Wellesnet

Editor’s note: Woodstock Celebrates’ commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the 1934 Todd Theatre Festival kicked off on the evening of Friday, May 16, 2014, at Stage Left Cafe at the Woodstock Opera House.

The two-day event is the result of the tireless efforts of Kathleen Spaltro and the dedicated volunteers behind the non-profit Woodstock Celebrates Inc., which also plans to mark the 100th anniversary of Orson Welles’ birth next spring.

Todd Tarbox, grandson of Roger Hill, and author of Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, delivered the opening address before nearly 75 Welles aficionados and introduced the moderator and guest speakers for the event.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Tarbox recalled Welles’ childhood, education at the former Todd School for Boys; the summer 1934 theatrical festival, which marked Welles’ professional debut as a stage director; and the late actor-director’s relationship with Hill, his mentor and lifelong friend.

Mr. Tarbox has graciously allowed Wellesnet to share his opening address in its entirety.
__________________

By TODD TARBOX

On behalf of Woodstock’s mayor, Dr. Brian Sager, city council members, and Woodstock Celebrates board members, I am delighted and honored to welcome you to Woodstock Celebrates Orson Welles, An 80th Anniversary Commemoration of the 1934 Todd Theatre Festival directed by Orson and produced by the headmaster of the Todd School for Boys and my grandfather, Roger Hill.

Woodstock Celebrates has set for itself the stirring challenge of pressing and framing the six-week 1934 Todd Theatre Festival, its wunderkind nineteen-year-old prime mover, and assorted other players like a bouquet of wild flowers, between this evening’s prologue and tomorrow afternoon’s closing session.

I have no doubt that the challenge will be met handsomely by the impressive assembly of Welles scholars and votaries that include Jonathan Rosenbaum, internationally regarded film critic and prolific author, whose books include Movies as Politics, Moving Places: A Life in the Movies, Discovering Orson Welles, and the editor of This is Orson Welles; Joseph McBride, who like Jonathan, is a highly respected film critic, historian, and biographer — in addition to being the author of three volumes on Welles, most recently, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles: A Portrait of an Independent Career, acted in Orson’s unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, in the role of Mister Pister, a young film critic, who Joseph describes as “a comically exaggerated version of myself”; Michael Dawson, president of International Productions, who has worked on a new release version of Welles’ Othello and is presently doing a new version of Chimes at Midnight, and completing a three-part documentary Citizen Welles; writer and editor, Jeff Wilson, founder of Wellesnet.com, and an authority on Orson’s extensive work in radio; Josh Karp, film critic and author of the forthcoming book The Unmaking of Orson Welles’s ‘The Other Side of the Wind; and Robert Elder, author of The Best Film You’ve Never Seen and The Film that Changed My Life — both touching on Welles’s work — who will serve as moderator for this evening’s and tomorrow’s sessions.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Todd School for Boys, which Orson attended from age 11 to 16 and returned three years later to stage-manage the Todd Theatre Festival, as well as direct one of the plays, Trilby, and appear in each of the three productions, allow me to provide an overview.

Richard Kimball Todd, shortly after receiving a theology degree from Princeton University, journeyed to the frontier community of Woodstock, Illinois in 1848, with this wife, Martha Clover, to establish a Presbyterian church and school — intent on bringing God and enlightenment to this neophyte community.

Todd purchased 14 acres on the corner of what is today Seminary and McHenry Avenues for $67.50 from an E.G. Howe, who the year before had obtained the land from the United States Government, that had taken it from the Sauk and Fox tribes in the aftermath of the 1832 Black Hawk War.

Six years after Todd arrived in Woodstock, James Sayre Griffing, a recent seminary graduate from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, spent a year trekking through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois selling maps of the Midwest to settlers. After a stopover in Woodstock, he wrote to his fiancée, Augusta Goodrich, in a letter dated April 28, 1853:

Beloved Augusta,

You inquire about the society and church at Woodstock. The Presbyterian Minister is a most excellent man, Mr. Todd and they have a very flourishing Sabbath School. Seven years ago, Woodstock had not existed. Now it numbers from six hundred to a thousand or more. You would not like the society there much after leaving Hartford. Refinement is a term but little understood. Yet, after all, I think there is as much real politeness there as back East. To be sure, they are not studied in the rules of etiquette and they are not formal. Yet treatment by them is the unstudied promptings of their generous natures. It has no borrowed stiffness, no affectation, but comes directly from the heart where most easily you can read the real feelings and motives that actuate their movements. They are plain, simple, frank, and generous. To be sure, the society is new and, as a consequence, is destitute of many of the facilities for education and general information. Yet the time is coming when the Mississippi Valley is to be the garden of the world, the great seat of literature and the arts, and, at the present rate of developing resources, that day is already dawning.

Mr. Todd’s seminary proved to be one such radiant bloom in the emerging Middle Border garden. After 40 years as the school’s headmaster, Todd retired in 1888. His successor, my great-grandfather, Noble Hill, guided the school for the next 40 years, when he deeded the school to his son, Roger Hill, and retired with his second wife, Nellie, to Ventura, California.

Though my grandfather is credited with establishing a renowned progressive private school, his father, Noble, planted the seeds in his son, insisting that a teacher’s primary role is to educate the entire child, not just the intellect.

