By RAY KELLY

Acclaimed biographer Patrick McGilligan has focused his sights on Orson Welles’ youth and produced the definitive account of the wunderkind’s first 25 years..

At more than 800 pages, Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane  explores Welles remarkable youth in well-researched and previously unknown detail, painting a rich portrait of his extraordinary parents and his rise to fame on stage, radio and film.

The book casts new light on Welles’ early days in Hollywood and dispels myths about his personal life. For example, McGilligan rejects the widely accepted belief that Michael Lindsay-Hogg is Welles’ illegitimate son, noting that Welles was living in the U.S. and Lindsay-Hogg’s mother, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, in Europe when the child was conceived. The book ends with the filming of Citizen Kane and neatly ties Charles Foster Kane’s dying word to Old Rosebud, a Kentucky Derby winner favored by Citizen Kane co-writer Herman Mankiewicz as a youth.

Due from Harper Collins on Nov. 17, the book has already been lauded by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, New Yorker and Welles authors James Naremore, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Joseph McBride.

McGilligan, who makes his home in Welles’ native Wisconsin, has previously written biographies of Alfred Hitchock, George Cukor, Clint Eastwood, Robert Altman and other cinematic greats. He graciously fielded some questions about Young Orson.

In Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light and Clint: The Life and Legend, you examined the full lives of those filmmakers. In contrast, Young Orson focuses on Welles’ life before his first Hollywood film, Citizen Kane. Was it always your plan to focus on his youth, or did that develop during your research?

It was always the plan to end the penultimate chapter with Orson calling the first take of “action!” on Citizen Kane. That is how the book was pitched.

It is true that I have written a number of cradle-to-grave biographies and also sweeping oral histories, and I had an idea that I could take a break from those formats and write a concept biography with Welles leading up to Citizen Kane that would anchor my research time in the Midwest (where I live) but also foreshadow the greatness and to some extent the ideas and themes of Kane.

It’s true of all of my books that the early years of a major artist’s life are portrayed as significant and influential. I also felt a deep admiration for Welles, and didn’t think that other books sufficiently explained his rootsand youthful drive.

At the same time this scheme gave me an excuse to avoid the expansive post-Citizen Kane years and career. The trouble with Orson, for a biographer, is that he got up in the morning and did six or eight things, where Hitchcock, for example, would be focused on two or three goals or projects. Following all of Orson’s ideas through to their eventuation, as he became more and more active and prolific, loomed, for me, as laborious. The way I wrote the book you can see his future clearly, I hope, without covering all of it in detail, just as you should better understand the roots of his genius.

In preparing for the book, what resources proved to be the most valuable?

The job has changed. When I started out in the early 1970s, I spent most of my time in the library. Later on, I spent most of my time interviewing people, often people who had not been interviewed in depth very often before. For this book, I returned to libraries and archives to a great extent. You have to keep in mind that everyone has been interviewed on the record multiple times, and that anyone who was still alive and knew Welles in 1941 – the year
my book ends except for the final chapter – that person would be 90-100 years old today. And I have a philosophy about interviewing people who are of that vintage, which is that it is rarely fair to the interviewee, or accurate factually.

So the plan of the book was always to fact check and collate everything that had gone before; go exhaustively into new archival material; also court and legal records; everything electronic that has become available in recent years, i.e. historical newspaper indices; while blanketing every local resource in Kenosha, Chicago, Highland Park, Woodstock, Grand Detour, Madison and other places in Illinois and Wisconsin – not to mention Ireland and Spain – before going very carefully into the New York and Hollywood years before Kane.

There were many untapped resources, but off the top of my head I’d say there were several that were key. I spent weeks reading Kenosha newspapers microfilm from the years 1900-1918 in the Kenosha public library. Very grueling! – and also very rewarding. His parents were local celebrities and they were often in the newspaper, and often on the front page. Let me put it this way: Orson was not the first Welles to shake the hand of a president, nor to direct a big stage
show, nor to appear in a motion picture. And his birth was announced on the front page! I had a hunch about this starting out, but only a hunch.

