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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Twenty-two years old by the spring of 1927, Orson’s brother was promoting himself as a magician, with a résumé boasting a stint doing magic and singing with a group in a western vaudeville tour. But Richard never held any job for very long without defaulting, and his employment history was no more reliable than his imaginary academic credits. He “was always trying to get some money and he was off some place and nobody knew where,” Roger Hill remembered. “ ‘Due to the Christmas festivities, I have contracted gonorrhea’ and he would like a little dough for that.”

  There was something clearly wrong with Richard.

  Orson’s brother was diagnosed with “dementia simplex”—a broad subtype of schizophrenia characterized by slow, progressive deterioration and mental inadequacy, though the term was often used as a catchall for unspecified mental illness. Simon Callow and other biographers have claimed that Dick Welles “conspired” with Dr. Bernstein to arrange this diagnosis, and certainly Bernstein, long Richard’s physician, was the medical authority supporting the determination. In May 1927, Dick filed papers to have his elder son declared incompetent and remanded to the State Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee.

  About sixty miles south of Chicago, Kankakee housed nearly four thousand patients in eighty buildings on a thousand-acre campus, which included a working farm. Though state documents record a small number of deaths there every year, some due to experimental drugs and other treatments for hard cases, the general population had the use of a golf course, dances, regular movies, and occupational therapy. Because of his artistic upbringing, Richard was channeled into the arts and crafts program, thought to provide a positive stimulus for “the primitive creative instinct,” according to a state report.

  But Richard wasn’t too delusional to fight his institutionalization tooth and nail. The young man filed suit repeatedly over the next eight years, trying to have his insanity judgment overturned. Court records of institutionalizations are strictly shielded by Illinois law, and Kankakee records have since been destroyed in a fire, so it is impossible to know what drugs or treatments Richard received there, or if these might have contributed to his debilitation.

  Young Orson was also cushioned from this latest trauma; he was off with Dr. Bernstein in the Caribbean when his father went to court. Yet he must have been troubled by his older brother’s downward spiral, whether he felt that Richard had disgraced the family, or that the family had failed Richard. Either way, it was up to him alone now to carry the family banner.

  Back at the Todd School, Orson took solace in the written word. He was encouraged to contribute to the school’s quarterly, The Red & White, also overseen by Roger Hill. Orson was a regular presence in the pages of The Red & White throughout his first year at Todd. For the Easter issue, he wrote a singsong ode to Chicago that he coyly entitled “Pome.”4 It was a parody of one of those long poems he had committed to memory—Henry Van Dyke’s “America for Me.”

  POME

  Tis fine to see the old school, and wander all around,

  Among the knarly oak trees and buildings of renown,

  To admire the ancient Clover Hall and the office of our King

  But now I think I’ve had enough of all this sort of thing.

  So it’s home again, and home again, Chicago town for me!

  I want a train that’s southward bound, to flit past field and tree,

  To that blessed land of “Home” and “Folks” beyond Cook County line

  Where movie shows are always good and malted milks are fine.

  Oh, Crystal Lake’s a hick’s town, there’s hayseed in the air;

  And Woodstock is a factory town, with Dagos everywhere

  And it’s sweet to dream in English Class, and it’s great to march in gym;

  But though this student may love Todd, home’s now the place for him.

  I like our games, I like our shows, with actors nicely drilled;

  I like our Beans, I like our Hash, with luscious thumbtacks filled;

  But Oh, to take you out my lad, for just a single day,

  And eat at Childs or Thompson’s (that is, if you will pay).

  I know that Todd is marvelous, yet something seems quite wrong,

  The teachers like to make you work entirely too long.

  But the glory of Chicago is “No parking on the streets,”

  We love our town for what she is, the town of “Home” and “Treats.”

  Oh, it’s home again, and home again, Chicago land for me.

  I want a train that’s southward bound to flit past field and tree,

  To that blessed town where Big Bill’s frown has King George on the run,5

  Where the hours are full of leisure and the leisure’s full of fun.

  For the magazine’s commencement issue that year, Orson produced a flurry of cartoon sketches and no fewer than four verse offerings. These included a romanticized portrait of an ancient mariner (not far from Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, a character the older Orson Welles would stalk on the stage and screen several times during his career).

  THE PILOT—A DESCRIPTION

  Staunch he stood, his great grim face, marred by the wrath of the sea,

  His burly hands gripped tight the wheel, his pose both wild and free.

  The biting wind clawed for his face and kept its fingers there.

  And the icicles came streaming down from his gray and sun-bleached hair.

  Another was a Longfellow-like ode.

  AT NOONTIME—A DESCRIPTION

  The sun beat mercilessly upon,

  The scorching heat cursed plain;

  And the field that lay in sunny wealth,

  Was gold with sun and grain.

  The toiler sought with lagging steps

  The comfort of the great oak trees

  And there to taste with hungry lips,

  The coolness of long sought breeze.

  The bloodstained sword and the earth stained plow

  Now lazy and idle lay;

  For all men’s number and various tasks

  Are left in the great noon day

  Close by a knotted oak there laughed

  A silvery rippling stream

  Whose shining crags and glittering rocks

  Cut the water in between

  On one moss bank his head in air,

  There dreamed a peasant boy;

  Who from sun bronzed feet to sun bronzed hair,

  Was a symbol of boyhood joys.

  His lengthiest contribution recast Camp Indianola’s rival sports teams as warring Indian tribes:

  THE ONAWAYS AND THE WENDIGOS

  The Onaways were hot and mad

  And in their war togs they were clad;

  Dancing up and down with might;

  Dancing in the firelight.

  Singing praises to Gods of war,

  Of ancient legend and olden lore,

  Of how they captured the fearless braves,

  And made them serve them as slaves.

  Waving scalps with thought of more,

  With hopes of hearts they’d have to gore,

  When suddenly from the forest trees,

  Blown by the gentle waving breeze,

  Came the cackling voice of an ancient hag,

  Who silenced the braves by the wave of rag;

  It is prophecied in the magic sands,

  That a terrible curse is upon these lands,

  And unless its braves shall turn to the wise,

  The almighty spirit his children despise,

  You of yourselves must not be talking

  Or with Wendigo packs you’ll soon be walking.

  The warriors knelt down upon the ground,

  And with attention most profound,

  Promised these things they would not do,

  And kept their oath right well and true.

  They won the war with the Wendigo braves,

  And made them serve them as their slaves.

  Orson closed the year with a solemn verse commemorating the terri
ble battles of the Great War:

  AT THE CALL OF THE DRUM AND FIFE

  From scorching heat to freezing cold,

  The men of whom these tales are told,

  Come from every walk of life,

  Come at the call of the drum and fife.

  From cobblers’ boys to rich men’s sons,

  They came to fight the tyrant Huns,

  Entranced by the song of blood and strife,

  March to war with the drum and fife,

  Thru fiery rain and gorey mud,

  The boys who bathed in the cleansing of blood,

  Sacrificing more than life,

  March to hell with the drum and fife.

  When Orson’s first year at the Todd School was over, a month after he turned twelve, he left Woodstock for Grand Detour and the last summer he would spend with his father in the small Illinois town that, he told Hill half a century later, came closest to being his private Rosebud.

  In his first year, Orson had established himself as a good student, a leading light on The Red & White, and an indispensable fixture of the school’s theatricals. If some teachers looked askance at the brash youngster, Orson had powerful allies in Roger and Hortense Hill. If some students did not warm to him, others did. While some books have portrayed him as a solitary boy at odds with his classmates, in truth he found boon companions among his peers, often across age lines and other divisions. Among them were Sherman Perlman, two years his senior and his partner in the Halloween magic act, whom he later called “my great pal” and “the closest friend I had at Todd”; and his roommate John Dexter, a talented halfback who later captained the formidable “Todd Eleven,” but who also stood shoulder to shoulder with Orson in girlie musicals, blackout skits, and, later, productions of Shakespeare.

  “In many a school,” Roger Hill explained years later, Orson “would have been very strange and might have had trouble. Todd was nutty enough and unique enough so that the things he could do were appreciated by the toughest football player in the place.”

  Grand Detour was another story. While many of the football players at Todd were equally comfortable onstage, the youth of Grand Detour kept their distance from Orson because of his lack of interest “in football, baseball, or any other form of athletics,” according to Charles Higham, who visited Grand Detour and spoke to a number of locals who claimed to remember Orson. In his overimaginative way, Higham wrote that, by contrast, “the girls fancied Orson because he entertained them with impromptu shows in a tent of his own making, playing every part in Shakespeare, both Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, hilariously changing from male to female clothes borrowed from anyone who would lend them.”

  At age twelve Orson still found creative solitude in his “art shack” across the road from the hotel. In the river village he spent hours horseback riding, the rare physical sport at which he felt proficient, and took in circuses and county fairs with his father. They traveled to Dixon to watch movies in the best theater in the county—the pictures were still silent, though some, especially comedies, had musical accompaniment—and they loved the vaudeville revues that came there on Sundays. Often they were driven to Dixon by one of the hotel workers, because Dick Welles no longer trusted his eyes at night.

  The Sheffield was in its second year under Dick Welles’s management, and it was running like clockwork. Travelers spread the word about the hotel’s excellent catfish on Saturday nights and the Sunday fried chicken suppers. The establishment drew a steady stream of business groups, vacation travelers, and acquaintances from Chicago. Booth Tarkington very probably dined at the hotel with his friend and collaborator Harry Leon Wilson, a native of nearby Oregon, whose picaresque stories were often set in that part of northern Illinois.

  Dick Welles read the Chicago newspapers at his own pace in the slow afternoons, handing the sections to his son as he finished them. But Welles was a night owl, and especially relished his son’s company after dark. When the guests retired, the two of them would sit on the front porch of the hotel, chewing over the day. Orson always called Dick “Father” or, on rare occasions, “Dad.” Dick Welles’s pet name for his younger son was “Lamb.” Orson’s father still drank and smoked profusely, using “one Virginia straight-cut cigarette to light another,” according to Higham.

  This last summer spent in Grand Detour was a golden memory for Welles. Not much given to nostalgia, he nevertheless considered the village “one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you get thrown out of,” and bristled to hear Grand Detour slighted. Years later, when Roger Hill referred in passing to the “little” Rock River, Welles objected but with humor. “I never think of it as little,” he quickly interjected, “It’s great . . . one of the foremost rivers in the world.” He would treasure his summers along the river—“the Hudson of the West,” as the hotel’s ads boasted—as if they had afforded him a portal to the past, “a childhood in the last century.”

  That golden summer, Dick Welles drew up his last will and testament. He had learned a lesson from his wife’s death: Beatrice Ives Welles had died intestate, without even life insurance. Dick Welles, by contrast, maintained a substantial policy on his hotel and considerable personal life insurance, and he added a stipulation to his will that both his sons must carry policies of their own.

  This was not simply a theoretical provision. Orson’s father was suffering from worsening heart disease, and by that summer he knew his days were numbered.

  One of his sons stood to benefit more than the other from his will. Because he had already made “extraordinary advances” to his older son, Richard—still residing in an “insane” ward at Kankakee—and because of Richard’s “apparent irresponsibility and ingratitude,” Dick Welles set aside only one seventh of his estate for his firstborn.

  Six sevenths would go to Orson.

  By the time Dick signed the document, on October 20, 1927, twelve-year-old Orson was back in Woodstock for seventh grade.

  Dick Welles wasn’t the only one passing the baton. Halfway thru the school year 1927–1928, headmaster Noble Hill announced his retirement, and by the end of term his son had assumed full command of the Todd School.

  The new headmaster and young Orson had much in common. They were both born talkers. Hill later marveled at “how easily words flowed from [Orson] in graceful prose even as a teenager,” matching his own uncanny ability to rattle off famous speeches, poems, songs, quotations from the Bible and Shakespearean passages from memory. But the new headmaster was genuinely self-effacing about his own talent, and perhaps this modesty was what Orson most admired in his mentor.

  Orson enjoyed the run of the school. He had a reliable ally in the new headmaster, but he irritated Hortense Hill on more than one occasion, suffering her barbed tongue, then winning her back with humor and kindness. He showed up in the Hills’ bedroom after hours, sitting on their bed and talking, talking, talking as the couple tried to wind down and get to bed. Hortense only narrowed her eyes balefully, never daring to get undressed.

  Hortense Hill was a sensible, nurturing maternal figure for the boys, hovering over them outside classes, watching over their grooming habits, and monitoring their daily meals. She was also a stunning beauty. They couldn’t escape her—but few of the boys wished to. Her wedding photograph, Welles told Skipper years later, was “one of the sexiest pictures I ever saw.”

  “Our sunshine,” Welles wrote upon her death, “the radiant blessing of my life.”

  The headmaster was less critical of his young charge, and found himself fascinated with Orson’s constant patter. They bonded over books such as Don Quixote, which Orson had read at an impressionable age, and which was a favorite novel for both of them. Oratory was part of the Todd curriculum, and during his visits to the Hills’ bedroom, Orson rehearsed his class assignments, among them the fiery speeches of radical abolitionist John Brown. He would toss off a favorite soliloquy from Shakespeare, then wait for Skipper to answer with a selection from his own vast repertoire. One night,
Skipper regaled him with orator Wendell Phillips’s eloquent tribute to the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint-Louverture. Orson listened to this with wide eyes—it was new to him—and went away, returning the next evening to repeat it to the Hills. Fifty years later, chatting with his former student by phone, Hill was thunderstruck when the filmmaker delivered the same address from memory. Did Welles remember the words simply because he’d heard them from the headmaster long ago? “More than once,” Welles drawled. “You were fond of it.” And then Welles did the same, on the phone intoning a celebrated speech by Illinois attorney general Robert G. Ingersoll, nominating James G. Blaine for president at the 1876 Republican convention:

  Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress, and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the malingerers of his honor.

  Hill was second to no one in his passion for American history, but Orson knew Shakespeare as well as his mentor. Hill knew the Bible better, however, and Welles often reached out to his old headmaster in later years when working on a script that required a particular biblical touch.

  Not all their banter was high-flown. The headmaster and his wife loved jokes and gossip, and Hill entranced Orson with tales of his gifted and often drunk cousin Jack Rogers, who had preceded him on the Montgomery Ward staff, and who specialized in sly copy for ladies’ wear.

  At first the Hill children were jealous of Orson’s constant presence in the house, and Hortense Hill also wondered why they must indulge this pest of a kid. But the couple were drawn by the boy’s good humor and intelligence, and they recognized that, under his showy exterior, he was a sensitive, thoughtful boy. At a time when his mother’s death was still a raw wound—and his father was showing signs of mortality—Orson found the Hills to be perfect stand-ins for his parents. But Orson was also perfect for the Hills. When Orson first arrived at the Todd School, Skipper Hill had still been laboring under his father’s shadow, feeling like a fake as he promoted the school’s athletic program when his real interest lay in the arts. Mentoring Orson gave him a chance to be his own man.