Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Like the vast majority of American settlements, it was of recent origin – the first settlers had arrived in 1835 – and when Welles was born, in 1915, there were still people alive who could remember those founding fathers and mothers who had named their little harbour town on the shore of Lake Michigan, Southport. Within fifteen years it had grown sufficiently – aided by the all-important railroad – to incorporate itself as a city, taking the old Indian name of Kenosha, meaning pike, after the fish that they so plentifully trawled out of the lake. From then on, its growth was prodigious. Almost overnight a society was constructed: schools, courts, streets, squares, hotels, factories. Like a thousand other towns across America, it created itself by willpower, inspired by twin visions of wealth and civic pride. From the beginning, there were parallel resolves to provide for the mind and the soul as well as for the body: in addition to assembly lines, furnaces and forges, there would be libraries, and concert-halls, and parks – especially parks, to the extent that Kenosha was familiarly known as Park City. None of this, material or spiritual, commercial or artistic, was achieved without a struggle. As it happens, Welles’s parents were, if not actively then certainly symbolically, on opposite sides in that struggle, one of the many divisions in their fundamentally riven relationship.

  Welles’s father, Richard Head Welles, was in trade.1 It is as simple as that. It became important for Welles to romanticise his father, for reasons that will become evident. Central to his image of his father was the fact that he was an inventor. He was; but in a very quiet way. Welles’s view of him as the Kenosha Leonardo does not, alas, withstand scrutiny. His inventions were largely confined to the business in which he worked, and that was the lamp trade. His first job had been in his uncle George Yule’s Bain Wagon Company; he had worked well and hard enough in this enormous organisation with its vast sales force supplying the railroads of the world to be rewarded with a partnership, at the age of twenty-five, in Yule’s subsidiary company, Badger Brass. Badger’s principal product, invented by E.L. Williams, was the Solar acetylene bicycle lamp – ‘a patented wonder of its time, a lamp that made its own gas and burned it’, according to a paper of the thirties. By 1901, they were producing a thousand lamps a day; four years later, thanks to the bicycle craze of the period, over a million were in use. Richard Welles was treasurer and general secretary of the firm, an exhausting, responsible job which he did well, balancing the books (no mean task; by 1900 the company was the sixth-largest employer in Kenosha) and liaising with the outside world. Bicycling World of 1901 admiringly reports that ‘practically the entire trade is acquainted with R.H. Welles’. His charm was widely acknowledged, and can be glimpsed in photographs, a lazy, sexy smile informing his handsome features.

  It would appear that his heart was not entirely in Badger Brass, even if his work was valued. His creative mind was engaged in his inventions – in 1904 he patented an automobile jack, the nearest, sadly, he came to actually inventing the automobile itself, as his son gallantly claimed – while the rest of him was drawn irresistibly to the fleshpots of Chicago. He couldn’t have chosen a better time for it. The big city2 – an hour and three-quarters by rail from Kenosha – was still awash with pleasurable possibilities. In 1912 when the Levee district was closed down, these pleasures would be severely curtailed, or at the very least driven underground, but for Richard Welles, in the hot flush of his young manhood, it was the embodiment of Edwardian shamelessness. ‘No other city in the world could boast of so much vice, such elaborate bagnios, such colourful madames, such a phalanx of demi-mondes,’ Alston J. Smith exuberantly recorded. ‘The madames would drive into the Loop to transact business, wearing extremely low-cut gowns and pounds of diamonds; their equipages would be banked with flowers and if it was at all dusky the lights would be turned on full blaze. In the back seat, wearing the most décolleté of gowns, shining with gems, and painted to a fare-thee-well, would be the youngest, fairest flower of the maison.’ Richard Welles, enchanted by all this elegant naughtiness, was a natural citizen of the demimonde, frequenting the splendid musical comedies to be found at Mortimer Singer’s various establishments, seducing the young ladies of their choruses. He began what amounted to a double life, Badger Brass by day – by night the Eversleigh club, ‘the classiest seraglio in town: if you didn’t know you were in a House of Ill Fame, you might have confused the joint with a young ladies’ seminary.’ When you paid by cheque, it would come back endorsed ‘Utopia Novelty Co.’ It was here, during these evenings of dining and yarning and delicious debauchery, that he began to drink more than ordinarily socially.

