Orson Welles, Vol I (5 page)

The sheer size of the city might have shocked a little boy from Kenosha. Building skyscrapers
not, like New York, out of necessity, but from aesthetic conviction, Chicago’s great architects Louis L. Sullivan and John Root had filled the tabula rasa that the fire had given them with block upon block of soaring, streamlined buildings, sweeping away any vestige of the Beaux-Arts fussiness and ornament that prevailed in most of America’s great cities. Chicago’s architects matched the city’s
spirit in their buildings. There was no Bauhaus imposition of an aesthetic; these men captured the spirit of their time and place and rendered it in brick and stone. And Chicago responded affectionately and wittily: the great wide sweep of Michigan Avenue is both celebrated and teased in its local nickname: Boul’ Mich’. Sullivan’s masterpiece, The Auditorium, intended for the Opera House but
acoustically disappointing, testifies in its sweep and scale to the ambitiousness of its subscriber-patrons. There is scarcely an opera house in the world that could have matched it for sheer grandeur. Art – especially the musical arts, but art in pretty well any form – was all the rage in Chicago. ‘A crazy thing happened here with the rich men and their wives at the turn of the century,’
⁴
wrote
Studs Terkel. ‘Mrs Palmer Potter and the other wives longed for culture. Whether or not they knew what it was, they wanted it. And so Chicago became a centre for culture because of the wives of the guys who were meatpackers.’ ‘I want less of steers and less of pork and more of culture,’ said one prosperous attorney in 1881.

This is what brought Beatrice Welles here. There is no record of her
becoming involved in either politics or social work in Chicago. Perhaps she felt that enough in that regard was being done without her. The Hull House settlement under Jane Addams was a world-famous foundation, ministering to the needs of the disadvantaged. Women in the city were particularly active politically: only three years after they had won the vote, Chicago very nearly elected a female
mayor. Beatrice’s political skills were not needed here. Her focus was on the arts and artistic circles: the fine arts, the theatre, above all, of course, music. In all of these, she was spoilt for choice. The Arts Institute possessed one of the finest collections in America if not the world; more significantly, the colony of practising artists was enormous, and they maintained a high profile: Boris
Anisfeldt, designer for Diaghilev and now a teacher at the Fine Arts Institute, led over a hundred artists in roasting a whole lamb or pig on the great seasonal holidays; Lorado Taft, head of the Institute – Fra Lorado to
his followers – held ‘Attic processions’ in flowing robes to celebrate the muses. And Mrs Palmer Potter and her friends made sure that these artists were feted and fabled. It
was fashionable and rewarding to be an artist in Chicago, 1918; the mildly preposterous suggestion widely offered at the time that Chicago was Florence to New York’s Rome had at least this grain of truth: the city sought to glorify itself through its artists. Nelson Algren, another of Chicago’s laureates, had a harsher phrase for it: ‘with the blood and sweat of the arena still on them, they would
pause together at the end of the week to sniff shyly at the little flowers of culture.’
⁵
They did more than sniff; they fertilised.

The theatre, too, boomed. The commercial theatre rivalled New York, with six or seven openings a week; you could catch touring productions like
The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, He Who Gets Slapped
and
R.U.R.
: the cream of the avant-garde. Stanislavsky brought the
Moscow Art Theatre, with Chekhov, Gorky and
Tsar Fyodor
. The Habimah came; and Mei Lan-fang; Stratford-upon-Avon, under Ben Greet; and, later, Katharine Cornell in
The Green Hat
. And at the Chicago Little Theatre, Maurice Browne, a Craig disciple, and his wife Ellen Van Valkenberg experimented with design and with light and with acting, presenting the symbolists and later Ibsen, a theatre of poetry
and image. As for the opera: Beatrice Welles must have been in her seventh heaven. Barely a city in the world, let alone in America, could field a season as brilliant as Chicago’s. It owed this in large measure to the desire of the Metropolitan Opera in New York to expel Oscar Hammerstein I from its immediate orbit. He moved his operation to Chicago, bringing with him Mary Garden and her notorious
performance of Richard Strauss’s
Salome
: ‘like a cat in a bed of catnip’, said the Police Chief, called in to maintain law, order and public decency, thus immeasurably enhancing the popularity of opera in Chicago. With Miss Garden as (in her own phrase) ‘directa’ of the company there was an air of temperament and danger about the whole enterprise, and again, a commitment to living, often daunting,
composers: Chicago was determined to be in the vanguard, thumbing its nose at New York. Prokofiev’s
Love of Three Oranges
, spiky satire clothed in prickly melody and shocking harmonies, was commissioned and premièred by the Chicago Opera, with sets and costumes by the lamb-roasting Anisfeldt. It was well, if uncomprehendingly, received. Visiting stars included Chaliapin, Louise Homer and Claudia
Muzio; Adolph Bolm, Diaghilev dancer and choreographer, became the ballet master.

It is worth detailing all these, not merely because of the delight
they gave Beatrice Welles, but because Orson, now talking and walking, was exposed to as many of the performances as possible. Beatrice’s ambitions for Orson, as for herself, were entirely musical. She became a member of the Lakeside Musical Society;
being who she was, she was before long running it. Through Dr Bernstein’s connections with the Elmans, she invited the great violinist to address the Society and perform for them; she herself gave her lecture-recital on Spanish music and its ‘cantillations and various charming dance rhythms’. Bernstein, who was also musical – he played the cello – had become acquainted with Chicago’s leading
music critic, Edward Moore, and, more passionately, with his wife, Hazel, creating further troilistic patterns in his emotional life. He was not of as passionate a disposition as these entanglements suggest, being that kind of Lothario who attaches himself with dog-like devotion to the object of his love, while yet being unable to make a complete commitment – hence the preference for a third party.
His attentions exasperated Beatrice Welles; stopping the car one day in the middle of Michigan Avenue, she ordered him out. But he was useful to her, and through his connection with the Moores she managed to attract a glittering roster of guest speakers and artists. In a charming fantasy, Welles’s biographer Frank Brady has suggested that it was not unusual to bump into Stravinsky and Ravel in
her drawing room; the record does not reveal that either of these gentlemen visited Chicago at all during her time there, let alone attended her soirées. It is conceivable that Prokofiev, in town for the première of
The Love of Three Oranges
, may have done so; quite certain that, in the wider social circles in which she moved, she would have met any visiting stars.

Equally certain is that
her entire new life was intolerable to poor Dick Welles. This high-falutin’, hobnobbing existence was not for him. He must have felt entirely inadequate, unable to tell one painting from another, sleeping through the interminable nights at the opera, unaware of the existence of the latest Bodenheim. He took his pleasure elsewhere. His new little fortune gave him the opportunity to be the person he
had always wanted to be: Champagne Charlie – all-round good fellow, friend to restaurateurs, barmen, pretty girls of every size or shape; a clubbable fellow, given to yarning, inordinately fond of travel, but mainly, according to his son, because of his love of the lounges of ocean-going liners: ‘the creaking of leather, the cradling seas, the cards he played so masterfully, and a captive audience
for his stories’.
⁶
Welles claimed that his father had actually broken the bank at Monte Carlo. Well, maybe he did and
maybe he didn’t, although some doubt was expressed in a 1940’s edition of the
Kenosha Journal
as to the actual extent of his globetrotting. ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, however, is unquestionably his song; it expresses him perfectly, with its rolling, strolling
gait, a spring in its heel and all the time in the world. It is some little way from this to Stravinsky, Ravel and the cantillations of Spanish dance rhythm – or indeed the jazz which he so loved, now, in 1918, having taken up residence in Chicago since being forcibly driven out of New Orleans with the closure of Storyville. Down there on the South Side, he was happily awash with cheap liquor and
hot rhythm while Beatrice, Orson and Dadda revelled in Ravel.

He was, by now, an alcoholic. He depended on alcohol; life was not possible without it. His purposeless presence must have been intolerable to the dynamic, frustrated Beatrice. ‘I’d see my father wither under one of her looks into a crisp, brown, winter’s leaf,’
⁷
wrote Welles. In 1919, they separated. Beatrice moved, with the children,
to a swish North Shore apartment on east Superior Street, a mere two blocks away from the area around the Water Tower: Towertown, the hub of the artistic community. From here, she planned her musical career, now calling herself Trixie Ives – an unexpectedly larky name for this very serious woman; it has the smack of the music hall about it: Miss Trixie Ives and Her Ivory Tricks! One glimpse
of her intense features would surely dispel any such fancy. As well as her own musical career, she was planning that of her son, Orson, four years old, and already conversing fluently with the adults to whom she invariably introduced him. So far he had been successful in his evasion of the nursery. To the amusement of her circle, he would stand on a chair and pretend to conduct (‘I was surprised
she indulged me in this, since she indulged me in nothing else’
⁸
); in fact, he would do pretty well anything to please an adult. Dr Bernstein, who loved his Pookles with the same devotion and microscopic attention that he extended to Beatrice, had provided Orson with two crucial presents: a magic set and a toy theatre. Quickly mastering these, he gave performances to the properly and politely
appreciative visitors in both his new media (though of course, as he was often to say later, to him they represented two sides of the same coin – the theatre of magic, the magic of theatre).

