Orson Welles, Vol I Read online

  No doubt sensing that the boy was developing out of their control, Maurice Bernstein and Dick Welles decided to remove him from the Washington School, Madison – where he had, in fact, been doing rather well scholastically, taking giant strides in what had hitherto been his worst subject, arithmetic – and submit him to the rigorous attentions of Noble Hill at the Todd School for Boys. Dick Welles had been vaguely threatening whenever he misbehaved to send him to Todd – where Richard Junior had been knocked into shape, until they threw him out – while Dr Bernstein entertained equally vague ideas of nurturing his artistic impulses; Todd had a reputation for being strong on music. The nature of what they had in mind may be deduced from the fact that their first choice of school had been Northwestern Military Academy at Lake Geneva. How different might the history of twentieth-century warfare have been had they succeeded. According to Dudley Crafts Watson, it was only with some difficulty that they got Orson admitted to Todd; no doubt the memory of the expelled Richard Junior was still fresh, and the staff desired no repetition of that experience. Once Orson was accepted, however, there was great relief among the unofficial committee masterminding his development: ‘the school did to him,’25 wrote Watson, ‘what none of the rest of us could.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Todd

  TODD WAS not quite what they had expected, however. In 1926, when Welles was enrolled, the school was undergoing a subtle change. The Christ-like Noble had decided to hand the reins over to his son, Roger, whom he summoned from a career in advertising to take his place on the staff and prepare himself for the headmastership. Lacking any academic qualifications whatever, Roger obeyed, joining the school as games teacher. In 1921, Noble Hill drew up an agreement handing over ownership of the school to his son, while remaining headmaster; by the time Welles arrived, Todd was evolving quite significantly into radical directions. Roger Hill proved to be an inspired and innovative educator, and Welles found himself in surroundings as congenial to his natural gifts as could have been devised. From being a sort of refined borstal, the school was becoming an establishment not unlike Dartington Hall in England, or Summerhill in Scotland. The ground had in fact been laid by Noble Hill. Once he had secured his authority (‘thus with a single blow had I crushed a rebellion and established my dictatorship’) he had already introduced a number of enlightened elements into school policy: interschool athletics were abhorred, for example, competition being regarded as unhealthy; every boy was automatically a member of the Literary Society, whose magazine, The Society Echo, was edited in rotation by the members. Central to Noble’s philosophy was the notion that, in his resounding phrase, ‘responsibility is the great educator’.1 Thus it was that the school’s intake ended at tenth grade, making the last two years seniors at fifteen and sixteen – and ‘seniority brings responsibility’. Once again Welles found himself in an environment in which childhood as sentimentally conceived was not encouraged.

  Building on these notions, Roger Hill gently transformed his stern father’s pedagogic principles, till, without knowing where he was going, he had created a school which educated without appearing to do so. His originality sprang from innocence of academic method, and a hatred of its self-importance. ‘When, by accident of birth, I became Headmaster of a great school,’2 he wrote, ‘I attempted to cover my shame through some graduate Education courses at Chicago University. How else could I face my peers in meetings of the Private Schools Association? But once I learned to talk their jargon, I found I didn’t want to … the Association had a predominantly military membership. Many of these institutions were mere reform schools for the rich … could I spend years in this job without becoming equally bumptious, overweening? Headmasters are big frogs in small puddles. They constantly speak down ex cathedra.’ He carved in the lid of his desk the phrase GOD’S BODYKINS, MAN, the beginning of Hamlet’s remark: ‘Use every man after his desert and who should ‘scape whipping?’ defining his own school in the brochure as a place where ‘one hundred boys (no more, such is the limit of intimacy) live a joyous communal existence with twenty-two folk called teachers whose birthdays have mounted a bit but whose zest for life has not dimmed; whose sense of humor is intact, and whose feeling of importance and dignity is (Allah be praised) not predominant.’

