Bernhardt had passed the show business torch to the future director of Citizen Kane.
Five months after the family relocated to Chicago, in September 1918, Dick Welles registered for the draft. At forty-five, he was nearly too old to serve. (The third national registration was held on September 12, for men eighteen through forty-five, but the armistice would be signed two months later.) Dick was fit and healthy, but on his draft form he listed his occupation as “not employed.” Without the routine of work and travel that had sustained him for almost two decades in Kenosha, Dick Welles was unmoored. His wife’s days were filled with bustle and ambition. His were filled with empty hours.
His downfall may have been aggravated by drink; it’s possible he was drinking steadily all along. But had he drank to excess in Kenosha? “By 1912 he was a hopeless alcoholic,” Charles Higham wrote of Dick Welles. But Welles was a much-chronicled public figure in Kenosha, and the local press consistently portrayed him as a model citizen. Even after Orson became famous, when he referred to his father’s alcoholism in interviews, longtime Kenoshans and family members insisted that Dick Welles drank normally, not heavily, when living in their city.
In Kenosha, Dick and Beatrice Welles seemed to have been an ideally married couple: standing together at rallies, holding hands and dancing together at holiday events, hosting memorable dinner parties in their home. Yet by the end of their first year in Chicago, there is no question that their marriage had imploded. In court papers, Beatrice was precise about the date: on February 1, 1919, after discovering that he was involved in an adulterous affair, Beatrice confronted her husband, and after a furious argument, the two stopped cohabiting that day.
It was not just one woman, either. Dick Welles had been conducting similar affairs “for a considerable time past,” according to her attestation, “with divers other lewd women.”
That reference to “lewd women” has led some to speculate that Welles’s affairs were with working girls of one kind or another: low-class chorines, perhaps, or even high-class call girls from Chicago bordellos. Court papers confirm that his lovers were not part of the Welleses’ social circle, in either Chicago or Kenosha. Their names, said Beatrice, were “unknown” to her.
In the shooting script of Citizen Kane, after the famous newsroom scene celebrating the success of the Inquirer, there is a scene in which Charles Foster Kane, Jed Leland, and Mr. Bernstein adjourn to a high-class bordello. In the script the bordello is called “Georgie’s Place”—an echo of Orson’s teasing nickname—but Welles once told John Houseman that the place was akin to Chicago’s turn-of-the-century Everleigh Club, where captains of industry like Marshall Field Jr. mingled with clientele like his father, he imagined. When Herman J. Mankiewicz, the script’s cowriter, was questioned during a lawsuit about the “Georgie’s Place” scene—which was shot but dropped from the film after censors objected to it—he became irritated. “It is my understanding,” Mankiewicz huffed, “that this is a customary thing [gentlemen frequenting a bordello] and not violently indecent.”
Not everyone would have agreed. Beatrice Welles ordered her husband off the East Pearson Street premises. Her social standing, her dignity, demanded it, but that wasn’t all. Her husband was unapologetic, and after he moved into a hotel he continued to see the particular “lewd” woman who had triggered the breakup. But the affair ran its course soon enough, and Dick Welles missed his family and regretted his indiscretion. Banishing painful memories, Beatrice relinquished their East Pearson Street home to her husband, installing herself and four-year-old Orson on nearby Superior Street, “the most fashionable apartment on the Gold Coast,” in the hyperbolic words of Dudley Crafts Watson. Still, Beatrice could not bring herself to forgive her husband, and she discouraged and restricted Dick’s visits to Superior Street. It was at this juncture, according to her divorce claims, that Dick Welles finally sank into “habitual drunkenness.”
The marital crisis coincided with another family emergency that could only have exacerbated the tensions between the couple. At the age of fourteen, Richard Ives Welles was asked to leave the Todd School, his boarding school in the town of Woodstock, sixty miles northwest of Chicago. The reasons have been lost over time. Perhaps Richard had been caught with a town girl, as Orson’s later headmaster Roger Hill theorized (though he never claimed to know firsthand). Whatever the case, it’s clear that Richard was behind in his course work, and he did not mix well with other boys.
