Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (37 page)

Orson told Stevens he preferred some of “the later guys” (in Stevens’s words) in the exhibition over Whistler, especially the more realistic painters such as George Bellows and Edward Hopper. But Stevens vigorously defended Whistler and the Romantic tradition, and Orson shut up and listened, as he would listen until the end of Stevens’s life.

“I hope Orson wasn’t too annoying,” FloFlo wrote to her husband when he told her about their museum expedition. “He can be sometimes,” she added. No, Stevens said, Orson was “very companionable,” before and after their debate. “I have a feeling that boy will get somewhere,” he confided. “There seems to be a kind of honesty in his precocious smartness.” Orson, for his part, recognized that Stevens had gone out of his way to be “very nice” to him, and he felt privileged to have been treated almost like a friend by the great man.

Stevens was nice enough to offer pointers on anything Orson sent him to read. He thought “Marching Song” showed real talent. (“There is splendid stuff in his play,” he told his wife.) But he agreed that the market was unpromising for such serious subjects, and he urged Orson to try something more salable. Having read his dispatches from Ireland, Stevens suggested that Orson try his hand at a book about his travels—a sort of early autobiography. Orson embraced the idea, dashing off pages in the last week of November, while Stevens was still in New York. The columnist read Orson’s effort quickly and gave him some advice. “I told him it was near-literary,” Stevens said to his wife, “and to get down to earth.” Orson took heed, writing late into the night on both his stage thriller and his nascent travel memoir.

Come December, and money was tight again. Orson begged Dr. Bernstein for reinforcements, while imploring Roger Hill, “in your official capacity of optimizer,” to assure the doctor that his money was being spent on worthwhile objectives. He was full of questions for the headmaster: When did he plan on returning to New York? Orson insisted he could find room for both Hills to stay at his small place. And why was Samson Raphaelson so elusive? “I’ve seen his name on a lot of big-time movies lately,” Orson wrote to Hill. “He’s our man! There must be some way of reaching him, of enthusing him.”

But Hill threw him a curve in his next letter, saying that he’d spoken with Dr. Bernstein, and Bernstein might be right: perhaps Orson should reconsider college, or acting. “Peddling our play is enough,” Orson moaned. “I just can’t bring myself to look for a job.”

Hill had another, more welcome suggestion: if they couldn’t interest a producer in “Marching Song,” perhaps they could self-publish the play using the Todd School printing press. Skipper could write a history-minded preface, and Orson could decorate the script with his scene design sketches and pen-and-ink caricatures, which the headmaster loved. Publishing “Marching Song” might make the play more attractive to a potential producer. Leaping at the idea, Orson instantly started adding drawings to the typed copies of “Marching Song” that he was still circulating. But when he handed the illustrated scripts to office intermediaries, he got only baffled looks in response.

The rejections for “Marching Song” were piling up. Ben Boyar finally weighed in: the script made swell reading, and it might make a good play, Boyar said, but not a commercial one. The Samuel French office praised its “passion and good writing,” but found it “too sprawling” for practical purposes. After charging him $5 for its report, Maddens issued a rejection: “Not suitable for the market.” Samson Raphaelson? Still incommunicado.

“I am now firmly convinced that ‘Marching Song,’ despite its merits, will never be produced, at least not this year,” Orson wrote to Skipper miserably. “I am aware that disappointments, it matters not how many, should in no way affect my confidence, but they do.” He would have to settle for the book version of “Marching Song.” Meanwhile, using John Clayton’s connections, Orson wangled a broadcasting audition at NBC in New York. The tryout was “very favorable,” he wrote to Florence Stevens, although he was diffident about radio for the time being. (“I’m not interested in anything but this aviation program,” he assured FloFlo.) Orson told Roger Hill to let Clayton know he was willing to return to Chicago for the radio series, but he would accept no less than $100 per episode. “For prostituting myself over the ether, I oughta get paid” well, Orson wrote to Skipper.

At the eleventh hour, however, “Marching Song” was rescued from failure. The veteran producer George C. Tyler wrote to Orson to declare his tentative interest in mounting the play. Nothing definite, but thereupon followed “some very exciting letters of approbation,” as Orson wrote to Florence Stevens. Tyler asked to option the script until the end of 1934: an unpaid option—no real commitment—but clear and definite interest. “There are some changes [he recommends,] of course,” Orson exulted, “but he thinks a good deal of it.”

