Orson Welles, Vol I (7 page)

Then – all tenderness, as if she was speaking from a great distance

‘A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king,

Whoever had so sweet a changeling …’

What did she mean? Was I, indeed, a changeling? (I have in later years been given certain hints …)

‘That stupid birthday cake,’ she said, ‘is just another cake; and you’ll have all the cakes you want. But the candles are a fairy ring. And you will never again in your whole life have just that number to blow out.’

She was a Sorceress.

‘You must
puff hard,’ she said, ‘and you must blow out every one of them. And you must make a wish.’

I puffed very hard. And suddenly the room was dark and my mother had vanished forever.

Sometimes, in the dead watches of the night, it strikes me that of all my mistakes, the greatest was on that birthday just before my mother died, when I forgot to make a wish.

Two days later, she was moved
to the Chicago Memorial Hospital where, on 10 May 1924, she died.

Whatever else this extraordinary scene was – Charles Higham calls it a lesson in mortality, though one might be pardoned for thinking it a lesson in theatre – it was certainly designed to ensure that Orson never forgot her. And he never did. It is not an exaggeration to say that from her position deep inside him, she dictated
his actions and influenced the course of his life up to his own death, more than sixty years later.

The Canadian Jungian Guy Corneau has written an extremely informative study of the sons of absent fathers, and has identified certain clear patterns of behaviour. In his account of one of his types, the Super-Achievers (or Heroes, as he suggestively calls them; and there can be no doubt that
Orson Welles, whatever failures may have shadowed his career, was heroically, almost superhumanly, productive for much of it) he says: ‘Mothers of heroes are not generally affectionate or accommodating as mothers; in fact, they’re more likely to be tough no-nonsense types, who are so proud of their off-spring that they try to make them into divine beings. The young hero thus finds himself trapped
in his heart of hearts, by the desire to please his mother, to fulfil her ambitions. He tries to satisfy the ambitions of his real mother, then, very soon, he starts aiming to satisfy the highest demands of his society, business, social group, or university … he lives for the approval of others. So that every one will love and appreciate him, he performs the most difficult exploits.’
²⁰

Kenneth
Tynan, in one of several profiles of Welles, wrote that ‘a perceptive American director once suggested to me that Orson reached a state of perfect self-fulfilment just before his mother’s death, and that he has been trying to recapture it ever since’.
²¹
That certainly is what Welles said, on many occasions. His mother’s death was the end of the idyll. It seems that the truth, as it usually is,
was considerably more complicated. Welles’s first nine years – the years with Mother – were certainly idyllic in the sense that he had her undivided attention, especially in the last five years, with his brother exiled and his father dismissed. But there was nothing relaxing about this attention. It was a focus full of demand: he was expected, required, in fact, to be intelligent, amusing, considerate,
sympathetic, grown-up – and to play the piano very well indeed.

Welles and his biographers have all made much of the fact that as soon as his mother died, out of grief he gave up playing the piano (and, it is implied, a promising career). The truth seems to be, however, that he couldn’t wait to give up a hated task for which he showed no particular aptitude. Relieved of the task, he carried
the guilt around with him for the rest of life; the guilt of never quite having done well enough. Now, in theory, he was free to do as he pleased; his easy-going dad wouldn’t force him to do anything he didn’t want to. Except that, in a further complication typical of a life in which nothing was ever simple, he now had two fathers. The next phase of his life was dominated by the struggle for power
between these two men, who formed an uneasy relationship
in the aftermath of the death of the woman they had both loved so unsatisfactorily, to the extent of moving in together, and then going on holiday together to Europe. Orson, meanwhile, was sent to stay with a family friend, Dudley Crafts Watson, a notable educationalist and father of several lively children. Perhaps Dr Bernstein and Dick
Welles were trying to restore him to the normal life of a child. If so, it was a question of too little, too late.

Shortly after his mother’s death, at Hillside Farm, Syosset, on Long Island, Orson Welles discovered sex. Playing nurses and doctors with the Crafts Watson children, he told Barbara Leaming, he was deflowered. Welles talked a lot to Mrs Leaming about his sex life and she gamely
reports what he told her. These are delicate matters upon which it is very difficult to secure reliable evidence; as sex researchers have discovered, pretty well everyone has a motive to lie, or at the very least exaggerate, in one direction or the other, about their sexual activities. At any rate, Welles said that he was deflowered at the age of nine, a couple of weeks after his mother’s death.
It sounds a very agreeable and friendly initiation; consolatory, perhaps. There is no record of Welles’s response to the loss of his mother, except for Maurice Bernstein chiding him for not being more demonstrative in his grief. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mother; I didn’t love her the way HE did.’
²²
Bernstein was shattered by her death, piously acquiring her possessions. He redoubled his
attentions to Orson. ‘I
was
my mother,’ Welles said, ‘and I kept the flame.’ More guilt; and more pressure to do something, or be something, extraordinary.

