Orson Welles, Vol I (6 page)

In addition to these musical outings to Ravinia, there were weekends, and sometimes longer stays, in the tiny town – village, properly speaking – of Grand Detour
¹²
. These were family jaunts, though somewhat unconventional ones. The Richards, Junior and Senior, would drive in
one car, Maurice, Beatrice and Orson in another, and they would stay in separate lodgings: Beatrice’s team in the house she had rented, the two Richards at the Sheffield House Hotel. It was – and to some extent still is – an idyllic escape from the big city, a sylvan settlement on the bend of Rock River, opposite a green, fertile island surrounded by smaller leafy islets. This is Davy Crockett territory
– almost literally. When Captain Andrus, veteran of the terrible Black Hawk war, pitched his tent here, laying claim to the land, he was watched by ‘lounging Indians’ as he cooked his meals. The year is 1834; a twelve-month away from the foundation of Kenosha. But the fact that Kenosha became Kenosha, and Grand Detour remained
just that, conceals an extraordinary American story that must have
given a dark thrill to the Welles boys on their regular visits to the little resort.

The town, once thriving, had been destroyed by a duel of wills between two of its residents, the famous John Deere, inventor of the revolutionary self-scouring plough (necessary because of the over-richness of the local soil), and his dark rival, darkly named, Solomon Cumins, from Vermont, emissary of a consortium
bent on wresting the patent from Deere. Cumins started little by little to buy up the entire town, including the newly installed dam, race and saw-mill. Deere, meanwhile, persuaded the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad Co. to lay tracks to Grand Detour; Cumins, gambling on getting Deere to leave town and give up – thus leaving him free to exploit the patent – intercepted the laying of the tracks.
The railroaders went instead to Nachusa and Dixon, which throve. Deere left the town and moved to Moline, where his business prospered to become mighty, his self-scouring ‘Grandy’ ploughs a household name. Cumins, baulked, ruled the town as its embittered tyrant for twenty-five years, allowing no newspaper, no journalist, no photographer to enter it. When he died, his son, Theron, immediately
fled to Dixon. Grand Detour, in effect, died then, too. The townspeople finally burnt down Cumins’s property; in the 1920s his grave was desecrated. It was believed that he was the devil.

What gave Grand Detour a new, if modest, lease of life – the thing that brought it, no doubt, to the Welleses’ attention – was its development into an Artists’ Colony. In the late nineties of the previous
century, the art boom had led to the foundation of Eagle’s Nest Camp on the east side of the river above Oregon as a retreat for writers, editors, and sculptors among what the
History of Ogle County
is pleased to describe as ‘an endless variety of towering cliffs and mystic caverns’. Just above Oregon, on a limestone bluff, stands Lorado Taft’s ‘43 foot behemoth’ of a monumental sculpture,
Black
Hawk
of 1911: 265 tons of concrete, its head and shoulders alone weigh 30 tons; but its heart is in the right place, a decent liberal’s apology for genocide. Rock River Valley became popular with Chicago artists: they ‘discovered’ Grand Detour which, knowing nothing of the lurid story of John Deere and Solomon Cumins, they took for a slumbering nineteenth-century village. Classes from the Art
Institute would spend two or three weeks going back to nature, and sketching it. The place they would stay was the Sheffield House Hotel.

This commodious hostelry has been under the same management for 50 years [boasted the brochure]. It has light, airy rooms, comfortable beds, bathrooms and modern conveniences, and in the dining-room, home-cooking and plenty of it. The table is always supplied
with fresh eggs, country butter and cream, vegetables just from the garden, poultry etcetera in such abundance as only Mrs Sheffield knows how to provide. Boating, bathing, fishing, tennis, croquet, all furnish amusement for guests and frequent hay-ride parties are organized for a visit to the famous castle Rock, Devil’s backbone, etc. – Boats are furnished free to guests.

It is interesting
to note in this blurb from the brochure the tone of nostalgia for pioneer days.

