Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (13 page)

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.

Bernhardt had passed the show business torch to the future director of
Citizen Kane.

Five months after the family relocated to Chicago, in September 1918, Dick Welles registered for the draft. At forty-five, he was nearly too old to serve. (The third national registration was held on September 12, for men eighteen through forty-five, but the armistice would be signed two months later.) Dick was fit and healthy, but on his draft form he listed his occupation as “not employed.” Without the routine of work and travel that had sustained him for almost two decades in Kenosha, Dick Welles was unmoored. His wife’s days were filled with bustle and ambition. His were filled with empty hours.

His downfall may have been aggravated by drink; it’s possible he was drinking steadily all along. But had he drank to excess in Kenosha? “By 1912 he was a hopeless alcoholic,” Charles Higham wrote of Dick Welles. But Welles was a much-chronicled public figure in Kenosha, and the local press consistently portrayed him as a model citizen. Even after Orson became famous, when he referred to his father’s alcoholism in interviews, longtime Kenoshans and family members insisted that Dick Welles drank normally, not heavily, when living in their city.

In Kenosha, Dick and Beatrice Welles seemed to have been an ideally married couple: standing together at rallies, holding hands and dancing together at holiday events, hosting memorable dinner parties in their home. Yet by the end of their first year in Chicago, there is no question that their marriage had imploded. In court papers, Beatrice was precise about the date: on February 1, 1919, after discovering that he was involved in an adulterous affair, Beatrice confronted her husband, and after a furious argument, the two stopped cohabiting that day.

It was not just one woman, either. Dick Welles had been conducting similar affairs “for a considerable time past,” according to her attestation, “with divers other lewd women.”

That reference to “lewd women” has led some to speculate that Welles’s affairs were with working girls of one kind or another: low-class chorines, perhaps, or even high-class call girls from Chicago bordellos. Court papers confirm that his lovers were not part of the Welleses’ social circle, in either Chicago or Kenosha. Their names, said Beatrice, were “unknown” to her.

In the shooting script of
Citizen Kane
, after the famous newsroom scene celebrating the success of the
Inquirer
, there is a scene in which Charles Foster Kane, Jed Leland, and Mr. Bernstein adjourn to a high-class bordello. In the script the bordello is called “Georgie’s Place”—an echo of Orson’s teasing nickname—but Welles once told John Houseman that the place was akin to Chicago’s turn-of-the-century Everleigh Club, where captains of industry like Marshall Field Jr. mingled with clientele like his father, he imagined. When Herman J. Mankiewicz, the script’s cowriter, was questioned during a lawsuit about the “Georgie’s Place” scene—which was shot but dropped from the film after censors objected to it—he became irritated. “It is my understanding,” Mankiewicz huffed, “that this is a customary thing [gentlemen frequenting a bordello] and not violently indecent.”

Not everyone would have agreed. Beatrice Welles ordered her husband off the East Pearson Street premises. Her social standing, her dignity, demanded it, but that wasn’t all. Her husband was unapologetic, and after he moved into a hotel he continued to see the particular “lewd” woman who had triggered the breakup. But the affair ran its course soon enough, and Dick Welles missed his family and regretted his indiscretion. Banishing painful memories, Beatrice relinquished their East Pearson Street home to her husband, installing herself and four-year-old Orson on nearby Superior Street, “the most fashionable apartment on the Gold Coast,” in the hyperbolic words of Dudley Crafts Watson. Still, Beatrice could not bring herself to forgive her husband, and she discouraged and restricted Dick’s visits to Superior Street. It was at this juncture, according to her divorce claims, that Dick Welles finally sank into “habitual drunkenness.”

The marital crisis coincided with another family emergency that could only have exacerbated the tensions between the couple. At the age of fourteen, Richard Ives Welles was asked to leave the Todd School, his boarding school in the town of Woodstock, sixty miles northwest of Chicago. The reasons have been lost over time. Perhaps Richard had been caught with a town girl, as Orson’s later headmaster Roger Hill theorized (though he never claimed to know firsthand). Whatever the case, it’s clear that Richard was behind in his course work, and he did not mix well with other boys.

Richard rejoined the family in Chicago around the time that his mother and father started living in separate apartments. At a loss for how to handle their son, both parents sought the counsel of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, who knew Richard well as a surgery patient and who also had mental health credentials stretching back to his first postings after medical school.

Dr. Bernstein was one of the few close family friends who had lingered in Kenosha. His marriage to Mina Elman had ended dismally, however; though Bernstein had tried to foster his bride’s musical ambitions—introducing her to musicians including Irish-born tenor John McCormack; soprano Alma Gluck; and her husband, violinist Efrem Zimbalist—Mina lacked professional ability, and her singing career never took flight. The couple lived together for only a few months before Mina moved out of their Library Park house in April 1917. Their divorce was finalized one year later in July. Dr. Bernstein maintained ties to the local Jewish community and the municipal government, and he kept up with Kenosha patients; with his brother, he even briefly launched a soft-drink distribution company from the same Main Street address as his office. But he made increasingly frequent trips to Chicago, and gradually shifted his practice there.