There was the matter of his education to be considered. Beatrice’s regime had left Welles, like
Hamlet
, full of quotations, knowing the high points of the poetic literature, more by sound than by sense, and able to hold forth on any subject
without pausing, hesitation or repetition; also, it has to be said, without much thought. Welles later modestly disavowed the delightful claims made for him – that at seven he knew
King Lear
by heart (‘er, no, didn’t touch
Lear
till later’
²³
), at eight he had written
A Universal History of the Drama
, at ten a critique of
Also Sprach Zarathustra
– but he was quite unusually quick to learn, a sharp
magpie, picking up brightly coloured fragments of language and information, and arranging them into impressive little orations. What he lacked entirely were any structured habits of mind or behaviour. His two fathers, Dadda and Dick, had different ambitions for him – Maurice Bernstein wanting him to be a living memorial to his mother’s greatness, a creative genius and intellectual giant – Dick
Welles hoping that he would develop into
an amusing sort of journalist. To that end he gave him a typewriter, and, discovering that he had some facility as an artist, tried to push him into the notion of being a cartoonist.

Both men must therefore have been gratified by the headline that appeared in
The Madison Journal
in February 1926:
CARTOONIST, ACTOR, POET
–
AND ONLY
10. Orson had been
sent to the Washington School – his first – in Madison; Dr Bernstein had connections there. The piece is Welles’s first meeting with the press, and it sets the pattern for all the many, many subsequent encounters. Detailing his achievements, which include oil painting, acting in, writing and directing plays, composing and reciting epic verse, and editing a summer camp paper –
The Indianola Trail
– the anonymous writer whips his story up to a pitch of fervour that verges on self-parody; the claim that Welles held his fellow campers spellbound for three or four hours at a time with his epic poetry makes one doubt the veracity of much of the rest. Orson, the writer maintains, was ‘already attracting the attention of some of the greatest literary men in the country’ without substantiating
it; he was definitely attracting the attention of Dr Frederick G. Mueller, psychologist of Madison State University, and friend of Maurice Bernstein.

Mueller had met the boy at summer camp and had proposed a series of tests on his obviously formidable intellect. The results were somewhat inconclusive, baffling Mueller and his fellow researchers; they detected ‘a profound dissociation of ideas’.
This seems to be another way of saying that he said whatever came into his head: a rich selection, no doubt, of magpie scraps produced in his mother’s drawing room, to enthusiastic applause. He was precocious – verbally, not intellectually; and he was not prodigious. Perhaps the most dangerous thing that can happen to precocity is acclaim – dangerous because the precocious behaviour, confirmed
as successful, will be endlessly reproduced. What was startling about ten-year-old Orson was his assurance; his personality, as one might say. He was phenomenal not in what he said or what he did, but in what he was. This process was well underway by the time of
CARTOONIST, ACTOR, POET AND ONLY
10. ‘The unceasing roar of appreciation from everybody when I was a child’, of which Welles spoke years
later to Leslie Megahey in interviews for the BBC, seemed to confirm his worth for him – despite the inner voice from his late mother telling him that he was not doing nearly well enough.

The sessions with Dr Mueller came to an abrupt end, Welles told Mrs Leaming, when that distinguished academic attempted to
seduce him. Welles escaped out of the window. This is a significant revelation, impossible
to evaluate objectively. Its interest is that it is the first of many claims made by Welles to have been, from a very early age, sexually interfered with by men. In his conversations with Barbara Leaming, he passes it off as all in good fun, and he seems in his stories always to escape, either by simply leaving the room, or by some witty ploy, with his honour intact. Nowadays, in the 1990s,
such claims no longer seem so amusing. This is something quite different from playing doctors and nurses with your contemporaries. He tells Mrs Leaming another droll story of that kind: drawn into a circle of sexual dabbling under the leadership of a certain forceful girl, they are all discovered in flagrante delicto by her mother, who immediately blames Welles, his verbal precocity having associated
him in her mind with Leopold and Loeb, the proto-Nietzschean murderers brought to trial in Chicago not long before. Very funny, and very likely. But to be approached sexually by an adult man, the same age as your father, must have a very different impact on you. No matter how fast-talking and apparently assured, no ten-year-old simply makes an Errol Flynn-like getaway from a fate worse than
death, and then has a good laugh about it afterwards.

A ten-year-old, confused by having two fathers, neither of whom is entirely satisfactory – the real one a drifting alcoholic, the other a cloying old fuss-budget with a somewhat religious attitude to one’s recently deceased mother – may be on the look-out for other, better fathers, and in so doing may offer himself as vulnerably in need
of protection. He may even become aware of the fact that he is sexually attractive to certain older men, and, playing with fire, may use his sexuality to secure their interest. He may, alternatively, want their sexual attention, but be frightened from accepting it at the last moment. Or he may accept their attentions, and later claim that he had avoided them. Finally, if he is simply very unlucky,
he may find himself again and again in situations where men force themselves on him. Whichever of these is true, it is remarkable how often Orson Welles reports himself as an object of homosexual desire. ‘From my earliest years, I was the Lily Langtry of the older homosexual set. Everybody wanted me.’
²⁴
The young Welles was not a beautiful child, being decidedly fat and rather pugnacious of expression;
but he had, and would never lose, when he desired to command it, a seductive charm which could get him most of what he wanted. Perhaps what he wanted above all was to be wanted. This area of sexual ambiguity persists throughout the early part of Welles’s life, striking a note of considerable complexity.

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.’

T
ODD 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.