Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (24 page)

At the time of the fire Dick Welles said his “valuable library” had been “completely destroyed,” according to the
Ogle County Republican.
(Orson added later that the library included his father’s precious “jade collection,” which was not covered by insurance.) The dazed hotelier guessed that the damages would rise to at least $30,000, and his insurance would cover only “a little over half that amount.” He was “undecided” about whether he might rebuild the hotel, Dick Welles told the press, pending “the nature of the adjustment he receives from the insurance companies.”

But the Hotel Sheffield was never rebuilt. And as far as anyone recalls, Orson’s father never set foot in Grand Detour again.

Like his mother’s death, the Hotel Sheffield fire was a catastrophe that took place while Orson was somewhere else, forcing him to draw on his imagination to fill in the gaps. Like his father, Orson never returned to Grand Detour. In years to come, when Dr. Maurice Bernstein suggested a nostalgic return to the town, or Roger Hill said he thought the site where his father owned a hotel might merit a plaque with Orson’s name on it, the filmmaker scoffed.

Orson capped his second outstanding year at Todd School with a mesmerizing recitation, at the commencement exercises, of the final courtroom speech John Brown made after the abolitionist was found guilty of treason. But the Grand Detour fire threw Orson’s summer plans into a scramble. Facing months of dispiriting meetings with fire investigators and insurance officials, Dick Welles had no place for him to spend the summer. Instead Orson was plunged back into the world of Dr. Bernstein, moving into Bernstein’s Chicago apartment for the remainder of June. He always felt at home in Chicago, where he could stock up on art supplies and books at Kroch’s and roam through the Art Institute whenever he liked. He hurried to catch the last plays of the season at the Goodman, where the repertory ensemble was alternating between a new play about India called
The Little Clay Cart
, translated from Sanskrit, straight from its Neighborhood Playhouse premiere in New York, and a studio production of Noël Coward’s
Hay Fever.

Now that he was thirteen, Orson was a welcome guest at the Tavern Club, a prestigious men’s club for arts patrons and cognoscenti atop an art deco skyscraper on the south bank of the Chicago River at Michigan Avenue. Ned Moore and Dr. Bernstein, both members, brought Orson along to luncheons there, reuniting him with old Ravinia acquaintances including Charles Collins, the drama critic of the
Chicago Tribune
; and Collins’s friendly rival, Ashton Stevens of the
Herald-Examiner.
John Clayton, the former foreign correspondent of the
Chicago Tribune
, now heading public relations for the Chicago Civic Opera, was another Tavern Club regular. The newsmen’s table was a kind of club within the club, a regular way station for show business and literary personalities passing through town, and for native sons in touring shows, who were greeted like returning war heroes. Among the latter group, for example, was Preston Sturges, a hometown actor and fledgling writer, who always dropped by while touring with road companies, long before he struck gold as a playwright. Nearly twenty years Welles’s senior, Sturges got to know Welles in the latter’s prep school days over lunches at the Tavern Club, and Orson avidly followed his career as Sturges became one of Hollywood’s first “writer-directors.”

The newsmen had always been fond of Orson, and now that he was nearing adulthood—at thirteen, he was almost as tall as the older men—they treated him more or less as an equal. Their talk was freewheeling, ranging over local and national stories, politics and crime, arts and society. They vied with each other, sparring on each new topic; for Orson, listening to them—and jumping in alongside them—it was like sitting at a table of unstuffy professors.

In July, when the “club within a club” adjourned to Highland Park and Ravinia, Orson accompanied Bernstein to a new house the doctor was renting on Kincaid Avenue in Highland Park, near Ned and Hazel Moore’s place. Orson had been away from the Ravinia music festival in recent years, but now “Uncle Ned” promoted the teenager as a novelty columnist to Louis Eckstein, the Chicago businessman who bankrolled the Ravinia Festival and published the
Highland Park News.
Eckstein signed up the “thirteen-year-old dramatic critic, cub reporter, and what have you,” in the words of the newspaper announcement, for a column called “Hitting the High Notes,” with Orson reporting “inside dope on the opera stars.”

Orson was uniquely positioned to collect the “inside dope,” since visiting Chicago critics and performers camped out at the Moores’ place, and these days at Bernstein’s house too. Celebrities were as common as clover at Ravinia, where on any given night the audience might include luminaries such as Ethel Barrymore or even Vice President Charles G. Dawes, who had a home in nearby Evanston. Barrymore, visiting Chicago, came to dinner at Dr. Bernstein’s house in early August, and young Orson sat across the table from the leading actress of her generation.

