Orson Welles was born 100 years ago, died 30 years ago and released his most celebrated film, "Citizen Kane," almost 75 years ago. There is not likely to be a more fitting observance of those anniversaries than Patrick McGilligan's "Young Orson," the story of Welles's early life, through the creation of the movie that was to become his lasting monument. As monuments tend to do, it cast a shadow over the remaining years of his life.
At age 25, Welles was not exceptionally young to be making his debut as a film director. As McGilligan points out, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and John Ford had all made movies by the time they reached that age. But he arrived in Hollywood bearing the label of “Boy Wonder,” having made his professional stage debut at age 16 with the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where he played, in heavy makeup, characters much older than he was. Over the next decade, he would make his Broadway debut, tour in repertory with Katharine Cornell, start his own theater company, astonish New York with his productions of “Macbeth” with an all-black cast and a modern-dress “Julius Caesar,” and cause a widespread panic with his Halloween 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.”
He was, in a word, precocious.
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How he got that way is both the theme and the riddle of McGilligan’s book. The word most often bandied about is “genius,” which Welles once said “was whispered into my ear ... while I was still mewling in my crib ... so it never occurred to me that I wasn’t until middle age.” And there were always plenty of people to whisper it, including his parents, Beatrice and Dick Welles, a prosperous Midwestern couple who began to pin their hopes on Orson when it became apparent that his older brother, Richard, had severe mental problems.
Welles’s parents catered to his every interest, particularly in the arts. Dick was a bon vivant who cultivated the friendship of Chicago’s newspapermen, giving him access to visiting celebrities, and Beatrice threw dinner parties that included famous actors and musicians. Beatrice died when Orson was just 9, but Dick continued to lavish attention on the boy, with the help of a somewhat enigmatic family friend, Maurice Bernstein. As McGilligan puts it, they “were Orson’s first producers, surrounding the boy with the finest stagecraft money could buy: high-quality puppet theater paraphernalia, the best magic and makeup kits, and a wide array of face paints, mustaches, beards, and wigs.”
Orson was 15 when Dick Welles died. Bernstein, who became Orson’s guardian, was, in McGilligan’s words, “a sophisticated man of ideas who could also be a bumbler and a buttinski,” but he and Orson were undeniably close. They used affectionate nicknames for each other throughout their lives: Bernstein was “Dadda” to Orson, whom Bernstein called “Pookles.” Welles also had another surrogate parent in Roger Hill, the headmaster at the Todd School in Woodstock, Ill., who was so impressed with the boy that he gave him free rein in the school’s theater: At age 15, Welles co-wrote and co-directed a musical revue with Hill, “designed the costumes, the lighting, and the sets [and] played the lead role.”
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In short, Welles had no lack of mentors and patrons in his early career, and he would continue to gather them. They would include Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir, the founders of the Gate Theatre; John Houseman, somewhat older and more experienced in the New York theater, who helped him found the Mercury Theatre; Herman J. Mankiewicz, his collaborator on the script for “Citizen Kane,” and George Schaefer, the head of RKO, whom Welles would call “an absolute hero” for his aid in getting the film made. The attention McGilligan devotes to their stories, and to others who were in Welles’s orbit, suggests that one reason Welles struggled to find success in his later career is that no one came along to provide the stability and direction those early mentors gave him.
“Young Orson” is an audacious book: To spend more than 700 pages telling the story of only a third of one man’s life may seem excessive, but McGilligan justifies it with richly detailed portraits of the people who made Welles what he became. For example, in telling the story of Orson’s talented and ambitious mother, Beatrice, McGilligan digs deeply into the politics of Kenosha, Wis., and the Unitarian Church and the Woman’s Club to which she belonged. An ardent suffragist who chafed against the restrictions of her life in Kenosha, she was elected to the school board, becoming the first woman to hold an elected public office in the city. It sounds like a small achievement compared to those of her son, but McGilligan’s attention to detail turns Beatrice’s triumph into a foreshadowing of Orson’s drive and determination.
It also serves to establish Welles as a deep-rooted American figure. Although he spent much of his later career abroad, courting the adulation (and money) of Europeans more enamored of the Welles mystique than his compatriots were, Welles remained very much a product of Midwestern cities and towns. The working titles of what became “Citizen Kane” were “John Citizen U.S.A.” and “American.” The ambition, ego, ruthlessness and recklessness of Charles Foster Kane are particularly American, and they’re as characteristic of Welles as of his creation.
Charles Matthews is a writer and editor in Northern California.
Young Orson
The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to ‘Citizen Kane’
By Patrick McGilligan
Harper. 820 pp. $40
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