  The man who had flunked his degree at college proposed an approach based not on examinations but on practical experience: theory deduced, if at all, from practice, not the other way round. It was his conviction that doing was the best way of learning, and that his pupils were not merely in transit to adulthood but fully alive and complicated human beings, needing neither to be put in their places nor to be patronised. ‘Boyhood is not a preparation for life. It is life itself in one of its most glorious aspects. Text-book training is a part of this life but only a part … at Todd we “expose” our boys to opportunities for expression of any inner urge … in each one of these the standards must be kept up – way up. Let the boy hitch his wagon to a star. He’ll never rise unless he tries … modern youth receives too few of the first-hand experiences their forefathers knew. In their place we have substituted the second-hand ones of the bleachers, the movies and – yes, even the text book. But life isn’t a matter of reciting things. It’s a matter of thinking things; doing things. At Todd we offer boys this chance.’3

  It was a standing joke in the school that Roger Hill’s personal enthusiasms would quickly become part of the curriculum. ‘I wonder what new hobby Skipper has that will be GOOD-FOR-THE-BOYS?’4 But since his passions were all boyish ones, they met with general approval, and were eagerly entered into. He liked flying, so he built an airport at Todd; he liked theatre, so Todd had a theatre. He was fond of dogs, so he set up a kennel. The children learned everything about breeding and training dogs; they learned the rudiments of veterinary medicine; they even sold dogs to local people from nearby Woodstock. Noble Hill had had a rather different view, but he seems to have accepted his son’s innovations. He was still headmaster, still wore his starched, stiff collars, addressed assembly and complained to the boys about the amount of shoe polish that they used. He was perceived as a kindly, harmless old party; whereas Roger – ‘Skipper’, after his yacht – was simply idolised by his pupils. Handsome, sporty, democratic, and married to Hortense (‘Horty’) whom he loved with unashamedly public desire and devotion, he was every boy’s ideal elder brother. ‘The adolescent’s adolescent’,5 Hascy Tarbox, one of them, later said.

  Welles joined the school after term had begun, and was, unusually, formally welcomed by the Hills. He created a stir from the beginning. ‘Other students stuck their head round the corner to see what kind of a celebrity had arrived.’6 Dr Bernstein (not his father; Dick Welles, perhaps feeling guilty, hardly ever came to Todd) brought Orson to Todd, nervously accompanying him as the boy was shown round the various facilities. Coming to the theatre, Orson is alleged to have protested at its shortcomings. ‘But Orson,’7 said Bernstein, ‘if everything was perfect you wouldn’t need to change it. Now you can make it over any way you want to. They’ve promised me that.’ And with this surely false promise, he departed, leaving him in the hands of Roger Hill. He and Welles fell for each other almost on sight. ‘I fell in love with Roger Hill. I tried to find a way to capture the attention of this fascinating man who fascinates me tonight as much as he did the first day I laid eyes on him,’ said Welles in the sixties, in a chat show entitled An Evening with Orson Welles. ‘He has never ceased to be my idea of who I would like to be.’ Roger was, indeed, the father that Welles desperately wanted: strong but not threatening, trustworthy without being dully predictable, many-layered but not complicated. Neither Welles’s actual father, amusing but unreliable and emotionally exhausting, nor Dadda, fussing, fretting, loving but leech-like, fitted the bill. In his own phrase, ‘a semi-orphan with a surplus of foster parents even before I went to Todd,’8 he knew that this was the one. As Barbara Leaming tells it, he set about seducing Hill. Seduction was his natural instinct, and he made his overtures on sev
eral fronts. Obviously he attempted a sexual seduction. ‘I’m the boy you could have had,’9 he told Hill years later. When that yielded no results, he tried another tack. Only four weeks after his arrival, he appeared in a Hallowe’en concert with a magic act of such ambitiousness that, almost inevitably, it fell apart. The magician did not, however. He held the stage while everything went wrong, engaging the audience with banter and bluster so effective and surprising that he emerged from the experience with a reputation. The person whom he crucially wished to impress – Skipper – was stunned.

