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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Throughout the Bernsteins’ two-week vacation—which included a guided tour of RKO; the studio premiere of Nurse Edith Cavell, followed by a party for executives and stars at the Trocadero; an Arthur Rodzinski concert at the Hollywood Bowl; and another Brentwood dinner party with Ashton and FloFlo Stevens and the Mario Chamlees—the doctor oohed and aahed about Hollywood. Orson couldn’t really begrudge him his enjoyment, especially after Bernstein, with his remarkable timing for such accidents of fate, recognized symptoms of appendicitis in the “pale lemon yellow” appearance of William “Vakhtangov” Alland, then rushed the “slave” off to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where the Chicago doctor performed a successful appendectomy.

  Bernstein kept dropping hints about moving to California, which Orson pretended not to hear. Writing from Chicago afterward to thank Orson for the “most wonderful vacation,” Hazel Bernstein apologized if they had monopolized his time. “I hope you didn’t feel inconvenienced, and I don’t believe that Dadda talked out of turn too much either,” she wrote. “The trip did make him realize that you are not his little Pookles, but Orson and a personage in your own right.”

  Everyone doted on Christopher Welles, who had arrived in Hollywood the week before the Bernsteins after three days of cross-country train travel. Not quite a year and a half old, Orson’s young daughter was his sunshine, her arrival “the most important event you can imagine,” he wrote to Virginia. He and Christopher would share precious little father-daughter time in their lives, and even during these first weeks in Hollywood, Orson spent most of each day at the studio. Writing to Virginia from RKO in mid-August, he admitted, “I haven’t seen your daughter today, but hope to before she’s put up for the night.” Life was hectic at the house, with its incessant flow of visitors and newcomers from the East taking up temporary quarters. Even so, Orson cooed over Christopher in letters to his wife, perhaps to keep Virginia’s attention.

  “Your daughter is behaving like a famous beauty,” the proud father wrote amusingly. “Good tempered only, I suspect, because it becomes her, independent, and shamefully fickle. Her big, beautiful, gray eyes have the serene look of a lady who confidently expects to get what she wants for the rest of her life.”

  Orson wrote to Virginia often that month, decorating his letters with blazing suns and hearts stabbed with arrows and doleful sketches of himself alongside the swimming pool looking bleary-eyed. (“The pool, beside which I am sitting at this moment, is deep and blue. The sky is blue and I am blue because you aren’t here with me.”) With all the grueling work at RKO, he reported, and regular bouts of swimming in the pool, he was “getting thin” and tanning up, though his wife shouldn’t expect “the [Johnny] Weissmuller effect.”

  His letters were chock-full of his usual endearments. He urged his wife to splurge on an escape to Paris for a couple of days with Geraldine Fitzgerald and buy herself “some pretty things,” adding, “You will never be entirely happy until you have a couple of evening gowns by ALIX who is just right for you.”40 Orson promised to buy Virginia a stylish new Mercury, the kind she had always coveted, once she came to join him; he pleaded for more letters from her, and complained good-naturedly when their elaborately arranged phone calls went awry.

  “I do very much wish you were here,” Orson wrote to Virginia, “and see now to the fullest extent how wrong I was in suggesting that it would be better for both of us if my first few weeks out here were spent without benefit of wife. As far as I am concerned, this was a complete mistake, and one which I beg you to rectify as soon as you can conveniently manage it.”

  More than once he reported that he spent most of his nights as a homebody, and when he told her about his social engagements it was usually to mention their old friends, or to emphasize the business side of his activities. Orson gave an amusing account of attending—at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on August 8—his first real Hollywood movie premiere, the Twentieth Century-Fox production of Stanley and Livingstone. The event drew one of the largest crowds in recent years, and the Los Angeles Times reported that a “near riot” involving hundreds of frenzied film fans had to be broken up by motorcycle policemen.

  The film itself was not nearly so exciting. Set in Africa (like Heart of Darkness), Stanley and Livingstone starred Spencer Tracy, “who somehow managed to be very poor,” and Cedric Hardwicke, “who was poor without any effort at all,” Orson reported.41 “Everybody applauds the appearance of screen favorites during the course of the movie, just as though it were opening night on Broadway or any old-fashioned stock company, and afterwards, everybody streams out of the theatre saying loudly, that this picture will undoubtedly make screen history. These words sound hollow enough, I can tell you. However, I am given to understand that Stanley and Livingstone will make a million dollars. Certainly that is the only possible excuse for it.”

