Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The theatre, too, boomed. The commercial theatre rivalled New York, with six or seven openings a week; you could catch touring productions like The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, He Who Gets Slapped and R.U.R.: the cream of the avant-garde. Stanislavsky brought the Moscow Art Theatre, with Chekhov, Gorky and Tsar Fyodor. The Habimah came; and Mei Lan-fang; Stratford-upon-Avon, under Ben Greet; and, later, Katharine Cornell in The Green Hat. And at the Chicago Little Theatre, Maurice Browne, a Craig disciple, and his wife Ellen Van Valkenberg experimented with design and with light and with acting, presenting the symbolists and later Ibsen, a theatre of poetry and image. As for the opera: Beatrice Welles must have been in her seventh heaven. Barely a city in the world, let alone in America, could field a season as brilliant as Chicago’s. It owed this in large measure to the desire of the Metropolitan Opera in New York to expel Oscar Hammerstein I from its immediate orbit. He moved his operation to Chicago, bringing with him Mary Garden and her notorious performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome: ‘like a cat in a bed of catnip’, said the Police Chief, called in to maintain law, order and public decency, thus immeasurably enhancing the popularity of opera in Chicago. With Miss Garden as (in her own phrase) ‘directa’ of the company there was an air of temperament and danger about the whole enterprise, and again, a commitment to living, often daunting, composers: Chicago was determined to be in the vanguard, thumbing its nose at New York. Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges, spiky satire clothed in prickly melody and shocking harmonies, was commissioned and premièred by the Chicago Opera, with sets and costumes by the lamb-roasting Anisfeldt. It was well, if uncomprehendingly, received. Visiting stars included Chaliapin, Louise Homer and Claudia Muzio; Adolph Bolm, Diaghilev dancer and choreographer, became the ballet master.

  It is worth detailing all these, not merely because of the delight they gave Beatrice Welles, but because Orson, now talking and walking, was exposed to as many of the performances as possible. Beatrice’s ambitions for Orson, as for herself, were entirely musical. She became a member of the Lakeside Musical Society; being who she was, she was before long running it. Through Dr Bernstein’s connections with the Elmans, she invited the great violinist to address the Society and perform for them; she herself gave her lecture-recital on Spanish music and its ‘cantillations and various charming dance rhythms’. Bernstein, who was also musical – he played the cello – had become acquainted with Chicago’s leading music critic, Edward Moore, and, more passionately, with his wife, Hazel, creating further troilistic patterns in his emotional life. He was not of as passionate a disposition as these entanglements suggest, being that kind of Lothario who attaches himself with dog-like devotion to the object of his love, while yet being unable to make a complete commitment – hence the preference for a third party. His attentions exasperated Beatrice Welles; stopping the car one day in the middle of Michigan Avenue, she ordered him out. But he was useful to her, and through his connection with the Moores she managed to attract a glittering roster of guest speakers and artists. In a charming fantasy, Welles’s biographer Frank Brady has suggested that it was not unusual to bump into Stravinsky and Ravel in her drawing room; the record does not reveal that either of these gentlemen visited Chicago at all during her time there, let alone attended her soirées. It is conceivable that Prokofiev, in town for the première of The Love of Three Oranges, may have done so; quite certain that, in the wider social circles in which she moved, she would have met any visiting stars.

  Equally certain is that her entire new life was intolerable to poor Dick Welles. This high-falutin’, hobnobbing existence was not for him. He must have felt entirely inadequate, unable to tell one painting from another, sleeping through the interminable nights at the opera, unaware of the existence of the latest Bodenheim. He took his pleasure elsewhere. His new little fortune gave him the opportunity to be the person he had always wanted to be: Champagne Charlie – all-round good fellow, friend to restaurateurs, barmen, pretty girls of every size or shape; a clubbable fellow, given to yarning, inordinately fond of travel, but mainly, according to his son, because of his love of the lounges of ocean-going liners: ‘the creaking of leather, the cradling seas, the cards he played so masterfully, and a captive audience for his stories’.6 Welles claimed that his father had actually broken the bank at Monte Carlo. Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, although some doubt was expressed in a 1940’s edition of the Kenosha Journal as to the actual extent of his globetrotting. ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, however, is unquestionably his song; it expresses him perfectly, with its rolling, strolling gait, a spring in its heel and all the time in the world. It is some little way from this to Stravinsky, Ravel and the cantillations of Spanish dance rhythm – or indeed the jazz which he so loved, now, in 1918, having taken up residence in Chicago since being forcibly driven out of New Orleans with the closure of Storyville. Down there on the South Side, he was happily awash with cheap liquor and hot rhythm while Beatrice, Orson and Dadda revelled in Ravel.

