Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane
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pregnancy of, 405, 407, 411, 437, 438, 449
and Jackie Pringle (third husband), 716, 717
and Project 891, 373, 374
separation and divorce, 598–601, 608, 613–14, 627, 630, 641, 658–59
side romances of, 472, 600
socializing, 406, 414, 542–43, 549
and vacation getaways, 377–78, 381, 413, 414, 515, 553, 558
and Voodoo Macbeth, 329, 341, 343
Welles, Virginia (Nicolson):
marriage to Orson, 298–99, 715;
in New York, 296, 297, 298, 317
and Woodstock summer theater, 279, 284, 286, 288
Wellman, William, 557
Wells, Henry Hill, 13
Wells, H. G., The War of the Worlds, 499, 504, 512
Wells, Orson C. “Ort” (stockbroker), 63, 188
Wells, Rachel Dagworthy, 12–13
Wells, Richard (ancestor), 12, 13
Wells, William Dagworthy, 13, 15
Wells, William H., 12–13
We Work Again (WPA film), 348n
WGN Chicago, 281
Whaley, Bart, Orson Welles: The Man Who Was Magic, 743
Wheelock, Ward, 516, 568–69, 573, 580, 581
Whiffen, Lawrence C., 224
Whipple, Sidney B., 436, 514
Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 233–34
Whole Town’s Talking, The (film), 590
Whorf, Richard, 310
Wickes, Mary, 473, 492
Wiene, Robert, 589
Wilcox, Herbert, 674
Wilde, Oscar, 123, 125, 126, 239, 464
Wilder, Thornton, 133, 282, 301
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 252, 517
influence of, 253–55, 256, 258, 259, 260, 303
The Long Christmas Dinner, 252, 685
Wiley, Louis, 636
Wilkerson, W. R., 583
Willard, John A., 416
Williams, “Big Boy” Guinn, 585
Williams, Charles, 738
Williams, E. L., 24, 29
Williams, Tennessee, 198
Williams and Walker, 27
Wilson, Mrs. Richard (Betty), 727
Wilson, Frank, 329, 331
Wilson, Harry Leon, 146
Wilson, Richard, 471, 549, 745–46
and Citizen Kane, 667, 697, 704
and It’s All True, 746
and Mercury Theatre, 434, 521, 547, 610, 667
and Orson’s “slaves,” 434, 473, 492, 502, 547
Wilson, Woodrow, 69, 612
Wiman, Dwight Deere, 228–29
Winchell, Walter, 562, 641, 659
Wings over Africa (film), 589
Winters, Linda, see Dorothy Comingore
Winwood, Estelle, 405
Wisconsin, women’s suffrage in, 42, 49–50, 51–54, 55–56, 59, 60, 72, 76, 78
Wise, Rabbi Jonah B., 511
Wise, Robert, 673, 703
Witham, Barry B., 384, 391, 402
Witherspoon, Herbert, 301
Witmer, Charles C., 61
WLS (Sears radio station, Chicago), 232, 236
Wonder Show, The (stage show), 358–59, 362, 368
Woodard, Isaac Jr., 352
Woodstock Opera House, 272, 275, 276, 281–82, 314
Woodstock (Daily) Sentinel, 161, 179, 181, 184, 282, 321
Woodstock Theater Festival, 272–89
critical reviews of, 282, 284, 285–86, 288
debts of, 288–89, 293
The Drunkard, 277–78, 289
Hamlet, 276, 277, 278, 279, 284–86
Trilby, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 284, 285
Tsar Paul, 276, 277, 278, 279, 287–89
Woodward, Ellen, 399–401
Woollcott, Alexander, 254, 255, 256–57, 259, 301, 303, 406, 512, 571, 645
World War I, 69–70, 78, 79, 80, 511
World War II, 511, 557, 578–79, 599, 620
WOR New York, 358, 404
WPA (Works Progress Administration):
and Cradle Will Rock, 390, 391, 392, 394, 396, 397, 399–402
and Federal Theatre Project, 327, 342, 354, 389–90, 391, 397, 399–402
and Project 891, 354–55, 370, 388
and Voodoo Macbeth, 332
Wray, Fay, 614, 642
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 170
Wright, Richard, Native Son, 660
Writers Guild of America, 696
WTAD Quincy, Illinois, 668
Wuthering Heights (film), 539, 541, 671
Wyatt, Eustace, 492, 521
Wyler, William, 567, 588
Yeats, George (Georgie Hyde-Lees), 212
Yeats, William Butler, 205–6, 212, 225
Young, Loretta, 454, 560, 643
Your Girl and Mine (film), 60
Youth’s the Season (stage play), 209
Yule, George (elder), 61, 74
Yule, George A., 23, 24–25, 35–36, 73–74
Yule, William, 36–37
Yule, William Jr., 279
Zaharoff, Sir Basil, 368–69
Zanuck, Darryl F., 567
Zatkin, Nathan, 308, 309, 317, 318, 327, 328
Ziegfeld Follies, 122
Zinnemann, Fred, 588
Zorina, Vera, 439, 440, 454, 455–57, 480, 486, 487–89, 490, 542–43, 559, 567
PHOTOGRAPHS
“Rosebud . . . !” The famous first word of dialogue in Citizen Kane, the clue to the puzzle of Charles Foster Kane—with multiple meanings for Orson Welles himself. “Maybe Rosebud was something he [Kane] couldn’t get, or something he lost,” says Thompson the reporter, “but it wouldn’t have explained anything.”
Special from birth, the newborn Orson, son of a power couple, was heralded on page one of his hometown paper in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The beautiful and multifaceted Beatrice Ives Welles: a prodigy who specialized in classical piano and spoken-word recitals (but wasn’t above serving up a Sousa march at parties); Kenosha’s first female school board official; and a leading suffragist. In his unfinished early film Too Much Johnson, Orson included a protest scene (with Joseph Cotten, LEFT) that referenced both Beatrice and his father, Dick Welles, who also supported the suffrage movement.
One of the earliest known photographs of little Orson with Beatrice, whose interest in education manifested itself in both her public school reform efforts and her private mentoring of her special boy in art, music, and literature.
Beatrice’s favorite cousin, the artist and Chicago Art Institute teacher Dudley Crafts Watson, a strong and lasting influence in young Orson’s life.
The only known photo of Orson with his parents, taken during a visit to Kenosha after their separation in Chicago. At far right, behind Orson, is Dr. Maurice Bernstein; to Bernstein’s right is Beatrice Ives Welles. Businessman and inventor Dick Welles stands aloof at far left, next to nanny Sigrid Jacobsen. The two older people are unidentified.
The Hotel Sheffield in Grand Detour, Illinois, Dick Welles’s grand experiment. Orson spent golden summers there, painting across the road on the shore of the Rock River.
As an adult, he considered the place one of the lost Edens of his life.
His first full-length profile: The Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin, February 19, 1926.
“A paradise for boys”: Wallingford Hall, the main entrance to the Todd School for Boys, where young Orson came into his own. “The school did to him . . . what none of the rest of us could,” recalled Dudley Crafts Watson.
The earliest known photograph of Orson onstage, performing magic tricks in his detective outfit with classmate Sherman Perlman, Todd School, Halloween, 1925.
Young Orson, around ninth grade, looking ready for greatness. “The guy was really an unbelievable human being,” said his first roommate and friend John Dexter, who graduated the same year as Welles. “We had a lot of fun.”
Orson (chin in hand) and classmates with headmaster Roger “Skipper” Hill—mentor, collaborator, and lifelong friend.
With Hill’s assent, Orson vi
rtually commandeered the Todd School’s elaborate entertainment schedule. In 1929 he directed and appeared in the school’s abridged Julius Caesar, staged for Chicago’s annual Drama League contest. (The Todd boys took second place.)
Nearing graduation, Orson (FOURTH FROM LEFT) with his Todd School classmates, among them several other geniuses and footballers capable of reciting Shakespeare on command.
At sixteen, newly orphaned, Orson went to Ireland, where he traveled the countryside on a cart pulled by a donkey named Sheeog.
Finally landing in Dublin, he met Hilton Edwards (LEFT, next to Orson) and Micheál MacLíammóir (RIGHT) at the celebrated Gate Theatre. Three years later, in 1934, he summoned them to perform for his Todd School summer festival, where classmate Hascy Tarbox took this photo.
Orson as a flamboyant Mercutio in the Katharine Cornell repertory production of Romeo and Juliet. The Cornell tour was a professional breakthrough with a steep learning curve.
Outside La Louisiane in New Orleans, scene of the Cornell players’ overindulgence.
A page from Everybody’s Shakespeare, Orson’s collaboration with Roger Hill; the pages were finally sent off to press after the tour.
Scenes from The Hearts of Age, Welles’s Sunday afternoon “home movie”: Welles’s friend William Vance (facing camera), who also served as cameraman; cackling granny Virginia Nicolson; and a grandstanding Orson (BOTTOM LEFT).
Welles with his wife, Virginia, shortly after their marriage. Regardless of his later comments, the two were very much in love. Orson always stressed Virginia’s innocence when they first met, but he was vulnerable too, and she was his salvation.
An eighteen-year-old Orson sat for the noted stage photographer Florence Vandamm for a publicity portrait that would be used for the Katharine Cornell tour and his Broadway debut in Romeo and Juliet; he inscribed this copy sweetly to his new wife.
Crowds at the sensational opening night of the Voodoo Macbeth: “That was magical,” Orson remembered in later years. “It’s the great success of my life.”
Conferring with his partner—and, at first, his loyal booster—John Houseman on the maiden Project 891, the French farce Horse Eats Hat.
Donning his makeup—a preoccupation with Orson from boyhood—for his defining performance as Faustus in Project 891’s 1937 production.
As Brutus (SECOND FROM LEFT) with the cast of the fall 1937 production of Julius Caesar. A hit with audiences and critics, it launched the Mercury Theatre like a rocket.
The Shoemaker’s Holiday, the Mercury’s comedic change of pace after Julius Caesar, was its second hit. With Joseph Cotten (CENTER) flanked by Hiram “Chubby” Sherman (LEFT) and Whitford Kane (RIGHT). Also pictured are cast members Norman Lloyd (FAR LEFT), Arthur Anderson, and Marian Warring-Manley (FAR RIGHT).
Orson spent several years taking small-time radio gigs for “grocery money” before he finally got his own series to host and produce.
The Christmas card he sketched for friends, 1937.
Orson (with cigar) with composer Marc Blitzstein (with mustache) during rehearsals for The Cradle Will Rock. Their deep friendship tested the Federal Theatre Project—and strengthened Orson’s left-liberal politics.
Three reputed lovers who were probably more like soul mates for sympathetic pillow talk: ballerinas Vera Zorina (RIGHT) and Tilly Losch (BELOW LEFT), and Irish-born actress Geraldine Fitzgerald (BELOW RIGHT).
Orson made the cover of Time magazine on May 9, 1938, at the age of twenty-three—in an era when that distinction signaled the arrival of true celebrity (though the profile was relegated to the magazine’s theater section).
A (retouched) family publicity photograph with new baby Christopher, born in 1938. By now, the relationship between the little girl’s parents was deeply strained.
The surviving segments of the never-completed Too Much Johnson reveal Orson’s filmmaking savvy and his slapstick soul. FROM TOP: the ebullient director; Mercury partner John Houseman, rapidly fading in importance at the Mercury, as a Keystone Cop; and Joseph Cotten in a Harold Lloyd–type scene.
Orson, arms upraised, during the War of the Worlds broadcast. Composer Bernard Herrmann conducts the orchestra at right; actor Ray Collins is in the foreground near microphone. The clock says 9 P.M.: the broadcast is nearly over.
The next morning, Welles explained himself to a gaggle of reporters.
With the legendary actor John Barrymore (LEFT), whom he went out of his way to befriend, on Rudy Vallée’s radio show. Barrymore died the following year.
Orson (LEFT) relished his brief vaudeville stint hamming it up in The Green Goddess.
Poolside with typewriter at his Brentwood mansion, sporting his notorious beard.
Despite the sniping of the gossip columnists, Orson was warmly welcomed to Hollywood by old-guard filmmakers, including RKO director George Stevens (with pipe), the nephew of Orson’s old friend Ashton Stevens. Ashton later visited the set of Citizen Kane with his wife, Florence (FloFlo).
A rare photograph of Welles with screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. To Welles, the cowriter of Citizen Kane was “a great, monumental, self-destructing machine” whom he loved and admired.
Old Rosebud, the Kentucky Derby–winning horse of 1914, was the inspiration for the mysterious mantra of Citizen Kane.
Welles with fellow Illinoisian Gregg Toland, whose work on Citizen Kane humbled the director and elevated the film. Welles made the rare gesture of sharing his directorial credit card with the cinematographer.
The director and Toland cavorting with the female extras in the “Georgie’s” brothel scene, deleted by censors before Kane’s final cut.
Kane was built, in part, around the stories of two mothers. The first was the boy’s mother, Mary Kane, played by Agnes Moorehead (ABOVE RIGHT), whom young Orson met less than a year after the death of his own mother. Her unforgettable scene, in the film’s deep backstory, also featured the banker Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), Kane Sr. (Harry Shannon), and Kane as a boy (Buddy Swan).
Joseph Cotten, for whom the part of Jed Leland was closely tailored, was the brother Orson wished he had. They were chuckling companions long before Citizen Kane, and remained so until the end of Orson’s life.
The other mother was Ruth Warrick, whose son Charles Kane Jr. is also ill-fated in the story. Warrick is seen here in Kane’s famous breakfast-table sequence, an idea indebted to a Thornton Wilder play that Orson saw in Chicago as a youth.
The “love nest” confrontation scene, a pivotal moment in the story, brought together four important characters: (FROM LEFT) Boss Gettys (Ray Collins), Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), Kane (Welles), and Emily (Ruth Warrick).
Dorothy Comingore was the true leading lady of Citizen Kane. Here Susan Alexander Kane makes her dismal opera debut—one of the film’s most magnificent concoctions.
Nightclubbing with Dolores Del Rio, the actress who became his girlfriend.
RKO president George Schaefer was the unsung hero of Citizen Kane: the studio chief who courageously (almost always)said yes.
Richard I. Welles, Orson’s older brother, returning from Reno and his marriage to Mildred Bill in 1941. When photographers confronted him at the airport, Richard demanded their plates. “Welles grasped the camera and a tug-of-war ensued before amused spectators,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “The photographer won.”
After Citizen Kane, Orson would go on to direct The Magnificent Ambersons for RKO. Although the picture was truncated by the studio, students of film prize Welles’s adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel, starring his Mercury family of players. (Welles even found a place for brother Richard as a carpenter on the set.)
Orson married twice more after his divorce from Virginia Nicolson. His marriage to actress Rita Hayworth was short-lived, though it yielded a daughter, Rebecca, and one film beloved by fans: The Lady from Shanghai.
The couple with “Dadda” Bernstein, who moved to Hollywood to be closer to his erstwhile ward.
His third wif
e was an Italian countess who acted under the name Paola Mori, playing a lead in Mr. Arkadin. They vacationed in Spain with their daughter, Beatrice, in the early 1960s.
SCENES FROM A LIFE ON CAMERA: With Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil; as Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight; with Joseph Cotten in The Third Man; with Oja Kodar in F for Fake; on the last day of his life (BELOW), reminiscing with talk-show host Merv Griffin.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick McGilligan is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life; and books on the lives of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. He also edited the acclaimed five-volume Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters and (with Paul Buhle) the definitive Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from Kenosha, where Orson Welles was born.
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ALSO BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN
Cagney: The Actor as Auteur
Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff
George Cukor: A Double Life
Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
Clint: The Life and Legend
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light