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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Hitchcock directed more than fifty pictures. (Vertigo was number nine on the AFI’s 2007 ranking.) Welles completed only about a dozen. Yet Welles ranked third in the number of votes attracted by any director in the Sight and Sound poll—behind only Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard—with several of his films drawing votes, and five firmly lodged in the top 250 of all time. Touch of Evil, his film noir gem from 1958, ranked fifty-sixth. The Magnificent Ambersons, even truncated, ranked eighty-first. Chimes at Midnight was number 154. F for Fake was 235. Welles was also represented by films in which he “merely” acted, with The Third Man part of a three-way tie at seventy-third place.

  Sight and Sound also conducted a separate poll in which film directors voted for the greatest and their favorites. Among the 358 filmmakers participating were Bong Joon-Ho from South Korea, Faouzi Bensaidi from Morocco, Jiri Menzel from the Czech Republic, Paul Greengrass from the United Kingdom, Luis Miñarro from Spain, Manuel Ferrari from Argentina, Pema Tseden from Tibet, Shinji Aoyama from Japan, and Martin Scorsese from the United States. All these and other contemporary directors voted for one or more Welles pictures—there were even scattered votes for Mr. Arkadin—and in the end Welles placed two films in the directors’ top hundred: Touch of Evil in a four-way tie at twenty-sixth; and Citizen Kane number three, behind Tokyo Story and 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Vertigo, the top Hitchcock film, was number seven.)

  Welles remains a lodestar for fans, critics, and scholars, as well as filmmakers. And, like Jimi Hendrix, whose recordings continue to emerge decades after his death, Welles keeps delivering. In 1992, Spanish filmmaker Jesus Franco released a compilation of his Don Quixote footage, though many Welles purists found it a bastardization. Two cinephiles, Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel, worked with Richard Wilson to restore Orson’s equally quixotic 1942 film It’s All True, shot in Brazil, for a 1993 documentary. In 1999 George Hickenlooper made The Big Brass Ring, drawing on Welles and Oja Kodar’s script, as rewritten by F. X. Feeney and Hickenlooper. In 2013, his long-lost Too Much Johnson footage was unearthed in Italy; the 1938 slapstick comedy footage toured film festivals after a crisp restoration, stunning audiences with its beauty and vitality. (“Deep focus, daring forms of blocking,” said James Naremore. “It pretty much knocked my socks off.”) The Munich Film Museum has compiled footage from several uncompleted Welles films, including The Dreamers, The Magic Show, and his one-man Moby Dick.

  And even “The Other Side of the Wind” may yet find its way through its legal and financial welter. In October 2014, the New York Times reported on the front page that a deal had been reached to hand over to a Los Angeles production company the 1,083 reels of negatives sitting in a warehouse in a Paris suburb. Peter Bogdanovich and Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, who has worked often with Steven Spielberg and who began his career as a line producer on “The Other Side of the Wind,” would oversee the editing of the film, based on Welles’s surviving notes. The main character in the story echoes Hemingway, and the inspiration for the script can be traced to Welles’s tussle with Hemingway in 1937; the film is also said to mark one of the most overt explorations of homosexuality in Welles’s oeuvre. The cast includes Bogdanovich, John Huston, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, and Dennis Hopper. “Cinema buffs consider it the most famous movie never released,” wrote the Times, “an epic work by one of the great filmmakers.”

  “No one had ever engaged in a dull conversation with Orson Welles,” his longtime friend, actor Joseph Cotten, said in a message read to a packed Directors Guild Memorial held one month after Welles died in 1985. “Exasperating, yes; sometimes eruptive, unreasonable, ferocious and convulsive . . . yet eloquent, penetrating, exciting, and always, never failingly always—even at the sacrifice of accuracy and his own vanity—witty and never, never, never dull.”

  Among the friends and colleagues who spoke at the event was former Todd School headmaster Roger Hill, who finally made his trip to California, as Welles had predicted, to deliver his prize pupil’s eulogy. Also on hand was Oja Kodar, who angrily recounted the many discouragements Welles had suffered late in life, denouncing those “whose fingers are still sticky from plucking at his wings.”

  “I promise you it didn’t make him bitter,” she told the crowd to Niagara-like ovations.

  Sometime after his death, his thirty-year-old daughter Beatrice brought his ashes to Spain, the country of many of Welles’s youthful enthusiasms. At his request, his remains were buried in an ancient well covered by flowers on the property of an old friend, bullfighter Antonio Ordoñez, in the mountaintop village of Ronda. Ronda is only a short distance from Seville, where, as a young man, Orson had indulged in the sport of bullfighting, and where, for a brief time, he had felt “untroubled by the itch of ambition,” in his words. The mountaintop “well” beckoned to him, Orson jokingly told Ordoñez, as a kindred “Welles.”

