It must have been sometime in early 1902 that Dick Welles met Beatrice Ives. The pianist was living with her parents in an apartment house on Madison Avenue in Chicago. Chicago was Dick Welles’s second home now, as it would be for his son Orson. Dick Welles was all but famous in Chicago by late 1902, in part for the meteoric exploits of a horse that raced under his name.
A close friend, Kenosha boxing promoter John E. Keating, had purchased the horse and named it “Dick Welles.”1 After being sold to a stablemaster named Rome Respess, the horse was running his first thrilling races at Washington Park racetrack in Chicago by the end of 1902. Soon the horse was racing nationally, celebrated as “the fastest horse in the world” in the six furlongs and one mile. The businessman from Kenosha could go to the Chicago racetrack and enjoy the rare privilege of betting on a champion named after himself. (A few years later, Orson’s father also could bet on the winner of the 1909 Kentucky Derby, a horse named Wintergreen sired by stallion Dick Welles.)
Orson Welles often told interviewers that he didn’t think his mother and father had very much in common—that he couldn’t imagine where they could possibly have met. But Dick Welles and Beatrice Ives had a good deal in common, including their mutual friends the Chicago newspapermen Drury Underwood, John McCutcheon, and George Ade. They could have met at newspaper offices, which they both frequented, or been introduced by Underwood at the racetrack.
The standard comment about Dick Welles is that he preferred low nightlife. True, he could be spotted at vaudeville performances, musicals with pretty chorines, touring magic shows, or the revues put on by black song-and-dance men Williams and Walker at the Great Northern on Chicago’s South Side. He frequented boxing matches as well as racetracks. But Orson’s father was at ease everywhere. He was just as likely to spend a night at the opera, or the symphony, or a Shakespeare production, or to stroll through the galleries of the museum. He could have met his future wife at a recital or stage play or high-society occasion. The two could have locked eyes first in Lake Geneva, where they were both spending long weekends as guests of a friend in 1902.
Yet it was a stealth romance. Dick Welles kept the seriousness of his intentions secret from even his closest friends until the front-page announcement in the Kenosha News on February 9, 1903, that “one of the best known young men of the city” was engaged to “one of the most beautiful and accomplished women in Chicago society,” a lucky lady who was all but a mystery to Kenosha. As with the engagement of Charles Foster Kane and Emily Monroe Norton in Citizen Kane, the news came out of nowhere. And the air of mystery extended to the wedding itself: When the lovers exchanged vows on Saturday afternoon, November 21, 1903, in the Chicago apartment near Lincoln Park where Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Ives lived, the local press was agog. “Ceremony Surprises Friends,” was the headline on the front page of the Kenosha News. “The engagement of the well known young people was announced last summer,” the story read, “but none of their friends and not even the relatives were advised of the date set for the wedding.” Beatrice had shrugged off her early Catholic influences, and an Episcopalian minister performed the ceremony. “Only a few relatives of the contracting parties were present,” noted the Kenosha News, among them Mr. and Mrs. Gottfredsen and teenager Jacob Rudolph.
After a luncheon, the newlyweds departed for a monthlong honeymoon that would begin in New York and continue on to the West Indies. They arrived back in Kenosha after the New Year, accepting the congratulations of well-wishers at a party held in their honor at Rudolphseim, before moving into temporary quarters downtown.
Chicago was a vertical jungle of steel and stone, choking with people and problems of growth. “First in violence” is how muckraking reporter Lincoln Steffens described the city in 1903, “deepest in dirt, loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new, an overgrown gawk of a village.”
Many people saw Kenosha as a “little Chicago,” because it was close enough to and faintly reminiscent of the larger city, though it was tiny by comparison and Kenoshans lived closer to the land and sky. Carl Sandburg, who had lived in both Chicago and Kenosha, evoked the cities’ shared midwestern melancholy in his poem “Sunset from Omaha Hotel Window”:
Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.
Beatrice and Dick Welles would never leave Chicago altogether; they would often travel there by train for events and shows and business and shopping, and for seeing friends and Beatrice’s parents. For now, however, humble Kenosha suited them both.
