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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Orson’s brother, Richard, was twenty-five at the time of his father’s death, and no longer required a guardian. With Richard institutionalized at Kankakee, however, Bernstein also became the financial executor of his one-seventh share of the estate. It would be Bernstein’s job to dole out moneys for support and necessities for Richard until he was released from Kankakee. The remainder of his one-seventh would be paid out to Richard when he turned thirty-five, according to the will.

  After allowances as warranted for “support, maintenance and education” of his younger son, the remaining six-sevenths “principal and reserve” of Dick Welles’s fortune was to be held in trust for Orson “until he shall have reached the age of twenty-five years.” As Charles Higham pointed out in his biography of Welles, “The proviso that this inheritance was to be held in trust until Orson’s twenty-fifth birthday was echoed, even to the age, in the discussion of the legacy of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane.”

  Dr. Bernstein quickly drew on the estate funds to purchase a larger house on Groveland Avenue in Highland Park, near the Ravinia grounds, ostensibly to carve out extra living space there for his new ward. Two thousand dollars was set aside for Orson’s college tuition. Especially later in life, after souring on his guardian, Welles wondered why Bernstein needed such a big house, and how much of his stipulated inheritance ever reached his pockets. Even in flush times, however—perhaps especially then—Orson’s pockets were riddled with holes.

  Many tenth-grade Todd School graduates transferred to other elite academies for two more years of high school. Some went straight on to college, or internships. But at Closing Day ceremonies, the school’s most illustrious graduate was undecided about his plans.

  Roger Hill’s opinion was that Orson was a good candidate for an Ivy League university. The headmaster thought his prize pupil should pursue an artistic career that might embrace acting, painting, and writing. Encouraged by Hill and Bernstein, Orson applied to several colleges, including Harvard. Skipper—not because he thought college was the best thing for Orson, he said later, but because he felt the boy should get away from Chicago—dutifully wrote reference letters.

  Harvard reportedly offered a scholarship to its famous “47 Workshop” in playwriting, but Hill thought Orson should go somewhere else for a broader education in the liberal arts. Late in the summer, the headmaster wrote to Clyde Tull at Cornell College. Tull, a professor of English, was a noted mentor for young talent and invited poets such as Carl Sandburg to the midwestern campus as artists in residence. Hill urged him to consider Orson, insisting that the boy was “really doing post graduate work with us last year . . . we can very honestly give him credit for three years high school work, work done in the class room with the proper number of hours. Of course, actually his education in all cultural subjects is now beyond that of the ordinary college graduate.”

  Although this letter stated that Orson was “talented to the point of genius,” the headmaster confessed he had one flaw: “I rather doubt if he could pass a college board examination in Algebra, although he passed this course with us. He is rather weak in mathematics.”

  Unenthusiastic about college, Orson opted to postpone any decisions about higher education while he spent the summer on the stage. In May, the Woodstock Daily Sentinel reported that he had signed up with a professional summer stock company in Michigan. Roger Hill operated a Todd School sideline, a summer camp on Portage Lake near Onekama, Michigan, called Camp Tosebo (TOdd SEminary for BOys). Orson had visited Camp Tosebo in prior summers, and thought there might be an opening for him in a nearby summer theater. Yet this opportunity fizzled, and he then took the bold step of advertising in the “At Liberty” section of Billboard, a trade paper for the music and entertainment industry:

  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, expertise, 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.

  The response was underwhelming.

  Orson met with actor-manager Fritz Leiber and asked to join Leiber’s Shakespearean company. Leiber was polite, but he told Orson he couldn’t promise anything; his troupe was at liberty until the fall, when the members would start preparing their next season. Orson then placed a second, more desperate advertisement in Billboard: “I will invest moderate amount of cash and my own services as Heavy, Character and Juvenile in good summer stock or repertory proposition.” Still no takers.

