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.