Walters Ms With Images, 4-09-1

Arrested development 1
Arrested development:
How Orson Welles tried to revolutionize television, and why television wouldn’t let him
By Ben Walters
Foreword
In 2003, I began writing a book about Orson Welles. It was part of a series of short
biographies, each of around 40,000 words. Although this was longer than any writing
project I had previously undertaken, it was a small amount of space for such a large life.
As I researched Welles’s career—a remarkably broad and various one—I became better
acquainted with the film, radio, and theater work for which he remains famous. I was also
struck by the peculiarities of his later life. Contrary to the reputation for profligacy and
wasted potential that he acquired, he never stopped vigorously pursuing new and
ambitious creative projects, funding them with the money he made from his widely
mocked appearances on television, in talk shows, commercials, and voice-over work.
But long before television was a source of revenue for Welles, it was an area of
fascination. For more than three decades, from the early 1950s until his death in 1985, he
was creatively engaged with T.V., bringing as much radical insight to that medium’s
particular strengths as he had to those of film, theater, and radio. Yet, despite producing a
handful of intriguing programs, he was never able to gain a foothold in the industry, other
than as a hired performer. Even within Welles scholarship, the story of his artistic passion
for television and the lessons that it can offer to today’s very different home
entertainment landscape is a largely untold one.
Although Welles’s interest in T.V. spanned several decades, I decided to focus on
the production history of one particular project, an unsold half-hour pilot Welles made for
American television in 1956, called The Fountain of Youth. This witty cautionary tale is,
in my opinion and many others’, Welles’s best work for television, a consummate
showcase of his radical and unique ideas for the medium that remains fresh and
stimulating to this day. The circumstances of its production also offer an enlightening
window onto Welles’s career and the T.V. industry in the mid-1950s, a period during
which both were in considerable flux.
I set out to synthesize for the first time the many glancing references to The
Fountain of Youth distributed throughout the numerous biographies of Welles, studies of
his work, and autobiographies and memoirs of those involved in the pilot’s production. I
was able to make use of notes from various screenings of rare Welles work that I have
attended over the years, notably those coordinated by the Munich Filmmuseum, which
holds much of Welles’s unfinished, unreleased, or little-seen work. I consulted the Paley
Center’s television archive to watch other television appearances Welles made around the
time of his work at Desilu, and to deepen my knowledge of the general state of American
television in the mid-1950s. And I benefited from the generosity of many friends and
Welles scholars, whose contributions are gratefully detailed in the acknowledgments
below.
‘Nobody seemed impressed’
A party at an apartment in Burbank, northwest Los Angeles, in the mid-1960s. At one
end of the room stands a small 16mm projector and a stack of film cans. Two dozen
young women are chatting over snacks, soft drinks, and champagne punch. There is some
shop talk, as the host and several of those present are secretaries at Desilu, the television
production company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in 1950. I Love Lucy and
The Untouchables were created there, and new science-fiction and action series called
Star Trek and Mission: Impossible are currently in development. But the company has
also had its share of non-starters, and, as an added attraction for the party, the host has
secured prints of a few unsuccessful Desilu pilots.
The guests watch sitcoms and crime shows, most of them entertaining enough, if
unremarkable. On the screen, the host of the next pilot, which is a decade old, extends his
invitation with a solemn chuckle: “The eternal triangle plus eternal youth equals a wacky
little romance, which we’ll bring you, if we may, in just a few seconds.” The story that
follows is set in New York in 1922, and concerns an actress, a tennis player, and the
scientist who dangles a youth serum under their well-turned noses. The action unfolds on
limited studio sets with back-projected scenery, and still photos regularly take the place
of the moving image. The tone, mostly playful, turns ruminative at times, perhaps
cynical, even macabre: at one point, the lead actress’s face is replaced by anatomical
drawings of veins, muscle, and bone. The whole thing hangs on a knowing, worldly
narration that doesn’t seem to convince its audience. As the half-hour show plays out,
sympathy flags, attention wanders, limbs are rearranged, and feet shuffle.
“Nobody really liked The Fountain of Youth,” remembers Sandra Delaney, one of
the Desilu employees present. “Nobody seemed impressed. It was very slow when you
consider what was on air at that time—Westerns, a lot of action, stuff like that. It just
took forever to get from Point A to Point B. It was just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And he
was the one doing the talking.”1
“He” was Orson Welles, the mercurial artist whose radically independent
sensibility had repeatedly left its stamp on twentieth century culture. “He knew how to
define a medium,” says the director Peter Bogdanovich, a friend and collaborator of
Welles’s for many years. “He did it in radio, he did it in theatre, he did it in film, he did it
1
Interview with the author, February 29, 2008
in television—then nobody could follow it.”2 Steve Bell, the late director of the Museum
of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills (now called the Paley Center), agreed, noting in
the introduction to an evening dedicated to Welles in 2000 that he “electrified the
Broadway theatre in the mid-1930s…transformed radio in the late 1930s…and arguably
[had] more influence on filmmakers and film history than any other filmmaker since
D.W. Griffith.” Furthermore, “he provided a direction for T.V. with the ‘Fountain of
Youth’ pilot and other experiments, here and in Europe, in the late 1950s. Unfortunately,
T.V. wasn’t interested.”
Welles was a promiscuous artist. His half-century of creativity is still defined by
his passionate, enduring marriages to film and theater, but those relationships were far
from exclusive. He stayed with radio for nearly two decades, and dallied regularly with
the written word and musical scoring. His talents as a draughtsman remained largely
private, enjoyed by collaborators and loved ones. He flirted with ballet. In television,
with its potential to tell intimate stories to a mass audience, he believed he had found a
great match. The Desilu pilot constituted a showcase for his ideas about the medium—
ideas as radical as those he had about film or theater, ideas that are filtering onto our
screens half a century later. But, at the time, Welles’s advances were rebuffed: like the
guests at that party, the T.V. industry shied away from The Fountain of Youth, and from
his other overtures. For Welles, television was the one that got away.
The early, not-quite-intersecting careers of Welles and television
Welles was an old hand at new tricks. In 1936, he was the 21-year-old director of a
2
Interview with the author, November 29, 2007
federally funded theater company whose productions made the front pages, and prepared
the ground for the Broadway triumphs of his independent Mercury Theatre Company. On
the air, he achieved stardom as the elusive, crimefighting Shadow, then conceived and
conducted First Person Singular, a series whose immersive sound design remains a high
watermark of radio drama—and whose Halloween, 1938, ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast
inadvertently convinced more than a million listeners that America was under attack from
Mars.
The following July, Welles accepted the most generous contract Hollywood ever
offered to a filmmaking novice. Two years and several false starts later, he vindicated
R.K.O. Studios’ gamble with Citizen Kane. Triumphantly disruptive of studio norms, it
was a critical sensation, a commercial disappointment, and an industry-wide public-
relations headache, thanks to its ribbing of William Randolph Hearst. Welles’s equally
masterful follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, was dumped into theaters in a
truncated, mitigated form while Welles was at large in Brazil, immersed in an ambitious
documentary project called It’s All True, which he never finished. Working on his own
terms and making little effort to communicate with the studio, Welles alarmed his
backers with spiralling costs and a focus on street-level—that is, black—Brazilian
culture. Eventually, R.K.O. cut him loose, and took out advertisements in the Rio papers
to publicize the fact.
Welles’s reputation for genius had led a national radio network, a Hollywood
studio, and two government departments to place their resources at his disposal. This
veteran of twenty-seven would never enjoy such institutional confidence again. But nor
would he be idle: following his return from Brazil, he performed on air, on screen, and on
stage, vigorously pursued progressive liberal causes, and, in 1943, married Rita
Hayworth. He also wrote a column for the New York Post, leavening his political
ruminations with pseudo-astrological advice and nuggets of celebrity news.
On February 27, 1945, his thoughts were on television. He was always fascinated
by mass culture and popular entertainment, but he had not been well-placed to observe
this new medium in its infancy: public T.V. broadcasting began in New York only three
months before he left for California in 1939, and the War Production Board put set
production on hiatus around the time of his return from Brazil. As the nation prepared for
peace, the new technology’s potential to rival radio’s dominance remained highly
questionable, but it was once again an object of active interest. Welles had been looking
into it, and the potential for abuse concerned him.
After advising his readers in the Post “Don’t argue with relatives today” and
wishing the actor Franchot Tone a happy fortieth birthday, he observed that the
Hollywood majors were sniffing around T.V. licenses. He stressed the dangers of the
vertically integrated business model that still made a closed shop of the movie industry,
and had undoubtedly diminished his own filmmaking opportunities. “The Me-Only boys
are now trying to sew up television, and they will, too, unless we stop them,” he warned.
“I say that sort of ownership is what makes independent productions so perilously close
to the impossible.” Three years later, the Supreme Court concurred, outlawing the
studios’ domination of film distribution and exhibition.
By then, T.V. was securing its place in national life—and Welles had abdicated
his, having achieved clear success in none of the spheres he pursued, despite, or because
of, their variety. His political aspirations—he mulled a senatorial run—and his marriage
to Hayworth fizzled, and his attempts to return to directing saw more features lost to
studio control: even The Stranger, which he undertook specifically to prove his ability to
function on institutional terms, was confiscated and recut. The failure of a grand-scale
stage adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days established a substantial tax burden that
would dog him for years. Welles was done with America, at least for a while—or perhaps
America was done with him. In July, 1947, he boarded a boat for Italy.
Television’s position, by contrast, had been slowly improving. T.V. remained
more or less a curiosity, often dismissed as a flash in the pan, until 1948, when “video”
coverage of the World Series and the presidential election campaign constituted its first
serious challenges to radio as America’s premier news source. The popularity of The
Howdy Doody Show and Milton Berle, meanwhile, staked out its potential as the
entertainment medium of choice for baby-boom families. Still serving less than half of
one per cent of American households in 1948, T.V.’s popularity grew exponentially over
Truman’s second term.
Even once its market was proven, however, the medium’s larger form and purpose
—its programming content, commercial structure, and geographical locale—remained up
for grabs. During this period, James L. Baughman notes in his recent history of
television’s formative years, Same Time, Same Station, a swathe of Manhattan by the
East River was earmarked for use as a multi-network “T.V. City.”3 After television’s
focus shifted to California, that area became the site of the U.N. Headquarters. Contrary
to Welles’s fears, the Hollywood studios kept their distance from T.V. well into the
1950s, while many in the nascent industry saw filmed programming as inherently inferior
3
James L. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-
1961 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p.91
to live broadcasting. Rather than movies, the medium’s presumed model and initial
backer was radio. Radio content was dictated less by studio management than by
advertisers, generally a single sponsor with a large degree of control over a given show.
This was a familiar model to Welles. Following the publicity boost of the Martian scare,
his radio drama show had become The Campbell Playhouse, and things had not always
gone smoothly with the soup people. (“The atmosphere was stunning in its perfection,”
ran their backhanded appraisal of one show, “but there was too damn much of it.”) A few
years later, the sponsor of another of Welles’s radio shows was discomfited by his
treatment of black guests as respected peers, and said so.
Such chafing aside, Welles had been lucky to find himself at the epicentre of the
radio boom, equipped with the talent and charm to parlay that good fortune into great
financial and creative opportunity. When it came to T.V., though, he was far from the
action. In Europe, the war’s greater physical and economic toll had forestalled the new
medium’s development. “Television is the one thing this country can’t export to Europe,”
he later told the New Yorker. “In every other way, America is so deeply involved in
Europe that you don’t feel cut off there.”4 The tipping point came roughly five years later
for British television than for its American counterpart, with the broadcast of the
coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in June, 1953. Welles was unimpressed by the signal
reception available at the time, calling it “as bad as a picture of a Chinese play, in which
someone brings on a chair and tells you it’s a mountain.”5 But, that August, he gave a
speech at the Edinburgh Festival that suggested he saw in the new medium the potential
to reach what he called “a third audience” between populism and intellectualism, a