A glimpse of Noble and his school was published in the pages of the December 19, 1901 Woodstock Sentinel:

For more than 50 years this school has, without intermission, opened its doors each succeeding term, and from it has gone hundreds of sons, many of whom have reached places of influence in the world’s great fields of activity. The sons of Todd seminary are scattered all over the continent, from New York to the Golden Gate, from the Canadian line to the Gulf. They are found in frozen Alaska, in London, in the “Dark Continent,” in the very isles of the sea… At the present time there are a few over forty pupils in the school, hailing from all parts of the country, who are carefully watched, instructed and disciplined by Prof. Hill, his estimable wife, three male and two female instructors… Todd seminary is in all respects what its owner designed to make it–a model home school for boys, wherein is taught not only the rudiments of a common education, but the finer essentials that go to make up model citizenship…

A quarter of a century later, the school continued to be “a model home school” instilling the “finer essentials” of citizenship. The 1928 Todd Seminary for Boys catalog, the last to be written by Noble Hill, informs prospective students and their parents, “Our ideal, ‘For every Todd boy a good citizen,’ is not a mere catch phrase, but a living principle in the daily life of the Todd boys… Woodstock is a beautiful little town of 4,000 inhabitants, with a New England charm about its quiet, shady streets, and surrounded by a country of wonderful beauty and fertility… True to its New England origin this school has ever stood for plain living and high thinking, and in harmony with Puritan traditions, it has had but two changes of administration in the eighty years of its history.
“Our teachers are all specialists. Their specialty is boys, and the varied interests which make up the modern boy life… The true work of the educator is developing character, and the true educator knows that character is developed on the playground and in the social circle even better than in the school room…

“In the Todd woods, a 40-acre oak and hickory grove situated one mile north of the campus, boys ‘hold communion with nature in her visible forms’ all year round and learn to understand the “various languages” in which she speaks to nature lovers. No other book contains so much ennobling truth as the great book of nature…

In a final “word to parents,” Noble avows with supreme confidence, which was one of his hallmarks, “Like the great Teacher we can do nothing for those who do not believe in us while we are daily performing miracles for those who do.”

Twenty years later, at a banquet celebrating Todd’s 100th anniversary in 1948, my grandfather said of his father, “To those Todd alumni who are over 30 years of age, Noble Hill is Todd. He was “The King,” stern, mosaic, sometimes awesome, yet invariably just and deeply, deeply revered.”

***

On September 15, 1926, two years before “The King” retired and placed the school in the hands of his son, an 11-year-old titanic presence arrived on campus, George Orson Welles.

The youngster’s devoted and cultured mother, Beatrice, separated from her husband, Richard Head Welles, when Orson was four, and five years later she died of acute yellow atrophy of the liver at age 43. Orson’s father, former treasurer of the Badger Brass Company in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was then retired after receiving $100,000 from the sale of the business. When not traveling the world, Richard divided his time between Trinidad, the Sheffield Hotel he purchased in Grand Detour, Illinois, and his apartment in Chicago.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to describe Orson’s life prior to arriving at Todd as complicated and conflicted. His parents were ill-suited as man and wife — Beatrice valued a life of culture, while Richard enjoyed life’s more earthly delights. Kenneth Tynan captured their troubled relationship with candor and clarity: “Where mother had her salon, father had his saloon.”

Compounding the Welles family dynamics was the presence of a young orthopedist, and family friend, Dr. Maurice Bernstein, who, when he first encountered 18-month-old Orson at the Welles home in Kenosha, reported hearing the toddler declaim, “The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguishes men from animals.” Astounded, it was not long thereafter that he pronounced the boy a “genius.”

During the seven years between Bernstein’s introduction to Orson and Beatrice’s death, the doctor’s interest in Mrs. Welles became considerably more personal than professional, and his admiration seemingly limitless for her youngest son, whom he referred to as “Pookles.” Orson dubbed Bernstein “Dadda.”

There developed a growing competition between Richard Welles and Maurice Bernstein for Orson’s affection that accelerated after Beatrice’s death. Not only were the tastes and temperaments of the two men diametrically opposed, neither considered the other fit to raise Orson. As a result of this growing contretemps, and possibly feeling overwhelmed and overburdened with the ultimate responsibility of raising Orson, and to keep him at a distance from Maurice, Richard decided to send his son to Todd. “I was sent to Todd in order to settle their hopeless battle,” Orson confided to Welles biographer, Barbara Leaming.

Richard Welles was a somewhat disaffecting and detached father. Indicative of his distant nature, he was vacationing in Trinidad when Orson first arrived at Todd with Dr. Bernstein. Also accompanying Orson were two oversized steamer trunks—one containing a list of personal “what to bring” items enumerated in the school catalog: a rug, a dark couch cover for the bed, four single sheets, four pillow cases, 12 towels, six napkins and ring, a Sunday suit, two school suits, eight shirts with collars, one dozen handkerchiefs, overalls for use in woods, and a good hat. The second trunk was chockablock with Orson’s most precious possessions: oriental decorations, books on performing magic and an extensive collection of paraphernalia for the young conjurer to employ when performing tricks that included the Vanishing Coin, the Wandering Rubber band, the Bewitched Walking Stick, the Weeping Pencil, the Spoon Dances, The Walking Pen, and the Ghostly Gathering — capes, wands, stacks of trick playing cards, a makeup kit, and an assortment of his favorite costumes, none more treasured than a Sherlock Holmes Inverness cape and deerstalker cap.

