Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (27 page)

After the rain stopped, he left “our Dad to snooze under mosquito netting” and stepped outside, venturing into a park where he encountered a traveling theatrical troupe. “In the park we found an open space,” Orson wrote, “in the center of which was a gayly-curtained platform. We guessed correctly that it was a temporary stage erected by some company of strolling players. We parted the drapes and peered in. The actors were clustered about a tiny stove eating their supper. They invited us to join in with them and of course we accepted.”

Seated in “the only chair” and presented with chopsticks, at which he was already evidently proficient, Orson proceeded to get “stuffed with rice, raw fish, and ‘saki.’ And while even our Japanese was more extensive than their English we carried on a successful conversation of three hours duration—entirely with our hands. We taught them a song from a school musical comedy and they instructed us in the art of Oriental theatrical fencing and make-up.
⁹

“It was a truly fascinating experience.

“Late that afternoon we left, promising to return to their show in the evening.”

Father and son returned when darkness fell. “We found ourselves alone in the park” with the troupe, Orson continued, the show drawing a sparse crowd. “The moving picture industry is hitting the theatrical world even in the East, and it was raining a little. The players laughed long and heartily, and we had tea. We were shocked by their living conditions, their poverty. They told us that they had enough rice for one more day, if no one came the next night. . . . They felt hurt when we offered them money and laughed at our sympathizing. They would laugh at death. We said good-bye and the last thing we heard as we walked down the road was the sound of their merry voices singing the American song we had taught them.”

In China, the two toured more widely, making a memorable visit to the Great Wall near Peking. Whether Dick Welles accompanied Orson on all the side trips is unclear, but Dick must have traveled on land with his teenage son when great distances were covered.

In a conversation with his daughter Chris Welles Feder, however, Orson implied that he was alone at least one day, probably in Shanghai, when he wandered into a Chinese opera. “I’ll never forget the elaborate costumes, the masks, the revolving stages,” he told her. He would evoke that moment in
The Lady from Shanghai
, the 1948 film in which a sailor (played by Welles), framed for a murder, hides in a Chinatown theater in San Francisco as Betty Leong and the Mandarin Theatre enact a masque onstage.

As the boat turned back toward America, Dick Welles reverted to sleeping through the days. For the rest of his life, Orson believed that his father was sleeping off his alcoholism, and other biographies accept this conclusion. But there may be more sympathetic explanations. Dick Welles’s heart condition had not gone away, and besides his gin and tonics he may well have been taking digitalis, then a popular treatment for heart disease. Digitalis retarded the swelling of body tissue and stimulated normal heart rhythms, and it was often prescribed in combination with lengthy bed rest; for this reason, people with heart disease often took ocean cruises. Digitalis was a difficult substance to prescribe in an accurate dosage, and its effects were notoriously erratic.

One voice that is absent from all this speculation is that of Dick Welles himself. He left no correspondence or other written record of his life. He may have known he was gravely ill; after discussing the trip with Orson, Barbara Leaming wrote that Dick Welles expressed a fear “of dying in the Orient.” At one point during the voyage, far from home, Dick Welles made his son promise “he wouldn’t be buried in the ground,” i.e., on foreign soil. He made Orson vow to have him cremated or buried at sea if he should die during the trip.

Orson returned from his summer in Japan and China rattled by the “terrifying journey” he had undergone with his drink-addled father. Barbara Leaming wrote that the boy complained privately to Roger and Hortense Hill about the voyage, and the Hills “made him vow not to see his father again until he had sobered up.” Orson “bluntly” passed on that ultimatum to Dick Welles. “That was the last I ever saw of him,” Welles told Leaming.

But when, exactly, was that blunt face-off? The first important production of the 1929–1930 season at Todd was George Bernard Shaw’s
Androcles and the Lion
, a large undertaking featuring forty dramatis personae—mostly Junior Troupers (underclassmen) but also members of the Society of Learn Pidgins (the youngest Todd boys), all of it “staged by Orson Welles,” his first credit as sole director. And Dick Welles was there to see the show.

