Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (36 page)

In late September, Orson had lunch at the Tavern Club with Charles Collins. The respected drama critic had read the John Brown play, and now he “waxed wonderfully human” over its prospects, Orson reported to Hill. Collins also suggested a few possible titles: “The Madman of Freedom,” “The Approaching Storm,” “War’s Pioneer.” Collins had known Orson since his adolescence but now treated him almost as a colleague or personal friend. When Orson spoke of his adventures in Ireland, Collins answered with stories of his flirtation with the Dublin-born actress Patricia Collinge when she last passed through Chicago.

In Highland Park, meanwhile, Dr. Bernstein announced disquieting news: Orson’s older brother wished to pay him a visit. Richard I. Welles, as he now called himself, had been fighting his institutionalization at Kankakee since 1927. His efforts were unsuccessful, but he was allowed occasional weekend outings in the company of a hospital attendant, and Richard was hoping to see his brother on his own twenty-seventh birthday, coming up on the first Friday of October. Bernstein had no legal responsibility for Richard, other than doling out small portions of the inheritance for hospital expenses, but he insisted that Orson welcome his brother for a birthday visit, and that Orson offer to pay Richard’s travel expenses out of his own allowance.

Orson had not seen his black-sheep brother for at least three years—the last time probably in the company of their father. “Frankly I have no desire to see him for another three,” Orson sounded off in a letter to Roger Hill. “He’s so upsetting to one’s equilibrium. But something has got to be done I suppose, and I do want to be as nice as possible.

“But what the hell? . . . Do I seem callous? Really, Richard is a tremendous strain. Always making off with himself or your silverware, and unbearably overbearing. But I do love him and sympathize—and I will try just this once to be a little unselfish. Incidentally, you must meet him. I’ll never feel you quite know me ’till you know my family.”

But Skipper never did get to know Richard, who would remain unknowable to all but a few in his lifetime. “After all that worry over Richard, and all that heroic self-sacrifice, the weekend is not to be,” Orson wrote a few days later. “Dadda forgot to perform certain Kankakee rites, he’s so busy these days, so brother Dick must languish in the institution over his birthday.”

Not long after that, the Hills rode to the rescue in Big Bertha, sweeping Orson away to New York. Roger Hill bet the moon on the whirlwind trip, installing his wife and prize pupil in a suite at the Algonquin “suitable for entertaining lucky Broadway producers who would be offered our opus,” in the headmaster’s words. Hill’s top candidate was Dwight Deere Wiman, who’d been his own former roommate at Todd School before coproducing a string of Broadway hits in the 1920s. Also high on the list was his college chum Samson Raphaelson, the New York playwright and nowadays a screenwriter for Ernst Lubitsch. When Wiman took a quick pass, Skipper pinned his hopes on Raphaelson but was unable to track him down—no surprise, as Raphaelson wasn’t even in New York. He was in and out of Hollywood.

When Wiman said no and Raphaelson couldn’t be found, Hill’s confidence faltered. He and his wife had duties in Woodstock, and they decided to leave promotion of the script—now titled “Marching Song”—to Orson. “I peered into an empty purse,” Hill recalled, “moved our boy into the cheapest of rooms, to continue sale efforts via pavement pounding, and headed home.” Hill dangled the hope that he might return to New York over a long weekend.

Installed at $9 a week in an “efficiency” with kitchenette and bath at an apartment house on the corner of Eighty-First Street and Broadway, Orson hit the pavement with a stack of typed scripts and his own researched list of prospects. His targets included Ben A. Boyar, general manager for Max Gordon, who had achieved his breakthrough as producer of Raphaelson’s
The Jazz Singer
; Richard E. French, general manager for John L. Golden, another producer of Raphaelson plays; Samuel French (no relation to Richard), a well-known publisher and producer of plays; and Broadway mainstays including William Harris Jr. and George C. Tyler, whose producing credits predated World War I.

The established producers gravitated toward musicals and light fare, but that wasn’t the only hurdle for the young aspiring playwright. Although Orson jumped out of bed earlier than usual every morning, dressed in his best, and spent the day knocking on producers’ doors, he rarely got to meet anyone important. And no one had the slightest interest in reading something written by a seventeen-year-old, unproduced, unrepresented writer from the Midwest. After days of polite but steady discouragement, Orson yearned for the bottomless optimism of the Hills. His own ebullience melted into “qualms and doubts,” in his words. The occasional inspiring letter from the headmaster enabled Orson to console himself that “ ‘Marching Song’ is the goods!” On days without any positive reinforcement, though, he had the “sinking suspicion” that their play was simply “bad.” Still, he wrote to Hill ruefully, “We can always write more, can’t we?”