  After Closing Day, a disconsolate Orson moved in with Dr. Bernstein in the Chicago apartment. The doctor urged him to do something constructive with his time while he sifted through realistic long-term options. Orson consented to private classes with the Russian scenic designer Boris Anisfeld, now in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. In June, Anisfeld took Orson “under his wing,” recalled Roger Hill, encouraging the young man “to live with him this winter and study art.”

  Between Art Institute tutorials, Orson lunched with the usual gentlemen at the Tavern Club. The big topic of conversation was the demise of the Goodman Theatre. The board had cashiered its founder, Thomas Wood Stevens, in the summer of 1930. Some members of the original company had quit, including the revered Whitford Kane, but a temporary director had hired replacements and the troupe had completed a respectable season intended to be more commercial. Still, the Goodman board felt that public support was insufficient, and in June 1931 the board announced that the professional company was being jettisoned for the foreseeable future in favor of “student productions.”

  Everyone was upset. For six years the Goodman Theatre experiment had been the pride and pinnacle of Chicago stage culture. No one was angrier than Ashton Stevens, who had extolled the Goodman in his column as the embodiment of what a small theater company should strive to be. Stevens had divorced his first wife and married a Goodman actress, Katherine Krug, who had stayed on to play several leads with the short-lived new repertory ensemble in 1930–1931.

  Meanwhile, in the Chicago Tribune, columnist Fanny Butcher, the “Armchair Playgoer,” devoted several admiring pieces to the Gate Theatre of Dublin, Ireland, a new company that followed the Goodman formula in building a classical as well as an experimental repertory. Together with the Abbey Theatre, the emergence of the Gate secured Dublin’s place as the new center of the English-language theater world, Butcher wrote.

  In July, after Orson’s tutorials with Boris Anisfeld ended, he and Dr. Bernstein returned to Highland Park for a stellar summer at Ravinia. That season brought Queena Mario, Lucrezia Bori, Mario Chamlee, Fred Vogel, and a host of other performers in no fewer than thirty-four operas. Peter Ibbetson, based on George du Maurier’s novel, was the consensus hit. As usual Orson attended all the operas and symphony performances and joined the dinner parties, many of them hosted by Dr. Bernstein or the Ned Moores, but his mood was subdued. He begged off his old column for the Highland Park News, instead sitting in the backyard, sketching, painting, and jotting notes for a play he thought he might produce himself—somewhere, sometime.

  He welcomed visits from the drama columnist Ashton Stevens and his wife, Katherine Krug, newly unemployed after the demise of the Goodman professional company. Krug was charming and vivacious, and especially friendly to Orson, who was much closer in age to her than her own husband. Their rapport endeared the young man to Stevens, whose reluctance to give Orson career advice was itself a kind of advice, implying that Orson should follow his own instincts.

  But Orson spent most of his time in Ravinia alone, with no close companions and no concrete objectives. Dr. Bernstein urged him to have a fallback plan: a wage-earning job, college enrollment, even further painting studies with Anisfeld—anything to occupy his time. Ned and Hazel Moore always sided with his guardian. Roger Hill was off at Camp Tosebo, purposely incommunicado.

  To Orson, it seemed a
s though all the members of his extended surrogate family were conspiring to persuade him to go to college, the option that interested him less and less. In mid-August, he and Dr. Bernstein had a heated argument over his apparent stubbornness and stagnancy.

  “Three days of particularly vicious domestic war-fare,” Orson reported to Skipper in a letter, “during which time I tried vainly to get in touch with you, ended in a roundtable conference which found all the principal powers as determined as ever. Dadda had thought the matter over and decided he could not permit my having ought to do with the diseased and despicable theatre. [Everyone else] was uniformly and maddeningly derisive. My head remained bloody but unbowed, and my nose, thanks to the thoughtful blooming of some neighboring clover (which I assured the enemy was ragweed!) began to sniffle hay-feverishly, and the household was illusioned into the realization that something had to be done.”

