Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (18 page)

Orson went home to stretch out his recovery, and Orson at home was a handful. Before he was old enough to go out on his own, one of the men had to escort him to an art store for paints, brushes, sketch pads, and easels; to a bookstore for the poetry, plays, novels, and works of history and philosophy the boy soaked up; to a magic shop next to the Princess Theatre; to the museum, where he’d clock in with “Uncle” Dudley for a few hours; to the opera, symphony, latest moving pictures, touring plays, and vaudeville shows.

Dr. Bernstein filled Beatrice’s role in the partnership. At home, the doctor read Orson’s school assignments, or original works—often verse. Young Orson’s precocious writing and speaking abilities, so reminiscent of his mother, were all the more impressive to Bernstein, for whom English was a second language. Insecure about his own writing, the doctor needed a collaborator for the one piece of medical research he published, and even when he wrote simple business letters a secretary touched up his imperfect grammar and spelling.

Later, presenting himself as the authority on Orson’s boyhood, Bernstein made great claims for the genius of his young charge. Bernstein was undoubtedly sincere, but he was a publicist at heart, and many of his stories were flights of fancy. Young Orson may have been fascinated with the theater and may have been a prodigy, but he did
not
at the age of eight or nine dash off a treatise called “The Universal History of Drama,” a piece Bernstein insisted was “something of a masterpiece even had it been written by someone twenty years his senior.” Nor did young Orson craft a searching essay on Goethe or Nietzsche. “I’m an anti-Nietzsche fellow, and I certainly never wrote that,” Welles told David Frost. “It sounds like one of those stories.” Later in life, Welles batted away questions about his supposed boy-genius masterworks like annoying houseflies. “No,” he’d simply say.

The boy’s artistic abilities must have seemed doubly remarkable to Dr. Bernstein, who revered the arts but was never an artist himself, playing the cello only as an enthusiast. The doctor applauded all the boy’s magic tricks and puppet shows, took special delight in his improvised poetry and his artwork, and was rarely bored watching young Orson perform huge chunks of Shakespeare, including all the famous soliloquies.

Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein were Orson’s first producers, surrounding the boy with the finest stagecraft money could buy: high-quality puppet theater paraphernalia, the best magic and makeup kits, with a wide array of face paints, mustaches, beards, and wigs. King Lear was one of his favorite Shakespeare characters, partly because of the elaborate costumes and makeup it required. (The young boy could recite “
any
speech from
King Lear
,” Bernstein insisted.) Some Welles experts have seen this penchant for
Lear
as a youthful obsession with growing old and the inevitability of death. “He spent his youth pretending to be old, dying men,” Peter Conrad wrote in
Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life.
But Orson was also instinctively following the age-old theatrical practice of building his characterization and performance from “externals.” The credo of many actors is that a physical lie begets a psychological lie, and Orson followed this credo as an actor and a director—though hardly unwaveringly. Being a distinct physical type himself, he was acutely aware of the physical appearance of characters.

To balance his mother’s “ultra-artistic” influence, Dr. Bernstein later told Peter Noble, Dick Welles introduced Orson to newsmen such as the Chicago-born Bud Fisher, creator of
Mutt and Jeff
, and George McManus, who drew
Bringing Up Father
, both of them syndicated Hearst cartoonists. Oil painting was an admirable high art, but cartooning seemed a more practical career goal, and Orson took his father’s views seriously. The boy started carrying around a pencil and notepaper, sketching people he encountered and places he visited. This became a lifelong habit, and Orson frequently adorned his letters to family and friends with funny little caricatures and line drawings of sights and landscapes.

With young Orson in tow, Dick Welles and Dr. Bernstein returned to New York City soon after the New Year. Dr. Bernstein wanted to bring the boy to the American debut of Igor Stravinsky, who was performing his piano concertos with the New York Philharmonic in early January 1925. Afterward, Bernstein took young Orson backstage to meet the Russian-born composer. Still later, after the concert and backstage visit, Bernstein recalled, the nine-year-old “discoursed intelligently on the evening’s music” to listeners in the lobby of the Waldorf Hotel. One of those who overheard him that night was a petite young brunette actress, Agnes Moorehead; she never forgot the intelligent boy, with his “shock of black hair” and blue blazer. “He was fantastic,” she recalled, “the way he kept explaining his feelings about the concert.” A decade later, the actress—who graduated with honors from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and forged her career on radio in the 1930s—came to mind as Orson pondered who should play Charles Foster Kane’s mother, the hard-bitten countrywoman, but with “a strong face, warm and kind,” according to the script. Less than a year after the death of his own mother, he had met her fictional counterpart.

On that same trip, Dick Welles brought Orson to see the famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini at the Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue. Afterward, father and son paid a visit backstage, and Houdini graciously showed the boy a fundamental card trick known as “the pass” or “the shift,” in which a card placed in the middle of a deck resurfaces as the top card.

Houdini, billed that year as the “World Famous Author, Lecturer, and Acknowledged Head of Mystifiers,” was at the height of his fame. The highlight of his Hippodrome show was his escape from a wooden box that was pierced by iron rods. Orson insisted on seeing the feat a second night, and Dr. Bernstein took him. This time, when they went backstage, the magician revealed to young Orson the secret of one of his favorite handkerchief tricks, cautioning the boy that a good magician practiced a newly learned trick a thousand times before performing it in public.

Just then, a prominent magic dealer knocked on the door and rushed into the dressing room to pitch Houdini a marvelous new vanishing lamp for his act. As Orson watched with big eyes, the dealer showed Houdini the trick, and after a few questions the magician quickly mastered the moves. “I’ll put it in the next show!” Houdini exclaimed, thus contravening his own advice. Nevertheless, Bernstein swore that Orson did practice his magic tricks
thousands
of times.

Thirty years later, Peter Noble reported in
The Fabulous Orson Welles
that Welles was still practicing with Houdini’s vanishing lamp, and that he performed the “old Houdini handkerchief trick most effectively” onstage. “I saw him do it at the great Sid Field Benefit Show at the London Palladium in 1951 and again, before the then Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, in the Variety Club Gala Show at the London Coliseum in 1952.”

Houdini was also from Wisconsin—Appleton—as Dick Welles liked to remind Orson. Dick loved magic, and if Bernstein took the lead escorting Orson to opera and the symphony, his father took the lead with magic, buying his son instructional books and taking him to see all the famous magicians in Chicago and New York. Magic was in Orson’s genes, Todd School’s headmaster Roger Hill once said—it was a boyhood passion closely linked to his father, and a wellspring of inspiration for Orson’s future as a conjurer of a snowstorm in a glass ball, a life faked in a newsreel, a palatial tomb, and a hallway of mirrors stretching into infinity.

When they came back to Chicago, Orson talked his way out of returning to public school, and his father and Dr. Maurice Bernstein debated the next step in his education. Unlike Richard, who quit his Montana fishery apprenticeship soon after his mother’s death—these days he was in and out of Chicago, driving Dick Welles crazy—Orson had no trouble busying himself constructively, and he easily kept up his studies at home. Welles and Bernstein knew it was best to gain Orson’s cooperation first before nudging him down any path.

A year after his mother’s death, in May, Orson celebrated his tenth birthday. His father and Dr. Bernstein took him to see the new Michael Arlen stage comedy
The Green Hat
, with Broadway’s newest leading lady, Katharine Cornell. Married to the play’s director, Guthrie McClintic, Cornell was the talk of the town that spring in Chicago. She proved a delightful comedienne, although over time romantic tragedy would emerge as her true forte.

Orson studied the program, memorizing the names of everyone involved in the comedy, including the lesser actors and even the backstage artists. He prided himself on paying attention to the unsung personalities; he was always recasting plays in his mind, and he returned to these boyhood mental notebooks throughout his career. One weekend in Kenosha, for example, he and his father saw the Theatre Guild touring production of A. A. Milne’s
Mr. Pim Passes By
at the Rhode. Going backstage after the show, father and son shook hands with all the actors—including Erskine Sanford, already a whiz at frazzled-old-man parts though he was only in his thirties.

