Pat Hobby and Orson Welles
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published in Esquire magazine
May (1940)
“Who’s this Welles?” Pat asked of Louie, the studio bookie. “Every time I pick up a paper they got about this Welles.”
“You know, he’s that beard,” explained Louie.
“Sure, I know he’s that beard, you couldn’t miss that. But what credits’s he got? What’s he done to draw one hundred and fifty grand a picture?”
What indeed? Had he, like Pat, been in Hollywood over twenty years? Did he have credits that would knock your eye out, extending up to—well, up to five years ago when Pat’s credits had begun to be few and far between?
“Listen—they don’t last long,” said Louie consolingly, “We’ve seen ’em come and we’ve seen ’em go. Hey, Pat?”
Yes—but meanwhile those who had toiled in the vineyard through the heat of the day were lucky to get a few weeks at three-fifty. Men who had once had wives and Filipinos and swimming pools.
“Maybe it’s the beard,” said Louie. “Maybe you and I should grow a beard. My father had a beard, but it never got him off Grand Street.”
The gift of hope had remained with Pat through his misfortunes—and the valuable alloy of his hope was proximity. Above all things one must stick around, one must be there when the glazed, tired mind of the producer grappled with the question, “Who?” So presently Pat wandered out of the drugstore, and crossed the street to the lot that was home.
As he passed through the side entrance an unfamiliar studio policeman stood in his way.
“Everybody in the front entrance now.”
“I’m Hobby, the writer,” Pat said.
The Cossack was unimpressed.
“Got your card?”
“I’m between pictures. But I’ve got an engagement with Jack Berners.”
“Front gate.”
As he turned away Pat thought savagely: “Lousy Keystone Cop!” In his mind he shot it out with him. Plunk! The stomach. Plunk! plunk! plunk!
At the main entrance, too, there was a new face.
“Where’s Ike?” Pat demanded.
“Ike’s gone.”
“Well, it’s all right, I’m Pat Hobby. Ike always passes me.”
“That’s why he’s gone,” said the guardian blandly. “Who’s your business with?”
Pat hesitated. He hated to disturb a producer.
“Call Jack Berner’s office,” he said. “Just speak to his secretary.”
After a minute, the man turned from his phone.
“What about?” he said.
“About a picture.”
He waited for an answer.
“She wants to know what picture?”
“To hell with it,” said Pat disgustedly. “Look—call Louie Griebel. What’s all this about?”
“Orders from Mr. Kasper,” said the clerk. “Last week a visitor from Chicago fell in the wind machine—Hello. Mr. Louie Griebel?”
“I’ll talk to him,” said Pat, taking the phone.
“I can’t do nothing, Pat,” mourned Louie. “I had trouble getting my boy in this morning. Some twirp from Chicago fell in the wind machine.”
“What’s that got to do with me?” demanded Pat vehemently.
He walked a little faster than his wont, along the studio wall to the point where it joined the back lot. There was a guard there, but there were always people passing to and fro and he joined one of the groups. Once inside he would see Jack and have himself excepted from this absurd ban. Why, he had known this lot when the first shacks were rising on it, when this was considered the edge of the desert.
“Sorry mister, you with this party?”
“I’m in a hurry,” said Pat, “I’ve lost my card.”
“Yeah? Well, for all I know you may be a plain clothes man.” He held up a copy of a photo magazine under Pat’s nose, “I wouldn’t let you in even if you told me you was this here Orson Welles.”
II
There is an old Charlie Chaplin picture about a crowded streetcar where the entrance of one man at the rear forces another out in front. A similar image came into Pat’s mind in the ensuing days whenever he thought of Orson Welles. Welles was in; Hobby was out. Never before had the studio been barred to Pat and though Welles was on another lot it seemed as if his large body, pushing in brashly from nowhere, had edged Pat out of the gate.
“Now where do you go?” Pat thought. He had worked in the other studios, but they were not his. At this studio he never felt unemployed—in recent times of stress he had eaten property food on its stages—half a cold lobster during a scene from The Divine Miss Carstairs; he had often slept on the sets and last winter made use of a Chesterfield overcoat from the costume department. Orson Welles had no business edging him out of this. Orson Welles belonged with the rest of the snobs in New York.
On the third day he was frantic with gloom. He had sent note after note to Jack Berners and even asked Louie to intercede—now word came that Jack had left town. There were so few friends left. Desolate, he stood in front of the automobile gate with a crowd of staring children, feeling that he had reached the end at last.
A great limousine rolled out, in the back of which Pat recognized the great overstuffed Roman face of Harold Marcus. The car rolled toward the children and, as one of them ran in front of it, slowed down. The old man spoke into the tube and the car halted. He leaned out blinking.
“Is there no police man here?” he asked of Pat.
“No, Mr. Marcus,” said Pat quickly. “There should be. I’m Pat Hobby, the writer—could you give me a lift down the street?”
It was unprecedented—it was an act of desperation but Pat’s need was great.
Mr. Marcus looked at him closely.
“Oh, yes, I remember you,” he said, “Get in.”
He might have possibly meant get up in front with the chauffeur. Pat compromised by opening one of the little seats. Mr. Marcus was one of the most powerful men in the whole picture world. He did not occupy himself with production any longer. He spent most of his time rocking from coast to coast on fast trains, merging ands launching, launching and merging, like a much divorced woman.
“Some day those children’ll get hurt.”
“Yes, Mr. Marcus,” agreed Pat heartily. “Mr. Marcus—”
“They ought to have a policeman there.”
“Yes, Mr. Marcus. Mr. Marcus—”
“Hm-m-m!” said Mr. Marcus. “Where do you want to be dropped?”
Pat geared himself to work fast.
“Mr. Marcus, when I was your press agent—”
“I know,” said Mr. Marcus, “You wanted a ten dollar a week raise.”
“What a memory!” cried Pat in gladness. “What a memory! But Mr. Marcus, now I don’t want anything at all.”
“This is a miracle.”
“I’ve got modest wants, see, and I’ve saved enough to retire.”
He thrust his shoes slightly forward under a hanging blanket. The Chesterfield coat effectively concealed the rest.
“That’s what I’d like,” said Mr. Marcus gloomily. “A farm—with chickens. Maybe a little nine-hole course. Not even a stock ticker.”
“I want to retire, but different,” said Pat earnestly. “Pictures have been my life. I want to watch them grow and grow—”
Mr. Marcus groaned.