  Scrambling for a solution, Orson had a sudden brainstorm. Drawing on his college fund, he proposed a walking and painting tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. He would begin in Ireland, sketching the glorious landscape, and by fall wend his way inexpensively to Dublin, where he promised to apply to Trinity College. It was his inheritance after all, he argued, and surely both his arts-minded mother and his travel-loving father would have approved. He vowed to write home regularly, and to keep a journal, which would prove to his guardian that he was making good use of his father’s money. The journal could serve as the basis of a magazine article later on, he suggested, or even an autobiography.

  It didn’t take the doctor very long to respond. Orson, bored and brooding, had been driving him crazy. “Dadda arrived at a momentous decision,” Orson wrote, “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 . . .

  “Four days later I was in New York!” On the morning of August 13, he made his way to the West Twentieth Street docks and boarded a White Star liner bound for Galway.

  CHAPTER 7

  1931–1932

  Travels in Ireland

  Crossing the Atlantic took ten days to two weeks, depending on weather conditions. Though he was booked in second class, Orson traveled with a cushion of several hundred dollars drawn from his inheritance and borrowed at the last minute from every Chicago friend and acquaintance he could corner. Stockbroker Orson “Ort” Wells, who had laid eyes on him once when he was a baby, saw him again now when Orson stopped by to ask for a $5 loan for his Irish trip. “I never have seen him since,” Wells complained good-naturedly to George Ade several years later.

  The shipboard days were long, and he had plenty of books to while away the hours: plays by Synge and O’Casey, the verse and fairy tales of James Stephens, Pádraic Ó Conaire’s Field and Fair: Travels with a Donkey in Ireland. But staring at the waves made him eager for action. “A few months of walking and painting in Ireland and Scotland,” Orson wrote to Roger Hill, “and then on to England where there are schools—and theatres!!!!!!”

  He composed expansive letters to Roger and Hortense Hill and to Dr. Maurice Bernstein, sometimes writing one household a letter and then copying it, with slight variations, for the other. The recipients typed up the letters and passed them around so that other interested parties—the Ned Moores, Ashton and Katherine Krug Stevens—were kept apprised of Orson’s adventures.

  “I am unspeakabl[y] lonesome for Todd—which is just another way of spelling your name,” Orson wrote to Skipper after arriving in Ireland. “You know, I think, of my fondness for you and Mrs. Hill. It is a love too great to speak of or describe.”

  He left the ship impulsively at the first port of call: the city of Galway, in the province of Connacht, the largest population center on Ireland’s west coast. At first he had planned to continue to the other side of the island and the sea town of Cobh in Cork Harbour, but he was too excited to stay on board. He felt like Columbus stepping ashore to turn a new page of history.

  “I wish I could describe that moment,” Orson wrote to his guardian, going on to describe it quite well, invoking various Irish clichés to poke fun at them. The men and women were streaming joyously down the gangplank, he wrote, dropping to their knees, weeping, kissing the earth, and singing “The Wearing of the Green.” “People separated for years were locking and unlocking in the intricacies of an Irish jig,” Orson wrote. He conjured a cinematic montage of the occasion, complete with a close-up: “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, and it’s God’s own country.’ ” Hearing himself murmuring the same phrase, the young American grabbed his luggage and fled the boat without settling his accounts.

  “I looked out over the rolling indigo sea to the misty mountains, blue and gold at the horizon,” he wrote, and felt at peace.

  Galway thrilled him. “Surprise 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 of Ireland—has loomed so unexpectedly—so breathtakingly,” he told his guardian in another letter.

  After spending three or four days in picturesque Galway, he chucked his oil paints into a haversack and started down the road toward Clifden, a seaside town about fifty miles to the north and west, the largest town in the province of Connemara. “Two miles revealed to me the impossibility of combining art, hiking, and pleasure,” Orson recounted in another letter to folks in Chicago, “and the third proved too much on the haversack. With a despairing scream it vomited forth my pigments and succumbed to total physical collapse.”

