Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (4 page)

After a year, Mary Head Welles finally filed for divorce. She may have been ignorant of her wayward husband’s mounting crises, because her divorce documents describe Richard not as a scam artist but as a man with superior business acumen climbing the ladder to success. Though Richard was served with divorce papers in Chicago in 1881, he refused to appear at proceedings and made no child custody claims.

Court records depict him as outwardly in “good health,” although his constitution was already failing. Four years after the divorce filing, living temporarily in Athens, Pennsylvania, he filed for what amounted to a disability pension owing to his aggravated hernia. Examined by a doctor, the Civil War veteran, now in his forties, was found to have a rupture on his right side “larger than a goose egg,” which the medical examiner felt might be controlled by a “suitable truss.” Granted his pension, Welles moved to New York City; he stayed there for the next fifteen years, registering minor patents (“Improvements in Bed Couches” and “Improvements in Bed-Chairs”) and announcing Welles Manufacturing Company products that never saw fruition. He too made ends meet as a bookkeeper.

In 1904, time finally ran out on him. That October, Welles suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a catastrophic breach triggered by the hernia. He was registered as a pensioner—$12 a month—at the National Soldiers Home in Hampton, Virginia. Doctors diagnosed a hernia, vertigo, eye disease, severe rheumatism, heart disease, and general feebleness. In his early sixties, Orson Welles’s paternal grandfather was a tremulous old man: his hair all white, his muscles flabby. (The doctors took care, however, to attribute Richard’s feeble condition to his hernia, “not to vicious habits.”)

Discharged in February 1905, Richard Jones Welles died in Washington, D.C., in May of the following year, at the age of sixty-two or -three. Asked repeatedly by government officials whether he had been married or fathered any children, he repeatedly answered no. As his next of kin he named his sister, Lucretia, married to another railroad agent in Madison, Wisconsin. At the end of his life, he reverted to spelling his name “Wells.”

The son he left behind, Richard Head Welles, certainly never forgot his father—among other things, he would follow in his footsteps as a resourceful inventor—but after the age of seven the boy probably never saw him again. His father became a taboo subject in the family. His own son would make a film about a fictional boy named Kane who never really knew his father either—neither the man called Kane Sr. in the motion picture, nor the man (possibly Kane’s father) described only as a “defaulting boarder” whose last testament sets Rosebud in motion. Richard Head Welles would not be the last Welles to grow up with an unseen father, or to become a flawed parent himself.

Richard Head Welles was known as Dickey, never Junior, and finally he was Dick, rarely Richard. Strictly speaking, he didn’t remain fatherless for long. Four years after his mother’s divorce, at Christmas 1885, Mary Head Welles married Frederick J. Gottfredsen, the eldest son of a Danish-born Kenosha pioneer who had built a successful business manufacturing and selling cigars, bricks, wood, flour, vinegar, and spirits. Frederick was a partner in the Gottfredsen Brewery; another Gottfredsen ran Kenosha’s oldest jewelry store.

Mary Head Welles Gottfredsen, as she now called herself, gave birth to a second son, Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen, in 1887. She and her second husband built a picturesque two-and-a-half-story stone-and-shingle house in downtown Kenosha and dubbed it Rudolphsheim. (According to a local pamphlet, the house, which still exists and is featured on local historic tours, “includes pieces of beer bottles, reportedly from the Gottfredsen Brewery, embedded in the stucco” of the gable.)

But young Dick Welles would not grow up in Rudolphsheim. His new stepfather never adopted him, and Dick never developed a close relationship with his half brother Jacob Rudolph, partly owing to the fifteen-year difference in their ages. By the time the new house was finished, Dick was fifteen years old and spending much of the year at the Racine College Grammar School, an exclusive boarding school on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan at the southern limit of Racine, a small city about ten miles north of Kenosha.

Racine College was an Episcopalian institution, organized according to a military system that had been modified to eliminate undesirable features, and it specialized in scientific and business training. The school also prided itself on a progressive curriculum that blended a classical education (including mandatory Greek and Latin) with a full range of arts programs.

