It's just after Frank Capra who directed "It's A Wonderful Life" talks about Hobart Bosworth losing his upper jaw to a pill of dry ice he kept in his mouth to produce convincing breath for a movie set in the South Pole, that conversation turns to the subject of Harry Cohn: "At least that era is over," Dick Cavett suggests, as we now know completely mistakenly. But Capra, like Welles, was a fan: "If he could bully you, he didn't want you around, if you could stand up to him, he wanted you."
It's also possible Capra got on Cohn's good side just by being immensely successful, and Cohn got on Capra's good side by letting him know it. Also interviewed is Mel Brooks, who describes his own introduction to Cohn beautifully, watching him wheeled around on his back from messenger to messenger "like a piece of field artillery." Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich are there too, it's quite a line-up, although I've never seen Dick Cavett so watery and ineffectual, but Mel Brooks has some fun with that.
Cohn seems to have been as keen to be hated as Orson Welles was to be loved, I'm having a ball playing both without the aid of a cigar, and I cannot overstate how easy everyone is making it for me. Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth Musical returned to the Cockpit tonight. I'm a huge fan of this show. Come and join me. Tickets here!
"I was eternally grateful to Harry Cohn for what he did for me, because I had a musical, Around The World In Eighty Days, and I had to open in Boston, I had a lot of costumes waiting in the railway station, which couldn't go from the railway station to the theatre about eight blocks away unless someone paid Brookes Costume Company forty-seven thousand dollars..."
Hm. Transcribing even this almost definitely exaggerated anecdote from Orson Welles, it strikes me how meandering and ultimately inconsequential the story behind the making of The Lady From Shanghai is, especially given it was Welles' one onscreen collaboration with both his wife Rita Hayworth, and her longtime harasser, producer Harry Cohn.
But that's fine, I guess. It's called Show Business, not Show Interesting. Let's finish...
"I found myself in the box office trying to think of who could send me this money, and I thought: Harry Cohn. I hardly knew him. And I called him up on the long distance phone. I said 'Harry Cohn, this is Orson Welles. I've just read a book –' and I turned a paperback around which the girl had in front of her who was selling tickets and I said 'It's called...' something or other, it wasn't called Lady From Shanghai then – I said: 'Buy it, and I will make it for you if you send me forty-seven thousand dollars in two hours.' And he did."
So I guess Around The World In Eighty Days did happen. Actually this is the internet, isn't it, I can check... Okay that's interesting, there's a contemporary recording on youtube (brought to you by "splendind, splendid Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer even in this time of grain restriction") that sounds like Americans doing The Goon Show, which I don't think I like. The video description suggests the show inspired the pretentious flop in Fred Astaire's musical The Band Wagon. Astaire worked a lot with Hayworth...
Anyway, ultimately Welles blamed composer Cole Porter for the failure of Around The World In Eighty Days, and film historians blamed Cohn for the failure of the The Lady From Shanghai, as they blame nearly every one of Welles' producers for the messy, unfinished nature of nearly every one of Welles' films. I don't know who they blame for the messy, unfinished nature of Welles' marriage to Hayworth or his political career, but don't get me wrong, I love Welles probably as much as he'd want me to: I love Citizen Kane unreservedly, I love The Trial unreservedly, and I love F for Fake unreservedly, and that's it, but that's more than enough. Joe Dante below also blames Cohn, and he'll know more than I do. He also mentions in his retelling the surprising involvement of William "The Tingler" Castle. But be warned: Rita Hayworth gets slapped in the face in the trailer's closing seconds. And be reminded: I'm playing both Welles and Cohn in the musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit in a few weeks. Tickets HERE!
That apparently was the instruction given to Rita Hayworth when Bob Landry took the above photograph for LIFE magazine in 1941. This photograph of Hayworth holding her breath would go on to sell over five million copies by the end of World War Two. It was this photograph Orson Welles saw while filming in Brazil which led him to famously declare the actress "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" Okay no, that's how he described RKO. What he actually said upon seeing Hayworth's picture was: "When I come back, that's what I'm going to do!" Which isn't far off. And reader, he did.
I'll be playing Rita Hayworth's second husband in Almog Pail's new musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre in a month's time. It's a wonderful script – the whole cheating-on-the-wife-you're-sawing-in-half side of Welles is not one we often see – and I'm really looking forward to starting rehearsals next week. I'll also be playing Hayworth's boss, Harry Cohn, the monstrous, Weinstein-ian head of Columbia Pictures. And at least four other Americans, so I'm also really nervous. But I love being part of a labour of love, and Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a musical. Get yer tickets HERE!
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