(Editor’s note: Kathleen Spaltro, who managed the 2014 Welles commemorative event in Woodstock, Illinois, is a writer and editor. A resident of Woodstock from 1990 onward, she has for many years advocated greater awareness of the importance of Woodstock in Orson Welles’s life and career).

By KATHLEEN SPALTRO

A towering figure in 20th century culture, Welles has a reputation as an elitist, but actually he possessed a passionate faith in the general audience’s capacity to embrace his work.  “Nothing has ever been too good for the public,” he noted to himself in the early Forties.  “Nothing has ever been good enough for the public.”

Orson Welles died at 70, 30 years ago.  In May 2015, Woodstock Celebrates, Inc. will celebrate his 100th birthday.  As the decades pass, Welles’s greatness as both an American and an international cultural force becomes ever more apparent.  The man loved Woodstock, and we wanted Woodstock to know that – and to know him.

EARLY LIFE

The 1915 birth of George Orson to Beatrice and Richard Welles followed by 10 years the birth of his older brother Richard. Ominously, their parents completely rejected Richard, eventually institutionalized for alleged mental illness. In seeming contrast, the parents exalted the genius of their younger son. Welles claimed that Beatrice read Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare to him when he was 2; that she chose as his primer Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream; that, by age 7, he knew Lear by heart and, at 10, had memorized the great Shakespearean tragedies.

These tales revealed the incessant parental emphasis on his genius. Welles’s parents separated when he was 6. While his father enjoyed a lively extramarital life, his mother had acquired an obsessive admirer, Dr. Maurice Bernstein, whom Orson called “Dadda.” Claiming that the toddler Orson had greeted him with the observation that man is the only medicine taking animal, Bernstein, too, related to Orson as a prodigy. Despite all of this inflated regard, Welles later confided to a biographer that he always feared “letting them down.” These adults’ acceptance of the child remained contingent on his performing up to their grandiose standards.

After Beatrice Welles died in 1924, “Dadda” Bernstein contended with her widower for Orson’s affections. When in the company of his alcoholic father, Orson took care of him while they battled over Orson’s artistic ambitions, of which his father disapproved. After Richard Welles died of heart disease and kidney failure in 1930, just before Orson’s graduation from Todd School for Boys in Woodstock,  Bernstein in 1931 became Orson’s guardian. He had transferred his obsessive and possessive love from Beatrice to her son. Welles told others later that he had “killed” his father Richard.

ROGER HILL AND TODD SCHOOL FOR BOYS

A countervailing, positive influence came from Orson’s exposure to Roger Hill, a teacher who eventually became headmaster of the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, which Orson had entered in Fall 1926 and from which he graduated in 1931. By Welles’s own account later, he was not looking for parents, having already had too many. Hill served as an ideal older brother—joyous, non-authoritarian, firmly supportive of creativity and autonomy. With the encouragement of this remarkable teacher, Welles engaged in theatrical productions as actor, writer, scenic artist, and/or director. Hill later remembered, “I knew he’d be a great man, and I tried to structure a life for him at Todd that wouldn’t impede his brilliance at all.” Welles himself named Hill as the single most important influence upon Welles, both personally and creatively. “I think of him all the time,” Welles asserted in middle age, for “[Hill was] the biggest [influence on me] by all odds. I wanted to be like him.” Welles stressed, “[Roger Hill] has never ceased to be my idea of who I would like to be.”

But the importance of Roger Hill extends far beyond his effect on Orson Welles. Usually, when people discuss Todd School, they mention its many physical attributes, among which were a film lab, radio studio, and recording studio. But these were only the outward manifestations of a remarkably insightful and effective approach to education–the most important point to make about the school.

Hill educated many young men (and some young women) by following the philosophy that giving responsibility and power to students motivates them to display responsibility and develop creativity. Given both responsibility and power, expected to attain a professional standard, Todd students were not subordinates but, instead, collaborators in their own education.

Roger Hill deserves wider appreciation of his accomplishment as an innovative educator. As editor of the catalog Todd: A Community Devoted to Boys and their Interests, produced by the senior class in 1930-31, Welles explained, “The uniqueness of the school lies in the fact that boys do things here instead of just being told about them.” Anyone who has ever hoped for more creativity and effectiveness in education would be fascinated by Roger Hill’s achievements at the Todd School for Boys. His example should not be lost to time but preserved for emulation.

