Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  As summers usually did in Kenosha, the summer of 1910 brought heavy storms. The high winds and torrential rains caused widespread crop damage and flattened fences and trees. When nature cooperated, Dick and Beatrice Welles took the steamboat to Milwaukee, rode special trains to the pastoral lakes in the countryside surrounding Kenosha, and visited Chicago to see Beatrice’s parents and enjoy the shows. They were among the thousands of Kenoshans drawn to the annual Old Settlers’ Picnic at Paddock Lake, with lectures, games, music, and basket dinners at noon. Each year, sadly, the number of actual old settlers decreased.

  The highlight of that summer was the four-day Home Talent Spectacle, an elaborate benefit for the Kenosha YMCA that Beatrice Welles staged at the Rhode Opera House in the last week of June. The show involved hundreds of local singers, dancers, and musicians performing their specialties against a series of posed and pantomimed tableaux. Besides helping to organize and stage the extravaganza, Orson’s mother played pieces on the piano and even sang “You’re Just the Girl I’m Looking For,” the hit of the 1906 Shubert light opera The Social Whirl. While her personal tastes were more sophisticated, Beatrice showed a good-humored willingness to try anything to entertain people, laughing at herself if she stumbled. In the final patriotic offering, “Pageant of the Nations,” she even posed as the Goddess of Liberty.

  July Fourth was always busy. In the morning the Welles family motored to Racine for the annual parade by veterans of the Spanish-American War. Part of the afternoon was spent at the races for trotters and pacers at the Bain racetrack. The family stopped by the Caledonian Society cricket matches, where the Yules figured prominently, and, like many Library Park families, they ended Independence Day with dinner and dancing at the Kenosha Country Club.

  On Labor Day, Kenosha held a downtown parade with floats and a thousand marchers, the streets lined with cheering citizens. The city’s brass workers were always the highlight of the procession, garbed in white duck suits and carrying brass canes, with the female lacquerers wearing white dresses. The following weekend, Badger Brass sponsored a separate field day for its employees, one of the company’s gestures after the strike. Workers and their families rode by rail to Silver Lake for the all-day company picnic, with games, prizes, music, dinner, and moonlight dancing. By now Badger Brass employed six hundred workers, Solar lamp orders continued to rise, and Dick Welles helped tally the profits.

  At the last important meeting of the summer, Beatrice Welles ascended to the office of vice president of the Woman’s Club. And, when its fall-winter schedule for 1910–1911 was unveiled, the new vice president dominated the programming, contributing not just her piano performances to the listed events but the first fully staged play the club had attempted.

  Ambitiously slated for the Rhode Opera House, Seven-Twenty-Eight; or, Casting the Boomerang was Augustin Daly’s adaptation of a German sex farce, first successfully produced in New York in 1883. The original stage show had featured Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, a specialist in playing grandes dames, in the role of Mrs. Bargiss, who entertains grandiose ambitions for her husband, an unproductive poet. Now, showing a surprising taste for age makeup and ribald comedy, the much-younger Beatrice Welles undertook the Mrs. Gilbert role in the club’s ambitious production.

  Although the play was nominally staged by a local schoolteacher, Seven-Twenty-Eight was entirely the brainchild of Beatrice Welles, and she was its driving force. And the show proved a triumph with audiences, although some clubwomen found it frivolous and risqué. Afterward Beatrice announced that Seven-Twenty-Eight was merely the first theatrical offering of a new Kenosha dramatics organization that would be permanently supported by the Woman’s Club.

  That year, the Welles family had an early Christmas Eve dinner at home. Later, Dick and Beatrice went to Guild Hall for a high-society party with refreshments and musicians imported from Chicago. After midnight services at the Unitarian Church, the couple returned home to little Richard, each opening one Christmas present before bed. On New Year’s Day the family departed for a much-needed getaway, motoring first to the annual automobile show in New York City, then going south for a sightseeing trip that included a foray to the West Indies.

  The Welleses had not yet returned to Kenosha by the day, in early 1911, when another important new character in the backstory arrived in the city.