4
Geoffrey T. Hellman, ‘Le Gros Légume,’ The New Yorker, October 24, 1953, p.27-28
5
Charles Higham, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (St. Martin’s
Press, 1985), p353
commercially viable market for innovative, accessible work. “We have to find a way of
making films—and here television may help us—by which, if two or three million people
see them, we have a return for our money,” he suggested.6
Welles’s first steps in television
Two months later, he had an opportunity to indulge his curiosity about T.V. at first hand.
On October 5, 1953, he returned to America for the first time in more than six years, at
the invitation of the theatre director Peter Brook. Asked to head up an edition of C.B.S.’s
flagship magazine program, Omnibus, Brook saw an opportunity to realize his
longstanding aspiration to collaborate with Welles. They agreed to present King Lear.
Having confirmed his involvement, Welles proved characteristically inaccessible while in
Europe. Some of the New York production team doubted he was coming. But as the
company gathered for the first meeting at the East Fifty-Ninth Street rehearsal space,
Welles strode in, right on time. “Let’s eat,” he said, “and I’ll tell you how I think Lear
should be played.”
Shakespeare was familiar territory, but Welles told the New Yorker he “wanted to
find out something about television here. I’ve never seen an American television show.”7
At his suite at the Plaza, further along Fifty-Ninth Street, he consumed a nightly diet of
anthology drama, comedy, talk and variety shows. The third season of I Love Lucy began
the day he arrived in New York, and he saw Fireside Theater, Ford Theater, and Four
Star Playhouse, along with Today and the sitcom The Life of Riley, and got his first
glimpse of Perry Como. Picture quality remained a bugbear, according to one of Welles’s
6
Orson Welles, ‘The Third Audience’, Sight and Sound, January 1954, p.121
7
Hellman, ibid.
biographers, Frank Brady:
“Snow” seemed to fall constantly; characters appeared in triplicate; halos and shadows
accompanied objects; the heads of performers were often cut off at the ears. “Good God, is this
what Lear is going to look like?” he asked one of the television producers visiting him at his hotel.
A new television set was ordered for his suite, but the reception was equally bad. Finally, the hotel
suggested that he move from the Fifth Avenue side of the building to the Central Park side, where,
they claimed, reception would be better.8
He declined, made do, watched what was being done, and suspected he could do better.
Welles enjoyed his experience on the studio floor acting for Brook, and was
impressed by the ease with which sets and cameras could be mobilized, as well as by the
relative cheapness of the process. “Technologically,” he said, “television is a hundred
years ahead of film.”9 He and Brook slashed King Lear down to 74 minutes, which they
persuaded the sponsor, Ford Motors, to air uninterrupted by commercial breaks—a
television first. This pared-down, non-stop approach was of a piece with Welles’s
Broadway productions, and, though Brook’s direction now feels stage-bound, it benefited
from powerful compositions and many neat touches. The conflation of certain locales
allowed for easy transitions; a small spotlight isolated Lear’s face in the darkness after
Cordelia’s death.
[[IMAGES: Lear1, Lear2, Lear3, Lear4]]
8
Frank Brady, Citizen Welles (Scribner’s, 1989), p.476
9
Brady, p.477
Welles in the CBS Omnibus production of King Lear.
The program attracted an impressive 15 million viewers and enthusiastic reviews.
“Like a confidently patient boxer who lets his opponent flail away for eight or nine
rounds and then calmly steps in to finish the fight with one blow, Orson Welles burst into
television (after several years of watchful waiting) and knocked everything for a loop,”
said Cue magazine. “The performance he gave as King Lear established a new high for
the medium in terms of power, heart and sheer artistry.” 10 According to Frank Brady, the
experiment led to Welles’s discussion of further adaptations for Omnibus—perhaps
Steinbeck, Hemingway, or Cervantes. A.B.C. and N.B.C. also expressed interest, but no
agreement was reached and Welles returned to Europe.
Exactly why there was no deal at this stage remains unclear, though Welles’s
outstanding tax problems might have played a part. It’s tempting to wonder whether, had
circumstances been different, N.B.C. might not have offered especially fertile ground.
That year, 1953, Sylvester L. Weaver, Jr., became the network’s president. Under “Pat”
Weaver, who had previously been vice-president in charge of television, N.B.C. made a
point of testing the boundaries of the medium. “We must think,” Weaver once wrote his
staff. “We must analyze. We must gamble. We must experiment.”11 Development money
went into projects with names like “Operation Frontal Lobes,” and “Operation Wisdom.”
Where C.B.S. programmed soap operas in the afternoon, N.B.C. presented the Matinee
Theatre, a series of dramatic offerings that the network claimed was “adding
sophistication to the ordinary person’s life that was lacking before.”12 During this period,
Today and Tonight were created, innovative programming concepts initially greeted with
broad scepticism. Your Show of Shows, which ran successfully from 1950 to 1954,
proved that audiences were open to a mix of “high” and “low” culture, with classical
readings one minute and magic tricks the next—precisely the sort of blend that Welles
10
Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles (Viking, 1985), p.390
11
Thomas Whiteside, ‘The Communicator’, The New Yorker, October 16, 1954, p.46
12
Baughman, p.103.
embraced.
Back in Europe, Welles continued to pursue his interest in television. Having
already established a profile on B.B.C. radio—notably in a Third Man spin-off called The
Lives of Harry Lime—he managed to secure his first B.B.C. T.V. series. Beginning
transmission on April 24, 1955, Orson Welles’ Sketch Book was a series of six 15-minute
programs in which he addressed the camera on a variety of themes, largely
autobiographical. His monologues were intercut with sketches that he doodled on a pad
as he spoke, illustrating such subjects as his teenage stage debut, his love for bullfighting,
and his use of the teleprompter. (“In this particular show, of course, I don’t need a prompt
as I make it up as I go along.”)
[[IMAGES: OWSB1]]
Welles in his first television series, Orson Welles’ Sketchbook, on the BBC.
His renown for stage and screen work notwithstanding, Welles’s preferred mode
of performance was expository rather than dramatic; he was always more comfortable as
a talker than an actor. In television, he recognized an ideal platform. Like radio, but
unlike theater or cinema, it was a personalized medium in which the performer addressed
no more than the number of people with whom one could have a conversation. On T.V.,
Welles noted, “you’re only addressing two or three people. And above all, you’re
addressing the ear.”13 It was therefore a gift to the charismatic raconteur, and his tone in
the Sketch Book was accordingly intimate, flattering, conspiratorial, always on the verge
of a chuckle or a wink. This was first-person T.V., programming that made eye contact
with the viewer. It was rather like having Welles over for dinner.
During the show’s run, Welles celebrated his fortieth birthday, and his third
marriage, to the beautiful 27-year-old Italian aristocrat, Paola Mori. The Sketch Book was
a moderate success, especially given its minimal production costs, and that summer he
presented another British television series, this time for the new commercial network,
I.T.V. Around the World with Orson Welles was a travelogue series, very different in
form to the Sketch Book but also a showcase for Welles’s intuitive grasp of the language
of television. His subjects were just as various as in the former show, but this time shown
at first hand. He visited Chelsea pensioners and almshouse widows in London, proving to
be as gracious a listener as he was engaging a talker. In Paris, Vienna, and the Basque
country, he celebrated local tradition, individuality, and eccentricity; in Spain, he
attended a bullfight, handing over main presenting duties to Kenneth Tynan and his wife,
13
Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (I)’, André Bazin and Charles
Bitsch, June, 1958, trans. Alisa Hart in ed. Mark W. Estrin (ed.), Orson Welles Interviews
(University Press of Mississippi, 1992), p.44
Elaine Dundy, but commentating on the actual fight in supposedly real time himself. In a
program not broadcast at the time, and the source of some controversy itself, he
investigated an elderly French farmer’s recent capital conviction for the murder of a
vacationing British family.
Exploiting the latest technology, Welles used location shooting and synchronized
sound to a degree unusual in television of the time, allowing for on-the-spot interviews
alien to newsreels or broadcast news bulletins. He was among the first to make sure that
the camera caught the back of his head and shoulder to establish his presence in the
scene, and to use handheld, first-person shots to simulate a violent attack. And he never
neglected the audience. Alternating between interview footage and cutaways recorded
later on—another of his innovations—he constructed a careful nexus of eye-contact to
ensure a three-way conversation between himself, his subject, and the viewer. If the
Sketch Book allowed Welles to get a sense of television’s power to seduce, Around the
World was where he learned its stops, felt his way around its own particular forms. But
he would shoot only six of the twenty-six episodes to which he committed.
In the fall of 1955, Welles received an offer that persuaded him to make the U.S.
home again. By November 25, he was in a suite at the Sulgrave Hotel on Park Avenue,
chatting politely into a camera. Edward R. Murrow, cigarette in hand, was ten blocks
downtown at the C.B.S. studios, where his celebrity interview show Person to Person
was based. Welles introduced him to Paola, and humbly insisted on showing him, and the
viewers at home, a photo of their 12-day-old daughter, Beatrice. Murrow touched on the
1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast and heard Welles’s thoughts on social
conformism. “Orson,” Murrow said as the exchange wound up, “there’s something I’ve
been wanting to ask you all evening. Do you think television has lived up to its
potential?”
“Well, I don’t, Ed,” Welles replied. “No, I don’t.” He adopted the tone of a
supportive but disappointed schoolteacher: terrific potential, must try harder. “It’s a
medium maybe as important as the printing press was when it first popped up on the
cultural horizon, and I don’t think people quite realize how important, how dangerously
important it is, and how wonderfully important. I think it’s too much a medium of casual
entertainment and not enough one of serious exchange of ideas. I don’t mean it should be
solemn and boring and all of that, but I do think that there are new forms that haven’t
even been attempted in T.V. and that ought to be. It’s solidifying and crystallizing too
quickly.”14
Less than six months later, Welles made The Fountain of Youth, broaching serious
subjects without solemnity and experimenting boldly with form. “T.V. is above all a way
to satisfy my predilection for telling stories, like the Arabian storytellers in the
marketplace,” he later told Cahiers du Cinéma. “I adore that, myself; I never tire of
hearing stories told, you know, and I make the mistake of believing that everyone has the
same enthusiasm!”15
Orson meets Lucy and Desi
Welles’s experiences at R.K.O.—the studio that backed Citizen Kane, broke up The
Magnificent Ambersons, and balked at It’s All True—established the reputation that
would accompany him for the rest of his life. Rightly or wrongly, he was perceived as
14
Person to Person, C.B.S. Television, November 25, 1955
15
Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (I)’, p.44
quixotic and unaccountable, by turns profligate and inspired. Even those who admired his
accomplishments would think twice about hiring him. His spell in Europe did little to
improve things: an exiled king across the water to a few, Welles was more generally
considered a curiosity, a has-been, or a liability. His profile as a movie actor had
declined, and his own films of the period—The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Othello,
Mr. Arkadin—were not, to put it mildly, sympathetically treated by U.S. studios,
distributors, critics, or audiences. Triumphs like the London stage production Moby Dick
—Rehearsed, meanwhile, barely registered in America.
Yet for all this, Welles retained a unique international profile, a reputation for
intelligence, innovation, and wit, and a yen for populism. When he returned to New York
late in 1955, he seemed determined to make a go of it again in his native land, and was
happy to use shows like Person to Person to promote himself. He had been invited to
mount a production of King Lear at City Center, and hoped it would restore him to
primacy on the American stage; he already had Ben Jonson’s Volpone in mind as a
follow-up. Lear, however, proved a disaster that ended Welles’s U.S. theater career for
good. Too busy directing to learn his own lines, he also broke both ankles at the start of
the run in January, 1956. His attempts to perform from a wheelchair, pushed by his Fool,
were not judged a success.
That February 5, Welles appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, gamely
reciting from the production that had folded in ignominy a week earlier. The show’s other
guests included Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who were plugging their own half-cocked,
over-reaching failure, Forever, Darling, the feature that dashed their movie hopes as
effectively as Lear ended Welles’s theatrical ambitions. Welles had known Ball and
Arnaz, he later said, since “before they met each other.” He and Ball had shared radio
bills in the late 1930s, and, when he arrived at R.K.O. in 1939, she was a contract player
at the studio. One of the many rumors about Welles buzzing around Hollywood at the
time was the suggestion that he was homosexual, prompting the publicity department to
arrange a press-friendly rendezvous. As Welles recalled it, “my official escort, given to
me by the studio one night, was one of the stock girls, who was Lucille Ball. That’s how I
met her first. We went to see the opening of some movie or other—I simply picked her
up at her house and we went to the movie and got photographed and came home and I
said ‘Good night,’ and that was the end of that. That was the end of that romance, but it
was the beginning of a long friendship.”16
Between 1934 and 1942, Ball appeared in more than 40 pictures for R.K.O.,
including Too Many Girls, on which she met Arnaz in June 1940. She was given
occasional supporting parts in features, and leading roles in B pictures, but was not
considered a particular asset. When Welles proposed her for the lead in the comedy
thriller The Smiler with the Knife—one of the projects he considered before settling on
Citizen Kane—he remembered being told “Lucy Ball is washed up, finished, we’re
letting her go, her career is over.”17 They would work together on radio during the war:
like many movie actors, she appeared several times on C.B.S.’s Orson Welles Almanac.
(In a March 1944 skit, she played his secretary, Miss Grimace. “That’ll be all,” she told
him. “That’ll be all who?” he haughtily replied. “That’ll be all, Fatso.”18) Ball’s memories
16
Bill Krohn, ‘My Favourite Mask Is Myself’, Cahiers du Cinéma, February, 1982
(expanded English-language version in Stefan Drössler (ed.), The Unknown Orson
Welles (Munich Filmmuseum, 2004), p.59
17
This Is Orson Welles, Orson Welles & Peter Bogdanovich with Jonathan Rosenbaum,
(Da Capo, 2nd edition, 1998), p33
18
Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans (Penguin, 2007), p.204
of Welles were mixed. “I had a real love-hate relationship with Orson,” she said towards
the end of her life. “His mind was awesome…but he was also a pain in the ass…He was
so wasteful. He left a huge trail of garbage in his wake. He did it with everything. He left
debts behind, wives behind, children behind, everything, as he just sailed through life.”19
Now here they all were, together again for Ed Sullivan. Welles lined up a
residency at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, a characteristic combination of Shakespearean
recitation and magic tricks that went down so well its run was extended from four weeks
to six. Other than that, he was at a loose end, with distinctly limited opportunities in the
fields for which he was famous: he had probably never seemed less appealing to film and
theater producers, and radio was in decline.
Ball and Arnaz, meanwhile, headed the country’s most ambitious and successful
independent television production company, Desilu. Its name—which Thornton Wilder
said “sounds like the past participle of a French verb”—was, of course, derived from its
founders’ forenames, and had previously been bestowed on a ranch and a yacht. The
company was created in 1950, when C.B.S. was considering a television transfer of
Ball’s successful radio sitcom, My Favorite Husband. The network doubted that
audiences would accept a W.A.S.P.-Latino marriage, so the real-life couple established
Desilu Productions to underwrite a vaudeville tour that proved C.B.S. wrong. The pilot
episode of I Love Lucy, starring Ball and Arnaz as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, was filmed
in February 1951; a year later, it was the nation’s top-rated T.V. show.
I Love Lucy was formally and industrially pioneering, too. Arnaz and Ball insisted
on shooting in Los Angeles, where their lives and careers were based—a demand so
unusual in 1951 that C.B.S. almost dropped the program because of it. As Coyne S.
19
Brochu, p.149
Sanders and Tom Gilbert note in their history of the company, Desilu didn’t, as is
sometimes suggested, pioneer the multi-camera system that became the industry standard
for much T.V. production. But Lucy did offer the finest demonstration of the system’s
efficacy, and was the first program to combine it with a live studio audience—another
Desilu innovation, exclusive to the company until the mid-1950s. Almost as novel was its
decision to film the show on 35mm, rejecting the standard practice of live broadcasting,
with later transmission in other time zones made possible through kinescoping, a
mediocre recording format. To assuage some of the network’s concerns about this
unorthodox set-up, Desilu agreed to shoulder the start-up and production costs of I Love
Lucy itself, retaining program rights in exchange. Lucy thus became one of the first shows
to be owned by its creators rather than the network, and proved an enormously profitable
asset once it became clear that, contrary to industry expectations, viewers were happy to
watch repeats of their favorite series.
Despite his inexperience, Arnaz proved an effective and popular corporate
president, and, with Lucy attracting audiences of more than 30 million in its first season,
Desilu soon began launching other shows. The company also poached managerial talent
from C.B.S., including Martin Leeds, who became Arnaz’s executive vice-president in
1953, effectively becoming Desilu’s chief operating officer. By early 1956, with
hundreds of employees and an eight-figure turnover, the company’s standing as a major
industry player was assured. Ratings for “Lucy” were holding up, but it was showing
signs of creative strain, with Desi lobbying C.B.S. to switch to a one-hour, color format
with an emphasis on guest stars. The previous year’s season, during which the Ricardos
relocated from New York to Los Angeles, had certainly established a pattern of celebrity
cameos, and the company was always open to innovative programming proposals.
When Welles crossed paths with Arnaz and Ball again that February, then, it’s
easy to imagine that they discussed collaborating: Orson simply must appear on the Lucy
show! Why, he’d be delighted, naturally. And, do you know, he had one or two ideas of
his own. Had Lucy and Desi heard about his work for British television, by any
chance…? Such exchanges would have been lubricated by the performers’ longstanding
friendship, and the sentimental streak they all brought to bear on business decisions. Ball,
for instance, had recruited the undistinguished Al Hall to direct Forever, Darling
because, in the words of Bernard Weitzman, “she liked him and he was nice to her when
she was a nobody.”20
Weitzman, who left C.B.S. to become Desilu’s head of business and legal affairs
in 1955, remembers the situation with Welles being similar. “The whole thing really
came about because Lucy and Desi, when they were contract players at R.K.O., were
treated very nice by Orson Welles. He had no place to go, really, and they wanted to
show him the appreciation that he showed them when they were kind of down and out.
So Desi said to him, ‘Come out to Desilu, we’ll do something together.’ They still had
great faith and confidence that Orson was a great creator, and a star, and a genius.” Arnaz
was still aware of Welles’s reputation, however, reporting in his autobiography: “I told
him, ‘Orson, I know you are partly responsible for breaking R.K.O. Studios. You went to
Brazil to do a picture, shot a million feet of film and never made the picture, and you
couldn’t have cared less. But I am not R.K.O. This is my ‘Babalu’ money [Arnaz’s
signature song], so don’t you fuck around with it.’” After that, he wrote, “I never had any
20
Interview with author, April 11, 2008. All Weitzman quotations from same source.
trouble with Orson.”21
Following his Las Vegas run, Welles departed for Ball and Arnaz’s Beverly Hills
home. Less than a year earlier, the couple had reluctantly relocated from their beloved
Desilu ranch in Chatsworth, California, to a five-bedroom white Georgian brick house at
1000 North Roxbury Drive. James Stewart, Agnes Moorehead, and José Ferrer lived on
the same block. Jack Benny, their next-door neighbor, was known on occasion to pass
wordlessly through their living room playing his violin. The plum trees were in blossom
when Welles arrived to take up residence in the Arnazes’ guest house, a large studio
space reached via a brick path that ran alongside the long lawn and swimming pool.
“It was only a few months,” Ball later told Jim Brochu, who described their
friendship in the book “Lucy in the Afternoon,” “but it seemed like ten years. He had the
servants hopping. He’d walk in the living room, all in black with his big cigar blowing,
and scare the hell out of the kids. I heard Little Desi crying one afternoon, and I thought,
‘Orson’s home.’ ”22 Certainly, Welles could be less house guest than force of nature;
when he appeared in I Love Lucy, one character mentioned a plan “to get out of town
until Mr. Welles blew over.”
In the episode, called ‘Lucy Meets Orson Welles,’ Orson is lined up to appear at
Ricky’s club, doing what Ricky calls “the same act he did in Las Vegas: some
Shakespeare, and, of course, his magic routine.” Orson needs a supporting performer.
Despite Ricky’s best efforts, Lucy gets wind of this and volunteers, not realising that she
will be a magician’s assistant rather than a Shakespearean heroine. It was, in other words,
a farce plot built around the fault lines in Welles’s own public persona—was he high
21
A Book, Desi Arnaz (William Morrow, 1976), p.307
22
Lucy in the Afternoon: An Intimate Memoir of Lucille Ball (Wm Morrow, 1990), p.150
artist or vaudevillian? Mostly, of course, the episode was a showcase for Ball’s comic
talents. After Lucy fails to conceal her disappointment at the true nature of the gig for
which she has lobbied so hard, Orson tells her she can “take it or leave it.” “I’ll take it,”
she snaps, and you can see Welles break up at her perfect timing. (“I am watching the
world’s greatest actress,” he had said while observing her rehearse from the wings.23) Ball
and Arnaz in turn watched Welles’s delivery of Romeo’s dying soliloquy in rapt silence.
[[IMAGES: Lucy1, Lucy2]]
23
Stefan Kanfer, Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball (Knopf,
2003), p.306
Welles and Ball in ‘Lucy Meets Orson Welles’.
The show’s climax saw Orson levitating “Princess Lu Si” and then leaving her
spinning in air, defiantly reciting Juliet. The illusion involved the use of a couple of
broomsticks. “It was the most painful experience of my life,” Ball later said. “Worse than
childbirth. It felt like the broom was up my ass, and I had to stay on the goddamned thing
for at least five minutes.” Nor was that the only problem with the shooting of the episode.
According to Ball, Welles struggled to fit into the biggest set of tails Desilu’s costume
department had to offer. “They were like big velour drapes that you used for backdrops,”
she said. “It was like putting skin on a sausage. He put me on the broom for the dress
rehearsal, and made some sweeping gestures and rrrrip! The tails split right up the back.
There was no time to get another set…. so [the costumier] cut some black cloth and
pinned it the best she could. If you look at the show, you see how self-conscious he is
about turning his back to the audience. God, that show was a stinker.”24
Welles gets to work
Welles’s initial proposal for his own project was a version of Volpone, the Ben Jonson
play he had hoped would follow his City Center King Lear. It was an inventive concept,
in which the actors would bring the stage equipment and set dressings on and off the set
as they performed. With Arnaz on vacation at Del Mar, where he bred horses, several
Desilu executives looked Welles’s script over. “And everybody said, ‘Oh my God, this is
terrible’,” remembers Bernard Weitzman. “Who would ever do a thing like that? The
networks certainly wouldn’t. It was a Shakespearean type script, which nobody knew
about, nobody understood, and nobody really felt it would go anywhere.”
“Don’t bother me unless it’s really an emergency,” Arnaz had instructed his staff
before departing. “So we called up Desi and said, ‘It’s an emergency!’ ” Weitzman
recalls. The executives went to Del Mar to meet Arnaz. “You can’t do this script,” they
told him. “It’s outrageous. The networks would laugh you out of the business.” Arnaz
looked at it, agreed, and charged Weitzman to work with Welles to develop a more
commercially viable property—perhaps an anthology drama format.

