Editor’s note: With the interest in the Orson Welles’ celebrations planned in Woodstock, Illinois, in 2014 and 2015, as well as the recent publication of “Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts” by Todd Tarbox, Wellesnet is offering up a look at Welles childhood from the man himself.
While he never penned an autobiography, the following essays appeared in English in the December 1982 – January 1983 issue of Paris Vogue. An editorial footnote in Vogue identified them as from “an autobiography that Orson Welles is currently writing.” These essays have appeared in the past on Wellesnet and several other websites, but hopefully this will appeal to some of our newer readers.
‘My Father Wore Black Spats’
By ORSON WELLES for Paris Vogue
His shoes were made for him in London and his hats in Paris. When he traveled by train he carried his own bed linen and a small Persian prayer rug for his feet. His cigars, from a private selection in Havanna, traveled first to England, here they were allowed to “breathe” in bond for two years before going to join him wherever he might be. His cigarettes, of Virginia tobacco “straight cut”, were beautifully made with an untreated paper so that when he was not quite sober enough to remember to keep puffing, they went out quietly like one of his cigars. Thus he lived to a great age before setting himself on fire. This happened in a mid-Western village in a small hotel which he had purchased with a view to enjoying, for a month or so each autumn, the simple pleasures of rural America. For the rest of the year he mainly commuted between his houses in Jamaica and Peking – these being the last of the pleasant places on earth where dozens of skilled domestic servants were available and cheap.
What he liked best, I think, were the sea crossings: the long freedom from lands in which he felt himself increasingly diminished. There was no more welcoming spot for my father than the bar of a nice, old-fashioned ocean liner: the creaking leather in the cradling seas, the cards he played so masterfully, a captive audience for his stories.
As for the spats, they were appreciated by the sort of gentleman who never traveled without his valet, and who had yet to acknowledge that the motor car had already purged the streets of the nuisances of the horse. Spats were mauve, dove gray and even white. That the spats of my father were black should explain why – although his chosen way of life might strike a modern reader as a touch on the flamboyant side – he would be pained to learn that he could never give such an impression. He hoped to be mistaken for one of those he most admired: some sober figure in the world of high finance, and not the idle, hedonistic London clubman he despised, – and so closely resembled.
The country hotel, in a horse and buggy village called Grand Detour, was his final self-indulgence. He did nothing to modernize it besides erecting an improved version of the classic smokehouse for ham and sausage, wild turkey, Eastern oysters and Western trout. In a separate bake house beaten biscuits and corn bread were produced in the early mornings by a black specialist imported from the south.
There was venison, wild duck, and much other fame in season. The terrapin* came to live to us from Maryland, and the wild rice from an Indian reservation where my father claimed to have been inaugurated as an honorary brave. But under his management this was not a welcoming hostelry. As far as possible, guests came by invitation only: a few writers my Godfather George Ade, for instance, Booth Tarkington, and some old sports from Broadway. The wooden-legged dragon who kept the gates went by the name of Olie (Rattlesnake Oil) Emery, in semi-retirement after a long career as a feathered red-skin in middle-Western medicine shows; and on the stormiest nights the weariest of lost travelers were seldom accommodated.
We’d just returned from China, and there was a nice Christmassy fall of snow on the ground of the night of the fire. To my great regret I was not present, having been packed off to boarding school for what was to be the last of my three years of formal education. The few old cronies my father had invited were yet to arrive, and most of the hotel staff had been given the night off to go to Dixon, six miles away, for the movie show.
