Chapter 1Kenosha

Foreword

On August 21, 1939, a film studio that was close to bankruptcy signed a contract with a twenty-four-year-old who had never made a feature.

The contract gave him a production unit, the actors he brought with him, and final cut.

Nothing like it had been offered to anybody before and nothing like it has been offered to anybody since. Not to the directors who came after him, not to the ones with a run of hits behind them, not to the ones who were already famous. The arrangement was an accident produced by a specific studio in a specific financial condition in a specific year, and within three years the studio had changed hands and the arrangement was gone.

Orson Welles had it once, at twenty-four, before he knew what it was worth.

He spent the next forty-three years refusing to work on any other terms, and the refusal is the subject of this book.

That is a different proposition from the two accounts of him that are usually on offer, and it is worth saying at the outset what those are and why I could not take either.

The first is the sabotaged genius. On this reading, a great artist was destroyed by philistines: the studio took The Magnificent Ambersons away from him and burned forty-three minutes of it; Universal recut Touch of Evil and hired somebody else to shoot new scenes; Hearst's people tried to have Citizen Kane bought and destroyed; and by the end he was reduced to selling wine on television because an industry that owed him everything would not give him a picture.

Every clause in that paragraph is true.

The second is the self-sabotaging fraud. On this reading, a man of enormous facility never grew up: he could not finish anything, he abandoned projects when they became difficult, he spent other people's money and then his own, he told stories about himself that were not true and repeated them for fifty years, and the unfinished films are not tragedies but the predictable output of a person who preferred beginning.

Most of that paragraph is also true.

The two accounts have been arguing with each other since about 1950 and the argument has not moved, because both sides have the evidence and neither can dispose of the other's. What I have tried to do instead is put the arithmetic in front of the argument.

Here is the arithmetic.

A director who does not own his negative is at the disposal of whoever does. That is not a moral observation; it is the structure of the industry, and it applied to everybody. What made Welles's case unusual is that he had, for a period of about thirty months, been the exception — and having been the exception, he never again accepted the rule.

So from 1948 he financed his own pictures, mostly by acting in other people's, and the consequence is legible in the physical film. Othello was shot across three countries over three years as money appeared and disappeared. Chimes at Midnight has a battle sequence assembled out of short takes because he could not afford enough extras to hold a wide shot. Don Quixote ran for twelve years until one of its actors died. The Other Side of the Wind was shot in pieces over six years and then impounded in a vault in Paris by a revolution in Iran.

None of that is a temperament. It is what happens when a man with no capital insists on terms that require capital, for four decades, and will not stop.

The temperament is real too, and this book does not pretend otherwise. But the temperament followed the arithmetic rather than producing it, and the standard accounts have the causation the wrong way round.

A word about where Citizen Kane sits in these pages.

It arrives at Chapter 10, and twelve chapters follow it.

That proportion is the argument. Every account of this life treats the years after 1942 as an epilogue — a long decline, punctuated by the occasional interesting failure, in which a man who had made the greatest American film at twenty-five did progressively less. The trouble with that shape is that it requires the reader to accept that thirty-five years of a working life produced nothing worth twelve chapters, and the films disprove it: Othello, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, F for Fake, and the one that was finished by other people in 2018.

I could not have written this book twenty years ago, and that is the second reason it exists.

The work can now be seen. Too Much Johnson, shot in 1938 and thought destroyed, turned up in a warehouse in Pordenone in 2008 and has been publicly available since 2014. Touch of Evil was reassembled in 1998 from the memorandum Welles wrote in 1957. Chimes at Midnight, kept out of circulation for decades by rights disputes, was restored and released in 2016. The Other Side of the Wind was completed and released in 2018.

A book about Orson Welles written before those recoveries was necessarily a book about legend. This one is written by somebody who has watched them, and the chapters that deal with the late and unfinished work say what is on the screen rather than what has been said about it.

A word about the register, since this is a cultural biography rather than a critical study.

The films and the broadcasts are treated here as historical evidence. That means asking what a production reveals about the institution that funded it, what a staging was arguing about the year it appeared in, and what a piece of film physically survives and why.

It also means that a good deal of what a film critic would want is absent. There is not much close reading of shots for their own sake, and where a sequence is described in technical detail it is because the detail bears on the argument — usually on money.

The battle in Chapter 18 is described because it is made of fragments and the fragments are what the budget bought. The opening shot in Chapter 17 is described because the memorandum asked for the score to come off it. The deep focus in Chapter 10 is described because it required a set with a ceiling and a studio willing to pay for one.