24
Brochu, p.116.
Desilu had some experience with anthology dramas built around film
personalities, having shot (though not developed) The Loretta Young Show, which had
begun in September, 1953, and was still going strong three years later. Another useful
recent model, from outside the company, was Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which had
debuted six months earlier, in October, 1955, to immediate success. Welles was perhaps
the only other working director with a high enough public profile to host his own
anthology series. Although they were always hit and miss, such anthologies were
considered T.V.’s most prestigious format. That year, Gore Vidal, who had had his first
taste of anthology writing, wrote that “the Golden Age for the dramatist is at hand,”25
while Life magazine earlier suggested that “if William Shakespeare were alive today, he
might well be writing for television.” Yet the success of these dramas was judged on
theatrical or filmic terms; few explored a uniquely televisual aesthetic. The genre’s
outstanding example, for instance, “Marty,” was praised as Broadway-worthy in its
original T.V. incarnation, then garlanded with Oscars after being adapted for the cinema.
Arnaz recalled suggesting an alterative approach to Welles: “If we could
accomplish the effect of you, as the host, in front of the television set in the viewer’s
living room, telling them what is happening or about to happen behind you, it would be
much more intimate.”26 The suggestion chimed with Welles’s own ideas. He had little
interest in being a conventional compère, like Hitchcock, who had introduced his own
pilot by noting “I shall not act in these stories, but will only make appearances—
something in the nature of an accomplice before and after the fact.” Welles fully intended
to be present at the scene. As early as 1937, when he began directing radio drama, he
25
‘Writing Plays for Television,’ in Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays, 1952-
1972 (Random House, 1972), p.33
26
Arnaz, p.305
suggested that broadcasting’s “particular amendment is the personalising of Chorus, of
making him a character in the play instead of an outside character looking in.”27 He
applied this notion of the active commentator to his sophisticated trailer for Citizen Kane,
and the start of The Magnificent Ambersons. He also seems to have intended it for the
unfinished Brazilian documentary, It’s All True. Now he planned to give the approach
free reign on the medium to which it was perhaps best suited. “I was going to be the
permanent star,” he later told Cahiers du Cinéma. “Not as a host like Ronnie Reagan,
coming on at the beginning and end of Death Valley Days [in 1965-66], or Hitchcock, but
woven all the way through the show.”28
Welles was full of suggestions for literary properties that might make good pilot
fodder, but most were under license to major studios. Then Bernard Weitzman suggested
an unoptioned short story by John Collier, ‘Youth from Vienna,’ which tickled Welles. It
concerned Dr. Humphrey Baxter, an unworldly endocrinologist specializing in the
“ductless glands” who falls for a Broadway ingénue, Caroline Coates, who falls right
back. Humphrey departs for Vienna to pursue his research, and they plan to be married
on his return, three years hence. But, as Welles knew, things can change while one is
away in Europe. Humphrey returns to find that Caroline has transferred her affections to
a tennis ace, Alan Brodie, whose vanity and narcissism rival her own. Displaying
gracious indifference, the scientist presents to the couple as a wedding gift the fruits of
his research: a phial of liquid that, he says, will grant its drinker two hundred years of
healthy youth. Unfortunately, the dose is indivisible, and neither lover is quite ready to
forfeit the antidote to aging…
27
Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Jonathan Cape, 1995), p.373
28
Krohn, p.61
Thanks to their cunning, simple plots, Collier’s stories would later feature on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Tales of the Unexpected (which
adapted ‘Youth from Vienna’ in 1983). Often lost in translation, however, was Collier’s
detached, sanguine narratorial voice—something that Welles’s storytelling approach was
uniquely well-placed to preserve. For instance, Welles’s script, renamed The Fountain of
Youth, retained more or less verbatim Collier’s description of what happens after
Humphrey leaves for Europe:
Humphrey’s boat sailed; Caroline’s play opened; she was more idolized than ever, and everyone
expected her to fall in love with someone else. But the first year passed, and the second year
passed, and the third year wore on, and Caroline was still faithful. There were two excellent
reasons for this. She was so extremely fond of Humphrey, and she was so extremely fond of
herself…29
Welles did tweak the characters, making Humphrey a generation older than Caroline and
Alan, and the words, inserting, for instance, the observation that “almost all of us wish
we were just a little younger than we are.”
He already had a strong conception of how the finished program would look and
feel. His flirtatious rapport with the audience would be the show’s core, but his narration
would be intermingled with the characters’ dialogue—we might hear his voice when their
lips moved, or vice versa. For the visuals, he proposed a combination of illustrations, still
photography, and back projection. Individual moments could be expressionistically
unpacked to powerful psychological effect through the use of freeze-frames, drawings
and ironic juxtapositions, while transitions across time and space would be made within a
single shot through simple changes in lighting, costume, or the projected backdrop.
Humphrey might be standing at a pier in his hat and coat, for instance; then the lights
would dim, the back-projected quayside would dissolve to a cosy interior, a waiter would
29
John Collier, ‘Youth from Vienna’, in Fancies and Goodnights (Time Life Books,
1965), p.303
appear to take Humphrey’s coat, and when the lights came up he was in a nightclub.
Nimble and witty, the approach was as keenly attuned to the quintessential
qualities of television as Welles’s Fascist-themed “Julius Caesar” had been to theater,
“The War of the Worlds” had been to radio, or “Citizen Kane” had been to film. Most of
the individual elements had been used before, but the beguiling fluidity of Welles’s
unified conception was unprecedented—as Desilu’s staff recognized. “It was a terrific
script, and everybody agreed that we should do that,” says the executive, Bernard
Weitzman.
Shooting The Fountain of Youth
“It was just a blow-away experience,” agrees Dann Cahn.30 Cahn had worked with Welles
a decade earlier as a junior editor on his troubled film of Macbeth. Now, he was Desilu’s
supervising editor, one of the industry’s most experienced hands, and something of an
innovator himself. Cahn was impressed not only by Welles’s ideas, but his thorough
preparation. “He laid out in his mind a lot of the editing ahead of time. It was modified to
some extent later, but he had a very clear picture of the way it was going to go, and he
was right. The novelty of the way that thing is presented—no one else has really
attempted that.”
Desilu was confident enough to fund the script’s production single-handed. “That
was very unusual,” says Weitzman. “Generally speaking, it was too expensive for an
independent company to finance pilots. One of the networks would finance it because it
30
Interview with author, February 1, 2008. All quotations from Cahn from this and a
subsequent interview with author, February 19, 2008.
gives them the right to put the series on the air. With Orson, we did it without even
talking to the networks. We thought we had something so special that we didn’t need
their help, because Orson was the genius of the show. He didn’t want some young kid
from the network to tell him, ‘I don’t like this scene, I don’t like this casting.’ We went
ahead and did it our way.”
It was not an especially expensive proposition. Aiming for a tone of
conversational intimacy, Welles required only a small cast, studio locations, and minimal
set dressing. Personnel costs were low too, with one individual serving as producer,
writer, director, star, production designer, and music supervisor. “He did everything,”
Dann Cahn says. “He didn’t operate the camera, but he had a hand in the lighting, with
the cinematographer, and he had a hand in the editing.” The total budget was calculated
at $49,832—barely half the $95,000 the pilot for I Love Lucy had cost five years earlier.
Even under these circumstances, Welles could not entirely check his
constitutional aversion to institutional accountability. One afternoon, Arnaz’s number
two, Martin Leeds, took him for lunch at Romanoff’s, the Beverly Hills restaurant.
Welles’s weight was a perennial problem—one cast member, perhaps uncharitably,
placed him at 340 pounds—and he was on a crash diet. He polished off his meagre lunch
of three balls of cottage cheese while Leeds’s meat was being carved. It took him only
slightly longer, Leeds recalled, to storm out of the restaurant after being informed that,
for commercial reasons, an hour-long program would be out of the question. Cahn
remembers a similar lunch during production: when Leeds began discussing commercial
issues, Welles stood up and left the room. “Show a top bean-counter to Orson Welles,”
Cahn says, “and he’d turn away from him.”

