ORSON WELLES

THE MAN WHO WAS MAGIC
by
Bart Whaley

I discovered at the age of six that almost everything in this world was phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I’ve always wanted to be a magician.
— Orson Welles
For too many years, the film industry has been ruled by fear… In this rotten game of chess, Orson was only a pawn, but he played like a knight. No one knew which direction he would jump. So he made himself unpopular.
— Maurice Seiderman
The final decision may well be that Welles is a superb bravura director, a fair bravura actor, and a limited bravura writer; but an incomparable bravura personality.
— Kenneth Tynan
FRONTISPIECE: Orson without makeup with his executive producer and friend, Alessandro Tasca di Cutò. They are on location for Chimes at Midnight in the ruined Gothic Church of San Vicente in Cardona, 50 miles northwest of Barcelona, Spain. It was chilly fall day in the mountains that October 1964. Photo by Nicolas Tikhomiroff, seen looming above his clients, courtesy of Prince Tasca.

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Copyright © 2005 Bart Whaley
Editor Susan Aykroyd
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR BART WHALEY
Born in San Francisco, 1928. Ph.D. in Political Science from M.I.T., 1969. Military-political deception theorist since 1968.
Student of magic as deception since 1973. Wrote The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Magic (1989 & 2000), Who’s Who in Magic (1990 & 2001), and The Man Who Was Erdnase (1991 with Martin Gardner & Jeff Busby). Won four international awards for these books.

In 2003-2004 Visiting Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, teaching deception, the detection of deception, and intelligence analysis. Also, in 2004 hosted a two-day conference at the School on “Magic and the Military”. At present he is polishing his forthcoming book, How to Detect Deception, while working as a consultant for the U.S. Intelligence community.
EDITOR’S NOTES
This is a large ebook. Some time ago, one publisher said that if it could be reduced by one-half he would take it. At that time, Bart said no, because he did not want to “gut it”. That publisher did not understand that this Orson Welles book is a case study of an individual that was able to think “out of the box”. Each small fact presented leads to the whole of a thinking process that will always provide an unexpected Third Option. The process that is presented here is the kernel of all deception theory. It's why Bart is called the “defining expert” of deception and counterdeception (the detection of deception) by the intelligence communities of many countries.

Not only does it personify the Whaley Deception Theory it presents the genius of Orson Welles through all his creative work, not just Citizen Kane. Orson Welles was not the pitiful individual that some biographers present. It's my wish that all who read this will appreciate (as I have come to) this unique presentation of Orson Welles, one that not only buries many of the old myths but, for the first time, presents him not just as a stage and film celebrity but as the extraordinarily multi-talented and creative thinker that he was.
Susan Aykroyd
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR EDITOR’S NOTES
THE I OF THE BEHOLDER
PART I: THE MAKING OF A MAGUS (1915-1934) SORCEROR'S APPRENTICE
THURSTON, HOUDINI, & MR. LONG
BOY MAGICIAN
YOUNG MACHIAVELLI
THE DUBLIN GATE
ATLANTIC CITY SWAMI

PART II: NEW YORK!, NEW YORK! (1934-1939) BROADWAY UNLIMITED
HARLEM NIGHTS AND STAGE VOODOO THE MAGIC OF SOUND & THE SOUND OF MUSIC PLAYING FAUST AND LOOSE
BULL IN THE AFTERNOON
MERCURIAL MOMENTS
THE SHADOW KNOWS!
MINDREADERS EXTRAORDINARY
THE VAUDEVILLIAN AND HIS UNHOLY FIVE

PART III: EARLY HOLLYWOOD (1939-1941) WESTWARD HO! HO! HO!
MANKY PANKY
THE CAMERA AS MAGIC BOX
“A TOUCH OF RHINESTONES”
NATIVE SON
THE TRADE OF THE TRICKS

PART IV: HOLLYWOOD AFTER KANE (1941-1947) AMBERSONS AND THE MAGIC OF LIGHT
THE MYSTERIOUS ORANGE TREE
JOURNEY INTO FEAR AND LOATHING
SESSIONS WITH FU-MANCHÚ
RITA MAID: HOW TO RECRUIT A MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT FRAMING THE MERCURY WONDER SHOW
THE WONDER SHOW OPENS
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
FOLLOW THE BOYS
MAGICAL MEDLEY
MEXICAN MELODRAMA
SPECIAL SERVICES
FILM AND LIFE
JOKERS WILD
AROUND THE WORLD FROM BOSTON TO BROADWAY TOWN SKRYER
LADY FROM SHANGHAI
JAZZ MAN
-vCopyright (c) 2005 Bart Whaley
PART V: WORLD VAGABOND (1947-1956) BLACK MAGIC IN ROME
THE MOOR OF MOROCCO AND VENICE “AN EVENING WITH EARTHA KITT” HARRY LIME MEETS WINSTON CHURCHILL WITH THE OLIVIERS AT NOTLEY ABBEY THE MOOR OF LONDON AND CANNES MASQUERADE
MOBY SHTICK

PART VI: AMERICAN INTERLUDES (1956-1966) LAS VEGAS MAGIC – “HORSIN' WITH ORSON" I LOVE LUCY AND DESI
TV MAGIC
HOW TO PREDICT PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS TOUCH OF EVIL
RETURN OF THE BULLFIGHTER
IN KAFKALAND
FALSTAFF IN QUIXOTELAND
ORSON WELLES VERSUS JAMES BOND

PART VII: AULD LANG SANG (1966-1972) THE GREAT ONE AND A MIS-MADE LADY SHAZZAM!
HOW TO RECRUIT ORSON WELLES OF RABBITS AND MEN
F FOR FAKE – DECEPTION PURE AND SIMPLE

PART VIII: THE USA (1972-1985)
BACK TO THE USA
CAREFREE IN ARIZONA
AN ARTIST'S EYE: SET AND COSTUME DESIGN DIRECTOR'S CUT
HOW TO CON A CON
IN A MAGIC CASTLE
THE LAST MAGIC SHOW
BUSINESS AND PLEASURE AT MA MAISON ON THE MAGIC SET WITH ORSON WELLES MORE MAGICAL APPEARANCES
PICKS & PANS – THE MAGICIAN AS CRITIC A RATHER BIZARRE MAGICKIAN
INTO THE MIND OF A MAGICIAN
MR. MEMORY
TRICKS NO TREATS
TIME & CHANCE
FINAL CUT

CONCLUSION: TWO QUESTIONS, TWO ANSWERS THE BIG BRASS RING
AN OPEN BOOK

APPENDICES:
A. MAGIC VOICE, WONDER WORDS
B. WHEN THE CREDITS ROLL
C. AUTEUR! AUTEUR!: WELLES AND AUTEUR THEORY D. THE GREAT MANIPULATOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CAST OF CHARACTERS
-viCopyright (c) 2005 Bart Whaley
THE I OF THE BEHOLDER
Speak of me as I am;
nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.
– Othello’s dying request
In later life whenever asked the secret of his success, he was ready with a stock one-liner: “Start at the top and work yourself down."
Orson Welles. A name to conjure with. A child prodigy; a boy genius. At age 16 in 1931 he was a celebrated actor on the Dublin stage. At 20 he was hailed as the most innovative director of plays on Broadway. At 22 his direction of The Cradle Will Rock stage play provided the most stunning first night ever in American theater – front page news in New York's next day papers. At 23 he was a Time magazine cover story and then seized the attention of all America with his Halloween eve War of the Worlds radio broadcast hoax that millions of listeners mistook for a real invasion by Martians. At 25 he made Citizen Kane, a movie that astounded the whole world and still heads the major lists of “best” films of all time.

Then this promise of genius quickly vanishes like Lewis Carroll's grinning Cheshire cat to be replaced by images of a fat old man doing TV commercials for thin young wines. This is the picture that most people have been given of him. But it's not just trite, it's false. And it wasn't tragic. At least not for him.

Two decades ago while watching Welles play himself as a magician in his last completed movie, F for Fake, I recalled references to his being an “amateur" conjuror. That film's theme was pure deception, an amusing cautionary romp to teach people how easily they can be tricked, hoaxed, deceived. As a specialist on military deception and a student of magic I wondered to what extent his clearly deep understanding of principles of the sorcerers art had affected his other work. Like Welles, Lewis Carroll had been a magic buff; perhaps Welles's Cheshire smile had only vanished from the front pages.

I wondered to what extent if any did his obvious ability to think like a magician influence his other movies. Or, indeed, his stage and radio work. Or, perhaps, even his personal life. I began to research these questions. I initially assumed it would take a week or two to get the answers. And a short article for some obscure film journal. That estimate was about as far off target as anything I’ve ever done. Why did I go so wrong?

Two facts slowly emerged. First, magic wasn’t just some casual hobby for him, an excuse for moments of R&R away from his demanding artistic creations. He’d early on learned that magic wasn’t just kid tricks, it was a whole way of life, a way to manipulate people, a way to get them to do things his way and without their quite knowing why. Second and consequently, he applied his magical thinking to all of his artistic projects – stage, radio, movies, TV. He did this throughout his life. It was the very source all those astonishing moments reported by his many biographers and the critics – all those creative solutions to problems that arose again and again during his many productions. All resulted from magical thinking at its best. And what is that? Neither more nor less than the rare ability to almost always find a third way out of those many either-or dilemmas we face in life and work. I came to call them Orson’s Third Option.

Both these key points had been either entirely overlooked by most of the biographers; or, at best, misunderstood and, accordingly, underplayed. The reason is simple. With only one exception, none of his biographers were magicians. And the one who was, James Naremore, wrote only about a narrow aspect of Welles’ movie work. I recognized this part in Orson and his work only because I too was a magician. Sometimes, it truly takes one to know one.

Orson is one of those endlessly fascinating subjects for writers and, judging by sales, readers. Like such friends and acquaintances as Marlene, Marilyn, Frank, Lucy, Desi, Tennessee, and Ernest, first name alone is usually sufficient identification. And it has promoted the sales of at least six TV documentaries, forty books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of passing references.

Higham’s first book (1970) concentrates on Orson’s movie career, as do the fine studies by Cowie (1965 & 1973) and McBride (1972 & 1996). France (1977 & 1990) examines his stage work. Naremore (1978) describes the actor. Leaming (1985) adds, and at depth, his private and family life as well as his excursion into politics in the 1940s. Carringer (1985) and particularly Wood (1990) stress his professional interest in music and his experiments in sound effects on stage and in radio and movies. The books by The Museum of Broadcast (1988) and Maltin (1997) show us the amazing radio director-actor. We need these separate monographic studies because he was all of these things and more – bullfighter and magician, for examples. So we also need an overview that puts all of these aspects together to picture the whole person, albeit an adult hard-wired to recognize that every professional and personal problem may yield to those magician’s Third Option. This is the intent of this book.

Conventional biography, like history, requires raw information (the “facts"), a theory to decide which pieces are relevant, and interpretation (insight) to conclude what they mean. We expect biography to blend these three ingredients in a manner that chronicles not just what the person did and what happened to him or her but to explain why these actions and consequences happened the way they did. The facts are the old news reporters’ “Five W’s” – Who, did What, to Whom, Where, When. Some add the speculative Why. But the Five W’s are themselves a theory, a set of categories that reporters and news editors believed embodied all the questions, which when answered, constituted “the story”. Early sociologist Harold Lasswell, borrowing from journalism, called this Communication Theory. But we can’t separate the facts from the person – whether reporter, historian, or biographer – who selects and interprets them.

All biographies and autobiographies cease to become objective after their recitation of certain usually reasonably verified vital statistics (date and place of birth, sex, employment, marital status, number of legitimate children, etc.). Usually but not always. Thus Orson fudged about the place of his conception. Houdini lied about his country of origin. Eartha Kitt, an orphan born without a birth certificate, can only estimate her birth year. Studio biographers and theatrical agents routinely fabricated younger ages for players like Shirley Temple, Lena Horne, Beatrice Straight, and Paola Mori. Immigrant movie producer Louis B. Mayer patriotically pretended he’d been born on the 4th of July. In all these examples from people Orson knew, the facts have been reasonably pinpointed through research. It’s when a writer seeks to flesh out this kind of bare-bones Who’s Who data that the uncertainties and ambiguities begin to multiply.

In 1966, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood became the first modern biography to inject the writer's own thoughts into the minds of his subjects. The stock excuse for books of this type is that the writer has sufficient “empathy" to justify doing this. Even if its principle is plausible, its application will fail whenever lesser minds seek to empathize with larger ones. Empathy is the ability to get inside other persons’ minds – seeing the world in their terms, sharing or at least understanding their feelings, desires, prejudices. Some degree of empathy is required of all good biographers. Psychopaths, judging from their insensitivity to their victims, have none. Saints, judging from their high rate of martyrdom, have far too much. Good biographers fall between these extremes; but, even at their best, none can completely identify with their subject on all facets of that other person.

Testy Dr. Sam. Jonson once memorably critiqued an unsolicited book: “Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." The good parts in Higham, Callow, and Thomson are the chunks of new information they have pried from obscure documents and the memories of eye-witnesses. The bad parts are their interpretations. All strive mightily to understand Orson, but none succeed. They acknowledge some of his enormous achievements but then invent a person too small to have produced any of them. Sometimes their three Orsons have become brainwashed prisoners who obediently feed back their captors’ rehearsed answers. Other times their Orsons are Rorschach ink blots from which the biographers read their own values, fears, and fantasies. But in all cases they are caricatures that resemble the corporeal Orson in bulk and name only. In his novel, I am Jonathan Scrivener (1930). Claude Houghton wrote of one character: “Mr. Winkworth is entirely normal and it is a dispensation of Providence that the normal have no insight of any kind. This fact makes life possible for the degenerate as well as the elect.” This explains why so many biographers disappoint. When they can’t understand someone’s behavior, they tend to manufacture a character that fits within their own range of insight. Many of Orson’s biographers did this by trying to put themselves in his shoes. But, because his shoes are so large, they shrink them to fit.

Celebrity biography tends to attract either the old myth builders – the Hagiographers – or the newly fashionable myth distorters – the Deconstructionists. The former paint in warm Bridges of Madison County colors; the latter in darkly poetic Fall of the House of Usher tones. But, like the fanzines and the weekly exposé tabloids they mimic, both give us fictions. And never assume
that the truth hides somewhere between these two lies. It usually exists outside both. That
Third Option.
It is wise to be skeptical of biographical details voiced or published, particularly while the subject is still alive. This holds even more for positive statements. Is the biographer seeking to curry favor with his subject or his subject’s friends and fans? Or avoiding libel suits? Diaries can be useful sources for resolving discrepancies between a person’s private and public opinions. Example: Kenneth Williams’s autobiography, published while Orson was alive, mixes favorable and moderately unfavorable views; but his diary, published after both he and Orson were dead, is venomous. Skepticism is also warranted for negative reports. Is the biographer grinding a secret axe?

Higham, Callow, and Thomson give us many fresh and welcome details along the way. Unfortunately each writer ends having constructed a monstrous puppet who is much less than the sum of Orson's many parts. Like Pauline Kael (see Appendix “When the Credits Roll”), they set themselves up as prosecuting attorneys who, having decided their suspect is guilty, proceed to marshal every scrap of evidence pointing to guilt and ignoring any pieces that are exculpatory. Fair enough in a courtroom where prosecutors can be challenged by lawyers and witnesses for the defense. But unfair in a biographical book where every trick of rhetoric and deceptive concealment of evidence is possible. Unfair to subject and reader alike.

The fair method found in most time-tested biographies and histories begins with an honest question, one that isn’t already loaded. For example: Did Orson’s career really decline after Citizen Kane? Or, better yet: What was the trajectory of Orson’s career and what factors account for it? Not, why didn't Orson Welles accomplish more with his life? That’s presumption at its worst.

To sharpen my point let’s try a couple of thought experiments. Ask the question, What went wrong with _____ [fill in a name]? Hemingway jumps to mind. A writer from a dysfunctional family who peaked early and then slipped downhill to become a caricature of himself. OK, but the parallels with Orson end there. Hem traveled different roads in both career and mind. We could also try filling in such early alleged burn-outs as Clifford Odets or J. D. Salinger or even Joseph Heller.

My final example will be another maverick whose enormous creativity peaked between ages 26 and 31 and then drifted for 44 years on old fame that, like Hemingway’s, included a Nobel Prize. OK, so why doesn't anybody ask what went wrong with Albert Einstein. The question that interests all his biographers and readers is What went right?

Having selected a fair question, the biographer must then gather all evidence relevant to that question. He may not discard any piece that doesn’t fit his preconceptions. Such puzzle pieces should at least be acknowledged in footnotes. This is what I’ve attempted.

Although Welles is the main subject or major figure in hundreds of books and articles, only a few mention – and then merely in passing – the role of magic in his personal or professional life. The stage, radio, and film critics, historians, and biographers tend to dismiss it as a “hobby" or “only a diversion". Not understanding the special psychology of either conjuring or that of the conjuror, they researched, interviewed, and wrote as if only the “high" art forms of the theater or cinema mattered to him, which presumably gave us all we need to know to understand both the man and his creations. With a single exception, none of these writers had even bothered to correctly spell the names of his behind-the-scenes magic assistants, much less researched the tricks themselves or even asked his views on magic and illusion. Yet these seemingly trivial details give the key that unlocks and discovers an unsuspected self; although it was one he'd never tried to hide, particularly not from close friends. Indeed, whenever he did try to tell people who he really was, all except other sorcerers assumed he was just being frivolous.

Magic held a life-long fascination for Orson Welles. It directly and deeply influenced much of his creative work as an actor, writer, and director in stage, radio, film, TV, opera, and ballet. It also reveals a playful side of the man. He even applied the psychological principles of conjuring to defeat enemies, win friends, and attract women. Magic specifically and deception in general were central factors driving and molding his life and his many other creations.

All successful magicians understand the psychology of deception. But what precisely is deception? It’s one of those slippery words that each of us knows what it means – until we try to talk about it with another person. I define deception as any attempt – by words or actions – intended to distort another person’s or group’s perception of reality. This definition avoids confusion with mere misinformation, incomplete information, or the truth value of statements. But it does permit us to include the authorized lies and deceptions practiced with our knowledge and approval by stage actors, magicians, and poker players.

Deception is part of the human condition, a form of social behavior that is evidently passed on, probably even partly inherited, from our pre-human ancestors. It has likely always been with us, is certainly with us today, and will remain as long as one person seeks unfair advantage over another. Each of us has had to deal with it at various times in our lives, many as deceivers, all as victims. Like lying. A lie, we would all agree, is a form of deception. But many will insist they are not liars because they speak no falsehood – not, mind you, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, but some narrowly and privately edited version of it. They reason that, because they are honest folk like the mythic young George Washington, they “cannot tell a lie”. And their excuse is that, anyway, it’s only “tactful” or a “white lie” or “only a lie of omission”. Even truth is sometimes the best lie – for the person who has a reputation for lying. Welles, having mastered the social psychology of deception, became a master – as sorcerer, practical joker, forger, con artist, and an unusually canny manipulator of the people in his career and personal life. It even set the pattern for his fabulous story telling, in structure and well as content. Knowing this secret side and how it works, we can better understand both who he was and why and how he dealt with others in the very odd ways he did – always surprising and often delighting them. And never quite losing his infectious grin.