That is the method: the film as a physical object with a production history and a cost, in a place, at a time, made under conditions somebody imposed.

Three things about method.

I have graded the disputed claims on the page rather than resolving them quietly. Who wrote Citizen Kane is not knowable in the proportions people want, and Chapter 10 says so and explains why. Whether he could have saved The Magnificent Ambersons by coming home is a counterfactual and Chapter 13 treats it as one. The suggestion that he had a psychological "fear of completion" is a biographer's diagnosis and is labeled as one.

I have not printed figures I could not source. There is a sum that circulates for what Hearst's allies offered to buy and destroy the Kane negative; this book describes the offer and does not print the number. There is a page count for the Bureau's file on him; it is not here. The footage totals for The Other Side of the Wind come from the team that completed it and are attributed to them.

And I have not invented quotations. Welles is the most quotable man in twentieth-century American culture and the most frequently misquoted, largely because he was so good at supplying lines that sound like something he would say. Where a remark cannot be sourced exactly — including the two most famous ones — this book describes it instead.

That last discipline costs a great deal on a subject like this, and I have kept to it, because a book arguing that a man's own account of himself cannot be trusted does not get to quote his account of himself for effect.

One further declaration, about what this book is not going to do with the films.

It is not going to rank them, and it is not going to argue about whether Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made.

That question has been settled and unsettled by a critics' poll five times since 1962 and the answer tells you about the critics rather than about the film. Chapter 22 records the results and declines to have a view.

What the book does instead is treat each picture as an event with a production history: who paid, on what terms, what was shot, what survived, and who decided.

That is an unglamorous way to write about a great artist and it is the only way I have found to write about this one without either joining the prosecution or joining the defense.

The films are extraordinary. Several of them are among the best things anybody has made. This book takes that as established and spends its length on how they came to exist and, in four cases, on how they came to exist again after their maker was dead.

He told the stories anyway, for fifty years, and they were better than the truth, and a considerable number of them are the only record we have.

One more thing about the shape, because a reader flicking through the contents will notice it.

There are two chapters in this book that are not about Orson Welles.

Chapter 12 belongs to Manoel Olimpio Meira, called Jacaré, who sailed a raft one thousand six hundred and fifty miles to win labor protections for the poorest workers in Brazil, and who drowned in 1942 during a reenactment for a film camera.

Chapter 14 belongs, in its first and last lines, to Isaac Woodard, an army sergeant blinded in police custody in South Carolina in 1946, whose affidavit Welles read on the radio and whose attacker was acquitted to applause.

In the standard accounts both men are incidents inside a director's difficult decade.

I have given each of them the opening and the closing of his chapter, and I want to say plainly that this is an editorial decision rather than a discovery. The facts are in every other book. What is different here is where they sit.

A biography is a machine for deciding whose life is the foreground, and every such decision is arbitrary at the edges. These two were the edges I could not leave where I found them.

That problem is the last thing this foreword has to declare. Where the sole source for an event in this book is Orson Welles, the book says so.

There is a great deal of Chapter 4 in that category.

Chapter 1 · Kenosha

He was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and by the time he was three the local newspapers had decided he was a genius.

Note the date. Europe was in the first year of a war the United States had not yet entered; the sinking of the Lusitania was the next day's news.

He lived to see the film he made at twenty-five placed first in an international critics' poll five times, at ten-year intervals, from 1962 onward. It held the position for two decades after his death and lost it in 2012, which is a posthumous career of its own and is Chapter 22's business.

That order of events is the argument of this chapter and it should be stated plainly before anything else, because every account of Orson Welles begins with the prodigy and treats the publicity as a consequence of it.

The publicity came first.

Kenosha in 1915 was a manufacturing town on the western shore of Lake Michigan, about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, with a harbor and machine shops and brass foundries and an automobile works. It made things. It had a population in the tens of thousands, a newspaper, a hospital, and the ordinary civic apparatus of a prosperous small industrial city in the American Midwest at the peak of American manufacturing.

It was not a cultural capital and it was not a backwater. It was a place where a family with money and interests could be locally significant, and the Welles family was.

Richard Head Welles was an inventor and a manufacturer, with patents and an interest in a bicycle-lamp business, and he had money. He was also, from early in the marriage and increasingly afterward, a drinker, and the drinking is not incidental — it is the fact that eventually removed him from the household and, in 1930, from the world.

