The Daily Page of Madison, Wisconsin, has taken a look back at the time a 10-year-old Orson Welles spent there in 1925.
Using comments offered by a childhood acquaintance of Welles to the Madison Literary Club in 1991, The Daily Page paints a portrait of a gifted youngster with a penchant for storytelling.
Welles’ summer camp bunk mate, Lowell Frautschi, recalled Welles’ amazing theatrical skills, but cast doubt on some of the tales the late director told.
For example, Frautschi said he did not believe Dr. Frederick Mueller, the director of a summer camp on the northwestern shore of Lake Mendota, made a sexual advance on Welles, which the film great said prompted him to slip out a back window, paddle a canoe across the lake, and take the next train back to Chicago.
Welles’ account of his time in Madison “should be regarded as self-indulgent entertainment, the product of a perfervid imagination, dramatizing history,” Frautschi said.
According to Frautschi, Mueller told him that “one of the new boys coming that summer was an unusual child.” Frautschi said he was told “to share my room in the barracks with him and to keep a close watch on his participation in camp activities.”
“Here I was living at camp with a boy who turned out to be an authentic genius … Orson was a large boy for his age, with a big round head and ample frame,” Frautschi recalled. “He had a pleasing personality and was friendly, so that he had no difficulty getting along with the other campers, although he was indeed awkward at sport.”
Welles’ mother, Beatrice, had been an accomplished Chicago musician, so he “was accustomed almost exclusively to the company of adults.” But she had died, and the father “was a wanderer” prone to alcoholism. Welles’ guardian wanted him “to learn the normal skills of boyhood, especially in physical activities,” Frautschi said.
Welles’ storytelling proved irksome.
“The only problem that I had with Orson,” Frautschi said, “had to do with the evening programs in the council ring,” when boys were encouraged to volunteer to sing or tell a story. “Orson volunteered every time. He told interminable stories … (and) the other boys soon grew tired of this and became restless, so that finally I had to tell Orson that he should not monopolize things that way, and that henceforth he should tell me in advance if he had something specific which he wanted to do or say.”
Welles performed a one-man production of “Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde,” and Frautschi said he was “overwhelmed by the performance.”
“(Welles) making the transformation from one character to the other with alterations in his mobile face and in his voice and actions which were truly amazing,” Frautschi said, adding he suggested Welles should perform at the commencement exercises, “when a large number of parents would be present for the award of prizes.”
“The big hall was packed,” Frautschi said, and Welles’ performance “was a smashing success, something that the boys and their parents would remember for years to come.”
The following year, Welles entered the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, where he remained until his graduation in 1931. More on his time at Tood School can be found in Todd Tarbox’s new book “Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts.”
Woodstock, which the Kenosha, Wisconsin-born Welles, called “home,” will honor him in May 2014 with a celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Todd Theatre Festival and again the following year when it marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.
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