A “very raw draft” of an unpublished memoir penned by legendary filmmaker Orson Welles has just been added to the University of Michigan’s archives. The typewritten manuscript, tentatively titled “Confessions of a One-Man Band,” was among the materials in eight boxes the Ann Arbor-area school recently procured from Croatian actress, screenwriter and director Oja Kodar (who was Welles’ long-time girlfriend and collaborator for 24 years before his death in 1985 at age 70). Welles is best known for directing and narrating controversial radio drama “The War of the Worlds” that shook up thousands of listeners in 1937 and directing and starring in the cinema classic “Citizen Kane” in 1941, when he was 25 years old. The 80-page typed document has handwritten notes and edits throughout. It includes passages about Welles’ parents; his second wife, actress Rita Hayworth, novelist Ernest Hemingway and filmmaker D.W. Griffith. According to Philip Hallman, curator of the Screen Arts Mavericks Collection, Welles clearly intended to publish the autobiographical work and had carefully placed rare photographs in envelopes that could be used in the book. The school already had three donated and two purchased archives of Welles and is conceivably the most expansive repository of written materials on him.