Welles’s attitude towards executives had always been distinguished by
indifference bordering on disrespect or even hostility; when the R.K.O. top brass visited
the set of Citizen Kane, he famously ceased shooting and fobbed them off with card
tricks. The half-hour pilot’s five-day shoot, which began on May 8, 1956, proved no
exception, even if the suits in question were Welles’s old friends. Ball remembered his
reluctance to communicate, while the actor Rick Jason reported that, “By the third day of
shooting, a somewhat hyper, and very nervous, Desi would pop onto the stage in a spiffy
sport jacket and black-and-white wing-tipped shoes, every two or three hours, smiling as
broadly as he could, and call out, ‘How’s it going, Orson?’ Welles, without looking up
from whatever he was doing, would dismiss him in an offhand way. ‘Fine, Desi, I’ll see
you later.’ ”31
Tall and strikingly good-looking in an angular, delicate, and slightly cruel way,
Jason was a contract player at Fox with some T.V. experience when Welles called his
agent regarding the role of the tennis player, Alan Brodie. The actor could barely believe
his luck. “I would have given anything to work with him,” he recalled in his memoir,
“and afterwards I would have given anything never to work with him again.” When they
met, “he greeted me like a long-lost brother,” Jason recalled. “I couldn’t have been
treated nicer, until we got on the set.”32
In contrast to his attitude to executives, Welles generally treated even the lowliest
actors with consideration and respect; in the mid-1960s, an unsuccessful auditioner wrote
to the London Stage simply to praise Welles’s graciousness at an open casting call. Jason,
31
Rick Jason, Scrapbooks of My Mind: A Hollywood Autobiography (Strange New
Worlds, 2000), also available at
http://www.scrapbooksofmymind.com/orson_welles_and_feet_of_clay.htm
32
Ibid.
however, considered him unnecessarily brusque, with “a maddening [habit] of walking
away from you as you were in conversation with him.” At one point during the shoot,
after suffering several such indignities in one day, Jason put two fingers in his mouth and
sent a loud whistle after Welles’s vanishing back. The director stopped and turned.
“Something the matter?” he asked. “Yes,” Jason indignantly replied. “Well, what is it?
Spit it out.” “When we’re conversing, will you kindly not walk away from me?” “Was I
doing that?” Welles replied absently. “Sorry. What is it you wanted?” Jason stared at
him. “Nothing,” he said, and walked away.
The actor recalled another clash during the filming of the scene in which
Humphrey hands the vial of liquid to Caroline and Alan. Welles shot take after take, until
eventually Jason snapped. “Orson, we’ve been standing here for thirty minutes. You’ve
heard of tired?” “You’re right,” Welles replied, and asked for three cane-backed chairs to
be brought over. “Turn the chairs around,” he commanded before Jason could sit down.
“Now then, people. Rest your hands on the chair backs and let’s do it one more time.”
Eventually, they got the shot. Jason strode off the set. “You son of a bitch,” he spat as he
passed Welles, who looked at him for a moment, threw his head back, and roared with
laughter. “It was,” Jason thought, “the funniest thing he’d heard all day.”33
Welles seemed to get on much better with his other young lead, the pneumatic
blonde Joi Lansing. Married barely a year, with an infant daughter at home, and a twenty-
year track record of compulsive sexual conquests unhindered by either of his previous
marriages, Welles enjoyed Lansing’s company very much. “I could tell you specifics,”
says Cahn, “about a couple of events in the projection room. I leave it to your
imagination.” Certainly, Welles was sufficiently taken to cast Lansing in his next feature,
33
Ibid.
Touch of Evil. Others who had worked with Welles in the past were happily reacquainted:
make-up man Maurice Seiderman had got his break on Citizen Kane, while veteran
vaudevillian Billy House—who played Humphrey Baxter’s friend, Morgan—had
delivered a memorable turn as a store-owner in The Stranger.
Welles’s ambitious plan to use, and interact with, back-projected photographs
came off as hoped. The year before, Cahn had been involved in the first such work for
television—the superimposition of the car bearing I Love Lucy’s leads onto a process shot
of the George Washington Bridge for the episode ‘California Here We Come!’ He was
impressed by Welles’s intuitive grasp of the technique. “He virtually did the whole thing
in front of a process photography screen,” Cahn recalls. “Today it would be green screen.
He would go crazy with what we could do today.”
The reliance on back projection and overlapping dialogue, and execution of scene
transitions through lighting and camera movement, meant that much of the editing was
effectively achieved in camera. The cutting of the film began during shooting, with
Welles laying his ideas out for supervising editor Cahn and his assistant, Bud Molin, and
then offering detailed responses to screenings of their assemblies. Welles’s habit was to
take a cab to the studio, hop out, and stride toward the screening room, calling over his
shoulder: “Somebody pay him. I don’t have any money.” “Because it was Orson Welles,
we were very much in awe of him,” Molin later told the Welles scholar Peter Prescott
Tonguette. “He would come in and he’d sit down and then we’d say to the projectionist,
‘Okay, roll it.’ And he turned around and said, ‘You know, the only time of my life that I
regret wasting is waiting for the film to start.’ So from that day on, the minute the door
opened, we’d say, ‘Okay, roll it!’ and we’d let him fumble his way through the theatre!”34
34
Peter Prescott Tonguette, Orson Welles Remembered: Interviews with his Actors,
“He rarely came to the cutting room and directed the cutting,” Cahn says. “He’d
come bouncing in there in the morning, or the afternoon. He’d see what you did and he
was always open to a suggestion. He was never the type of creative talent that couldn’t
accept anybody else’s ideas.” His aversion to institutional oversight, however, remained
evident. During one editing session, Welles’s least favorite lunch companion, Martin
Leeds, telephoned the cutting room. “What’s going on with Orson?” he asked Cahn.
“When’s he going to finish?” Welles’s reply was weary and imperious: “I can’t take that
call. No Martin Leeds exists!” Cahn opted for a more tactful reply. “He can’t speak to
you now, Martin,” he remembers saying. “And that was the end of that.”
Welles paid particular attention to the music. “We had a piano in the cutting
room,” Cahn recalls, “and he had this interesting guy noodling [away]. Orson would tell
him to do this and that, and Orson literally wrote the score while we were cutting.”
Welles believed in trying new things for the sake of it. “What happens if you turn the
sticks around,” he asked a xylophone player, “and hit the keys with just the sticks, rather
than the hammer?” The player didn’t know, so they tried it, liked it, and used it. Also
featuring clarinet, banjo, and throbbing drums, the honky-tonk score was in keeping with
the 1920s setting yet in jaunty counterpoint to the story’s graver elements.
Welles completed shooting in the five days allotted, and delivered the pilot only
five thousand dollars over budget. “He stuck with it,” Cahn says. “He came in, and he
stuck with it, and he finished it. That was the great thing. So many times, he wouldn’t do
that on projects.” As with many of Welles’s productions, rumors of profligacy persisted,
even in the absence of any supporting evidence. Ball later suggested, contrary to
documentation seen by the Welles researcher Bill Krohn, that Welles took six weeks to
Editors, Cinematographers and Magicians (McFarland, 2007), p.34

