Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (113 page)

The magicians and Welles’s Hollywood friends all adored Kodar. She was smart, funny, gorgeous, and an equal partner in all of Orson’s schemes. After years of relatively chaste filmmaking, Welles had even shot some nude scenes of Kodar, as he had rarely done before with any actress. Kodar rolled her eyes when the young magicians arrived to confer with Orson, the way Welles’s mother, Beatrice, had rolled her eyes at his father Dick Welles’s enthusiasm for magic, but whatever made Orson happy made Kodar happy, too.

Orson’s second wife, Rita Hayworth, was still alive in 1985, although she was reclusive and rumored to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Welles had been married to the beautiful Hayworth for five years, from 1943 to 1948, and they had one child, Rebecca, born in 1944. Orson had brought Rebecca into a series of Jim Beam whiskey advertisements he made in the 1970s, but their relationship, never healthy, had since deteriorated, and they were rarely in touch.

Christopher, Orson’s firstborn, had by 1985 dropped her boyish first name; today she was Chris Welles Feder, the surname that of her second husband. She had spent some time as an adolescent at the Todd School, with Roger and Hortense Hill in effect foster-parenting her during the long intervals when her actual parents were unavailable. When Orson and Virginia feuded over his financial obligations in the early 1950s, Hortense Hill took Virginia’s side, occasioning a rare rupture in his friendship with the headmaster.

Orson’s oldest daughter worked hard to effect a reconciliation with her famous father over the decades, efforts she chronicled poignantly in her 2009 memoir
In My Father’s Shadow.
She once met up with Welles in Hong Kong, only to lose touch with him for the next eight years. Chris told author Charles Higham—who was working on his biography of Welles in the early 1980s, at the same time as Barbara Leaming—that she had had little or no contact with her father in recent years. The three half sisters had grown up as virtual strangers to one another.

“Only Beatrice,” wrote Higham, “a tall and Junoesque beauty with fair hair and a voluptuous figure, has been close to Welles in recent years.”

Virginia Nicolson was still alive, too, in England after spending years in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her third husband, Jackie Pringle. Her marriage to the witty and dapper scenarist Charles Lederer had lasted nine years. After she quit acting, Virginia Lederer had written a roman à clef about Hollywood called
Married at Leisure
, in which Orson was not even remotely referenced—perhaps because she was still suing him for alimony and child support. A court eventually found in her favor, but even so Orson managed to wriggle out of paying it all.

Virginia and Orson’s daughter preferred Lederer to Pringle as a stepfather, and so did Welles. Orson stayed close to Lederer, one of those ill-starred talents he was fond of. Orson always claimed that he wrote two thirds of Howard Hawks’s
I Was a Male War Bride
, a script credited to Lederer, after his friend, hooked on alcohol and various drugs, took one of his periodic dives into dysfunction.

After moving to Johannesburg in 1949, Virginia came under the influence of her new husband, a Briton in every respect except his birthplace: Chicago. A World War II military hero for England, Pringle was also “an accomplished horseman, a crack polo player, and a gifted linguist,” in Chris Welles Feder’s words. But Pringle had no aptitude for fatherhood, and he had urged Virginia to ship Chris off to finishing schools in Switzerland and the United States. Her mother, meanwhile, had been transformed almost overnight from the bright, openhearted debutante Orson had fallen in love with back in the summer of 1934 to Virginia Nicolson Pringle, a “puff-faced, dowdy British matron,” in her daughter’s words, with an attitude toward native South Africans as hard and bigoted as her spouse’s.

In the mid-afternoon, Freddie Gillette, the last of Welles’s long-suffering chauffeurs, arrived to drive him to the Talent Celebrity Theater at Sunset and Vine, less than two miles away.

Perhaps because he always had been driven around as a boy—by his father or Dr. Maurice Bernstein—Orson stubbornly never learned to drive and enjoyed the indulgence of a chauffeur. Gillette was more of a hired hand than the diminutive George “Shorty” Chirello, whom Orson had launched onscreen as his magic assistant in
Follow the Boys
in 1944, later giving him bit parts in
The Lady from Shanghai
and
Macbeth.
Chirello picked up a few acting jobs after Orson went abroad for years and paid him back with friendship, one time flying to Paris and offering his life’s savings as a loan to get Welles out of deep hock. (Orson declined.)

