Orson Welles, Vol I (2 page)

I have challenged him and the record; I have questioned everything. I cannot pretend, of course, to have found all the answers, but I hope to have traced a credible path through his history, a path recorded not merely on his personal map, but on the larger one of his period and world. To this end, I have spoken to a large number of people who worked with him or knew him up to and including
the making of
Kane
, which is as far as the present volume goes: schoolfriends, teachers, fellow actors, fellow directors, stage managers, assistants, secretaries, press agents. I have been in correspondence with yet more; as I have with some of the large army of Welles scholars, who have with astonishing generosity shared their researches in specific areas. I list all of them in the acknowledgements,
but I must here name Andrea Nouryeh, whose as yet unpublished work on the Mercury Theatre is definitive, exhaustive and revelatory; Richard France, author of the only full-length study of Welles’s work in the theatre, who supplied me with many of his original documents; and James Naremore, whose
The Magic World of Orson Welles
is the single indispensable volume on Welles. I have visited all the
places in which Welles lived and the buildings in which he worked (when they still stand). Above all I have closely examined his own words, in letters, pronouncements, speeches, articles and, particularly revealing, in his unfilmed screenplay,
The Cradle Will Rock
, a dramatisation of the events surrounding one of his most famous productions. He was not – though he would have loved to have been,
or to have been thought to have been – a natural writer, but he was a very characteristic one. The style was the man.

I have also closely studied the newspapers, because, paradoxically, that is where Welles’s real life was. He was unable to resist a fix of publicity; merely to see a reporter’s notebook was to unleash
his powers of invention. He publicly constructed himself, from the earliest
age – my first press clipping is headed
ACTOR, POET, CARTOONIST
–
AND ONLY TEN
– in a medium that he courted and denounced in equal measure; and the press returned the compliment. Together they concluded a sort of Faustian pact wherein Welles was meteorically advanced by sensation-hungry newspapers, to whom he pandered shamelessly, until at the height of his fame he fell foul of them; saddled
with a preposterous reputation and a personality drawn by him and coloured by them, he found himself unemployable, his work overshadowed by his everexpanding Self. Even his body became legendary, out of control; whatever his soul consisted of protected from the world by wadding. Locked in a personal relationship as complex and curious as that of Lear and his fool, Welles and the newspapers needed
and abominated each other in a co-dependency that only his death dissolved. It is no coincidence that his most famous work is the apotheosis of the newspaper film.

His death provoked an orgy of journalism. The main questions asked of him when he died were: what went wrong after
Citizen Kane
?; and why did he get so fat? This book, the first of two, tries to answer the question what went wrong
before
Citizen Kane
? To the second question – by no means a foolish or shallow one – there is no simple answer, but I hope that by the end of this volume, enough of Welles’s temperamental imperatives will have been revealed for his phenomenal physical expansion to seem, at the very least, unsurprising. The word phenomenal in this context is not used loosely (by the end of his life his bulk warranted
an entry in
The Guinness Book of Records
) and it is one that recurs at every stage of this study. He made himself into a phenomenon – courted phenomenality with brilliant determination – and it is as such that he must be considered. This is a terrible burden both for an artist and for a human being; neither the work nor the man can fully be separated from this alternative self. That, of course,
was his purpose: to put himself and his work beyond criticism, so that both became merely manifestations of his legend.

This is an interesting but dangerous ploy, a life strategy (in the phrase of the pop psychologists) fraught with danger – principally the danger to the private self and its sources of nourishment for both work and life. Personality and art become a series of diversions, a
continuous and costly firework display, momentarily dazzling but swiftly self-consuming – an auto-da-fé felo de se. In Welles’s case,
the fireworks were uniquely brilliant; the bonfire of his vanities made a gorgeous blaze, casting lively, lurid shadows in all directions. The cost to him, and the question of whether things could have been otherwise, are the real subjects of this book.

