Best books on Orson Welles?

[Store Hadji]

As much as I like having the photocopied version of anything I don't have, I have a hard-on for the real deal. I prefer my 78-speed sets of The Mercury Shakespeare series, which I don't even have a Victrola to play, to the CDs issued by Pearl. It's just the real thing, article, deal, whatever verses the copy. But I wouldn't argue with the carbon-paper Put Money In Thy Purse at this point. It is NOT available at any of the libraries networked locally, so they all suck. They do have a lot of Cliff Irving books, including Fake (which I've read and loved,) so those I should sample.

Jaime - check out Frank Norris' novel McTeague, which Stroheim filmed page for page and greatly embellished as Greed (or did before Thalburg used the scissors.) I think you'll be surprised by it's power, starkness, simplicity and no-punches-pulled no-BS honesty and cynicism. It was written over a hundred years ago, but could have been first published yesterday. Helluva book.

[Glenn Anders]

While looking forward to Callow's second volume, I maintain that the difference between his book and Thomson's (aside from scope) is that Thomson laments, in restrospect, the failings of character which crippled Welles' later projects, whereas Callow snidely takes a postion of critical superiority toward the early works themselves, on which Welles' reputation was based.

And those works Callow is dealing with are some of the triumphs of American Theater, Radio and Cinema, in the period, and down to today. The theatrical work may be mentioned in the same breath with the best British productions of the 1930's, and no radio or film of that time in Britain came close to The Mercury Theater on the Air or CITIZEN KANE.

Both Callow and Thomson are British, and a certain diffidence may be detected in both. But, in my opinion, Callow displays an underlying envy that nothing which he has ever done in the theater or on screen matches the repute of Welles' accomplishments. Thomson, whatever problems it has created in his life, whatever fantasies he spins in Rosebud, whatever errors he makes, is clearly a lover of Welles. CITIZEN KANE overtook him in the way that some of us have been describing on another thread here. He has spent his life trying to lay down the torch he has been carrying over those first experiences.

Callow, from the evidence in The Road to Xanadu, thinks he has Welles' pegged as a phony, an egomaniac, and a creation of American PR, which a wellbred Englishman of 1930's (or of Callow's generation) would have enjoyed "taking the mickey out of."

In my judgement, that is what Callow attempts to do (unsuccessfully) in The Road to Xanadu.

Much as I admire Jonathan Rosenbaum, I early recognized that he had placed himself in Callow's camp rather than that of Thomson. It may be a conflict of the emotional/literary vs the intellectual/theatrical.

For a recent example of what I feel is Thomson's motivation, at least, let me refer you to a piece (which mentions CITIZEN KANE as an early primary influence) that I found a link to in www.greencine.com:

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/40/features-thomson.php

In this piece, you can see the highly emotional and artistic attachment Thomson formed with the first movies and directors he was exposed to.

Have we mentioned greencine before here, btw?

Most addicting.

Finally, though I don't quite know how you bring it in, Hadji, my praise is with yours. both for McTeague and for GREED.

And no matter what Welles said about not being influenced by Von Stroheim, I can't help thinking that he was.

Glenn

[tonyw]

Glenn,

I support your observations concerning Callow. His work represents jealous, "gay bitchiness" envy, for the reasons you have stated. He is hell-bent on desttroying the achievements that Welles made in the audio work of the Mercury Theatre.

It may be that Jonathan Rosenbaum becoming more generous over the years since he originally critiqued Callow in "The Battle Over Orson Welles" which first appeared in Cineaste 22.3 (1996) and which has since been republished in his recent excellent collection of essays.

Maybe, Callow has mellowed over the years after venting his spleen in the first book? Who knows? We shall have to await its publication.

[Gordon]

About Callow:

I agree that the Callow book mentions homosexuality way too many times, makes innuendos that are likely inaccurate, if not downright slanderous, and implies that homosexuality is central to Orson Welles's story, which it is not. However, if you let the whole topic of homosexuality go, the Callow book is for me the most worthwhile of the Welles biographies.

Callow really adds to one's appreciation of Welles as a director of stage works like Faustus. He also refuses to accept as true the many legends about Orson Welles, most begun by Welles himself, and whenever possible checks them out for factuality. This is what a real biographer does, not merely repeating the received wisdom. I would almost say that Callow's is the only 'major biography' as I like to think of the term, in that he does more than just repeat the same stuff from the Lilly that all the other books re-cycle. I'm thinking of Jos. McBride's approach to biography. To write Searching for John Ford, McBride tracks down the family's ancestral home in Ireland interviews everyone alive that is related to or knew Ford and literally goes through Ford's tax returns checking every fact commonly accepted about Ford and testing its truthfulness. In his Spielberg biography, McBride debunks the myth that Spielberg jumped off the tram at Universal City and set himself up in an office. McBride has not written a biography of Orson Welles. He has written a book of critical essays on Welles films and a terrific little book documenting every film Welles appeared in as an actor. Since there is not a McBride biography of Welles, which would be truly exhaustive in its research, I consider the Callow book to be the best researched of the Welles biographies. It's also very well written and an enjoyable read.