“Till they explode,” he said. “Look at Fox! I cried for him.” He pointed to his eyes, “Tears!”
Pat nodded very sympathetically.
“I want only one thing.” From the long familiarity he went into the foreign locution. “I should go on the lot anytime. From nothing. Only to be there. Should bother nobody. Only help a little from nothing if any young person wants advice.”
“See Berners,” said Marcus.
“He said see you.”
“Then you did want something,” Marcus smiled. “All right, all right by me. Where do you get off now?”
“Can you write me a pass?” Pat pleaded. “Just a word on your card?”
“I’ll look into it,” said Mr. Marcus. “Just now I’ve got things on my mind. I’m going to a luncheon.” He sighed profoundly. “They want I should meet this new Orson Welles that’s in Hollywood.”
Pat’s heart winced. There it was again—that name, sinister and remorseless, spreading like a dark cloud over all his skies.
“Mr. Marcus,” he said so sincerely that his voice trembled, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Orson Welles is the biggest menace that’s come to Hollywood for years. He gets a hundred and fifty grand a picture and I wouldn’t be surprised if he were so radical that you had to have all new equipment and start all over again like you did with sound in 1928.”
“Oh my God!” groaned Mr. Marcus.
“And me,” said Pat, “All I want is a pass and no money—to leave things as they are.”
Mr. Marcus reached for his card case.
III
To those grouped together under the name “talent” the atmosphere of a studio is not unfailingly bright—one fluctuates too quickly between high hope and grave apprehension. Those few who decide things are happy in their work and sure that they are worthy of their hire—the rest live in a mist of doubt as to when their vast inadequacy will be disclosed.
Pat’s psychology was, oddly, that of the masters and for the most part he was unworried even though he was off salary. But there was one large fly in the ointment—for the first time in his life he began to feel a loss of identity. Due to reasons that he did not quite understand, though it might have been traced to his conversation, a number of people began to address him as “Orson.”
Now to lose one’s identity is a careless thing in any case. But to lose it to an enemy, or at least to one who has become scapegoat for our misfortunes—that is a hardship. Pat was not Orson. Any resemblance must be faint and far-fetched and he was aware of the fact. The final effect was to make him, in that regard, something of an eccentric.
“Pat,” said Joe the barber, “Orson was in here today and asked me to trim his beard.”
“I hope you set fire to it,” said Pat.
“I did,” Joe winked at waiting customers over a hot towel. “He asked for a singe so I took it all off. Now his face is as bald as yours. In fact you look a bit alike.”
This was the morning the kidding was so ubiquitous that, to avoid it, Pat lingered in Mario’s bar across the street. He was not drinking—at the bar, that is, for he was down to his last thirty cents, but he refreshed himself frequently from a half-pint in his back pocket. He needed the stimulus for he had to make a touch presently and he knew that money was easier to borrow when one didn’t have an air of urgent need.
His quarry, Jeff Boldini, was in an unsympathetic state of mind. He too was an artist, albeit a successful one, and a certain great lady of the screen had just burned him up by criticizing a wig he had made for her. He told the story to Pat at length and the latter waited until it was all out before broaching his request.
“No soap,” said Jeff. “Hell, you never paid me back what you borrowed last month.”
“But I got a job now,” lied Pat. “This is just to tide me over. I start tomorrow.”
“If they don’t give the job to Orson Welles,” said Jeff humorously.
Pat’s eyes narrowed, but he managed to utter a polite, borrower’s laugh.
“Hold it,” said Jeff, “You know, I think you look like him?”
“Yeah.”
“Honest. Anyhow I could make you look like him. I could make you a beard that would be his double.”
“I wouldn’t be his double for fifty grand.”
With his head on one side Jeff regarded Pat.
“I could,” he said, “Come on in to my chair and let me see.”
“Like hell.”
“Come on. I’d like to try it. You haven’t got anything to do. You don’t work till tomorrow.”
“I don’t want a beard.”
“It’ll come off.”
“I don’t want it.”
“It won’t cost you anything. In fact I’ll be paying you—I’ll loan you the ten smackers if you’ll let me make you a beard.”
Half an hour later Jeff looked at his completed work.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “Not only the beard but the eyes and everything.”
“All right. Now take it off,” said Pat moodily.
“What’s the hurry? That’s a fine muff. That’s a work of art. We ought to put a camera on it. Too bad you’re working tomorrow—they’re using a dozen beards out on Sam Jones’ set and one of them went to jail in a homo raid. I bet with that muff you could get the job.”
It was weeks since Pat had heard the word job and he could not himself say how he managed to exist and eat. Jeff saw the light in his eye.
“What say? Let me drive you out there just for fun,” pleaded Jeff. “I’d like to see if Sam could tell it was a phony muff.”
“I’m a writer, not a ham.”
“Come on! Nobody would never know you back of that. And you’d draw another ten bucks.”
As they left the make-up department Jeff lingered behind a minute. On a strip of cardboard he crayoned the name Orson Welles in large block letters. And outside without Pat’s notice, he stuck it in the windshield of his car
He did not go directly to the back lot. Instead he drove not too swiftly up the main studio street. In front of the administration building he stopped on the pretext that engine was missing, and almost in no time a small but definitely interested crowd began to gather. But Jeff’s plans did not include stopping anywhere long, so he hopped in and they started on a tour around the commissary.
“Where are we going?” demanded Pat.
He had already made one nervous attempt to tear the beard from him, but to his surprise it did not come away.
He complained of this to Jeff.
“Sure,” Jeff explained. “That’s made to last. You’ll have to soak it off.”
The car paused momentarily at the door of the commissary. Pat saw blank eyes staring at him and he stared back at them blankly from the rear seat.
“You’d think I was the only beard on the lot,” he said gloomily.
“You can sympathize with Orson Welles.”
“To hell with him.”
This colloquy would have puzzled those without, to whom he was nothing less than the real McCoy.
Jeff drove on slowly up the street. Ahead of them a little group of men were walking—one of them, turning, saw the car and drew the attention of the others to it. Whereupon the most elderly member of the party, threw up his arms in what appeared to be a defensive gesture, and plunged to the sidewalk as the car went past.
“My God, did you see that?” exclaimed Jeff. “That was Mr. Marcus.”
He came to a stop. An excited man ran up and put his head in the car window.
“Mr. Welles, our Mr. Marcus has had a heart attack. Can we use your car to get him to the infirmary?”
