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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  After securing her divorce in Reno, Virginia Nicolson Welles had lingered in Hollywood, staying with Geraldine Fitzgerald for weeks; then, shortly after the writing team left for Victorville, Virginia had fallen ill, with acute abdominal pain. Entering a Los Angeles hospital on February 21, she was diagnosed with potentially life-threatening peritonitis. After emergency surgery, she remained in the hospital for about a month. Her slow recovery complicated the arrangements for the care of Christopher, and placed an additional strain on Orson’s time and finances. Virginia’s medical bills piled up even as his alimony lagged behind.

  Orson was solicitous about his ex-wife’s health, however, visiting her often at the hospital (where he often crossed paths with a friend, writer Charles Lederer, who was visiting Virginia even more faithfully). At one point Orson volunteered to pay Virginia’s long-range hospital bills if she would accept a temporary cut in his child support payments. When the medical costs continued to mount, however, Orson retracted his offer, insisting that he’d been misunderstood. Virginia was furious, and her hospital debt became the cornerstone of financial grudges she nursed against Welles for years.

  Orson and Dolores Del Rio made a decision to keep a low profile while Virginia was in the hospital. “Welles and his Hollywood love are chilling,” wrote columnist Walter Winchell. But when the beautiful Mexican actress abandoned the home she shared with Cedric Gibbons in March 1940, publicly declaring the end of their “nine-year perfect marriage,” Hollywood columnists speculated that she and Welles were headed for the altar. Del Rio was still denying any heated romance between her and Orson, though, and when the couple traveled together to New York, on at least one occasion, Del Rio’s mother stayed with her daughter in the same hotel room, adjacent to Orson’s.

  In the early weeks of 1940, actress Marlene Dietrich, a friend of both, went out on the town frequently with the two rumored lovers. “Marlene was the ‘beard,’ you see, for Dolores when she was married,” Welles boasted to Barbara Leaming. “I would take out Dolores by taking out Marlene too. Who would guess with those two girls what I was up to?” Orson also went out alone with Dietrich often enough to make columnists wonder if he was wooing her. He wasn’t, although their “dates” launched a lifelong close friendship. (Welles, who dubbed Dietrich “Super Marlene,” revered her above all other screen goddesses—with the exception of Garbo, although he rated Dietrich as more intelligent. He would later relish the chance to saw “Super Marlene” in half for delighted servicemen at the Mercury Wonder Show, and he gave Dietrich an unforgettable part in the twilight of her career as the clairvoyant prostitute Tanya, in love with Welles’s corrupt Quinlan, in Touch of Evil.)

  Another of Del Rio’s close friends was the actress Fay Wray, who suspected Del Rio—raised as a proper Catholic—of using her chaste dalliance with Welles to force Gibbons into a divorce. “She apparently didn’t consider having an affair with Orson, but thought she must leave Cedric, get a divorce,” Wray recalled. “She seemed herself a lady of purity.”

  In any case, Del Rio’s divorce suit would not go to court for another six months.

  Orson gained time and lost money as the radio series wound down in February and March.

  With Paul Stewart in New York and John Houseman in Victorville, Orson had to organize the season’s last Campbell Playhouse programs himself, with the assistance of the West Coast staff. Keeping on the show business columnist Hedda Hopper’s good side, Orson gave Hopper a showy part in his radio version of Dinner at Eight, broadcast on February 18; Hopper played the character Billie Burke had played in the 1933 movie. Lucille Ball, who had watched her chances for The Smiler with the Knife go down the drain, was consoled with Jean Harlow’s role.49

  Many of the Campbell Playhouse shows in 1940 made use of screen stars who were willing to moonlight on radio, and some were simply radio renditions of Hollywood pictures. Loretta Young starred opposite Welles in an adaptation of the screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild (broadcast on January 14, 1940). William Powell and Miriam Hopkins played the leads (with Orson playing Hopkins’s father) in a freewheeling rendition of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (January 28). Joan Blondell was paired with Orson, essaying the Cary Grant role, in an abridgment of Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (February 25). And Orson played second fiddle to Jack Benny in Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman’s June Moon (March 24).