Like all entering students, he was given the Stanford-Binet test measuring intelligence that consisted of a series of questions followed by multiple answers, requiring the student to underscore the correct response. Orson’s first test had the question: “Deserts are crossed by horses, trains, automobiles, camels, donkeys.” He underscored every item and wrote “See other side.” On the back of the test he wrote, “All of these, but the writer was obviously too dumb to know it.” This and subsequent annual tests established Orson’s IQ at 185; 140 and above was considered the genius level.

Orson quickly made his considerable creative presence known. During his tenure at Todd he wrote prodigiously for the school’s literary magazine, Red and White, painted murals, captivated his classmates and teachers with his adroitness as a magician, wrote, directed, and acted in dozens of plays that were performed at Todd, the Woodstock Opera House, and throughout the Midwest.

In May 1931, Orson and his classmates graduated after their sophomore year. The culmination of Orson’s acting career at Todd was his blending of Shakespeare’s English history plays that was performed at graduation. The highpoint of his literary career at Todd was writing and editing the following year’s school catalog, Todd: A Community Devoted to Boys and Their Interests. The 15-year-old polymath portrayed Todd to prospective students and parents with a crystalline eye and an affectionate heart:

Todd is not perfect. This we realized and this we rejoiced in, for if it were, the joy of making it finer would be gone…

Todd is a bustling bee hive of activity from dawn until dark and, for some of us, on into the night. Skipper tells us there is no joy compared with having accomplished something worthwhile with your hands or your brain and we have found he’s right.

Every boy can express himself in some line of useful or artistic endeavor, and the program at Todd is to give him this opportunity.

In the next few pages, we will try to give you some slight picture of this guild of young artists and artisans who are finding the thrill there is in doing the work of the world and who have learned that usefulness is the highest good and greatest joy.

Reflecting on Todd productions, Orson wrote:

Todd Dramatics is the activity that touches every boy here and gives him a chance to express any talent he has. It is not a single activity, but a combination of all. 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.
After leaving the campus in the summer of 1931 and spending the remainder of his life in perpetual transit, “home” for him would be Todd and in the embrace of my grandparents.

Living in Europe in the early ’50s, nomadic Orson was asked in an interview where he considered home. After an extended pause he replied, “I have lots of homes …but, I suppose it’s Woodstock, Illinois if it’s anywhere. I went to school there for five years, and if I think of home, it’s there. It may be a tedious bromide to say that school days are the happiest days of your life, but Roger Hill and his staff were so unique, and the school so imbued with real happiness, that one could hardly fail to enjoy oneself within its boundaries.”

At the 1978 tribute, Working with Welles, sponsored by the American Film Institute, Orson had this to say about my grandfather:

“Roger Hill was a teacher in a boarding school where I was sent because of my delinquencies. I was threatened with Todd because my brother had gone there. It was then called Todd Seminary for Boys… It was run by Roger’s father who was a God-fearing deep-water sailor and preacher who had broken the capstan bar and I don’t know what else and was an extraordinary figure. Roger, known as Skipper, worked in his father’s school teaching gym when I came to Todd. I tried to find a way to capture the attention of this man who fascinates me tonight as much as he did the first day I laid eyes on him. I decided that the best way was dramatics: Let’s put on some plays. Having gone to all that trouble to get his attention in the theatre, I became stuck in it. I had to learn every bit of Shakespeare because he knew it and I had to learn the entire Bible because he knew it. After I left Todd, we did a series of Shakespeare textbooks, which are still in wide use. We wrote a play together and went to New York and almost sold it. He has been seen back-stage working thunder machines in any number of bravura productions of mine. He has never ceased to be my idea of who I would like to be. If I know anything at all, he taught it to me.”

In Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, Orson reflects on his initial encounter with my grandfather and performing in Finesse the Queen.

“The first time I saw you, you were walking up a snowy sidewalk, in the late fall, just before Halloween, with your open galoshes flopping and rather too much hair for those days, looking artistic and rather brigandish. It was then that I declared to myself that I would make that man my friend no matter what the price…”

On location in San Carlos, Nuevo Guymas, Mexico on the Bay of Cortez in 1969, acting in Mike Nichols’ movie, Catch 22, during a break, Orson was asked by Peter Bogdanovich, “Did your guardian, Dr. Bernstein, have any influence on your creative life?” Orson responds, “Well, he was an enormously important element in my life. But we seldom had the same tastes in anything. I’d say the biggest influence was Roger Hill… He’s still a great, valued, friend. Roger is now eighty-something, runs a chartering service in Florida, and he helped me with the boats in The Deep when I shot in the Bahamas… I can’t imagine life without him, and I go 10 years without seeing him but it doesn’t seem like ten years, because I think of him all the time. He was a great direct influence in my life — the biggest by all odds. I wanted to be like him. Everything he thought, I wanted to think, and that wasn’t true of Dr. Bernstein.”

Much is known and written about Orson Welles, but comparatively little is known about Roger Hill, co-prime mover of the Todd Theatre Festival, who was born in Woodstock and lived here until the mid-1950s when he and my grandmother moved to Florida.

Skipper was born in 1895, 20 years to the month Orson’s senior. He outlived his stellar student and friend by five years. As a child, Skipper attended his father’s school. He was Noble and Grace Rogers Hill’s second child, their first being a daughter, Carol. His mother, referred to on campus as “the Mother of Boys,” died on the school’s commencement day, June 11, 1914. His father, Noble, died in May of 1953, just before his 95th birthday.

After graduating from Todd, Skipper attended the University of Illinois, where he met his future wife, Hortense Gettys. They were married and moved to Chicago where my grandfather began a career in advertising working as a copywriter at Montgomery Ward. While Skipper was at Ward’s, Noble invited his son to return to Woodstock where he and my grandmother would join the Todd faculty. They happily accepted Noble’s offer, and made Todd School their home until its closing in 1954.

During his tenure as headmaster at Todd, Skipper provided one of the most progressive educational programs in the country. His educational philosophy embraced the concept that all youngsters were “created creators.” Toward that end, Todd offered an extracurricular program that was generations ahead of its time. It included producing sound motion pictures and theatrical productions. Two buses, referred to as “Big Berthas,” permitted students and faculty to travel throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Crewed by the Todd faculty and students, the school’s schooner, Sea Hawk, cruised the Great Lakes. A 300-acre working farm, run in large measure by students, expanded an appreciation of agronomy and enhanced the school’s cuisine. Todd maintained a winter outpost in the Florida Keys.

During the last decade of the school’s existence, Skipper established the Todd Airport, a half a mile east of the campus that housed a Link Trainer and three Piper Cubs affording interested students flight instruction and flight time. The Piper Cubs have long flown away and that sacred space is now home to Marian Central Catholic High School.

Skipper was married for 66 years to Hortense, who died in 1982. They were the parents of three children, Joanne, Bette, and Roger II. My mother, Joanne, was their first born.

***

So much for preamble: allow me now to share, Rashomon-like, an overview of the Todd Theatre Festival through the eyes and pens of participants and critics. My grandfather and Orson conceived the idea of a theatre festival early in 1934 while Orson was on tour playing leading roles at age eighteen in Katharine Cornell’s celebrated repertory company. On June 24, when the final curtain came down on the Cornell tour, plans for the Todd Theatre Festival were set, and rehearsals for the first production were days away. The next day, Orson met Micheál macLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, the prominent Irish co-directors and actors at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. Both had been captivated by Welles three years before when he arrived at their theatre and within weeks was cast in leading roles and receiving considerable critical acclaim. They were so impressed with young Orson’s unbridled talent and engaging presence that they agreed to travel to Woodstock and participate in his theatre festival. Beyond the prospect of performing with Welles, what was the lure that convinced the two Dubliners to spend the summer of 1934 in Woodstock?

A beguiling letter from Orson to Hilton Edwards, on Andrew Jackson Hotel, Nashville, Tennessee stationary on April 12, 1934 played no small role in his and macLiammóir’s affirmative decision.

Dear Hilton:

“Like a wax flower tree under a bell of glass in the paisley and gingham county of McHenry is Woodstock, grand capital of mid-Victorianism in the Middle West. Gorgeous over a square full of Civil War monuments and band-stands in this flossy little township is the edifice in the picture.

“This very rustic and rusticated thing is a government office building, a public library, a fire department, and what is more to our purpose, a real old honest-to-horse-hair Opera House. Our purpose exactly is the foundation of an American Festival Theatre for the summer consideration of plays, great and neglected, for the reverent uncellaring of a vintage spirit in the Theater, full-bodied and of good bouquet. Where more fitting for the recovery of that splendid almost forgotten older Theater than in its very heart, the provincial Opera House? In Woodstock, deep in the sticks, but ninety minutes from the Century of Progress Exposition, we appear to have found the right Opera House and the right Festival town.”

So reads the beginning of a circular begging young ladies and gentlemen to come to the Todd Summer School of Theatre, which is auxiliary to the Todd Theater Festival, a circular full of pretty pictures and five dollar words, which is plaguing at this writing these forty-eight United States of America. Sitting here, driving my stenographer crazy-mad with my silences wondering at some length how to begin telling you about Woodstock’s Festival Theater.

You cable me a little plaintively for particulars. Well, what particulars? I was very proud of that cable I sent you; in twenty dollars’ worth of words I had succeeded, so I thought, in getting down every fact about the Theater Festival that anybody could possibly want to know. It seems I was wrong. It’s my fault, not yours. If somebody tried to snatch me out by the roots and transplant me for two months to a strange company in a strange country, I should ask for a few whys and hows.
Here are the particulars.
With the idea of founding in America a Festival Theater in the European spirit and tradition, Woodstock, fifty miles from Chicago by easy motor drive, is to become the scene of a good deal of theatrical hysteria during the months of July and August. Critics in Chicago, that impressively populated metropolis, as well as those from New York and the smaller fry all over the Middle West, are already stuffing their columns with bravos and hand-claps over the project. That the press is so ready to boost the Todd Theater Festival three months before its first day of rehearsal is due not so much to their hunger for something to write about as their delight at the prospect of something new and the dignity which the names associated in this business inspire. It is going to be a pretty superlative company; you can take my word for it. Katherine Krug, Whitford Kane, Hiram Sherman, George MacCready, Brenda Forbes, and let us pray, Hilton Edwards and the inimitable Micheál, are quite enough to antidote the effect of Orson Welles in any theater. I have only listed a few; there may be more changes, and already it has been hinted that a couple of more really top-notch stars and featured players may be added to the cast. I can positively guarantee you good company, and excellent support.
And good living is another promise. You see, the whole company, as well as the school, is to be resident on the campus of the Todd School for Boys, a beautifully equipped modern institution for preparatory education, of which, by the way, I am a graduate. This place during the summer is vacant, and Mr. Roger Hill, principal of Todd, President of the Todd Press, and one of the business managers of the festival, is kindly turning over the entire campus with its submarine-lit swimming pool, its riding stables, its machine and print shops, cottages and dormitories, private experimental theater, luxurious land yacht for transportation, and its fifty acres of American woodlands, to the Festival company for its sole use in July and August. Here, three minutes from Woodstock’s Opera House and the town square, we will live and work, and as there are only four performances to be given a week, it is also safe to say, play. The advantage of preparing three plays thus leisurely and without the discomfort of nightly performances is obviously immeasurable. Each production will have careful, painstaking, and leisurely consideration, so that by the time the critics get at them they won’t need either the old apology of the summer repertory theater, or the older apology of the first night.
Outside of rehearsals and performances, you and Micheál will have just as much free time and freedom as you want. You are near Chicago and the World’s Fair, and in Woodstock you are in attractive and amusing society. If you want to light a set, you have only to ask; if you want to direct a scene or design it, you have only to ask, but if you don’t want to do any of these things, you have only to keep quiet and lay back in the sun. I promise you that you won’t be asked. You will have principal parts in each of the three plays. You will each have a couple of hours a week to talk to the students on production, or something. Beyond that, the whole thing is a vacation.

