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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  The Welleses returned in time for Beatrice to help prepare for a national assembly of suffragists coming up in Chicago. Among those pitching in was Beatrice’s cousin Dudley Crafts Watson, Aunt Augusta’s eldest son, who designed yellow-and-white “artistic marching costumes” for the Kenosha contingent. The recently named director of the Milwaukee Art Institute (forerunner of today’s Milwaukee Art Museum), Watson was a true character who affected a mustache, round pince-nez suspended by a ribbon from his lapel, and a walking cane. (“Tap, tap, tap, Dudley’s coming,” people said.)

  Braving strong winds and a driving rain, Beatrice and a dozen of her friends donned their uniforms and “Woman’s Suffrage Is Preparedness” badges, then met up with their counterparts from Racine before heading off to Chicago. There they paraded through the streets with thirty thousand activists from all the forty-eight states, ending their march at the Coliseum, where the Republican National Convention was in session, presenting a suffrage resolution to the platform committee.

  Back in Kenosha for the rest of the summer, Beatrice helped launch public swimming classes at Washington Island beach, met with neighborhood women to bolster the formation of a local drama guild, and christened a “bigger, better” Girls’ Recreation Club in a new facility near Lake Michigan. At the Old Settlers’ Picnic she spoke on “The Civic Responsibility of Women” and held a lawn crowd spellbound. The whole family took a boat trip to Mackinac Island, and several times Beatrice, Lottie Jordan, and Ray Elizabeth Needham rode the special concert train to Ravinia.

  For more than a year Orson’s mother had played down her musical aspirations, limiting herself to a few kindergarten performances, while hosting private lessons and summer student recitals in her home. But close friends knew she agonized over her dormant career—she still listed “pianist” as her profession on legal documents—and when Harriet Bain announced a sabbatical from activism to return to painting, her example wasn’t lost on her good friend Beatrice.

  As fall arrived, Beatrice started telling confidantes that she, too, had reached a turning point. Resolving to limit her future political commitments, she threw herself back into her music—practicing as long as seven hours daily—and stepped up her trips to Chicago to further her studies. She also redoubled her efforts to bring serious music to Kenosha, coaxing her friend Louis Kreidler, a baritone with Chicago’s Grand Opera Company, to perform with her at an unusual public recital at her home. She charged attendees $1, with the proceeds going to the Girls’ Recreation Club, and told the Kenosha News that everyone was welcome. “Mrs. Welles wishes none to feel that a personal acquaintance with her is necessary to make them feel welcome at the concert,” the paper reported. “It is her hope that this concert is to take upon itself the proportions of a democratic movement.”

  Kreidler sang selections from I Pagliacci, Brahms, and Grieg, and Beatrice performed solos by Massenet, Moszkowski, and MacDowell. The unusual home recital was guest-reviewed in the News by the director of the Milwaukee Art Institute—this was one way Dudley Crafts Watson looked after his cousin—writing that Beatrice performed “superbly.”

  Flushed with newfound purpose, Beatrice Welles was ready to resume her musical career.

  Just a few months later, Dick Welles reached a crossroads of his own.

  In the third week of January 1917, the Kenosha News proclaimed: “Badger Brass Sold Today.” The C. M. Hall Lamp Company of Detroit had purchased the firm outright; at first the Detroit company said it would maintain the Kenosha plant, but that changed soon enough, and the sale of Badger Brass was the first step in the downward spiral of the industries that had fed local growth for decades. The sale price was said to be “in the neighborhood of $400,000,” with the bulk divided between George A. Yule, the company’s longtime president; and Richard Head Welles, its treasurer and general manager. Although Yule said he would switch over to running Bain Wagon Works, where his frail father, in his nineties, still showed up for work every day, Welles announced his retirement with “no plans for the immediate future,” reported the Kenosha News, other than “to take a long ocean cruise.”

  In his mid-forties, with two young sons he doted on and a beautiful, talented young wife, Dick Welles was a rich man—a millionaire in today’s dollars—with nothing but blue skies on the horizon.