  After the premiere, Welles freely confessed, he debauched himself at the soiree held at the Café Trocadero, mingling with the likes of Leland Hayward and Margaret Sullavan, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Mary Pickford, and other Hollywood celebrities. Later the party moved to Victor Hugo’s at the corner of Beverly and Wilshire, where Benny Goodman’s jazz orchestra was holding court, incorporating African drumming for the revelers on the dance floor. Orson confessed to Virginia that he didn’t get home to bed until “as late as one-thirty, which in Hollywood is practically dawn.” However, sleeping late the next morning allowed him extra daylight time at home for a “visit with your daughter” and “a good deal of work on the script,” he wrote.

  The Los Angeles Times ran the first local photograph of Welles at the Stanley and Livingstone premiere with this caption: “Hollywood Convert—Orson Welles, goateed at 24, learns what a Southern California premiere is like. Stage, radio and (soon) film star, official chronicler of Martians’ comings and goings, he is seen here accompanied by Lucille Ball, screen actress.” The studio had arranged his “date” with Ball, then a single and attractive starlet in B movies, but Orson’s interest in her was purely professional. Ball made him laugh, and he pondered using her in a film. No reason to worry Virginia by mentioning his night out with Ball—or, the following week, by mentioning the premiere of The Wizard of Oz, which he attended with another date, a discovery of Charles Chaplin’s named Linda Winters (a.k.a. Dorothy Comingore).

  Now and then Orson supped at the Mankiewiczes’ home, one Saturday night joining a stellar group that included the Leland Haywards, the James Thurbers, and the Max Reinhardts. “Mankiewicz spoke of you constantly,” he wrote to Virginia teasingly, “and with almost excessive affection.” He invited Burgess Meredith to Brentwood repeatedly, but was always stood up. (“Spent all morning apologizing on the phone,” Orson wrote. “He sends you his love.”) Sometimes, after dining at home alone, Orson got into his “nice Buick roadmaster” and was chauffeured back to the RKO studio to run films or watch a nighttime shoot of The Flying Deuces, starring two master clowns, Laurel and Hardy, who always cracked him up.

  “My life is equally divided between your delightful Hollywood household and the RKO studio,” Welles wrote to Virginia not long after Christopher had arrived, “which are equally homelike and just about as old fashioned and friendly as Liederkranz Hall”—a humorous reference to the home of Columbia Broadcasting’s Studio X on West Fifty-Eighth Street in New York.

  More than once, Orson lost track of the hours during these late-night sessions at RKO, calling up films and footage in the projection room, “picking out what is known as ‘atmosphere’ and ‘keys’ for ‘process,’ and indulging myself in some of the really good moving pictures. All of which is enormously educational and valuable.” One night, he paid a visit to a nearby set where filming was in progress and fell into a deep discussion with “a sound man I hadn’t met before,” Orson reported. “There went the evening.” Although the sound man “used to work for Disney and although he is probably the Dean of his Department, he is the freshest spirit and the greatest enthusiast. We got along wonderfully, and I am arranging to have
him for [my] picture.

  “This is the procedure, day after day,” Orson continued, writing to Virginia, “I talk with people and stumble around in their departments, and every once in a while, I find somebody that should belong to the Mercury. In this way, I am slowly recruiting a crew. It is a slow, but a tremendously important procedure and I am learning a lot along the way.”

  By the summer’s end, Welles had learned a great deal and made enormous progress on his first project for RKO. Between the two of them, Welles and Houseman had finished an “actual shooting script” of Heart of Darkness, Orson wrote Virginia, “which may turn out to be very bad, but is certain to be quite remarkable, in any case. Frankly I am a little scared.”

  Unfortunately, he had to interrupt work on the Heart of Darkness project to travel back east. The “Peter Ibbetson” premiere of the new Campbell Playhouse season was fast approaching, Orson wrote to his wife, and “time marches on toward the inevitable commencement of the regular weekly grind. I must say I am not looking forward to it. I would just like one week with nothing to do before it all starts again, and of course, as usual, I need a lot more weeks than I have, just for work.

  “I envy you [in Ireland], almost as much as I miss you.”

  Then, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland.