  This was Dr. Maurice Abraham Bernstein. Although his birth date varies in records, Bernstein was born, probably in 1883, in the town of Pereyaslav in Ukraine. The eldest of four, Bernstein emigrated with his parents to Chicago when he was a child. He was awarded high school equivalency credentials by the Lewis Institute, a junior college in Chicago; he was naturalized as a citizen in 1906; and two years later he graduated from Northwestern University medical school. In the three years after his graduation, the young physician worked for the Chicago department of health, the Cook County Institution for Nervous and Mental Diseases, and the Dunning Hospital for the Insane.

  At twenty-eight, Dr. Bernstein was the same age as Beatrice Welles, and roughly the same height though wirier than her husband, Dick—in Citizen Kane, the character to whom the doctor lent his name is described as “an undersized Jew,” in the words of the script, “spry, with remarkably intense eyes.” Bernstein’s gray eyes, framed by thin spectacles, were indeed penetrating. He had an oval face, a square chin, an imposing straight nose, and short brown hair combed straight back from his forehead. The doctor may have known Dick and Beatrice Welles before coming to Kenosha; they could have met at music recitals or cultural events in Chicago. A lover of the arts, Bernstein especially cherished opera and classical music, and was an amateur cellist.

  Bernstein was a young, modern doctor, without affiliation to Hahnemann Hospital and with no homeopathic orientation. Kenosha struck him as a place of opportunity where Jewish people were welcome—the Jewish community had a local foothold downtown—and more doctors were needed. Since obtaining his medical degree Dr. Bernstein had occupied only lowly institutional offices, and despite his genuinely charitable impulses toward the arts, or perhaps because of them, he was not a prosperous man. Bernstein thought he could forge a better living with his own practice. Kenosha offered him that independence, within the context of a fast-growing population.

  Bernstein found modest office space above a saloon at the corner of Main and Market. By May 1 his name was appearing in Kenosha newspapers—he was quite good at getting his name in the paper—as the city’s newest doctor. He advertised a specialty in orthopedic surgery—“deformity cases”—and expertise in mental diseases. The new physician declared his politics as liberal Republican, and was reported to favor a health crusade to remove children’s tonsils as a guard against rheumatic diseases—another sign of his affinity with Beatrice Welles.

  No sooner had the doctor arrived, however, than he departed. After a mere two months in Kenosha, Bernstein was unexpectedly offered the job of senior physician of the Cook County infirmary in Oak Forest, Illinois, a complex that also housed the Dunning Hospital for the Insane. Dr. Bernstein left for Oak Forest at once, according to press accounts, pledging to check up on his new Kenosha patients on weekends.

  And no sooner had he departed than he returned. According to the Kenosha News and several Chicago newspapers, Bernstein resigned from the Cook County infirmary after only two months, following a heated exchange of malpractice charges and countercharges, and a physical altercation with Peter Bartzen, nominally his boss, president of the Cook County board.

  According to Bernstein, after arriving in Oak Forest he had discovered “gross incompetency” at the Cook County Infirmary in the form of an entrenched staff doctor whose improper administering of anesthesia had caused the death of at least one patient. Bernstein’s accusation stirred up the medical establishment and prompted a coroner’s inquiry, but the investigation exonerated the staff doctor. According to Bartzen, the real problem was Bernstein, who he claimed had “left a piece of sponge in a patient after an operation.” Bernstein struck back b
y publicly calling the county board president a liar.

  What happened next was one of the colorful and improbable incidents that seemed to dog Maurice Bernstein throughout his life. Bartzen was on his way to the Oak Forest clinic to fire Bernstein when they bumped into each other at the train depot. Bartzen, incensed at having been called a liar, according to his own account, marched up to Dr. Bernstein and struck him on the jaw, then followed up with a quick kick. “When I went to hit him again he jumped on the train which was moving out.” Bernstein scoffed at this version of events, giving the local press a statement full of his characteristically flowery language. When “this vitriolic Czar of the Cook County Board descended upon me like a modern Mars with flaming nostrils and language that would have put a dock walloper to blush,” demanding to know “why I had presumed to find fault with his friends,” Bernstein said he was “obliged to administer to him a sound and much-deserved chastisement.”

  The unapologetic Bernstein claimed that he, not Bartzen, won the “Battle of the Train Depot.” Furthermore, Bernstein insisted that he’d resigned his Cook County position “before our little one-sided combat and not after, as [Bartzen] would have the public believe.”

  Both men filed defamation lawsuits, and the brouhaha was settled and hushed up by lawyers. While the facts are indeterminate, the anecdote captures something about the man who became Orson Welles’s guardian after the death of his parents. Some who knew him believed that the formidable doctor was fundamentally a man of probity; others saw Dr. Bernstein as a slippery human sphinx. He was a man of thought who could also be, for better and worse, a man of decisive action. He was a sophisticated man of ideas who could also be a bumbler and a buttinski. He was a Dickensian character of many odd and discrepant parts.

  By August 2, restored to Kenosha, Dr. Bernstein was summoned by Beatrice Welles to tend to five-year-old Richard, who had broken his arm “while playing in the door yard of the Welles home on Pleasant Street,” according to newspaper accounts. Beatrice was already worried that her little boy might be a tad accident-prone. And, from that summer day forward, Dr. Bernstein became an unofficial member of the Welles family, a close friend and deep admirer of Beatrice especially, but also friendly with her husband, Dick, and fatherly to their children. No one could have predicted how much the new Kenosha physician’s first house call to the Welleses would bring him inside the family and call on his expertise in both surgery and mental illness.

  Young female artists and activists dominated Beatrice Welles’s circle of friends. Many were single working teachers—school board policy mandated that teachers be unmarried. Among her closest friends were the city’s most dedicated suffragists, who wanted voting rights for women for all offices.

  These young progressive women increasingly diverged from the older guard of the Woman’s Club, who never warmed to the suffrage movement. Many of the older women felt threatened by their younger peers’ community activism, and in some cases by their personalities.

  Among other things, the old guard believed that the activists and suffragists—even those who sprang from settler bloodlines—could not be counted on to stay in Kenosha. Among Beatrice’s friends was Harriet Bain, who was a niece of Bain Wagon Works’ founder Edward Bain and also a staunch feminist. A talented artist, Harriet taught at the private Kemper School for Girls, and gave stereopticon lectures on the Italian Renaissance at the Woman’s Club; she frequently mused aloud about one day leaving Kenosha for Europe to study painting.

  Another of Beatrice’s activist friends was Charlotte Hannahs Jordan, the daughter of the founder of Hannahs Manufacturing, a purveyor of furniture and wood products in Kenosha. Lottie Jordan was married to Edward S. Jordan, a Rambler executive who had plans to form his own car company. The Jordans had lived in Cleveland for a time, and they often talked about how much they missed the larger city. They had conducted an investigation of tenement and sweatshop conditions in Cleveland, and in Kenosha, Lottie led discussion groups exploring the pioneering 1904 book Poverty by the socialist Robert Hunter, who was involved in the settlement house movement.

  A third associate of Beatrice Welles’s was Ray Elizabeth Needham, who was born in Colorado but raised in Ripon, Wisconsin. Tall, blond, and soignée, Ray Elizabeth Needham plunged into every community issue, but above all she was a suffragist. She met her husband at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before she transferred to Smith College. Her husband, Maurice, was an ad man for the Jeffery and Nash motor companies in Kenosha, but he had his sights set on running his own ad agency in Chicago. Everyone knew that Harriet Bain, Lottie Jordan, and the Needhams would move away from Kenosha one day.

  The Woman’s Club stalwarts resisted engagement with the grittier realities in Kenosha, and friction between the factions led Beatrice Welles and her friends to mount a brazen challenge to the entrenched leadership in May 1911. Just after finishing her term as vice president—“in a very acceptable manner,” said the Kenosha News—Beatrice confronted the club with an alternative slate of officers, challenging the ticket approved by the formal nominating committee.

  “The insurgents,” as Beatrice’s slate was dubbed locally, offered candidates for all available offices—including Beatrice herself, running for president against a Kenosha dowager, Caroline Rowe. By narrow margins, however, the establishment regulars won all the club races. Beatrice hurried to proclaim her loyalty to the victors, but the older women had been deeply and permanently affronted. The division in the Woman’s Club, which had festered quietly over the past few years, now became an open rift. The Woman’s Club always went dark over the summer, but when the next season’s programming was announced, Beatrice Welles’s presence was pointedly diminished. She tried to maintain cordial relations with the older clubwomen, but they were wary of her now, regarding her as too self-righteous, radical, and avant-garde.

  For her part, Orson’s mother started shifting her time and energy to the burgeoning suffragist movement, taking a lead in forming a Kenosha branch of the National Political Equality League.

  On October 6, 1911, Beatrice Welles’s father, Benjamin Ives, died at his home in Chicago. He was sixty-one years old. After his years of financial troubles, and the months he had spent enduring “a complication of diseases,” according to newspapers, his death was a mercy. After a Chicago funeral, his remains were interred in a family plot arranged by the Welleses in Kenosha’s Green Ridge Cemetery, close to downtown. His widow, Lucy, then moved to Kenosha to live with her daughter’s family. Beatrice employed a nanny, but now her mother would be on hand to help with six-year-old Richard, who was just entering school. Lucy Ives, who had visited Kenosha often, was befriended by members of the Woman’s Club in her age bracket—helping to bridge the divide between young and old.

  Another woman who bridged all the blocs in Kenosha was the school superintendent, Mary Bradford. Although she was a community activist and suffragist to rival any of the “insurgents,” she was also matronly and a contemporary of the older clubwomen, and she had a diplomatic touch that served her causes well. Her foremost interest was in local education reform, a concern she shared with Beatrice Welles. Both were proponents of publicly funded kindergartens for children starting at age four. Both were in favor of open-air schools. Both called for more truant officers and for stricter enforcement of laws that stipulated compulsory education from ages seven to fourteen. Both advocated “special classes” for delinquent, handicapped, and foreign-born children. Both supported retirement funds for teachers, and annual examinations of children by qualified physicians. Both sought public and private moneys to ensure adequate food and clothing for schoolchildren.

  Mary Bradford brought an air of respectability to the issues she embraced, and hers was one of the few voices that tended to unite the local women. Indeed, she seemed as popular with most Kenosha men as with the women, and larger Wisconsin cities repeatedly tried to lure her away with lucrative offers, which she invariably declined. In November 1911, Bradford was elected president of th
e Wisconsin State Teachers Association.

  Mary Bradford, Beatrice Welles, and their circle of feminists looked ahead to the spring 1912 municipal elections. The two-term Democratic incumbent, Matthias J. Scholey, still a stubborn opponent of school improvements, was vulnerable, having served the past two years simultaneously as a state legislator. His liberal Republican challenger, lumberman Dan O. Head, embraced educational reform, improved public works, regular tax levies, and honest government, along with opposition to “bad houses, wine rooms, and evil dance halls.” The well-liked Head was another relative of Dick Welles’s: the nephew of the banker Welles had sued for the inheritance that helped seed the founding of Badger Brass.

  Beatrice and Kenosha’s nascent branch of the National Political Equality League handed out hundreds of flyers and posters crying, “Women, You Must Vote for the Sake of Your Children.” On election night in April, Scholey’s forces were annihilated as Head clinched the mayoralty by a huge margin. A cheering crowd formed downtown, and local women headed up a parade that marched through the streets, shooting off fireworks.

  The other election results, however, were discouraging for the sisterhood. Only 169 of an estimated 1,000 eligible women bothered to vote, and the school board results—all the winners were men, the majority of them illiberal—reflected weak support for the feminist agenda. The largest number of women voters in any Kenosha neighborhood, forty, showed up in the Third Ward, near the Welles’s home.

  In the wake of the disappointing results, Beatrice, Mary Bradford, and Harriet Bain held many soul-searching conversations about how the movement should respond. The Kenosha Political Equality League announced a summer-long campaign to raise the political consciousness of local women and men, and to prepare for a suffrage referendum to coincide with the statewide fall 1912 election. A bitter debate was raging in the Wisconsin legislature over a proposed bill endorsing women’s suffrage, and as a compromise a state referendum on female enfranchisement had been added to the ballot in the fall. Beatrice and her fellow suffragists fought hard to promote the referendum, donning yellow ribbons emblazoned with “Vote for Women” and giving speeches at county fairs and picnics. Reverend Florence Buck returned to the city to give an address on the subject, and national activists such as Inez Milholland from New York and Jane Addams from Chicago’s Hull House headlined right-to-vote rallies.