Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (23 page)

In his first year, Orson had established himself as a good student, a leading light on
The Red & White
, and an indispensable fixture of the school’s theatricals. If some teachers looked askance at the brash youngster, Orson had powerful allies in Roger and Hortense Hill. If some students did not warm to him, others did. While some books have portrayed him as a solitary boy at odds with his classmates, in truth he found boon companions among his peers, often across age lines and other divisions. Among them were Sherman Perlman, two years his senior and his partner in the Halloween magic act, whom he later called “my great pal” and “the closest friend I had at Todd”; and his roommate John Dexter, a talented halfback who later captained the formidable “Todd Eleven,” but who also stood shoulder to shoulder with Orson in girlie musicals, blackout skits, and, later, productions of Shakespeare.

“In many a school,” Roger Hill explained years later, Orson “would have been very strange and might have had trouble. Todd was nutty enough and unique enough so that the things he could do were appreciated by the toughest football player in the place.”

Grand Detour was another story. While many of the football players at Todd were equally comfortable onstage, the youth of Grand Detour kept their distance from Orson because of his lack of interest “in football, baseball, or any other form of athletics,” according to Charles Higham, who visited Grand Detour and spoke to a number of locals who claimed to remember Orson. In his overimaginative way, Higham wrote that, by contrast, “the girls fancied Orson because he entertained them with impromptu shows in a tent of his own making, playing every part in Shakespeare, both Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, hilariously changing from male to female clothes borrowed from anyone who would lend them.”

At age twelve Orson still found creative solitude in his “art shack” across the road from the hotel. In the river village he spent hours horseback riding, the rare physical sport at which he felt proficient, and took in circuses and county fairs with his father. They traveled to Dixon to watch movies in the best theater in the county—the pictures were still silent, though some, especially comedies, had musical accompaniment—and they loved the vaudeville revues that came there on Sundays. Often they were driven to Dixon by one of the hotel workers, because Dick Welles no longer trusted his eyes at night.

The Sheffield was in its second year under Dick Welles’s management, and it was running like clockwork. Travelers spread the word about the hotel’s excellent catfish on Saturday nights and the Sunday fried chicken suppers. The establishment drew a steady stream of business groups, vacation travelers, and acquaintances from Chicago. Booth Tarkington very probably dined at the hotel with his friend and collaborator Harry Leon Wilson, a native of nearby Oregon, whose picaresque stories were often set in that part of northern Illinois.

Dick Welles read the Chicago newspapers at his own pace in the slow afternoons, handing the sections to his son as he finished them. But Welles was a night owl, and especially relished his son’s company after dark. When the guests retired, the two of them would sit on the front porch of the hotel, chewing over the day. Orson always called Dick “Father” or, on rare occasions, “Dad.” Dick Welles’s pet name for his younger son was “Lamb.” Orson’s father still drank and smoked profusely, using “one Virginia straight-cut cigarette to light another,” according to Higham.

This last summer spent in Grand Detour was a golden memory for Welles. Not much given to nostalgia, he nevertheless considered the village “one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you get thrown out of,” and bristled to hear Grand Detour slighted. Years later, when Roger Hill referred in passing to the “little” Rock River, Welles objected but with humor. “I never think of it as
little
,” he quickly interjected, “It’s great . . . one of the foremost rivers in the world.” He would treasure his summers along the river—“the Hudson of the West,” as the hotel’s ads boasted—as if they had afforded him a portal to the past, “a childhood in the last century.”

That golden summer, Dick Welles drew up his last will and testament. He had learned a lesson from his wife’s death: Beatrice Ives Welles had died intestate, without even life insurance. Dick Welles, by contrast, maintained a substantial policy on his hotel and considerable personal life insurance, and he added a stipulation to his will that both his sons must carry policies of their own.

This was not simply a theoretical provision. Orson’s father was suffering from worsening heart disease, and by that summer he knew his days were numbered.

One of his sons stood to benefit more than the other from his will. Because he had already made “extraordinary advances” to his older son, Richard—still residing in an “insane” ward at Kankakee—and because of Richard’s “apparent irresponsibility and ingratitude,” Dick Welles set aside only one seventh of his estate for his firstborn.

Six sevenths would go to Orson.

By the time Dick signed the document, on October 20, 1927, twelve-year-old Orson was back in Woodstock for seventh grade.

Dick Welles wasn’t the only one passing the baton. Halfway thru the school year 1927–1928, headmaster Noble Hill announced his retirement, and by the end of term his son had assumed full command of the Todd School.

The new headmaster and young Orson had much in common. They were both born talkers. Hill later marveled at “how easily words flowed from [Orson] in graceful prose even as a teenager,” matching his own uncanny ability to rattle off famous speeches, poems, songs, quotations from the Bible and Shakespearean passages from memory. But the new headmaster was genuinely self-effacing about his own talent, and perhaps this modesty was what Orson most admired in his mentor.

Orson enjoyed the run of the school. He had a reliable ally in the new headmaster, but he irritated Hortense Hill on more than one occasion, suffering her barbed tongue, then winning her back with humor and kindness. He showed up in the Hills’ bedroom after hours, sitting on their bed and talking, talking, talking as the couple tried to wind down and get to bed. Hortense only narrowed her eyes balefully, never daring to get undressed.

Hortense Hill was a sensible, nurturing maternal figure for the boys, hovering over them outside classes, watching over their grooming habits, and monitoring their daily meals. She was also a stunning beauty. They couldn’t escape her—but few of the boys wished to. Her wedding photograph, Welles told Skipper years later, was “one of the sexiest pictures I ever saw.”

“Our sunshine,” Welles wrote upon her death, “the radiant blessing of my life.”

The headmaster was less critical of his young charge, and found himself fascinated with Orson’s constant patter. They bonded over books such as
Don Quixote
, which Orson had read at an impressionable age, and which was a favorite novel for both of them. Oratory was part of the Todd curriculum, and during his visits to the Hills’ bedroom, Orson rehearsed his class assignments, among them the fiery speeches of radical abolitionist John Brown. He would toss off a favorite soliloquy from Shakespeare, then wait for Skipper to answer with a selection from his own vast repertoire. One night, Skipper regaled him with orator Wendell Phillips’s eloquent tribute to the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint-Louverture. Orson listened to this with wide eyes—it was new to him—and went away, returning the next evening to repeat it to the Hills. Fifty years later, chatting with his former student by phone, Hill was thunderstruck when the filmmaker delivered the same address from memory. Did Welles remember the words simply because he’d heard them from the headmaster long ago? “More than once,” Welles drawled. “You were fond of it.” And then Welles did the same, on the phone intoning a celebrated speech by Illinois attorney general Robert G. Ingersoll, nominating James G. Blaine for president at the 1876 Republican convention:

Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress, and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the malingerers of his honor.

Hill was second to no one in his passion for American history, but Orson knew Shakespeare as well as his mentor. Hill knew the Bible better, however, and Welles often reached out to his old headmaster in later years when working on a script that required a particular biblical touch.

Not all their banter was high-flown. The headmaster and his wife loved jokes and gossip, and Hill entranced Orson with tales of his gifted and often drunk cousin Jack Rogers, who had preceded him on the Montgomery Ward staff, and who specialized in sly copy for ladies’ wear.

At first the Hill children were jealous of Orson’s constant presence in the house, and Hortense Hill also wondered why they must indulge this pest of a kid. But the couple were drawn by the boy’s good humor and intelligence, and they recognized that, under his showy exterior, he was a sensitive, thoughtful boy. At a time when his mother’s death was still a raw wound—and his father was showing signs of mortality—Orson found the Hills to be perfect stand-ins for his parents. But Orson was also perfect for the Hills. When Orson first arrived at the Todd School, Skipper Hill had still been laboring under his father’s shadow, feeling like a fake as he promoted the school’s athletic program when his real interest lay in the arts. Mentoring Orson gave him a chance to be his own man.

Over time, as Orson spent more time with the headmaster and his family, Hill recalled “that there weren’t really the same rules for Orson” as for the other students. Though athletics remained important under Roger Hill’s leadership, Orson managed to elude gym and sports classes by faking Dr. Bernstein’s signature on a form excusing him from strenuous physical activity owing to health concerns. Not that all exercise was undesirable—Orson made a point of telling classmates what a shame it was that Todd School had no swimming pool, because swimming was his real forte. When the school installed a pool a few years later, Orson felt trapped. “Try to build a mountain for me to get called a liar on!” he complained to Skipper.

By then, though, Roger Hill and his protégé were co-conspirators; their devotion to the arts was gradually changing the school’s direction. “Every youngster is a creator” became the new headmaster’s credo, and his freethinking approach to education was bolstered by his success with Orson.

Woodstock had a convenient downtown train station, and Skipper took the boys to Chicago regularly for lectures, music and theater performances, and museum visits. Like Orson’s parents, the headmaster always arranged backstage passes so the boys could meet the artists, entertainers, and dignitaries. Along with the Theatre Guild plays trucked in from New York, the students also saw frequent productions at the local Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Memorial Theatre.

Led by Thomas Wood Stevens, the founder of the drama department of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Goodman was an annex of the Art Institute of Chicago, housing a professional repertory company and a drama school since 1925. The Goodman had emerged as the leader of Chicago’s “little theater” movement, a bastion of artistic purity that offered an ambitious mix of classical and avant-garde works. The troupe’s standout performers included the Irish actor Whitford Kane, who also sometimes directed its presentations, including an acclaimed spring 1926 production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that the Todd boys attended.

Orson’s second year at Todd was busier and more productive than the first. Between trips to Chicago, he expanded his sketching and writing efforts for
The Red & White.
He assumed more responsibility for organizing the Saturday night entertainments. And he really began to distinguish himself in the all-school productions. Soon, Roger Hill was handing the seventh-grader starring roles that traditionally had been earmarked for boys in their last year at the school.

Partly thanks to Orson, the school’s foolishments were gradually replaced by solid dramatic works. In the spring of 1928 he took one of three lead roles in
Food: A Tragedy of the Future
, a single-act satire by William De Mille set in a future world where ordinary foodstuffs are more precious than money. Orson played a simpering wife who covets the nutritional benefits of an egg; his pal Sherman Perlman played his husband. The program was filled out by Orson’s tarantellas on the piano—suggesting, as Simon Callow observed, “that his abandonment of the piano was not quite as complete as he later chose to remember.”

On the day Orson turned thirteen, May 6, 1928, his father was away in Grand Detour airing out the Hotel Sheffield for the summer ahead. Early in the morning on May 14, as hotel employees installed a new elbow in a kitchen smoke ventilator, they set fire to a handful of papers to test the draft. The smoke carried a spark upstairs, and the fire that ensued wasn’t discovered until 9:30
A
.
M
., by gaining “considerable headway,” according to newspapers. The housekeeper summoned firemen, but by the time the pumper covered the six miles from Dixon to Grand Detour, the hotel was engulfed by “a mass of flames.” The pumper drew water from the nearby river, but it was too late. Only the chimney survived the blaze, according to local reporters, along with “a few pieces of furniture” from the hotel.

The hotel fire would become one of the most mysterious incidents in Orson’s boyhood. Peter Noble, in one of the earliest published accounts of the fire, quotes one local resident as saying that “apparently” Dick Welles was sleeping off drunkenness as the fire spread through the Sheffield. “They had to break down the door of his book-lined and paper-littered room and carry him, protesting bitterly, down the stairs to safety,” according to Noble. Charles Higham embellished this account, claiming that Dick had been “sleeping late, heavily hung over after a night of drinking bootleg liquor,” and waitresses had to march him out through the smoke. Orson’s own version didn’t help: in his 1983
Paris Vogue
piece, the filmmaker referred to his father as “the suspected arsonist,” and claimed that Dick Welles “emerged from the flames dressed only in his night shirt, carrying in one hand an empty parrot cage, and in the other, a framed, hand-tinted photograph of a lady in pink tights (an ex-mistress fondly remembered) named Trixie Friganza.”
⁶
Orson also took liberties with the date of the fire, which he placed after “we’d just returned from China” (a trip two years in the future), and he set the scene with “a nice Christmassy fall of snow on the ground” (there was no such snow).