Just then, a prominent magic dealer knocked on the door and rushed into the dressing room to pitch Houdini a marvelous new vanishing lamp for his act. As Orson watched with big eyes, the dealer showed Houdini the trick, and after a few questions the magician quickly mastered the moves. “I’ll put it in the next show!” Houdini exclaimed, thus contravening his own advice. Nevertheless, Bernstein swore that Orson did practice his magic tricks thousands of times.
Thirty years later, Peter Noble reported in The Fabulous Orson Welles that Welles was still practicing with Houdini’s vanishing lamp, and that he performed the “old Houdini handkerchief trick most effectively” onstage. “I saw him do it at the great Sid Field Benefit Show at the London Palladium in 1951 and again, before the then Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, in the Variety Club Gala Show at the London Coliseum in 1952.”
Houdini was also from Wisconsin—Appleton—as Dick Welles liked to remind Orson. Dick loved magic, and if Bernstein took the lead escorting Orson to opera and the symphony, his father took the lead with magic, buying his son instructional books and taking him to see all the famous magicians in Chicago and New York. Magic was in Orson’s genes, Todd School’s headmaster Roger Hill once said—it was a boyhood passion closely linked to his father, and a wellspring of inspiration for Orson’s future as a conjurer of a snowstorm in a glass ball, a life faked in a newsreel, a palatial tomb, and a hallway of mirrors stretching into infinity.
When they came back to Chicago, Orson talked his way out of returning to public school, and his father and Dr. Maurice Bernstein debated the next step in his education. Unlike Richard, who quit his Montana fishery apprenticeship soon after his mother’s death—these days he was in and out of Chicago, driving Dick Welles crazy—Orson had no trouble busying himself constructively, and he easily kept up his studies at home. Welles and Bernstein knew it was best to gain Orson’s cooperation first before nudging him down any path.
A year after his mother’s death, in May, Orson celebrated his tenth birthday. His father and Dr. Bernstein took him to see the new Michael Arlen stage comedy The Green Hat, with Broadway’s newest leading lady, Katharine Cornell. Married to the play’s director, Guthrie McClintic, Cornell was the talk of the town that spring in Chicago. She proved a delightful comedienne, although over time romantic tragedy would emerge as her true forte.
Orson studied the program, memorizing the names of everyone involved in the comedy, including the lesser actors and even the backstage artists. He prided himself on paying attention to the unsung personalities; he was always recasting plays in his mind, and he returned to these boyhood mental notebooks throughout his career. One weekend in Kenosha, for example, he and his father saw the Theatre Guild touring production of A. A. Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By at the Rhode. Going backstage after the show, father and son shook hands with all the actors—including Erskine Sanford, already a whiz at frazzled-old-man parts though he was only in his thirties.
Orson inherited his father’s fondness for comic dancers, such as the vaudeville act Durant and Mitchell, and years later he would hire Jack Durant for a nightclub scene in Journey of Fear. Another dancer who made an impression on young Orson was the loose-limbed comic dancer Harry Shannon from Saginaw, Michigan, whom he saw cavorting in a Chicago revue. By the time Orson saw him again, in 1940, Shannon was fifty years old, with no serious dramatic credits. Orson was searching for someone to play his character’s father in Citizen Kane—a role that goes without description, unusually so, in the published script. Shannon was doing uncredited bits in Hollywood pictures until Orson chose him to play, unforgettably, the vaguely ineffectual, possibly alcoholic and abusive senior Kane.
Young Orson would follow Cornell’s career after seeing her in The Green Hat, and more than once he drew casting from the roster of her ensembles. The next time he saw her onstage, it was several years later in New York, in a drama called Dishonored Lady by Margaret Ayers Barnes and Edward Sheldon—the latter a Chicago playwright whose work Orson followed. It was a bit of guignol, not really very good, although Cornell was authoritative in her role. And Orson noticed one actor: Fortunio Bonanova, a former opera tenor from Mallorca, who played an oily South American lover murdered by Cornell. Bonanova stole his scenes, and Orson would not forget him. In 1940, as he reworked the scenes in Citizen Kane in which Susan Alexander Kane strains to hit the high notes while rehearsing for her opera debut, Orson thought of Bonanova for the role of the frustrated voice tutor, Matisti.