  With a kind of anxious curiosity, the Kenosha newspapers faithfully chronicled the local power couple in their state of transition. Beatrice and Dick Welles seemed carefree on the surface, often spotted on first nights at the Rhode Opera House, enjoying shows such as May Robson’s Miss Matt, seated in one of the front rows with Dr. and Mrs. Maurice Bernstein.

  Dr. Bernstein had married Mina Elman on New Year’s Eve 1916. The Welleses did not attend the ceremony, which took place at the Hotel Statler in Buffalo, New York. (Elman reportedly wanted to establish the union on a fifty-fifty basis by marrying halfway between her home in Massachusetts and the groom’s in Kenosha.) Some biographers have described Mina Elman, the younger sister of violinist Mischa Elman, as “plain,” but the Kenosha newspapers described her as chic and fashionable, “a girlish, round faced young person with claims to beauty.” The newlywed Bernsteins moved into a Library Park house around the corner from the Welles family. The Welleses, and Beatrice in particular, were sympathetic to the aspiring classical singer.

  Beatrice made her “public reappearance” as a musician at a Guild Hall program in late January. When the management refused to allow her to transport her own full-size concert grand piano from home for the concert—as she’d done before, at great cost and inconvenience to the venue—the new Mrs. Bernstein saved the day by lending her personal grand piano, “a size or two smaller” than Beatrice’s. Also on the bill was Sybil Sammis MacDermid, a New York soprano, but it was Beatrice who stole the show and made it the social highlight of the winter. Her selections, including several polonaises and Chopin’s Étude in A-flat Major, were “marked by great delicacy and charm and a certain sureness as well as brilliance,” according to the Kenosha News, and her performance was met with storms of applause.

  It was also a Bernstein—this time the doctor—who rode to the rescue the following week, when twelve-year-old Richard suffered another mishap. Some sources say the boy tumbled down the stairs, others that he took a blow to his head while playing football. Whatever the case, the accident was serious enough for Dr. Bernstein to send the boy to a Chicago hospital for multiple procedures, including surgery to reset earlier fractures of his arm and leg. (Kenosha’s hospital, built in 1910, was inferior to the many Chicago facilities; a local adage was: “Get sick in Kenosha—go to the hospital in Chicago.”) Originally expected to stay ten days in the hospital, Richard lingered there for more than three weeks. His parents shuttled between the hospital and a Chicago hotel, and Beatrice herself was eventually overcome with stress and exhaustion, as local newspapers reported. In those days, doctors commonly prescribed bed rest for women suffering from anxiety or depression, and returning to Kenosha, Beatrice spent several days in bed—the first hint of an Achilles’ heel in this dynamo of energy.

  Other books have painted Beatrice as preferring to leave the mothering of her children to others, but in private she mentored young Richard—and now little Orson—in art, music, and literature. While her husband taught the boys sports and magic tricks, Beatrice nurtured their cerebral and spiritual side. But eleven-year-old Richard still had trouble in school, and he seemed accident-prone. That winter, after a restorative family trip to Florida, his parents decided it was time for Richard to go to a boarding school in the fall.

  With Beatrice and her circle of close friends finally slowing down, the late February 1917 “Suffrage Edition” of the Kenosha News served as a kind of valedictory for her generation of feminists in the city. With Harriet Bain as editor in chief, Ray Elizabeth Needham as managing editor, and Emma Robinson as city editor, the paper featured contributions by Drury Underwood and by George Ade, who sent an amusing wire from a Florida hotel: “Once there was a Man
opposed to Universal Suffrage because he said Every Woman would Vote just the way her Husband told her to Vote,” wrote Ade. “Later on he got Married. He is now a Pacifist.” For a feature entitled “How It Seems to Be a Husband of a Suffragist,” Dick Welles observed wryly: “Being the husband of a suffragist seems just the same as it did before I made a suffragist out of her.”

  The keynote of the special section was a four-stanza poem by Beatrice Welles, under her byline “B.I.W.,” expressing the common frustrations of the Kenosha sisterhood:

  When the news was circulated

  That male citizens awaited

  The assistance of Kenosha’s ladies fair

  To help them in improvement

  Thru their new-formed civic movement

  With twelve dollars we announced that we’d be there.

  We had worked in days departed

  In a manner most whole hearted

  For the things we thought would do Kenosha good

  So with flesh and spirit willing

  At this convocation thrilling

  We prepared to do what ever thing we could.

  We sat with breath bated

  And thru fifteen speeches waited

  With our ears attuned and listening for our cue

  Till a gentleman, distinguished,

  Said we should not be extinguished

  For in taking care of garbage we might do—

  Then a board of men elected

  And committees they selected

  But on not one of them were women asked to be.

  And as we homeward wandered

  We very sadly pondered

  Do men alone make up “community?”

  By the time the special edition was in print, however, nearly all the best-known champions of the suffrage movement in Kenosha had moved on. Harriet Bain left for Spain to resume her painting. (She later moved to New York, where she became a founding member of the modernist New York Society of Women Artists.) Emma Robinson suffered a nervous breakdown and departed for California. Lottie Jordan moved to Cleveland, where her husband opened a new car factory. Finally, in April, Ray Elizabeth Needham left for Chicago with her husband, Maurice, who launched his own sales agency there. Of all Beatrice’s closest friends, only Mary Bradford—a Kenoshan to the last—remained in the city.

  The Welleses’ circles were narrowing. Dick Welles had rejected entreaties from Charles Hall, his colleague at Badger Brass, to accept a top position with the new parent company in Detroit. Another longtime crony at Badger Brass, L. J. Keck, used his share of the buyout to relocate to rural New York. And the departure of Edward Jordan and Maurice Needham, Dick’s friends and fellow male suffragists, left Kenosha a smaller, lonelier place for the young couple.

  Lucy Ives returned early from another family vacation in the summer of 1917, feeling poorly. Her health took a turn for the worse in July, and she died on August 10. Orson’s maternal grandmother was not yet sixty when she died. Her death certificate lists the cause as an uncommon, difficult-to-diagnose type of colon cancer. Her attending physician was the all-purpose Maurice Bernstein. She was interred next to her husband in the Welles family plot in Green Ridge Cemetery.

  Some historians have depicted Lucy Ives as a nonentity, suggesting that Beatrice Welles was emotionally and intellectually aloof from her mother. Yet Lucy made many friends in Kenosha, and the press mourned her as “a woman of rare personal charm, of intellectual development, of an unusually happy disposition.” To many, mother and daughter had seemed like kindred souls.

  Grief-stricken, Beatrice took to bed once more, and this time her illness was severe enough that she was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago. Beatrice and her mother had at one time talked about organizing a major benefit for the Red Cross, which was heavily taxed by America’s entry into the Great War; now, on returning to Kenosha, Beatrice announced that the benefit would go forward in her mother’s honor. Channeling her pacifism into war relief, she organized a concert in late October, again with baritone Louis Kreidler, mixing opera and classical music with “La Marseillaise” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Her piano playing reached a stirring peak with songs that touched on death such as “Mourn with the Sighing Wind” and “Danny Deever,” with lyrics from the Kipling poem. But Beatrice did not offer as many solos as the audience had hoped—and a few weeks later, just before Christmas, the city’s first elected female official surprised her fellow school commissioners by submitting her resignation from the board, effective immediately. The terse announcement, on the front page of the Kenosha News, offered no real explanation.

  Even her opponents on the school board had come to appreciate Beatrice as a tireless advocate of the public welfare. Mary Bradford would miss her loyal co-conspirator, but she knew that Beatrice’s artistic ambitions could not be gratified in Kenosha, and she accepted the resignation sadly. By the end of the year, the Welleses were making arrangements to leave their Park Avenue home, and Kenosha.

  Beatrice had grown weary of the rancor and struggles that hampered her diverse causes. Her many sideline projects—the Woman’s Club drama group, the alternative and populist Kenosha City Club, the activist Woman’s Alliance of the Unitarian Church, and the Girls’ Progressive Club shelter—would fail rapidly in her absence. Yet Beatrice and her circle of activist friends had succeeded in spurring real change. The following year, when Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment granting national female suffrage, the credit belonged in part to the suffragists of Kenosha.

  One night that January, Dick and Beatrice Welles huddled together on the late Saturday theater train as it burrowed through snowdrifts from Chicago back to Kenosha, finally pulling into town on Sunday at dawn. It was their last such trip. Not long afterword, faster than anyone expected, Kenosha’s onetime power couple left the city to take up a new life in Chicago. One of their sons, little Orson, not yet three years old, would move with them. The other, twelve-year-old Richard, was away at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois—an institution that would loom large in the Welles family’s future.

  The Welleses had many reasons to move to Chicago, but their two boys were significant factors. Richard was complicated: he sang, played piano, and painted with talent, and he had learned a love of magic from his father, but he never settled comfortably into school, and he acted out in worrisome ways. Dick and Beatrice were increasingly uneasy about their oldest child, and they knew that in Chicago they could consult medical specialists if his problems persisted.

  With more time on her hands than she’d had in years, Beatrice could also devote close attention to little Orson, as perhaps she never did with Richard. She had fretted that Kenosha would stifle her younger son’s creativity, whereas Chicago’s artistic and musical offerings would nurture his instincts and intellect as they had nurtured his mother’s. In their new home, Beatrice would read to the boy from her favorite works of poetry, drama, and literature. She would speak to him like an adult. She would raise him to explore and express himself. If she was at fault in any way for Richard’s quirky and disappointing behavior, then Orson offered her, and her husband, a precious second chance.

  By the time the Welles family arrived in 1918, Chicago had mushroomed into a metropolis of nearly three million people. Its mayor was the corrupt, buffoonish “Big Bill” Thompson—often called a “Hearst mayor,” as his campaign was pushed heavily by the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst. The city’s streets were jammed with streetcars and automobiles; its downtown was filled with tall buildings; its neighborhoods boasted many new single-family bungalows. Ben Hecht was corresponding from Berlin for the Chicago Daily News, while his future writing partner, Charles MacArthur (they would collaborate on The Front Page), was on sabbatical from the Chicago Tribune—volunteering with the Black Watch Highlanders in the Great War.

  By Easter Sunday, the Welles family had settled into a spacious apartment on East Pearson, close to Lake Michigan and not far from downtown. Later in the month of
May, after Orson’s third birthday, the family took a taxi to the Illinois Theater in the theater district, where they saw the actress Sarah Bernhardt in a single afternoon performance of Eugene Morand’s allegorical Les Cathédrales, which had been a huge success at her theater in Paris in 1915 and at a royal command performance in London the following year. The pacifist stage poem depicted the war-ravaged cathedrals of France as seen in a waking dream by a French soldier. Proceeds from the occasion went to relief of French artists wounded in the war, and to the widows and orphans of those who had died. These were sacred causes for Beatrice—pacifism and the victims of war.

  At seventy-four, Bernhardt had an artificial limb—one of her legs had been amputated after an injury—but she still performed and still greeted well-wishers backstage after the show, and that day Dick and Beatrice Welles were among them. Little Orson “touched the hand of Sarah Bernhardt,” he recalled years later. “Can you imagine that?” The little boy was “led into a bower of dark-red roses where that marvelous old lady sat in her wheelchair refreshing herself from a tank of oxygen. That hand I took was a claw covered with liver spots and liquid white and with the pointy ends of her sleeve glued over the back of it.” This was one of several farewell tours for one of the theatrical legends of the nineteenth century; she went on to play in North America deep into October. The tour included Milwaukee in Wisconsin, though not Kenosha.