Orson Welles: A Biography

...I think he disdains them and I think he's contemp tuous of their intelligence, and outraged that they nevertheless control what he does...

...Miss Learning, herself, swallows whole Welles's solemn defense of that sequence as an illustration of Bertolt Brecht's "alienation" theory for the theater...

...Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue...

...El from falling off a ladder while pruning a tree...

...It almost goes without saying that he adapted, designed, and directed this theater montage himself and that because he had the demands of a perfectionist he asserted his authority over the cast with the benevolent despotism of a Genghis Khan...

...Too often we unintentionally victimize others in the process...

...What are the long-term consequences of this proposal...

...Public speaking and sports were stressed equally, both of them supervised by Roger Hill, who was instantly and for years thereafter as impressed by Welles as Welles was by him...

...When Welles was five, the family moved to Chicago where Orson was introduced to and allegedly conversed with the musical celebrities who frequented his mother's salon and, already stage-struck, made his theater debut in the Chicago Opera as Madame Butterfly's love-child, "'trouble...

...Welles has usually known with whom he could push an initial advantage...

...That's my theory...

...The abovementioned magazines.are distinguished and influential trend-setters, and the time has come to give them some serious competition...

...Sent by Dr...

...The National Catholic Register has said that "for sheer feistiness and guts, it's hard to too the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...

...I have waited for years for someone to assure me that the ending of, for instance, The Lady from Shanghai was imposed on Welles for reasons (no doubt financial) with which he had to comply...

...The legendary attributes of the Welles we've heard of seem to have been initiated shortly after his birth (in 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin) by a Dr...

...I had a very bad way of turning these guys off...

...So they were: a longer moment than, most likely, they envisioned...

...There's some kind of perverse, suicidal refusal to deal with people...

...By chance, again, he met Thornton Wilder at a party in Chicago...

...Far be it from me to favor the front office, but in such matters there is usually truth on both sides...

...Arkadin, which he subsequently made into a film) with the complaint: "Yes, everybody had heard of him, but nobody knew much about him...

...Berkeley, CA 94706 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 51 Hearst, for other than political reasons...

...The novel ends with the sort of melodramatic violence which is the obvious escape route for a novelist whose characters don't really have much to do with each other...

...George A. Kelly, James Likoudis, Ralph Mclnerny, John T. Noonan Jr., Kevin Perrotta, James J. Thompson Jr., S.L...

...Wells's The War of the Worlds, which reputedly whitened the hair of half the nation-and who went on to make Citizen Kane, a milestone in American motion-picture art and a substantial thorn in the flesh of William Randolph Catholics There is a tenacious myth in America that says Catholics are stupid, ignorant, and superstitious...

...Ransom believed that he would become a different person, better somehow, if he kept training...

...I thought it would embarrass them if I said I wasn't homosexual, that would be a rebuke, so I always had a headache...

...he, in turn, without having set eyes on Welles, introduced him to the producer, Guthrie McClintic who, by chance, needed a second lead for three plays he was sending on the road, starring his wife, Katharine Cornell, and Basil Rathbone...

...Orson's incurable addiction to life as theater, theater as life, was without reservation encouraged...

...Heston's statement as the last word in this context...

...The book has its incidental pleasures...

...Ransom thought, was his own movie now"), the prose is for the most part gracefully wrought...

...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...

...Only one Welles died on October 10...

...Welles's father, Richard, had retired in disappointment from a lucrative career as an inventor and was assuaging his regrets for not having become a multi-millionaire by drinking himself into the grave...

...Whatever reservations I may have expressed above are unimportant beside my substantial respect for Welles's achievement...

...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...

...At the same time it is, I'll risk saying inevitably, the most enthralling book ever, in my recollection, about show business, especially about movie show-business...

...magazine that can speak with the same authority and "weight" as a Commonweal or a Commentary...

...He played "a somewhat less artistic role," as Miss Learning puts it, costumed as a rabbit in front of Marshall Field's department store, murmuring periodically to passers-by, "Dear me, I must hurry-or else it will be too late to see the woolen underwear on the eighth floor...

...Admittedly, it is not always possible to fully answer these questions...

...It was his way of knowing himself...

...In 1916 the doctor, so goes his story, had looked in at the nursery and the eighteen-months-old Orson had declared roundly, "The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguishes men from animals...

...The rest is the Orson Welles with whom we are more familiar, by whom we have been periodically enlightened, entertained, or confused-the front page genius who, in the thirties, staged a black Macbeth in Harlem and, against greater hostility, The Cradle Will Rock in Manhattan, who dramatized, on the air, H.G...

