Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (17 page)

Dick Welles arranged for his wife’s burial in Kenosha in the family plot. The many drama and music critics she knew traveled from Chicago and Milwaukee to attend the funeral. A local Baptist minister who had known Beatrice eulogized her, and Dick also paid $50 for Horace Bridges, a Shakespeare expert and leader of the secularist Chicago Ethical Society, to come by train from Chicago and deliver a meditation.

Nineteen-year-old Richard was conspicuously absent. With his father’s help, Richard had recently signed on as an “apprentice fish-culturist” with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in Bozeman, Montana, and no one thought it wise to jeopardize his job by bringing him home so soon. Nine-year-old Orson was at his mother’s grave, however. Years later, when he told interviewer Joseph McBride that he had only terrible memories of Kenosha, his companion, Oja Kodar, pointed out that his recall was colored by the miserable, rainy day of his mother’s funeral.

What to do about Orson was a pressing concern. Dudley Crafts Watson’s tour of Europe was on the horizon, and after Beatrice’s death the three men closest to her all felt the trip should go on in her memory. Watson and Dr. Bernstein agreed to travel ahead with Orson to the village of Wyoming in upstate New York, where the Watson family spent part of every June at an artists’ colony, Hillside. There, little Orson could stay for the summer with Watson’s wife and their three young daughters—Augusta, Emily, and Marjorie—while the three men headed off to Europe.

It speaks to the suddenness of Beatrice’s deterioration, as well as to her enigmatic relations with her husband, that she did not leave a will. Thanks to the arrangement with Dick Welles, who inherited her estate, she possessed more than $7,000 in stocks and bonds on her death, along with several hundred dollars in a checking account. Her few debts were easily paid. In the flurry that followed her death, Dr. Bernstein ended up with Beatrice’s piano and other family belongings, including some Asian treasures. Years later Orson would blame Bernstein for expropriating these objects, but what use did Dick Welles have for them? The Welles family was done with the piano and all that. Orson later insisted that he would never again play either the piano or the violin: not quite true, but true enough.

Orson’s father lingered in Chicago, tidying up his wife’s financial affairs, before rushing off to join Watson, Bernstein, and a group of Chicago art lovers as they sailed from Boston to England on June 10. From there, the group went on to Spain, France, Austria, and Italy, while Orson spent the first part of the summer with his cousins at Hillside.

“Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks,” Jack Amberson says poignantly to his nephew George Amberson Minafer, after misfortune has humbled the Ambersons, in Booth Tarkington’s novel. Uncle Jack (played by Ray Collins) says the same thing to George (Tim Holt) in Orson Welles’s film of
The Magnificent Ambersons
.

Time and money were the two bogeymen of Welles’s career, and he battled both in grand style. His mother’s unexpected death taught him about the exigencies of time. From his mother, Welles adopted the view that art was ephemeral, time fickle, and money a mere tool, as mundane as a shovel. Time was not an enemy—it was a waiting game—and he would make an art of waiting and playing the game. Even the life of an artist was not to be glamorized: there were only a few immortal artists, she taught him, and it would be immodest to think of himself as one. Despite his great ego, he never altered this view.

As a child, Orson had been torn from Kenosha and shuttled between the homes of his estranged parents, both of whom he loved and both of whom, in their individual ways, ceaselessly traveled. His rootlessness, his quickness to pack his bags and escape, would turn him into the most nomadic of American filmmakers. “Orson never wanted to face unpleasantness,” Dr. Maurice Bernstein observed decades later, and the habit of skirting unpleasantness could be traced to his itinerant boyhood and his quick removal from Chicago after the death of his mother.

A boy’s love for his lost mother is a motif that crops up in a number of Orson Welles films. The scenes cited by most scholars occur in his two earliest pictures. One is
The Magnificent Ambersons
, in which George Amberson Minafer visits his mother, Isabel, on her deathbed—the rippling-lace lighting here is sublime. George has behaved abominably toward his mother, yet even in her delirium Isabel thinks only of her son: “Darling, did you get something to eat?” she asks tenderly, “Are you sure you didn’t catch cold coming home?” Her eyes follow him as he leaves in shame, and Isabel’s ensuing death takes place offscreen, just as Orson must have been too young to have been in the hospital room when his own mother died late at night. Delivering the news, George’s aunt Fanny wraps him in a reassuring embrace:

“She loved you. She loved you.”