He had accomplished his mission after all. “Marching Song” was still alive. The headmaster might not make it back to New York anytime soon, but the dream of collaborating with Skipper on a Big Idea musical was still a possibility. He continued to putter away on his Irish travel memoir, and his stage thriller was “shaping up beautifully.”

In Ireland Orson had learned to keep his trunk always half packed and ready to go. In New York he learned another lesson: betting the moon on a single script was foolish. At any given time he could and should have a wide range of projects in the works.

By Christmas, he was back in Chicago.

John Clayton’s aviation series never got the green light from radio station WLS, however. And despite the earnestness Orson invested in the Irish travel book, and the encouragement he got from Ashton Stevens, he was dissatisfied with his efforts and shifted this writing project to the back burner. He also set aside “Where Was Moses?” once and for all.

Orson pleaded with Roger Hill to play hooky from Todd and join him for lunch in Chicago, where they could discuss their next Big Idea. “As you love me, do this little thing,” Orson wrote to Skipper. “Drive in tomorrow, or at most the next day. Tell Hortense you have conferences, auditions, and so on in great numbers.” They could even squeeze in a matinee of Cecil B. DeMille’s latest picture,
The Sign of the Cross
—a biblical epic “directed by the future director, according to [George] Tyler, of ‘Marching Song.’ . . . Then coffee, this doughnut or that, and you can be back in Woodstock for vespers. . . . Please, please!”

In early January, Orson organized a reading of “Marching Song” in Highland Park in front of his surrogate family; a sprinkling of Todd School alumni; and invited guests such as John Clayton, artist Helen S. Levey, recitalist Hazel Felman, and drama critic Lloyd Lewis of the
Chicago Daily News
, who was also a Civil War expert. Reciting his own script aloud taught Orson a few things. “Modern dialogue is always dialogue of implication,” he wrote to the headmaster, who missed the event. “Mine goes where angels fear to read, hits big moments right on the head, suggesting nothing, which, they tell me, is a method difficult almost unto impossibility.” The reading went off with “an emphatic bang,” Orson reported, but it was a last hurrah for “Marching Song.”

Orson spent that winter with too much time on his hands, shuttling anxiously between Chicago and Woodstock, debating future projects—
his
future, really—with Skipper. They mulled ideas for a musical about another Big American like John Brown. Only this time, Orson thought, their subject ought to be a contemporary public figure, a fictional tycoon with the story set in Chicago.

Orson had three different real-life tycoons in mind from which they might create a composite: Samuel Insull, Robert R. McCormick, and William Randolph Hearst. His parents had known all three of these men in passing; he himself had fleeting contact with them. Orson proposed a drama, perhaps with music and songs, about a typical American tycoon with one foot in Chicago’s newspaper world and the other in opera or show business.

Orson had met Insull in the corridors of the Chicago Civic Opera House on his Todd School tours. After unscrupulously making his fortune in electrical power, Insull had underwritten the arts and championed opera in Chicago, sometimes insisting on casting his favorite singers in leading roles. Insull had sponsored the comeback of his wife, actress Gladys Wallis, in the leads of plays launched in Chicago and then shipped to Broadway. Though he lived in splendor through the years of Orson’s youth, Insull was eventually indicted and fled the United States to evade malfeasance charges. In the end he was captured and tried, and although he was found not guilty, he died almost penniless. “His opera house and his millions and his baronial estate and his eventual disgrace” made Insull a natural subject for Orson’s proposed story about the rise and fall of a Big American, the headmaster recalled years later.

Publisher Robert R. “Bertie” McCormick, known as “the Colonel” for his World War I service, was another local tycoon Orson had encountered at the
Chicago Tribune
and the Tavern Club. A member of the prominent family that presided over Chicago business and society, McCormick led his newspaper in early crusades against gangsters, racketeering, and Prohibition, but by the 1930s he had turned into a conservative, even fascist-minded Republican, a bitter opponent of the New Deal. McCormick had a messy private life too: named as the debaucher of a relative’s wife in a long-running, notorious divorce case, the Colonel ended up marrying his mistress, Amy Irwin Adams, in a surreptitious ceremony his own newspaper was not allowed to cover.