Richard rejoined the family in Chicago around the time that his mother and father started living in separate apartments. At a loss for how to handle their son, both parents sought the counsel of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, who knew Richard well as a surgery patient and who also had mental health credentials stretching back to his first postings after medical school.
Dr. Bernstein was one of the few close family friends who had lingered in Kenosha. His marriage to Mina Elman had ended dismally, however; though Bernstein had tried to foster his bride’s musical ambitions—introducing her to musicians including Irish-born tenor John McCormack; soprano Alma Gluck; and her husband, violinist Efrem Zimbalist—Mina lacked professional ability, and her singing career never took flight. The couple lived together for only a few months before Mina moved out of their Library Park house in April 1917. Their divorce was finalized one year later in July. Dr. Bernstein maintained ties to the local Jewish community and the municipal government, and he kept up with Kenosha patients; with his brother, he even briefly launched a soft-drink distribution company from the same Main Street address as his office. But he made increasingly frequent trips to Chicago, and gradually shifted his practice there.
Now, at this critical hour, Dr. Bernstein became not only the family physician for all situations, but also an intermediary between the estranged Dick and Beatrice Welles. Bernstein concluded that Richard had mental or emotional problems, and he told young Richard’s parents that he thought the boy should be enrolled in a Chicago preparatory school closer to home and watched carefully.
Together Beatrice and Dick Welles decided on the Latin School of Chicago, the city’s premier prep school, on the near North Side. Although Beatrice never forgave her husband’s betrayal, their shared devotion to their children kept the marriage together—if in name only.
Striving to regain her artistic footing in Chicago, Beatrice resumed piano lessons with her former teacher Julia Lois Caruthers. She took on a few pupils in piano and spoken-word performance. She built up a fresh repertoire of recital pieces and reconnected with women’s club patrons in Chicago and along the North Shore. Her cousin Dudley Crafts Watson, who had encouraged her to leave Kenosha, promised engagements for her at the Milwaukee Art Institute.
Refashioning herself as an elocutionist was part of her plan. Female elocutionists thrived in progressive women’s clubs throughout America in the early twentieth century. As the feminist scholar Marian Wilson Kimber has noted, elocution was considered a respectable and womanly art for public purposes, while also serving as a means of entertainment and education in the home. Beatrice had been gravitating toward this specialty during her last years in Kenosha, and in Chicago several of her students, whom she mentored, combined music and elocution in their performance pieces; these pupils included Ann Birk Kuper and Phyllis Fergus. Kuper went on to a long career in dramatic recitals throughout the Midwest, and Fergus became even more acclaimed as a spoken-word diseuse and composer who specialized in “story poems” for speaker and piano. A founding member of the Society of American Women Composers, Fergus organized concerts by female composers at the White House; her several dozen published works included piano and violin solos and choral music for women’s voices.
In April 1920, two years after her last public performance, Beatrice returned in a Lake View Musical Society recital in the Parkway Hotel ballroom. The highlight of the recital was a new piece by Phyllis Fergus blending two violinists, a contralto, and Fergus’s piano accompaniment, with Beatrice declaiming the verse of Natalie Whitted Price, a l
ocal suffragist and published poet. Beatrice’s dark, mellifluous voice was perfectly matched to Fergus’s intricate compositions, and the Lake View Musical Society event launched Fergus’s career, with Beatrice the star elocutionist of her earliest programs. The Women’s League Candlelight Musicale devoted an entire evening to Fergus’s compositions in February 1921, with Beatrice reading the poetry of Robert Browning, Edmund Vance Cooke, and again Natalie Whitted Price; Beatrice’s vivid rendering of Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” was the centerpiece. Beatrice and Phyllis Fergus took variations of this playbill to many ladies’ organizations that formed a constellation leading up the North Shore. Their tour brought them to the Milwaukee Art Institute in March 1921.
Their ascent was interrupted in June 1921, when Phyllis Fergus married the Chicago steel and iron broker Thatcher Hoyt and took a several-year break from performing.
Young Orson would celebrate his fifth birthday in May 1920. Short and chubby, the boy had dark lanky hair that fell over soulful brown eyes staring above a snub nose. Although his mother dressed him in cutesy sailor suits, in truth he was already a budding sophisticate.