Your passage from Ireland to New York and from New York to Woodstock and back again at the end of the season, is paid for you, as I cabled, and, as I also cabled, all your expenses during your stay with us will also be paid. Besides very comfortable rooms (running hot and cold water), this includes all your meals (by an excellent chef), and a great list of luxuries and facilities for recreation too long to be here enumerated.
Rehearsals start on the first of July and the Festival closes at the end of August.
Your position is entirely dignified and even spectacular, and you will receive more attention than if you were merely joining a Broadway production in the winter season. The terms which are being made you for this festival season are, believe me, as generous as any offered to a player in a summer theater in this country. Your names will be featured, and you will receive nation-wide publicity.
Well, I can’t seem to think of anything else which you might want to know. All that I can think of is what I want to know, which is your answer. I wish you’d make that answer by cable, collect, as soon as you conceivably can…
Give my love to everybody. I am anxiously awaiting your cable. As always.
Hurriedly and affectionately yours,
Orson

After receiving Edwards’s acceptance, Orson responds on May 2:

Dear Hilton:
I am overjoyed at yours and Micheál’s acceptance of our Theatre Festival offer. It will mean a great deal to us to have you in Woodstock and it will be lovely to see you again.
Of course, we’ll give you an earlier crossing, if you like—time for a week to get thoroughly dizzied in that raucous and remarkable metropolis of New York. I will be playing somewhere in the vicinity. I will be able to meet your boat, see you to a hotel, have some occasional chats with you, and if necessary, hold your little hands. You see our tour isn’t over until June 24. About the 26th or 27th, we will all rush off together to Woodstock and begin rehearsals.
Much love to you and Micheál. As ever
Orson

In One Man’s Time and Chance: A Memoir of Eighty Years, my grandfather provides an arresting overview of the festival:

Over the years the Todd campus was put to sundry and exciting adult uses. Many summers the buildings were turned over to the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization so influential in foreign affairs. These zealots for peace would fill Todd with foreign students from American universities. Each week new faculty folk and State Department personnel would arrive to counsel with them. Wonderful new friends. Vivid memories. But no summer was more exciting (and none so hectic) as that of 1934 when 15 assorted equity actors and 20 assorted “students” moved into our cottages and dormitories. The tuition-payers were a mixed bag including a professor of Drama at Iowa State and a bevy of stage-struck high school kids. They all slaved mightily night and day and none objected when Whitford Kane failed to show up to direct their “classes.” Our literature had promised the former Goodman director would head our school, but at the last minute he was offered a tempting movie contract.
The summer was memorable for a few of us. It was also portentous for posterity and portentous for our town. It saved the lovely old Woodstock Opera House from demolition and thereby saved the small city itself from urban blight. . .
There were nightly parties after each performance under flood lights on the patio between Wallingford and Clover Halls. Lasting for hours, most of them turned into nightclub experiences. Our own cast, all exhibitionists, would start things off but usually the ball was carried by visiting celebrity guests. Even taciturn Thornton Wilder was persuaded to talk. De Wolf Hopper did his Casey at the Bat for us one night, possibly for the last time ever. He died the next year. Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, a harried Hortense was thinking up new inducements to persuade temperamental cooks to stick it out for the season while gulping coffee to fortify herself for gushing ‘goodnights’ to guests before taking up her now-until-dawn chores of preserving the virginity of a dozen nubile females placed in her care by trustful mothers.

The subject of “preserving the virginity of a dozen nubile” in my grandmother’s care is a topic drolly discussed in Friendship Act Two, Scene One in which Orson and Roger are discussing The Cradle Will Rock, the screenplay that Orson is preparing and in which his first wife, Virginia Nicolson, plays a major role.

ORSON: I’m turning Virginia into the leading heroine of the world and I’m sure she’ll be happy about it. I’m giving her big scenes. She’s a leading lady. That’ll be a surprise to folks who know her today, to see what her life was like in the late ’30s. She’s the greatest girl in New York. It’s the way to make me look bad, to portray Virginia as the virtuous wife, so she’s the Virgin Mary.
[Laughter]
ROGER: That’s quite a bit of fiction, too. She was quite a gal, but she wasn’t the Virgin Mary.
ORSON: [Laughing] Oh, no, that’s right, but she was a virgin when I met her at Todd, one of the only ones I can remember. Virgins have that sort of look about them, and, before long, that look vanishes and so do the virgins.
ROGER: That reminds me about our summer theatre festival in Woodstock, when the mothers of the nubile aspiring school-age actresses said to Horty, “We wouldn’t leave our daughters if it weren’t for you.”
ORSON: [Uproarious laughter]
ROGER: Horty had to spend all her nights trying to keep them virgins.
ORSON: [Still laughing] Pretty hard to do during the hot months.

