On March 15, he arrived in New York, still two months shy of his seventeenth birthday. He spent a few days shopping his résumé around to Broadway agents and producers, but was neither surprised nor deflated to learn that he was more famous in Dublin than New York.
He boarded a train for Chicago. Thanks to Dr. Maurice Bernstein, the local press was there to greet him and mark the occasion. “Chicago Schoolboy Who Won Place on Dublin Stage Returns,” read the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune on March 18, 1932.
When his train pulled into the station, the young actor had a Buster Keaton–like moment. The reporters were waiting for him, but they were on the wrong track. When Orson spotted them, he jumped off the train and raced toward them, shouting and waving excitedly, lugging his cheap suitcase, huge and cumbersome and little better than cardboard. His father had given him a piece of lasting advice: never carry luggage anyone would think of stealing. As he raced down the platform, the suitcase finally erupted under the pressure, spilling Orson’s belongings—his writing pads and books and clippings of his Dublin shows—all over the ground. Dr. Bernstein and the reporters scurried to help him grab the stuff as the wind whistled around the depot.
CHAPTER 8
1932–1933
“Hope Rises with the Morning Sun”
Orson’s “adopted Irish brogue” was so thick on his return, according to biographer Frank Brady, that even Dr. Maurice Bernstein had “trouble understanding him.” His guardian also had trouble understanding why he now smoked cigars whenever he felt like it. When Orson’s brogue faded, a manner of speech and gesture often described as mid-Atlantic replaced it—permanently. But the cigars became a lifelong prop for him, useful for dramatic pauses and gesticulation, on- and offstage—even late in life, when doctors’ orders kept him from smoking them.
He stayed with the excitable Dr. Bernstein only briefly, which was long enough. Then it was off to Woodstock, where Roger Hill had concocted a job for Orson as second-semester drama coach. Within a week of his triumphant return from the Irish stage, Orson was immersed in the prep school’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night.
Skipper Hill had chosen it as the school’s entry in Chicago’s annual Drama League competition, partly because his students had attended Jane Cowl’s production at Chicago’s Harris Theater in the spring of the previous year. Todd’s version would borrow heavily from hers—Orson would even copy Robert Edmond Jones’s acclaimed set design, which featured a huge book occupying center stage, arranged against the backdrop of a sea. In Cowl’s production, a clown turned the book pages, but in the Todd version, the boys would turn the pages, revealing Orson’s series of scene paintings.
Full of adrenaline after his Irish sojourn, Orson did it all. He devised the colorful costumes and settings; he helped condense Shakespeare’s text; he played Malvolio, the steward of Olivia’s household; and, of course he “codirected” the Todd Troupers. Not all were boys: Roger Hill’s eldest daughter, Joanne, played Olivia, the character at the center of the play’s setup. Using the school’s new sixteen-millimeter camera, Orson filmed the Twelfth Night dress rehearsals for the actors to see and critique their performances—similarly, he would later use phonograph recordings for radio show run-throughs and, sometimes, in Hollywood.
In the 1970s, author Frank Brady watched color footage of this rehearsal film, the rarest of the rare in Welles’s oeuvre, in the headmaster’s living room in Miami. “The print that I saw,” Brady wrote, “was still perfectly preserved with rich color and quite professionally focused but without any camera movement, or pronounced flourishes or angles. It was simply shot from one point of view, perhaps from the middle of the tenth row of the theater: an amateur recording of the play on film rather than a piece of cinema. Orson narrated this film by making a phonograph record that was to be played in accompaniment.”
Over the years, the annual Drama League contest—the scene of Orson’s great disappointment in 1929—had acquired mythic status at Todd School, as an occasion for the slingshot-wielding Todd boys to challenge the bigger, richer Chicago Goliaths. Three years after his failure, Orson was determined to redress the balance. And now the young drama coach led the underdog Todd Troupers through showdowns against Senn High School, with a student body of eight thousand, and Bowen High School, with seven thousand, in the Fine Arts building of the Goodman Theatre.
The two-and-a-half-foot silver loving cup went to Todd School.
Early in May, Skipper had scheduled a two-week history and civics road trip for eighth-graders, and Orson begged a seat on the bus. He was still too young to help with the driving (and didn’t care to learn to drive anyway), so Hill made him chief of crew—the crew being all the Todd boys on the trip. Along with assistant-teaching, Orson supervised the daily journals the boys were expected to keep on the trip, and even helped organize the meals cooked on board the school’s fully equipped Arrow Coach, which Hill dubbed “Big Bertha.”
Orson’s connection with Skipper Hill was as strong as ever, and the trip would give him a chance to pursue a hidden agenda: he had talked the headmaster into collaborating on a stage play. Only in his weaker moments did Hill think of himself as a playwright, but Orson was a natural writer, and their long hours together on the road would give them time to discuss Orson’s “Big Idea.” That was one reason the itinerary took the boys south, through Kentucky, Louisville, and Lexington, en route to Appomattox Court House, Harpers Ferry, and Washington, D.C. Orson wanted to write a biographical play about the radical abolitionist John Brown.
Orson and Skipper Hill both were fascinated by the odyssey of Brown, who had tried to inspire a slave revolt with his attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859, an incident that helped trigger the Civil War and led to Brown’s capture and execution. Visiting the historic sites was a way of teaching civics to the Todd boys, but also a way for Orson and Skipper to soak up the atmosphere of places where the great opponent of slavery had lived and breathed. Orson spent hours sitting next to Hill as the headmaster drove Big Bertha through Kentucky and Virginia, both of them talking excitedly about Brown, brainstorming ideas for their play.
From Washington they drove north to New York City, where the Todd boys visited the Empire State Building, which had just opened the previous year. Skipper had brought the Twelfth Night camera along on the bus trip, and Orson captured silent footage of the boys gaping at various landmarks. Sometimes the chief of crew went before the camera himself—the ebullient tour guide, gesturing toward the viewers and expounding, always the incorrigible actor. But the trip also exposed Orson to the deepening effects of the Great Depression, now in its third year. In Ireland he had witnessed dire poverty, and now, in New York, he must have seen the droves of unemployed begging on street corners and living in parks. His growing political consciousness would inform his sympathetic portrayal of the radical John Brown.
From the city they swung upstate, stopping at Brown’s farm in North Elba, near Lake Placid, and at Niagara Falls before heading back to Woodstock. They returned just in time for Orson to start preparing for Closing Day ceremonies on June 15, which included a reprise of Twelfth Night, a musical puppet show, a short French play, and a “home movie” interspersing clips of Todd daily life with footage from their American history bus tour.
The Hills lingered in Woodstock for another week before leaving for Camp Tosebo in Michigan. Orson visited the camp briefly in July, then moved back in with Dr. Bernstein, shuttling between the doctor’s residences in Highland Park and Chicago, still corresponding faithfully with the headmaster while taking the lead in researching John Brown.
The Depression had doomed the Ravinia Festival, which underwent a financial crisis and closed that summer. The theater scene in Chicago was also bleak. Charles Collins in the Chicago Tribune pronounced it comatose until fall. July was torrid, driving Orson and thousands of other Chicagoans into air-conditioned movie theaters for the matinees. After delving into books and newspapers for a month in the public library, Orson was re
ady to write—and eager to leave the city, where the heat and dust of August aggravated his asthma and hay fever.
Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Roger Hill were now conspirators in looking after Orson’s needs, as Bernstein and Orson’s father once had been, and they recommended one of the summer cottages in northern Wisconsin owned by an Evanston colleague of Bernstein’s, Dr. J. P. Sprague. The cottage retreat was near Woodruff and Mercer Lake, a vacation destination for city dwellers, 350 miles north of Chicago. Summer camps, cabins, and sparse hamlets dotted the north woods area, part of the vast Lac du Flambeau reservation set aside for the Chippewa tribe.