  He was, by now, an alcoholic. He depended on alcohol; life was not possible without it. His purposeless presence must have been intolerable to the dynamic, frustrated Beatrice. ‘I’d see my father wither under one of her looks into a crisp, brown, winter’s leaf,’7 wrote Welles. In 1919, they separated. Beatrice moved, with the children, to a swish North Shore apartment on east Superior Street, a mere two blocks away from the area around the Water Tower: Towertown, the hub of the artistic community. From here, she planned her musical career, now calling herself Trixie Ives – an unexpectedly larky name for this very serious woman; it has the smack of the music hall about it: Miss Trixie Ives and Her Ivory Tricks! One glimpse of her intense features would surely dispel any such fancy. As well as her own musical career, she was planning that of her son, Orson, four years old, and already conversing fluently with the adults to whom she invariably introduced him. So far he had been successful in his evasion of the nursery. To the amusement of her circle, he would stand on a chair and pretend to conduct (‘I was surprised she indulged me in this, since she indulged me in nothing else’8); in fact, he would do pretty well anything to please an adult. Dr Bernstein, who loved his Pookles with the same devotion and microscopic attention that he extended to Beatrice, had provided Orson with two crucial presents: a magic set and a toy theatre. Quickly mastering these, he gave performances to the properly and politely appreciative visitors in both his new media (though of course, as he was often to say later, to him they represented two sides of the same coin – the theatre of magic, the magic of theatre).

  For Dr Bernstein, however, this was no kid putting on a show for Mummy’s friends. The fatal word ‘genius’ had no sooner formed itself in his mind, than he was whispering it in Orson’s ear. Verbally precocious Orson certainly was, but in no other regard did he demonstrate prodigious gifts; neither in reading (he was slow to start this), the visual arts, nor – unfortunately – musicianship, the sphere in which success was most ardently willed on him by his mother. ‘She was not the musical version of a stage mother, but was simply resolved that whatever I did had to be good if it was to be done at all, and I was made to practise hours on end every day.’9 Beatrice was not to be defied. In a disturbing story that he told on several occasions with different endings, Welles describes how, ‘distracted to the point of madness by endlessly repeated musical scales’, he climbed onto the third-floor balcony of the hotel in which they were staying (the Ritz in Paris, he says, a nice, colourful touch) and threatened to throw himself off. The piano teacher, terrified, rushes to get Beatrice. Generally, the story ends with Beatrice gently luring him down off the balcony. In his autobiographical fragment, something quite different happens. ‘Well,’10 says Beatrice to the hysterical piano teacher, ‘if he wants to jump, let him jump.’ Eventually he came down of his own accord. Welles adds: ‘the truth is her heart was in her mouth … by the sheer force of her formidable character, she persuaded the spinster lady to muffle her whimpering … she was, in all things, as tough
-minded as she was loving-hearted.’ Years later he told Barbara Leaming: ‘I always felt I was letting them down. That’s why I worked so hard. That’s the stuff that turned the motor … my mother and father were much cooler and more distant. I trusted and feared their judgement.’ It is to be wondered whether it was both of them, or simply his mother that he felt he was letting down. The word he uses of her – formidable – rings out. No one ever said that of Dick, though of course people create their emotional hold over others in different ways; some do it with a look, and some with a shrug. In their differently blighted ways, the pressure behind both may have been the same: an overwhelming sense of unfulfilment in themselves, a desire to make another live for them.

  Despite his disappointing showing at the keyboard, Orson was able to participate in musical performances, but in a way more familiar from his later achievements. Just outside Chicago is a charming lakeside suburb called Ravinia Park, and here, to add to what was almost an embarrassment of musical riches, the entrepreneur Louis Eckstein established what he called ‘his yacht’ and what more extravagant wordsmiths (no doubt in his pay; publicity was one of the sources of his fortune) dubbed ‘the Chicago Bayreuth’: a summer opera festival, which ran from 1912 to 1935. Claudia Cassidy wrote of it: ‘There never was anything like Louis Eckstein’s Ravinia, and there will not be again. The little wooden Pavilion in the flowering park. About 14,000 seats. The little stage with the blue velvet curtains, stars of the Chicago, Metropolitan and Paris Operas, fifty players of the Chicago Symphony in the pit.’11 The repertory was very much the staple repertory of the time – Verdi, Puccini and the verismo school (contemporary composers: Leoncavallo, Alfano, Montemezzi) and the French repertory whose great interpreters were still alive and really able to do it justice.

  Beatrice and Maurice Bernstein, accompanied by Orson, were regular subscribers, as were the Moores, and it is possible that they were able to get Orson enlisted as a non-singing infant, of whom there are a number in the repertory favoured by Ravinia, most notably the role of Trouble, Cio-Cio San’s son in Madame Butterfly. It is claimed that Orson did indeed essay this role, though it has proved impossible to verify it. In fact, at the period when he might have done so, performances were only semi-staged. Perhaps the diva (Edith Mason and Claudia Muzio both sang Butterfly during this period) had requested a child as a dramatic aid – though most divas would be likely to make the opposite request. At any rate, if he wasn’t Trouble in 1920, he has certainly been Trouble ever since, not least to his biographers. There are further unverified and unverifiable reports that he was relieved of his role in Pagliacci when Martinelli complained that he had become too heavy to lift, but it is difficult to imagine what role it might be that required him to be lifted. The important thing is that Orson was exposed to and immersed in opera and its special dramaturgy from the earliest possible age.

  In addition to these musical outings to Ravinia, there were weekends, and sometimes longer stays, in the tiny town – village, properly speaking – of Grand Detour12. These were family jaunts, though somewhat unconventional ones. The Richards, Junior and Senior, would drive in one car, Maurice, Beatrice and Orson in another, and they would stay in separate lodgings: Beatrice’s team in the house she had rented, the two Richards at the Sheffield House Hotel. It was – and to some extent still is – an idyllic escape from the big city, a sylvan settlement on the bend of Rock River, opposite a green, fertile island surrounded by smaller leafy islets. This is Davy Crockett territory – almost literally. When Captain Andrus, veteran of the terrible Black Hawk war, pitched his tent here, laying claim to the land, he was watched by ‘lounging Indians’ as he cooked his meals. The year is 1834; a twelve-month away from the foundation of Kenosha. But the fact that Kenosha became Kenosha, and Grand Detour remained just that, conceals an extraordinary American story that must have given a dark thrill to the Welles boys on their regular visits to the little resort.

  The town, once thriving, had been destroyed by a duel of wills between two of its residents, the famous John Deere, inventor of the revolutionary self-scouring plough (necessary because of the over-richness of the local soil), and his dark rival, darkly named, Solomon Cumins, from Vermont, emissary of a consortium bent on wresting the patent from Deere. Cumins started little by little to buy up the entire town, including the newly installed dam, race and saw-mill. Deere, meanwhile, persuaded the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad Co. to lay tracks to Grand Detour; Cumins, gambling on getting Deere to leave town and give up – thus leaving him free to exploit the patent – intercepted the laying of the tracks. The railroaders went instead to Nachusa and Dixon, which throve. Deere left the town and moved to Moline, where his business prospered to become mighty, his self-scouring ‘Grandy’ ploughs a household name. Cumins, baulked, ruled the town as its embittered tyrant for twenty-five years, allowing no newspaper, no journalist, no photographer to enter it. When he died, his son, Theron, immediately fled to Dixon. Grand Detour, in effect, died then, too. The townspeople finally burnt down Cumins’s property; in the 1920s his grave was desecrated. It was believed that he was the devil.

