The true secrets of conjuring are pure but sophisticated psychology. As Orson came to understand, “it's fooling the mind that's the real challenge."2 To become a master of this, the apprentice must learn to use misdirection to trick the spectator's mind. And by doing so he becomes an applied psychologist and an actor.3
1 Although Hill (1977) consistently spells it "Dahda", Bernstein signed his photo (in Leaming [1985], after p.178) "To Orson from his Dadda".
2As quoted in "Incomparable Orson" (1947), 6.
3There are two apparent exceptions to this rule about misdirection. 1) So-called self-working apparatus tricks. 2) Tricks that depend on "secret knowledge", that is, information available to the magician about how the world works that is not know to the average lay person. For example, except for dice players, few persons are aware that all dice (except crooked "misspots") are spotted so that the sum of each of the three sets of opposing sides totals seven (1+6, 2+5, and 3+4) — a simple fact that generations of magicians have used to baffle the unwitting and some dice cheats have used to bilk suckers.
I would argue that these are not true exceptions. The "self-working" tricks have the misdirection already built in. And the "secret-knowledge" effects depend on the magician's deceptive patter to throw off any suspicion. In both cases the misdirection is (continued...)
All magi know Robert-Houdin's century-old definition that “A conjuror is ... an actor playing the part of a magician."4 Since childhood, Orson combined these two arts and often quoted the French master on this point. Around the time of that first magic set Dadda Bernstein also gave him a toy puppet theater for which the boy, imagination afire, created his own playlets.
Orson was a gifted child, endowed by nature and nurture with a sturdy but less than spectacular IQ of 146. As most psychologists of the time rated 140 or more as “potential genius", Orson just qualified for the legend of braininess that would infuse and confuse biographical accounts. Still, there are advantages in being a jump ahead of any randomly chosen group of 250 others with that particular combination of measured verbal and problem-solving skills.
Those so-called smart genes helped, but he had a more important kick-start toward the person he would become. His childhood was spent in an adult world amidst a well-to-do extended family of cosmopolitans and sophisticated eccentrics. Today, many would label this a “dysfunctional family” and, without further thought, assume it “explains” Orson’s subsequent behavior. Well, yes and no. Yes only because it describes a home and social setting with little that was “average” or “normal” or “traditional” about it. No mainly because, as he slowly grew to understand the extreme unusualness of his heritage, he discarded most parts that were ill-suited to life in a wider society and kept, even reinforced, those parts that made him different but strong.
His mother, Beatrice Welles, was a semi-professional concert pianist, a women's rights activist, a pacifist (for which she'd been jailed briefly in 1914), and a somewhat puritanical crusader against booze, brothels, and blatant sexuality in movies. And, if we can believe Orson, a devotee of practical jokes and hoaxes.
His father, Richard “Dick" Welles, had owned a factory and, later, within his child's memory, a resort hotel. He was an inventor, gourmet, chain-smoker of cigars and cigarettes, flagrant womanizer, convivial alcoholic, brilliant conversationalist, teller of tall tales, and a vaudeville and silent movie buff.
Dadda Bernstein, third person in this open marital triangle, was a physician, ladies' man, social climber, a greedy embezzler, a devious user of others, and an opera and theater goer. Orson's only sibling, a brother ten years his senior, was already showing signs of quiet madness and was pushed off to boarding school and, later, into an insane asylum.5 Thus Orson wasn't just the favored child but, in effect, an only child. One with a close and concerned mother, a close and friendly father, and a close and manipulative Dadda.
His ancestry, which one biographer's diligent research assistants traced back 16 generations, was of English stock with some infusion of Welsh and a bit of French along the way. And five of his direct forebears, including John and Priscilla Alden, had arrived in the New World in 1620 on the Mayflower. These genealogical facts are relevant only because Orson and most of his biographers tell so many different tales. For example Orson consistently maintained that his two given names came from his parent's table-mates on a Caribbean cruise, George Ade (an American agnostic and famous satirist) and Orson “Ort" Collins Wells (Ade's wealthy longtime travel companion and lover).6 Ade’s biographer, Fred Kelly, reports the following:7
3 (...continued)
implicit in the presentation. See Bart Whaley, "Toward a General Theory of Deception", The Journal of Strategic Studies (London), Vol.5, No.1 (March 1982), 178-192; reprinted in Epoptica, No.5 (January 1984), 270-277.
4Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic (1868/1877 translation), 43.
5Diagnosed as an advanced case of schizophrenia and dementia simplex. Higham (1985), 50.
On one of their West Indian cruises toward the end of 1914 George and Ort ate at the same table with a couple from Kenosha .... When they were saying good-by, Mrs. Welles said she had enjoyed their company so much that if the child she was expecting in a few months should be a boy she intended to name it for them, George Orson.
As no source is given it’s possible that Kelly, may have got this story from or through Orson Welles. In any case it seems the lad’s names actually honored his paternal grandmother's uncle George Head and her father, Orson Sherman Head (a locally famous district attorney in Kenosha). Perhaps Mrs. Welles was teasing, having already chosen her boy child’s name and playing on the coincidence, or even honoring all four men.
The family, although no longer devout, was fourth generation Protestant Episcopalian—and Quaker and Puritan before that. Orson would later misreport his father's Episcopal funeral as Lutheran and misinform one late interviewer that he'd been raised Roman Catholic. Nor did he ever convert to Catholicism, a fact that the Archbishop of Madrid verified when Orson's ashes were interred in Spain.8 In 1965 when, in anticipation of becoming a Spanish citizen, he had a legal deposition prepared in which he declared himself and his family (that is, third wife Paola and their daughter Beatrice) to be Roman Catholic.9 Perhaps he'd contemplated a turn toward a religion at that time but otherwise he'd seemingly never been religious. Toward the end of Orson's life the head of the Greek Orthodox Church dined at Orson’s favorite bistro, and hoping to meet the actor, extended at invitation through the proprietor to attend a high mass at local St. Sophia cathedral as the Archbishop's guest of honor. When the proprietor passed along this invitation, Orson said only, "Please tell him I really appreciate that offer, but I am an atheist."10 Orson never joked or teased about the religious beliefs of others. He accepted it as a cultural artifact, suitable for the births, deaths, and marriages of strangers and even some friends — but without emotional or intellectual meaning for himself.
He claimed he had nine aunts although it has been proven otherwise. And exaggerated their eccentricities. Aunt Dot, did visit China but didn't, as Orson told it, fall out of a rickshaw and disappear forever into a crowd. In fact she returned without incident from her package tour. He told of Aunt Medora's being wooed by famous magician Herrmann the Great — when both were sedately married to their respective spouses, hers a plain businessman in New Jersey. In another version Orson made out that, when deserted by her magician fiancé, Medora became a recluse who consoled herself by practicing card tricks. Some of these fancies he made up, the others he'd heard from relatives, mainly his mischievous father. For example, father Richard was the source of the much embroidered tales of Aunt Hat's (Harriet's) eccentricities. And when retelling the vanishing aunt-in-the-rickshaw legend to one friend, Orson admitted, “Now, I don't believe this, but my family always told the story." Another example was one aunt who, he often mentioned, “rode the [John]stown flood on a piano. It's one of those stories," he told a Merv Griffin audience, “you hear in
your family, and you repeat it to get a laugh, without really believing in it." His father's mother, Mary, quietly practiced black magic in her home, Orson proudly proclaimed this in later years and there is some independent evidence.11
6 OW had claimed George Ade and Orson C. Wells as his namesakes as early as 8 December 1936 in a letter to novelist Carl Carmer.
7Fred C. Kelley, George Ade: Warmhearted Satirist (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), 209.
8Riambau (1993), 17.
9Cobos (1993), 172.
10Terrail (1999), 104-105.
He was sickly, but not enough to keep him out of school. When it became time for kindergarten at age four he pretended an appendicitis attack, faking a high temperature by pressing the thermometer against a hot-water bottle. Found out, he explained that he didn't want to waste time with children whose only ambition was “to be Boy Scouts."12 He had his way, so Beatrice educated him at home where she and tutors taught him to read and to play the piano.
Beatrice, believing like many parents of that era that children were tiny uneducated and unsocialized adults, raised Orson accordingly. She included him fully in her social life among the Chicago art and music crowd. Her policy, he understood, was that “children could be treated as adults as long as they were amusing. The moment you became boring, it was off to the nursery."13 Thus the earliest molding of the Great Entertainer.
At ages five and six Orson spent the summers with his mother in Grand Detour, Illinois. A hundred miles west of Chicago, it was a small resort town that catered to weekend tourists. Orson impressed the local men and boys, whom he openly called “hayseeds", as a snob and the boys teased him about his unathletic pudginess. But he delighted the young girls with impromptu back-yard tent-shows of Shakespearean scenes where he played Romeo and Juliet or Caesar and Cleopatra, all with fast costume changes to fit his back-and-forth switching of roles.14
At this point his parents separated permanently and Orson alternated living with his mother and Dadda and with his father, who was becoming more deeply than ever devoted to the bottle. His mother developed a chronic case of “yellow jaundice", what today is labeled hepatitis. When she realized she was dying she gently taught Orson the meaning of death with a magical séance. On her deathbed in her room they were alone, celebrating his ninth birthday. She told him her death was close and recited some of his favorite lines from Shakespeare. Then, explaining that he would have many birthday cakes but only this one with its “fairy circle" of nine candles, she had him blow out each candle, one by one, until the otherwise unlit room became jet black. This was the last time he saw her. Four days later she was dead.
Orson's grieving was intense but brief. After less than a month's depression, he was more than himself again, in large part (he would later say) thanks to two of his female cousins who had initiated him into doctor-and-nurse sex, which he proclaimed pleasantly addictive. And, after all, he still had two parents: his admired natural father and the respected but intrusive Dadda. He briefly shared the same home with both men and then moved between them.
The only overt consequence of his mother's death was, he would later claim, that he immediately and forever stopped playing the piano. But this wasn’t quite true. As one biographer discovered, Orson played at least once more, four years later in a prep-school concert.15 However his passive appreciation of music would continue to grow.
11 Johnston & Smith (1940), 96; Higham (1985), 3, 29, 46-47; Noble (1956), 47; Higham (1985), 29. Orson's recollections of her are quoted in Griffin (1982), 33; OW in Griffin (1982), 34; OW in Griffin (1982), 33.
12Johnston & Smith (1940), I, 96; Brady (1989), 5-6.
13Leaming (1985), 13, quoting from her 5 Jun 83 interview with OW.
14Higham (1985), 41-42, based on his interviews with 11 surviving residents of Grand Detour.
His father, Richard, introduced him to vaudevillian friends and took him to China, Japan, and Trinidad (but not, as Orson would later be quoted as claiming, Europe). Richard didn't believe in the early-to-bed theory of child rearing and would chat with his young son until late hours when Orson would decide to take himself off to bed. Dr. Bernstein took him to Cuba and, as a devotee of theater, to plays, operas, and concerts.
Drawing in equal parts from his three parents, young Orson developed a lasting appreciation and love of travel as well as for both the vulgar artistry of vaudeville and the so-called fine arts. Orson's equal fondness for both "high" and "low" culture is crucial to understanding him. Those who overlook this point often mistakenly accuse him of betraying his supposedly lofty artistic standards by prostituting his talents in later life in those many TV talk-show and sitcom appearances and narrations of popular movies like Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Vikings (1958) much less acting in such flicks as The Muppet Movie (1979).
THURSTON, HOUDINI & MR. LONG
Back when Orson was six, Richard had begun taking his son to see stage magicians in Chicago. Three of the greats stuck in his mind: Thurston, Houdini, and Long Tack Sam: Howard Thurston was then North America's star illusionist. Orson first saw his spectacular The Wonder Show of the Universe when his father took him some time around 1921.16 Thurston's full-evening show trouped a company of 40 with equipment that filled three railway baggage cars. Each full-evening performance presented 18 big illusions plus some small stage magic. Although Thurston added several new effects and dropped some old ones each season, his regularly featured bits included Sawing a Woman in Half, the Levitation of the Princess Karnac, the Sword Cabinet, the Floating Ball, the Card Star, Hypnotizing a Duck, and materializing a duck from under the jacket of a gentleman in the audience — all effects that Orson would later perform.17 But at that time Orson made do with “a couple of big illusions" that his father had bought for him.18 Although he evidently saw Thurston's show on later occasions, he never met the master.19
Two decades later Orson accurately recalled this show:20 As breathless a moment as I've enjoyed in a playhouse was the climax of an illusion performed by Howard Thurston. He called it resoundingly “the Levitation of the Princess Karnac" and after he passed the hoop around the floating lady to prove the absence of wires, rods or sheets of glass, the wizard came down to the footlights and implored us to be as quiet as possible because the slightest noise might have a dangerous effect on the Princess. We all knew he was lying. We knew we could cough our heads off and whatever machinery was holding up the Princess wouldn't budge. But we couldn't see the machinery—Thurston had showed us it couldn't be there so we gave up. It wasn't a puzzle any more—it was magic. In the precise meaning of the word it was marvelous and wonderful.
15 Callow (1996), 30, 45.
16OW in undated [1943] draft guest column for Leonard Lyons' syndicated "The Lyons' Den" column in The New York Post of either 10 Feb or 25 Jul 1943; OW to Ward (1983), 32-33; Gary Darwin interview, 11 May 91, recalling his 1956 conversation with Welles.
17For description of Thurston's show in 1931 see Max Holden, Programmes of Famous Magicians (New York: Max Holden, 1937), 41-43.
18OW in Ward (1983), 32.
19Jane Thurston Shepard telephone interview, 12 Feb 92. The late Miss Thurston (Howard's adopted daughter) says that, if she had ever met Orson Welles, she would have remembered.
20Welles, undated [1943] draft of a guest column for Leonard Lyons' column in The New York Post of either 10 Feb or 25 Jul 1943.
Nobody made a sound. I encountered that memorable silence when I was six years old and during its observance I determined to grow up to be a magician.
I never changed my mind.
* * * In 1925 Orson was taken by Dr. Bernstein to New York City for an evening concert by Igor Stravinsky, who was then on his first tour of the USA. The concert was followed by a private gathering in the lounge of the Waldorf Hotel where young Orson's discourse on the Russian modernist composer impressed budding actress Agnes Moorehead, who at 18 was twice his age, as that of “an intellectual adult".21
At the beginning of next year the 10-year-o
ld prodigy was packed off to Madison, Wisconsin, to be placed in the care of Dadda's German friend, Dr. Frederick G. Mueller, a prominent psychologist at the University of Wisconsin. As a specialist in precocious children, he wanted to study Orson by running him through a battery of mental tests and otherwise closely observe this unusual specimen whom he promptly moved into his home. Orson, having secretly read up on dream analysis in the professor's library, plagiarized some of the more intriguing dreams to baffle the man. Faced with word-association tests, he came primed with bizarre answers. Even Dr. Bernstein admitted that Orson had been testing his testers.22
Dr. Mueller enrolled his house guest in the 4-B grade at Washington School, a local city-run grammar school, where Orson soon skipped a full grade. He dealt quickly and decisively with the school bullies. Knowing they'd expect him either to grovel or fight and lose, he created a Third Option, tricking them into playing by his rules. The first time one hit him, Orson went to the bathroom, emerging so splotched with “blood" (red paint from his artist's kit) that the ruffians were frightened off and henceforth avoided him.23
A speech by the boy during a school assembly was so shocking that it got him a feature article in the Madison Journal. He'd concluded a 10-minute lecture on art history by attacking the school's art instruction, which he proclaimed suppressed individual creativity and encouraged only robotic imitations. When a teacher interrupted to say, “You mustn't criticize the public-school system," he replied, “If the public-school system needs criticizing, I will criticize it."24
Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1 Page 3