Dick Welles kept busy, traveling often not only to Chicago but to Detroit, Syracuse, and New York City for sales meetings and auto shows, and logging daily hours at the Badger Brass plant when he was home. Beyond maintaining the company books, he acted as a point man with the workers and as an industry spokesman to the newspapers.
He was also starting to register patents for enhancements in his field. The first year of his marriage was the year Orson Welles’s father unveiled his first invention: an “acetylene-generator” for use in headlights “for vehicles, such as automobiles.” Grasping the usefulness of the bicycle lamp to the car industry—at a point when the car industry barely existed—Dick Welles had improved E. L. Williams’s acetylene gas lamp for effective application to automobiles. “[Welles] reasoned that the acetylene generator and the lamp could be in two different places on a car,” wrote John F. Kreidl. “Combining them in one spot was not so important as insuring a steady, smooth and continual gas flow of long duration.” Welles’s patent application included his sketch of a portable acetylene generator that could be fitted onto the rear of an auto, keeping it supplied with gas for weeks. “Credit here must be given to the man who straddled inventing and marketing,” observed Kreidl.
Over the next fifteen years, more than a dozen patents would be filed under the name of Richard H. Welles, each meticulously drawn with accompanying technical specifications. Most were for tweaks in standard headlight design, but Welles also devised a new type of searchlight, an improved automobile jack, and a chart for cataloging mechanical devices with numerous intricate small pieces. Some books about Orson Welles have trivialized his father’s inventions, but even when they were adjustments to existing designs, the inventions were of material value to Badger Brass, and they added to his income. (One Kenosha car parts company, for instance, snapped up Welles’s automobile jack exclusively for its vehicles.) Such innovations were also important for publicity. As companies with copycat brands of vehicle lights sprang up to compete with Badger Brass, Welles’s steady stream of new patents attracted attention from the local press and national industry.
The factories slowed down during the summer, as did much of Kenosha. After vacationing at nearby Lake Powers, the Welleses moved into their first real home, at 210 Deming Street, less than a block away from Rudolphsheim. But Dick Welles would always lease his homes, never purchase them outright—a cautious streak that also distinguished the young power couple from the more confident wealth of the town’s early settler and ownership class. Though sixteenth in population, Kenosha was the state’s third-wealthiest city in 1905, with more than a dozen individuals worth at least $300,000: one Head, one Bain, one Simmons, several Yules, and Thomas B. Jeffrey, but no Welles.
The couple often traveled to Chicago or Milwaukee to attend the theater, but just as visits from Edwin Booth and Helena Modjeska brightened life in the small town of The Magnificent Ambersons, many shows came to the Rhode Opera House, a short walk from the Welles home. The prestigious Rhode showcased everything from Shakespeare productions featuring John Griffith (who began his career with Edwin Booth) to popular spectacles such as “The World’s Greatest Seeress,” Madame Gertrude, a blindfolded mind-reader who divined messages in slips of paper passed to her onstage. Dick Welles’s friends Drury Underwood, John McCutcheon, and George Ade all moonlighted as playwrights, and Ade’s stage comedies, set in a bucolic Midwest, were especially popular at the Rhode. The Well
eses entertained the newspapermen and other Chicago friends whenever they visited Kenosha.
On Labor Day weekend 1904, the Welleses attended a production of Richard Carle’s Texas comic opera Tenderfoot, typical of the lighthearted entertainments that dominated the Rhode’s calendar. When the electric lights burned out during the second act, Carle, an all-around entertainer in the mode of George M. Cohan, improvised with jokes and songs until they were repaired. Dick and Beatrice Welles enjoyed making their way backstage, often greeting the performers once in Chicago and then again when their tours stopped in Kenosha. The Welleses befriended Carle, hosted him for dinner, and saw him frequently on their trips to New York. (Though it was dropped from the final cut, their friendship was referred to in the Citizen Kane script: when Kane makes Jed Leland the Inquirer’s new drama critic, his first assignment is reviewing Spring Chicken, an actual 1906 Broadway play starring Carle.)