shoot the program, and blew $10,000 on a wrap party, suggesting that it could be written
off against tax. “Desi almost punched him on the nose,” Ball claimed, demanding: “
‘How would jou know? Jou hafen’t paid your taxes in twenty-fife years.’ Orson screamed
laughing. Got all red in the face. Desi started laughing. We were all holding ourselves.
Once Desi and Orson started drinking, that was it. Boy, it was a great party.”35
A revelation
The accusation of fiscal irresponsibility is questionable, but there was certainly reason for
good cheer: The Fountain of Youth was a revelation. True to his notion of T.V. as a
storyteller’s medium, Welles’s presence permeated the show. It opened with a card
simply bearing his name, followed by a black screen over which he intoned: “Orson
Welles speaking.” He introduced the main characters through cutaways to still
photographs (“here she is…here he is…”) and showed his mastery over the material in
other ways. When a captioned shot of Vienna appeared, for instance, he walked on-screen
and declared: “Wait a minute, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before going to Vienna,
Humphrey Baxter spent an evening in New York.” As he stood there, the back-projected
image duly gave way to Manhattan skyscrapers.
[[IMAGES: FOY1, FOY2, FOY3]]
35
Brochu, p.151
The show’s title card; Humphrey first sees Caroline; Welles in narrator mode.
The initial feel, then, was of a slide show or narrated photo-roman. The theater
outing that gave Humphrey his first glimpse of the actress Caroline Coates played out in
eight still frames. Later, when Humphrey returns from his gland research in Vienna to
learn of Caroline’s change of heart, the quayside scene is shown in sixteen still shots. On
hearing the terrible news, Welles tells us, “Humphrey closed his eyes,” and the final
photograph becomes a moving image that shows the eyes close. The power of this simple
jolt anticipated by six years the celebrated single moving image of eyes opening that
Chris Marker would insert into his photo-roman, La Jetée.
Even once the characters broke into independent movement, the boundaries
between story and teller remained permeable: at one point, Joi Lansing’s voice came out
of Welles’s mouth; at another, the three main characters’ lips moved in sync to his
narration of their entire conversation. But at moments of dramatic momentum, Welles got
out of the story’s way. After ten minutes dominated by his presence came five in which
he was neither seen nor heard, and the story’s climax was also played as a straight scene
between the two leads.
The cast was certainly up to the task. As Caroline, Lansing was pouty and faux-
ingenuous, with an undercurrent of sharp self-awareness, while Rick Jason was plausibly
tetchy and self-satisfied as Alan. Television stalwart Dan Tobin judged Humphrey
perfectly, balancing bitter patience with winningly impish glints—a sarcastically
obsequious smile here, a knowingly wrinkled nose there. Facial expressions were
repeatedly emphasized; a couple of stills even showed Tobin exaggeratedly mouthing the
letters “B” and “G” when spelling a colleague’s name for Caroline.
[[IMAGES: FOY4, FOY5]]

