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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Within just a few months, Orson had starred in and designed the sets of two holiday programs and spoken out controversially at a school assembly. His teachers saw no reason to wait until the end of the year before promoting him to fifth grade.

  The Capital Times caught wind of the “unusual child” from Chicago and dispatched a reporter to profile him for a special section on public school activities. (One wonders who tipped the editors off: Professor Mueller, Dr. Bernstein, even young Orson himself?) Needing a photograph to accompany the article, the newspaper arranged for Orson to pose for a portrait specialist from De Longe’s Studio in Madison. The boy phoned Dr. Bernstein to discuss what he should wear for his first publicity still, deciding on “an eccentric Oscar Wilde tie,” in Barbara Leaming’s words, to “afford a proper image for his public.”

  The first published photograph of Orson Welles appeared on February 19, 1926, in the afternoon edition of the Capital Times, showing a grinning chipmunk-cheeked boy wearing a foppish sort of ascot. “Cartoonist, Actor, Poet and only 10” was the headline of Orson Welles’s first newspaper interview. The precocious young student, identified by the anonymous reporter as “Orson G. Welles,” was said to be “already attracting the attention of some of the greatest literary men and artists in the country.”

  This was the first contemporaneous outside account of the boy, and the witness was impressed. Orson G. had a “fluent command of language,” according to the Capital Times, incorporating “a surprising number of large words equal to those of the average adult” in his everyday speech. Moreover, he “reads constantly,” evincing tastes ranging “far beyond his years,” encompassing the “old masters in art and literature” along with “the difficult subjects of philosophy and history.”

  The boy from Chicago was “adept at cartooning,” but he was also a natural-born poet and actor, especially gifted “in the art of make-up and impersonations.” Noting that Orson had dominated the storytelling sessions at Camp Indianola the summer before, the newspaper reported that he might grow “particularly interested in one of the characters” when improvising a story—so much so that he felt compelled “to paint the character,” seizing his oil paints and “making a study that, though it is amateurish in technique, shows a keen insight and interpretation.”

  The boy had written up one of his campfire stories, which he called “The Yellow Panther,” but the reporter said that the story was too long to be included in the interview. However, the Capital Times did give readers a sample of Orson’s poetry, which was “entirely spontaneous, with a depth of thought far beyond the ordinary childish jingle.” The sample was a verse Orson said he had dictated to Professor Mueller just a few nights earlier.

  It was titled “The Passing of a Lord”:

  He sat upon a satin chair.

  A Lord was he and had that air;

  About his neck was golden fringe,

  His trousers ironed without a singe.

  At the right of him a table stood,

  Made of the finest Circassian wood;

  Covered it was with a beaded mat,

  and upon it reclined a Persian cat.

  His wig was powdered to the last degree.

  and silver buckles were at his knees.

  The window was thrown open

  and let in the air.

  The Lord sat still and was unaware.

  A moment before there had been a shot.

  The aim was true but the Lord knew not;

  The next day they found him in a pool of his blood,

  His fine clothes torn and bespattered with mud.

  Not bad, and within it the glimmer of an idea—“the passing of a lord”—that would open Citizen Kane. But the Capital Times stopped short of calling the boy a “genius,” and the reporter conceded that Orson had at least one flaw: a self-confessed weakness in arithmetic, “which he regard as a serious bugbear in his life.” Still, the Capital Times feature concluded auspiciously: “Orson has many ambitions. At the present time he cannot decide what he will be when he grows up.”

  Curiously, the Capital Times article did not mention the aspect of the boy’s stay in Madison that would later become notorious. While living in the care of Professor Mueller, according to biographer Peter Noble, young Orson spent “many hours” with “eminent psychologists and medical men” who were studying child prodigies. (In another, less sensational account, the experts in question were Mueller’s graduate students.) According to Noble, the local brainiacs shouted questions at Orson, such as “What first comes into your mind when you hear the word ‘Teddybear’?” To which he reportedly responded: “Oscar Wilde’s epigram—‘A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ ”

  In her authorized biography, informed by her interviews with the filmmaker, Barbara Leaming wrote that Orson embellished the nightly dreams he shared with the scholars. “Since he’d been brought to town as a prodigy, he’d better have a prodigy’s dreams,” Leaming wrote. “Afraid that his own would be much too dull, he routinely memorized dreams from the case studies in Herr Professor’s library at home.”

