"Orson is coming! Orson is coming!" So chanted the crowds at the Rio carnival in 1942. The local newspapers were no less stirred. One took to writing about what it called "the Giant Boy". Another filled a page with a picture of the giant boy in a linen suit and full-on party mode, headlining it "Carioca Citizen Kane".
Who could begrudge the Brazilians their excitement? The dancer in their midst was, after all, a wunderkind, the man Hollywood had given carte blanche on his first picture. Now he had been des-patched south of the border, a cultural ambassador for the US State Department, tasked with shooting a documentary about Rio's annual revels and cementing pan-American relations in the fraught and fevered months following Pearl Harbor. Entitled It's All True, the picture was released, bastardised beyond belief and half a century late, in 1993.
Par, in other words, for the course. Not many of Orson Welles's movies made it to the cinema on time - and even fewer looked as he'd imagined they would. The Lady from Shanghai (1948) was hacked about by Harry Cohn and his minions, probably in revenge for Welles's insistence that the picture's leading lady, his ex-wife Rita Hayworth, exchange her trademark spume of refulgent red hair for a cropped peroxide number 40 years ahead of its time. Before being hired to direct The Stranger (1946), the man behind Citizen Kane had to sign a cinematic pre-nup: in the event of any dispute he would submit to the studio's will. As for the treatment meted out to his second picture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), it is sufficient to remember that in 1985, only days before his death, a solitary Welles was seen weeping over a television broadcast of his butchered baby.
But as Simon Callow maintains in this manically attentive but admirably level-headed book - the second volume of his biography - we shouldn't feel bad for him. All too often, as Callow documents, Welles would skip town before post- production work began, handing a "film over to his associates at the most delicate stage in its life". Such abandonment, argues Callow, is like a tailor doing nothing to a suit after a final fitting: "the raw materials are in place, the shape is essentially there, but all kinds of vital alterations can still be made". A school report would have said that Welles was good at starting things but bad at finishing them. The trouble was, there were no school reports. As Callow points out more than once, Welles had very little formal education. Certainly no one ever taught him the 99 per cent perspiration rule. Ideas spewed out of him, but the idea of working on those ideas, of refining and polishing them, was anathema to him.
Some might defend Welles by claiming he was too vital to submit to the dull repetitions - "one more time, please, darlings" - that constitute the bulk of movie-making. Realistically, however, someone has to bark orders on set, and that someone is usually the director. Little wonder, then, that the It's All True crew grew impatient with their director, and that the money-men eventually pulled the plug. Callow quotes a typical entry in the production log: "On location 8pm. Waited for Mr Welles until 9.30pm." Often Mr Welles failed to show up at all. When he wasn't having his way with one or other of the local lovelies, he spent most of his time in Rio footling around on the radio.
None of this, it should be said, is news. We have known the broad lineaments of Welles's story for years. While Hello Americans furnishes us with much fresh detail on the minutiae of his working life, it does little to alter our understanding of the man. He couldn't take orders, and there's an end to it. At one point in Callow's story, Welles tries his hand at journalism - writing a column for the New York Post. Desperate, as movie people always are, to be taken seriously, Welles wanted to discuss politics. But his editor (not to mention his readers) soon tired of his endless plaudits for FDR: "If you gave us more Orson Welles reporting of contacts in Hollywood, radio, theatre," he was told, "I believe we could go to town." And you can go to hell, said Welles. Another bridge burned. By the end of the book, the giant boy's long exile is beckoning. Goodbye Americans.
How long it will take Callow's Welles to wave that goodbye is anyone's guess. Hello Americans, which covers a mere six years of Welles's life, clocks in at more than 500 pages. Welles's first quarter- century, chronicled by Callow in The Road to Xanadu (1995), was longer still. True, there was a Roman grandeur to Welles's fall, but at this rate Callow's biography is going to be fatter than Gibbon. "All's well that ends Welles," quipped one of Orson's many enemies. If Callow has his way there will be no end. Orson is coming! Orson is still coming!
