Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (50 page)

The partners quickly rounded up a cast and launched read-throughs in Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane’s basement apartment on West Fourteenth Street. Alexander Scourby, who was attracting attention in plays at the New School for Social Research; and Miriam Batista, who had recited Shakespeare in vaudeville, were cast as the incestuous lovers Annabella and Giovanni. The role of Bergetto, the play’s ill-fated buffoon, went to Chubby Sherman, “of whose talent,” Houseman wrote, Orson “was so fanatically convinced that he would not rest till he had proved it to the world.”

On
Panic
, Houseman had been Orson’s boss. ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
would be their first real collaboration. With his intense personality and creative drive, Orson led the way, adapting the script, designing the scenery, and directing the play. “I watched him, with growing wonder,” Houseman wrote in his memoir, “take as mannered and decadent a work as John Ford’s tragedy, bend it to his will and recreate it, on the stage of his imagination, in the vivid dramatic light of his own imagination. . . .

“I was almost thirty-three years old. Welles was twenty. But in my working relationship with this astonishing boy whose theatrical experience was so much greater and richer than mine, it was I who was the pupil, he the teacher. In certain fields I was his senior, possessed of painfully acquired knowledge that was wider and more comprehensive than his; but what amazed and awed me in Orson was his astounding and, apparently, innate dramatic instinct.”

Still, the Phoenix faced a familiar hurdle: funding. Francis Carpenter, for whom Orson had set aside a small role in the play, convinced the partners that he had a lifeline to a deep-pocketed angel. “The most outrageous of Orson’s many singular friends,” as Houseman put it, Carpenter vowed to extract $10,000 from “an aging lady of great wealth,” who was his “protectress.”

As the play’s scheduled May opening neared, ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
was in a heightened state of readiness—“cast, designed, housed,” in Houseman’s words—but still penniless. No longer able to afford the rent on Riverside Drive, Orson and Virginia sneaked off to join Carpenter on Long Island, where he was squatting at a mansion owned by the elderly “protectress.” A devilish character, Carpenter cleverly borrowed what little money the Welleses had and then left them to their own devices, the mansion empty, its refrigerator bare. After three days without a decent meal—or any sign of Carpenter—they surrendered and wired to Dr. Bernstein. The couple moved back into the Algonquin, “signing for things,” as Orson wrote to Skipper. “We are broke . . . our income and our heart.”

Not long afterward, Orson was supposed to take over the Bijou, launching actor and technical rehearsals for ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
But the theater and other vendors demanded payments in advance. Carpenter was summoned to a showdown at the Phoenix office. Where was the promised $10,000? Well, Carpenter had good news and bad news. He had just visited the elderly protectress, who had authorized the $10,000. The bad news: it turned out that their benefactor was more passionately devoted to theater
buildings
than to the plays themselves. The $10,000, she stipulated, could be used only for renovating and redecorating the rundown Bijou.

After a long, tense silence, Orson began to laugh. His laughter built into cascading roars. “If Orson had not started to laugh,” Houseman recalled, “I doubt if Francis Carpenter would have left the premises . . . alive. His hilarity was infectious. Actors who dropped in to inquire about the start of rehearsals found us, an hour later, still howling, roaring, crowing and slapping ourselves in wild and uncontrollable hysteria.” The pair adjourned for an elaborate lunch, during which they decided to cancel the show, vacate the Sardi office, and suspend their partnership.

It was vintage Orson Welles: the fun was in the doing, and the doing was done. He held nothing against Carpenter, who was still welcome in Welles projects as late as 1956, when he appeared among the cast of
King Lear
at New York’s City Center. Welles and Houseman parted as friends, promising to stay in touch, but without any real certainty that they would get together again.

With the Broadway season drawing to a close, Orson sent five-alarm telegrams to his guardian and his former headmaster. “The money has a count of three days yet before it’s out. And I mean down and out.” He pleaded with Roger Hill for a onetime job staging the Todd Troupers’ last play of the school year, always a major endeavor. Seeing how downhearted his prize pupil was, Hill drew up “a face-saving offer,” in his words, “a very formal-looking document with everything nominated in the bond” that pledged $100 monthly to Orson, from May through August, in exchange for his directing the spring play. The Hills also arranged for the couple to lodge in a cottage near Lake Geneva for the rest of the summer. Orson could concentrate on his writing. In return, Hill would take half ownership of the profits of anything Orson wrote.

