Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (39 page)

“I’m sorry, but this absolutely exhausts all recollection,” Welles concluded.

There were no letters from Skipper in Barcelona. Taking this as a sign of disapproval, Orson booked passage on a slow ship stopping frequently along the south and west coasts of Spain, and rededicated himself to writing.

The only draft he had completed and mailed was
Julius Caesar.
Now he plunged into
The Merchant of Venice
, pushing himself through the nights. By the time the vessel reached Malaga he had made progress—but once again the process of adapting Shakespeare proved daunting. “Besides being a rip-snorting romance, moving and hair-tingling from the first entrance to the last exeunt,”
The Merchant of Venice
“is one of the most imperishable collections of poetic writing ever produced. God! I hate gooing it up!”

Dawn was “sweetening the sultry Spanish night” as he labored on
Merchant
, he wrote to Skipper. He had “never worked so hard” and “produced so little. I gave up trips and things, I really did, everything except the most perfunctory sight-seeing; since I left Tangier I’ve stuck in this wretched little bake-house of a boat and screwed my face into granny-knots.” Orson prodded Hill for reassurance, worrying about the “limitation of space, and the kids’ lack of a stage vocabulary, and the dangers of scaring them off us with anything,
anything
, faintly esoteric or syllabled.” When his nerves overwhelmed him, or he needed a distraction, Orson toyed with other projects: a one-act play; a Greek tragedy (“with masks and a good company of six actors,” he wrote to Hill); a “Big Idea for filming
Treasure Island.”
¹⁶

Late at night in the Malaga harbor, however, he decided he was closing in on an authoritative approach to
The Merchant of Venice.
His working draft was “messy, pasted, scratched and scribbled,” he conceded, the stage directions were “garbagey,” the “descriptions of emotions . . . simply bloody, there’s no defending that.” But his writing had begun to sharpen; the latest scenes evinced real quality. “
The drawings are going to be hot!
” he wrote proudly. His once tentative grasp of this play was now “very good—O, infinitely better than it was on
Julius Caesar.”

As dawn approached, Orson completed his draft of
Merchant
, just in time to mail the pages to the headmaster (“sailing time, mailing time”). He was still undecided about what the third play should be:
Hamlet
?
Twelfth Night
?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
?
Much Ado About Nothing
? He would think it over as he sailed on to the river port of Seville, writing a chatty letter to Hortense.

Seville was a travel poster come alive, one of the most enchanting cities in Spain, its ancient culture a patchwork of Roman and Moorish traditions. Orson left the ship to meet with Dr. Walter Starkie, professor of Romance languages at Trinity College, who was on the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre. Orson had heard Starkie speak in Chicago on the beauties and mysteries of Spain, and had met him in Dublin.

A scholar of Gypsies who roamed Spain with them and spoke their Romany language fluently, Starkie was at work on a new volume of
Raggle Taggle
, his ongoing series of picaresque travelogue books. The latest installment would cover his wanderings in Barbary, Andalusia, and La Mancha, and life in the Triana quarter of Seville.

Triana was “the home of song and dancing,” as Starkie wrote, with Gypsies, flamenco artists, and bullfighters idling in the parks and cafés. Orson was instantly enamored of the sleepless quarter, with its orange blossom scent and constantly thrumming guitars. With his pulp-fiction earnings easing his financial concerns, he took a flat above a “fuzz castle” (bordello), with money left over to buy drinks for “half of Andalusia,” as he told Barbara Leaming.

Just across the Puente de Triana, spanning the wide Guadalquivir River, lay the city proper and its landmark bullring, La Maestranza. Seville was “the city of the bull,” and spring was the season for bullfighting fever. Orson had just read Ernest Hemingway’s
Death in the Afternoon,
celebrating the rituals and traditions of bullfighting. He mingled “with the bull-fighting set and soon was helping out ‘backstage,’ ” Peter Noble wrote.

