Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (14 page)

Later, as he embellished Orson’s life story for publicity purposes, Dr. Bernstein had a habit of leaving out the boy’s parents. In
his
telling, it was Bernstein who took little Orson to the museum, who bought him his first conductor’s baton, puppet show, magic kit. But the truth is that Orson’s early years were dominated by Beatrice, who would make the grade as an outstanding mother to her second son. She took charge of Orson’s intellectual and artistic development, sharing works of classic literature with him as bedtime reading. These early reading sessions gave him an adult vocabulary, along with early training in the memorization and recitation skills that were his mother’s forte. Beatrice loved old-fashioned story poems like Noyse’s “The Highwayman” or “Barbara Frietchie” by John Greenleaf Whittier, but also drew her bedtime repertoire from “the poetry of Swinburne, Rosetti, Keats, Tennyson, Tagore and Walt Whitman,” according to Peter Noble’s
The Fabulous Orson Welles.
²

Orson’s mother also read to him daily from Charles and Mary Lamb’s two-volume
Tales from Shakespeare
, an illustrated English compendium of the comedies and tragedies, simplified for children. (Orson eventually grew old enough to demand “the real thing,” Noble wrote, probably exaggerating.)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was always Beatrice’s favorite Shakespeare play, and by Orson’s third birthday, Noble claimed, she had switched to reading from the actual text. This play became “my reading primer,” Orson recalled, though his mother drummed it into him so thoroughly that he contrived to avoid it professionally throughout his career. It was one Shakespeare masterpiece he never acted in or directed.

Beatrice prized painting too, and so by the time he was five Orson had received his first paint kit, a gift of easel, brushes, and colors from his mother’s friend Lorado Taft, the eminent Chicago sculptor. Orson was often taken to the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, where he was encouraged to ponder the works of the masters and mimic them as best he could on his sketch pad. His mother was acquainted with many of the museum’s visiting artists, such as Russian painter Nikolay Roerich, who presided over a major Chicago exhibition in 1920, and the painter and stage designer Boris Anisfeld. Little Orson was encouraged to ask the celebrated artists questions about their work, as an adult would, and he drew and painted even on his own time, precociously and happily. “That’s what I loved most,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich ruefully. “Always. If only I’d been better at it.”

Imbuing her son with a love of music was another of Beatrice Welles’s priorities. Orson received regular violin and piano lessons, and attended the symphony, opera, and ballet in company with his mother, or Dr. Bernstein, or both together. Beatrice, convinced that Orson should learn piano not from his mother but from an outside teacher, enlisted Phyllis Fergus Hoyt to give him instruction in an upstairs room at the Hoyts’ residence on North State Parkway. Orson liked to say that he eventually grew so weary of the “endlessly repeated musical scales” that he threatened to hurl himself out a window. Alarmed, Phyllis rushed to tell his mother, who was waiting in an anteroom. Beatrice rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, just tell him to go ahead!” “She had to kill my act, you see,” Welles explained years later to his daughter Chris Welles Feder. But Welles was genuinely fond of Phyllis Fergus Hoyt; decades later, spotting her in a New York hotel lobby, he rushed up and gave her a bear hug.

The beauty of Orson Welles’s upbringing, however, may be in how Beatrice filled in her own gaps. She carefully organized and overloaded Orson’s time, making sure he was always constructively occupied. Part of her strategy was fobbing him off regularly on childless acquaintances who were “good influences”—friends and relatives who knew her mind and shared her values, broadening the safety net for this boy from a newly broken home.

She counted on Orson’s father, and Dr. Bernstein, to expose Orson to boyish interests and popular culture. While his mother read masterworks to him, the two men took him to Kroch’s, the big downtown bookstore, and loaded him up with adventure tales, spy thrillers, and whodunits. Dick Welles was devoted to musicals and vaudeville acts and the big touring magic shows that came to Chicago and took over the downtown theaters for a week. Beatrice rolled her eyes at too much magic, but the mentalists intrigued her, and if Orson was happy she was happy.

One of Dick Welles’s heroes was the magician Harry Thurston, who performed annually in Chicago. The Great Thurston, as he styled himself, had been on the circuit since before the Great War, working his way up from a one-man card-trick act to the host of an extravaganza complete with scantily clad female assistants, small furry animals that popped out of strange places, and forty tons of apparatus. Harry Houdini’s greatest contemporary rival, Thurston considered himself a greater success with the public: “America’s most popular magician.”

