Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (115 page)

Dr. Bernstein kept a hand in the film business while Welles was away. One of his patients was Ida Lupino, and she gave him a bit part in the extended obstetrical sequence in her 1949 film
Not Wanted.
(He later served as a technical consultant for another Lupino film.) Friendly with Hedda Hopper, the doctor turned up regularly in her column, usually touting Orson’s latest project; he was often identified by the columnist as Orson’s “foster father,” which he never was. Bernstein ran little errands in Hollywood for Welles, liaising with makeup artist Maurice Seiderman, for example, and arranging to send dozens of false noses overseas to Orson.

Orson was back in Hollywood by the summer of 1956, lured by a good paycheck into playing a cattle baron for a low-budget Universal Western,
Man in the Shadow.
This led to his guest appearance on
I Love Lucy
, his Desilu TV pilot
The Fountain of Youth
, and making
Touch of Evil
for Universal the following year. Dr. Bernstein was ready with his medical kit when Orson slipped one day on the bank of a canal in Venice—Venice, California—while directing a scene for the film noir. Welles suffered “a severe sprain of the left ankle and knee, facial cuts and a possible break of his left wrist,” according to wire service accounts, but the semiretired Dr. Bernstein fixed him up as of yore, and Orson went right back to work.

Welles left again for Europe shortly after the end of filming on
Touch of Evil
, and he was in Italy seven years later when, on the weekend of July Fourth, the eighty-one-year-old doctor fell from a ladder while pruning a tree in his yard, and died.

According to Barbara Leaming, when Welles learned the news he reacted with “mixed feelings.” Mingled with “profound regret” and warm memories was his conviction, which had gradually hardened into a certainty by the time Leaming interviewed him, that Bernstein had plundered his trust fund. “Much as he genuinely loved Dadda,” Leaming wrote, “Orson also resented him for having kept much of the money Dick Welles had left Orson in his will (a fact of which Skipper did not hesitate to remind Orson).”

Not only had Bernstein lived out his days at a comfortable Beverly Hills address—which Welles believed was paid for by his trust fund—but the premises were sprinkled with Welles family treasures, including his mother’s piano and his father’s Oriental prayer rug (“of museum quality,” according to Welles). His father had loved that prayer rug, Welles told Leaming, and Dick Welles took it on all his travels, yet the doctor had purloined it while his father was still alive. “I do not think that Dadda Bernstein had any notion that he was actually stealing from me,” Welles told Leaming. “It was all for my own good. I don’t think he could have had a moment of conscience. It was all justified in his mind.”

While Dr. Bernstein may have skimmed money, it seems unlikely that he stole the bulk of the fabled trust fund. Bernstein did not live luxuriously in the 1930s, nor did he die a very wealthy man. In his will, as it happened, he bequeathed a half share of his estate to Welles, if his wife predeceased him or died before the will was effected (the other half went to his sole surviving sister). Searching for language in the will to describe his relationship with Welles, the doctor characterized his former ward, for the first time in print, as his “friend.”

Hazel Bernstein would live for another six years. During that time, Welles complained later, she dispersed his family treasures among her acquaintances in Beverly Hills, and he had no idea where the piano or prayer rug had landed. She did ship off to Orson in Europe a trunkful of his boyhood letters, journals, and youthful writing projects, which the doctor had kept for the biography of Welles he had hoped to write. In 2014, Orson’s youngest daughter, Beatrice, announced that she intended to edit and publish these youthful writings, which may shed light on some of the more persistent mysteries of Orson’s boyhood—from the pulp fiction he may or may not have penned, to his rumored fling with bullfighting in Seville, to the enigma of Dr. Bernstein.

What thoughts went through Welles’s mind as he stepped onstage in public for the last time?

“Orson is here—wow!” Merv Griffin announced to his audience on October 9, 1985. “The one and only Orson Welles.”

Welles tottered on his legs and supported himself with his favorite cane. His bearded face looked sallow and drawn, pocked with age. A handsome blue greatcoat draped his heavy frame, and a polka-dotted ascot evoked the one he’d worn as a ten-year-old schoolboy for his first press photograph and interview in a Madison, Wisconsin, newspaper in the winter of 1926.

