Orson Welles / Rosebud

...Callow adjudges Welles the actor overly fond of "the big gesture" at the expense Nipped in the Rosebud: The Price of Early Genius...

...During rehearsals, he would sit and eat enormous catered meals in the stalls, shouting out commands between mouthfuls of prime 4 Such a personalitymight yet havebeen tolerable to hiscollaborators but forWelles's colossalselfishness...

...By the i970's he was best known for those wine commercials and the card tricks he performed on "Me Merv Griffin Show...

...David Thomson's Rosebud devotes about sixty pages to Kane, and they are the only part of the book worth reading...

...No one suffered more from the young man's tantrums, irrational suspicion, and greed for credit than John Houseman, Welles's partner and producer in the Mercury Theater from 1935 to 1940...

...It remains to be seen whether such criticism will prove more than a futile exercise...

...But a modest congressional proposal to reign in preference in federal contracting has already been shelved for this season by Republican leaders...

...Welles's struggle -to defy the jeers of a movie industry envious of his unprecedented artistic freedom, and then to release the result despite threats from its thinly veiled subject, the publisher William Randolph Hearst-is thrilling and suspenseful...

...While playing the title role in his 1937 version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, he was also starring in several radio shows, rushing back and forth between theater and studio in a hired ambulance during the intervals when he was not on stage...

...But the debate is sure to continue...

...It does not seem likely that conflicting appeals to the courts will yield a very clear resolution in the absence of legislative action...

...Last year, President Clinton ordered a review of existing federal programs to make sure none were either abusive or unnecessary...

...If nothing else, Zelnick's book remains quite persuasive on this point: government cannot be trusted to implement affirmative action policies without raising hackles...

...The Magnificent Ambersons is proof that there was another, very promising, direction for Welles to go: deeper into human nature...

...There is no mechanism for forcing the federal government to organize a national voter referendum (and such a thing has never been attempted...

...No two men on the face of the earth could have been less alike, and yet they might have been made for each other...

...Not that Welles was a failure...

...FRANCIS X. RoCCA is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...

...Joanna Pleszczynska Registered Patent Agent phone/fax: (703) 978-76784216 Sherando LaneAnnandale, VA 22003 PATENT PROSECUTION Infringement, Validity & Novelty Patent Searches 76 October r 9 9 6 . The American Spectator...

...In the 1937-38 season alone, Welles had four hits on Broadway...

...There were occasional coups, such as his classic Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1966), but increasingly Welles made his living in fat character parts and documentary voice-overs, not to mention the ads...

...rib while the others worked without a break...

...The shrewd and careful Houseman took charge of practical matters and struggled to focus the energies of the "monstrous boy" fifteen years his junior-energies on which both of them throve...

...Inevitably, "Welles despised him for the very thing that was his greatest contribution," and without which Welles would eventually founder...

...Perhaps that region was simply too forbidding...

...Bergmann served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the heady 196o's, as the War on Poverty was being hatched...

...Having watched the film countless times over the last four decades, he has come up with a number of arresting observations, and a theory that the whole story is the reverie of a dying man...

...Such a personality might yet have been tolerable to his collaborators but for Welles's colossal selfishness...

...He absorbed other people's ideas and innovations and carried them out with force and flair...

...That such a book could be published by a top ABC news reporter-and endorsed by Ted Koppel on the back-also tells us something...

...Apparently he also toyed with returning to Wisconsin and running for the Senate against Joe McCarthy...

...Thomson is not only a film critic but a film academic, and despite brimming enthusiasm for the subject, his approach has all the appeal of a graduate school seminar...

...When disaster occasionally obliged him, he would languish for days in the blackest of depressions...

...The year after Citizen Kane he made The Magni ficentAmbersons, an arguably greater film-but in his remaining four decades he never did anything else in that league...

...Most of the action takes place not in Hollywood but on the legitimate stage, and at the other scenes of Welles's boyhood: Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he was born to a prosperous manufacturing family...

...75 The American Spectator • October 19 9 6 of psychological subtlety, and cursed by the "mighty organ" of a voice whose power and charm-combined with a gift for improvisation, even in verse-allowed him to get away without learning his lines...

...the capitals of Europe and Asia, where his alcoholic father took him on extravagant, desultory vacations...

...Even though he lacked the panache to die young, his greatness goes universally acknowledged today...

...Of course Welles had done plenty of other things before their time...

...If President Clinton is right that "the era of big government is over," we are not likely to see any ground swell of new public demands for a systematic reallocation of opportunity and rewards in the American economy across racial lines of the sort urged by Barbara Bergmann...

...On the rest of Welles's life, his loopy and self-indulgent ruminations are unbearable...

...Callow gives us much psychological data and some restrained speculation, drawing the picture of a child spoiled by the excessive attentions and expectations of his elders, of a young man beset by guilt for his parents' deaths, and of a vastly talented artist tortured by a sense of his own smallness...

...Did I mention that Prof...

...This first of two volumes carries Welles's story up to the premiere of Kane...

...The story of the making of Citizen Kane has been told before, but Callow retells it magnificently, drawing on the work of other scholars and his own thorough research...

...The eventual triumph (artistic, though not commercial) belongs to a talented group rather than a single man, yet as Callow points out, neither the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz nor the cinematographer Gregg Toland, the two most celebrated of Welles's collabo rators, ever matched their achievements on this film...

...by z6 he had made one of the greatest movies of all time on his first try...

...Until someone figures out a way to square the circle, however, it does not seem likely that there will be an effective demand for extending government controls, in the way Eastland seems to contemplate, to add a whole vast and potentially quite litigious and assertive constituency-namely, white males-to the existing clients of the government's anti-discrimination machine...

...His failure was as much a public happening as his success had been...

...Critics are no longer constrained by fear that it is "racist" to criticize affirmative action...

...But those forty fallow years remain a pity, a shame, and a mystery-as they must have been to him...

...The call to Hollywood in 1940 broke it...

...and Dublin, where as a trustfunded orphan of i6, Orson bluffed his way into the company of the Gate Theatre and made an instant hit playing a German Duke thirty-five years his senior...

...Yet even here he manages to be both flippant and pretentious...

...Simon Callow, an accomplished actor and director in both theater and film, brings a colleague's sympathy and insight to his account of Welles's brilliant career...

...Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu Simon Callow Viking / 64o pages /$32.95 Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles David Thomson Alfred A Knop f /463 pages /$3o REVIEWED BY Francis X. Rocca 0 rson Welles died alone, so nobody knows his dying words, but his last utterance in the public consciousness was: "We will sell no wine before its time...

...After much delay, high level White House staffers produced a report assuring the president that no existing programs were either abusive or unjustified...

...The major events of Welles's subsequent life bear out how difficult it must have been: the failed marriage to Rita Hayworth, his ballooning size, his wanderings through South America and Europe in furtherance of various quixotic schemes, including a film version of Don Quixote...

...By itself, however, it will not constrain any of the federal programs that continue to provide pressure toward racial or "gender" preference...

...Nonetheless, fueled by coffee, booze, and Benzedrine-and the adrenalin which Callow says he needed so badly that he constantly courted disaster in order to produce it-Welles could work for inhuman lengths of time, and his ambition could seem limitless...

...The latter's growing fame, especially after the 1938 broadcast that started a Martian invasion-scare, put a strain on their bond...

...His decline, too, was premature...

...By age io he was quoting Voltaire and Oscar Wilde...

...An undisciplined performer, Welles was also a unique case of "The Director as Truant"-he would abandon both cast and crew to go on days-long benders...

...Chicago, where his mother tried to groom him to fulfill her frustrated musical ambitions, then died when her son was nine...

...Like Callow, Thomson thinks Kane was an impossible act to follow...