Humphrey enunciates the letters ‘B’ and ‘G’.
As a film director, Welles was conspicuously uninterested in tight framing—“I
stay away from close-ups when I can,” he told Peter Bogdanovich 36—but they dominate
“The Fountain of Youth.” This was, of course, in tune with the idea of television as a
conversational medium: a close-up on T.V. is pretty close to inserting a life-size head into
the room. A character might then seem more like a peer than an idol. Welles recognized
that the medium had something of the mirror about it, and that the face was thus its ideal
subject; but he also saw the narcissism implicit in this, and made that his subject too.
Once Humphrey has given Caroline and Alan his trick gift, a test tube of eternal youth,
the lovers place it on their mantelpiece, below a mirror. From a position behind it, we see
them look at themselves, and each other, as they offer increasingly hollow declarations of
36
Bogdanovich & Welles, p.22
self-denial. Both stay in shot, but they keep moving, swapping places, turning their backs,
approaching the camera, then backing away in an intricately choreographed manoeuvre.
The effect recalls the climax of “The Lady from Shanghai,” which takes place in a hall of
mirrors—a tar patch of narcissism.

Alan and Caroline ponder their wedding present, to the narrator’s amusement.
The Fountain of Youth is one of Welles’s few plainly comedic undertakings, but
its gaiety masks its status as a disquisition on aging and vanity. The narration refers wryly
to Narcissus and Miami Beach, monkey glands and “the wistful hope of turning the clock
back, or at least slowing it up a bit.” Welles himself had always seemed more interested
in turning it forward, or speeding it up: he started applying old-age make-up as a five-
year-old; was playing middle-aged heavies at Dublin’s Gate Theatre aged 16; and was on
the cover of Time magazine aged 22, costumed as the 88-year-old Captain Shotover from
George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Charles Foster Kane was only the most
familiar example of his playing beyond his years on film. Now in his forties, Welles was
aware of “the simple truth…that I am not getting any younger”—the justification he had
offered the readers of the New York Times earlier that year for why he should play the
crumbling patriarch Lear. Now he laid the sound of a ticking clock over several scenes in
his pilot—an emblem of mortality he would reprise for the opening sequence of Touch of
Evil, which culminates in Joi Lansing’s character being blown to smithereens. The
ticking in The Fountain of Youth is not associated with a bomb, but its implication is no
less fatal.
At the start of the show, Welles proposes a kind of stasis. “How would you like to
stay just as young as you are and not to grow a day older for the next two hundred years?
No, I’m not plugging some new miracle cosmetic, the question is actually faced by the
characters in our story…” Later, Alan expresses his resentment of Caroline in precisely
the language normally used to plug cosmetics: “You’re not gazing at me with love,” he
splutters, “you’re examining me for enlarged pores, and wrinkles, and sagging tissues!”
Welles was not simply satirizing the language of commercials; his ideas were
diametrically opposed to the values that they promoted and exploited. Like Welles, the
advertising industry recognized the aptness of the human face to televisual expression,
but it sought to glamorize it, and insisted that the viewer could buy a piece of what
Humphrey calls “our little immortality.” In counterpoint, The Fountain of Youth uses the
human face as a memento mori.
The program’s most disturbing sequence, toward the end, sees Caroline’s head
silhouetted against images that illustrate her anxieties about aging. As the clock ticks, her
glamorous publicity shot fades into a series of anatomical drawings: one of a normal face
with some blood vessels exposed; then one showing the muscles; then the nerves. Welles
speaks over the sequence, quoting Collier:
She stood and watched her reflection, and, in the stillness and silence of the apartment, she could
feel and almost hear the remorseful erasures of time. Moment after moment, particles of skin wore
away, hair follicles broke, splintered, and decayed, like the roots of dead trees. All those little
tubes and lines of threadlike chains in the inner organs were silted up like doomed rivers. And the
glands, the all-important glands were choking and clogging and falling apart.
The image turns to a skull, and Caroline screams. Revlon and Maybelline would not be
lining up to offer sponsorship.