It is
hard to resist comparison with that other O.W. whose famous phrase about putting his genius into his life, his talent into his work could equally be applied to Welles; as with Wilde, however, it was not so much that his life was a work of genius as that his life story has the quality of a work of fiction – as if he himself were the creation of a novelist of extravagant invention, his story deliberately
shaped into an exemplary pattern – a warning to us all, perhaps. The similarity between Wilde and Welles is not merely accidental, a question of initials, a congruity of flamboyances, but chillingly precise in one particular: both men set out to conquer the world by seeking to master the instruments of publicity; both became its servants – perhaps, if it is not too melodramatic a phrase, its
victims.

T
HE ROAD
to Xanadu begins in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The incongruity of his birthplace is commented on again and again in accounts of Welles. Every country has its joke towns, good for an easy laugh, and if Kenosha is not quite in the league of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or Normal, Illinois, it is still sufficiently redolent of boondockery to seem to mock the very idea of aspiration
in its sons and daughters. ‘Orson is frightened to death of being thought ordinary in any way,’ wrote Herbert Drake in an article entitled ‘Orson Welles – Still a Four-Ply Genius’ (he was thirty-two years old at the time). ‘He is annoyed at his parents to this day because he sprang yelling into the world in prosaic Kenosha, Wisconsin.’ To which Welles replies: ‘I never blamed my folks for Kenosha
– Kenosha has always blamed my folks for me.’

And it is true; Kenosha always felt slighted by Welles, but Welles expressed himself – not unaware of the incongruity – very warmly towards his origins. Wisconsin (along with Indiana and Illinois) embodies the very notion of the Mid-West, that decent, solid, flat heartland of America, from which everything of value in the national life has, according
to some theories, sprung – created by men and women desperate to escape its cosy embrace. How could Orson Welles – immoderate and cosmopolitan, opposite qualities to those of the Mid-West – have anything to do with little old Kenosha, Wis? In fact Kenosha is neither little nor old, and though Welles was born there, of parents who were native Mid-Westerners, his stay was brief: before he was
four he and his family had moved the barely sixty miles to Chicago, Illinois, still the Mid-West, in fact its capital city, but a planet apart. Kenosha, Wisconsin was none the less the scene of his earliest experience, and his family – mother and father, uncles, aunts, grandfather and grandmother – were prominent and engaged participants in its intense life. Welles’s statement that he had never disowned
Kenosha was true. He felt immense yearning for what he came to think of as its vanished charm, while ceasing himself to belong to it in any detectable form.

Like the vast majority of American settlements, it was of recent origin – the first settlers had arrived in 1835 – and when Welles was born, in 1915, there were still people alive who could remember those founding fathers and mothers who
had named their little harbour town on the shore of Lake Michigan, Southport. Within fifteen years it had grown sufficiently – aided by the all-important railroad – to incorporate itself as a city, taking the old Indian name of Kenosha, meaning pike, after the fish that they so plentifully trawled out of the lake. From then on, its growth was prodigious. Almost overnight a society was constructed:
schools, courts, streets, squares, hotels, factories. Like a thousand other towns across America, it created itself by willpower, inspired by twin visions of wealth and civic pride. From the beginning, there were parallel resolves to provide for the mind and the soul as well as for the body: in addition to assembly lines, furnaces and forges, there would be libraries, and concert-halls, and parks
– especially parks, to the extent that Kenosha was familiarly known as Park City. None of this, material or spiritual, commercial or artistic, was achieved without a struggle. As it happens, Welles’s parents were, if not actively then certainly symbolically, on opposite sides in that struggle, one of the many divisions in their fundamentally riven relationship.

