THE RISE AND FALL OF ORSON WELLES.

Byline: Paul Brownfield Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Title: ``Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles''

Author: David Thomson

Data: 461 pages, Knopf; $30

Our rating: Four Stars

In the end, the great Orson Welles was something like 350 pounds, hawking cheap wine and appearing too often on ``The Merv Griffin Show'' in Los Angeles.

``He got into the habit of lunching at Patrick Terrail's restaurant, Ma Maison, on Melrose,'' David Thomson tells us in his arresting new biography of Welles called ``Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.''

``Indeed, he became a fixture there and even a reason for going to the place. He had his own table, and he could be beheld there, drooping over a chair, often in the company of a small dog, Kiki. And so, somehow, a world-famous sophisticate was reduced to having a home in Las Vegas and keeping company with a poodle.''

That passage underscores two things you should know about this book: It's filled with great anecdotal writing, and it never once debases itself by pitching Welles as simply a victimized genius, a reject of the Hollywood machine.

Beginning with his Kenosha, Wis., childhood, ``Rosebud'' traces Welles' life and his fitful work with a narrative that never feels researched; this is biography that reads like a novel, the work of a fan, but never fawning.

In fact, Thomson makes the interesting point that only a creature as singular in personality and ego as Welles would have let himself go the way he did: The former wonder boy - 24 when he made ``Citizen Kane'' - reduced to doing dog food commercials when he died alone of a massive heart attack on Oct. 10, 1985.

As Thomson shows, it was ego - and a refusal to distinguish between whim and inspiration - that more than anything else defined Welles' up-and-down career as a filmmaker.

He was brought to Hollywood by RKO in 1939, having made a name for himself as an actor, stage director, and the voice behind ``The War of the Worlds,'' that faux Martian attack broadcast on radio in Welles' deep, foreboding voice.

As soon as he arrived in Hollywood, Welles was trouble - an incorrigible little boy ahead of the class, given carte blanche to make two pictures. The first - after much delay and ridicule from the trades that the ``boy wonder'' couldn't make it - was ``Citizen Kane,'' released in 1941.

In his ``Kane'' chapters, Thomson hits the highlights. Fans of the film will be familiar with some of it: that Welles didn't write the script, though he later took credit for Herman Mankiewicz's work; that William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate on whom many thought ``Kane'' was based, ordered theaters to bar the film.

``Kane'' ultimately lost $150,000 - too ahead of its time in narrative structure, its brilliant use of sound and photography lost on audiences.

``Kane'' also proved to be the beginning of Welles' awful relationship with the Hollywood system.

``He would not ask, beseech or belittle himself - that was his fatal vanity - he would not be a performing Kong for the monkeys,'' Thomson says. ``Instead, he let them know that he regarded them as lesser creatures. Like God, he wanted to be asked. What vicious good fortune it was that, as a youth, he had got that carte blanche offer. It was the only way he would ever work in pictures. But by the age of 27, he had become the dreadful and living proof that Hollywood should not break its own rules.''

``Rosebud'' is equally fascinating away from the subject of ``Kane.''

Thomson is just a terrific writer, and he whips us merrily through the rest of Welles' crazy career - the affairs (Vivian Leigh, Lena Horne, Dolores Del Rio); the brief, improbable marriage to Rita Hayworth; the self-imposed exile to Europe, where he often lived in hotels; the lousy acting jobs to raise money for the pipe-dreamy, never-completed projects (let's do a movie of ``Don Quixote''!); and the films he did finish but which were dreadful (``Mr. Arkadin'' and, less so, ``The Lady From Shanghai'').

Welles may only have achieved true greatness in retrospect (``Citizen Kane'' and ``The Magnificent Ambersons'' are fixtures on scholarly top 10 lists). But to truly know the man is also to understand how awful he could be, to see the Paul Masson wine commercials on the same character continuum as ``Kane.''

Thomson never lets go of this conceit, never stops exploring the folly in Welles, and it keeps rewarding him. Thomson helps us see why Welles made the reckless decisions in his life and work.

Most especially, Thomson shows, it was in Welles' nature to be grand and capricious. When he failed, he failed spectacularly (try sitting through ``Arkadin''). Also, there was hardly a script Welles touched without reworking - often to the detriment of everyone concerned, himself included.

On the set, he had a tendency to bully, because he knew he was smarter than everyone else. And he'd have 10 or 15 other projects going at once, with actors on a given picture getting old or dying off by the time Welles had scrounged up the money and shot everything he felt he needed.

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Photo: A 24-year-old wunderkind when ``Citizen Kane'' was r eleased in 1941, Orson Welles didn't mesh well with the Hollywood world, and was reduced to hawking wine and dog food in television commercials when he died of a massive heart attack in 1985.