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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Orson himself pinpointed the last time he glimpsed his father. It was not at a performance of Androcles and the Lion, but at the second major Todd School production of the year: Wings over Europe, the British drama the Todd boys had seen staged by the touring Theatre Guild in Chicago the previous year.

  Wings over Europe was presented in Roger’s Hall one week before Christmas 1930. Again, Dick Welles made the trip from Chicago; again, he left quickly after the last act—because “he didn’t want to admit he was interested in my acting career or some damn thing,” Welles told Leaming. Orson had the leading role, as an intense poet-scientist grappling with deadly knowledge; Hill was the nominal codirector, but Orson was really in charge, borrowing shrewdly from the Theatre Guild version.

  As Orson later recalled, even as his father slouched somewhere in the back row, the Roger’s Hall performance came to an unexpected climax. In the story, several government officials have come to meet with the scientist, concerned that he intends to detonate a bomb. Another senior—a boy Orson didn’t particularly like, as either actor or classmate—played a Parliament official who is goaded by his colleagues into shooting Orson’s character. When the boy pointed his gun at Orson, however, the prop weapon didn’t fire. Orson the director was crestfallen—but Orson the actor was thrilled, a moment later, when the other student startled everyone by diving across a table, tackling Orson, and wrestling him to the ground, saving the scene. “I admire him for that,” Welles told Hill fifty years later.

  By the time the curtain call was over, Dick Welles was gone. Orson had kept his vow to distance himself from his father, although his ambivalence about the decision was never resolved. “I didn’t think I was doing the right thing, I simply wanted to please the Hills,” he told Leaming in 1984. “I promised,” he told his daughter Chris Welles Feder, “not because I agreed with them—I didn’t think my father’s drinking was a terrible thing—but because I wanted to please them.”

  Dick Welles returned to Chicago, alone with his thoughts. He no longer had a permanent address; instead he shuttled from one residential hotel to another, and by the late fall of 1930 he was under the regular care of a nurse. His mental faculties may have deteriorated: when he fell behind on his bill at the Harrison Hotel, his half brother, Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen, had to be summoned from Kenosha to help settle his accounts. His debts included payments to the Harrison Hotel’s house physician, as well as minor bills he had left unpaid in Grand Detour. Gottfredsen helped move Welles to the Hotel Bismarck, on Randolph Street in the heart of the Loop.

  A few days before Christmas, Dick Welles used the hotel phone to ring Kenosha and speak to his half brother’s wife, asking her if she would buy a flowering plant as a holiday gift for his mother, promising to repay the cost. (His half brother would later dun his estate for the expense.)

  Also just before Christmas, Dr. Maurice Bernstein visited Dick at the Bismarck, less than half a mile from his office on Michigan Avenue. Bernstein, who must have realized that Dick was clinging to life but failing rapidly, may have cautioned Roger Hill and suggested that Orson stay in Woodstock over Christmas. Bernstein and Dick Welles talked over Dick’s will and the future of his sons after his impending death.

  Orson’s father made it through the holiday, but three days later, in the late afternoon of Sunday, December 28—the last weekend of 1930—he collapsed. In signing Dick Welles’s death certificate, Dr. Bernstein noted the principal causes of death as “chronic myocarditis,” which is an inflammation of the heart muscle commonly associated with chronic alcoholism (though also linked to certain viruses and prescription drugs), along with “chronic interstitial nephritis,” an inflammatory condition sometimes triggered by toxins or prescribed medications (but also a possible sign of autoimmune disease). According to Bernstein’s death certificate notes, the nephritis first manifested itself in May 1930—just before the Far East voyage Dick Welles undertook with his son. In Dick’s case, unlike that of Orson’s mother, no autopsy was performed.

  Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen returned in haste to Chicago. As other books have noted, Gottfredsen filled in several blanks on the official death form with “Don’t know”—among them Welles’s birthplace; the name of his father; and, most puzzlingly, the name of Dick Welles’s mother—Gottfredsen’s own.

  Bernstein sent a telegram to Orson at Todd School: “Your father’s dead. Rush here.”

