Welles causes endless trouble because of his unstable place in the American cultural hierarchy of high and low. He loved tragedy and vaudeville, Expressionist cinema and boys’ adventure stories. He converted genre vehicles like “Touch of Evil” into surreal labyrinths; he made “Macbeth” look like Gothic horror. He was a subversive populist, a celebrity avant-gardist. He was also, frequently, a political artist, one who came of age during the heyday of the Popular Front and never ceased to roil the culture industry. Despite acres of commentary, much about him remains relatively unexplored: his identification with African-Americans, his investigation of sexual ambiguities. In a strange way, he is still active, still working; if, as is hoped, a completed version of “The Other Side of the Wind” soon emerges, he may confound us once again.
The familiar part of the Welles saga, his rapid rise to the pinnacle of “Kane,” has been told many times, most stylishly in Simon Callow’s 1995 book, “Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu”—the first of three biographical volumes to date, with a fourth to follow. But Patrick McGilligan’s “Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to ‘Citizen Kane’ ” (HarperCollins), the product of years of meticulous research, may be the definitive account. It reveals, among other things, that Welles’s reputation as a self-mythologizer is itself a bit of a myth: quite a few improbable anecdotes turn out to be more or less true. Did Welles see Sarah Bernhardt perform in Chicago? Did he make his stage début as Sorrow, the child in “Madama Butterfly,” at the Ravinia Festival? Absolute confirmation is lacking, but the chronologies line up. (A detail from the Chicago Tribune: at a 1919 performance of “Butterfly,” an unnamed child of unusual heft substituted as Sorrow, causing giggles in the audience.)
Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father, Richard, was a charming, dissipated inventor who worked for a manufacturer of bicycle lamps; his mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, was a pianist and an activist. Welles’s worldliness evidently stemmed from his father, his artistic gifts and radical tendencies from his mother. McGilligan, who has written biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Nicholas Ray, has combed through newspaper archives and unearthed many new details of Beatrice’s activities, which included suffragist campaigns and a stint on the Kenosha school board. Beatrice died in 1924, of hepatitis, just after Orson’s ninth birthday. Richard lived for six more years, his health ruined by alcoholism. Maurice Bernstein, a social-climbing Chicago doctor who had befriended the couple, became Orson’s guardian, shuttling him around while engaging in a flurry of high-profile affairs.