Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (15 page)

“The boy has, of course, suffered a severe mental shock [possibly from the operation], and the remedy is to keep his mind absolutely free from dwelling on this illness. I would suggest that even his periods of full time be indefinitely occupied for a while. It is difficult to tell how much actual soreness and fatigue he will experience when he gets into active school life.”

It was not to be: Richard never returned to Northwestern Academy, or any other school. After coming home from the hospital, he shuttled between his parents’ apartments. Beatrice Welles all but threw up her hands. She was increasingly preoccupied with the boundlessly energetic Orson and her own blossoming career as an elocutionist; convinced that what Richard needed was a father’s strong example, she tossed the gauntlet to her estranged husband.

In the spirit of healing and reconciliation, Dick Welles proposed that the entire family spend the month of June vacationing together in Grand Detour, Illinois. Beatrice agreed.

A short drive from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the village of Grand Detour—named for the Rock River’s loop around it—was an escape from the summer heat for Chicagoans. Artists from hundreds of miles around were drawn to the picturesque river and elm-shaded streets of the town, called the “Hudson of the West” by feminist author Margaret Fuller. The Chicago Art Institute painter Charles Francis Browne presided over summer classes there. Nearby, on the river’s east bank, stood Eagle’s Nest Bluff, the home of an artists’ colony founded before the turn of the century by a group of Chicago artists and architects led by Lorado Taft, whose towering statue of Sauk Indian leader Black Hawk loomed over the compound.

Having made trips through Grand Detour many times on their way back and forth to Lake Geneva, Dick and Beatrice Welles both felt a connection to the place, and the couple took a rental cabin on the north side of the main bridge. Dr. Bernstein came along as an escort for Beatrice and Orson, but also to monitor Richard’s behavior. The family was hoping that a summer in peaceful Grand Detour might help Richard regain his physical and mental health. Regular long walks, fishing, and river recreation were arranged, along with day trips to the nearby towns of Oregon and Dixon for circuses, county fairs, and moving pictures. Richard enjoyed painting almost as much as Orson, and because of the lifelong gulf between them, they never spent as much concentrated time in each other’s company as during these weeks.

But the vacation was marred by Dick and Beatrice Welles’s persistent quarrels, often revolving around finances. Dick Welles controlled the purse strings for Beatrice’s household, and she regarded her separation allowance as inadequate. Dick balked at underwriting Beatrice’s many dinner parties, music lessons, monthly masseuse appointments, and frequent travel for functions and performances. Nor did he wish to pay for the nanny, Sigrid Jacobsen, who helped her tend to seven-year-old Orson, and also handled sewing and domestic chores.

The couple’s attempt at peacemaking failed, and shortly after July 4, Beatrice and little Orson departed for Highland Park, where they often stayed with the
Chicago Tribune
music critics Edward “Ned” Moore and his wife, Hazel—at first just for weekends, but by 1922, Beatrice’s stays stretched through most of July and August. Dr. Bernstein, another long-standing friend of the Moores, accompanied Orson and his mother.

This was the first golden age of Ravinia, the beautiful all-purpose park that sprawled across thirty-six woodland acres in Highland Park, twenty-five miles north of Chicago. Since its debut just before the Great War, Ravinia’s ambitious summer program of grand opera and symphony performances had attracted classical music lovers from around the world. The 1922 summer season would reach a peak with thirty-one opera productions—a “colossal achievement,” Edward Moore observed in the
Tribune
, “even when some are cut to accommodate the Ravinia traditions of time in and time out.”

