Callow Simon - Orson Welles. volume 3, One-man band

W HEN, IN 1989, my English publisher Nick Hern and I approached that splendid elder-statesman of American publishing, Aaron Asher, with a proposal to write a biography of Orson Welles, I said to him that I thought it would have to be in three volumes, the third of which, I suggested, should be a novel. He looked at me, pityingly, and said, If you are very lucky, you will be allowed to write this biography in two volumes, neither of which will be a novel.

After I had written and delivered the first volume, The Road to Xanadu, which culminated in the release of Citizen Kane, I hit a rock. It was clearly going to be impossible to write the remaining forty-two years of a life which consisted of a continuous volcanic eruption of films, plays, radio programmes, journalism, painting and political interventions, without resorting to the one-damned-thing-after-another school of biography a method I had specifically set out to avoid. With wonderful nonchalance Dan Franklin, by then my publisher at Jonathan Cape, accepted my proposal of writing a second volume which would cover exactly five years of Welless life five years packed with adventures and experiments in various media, but focusing above all on politics. This book was called Hello Americans, the title of one of Welless many radio series in which he valiantly sought to interest the nation in its history and its place in the world. The third and final volume would trace Welless life from 1947 when, at the end of those five largely unsuccessful years, he seemed to throw in the sponge, and stomped off to Europe. There, on and off (but mostly on), he spent the next twenty years of his life. He then returned to America, where he passionately pursued a number of projects which never reached completion the only two films he finished from then until his death in 1985 were both in fact made in Europe.

Knowing that I had this difficult Wellesian period in my sights, friends sympathised with me how sad it is, they said, such a terrible decline. But I have never shared that view. Welles did it his way. If he had modified his behaviour if he had trimmed his sails, if he had pulled in his horns he could have made many more films. But he would not then have been the force of nature that he was. He would just have been another film-maker. As it was, this period in Welless life left behind him at least two films, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, that are remarkable by any standards, plus extraordinary work in several other media but above all I looked forward to tracing that arc as Welles struck out towards the unknown region.

Such was my plan. But I was baulked by Welles himself. His prolificity during these years was so immense, the circumstances surrounding every venture (successful or unsuccessful) on which he embarked were so complex and extraordinary, and the ambitiousness of his approach to each was so unfettered, that had I attempted to encompass nearly forty years from 1947 till his death, the book would have run to considerably more than a thousand pages; just lifting it without an osteopath in attendance would have been risky. It has therefore seemed entirely logical to end this third volume with Chimes at Midnight, the film widely thought to be Welless masterpiece and unquestionably his most personal work. It is also a culmination of his work in the theatre, to which with his production of Ionescos Rhinoceros he finally bade farewell after an epoch-defining quarter of a century of provocative activity. This leaves a fourth and truly final volume to deal with his last two decades of unceasing exploration and experimentation, most of it in conjunction with a collaborator who was also his muse and his mistress, who inspired him to venture into territories where he had as yet never been.

The present volume is called One-Man Band for obvious reasons. Frustrated in his dealings with every studio he ever worked for, Welles made a full declaration of independence with his film of Othello, taking on more and more of the functions associated with film-making: raising the money, designing, editing, sometimes even shooting scenes himself. He only ever worked for a Hollywood studio with its clearly demarcated roles and its hierarchical structure on one more occasion after his self-exile; otherwise, he was free. But with that freedom came the possibilities of chaos, and chaos (or something very like it) was the element in which he moved for most of his remaining career.

It is a life like no other, and as before I have tried to give an impression of what it was like to live that life, and to have been part of it, to be plunged into what Michel MacLiammir so drolly called the Welles vortex. Welles packed more living into his life, pursued more professions, thrust out in more directions and formed more intense relationships than any twenty men put together. It is this life that has interested me, of which the making of movies was such a central and integral part, more than the finished results, remarkable as they often were. This sets me apart from many students of Welles for whom Welles the auteur is their sole focus. Welles would not have understood that, or approved of it. Im profoundly cynical about my work and about most works I see in the world, he told