I used to hate the Dixon movies. In the exciting spots the film invariably got stuck in the projector; and in the back rows the male teen-agers made rowdy noises during the love scenes. Dixon just then was Ronald Reagan’s town. We never met. He moved in slightly older circles (as he does today). But he would have been a member of the boys’ choir in the movie house. I believe it was in Dixon that our President formed his basic image of that peculiarly innocent America to which he would like us all to return. Dixon had the kind of main street we used to see in a Hollywood studio, with hitching posts, barber poles and a wooden Indian in front of the cigar store. Norman Rockwell. Grand Detour was Mark Twain. Anyway, that six-mile distance was too much for the Dixon Fire Department which arrived only in time to preside over the smoking ruins of what had been America’s most exclusive hotel. There was some concern for old Rattlesnake, but he had been spared, having spent the entire evening in dalliance with a lady called Easy Emma in a ruined barn down by the river where, some years earlier, John Deere had forged the first steel plow.
At the very last moment my father (the suspected arsonist) emerged from the flames dressed only in his night shirt, carrying in one hand an empty parrot cage and in the other, a framed hand-tinted photograph of a lady in pink thights (an ex-mistress fondly remembered) named Trixi Friganza.
My mother was the “Trixi” who became his first wife: Beatrice Ibes well-born, and comfortably wealthy until the day when Grandfather Ives announced that he has somehow managed to lose the last of his coal mines. After this Miss Ives – already a gifted concert pianist – went to work as a “typewriter” (as stenographers were then called) to pay for the completion of her musical training. She was a celebrated beauty, a champion rifle shot, a highly imaginative practical joker, a radical and suffragette who held, after her marriage, political office, and even did a little time in jail.
Why did she marry my father?
Much of the older of the two, he was, in fact, an Edwardian bon vivant who picked most of the ladies from the musical comedy stage. He had a famous name because of a cigar. The “Dick Welles” cigar was a cheap and popular smoke named for a horse which had won the Kentucky Derby. The horse had been named for my father. Apart from this one doubtful honor, Dick Welles was mildly notorious as a man about town who dabbled in many enterprises including the six-day bicycle race which he brought to America. He had himself cut quite a figure as an international automobile racer. A wagon and carriage works belonged to one of his crazy aunts and here he had built some of America’s first cars. Because he was a friend of the American novelist Booth Tarkington, it has long been a family assumption that the author had my father in mind when he created the character which I will always think of as the Joseph Cotten role in “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
Unlucky in the field of industry, my father invariably recouped his business losses at the gaming tables. He broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and was a bit ashamed of it. In his passport he described himself as an inventor. He actually got a sort of aeroplane off the ground quite shortly after Kitty Hawk. Perhaps the most original of his creations: to this day it remains the only flying machine specifically designed to keep the motor at all times safely on the ground.
My mother played the kind of music and liked the kind of people he abhorred. She was even, among so many other things, a scholar of East Indian literature. What could he have made of that? Both were great charmers – that must have been it. A strange marriage all the same. My paternal grandmother put a curse on it.
The ballroom on the top floor of the old woman’s house had, at some remote period, been mysteriously converted into an enormous indoor miniature golf course full of wooden hills and nasty little sand traps, still partly covered with rotting green paper. Crowning the highest of the hills there had been erected, at a later date, what was unmistakably an altar. Representing some more recent epoch in Grandmother’s spiritual progress, it was no place for Christian sacraments. The feathers of many birds long dead lay all about the golf course, and the altar itself was deeply stained with blood. This dreadful woman – dwarfish, obese and evil-smelling – was a practicing witch.
On the occasion of her son’s funeral, celebrated in that huge house of hers this hellish creature managed to sandwich some obscure passages into the ordinary protestant service, so that the wretched, weak-willed minister was confused enough to read out during the ceremony several of the more bizarre invocations employed by Madame Blavatsky, and great, reeking dollops of Aleister Crowley.
I was in no condition to interfere, being convinced – as I am now – that I had killed my father.
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‘A Brief Career as a Musical Prodigy’
By ORSON WELLES for Paris Vogue
Violinist, pianist…child conductor…
This last was pretty much of a fake. By the time I was seven I was reading through the scores and waving my little baton in the presence of such people as Heifetz, Casals, Schnabel, Wallenstein and Mischa Ellman, when they gathered informally in chamber groups in my mother’s house. Her own professional life was frustrated by long illness, but just about everybody was in love with her, so the celebrated musicians, when they came to visit and play, were kind enough to pretend that the midget Von Karajan in front of them was not (as I must truly have been) a damned nuisance.
