Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  To mark the new era in Orson’s life, his father planned a quick end-of-summer trip to New York, where they would catch the premiere of Don Juan, the first feature-length motion picture with a sound track of sound effects and music. The New York Philharmonic provided the synchronized music, and a real-life Don Juan, Dick Welles’s friend John Barrymore, played the title role. But Dick Welles lasted only half an hour into the show, Orson recalled, before the horror of it all drove him up the aisle and out of the theater. “This,” he grumbled, “ruins the movies forever.” Dick Welles was bothered less by the sound track than by his friend’s appearance. “He was a chum of Barrymore’s and this must have been the very worst Jack ever was,” Orson recalled. “They’d put this little curly blond wig on him—and he just looked diseased.”

  Back in Chicago, Orson’s father handed him off to Dr. Bernstein, who escorted the boy to the Todd School in Woodstock. The two began by inspecting the facilities, strolling around the grounds noncommittally until they entered the theater and assembly hall. Orson, poking around backstage, stared at the ancient lighting board. “That won’t do,” he complained. The theater wasn’t perfect, Dr. Bernstein conceded, but perhaps Orson could improve it.

  “OK, this will do,” Orson said. “This will do.”

  After arriving at the school, Orson took the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale Test to measure his intellectual development. Years later, headmaster Roger Hill, as towering a figure in Orson Welles’s life story as any person he had yet encountered, reviewed the multiple-choice portion of Orson’s test while working on his own autobiography. “Deserts are crossed by Horses, Trains, Automobiles, Camels, or Donkeys,” read one question. “Underscore the correct answer.” Young Orson had underscored all five choices and added a scribble, “See other side,” where he added: “All of these, but the writer of this test was obviously too dumb to know it.”

  The test established the boy’s IQ as 185. Hill entered a dry note in the margin: “140 is considered genius level.” The word was beginning to follow him around.

  “A genius?” Welles laughingly told the New York Post in 1937, shortly after his triumphant Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar came to Broadway. “Perhaps. I’m either the genius they say I am or the world’s godawfullest ham. It’s a fifty-fifty split.”

  It was a word other people used about him, with or without prompting. Orson never used it about himself, he insisted later in Hollywood, after the word had become a millstone. The only real twentieth-century geniuses, he added, were Picasso, Einstein, and someone in China the West hadn’t heard of yet.

  “It’s just one of those words,” he insisted—a meaningless catchall. Like “love” or “happiness.”

  CHAPTER 5

  1926–1929

  “A Paradise for Boys”

  Orson Welles liked to deride The Stranger, his entertaining if conventional 1946 picture for RKO, as the least significant film in his oeuvre. The in-joke of The Stranger is that the provincial Connecticut town where the story takes place is modeled after Woodstock, Illinois—“a picturesque Thornton Wilder small-town setting,” as Welles once said. He tried several times to use his films to evoke Woodstock, the home of the Todd School, where Welles started classes in the fall of 1926. The town had a lasting place in his heart: so did the school, “a paradise for boys,” he said years later.

  The town square in The Stranger recalls that of Woodstock, with its bandstand and Civil War statue. Each town revolves to an extent around an elite boarding school. One scene in the film shows a gym blackboard scrawled with names from Orson’s schoolboy past: “Puny Hill,” gently mocking the height of Orson’s beloved headmaster; “Mrs. Collins,” the staff member who screened him in Grand Detour; and a dire warning from “Coach Roskie,” named for young Orson’s archenemy on the faculty. The blackboard displays an announcement from “Wallingford Hall,” where Welles was once quartered; and notice of an upcoming basketball game, “Harper vs. Todd.”

  Set on a ten-acre campus about sixty miles northwest of the Loop, on the outskirts of Woodstock, the Todd School for Boys had been open for business since 1848. “Near enough to Chicago to be easy of access for parents desiring to place their boys with us from any part of the country,” as the school booklet described it, “at the same time, it is far enough from the city to be free from the interruptions of too frequent comings and goings, which are very demoralizing to a school of this kind.”

