Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (28 page)

Orson stalked out of his grandmother’s living room and returned to Chicago with Dr. Bernstein; he would never shed his resentment over his father’s funeral. He never again said a kind, or even an accurate, word about his paternal grandmother, Mary Head Welles Gottfredsen, going so far as to describe her in interviews as a “witch” who made animal sacrifices. For her part, she said nothing at all in public about him, and in her will left him his choice of half the books from her personal library.

Richard Head Welles was only fifty-eight when he died. He was mourned on the front page of the
Kenosha News
, and in the journals of the trades he had left behind. “Old-timers in the industry will regret to learn of the sudden death” of “Dick Welles, as everyone knew him,” read a notice in
Automobile Topics.

In Chicago, when the First Union Trust and Savings Bank, executor of Dick Welles’s estate, presented his will for probate, the event made louder headlines than the news of Welles’s death. The front page of the local section of the
Herald and Examiner
reported that Welles had left a $100,000 fortune to his fifteen-year-old son, George Orson Welles. The probate court appointed Dr. Bernstein as the boy’s guardian
ad litem
, a temporary position until other candidates were reviewed. But the
Herald
glossed over the details: “Dr. Bernstein Made Guardian of Rich Boy,” the headline prematurely announced.

His mother’s death taught young Orson the capriciousness of time. He had learned not to live in fear that time would run out, but rather to thumb his nose at time in every brave and devious way imaginable. His father’s death would remind him of this, while teaching a new lesson: money was an abstraction. The headlines called him a rich boy, but those riches were withheld from his grasp. Money, for him, would always be as insubstantial and capricious as time.

In his last years, Welles would come to view his father as an “enormously likable and attractive” human being, adding that “it was a great sorrow to me when he died.” He blamed himself for deserting his father in those final days, not the Hills—“momentarily, false gods,” he called them—whose guidance, usually so valuable, had failed him at that critical juncture.

“I had followed the wrong adults, you know, and for the wrong reasons,” Welles explained to Barbara Leaming. “I’ve never, never . . . I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it—how can you get rid of a
real
guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.” After his brother, Richard, had so disappointed his parents, he had felt “the burden of achievement” shift to his own shoulders. “I couldn’t let them down,” Orson told his daughter Chris. “My parents were larger than life to me, wonderful, mythical, almost fantastical creatures, and more than anything I wanted to please them. . . . The wish to please them has never left me.”

That desire would come to shape Orson Welles’s life and career. He was confronted continually by setbacks, interruptions, and delays, and often he was wounded by problems of time or money—but rarely was he permanently deterred. He rejected obstacles and crises, always pushing on, almost relishing the hurdles. Without the tragedy of his parents, Welles might never have developed his singular drive, his quixotic belief that time and money should not matter.

At school, Orson turned his back on calamity. On a cold winter night just a few weeks after his father’s death, he kept a previous appointment to address the Dean Street School Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) on the subject of “China and Japan.” Wearing a “magnificent” costume he had purchased in the Far East, Orson strode onto a stage bedecked with his own souvenirs, greeted the PTA audience with “Good evening” in Japanese dialect, and then began to make drawings on a chalkboard as he related off-the-cuff stories about his summer trip. “We traveled with him in mind,” reported the
Woodstock Sentinel
, “as he led us along the wide beautiful streets and also through the narrow, poorer districts of both of these countries.” Though Dick Welles’s behavior, and condition, had cast a shadow over the trip, Orson mentioned his late father only lightly in passing. “Orson is a young man fifteen years of age and already a genius,” the
Sentinel
reported, “with poise, expression, and ability beyond his years.”

Poise, indeed.

And “genius” again: Orson’s senior year at the Todd School confirmed the impression, already recurring in newspaper accounts of his activities. The school year 1930–1931 brought no fewer than five full-scale all-school plays that could have been billed as “Orson Welles productions,” in addition to the many Saturday night entertainments he continued to oversee. Although the latter were frivolous, Orson was also starting to express his social conscience. When he and Hascy Tarbox staged an elaborate puppet theater program—long enough to take up half of one Saturday night bill—the villainous puppet was the proprietor of the “J. P. Bloodshed Bank.” And the second half of the show, as Todd Tarbox wrote in
Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts
, “was a lively musical revue performed by puppets resembling faculty members.”

His grades, admittedly boosted by the helping hands of other students, now reached honors level. Outside the classroom, he did everything from painting history murals on school walls to editing and designing a publication called
Todd: A Community Devoted to Boys and Their Interests
—a combination yearbook, catalog, and sales brochure that he enhanced with sly personal annotations. (“Every word of this book was either written or edited by him,” wrote Roger Hill in a subsequent letter to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, enclosing a copy with his letter urging them to admit Orson. “The only ‘cheating’ I did in this was to make him cut out some of his best bits of writing as they were too completely mature.”)

In late February, the Todd Troupers brought new life to one of Orson’s old favorites:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
¹⁰
Billed as “J. Worthington Ham,” Orson joined forces with codirector Roger Hill to re-create the atmosphere of the original 1880s stage productions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story. As a candlelighter “lit” the footlights, the student orchestra—wearing vintage costumes—struck up the overture, with Carl Hendrickson back on the podium. A vendor sold peanuts between acts. With a blurb from John Clayton (“This is the best thing the Troupers have ever done!”), the Troupers took the show to venues in Lake Forest and Highland Park.

The headmaster was skeptical about squeezing so many full-scale plays into the school calendar, but Orson could not be talked out of Molière’s
The Physician in Spite of Himself.
Orson starred in and supervised this early spring production, which boasted a “full-blown constructivist setting” reminiscent of Vsevolod Meyerhold, according to Simon Callow. Always influenced by what he saw, Orson could recall the similarly modernist production of Elmer Rice’s
The Adding Machine
, which had had its Chicago premiere at the Goodman in 1930.

The theatrical high point of Orson’s senior year was the last play, which was traditionally offered as part of the Closing Day program. Orson set out to produce an adaptation of
Richard III
, carrying around “a falling-to-pieces one-volume Shakespeare,” in Roger Hill’s words, which he “marked up with great black-crayon cuts.” As his modifications continued, however, he began to draw on other Shakespeare plays, until his
King Richard III
(as he called it) became a stitched-together condensation of all the Bard’s history plays covering the War of the Roses.

Orson and Roger Hill reached down into the fifth grade, casting fifty Todd boys of all ages; and they crafted their most elaborate set ever for the spectacle. Orson himself would play the hunchbacked Richard III, “his face unrecognizable, as if made from spare parts of several faces stuck together with huge pieces of sticking plaster,” as Simon Callow wrote. “Disturbing and powerful.” But Orson’s script was too lengthy for any audience to bear, and he felt under pressure to trim and then trim some more, rather drastically, at the eleventh hour. Even so, the production, which stretched over three hours, was “the most outstanding affair of its kind ever attempted by the Troupers,” wrote the
Woodstock Sentinel
, with acting “far beyond that usually found in school plays. . . . Orson Wells [
sic
] outdid himself. . . . Orson today leaves Todd. If he misses his school in the days to come he may be sure that the school will also miss him.”

With his three-hour
King Richard III
, a luncheon, a swim meet, a riding exhibition, numerous speeches, and the annual bestowing of laurels, Closing Day ceremonies that year dragged on interminably. Only ten seniors were graduating, with Orson one of four honor students. According to the only extant copy of his report card, for the first semester of his final term, he received unsurprising A’s in English, ancient history, and art; questionable A’s in algebra and spelling; B in French, and also in neatness and deportment; and C’s, finally, in Latin and gymnasium—the former an elective but neither C averaged for honors.

His graduation was attended by Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Ned and Hazel Moore, along with his mother’s favorite cousin, Dudley Crafts Watson. “The school did to him,” Watson told Peter Noble, “what none of the rest of us could.”

Orson’s friend John Dexter also graduated that year. “At Todd,” Dexter recalled, “the guy was really an unbelievable human being. We had a lot of fun and he was a great guy.”

“It was only at Todd that I could be my own person,” Orson told his daughter Chris Welles Feder. “My greatest coup,” he added poignantly, was not getting good grades, playing lead roles, or staging the ambitious
King Richard III
on Closing Day. It was, simply, “winning Skipper’s love.”

Shortly before graduation—on May 7, very nearly coinciding with Orson’s sixteenth birthday—a Chicago judge formally appointed Dr. Bernstein as the guardian of the boy’s welfare and estate. It may be, as Orson later insisted, that Dick Welles wanted his son to be able to choose his own guardian. The judge did consult Orson, although his wishes were nonbinding.

Orson said in later interviews that he would have preferred Roger Hill. The headmaster discussed it with him at Chicago’s Union Station, probably over spring break. But Skipper was reluctant to take on the mantle. “I remember we sat down on one of the great seats and talked a long time,” Hill recalled, “and he asked me if I’d be his guardian. And I, selfishly in one way, because I didn’t want [the] trouble of doing it, but I said, ‘Orson, that would be mad. It would break Dadda’s heart.’ This Bernstein who had been practically his father and he called Dadda.”

The precise monetary value of Dick Welles’s estate was fluid, dependent on the fate of his oil and railroad stocks (the will directed that the estate be “invested at all times in safe, income bearing or interest bearing properties and securities”), and on the termination value of his insurance policies: accident, home, and travel. According to court documents, Welles owned 200 shares of capital stock and 102 shares of common stock in the Standard Oil Company of Indiana; 100 shares of preferred stock and another 50 of common stock in Chicago and Northwestern Railway; 100 shares each in Illinois Central Railroad and Pullman; 52 shares of preferred stock and 106 shares of common stock in Tex-La-Homa Oil Corporation; 50 shares of preferred stock in B. F. Goodrich; and 25 shares of preferred and 1,400 shares of common stock in Globe Consolidated Oil. There were share amounts of a handful of other stocks—smaller numbers of shares, but not necessarily trivial.

The probate court fixed $42,344 as the determined value of the stock holdings, added to which Orson’s father had $21,191.82 cash in his bank account. The court estimated the total value of Welles’s estate at $63,535.82. Adjustments for inflation can be calculated in various ways, but it would be reasonable to estimate the value at roughly $900,000 in today’s terms. Orson’s father also owed debts totaling $8,901.29.

The court’s financial estimate did not count Beatrice Ives Welles’s jewelry, including a globular crystal necklace and drop earrings, a crystal neck pendant, and seed pearl earrings with drops, all stored in Dick Welles’s safe-deposit box. Nor did it include his itemized personal belongings: a gold matchbox, silver lighter, and silver key-winding watch; a complete set of table silver for twelve with teapot, gravy dish, olive forks, platters, and pearl-handled knives; one Iver Johnson revolver (the type of gun used to assassinate William McKinley in 1901); an oil painting of Wild Bill Hickok; and, touchingly, one photograph of “Dick Welles” the racehorse. Nor did it include continued earnings, if any were still forthcoming, from Dick Welles’s patents.

Some of these personal belongings may have been sold, but many ended up in the hands of Dr. Bernstein. Orson’s father also left a trove of family photographs, his gladstone bag, and a traveling trunk of private items and memorabilia; these too would be held for years in a safe-deposit box at the First Union Trust and Savings of Chicago, which administered his estate.

Orson’s brother, Richard, was twenty-five at the time of his father’s death, and no longer required a guardian. With Richard institutionalized at Kankakee, however, Bernstein also became the financial executor of his one-seventh share of the estate. It would be Bernstein’s job to dole out moneys for support and necessities for Richard until he was released from Kankakee. The remainder of his one-seventh would be paid out to Richard when he turned thirty-five, according to the will.

After allowances as warranted for “support, maintenance and education” of his younger son, the remaining six-sevenths “principal and reserve” of Dick Welles’s fortune was to be held in trust for Orson “until he shall have reached the age of twenty-five years.” As Charles Higham pointed out in his biography of Welles, “The proviso that this inheritance was to be held in trust until Orson’s twenty-fifth birthday was echoed, even to the age, in the discussion of the legacy of Charles Foster Kane in
Citizen Kane.”