One of the early legends attaching to Orson Welles is that he made his stage début as an infant performer at the Ravinia Festival, playing Dolore, the infant in Madame Butterfly. Russell Maloney reported the story in "The Ageless Soul," a New Yorker Profile of Welles that appeared in 1938; Peter Noble stated in his 1956 biography The Fabulous Orson Welles that little Orson played various infant roles in opera but soon "became so heavy that sopranos finally refused to lift him." Later, the Welles biographers Charles Higham and Simon Callow denied that such an incident could have taken place, declaring that no full performances of Butterfly were given at Ravinia in that period. In fact, as I note in my Welles piece this week, Ravinia presented Butterfly on various occasions in 1918 and 1919, when Welles was three or four. He could well have been one of the unnamed performers assuming the Dolore role. I found the item above in the archives of the Chicago Tribune; the date is Aug. 4, 1919. Might he have been the "fairy child" mentioned here? Or, possibly, the "far heftier child" who replaced him? Almost certainly, we will never know.
Incidentally, the noted American soprano Edith Mason, mentioned here, later married Maurice Bernstein, who became Welles's guardian after his father's death. His name appears in a 1930 Tribune story investigating rumors of a rift in that marriage. Mason's personal secretary offers the explanation that the singer has moved out of Bernstein's home because his young visitor (not yet his charge) has caught a "terrible cold, a perfectly awful one," which she did not wish to catch. Mason and Bernstein soon divorced, and Mason returned to her first husband, the conductor Giorgio Polacco. The story, which appeared on page 3 of the paper, gives a glimpse of the strangeness of Welles's childhood.