CITIZEN KANE overtook him in the way that some of us have been describing on another thread here.

I enjoy the thread where everybody tells how they came to be interested in Orson. It might be interesting on this thread to summarize the accounts in the books on Orson Welles of how the authors came to be aficionados. Naremore, McBride and Bogdanovich come immediately to mind as writers whose stories of how they became interested make for good reading, and I'm sure there are many others if someone looked them up.

I think of Kenneth Tynan as quoted in Orson's Shadow, (btw I'd like to read more about this marvelous play here on Wellesnet)

Tynan says, "I've been his (Orson's) emisary since I first saw Citizen Kane in a cinema in Birmingham when I was sixteen. I took a different girl to see it for the rest of the week. On the fifth night, I blindfolded myself to revel in the use of sound and I wrote that if it were up to me, Orson Welles would be in charge of the entire American film industry from then on."

Greed/McTeague:

What a story! Just like the card from the test screening of the Magnificent Ambersons, where the audience member wrote that it was the best film they'd ever seen; four people (don't recall who they were or what Thalberg's role was) saw the entire completed Greed in a screening and 3 of them knew that they had seen the greatest film ever made up to that point.

The novel must have been a knock-out. Supposedly Stroheim was staying in a boarding house and found a copy of McTeague lying on a table, read it and decided then and there to become a film maker so that he could make a movie of it.

Sort of like with The Other Side of the Wind, the story of the making of the film is itself a facinating tale.

[Store Hadji]

I do remember there being a recurrent homo theme in the Callow book - not the kind of thing I cared for, one of the book's flaws for me (true or not.) I really need to read this one again. It seems Callow drew some other conclusions that I disagreed with, but I don't remember what they were. My next reading I'll certainly be looking for indications of jealousy and bitchiness and attempts to discredit Welles. I may well change my opinion after that. The book did have a lot more detail and was, I still think, better researched than the other bios, though it might have been better if he'd steered clear of controversy (he's a Hearst minion! I knew it!)

[David N]

McTeague is a must read. It's a tragedy that Frank Norris died so young. Regarding Greed, whether or not von Stroheim's original cut was a masterpiece or not, you have to admit that distributing an 8 or nine hour movie in 1925 was probably folly. And in the end, what got cut out was a couple of side stories that weren't central to the main story. Of course, I wish the original cut still existed. Von Stoheim was a genius. But they didn't change that ending out in Death Valley. There aren't many more powerful endings in cinema. And unfortunately they butchered Ambersons. Greed in it's current state is an unqualified masterpiece. Even better with the Schmidlin additions. With Ambersons, I have to reference the original script and try to channel/dream Orson's ending. And I agree that Stroheim influenced Welles. In the Bogdanovich book, he speaks as highly of Stroheim as anyone. I wish Warners would quit screwing around and release Greed!!

[The Night Man]

Callow snidely takes a postion of critical superiority toward the early works themselves, on which Welles' reputation was based....

...Callow, from the evidence in The Road to Xanadu, thinks he has Welles' pegged as a phony, an egomaniac, and a creation of American PR, which a wellbred Englishman of 1930's (or of Callow's generation) would have enjoyed "taking the mickey out of."

Odd, Glenn, that I recently reread Callow's book and I don't recall any attitude such as this. I'll certainly give it another look now in light of your comments, with an eye toward any envious condescension on Callow's part.

...the Callow book mentions homosexuality way too many times, makes innuendos that are likely inaccurate, if not downright slanderous, and implies that homosexuality is central to Orson Welles's story, which it is not. However, if you let the whole topic of homosexuality go, the Callow book is for me the most worthwhile of the Welles biographies.

This is a very curious comment, Gordon, in light of Welles' relationships (personal and professional) with Hilton Edwards, Michael MacLiammoir, Hiram Sherman, Francis Carpenter, Thornton Wilder, Alexander Woolcott, Marc Blitzstein, and John Houseman.

There are a few too many questions about Welles' sexuality for the subject to go unexamined in a comprehensive biography. And how do you know that Welles was not bisexual? You may not want to hear about it (for whatever reason), but that doesn't make the subject any less significant.

That Callow's allegations re Welles' sexuality have made some here so nervous I find genuinely amusing, since I have long noted a lavender streak in Welles' work (his film work, that is). In fact, that's one of the reasons I was intrigued by him in the first place.