  The private estate bars visitors, although people stream to the place nearly every day, many of them coming from far away. The only way to catch a glimpse of Welles’s grave is from the road. There is no lengthy inscription on the marker: no mention of Citizen Kane, the Mercury Theatre, “War of the Worlds,” or any other work by the outstanding whirling pagoda of the cinema.

  “He was some kind of man,” Tanya (Marlene Dietrich) says of Hank Quinlan (Welles) at the end of Touch of Evil. “What does it matter what you say about people?”

  Welles himself always scoffed at posterity. “I’m against posterity in principle,” he said often. “I think it’s almost as vulgar as success.” And such is his legacy that the plaque on his gravestone bears only his dates and his immortal name:

  GEORGE ORSON

  WELLES

  1915–1985

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Two prevailing and diametrically opposed attitudes seem to dictate the way most people currently think about Orson Welles,” the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, when reviewing three books about Welles for Cinéaste in 1996. “One attitude, predominantly American, sees his life and career chiefly in terms of failure and regards the key question to be why he never lived up to his promise—‘his promise’ almost invariably being tied up with the achievement of Citizen Kane. Broadly speaking, this position can be compared to that of the investigative reporter Thompson’s editor in Citizen Kane, bent on finding a single formula for explaining a man’s life.

  “The other attitude—less monolithic and less tied to any particular nationality, or to the expectations aroused by any single work—views his life more sympathetically as well as inquisitively; this position corresponds more closely to Thompson’s near the end of Kane when he says, ‘I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.’ ”

  When I launched my research four years ago, I was acutely aware of the many Thompsons who preceded me on the subject of Orson Welles. I find something worthwhile in even the least of the many books—and many more articles—about Welles. My goal was to collate and fact-check them, to explore fresh research, and to arrive at a different, more balanced, and, yes, more sympathetic account of Welles’s life in the years leading up to Citizen Kane. The backstory of his life and early career would help explain the genesis and ideas behind the famous film.

  Previous books have suffered from both gaping holes and negative assumptions, all of which have contributed to the accepted mythology about Welles, feeding widespread theories about his egomania and self-destructiveness. I hoped to create a chronological narrative that would fill in gaps and blind spots and counter some of this negative mythology.

  The job of writing film biographies has certainly changed since the first one I wrote, which I began as an undergraduate in college. Since Young Orson was intended to end, except for a final chapter, in 1940, and anyone who was Orson’s contemporary in 1940 would be in his or her mid-nineties today, I did fewer actual interviews for Young Orson than for any of my other books. Besides, I think it can be unfair to rely heavily on the fuzzy memories of nonegenarians—unfair to them and to the subject. I burrowed
into libraries, archives, courthouses. I read endless microfilm, oral histories, letters, and unpublished memoirs. I pored over electronic records and newspaper and periodical indexes on the Internet. I read everything I could about Welles, including many hundreds of articles and books.

  At the end of the long road of every book I write, however, I look back with similar fond memories. I could not tell you how many Oscars Citizen Kane was nominated for without looking up the number in my own pages. But I remember the interesting and helpful people I met along the road. I am grateful to those who answered the telephone, welcomed me to their institutions or homes, walked me around the places where young Orson lived, responded to my e-mail queries and persistent requests for information or documents. Behind each name or organization on this list is someone who inched this book toward the finish line.

  Advice and assistance: Charles Barr, John Charles Bennett, Matthew Bernstein, Richard Bleiler, Alan Brostoff, Mark Burman, Russell Campbell, Stuart Campbell, Lorenzo Codelli, William G. Contento, Paul Cronin, William Cross, Michael Dawson, Anne Edwards, Scott Eyman, Burt Fields, Touria El Glaoui, Diane Giles, Sidney Gottlieb, Kevin Greenlee, John Gurda, Ron Halberg, Reynold Humphries, Robert James, Josh Karp, Ray Kelly, Marian Wilson Kimber, Daniel Kremer, James Landers, Daniel and Caryl Lemanski, Tom Matthews, Lee Matthias, Patrick McGavin, Russell Merritt, Elliott Miller, Kathryn Morice, Gary Morris, Will Murray, Frank Noack, Holly Gent Palmo, James Robert Parish, Brian Reddin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Santiago Rubin de Celis, Randy Rutsky, Karl Schadow, Beth Schroeder, Michael Schumacher, Roberta Smoodin, Jim Steinmeyer, Howard Suber, Peter Tonguette, Mary Troath, Jim Van Hise, Chris Feder Welles, Barry B. Witham, Leigh Woods, Jim Zimmerman.

  Cynthia Richardson dug into Chicago court and government records for me. Vanda Krefft gave generously of her time, dipping into files at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Sky McGilligan conducted research at the Margaret Herrick Library and in the Special Collections of the University of Southern California. Clancy McGilligan read hours of microfilm at the Kenosha Public Library.

