Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
The glutton who GORGED HIMSELF ON WOMEN
He ate three steaks at a time and cheated on wife Rita Hayworth after a week. But Simon Callow says Orson Welles’s brilliance was unparalleled
Earlier this year, to coincide with the centenary of his birth, there was a play on in London about Orson Welles. It was called Orson’s Shadow and it’s the third play I know of about Welles. There are three films about him too, and he’s been portrayed in over 80 films and TV programmes. Almost every year another book is published about him and I personally have been researching him for a quarter of a century since I became fascinated by this staggeringly charismatic, brilliant and bewilderingly versatile man. One Man Band, the third hefty volume of my ( gulp) four-volume biography of him, has just been published. Even now, the 30th anniversary of his death, Orson Welles still haunts us. Why?
Firstly because of the work, above all Citizen Kane which is still, as it has been for decades, regularly voted either the best film ever made or among the top five. Secondly there is his sheer precociousness: Kane, his first film, was made when he was 25 and had never acted in a film, let alone written, directed and produced one. Thirdly, his uniquely charismatic personality as one of the greatest wits and conversationalists of his day.
By the time he made Kane he’d already rocked the world with a radio version of HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds which had so convinced listeners a Martian invasion was underway in New Jersey that hundreds of them fled for the hills or locked themselves in their basements. The publicity that surrounded that phenomenon took Welles to Hollywood in 1939 to work for the film studio RKO on an unprecedented contract as actor-director-producer, which gave him final cut on any movies he might make. But just two years later, after Kane and the failure of his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, he was an outcast.
Until that point in his career he had been encouraged, endorsed, empowered and embraced. And then it all went into reverse. He was successively discouraged, demeaned, dismissed, even despised. Once the charm had been broken, it never resumed; everything was a struggle from then on, and for the rest of his life his constant prop was a begging bowl, into which fewer and fewer contributions dropped.
There were reasons for Welles’s demise. He had, from the beginning, an inbuilt loathing of authority in any form, seeing it as an affront to his very being. He fell out with everyone who was in a position to say no to him, a rare exception being the great English director Carol Reed who directed Welles in his most celebrated film role, Harry Lime in The Third Man. He returned to Hollywood to make four more films, among them The Stranger with Edward G Robinson, which was a box- office success, but most of his work after 1947 was done away from America and in his last 20 years he only managed to complete two films, each of them just over an hour long.
Which brings us to Welles the man, as opposed to Welles the artist. He was unquestionably one of the most extraordinary personalities of the 20th century. He was born in the American Midwest to a mother who was a pianist and social activist, and a father who had taken early retirement in exchange for a large amount of money which he proceeded to spend like water. His mother was hard-working; his father was a playboy, crazy about chorus girls and travel. Unsurprisingly, they split up when Welles was little; his mother died when he was ten, his father when he was 15, but not before he’d taken the boy round the world.
From his earliest years he was acclaimed as a prodigy; psychologists studied him. Even physically he was out of the ordinary: he shot up to his full 6ft 3½ in by the age of 14, by which time his voice had descended to the basso profundo that made him so recognisable. At the age of ten he was writing opera reviews for the local paper. His passion, from the time he got his first toy theatre, was the stage; at school, at the age of 14, he adapted and directed plays, including a version of Shakespeare’s history plays.
When his father died he went to Ireland alone, now aged 16, ostensibly on a sketching holiday, but actually to find work as an actor. Astonishingly he landed a lead role in a play at the prestigious Gate Theatre in Dublin. Back in Chicago he published a set of Shakespeare textbooks which he illustrated and co-wrote with his old headmaster; they remained in print for 30 years.
Welles’s appetite for everything was enormous – work, art, food and women. He was modest about his prowess as a lover, but essentially he was a classical Don Juan: find ’em, fondle ’em and forget ’em. His three marriages were scuppered from the beginning by his sexual restlessness: a man who can cheat on Rita Hayworth a week after marrying her must certainly be in the grip of a peculiarly perverse compulsion.
Insecurity seemed to underpin a great deal of his life; he even seemed to doubt his own height, frequently wearing platform shoes to bolster his towering dimensions. As for his craving for food – he regularly ordered three steaks for himself at the same meal – it was clearly not hunger, nor simply greed: he was evidently trying to fill a hole in himself that food could never fill. ‘My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four,’ he explained. ‘Unless there are three other people with me.’
He lamented the fact that he had made so few films. He regarded every one as an experiment, and he continued experimenting to the day he died, but by then his achievements had been overshadowed by his persona and some tacky TV ads for whisky and frozen peas. He was at various times a magician ( he played Vegas), a painter, a writer, a newspaper columnist, a radio comedian, a political activist and a documentary-maker. He even staged a ballet.
Welles could master any subject in hours; he made eloquent speeches in languages he had known nothing of only days earlier. As he approached each of the mediums in which he worked he instantly grasped their potential, effortlessly mastering the principles of light, sound and cinematography.
For the last 20 years of his life his mistress was the sculptress Oja Kodar, but he could scarcely walk at the time of his death of a heart attack, aged 70, in the modest bungalow they shared in West Hollywood. He died with his typewriter propped up on his chest, his mind still teeming with ideas for movies, the medium he so memorably called ‘the ribbon of dreams’.