In late October came a body blow: the
New York Times
reviewed a “searching” new biography of John Brown that sounded superior to their own work. “My happiness and self-respect seem founded only on an admiration and confidence in that, our play,” Orson wrote dismally. “Sometimes I go wandering off into the suburbs of doubt, and journeying too far catch a glimpse of that awful pit, without a bottom, and sickeningly without a vestige of gravitation to take you there—and then there is a great floundering of entrails within me, the nausea of despair—and I go scurrying back to the Times Square of our optimism.”

Characteristically upbeat, Hill replied swiftly: Didn’t an acclaimed new biography make the abolitionist’s story all the more marketable? Orson thrived on such pep talks, no matter how unrealistic. He mailed a fresh version of the script to Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir at the Gate Theatre, then took out his well-thumbed stage directory and jotted down more names of producers. “I’ve been pawing through that lousy directory for so long I think I shall go mad,” Orson wrote, “mad . . . Mad . . .
MAD
!” At the urging of Hill and Dr. Bernstein alike, Orson finally agreed to seek a literary agent to represent the script to producers. He tried Leah Salisbury, a onetime actress who had developed an important clientele; and Alice Kauser, a play broker since the turn of the century. “They [literary agents] were much the most difficult,” Orson reported bitterly. “Gave one a sense of defeat, just by their manner, obviously youth was a tremendous handicap. Producers are much more folksy” with their rejections.

One day, on West Forty-Eighth Street, Orson ran into Hubert Osborne, the former director of the Goodman Theatre, who had taken over briefly after its founder, Thomas Wood Stevens, was cashiered. When Osborne asked what he was doing in New York, Orson boasted that he was a playwright now, busy trying to interest producers in a serious drama. Serious drama was a long hard road, Osborne observed sadly. “Don’t let them forget your face,” Osborne advised him. “Which means, I suppose, sitting in offices,” Orson wrote to the headmaster. “I can think of . . . nothing in this whole wide world I would like to do less.”

Osborne, who knew Orson primarily as an actor, urged him to try out for some acting parts in his spare time. In his quest to find a home for “Marching Song,” Orson had almost forgotten he was an actor with professional credits—and acting was indeed his best bet for income. Learning that there was an opening for an understudy in a revival of
The Silent House
, a 1928 melodrama, Orson stopped by the Shubert offices and sat around with a few dozen other optimists, hoping for the part. “Somebody got it days before,” he wrote to the Hills. “They always do.”

Night was when he felt most positive, his energy infinite. With most of the work on “Marching Song” complete, he dived into another project, a more commercial stage thriller, tentatively called “Where Was Moses?” He and Skipper had sketched out the story en route to New York, but Orson was determined to write “Where Was Moses?” alone. He wanted Hill to produce the show in Chicago before embarking on a national tour, ultimately bringing it to Broadway.

Orson expected to play the lead, another Chinaman to add to his repertoire; the staging would incorporate his penchant for magic. “My part is absolutely marvelous, and will give ample opportunity for the exhibition of my every trick,” Orson reported to Hill. “I’m really writing it with your promise to produce it,” he reminded the headmaster. “It’s a cheap show and should pack ’em in, not only at home but around about, even in Gotham if it takes at all. In fact I’m envisioning a production company by us—limitless possibilities, Skipper, limitless.”

Orson wrote the Hills overlapping letters while waiting desperately for mail from either of them. Had Skipper tracked down Samson Raphaelson? Had he seen
Of Thee I Sing
yet? “You don’t know, you can’t guess, how my spirits can fade and wilt without you,” he wrote to the headmaster. “Particularly in this strange, trying town and in this strange, trying situation.”

Most producers’ offices were willing to let him drop off a copy of “Marching Song,” but few ever responded. “I haven’t been phoned, or post-carded, or written to,” he reported to Hill. One day, when he missed paying his rent, his landlord virtually tossed him onto the sidewalk. Orson downsized into a fourth-floor flat in a nearby brownstone on West Seventy-Seventh Street, a “sunny quiet friendly old room,” shabbier than the “efficiency” apartment but close enough to shops and Broadway. He worried about the $7.50 weekly rent, and whether he should send his mail by special delivery, or settle for a three-cent stamp. He wired to Dr. Bernstein, pleading for money.