“Uncle Ned” and “Aunt Hazel” spent the summer hosting musicians, opera singers, and other friends in their large house on Kincaid Street in Highland Park, a suburb of lakefront mansions, forested estates, and bohemian hideaways. A Wisconsin native in his mid-forties, Moore was a witty, discerning critic and a composer himself. He and his wife, who had no children of their own, doted on Beatrice and little Orson. Another fixture at Ravinia was the museum director and “art evangelist” Dudley Crafts Watson, Beatrice’s cousin, who summered with his own family near the Moores. The Moores’ guests included many of the prima donnas, or divas—and their male counterparts—from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, who enchanted Ravinia audiences during the summer, when the Met was dark. The leads that summer in Ravinia included Alice Gentle, Claire Dux, Queena Mario, Edith Mason, tenor Mario Chamlee, who had come to the fore in the opera world after Caruso’s death in 1921, and Chamlee’s wife, Ruth Miller. They gathered at the Moores’ dinner table, the mere mortals genuflecting before the divine performers—“diva” derived from the Italian word for “goddess.” The divas’ elaborate airs and posturing, their scandals and messy private lives, even their tantrums, were all forgiven in deference to their artistry.

Also collecting around the Moores’ table were Uncle Ned’s Chicago newspaper colleagues, including Charles Collins of the
Chicago Tribune
, Eugene Stinson of the
Daily News
, Herman De Vries of the
American
, Felix Borowoski of the
Record-Herald
, and Ashton Stevens of the
Herald-Examiner.
Stevens was a slender, dashing critic who came from a family of actors and impresarios in San Francisco and Hollywood. A lifelong theater fan, he had seen Edwin Booth’s
Hamlet
as a boy and had interviewed all the famous stage artists—Richard Mansfield, Mrs. Fiske, the Drews, the Barrymores, Laurette Taylor, Ina Claire. Also knowledgeable about music, he wrote the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
entry on the banjo, and once gave banjo lessons to none other than William Randolph Hearst, who was spurred to employ Stevens at the
San Francisco Examiner
and the
New York Evening Journal
before anchoring him at the
Chicago Examiner.
Stevens had a three-decade store of Hearst anecdotes, replenished several times a year when the publisher stopped by to see his old banjo teacher during his Chicago visits.

Dick Welles’s experiment in reconciliation with Beatrice that summer had fizzled—their discord continued and he rarely visited Ravinia nowadays—but in the stimulating atmosphere of the Moore household, full of show business anecdotes, little Orson found a different kind of close family. As at his mother’s artistic salon in Chicago, Orson had a seat at the table along with the bright, fascinating adults—provided that he had napped, of course—and he learned to be equally adept at piping up or listening quietly. Uncle Ned loved the boy, and more than one Chicago newspaper would describe Orson as “Ed Moore’s protégé.” But in a sense, he was everyone’s.

CHAPTER 4

1922–1926

A Great Shock

In the fall of 1922, moved by his ardent enthusiasm for singing, juggling, and magic, Orson’s older brother announced that he was going to join a vaudeville troupe. In the first of his vanishing acts, teenage Richard Welles packed a bag and went on the road.

Their failed idyll in Grand Detour, and Richard’s disappearance, cast a shadow over the family. On October 13, not long after returning from Ravinia and almost three years after she and Dick had separated, Beatrice Welles filed for divorce. Orson recalled listening “quietly the night of their last quarrel,” Barbara Leaming wrote, “after which, by mutual agreement, Dick and Beatrice separated forever. Orson was neither surprised nor terribly shaken.”

“When they separated,” Leaming quoted the filmmaker as recalling, “I felt no partisanship.” After all, he explained, the divorce meant receiving “twice the love” from his parents.

In her divorce claim, Beatrice accused her husband of drunkenness and philandering, while affirming her own comportment as a “true, faithful, chaste, and affectionate” spouse who had “treated him kindly and affectionately” throughout their almost twenty-year marriage. But it was Dick Welles’s parsimoniousness that had forced Beatrice’s hand. In her divorce filing, she estimated that her husband owned “stocks, bonds and other securities” worth $150,000, and collected another $8,000 annually from his investments, while she herself was “possessed of no property, either real or personal,” and had “no means wherewith to support herself or children.” Closely watched by their friends in the press and high society, the case was reported on page one of the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
’s city section. Tellingly, Beatrice was represented by a Chicago public defender.