By some accounts, Orson Welles had first appeared onstage at the tender age of three, in the role of Trouble, the child of Madame Butterfly, in the August 1918 production of Puccini’s opera at Ravinia, the outdoor venue in Highland Park. More recently, the boy had pocketed $10 for greeting shoppers at Marshall Field’s department store in downtown Chicago; he was dressed as the White Rabbit and exclaimed, “Oh, I must hurry—or else it will be too late to see the woolen underwear on the eighth floor!” He was a born showman, and from the beginning no job was beneath him: $10 was $10, especially to a boy whose parents had separated and who became a pawn in the conflict between them, often a conflict over money.
During Orson’s earliest years in Chicago, that rift was often bridged by Dr. Maurice Bernstein. The doctor had an office on Michigan Avenue and an apartment on Chicago Avenue, one block north of Superior, where little Orson lived with his mother. Childless himself, Dr. Bernstein made himself indispensable to Beatrice, joining her and little Orson on regular outings, but he also accompanied Orson on many excursions with his father. In time, the doctor became a kind of bonus member of the family: a companionable fellow, reliably humorous, the king of bad jokes. Everyone liked him, even Dick Welles. Orson was encouraged to call Bernstein “Dadda,” a term of affection that has struck some of Welles’s biographers as a slight toward Dick Welles, but which may have been the child’s contraction of “doctor.” As for Bernstein, he dubbed Orson “Pookles,” and they were Dadda and Pookles to each other for most of their lives.
Over time, some wondered whether Beatrice Welles and Bernstein ever transcended the bounds of friendship. It was true that Dr. Bernstein “left Kenosha to be near my mother,” Welles said. Nostalgic about his early career in Kenosha, the doctor always pined for the small Wisconsin city that was his personal Rosebud, “a paradise he’d lost,” according to Welles. “My mother used to make heartless fun of that.” Though Dr. Bernstein adored Beatrice, she was merely fond of him, Welles thought.
Later, as he embellished Orson’s life story for publicity purposes, Dr. Bernstein had a habit of leaving out the boy’s parents. In his telling, it was Bernstein who took little Orson to the museum, who bought him his first conductor’s baton, puppet show, magic kit. But the truth is that Orson’s early years were dominated by Beatrice, who would make the grade as an outstanding mother to her second son. She took charge of Orson’s intellectual and artistic development, sharing works of classic literature with him as bedtime reading. These early reading sessions gave him an adult vocabulary, along with early training in the memorization and recitation skills that were his mother’s forte. Beatrice loved old-fashioned story poems like Noyse’s “The Highwayman” or “Barbara Frietchie” by John Greenleaf Whittier, but also drew her bedtime repertoire from “the poetry of Swinburne, Rosetti, Keats, Tennyson, Tagore and Walt Whitman,” according to Peter Noble’s The Fabulous Orson Welles.2
Orson’s mother also read to him daily from Charles and Mary Lamb’s two-volume Tales from Shakespeare, an illustrated English compendium of the comedies and tragedies, simplified for children. (Orson eventually grew old enough to demand “the real thing,” Noble wrote, probably exaggerating.) A Midsummer Night’s Dream was always Beatrice’s favorite Shakespeare play, and by Orson’s third birthday, Noble claimed, she had switched to reading from the actual text. This play became “my reading primer,” Orson recalled, though his mother drummed it into him so thoroughly that he contrived to avoid it professionally throughout his career. It was one Shakespeare masterpiece he never acted in or directed.
Beatrice prized painting too, and so by the time he was five Orson had received his first paint kit, a gift of easel, brushes, and colors from his mother’s friend Lorado Taft, the eminent Chicago sculptor. Orson was often taken to the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, where he was encouraged to ponder the works of the masters and mimic them as best he could on his sketch pad. His mother was acquainted with many of the museum’s visiting artists, such as Russian painter Nikolay Roerich, who presided over a major Chicago exhibition in 1920, and the painter and stage designer Boris Anisfeld. Little Orson was encouraged to ask the celebrated artists questions about their work, as an adult would, and he drew and painted even on his own time, precociously and happily. “That’s what I loved most,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich ruefully. “Always. If only I’d been better at it.”