  For interviews and supplementary material I am especially grateful to the children of persons who figure in Welles’s early life story. These include Mrs. Thallis Drake, the daughter of Phyllis Fergus; Bill Mowry, the son of William Mowry Jr.; Ryan O’Neal, the son of actor Charles O’Neal; Cynthia Bulens, the daughter of William Vance; and Mike Woldenberg, the son of Haskell and Edna Woldenberg, the last proprietors of Camp Indianola.

  Screenings: Joseph McBride dug into his personal vaults for his tape recording of Welles’s last appearance on The Merv Griffin Show; Brian Reddin, from Dublin, arranged for a viewing of his documentary Orson Welles and the Gate Theatre; Alberto Rojas Maza, from Seville, sent his documentary El Americano; Michael Tapper, from Sweden, mailed a copy of The Well (Brünnen).

  Photographs: Marie Kroeger, Ryerson Archives, Art Institute of Chicago; Christine Cheng, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Special Collections, George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia); Dollie Banner, Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store (New York); Cathy Schenck, Librarian, Keeneland (Lexington, Kentucky); Meredith Jumisko, Public Relations, Kenosha Area Convention and Visitors Bureau; Tom Schleif, Executive Director, Kenosha History Center; Ann Tatum, Kentucky Derby Photo Archives, Kinetic (Louisville, Kentucky); Joseph McBride; Heather Winter, Milwaukee Institute of Art Archives, Milwaukee Art Museum; Dudley Crafts Watson Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; Todd Tarbox, Carol Nishijima, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles; Lilly Library, University of Indiana (Bloomington); Special Collections Library, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor); Sandra Garcia-Myers, Charles Higham Collection, Archives of the Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California; Woodstock Public Library (Woodstock, Illinois).

  Special thanks to Francy Paquette and Andy Sharlein of Allied Digital Photo in Germantown, Wisconsin, for reproduction services.