  What gave Grand Detour a new, if modest, lease of life – the thing that brought it, no doubt, to the Welleses’ attention – was its development into an Artists’ Colony. In the late nineties of the previous century, the art boom had led to the foundation of Eagle’s Nest Camp on the east side of the river above Oregon as a retreat for writers, editors, and sculptors among what the History of Ogle County is pleased to describe as ‘an endless variety of towering cliffs and mystic caverns’. Just above Oregon, on a limestone bluff, stands Lorado Taft’s ‘43 foot behemoth’ of a monumental sculpture, Black Hawk of 1911: 265 tons of concrete, its head and shoulders alone weigh 30 tons; but its heart is in the right place, a decent liberal’s apology for genocide. Rock River Valley became popular with Chicago artists: they ‘discovered’ Grand Detour which, knowing nothing of the lurid story of John Deere and Solomon Cumins, they took for a slumbering nineteenth-century village. Classes from the Art Institute would spend two or three weeks going back to nature, and sketching it. The place they would stay was the Sheffield House Hotel.

  This commodious hostelry has been under the same management for 50 years [boasted the brochure]. It has light, airy rooms, comfortable beds, bathrooms and modern conveniences, and in the dining-room, home-cooking and plenty of it. The table is always supplied with fresh eggs, country butter and cream, vegetables just from the garden, poultry etcetera in such abundance as only Mrs Sheffield knows how to provide. Boating, bathing, fishing, tennis, croquet, all furnish amusement for guests and frequent hay-ride parties are organized for a visit to the famous castle Rock, Devil’s backbone, etc. – Boats are furnished free to guests.

  It is interesting to note in this blurb from the brochure the tone of nostalgia for pioneer days.

  Bob White whistles in the field and birds and bees revel in clover and orchard bloom. If you love the country, if you would hear again the familiar song of the meadow lark, the bobolink, the brown rush and the whip-poor-will; if you would sit down once more with the same old out-of-door appetite, to meals such as you had on the farm – COME TO GRAND DETOUR. Rooms: $2.50 per night.

  In his memoir Welles remembered it as ‘Mark Twain, a horse and buggy village … a childhood there was like a childhood back in the 1870s. No electric light, horse-drawn buggies – a completely anachronistic, old-fashioned, early-Tarkington, rural kind of life. It was one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you get thrown out of.’13 Solipsistically – he was after all a child when he was there, and childhood is almost by definition solipsistic – he saw it all as somehow deriving from his father. Sometimes he claimed in interviews that his father owned the village; in others that Dick had decreed that there would be no cars and no electric light. There was no electric light, just as there was no running water, not from choice but from sheer bloody necessity. As it was and is situated slap on Route 3, it would be hard to ban automobiles, but there
is indeed every possibility that no one there owned one. Decrees from Richard Welles held no force in Grand Detour which had a life very much its own, one which went on quite satisfactorily when the Welleses and the other guests had repaired to the big city after their brief sojourns.

  It was certainly a paradise for small boys interested in small boy-like activities; this may not have included Orson. Among the diversions were the annual clam harvesting (for the shells only: they make good buttons) and – during the winter – ice-sawing on the river; still big business in the twenties. Equally picturesque but to be viewed from a distance was the annual Ku Klux Klan meeting, which took place for a week every July in a cow pasture at the bottom of Canal Street known surprisingly frankly as Klan Park. On Whirlpool Rock, a large wooden cross was built and burnt for all to note. One summer, two boys swimming in Klan Park found a new flag-pole. In its base, three human skulls were embedded, emblazoned KKK. Many Americas coexisted in young Orson’s head. His father, for his own diversion, would most probably have ended up on Nigger Island, just across the river. Here the eponymous African-American, whose name was Washington, had an apparently unlimited supply of bootleg liquor. 1920 was the first year of official prohibition (though it had been creeping up for some time) and Dick Welles would have been relieved to have discovered such a plentiful supply; a dry holiday would have been no holiday at all for him.