Between entering the school in Fall 1926 and graduating in 1931, young Orson participated in about 30 theatrical productions as actor, writer, scenic artist, and/or director. These included an unwieldy 1930 welding of Henry VI and Richard III that prefigured a later troubled 1939 production of Shakespeare’s English history chronicle called Five Kings, still later recycled into stage (1960) and film (1964-66) productions of Chimes at Midnight.  Hence, Woodstock saw the genesis of a film that many consider Welles’s greatest cinematic achievement. As a student, Orson also took full advantage of Todd School facilities for radio and movie production.

DUBLIN, WOODSTOCK, NEW YORK

When Ralph Waldo Emerson thanked Walt Whitman for an edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Emerson wrote, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.” On 16-18 May 2014, Woodstock Celebrates, Inc. commemorated the beginning of Orson Welles’s great career here in Woodstock in the Thirties, as well as its long foreground in Welles’s mentorship at Woodstock’s Todd School by Roger Hill.

To Roger Hill, I apply Henry Adams’s observation that “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”  Orson Welles would have been the first to emphasize that Roger Hill’s influence on Welles in fact never stopped and remained a lifelong motivator.

After Welles’s 1931 graduation from Todd School, the 16-year-old Welles travelled to Ireland and there made his debut as a professional actor at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. Upon Welles’s return to the Midwest, his ongoing creative relationship with Hill included a production of Twelfth Night at Todd in 1933, as well as collaboration on a play about John Brown called Marching Song. Their partnership struck a high note in 1934, with the Todd Press publication of Everybody’s Shakespeare by Roger Hill and Orson Welles. Also, in Woodstock in 1934, Welles directed and acted in his first film, the eight-minute short Hearts of Age.

Moreover, Hill financed the 1934 Todd Drama Festival at the Woodstock Opera House that featured Welles, as well as Irish actor-managers who had given Orson his theatrical debut a few years earlier in Dublin’s Gate Theatre. (Welles years later cast them in his film of Othello.) During this theatrical festival, Welles made his professional debut at the Woodstock Opera House as an American theatre director.

Virginia Nicholson, a Chicago socialite, participated in the 1934 Drama Festival. After Orson proposed to Virginia in the gazebo on the Woodstock Square, she became his first wife.

Besides Welles’s marriage to Virginia Nicholson, other 1934 events had ongoing consequences, Welles would go to New York to become a director and star of stage productions. He would eventually go to Hollywood to explore his interest in film direction, And Everybody’s Shakespeare, the 1934 edition of three plays that emphasized study through performance, would evolve into The Mercury Shakespeare, an edition of four plays, published at the end of the Thirties when Welles had become famous as a radio and stage actor and director.

THE SCOPE OF ORSON WELLES’S ACHIEVEMENT

A world-class figure in twentieth-century culture, Orson Welles was a tremendous force who excelled in film, live theatre, and the broadcast media of radio and television.

Of the 85 films that master director Martin Scorsese considers must-see movies, Orson Welles directed 6 and appeared in a seventh.

Citizen Kane (1941)

The Third Man (1949) [directed by Carol Reed]

Macbeth (1948)

Touch of Evil (1958)

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

Othello (1952)

The Trial (1962)

Although Scorsese did not list Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965), some consider it Welles’s greatest film. Others esteem The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) as an eighth Welles film masterpiece.

Besides excelling as a film director and as an actor in both his own and others’ movies, Welles was a giant as a director of and actor in live theatre, as a radio director and actor, and as a creator of television programs.

While his most famous radio broadcast was the notorious War of the Worlds program that terrified many in 1938, Welles participated in many radio broadcasts.  In addition, Welles distinguished himself in television production with The Fountain of Youth (1958) and The Immortal Story (1968).  Moreover, Welles directed several famous stage plays, including Macbeth (1936), Julius Caesar (1937), Around the World in Eighty Days (1946), and King Lear (1956).

RADIO DIRECTOR AND STAR

Welles’s career in New York included both live theatre and radio productions as Welles pursued his aims by employing both media, often simultaneously. So the Mercury Theatre company that he founded with John Houseman to stage theatrical productions expanded to include radio theatre in its incarnation as Mercury Theatre on the Air.

Welles’s involvement with radio between 1936 and 1941 encompassed more than 100 radio theatre dramatizations; his participation included producing, directing, writing, and/or acting. Besides appearing in Cavalcade of America and The March of Time as well as writing, directing, and acting in a seven-part radio version of Les Misérables (1937), he became famous to radio audiences as the crime-fighting lead character in The Shadow. In 1938, CBS’s Mercury Theatre on the Air began to broadcast productions of such classics as Dracula, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, Julius Caesar, Sherlock Holmes, The Pickwick Papers, and A Tale of Two Cities. Then came the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast that frightened many listeners into believing that a Martian invasion of New Jersey was occurring.