  It may be presumed that he went home as rarely as possible – neither to the sober house his mother had provided for him, still less to her own, on the other side of Kenosha’s main square. Named Rudolphsheim, it was a squat, massive building studded with beer bottles, in defiant proclamation of her second husband’s déclassé profession of brewer. Orson Welles3 was frank in his loathing of this grandmother, Mary Head Welles Gottfredson; in general, it is hard not to share his feeling. Wagnerian is the word that comes most vividly to mind in describing her: physically tiny, her eyes ablaze, she seems to embody the triumph of the will. Her courtship of Orson’s grandfather seems to belong more to the insect world than to that of normal human relations. The daughter of a powerful Kenosha attorney, she had travelled unaccompanied to St Joseph, Missouri for reasons which are unclear (though she seems to have had no doubts about what she was doing). There she met and selected for her future husband an amiably good-looking freight clerk by the name of Richard Wells, whisked him back to her appalled family in Kenosha, and proceeded in frank defiance of them to marry him. She was at the time fourteen and a half years old. No protest of her formidable family would deter her, not even the legendary temper of her father, Orson Head, draconian attorney and sometime senator, one of ‘The Pioneer Lawyers of Kenosha County’, according to a contemporary publication. His photograph shows him to possess the original of his daughter’s thunderous mien. The fourteen-year-old bride and her twenty-six-year-old spouse made their way back to St Joseph where they quickly went through her substantial dowry, returned to Kenosha – with their son Richard, born in 1872 – and set up house, finally moving in with Mary’s protesting family after the old District Attorney’s death.

  By 1881, Richard Senior had had enough and fled, thereafter to pursue a nomad’s life, an occasional inventor and perennial bon viveur, just like his son. His was a ghostly existence: last sighted in 1901, he had been declared dead some sixteen years before by his formidable ex-wife to enable her to collect the patrimony conditional on his demise. Once she had consigned Richard to the ranks of the living dead, Mary remarried, this time – scandalising her family for a second time – to the Danish-American brewer Gottfredson, soon giving birth to her second son, Rudolph, after whom she named her ugly, beer-bottle-studded folly. It was in this dismal dwelling that Richard Wells Junior grew up with a stepfather for whom he had no feeling and who had none for him, a much younger stepbrother who was a model of good behaviour and a mother single-mindedly devoted to outraging the family who had so disapproved of her. She took on the role of society hostess, seeming to parody the gracious ways that the family had cultivated; one of her most striking innovations was to charge admission for the parties she threw. Richard Wells escaped this ménage as soon as possible, somehow emphasising his independence by adding an extra e to his name. By 1901, well established in business, he had his own house, a hundred yards down the street from Rudolphsheim, and a reasonable income. Perhaps having the house suggested to him the notion of marriage; at any rate, in 1903, he met – somewhere between Badger Brass and the Utopia Novelty Company – a formidable young woman with whom he fell powerfully in love.

  Beatrice Ives’s background was, like her suitor’s, commercial and Mid-Western: her father had been a prosperous coal merchant in Springfield, Illinois, where she was born in 1882, but had suffered during the coal slump of the 1880s. They continued to maintain an
impressive establishment just outside Kenosha, but it was a squeeze to make ends meet; Beatrice Ives and her mother Lucy gave music lessons in order to survive. When this was not enough, Beatrice, according to her son Orson in the beautifully written and almost entirely imaginary autobiographical piece that he wrote in French Vogue4, in 1982, ‘went to work as a “typewriter” (as stenographers were then called) to pay for the completion of her musical training. She was a celebrated beauty, a champion rifle shot, a highly imaginative practical joker, a radical and a suffragette.’ With only a small allowance for filial exaggeration, everything in his description is borne out by independent witness. Perhaps ‘handsome’ is a more precise word than ‘beautiful’; her photographs none the less reveal a most striking woman: in one of them she sits at her piano, a hand on the keyboard. Her eyebrow cocked, she looks challengingly out of her huge eyes into the camera. Underneath her fine aquiline nose, the full, wide mouth is unsmiling; a fiercely intelligent face. One would not readily cross this woman – even if she was not as good a shot as Welles claims. His is the only evidence for this gift, but it seems perfectly feasible. Of her practical jokes, there are no recorded instances, either, but her political activity, and her musicianship, are both well attested.

