What ever became of Orson Welles?
The analogue to Orson Welles in TTL was George Welles, born on a slightly different date to the same family. The family situation for George Welles was different from our world’s Orson Welles: his parents never separated, his father did not become an alcoholic, and his mother did not die from hepatitis. Growing up in a stable and relatively affluent family, George Welles developed talent early in life both as a musician and as a writer. By the early 1930s, Welles was living in New York City, and working as a musician and composer in the city’s theater scene. He rose in prestige within this world, and, in spite of his youth, was given a chance in 1940 to bring his artistic vision to the stage.
Welles’s first attempt at directing, writing and composing a stage musical, a song-and-dance adaptation of
Faust, was a massive commercial failure. The outbreak of the SGW in 1941 served to dampen the New York theater scene even further. Welles volunteered for service in the US military; his technical skills with electrical sound systems led to his service in the United States Army Signal Corps. Welles was honorably discharged in 1947, after which he returned to New York City.
Welles did not return to the theater world. Instead, he started a new career as a scriptwriter, first in commercial radio and later in television. Welles did not particularly enjoy this work, but the pay was good in a USA still undergoing national reconstruction. Welles found a creative outlet in fiction writing, beginning with short stories. In 1954, his first novel,
Sound Off (a satire of army life and the ethos of national service) was published, to lukewarm reviews and disappointing commercial sales. Welles worked as a television screenwriter until his retirement in 1974. He died in 1989.
Although
Sound Off was a commercial disappointment when it was first published, the novel gained new, positive attention from both scholars and the general public as one of the best satires of US military life ever written. The novel later became one of the inspirations for director Zachary C. Webster’s 2000 film
Quartermaster Corps, the first US movie released as part of the “Low Life Wave” of the 2000s.