There is a special risk in writing about Orson Welles. The dimensions may get a little out of hand, as if they had to mime the physical size and imaginative reach of the subject. Patrick McGilligan’s excellent biography of Alfred Hitchcock takes 750 pages to cover the director’s life and his fifty films. By page 706 of Young Orson, Welles is about to start shooting Citizen Kane, his first full-length movie: he is twenty-five years old, and he lived till he was seventy. There is a thirty-nine-page postlude about the day and night of Welles’s death.
But much of the book reads as if the causality went the other way. Citizen Kane is a great excuse to study a lost America, the culture and politics of Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the early years of the twentieth century, the involvement of the talented pianist Beatrice Welles, Orson’s mother, in the women’s movement and the artistic life of the time, the lapse of Orson’s father, the rich and adventurous Richard Welles—the first man in town to drive an automobile—into drink and heart disease.
It’s good too to ponder the image of the five-year-old Orson dressed as the White Rabbit and telling the shoppers at Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago that he has to hurry—“or else it will be too late to see the woolen underwear on the eighth floor!” It doesn’t say much about the genesis of Citizen Kane perhaps, but we surely learn something about the uses of literature.