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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Special thanks to the numerous librarians and reference specialists, many of them anonymous, who answered my queries, but especially to Patty Bajabir, Suzanne Hildebrandt, Laura Kastelic, Steve M. Hutchens, and the staff of Kenosha Public Library; Curtis Mann, manager of the Sangamon Valley Collection of the Springfield Public Library (Illinois); Craig Simpson, Isabel Planton, and the staff of the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington; Peggy Daub, Phillip Hallman, and Kate Hutchens in the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the staff of the Milwaukee Public Library; and the staff of the Woodstock Public Library.

  I am especially grateful to the reference desk and interlibrary loan department of the Raynor Memorial Libraries of Marquette University. The Marquette librarians answered countless queries and repeatedly hunted down source material from other libraries.

  In Ireland I was blessed with assistance from Eithne Massey and Ms. Phil Comerford of the Dublin and Irish Local Studies Collections, Dublin City Library and Archive; Mary Qualter, Clerical Officer, Galway County Libraries; the staff and electronic indexes of the National Library (Dublin); and Aisling Lockhart, Manuscripts and Archives, Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin. Eileen Leahy helped with a little eleventh-hour research. Anthony Tracy and Ruth Barton invited me to their colleges to talk, helping me to pay the way for research and travel. Gwenda Young brought me to University College–Cork on a Fulbright, teaching at UCC, furthering my work in Ireland.

  In Seville, María Gisèle Royo and Antón Calderon Ferre squired me around. Alberto Rojas Maza shared his knowledge of Welles’s bullfighting stint. Francesco Zippel made Rome hospitable. In Paris, Alain Kerzoncuf and Bertrand Tavernier welcomed me, and Marie-Dominique Montel and John Baxter also opened their doors wide. Over the years, Baxter has been a great friend of my books and a human encyclopedia for my questions.

  Kathleen Sapltro and John Daab welcomed me to Woodstock with lunch, a screening, and many leads and suggestions.

  Ruth Barton read the Irish chapter and made sharp recommendations for revisions. Bonnie Hendrickson, Town Historian at the Oregon Public Library (Illinois); and Duane Paulsen, local historian of Grand Detour, read the Grand Detour sections and made suggestions. Dr. John Hanson of Milwaukee advised me on the medical speculations and diagnoses. Wisconsin historian John Buenker read the Kenosha portion of the book and offered pointers. Jim Steinmeyer consulted on magic and magicians and critiqued the final chapter revolving around the last day of Welles’s life. Welles expert James Naremore, also knowledgeable about magic and magicians, read a draft of the manuscript, giving me the benefit of his wide-ranging expertise. Todd Tarbox and his wife, Shirley, read every chapter involving Roger Hill and the Todd School, and went further than just correcting mistakes; they performed line-by-line editing of a draft for syntax and grammar. None of the above people can be blamed, however, for any mistakes of fact or judgment that have persisted into the final form of this book.

  For me, every book takes a village of friends and supporters to help me write it. Roger Hill’s grandson Todd Tarbox engaged in almost daily communications with me for several years, offering items from his seemingly bottomless trove of Todd School memorabilia, along with advice and good fellowship and the wisdom of his own lifelong experience. Juan Cobos in Spain started me off with long constructive e-mails, sharing his pioneering interviews with Welles, his research, and his thoughts.

  Above all, Joseph McBride has run the marathon with me. McBride has written three notable books about Orson Welles, and he could have regarded me as a rival or Johnny-come-lately. But he sent me literally hundreds of e-mails expounding on this or that aspect of Welles’s career. He forwarded many pieces by other Welles experts. He mailed recordings, videos, and DVDs and dug up photographs for reference or use. He read the next-to-last and final drafts of the book, editing for style and language as well as for content. He made countless spot-on criticisms and corrections, and tolerated my disagreement on occasion. Although only a few years separate us in age, there is no question as to who is the elder statesman and the last word in Wellesiana. Thank you, Joe.

  My agent, Gloria Loomis, and her associate Julia Masnick treat me so nicely it is almost as though I lead the Watkins/Loomis agency in royalties (I don’t). For twenty-five years I have been fortunate to have the same agent and also the same editor. I often say, only half-jokingly, that my editor deserves a co-byline. Calvert Morgan Jr. burrowed into Welles and Citizen Kane, and became every bit the expert, adding nuances and correcting details—finding a mistake in the very first sentence of the submission draft!—supporting his suggestions with references to the likes of musician Jack White. My job is never done, thankfully, until Cal has added his thoughtful touches and (substantive) line editing.

  And my family—my wife, Tina; and sons Clancy, Bowie, and Sky—always live and breathe the subject for as long as I do.

  NOTES

  These books, among the many, many consulted, were my indispensable sources: Michael Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Popular Culture (Columbia University Press, 1999); Peter Biskind, My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (Metropolitan, 2013); Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (Scribner, 1989); Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking, 1995); Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, revised and updated (University of California Press, 1985); Peter Conrad, Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life (Faber and Faber, 2003); Mark W. Estrin, ed., Orson Welles Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2002); Chris Welles Feder, In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles (Algonquin, 2009); Richard France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (Bucknell University Press, 1977); Ronald Gottesman, Focus on Citizen Kane (Prentice-Hall, 1971); Charles Higham, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (St. Martin’s, 1985); Roger Hill, One Man’s Time and Chance: A Memoir of Eighty Years, 1895–1975 (Roger Hill, 1977); John Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir (Simon and Schuster, 1972); Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (Viking, 1985); Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond (Knopf, 2011); Micheál MacLíammóir, All for Hecuba: An Irish Theatrical Biography (Methuen, 1946); Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz (William Morrow, 1978); James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (Oxford University Press, 1978); James Naremore, ed., Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2004); Peter Noble, The Fabulous Orson Welles (Hutchinson, 1956); Todd Tarbox, Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts (BearManor Media, 2013); Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 2007); David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (Knopf, 1996); Peter Tonguette, Orson Welles Remembered: Interviews with His Actors, Editors, Cinematographers and Magicians (McFarland, 2007); Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich This Is Orson Welles (HarperCollins, 1972); Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz, with “Raising Kane” by Pauline Kael, Citizen Kane: The Complete Screenplay (Bantam Books, 1971).

  A Note on Sources: My research depended heavily on innumerable small press items obtained through examination of microfilm, local clip files, and electronically indexed newspapers and periodicals. I consulted all available government and court documents—birth, death, marriage, divorce, probate, draft, medical, immigration, travel, and so on. Dates and sources are often made clear in the context of the narrative. Only key sources not listed at the beginning of this chapter are specified.

  Chapter 1: THE BACKSTORY TO 1905

  All quotes from the Citizen Kane screenplay, unless otherwise noted, are from the “shooting script,” originally published in The Citizen Kane Book along with the essay “Raising Kane” by Pauline Kael (Little, Brown, 1971). The reporter, Thompson, reads Walter P. Thatcher’s “journal” recounting his first meeting with Kane as a boy in 1870, accordin
g to the script; but he reads from Thatcher’s “unpublished memoirs” (not his “journal”) in the film, and the dissolve from the manuscript to Mrs. Kane’s boardinghouse clearly shows the date as 1871—one of a thousand ways the film differs from the published script. All citations from Peter Bogdanovich’s interview sessions with Welles from Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles.

  “I am almost belligerently Midwestern . . .” from Orson Welles (OW), letter of December 21, 1937, to Wisconsin congressman Thomas R. Amlie, trying to backpedal from a short profile of him in the New Yorker, December 11, 1937, in which the journalist A. J. Liebling quotes OW describing Kenosha as “a nasty little Midwestern City.” (The quote about Kenosha was “flagrantly and libelously in error,” Welles wrote to Congressman Amlie. “I said ‘little,’ but never, never, ‘nasty.’ I have been to Kenosha in recent years and have found it . . . charming and vital.”) “The sounds of factory whistles . . .” and other Dr. Maurice A. Bernstein (MAB) quotes about the Welles family from the handwritten “Memoir of Orson Welles’s Early Years” in the Richard Wilson–Orson Welles Papers in Special Collections, University of Michigan Library (UM). “Spoke his first words . . .” from a letter of November 20, 1939, from MAB to Mercury Theatre publicist Herbert Drake (UM). “To counteract the local whisky . . .” from James Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (Vintage, 2010). “A quiet tick-tock, tick-tock . . .” from Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (Harcourt, Brace, 1926). “Elected on the Republican ticket . . .” from History of Sangamon County, Illinois (Inter-State Publishing, 1881). The military pension papers of Richard Jones Wells/Welles courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). All the inventions of Richard Jones Wells/Welles and his son Richard Head Welles can be located with the aid of the Google Patents search engine. “Hundreds of friends” from St. Joseph (Missouri) Gazette, July 22, 1876. “A desirable ally and . . .” from Head’s obituary, Kenosha Telegraph, February 25, 1875. “Impetuous and talented” from Victoria Price, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography (St. Martin’s, 1999). John F. Kreidl’s unpublished essay on Dick Welles and the Badger Brass company is among Joseph McBride’s papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. “A little, small-boned man” from the full transcript of the Orson Welles–Roger Hill telephone conversations (UM). The provenance of “Dick Welles” the race horse is traced in Charles Collin’s column, “A Line o’ Type or Two,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1944. “First in violence, deepest in dirt . . .” from Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (McClure, Phillips, 1904). “[Caruso] used to be in the house . . .” from Tarbox, Orson Welles and Roger Hill.

  Chapter 2: 1905–1915

  Kenosha Evening News for the following: “illustrating the most dramatic points,” December 5, 1906; “fanatics,” October 20, 1907; “by machines and girls” December 6, 1907; “one of the quietest holidays ever known,” December 25, 1907; “practically gone out of business,” February 3, 1908; Dick Welles’s involvement in the “kidnapping” of militant Louis Kekst is covered in a series of News articles including November 21 and December 23, 1907; “the greatest interest of the evening,” April 30, 1909; “There will be no consideration,” July 23, 1908. The Chicago Tribune reported the anarchist plot to destroy Badger Brass, June 21 and 22, 1908. Beacon Press published Marion Murdoch’s The Hermit Thrush and Other Verses in 1924. I have also consulted Mary Davison Bradford, Memoirs of Mary D. Bradford: Autobiographical and Historical Reminiscences of Education in Wisconsin (Antes, 1932).

  “Piece of sponge” and “Battle of the Train Depot” Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1911. Kenosha Evening News for the following: “while playing in the door yard,” August 2, 1911; Beatrice Welles (BW) and the charge of “the insurgents,” May 5, 1911; “deplorable social conditions” and “Those departments of city government,” Jane Addams, March 29, 1912; “He drove the jitney men,” September 14, 1916; Kenosha Woman’s Club schism, February 9, 1914 (also Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1914): “This is the first opportunity,” May 22, 1914; “from many walks of life” and the founding of the Kenosha City Club, June 27, 1914; Charles Witmer’s exhibition flights and filmmaking in Kenosha, July 13, 1914; BW expounds on the community Christmas tree and “the real Santa Claus,” December 7, 1914; “Men who counted their wealth,” December 10, 1914; BW’s front-page plea for open-air and special needs schools, November 15, 1914.

  Chapter 3: 1915–1921

  Kenosha Evening News: meeting of BW, Kenosha suffragists, and President Woodrow Wilson, January 29, 1916; BW’s involvement in the campaign to establish a Kenosha board of review to censor “sordid moving pictures,” November 28, 1916 (also Racine Journal, October 12, 1916); BW’s support for “sex hygiene” courses in public schools, October 1, 1915; her “Mother and Child” “storiette,” from a series of articles including January 26, January 28, and February 29, 1916; “artistic marching costumes” and the Kenosha suffragists’ trip to Chicago for the national assembly and parade to the Republican convention, June 7, 1916; “superbly” from Dudley Crafts Watson (DCW), guest review, November 6, 1916; “Badger Brass Sold Today,” January 20, 1917; Mina Elman is described as chic and beautiful in a review of May Robson’s play Mrs. Matt, January 12, 1917; “a size or two smaller,” January 23, 1917; “marked by great delicacy,” January 24, 1917; hospital stay of Richard I. Welles (RIW) in Chicago, March 13, 1917; “Suffrage Edition” of the Kenosha Evening News, with contributions by BW and Dick Welles, February 27, 1917; “a woman of rare personal charm,” from Lucy Ives’s obituary, August 10, 1917.

  Sarah Bernhardt in Les Cathédrales, Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1918. “Touched the hand of . . .” and “a sort of imitation musical Wunderkind” from Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. “The most fashionable apartment . . . ,” DCW quotes here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, are from Noble, The Fabulous Orson Welles. Marian Wilson Kimber’s book Feminine Entertainments: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. “She had to kill my act . . .” from Chris Welles Feder, In My Father’s Shadow. I am indebted to Peter Tonguette and his book Orson Welles Remembered, and to James Naremore and Jim Steinmeyer for bolstering my knowledge of magic tricks and history. Additionally I drew from several of Steinmeyer’s books and from Maurice Zolotow, “Unforgettable Orson Welles,” Reader’s Digest, December 1986. “I idolized him” from Jim Steinmeyer, The Last Greatest Magician in the World: Howard Thurston (Tarcher, 2011). The Louis K. Anspacher dinner is reported in Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1922. “While I prayed . . .” from Tarbox, Orson Welles and Roger Hill. Michael Atkinson first propounded the theory that Charles Foster Kane’s real father was “the unseen deadbeat boarder” named “Fred Graves” in the published script of Citizen Kane: see Atkinson, “Revisiting Rosebud: The Mystery of Mrs. Kane” (movingimagesource.us, 2013). “He [Bernstein] left Kenosha . . . ,” is from Leaming, Orson Welles. “The word genius was whispered . . .” from Leaming, Orson Welles. “Even when some are cut . . .” from Edward Moore, Chicago Tribune, August 13, 1922, roundup of the Ravinia season. Bill Doll, “Ashton Stevens,” Theatre Arts, July 1951, helped with biographical background.

  Chapter 4: 1922–1926

  Details of BW’s appearances in Milwaukee come from Art Bulletin (a Milwaukee Art Institute publication) and scrapbooks in the Milwaukee Art Museum archives. “Very modern compositions . . .” and “Her interest at the present time . . .” from publicity in Milwaukee Evening Sentinel, January 28, 1923. “I try to be a Christian . . .” from Eric David’s article on Welles and religion, Christianity Today, May 19, 2009. The account of BW’s “interpretative concert” from Milwaukee Journal, November 16, 1923, “Of the most delicate and colorful imagination . . .” from Catherine Pannill Mead’s obituary for BW, Milwaukee Evening Sentinel, May 12, 1924. OW talked about his mother’s penchant for practical jokes and mischief-making on the David Frost Show, May 12, 1970: its transcript has been posted by www.wellesnet.com. OW’s faux memoir, Paris Vogue, D
ecember 1983, was made available in English as “A Brief Career as a Musical Prodigy,” www.wellesnet.com.