The War of the Worlds Murder

FRIDAY

On M ay 6, 1915, Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not far from Chicago, Illinois. His family was well-off, even well-to-do, his father an inventor and a hotelier, his mother a renowned pianist. From early childhood, he was surrounded by friends of the family who were intellectuals and artists-musicians, writers, actors, painters, and the occasional industrialist. He was welcomed as a prodigy, a child genius, and Orson lived up to the challenge. Before long a headline in a Madison newspaper was proclaiming him: “Cartoonist, Actor, Poet-and Only Ten!”

“My father,” he once said, “was a gentle, sensitive soul whose kindness, generosity and tolerance made him much beloved…. From him I inherited the love of travel, which has become ingrained within me. From my mother I inherited a real and lasting love of music and the spoken word, without which no human being is really a complete and satisfactory person.”

His father, however, often travelled without him; and his mother died within days of the boy’s ninth birthday. His guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein (a former lover of Orson’s mother), shared with the parents a belief in the boy’s genius-Bernstein gave the child a conductor’s baton at age three. The guardian (“Dadda,” Orson called him) also introduced young Orson to magic tricks, and gave him a puppet theater where the precocious one could concoct his own shows.

He was fifteen when his father died, and his youth thereafter was spent in a series of progressive schools; by high school he was an old hand at producing Shakespeare, coming up with a version of Julius Caesar that won top prize from the Chicago Drama League for a student production (once the jury had been shown proof that the young actors were not professionals).

At sixteen, he set out from the latest of these schools for Europe with five hundred dollars and a dream of becoming an artist-he had painted and drawn since age two. He wound up in Dublin, broke-travelling by donkey cart, paying his way with his artwork after the money ran out-and presented himself to the prestigious Gate Theatre company as an American Broadway star, “the sensation of the New York Theatre Guild.”

His confidence was credible, if not his story, and soon in this old city with its rich theatrical tradition, the young actor was on stage, winning good notices-playing a duke, the ghost in Hamlet, and even the King of Persia. Soon offers came from England, but when the boy tried to follow up on these opportunities, the Ministry of Labor refused a work permit, and Orson Welles returned to America, a seasoned veteran of the Dublin stage.

But Broadway was-initially-unimpressed, and young Welles sought theatrical satisfaction offstage, creating an annotated stage edition of Shakespeare’s works (The Mercury Shakespeare) and returning to the pursuit of painting, first in Morocco, then Spain. When playwright Thornton Wilder recommended him to Katharine Cornell, the celebrated actress hired him to appear in touring productions of The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Romeo and Juliet.

Operating out of Chicago, Welles further dabbled in theater in nearby rural Woodstock, organizing a festival through the Todd School, one of the progressive institutions he’d attended as a child. In addition to attracting attention, and making his first short film, Welles won a wife, a lovely and privileged eighteen-year-old actress, Virginia Nicholson.

His touring for Katharine Cornell finally led to Broadway, where a struggling producer-John Houseman-saw the teenager’s performance as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, and knew at once his own destiny would be bound up with that of this “monstrous boy-flatfooted and graceless, yet swift and agile…from which issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of the well-trained professionals around him.”

At thirty-three, the balding, stocky former Jacques Haussmann-born in Bucharest to an English mother and French father, a successful grain merchant turned Broadway writer/producer/director-was at a personal crossroads. Despite an intimidating bearing, including the accent of a cultured English gentleman, Houseman had little confidence in himself-“My shame and fear were almost unbearable, my ineptitude so glaring”-and in the nineteen-year-old Welles, Houseman saw in full bloom the qualities he himself lacked.

A partnership began with Houseman hiring the teenager to play a sixty-year-old failed industrialist in the prophetically titled Archibald MacLeish play, Panic. The show ran only three performances, but Welles was praised, and a partnership was forged, Houseman as business administrator, Welles as artistic director. Together they mounted New York’s most compelling theatrical productions of the mid-1950s. For the Federal Theatre, a WPA project designed to create work for actors, they staged an innovative, all-black-cast Macbeth in a striking Haitian voodoo setting designed by Welles himself. Then, with barely two nickels to rub together, the two men created their own repertory company, the Mercury Theatre.

Their first production, Julius Caesar, was performed in modern dress in a stark, startling setting-actors in business suits and fascist military uniforms against a blood-red background. Their most famous production, Marc Blitzstein’s opera The Cradle Will Rock, found the dynamic duo thumbing their noses at the WPA shutting them down, and skirting union demands despite the play’s (and their own) left-wing stance, by staging the show from the audience, actors standing and performing their lines in the aisles amid dazzled theatergoers.

During this same period, Welles had become a popular radio actor-a brilliant serialization in 1937 of Les Miserables had paved the way for future glories, and by 1938 The March of Time and Shadow star was making a thousand dollars a week…even before he brought his and Jack Houseman’s repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, to CBS.

In October 1938, Orson Welles was twenty-three years old.