Fabulism

Celebrity biographies

The Fabulous Orson Welles by Peter Noble

It’s good to read things that are, let’s say, fifty or so years old, because they throw so much unexpected, so much wholly undesired, light on contemporary things. The celebrity biography is as old as mass literacy. And it has always been stuffed with falsehood, skating by on aura and the appeal and glamour of fame, always shot through either with boo-hoo misery or with a tone of unearned, grating jocularity.

Peter Noble’s book about Orson Welles, which appears from Noble’s own authorial commentary to have had some involvement from its subject, is fairly competent in some ways. It does not read badly. But it is so thoroughly filled with misunderstanding of its subject, and active misinformation spread by Welles himself and unchecked by Noble, that it is more interesting as a historical document of what fame was in those long gone days than it is as history.

It was the first biography or Welles and was, of the major releases, clearly the worst. Noble possibly thought that the star was in eclipse and ought to be documented in that state. Welles had made Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, he had been a star of both the New York stage and the continental radio. He had played Sherlock Holmes on the America wireless and he had played Moriarty opposite John Gielgud as Holmes on British radio. He was Harry Lime, conceived by Graham Greene and filmed by Carol Reed; he had played Lime on the wireless, in a series of pulpy programmes of light heart; and he had welcomed listeners into the Black Museum of Scotland Yard. Welles might have seemed on the slide: he had been thrown over by RKO Pictures and had failed to complete more than one project. His cheapo experiment in Macbeth had failed to find critical adoration, and failed to make all that much money.

Some of these might have been worthy things to write about. But that is not all Noble did. Take the subject, even in 1956, when the book appeared, of Welles’s weight. Nowadays, the Welles of 1956 might not – as he was then – be considered all that fat. We are surrounded by people as round as snow-globes these days, but of course, in 1956, people weren’t.

Welles is asked, Noble gives it to believe, by the author, about his dietary habits. He eats regularly and well, buttered rolls at every meal. But that does not account, Noble writes, for the fat steaks Welles enjoyed between meals. Yet a nice, juicy steak needs no justification, Noble claims Welles said – to him, to anyone? We do not know. This kind of pappy nonsense is the stuff of the contemporary biography of a famous face. Who cares? Who could possibly care?

When Jonathan Aitken, later a cabinet minister, later a liar and perjurer and prisoner, later still a reformed man of deeply religious stripe, wrote a star-chasing biography of the hot young actors, models, journalists and so on of the 1960s – and called it, wonderfully, The Young Meteors – he said later he did one thing right. He chose the right title. Everything else in it, he said, was wrong. Or wrongly conceived. Or badly done. He would not write such a thing again.

These are the perils of the celebrity biography: the relentless focus on the trivial, on the things historians will not care two ha’pennies about. Things that doom you, the author, to irrelevance. The first draft of a history no one reads, nor takes the time to refine.

But the world has always needed this kind of thing: ever since the paperback book and mass education. Pap for the public, tales of the people on the vast cinema screen. It’s what people want. It’s what they’ve always wanted. Don’t give them anything solid – it will stick in their throats. It will stick in their throats.