***

What of the festival itself—those six frenetic, prolific, historic weeks—showcasing three plays Trilby, Hamlet, and Tsar Paul — was it a critical success? Who better to make that assessment than the critics themselves?

In anticipation of opening night, Charles Collins of The Chicago Tribune wrote under the headline, SUMMER DRAMA COMES TO LIFE IN WOODSTOCK FESTIVAL/Drama Festival in the Heartland:

Next Thursday night will bring a curious adventure to the dauntless few who follow the chase of the disappearing drama. The trail will take us to the town of Woodstock in McHenry County, where a picturesque old opera house in the civil war style of architecture will become the headquarters of Chicagoland’s first summer drama colony.
There is an air of fantasy about this outcropping of the theatrical arts on the sun baked prairies of northern Illinois. It represents, chiefly, the conjurations of a 19-year-old lad who appears to be a striking specimen of adolescent genius in the drama. His name is Orson Welles…
Young Welles spent the past season playing leading roles in Katharine Cornell’s repertory company on a nation-wide tour which was, in its implications, the most important thing that happened in connection with the legitimate theater during the year. This fact is a sound guarantee of his prowess on the stage. His years may be few, but his gift for footlights is already adult… Performances will be given on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights for the next six weeks.

On opening night, July 12th, Judith Cass of The Chicago Tribune, touched on the play Trilby and the “pilgrimage” of Chicago’s socialites to Woodstock

If Chicago supports the Todd Theatre festival, opening tonight, as enthusiastically as New Yorkers support the several country theater companies that spring up each summer within motoring distance of New York, tonight’s pilgrimage to the old town of Woodstock will be the first of many similar ones that socialites will make during the next six weeks…
The classic thriller, Trilby, will be the first production and Chicagoans will have a very special interest in it, for Trilby is to be portrayed by a Chicago socialite, Miss Louise Prussing, who has met with success on the stage in London and New York as well as here, and Svengali is to be played by young Orson Welles, the Chicago boy who was acclaimed at home and abroad…
Dinner Parties to Precede Play

Among the many hostesses who are planning to entertain at early dinners tonight and then drive with their guests to Woodstock is Mrs. Leo Nicolson, who is having a buffet supper at her charming little home in Wheaton. She will have a very personal interest in the production, for her daughter, Virginia, is to take part.

In addition to the positive pre-festival press, Chicago radio stations touted the upcoming event. The most unique radio promotion was WGN broadcasting macLiammóir, Edwards, and Welles reading a scene from Trilby on July 8th, at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, 628 feet above the ground in the observation platform of the Fair’s main attraction, the Sky-Ride.

Responding to Orson’s acting in Trilby, Lloyd Lewis of The Chicago Daily News wrote, “Mr. Welles shows remarkable vigor of imagination and dramatic instinct, and with regimentation of his industry he will, I think, go far on the stage.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Charles Collins filed this review of Trilby with the headline: TRILBY OPENS DRAMA SEASON AT WOODSTOCK/OLD OPERA HOUSE HAS A PLAY OF SOME VINTAGE

An opera house forty years old or more and a play of the same vintage came to life at Woodstock last night with the premier of the Todd Theatre Festival. The occasion marked the birth of the first summer drama colony in Chicagoland and brought out an enthusiastic capacity audience of pilgrims from Chicago and residents of the region…

Orson Welles, leading spirit of the Todd Theater festival, a youth of 19 years with strong promise of a brilliant future on the stage, appears in the role of Svengali… He disguises his boyish countenance with the lank oily whiskers and nose that are familiar to everyone who has seen DuMaurier’s notable illustrations of his text.

The characterization is so successful in its exterior that Welles’ friends and fellow alumni of the Todd school, where his career started, would have failed to recognize him but for the help of the program. He has a striking gift for makeup and the tricks that go with the trade of character acting.

In the same edition, society columnist, India Moffett, writes of opening night:

It was a gala occasion, perhaps the most exciting the little town of Woodstock ever has had and certainly the most thrilling it has had in many a day. The whole town was out to watch the guests assemble in front of the theatre. The square in front of the theatre was as gay and as crowded as it is on Saturday night. But instead of small, inexpensive cars such as farmers bring to town on Saturdays; there were expensive foreign and domestic cars, many of them with liveried chauffeurs at the wheel.

But a spirit of informality and rustic simplicity permeated the whole place and everyone agreed that the Todd Theatre Festival has brought something wholesome and fresh to add to the entertainment possibilities of Chicago for the next six weeks.

The fans that management has provided are more than welcome, for the old opera house isn’t air conditioned and the artificial breeze that the hundreds of fans produced is very pleasant. The heat does not diminish the enthusiasm of the audience, however. It is delightful to sit and be thrilled by Orson Welles’s Svengali and be reached by Louise Prussing’s helplessness and loveliness as Trilby, and every now and then to glance out through the windows and see the green leaves gently moving in the last glow of twilight.

The Wheaton contingent that came to Woodstock carried with it several boxes of flowers, for a young Wheaton girl, Virginia Nicolson, was making her debut and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Leo Nicolson, and their neighbors were proud of their budding actress…

Mrs. Roger Hill, wife of the headmaster of the Todd School for Boys, and her two daughters, Joanne and Bette, joined the Nicolson party on the steps of the theatre before the performance.