Pat stared. Then very quickly he opened the door on the other side and dashed from the car. Not even the beard could impede his streamlined flight. The policeman at the gate, not recognizing the incarnation, tried to have words with him but Pat shook him off with the ease of a triple-threat back and never paused till he reached Mario’s bar.
Three extras with beards stood at the rail, and with relief Pat merged himself into their corporate whickers. With a trembling hand he took the hard-earned ten dollar bill from his pocket.
“Set ’em up,” he cried hoarsely. “Every muff has a drink on me.”
First Person Singular
Before Orson Welles created his own radio series, he frequently performed on the radio in series such as The March of Time and The Shadow. He used his income from radio to support the theater company he founded with John Houseman, the Mercury Theatre. The Mercury Theatre made a big impression in 1938, and Time magazine featured Welles on its cover on May 9, 1938. Taking advantage of Welles’s new celebrity, CBS offered Welles total creative control for a short radio series. First Person Singular ran for nine episodes, from July 11 to September 5, 1938. It continued under the title The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
Here is one of those episodes; an adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1859 novel "A Tale of Two Cities", broadcast on July 25, 1938.
‘Citizen Kane’: The Hollywood Reporter’s 1941 Review
On May 1, 1941, RKO Radio Pictures held the premiere of Citizen Kane at the Palace Theatre in New York.
By THR Staff
May 1, 2017
On May 1, 1941, RKO Radio Pictures held the premiere of Citizen Kane at the Palace Theatre in New York, garnering raves from local critics. Ahead of its release, The Hollywood Reporter appraised producer-director Orson Welles‘ picture in a review originally headlined “‘Kane Astonishing Picture.”
Citizen Kane is a great motion picture. Great in that it was produced by a man who had never had any motion picture experience; great because he cast it with people who had never faced a camera in a motion picture production before; great in the manner of its story-telling, in both the writing of that story and its unfolding before a camera; great in that its photographic accomplishments are the highlights of motion picture photography to date, and finally great, because technically, it is a few steps ahead of anything that has been made in pictures before.
From the point of entertainment, this reviewer chooses again to qualify it as great. An audience might not think so because they might not understand its technical perfections, or will be astonished, as we were, at the acting of a cast that had never been in a studio before. Nor will they credit the fact that this entertainment was really brought to the screen on a low budget — under $800,000 — and, in order to accomplish that, things had to be done that no brain or set of brains had ever before accomplished.
These items interested us, made the entertainment much greater, and how much an audience’s ignorance of these facts will discount the actual entertainment, we can’t tell. But we’ll venture the opinion that no ticket buyer, if he ever has the opportunity of buying a ticket to see Citizen Kane, will leave the theatre mad at his buy, because he will be entertained, although probably not as much as those knowing the inside of this whole production.
Whether the story was inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst is of little interest to this reviewer; that’s for others to determine and act as they see fit. However, we might express our opinion that we will be surprised if the picture ever hits a theatre where admission is charged, and if that is finally the case, audiences will lose the opportunity of seeing a fine motion picture produced in a most adult fashion and one that should lift Orson Welles right up to the top of producers and actors.
Violates Tradition
Welles has made his Hollywood debut in such an astonishingly unconventional production that it is difficult to criticize Citizen Kane along the customary lines. Time after time, as the life of Charles Foster Kane is unfolded, Welles violates cinema tradition in acting, writing and photography, and gets away with it all magnificently.
He wastes no time in introducing his different technique. The film begins with a mythical two-reel “News on the March,” obviously based on the March of Time, since the commentator’s phraseology is unmistakable “Time” talk. It is a short on the life of the great publisher, Charles Foster Kane, who has just died, and it touches on the highlights of his career from the day he acquires The New York Inquirer until his death.
As Kane succumbs, he is heard to utter one word, “Rosebud,” and it is this one word which holds together the succeeding episodes of the film. As the short ends, it becomes apparent that this was a screening of the subject for its producers. They are dissatisfied with it, because the short has not brought out the hidden motivations which make Kane such a fabulous character, nor has it explained the meaning of the cryptic reference to “Rosebud.”
Hearst Mentioned Once
It is in this scene at the end of the “News on the March” sequence that the name of Hearst is mentioned the only time in Citizen Kane. One of the actors is overheard saying “It could have been any publisher, could have been Pulitzer, could have been Hearst.” Another responds: “Yes, and it could have been John Doe.”
A reporter from “News on the March” then begins the monumental task of checking Kane’s life, beginning with his infancy in the West when he inherits a fortune, the arrival of the estate’s lawyers to take young Kane to school finds him sledding in the snow and fighting against leaving this pastime to accompany the attorneys. To obtain his information, the reporter interviews the five persons who knew Kane best: his lawyer, his right hand man in the Kane publications, his former dramatic critic, and his second wife, whom he meets as a penniless flighty girl and attempts to make the public accept as a great singer, and the butler who manages his far-flung estate on the Gulf of Mexico.
Wife Supplies Drama
The drama critic, the lawyer, the butler and his publishing aide all contribute their bits to the Kane saga, but the dramatic high spots come mostly from the memory of the press tycoon’s second wife, by this time a drunken derelict, still trying to be a singer in an Atlantic City dive. When she meets Kane, he is already married to the niece of a mythical U.S. president, and so bored that he rarely comes home. Their meeting is just a “pick-up” on a rainy street, but it progresses so fast that, in no time, the illicit amour becomes public knowledge through exposure by a politician he is fighting, and Kane loses a sure election as governor of New York.
His first wife divorces him, he marries the singer, and then inaugurates a campaign in all his papers to establish her as a star. She is a desperately incompetent performer, and his efforts to put her over make him a laughing stock and cost him his best friend, the dramatic critic.
Finally, shorn of most of his journalistic power by the 1929 crash, an embittered old man, he retires to his incredible Gulf Coast place. There the second wife does jigsaw puzzles in the vast living room and grows to hate him. She leaves him, and Kane’s death follows very soon afterwards. He is broken, friendless and all he has left behind him are the palace and its grounds — which include a private zoo — his untold art treasures, and a string of papers actually controlled by banks. Not until the final scene is the mystery of “Rosebud” explained, and, though it is done with utter simplicity, it provides a chill and lump in anyone’s throat.
