Orson Welles Betrayed to FBI by Mystery Woman

So concerned were agents by Welles' outspokenness on civil rights for blacks, denouncement of red-baiting and opposition to fascism that they had the woman, whose identity remains a mystery, report on his private telephone conversations and his writings, FBI files show.

She told agents of the director's finances (he was broke) and of his sex life (he was allegedly cheating on his wife, movie star Rita Hayworth, with starlets and "cabaret dancers"). She even informed the FBI of his travels.

Welles was on a select and secret list of agitators who could be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency" and confined, just as the government had imprisoned Japanese-Americans at the outbreak of World War II.

New information

The revelations are among newly released documents from Welles' FBI file that span 13 years, from 1941 to 1954. Much of the file was first opened up to film historians years ago at the bureau's headquarters in Washington.

The new documents, provided to APBnews.com following a Freedom of Information Act request, are from the FBI's New York field office. Included are duplicates of some pages in the main file, but with fewer redactions. Also included are some previously undisclosed documents regarding Welles' political activism.

Some of the allegations were accurate; some were not.

'He would have been surprised'

The files reveal for the first time that G-men not only shadowed the artist but also mined information from at least one source close to him, a female associate who apparently accompanied Welles to the April 1945 United Nations World Security Conference in San Francisco.

University of Michigan film scholar Catherine Benamou said that if Welles had known there was a snitch in his midst, "he would have been surprised and disappointed."

Welles worked with or employed numerous artists who were radicals, leftists, communists or "reformed Reds" during his stage, screen and radio career. Those artists generally would not have been inclined to become informants, said film critic and Welles authority Jonathan Rosenbaum.

"Those are the kind of people who would want to go to work for him," said Rosenbaum, who edited the book This Is Orson Welles. "I think he was perfectly aware of how radical they were. He just didn't happen to share their politics in the same way."

If one of his entourage was indeed a snitch, it was a betrayal that the trusting Welles never discovered.

Supported creation of U.N.

The director of such film classics as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil wasn't cagey about his politics, which were undeniably left-leaning. He lent his name to a litany of liberal organizations and formed at a few of his own.

Among the causes Welles used his fame to support was the push to create the United Nations, which was formed by 51 countries in 1945 only months after the San Francisco meeting.

As Welles made plans to travel up and down the coast between Hollywood and San Francisco for the duration of the U.N. meeting, the woman told FBI officials that she was at their disposal if they desired to keep an eye on him.

She first gave them the schedule of events in several cities for the "Free World" group Welles helped lead. The group was determined to avoid political rifts between the countries participating in the U.N. conference. She even tipped off agents as to which trains he would take.

'Spends money recklessly'

The informant also told agents that Welles "spends money recklessly," according to one FBI memo, and "at the present time has no money at all in his own account." Mercury Productions, which Welles led, only had $3,800 in the bank, the tipster said.

Hayworth was called "smart" by the female informant because the actress kept her earnings in a separate account and away from her husband, who was said to make only $770 per week from his contract with International Pictures plus a pittance from his newspaper column, "Orson Welles' Almanac."

Several monthly expenses were listed that drained Welles' finances, including $800 for rent and nearly $2,000 paid to his researchers and various secretaries. Further, during the wartime rationing he bought "gasoline on the black market at 50 cents per gallon," the informant reportedly said.

Welles planned to attend the U.N. conference on the weekends, where he set up radio broadcasts featuring many of the participants. When not there, each morning at 8:45 and again at 6 in the evening Welles was to place a call to a colleague who was to be briefed on events at the meeting, said the informant. Remarks he made on the phone she repeated to her FBI handlers, and the Los Angeles special agent-in-charge told FBI Director Herbert Hoover he wanted to tap the phones.

If G-men did listen in, the evidence of it was purged from the files.

'He was not a communist'

Welles also was to edit a special conference newsletter read by delegates and crank out his regular newspaper column from San Francisco. He collaborated on each with ghostwriters, including one whose name is blacked out, but whom bureau officials described as being a suspected communist Welles had recently hired.

The informant offered to show G-men the ghostwriter's notes for Welles' "Almanac" column. The agents got little else from her, though. Welles, it seems, was not a follower of Lenin or Marx after all.

"He was not a communist," said Rosenbaum, a writer for the Chicago Reader. He said Welles was also accused of being a "premature" anti-fascist, but that was true.