I find it strange that my mother indulged me in this since she indulged me in nothing else. She was not the musical version of a stage mother, but was simply resolved that whatever I did had to be good if it was to be done at all, and I was made to practice hours on end every day.
Once, distracted to the point of madness by endlessly repeated musical scales, I attempted suicide.
What I really wanted to end, of course, was not my life but the scales, and I did place myself in a position of imminent peril on the outside of one of those railings in the Ritz some two and a half stories above the Place Vendome. I hung there listening to the wretched spinster lady who’d been engaged to supervise my practice calling hysterically for my mother in an adjoining room.
Pause… Then my mother’s voice: “Well,” she said, “if he wants to jump, let him jump.”
The truth is her heart was in her mouth. She knew her son, and knew that stepping off into space would have appealed to me for its gaudy element of melodrama and pathos. (“Now they’ll be sorry.”) She also imagined that a child could have no significant sense of the reality of death. But in this she was mistaken. I knew very well that she was going to die, and how real that would be, and how very soon it would happen. Whenever she left me, the moment the door had closed, I would burst into tears, afraid that I would never see her again.
But she was certainly right about that business of mine out on the balcony. If I’d heard her rushing toward me the excitement might well have been just enough, and I wouldn’t be here now remembering it. Later, my mother told me that she stood still all that time in the hall outside the room with the piano. By the sheer force of her formidable character she persuaded the spinster lady to muffle her whimpering… Then, finally, there came to her ears the sound she’d been waiting for:
“Do-re-mi-fa-sol…”
My mother had won. She was, in all things, as tough-minded as she was loving-hearted.
The last time I was allowed to visit her… It must have cost great effort and much pain to have let me find her sitting up in bed. And how much like her it was to have arranged it so that our farewell in that black room was made to seem like the high point of my birthday party. I heard that cello voice: “Well now, Georgie-Porgy…” I’d just learned that I’d been baptized “George” — that Orson was a mere middle name, and had reacted tragically to the revelation. My father had said, “Hell, we had to call you ‘Orson’ — every damned pullman porter in the country is named ‘George’.” My gangsterish little friends in the neighborhood had taken up the maddening chant:
“Georgie-Porgie, puddin’ and pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry!”
The first line of the hateful couplet seemed to sum up the chubby little grub I knew myself to be, but I rather liked the part about kissing girls. Mother, who knew about that awful jingle, was teasing me — as she so often liked to do.
Then I heard her again, a voice in the shadows, speaking Shakespeare:
“These antique fables apprehend, More than cool reason ever comprehends.”
The quotation, spoken consolingly, came from her choice of a primer when she was first teaching me to read. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is not the easiest way to start spelling out one’s first written words, but “Why,” she demanded, “should a person at his most impressionable age be shoveled into the sordid company of ‘Auntie’s Nice Kitty-Cat,’ and ‘Little Sister’s Silly Red Ball’?” I was marinated in poetry, and to learn right at the beginning, “a sense of awe, delight and wonder.”
And now she was holding me in one of her looks. Some of these could be quite terrible. I’d seen my father wither under them into a crisp, brown winter’s leaf.
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.”
Those great shining eyes looked dark by the light of the eight small candles. I can remember now what I was thinking. I thought how green those eyes had always been when it was sunny.
Then — all tenderness, and as if speaking from an immense distance:
“A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king, Who ever had so sweet a changeling…?”
What did she mean? Was I, indeed, a changeling? (I have, in later years, been given certain hints…)
Mother had told me that because it was just six o’clock in the morning: time for everyone to start work in the factories, whistles and bells had all started blowing at once, like heralds, at the moment of my birth.
“This stupid birthday cake,” she said, “is just another stupid 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.
Copyright 1982 – Paris Vogue/ Conde Naste
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