His older brother had made an unfortunate splash in the news in 1941, on returning to Los Angeles after marrying Mildred Alice Bill in Reno. “The bulky, blushing brother of Orson, the boogieman,” in the words of the Los Angeles Times account, lashed out at photographers at the airport, trying to grab their photographic plates away from them. Orson said in interviews that his brother had met his wife, a native Angeleno fifteen years his junior, at a soup kitchen in downtown Los Angeles; Richard had a habit of attaching himself to churches and charities while making ends meet with intermittent jobs.
Occasionally, Richard found outlets for his artistic impulses, which ran deep in the Welles family. In May 1942, for example, he served as “technical director” of the Victory Week celebration staged by the Junior Chamber of Commerce of Sierra Madre, a small city in Los Angeles County, nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. According to wire service accounts, Richard arranged “the public address system” and staged “the parade of victory girl entries” for the event, which culminated in the crowning of a local beauty queen along with the burning of effigies of Hitler and Hirohito. But he never lived in the same place for very long, and after about a year in Sierra Madre he vanished from the city directory.
Richard’s marriage lasted five years, before a protracted separation and divorce, with Mildred Welles attesting to his mental cruelty and his failure to support her. The only property he claimed in the divorce were his favorite books, his musical recordings, and a box of family photographs. At the time of the final decree in 1947, Richard was living in a Culver City hotel, working as a salesman for a stove company. Court papers noted his speech impediment.
The divorce, and perhaps Orson’s departure for Europe in late 1947, sent Richard back to northern California, where he bobbed between small cities and short-lived jobs and stints with Episcopalian church groups. In 1952 he found a temporary position at the St. Francis Home for Boys in Salina, Kansas, teaching arts and crafts therapy to orphan and delinquent boys, but after two months he returned to northern California’s Napa Valley. In mid-1953 he turned up as an attendant at the Grafton State School in North Dakota, teaching recreational activities to people with mental disabilities, but again he lasted only two months before leaving for a new home in Santa Rosa, California.
In early 1954, Richard had his best opportunity at St. Mary’s Episcopal School for Indian Girls in Springfield, South Dakota—on the border of Indian lands known as, of all things, the Rosebud Reservation. Flaunting his famous brother’s name as much as his own experience in church social work, Richard was hired as recreational director of the small school, promising to stage puppet shows and theatrical productions with the thirty girls, while guiding them in learning to make plastic religious Christmas ornaments to provide “commercial value to the school,” in the words of a parish newsletter, and “allow proper expression of Indian art.” Installed at St. Mary’s by Palm Sunday, Richard hosted services for a congregation of several dozen Episcopalians. The Yankton Press and Dakotan covered his arrival at the school; the article was complete with a photograph of the “quiet little man,” with glasses and curved-stem pipe, studying a Gilbert and Sullivan script he intended to adapt for the Indian girls.
The article repeated Richard’s boast that he had written the script for “War of the Worlds” and had been “associated with his brother” as a writer on other Campbell Playhouse broadcasts and Mercury Theatre productions before quitting radio and theater because of “the advent of television.” He had returned to the Northwest, Richard said, recalling it fondly after his youthful travels there as a member of a boys’ quartet in vaudeville.
Richard had big plans for the future of St. Mary’s: introducing a weaving loom to the school, making ceramics from a gas-fired kiln, holding basketry and bead classes. Richard even planned a show with a concept that sounds like a variant of Welles’s Five Kings, weaving together “portions of four Gilbert and Sullivan operettas,” to be prerecorded by the girls and played under a puppet show performance.
That newspaper interview, surviving correspondence in Richard’s hand, and extensive church records support the impression that Richard tended to struggle with positions that made demands on his abilities and coping mechanisms. Richard was well liked at St. Mary’s, and he was wholehearted about arts and crafts, but after just a month he started sending the bishopric letters outlining impractical goals and demanding extra compensation for his efforts.
