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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  When the decision was announced, pandemonium broke out in the theater. Hiram “Chubby” Sherman, a Goodman actor who was Whitford Kane’s protégé, leaned over to whisper in Kane’s ear. Kane jumped up to propose a face-saving “special award” for Todd School. “For God’s sake, Roger,” Kane told Hill afterward, “get a rich parent to buy a cup and have it engraved from us.” Chicago’s Better Speech Association chipped in, offering the Todd boys another special citation for diction. But Orson wasn’t fooled: he had lost. His Julius Caesar had fallen short. He felt miserable, a failure.

  Late that evening, as Orson was licking his wounds, Dr. Bernstein wrote him a letter of consolation. “Applause [means] little in the long run and not all the things we do that are worthwhile receive recognition,” he advised. “Look at all the great works of art that slumbered without being recognized and so let this be a lesson to you. There will be times in your life when you will meet up with the same situation. Some day when you will be in the eyes of the world doing big things, as I know you will, you will look back upon this disappointment as having been just a passing experience. We must learn to accept disappointments and profit by them.

  “Success is in the silences, though fame is in the song,” Bernstein continued, quoting a line from the poem “Envoy” by Bliss Carman, a Canadian poet Orson’s mother had loved. “I know your true values and I hope to live long enough to see them grow into fruition.

  “I love you more than all else, Dadda.”

  The 1929 commencement edition of the The Red & White was the last issue with Orson as its editor. Along with sketches and musings, the issue indulged the budding maestro’s silly side, with a humorous ode to mumps, which had overrun Todd School in the spring, and another happy-go-lucky poem to the summer ahead.

  I’D LIKE TO BE A KITE

  I’d like to be a kite and sail the skies,

  I’d like to see the school building from above,

  I’d like to break off all my mortal ties,

  I’d like to fly—and gosh I’d love

  To just keep sailing and not listen to the bell.

  And what an end, to in an oak tree lie,

  T’would suit me well—

  To soar above the world—and then die!

  Orson’s bag was packed for the summer, but he would be soaring beyond Chicago. With Grand Detour out of the running, and Ravinia dark until July, everyone in his extended family—his father, Dr. Bernstein, the Moores, and by now the Hills—worried that the inexhaustible Orson would have too much idle time on his hands.

  The headmaster had a brainstorm. Carl Hendrickson, Todd’s chorus and orchestra director, spent part of every summer touring Europe. Hendrickson was willing to take Orson and another Todd boy along, for a guided art-travel tour much like the one Dudley Crafts Watson had given Orson’s father. Dick Welles liked the idea, and promised to meet Orson in Europe at the end of the summer.

  Along with the boys, Hendrickson would be bringing along his new toy: an eight-millimeter movie camera. He had become fascinated with motion pictures during his stint conducting the house orchestra at Chicago’s most lavish picture palace, and had brought the camera on several school camping trips, filming little scenarios with the boys to project at school on Saturday nights. These “home movies” were Orson’s first brush with filmmaking.

  The small group sailed from New York in June, for a ten-week itinerary including England, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The three traveled “third rate, almost bumming,” Orson later recalled, booking cheap train seats and steerage on Mediterranean boats.

  The chaperoning was loose. Orson told Barbara Leaming that he enjoyed his first “grown-up” sexual encounter on board the ship with a girl who was two or three years older. Orson was savvy enough to tip a steward to borrow a first-class cabin, but he made no boasts about his lovemaking. “I was, however, not a wunderkind in that department,” he said, “merely precocious.”

  In London, Orson later claimed, he attended a mass rally in Hyde Park, where he met a nice gentleman who took him to a closed-door meeting of militant socialists. In Munich, where the three were quartered with a woodcarver and his family, they visited a beer hall; Orson recalled sitting next to a man with a toothbrush mustache who rose from a bench to deliver a rant. He realized in retrospect that the ranting man could only have been Adolf Hitler.

  In Milan, or so Dr. Bernstein later insisted, Orson was roused by police as he slept in a park and was briefly arrested after faking a conniption.

