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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Steinmeyer always remembered one night at dinner when Welles had suffered a bad day in the film world—one of many bad days in the last year of his life. Orson’s dream of a filmed King Lear, financed by French admirers; his hope to convince someone in Hollywood to let him chronicle the saga of The Cradle Will Rock on the big screen; his plans to direct an independent film called The Big Brass Ring, based on his script about a presidential candidate compromised by a homosexual mentor: all these projects had collapsed earlier in the year. Still, Welles rarely whined or complained. “Everybody wants to give me an award,” one of the magicians recalls him saying—memorably, because it was out of character—“but nobody wants to hire me to make a film.”

  That night, with Steinmeyer, Welles seemed glum over dinner, in a daze. Fumbling for conversation, Steinmeyer mentioned that he’d just read and loved Preston Sturges’s play Strictly Dishonorable. He knew that Welles, since his youth in Chicago, had followed Sturges and that the two were friends until Sturges’s death in 1959. Welles raised an eyebrow in annoyance, perhaps because Pauline Kael had raised the specter of Sturges’s The Power and the Glory as an influence on Citizen Kane in her widely read essay “Raising Kane.” As if to cut off the conversation, Welles muttered that he’d seen the original Broadway production of Strictly Dishonorable. Steinmeyer looked doubtful.

  Orson fixed the younger man with a hard stare of one-upmanship. “Tullio Carminati was the Latin Lover in it,” Welles drawled. “I would have liked to see Antoinette Perry on the stage, but by this time she was only directing. Later, you know, Cesar Romero did Carminati’s part on the road, launching him as a star.” Caught up in the subject, Welles went on to deliver a knowing exegesis on the various incarnations of Strictly Dishonorable, and the play’s strengths and weaknesses. As Orson held forth, his mood lifted, the day’s disappointments forgotten. “I walked away from that dinner,” Steinmeyer remembered, “realizing how Orson’s dismissive manner often earned the reputation for him of being a fabulist, but he had actually been there, seen things, processed them, even if he didn’t care to explain in a casual conversation.”

  Today’s trick for The Merv Griffin Show involved a pristine deck of cards that would be divided and shuffled by two complete strangers. Handed the decks, Orson would miraculously turn up four aces, two from each separate pile of cards. Like the Great Thurston, who had started out onstage performing with just a deck of cards, these days Orson was a one-man show.

  Except not really: Like most magicians, Orson used helpers, such as Steinmeyer—and often, as tonight, a “stooge,” or plant, in the studio audience. When it came to stooges, magicians had different schools of thought: certain purists avoided them; others used them without compunctions. Orson liked stooges, Steinmeyer felt, because he was always anxious about performing his magic in public, and a stooge gave him an extra measure of security. He also liked the idea of being propped up by an invisible army of helpers and collaborators. Orson did not wish to meet the stooge beforehand, so he could say honestly that he and the audience member he chose were crossing paths for the first time. He didn’t want Merv Griffin to know about the stooge, either.

  With swollen, arthritic fingers, Welles no longer had much genuine sleight of hand, but the young magicians learned not to underestimate him, lest he sense their skepticism, grab the deck of cards, and whip off a superb one-hand top-palm. His lifelong reliance on stand-in rehearsals and stooges made for occasional disasters, however: once, on Merv Griffin, Orson knocked over the fishbowl he was using, splattering water and glass everywhere—a shattering fishbowl was one contingency no one had anticipated—then asked if anyone in the audience was named Albert, the designated name of the stooge. Another Albert, the wrong one, stood up.

  Whether he got his comeuppance in his living room, or onstage in front of a national audience, Orson was generally delighted by the mishaps. He laughed uproariously at his gaffes—laughed so hard, sometimes, that the magicians worried he might keel over and die.

  The night before, Orson had stayed up late, going over the new trick in his mind and working on various projects, including his first lesson plans as a professor. On the Thursday morning after the taping of Merv Griffin, he was scheduled to meet with officials at UCLA, including Professor Howard Suber, who after a year of courting had finally persuaded Welles to teach a seminar on filmmaking. Orson had resisted such overtures for years, but Suber, an expert on Welles (he had taught an entire course devoted to Citizen Kane), finally prevailed after a long lunch at Ma Maison, where Orson characteristically picked up the check. As part of the deal, Orson would also gain access to UCLA soundstages and equipment, with a group of students as his crew. But that Thursday morning meeting threatened to be a bit of a showdown, as word had spread that Orson, with his longtime cameraman Gary Graver, had already taken over a campus soundstage and they were shooting scenes for unspecified purposes. Was Welles serious about teaching at UCLA, or was this another instance of misdirection—trading his name for access? Tomorrow would tell.

