"Orson Welles And Roger Hill: A Friendship In Three Acts," by Todd Tarbox

I am grate­ful to the crit­ic and schol­ar Jonathan Rosenbaum for a good many reas­ons, and most recently I find that I owe him for steer­ing me in the dir­ec­tion of this splen­did book, a far less hyped cor­rel­at­ive and cor­rect­ive to the Henry Jaglom/Peter Biskind offer­ing My Lunches With Orson, which I con­sidered on this blog a couple of weeks ago. 

The eleven-year-old Welles was enrolled at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois in 1926. Roger Hill, twenty years Welles’ seni­or, was an instruct­or there; he later inher­ited the pos­i­tion of head­mas­ter, which had been that of his fath­er, Noble Hill. Roger Hill was one of Welles’ earli­est ment­ors and a lifelong friend and sup­port­er, and, accord­ing to the intro­duc­tion to this book by Tarbox, a grand­son of Hill’s, Hill and Welles began record­ing their phone and in-person con­ver­sa­tions in the early ’80s in the hopes that the tapes would aid in their respect­ive mem­oirs. The first record­ing in the Tarbox book is from November 25, 1982; the final one is from October 9, 1985, the even­ing before Welles’ death. This is the same peri­od in which the con­ver­sa­tions that make up My Lunches With Orson were recor­ded. But while there is a cer­tain amount of cros­sov­er, there is abso­lutely no redund­ancy here. While I’m not going to address the con­tro­versy con­cern­ing wheth­er or not Jaglom is entirely truth­ful when he says his con­ver­sa­tions with Welles had been recor­ded with Welles’ pri­or con­sent, the Welles in My Lunches, some­times truc­u­lent, spite­ful, per­verse, giv­en to vent­ing resent­ments, etc., is a par­tic­u­lar kind of private Welles who coex­ists with an Orson who is very aware of the fact that he is giv­ing a per­form­ance for a young­er admirer. Is the Welles in the Hill con­ver­sa­tions on his best beha­vi­or because he clearly knows that these con­ver­sa­tions are in some sense inten­ded for pos­ter­ity? I would say yes and no, and I would also say that the Welles that emerges in Tarbox’s book is the truer Welles. And yes, it is a Welles that is more noble than the one con­struc­ted via Biskind and Jaglom. 

That Welles lets his bet­ter angels speak through him via Hill has to do with, you’ll see if you read the book, which you def­in­itely should, his ease with Hill. The two go back a very long way, and we can infer that Hill knows Welles’ quirks and foibles like almost no oth­er, and that he for­gives them all because he really loves Orson, and Orson really loves him back. There’s not as much film­mak­ing talk in this book as there is in My Lunches; there’s quite a bit of fond remin­is­cing about places and events and people that may not have a too-privileged place in the philo­sophy of those who are exclus­ively con­cerned with Welles the cine­aste. But these top­ics are not brought up in the ser­vice of a facile nos­tal­gia; everything touched upon in these con­ver­sa­tions of course deeply informed Welles the artist, a deeply soph­ist­ic­ated man and a product of a very American cul­ture that I some­times fear van­ished about thirty or forty years ago. 

As the title implies, the book is struc­tured as a play. Rather than lay out tran­scrip­tions of the con­ver­sa­tion, Tarbox provides set­tings and stage dir­ec­tions and incor­por­ates flash­backs in which the play­ers, Welles and Hill, read from cor­res­pond­ance or oth­er texts. This may strike some read­ers as an overly sen­ti­ment­al, even quaint device, and it does lead down some awk­ward alleys, par­tic­u­larly dur­ing one con­ver­sa­tion in which Welles admits he’s speak­ing from a phone exten­sion in his loo. At oth­er junc­tures, how­ever, the con­ceit of a stage present­a­tion works pretty beau­ti­fully, as in an exchange in which Welles and Hill dis­cuss a small civil-rights cru­sade that Welles spear­headed via his radio show in 1946: 

ROGER: Your finest
hour, actu­ally many hours, on your [radio show seg­ment] Almanac was
cham­pi­on­ing a black sol­dier who, return­ing to his homet­own some­where in the
South, was beaten by a mob. What was his name? 