Two weeks later, the festival staged Hamlet. The Chicago Tribune’s Collins was effusive in his praise. The July 27th banner headline proclaimed: MACLAIMMOIR IS EXCEEDINGLY GOOD AS HAMLET/IRISH ACTOR HAS NOBILITY OF UTTERANCE

The principal point of interest in the Todd Theatre Festival’s production of Hamlet, which was given its first performance, last night, is Micheál macLiammóir interpretation of the melancholy Prince of Denmark. How good is macLiammóir is the question.

The answer is that he is exceedingly good, Collins enthuses. He is a graceful actor with a poetic personality. His sensitive, romantic face and lithe figure are exactly in the requirements for the role, and his voice has a dark, brooding eloquence. His reading is in every detail intelligent and illuminating…

Orson Welles doubles as the ghost and as the king. He reads the magnificent speeches of the ghost with fine effect, and adds new touches of character to the king. I have never before seen the murderous and incestuous Claudius acted except as an obvious and perfunctory villain. Welles, the nineteen year old master of character, puts into the role suggestions of an exceedingly corrupt Roman emperor…

In the August 10, 1934 edition of The Chicago Tribune Collins’s analysis of the festival’s final play, Tsar Paul was lavish.

Tsar Paul, a play with an insane emperor as its central character, was given its first performance on the American stage last night as the third and last production of the Todd Theater Festival at Woodstock, Ill.

This piece, a typical historical drama full of Muscovite nobles, elaborately costumed army officers and ornamental court attendants, brings Hilton Edwards, stage director of the Gate Theater of Dublin, into the foreground of the Todd festival. He appears as the mad, or at any rate feeble-minded, tsar, son of Catherine the Great, who joined one of the European coalitions against Napoleon and developed grandiose schemes for military conquest…

Orson Welles figures in the play as a prime minister who leads a conspiracy to bring about Paul’s abdication and death and his son Alexander’s succession. He achieves the effect of vigorous and cunning old age by a makeup that suggests a death’s head. Micheál macLiammóir, who recently acted a fine Hamlet for this festival, appears as the young crown prince who is too scrupulous and gentle to lend himself to plot against the father whom he dreads and hates. Louise Prussing contributes a graceful and appealing study of the tsar’s admirable mistress.”

Another credible and colorful source to the comings and goings at the festival was Micheál macLiammóir, who in his charming All For Hecuba: An Irish Theatrical Autobiography, records:

Hilton and I were given a white cottage to ourselves and stayed happily there, sleeping on the porch through all those weeks of successive heat waves, and eating in the main schoolhouse; the company was a mingled assembly of professionals and students, all of them friendly and delightful…

Commenting on the festival’s first play macLiammóir observed,

Hilton played Taffy and Orson, as well as playing Svengali, directed the production which was disappointingly vague and indefinite… his Svengali lacked grace and humor… But in the two succeeding productions which he put into Hilton’s hands he was superb: his Count Pahlen in Tsar Paul kept all the essentials of the part and extended the limitations of its framework, and his King in Hamlet was outrageously exciting…

Between rehearsals and performances, Chicago was a frequent haunt for the two Irish directors and actors.

Chicago was fifty miles away, macLiammóir writes, but one thought nothing of driving there to spend an evening at the World’s Fair or to dine and go to a show during the free time between our fortnightly runs. I close my eyes and I am back again with Louise Prussing and the others, riding swiftly through the burning afternoon towards the big city and Hilton is saying: “[I’m] discontented with the theatre, discontented with acting especially, a coarse, limited medium, but what else can I do? I wish to God I could create. Production! Acting! I’m discontented, discontented.”

And Orson replies, “Sure, it’s coarse. Sure it’s limited. It’s good enough for me.”

***

The Todd Theatre Festival not only provided Orson the opportunity to direct a play for the first time professionally, it also marks his first experience directing a motion picture, the tyro’s eight-minute surrealist satirical nod to Jean Cocteau — The Hearts of Age that Welles described as “just a Sunday afternoon movie” filmed on the Todd campus during the festival.

In Time and Chance, my grandfather provides a buoyant account of this “lost” and found film:

The American Film Institute, which gave Orson a Lifetime Achievement in Motion Pictures and Television award in 1975, now preserves in the hallowed sanctuary of The American Film Institute collection at the Library of Congress a short 16mm surrealistic parody produced (with tongue in cheek) on the Todd campus when Orson was 19 and Virginia was a student in our 1934 Summer Theatre Festival. This bit of midsummer madness is called The Hearts of Age…

I should add here a bit of “scholarship” to help future researchers. (A skeptic in our Groves of Academe once defined literary scholarship as finding out more and more about less and less.) Anyway, here’s more on the “mystery” of this film and how, lost for decades, it finally came to light: Our daughter, Joanne, has a friend, Frances Garland Donald who helped out that summer of 1934 in the Opera House and on the campus. Later she became Director of Public Relations for the Greenwich Library in Connecticut.