  Helen Hayes made more appearances on Orson’s radio show in its first two years than any other star, and she returned to the series for “Vanity Fair” (January 7) and “Broome Stages” (February 4). Orson’s friend Geraldine Fitzgerald, not quite a movie star of the first magnitude, then or ever, acted with Welles for a radio version of A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel (January 21).

  Orson would host the final broadcast on March 31, with mixed feelings. The sponsor, Campbell, had grown fond of tinkering with the stories and the stars, taking a special interest in the lead actresses, and for months it resisted Orson’s attempts to schedule Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The story was “absolute sockeroo,” he told the sponsor in a memo, and he wanted to play Edward Fairfax Rochester, the unbridled master of the manor who falls in love with the lowly servant Jane. In the memo he was reduced to painful pleading: “This may seem a foolish point,” he finished, “but I do think it would be generous to give me opportunity to do something worthwhile myself on last show rather than supporting an actress in a negligible character part.”

  Campbell finally relented and gave Orson the chance to play Rochester. For the part of Jane, Orson turned to actress Madeleine Carroll, who had performed for him in broadcasts of “The Green Goddess” and “The Garden of Allah.” He got his wish to play Rochester again, claiming the role in Robert Stevenson’s atmospheric big-screen version of 1943, with Joan Fontaine as Jane. Orson preferred Carroll to Fontaine, whom he called “just a plain old bad actor,” in his conversations with Henry Jaglom. “She’s got four readings and two expressions.”50

  Orson’s real interest in Jane Eyre was the opportunity to play Rochester: if he was given the chance to direct sixty films of his choice, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, not one of them would be Jane Eyre. Welles did so much script and production work on the 1943 film version, produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, however, that the studio offered him a credit as an associate producer. He declined.

  “Parts of the film looked as though you had directed [them],” Bogdanovich said.

  “Oh, I invented some of the shots,” Welles commented. “That’s part of being that kind of producer. And I collaborated on it, but I didn’t come around behind the camera and direct it. Certainly, I did a lot more than a producer ought to, but [director Robert] Stevenson didn’t mind that. And I don’t want to take credit away from him.”

  Robert Coote and Edgar Barrier, among the actors Orson was courting for film work, were behind the mike for “Jane Eyre,” the last Campbell show of the season. But Coote and Barrier booked themselves up with Hollywood jobs too quickly afterward; neither would appear in Citizen Kane. Another player in “Jane Eyre” was George Coulouris, who took a role in the Warner Brothers melodrama All This and Heaven Too after seeing Heart of Darkness and The Smiler with the Knife fall by the wayside. But he remained Orson’s first and only choice to play Walter Parks Thatcher.

  Every day and most nights Orson showed up at RKO, making sketches and preparations for Citizen Kane. And as usual he had a wealth of other activities and projects on his plate.

  Orson spent a day with documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, who had impressed him with his films Nanook of the North (which Orson had seen with his mother in Chicago in 1922) and Man of Aran, documenting life on the Irish islands. Afterward, Welles announced plans to collaborate with Flaherty on projects set in the South Pacific and the arctic. (The projects didn’t work out as planned, but Flaherty did contribute story material and ideas to part of Welles’s uncompleted It’s All True in 1942.)

  Orson also found time to make a test recording for a proposed new radio
series featuring selected stories from the Bible. A throwback to his afternoon poetry recitals on radio in New York, the pilot episode was cobbled together with a few Mercury regulars, backed by a symphony orchestra; Orson narrated the origins of Adam and Eve. But the project found no takers and was stillborn.51

  Other Hollywood studios contacted Orson about possible acting jobs, and there was fleeting industry buzz that he was in line to play the acerbic critic Sheridan Whiteside—a character based on his early booster, Alexander Woollcott—in the planned screen version of the Kaufman-Hart play The Man Who Came to Dinner. But that film was a Warner Brothers production, and his home studio nixed the idea; his starring debut was reserved for RKO.

  In interviews, Orson was constantly spooling out plans for future projects; he even went so far as to register a few titles with industry groups, including a film based on The War of the Worlds and another focusing on the Borgias, a sweeping (if less likely) Hollywood subject reflecting his longtime fascination with the Italian Renaissance. And when he wasn’t talking with show business columnists, he was keeping up his profile in radio: in late March, for example, he repaid Jack Benny for his stint on The Campbell Playhouse by appearing on Benny’s own radio hour. He and Benny had an easy friendship. In 1943, when Benny fell ill, Orson hosted The Jack Benny Show for six weeks, performing some of his funniest bits as himself, spoofing his own genius.

  Some of these activities might seem random, but Welles had to tread water while Mankiewicz was working on his draft of Citizen Kane, and the radio paychecks helped to replace his income from Campbell Playhouse. Albert Schneider and Herbert Drake were hard at work promoting Orson’s national speaking tour. “Lecture is informal,” Drake said, touting the tour in a telegram sent to Sam Zolotow at the New York Times. “Welles invites hecklers from outset . . . besides talking, reads speeches, Hamlet, Richard III, Congreve etc. . . . opens and closes with jokes.”

  On April 3, shortly after the final Campbell broadcast, Orson opened the intended national tour at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, addressing a full house of more than two thousand. “The New Actor” was his topic, and although he spoke off the cuff from notes, his comments were serious and thoughtful. “The business of the actor is to increase the awareness of each person in the audience of his being alive,” Welles declaimed. “It is a great Christian and a great democratic obligation to remind them of themselves as a part of the human race.”

  Interspersing his lecture with readings from Shakespeare, Welles addressed the Pasadena crowd for two hours “almost without pause,” according to press accounts. Later, he delivered “virtually a second lecture backstage” to “at least one hundred and fifty young students of the drama and some older ones,” who lobbed questions at him for another half hour. The audience got its money’s worth, and so did Orson—earning $1,000 to $1,500 per lecture—with Albert Schneider’s agency, Columbia Artists, taking a 25 percent commission. The Pasadena date was a dress rehearsal for a full itinerary—Kansas City, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and beyond—and Welles even volunteered to pay his own travel expenses in order to encourage further bookings.

  The second lecture date on April 11 in Kansas City, however, backfired. The problem wasn’t the size of the turnout—there were nearly five thousand people, twice as many as in Pasadena—it was the reaction to negative comments Orson purportedly made about Hollywood during the lecture, which were sent out across the country by the wire services. “Of the movies,” the United Press quoted him as saying, “I will speak only in terms of contempt.” “The average American only goes to movies,” Welles supposedly said, “because it is better than drink.”

  By the time Welles arrived back in Hollywood, a firestorm was raging. The United Press account—headlined “Hollywood! Orson Welles Does Not Approve of You!”—was excerpted over Radio KFI in Los Angeles, and Hedda Hopper commented acidly on the story in her column. Orson quickly took out a half-page advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter, insisting that he’d been “grossly misquoted,” and offering a recap of his lecture that was intended to correct the “misstatements.” He had been upbeat about Hollywood in his speech, he insisted, actually telling his audience: “A movie today is a better bargain for your money than a play. The motion picture medium is populated with ninety per cent of the world’s theater talent. It is healthier, livelier, more inventive. It has yet to discover its limitations.” His comment about speaking of Hollywood “only in contempt” had been nothing more than a misunderstood joke.

  For many, the advertisement ended the controversy, but for a couple of weeks Orson’s alleged diatribe against Hollywood became grist for the mill of snide columnists and pundits not only in Hollywood but across the nation. The United Press kept feeding the story, asking other stars about Welles’s insult to filmdom. “He is just trying to imitate a Harvard undergraduate,” actress Ann Sheridan was quoted as saying. Some wouldn’t nibble. “I know it sounds awful screwy,” Pat O’Brien said, “but I met Orson once and he’s a really nice kid.”

  Unhappy about the negative publicity, RKO pressured Welles to halt his lecture tour. Orson gave interviews to explain himself, telling Fredrick C. Othman in the Hollywood Citizen-News, “Every time I open my mouth, I seem to say too much.” He’d launched his lecture tour only to make a little extra money, he explained, having paid out $80,000 of his earnings toward Mercury’s debts and projects in the past year. “Everybody seems to think I’m on one of those salaries you read about,” Welles added. “RKO isn’t paying me a cent. I don’t get any money until I start making pictures.”

