Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Orson’s father lingered in Chicago, tidying up his wife’s financial affairs, before rushing off to join Watson, Bernstein, and a group of Chicago art lovers as they sailed from Boston to England on June 10. From there, the group went on to Spain, France, Austria, and Italy, while Orson spent the first part of the summer with his cousins at Hillside.

  “Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks,” Jack Amberson says poignantly to his nephew George Amberson Minafer, after misfortune has humbled the Ambersons, in Booth Tarkington’s novel. Uncle Jack (played by Ray Collins) says the same thing to George (Tim Holt) in Orson Welles’s film of The Magnificent Ambersons.

  Time and money were the two bogeymen of Welles’s career, and he battled both in grand style. His mother’s unexpected death taught him about the exigencies of time. From his mother, Welles adopted the view that art was ephemeral, time fickle, and money a mere tool, as mundane as a shovel. Time was not an enemy—it was a waiting game—and he would make an art of waiting and playing the game. Even the life of an artist was not to be glamorized: there were only a few immortal artists, she taught him, and it would be immodest to think of himself as one. Despite his great ego, he never altered this view.

  As a child, Orson had been torn from Kenosha and shuttled between the homes of his estranged parents, both of whom he loved and both of whom, in their individual ways, ceaselessly traveled. His rootlessness, his quickness to pack his bags and escape, would turn him into the most nomadic of American filmmakers. “Orson never wanted to face unpleasantness,” Dr. Maurice Bernstein observed decades later, and the habit of skirting unpleasantness could be traced to his itinerant boyhood and his quick removal from Chicago after the death of his mother.

  A boy’s love for his lost mother is a motif that crops up in a number of Orson Welles films. The scenes cited by most scholars occur in his two earliest pictures. One is The Magnificent Ambersons, in which George Amberson Minafer visits his mother, Isabel, on her deathbed—the rippling-lace lighting here is sublime. George has behaved abominably toward his mother, yet even in her delirium Isabel thinks only of her son: “Darling, did you get something to eat?” she asks tenderly, “Are you sure you didn’t catch cold coming home?” Her eyes follow him as he leaves in shame, and Isabel’s ensuing death takes place offscreen, just as Orson must have been too young to have been in the hospital room when his own mother died late at night. Delivering the news, George’s aunt Fanny wraps him in a reassuring embrace:

  “She loved you. She loved you.”

  The role Orson assigned to mothers in Citizen Kane is even more complicated. “There’s just not any connection” between his real-life mother and the mother of Charles Foster Kane, Welles insisted to Peter Bogdanovich. Beatrice Welles was “very beautiful, very generous and very tough,” Welles said, and “rather austere with me.” By comparison, Mary Kane, played by Agnes Moorehead, is a hard-bitten countrywoman.

  But neither Welles nor Bogdanovich mentioned the second mother to appear in the film: Kane’s first wife, Emily Monroe Norton, whom Kane rejects in a climactic scene at his supposed “love nest.” Later, the divorced Emily is killed along with her and Charles’s little boy, Charles Kane Jr., in an offscreen automobile accident. Emily Kane was played by Ruth Warrick, who—like Dolores Costello, playing Isabel in The Magnificent Ambersons—evokes the ladylike Beatrice Ives Welles. Charles Kane Jr. is eight when he and his mother perish in Citizen Kane, close to Welles’s age when Beatrice died.

  Bogdanovich tried to argue the point with Welles, reminding him of the sequence when Kane first meets Susan Alexander, his second wife in the film. Their meeting derails Kane’s trip to a warehouse, where he intends to go through his dead mother’s effects “in search of my youth.” Later in the sequence, when Susan and Kane are talking in her apartment, she tells him that her mother always thought she should sing grand opera. “It’s just what, you know, mothers are like,” Susan explains sweetly. Kane hesitates, then replies, “Yes” (“in a sad reflective tone, full of memories,” in Bogdanovich’s words). Following an awkward pause between them, Kane asks Susan to play the piano and sing for him.

  Kane really doesn’t know what mothers are like, does he? After all, his own mother sent him away.

  “It’s one of my favorite moments in the picture,” Bogdanovich told Welles.

  “No, Peter,” Welles insisted, refusing to nibble. “I have no Rosebuds.”

  Equidistant between Rochester and Buffalo, Wyoming, New York, was a picture-postcard village in the heart of Middlebury township in Wyoming County. Settled as a “water cure” spa in 1851, the Hillside estate was a family vacation home before a daughter, Lydia Avery Coonley Ward, a Chicagoan, turned it into a summer colony for artists, writers, and musicians. After her death, Dudley Crafts Watson became one of a group of devotees who kept Hillside active.

  Hillside was far from Chicago. Orson had been close, from earliest memory, to his Watson cousins Augusta (born in 1910), Emily (1912), and Marjorie (1915)—perhaps especially Emily, who was slightly older than he and a mischief maker. The Watson girls were a captive audience for Orson, who stayed awake long after the grown-ups, spinning ghost stories enlivened by simple theatrical effects he was already shrewdly mastering: thunder and lightning, a flashlight, and a magician’s voice for mind reading and hypnosis. “His [character for the] radio program ‘The Shadow’ was born that summer under my daughters’ bed, after they had gone to bed at night, scaring them to death,” recalled Dudley Crafts Watson.

  Young Orson had other eye-opening adventures in the girls’ bedroom, he claimed later. “Emily Watson introduced me to the mysteries of playing doctor,” Welles said. “But she was full of what I later discovered to be misinformation.” Limited and “fumbling” though they may have been, in Barbara Leaming’s words, these early experiences left the young boy “with a keen appetite for more.” A few more years would pass before Dr. Maurice Bernstein tried to explain the facts of life to him. Orson always laughed to recall the doctor’s abashed demonstration of the mechanics. “He drew a circle on a blackboard and that was the end of the evening,” Welles said.

  Besides his girl cousins, Orson’s playmates at Hillside included the vacationing children of the family of Aga Khan III, who had come to Wyoming in part to foster Prince Aly Khan’s interest in racehorses. Nine-year-old Orson and thirteen-year-old Aly Khan, who crossed paths here for the first time, would grow up to marry the same woman, Rita Hayworth, in the 1940s. “We’ve known each other all our lives,” Welles liked to boast.

  By the time Dick Welles returned from Europe, he had spent many days and nights discussing his son’s future with Dudley Crafts Watson and Dr. Bernstein. Orson was a demanding boy, and while he was perfectly capable of entertaining himself for long periods of time, he thrived on input and interaction. (In another era he might have been labeled “hyperactive.”) He scoffed at afternoon naps, and after his mother’s death avoided going to sleep as long as possible after dark. He play-acted through the night in his bedroom, with magic, puppets, makeup, and costumes to keep himself entertained.

  Perhaps Beatrice had indulged her youngest son by giving him such a long leash, and by immersing him in her world of performance and self-expression, yet her constancy and values also had shaped him into a bright and personable boy. Everyone felt beholden to her.

  In his early fifties, Dick Welles was feeling the weight of age. His mother, now approaching eighty and living alone at Rudolphsheim (her second husband had died in 1913), would be no help to him in raising the boy; at family get-togethers, she long had made it known that she felt Beatrice was pampering Orson with her dalliance in the arts instead of giving him a more practical upbringing.

  The other two men felt that Dick Welles should continue to raise Orson in a way that honored Beatrice’s priorities, and they promised to help as best they could. Watson traveled even more frequently than Dick Welles, but young Orson could and did spend long hours in “Uncle” Dudley’s care
at the Art Institute of Chicago, playing detective with his girl cousins, slipping out into the skylights over the galleries, prowling around the narrow solid flooring while avoiding the expanses of glass. As for Dr. Bernstein, still childless, he doted on the young boy, seeing in Orson the possible fulfillment of Beatrice’s artistic promise. According to Welles, Bernstein believed that “I was my mother and I kept the flame.” The doctor even scolded the boy for not mourning his mother enough. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mother,” Orson told Barbara Leaming; it was just that “I didn’t love her the way he did.”