In his prep school days, Dick Welles was regarded as “impetuous and talented,” according to Victoria Price, the daughter of future Mercury Theatre actor Vincent Price, whose father, Vincent Leonard Price, was Dick’s classmate at Racine College. Dick and the elder Price were active in school theatricals, and they teamed up to stage an “extravagant magic show” for the whole school, according to
Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography.

Racine College Grammar School offered the equivalent of a high school diploma, but after graduating Dick Welles may briefly have attended one of several university-type academies in Kenosha or Milwaukee. “He studied law but did not complete the courses,” Dr. Bernstein wrote of Orson’s father. “He was a well read man who took an interest in many things.” Along with skills in reading, writing, and mathematics, Dick also showed an interest in mechanical engineering, much like his derelict father. A hunter and sportsman, he took up cycling when it was still a novelty, sailed on Lake Michigan, and golfed on the makeshift greens of Kenosha.

But the most astonishing thing young Dick Welles did, at the tender age of sixteen, was to file suit against the banker in charge of his trust fund—his own close relative and one of Kenosha’s pillars of commerce. Working through his fiduciary guardian, a prominent Kenosha attorney, Dick accused Daniel Head, executor of his grandfather’s will, of furnishing no reliable account of expenditures from the trust fund for ten years following the death of Orson S. Head.

It was a play for independence on the young man’s part, but it had other consequences, intentional or not—including exposing his mother’s growing fear of debt before her second marriage and her pattern of unsuccessful investment in Chicago stocks. The suit divided the numerous Head siblings, with each weighing in with his or her version of the facts. Partly to defend her own financial decisions, Dick’s mother was compelled to join the attack on Daniel, the nominal elder statesman of the extended Head family; she even tried (unsuccessfully) to claim a share of the trust fund for Jacob Rudolph, unborn at the time of her father’s death.

The case droned on for years, like
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
, but the final ruling after appeals in 1895 made headlines throughout the state of Wisconsin. The bank was unable to furnish sufficient paperwork to back up its claims, and the case was settled in favor of Richard H. Welles, as he was now known formally after attaining his majority. Young Welles received $6,972 as the residue of his share of the Head trust fund, originally calculated at $15,054.81, the balance of which had been paid out for his support and education since his grandfather’s death twenty years earlier. (The settlement—the equivalent of nearly $200,000 today—was a fair bundle at the time.)

The next five years went by in a blur. With bicycling all the rage, the first thing Dick Welles did with his windfall inheritance was sail from New York to Liverpool to embark on a five-week biking tour of England and France with a gang of well-heeled Kenosha friends. Welles organized a group called the Kenosha Wheelmen to participate in the earliest statewide long-distance races, and he traveled to several midwestern cities for conventions. He could have put a little time and money into the six-day track cycling races that started in Madison Square Garden before sweeping the Midwest, as his son the filmmaker later claimed.

Dick Welles may also have done a brief stint in the Yukon searching for gold in the late 1890s, palling around with the free-spirited budding playwright Wilson Mizner and Sid Grauman, later of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. At least his son Orson claimed as much in interviews, and while no proof of those travels has surfaced, Alaska records are incomplete, and the facts, timing, and spirit of the story all jibe with what’s known of his father’s character.

Even before the court ruling gave him financial security, Orson’s father loved to travel. Though he often went by boat or train, Dick Welles also went in with friends on a pleasure yacht they kept docked in Kenosha. He made frequent excursions to Chicago and New York, headed south in the spring to roam Civil War battlefields, and regularly made it to the West Indies.

Chicago got to know Orson’s father particularly well. He mingled there widely and democratically. At the racetrack, boxing matches, and vaudeville shows, Dick Welles befriended the city’s best-known newsmen, including the racetrack humorist Drury Underwood of the
Chicago Chronicle
; the cartoonist and illustrator John T. McCutcheon of the
Chicago Record-Herald
; and the columnist George Ade, McCutcheon’s
Record
colleague collaborator, and Sigma Chi brother at Purdue University.

Orson’s father increasingly mixed pleasure with business in Chicago. Bain Wagon Works had gone into bicycle manufacturing in the 1890s, and toward the end of his five years of wanderlust Dick Welles was hired by the Yules as a road representative for Bain. George Yule, born in Scotland, had been Edward Bain’s longtime right-hand man at Bain before taking over as boss. His son, George A. Yule, had risen up under his father to superintendent at Bain. George A. Yule was fourteen years older than his wife’s sister’s son, but he and Dick had a strong bond.