  By the time Orson arrived, Gottfredsen—the Wisconsin uncle he barely knew—had prepared the body for the train to Kenosha, where prayers were said over a casket set amid candles and incense in the living room of Rudolphsheim on the afternoon of December 30.

  As with his mother’s service, the minister was Episcopalian. But Orson said later that he was aghast at the funeral, full of rituals he found unfamiliar and peculiar, and he was haunted by his failure to honor his father’s wishes to be cremated or buried at sea. But Dick Welles had spoken with both Dr. Bernstein and Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen about his wishes shortly before his death, and a plot was reserved for him next to his wife and her parents in the Green Ridge Cemetery. Orson was a teenager with no standing to interfere.

  Orson stalked out of his grandmother’s living room and returned to Chicago with Dr. Bernstein; he would never shed his resentment over his father’s funeral. He never again said a kind, or even an accurate, word about his paternal grandmother, Mary Head Welles Gottfredsen, going so far as to describe her in interviews as a “witch” who made animal sacrifices. For her part, she said nothing at all in public about him, and in her will left him his choice of half the books from her personal library.

  Richard Head Welles was only fifty-eight when he died. He was mourned on the front page of the Kenosha News, and in the journals of the trades he had left behind. “Old-timers in the industry will regret to learn of the sudden death” of “Dick Welles, as everyone knew him,” read a notice in Automobile Topics.

  In Chicago, when the First Union Trust and Savings Bank, executor of Dick Welles’s estate, presented his will for probate, the event made louder headlines than the news of Welles’s death. The front page of the local section of the Herald and Examiner reported that Welles had left a $100,000 fortune to his fifteen-year-old son, George Orson Welles. The probate court appointed Dr. Bernstein as the boy’s guardian ad litem, a temporary position until other candidates were reviewed. But the Herald glossed over the details: “Dr. Bernstein Made Guardian of Rich Boy,” the headline prematurely announced.

  His mother’s death taught young Orson the capriciousness of time. He had learned not to live in fear that time would run out, but rather to thumb his nose at time in every brave and devious way imaginable. His father’s death would remind him of this, while teaching a new lesson: money was an abstraction. The headlines called him a rich boy, but those riches were withheld from his grasp. Money, for him, would always be as insubstantial and capricious as time.

  In his last years, Welles would come to view his father as an “enormously likable and attractive” human being, adding that “it was a great sorrow to me when he died.” He blamed himself for deserting his father in those final days, not the Hills—“momentarily, false gods,” he called them—whose guidance, usually so valuable, had failed him at that critical juncture.

  “I had followed the wrong adults, you know, and for the wrong reasons,” Welles explained to Barbara Leaming. “I’ve never, never . . . I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it—how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.” After his brother, Richard, had so disappointed his parents, he had felt “the burden of achievement” shift to his own shoulders. “I couldn’t let them down,” Orson told his daughter Chris. “My parents were larger than life to me, wonderful, mythical, almost fantastical creatures, and more than anything I wanted to please them. . . . The wish to please them has never left me.”

  That desire would come to
shape Orson Welles’s life and career. He was confronted continually by setbacks, interruptions, and delays, and often he was wounded by problems of time or money—but rarely was he permanently deterred. He rejected obstacles and crises, always pushing on, almost relishing the hurdles. Without the tragedy of his parents, Welles might never have developed his singular drive, his quixotic belief that time and money should not matter.

  At school, Orson turned his back on calamity. On a cold winter night just a few weeks after his father’s death, he kept a previous appointment to address the Dean Street School Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) on the subject of “China and Japan.” Wearing a “magnificent” costume he had purchased in the Far East, Orson strode onto a stage bedecked with his own souvenirs, greeted the PTA audience with “Good evening” in Japanese dialect, and then began to make drawings on a chalkboard as he related off-the-cuff stories about his summer trip. “We traveled with him in mind,” reported the Woodstock Sentinel, “as he led us along the wide beautiful streets and also through the narrow, poorer districts of both of these countries.” Though Dick Welles’s behavior, and condition, had cast a shadow over the trip, Orson mentioned his late father only lightly in passing. “Orson is a young man fifteen years of age and already a genius,” the Sentinel reported, “with poise, expression, and ability beyond his years.”

  Poise, indeed.

  And “genius” again: Orson’s senior year at the Todd School confirmed the impression, already recurring in newspaper accounts of his activities. The school year 1930–1931 brought no fewer than five full-scale all-school plays that could have been billed as “Orson Welles productions,” in addition to the many Saturday night entertainments he continued to oversee. Although the latter were frivolous, Orson was also starting to express his social conscience. When he and Hascy Tarbox staged an elaborate puppet theater program—long enough to take up half of one Saturday night bill—the villainous puppet was the proprietor of the “J. P. Bloodshed Bank.” And the second half of the show, as Todd Tarbox wrote in Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, “was a lively musical revue performed by puppets resembling faculty members.”

  His grades, admittedly boosted by the helping hands of other students, now reached honors level. Outside the classroom, he did everything from painting history murals on school walls to editing and designing a publication called Todd: A Community Devoted to Boys and Their Interests—a combination yearbook, catalog, and sales brochure that he enhanced with sly personal annotations. (“Every word of this book was either written or edited by him,” wrote Roger Hill in a subsequent letter to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, enclosing a copy with his letter urging them to admit Orson. “The only ‘cheating’ I did in this was to make him cut out some of his best bits of writing as they were too completely mature.”)

  In late February, the Todd Troupers brought new life to one of Orson’s old favorites: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.10 Billed as “J. Worthington Ham,” Orson joined forces with codirector Roger Hill to re-create the atmosphere of the original 1880s stage productions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story. As a candlelighter “lit” the footlights, the student orchestra—wearing vintage costumes—struck up the overture, with Carl Hendrickson back on the podium. A vendor sold peanuts between acts. With a blurb from John Clayton (“This is the best thing the Troupers have ever done!”), the Troupers took the show to venues in Lake Forest and Highland Park.

  The headmaster was skeptical about squeezing so many full-scale plays into the school calendar, but Orson could not be talked out of Molière’s The Physician in Spite of Himself. Orson starred in and supervised this early spring production, which boasted a “full-blown constructivist setting” reminiscent of Vsevolod Meyerhold, according to Simon Callow. Always influenced by what he saw, Orson could recall the similarly modernist production of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, which had had its Chicago premiere at the Goodman in 1930.

  The theatrical high point of Orson’s senior year was the last play, which was traditionally offered as part of the Closing Day program. Orson set out to produce an adaptation of Richard III, carrying around “a falling-to-pieces one-volume Shakespeare,” in Roger Hill’s words, which he “marked up with great black-crayon cuts.” As his modifications continued, however, he began to draw on other Shakespeare plays, until his King Richard III (as he called it) became a stitched-together condensation of all the Bard’s history plays covering the War of the Roses.

  Orson and Roger Hill reached down into the fifth grade, casting fifty Todd boys of all ages; and they crafted their most elaborate set ever for the spectacle. Orson himself would play the hunchbacked Richard III, “his face unrecognizable, as if made from spare parts of several faces stuck together with huge pieces of sticking plaster,” as Simon Callow wrote. “Disturbing and powerful.” But Orson’s script was too lengthy for any audience to bear, and he felt under pressure to trim and then trim some more, rather drastically, at the eleventh hour. Even so, the production, which stretched over three hours, was “the most outstanding affair of its kind ever attempted by the Troupers,” wrote the Woodstock Sentinel, with acting “far beyond that usually found in school plays. . . . Orson Wells [sic] outdid himself. . . . Orson today leaves Todd. If he misses his school in the days to come he may be sure that the school will also miss him.”