  If Dr. Bernstein carried a torch for Beatrice, he also felt a responsibility toward Dick Welles. Bernstein and Welles had established an awkward friendship, but by now something else bridged their differences. Evidence suggests they also had a doctor-patient relationship.

  Peter Noble’s book about Orson, which was virtually ghosted by Bernstein, states that “an illness late in his life” had led to Dick Welles’s “addiction to gin.” This may sound like an overly sympathetic diagnosis, but it was grounded in contemporary medical practice: in the early twentieth century, many physicians prescribed gin as a kind of herbal pain relief, often blending it with bitter medicinal quinine. The famous drink that resulted, gin and tonic, was thought to offer relief from diseases like malaria, and to calm heart palpitations. Orson’s father may have been self-medicating to ameliorate his atrial fibrillation—a condition that would recur in his sons half a century later.

  Neither Dick Welles nor Dr. Bernstein alone could handle Orson, but together the former husband and the bachelor physician would do their best. After bringing Orson home from Hillside to Chicago, they resolved to preserve the family’s summer routine, taking the boy back to Grand Detour, where Charlie Sheffield was finally getting ready to sell his hotel. After a few weeks, Dr. Bernstein picked Orson up to bring him to Ravinia, where Ned and Hazel Moore would take their turn as increasingly important members of his extended surrogate family.

  At the end of the summer Dr. Bernstein moved from his East Chicago Street address into an apartment shared with Dick Welles on Cambridge Street in the River North neighborhood. He and Dick never became soul-baring friends, however—in the nearly one hundred pages of cursive notes Bernstein kept for his own planned biography of Orson, he could only write (inaccurately) that “Dick Welles was born in Kansas.” But the unlikely roommates were determined to join forces in raising young Orson. Their first major decision was to enroll the nine-year-old in a public school near the University of Chicago. Dick, the senior partner in every way, “felt that by going to a public school, [Orson] would come in contact with boys of his own age and take part in their games,” recalled Bernstein. Dick Welles himself went to work every day; he now listed his profession as “stockbroker,” though mainly he tended to his own stocks while giving investment advice to friends. Bernstein, according to his own recollection, agreed to drive Orson to school in the morning and “call for him when school was out.”

  The public school experiment was unsuccessful. “Orson did not fit in with the usual boys,” the doctor recalled; he didn’t join in sports and games at recess, and he was taunted. And there was another reason Orson didn’t last long: “I persistently pretended to be sick,” the filmmaker recalled years later. “One afternoon, upon returning from school, I put the thermometer on the hot water bottle, which moved Dadda to send me to the hospital where they took out my appendix. I kept saying, ‘Wait a minute, I’m feeling better.’ Nobody would listen.” Bernstein always insisted that Orson really did have appendicitis, and over the years the story led to a running argument between Pookles and Dadda.

  Orson went home to stretch out his recovery, and Orson at home was a handful. Before he was old enough to go out on his own, one of the men had to escort him to an art store for paints, brushes, sketch pads, and easels; to a bookstore for the poetry, plays, novels, and works of history and philosophy the boy soaked up; to a magic shop next to the Princess Theatre; to the museum, where he’d clock in with “Uncle” Dudley for a few hours; to the opera, symphony, latest moving pictures, touring plays, and vaudeville shows.

  Dr. Bernstein filled Beatrice’s role in the partnership. At home, the doctor read Orson’s school assignments, or original works—often verse. Young Orson’s precocious writing and speaking abilities, so reminiscent of his mother, were all the more impressive to Bernstein, for whom English was a second language. Insecure about his own writing, the doctor needed a collaborator for the one piece of medical research he published, and even when he wrote simple business letters a secretary touched up his imperfect grammar and spelling.

  Later, presenting himself as the authority on Orson’s boyhood, Bernstein made great claims for the genius of his young charge. Bernstein was undoubtedly sincere, but he was a publicist at heart, and many of his stories were flights of fancy. Young Orson may have been fascinated with the theater and may have been a prodigy, but he did not at the age of eight or nine dash off a treatise called “The Universal History of Drama,” a piece Bernstein insisted was “something of a masterpiece even had it been written by someone twenty years his senior.” Nor did young Orson craft a searching essay on Goethe or Nietzsche. “I’m an anti-Nietzsche fellow, and I certainly never wrote that,” Welles told David Frost. “It sounds like one of those stories.” Later in life, Welles batted away questions about his supposed boy-genius masterworks like annoying houseflies. “No,” he’d simply say.

  The boy’s artistic abilities must have seemed doubly remarkable to Dr. Bernstein, who revered the arts but was never an artist himself, playing the cello only as an enthusiast. The doctor applauded all the boy’s magic tricks and puppet shows, took special delight in his improvised poetry and his artwork, and was rarely bored watching young Orson perform huge chunks of Shakespeare, including all the famous soliloquies.

  Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein were Orson’s first producers, surrounding the boy with the finest stagecraft money could buy: high-quality puppet theater paraphernalia, the best magic and makeup kits, with a wide array of face paints, mustaches, beards, and wigs. King Lear was one of his favorite Shakespeare characters, partly because of the elaborate costumes and makeup it required. (The young boy could recite “any speech from King Lear,” Bernstein insisted.) Some Welles experts have seen this penchant for Lear as a youthful obsession with growing old and the inevitability of death. “He spent his youth pretending to be old, dying men,” Peter Conrad wrote in Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life. But Orson was also instinctively following the age-old theatrical practice of building his characterization and performance from “externals.” The credo of many actors is that a physical lie begets a psychological lie, and Orson followed this credo as an actor and a director—though hardly unwaveringly. Being a distinct physical type himself, he was acutely aware of the physical appearance of characters.

  To balance his mother’s “ultra-artistic” influence, Dr. Bernstein later told Peter Noble, Dick Welles introduced Orson to newsmen such as the Chicago-born Bud Fisher, creator of Mutt and Jeff, and George McManus, who drew Bringing Up Father, both of them syndicated Hearst cartoonists. Oil painting was an admirable high art, but cartooning seemed a more practical career goal, and Orson took his father’s views seriously. The boy started carrying around a pencil and notepaper, sketching people he encountered and places he visited. This became a lifelong habit, and Orson frequently adorned his letters to family and friends with funny little caricatures and line drawings of sights and landscapes.

  With young Orson in tow, Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein returned to New York City soon after the New Year. Dr. Bernstein wanted to bring the boy to the American debut of Igor Stravinsky, who was performing his piano concertos with the New York Philharmonic in early January 1925. Afterward, Bernstein took young Orson backstage to meet the Russian-born composer. Still later, after the concert and backstage visit, Bernstein recalled, the nine-year-old “discoursed intelligently on the evening’s music” to listeners in
the lobby of the Waldorf Hotel. One of those who overheard him that night was a petite young brunette actress, Agnes Moorehead; she never forgot the intelligent boy, with his “shock of black hair” and blue blazer. “He was fantastic,” she recalled, “the way he kept explaining his feelings about the concert.” A decade later, the actress—who graduated with honors from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and forged her career on radio in the 1930s—came to mind as Orson pondered who should play Charles Foster Kane’s mother, the hard-bitten countrywoman, but with “a strong face, warm and kind,” according to the script. Less than a year after the death of his own mother, he had met her fictional counterpart.

  On that same trip, Dick Welles brought Orson to see the famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini at the Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue. Afterward, father and son paid a visit backstage, and Houdini graciously showed the boy a fundamental card trick known as “the pass” or “the shift,” in which a card placed in the middle of a deck resurfaces as the top card.

  Houdini, billed that year as the “World Famous Author, Lecturer, and Acknowledged Head of Mystifiers,” was at the height of his fame. The highlight of his Hippodrome show was his escape from a wooden box that was pierced by iron rods. Orson insisted on seeing the feat a second night, and Dr. Bernstein took him. This time, when they went backstage, the magician revealed to young Orson the secret of one of his favorite handkerchief tricks, cautioning the boy that a good magician practiced a newly learned trick a thousand times before performing it in public.