  ‘We all recognised almost immediately that Orson was someone very different.’10 John C. Dexter, on whom had fallen the distinction of being his room-mate, had never met another child like him. Welles arrived with several suitcases and a large steamer trunk full of make-up, wigs, capes, magic equipment, candles, flashlights and assorted stage wear. ‘I was informed before he was unpacked that he had been born in it, on stage. He enquired into my knowledge of the theatre, which was nil, and proceeded to relate what a wonderful medium it was.’ Switching the lights off he retired into the bathroom, reappearing with a candle, hunchbacked and gruesomely made-up. ‘Who am I?’ he demanded, to which Dexter had ‘a negative reply’. Not for long. His night classes had begun. ‘We all had to bathe then change into clean night clothes and lights out at nine (controlled by the dorm marm). Then the Welles little theatre would begin.’ After several months, with deep bags under his eyes, Dexter requested a transfer. Welles thereafter had a room of his own, a thing unheard of. In it he would burn incense, and speak, as he often did, of the Mysteries of the East. There, too, he kept a pastel-tinted photograph of his mother. ‘He was not one of us,’11 said Hascy Tarbox, another student. ‘Not part of the human zoo.’

  Hortense Hill kept a cooler head than her husband. ‘When I first saw him at ten years old he was dressed as Sherlock Holmes. I thought he was a cute little round-faced boy. As I got to know him more and found out how demanding he was, I learned how much of a problem it was going to be just to keep him a little bit under.’12 Welles, a regular visitor to the Hills’ house almost from the beginning, at first saw Hortense as a threat to his relationship with Roger; then, under the influence of Horty’s practical kindness, and aware – as everybody inevitably was – of their indivisibility, he formed a double attachment to them. Roger was all energy, enthusiasm, optimism: ‘he had a kind of youth that I never had,’13 Welles later said. ‘He was always younger than I was.’ Hortense was shrewder and, perhaps, deeper. ‘Of everyone I’ve known, she was the most truly passionate. Other great and good souls may be described as warm, or warm-hearted. That’s too tepid sounding for Hortense. Warm is a word for comfort or consolation. The word for her is HEAT. Fire.’14 Arriving at Todd, Welles had expected a spell of penal servitude. Instead he found his first real home, with a perfectly balanced and deeply committed pair of proto-parents. ‘It’s that Christian marriage we’re all supposed to believe in,’15 Welles told Barbara Leaming. Roger Hill, writing after his wife’s death, offered this utterly characteristic observation: ‘What’s the formula? OPPOSITENESS! POLARITY! The magnetic pull of the negative for the positive … a Kiss-Me-Kate alliance … sure there are fights. Otherwise, how dull … opposites in every way except a shared appetite for life. Is this the polarity that puts the magic in our lives? Certainly,’16 he concluded, aged ninety-three, ‘it is the basis for healthy sex.’ Here, for the first time in Welles’s life, was a model of normal behaviour to which he could respond.

  The idyll was not without shadow, however. ‘Orson could talk a good talk,’17 said Joanne, the Hills’ eldest daughter. ‘The minute my mother and father listened to him they were fascinated. I was furious. It didn’t seem right the amount of attention he got.’ Joanne and her sister were outraged by the cuckoo that had suddenly appeared in the nest. ‘He didn’t look or feel like a twelve-year-old,’18 said the final member of the family, Hascy Tarbox, like Welles a semi-orphan, similarly taken under the Hills’ wings. Hitherto he had been considered something of a prodigy. ‘Hascy was as gifted as his schoolmate, Orson, and could have found predictable fame in many fields, acting, singing, writing, painting.’ But now, like everyone else, he played second fiddle to the new arrival. Roger became obsessed by Welles, and remained so till the day, some years after Welles’s own death, that he died. ‘I knew he was going to be a great man, and I tried to structure a life for him at Todd that wouldn’t impede his brilliance at all.’19 Roger Hill’s Todd School provided the hothouse in which Orson Welles’s exotic talents bloomed. It was a stroke of destiny that put that boy into that school at that moment. ‘It was either the best thing or the worst thing that ever happened to him,’20 according to Hascy Tarbox, ‘if he’d gone to somewhere sensible like West Point Military Academy he would have had all that genius nonsense knocked out of him.’ Which is as pithy an assessment of the effect of Todd on Orson Welles as could be asked for.