...The other emotional hurt driving our hero is presented in a series of flashbacks to the Afghan border a few years earlier, where Ransom had been the unintentional accomplice in the death-by-overdose of a woman who is so flipped out that the reader cares neither about her nor Ransom's guilt over the incident...

...No one has produced a full-scale history of Orson, man and boy, and it will be completely unnecessary now for anyone else to attempt it...

...After his early infatuation with Beatrice Welles, a beauty, a feminist, and a literary intellectual, he became increasingly alienated from her by his ingrained contempt for the arts (she was also an accomplished musician...

...Miss Learning's is the real copious thing-if a fantastic subject may be defined as real at all...

...Miss Learning, whose documentation seems to be GET SMART reliable, provides Welles with no alibi that convinces me...

...Used irresponsibly, it can do more harm than good Virtually every major dilemma we face today-inflation, massive unemployment, prohibitively high interest rates, and on and on-can be traced to legislation (and legislators) of the recent past which was enthusiastically supported by voters...

...That is, they don t study the issues or the candidates, nor do they consider the long-term and indirect consequences of a particular proposal...

...But the moral conflicts in this novel are too simple, too programmatic, to engage a mature reader...

...But when, at the Shubert organization, he was snubbed by an office-boy, he left Manhattan in a huff for the more friendly environs of Illinois where, with histrionic resignation, he postponed his ambition to become a world-famous actor and settled down, for a season, as a dramatic coach at his alma mater, the Todd School...

...During his years as a film director, producers in the industry have persistently criticized Welles for his inabil ity to complete a movie or even to sus tain its production without catastrophic hitches and without retaliatory charges that whatever has gone wrong with the film has always been the fault of someone else...

...Ransom has apparently come to Japan to escape the crass material ways of his TV producer father, but his filial complaints are nothing more than trite adolescent grumbling...

...The writing is more restrained than in Bright Lights, Big City...

...The liberal Protestants have their Christian Century, the Evangelicals have their Christianity Today, the liberal Catholics have their Commonweal, and the Jews have their Commentary...

...Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, where he was sent to undergo a puritanical regime of discipline, turned out to be the decisive playground for his talents...

...Welles...

...If the other boys condoned his dictatorial guise it was because en couraged by Skipper [i.e., Hill] they all self-consciously saw themselves as somehow sharing with the prodigy a ORSON WELLES: A BIOGRAPHY Barbara Learning/Viking/$19.95 Vernon Young 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 moment in theatrical history...

...There will be less excuse hereafter for not knowing much about Mr...

...Varnado, and Paul C. Vitz...

...This experience was followed-or rather, accompanied-by hazards in another part of the forest...

...The Irish episode and its sequel, as recounted by Miss Learning, illustrate a prominent motif in Welles's career: The longest way round is the shortest way home...

...In his last year at Todd as a student, Welles contrived a Shakespearean hash, so to say, which would be in kind recapitulated when, for the Mercury Theater in New York, he produced Five Kings (from which, in turn, came the inspiration for his composite Falstaff movie, Chimes at Midnight...

...Aged ten, Orson was lodged by his guardian, Bernstein, with a German psychologist, from whom he was short ly forced to flee when it became obvious that his body, not his mind, was the primary object of Herr Professor's interest...

...I mean, he can charm actors and stage hands and drivers and makeup people: why can't he take a little time and charm the men who are going to give him the money to make the movies...

...Considering the frequency with which artists and intellectuals insist that their childhood was miserable and their adolescence unbearable, Orson Welles is a dazzling exception...

...From my earliest childhood," Welles has confessed, "I was the Lillie Langtry of the older homosexual set...

...The father seems unattractive enough when he arrives on the scene, but that does not alter our impatience with his hardboiled son...

...And a vote cast in ignorance is worse than no vote at all...

...Even the "magisterial" New York Times has had to take notice...

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...The karate kid neither smokes nor drinks and he goes to bed early...

...The steps by which Welles breached the international theater as an actor, only three years later, involved three principal conditions: sheer bluff on his part, the talent to support...

...Orson Welles as film-maker-let us keep our heads-has been both genius and ham...

...See, film is the only art form whose raw materials are so expensive that the artist can't afford to buy them for himself...

...that bluff when it was called, and the coincidence of someone needing him on the spot...

...But unless these issues are at least addressed, we vote as if blindfolded...

...The reader should be able to judge for himself, from the evidence supplied, the extent to which Welles remains justified in his belief that he has been the invariable victim...

