I listened to Orson … just home from school, talk. He seems to me to be a precocious child, very gifted in his use of words and interested in art. I can’t say he is a very lovable child, but it is no doubt because he has been made so much over that he is too desirous of being the center of attention and has that know-it-all attitude. He’s quite interesting, tho, for it’s my first experience with anyone of the kind. Mr. [Dick] Welles just dotes on him, calls him “lamb.” He is so crazy about him that it’s almost pitiful.
The next day, she wrote:
Orson … & I have just come in from a delightful walk. I think it is about 9 [o’clock]. Orson is a great boy—such a complex [mind]. He uses the longest words and talks about things that are most unusual for a boy so young—religion, the universe, etc. He has a great sense of humor, however, which offsets some of this peculiarity, & I like him much better than when we first met. He says even psychologists haven’t been able to figure him out. …
How my father loved the idea that no one could figure him out; yet it is not so difficult to peer through the fog of “myth and obfuscation” and catch a glimpse of the boy torn between the doting father who called him “lamb” and the wily doctor who called him “Pookles.” A boy already troubled by insomnia, who spent a portion of every night measuring how alone in the world he was: his mother dead; his father and Dadda fighting for possession of him but incapable of understanding him; his older brother, Richard, drifting around somewhere, continuing to disappoint his elders.
“That left the burden of achievement on me,” my father remembered, “and I couldn’t let them down, you see. My parents were larger than life to me, wonderful, mythical, almost fantastical creatures, and more than anything I wanted to please them …”
“But your mother was dead,” I reminded him.
“They were both dead by the time I was fifteen,” he said, “but that didn’t change anything, not at all, because the wish to please them has never left me.” Lighting a cigar, he puffed on it thoughtfully, while we shared a moment of silence and, I felt, a rare moment of truth.
“EVERY SCHOOL VACATION, I’d get these pathetic calls from Orson’s dad, begging me to let his kid spend it with him,” Skipper remembered. “Then Doctor’d call me in a tizzy and give me an earful about Dick Welles’s drinking and womanizing and what a bad influence he was on the boy.” Skipper shook his head with a rueful laugh. “Doctor wanted Orson to spend all his vacations with him and see pratically nothing of his father. The tug-of-war between those two made it really tough on the poor kid.”
“Where did my father want to spend his vacations?”
“With his dad, of course. He adored him.”
“So what did you and Granny do?”
Orson Welles at fourteen.
“Well, Horty and I couldn’t prevent Orson from seeing his father, but we did swing the contest in Doctor’s favor. We believed he was a better influence, you see.” Granny and Skipper were also impressed by Doctor’s new wife, Edith Mason, an opera singer well known in her day.
The Hills might have seen the situation differently had they been privy to Doctor’s predilection for creating domestic triangles. I learned from my father that during one school vacation spent in Edith Mason’s apartment in Chicago, he found himself living not just with Dadda and the glamorous Edith but with her former husband, the Italian conductor Giorgio Polacco, and their daughter Graziella, all of whom were yelling at one another in several languages. “I couldn’t wait to get back to my lonely room at Todd,” he recalled with his wheezy laugh. “It was only at Todd that I could be my own person.”
He went on to confide in me that much as his father and Dadda despised each other, they were united in their disapproval of the theater as a career. “God forbid that I should become an actor!” he boomed. “My father wanted me to go into business or high finance, and Dadda wanted me to become a musician like my mother.”
“And you didn’t want to go in either of those directions.”
“You bet I didn’t!” A burst of laughter. “I was passionate about the theater—putting on plays was all I ever wanted to do with my life — and Skipper, God bless him, was the only one of my elders who encouraged my theatrical ambitions. That’s why they call him my mentor, you know.” (“Hell, I was never his mentor,” Skipper would scoff in his old age. “There was nothing I could teach Orson about acting or the theater that he didn’t already know.”)
Yet as time went on, Todd was not always the refuge young Orson needed it to be. His father began appearing on campus unannounced and invariably drunk. “Sometimes Orson was so embarrassed, he hid in his room,” Skipper remembered. “It got to where Dick Welles was drunk pretty near all the time — the main reason Horty and I didn’t think Orson should stay with him. After that hotel burned down, Horty was convinced Orson put his life in danger every time he stayed with him. Well, you know what a mother hen Horty is …”
Skipper was referring to the Sheffield Hotel, which my grandfather Welles ran for a time in Grand Detour, Illinois. It had burned to the ground in May of 1928, soon after my father turned thirteen. There are conflicting reports about the fire. The most colorful one occurs in a memoir my father began toward the end of his life at Skipper’s urging, only to abandon it after a handful of pages. (“I hate writing about myself,” he confided to me at the time. “It’s so difficult. I’d much rather write about all the fascinating people I have known.”)
In the surviving fragment, eventually published in a 1983 issue of Paris Vogue that featured Orson Welles, he is up to his old trick of scattering a few shards of truth among the newly polished myths. And how he leads us on a merry dance as we try to catch him out! He himself had missed the fire, he tells us, having been packed off to boarding school “for the last of my three years of formal education.” But Father Orson, you were only thirteen when the hotel caught fire. You had three more years ahead of you at Todd before you would graduate at sixteen, remember? Never mind. He describes the scene as though it had unrolled before his eyes, as though he were leaning forward in his director’s chair, hunched on the edge of the seat, the air around him echoing his roar of “Action!” Look! The gracious old hotel has just caught fire. Smoke is billowing out of windows and doorways. Upper floors begin to teeter and crumble. Monstrous flames lick the night sky like the yellow tongues of dragons. The cold intensifies the harsh light and the “Christmassy fall of snow.” Christmas in May, Father Orson? Wait! Here comes Dick Welles, “the suspected arsonist,” who looks so much like Errol Flynn that he probably is. He is staggering out of the flames, wearing only a nightshirt. In one hand he carries a parrot cage; in the other, a hand-tinted photograph of “a lady in pink tights,” a former sweetheart named Trixi Friganza. Close-up of the empty parrot cage. Cut!
Two years after the fire, his father took Orson to China on an ocean liner. They had not been at sea very long before the fifteen-year-old boy realized that his father was in an advanced stage of alcoholism. Dick stayed in his cabin, either too ill or too drunk to function, leaving his son to fend for himself. Touchingly, Orson wrote the Hills that he wished he could “find a drink that wouldn’t make him sick.” While he took no moral position about his father’s drinking, it wasn’t easy to travel with a man so drunk that at one point he lost his pants in public.
The Hills maintained that the trip was “pretty much a disaster from start to finish,” but my father told me he did not agree. “That trip introduced me to the exotic theater arts of the Far East, and I can’t tell you what a strong impression they made on me at the time.” When he hadn’t been looking after his father, he had been going to the Chinese opera and every other theatrical entertainment he could find. “I’ll never forget the elaborate costumes, the masks, the revolving stages …” It had been a crash course for him in brilliant stage tricks and exotic effects.
On his return, the Hills made him promise he would not see his father again, unless, by some miracle, Dick Welles reformed. “So I promised,” m
y father recalled, “not because I agreed with them—I didn’t think my father’s drinking was a terrible thing—but because I wanted to please them.”
On December 28, 1930, Dick Welles died alone in a Chicago hotel at the age of fifty-eight. Orson had stayed away from his father during the half year that had elapsed since their return from China. Now he blamed the Hills for exacting such a promise and blamed himself for ignoring his father’s entreaties to come and see him. “If I’d gone to see him, he might still be alive,” he reproached Skipper. It did no good to point out that the causes of death listed on Dick Welles’s death certificate, ironically signed by his arch rival, Maurice Bernstein, did not include filial neglect.
DICK WELLES’S WILL stipulated that Orson choose a legal guardian who would be in charge of him and his inheritance until he came of age. My father immediately approached Skipper, never dreaming the older man would refuse. (“I wasn’t even tempted,” Skipper confided in me. “I had enough on my hands already.”) Although it took some doing, Skipper persuaded Orson to make Maurice Bernstein his guardian, pointing out that “it would break his heart” if he didn’t. He made the boy swear he would never let Doctor know he hadn’t been his first choice.
My father’s sixteenth summer was a turning point in his life. He graduated from Todd, which in those days did not go beyond tenth grade, and then he was in limbo. Doctor was adamantly opposed to his having anything to do with the theater and determined to send him to Harvard or Yale as soon as he could be admitted. Why not spend the summer in a college preparatory school, he suggested? That was the last thing the teenager wanted to do since college held no appeal for him. He enrolled instead in painting classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. While he had a flair for art, particularly the quick, humorous sketch or watercolor, he was far more interested in finding work as an actor or painting scenery for a summer stock company. He placed several advertisements in the Chicago papers and made the rounds of theatrical agencies, but nothing came of it.
Meanwhile, the aspiring young actor was learning to his dismay that he had saddled himself with a wily, tightfisted guardian. Dadda Bernstein made his Pookles plead for every dollar, nor did he spare a penny for Orson’s older brother, Richard, who had been locked up the year before in the state asylum in Kankakee, Illinois. One of Dick Welles’s last acts had been to commit Richard at the age of twenty-four for reasons that have never been clear.
“Why did they put your brother in a nuthouse?” I once had the temerity to ask my father, bringing a reproving scowl to his face.
“It would behoove you, Christopher, out of respect for your unfortunate uncle to call it an asylum.” Subject closed.
However tightfisted Doctor may have been with my father, he had no compunction about using his ward’s money to build a lavish home in the leafy town of Ravinia just outside Chicago. The house was for Pookles, he maintained as he moved in his new lady love, Hazel Moore, and her husband Ned, creating yet another domestic triangle. Now that Pookles had a real “home,” why was he avoiding it? Doctor professed to be hurt and offended when Pookles preferred his old room at Todd which Skipper had let him keep. Todd would remain my father’s base of operations for several years.
During the summer, though, Skipper had little time for him, and in the end young Orson was forced to stay with his guardian’s ménage in Ravinia. “It was not a happy feeling to be living in a house furnished mainly with the belongings of my late mother,” he recalled to me. In fact, the threesome in Ravinia made him as uncomfortable as he had been during the screaming matches in Edith Mason’s apartment. “But Ravinia was even worse,” he told me, “because I felt the adults were all against me.”
To add to my father’s misery, the ragweed was rampant that summer and he was suffering from hay fever and asthma. It became clear to everyone that he could not stay much longer in Ravinia. One torpid night, the subject of what he should do for the rest of the summer was hotly debated, and as my father later wrote Skipper, “Dadda arrived at a momentous decision.” It was agreed that Orson should go on a sketching tour of Ireland and Scotland. “Going abroad alone is not quite as unthinkable as joining the theater.”
Little did Dadda know that in allowing his beloved Pookles to go to Ireland that summer of 1931, he was also allowing the unthinkable to happen. It was in Dublin’s Gate Theatre that Orson Welles, at the age of sixteen, made his professional stage debut. And never looked back.
4
My Father Lost and Found
“I DON’T WANT TO leave you, Granny,” I told her through helpless tears, my arms tightly wound around her waist. “Why do I have to live in Rome with Mommy and her new husband? I’m sure they don’t want me. I’m sure if you ask Mommy, she’ll say—”
“Now, Chrissie, you know your mother loves you and wants you to live with her—”
“No, she doesn’t, Granny. She doesn’t!”
“There, there, dear, don’t get yourself worked up. Just think, you and Orson will be living in the same city again—”
“Daddy’s living in Rome?”
“Well, of course he is. You knew that.”
“Will I get to see him, Granny?”
“Of course you will, dear. There now, dry your eyes. There aren’t many little girls who get to fly to Rome all by themselves on a great big airplane—”
Summer was ending in 1949 when, at the age of eleven, I was put on the plane to Rome with my new passport securely pinned to my undershirt. All the way across the Atlantic, I made up fantastic stories about my life, which I poured into the indulgent ear of the kindly, gray-haired gentleman sitting next to me. He looked at me with growing amazement until, exhausted by my performance, I fell asleep.
En route to Naples, the plane touched down briefly in Rome. When I did not get off with the other disembarking passengers, my frantic mother talked the sympathetic Italian officials into allowing her to board the plane. She found me sound asleep in my seat. It seems my seat companion gave her such an astonished look that when we were out of the airport, she demanded, “What on earth did you tell that man, Chrissie? I won’t have you making up stories about me to strangers.” I knew it was pointless to explain that my “stories” weren’t about her at all.
My first week in Rome passed in a daze. I could not yet believe I had left behind me, like a room abruptly locked in my absence, the bucolic town of Woodstock, Illinois—the town my father once likened to “a wax flower under a bell of glass in the paisley and gingham county of McHenry.” Surely I would go back there soon and live again among people who thought well of me—the Hills, their children and grandchildren, the many friends I had made at Todd among the faculty and their children. The conviction that my true home lay among decent, caring folk in small-town America kept me going during the early bewilderment of Rome.
What disconcerted me at first was not the change of locale—the shift from the flat farmlands of Illinois to a lively metropolis filled with history, monuments, and deafening traffic. It was my anxiety about my new stepfather, Major Jack Pringle, and whether or not we were going to get along. When I wasn’t worrying about that, I found it exciting to be in Rome. I could see how grand and beautiful it was, unlike anything I had known. We were living in the heart of the city on the Via del Corso, just steps away from the Piazza Venezia. Home was now an elegant second-floor apartment with a ceiling that my mother said belonged in a Renaissance palazzo and looked as though it had been painted by Raphael. In the early morning while I sat alone in the dining room, sipping hot chocolate with steamed milk, I stared dreamily upward at the baby angels flying through rosy clouds and wished hard that I might join them. The frescoes had been discovered by the previous tenants when their maid, dusting for cobwebs, had poked a hole through the false ceiling with her broom, and there they were, as fresh as the day they were painted.
After breakfast I often accompanied Rosina, the woman who cooked and cleaned for us, to the open-air market within walking distance of our apartment. She was stouter
than Granny and had a front tooth missing, which did not stop her from beaming at me at every opportunity, and she dressed in black from her head scarf down to her scuffed, lace-up shoes. Although she spoke not a word of English, somehow we communicated with smiles and body language. It was at the noisy, bustling market that I learned my first words of Italian—pesce (fish), peperoni (green peppers), pomodori (tomatoes), and whatever else Rosina was buying that day. How I loved walking through the market, lugging a large, open wicker basket filled with our purchases, admiring the piles of apples or heads of lettuce heaped on the stands, all the vibrant colors, the warring smells of fish and cheese and freshly baked bread. Around me shoppers were haggling at the top of their voices, vendors were yelling back and throwing their hands in the air, then the shoppers edging toward the next stall, the vendors erupting again in a torrent of emotion, and all this commotion over a kilo of onions or a fat wedge of parmesan cheese.
I could enjoy living in Rome, I thought, if only I could live here with Rosina instead of my new stepfather. Many years would pass before I could finally acknowledge his considerable intelligence and charm, but even on our first encounter, I saw how attractive he was, without being handsome. Slim, dark-haired, with a trim mustache and a military bearing, he was an elegant dresser verging on being a dandy, an upper-class Englishman who aped the prejudices of his class and yet was something of a maverick. Firmly believing women were inferior, he nonetheless treated them with the utmost gallantry. “When Jackie lights my cigarette,” my mother liked to say, “I feel like I’m a member of the British aristocracy.”
My stepfather was a World War Two hero renowned for his six daring escapes from high-security prisons, an accomplished horseman, a crack polo player, and a gifted linguist. While a prisoner of war, he had taught himself Italian, German, Spanish, and French, all of which he spoke fluently. There was much to admire and respect about the man, but I was not his contemporary, nor was I meeting him at a cocktail party when he could have lit my cigarette. Life had cast him as my stepfather, a role for which he had neither the aptitude nor the desire. When Charlie Lederer had married my mother, he had not seen me as a liability, but Jack Pringle’s one thought about me was how to get rid of me so he could have my mother to himself.
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