Dick Welles proved a tremendous man on the road for Bain. Dapper and friendly, he was a hail-fellow-well-met, a man people remembered and looked forward to seeing again. Visiting Chicago, he formed friendships with such forward-thinking businessmen as Thomas B. Jeffery, the inventor and manufacturer of the Rambler bicycle; and Charles N. and Walter J. Frost, a father and son who ran a brass, bronze, and aluminum casting business. Welles hoped to intrigue them with his vision for a new Kenosha company, anchored by his relationship with George A. Yule and their family ties to the Bain Wagon Works network, which would combine the exploding market for crucial bicycle parts with the coming boom in horseless carriages.

Film scholars have pointed out that Dick Welles resembles the character Eugene Morgan in Booth Tarkington’s
The Magnificent Ambersons
, played in Orson Welles’s screen adaptation by Joseph Cotten. Morgan is not an Amberson but an outsider enamored of the ill-fated Isabel Amberson, and not an inventor but a horseless-carriage pioneer and entrepreneur. In the backstory of the novel, as a young man, Morgan loses favor with Isabel after causing a drunken scene on the lawn of the Amberson mansion, serenading her and stepping through a bass viol before being led away. Isabel then marries the persistent Wilbur Minafer, “a steady young businessman and a good churchgoer.” After the death of his first wife, Morgan returns to town with plans to build an automobile factory, having left behind his wildness. To Isabel’s spoiled son George, the central figure of the story, Morgan is a despised rival for his mother’s affections and a symbol of the vulgar parvenu. Yet ultimately it is Morgan who proves the sensible one in the story: when George’s uncle and aunt consider investing in early automobile lamplights, Morgan advises them to “go slow”—but the Ambersons ignore his advice and lose the remainder of their fortune investing in poorly designed headlights.

Years later, the filmmaker would claim that his father, a headlight inventor, had been a model for Tarkington’s character Morgan—a claim that was scoffed at by some interviewers. But Dick Welles did get to know Tarkington, who was a kind of third musketeer from Purdue and Indiana along with McCutcheon and Ade. Then a budding author flitting through Chicago, Tarkington was struck by Welles, seeing him as typically midwestern, with depth charges beneath the surface impression. Like Eugene Morgan, Welles once had been “a fairly wild young fellow,” in the novel’s words. But the wild young Welles had grown into a savvy, prudent businessman. When he told Jeffery and Frost that he was going to invest his personal savings in the new headlight company, they were won over.

Dick Welles sought out a bicycle lamp inventor, E. L. Williams, in England. Williams had just patented the Solar lamp, named for its purported brightness; it consisted of a small petroleum lamp “inside a casing with a wick that could be lit before a reflecting parabolic mirror,” in the words of John F. Kreidl, author of an unpublished study emphasizing Dick Welles’s importance to the bicycle and car lamp industry. According to Kreidl, the Solar was “a Rube Goldberg invention at best,” and Williams’s tireless tinkering and minor improvements could not change the fact that it was dirty and foul-smelling in operation. But the inventor’s timing was good: the Solar emerged at the height of the bicycle craze, just as riders were discovering the dangers of biking at night.

Williams intended his invention purely for bicycles and never foresaw a potential application to automobiles. It was Dick Welles who had the brainstorm and the idea of forging links between Williams and midwestern businessmen who were interested in opening up the market for headlights for mechanical and motorized vehicles. By late 1897, Welles had the English inventor on board as a partner in the new Kenosha venture, and he was ready, with George A. Yule, to announce the formation of the Badger Brass Company, with an exclusive world license to manufacture and sell Solar lamps.

E. L. Williams, Charles N. Frost, George A. Yule, and Dick Welles were the original Badger Brass partners. Williams remained in England, banking his share of profits; there is no record that he ever even visited Kenosha. The Frosts soon went their own way, establishing Frost Manufacturing in Kenosha to stamp out parts for industrial, household, and automotive use. Yule and Welles remained at the helm from the beginning to the end.