Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (26 page)

But if the headmaster had boundless warmth and approval for Orson, he also had boundless warmth and approval for all the Todd boys, and not a few alumni named their children “Roger” or “Todd.”

Orson spent almost as much time on the train to Chicago, during the school year 1929–1930, as he did in class. With access to free or discounted tickets to the Chicago Civic Opera, the Chicago Symphony, the Shakespeare Society, the Goodman Theatre, and all the touring Theatre Guild productions, he attended dozens of productions and stored them all away in his mind, crammed with memories like Xanadu’s cellar. He’d see a play; make a mental note about a scene that worked, a playwright worth following, or an actor who stole the show; and recall the memory when he needed it—sometimes decades later.

The Todd students paid an extended call to the dressing room of the soprano Mary Garden, “the Sarah Bernhardt of opera,” after seeing her in
L’Amore dei Tre Re
and
Le Jongleur de Notre Dame.
They also enjoyed a private audience with Chicago’s foremost Shakespearean, the actor and director Fritz Leiber. Orson and the Todd Troupers attended every Shakespeare production offered by Leiber’s troupe during its twelve-week run at the Civic Theatre starting in late 1929. A Chicago native, Leiber had played Mercutio in a 1916 silent film of
Romeo and Juliet
, and he became a regular character actor in Hollywood after sound arrived. That season in Chicago, Leiber either directed or starred in ten Shakespeare plays—
Macbeth
,
Othello
,
King Lear
, and
Hamlet
among them. The Todd boys met with Leiber backstage, where they were encouraged to ask him about his interpretations of the plays; the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
ran a photograph of Leiber with Roger Hill, Orson, and the other Todd Troupers.

One Shakespeare play Leiber omitted that season was the comedy
Much Ado About Nothing
, so Hill bused the boys to Madison, Wisconsin, to see it performed by Sir Ben Greet, one of the last great actor-managers, who was near the end of his touring days with his players. “Constant play-going of this sort,” reported the Woodstock newspaper, “develops a critical faculty in the Todd Troupers which is reflected in the remarkable excellence of their own productions.”

The Todd boys gorged themselves on theater that year, taking in the entire New York Theatre Guild road show schedule, which included
Caprice
with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Eugene O’Neill’s
Strange Interlude
; the Czech science fiction play
R.U.R.
by Karel Čapek; a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s
Major Barbara
; and a new British drama,
Wings over Europe.
They also attended the Goodman’s acclaimed
Romeo and Juliet
—another Shakespeare standard Leiber had omitted—as well as a revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy of manners,
The Rivals
; and a young people’s matinee of
Ivanhoe.

In Woodstock, the school’s own drama program was evolving. Carl Hendrickson had lingered in Europe, taking a yearlong sabbatical to get married; and without him to crank out music and songs, the foolishments waned. Orson harbored ambitions to mount important dramatic works, and in Hendrickson’s absence the headmaster leaned on the youth increasingly.

Early in the winter, the Todd Troupers mounted a tribute to the Chicago poet and playwright Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, whose death in the 1918 influenza pandemic had led his family to found the Goodman Theatre. The first show to be staged in “Roger’s Hall,” the newly renovated auditorium named for the popular young headmaster, was Goodman’s one-act
Dust of the Road
starring Orson as the restless ghost of Judas, condemned to wander the Earth and implore others not to sell their souls for thirty pieces of silver. To fill out the evening, Orson wrote, directed, and starred in his first original play,
Purple Joss.
The text has been lost, but a joss stick is a type of incense, and newspaper accounts suggest that the play was a one-act Oriental mystery. Orson also presented a satirical sketch,
Skum of the Earth
, poking gentle fun at Goodman’s portentous
Dust of the Road.
Orson was the young man of the hour, writing, directing, or starring in every part of the show.

Roger’s Hall was part of an extraordinary expansion of the Todd School that was preoccupying the headmaster in the fall of 1929. By the end of the year the school had added a swimming pool and a riding academy, and inaugurated ambitious road trips to American historical sites. Soon after Orson’s graduation, other amenities would follow: a radio laboratory and even a small airport, complete with three Piper Cubs, so that the boys could have flying lessons.

