By TODD TARBOX
Recently, I came upon a snapshot of Orson and my grandfather, Roger “Skipper” Hill, taken during the filming of Welles’s movie Dead Reckoning, alternately titled The Deep.
The image brought to mind a wonderful reflection Skipper wrote in his memoir, One Man’s Time And Chance – A Memoir of Eighty Years 1895-1975, concerning weeks of collaboration on this project that like The Other Side of the Wind, might one day be released in a form close to Orson’s vision.
On the thirtieth anniversary of Welles’s death allow me to quote Skipper:
“Dead Reckoning is a sea-going thriller involving two yachts that meet in mid-ocean with subsequent murder and mayhem. The film was started in the Adriatic. Orson played the villain and cast Laurence Harvey and Oja Kodar as co-stars. His first message of distress came from Yugoslavia. One of his rented yachts was no longer available. I must find a duplicate and help him finish up in Miami waters. I tell him there are no empty horizons near Miami but he and his crew might come to the Bahamas. ‘Send me a picture of the boat you must duplicate. I’ll make copies and circularize yacht brokers.’ But his ketch proved to be of weird design, impossible to duplicate. ‘Never mind’ he wires, ‘We’ll shoot around any discrepancies.’ And later: ‘You must find something somewhere. Absolutely must come with cast. This is a wild cry for help.” Even that didn’t move me. I was tied tight to my chores of chartering in the Keys. What I finally fell for was his satanic flattery: ‘I know it’s impossible. All I ask is that you pass one of your usual miracles.” So, I bought miles of film, found a ketch and a cameraman and arranged a Bahamian rendezvous. He arrived with Oja only, plus costumes for the others. These we would fill with local flesh. More accurately, I would fill them. The couple departed after a few days leaving me the costumes, the cameraman and reams of instructions. Orson, it seemed, was committed to a movie in the mountains of Yugoslavia where, with Tito’s army, he was to film the storied resistance of those Partisans in World War II.
“My problems were more immediate. This film’s climax is a knife fight under water. Down there the bad guy, Welles, meets his gory end. Before leaving us, our director-star had begun this scene by falling off the ketch and sinking beneath the water. Now I must locate a super swimmer who could fill that huge costume. In Miami, a commercial conch diver was found almost big enough and completely dumb enough to believe my assurance that the dye we must put on his blonde hair would soon wear off. What I failed to solve was the problem of that brilliant red gore Orson insisted must gush from his neck during the final stab wounds. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘Max Factor sold a blood routinely used in Technicolor fights. Then he wrote out these instructions:
“This liquid could be kept in the armpit of the costume. A tube will lead up to the neck where the stabs should occur. When these start, your actor, like the wily Scot with his bag of air, can eject the contents by compressing his elbow.”
“Damned if it didn’t work, too. But O woe! Down there in the depths, it came out green!”
Hours before Orson’s last conversation with my grandfather, he appeared on the Merv Griffin Show and Griffin asked him. “Were there certain parts of your life that were really joyous?” Welles paused for a moment and responded, “Oh, yes. There are certain parts of every day that are joyous. I’m not essentially a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy. There’s a difference, you know, because joy is a great big electrical experience. And just happiness is, what, I don’t know. A warthog can be happy.”
I’m glad to know Orson experienced an abundance of joy. I can attest he provided enormous quantities of joyous electricity to my grandfather and grandmother as he did to millions of people during his lifetime, as he continues to do, and will for generations to come. What a fitting legacy for George Orson Welles that he so richly deserves.
Todd Tarbox is the author of “Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts.” It is available from BearManor Media and Amazon.com.
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