Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (38 page)

Now, like his father, he proposed a long voyage. “I have decided not to go to college,” Orson wrote to the headmaster. With the Depression at its worst, he guessed that the investments tied to his inheritance, managed for Bernstein by the First Union Trust and Savings, were plummeting in value. “Pretty soon there’s going to be a powerful inflation or something. And my money, if I still have it, won’t be worth anything. I propose to enjoy it now.”

But how could he concoct travel plans that would be sufficiently worthwhile to coax the necessary outlay from the parsimonious Dr. Bernstein?

Skipper understood the problem, and when Orson visited him in Woodstock in late February the headmaster came up with a Big Idea all his own. Forget John Brown, Hill said. Instead, he and Orson could collaborate on a compendium of Shakespeare plays annotated for high school teachers and students. All the intelligence and passion Orson had brought to his Shakespeare adaptations at school could be channeled into a practical and inspiring guidebook for staging the plays with young people. Orson could condense the classical works while contributing scene sketches and illustrations, as he’d done with the copies of “Marching Song” that he circulated in New York. Hill would serve as adviser and editor of the Shakespeare book, and perhaps add some writing of his own. And the Todd School could print the book and sell it by mail order.

How well Hill knew his prize pupil! Nothing excited Orson more than Shakespeare, whose body of work he had mastered, committing nearly all the most famous plays to memory. Returning to Highland Park, Orson swept his sundry other projects off the table and went feverishly to work, writing, first, a grand introduction summing up the Bard’s greatness.

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and the moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heart beats. He speaks to everyone.

Orson rushed to the post office and mailed the grand introduction to Todd School, anxious for Hill’s response. The headmaster recognized that he had tapped a deep well. “When I read the first few sentences of what he wrote,” Hill told Barbara Leaming, “they were absolutely fantastic.” He also loved the sample drawings Orson had enclosed. “Kids will love them,” he wrote to Orson. “We’ll fill the margins of every page.”

Orson went into overdrive, pulling together everything he would need—writing tools, sketch pads, a collected Shakespeare, other books—and cramming it all into his cheap battered trunk. He proposed a working trip to Africa. He thought that if he booked an inexpensive passage on a freighter he could visit his acquaintance from Paris, Brahim El Glaoui, in Morocco, and on the return trip he could stop and meet up with Dr. Walter Starkie, an Abbey Theatre man traveling with Spanish Gypsies, who was said to be living in Seville.

Dr. Bernstein was persuaded by the merits of the project, especially since the headmaster had vouched for it. Orson’s guardian agreed to release enough of his inheritance to bankroll the trip. The good cop–bad cop routine the headmaster and doctor had going with Orson worked exceedingly well. The two father figures rarely clashed directly, and while Hill was amused by Orson’s frequent grumbling about Bernstein, he held his tongue and rarely seconded those complaints. Putting Orson on a ship to Africa, to go off and create an annotated Shakespeare, would suit both the frustrated guardian and the enterprising Todd School headmaster. As Hill told Barbara Leaming, “It would keep Orson occupied and it would rejuvenate the print shop.”

Orson took the train to New York and boarded a freighter called the
Exermont
, which departed for Casablanca on March 20, 1933. The ship accommodated twelve paying passengers, but Orson and another person were the only ones on this voyage. He looked forward to two weeks at sea. “It is all very Eugene O’Neill and salty and shippish,” Orson reported to Roger Hill. His private quarters were not luxurious, but “I can work beautifully in a two-by-four lounge in the presence of all the officers,” he wrote. “The radio won’t work, which is another blessing.”

A week or so later, the
Exermont
passed within one hundred miles of the Azores. “This morning there was sunlight and a school of turtles, but I slept through,” Orson wrote to the headmaster. “Now of course, it’s raining. Nary a turtle. . . . I wish you were here. You’d love it. Everybody from the Captain down is a real character, and you can’t think how out
on the ocean
it seems in a tiny freighter wallowing about in the high Atlantic. Here is a crossing that’s genuine adventure, fourteen karat. Just the meals are rare fun, chasing the stews and soups around the mess and trying to keep chair and self beside the shifting scene of the table.”