  In Rome, as he waited to glimpse Pope Pius XI, he commandeered Hendrickson’s eight-millimeter camera and attempted to direct his first motion picture: a sort of documentary featuring St. Peter’s Basilica.

  “A highly artistic study in 8mm of the big church that bears your name,” Orson later told Peter Bogdanovich, “featuring Significant Architectural Detail. This was hand-held throughout, mind you, so it was really way ahead of my time. I got fascinated with that fountain—[Michelangelo] Antonioni at the very summit of his powers never held a single shot so long. Then, to my horror, the very instant I’d run out of film, the great doors of the cathedral were flung open, and with a mighty fanfare of trumpets, out came the Pope on a palanquin surrounded by Swiss Guards and a hundred cardinals.”

  On his first visit to Vienna, the locale of The Third Man, Orson recalled meeting the cigar-smoking Frau Sacher and stuffing himself with her famous Sacher torte at the Hotel Sacher. Orson and his companions also attended the magnificent State Opera House, although Orson was preoccupied by something other than the singers onstage.

  “I was just becoming interested in girls,” Welles reminisced some years later. “There was a knock on the back of my chair and I looked around, and a very pretty girl was sitting there, a little older than myself, but not too much older. And I gave her a big smile and she didn’t react at all. Then there was another little tap on the back of my chair and I looked around and still no reaction. The opera went on, a third tap, and I looked and discovered that she wasn’t flirting with me. She was cracking hard-boiled eggs. She’d brought her picnic lunch to the opera.”

  In Vienna, Carl Hendrickson also escorted the boys to a small playhouse to see a Schnitzler comedy, directed by the Austrian stage visionary Max Reinhardt. Orson spoke little German, but such obstacles never hampered his enjoyment. His father, Dick Welles, met up with the school group in Berlin and took his son to see Elisabeth Bergner in Reinhardt’s production of Romeo and Juliet—the impresario ran theaters simultaneously in Berlin and Vienna. One of the most important theatrical figures of the early twentieth century, Reinhardt was renowned for his spectacular innovations in staging, breaking with realist tradition to incorporate expressionist and other modern aesthetic influences into his productions. Orson idolized him.

  “He was a great, great director,” Welles told Henry Jaglom a half century later, “a great master of spectacle as well as intimate comedy. He could do anything.”

  Stopping in London, Orson and his father would have been on time to see John Galsworthy’s The Skin Game, later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock with the same star, Edmund Gwenn; and a variety show at the Coliseum featuring George Burns and Gracie Allen. They surely lined up to see the Australian Shakespeare specialist Oscar Asche in his modern-dress production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Apollo. Father and son returned, through Quebec, in the last week of August.

  One curious by-product of Orson’s first trip abroad was his maiden venture into public speaking. As a boy, Orson had gladly held forth at dinner parties, fireside gatherings, and school assemblies, but he had never delivered a prepared talk at an event open to the general public. His first opportunity came in March 1930, when he gave an entertaining “travel talk” on his European vacation for members of the Woodstock Woman’s Club. Much as his mother and Uncle Dudley once had done with their “music picture symphonies,” Orson enlivened his improvised performance by caricatures he sketched on a large pad. His presentation “had all the humor and sparkl
e of a clever, witty, but thoroughly natural and fun-loving American school boy,” reported the Woodstock Daily Sentinel. He may not have struck everyone as an all-American boy, but a clever, witty speaker he was. And public speaking would become a lifelong sideline.

  CHAPTER 6

  1929–1931

  A Great Sorrow

  In September 1929, Dr. Maurice Bernstein drove Orson to Woodstock for ninth grade.

  By now Roger and Hortense Hill had become very friendly with Dr. Bernstein, seeing him as a source of stability in Orson’s life. They encountered Dick Welles only fleetingly at school plays, where he seemed subdued. The Hills got along more easily with Bernstein, an extrovert who counted other school families within his practice. When Bernstein and Ned Moore attended Orson’s plays, the local newspaper listed them as important out-of-town visitors, providing an extra fillip of publicity for the school.

  Although Dr. Bernstein often boasted about “his ability to charm other women,” in the words of one of his conquests, no one was ever quite sure how successful he actually was in his love life. This made it all the more surprising when Bernstein suddenly married a glamorous Chicago diva he had been assiduously wooing all summer.

  In July, a Chicago court had granted Edith Mason a divorce from her third husband, the Chicago Civic Opera conductor Giorgio Polacco. Bernstein had been waiting in the wings for a year or more. In late October, he and Mason eloped to Antioch, Illinois, a small town in northern Lake County, where they said their vows before a local justice of the peace. Two weeks later, when the Chicago press learned the news, the story of the doctor who won the heart of the famous opera star hit the wire services, appearing in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other papers from coast to coast.

  Court records of Polacco and Mason’s divorce bolster the image of Bernstein as a threat to their marriage. Polacco named the doctor as his romantic rival, demanding justice for the unfair loss of his wife and their four-year-old daughter. Welles later told Barbara Leaming that Dr. Bernstein “had this way of getting himself into triangles as the third party.” Bernstein had carried a torch for Beatrice Welles, and Orson told Leaming that the doctor conducted an “on-again, off-again liaison” with Hazel Moore for years behind Ned Moore’s back. But other anecdotes suggest that the doctor was a prim, old-fashioned character who was fundamentally clueless about women—and some husbands, including Dick Welles, felt safe leaving their wives in Bernstein’s company.

  Only a few witnesses received advance word of Dr. Bernstein’s wedding. Among them were Orson; the Hills, who drove him to Antioch for the ceremony; and Ned and Hazel Moore. (Dick Welles was absent.) Some members of the Todd School community saw Orson as a “privileged character” (a “p.c.,” as Simon Callow put it), and the impromptu trip to Antioch as just one more example of the many ways the Hills spoiled him. Not every teacher at Todd treated him as indulgently as the headmaster wished. One who viewed him with ambivalence was coach Tony Roskie, who had inherited the post of athletic director from Roger Hill. Orson was still ducking the school’s fitness regimen, and he and Roskie engaged in a “running fight” over that and other matters, according to Welles.

  Orson now had a single room in Grace Hall—single rooms were rare, but there were some—that was full of Oriental knickknacks his father had given him. He perfumed it by burning sticks of incense, a hazard that was strictly forbidden at the school. Roskie saw the room as a challenge to his authority, a veritable den of iniquity in the heart of Todd School. “He hated the Oriental decorations in my room,” Welles recalled. “He said they would attract germs.”

  Worse yet, Orson routinely sneaked off campus to flirt with a girl who sang in a local church choir—another violation that bothered Roskie, though most of the Todd boys also chased town girls when they could. Orson secretly cultivated more than one “townie” girlfriend during his upper school days, he told his former headmaster decades later. “Barking and yelling and all that,” Welles laughingly recalled. “Meaningful. It included everything but penetration. The maiden fair had to remain a maiden until the wedding day.”

  Of all the dormitories at Todd, Grace Hall was the most difficult to escape. “I was in the main part of the prison,” Welles recalled, “It took some ingenuity.” Roskie was determined to catch him in the act, however, and one night, when Orson crawled up the fire escape and back in through a window, the coach was waiting for him. Roger Hill waived any punishment, but Roskie boldly confronted the headmaster with Orson’s “delinquency” at a meeting of “the entire faculty,” Hill recalled, “all of whom thought I was too easygoing.” Hill talked his way out of the situation.

  Hill’s three children “despised” Orson because of the preferential treatment Hill gave him, according to Welles, viewing him as “this gosling in the midst of the chicken run.” But he wasn’t the only “p.c.” at the school. Two years behind Orson, another budding “genius,” Hascy Tarbox, was emerging as a vital contributor to many of the school plays Orson dominated. Tarbox would grow up to marry Hill’s eldest daughter, Joanne. Despite a strong career as a commercial artist, he sometimes felt he languished in Orson’s shadow. Tarbox gave interviews reflecting these tensions (“Orson had no friends,” he told Leaming), echoing the sentiments of adults like coach Roskie, who grumbled that Orson “was a good kid, but he wasn’t the only one. The school didn’t revolve around him.”

  But if the headmaster had boundless warmth and approval for Orson, he also had boundless warmth and approval for all the Todd boys, and not a few alumni named their children “Roger” or “Todd.”

  Orson spent almost as much time on the train to Chicago, during the school year 1929–1930, as he did in class. With access to free or discounted tickets to the Chicago Civic Opera, the Chicago Symphony, the Shakespeare Society, the Goodman Theatre, and all the touring Theatre Guild productions, he attended dozens of productions and stored them all away in his mind, crammed with memories like Xanadu’s cellar. He’d see a play; make a mental note about a scene that worked, a playwright worth following, or an actor who stole the show; and recall the memory when he needed it—sometimes decades later.

  The Todd students paid an extended call to the dressing room of the soprano Mary Garden, “the Sarah Bernhardt of opera,” after seeing her in L’Amore dei Tre Re and Le Jongleur de Notre Dame. They also enjoyed a private audience with Chicago’s foremost Shakespearean, the actor and director Fritz Leiber. Orson and the Todd Troupers attended every Shakespeare production offered by Leiber’s troupe during its twelve-week run at the Civic Theatre starting in late 1929. A Chicago native, Leiber had played Mercutio in a 1916 silent film of Romeo and Juliet, and he became a regular character actor in Hollywood after sound arrived. That season in Chicago, Leiber either directed or starred in ten Shakespeare plays—Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet among them. The Todd boys met with Leiber backstage, where they were encouraged to ask him about his interpretations of the plays; the Chicago Herald and Examiner ran a photograph of Leiber with Roger Hill, Orson, and the other Todd Troupers.

  One Shakespeare play Leiber omitted that season was the comedy Much Ado About Nothing, so Hill bused the boys to Madison, Wisconsin, to see it performed by Sir Ben Greet, one of the last great actor-managers, who was near the end of his touring days with his players. “Constant play-going of this sort,” reported the Woodstock newspaper, “develops a critical faculty in the Todd Troupers which is reflected in the remarkable excellence of their own productions.”

  The Todd boys gorged themselves on theater that year, taking in the entire New York Theatre Guild road show schedule, which included Caprice with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude; the Czech science fiction play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek; a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara; and a new British drama, Wings over Europe. They also attended the Goodman’s acclaimed Romeo and Juliet—another Shakespeare standard Leiber had omitted—as well as a revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s eighteenth-century
comedy of manners, The Rivals; and a young people’s matinee of Ivanhoe.

  In Woodstock, the school’s own drama program was evolving. Carl Hendrickson had lingered in Europe, taking a yearlong sabbatical to get married; and without him to crank out music and songs, the foolishments waned. Orson harbored ambitions to mount important dramatic works, and in Hendrickson’s absence the headmaster leaned on the youth increasingly.

  Early in the winter, the Todd Troupers mounted a tribute to the Chicago poet and playwright Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, whose death in the 1918 influenza pandemic had led his family to found the Goodman Theatre. The first show to be staged in “Roger’s Hall,” the newly renovated auditorium named for the popular young headmaster, was Goodman’s one-act Dust of the Road starring Orson as the restless ghost of Judas, condemned to wander the Earth and implore others not to sell their souls for thirty pieces of silver. To fill out the evening, Orson wrote, directed, and starred in his first original play, Purple Joss. The text has been lost, but a joss stick is a type of incense, and newspaper accounts suggest that the play was a one-act Oriental mystery. Orson also presented a satirical sketch, Skum of the Earth, poking gentle fun at Goodman’s portentous Dust of the Road. Orson was the young man of the hour, writing, directing, or starring in every part of the show.

  Roger’s Hall was part of an extraordinary expansion of the Todd School that was preoccupying the headmaster in the fall of 1929. By the end of the year the school had added a swimming pool and a riding academy, and inaugurated ambitious road trips to American historical sites. Soon after Orson’s graduation, other amenities would follow: a radio laboratory and even a small airport, complete with three Piper Cubs, so that the boys could have flying lessons.