Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (35 page)

The Packard wove past small lakes and through dense pine forest. Arriving at the luxurious-looking lodge, Orson was treated to “as demoralizing a breakfast as has ever been fed to an aspiring co-dramatist,” he reported in a letter to the headmaster. A three-day introduction to the north woods followed: the Meigs family took him sightseeing, hiking, swimming, sailing, canoeing, game-fishing, and even for a bit of hunting. “We went out for deer but brought home a mere brace of gamey partridge,” Orson recounted.

Eager to buckle down, Orson erected a personal wigwam on a small pine grove island offshore from the main lodge. The wigwam materials, Orson wrote to Skipper, consisted of “wild things, deer skin and bark, soft maple and basswood.” He forked $25.50 over to local “squaws and a few antiques of the neuter gender” for help in gathering materials and constructing the “great inverted salad bowl” in which he meant to dwell. He still didn’t feel much like writing, and went paddling along the river, recognizing “a portly old gentleman in a mellow panama”—none other than Hortense Hill’s father, Arthur Lincoln Gettys, who was vacationing nearby.

Gettys was a prominent Chicago attorney, a partner in a firm with five-term Chicago mayor Carter Harrison Jr., himself the son of another five-term Chicago mayor, Carter Harrison Sr., once a presidential hopeful. The Harrisons belonged to the newspaper family that owned the
Chicago Times.
Orson loved the name Gettys, and he would use it in
Citizen Kane
for Boss Gettys, the corrupt political broker described as “a big heavy set man, a little past middle age” in the script.

“Fate—everything is fate,” Orson wrote to Skipper from the Wisconsin north woods. The people he met, the places he went, all added up to a road map pointing him to his future.

The young man was galvanized by the first letter he received from Roger Hill. Skipper had dashed off an opening for their play about John Brown, a scene set at a town hall meeting in Concord, Massachusetts, where the debate is dominated by abolitionists Henry David Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison.

Orson was all enthusiasm, but it was Hill whose discipline had started the ball rolling. Feeling “permanently shamed” by his own procrastination, Orson promptly sat down at his typewriter in the wigwam and pecked out a title page—“Kansas Days, Copyright, 1932”—breathlessly summarizing the projected work as “a play of the stirring days just before the civil war, concerning chiefly John Brown, prophet—warrior—zealot—the most dramatic and incredible figure in American history.”

Then he wrote his own first scene, setting it at John Brown’s farm in North Elba, from where the antislavery crusader set out for Harpers Ferry. (After his death, the abolitionist’s body would be returned to North Elba—the place where “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave.”) The scenes Orson wrote now would be overhauled later, but, as always with him, when the writing began to flow it gushed. “I have trouble sometimes thinking things out clearly unless I write my thoughts down in some consecutive order,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich years afterward, “so I write myself quite a good deal of disposable prose.” He would evolve a lifelong habit of settling down to write late in the evening, after everyone else had retired—“a ten-thirty that feels, even to this inveterate night-hawk, like the cold moment before dawn in a Dublin scene-dock,” he wrote to Skipper. Guzzling coffee, he would write until dawn.

Inspired by one scene, then another, Orson often wrote episodes out of sequence—and that may have contributed to the structure of this first script, which would be framed by its opening, Brown’s death, and then be driven forward by a clever narrative device: a newspaperman’s search for the real man behind the legend. The stage directions called for stereopticon slides of photographs, documents, and newspaper headlines. All of these elements anticipated
Citizen Kane
, noted Welles’s authorized biographer, Barbara Leaming. “Long before John Brown actually appears on stage,” Leaming observed, “we have examined a variety of conflicting points of view about him.”

Hill was older and wiser, but in this teaming with Orson he swiftly became the junior partner, as reflected in the credit on Orson’s cover page, which read “by Orson Welles and Roger Hill.” Hill understood his role: once he fired the starter pistol, he could step back and watch Orson run the race. The headmaster would complete only a few scenes for the play; the bulk of the work was Orson’s.

Even at seventeen, Orson was already a peerless editor of other people’s ideas. “Personally I think it’s
great
. Wonderful!” he wrote, critiquing Hill’s first pages, before asking tactfully, “With this opinion understood, may I offer the inevitable criticism?” Certainly the headmaster had “made incredibly dull expository material genuinely dramatic. But I do think there’s too much Thoreau! Not too many lines, understand, but too wonderful a personality. He completely dominates the off-stage individuality of John Brown, whose shadow should be more real than any of the persons actually presented. All of the characters are perhaps a little too painstakingly
characters
.”

He tempered his critiques with praise. Thoreau’s “marching-on” speech in defense of Brown was “superb,” Orson noted, “the kind [of speeches] that live because they combine a literary quality with a very real dramatic and practically theatric power.” But parts of the other dialogue Hill wrote were perhaps “too good,” Orson said. “We don’t want to be accused of bombast. I think neat ‘lines’ are a fault of mine too, we must both beware, for that way lies floweriness.”

Another lifelong pattern emerged: alone with his creative impulses, Orson always had too much energy, too many thoughts in his head, to focus exclusively on one Big Idea. Once he plunged into the John Brown script, his mind began racing, and during breaks from writing about the abolitionist he dashed off notes for other projects. He whipped up an outline for a mystery play called “The Dark Room,” involving society figures gathered together for a haunted séance. “A natural, a positive honey!” Orson predicted in a letter to the headmaster. “Every English-speaking repertory company on the globe will be doing that show, mark my words!” But he didn’t get very far on “The Dark Room” before he was distracted by another intriguing possibility: “Bright Lucifer,” a story that could draw on his own life and the northern Wisconsin locale. But he soon stalled on “Bright Lucifer,” and set that aside too.

The “sacred” task of the moment, he realized, was his collaboration with Roger Hill. Orson pined for the “sunshine of your enthusiasm,” he admitted to Skipper, and sometimes withheld finished pages for fear of the headmaster’s negative reaction. If Hill didn’t respond to his work quickly enough by mail, Orson worried that it had fallen short. Orson peppered his letters with the puns and silly jokes that amused them both: “I can ride a canoe, canoe?” (“Skipper brought out the boy in him,” Simon Callow wrote.) He signed his letters, “Love without end.”

A series of fierce August thunderstorms finally expelled him from his wigwam. He had struck up an acquaintance with another vacationer, Lawrence C. Whiffen, who operated Wisconsin’s first archery supply store in Milwaukee, and Whiffen offered to share his pine log cabin for a small stipend. A bow-hunting fanatic, about fifteen years older than Orson, Whiffen spent summers in the Lac du Flambeau region honing his archery skills while working on conservationist tracts. “Larry the Archer,” as Orson fondly dubbed his cabin mate, was the strong, silent type, but Whiffen made “a great to-do” pounding on his Underwood through the night—setting a good example for Orson, who sat across the table from him, doing the same.

When not writing, Orson spent time with the multitudinous Meigses. One day James Jr. bagged a deer (“You ‘bag’ a deer, don’t you? Or do you
bug
it?” Orson joked to Skipper), and it was a splendid animal, “glorious antlered.” All feasted on the venison. Orson was friendly enough with James Jr., “a remarkable huntsman” who was nearly his age, though he noted that “his are the huntsman’s faults and there is just no halting the tedious, Albert-like inevitability of his tongue.”
¹⁵
He preferred the younger, more artistic William, whom the family called Willie.

Orson tried never to miss a John Barrymore picture, and one day he drove with the Meigses to see
Grand Hotel
at the Isle Theatre in Minocqua. Orson bought tickets for the whole family—in honor of Willie’s fourteenth birthday, but also as a “gesture made towards repaying all this overwhelming Meigs hospitality,” Orson wrote to Skipper. But these movie tickets, along with the rent he paid to Larry the Archer, the cost of the wigwam, and “a general malted milking now and then,” as Orson reported to the headmaster, left his wallet shrunken “to the most incredible flatness,” engendering “a state of mind not amiably inclined to fertility and the fruitful pen.” Orson fired off telegrams to Dr. Bernstein and Skipper, pleading for cash.

When his guardian temporized, the headmaster sent $25 by wire from Michigan, calling it a gift that would not have to be repaid. Orson could have wept. “I can scarcely think of a more perfect workshop,” a newly hopeful Orson wrote to the headmaster from Larry the Archer’s cabin. “A tuneful country this, here on the reservation, now that noisy outboards have been packed away. Woodland sounds from the wild where the Chippewa hunt bear and deer, silver sounds from the lake, and sunny insect sounds at mid-day. A little sad, perhaps the song the marsh-folk sing, and sadder yet the endless dirging of the wind in the fir trees. At night there are stealthy little sounds, and always the unbelievable: ceaseless in the air, the throbbing of medicine-drums.”