  Welles called Graver—they spoke nearly every day—reminding the cameraman to pick up equipment at a rental house in Hollywood for a scene he thought he might shoot at UCLA, as long as he was going to be on campus tomorrow. It might be a recitation from the one-man Julius Caesar that Orson was planning, or a scene from a loose-knit adaptation of King Lear he and Graver had been compiling, or a bit of prestidigitation for “The Magic Show.” The cameraman and crew sometimes didn’t know exactly what Orson was going to film until he arrived.

  Welles checked in with Steinmeyer. The young magician had found a dependable stooge for him, a dancer from magician Harry Blackstone Jr.’s show. At a prearranged signal, she would volunteer to take the decks of cards from Orson onstage and prepare them for handling by the audience members. Her job was to shuffle the cards (awkwardly and tentatively), while keeping the top stock of four aces in place. When the camera was off her, she would quickly cut and rearrange the cards to make sure Orson would find the aces. The stooge would sit up front. Steinmeyer, too, would sit nervously in the audience, an emergency backup.

  Orson said he would meet Steinmeyer backstage at the taping but wanted him to get to the studio early, bringing the two decks of cards to Griffin’s dressing room. The cards were sealed in cellophane, but—unbeknownst to Griffin—the cellophane had been slit open and the cards reordered before it was sealed again. It was important to Orson that he impress Griffin with his magicianship. Yet magic meant little to Griffin, unlike Johnny Carson, a onetime magician himself. Griffin loved Orson’s personality and admired his films; the magic was just an excuse to have him on the show.

  At that late-afternoon taping, Orson had a surprise planned for his old friend Merv.

  Orson spent the morning alone on the ground floor of his two-story faux-antebellum mansion, with its swimming pool and guesthouse. The expansive grounds with views of the surrounding Hollywood hills were dotted with fruit and palm trees. These days, his immense weight and weak legs made it almost impossible for Welles to climb to the second floor and its master bedroom without a good deal of incentive and assistance. Instead he usually worked on the first floor, where he had a second bedroom and bath, with his typewriter and stacks of scripts, correspondence, and notes spread out across his worktable and the spacious living room.

  His companion, the artist and actress Oja Kodar, was away in Europe, as she was periodically. Orson missed her terribly. She had been Welles’s “companion, confidant, cohort in . . . conspiracy, closest accomplice, muse,” in Peter Bogdanovich’s words, for nearly twenty-five years, collaborating with him on numerous projects, and playing a lead in F for Fake (1973). Born in Zagreb the year Citizen Kane was released, the exotic Kodar had her own busy life and interests, including an art gallery she ran in Yugoslavia. Her nephew Aleksandar stayed in attic space in the house, helping to keep an eye on Welles.

  Welles had lived in Hollywood since the late 1970s, but his legal residence was in Las Vegas—as was h
is legal wife, the Italian countess Paola di Girifalco. Paola—who under her professional name, Paola Mori, played the female lead in Mr. Arkadin—had followed Virginia Nicolson and Rita Hayworth to become the third Mrs. Orson Welles in 1955. But Mori had stayed behind in Las Vegas with their grown daughter, Beatrice, when Welles moved to Los Angeles to share a house with Kodar. How estranged Orson and Paola were, how well they got along, no one knew for sure. Orson talked about his love life with less eagerness than he reminisced about Citizen Kane.

  The magicians and Welles’s Hollywood friends all adored Kodar. She was smart, funny, gorgeous, and an equal partner in all of Orson’s schemes. After years of relatively chaste filmmaking, Welles had even shot some nude scenes of Kodar, as he had rarely done before with any actress. Kodar rolled her eyes when the young magicians arrived to confer with Orson, the way Welles’s mother, Beatrice, had rolled her eyes at his father Dick Welles’s enthusiasm for magic, but whatever made Orson happy made Kodar happy, too.

