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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Orson tried never to miss a John Barrymore picture, and one day he drove with the Meigses to see Grand Hotel at the Isle Theatre in Minocqua. Orson bought tickets for the whole family—in honor of Willie’s fourteenth birthday, but also as a “gesture made towards repaying all this overwhelming Meigs hospitality,” Orson wrote to Skipper. But these movie tickets, along with the rent he paid to Larry the Archer, the cost of the wigwam, and “a general malted milking now and then,” as Orson reported to the headmaster, left his wallet shrunken “to the most incredible flatness,” engendering “a state of mind not amiably inclined to fertility and the fruitful pen.” Orson fired off telegrams to Dr. Bernstein and Skipper, pleading for cash.

  When his guardian temporized, the headmaster sent $25 by wire from Michigan, calling it a gift that would not have to be repaid. Orson could have wept. “I can scarcely think of a more perfect workshop,” a newly hopeful Orson wrote to the headmaster from Larry the Archer’s cabin. “A tuneful country this, here on the reservation, now that noisy outboards have been packed away. Woodland sounds from the wild where the Chippewa hunt bear and deer, silver sounds from the lake, and sunny insect sounds at mid-day. A little sad, perhaps the song the marsh-folk sing, and sadder yet the endless dirging of the wind in the fir trees. At night there are stealthy little sounds, and always the unbelievable: ceaseless in the air, the throbbing of medicine-drums.”

  The John Brown script had languished briefly as he scrounged for subsistence. Now his spirit was lifted, his creativity recharged. After “a soul-satisfying dinner” provided by the Meigses, he plunged afresh into the script. The night flew by. “Now, through the murky spectacles of early morning (one does keep barbaric hours in this bee-loud glade),” Orson wrote to Skipper, quoting Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “I search in vain for rosy pigmentation. Courage my soul! Hope rises with the morning sun.”

  September brought Orson back to Highland Park, where he busied himself collating his scenes with the headmaster’s, revising as he toiled. He and Roger Hill planned a trip to New York once the fall semester was safely under way. Skipper was genuinely enthusiastic about Orson’s script and thought he could pitch it to any number of former Todd boys who were now in show business.

  And Orson’s script it was. In just one month’s time, Orson had written more than two hundred pages, encompassing eleven major scenes and twenty-nine characters. Hill claimed credit for only “most” of one finished scene, the very first he wrote, and even that was rewritten by Orson. After spending the first half of September on revisions, Orson started typing multiple drafts for submission purposes.

  Autumn was gorgeous, and the Moores, who still lived near Dr. Maurice Bernstein, had “a heavenly back-yard, sun-flecked and fragrant,” where Orson could sit writing, typing, and retyping. (“I doubt if I have ever, even in a class-room, been forced into such stupid, wearing work,” he nevertheless complained.) Orson’s guardian and the Moores were so closely aligned that today they might be considered “blended households.” Orson could never quite figure out what was going on between Bernstein and Aunt Hazel; but he complained in his letters that the two quarreled often and sometimes tearfully, interrupting his concentration and slowing his writing.

  For that reason and others, Orson occasionally escaped to Chicago, where the newspaper world was in an uproar. After repeated clashes with a new editor of the Chicago Examiner, his friend Ashton Stevens had been threatened with the sack; the respected drama critic eventually accepted a switch to the afternoon Hearst paper, the Chicago American. Thanks to Stevens, Ned Moore, John Clayton, and his other well-placed friends, Orson still had his choice of opening-night tickets for the symphony, opera, and theater. He was particularly taken by Of Thee I Sing, by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind (with a Gershwin score), a new hit satirizing a presidential campaign. The play had its Chicago premiere in late September, and Orson agreed with Charles Collins, who wrote in the Tribune that it was the “most triumphant show of the year.” “Much the swellest thing,” Orson wrote to Skipper. “You must see it.” He and Hill were already talking about writing a second play—a Big Idea musical about another famous American, perhaps even a president. To Orson, the triumphant Of Thee I Sing was both a template and an inspiration.

  Still, Highland Park stymied his creativity. When Dr. Bernstein wasn’t bickering with Aunt Hazel, he was lecturing Orson about the future. Orson had enjoyed his little fling with theater; now, perhaps, was the time for college. After all, if Orson was still serious about his theatrical ambitions, why was he lolling around in the Moores’s backyard? Orson had “wasted the summer,” and now he was “wasting the already started theatrical season,” his guardian warned him. If Orson was going to try to sell his play, when was he leaving for New York?

  Orson was just as impatient. “Why not now now NOW?” he wrote to Skipper.

  Orson’s plans and problems and Big Ideas exasperated Bernstein—indeed, nearly overwhelmed him. As Hazel Moore pointed out, whenever Orson was home Bernstein got lost “in the throes of Orson,” and was unable to focus on his own interests.

  Aunt Hazel thought she handled Orson better, finding him always “an intensely interesting person, regardless of the element of agreement one may have with him.” The boy’s feelings about Hazel were harder to discern: in one passage of her biography, Barbara Leaming wrote that Orson “vehemently disliked the autocratic” woman, but elsewhere she wrote only that he found her “somewhat irritating,” a kinder analysis. Orson was not quoted directly.

  Everyone in the Moore and Bernstein households seemed intent on debating Orson’s best possible future. The Moores always sided with Dr. Bernstein, who wanted to point Orson toward a constructive target and dispatch him toward that goal for a fixed and if possible lengthy period of time. The Hills felt the same way: “Anything to get him out of my hair!” Skipper told Leaming.

  In late September, Orson had lunch at the Tavern Club with Charles Collins. The respected drama critic had read the John Brown play, and now he “waxed wonderfully human” over its prospects, Orson reported to Hill. Collins also suggested a few possible titles: “The Madman of Freedom,” “The Approaching Storm,” “War’s Pioneer.” Collins had known Orson since his adolescence but now treated him almost as a colleague or personal friend. When Orson spoke of his adventures in Ireland, Collins answered with stories of his flirtation with the Dublin-born actress Patricia Collinge when she last passed through Chicago.

  In Highland Park, meanwhile, Dr. Bernstein announced disquieting news: Orson’s older brother wished to pay him a visit. Richard I. Welles, as he now called himself, had been fighting his institutionalization at Kankakee since 1927. His efforts were unsuccessful, but he was allowed occasional weekend outings in the company of a hospital attendant, and Richard was hoping to see his brother on his own twenty-seventh birthday, coming up on the first Friday of October. Bernstein had no legal responsibility for Richard, other than doling out small portions of the inheritance for hospital expenses, but he insisted that Orson welcome his brother for a birthday visit, and that Orson offer to pay Richard’s travel expenses out of his own allowance.

  Orson had not seen his black-sheep brother for at least three years—the last time probably in the company of their father. “Frankly I have no desire to see him for another three,” Orson sounded off in a letter to Roger Hill. “He’s so upsetting to one’s equilibrium. But something has got to be done I suppose, and I do want to be as nice as possible.

  “But what the hell? . . . Do I seem callous? Really, Richard is a tremendous strain. Always making off with himself or your silverware, and unbearably overbearing. But I do love him and sympathize—and I will try just this once to be a little unselfish. Incidentally, you must meet him. I’ll never feel you quite know me ’till you know my family.”

  But Skipper never did get to know Richard, who would remain unknowable to all but a few in his lifetime. “After all that worry over Richard, and all that heroic self-sacrifice, the wee
kend is not to be,” Orson wrote a few days later. “Dadda forgot to perform certain Kankakee rites, he’s so busy these days, so brother Dick must languish in the institution over his birthday.”

  Not long after that, the Hills rode to the rescue in Big Bertha, sweeping Orson away to New York. Roger Hill bet the moon on the whirlwind trip, installing his wife and prize pupil in a suite at the Algonquin “suitable for entertaining lucky Broadway producers who would be offered our opus,” in the headmaster’s words. Hill’s top candidate was Dwight Deere Wiman, who’d been his own former roommate at Todd School before coproducing a string of Broadway hits in the 1920s. Also high on the list was his college chum Samson Raphaelson, the New York playwright and nowadays a screenwriter for Ernst Lubitsch. When Wiman took a quick pass, Skipper pinned his hopes on Raphaelson but was unable to track him down—no surprise, as Raphaelson wasn’t even in New York. He was in and out of Hollywood.

  When Wiman said no and Raphaelson couldn’t be found, Hill’s confidence faltered. He and his wife had duties in Woodstock, and they decided to leave promotion of the script—now titled “Marching Song”—to Orson. “I peered into an empty purse,” Hill recalled, “moved our boy into the cheapest of rooms, to continue sale efforts via pavement pounding, and headed home.” Hill dangled the hope that he might return to New York over a long weekend.

  Installed at $9 a week in an “efficiency” with kitchenette and bath at an apartment house on the corner of Eighty-First Street and Broadway, Orson hit the pavement with a stack of typed scripts and his own researched list of prospects. His targets included Ben A. Boyar, general manager for Max Gordon, who had achieved his breakthrough as producer of Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer; Richard E. French, general manager for John L. Golden, another producer of Raphaelson plays; Samuel French (no relation to Richard), a well-known publisher and producer of plays; and Broadway mainstays including William Harris Jr. and George C. Tyler, whose producing credits predated World War I.

  The established producers gravitated toward musicals and light fare, but that wasn’t the only hurdle for the young aspiring playwright. Although Orson jumped out of bed earlier than usual every morning, dressed in his best, and spent the day knocking on producers’ doors, he rarely got to meet anyone important. And no one had the slightest interest in reading something written by a seventeen-year-old, unproduced, unrepresented writer from the Midwest. After days of polite but steady discouragement, Orson yearned for the bottomless optimism of the Hills. His own ebullience melted into “qualms and doubts,” in his words. The occasional inspiring letter from the headmaster enabled Orson to console himself that “ ‘Marching Song’ is the goods!” On days without any positive reinforcement, though, he had the “sinking suspicion” that their play was simply “bad.” Still, he wrote to Hill ruefully, “We can always write more, can’t we?”

  In late October came a body blow: the New York Times reviewed a “searching” new biography of John Brown that sounded superior to their own work. “My happiness and self-respect seem founded only on an admiration and confidence in that, our play,” Orson wrote dismally. “Sometimes I go wandering off into the suburbs of doubt, and journeying too far catch a glimpse of that awful pit, without a bottom, and sickeningly without a vestige of gravitation to take you there—and then there is a great floundering of entrails within me, the nausea of despair—and I go scurrying back to the Times Square of our optimism.”

  Characteristically upbeat, Hill replied swiftly: Didn’t an acclaimed new biography make the abolitionist’s story all the more marketable? Orson thrived on such pep talks, no matter how unrealistic. He mailed a fresh version of the script to Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir at the Gate Theatre, then took out his well-thumbed stage directory and jotted down more names of producers. “I’ve been pawing through that lousy directory for so long I think I shall go mad,” Orson wrote, “mad . . . Mad . . . MAD!” At the urging of Hill and Dr. Bernstein alike, Orson finally agreed to seek a literary agent to represent the script to producers. He tried Leah Salisbury, a onetime actress who had developed an important clientele; and Alice Kauser, a play broker since the turn of the century. “They [literary agents] were much the most difficult,” Orson reported bitterly. “Gave one a sense of defeat, just by their manner, obviously youth was a tremendous handicap. Producers are much more folksy” with their rejections.

  One day, on West Forty-Eighth Street, Orson ran into Hubert Osborne, the former director of the Goodman Theatre, who had taken over briefly after its founder, Thomas Wood Stevens, was cashiered. When Osborne asked what he was doing in New York, Orson boasted that he was a playwright now, busy trying to interest producers in a serious drama. Serious drama was a long hard road, Osborne observed sadly. “Don’t let them forget your face,” Osborne advised him. “Which means, I suppose, sitting in offices,” Orson wrote to the headmaster. “I can think of . . . nothing in this whole wide world I would like to do less.”

  Osborne, who knew Orson primarily as an actor, urged him to try out for some acting parts in his spare time. In his quest to find a home for “Marching Song,” Orson had almost forgotten he was an actor with professional credits—and acting was indeed his best bet for income. Learning that there was an opening for an understudy in a revival of The Silent House, a 1928 melodrama, Orson stopped by the Shubert offices and sat around with a few dozen other optimists, hoping for the part. “Somebody got it days before,” he wrote to the Hills. “They always do.”

