Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  In any event, what is not at all in question is that he was born in Kenosha, on 6 May 1915. ‘Over and over again, this date has been confirmed by the city fathers of Kenosha for the benefit of Sunday supplement journalists hopeful of discovering that Welles is really thirty or thirty-five,’9 said The New Yorker in 1938. ‘This scepticism about his age has never angered Welles, but he cannot restrain a sensation of gentle triumph whenever he hears that another reporter has put himself to the useless expense of wiring to Kenosha for a duplicate of the birth certificate.’ His mother later told him that because it was six o’clock in the morning – the time Kenosha’s many factories started work – whistles and bells had all started blowing at once, as if to herald him; a perfectly appropriate beginning, since most of the rest of his life was accompanied by fanfares of one sort or another.

  He weighed ten pounds, and was a roaring success from the very start. This was the baby Beatrice and Richard had wanted all along: bright as a button, bonny, iron-lunged and lusty. In the face, no doubt, of the adulation heaped on the noisy head of the newcomer, Richard Junior, the failed candidate for family affection, became even more sullen and unmanageable. A decision was taken when he was eleven (a year after the baby’s arrival) to send him away to school, an unusual step for an American family; clearly they felt that severe measures were called for. The school they chose brooked no nonsense in the discipline department. The Todd Seminary for Boys had a fearsome reputation for dealing with problem cases. The Rev. Todd had founded the school in the middle of the previous century, but, losing control of his delinquent charges, he had handed over the reins to his deputy, the impressive Noble Hill, known as ‘the King’. This Spartan man, born with splendid appropriateness in Economy, Nova Scotia, formulated the Todd spirit in the brochure that Beatrice and Richard Welles must have read: ‘it is the spirit of Loyalty, Obedience and Service. There you have the Todd idea in a nutshell. To state it concisely, it is the spirit of obedience, for where you have obedience there will be loyalty and service. There is nothing new or original in my methods,’10 he added, modestly. ‘Without bigotry or cant, I simply follow the methods of The Great Teacher. Like him, I become flesh and dwell among my pupils living the life of sacrifice and service. I drive out all who profane the temple with unholy traffic, and I refuse to attempt any mighty works for those who lack faith in me or my methods.’ The little boy in the photographs cuddling his baby brother, or being happily dandled on his mother’s knee, seems hardly to have deserved this righteous onslaught. No doubt his blond locks and smiling face hid deep contrarieties; he was, too, approaching ‘the difficult age’. None the less, to have been faced with the Holy Terror of Todd seems a little excessive. The regime was in some regards enlightened: corporal punishment was rare ‘and then only on the insistence of parents’; locks and keys were unknown and individual and property rights respected. On vacation, none the less, Richard spoke to his young brother in lurid terms of what he endured. ‘I knew about Todd,’ Orson told Barbara Leaming, ‘as criminals know about San Quentin.’

  The absence of Richard Junior meant that the infant Orson had the spotlight all to himself, and it beat down on him unrelentingly. The best that could be hoped for Richard was to be saved from a life of vice or crime. Of Orson, there was no limit to what was expected; and he amply fulfilled expectation. It is clear from the infant snaps that whatever else he might or might not be, he would not be ignored. There is about his demeanour, to a degree rare in a baby, a sort of authority; his stare commands the camera. A heavy child, his features – as was widely remarked at the time – have something Oriental about them: not Far Eastern, neither Japanese nor Chinese, but Mongolian, with their burning brown eyes slightly slanted, wide lips and squashy little nose–a face in width, not length. The eyebrows are already, aged two, active, charmingly mobile, lending that forceful visage an irresistible vulnerability. Some of his father’s face is there, but the whole feeling of it derives from his mother. Not a handsome child, exactly, but one bursting with character. His mother had firm ideas about what to do with him. Almost before he could speak, she was reading to him – Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, to begin with, and then the real thing. ‘Why,’ she demanded, ‘should a person at his most impressionable age be shovelled into the sordid company of Auntie’s Nice Kit Kat or Little Sister’s Silly Red Ball?’ The chairman of the Kenosha Board of Education had original notions on the subject. There would be no reaching down to the child’s level, no baby talk. ‘Children could be treated as adults as long as they were amusing,’ Welles wrote in Vogue. ‘The moment you became boring, it was off to the nursery.’ Or, when you were old enough, to the Todd School. Orson learned his lesson very quickly: the nursery was not a place where he planned to spend much time. A photograph shows him watching with glazed eyes as his brother babyishly labours over a pile of building bricks; not for him. He would master whatever skills were required to keep him at the side of his beautiful, tough mother. A visiting doctor, called in to examine Richard Junior’s head – he had fallen downstairs and broken it – was somewhat surprised to be told by the one-and-a-half-year-old Orson that ‘the desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguishes men from animals’.11 If articulate speech was what was required, then articulate speech it would be, whether one quite understood what one was saying or not.

