by Simon Callow
The catalogue was his farewell to the campus. It became ‘one of the Merrie Englands’, a kingdom of which the king was a boy: him. Before he left Todd, there was one thing to be done: one of the school’s hallowed rituals. Each boy on becoming a senior was given a sled, which he kept as long as he was there. When he left, he handed it over to an upcoming senior; solemnly, this is what he did, in May 1931. As far as we know, it was not named Rosebud.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ireland/Jew Süss
IN THE immediate hiatus following graduation from Todd, Orson enrolled in Boris Anisfeldt’s class at the Chicago Art Institute. He had a very lively talent for sketching; his line drawings are sharp, witty and evocative, especially effective in capturing the essential character in a face. He told Hascy: ‘I was never any good, but I could always make it go where I wanted it to.’1 His gift was for illustration. It is unlikely that he ever expected to cultivate it professionally, though it was politic of him to suggest, as he did now, that painting was his real passion – as opposed to the less respectable, the feared and dreaded, theatre. It can hardly have been by accident that the teacher in whose class he enrolled had been a brilliant theatre designer in his time. At any rate, his attendance at the classes was fitful, as he engaged in the pursuit for which they were, in reality, nothing but a cover.
Billboard for May 1931 carried, under its
‘At Liberty
Dramatic Artists’
column, the following announcement:
ORSON WELLES – Stock, Characters, Heavies, Juveniles or as cast. Also specialties, chalk talk or can handle stage. Young, excellent appearance, quick sure study. Lots of pep, experience and ability. Close in Chicago early in June and want place in good stock company for remainder of season. Salary according to late date of opening and business conditions. Photos on request. Address ORSON WELLES c/o H.L. Powers, Illinois Theatre, 65 E Jackson Bvd, Chicago, Ill.
Orson was rarely out of the Powers Agency that summer, to no avail – pipped at the post, perhaps, by the young gentleman who, in the same edition, advertised himself as having ‘some singing-talking specialties’ and being able to ‘build, repair anything; paint plain scenery, banners’. Chalk talk was no match for singing-talking specialties, and certainly not for a skilled carpenter. Accordingly, the following month a second, more desperate, ad was placed:
Orson Welles is willing to invest moderate amount of cash and own services as Heavy, Character and Juvenile in good summer stock or repertory proposition. Reply to Orson Welles, Dramatic Coach, Todd Academy, Woodstock, Illinois.
We may assume that Maurice Bernstein was unaware of Orson’s plans for himself. Like many a parent or guardian before him, Dadda’s suggestion was that Orson should first become qualified academically, and then, with a safety net underneath him (that is the standard phrase), should he still feel the need to act, he could go ahead and give it a try. Clearly this was not going to wash with Orson, his appetite for the theatre raging, and all his juices at full flood after an unbroken sequence of triumphant productions at Todd. Had there been any takers for his adverts, he would have been off like a greyhound out of a trap. But for the time being, in the absence of any openings, he continued to pose as a would-be painter. The question of his future was the sole topic in his guardian’s home, which had undergone radical rearrangement. Bernstein’s marriage to Edith Mason broke up amid ugly recriminations (including the familiar one that he was a fortune-hunter; also that he was ‘and is’ a notorious womaniser). ‘I told her before she married Dr Bernstein, who though a capable surgeon is a Russian Jew, and therefore a hybrid as I see it,’ wrote Mason’s brother, Baron Barnes, in a comprehensively politically incorrect letter written during an earlier breakdown of the marriage only a year after it had been entered into, ‘that she’ll do just as she pleases – get the divorce amid worlds of mud as publicity, probably marry that damn dago again and cut her throat in the end with her decent-minded American public and be fini’. He was right in everything except the last prediction; Edith Mason became one of the most admired and respected singers America has produced. But there was mud, and she did remarry the damn dago, Polacco. Losing no time at all, Bernstein resumed his relationship with Mrs Edward Moore; when Moore died, she became the third (and last) Mrs Bernstein. An altogether calmer figure than La Mason, she rather went to the other extreme, being something of a hygiene faddist. Orson preferred to spend most of his time back at Todd, where Skipper let him have a room of his own. From time to time, however, he would visit Maurice and Hazel at their spotless residence in Highland Park and address the equally vexed questions of his legacy and his future: intertwined problems, in fact.