Gillette, whom Welles referred to as “a tall Shorty,” was a kind, attentive man who answered whenever Orson bellowed his name and fussed obsequiously over his employer’s comfort. The two had developed a repertoire of little rituals: When Gillette saw that someone unpleasant had lingered too long at Orson’s table at Ma Maison, he would hurry in with an urgent note for Orson—always blank.

Arriving at the theater, Welles found Jim Steinmeyer and asked about the stooge and whether Merv Griffin had received the decks of cards. Then he ambled to the door leading to Griffin’s dressing room—which was up a flight of stairs he couldn’t manage—and rapped on it with his cane. Griffin came downstairs to greet him. Griffin, who hadn’t seen Orson since before his seventieth birthday in May, was taken aback by his “haggard appearance.”

Since his birthday, Orson had been shedding weight on his doctor’s orders. “He told me my heart wasn’t functioning properly, my liver was a mess, and that my blood pressure was off the chart,” Welles explained to Roger Hill. “He said, ‘Either you lose weight or you will die.’” Orson suffered from diabetes, chronic phlebitis, and atrial fibrillation. At his peak, he carried close to four hundred pounds on his frame (slightly taller than six foot two). Anyone who hadn’t witnessed his Falstaffian appetite, in his prime, could be forgiven for doubting the apocryphal tales it inspired. Could he really have eaten an entire turkey one day at lunch? Or seventeen hot dogs at Pink’s?

Over time, some comedians and film critics conflated his weight problems with notions of his fabled self-indulgence as a filmmaker. Welles was sensitive about his weight and dismayed by jokes about it. Even Merv Griffin told a version of the episode at Pink’s in his 2003 autobiography
Merv: Making the Good Life Last
, claiming that one day, after lunching with Welles at Ma Maison (where Orson dined on his daily “little piece of grilled sole”), he had spotted his friend’s car parked at the landmark hot-dog stand at the corner of La Brea and Melrose. Heading for the car with “a tray piled high with at least a dozen hot dogs” was Freddie Gillette, Welles’s chauffeur. “People loved to gloat over his weight,” Peter Bogdanovich told
Los Angeles
magazine in 2012, “because they felt it would diminish his genius in some strange way.”

After his alarming seventieth-birthday physical, Orson finally changed the gluttonous eating and drinking habits that had transformed him, over four decades, from the handsome, baby-faced young mastermind of
Citizen Kane
into an unseemly and unsteady behemoth of a man. “If you’ll pardon the pun,” Orson told Roger Hill, “I’ve gone cold turkey, eating little and what little I eat is dispiritingly unappetizing.” He no longer smoked, although he often fingered a cigar. He avoided coffee and drank Perrier, not vodka. His diet was fruit, vegetables, and grains.

With iron willpower, Orson had dropped something like one hundred pounds since his birthday in May. He felt only worse. “I’ve lost a good deal of energy, and I hope to God it comes back because there’s so much that needs my attention,” he told Hill. “In addition to the intrinsic joy of eating well, dining provides an ideal opportunity for spirited social discourse. Even when I’m dining with others [now], I feel alone and removed.”

Some friends thought the shrinkage dangerously precipitous, but people who saw him on a regular basis were used to the waning and waxing of Welles’s appearance.

Now, greeting Orson at the bottom of his staircase, Griffin concealed his apprehension.

“Tonight, I feel like talking,” Orson told him. Griffin parried with a joke—it was a talk show, after all—but Welles was serious. “Merv, I mean it,” he insisted. “I feel expansive tonight. You know all those silly gossipy little questions you’ve been trying to ask me for years about Rita and Marlene? Well, go ahead and ask them. Ask me anything you want.”

Griffin was astonished. “Anything I want? Even about the making of
Citizen Kane
?”

Welles was in a buoyant mood. After his magic trick, he would be joined on the show by Barbara Leaming, whose new biography of Orson was shooting up the best-seller lists. Leaming was going to talk about Welles’s life and career with Griffin, and Orson would sit beside her on camera. He had enjoyed working with Leaming on her book, and he wanted to please her.

“Ask me,” said Welles, turning and ambling toward the green room.

When he turned seventy in May, Welles became the longest-lived member of his family.

