TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/042489/04248900.064

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 5KB | 89 lines

BOOKS, Page 85

Getting to the False Bottom

By R.Z. Sheppard


    CITIZEN WELLES
    by Frank Brady
    Scribner's; 655 pages; $24.95

    The late Orson Welles was, in the nostalgic phrase, a star of
stage, screen and radio. He was also one of those grand,
self-inflating talents whose failures received almost as much
attention as his successes. His long, attenuated career covered the
spectrum, from classics to commercials. Old-timers still remember
his controversial rejiggerings of Shakespeare and his War of the
Worlds radio drama, which had many listeners believing New Jersey
had been invaded by Martians. And, of course, every generation has
embraced Citizen Kane, his brilliant 1941 film based on the life
and times of press lord William Randolph Hearst.

    But Welles was not made for that more contemporary medium, TV.
His Falstaffian girth, so impressive on stage and screen, seemed
grotesque when stuffed into the small tube. The voice that shivered
the old Philco during the Depression sounded hokey when it was used
to seduce would-be sophisticates of the '70s. "Paul Masson will
sell no wine before its time" joined the fleeting body of marketing
folklore and spun off into dozens of jokes. (In one, the Welles
impersonator intones the line, glances at his watch and says
impatiently, "It's time.")

    In taking his subject from precocious childhood through
audacious beginnings as an actor-director and finally to the status
of cult figure to be wheeled in on special occasions, biographer
Frank Brady reveals Welles as a thin man in which there was always
a fat man trying to get out. Even as a tall, trim youth, Welles had
gargantuan intellectual and physical appetites. It was not enough
that he had prematurely grasped the concept that art was
essentially an illusion, a magic show. He insisted on making his
tricks as obvious as possible.

    Welles was also a conspicuous womanizer and gourmand. He was,
writes Brady, "a man who would think nothing of starting off a meal
with a bottle of Moet et Chandon just for himself, followed by a
Boudin Noir aux Pommes (blood sausage with apples), then a bottle
of Beaujolais Nouveau to help wash down a Terrine de Canard and a
huge porterhouse steak, and finally a Mousse a l'Armagnac, followed
by four or five glasses of Calvados, and several cups of very black
coffee."

    Brady encircles his outsize subject with equal parts of
anecdote and scholarship. He does not attempt the intimate tone of
Barbara Leaming's authorized 1983 biography or try for the
high-skid finish of Charles Higham's Orson Welles: The Rise and
Fall of an American Genius (1985). Citizen Welles covers more
ground and digs deeper, revealing an artistic nomad whose life had
too many ups, downs and lateral movements to be treated as a sales
chart. The author is a great admirer, crediting Welles as an
originator of the film noir genre and a technical pioneer whose
influence can be detected in dozens of films. He even notes that
the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has acknowledged that the
structure of his book The Death of Artemio Cruz was lifted from
Citizen Kane. But Brady is prudent about using the word genius, an
encomium more freely handed out at Academy Award gatherings than
at Nobel Prize ceremonies.

    The biographer, who teaches film courses at St. John's
University in New York City, also provides valuable evidence that
blunts film critic Pauline Kael's assertion that Herman J.
Mankiewicz, not Welles, was mainly responsible for the final script
for Citizen Kane. Mank, as he was known, does get credit for the
basic plot and the "Rosebud" sled gimmick, but most of the words
belong to Welles, who, after all, had to speak them as the film's
protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. Among the footnotes to this
classic is Steven Spielberg's purchase at auction of one of three
sleds used in the project. The young producer-director paid $55,000
for the icon, only to have Welles later declare it a fake.

    Fabrication, contrivance and artifice were subjects he knew
something about. "I discovered at the age of six," Welles once told
an interviewer, "that almost everything in this world was phony,
worked with mirrors." His 1973 movie F for Fake is about the
ambiguity of artistic charlatanism and, says Brady, stands as
Welles' most personal film.

    Unlike previous biographies, Citizen Welles gets to the bottom
-- or should one say, false bottom -- of the man. At one level the
book projects an old-world Promethean hero thundering against
authority and convention. But conveyed with equal weight is an
impresario of the self in the American maverick tradition of
Charles Ives, Ezra Pound and even Mark Twain's the King and the
Duke.