Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (10 page)

Finally, Harriet Bain and Mary Bradford approached Beatrice Welles. Beatrice was reluctant: she considered herself more an artist and a charitable reformer than a political zealot, and above all she feared that running for office would limit her artistic opportunities.

Mary Bradford, who was old enough to be Beatrice’s mother—but was far more of a progressive social crusader—reminded her that running for office would mean safeguarding the future for children like her own son, now eight years old. This argument touched a nerve. Beatrice and her husband worried about little Richard. He was a bright boy who enjoyed reading and music and magic tricks, but he stuttered, and he hadn’t taken to school or made friends easily. Richard needed special attention—the very kind of individual treatment that was a constant issue for the school board. Beatrice was sold.

The news that Beatrice Welles had decided to throw her hat into the ring—coming just days after the Woman’s Club showdown, in which her friends and supporters had been steamrollered—electrified Kenosha. The “antis” had been thrown a gauntlet, and young and old voters, female and male, poured out across the city. And the results gave Kenosha activists the victory they’d long been seeking: Beatrice Welles defeated her opponent, John I. Chester, vice president of the N. R. Allen and Sons tannery, by a vote of 293 to 189.

Though the results were tempered by a disappointment at the top of the ticket—where liberal Republican Dan O. Head had declined to run for a second term as mayor, and Democrat Matthias J. Scholey was returned to office—the headlines were all about Beatrice Welles, the first woman elected to public office in Kenosha’s history. After months of fractiousness, the vast majority of the city reacted with pride and joy, and when Beatrice took her seat at the first meeting the following week, she was greeted with bouquets of flowers and a tremendous ovation from a swarm of well-wishers.

Beatrice Welles’s school board victory enhanced her local celebrity. On June 1, 1914, Kenosha’s only female officeholder gave her first musical performance outside woman’s clubs, church events, or the privacy of her home—an “illustrated recital” at the Guild Hall, featuring the music of Schumann, Wagner, and MacDowell with stereopticon slides, to benefit the Girls’ Progressive Club, her signature community project. “This is the first opportunity the Kenosha public had to enjoy one of these programs,” the
Kenosha News
reported.

That month Beatrice reached another milestone, launching an activist alternative to the Woman’s Club called the Kenosha City Club, composed of women “from many walks of life” who felt committed to “civic problems.” The club would take up all the issues the Woman’s Club had ignored: health conditions, municipal garbage, and growing poverty and inequities in the city. Convening a luncheon of friends and supporters at the downtown Hotel Borup, Beatrice invited Superintendent of Schools Mary Bradford to be the main speaker, and also gave a talk herself, emphasizing “the real need of Kenosha of a strong organization to take the right side in dealing with all great questions in the municipal life of the city.” For the second meeting, Beatrice called on her friend Zona Gale to address the activist-minded group.

The emergence of the Kenosha City Club outraged the “antis,” who viewed the upstart club as a rebuke of their traditional values. The exodus of suffragist members embarrassed the older clubwomen, especially when it received coverage in the Chicago papers. And now the older, more established club was forced to compete for guest speakers like Gale, Wisconsin’s most famous woman. A conciliator at heart, Beatrice tried to mend fences with the Woman’s Club, giving a piano performance at its last meeting before the summer. But she also threw sharp elbows, and her personality—viewed by some as self-important—made her a divisive symbol of social change among many of the older members.

For the time being, Beatrice redoubled her efforts for the cause. She and Mary Bradford organized a mass meeting marking National Suffrage Day, with Beatrice conducting the Shubert Club choir in “a song of spring” and leading the audience in a sing-along finale of “America.” In June, along with Lottie Jordan, Harriet Bain, and Mary Bradford, Beatrice attended the national suffrage leaders’ banquet at the Congress Hotel in Chicago.

Late in the summer, the group launched “Self-Denial Suffrage Day,” in which local suffragist leaders trimmed unnecessary household expenses and donated the savings to the cause. The brainstorm of Harriet Bain, the idea was picked up nationally. In the fall, Beatrice, Mary Bradford, Harriet Bain, and Lottie Jordan took the train to the state suffragist convention in Milwaukee, joining a peace rally at Immanuel Church and attending a special showing of a pro-suffrage moving picture,
Your Girl and Mine
, at the Butterfly Theater.
Your Girl and Mine
was coproduced by William Selig with a company run by suffragist leader Ruth Hanna McCormick, who was head of the congressional committee for the National American Woman Suffrage Association and whose husband was Robert Medill McCormick of the family that owned the
Chicago Daily Tribune.

The Kenosha chapter of the Political Equality League was neither the largest nor the most militant of the many affiliated leagues that sprang up across Wisconsin, but in some ways it set the standard for the organization. And the leadership’s family ties to the thriving industrialists of Kenosha often made it the state’s most successful chapter in raising money for the cause.

Summer was always full of pleasant distractions. The circus came to town, and so did Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show, and a host of barnstorming wrestlers and magicians.

In July 1914, aviation fever swept Kenosha. Dick Welles, the man who had driven the first automobile and the first jitney bus on the city’s streets, now brought the first hydro-aeroplane for three days of exhibition flights. In more than one interview, Orson Welles credited his father with having invented a peculiar air-travel machine—“a glider attached to a steam-driven engine,” according to Barbara Leaming’s
Orson Welles
—with a Negro servant piloting the glider into a crash landing while Dick Welles controlled a wheel from below. But the local press—diligent in covering the Welles family—never made any mention of such an invention, and the claim probably originated with that consummate fictioneer Dr. Maurice Bernstein. (Similarly, biographer Charles Higham insisted that Dick Welles had “presented young fliers at the first air show in northern Wisconsin in 1903, shortly before Orville and Wilbur Wright made their successful pioneer flight at Kitty Hawk.” Again: highly dubious.)

But Dick Welles was genuinely smitten with air travel, and air shows were all the rage by 1914. That summer, on behalf of the Kenosha Retailers Association, Welles lured Chicago aviator Charles C. Witmer to the city to headline an aviation festival, intended to promote Kenosha’s modern firefighting and lifesaving stations. A private pilot for Harold F. McCormick, another member of the influential Chicago family, who was International Harvester’s chairman of the board, Witmer was a pioneer of aviation photography who aspired to be a filmmaker. The aviator brought with him a camera crew and a small group of performers, including Florence Smith, a stage actress well known in Chicago. Witmer planned to involve local citizens and airplane maneuvers in a moving picture comedy set in Kenosha.

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.