Books

By Otto Friedrich

THE MYSTERY OF CITIZEN WELLES ORSON WELLES: A BIOGRAPHY by Barbara Leaming; Viking; 562 pages; $19.95 ORSON WELLES: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN GENIUS by Charles Higham; St. Martin's Press; 373 pages; $19.95 THE MAKING OF CITIZEN KANE by Robert L. Carringer University of California; 180 pages; $22.50

"I got a letter the other day from a woman . . . saying, 'We agreed when I was pregnant that you would not take any responsibility for my child, but I would like you to see what a fine boy he's grown up to be.' And there's a picture of a grown-up boy on the beach." But, says Orson Welles, "I don't remember having met her . . . I don't believe it's true because I don't think I have that poor a memory. But anything is possible!"

Welles was 70 last May, so it is probably time for people to stop calling him an aging boy wonder and recognize that his is one of the saddest stories of success and failure in American life. Sad because such enormous promise has remained so unfulfilled for so long. Welles was 16 when he talked his way into his first starring role at Dublin's Gate Theater; 18 when he toured the U.S. as Mercutio in Katharine Cornell's version of Romeo and Juliet; 20 when he wowed New York by staging an all-black Macbeth; 22 when he became the celebrated radio voice of Lamont Cranston ("The Shadow knows!"); 23 when he touched off a national panic with his broadcast of a Martian invasion in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Invited to Hollywood to do pretty much as he pleased, he started out by creating one of the best films ever made, Citizen Kane, which he starred in, directed and partly wrote before he was 26. Ever since, for nearly half a century, it has been all downhill, all the way down to that obese figure holding up a wineglass in a TV commercial.

"Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died," Welles observed somewhat bitterly after receiving a special Academy Award in 1970 from a Hollywood that regarded him as too irresponsible to be financed. "They just come along, and while the little needles fall off me, replace them with medallions."

Welles obviously has much to tell, but he has always been reluctant to tell it, except in occasional bursts of self-promotion. But Barbara Leaming, a professor of theater and film at Hunter College, managed to arrange a meeting at Ma Maison restaurant in Los Angeles early in 1983. Something about her encyclopedic knowledge of his life, combined with her gushing admiration, persuaded him to keep talking. Welles recounted his weird childhood. His father was a failed inventor who became an alcoholic, his mother a failed pianist who died when he was nine, and his older brother a schizophrenic. At 18 months, Orson was "discovered" by Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a family friend, who pronounced the tot a genius and supplied him with a violin, paints and a puppet theater, while ardently courting the genius' mother.

Welles' recollections include not only the famous triumphs but tales about private lives in the world of show business. Like what happened the first time he attempted adultery. The romantic atmosphere was broken when, over the hotel-room radio, he heard himself as the Shadow, asking the familiar and all too relevant question: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

Or what happened the night he met Marilyn Monroe at a party, took her & upstairs and started making love. A man who thought it was his wife who had gone upstairs banged on the door until it opened, punched the showman, then realized his mistake.

Or what happened when Charlie Chaplin persuaded the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who regularly wore wings while she preached, to put on the wings while he had his way with her in a London hotel room. Well, never mind.

Such tales are richly entertaining, but is it just possible that Welles, who loves both magic and practical jokes, is making some of these things up? Just for fun? As Welles said of his forgotten son, "Anything is possible." But Leaming is such an enthusiastic admirer that she not only took down everything Welles said, but argues his cause in all his old battles. Most of the star's botched or abandoned projects turn out to be someone else's fault or at worst a series of misunderstandings. Even the breakup of his marriage to Rita Hayworth is blamed on her insecurity. Throughout, Welles remains an unappreciated genius, large of heart and kind to small animals.

Leaming is acutely hostile to more critical predecessors, notably Charles Higham, who argued in The Films of Orson Welles (1970) that the director suffered a neurotic fear of finishing his movies. "A destructive book," says Leaming. Welles shares her animosity. In one of his expensively unfinished films, The Other Side of the Wind, which stars John Huston as an aging movie director attempting a comeback, Welles included a snotty critic called "Higgam." This role was played for a time by Director Peter Bogdanovich, who was also collaborating on a book, titled This Is Orson Welles, until Welles canceled the book. It is all a bit like that marvelous scene at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, in which Welles had Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane firing away at each other's reflections in a fun-house hall of mirrors.

Higham has made a cottage industry out of Hollywood biographies (Kate, Marlene, Bette, etc.), and now, by expanding his field from an analysis of Welles' films to a full-scale biography, he balances his harsh criticism of his subject's eccentricities with an admiring portrait of the young Welles as a brilliant innovator on stage and radio. But, the author notes, even then there was "the megalomania that would soon consume him." And he holds to his view that when Welles flew off to Rio to film the carnival without finishing the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), when he flew off to Europe without finishing the editing of Macbeth (1948), when he wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on abandoned projects like Don Quixote, he feared that a completion would "have the finality of death."

Although Higham's book suffers from his inability to talk to Welles, it nonetheless seems a more accurate portrait than Leaming's collection of quotations from her hero. Still, if Welles had never started a single film after Citizen Kane, he would remain one of Hollywood's great creators. Now that cinema has become a major field of study in academia, several surveys have shown that Citizen Kane is by far the most thoroughly explicated film. So there is a place in the classroom for The Making of Citizen Kane. Robert L. Carringer, an associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hardly mentions the actors in Citizen Kane, much less what the film means or represents, but he is exhaustive in his analyses of the art direction, the photography, the special effects, the sound track.

Leaming's goal was more ambitious, and Welles egged her on. "I think there's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present," Welles told her. She took his advice and decided to interrupt her narrative every once in a while with italic chapters in which she rather portentously describes herself interviewing Welles. At the end, she writes about herself talking to Welles while he in turn is thinking about directing a movie about himself, a movie in which somebody else will play the 22-year-old Welles defying Washington opposition to stage Marc Blitzstein's radical opera The Cradle Will Rock. And he is already starting to change supposedly factual scenes around, to imagine new ones. "The way I want to do it is much more interesting than I was!" he says, then bursts into laughter. Once again anything is possible, and once again there is gunfire in the hall of mirrors.