The University of Indiana papers are very good and extensive, but they have been combed through by previous authors, and the new Oja Kodar papers and Chris Welles Feder papers at the University of Michigan contain fresh material previously unavailable.

Orson’s own letters and published writings from youth were extremely helpful, and once I collected them and lined them up chronologically I had his voice in the early part of the book. There was a tremendous amount in court and government records and, finally, the electronic newspaper indices were wonderfully useful. I had to figure out how it all lined up and connected into a narrative.

From your research, what portrait emerged of his parents and his older brother, Richard?

Hard to summarize, which is why the book is so long!. Hos parents were “mythically wonderful,” in Orson’s own words, and I think if you read about them in my book that will bear up as true. They were tremendous people, fascinating people, and they shaped him for greatness. The mother was artistic to a fault, but also politically progressive, and also fun-filled. Like Orson in many ways. The father was every bit her equal as a character (and every bit the suffragist! – as you will read). Also like Orson in many ways. They were faceted people, and they endowed their son with all of their facets, always encouraging him, never discouraging him. The portrait of them in my book is more rounded and more sympathetic to both of them, than in previous books, as well as more detailed. You can’t underestimate the shadow they cast.

About Richard, his brother, I found out quite a bit – and eventually I even had letters in his hand from when he was an adult. But I didn’t find out enough; you can’t get his institutionalization papers unless you have endless money and a willing lawyer and even then it is unlikely you will prevail. I’m not sure the asylum papers would answer everything. Orson was distant from Richard but good to him under the circumstances. I don’t buy the idea that Orson was haunted by Richard’s troubles, or that brother-figures haunt his work. It’s an interesting idea; I’m just not keen on it. But one of the attractions of the way I did the book is that I didn’t have to analyze or overly analyze any of Orson’s films, The only ones encompassed by the time period of the book are (excepting a few odd home movie-type discoveries that Wellesians will relish) are The Hearts of Age and Too Much Johnson. The book ends before Citizen Kane!

Previous biographies have made much of Dick Welles’ drinking. The portrait that emerges in Young Orson is that his problem seems to have become more pronounced in his final years. Do you think he turned to the bottle after the sale of his business and end of his marriage?

I think Dick Welles’s drinking (that is, his over drinking) began as a midlife crisis precipitated by the sale of Badger Brass and leaving Kenosha.

His older son Richard and his wife Beatrice already had been hospitalized – each, at least once.
The problems inside the family obviously worsened after Kenosha, and these include Beatrice (Orson’s mother) returning to and amping up her performance career, while Dick himself was mostly idle. He had no job. His inventions stopped. He began seeing other women. There is almost no evidence of him drinking or womanizing before 1918, the year the family relocated to Chicago.

It’s important to add that, later, his drinking may have had sympathetic medical causes, which has ramifications for the Far East voyage he took with Orson near the end of his life. I write about this in some detail in the book. What Orson said about that time in later interviews was based on his perspective as a boy, when he didn’t know everything that was going on – he couldn’t have known – and Dr. Bernstein gave him versions of events that were intended to protect him from devastation at the time. Dr. Bernstein treated or supervised the medical care of every member of the family, and he sometimes had mixed motives with his versions of events.

Like Orson himself, who said so consistently (with some errors in his remarks that I attribute to his boyhood perspective), I find Dick Welles to have been an enormously positive influence and a deeply admirable and sympathetic figure, whose complexity has been previously misunderstood.

Welles seems to have been shaped by a combination of parental figures. How was his life influenced by his mother, father, Maurice Bernstein and Roger Hill?

Young Orson just got an appreciative review in Publisher’s Weekly that said the book was “a book about families, with rich profiles of Welles’s affluent, indulgent parents; a series of father figures who mentored him, promoted him, and lent him money; and his close-knit acting ensemble at the Mercury Theater, where he played the paternal, tyrannical head of the household.”

