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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and the moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heart beats. He speaks to everyone.

  Orson rushed to the post office and mailed the grand introduction to Todd School, anxious for Hill’s response. The headmaster recognized that he had tapped a deep well. “When I read the first few sentences of what he wrote,” Hill told Barbara Leaming, “they were absolutely fantastic.” He also loved the sample drawings Orson had enclosed. “Kids will love them,” he wrote to Orson. “We’ll fill the margins of every page.”

  Orson went into overdrive, pulling together everything he would need—writing tools, sketch pads, a collected Shakespeare, other books—and cramming it all into his cheap battered trunk. He proposed a working trip to Africa. He thought that if he booked an inexpensive passage on a freighter he could visit his acquaintance from Paris, Brahim El Glaoui, in Morocco, and on the return trip he could stop and meet up with Dr. Walter Starkie, an Abbey Theatre man traveling with Spanish Gypsies, who was said to be living in Seville.

  Dr. Bernstein was persuaded by the merits of the project, especially since the headmaster had vouched for it. Orson’s guardian agreed to release enough of his inheritance to bankroll the trip. The good cop–bad cop routine the headmaster and doctor had going with Orson worked exceedingly well. The two father figures rarely clashed directly, and while Hill was amused by Orson’s frequent grumbling about Bernstein, he held his tongue and rarely seconded those complaints. Putting Orson on a ship to Africa, to go off and create an annotated Shakespeare, would suit both the frustrated guardian and the enterprising Todd School headmaster. As Hill told Barbara Leaming, “It would keep Orson occupied and it would rejuvenate the print shop.”

  Orson took the train to New York and boarded a freighter called the Exermont, which departed for Casablanca on March 20, 1933. The ship accommodated twelve paying passengers, but Orson and another person were the only ones on this voyage. He looked forward to two weeks at sea. “It is all very Eugene O’Neill and salty and shippish,” Orson reported to Roger Hill. His private quarters were not luxurious, but “I can work beautifully in a two-by-four lounge in the presence of all the officers,” he wrote. “The radio won’t work, which is another blessing.”

  A week or so later, the Exermont passed within one hundred miles of the Azores. “This morning there was sunlight and a school of turtles, but I slept through,” Orson wrote to the headmaster. “Now of course, it’s raining. Nary a turtle. . . . I wish you were here. You’d love it. Everybody from the Captain down is a real character, and you can’t think how out on the ocean it seems in a tiny freighter wallowing about in the high Atlantic. Here is a crossing that’s genuine adventure, fourteen karat. Just the meals are rare fun, chasing the stews and soups around the mess and trying to keep chair and self beside the shifting scene of the table.”

  Orson “slept through” most days because he worked through most nights, spreading his books and notes around him as he launched into condensation and embroidery of the first play he tackled—Julius Caesar. He had seen Julius Caesar performed numerous times and even staged it himself for Todd School. But as he worked, he felt the nagging underside of creativity, an insecurity that people didn’t always associate with him. Behind the face of soaring confidence, he was questioning himself. “I’ve gotten some swell ideas about Brutus and the rest, what was going on in the author’s mind when he wrote them down, etcetera,” Orson wrote to Hill. The work made him feel “much nearer to Caesar than I ever dreamed I could. . . . Just near enough to know how far I am. And Skipper, I’ve always known Caesar pretty well, and others, Hamlet even, are terribly foreign. What do I know about Hamlet? What do I know about Shakespeare? I feel an awful bluff.”

  Doubt made him cautious, and he slowed down. The first batch of scenes, which he mailed when the ship briefly made port, contained “grotesque word ordering,” Orson warned the headmaster, along with “repetitions and misfirings.” At first, he felt trepidation about encroaching on the Bard with his own editing and annotations. “What right have I to give credulous and believing innocents an inflection for a mighty line of Shakespeare’s? Who I am to say that this is ‘tender’ and this ‘angrily’ and this ‘with a smile’?” He cautioned Hill that his work might require “a little spring cleaning” before it was ready to show the world. “I wonder, will you think there’s not enough, or as I fear today, much too much? Is our whole idea wrong? I wish to high heaven you were here to reassure me.”

  As he did throughout his life, Orson sprinkled little drawings and verse into his correspondence. In the earliest surviving letter from this trip, Orson offered Hill an ode to the indelible experience of seafaring:

  Days now numberless, it seems to me.

  We’ve lolled and wallowed in the lusty sea.

  Careening and squeaking, teetering and creaking.

  Curtseying and kicking down the waves.

  And screwing through the working waters of the sea.

  Time is a thing that used to be.

  The order and ascent of days is nothing now.

  The March-blown, hail-fretted oceans mawl our bobbing bedlam.

  Shiver the empty Exermont from screw to prow.

  And yet still to Africa there move a million mountains, growing now.

  An acreage hysterical for us to plow.

  Crash in the galley.

  Crash in the shelter deck.

  Crash on the bowing prow.

  Crash on the bowing prow.

  Time is a thing that used to be.

  The order and ascent of days is nothing now.

  “Today,” the letter concluded, “for the first time it’s fairly calm and we’re headed Southish” toward the coast of Africa. “There’s no hail to speak of . . . My love, Orson.”

  When the ship docked at Casablanca, Orson left it for Marrakech, where he hoped to find Brahim El Glaoui, the son of T’hami El Glaoui, the pasha of Marrakech—the “King of the Atlas,” as he was known. Orson arrived in time for Aid Al-Kebir, an important Islamic holiday, a four-day festival that marked the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

  “Exciting is the word,” Orson wrote from Marrakech. “The pleasure city of the Bedouin, the mountain clansmen and the Graid Caid, the high capital of Islamic fanaticism; frenzied, noisy, wicked, utterly proud, a violent place. I have been lying here in bed brooding over the typewriter which I have perched on my knees in the frantically peach-colored French quilts, trying to frame sentences for you about this wild, swaggering city.”

  Writing late at night, he threw the shutters of his hotel window open to “a garden-scented, star-populous, moon-bright and very noisy night. . . . A million dogs from the Mella to the Medinah howl without pause: locusts, gramophones, flutes, drums, cymbals, crowing cocks, the sleighbellish ringing of the taxi carriages, hoarse Arabic and nasal French, music and more music . . .

  “A night to be out in the streets.”

  He drank sweet thick coffee and gazed out the window. Whenever the street parade dwindled, his typewriter started up, disturbing the neighbors till they banged on his walls. His goal was to write until dawn and catch a glimpse when the sultan passed on the way to prayer.

  Orson spent his first days in Morocco writing—not the Shakespeare book, but a flurry of letters home to Roger Hill and Dr. Maurice Bernstein. “Visiting sunsets and Kasbahs and Souks and whatnot,” Orson reported to Skipper. “In a mere week, I’ve spent most of my money and all of my time doing just what I swore to you I wouldn’t. Don’t blame me, blame Africa.”

  The El Glaoui family was not easily located; the members were dispersed among several castles in Fez. After a week Orson left Marrakech by bus, heading for the French protectorate near the Grand Atlas Mountains, expecting to meet up with Brahim El Glaoui there and grow “horribly industrious and economical.” Besides passengers the bus was filled with stinking ch
ickens, and Orson struck up a friendship with an elderly curator from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, who was roaming Morocco painting landscapes. Together in Fez, he and this kindred soul knocked on the door of the palatial residence of Brahim El Glaoui.

  Orson told Barbara Leaming that Brahim El Glaoui and his family warmly welcomed the visitors, inviting the young American and the elderly Dutch museum curator into their home and then bringing them along on a “two-week picnic” that wove through the Atlas Mountains in a long train with other European guests and a parade of retainers. (It was not unlike the extravagant picnic party led by Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane.) Every night the two oddly paired travelers were treated to elaborate feasts, singing, dancing, and storytelling. Six guests shared a tent, and Brahim El Glaoui made a gift to his guests of concubines from his entourage, Welles claimed. “Entrancing experience,” Welles told Leaming, as usual stingy with the carnal details. The Dutch curator didn’t think it was so entrancing, and hopped a bus to Casablanca.

  Over the years, Welles would develop a reputation for mythmaking, but he rarely made up stories about himself out of whole cloth; imaginative embroidery of actual events was more his style. The stories he told about his time with Brahim El Glaoui were too fabulous for many people to swallow. “No one believes me,” Orson dolefully told an interviewer later in the 1930s, “so I’ve stopped talking about them any more.” Decades later, Welles’s biographer Simon Callow made it clear that he doubted the whole business—elderly Dutchman, concubines, and all.

  One thing seems certain: Orson neglected his work on Shakespeare in Morocco. “I didn’t do much writing at all,” he later admitted, “I did a lot of reading.” He was probably still in Fez when his eighteenth birthday came—there is a monthlong gap in his surviving letters—but after lingering a while longer in the French protectorate, he boarded a bus to Tangier. From there he took a ferry to the southern tip of Spain, and then traveled by train to Barcelona, where he was expecting to receive money from Dr. Bernstein via Western Union. Barcelona was in the throes of a workers’ strike, but the doctor had sent a bonanza: payments from a magazine that had accepted Orson’s pseudonymous short stories about a young Baltimore sleuth. He was suddenly flush.

  Unfortunately for Welles scholars, neither the identity of his pulp-fiction collaborator nor their pseudonym has ever been discovered. To this day, Orson’s short stories remain lost. Pulp fiction historians Sam Moskowitz and Nils Hardin tried tracking them down in the late 1970s, corresponding with Welles when he was living in Los Angeles. “I did indeed write in the pulps,” Welles told them, “and earned my living doing it for the better part of a year, but I did this through an arrangement with a pulp writer who had all the proper connections and who sold my stories under various established nom de plumes [sic] of his own. I never saw these in print because I was living in Africa and Spain and this long-forgotten partner’s name escapes me.”

  Perhaps it was John Clayton, one of the names Welles dredged from his memory. But he had already forgotten the man’s name even by the time of a deposition he gave in 1949. When lawyers for Ferdinand Lundberg, digging for parallels between Imperial Hearst—Lundberg’s biography of William Randolph Hearst—and Citizen Kane, asked Welles what other literary works he had written before Kane, Orson volunteered that he had written “two or three novels unpublished” and a number of short stories. What had happened to this early fiction? “All destroyed,” Welles told Lundberg’s lawyers. “I do not know where the manuscripts for special articles and short stories are, if they indeed exist, and I have no memoranda as to the dates or publication of these works.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Welles wrote to the two pulp fiction historians in the late 1970s, “I know we [he and his coauthor] did manage on a few occasions to place stories in Adventure—considered then to be the ultimate in its field. Most of my stuff, as I remember, ran in lesser magazines.” Besides the “detective series with a rich, young aristocratic sleuth living with his three elderly aunts in Baltimore,” the filmmaker said, he also wrote “a good deal of science fiction of the Lobster-Men type and a few novelettes and stories laid in the Far East.

  “I’m sorry, but this absolutely exhausts all recollection,” Welles concluded.

  There were no letters from Skipper in Barcelona. Taking this as a sign of disapproval, Orson booked passage on a slow ship stopping frequently along the south and west coasts of Spain, and rededicated himself to writing.

  The only draft he had completed and mailed was Julius Caesar. Now he plunged into The Merchant of Venice, pushing himself through the nights. By the time the vessel reached Malaga he had made progress—but once again the process of adapting Shakespeare proved daunting. “Besides being a rip-snorting romance, moving and hair-tingling from the first entrance to the last exeunt,” The Merchant of Venice “is one of the most imperishable collections of poetic writing ever produced. God! I hate gooing it up!”

  Dawn was “sweetening the sultry Spanish night” as he labored on Merchant, he wrote to Skipper. He had “never worked so hard” and “produced so little. I gave up trips and things, I really did, everything except the most perfunctory sight-seeing; since I left Tangier I’ve stuck in this wretched little bake-house of a boat and screwed my face into granny-knots.” Orson prodded Hill for reassurance, worrying about the “limitation of space, and the kids’ lack of a stage vocabulary, and the dangers of scaring them off us with anything, anything, faintly esoteric or syllabled.” When his nerves overwhelmed him, or he needed a distraction, Orson toyed with other projects: a one-act play; a Greek tragedy (“with masks and a good company of six actors,” he wrote to Hill); a “Big Idea for filming Treasure Island.”16

  Late at night in the Malaga harbor, however, he decided he was closing in on an authoritative approach to The Merchant of Venice. His working draft was “messy, pasted, scratched and scribbled,” he conceded, the stage directions were “garbagey,” the “descriptions of emotions . . . simply bloody, there’s no defending that.” But his writing had begun to sharpen; the latest scenes evinced real quality. “The drawings are going to be hot!” he wrote proudly. His once tentative grasp of this play was now “very good—O, infinitely better than it was on Julius Caesar.”