The role Orson assigned to mothers in
Citizen Kane
is even more complicated. “There’s just not any connection” between his real-life mother and the mother of Charles Foster Kane, Welles insisted to Peter Bogdanovich. Beatrice Welles was “very beautiful, very generous and very tough,” Welles said, and “rather austere with me.” By comparison, Mary Kane, played by Agnes Moorehead, is a hard-bitten countrywoman.

But neither Welles nor Bogdanovich mentioned the second mother to appear in the film: Kane’s first wife, Emily Monroe Norton, whom Kane rejects in a climactic scene at his supposed “love nest.” Later, the divorced Emily is killed along with her and Charles’s little boy, Charles Kane Jr., in an offscreen automobile accident. Emily Kane was played by Ruth Warrick, who—like Dolores Costello, playing Isabel in
The Magnificent Ambersons
—evokes the ladylike Beatrice Ives Welles. Charles Kane Jr. is eight when he and his mother perish in
Citizen Kane
, close to Welles’s age when Beatrice died.

Bogdanovich tried to argue the point with Welles, reminding him of the sequence when Kane first meets Susan Alexander, his second wife in the film. Their meeting derails Kane’s trip to a warehouse, where he intends to go through his dead mother’s effects “in search of my youth.” Later in the sequence, when Susan and Kane are talking in her apartment, she tells him that her mother always thought she should sing grand opera. “It’s just what, you know, mothers are like,” Susan explains sweetly. Kane hesitates, then replies, “Yes” (“in a sad reflective tone, full of memories,” in Bogdanovich’s words). Following an awkward pause between them, Kane asks Susan to play the piano and sing for him.

Kane really doesn’t know what mothers are like, does he? After all, his own mother sent him away.

“It’s one of my favorite moments in the picture,” Bogdanovich told Welles.

“No, Peter,” Welles insisted, refusing to nibble. “I have no Rosebuds.”

Equidistant between Rochester and Buffalo, Wyoming, New York, was a picture-postcard village in the heart of Middlebury township in Wyoming County. Settled as a “water cure” spa in 1851, the Hillside estate was a family vacation home before a daughter, Lydia Avery Coonley Ward, a Chicagoan, turned it into a summer colony for artists, writers, and musicians. After her death, Dudley Crafts Watson became one of a group of devotees who kept Hillside active.

Hillside was far from Chicago. Orson had been close, from earliest memory, to his Watson cousins Augusta (born in 1910), Emily (1912), and Marjorie (1915)—perhaps especially Emily, who was slightly older than he and a mischief maker. The Watson girls were a captive audience for Orson, who stayed awake long after the grown-ups, spinning ghost stories enlivened by simple theatrical effects he was already shrewdly mastering: thunder and lightning, a flashlight, and a magician’s voice for mind reading and hypnosis. “His [character for the] radio program ‘The Shadow’ was born that summer under my daughters’ bed, after they had gone to bed at night, scaring them to death,” recalled Dudley Crafts Watson.

Young Orson had other eye-opening adventures in the girls’ bedroom, he claimed later. “Emily Watson introduced me to the mysteries of playing doctor,” Welles said. “But she was full of what I later discovered to be misinformation.” Limited and “fumbling” though they may have been, in Barbara Leaming’s words, these early experiences left the young boy “with a keen appetite for more.” A few more years would pass before Dr. Maurice Bernstein tried to explain the facts of life to him. Orson always laughed to recall the doctor’s abashed demonstration of the mechanics. “He drew a circle on a blackboard and that was the end of the evening,” Welles said.

Besides his girl cousins, Orson’s playmates at Hillside included the vacationing children of the family of Aga Khan III, who had come to Wyoming in part to foster Prince Aly Khan’s interest in racehorses. Nine-year-old Orson and thirteen-year-old Aly Khan, who crossed paths here for the first time, would grow up to marry the same woman, Rita Hayworth, in the 1940s. “We’ve known each other all our lives,” Welles liked to boast.

By the time Dick Welles returned from Europe, he had spent many days and nights discussing his son’s future with Dudley Crafts Watson and Dr. Bernstein. Orson was a demanding boy, and while he was perfectly capable of entertaining himself for long periods of time, he thrived on input and interaction. (In another era he might have been labeled “hyperactive.”) He scoffed at afternoon naps, and after his mother’s death avoided going to sleep as long as possible after dark. He play-acted through the night in his bedroom, with magic, puppets, makeup, and costumes to keep himself entertained.