Beatrice Ives Welles was a concert pianist. That is the description that appears everywhere and it undersells her. She performed, she was accomplished enough to be taken seriously, and she was in addition a woman of considerable public energy: she sat on the school board, she was involved in the suffrage movement, and she was, by every surviving account, a person of formidable presence in a room.

There was an older brother, Richard, ten years senior, who does not appear much in the standard accounts of this life and who this chapter will return to at the end, because his absence from those accounts is itself a piece of evidence.

The Ives side is worth a paragraph because it supplies the money and the standing.

Beatrice's family had been established in the region for some time and had means. That is the material basis of a household in which a woman could be a serious pianist rather than a person who played, and in which a child could be taken to concerts.

It is also the reason the family was locally prominent enough for the newspaper to be interested in what its children could do.

That last point is not incidental and it is the mechanism this chapter is about. Small-city newspapers in 1918 ran items about the accomplishments of local families, and the families supplied them. A remarkable child in a household of no standing produces no coverage; a remarkable child in a household that the paper writes about anyway produces a series of items, each building on the last.

Beatrice Welles knew a great many people in Kenosha. She sat on the school board, which means she stood for election and won it, in a period when women had only just secured the vote nationally and when a seat of that kind was a real position in a town's civic life.

She was also involved in suffrage work.

Add to that a professional performing career and it describes a woman who was, by the standards of a midwestern manufacturing town in 1917, formidably public — the sort of person who is interviewed, invited, and quoted.

So the child's reputation was not manufactured in a vacuum. It was assembled out of the ordinary machinery by which a prominent family's news becomes a town's news, operating on a boy who was, by every subsequent indication, genuinely exceptional.

Now the prodigy, and the machinery that produced him.

The claims made about the small child, in print, in his lifetime and afterward, are these: that he could read at two; that he had read Shakespeare by the time he was a toddler; that he recited from memory at an age at which most children are assembling sentences; that a physician who was close to the family declared him a genius and was proved right.

Some version of some of that is likely to be true. He was, by every account of his adult life, exceptionally quick, verbally extraordinary, and possessed of a memory that startled people who worked with him fifty years later. A child who becomes that adult was probably a remarkable small boy.

What the record establishes is narrower and more interesting than the claims.

It establishes that the claims were made publicly, in the local press, while he was still a small child; that the family did not correct them; and that the child grew up inside a set of public statements about himself that had been issued before he was old enough to have any view about them.

That is a very unusual condition and this book will argue that it accounts for a great deal.

Consider what it means. Most people acquire a reputation gradually, by doing things, and the reputation lags the achievement. This one was installed in advance. By the time Orson Welles was capable of an achievement, the description of him was already in circulation, and everything he subsequently did was measured against a claim that had been made when he was three.

There are two ways to live inside such a claim. One is to spend a life failing to meet it. The other is to take charge of it — to become the person who issues the statements about yourself, rather than the person the statements are issued about.

He took the second option and he never stopped. Chapter 4 describes a sixteen-year-old arriving at a theater in Dublin and announcing that he was a Broadway star, which was not true and which worked. Chapter 8 describes a twenty-three-year-old who became internationally famous for an event that was substantially smaller than the reporting of it and who spent forty-seven years declining to correct the record.

The apparatus was installed in Kenosha in about 1918, and the boy learned to operate it.

Maurice Bernstein belongs in this chapter although his largest role comes in the next one.

He was a physician, he was close to the family — close to Beatrice in particular, in a way that was discussed at the time and has been discussed ever since — and he attached himself to the youngest child with an intensity that everybody around them noticed.

It was Bernstein, on most accounts, who supplied a good deal of the genius talk, who bought the boy the props of a prodigy's childhood, and who told other people what the child was. When both parents were dead, before Orson was sixteen, Bernstein became his guardian.

This book is not going to psychologize that relationship, because the material for doing so honestly does not exist. What it will record is the structure: a small boy, in a household with an absent drinking father and a formidable mother who died young, acquired an adult whose emotional life was organized around him and whose principal activity on his behalf was publicity.

The father should be given his own account before the mother takes the chapter, because he is reduced almost everywhere to the drinking and he was more than that.

Richard Head Welles held patents. The bicycle-lamp interest is the one usually mentioned and it was real; he was, in the terms of the period, an inventor with a manufacturing stake, which in a town like Kenosha was an entirely respectable form of being a man of business.

He also traveled, extensively, and appears to have been genuinely interested in the world in a way that the household passed on. There are accounts of trips with the boy — to the Far East among other places — and whatever else those journeys were, they gave a child of ten an experience of foreignness that almost nobody in the American Midwest had.

