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already an accomplished violinist, but he saidthat he did nothing with music afterward—although François Truffaut has called him the most “musical” of directors. After a brief stay with friends, he returned to his father, who by this time had developed an addiction to gin. The two of them made an incredible world trip together, visiting China, among other places, and then settled in Illinois at a bizarre hotel that Dick Welles had purchased. Fire destroyed the hotel, the two Welleses moved again, and not long afterward, when Welles was fifteen, his father also died.
    During all this time, young Orson had been treated as an adult and was on speaking terms with a number of well-known artistic figures. He was given very little conventional education, partly because of illness and partly because in his earliest years his mother kept him always by her side. Welles claimed to have been learning to read from his mother’s copies of Shakespeare at the age of five, and he was smoking his father’s cigars at twelve. At various periods in his youth he made a study of Nietzsche, met Harry Houdini, and staged elaborate plays and puppet shows. But if he was like an adult, he was also something of a freak, overgrown in body and talent, and he quickly became a subject for child psychologists to examine and reporters to publicize. Such precocity doubtless made him insufferable, yet it did not conceal the essential pathos of his circumstances. Virtually from the time he could walk, he was attracted to playacting, using a makeup kit to fulfill two kinds of pretenses. On the one hand was an aggressive or perhaps defensive disguise; for example, during a brief stay at Washington School in Madison, Wisconsin, he frightened teachers and bullying schoolmates with bloody horror makeup. On the other hand, he liked to change his appearance to make himself as unlike a child as possible; repeatedly he put on whiskers and wrinkles, pretending to be an old man. Interestingly, these two elements—horror and old age—are central to much of his later work.
    From 1928 on, Welles was the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician, family friend, and patron of the opera. Dr. Bernstein had divorced his wife and married a soprano, but the resemblance to Charles Foster Kane stops there; purportedly an expert with gifted children, Bernstein had the wisdom to enroll Welles at the progressive Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, a town the boy later described as “a Victorian posy under a bell of glass.” It was the happiest time of Welles’s youth, largely because of his mentor and friend Roger Hill, the peaceful surroundings, and the free rein he was given with his imagination. Among Welles’s accomplishments were a huge mural for the school and several dramatic productions that were virtually one-man shows; for example, he was Brutus
and
Cassius, Androcles
and
the lion in productions he also directed and designed.
    Despite Welles’s obvious dramatic talent, first his father and then Dr. Bernstein tried to focus his attention on art. The father tried to make him a cartoonist, introducing him to Bud Fischer (the elder Welles’s acquaintances included not only creators of comic strips but also William Randolph Hearst himself), and Dr. Bernstein subsequently encouraged him to study at the Chicago Art Institute. Finally, using part of the inheritance Dick Welles had left, Bernstein sent the young man on a painting tour of Ireland; the Irish climate, for some unexplained reason, was supposed to be good for Welles’s chronic hay fever, and the landscape would give him a subject for his art. But the experiment did not work. Welles found his way to Dublin and the Gate Theatre, where he auditioned for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, claiming to be a veteran of the New York Theatre Guild. (He did not try the Abbey, which was better known in America, because there he would have to be an Irish