Within days of the collapse of ’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
, Orson and Virginia fled New York, heading first to Dartmouth in New Hampshire to see Orson’s Todd classmate William Mowry Jr. play Brutus in an innovative college production of
Julius Caesar.
It was a very unusual production, involving minimal scenery: raised platforms of varying heights, with the main action taking place under pools of light and the rest of the stage plunged into darkness. By the end of April Orson and Virginia were back in Wheaton with the Nicolsons, attending the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s season finale. Orson made a few public appearances in Chicago, addressing groups on “general subjects of the stage,” including a presentation at the Circuit Theatre, sponsored by the Round Table of the University of Chicago, that was broadcast locally.

Skipper Hill and musical maestro Carl Hendrickson had already planned the last play of the school year,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, by the time Orson arrived in Woodstock just before his twentieth birthday on May 6. Hill’s daughter Joan was playing the female lead, Eliza. Although Orson took over the reins of directing, there was little of the publicity fanfare that had marked the previous year’s summer festival, and Chicago critics were not bused to the school for performances.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
rarely came up in Hill’s later conversations with Welles, except in jokes about the prop gun that misfired in a climactic scene. Orson ghosted a glowing front-page notice in the
Woodstock Daily Sentinel
that gave all credit for masterminding the show to Hill.

After commencement, the Welleses repaired to their summer rental on the south shore of Lake Geneva, half an hour north of Woodstock. Their hope was that they would find peace and inspiration in the idyllic resort community, with the mansions of Chicago industrialists sprinkled around a picturesque lake and beautiful countryside. Lake Geneva was not as rarefied as Ravinia, but the food was excellent, and there were genuine tourist attractions, including the University of Chicago’s world-renowned Yerkes Observatory. That summer, the young couple could see Ethel Barrymore’s daughter, Ethel Barrymore Colt, and her touring company perform
She Stoops to Conquer
; they also took in productions by a local summer stock group, the Belfry Players.

While in Lake Geneva, the couple were visited more than once by Dr. Maurice Bernstein and Hazel Moore, as well as Orson’s mother’s favorite cousin, “Uncle” Dudley Crafts Watson, who delivered a stereopticon lecture to a local club. Watson always said that the natural splendors of Lake Geneva, where he was born, inspired his affinity for painting landscapes.

Orson’s brother, Richard, had finally been discharged from Kankakee State Hospital, and had taken up temporary residence in Chicago. With almost no money left from his meager inheritance, Richard was working at Hull House, teaching arts and crafts to its impoverished residents. “He got fired from Hull House,” Welles told Barbara Leaming, “because he took a hooker upstairs and locked himself in with her and they couldn’t get him down for days.” Although this anecdote, burnishing Richard’s credentials as a Lothario, can’t be verified in Hull House archives, Orson must have seen his brother a few times over the summer. Their relationship was strained but cordial. Most people regarded Richard warily; although docile, he was always borrowing money and claiming things he had never done, sparking dustups wherever he worked, even at the settlement house.

Orson and Virginia paid occasional visits to Chicago, where they had the loan of Ashton Stevens’s apartment on Bellevue Place. They also stole weekends in Wheaton, spending long afternoons golfing, then dining and dancing in the company of Virginia’s parents.

To family and friends, Orson seemed unusually subdued. Leo Nicolson, who hated the fact that his daughter had abandoned her family for the theater, tried to talk Orson into a career as a stockbroker, offering to set him up with friends in the Loop. Orson demurred. Nicolson was insistent, proclaiming that he didn’t want his daughter living hand to mouth, married to a failure. Forced into a privileged country-club milieu in the depths of the Depression, holding his tongue while a hard-drinking businessman berated the arts and show business, Orson felt his spine stiffen.

Virginia was on Orson’s side. No longer tempted by suburban high society, she felt she had more in common with the black sheep of the Nicolson family: her father’s brother, John Urban Nicolson, a poet who had translated Villon’s complete works and a modern edition of
The Canterbury Tales
with illustrations by Rockwell Kent.

