Orson Welles, Vol I Read online

  When Orson and Guggie were alone together, they discussed philosophy and poetry; or rather, Orson discussed philosophy and poetry. ‘Orson was distressed that I seemed to be very logical and not given to appreciating poetry or mythology. He said: “you are an Aristotelian, I’m going to make a Platonist out of you if it kills me.”’27 He recited to Guggenheim a poem by Lin Yutang that he claimed summed up his personal philosophy:

  Parents when a child is born

  Hope for it to be intelligent

  But I through intelligence having ruined my whole life

  Only hope the child will prove innocent of correction, ignorant and stupid.

  He will then crown a long and successful career

  By becoming a cabinet minister.

  Throughout his life, Welles maintained an implacable opposition to logical thought, preferring to speak in gnomically resonant phrases that he would refuse to explain. There is a curious tension in this, since his was not a poetic nature, nor was he able or willing to propound any coherent vision. He was, in fact, a logical thinker who refused to think logically, in love with the sound of poetry, addicted to paradox and wit, but never with the objective of expressing anything precise. He preferred even as a child, on this evidence, to create an atmosphere of thought and meaning without really saying anything. Jean Clay, interviewing him in the sixties, ran up against a brick wall when he tried to probe him a little. ‘Welles does not want to explain himself. When I asked him about one of his sibylline remarks, “Picasso is a son of the sun; I am a son of the moon”, he became angry. “I won’t answer. No discussions. I haven’t got time. It doesn’t interest me.”’28 He had the habits of mind of someone who has been expected to talk coherently before he has anything coherent to say.

  Like bright twelve- and thirteen-year-olds anywhere, at any time, young Orson and young Guggie were enthralled by the feeling that they had discovered truths hitherto obscured. ‘Our philosophic discussion always reminded me of Raphael’s Academy.’29 They sat in the front pews of the Presbyterian Church every Sunday, snickering and whispering over their copy of The Bab Ballads. Again, extraordinarily, no reproach or penalty was forthcoming. Welles’s enthusiasm for mythology and poetry clearly did not extend to the sphere of religion.

  Guggenheim managed to maintain his friendship with Welles and still be part of the main life of the school. He was a sportsman, a musician, a mathematician. Son of a famous doctor, a distinguished doctor himself now, he had a strong feeling at the time that part of Welles’s apartness was to do with sexual complication. He always refused to be Guggenheim’s room-mate. ‘I always had the feeling that he was bi-sexual, that he didn’t trust himself in the immediate vicinity of a friend.’30 In his first year of high school, Welles related a dream to Guggenheim: he approached a castle in the shape of the Tower of Babel, with a winding spiral staircase which he ascended. On every floor, in every single room, he was greeted with the same sight – a dead man with arms folded across his chest, covered in newspaper, with an unlit cigar in his mouth. Going up to another floor, he would find the identical scene, all the way to the top. After this dream Welles became depressed, stopped talking to anybody; his only contact with the school was Paul – who had to report regularly to Skipper about him: what he was thinking, what he was doing. He carried on with his schoolwork, but cut himself off socially from everyone. ‘He told me that his dream made it very clear to him that he had committed “the unpardonable sin”. What, he never said – somehow I had the feeling that this had to do with homosexual activity.’31

  The perpendicular cigar – its phallic associations a commonplace of Freudian dream interpretation – suggests some kind of a rite-of-passage dream; a young man becoming aware of his masculine potency for the first time. The assumption of masculinity predicates the death, symbolically, of the father: which the dream also contains. On the face of it, the dream’s central figure is a dead parent – a cigar-smoking adult (Welles’s father was not only a heavy smoker, he had a cigar named after him); the sin might then be patricide. Welles told Bogdanovich: ‘I’ve had that recurring dream since I was about 12 – that I murdered somebody and buried him under the floorboards. I wake up and say “Where did I do it?”’32 Welles’s father was still alive, but Orson may have felt that he symbolically slew him, not once but twice: by in effect adopting Roger Hill as his preferred father, but also, earlier, by siding with his mother, who, on her deathbed, as her parting gesture had sowed a seed of doubt as to Dick’s paternity: ‘was I a changeling?’ No doubt his various guilts merged, as they so often do, into one nameless guilt; whatever its source, it never left him. He scarcely knew an untroubled night till the day he died.

