Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  The highlight of the three-day festival was a public flight by Dick and Beatrice Welles. Kenosha’s “first couple” waved to a crowd as they climbed aboard a plane, piloted by Witmer, which made a ten-mile sweep out over Lake Michigan, circling around the breakwater, city lighthouse, and shore, thrilling thousands of onlookers. It was one of several scenes Witmer shot for his intended comedy, tentatively titled “Her Escape”—making Dick and Beatrice Welles the first Welleses to appear in a film. Alas, “Her Escape” was never completed, and the footage is lost today.

  The fall colors were glorious, and in September the Welleses attended a performance by a touring illusionist known as the “Man of Many Mysteries” (a.k.a. Eugene Laurant, based in Chicago), whose specialties included a Chinese Linking Ring trick and something he called “chapeaugraphy,” which involved manipulating a piece of felt into many hat shapes while describing the results in verse. They also saw Twelfth Night performed by the troupe led by Ben Greet, one of that dying breed of actor-managers who traveled the country tirelessly with their repertory players, bringing Shakespeare and other classical works of the theater to outposts like Kenosha. The Welles children would grow up hearing names like Greet’s spoken with awe.

  The end of 1914 was dampened by a series of unfortunate occurrences. The elder George Yule, now ninety years old, suffered a stroke in California, where he spent part of each winter. Kenoshans wondered whether Bain Wagon or Badger Brass could continue very long without the head of the Yule clan, who was the boss of one company and the patron spirit of the other.

  The Unitarian Church also suffered a crippling scandal. After searching for a worthy permanent replacement for the Reverend Florence Buck, the congregation finally settled on a young pastor who was much admired—until two months after his arrival, when local headlines revealed him as a bigamist who had falsified his ministerial credentials. The disgraced new minister was forced to resign, and Kenosha’s Unitarians never really recovered. Beatrice Welles still led the Unitarian choir, but she had already stepped back from the church, bequeathing leadership of the Woman’s Alliance to another congregant. She would never again feel the same about the Unitarians, or any religion. Dick Welles’s mother, Mary Gottfredsen, quit the board to become a Christian Scientist—and she wasn’t the only Kenoshan to abandon the once thriving church.

  The holidays had always been a time of hope and joy for the Welles family, and in 1914 Beatrice endeavored to use that spirit to heal the rifts in their larger community. Together with her mother and Mary Bradford, she spearheaded a fund drive featuring Kenosha’s first Community Tree, modeled after a similar effort in Chicago. A forty-foot tree from a Wisconsin farm was delivered to Library Park Square, and volunteers from the rival women’s clubs filled boxes with candy and gift coupons. Subscribers to the drive were asked to pay anything from one penny to $1, and in turn every Kenosha child between the ages of two and fourteen would receive a coupon for a gift, so none would feel disadvantaged at Christmas. The campaign would culminate on Christmas Eve, with Santa Claus arriving in Kenosha. “Community Christmas Tree Will Recognize No Caste in Distribution of Presents,” declared the Kenosha News.

  It was one of Beatrice Welles’s finest hours. She began the week by giving a dramatic reading of Zona Gale’s story “The Great Tree” to families at the local Baptist church. On the front page of the Kenosha News, she held forth on the true meaning of Christmas, comparing “the literal Santa Claus, with the reindeer and long whiskers,” with “the real Santa Claus portrayed in the hearts of the givers,” as represented by the Community Tree fund. “On Christmas Eve, every person in Kenosha will celebrate Christmas with every other person,” one prominent city banker told the newspaper. “There will be no labeling of this one or that one or the other one. It will be a Kenosha community Christmas in spirit and deed.”

  As darkness fell on Christmas Eve, with the mercury plunging toward zero and a sharp wind rising from the west, ten thousand citizens thronged the downtown streets. As the crowd sang Christmas songs, Santa Claus arrived at the head of a marching Boy Scout band. “Men who counted their wealth by the hundreds of thousands touched shoulders with their own workmen,” the Kenosha News reported. Clubwomen old and young dressed as Santa’s helpers and handed out four hundred Christmas packages to children, before the shivering crowd, including Beatrice Welles, the mistress of ceremonies and heroine of the day, scurried to the warmth of home.