MATISTI
Impossible! Impossible! . . . I will be the laughingstock of the musical world. People will say—
KANE
If you’re interested in what people will say. Signor Matisti, I may be able to enlighten you a bit. The newspapers, for instance, I’m an authority on what the papers will say, Signor Matisti, because I own eight of them between here and San Francisco. . . . It’s all right, dear. Signor Matisti is going to listen to reason. Aren’t you, maestro?
Like Shannon, Bonanova had been languishing in Hollywood, taking walk-on parts as headwaiters and hotel managers. “Sent for him the minute I wrote that part,” Orson told Peter Bogdanovich. “He was so marvelous. God, he was funny.”
In June 1925, Dick Welles took his son back to the Hotel Sheffield in Grand Detour. The hotel was filled to capacity that summer on most weekends and holidays. Some writers have scoffed at Welles’s recollection that the Sheffield was filled with circus folk, or that the hotel employees included colorful characters like “Rattlesnake-Oil Emery” and a waitress who performed birdcalls in a tent show. But Rattlesnake-Oil Emery was a real person—the hotel’s handyman and launderer, who also butchered chickens—and Route 2, which ran past the hotel, was busy all summer long with circus and festival wagons on their way to county fairs.
Memorial Day opened the summer season, and Orson and his father trekked to Court House Square in Oregon, where by 1926 the parade of Civil War “Old Boys” in their tattered blues had dwindled to a feeble handful.
With their parents off on another European art tour, the Watson girls joined them for the month of June. Marjorie Watson recalled Orson honing his magic act that summer, trying to hypnotize his cousins. One day, ten-year-old Orson and his cousins Emily and Marjorie managed to slip the noose, as they later boasted, running away to live the actor’s life on the road. County police searched for them for hours before spotting them in Oregon, ten miles north, with the girls passing as boys, all of them in blackface, singing and dancing for pennies on a street corner.
Emily went along fearlessly with Orson’s adventures, her father told Peter Noble. “Orson was exceedingly gallant, made her pine-bough beds to sleep on at night in the deep woods and took off his own coat and put it over her. Her only concern was when he threw all the money that he had in his pockets into a stream and said, ‘Now we will live on our own talents, or we will starve to death.’ ”
When the Watsons whisked the girls away, Dick Welles and his son were left to their own devices for a few weeks. Young Orson was an “odd child,” in the words of Frederick J. Garner, a Grand Detour resident, “and stories are told of him entertaining people in the evening at the country store.” Every now and then father and son took off for Dixon, the biggest town in the county, driving to the downtown air-conditioned theater where the comedies and Westerns were interspersed with vaudeville acts on Sundays. In the summer of 1925 they saw Chaplin in The Gold Rush; they also saw the spectacular Ben-Hur, and William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds.
Dick Welles was finally closing in on a deal for the Hotel Sheffield, and he was hoping to install his restless son at a summer camp for boys during August. Dr. Maurice Bernstein knew of a good one near Borcher’s Beach on the north shore of Lake Mendota, the largest and most beautiful of the lakes surrounding Madison, Wisconsin. It was a curious fact about Camp Indianola that it recruited heavily from the Chicago Jewish community, and the majority of its campers were Jewish. The camp stressed resourcefulness and self-reliance, traits young Orson
had in abundance. But Orson would also benefit from the outdoor physical regimen.
The dome of the state capitol and the buildings of the University of Wisconsin could be glimpsed several miles away on the other side of Lake Mendota. Camp Indianola had grown, since its humble beginnings in 1907, into a large, well-equipped facility boasting a large two-story cottage with library and music rooms, a canoe house, a mess hall, and a general assembly building with a small stage. By 1925, more than one hundred boys were attending the summer camp, coming largely from Madison, southern Wisconsin, and northern Illinois. The camp was owned and operated by Frederick Mueller, known to his young charges as Captain, and his wife, Mina.