Now, at this critical hour, Dr. Bernstein became not only the family physician for all situations, but also an intermediary between the estranged Dick and Beatrice Welles. Bernstein concluded that Richard had mental or emotional problems, and he told young Richard’s parents that he thought the boy should be enrolled in a Chicago preparatory school closer to home and watched carefully.

Together Beatrice and Dick Welles decided on the Latin School of Chicago, the city’s premier prep school, on the near North Side. Although Beatrice never forgave her husband’s betrayal, their shared devotion to their children kept the marriage together—if in name only.

Striving to regain her artistic footing in Chicago, Beatrice resumed piano lessons with her former teacher Julia Lois Caruthers. She took on a few pupils in piano and spoken-word performance. She built up a fresh repertoire of recital pieces and reconnected with women’s club patrons in Chicago and along the North Shore. Her cousin Dudley Crafts Watson, who had encouraged her to leave Kenosha, promised engagements for her at the Milwaukee Art Institute.

Refashioning herself as an elocutionist was part of her plan. Female elocutionists thrived in progressive women’s clubs throughout America in the early twentieth century. As the feminist scholar Marian Wilson Kimber has noted, elocution was considered a respectable and womanly art for public purposes, while also serving as a means of entertainment and education in the home. Beatrice had been gravitating toward this specialty during her last years in Kenosha, and in Chicago several of her students, whom she mentored, combined music and elocution in their performance pieces; these pupils included Ann Birk Kuper and Phyllis Fergus. Kuper went on to a long career in dramatic recitals throughout the Midwest, and Fergus became even more acclaimed as a spoken-word diseuse and composer who specialized in “story poems” for speaker and piano. A founding member of the Society of American Women Composers, Fergus organized concerts by female composers at the White House; her several dozen published works included piano and violin solos and choral music for women’s voices.

In April 1920, two years after her last public performance, Beatrice returned in a Lake View Musical Society recital in the Parkway Hotel ballroom. The highlight of the recital was a new piece by Phyllis Fergus blending two violinists, a contralto, and Fergus’s piano accompaniment, with Beatrice declaiming the verse of Natalie Whitted Price, a local suffragist and published poet. Beatrice’s dark, mellifluous voice was perfectly matched to Fergus’s intricate compositions, and the Lake View Musical Society event launched Fergus’s career, with Beatrice the star elocutionist of her earliest programs. The Women’s League Candlelight Musicale devoted an entire evening to Fergus’s compositions in February 1921, with Beatrice reading the poetry of Robert Browning, Edmund Vance Cooke, and again Natalie Whitted Price; Beatrice’s vivid rendering of Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” was the centerpiece. Beatrice and Phyllis Fergus took variations of this playbill to many ladies’ organizations that formed a constellation leading up the North Shore. Their tour brought them to the Milwaukee Art Institute in March 1921.

Their ascent was interrupted in June 1921, when Phyllis Fergus married the Chicago steel and iron broker Thatcher Hoyt and took a several-year break from performing.

Young Orson would celebrate his fifth birthday in May 1920. Short and chubby, the boy had dark lanky hair that fell over soulful brown eyes staring above a snub nose. Although his mother dressed him in cutesy sailor suits, in truth he was already a budding sophisticate.

By some accounts, Orson Welles had first appeared onstage at the tender age of three, in the role of Trouble, the child of Madame Butterfly, in the August 1918 production of Puccini’s opera at Ravinia, the outdoor venue in Highland Park. More recently, the boy had pocketed $10 for greeting shoppers at Marshall Field’s department store in downtown Chicago; he was dressed as the White Rabbit and exclaimed, “Oh, I must hurry—or else it will be too late to see the woolen underwear on the eighth floor!” He was a born showman, and from the beginning no job was beneath him: $10 was $10, especially to a boy whose parents had separated and who became a pawn in the conflict between them, often a conflict over money.

During Orson’s earliest years in Chicago, that rift was often bridged by Dr. Maurice Bernstein. The doctor had an office on Michigan Avenue and an apartment on Chicago Avenue, one block north of Superior, where little Orson lived with his mother. Childless himself, Dr. Bernstein made himself indispensable to Beatrice, joining her and little Orson on regular outings, but he also accompanied Orson on many excursions with his father. In time, the doctor became a kind of bonus member of the family: a companionable fellow, reliably humorous, the king of bad jokes. Everyone liked him, even Dick Welles. Orson was encouraged to call Bernstein “Dadda,” a term of affection that has struck some of Welles’s biographers as a slight toward Dick Welles, but which may have been the child’s contraction of “doctor.” As for Bernstein, he dubbed Orson “Pookles,” and they were Dadda and Pookles to each other for most of their lives.

Over time, some wondered whether Beatrice Welles and Bernstein ever transcended the bounds of friendship. It was true that Dr. Bernstein “left Kenosha to be near my mother,” Welles said. Nostalgic about his early career in Kenosha, the doctor always pined for the small Wisconsin city that was his personal Rosebud, “a paradise he’d lost,” according to Welles. “My mother used to make heartless fun of that.” Though Dr. Bernstein adored Beatrice, she was merely fond of him, Welles thought.