Although a voracious reader, there's no hard evidence that Orson had read any of the works of Florentine Renaissance politician-historian-dramatist Niccolò Machiavelli prior to adulthood.1 He didn't need to – he’d learned the principles at an early age. Machiavelli got a bum rap 52 years after his death in 1527 when “Machiavellian" was coined to refer to the political philosophy that advocates deception and guile as the most effective way to win in the great game of power politics. Fine, except for the advocacy. In fact he’d written The Prince as satire, an exposé to enlighten and thereby give back some power to the victims of tyrants to help them better defend against deception. It wasn’t written to teach deception to the great Medici lord to whom he had dedicated his masterpiece, the tyrant who had seized his beloved Florentine Republic and had him thrice tortured on the rack. The florid dedication was facetious – the author hadn't even bothered to send Giuliano de Medici a copy.2

Most socially and politically naive adults share the misconception that deception – of whatever kind – is a complicated activity. They quote Sir Walter Scott's lines about the “tangled web" of deceit as if they were gospel. When back in 1805 Scott bemoaned “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!" the romantic British knight expressed a belief widely held among Anglo-Saxons that deception is a convoluted business. And so it is – in the tangled minds of people who insist on making the simple difficult. Even some of my former colleagues in military deception and counterintelligence prefer to pursue inscrutable models of deception. Obviously, from the planning and outcome of Operation Desert Storm, one amateur magician named Norman Schwartzkopf didn't.

To deceive, to play any trick, one need only hide something real while showing in its place something false but plausible. Regardless of their social or technological context, this method is used by all deceivers – whether in magical effects, theatrical or cinematic illusions, politics or war, or in con games, hoaxes, in all jokes including practical jokes, literary and art forgeries, and finally those discreet but hypocritical lies we label “white" or “tactful". Each of these types of deception tries to dissimulate one truth while simultaneously simulating a substitute “truth".3 If the attempt succeeds, the target is duped. It's that simple. Orson understood and, like all masters of the art, kept his various deceptions simple. Those overly clever deceivers who design elaborate games only increase their risk of detection because the more complicated the ruse, the more clues – each inviting the intended victim to discover the solution. Magicians call these clues “discrepancies" and even the most elegant attempts to deceive will have at least two – one real thing hidden, one false thing substituted.4 So the most effective deceptions cut the discrepancies to the minimum and then make every effort to disguise the two or more that remain.

1 In 1939 Welles contemplated directing and starring in a movie titled The Life of Machiavelli and read over several books on the Italian Renaissance. When he went to Italy in 1947 he evidently read further into the subject.
2Garrett Mattingly, "Machiavelli's Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?", The American Scholar, Vol.XXVII (1958), 482-491. While it is admittedly impossible to prove a negative, the fact that the "gift" manuscript volume is unrecorded in the meticulous records of the Laurentian Library is strong evidence of its phantom nature.
3Barton Whaley, "Toward a General Theory of Deception", The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol.5, No.1 (March 1982), 178-192; reprinted in Epoptica: A Review of Current Magic Literature and Apparatus #5 (January 1984), 270-277.
4R. V. Jones, "The Theory of Practical Joking – Its Relevance to Physics", Bulletin of the Institute of Physics (June 1957), 193-201. A minor revision is "The Theory of Practical Joking – An Elaboration", Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Vol.11, No.1/2 (January/February, 1975), 10-17. Dr. Jones is a leading military deception planner, experimental physicist, and practical joker
– three activities that he links by theory in this important paper. A revised version is Jones (1975). A good general study of deception theory is Jason Randal, Ph.D, The Psychology of Deception: Why Magic Works (Venice, California: Top Secret Productions, Inc., (continued...)

Orson Welles was a magician, and it’s the magician’s talent to confront people with an ever-unexpected and surprising Third Option. This is an odd choice that few others can fully understand even afterwards. Conjurers are masters of options because every magical effect can in theory be achieved by more than one method. Thus at least three quite different methods each have been used for Sawing a Woman in Half or Catching a Bullet or Levitating a Lady, all illusions that Orson already understood and would one day himself perform. The fact that any one of several methods, sometimes dozens, can lurk behind any specific effect makes it all the more difficult for the audience (even other magicians) to detect the very natural cause of each of these seemingly supernatural happenings.

I began this book on 29 March 1991. It was later than I thought. More than 100 persons who might have clarified certain details had already been led into the beyond by Orson's symbolic Roman god Mercury. Another 17 died before I could reach them. Fortunately many had left autobiographies or interviews or letters that answered most of my questions. My wishlist of survivors and experts grew to 331.

My thanks to the 241 individuals who responded are so extensive that I've acknowledged them by name in an end piece. Only 17 had been interviewed by any of Welles' previous BEEographers, as he called them.5 This reflects the fact that their interests differed from mine and not on their research, which was, collectively, enormous. The main value in interviewing so many people isn't merely to capture yet another anecdote but to double, triple, or sometimes even quadruple-check the fallibility of memories – a labored process that drew many delightfully unexpected responses and solved several old puzzles.

Early on I felt like the reporter sent to interview Citizen Kane's associates to uncover the man behind the mask and receive different views from each. But it soon became evident that the varied impressions of Orson Welles depended on the specific relationship he'd created with each person. Like Kane he wore several masks. Unlike Kane he controlled which one he would don for which person or group. This accounts in large part for the several different, almost Rashomon-like vignettes given of Orson by various people. However this tangled portrait quickly unravels when we sort the witnesses into five batches:

4 (...continued)
1982, 209pp).
5The interviewers and their interviewees (naming but not counting the duplicates) were: PETER NOBLE: Ray Seery. BARBARA LEAMING: Greg Garrison, Henry Jaglom, and Alessandro Tasca di Cutò. ROBERT L. CARRINGER: Hilyard Brown, Frank Brady, Richard France, James Naremore. JAMES NAREMORE: Robert Carringer, Joseph McBride, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. FRANK BRADY: Anthony "Coach" Roskie, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Robert Carringer. JAMES HOWARD: Henry Jaglom. HARLAN LEBOW: Robert Carringer. JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: Bill Krohn, James Naremore, Jim Steinmeyer, Bret Wood, George Fanto, and Joseph McBride. PETER BOGDANOVICH: Elizabeth Wilson. JUAN COBOS: Alessandro Tasca. DAVID CHARVET: Stan Kramien. SIMON CALLOW: Anthony "Coach" Roskie and James Naremore. DAVID THOMSON: Henry Jaglom.

First, there is Welles himself. He fibbed a lot, as he confessed and as five of his more recent biographers prove up to a point. But the more important questions left unexplored are: what did he lie about, to whom, under what circumstances, and why? Indeed, which were true lies in the sense of intending to deceive, and which were simply tall tales designed only to entertain? And, for his childhood years, which are real memories and which false, or just family fables that he repeated unwittingly? The answers are surprising. He wasn’t a pathological liar as has been suggested. To the extent that he lied, he was selective and calculating. From whatever unconscious depths they may have been conjured, his lies were strictly Machiavellian – each crafted to amuse or manipulate or both.
Orson, boy and man, was never moralistic. But he was, with some major lapses, highly ethical. And, although magic has its power-taking manipulative side, it is an ethical art. As master magician Karl Germain explained, “Conjuring is the only absolutely honest profession – a conjuror promises to deceive and does."6 Because Orson was also an entertainer those lies and deceptions were designed more often to amuse others and himself.
This second group comprises the persons who knew him only slightly or indirectly and then not in any professional sense. They aren't producers, directors, cinematographers, film editors, set or costume designers, lighting or sound engineers, actors, or magicians. They know only Welles’ finished works – not the man – and their efforts to infer the latter from the former are at best second-hand pop psychology creating new myths and purveying much nonsense. These conclusions prove at best worthless, at worst fog our picture of Welles.

Third are those who, although also knowing him only in passing or during brief collaboration, were otherwise his professional peers in at least one closely observed activity. Their reported observations – whether positive or negative and usually both – have much value but are open to the usual misunderstanding of short-sightedness and so must be carefully weighed against the views of the next two groups who enjoyed both wider perspectives and multiple contacts.

Fourth are the people who'd known him close-up both professionally and socially at different periods and for some time. These individuals saw both his faults and his virtues yet could appreciate him for himself. Most that fall in this group were true friends. Their perceptions of Orson deserve very close attention.

Fifth, a sub-set of the preceding group, are his closest magician friends and collaborators. Their insights earn our closest attention because only conjurors could appreciate how Welles' ability to think like a magician affected everything he did.

This book is not a biography of a conjuror nor a psychological profile. It is the story of a man who thought like a magician. This self-taught ability enabled him to create in different arts and to manipulate different types of people. And to do so to a more conscious degree than most artists or ordinary folk. But the most fascinating aspect of Orson Welles is not his bravura creations on stage and in radio and films. It is his bravura creation of an extraordinary person – himself.
6Germain as quoted in Stuart Cramer, Germain the Wizard and His Legerdemain (1966), 107.
From here on I'll call my subject Orson rather than Welles. It saves one letter per mention. Besides, as he said, "Everybody calls me Orson" – a presumptuous familiarity that surprised but never annoyed him, knowing that he alone could open the doors to any real intimacy.
PART I: THE MAKING OF A MAGUS (1915-1934)
George Orson Welles was conceived in rural Kenosha, Wisconsin, and born there on 6 May 1915 into a prosperous and preposterous family. He was raised since age three in metropolitan Chicago.
SORCEROR’S APPRENTICE
Orson began to hocus-pocus at age four. He was inspired by and first learned that art, as did so many other young conjurors, from a Mysto Magic set. That simple box of tricks had been a gift from Dr. Maurice A. Bernstein. This handsome Russian-Jewish orthopedist was Orson's physician and his mother's lover. Orson called him “Dadda"1 — to his real father's annoyance. Dr. Bernstein (pronounced bern-STEEN, as he insisted), observing the child's delight and quick proficiency, gave him a second, more advanced magic set at age five. Dadda could have bought these kits from either of Chicago's two magic shops (The Chicago Magic Company or Art Felsman's), but it's much more likely he got them in the famous Marshall Fields emporium's large toy department, where Orson had recently made his professional stage debut by being paid a few dollars to portray Peter Rabbit in a tableau.

Mysto Magic kits were an open sesame for generations of aspiring young magi. Made and marketed since 1908 by John A. Petrie and A. C. Gilbert's Mysto Manufacturing Company and then from 1916 through 1956 by the successor A.C. Gilbert Company, even their smallest box of tricks revealed the secret methods of the art. Omitted from the early sets were a standard deck of playing cards and, of course, any large illusions—he'd acquire those later. Nevertheless, these few tiny props and their accompanying 32-page bare-bones instruction booklet were enough to make it clear to the alert child that all the secret methods of magicians are simple. Indeed, as Orson later said, “ridiculously simple".

When given a magic set or taught a trick, most kids merely conclude, Oh, so that's how it's done! Puzzle solved, they then shift to the more weighty matters of childhood. But a rare few like Orson sense underlying principles and become intrigued. Knowing how a trick is done and being able to fool others are quite different matters. At some point the aspiring sorceror must go beyond the Mysto Magic stage of awareness and learn how to deceive. The real secrets of magic aren't its mechanical methods like wires, mirrors, trapdoors, gimmicks, or sleights. Those are merely tools of the conjuring trade, as inconsequential for judging their craft as paint-boxes and brushes are for judging the worth of a Rembrandt. Fox-TV’s clumsy “Masked Magician” of 1998 exposed only those tools, not the mind games that deceive us. Such exposers teach no one how to become a magician.

The true secrets of conjuring are pure but sophisticated psychology. As Orson came to understand, “it's fooling the mind that's the real challenge."2 To become a master of this, the apprentice must learn to use misdirection to trick the spectator's mind. And by doing so he becomes an applied psychologist and an actor.3

1 Although Hill (1977) consistently spells it "Dahda", Bernstein signed his photo (in Leaming [1985], after p.178) "To Orson from his Dadda".
2As quoted in "Incomparable Orson" (1947), 6.
3There are two apparent exceptions to this rule about misdirection. 1) So-called self-working apparatus tricks. 2) Tricks that depend on "secret knowledge", that is, information available to the magician about how the world works that is not know to the average lay person. For example, except for dice players, few persons are aware that all dice (except crooked "misspots") are spotted so that the sum of each of the three sets of opposing sides totals seven (1+6, 2+5, and 3+4) — a simple fact that generations of magicians have used to baffle the unwitting and some dice cheats have used to bilk suckers.
I would argue that these are not true exceptions. The "self-working" tricks have the misdirection already built in. And the "secret-knowledge" effects depend on the magician's deceptive patter to throw off any suspicion. In both cases the misdirection is (continued...)

All magi know Robert-Houdin's century-old definition that “A conjuror is ... an actor playing the part of a magician."4 Since childhood, Orson combined these two arts and often quoted the French master on this point. Around the time of that first magic set Dadda Bernstein also gave him a toy puppet theater for which the boy, imagination afire, created his own playlets.

Orson was a gifted child, endowed by nature and nurture with a sturdy but less than spectacular IQ of 146. As most psychologists of the time rated 140 or more as “potential genius", Orson just qualified for the legend of braininess that would infuse and confuse biographical accounts. Still, there are advantages in being a jump ahead of any randomly chosen group of 250 others with that particular combination of measured verbal and problem-solving skills.

Those so-called smart genes helped, but he had a more important kick-start toward the person he would become. His childhood was spent in an adult world amidst a well-to-do extended family of cosmopolitans and sophisticated eccentrics. Today, many would label this a “dysfunctional family” and, without further thought, assume it “explains” Orson’s subsequent behavior. Well, yes and no. Yes only because it describes a home and social setting with little that was “average” or “normal” or “traditional” about it. No mainly because, as he slowly grew to understand the extreme unusualness of his heritage, he discarded most parts that were ill-suited to life in a wider society and kept, even reinforced, those parts that made him different but strong.

His mother, Beatrice Welles, was a semi-professional concert pianist, a women's rights activist, a pacifist (for which she'd been jailed briefly in 1914), and a somewhat puritanical crusader against booze, brothels, and blatant sexuality in movies. And, if we can believe Orson, a devotee of practical jokes and hoaxes.

His father, Richard “Dick" Welles, had owned a factory and, later, within his child's memory, a resort hotel. He was an inventor, gourmet, chain-smoker of cigars and cigarettes, flagrant womanizer, convivial alcoholic, brilliant conversationalist, teller of tall tales, and a vaudeville and silent movie buff.
Dadda Bernstein, third person in this open marital triangle, was a physician, ladies' man, social climber, a greedy embezzler, a devious user of others, and an opera and theater goer.
Orson's only sibling, a brother ten years his senior, was already showing signs of quiet madness and was pushed off to boarding school and, later, into an insane asylum.5 Thus Orson wasn't just the favored child but, in effect, an only child. One with a close and concerned mother, a close and friendly father, and a close and manipulative Dadda.

His ancestry, which one biographer's diligent research assistants traced back 16 generations, was of English stock with some infusion of Welsh and a bit of French along the way. And five of his direct forebears, including John and Priscilla Alden, had arrived in the New World in 1620 on the Mayflower. These genealogical facts are relevant only because Orson and most of his biographers tell so many different tales. For example Orson consistently maintained that his two given names came from his parent's table-mates on a Caribbean cruise, George Ade (an American agnostic and famous satirist) and Orson “Ort" Collins Wells (Ade's wealthy longtime travel companion and lover).6 Ade’s biographer, Fred Kelly, reports the following:7

3 (...continued)
implicit in the presentation. See Bart Whaley, "Toward a General Theory of Deception", The Journal of Strategic Studies (London), Vol.5, No.1 (March 1982), 178-192; reprinted in Epoptica, No.5 (January 1984), 270-277.
4Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic (1868/1877 translation), 43.
5Diagnosed as an advanced case of schizophrenia and dementia simplex. Higham (1985), 50.
On one of their West Indian cruises toward the end of 1914 George and Ort ate at the same table with a couple from Kenosha .... When they were saying good-by, Mrs. Welles said she had enjoyed their company so much that if the child she was expecting in a few months should be a boy she intended to name it for them, George Orson.

As no source is given it’s possible that Kelly, may have got this story from or through Orson Welles. In any case it seems the lad’s names actually honored his paternal grandmother's uncle George Head and her father, Orson Sherman Head (a locally famous district attorney in Kenosha). Perhaps Mrs. Welles was teasing, having already chosen her boy child’s name and playing on the coincidence, or even honoring all four men.

The family, although no longer devout, was fourth generation Protestant Episcopalian—and Quaker and Puritan before that. Orson would later misreport his father's Episcopal funeral as Lutheran and misinform one late interviewer that he'd been raised Roman Catholic. Nor did he ever convert to Catholicism, a fact that the Archbishop of Madrid verified when Orson's ashes were interred in Spain.8 In 1965 when, in anticipation of becoming a Spanish citizen, he had a legal deposition prepared in which he declared himself and his family (that is, third wife Paola and their daughter Beatrice) to be Roman Catholic.9 Perhaps he'd contemplated a turn toward a religion at that time but otherwise he'd seemingly never been religious. Toward the end of Orson's life the head of the Greek Orthodox Church dined at Orson’s favorite bistro, and hoping to meet the actor, extended at invitation through the proprietor to attend a high mass at local St. Sophia cathedral as the Archbishop's guest of honor. When the proprietor passed along this invitation, Orson said only, "Please tell him I really appreciate that offer, but I am an atheist."10 Orson never joked or teased about the religious beliefs of others. He accepted it as a cultural artifact, suitable for the births, deaths, and marriages of strangers and even some friends — but without emotional or intellectual meaning for himself.

He claimed he had nine aunts although it has been proven otherwise. And exaggerated their eccentricities. Aunt Dot, did visit China but didn't, as Orson told it, fall out of a rickshaw and disappear forever into a crowd. In fact she returned without incident from her package tour. He told of Aunt Medora's being wooed by famous magician Herrmann the Great — when both were sedately married to their respective spouses, hers a plain businessman in New Jersey. In another version Orson made out that, when deserted by her magician fiancé, Medora became a recluse who consoled herself by practicing card tricks. Some of these fancies he made up, the others he'd heard from relatives, mainly his mischievous father. For example, father Richard was the source of the much embroidered tales of Aunt Hat's (Harriet's) eccentricities. And when retelling the vanishing aunt-in-the-rickshaw legend to one friend, Orson admitted, “Now, I don't believe this, but my family always told the story." Another example was one aunt who, he often mentioned, “rode the [John]stown flood on a piano. It's one of those stories," he told a Merv Griffin audience, “you hear in your family, and you repeat it to get a laugh, without really believing in it." His father's mother, Mary, quietly practiced black magic in her home, Orson proudly proclaimed this in later years and there is some independent evidence.11

6 OW had claimed George Ade and Orson C. Wells as his namesakes as early as 8 December 1936 in a letter to novelist Carl Carmer.
7Fred C. Kelley, George Ade: Warmhearted Satirist (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), 209.
8Riambau (1993), 17.
9Cobos (1993), 172.
10Terrail (1999), 104-105.