If Dick Welles worried about other men pursuing Beatrice, she did little to allay his fears, suggesting that the count grant her an annulment so that she might be “at liberty to marry again” if the opportunity arose. She also threatened to secure “sole care, custody and education” of her two sons—Richard, who had just turned seventeen; and seven-year-old Orson. If her husband refused to accept her financial demands, she said, she would carry through with the suit. But the record of their dispute is one-sided, as Dick Welles filed no rebuttal to the claim. It’s clear that he opposed the divorce, but his silence in response is a mystery. Was Orson’s father afraid that open-court testimony about his drinking and womanizing would invite scandal? And what bothered him more: the possibility of forfeiting some of his money, or the threat that his children would be taken away from him?

The answer came within ten days of Beatrice’s filing, when the divorce petition was abruptly withdrawn and dismissed. Dick Welles had turned over to his wife fifty shares each of Goodrich Rubber and Utah Copper, and agreed to deposit a specified monthly sum into Beatrice’s bank account, making her financially stable and independent.

From that point forward, the couple would meet mainly for crises and special occasions. But their divorce was never finalized. Perhaps Dick Welles hoped for one last chance to redeem himself in Beatrice’s eyes.

At the Milwaukee Art Institute, among the many programs launched by museum director Dudley Crafts Watson were his own acclaimed “music picture symphonies,” a series of informative and entertaining lectures on foreign art and architecture accompanied by stereopticon slides from Watson’s travels to European landmarks and more exotic locales including Morocco and Egypt. Watson invited Beatrice to provide piano accompaniment to his main attraction, an opportunity that afforded her a small fee and exposure for her talent.

Their first joint presentation was scheduled for a Sunday in early January 1923, soon after her divorce suit was withdrawn. Beatrice rehearsed long and hard for the program of Wagner, MacDowell, and “very modern compositions by hitherto unknown Spanish and French composers,” according to a Milwaukee newspaper, performing behind Watson as he expounded on Montsalvat and the Holy Grail, illustrating his lecture with his stereopticon slides. This event at the Milwaukee museum was greeted so warmly that the two were able to bring it to women’s clubs in Wisconsin and the Chicago suburbs. Beatrice adored her erudite cousin, even if others found him stuffy, and for a time the two of them were a happy team on the road, with little Orson and his nanny sometimes tagging along.

Although she eschewed the kind of immersion in women’s clubs that had preoccupied her in Kenosha, Beatrice took a growing role in the Lake View Musical Society, a music appreciation organization of well-heeled Chicago society ladies. As leader of one committee promoting the careers of young musicians and another for community outreach, she promoted emerging talent such as the Jacques Gordon String Quartet and the new female composer Aletta Arnold, presenting the artists at home soirees and civic appearances hosted by patrons such as Edith Rockefeller McCormick, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller and the ex-wife of Harold McCormick, head of the Chicago Civic Opera.

Beatrice kept her pledge to stay away from grittier social activism, but Orson recalled that he was not overly spoiled with Christmas presents, while his mother trundled underprivileged children into their home for holiday parties and gifts. The Welles family always sandwiched in a Yuletide trip to Kenosha for awkward reunions at Rudolphsheim. Dick Welles’s mother, Mary Gottfredsen, was openly skeptical about Beatrice’s artistic “career,” and this was one reason that Orson, as an adult, spoke ill of his paternal grandmother.

Organized religion no longer appealed to Beatrice the way it had back in the days of Reverend Florence Buck and the Kenosha Unitarians. Little Orson was never baptized, and though the family went to church at Christmas, the boy did not attend regular services while he was growing up. (“I try to be a Christian,” Welles told Merv Griffin late in life, “but I don’t pray, really, because I don’t want to bore God.”) Yet Beatrice’s quest for the sacred artistic experience was leading her deeper into spiritual realms. Though she had never traveled overseas, her cousin’s tales of foreign cultures opened her eyes to the arts and beliefs of the Far East; and the poetry and stories of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali who won the Nobel Prize in 1913, inspired in her a new search for transcendence in her music and recitals.