At a meeting of the Sioux Falls church board in late May, Richard proposed an adult extension outreach program at the school, modeled after the Chautauqua circuit. He himself would offer enlightening lectures on art, music, civics, humanities, or travel, accompanied by slides or documentary films. This ambitious new curriculum would include a play-reading group, which Richard would coach through “a standard play such as Our Town.” The program would bring in extra revenue for the school, Richard assured the board—in turn facilitating a hike in his salary. His proposal was met with polite remarks, but the reservation school was already in a constant struggle to survive, and its constituency could not be counted on to absorb unusual costs. The bishop admired Richard’s ideas for so many “interesting undertakings,” but this was no time for grandiose schemes.
Leaning on his rapport with the bishop, Richard started sending him increasingly insistent letters complaining of his sacrifices and asking for additional compensation during the summer. He had “diabetic medical needs,” Richard wrote—another echo of his brother, Orson—and was still suffering from a past “fracture of my left leg.” He had signed a contract permitting “outside engagements,” expecting to promote himself locally “as an entertainer in magic,” but these plans had resulted in only one local gig, paying a pitiful $25. He needed a car to expand his territory for better bookings. The bishop wrote back sympathetically but noncommittally.
Finally, Richard escalated his demands for “remunerative work somewhere,” asking the diocese to guarantee that his needs be met by July 1. This was “not an ultimatum, but only a statement of human necessity.” When the board met again in late June, Richard was dismissed from his post—ostensibly because of funding problems, but really because he had become difficult and obstreperous. Richard wrote one last angry letter to the bishop, demanding a good reference letter, which he received. (His Five Kings–style Gilbert and Sullivan puppet show was staged by the girls as scheduled at the end of the school year, and from sparse accounts it appears to have been a success.)
Retreating once more to northern California, Richard seems to have withdrawn into his shell. He maintained his interest in arts and crafts and frequented local gem and mineral shows. By the early 1970s, he was “self-employed” as a property manager for buildings, finally landing on Noe Street in San Francisco “in a depressing apartment in the worst part of town,” according to Charles Higham’s always imaginative account. When Richard died, his estate came to “$470.65 in cash, $504.50 in coins, and $355 in Social Security,” Higham detailed, later “attached by the public administrator to pay the costs of his funeral.” But Richard was cremated, and there was no funeral.
Orson paid out small sums of money through the years to assist his brother, but he had gradually fallen out of touch with the lost soul, who was as peripatetic in his way as Orson himself. F. X. Feeney, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2011, mused that Richard’s tragedy “haunted the Maestro into old age” and was evoked in “the troubled, double-crossing partnerships throughout his body of work.” But Charles Foster Kane was an only child, and the brother figure in Citizen Kane is his close friend Jed Leland, whom Kane initially admires and adores. It is Kane who betrays Leland, by betraying their ideals, as Orson more than once explained patiently to interviewers. Orson’s films often revolved around betrayals, but the characters he played rarely had brothers.
Curiously, Barbara Leaming made no mention of Richard 1. Welles’s death in her book. But she dwelled on that of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, twenty-one years b
efore, in July 1964.
The doctor and his wife, Hazel, had come to live in Hollywood by the end of the summer of 1940, in time to witness much of the filming of Citizen Kane. Bernstein treated Orson when he injured his foot on the set in late August, and again later after the room-wrecking scene in Xanadu. During the last days of filming in December, when Orson was bedridden with a bad cold for several days, the doctor “descended from my bone and joint pedestal and took care of him—shot him full of Vit. B.”
The enterprising Bernstein established an office on Camden Drive in Beverly Hills and bought a two-story Mediterranean-style residence with a swimming pool on Schuyler Road near Greystone Park. Orson arranged for his former guardian to enjoy one of the first previews of Citizen Kane outside the studio, bringing a print to Bernstein’s home to screen the week before the film was officially released to theaters, in late April 1941. It was a thoughtful early present for Bernstein, whose fifty-eighth birthday fell on May 10, four days after Orson’s. The two enjoyed extending birthday wishes to each other over the years, even if only by phone.