Campbell Soups subsequently offered to sponsor Welles’s radio productions, so the show became The Campbell Playhouse. From 1938 to 1940, it offered to its radio audience Welles’s productions of Rebecca, A Christmas Carol, Our Town, and The Magnificent Ambersons (later filmed by Welles). Lady Esther cosmetics sponsored the Orson Welles Show that followed in 1941-42.

With the advent of World War Two, Welles participated in nonfiction broadcasts like We Hold These Truths, Ceiling Unlimited, and Hello Americans (which sought to improve relations between North America and Latin America). In the mid-Forties, the Orson Welles Almanac made its debut as a radio variety show. Orson Welles Commentaries offered Welles’s political opinions, including a sustained focus on an African-American veteran blinded by a beating when he returned home. These broadcasts may have influenced President Harry Truman’s 1947 decision to desegregate the armed services. In 1945, Welles took over This Is My Best. Mercury Summer Theatre in 1946 offered Around the World in Eighty Days and Moby Dick.

Besides these radio programs of his own, Welles appeared on many other contemporary radio shows, such as Suspense, Lux Radio Theatre, and Jack Benny’s programs. Later, in the early Fifties, after Welles’s superb acting of the character Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man, Welles played Lime on British radio in The Adventures of Harry Lime. He also served as the narrator in the British radio series The Black Museum and portrayed Professor Moriarty in the BBC’s 1954 Sherlock Holmes, with John Gielgud as Sherlock Holmes and Ralph Richardson as John Watson.

After Welles’s death in 1985, he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988. Many of these broadcasts are available for listening at https://www.wellesnet.com/audio-orson-welles-the-radio-years/. See also https://www.wellesnet.com/radioindex.htm.

LIVE THEATRE DIRECTOR AND STAR

Orson Welles soon graduated from his beginnings as an actor in live theatre by adding the responsibilities of writing, producing, and directing stage productions. With the production of Trilby during the Todd Theatre Festival at the Woodstock Opera House in the summer of 1934, Welles had made his debut as a professional American director. Just before the summer of 1934 and just after it, Welles toured with Katharine Cornell’s theatre company in Romeo and Juliet, in which he played Mercutio and then Tybalt. Welles’s work as Tybalt attracted the attention of John Houseman in New York City, and in 1935 Welles played McGafferty in a Houseman production of Panic. These two men formed a creative collaboration that would result in several groundbreaking and memorable stage productions under the aegis of the Federal Theatre Project [a New Deal program] and then the Mercury Theatre,

Their collaboration in 1936-37 included three particularly famous shows: a version of Macbeth set in Haiti rather than Scotland and performed in Harlem, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and the controversial political drama The Cradle Will Rock.

The innovative presentation of Macbeth prefigured another imaginative reconstruction of Shakespeare, the renowned 1937 modern-dress, Fascist-costumed Julius Caesar in which Welles played the ambivalent assassin Brutus. Other Mercury Theatre shows through 1941 included Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays edited by Welles into Five Kings, and the socially courageous exploration of African-American life, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Welles envisioned for Too Much Johnson, also from this time period, the inclusion of some filmed sequences long thought lost but recently discovered in an Italian warehouse and restored for viewing.

Welles’s film career turned him away from both live theatre and radio in the early Forties, but just as he resumed his radio career upon occasion, he returned to the stage periodically. The late Forties and early Fifties saw Welles’s productions of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, Macbeth, and Othello, while Welles’s contributions to the stage in the mid-Fifties to the early Sixties included Moby Dick Rehearsed, King Lear, Chimes at Midnight [another reworking of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays] and the absurdist drama Rhinoceros.

FILM DIRECTOR AND ACTOR

Welles is best-known to his fellow Americans as a movie star and as the director of “the greatest film ever made,” Citizen Kane. Perhaps most Americans think of Welles as primarily an actor in movies. But, as good as his acting often was, his contribution as a director of films far surpasses his acting prowess. And, even though Citizen Kane still stands as an unique directorial achievement, Welles’s later films certainly command just as much attention, admiration, and interest. Indeed, many Welles enthusiasts prefer one or more of his later films as their personal favorites.

As an actor in movies directed by others, Welles gave notable performances in Jane Eyre (1943) as Jane’s moody and mysterious employer; in Black Magic (1947) as Cagliostro; in Prince of Foxes (1948) as Cesare Borgia; in Moby Dick (1956) as Father Mapple; in The Long Hot Summer (1957) as Will Varner; as the Clarence Darrow-based character in Compulsion (1959); and in A Man for All Seasons (1966) as Thomas Cardinal Wolsey. Perhaps Welles’s best acting in another director’s film was his mesmerizing Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949).

