Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (112 page)

Welles had planned and rehearsed the card trick over the past several days with Jim Steinmeyer, a young designer of illusions and effects who was part of magician Doug Henning’s team. Orson liked Steinmeyer, who was only about a year or two older than he himself had been when he directed
Citizen Kane.
They bonded initially over Steinmeyer’s book
Jarrett
, a revised version of the magic manual by the turn-of-the-century illusionist Guy Jarrett, who had designed magic feats for the Great Thurston. Steinmeyer could talk knowledgeably about the history of magic or Broadway, but he came from Oak Park, Illinois, and could also hold his own in a conversation about Kenosha. A fan of Orson’s long before they met, he even owned a copy of
Everybody’s Shakespeare.

The magicians who helped Welles with his television appearances, or with constructing the illusions for “The Magic Show,” one of his long-gestating, never-completed projects, knew better than to grill him about his famous films. While it was not quite true that Orson never enjoyed reminiscing, he claimed not to have watched
Citizen Kane
since approving its final cut in 1941. (Though he conceded that he did watch it at least partially once more, for his interview sessions with Peter Bogdanovich.) The older Welles could be rude, even belligerent, to anyone who approached him with a fan’s fervor and questions, whether it was a television executive, a prospective film producer, or a college student.

Barbara Leaming called this the “Crazy Welles”: the temperamental, menacing mask Orson always carried in reserve, yanking it out like a blunt weapon when he felt cornered. Frederick Muller, the editor of
The Trial
and
Chimes at Midnight
, grew tired of the mask, and one day asked him why he treated people so badly.

“Well,” Orson replied, “I grew up in very unhappy family circumstances and this is my defense. I want people to be scared of me.”

“But you’re not a nasty man,” said Muller, “so why do you want to give the impression that you’re nasty?”

“It’s my defense,” insisted Orson, refusing to discuss it any further.

The magicians were not exempt from this reluctance to reminisce; they knew that about Welles and respected it. They were there to serve a different part of his life, to distract him with innocent pleasures from his difficult career struggles and his filmmaking concerns.

He asked the magicians to his house, to perform feats he had read or heard about or seen performed somewhere, perhaps long ago in his boyhood. Wearing his big kaftan, the supreme audience of one would sit in his massive chair in the living room, with his tiny black poodle Kiki barking on his lap, and become a rapt little boy all over again as the magicians demonstrated the trick he intended to learn. As they repeated the trick, articulated its steps, he began to make suggestions, bubbling with ideas as he began to take the trick over himself. He approached a magic trick the way he approached everything, always trying to improve it, seeking the maximum effect—even when that meant overthinking the illusion. Orson knew other magicians would watch him on TV, and he wanted them to be amazed too.

“The thing I like about magic,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, “is that it’s connected with circus, and with a kind of corny velvet-and-gold-braid sort of world that’s gone. . . . I never saw anything in the theatre that entranced me so much as magic—and not the wonder of it: it’s the kind of slightly seedy, slightly carnival side of it. I’m a terrible pushover for all forms of small-time show business anyway. Small theatres, small circuses, magic, and all that.”

The young magicians were like his stand-ins for these informal rehearsals. Grossly overweight by the last decade of his life, unable to keep on his feet for very long, Welles directed the young magicians from his chair while watching their moves carefully and taking mental notes. Like his “slaves” of old, the young magicians gathered his props for him, advised him on handling the props, and offered suggestions and tips for his patter and misdirection.

Steinmeyer had been part of Orson’s life for about four years now. The circle of young magicians and illusion designers in Los Angeles passed Welles down like an heirloom, one that carried a curse. Working with him was always thrilling and rewarding, but it could also be a horror show. Sometimes Welles wanted to rehearse at odd hours—after midnight, for example. He could be hard to please, and the rehearsals could be nerve-wracking. Young magicians who were sucked into Orson’s vortex suddenly found themselves at his beck and call. If they took their phones off the hook, a messenger arrived: “Your phone is off the hook. Call me. Orson.”