  This dark inner world of Welles appears in sharp contrast to the bustling utopia all around him. Set in forty acres of woodland, Todd was a self-contained world, with its own shops, at which every boy had his own cheque account, its printing press, its forge, even its farm. A visiting journalist rhapsodised: ‘Todd is the most complete laboratory for self-expression to be found in the land.’33 After describing the print shop and the music building, he enters the manual shop where a group was building ‘an amazingly authentic stage-coach for use in a Western movie they were producing’. Another group was manning the rabbit hutches; yet another rehearsing a play that had been written and planned by a student: ‘in the paint shop the boy artist in charge informed me that the flats and boxes which were getting a final splatter coat were “not planned for realism but for symbolic impressionism through the use of mass and line”. I hoped my gasp was not too audible to the lad.’ It is tempting, and by no means improbable, to think that boy was Orson Welles. But it could have been a lot of other boys. Todd bred them like that.

  Only one boy, however, was in charge in the theatre. ‘The theatre was totally Orson’s,’34 said Hascy. ‘It was a one-man band.’ This was Orson’s real world: the theatre, refuge of all who feel themselves not to be entirely part of the human race. He took it by the scruff of its neck, and made it into his own special arena. Not immediately, of course. It had flourished for many years before he arrived, the creation of the stage-struck Roger Hill. Like everything else at Todd, it was spread across the whole school, from ages six to sixteen, divided up into separate companies: the Todd Troupers, the Junior Troupers, the Learn Pigeons, the Tiny Troupers, the Slap Stick Club, and the racy Paint and Powder Club (Saturday night entertainments). It was entirely unsupervised by faculty members, the only central directive being that ‘our activities are genuine, not artificial. Our standards in these activities are professional, not sentimental. Our viewpoint on childhood is realistic, not maudlin. Our classroom pedagogy relies on mental discipline, not ego building … our TODD TROUPERS take to the road to perform for audiences who have paid for tickets and will pay again only if they have been entertained.’35 Responsibility the great educator.

  When Orson arrived at Todd, the school was famous for its musical comedies. They were cashing in on a theatrical aberration of the time: all-male casts of collegians that travelled as girlie shows. ‘Soon a whole country was finding hilarity in chorus lines of bony-kneed transvestites kicking up hairy legs.’36 Roger Hill wrote the lyrics and the book; the music teacher, Carl Hendrickson, wrote the songs. Finesse the Queen was their offering for 1926. Orson put himself forward. ‘The chubby 11-year-old was just the size and shape for the chorus. Unthinkable, once you had talked to him. The child had an adult presence even then. Also, believe it or not, the same VOICE now recognisable the world over as WELLES.’37 (Roger Hill, though the identification is no doubt redundant.) Orson was cast as leading man, as well as supervising the make-up of his leading lady, John C. Dexter. ‘When he finished with me he kissed me, said he couldn’t help it, but I turned out so good. He had a crush on me every time we did that show.’38 Quite right too; he looks quite lovely in the production photographs. As for the chorus girls: ‘Yes, They’re Boys – Real Ones, too. This same group won the 85-pound State Basketball Championship.’39 Orson s
urveys them wolfishly.

  His next role was en travesti, but altogether more serious: he played (despite that VOICE, as Roger Hill would say) the Virgin Mary in the Nativity play, one of a sequence of roles with biblical overtones. Next was Judas Iscariot in The Dust of the Road, followed by Christ in The Servant of the House. This is an unusual, perhaps a unique, hat-trick, though to be scrupulously accurate, the character in that very rum piece, The Servant of the House, is never specifically identified as Jesus, posing as he does as an English butler rather coyly named Manson (Man’s Son). ‘Mystic, Ibsenic, Maeterlinckian, symbolic, morality-wise, conscientious, talky, didactic, preachy, at times impressive, and enormously tedious’,40 as Alan Dale wrote, it was not obvious matter for schoolchildren. In this enterprising repertory, Welles seems invariably to have played the leading role: in the musical It Won’t Be Long Now – like Finesse the Queen a transcontinental, transoceanic extravaganza – he plays Jim Bailey, ‘a pal with troubles of his own’; in Wings over Europe (which he designed, as he did most of the shows) he was Francis Lightfoot, a genius, who discovers how to harness the power of the atom; the British government’s greedy response makes him resolve to blow the earth to bits. He is killed before this can happen; the play ends, ominously, with reports of A-bomb planes passing over London. The effect of this piece, a small sensation on Broadway the very year in which the Todd Troupers played it, must have been remarkable with a cast of young teenagers, starring a twelve-year-old as the destructive genius.