Among the guests for the early screening at Dr. Bernstein’s home were the Russian-born American ballet-master Adolph Bolm, who had danced and choreographed in Chicago in the 1920s before moving to Los Angeles; and the pianist and composer Igor Stravinsky. “The Herrmann music is grand,” Hazel Bernstein wrote to Ashton Stevens. “I am very happy that he has made a good film,” Dr. Bernstein also wrote to Stevens. “You know how they felt about him here. Bets were being made that Orson would never produce a picture. He has vindicated [RKO president George] Schaefer who stuck by him.”
Although Stevens was forbidden to mention Citizen Kane or Orson’s name in the Hearst newspaper where his column still appeared, he never wavered in his support for Welles—nor, for that matter, in his respect and fondness for his own longtime boss William Randolph Hearst. Stevens managed to separate the two in his mind.
Many of the Bernsteins’ old Chicago friends had relocated to Los Angeles, and with the help of the Mario Chamlees, Maurice and Hazel were soon reestablished as fixtures in the city’s music and arts community. Dr. Bernstein became a patron of the Long Beach and Los Angeles symphony orchestras, and hobnobbed with classical artists such as Stravinsky and Lotte Lehmann. The doctor saw Stravinsky, a neighbor in Beverly Hills, as often as he could, one time intrepidly arranging to play for the maestro his own cello composition, which he titled “Song Without Words.” “How do you find the time?” Stravinsky was said to have commented, politely.
The Bernsteins blended into the film community too. With referrals from Welles and their Chicago connections, the doctor built a thriving practice, counting Errol Flynn, director John Huston, Joseph Cotten, and Rita Hayworth among his first patients. Another client was the Chicago-born silent screen actress Dagmar Godowsky. (“Her father was the famous Leopold Godowsky,” Bernstein reminded Ashton Stevens in a letter—Godowsky the prodigy and Chicago teacher who had taught piano technique to Orson’s mother.) Hollywood was a small world, and on one occasion Bernstein was even summoned to treat the sacroiliitis of William Randolph Hearst. “He looks very well,” Bernstein wrote to Stevens afterward. “I am afraid that when he learns I am related to Orson I shall lose a good patient.”
Dr. Bernstein still saw himself as the protector of Orson’s reputation and interests. When Orson was in Brazil from February to June 1942, working on his documentary It’s All True, Bernstein made a point of visiting Dolores Del Rio at RKO, where The Magnificent Ambersons was in its editing crisis, and where the final scenes of Welles’s Mercury production Journey into Fear were being shot, with Del Rio in the cast and Norman Foster directing with Welles’s guidance. “I took lunch with Dolores at the studio and watched them shoot the scene in the café . . . dancing and so forth,” Bernstein wrote to Orson in Brazil. “Dolores looked like a large cute attractive cat in her make-up.”
One day the doctor enjoyed “a long visit” with Charles Chaplin at the Godowsky residence. It was shortly after the first press previews of The Magnificent Ambersons in May 1942. Bernstein’s unfettered account of his talk with Chaplin caused the first real chill in his relationship with Welles. “[Chaplin] thinks that you are a great artist, though still young in your conception of human emotion,” Bernstein wrote to his onetime ward, who was still in Brazil. “He has much to say about Kane, which he was crazy about, with only the above reservation of emotional value.” Welles admired Chaplin and considered him a friend, and later, without credit, he would write an early draft of Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. But Orson did not care to have his work graded on “human emotion,” especially by a master like Chaplin.
Bernstein’s relationship to Welles in these years was increasingly intrusive and meddlesome. Scorning the current Mercury business manager, Jack Moss, as an unimaginative yes-man, he suggested instead that Orson partner up with a man like Chaplin, “an unusual man,” for whom “Hollywood has not blotted out his appreciation of the fine things in art.” Orson once had such an unusual man, Bernstein wrote: John Houseman, a partner who wasn’t afraid to give Orson “an honest opinion” rather than “flatter” him with approval. “[Houseman] is the one person I am sorry you broke with,” Bernstein wrote.
“I wish too that you could have a little confidence in me,” Bernstein continued in his letter to Orson. “I guided you in a way which I have never regretted. And you still need a guardian! The proof of this is that you have little to show after all your tremendous success. You are now a man, and I am talking to you man to man. I am alarmed when I think of the mercenary people who surround you—Moss—his lawyer, and others who have sucked you dry.”
