Homage to awesome Welles on his centenary

One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla, to lunch. After eating enough food for ‘a dozen hungry people’ and sinking ‘one glass of wine after another’, all the while enchanting his guest with gossip and conjuring tricks, Welles downed his coffee and said it was time to go. Ribolla smiled and waited for him to get the bill. And waited. Eventually she asked for it herself. When it arrived Welles passed it over, saying, ‘Leave a large tip for these nice waiters.’ ‘But Mr Welles, I can’t afford meals like this.’ Welles turned sulphurous: ‘How dare you go out with me with not enough money?’, he said as he stormed out. ‘It’s OK lady,’ a waiter comforted the weeping Ribolla. The owner ‘knows the signore well’. Men like him are ‘too involved with creating to be bothered by such minor matters as paying’.

And there you have him, the Hollywood big boys would say. If you wanted an aesthetic visionary, bursting with last-minute, off-the-wall ideas, Welles was your go-to guy. If, on the other hand, you wanted a picture brought in on time and under budget — steer well clear. Who could demur? Welles had an IQ of 185 (well on to genius terrain), but he never understood that the cinema isn’t first and foremost an art. It’s a machine for making money. Anyone unhappy being a cog won’t fit in.

Certainly Welles didn’t. In 1939, when he arrived in Hollywood as the brains behind a succession of Broadway smashes and radio sensations (each evoked wondrously in Patrick McGilligan’s granularly detailed Young Orson), he so awed the studio bosses that they granted him what they had never granted any director: carte blanche.