Free I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead by Charles Tranberg

pictures.
    Like Mysteries of Paris and The Gumps, The New Penny lasted only a
season, but like these other shows it had enhanced Agnes’ career. She often
appeared on five or six different radio shows per week in steady demand.
She soon became part of an important radio news dramatization program, The March of Time, which would reintroduce her to the young man she had
met while working on The Gumps, Orson Welles, and, with him and an
extraordinary group of fellow seasoned radio veterans, would go on to
create radio history — with a bit of notoriety in the process.
4
ORSON AND THE MERCURYTHEATRE
    In the early 1920’s an Aunt took Agnes on a trip to New York. They stayed
in the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. One day Agnes was sitting at a table next
to a precocious little boy, probably seven or eight years old, who was chubby
and had expressive eyes. The little boy was deep in conversation with, who
she thought, was his father and two elderly women. “It was at an afternoon
tea,” Agnes recalled, “and he was talking learnedly about musical theory.”
Years later she encountered a young man who reminded her of this young
boy but didn’t say anything to him because she just didn’t think it could be
the same person. Some time after that she was reading Life magazine, which
had an article that greatly interested her; as she turned the pages, she found
a picture of the young boy she had encountered those many years earlier at
the Waldorf Astoria — she was absolutely convinced it was he. That young
boy was the focus of the story she was reading. It was the same young man
she found so familiar when she met him years later. Agnes now realized that
the precocious young boy was none other than Orson Welles. When Welles
was finally told of the incident he began to fondly tell people that he had
known Agnes Moorehead “since I was seven years old.”
    No doubt about it: Orson Welles was a prodigy. He was born George
Orson Welles, on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father, Richard
Welles, had been an inventor who had patented headlamps for the first
automobiles, and Welles would later say that Booth Tarkington had based
the character of Eugene Morgan in his famous novel, The Magnificent
Ambersons, on his father. Welles’ mother, Beatrice, was a musician, who
later became one of the first women elected to public office in Wisconsin,
when she was elected to the Kenosha School Board. Welles had one brother,
who seemingly was not as bright as Orson, and who stuttered; the brother
must have experienced a terrible inferiority complex, since the parents
lavished praise on Orson, while ignoring him.
    Orson’s parents divorced when he was six. His father had developed a
serious drinking problem and his mother had fallen into an affair with
another man — a doctor who had treated Orson’s grandmother when she
was dying of stomach cancer. When they divorced Orson moved with his
mother to Chicago where she helped support them by giving piano lessons
while Orson recited Shakespeare. In his spare time young Orson wrote
plays, developed an interest in magic tricks and performed in puppet
shows. When Orson was nine, his mother died of hepatitis. Orson was
devastated and his father was of little help because of his own losing battle
with alcoholism. As it turned out, Orson stayed in the care of the doctor
his mother had an affair with. They lived for a few years in the Chicago area
where Orson was able to enjoy the culture the city had to offer such as
attending the theatre or symphonies.
    When Orson was 11, he returned to Wisconsin where he attended
public schools in Madison living with a friend of the doctor’s. Orson had
no formal education prior to this, but having been home schooled by tutors
he excelled and was advanced from the fourth to the fifth grade. One of his
teachers, Dorothy Chapman, later said, “His interests were definitely
toward art and dramatics. He disliked arithmetic and found the regular
school curriculum