Androcles
was a typical Todd School shoestring operation—the school never had adequate resources for proper costumes, sets, or even rehearsals. Of course the casting was catch-as-catch-can too, and Orson learned to appreciate the Todd footballers who could act, such as John Dexter; William Mowry Jr., who later followed Orson into the Mercury Theatre; and the ordinary-seeming Edgerton Paul, who played Androcles in this production, and who always underwent an impressive transformation onstage. Orson directed Paul in key roles at Todd before he too joined the Mercury. “A funny little fellow,” Orson mused years later, “with acne and unfortunate in every way but he kind of cast all that aside when he got into makeup and costumes.”

Todd productions encouraged Orson’s habit of directing as though trapped in the eye of a storm, herding his fledgling actors, shouting at them, driving them fiercely toward the cliff’s edge. “If you had a lead, you did exactly as you were told” by Orson, remembered Hascy Tarbox, then a Junior Trouper. “He choreographed everything. ‘That’s your mark. Don’t move. Don’t wriggle.’ He was a martinet. The result was extraordinary theatre.” Dexter concurred: “Keep it moving!” was Orson’s credo, he remembered. Yet when necessary, Orson was also insightful and nurturing: “He would stop and explain to one and all the plot, the feeling he wanted, the mood, the speed, etc. How he knew it I don’t know.”

As was his wont, Orson took a plum role himself in
Androcles
, doubling as the brutish warrior Ferrovius, whom Androcles describes as having “the strength of an elephant and the temper of a raving bull.” He even designed and wrote the production’s program, including an amusing discourse on the import of the play: “A mystery surrounds the author of this delightful satire. Just what is Bernard Shaw, vegetarian, socialist, anti-vivisectionist and Irishman, really driving at?”

Roger’s Hall filled up with parents and townies, many of them drawn by Orson’s growing reputation. Among them was Dick Welles, who arrived by train from Chicago. Was it here and now, at
Androcles and the Lion
, that Orson cornered his father and told him to stay away? Or did he write his father a letter and later dodge Dick’s telephone calls?

Leaming and Callow agree that practically everyone in the school knew that Orson’s father was an alcoholic. “His father would come out to see almost every play that we would do,” Hill said, “but he would go into the back seat and he’d sit there silently and he’d probably leave just before the end.” Dick Welles was “usually pretty heavily cocked with alcohol,” the headmaster recalled. “According to Paul Guggenheim,” Callow wrote, without quoting Guggenheim directly, Orson “hated” his father and made himself scarce whenever Dick Welles showed up at Todd for his performances. “His drunkenness was impossible to ignore,” Callow explained, “an unbearable embarrassment in front of his fellow students.”

But was it really so surprising that a father would leave a school play quickly, as the curtain fell, if his son had warned him away? If he thought his presence was embarrassing his son, or if he was reluctant to reveal his own deteriorating health?

Just a week after
Androcles and the Lion
, Orson stopped in at the Tavern Club after a Saturday matinee of Fritz Leiber’s company performing
Julius Caesar.
According to Ashton Stevens in his “A Column or Less” for the
Herald-Examiner
, Orson came looking for “either his guardian, the distinguished Dr. Bernstein, or the doctor’s playmates, the childless but children-loving Ned Moores.” When neither could be found, Orson sat down alone and ordered a meal. “Too young to be a member of the Tavern, and too prosperous looking to be a dinner-snatcher, he caused considerable speculation,” Stevens wrote. But the headwaiter vouched for the boy: “Why, that young gentleman’s all right,” the headwaiter reportedly said. “He’s the only son of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Moore.”

Callow pitied “poor Dick Welles, if he was able to read the piece,” with its references to Bernstein as Orson’s guardian and the boy himself “as another man’s son.” Yet Stevens was obviously kidding; as an old friend of Dick Welles, he knew full well who Orson’s real father was; and the headwaiter was quoted as part of the joke. Stevens went on to praise Orson’s self-assurance, predicting that the youth would become “my favorite actor” someday, though he had “yet to see him act.” He vowed to file the column away, betting that Orson would be “at least a leading man by the time it has yellowed.”

Orson himself pinpointed the last time he glimpsed his father. It was not at a performance of
Androcles and the Lion
, but at the second major Todd School production of the year:
Wings over Europe
, the British drama the Todd boys had seen staged by the touring Theatre Guild in Chicago the previous year.