Welles often used income derived from his acting in movies (and for radio and live theatre) to finance his own films. Consequently, he often was busily acting for other directors while he was producing, directing, writing, and acting for himself. From the Forties, Welles’s own films include Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Stranger (1946), and The Lady from Shanghai (1947). For its technical innovations and narrative wizardry, Kane is often praised as the greatest film ever made, while Ambersons, although mutilated by others, is still distinctively Wellesian and possibly Welles’s most engaging and likeable film. The Stranger entertains with several echoes and jokes from Welles’s days at Todd School in Woodstock. And, in The Lady from Shanghai, Welles elicited several great performances, including a superb femme fatale impersonation by his then-wife, Rita Hayworth. Welles adapted Macbeth in a film completed in a little more than three weeks (1948).

From the Fifties onward, Welles encountered much frustration in financing and completing his projects. However, the much-delayed Othello (1952) proved to be a masterpiece. The uneven Mr. Arkadin (1955) included several masterful performances by character actors. Then, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, Welles created two more masterpieces: the fascinating crime drama Touch of Evil (1958) and the beautiful The Trial (1962), based on Franz Kafka’s novel. Several more years of effort culminated in the masterful Chimes at Midnight (1965), the end-result of decades of tinkering with Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses history plays, and in the film-essay about forgery, F for Fake (1973). In the Seventies, Welles struggled to finish The Other Side of the Wind, which others have plans to complete and restore in 2015. Besides The Other Side of the Wind, Welles envisioned several other unproduced and/or unfinished films. Among these, It’s All True was salvaged by others and won awards as an excellent documentary.

TELEVISION DIRECTOR

Orson Welles’s career as a television personality encompassed projects in which he appeared as a guest star or a guest host, as well as shows for which he wrote, produced, directed, and/or acted. Some of these guest projects included a performance for Peter Brook as King Lear on Omnibus (1953) as well as a guest stint on I Love Lucy (1956) called “Lucy Meets Orson Welles,” and a Hallmark Hall of Fame production of The Man Who Came to Dinner (1972).

Some of Welles’s own television shows featured Welles discussing a miscellany of topics that interested him: Orson Welles’ Sketchbook (1955), the travelogue Around the World With Orson Welles (1955), and Orson Welles and People (1956). The Orson Welles Show (1978), a pilot for a Welles-hosted talk show, never attracted the necessary financial commitment. This pilot included interviews of Burt Reynolds, Jim Henson, and Frank Oz, as well as magic tricks performed by Welles with the help of Angie Dickinson.

Other Welles-created television programs focused on a single theme. These included Portrait of Gina (1958) [about the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida], the Peabody Award-winning but unsold Desilu series pilot The Fountain of Youth that aired on Colgate Theatre (1958), In the Land of Don Quixote (1964), Isak Dinesen’s The Immortal Story (1968), his lost The Merchant of Venice (1969), and Filming “Othello” (1979) [Welles’s documentary about his film of Shakespeare’s tragedy]. Ben Walters of The Guardian in 2009 praised Welles’s The Fountain of Youth as “a radical masterpiece of television art. A playful and macabre distillation of his ideas about TV as a nimble storyteller’s medium, it placed Welles in the thick of his story, deploying still photographs and illustrations, on-camera set changes and tricksy sound mixing to adorn a wry tale about vanity and ageing.”

MAJOR AWARDS

Lifetime Achievement Awards

Venice Film Festival, 1970

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1971

American Film Institute, 1975

Los Angeles Film Critics Association, 1978

British Film Institute, 1983

David di Donatello Awards: Luchino Visconti Award, 1983

Directors Guild of America, 1984

National Board of Review, 1985

Academy Awards

Best Original Screenplay, Citizen Kane, 1941

Cannes Film Festival

Grand Prize, Othello, 1952

Best Actor, Compulsion, 1959

20th Anniversary Prize and Technical Grand Prize, Chimes at Midnight, 1966

Cinema Eye Honors Awards

For F for Fake, 2014

French Syndicate of Cinema Critics

Best Film, The Trial, 1964

Hugo

Best Dramatic Presentation—Short Form, War of the Worlds, 1939

Los Angeles Film Critics Association

Best Documentary/Nonfiction Film, It’s All True, 1993

Munich Film Festival

One Future Prize, It’s All True, 1994

Peabody Award

For The Fountain of Youth, 1958

Sant Jordi Awards

Best Foreign Film, F for Fake, 1974

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