He was, by the descriptions that survive, charming, funny, and unreliable, and his son spent fifty years being the first two and being accused of the third.

That resemblance is worth naming without making a thesis of it. A biography that reads a man's whole career as an argument with his father has generally stopped looking at the evidence.

What can be observed is narrower: that both of them were entertaining company, that both of them had money that came and went, and that one of them died at fifty-eight of drink and the other lived to seventy in a condition that his doctors had been warning him about for years.

Now the mother, because the four years he had of her were the ones that mattered.

Beatrice Welles played for him. There is no dispute about this in any source: the household was musical, she performed, and the child was in the room. He also, by his own account and by others, was taken to concerts and to the theater and was talked to as though he were a person rather than a child.

That is the whole of the formal education he received in the arts, and it lasted until he was nine, and it took.

His musical facility as an adult was real. He composed, badly, and had a good ear; more importantly he understood music structurally, which is why the radio work of Chapter 8 does what it does and why his collaboration with Bernard Herrmann in Chapter 10 produced what it produced. A director who can hear a scene as a score is rare, and the ones who can generally had a musician in the house.

The parents separated. That should be stated plainly rather than left in the shadows, because the standard accounts tend to blur it into a general atmosphere of unconventionality.

By the early 1920s the marriage had effectively ended. Beatrice took the boy to Chicago. Richard was elsewhere and drinking. The household of Kenosha, with its two accomplished parents and its remarkable child, existed for a few years and then dispersed.

And then, on May 10, 1924, four days after his ninth birthday, Beatrice Welles died.

Chapter 2 is about that and about the second death six years later. What this chapter has to establish is what was already in place before either of them.

It is this. By the age of nine he had a public reputation he had not earned, an absent father, a devoted and eccentric guardian-in-waiting, a musical education from a professional, and no institution of any kind.

No school he had been at for long. No town he was from in any settled sense. No church. No extended family in any structural role.

That last item is the one this book will keep returning to, because it explains the shape of the working life. Chapter 3 describes a boy who at eleven found a school with a theater in it and built a company. Chapter 7 describes a man of twenty-two who built another one. Chapter 16 describes a man of forty in Morocco with a handful of people who followed him from country to country for three years.

Every good period in Orson Welles's professional life is a period in which he had a company. Every bad one is a period in which he was alone with an institution.

He had learned, by nine, that the institutions did not hold.

Chicago should be added to the account, because the household moved there and it is where the nine-year-old actually lost his mother.

Beatrice took him to the city after the marriage ended, and the years between about 1921 and 1924 were spent there rather than in Kenosha.

That matters for two reasons.

The first is cultural. Chicago in the early 1920s had a symphony, an opera, theaters, and a musical life of real seriousness, and a professional pianist living there with a small boy had access to all of it. The concerts he described attending for the rest of his life were mostly Chicago concerts.

The second is that it removes the last of the Kenosha structure. By 1922 the family was not a family in a town where it was known; it was a woman and a child in a city, with a husband elsewhere and a business behind them.

So the four years he had of his mother's undivided attention were the four years in which she had nothing else, and they ended when she died.

A last note on the brother, because the omission is instructive.

Richard Ives Welles, the elder son, was ten years older. He did not do well. He was institutionalized for a period; his adult life was difficult; and he lived a long time, mostly out of view, largely unmentioned by his brother in fifty years of interviews about a childhood he discussed constantly.

That silence is not evidence of cruelty and this book will not treat it as such. Families do this, and the reasons are usually painful and private and not recoverable.

What it does establish is a proposition about the sources. Orson Welles talked about his own early life more than almost any public figure of his century, in hundreds of interviews across five decades, and produced an account that is vivid, detailed, internally consistent and enormously entertaining.

There is a brother in the actual childhood who is barely in it.

That is not a small omission and the size of it should be stated plainly. A sibling ten years older is, for a small child, one of the two or three largest facts of the household. He is there for the marriage's collapse, for the move to Chicago, for the mother's death, for whatever the father was doing in those years.

An account of a childhood that leaves him out is not a memory with a gap in it. It is a composition.

This book is not able to say why, and it declines to speculate, because a family's decisions about an institutionalized child in the 1920s are not recoverable from the outside and the guesses available are all cruel to somebody.

What it can say is what the omission does to the evidence. Every anecdote in the standard account of these years — the concerts, the precocity, the mother at the piano, the doctor's admiration — reaches us through a narrator who was capable of leaving out a brother.

Whatever else the account is, it is authored, and Chapter 2 is where the authorship becomes visible.