  Night was when he felt most positive, his energy infinite. With most of the work on “Marching Song” complete, he dived into another project, a more commercial stage thriller, tentatively called “Where Was Moses?” He and Skipper had sketched out the story en route to New York, but Orson was determined to write “Where Was Moses?” alone. He wanted Hill to produce the show in Chicago before embarking on a national tour, ultimately bringing it to Broadway.

  Orson expected to play the lead, another Chinaman to add to his repertoire; the staging would incorporate his penchant for magic. “My part is absolutely marvelous, and will give ample opportunity for the exhibition of my every trick,” Orson reported to Hill. “I’m really writing it with your promise to produce it,” he reminded the headmaster. “It’s a cheap show and should pack ’em in, not only at home but around about, even in Gotham if it takes at all. In fact I’m envisioning a production company by us—limitless possibilities, Skipper, limitless.”

  Orson wrote the Hills overlapping letters while waiting desperately for mail from either of them. Had Skipper tracked down Samson Raphaelson? Had he seen Of Thee I Sing yet? “You don’t know, you can’t guess, how my spirits can fade and wilt without you,” he wrote to the headmaster. “Particularly in this strange, trying town and in this strange, trying situation.”

  Most producers’ offices were willing to let him drop off a copy of “Marching Song,” but few ever responded. “I haven’t been phoned, or post-carded, or written to,” he reported to Hill. One day, when he missed paying his rent, his landlord virtually tossed him onto the sidewalk. Orson downsized into a fourth-floor flat in a nearby brownstone on West Seventy-Seventh Street, a “sunny quiet friendly old room,” shabbier than the “efficiency” apartment but close enough to shops and Broadway. He worried about the $7.50 weekly rent, and whether he should send his mail by special delivery, or settle for a three-cent stamp. He wired to Dr. Bernstein, pleading for money.

  Just as his spirits began to plummet, a “cheering letter” from the Hills lifted him up again, pushing him back to work on the commercial thriller and coaxing him to keep looking for producers for “Marching Song.” He met with the reader who had “covered” the John Brown play for producer William Harris, who told him the script was “extremely interesting” but not the kind of subject Harris backed. Again, he despaired. “I went over to the Riverside and stared moodily at the deep black water,” he wrote to Skipper. Then one happy day, Orson managed to coax Ben Boyar to the telephone, and Boyar promised to read “Marchi
ng Song” and get back to him.

  Another “cheering” epistle arrived from Hortense Hill, saying she hoped Orson wasn’t feeling too lonely in New York. “No, I’m not lonely,” he replied. “Strangely enough I haven’t been a bit. A little bitter perhaps, inert rather, and cheerless, but the thriller has kept my nose to its own peculiar grindstone, and I haven’t minded. My dread of New York has been supplanted by a half contemptuous affection. Broadway has become for me the most transparent and the least dazzling of all main streets—inclusive of Indianapolis and Kenosha—[and] the desirability of the end for which we are all striving here, grows more and more dubious.

  “It’s cold out,” he ended, “My hands are still numb. Too numb to type properly.”

  October became November. Orson lived according to his mood swings. Sometimes he pinched pennies; at other times he dined well. “I gotta be comfortable!” he wrote to Skipper. He spent a few precious dollars to join Actors Equity, in case he lucked into an acting job, but warned Hill not to tell Dr. Bernstein, whom he constantly dunned for advances on his allowance.

  A wire from Dr. Bernstein bailed him out financially one last time, but Bernstein also scolded him: “I do hope you won’t continue to waste your youth aimlessly.” His guardian dangled a fresh possibility: John Clayton, out of regular work since the Chicago Civic Opera closed in 1931, was on the verge of signing a contract to produce a twenty-six-episode aviation drama series for WLS, the Sears Roebuck radio station in Chicago, an affiliate of the Blue Network of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Clayton had told Bernstein he envisioned a continuing part for Orson. Orson was tempted—it was his first job prospect in months—and yet he knew that accepting it would mean returning to Chicago with his tail between his legs.