Todd Tarbox, grandson of Roger Hill, headmaster of the famous Todd School for Boys, Woodstock, Illinois, along the progressive approach of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill, and the son of Hascy Tarbox, younger classmate and perhaps rival to Orson Welles contacted me after seeing some reference to Welles by me. Over the years, hear and there, I have written about Welles and Citizen Kane. I devote one chapter in my recent book to Welles. And what is that attraction?
I am appalled by what this culture, other cultures, do to the artist. The average Joe may or may not be emotionally impoverished; however, the real artist is never poor. That is a line from Babette’s Feast. Throughout his career critics faulted Welles for his incomplete and unfinished films. I ask you: what human being is not a mess of unfinished business when he comes to die? Why this envy of Welles and the need to tear him down. The appealing aspect for me is how Welles fought this off all his life and elements of that resistance are in this book.
Of course, Tarbox’s book is the kind of book we cinephiles read while chewing Jujyfruits; it is absorbing, illuminative, informative, often provocative and with all the minutiae that fans want to know about Welles’s life, this man with an IQ of 185. So I read it straight through the night; it was not an analysis of the relationship between Roger Hill, the mentor, and Welles, the mentored; it was beyond that. What we have here is a delicious artifact, tapes that Hill-Welles kept of their conversations over the years, knowing full well that each was an important part of the other’s history. They both had a mastery of Shakespeare and often one would begin a quotation from the Bard only to have the other complete it; both their memories are astonishing.
What is salient here is the connection between a 70 year old and a 90 year old, the sustaining intellectual and emotional content of their conversations, the vigor in which they are expressed. Although the remembrance of things past is richly embroidered — that actor, that school play, that show, it really reveals how Roger Hill viewed Welles as a foster son if you will and loved him for his very being! That is Hill’s contribution, as I see it. Welles did not have to meet any expectations as the boy wonder; the world would sordidly go after him for decades on that hobbyhorse. The book is about love, the reciprocal exchange of love. Todd Tarbox should follow up with a book about his own father who is also an intriguing presence; he chose to stay close to the hearth of Hill, even marrying his daughter, while Welles flew the coop, but not entirely. He chose to maintain a friendship over decades — how many of us can say that? or have the staying power for such a relationship? or the opportunity?
In psychoanalytic lore, if I remember the rubrics, it’s been some time since I practiced; there is the concept of the “hold.” Think of the therapist presenting the client with a giant trampoline, encouraging him to bounce and cavort all he wants, knowing full well that he is safe and secure, that no judgment will be made; to know what it is to be enjoyed as a human being unconditionally. Roger Hill gave Welles that support. Often he ends a phone conversation with words of love, of encouragement; often his words are nurturing and admiring without being a sycophant. He enjoyed Welles’s genius without extolling it; he admired the boy who grew into a great artist and man. Although his works won Hill’s admiration, the thrust of the book is that Welles as a person was his best accomplishment. That is why Welles went back and back to Hill, for he was loved.
I must say here that there is dissenting material, lots of it, about Welles as a man; genius can be insufferable and often we need to cover our eyes before it, think of Salieri and Mozart. Nevertheless, Welles is revealed here as open, greatly liberal, free of racism, and tender. I recall this man who chose not to go to college telling his daughter (Chris Welles Feder) that the world was her curriculum and go forth and taste of it; she recalls how one day he took her through Rome explaining what this building or that statue meant historically, enriching her from his own vast treasury of experiences (he is rumored to have read one or two books a day).
Roger Hill was an inner-directed stoic, whose appeal as I sense it, was his capacity to deal with life moment to moment, as we discover Welles and he periodically threading their talks with the denial of death, the breakdown of the body from ageing, of living, of dying, of what is and is not important in the world. Welles is a fountainhead of information which he shares with Hill who takes it in and often asks for more, or clarification; Hill is not threatened by Welles knowledge which may have been one of the emotional ties that Welles appreciated. Welles detested cant of any kind.
I can sum it up, for it is not hard to do: Hill, as depicted in the book, was a free and liberated human being and was not threatened by that same blessing in any other human being. Hill, in fact, encouraged that in his students, to be free, not to be disciples, for that is deadly and Welles drank deeply from that. At the same I must caution that all is not simple between human beings and not all of the complexities of both men are revealed here, or can be.
“Horrible Mistake”
Jacques Tourneur directed some cult classics under the producer tutelage of Val Lewton in the early 40s, “The Cat People” and “I Walked With a Zombie.” And in 1957 he did “Night of the Demon”/ “Curse of the Demon,” (UK) which I saw with my parents. My father was surprised and let down that Dana Andrews was in this horror picture as if had chosen to be mired in B movies. Amazing what one dredges up from childhood.
Andrews had been in “The Best Years of our lIves,”1946, “Laura,” 1944, “The Ox-Bow Incident,”1943, and “A Walk in the Sun,” 1946, most of these A films. Tourneur and Andrews also worked together in “Canyon Passage,”made in 1946 with Susan Hayward, Brian Donlevy (memorable in “Beau Geste” as a vicious sergeant, 1939) Ward Bond and a very young Lloyd Bridges. It was a standard B flic in which Hoagy Carmichael introduced “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” a rather homely man who often tinkled the ivories in several movies and was the composer of the classic “Stardust,”and “In the Cool Cool Cool of the Evening.”
