Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  It’s an authentic cameo, charming and evocative. Naive, pardonably, and still a bit stilted, but the narrative and the images are vivid: the best of his childish writing. The performance is most likely to have been Kabuki, with its mix of music and drama. He must have had occasion to see many varieties of theatre – a whole other world unknown to his contemporaries. If his boyish prose scarcely reflects that, it’s hardly surprising, but this Far Eastern journey – and an earlier one, when he was twelve – gave him the certainty that there was a world elsewhere.

  Something else his despatches to the Highland Park News fail to convey is that he was travelling with a hopeless drunk: his father (‘our Dad’, snoozing under the mosquito net). This last trip to Shanghai has the air of a farewell voyage: Dick’s farewell to travel, to Orson, to life.

  It seems that the razing of the Sheffield House Hotel was a psychological blow for Richard Welles. He appears to have done everything he could – the toy house, the smoked sausages – to make it somewhere special for him and his son, away from Todd, away from Maurice Bernstein, away from the theatre, which was sucking Orson in. He would have been only too happy if it had been the theatre he, Dick, loved: vaudeville, musical comedy, the circus. Of all of these he was a connoisseur, known backstage and in the theatre bars. He would take Orson to meet the stars, especially the magicians. Welles said later that love of magic was what bound him and his father together; a curious thought. Magic, both black and white, threads its way through Welles’s life and career. He had performed it to delight his mother’s guests; he had used it to lasso Roger Hill’s affection. It is the theatrical equivalent of fireworks: brilliantly impressive, it leaves nothing behind. It is an end in itself, contentless, inexplicable. It renders the successful practitioner mysterious and powerful, though there is never any doubt in the audience’s mind that it is not real. The word trick is significantly central to descriptions of magic. We, the audience, are bamboozled; the magician has got away with something.

  Alcoholics are always trying to get away with something, too: hoping – believing – that their condition passes unnoticed; or that it doesn’t matter; and, in a brilliant double bind, that if things go wrong, it was only because they were drunk, so that’s all right. They didn’t mean it or they didn’t see it. They, too, are involved in a conjuring act: by taking the magic potion, they make things disappear – the past, the present, the future; pain, complication, loss; the truth. Hey presto! It’s gone. So Orson and his father were great fans of magic. There is a story that Richard Welles took Orson backstage to meet Harry Houdini. Orson enthusiastically showed the great conjuror his handkerchief trick, to be told to keep working on it: he must never, ever, perform a trick until he’d practised it in private at least a thousand times. Going back some little while later to show Houdini how much he’d improved, Welles found the great man having a brand new trick demonstrated by its inventor. ‘Great,’ says Houdini, ‘I’ll put it in tonight.’ A turning point, and a dangerous lesson. Getting away with things is always exciting, of course – until you don’t.

  Dick Welles was getting away with less and less. Feeling the increasing loss of his favourite son, he cruelly punished his eldest one. Loathing his sullen, uncommunicative namesake, who had continued drifting aimlessly, wandering the country, working as a casual labourer, Dick Welles had conspired with Dr Bernstein to have Richard certified insane (dementia simplex, a form of catatonia, was diagnosed) and imprisoned in the state sanatorium of Kanakee. This terrible act was never alluded to by Orson; when he mentioned his brother at all it was to suggest that he was charmingly eccentric. Various early biographers describe him as a member of a religious cult, and author of a Life of Jesus, which must have been something of a family trait, since both Beatrice and Orson have the same pious work attributed to them. These whimsical details mask a grim truth unearthed by Charles Higham: Richard Ives Welles was for ten years – from the age of twenty-five – incarcerated in a lunatic asylum along with four thousand fellow inmates in varying degrees of mental distress, during which time he saw no member of his family except his cousin, Irene Lefkow, appointed guardian in the absence of Richard’s father. There is no evidence of his having harmed anyone or caused any breach of the peace; when he was finally released, he followed a slightly erratic career as a social worker, popping up in his brother’s life from time to time. His very existence, not to mention his enforced confinement in a state sanatorium when Orson was fifteen years old, can only have weighed darkly on Welles’s young heart.

  Richard Junior had been expelled from Todd; Dick Welles might have hoped that Orson would be. Treated with contempt when he attempted to visit Orson there, he resorted more and more to the bar-room where, with his ever-open tab, he was everybody’s best friend. Orson too discovered this trick, on their first voyage to Shanghai. ‘I discovered the magic of money,’57 he told David Lewin, in an interesting phrase, ‘when I crossed the Pacific from China and Japan to San Francisco at the age of 12. By signing my name on chits for everyone’s drinks at the bar, I was able to cause universal happiness. At the end of the trip, my father received a bar bill for $2,700. He said “We’ve had alcoholics in the family, but no one started at 12.”’ That sounds like fun. The replay in 1930 was far from it. This time it was the sheer humiliation of having to replace his father’s pants in front of ‘the colonial British’ with whom he drank. This contrasts horribly with the image of him Orson tried to fashion in his memoir: ‘he hoped to be mistaken for one of those he most admired: some sober figure in the world of high finance, and not the idle, hedonistic London clubman he despised – and so closely resembled. He was, in fact, an Edwardian bon vivant. My father wore black spats. His shoes were made for him in London and his hats in Paris. When he travelled by train he carried his own bed linen and a small Persian prayer rug for his feet … as for the spats, they were appreciated by the sort of gentleman who never travelled without his valet, and who had yet to acknowledge that the motor car had already purged the streets of the nuisance of the horse. Spats were mauve, dove gray and even white. That the spats of my father were black should explain why – though his chosen way of life might strike some modern readers as a touch on the flamboyant side – he would be pained to learn that he could never have given such an impression.’58 The spats were not the problem.

  So now, as we all do eventually, Orson had become parent to his parent. He was fifteen years old. The tangle of premature responsibility, guilt and necessary deception held him in its grip for the rest of his life. The consequences for adults of having alcoholic parents have recently been the subject of intensive study. A specialist in this area, Janet Woititz, drew up a list of characteristics of such people: they are strikingly applicable to Orson Welles: ‘they guess at what normal behaviour is; they have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end; they lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth; they judge themselves without mercy; they have difficulty having fun; they take themselves very seriously; they have difficulty with intimate relationships; they overreact to changes over which they have no control; they constantly seek approval and affirmation; they usually feel that they are different to other people; they are super responsible or super irresponsible; they are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved; they are impulsive. They tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviours or possible consequences. This impulsivity leads to confusion, self-loathing and lack of control over the environment. In addition, they spend an excessive amount of energy clearing up the mess.’59 Orson Welles, more even than most human beings, was highly individual and not easy to type. It is, however, very interesting that had one drawn up a list of Welles’s patterns of behaviour, they might, substituting ‘he’ for ‘they’, have looked very like the above. Whatever else he was, Orson Welles was the son of an alcoholic and an absent father. They happened to be the same parent. His mother, though dead, was far from absent.
His father, still alive, was, to all intents and purposes, not there. Soon, he would not be there, full stop. And though he lived for another six months, Orson never saw him again. To add to the momentousness of this farewell voyage, Richard Welles staged for Orson a harrowing scene to rival Beatrice’s deathbed scene: Dick made him swear solemnly that he wouldn’t let them bury him under the ground – he must either be buried at sea or cremated. In case Orson were not sufficiently acquainted with the notion of mortality, Dick spelt out the details.

  Small wonder that ‘I was, in my childhood, determined to cure myself of childhood, a condition I conceived to be a pestilential handicap.’60 By 1930, in charge of a child-adult, he was completely cured. He never ceased from that moment on to try to recover the state that he had never really known. When he returned to school, the Hills, hearing of his terrifying journey, made him vow not to see his father again until he had sobered up; in other words, not to see him again, because only death was strong enough to prise him away from the bottle. And that is how it was. Orson behaved as always under pressure: he brazened it out. He gave a talk about his recent travels entitled ‘Toilets of the World’. No doubt he had assisted Dick to a great many of them. A paternal connection may have been responsible for his appearance shortly after on the front page of the Chicago Herald American. Having dabbled with the suburban press, he was now news in a major regional paper. If it was parental pull that secured this coup, it might have seemed to Dick Welles slightly to have backfired. The piece was written by his friend Ashton Stevens, the paper’s drama critic, and one of the most distinguished drama critics in America. Welles always said that the character of Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane was based on Stevens; the Herald American was a Hearst paper. The piece he wrote in November 1930 was in his weekly column, and its opening has been widely quoted in articles and books about Welles:

  Given as good an education as will adhere to him at a good college, Orson Welles is as likely as not going to become my favourite actor. True, it will be 4 or 5 years before he has attained his majority and a degree, and I have yet to see him act. But I like the way he handles a difficult situation and to lay my plans long ahead, I am going to put a clipping of this paragraph in my betting book. If Orson is not at least a leading man by the time it has yellowed, I’ll never make another prophecy.

  Passing over the crucial phrase ‘I have yet to see him act’, various writers have praised Stevens for his prescience. In the circumstances, this is not so much prescience as clairvoyance. The piece continues:

  This was the difficult situation handled by my young friend. He came into town from his prep school at Woodstock and spent all his money on a matinee. Penniless, hungry, and unable to find either his guardian, the distinguished Dr Bernstein, or the doctor’s play-mates, the childless but children-loving Ned Moores, Orson gamely walked into his guardian’s club and ordered a meal.

  Too young to be a member of the Tavern, and too prosperous looking to be a dinner-snatcher, he caused considerable speculation among the club’s employees. Manager Kuhn was sent for. One glance at the youth, who met it with the acknowledging smile of a man of the world and O.K’d Orson to the headwaiter, saying, ‘Why that young gentleman’s alright; he’s the only son of Mr & Mrs Edward Moore.’

  Poor Dick Welles, if he was able to read the piece, to find one of his deadly rivals for Orson’s affection described as ‘his guardian’ – and then to read that it was a triumph for Orson to be passed off as another man’s son.

  In truth, it is unlikely that Dick Welles was in any condition to focus on such nuances. Installed in the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago, denied the presence of his son, even at Christmas, but hopefully surrounded by his bird-cage and the portrait of Trixi Friganza, he died on 28 December 1930. The death is tinged with a certain mystery. The certificate, unearthed by Charles Higham, gives as cause of death, chronic myocarditis and chronic nephritis, respectively heart and kidney diseases, and cardiac failure – all of which is perfectly consonant with what we know of his life. There are persistent rumours, however, that he killed himself; which also seems perfectly feasible. Finally, Orson Welles, in his memoir, claims that he was at the time, and continued to be, convinced that he killed his father, adding: ‘I’ll try to write about that later.’61 Understandably, he never did.

  In a sense, all three of these claims are true. Clearly, the conditions described on the death certificate account perfectly satisfactorily for Richard Welles’s death, and they are commonly found in heavy smokers and drinkers. There is a curious feature, drawn attention to by Higham: both witnesses, Maurice Bernstein and Jacob Gottfredson, Dick Welles’s brother-in-law, declare the deceased’s father and mother to be ‘unknown’ – this of Jacob’s own mother. There is no apparent explanation for this. As for the suicide theory: Dick Welles drank himself to death. What other course did he have? What was there to live for? Desertion by his child-parent, Orson, was the end for him. There is no record of how the break was made – whether he was given an ultimatum, or whether Orson simply wasn’t there any more – but in his alcoholic twilight he would have no reason to expect ever to see him again. It is also, of course, possible that he did actually kill himself, by means undetected in the post-mortem examination, but to have done so seems redundant. He must have known he was on his way out. Orson himself told Barbara Leaming that he thought his father had committed suicide, having lost the tug-of-war with Maurice Bernstein for Orson, but also out of a kind of continuing grief for the loss of Beatrice – lost, as it happens, in another tug-of-war, and to the same man. The first suggestion is really a confirmation of Dick’s desperation; the last seems to smack a little of wish-fulfilment, a posthumous reunion of two beloved but estranged figures.

  But what of Welles’s self-accusation? What matters here is not proof one way or the other (quite obviously he did not physically kill his father) but the fact that he felt that he was, at the deepest level, responsible for his father’s death. He was already riven with guilt about him. He had favoured his mother over his father, was her emissary in the world, living out her hopes and dreams. He had given his emotional loyalty to other substitute fathers. He had perhaps wished his father out of the way. Often, in the years to come, he would frighten himself with the destructive power of his will; perhaps he had used it here, with apparently direct results. Above all, however, Orson had, at the behest of others, abandoned his father. Six months is an awfully long time in the relationship of a fifteen-year-old boy to his father. He had never let more than a couple of weeks go by before without seeing Dick. And now he could never see him again. The loss of his mother occurred when he was nine, a child; and besides, he had never really lost her. Now he was a man. The loss of his father was irremediable, a shattering blow. Having never really had him, he searched for him all his days, sometimes trying to be him, sometimes trying to create an image of him that would absolve the disappointment of the past. He remained an absence, a void, a gap deep within Orson which nothing could fill.

  His position was desperate. Paralysed with guilt, he felt that both his surviving father figures were somehow implicated in Richard Welles’s death: Dadda Bernstein had stolen first Beatrice then Orson away from him; Skipper and Horty had stopped Orson from seeing him when he was in most need. ‘I didn’t think I was doing the right thing. I simply wanted to please the Hills … [after his death] I felt that they had been, momentarily, false gods; that I had followed the wrong adults, you know, and for the wrong reasons.’62

  For the immediate future, there was more pain to endure. It was decreed, inevitably, that the funeral must take place in Kenosha; arrangements were in the hands of Dick’s – ‘unknown’ – mother, Mary Head Welles Gottfredson. Orson’s relationship with her had never been a success. Despising Richard Junior (who for obvious reasons was not at his father’s funeral), she was permanently incensed by Orson, whom she regarded as unmanly. Orson fiercely defended his right to aestheticism. Their occasional encounters after the family had left Kenosha were fr
aught, with Orson defiant – not something to which Mrs Gottfredson was accustomed. Her other grandson Edward recalled that ‘Orson once tried to scare Grandma with a rubber dagger and when Grandma refused to become frightened, he dramatically plunged the dagger into his own heart, and died as horribly as his youthful histrionic powers would permit.’63 ‘He was always emoting all over the place,’ explained Mrs Gottfredson Junior. ‘And egotistical as hell,’ added her husband. When Orson arrived, explaining that his father must be buried at sea, or cremated, he was brushed aside. He persisted, frantic and tearful, and was ignored. His brimming cup of guilt must have overflowed. The final betrayal: to break a solemn oath given to a dying man. ‘I was in no position to interfere, being convinced – as I am now – that I had killed my father.’64