wasn’t going to rush to my side, fall on her knees, and weep and plead with me not to take my life, I climbed back into the room.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I sat down at the piano and started playing those dreadful scales again.”
Unlike the endless practicing, my father recalled how much he enjoyed mingling with the musicians and theater people who flocked to his mother’s home in the evenings. At these gatherings he was treated like an adult, encouraged to recite epic poems by heart or otherwise amaze his mother’s friends. The moment he became “boring,” it was back to the nursery. So young Orson learned to be nimble-tongued and entertaining — traits he would retain long after he had escaped into fame and adulthood. “I was always determined,” he told me in the voice of one who had thrown off a terrible illness, “to rid myself of childhood.”
Beatrice Ives-Welles, as she billed herself, became a performing artist of some renown, devising a unique one-woman show in which she played her own compositions on the piano while reciting poetry. Unfortunately her career was cut short by increasing bouts of ill health. On May 10, 1924, just fourdays after Orson’s ninth birthday, Beatrice Welles died at the age of forty-two. “Ever since then,” my father confided, “I’ve never wanted to celebrate my birthday.”
Beatrice Ives Welles—“his mother and his muse.”
Granny believed he never got over losing his mother at such a young age. “She had been dead two years when he came to us at Todd, and already he was making up stories about her.”
It no longer mattered who Beatrice Welles had been in real life. In her son’s eyes, she grew ever more beautiful, brave, and amazing, until she became a crack shot who could shoot straighter than Annie Oakley, and a suffragette who had staged more protest marches than Susan B. Anthony. True, she had not loved him enough; she had exiled his father and thrown open the door to Doctor, the fox in the chicken coop; but she lived on in his memory as tough, exciting, glamorous. The woman, real and invented, who had opened his ears to music, his eyes to art, and his mind and heart to the theater. His mother and his muse.
T ODD S CHOOL WAS a strong point of connection between my father and me. “You were the lucky one,” he laughed during one of our reminiscences in later years, “because when you went to Todd, Skipper was the headmaster and the place had become a paradise for boys.” I didn’t want to point out that when I went to Todd, it was not exactly a paradise for girls. “I had to contend with Nobel Hill, you see,” my father went on, referring to Skipper’s stern, Bible-pounding father, “the same headmaster who’d expelled my older brother, Richard. You have no idea how terrified I was when I heard they were sending me to Todd.”
(Fortunately for Orson the schoolboy, by the time he arrived at Todd, Nobel was becoming a figurehead, and Skipper was in the process of assuming command, a job he later said he took on with deep reluctance, having envisioned a big-city life in Chicago and a sprightly career in advertising.)
“Do you know what my greatest coup was at Todd?” my father asked me with shining eyes. After an expectant pause, he answered his own question: “Winning Skipper’s love. I was just a kid in knee pants, and Skipper was a married man in his midthirties, but it was what the French call
un coup de foudre
. We were fatally attracted to one another, you see. The difference in our ages didn’t matter, because Skipper was always younger than me. He had the kind of youth I never had.”
“There
is
something ageless about him,” I agreed.
“Oh, he’ll never grow old. He’ll outlive us all!”
“You’ve often joked that he’s a leprechaun in disguise.”
“What makes you think I was joking? You know what? I’ve decided he’s really a troll. The kind who lives under a bridge and lies in wait for unsuspecting
“Then what did you do?”
“I sat down at the piano and started playing those dreadful scales again.”
Unlike the endless practicing, my father recalled how much he enjoyed mingling with the musicians and theater people who flocked to his mother’s home in the evenings. At these gatherings he was treated like an adult, encouraged to recite epic poems by heart or otherwise amaze his mother’s friends. The moment he became “boring,” it was back to the nursery. So young Orson learned to be nimble-tongued and entertaining — traits he would retain long after he had escaped into fame and adulthood. “I was always determined,” he told me in the voice of one who had thrown off a terrible illness, “to rid myself of childhood.”
Beatrice Ives-Welles, as she billed herself, became a performing artist of some renown, devising a unique one-woman show in which she played her own compositions on the piano while reciting poetry. Unfortunately her career was cut short by increasing bouts of ill health. On May 10, 1924, just fourdays after Orson’s ninth birthday, Beatrice Welles died at the age of forty-two. “Ever since then,” my father confided, “I’ve never wanted to celebrate my birthday.”
Beatrice Ives Welles—“his mother and his muse.”
Granny believed he never got over losing his mother at such a young age. “She had been dead two years when he came to us at Todd, and already he was making up stories about her.”
It no longer mattered who Beatrice Welles had been in real life. In her son’s eyes, she grew ever more beautiful, brave, and amazing, until she became a crack shot who could shoot straighter than Annie Oakley, and a suffragette who had staged more protest marches than Susan B. Anthony. True, she had not loved him enough; she had exiled his father and thrown open the door to Doctor, the fox in the chicken coop; but she lived on in his memory as tough, exciting, glamorous. The woman, real and invented, who had opened his ears to music, his eyes to art, and his mind and heart to the theater. His mother and his muse.
T ODD S CHOOL WAS a strong point of connection between my father and me. “You were the lucky one,” he laughed during one of our reminiscences in later years, “because when you went to Todd, Skipper was the headmaster and the place had become a paradise for boys.” I didn’t want to point out that when I went to Todd, it was not exactly a paradise for girls. “I had to contend with Nobel Hill, you see,” my father went on, referring to Skipper’s stern, Bible-pounding father, “the same headmaster who’d expelled my older brother, Richard. You have no idea how terrified I was when I heard they were sending me to Todd.”
(Fortunately for Orson the schoolboy, by the time he arrived at Todd, Nobel was becoming a figurehead, and Skipper was in the process of assuming command, a job he later said he took on with deep reluctance, having envisioned a big-city life in Chicago and a sprightly career in advertising.)
“Do you know what my greatest coup was at Todd?” my father asked me with shining eyes. After an expectant pause, he answered his own question: “Winning Skipper’s love. I was just a kid in knee pants, and Skipper was a married man in his midthirties, but it was what the French call
un coup de foudre
. We were fatally attracted to one another, you see. The difference in our ages didn’t matter, because Skipper was always younger than me. He had the kind of youth I never had.”
“There
is
something ageless about him,” I agreed.
“Oh, he’ll never grow old. He’ll outlive us all!”
“You’ve often joked that he’s a leprechaun in disguise.”
“What makes you think I was joking? You know what? I’ve decided he’s really a troll. The kind who lives under a bridge and lies in wait for unsuspecting
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