His mother had passed away at age forty-two, his father at fifty-eight. His older brother, Richard, had died after a bout with pneumonia, one month shy of his seventieth birthday, on September 8, 1975. Richard’s death certificate listed heart disease as a contributing factor.

Fated to be a footnote in his famous brother’s life story, Richard had hung around southern California for much of the 1940s. Orson forgave Richard everything—even his claim, on one occasion, to have written the “panic broadcast” of “War of the Worlds.”

His older brother had made an unfortunate splash in the news in 1941, on returning to Los Angeles after marrying Mildred Alice Bill in Reno. “The bulky, blushing brother of Orson, the boogieman,” in the words of the
Los Angeles Times
account, lashed out at photographers at the airport, trying to grab their photographic plates away from them. Orson said in interviews that his brother had met his wife, a native Angeleno fifteen years his junior, at a soup kitchen in downtown Los Angeles; Richard had a habit of attaching himself to churches and charities while making ends meet with intermittent jobs.

Occasionally, Richard found outlets for his artistic impulses, which ran deep in the Welles family. In May 1942, for example, he served as “technical director” of the Victory Week celebration staged by the Junior Chamber of Commerce of Sierra Madre, a small city in Los Angeles County, nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. According to wire service accounts, Richard arranged “the public address system” and staged “the parade of victory girl entries” for the event, which culminated in the crowning of a local beauty queen along with the burning of effigies of Hitler and Hirohito. But he never lived in the same place for very long, and after about a year in Sierra Madre he vanished from the city directory.

Richard’s marriage lasted five years, before a protracted separation and divorce, with Mildred Welles attesting to his mental cruelty and his failure to support her. The only property he claimed in the divorce were his favorite books, his musical recordings, and a box of family photographs. At the time of the final decree in 1947, Richard was living in a Culver City hotel, working as a salesman for a stove company. Court papers noted his speech impediment.

The divorce, and perhaps Orson’s departure for Europe in late 1947, sent Richard back to northern California, where he bobbed between small cities and short-lived jobs and stints with Episcopalian church groups. In 1952 he found a temporary position at the St. Francis Home for Boys in Salina, Kansas, teaching arts and crafts therapy to orphan and delinquent boys, but after two months he returned to northern California’s Napa Valley. In mid-1953 he turned up as an attendant at the Grafton State School in North Dakota, teaching recreational activities to people with mental disabilities, but again he lasted only two months before leaving for a new home in Santa Rosa, California.

In early 1954, Richard had his best opportunity at St. Mary’s Episcopal School for Indian Girls in Springfield, South Dakota—on the border of Indian lands known as, of all things, the Rosebud Reservation. Flaunting his famous brother’s name as much as his own experience in church social work, Richard was hired as recreational director of the small school, promising to stage puppet shows and theatrical productions with the thirty girls, while guiding them in learning to make plastic religious Christmas ornaments to provide “commercial value to the school,” in the words of a parish newsletter, and “allow proper expression of Indian art.” Installed at St. Mary’s by Palm Sunday, Richard hosted services for a congregation of several dozen Episcopalians. The
Yankton Press and Dakotan
covered his arrival at the school; the article was complete with a photograph of the “quiet little man,” with glasses and curved-stem pipe, studying a Gilbert and Sullivan script he intended to adapt for the Indian girls.

The article repeated Richard’s boast that he had written the script for “War of the Worlds” and had been “associated with his brother” as a writer on other
Campbell Playhouse
broadcasts and Mercury Theatre productions before quitting radio and theater because of “the advent of television.” He had returned to the Northwest, Richard said, recalling it fondly after his youthful travels there as a member of a boys’ quartet in vaudeville.

Richard had big plans for the future of St. Mary’s: introducing a weaving loom to the school, making ceramics from a gas-fired kiln, holding basketry and bead classes. Richard even planned a show with a concept that sounds like a variant of Welles’s
Five Kings
, weaving together “portions of four Gilbert and Sullivan operettas,” to be prerecorded by the girls and played under a puppet show performance.

That newspaper interview, surviving correspondence in Richard’s hand, and extensive church records support the impression that Richard tended to struggle with positions that made demands on his abilities and coping mechanisms. Richard was well liked at St. Mary’s, and he was wholehearted about arts and crafts, but after just a month he started sending the bishopric letters outlining impractical goals and demanding extra compensation for his efforts.