  Archives and organizations: Gregg Tubbs, Director of Corporate Communications, American Lung Association; Marie Kroeger, Ryerson Archives, Art Institute of Chicago; Elizabeth Thrond, Center for Western Studies, Augustana College (Sioux Falls, South Dakota); Jean L. Green, Head of Special Collections, and Beth T. Kilmarx and Mary E. Tuttle, Tilly Losch Collection, Binghamton University Libraries (Binghamton, New York); Robert T. Muth, Director, Bozeman Fish Technology Center, Bozeman, Montana, and Carlos R. Martinez, Director, Fish Hatchery and Archives (Spearfish, South Dakota); Michele Westberg, Clerk, Bozeman Municipal Court (Montana); CA/RK, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library (New York); Catherine Williamson, Butterfields (Los Angeles, California); Stephanie Buck, Librarian/Archivist, Cape Ann Museum (Gloucester, Massachusetts); Ashlee Wright, Carmel Public Library (Carmel, California); Tina Eger and Danelle Orange, Archivists, Carthage College (Kenosha, Wisconsin); Cedar Rapids Public Library (Iowa); Jeanne Hamilton, Director, and Barbara Krehbiel, Charleston Carnegie Public Library (Charleston, Illinois); Lish Thompson, South Carolina History Room, Charleston County Public Library; Chicago History Museum Research Center; Deborah Hastings and Elizabeth Cline, Reference, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (Ohio); Teresa Yoder, Special Collections, Chicago Public Library; Cleveland Public Library (Ohio); Charis Emily Shafer, Brianne LaCamera, Brandi Kalicki, and Kristen La Follette, Mercury Theatre and Theatre Union Collections, Columbia University Center for Oral History, Butler Library, Columbia University (New York); Karen Meier, Dane County Court (Madison, Wisconsin); Sarah Hartwell, Reference, Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth University (Hanover, New Hampshire); Cully Sommers, Music, Arts, and Literature Department, Detroit Public Library (Michigan); Julie Levang, Reference, Duluth Public Library (Minnesota); Michelle Franklin and Ashley Todd-Diaz, Curator of Special Collections and Archives, Emporia State University (Emporia, Kansas); Cheryl Bronkema, Freeport Public Library (Freeport, Illinois); Nancy Shlaes, Ann Birk Kuper Papers, Special Collections, Governors State University (Chicago, Illinois); Hope Schneider, Nahman-Watson Library, Greenfield Community College (Greenfield, Massachusetts); Carl White, Greenwich Public Library (Connecticut); Susan Halpert, Vera Zorina Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts); Chris Applin, Local History, Hoyt Public Library (Saginaw, Michigan); Ralph A. Pugh, Archivist, Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago); Taran T. Ley, John Reinhardt, and Sandra Fritz, Reference Librarians, Illinois State Library and Archives (Springfield); Kate Choplin, Public Services, Indianapolis Public Library (Indiana); Dr. John A. Horner, Missouri Valley Room, Kansas City Public Library (Missouri); Peter Shaw Johnson, President and Manager, Historic Green Ridge Cemetery, Kenosha (Wisconsin); Julia Johnas, Highland Park Public Library (Illinois); Kankakee Public Library (Illinois); Cynthia Nelson, Curator/Archivist, Kenosha County Historical Society (Wisconsin); Teresa Sutter, Research and Alumni Coordinator, Latin School (Chicago, Illinois); Ellie Jordan, Lake Geneva Public Library (Wisconsin); Lewis Wyman, George Middleton Papers, Manuscript Division, and Jan Grenci, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.); Romeo Dais, Madison Public Library (Wisconsin); Ken Syke and Carolyn Lowrey, Madison Public Schools Administration (Wisconsin); Nancy Fike, Museum Administrator, McHenry County Historical Society (Illinois); Heather L. Winter, Librarian/Archivist, Milwaukee Art Museum; Missouri State Archives; Jared Brennan, Special Collections, Nashville Public Library (Tennessee); Bonnie Marie Sauer, Archivist, National Archives and Records Administration (New York); Tom Ankner, Charles F. Cummings, New Jersey Information Center, Newark Public Library; Hope Dunbar, Ashton and Florence Stevens Papers, Newberry Library (Chicago, Illinois); John Calhoun, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library; Diane Anderson, HR Coordinator, North Dakota Developmental Center (Grafton); Susan Sacharski, Archivist, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago; Janet C. Olson, Assistant University Archivist, and Nicholas D. Munagian, Gate Theatre Papers, Special Collections, Northwestern University Library (Evans
ton, Illinois); Edward L. De Sanctis, Oneida County Historical Society (New York); Alice Gerard, Town Historian, Palisades (New York); Linda White, Perrot Memorial Library (Greenwich, Connecticut); Marilyn Holt, Pennsylvania Department, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; Gabriel Swift, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Curt Phillips, Pulp Mags@yahoogroups.com; Elizabeth Wilkinson, Archivist, George Ade Papers, and Shauna Borger, Digital Collections, Purdue University Libraries (Indiana); Rachel Carter, Archivist, Everett Library, Queens University of Charlotte (South Carolina); Quincy Public Library (Illinois); Racine Public Library (Wisconsin); Linda Balk, Librarian, Renville Genealogical Society (Oliva, Minnesota); Mark Colly (press office) and Freek Heijbroek (author), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam); Laura Haule, St. Charles Public Library (Illinois); Shirley Andria, Administrat Services Coordinator, Saint Francis Community Services (Salina, Kansas); Peg Koller, Librarian, St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy (Delafield, Wisconsin); Judy Oski, Sawyer Free Library (Gloucester, Massachusetts); Sandy Day, Local Historian, Schiappa Library (Steubenville, Ohio); Mahina Oshie, Seattle Public Library (Washington); Debbie R. Henderson, Archival Collection, Sierra Madre Public Library (California); Judith Munns, Skagway Museum (Alaska); Laurie Winship, Museum Director, Skaneateles Historical Society (New York); Erin Kinhart and Elizabeth Botten, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.); Katharine J. Rinehart, Sonoma County Library (Santa Rosa, California); Pamalla Anderson, Ronald Davis Oral History Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University; Tessa Brawley, Dudley Watson Crafts Collection, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library; David Kessler, Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley; Christine Colburn and Rena Schergen, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; Kelly M. Grogg and Haley Lott, Charles O’Neal Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City); Andrew Horbal, Hornbake Library, University of Maryland (College Park); Edward (Ned) Comstock, Archives and Special Collections, University of Southern California; David Null, Director, Archives and Records Management, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Troy Reeves, Head, Oral History Program, Steenbock Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives; Dan Hauck, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Area Research Center Reading Room; Melissa Olson, University of Wisconsin–Parkside Archives and Area Research Center (Kenosha); Ginny L. Kilander, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming–Laramie; Lori B. Bessler, Reference, and Matt Tischer, Scott F. Roller, Richard L. Pifer, Harry L. Miller, and Mary K. Huelsbeck, Archives and Special Collections, Wisconsin State Historical Society (Madison); Neal Kenney, Special Collections, West Chester University Library (West Chester, Pennsylvania); Wheaton Public Library (Illinois); Jane Bouley, Local Historian (Branford, Connecticut), and Alice Pentz, Library Director, Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library (Stony Creek, Connecticut); Lesley Mackey McCambridge, Senior Director of Credits and Creative Rights, Writers Guild of America, West; Andrea Vernola, Martha Hansen, and Julie Fee of the Woodstock Public Library (Illinois); Doris Bannister, Historian, Town of Middlebury and County of Wyoming (New York); Laurie Klein, Thornton Wilder Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut).