Radio and television mirror (Nov 1939-Apr 1940)

Orson Welles is no ordinary man, either in his public appearance or in his private life. Everything in his home is built on a giant scale. His living room is nearly three stories high, as big as a railroad terminal. quered the theater, radio, and the moving pictures — and thrown a bombshell into each one. How has he done it? By hard work — yes. By native talent and ability — yes. But not entirely. For Welles is no ordinary toiler. He is a fantastic person, whose life up to now has been more weird than any play or radio program he has ever produced. There is something uncanny about him. In twenty-four years he has packed a lifetime of adventure beneath his belt. His life story reads like a romance. TWELVE years ago, Orson Welles » stood on the steps of a garish Chicago hotel, listening to the scream of an ambulance as it raced away down the street. In that ambulance, lying under a white sheet, was all he knew of love and life. His dad. And he was dead. At twelve he was all alone in the world. For six years he had traveled the globe with the man who lay still under the white sheet. It had been a strange life for a little boy. One month, riches — a luxurious cabin on a big liner, a tutor to teach him French, servants, the opera. The next, poverty — and a dingy little NOVEMBER, 1939 room on some foreign street, with nobody but the landlady to take care of him. But he had not minded it. Somehow or other, his dad had always pulled them through. His father was a speculator, an inventor — and a man who loved splendor and good living above all things. They had seen strange and beautiful things together. There was a house in Peking, where they had lived once, with a tiled roof and floors as polished as a mirror, where you could stand at the doorway and see the yellow hills of China, humpbacked and old, in the distance, and the Great Wall, curling like a dragon in between. There was a house in Kingston, Jamaica, too, prim with green lawns and sea-shells — a house white as a branch of coral. They had lived there once, when Dad had been flush with money, and the governor bad driven them in his carriage along roads bordered with hibiscus flowers. They would never see those houses again. Two tears trickled slowly down the boy's face. Images flooded into his mind — each one, like a sharp stab of pain. Dad. He saw him again, as he had been years ago. just before Mother died — debonair, handsome, and happy, with his humorous smile, and his brown eyes that were so eager for life. Dad had never been the same since Mother died. He had been a very small boy then — but he could remember those years so well — those beautiful years when Mother had been alive. They too had been exciting — but in a different way from the ' years of ceaseless roving. Sometimes they had lived here in Chicago, in a big stone house with high windows — sometimes at the Sheffield Hotel in Illinois where his father owned 170 acres of land. He had had a pony of his own at the Sheffield Hotel, but he loved Chicago best. In Chicago it had been warm and gay, and there were always people about. Musical people. Mother's friends. He had had a little violin then, on which he took lessons, and Mother used to tell people he would grow up to be a concert violinist some day. He loved music better than anything in the world. But Father always laughed at the idea. "You'll make a sissy out of the boy," he would say. Father (Continued on page 53) 31