  At the 1928 commencement, he appeared as The Wife in a short play by William de Mille with a – for him – prophetic title: Food: A Tragedy of the Future. Interestingly, at this same event there was a programme of music put on by the music department and among the items (including a Mozart minuet played by Paul Guggenheim) was a Tarantella for piano by Miller, played by Orson. Now pretty well any tarantella is likely to be difficult to play, so it would appear that his abandonment of the piano was not quite as complete as he later chose to remember. It was a year or two before he started directing the Troupers, but he worked with all the other groups. Being directed by him was a fairly terrifying experience, in which democratic consultation was unknown, and ordinary politeness a luxury. ‘It was Simon Legree. He never said anything about interpretation. If you had a lead, you did exactly as you were told. He choreographed everything: that’s your mark. Don’t move. Don’t wriggle. He was a martinet. The result,’41 adds Hascy Tarbox, ‘was extraordinary theatre. His vitality swept you away. He drilled us and we became a magnificently choreographed company.’ He threw out lines that meant little to the story or the plot, or mumbled insignificant ones, and trained his tiny troupers to ‘speak over him but always keep the plot moving’, according to John Dexter. ‘I can remember a number of times in rehearsal he would stop and explain to one and all the plot, the feeling he wanted, the mood, speed, etc. How he knew it I don’t know.’42

  It is indeed a puzzle. Here Welles is unquestionably prodigious. To be a remarkable actor at the age of twelve is unusual, but not unheard of. To be a director, especially a director in this mould, a Reinhardt, or a Guthrie, a virtuoso, controlling and organising large groups, shaping and orchestrating texts, is entirely unheard of at this age. The most startling thing, the almost monstrous element, is the degree of authority it requires: how does a twelve- or thirteen-year-old acquire that? There have been infant conductors – a Pierino Gamba, say – directing the London Symphony Orchestra at that age. But the LSO is a body of trained musicians: as long as Gamba knew what he wanted, they would follow him. Welles was dealing with kids, not merely untrained but not necessarily even talented. He was their own age, yet they took it, apparently without demur. It can only be because they acknowledged that the results justified it. During his time at Todd, Welles devoted himself to the theatre to such an extent that it almost became a theatre arts degree course – except that he was teacher and pupil, course director and apprentice. He mastered every aspect of production during this time – design, stage management, lighting design, set-building. The campus theatre was a well-equipped two-hundred seater, with a reasonable number of lamps, all on dimmers; a plaster back wall which made possible ‘realistic and stunning outdoor effects’; an arras, with a drape setting (the drapes being removable) and a rigging loft equipped with ten sets of lines. He used every aspect to its utmost potential.

  He had, at this astonishingly early age, a clear conception of the unifying role of the director, an idea which had not yet taken root in America in practical form. Its first articulate proponent was Edward Gordon Craig, though its lineage can clearly be traced down, through Appia, to Wagner. It flourished in Europe in the work of Brahm, Reinhardt, Copeau. Books were written by or about these men (and of course by their masters, Craig and Appia), and Welles may well have read them, or reviews of them, in, for example, the excellent and well-illustrated Theatre Arts Monthly. It is also possible that Orson had seen their work in Europe, when travelling with his father. However he acquired it, at the age of fifteen he had a highly developed notion of a many-pronged assault on the theatre, and was able to write about it with great lucidity: ‘The Theatre blends in a common art the talents of the story teller, the poet, the speaker, the singer, the dancer, the composer, the mimic, the artist, the carpenter, and the electrician.’43 Unlike Craig, of whom this is a liberal paraphrase, he did not name the director as the controlling figure; but it is evident that the blending into a common art must be done by someone, and that someone – even at fifteen – was Welles.