Orson “slept through” most days because he worked through most nights, spreading his books and notes around him as he launched into condensation and embroidery of the first play he tackled—
Julius Caesar.
He had seen
Julius Caesar
performed numerous times and even staged it himself for Todd School. But as he worked, he felt the nagging underside of creativity, an insecurity that people didn’t always associate with him. Behind the face of soaring confidence, he was questioning himself. “I’ve gotten some swell ideas about Brutus and the rest, what was going on in the author’s mind when he wrote them down, etcetera,” Orson wrote to Hill. The work made him feel “much nearer to
Caesar
than I ever dreamed I could. . . . Just near enough to know how far I am. And Skipper, I’ve always known
Caesar
pretty well, and others,
Hamlet
even, are terribly foreign. What do I know about
Hamlet
? What do I know about Shakespeare? I feel an awful bluff.”

Doubt made him cautious, and he slowed down. The first batch of scenes, which he mailed when the ship briefly made port, contained “grotesque word ordering,” Orson warned the headmaster, along with “repetitions and misfirings.” At first, he felt trepidation about encroaching on the Bard with his own editing and annotations. “What right have I to give credulous and believing innocents an inflection for a mighty line of Shakespeare’s? Who I am to say that this is ‘tender’ and this ‘angrily’ and this ‘with a smile’?” He cautioned Hill that his work might require “a little spring cleaning” before it was ready to show the world. “I wonder, will you think there’s not enough, or as I fear today, much too much? Is our whole idea wrong? I wish to high heaven you were here to reassure me.”

As he did throughout his life, Orson sprinkled little drawings and verse into his correspondence. In the earliest surviving letter from this trip, Orson offered Hill an ode to the indelible experience of seafaring:

Days now numberless, it seems to me.

We’ve lolled and wallowed in the lusty sea.

Careening and squeaking, teetering and creaking.

Curtseying and kicking down the waves.

And screwing through the working waters of the sea.

Time is a thing that used to be.

The order and ascent of days is nothing now.

The March-blown, hail-fretted oceans mawl our bobbing bedlam.

Shiver the empty
Exermont
from screw to prow.

And yet still to Africa there move a million mountains, growing now.

An acreage hysterical for us to plow.

Crash in the galley.

Crash in the shelter deck.

Crash on the bowing prow.

Crash on the bowing prow.

Time is a thing that used to be.

The order and ascent of days is nothing now.

“Today,” the letter concluded, “for the first time it’s fairly calm and we’re headed Southish” toward the coast of Africa. “There’s no hail to speak of . . . My love, Orson.”

When the ship docked at Casablanca, Orson left it for Marrakech, where he hoped to find Brahim El Glaoui, the son of T’hami El Glaoui, the pasha of Marrakech—the “King of the Atlas,” as he was known. Orson arrived in time for Aid Al-Kebir, an important Islamic holiday, a four-day festival that marked the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

“Exciting is the word,” Orson wrote from Marrakech. “The pleasure city of the Bedouin, the mountain clansmen and the Graid Caid, the high capital of Islamic fanaticism; frenzied, noisy, wicked, utterly proud, a violent place. I have been lying here in bed brooding over the typewriter which I have perched on my knees in the frantically peach-colored French quilts, trying to frame sentences for you about this wild, swaggering city.”

Writing late at night, he threw the shutters of his hotel window open to “a garden-scented, star-populous, moon-bright and very noisy night. . . . A million dogs from the Mella to the Medinah howl without pause: locusts, gramophones, flutes, drums, cymbals, crowing cocks, the sleighbellish ringing of the taxi carriages, hoarse Arabic and nasal French, music and more music . . .

“A night to be out in the streets.”

He drank sweet thick coffee and gazed out the window. Whenever the street parade dwindled, his typewriter started up, disturbing the neighbors till they banged on his walls. His goal was to write until dawn and catch a glimpse when the sultan passed on the way to prayer.

Orson spent his first days in Morocco writing—not the Shakespeare book, but a flurry of letters home to Roger Hill and Dr. Maurice Bernstein. “Visiting sunsets and Kasbahs and Souks and whatnot,” Orson reported to Skipper. “In a mere week, I’ve spent most of my money and all of my time doing just what I swore to you I wouldn’t. Don’t blame me, blame Africa.”