Seville was the setting of another of Orson’s elusive legends. Did the eighteen-year-old really take bullfighting lessons from a toreador at a local ranch, briefly launching himself in “a succession of pitiful bullfights” (Leaming’s phrase) in which he billed himself as “El Americano”? And when he failed as a bullfighter, did Orson really relaunch himself as a picador, who stabs the bull with a lance from on horseback to weaken and goad it? Did the scars he proudly exhibited to interviewers in later years truly originate in the bullring?

Simon Callow, skeptical about the tale, pointed out that Orson’s bullfighting wounds “tended to travel a little” from one interview to the next. Welles told Leaming that at one point rowdy audience members had “showered him with beer bottles (from which he still bears a slight scar on his upper lip).” According to Kenneth Tynan, however, it was his thigh that suffered injury. When David Frost interviewed the filmmaker, the injury migrated to his neck—and there were “others” he’d rather not bare, Orson hinted, since Frost’s show was “a family type of program.”

What to believe? It’s true that Orson lived in Seville for only a month or so, but he had already proved he could pack a lot of frenetic activity into the briefest time. Seventy-five years after Orson came to Seville, two European filmmakers spent months chasing the truth, and their documentary
El Americano
insists that Orson participated in at least four bullfights as “El Americano,” with bulls he purchased with his pulp-fiction windfall. (Paying for the bulls was one shortcut to becoming a matador.)

There’s no question that Seville initiated him into the world of bullfighting and launched his many friendships with the bravest matadors and a lifelong reverence for the sport that soured only toward the end, when he began to feel pity for the bulls. Over time Welles would draw close to Antonio Ordoñez, a top bullfighter of his era, whom Ernest Hemingway chronicled admiringly in
The Dangerous Summer
, and also the Peruvian
torera
Conchita Cintrón, one of the greatest women ever to command the ring, for whose autobiography Welles supplied the introduction.

Years later, while shooting
Mr. Arkadin
in Madrid, Welles habitually stretched out his lunch hour to attend the bullfights of his famous friends. One time, the filmmaker returned after witnessing one of Ordoñez’s storied turns in the ring, a riveting bullfight that was already the buzz of the city. His assistant, Juan Cobos, asked Welles about what he had seen. “Juan, you know how much I love bullfighting,” Welles answered solemnly. “It was an extraordinary
faena.
Ordonez’s art was so great that I was deeply moved. Tears came to my eyes, and for a time I couldn’t see well for the beauty of that magnificent performance.”

Working on the same film, an elderly assistant producer challenged Welles—saying, as a native Andalusian who prided himself on his knowledge of bullfighting, that he doubted the legend of “El Americano.” “In the history of a towering art,” he had heard Orson boast, “there can be very few people who were as bad as I was.” But if Orson were as poor a toreador as he claimed, the Andalusian said, surely he would have heard of him! Welles roared with laughter.

Orson’s one-month idyll in Seville also established his lifelong love affair with Spain. Along with the magnificent food and wine, Spain was the land of Cervantes and Don Quixote. “[Don Quixote] is better than any single creation in Homer or Tolstoi or Shakespeare,” Welles once said, “this heraldic creature . . . this tattered, battered, divine old dreaming fool.” Spain was the inspiration for monumental painters and artists such as Velásquez, Goya, and Picasso, whom Orson revered, the home of epic explorers like Cortés, Pizarro, Magellan, and Amerigo Vespucci.

Seville was very diverting, and once again the Shakespeare project was put on hold until Orson finally made his way to Lisbon and departed the Iberian peninsula in the first week of June, with just enough money left to fund the voyage home. He would have to make up for the lost time while crossing the Atlantic, and he did. He arrived back in Chicago with solid drafts of the three Shakespeare plays (“edited for reading and arranged for staging”) that would form the eventual book:
Julius Caesar
,
The Merchant of Venice
, and
Twelfth Night.

CHAPTER 9

1933–1934

The Saga Begins

Back in Chicago by mid-June after three months away, Orson planned to spend the rest of the summer revising and polishing the Shakespeare book. The remaining work included finishing the scene designs and illustrations that would accompany the text. “He turned out literally thousands of detailed sketches, most of them crumpled and thrown away in angry frustration by a self-critical young artist,” Roger Hill recalled. The headmaster, who was summering in Michigan, consulted with Orson by phone and letter.