“Rosebud” Explained
The camera pans over the limitless expanse of paintings, sculpture, and all his other useless possessions. Appraisers are sorting it out, and the worthless items are burned. Into the flames go all manner of knickknacks, and at last the wreckers begin burning odds and ends from his mother’s home out west, which Kane had collected after she died. Suddenly the flames are seen licking over a little boy’s sled. The camera picks it out from the rest of the fire, and on it is written the one word “Rosebud.”
Welles’ performance is nothing less than astonishing. He begins as a youth of 21, goes through middle age to his death, and makes every moment believable in voice, walk and gesture. Even in his love scenes is Welles effective.
The support he gets from the cast, every one of whom is a completely new face to picture audiences, is downright amazing. There isn’t a weak member of the troupe, and though space doesn’t permit praise for all of them, a few must be selected for special mention. Dorothy Comingore, as the singer, is put through a range of emotions that would try any actress one could name, but she delivers without a second’s let-down. Citizen Kane should make this girl a star. Joseph Cotten, who played in Philadelphia Story, is splendid as the drama critic, as are Everett Sloane in the role of Bernstein, Kane’s faithful aide, and Ruth Warrick, as his first wife.
Gregg Toland’s camera has never performed such miracles. He has caught the players from daringly unusual angles. He produced effects so novel in some scenes that they cannot be described here. The musical score by Bernard Herrmann is also worthy of commendation. — unbylined review, originally published March 12, 1941.
Twilight in the Smog
Solemn suburbia crowds out the raucous old circus
by Orson Welles
Published in Esquire Magazine
March 1959
It used to be easy to hate Hollywood. For me it was no trouble at all. But that was years ago. I don’t think either of us have mellowed very much since then; but we are getting on a bit and our feelings for each other are scarcely as passionate as they were. For one thing, I no longer live there; I’m not just saying this—I really don’t. Formerly this claim was the purest affectation; now it’s a fact. It was my melancholy pretense that I was a transient, temporarily employed. There was nothing original about this self-deception. In the film colony a good half of the working population, including many of the oldest inhabitants, keep up their spirits by means of the same ruse. People buy houses and spend half their lives in them without unpacking all their bags. By now, however, I think it’s safe to announce that I am one of those who got away. I chose freedom—and that was quite a while ago. Nowadays, if I do venture back behind the chromium curtain, it’s never without a return ticket to the outside world. Also, I’m very careful about sitting down. This is important. In that peculiar climate one is haunted with the possibility that standing up again might suddenly exceed one’s aspirations. Hollywood is a place where a youngish man is ill-advised to indulge in a siesta. Leaving a call for four-thirty won’t do him any good. The likelihood remains that when he wakes up he’ll be sixty-five.
It was Fred Alien who said, in his fair-minded way, that “California is a wonderful place if you’re an orange.” I guess what Fred was actually referring to was the general region of Los Angeles, or, as it’s called, Greater Los Angeles (greater than what?). Like so many of us, this was the part of the state he knew best and liked least. Anyway, as the citrus people are the first to admit, smog has taken the fun out of life even for the oranges.
When we speak of Hollywood we take in, of course, more than the community of that name: we mean the movie and TV studios in the San Fernando Valley; we include the beach houses, villas and palazzi in Santa Monica and Malibu. We mean the film colony which is spread so wide and thin, and the “industry” itself, which no longer dominates the scene as it once did. In the stately homes of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, oil millionaires are at least as numerous as movie stars, and nowadays the luckier studios bristle with oil pumps.
According to the map, Hollywood is a district attached but not belonging to the City of Los Angeles. But this is not strictly accurate: Los Angeles—though huge, populous and rich—has never quite made it as a city. It remains a loose and sprawling confederation of suburbs and shopping centers. As for downtown Los Angeles, it’s about as metropolitan as Des Moines or Schenectady.
The metropolitan air is what one misses. Neither the theatre nor its artists are at their best in a suburb. Or a gigantic trailer camp. Whether we work before a camera or behind the footlights, actors are, by nature, city people. Hollywood is most precisely described as a colony. (Colonies are notoriously somewhat cut off from reality, insular, bitchy and cliquish, snobbish—a bit loose as to morals but very strict as to appearances.) One expects a colony to be an outpost of empire. Hollywood might be called an outpost of civilization (a word which means, after all, “city culture”), but it’s also the heart of its own empire of the movies: a capital without a city, yet among its colonies are numbered the great cities of the world.
What is best in any branch of theatre must always have a certain flavor of tradition. Dear, shabby old Times Square, for instance, has its roots in Rome and the Middle Ages. It was, after all, a kind of marketplace, and in the old tradition. The saloons and bars of the Broadway area are still the sorts of places where show folk have always gathered in Athens and Madrid, in London and Paris and Peking. But Hollywood, which boasts the largest population of actors ever concentrated in a single community, is also the first show town in history without a pub or a bistro in the traditional sense. In California the tradition of the Mermaid Tavern has given way to the country club. A rigidly standardized middle-class suburbia is replacing the raucous and circusy traditions of the recent past.
Is Hollywood’s famous sun really setting? There is certainly a hint of twilight in the smog and, lately, over the old movie capital there has fallen a gray-flannel shadow. Television is moving inexorably westward. Emptying the movie theatres across the land, it fills the movie studios. Another industry is building quite another town; and already, rising out of the gaudy ruins of screenland, we behold a new, drab, curiously solemn brand of the old foolishness.
There must always be a strong element of the absurd in the operation of a dream factory, but now there’s less to laugh at and even less to like. The feverish gaiety has gone, a certain brassy vitality drained away. TV, after all, is a branch of the advertising business, and Hollywood behaves increasingly like an annex of Madison Avenue.
Television—live, taped or on film—is still limited by the language barrier, while by nature and economics moving pictures are multilingual. Making them has always been an international affair. Directors, writers, producers and, above all, the stars come to Hollywood from all over the world and their pictures are addressed to a world public. The town’s new industry threatens its traditional cosmopolitanism and substitutes a strong national flavor. This could not be otherwise since our television exists to sell American products to American consumers.
And there’s the question of money.
Millions of dollars are being made in television, but a million dollars has never been spent on any television show. Some few of the most lavish “spectaculars” are budgeted at the cost of a B-picture. All the rest of the TV product is made for “quickie” prices, the big money being spread thin to cover the whole season. If there’s any conspicuous waste in this new industry it’s only in the area of talent. A half-hour television western multiplied by three equals the playing time of a “program picture.” But add the total price of all three and you have less than half the minimum budget for a negotiable second feature. Some TV stars are paid about as much for a week’s solo appearance in Las Vegas as the complete production cost of one of their TV programs—and this includes full cast and crews, script, sets, photography, raw stock, wardrobe, music, scoring, mixing, processing, insurance—even their own star salaries. This penny-pinching grind runs counter to the town’s most venerable instincts, but now, with the biggest of the big film studios limping along on economy programs administered by skeleton staffs, the gold-rush atmosphere which once was Hollywood’s own dizzy brand of charm is just a memory.
In its golden age—in the first years of the movie boom—the mood and manner were indeed much like that of a gold rush. There was the frenzy and buccaneering hurly-burly of an earlier California: the vast fortunes found in a day and squandered in a night; the same cheerful violence and cutthroat anarchy. All of that Western turbulence has been silenced now; the wild and woolly charm is just a memory.
Architectural fantasy is in decline, the cheerful gaudiness is mostly gone, the more high-spirited of the old outrages have been razed or stand in ruins. In the “better” residential and business districts a kind of official “good taste” has taken charge. The result is a standardized impeccability, sterile and joyless, but it correctly expresses the community’s ardent yearnings toward respectability.
Right down to this last moment in a long, long history, show folk have been kept quite firmly segregated from respectability. Significantly, the theatre profession had no contact (or contamination) with the middle class. Indeed, ifs just recently that we began to employ that very middle-class word, “profession.” This was when the mention of art began to embarrass us, and this was the beginning of our fall from grace: when we suddenly aspired to the mediocre rank of ladies and gentlemen. Before that, and in common with all other artists, we had no rank at all, and stood in our own dignity outside of protocol.
Something of what’s ailing the new Hollywood, its movies, and us who make them can be traced, I think, back to that first fatal descent into polite society. It really started on that disastrous morning in the last century when the great English tragedian Henry Irving knelt before Queen Victoria to accept the theatre’s first accolade. For Irving, knighthood seemed a giant step out of the old gypsydom, a deliverance from vagabondage; he thought of it as dignifying his “profession”—as sanctifying it with respectability. We can’t rebuke him from this distance for imagining that the receipt of royal honors immeasurably elevated the social status of the theatre. Too many of his compatriots today agree with him. For my part, I’m convinced that this famous elevation was, in its consequences, nothing less than an abdication from royalty. I don’t think that the great leaders of the stage in any country deserve to be ranked with the minor nobility. I think they deserve more. Sir Henry, rising from his knee a dubbed knight, dragged us all, not upward, but sideways—into another dimension, embedding us squarely and forevermore in the middle class.
What had been invulnerable in our position was the fact that we really had no position whatsoever. For just as long as there was no proper place for us—neither above nor below the salt—an actor was at liberty to sit wherever he was welcome, and this way very often next to the king. (It may be noted that our most distinguished cousins in the British theatre are not today the easy intimates of royalty.) I hold that we had more to give our art and to our audiences when we ourselves were royal bums, draped in our own brand of imperial purple. Our crown was tin, but it was a crown, and we wore it, with a difference, among such other diadems as happened to be gold. For decades after Irving, the new stage gentry on both sides of the Atlantic made private imitation and public representation of the bourgeois their paramount concern. Then came the movies.
This was an institution “legitimate” actors could look down on with all the priggish contempt formerly lavished by middle-class respectability on the playhouse itself. Hollywood became a word in the language, and in this unlikely outpost—unfettered, unbracketed and largely unconsidered—a motley crew of show folk, in spirit far closer to the circus, to burlesque and the commedia dell’arte than to the starchy stage world of that epoch, was gaily producing a new art form, and celebrating in the process a brief but exciting renaissance of the old royal nonsense and glory.
That glory had all but died out as the theatre reduced itself into a mere profession. Now—as the making of motion pictures began to be spoken of and to be organized as a mere industry—the glory started dimming in Hollywood.
What’s valid on the stage or screen is never a mere professional effort and certainly not an industrial product. Whatever is valuable must, in the final analysis, be a work of art. There should be no need to repeat that originality is one of the essential definitions of any work of art, and that every artist is an individual. Just as obviously, the industrial system cannot accommodate originality. A genuine individual is an outright nuisance in a factory.
There’s Method in Their Madness
There used to be something spoken of as “the Hollywood influence.” What is more noticeable today is that the rest of America is influencing Hollywood.
As always, much fun is provided by the current sex symbols, but Jayne and Elvis are too patently creatures of the publicity experts—fuzzy carbon copies of the old freewheeling originals, the vamps and sheiks who invented themselves and lived up so gorgeously to their own legends. The recent crop of “Method actors” and the official representatives of the beatnik constituency are rather too sullen in their personal style to add much color to the pallid scene. The biggest noise they make is on their bongo drums and their gestures of protest are no less standardized than the conformist patterns they pretend to reject. They have their own conformism, these eagle scouts of The Actors Studio—there is no madness in their method.
Of the authentic mavericks the youngest, men like Mitchum and Sinatra, are in their forties. Rock ‘n’ roll throws up an occasional oddball of a minor sort, but such types are “cool” in the dictionary sense of the word and do nothing to the tepid temperature of the new Hollywood one way or another. Their kind of egotism rages in a sort of monotone and with no exuberance. They hold the mirror up to their own generation. So do their pseudosuburbanite elders in the film colony. These two groups, the T-shirts and the sports jackets, are more accurate reflections of today’s America than were those dazzling pioneers who blazed screenland’s frontiers.
One of our producers, by way of explaining the school of neorealism in the Italian cinema, told me that over there, instead of actors, they use people. For good or evil it’s certain that the town is overrun with characters who are quite reasonable facsimiles of today’s people. It’s a solemn thought, but maybe that’s what*s wrong with Hollywood.
Orson Welles's "Voodoo" Macbeth (1937)
It had long been assumed that no sound or moving images survived from Orson Welles’s legendary “Voodoo Macbeth,” the Federal Theatre Project’s 1936 Harlem stage production of Shakespeare’s play, set in Haiti with an African American cast. But priceless historical footage can turn up within unlikely places. This long-forgotten record of the first professional play staged by Orson Welles was found in another film, the U.S. government-produced We Work Again, a Depression-era documentary on African American employment.