  And there was one more bit of merry Christmas news: ten years after the birth of her first child, Beatrice told her husband she was pregnant again.

  Beatrice and Dick Welles sneaked off to the Caribbean after the New Year, leaving ten-year-old Richard with Lucy Ives. The Welleses often rendezvoused in the West Indies with their Chicago pals John McCutcheon, who was planning to buy a private island in the Bahamas, and George Ade, by now one of America’s most successful authors and playwrights. In Trinidad, one of Dick Welles’s favorite places, they joined up with Ade and his longtime homosexual companion Orson C. Wells, a millionaire stockbroker from Chicago by way of Wisconsin.

  The three men smoked cigars and drank rum on the boat as they basked in the blazing sun, marveling at the expectant Beatrice, looking healthy and happy in her swimwear. The Kenosha couple joked about the similarity between the names Wells and Welles, and told George and “Ort” Wells that they would name their new baby after the two men if it was a boy. Orson Welles enjoyed telling this anecdote, which became a staple of Welles family lore, and kept a yellowed clipping of the famous author’s obituary for years.

  Back in Kenosha, the winter and spring passed quietly, with Dick Welles cutting back on travel and his wife busy with school board duties. Beatrice and her close ally, school superintendent Mary Bradford, continued their push for reform, but progress was slow. The women contrived to disagree in public about certain matters, just to allay any fears that they were forming any sort of conspiracy against the men. But a conspiracy it was: the two never disagreed privately, and Beatrice and Mary Bradford walked arm-in-arm to meetings, reviewing their strategies along the way.

  Regardless, the report card on Kenosha’s schools was frustrating. The board agreed to build “portable schools” as a temporary solution to overcrowding and buildings in disrepair, but refused by a majority to invest money in either a special school for the deaf or any type of open-air school. Beatrice dashed off an angry letter denouncing the decision, arguing that children with special needs should be “the first aim of the public school,” and deserved special help to become “valuable citizens.” The Kenosha News ran the letter on its front page.

  Beatrice took satisfaction in her committee work and interaction with teachers. She was in charge of the teachers’ committee, showing appreciation for veteran teachers while recruiting new staff members, and joined a committee that promoted “Wider Use,” opening the schools up for community programs and events. She was also the board’s emissary to the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). Beatrice rarely missed a board meeting, and the other commissioners, even those who opposed her initiatives, admired her dedication. Before she was even one year into her term, Beatrice was whispered about as a consensus choice for board president.

  But she declined, in light of her new obligations as a mother-to-be. Early in the morning on May 6, Beatrice gave birth to a ten-pound boy. His parents named him George Orson Welles. Of course “Orson” had been the name of Dick Welles’s maternal grandfather, whose bequest laid the foundation of his business career. The only real borrowing from the famous Trinidad pact was “George,” a name Orson kidded about for years, though he was proud of his connection to George Ade and used it as his first name on official documents. The baby had two godfathers: Ade was one, John McCutcheon the other.

  Flash-forward seven months to New Year’s Day 1916, when Beatrice and Dick Welles hosted an open house for a grand array of relatives, friends, and neighbors, including the Rhodes, the Needhams, the Jordans, Harriet Bain, Mary Bradford, and Dr. Maurice Bernstein
.

  Shortly after settling in Kenosha, Dr. Bernstein had been appointed to its new board of health, which was trying to stem a citywide epidemic of scarlet fever and diphtheria among children. The local press noted that Bernstein was the least well-known of the five physicians named to the board, but in the ensuing four years he had ingratiated himself with many of the city’s residents, including the Welles family.

  By 1916, Bernstein was among the most respected doctors in Kenosha. The Kenosha News chronicled his travels to Milwaukee to teach surgery at Marquette Medical College; to Rochester, Minnesota, for tutorial clinics given by the Mayo brothers; and to Chicago for consulting—all while he maintained a full calendar of patients in Kenosha’s downtown Gonnermann Building. Bernstein was a demon driver, and local columnists joked about his frequent speeding tickets for racing to his various obligations.