Orson inherited his father’s fondness for comic dancers, such as the vaudeville act Durant and Mitchell, and years later he would hire Jack Durant for a nightclub scene in
Journey of Fear.
Another dancer who made an impression on young Orson was the loose-limbed comic dancer Harry Shannon from Saginaw, Michigan, whom he saw cavorting in a Chicago revue. By the time Orson saw him again, in 1940, Shannon was fifty years old, with no serious dramatic credits. Orson was searching for someone to play his character’s father in
Citizen Kane
—a role that goes without description, unusually so, in the published script. Shannon was doing uncredited bits in Hollywood pictures until Orson chose him to play, unforgettably, the vaguely ineffectual, possibly alcoholic and abusive senior Kane.

Young Orson would follow Cornell’s career after seeing her in
The Green Hat
, and more than once he drew casting from the roster of her ensembles. The next time he saw her onstage, it was several years later in New York, in a drama called
Dishonored Lady
by Margaret Ayers Barnes and Edward Sheldon—the latter a Chicago playwright whose work Orson followed. It was a bit of
guignol
, not really very good, although Cornell was authoritative in her role. And Orson noticed one actor: Fortunio Bonanova, a former opera tenor from Mallorca, who played an oily South American lover murdered by Cornell. Bonanova stole his scenes, and Orson would not forget him. In 1940, as he reworked the scenes in
Citizen Kane
in which Susan Alexander Kane strains to hit the high notes while rehearsing for her opera debut, Orson thought of Bonanova for the role of the frustrated voice tutor, Matisti.

MATISTI

Impossible! Impossible! . . . I will be the laughingstock of the musical world. People will say—

KANE

If you’re interested in what people will say. Signor Matisti, I may be able to enlighten you a bit. The newspapers, for instance, I’m an authority on what the papers will say, Signor Matisti, because I own eight of them between here and San Francisco. . . . It’s all right, dear. Signor Matisti is going to listen to reason. Aren’t you, maestro?

Like Shannon, Bonanova had been languishing in Hollywood, taking walk-on parts as headwaiters and hotel managers. “Sent for him the minute I wrote that part,” Orson told Peter Bogdanovich. “He was so marvelous. God, he was funny.”

In June 1925, Dick Welles took his son back to the Hotel Sheffield in Grand Detour. The hotel was filled to capacity that summer on most weekends and holidays. Some writers have scoffed at Welles’s recollection that the Sheffield was filled with circus folk, or that the hotel employees included colorful characters like “Rattlesnake-Oil Emery” and a waitress who performed birdcalls in a tent show. But Rattlesnake-Oil Emery was a real person—the hotel’s handyman and launderer, who also butchered chickens—and Route 2, which ran past the hotel, was busy all summer long with circus and festival wagons on their way to county fairs.

Memorial Day opened the summer season, and Orson and his father trekked to Court House Square in Oregon, where by 1926 the parade of Civil War “Old Boys” in their tattered blues had dwindled to a feeble handful.

With their parents off on another European art tour, the Watson girls joined them for the month of June. Marjorie Watson recalled Orson honing his magic act that summer, trying to hypnotize his cousins. One day, ten-year-old Orson and his cousins Emily and Marjorie managed to slip the noose, as they later boasted, running away to live the actor’s life on the road. County police searched for them for hours before spotting them in Oregon, ten miles north, with the girls passing as boys, all of them in blackface, singing and dancing for pennies on a street corner.

Emily went along fearlessly with Orson’s adventures, her father told Peter Noble. “Orson was exceedingly gallant, made her pine-bough beds to sleep on at night in the deep woods and took off his own coat and put it over her. Her only concern was when he threw all the money that he had in his pockets into a stream and said, ‘Now we will live on our own talents, or we will starve to death.’ ”

When the Watsons whisked the girls away, Dick Welles and his son were left to their own devices for a few weeks. Young Orson was an “odd child,” in the words of Frederick J. Garner, a Grand Detour resident, “and stories are told of him entertaining people in the evening at the country store.” Every now and then father and son took off for Dixon, the biggest town in the county, driving to the downtown air-conditioned theater where the comedies and Westerns were interspersed with vaudeville acts on Sundays. In the summer of 1925 they saw Chaplin in
The Gold Rush
; they also saw the spectacular
Ben-Hur
, and William S. Hart’s
Tumbleweeds.