The El Glaoui family was not easily located; the members were dispersed among several castles in Fez. After a week Orson left Marrakech by bus, heading for the French protectorate near the Grand Atlas Mountains, expecting to meet up with Brahim El Glaoui there and grow “horribly industrious and economical.” Besides passengers the bus was filled with stinking chickens, and Orson struck up a friendship with an elderly curator from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, who was roaming Morocco painting landscapes. Together in Fez, he and this kindred soul knocked on the door of the palatial residence of Brahim El Glaoui.

Orson told Barbara Leaming that Brahim El Glaoui and his family warmly welcomed the visitors, inviting the young American and the elderly Dutch museum curator into their home and then bringing them along on a “two-week picnic” that wove through the Atlas Mountains in a long train with other European guests and a parade of retainers. (It was not unlike the extravagant picnic party led by Charles Foster Kane in
Citizen Kane.
) Every night the two oddly paired travelers were treated to elaborate feasts, singing, dancing, and storytelling. Six guests shared a tent, and Brahim El Glaoui made a gift to his guests of concubines from his entourage, Welles claimed. “Entrancing experience,” Welles told Leaming, as usual stingy with the carnal details. The Dutch curator didn’t think it was so entrancing, and hopped a bus to Casablanca.

Over the years, Welles would develop a reputation for mythmaking, but he rarely made up stories about himself out of whole cloth; imaginative embroidery of actual events was more his style. The stories he told about his time with Brahim El Glaoui were too fabulous for many people to swallow. “No one believes me,” Orson dolefully told an interviewer later in the 1930s, “so I’ve stopped talking about them any more.” Decades later, Welles’s biographer Simon Callow made it clear that he doubted the whole business—elderly Dutchman, concubines, and all.

One thing seems certain: Orson neglected his work on Shakespeare in Morocco. “I didn’t do much writing at all,” he later admitted, “I did a lot of reading.” He was probably still in Fez when his eighteenth birthday came—there is a monthlong gap in his surviving letters—but after lingering a while longer in the French protectorate, he boarded a bus to Tangier. From there he took a ferry to the southern tip of Spain, and then traveled by train to Barcelona, where he was expecting to receive money from Dr. Bernstein via Western Union. Barcelona was in the throes of a workers’ strike, but the doctor had sent a bonanza: payments from a magazine that had accepted Orson’s pseudonymous short stories about a young Baltimore sleuth. He was suddenly flush.

Unfortunately for Welles scholars, neither the identity of his pulp-fiction collaborator nor their pseudonym has ever been discovered. To this day, Orson’s short stories remain lost. Pulp fiction historians Sam Moskowitz and Nils Hardin tried tracking them down in the late 1970s, corresponding with Welles when he was living in Los Angeles. “I did indeed write in the pulps,” Welles told them, “and earned my living doing it for the better part of a year, but I did this through an arrangement with a pulp writer who had all the proper connections and who sold my stories under various established nom de plumes [
sic
] of his own. I never saw these in print because I was living in Africa and Spain and this long-forgotten partner’s name escapes me.”

Perhaps it was John Clayton, one of the names Welles dredged from his memory. But he had already forgotten the man’s name even by the time of a deposition he gave in 1949. When lawyers for Ferdinand Lundberg, digging for parallels between
Imperial Hearst
—Lundberg’s biography of William Randolph Hearst—and
Citizen Kane
, asked Welles what other literary works he had written before
Kane
, Orson volunteered that he had written “two or three novels unpublished” and a number of short stories. What had happened to this early fiction? “All destroyed,” Welles told Lundberg’s lawyers. “I do not know where the manuscripts for special articles and short stories are, if they indeed exist, and I have no memoranda as to the dates or publication of these works.”

“For what it’s worth,” Welles wrote to the two pulp fiction historians in the late 1970s, “I know we [he and his coauthor] did manage on a few occasions to place stories in
Adventure
—considered then to be the ultimate in its field. Most of my stuff, as I remember, ran in lesser magazines.” Besides the “detective series with a rich, young aristocratic sleuth living with his three elderly aunts in Baltimore,” the filmmaker said, he also wrote “a good deal of science fiction of the Lobster-Men type and a few novelettes and stories laid in the Far East.