  The effect of Orson Welles on Todd was limited, but within those limits, overwhelming. Because, with the approval and protection of Roger and Hortense Hill, he only participated in those areas of the school’s life that interested him, life in general went on pretty much as it had done; but his presence was a highly visible one, since he commandeered all the most public activities: the theatre, the literary society, the school magazine. From an early stage in his school career, he was in control of what might be described as the media. The rest of the school population seem to have taken it lying down.

  He did take lessons in the ordinary way, up to a point; but he was not a co-operative student. ‘I attacked the textbooks rather than mastered them. I led student revolutions – comic ones.’21 The teachers that Roger Hill had assembled around him were outstandingly gifted, and, as he made sure, lacking in pomposity, but they were not always able to see the amusing side of these comic revolutions of Welles. He made it his life’s work to catch them out. In any area of knowledge where he had some expertise, he was unrelenting. He had become fascinated by Egyptology, but was not an admirer of the works of the leading American authority, the Chicago-based scholar, James H. Breasted. Todd’s history teacher revered Breasted. Welles set himself to destroy him, and in class after class, bombarded the unhappy man with evidence supposedly refuting the great scholar. Similarly, in English lessons, he tormented the instructor ‘if he even so much as dangled a participle’,22 according to John C. Dexter. Eventually, the instructor resigned. Hill never chastised Welles for these activities. Once, in fact, he publicly endorsed them; trying to catch the teachers out, he said, made the students do a great deal of extra-curricular work, which was all to the good. Complaints from persecuted members of staff were rebuffed by the Hills on the grounds that Welles was a special case, requiring special treatment. ‘It was MADNESS!’ roared Hascy Tarbox, sixty years later. Nanette Hendrickson tersely reported that ‘he had a beautiful voice, a lot of talent, but he was not easy as a person’. She was speaking at the time of his death, of course, and was baffled by the fact that the famous school for which she and her husband had worked all their lives had become simply a small detail in the biography of Orson Welles. Coach Tony Roskie, second only to Skipper Hill as a campus hero, was equally tightlipped: ‘He was a good kid, but he wasn’t the only one. The school didn’t revolve around him.’23

  His relations with his fellow students seem not to have been of the best, a situation that could only have been exacerbated by his powerful protectors. He was known as a p.c.: privileged character. An air of mutual suspicion seems to have prevailed. There may be some truth in Maurice Bernstein’s later remark that ‘Orson really looked up to other children. He didn’t know how to behave among them and could not join in their childish pleasures. They mystified him, even scared him.’24 But the effect of this anxiety was to make him arrogant and separate. His one friend was Paul Guggenheim, ‘the second genius in Todd’s class of 1931’,25 wrote Roger Hill. ‘Opposites in every way, theirs was a symbiosis.’ Having scored a public hit with his short
story after Poe ‘The Ingrown Toenail’, ‘Guggie’ was chosen by Skipper to be Welles’s best friend. ‘I became a man of importance, particularly one worthy of the company of Orson. All the other boys looked on us as VIPs – socially, we were carried around on cotton wool.’26 They swaggered about like feudal knights, exacting tithes from the other boys’ food parcels from home, demanding and getting their share of the other boys’ fruit and vegetable supplements. Welles led, Guggie followed. Orson even exacted his feudal dues from Guggenheim; the chocolate that his room-mate got from his Swiss father was generally, and without permission, consumed by Orson, who took pleasure in eating it in front of its rightful owners while he watched them playing football – a game (like most games) he refrained from engaging in. His only sport was fencing, and that for the obvious reason: it had some application to the stage.