  The doctor joined Dick Welles in the annual parade of Kenosha automobile owners, but he also mixed with the Welleses and other Kenoshans on the weekend trains heading to classical music programs in Chicago and on the North Shore. He and the Welleses had many friends in common, including the Rhodes, who owned and operated the Opera House, where Bernstein took orchestra seats for all the touring shows.

  In the late fall of 1915, the Kenosha papers were reporting on Bernstein’s romantic pursuit of Mina Elman, the younger sister of the Ukrainian-born violinist Mischa Elman. The renowned violinist was one of many musicians Bernstein befriended, often meeting them first when they played in Chicago, where he was known to dash backstage to assist in medical emergencies. The doctor had met Mina Elman when he was visiting her brother at his retreat on Cape Ann in Massachusetts. The violinist had returned the favor, visiting Bernstein in Kenosha and stirring excitement among those who knew his reputation. Bernstein brought Elman to the Welles home for dinner.

  Beatrice issued two hundred invitations to her New Year party, which she envisioned as a revival of the old-fashioned custom of open houses. As Booth Tarkington described them in The Magnificent Ambersons, open houses involved guests going from one house to the next, “leaving fantastic cards in fancy baskets as they entered each doorway, and emerging a little later, more carefree than ever, if the punch had been to their liking.” The open house was Orson’s coming-out, and the chubby baby was the star of the party. His mother called him “Georgie-Porgie,” and everyone cooed over him. Beatrice’s mother, Lucy Ives, cohosted the affair, and a few Watson relatives from Evanston and women friends from Chicago came early to help with the arrangements. The Welleses’ sun parlor served as a smoking room for the gentlemen, while the ladies chatted over punch and French cakes.

  The Ambersons in Booth Tarkington’s novel led a life of fin de siècle grandeur, in a three-story mansion with a black walnut stairway, a skylight dome, and a ballroom, all maintained with the help of liveried servants whom Tarkington called “darkies.” The Welleses’ celebration was modest by comparison, but their lives had another kind of richness. Dick and Beatrice Welles were widely beloved in the city of Kenosha, and clearly in love with each other. As Booth Tarkington wrote of the Ambersons, the Welleses were “magnificent in their day and place.”

  Orson would have his own words for it: his parents were “mythically wonderful.”

  II

  ROSEBUDS

  CHAPTER 3

  1915–1921

  The Whispered Word “Genius”

  Orson Welles’s penchant for rubbing shoulders with royalty—not just show business royalty, but popes and kings and heads of state—was in his genes.

  Just as Orson was not the first Welles to direct a stage play or appear in a motion picture, he was not the first Welles to shake hands with an American president. His mother’s family knew Abraham Lincoln back in Springfield, Illinois. And although presidents rarely visited Kenosha—at best, a presidential train would idle for a while on the tracks there—when Woodrow Wilson stopped at the station in late January 1916, he agreed to meet with a delegation of female activists. Beatrice Welles and Harriet Bain led a group of five hundred women, wearing yellow sashes and carrying a huge banner demanding a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage. Beatrice and the feminist contingent presented President Wilson with a petition and boxes of the homemade cakes known locally as “suffrage snaps,” a staple at Kenosha County Political Equality League programs.

  Orson’s mother was a particularly admirable whirlwind of activity during his first year of life. Although a second woman was appointed to fill a Kenosha school board vacancy, the conservative male majority still blocked most new expenditures. But Beatrice also gave her time to a seemingly endless variety of other concerns: helping to organize a mass meeting on child labor, prodding the City Club to sponsor nursery support and a cooking school, helping to host an annual luncheon of farmers’ wives. America had not yet entered World War I—which was then called the Great War—and like many suffragists Beatrice lent her name to antiwar events, including local fund-raising for victims of the genocide in Armenia (Kenosha had a sizable Armenian population). Before one Woman’s Alliance meeting, Beatrice presented a recital of Lincoln Colcord’s pacifist poem Vision of War, offering a “clear voiced expressive rendering” of his graphic imagery. Colcord’s humanism and internationalism were values that Beatrice “frankly confessed in many instances embodied her own,” according to one newspaper account, and her talent for dramatic recitation foreshadowed her son’s rhetorical flair.