Orson’s first column, after the Fourth of July weekend, was jokey and polite. But he turned thoughtful in his next piece, offering capsule reviews of four “brilliant” productions:
Lohengrin
,
Manon
,
Il Trovatore
, and
L’Amore dei Tre Re.
Of the last, he rhapsodized, “The effects [conductor Gennaro] Papi got out of his orchestra! Music as Montmezzi wrote it to be. All the beauty and the horror of a great romance wrought from men and instruments by a master of directors. And the encomparable Lazzari. The Mansfield of modern Opera he should be called.”
⁷
In later columns he gave informed commentary on the productions of
La Juive, Fra Diavolo
,
Le Chemeneau
,
Thaïs
,
Marouf
, and
Tosca
, assessing everything from makeup and costumes to lighting and set design, but always particularly attentive to the actors. (“The acting just got by!” the young columnist complained about
Tosca.
“And that’s all! I am afraid, however, that the audience, the largest of the year, was far from disappointed.”)

Later in life, Orson viewed “Hitting the High Notes” as one of those youthful indiscretions for which it was his eternal duty to apologize. “I have so many happy memories of you and Mario from the very earliest times,” he wrote to Mario Chamlee’s wife, the soprano Ruth Miller, in the 1970s. “I have quite forgotten that I was ever presumptuous enough, in those salad days, to attempt a review of one of Mario’s performances. But of course I do remember his
Marouf
very well indeed. He was not just a fine singer, but also a superb actor.”

Orson attended all the operas that summer and also all the performances of the Chicago Symphony, whose lead violinist, Jacques Gordon, had played in his mother’s home and at her memorial service. What he did not already know about opera, he could crib from his frequent concert companions—especially Uncle Ned, who wrote critiques of the Ravinia operas for the
Chicago Tribune
; and Aunt Hazel, who was one of the classical reviewers on her husband’s staff. Moore treated Orson like the son he never had, even agreeing to lend his precious collection of music recordings to the Todd School library at Orson’s urging. At the time, Moore was preoccupied with his magnum opus,
Forty Years of Opera in Chicago
, a book that would become the definitive source on the notorious story of Ganna Walska, a Polish garden enthusiast with a penchant for wealthy husbands. Walska’s second husband was the Chicago Civic Opera’s head Harold F. McCormick, who lavished money on her ill-advised musical career, paying for singing lessons and thrusting her into plays and operas that flopped. Walska would become one of several inspirations for the character of Susan Alexander in
Citizen Kane.

Besides seeing everything at Ravinia for several seasons, Orson rarely missed the operas that were performed in Chicago, thanks to Roger Hill and John Clayton. In the fall of 1928, Clayton, who had two sons enrolled at Todd, began arranging for the Todd boys to have a block of free seats at the Civic Opera on Sundays, and he made sure the boys met the stars after the performances. Clayton also introduced the boys to Harold F. McCormick, who was still married to Walska; and to Samuel Insull, a public utilities magnate who was a driving force behind the new Civic Opera House, and who also took a sometimes heavy hand in repertoire and casting.

On the Todd boys’ opera trips, Orson was everyone’s favorite seatmate. “He knew all the operas by heart,” remembered John Dexter. “On the train going in Orson would tell us what the hell was going on, what the opera was all about. Kids used to fight to sit next to him at the opera. ‘What’s going? What’s the old broad singing about?’ ”

But young Orson was also made uncomfortable during this time by the moments—apparently frequent—when one of the male Italian opera singers spied him as “meat for a quick seduction,” as Welles told Barbara Leaming. He had a knack of catching the attention of preying homosexuals—like Captain Mueller—or perhaps of blaming them for his own sexual discomfort.

Welles told Leaming that he was forced to rebuff a number of “advances” from male opera stars while keeping secret his embarrassment at their behavior. Homosexual men seemed to trail him everywhere: a classmate he later said he took pains to avoid; a Todd School father who sprang upon him in bed during one weekend sleepover, he claimed. Orson complained of such situations so often that it’s hard to believe they’re purely fictional, so Simon Callow may be right: “Pretty well everyone must have felt some sort of sexual frisson in his presence.”

