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

by McGilligan, Patrick

Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

  Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director

  EDITED BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN

  Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (with Paul Buhle)

  Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin

  Film Crazy: Interviews with Hollywood Legends

  Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age

  Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s

  Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s

  Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s

  Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover photographs © W. Eugene Smith/Black Star (front); © Apic/Moviepix/Getty Images (spine)

  Front image after cover courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger's Movie Material Store.

  COPYRIGHT

  YOUNG ORSON. Copyright © 2015 by Patrick McGilligan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint photographs: Orson Welles Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University; Federal Theatre Project Collection, George Mason University; Keeneland (Old Rosebud); Kenosha County Historical Society: Joseph McBride; Russell Merritt; Milwaukee Art Museum (Dudley Crafts Watson); Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store; Ashton Stevens Collection, Newberry Library; Duane Paulsen (Hotel Sheffield); Sangamon Valley Room, Springfield Public Library; Todd Tarbox; Oja Kodar, Orson Welles, Richard Wilson and Chris Feder Welles Collections, Special Collections, University of Michigan Library; Charles Higham Collection, Archives of the Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California (Dick Welles group photo); Los Angeles Times Collection, Doheny Library, University of California at Los Angeles (Richard I. Welles photograph); Woodstock Public Library.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN: 978-0-06-211248-4

  EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2015 ISBN 9780062112507

  15 16 17 18 19 DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada

  www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

  Rosedale 0632

  Auckland, New Zealand

  www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF, UK

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com

  1 As often as not the horse’s name was spelled “Dick Wells.”

  2 Noble’s 1956 book was the first extensive biography of Welles and the one most influenced by Dr. Bernstein. When speaking to Peter Bogdanovich, Welles debunked it as “a perfect treasury of misinformation,” but Noble tried earnestly to interview Welles and others, and the trick, for him as well as readers, became sorting out the facts from the factoids.

  3 Originally, the school was known as the Todd Seminary for Boys.

  4 The original spellings and punctuation of “Pome” and Orson’s other writings are preserved.

  5 “Pome” showed that young Orson was already attentive to politics: “Big Bill” referred to corrupt, buffoonish Mayor Thompson of Chicago, and “King George” to George V of England, whom the mayor had denounced as America’s worst enemy, threatening to punch the monarch in the nose if they ever met.

  6 Trixie Friganza was a vaudevillian who was Dick Welles’s contemporary. In his Paris Vogue piece, Orson made a conceit of coupling Friganza’s first name with his mother Beatrice’s supposed nickname, “Trixie.” Some accounts say Beatrice Ives used “Trixie” as a stage name. Others say it was Dudley Crafts Watson’s pet name for his cousin. Both versions are unlikely.

  7 The newspaper preserved Orson’s misspellings of “Montemezzi” and “incomparable.”

  8 “Gissing” was a reference to Christopher Morley’s 1922 novel Where the Blue Begins, which concerned a dog named Mr. Gissing, who makes an exhausting search, traveling vast distances to seek the meaning of life, meeting with little success until he returns home to find solace in the blue of the cerulean flames in his fireplace.

  9 The song was probably from Orson’s favorite foolishment, Finesse the Queen.

  10 Orson also would perform his old Camp Indianola favorite on radio, and he would be very funny as Maurice, the leader of a traveling troupe staging a hapless version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the 1969 comedy film Twelve Plus One, a.k.a. The 13 Chairs.

  11 Orson’s underlining, here and elsewhere quoting from his letters, has been preserved.

  12 The reader might keep in mind that there are as many versions of this first encounter between Welles and the Gate’s cofounders as there are accounts of Stanley meeting Livingstone. In one of Welles’s, MacLíammóir was not even present.

  13 The Abbey Theatre regulars toured Canada and the United States from October 1931 through April 1932, so they were absent from Dublin the entire time Orson lived in that city.

  14 William Meigs would later have a career as a singer in stage vehicles and as an actor in television and films, mainly Westerns.

  15 “Albert-like” is probably a reference to Prince Albert of York, later King George VI of England, notorious for his stammer.

  16 Decades later, Welles would be involved twice in films of Treasure Island: a 1965 short, which he directed, and a 1972 feature. In both versions he played Long John Silver.

  17 In Hollywood, years after the Cornell tour and his stint with the Mercury Theatre, John Hoysradt would change his name and appear in many films as John Hoyt.

  18 “Blackie” was a reference to the southern drawl O’Neal still had when he moved as a youth from Atlanta to Pierre, South Dakota. Local toughs dubbed him “Nigger.” O’Neal clobbered the toughs, and his nickname became “Blackie.” Even his mother started calling him “Blackie.”

  19 Her family name appears as “Nicholson” in early Chicago newspaper accounts, and in many books on Welles, but over time it became “Nicolson.”

  20 The legend persists in other books that Welles crossed paths with Robert Flaherty on the Aran Islands during his Irish sojourn. Welles fueled this belief with his interview for the BBC’s Portrait of Robert Flaherty in 1952, commemorating Flaherty’s death. “By accident, on a trip by curragh,” Welles said, “I found myself on Inishmore and in the midst of a long and very rich conversation with Flaherty.” But Flaherty did not make his first preliminary visit to the islands until late October 1931, according to Paul Rotha’s Robert J. Flaherty, by which time Welles was onstage in Dublin. In January 1932, Flaherty returned to Inishmore, which he made his base of operations, but Welles was still being kept busy at the Gate Theatre. Did he perhaps meet Flaherty in Dublin and concoct the rest of it, or was the whole yarn a fantasy memory?

  21 Joseph Cotten checked his recall with Welles when writing his memoir, but Orson’s version of events, given to Henry Jag
lom, was that the fateful School of the Air episode, which reduced them to laughter, told the story of the Olympic Games, and “we had to say things like, ‘Let me see your javelin. It is by far the biggest in all Athens.’ ”

  22 The eventual setting of the all-black Macbeth would be Haiti, not Martinique, which was a detail left over from the Caribbean Romeo and Juliet.

  23 A Hearst newsreel crew shot about four minutes of the play during its run for the WPA film We Work Again. Welles had nothing to do with the filming, but it is precious documentation of the Voodoo Macbeth, which survives and can be easily found on YouTube.

  24 Did Orson black up as Macbeth in Detroit, or was it Indianapolis? The city varies along with other details of the great moment in differing accounts. And did Welles play Macbeth with the all-black cast “just for publicity,” as actor George Coulouris complained in one interview? The fact is that if Orson did play Macbeth in the road show of the Voodoo Macbeth it was never mentioned at the time in any known press clipping from a white or black newspaper.

  25 Schweinerei can be translated several ways, with “dirt” and “filth” among them.

  26 Owing to what happened next, Faustus would never reopen. But Orson rarely left pet ideas completely behind, and he modernized the legend of Faustus for a one-acter he included in An Evening with Orson Welles, presented in Paris in 1950. Duke Ellington supplied the music. Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir were involved, with MacLíammóir as Mephistopheles to Welles’s Faustus, and singer Eartha Kitt as Helen of Troy. “Photographs of Orson and Eartha at Paris bistros, such as Bricktop’s, were being published all over Europe,” Frank Brady wrote in Citizen Welles, “with the implication that the enticing Miss Kitt was not only his Trilby but also the new love of his life.”

  27 The Shoemaker’s Holiday had previously been on the list of possible plays planned by Project 891.

  28 Initially Reid was billed as “Ted Reid” but soon—and for many decades—he became known as “Elliott Reid.”

  29 Among other problems with this anecdote, The Shadow was taped “live” with Orson in front of the microphone. Perhaps the show was recorded and delayed for certain markets, but it still raises the question why the incipient lovers were listening to a radio tuned to a broadcast of The Shadow.

  30 There is a Lubitschean dissolve in Citizen Kane from the cheap rooming house where Susan Alexander is living when Kane meets her to the fancier place where she becomes a “kept woman.” The showdown between Gettys and Kane takes place in this fancier apartment, in the presence of Kane’s wife, Emily. Gettys threatens to give the story of Kane’s affair with Susan to every newspaper in the state. But Susan protests, “There isn’t any story!” Gettys tells her to shut up. She tries again, “Mr. Kane is just—” She is cut off again, and by then Kane has made up his mind what to do. We never hear Susan’s explanation; maybe she has remained the nice girl who, in her first meeting with Kane, insisted on keeping her apartment door open, and Kane is merely helping her out in life—until Gettys calls his bluff.

  31 Welles did, however, include a condensation of the first act of The Importance of Being Earnest in his An Evening with Orson Welles in Paris in 1950.

  32 Paul Bowles’s more elaborate score and effects would be confined to recordings and were never performed “live” with the play. The composer released his suite, in 1939, as Music for a Farce.

  33 The anecdote about audience members hurling fruit at the actors sounds suspiciously as though Orson staged the incident in the spirit of the farce. Or did the summer audiences really come to the play with apples and bananas to nibble on and to throw at the performers?

  34 Note the interesting discrepancy: that neither Houseman nor Welles might ever have read War of the Worlds in its entirety (according to Houseman in his 1972 memoir), with that same book metamorphosing a few days later into “Orson’s favorite project” (as Houseman wrote in his revised 1988 book Unfinished Business).

  35 Schauspieler is German for “actor.”

  36 The “Capehart hook-up” refers to a state-of-the-art Capehart radio-phonograph instrument and sound system.

  37 There are many variations of this often-cited phrase, but the original, which is quoted above, appears in Alva Johnston’s and Fred Smith’s series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, January 1940.

  38 Winchell repaid Orson’s fondness. “After the Kane thing,” Welles told Henry Jaglom, “my name was never, ever printed in a Hearst paper. The Hearst paper in New York was the Daily Mirror and Winchell was forbidden to write my name. So he called me G. O. Welles, George Orson Welles, and nobody ever noticed it. He deliberately put me in almost every day, just for the fun of it.”

  39 Frank Brady plausibly theorized that the notions of “genius” and “carte blanche” were intentionally planted by RKO press agents, “to promulgate his [Welles’s] image as a boy wonder and creative insurgent.” Perhaps for that reason, Orson himself rarely challenged the hyperbole.

  40 The French haute couture designer Alix Grès.

  41 Still a poor speller, Orson wrote the actor’s last name as “Tracey.”

  42 Welles never backed off his admiration for child star Rooney. “Mickey Rooney was one of the most talented people in Hollywood,” he told Henry Jaglom in their 1980s conversations. Rooney appeared in Welles’s eight-minute “Vienna” from 1968, included in his unfinished compilation film, “One Man Band,” which started life as a CBS television special but was completed as a documentary, Orson’s Bag. At one point, Rooney was also supposed to play the Fool in a 1980s film of King Lear with Welles as Lear and Oja Kodar as Cordelia.

  43 Ford, always cagey about politics, blamed this non-casting on Welles, telling John Wayne in a letter Orson had missed a key meeting because “of a slight fever upset etc. So fuck him,” adding, “Fuck Bond too.” Welles blamed his own agent, not Ford.

  44 Molnár in fact was not dead then. He lived until 1952.

  45 Only later would their friendship founder, after Fitzgerald started a whispering campaign against Virginia’s second husband, screenwriter Charlie Lederer, claiming falsely that Lederer was homosexual. Fitzgerald’s son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, suggests in his book that Geraldine started the rumor after Lederer rebuffed her advances.

  46 But if D. W. Griffith was disapproving at the Christmas party, he admired Welles later after seeing Citizen Kane. “I loved Citizen Kane and particularly loved the ideas he [Welles] took from me,” Griffith told Ezra Goodman in an interview in 1948, the year of the director’s death. The interview was originally published in the New York newspaper PM and reprinted in Goodman’s The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961).

  47 Yet it was also true that the Welles genealogy ran through the town of Kane in the county of Kane, in Illinois.

  48 The “Thatcher” looked back to Orson’s boyhood piano teacher, Phyllis Fergus—and her husband, Chicago businessman Thatcher Hoyt.

  49 Orson and Lucille Ball stayed friends over the years, however, and the “Lucy Meets Orson Welles” episode was a hilarious highlight of the sixth season of I Love Lucy in 1956. In the episode, Lucy has contrived to join Orson’s appearance at Club Babalu, believing it will give her an opportunity to show off her Shakespeare skills. She winds up as Orson’s assistant in his magic act, but rebelliously, and while suspended horizontally in midair recites the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. The same year, Ball’s Desilu company produced Orson’s imaginative television pilot The Fountain of Youth, which was intended to launch an anthology series (the series never aired); the pilot won a Peabody Award, and helped get Welles off the blacklist.

  50 Fontaine got back at Welles in her autobiography No Bed of Roses, complaining about his demands, his lateness, his melodramatics “on and off the set,” his second-guessing of the director of Jane Eyre. “Everything about him was oversized, including his ego,” the actress wrote, adding, “Oddly enough, Orson wanted very much to be liked. We could only think of him as someo
ne to handle carefully, to avoid as much as possible.”

  51 Later, during the production of Citizen Kane, Orson briefly explored the idea of a film about the life of Jesus.

  52 Author’s emphasis.

  53 Peter Bogdanovich’s film The Cat’s Meow, starring Eddie Izzard as Chaplin, Cary Elwes as Ince, Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies, and Edward Herrmann as Hearst, would cover this same territory entertainingly on Orson’s behalf in 2001.

  54 Alland also voiced the narration years later for the mock newsreel about Hearst in Welles’s F For Fake.

  55 Since McKinley’s first name was William, “Uncle John” further distances the script from the real-life assassination while making a separate and distinct allusion to the Harding administration and the Teapot Dome scandal.

  56 Susan says one thing more after “It’s morning already . . . ,” adding a final grace note to her character before leaving Citizen Kane. “Come around,” she tells Thompson the reporter, “and tell me the story of your life sometime.”

  57 Herrmann gave the title of the film’s pastiche a variant spelling: Salambo.

  58 Mank tried the “whirling pagoda” approach only one other time in his career aside from the Dillinger project, a few years after Citizen Kane with none other than John Houseman as his producer. It was another project for RKO, “Tasker Martin,” an adaptation of a Diana Gaines novel of the same title, the story of a ruthless industrialist with more enemies than friends. Developed by Houseman and Mankiewicz in 1950, “Tasker Martin” involved the industrialist’s retinue gathering with conflicted emotions to discuss his life after his mysterious disappearance. The script was completed just before Houseman’s testimony, though never filmed. Houseman does not mention the failed project in his memoir.

  59 Actually Orson’s crush was a French actress, Barbara Laage, later in François Truffaut’s film Bed and Board. Orson had tried in vain to talk Harry Cohn into letting Laage star in The Lady from Shanghai.

  60 One footnote to the Oscar ceremony is that Citizen Kane lost in the category of Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture, which Bernard Herrmann won for All That Money Can Buy, a less distinguished RKO picture, directed by William Dieterle, that had followed Citizen Kane in Herrmann’s Hollywood career.