Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (34 page)

One day he took the train to a Hertfordshire village, Ayot Saint Lawrence, to knock on the door of one of his heroes, George Bernard Shaw, whose plays he had seen in Chicago and produced at the Todd School. Shaw was also a Dubliner and a stalwart of the Gate, which regularly presented his plays. (For a long time
Back to Methuselah
boasted the Gate’s box office record.) Meeting the great playwright was a memory Orson always prized. “I recall the way in which he received me,” Welles told Peter Noble, “listened to my ideas on the Theatre, gossiped about Dublin and shared a joke with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. I remember his walking me down to his gate and talking to me with the greatest simplicity as if I were as grown up as he.”

Orson could not resist a short hop to Paris, where he “wined, drank, and attended parties with exuberance,” according to Frank Brady’s
Citizen Welles.
Crashing parties in Paris, Orson crossed paths with Brahim El Glaoui, who was the eldest son of the pasha of Marrakesh and served as his father’s envoy. Brahim invited Orson to visit him in Morocco one day.

By now, however, Orson was homesick. And where was home for him? It was not Kenosha, and not quite Chicago, and never Highland Park. Graduation, his first professional credits, and eight months away from the United States helped settle the issue.

Several decades later, an interviewer in Paris asked him: Where was home for Orson Welles? “That’s a problem,” he replied in the filmed exchange. “As a kid I was moved around everywhere. I have lots of homes but I would like to have the one—but I don’t . . .

“I suppose it’s Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere.”

He had told Roger Hill as much in his letters home, hinting that now he felt qualified to teach dramatics at the Todd School, if the headmaster could be convinced to create such a position for him.

On board the ocean liner heading back to the United States, young Orson clasped his arms and leaned over the rail on deck, puffing manfully on his cigar. He felt more like an Irishman than an American, and he had the accent and pixie sayings to show for it. (It was good practice for his later stint as Michael O’Hara in
The Lady from Shanghai
—a film whose working title was “Black Irish.”)

He had become a professional in Dublin, taking lead acting roles and being applauded for them. He had designed scenery for several plays and even directed one. He belonged now to acting and the theater, to the ancient dishonorable profession of faking it. It was perfect for him, a profession of scrounging and faking. Whatever else happened to him later in life, he always would be an actor.

For all this, he was indebted to those consummate scroungers and fakers Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir. Welles would always consider Edwards his role model as a director, storing the older man’s many and varied lessons in his memory—even if he didn’t always follow those lessons. And MacLíammóir? Beyond his vaulting standards as a scenic designer, wasn’t MacLíammóir just the kind of glorious artiste Orson himself wished to be?

For decades, Welles’s plays and films would be stimulated by their great example and influence. “My debt to them can never be measured,” Orson said frequently in interviews, adding, “I don’t suppose any director ever owed so much to another director as I did to Hilton.”

On March 15, he arrived in New York, still two months shy of his seventeenth birthday. He spent a few days shopping his résumé around to Broadway agents and producers, but was neither surprised nor deflated to learn that he was more famous in Dublin than New York.

He boarded a train for Chicago. Thanks to Dr. Maurice Bernstein, the local press was there to greet him and mark the occasion. “Chicago Schoolboy Who Won Place on Dublin Stage Returns,” read the headline in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
on March 18, 1932.

When his train pulled into the station, the young actor had a Buster Keaton–like moment. The reporters were waiting for him, but they were on the wrong track. When Orson spotted them, he jumped off the train and raced toward them, shouting and waving excitedly, lugging his cheap suitcase, huge and cumbersome and little better than cardboard. His father had given him a piece of lasting advice: never carry luggage anyone would think of stealing. As he raced down the platform, the suitcase finally erupted under the pressure, spilling Orson’s belongings—his writing pads and books and clippings of his Dublin shows—all over the ground. Dr. Bernstein and the reporters scurried to help him grab the stuff as the wind whistled around the depot.

