Roger Hill’s daughter recalls Orson Welles at Todd

[Wellesnet]

Roger Hill's daughter, Joanne, shares her recollections of Orson Welles at the Todd School in an illuminating piece for Wellesnet.com. Check it out at http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=5006

[Eve]

Quoting from these recollections...
"He had no empathetic skills. ..."

Do we not tend to notice more the lack of empathy concerning other people than concerning ourselves?
Surely Orson Welles couldn't have given his fellow men anything at all if his heart and mind wouldn't have been filled with empathy towards them. No black and white scheme for any of us - only a more or less developed multilayered capacity for understanding and compassion...

Another quotation...
"I will tell you that while Orson was a notorious liar and was proud of his propensity to prevaricate – he must have given dozens of different biographical tales of his birth and upbringing – ..."

And a quote from her father, Roger Hill, in his "One Man's Time and Chance, a Memoir of Eighty Years 1895 to 1975" (p. 110)...
"Todd boys resent hearing the great man, when making guest appearances on the tube, dream up a boyhood spent in China. Peace, dear lads. This is an entertainer. Fiction is often more fun than is fact. And he did spend at least one summer in the orient. ..."

[mteal]

Many thanks to Joanna for her fascinating recollections. And thanks Eve, that's a terrific quote from Roger Hill. Everything Welles did was for the sake of entertainment. Too bad Roger Hill's memoirs, which were online, seem to have now been removed. Joanna says she was in the TWELFTH NIGHT Todd production (the one with the giant book onstage) and that it was performed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, at the English Pavilion. Here's a nice panorama shot of the Fair.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... norama.jpg
Unfortunately the English Pavilion is not one of the labeled sites, but it probably would have been somewhere around here, with the other European pavilions: