By TODD TARBOX
It’s always a joy returning to Woodstock where I spent my first 10 years living with my parents, Joanne and Hascy Tarbox, and my sister, Melinda, at the Todd School for Boys, a magical world that Orson referred to as his “Camelot.” It was the Camelot for hundreds of boys and a few fortunate girls, Orson’s first daughter, Christopher, being one of them.
I am particularly pleased being invited by Arlene to share a few reflections on Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts — that recounts the 60-year relationship between my maternal grandfather, Roger Hill, who for 25 years was the headmaster of the Todd School, and one of the school’s most accomplished students, Orson Welles.
Their extraordinary relationship began two years after the death of Orson’s mother, Beatrice, when 11-year-old Welles was enrolled Todd, where my grandfather was a teacher and my great-grandfather, Noble Hill, was the headmaster.
Orson arrived campus on September 15, 1926, and like all entering students, he was given the Stanford-Binet test measuring intelligence. It consisted of questions followed by multiple answers, requiring the student to underscore the correct response. Orson’s first test had this question: “Deserts are crossed by horses, trains, automobiles, camels, donkeys.” Orson 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 titanic creative presence known. During the next five years, 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 successful blending of Shakespeare’s English history plays into his Five Kings, which was performed at graduation. The highpoint of his writing career at Todd was writing and editing the following year’s school catalog, Todd: A Community Devoted to Boys and Their Interests. As I write in the book, “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… Our school is the oldest in the west. It was started in 1848 by Richard Todd. He had a wife whose name was Martha Clover and her mother’s name was Wallingford, and that is where we get the names of some of our buildings. Mr. Todd came from Princeton.
To give those of you who are unfamiliar with the Todd School, allow Orson to provide a glimpse of the school circa 1931:
Noble Hill was in charge for 40 years. He enlarged the campus to about 10 times its old size and added the forty acre north campus.
Roger Hill, or Skipper as everybody calls him, has been here 12 years and everybody knows what he has done…
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 dramatics, 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.
Orson and I share a common affection for Woodstock and consider it “home.” 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.”
Orson’s sense of Woodstock being home was intimately coupled — pun intended — with his affection for my grandparents. The summer after graduating from Todd and launching his professional acting career at the age of 16 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, Orson wrote to my grandparents requesting a copy of Todd: A Community Devoted to Boys and Their Interest and ended his letter wistfully confessing, “I am unspeakably lonesome for Todd — which is just another way of spelling your name.” The resilient tie with my grandfather and my grandmother, Hortense, unlike many of Orson’s other relationships, never waned.
Five decades after Orson graduated from Todd, Skipper asked Orson if he remembered precisely what prompted his coming to Todd. Orson’s memory on the subject, like his recall on all subjects that interested him was encyclopedic. Welles’ response was particularly colorful:
“I returned to Chicago, where Dadda, not my father, met me because my father had gone off to Trinidad. I began living with Dadda and that’s when I began my brief incarceration in a public school and where I met captivating little Miss Levy, who organized a small club for orgiastic practices in the basement of her apartment building.
“One day, Mrs. Levy appeared in our apartment denouncing Dadda for allowing me to become a raving sex monster who had deflowered her daughter and I remember her ranting, “Look what happened to that little boy Bobby Franks at the hands of Leopold and Loeb.” I remember that very clearly. There was supposed to be a strong connection between the Leopold and Loeb murder and what we were playing down in the basement. Have I lost you? It was just one sexual encounter after another. It didn’t calm down until I got to Woodstock and was able to catch my breath. I really had a terrible feeling. I didn’t know what Leopold and Loeb had done. I’d seen the headlines, and I suddenly realized that these innocent foolings around that we were doing in the basement would send you to the death house. So that’s why I went rather meekly to this reform school, which was the Todd School for Boys.
“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. And the price was beginning my career on the stage performing in your musical comedy, Finesse the Queen, and singing, “Ah Gondolivia, Gondolivia, land of melody.”
“I thought that those flopping galoshes were the most dramatic thing I’d ever seen. In addition to performing a bit of magic, I cobbled together a Tennyson comic act, which included some snappy material, with the ending line, “Do you see those gracious meadows?” “No, but I see the Noble Hills,” which absolutely brought the house down.
“All my early acting and magic efforts were to impress you…”
Much is known and written about Orson Welles, comparatively little is known about Roger Hill, who lived in Woodstock until the late 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, known when he was a boy and when Orson attended, as the Todd Seminary for Boys. 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.
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 their 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 that afforded 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.
Not surprisingly, Woodstock and the Todd School are frequent topics of conversation throughout Friendship. Reminiscing on the Todd Theatre Festival in 1934, Skipper asks Orson:
ROGER: Do you remember the charming, if florid, prose you wrote for our Todd Theatre Festival mailing piece? I ran across a copy the other day. Where is it, oh, here it is. If you’ll indulge me, it starts out, “Like a wax flower under a bell of glass, in the paisley and gingham county of McHenry is Woodstock, grand capital of mid-Victorianism in the Midwest. Towering over a Square full of Civil War monuments, a bandstand and a springhouse is the edifice in the picture. This very rustic and rusticated thing is a municipal office building, a public library, and fire department and what is more to our purpose, an honest-to-horsehair opera house.”
Not everyone was pleased with your characterization of the town. Many of the city fathers were mad at you and me for what they considered our making fun of the town with your effusive—
ORSON: Well, there was nothing to make fun of. What I wrote was in affection and admiration.
ROGER: Of course it was. Now the town burghers quote your passage of praise in all their promotional pieces. Times have changed and the town now treasures its roots, which you extolled. But, 50 years ago, Woodstock was the home of the Woodstock Typewriter factory, the Oliver Typewriter Company, and several other large and prosperous manufacturing operations. The city fathers of that era wanted to be the new Elgin, a prosperous manufacturing center, home of the Elgin Watch Company, and 20 miles south of Woodstock. They didn’t share your bucolic, sepia-colored image of the town. They didn’t want your charm at all. “Watch Woodstock grow!” was their ceaseless mantra.
Another of my favorite exchanges between the two touches on another Illinois town significant in Orson’s life prior to attending Todd, Grand Detour on the Rock River, a few miles north of Dixon. Skipper is working on a second edition of his One Man’s Time and Chance/A Memoir of Eighty Years 1985/1975 when Orson calls:
ROGER: My mind now is on your childhood. Did you receive the photograph I sent of your father’s old hotel in Grand Detour?
ORSON: Oh, yes. That photograph was taken before my father died. I remember the addition he built and the photograph predates those changes.
ROGER: Let me ask you a question. As you come into Grand Detour, there’s an historical sign, which has a paragraph or two about the community being the home of John Deere and his plow. Well, I think there also ought to be a little notice of the hotel that burned down, which was quite an historic spot, and the Orson Welles mention. I’m reasonably certain the village would do this if I approached the city fathers.
ORSON: Oh for — Why? We’re all going to be dumped eventually. What does Thomas Mann say on the subject?
“Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.” [Laughs ruefully] I don’t think I did anything of note in Grand Detour and that’s why I think it would be pompous to introduce myself. After all, the entire territory is now given over as sacred ground to Ronnie Reagan.
ROGER: I accept your argument. On the other hand, unless you haven’t definitely ruled me out, I’m going to broach the subject with the good burghers of your long ago haunts.
ORSON: Oh, I don’t forbid it. But permit me to giggle quietly and think how much happier I’d be if you’d use the time to visit your old lonely friend because the only real existence we have is the people we love. Putting up little signposts and putting notices in libraries where the paper will rot away in seventy years is inexpedient. I don’t believe in terrestrial immortality. I have my doubts about the other, but I’m damn sure that terrestrial immortality is a fickle lady at best…
I’m happy to report that with the advent of the Internet, and thanks to Caryl and Dan Lemanksi and Woodstock Library’s Martha Hansen, Skipper’s Time and Chance is now available online, and I’m equally pleased to add that my treasured print copy shows no sign of rot.
I mentioned earlier that Orson often referred to the Todd School as his Camelot. Skipper argued that Todd’s closing was particularly traumatic for Orson, who had spoken a number of times in the 1940s of one day returning to Todd to teach. In 1945, he told Hedda Hopper, “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 there (Todd) and give full rein to my ideas. That’s when life will really begin for me.” It must have been a blow to Orson to realize less than a decade later that life would never “really begin” again for him at Todd.
Orson’s sorrow over the school’s closing mellowed over the decades, but his love for Todd, Woodstock, and my grandparents never diminished.
Joseph McBride in his book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career provides a charming example of Orson’s lifelong affection for Todd and the Hills. In the late 1970s, while directing The Other Side of the Wind, quoting McBride:
“When Welles felt in a particularly festive mood, or wanted to cheer up his sluggish actors, he would burst into a favorite song. It came from Finesse the Queen, a musical comedy review he starred in as an 11-year-old boy at Todd School in the 1920s. Hearing him warble the tune in a tone of innocent sincerity took the listener back to Welles’ semi-mythological youth:”
“Everyone loves the fellow who is smiling,
He brightens the day and lightens the way for you —
He’s always making other people happy
Looking rosy when you’re feeling awful blue.”
Writing the book, I came to appreciate the catholicity of their interests and their dexterity at moving from topic to topic. I was also impressed with, and have included in the book, a number Orson’s early erudite and articulate letters to my grandparents, as well as several pages from their co-authored textbook series of Shakespeare plays, Everybody’s Shakespeare published when Welles was 19.
In closing, to provide an example of the wide expanse of subjects the two would traverse during a typical conversation, I would like to play for you several minutes of their exchanges from Act Three, Scene Four, entitled, “I Think We First Spoke, And then Sang, Later We Told Stories, And Finally Danced.” The conversation begins with Orson and Skipper’s delightful discourse on New Year’s Eve in New York City, and concludes with a poignant reflection on death. Skipper and Orson were devoted students of literature — Shakespeare, the Bible being two of their literary wellsprings. In the closing minutes of the scene, Orson and Roger recite from both — one offering a line and the other completing it, which I see as a marvelous metaphor of their abiding friendship and shared real existence.
After listening to a few minutes of their real existence, I would be pleased to carry on a dialogue with you on Friendship.
Many thanks for sharing your Saturday afternoon with me.
___________