Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  The town was not without its amiable eccentricities. The fine building which dominates the town had been the Grand Detour Methodist Episcopal Building until the man who built it – disgusted with the low attendances of his fellow churchgoers – converted it into a ballroom. In the twenties, the Grand Detour Players staged plays there; local legend has it that Orson took part. It’s hard to see how he could have failed to, though his relations with the community were not of the best. He seemed to regard them as rural know-nothings, and took pleasure in proving his superior smartness. ‘Do you want to see the stars?’14 he asked young Bruno Catalina, (now running the Grand Detour bar). On receipt of a cent, he handed the boy a painted tube (with soot on the eye-piece, naturally); as the boy screwed his eyes up, Welles kicked him in the pants. ‘Now you can see the stars!’ he gloated. This heartless scene is played out in a million playgrounds around the world, but it did nothing to endear the Grand Detourians to him. They found him to be a loner, and taunted him: ‘Georgie, Porgie, Pudding and Pie.’ Now they remember him as an oddity: curiously attired by his mother in velvet knee-breeches, dressing up all day long, eating, reciting, and showing off the smattering of foreign words that his mother had taught him (allegro con brio, and so on, no doubt).

  It’s a sad image, but then childhood, for Welles, as he repeated again and again in later life, was ‘a prison’, ‘a pestilential handicap15 I determined to cure myself of’. He vouchsafed Peter Bogdanovich a very touching glimpse of himself in Grand Detour: ‘There was a country store that had above it a ballroom with an old dance floor with springs in it, so that folks would feel light on their feet. When I was little, nobody had danced up there for many years, but I used to sneak up at night and dance by moonlight with the dust rising from the floor …’16 Years later he remembered Grand Detour as a lost paradise, but from all the evidence it was as complicated an experience as anything else in his young life, with his always exigent mother, his father slipping away, both actually and onto-logically, and his brother … what do we know of his brother? Nothing at all: an unperson, tolerated, fed, clothed, but seemingly allowed no affirmation – never encouraged, never admired, never enjoyed. No praise for him, no laughter; no plans and no hopes. At some unspecified point, he was expelled from the Todd School, but there is no mention of how or why. One of the strict rules of that academy – the downside of the rule outlawing locks – was that theft was punished with instant dismissal. Perhaps the unhappy young fellow had tried to get something for nothing. If he did, it would be all too understandable. It feels as if they were all just waiting for him to go away; which, eventually, almost unnoticed, he did. For Orson, the situation must have been excruciating. His brother should have been his natural ally. He must have felt that siding with him would be a defiance of his parents, and dependent as he was on their approval, how could he risk that? Ten years is an enormous gap between siblings, anyway, but life might have been rather different for both of them had they found in each other a friend.

  Back in the city, life continued as before, with one crucial difference. Beatrice began to be unwell. This interfered with her professional life, but she was, true to form, undaunted by it. She continued her single-handed education of Orson, reading to hm from the classics, having him read to her. He started on the course of voluminous though unsystematic reading which persisted throughout his life. ‘I was marinated in poetry and to learn right at the beginning, “a sense of awe, wonder and delight.”’17 Beatrice’s regime did not include the sciences, natural, physical or mathematical, nor did he ever make good the deficiency. She taught him the things she wanted to share. What she was looking for was a companion, someone she could talk to on her own level. Dick was gone, but he had anyway been incapable while he was around of expressing an interesting opinion about anything that concerned her. As for Maurice Bernstein, intelligent and cultured though he was, his anxious, cloying devotion was equally useless to her. Unsentimental, longing to stretch her intellectual wings, she turned to Orson for stimulation, and of course, he was a disappointment.

  Not only was her own health a source of anxiety, she also had to look after Orson’s. Though physically strong, he was plagued by respiratory conditions – hay fever, and, particularly virulent, asthma – which even at the time were acknowledged to have psychosomatic origins. It is interesting to note that outstandingly gifted people very often endure periods of ill health in childhood. The enforced inactivity, the absence of companions and playmates, give rise to fantasy and speculation for which the ordinarily healthy child never has time. They do, moreover, create in a child a sense of specialness, of requiring, and being entitled to, special attention. Asthma and hay fever would never leave Welles; crises would always provoke both. In 1924 came the first great crisis of his life; perhaps also the worst.

  His mother, weak for some time, now contracted jaundice, at that time an always terminal, always agonising condition. ‘I knew very well she was going to die, and how real that would be, and how very soon it would happen. Whenever she left me, the moment the door had closed, I would burst into tears, afraid that I would never see her again.’18 Dick Welles and Maurice Bernstein, his two fathers, the surrogate and the real, moved into the apartment. Perhaps this helped Welles; their feelings – rivals in affection for both Orson and Beatrice – may only be guessed at. Bernstein of course attended her as her physician. There is no record of Richard Junior being present, and no one seems to have felt his absence. Expelled from Todd School, he was now drifting aimlessly through life as the great family drama unfolded without him.

  On Orson’s birthday – his ninth – he was summoned to his mother’s sickroom. He describes the scene in his memoir with graphic precision, like a scene from a film, a most wonderfully scripted scene, which tells us the essence of everything that he wanted to carry around with him from the experience, the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life.

  How much like her19 it was to have arranged it so that our farewell in that black room was made to seem like the high point of my birthday party. I heard that cello voice: ‘Well now, Georgie-Porgie …’ Mother, who knew about that awful jingle, was teasing me – as she often liked to do. Then I heard her again, a voice in the shadows, speaking Shakespeare:

  ‘These antique fables apprehend,

  More than cool reason ever comprehends.’

  The quotation – spoken consolingly – came from her choice of a primer when she was first teaching me to read.

  And now she was holding me in one of her looks. Some of these could be quite terrible.

  ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

  Are of imagination all compact.’

  Those great shining eyes looked dark by the light of the eight small candles. I can remember now what I was thinking. I thought how green those eyes looked when it was sunny.

  Then – all tenderness, as if she was speaking from a great distance

  ‘A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king,

  Whoever had so sweet a changeling …’

  What did she mean? Was I, indeed, a changeling? (I have in later years been given certain hints …)

  ‘That stupid birthday cake,’ she said, ‘is just another cake; and you’ll have all the cakes you want. But the candles are a fairy ring. And you will never again in your whole life have just that number to blow out.’

  She was a Sorceress.

  ‘You must puff hard,’ she said, ‘and you must blow out every one of them. And you must make a wish.’

  I puffed very hard. And suddenly the room was dark and my mother had vanished forever.

  Sometimes, in the dead watches of the night, it strikes me that of all my mistakes, the greatest was on that birthday just before my mother died, when I forgot to make a wish.

  Two days later, she was moved to the Chicago Memorial Hospital where, on 10 May 1924, she died.

  Whatever else this extraordinary scene was – Charles Higham calls it a lesson in mortality, though one might be pardone
d for thinking it a lesson in theatre – it was certainly designed to ensure that Orson never forgot her. And he never did. It is not an exaggeration to say that from her position deep inside him, she dictated his actions and influenced the course of his life up to his own death, more than sixty years later.

  The Canadian Jungian Guy Corneau has written an extremely informative study of the sons of absent fathers, and has identified certain clear patterns of behaviour. In his account of one of his types, the Super-Achievers (or Heroes, as he suggestively calls them; and there can be no doubt that Orson Welles, whatever failures may have shadowed his career, was heroically, almost superhumanly, productive for much of it) he says: ‘Mothers of heroes are not generally affectionate or accommodating as mothers; in fact, they’re more likely to be tough no-nonsense types, who are so proud of their off-spring that they try to make them into divine beings. The young hero thus finds himself trapped in his heart of hearts, by the desire to please his mother, to fulfil her ambitions. He tries to satisfy the ambitions of his real mother, then, very soon, he starts aiming to satisfy the highest demands of his society, business, social group, or university … he lives for the approval of others. So that every one will love and appreciate him, he performs the most difficult exploits.’20

  Kenneth Tynan, in one of several profiles of Welles, wrote that ‘a perceptive American director once suggested to me that Orson reached a state of perfect self-fulfilment just before his mother’s death, and that he has been trying to recapture it ever since’.21 That certainly is what Welles said, on many occasions. His mother’s death was the end of the idyll. It seems that the truth, as it usually is, was considerably more complicated. Welles’s first nine years – the years with Mother – were certainly idyllic in the sense that he had her undivided attention, especially in the last five years, with his brother exiled and his father dismissed. But there was nothing relaxing about this attention. It was a focus full of demand: he was expected, required, in fact, to be intelligent, amusing, considerate, sympathetic, grown-up – and to play the piano very well indeed.

  Welles and his biographers have all made much of the fact that as soon as his mother died, out of grief he gave up playing the piano (and, it is implied, a promising career). The truth seems to be, however, that he couldn’t wait to give up a hated task for which he showed no particular aptitude. Relieved of the task, he carried the guilt around with him for the rest of life; the guilt of never quite having done well enough. Now, in theory, he was free to do as he pleased; his easy-going dad wouldn’t force him to do anything he didn’t want to. Except that, in a further complication typical of a life in which nothing was ever simple, he now had two fathers. The next phase of his life was dominated by the struggle for power between these two men, who formed an uneasy relationship in the aftermath of the death of the woman they had both loved so unsatisfactorily, to the extent of moving in together, and then going on holiday together to Europe. Orson, meanwhile, was sent to stay with a family friend, Dudley Crafts Watson, a notable educationalist and father of several lively children. Perhaps Dr Bernstein and Dick Welles were trying to restore him to the normal life of a child. If so, it was a question of too little, too late.

  Shortly after his mother’s death, at Hillside Farm, Syosset, on Long Island, Orson Welles discovered sex. Playing nurses and doctors with the Crafts Watson children, he told Barbara Leaming, he was deflowered. Welles talked a lot to Mrs Leaming about his sex life and she gamely reports what he told her. These are delicate matters upon which it is very difficult to secure reliable evidence; as sex researchers have discovered, pretty well everyone has a motive to lie, or at the very least exaggerate, in one direction or the other, about their sexual activities. At any rate, Welles said that he was deflowered at the age of nine, a couple of weeks after his mother’s death. It sounds a very agreeable and friendly initiation; consolatory, perhaps. There is no record of Welles’s response to the loss of his mother, except for Maurice Bernstein chiding him for not being more demonstrative in his grief. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mother; I didn’t love her the way HE did.’22 Bernstein was shattered by her death, piously acquiring her possessions. He redoubled his attentions to Orson. ‘I was my mother,’ Welles said, ‘and I kept the flame.’ More guilt; and more pressure to do something, or be something, extraordinary.

  There was the matter of his education to be considered. Beatrice’s regime had left Welles, like Hamlet, full of quotations, knowing the high points of the poetic literature, more by sound than by sense, and able to hold forth on any subject without pausing, hesitation or repetition; also, it has to be said, without much thought. Welles later modestly disavowed the delightful claims made for him – that at seven he knew King Lear by heart (‘er, no, didn’t touch Lear till later’23), at eight he had written A Universal History of the Drama, at ten a critique of Also Sprach Zarathustra – but he was quite unusually quick to learn, a sharp magpie, picking up brightly coloured fragments of language and information, and arranging them into impressive little orations. What he lacked entirely were any structured habits of mind or behaviour. His two fathers, Dadda and Dick, had different ambitions for him – Maurice Bernstein wanting him to be a living memorial to his mother’s greatness, a creative genius and intellectual giant – Dick Welles hoping that he would develop into an amusing sort of journalist. To that end he gave him a typewriter, and, discovering that he had some facility as an artist, tried to push him into the notion of being a cartoonist.

  Both men must therefore have been gratified by the headline that appeared in The Madison Journal in February 1926: CARTOONIST, ACTOR, POET – AND ONLY 10. Orson had been sent to the Washington School – his first – in Madison; Dr Bernstein had connections there. The piece is Welles’s first meeting with the press, and it sets the pattern for all the many, many subsequent encounters. Detailing his achievements, which include oil painting, acting in, writing and directing plays, composing and reciting epic verse, and editing a summer camp paper – The Indianola Trail – the anonymous writer whips his story up to a pitch of fervour that verges on self-parody; the claim that Welles held his fellow campers spellbound for three or four hours at a time with his epic poetry makes one doubt the veracity of much of the rest. Orson, the writer maintains, was ‘already attracting the attention of some of the greatest literary men in the country’ without substantiating it; he was definitely attracting the attention of Dr Frederick G. Mueller, psychologist of Madison State University, and friend of Maurice Bernstein.

  Mueller had met the boy at summer camp and had proposed a series of tests on his obviously formidable intellect. The results were somewhat inconclusive, baffling Mueller and his fellow researchers; they detected ‘a profound dissociation of ideas’. This seems to be another way of saying that he said whatever came into his head: a rich selection, no doubt, of magpie scraps produced in his mother’s drawing room, to enthusiastic applause. He was precocious – verbally, not intellectually; and he was not prodigious. Perhaps the most dangerous thing that can happen to precocity is acclaim – dangerous because the precocious behaviour, confirmed as successful, will be endlessly reproduced. What was startling about ten-year-old Orson was his assurance; his personality, as one might say. He was phenomenal not in what he said or what he did, but in what he was. This process was well underway by the time of CARTOONIST, ACTOR, POET AND ONLY 10. ‘The unceasing roar of appreciation from everybody when I was a child’, of which Welles spoke years later to Leslie Megahey in interviews for the BBC, seemed to confirm his worth for him – despite the inner voice from his late mother telling him that he was not doing nearly well enough.

  The sessions with Dr Mueller came to an abrupt end, Welles told Mrs Leaming, when that distinguished academic attempted to seduce him. Welles escaped out of the window. This is a significant revelation, impossible to evaluate objectively. Its interest is that it is the first of many claims made by Welles to have been, from a very early age, sexually interfered with by men. In his conversat
ions with Barbara Leaming, he passes it off as all in good fun, and he seems in his stories always to escape, either by simply leaving the room, or by some witty ploy, with his honour intact. Nowadays, in the 1990s, such claims no longer seem so amusing. This is something quite different from playing doctors and nurses with your contemporaries. He tells Mrs Leaming another droll story of that kind: drawn into a circle of sexual dabbling under the leadership of a certain forceful girl, they are all discovered in flagrante delicto by her mother, who immediately blames Welles, his verbal precocity having associated him in her mind with Leopold and Loeb, the proto-Nietzschean murderers brought to trial in Chicago not long before. Very funny, and very likely. But to be approached sexually by an adult man, the same age as your father, must have a very different impact on you. No matter how fast-talking and apparently assured, no ten-year-old simply makes an Errol Flynn-like getaway from a fate worse than death, and then has a good laugh about it afterwards.

  A ten-year-old, confused by having two fathers, neither of whom is entirely satisfactory – the real one a drifting alcoholic, the other a cloying old fuss-budget with a somewhat religious attitude to one’s recently deceased mother – may be on the look-out for other, better fathers, and in so doing may offer himself as vulnerably in need of protection. He may even become aware of the fact that he is sexually attractive to certain older men, and, playing with fire, may use his sexuality to secure their interest. He may, alternatively, want their sexual attention, but be frightened from accepting it at the last moment. Or he may accept their attentions, and later claim that he had avoided them. Finally, if he is simply very unlucky, he may find himself again and again in situations where men force themselves on him. Whichever of these is true, it is remarkable how often Orson Welles reports himself as an object of homosexual desire. ‘From my earliest years, I was the Lily Langtry of the older homosexual set. Everybody wanted me.’24 The young Welles was not a beautiful child, being decidedly fat and rather pugnacious of expression; but he had, and would never lose, when he desired to command it, a seductive charm which could get him most of what he wanted. Perhaps what he wanted above all was to be wanted. This area of sexual ambiguity persists throughout the early part of Welles’s life, striking a note of considerable complexity.