Bob White whistles in the field and birds and bees revel in clover and orchard bloom. If you love the country, if you would hear again the familiar song of the meadow lark, the bobolink, the brown rush and the whip-poor-will; if you would sit down once more with the same old out-of-door appetite, to meals such
as you had on the farm –
COME TO GRAND DETOUR.
Rooms: $2.50 per night.

In his memoir Welles remembered it as ‘Mark Twain, a horse and buggy village … a childhood there was like a childhood back in the 1870s. No electric light, horse-drawn buggies – a completely anachronistic, old-fashioned, early-Tarkington, rural kind of life. It was one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you get
thrown out of.’
¹³
Solipsistically – he was after all a child when he was there, and childhood is almost by definition solipsistic – he saw it all as somehow deriving from his father. Sometimes he claimed in interviews that his father owned the village; in others that Dick had decreed that there would be no cars and no electric light. There was no electric light, just as there was no running water,
not from choice but from sheer bloody necessity. As it was and is situated slap on Route 3, it would be hard to ban automobiles, but there is indeed every possibility that no one there owned one. Decrees from Richard Welles held no force in Grand Detour which had a life very much its own, one which went on quite satisfactorily when the Welleses and the other guests had repaired to the big city
after their brief sojourns.

It was certainly a paradise for small boys interested in small boy-like activities; this may not have included Orson. Among the diversions were the annual clam harvesting (for the shells only: they make good buttons) and – during the winter – ice-sawing on the
river; still big business in the twenties. Equally picturesque but to be viewed from a distance was the
annual Ku Klux Klan meeting, which took place for a week every July in a cow pasture at the bottom of Canal Street known surprisingly frankly as Klan Park. On Whirlpool Rock, a large wooden cross was built and burnt for all to note. One summer, two boys swimming in Klan Park found a new flag-pole. In its base, three human skulls were embedded, emblazoned KKK. Many Americas coexisted in young Orson’s
head. His father, for his own diversion, would most probably have ended up on Nigger Island, just across the river. Here the eponymous African-American, whose name was Washington, had an apparently unlimited supply of bootleg liquor. 1920 was the first year of official prohibition (though it had been creeping up for some time) and Dick Welles would have been relieved to have discovered such a
plentiful supply; a dry holiday would have been no holiday at all for him.

The town was not without its amiable eccentricities. The fine building which dominates the town had been the Grand Detour Methodist Episcopal Building until the man who built it – disgusted with the low attendances of his fellow churchgoers – converted it into a ballroom. In the twenties, the Grand Detour Players staged
plays there; local legend has it that Orson took part. It’s hard to see how he could have failed to, though his relations with the community were not of the best. He seemed to regard them as rural know-nothings, and took pleasure in proving his superior smartness. ‘Do you want to see the stars?’
¹⁴
he asked young Bruno Catalina, (now running the Grand Detour bar). On receipt of a cent, he handed
the boy a painted tube (with soot on the eye-piece, naturally); as the boy screwed his eyes up, Welles kicked him in the pants. ‘Now you can see the stars!’ he gloated. This heartless scene is played out in a million playgrounds around the world, but it did nothing to endear the Grand Detourians to him. They found him to be a loner, and taunted him: ‘Georgie, Porgie, Pudding and Pie.’ Now they remember
him as an oddity: curiously attired by his mother in velvet knee-breeches, dressing up all day long, eating, reciting, and showing off the smattering of foreign words that his mother had taught him (allegro con brio, and so on, no doubt).