  As a school board commissioner, Beatrice made the rounds of county schools, even those deep in the countryside. The ties she forged with Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) groups inspired her involvement with other causes, including the temperance movement—though she herself was not a teetotaler, rather a moderate reformer who campaigned against all-night saloons and saloons that were open on Sundays. Similarly, in 1915, Beatrice pushed the school board to crusade against “abnormal and sensational” moving pictures, urging the Kenosha city council to establish the city’s first censorship board after PTA members complained about Kenosha theaters that advertised certain fare as “For Adults Only” yet sold tickets to teenagers. Like many young mothers, Beatrice was not against all movies; she opposed only the “sordid moving pictures” that tempted local children. (Indeed, she publicly recommended films that reflected her ideals, such as the pro-enfranchisement Your Girl and Mine and Alla Nazimova’s pacifist War Brides.) Orson’s father was a more avid and less discriminating moviegoer, a fan of detective stories, slapstick comedies, and exciting Westerns.

  Beatrice bucked the PTAs on other issues, however, promoting “sex hygiene” classes in the high schools and arguing to frame this sensitive subject “in a beautiful, wholesome manner” that would instill in teenage boys “an eternal reverence for all women.” Her early embrace of sex education took many Kenoshans aback, and despite her best efforts it was a hard sell.

  Beatrice’s many talks and recitals for school audiences made her a star on the PTA circuit. Spurred into writing by Zona Gale’s example, in January 1916 Beatrice introduced “a story of her own authorship,” called “Mother and Child,” that became a set piece in the readings she performed for students, teachers, and parent groups at several school venues. Although the “storiette,” as Kenosha newspapers dubbed it, has since been lost, contemporary accounts indicate that it dramatized a fictional colloquy between parent and child on delicate matters including sex and death. The moral of the storiette was that it was a mother’s duty—“her privilege”—to address difficult subjects while her children were still at an impressionable age. “The mother who withholds knowledge from her child from a sense of delicacy condemns her child to dangerous possibilities,” Beatrice cautioned. “There is danger in waiting ‘until the child is old enough or until he asks me.’ He may never ask.”

  Her storiette broached the possibility of a child’s dying from social neglect, or catastrophic disease. She foretold the passing of a “child dweller in the paradise of earthly innocence, being taken gently by
the hand and led by his mother into the other world.” Audience members dabbed away tears. “Here and there a stifled sob gave evidence of the emotional power of both the story and its reader,” reported the Kenosha News.

  Despite her local fame, it was not a foregone conclusion that Beatrice would run again for school board commissioner in the spring 1916 elections. But Mary Bradford and Harriet Bain prevailed on her, and she won a second term—though this time her margin of victory was only thirty votes, 394 to 364, reflecting her polarizing effect on people. But the playground tax referendum Beatrice supported, which was voted on citywide, passed by a larger margin; and such direct voter initiatives, which could not be undermined by the city council or the mayor, were proving effective at securing more playgrounds and other school improvements for the city: better school gardens, upgraded toilet facilities, and repairs to aging buildings. Ground was even broken on Kenosha’s first open-air school, a longtime cause for Beatrice.

  When Beatrice convened the last Kenosha City Club meeting of the season in her home, in late May 1916, it was the largest one yet.

  That summer, Beatrice and Dick Welles enjoyed several days at Richard Carle’s country estate in Long Beach, New York, heading into Manhattan for a steady round of theatergoing, museum visits, and concerts. Dick Welles’s friendship with Harry Sommers, a well-known theater manager, helped him secure excellent seats for every stage show. Just a year old, young Orson came along for his first trip to New York City, staying behind with a nanny when the couple went out on the town. Beatrice’s mother lingered in Kenosha, recovering after a long stay at Chicago’s Hahnemann Hospital in 1915. She had a servant to help watch eleven-year-old Richard, though the boy came down with measles during that season’s epidemic.