Just as his spirits began to plummet, a “cheering letter” from the Hills lifted him up again, pushing him back to work on the commercial thriller and coaxing him to keep looking for producers for “Marching Song.” He met with the reader who had “covered” the John Brown play for producer William Harris, who told him the script was “extremely interesting” but not the kind of subject Harris backed. Again, he despaired. “I went over to the Riverside and stared moodily at the deep black water,” he wrote to Skipper. Then one happy day, Orson managed to coax Ben Boyar to the telephone, and Boyar promised to read “Marching Song” and get back to him.

Another “cheering” epistle arrived from Hortense Hill, saying she hoped Orson wasn’t feeling too lonely in New York. “No, I’m not lonely,” he replied. “Strangely enough I haven’t been a bit. A little bitter perhaps, inert rather, and cheerless, but the thriller has kept my nose to its own peculiar grindstone, and I haven’t minded. My dread of New York has been supplanted by a half contemptuous affection. Broadway has become for me the most transparent and the least dazzling of all main streets—inclusive of Indianapolis and Kenosha—[and] the desirability of the end for which we are all striving here, grows more and more dubious.

“It’s cold out,” he ended, “My hands are still numb. Too numb to type properly.”

October became November. Orson lived according to his mood swings. Sometimes he pinched pennies; at other times he dined well. “I gotta be comfortable!” he wrote to Skipper. He spent a few precious dollars to join Actors Equity, in case he lucked into an acting job, but warned Hill not to tell Dr. Bernstein, whom he constantly dunned for advances on his allowance.

A wire from Dr. Bernstein bailed him out financially one last time, but Bernstein also scolded him: “I do hope you won’t continue to waste your youth aimlessly.” His guardian dangled a fresh possibility: John Clayton, out of regular work since the Chicago Civic Opera closed in 1931, was on the verge of signing a contract to produce a twenty-six-episode aviation drama series for WLS, the Sears Roebuck radio station in Chicago, an affiliate of the Blue Network of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Clayton had told Bernstein he envisioned a continuing part for Orson. Orson was tempted—it was his first job prospect in months—and yet he knew that accepting it would mean returning to Chicago with his tail between his legs.

Orson stalled before replying, asking for Roger Hill’s all-important opinion. He and Hortense had both loved the presidential campaign musical
Of Thee I Sing
, but on learning that Skipper didn’t think much of it, he was forced to rethink his own view. Maybe the problem, he wrote to the headmaster, was the play’s focus on the political scene. “Nothing could be as funny as American Politics except American Politics,” he suggested, musing that perhaps “The Newspaper Business” would make for a better Big American backdrop. “Whoa!” Orson scribbled, “There’s an idea! The newspaper business as an operetta. A
Front Page
[set] to Gershwin, only more so!!!!!”

He saw as many plays and movies as time and money allowed. The films he made sure to catch that fall included Ernst Lubitsch’s
Trouble in Paradise
, with Samson Raphaelson’s script; and Jean Cocteau’s avant-garde
Blood of a Poet.
Orson admired Roman Bohnen, who had been a star of the Goodman Theatre in its heyday, and he made a point of getting to Jackson Heights in Queens, where a small left-wing theater group was presenting Bohnen’s new message play,
The Incubator
, about a delinquent who is “incubated” as a criminal in a state school for youthful offenders. Also in New York was another player from the Goodman—actress Katherine Krug, the wife of Ashton Stevens—who’d recently been hired as a Broadway understudy and was now using her married name, Florence Stevens, professionally.

Florence Stevens (FloFlo to close friends, including Orson) was “a dear,” Orson wrote to the Hills. “She’s my salvation. We’ve been out together a good deal, shows and what-not.” He and the actress preferred sophisticated theater- and moviegoing, heading to the Criterion, for example, to watch the sensational German film
Mädchen in Uniform
, with its pro-lesbian storyline and all-female cast.

Ashton Stevens visited New York in mid-November to see his wife on Broadway, where she had stepped into a billed role in the new Edgar Wallace mystery
Criminal at Large
, and to review fall cultural offerings for the
Chicago American.
Orson accompanied him to the Whistler retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother
was on loan from the Louvre, and other major Whistlers were juxtaposed with masterpieces by his contemporaries and the next generation of artists. The two gazed at Whistler’s
White Girl
, and the painting that hung opposite from it, Eugene Speicher’s portrait of Katharine Cornell in George Bernard Shaw’s
Candida
, her signature role.