  Orson’s second wife, Rita Hayworth, was still alive in 1985, although she was reclusive and rumored to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Welles had been married to the beautiful Hayworth for five years, from 1943 to 1948, and they had one child, Rebecca, born in 1944. Orson had brought Rebecca into a series of Jim Beam whiskey advertisements he made in the 1970s, but their relationship, never healthy, had since deteriorated, and they were rarely in touch.

  Christopher, Orson’s firstborn, had by 1985 dropped her boyish first name; today she was Chris Welles Feder, the surname that of her second husband. She had spent some time as an adolescent at the Todd School, with Roger and Hortense Hill in effect foster-parenting her during the long intervals when her actual parents were unavailable. When Orson and Virginia feuded over his financial obligations in the early 1950s, Hortense Hill took Virginia’s side, occasioning a rare rupture in his friendship with the headmaster.

  Orson’s oldest daughter worked hard to effect a reconciliation with her famous father over the decades, efforts she chronicled poignantly in her 2009 memoir In My Father’s Shadow. She once met up with Welles in Hong Kong, only to lose touch with him for the next eight years. Chris told author Charles Higham—who was working on his biography of Welles in the early 1980s, at the same time as Barbara Leaming—that she had had little or no contact with her father in recent years. The three half sisters had grown up as virtual strangers to one another.

  “Only Beatrice,” wrote Higham, “a tall and Junoesque beauty with fair hair and a voluptuous figure, has been close to Welles in recent years.”

  Virginia Nicolson was still alive, too, in England after spending years in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her third husband, Jackie Pringle. Her marriage to the witty and dapper scenarist Charles Lederer had lasted nine years. After she quit acting, Virginia Lederer had written a roman à clef about Hollywood called Married at Leisure, in which Orson was not even remotely referenced—perhaps because she was still suing him for alimony and child support. A court eventually found in her favor, but even so Orson managed to wriggle out of paying it all.

  Virginia and Orson’s daughter preferred Lederer to Pringle as a stepfather, and so did Welles. Orson stayed close to Lederer, one of those ill-starred talents he was fond of. Orson always claimed that he wrote two thirds of Howard Hawks’s I Was a Male War Bride, a script credited to Lederer, after his friend, hooked on alcohol and various drugs, took one of his periodic dives into dysfunction.

  After moving to Johannesburg in 1949, Virginia came under the influence of her new husband, a Briton in every respect except his birthplace: Chicago. A World War II military hero for England, Pringle was also “an accomplished horseman, a crack polo player, and a gifted linguist,” in Chris Welles Feder’s words. But Pringle had no aptitude for fatherhood, and he had urged Virginia to ship Chris off to finishing schools in Switzerland and the United States. Her mother, meanwhile, had been transformed almost overnight from the bright, openhearted debutante Orson had fallen in love with back in the summer of 1934 to Virginia Nicolson Pringle, a “puff-faced, dowdy British matron,” in her daughter’s words, with an attitude toward native South Africans as hard and bigoted as her spouse’s.

  In the mid-afternoon, Freddie Gillette, the last of Welles’s long-suffering chauffeurs, arrived to drive him to the Talent Celebrity Theater at Sunset and Vine, less than two miles away.

  Perhaps because he always had been driven around as a boy—by his father or Dr. Maurice Bernstein—Orson stubbornly never learned to drive and enjoyed the indulgence of a chauffeur. Gillette was more of a hired hand than the diminutive George “Shorty” Chirello, whom Orson had launched onscreen as his magic assistant in Follow the Boys in 1944, later giving him bit parts in The Lady from Shanghai and Macbeth. Chirello picked up a few acting jobs after Orson went abroad for years and paid him back with friendship, one time flying to Paris and offering his life’s savings as a loan to get Welles out of deep hock. (Orson declined.)

  Gillette, whom Welles referred to as “a tall Shorty,” was a kind, attentive man who answered whenever Orson bellowed his name and fussed obsequiously over his employer’s comfort. The two had developed a repertoire of little rituals: When Gillette saw that someone unpleasant had lingered too long at Orson’s table at Ma Maison, he would hurry in with an urgent note for Orson—always blank.