  With his three-hour King Richard III, a luncheon, a swim meet, a riding exhibition, numerous speeches, and the annual bestowing of laurels, Closing Day ceremonies that year dragged on interminably. Only ten seniors were graduating, with Orson one of four honor students. According to the only extant copy of his report card, for the first semester of his final term, he received unsurprising A’s in English, ancient history, and art; questionable A’s in algebra and spelling; B in French, and also in neatness and deportment; and C’s, finally, in Latin and gymnasium—the former an elective but neither C averaged for honors.

  His graduation was attended by Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Ned and Hazel Moore, along with his mother’s favorite cousin, Dudley Crafts Watson. “The school did to him,” Watson told Peter Noble, “what none of the rest of us could.”

  Orson’s friend John Dexter also graduated that year. “At Todd,” Dexter recalled, “the guy was really an unbelievable human being. We had a lot of fun and he was a great guy.”

  “It was only at Todd that I could be my own person,” Orson told his daughter Chris Welles Feder. “My greatest coup,” he added poignantly, was not getting good grades, playing lead roles, or staging the ambitious King Richard III on Closing Day. It was, simply, “winning Skipper’s love.”

  Shortly before graduation—on May 7, very nearly coinciding with Orson’s sixteenth birthday—a Chicago judge formally appointed Dr. Bernstein as the guardian of the boy’s welfare and estate. It may be, as Orson later insisted, that Dick Welles wanted his son to be able to choose his own guardian. The judge did consult Orson, although his wishes were nonbinding.

  Orson said in later interviews that he would have preferred Roger Hill. The headmaster discussed it with him at Chicago’s Union Station, probably over spring break. But Skipper was reluctant to take on the mantle. “I remember we sat down on one of the great seats and talked a long time,” Hill recalled, “and he asked me if I’d be his guardian. And I, selfishly in one way, because I didn’t want [the] trouble of doing it, but I said, ‘Orson, that would be mad. It would break Dadda’s heart.’ This Bernstein who had been practically his father and he called Dadda.”

  The precise monetary value of Dick Welles’s estate was fluid, dependent on the fate of his oil and railroad stocks (the will directed that the estate be “invested at all times in safe, income bearing or interest bearing properties and securities”), and on the termination value of his insurance policies: accident, home, and travel. According to court documents, Welles owned 200 shares of capital stock and 102 shares of common stock in the Standard Oil Company of Indiana; 100 shares of preferred stock and another 50 of common stock in Chicago an
d Northwestern Railway; 100 shares each in Illinois Central Railroad and Pullman; 52 shares of preferred stock and 106 shares of common stock in Tex-La-Homa Oil Corporation; 50 shares of preferred stock in B. F. Goodrich; and 25 shares of preferred and 1,400 shares of common stock in Globe Consolidated Oil. There were share amounts of a handful of other stocks—smaller numbers of shares, but not necessarily trivial.

  The probate court fixed $42,344 as the determined value of the stock holdings, added to which Orson’s father had $21,191.82 cash in his bank account. The court estimated the total value of Welles’s estate at $63,535.82. Adjustments for inflation can be calculated in various ways, but it would be reasonable to estimate the value at roughly $900,000 in today’s terms. Orson’s father also owed debts totaling $8,901.29.

  The court’s financial estimate did not count Beatrice Ives Welles’s jewelry, including a globular crystal necklace and drop earrings, a crystal neck pendant, and seed pearl earrings with drops, all stored in Dick Welles’s safe-deposit box. Nor did it include his itemized personal belongings: a gold matchbox, silver lighter, and silver key-winding watch; a complete set of table silver for twelve with teapot, gravy dish, olive forks, platters, and pearl-handled knives; one Iver Johnson revolver (the type of gun used to assassinate William McKinley in 1901); an oil painting of Wild Bill Hickok; and, touchingly, one photograph of “Dick Welles” the racehorse. Nor did it include continued earnings, if any were still forthcoming, from Dick Welles’s patents.

  Some of these personal belongings may have been sold, but many ended up in the hands of Dr. Bernstein. Orson’s father also left a trove of family photographs, his gladstone bag, and a traveling trunk of private items and memorabilia; these too would be held for years in a safe-deposit box at the First Union Trust and Savings of Chicago, which administered his estate.