Frautschi on Welles: "Here I was living at camp with a boy who turned out to be an authentic genius."
Orson Welles, who lived in Madison for about a year when he was 10, used to tell stories about the director of a summer camp he attended putting the sexual moves on him, which the budding genius avoided by slipping out a back window and taking the next train back to Chicago.
"I don't believe it," says Lowell Frautschi. And he was there.
Camp Indianola was a boys' camp on the northwestern shore of Lake Mendota on land that is now part of Governor Nelson State Park (just past Jerry Frautschi's estate on County M). Lowell and his brother, Walter, each worked there several years during college; Lowell thought it was the hardest and some of the most important work he ever did.
It certainly gave him some interesting experiences, as he related to the Madison Literary Club in 1991.
In 1925, camp director Dr. Frederick Mueller, a psychology instructor at UW, told Lowell that "one of the new boys coming that summer was an unusual child." Mueller instructed Lowell "to share my room in the barracks with him and to keep a close watch on his participation in camp activities."
"His name was Orson Welles," Frautschi said. "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. 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," Frautschi recalled.
He brought his own easel, and paints given him by the famed Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, so Mueller added arts to the curriculum. As Orson was the only member of the class, he and Frautschi would go to a nearby pasture "where Orson put up his easel and proceeded to paint, while I sat on the ground and read."
Welles' mother had been a musician at the heart of an artistic community in Chicago, so he "was accustomed almost exclusively to the company of adults." But she had died, and the father "was a wanderer" prone to alcoholism, Frautschi recounted; now Welles' guardian wanted him "to learn the normal skills of boyhood, especially in physical activities."
"He entered into things well enough to relieve me of any special effort along that line," Frautschi said.
"The only problem that I had with Orson," Frautschi continued, "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," Frautschi said, 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."
Then one day, near the end of the season, Welles told Frautschi that he wanted to do a play, and asked for some props. "Being wary," Frautschi told Welles "that I thought we should have an audition first."
It was Welles' one-man show of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and Frautschi was "overwhelmed by the performance that I saw." Sixty-six years later, Frautschi recalled 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 told Mueller that 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."
Welles lived with Mueller and his wife for about a year, attending the old Washington School at Broom and West Johnson streets. It was an arrangement Welles would later paint in lurid terms, telling biographer Barbara Leaming that "the large powerful German had been staring at and circling him a bit too keenly." One night, with his wife away, "Herr Professor finally made his move," Leaming wrote, at which point "Orson decided it was best to slip out a back window, find the local train station," and return to his guardian in Chicago. Welles told another author that he "fled Madison during the dead of night by canoe and train after a camp counselor tried to molest him."
If the notion of the 10-year-old aesthete canoeing by himself across Lake Mendota, at night, weren't fanciful enough to cast doubt on Welles' story, there's Frautschi's first-hand account of the two participants.
Reviewing the several years he worked for Mueller, "usually in the company of males, most of whom were boys of varying ages," Frautschi recalled, "I never saw any gestures or facial expression or heard any word which would have indicated such a tendency." For her part, "the suspicious eyes of Mrs. Mueller were directed toward members of the female sex."
As for Orson, Frautschi said, "during the two months that I was with him daily, and slept in the same room, I never had reason to suspect that he was preoccupied with thoughts of that kind."
Although Leaming's book was well-received, Frautschi wasn't a fan, citing what he called it "undependability as to facts concerning which I have some knowledge." He said Welles' account of his time in Madison "should be regarded as self-indulgent entertainment, the product of a perfervid imagination, dramatizing history."
Although Frautschi only saw Welles once more after that summer, a chance encounter on State Street, "I have never forgotten him, however, and followed his career with mingled admiration and distaste."
Camp Indianola was sold to the DNR in 1975 for $550,000. All that remains of the camp today are three of the four stone pillars that stood at the end of the driveway in front of Mueller's house.