The John Brown script had languished briefly as he scrounged for subsistence. Now his spirit was lifted, his creativity recharged. After “a soul-satisfying dinner” provided by the Meigses, he plunged afresh into the script. The night flew by. “Now, through the murky spectacles of early morning (one does keep barbaric hours in this bee-loud glade),” Orson wrote to Skipper, quoting Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “I search in vain for rosy pigmentation. Courage my soul! Hope rises with the morning sun.”

September brought Orson back to Highland Park, where he busied himself collating his scenes with the headmaster’s, revising as he toiled. He and Roger Hill planned a trip to New York once the fall semester was safely under way. Skipper was genuinely enthusiastic about Orson’s script and thought he could pitch it to any number of former Todd boys who were now in show business.

And Orson’s script it was. In just one month’s time, Orson had written more than two hundred pages, encompassing eleven major scenes and twenty-nine characters. Hill claimed credit for only “most” of one finished scene, the very first he wrote, and even that was rewritten by Orson. After spending the first half of September on revisions, Orson started typing multiple drafts for submission purposes.

Autumn was gorgeous, and the Moores, who still lived near Dr. Maurice Bernstein, had “a heavenly back-yard, sun-flecked and fragrant,” where Orson could sit writing, typing, and retyping. (“I doubt if I have ever, even in a class-room, been forced into such stupid, wearing work,” he nevertheless complained.) Orson’s guardian and the Moores were so closely aligned that today they might be considered “blended households.” Orson could never quite figure out what was going on between Bernstein and Aunt Hazel; but he complained in his letters that the two quarreled often and sometimes tearfully, interrupting his concentration and slowing his writing.

For that reason and others, Orson occasionally escaped to Chicago, where the newspaper world was in an uproar. After repeated clashes with a new editor of the
Chicago Examiner
, his friend Ashton Stevens had been threatened with the sack; the respected drama critic eventually accepted a switch to the afternoon Hearst paper, the
Chicago American.
Thanks to Stevens, Ned Moore, John Clayton, and his other well-placed friends, Orson still had his choice of opening-night tickets for the symphony, opera, and theater. He was particularly taken by
Of Thee I Sing
, by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind (with a Gershwin score), a new hit satirizing a presidential campaign. The play had its Chicago premiere in late September, and Orson agreed with Charles Collins, who wrote in the
Tribune
that it was the “most triumphant show of the year.” “Much the swellest thing,” Orson wrote to Skipper. “You must see it.” He and Hill were already talking about writing a second play—a Big Idea musical about another famous American, perhaps even a president. To Orson, the triumphant
Of Thee I Sing
was both a template and an inspiration.

Still, Highland Park stymied his creativity. When Dr. Bernstein wasn’t bickering with Aunt Hazel, he was lecturing Orson about the future. Orson had enjoyed his little fling with theater; now, perhaps, was the time for college. After all, if Orson was still serious about his theatrical ambitions, why was he lolling around in the Moores’s backyard? Orson had “wasted the summer,” and now he was “wasting the already started theatrical season,” his guardian warned him. If Orson was going to try to sell his play, when was he leaving for New York?

Orson was just as impatient. “Why not now
now
NOW?” he wrote to Skipper.

Orson’s plans and problems and Big Ideas exasperated Bernstein—indeed, nearly overwhelmed him. As Hazel Moore pointed out, whenever Orson was home Bernstein got lost “in the throes of Orson,” and was unable to focus on his own interests.

Aunt Hazel thought she handled Orson better, finding him always “an intensely interesting person, regardless of the element of agreement one may have with him.” The boy’s feelings about Hazel were harder to discern: in one passage of her biography, Barbara Leaming wrote that Orson “vehemently disliked the autocratic” woman, but elsewhere she wrote only that he found her “somewhat irritating,” a kinder analysis. Orson was not quoted directly.

Everyone in the Moore and Bernstein households seemed intent on debating Orson’s best possible future. The Moores always sided with Dr. Bernstein, who wanted to point Orson toward a constructive target and dispatch him toward that goal for a fixed and if possible lengthy period of time. The Hills felt the same way: “Anything to get him out of my hair!” Skipper told Leaming.