  Published accounts differ on this question of young Orson’s time under the watchful eye of Madison’s academic elite. According to Noble, the boy was viewed “as an obvious child genius, another Mozart or Menuhin,” and he had “the life of a circus exhibit, with his every reaction noted and all his pronouncements filed.” But the Capital Times article did not refer to Mueller as a professor, and if Mueller was studying unusual children, he never published his research on the subject. (Indeed, he never completed his PhD in psychology; according to university records, his unfinished thesis was on Goethe and Young Werther.)

  Welles himself later said that he developed qualms about Professor Mueller, worrying that his accounts of his off-color dreams, and perhaps all that talk about Oscar Wilde, had aroused unwonted passions in his host. Mueller studied Orson “a bit too keenly,” according to Leaming, and made the boy “the object of homosexual advances.” This, according to Leaming, was already “nothing new to Orson who, having been frightened and ashamed the first few times it happened, soon knew just what to say when the bohemians who frequented his mother’s salon made their move.”

  Years later, reflecting on his time in Madison, Welles could not even bring himself to identify Mueller by name. He referred to the head of Camp Indianola only as “Herr Professor.” “From my earliest childhood, I was the Lillie Langtry of the older homosexual set,” Welles said, explaining that many men had been attracted to him. “Everybody wanted me. I had a very bad way of turning these guys off. I thought it would embarrass them if I said I wasn’t homosexual, that it would be a rebuke, so I always had a headache. You know, I was an eternal virgin.”

  There is always the chance that Orson, at age ten, was reading more into such attentions than was there—that this boy who had lost his dominant mother and seen his father’s role in his life whittled down may have felt anxious and insecure about his sexuality as he neared puberty. He may have channeled his fears into intimations of homosexuality—even pedophilia, given the circumstances. But Orson certainly believed that he’d been an object of Mueller’s lust, repeating the charge more than once in interviews and also in his private conversations with Roger Hill. Though he would have friendships, and work comfortably, with many nonheterosexuals in his long career, homosexual traits were sometimes as much a bugbear for him as arithmetic.

  Just a few years after Orson’s interlude in Madison, as it happens, Mueller’s wife divorced him—accusing her husband of being a womanizer, not a homosexual. Lowell Frautschi, Orson’s camp supervisor, agreed that Mueller had an eye for ladies. “During the several years that I knew and worked for Frederick Mueller, usually in the company of males, most of whom were boys of varying ages, I never saw any gesture or expression, or heard any word, which would have indicated a sexual interest in young boys,” Frautschi said. Asked directly about Mueller’s alleged “homosexual advances” toward Orson, Frautschi s
aid simply, “I don’t believe it.”

  But Orson stuck to his story to the end of his life, insisting that his terror of Mueller finally prompted him to flee Madison once and for all. One day, he said, he climbed out a back window of the Mueller apartment at the corner of State and Frances, ran to the depot a few blocks away, and caught the train to Chicago. The runaway showed up unannounced on Dr. Bernstein’s doorstep a week or two before his eleventh birthday in May 1926. The doctor hurriedly wired to Dick Welles, who was vacationing in Trinidad.

  By this point, Orson’s own sexuality was undoubtedly stirring. Even before his father made it back to Chicago, the boy was caught up in another coming-of-age escapade, this time involving the young daughter of artist Beatrice S. Levy, who was affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago. Orson and Levy’s daughter, who was about his age, were engaged in some “innocent fooling around” in the Levys’ basement when her mother came home without warning and discovered them. Beatrice Levy blamed Orson for the episode; the embarrassed Dr. Bernstein was relieved to hand the boy over to his father.