He was sickly, but not enough to keep him out of school. When it became time for kindergarten at age four he pretended an appendicitis attack, faking a high temperature by pressing the thermometer against a hot-water bottle. Found out, he explained that he didn't want to waste time with children whose only ambition was “to be Boy Scouts."12 He had his way, so Beatrice educated him at home where she and tutors taught him to read and to play the piano.

Beatrice, believing like many parents of that era that children were tiny uneducated and unsocialized adults, raised Orson accordingly. She included him fully in her social life among the Chicago art and music crowd. Her policy, he understood, was that “children could be treated as adults as long as they were amusing. The moment you became boring, it was off to the nursery."13 Thus the earliest molding of the Great Entertainer.

At ages five and six Orson spent the summers with his mother in Grand Detour, Illinois. A hundred miles west of Chicago, it was a small resort town that catered to weekend tourists. Orson impressed the local men and boys, whom he openly called “hayseeds", as a snob and the boys teased him about his unathletic pudginess. But he delighted the young girls with impromptu back-yard tent-shows of Shakespearean scenes where he played Romeo and Juliet or Caesar and Cleopatra, all with fast costume changes to fit his back-and-forth switching of roles.14
At this point his parents separated permanently and Orson alternated living with his mother and Dadda and with his father, who was becoming more deeply than ever devoted to the bottle.
His mother developed a chronic case of “yellow jaundice", what today is labeled hepatitis. When she realized she was dying she gently taught Orson the meaning of death with a magical séance. On her deathbed in her room they were alone, celebrating his ninth birthday. She told him her death was close and recited some of his favorite lines from Shakespeare. Then, explaining that he would have many birthday cakes but only this one with its “fairy circle" of nine candles, she had him blow out each candle, one by one, until the otherwise unlit room became jet black. This was the last time he saw her. Four days later she was dead.

Orson's grieving was intense but brief. After less than a month's depression, he was more than himself again, in large part (he would later say) thanks to two of his female cousins who had initiated him into doctor-and-nurse sex, which he proclaimed pleasantly addictive. And, after all, he still had two parents: his admired natural father and the respected but intrusive Dadda. He briefly shared the same home with both men and then moved between them.

The only overt consequence of his mother's death was, he would later claim, that he immediately and forever stopped playing the piano. But this wasn’t quite true. As one biographer discovered, Orson played at least once more, four years later in a prep-school concert.15 However his passive appreciation of music would continue to grow.

11 Johnston & Smith (1940), 96; Higham (1985), 3, 29, 46-47; Noble (1956), 47; Higham (1985), 29. Orson's recollections of her are quoted in Griffin (1982), 33; OW in Griffin (1982), 34; OW in Griffin (1982), 33.
12Johnston & Smith (1940), I, 96; Brady (1989), 5-6.
13Leaming (1985), 13, quoting from her 5 Jun 83 interview with OW.
14Higham (1985), 41-42, based on his interviews with 11 surviving residents of Grand Detour.

His father, Richard, introduced him to vaudevillian friends and took him to China, Japan, and Trinidad (but not, as Orson would later be quoted as claiming, Europe). Richard didn't believe in the early-to-bed theory of child rearing and would chat with his young son until late hours when Orson would decide to take himself off to bed. Dr. Bernstein took him to Cuba and, as a devotee of theater, to plays, operas, and concerts.

Drawing in equal parts from his three parents, young Orson developed a lasting appreciation and love of travel as well as for both the vulgar artistry of vaudeville and the so-called fine arts. Orson's equal fondness for both "high" and "low" culture is crucial to understanding him. Those who overlook this point often mistakenly accuse him of betraying his supposedly lofty artistic standards by prostituting his talents in later life in those many TV talk-show and sitcom appearances and narrations of popular movies like Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Vikings (1958) much less acting in such flicks as The Muppet Movie (1979).
THURSTON, HOUDINI & MR. LONG
Back when Orson was six, Richard had begun taking his son to see stage magicians in Chicago. Three of the greats stuck in his mind: Thurston, Houdini, and Long Tack Sam:
Howard Thurston was then North America's star illusionist. Orson first saw his spectacular The Wonder Show of the Universe when his father took him some time around 1921.16 Thurston's full-evening show trouped a company of 40 with equipment that filled three railway baggage cars. Each full-evening performance presented 18 big illusions plus some small stage magic. Although Thurston added several new effects and dropped some old ones each season, his regularly featured bits included Sawing a Woman in Half, the Levitation of the Princess Karnac, the Sword Cabinet, the Floating Ball, the Card Star, Hypnotizing a Duck, and materializing a duck from under the jacket of a gentleman in the audience — all effects that Orson would later perform.17 But at that time Orson made do with “a couple of big illusions" that his father had bought for him.18 Although he evidently saw Thurston's show on later occasions, he never met the master.19
Two decades later Orson accurately recalled this show:20
As breathless a moment as I've enjoyed in a playhouse was the climax of an illusion performed by Howard Thurston. He called it resoundingly “the Levitation of the Princess Karnac" and after he passed the hoop around the floating lady to prove the absence of wires, rods or sheets of glass, the wizard came down to the footlights and implored us to be as quiet as possible because the slightest noise might have a dangerous effect on the Princess. We all knew he was lying. We knew we could cough our heads off and whatever machinery was holding up the Princess wouldn't budge. But we couldn't see the machinery—Thurston had showed us it couldn't be there so we gave up. It wasn't a puzzle any more—it was magic. In the precise meaning of the word it was marvelous and wonderful.

15 Callow (1996), 30, 45.
16OW in undated [1943] draft guest column for Leonard Lyons' syndicated "The Lyons' Den" column in The New York Post of either 10 Feb or 25 Jul 1943; OW to Ward (1983), 32-33; Gary Darwin interview, 11 May 91, recalling his 1956 conversation with Welles.
17For description of Thurston's show in 1931 see Max Holden, Programmes of Famous Magicians (New York: Max Holden, 1937), 41-43.
18OW in Ward (1983), 32.
19Jane Thurston Shepard telephone interview, 12 Feb 92. The late Miss Thurston (Howard's adopted daughter) says that, if she had ever met Orson Welles, she would have remembered.
20Welles, undated [1943] draft of a guest column for Leonard Lyons' column in The New York Post of either 10 Feb or 25 Jul 1943.
Nobody made a sound.
I encountered that memorable silence when I was six years old and during its observance I determined to grow up to be a magician.
I never changed my mind.
* * *
In 1925 Orson was taken by Dr. Bernstein to New York City for an evening concert by Igor Stravinsky, who was then on his first tour of the USA. The concert was followed by a private gathering in the lounge of the Waldorf Hotel where young Orson's discourse on the Russian modernist composer impressed budding actress Agnes Moorehead, who at 18 was twice his age, as that of “an intellectual adult".21

At the beginning of next year the 10-year-old prodigy was packed off to Madison, Wisconsin, to be placed in the care of Dadda's German friend, Dr. Frederick G. Mueller, a prominent psychologist at the University of Wisconsin. As a specialist in precocious children, he wanted to study Orson by running him through a battery of mental tests and otherwise closely observe this unusual specimen whom he promptly moved into his home. Orson, having secretly read up on dream analysis in the professor's library, plagiarized some of the more intriguing dreams to baffle the man. Faced with word-association tests, he came primed with bizarre answers. Even Dr. Bernstein admitted that Orson had been testing his testers.22

Dr. Mueller enrolled his house guest in the 4-B grade at Washington School, a local city-run grammar school, where Orson soon skipped a full grade. He dealt quickly and decisively with the school bullies. Knowing they'd expect him either to grovel or fight and lose, he created a Third Option, tricking them into playing by his rules. The first time one hit him, Orson went to the bathroom, emerging so splotched with “blood" (red paint from his artist's kit) that the ruffians were frightened off and henceforth avoided him.23

A speech by the boy during a school assembly was so shocking that it got him a feature article in the Madison Journal. He'd concluded a 10-minute lecture on art history by attacking the school's art instruction, which he proclaimed suppressed individual creativity and encouraged only robotic imitations. When a teacher interrupted to say, “You mustn't criticize the public-school system," he replied, “If the public-school system needs criticizing, I will criticize it."24
* * * Beginning in March, during a break from both school and the observations of Dr. Mueller, Orson was taken one afternoon by Dadda to see Harry Houdini perform early during the master's recordbreaking eight-week stay at Chicago's Princess Theatre on South Clark Street.25 With 13 assistants and an executive staff of three, this was the master's first big all-Houdini show, which he'd been trouping through the Eastern and Central states since the previous fall.
21 Noble (1956), 31; Higham (1970), 5, paraphrasing his interview with Miss Moorehead. Higham gives Orson's age as "five", which would place his meeting with a 13-year-old Moorehead around 1920. However, while the events reported are circumstantially true, the ages and their implied dates aren’t. Stravinsky first came to the USA in 1925 and didn't return for ten years.

22 Johnston & Smith (1940), I, 9-10; Higham (1985), 47.
23Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 52; Brady (1989), 9. Higham (1985), 49, probably errs in placing this incident at Todd.
24Johnston & Smith (1940), I, 9-10.

The two-and-a-half hour performance watched by the blue-eyed boy had three acts. The first, lasting 45 to 60 minutes, featured Houdini's magic. This segment included The Miser's Dream where Houdini produces a small fortune in silver dollars from his bare hands and the Orange Tree that visibly grows real oranges. The second act was devoted to his three most famous effects: The opener was the Substitution Trunk (with wife-assistant Bess), followed by the Needle Swallowing Trick, and closed by the death-defying upside-down Water Torture Cell escape. The final act was his lecture-exposé of the methods used by fraudulent psychics.26 Except for the Miser's Dream and Water Torture Cell, Orson would eventually perform all these famous feats, including at least one private psychic exposé.

After the show, Dadda took the boy backstage to meet the 51-year-old star. Impressed by the tall, round-faced lad's grasp of magic history, Houdini taught him the Pass, that basic sleight-of-hand move for cutting a deck of cards so that it imperceptibly transposes its upper and lower portions, thereby nullifying the cut. Accompanying the great showman to his dressing room, Orson did this sleight. Houdini, annoyed, commanded, “Never perform any trick until you have practiced it a thousand times." Orson so took to heart this advice from his admired master that he spent the next few weeks practicing the Pass.27

Next month Orson met Houdini for the second and last time and presumably was anxious to show his teacher the results of long practice. On this occasion he was brought by his father. During their backstage visit after the matinée show, Carl Brema, the famous German-born maker of fine quality conjuring apparatus, arrived from his shop in Philadelphia with an imported Conradi Vanishing Lamp. Young Orson was dumbfounded when Houdini, on accepting the prop, said “Fine, I'll put it in the show tonight."28 Orson didn't know that Houdini had already been doing the Vanishing Lamp for at least four months.29 So Brema's must have been either a repair job or a replacement for the gimmicked prop required for the effect. Despite Orson's misunderstanding, this encounter still served as a useful lesson in “great disillusionment", as he called it, about advice from one's elders.

25 The dates of Houdini's stay at the Princess are established, thanks to Frank Koval and Ken Silverman, by a notice in The Sphinx (Mar 1926), 6; and letters by Houdini to Frank Ducrot, 3 Apr 1926, and Houdini to Dr. A.M. Wilson, 17 Mar & 10 May 1926. Originally booked for two weeks beginning March 8th, Houdini got a two week extension and then a further four weeks. Orson would later say he'd seen Houdini perform at the Hippodrome [in New York City] and first met him there. OW in Orson Welles' Sketch Book, No.3 (1955). To be true that would have been in 1918 when Houdini featured the Vanishing Elephant and Orson would have been only three. It's Orson's recollection of the Vanishing Lamp that pinpoints the meeting with Houdini to the master's 1925-26 tour. Cy Endfield recalls Orson saying that he'd been taken by his "step-father" [i.e., Dadda] to see Houdini at age "eleven". Endfield audiotape to Rosenbaum (Fall 1992).

26 For descriptions of this full-evening show, which Houdini varied from time to time, see Furst (1968), [1]-[4]; and Milbourne Christopher, Houdini: The Untold Story (New York: Crowell, 1969), 216-229.
27Griffin (1982), 35; and Ward (1983), 34, where Orson told them, respectively, that Houdini "taught me the pass." This is not only plausible but likely, as we know that some years earlier Houdini had taught his own version of the Pass to 15-year-old Ralph Read. See Farelli in Hugard's Magic Monthly (Feb 1953), 1046. However, Johnston & Smith (1940), I, 96, probably based on Johnston's interview with Bernstein; and Noble (1956), 31, make it some unspecified trick with a red (a detail added by Noble) handkerchief, probably based on his correspondence with Bernstein. That is a possible but less likely sleight for Houdini to have shown a novice, particularly as Houdini was then again busy practising card magic to revive it for his next tour.
The anonymous article "Incomparable Orson" (1947), 6, says "a man from Carl Brema's ... came in with a new trick in linking chains." Most unlikely!
28OW on Orson Welles' Sketch Book, Episode No.3 (1955). Slightly different quotes are given by Noble (1956), 31; and by OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 182-183.
29Furst (1968), [3].

Incidentally, Orson must have later read about the Vanishing Lamp or figured out the method from seeing the prop in Brema's hands, because he once characterized it as a rather bad trick.30 Perhaps this was because, like many other magi, he thought the method too obvious.

Of all magicians Houdini was arguably, as Orson called him, “the greatest showman of our time."31 Orson would emulate that aspect and recalled that “I loved Houdini" because among other reasons “he was dynamic." But “he wasn't an illusionist; he was a challenger. He challenged the audience. He didn't seduce them. He set up a kind of Olympic game and then won it at the end." Orson sensed that Houdini “had a kind of contempt for illusionists."32 Orson loved illusionists and believed in “seducing" his audiences. But, giving Houdini his due, Orson appreciated that “two of the musts for magicians are nerve and showmanship. If you've got those, more than half the battle is won."33

He was surely introduced to his first magical supply store at the time of these two meetings with Houdini. The Princess Novelty (later Magic) Shop was located next door to the Princess Theatre in a store front that made it one of America's first on-street magic dealerships open to the general public. During Houdini's run at the theater the shop featured a display of handcuffs and leg irons on loan from Houdini and The Great Kolar. And it was the main gathering place for the local wizards.34 It had been opened the previous year by three enterprising young magi: Joe Berg, Sam Berland, and Harry Faber. Years later Berland would become one of Orson's mail-order magic suppliers and Berg would become a regular supplier and a personal friend.

Orson's third most memorable performer was Long Tack Sam, the most famous authentic Chinese magician in the Western world. That vaudeville headliner's short comedy-magic act included his spectacular somersault that finished when a giant bowl of water materialized from thin air into his outstretched hands.35 Evidently his father took Orson backstage because Mr. Long taught him a small trick or two.36 This was most likely after Orson had passed his fifteenth birthday in 1930 during Long's fifth American tour when he played Chicago's Palace Theatre.

Orson would never forget these big vaudeville magic shows. Two decades later, he wrote, “In magic's golden age magicians offered laughter as part of the show but never permitted disenchantment. For a marvelous hour or two they elevated their most[ly] adult audiences to the status of delighted children."37
BOY MAGICIAN
One evening in the early summer of 1926 Orson abruptly cut short what was to have been the rest of the year in Madison at public school and in the home of Dr. Mueller. While the psychologist's wife was out, Orson, suddenly facing what he believed was an overt sexual advance by his host, skipped out a back window, went to the railway station, and returned to Chicago.38 Again Orson, having to take care of himself, had done so in an indirect and non-confrontational, but effective way.

30 Ward (1983), 34.
31OW on videotape of Orson Welles' Sketch Book, Episode No.3 (1955).
32OW interview in Ward (1983), 33.
33Quoted in "Incomparable Orson" (1947), 6.
34The Sphinx (Mar 1926), 6.
35A description of Long's act at that time is in Price (1985), 530-531.
36OW on Orson Welles' Sketch Book, Episode No.3 (1955). Also OW as overheard by Tynan (1961/1976), 14. Tynan has "Dadda" taking Orson to see Long Tack Sam, but this is probably a garble.
37Welles (1948), vi-vii.

He spent the remainder of that summer in Grand Detour with his father at the sizeable Sheffield House Hotel, which Dick had recently bought and ran as a business for travelers and a hospitality house for occasional visiting vaudeville cronies. One was a magician whom Orson got to teach him some tricks. Another visiting vaudevillian taught him how to apparently swallow goldfish by a combination of sleightof-hand (switching the live fish for carrots) and verbal hocus-pocus, the type of sleight-of-mouth that marks the lines or, as most of them call it, “patter" delivered by all good magi. And it was probably at this time that another of his father's chums, a professional mindreader, taught him some rudimentary tricks of psychic mindreading along with the sage warning that the time to quit that racket is when you begin to believe you really have The Power.39

Toward the end of his stay at the hotel, Orson was visited by Marjorie Watson, the 9-year-old younger cousin in the pair with whom he'd played doctor-and-nurse. They promptly eloped. He assured her that they could pay their way by performing magic and giving minstrel shows at a penny a turn. He disguised her as a boy by cropping her hair and giving her some of his clothes. The young Romeo and his Juliet slept in the woods and gave street shows for four days until apprehended 18 miles up the road in the small town of Oregon while working a “tip" of local pedestrians. The Illinois State Rural Police returned the two hungry children to their homes.40
* * *
That fall, “dressed as Sherlock Holmes", he was sent off to the Todd Seminary (later renamed School) for Boys and enrolled in the 6th grade. The school was in Woodstock, Illinois, home of the famous Woodstock typewriter and not the more famous Rock-and-Roll venue in upper New York state. Set on a 300-acre tract some 40 miles west of Chicago, the 78-year-old costly private boarding school for a hundred talented lads covered the first ten grades, with qualified graduates receiving full credentials for college entrance.41

Orson contrived to evade the School's vigorous athletic program by forging Dr. Bernstein's name to an excuse note claiming that the lad was “delicate and could not be expected to take part in any athletics whatsoever."42 This fabrication didn't last long before he was found out and made to participate.

Recognizing the value of an adult protector and mentor, he set out to capture the attention of the owner and soon-to-be headmaster, Roger “Skipper" Hill. At 31, the genial, literate, puckishly down-toearth Skipper was then the school's English and drama teacher and athletic coach.

That fall at the school's annual Halloween Eve show, Orson performed a magic act. For his main trick he materialized a small building from underneath a handkerchief. He intended that the building then burst into flames, but it failed to ignite. Skipper was one of the few in the audience who realized the trick had gone awry, but he was impressed by how the boy magician managed to cover partial failure by improvising patter delivered in that already deep and self-confident voice to make it seem that the trick had ended as planned.43 Skipper was won over and he and his wife, “Horty" (Hortense), became Orson's dearest life-long friends, even calling him their “foster son". This was his first close exposure to a monogamous couple and a loving one at that.

38 OW interview of 22 Jun 1984 in Leaming (1985), 17.
39Leming (1985), 70.
40Dudley Crafts Watson (Marjorie's father) and Frederick J. Garner interviews in Noble (1956), 37-38; and OW interview of 9 Feb 83 in Leaming (1985), 18-19.
41Hortense Hill interview in France (1977), 22.
42Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 25; Higham (1985), 49.

Skipper treated Orson as an adult: “In some ways, he was never really a young boy." They discussed mainly Shakespeare, opera, and magic; and Orson persuaded him to expand the school's sophomoric drama repertoire by adding Shakespeare and other classics. Having created his own niche, Orson quickly dominated it.44

He supplemented his fictitious roles on the Todd stage with two impersonations in life. One afternoon at age 11, alone and without money in downtown Chicago, he'd scammed a hearty meal at a leading private club by passing himself off as the son of member Edward C. “Ned" Moore, prominent music critic and Dadda's friend and cuckoldee.45 And during one Christmas vacation he attempted to gain access to Skipper and Hortense Hill's room at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago during their absence by telling the desk clerk that he was their son. The Great Impersonator was refused entrance when the house detective found the initials “OW" in his hat. Nor did they accept his lame assertion that this stood for his “middle name, Watson". Skipper explains: "He could have amended his claim to that of foster son and proved it by a phone call to my office. But that would have been too easy. And spoiled all the fun."46

In May 1927 at the beginning of Orson's first summer vacation from Todd, Dick Welles took him for a quick 12th birthday cruise of China and Japan.47 In Hong Kong and Shanghai Orson delighted in seeing Chinese classical theater and magicians.48 Among the leading local conjurors, Ching Ling Foo had recently died and Long Tack Sam was on one of his many world tours during which Orson would catch up to him in Chicago. However, the great Han Ping-chien might have been playing Shanghai at that time. Whatever Chinese actors and magi Orson did see would have dressed their acts in the ornate style that he recaptured 19 years later in a scene in The Lady from Shanghai, which he filmed in the Mandarin Theater in San Francisco's Chinatown. Chief among the treasures Orson brought back from this trip were several magic books.49
Later that summer Dadda vacationed in Cuba with Orson who drew stares with his sloppy school clothes, unkempt hair, and wearing his look-older theatrical facial makeup in daytime.50
Todd had no swimming pool when Orson first arrived, but a large one was built during his second year. This created a problem that Orson confessed to Skipper who recalled that “it was the most crucifying thing that had ever happened to him. He'd told everyone that the reason he hadn't gone out for football or anything was because he was a great swimmer. Now, he had to build up the story that he was a mountain climber instead."51 Surprisingly, he came to love swimming (as well as fencing), indeed well enough to make the swim team; although, as athletic director (replacing Skipper who'd become headmaster) Anthony “Coach" Roskie remembers, “He was not very good at athletics — quite lefthanded."52

43 Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 52. Also Leaming (1989), 22-23.
44Hill 1983 interview in Leaming (1985), 23, 24.
45Johnston & Smith (1940), II-51; Brady (1989), 15; and Callow (1996), 60-61. These accounts derive from Ashton Stevens' weekly column in a November 1930 Herald American.
46Hill (1977), 129. Further details, presumably from Skipper, in Johnston & Smith (1940), II-51; and Brady (1989), 15.
47Hill (1977), 110; Brady (1989), 9. Higham (1985), 52, places this trip in summer 1930 when Orson was 15; but this may refer to the "second" trip to the Far East mentioned by Brady (1989), 15-16.
48Brady (1989), 15-16.
49Nostalgic, yes; but gratuitous, no. As Leaming (1985), 336-339, astutely argues, Welles made it an integral part of the visual and psychological setting in accord with his current excitement with Brecht's theory of Chinese stage acting.
50Higham (1989), 50.
51Roger Hill, as quoted in France (1977), 27.

Preferring the company of adults and girls, he made only one friend, Paul Guggenheim, among the boys at Todd. Instead he overawed them by his unconcealed, even deliberately exaggerated sophistication—the exotic places he'd seen, the famous people he'd met, the grown-up things he knew. Orson's closest rival, Hascy Tarbox, flatly stated, “He was never a boy. Or if he had been, he tried to pass that phase in development so fast that he gave the illusion to we mere mortals that he was indeed ageless." As biographer Leaming concludes, “How odd it must have seemed to those ordinary boys at Todd for one so young to possess anything so distinctly adult as a past!"53

Later, on many evenings Orson would join Coach Roskie, who did extra duty as a dormitory master, in the common room of the dorm for the younger pupils where he “loved to entertain before the boys". His one-man performances consisted of “lots of magic tricks" and telling made-up stories until bedtime when he cajoled the youngsters off to their beds by promising another performance another night.54 And he made the much-exaggerated claim that he'd been taught his magic by the great Houdini himself.55
By age 14 he'd already acquired the knack — crucial to any actor, story-teller, con artist, or magician—of adjusting his performance to subtle cues from his audience. Roskie noticed that:56
He watched their eyes and could tell when they wanted more, or when they wanted something else. He'd just make up the story according to what he saw in their faces. ... It was like he'd do something and you'd say, “Hey, that's nice," and then he'd go one step further and turn it into something you never thought of. That's the way he did things, always just one step beyond what you'd expect.

Skipper noted his favorite student's delight in outrageous but imaginative tall tales and pranks. When still only 14 Orson had even run a remarkably sophisticated confidence game. He'd taken a prose translation of a Sophocles play and rewritten it in iambic pentameter, a verse form he'd learned from Shakespeare. Then, passing himself off as a Greek scholar, he sold it as an original translation for $300 to a theater director. When the director found out it wasn't original, Orson was nearly arrested.57 The experience taught him to become more careful. While this was his last certifiable con game, he would often come close with various scams, elaborate hoaxes, and other pranks.

At this time he composed a cheery little song whose lyrics ran: 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.

52 Anthony "Coach" Roskie telephone interview, 16 Sep 93.
53Tarbox 1983 interviews in Leaming (1985), 24.
54Anthony "Coach" Roskie telephone interview, 16 Sep 93. Also Roskie interview in Brady (1989), 11, where his name is misspelled "Roskey".
55Higham (1985), 49.
56Brady (1989), 11, as confirmed by Roskie telephone interview with BW, 16 Sep 93. In 1945 Welles, in his movie The Stranger, would fondly remember Coach Roskie by placing his surname on a bulletin board of the gymnasium of a fictitious boys' school patterned after Todd. Indeed, except for a studio veto on the grounds of cost, he would have shot the school scenes on location at Todd.
57Roger Hill interview in Brady (1989), 15. A slightly different version is given in Johnston & Smith (1940), II-51, probably based on Johnston's 1939 interview with Hill.
For years to come he'd often sing it to celebrate particularly joyous moments such as the arrival of a dear friend or when a rattled actor finally got his lines right.58
Orson expanded his geographical horizons in the summer of 1929 by a walking tour of Europe. With two companions (including a Todd teacher) he saw Europe for the first time, visiting England and touring Germany, France, and Italy. Having abandoned his travel mates along the way, he finished the trip alone.59 “Travel", Skipper later remarked, “has ever been Orson's addiction. Also Orson's education. Man and boy, he's had a fantastic capacity for absorption. From books; from people; from experiences."60

That fall Dr. Bernstein visited Todd, using its charming setting to marry Edith Mason, worldfamous prima donna and reigning diva of the Chicago Opera. As a condition of her divorce from her Italian operatic conductor, Dadda had agreed to three terms: 1) wean Miss Mason away from her addiction to eating pies; 2) force her to stop smoking cigarettes; and 3) pay the ex-husband $100,000 for loss of his wife's sexual favors. Dadda cunningly evaded this last obligation by inviting the ex to move in and share the bride. Orson sometimes stayed with this cosy threesome during the next two years until Miss Mason divorced Dadda and remarried her Italian.61

Throughout his five years at Todd, Orson specialized in drama classes and school plays and tinkered with the school's radio station (for which he wrote an unbroadcast Sherlock Holmes script). Skipper, as drama teacher-director, ran an unusually ambitious program. In addition to the regular weekly shows in the school's theater for uncritical students, friends, and parents, Skipper would take his Todd Troupers on the road to make money, playing a rented theater in Chicago and movie houses in the suburbs.

Orson was, as Skipper put it, “a star with the [touring] company from the time he was thirteen" and “by the time he was a senior was virtually directing them."62 He worked hard and happily with this junior repertory company. And he began his habit of freely experimenting with classic roles and texts (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Molière, etc.).
* * *
While still at Todd, Orson had come to the attention of James C. “Jim" Sherman, wealthy owner of the Palmer Gift Shop with its large magic section, located within Chicago's famous and elegant Palmer House hotel. Sherman would recall that Orson “was terrifically magic conscious then, and did his hobby no harm on every possible occasion."63
YOUNG MACHIAVELLI
“I discovered at the age of six", Orson would recall two decades later, “that almost everything in this world was phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician."64 Although some might question that a six-year old could be so worldly, there's every reason to believe this was indeed his view by at least age 11. And there's ample evidence that even as a child he understood that all the important adults in his world were practicing deception as a way of life and the rest were their dupes. By the time he left Todd School, he'd learned to be positively Machiavellian.

58 Mac Liammóir (1952), 25, 31, 139.
59Hill (1977), 118; Higham (1985), 52.
60Hill (1977), 118.
61Higham (1985), 51.
62Hill interview in France (1977), 23-24.
63Ted Annemann in The Jinx, No.147 [undated, but late August 1941], 822, paraphrasing Sherman's recent conversation.
64Look, 16 Nov 1943. Also partially stated in Denton & Crichton (1943), 14.
* * *
At the end of 1930 when Orson was 15 his father unexpectedly died. The normal shock was magnified by the fact that, since the beginning of fall when the boy had returned to school, he'd been avoiding his much-admired but increasingly booze-pickled father. This was on the advice of both Dadda and Skipper — the first probably self-serving, the second well-intended but inappropriate. Whatever their motives, they put the youth in a position where he'd cruelly withdrawn a child's loving attention at the worst possible time. If Orson hadn't already suspected, these circumstances taught him that, however well-meaning, even his idolized protectors had their share of dirt on clay feet.

Orson's mother had prepared him for her death. His father couldn't. Richard, at age 58, had died suddenly three days after Christmas, alone in his room at the Bismarck Hotel in downtown Chicago. The official cause was given as “cardiac failure" (a heart attack) as a consequence of a history of “chronic myocarditis" (a heart disease) and “chronic nephritis" (kidney disease). However Orson always believed that Richard hadn't slowly drunk himself to death but had committed suicide with a single overdose.65 Paranoia? The fictionalized guilt of a child for the abandonment by death of a parent? Not necessarily and probably not. It was common practice back then for physicians to conceal both the “shame" of alcoholism and the “sin" of suicide. Moreover, the death certificate, which was mysteriously riddled with weird discrepancies, had been signed by the least disinterested physician in Chicago—Dr. Bernstein himself.66 Had he falsified this document? Probably. And that's reportedly what Orson later said.67
He accepted responsibility for his father's “lonely death" and never forgave himself. He argued that:68
I've always thought I killed him. ... I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it — how can you get rid of real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.

Real guilt? Orson's statement may be unfair to shrinks. Freudian (and Jewish and Catholic and Protestant) guilt is a burden, however well meant, laid upon us by others—religious teachers, moralistic law makers, parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues. We feel this type of guilt whenever we fall short of the standards they've imposed, imposed as an obligation—the very opposite of a responsibility, which we're free to accept or reject along with the authority that goes with it. Orson, like many of us, seemingly confused these two quite different meanings and causes of “guilt", his own resulting from having allowed himself to be diverted by Dadda and Skipper from his freely assumed feelings of responsibility toward his father.

He did say later that he believed his mother and father had certain unspecified “expectations" so that “I always felt I was letting them down."69 Now this fits the Freudian definition of neurotic guilt. Although Orson's belief, justified or not, may have diluted some of the joys he would feel, it never crippled him.

65 According to unpublished papers of John Houseman at UCLA cited in Higham (1985), 135n; and partly confirmed by Houseman (1972), 414.
66Higham (1985), 53.
67At least according to unpublished papers of John Houseman at UCLA cited in Higham (1985), 135n.
68OW interview of 19 Jun 83 in Leaming (1985), 32-33.
69OW interview of 8 Jun 84 in Leaming (1985), 408.
* * *
His lifetime work overflows with ageing characters facing their mortality. Some have interpreted this as a morbid preoccupation with death. Rather than leaping to the pop-psych conclusion that Orson had a morbid preoccupation with death, Skipper Hill, who knew Orson as well as anyone, was content to simply observe his behavior and conclude that: “The critics tell us Orson is obsessed with death. I tell you that he has always been obsessed with life, with its sensitivities, with its promises."70
Orson's parents had taught well. As a child he'd already accepted a truth that most of us learn only in middle age if ever:71
I began thinking about death the minute they told me about it and I was indeed very little then. ... I don't think you are truly alive unless you constantly remember you're going to die. In fact, I think what give dignity and tragedy, meaning and beauty, to life is the fact that we will die. ... And if we don't know we are going to die, nothing in life is sufficiently precious to us.

This attitude explains better than anything else why Orson always strikes others as driven, as if by some demon, to accomplish so many things. People entranced by life and living comfortably with their mortality often strike those who aren't as “arrogant" when they are just self-assured, as “aggressive" when merely asserting themselves, “tactless" whenever simply trying to avoid time-consuming hypocritical games by being frank, self-destructively “cynical” when only rationally skeptical, “insensitive" or “selfish" when deeply absorbed in the thrill of creative work, “perfectionist" when setting high standards, and “compulsive" or “workaholic" when strongly motivated to reach desired goals. But we must be confident, assertive, direct, skeptical, task-oriented, committed, and keep to high standards, if we are ever to achieve our most important priorities in a single lifetime. In this process Orson wasn't “driven"—he was having fun driving. Because few chose to keep up with his fierce pace, he would make and keep few close friends; but those few were precious indeed.
* * *
His father's death left Orson with two “parents", Dadda Bernstein and Skipper Hill; but by choice he was already beginning to move out on his own. His four parents had given him much and he'd selected the parts that suited him: Recognition of his own worth and talent; the ability to give and accept affection; a sophisticated education that, combined with his considerable social skills, enabled him to deal effectively with adults; a strong sense of ethics, if not morals, that he called “chivalry"; a passion to test the limits of his abilities, coupled with a somewhat naive optimism. And a protective wisdom, skeptical but never cynical, about the often devious ways of a world he now faced alone.

His father's unusual will gave Orson the power to appoint his own legal guardian. Loving but not trusting Dadda Bernstein, he offered the guardianship to his best friend and unofficial foster father, Skipper Hill. But Skipper declined, giving the true but evasive and insufficient reason that it would hurt Dadda. Out of misguided tactfulness Skipper also advised Orson to conceal this arrangement from Dadda. So Orson appointed Bernstein who immediately began to embezzle Richard's comfortable estate of $43,500 (more than a half million in today's money). Of this, $37,000 was for Orson and $6,500 for his black-sheep older brother. Bernstein carefully manipulated these funds so that the brother never got a penny of his share and the bank's records were altered to show only $20,000 due Orson.72 Dadda's embezzlements were made easier by lying to Orson that there wasn't any money in the estate —his thin and quite insulting excuse being that otherwise Orson would have spent it all in advances before the balance was to pass to him at age 25.
70Hill (1977), 118.
71OW interview of 1 Apr 77 with Merv Griffin (1982), 48-49.
This double betrayal of trust by the two most important people left in Orson's life made him neither bitter nor resentful, much less cynical, but helped him realize that the only person he could rely on was himself. In future he politely listened to but seldom took the advice of either man. This is just as well—otherwise he would have avoided the stage (Dadda wanted him to go to college and then make a career in classical music), cancelled his War of the Worlds broadcast (Skipper's advice), fired his devoted staff in 1942 (Dadda), become an Army officer in WW II (Skipper), and in his late 60s would have dropped filmmaking for either a second go at politics or some puny academic post teaching cinema (Skipper).
Henceforward Orson never blamed others for bad advice that he accepted and acted on. Like any mature adult, he took upon himself full responsibility for his own decisions and actions.
* * *
Next year (1931), at the end of spring semester, he graduated from Todd with honors, later attributing this academic achievement to his bright fellow-student and friend, Paul “Guggie" Guggenheim, whom he'd inducted into ghosting many of his assignments in Latin and Geometry.73 Meanwhile he'd concentrated on improving his skills as an actor, director, dramatist, set designer, painter, sketch artist, cartoonist, radio buff, puppeteer, con artist, and magician.

Orson attended the famous Chicago Art Institute that summer for a drawing course that he dropped after two weeks. During that time he actively began seeking a stage career. He signed with the Powers Agency in Chicago and placed a 73-word ad in both of the country's leading stage magazines, Variety and The Billboard.74

This seemingly straight-forward advertisement isn't. By claiming he would “close in Chicago in early June" he simultaneously lies that he already has a professional stage career, implies he has been on tour, and hides the fact that he'd just graduated from high school. The reference to “chalk talk" as a Wellesian specialty is revealing. During the early 1900's chalk talk acts were one of the odd “allied arts" of conjuring, popular with vaudeville and club stage performers, particularly such well-known magi as Doc Tarbell and Buddy O'Day.75 Because it is a light entertainment combining rapid cartooning on blackboard or easel with amusing patter, it was a natural for Orson, as he would prove two decades hence on a popular BBC-TV series titled Orson Welles' Sketch Book. But the reference to chalk talk in his ad shows he was willing to work vaude in addition to (or even instead of) the legitimate theater.

72 Leaming (1985), 34, 35; Higham (1985), 53-54.
73OW 1969 interview in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 67-68.
74Hill (1977), 117.
75For the history of chalk talk see Whaley (1989), 139.
THE DUBLIN GATE
With college openings looming for fall, Dadda pressed Orson to attend Cornell University and train for a career in music. Skipper wanted him in Harvard where he could study drama, but Dadda vetoed that idea. Orson was tempted by a stage career but didn't fancy college. After three days of rancorous discussions at home with Dadda (backed by Mrs. Ned Moore, his latest live-in menage à trois lover), the executor held firm. So Orson engineered a "compromise" — one that would turn the course of his life toward a direction he'd already half chosen. As he explained to Skipper, “my nose, thanks to the thoughtful blooming of some neighboring clover (which I assured the enemy was ragweed!) began to sniffle hay-feverishly, and the household was illusioned into the realization that something had to be done." The doctor, concerned for his ward's exaggerated state of health, prescribed a few months walking tour of Ireland and Scotland and even grudgingly parted with $500 of Orson's inheritance to fund this therapeutic expedition. (Although Orson wouldn't learn until decades later, the not-so-good doctor conned the estate bankers into believing he'd advanced substantially more money to his ward so he could pocket the difference.)76

Thus, that August, the 16-year-old boy sailed off alone second-class on a British steamer from New York to Galway, on Ireland's west coast. Free at last, he confessed in a letter to Skipper his secret agenda in agreeing to Dadda's terms: “A few months of walking and painting in Ireland and Scotland ... and then on to England where there are schools—and theatres!!!!!!."77 The reference to “schools" was likely only a sop to please Skipper.