Perhaps Beatrice had indulged her youngest son by giving him such a long leash, and by immersing him in her world of performance and self-expression, yet her constancy and values also had shaped him into a bright and personable boy. Everyone felt beholden to her.

In his early fifties, Dick Welles was feeling the weight of age. His mother, now approaching eighty and living alone at Rudolphsheim (her second husband had died in 1913), would be no help to him in raising the boy; at family get-togethers, she long had made it known that she felt Beatrice was pampering Orson with her dalliance in the arts instead of giving him a more practical upbringing.

The other two men felt that Dick Welles should continue to raise Orson in a way that honored Beatrice’s priorities, and they promised to help as best they could. Watson traveled even more frequently than Dick Welles, but young Orson could and did spend long hours in “Uncle” Dudley’s care at the Art Institute of Chicago, playing detective with his girl cousins, slipping out into the skylights over the galleries, prowling around the narrow solid flooring while avoiding the expanses of glass. As for Dr. Bernstein, still childless, he doted on the young boy, seeing in Orson the possible fulfillment of Beatrice’s artistic promise. According to Welles, Bernstein believed that “I
was
my mother and I kept the flame.” The doctor even scolded the boy for not mourning his mother enough. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mother,” Orson told Barbara Leaming; it was just that “I didn’t love her the way he did.”

If Dr. Bernstein carried a torch for Beatrice, he also felt a responsibility toward Dick Welles. Bernstein and Welles had established an awkward friendship, but by now something else bridged their differences. Evidence suggests they also had a doctor-patient relationship.

Peter Noble’s book about Orson, which was virtually ghosted by Bernstein, states that “an illness late in his life” had led to Dick Welles’s “addiction to gin.” This may sound like an overly sympathetic diagnosis, but it was grounded in contemporary medical practice: in the early twentieth century, many physicians prescribed gin as a kind of herbal pain relief, often blending it with bitter medicinal quinine. The famous drink that resulted, gin and tonic, was thought to offer relief from diseases like malaria, and to calm heart palpitations. Orson’s father may have been self-medicating to ameliorate his atrial fibrillation—a condition that would recur in his sons half a century later.

Neither Dick Welles nor Dr. Bernstein alone could handle Orson, but together the former husband and the bachelor physician would do their best. After bringing Orson home from Hillside to Chicago, they resolved to preserve the family’s summer routine, taking the boy back to Grand Detour, where Charlie Sheffield was finally getting ready to sell his hotel. After a few weeks, Dr. Bernstein picked Orson up to bring him to Ravinia, where Ned and Hazel Moore would take their turn as increasingly important members of his extended surrogate family.

At the end of the summer Dr. Bernstein moved from his East Chicago Street address into an apartment shared with Dick Welles on Cambridge Street in the River North neighborhood. He and Dick never became soul-baring friends, however—in the nearly one hundred pages of cursive notes Bernstein kept for his own planned biography of Orson, he could only write (inaccurately) that “Dick Welles was born in Kansas.” But the unlikely roommates were determined to join forces in raising young Orson. Their first major decision was to enroll the nine-year-old in a public school near the University of Chicago. Dick, the senior partner in every way, “felt that by going to a public school, [Orson] would come in contact with boys of his own age and take part in their games,” recalled Bernstein. Dick Welles himself went to work every day; he now listed his profession as “stockbroker,” though mainly he tended to his own stocks while giving investment advice to friends. Bernstein, according to his own recollection, agreed to drive Orson to school in the morning and “call for him when school was out.”

The public school experiment was unsuccessful. “Orson did not fit in with the usual boys,” the doctor recalled; he didn’t join in sports and games at recess, and he was taunted. And there was another reason Orson didn’t last long: “I persistently pretended to be sick,” the filmmaker recalled years later. “One afternoon, upon returning from school, I put the thermometer on the hot water bottle, which moved Dadda to send me to the hospital where they took out my appendix. I kept saying, ‘Wait a minute, I’m feeling better.’ Nobody would listen.” Bernstein always insisted that Orson really
did
have appendicitis, and over the years the story led to a running argument between Pookles and Dadda.