Read The Magic World of Orson Welles for Free Online Page B

citizen with at least a marginal proficiency in Gaelic.) No one really believed Welles’s lie about the Theatre Guild, but he was such a curious and demonic overactor that he was immediately given roles to play, and from his first performance as the villainous Duke in
Jew Süss
he was a small sensation. After his triumphant stay at the Gate, however, he found it difficult to get a work permit for the more famous theaters in England; more travel and some writing followed, and he finally returned, somewhat disillusioned, to the Midwest, where he occupied himself with a variety of activities. With William Vance he directed his first film, a silent expressionist farce called
Hearts of Age
, which Joseph McBride has described in detail. It is actually a short but elaborate home movie, with Welles and the other players nearly unrecognizable under layers of makeup. Welles appears in the role of Death, garbed as a stage Irishman, dancing about and leering around corners or through windows. The movie is virtually plotless and is filled with the camera trickery and heavy-handed symbolism of the avant-garde, all of it presented in the form of a crude parody.
    At about this same time, when he was eighteen, Welles collaborated with Roger Hill on editing
Everybody’s Shakespeare
and writing a play about John Brown, titled
Marching Song
. He also wrote another play on his own, which he called
Bright Lucifer
. No one seems to have shown interest in either project, although as late as 1938 Welles spoke fondly of
Bright Lucifer
to an interviewer from the
New Yorker
and talked of having it produced. It happens that the manuscript of this play survives in the Arnold Weissberger Collection at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Theater Research, and while it is hardly the product of genius, it is valuable for its revelation of the young Welles’s personality—in fact, the title seems to me an apt description of his wholecareer in America. Like many of Welles’s best-known films,
Bright Lucifer
is a curious blend of philosophic argument and gothic fantasy, loaded with playful and sometimes troubling autobiographical references; it indirectly summarizes Welles’s childhood and adolescence, and it foreshadows much of his later work.
    The three-act play is bound in a folder that looks almost like a child’s copybook. It is covered with handwritten revisions, and on the opening page is an impressive sketch by Welles of the play’s only setting—the main room of a sportsman’s cabin, sparsely furnished but darkened with atmospheric shadow. Three characters have gathered here on an island for a few days of fishing: a middle-age newspaperman named Bill Flynn, editor of a Sunday feature that is described at one point as an “inquirer”; Bill’s younger brother, Jack, a burned-out actor of Hollywood horror films; and Bill’s ward, Eldred Brand, a demonic adolescent who is the “bright Lucifer” of the title. Eldred is a precocious, sexually ambiguous, and quite insane child whom Jack calls a “busy little bitch boy.” In many respects he resembles the young Welles: he is an orphan, a victim of hay fever, a cigar smoker, and a devotee of Nietzsche; he also has more than a little in common with Shakespeare’s Edmund, the chief villain in
King Lear
, one of Welles’s favorite dramas. Indeed the play is so filled with situations drawn from the author’s experience that one cannot help wondering what Dr. Bernstein would have thought of the following exchange between Eldred and his foster father, Bill:
    ELDRED : You never miss a chance, do you, to remind me that I’m an orphan—an adopted orphan?
    BILL : Please, Eldred—
    ELDRED : If it had just happened that you were my father instead of the man that beat you to it—
    BILL : Please, Eldred—(pause) I’ve never denied that I loved your mother, but I loved your father, too.—And Sonny, I love