Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  It is noteworthy that all the specific comment is to do with the acting, not the music. The third column continues the raillery:

  … and omitting the accident suffered by Rethberg’s ‘territory’ when a light slithered down from the flys and struck her in the middle of a dramatic area (wherever that is). I would lay down my job and hie myself to the ‘eatery’ where I would replenish the empty corridors of my bread basket with healthful nourishment. The best I can do is promise a better article next time, and a review of Fra Diavolo. Another journalistic tragedy. And so to the printery!

  Two ominous signs: he eats when he can’t work; and he resorts to that ancient journalistic standby, the column about the impossibility of writing a column. There were two more columns in exactly the same vein. Unpalatable though all this is, it is a passable imitation of what an adult journalist in the same mould might have written, though Welles was perhaps able to be slightly more rebarbative, hiding behind his youth. This is precocity run riot; not a pretty sight. The writing itself is what an exuberant and opinionated thirteen-year-old might jot down in letter form – there are letters of Mozart at the same age which are as bumptious and as callous – but there are few thirteen-year-olds who would commit themselves to newsprint in like vein – few who would want to; even fewer who would be asked to. Maurice Bernstein seems to be behind this: his summer house in Highland Park was near to his beloved Moores and the Crafts Watsons. No doubt a discreet word in the editor’s ear had swung it.

  When Welles was not with Bernstein (with whom he sometimes travelled; together, in 1927, they took a cruise to Cuba) he was with his father. They too travelled, quite how far and how often it is now impossible to determine; China was on the itinerary at least twice. He later claimed that he led a restlessly peripatetic life with his father, spending part of every year in Shanghai, another part in Jamaica where his father supposedly had a winter residence, at other times flitting from European capital to European capital. The years of wandering are an essential part of the biography of the artist, his meetings with remarkable men, his hidden years. ‘I rollicked around my whole childhood,’45 he told Huw Wheldon.

  ‘What places do you remember most vividly from this early, globe-trotting period?’46 asked Kenneth Tynan in 1967. ‘Berlin had about three good years, from 1926 onward,’ replied Welles (he was then aged eleven to fourteen) ‘but the best cities were certainly Budapest and Peking. They had the best talk and the most action right up to the end.’ Just how good were Welles’s Hungarian and Mandarin, one wonders? To Bazin and the Cahiers du Cinéma team he said that he’d seen an enormous number of German stage productions in his childhood, also Russian and French ones; while he told Bogdanovich that he’d seen ‘all the great ones, Werner Krauss and Kachalov’47 (Craig’s and Stanislavsky’s Hamlet). Then he goes too far: ‘this hand that touches you now once touched the hand of Sarah Bernhardt – can you imagine that?’ Well barely, since her last stage appearance in America was in 1918 (when Welles was three), and her last onstage appearance anywhere – it was in France – was in 1920. ‘The hand I saw was a claw covered with liver spots and liquid white and with the pointy ends of her sleeves glued over the back of it,’ he reports, a brilliant and vivid description, as striking when said by Orson Welles as it was when said by Micheál Mac Liammóir, to whom it actually happened.

  This little economy with the truth, however, does not discredit all the rest. Dr Bernstein told a journalist that in 1929, he and two other boys went to Europe visiting France, England and Italy. The records of the police in Italian, claimed the not always wholly reliable Dadda, show that Orson was arrested for sleeping in the park and throwing a stunt fit in the streets. There is clear evidence that he was in Munich and possibly Berlin in 1929; he was on a walking tour with the school, sending back to his nurse in Chicago a boisterously boyish card: ‘How you’d love it here … the beer! Oh, baby!’48 which is probably what she wanted to hear, not a scene-by-scene account of Jedermann. (Later, he reported how he’d been sitting in a Munich beer hall, when some funny little chap in a Charlie Chaplin moustache started to harangue the audience … Even Roger Hill, who reports this story, was a little sceptical of Orson’s Zelig-like ability to be present at every crucial moment in modern history.)

  As often as not, however, Welles and his father would go to Grand Detour. In 1925, the year before Welles went to Todd, Dick had, on an alcoholic whim, bought the admirable Sheffield House Hotel, so glowingly described in its brochure. Evidently Dick’s chums, Charles and Lotte Sheffield, who had rebuilt the hotel after it had burnt down at the turn of the century, had had enough; they had been running it for fifteen years. It must have taken some running, too: a sixty-room L-shaped frame building, it had steam heat and indoor plumbing, and boasted a fine restaurant with an excellent cook. There were two waitresses; on Sundays the restaurant pulled in customers from as far as Rockford or Clinton, Iowa. Although not quite what Welles claimed for it – ‘America’s most exclusive hotel’49 – it was a splendid place, then surrounded by elms, all of which were wiped out in the 1960s.

  Dick approached the business of being a hotelier with unexpected seriousness, sensibly buying the Sheffield General Store; he it was who converted its upper level into the dance hall on whose springy floor Orson danced in the moonlight. He also rented a small unpainted building on River Street and turned it into a giant toy house for Orson, filling it with ‘wonderful Chicago-built toys’,50 in the envious words of a contemporary Grand Detourian. Welles liked to claim that his father had bought the hotel because he liked the service, then threw all the guests out. He was also said – by Welles, of course – to have admitted only old music-hall performers as guests; or, alternatively, to have recruited his staff exclusively from vaudevillians. None of this was true: the clientele, actively encouraged, consisted mainly of Chicago artists on their sketching expeditions or casual tourists in the region. The restaurant was frequented by people from miles around; you had to book to be sure of a table. Dick was rarely there; in his absence the hotel was run, profitably and efficiently, by the excellent staff, most of whom he had inherited from the Sheffields. It is entirely possible, none the less, as Orson remembered, that he smoked his own sausages, and that ‘you’d wake up in the morning to the sound of the folks in the bake-house and the smells …’51 For Welles Grand Detour was ‘one of the Merrie Englands’. He felt that he’d had ‘a childhood in the last century from these short summers’. Idyllic though it assuredly was, he remained unable to form any relationship with the people of Grand Detour. Even the man who drove him the four-hour journey to Todd and back in Dick Welles’s brand-new, four-door Chevrolet (no cars, Orson? Just Daddy’s, perhaps) ‘never got to know Orson well’.52

  Dick Welles, on the other hand, seems to have been much liked, and not regarded in the least as eccentric. The only feature of his father’s regime worth commenting on was his regular and profound drunkenness. ‘Eccentric’ is a much more agreeable word than ‘drunk’; it is touching of Welles that in order to convince himself of the euphemism, he invented the appropriate eccentricities.

  It all ended very suddenly on 28 May 1928. The Chicago artists were sketching in their bad-weather studio over the Landmark restaurant, while the chambermaids were burning some papers in the grate. A few of the burning papers entered the upstairs lumber room; the fire took hold. People poured out of the hotel, including a confused Dick Welles. The building burned to the ground; overnight, someone stole the large boiler from the basement. The next day, Dick Welles left Grand Detour, and never went back. Nor did Orson. Over the years, he marinaded the events of that night, turning them into a charming tragic-comic tale. ‘We’d just returned from China, and there was a nice Christmassy fall of snow on the ground the night of the fire,’53 he wrote in his memoir. The fire actually occurred on 28 May, during the day, and they hadn’t been to China that year, nor was Orson present; he was in Highland Park, doling out bad reviews to hapless opera singers. ‘The six-mile distance was to
o great for the Dixon Fire Department which arrived to preside over the smoking ruins of what had been America’s most exclusive hotel. At the very last moment, my father (the suspected arsonist) emerged from the flames dressed only in his nightshirt, carrying in one hand an empty parrot cage and in the other, a framed, hand-tinted photograph of a lady in pink tights (an ex-mistress fondly remembered) named Trixi Friganza.’ Something stirred at the back of Welles’s mind as he wrote this, and he comments on the extraordinary coincidence that both his father’s favourite mistress and his mother should have had the same unusual nickname. He does not recall that at the time of the fire he himself had a hand-tinted photograph of that other Trixie, his mother, at his own bedside.

