Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles

by Frank Brady

Discusses the life and work of widely-acclaimed actor Orson Welles, revealing the private man behind the public persona

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Film, Biography Memoir

655 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992

About the author

Frank Brandy is the author of numerous critically acclaimed biographies. Internationally recognised as the greatest authority on the life and career of Bobby Fischer, he is also president of New York City's Marshall Chess Club and was the founding editor of Chess Life.

Reviews

[Suzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can only pray that the copyediting was improved in later editions, because that was the sloppiest work I've ever seen.

As to the content... I can see why this biography is popular with a certain kind of Welles fan. Brady acknowledges Welles' faults, but the text sometimes borders on the sycophantic. Countless fawning descriptions of Welles' admittedly remarkable voice litter the discussion of his radio work. Reports of negative reviews are always immediately tempered with direct quotes of whatever positive reviews Brady could scrape together. There is precious little detail about Welles' private life--especially after his career kicks off--which perhaps is a kindness to Welles, given his propensity for cheating on his wives and alienating his allies. (Sadly, it also means we miss reading about his many solid friendships, and while we are told repeatedly about the famous Welles charm, we aren't really given a clear picture of it. Brady tells instead of showing.) Still, his professional life is messy and dramatic enough to hold anyone's attention.

Brady may have better served Welles' later years by breaking the biography into two volumes. I shudder to think how frustrating and depressing the second volume would be--Simon Callow will be helping me find out, one of these days--but at least it would have allowed Welles' last twenty years or so to be fleshed out more. Brady's account feels like little more than a list of failures and incomplete masterworks.

On a side note, it also annoyed me inordinately that he referred to Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards as "friends", an offense of understatement that I believe he later committed against another homosexual couple as well. Distractingly ridiculous.

[z]

- prolly the best Welles biography out there: just the facts, very few remarks on Welles' movies (McBride) or on his inner demons (Callow) or his sex life (Leaming)

[David Sterritt]

Frank Brady’s “Citizen Welles” is probably the longest book I’ve read on Welles, and its flaws aside – careless writing, in particular – it strikes a good balance between the auteur’s life and work, and contains some interesting material I don’t recall coming across before. Welles was unique in the fullest sense, and I never tire of revisiting his films and thinking about his enormous impact on world cinema. It’s also great to know I have plenty of company in this all-important area of film culture.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it contains some errors and misapprehensions (pointed out succinctly in Rosenbaum's "Discovering Orson Welles," overall the book seems even-handed and shies away from Welles' personal life. I'd have preferred more citing of sources, but overall a satisfying overview of his life and work.

[Michael Losasso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read for beginners to Welles

A good biography for all those looking to learn the general expanse of the life of Orson Welles. Not as comprehensive as say Simon Callow's 3 volume biography but still does a.fantastic job detailing Welles' life.

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best bios I've ever read. The Steven Spielberg/Rosebud/Wife/Welles Play story is heartbreaking and revealing. An under-appreciated man.

[Brad Hodges · Rating 5 out of 5]

This year is the centenary of Orson Welles, born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. To honor this I looked for a good biography of the man, who lived a life that almost seems too incredible to be true. I found the right one with Frank Brady's Citizen Welles, originally published in 1989. It covers the life of Welles from soup to nuts, from his early years as a child prodigy, to his astounding successes as a young man in the theater and then radio, to his making the greatest movie ever to come out of Hollywood, and then the pathos of his later life, when the man was lauded as a genius but no one would give him money to make films.

"Orson Welles had a remarkably complex life, filled with contrasts and extremes, and just getting down the bare facts of his various adventures and many careers over a half-century of relentless activity spanning several continents," writes Brady, and he's not kidding. It's interesting to note that Welles only directed 12 films, but almost all of them were classics (some identified as so only years later) but also directed many plays; wrote, directed, and acted in countless radio scripts, as well as acting in many films directed by others. To those in a later generation, he may have been best well-known as a wine pitchman.

Welles seems not to have been born so much as emerged fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus. At a very young age he was putting on puppet shows, which led to a fascination with the theater. He attended a boarding school and and learned to love acting. He was orphaned as a teenager (his father was an inventor, who many say was the model for Joseph Cotten's character in The Magnificent Ambersons) and went to Ireland, where he managed to get work with in a Dublin theater company. Then he went to London and had some success there before returning to New York.

Welles' life on Broadway in the '30s is enough for a book in itself, and in fact has been made into two films. He and John Houseman partnered for the WPA to mount several landmark productions, including the "Voodoo" Macbeth, the modern-dress Julius Caesar, and Marc Blitzteins' opera, The Cradle Will Rock. Brady's chapter on the latter reads like a thriller, as the theater where the show was to take place was closed by the government. Houseman and Welles found a different theater, and lead a march down the New York streets. In order not to violate union rules, the performers sang from the seats, not the stage, with Blitzstein playing on stage. After reading it I felt like I'd been there.

The most lucrative career Welles had was for the radio. He was an immensely popular radio star, trading quips with Charlie McCarthy and producing, writing, and directing adaptations of classic works. The most famous, or infamous, was his 1938 Halloween broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which created a panic among the citizenry. For many years I lived a short walk away from Grovers Mill, the purported landing of the Martians, and there's a water tower still there that someone took a shot at, thinking it was a Martian spacecraft.

All along there was a mutual interest between Hollywood and Welles to make films, but it wasn't until William Schaefer and RKO came along that Welles made a three-picture deal. He struggled to find the right property to be his first film. He had always wanted to make Cyrano de Bergerac, for example. He finally hit on the story that was first called American, about a man who becomes successful but loses his innocence. In what would prove to be unusual, it was based on an original screenplay (all of Welles' films after that would be based on published works), co-written by Herman Manckiewicz (there would be, and perhaps still is some controversy about how much Welles actually contributed to the script). But what would cripple the film's success, and Welles' career, was how much Citizen Kane would end up being similar to the life of William Randolph Hearst.

Brady devotes two long and thrilling chapters to Kane, and it struck me that if Welles had started his career with anything else, perhaps the non-offensive Cyrano, how things might have been different. Hearst was not an easy man to anger. He controlled many of the newspapers in the country, and not one of them would issue take any advertisements or do any press on Kane, except for vitriolic columnist Hedda Hopper, who strafed the film. Although filmmakers who saw the film realized it was the most amazing thing they had ever seen, and would rewrite the way films were made, it was not a big success with the public. It's interesting to note though that it did receive several Oscar nominations (four for Welles); he won only for screenwriting.

The Magnificent Ambersons followed, and what followed would be repeated several times throughout his career--the picture was taken away from him in the editing room. The released film is still great, but Welles was done as a golden boy. A documentary he was making in South America, It's All True, had the plug pulled on it after Schaefer was removed at RKO, and Welles, for the rest of his life, would struggle to find financial backing for his films.

Instead he worked for hire, trying to raise money by acting to make his own films. The most famous of these roles was as Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man, one of the most famous cameos in film history. I find it interesting that Brady glosses over the controversy of whether Welles wrote the "Cuckoo clock" speech--Brady says he did, and that nobody disputes it. Welles says he got it from a German play. What I didn't know is that for years Welles had a hit radio show in England playing the character of Harry Lime.

Welles managed to somehow make films--The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, and a long gestating film of Othello, that was finally released in 1950 and won the Palm D'or at Cannes. In the '50s he made a film I'd frankly never heard of--Mr. Arkadin, which was again taken away from him and there exist a multitude of versions. I have a copy right now ready to watched from Netflix. He also scored a great triumph with Touch of Evil, which he was able to direct because of the influence of Charlton Heston (despite his gun fetish, Heston did do some noble things). The film was indifferently released, being on the bottom half of a double feature, but again, over the years, people have understood its greatness, both in his direction and his performance as a corrupt sheriff.

There are several films that Welles tried to make but never came to fruition, including Don Quixote (which also proved to be a Waterloo for Terry Gilliam), a picture called The Big Brass Ring, which was never made because he couldn't get a big star to play a homosexual character, and something called The Other Side of the Wind. He earned a living appearing on television talk shows and in commercials, known primarily for being fat, a somewhat sad existence for someone with so much talent. To the very end he was trying to raise money for film projects, notably King Lear.

Brady is clearly a fan, but the book is not a hagiography. I did find it interesting that while discussing Welles' three marriages and his affair with Delores Del Rio, there is nothing to the rumors about bisexuality. What comes across most is Welles' huge appetite, not only for food but in all the good things in life. His genius is also apparent. When he adapted Shakespeare, he often rewrote him, and incorporated lines from other plays (Julius Caesar contained lines from Coriolanus). One of his projects was called The Five Kings, which took several of Shakespeare's histories and boiled them down into one, very long evening. The play was not a success, and closed early. He also directed a stage musical version of Around the World in 80 Days, which included elephants on stage.

Welles was also a charming man, a great storyteller. He had a regular table at Ma Maison where he would have lunches with people he hoped would give him money. A very interesting one of these occasions was when he lunched with Amy Irving, hoping she would appear in a film he was trying to make. She was at the time married to Steven Spielberg, who was riding high after E.T., and joined Irving at the lunch. Spielberg was such a Welles fan that he bought one of the sleds used as Rosebud in Citizen Kane, but Welles said it was a fake. Spielberg probably was aware that Welles might cast Irving to get him to invest, and Spielberg didn't give Welles a penny. Welles even had to pick up the check.

The life of Orson Welles comes across as one of the great "might have been" stories of all time, even with him making the film acknowledged by most as the greatest of all time. He was a man whose success was front-loaded in life--Citizen Kane is at the halfway point of Brady's book, even though Welles was only 25 when he made it and would live another 45 years. Not to dump on Spielberg, but I wish he would have said, "How much do you need and you have full creative control." Brady notes the irony of Welles receiving very high honors, especially only the third AFI Life Achievement Award (following John Ford and James Cagney). He was surrounded by dozens of Hollywood greats, singing his praises, but he couldn't get a film financed.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In most autobiographies, the narrator's lie. When the author is known for magic and taking "the mickey out" of the news, reading that author's autobiography becomes an exercise in subtext and irony. Frank Brady published his biography on Orson Welles nine years before Peter Bogdanovich published This Is Orson Welles, co-authored by the man himself. To critique Brady for not getting everything correct about Welles would make about as much sense for critiquing Welles for trying to fake us out on a couple of points. To appropriate a Welles' tale, we knew the scorpion stung before we gave it a ride.

So to be fair to Brady, his biography is a respectable work of research. Brady has a good eye for useful detail. Put together with some of the blind spots Bogdanovich himself acknowledges in the introduction to This Is Orson Welles, the two books help make some sense of one of the most maligned and entertainingly evasive artists of our time.

Count my grandparents--whom I love--among those who thought Orson Welles didn't play fair. I heard about "The War of the Worlds" broadcast from them before I ever saw Citizen Kane. Welles was one of many celebrities who wasn't "nice."

Brady focuses on more than manners, more than 'Kane.' While Welles the director may have been what mattered most to Welles himself, the topic can't be discussed without an in-depth look at how the sub-topics of radio broadcaster, theatrical director, stage actor, screen actor, magician, pundit and film editor all contributed to the autuer. Brady's research on all of Welles' work supports and goes beyond that of Welles himself. For example, Brady writes about Welles early radio and theater work, "One of the problems Welles had to confront from the very beginning...was caused by his overinvolvement in so many projects and his procrastination" (147). While overinvolved, Welles would imbue his works with a worldview that was present at least as early as his stage production of Julius Caesar in which Welles played Brutus, a good man of principle, "committed to the demands of his conscience but somewhat bewildered" by how to respond to crisis (124). Brady then quotes Welles himself:

"[Brutus is] the classical picture of the eternal, impotent, ineffectual, fumbling liberal, the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn't know how....He's dead right all the time--and dead by the final curtain. He's Shakespeare's favorite hero--the fellow who thinks the times are out of joint, but who's really out of joint with his time." (124)

Welles not only describes much of his approach to Shakespeare but to many of his characters: Charlie Kane, Mike Vargas, Jake Hannaford. These are the despicable idealists he would later tell Bogdanovich about.

While more than one critic has commented on Citizen Kane' s similarity to Mr. Arkadin, no one has yet linked 'Arkadin' to Welles' radio production of Archibald MacLeish's The Fall of the City. While Brady correctly on the play's "symphonic effect," will revolutionize movies as "sound montage" in Citizen Kane, Brady's block quotes also capture the critique of fascism:

The city of masterless men
will take a master.
There sill be shouting then:
Blood after! (108)

What is striking in Brady's choice of quotes is how well they support the theory that Welles dramatized post-modern indeterminacy before academics rendered it in their less dramatic opacity. Welles and MacLeish, on the radio risked it when the city's conqueror arrives and lifts the visor of his helmet:

There is no one.
No one at all.
No one.
The helmet is hollow.
The metal is empty.
The armor is empty.
I tell you there is no
one at all there. (108)

It might as well be the cockpit of Arkadin's plane or Thompson's literal definition of Rosebud. The richness of Brady's research makes a web of nearly inexplicable connections far beyond the tired one of Hearst, Hearst, Hearst. As implied by Brady's title, Welles himself is the media giant, too mulit-faceted to be defined; the idealist corrupted.

Just when we thought Netflix had advanced studies of Welles with the release of The Other Side of the Wind, they follow up with Mank David Fincher's half-bright biopic, which at best dramatizes Hearst's fake news of Upton Sinclair's and at worst perpetuates the long-discredited Pauline Kael theory that Welles had nothing to do with Citizen Kane's screenplay (irony of irony: Fincher steals Joseph Mankiewicz' propaganda against Sinclair and attributes it to his brother Herman, who is Kael's creator of 'Kane' ... which she labeled a "shallow masterpiece," anyway). Any book or movie about Welles that discusses W.R. Hearst as the sole model for Charles Foster Kane or Marion Davies as the sole model for Susan Alexander Kane is at best third-rate. By mentioning farm machinery heir Harold McCormick and second-wife Ganna Walska, who sang at the Chicago Civic Opera, Brady does some heavy-lifting, that if Citizen Kane is a roman a clef, then the sources were many,--like Kane himself--too diverse to be summed up by something as simple as "a sled" or "W.R. Hearst" (230-263).

If Brady's book has a flaw, it is that Welles has been prolific since his death. The Murch re-edit of Touch of Evil, the digital restorations of the sound quality of Chimes at Midnight and release of The Other Side of the Wind continue to prompt reassessments of Welles' work. Citizen Welles is as good a primer for Welles' current Act IV as there is. Act V could include The Deep, The Merchant of Venice, Treasure Island, The Dreamers and perhaps even restorations of The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai.

[Akita · Rating 1 out of 5]

Excerpt from Chapter 13:

Welles had personal difficulties with Anne Baxter as a result of an incident that occurred after his consumption of nine demolitionary martinis at a party given by Joseph Cotten. As she explained in her memoir, Intermission, Orson, while drunk, secretly sent his chauffeur home and pleaded to having no transport. Would she drive him?

Gad, what a drive. I prayed for a policeman. Six feet four and 250 pounds, and what seemed like six hands in my shirt. All he kept saying was, "Oh, the beauty of it. Oh, the beauty of it." In tears of rage I finally shoved him out at Sunset Boulevard, threw my tattered bra in the gutter, and gunned up the hill to home and Mother. Poor Orson. I always wondered how long it took him to get a cab.

She forgave him, however, and despite the trauma, was able to say at the film's end that Orson was the best director she had ever worked with.

[John Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the type of book that at least used to dominate the biography section of bookstores. The subject is an important figure in his field, the book at least attempts to address every important event in his life, and the politicized, "woke" blather that tells the reader much more about the author's obsessions than about the subject of the book or the events he lived through is thankfully absent. Indeed, "wokeness" hadn't even been invented when Mr. Brady published this volume. The flip side of the book's comprehensive scope, however, is that it cannot cover any of the major events and issues in Welles' life satisfactorily; that simply is not possible within the space of one volume. Still, I give the book four stars for its workmanlike research and writing.

[Frank Marzano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virtually every project (radio, theater, film) that Wellles was involved with gets some attention. There's some details on his personal life, too, but not excessively many.

[Gareth Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and written cradle-to-grave biography.

[Richard Stueber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another biography of the great Orson Welles. Unlike "Young Orson" by Patrick McGilligan which mainly went up to 1940 this one covers his entire life from his birth in Kenosha, Wisconsin up to his last day on which he appeared on the Merv Griffin show. Both are well worth reading for fans of cinema history.

[sam]

Started reading this but couldn't get more than twenty pages into it. Too full of "child prodigy" bull, slick biographical prose and outlandish, obviously untrue anecdotes. I'll come back and skim it, but it seems thin on facts.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A serious, well-documented biography of Welles.

[John Raspanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent biography on an American genius.