Shorty had moved in between Orson and myself, paint can in hand, tending his master like a medieval apprentice.
“I think Mr. Heller and I may require some privacy,” Welles said gently to his factotum. “Would you mind terribly leaving us alone?”
Shorty set the paint can on the table, gestured “o.k.,” then trundled off.
“Why’s that little guy a deaf mute, all of a sudden?” I asked. “He was talkative as hell, all the way in here.”
Welles twitched his tiny smile. “Yes, Shorty’s loquaciousness-even his bluntness-can be something of a problem. That’s why I’ve instituted my docking procedure.”
“Your what?”
“I dock Shorty ten dollars every time he speaks around any guest or business associate I’m entertaining.” He carefully set the brush across the open paint can. “Care for the nickel tour?”
The pudgy, congenial, vaguely arrogant man showing me around his film set had, at thirty-one, already made history in theater, radio, and film. His dynamic Broadway productions for the Federal Theater Project and his own Mercury Theater had made him famous; his War of the Worlds radio broadcast, duping thousands into thinking Martians had invaded earth, had made him infamous. His Hollywood achievements included directing and cowriting three movies-two of which were already acknowledged as modern classics, if not box-office favorites-as well as condescending to star on occasion in films for other directors. He was widely considered a genuine genius-and, in the executive suites of the movie industry, a genuine pain-in-the-ass, starting with his ill-advised, barely veiled attack on press lord William Randolph Hearst by way of his film Citizen Kane.
How Welles had come to be directing a movie at Columbia could be explained only one way: his wife, Rita Hayworth, was Harry Cohn’s biggest star… and she was starring in this picture.
For perhaps ten minutes, Welles guided me through his “Crazy House,” a fully operable carnival funhouse, with sliding doors, tilting floors, slanting walls, and a seemingly endless hall-of-mirrors maze. The latter was equipped with plate-glass mirrors seven feet by four feet, one after another, dozens and dozens of them, and several more dozen of the distorting variety, turning Welles razor-thin and making a short fat fool of me.
“I discovered at an early age,” he told me, leading me mischievously through the labyrinth, “that almost everything in this world was phony-done with mirrors.”
Images of each other seemingly blocking our every path, I asked him how in hell he could shoot in here, with all this glass.
“They’re mostly two-way mirrors,” he said, “and those that aren’t have tiny peepholes drilled for the camera operators. Not that way, dear! This way… follow me…”
Welles’ funhouse had a distinctly macabre flavor-he led me gleefully through rooms of flimsy canvas walls and spongy plywood floors that were weirdly angled, painted with skewed faux windows, creating a warped Caligari perspective. He grinned like a naughty child as he ushered me through hanging beads and drooping chains and gauzy half-shredded curtains, past black-and-white murals with STAND UP OR DIE lettered in the quaint fashion of turn-of-the-century circus posters, into areas decorated with papier-mache skeletons and cattle skulls and grotesque grinning clown heads.
Something sprang out at me, and I jumped-a blonde mannequin head on a bobbing spring was suddenly staring right at me; she had the bottom of her pretty face rotted away, and a cigarette in her skull teeth, through which Welles’ booming laughter seemed to emanate.
In the next chamber, dismembered female legs dangled from the ceiling-shapely mannequin limbs, in high heels and sometimes seamed stockings-with further ghastly images painted directly over the fake brick walls, including a trio of handle-bar-mustached gents in old-fashioned bathing attire that revealed where sections of their flesh and musculature had been cut away from the bone.
“We’ve worked our way to the front,” Welles said, gesturing me through a passageway, “which in true movie-magic tradition is in the back.”
The entrance was papier-mache rock, with plywood stairs painted gray to match, as if the “Crazy House” had been fashioned within a cave, and all around the doorway, mannequin hands and reaching arms poked out from the walls, a frame of disembodied limbs. On one wall had been painted a cartoon of a woman, cut in half, a screw protruding from her left breast and dripping blood, lying atop a cow that had been flayed to the midsection.
Welles sat on the steps and fished out a cigar from his suitcoat pocket; just above him a decapitated clown’s head grinned from within a baroque bird cage. “You don’t care for one, do you, Nathan?”
He meant a cigar, not a clown’s head.
“No.” I sat next to him. “No, thanks.”
He fired up the Havana and got it going, waved out his match, and I noticed for the first time that the dark eyes in that cherubic puss were bloodshot.
“You know, I just can’t seem to finish this set. It was the first thing I began on this picture, back in late September… before we went to Mexico, for location shooting… I’m responsible for this strike, you know.”
“How are you responsible?”
He gestured to the gruesome images around us. “By doing all this painting myself, with the help of a few friends. I couldn’t turn over something this… intensely personal… to the hacks in the Columbia art department. I would have had the same artisans who bring their masterful touch to the Three Stooges.”
“And that’s what started the strike?”
He sighed dark, richly fragrant smoke. “It did, when members of the Motion Picture Set Painters Union… local 279… came to this soundstage and discovered that their work had been completed by ‘nonunion’ hands.”
“And here I thought you were such a flaming liberal.”
“Oh I am, my dear, with a notable exception-in matters relating to my art, I am slightly to the right of Genghis Khan.”
“You haven’t asked why I wanted to see you.”
The rosebud mouth twitched a tiny smile. “Did I thank you for recommending your friend, Mr. Rubinski, to handle that piece of business last year?”
“No. You’re welcome. I take it Fred handled that matter… discreetly.”
“Oh yes… of course I had to pay the girl twenty thousand to keep it out of court, and out of the papers. I didn’t rape her, you know-that was utter nonsense.”
“None of my business.”
“My darling, if you had seen her-she was such an ugly thing. I would simply never rape an ugly girl. And I never seem to have to rape the beautiful ones.”
His irony was strained, and as relaxed as that baby face was-so unformed looking, almost fetuslike-his forehead was tight and between his brows was a deep crease of tension.
He leaned toward me and touched my arm. “Have I apologized for snubbing you?”
“When did you snub me?”
“At La Rue, a week or two ago… I was dining with my soon-to-be-ex-wife.”
So he had noticed me.
“You see,” he was saying, “we’ve been making some silly attempts at reconciliation, not the least of which is this film, and if I’d introduced you-my friend the famous divorce detective from Chicago-Rita might have misunderstood.”
“That’s all right. No offense taken.”
“And I was in a particularly black mood, further acerbated by alcohol. Who was your lovely companion?”
“My wife.”
“Really! Congratulations! When did this happen?”
“Not long ago. We’re sort of on our honeymoon.”
“I was given to understand you were out here consolidating your business with Mr. Rubinski-did I read something to that effect in the Examiner?”
“You read the Hearst papers?”
“I’m keeping a particularly close eye on them right now.”
“Why is that?”
Welles ignored the question, exhaling Havana smoke. “I hope your marriage is more successful than mine. I’m sure you wonder how even a ‘monstrous boy’ like me… that’s what Houseman likes to call me… could fail to make a go of it with a beautiful, kind, sensitive, intelligent woman like Margarita Carmen Cansino Welles.”