This is a true smart reading of the book.

I write in the book that, contrary to what has been written elsewhere, Orson’s mother was brilliant at being a mother, and part of her brilliance was in plugging her own gaps with substitute parental figures and making sure that Orson was constantly engaged in constructive behavior. His own parents and Dr. Bernstein and Roger Hill were obviously the most significant, and they overlapped in time and responsibilities, but there was also the Edward Moores, a bunch of other Chicago newspaper folk including (most importantly) Ashton Stevens, the family cousin and artist Dudley Crafts Watson, and many other interesting people – writer George Ade, sculptor Lorado Taft, etc. – who filled in here and there. The most amazing thing about them was they were all on the same page, beholden to Beatrice, fascinated by Orson and devoted to encouraging his self expression. Roger Hill, above all, was a godsend, in that he took over after both parents died, to an extent, and then continued in his surrogate parental role with Orson for the rest of their lives.

Welles was known for spinning yarns about his past. What aspect of his life differ greatly from the stories he told interviewers?

I know Orson has a reputation for spinning yarns, but one of the things I did rigorously was to check his anecdotes against known facts and dates etc. I find him as truthful as anyone else I have written about. I’d go farther: He was more truthful. “Truthfulness” was very important to him and his art. I am speaking primarily of when he was personally on the scene, witnessing something; when he talks about events that happened outside his purview, that is different. Often, then, the stories are hand me down stories from Dadda Bernstein, or someone else.

Otherwise, Orson was more often truthful. Again, I am talking mainly about pre-Citizen Kane times, because I didn’t have to go any farther in my vetting.

There seems to be a shortage of close friends his own age in his early years. How do you think that impacted his development?

I am not sure that is true, and I react instinctively against it. Orson made friends wherever he went, but he had so many different homes in different places, moving constantly as a boy. He was close with his girl cousins. He had friends in Chicago and Highland Park among the children of artists and newspaper people. He made good friends during the one year he spent in Madison as a boy who remembered him (vividly) after he left. He had several very close friends at the Todd School – even though other biographers have said he didn’t – including classmates who always remembered him warmly and others who followed him into the Mercury. Bill Vance, the cameraman of “Hearts of Age,” was also Orson’s friend. (Orson assisted and is credited on at least one of the Vance brothers’s “home movies.”) Before the Mercury itself, Orson found Joseph Cotten, a lifelong best friend. Oh, he had many, many friends.

Welles was at once solitary and social. I hate to be overly categorical, but he was often solitary when creating and social when working. He had a great capacity for befriending and recruiting people to his cause. That was one of his tremendous gifts. He liked people. He was a dedicated humanist. He told Peter Bogdanovich, in their interviews, that he often cast friends in roles rather than actors who might have been better. I think this is a telling remark.

Perhaps it was hard to be his friend because you were either eagerly involved in his present project, or he was off to something else without you, which was inevitable with him because the wheels were always turning. But that is not so very different from ordinary friendships, and when Orson liked you once he liked you forever – there are many such anecdotes in the book. Perhaps you should say there was “a shortage of lifelong friends,” but again that is not so unusual, and again there are the Roger Hills and Joseph Cottens.

What major surprises will Wellesians find in Young Orson?

The surprises start early. There are too many to list. Many are small surprises. Some are discoveries of writings or minor filmmaking ventures pre-Citizen Kane. Some surprises in my research led me to re-interpret significant events in his life, diverging from previously held assumptions. There are big surprises in the Houseman relationship. There are major surprises in terms of Orson’s “love life” and putative children. There are major surprises, even, when it comes to the actual origin and meaning of “Rosebud.”

But I think the real revelation of the book, as was hopefully true of my Hitchcock biography, is not in its many surprises, chapter by chapter, but in its over-all credibility as a biography of Welles leading up to Kane. This formative part of his life story explains a lot, and it has only been inadequately or inaccurately depicted before now.

________

Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.

• RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE