Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (3 page)

The Welleses had been landed gentry in England, and in the eighteenth century Richard Wells, a dry goods merchant in Burlington, New Jersey, became an officer of the Bank of North America. In time Richard’s family moved to Delaware, where his son, William, born in 1769, joined his father’s several thriving businesses and studied to become an attorney. William H. Wells married Rachel Dagworthy, the daughter of a Revolutionary War general. She stood to inherit timber and tannery holdings, and their union enhanced William’s portfolio, but Rachel may have been an illegitimate daughter, and William had to forswear his Quaker faith to wed her in an Episcopalian church.

A liberal member of the Federalist Party—America’s first political party, formed by Alexander Hamilton—William H. Wells opposed strong central government but looked kindly upon the Bank of North America, the first central bank, over which his father helped to preside. Elected to the Delaware State Assembly in 1795, William served several terms there and in the state senate before occupying a U.S. Senate seat from 1813 to 1817. After retiring from politics, he practiced law while amassing a small fortune from Pennsylvania oil and other interests. Wells and his wife raised five sons, all of whom would become lawyers—including Henry Hill Wells, who was born in 1797.

An officeholder like his father, Henry Hill Wells served as secretary of state for two governors of Delaware in the early 1820s. In his book
Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius
, biographer Charles Higham credited Henry Hill Wells with helping to free slaves via the Underground Railroad, but documentation of this abolitionist spirit in both the father and his sons is sparse. Henry Hill Wells never enjoyed fabulous wealth, Higham wrote, and the sons gained little from their father’s estate, which had dwindled by the time of William’s death in 1829.

Henry Hill Wells was not quite the political animal his father was, and in the mid-1830s he left government and Delaware for Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he had a number of relatives, purchasing a vacant lot near St. Stephen’s Church and hanging his shingle as a lawyer around 1835. He built a practice and a home for his wife and three children: Lucretia Wells, their only daughter, born in 1833; William Dagworthy Wells, born in 1837; and Richard Jones Wells (his middle name was probably his mother’s maiden name), probably born in 1843.

Henry Hill Wells, Orson’s paternal great-grandfather, died in 1856, shortly after moving to Skaneateles, New York. His eldest son, nineteen-year-old William, lit out for Quincy, Illinois, where he found work as a freight clerk on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. Richard lingered behind long enough to complete his basic education and an apprenticeship, then trailed his brother to Quincy. By the time Richard was hired by American Express, a new mail delivery service, he could read and write and calculate. Richard showed a knack for mechanical engineering and draftsmanship, and he could ride horses surpassingly well.

Every train traveler heading west to Chicago or Saint Louis passed through Quincy, then Illinois’s second-largest city, on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River. The Wells brothers shared a room at the handsome Quincy House, where the U.S. senator Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s opponent, maintained an office. The brothers were in Quincy when Lincoln defeated Douglas in late 1860.

The following April, the rebel attack on Fort Sumter launched the Civil War. Five feet eight and a half, trim and fair-complexioned, with sandy brown hair and blue eyes, Richard Jones Wells was not yet twenty on August 9, 1862, the day he enlisted, in Chicago, as a private and “express messenger” for M Company of the Illinois Volunteers, or First Regiment, Light Artillery. His brother William, meanwhile, stayed at his railroad job in Quincy, which was an important hub for wartime operations. With trains bringing vital supplies to the Union general S. A. Hurlburt’s forces in northern Missouri, there was plenty of work.

Richard J. Wells would have a brief but noteworthy career as a soldier in the War Between the States. Stationed early in 1863 near Campbellsport, Kentucky, Richard was involved in the famous Battle of Tebbs Bend, with Illinois, Michigan, and Kentucky companies striving to hold a key bridge on the Green River. By now a sergeant, Richard commanded a field piece and caisson in the battle, riding hard and fast against the Confederate troops, but his weary horse stumbled and he was thrown violently onto the pommel of the saddle. Rejoining the pursuit, Richard felt “a colic or severe pain in my bowels.” Later he discovered a sore spot and a lump on the right side of his abdomen, but at first he said nothing. The next morning, the company surgeon sent him to a military hospital in Nashville, where he was diagnosed with a right inguinal or groin hernia. Richard’s initial failure to report his injury cast a permanent shadow over his claim; no eyewitness could attest to the horse-riding accident. Wells—who had been too embarrassed to tell any of his blue-uniformed comrades about the wound in his private parts—would later be investigated repeatedly with regard to pension and medical benefits.

But his injury was real, and Richard J. Wells spent two months convalescing in the hospital before being discharged with what was considered a permanent disability. (A groin hernia tends to enlarge over time, leading to swelling and inflammation in the scrotum.) Richard spent his convalescence sketching ideas for patents he had dreamed up in hopes of striking it rich. (The oft-repeated claim that one of Welles’s forebears invented a military mess kit may have its fuzzy origins here.) Still recovering, Richard returned to Quincy in mid-1863, working for both the railroad and American Express.

When Richard’s older brother William took a job with the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad in Saint Joseph, Missouri, about two hundred miles west on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy route, Richard joined him, hoping his new position as a station agent would help him find investors for his inventions. Like other Welles men Richard was a born salesman, handsome and charming, and he would make “hundreds of friends” working for the railroad, according to one local newspaper account. About 1868, probably in Chicago, where so many train lines—and human paths—converged after the Civil War, the twenty-six-year-old Richard J. Wells met and courted a young woman, a few years younger than himself, from Kenosha, Wisconsin.

This young woman, Mary Blanche Head, has been ill-served by film historians and biographers. Charles Higham claimed in his 1985 biography of Orson Welles that she was only fourteen and a half, a sullen, stocky runaway from a “harsh and terrifying father,” when she encountered the dashing Wells in Saint Joseph and “entered immediately into an affair” with the older man. “Soon after,” Higham wrote, “with great daring, [she] decided that they would get married.” According to this biographer, Mary Head had a “fierce and ambitious disposition” and was “uncontrollable . . . ill-tempered and harsh when crossed.” This colorful fiction was essential to Higham’s portrait of the Heads as the family who introduced the gleam of fanaticism into Welles’s genealogy. Although Higham’s life of Welles has been discredited in many respects, this portrait of Mary Head and her family has persisted in subsequent accounts.

In truth, the Heads were sobersided Yankees living the American dream; their family roots ran as deep as those of the Iveses, the Watsons, and the Welleses. The Heads, too, had come over on the
Mayflower.
Mary’s father, Orson Sherman Head, was a former Oneida County, New York, farm boy with flaming red hair and a robust physique. He studied law in the office of a local attorney before pulling up roots and heading west. In 1841, at twenty-four, he landed in the Wisconsin village of Southport. Head’s rise to wealth and local prestige was symbolized by the imposing two-story brick dwelling he built there, the home where his daughter Mary Head was raised, at the corner of Chicago and Prairie, in the burgeoning city soon to be renamed Kenosha. Many relatives from New York followed Orson S. Head to Southport, opening the first foundries, lumberyards, and wagon works.

After being admitted to the Wisconsin bar, Orson Welles’s maternal great-grandfather and namesake was elected district attorney of Kenosha several times. “A desirable ally and a dangerous enemy in the courts,” according to one obituary, Head was known for his dedication to clients (“it mattered not how poor and humble”) and for cross-examinations that could be brutal and intimidating. “There was no more chance for falsehood to survive one of his examinations than for a kernel of wheat to pass unbroken between the upper and nether millstones.”

Another politician in the Welles family tree, Head served a short stint in the Wisconsin State Senate in 1851, making a name for himself in the capital, Madison, as an enemy of fraud and corruption. “Outspoken” and “brusque,” according to local opinion, Head was seen as a “hard-hearted” fellow by some, by others as a good man with “a peculiar vein of tenderness” that tempered his toughness, a product of struggle and rectitude. He doted on his horses and—like the Iveses—revered Abraham Lincoln, more than once breaking into tears as he recited the Gettysburg Address. Above all, his obituaries noted, Head was a kindly father and a providing one. After his death, the fortune he had made in agriculture, land, and speculation was divided equally among his six children. According to most documents, Mary, his oldest child, was born in Kenosha in 1845; she was neither fourteen nor a runaway when she met and was beguiled by Richard J. Wells—a man not much older than she.

Nor was she unattractive. In her early twenties, Mary Blanche Head was pretty and cultivated, probably classically tutored at home, and she was interested in art, music, and literature. Her father had business interests in Chicago, where the Head family traveled for recitals, entertainment, and shopping. She met Wells when he visited Chicago, searching for investors in the biggest city in the Midwest, which was mushrooming with newcomers and trade since the Civil War.

Richard J. Wells’s first visit to Kenosha, however, was undoubtedly for his wedding to Mary Head on October 29, 1868. The minister was Episcopalian, as were (since birth) the bride and groom. The new Mrs. Wells moved to Saint Joseph, going to work as a cashier for the Pacific House, the residential hotel where her husband lived. Her husband’s first patent, registered from the address of the Pacific House in August 1869, was for “certain new and useful Improvements in Car-Couplings” for trains. His next patent, for an improvement in umbrella holders, showed his versatility, and in more ways than one: For the first time he added an “e” to his surname, transforming himself into “Richard J. Welles.” Perhaps the change was an affectation, perhaps a subtle flourishing of a new pride and identity.

According to Higham’s research, the couple moved from elegant hotels to expensive houses to failed land developments and finally to bare lodgings, all within a few years. On November 13, 1872, still living in Saint Joseph, Mary gave birth to a son. The couple gave the boy a name that knitted the two family histories together: Richard Head Welles. Yet trouble was already in the air: “within a month Richard had been fired,” Higham notes, and their marriage was doomed.

Mary Head Welles wanted children and a stable family life, but her husband was fixated on patents and get-rich schemes. At first their marriage was convenient for Richard, who relied on his father-in-law for investment and for other opportunities. One of Welles’s inventions was for “certain improvements in harness-trimmings,” and Mary’s sister Harriet was married to the son of the superintendent of Kenosha’s Bain Wagon Works, in which the Head family had invested. Bain was the largest manufacturer and supplier of wagons in the United States and perhaps the world, at a time when wagons were the principal means of transportation.

Upon marrying Orson S. Head’s daughter, Richard J. Welles borrowed $7,000 from his father-in-law, a goodly sum at the time; when Head died in 1875, Welles was able to dodge the debt. Welles was also accused of embezzling another $20,000 from the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad; this was the charge that got him fired soon after his son’s birth. But a jury believed his version of events, and crowds cheered the popular ex–station agent as he departed by train for Chicago in July 1876. After intermediate stops in Kenosha and elsewhere, Welles took up residence in Chicago with Mary and their four-year-old son, Richard.

Although Richard J. Welles never attained a law degree like his father, his life would give him plenty of exposure to statutes and courtrooms. In Chicago, Welles and some shadowy partners launched a company that was meant to manufacture new harness and bridle wares based on his patents. He had expected to sell his wares to big national distributors like Bain Wagon Works, but Orson S. Head’s death, coupled with Richard’s growing estrangement from his wife, Mary, scotched that connection to relatives. Welles turned to new brainstorms; like other Welleses who never found a true, permanent home, he talked vaguely of opening a hotel for businessmen. But the money he took from investors disappeared like rabbits in a hat.

By 1878, Welles’s illusory saddlery empire had evaporated. When he wasn’t in court defending himself from aggrieved patent investors, he was heading off on vague trips to other cities drumming up more believers. His indifference to his wife lapsed into hostility, and when young Richard was six, Mary finally took the boy and fled to Kenosha. For a few months Welles sent child support, but it was scanty, and soon it dwindled to nothing.

At first, Mary Head Welles lacked for little except a husband’s attentions. She had inherited nearly $20,000 from her father’s estate in addition to land and possessions, with a nearly equal sum placed in trust for her son Richard, the eldest Head grandchild. Her trust was doled out in increments by one of the extended Head family, banker Daniel Head, who also came originally from Oneida County, and Mary used the money to invest in oil and grains. By degrees rejoining Kenosha society, she attended soirees and dance parties and vacationed with her little boy, nicknamed Dickey, in Lake Geneva, a favorite getaway for Kenoshans as well as Chicagoans.