For Dr Bernstein, however, this was no kid putting on a show for Mummy’s friends. The fatal word ‘genius’ had no sooner formed itself in his mind, than he was whispering it in Orson’s ear. Verbally precocious
Orson certainly was, but in no other regard did
he demonstrate prodigious gifts; neither in reading (he was slow to start this), the visual arts, nor – unfortunately – musicianship, the sphere in which success was most ardently willed on him by his mother. ‘She was not the musical version of a stage mother, but was simply resolved that whatever I did had to be good if it was to be done at all,
and I was made to practise hours on end every day.’
⁹
Beatrice was not to be defied. In a disturbing story that he told on several occasions with different endings, Welles describes how, ‘distracted to the point of madness by endlessly repeated musical scales’, he climbed onto the third-floor balcony of the hotel in which they were staying (the Ritz in Paris, he says, a nice, colourful touch) and
threatened to throw himself off. The piano teacher, terrified, rushes to get Beatrice. Generally, the story ends with Beatrice gently luring him down off the balcony. In his autobiographical fragment, something quite different happens. ‘Well,’
¹⁰
says Beatrice to the hysterical piano teacher, ‘if he wants to jump, let him jump.’ Eventually he came down of his own accord. Welles adds: ‘the truth
is her heart was in her mouth … by the sheer force of her formidable character, she persuaded the spinster lady to muffle her whimpering … she was, in all things, as tough-minded as she was loving-hearted.’ Years later he told Barbara Leaming: ‘I always felt I was letting them down. That’s why I worked so hard. That’s the stuff that turned the motor … my mother and father were much cooler and more
distant. I trusted and feared their judgement.’ It is to be wondered whether it was both of them, or simply his mother that he felt he was letting down. The word he uses of her – formidable – rings out. No one ever said that of Dick, though of course people create their emotional hold over others in different ways; some do it with a look, and some with a shrug. In their differently blighted ways,
the pressure behind both may have been the same: an overwhelming sense of unfulfilment in themselves, a desire to make another live for them.

Despite his disappointing showing at the keyboard, Orson was able to participate in musical performances, but in a way more familiar from his later achievements. Just outside Chicago is a charming lakeside suburb called Ravinia Park, and here, to add
to what was almost an embarrassment of musical riches, the entrepreneur Louis Eckstein established what he called ‘his yacht’ and what more extravagant wordsmiths (no doubt in his pay; publicity was one of the sources of his fortune) dubbed ‘the Chicago Bayreuth’: a summer opera festival, which ran from 1912 to 1935. Claudia Cassidy wrote of it: ‘There never was anything like Louis Eckstein’s Ravinia,
and there will not be again. The little wooden Pavilion in
the flowering park. About 14,000 seats. The little stage with the blue velvet curtains, stars of the Chicago, Metropolitan and Paris Operas, fifty players of the Chicago Symphony in the pit.’
¹¹
The repertory was very much the staple repertory of the time – Verdi, Puccini and the verismo school (contemporary composers: Leoncavallo, Alfano,
Montemezzi) and the French repertory whose great interpreters were still alive and really able to do it justice.

Beatrice and Maurice Bernstein, accompanied by Orson, were regular subscribers, as were the Moores, and it is possible that they were able to get Orson enlisted as a non-singing infant, of whom there are a number in the repertory favoured by Ravinia, most notably the role of Trouble,
Cio-Cio San’s son in
Madame Butterfly
. It is claimed that Orson did indeed essay this role, though it has proved impossible to verify it. In fact, at the period when he might have done so, performances were only semi-staged. Perhaps the diva (Edith Mason and Claudia Muzio both sang Butterfly during this period) had requested a child as a dramatic aid – though most divas would be likely to make
the opposite request. At any rate, if he wasn’t Trouble in 1920, he has certainly been Trouble ever since, not least to his biographers. There are further unverified and unverifiable reports that he was relieved of his role in
Pagliacci
when Martinelli complained that he had become too heavy to lift, but it is difficult to imagine what role it might be that required him to be lifted. The important
thing is that Orson was exposed to and immersed in opera and its special dramaturgy from the earliest possible age.