  He retreated into a nearby pub for a pitcher of warm Guinness. Spying a donkey cart, “the commonest sight in Ireland,” he felt inspired, and jumping up, offered to purchase the cart from its owner. He was told in no uncertain terms that “everything in the donkey and donkey-cart line had been bought up for use in the haying and gathering of new turf to follow for the next two months.” Undeterred, Orson asked for directions to a local shop, McDonogh and Sons, which crafted new donkey carts for sale. By a happy coincidence, Mr. McDonogh, the shop owner, was a relative of Pádraic Ó Conaire, the Galway-born Gaelic-language writer who had died a few years earlier—and whose travel memoir Orson had absorbed during the crossing. McDonogh, in turn, introduced Orson to the writer’s brother, a clay-pipe-smoking man named Isaac Conroy.

  When Orson said he wished to buy a donkey cart and roam the west of Ireland, painting the countryside in all its splendor, “an adventure-loving, romance-loving, very Irish light” came into the eyes of McDonogh and Conroy, and the two men conveyed him by Chrysler to Galway Racecourse, where he was able to haggle his way into purchasing an excellent donkey, “a three year old Spanish lady with original ideas, and a beauty of face and figure”; and a suitable used cart, “a magnificent creation of blue and orange.”

  Soon another Ó Conaire relative materialized—Michael, a cousin of Isaac—and the four men became fast friends. “I lived in their houses, danced with their daughters, and swam with their sons,” Orson wrote home.

  He christened his new donkey Sidheoghe, or Sheeog, which was “delightful Gaelic for a certain specie of fairy,” recounted Orson. The Galway citizenry turned out “in thousands for the purposes of instructing Sheeog and myself (both novices in the mysteries of cart driving and pulling),” and one local blacksmith even shod the donkey free of charge. Before Orson could leave, however, horse fever descended on the city in the form of the annual Galway Races, which meant several days of “carousing, fun-making, fighting, gambling, drunkenness, and gaiety of every conceivable description.”

  The president of the Irish Free State, W. T. Cosgrave, a veteran of the Easter Rising of 1916, arrived to officiate at the races, lodging with the McDonoghs along with the young American. “We grew very friendly,” Orson wrote to Dr. Bernstein. “He is a charming, quiet and extremely intelligent man.” (To Hill, he
described Cosgrave somewhat differently, as “a severe, puritan-looking figure.”) Orson took Cosgrave for a ride in his donkey cart and mused about advertising it as “The Cart That Carried the President.” Cosgrave etched “a good-luck sun (for good weather) rather like this [Orson drew a smiley sun] on the side” of his cart, but he mused in his letter, “I don’t suppose I’d ever get [anyone] to believe he did it.”

  Finally, Orson tore himself away from the dream of Galway, promising to save his stories for his return—“much shall be recounted at Ravinia firesides.” He started down the winding roads to Clifden. (“The roads are literally ribbons,” he wrote, “six inches of gravel on an endless peat bog. When autos pass over them they shake and sink under their weight.”) Exploring the west coast, he told tales of climbing mountains, escaping quagmires, and even spending a week or so tethered to a band of Travellers (Gypsies).

  He often camped on the roadside at night, feeding Sheeog on the mountain grass and cooking over a turf fire before curling up to sleep under his cart. “There were nights too spent in the cottages,” young Orson wrote home, and “most of my daytime meals were eaten among the people.” Sometimes he joined in “weddings, wakes, and matchmakings.” He did a fair amount of painting on the road, with unsatisfying results: “Ten terrible landscapes,” six of which were “hideous abortions,” he reported. Four of them “paid for lodgings” and now hung in mountain dwellings; the others were ruined by weather and “diversions.” He despaired of capturing the island’s beauty in oils. “Ireland is really a water-color country,” he wrote, “and I have learned to my sorrow that whatever craftsmanship I can lay claim to, lies only in the channels of still-life, composition, design and portraits. . . . The almost unearthly quality of the countryside and the mountains in the West and North completely stumped me.”