Steinmeyer, however, never experienced a single twinge of displeasure. Orson was always gracious and kind to him, phoning Steinmeyer to see how he was doing today, asking what
he
was working on, offering advice. Welles always paid him a little money out of pocket each time Steinmeyer helped him out with a magic trick. Several times Welles took him to lunch at the West Hollywood bistro, Ma Maison, but occasionally Orson and his companion, Oja Kodar, threw a pasta dinner for Steinmeyer in their home kitchen, which was more wonderful.

Steinmeyer always remembered one night at dinner when Welles had suffered a bad day in the film world—one of many bad days in the last year of his life. Orson’s dream of a filmed
King Lear
, financed by French admirers; his hope to convince someone in Hollywood to let him chronicle the saga of
The Cradle Will Rock
on the big screen; his plans to direct an independent film called
The Big Brass Ring
, based on his script about a presidential candidate compromised by a homosexual mentor: all these projects had collapsed earlier in the year. Still, Welles rarely whined or complained. “Everybody wants to give me an award,” one of the magicians recalls him saying—memorably, because it was out of character—“but nobody wants to hire me to make a film.”

That night, with Steinmeyer, Welles seemed glum over dinner, in a daze. Fumbling for conversation, Steinmeyer mentioned that he’d just read and loved Preston Sturges’s play
Strictly Dishonorable.
He knew that Welles, since his youth in Chicago, had followed Sturges and that the two were friends until Sturges’s death in 1959. Welles raised an eyebrow in annoyance, perhaps because Pauline Kael had raised the specter of Sturges’s
The Power and the Glory
as an influence on
Citizen Kane
in her widely read essay “Raising
Kane
.” As if to cut off the conversation, Welles muttered that he’d seen the original Broadway production of
Strictly Dishonorable.
Steinmeyer looked doubtful.

Orson fixed the younger man with a hard stare of one-upmanship. “Tullio Carminati was the Latin Lover in it,” Welles drawled. “I would have liked to see Antoinette Perry on the stage, but by this time she was only directing. Later, you know, Cesar Romero did Carminati’s part on the road, launching him as a star.” Caught up in the subject, Welles went on to deliver a knowing exegesis on the various incarnations of
Strictly Dishonorable
, and the play’s strengths and weaknesses. As Orson held forth, his mood lifted, the day’s disappointments forgotten. “I walked away from that dinner,” Steinmeyer remembered, “realizing how Orson’s dismissive manner often earned the reputation for him of being a fabulist, but he had actually been there, seen things, processed them, even if he didn’t care to explain in a casual conversation.”

Today’s trick for
The Merv Griffin Show
involved a pristine deck of cards that would be divided and shuffled by two complete strangers. Handed the decks, Orson would miraculously turn up four aces, two from each separate pile of cards. Like the Great Thurston, who had started out onstage performing with just a deck of cards, these days Orson was a one-man show.

Except not really: Like most magicians, Orson used helpers, such as Steinmeyer—and often, as tonight, a “stooge,” or plant, in the studio audience. When it came to stooges, magicians had different schools of thought: certain purists avoided them; others used them without compunctions. Orson liked stooges, Steinmeyer felt, because he was always anxious about performing his magic in public, and a stooge gave him an extra measure of security. He also liked the idea of being propped up by an invisible army of helpers and collaborators. Orson did not wish to meet the stooge beforehand, so he could say honestly that he and the audience member he chose were crossing paths for the first time. He didn’t want Merv Griffin to know about the stooge, either.

With swollen, arthritic fingers, Welles no longer had much genuine sleight of hand, but the young magicians learned not to underestimate him, lest he sense their skepticism, grab the deck of cards, and whip off a superb one-hand top-palm. His lifelong reliance on stand-in rehearsals and stooges made for occasional disasters, however: once, on
Merv Griffin
, Orson knocked over the fishbowl he was using, splattering water and glass everywhere—a shattering fishbowl was one contingency no one had anticipated—then asked if anyone in the audience was named Albert, the designated name of the stooge. Another Albert, the wrong one, stood up.

Whether he got his comeuppance in his living room, or onstage in front of a national audience, Orson was generally delighted by the mishaps. He laughed uproariously at his gaffes—laughed so hard, sometimes, that the magicians worried he might keel over and die.

