Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (134 page)

WLS (Sears radio station, Chicago), 232, 236

Wonder Show, The
(stage show), 358–59, 362, 368

Woodard, Isaac Jr., 352

Woodstock Opera House, 272, 275, 276, 281–82, 314

Woodstock (Daily) Sentinel
, 161, 179, 181, 184, 282, 321

Woodstock Theater Festival, 272–89

critical reviews of, 282, 284, 285–86, 288

debts of, 288–89, 293

The Drunkard
, 277–78, 289

Hamlet
, 276, 277, 278, 279, 284–86

Trilby
, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 284, 285

Tsar Paul
, 276, 277, 278, 279, 287–89

Woodward, Ellen, 399–401

Woollcott, Alexander, 254, 255, 256–57, 259, 301, 303, 406, 512, 571, 645

World War I, 69–70, 78, 79, 80, 511

World War II, 511, 557, 578–79, 599, 620

WOR New York, 358, 404

WPA (Works Progress Administration):

and
Cradle Will Rock
, 390, 391, 392, 394, 396, 397, 399–402

and Federal Theatre Project, 327, 342, 354, 389–90, 391, 397, 399–402

and Project 891, 354–55, 370, 388

and Voodoo
Macbeth
, 332

Wray, Fay, 614, 642

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 170

Wright, Richard,
Native Son
, 660

Writers Guild of America, 696

WTAD Quincy, Illinois, 668

Wuthering Heights
(film), 539, 541, 671

Wyatt, Eustace, 492, 521

Wyler, William, 567, 588

Yeats, George (Georgie Hyde-Lees), 212

Yeats, William Butler, 205–6, 212, 225

Young, Loretta, 454, 560, 643

Your Girl and Mine
(film), 60

Youth’s the Season
(stage play), 209

Yule, George (elder), 61, 74

Yule, George A., 23, 24–25, 35–36, 73–74

Yule, William, 36–37

Yule, William Jr., 279

Zaharoff, Sir Basil, 368–69

Zanuck, Darryl F., 567

Zatkin, Nathan, 308, 309, 317, 318, 327, 328

Ziegfeld Follies
, 122

Zinnemann, Fred, 588

Zorina, Vera, 439, 440, 454, 455–57, 480, 486, 487–89, 490, 542–43, 559, 567

PHOTOGRAPHS

“Rosebud . . . !”
The famous first word of dialogue in
Citizen Kane
, the clue to the puzzle of Charles Foster Kane—with multiple meanings for Orson Welles himself. “Maybe Rosebud was something he [Kane] couldn’t get, or something he lost,” says Thompson the reporter, “but it wouldn’t have explained anything.”

Special from birth, the newborn Orson, son of a power couple, was heralded on page one of his hometown paper in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The beautiful and multifaceted Beatrice Ives Welles: a prodigy who specialized in classical piano and spoken-word recitals (but wasn’t above serving up a Sousa march at parties); Kenosha’s first female school board official; and a leading suffragist. In his unfinished early film
Too Much Johnson
, Orson included a protest scene (
with Joseph Cotten,
LEFT
) that referenced both Beatrice and his father, Dick Welles, who also supported the suffrage movement.

One of the earliest known photographs of little Orson with Beatrice, whose interest in education manifested itself in both her public school reform efforts and her private mentoring of her special boy in art, music, and literature.

Beatrice’s favorite cousin, the artist and Chicago Art Institute teacher Dudley Crafts Watson, a strong and lasting influence in young Orson’s life.

The only known photo of Orson with his parents, taken during a visit to Kenosha after their separation in Chicago. At far right, behind Orson, is Dr. Maurice Bernstein; to Bernstein’s right is Beatrice Ives Welles. Businessman and inventor Dick Welles stands aloof at far left, next to nanny Sigrid Jacobsen. The two older people are unidentified.

The Hotel Sheffield in Grand Detour, Illinois, Dick Welles’s grand experiment. Orson spent golden summers there, painting across the road on the shore of the Rock River.

As an adult, he considered the place one of the lost Edens of his life.

His first full-length profile:
The Capital Times
, Madison, Wisconsin, February 19, 1926.