  Welles was forced to cancel all the dates outside Los Angeles, where he saved face with two lectures at UCLA in May. Those lectures were more quietly successful, by all accounts, although Orson still couldn’t keep all his opinions to himself. When a questioner at UCLA asked what he thought about the recent Broadway hit Key Largo, Orson snapped, “Nothing in the world can induce me to see a Maxwell Anderson play, and vice versa.”

  He had counted on the tour for cash to keep Mercury operations alive, but the controversy was “a really scurvy trick” played on him by irresponsible reporters, Herbert Drake wrote to Ashton Stevens. The effect was “really disastrous. . . . More and more it becomes apparent that the only thing Orson can do to keep these screamers quiet is to buckle down and do that movie.”

  Even as the controversy about his contempt for Hollywood played out disastrously in public, privately another issue arose to blindside Orson, distracting his attention and threatening his reputation.

  A new book due in stores, called The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, analyzed the national reaction to the “War of the Worlds” broadcast. The author, Hadley Cantril, an associate professor of psychology at Princeton University (the home of Orson’s character in the broadcast), had sifted polling data and conducted interviews with the general public to study the spectrum of responses to the broadcast. Early on, Professor Cantril had corresponded with Welles, who referred him to John Houseman for background about the making of the program. As advertised on its cover, the book would also include the first publication of the “War of the Worlds” script.

  In late March, Cantril sent galleys to Welles, hoping for his support with publicity when Princeton University Press brought out the book in mid-April. When Orson read Cantril’s prefatory material, however, he reacted with horror. Cantril thanked Howard Koch for his permission “to publish for the first time his [Koch’s] brilliant adaptation of the ‘War of the Worlds.’ ” And although the cover credit promoted “the complete script of the Orson Welles broadcast”—a more accurate description of the script, which had been transcribed from the broadcast—inside the book the phrase “script by Howard Koch” leaped out at Welles repeatedly.

  Orson unleashed a volley of heated telegrams and letters to Cantril. Crediting Koch “to the exclusion of myself as the dramatist,” Welles wrote, was a “grave” error that would be “detrimental to my reputation” in radio and Hollywood. “The id
ea for the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast and the major portion of its execution was mine,” he insisted. “Howard Koch was very helpful in the second portion of the script [which centered on the character Welles himself played] and did some work in the first, most of which it was necessary to revise.” While he “always worked with a fairly large complement of writers,” Welles went on to explain, “the initial emphasis and attack on a story as well as its ultimate revised form have in almost every instance been mine.” Among the writers “of much greater service” than Koch to the ultimate “War of the Worlds” script were Houseman (“my partner” and “chief collaborator”) and Paul Stewart, who “also did a great deal of writing.” And there were indispensable contributions from the chief engineer John Dietz; CBS production executive Davidson Taylor (helpful with “news dispatches, mobile unit pickups, special interviews etc.”); and “my director of music,” composer-conductor Bernard Herrmann.

  Professor Cantril was taken by surprise. Until that moment, on the eve of publication, he had had no idea that he might be transgressing by crediting the script to Koch. Cantril replied that he had affidavits and correspondence from Koch, Houseman, and Koch’s assistant Anne Froelick attesting to Koch’s authorship. “The testimony of Mr. Houseman is no more valid than that of Miss Froelick,” Welles replied testily, “for the simple reason that Mr. Houseman is about to produce a play by Mr. Koch on Broadway,” which Froelick was also involved in planning.

  Cantril offered to add a last-minute errata sheet to The Invasion from Mars, affirming Welles’s overall supervisory authorship. But Orson insisted this was inadequate.

  WAR OF THE WORLDS WAS NOT ONLY MY CONCEPTION, Orson telegraphed to the professor, BUT ALSO, PROPERLY AND EXACTLY SPEAKING, MY CREATION. VERY HAPPY TO HAVE ALL MY ASSISTANTS CREDITED BUT THIS IS MEANINGLESS WITH THE FINAL LINE “AND WRITTEN BY HOWARD KOCH.” ONCE AGAIN, FINALLY, AND I PROMISE FOR THE LAST TIME, HOWARD KOCH DID NOT WRITE ‘THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.’