In Galway Bay he fell in love with the Aran Islands, so poor that their few hundred residents couldn't even afford a resident priest much less electricity or telephones. Passing through Inisheer (smallest of the three islands) he witnessed an impressive form of supernatural magic presented as theater—a Roman Catholic exorcism. An old house was being moved stone-by-stone from one side of the road to the other, leaving behind one room. An evil spirit haunting the building had been trapped and sealed in that room. However, when the house was being moved, the spirit had escaped, causing a stone to fall and injure the elderly owner. He decided to leave one room behind and had summoned a priest from the mainland to drive the spirit back into it. Orson reported:78

I was fascinated and remained to witness the result. A young, well-educated and intelligent priest arrived deeply embarrassed to see me there, knowing he had to go through with the ceremony for the old man's piece of mind. I learned from him that a priest is not obligated to believe the evil spirit was going back into the room, but it obviously gave comfort to the victim. So, in fact, I saw the “bell, book and candle" ceremony and the resealing of the room.

During his leisurely journey across Ireland by donkey cart, a bicycle named Ulysses (for side trips), Shannon River barges (two weeks), and a bus, Orson supplemented his dwindling cash by selling the oil paintings he'd been doing or bartering them for food and lodging. (Dadda had ignored his ward's urgent requests for money.) Arriving in Dublin broke, Orson tried to con his way into a job on the stage. Although he had smoked an occasional cigar in the company of adults since age 10 or 11, this day he began his life-long cigar habit to enhance his image of being older than he looked.79 Presenting himself at the Dublin Gate Theatre he lied in claiming he'd been a professional actor in America. The theater's English co-director, Hilton Edwards, wasn't deceived: “Tall, young, fat: says he's been with the Guild Theatre in New York. Don't believe a word of it, but he's interesting. I want him to give me an audition."80 Orson passed muster and was hired despite his transparent fibs.

76 France (1977), 27-28; Leaming (1989), 37-39; Higham (1985), 54.
77OW letter to Hill, Sep 1931, quoted in France (1977), 28.
78OW 1 Apr 76 interview in Griffin (1982), 38-39.

Edwards, who would work closely with Orson for the first three weeks, had made Orson accept one condition as the basis of his hiring: “Don't obey me blindly, but listen to me. More important still, listen to yourself. I can help you how to play this part [the meaty role of the Duke in Jew Süss], but you must see and hear what's good about yourself and what's lousy." Orson replied, “But I know that already."81 Whether or not he did, this would become Orson's own philosophy when directing other actors.

From the beginning of what would prove a long working relationship with the Gate's other codirector, Micheál Mac Liammóir recognized that Orson's great secret was a “superb inner confidence that no one could blow out. ... He knew that he was precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth."82

He reveled in the opportunities to exercise his many talents at the Gate. There, in addition to subbing as scene painter and assistant press agent, he acted in one major role and several minor ones that were applauded by both audiences and critics. The most enthusiastic critic, writing the theatrical “Chitchat and Criticism" column in an Irish sporting and society weekly under the by-line of “Knowles Noel Shane", was Orson himself, or so he later claimed.83

After their evening shows he would entertain junior members of the troupe plus hanger-on Trinity College students during late meals at cheap Dublin eateries with tales of the eccentricities of his “nine" aunts and his adventures in China, Greece, and Turkey. His delighted listeners accepted these as the fictions they were meant to be.84 If his wild stories didn't deceive, his lies about his age did somewhat. Introducing himself as 18 (when actually 16) he gradually increased this to 22 and sometimes even 24.85 However, these latter numbers exceeded the limits of credulity of the majority of his Dublin acquaintances, most of whom accepted 18, with only the rare skeptics like Edwards and Mac Liammóir suspecting less.86

He was at ease with the open homosexuality of the Gate's two co-director lovers, Edwards and Mac Liammóir. In childhood his mother's bohemian friends had made him aware of the art world's tolerance for a wide range of sexual expression. Initially embarrassed by the occasional advances from men long before Dr. Mueller, he quickly learned to manipulate his way out without causing them embarrassment—he would lie trivially but tactfully by saying he had a “headache".87 Then in his midteens he found that a matter-of-fact admission of his own heterosexual bent was sufficient to ease social and professional relationships with homosexuals and bisexuals, male and female alike. This tolerance often served well in later years: helping get his first Broadway acting job and then when directing his own casts and crews of stage, film, and magic shows. Indeed he became sufficiently comfortable to write homoerotic subthemes for the protagonists or main characters in four of his works: Bright Lucifer (1934), Iago in Othello (1952), The Other Side of the Wind (1970s), and The Big Brass Ring (1981).

79 OW in 1982 With Orson Welles interview.
80MacLiammóir (1946/1967ed), 127.
81Mac Liammóir (1946/1967ed), 129.
82Mac Liammóir (1946/1961ed), 127.
83OW in his drafts for his Leonard Lyons guest columns for 10 Feb 1943 and 1 Dec 1944. A search by staff of the Dublin Gate Theatre Archive at Northwestern University did not turn up this by-line. (R. Russell Maylone letter to BW, 19 Aug 94.) Without independent verification, OW's "Knowles Noel Shane" story is hard to accept, particularly given the fact that a few years later (in 1934) he was hired for his first job in radio by a man with the same very rare given name, Knowles Entrikin. However, using a pseudonym to critique or defend one's own accomplishment is, of course, not so much a hoax as the kind of practical joke that would appeal to Orson. Indeed, as pointed out to me by Jonathan Rosenbaum (conversation of 28 Dec 2001),. Orson himself would use this method in 1972 in ghosting an eloquent defense of his authorship of Citizen Kane.
84Mac Liammóir (1946/1967ed), 131; Higham (1985), 58.
85Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 54, based on OW's contemporary letters to Skipper Hill.
86Lady Longford (wife of a Gate Theatre director) letter to Noble (1956), 60.

He would also come to actively and vocally champion blacks, Latinos, Jews, Catholics, and women during times when that wasn't always fashionable even in his liberal and theatrical circles. This stand, as with homosexuals, won him throughout the rest of his life the loyalty of many talented minority professionals.
* * *
From Dublin Orson went in early 1932 to London. But he was unable to get theatrical employment there because recent Ministry of Labour regulations blocked the necessary work permit for foreigners. So, in March, back to the States and Skipper Hill who found busy work for his young friend. First on the Todd faculty as drama coach directing the Todd Troupers. Then that summer co-writing a play while living in a lake-side wigwam on the Ojibway Indian Reservation in Wisconsin.

Early next year Skipper set him to editing and illustrating a Shakespeare series for the Todd Press. Orson lived and worked in a tiny studio in what served as Chicago's Bohemian section. Some nights he would visit the vast Century of Progress world's fair on the South Side. There he could see Shakespeare staged in a replica of the Globe Theatre, big illusions performed on the stage of Carter the Great's large Temple of Mystery magic theater, conjurors Dorny and Johnny Platt performing in an oriental show, and, on the midway, Mickey MacDougal pitching Svengali Decks, Dai Vernon cutting silhouettes, or Bil Baird in his professional debut as a puppeter.88

Finding interesting work for Orson was Skipper's preemptive strategy for keeping the boy from intruding more than wanted on his time. If these diversions required a few dollars, Skipper thought it worthwhile. Beginning with Skipper, Orson developed a lifelong habit of using those around him as stooges for his projects. He left it up to them to set the conditions and limits of their servitude.

Conversely, Skipper recognized (and hence overcame) his own tendency to unnecessarily push his young friend. As he admitted to Orson in that terrible time of troubles in 1941 when it seemed that Citzen Kane might be suppressed by the studio before its release:89

Frankly, I have always felt that you functioned better without me than when I was at your back. If things were not going well for Orson my remedy was to send him off someplace with twelve dollars and fifty cents. Push him off some edge with the assurance that he'd invent a new swimming stroke when he hit the water. Or, if there was no water below, assured that like a cat he would light on his feet.

87 OW 1983 interview in Leaming (1985), 17.
88For more on magic at the Chicago fair see George Boston, Inside Magic (1947); Steinmeyer (ed), Jarrett (1981); and Berg (1983), 50.
89Hill undated [around March 1941] letter to OW.

Orson suggested he could work better abroad. So, late that spring of 1933, he was off on a freighter to Morocco where he became the guest of the Pasha of Marrakesh whose son he'd met in Paris during his previous trip to the Continent. In addition to editing and illustrating the Shakespeare plays, he spent two or three days each week in the palace writing detective tales that he sold through a Chicago contact to American pulp magazines, thereby joining the ranks of such notable pulp mystery writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The protagonist of his five short stories is a young amateur playboy detective living with his aunt in Baltimore.90 It was surely inspired by the spoof character of “William J. Spurns", a young amateur playboy detective living in New York, which Orson had acted at Todd six years earlier in Skipper Hill's musical comedy, Finesse the Queen, and based on the then famous founder of the William J. Burns International Detective Agency.91

These stories show Orson smoothly transferring his knowledge of deception theory to yet another new medium. The art of writing mysteries is, of course, an exercise in deceiving the reader. Raymond Chandler made an analogy between sleight-of-hand and the plotting of detective stories when he wrote, “The most effective way to conceal a simple mystery is behind another mystery. This is literary legerdemain. You do not fool the reader by hiding clues or faking character à la [Agatha] Christie but by making him solve the wrong problem." Here is misdirection at its best.
{SIDEBAR}: PASHA FACT OR FICTION
Orson often told a colorful story about his stay in Marrakesh as the guest of the Pasha, the Glaoui. Biographer Simon Callow not only questions the truth of this story but did much commendable research on it. Although inconclusive, Callow’s account raises substantial doubt. While sharing that doubt, I'm less sure it’s justified. Most importantly, in 1931, two years before

Orson, Morocco had been toured by three of his future associates, Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles, and Henry Dunham. Bowles and his friend-lover Dunham even received palatial hospitality in Fez and also visited Marrakesh.92 These are noteworthy coincidences given the fact that Morocco was then a remote and exotic destination available to only the most adventuresome American tourists. So I'm surprised that neither their three autobiographies nor their several biographers cast doubt on Orson's story. Even if to conceal a testable lie Orson had avoided telling his story to any of these three, they surely would have heard it from their many co-workers like Jack Houseman or Virgil Thomson during their close association with Orson from 1936 through 1939. Consequently, even their silence modestly supports Orson’s seemingly tall tale. {END SIDEBAR}

Thence that summer to Spain and Seville where Orson claimed he rented a private room in a brothel in the Gypsy quarter of Triana. There the penny-a-word fee (standard at that time) from his pulp sales made him feel that “I was a rich fellow in those days." Some of those dollars went to buy bulls that he fought in a minor local ring with terrified enthusiasm but no distinction. Performing on “three or four occasions" as El Americano, the young novillero admitted he was “no damn good" and even managed to get himself gored in the thigh.93 (I'd mistrusted Orson's bullfighting claims until reading Micheál Mac Liammóir's 1949 diary. There the until then equally skeptical Irish aficionado mentions finding a photo of a young Orson “in matador's clothes killing his bull in the arena at Seville.")94

90 OW interview with Ivonne Baby in El País, No.121 (Madrid), 6 Mar 1982, p.1, as cited in Riambau (1993), 19; Leaming (1985), 60; Ward (1985), 35; Bill Blackbeard telephone interview, 9 Dec 92, citing his conversation in the 1970s with Nils Hardin, editor of a pulp fanzine, who had interviewed a notably forgetful Orson on this point in the 1970's. [track these stories thru Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in U.S. Pulp Magazines (Garland Press, 2 vols., c.1988).

91 Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 52; Higham (1985), 49.
92On the 1931 Copland-Bowles-Dunham tour see Sawyer-Lauçanno (1989), 110-119.
93Cobos, Rubio, & Pruneda (1964/1966), 41; Riambau (1993), 20.

Additional confirmation is reported by the Welsh-English actor, Keith Baxter. In early 1965 Baxter was in Madrid where Orson had introduced him to bullfighting and bullfighters, including, as Baxter reported:95

An elderly bandillero who worked with the legendary Antonio Ordonez claimed to have seen the teenage Welles in action in a small town outside Seville. Welles had fought with courage, but without style he said.

The old man's 32-year-old memory of such an event is plausibly accurate, given the extraordinary rarity of Yankee or Anglo-Saxon bullfighters in Spain above the rank of pure amateur (like Barnaby Conrad). The only other of whom I've heard in the inter-war period was Sydney Franklin, Hemingway's friend.
* * *
Soon after returning to the States, Orson tried to con his way onto the New York stage by puffing up his rather decent Dublin credentials, declaring that he'd also played the world-famous Abbey Theatre. In fact, the Abbey Players had been touring the USA throughout his Dublin months.96 But Orson really had trod that illustrious stage — one Sunday night on loan from the Gate as a fill-in pro in an amateur production.97 So, while his claim to have played the Abbey had a spot of truth, it was still a lie because of his intent to imply membership in that most distinguished of theatrical companies. It became a modestly durable element in Wellesian myth that pops up from time to time unchallenged, as in Meryman (1978).

Nevertheless he landed an acting job with the elite American troupe of Katharine Cornell. At that time Kit Cornell was being called the First Lady of Theater, a superlative honorific she was sharing with three other actresses in America. But she was truly first among equals in number of fans and the most hit shows. At first try Orson had leapt into the Big Time.

How had he managed this rare coup? Wise for his age and time, he knew that the answer was to play one's connections to the utmost rather than just stumble through life's chancy Yellow Pages. And the best of connections came at this crucial moment. Skipper and Horty Hill had been invited to an arty cocktail party in Chicago and brought their 18-year-old friend along. There he met 36-year-old Pulitzer Prize novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder and, mistaking this Puritanically asexual man for a homosexual “queen", tried to ingratiate himself with a bit of campy banter.98 Although this ploy failed, its goal was achieved when, to Orson's surprise, Wilder recognized the youth from two separate sources that had richly praised Orson's acting: clippings the writer’s sister had passed along from Dublin friends and The New York Times’s Dublin theater columnist. Wilder urged a reluctant Orson to stick with acting. And told him that, if he'd hop the Broadway Limited train to New York, Wilder would telephone ahead to his close friend, theatrical critic Alexander Woollcott, to set up an appointment for Orson to discuss a stage career.

94 Mac Liammóir (1952), 78.
95Baxter (1998), 91.
96France (1977), 22, 27, 36.
97Madeline Ross interview in Noble (1956), 59; Rosenbaum in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 329.
98Callow (1996), 138, errs in labelling Wilder "gay". On Wilder's profound asexuality see Richard H. Goldstone, Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975).

Aleck Woollcott was then the nation's top radio personality. His Sunday evening CBS The Town Cryer show of personalized commentary, anecdotes, and criticism enthralled an audience of six million that earned him a for then fabulous $3,500 weekly pay check. This clever 46-year-old fat man with a squeeky voice was also one of those few celebrities who often went out of their way to help and promote young talent. At that very moment he was letting young Alexander King live in his big apartment overlooking the East River until King's luck would turn, as it soon did.

So King was present when “Orson Welles suddenly showed up, looking terrible. Woollcott immediately dressed him from head to foot", giving him “all the clothes he could spare" and “took him out and got him shoes, which were hard to find because his feet were so big."99 Properly attired, Orson was taken that evening to an elegant restaurant where Woollcott was impressed enough to decide to pass him along to Guthrie McClintic, Kit Cornell's close partner and, given the sexual masquerades of that time, husband and wife in title only. McClintic approved and Orson got his big Broadway start. His straight to gay-friendly networking had clicked.

Woollcott wasn't quite sure he'd "done well by Miss Cornell" until days later when he had a chance to observe Orson's behavior at an intimate dinner where they were the only guests of Cornelia Gray Lunt, a wealthy spinster and social lioness from Evanston, Illinois, where she'd known Orson. While they dined in her suite at the St. Regis, New York's then most elegant hotel, Woollcott marveled at how his 18-year-old acquaintance handled himself with these two worldly companions, Woollcott at 46 and Miss Lunt at an outrageous 91.100 He would later neatly sum up young Orson in his immortal quip (later misattributed to Herman Mankiewicz), “There, but for the grace of God, goes God!”101
* * *
We all invent our public images. Most of us do so unwittingly, thereby fueling a lucrative industry for psychotherapists and others of that tribe. But Orson took conscious pleasure in inventing himself. He told a director friend: “I've always hidden behind masks all my life." And to one biographer, “He freely—even delightedly—admitted to having so embellished certain stories about himself that they seldom came out the same way twice." And indeed they didn't.102 At least not with people whom he considered fair game. After all he'd been raised to be an entertainer and learned in self-defence to be a manipulator.

His simplest mask was a false nose, his own being short, tilted upward, and a bit pug-like. “Both Laurence Olivier and I", Orson said, “detest our own noses. They tend to give our faces a comic appearance, whereas we both have a strong desire to play mainly dramatic rôles. For all normal uses, my own nose is quite pleasant and fairly decorative. It stopped growing, however, when I was about ten years old. Thus it is violently unsuitable for rôles such as Lear, Macbeth and Othello." Since as early as a school performance at age 14 as Richard III we see him wearing a succession of fake noses in all but a handful of his theatrical and movie parts.103

99 Alexander King interview in Teichmann (1976), 197.
100Alexander Woollcott, Long, Long Ago (New York: Viking, 1943), 66-72.
101Attributed to Woollcott by Noble (1956), 22. Attributed to Mankewicz in 1940 at the RKO studios by Meredith (1974), 302; and thence by Meryman (1978), 237 & 263; Mordecai Richler in GQ (Oct 1985), 140; and many others. The earliest citation I find is in Rosten (1941), 51, where it is attributed to “someone”. The many variants of this line, with only the referent or the last name changed, trace back to the 16th century.
102Jaglom in Perlmutter (1988), 4; Brady (1989), vii; Higham (1970), 190.

John Houseman wrote that “It was always a shock to see Welles without the makeup and the false noses behind which he chose to mask himself."104 But Houseman often mistook the man for the actor. The fake noses were indeed masks, but ones that served only one precise purpose: Orson explained that while playing the role of a hateful character, “I put aside part of my political and moral beliefs, I put on a false nose, I do all that: but it remains Orson Welles. There's no use fighting it. Since I believe very strongly in the quality of chivalry, when I play the role of someone I detest, I put great value on being chivalrous in my interpretation."105 This calculated ambiguity is precisely how he forces us to empathize with Faust, Charles Foster Kane, Macbeth, Harry Lime, Mr. Arkadin, Hank Quinlan, even Prince Hal, and the other monsters of his creation or interpretation. Orson's admiring but puzzled new friend Françoise Sagan, French writer and film reviewer for L'Express, sought to understand him better by screening all his movies in one week. She concluded:106

I thought I recognized in all of them the same obsession: an obsession with temperament. Welles likes a certain kind of man, one no doubt like himself: violent, tender, intelligent, amoral, rich; self-obsessed and self-consuming, a force of nature, domineering, fearsome, never understood yet never complaining about it. The young and ruthless Kane, the arrogant Arkadin, the brooding Othello, all monstrous, all loners — the price of supreme intelligence. There is only one film in which he played the part of the victim—The Lady from Shanghai The role of the monster is left to Rita Hayworth; it must be said that he was in love with her.

French filmmaker François Truffaut had a slightly different take: “He is a moralistic director, always showing the angel within the beast, the heart in the monster, the secret of the tyrant. This has led him to invent an acting style revealing the fragility behind power, the sensitivity behind strength."107

We'll meet Orson in his other masks—some that reveal more than they hide. For now it's enough to know that all were as calculated and controlled as his putty noses. And we'll catch glimpses of him without disguise.
ATLANTIC CITY SWAMI
During his 1933-34 tour through America with Kit Cornell's troupe, Orson continued his usual off-stage high jinks. The season had begun with five weeks' rehearsal in New York in late OctoberNovember. One day on his own on the Atlantic City boardwalk he decided to try his hand as a pseudopsychic by reading palms. His was the traditional method of “mitt readers" and other fortune-tellers that they call “cold reading". He would, for example, solemnly announce to one person that “You have a scar on your knee." To another (or the same, for that matter) he'd proclaim “You went through a great emotional change between the ages of twelve and fourteen." And he was almost always right, because—if we stop to think what the psychic is really saying—such seemingly intimate personal details apply to most of us. By just such generalizations delivered with feigned intimacy do psychics reach their common claim of being right 80% of the time. And most adults will accept generalities when proclaimed with feigned intimacy in an all-knowing voice by any person to whom they’d granted the mantle of authority. Orson's cold readings were liberally supplemented by relying on a keen intuition he shared with all successful fortune-tellers. As he recalled later, “I believe I saw and deduced things my conscious mind did not record." In general, he added, “I told people good things [and] made them happy."108 He recognized that the real secret of this “racket" was human gullibility: “Most people want to be fooled. When you tell them something about themselves, they only hear what's true and they don't notice what isn't."109 As one mentalist frankly admitted, “Fortune telling ... is basically a mixture of counseling and social work draped in a framework of mysticism."110 But Orson also saw its sinister side where, as with Macbeth's three weird women, prophesy can inspire hitherto unthought, even otherwise unthinkable actions.

103 OW interview with Noble (1956), 82. Olivier admits his own nose-o-phobia in Laurence Olivier, Confessions of an Actor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 38. For more on his wonderful noses see Brady (1989), 60-61; Leaming (1985), 350, 353, 401, 424; Higham (1985), 60; and Howard (1991), 13.
104Houseman (1972), 150.
105OW's 1958 interview in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, as quoted in Comito (1985), 208. OW had earlier made the same point regarding Caesar in a
1937 interview with the New York Times. This point is accepted by Naremore (1978/1989), 12.
106Sagan (1985), 84.
107Truffaut, American Film Institute address, 9 Feb 1975.

Cornell’s long road tour began on November 25th. The entire company of 40 players and 14 staff spent the next 29 months traveling by train. They occupied four private carriages for themselves and their scenery and props. Orson shared a double-berth on the train and a hotel room with 29-year-old actor John Hoystradt (later renamed Hoyt). He was impressed by Orson's generally high spirits that frequently ended in misbehavior, particularly by often being late. Once for example (on March 29th), having missed the train's departure, Orson drew on his inheritance to hire a private airplane to make the jump to Indianapolis for the next scheduled performance.111

Miss Cornell's long-time personal manager, Gertrude "Gert" Macy, recalled of Orson that “After a performance in San Francisco one night [8 January 1934], he put on a wig, a moustache, a beard and flowing cape and paraded around the Mark Hopkins Hotel as some foreign dignitary."112 This prank had also been observed by Miss Cornell who, in her regal way, sent a note to Orson's table suggesting it was time for the teenager to return the costume to wardrobe and toddle off to bed.113

In early March while the troupers stopped off for a week in Kansas City, Missouri, Orson returned to his psychic reading scam. Putting on a turban and calling himself a “Swami"—which as he later admitted was “the corniest name I could think of!"—he rented a front parlor in the shabby downtown area and posted a sign advertising readings. To his clients “I began just saying things off the top of my head." All went well until an attractive woman in her late 30's appeared. Wearing a bright red dress, she seemed “perfectly happy"—nothing on the surface to suggest her recent tragedy. Yet by luck or insight he blurted out the truth, “You just lost your husband" and she burst into tears. “I quit then, because I had become what is known as a shut eye; that is an expression in the rackets, an occupational disease of the psychics which is to believe yourself. You are receiving [clues and cues] instantaneously and you give the answers before you have consciously rationalized. All I could do was comfort her in her loss and close up shop." After this sobering lesson on the price of arrogance, he recalled the cautionary advice of the pro mindreader who'd warned him about those psychics who come to believe in their “power". Consequently he dropped psychic readings from his bag of tricks.114

108 Tynan (1961/1967), 294; Ward (1983), 34; Brady (1989), 54, who jumbles this with the later episode in Kansas City.
109OW in recording of Orson Welles' Eversharp Almanac, Episode 6 (1945).
110T.A. Waters, Omnimancy: A Treatise on Fortunetelling (1981), 2.
111Hoystradt 1975 talk at Studio One in Hollywood as cited in Higham (1985), 66; Gertrude Macy 1972 letter to France (1977), 43.
112Gertrude Macy 1972 letter to France (1977), 43. See also Brady (1989), 54.
113Tad Mosel, Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 337.

The stopover in Kansas City brought Orson a further welcome diversion. On the afternoon of March 11th he and John Hoystradt joined Kit in her rented house to listen to a radio broadcast of Toscanini conducting the New York Philharmonic. This was one of the regular Sunday afternoon CBS broadcasts that reached an estimated audience of nine million Americans They were so impressed that the three of them caught later performances by the maestro, even if they had to take a night train to some nearby city to get within range of a CBS network station.115

For the jump from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Louisville, Kentucky, on April 8th Cornell and McClintic had their hotel pack lunches and separated from the rest of the company to take Orson, Hoystradt, Gertrude Macy (Kit's manager), and actress Brenda Forbes on a leisurely Sunday trip down the Ohio River. Their vessel was the coal-powered steamboat, the Chris Greene, a recently built 190-foot sternwheeler. Operated by the famous Greene Line Steamboats, Inc., out of Cincinnati, their genial captain, co-owner, and hostess was 60-year-old Mary “Ma” Greene, since 1897 one of only a handful of women licensed river-boat pilots. I hope Orson and his fellow troupers knew to BYOB as their teetotal captain ran a dry bar.116 The troupe then had a day off in Princeton, New Jersey, on May 6th, Orson's 19th birthday.

The long tour across the USA and back ended at the Brooklyn Opera House on June 20th. The company had spent 29 weeks on the road, traveling 17,000 miles to give 225 performances in 75 cities and towns in 31 states (and Toronto, Canada) for nearly a half million people. It had been an extraordinary experience for all. And Orson had earned some kudos, a few from the critics, some grudging remarks from McClintic, but a wholehearted comment from Miss Cornell: "We were all struck by his beautiful voice and always provocative acting method."117

With much free time during the tour Orson discovered a literary-artistic genre widely if rather inaccurately associated with childhood—the newspaper comic strip. He began a long love affair with Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates, and the early L'il Abner. He even planned in 1940, seventeen years ahead of academics and art critics, to write an article for Harper's magazine extolling the comics as a worthy art form at a time when such expressions of “mass culture" were dismissed with snobbish contempt by the intelligentsia.118
* * *
During the Cornell troupe's summer recess, 19-year-old Orson joined Skipper Hill's theater festival in Woodstock, Illinois. With Skipper's approval he conceived and executed a neat academic fraud to help finance the event. Outside students—teenage boys and girls—would be accepted for a two-month summer-school drama course for the then hefty tuition of $250, if they passed an audition. This last twist was Orson's, so he personally conducted the auditions, making sure that all 20 applicants passed. Moreover, as Skipper later confessed, “the school was a phony" because no formal instruction was given — only on-the-job experience slaving for the staff, the 15 paid pro actors, and Orson.119

114 OW on recording of Orson Welles' Eversharp Almanac, Episode 6 (1945). Substantially repeated in 1966 interview in Tynan (1967); and in Ward (1983), 34; and Leaming (1985), 70-71; based on their interviews with Welles in 1983.
115Cornell (1939), 142. See also Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (New York: Knopf, 1987), 139.
116Cornell (1939), 143. Also Dave Dawley’s internet site, <http://members.tripod.com>.
117Cornell (1939), 127.
118Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 54; OW in Welles & Bogdanovich tape edition of This is Orson Welles (1992), Tape 4, Side 8. The article never appeared. The breakthrough book that made the popular arts intellectually and academically acceptable was my colleague and friend David Manning White's Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957).

The festival was planned around three plays, Trilby (featuring Orson's demonic Svengali), Tsar Paul, and Hamlet. During the weeks of rehearsal of this last work, popular American novelist, playwright, and distinguished Hamlet scholar Thornton Wilder was a guest in Skipper and Horty Hill's home. His visit coincided with the initial Todd Press printings of the Hill-Welles editions of Shakespeare. Wilder was amazed by the professionalism of the school's printing plant but was even more view of by Orson's interpretation. Wilder declared the opening four sentences of Orson's Introduction the finest summation of the Elizabethan's genius ever written.120 Here they are:121

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man's season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heart-beats.
We don't know Wilder's reaction to the follow-on sentence, one that ended the paragraph in words that proclaimed Orson's revolutionary views on how modern audiences can best approach Shakespeare:
He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth.
It was this early view that Orson henceforth applied to all his many distinctive and controversial Shakespearian productions on stage and in text, radio, and film.
While his randy guest stars from Ireland, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir, pursued the teenage Todd boys, the boys (well, most of them) chased the girls, and Orson seduced bright and pretty Miss Virginia Nicholson, 18, who had passed up her debutante coming-out party to work the festival.

He took a few hours off one day to debut as a movie producer, co-director, and assistant camera operator. Purely for diversion he got together with Virginia and a cameraman friend to spoof the then fashionable surrealistic art-films of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, and Luis Buñuel. Shot as a 16mm black-and-white silent, it runs only five minutes. Although made as an amateur's joke, The Hearts of Age reveals Orson's life-long “hatred" of symbolic imagery. As Bret Wood first pointed out, “such devices are peripheral to the central meaning" in Orson's scripts, which are "expressed through narrative and dialogue." Thus even such powerfully evocative images as:122

The snow-filled glass ball of Citizen Kane, the clock angel of The Stranger and Welles' other visual symbols are not puzzles to be deciphered by the viewer but reflections of elements clearly presented in the film. The symbols are used to remind the viewer of aspects of the story which make the entire film more significant when considered in relation to that scene in which it is surreptitiously placed (the viewer's perception of Elsa is enhanced by the huge creatures in the aquarium where she seduces Michael in The Lady from Shanghai).

119 Leaming (1985), 74-75, based on her 1983 interviews with Roger Hill, Hascy Tarbox, and OW. Also Hill (1977), 123, where he puts the tuition at $500.
120HIll (1984), 75-76.
121Roger Hill and Orson Welles (editors), Everybody's Shakespeare (Woodstock, Ill.: The Todd Press, 1934), Introduction, p.22.
122Wood (1990), 151-152.

Orson never used visual symbols to mystify, much less hint at any possible psychological underpinnings of his characters. So what of Kane's snow-globe? He cheerfully credited his co-script writer Mankiewicz with that idea, saying, "It's a gimmick, really, and rather dollar-book Freud."123 And “Rosebud”? Again Orson credited his co-writer.

He portrayed people on film as on stage for what they do, specifically how they deal with power—how they get it, use it, and lose it. When directing actors he never explained their motivation, only what he wanted them to do and say, leaving them free to inject their own interpretation. Disinterested in motives on stage or in life, Orson never asked, “What does she mean by that?" His judgement on psychoanalysis: “About as valuable as—but considerably more expensive than—consulting your local astrologer."124
123OW interview in Powell (1963).
124OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 242. PART II: NEW YORK!, NEW YORK! (1934-1939)
BROADWAY UNLIMITED
A memorable summer ended, Orson packed his Mysto Magic set in his head and moved to New York City to try his hand on Broadway. While waiting for Miss Cornell's new season to open in December he applied for his first job in radio. This was one of the minor speaking parts in CBS's School of the Air of the Americas, a daily afternoon series, which paid $18.50 per show. Appearing for an interview in the Madison Avenue office of CBS's drama director Knowles Entrikin he met a tall, slim, handsome stage actor with a soft Virginian accent who was seeking one of the same jobs. Enter Joseph "Jo" Cotten. Orson, to disguise his youthfulness that day, had adopted a new mask – a pipe. Unfamiliar with the proper handling of this dangerous device, he knocked the smoldering dottle into the director's wastebasket, starting a fire that drew uncomplimentary attention. But he got the job.1

And so did Jo Cotten. Although ten years older than Orson, they shared a sardonic humor and a love of practical joking, high-living, booze, and women that would sustain a life-long friendship. After its end Jo wrote, “I know little about Orson's childhood and seriously doubt that he ever was a child."

That November Orson and Virginia married quietly. And remarried the following month to please her socialite parents. But it didn't please his wealthy new father-in-law when Orson declined his suggestion that he become a stock broker.

It did please the in-laws that the fancy but phony second wedding had been officiated by bigname Congregational minister Vincent G. Burns. The Reverend Burns's autograph was in demand as coauthor of the recent best-selling autobiography of his brother and its popular spin-off movie, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. But it would take another three years for Orson to become famous enough to begin refusing autographs to clamoring fans. So why was his signature already being forged? It was appearing on the title pages of many copies of his first books, those three volumes in the Everybody's Shakespeare series co-edited and illustrated by Orson and published that year by the Todd Press in Woodstock. Anticipating his protégé's future fame with its consequent market for autographs, Skipper got Hascy Tarbox to inscribe Orson's name on piles of copies. "I got terribly good," said the artistically inclined Tarbox when later proudly admitting his forgeries, which extended to doing Skipper's signatures as well. Orson, when he found out, was not amused.2 (Collectors beware! In March 2001 an internet antiquarian book dealer was offering copies "signed by Orson Welles" for $2,000 and $2,500 when unsigned copies were going for only $175 to $350.)
* * *
When Katharine Cornell's winter season opened (December 6th in Detroit and thence to Broadway on the 20th) with Romeo and Juliet, Orson's two roles were minor and drew little notice from the critics. But one Broadway first-nighter noticed. John Houseman was spellbound – so much so that he wanted Orson for himself. The sophisticated 32-year old Romanian-born Alsatian-British Jewish grain merchant-turned-theatrical director had, as the protégé and roommate of composer Virgil Thomson, begun to make a name from his first avant-garde stage production, Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. When Houseman brought Orson to the flat he shared with Thomson, the latter recalled, “That Orson could be so overbearing at eighteen was in his favor; that he had already directed plays in Dublin we did not believe.”3
1Cotten (1987), 29-31.
2Joanne Tarbox interview, 30 Sep 93; Hascy Tarbox, Mar 1983 interview in Leaming (1985), 96.
Houseman and Orson would work together to their mutual advantage for the next six years, with Orson as the visionary creator and Houseman as the astute business manager who helped make it possible. But, early on, Virginia predicted with insight worthy of The Swami himself that Houseman would someday become Orson's Iago, betraying him out of jealous hatred.4

Houseman's autobiography devotes over 300 pages to his extraordinary portrait of Orson. Although by all accounts (including his own) Houseman's behavior was strictly heterosexual, Barbara Leaming virtually proves that his book implicitly but clearly and repeatedly reveals himself caught up with Orson in a fantasy with a homoerotic component. One that Orson recognized, manipulated, and exploited.5 I believe she’s right. For me the proof is in Housesman’s extraordinarily bitter comments on their final break where he writes of:6

... soul-destroying months I spent there [in Hollywood] as Orson Welles’s castrated, ineffectual partner while our five years’ personal and professional partnership withered and died in the blast of his sudden fame.
This reaction reeks of a lover’s jealousy that, when finally jilted, turns to hate.
However, I believe the dynamic of their relationship was also driven by Houseman’s need to be acknowledged as the power behind Orson’s successes, the Great Producer as it were. Having failed to get that recognition from Orson, he preached those 300 pages to make sure that at least everyone else would give him more credit than deserved. And largely succeeded – just as he had to some degree with Virgil Thomson and would later with Herman Mankiewicz. Throughout his career Houseman consistently played the role of the chief of staff, the expediter, the producer, the power behind the throne.7

Whatever the psycho dynamics, Orson's stage career would climb throughout next year (1935) under the guidance of Houseman. At this time Houseman was involved in producing the first play at the newly formed Phoenix Theatre. Produced by Houseman, Orson became the central character in Panic, a new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner writer-poet Archibald MacLeish. This blank-verse drama about the Stock Market Crash of ’29 featured Orson as a middle-aged market manipulator.

The play's central character was McGafferty, a formidable industrial and financial leader caught in the Stock Market Crash of '29. How did Orson get cast in this giant's role? Neither Alfred Lunt nor Edward G. Robinson were available. Neither were John or Lionel Barrymore. Houseman was unable to recruit Paul Muni. At this point, remembering boy Orson's current portrayal of mature Tybalt in Cornell's Romeo and Juliet, Houseman secretly approached Orson backstage and invited him to join him at a nearby bar. There, over two rounds of old fashioneds, persuaded Orson to agree to audition for the role of McGafferty. Two days later Orson did so:8

3 Thomson (1966), 253.
4Leaming (1985), 87, evidently based on correspondence or interviews with OW.
5Houseman (1972), 167, etc; Leaming (1985), 81-87.
6Houseman, Front and Center (1979), 107.
7On Houseman’s relationship with Thompson see particularly Thomson (1966); and Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson (New York: Norton, 1997), 240-243, 555. Note also the fact that his mentor and roommate in at least five apartments during the years 1935-37 and again in 1943 and 1945 was Virgil Thomson, a very active if publically secret homosexual. And that his last years were as mentor to gay TV and movie director James Bridges. However I interpret Houseman’s social and professional motives as being about control rather than sex.

I saw MacLeish's eyes narrow in exasperation as a tall nineteen-year-old boy in gray pants and a loose tweed jacket ... entered our bare, one-room office over the Burlesque house to read for the role of the aging tycoon, McGafferty. I gave him the hardest part first; the last despairing phase when McGafferty, harried and weakened with fear, becomes convinced. through the suicide of his last trusted associate, that his own end has come.

Sitting stiffly in that small grimy office ..., hearing that voice for the first time in its full and astonishing range, MacLeish stared incredulously. It was an instrument of pathos and terror, of infinite delicacy and brutally devastating power.

When Panic opened March 15th, it played its two scheduled performances (plus an add-on show for Communist Party supporters) to lackluster reviews. The general public wasn't much interested in the author's take on a seven-year old economic catastrophe. And the Communist Party leaders only grudgingly backed MacLeish's sympathetic portrayal of a distressed and disgraced capitalist pushed to the brink of suicide.

One performance of Panic was seen by Paul Stewart, a 26-year-old radio actor. Consequently, on Stewart’s recommendation to CBS, Orson auditioned for and won a permanent spot on The March of Time, a daily (later weekly) late-evening dramatized news show.9 Beginning March 22nd (reading a scene from Panic), for the next four years he impersonated such newsworthy figures as New York Mayor La Guardia, Sigmund Freud, Charles Laughton, Sir Basil Zaharoff, and even the Dionne Quintuplets. He mimicked each voice (except the Quints) after listening to newsreels or phonograph records, taking care to capture each person's dialect, accent, tone, tempo, phrasing, and other distinctive vocal characteristics.10 So radio would remain Orson's bread and butter as well as stretch his developing talents.

He had achieved a modest level of celebrity. A tiny brochure issued that year by Keen's English Chop House, the famous beef and ale restaurant in Lower Manhattan, took care to mention Orson's membership in the establishment's exclusive "Pipe Register", which assured his personal clay pipe on the wall, there to await his call to the Pipe Warden following dinner.11

With a steady income from radio but furiously busy, Orson had put off shopping for Virginia's Christmas present until late on Christmas Eve 1935 when he entered Saks Fifth Avenue. He eased himself through the battling mob by commandeering a wheelchair to which the suddenly courteous shoppers yielded the right of way. Arriving just at closing in the fur department, he picked a mink stole. Annoyed by the price, he appealed to the clerk from his wheelchair by explaining that the piece was about to go on post-season sale anyway and pleading “Otherwise I have nothing for my wife." He got the fur on his terms. Toward the end of his life Orson recalled:12
I never did anything remotely that intelligent again. It was a flash of Christmas sentiment on their part. But I always regarded it as great shrewdness on mine.
8 Houseman (1972), 151.
9Noble (1956), 86.
10The most detailed account of Orson's mimicry technique is Brady (1989), 70-71, 75-78.
11David Jay, Tobacco Smoke and Taverns (New York: Keen's, 1935), 9.
12OW 23 Dec 83 interview in Leaming (1985), 93.
HARLEM NIGHTS AND STAGE VOODOO
Early in the new year (1936) Houseman got himself and Orson signed on with the WPA's Federal Theatre Project and Orson was made stage director of the Harlem-based New York unit, the largest of its 18 nationwide black theatrical groups. Already an amateur theater producer, dramatist, set designer, and director, Orson was about to become an instant pro in all these later categories, as well as expand his range as an actor. And so, for the next 18 weeks, from early February through June, Orson virtually lived in Harlem with only time out downtown for sleeping and his regular radio jobs.

Headquarters for Orson and Houseman and their Negro Theatre Project was the famous Lafayette Theatre. Leased by the WPA, the Lafayette was an ideal choice. Located at 2235 7th Avenue in the heart of Harlem gave maximum accessibility. Opened in 1912 as a variety theater, it had featured such top jazz orchestras as Fletcher Henderson’s and Duke Ellington’s. It would become the first local night spot to desegregate. Then in 1935 it became a movie house. Its 1,500-seat auditorium was the largest Harlem theater with a full stage and backstage. The ample basement had from 1932 until recently housed the Hoofer’s Club, the informal jazz hangout of Harlem’s leading dancers (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Honi Coles, etc). The building was still in good condition when occupied by the Negro Theatre Project.

It was off-beat timing when Orson and Harlem discovered each other. The sparkling “Harlem Renaissance” had run from 1920 through the early Prohibition years until it fizzled out after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Radical writer Langston Hughes summed it up:13

That ... was the end of the Harlem Renaissance. We were no longer in vogue, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward. Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money.

Orson arrived in the depths of the Great Depression. The vibrant Harlem ghetto had become an impoverished slum where more people were in bread lines than theater ticket lines. Unemployment ran fives times that in the rest of New York. The black-white honeymoon had ended definitively on the evening of 19 March 1935 when some ten thousand angry locals marched down Lenox Avenue destroying all white-owned businesses. The riot, sparked by white store clerks having roughed up a Puerto Rican boy for shop-lifting a knife, left three dead, 30 hospitalized, and over 100 arrested.14

Orson’s first job for the Federal Theatre Project was to direct an astounding version of Macbeth. To take full advantage of the all-black cast, Orson's bride, Virginia, brightly suggested that Shakespeare's Scottish setting be reset in Haiti during the historical time of rising against a black tyrant of the early 1800s. Henceforward the production was unofficially known as the “Voodoo" Macbeth. It introduced many of the elements that would mark all of Orson’s future stage creations and carry over into his radio, movie, and TV work. As drama historian Richard France recognized, Orson already:15

was possessed of an imagination and sense of originality altogether unbounded by any theoretical restraints. Ideas came to him ... catch-as-catch-can, with everything and anything being integrated into his production schemes. His theatrical vocabulary was at once the highest and the lowest and readily lent itself to those violent effects of contrast which were his signature. He was the sideshow barker wallowing in the high excitement and derring-do of the circus or variety theatre on the one hand, while simultaneously exercising austerity and disciplined understatement on the other.

13 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940), 334.
14See Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of Afro-American Culture, 1920-1930 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981).
15France (1977), 55.

But his inventions were never merely those self-indulgent expressions of artists or critics who presume that “new" equals “creative". Orson understood that novelty must fit into a wider dramatic scheme to earn the word creative. And even then he always mistrusted that overworked word.

In “Voodoo" Macbeth we first discern Orson's “delight in sharing not only illusion but the mechanics of illusion with his audience."16 He would soon repeat this lesson on radio (War of the Worlds) and then in film after film. And with his friends.

The play ends with the death and decapitation of Macbeth, his severed head hurled from the ramparts by the victorious Macduff to the three witches who then display it impaled upon a staff. Orson had an interesting Third Option for presenting this beheading effect. As a magician, he would have known how to do it convincingly in full view of the audience by using a truncated variation of the old Palingenesia method he'd seen Houdini revive on stage ten years before. However he chose to present the audience with a done deed,17 probably, as Richard France suggests, because “it was the [sudden and unexpected] sight of the severed head, not the process of beheading that was paramount for Welles."18 Orson left it to Roman Polanski to use the Palingenesia method in his film version of Macbeth (1971).

Orson's Macbeth posed a casting problem that needed disguise. The show advertised an allNegro cast and it was. But the two leads, blue-eyed giant Jack Carter as Macbeth and Edna Thomas as Lady Macbeth were so light-skinned that it was feared audiences would mistake them for whites. The solution was that both Carter and Thomas played in black face, “making down" or “blackening up” as Negro jargon of those days realistically called dark makeup.

Orson was intrigued by the company's troupe of African Gold Coast drummers and worked closely with them. This group of dancers, singers, and drummers had been formed three years earlier by Asadata Dafora Horton, an Oxford-accented native of the West African British colony of Sierra Leone (and, briefly during his return there in 1963, as Minister of Culture). Dafora, a choreographer and one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, was already recognized as the "preeminent purveyor of African dance and culture in America". His group comprised Afro-American women dancers (including the famous Ollie Burgoyne) and African male drummers, including an authentic (or perhaps only stage) witch doctor named Abdul Assen, a silver-bangled Nigerian Moslem dwarf whose gold teeth had diamond insets.19 Their first act upon being hired as musicians and dancers for Macbeth was, or so it was said, to formally requisition several black goats that they ritually sacrificed late one night in the theater to provide the skins for their resonant drums. Whatever the truth of that story Orson made their awesome drumming a recurring theme in the play's music and sound effects.20

16 France (1977), 55, paraphrasing Pauline Kael (1971/1984), 61-62: "I think what makes Welles' directorial style so satisfying in this movie [Kane] is that we are constantly aware of the mechanics – that the pleasure Kane gives doesn't come from illusion but comes from our enjoyment of the dexterity of the illusionist and the working of the machinery."

17 The stage directions as reprinted in France (1990), 96, specify "He falls dead, his body hidden behind the battlements at the top of the tower."
1818.France letter to BW, 11 Apr 92. As later in Orson's film version of Macbeth where the beheading is also done off-stage during a brief cutaway shot to the witches' symbolic decapitation of a figurine and the already severed head then first seen by the movie audience.
19A whole chapter on the remarkable Asadata Dafora and his troupe is in Perpener (2001), 101-127. See also Thomson (1966), 262.

The extent and depth of Orson’s control of the sounds, including the music, in his productions has never been fully appreciated or credited. This omission, like his magic, is an important gap because, as we’ll discover, he consciously tried to edit each part of all his movies to a “rhythm” that would build to an overall “musical” structure.21 This important subject will be analyzed in detail later, but its role in his Voodoo Macbeth is worth notice here because it was the first of his astonishing stream of creative and usually successful experiments in sound. Because Virgil Thomson was the composer-arranger and musical director for Macbeth, he automatically tends to get full credit. But Thomson himself, for all his immodesty, modifies the record by properly crediting Orson for the following key “device”, which his autobiography called “really Welles’s.”22 In addition to the “sizable pit orchestra” there was a backstage percussion group comprised of the great “thunder drum”, a standard thunder sheet, bass drums, kettledrums, and a wind machine. These served two purposes. First as mere sound effects, specifically to simulate a storm. But also, as explained by Thomson, “played by musicians and conducted, for accompanying some of the grander speeches. In this way, on a pretext of rough weather, I could support an actor’s voice and even build it to twice life size.”

This large orchestral and sound-effects group required precise musical control because, Thomson points out, with all their percussion noise, the backstage musicians couldn’t “hear lines but must depend on light-cues; nor can an actor so accompanied change his reading much from one night to another.”23

Orson imposed his wishes on and involved himself in all aspects of this production. But he was wise enough even at this early stage in his career as director to avoid miring himself and the whole production by micro-managing all the fine details. As Thomson testified:24
He knew exactly the effect he wanted. He never told you how to produce it. You leave those things to people who have the technique.
This would become Orson’s lifetime practice, although admittedly he sometimes would let himself get caught-up in details to the detriment of the overall product.
Dafora was disturbed when he read a scathing opening night review of Macbeth, which appeared two days later in the Republican New York Herald-Tribune. Percy Hammond, the dean of New York drama critics, had written that “The Negro Theatre, an offshoot of the Federal Government and one of your Uncle Sam's benevolent experimental philanthropies, gave us, last night, an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling." Dafora brought his voodoo troupe to Orson and Houseman and showed them a clip of Hammond's review. He then asked only two questions: “The work of an enemy?" and “He is a bad man?" When Houseman and Welles agreed on both points, Horton translated to his colleagues who nodded and silently withdrew. Next day the theater manager reported that the drummers had spent the night in the building chanting with more than their usual fervor and Orson and Houseman exchanged glances because they had just read the afternoon newspaper report that Percy Hammond had been suddenly taken ill with pneumonia. Forty-eight hours later he was dead. Houseman's account not only portrayed the sophisticated Dafora as a stereotypical jungle darkie speaking funny English but played up the supernatural and claimed that Orson was “ridiculously superstitious”. Orson's account was matter-of-fact flatly contradicting Houseman, in saying “Hard to believe, but it is circumstantially true."25

20 Thomson (1966), 262; Houseman (1972), 190-193.
21Wood (1990), 176-179, 182-185, summarizes OW’s more ambitious music projects, all unrealized.
22Thomson (1966), 263.
23Thomson (1966), 263.
24Thomson 1972 interview in France (1977), 69.

French avant-garde poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau, whom Orson had recently parodied in Hearts of Age, was in New York on June 9th. He was flitting through on the last stopover on his personal Eighty Days Around the World tour with his current lover playing the role of Passepartout.26 Cocteau’s old friend from Paris days, Virgil Thomson, recalled escorting him that Sunday evening to Harlem:27

I took him to Macbeth. And he savored each ingenious violation of the straightforward, excepting only one: he did not understand the constant lighting changes. His classical theater mind found them distracting till he had seized their function in the spectacle as contributing to the climate of violence.

Cocteau found little resemblance between the “barbaric frenzies” of this black spectacle and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He referred to its “Wagnerian” climate and called its final scene “a gorgeous ballet of catastrophe and death.” He took no notice of Orson, failing to remember him when they met in Paris a decade later.

Virgil Thomson, who’d observed Orson as closely in this period as did his friend and protégé Houseman, managed a more emotionally distanced view of their collaboration. Of the creation of the Harlem theater and its Macbeth he wrote that:28

... due to Welles’s brilliant planning and to Houseman’s administrative tact. ... [ Macbeth] was Houseman’s dream but Orson’s child.... And in this Orson showed himself, still just eighteen, as imaginative, foresighted, patient, above all with a knack for making actors act.
* * *
Caught between his drive to create and the need for money, Orson began a life-long habit of working several major projects at the same time. Rehearsals of Macbeth in Harlem ran from after midnight until 8 AM, during which time Orson would consume quantities of whiskey – until Virgil Thomson got him to switch to white wine. After rehearsals he'd hold a breakfast conference. He'd then rush downtown to begin a round of radio appearances that ran from 10 AM until midnight when it was time to get back to Harlem, somehow managing to squeeze in some time for carousing. Several days of this hard schedule brought him to the point of exhaustion. That happened one noon early that year when he arrived at the CBS studios just in time for his daily unrehearsed recitation on a 15-minute light-musicwith-poetry show called Musical Reveries. Handed an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet, he was too befuddled to understand it. Rather than just fluff around, he chose to deliver the last lines in double-talk. Clever but costly, as the unsympathetic producer decided this was Orson's last day (at $50 per) on the show.29

25 Houseman (1972), 202-203; Brady (1989), 90.
26Jean Cocteau, Round the World Again in 80 Days (London: Taurus, 2000(as translated from the 1936 edition), 241.
27Thomson (1966), 263.
28Thomson (1966), 263.
29OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 280, 333; and verified in most details by Johnston & Smith (1940), III, 45.

Orson's verbal improvisation that day had been a radio first for double-talk, those lines spoken in an earnest and sincere voice but deliberately mixing real with nonsense words. Orson would have known from Robert-Houdin's autobiography that this deceptive manner of speaking had originated in the early 1800s among French conjurors. They called it amphigouri. It suited their patter because it gave a comic but meaningless explanation of magical methods, thereby keeping the secrets. However, by 1868 this type of comedic verbal hoax had become passé. Then, in 1936, with its freshly coined term “doubletalk", it enjoyed a revival among American magi and others, particularly after being introduced two years after Orson's inspiration, to a mass audience on a Jack Benny radio show when it triggered a major public fad.30
* * *
By the summer of '36 Orson had become amazingly successful both in radio (where he was now earning $1,000 per week) and on stage (where he earned a big reputation but small money). He told Frank Case, the Algonquin's amused manager, that he no longer had those moments when he faced the possibility of having to sleep in Central Park but could now face the possibility of buying Central Park.31

To keep him with the Federal Theatre, its director gave him his own showplace. This was the elegant 900-seat Maxine Elliott's Theatre on West 39th Street just off lower Broadway. Orson thought of it as his “magic box".32

His first production there in September, Horse Eats Hat, was his slapstick version of a French sex farce. Nat Karson, skilled set designer and old friend of producer Houseman, was responsible for engineering Orson's “magic devices" whereby the entire set and props, “seized with a sudden life of their own, were seen to fly off suddenly in various directions."33 Bil Baird designed the break-apart furniture and there was even a seven-door set “in one” used for slapstick hide-and-seek.34 Orson's idea of having the whole set collapse around and over the players anticipated Andrew Lloyd Webber by 50 years.
These hi-jinks weren’t for everyone. Playwright Marc Connelly recalls attending a performance where:35
From the moment the curtain rose I found it hilarious. So did someone else seated some distance from me whom I couldn’t see. We were volcanic islets of mirth in a sea of silence. Hearing another man laughing as much as I kept me from being intimidated by the general apathy.
At the intermission , Connelly recalled:
As the audience and I moved into the lobby I spotted a man wiping tears of pleasure from his eyes. It was my friend [novelist] John Dos Passos. For our own security, in case the second act proved as funny as the first, we sat in adjacent vacant seats we found in a rear row and for the rest of the evening screamed with laughter together. I was never able to understand the apathy of the rest of the audience.

30 Robert-Houdin (1868/1877 tr), 86-87; Annemann in Jinx (1937), 234, (1938), 270, 292.
31Case (1938),68.
32OW 16 Jul 84 interview in Leaming (1985), 112.
33Houseman (1972), 220, 221. Houseman credits Abe Feder but Richard France letter to BW, 11 Apr 92, identifies Karson rather than Feder as having engineered these effects.
34Thomson (1966), 264-265
35Connelly (1986), 230-231.

That one performance wasn’t a fluke – the play drew generally mixed comment. But lots of it. And that’s what mattered to Orson because it kept public attention on himself. Jo Cotten recalls Orson entering the theater waving a newspaper above his head and thundering gayly that local columnist “O. O. McIntyre mentioned me today." When Jo and the others dutifully shouted in unison “What did he say?", Orson roared laughingly, “He said I was a flash in the pan."36

The play ran ten weeks to generally full houses and many repeat customers. Bertha “Spivy” LeVoe, the outrageous lesbian singer-owner of Spivy’s Roof claims she saw it 30 times, sometimes bringing friends. Often after the show Orson would bring Virginia to Spivy’s club at 139 East 57th Street for drinks and the three became friendly. But Spivy noticed that the couple quarreled a lot at first. Later he began dropping in at Spivy’s with other people while Virginia would come separately, “squired by a handsome actor or writer.”37 The marriage was slipping.
* * *
Horse Eats Hat marks Orson's first clear effort to break out of the conventional “frame" of illusion set by traditionalists in every artistic medium. The most treasured convention of classical EuroAmerican theater is that the audience is set apart physically and emotionally from the actors by the proscenium arch. Orson used Horse to pierce this veil. First, he introduced the Elizabethan “thrust stage," the first ever seen on Broadway.38 This let his actors occasionally intrude over the audience. He’d use this device again in his productions of Faust (1937), Five Kings (1939), and Native Son (1940). He also sent actors and action out into the aisles and audience. Another tradition separating the audience from the play is that the action stops during intermission. (Indeed two intermissions were usual then.) He broke that convention by having a brightly uniformed lady trumpeter sound off from one of the boxes and puppeteer-actor-acrobat Bil Baird pretend to pound out tunes on a player piano in another box. Ending his solo, Baird would “accidentally" tumble over the balcony and, catching a foot in the railing, become suspended upside-down over the audience. Late in the run Baird lost his foothold and fell, fracturing a leg in several places. Orson's directorial style of pushing his actors and crew to the limits of their technical and even physical ability was already evident.