When Orson had a goal, he pursued it single-mindedly. But that summer, for the first time in a long while, he had no real goal. He and Virginia spent many evenings in Lake Geneva going to films like John Ford’s
The Informer
and Robert Flaherty’s
Man of Aran
, a documentary re-creation of life on the Aran Islands, which served mainly to remind Orson of the three years that had passed since his time in Ireland, and how stalled he was in life.
²⁰

Orson wrote incessantly over the summer of 1935, but he kept shifting gears, and “the literary product of this period was not particularly promising or voluminous,” Hill recalled. What little he accomplished has vanished. “Mainly he worked on the old standby, an Irish travel book,” Hill remembered. “Also, he turned out a long and rambling piece which was planned for magazine use entitled ‘Now I Am 21’ or something of the sort. It elucidated in lengthy form his philosophy on life, love, literature, art, the drama, and what not. If his travel book was halted for this, so this was halted for another Big Idea—a daily radio program which would be a sort of super-almanac. ‘June 28: This date is famous because of the birth of so-and-so in 1522. Also, the signing of such-and-such a treaty of 1614 etc.’ The incidents had to be dramatized.

“A sort of March of All-Time.”

There would be many crossroads in Orson’s life, but the summer of 1935 was one of the most fateful. What should he do with his talent and profession? He was gifted with a deep vein of creativity—even genius, perhaps, as newspaper clippings reminded him. But did he have the character and discipline to channel that genius into a career?

Living modestly, dining out on the Nicolsons, and collecting the monthlies from Dr. Bernstein and Skipper, Orson and Virginia managed to save a surprising amount of money that summer. The respite breathed new life into them, and by the end of August Orson had made a decision. He would leave the past behind him: the Midwest, his summer projects, and along with them his doubts about his own future. He believed in his own luck, and in the kindness of fate. He would kick away the logjams in his path. He and Virginia would return to New York, and this time they would succeed.

The Nicolsons were not pleased with the decision, but no one else who knew the couple was surprised when they said good-bye at the end of August. They were still so young. Virginia Nicolson Welles was only eighteen, Orson just twenty.

The Hills gave the couple an old Essex motorcar to drive east and then junk. Orson still didn’t know how to drive, so Virginia drove the whole way at a safe crawl. Orson talked a blue streak, reciting poetry to keep her alert at the wheel. They pulled into Manhattan and abandoned the car in a hotel lot, and almost immediately their luck—fate—turned.

Orson picked up an “odd job at Columbia [CBS],” he wrote to Hill excitedly, with other radio work promised to follow. The couple moved into “the loveliest English basement apartment on 14th Street you could imagine.” The place they found, at 319 West Fourteenth Street, was close to Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane’s place, a bookstore, and a “chink laundry,” in Orson’s phrase. They committed to a one-year lease, reflecting their freshly sunny outlook. “Space, charm, electric ice-box, garden, and all for fifty-five dollars a month! Virginia’s having the time of her life living here. A real home and all the rest of it,” he told the headmaster. “There’s plenty of room for you when you come.”

Moreover, Orson reported, his rapport with John Houseman was paying off: the Phoenix Theatre was resurgent. “’
Tis Pity She’s a Whore
goes into rehearsal in less than ten days!”

The “odd job” was Orson’s first appearance on a national radio program. One of his actor acquaintances, Paul Stewart, had recommended him to the producer of
American School of the Air
, a long-running educational series that CBS broadcast into U.S. public schools for half an hour one morning a week. The educational series was a source of small but appreciated paychecks to many in show business, and among the struggling actors hired along with Orson was a tall, dapper Virginian whose gentlemanly exterior concealed the spirit of a scamp.

Ten years older than Orson, Joseph Cotten was a late bloomer in show business. Born in Petersburg, Virginia, the son of an assistant postmaster, Cotten had studied acting at the Robert Nugent Hickman School of Expression in Washington, D.C., where he learned to moderate his drawl and paid for his tuition by selling vacuum cleaners and playing center on a semi-professional football team. Unable to find immediate work as an actor in New York, Cotten retreated to Miami, selling advertising for the
Miami Herald
while writing occasional drama criticism for it. Cotten performed with Miami’s Civic Theater for several years before returning to New York as an assistant stage manager for producer David Belasco. The handsome Virginian had begun picking up minor Broadway parts (he had appeared, for example, in Guthrie McClintic’s production of
Jezebel
), but
American School of the Air
was his meal ticket.