In September 1904, the Welleses spent a week at the Saint Louis Exposition, subtly advertising their politics by telling the Kenosha newspaper that they had lingered at Wisconsin’s impressive public education exhibit, organized by former Kenosha High teacher Mary D. Bradford, now on the staff of the Normal School at Stevens Point. In the November elections, Welles voted for the most progressive candidates: Theodore Roosevelt for president and Robert M. La Follette for governor of Wisconsin. Kenosha County went heavily for Roosevelt and La Follette, and each won his race. The Welleses lived in the Second Ward, along the edge of the Third, the county’s most liberal district. The statutes permitted women to vote only for school board representatives, but the Kenosha newspaper reported a scant turnout among the eligible female electorate, claiming that they “show little interest in voting.” Not true of Beatrice, who voted in the school board race and declared that one day she intended to vote for president too.
At Christmastime the couple enjoyed the performance of ex-pugilist James J. Corbett touring in the melodrama Pals and celebrated Christmas Eve at the Unitarian Church, where Beatrice had taken charge of the choir and music for increasingly thronged religious services.
Their first full year in Kenosha was a decidedly happy one, and by early March 1905 Dick Welles was telling relatives that his wife was pregnant. On March 20 the couple headed to Chicago for the opening night of the Metropolitan Grand Opera season, with Enrico Caruso making his debut in the city as Edgardo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Auditorium. After the performance they attended a party for Caruso and initiated a friendship with the celebrated tenor. Caruso, a notorious masher, was not immune to Beatrice’s beauty, and in time he would hear her play the piano, admiring her musicianship. Caruso never sang in Kenosha, but whenever he appeared in Milwaukee or Chicago, or if Beatrice happened to be in New York when he was performing, she was in the audience. Later, when Orson’s mother returned to living in Chicago, Caruso faithfully attended her soirees when he was in the city.
“[Caruso] used to be in the house a lot before I was born and when I was a baby,” her son Orson Welles remembered decades later. “There’s a cartoon he made of my mother at the piano. He was a very good cartoonist.”
Business was good at Badger Brass. Solar brand acetylene lamps were selling widely now in England and Europe, and before long sales of Welles’s automobile variant overtook the original bicycle lamp. By late 1904, Badger Brass, with more than one hundred workers, had the seventh-largest payroll in Kenosha. In early 1905 the company moved into a new, larger plant on Lyman Avenue, touted in advertising and publicity as the “largest lamp making plant in the United States.” Dick Welles rushed to New York to organize an East Coast branch with a long-term lease on two floors of the Iron Age Building, at the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street and Eleventh Avenue.
After another protracted business trip east that fall, Welles had only just returned to Kenosha when, on October 7, 1905, Beatrice gave birth to a boy. The baby was christened Richard Ives Welles, his first and middle names a nod to his father and mother.
CHAPTER 2
1905–1915
“Mythically Wonderful” Parents
Though some books have portrayed her as a sophisticate trapped in a suffocating hamlet, Beatrice Welles, not quite twenty-one when she married Dick Welles, thrived in Kenosha, at least at first. Although she arrived as an outsider, she did not lack confidence or charm, and she swiftly found her foothold in the community. In particular, she found a home at the Unitarian Church, where her mother-in-law, Mary Gottfredsen, sat on the board; and at the Woman’s Club—two organizations that were every bit as important to Kenosha as Badger Brass.
The Unitarians were one of the first churches to ordain women, and their congregation in Kenosha was presided over by the young and charismatic Reverend Florence Buck. A highly intelligent and cultured speaker, Florence Buck gave public lectures on artistic and scientific topics, and was an outspoken activist for causes that included public education and feminism. Beatrice stepped up her involvement with the Unitarian Church in the year after her first son’s birth, growing close to Buck and Buck’s associate, Reverend Marion Murdoch. The two Unitarian ministers were so deeply attached in public and private that they were widely presumed to be lesbian lovers.