"Right-wing people wanted to persecute everybody on the left," he said, and that usually meant a file at Hoover's FBI.

"He respected communists, and he agreed with them when it came to civil rights and fascism," said Benamou, author of a forthcoming book on the entertainer.

Welles was vehemently in favor of civil rights and violently opposed to fascism. He also leaned toward socialism and anarchist politics, she said.

Secret mission to South America?

Benamou has spent years restoring tens of thousands of feet of film stock Welles shot in the '40s on location in Brazil, which is the subject of her book. One of the stranger things in Welles' file is a letter signed by a "J. Edgar Hooverite, Jr." which deals with that trip.

The letter was addressed to the real FBI director and claimed that "there is something screwy about the whole setup," urging the FBI director to stop Welles from going south of the border.

A published item by gossip-mongering Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper soon followed, claiming that the trip was a secret mission commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Interviewed by the FBI, Hopper revealed that Hayworth was her source, but the gossip columnist had no idea what the "mission" was really all about.

Benamou said Welles was merely a goodwill ambassador sent to Latin America to beat back propaganda by Axis operatives during World War II. As for Welles' political activism, she said he might have felt protected by his friendship with FDR, for whom he campaigned.

"[Welles] liked to be liked by a lot of people," Benamou said. "He probably felt that some people who liked him were powerful enough to protect him."

Citizen Kane a communist flick?

His relationship with FDR might have made Welles particularly bold in his social and ideological pronouncements and artistic endeavors, Benamou said. Welles knew anti-communists such as Hoover and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst could not easily blacklist a friend of the president. Hearst, of course, was the thinly veiled subject of Citizen Kane, and he used his newspapers and news wire services to try to crush the film.

Actress Dorothy Comingore, who played opposite Welles in the motion picture, was also derided in the FBI file as a suspected communist, and the film itself was misinterpreted by agents as a product of the director's own communist beliefs.

Regardless of whatever Welles thought he could get away with in the Roosevelt years, he was always a risk-taker, Benamou said.

"But he didn't always do what was best for him, for his best interests, and he may have suspected the FBI was trailing him," even if it was at a discreet distance.

Accusations start

On April 12, 1945, his ally in the White House died and a nation mourned. The FBI's close surveillance of Welles began that week as he prepared to journey to San Francisco to encourage part of FDR's legacy, the UN.

The following year, an official of the American Federation of Labor called Welles a "red" in a union publication, along with actress Myrna Loy and other Hollywood notables, according to a United Press wire story clipped and tucked into the New York file. The AFL official retracted the accusation against Loy, the story reported, but faced a $1 million lawsuit by Welles for making the charge.

The accusations did not stick, and the FBI grudgingly admitted as much in 1949.

By then, Welles was living in Europe and making a film in Italy. An informant joked that the director was so broke that the movies were produced "in order to finance a trip home to the United States."

McCarthy-era mischief

In a memo that year to the special agent-in-charge in Los Angeles, Hoover demanded that his subordinates either prove Welles was a communist or remove his name from the security index file containing thousands deemed a "threat to the internal security."

And with that, the FBI removed Welles' name from the subversives index. It didn't end there, however.

A June 1950 pamphlet, Red Channels, which was authored by three former FBI agents and a television producer, accused Welles and 150 other Hollywood writers and directors of being communists.

One of the newly released documents excerpts an unnamed but high-profile informant who apparently was willing to name names in 1951, just as Sen. Joseph McCarthy was turning up the heat on celebrities in Washington. Welles was mentioned by the FBI snitch, who said he had "liberal views, but is anti-communist."

Stalinist or Imperialist?

A January 1954 memo, the last page in the New York file, recounts testimony to the FBI by another informant who claimed Welles was an "active and fanatical Stalinist" in the '40s. The memo adds that Welles "refused to allow non-Stalinists to work as supporting actors in his radio and motion picture casts during that period."

But Welles had allegedly changed his tune since the war years and become "a loyal subject of American Imperialism," the FBI report stated.

Benamou characterized the decades-old accusations as "extreme." Welles was never a Stalinist or an Imperialist, she said.

"There were these kind of opportunistic and jealous people around him, and they were capable of saying these outrageous things when questioned by people for news stories and even by the FBI," Benamou said. "One has to read between the lines and weigh what people were saying."

By James Gordon Meek, an APBnews.com editor.

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