Welles’s father, Richard Head
Welles, was in trade.
¹
It is as simple as that. It became important for Welles to romanticise his father, for reasons that will become evident. Central to his image of his father was the fact that he was an inventor. He was; but in a very quiet way. Welles’s view of him as the Kenosha Leonardo does not, alas, withstand scrutiny. His inventions were largely confined to the business in which he
worked, and that was the lamp trade. His first job had been in his uncle George Yule’s Bain Wagon Company; he had worked well and hard enough in this enormous organisation with its vast sales force supplying the railroads of the world to be rewarded with a partnership, at the age of twenty-five, in Yule’s subsidiary company, Badger Brass. Badger’s principal product, invented by E.L. Williams, was
the Solar acetylene bicycle lamp – ‘a patented wonder of its time, a lamp that made its own gas and burned it’, according to a paper of the thirties. By 1901, they were producing a thousand lamps a day; four years later, thanks to the bicycle craze of the period, over a million were in use. Richard Welles was treasurer and general secretary of the firm, an exhausting, responsible job which he did
well, balancing the books (no mean task; by 1900 the company was the sixth-largest employer in Kenosha) and liaising with the outside world.
Bicycling
World
of 1901 admiringly reports that ‘practically the entire trade is acquainted with R.H. Welles’. His charm was widely acknowledged, and can be glimpsed in photographs, a lazy, sexy smile informing his handsome features.

It would appear that
his heart was not entirely in Badger Brass, even if his work was valued. His creative mind was engaged in his inventions – in 1904 he patented an automobile jack, the nearest, sadly, he came to actually inventing the automobile itself, as his son gallantly claimed – while the rest of him was drawn irresistibly to the fleshpots of Chicago. He couldn’t have chosen a better time for it. The big city
²
– an hour and three-quarters by rail from Kenosha – was still awash with pleasurable possibilities. In 1912 when the Levee district was closed down, these pleasures would be severely curtailed, or at the very least driven underground, but for Richard Welles, in the hot flush of his young manhood, it was the embodiment of Edwardian shamelessness. ‘No other city in the world could boast of so much
vice, such elaborate bagnios, such colourful madames, such a phalanx of demi-mondes,’ Alston J. Smith exuberantly recorded. ‘The madames would drive into the Loop to transact business, wearing extremely low-cut gowns and pounds of diamonds; their equipages would be banked with flowers and if it was at all dusky the lights would be turned on full blaze. In the back seat, wearing the most décolleté
of gowns, shining with gems, and painted to a fare-thee-well, would be the youngest, fairest flower of the maison.’ Richard Welles, enchanted by all this elegant naughtiness, was a natural citizen of the demimonde, frequenting the splendid musical comedies to be found at Mortimer Singer’s various establishments, seducing the young ladies of their choruses. He began what amounted to a double life,
Badger Brass by day – by night the Eversleigh club, ‘the classiest seraglio in town: if you didn’t know you were in a House of Ill Fame, you might have confused the joint with a young ladies’ seminary.’ When you paid by cheque, it would come back endorsed ‘Utopia Novelty Co.’ It was here, during these evenings of dining and yarning and delicious debauchery, that he began to drink more than ordinarily
socially.

It may be presumed that he went home as rarely as possible – neither to the sober house his mother had provided for him, still less to her own, on the other side of Kenosha’s main square. Named Rudolphsheim, it was a squat, massive building studded with beer bottles, in defiant proclamation of her second husband’s déclassé profession of brewer. Orson Welles
³
was frank in his loathing
of
this grandmother, Mary Head Welles Gottfredson; in general, it is hard not to share his feeling. Wagnerian is the word that comes most vividly to mind in describing her: physically tiny, her eyes ablaze, she seems to embody the triumph of the will. Her courtship of Orson’s grandfather seems to belong more to the insect world than to that of normal human relations. The daughter of a powerful
Kenosha attorney, she had travelled unaccompanied to St Joseph, Missouri for reasons which are unclear (though she seems to have had no doubts about what she was doing). There she met and selected for her future husband an amiably good-looking freight clerk by the name of Richard Wells, whisked him back to her appalled family in Kenosha, and proceeded in frank defiance of them to marry him. She was
at the time fourteen and a half years old. No protest of her formidable family would deter her, not even the legendary temper of her father, Orson Head, draconian attorney and sometime senator, one of ‘The Pioneer Lawyers of Kenosha County’, according to a contemporary publication. His photograph shows him to possess the original of his daughter’s thunderous mien. The fourteen-year-old bride and
her twenty-six-year-old spouse made their way back to St Joseph where they quickly went through her substantial dowry, returned to Kenosha – with their son Richard, born in 1872 – and set up house, finally moving in with Mary’s protesting family after the old District Attorney’s death.