  On the face of it, barely a single one of her qualities would seem to recommend her to a sensual, dreamy young man looking for a mate. Neither her music nor her intellect nor her politics would have obvious appeal for him. The gunmanship, perhaps? It may well have been her feminine strength to which he with his masculine weakness was drawn; and vice versa. She, interestingly, had had a tense relationship with her own tough mother, while adoring her gentle, hopeless father. Or perhaps it was just sex; both seem powerfully sensual figures. ‘It was because they were both charmers,’5 Welles told a biographer, Barbara Leaming, vaguely. Different as individuals, they also had very different notions of marriage: he was looking forward to relaxing into it; she saw it as a springboard for a life of achievement – in the arts, in social amelioration, in self-improvement. Freed from economic embarrassment (he was no millionaire, but solidly successful) she could devote herself to her life’s work with the intensity that she brought to everything. They married, in November of 1903, in an Episcopalian church in Chicago, and he brought his bride home to Kenosha to meet Mother.

  The meeting was not a success. After that first encounter, Beatrice never stepped inside Rudolphsheim again until poverty compelled the young family temporarily and briefly to move in with the old tyrant. By then, they were three. Beatrice had given birth in 1905 to a son, named, a little uninventively perhaps, Richard (the third in a row). From the beginning he failed to please. His mother was disappointed in his apparent lack of intelligence, his father found him dull and withdrawn, and his grandmother – who probably would have been dissatisfied had Beatrice given birth to the Messiah – loathed his slovenly, disobedient ways. The photographs reveal a pleasant-looking young fellow, his features more influenced by his father’s regular and balanced looks than the more dramatic ones of his mother. He is found in most of the pictures holding his baby brother, and seems happy to be doing so. As for that brother – no, this is to anticipate. For the time being, they are three: Richard Senior, drinking more and more heavily as he realises how little companionship marriage seems to have bought; Beatrice, increasingly involved in the life of the community, expanding her musical activities and leaving her husband further and further behind both intellectually and socially; and little Richard, failing to bridge the growing gap between his parents, lonely, awkward, seemingly unable to meet with anyone’s approval.

  Their financial problems can hardly have helped. They moved four times in ten years, always to cheaper accommodations, occasionally having to take in lodgers. Some of the money had gone on Richard’s booze; but Badger Brass, like many other Kenosha companies – like companies all over the industrialised world during that pre-war decade – was in the throes of considerable industrial unrest. There were strikes and bomb threats. During those years, the rate of development reached fever pitch; more and more people flooded into the city which grew in ten years from the eighteenth most populous in Wisconsin to the ninth. Housing, education and health provision all became critical. Charles Higham vividly describes the city as ‘a microcosm of industrial America at the beginning of the automobile age’.6 It was Chicago writ small: Kenosha, like the bigger city, was also divided up into ethnic neighbourhoods more accurately described as ghettoes. What was this huge new labour force making? Iron and brass beds, pleasure and commercial vehicles, harness leather, brass and copper sheet and roll. The factories that made these commodities were the largest of their kind in the world. Eighty years before – a mere lifetime ago – there had been nothing; nothing whatever but sedge and swamp. Now these powerhouses had brought with them a sort of urban hell, with the poor of the world, it seemed, living in their shadow. When the city council offered lectures on The Child, they were given in seven languages: Italian, Russian, Yiddish, Polish, Slovak, German and English.

  The city was acutely aware of the crisis. Just as in Chicago, where Jane Addams had founded her visionary Hull House settlement for the relief of the poor, there was a surge of involvement by middle-class women in the question of welfare. Already campaigning furiously for the vote, they were now determined to act effectively, if need be unilaterally, to eradicate the squalor, both moral and physical, of the city. In the forefront of these reformers was Beatrice Welles. In February 1914, she made Kenosha history – and the front page of the local newspaper – by being the first woman to be elected to political office: she became first a member of the Board of Education, then its Chairman. ‘Mrs Welles will have as strong support among the men as among the women,’ claimed the News. They were right: she won by a large majority over her male competitor, and received 171 out of 185 votes cast by the women of her ward. The News continued: ‘she is one of the most prominent members of Kenosha clubs and societies, and has taken a great interest in public questions.’ She had actually founded the Kenosha City Club ‘to study civic problems, to seek ways of correcting wrongs, and giving proper support to movements along right lines’. Mary D. Bradford, one of the great educationalists of the period, had occasion to work with her; in her memoirs she wrote that ‘she was a very handsome woman, of brilliant intellect and had the courage of her convictions. She was a brilliant public speaker … her social prestige aroused an interest among those who had previously been rather indifferent.’7

  Her passion for music and the other arts was equal to her social commitment; here too, there was an undercurrent of crusade, a visionary impulse towards improvement. Art for Art’s Sake was to her a meaningless watchword. In Kenosha she was by no means starved of music. Before the development of the mechanical media, the touring circuit was in full swing. No musician of note considered himself or herself too grand to take to the road; the road was where the bulk of their performances were given. Thus Kenosha, provincial and Mid-Western, was host during the last years of the old century and the first of the new to – among many others – Kreisler, Gieseking, Cortot, Tito Schipa, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink, all of whom could command full houses in any capital in Europe. Part of the ritual of the road was that the artists would be feted, fed and housed by the local grandees. If one was reasonably well connected, one could confidently expect to take supper with one’s hero. It was thus that Beatrice Welles came to mix with many of the leading musicians of her day. Her own playing was greatly admired locally; she was, says Mrs Brown in her 1934 study, Music in Kenosha, ‘among the best-known pianists in Kenosha’.8 But her fame did not stop there. Frederick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of the great men in American music, is quoted as saying that she was the foremost woman pianist he knew – a sexist compliment from a sexist age, but an impressive testimonial, none the less.

  The use to which she put her talent was characteristically original and educational: she pioneered a form of lecture recital in which perfo
rmances of daringly modern pieces by Ravel and Debussy were interspersed with poems and disquisitions on the music. Her speaking voice – ‘cello voice’ as Welles describes it in his Vogue piece – was much remarked on for its beauty, and her programme was held to be a great success. Her constant quest to engage in improving activity is characteristic of the auto-didact – imparting the fruits of her own ceaseless self-improvement with the urgency that comes from knowing that there will never be enough time to learn all that needs to be learned. She was, without being absolutely pre-eminent in any of her spheres, a public figure to be reckoned with – reformer, teacher, artist. Life at home, however, with the two Richard Welleses – Senior lazy and boozy, Junior sullen and slow-witted – can have afforded her little satisfaction. Since 1911, too, after the death of the father she loved, the mother she felt uncomfortable with had moved in, already ill with the stomach cancer which would eventually and agonisingly kill her. Into this complex ménage, George Orson Welles was introduced on 6 May 1915.

  He was named after a famous, and famously discreet, gay couple, George Ade and Orson Wells. Wells, a stockbroker, was nicknamed ‘Circumnavigation’ in acknowledgement of the passion for travel which he indulged with Ade, one of America’s best-known humorists. A witty double portrait in cartoon form shows them on the steps of a pyramid, Wells with drink in hand, Ade in flowing Edwardian gown, picture hat and parasol, clutching a handbag on which is written FABLES IN SLANG, the title of his masterpiece. The couple are the first of many gay men who had an influence on Welles at crucial points in his life. It is also entirely possible that he was not named after these two men at all, since George was his great-uncle’s name and Orson that of his great-grandfather. Grandmaternal influence may have prevailed. Thus the first question mark in Welles’s life hovers over the font. Even that may not be the first: there is an earlier, and altogether unresolvable, question: where was he conceived? Perhaps in order to avoid the derision of having been born in Kenosha, Welles liked to say that conception (obviously a vital incident in the legend of the artist) occurred in Rio de Janeiro. It is perfectly possible. Anyone can hop on a train from Kenosha to New York and a boat from New York to Brazil, and Richard Welles was, Orson always averred, passionate about travel; his father and mother are said, indeed, to have met Ade and Wells on a Caribbean cruise just before her confinement with Orson. This would suggest rather a lot of travelling within a nine-month period. The seriously surprising factor is that they could afford these journeys: at the time of Orson’s birth the family had moved to the least impressive of all their Kenosha residences – 463½ Park Avenue; the other ½ was let out to businessmen. Perhaps they were attempting to salvage their relationship by having a holiday in Brazil, Orson was the outcome, and they wanted to celebrate his coming birth with another jaunt.