Orson thought he might also borrow from the story of the Colonel’s cousin, Harold F. McCormick, chairman of the board of International Harvester Company, who once was married to Edith Rockefeller, daughter of the Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. It was Harold McCormick who, after divorcing Edith Rockefeller, married the Polish opera singer Ganna Walska and attempted to launch Walska as a diva. In 1920, after paying for her singing lessons, McCormick had arranged for Walska to star in the Chicago Civic Opera production of
Zaza
, which ended with his tempestuous wife storming out during final dress rehearsals. Though Walska’s abrupt departure doubtless saved her from a critical drubbing, the scandal permanently tarnished McCormick’s reputation, and the marriage was short-lived.

Last but not least was William Randolph Hearst, the czar of America’s largest publishing and media chain, whose newspapers and magazines typified the “yellow journalism” of the early twentieth century. Hearst was twice elected a congressman in New York, but proved unsuccessful in a series of later campaigns—for mayor of New York City, and for governor
and
lieutenant governor of New York State. Though Hearst still ran his increasingly right-wing media empire with an iron fist, after his political ambitions fizzled he lived openly with the comedic actress Marion Davies in Hollywood, while dabbling in film production as head of his own company, Cosmopolitan, whose pictures were released by MGM.

Orson had caught glimpses of Hearst on his visits to Chicago, where he roamed the offices of his newspapers. But he also knew Hearst from the many stories told about him by the newsmen of the Tavern Club, especially Ashton Stevens, Hearst’s longtime friend and employee. Orson also took pride in believing that his father had been chummy with Hearst before he was born.

Orson and Skipper talked long about the Big American Idea, circling it warily. Hill mainly intended to encourage Orson. But both understood that writing another stage play about a Big Idea would mean a mountain of research and a tremendous investment of time, and neither was ready for the commitment.

After arguing about his future with Dr. Bernstein, Orson moved in for a while with John Clayton’s family. “Tough days those,” Clayton remembered. “Vain job hunting by day. Writing until four or five in the morning.” Both Orson and Clayton were at loose ends, unemployed in the depths of the Depression. “No jobs for any of us,” said Clayton. “The cash reserves dwindled.” Still, Clayton was impressed by Orson’s resilience. One day, when Orson was down to $1, he took his money and bought a bouquet for Mrs. Clayton and a cake for the family, bursting through the front door and proclaiming, “Let them eat cake!”

Finally cornered in Hollywood, Samson Raphaelson dutifully read the John Brown play and offered equal parts flattery and discouragement. “Stick with this boy!” Raphaelson wrote to the headmaster. “Any three pages of this script sing. But any 20 pages fall apart. Tell your star pupil to either turn this into a novel or teach him that stage plays are tight little miniatures.” When George C. Tyler allowed his option on the play to lapse, Orson briefly went to work revising “Marching Song” as a book, a biography of John Brown, lest all his research go to waste.

While in Highland Park, he tried to find inspiration in Ned Moore’s collection of recordings, but grew so weary of listening to “Debussy and others,” he wrote, “that another symphonic blue note will find me rolling on the floor.” Moore and Dr. Bernstein strongly hinted that, with his sonorous voice and professional poise, Orson might have some success on the women’s club circuit, reciting behind music as his mother once did. “We recited over some of my mother’s old things inclusive of Oscar Wilde and Phyllis Fergus,” Orson wrote Skipper, “and even the pleasing discovery that several numbers were dedicated to me, with my name spelt out at the top in print, failed to keep me from feeling a little disillusioned about musical readings.”

Orson thought about earning a little extra money writing detective stories. There were several publishers of story magazines in Chicago, and Orson knew a published fictioneer with the right connections who agreed to partner with him on a few stories under a pseudonym. Very quickly Orson amassed half a dozen linked stories that concerned, as Barbara Leaming wrote, “a young detective who lived in Baltimore with his aunt. A dilettante and a playboy of sorts, the colorful character was based on what Orson imagined his father’s youth to have been like.”

But Orson was itching to get far away from Highland Park. He needed to go somewhere new and different to find solace and inspiration. “The year is tearing by depressingly swift,” Orson wrote to Skipper, “and boats are sailing all over the world. I’m sick of Ravinia: sick and desolate. I want to finish my [travel] book in peace. I want to get going. I’m going mad.”