“Canyon Passage” was nothing much as a film but directorially it did have one or two nuances, especially the executing of a convicted murderer off screen, subtle for an oater. Why I recall this film which I have seen off and on within the last few years is a memorable line spoken in a bar by Onslow Stevens, a dry and durable actor of the 30s and 40s. It is delivered off hand which makes it more telling and while the actor’s back is to the camera, thus even more effective.
When Andrews confronts the gambler Stevens about all the loses his friend Donlevy has incurred at his poker table, Stevens is also upset at that also but as he rises he says, “Mankind is a horrible mistake.” I don’t recall a memorable line from “Ben Hur,” “Spartacus,” “El Cid,” or “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” I wonder how the writer and director in 1946 got away with this noirish comment. In fact after the war up to the mid 50s were the years of film noir, much of it was a response to what the war had taught us about humanity. Tourneur directed the classic film noir “Out of the Past.” And Welles made the greatest noirish B movie, “Touch of Evil,” in which there are several memorable lines by Marlene Dietrich (Welles’ friend and assistant in the magic act he used to entertain troops during the war) in a cameo as a madam.
In some way, in some fashion, the line about “horrible mistake” resonates in me, fits suitably into my general frame of mind. I relish that the suits at the front office missed that one acidic if not brilliant accusation about the species — its innate failings. As I look at the debates and observe how one is condemned for showing feelings (Biden vs. Boy Scout), I see how nauseating and politically correct we are. Watching that blustering grotesquerie, Russ Limbaugh, blame and castigate Martha Raddatz, as the moderator for limiting Ryan’s performance, I conclude that we are indeed a horrible mistake.
If a truth is accepted after denial, projection and other psychological human defenses are let down or worked through, we come upon a realization or an awareness that we give large measure of credence to. For me mankind is not as much a species, very much the animal. For me it is as profound a truth as it is for a die-in-the-wool Catholic that Christ was the son of God–but he wasn’t, nor did he rise, fitting mottled mythological musings for an animal.
Recently I was labeled, in essence, by some old cocker about my age, a curmudgeon. He could not grasp my comments about authority or rules and regulations, for they spoke of disgruntlement, which is not allowed. For me it was my ongoing battle with authority. As I walked out of the place in which he was a volunteer, he muttered words, in effect, wondering how I could exist as a person and how my wife could endure the bleakness of my soul. Ah, to be judged by a volunteer.
He went so far as to show me a plaque on his desk ostensibly to be used with misfits such as myself. It had a homily about accepting old age which was an Irish proverb and I had the temerity to tell him that of all the proverbs he could give me, Irish ones were near the bottom, and I also felt but did not say that if your insight came down to a Hallmark sentiment how pathetic you were. It is the misbegotten belief that if you shove a bible into one’s hands you will find the truth. Hogwash! Books are not life. Words are not life. Learn how to live moment to moment free of other people’s convictions and musings and then you will be free.
Jane and I looked at one another. He didn’t get it, never did, never would, for his life, if I may judge, was spent as an adherent. And because he didn’t get it, he labeled me. I became a “horrible mistake” as a person.
Again I am nauseated by culture, any culture, and especially sickened by this one, in which a political wife speaks of her husband in an attempt to “humanize” him to the populous. Now that is real resurrection of the dead! If he ain’t a human being, why run this cadaver for office and why must we endure such a pathetic plea. And little Sarah that Todd knocked up in the backseat in his truck as her fanny wriggled uncomfortably on a spent Coke can, this vagina on stilts, is off to the side yelling at Romney to pull the trigger.
What is one to do if one sees all this cant? It is the perennial question — rush off like Thoreau to the woods for a respite, not bad if you are single and have the time for it; go out and try to change the system (never works, only leads to reform which leads to more structured recalcitrance until the next reform is required — the history of revolutions teaches us this; start with Condorcet and end with Robespierre and then Napoleon.) Human stupidity is a repetition compulsion.
After decades of living I have reached some insight and thus some concluding propositions. I conclude that all I can do is be free of the bullshit, to cleanse myself on a daily basis; that I am surrounded by human frailities, gross behaviors and lunacies that assault me on all sides. It is a struggle to be free of religion, of others in particular, of parents, of the state, the government and of one’s own blindednesses. By the by, isn’t that the curriculum of a meaningful education?
I have also concluded that it is a losing proposition to sustain, yet I continue to do so, for in a way I too, for others, am a “horrible mistake.”
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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Politics
Tagged Biden, Canyon Passage, Dana Andrews, film noir, Hoagy Carmichael, I Walked With a Zombie, Jacques Tourneur, Martha Raddatz, Night of the Demon, Orson Welles, Out of the Past, Palin, repetition compulsion, Romney, Russ Limbaugh, The Cat People, Touch of Evil, Val Lewton