Hill liked to say that he turned Todd’s dramatic program over to Orson to get the youth out of his hair. Welles liked to say he did so much in so many plays to capture Skipper’s attention. But Orson was a godsend, a self-starter, and Hill delegated more and more responsibility to him as the school year wore on. Hill was still listed as director of the all-school plays, but his actual involvement tapered off.

Naturally, as Orson immersed himself in dramatics, his grades suffered, especially in the subjects that didn’t come naturally to him. Here again the headmaster was complicit, encouraging Orson to befriend his classmate Paul Guggenheim, whom Hill regarded as “the other genius” in the same age bracket. Hill then looked the other way when Orson paid Guggenheim for assistance with Latin declensions and geometry. Orson was proud of his lifelong resistance to mathematics, and his spelling also stayed weak. But these weaknesses would not be reflected in his Todd School grades.

Orson’s schedule was brutal, and by Christmas he had run himself down and developed a bad cold. His father was still away, so Orson headed to Bernstein’s house in Highland Park, where the doctor was spending the holiday with his new wife, the opera diva Edith Mason.

Their marriage was fast combusting. At first the newlyweds had shuttled between Bernstein’s modest flat and Mason’s luxurious Lake Shore Drive apartment. Yet Mason’s ex-husband, Giorgio Polacco, dogged their every move—calling to talk to her, turning up to visit, sitting down and refusing to leave. Orson still visited Bernstein on his many trips to Chicago, but now those visits were unsettling, with the three adults always quarreling. Court records prove the truth of this anecdote: Polacco carried a gun, and at one point he showed up and waved it around, threatening to shoot the couple and himself—until Mason grabbed the gun and threatened to kill herself first.

Orson’s presence stirred up other layers of complexity. Polacco was sexually omnivorous, according to Barbara Leaming, and lusted after Orson, always trying to “touch” the teenager when no one was looking.

Orson admired Edith Mason’s singing, but she was no fan of his. When he arrived in Highland Park, the opera star was greatly “upset” by his cold, according to Chicago newspapers, because she herself “recently had recovered from a cold” and did not want to risk a relapse. When Dr. Bernstein refused to find Orson somewhere else to stay, Mason stormed off, taking a suite at the Belden-Stratford apartments in the city. When reporters got wind of the contretemps and asked Bernstein whether he and the diva had separated permanently, the doctor insisted that he was spending Christmas in the suburbs for peace and quiet. “I visit my wife and see her often,” he insisted. “I am very much in love with her, and I think she still is in love with me.” But the marriage never recovered, and within months Mason had filed for divorce.

The case took a year and a half to resolve, with Mason leaving the Civic Opera and taking up residence in Dallas, Texas. The divorce proceedings painted “a strange marital mosaic,” according to the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, with a “curious roundelay of charges and countercharges.” Mason claimed that the doctor “set about deliberately to obtain money from me, to live off my income, and to spend my income,” even borrowing $1,000 from her to buy her a diamond wedding ring. Bernstein countered her charges with a five-thousand-word deposition that presented Polacco as the “arch conspirator against his marital happiness,” according to the press, turning up incessantly on their doorstep, threatening their lives, trying to extort $100,000 from Bernstein to compensate him for the loss of his beloved wife and daughter. Polacco even warned Bernstein that Mason was getting fat, urging the doctor to put her on a diet and curtail her smoking, which was ruining her glorious voice. Bernstein attested that Mason had her own faults: she was “extravagant in behalf of herself,” according to the
Herald and Examiner
’s account of his deposition, “citing as one example her possession of 100 pairs of shoes.”

After the divorce came through, Mason reconciled with Polacco, remarrying him later in 1931, then divorcing him again six years later. The enigmatic doctor, meanwhile, had added a second failed marriage to his own scorecard.

Where was Dick Welles throughout this soap opera? Was he traveling constantly for pleasure in the Caribbean, as some accounts suggest? Was he visiting his son Richard in Kankakee? Is it possible that Dick was ill, even in a hospital for tests, without Orson’s knowing?

According to Peter Noble’s biography, relying heavily on information from Dr. Bernstein, Dick Welles retired from business after his wife’s death and devoted himself “to enjoying a life of leisure and travel,” with his son as his “constant companion.” Barbara Leaming’s biography expanded on this travelogue and gave Dick an ulterior motive. “Expressly to steal him away from Dr. Bernstein,” wrote Leaming, “Dick took Orson on far-flung travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia.” Orson insisted in multiple interviews that his father even lived in China for long spells.

But this appears to be more fantasy than memory. Though available records are admittedly partial, they indicate that after his wife’s death Dick Welles rarely traveled outside the United States, apart from his customary vacations in the Caribbean. His two documented trips to Europe were his 1925 excursion with Dudley Crafts Watson’s tour group, which included Dr. Bernstein, and his trip to meet Orson in Berlin in the late summer of 1928.

In the summer of 1930, however—in honor of Orson’s fifteenth birthday, and perhaps for other reasons—Dick Welles proposed a long voyage to the Far East.

That spring, Orson and Roger Hill cowrote a joke-laden musical revue,
Troupers’ Trifles of 1930
, which was performed at Roger’s Hall for the student body, then reprised at the Woman’s Club and the Woodstock Opera House before touring to a few North Shore towns. Orson designed the costumes, the lighting, and the sets; played the lead role; and, for the first time, officially shared directing credit with the headmaster. After attending a performance of
Troupers’ Trifles
, Dick Welles unveiled his plans: in early July, he and Orson would leave by train for Seattle, where they would embark on a boat for Japan and China.

For a young man already fascinated with the Orient, it was a dream trip. Orson arranged to resurrect his
Highland Park News
column as a kind of travel diary, complete with a new title, “Inklings,” and his own ink-sketched logo.

His first dispatch came from on board the twenty-thousand-ton
Korea Maru
, off the shore of Victoria, Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. “Gissing would terminate his feverish search for ‘where the blue begins’ were he here now, for this is where the blue ends,” Orson reported ecstatically, “the sky being considerably faded with the heat.”
⁸

It would take the
Korea Maru
a few weeks to cross the Pacific. After anchoring briefly in Honolulu and Manila, the vessel reached Japan in late July. Orson gave one account of the crossing in his column, and another later on at a Woodstock speaking engagement; both lighthearted, they formed the basis of accounts of the trip in the earliest books about Welles. Not until Welles retold the story to Barbara Leaming, many years later, did a darker narrative emerge. This tale, supported by Orson’s private letters from the time, was colored with anguish.

At first, Orson busied himself aboard ship writing a prospective radio script featuring Sherlock Holmes. As the filmmaker later recalled, he began to notice that his father was sleeping through most of the days on board. Forced to fend for himself, Orson whiled away the hours signing chits at the bar “for everybody on the ship,” as Peter Noble wrote, quoting Welles. “I was certainly popular on that voyage, and the pile of signed chits grew into an enormous heap. My poor father, who knew nothing about my chit-signing, was obliged to settle up a huge bill when the ship landed in China, gave me his first and only lecture—on the value of money.

“I am afraid that it had very little effect on me.”

According to Leaming, Dick Welles spent the voyage repeatedly drinking himself into a “stupor” and once was “drunk enough to lose his trousers” before shocked witnesses on the ship. He made Orson his errand boy, tasked with keeping his father supplied with all the alcohol he could consume. The young man, now fifteen, wrote to the Hills in misery, saying he only wished his father could “find a drink that wouldn’t make him sick.” Worse yet, Dick grew furious when he realized that Orson was picking up drinks for himself as he raced to the bar to replenish his father’s glass, and warned the boy that no member of the Welles family had started out on the road to alcoholism at such a tender age. “There was considerable tension” between Orson and his father, Leaming wrote. “Dick made no bones about being terribly disappointed with Orson, who, he kept sadly repeating, had passed from him.”

Stopping in Tokyo, they gazed upon Frank Lloyd Wright’s recent Imperial Hotel (“typically Wright with long, horizontal lines and very handsome,” Orson reported in the
Highland Park News
), then docked in the ancient capital, Nara. “Picturesque and lovely, one of the most beautiful spots in Japanese Japan and particularly so in the rain,” Orson said in his second “Inklings” column. “It started to sprinkle just as we left the station in our rickshaw and increased in violence as we rode. There was a thin green mist hanging over everything as we went scurrying through a kind of three dimensional Japanese print, rattling over little lacquered bridges across willow-bordered streams under huge pines as old as time itself, crunching across temple yards, past age-old pagodas, and on up the hill to our hotel.”