Caroline’s epiphany.
Within Desilu, the show was greeted with almost unanimous admiration. “Martin
Leeds thought it was crazy,” supervising editor Dann Cahn recalls, but Ball and Arnaz
“were thrilled with it.” So was Bernard Weitzman, the executive who had first suggested
John Collier’s story to Welles. “What did I think of it?” he says. “Unusual. Spectacular.
Way ahead of its time. Everybody was very happy with the results. We thought it would
be very important for Desilu Productions—it would give us another feather in our cap.”
The company’s investment in the program seemed sound. “Its commercial prospects we
thought would be terrific,” Weitzman says.
A strange situation
The networks and advertisers were also impressed. “This is the greatest pilot I have ever
seen,” Hubbell Robinson, head of programming for C.B.S. in New York, told Arnaz. “It’s
the only innovation I’ve seen in television in years. Tell Orson it’s brilliant…But…will
the average viewer understand it?” Arnaz, according to his autobiography, robustly
defended the show’s accessibility (“You understood it, didn’t you, Hubbell?”), and
C.B.S. tentatively assigned a slot. General Foods expressed interest in sponsoring the
show, but, Arnaz recalled, “they began to have trouble with Orson about whether he was
going to do thirty-eight weeks, thirty weeks or what. It’s kind of hard to pin Orson down.
Everybody got scared and the show never went on the air as a series.”37
[[IMAGES: FOY12]]
37
Arnaz, p.306
Welles’s credit for The Fountain of Youth.
“You couldn’t help but admire what he did,” says Bernard Weitzman,
“particularly when you read the credits.” The final card read: “Screenplay, musical
arrangement, the production designed, and directed by: Orson Welles”. “I mean,”
Weitzman asks, “what was left to do?” The problem, Desilu discovered, was that the
image of Welles as single-handed genius now inspired unease rather than excitement.
“The networks and the advertising agencies had heard so much negative stories about
Orson Welles they never believed that he could duplicate this show again, particularly on
a weekly basis,” says Weitzman. “They’d say, ‘Mm, you know, we’d love to have it if it
was somebody other than Orson Welles. He doesn’t know much about television, and we
don’t really trust him. He didn’t pay his taxes, they shipped him out of the country, and
what did he do when he was in Europe? He did a couple of things, but nothing
comparable to Citizen Kane.’ ”
Institutional accountability was a non-negotiable requirement for any potential
backer, and by the time television was established as a major medium, Welles’s credit in
that department was bad. “Orson was one of these people who’s so bright and so much of
a genius that he wanted to do it his way,” says Weitzman. “And if you want to do it your
way, you’ve got to have a series of successes now, as opposed to the past. Once you go
into a series of failures, I don’t care who you are, nobody wants to touch you.” Desilu’s
mistake was not to anticipate this and downplay Welles’s responsibility. Any potential
client’s first question, Weitzman says, would be: “ ‘Who’s your show-runner?’ Orson
Welles was the show-runner because he didn’t have anybody else on the show except
him! We should have said, ‘Look, we’ve got Orson Welles, but we’ve got this guy and
this lady, this one’s a writer, this one’s a director. Here’s our team to support Orson. But
we didn’t do that. It was as much our fault as it was Orson’s.”
Despite the continued efforts of the company, no backer was ever found. Years
later, Welles recalled, “they finally got some kind of nibble. And I said, ‘I’ve just
forgotten… It’s too late now.’ ”38 Like so much of his career, the program stands as both
inspiration and cautionary tale. “It was brilliant because of Orson, but we couldn’t sell it
because of Orson,” Weitzman says. “It was a strange situation.”
The Fountain of Youth was broadcast once, on September 16, 1958, as one of
several abortive pilots aired on N.B.C.’s Colgate Palmolive Theatre. As a result, it won a
Peabody Award for Creative Achievement, and remains the only unsold pilot with that
distinction. “Once you’ve seen it, you’ll know why it was never bought,” read the
preview in the New York World-Telegram and Sun. “It’s too daring, imaginative and
funny to be confused with the stodgy fare they think TV audiences want.”39 The paper’s
review the following morning was even more enthusiastic. It ran under the headline:
“Orson Welles, TV Needs You.”40
Television ossifies; Welles’s ideas about it do not
When Desilu chose to back The Fountain of Youth, there was still a chance that
something radical could find a place in the ecosystem of American television. That soon
changed. In September, 1956, Pat Weaver, the visionary, experimental president of
N.B.C., was forced out. His eventual replacement, Robert E. Kintner, announced his
38
Krohn, p.60
39
Dick Kleiner, “Orson Welles Epic Daring, Imaginative,” New York World-Telegram
and Sun, September 16, 1958
40
Harriet Van Horne, “Orson Welles, TV Needs You, New York World-Telegram and
Sun, September 17, 1958
intention “basically to create what we call a schedule of meat-and-potatoes,” founded in
unchallenging content that would deliver high ratings and satisfy sponsors. Matinee
Theatre—the show that was meant to add sophistication to the ordinary person’s life—
gave way to afternoon soaps, the Sunday afternoon public-interest slot to football. On the
day that The Fountain of Youth was broadcast in 1958, the president of C.B.S. used a
speech to the Pittsburgh Advertising Club to insist that the “many who say that television
is all quizzes and Westerns don’t know what they are reporting.”
In the late 1950s, A.B.C. overtook N.B.C. in the ratings for the first time, with a
schedule of Westerns, crime, and Disneyland. Its success was transitory, but its model of
competitive populism endured, along with its canny tactic of appealing to advertisers on
the basis not of an audience’s size, but its demographics. More and more programming
was calculated to appeal to the sponsors’ preferred sector, the young—or those who
wished they were just a little younger than they were. Writing in Esquire in 1959, Welles
described T.V. as “a branch of the advertising business,” and a penny-pinching one at
that: “If there’s any conspicuous waste in this new industry it’s only in the area of
talent.”41 Formal innovation was discouraged. “Who,” Variety asked in 1960, “has dared
come forward with one new form in television entertainment in recent years?”42 By the
middle of the 1960s, the network model that would hold sway for the rest of the century
—a rigid prime-time schedule of formulaic genre programming—was firmly entrenched,
and The Fountain of Youth was the fossilized record of an evolutionary dead end. Little
wonder the women at that party in Burbank found it so unappealing.
Neither his pilot’s failure nor the industry’s ossification extinguished Welles’s
41
Orson Welles, “Twilight in the Smog,” Esquire, March, 1959
42
George Rosen, “TV’s Illegitimate Theatre,” Variety, June 15, 1960
enthusiasm for T.V. In the months following his work at Desilu, he spent $17,000 of his
own money planning a series about Winston Churchill and making an illustrated essay on
Alexandre Dumas. “I wanted to do a series of half-hour portraits of people,” he later told
Peter Bogdanovich. “Nobody would have any part of it.”43 The following year, after the
studio ejected him from the editing suite on Touch of Evil, he went to Mexico to shoot a
T.V. version of Don Quixote—a project he would continue working and reworking,
without completion, until he died. In 1958, he once again left America for Europe, partly
to shoot a program for A.B.C., some of whose executives had seen The Fountain of
Youth at the Ball and Arnaz home on North Roxbury Drive. The network rejected the
playful, impressionistic portrait of Gina Lollobrigida that Welles created in Italy, alarmed
at his expenditure and unaccountability, and the unorthodox result. In the early 1960s, he
made Spanish travelogues for Italian T.V.; at the end of the decade, he shot broad
character-comedy skits in England unlike anything in his work for cinema. Many of his
last completed films, including The Immortal Story, F for Fake, and Filming ‘Othello,’
originated as television projects. The last two, hailed on their release as indicative of a
bold new direction, drew heavily on the T.V. grammar he had developed two decades
earlier.
By the time Welles died, on October 10, 1985, he felt his earliest fears about the
uses of television had come to pass, with the conservative, commercial imperatives of the
networks eclipsing the medium’s potential to challenge and stimulate. “You don’t assist
television,” he complained, “it’s just on. Sadat is killed and Lux soap is used and people
sit eating food while another soldier bleeds to death in Lebanon and it’s unreal.”44
43
Welles & Bogdanovich, p.290
44
Welles & Bogdanovich, p.451
Yet by then, many younger people most strongly associated Welles himself with
not film, radio, or theatre, but T.V., in the form of talk shows, voice-overs and advertising
—the “tripe” about which he complained to Edward R. Murrow three decades earlier.
The industry found ways to use Welles’s skills as a raconteur, and he was happy to
capitalize on his fame. In this respect, T.V. appearances took the place of movie cameos
in his unorthodox personal economy, a means of funding the heartfelt artistic enterprises
that he never stopped pursuing, even as they grew harder and harder to realize. His own
television projects remained among these, but he never managed to gain a purchase on
the medium in the way that other inventive minds did—minds more willing to come to
terms with institutional requirements, and less burdened by reputation.
[[IMAGES: TOWS]]
Pilot for The Orson Welles Show, with guests Burt Reynolds and the Muppets.
No one can say what contribution Welles might have made to the revolutionized
home entertainment landscape that has taken shape since his death, but the echoes of his
ideas can sometimes be heard there. Filming ‘Othello,’ for instance, is a D.V.D.
commentary track avant la lettre. In 1978, he made a talk show pilot, with guests
including Burt Reynolds and the Muppets, whose self-reflexive tone has certain
similarities to H.B.O.’s The Larry Sanders Show. With the advent of V.H.S., he
anticipated the straight-to-video market and pitched a King Lear composed mainly of
close-ups that would “get back to the business of talking directly with the audience.”
(Neither proposal found backing.) Many music videos offer fluid visuals that take their
cue from the soundtrack, not unlike The Fountain of Youth, while Welles’s conception of
storytelling resonates with the approach of N.P.R.’s This American Life (now also on
Showtime), even down to the risk of the teller obstructing the tale.
Welles would perhaps have stood to gain the most from subscription cable
television, whose more adventurous commissioning strategies have fertilized culturally
ambitious programming of a kind that still remains unsustainable on conventional
network terms. The closest recent analogue to Welles’s Desilu pilot is Arrested
Development, a densely constructed sitcom that also used still photography and ironic
juxtaposition, and combined knowing narration with jaunty music. It received huge
critical acclaim but limited support from its network, Fox. In 2006, it was cancelled
midway through its third season.
[[IMAGES: OWSB2]]
Engaging the camera with one-to-one intimacy in Orson Welles’ Sketch Book.
Such echoes, both formal and institutional, can be heard online, too. There, the
notion of the small screen as a conversational conduit has been realized more literally
than Welles could have anticipated: webcam exchanges play out across the globe in the
same key of one-to-one intimacy pioneered in Orson Welles’ Sketch Book. He would
probably have relished the diminution of corporate power that the file-sharing age has
brought about, and celebrated the ways digital technology has facilitated the creation of
new forms, and the rediscovery of neglected work. He always had faith in the ability of
the audience to make wise choices. Thanks to YouTube, The Fountain of Youth is
currently available to any online viewer within seconds, half a century after Welles set
out to communicate his ideas about home entertainment to a mass audience. It hasn’t
aged a bit.
Bibliography
Arnaz, Desi, A Book (William Morrow, 1976)
Baughman, James L., Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-
1961 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
Bazin, André, Orson Welles: A Critical View (Harper & Rowe, 1978)
Bazin, André, and Charles Bitsch, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (I),’ Cahiers du Cinéma
June, 1958 (trans. Alisa Hart in Estrin, cited in ‘Books’ below)
Ball, Lucille, Love, Lucy (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996)
Berg, Chuck & Tom Erskine, eds, The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles (Checkmark, 2003)
Brady, Frank, Citizen Welles (Scribner’s, 1989)
Brochu, Jim, Lucy in the Afternoon: An Intimate Memoir of Lucille Ball (Wm Morrow,
1990)
Callow, Simon, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Jonathan Cape, 1995)
—Orson Welles: Hello Americans (Penguin, 2007)
Collier, John, ‘Youth from Vienna’ in Fancies and Goodnights (Time Life Books, 1965),
pp299-324
Conrad, Peter, Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life (Faber, 2003)
Cowie, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles (A.S. Barnes, 1973)
Drössler, Stefan (ed.), The Unknown Orson Welles (Munich Filmmuseum, 2004)
Estrin, Mark W., ed., Orson Welles Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 1992)
Godbout, Oscar, ‘TV to Offer Story by Dostoevski,’ The New York Times, May 8, 1956
Goldenson, Leonard H., Beating the Odds (Scribner, 1991)
Hellman, Geoffrey T., ‘Le Gros Légume,’ The New Yorker, October 24, 1953
Heylin, Clinton, Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios
(Chicago Review Press, 2005)
Higham, Charles, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (St. Martin’s
Press, 1985)
—Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball (St. Martin’s Press, 1986)
James, Caryn, ‘Welles’s Chance to Make Television Do His Bidding,’ The New York
Times, March 26, 2000
Jason, Rick, Scrapbooks of My Mind: A Hollywood Autobiography (Strange New Worlds,

2000), also available at
http://www.scrapbooksofmymind.com/orson_welles_and_feet_of_clay.htm
Kanfer, Stefan, Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball (Knopf,
2003)
Kleiner, Dick, ‘Orson Welles Epic Daring, Imaginative,’ New York World-Telegram and
Krohn, Bill, ‘My Favourite Mask Is Myself,’ Cahiers du Cinéma, February, 1982
(expanded English-language version in Drössler, cited in ‘Books’ above)
Leaming, Barbara, Orson Welles (Viking, 1985)
McBride, Joseph, Orson Welles (Da Capo Press, 1996, 2nd edn.)
—Whatever Happened to Orson Welles? (University Press of Kentucky, 2006)
Naremore, James, The Magic World of Orson Welles (Oxford University Press, 1989, 2nd
edn.)
Rosen, George, ‘Television’s West Side Story,’ Variety, November 13, 1957
—‘TV’s Illegitimate Theatre,’ Variety, June 15, 1960
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 2007)

—This Is Orson Welles (Da Capo, 1998, 2nd edn., with Orson Welles & Peter
Bogdanovich)
Sanders, Coyne Steven & Tom Gilbert, Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz
(HarperCollins, 1993)
Seldes, Gilbert, ‘A Clinical Analysis of TV,’ The New York Times Magazine, November
25, 1954
Sheehan, Harry, ‘TV as Snowglobe,’ Film Comment, January, 1992
Sterling, Christopher H. & John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American
Broadcasting (Wadsworth, 1990, 2nd edn.)
Thomas, François & Jean-Pierre Berthomé, Orson Welles at Work (Phaidon, 2008)
Thomson, David, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (Little, Brown, 1996)
Tonguette, Peter Prescott, Orson Welles Remembered: Interviews with his Actors,
Editors, Cinematographers and Magicians (McFarland, 2007)
Van Horne, Harriet, ‘Orson Welles, TV Needs You,’ New York World-Telegram and
Vidal, Gore, ‘Writing Plays for Television,’ in Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected
Essays, 1952-1972 (Random House, 1972)
Walters, Ben, Orson Welles (Haus, 2005)
Welles, Orson, ‘Orson Welles’ Almanac,’ The New York Post, February 27, 1945
—‘Tackling King Lear,’ The New York Times, January 8, 1956
—‘The Third Audience,’ Sight & Sound, January, 1954
—‘Twilight in the Smog,’ Esquire, March, 1959
Welles, Orson & Peter Bogdanovich, and Jonathan Rosenbaum

This Is Orson Welles (Da Capo, 1998, 2nd edn.)
Whiteside, Thomas, ‘The Communicator,’ The New Yorker, October 16 & October 23,
1954
TV material
Around the World with Orson Welles (five episodes)

Dir. Orson Welles, 1955, Associated Rediffusion / I.T.V.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (pilot episode)

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1955, Shamley Productions / Revue Studios
A Dream Called Public Television

Dir. Blaine Baggett, 1981, P.B.S.
The Fountain of Youth

Dir. Orson Welles, 1956, Orson Welles Enterprises / Desilu Entertainment
I Love Lucy (‘Lucy Meets Orson Welles’)

Dir. James V. Kern, 1956, Desilu Entertainment
I’ve Got a Secret

Welles guest appearance, October 17, 1956, C.B.S.
King Lear
Dir. Peter Brook, 1953, C.B.S. “Omnibus”
Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie

Dir. Lucie Arnaz, 1993, Arluck Entertainment
Out of Darkness
Dir. Albert Wasserman, 1956, C.B.S. Continental Classroom
Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (six episodes)

Dir. Orson Welles, 1955, B.B.C. Television
Person to Person
November 25, 1955, C.B.S.
The Steve Allen Show

May 5, 1957, N.B.C.
Working with Orson Welles

2000, Museum of Television and Radio Seminar Series
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Welles remains at the center of a lively research community, and I was lucky to be able to
discuss my ideas with such experts as Catherine Benamou, Simon Callow, Bill Krohn,
Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Peter Prescott Tonguette, though our conversations are not
quoted above. Peter Bogdanovich, for many years a friend and collaborator of Welles’s
as well as a director in his own right, was also generous and helpful. Bill Krohn has
written about financial documentation related to The Fountain of Youth that he was able
to see, off the record, some years ago.
Although the production took place more than fifty years ago, I was able to speak
to people directly involved in it. Desilu’s supervising editor, Dann Cahn, participated in
an oral history project organised by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which
was able to pass his contact details on to me. Through publicly available listings
information, I located Bernard Weitzman, a senior Desilu executive at the time The
Fountain of Youth was made, and Sandra Delaney, a Desilu employee with memories of
the production’s equivocal status within the company. All three were patient and
generous, and provided invaluable insiders’ perspectives on the story.
This article originated as the thesis for my Master of Arts in Journalism, and was
submitted in 2008 to the Journalism School, Columbia University. I greatly benefited
from the perceptive advice of my course leaders, Alisa Solomon and David Hajdu, and
thesis advisors, Melissa Harris, editor of Aperture, and Mark Harris, who writes for
Entertainment Weekly and recently published a book about American cinema of the late
1960s, Pictures at a Revolution. They were both essential to the overall structure and
style of the thesis. At the redrafting stage, I also benefited from the suggestions of writer
and journalist friends, including Emma Brockes, Chris Hogg, Michael Shaw, J.M. Tyree,
and Jessica Winter, and Fabio Periera, whose insight, patience and support were of
immeasurable help throughout the year.

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Arrested development 1

mocked appearances on television, in talk shows, commercials, and voice-over work.

entertainment landscape is a largely untold one.

Although Welles’s interest in T.V. spanned several decades, I decided to focus on

which both were in considerable flux.

Fountain of Youth distributed throughout the numerous biographies of Welles, studies of

Welles scholars, whose contributions are gratefully detailed in the acknowledgments

‘Nobody seemed impressed’

A party at an apartment in Burbank, northwest Los Angeles, in the mid-1960s. At one

secured prints of a few unsuccessful Desilu pilots.

was the one doing the talking.”1

the introduction to an evening dedicated to Welles in 2000 that he “electrified the

Broadway theatre in the mid-1930s…transformed radio in the late 1930s…and arguably

T.V. wasn’t interested.”

Welles was a promiscuous artist. His half-century of creativity is still defined by

The early, not-quite-intersecting careers of Welles and television

was a critical sensation, a commercial disappointment, and an industry-wide public-

masterful follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, was dumped into theaters in a

backers with spiralling costs and a focus on street-level—that is, black—Brazilian

to publicize the fact.

ruminations with pseudo-astrological advice and nuggets of celebrity news.

into it, and the potential for abuse concerned him.

studios’ domination of film distribution and exhibition.

Television’s position, by contrast, had been slowly improving. T.V. remained

Truman’s second term.

—its programming content, commercial structure, and geographical locale—remained up

treatment of black guests as respected peers, and said so.

to reach what he called “a third audience” between populism and intellectualism, a

see them, we have a return for our money,” he suggested.6

Welles’s first steps in television

flagship magazine program, Omnibus, Brook saw an opportunity to realize his

Having confirmed his involvement, Welles proved characteristically inaccessible while in

biographers, Frank Brady:

relative cheapness of the process. “Technologically,” he said, “television is a hundred

persuaded the sponsor, Ford Motors, to air uninterrupted by commercial breaks—a

[[IMAGES: Lear1, Lear2, Lear3, Lear4]]

Welles in the CBS Omnibus production of King Lear.

The program attracted an impressive 15 million viewers and enthusiastic reviews.

experiment led to Welles’s discussion of further adaptations for Omnibus—perhaps

agreement was reached and Welles returned to Europe.

Back in Europe, Welles continued to pursue his interest in television. Having

programs in which he addressed the camera on a variety of themes, largely

country, he celebrated local tradition, individuality, and eccentricity; in Spain, he

vacationing British family.

later on—another of his innovations—he constructed a careful nexus of eye-contact to

he would shoot only six of the twenty-six episodes to which he committed.

Orson meets Lucy and Desi

considered a curiosity, a has-been, or a liability. His profile as a movie actor had

Mr. Arkadin—were not, to put it mildly, sympathetically treated by U.S. studios,

—Rehearsed, meanwhile, barely registered in America.

were not judged a success.

That February 5, Welles appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, gamely

was the beginning of a long friendship.”16

residency at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, a characteristic combination of Shakespearean

theater producers, and radio was in decline.

independent television production company, Desilu. Its name—which Thornton Wilder

audiences would accept a W.A.S.P.-Latino marriage, so the real-life couple established

watch repeats of their favorite series.

Despite his inexperience, Arnaz proved an effective and popular corporate

hundreds of employees and an eight-figure turnover, the company’s standing as a major

she was a nobody.”20

trouble with Orson.”21

Desilu ranch in Chatsworth, California, to a five-bedroom white Georgian brick house at