In his introductory patter, he forgot to tell the stooge to remove the jokers from the decks. Nervously, she told him she had removed them, and then she admitted she hadn’t. Orson, a little flustered, told her to take them out now. An experienced card handler wouldn’t have been fazed by the mistake, and fortunately the stooge was a performer, so she made a show of acting rattled while taking her time getting the jokers out of the deck; and she adjusted the breaks in the cards so that the aces were on top.

Orson told the audience they themselves would guide his magic trick with their mysterious “whamming” powers. He misdirected the audience with his patter, speaking of the good old days of slow crossings on ocean liners where he encountered many famous card-playing con men, fleecing the rich passengers. He chose two audience members to approach the apron. Looming over them, Welles guided the two through dealing the cards, so that he himself did not have to handle them, insisting that the outcome depended on one of them being “a genius of a whammy.”

As the aces were finally revealed, the audience erupted in seemingly genuine applause. Welles beamed with delight. In watching the episode today, it’s still striking to see how pleased Orson was with his own performance, and how much the audience fed off his enjoyment.

Orson was then led to a chair near Griffin’s desk for their first segment of conversation. The two men had a warm and genial relationship dating back to Orson’s first extended appearance on Griffin’s show, back in 1976, when Griffin told him backstage that he considered
Citizen Kane
the greatest motion picture of all time. “That just shows you have good taste,” Welles responded. He had startled Griffin, then, by saying he didn’t want to talk about
Citizen Kane
or anything else in his past career. Welles was Griffin’s sole guest that night, and the host had to throw out all his notes for the ninety-minute program. But the conversation was natural and wide-ranging, and the two shared a long lunch afterward. (“I thought you’d be bland,” Orson told Griffin over lunch. “After all, I’m used to hanging out with Marlene Dietrich. But you’re not. You’re actually a good listener. For some reason, I think I can confide in you.”)

Griffin was an extremely good listener, and he was Welles’s staunch supporter through the years, during times when the talk show appearances meant a lot to Orson. The two men privately gossiped about subjects Orson would never air in public, with Orson sometimes adopting his protective coloration (Griffin was a discreet homosexual) and freely speculating about who was gay or closeted in Hollywood. Orson teased Griffin by telling him that Joseph Cotten would never go on his show, because Cotten was homophobic.

Griffin was not bland. He could be daring, as when he reunited Welles and John Houseman in February 1979. The Mercury Theatre partners had not seen nor spoken to each other since a chance meeting in a London restaurant two decades before, which had degenerated into an ugly shouting match. The two men were kept separated backstage until they were introduced. “Both men walked out at the same time from opposite sides of the stage,” recalled Griffin. “Meeting in the middle, they embraced each other warmly and the show took off from there.”

Although the subsequent on-air discussion touched only mildly “on their estrangement,” and “the significance of their rapprochement” was lost on the majority of the TV audience, Griffin knew Orson well enough to realize that “he was truly enjoying himself” that day. The rapprochement lasted only as long as the cameras were on, however; the two former partners never met again and later resumed sniping at each other. (Nothing irritated Welles more than Houseman’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
The Paper Chase
in 1973. “He’s enjoying his senior citizenship as a grand old actor,” Welles scoffed when lunching with Henry Jaglom. “He is dreadful. As an actor he can’t read a line.”)

Griffin could be thoughtful and probing in his interviews, as his final show with Welles attested. The host began by telling Orson how good he looked, complimenting him on his dramatic loss of weight, although in his autobiography Griffin says that Orson’s appearance concerned him. “You celebrated a big birthday” since his last appearance, Griffin asked, “didn’t you?”

Orson admitted his birthday was “right up there in the double numbers.” But, he continued, he hated birthdays, “because you always think, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a lot less candles on the cake? As it is now, when they bring out a cake with my right number of candles it looks like the Chicago fire.” When Griffin commented that George Bernard Shaw had once made an amusing remark on the subject of old age, Welles countered with a hard truth attributed to French statesman Charles de Gaulle: “Old age is a shipwreck.”