Orson had been a pudgy boy with chipmunk cheeks, but by the summer of 1928, he had sprung up into a tall (six feet two inches or more, eventually) and strikingly handsome youth with dark brown eyes, unruly black hair, and a high pale arching forehead. To his big, winning smile and characteristic booming laugh was added a voice that was now preternaturally sonorous—a voice like God’s, as Roger Hill liked to say—that could fill any room or auditorium.

His personality grew as surely as his body. He was grand and theatrical in his mannerisms. He crackled with energy and ideas. His delight was contagious; his rages were explosive. Hungry for attention, brooding when bored, Orson could also be contemplative and sweetly solicitous about other people. To people who knew him well, he was wonderful, if also, to people who knew him best, a handful—a singular character inside a singular physical package.

As he entered eighth grade in the fall of 1928, Orson was firmly ensconced as the Todd School’s shining star of all things literary and theatrical. Promoted to editor of the
The Red & White
, he crafted a Kane-like “declaration of principles,” sketching a man with a placard: “Our Platform—a Bigger, Better, Snappier Red and White.” Besides writing poetry and a regular column, he now reviewed shows at Woodstock’s downtown Miller Theatre. (“The whole piece was rather loosely put together,” he wrote of the touring musical
Sweetheart Town.
“The leads were handled by very competent talent but the chorus work was rather pitiful in spots.”) And his own theatrical blossoming continued. By now, thanks to Roger Hill, Orson was taking lead roles in most of the all-school plays, and handling much of the backstage work as well. In the fall of 1928, he starred in A. A. Milne’s mystery-comedy
The Man in the Bowler Hat
; the following spring he played the main role of the condemned murderer in Holworthy Hall and Robert Middlemass’s famous one-act
The Valiant
, a production that toured to other nearby schools.

Orson’s third year as a Todd boy culminated in his first Shakespeare production for the school, an abridged
Julius Caesar
presented at the Drama League of Chicago’s annual tournament at the Goodman Theatre in late May 1929. The task of adapting the play fell to Orson, who was just turning fourteen; Roger Hill helped—but mostly it was Orson, as the headmaster always said. They condensed Shakespeare’s text into a sixty-minute version for a cast of twenty of the school’s older, more proficient boys. The direction, too, was a collaboration between Orson and Hill—but, again, mostly Orson, making this the first all-school play he directed. He even handled costume and stage design, draping the cast in bedsheet togas and crafting sets from cardboard boxes. It was an early instance of Welles’s career-long creativity with pinchpenny budgets combined with a philosophy of bricolage—with actors
and
sets.

Slathered in makeup, Orson also played two of the key roles in the Todd School production—Cassius and Mark Antony. “As Cassius, I killed Caesar quickly,” he recalled, “then ran around, changed my make-up and was back on stage in time as Antony for the funeral oration.” The cast included his friends John Dexter and Sherman Perlman, the latter about to graduate.

The Goodman tournament put the Todd boys in competition with other Chicago-area schools, and their annual bête noire was Nicholas Senn High School, which had taken the coveted first-prize silver cup and $25 award for two years running. A third victory would give Senn permanent possession of the trophy. The governor of the panel of judges was the Goodman’s leading actor-director, Whitford Kane, whom both Hill and Orson knew personally from backstage visits.

Orson desperately wanted to take the trophy home to Todd, and by all accounts his first public foray into Shakespeare set a high bar. But another contender, Morgan Park High School, surprised everyone with a powerful staging of a one-act play set in China called
Robe of Wood.
Todd’s chances were hurt when one of the tournament judges insisted that the “two” Todd boys playing Cassius and Mark Anthony—both Orson—must be ringers because they were obviously too big in size to be high school students. Morgan Park took first place.

When the decision was announced, pandemonium broke out in the theater. Hiram “Chubby” Sherman, a Goodman actor who was Whitford Kane’s protégé, leaned over to whisper in Kane’s ear. Kane jumped up to propose a face-saving “special award” for Todd School. “For God’s sake, Roger,” Kane told Hill afterward, “get a rich parent to buy a cup and have it engraved from us.” Chicago’s Better Speech Association chipped in, offering the Todd boys another special citation for diction. But Orson wasn’t fooled: he had lost. His
Julius Caesar
had fallen short. He felt miserable, a failure.