[Glenn Anders]

Much good comment here.

Too much to do it all justice.

With thanks for a number of comments in agreement, I would add, to be fair, that no one that I know of has a better account than Callow of Welles' teenage years, and that "round the world" trip with Dad.

I did not go into Callow's suggestions about Welles' sexuality, only his attitudes toward the man's early accomplishments.

About suggestions of homosexuality and bisexuality, I would say this:

Welles, after the death of his mother, when he was nine, grew up without much positive female influence. His aunt was a harridan, and Skipper Hill's wife, though sympathetic, seems to have stayed in the background.

In fact, Welles grew up in the company of men, many of them gay, or in the closet. The list you make, Nightman, documents that fact. We don't know much about what all his experiences were with them, whether there were advances, how he received them. A number of these individuals did describe him when he was 15-25 as "beautiful." Certainly, in the 1930's. a large contingent of talented people in the Arts were concealing their personal lives from the public. If Welles were concealing a "lavender streak," he was working non-stop with the opposite sex, too.

[I'm reminded that Burt Lancaster indicated that he was just too beautiful, and there was just too much of him, not to share. That attitude in a recent biography of Lancaster rather surprised me, I must say. Stardom may bring Narcissism and vice verse.]

Regardless, whatever Welles' experience and attitudes toward the subject, he appears to have been remarkably enlightened in regard to gender and racial matters for his time. He was an equal opportunity appreciator and booster of talent. That he was concerned about these subjects is reflected in the vehicles he picked and the thematic interpretations he adopted. Those vehicles and interpretations dealt more and more frankly with homosexuality (and the concealment of it) as he grew older.

Think of two of his final projects: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, and The Big Brass Ring.

"Anyway, what does it matter what you say about a man?"

Glen

[chrissie]

Personally, whether or not he was bi seems almost irrelevant, but given that he's been dead for 20 years and not a shred of evidence (or even real good gossip) has emerged actually makes me doubt it. How many others from the closet is this true of? It always comes out when they're dead, however well they protected it when alive.

People can, I think, mistake social influence and sexual orientation. The social influence of gay culture (for instance), from a very young age (16 is pretty young) will have a big effect on someone... but the idea that this will shape a person's sexual orientation is incredibly old-fashioned and hardly credible TODAY.

If the contention is that a straight man can't be close friends with, and sympathetic toward, gay men, or exhibit theatrical tendencies stereotypically (i.e. to an extent, falsely) associated with homosexuals... it's a pretty damned weak -- and annoyingly narrow-minded -- contention.

In other words, if you want to understand OW's attitude and overall demeanour, his (social) influences are self-evident. He may well have been bisexual, but mechanically speaking, that's an entirely different issue. The conventional approach of assigning everyone/everything to rigid little boxes will miss this point... and, presumably, miss the whole point of Orson Welles, period.

[NoFake]

Jonathan Rosenbaum made some very pertinent observations on this subject in Locarno. (If I'm misrepresenting something from memory or bad handwriting, I hope Jonathan will weigh in and correct me!) Noting that in TOSOTW, Jake Hannaford’s persona is a DeMille-type director in the classic mold, and the film-within-a-film is highly experimental, he suggested that the disconnect was intentional on Welles’ part. That, as in "Kane," this was another illustration of the impossibility of “explaining a man’s life.” He also pointed out similarities between characters Welles disliked — Kane, Quinlan, Lime, Clay — and suggested that developing them gave Welles the chance to explore them — maybe even, as Mr. Clay, to give him the temporary, tangential illusion of power over them — but NOT to explain them. Journalists who tend to mythologize Welles and try to define him are denying him the possibilities he granted his characters.

[The Night Man]

Chrissie said:

Personally, whether or not he was bi seems almost irrelevant, but given that he's been dead for 20 years and not a shred of evidence (or even real good gossip) has emerged actually makes me doubt it. How many others from the closet is this true of? It always comes out when they're dead, however well they protected it when alive.

You admittedly have not read Callow's book, so let me quote a passage for you:

...Francis Carpenter, a friend of both Orson and Virginia, [was] thought of by those who remember him as camp beyond the dreams of Quentin Crisp, someone who, at a time of rigid sexual typing, flaunted his outrageousness without inhibition. His audition, Houseman observes, was of 'prodigious obscenity'. Both the Welles were deeply fond of him; in Welles' case there may have been more than simply friendly affection. William Alland, as close as anyone to Welles shortly after the period under discussion, avers that without question Welles and Carpenter had had a sexual relationship, and were publicly prone to furious rows and extravagant reconciliations. Whatever the truth of this, Carpenter remained part of Welles loose-knit theatrical family almost to the end, finally appearing in KING LEAR at the City Center in 1956. During the Second World War he astonished his circle by performing acts of conspicuous gallantry on the battlefield, for which he was much decorated - a notion which amused him no end.