Griffin eased into a discussion of Leaming’s biography. “It really surprised me” to hear that Orson had cooperated on the book, Griffin ventured, “because I know you well, and you’ve never wanted trips down memory lane.” Orson explained that Leaming had worked long and hard for years without his encouragement, and that after meeting her he became “very fond” of the author and agreed to cooperate.

“Are there certain parts of your life that were really joyous?” Griffin asked.

“Oh yes,” Orson replied quite readily, “there are certain parts of almost every day that are joyous. I’m not essentially a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy. And there’s a difference, you know, because joy is a great, big electrical experience. . . .”

“What about painful times?”

“Enough of those to do. I’m saving those for my own book.”

“Are they usually more associated with your work?” prodded Griffin.

“All kinds of pain,” Orson replied, pausing and repeating, “All kinds of pain . . . Bad conscience pain too, you know. That’s the worst. Regrets of the things, the times . . . you didn’t behave as well as you ought to. That’s the real pain.”

(Peter Bogdanovich also asked once if he had regrets. “Millions,” replied Welles promptly. “But, you know, I like the people who are
ready
and
willing
to make fools of themselves—being, as I am, a full member of the fraternity.”)

What about the women in your life? asked Griffin. Will you write about them in your book? Welles scoffed—“If you think I’m going to write a succession of boasts or lies about conquests in that nature, you’re mistaken”—but Griffin coaxed him into reminiscing about two women he rarely impugned: his second wife, Rita Hayworth (“one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived”); and his longtime pal Marlene Dietrich (one of the “all-time glamour people” and “the most loyal friend”).

Griffin mentioned the glory days of the Mercury Theatre. “You were quite young, weren’t you?” he asked. “All that success at that age—hard to handle, or easy to handle?”

“Anybody who has trouble being successful doesn’t get any sympathy from me,” Welles replied quickly and firmly, after reminding Griffin that he’d found stardom in Dublin several years before hitting it big in New York. “I was just awful busy and awful lucky,” he added. “I had a tremendous streak of luck, and I was very grateful for that. Because I’m not being fake-modest talking about luck . . . I do really think that it has everything to do with anybody’s life.”

After the break, Orson moved over to give Barbara Leaming the seat closest to Merv Griffin.

In the conversation that followed, Welles deferred to Leaming as she ran through some of the highlights of her research. When Leaming described how the sixteen-year-old Orson was deflated to be treated like a nobody at the Shubert Office in New York, after playing leads for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, Orson flared his nostrils. “It’s an invention!” he barked.

Her source was none other than his former Todd School headmaster Roger “Skipper” Hill, Leaming insisted. But Hill was in his nineties, Welles replied, adding warmly, “We talk on the phone every two or three days.”

Orson had recently been helping Joseph Cotten with a memoir of his own, combing through his old friend’s work in progress, editing sections, and fact-checking his anecdotes about the Mercury Theatre. Orson had also struggled to shape his own memories into the script about
The Cradle Will Rock.
And he toyed constantly with his own autobiography, for which he had already been paid (and returned) at least one advance. Honest recollection and wise reflection were very much on his mind.

What had surprised Leaming most in her research? Griffin asked.

Orson’s sense of humor, she replied, which was abundant and often directed at himself. She also mentioned his tireless political campaigning on behalf of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Welles’s left-liberal and social justice crusades in the 1940s. Hearing this gave Orson obvious pleasure. “I was very busy in that arena for a while,” Welles said.

Leaming and Griffin giggled over Welles’s many reputed love affairs and romantic conquests, but this seemed to disturb Orson, who refused to be drawn into their chatter. When Leaming told Griffin that many of the stories of Welles’s love life had come from his devoted chauffeur, George “Shorty” Chirello, who boasted prodigiously on his behalf, Orson barked, “It’s all a tissue of lies from a lot of people that have safely gone to their reward.”

Briefly recapping Welles’s career, Griffin introduced a series of film stills, inviting Orson to comment on them for the audience. The first was a shot from
Citizen Kane
, showing Kane alongside Ruth Warrick, whose putative love affair with Welles was explored in Leaming’s book.