The night before, Orson had stayed up late, going over the new trick in his mind and working on various projects, including his first lesson plans as a professor. On the Thursday morning after the taping of
Merv Griffin
, he was scheduled to meet with officials at UCLA, including Professor Howard Suber, who after a year of courting had finally persuaded Welles to teach a seminar on filmmaking. Orson had resisted such overtures for years, but Suber, an expert on Welles (he had taught an entire course devoted to
Citizen Kane
), finally prevailed after a long lunch at Ma Maison, where Orson characteristically picked up the check. As part of the deal, Orson would also gain access to UCLA soundstages and equipment, with a group of students as his crew. But that Thursday morning meeting threatened to be a bit of a showdown, as word had spread that Orson, with his longtime cameraman Gary Graver, had already taken over a campus soundstage and they were shooting scenes for unspecified purposes. Was Welles serious about teaching at UCLA, or was this another instance of misdirection—trading his name for access? Tomorrow would tell.

Welles called Graver—they spoke nearly every day—reminding the cameraman to pick up equipment at a rental house in Hollywood for a scene he thought he might shoot at UCLA, as long as he was going to be on campus tomorrow. It might be a recitation from the one-man
Julius Caesar
that Orson was planning, or a scene from a loose-knit adaptation of
King Lear
he and Graver had been compiling, or a bit of prestidigitation for “The Magic Show.” The cameraman and crew sometimes didn’t know exactly what Orson was going to film until he arrived.

Welles checked in with Steinmeyer. The young magician had found a dependable stooge for him, a dancer from magician Harry Blackstone Jr.’s show. At a prearranged signal, she would volunteer to take the decks of cards from Orson onstage and prepare them for handling by the audience members. Her job was to shuffle the cards (awkwardly and tentatively), while keeping the top stock of four aces in place. When the camera was off her, she would quickly cut and rearrange the cards to make sure Orson would find the aces. The stooge would sit up front. Steinmeyer, too, would sit nervously in the audience, an emergency backup.

Orson said he would meet Steinmeyer backstage at the taping but wanted him to get to the studio early, bringing the two decks of cards to Griffin’s dressing room. The cards were sealed in cellophane, but—unbeknownst to Griffin—the cellophane had been slit open and the cards reordered before it was sealed again. It was important to Orson that he impress Griffin with his magicianship. Yet magic meant little to Griffin, unlike Johnny Carson, a onetime magician himself. Griffin loved Orson’s personality and admired his films; the magic was just an excuse to have him on the show.

At that late-afternoon taping, Orson had a surprise planned for his old friend Merv.

Orson spent the morning alone on the ground floor of his two-story faux-antebellum mansion, with its swimming pool and guesthouse. The expansive grounds with views of the surrounding Hollywood hills were dotted with fruit and palm trees. These days, his immense weight and weak legs made it almost impossible for Welles to climb to the second floor and its master bedroom without a good deal of incentive and assistance. Instead he usually worked on the first floor, where he had a second bedroom and bath, with his typewriter and stacks of scripts, correspondence, and notes spread out across his worktable and the spacious living room.

His companion, the artist and actress Oja Kodar, was away in Europe, as she was periodically. Orson missed her terribly. She had been Welles’s “companion, confidant, cohort in . . . conspiracy, closest accomplice, muse,” in Peter Bogdanovich’s words, for nearly twenty-five years, collaborating with him on numerous projects, and playing a lead in
F for Fake
(1973). Born in Zagreb the year
Citizen Kane
was released, the exotic Kodar had her own busy life and interests, including an art gallery she ran in Yugoslavia. Her nephew Aleksandar stayed in attic space in the house, helping to keep an eye on Welles.

Welles had lived in Hollywood since the late 1970s, but his legal residence was in Las Vegas—as was his legal wife, the Italian countess Paola di Girifalco. Paola—who under her professional name, Paola Mori, played the female lead in
Mr. Arkadin
—had followed Virginia Nicolson and Rita Hayworth to become the third Mrs. Orson Welles in 1955. But Mori had stayed behind in Las Vegas with their grown daughter, Beatrice, when Welles moved to Los Angeles to share a house with Kodar. How estranged Orson and Paola were, how well they got along, no one knew for sure. Orson talked about his love life with less eagerness than he reminisced about
Citizen Kane.