Before the 1960s (and particularly in the 1930s, a time of conservative retrenchment on social matters), it was highly unusual for a straight man to be close friends with, or sympathetic toward gay men (especially "sissies", that is, effeminate gay men). They might be tolerated (rarely), but never embraced. Even allowing for the fact that Welles was a highly unusual individual with enlightened attitudes toward race and gender issues, it still stands as passing strange that he was so closely associated with so many gay men.

Does this prove anything regarding his own sexual proclivities? No. But it is certainly fodder for speculation.

It must be admitted that Welles was a man of prodigious appetites - for food, for booze, for drugs, and for sex. It's not really so outlandish to believe that he would have experimented sexually.

In other words, if you want to understand OW's attitude and overall demeanour, his (social) influences are self-evident. He may well have been bisexual, but mechanically speaking, that's an entirely different issue. The conventional approach of assigning everyone/everything to rigid little boxes will miss this point... and, presumably, miss the whole point of Orson Welles, period.

I respectfully disagree. I don't believe it is "an entirely different issue." If he was bisexual, that is in my opinion a significant fact, because bi- and homosexuality are so far out of the norm that they cannot help but color one's world-view and, in the case of artists, shape one's artistic angle of vision.

The beauty part of all of this is, though, that being a Welles aficionado allows each one of us to be a Thompson, seeking the never-knowable core of Welles the man. That's part of what keeps him (and his work) evergreen, that he can never be parsed completely and utterly.

[chrissie]

By 'entirely different issue,' I meant the distinction between social influence and sexual orientation. I thought this was stated clearly?

There is no evidence at all to suggest, for example, that a child raised by two gay parental figures will also 'become' gay (though the religious right would have us believe this, naturally). What I object to on this thread is not the idea that Orson might have been bisexual (more power to him), but some of the mundane reasoning for thinking this might be the case -- unimaginative stereotyping of a man who confounds that approach in most ways.

As you say, it was highly unusual at that time for a straight man to be close to gay men. Also unusual for a white man to get involved in the race issue. And it's more than incredibly unusual that a man handed the opportunity for fame and fortune thwarted this by being stubbornly determined to do things the way he felt they should be done rather than taking the path of least resistance. Well... all of the above is unusual from the conformist point of view, anyway...

Having not read Callow, I didn't know that there was gossip in there. Is that the extent of it?

[R Kadin]

(Original post removed, as others have already covered similar thoughts perfectly well.)

[The Night Man]

Chrissie, you're so busy objecting to and arguing against something I never said that you're missing the point.

It's nice that you're progressive and broad-minded, those are admirable traits, but I've never claimed that hanging around with gay men turned Orson gay (or bisexual). That's an absurd idea. In fact, I believe quite the opposite - that because Orson had a (perhaps latent, perhaps not) homosexual element in him he hung around with gay men. Glenn suggested that gay men present in Orson's early life may have been an influence on his sexual tastes; personally I don't buy that notion. Orson had no contact with any of the gay men I listed until he was at least 16, which is well past the age at which one's sexual orientation has been set. His earliest male influences were his father, Bernstein, and Roger Hill, and it has never been suggested, as far as I know, that any of them were gay. And even if they were, I don't believe that that would have made Orson gay (or bisexual).

But I'm curious what you mean by your contention that associating with these gay men was a factor in his "social influence"? Social influence in terms of what? Are you talking about his "theatrical tendencies" (whatever that means)? Are you talking about his taste in art and ideas? If so, then I have to say that I find that in itself a rather mundane bit of reasoning. Orson was, if nothing else, precocious, and I suspect his influences far predated his association with any gay men. Perhaps you meant his sartorial tastes, in which case I might agree with you.

I do have to say, however, that I agree completely with your statement, "The conventional approach of assigning everyone/everything to rigid little boxes will miss... the whole point of Orson Welles, period." Of course I have to point out as well that bisexuality is one of the ultimate obliterators of rigid little boxes.

You really should read Callow yourself, in full; quoting bits and pieces here doesn't do justice to his work.

[Store Hadji]

Well, this thread has strayed a bit - and become a battlefield. Let's take care that Jeff doesn't have to come lock it. May I politely suggest the PM facility? (Tell me to get stuffed if I'm out of line!)

I will say that Welles' progressive views were about 40 years ahead of their time, similar to his films. The Voodoo Macbeth, carousing with Jack Carter, subject matter in It's All True and championing of Isaac Woodward's case were all things none of his contemporaries would have dared touch. Good for you, Orson!