Nor was Bernstein’s wife one to censor herself on the subject of Welles. “Have you seen Mrs. Miniver yet?” Hazel wrote to Ashton Stevens. “It’s quite a picture, with all the human-ness and heart that our precocious Orson’s opus (i) lack.” The Bernsteins were irrepressible, inexhaustible, uncontrollable. The following year, when Welles married Rita Hayworth, they proved themselves as devoted to his new wife as they had been to Del Rio or Virginia Nicolson. The Bernsteins visited Orson and Rita often at their new “gaudy Hollywood modern mansion,” Hazel wrote to Ashton Stevens irreverently, with “a pool of pools, a lake, huge melon shaped, with an island in the middle, and tremendous pavilion and bath house, barbecues, ping pong etc. On a huge scale like Mr. Welles himself. Ah well, what’s life without an Orson?”
Bernstein proved indispensable as a medical consultant to Orson’s second wife, who was plagued by health concerns, real and imagined. After Rebecca was born in 1944, the doctor became an eager babysitting “grandfather.” Orson was away in New York for most of the first half of 1944, preparing for the filming of The Stranger in the fall, writing his crusading newspaper column, engaging in war-related activities, and making public appearances. (An entire book could be written about that single year, with much left out.)
“As hard as I try not to write or think of you it is no go,” the doctor wrote to Orson poignantly from his Beverly Hills office one day. “I am like a person who tries to see how long he can hold his breath. I hear you every Sunday [on the radio] and hear about you from those New Yorkers who see you regularly in church”—this last a sample of Bernstein’s humor.
Orson’s marriage to Hayworth collapsed in stages, ending with their separation in 1947. Two years later, she married Prince Aly Khan and moved overseas; thereafter, Bernstein could no longer please Orson by fussing over Rebecca, who was henceforth removed from both of their worlds. Welles himself left America in November 1947, after The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai (with Hayworth excelling opposite her estranged husband in an exceptional film noir), and Macbeth. Beset by personal and professional financial crises, he saw Hollywood as an increasingly inhospitable place—not least because of the onset of the anticommunist blacklist.
The blacklist cut like a scythe through Orson’s circle. Howard Koch, subpoenaed as one of the “Hollywood Nineteen,” had to write under pseudonym
s until the 1960s. Dorothy Comingore, the Susan Alexander of Citizen Kane, saw her career destroyed when her husband, screenwriter Richard Collins, became a cooperative witness for the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Orson’s “slaves” William Alland and Betty Wilson (Richard Wilson’s wife), both onetime communists, also “named names” to HUAC. Georgia Backus, the Radio Guild activist who had a small but unforgettable role in Citizen Kane as Miss Anderson, the guardian of the Thatcher Memorial Library, never worked in show business again. John Berry, who stayed with the Mercury Theatre through the tour of Native Son before becoming a director in Hollywood, fled to France. Canada Lee, the African American actor who played Banquo in the Voodoo Macbeth and Bigger Thomas in Native Son on stage for the Mercury, and many, many other friends of Orson’s were affected.
In the fall of 1947, Orson was lured overseas by two enticements: an acting job abroad, and a crush on a European actress. Dr. Bernstein saw him off at the airport. “The cutter for Macbeth even went to the plane with him to cut to the bitter end,” reported Hazel Bernstein. “The baggage was loaded with untold dollars’ worth of I. Magnins finery for his latest Italian actress lady-love.59 . . . He announces that he is a thoroughly domesticated and changed man, who no longer rages or rants. Hmmmmm!”
For the next six or seven years, Bernstein did not so much as lay eyes on Orson—this was the longest time they had ever been separated. Welles usually phoned Bernstein on New Year’s Eve, and around the date of their birthdays, but in between the communication dwindled. “I have not heard from Orson in months,” the doctor complained to Ashton Stevens.
Stevens died in 1951, not long after receiving an effusive New Year’s cable from Welles. “Orson is such a great-hearted person,” Stevens’s wife, FloFlo, wrote to the Bernsteins. “Why is everyone surprised when he does something nice?”
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 85