  The school’s buildings included large classrooms and residential halls; an assembly hall and theater; a gymnasium with a bowling alley; a music cottage; a library; a horse stable and riding track; and print, woodworking, and metal shops. (“After we have learned to handle woodworking tools, we can make things needing some blacksmithing,” according to the school booklet, “like a sled.”) The school promoted physical culture and contact with nature, providing an outdoor tennis court, a running track, and a toboggan slide in winter. About a mile away, students had access to another forty acres of hickory and oak, a place for hiking and spiritual reflection.

  The basic tuition from September to June 1926 was $900 to $1,000, depending on whether a boy had a single or double room—this would be $13,000 or more in today’s currency. In theory the students were all boys, although a daughter or two of teachers and administrators were often sprinkled among the boys. Some students came from as far away as Europe, South Africa, or South America, but most were from Chicago or the North Shore. (In Citizen Kane, Kane tries distracting Susan Alexander by wiggling his ears. “It took me two solid years in the best boys’ school in the world to learn that trick,” he says. “The fellow who taught it to me is now the president of Venezuela.”)

  The Todd program began in first grade for some and ended after tenth grade for all. After graduating, the highest achievers were ready for early admission to colleges, though many went on to the upper levels of other prep schools. Most “Todd boys,” as they were known, were sons of Chicago-area captains of business, destined to follow in the family occupation, although the school’s alumni also included authors, scientists, economists, and lawyers.

  A Todd boy wore a suit and tie to classes, and participated in marching drills and flag raisings, but the school atmosphere was more “homelike” than regimented. The assembly hall was used for daily chapel services but it also served for a wide variety of entertainment. The school promoted good citizenship and leadership, but it stressed self-expression over conformity. Boyhood was not a pestilential handicap at Todd; it was regarded as a time to be savored.

  “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, and the Todd School’s founder, Richard Kimball Todd—a native of Vermont who had graduated from Princeton—ran his institution along Presbyterian lines.3 His successor, Noble Hill, maintained both the morning religious assemblies and the all-school “crocodile” marches, eyes forward, into town for Sunday services. Hill had been headmaster for thirty-seven years in the fall of 1926. Nearing seventy, he was stern but kindly; boys and teachers alike referred to him as “the King.”

  “I hear we’ve got another Welles boy,” the King was said to have commented within his son Roger Hill’s earshot after Orson was enrolled there. “I hope he’s nothing like his brother.”

  On arriving as an “intermediate boy” in early September 1926, eleven-year-old Orson was ushered into a brightly painted ground-floor room in the Clover Hall dormitory. He was assigned to share it with another Illinois boy, John Dexter, who had been at Todd since the first grade. Along with a small suitcase of clothing, Dexter recalled, Orson lugged into the room a large steamer trunk stuffed with makeup, costumes, and props. That first night, after the lights went out at nine o’clock sharp, Orson stole out of bed and lit an array of candles—strictly forbidden—then plunged into the closet. Just as Dexter was dozing off, his new roommate burst from the dark, weirdly made up and costumed, reciting passages from Shakespeare. “This went on night after night,” Dexter recalled years later. While
he found the shenanigans amusing, Dexter eventually encouraged Orson to move into a single room.

  In his early days at Todd, young Orson marked his territory, challenging a pedantic history teacher on the accuracy of his Egyptology and rebuking an English teacher for dangling his participles. In time, Orson would become more clever about how to get his way.

  One educator he kept his distance from, at least at first, was Roger Hill, the headmaster’s thirty-year-old son. A Todd School alumnus himself, Roger had gone on to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and then to a short stint in advertising in Chicago, before his father lured him back as athletic director of the boys’ school. A slender, dapper man with the look of Douglas Fairbanks and what Welles recalled as a “sailor’s swagger,” the younger Hill sported “rather too much hair for those days, looking artistic and rather brigandish.” An avid sailor, he was known as “Skipper” around the school, and he kept a boat moored on Lake Michigan for sailing trips.

  To Orson, the really alarming thing about Skipper was his position as athletic director. Skipper was a basketball expert—he wrote a guide called Let’s Go Team! that was a “local best-seller”—and a believer in acrobatics. Orson abhorred both disciplines. Basketball “intimidated me tremendously,” Welles reminded Hill several decades later during one of their long-distance phone conversations, which fill Todd Tarbox’s book Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, while acrobatics inspired “mental pictures of myself engaged in some sort of gymnastic endeavor, not prostrate with physical pain, but worse, stabbed by the pain of hearing the roars of laughter from my peers.”

  Short and stout, Orson didn’t look like much of a basketball player. Skipper didn’t particularly notice the new sixth-grader until the Halloween bash. Todd boys were in perpetual lockdown, their “town privileges” limited to special events and Sunday churchgoing; school officials channeled the boys’ energies into Saturday night skits and recitals, and one of the big Saturday night events was the annual costume party and variety show for Halloween.

  That weekend, a star was born. The new boy worked up a number of routines, in one memorably spoofing Tennyson (“Do you see those gracious meadows?” “No, but I do see the Noble Hills”), but it was his magic act that wowed everyone. Dressed like Sherlock Holmes, complete with deerstalker cap and flowing cape, Orson strode onstage and chewed the scenery, staring disapprovingly through his reading glasses at Sherman Perlman, the upperclassman recruited as his Watson, while he ran through his repertoire of illusions like a young Thurston.

  “A terrific show,” Hill recalled years later, so much so that even the glitches were memorable. “The miniature building that [Orson] caused to materialize from beneath a handkerchief wasn’t aflame,” Barbara Leaming wrote. Though the trick had fizzled, “Orson’s rapid-fire inventive banter, delivered in stentorian tones and with much accompanying choregraphy, almost entirely obscured what had really happened.” Skipper was impressed.

  Roger Hill may have been locally famous for promoting basketball, but he harbored a secret: he didn’t really care that much for the sport—or for organized sports of any kind. He felt like a fraud as both an athletic director and an educator, having left college for his advertising job without even graduating. His proudest achievements were writing Boneyard Babblings, a collection of poems depicting undergraduate life, and serving as the editor of his university literary magazine. He modeled himself after a fellow staffer at the magazine, writer Samson Raphaelson, whose first play, The Jazz Singer, had debuted on Broadway in the fall of 1925.

  Instead of graduating, Hill had married a university woman from Chicago, Hortense Gettys, and taken a sensible job writing advertising copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog in Chicago. His experience at “Monkey Ward’s,” as it was called, enhanced his natural skills as a born promoter but made him feel like a traitor to his artistic soul. Skipper had enjoyed music and theater from boyhood, when his mother’s brother, Joseph Morgan Rogers, an author and a critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, often took him to operas and symphonies while visiting Chicago. To coax Hill back to Todd, his father put the school’s drama and entertainment programming under his aegis.

  Orson always needed collaborators—co-conspirators—in his artistic endeavors. He needed them more than he needed money or even, arguably, an audience. And he had a positive genius for finding the right partners for his plans. Once Orson realized that Skipper was a reluctant athletic director, their kinship was sealed.

  Roger Hill presided over Todd’s elaborate dramatics program, which included several tiers based on age and class, as well as two all-school clubs—the Slap Stick Club, and the Paint and Powder Club—that shared responsibility for producing shows on Saturday nights. By 1926, the upper-grade Todd Troupers were staging five or six full-length all-school plays each year under Hill, who wrote many of these plays and directed all of them. After he was won over by Orson’s Halloween show, Skipper promoted the young man to a leading role in the school’s traditional Christmas pageant—playing a most unlikely Virgin Mary.