  Arriving at the theater, Welles found Jim Steinmeyer and asked about the stooge and whether Merv Griffin had received the decks of cards. Then he ambled to the door leading to Griffin’s dressing room—which was up a flight of stairs he couldn’t manage—and rapped on it with his cane. Griffin came downstairs to greet him. Griffin, who hadn’t seen Orson since before his seventieth birthday in May, was taken aback by his “haggard appearance.”

  Since his birthday, Orson had been shedding weight on his doctor’s orders. “He told me my heart wasn’t functioning properly, my liver was a mess, and that my blood pressure was off the chart,” Welles explained to Roger Hill. “He said, ‘Either you lose weight or you will die.’” Orson suffered from diabetes, chronic phlebitis, and atrial fibrillation. At his peak, he carried close to four hundred pounds on his frame (slightly taller than six foot two). Anyone who hadn’t witnessed his Falstaffian appetite, in his prime, could be forgiven for doubting the apocryphal tales it inspired. Could he really have eaten an entire turkey one day at lunch? Or seventeen hot dogs at Pink’s?

  Over time, some comedians and film critics conflated his weight problems with notions of his fabled self-indulgence as a filmmaker. Welles was sensitive about his weight and dismayed by jokes about it. Even Merv Griffin told a version of the episode at Pink’s in his 2003 autobiography Merv: Making the Good Life Last, claiming that one day, after lunching with Welles at Ma Maison (where Orson dined on his daily “little piece of grilled sole”), he had spotted his friend’s car parked at the landmark hot-dog stand at the corner of La Brea and Melrose. Heading for the car with “a tray piled high with at least a dozen hot dogs” was Freddie Gillette, Welles’s chauffeur. “People loved to gloat over his weight,” Peter Bogdanovich told Los Angeles magazine in 2012, “because they felt it would diminish his genius in some strange way.”

  After his alarming seventieth-birthday physical, Orson finally changed the gluttonous eating and drinking habits that had transformed him, over four decades, from the handsome, baby-faced young mastermind of Citizen Kane into an unseemly and unsteady behemoth of a man. “If you’ll pardon the pun,” Orson told Roger Hill, “I’ve gone cold turkey, eating little and what little I eat is dispiritingly unappetizing.” He no longer smoked, although he often fingered a cigar. He avoided coffee and drank Perrier, not vodka. His diet was fruit, vegetables, and grains.

  With iron willpower, Orson had dropped something like one hundred pounds since his birthday in May. He felt only worse. “I’ve lost a good deal of energy, and I hope to God it comes back because there’s so much that needs my attention,” he told Hill. “In addition to the intrinsic joy of eating well, dining
provides an ideal opportunity for spirited social discourse. Even when I’m dining with others [now], I feel alone and removed.”

  Some friends thought the shrinkage dangerously precipitous, but people who saw him on a regular basis were used to the waning and waxing of Welles’s appearance.

  Now, greeting Orson at the bottom of his staircase, Griffin concealed his apprehension.

  “Tonight, I feel like talking,” Orson told him. Griffin parried with a joke—it was a talk show, after all—but Welles was serious. “Merv, I mean it,” he insisted. “I feel expansive tonight. You know all those silly gossipy little questions you’ve been trying to ask me for years about Rita and Marlene? Well, go ahead and ask them. Ask me anything you want.”

  Griffin was astonished. “Anything I want? Even about the making of Citizen Kane?”

  Welles was in a buoyant mood. After his magic trick, he would be joined on the show by Barbara Leaming, whose new biography of Orson was shooting up the best-seller lists. Leaming was going to talk about Welles’s life and career with Griffin, and Orson would sit beside her on camera. He had enjoyed working with Leaming on her book, and he wanted to please her.

  “Ask me,” said Welles, turning and ambling toward the green room.

  When he turned seventy in May, Welles became the longest-lived member of his family.

  His mother had passed away at age forty-two, his father at fifty-eight. His older brother, Richard, had died after a bout with pneumonia, one month shy of his seventieth birthday, on September 8, 1975. Richard’s death certificate listed heart disease as a contributing factor.

  Fated to be a footnote in his famous brother’s life story, Richard had hung around southern California for much of the 1940s. Orson forgave Richard everything—even his claim, on one occasion, to have written the “panic broadcast” of “War of the Worlds.”