CHAPTER 8

1932–1933

“Hope Rises with the Morning Sun”

Orson’s “adopted Irish brogue” was so thick on his return, according to biographer Frank Brady, that even Dr. Maurice Bernstein had “trouble understanding him.” His guardian also had trouble understanding why he now smoked cigars whenever he felt like it. When Orson’s brogue faded, a manner of speech and gesture often described as mid-Atlantic replaced it—permanently. But the cigars became a lifelong prop for him, useful for dramatic pauses and gesticulation, on- and offstage—even late in life, when doctors’ orders kept him from smoking them.

He stayed with the excitable Dr. Bernstein only briefly, which was long enough. Then it was off to Woodstock, where Roger Hill had concocted a job for Orson as second-semester drama coach. Within a week of his triumphant return from the Irish stage, Orson was immersed in the prep school’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy
Twelfth Night.

Skipper Hill had chosen it as the school’s entry in Chicago’s annual Drama League competition, partly because his students had attended Jane Cowl’s production at Chicago’s Harris Theater in the spring of the previous year. Todd’s version would borrow heavily from hers—Orson would even copy Robert Edmond Jones’s acclaimed set design, which featured a huge book occupying center stage, arranged against the backdrop of a sea. In Cowl’s production, a clown turned the book pages, but in the Todd version, the boys would turn the pages, revealing Orson’s series of scene paintings.

Full of adrenaline after his Irish sojourn, Orson did it all. He devised the colorful costumes and settings; he helped condense Shakespeare’s text; he played Malvolio, the steward of Olivia’s household; and, of course he “codirected” the Todd Troupers. Not all were boys: Roger Hill’s eldest daughter, Joanne, played Olivia, the character at the center of the play’s setup. Using the school’s new sixteen-millimeter camera, Orson filmed the
Twelfth Night
dress rehearsals for the actors to see and critique their performances—similarly, he would later use phonograph recordings for radio show run-throughs and, sometimes, in Hollywood.

In the 1970s, author Frank Brady watched color footage of this rehearsal film, the rarest of the rare in Welles’s oeuvre, in the headmaster’s living room in Miami. “The print that I saw,” Brady wrote, “was still perfectly preserved with rich color and quite professionally focused but without any camera movement, or pronounced flourishes or angles. It was simply shot from one point of view, perhaps from the middle of the tenth row of the theater: an amateur recording of the play on film rather than a piece of cinema. Orson narrated this film by making a phonograph record that was to be played in accompaniment.”

Over the years, the annual Drama League contest—the scene of Orson’s great disappointment in 1929—had acquired mythic status at Todd School, as an occasion for the slingshot-wielding Todd boys to challenge the bigger, richer Chicago Goliaths. Three years after his failure, Orson was determined to redress the balance. And now the young drama coach led the underdog Todd Troupers through showdowns against Senn High School, with a student body of eight thousand, and Bowen High School, with seven thousand, in the Fine Arts building of the Goodman Theatre.

The two-and-a-half-foot silver loving cup went to Todd School.

Early in May, Skipper had scheduled a two-week history and civics road trip for eighth-graders, and Orson begged a seat on the bus. He was still too young to help with the driving (and didn’t care to learn to drive anyway), so Hill made him chief of crew—the crew being all the Todd boys on the trip. Along with assistant-teaching, Orson supervised the daily journals the boys were expected to keep on the trip, and even helped organize the meals cooked on board the school’s fully equipped Arrow Coach, which Hill dubbed “Big Bertha.”

Orson’s connection with Skipper Hill was as strong as ever, and the trip would give him a chance to pursue a hidden agenda: he had talked the headmaster into collaborating on a stage play. Only in his weaker moments did Hill think of himself as a playwright, but Orson was a natural writer, and their long hours together on the road would give them time to discuss Orson’s “Big Idea.” That was one reason the itinerary took the boys south, through Kentucky, Louisville, and Lexington, en route to Appomattox Court House, Harpers Ferry, and Washington, D.C. Orson wanted to write a biographical play about the radical abolitionist John Brown.

Orson and Skipper Hill both were fascinated by the odyssey of Brown, who had tried to inspire a slave revolt with his attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859, an incident that helped trigger the Civil War and led to Brown’s capture and execution. Visiting the historic sites was a way of teaching civics to the Todd boys, but also a way for Orson and Skipper to soak up the atmosphere of places where the great opponent of slavery had lived and breathed. Orson spent hours sitting next to Hill as the headmaster drove Big Bertha through Kentucky and Virginia, both of them talking excitedly about Brown, brainstorming ideas for their play.

From Washington they drove north to New York City, where the Todd boys visited the Empire State Building, which had just opened the previous year. Skipper had brought the
Twelfth Night
camera along on the bus trip, and Orson captured silent footage of the boys gaping at various landmarks. Sometimes the chief of crew went before the camera himself—the ebullient tour guide, gesturing toward the viewers and expounding, always the incorrigible actor. But the trip also exposed Orson to the deepening effects of the Great Depression, now in its third year. In Ireland he had witnessed dire poverty, and now, in New York, he must have seen the droves of unemployed begging on street corners and living in parks. His growing political consciousness would inform his sympathetic portrayal of the radical John Brown.

From the city they swung upstate, stopping at Brown’s farm in North Elba, near Lake Placid, and at Niagara Falls before heading back to Woodstock. They returned just in time for Orson to start preparing for Closing Day ceremonies on June 15, which included a reprise of
Twelfth Night
, a musical puppet show, a short French play, and a “home movie” interspersing clips of Todd daily life with footage from their American history bus tour.

The Hills lingered in Woodstock for another week before leaving for Camp Tosebo in Michigan. Orson visited the camp briefly in July, then moved back in with Dr. Bernstein, shuttling between the doctor’s residences in Highland Park and Chicago, still corresponding faithfully with the headmaster while taking the lead in researching John Brown.

The Depression had doomed the Ravinia Festival, which underwent a financial crisis and closed that summer. The theater scene in Chicago was also bleak. Charles Collins in the
Chicago Tribune
pronounced it comatose until fall. July was torrid, driving Orson and thousands of other Chicagoans into air-conditioned movie theaters for the matinees. After delving into books and newspapers for a month in the public library, Orson was ready to write—and eager to leave the city, where the heat and dust of August aggravated his asthma and hay fever.

Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Roger Hill were now conspirators in looking after Orson’s needs, as Bernstein and Orson’s father once had been, and they recommended one of the summer cottages in northern Wisconsin owned by an Evanston colleague of Bernstein’s, Dr. J. P. Sprague. The cottage retreat was near Woodruff and Mercer Lake, a vacation destination for city dwellers, 350 miles north of Chicago. Summer camps, cabins, and sparse hamlets dotted the north woods area, part of the vast Lac du Flambeau reservation set aside for the Chippewa tribe.

Seventeen-year-old Orson boarded an overnight Chicago and Northwestern train, carrying his paints, brushes, pads of paper, typewriter, and books, heading for the Wisconsin woods. The train seemed to crawl north in the August torpor. At the water fountain, Orson bumped into James B. Meigs, who was the father of several Todd boys and the business manager of the
American Weekly
, the lurid Sunday magazine of the Hearst newspaper chain. His older son, James Jr., who had just graduated from Todd, was a Trouper in the large cast of
Twelfth Night
; and the younger Meigs boy, William, was also theatrically inclined, with a strong singing voice.
¹⁴

Meigs invited Orson to stay with him and his family on their estate near Lac du Flambeau. Orson could have the run of the place and join the Meigses for meals in the main lodge. Orson was tempted, and when he met the driver who’d been sent to bring him to J. P. Sprague’s cottage—a “cross-eyed half-breed,” in Welles’s words, who was “raving drunk” at 6:30
A
.
M
.—he took Meigs up on the offer. Orson got back on the train and accompanied Meigs to Lac du Flambeau, which boasted “a main street like an illustration from somebody’s novel of life in the early lumbering and Indian-fighting days,” in Orson’s words. At the station, he crammed himself into a Packard with Meigs and the rest of the “multitudinous” Meigs family.