Barbara Leaming’s biography of Welles refers to Mueller as a professor of psychology, an “eminent German psychologist who specialized in unusual children.” In fact, Mueller was born in Wisconsin—his parents were German immigrants—and the German language was one of his teaching specialties in college and later in Madison-area high schools. When not running Camp Indianola, Mueller was, indeed, a psychology instructor at the university in Madison, but he was not a particularly “eminent” academic; his only advanced degree, then or later, was a master’s degree in philosophy.
Camp Indianola was situated on onetime Native American ground, and Captain Mueller ran it like an Indian encampment, with the boys divided by age and size into opposing Onaway and Wendigo tribes for sports and games. Among the pastimes were archery, horseback riding, swimming, and canoeing. The campers could fish for black bass, pike, bullheads, perch, and bluegills in abundance from rowboats a short distance from shore. Older boys lived in large tents on raised wooden platforms, arranged in a semicircle, and smaller tents were available for roadside pitching on overnight trips. The summer culminated with the boys taking a two-week “Gypsy trip” north through the Wisconsin Dells, a popular tourist destination.
Before the new boy arrived, Captain Mueller buttonholed Lowell Frautschi, a university undergraduate serving as the camp athletic director. Mueller told Frautschi that an “unusual child,” whose mother had died tragically the previous year, was arriving shortly. The new boy had been raised in a “heady environment and was accustomed almost exclusively to the company of adults,” Frautschi recalled Mueller telling him. The boy would benefit from learning “the normal childhood skills.” Mueller asked Frautschi to share his barracks room with the boy, and to “keep a close watch on his participation in camp activities.”
Many years later, Frautschi vividly recalled the new arrival. “Orson was large for his age,” he noted. “He had a pleasing personality and had little difficulty getting along with the other campers, although he was indeed awkward at sports. He entered into things well enough to relieve me of any special effort in having to encourage him.”
Besides bunking together, Frautschi and Orson shared a morning art class, which had only one student: Orson. Dick Welles had stipulated that art be added to the program, and paid extra for Frautschi to supervise the class. The new boy arrived with his own easel and paint set, which he told Frautschi had been a gift from the eminent Lorado Taft. “We would usually go somewhere, such as a nearby pasture,” Frautschi remembered, “where Orson would put up his easel and proceed to paint while I sat on the ground and read.”
Young Orson also got involved with the camp newspaper, the Indianola Trail, writing humorous tidbits and verse. One fragment of Orson’s creativity survives from that summer of 1925, four lines from a lengthy pastoral titled “The Voice of the Morning,” his earliest known published work:
From out of the dark and dreary night, a mellow voice did come
A voice of sweetened love and truth
Of passionate love, in sooth.
It said awake, my son, ’tis day.
The “unusual child” may have fitted in surprisingly well overall, but he did cause a few problems at the camp’s evening gatherings, where the boys were encouraged to demonstrate their talents. “Orson volunteered every time!” Frautschi recalled. “He told interminable stories made up from things he had read—and he seemed to have read everything—and from his own active imagination. The other boys soon grew tired of this and became restless, so finally I told Orson he should not monopolize the scene that way.”
Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein took turns visiting on weekends, huddling with Captain Mueller for updates on Orson’s progress. “The few comments that I exchanged with Bernstein,” said Frautschi, “revealed that he was genuinely interested in Orson’s welfare.” Dick drove over rough country roads from Grand Detour. “He was thin and rather languid,” recalled Frautschi. “As I saw him leaning against the front of the barracks, the thought occurred to me that he looked like a character out of a Joseph Conrad novel of the South Seas.”
Decades later, Orson told film historian Joseph McBride that he had few warm memories of Camp Indianola. One night, he claimed, he escaped out his cabin window, rowed a war canoe the five miles or so across the lake to catch a train for Chicago, and never went back. Orson did run away from home more than once in the period after his mother’s death, as many boys do, but Frautschi did not recall the great escape, and Orson was definitely back at the camp by the end of August to give a one-man show at the closing ceremonies.
All he needed for his show was a few props, he told Frautschi: eyeglasses, a pitcher, two chairs, a table. Frautschi recalled “being wary” and insisting on a preview of the entertainment. So Frautschi sat alone in the assembly hall watching Orson perform an abridged Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, “making the transformation from one character to the other, altering his facial expressions, voice, and movements in a truly amazing way.” Orson was then allowed to perform the show at “a sort of commencement exercise” on the last weekend, with his father and Dr. Bernstein in attendance. “Young Orson played to a packed hall,” remembered Frautschi, “and was a stunning success.”
Since his son had thrived on Captain Mueller’s watch, Dick Welles asked if Orson could stay on with Mueller for the school year in Madison, trying out a school there. By now the deal for the Hotel Sheffield was done, and renovating and expanding the building would keep Dick Welles in Grand Detour for much of the winter. Captain and Mina Mueller were glad to take the boy in, and Dick was happy to pay the costs.
Professor Mueller (he was “Captain” only during the summer) lived at the campus end of State Street, which ran from downtown Capitol Square to the University of Wisconsin campus on the shore of Lake Mendota. The Muellers occupied a first-floor flat on the corner of State and Frances, two blocks from the campus mall. Washington Grade School, where Orson was enrolled in fourth grade, was three blocks away.
In later years, the filmmaker would recall Madison as a “wonderful city.” But his time there was also his first experience of living, effectively, on his own, and his fond memories were mixed with discomforting ones. At Washington Grade School, Orson stood out for the way he looked and dressed and carried himself, and he felt targeted on the playground. “The strange plump youngster who talked like a University professor was soon the butt of his classmates,” wrote Peter Noble (per Bernstein). The taunts continued until Orson brought his makeup kit to school one day, and in the washroom before recess “painted his face to resemble a bloody pulp. . . . The bully screamed and fled,” according to Noble.
At first, as one teacher recalled, the newcomer seemed a “quiet, polite, rather shy little boy who spent most of his time by himself.” After a period of adjustment, however, young Orson blossomed, as he had at Camp Indianola. That November he played Squanto in the school’s First Thanksgiving pageant; the following month he was Ebenezer Scrooge in its production of A Christmas Carol. Orson also designed and helped build a stage fireplace for the holiday show; the prop was tucked away and reused for decades.
According to Dr. Bernstein, one day Orson was invited to address an all-school assembly, and in the course of his lecture on art he lambasted his teachers for their lack of creativity. “You mustn’t criticize the public school sy
stem!” one teacher called out, to which young Orson rejoined, “If the public school system needs criticizing, I will criticize it!” There was scattered applause. He had made waves—and not a few friends.
In Chicago over the Christmas holiday, Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein took Orson to the latest edition of the Ziegfeld Follies, playing at the Illinois Theater. One of the headliners was the master juggler and pantomimist W. C. Fields, who made a lasting impression on Orson. “I laughed so hard they got worried and took me out of the theatre,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “All next day I had to be kept in bed. Quite literally, I’d laughed myself sick. Bill Fields only had to cross a room, you know, and I’d be retching with laughter.” He and “Uncle Claude,” as he called Fields, became friendly later in Hollywood, and Welles appeared in one movie with Fields—Follow the Boys, in 1944—although they didn’t share a scene. Orson swore the comedian was funnier onstage than he ever was onscreen.
After returning to Madison, Orson invited a dozen boys and girls to the Muellers’ flat for an eleventh birthday party for his friend Stanley Custer, who lived around the corner from the Muellers on Hawthorne Court. Orson, known to the neighborhood as a “bookwork kid” (in the words of Stanley’s journalist brother, Frank Custer), donned an orange robe and Oriental turban to perform his “eye-opener tricks” (Stanley Custer’s phrase) for his schoolmates, featuring card tricks, colored scarves, and disappearing coins. He even hypnotized one boy, using the classic swaying watch to cast the spell.
Orson presented the guest of honor with a copy of the adventure saga In the Shadow of Great Peril, the work of an eleven-year-old Chicagoan, Horace Atkisson Wade, who was publicized as “America’s Youngest Author.” “I know the author,” Orson boasted to Custer, and he may well have known Atkisson: his godfather George Ade had written the preface. “From me to you, Orson,” the young magician inscribed the book, adding a caricature of Custer and himself.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 14