Seventeen-year-old Orson boarded an overnight Chicago and Northwestern train, carrying his paints, brushes, pads of paper, typewriter, and books, heading for the Wisconsin woods. The train seemed to crawl north in the August torpor. At the water fountain, Orson bumped into James B. Meigs, who was the father of several Todd boys and the business manager of the American Weekly, the lurid Sunday magazine of the Hearst newspaper chain. His older son, James Jr., who had just graduated from Todd, was a Trouper in the large cast of Twelfth Night; and the younger Meigs boy, William, was also theatrically inclined, with a strong singing voice.14
Meigs invited Orson to stay with him and his family on their estate near Lac du Flambeau. Orson could have the run of the place and join the Meigses for meals in the main lodge. Orson was tempted, and when he met the driver who’d been sent to bring him to J. P. Sprague’s cottage—a “cross-eyed half-breed,” in Welles’s words, who was “raving drunk” at 6:30 A.M.—he took Meigs up on the offer. Orson got back on the train and accompanied Meigs to Lac du Flambeau, which boasted “a main street like an illustration from somebody’s novel of life in the early lumbering and Indian-fighting days,” in Orson’s words. At the station, he crammed himself into a Packard with Meigs and the rest of the “multitudinous” Meigs family.
The Packard wove past small lakes and through dense pine forest. Arriving at the luxurious-looking lodge, Orson was treated to “as demoralizing a breakfast as has ever been fed to an aspiring co-dramatist,” he reported in a letter to the headmaster. A three-day introduction to the north woods followed: the Meigs family took him sightseeing, hiking, swimming, sailing, canoeing, game-fishing, and even for a bit of hunting. “We went out for deer but brought home a mere brace of gamey partridge,” Orson recounted.
Eager to buckle down, Orson erected a personal wigwam on a small pine grove island offshore from the main lodge. The wigwam materials, Orson wrote to Skipper, consisted of “wild things, deer skin and bark, soft maple and basswood.” He forked $25.50 over to local “squaws and a few antiques of the neuter gender” for help in gathering materials and constructing the “great inverted salad bowl” in which he meant to dwell. He still didn’t feel much like writing, and went paddling along the river, recognizing “a portly old gentleman in a mellow panama”—none other than Hortense Hill’s father, Arthur Lincoln Gettys, who was vacationing nearby.
Gettys was a prominent Chicago attorney, a partner in a firm with five-term Chicago mayor Carter Harrison Jr., himself the son of another five-term Chicago mayor, Carter Harrison Sr., once a presidential hopeful. The Harrisons belonged to the newspaper family that owned the Chicago Times. Orson loved the name Gettys, and he would use it in Citizen Kane for Boss Gettys, the corrupt political broker described as “a big heavy set man, a little past middle age” in the script.
“Fate—everything is fate,” Orson wrote to Skipper from the Wisconsin north woods. The people he met, the places he went, all added up to a road map pointing him to his future.
The young man was galvanized by the first letter he received from Roger Hill. Skipper had dashed off an opening for their play about John Brown, a scene set at a town hall meeting in Concord, Massachusetts, where the debate is dominated by abolitionists Henry David Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison.
Orson was all enthusiasm, but it was Hill whose discipline had started the ball rolling. Feeling “permanently shamed” by his own procrastination, Orson promptly sat down at his typewriter in the wigwam and pecked out a title page—“Kansas Days, Copyright, 1932”—breathlessly summarizing the projected work as “a play of the stirring days just before the civil war, concerning chiefly John Brown, prophet—warrior—zealot—the most dramatic and incredible figure in American history.”
Then he wrote his own first scene, setting it at John Brown’s farm in North Elba, from where the antislavery crusader set out for Harpers Ferry. (After his death, the abolitionist’s body would be returned to North Elba—the place where “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave.”) The scenes Orson wrote now would be overhauled later, but, as always with him, when the writing began to flow it gushed. “I have trouble sometimes thinking things out clearly unless I write my thoughts down in some consecutive order,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich years afterward, “so I write myself quite a good deal of disposable prose.” He would evolve a lifelong habit of settling down to write late in the evening, after everyone else had retired—“a ten-thirty that feels, even to this inveterate night-hawk, like the cold moment before dawn in a Dublin scene-dock,” he wrote to Skipper. Guzzling coffee, he would write until dawn.
Inspired by one scene, then another, Orson often wrote episodes out of sequence—and that may have contributed to the structure of this first script, which would be framed by its opening, Brown’s death, and then be driven forward by a clever narrative device: a newspaperman’s search for the real man behind the legend. The stage directions called for stereopticon slides of photographs, documents, and newspaper headlines. All of these elements anticipated Citizen Kane, noted Welles’s authorized biographer, Barbara Leaming. “Long before John Brown actually appears on stage,” Leaming observed, “we have examined a variety of conflicting points of view about him.”
Hill was older and wiser, but in this teaming with Orson he swiftly became the junior partner, as reflected in the credit on Orson’s cover page, which read “by Orson Welles and Roger Hill.” Hill understood his role: once he fired the starter pistol, he could step back and watch Orson run the race. The headmaster would complete only a few scenes for the play; the bulk of the work was Orson’s.
Even at seventeen, Orson was already a peerless editor of other people’s ideas. “Personally I think it’s great. Wonderful!” he wrote, critiquing Hill’s first pages, before asking tactfully, “With this opinion understood, may I offer the inevitable criticism?” Certainly the headmaster had “made incredibly dull expository material genuinely dramatic. But I do think there’s too much Thoreau! Not too many lines, understand, but too wonderful a personality. He completely dominates the off-stage individuality of John Brown, whose shadow should be more real than any of the persons actually presented. All of the characters are perhaps a little too painstakingly characters.”
He tempered his critiques with praise. Thoreau’s “marching-on” speech in defense of Brown was “superb,” Orson noted, “the kind [of speeches] that live because they combine a literary quality with a very real dramatic and practically theatric power.” But parts of the other dialogue Hill wrote were perhaps “too good,” Orson said. “We don’t want to be accused of bombast. I think neat ‘lines’ are a fault of mine too, we must both beware, for that way lies floweriness.”
Another lifelong pattern emerged: alone with his creative impulses, Orson always had too much energy, too many thoughts in his head, to focus exclusively on one Big Idea. Once he plunged into the John Brown script, his mind began racing, and during breaks from writing about the abolitionist he dashed off notes for other projects. He whipped up an outline for a mystery play called “The Dark Room,” involving society figures gathered together for a haunted séance. “A natural, a positive honey!” Orson predicted in a letter to the headmaster. “Every English-speaking repertory company on the globe will be doing that show, mark my words!” But he didn’t get very far on “The Dark Room” before he was distracted by another intriguing possibility:
“Bright Lucifer,” a story that could draw on his own life and the northern Wisconsin locale. But he soon stalled on “Bright Lucifer,” and set that aside too.
The “sacred” task of the moment, he realized, was his collaboration with Roger Hill. Orson pined for the “sunshine of your enthusiasm,” he admitted to Skipper, and sometimes withheld finished pages for fear of the headmaster’s negative reaction. If Hill didn’t respond to his work quickly enough by mail, Orson worried that it had fallen short. Orson peppered his letters with the puns and silly jokes that amused them both: “I can ride a canoe, canoe?” (“Skipper brought out the boy in him,” Simon Callow wrote.) He signed his letters, “Love without end.”
A series of fierce August thunderstorms finally expelled him from his wigwam. He had struck up an acquaintance with another vacationer, Lawrence C. Whiffen, who operated Wisconsin’s first archery supply store in Milwaukee, and Whiffen offered to share his pine log cabin for a small stipend. A bow-hunting fanatic, about fifteen years older than Orson, Whiffen spent summers in the Lac du Flambeau region honing his archery skills while working on conservationist tracts. “Larry the Archer,” as Orson fondly dubbed his cabin mate, was the strong, silent type, but Whiffen made “a great to-do” pounding on his Underwood through the night—setting a good example for Orson, who sat across the table from him, doing the same.
When not writing, Orson spent time with the multitudinous Meigses. One day James Jr. bagged a deer (“You ‘bag’ a deer, don’t you? Or do you bug it?” Orson joked to Skipper), and it was a splendid animal, “glorious antlered.” All feasted on the venison. Orson was friendly enough with James Jr., “a remarkable huntsman” who was nearly his age, though he noted that “his are the huntsman’s faults and there is just no halting the tedious, Albert-like inevitability of his tongue.”15 He preferred the younger, more artistic William, whom the family called Willie.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 26