  The school went all out for its shows, whatever the tier. A few years later, Orson contributed a description of the school’s dramatic offerings for the Todd catalog. “The scenery is in every case original, being designed and built and painted by the boys,” he wrote. “The make-ups are also done by the boys. Our stage is completely equipped. The lighting is most modern with all the circuits on dimmers, and a plaster back wall similar to the Goodman’s [Goodman Theatre’s] in Chicago makes possible very realistic and stunning outdoor effects.”

  With so much to supervise, Skipper enlisted his wife, Hortense, as his lieutenant. And a former child prodigy, Carl Hendrickson, ran the school orchestra and chorus, composing music for the full-length “foolishments” that dominated the theatrical schedule when Orson arrived at the school. Skipper had discovered the handsome Swede at the Chicago Theatre on State and Lake in 1923, leading the orchestra behind the silent pictures and variety acts. After inveigling Hendrickson to Todd, Hill teamed up with him to create a number of original revues for the school, with the boys dressed up as ingenues, grandes dames, and chorus girls. There was a vogue for lighthearted drag shows in prep schools and colleges. Hill had written one such revue in college, and lyrics for another; he and Hendrickson even sold a few of the Todd foolishments to national agencies for packaging to Kiwanis and Rotary clubs.

  Orson appeared in at least three of the Todd Troupers’ foolishments in 1926–1927: Around the World, Finesse the Queen, and It Won’t Be Long Now. He loved to dance and sing, even if that wasn’t his forte, and he loved the songs with their silly lyrics. Years later, while directing his first picture in Hollywood, Welles wrote to Hill to urge him to watch a certain dance scene in Citizen Kane for proof that his Charleston steps from Around the World were remembered.

  The spring extravaganza, Finesse the Queen, a three-act play with fifteen musical numbers, was a love story between a prince and a commoner set in mythical Gondolivia. By now Orson had a singing and speaking role; he was billed as detective “William J. Spurns, who has a clew.” (He never forgot the Finesse songs either, and half a century later, on the set of one of his last, uncompleted films, “The Other Side of the Wind,” Welles repeatedly regaled cast and crew with snatches: “Everybody loves the fellow who is smiling,” he sang. “Ah Gondolivia, Gondolivia, land of melody!”)

  His first roommate, John Dexter, was the “leading lady” in Finesse, and young Orson used his makeup expertise to give his friend an air of femininity. “When he finished with me, he kissed me, said he couldn’t help it, but I turned out so good,” recalled Dexter. “He had a crush on me every time we did that show.” A photograph survives of eleven-year-old Orson, still bantam-size, beaming up at the bigger, taller Dexter.

  By the time It Won’t Be Long was produced, Roger Hill knew he could count on Orson, who was cast as one of six leads—the hero’s best friend, “with troubles of his own,” according to the program. Offstage,
the sixth-grader was making himself just as indispensable, increasingly taking charge of lighting, sets, makeup, and costumes for the school’s many varied programs.

  The Todd Troupers toured the foolishments to nearby prep schools and small colleges, and the experience sharpened their skills. Music director Carl Hendrickson was a severe taskmaster who insisted on precise timing and cues, but he was also fantastically resourceful—not unlike composer Bernard Herrmann, with whom Orson would forge an alliance a decade later. Skipper Hill was always unflappable in a crisis, a tolerant overseer—his wife, Hortense, less so. “Horty” famously corrected Orson during the spring tour of It Won’t Be Long, scolding him for laying on his own greasepaint a bit thick. “Just be still and let me do the makeup,” she told Orson firmly. “No doubt my fascination, if not obsession, with the art of make-up is an effort to, in some small measure, gain Hort’s begrudging approval,” Welles told Skipper years later.

  Also, in the spring, Dick Welles took Orson and Dr. Maurice Bernstein on another trip to New York for a round of concerts, plays, museums, and motion pictures. Dr. Bernstein and Orson traveled on to New Orleans, sailing from there to Havana and other points in the Caribbean. Dick was called back to Chicago for an unhappy reason: to prepare for a court case against his older son, Richard.