...That Edwards and his co-director, Michael MacLiammoir, were homosexuals, may well have determined the outcome ahd Welles, having spent his earlier years fending off male advances, had learned how to appear coquettish in order to gain a present advantage...

...Whether or not Edwards wholly believed him we'll never know, but by chance he needed an actor desperately just then and Welles, after a nervous but satisfactory audition, was hired...

...There was, by the way, an older brother, who seems to have been something of a loony...

...The vote is not, in itself, a magic wand that brings only blessings...

...Since a New York Times reviewer had extolled his performance at the Gate and repeated his fib about the Theater Guild, Welles returned to America in order to exploit his flowering reputation...

...Everybody wanted me...

...Orthodox Catholics have newspapers, quarterly journals, family magazines, and clergy magazines, but they have no "literary" Our contributors include the best orthodox Catholicism has to offer: Francis Canavan S.J., Christopher Derrick, Joseph Fessio S.J., Paul H. Hallett, James Hitchcock, Msgr...

...Since we can scarcely believe that Wisconsin was uniquely rampant with homosexuality in the twenties, Welles's report suggests that if everyone were as frank as he about his boyhood vicissitudes, a considerable number of American communities would be revealed as crypto-gay...

...it is also true that the film industry deserved better of Orson than it got...

...Today's soothing drug can easily become tomorrow's nightmarish addiction...

...Barbara Learning has written a 562-page biography of him, based on two-year interview sessions with the man, himself, together with testimony from everyone alive, it seems like, who encountered Welles for five minutes (in the spirit of "I once knew a man who saw Shelley...

...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 1 1069 Kains Ave...

...In any case, Welles's debut (in Jew Suss) was a triumph with the Dublin audience and its press, so much of a triumph that Edwards and MacLiammoir, with the fickleness of their kind, having paved his way to success in the first place, proceeded to rein him in...

...Well, the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has arrived on the scene to dispel those falsehoods...

...Nearly all the others have moments of merit, of "the Welles touch," and moments of astoundingly melodramatic taste...

...It not only has great wit and sense of place, but it is also one of the more virtuosic displays of writing by a young American since Michael Herr pasted together Dispatches...

...Hoping to dazzle Hill with his acting prowess, as he would be unable to do with his lesser talent for basketball, he launched a succession of plays in which, according to a fellow-student, he played Cassius, Mark Antony, Richard III, Dr...

...Holden Caulfield) and both are trying to get over something terribly sad which happened to them before the first chapter...

...Does this legislation help some people at the expense of others...

...He felt that the discipline would tone all of his being...

...The problem with this advice is that too many people take it literallythey do nothing else, then they vote...

...Born in 1977 and published 10 times a year, we've already made a mark...

...Our attention is usually focused only on those we wish to help...

...Books already exist on the subject of Welles but they are mainly critiques or loose adulations of his theater and film productions...

...Enter Bernstein, a Russian-born orthopedist...

...The eponymous hero of McInerney's second novel, Ransom, has little in common with his immediate predecessor, except that both partake in the American literary tradition of backing away from sex at the last minute (cf...

...Maurice Bernstein, who was then virtually installed in the Welles's household and who would become a lifelong mentor of and nuisance to Orson, from 1916 to 1958-when he died Vernon Young is a writer living in Philadelphia...

...For a series of 36 of these award-winning essays, send $10.00 to Alternatives, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242...

...Wilder remembered having read about the youth's extraordinary success in Dublin and wrote a letter of recommendation for him to Alexander Woollcott, one of the most influential columnists of his day...

...That is why the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has made its appearance...

...That's not what he does...

...McInerney is quite good at depicting the hollowness of expatriate life, and his portrait of the modern Japanese, a race not entirely comfortable with its recent veneer of Western values, is convincing...

...You know, I was like an eternal virgin...

...Hyde, and Jesus Christ...

...While there are lapses into chic journalisms (a telephone is described as "Ransom's major electronic interface with the rest of the world") and cliche ("But this, It is probably as true today as it was in 1952 when Orson Welles, with himself in mind, obviously, began a novel (Mr...

...To be sure, The Lady from Shanghai was drastically cut by Harry Cohn-about twenty percent, according to Welles...

...I, for one, am willing to believe in Welles's infantine coherence...

...And honest men will differ as to what the answers mean...

...As a bonus, we will also send you a free subscription to our monthly journal Imprimis...

...But that percentage did not apparently include the pretentious mirror sequence...

...0 D espite the best intentions, the following bad advice is always circulated around election time: "If you do nothing else, at least vote...

...He falls in with a set of other young Americans who are all trying what Thomas McGuane (an obvious influence on McInerney) has dubbed "the Rand-McNally approach to self-discovery"--in this case burning a three-year hole on their resumes in order to do a little Zen and drugrunning...

...Perhaps, as an actor (about which I've said lit tle here) Welles is less debatable than he has been as a writer and director...

...If Miss Learning's biography is not as critical as it might have been, it is as affectionate as its subject deserves...

...it is no more incredible than a host of anecdotes in his marathon of nine lives...

...The death, on October 10, of Orson Welles, was announced shortly after I had submitted this review...

...Perhaps the most impar tial view of this matter has been formulated by the actor, Charlton Heston, quoted by Miss Learning: It's acceptable wisdom that Orson deserved better of the film industry than he got...

...What strikes one in this incredi ATTENTION: ble sequence is that no matter what detours Welles took or what phony credentials he offered, his destiny seems to have been decided somewhere in the looms of time...

...Bernstein on a walking tour of Ireland (to escape the hayfever season in Illinois), Welles talked his way into the Gate Theater of Dublin by presenting himself to Hilton Edwards as an actor from the Theater Guild in New York City...

...In his sessions with Barbara Learning, Welles has protested, with no little exasperation, the unfairness of these complaints...

...Jekyll and Mr...

...He has made three unarguably outstanding films: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Othello...

...Orson wouldn't have had this problem if he'd been a painter or a writer...

...Like a lot of young writers today, Jay McInerney is very clever but has no real idea as yet about how to go to work on what Lionel Trilling called "the recalcitrant stuff of life...

...At the age of 17, Orson Welles was in like a burglar, engaged to play Mercutio and Marchbanks and Octavius in a touring company with internationally celebrated stars...

...We pick up a good deal of interesting information about the mar tial arts, and there are pleasant narrative stretches when the author stops forcing the exiguous emotional content of the novel and simply depicts the quotidian rounds of his characters...

...But he has to grovel to some studio head for whose in telligence he has little respect and who he recognizes has no talent at all...

...As an individual, you may not steal another's money or property, nor may you force another to do anything against his will...

...Moreover, there is a prejudice among modernist Catholics that those Catholics who really believe in the Bible, the creeds, tradition, and the Church are intellectually feeble...

...He thinks, why must I be nice to this man...

...You see, we believe that orthodox Catholics need a high-grade magazine that really speaks to the mind as well as the heart, that speaks Truth with clarity, verve, and style...

...Shouldn't groups of individuals, as a government, be measured by the same standard...

...Subscribe today...

...it is not simply a biography in the chronological sense, where he was when, it's a compendium of Welles's own opinions of where he was when...

...National Review calls us "first-rate" and Newsweek has conceded that we are "thoughtful," even praising our "childlike exuberance...

...Unfortunately, in trying to write a real novel, instead of the fictional equivalent of a rock video, McInerney proves unable to create a moral world with any more subtlety than that inhabited by Godzilla...

...Help us explode old myths and prejudices...

...While we are not surprised to hear that precocity in most things was a feature of Welles's growing-up, the mind does boggle when we are told that after his mother's death he spent four weeks with her relatives, and his girl cousins initiated him sexually, at the age of nine...

...All government Hillsdale College Hillsdale Michigan 49242 programs have a price tag which you, the taxpayer, must pay, • Does this proposal ask the government to do something which would be illegal or immoral for me to do personally...

...What will this program add to my tax burden...

...As long as the prints may last, Welles will be indelible, as Harry Lime no less than as publisher Kane, as the ontrack voice of The Magnificent Ambersons, as Cardinal Wolsey or as Othello...

...To anyone associated, in one way or another, with "theater," in the large sense of the word, Welles has been a refreshing presence for over forty years-intrepid and resourceful, idiosyncratic and endearing...

...for that reason I am reluctant to leave Mr...

...Within a few months Welles knew it was time to take his leave...

...After all, it's said, there aren't even enough intelligent orthodox Catholics to support a decent journal of opinion...

...thereof, an anecdote from Miss Learning which is not, I think, commonly known: Welles, it seems, had somehow found out that "Rosebud" was Hearst's pet name for the genitalia of his mistress, Marion Davies...

...he persuaded Hill to reform the dramatic curriculum then current at Todd so that Shakespeare would become the rule rather than the exception...

...Many, if not all, of these problems could have been avoided if we had adequately addressed the following questions before voting...

...Far from blowing his prospects and money up his nose, Christopher Ransom is in Japan studying the martial arts...

...But orthodox Catholics have nothing comparable in the field...