  The effect on the doctor was remarkable. He experienced a coup de foudre. ‘I was astounded by the extraordinary mental maturity of the boy,’ he told Peter Noble thirty years later. ‘He was talking remarkably sound sense at the age of two, and I felt sure, from his appearance, demeanour and receptivity to paintings and sculptures, that he was destined to be some kind of an artist.’ In addition to Richard Junior’s head, the doctor was treating Beatrice Welles’s mother, Lucy Ives, increasingly and agonisingly in the grip of the cancer that would kill her. In the course of his encounters with Beatrice he had fallen under her spell. Now, meeting her son for the first time, he experienced a double cathexis, falling in love with both mother and son. He soon became a regular visitor; another part of Orson’s already overcrowded emotional landscape. He awarded Orson the name Pookles, and was in turn called Dadda. The significance of this can have been lost on no one.

  His real name was Maurice Abraham Bernstein. He had been born, according to the 1929 edition of Who’s Who in Chicago, in Russia in 1886; trained and graduated in Chicago where he had practised since 1908, specialising in orthopaedics, but equally at home in hormone therapy, gastrology and infantile paralysis. Three years after graduation he moved, somewhat abruptly, to Kenosha, ‘exiled from Chicago’, according to Higham, ‘because of a scandalous episode in which he was charged with attacking, beating, and leaving injured a clinic supervisor’. Scandal of another kind was never far behind him, either. Immensely handsome in a wolfish way, he was prone to triangular involvements, perhaps believing, with Oscar Wilde’s Algernon, that in married life, three is company and two is none. He had been married himself, the year in which he met the Welleses, 1917. His bride was Minna, the rather plain sister of the virtuoso violinist Mischa Elman who had provided her, at Dr Bernstein’s demand, with a dowry of $15,000; the marriage had lasted no more than four months, dissolving amidst accusations of cupidity and treachery. It seems fairly certain that he started an affair with Beatrice Welles on the rebound.

  The atmosphere in 463½ Park Avenue can only be guessed at. Beatrice was rarely at home. She maintained a heavy programme of public appearances, both musical and political, to such an extent that she briefly considered farming out her explosively ebullient younger son to her childless neighbours, the Andreas. They nervously declined the offer, instead adopting two very sweet but thoroughly normal children, with whom Orson would play, rather roughly. Otherwise he was looked after by his deeply caring nanny, Sigrid Jacobsen. Beatrice meanwhile continued her social work with the dauntingly-named Big Sisterhood Association; this sterling organisation was dedicated to saving fallen girls, of
whom there were now a great many more since the further explosion of immigration precipitated by the war – to which Beatrice had been publicly and militantly opposed but which America had now, in 1917, entered as an Associated Power. Germans and Italians flooded the city, straining to breaking point the fledgling welfare system; Beatrice gave herself over to solving their problems. Beatrice’s mother, meanwhile, was dying in extreme pain. Sedatives were of little avail and the air was rent with her screams. Richard Junior was away at school, and when he wasn’t there, he was in the doghouse. Richard Senior, cuckolded, had relapsed into untrammelled alcoholism, the only restraint on which, his participation in the affairs of Badger Brass, was removed when the company was bought out in that same crucial year of 1917. The CM Hall Lamp Company of Detroit swallowed it whole; Richard’s settlement was $100,000, no mean sum – at least a million of today’s dollars. He had no need to work ever again, so he didn’t. He was forty-six.

  A year later, Beatrice’s mother Lucy Ives died, and, as if they had been waiting for a signal, the whole ménage moved to Chicago: Beatrice, the two Richards, Orson – and Dr Bernstein. Orson’s Kenosha period was over. He only ever returned to visit his dread grandmother. But the sights and sounds of it stuck with him. The area in which he lived – around Library Park – was, and is, an attractive place, a few minutes’ walk from the southern shore of Lake Michigan. It has a seaside feeling about it, the regular houses laid out on their grid – balanced, peaceful. Rudolphsheim, on one side of the Park, and the other large house which has become a funeral home dominate, but they don’t overwhelm. It is Norman Rockwell territory, porches and gabled roofs; but even more it is Booth Tarkington. Describing his Indiana town in The Magnificent Ambersons, Tarkington describes at the same time the elegant part of Kenosha: ‘At the beginning of the Ambersons’ great period most of the houses of the Midland town were of a pleasant architecture. They lacked style, but they also lacked pretentiousness, and whatever does not pretend at all has style enough. They stood in commodious yards, well shaded by left-over forest trees, elm and walnut and beech …’ Fitzgerald spoke of it, too, in The Great Gatsby: ‘That’s my Middle West – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly leaves thrown by lighted windows on the snow.’ A part of all that remained with Orson Welles, however far he wandered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chicago

  CHICAGO IN 1918 was heaven and hell. Barely fifty years older than Kenosha, Wisconsin, its name celebrating the drained wild garlic swamps on which it stood, it had been galvanised as a city by the fire that had all but razed it in 1870. Its citizens – and more particularly its architects – plunged into a fervour of new building as comprehensive as that of London in 1666, and with the same effect on civic pride. Chicago was full of itself, and America was full of Chicago. The Windy City they called it: not from the gales which certainly do sweep down its streets, but from the unconscionable amount of publicity the city generated to secure for itself the privilege of hosting the Columbian Exposition of 1893 – a celebration of both Americas, North and South, of art, of industry, but most of all, of Chicago. The city’s nickname for itself was more self-mocking (a sure mark of confidence) than anything anyone else could come up with: Porkopolis. For this was also the city of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the centre of the meat trade, awash with the blood of a million animals and of quite a few humans, too. A vast industrial complex and a port, the archetypal megalopolis of the modern world,

  Hog Butcher for the World

  Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat

  Player with Railroads

  and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

  Stormy, husky, brawling.

  City of the Big Shoulders.

  Carl Sandburg’s words. Sandburg was Chicago’s poet laureate, and it says something for the city that it should have had one. It had, in fact, many, and Chicago proved an inexhaustible topic for them. Gathered round the Old Water Tower in the North Side, these writers – Sherwood Anderson, Max Bodenheim, Edgar Lee Masters, Ben Hecht – collectively took the lead in American letters, making a new language, giving voice to the savage vitality of the city – Chicago the prototype of all urban experience. ‘You know my city – Chicago triumphant; factories and marts and roar of machines – horrible, terrible, ugly and brutal. Can a singer arise and sing in this smoke and grime? Can he keep his throat clear? Can his courage survive?’ H.L. Mencken, incorruptible arbiter of American literary taste, gave Anderson his answer: ‘Out in Chicago, the only genuinely civilised city in the New World, they take the fine arts seriously and get into such frets and excitements about them as are raised nowhere else save by baseball, murder, political treachery, foreign wars and romantic loves … almost one fancies the world bumped by a flying asteroid, and the Chicago river suddenly turned into the Seine.’1

  It was to this city, drunk radiant with contradictions – ‘Chicago, the jazz-baby – the reeking, cinder-ridden, joyous baptist stronghold; Chicago, the chewing gum centre of the world, the bleating, slant-headed rendezvous of half-witted newspapers, sociopaths and pants makers’,2 to quote one of its more restrained self-descriptions – that Beatrice Welles brought her family. It was certainly she who brought them: her husband, though enamoured of the stage and its citizens, and partial to fine wine and good food and concomitant fleshly pleasures, showed no sign of needing to move to the source of these things, and Dr Bernstein, according to Orson, only left Kenosha to be near Beatrice. He spoke of it as ‘a paradise he’d lost … my mother used to make HEARTLESS fun of that.’3 As for the boys – cosy and comfortable though they surely were in Kenosha, this huge and thrilling city was the biggest playground a child could imagine. This is where Orson Welles grew up, this swaggering, boastful place, which sneered at New York as a provincial cousin. Here was everything and anything they could want – provided they had the money. And, thanks to Richard Welles’s golden handshake, they did. Had they not, it might have been a harsh life; they would have shared the squalor and deprivation of a large portion of the city’s population, the immigrants in their northern ghettoes, the blacks in theirs on the South Side. For these people, undernourished, brutalised, cold, Chicago was hell. ‘For God’s sake,’ cried Margaret Anderson at the end of her first editorial for The Little Review, one of Chicago’s many little magazines, ‘why doesn’t someone start the revolution?’ All the conditions were present, enough to make a Marxist despair at its reluctance to occur. But Chicago was still too high on itself. Even the poor were swept up in its undentable confidence, which lasted till the Big Crash – ten years away, in 1929. After that, nothing would ever quite be the same again for Chicago. In Alston J. Smith’s phrase: ‘there was the manic phase. Then came the Great Depression.’

  The sheer size of the city might have shocked a little boy from Kenosha. Building skyscrapers not, like New York, out of necessity, but from aesthetic conviction, Chicago’s great architects Louis L. Sullivan and John Root had filled the tabula rasa that the fire had given them with block upon block of soaring, streamlined buildings, sweeping away any vestige of the Beaux-Arts fussiness and ornament that prevailed in most of America’s great cities. Chicago’s architects matched the city’s spirit in their buildings. There was no Bauhaus imposition of an aesthetic; these men captured the spirit of their time and place and rendered it in brick and stone. And Chicago responded affectionately and wittily: the great wide sweep of Michigan Avenue is both celebrated and teased in its local nickname: Boul’ Mich’. Sullivan’s masterpiece, The Auditorium, intended for the Opera House but acoustically disappointing, testifies in its sweep and scale to the ambitiousness of its subscriber-patrons. There is scarcely an opera house in the world that could have matched it for sheer grandeur. Art – especially the musical arts, but art in pretty well any form – was all the rage in Chicago. ‘A crazy thing happened here with the rich men and their wives at the turn
of the century,’4 wrote Studs Terkel. ‘Mrs Palmer Potter and the other wives longed for culture. Whether or not they knew what it was, they wanted it. And so Chicago became a centre for culture because of the wives of the guys who were meatpackers.’ ‘I want less of steers and less of pork and more of culture,’ said one prosperous attorney in 1881.

  This is what brought Beatrice Welles here. There is no record of her becoming involved in either politics or social work in Chicago. Perhaps she felt that enough in that regard was being done without her. The Hull House settlement under Jane Addams was a world-famous foundation, ministering to the needs of the disadvantaged. Women in the city were particularly active politically: only three years after they had won the vote, Chicago very nearly elected a female mayor. Beatrice’s political skills were not needed here. Her focus was on the arts and artistic circles: the fine arts, the theatre, above all, of course, music. In all of these, she was spoilt for choice. The Arts Institute possessed one of the finest collections in America if not the world; more significantly, the colony of practising artists was enormous, and they maintained a high profile: Boris Anisfeldt, designer for Diaghilev and now a teacher at the Fine Arts Institute, led over a hundred artists in roasting a whole lamb or pig on the great seasonal holidays; Lorado Taft, head of the Institute – Fra Lorado to his followers – held ‘Attic processions’ in flowing robes to celebrate the muses. And Mrs Palmer Potter and her friends made sure that these artists were feted and fabled. It was fashionable and rewarding to be an artist in Chicago, 1918; the mildly preposterous suggestion widely offered at the time that Chicago was Florence to New York’s Rome had at least this grain of truth: the city sought to glorify itself through its artists. Nelson Algren, another of Chicago’s laureates, had a harsher phrase for it: ‘with the blood and sweat of the arena still on them, they would pause together at the end of the week to sniff shyly at the little flowers of culture.’5 They did more than sniff; they fertilised.