  It seems that by this time Dick and Orson were losing each other. Dick would occasionally go to Todd; according to Paul Guggenheim, Orson used to hide from him when he did, saying that he hated him. His drunkenness was impossible to ignore, an unbearable embarrassment in front of his fellow students. So Orson hid. In effect he disowned him. In this he was encouraged by the Hills, who thought him an appalling influence. But Dick in a way disowned Orson, too. Coming unannounced to a performance of Wings over Europe, he left before the end of the play, because, Welles told Barbara Leaming, ‘he didn’t want to admit he was interested in my acting career or some damn thing’.54 There was nothing Dick Welles could do to bridge the gap between himself and this son whom he so deeply but unusefully loved. For Orson, the theatre, Todd, and the Hills were his emotional reality. His work on plays continued with unabated intensity. Now – at the age of fourteen – he was designing and directing as well as starring in the Todd Troupers productions. This was a serious business, thanks to Roger Hill’s policy. ‘I felt that the ordinary audience for school shows was worse than none at all because it consisted of parents and friends who were completely uncritical. So we organised the Todd Troupers and started taking shows out of town. We would rent the Goodman Theatre in Chicago or use some of the suburban movie houses in the area.’55 Welles also wrote the programmes: ‘ANDROCLES AND THE LION: JUNIOR TROUPERS OF TODD together with LEARN PIGEONS PRESENT FOR WOODSTOCK’S WOMEN’S CLUB a special performance of ANDROCLES AND THE LION being an arrangement of the play by G. BERNARD SHAW and staged by ORSON WELLES.’ There is an excellent woodcut by Welles on the cover. ‘NOTE: A mystery surrounds the author of this delightful satire. Just what is Bernard Shaw, vegetarian, socialist, anti-vivisectionist and Irishman, really driving at? … In ANDROCLES AND THE LION, the author flaunts the wormy spots in Caesarism, Paganism and Martyrdom right in our faces. But don’t let that worry you. Somewhere in Hertfordshire a blue eye is winking. It is suggested that you wink right back and accept, for this evening at least, the Shavian doctrine of the theatre: “Don’t take anything seriously.”’

  There was nothing makeshift about the productions or the presentation. The good people of Woodstock or the Goodman Theatre’s subscribers could count themselves lucky to catch Orson’s production of The Physician in Spite of Himself, in a full-blown constructivist setting with its naked structure, inclined planes, platforms, wheels, stepladders and stage lights clearly visible, an environment that deliberately forces a playing style of extreme physicality. The set is pretty well a duplicate of Meyerhold’s design for The Magnanimous Cuckold. But that famous production had been staged only seven years before, in 1922, and on the other side of the world. Its implications had barely been absorbed by the avant-garde of the English-speaking theatre. And here it was, being boldly reproduced by a small boys’ school in a small town in the Mid-West of America. Of course the idea was a borrowed one; but Picasso’s mot about originality is particularly appropriate here: to imitate others is necessary; to imitate oneself is pathetic.

  There was, too, Julius Caesar, the entry for the Goodman Theatre Amateur Drama League, hence pared down to sixty minutes. On the evidence of surviving photographs, the design uses the width of the stage but is scenically relatively conventional, the set consisting of boxes shifted around during the action; togas were worn, created from bedsheets the boys stripped from their own beds. Fifteen-year-old Orson played both Antony and Cassius. In the competition, the boys playing these two roles were highly praised, but disqualified because they were evidently older than seventeen, the age limit for entrants. Or so the story goes; certainly a photograph of his Cassius shows him expressionistically intense in his shock wig, with no hint of the schoolboy about him. Welles was evidently very upset to have lost; Dadda Bernstein wrote him a charming note of consolation, containing sentiments that only someone who had never stood on a stage could have expressed: ‘even though you did not get the first prize it was worth doing. Applause means little in the long run and not all the things we do that are worth while receive recognition … some day when you will be in the eyes of the world doing big things as I know you will, you will look back on this disappointment as having been just a passing experience … “Success is in the silence, though fame is in the song.” I know your true values and hope to see them grow into fruition. I love you more than all else. Dadda.’56 Over the years in which Welles sometimes seemed to value the song far above the silence, he never lacked either love or faith.

  That summer, in July of 1930, Orson and his father went by sea to Shanghai. Earlier, in the middle of June, he had resumed his column for the Highland Park News. No longer music critic for the Festival (after death threats, perhaps?), he had his own chat spot: ‘Inklings’, with a smart logo (the name of the column being poured out of an ink bottle) designed by himself. The June 30th piece is a vacuous piece of chatter, a word-spinning puff for his editor’s forthcoming marriage, replete with middle-aged matrimonial jokes (‘All of which goes to show that intelligence and world-wide experience has nothing to do with it. Immunization is impossible! Our brainiest men are acquiring the ball and chain every day. Nothing can be done, Mort has put his foot firmly in the molasses. All we can do is to smile through the tears and yell a hoarse “Congratulations!”’ On July 4th, he announced the Shanghai trip. The column has a new, cunningly fashioned logo showing assorted Chinese heads on a globe over the rim of which a steamer is puffing; there are clouds on the other side; a placard, upside down, says OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD. At the bottom of this there is a slogan: THE INSIDE DOPE ON CHOP SUEY LANDS.

  More or less (in the manner of the COMING ATTRACTIONS ANNOUNCER of the Talkies) Ladeez and Gentlemen: … instead of lingering here in HP to prattle weekly – (voice from the gallery: ‘weakly is right!’ – we are packing up and going far away … very, very far away indeed. Even unto the other side of the earth i.e. China and environs – many thousands of miles beneath Central Avenue, to the under-world kingdoms of dog-stew and birds’ nest soup … we are broadening out, we will write about the East, and we’ll spill you the whole business, absolutely everything … All the clout, glamour, romance of the Orient will troop in Literary Caravan across the glowing lines of this: your favourite feature of your favourite journal … I thank you!!!! (loud sound of escaping steam as we take our bow).

  It’s school magazine stuff, but fun. The next column, July 11th 1930, describes the journey to Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, whence the boat departed:

  Dear Readers: We’ve rattled down out of the cool, clean air of the mountains on to a dry and dusty desert wasteland … nothing is particularly desirable today. Gissing would terminate his feverish search for ‘where the blue begins’ were he here now, for this is where the blue ends, the sky being considerably faded with the heat …

  Further instalments will come, he says, but fitfully: it takes fourteen days for the mail boat to return.

  We’d write more but there’s about a second left for us to get to the gang-plank. And so – Adios!

  His slang is more Edwardian, it seems, than 1920s – perhaps because he spends so much time around older people. He seems to want to present himself as an old buffer; an Alexander Woollcott tone prevails. But he paints the scene amusingly, dramatising himself, as he was to do fo
r the rest of his life. He is ever-present between the reader and the subject.

  The last column was that of 5 September 1930: headed MIDNIGHT, YELLOW SEA. It is worth quoting at length:

  The heart of the Chinese pirate country: the first day in Nara was an adventurous one to say the least. Nara is picturesque and lovely, one of the most beautiful spots in Japanese Japan and particularly so in the rain. It started to sprinkle just as we left the station in our ricksha and increased in violence as we rode. There was a thin green mist hanging over everything as we went scurrying through a kind of three-dimensional Japanese print, rattling over little lacquered bridges across willow-bordered streams under huge pines as old as time itself, crunching across temple yards, past age-old pagodas, and on up to the hill to our hotel. The furnishings in our room were typically Nipponese and most fascinating but not sufficiently so to keep us among them, so leaving our Dad to snooze under mosquito netting we stepped out the back entrance and took a walk. It had just stopped raining. You know how lovely it can be right after a summer rain – everything clean and green and glistening? It was like that, just as fragrant as a flower, as warm and wet as the tropics in heaven. The willows wept liquid sunshine into the silver streams, lovely little sacred deer stood in the deep, damp grass, a pilgrim scuffled along the road, his bell tinkling faintly from beneath his great straw coat, and behind the pagodas above everything, there hung a rainbow … ! In the park we found an open space in the centre of which was a gayly-curtained platform.

  We guessed correctly that it was a temporary stage erected by some company of strolling players. We parted the drapes and peered in. The actors were clustered about a tiny stove eating their supper. They invited us to join in with them and of course we accepted. We shall not forget that meal. How we thanked our lucky stars we had learned to eat with chopsticks! We were the honored guest. Seated in the only chair, we were stuffed with rice, raw fish and ‘saki.’ And while even our Japanese was more extensive than their English we carried on a successful conversation of three hours’ duration entirely with our hands. We taught them a song from a school musical comedy and they instructed us in the art of Oriental theatrical fencing and make-up. It was a truly fascinating experience. Late that afternoon we left, promising to return to their show that evening. We did, but we found ourselves alone in the park. The moving picture industry is hitting the theatrical world even in the East, and it was raining a little. The players laughed long and heartily, and we had tea. We were shocked by their living conditions, their poverty. They told us that they had enough rice for one more day, if no one came the next night … They felt hurt when we offered them some money and laughed at our sympathising. They would laugh at death … we said goodbye and the last thing we heard as we walked off down the road was the sound of their merry voices singing the American song we had taught them.