Biography: It is perhaps irreverent to wonder if Simon Callow threw his hat at this, part two of his monumental biography of Orson Welles, which would account for the wretched puns with which he defaced his chapter headings - 'Wellesafloppin' and 'The Welles of Onlyness' .
Welles made Citizen Kane in 1941 when he was 26, and his career was as doomed as it was brilliant. He began by antagonising William Randolph Hearst, the press baron, but already the RKO front office - a conspiracy of book-keepers - loathed him. Callow begins this second volume with Kane (and ends it with Macbeth - a farrago of Scotch mists and Harry Lauder accents).
Welles's next film after Kane was The Magificent Ambersons, a beautiful piece of Americana, with Joseph Cotten and - as the detestable young anti-hero - Tim Holt. The knives were out. Welles had hardly departed for South America to make It's All True - part drama, part documentary - before Ambersons was butchered to two-thirds its length and a new up-beat ending tacked on.
Nonetheless and with the aid of a succession of dancers and available show-girls, he contrived to enjoy himself in Rio, and found time to acquire a "steady" mistress, the actress Dolores del Rio, a mature lady, who wanted nothing except commitment. She should have known better, and in due course, she was dumped, but was compensated with a featured role in Journey into Fear. Welles was credited as producer, but after the first few minutes it became clear that his touch - free of gimmicks - was in every frame.
He took up with Rita Hayworth, much to the fury of the foul-mouthed Harry Cohn, the czar of Columbia Pictures, to which she was under contract. Welles took her intellect seriously, and, in the words of Jane Eyre: Reader, she married him. Famously, Rita had declared "Every man who made love to me went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me". Welles was no exception. It was not long before he became bored with waking up with Rita Hayworth.
On his arrival in Hollywood he described the place as "the biggest train set a boy ever had". It became only too true: it was his personal toy. He devised a magic show in which Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich, whom he sawed in half, became - although not in the literal sense - components. He mounted a production of Around the World in 80 days which he somehow pulled together in the grandiose manner of a Victorian actor-manager. He played the detective, Dick Fix. One suspects that he would have happily played all the other parts as well, including the occasional Indian elephant and Bengal Tiger.
He stepped effortlessly into another role: that of super-patriot, and made speeches which, while undoubtedly sincere, succeeded in decoying the stalwarts of HUAC away from Welles's radical New York past and the heyday of the Mercury Theatre. Professionally, he was at the top of the tree; perhaps, or perhaps not, he failed to notice that he was going nowhere.
The inimitable Sam Goldwyn is reputed to have said of a certain writer who ran foul of him: "Never let him in the studio again", wisely adding, "Unless we need him". Harry Cohn might have entered the same caveat with regard to Welles, who had greedily taken Rita Hayworth for himself, but he happily gave the pair what passed for his blessing for the thriller, The Lady from Shanghai.
There are those in whose eyes the boy wonder could do no wrong, but to me it is a film done on crude Columbia film stock without light or shade. It looks awful and has little to offer apart from the dazzling Hall of Mirrors sequence and Rita Hayworth, whose signature red hair - to Cohn's fury - had been dyed blonde. Welles not only directed but played the lead - an Irish sailor named Michael O'Hara. His struggle with a Kiltartan accent (Welles, 1; O'Hara, Nil) lead one to wish that he had stayed on the far side of the camera.
In fairness, his Macbeth caught the essence of the play, and his gamble on an untried actress, Jeanette Nolan, as Lady Macbeth was a success; although in a biography that is remarkably free from error it is a pity to see that Dan O'Herlihy (who played Macduff) is rechristened Donal.
Welles went to Europe and stayed there. Some of his films thereafter were merely unfinished, others no more than fragments. To keep the pot boiling, he advertised this commodity and that; his voice - that hypnotic rumble - extolled the virtues of liquor, notably sherry.
He needed money , both to live on - he was a prodigious eater - and to pay for his great, never completed project, a film version of Don Quixote. Meanwhile, the question was asked ceaselessly: "Whatever happened to Orson Welles?" The answer is simplicity itself: when aged 26, he made Citizen Kane, burned himself out, and then - fatally - delayed getting out of Hollywood. For the rest of it, one might echo Mr Bennet and say "You have delighted us long enough".
Hugh Leonard is a playwright and novelist
Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow Jonathan Cape, 507pp. £25