ORSON: Isaac
Woodard. He wasn’t beaten by a mob, but by a police­man. Woodard was on a bus,
not too far from his home in South Carolina. As a stop, he took too much time
in the “colored” men’s room to sat­is­fy the bus driver. A heated exchange
fol­lowed, prompt­ing the bus driver to call a cop, who, without provocation,
beat the neje­sus out of Woodard with a billy club, which blinded him. I
imme­di­ately inveighed against this mind­less mad­ness, and, over the next several
months, as the case unfol­ded, I con­tin­ued to seethe over the air.

ROGER: Didn’t the
NAACP con­tact you?

ORSON: Yes, the
NAACP brought Woodard’s plight to my attention.

ROGER: Now it comes
back. Wasn’t he a dec­or­ated war hero?

ORSON: He served
over­seas for over a year and was dec­or­ated with a battle star.

[Scrim: Thirty-one-year-old Orson in an ABC radio studio
read­ing his July 28 1946 commentary.]

Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well. Scrub and scour.
We will blast out your name. We’ll give the world your giv­en name, Officer X.
Yes, and your so-called Christian name. Officer X—after I have found you out,
I’ll nev­er lose you. If they try you, I’m going to watch the tri­al. If they
jail you, I’m going to wait for your first day of free­dom. You won’t be free of
me…You can’t get rid of me…Who am I? A masked avenger from the com­ic books? No,
sir. Merely an inquis­it­ive cit­izen of America.

ORSON: Week after week, I updated my audi­ence on the
pro­gress of the case. I was threatened with law­suits if I didn’t cease and
desist. The threats only heightened my resolve to make America aware of the
bit­ter fruits of this man’s ser­vice to his coun­try. A lot of people from the
South and North wrote and asked what busi­ness it was of mine to involve myself
in this case. 

[Scrim: Thirty-one-year-old Orson at the ABC microphone
read­ing his Woodard script.]

God judge me if this isn’t the most press­ing busi­ness I
have. The blind sol­dier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is
fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio. He hasn’t.
I was born a white man and until a colored man is a full cit­izen like me I
haven’t the leis­ure to enjoy the free­dom that this colored man risked his life
to main­tain for me. I don’t own what I have until he owns an equal share of it.
Until someone beats me, and blinds me, I am in his debt. And so I come to this
micro­phone not as a radio dram­at­ist (although it pays bet­ter), not as a
com­ment­at­or (although it’s safe to be simply that). I come, in that boy’s name,
and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I
come with a call to action.

[Lights dim]

ROGER: What became
of the case?

ORSON: The
Department of Justice filed charges against the rogue cop.

ROGER: Didn’t the
NAACP cred­it you as the prime mover in caus­ing the gov­ern­ment to act?

ORSON: There were a
num­ber of us on the side of the angels. I was just the one with a microphone
and a weekly nation­al audi­ence. Our broad­casts led to a bene­fit in New York on
Woodard’s behalf. Billie Holiday, Milton Berle, Cab Calloway, and many others
joined me on stage and per­formed for an impas­sioned audi­ence of over 30,000,
demand­ing justice for one black man and for all of black America.

ROGER: Was justice
served?

ORSON: Sadly, no.
Though the Justice Department took the case to tri­al, an all-white jury
acquit­ted the cop. I’ll nev­er for­get a line from the defense attorney’s closing
argu­ment to the jury, “If you rule against my cli­ent, then let South Carolina
secede again.” 

This is mov­ing, still vital stuff, I’d reck­on. And it speaks mul­ti­tudes of both men, mul­ti­tudes that are maybe will­fully ignored in Biskind/Jaglom, whose book starts by tak­ing too-giddy pleas­ure in Welles’ delib­er­ately imp­ishly pro­voc­at­ive pro­nounce­ment to Jaglom that “every­body should be big­oted.” Peter and Henry should be ashamed of themselves. 

The Tarbox book is also gen­er­ously illus­trated, not just with pho­tos but with repro­duced pages from Welles’ scripts, includ­ing more than a few from the Shakespeare sta­ging adapt­a­tions on which Hill and Welles col­lab­or­ated. You can buy the book via Amazon here. And you should also read Jonathan R.‘s thoughts on the book, here.