Wings over Europe
was presented in Roger’s Hall one week before Christmas 1930. Again, Dick Welles made the trip from Chicago; again, he left quickly after the last act—because “he didn’t want to admit he was interested in my acting career or some damn thing,” Welles told Leaming. Orson had the leading role, as an intense poet-scientist grappling with deadly knowledge; Hill was the nominal codirector, but Orson was really in charge, borrowing shrewdly from the Theatre Guild version.

As Orson later recalled, even as his father slouched somewhere in the back row, the Roger’s Hall performance came to an unexpected climax. In the story, several government officials have come to meet with the scientist, concerned that he intends to detonate a bomb. Another senior—a boy Orson didn’t particularly like, as either actor or classmate—played a Parliament official who is goaded by his colleagues into shooting Orson’s character. When the boy pointed his gun at Orson, however, the prop weapon didn’t fire. Orson the director was crestfallen—but Orson the actor was thrilled, a moment later, when the other student startled everyone by diving across a table, tackling Orson, and wrestling him to the ground, saving the scene. “I admire him for that,” Welles told Hill fifty years later.

By the time the curtain call was over, Dick Welles was gone. Orson had kept his vow to distance himself from his father, although his ambivalence about the decision was never resolved. “I didn’t think I was doing the right thing, I simply wanted to please the Hills,” he told Leaming in 1984. “I promised,” he told his daughter Chris Welles Feder, “not because I agreed with them—I didn’t think my father’s drinking was a terrible thing—but because I wanted to please them.”

Dick Welles returned to Chicago, alone with his thoughts. He no longer had a permanent address; instead he shuttled from one residential hotel to another, and by the late fall of 1930 he was under the regular care of a nurse. His mental faculties may have deteriorated: when he fell behind on his bill at the Harrison Hotel, his half brother, Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen, had to be summoned from Kenosha to help settle his accounts. His debts included payments to the Harrison Hotel’s house physician, as well as minor bills he had left unpaid in Grand Detour. Gottfredsen helped move Welles to the Hotel Bismarck, on Randolph Street in the heart of the Loop.

A few days before Christmas, Dick Welles used the hotel phone to ring Kenosha and speak to his half brother’s wife, asking her if she would buy a flowering plant as a holiday gift for his mother, promising to repay the cost. (His half brother would later dun his estate for the expense.)

Also just before Christmas, Dr. Maurice Bernstein visited Dick at the Bismarck, less than half a mile from his office on Michigan Avenue. Bernstein, who must have realized that Dick was clinging to life but failing rapidly, may have cautioned Roger Hill and suggested that Orson stay in Woodstock over Christmas. Bernstein and Dick Welles talked over Dick’s will and the future of his sons after his impending death.

Orson’s father made it through the holiday, but three days later, in the late afternoon of Sunday, December 28—the last weekend of 1930—he collapsed. In signing Dick Welles’s death certificate, Dr. Bernstein noted the principal causes of death as “chronic myocarditis,” which is an inflammation of the heart muscle commonly associated with chronic alcoholism (though also linked to certain viruses and prescription drugs), along with “chronic interstitial nephritis,” an inflammatory condition sometimes triggered by toxins or prescribed medications (but also a possible sign of autoimmune disease). According to Bernstein’s death certificate notes, the nephritis first manifested itself in May 1930—just before the Far East voyage Dick Welles undertook with his son. In Dick’s case, unlike that of Orson’s mother, no autopsy was performed.

Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen returned in haste to Chicago. As other books have noted, Gottfredsen filled in several blanks on the official death form with “Don’t know”—among them Welles’s birthplace; the name of his father; and, most puzzlingly, the name of Dick Welles’s mother—Gottfredsen’s own.

Bernstein sent a telegram to Orson at Todd School: “Your father’s dead. Rush here.”

By the time Orson arrived, Gottfredsen—the Wisconsin uncle he barely knew—had prepared the body for the train to Kenosha, where prayers were said over a casket set amid candles and incense in the living room of Rudolphsheim on the afternoon of December 30.

As with his mother’s service, the minister was Episcopalian. But Orson said later that he was aghast at the funeral, full of rituals he found unfamiliar and peculiar, and he was haunted by his failure to honor his father’s wishes to be cremated or buried at sea. But Dick Welles had spoken with both Dr. Bernstein and Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen about his wishes shortly before his death, and a plot was reserved for him next to his wife and her parents in the Green Ridge Cemetery. Orson was a teenager with no standing to interfere.