Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (19 page)

Dick Welles was finally closing in on a deal for the Hotel Sheffield, and he was hoping to install his restless son at a summer camp for boys during August. Dr. Maurice Bernstein knew of a good one near Borcher’s Beach on the north shore of Lake Mendota, the largest and most beautiful of the lakes surrounding Madison, Wisconsin. It was a curious fact about Camp Indianola that it recruited heavily from the Chicago Jewish community, and the majority of its campers were Jewish. The camp stressed resourcefulness and self-reliance, traits young Orson had in abundance. But Orson would also benefit from the outdoor physical regimen.

The dome of the state capitol and the buildings of the University of Wisconsin could be glimpsed several miles away on the other side of Lake Mendota. Camp Indianola had grown, since its humble beginnings in 1907, into a large, well-equipped facility boasting a large two-story cottage with library and music rooms, a canoe house, a mess hall, and a general assembly building with a small stage. By 1925, more than one hundred boys were attending the summer camp, coming largely from Madison, southern Wisconsin, and northern Illinois. The camp was owned and operated by Frederick Mueller, known to his young charges as Captain, and his wife, Mina.

Barbara Leaming’s biography of Welles refers to Mueller as a professor of psychology, an “eminent German psychologist who specialized in unusual children.” In fact, Mueller was born in Wisconsin—his parents were German immigrants—and the German language was one of his teaching specialties in college and later in Madison-area high schools. When not running Camp Indianola, Mueller was, indeed, a psychology instructor at the university in Madison, but he was not a particularly “eminent” academic; his only advanced degree, then or later, was a master’s degree in philosophy.

Camp Indianola was situated on onetime Native American ground, and Captain Mueller ran it like an Indian encampment, with the boys divided by age and size into opposing Onaway and Wendigo tribes for sports and games. Among the pastimes were archery, horseback riding, swimming, and canoeing. The campers could fish for black bass, pike, bullheads, perch, and bluegills in abundance from rowboats a short distance from shore. Older boys lived in large tents on raised wooden platforms, arranged in a semicircle, and smaller tents were available for roadside pitching on overnight trips. The summer culminated with the boys taking a two-week “Gypsy trip” north through the Wisconsin Dells, a popular tourist destination.

Before the new boy arrived, Captain Mueller buttonholed Lowell Frautschi, a university undergraduate serving as the camp athletic director. Mueller told Frautschi that an “unusual child,” whose mother had died tragically the previous year, was arriving shortly. The new boy had been raised in a “heady environment and was accustomed almost exclusively to the company of adults,” Frautschi recalled Mueller telling him. The boy would benefit from learning “the normal childhood skills.” Mueller asked Frautschi to share his barracks room with the boy, and to “keep a close watch on his participation in camp activities.”

Many years later, Frautschi vividly recalled the new arrival. “Orson was large for his age,” he noted. “He had a pleasing personality and had little difficulty getting along with the other campers, although he was indeed awkward at sports. He entered into things well enough to relieve me of any special effort in having to encourage him.”

Besides bunking together, Frautschi and Orson shared a morning art class, which had only one student: Orson. Dick Welles had stipulated that art be added to the program, and paid extra for Frautschi to supervise the class. The new boy arrived with his own easel and paint set, which he told Frautschi had been a gift from the eminent Lorado Taft. “We would usually go somewhere, such as a nearby pasture,” Frautschi remembered, “where Orson would put up his easel and proceed to paint while I sat on the ground and read.”

Young Orson also got involved with the camp newspaper, the
Indianola Trail
, writing humorous tidbits and verse. One fragment of Orson’s creativity survives from that summer of 1925, four lines from a lengthy pastoral titled “The Voice of the Morning,” his earliest known published work:

From out of the dark and dreary night, a mellow voice did come

A voice of sweetened love and truth

Of passionate love, in sooth.

It said awake, my son, ’tis day.

The “unusual child” may have fitted in surprisingly well overall, but he did cause a few problems at the camp’s evening gatherings, where the boys were encouraged to demonstrate their talents. “Orson volunteered every time!” Frautschi recalled. “He told interminable stories made up from things he had read—and he seemed to have read everything—and from his own active imagination. The other boys soon grew tired of this and became restless, so finally I told Orson he should not monopolize the scene that way.”

Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein took turns visiting on weekends, huddling with Captain Mueller for updates on Orson’s progress. “The few comments that I exchanged with Bernstein,” said Frautschi, “revealed that he was genuinely interested in Orson’s welfare.” Dick drove over rough country roads from Grand Detour. “He was thin and rather languid,” recalled Frautschi. “As I saw him leaning against the front of the barracks, the thought occurred to me that he looked like a character out of a Joseph Conrad novel of the South Seas.”

Decades later, Orson told film historian Joseph McBride that he had few warm memories of Camp Indianola. One night, he claimed, he escaped out his cabin window, rowed a war canoe the five miles or so across the lake to catch a train for Chicago, and never went back. Orson did run away from home more than once in the period after his mother’s death, as many boys do, but Frautschi did not recall the great escape, and Orson was definitely back at the camp by the end of August to give a one-man show at the closing ceremonies.

All he needed for his show was a few props, he told Frautschi: eyeglasses, a pitcher, two chairs, a table. Frautschi recalled “being wary” and insisting on a preview of the entertainment. So Frautschi sat alone in the assembly hall watching Orson perform an abridged
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, “making the transformation from one character to the other, altering his facial expressions, voice, and movements in a truly amazing way.” Orson was then allowed to perform the show at “a sort of commencement exercise” on the last weekend, with his father and Dr. Bernstein in attendance. “Young Orson played to a packed hall,” remembered Frautschi, “and was a stunning success.”

Since his son had thrived on Captain Mueller’s watch, Dick Welles asked if Orson could stay on with Mueller for the school year in Madison, trying out a school there. By now the deal for the Hotel Sheffield was done, and renovating and expanding the building would keep Dick Welles in Grand Detour for much of the winter. Captain and Mina Mueller were glad to take the boy in, and Dick was happy to pay the costs.

Professor Mueller (he was “Captain” only during the summer) lived at the campus end of State Street, which ran from downtown Capitol Square to the University of Wisconsin campus on the shore of Lake Mendota. The Muellers occupied a first-floor flat on the corner of State and Frances, two blocks from the campus mall. Washington Grade School, where Orson was enrolled in fourth grade, was three blocks away.

In later years, the filmmaker would recall Madison as a “wonderful city.” But his time there was also his first experience of living, effectively, on his own, and his fond memories were mixed with discomforting ones. At Washington Grade School, Orson stood out for the way he looked and dressed and carried himself, and he felt targeted on the playground. “The strange plump youngster who talked like a University professor was soon the butt of his classmates,” wrote Peter Noble (per Bernstein). The taunts continued until Orson brought his makeup kit to school one day, and in the washroom before recess “painted his face to resemble a bloody pulp. . . . The bully screamed and fled,” according to Noble.

At first, as one teacher recalled, the newcomer seemed a “quiet, polite, rather shy little boy who spent most of his time by himself.” After a period of adjustment, however, young Orson blossomed, as he had at Camp Indianola. That November he played Squanto in the school’s First Thanksgiving pageant; the following month he was Ebenezer Scrooge in its production of
A Christmas Carol.
Orson also designed and helped build a stage fireplace for the holiday show; the prop was tucked away and reused for decades.

According to Dr. Bernstein, one day Orson was invited to address an all-school assembly, and in the course of his lecture on art he lambasted his teachers for their lack of creativity. “You mustn’t criticize the public school system!” one teacher called out, to which young Orson rejoined, “If the public school system needs criticizing, I will criticize it!” There was scattered applause. He had made waves—and not a few friends.

In Chicago over the Christmas holiday, Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein took Orson to the latest edition of the
Ziegfeld Follies
, playing at the Illinois Theater. One of the headliners was the master juggler and pantomimist W. C. Fields, who made a lasting impression on Orson. “I laughed so hard they got worried and took me out of the theatre,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “All next day I had to be kept in bed. Quite literally, I’d laughed myself sick. Bill Fields only had to cross a room, you know, and I’d be retching with laughter.” He and “Uncle Claude,” as he called Fields, became friendly later in Hollywood, and Welles appeared in one movie with Fields—
Follow the Boys
, in 1944—although they didn’t share a scene. Orson swore the comedian was funnier onstage than he ever was onscreen.

After returning to Madison, Orson invited a dozen boys and girls to the Muellers’ flat for an eleventh birthday party for his friend Stanley Custer, who lived around the corner from the Muellers on Hawthorne Court. Orson, known to the neighborhood as a “bookwork kid” (in the words of Stanley’s journalist brother, Frank Custer), donned an orange robe and Oriental turban to perform his “eye-opener tricks” (Stanley Custer’s phrase) for his schoolmates, featuring card tricks, colored scarves, and disappearing coins. He even hypnotized one boy, using the classic swaying watch to cast the spell.

Orson presented the guest of honor with a copy of the adventure saga
In the Shadow of Great Peril
, the work of an eleven-year-old Chicagoan, Horace Atkisson Wade, who was publicized as “America’s Youngest Author.” “I know the author,” Orson boasted to Custer, and he may well have known Atkisson: his godfather George Ade had written the preface. “From me to you, Orson,” the young magician inscribed the book, adding a caricature of Custer and himself.

Within just a few months, Orson had starred in and designed the sets of two holiday programs and spoken out controversially at a school assembly. His teachers saw no reason to wait until the end of the year before promoting him to fifth grade.

The
Capital Times
caught wind of the “unusual child” from Chicago and dispatched a reporter to profile him for a special section on public school activities. (One wonders who tipped the editors off: Professor Mueller, Dr. Bernstein, even young Orson himself?) Needing a photograph to accompany the article, the newspaper arranged for Orson to pose for a portrait specialist from De Longe’s Studio in Madison. The boy phoned Dr. Bernstein to discuss what he should wear for his first publicity still, deciding on “an eccentric Oscar Wilde tie,” in Barbara Leaming’s words, to “afford a proper image for his public.”

The first published photograph of Orson Welles appeared on February 19, 1926, in the afternoon edition of the
Capital Times,
showing a grinning chipmunk-cheeked boy wearing a foppish sort of ascot. “Cartoonist, Actor, Poet and only 10” was the headline of Orson Welles’s first newspaper interview. The precocious young student, identified by the anonymous reporter as “Orson G. Welles,” was said to be “already attracting the attention of some of the greatest literary men and artists in the country.”

This was the first contemporaneous outside account of the boy, and the witness was impressed. Orson G. had a “fluent command of language,” according to the
Capital Times
, incorporating “a surprising number of large words equal to those of the average adult” in his everyday speech. Moreover, he “reads constantly,” evincing tastes ranging “far beyond his years,” encompassing the “old masters in art and literature” along with “the difficult subjects of philosophy and history.”

The boy from Chicago was “adept at cartooning,” but he was also a natural-born poet and actor, especially gifted “in the art of make-up and impersonations.” Noting that Orson had dominated the storytelling sessions at Camp Indianola the summer before, the newspaper reported that he might grow “particularly interested in one of the characters” when improvising a story—so much so that he felt compelled “to paint the character,” seizing his oil paints and “making a study that, though it is amateurish in technique, shows a keen insight and interpretation.”

The boy had written up one of his campfire stories, which he called “The Yellow Panther,” but the reporter said that the story was too long to be included in the interview. However, the
Capital Times
did give readers a sample of Orson’s poetry, which was “entirely spontaneous, with a depth of thought far beyond the ordinary childish jingle.” The sample was a verse Orson said he had dictated to Professor Mueller just a few nights earlier.

It was titled “The Passing of a Lord”:

He sat upon a satin chair.

A Lord was he and had that air;

About his neck was golden fringe,

His trousers ironed without a singe.

At the right of him a table stood,

Made of the finest Circassian wood;

Covered it was with a beaded mat,

and upon it reclined a Persian cat.

His wig was powdered to the last degree.

and silver buckles were at his knees.

The window was thrown open