In March of 1970 she wrote to Hascy and Joanne as follows:

Dear Joanne and Hascy,

This is a letter about the long arm of coincidence. Sometime along about 1960 we received a bequest of a lot of old films from a film buff named William Vance, who had started out in the Midwest and came, by the advertising route, to New York. He lived in Riverside and when he died his widow recognized the value of the old prints and gave them to the Library. The next thing that happened we got a new Film Director who was as much a film buff as William Vance. When he got a chance he sat down and looked at every piece of film in the bequest, and what turned up was a little ten-minute opus, dated 1934 – silent, under the name The Hearts of Age. The Film Director, being an admirer of Orson Welles, thought he recognized the famous face even under some wild make-up and knowing I once worked with the great man in his early days asked if I could shed any light. I was able to identify the setting as Todd. There are a lot of shots of the school bell ringing. Orson does a good deal of running up and down the fire escapes and waving from the roofs. Virginia Nicolson, also heavily made up, rocks in a rocking atop the school bell. A gentleman in period costume rushes downstairs in one scene, and I tentatively identified him as Micheál macLiammóir, but I could be wrong. A young man who might be Hascy Tarbox pulls the bell rope continuously throughout, but since he is made up in blackface, complete in white wool wig, I certainly can’t be sure of that either.

Then came two pages of questions. Hascy’s letter of reply was hilarious:

March 18, 1970

Dear Frances,

Bill Vance did the camera work. Virginia hunkered down on top of the old Todd bell, rocked back and forth. The guy in the burnt cork could have been anybody, except me. For some odd reason, I rather think the bell tolling was done by one Edgerton Paul, a Todd boy some few years my senior, and a few inches shorter. Anybody I loomed over, I remember.

I also remember hanging around on the periphery watching the filming of this deathless effort. What is most sharply etched in my mind’s eye was Welles descending a fire escape. In some fairness to Orson, who has all the grace of a water buffalo, there was a step missing on that fire escape. He kept on barking his shins, landing on his can and wasting film. He must have taken a half dozen reruns before it dawned on him that even Christ only tried water, not air. Eventually, he got the concept that if he started out with the other foot, and counted, he lessened the chances of breaking his neck.
I saw an answer print to that opera and wasn’t terribly impressed, deemed it a cinematic fumarole. For this I was abolished. Reckoned a scurvy lout, with no sensitivities, and not worthy of touching the hem of Orson’s gown.

Now, some specifics. Vance owned the film. Bill arrived in Woodstock as a student for the Woodstock Summer Theatre Festival. We had, you may remember, some pros that were starving to death. There was Leslie Howard’s old leading lady and sometime mistress. There were the two from the Gate Theatre in Dublin. There was a living disaster, with a problem or two, who had spent his formative years in and out of Spanish army barracks, where close order drill was never an issue. There was a stripper, who shall remain nameless and vanished midway through the festival. There were a few Todd faculty members for comic relief, and a small legion of young, and some not-so-young, paying customers, Vance being numbered among them. Then there was me, just hanging around waiting to marry one of the rich Hill girls.

Much love to you and yours,

Hascy

***

The “good living” at the Todd Theatre Festival that Orson promised Hilton Edwards and Micheál macLiammóir proved to be exceedingly true as macLiammóir writes in All for Hecuba:

The experiment was successful; the Chicago critics had approved of us, we were flattered and pursued, and, as is usual in America, whatever we did was chronicled. One night in the theatre I lost my braces and sent the man who helped me dress to buy a new pair, and the incident was given headlines in the Tribune and some other papers: “Irish Star Mislays Suspenders.” “Frantic Manservant’s Search in 5 & 10 Stores…”

In August 1971, from the remove of 37 years, the indomitable and enduring theatre critic, Claudia Cassidy reflected on Welles in her On the Aisle column in The Chicago Tribune:

I first saw Orson the actor as a flamboyant young Mercutio in Cornell’s Juliet. He was an old hand even then at 18.” She also attended the three Todd Theatre Festival productions and recalled:

This was an audacious, supremely self-confident boy of 19. At summer’s end I wrote: ‘His variety and range are amazing and his youth has nothing to do with the matter except to hint at genius. The man is an actor and I think one of our major theater pages will have fine things written in his name. Perhaps Todd Festival’s chief achievement will be to permit a lot of people to say of Orson Welles, “I saw him when.”

***

Little more than a decade after the festival, when Orson had achieved international prominence, Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, asked him what he hoped for the future.

“My real interest in life is education,” he responded. “I want to be a teacher. All this experience I’ve been piling up is equipping me for that future. I shall know how to dramatize the art of imparting knowledge. One day I shall leave all this behind me, go back to Todd and give full rein to my ideas. That’s when life will really begin for me.”

That one day never arrived: a decade later the Todd School for Boys graduated it last class. Orson’s sorrow over the school’s closing mellowed over the decades, but his love for Todd, Woodstock, and my grandparents never diminished.

In his and Orson’s book, This Is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich recalled a particularly memorable moment with Welles. The two of them are strolling along a street in Beverly Hills, when Orson begins to tap dance and sing one of his favorite songs, Gondolivia from Finesse The Queen:

Everyone loves the fellow who is smiling,
He brightens the day and lightens the way for you
He always makes other people happy
Looking rosy when you’re feeling awfully blue.

“There was a full moon,” Bogdanovich writes, “and Orson’s face was beaming, looking remarkably like an out-to-please teenager, unburdened by legends, lies, mistakes, triumphs, or failures, the whole world still out there for him to conquer.”

“Orson Welles is a creature made for the screen and the stage,” observed Jean Renoir. When he steps before a camera, it is as if the rest of the world ceases to exist. He is a citizen of the screen.” Renoir neglected to add that Orson was likewise “a citizen of the stage” that took root at Todd and burst into full bloom at the festival we are here celebrating.

Thank you.

***

Reprinted with kind permission of Todd Tarbox, 2014.
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