Without the Ravinia music festival to attract him to Highland Park, Orson took a room on Rush Street, a few blocks from the Newberry Library, furnishing it with a rug, a daybed, a wicker chair, and a folding table, all from Dr. Bernstein’s attic. Orson sketched his designs for the book on a large drawing board, working through the night and sleeping until late morning, when his guardian woke him for “brunch—my lunch, his breakfast” (Bernstein’s words) at the Tavern Club.

All the Tavern Club regulars were still in place: newspapermen Lloyd Lewis, Charles Collins, John Clayton, Ned Moore, and Ashton Stevens. In that summer of 1933, much of the talk revolved around the Century of Progress Exposition, a world’s fair that had opened on near South Side parkland in May, as Orson was acquiring his bullfighting scars in Seville. The fair’s most conspicuous symbol, and one of its most popular attractions, was the Sky Ride, which ran along the shoreline of Lake Michigan and carried passengers up high from one end of the fairgrounds to the other. Clayton was now involved with public relations for the Century of Progress Exposition.

One night in early August, Clayton dropped by Rush Street and coaxed Orson away from his worktable to a party at Hazel Felman’s house. The guest list would be a who’s who of local arts and society, Clayton promised—including Roger and Hortense Hill, who were passing through Chicago. Felman was a contemporary of Orson’s mother and, like her, a star on the women’s club circuit. She composed musical settings for the works of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and other well-known poets. Felman had just performed at the Century of Progress.

During the party, Orson found himself squeezed into one end of a room where people were taking turns on the piano. He was discussing his abandoned play about John Brown with Lloyd Lewis, the
Chicago Daily News
drama critic and Civil War expert, when a reedy professorial type eased into the corner with them. The newcomer asked Orson if he was a pianist waiting his turn. “No,” Orson replied haughtily, looking the man up and down, he was
not
a pianist. (“Here’s another queen!” Barbara Leaming says he was thinking.)

By a surprising “jump of association,” the professorial type later recalled, he asked if Orson was “the extraordinary young American actor” who had starred on the Dublin stage, and about whom he’d read so much in the Chicago press. Yes, Orson admitted. “I
used
to be an actor,” he added. “Now I am an author.” In fact, Orson explained, he was currently working on a new guidebook to staging Shakespeare plays for high school teachers and students. “Let’s get out of here and have a talk,” said the man, introducing himself as Thornton Wilder.

It seems incredible that Orson did not recognize the tall, bespectacled Wilder, who was as famous as anyone in Chicago, or on the larger American literary scene. Wilder had earned his first Pulitzer Prize for his novel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
in 1928, and taught English and classic literature at the University of Chicago. Even if Orson had never seen Wilder’s photograph, he would have glimpsed the author at the Drama League tournament in the spring of 1932, when
The Long Christmas Dinner
, a playlet telescoping ninety years of Christmas dinners into a single act, had one of its first public performances. This was the same Drama League tournament where Orson directed the Todd boys in
Twelfth Night
, competing (and winning) in another category.

The meeting between Wilder and Welles was probably contrived by John Clayton. Wilder was intrigued by Orson, whose height was towering (he even towered over Wilder), and whom he later recalled as “rather pudgy-faced . . . with a wing of brown hair falling into his eyes and a vague Oxford epigrammatic manner.” Wilder bore Orson away to his rooms at the University of Chicago, where the two enjoyed a “galvanizing” talk (Wilder’s word). They conversed late into the night, warming to each other as they discovered shared interests and a similar background (both of them were born in Wisconsin—Wilder in Madison). Orson’s vaguely Oxonian manner was a pose derived “from his misery,” Wilder decided, “and [it] soon drops under a responsible pair of eyes like mine.” Orson might have an outsize personality, Wilder thought, but he also possessed depth of mind and character.