  On the same day, RKO president George Schaefer, who was traveling in Europe, sent a telegram to Welles. Within days, England and France would declare war on Germany. Beyond the general destabilizing effects of the coming war, Schaefer realized that the news was bad for RKO: Hollywood already had lost its foothold in Germany, and now the studio would lose distribution in England and the other nations of Europe, where it had been earning reliable profits in recent years.

  RKO WOULD HAVE LOST MONEY ON EVERY IMPORTANT PICTURE IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS IF WE ELIMINATED THE MARKETS OF GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE AND POLAND, Schaefer informed Welles in the telegram.

  ALL THIS SEVERE BLOW AS YOU KNOW AND PUTS US IN A POSITION WHERE I MUST MAKE PERSONAL PLEA TO YOU TO ELIMINATE EVERY DOLLAR AND NICKEL POSSIBLE FROM HEART OF DARKNESS SCRIPT AND YET DO EVERYTHING TO SAVE ENTERTAINMENT VALUE. . . . OF COURSE THIS IS NOT ENCOURAGING TO YOUR GOOD SELF BUT BELIEVE THERE IS NOTHING ELSE I CAN DO.

  Welles’s reply, which came swift and strong, was almost touchingly dutiful:

  YOU HAVE MY WORD BECAUSE OF CONDITIONS EXPLAINED EVERY CENT WILL BE COUNTED TWICE IN HEART OF DARKNESS NO SINGLE LUXURY WILL BE INDULGED. . . .

  PLEASE BELIEVE EVERY POSSIBLE EFFORT WILL BE MADE TO JUSTIFY CONFIDENCE EXPRESSED IN TIMES WHEN CONFIDENCE IS EXPENSIVE . . .

  I AM TRYING VERY HARD TO BE WORTH IT.

  The onset of a world war could not shake the bond between Orson and his new patron. Schaefer further earned the younger man’s trust when he read the formative script draft of Heart of Darkness and diagnosed its faults.

  Houseman had not excelled as a screenwriter. (“I was an editor and an adapter rather than writer,” he wrote later.) He had been uncomfortable from the start in Hollywood, where his name meant little or nothing to the columnists, and the press treated him as simply another anonymous member of Orson’s entourage. He saw himself as a “failure” in the new arena of motion pictures. “Frightened by the necessities of an unfamiliar medium, worried by the ambivalence of my own feelings for Orson and in my anxiety to give him what he wanted, I found myself unable to give him anything at all,” Houseman wrote years later. When his initial draft of Heart of Darkness was found wanting, he was certain that Welles felt personally “betrayed” by his inadequacies.

  Yet Orson’s letters at that time suggest nothing of the kind. When Houseman decided to return to New York, he was paid a generous $15,000 for his rejected draft. Orson himself then took over the writing of the new draft.

  Moreover, Orson gave Houseman a golden send-off: his partner was put in charge of the Campbell Playhouse series back east, “arguing with the agency, getting the scripts written and watching preliminary rehearsals,” in Houseman’s words, in preparation for the Sunday night broadcasts. Orson may have foreseen Houseman’s retreat to New York as early as his August negotiations with Ward Wheelock, and used his partner’s return as a bargaining chip to alleviate Wheelock’s concerns.

  Orson began his weekly commute to New York on the second weekend of September, usually taking the sixteen-hour transcontinental sleeper leaving Los Angeles late Saturday afternoon for Newark, New Jersey. (New York’s La Guardia Field did not open until later that year.) The trip cost several thousand dollars, and the thirteen other passengers on the DC-3 were usually important businessmen or show business figures like himself. He would always regret how Hollywood forced him to leave behind his life of frequent train rides, his favorite means of travel.

  Orson was driven directly from Newark to the studio in Manhattan, where he’d listen to the rehearsal recording while eating breakfast. After final rehearsals, the 8 P.M. broadcast, and a full second performance of the show at 10 P.M. for the West Coast, Welles and Houseman shared long dinners while they discussed the next week’s episode, or plans for Heart of Darkness. The next morning, Houseman sometimes drove Welles back to Newark for the return trip to California. If Welles’s schedule became jammed, he took a plane or train to Chicago, connecting there with another flight to the coast, and sometimes rendezvousing with an increasingly plaintive Dr. Maurice Bernstein, who waited for hours in his car at the airport for a few minutes with his ward.

  There were many perils in this tightly organized itinerary. One day, as Orson was speeding back to Newark, his car broke down on the Pulaski Skyway, and he and two Mercury players climbed out and stuck out their thumbs. The only vehicle to stop for them was a garbage truck, but that was good enough to get them to the airport on time. When a guard at the airport gate asked what kind of cargo he was carrying, the truck driver barked, “Actors and garbage!” (“At least he gave us top billing,” Orson liked to say.)

  Herbert Drake doled out tales of the cross-country commute to columnists, and the incident with the garbage truck, for example, was widely covered at the time. But not every story was so flattering. Syndicated radio columnist Jack Sher, visiting the CBS studio for a Sunday broadcast, offered what he said was a verbatim account of one of Orson’s characteristic meltdowns:

  “ ‘Don’t tell me what I can do! Tell me what I can’t do and I’ll do it!’ So screams Orson Welles at his stand-in and stooge.

  “ ‘But you can’t possibly make the plane, Mr. Welles,’ Backpangoff [William Alland] says nervously, brushing the straight black hair out of his eyes.

  “‘Don’t stand there and tell me what I can’t do!’ Welles screams again. ‘Find out what time that plane will get me to Hollywood!’

  “Backpangoff scurries away. A girl comes running up.

  “ ‘Florida wants you on the phone, Mr. Welles.’

  “Welles stands up and roars, ‘I’ll be there! Coming! Coming! Backpangoff! Backpangoff! Where is that guy!’

  “Backpangoff appears suddenly again.

  “ ‘There you are!’ Welles yells. ‘Find out what time I can get a plane to Florida. I may go to Florida.’ And so saying, Mr. Welles rushes for the phone booth.”

  Orson considered purchasing a private plane to make his East Coast trips more convenient, but Arnold Weissberger told him he couldn’t afford to own a plane. In truth, he couldn’t even afford his air tickets, which were paid out of an advance on his radio salary. By the end of the year, he had logged enough miles on TWA to be awarded a plaque as its most traveled customer of 1939. This made another feel-good publicity item, but from September to December, before the show relocated for the rest of the season to Los Angeles, the travel took a physical and financial toll on Welles and everyone around him.

  The show was a headache in other ways. Diana Bourbon proved more assertive than Ward Wheelock ever was, badgering Orson constantly to consider actors and stories she preferred to his selections. The agency controlled the purse strings, so he had to listen, but he and Bourbon tangl
ed incessantly over the gray areas in every creative decision. Bourbon sent a stream of memos to West Coast representative Ernest Chappell, warning him against Orson’s seductive personality (“He sings a siren song to anybody who listens to him”) and offering unvarnished critiques of the Campbell Playhouse shows after they were broadcast.

  On October 8, for example, the series offered “Algiers,” with Orson as the French jewel thief Pepe le Moko, who is hiding out in the Casbah—a role made famous by Charles Boyer in the 1938 movie. Orson’s romantic interest in the show was Paulette Goddard, as the character Hedy Lamarr played in the film. Ray Collins was the detective Slimane, played onscreen by Joseph Calleia. After the broadcast Bourbon sent a corrosive memo complaining that Collins had given an inadequate performance; that the sound effects were “overproduced”; and that Welles had spent too much time in his after-show banter plugging Goddard’s next picture, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. “We’re not in the business of giving away free commercials,” Bourbon lectured.

  Welles dictated an eight-page reply, furiously defending Collins as “wonderful,” adding, “I must protest against aesthetic discussion between you and Chappell about performances by actors, over whose efforts mine is the sole authority.” He said he was not crooning siren songs to Chappell. “Any ‘siren song’ I’ve sung in New York you can lay down to my very real affection for you,” Orson wrote to Bourbon. “I’m not a wheedler or charmer. My fault as a personality, as you must know, is that I am somewhat arbitrary by inclination and often unreasonable. I have complete control and absolute jurisdiction over almost every point brought up in your letter to Chappell. I rejoice at criticism but I do not and I will not submit to unreasonable interference.” As for The Great Dictator, he said, he had plugged it simply because “I wanted to plug it.” And “please remember,” Orson finished with dignity, “that whatever gives our format individuality beyond regular interest attaching itself to our guest is my own extremely personal rather particular style which must needs express authentically my own enthusiasm and tastes.”