Orson Welles was twenty years old when he directed the Macbeth seen here. The offer came from his early mentor John Houseman, who had been appointed head of the Negro Theatre Unit of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project. (The $23.86 per week salary was not an inducement. Welles’s radio voice already earned him a thousand dollars a week, much of which he spent on the production.) After mounting two newly commissioned plays by African Americans, the Negro Theatre Unit was looking to produce a “classical” play with a black cast. Welles’s concept—which he credited to his wife, Virginia Nicolson—was to move Macbeth from medieval Scotland to nineteenth-century Haiti and the court of Henri Christophe (1767?–1820), the former slave who proclaimed himself “King Henry I.” Key to the transposition, as Welles put it at the time, was that “the witch element in the play falls beautifully into the supernatural atmosphere of Haitian voodoo.” If few of the available black actors had experience with blank verse, that was all the better to Welles, who, throughout his career, made Shakespeare less highbrow, often by way of massive textual changes. After a long four-month rehearsal, Macbeth opened at the Lafayette Theater (7th Ave. at 133rd St.) on April 14, 1936.
Captured on film are the production’s final minutes: the arrival of the conquering army disguised as “Birnam Wood,” Macbeth’s death at the hands of Macduff, and “th’ usurper’s cursèd head” mounted “upon a pole.” The off-screen narrator of We Work Again could not be more wrong in telling us that “every line in the play has remained intact.” For those who know Shakespeare’s text well, the concluding moment is jolting. Welles brings back a character often cut altogether, the witch queen Hecate, transforms her into a man (played by Eric Burroughs), and gives him a final line—taken from the first act—reaffirming the witches’ power: “The charm’s wound up!”
Welles’s version thus ends not with the reestablishment of political order but with the return of repressed instincts. Macbeth is played by six-foot-four-inch Jack Carter, who had experience on Broadway in Porgy and experience in jail for murder. “The end, which is always somewhat confused,” commented Jean Cocteau after seeing the production, is transformed “into a superb ballet of ruin and death.”
Some mainstream reviewers carped about Welles’s alterations of Shakespeare, or chided the black voices for lacking “poetry.” However, even Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times conceded that “as an experiment in Afro-American showmanship the Macbeth merited the excitement that rocked the Lafayette last night. If it is witches you want, Harlem knows how to overwhelm you with their fury and phantom splendor.” Black reviewers saw something more, an African American–cast play that was neither stereotypical “folklore” nor a slick musical: Roi Ottley in Harlem’s Amsterdam News wrote, “In Macbeth the negro has been given an opportunity to discard the bandana and burnt-cork casting to play a universal character.” The play sold out its sixty-four-perfomance Harlem run (during which Welles reached voting age), with seats given away for each Monday’s performance on presentation of relief cards. Maurice Ellis, seen here as Macduff, took over the title role when the production went on national tour—overcoming the challenges facing a 110-member African American company moving through segregated cities. —Scott Simmon
ORSON WELLES IS DEAD AT 70;
INNOVATOR OF FILM AND STAGE
New York Times
Oct. 11, 1985
Orson Welles, the Hollywood ''boy wonder'' who created the film classic ''Citizen Kane,'' scared tens of thousands of Americans with a realistic radio report of a Martian invasion of New Jersey and changed the face of film and theater with his daring new ideas, died yesterday in Los Angeles, apparently of a heart attack. He was 70 years old and lived in Las Vegas, Nev.
An assistant coroner in Los Angeles, Donald Messerle, said Welles's death ''appears to be natural in origin.'' He had been under treatment for diabetes as well as a heart ailment, his physician reported. Welles's body was found by his chauffeur.
Despite the feeling of many that his career - which evoked almost constant controversy over its 50 years -was one of largely unfulfilled promise, Welles eventually won the respect of his colleagues. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Film Institute in 1975, and last year the Directors Guild of America gave him its highest honor, the D. W. Griffith Award.
An Unorthodox Style
His unorthodox casting and staging for the theater gave new meaning to the classics and to contemporary works. As the ''Wonder Boy'' of Broadway in the 1930's, he set the stage on its ear with a ''Julius Caesar'' set in Fascist Italy, an all-black ''Macbeth'' and his presentation of Marc Blitzstein's ''Cradle Will Rock.'' His Mercury Theater of the Air set new standards for radio drama, and in one performance panicked thousands across the nation.
In film, his innovations in deep-focus technology and his use of theater esthetics - long takes without close-ups, making the viewer's eye search the screen as if it were a stage - created a new vocabulary for the cinema.
Frequently Used Cliche
By age 24, he was already being described by the press as a has-been - a cliche that would dog him all his life. But at that very moment Welles was creating ''Citizen Kane,'' generally considered one of the best motion pictures ever made. This scenario was repeated several times. His second film, ''The Magnificent Ambersons,'' was poorly received, but is now also regarded as a classic, although the distributors re-edited it and Welles never liked the result. ''Falstaff'' and ''Touch of Evil,'' two of his later films, were also changed by others before their release.
For his failure to realize his dreams, Welles blamed his critics and the financiers of Hollywood. Others blamed what they described as his erratic, egotistical, self-indulgent and self-destructive temperament. But in the end, few denied his genius.
He was a Falstaffian figure, 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighing well over 200 pounds, with a huge appetite for good food and drink and large cigars. Loud, brash, amusing and insufferable by turns, he made friends and enemies by the score.
His life was a series of adventures whose details are fuzzy, in part because he was a bit of a fabulist, delighting in pulling the legs of listeners, in part because the credit for his achievements is the subject of fierce controversy.
George Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wis., on May 6, 1915, the son of Richard Head Welles, an inventor and manufacturer, and of the former Beatrice Ives. His mother was dedicated to the theater, and Welles said he made his debut at 2 as the child of ''Madame Butterfly'' in an opera performance.
A Genius at 18 Months
According to ''Orson Welles,'' an authorized biography by Barbara Leaming published a few weeks ago, Welles's genius was discovered when he was only 18 months old, not by a Broadway producer or agent but by his doctor, Maurice Bernstein, who, pronouncing the child a prodigy, began to furnish him with a long series of educational gifts. These included a violin, painting supplies, a magic kit, theatrical makeup kits and even a conductor's baton.
His parents were divorced; Mrs. Welles died when he was 6, and he spent several years traveling around the world with his father, a bon vivant.
At 10, he entered the Todd School in Woodstock, Ill. His five years there were his only formal education.
