right and so was Orson. He was a serious dabbler, obsessively committed to experimentation, determined to make an impact on whatever medium of expression he chose, but irresponsibly reluctant to see most things through to their conclusion. “Mercury was less a unit within RKO,” says Simon Callow, “than a laboratory in a state of ceaseless experimentation, a heuristic enterprise in quest of what might prove ultimately to be interesting, rather than an organisation narrowly dedicated to the achievement of a particular result.”

It is more than 10 years since Callow published the first volume in this three-book biographical study, to widespread acclaim. That covered the first 25 years of Welles’s life, concentrating on his pioneering work in theatre and radio in the 1930s and culminating in the making of his prodigious first film, Citizen Kane. This second volume covers the short period from 1941 to 1947, between Kane and Macbeth, after which Welles went into voluntary exile in Europe. They were “astonishingly abundant” years and Callow’s dogged research reminds us that they saw Welles at his most productive and protean. Indeed, his fecundity was more of a halter than a spur. During these years he announced some 40 or 50 projects that came to nought. (One such, a proposed cinematic collaboration with Duke Ellington called The Story of Jazz, resulted in the composer-bandleader being paid $12,500 for writing a mere 28 bars.) The same mercurial impulse was reflected in his personal life, which was dominated during this period by his newsworthy though uncommitted marriage to the actress Rita Hayworth, and his life as an active citizen in the Popular Front sense.

He served as a surrogate diplomat, proselytising for democratic American values in South America in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. He wrote a syndicated daily newspaper column, edited Free World magazine, and used the radio as a soapbox. He directed and starred in a circus-style magic show (the Mercury Wonder Show) for the entertainment of troops passing through Los Angeles. He substituted for Jack Benny, the country’s most popular radio comedian, as host of his eponymous show. (Indeed, CBS boss Bill Paley liked the result so much that he offered Welles his own comedy show, an offer not taken up.) His Around the World (based on Jules Verne’s novel) was one of the most technically challenging stage productions ever mounted, and a financial catastrophe. He offered to spearhead an education drive. Seeing himself as a modern-day tribune of the people, he was constantly in demand as an orator — “If it is a little unusual for a movie director or actor of his stature to have appeared in radio comedies, or to have written popular columns for tabloids,” says Callow, “it is virtually unheard of for one to have become an orator of a decidedly political bent while remaining a practising artist”. He contemplated standing for the US Senate, but lacked the stamina for electoral politics.

The traditional perception of Welles as an enfant terrible burdened with genius was one that he occasionally found useful. (Even the announcement by Hayworth that she was divorcing him because she “couldn’t put up with his genius any more”, Callow notes, was “a pleasant piece of PR”.) But Welles was never solipsistic. He was an instinctive collaborator as well as an inspiring leader, although “it was impossible for him to be subordinate” and “his entire personality was constructed on being masterful”. However, he took instruction well from those he respected. For example, Louis Dolivet, a French émigré internationalist, “taught him how to debate, in print and on his feet”.

Although Callow is affected by Welles’s charm, nonetheless he is not overwhelmed by it. He recognises that Welles was complicit in his own downfall. It is true that “bad luck exposed his weaknesses”, but he was “a man in the grip of a temperament that was often fundamentally at war with his gifts”. He was a bamboozler, but managed to stay on the acceptable side of charlatanry. “His casual claim to be half-Southern is another charming piece of self-fabulism,” notes Callow of a piece Welles wrote about racial tolerance for Glamour magazine. “There are so many halves to Welles that by this stage he must have added up to several people — a whole family, perhaps.” Hello Americans is full of witty asides such as this. As a biographer, Callow is a match for his subject in terms of showmanship, but he has gifts of analysis that eluded Welles.

Callow explains how close The Magnificent Ambersons came to fulfilling the promise of Kane, but relates with anguish and a vicarious sense of frustration how Welles blithely forfeited control of the enterprise. One of his best chapters is on that fractured oneiric noir masterpiece, The Lady from Shanghai, which Callow suggests allegorised Welles’s relationship with Hollywood, “the treacherous beauty whose intentions could never be fathomed and whom it was impossible to know”. Yet at the core of this enchanting book is Welles’s role as a Popular Front artist, politically engaged and with a passion to “dramatise unseen America, North and South”. By 1947 that passion had dissipated. Hence, Hello Americans is as much a tale of political disillusionment as it is of thwarted artistic endeavour.