  His writing, here and everywhere, was an occasional thing for him; but it is from the start entirely characteristic. In 1928, he was the editor of Red and White: Tosebo [ = TOdd SEminary for BOys] Camp Number: the frontispiece contains a sketch – signed by Welles – of a man carrying a placard that proclaims OUR PLATFORM: A BIGGER, BETTER, SNAPPIER, RED AND WHITE. The first piece is a ‘History of Todd’ by ORSON WELLES, brisk and clear; then comes ‘Item: Senior Literary Society Starts Active Year: “Senior Society has staged some interesting Friday night sessions this fall. Rivalry is keen and some creditable bits of literary work have been produced. Orson Welles’s paper of October 19th was the high spot of the term thus far.”’ Nothing like editorial impartiality. ‘Theatricals’ is by Staff Drama Critic, whose tone of voice is oddly familiar. He is reviewing Sweetheart Town, at the Woodstock Opera House. One has to remind oneself that it is a thirteen-year-old writing.

  ‘The whole piece was rather loosely put together … for instance, The March of the Wooden Soldiers was used in a drawing-room setting with no lines either before or after to give it the slightest plausibility. Evidently the producing company had the costumes and figured it was an easy number to stage so in it went. The leads were handled by very competent talent but the chorus work was rather pitiful in spots.’44 Very strict; a hint perhaps of a note session after one of the young Welles’s rehearsals. The Tosebo Camp number 1928 closes with a cartoon, also by the editor, which is in effect the earliest surviving Welles storyboard. 1. Opening two shot, medium close-up; 2. wide shot on boys’ backs; 3. close-up on speaker, as other boy disappears, leaving behind only an exclamation mark, a question mark and a puff of dust. His sense of line was highly developed; his father’s hopes for him as a cartoonist were not founded on nothing. His confidence leaps off the page. Nothing said is remarkable; nor is it said remarkably. But it is said loud and clear. It expects to be heard.

  His journalism went professional that same summer of 1928, while he was staying with Maurice Bernstein in his holiday retreat. The Highland Park News of 6 July 1928 printed an ominous headline: RAVINIA STARS BEWARE. ‘On page eight of this issue,’ ran the story, ‘we are introducing Orson Welles, our 13-year-old drama critic, cub reporter and what have you …’ Though the intention is merry, there is something a little disquieting about it. The first article opens in the middle-aged leftover Edwardian style Welles was often to affect in later life.

  HITTING THE HIGH NOTES: ORSON WELLES


  ‘Cover the opera,’ quoth the editor the other evening as he threw down the proof-sheet he had been reading and gave me a professionally ‘editorial’ look with those beautiful eyes of his. ‘Play Ravinia for all it’s worth, it’s good, interesting news!’

  Well, to begin with – there’s hardly any opera to write about! Yes, you will remind me that the most reliable of Ravinia’s stars have appeared on the stage in costume, that people have flocked to the park, that tickets are on sale at the gate … but I will not admit that there has been any real performances as yet, some lovely singing yes, but Ravinia was not half as beautiful last week, as it will be next and the weeks to come.

  He goes on in this unlovely vein, revealing how ‘Martinelli came near swallowing his moustache which had come off in the heat, or how An Onion [ = A. Anian, a leading singer of the day] fell off a stool to the unsuppressed enjoyment of both the audience and singers. But,’ he continues, ‘I have some dandy jokes planned on the singers for next week, some news that wouldn’t get into print otherwise, some verse, I hope some reviews, and – well …’ He signs off with a prayer that ‘both the opera and this column will be improved, I am, Orson Welles.’ A familiar sign-off.

  The column is so repulsive in tone, it’s almost inconceivable that he was asked to repeat it. But he was:

  Last week I insinuated that there had been no real performance of opera in Ravinia and I think I was right.

  He goes on to praise the casts of Lohengrin, Manon and Trovatore, reserving his main comment for Montemezzi’s Wagnerian verismo opera, L’amore Dei Tre Re:

  The incomparable Lazzar! the Mansfield of modern Opera he should be called. If you have gasped when he strangles Fiora and thrilled ’neath the spell of one of America’s most glorious voices, then I advise you to go to Fra Diavolo next week and laugh at the comical hobo who eats spaghetti and does the most convincing murder on the stage with equal artistry.