Imbuing her son with a love of music was another of Beatrice Welles’s priorities. Orson received regular violin and piano lessons, and attended the symphony, opera, and ballet in company with his mother, or Dr. Bernstein, or both together. Beatrice, convinced that Orson should learn piano not from his mother but from an outside teacher, enlisted Phyllis Fergus Hoyt to give him instruction in an upstairs room at the Hoyts’ residence on North State Parkway. Orson liked to say that he eventually grew so weary of the “endlessly repeated musical scales” that he threatened to hurl himself out a window. Alarmed, Phyllis rushed to tell his mother, who was waiting in an anteroom. Beatrice rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, just tell him to go ahead!” “She had to kill my act, you see,” Welles explained years later to his daughter Chris Welles Feder. But Welles was genuinely fond of Phyllis Fergus Hoyt; decades later, spotting her in a New York hotel lobby, he rushed up and gave her a bear hug.
The beauty of Orson Welles’s upbringing, however, may be in how Beatrice filled in her own gaps. She carefully organized and overloaded Orson’s time, making sure he was always constructively occupied. Part of her strategy was fobbing him off regularly on childless acquaintances who were “good influences”—friends and relatives who knew her mind and shared her values, broadening the safety net for this boy from a newly broken home.
She counted on Orson’s father, and Dr. Bernstein, to expose Orson to boyish interests and popular culture. While his mother read masterworks to him, the two men took him to Kroch’s, the big downtown bookstore, and loaded him up with adventure tales, spy thrillers, and whodunits. Dick Welles was devoted to musicals and vaudeville acts and the big touring magic shows that came to Chicago and took over the downtown theaters for a week. Beatrice rolled her eyes at too much magic, but the mentalists intrigued her, and if Orson was happy she was happy.
One of Dick Welles’s heroes was the magician Harry Thurston, who performed annually in Chicago. The Great Thurston, as he styled himself, had been on the circuit since before the Great War, working his way up from a one-man card-trick act to the host of an extravaganza complete with scantily clad female assistants, small furry animals that popped out of strange places, and forty tons of apparatus. Harry Houdini’s greatest contemporary rival, Thurston considered himself a greater success with the public: “America’s most popular magician.”
Thurston was small of stature, but one of his achievements was transforming himself into a charismatic spellbinder onstage. His originally affectless
midwestern speech was said to have been honed at the Moody Bible Institute, and his hypnotic patter masterfully misdirected the audience’s attention as he wove his illusionist wonders. His musical voice rippled, purled, and enchanted, stretching out each syllable to mesmerizing effect. While assuring his audience that he loved them, and that “I wouldn’t deceive you for the world” (a line Orson later adopted for his unfinished film “The Magic Show”), the Great Thurston fooled his audiences time and again.
“I idolized him,” Welles recalled. “He was the finest magician I’ve ever seen.”
Another favorite of Dick Welles’s was the equally formidable Okito, who started out in the Great Thurston’s act. Okito was the stage name of Theodore Bamberg, the Dutch-born patriarch of a family of magicians. Billed as “Europe’s greatest shadowist,” Okito appeared in immaculate evening attire and cape, and dominated the stage entirely with his fingers and hands, projecting fantastic shadow figures on a blank screen—not unlike what Charles Foster Kane does in Citizen Kane to amuse Susan Alexander on their first evening together.
Dick Welles always made his way backstage to meet the touring magicians, and to wangle a few magic lessons for his boy. Okito lived in Chicago for periods between his world tours, and from these great magicians and others—later to include Harry Houdini—the impressionable boy eagerly absorbed lessons in bluff and patter and poise.
He was usually able to talk one parent or the other into a moving picture matinee, especially in his mother’s case if the show was a literary adaptation or could be otherwise defined as uplifting. Orson never lost his boyhood affection for Allan Dwan’s Robin Hood, whose stars, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, attended the film’s 1922 premiere in Chicago. “I was batty about Robin Hood and The Three Musketeers,” Orson told Peter Bogdanovich. “Fairbanks was my idol.” He had a similar fondness for the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. “I still see Lon Chaney as I saw him when I was eight years old,” Welles told Henry Jaglom. “Everything he did I adore.”
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 10