  Orson may have contrived his return to Chicago to catch the last weekend of Harry Houdini’s run at the Princess Theater. His father was back in time to take him to the show as a treat for his eleventh birthday—but by now, another year older and wiser, Orson cast a more cynical eye on the “Master Mystifier.” “A squat little man in evening clothes,” Houdini marched onstage and ripped off the sleeves of his tailcoat. “A short sleeved tailcoat?” Welles mused years later. “Even as a kid, I realized the coarseness of it. It was supposed to be a sort of ‘nothing up my sleeve’ thing. Then, of course, he proceeded to perform a bunch of silly mechanical tricks that couldn’t have involved his sleeves at all.”

  Houdini’s style and patter were nothing compared with the Great Thurston’s. One third of Houdini’s magic was “awful stuff,” devices with buttons and sliding compartments. But the other two thirds featured daredevil escapes—including his famous trick of escaping from an upside-down position in a tank of water—which struck Welles as genuinely “thrilling.” Houdini also gave lectures on spiritualism and contact with the dead through spirit mediums, and the boy found these “riveting, like a perverse sort of revival meeting.” Orson loved the mentalism that the best magicians practiced, and mind reading and clairvoyance were part of his own growing bag of tricks.

  Welles couldn’t have known it, of course, but this would be Houdini’s last Chicago appearance; that fall, he would die of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix.

  Not long after they saw Houdini, Dick Welles and his son left to spend the summer in Grand Detour, where Dick was now the owner and proprietor of the Hotel Sheffield. (He had toyed with renaming it the Hotel Welles, but the name Sheffield was well known throughout northern Illinois, too valuable a brand name to sacrifice to ego.) He had purchased only the building—Charles Sheffield retained ownership of the surrounding land—but Orson’s father invested ten thousand dollars in a new stairway, a larger fireplace, and a modernized porch dining room. He also bought a general store just west of the hotel and renovated the upstairs to create a ballroom with a dance floor. “When I was little,” Orson told Peter Bogdanovich, “I used to sneak up at night and dance by moonlight with the dust rising from the floor.” An old stone barn was also remodeled into a stable for horses for the guests.

  At first, Dick Welles had announced a grand reopening for Christmas 1925, with plans to keep the hotel open all winter. But the winter weather was harsh, and there were few travelers. The true grand opening came in the summer of 1926, and it was a success. Dick Welles had finally made his fresh start, putting his time and attention into the Sheffield as he once had into Badger Brass. One of his innovations was enticing manufacturing groups such as the Illinois Lumbermen’s Association to hold their district meetings at the hotel. The Sheffield had a long-standing reputation for home-cooked food; now, at the height of Prohibition, Welles added homemade wine. Dick Welles made his own red vintage in the cellar for “quite a large and discerning patronage,” according to Henry C. Warner, a Dixon lawyer who handled the hotel transaction for Welles and Charlie Sheffield.

  Orson would later wax nostalgic over “the sounds of the folks in the bake-house and the smells” in the kitchen when he woke up in the mornings, causing at least one biographer to scoff at his imagination. But along with the basement wine from California grapes, the new Sheffield did offer house-baked bread, fresh vegetables from its own garden, cuts of meat delivered from nearby farms, and “Eastern oysters and Western trout,” in Welles’s phrase, cured in the yard smokehouse. The menu was overseen by the Sheffield’s longtime cook, Frances Wakenight, whose cream pies were beloved by travelers and whose Sunday suppers still drew crowds.

  Between Dick Welles’s new business recruits, loyal returning customers, and a steady stream of travelers, the Sheffield hosted more than a hundred guests on many weekends. That kept Dick busy, and most of the time Orson was free to roam the place unsupervised. He even had a space of his own: a one-room hut across the road that his father set up as an art studio and clubhouse. Besides drawing and painting supplies, the “art shack” was full of books, costumes, props, and expensive toys from Chicago, many of which the boy was fast outgrowing.

  The city boy did not always mix freely with the hotel’s rural neighbors. “Most people either disliked the boy or were afraid of him,” Peter Noble wrote, quoting Grand Detour resident Frederick J. Garner, “but there is no doubt that he made a tremendous impression.”

  One reason some townies gave him a wide berth was that Orson had a reputation for practical jokes. On one occasion, he built a stargazing contraption in his “art shack,” luring young customers across the highway and charging them a penny for the chance to press an eye against the homemade telescope and view the firmament. When a neighborhood kid, Bruno Catalina, complained “I don’t see no stars up there,” the rapscallion Orson gave him a kick in the behind, and both Catalina and the contraption collapsed in a heap. “I chased him into the hotel,” Catalina boasted to more than one interviewer over the years, “but he was too cowardly to come out. Finally I got my revenge. I stole one of his toy trains.”

  For others, however—especially his girl cousins from Grand Detour, and the daughters of other vacationers—Orson was good company, a sweet, attentive, and fun-filled boy. He and the Grand Detour girls took over the dance floor above the general store, donning wigs, beards, and hats for their pretend games. Orson was always leading the war against boredom, his own above all.

  One school of thought—shared in retrospect by Orson himself—was that he was a deeply serious boy who wished to skip the usual rites of passage through boyhood and go straight to adulthood. “Childhood seemed to me,” Welles told Bogdanovich, “a pestilential handicap.” But Orson was as much a silly prankster as his mother, and the idea of skipping boyhood was part of his self-mythology. Both boys, the silly one and the serious one, were layers of the same complicated person, who was like a set of Russian nesting dolls.

  Orson could make very different impressions on different people. The lawyer Henry C. Warner found him a chameleon: one moment surprisingly adult, the next a boy like any other. That summer, Warner took part in public observances of Memorial Day in Grand Detour. Young Orson volunteered to give a recitation, but “the gentleman in charge asked him not to be bothersome, and that, of course, they would not give him a place on the program,” Warner recalled. Skilled at forging alliances, Orson lobbied Warner, who knew his reputation as “quite a celebrated boy wonder.” Never mind, Warner assured him; just pop up on the platform next to me after a certain song is done, and I’ll introduce you. “Elatedly he did so,” Warner recalled.

  Orson performed “Sheridan’s Ride” by Thomas Buchanan Read, one of those story poems that had been drummed into him by his mother, the kind she used in her recitals. It depicted the Union general’s furious ride through the Virginia countryside rallying his troops for a decisive Civil War battle. (A mu
ltitalented artist after Orson’s heart, Read not only wrote the famous verse but also made a famous painting illustrating the ride.)

  Hurrah! Hurrah for Sheridan!

  Hurrah! Hurrah for horse and man!

  The boy’s exuberant performance was the highlight of the day.

  Twenty-one-year-old Richard appeared at the Sheffield for a short visit, asked for money, and then vanished again. Orson’s brother was capable of stretching a few dollars for weeks, but he also dunned his father endlessly, and Dick Welles was growing tired of it. Reading a newspaper story about a man with a similar name who was killed in a plane crash, Dick Welles made an unhappy remark that Orson never forgot: he wished the dead man were his son Richard.

  By comparison, for that reason and many others, Orson was a treasure.

  The question hanging overhead that summer was what school Orson would attend in September. After talking it over with Dr. Maurice Bernstein, Dick Welles decided that Madison was the end of their experiment with public schooling. A preparatory boarding school was the traditional answer in the Welles family, but both men knew that Orson would have to be won over. Together they decided on the Todd School for Boys, conveniently located halfway between Chicago and Grand Detour. Richard had foundered at the Todd School, but Dick and Beatrice had never blamed the school for Richard’s problems there; in fact, the Todd administrators had shown judgment and caution in sounding early alarms about his behavior.

  After receiving a letter of inquiry about the young applicant, the Todd School sent staff member Annetta Collins to Grand Detour to meet with Dick Welles in late August. Collins was the head of the Intermediate Department, the school’s four-year program for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds, and part of her job was to screen prospective students. Dick Welles greeted her politely at the hotel before directing her across the road to the “art shack,” where Orson awaited her. Collins interrupted the boy as he daubed at an easel. She gave him a précis of the school. He listened solemnly. Orson asked her if boys enjoyed freedom of creativity at the Todd School. He asked about the opportunities for painting and the dramatics program and whether he would be able to practice and perform his magic act without hindrance. After listening to Collins’s repeated assurances, Orson told her the school sounded interesting and he would think it over.