Under the guidance of Roger Hill, the headmaster, young Orson steeped himself in student theater, staging and acting in a series of Shakespeare productions. Together, he and Mr. Hill edited ''Everybody's Shakespeare,'' a text for school productions, which sold well for many years.
On his graduation, he took a brief course in painting at the Chicago Art Institute, then sailed for Ireland on a sketching tour. There, smoking a cigar to disguise the fact that he was only 16, he managed to convince the Gate Theater in Dublin that he was a Theater Guild actor on a holiday.
He went on as the Duke in ''Jew Suss,'' followed it with other featured parts and even achieved a featured role at the eminent Abbey Theater, all in his first professional season. Then, after a spell of travel in Spain and Morocco, he returned to Chicago.
Toured With Katharine Cornell
Through Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott, Welles was introduced to Katharine Cornell, who engaged him for supporting roles in a tour that included ''Candida,'' ''Romeo and Juliet'' and ''The Barretts of Wimpole Street.'' When Miss Cornell opened ''Romeo and Juliet'' on Broadway on Dec. 20, 1934, Welles played Tybalt. He was then 19 years old.
Like everything else he did, Welles's acting was a subject of controversy. Some critics would always accuse him of hamming, of hogging the limelight - especially when he was also the director. But many professionals and a large public found his presence electrifying. ''He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child,'' said Jean Cocteau, ''a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.''
Early in his Broadway career, Welles picked up supplementary income as a radio actor. He became familiar to millions as the sepulchral voice of ''The Shadow,'' a wizard who turned virtually invisible to foil criminals. But he kept up with the theater; in 1935 he was engaged by the producer-director John Houseman to star in Archibald MacLeish's poetic drama of the Depression, ''Panic,'' in which he portrayed a tycoon.
To combat unemployment, the Roosevelt Administration had set up the Works Progress Administration, one of the many projects of which was the Federal Theater. With Mr. Houseman as manager and Welles as director, it mounted several striking productions - the black ''Macbeth,'' a starkly austere ''Dr. Faustus,'' a comic ''Horse Eats Hat'' - that excited the theater world.
Even more than some other W.P.A. projects, the Federal Theater also stirred conservative wrath. The last straw came when a troupe featuring Howard da Silva and Will Geer prepared to stage ''The Cradle Will Rock,'' a leftist musical by Marc Blitzstein, in 1937.
The authorities banned the production and locked the company out of the theater on opening night. Welles joined the cast and an audience of 2,000 in a march up Sixth Avenue to a rented theater. To evade the ban, the actors sang from seats in the auditorium, with Mr. Blitzstein conducting from a piano on stage.
Co-founded the Mercury
The Federal Theater soon was liquidated, but Welles and Mr. Houseman went on to found the Mercury Theater. Its first production in late 1937, a ''Julius Caesar'' in modern dress with overtones of Fascist Italy, was a smash hit. The Mercury took in the production of ''The Cradle Will Rock'' that had been banned by Government authorities; it had success also with ''Shoemaker's Holiday'' and ''Heartbreak House.''
Chiefly to provide its actors with steady income, the company signed up with CBS Radio as the Mercury Theater of the Air. Its acting, dramatic tension and inventive use of sound effects set new highs in radio theater.
On Oct. 30, 1938, the Mercury Theater of the Air presented a dramatization of H. G. Wells's ''War of the Worlds,'' in the form of news bulletins and field reporting from the scene of a supposed Martian invasion of New Jersey. It was an event unique in broadcast history, frequently recalled in books, magazine articles and repeat performances.
Many thousands of listeners tuned in after the introduction, heard the music interrupted by flash bulletins and panicked. Some armed themselves and prepared to fight the invaders; many more seized a few belongings and fled for the hills. Police switchboards around the country were flooded with calls.
Welles was already famous; a few weeks earlier, at age 23, he had appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the ''Wonder Boy'' of the theater. Now he was suddenly a household word -the target of some indignation, but also of amused admiration.
Hollywood Contract
The Mercury Theater on Broadway was nevertheless a financial failure, and ended its theatrical existence in early 1939. The following season the company, including such relatively unknown actors as Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane, went to Hollywood under a contract with R.K.O. that granted Welles total artistic freedom.
On his first visit to a film studio, Welles is said to have marveled, ''This is the biggest electric-train set any boy ever had.'' The movie community, however, was not entranced by the unconventional young interloper.
A Saturday Evening Post profile in 1940 reflected this view. ''Orson was an old war horse in the infant prodigy line by the time he was 10,'' it said. ''He had already seen eight years' service as a child genius. Some see the 24-year-old boy of today as a mere shadow of the 2-year-old man they used to know.''
Welles was then directing ''Citizen Kane,'' based on a scenario by Herman J. Mankiewicz, with himself in the title role. An impressionistic biography of a newspaper publisher strongly suggestive of William Randolph Hearst, it is now fabled for its use of flashback, deep-focus photography, sets with ceilings, striking camera angles and imaginative sound and cutting.
Kenneth Tynan has written, ''Nobody who saw 'Citizen Kane' at an impressionable age will ever forget the experience; overnight, the American cinema had acquired an adult vocabulary, a dictionary instead of a phrase book for illiterates.'' Stanley Kauffmann called it ''the best serious picture ever made in this country.''
Accusations and Rebuttals
The making of ''Kane'' has been the subject of fierce polemics. Pauline Kael, in a famous New Yorker article in 1971, called it a ''shallow masterpiece'' and ''comic-strip tragic,'' and accused Welles of trying to deny credit to Mr. Mankiewicz, Mr. Houseman and the cameraman, Gregg Toland. This has been rebutted in part by Mr. Houseman - who said he had been the pupil and Welles the teacher in stage creation - and in great detail by many Welles admirers, notably the director Peter Bogdanovich.
It turned out that Miss Kael had not sought to question Welles. His defenders concede that he had thrown violent tantrums, leading to the departure of Mr. Houseman, but say he was frequently generous in praise of his collaborators.
More seriously, the Hearst newspaper chain was accused of seeking to block the showing of ''Kane'' and it long barred mention of Welles and his film in its publications. ''Citizen Kane'' could neither be reviewed nor advertised in its newspapers. An offer was made to pay R.K.O. what it had cost to make the picture plus a modest profit - well below $1 million in all - to destroy all prints of the film.
This was refused. But ''Kane'' drew a mixed reception when it opened in 1941, and it was years before it turned into a profit maker. Welles won an Academy Award for writing the film, and was nominated for directing and acting awards.
Meanwhile, Welles was making Mercury's second movie, ''The Magnificent Ambersons.'' At the close of shooting, Welles acceded to a request by Washington that he fly to Rio de Janeiro to make a good-neighborly documentary on the Mardi Gras. On his return, he found that an impatient R.K.O. had done the final cutting of ''The Magnificent Ambersons.''
Difficulty With Financing
He was deeply hurt, and he disowned the film. On the movie company's side, the assertion was made that Welles was impossible to deal with on content, and unreliable on costs and completion dates. This perception, encouraged by some journalists, made it forever afterward difficult for Welles to obtain financing for his projects.
Welles and his supporters retorted that his budgets were always low, sometimes remarkably so, and that his shooting schedules were sometimes extaordinarily tight. Some concede that, never satisfied with his work, he had an almost neurotic reluctance to view it when done, and several uncompleted works remain in storage.
After ''The Magnificent Ambersons,'' the tireless Welles returned to Broadway in 1941 to direct a dramatization of Richard Wright's ''Native Son,'' which was a triumph; did a series of wartime propaganda broadcasts for the Government; produced and acted in the movie thriller ''Journey Into Fear'' (1942), which was a failure, and starred as Mr. Rochester in the highly popular ''Jane Eyre'' (1943).
Rejected by the Army because of flat feet, he took part as a magician - another of his talents - in a tour of the European Theater of Operations, in which his act was sawing Marlene Dietrich in half. Back home after the war, he adapted and staged a Cole Porter musical version of ''Around the World in 80 Days'' in 1946 that was praised by critics but failed at the box office. He lost $350,000 of his own money in the production.
He also directed and acted in a Hollywood spy thriller, ''The Stranger,'' in 1946, and produced, directed and co-starred with Rita Hayworth in ''The Lady From Shanghai,'' in 1948.
Three Marriages
He and Miss Hayworth, who were married in 1943, were divorced in 1948. They had a daughter, Rebecca. Welles had a son, Christopher, from his first marriage, to Virginia Nicholson, which also ended in divorce. In 1955, he married the Italian actress Paola Mori, who appeared with him in his ''Mr. Arkadin.'' They have a daughter, Beatrice.
In part because of his losses from ''Around the World,'' which were ruled nondeductible for tax purposes, Welles moved to Europe, where he lived most often in Spain, for many years. From time to time, he would act in a film or television show or in television commercials - he was always in demand as a performer - and from time to time would use his earnings and what financing he could raise to make a picture, or part of one. His acting talents enhanced such films - made by other directors - as ''Tomorrow Is Forever,'' ''The Third Man,'' ''Compulsion,'' ''A Man for All Seasons'' and ''Catch-22.''
In Italy and Morocco, at intervals from 1949 to 1952, he put together and starred in ''Othello'' and ''Macbeth.'' The latter film, shot in three weeks, has been violently criticized. In Mexico and Paris, beginning in 1955, he filmed the not yet completed ''Don Quixote.'' In four European countries in 1954, he made ''Mr. Arkadin,'' based on a thriller he had written himself.
In Paris and Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1962, he wrote, directed and acted in ''The Trial,'' based on the Kafka novel. Many critics decry it; some call it a masterpiece. He completed two other films in Europe and, in 1970, began a major project, ''The Other Side of the Wind,'' which remains unfinished. His last directorial effort to be released was ''The Immortal Story'' in 1968; he also performed in it.
In 1958, Welles returned briefly to Hollywood to act with Charlton Heston in ''Touch of Evil.'' At Mr. Heston's suggestion, Welles was enlisted as director as well. Some admirers consider it one of his best films, and its opening scene, coming to a climax in a car explosion, is a model of the genre, although Welles was to complain that it, too, had been re-edited by the studio without his permission.
He also staged, and appeared in, a successful run of ''Othello'' in London, and was featured in dozens of television shows.
Boycotted New York Stage
He refused to appear on Broadway, however, after an unfortunate appearance in ''King Lear'' during which, having broken an ankle, he acted in a wheelchair. He vowed that he would never return to the New York stage while Walter Kerr was still a critic there. Writing for The New York Herald Tribune, Mr. Kerr had described Welles as ''a buffoon,'' ''an actor without talent'' and ''an international joke, possibly the world's youngest has-been.''
Mr. Kerr was not the only hostile critic. In 1963 Stanley Kauffmann, although more admiring of Welles's virtuosity, also accused him of overacting and concluded, ''After 'Kane,' his film directing consists of sometimes glittering, often wild attempts to recapture that first fine careful rapture.''
That was the common reception given in this country to Welles's film ''Falstaff,'' which had been hailed in Europe under the title ''Chimes at Midnight.'' When it appeared here in 1967, a number of critics panned it, one calling Welles ''inarticulate'' and saying he made Falstaff ''a sort of Jackie Gleason.''
More recently, however, The Times's Vincent Canby wrote that the picture ''may be the greatest Shakespearean film ever made.''
The film and television writer Stephen Farber commented: ''Looking back over American movie history - a history of wrecked careers - you begin to see that the critics have a lot to answer for. The classic victim is Orson Welles.''
This was, of course, also Welles's view. He complained, ''They don't review my work - they review me.'' It cannot be doubted that his flamboyant personality, his enormous early success, his pride and his lofty aspirations caused critics to measure him against standards they might not have applied to a more modest film maker.
He was the legendary sort of figure upon whom old anecdotes are rehung. Mr. Mankiewicz, for example, was reported by Miss Kael to have said of Welles, ''There, but for the grace of God, goes God.''
Welles inspired harsh criticism, yet most people felt that even his most unsuccessful, most self-indulgent works all had some feature, some turn that was memorable. There were no dissenters when, at the dedication of a Theater Hall of Fame in New York 1n 1972, his name was among the first to be chosen.
He is survived by his wife and three children.
Dearest Angel Girl:
…I suppose most of us are lonely in this big world, but we must fall tremendously in love to find it out. The cure is the discovery of our need for company — I mean company in the very special sense we’ve come to understand since we happened to each other — you and I. The pleasures of human experience are emptied away without that companionship — now that I’ve known it; without it joy is just an unendurable as sorrow. You are my life — my very life. Never imagine your hope approximates what you are to me. Beautiful, precious little baby — hurry up the sun! — make the days shorter till we meet. I love you, that’s all there is to it.
Your boy,
Orson