By Christmas 1906, with little Richard now a year old, Beatrice was ready to make her theatrical debut in Kenosha. The Unitarians were leaving their house of worship—the church building in Kenosha, dedicated in 1867—for a new structure that was in the early stages of construction, and Florence Buck was planning a benefit to raise money for the furnishings. The benefit would feature a dramatic recital of Charles Kingsley’s historical novel Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face, set in Roman Egypt, and Beatrice Welles would direct the church and clubwomen in a series of tableaux corresponding to Buck’s recitation—a style of dramatic presentation that was in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century, based on the techniques, developed by François Delsarte, that Beatrice had studied at the Chicago Conservatory. Mrs. Z. G. Simmons, wife of the head of Simmons Manufacturing and president of the Woman’s Club, agreed to portray Hypatia, the fifth-century astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher. Besides directing, Beatrice would play Pelagia, a beautiful woman who lives as a hermit to atone for her sins.
The Kenosha wellborn packed the large Guild Hall auditorium, paying fifty cents a ticket to hear Florence Buck narrate as Beatrice Welles and other costumed society women assumed dignified poses “illustrating the most dramatic points of the story,” reported the Kenosha News. The resulting spectacle was “one of the most novel and artistic ever enjoyed” in the city.
Over at Badger Brass, however, clouds darkened the horizon. Almost as soon as it was founded, the company ran into friction from labor activists. After some early skirmishes with workers who wanted improved wages and conditions, the management, under Welles’s enlightened leadership, shrewdly recognized a union shop affiliated with the International Metal Workers Union.
The early twentieth century was a period of tremendous growth and transformation in Kenosha. The city’s earliest settlers had come mainly from New England and New York. When the population exploded, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia took the skilled positions in city industry, and a later wave, primarily from Italy or eastern Europe, claimed the remaining jobs, largely unskilled. At Badger Brass the skilled metal polishers, buffers, and molders drew better pay and had better working conditions than the less skilled solderers, screw machine hands, press room riveters, and drillers—and this disparity became a sore point for the union.
Like many American cities, Kenosha proved a hotbed of labor agitation in the early years of the century. Unrest dogged all the major factories: Simmons Manufacturing (bedroom furniture), Chicago-Kenosha Hosiery (stockings), and N. R. Allen’s Sons (leather goods). But the city’s brass- and metalworkers were the most comprehensively organized, with thousands of members employed by the Jeffery Company, Chicago Brass, Bain Wagon, and Badger Brass. Thanks to its progressive history with the union, Badger Bras
s stood out as a bellwether for potential union action, and flare-ups there spread fast to the other brass and metal workshops.
As the company grew, with record earnings again reported in 1906, the union became balky. The less skilled laborers, who worked ten hours but were paid for nine (their wages averaged $2.10 a day), were always the most militant faction and perhaps the largest, but they were constantly outflanked in negotiations by buffers, lamp makers, and other groups that regularly exacted concessions from the company. When Badger Brass union officials reached out to the international organization, the leadership dispatched operatives from Cincinnati and Chicago to rally union solidarity and stage a walkout for uniform higher pay and shorter hours. The advances they sought would set a new national standard for the brass and metal industry.
The trouble came to a head in February 1907. The militant unskilled workers walked out in a job action, sympathetic lamp makers and buffers joined the incipient strike, and soon the Badger Brass factory found itself at a standstill. Dick Welles spoke publicly on behalf of management and represented the company in round-the-clock talks with the strike committee at the downtown Hotel Eichelman. George A. Yule was never very far away from the action, but despite his otherwise liberal politics, he did not care for ultimatums—or unions, for that matter.
Sitting across from Dick Welles and other Badger Brass executives, the brass and metal unionists demanded ten hours’ compensation for a nine-hour day, for all employees. Welles stood his ground, insisting that Badger Brass would not tamper with a contract that was still in force until the fall, but offered a temporary and voluntary nine-hour day for nine hours’ wages, covering most but not all workers. (Some would still be obliged to work ten hours, while earning only nine hours’ pay.) That winter, as it turned out, the union had no appetite for a long work stoppage; within a week the union rescinded the walkout, and the strikers were all hired back.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 4