  As dawn approached, Orson completed his draft of Merchant, just in time to mail the pages to the headmaster (“sailing time, mailing time”). He was still undecided about what the third play should be: Hamlet? Twelfth Night? A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Much Ado About Nothing? He would think it over as he sailed on to the river port of Seville, writing a chatty letter to Hortense.

  Seville was a travel poster come alive, one of the most enchanting cities in Spain, its ancient culture a patchwork of Roman and Moorish traditions. Orson left the ship to meet with Dr. Walter Starkie, professor of Romance languages at Trinity College, who was on the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre. Orson had heard Starkie speak in Chicago on the beauties and mysteries of Spain, and had met him in Dublin.

  A scholar of Gypsies who roamed Spain with them and spoke their Romany language fluently, Starkie was at work on a new volume of Raggle Taggle, his ongoing series of picaresque travelogue books. The latest installment would cover his wanderings in Barbary, Andalusia, and La Mancha, and life in the Triana quarter of Seville.

  Triana was “the home of song and dancing,” as Starkie wrote, with Gypsies, flamenco artists, and bullfighters idling in the parks and cafés. Orson was instantly enamored of the sleepless quarter, with its orange blossom scent and constantly thrumming guitars. With his pulp-fiction earnings easing his financial concerns, he took a flat above a “fuzz castle” (bordello), with money left over to buy drinks for “half of Andalusia,” as he told Barbara Leaming.

  Just across the Puente de Triana, spanning the wide Guadalquivir River, lay the city proper and its landmark bullring, La Maestranza. Seville was “the city of the bull,” and spring was the season for bullfighting fever. Orson had just read Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoo
n, celebrating the rituals and traditions of bullfighting. He mingled “with the bull-fighting set and soon was helping out ‘backstage,’ ” Peter Noble wrote.

  Seville was the setting of another of Orson’s elusive legends. Did the eighteen-year-old really take bullfighting lessons from a toreador at a local ranch, briefly launching himself in “a succession of pitiful bullfights” (Leaming’s phrase) in which he billed himself as “El Americano”? And when he failed as a bullfighter, did Orson really relaunch himself as a picador, who stabs the bull with a lance from on horseback to weaken and goad it? Did the scars he proudly exhibited to interviewers in later years truly originate in the bullring?

  Simon Callow, skeptical about the tale, pointed out that Orson’s bullfighting wounds “tended to travel a little” from one interview to the next. Welles told Leaming that at one point rowdy audience members had “showered him with beer bottles (from which he still bears a slight scar on his upper lip).” According to Kenneth Tynan, however, it was his thigh that suffered injury. When David Frost interviewed the filmmaker, the injury migrated to his neck—and there were “others” he’d rather not bare, Orson hinted, since Frost’s show was “a family type of program.”

  What to believe? It’s true that Orson lived in Seville for only a month or so, but he had already proved he could pack a lot of frenetic activity into the briefest time. Seventy-five years after Orson came to Seville, two European filmmakers spent months chasing the truth, and their documentary El Americano insists that Orson participated in at least four bullfights as “El Americano,” with bulls he purchased with his pulp-fiction windfall. (Paying for the bulls was one shortcut to becoming a matador.)

  There’s no question that Seville initiated him into the world of bullfighting and launched his many friendships with the bravest matadors and a lifelong reverence for the sport that soured only toward the end, when he began to feel pity for the bulls. Over time Welles would draw close to Antonio Ordoñez, a top bullfighter of his era, whom Ernest Hemingway chronicled admiringly in The Dangerous Summer, and also the Peruvian torera Conchita Cintrón, one of the greatest women ever to command the ring, for whose autobiography Welles supplied the introduction.