It’s a sad image, but then childhood, for Welles, as he repeated again and again in later life, was ‘a prison’, ‘a pestilential handicap
¹⁵
I determined to
cure myself of’. He vouchsafed Peter Bogdanovich a very touching glimpse of himself in Grand Detour: ‘There was a country store that had above it a ballroom with an old dance floor
with springs in it, so that folks would feel light on their feet. When I was little, nobody had danced up there for many years, but I used to sneak up at night and dance by moonlight with the dust rising from the floor
…’
¹⁶
Years later he remembered Grand Detour as a lost paradise, but from all the evidence it was as complicated an experience as anything else in his young life, with his always exigent mother, his father slipping away, both actually and onto-logically, and his brother … what do we know of his brother? Nothing at all: an unperson, tolerated, fed, clothed, but seemingly allowed no affirmation –
never encouraged, never admired, never enjoyed. No praise for him, no laughter; no plans and no hopes. At some unspecified point, he was expelled from the Todd School, but there is no mention of how or why. One of the strict rules of that academy – the downside of the rule outlawing locks – was that theft was punished with instant dismissal. Perhaps the unhappy young fellow had tried to get something
for nothing. If he did, it would be all too understandable. It feels as if they were all just waiting for him to go away; which, eventually, almost unnoticed, he did. For Orson, the situation must have been excruciating. His brother should have been his natural ally. He must have felt that siding with him would be a defiance of his parents, and dependent as he was on their approval, how could
he risk that? Ten years is an enormous gap between siblings, anyway, but life might have been rather different for both of them had they found in each other a friend.

Back in the city, life continued as before, with one crucial difference. Beatrice began to be unwell. This interfered with her professional life, but she was, true to form, undaunted by it. She continued her single-handed education
of Orson, reading to hm from the classics, having him read to her. He started on the course of voluminous though unsystematic reading which persisted throughout his life. ‘I was marinated in poetry and to learn right at the beginning, “a sense of awe, wonder and delight.”’
¹⁷
Beatrice’s regime did not include the sciences, natural, physical or mathematical, nor did he ever make good the deficiency.
She taught him the things she wanted to share. What she was looking for was a companion, someone she could talk to on her own level. Dick was gone, but he had anyway been incapable while he was around of expressing an interesting opinion about anything that concerned her. As for Maurice Bernstein, intelligent and cultured though he was, his anxious, cloying devotion was equally useless to her.
Unsentimental, longing to stretch her intellectual wings, she turned to Orson for stimulation, and of course, he was a disappointment.

Not only was her own health a source of anxiety, she also had to look after Orson’s. Though physically strong, he was plagued by respiratory conditions – hay fever, and, particularly virulent, asthma – which even at the time were acknowledged to have psychosomatic
origins. It is interesting to note that outstandingly gifted people very often endure periods of ill health in childhood. The enforced inactivity, the absence of companions and playmates, give rise to fantasy and speculation for which the ordinarily healthy child never has time. They do, moreover, create in a child a sense of specialness, of requiring, and being entitled to, special attention.
Asthma and hay fever would never leave Welles; crises would always provoke both. In 1924 came the first great crisis of his life; perhaps also the worst.

His mother, weak for some time, now contracted jaundice, at that time an always terminal, always agonising condition. ‘I knew very well she was going to die, and how real that would be, and how very soon it would happen. Whenever she left
me, the moment the door had closed, I would burst into tears, afraid that I would never see her again.’
¹⁸
Dick Welles and Maurice Bernstein, his two fathers, the surrogate and the real, moved into the apartment. Perhaps this helped Welles; their feelings – rivals in affection for both Orson and Beatrice – may only be guessed at. Bernstein of course attended her as her physician. There is no record
of Richard Junior being present, and no one seems to have felt his absence. Expelled from Todd School, he was now drifting aimlessly through life as the great family drama unfolded without him.

On Orson’s birthday – his ninth – he was summoned to his mother’s sickroom. He describes the scene in his memoir with graphic precision, like a scene from a film, a most wonderfully scripted scene,
which tells us the essence of everything that he wanted to carry around with him from the experience, the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life.

How much like her
¹⁹
it was to have arranged it so that our farewell in that black room was made to seem like the high point of my birthday party. I heard that cello voice: ‘Well now, Georgie-Porgie …’ Mother, who knew about that
awful jingle, was teasing me – as she often liked to do. Then I heard her again, a voice in the shadows, speaking Shakespeare:

‘These antique fables apprehend,

More than cool reason ever comprehends.’

The quotation – spoken consolingly – came from her choice of a primer when she was first teaching me to read.

And now she was holding me in one of her looks. Some of these could be
quite terrible.

‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.’

Those great shining eyes looked dark by the light of the eight small candles. I can remember now what I was thinking. I thought how green those eyes looked when it was sunny.