Dick Welles had made his will in 1927. It contains a startlingly brutal paragraph about his son Richard (‘the irresponsibility and ingratitude of said Richard I. Welles’2) who was reduced to inheriting one seventh of the estate which should be administered to him until his thirty-fifth birthday (it was never paid to him); the rest went to Orson, likewise being administered to him until his twenty-fifth birthday. Richard’s one seventh amounted to $6,500; Orson’s portion was $37,500; these sums are worth approximately ten times the amount at current rates. Maurice Bernstein, as trustee, was responsible for the administration of the estate. Richard, incarcerated in Kanakee, was allowed niggardly sums for clothing and upkeep. Orson hardly found it easier to extract money for his needs. According to a 1940 article in Saturday Evening Post, Bernstein never let Orson know how much he had inherited, suggesting that it was little or nothing. ‘He feared his ward might never do anything useful if he learned that an inheritance was hanging over his head. To let him know of his inheritance would be like letting an Osage Indian know that he had struck oil.’3 This is conceivable; whatever the case, there invariably hovers over any financial dealing concerning Dr Bernstein a question mark – with both his previous wives, with Richard Junior, with Orson – even with Beatrice, from whom it is suggested that he expected, erroneously, to inherit. There is no doubt of his love for Orson, but there is a possibility that he tried to cheat him, too. A further complication for the boy.
As for his future: the goal was always Harvard or Cornell. The most Orson could hope to do was to stave off the hour at which he would be obliged to enrol. In August, he managed to buy, as he saw it, a little time.
Three days of particularly vicious domestic warfare … ended in a roundtable conference which found all the principal powers as determined as ever [he wrote to Roger Hill]. Dadda had thought the matter over and decided he could not permit my having ought to do with the diseased and despicable theatre. The deuteragonist and the tritagonist questioned the educational value and the chorus (everybody about) was uniformly and maddeningly derisive. Things went from bad to worse. Alternately I defended and offended. My head remained bloody but unbowed and my nose, thanks to the thoughtful blooming of some neighbouring clover (which I assured the enemy was ragweed!) began to sniffle hay-feverishly, and the household was illusioned into the realisation that something had to be done.
It was then that Dadda arrived at a momentous decision – and in the spirit of true martyrdom chose the lesser of two great evils. Going abroad alone is not quite as unthinkable as joining the theatre – and so … I was whisked out of the fire into the frying pan. Four days later I was in New York!
A few months of walking and painting in Ireland and Scotland … and then on to England where there are schools – and theatres!!!!!!
It is curious that in later life Welles liked to suggest that really he had just drifted into the theatre. His work at Todd was simply to impress Skipper; he had really wanted to be a painter; it was all a charming accident which took him by surprise. In fact he was fanatically devoted to the idea of the theatre, immersed in its lore and its terminology (even his account of a domestic battle is analysed in terms of a well-informed knowledge of the Greek theatre), and deeply ambitious. Perhaps he had come to believe his own propaganda, the pretence that he was obliged to maintain for
Maurice and Hazel Bernstein. There was no need to conceal his glee from Skipper, who wanted nothing more for him than to follow his heart. It was to Skipper that the above letter was addressed, from on board the SS Baltic the night before disembarking at Galway.
If Welles felt the slightest anxiety at the prospect of being alone in a strange country, he doesn’t betray it. In fact, his despatches and the journal that he kept betray nothing but youthful exuberance, delight in the new world that he was discovering and unqualified joie de vivre. His life at home – whether at Todd or at the Bernsteins’ – was of such continuing complexity that it must have been a liberation simply not to be there. He was also strongly and romantically drawn to Ireland, infected by the twin charms that rendered it such a magnet for romantics in the first couple of decades of the century: on the one hand, its timeless and unvarnished beauty, on the other, its nationalist revival, both political and cultural. The idea of Ireland – passionate, oppressed, mystic – was in every way the antithesis of the old tired civilised post-war world. ‘Get out your Don Byrne and your Synge and your gallic ballads – you can’t trace my wanderings on the map!’ he wrote to Skipper, that last night on board the Baltic.
He carried with him in his pocket a copy of Field and Fair, by Pádriac Ó Conaire: Travels with a Donkey in Ireland, and he seems to have accepted its invitation:
Come with me, O friend of my heart, and let us enjoy the sight of majestic mountain peaks and dark pine forests; let us stroll by musical streams, past cool brooks where dwell thousands of birds; come along for Spring is at hand, and fresh blood is flowing through your veins and mine … come along with me, my friend, and we shall travel till night overtakes us. We shall pass thro snug little villages with a light in every house, and a messy fire will be seen through the open door, and the bean-a-tighe busy preparing the meal, or minding her baby, or having a chat with her neighbour … up, friend of my heart, and come along with me till I have cured that dark disease that afflicts your mind … delay not, but come along.
Intoxicating stuff: a perfect remedy for late-adolescent accidie, sense of self-disgust and self-weariness, oneself ever-present, unavoidable, impossible to ignore, Ó Conaire’s ‘dark disease that afflicts your mind’. And Ireland lived up to Ó Conaire: it did not disappoint. In fact, it inspired Orson to pages of prose every bit as high-flown, and in their own way, as contagiously charming as those of his model. It was of course in the back of his mind that he might return not merely with a number of masterpieces on canvas (he had come laden with the accoutrements of the career he pretended to espouse) but also with a slim volume of travel writing. He kept a journal, and wrote letters to Hortense and Roger Hill and to Dadda. The latter have a more studied quality, as if for publication; indeed, Dadda being Dadda, the moment they arrived they were typed up and passed around among interested parties. It is the most extended correspondence Welles undertook, and along with the private matter of the journal and the chatty tones of the letters to Roger and Hortense (‘the Skippers’, as he calls them) it gives a very agreeable picture of the sixteen-year-old Orson, footloose and fancy free. It is still to some extent an official account; there are no intensely private revelations. Even on holiday, and to his most intimate circle, Orson presented a public face.
Our very landing was dramatic – the tender pulled up to the side of the ship full of luggage and relations – everyone aboard it seemed to me was Irish – men and women got on their knees, weeping with joy, there was much craning of necks and pitiful waving and then little cries of recognition as first one passenger and then another picked out their ‘Paddy’ or ‘Michael.’ A fine tall man with flowing silver hair and a face like Wotan brandished his silver-headed cane fiercely over our heads crying in a voice like thunder – ‘Sure it’s God’s own country.’ I looked out over the rolling indigo sea into the misty mountains, blue and gold at the horizon – they were singing ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ and on the tender people separated for years were locking and locking in the intricacies of an Irish jig. ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter, home from the hills.’ I unarmored, as Wotan, leaping madly down the gang-plank sang out for the hundredth time – ‘Sure, and it’s God’s own country.’
He decided impulsively to disembark at Galway, making up his own itinerary.
I must say I don’t regret it. If I had gone on to Cobb, I should have missed Connacht entirely – the West Coast of Ireland is unknown and unbelievable. In all Europe and the Western Hemisphere there is nothing to approach it – in this Americanised three-quarters of the globe, it is unique – the last frontier of romance.
The writer of this was not a topographical ignoramus: at the beginning of this letter to Dadda Bernstein he says ‘surprises I have had in my travels – countries like Japan and China have exceeded my expectations, but in sixteen short, very full years of living, nothing comparable with Galway – or the West Coast of Ireland – has loomed so unexpectedly – so breath-takingly on my horizon’. The sense of awe and excitement never seems to have left him. He relates his adventures with comic awareness of his own situation; the country, its people and its customs seem glorious to him: Ó Conaire himself could not have celebrated them more. Despite fetching up in Galway at the height of the turfing season, he manages to acquire the regulation donkey; her name, after ‘a certain species of fairy’, is Sidheoghc (pronounced – and thereafter spelt – Sheeog) and together he and she embark, in classic Robert Louis Stevenson fashion, on a month’s adventuring.
We travelled a good per cent of Ireland together, Sheeog and I – from Galway to Donegal and the giants’ courseway, and nearly back, at night we camped at the roadside – Sheeog feeding on the mountain grass and I cooking over a turf fire, and when the stars were out, Sheeog went to join the ‘sidhe’ – the fairies – and I curled myself up under the cart and fell asleep. There were nights, too, spent in the cottages, wakes, weddings, and match-makings … my week with the band of gypsies, my mountain-climbs, my night in a quagmire, and finally, the auctioning of Sheeog at the Clifden fair – should all make tolerably interesting after-dinner tales.
He found a welcome in the small, comfortable communities scattered around the countryside. He was a stranger, and therefore fascinating. He evidently had no fear, which people as well as dogs can spot in an instant. He also seemed to assume, which is more surprising, that people would treat him generously; so of course they did. What it was in his experience that led him to such an assumption is not easy to know, although, despite the myriad complications of his emotional life, he had never known rejection, and rarely encountered malice. He had been greatly loved: by no means always wisely, but very well. And it seems that there was never a time in his life that Orson Welles joined a group of people, expecting them to dislike him.
As for the gypsies … well, why not? He was obviously ready for anything. Like many people whose home life is for whatever reason unsatisfying, he was always able to become part of a different clan with ease: to identify with them, to join in, to be one of them. This too was a repeated pattern. At various times in his life, Welles would become immersed in black life, in Spanish life, in Arab life. Lacking a family of his own in the usual sense, he had no identity to lose; he was thrilled to belong to a new one. Of course, he would then move on. So a week with the gypsies would be par for the course. Having sold the donkey, his next move was to the Aran Islands, a yet more intimate community than that of the West Coast, and one with which he identified even more easily and closely. Synge, it would appear, was the lure, initially. His love affair with all things Irish had not entirely made him forget his first and one true love, the theatre. He found his way to it with unerring instinct. In Galway, Professor Liam O’Briain had, with a little government money, established the first Irish-speaking theatre, the Taibhearc. Their initial production had been Diarmuid and Gráinne, by the young actor and designer Micheál Mac Liammóir (who had, uncredited, illustrated the copy of Field and Fair in Welles’s pocket), and they we
re eager to recruit young Irish-speaking actors. Hearing of this, Welles applied for a grant to learn the Irish language – on the Aran Islands, for preference – and then return to act at the Taibhearc. His application was turned down; they didn’t have that sort of money. So he made his way to the isles of Synge on his own.
John Connelly who sells stout and plug tobacco built a slate roof on his house thirty years ago. Fifty years before, the English government performed the remarkable engineering feat of erecting a coast-guard station – (which has gone out of use, and which I use as a studio) – and a light-house. There too, there is a priest who braves the waves when the Sundays are fine – to say Mass, but despite these vague hints at civilisation, Inisheer remains as it has been for many centuries – the most primitive spot in Europe.
He describes the history of the isles – ‘these people who produced and flourished in Tut Antkahmen’s time – and kept alive the flame of Christian culture in the days of Genghis Khan’ – in excitable language: ‘it is almost beyond belief that two days’ journeying from the world’s greatest metropolis brings one to a land where an intelligent and aristocratic people live in archaic simplicity, surpassing anything in Homer!’ He calls the island ‘their paradise’. It is notable that Welles’s view of human history, and of life in general, is very severely polarised into the innocent and the corrupt. For him, very little exists between evil and good. The West of Ireland was for him pre-lapsarian. Writing to Hortense Hill, he says that