In later years he would extend this frame-breaking – which is the essence of comedy, surrealism, and magic, indeed of all forms of deception as well as creativity – to every medium in which he would work. Why? Precisely because he thought magically. Like a conjuring performance, the world is divided into two parts: out front where the audience sees the intended effect and backstage where the manipulator's strings are. (For those readers who recognize here the theatrically based jargon of the late great sociologist Irving Goffman I would point out that he had only independently stated a point of deception theory first proclaimed nine years earlier by magician Henry Hay.39)

36 Cotten (1987), 38.
37Spivy interview in Noble (1956), 202. Spivy’s real name is thought to have been Bertha LeVoe.
38On Orson's reintroduction of the thrust stage (a narrow extension of the stage beyond the proscenium into the orchestra and first row of the audience) see Houseman (1972), 230-231; France (1977), 91.
39Henry Hay, The Amateur Magician's Handbook (New York: Crowell, 1950), 36; Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Inew York: Doubleday, 1959); Irving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974).

In conjurors' jargon, the “effect" is what the audience is meant to perceive – coins or cards are plucked out of thin air, one solid metal ring links with another, the lady vanishes. The “method" is the secret means by which that effect is accomplished. In drama, opera, ballet, radio, TV, and cinema the audience knows the method and needs only suspend disbelief to enter into the illusion. In magic, however, the performer disguises the method so the audience perceives only the intended effect – the illusion – ideally and usually with no way to figure out how it had been accomplished. The reason this is possible, as one wise magician explains, is because “Magic is the only game that people pay someone to come and play with them to which they do not know the rules."40 Orson used these secret rules and induced most of those around him to play by them, just as he had those 4th grade school bullies in Madison, Wisconsin. Most persons expect to deal with a simple pair of alternatives – Orson had the magicians' talent to confront people with that ever-unexpected and surprising Third Option.

As if he didn't already have enough to do with his radio and stage work, Orson even played a New York burlesque house. He'd already played one in Utica, New York, on 21 May 1934; but that had been with the Cornell troupe when it rented the house for its legit plays.41 Now, or so he later claimed, he'd arranged with the management of Minsky's sleazy Republic Theatre burlecue on 42nd Street to appear there occasional afternoons between the stripteasers' acts by filling in as straight man to the vulgar house comedians.42 I suspect that this was how Orson found Augustus E. “Gus” Schilling, a 28-year-old veteran burlesque comic. In any case, two years later in February 1939 Orson recruited him as one of his Mercurians to appear in, most appropriately, "Burlesque", one of the Mercury's CBS radio plays. Schilling, famous for his "fairy"-prance exit at the Star in Brooklyn and at Minsky's Republic, was then married to top stripper Betty Rowland.43 Schilling would have minor parts in nine further Mercury productions over the next decade on stage, in radio, and on film.

It would have been a tidy coincidence if Orson's burlesque act had been caught by his future admirer, German refugee playwright Bertolt Brecht of whom a friend wrote "His big luxury and dissipation was a seat in the balcony at Minsky's Republic Theatre on 42nd Street. Brecht said it was the only honest Broadway theater in New York."44 But the timing was probably wrong, as Brecht's first visit to New York had been in fall 1935. By the time of his later visits (1943 and 1945) whatever shows he saw there were at best only bland shadows of the originals. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, disagreeing with Brecht's assessment of burlesque, had promised to stamp out the verbal and visual improprieties of burlesque in New York City and did so – effectively in mid-1937 and then absolutely in 1942.
THE MAGIC OF SOUND & THE SOUND OF MUSIC
During this period Orson began working closely with several of the more talented young classical music composers in America: Virgil Thomson (in 1936 - 1938), Paul Bowles (1936-38), Aaron Copland (1937-39), Lehman Engel (1937-38), Marc Blitzstein (1937), Bernard Herrmann (1938). Later years found him working again with the previously mentioned plus Otto Luening & Vladimir Ussachevsky (1955-56). And in Europe with Jacques Ibert (1947-48), Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (1951, 1965, 1970), Jean-Michel Demase (1953), Paul Misraki (1955), Jean Ledrut (1962), and Michel Legrand (1975). All of them composed and, except for Copland, Ibert, Misraki, Demase, Ledrut, and Legrand also conducted the music for the plays, the opera, ballet, radio and TV dramas, and movies that Orson directed.

40 Jeff Busby interview, 19 Jul 84.
41Cornell (1939), 288.
42Leaming (1985), 166.
43Irving Zeidman, The American Burlesque Show (New York: Hawthorne, 1967), 158, 178, 193, 202.
44Hy Kraft, On My Way to the Theater (New York: Maclimman, 1971), 147.

He handled this array of expert musicians the same way he did his actors – by telling them precisely what he wanted. That none rebelled was no result of his childhood music lessons but of his profound talent for understanding how music can be used to enhance the theatrical effects he strove for, as well as how to manipulate these eleven highly individual personalities.

Thus Lehman Engel recalled:45 “In ordering the music from me, he practically dictated it just as he dictated the acting performances. He beat out rhythms to go with planned action and “walked off" space to indicate duration. He never miscalculated.”

Virgil Thomson, after initial doubts, concluded that:46 “He knew it [music] so well and so thoroughly that I, as an older musician with a certain amount of pride, would not write him original music. I would not humiliate myself to write so precisely on his demand. On the other hand, I respected his demands dramatically. So ... I gave him sound effects and ready-made music.”
This was rare praise from a man known as much for the lofty musical standards he set for others as for his own need to control all aspects of his musical and other works.
Aaron Copland reported that he took poet-dancer Edwin Denby's advice that the best way to handle Orson's odd ways was “show him you trust him and leave him alone."47
The superb but touchy “Benny" Herrmann rated Orson “a man of great musical culture" and said repeatedly that he was the only stage or film director from whom he had ever accepted professional advice. He dismissed all the others – he'd worked with 31 in four countries – as “just babes in the woods" when it came to music.48

Lavagnino, whom Orson called “extraordinarily talented", rejoiced in his director's deep understanding of music and flow of inspiration. When he asked what sparked these ideas, the best Orson managed was to say that he was like “one of those whores who is indifferent to a client built like Hercules but can get turned on by a simple nobody who arrives at the brothel at the right moment."49

Yet, as expert as these composers were, later ones didn’t quite meet Orson's standards. As he would bluntly explain to one biographer, “I tend more and more now to get music that isn't composed [for the occasion] – so that I can control it, so that I'm not at the mercy of what he turns up with, after he's already under contract."50

Just as his tastes and expertise in theater ran from Shakespeare to vaudeville, his appreciation and knowledge of music ranged from classical and opera to jazz. And he'd later work with pop composers Cole Porter and Henry Mancini and in his 60s come to appreciate some rock, even some heavy metal.

45 Engel (1974), 86.
46Thomson letter to Houseman in Houseman (1972), 192.
47 Copland & Perlis (1984), 262.
48Herrmann interview and 1977 lecture in Evan William Cameron (editor), Sound and the Cinema (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Redgrave, 1980), 121. The autobiographies and biographies of Blitzstein, Bowles, Copland, and Thomson all make passing references to Welles.
49Lavagnino interview in Higham (1985), 268-269.
50OW in Welles & Bogdanovich Tape 4 (1992), Side A.

Orson was introduced to jazz music sometime in the mid-1930s. This happened after his move to New York City in 1934 and certainly by early 1936 in connection with his production of the black “voodoo” Macbeth. His black cast members Jack Carter and Edna Thomas took him to Harlem niteries where, I presume, he was exposed to some jazz.

An early jazz hangout for Orson, perhaps his earliest, was Dickey Wells’s Shim Sham Club. He was drawn to it because it was only a block above his headquarters in the Lafayette Theater. And also because its name mimicked his father’s, Dick Welles.51 Dickey Wells (not to confused with the famous black jazz trombonist named William “Dicky” / “Dickie” Wells) was a Harlem impresario. He emerged soon after the Renaissance when in 1933 he opened his club in the premises of the famous Nest Club, which had closed in 1930. Located at 169 West 133rd Street, it stood in the heart of Harlem on “Jungle Alley”, the stretch of 133rd between Lenox and 7th Avenue that housed the main Harlem nightclubs. It had featured an inferior jazz band called Dickey Wells’ Shim Shammers and Billie Holiday had reportedly sung there in 1936; but, although Orson may have heard her at that time, they wouldn’t meet until later in Hollywood.

Macbeth itself included both black African music and performers and American Negro jazz music and musicians. Except for Virgil Thomson’s orchestrations and overall musical direction and some orchestrations, the music and musicians was all-black. Leonard De Paur, the play’s black choir director and a prominent musicologist, was particularly familiar with jazz.52 And except for the rhythms of the African drummers, the orchestral music had been composed by jazzmen James P. Johnson (stride pianist), Porter Grainger, and Joe Jordan. The orchestra was conducted by Jordan. Born in Cincinnati 54 years earlier, he was a pioneer ragtime and jazz performer, band leader, and composer (“Pekin Rag”, “That Teasin’ Rag”, “Dixie Land”, and “Lovie Joe”. That last, which he co-wrote, was the song that brought Fanny Brice instant fame in the 1910 Ziegfeld Follies. Its chorus was sensational:53

Lovie Joe, that ever lovin’ man
From ‘way home in Birmingham.
He can do some lovin’ an’ some lovin’ sho’, An’ when he starts to love me I jes’ hollers “Mo”!

Orson’s considerable understanding of jazz impressed critics Joseph P. Delaney and Dave Dexter Jr, composer Duke Ellington, and clarinetists Barney Bigard and Joe Darensbourg.54 One measure of Orson's depth of understanding was his ability to tell authentic jazz from the cheap imitations that were already being touted by some pop jazz and folk faddists.55 Nor did he accept the narrow view of snobbish afficionados (“moldy figs” we called them) who preached that the only good jazz was the traditional New Orleans style.

Over the years Orson would commission or employ and admire such American jazz masters as Joe Jordan, Count Basie, Cee Pee Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Barney Bigard, Nat King Cole (in his pre-pop "Trio" days), Meade Lux Lewis, Billie Holiday, Hazel Scott, Kid Ory, Jimmy Noone, Joe Darensbourg, Ethel Waters, Wingy Manone, Billy Strayhorn, and European jazzmen Martial Solal (French) and Daniel Humair (Swiss).

51 Brady (1989), 81.
52Leonard Feather, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New edition, New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 22.
53Thomas L. Morgan, “Joe Jordan” at <http://www.jass.com/jordan.html>.
54Delaney telephone interview, 1991; Dave Dexter, Jr., Playback Playback 241; Barney Bigard, With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Clarinetist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 85-86.
55Orson Welles, “Foreword” in Dave Dexter Jr., Jazz Cavalcade (New York:Criterion, 1946), vi-vii;

Orson met Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, the great and popular jazz and swing trumpeter, singer, band leader. It was late 1940 and Armstrong had just arrived on the West Coast on a transcontinental tour. They agreed to do a movie about Armstrong’s life as a jazzman. Next year this project, tentatively called “Jazz Story”, will become part of Orson’s never realized four-part omnibus movie titled It’s All True.56

His early appreciation of jazz was unusual among Americans who were neither musicians nor black. Moreover, he understood and made frequent use of this musical form. This deserves more than the passing notice given by his biographers. Moreover, I believe it's easily explained. The essence of jazz is its improvisational structure and improv was Orson's ideal for himself as director, actor, magician, and person. And, as we'll repeatedly see, he was happiest with actors whenever they brought that special creative thrill to their roles. He treasured the unexpected in art and in life.

{SIDEBAR:} Accidental Improv
Orson so delighted in happy accidents that he let stand at least two slips of dialog in his films. First, in Citizen Kane (1941) when Jo Cotten, playing his famous drunk reporter scene sober but exhausted, was supposed to say to Kane, "Well, you said yourself you were looking for someone to do dramatic criticism." Instead out came, "crammatic crimetism", which Orson happily accepted.57

The second lucky moment came 21 years later in The Trial (1962) when the script called for a nervous Anthony Perkins to explain to the police who were searching his apartment, "That's just my phonograph.". Instead out popped, "That's just my pornograph."

When Bogdanovich mentioned John Ford’s remark about “most of the good things in pictures” happening “by accident,” Orson’s delighted comment was, “Yes! You could almost say that a director is a man who presides over accidents.”58
{END SIDEBAR}

For all his musical knowledge and many-sided creativity, Orson evidently never composed a tune except for that little “Everyone loves the fellow who is smiling" song he'd written at prep school. However he would write the risqué lyrics of “This Is Myrtle’s Wedding Day”, a song for Citizen Kane, which was cut along with the brothel scene.59 And, as we’ll see, he composed the words to two or three specially commissioned Strayhorn/Ellington tunes.60

Orson even sang, although rarely either publically or, except for his own "Everyone" ditty, even privately. He sang one song at the premier of his 1936 stage production of Horse Eats Hat – a rendition that convinced Virgil Thomson that Orson’s “ear was not for music.”61 In 1942 he recorded “You Made Me Love You”, which was later released in an anthology Calling All Stars LP album, an anthology of 15 songs recorded between 1932 and 1952 by 15 unlikely movie stars ranging from Humphrey Bogart to a duet by Charles Laughton & Elsa Lanchester. Four decades later he returned to musical performance but only as narrator. Daughter Beatrice had grown up to become briefly a pop-music critic for the London Times. Through her Orson came to appreciate some rock music, particularly the American heavy metal group Manowar for whom he volunteered promos and even narrated their "Dark Avenger", a somber piece about a Viking warrior who returns home bent on revenge. Orson recorded it with the group's four long-haired musicians in a Los Angeles sound studio and it was released in 1982 on their debut album, Battle Hymns.62

56 Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), 427, 428.
57Cotten interview in Action (May-Jun 1969), 30. The Cutting Continuity script has "dramatic crimitism".
58OW quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It (New York: Knopf, 1997), 40-41.
59Brady (1989), 267.
60A possible second composition is the absurd ditty in The Trial (1952) that accompanies K while awaiting his execution.
61Thompson (1966), 264. Also Thomson 1986 interview in Sawyer-Lauçanno (1989), 168.

Two years later (1984), at age 69, he'd record the lugubrious, "I Know What It Is to Be Young (but you don't know what it is to be old)." Again he only spoke the words to musical accompaniment. This was a five-minute piece with the Ray Charles Singers and the Nick Perito Orchestra. Unlike the offbeat piece for Manowar, I presume this was done just for the money.63

But for now, his early exposure to black music included the great Ellington big jazz & swing band after it followed the famous Cotton Club nitery down from Harlem to its new location at 48th & Broadway in mid-town Manhattan, where the band played on two occasions from March 1937 until June 1938. Regular customers included Stravinsky and Orson. Duke Ellington’s teenage son, Mercer, would recall an extraordinary scene:64

Orson Welles used to sit on the bandstand and write his scenarios. He used to like to sit right in the brass section and write while the band was playing. Nobody ever knew he was there, you know. He’d be sittin’ there in between the two rows between the trumpets and trombones.
PLAYING FAUST AND LOOSE
That winter (1936) Orson was preparing Doctor Faustus as his second work at the Maxine Elliott's. Paul Bowles, the play's composer and orchestra conductor, observed him “using his repertory of magic tricks."65 In fact Orson would use magical and theatrical “trickwork" on a scale and of a type never before seen on Broadway. Only the vast 18th and 19th century opera and ballet stages of Europe and America had even approached the dramatic levels of special effects he was now about to unleash – and at a fraction of their cost.66

{SIDEBAR:} This play's subject invited such effects. How better to simulate the supernatural magic of wizards than by the natural magic of the stage sorceror. The real Georg Faust (who died in the 1530's) had been a German astrologer and practitioner of witchcraft. He became legend within five decades after his death, when Johann Spiess's Historia von Dr Johann Fausten (1587) first mingled fact with reports of earlier wonder workers to add the pact with Satan's emissary, Mephistophilis. The legend was further dramatized and popularized by several writers, notably Christopher Marlowe in his stage adaption of Spiess as The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1589); by Johann Nikolaus Pfizer in his 1674 version, which added the element of Faust's love for a poor girl; by Goethe in his drama Faust (1831); Berlioz in his opera La damnation de Faust (1948), Gounod in his opera Faust (1859); and, after Orson, Thomas Mann in his novel Faust (1947).67
{END SIDEBAR}

62 PieceBrady (1989), 570. "Dark Avenger" originally appeared on the Manowar debut LP album Battle Hymn (Liberty Records LBG 30349) and thence on CD. Higham (1985), 328, misspells the band's name and errs in presumeing this was just another of Orson's "marginal assignments" that signaled his "fall".

63 Brady (1989), 569-570. "I Know" is on LP in the USA as GBNP Crescendo GNPS 1206 and in the UK as Splash SP 29.
64Mercer Ellinton in Wayne Enstice & Paul Rubin, Jazz Spoken Here (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 118, as quoted in Nicholson (1999), 124.
65Bowles (1972), 195.
66For early theatrical trickwork see Albert M. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (New York: Munn, 1898), 251-366.

This legendary necromancer was an obvious model for several modern ones who took his name. Others conjured Faustian images in their advertising posters, as with the Devil's imps who whisper into the ear of Kellar, that leading American turn-of-the-century stage illusionist who had passed his cape to Thurston. Orson was about to join this company with his stage adaptation of the Elizabethan drama by the similarly precocious Marlowe.

Director-editor Orson cut Marlowe's original five acts to one, whose 15 scenes ran 75 to 85 minutes without either the conventional intermission or usual curtains between scenes. He cast mulatto actor Jack Carter (the star of Voodoo Macbeth) as Mephistophilis. Seizing his first chance on stage to play a master magician – albeit a supernatural one – Orson took the lead role as Faustus.68 And, as he later told a magician friend, he consciously used this opportunity to conjure,69 although in ways so unconventional that neither his lay audiences nor the critics would recognize.

Specifically he chose to do an “all Black-Art show"70 by setting his play completely within a conjurors' Black Art stage. Black Art (B.A.) is their jargon for achieving invisibility based on the principle of camouflage that adjacent objects of same color and tone are, in the absence of shadow, seen by the human eye as a single object. Thus a black object against a black background is invisible. Other matched colors work, but a non-shiny black is the easiest to control because it reflects the least amount of light.

{SIDEBAR:} BLACK ART. Although magicians had long applied the B.A. principle to small tricks, it was first extended to the entire stage by late-19th century German theatrical manager Max Auzinger. He'd discovered it by chance while watching a play and noticing that the white teeth of a black-face actor in a dark dungeon seemed disembodied and flashed on and off when the actor opened and closed his mouth. In 1885 Auzinger premiered the world's first full-stage Black Art act at the Passage-Panoptikum in Berlin. Performing initially as “Maxistan A. Uzinger" and later as “Ben Ali Bey", he called it the Schwarze Kabinett (Black Cabinet). Auzinger taught the secret to his Austrian employer, Charles Arbré, who exhibited it the following year in Hamburg.

Soon afterwards, two Continental performers appeared, fresh from Germany, in Canada where they attempted unsuccessfully to get funding to put on this type of act. However, copy-cat billed as “Ben Ali Bey", they did manage to premier it in the USA in 1886 at the Miners Bowery Theater in New York City. The B.A. stage was introduced in Britain later that year when Buatier De Kolta performed his patented “Modern Black Magic" act at the Egyptian Hall in London. De Kolta had independently reinvented the method the previous fall from reports of Auzinger's effect.

Tod 