Thurston was small of stature, but one of his achievements was transforming himself into a charismatic spellbinder onstage. His originally affectless midwestern speech was said to have been honed at the Moody Bible Institute, and his hypnotic patter masterfully misdirected the audience’s attention as he wove his illusionist wonders. His musical voice rippled, purled, and enchanted, stretching out each syllable to mesmerizing effect. While assuring his audience that he loved them, and that “I wouldn’t deceive you for the world” (a line Orson later adopted for his unfinished film “The Magic Show”), the Great Thurston fooled his audiences time and again.

“I idolized him,” Welles recalled. “He was the finest magician I’ve ever seen.”

Another favorite of Dick Welles’s was the equally formidable Okito, who started out in the Great Thurston’s act. Okito was the stage name of Theodore Bamberg, the Dutch-born patriarch of a family of magicians. Billed as “Europe’s greatest shadowist,” Okito appeared in immaculate evening attire and cape, and dominated the stage entirely with his fingers and hands, projecting fantastic shadow figures on a blank screen—not unlike what Charles Foster Kane does in
Citizen Kane
to amuse Susan Alexander on their first evening together.

Dick Welles always made his way backstage to meet the touring magicians, and to wangle a few magic lessons for his boy. Okito lived in Chicago for periods between his world tours, and from these great magicians and others—later to include Harry Houdini—the impressionable boy eagerly absorbed lessons in bluff and patter and poise.

He was usually able to talk one parent or the other into a moving picture matinee, especially in his mother’s case if the show was a literary adaptation or could be otherwise defined as uplifting. Orson never lost his boyhood affection for Allan Dwan’s
Robin Hood
, whose stars, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, attended the film’s 1922 premiere in Chicago. “I was batty about
Robin Hood
and
The Three Musketeers
,” Orson told Peter Bogdanovich. “Fairbanks was my idol.” He had a similar fondness for the 1923 version of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, with Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. “I still see Lon Chaney as I saw him when I was eight years old,” Welles told Henry Jaglom. “Everything he did I adore.”

It was his mother who took Orson to Robert Flaherty’s pioneering
Nanook of the North
, the feature-length documentary about Eskimo life in the Canadian Arctic. Welles never forgot how he was bowled over by
Nanook
, and by another Flaherty documentary, set in Ireland,
Man of Aran
, which he saw at a later time. Orson never lost his nostalgia for these and other early silent moving pictures, among the most sophisticated of their era, which he saw in the company of his parents.

Little Orson was scarcely thinking of a stage or screen career in 1920. At the age of five, he was a more likely candidate to be a painter or musician. He had real talent in violin and piano, and friends of his mother treated him as “a sort of imitation musical Wunderkind,” in his words. His mother’s small ensemble and other music groups rehearsed at their apartment, and the boy stood in front of them as they played their instruments, waving his toy baton. He sometimes performed on his instruments for his mother’s dinner guests, who were luminaries passing through Chicago.

Beatrice’s many “brilliant dinner parties” featured these luminaries “chiefly of the theater and the music world,” according to Dudley Crafts Watson, “sometimes eighteen or twenty in number.” By age six Orson was permitted to stay up late and sit in on the luminary dinners, as long as he cooperated by taking an afternoon nap. He sometimes obliged the nap, but he never went down easily at night. After getting a good night kiss, he’d follow his mother into her bedroom, talking a blue streak until she escorted him back to his room with strict instructions to go to bed after he finished whatever poem or sketch he was working on. Then he’d follow her back again, talking and talking until finally she fell asleep, often waking up the next morning with little Orson curled up beside her, snoring.

In April 1922, Beatrice and Dr. Bernstein hosted a dinner in honor of the poet, playwright, and Shakespeare authority Louis K. Anspacher, who was visiting Chicago for a lecture. Orson, almost seven, sat alongside his cousin Dudley, whom he thought of as “Uncle” Dudley, and Russian sculptor Boris Lovet-Lorski, taking in their high-flown conversation. The new Jacques Gordon String Quartet, which his mother championed, performed for the guests.

Recalling the celebrities who passed through his Chicago home in his youth, Welles liked to believe that some of them, such as the opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin, had designs on his beloved mother. “I’ve always suspected [Chaliapin] was my father because he had a big love affair with my mother at the time when it would have counted,” Welles mused in his phone talks with Roger Hill. “He looks a lot more like I do than my father did.” It didn’t matter that the opera singer was actually nowhere near his mother, or even the Midwest, when Orson was conceived. The important thing was that Chaliapin, who came straight from the opera stage to the Welles apartment wearing his costume, showed a paternal interest in the boy, bouncing him on his knee, at a time when Dick Welles was persona non grata in the household. “While I prayed to God as a little child,” Welles mused, “I always prayed to Chaliapin dressed for
Boris Godunov.”

Welles enjoyed imagining his mother’s illustrious flings; and on another occasion, he hinted that Beatrice may have enjoyed a liaison with Enrico Caruso as well. (The filmmaker in him also imagined a possible extramarital romance for Charles Foster Kane’s mother: it is there deep in the backstory of
Citizen Kane
, just a hint of Mary Kane’s affair with the boarder who leaves her his fortune—a boarder who might well have been Kane’s real father.)

Whatever their relationship with Beatrice, the visiting luminaries doted on little Orson, seeing in the exuberant boy a reflection of his charming, talented mother—and, perhaps, of themselves as children. A marvel of a boy, little Orson could draw and paint, play the violin and piano, recite verse and drama, sit and listen to artistic shoptalk, and sometimes chip in thoughtfully during the adults’ conversations. He might even crawl into a famous guest’s lap and fall asleep. Dr. Bernstein thought the adorable, mischievous boy was a genius, and said so. His mother merely smiled. “The word genius was whispered into my ear the first thing I ever heard while I was still mewling in my crib,” Welles said, “so it never occurred to me that I wasn’t until middle age.”

The other Welles boy, Richard, did not thrive at Chicago Latin, where he was repeating the eighth grade he’d failed to finish at the Todd School. Indeed, in the spring of 1921 another malady struck the fifteen-year-old, and he was sent home to the care of Dr. Bernstein. Richard claimed later to have aggravated his previous leg fracture, but it is hard to know.

Orson’s older brother was already a smooth confabulator. Later, Richard would boast that he excelled in his home studies, that his grades in French and Latin should have been solid enough for high school credit. But despite the attention and encouragement that came with home schooling, Richard never did complete his course requirements. “No work done by Richard Welles in the Chicago Latin School could possibly be construed as High School Work,” an administrator there wrote in his file. “He missed almost the whole of our Eighth Grade and was never in our High School. It is true that we have French and Latin in our Eighth Grade, but the amount done by him was not enough to constitute a credit in any sense.”

His parents placed their last bet on Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, originally located in Highland Park, but operating since 1915 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where both his parents had summered in days past. Richard was enrolled for the fall term at the academy in 1921, but almost immediately he was sent back to Chicago. The problem, it seems, went beyond adolescent maladjustment; surviving medical records suggest the investigation of a cord lesion, or a central lesion contained within the skull, which could cause mood swings and right side weaknesses. To address the problem, Dr. Bernstein recommended an operation, although its exact nature—and, indeed, whether Bernstein performed it himself—is unclear.

In early November, Dr. Bernstein wrote to inform Northwestern Academy that the operation had been a success. “There were no evidences of an organic nervous lesion,” the doctor said. “The spinal puncture showed clear fluid, and the electrical tests showed no degenerative changes in the muscles. We have, therefore, made a diagnosis of a functional nerve condition, possibly concussion of the spine. He is making a very rapid improvement regaining function in all his muscles. I expect that he will return to school either at the end of next week, or the beginning of the following week. This will undoubtedly relieve your mind of the contagious nature of his trouble.”

The academy furnished a history outline and English and geometry study guides so that the sixteen-year-old could keep up with his education at home. Bernstein assured school officials that Richard was physically sound, though “the muscles of [his] right side have not fully regained their tone and it will be necessary for him to sleep indoors and avoid cold baths or showers.” Mentally, however, the teenager suffered from a neurosis or hysteria that combined periods of high excitement with low discouragement. “I am sending him back to school at this early date, because there is a psychological aspect to a condition of this character that requires a care that you and your splendid school are best able to give him.