It was his mother who took Orson to Robert Flaherty’s pioneering Nanook of the North, the feature-length documentary about Eskimo life in the Canadian Arctic. Welles never forgot how he was bowled over by Nanook, and by another Flaherty documentary, set in Ireland, Man of Aran, which he saw at a later time. Orson never lost his nostalgia for these and other early silent moving pictures, among the most sophisticated of their era, which he saw in the company of his parents.
Little Orson was scarcely thinking of a stage or screen career in 1920. At the age of five, he was a more likely candidate to be a painter or musician. He had real talent in violin and piano, and friends of his mother treated him as “a sort of imitation musical Wunderkind,” in his words. His mother’s small ensemble and other music groups rehearsed at their apartment, and the boy stood in front of them as they played their instruments, waving his toy baton. He sometimes performed on his instruments for his mother’s dinner guests, who were luminaries passing through Chicago.
Beatrice’s many “brilliant dinner parties” featured these luminaries “chiefly of the theater and the music world,” according to Dudley Crafts Watson, “sometimes eighteen or twenty in number.” By age six Orson was permitted to stay up late and sit in on the luminary dinners, as long as he cooperated by taking an afternoon nap. He sometimes obliged the nap, but he never went down easily at night. After getting a good night kiss, he’d follow his mother into her bedroom, talking a blue streak until she escorted him back to his room with strict instructions to go to bed after he finished whatever poem or sketch he was working on. Then he’d follow her back again, talking and talking until finally she fell asleep, often waking up the next morning with little Orson curled up beside her, snoring.
In April 1922, Beatrice and Dr. Bernstein hosted a dinner in honor of the poet, playwright, and Shakespeare authority Louis K. Anspacher, who was visiting Chicago for a lecture. Orson, almost seven, sat alongside his cousin Dudley, whom he thought of as “Uncle” Dudley, and Russian sculptor Boris Lovet-Lorski, taking in their high-flown conversation. The new Jacques Gordon String Quartet, which his mother championed, performed for the guests.
Recalling the celebrities who passed through his Chicago home in his youth, Welles liked to believe that some of them, such as the opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin, had designs on his beloved mother. “I’ve always suspected [Chaliapin] was my father because he had a big love affair with my mother at the time when it would have counted,” Welles mused in his phone talks with Roger Hill. “He looks a lot more like I do than my father did.” It didn’t matter that the opera singer was actually nowhere near his mother, or even the Midwest, when Orson was conceived. The important thing was that Chaliapin, who came straight from the opera stage to the Welles apartment wearing his costume, showed a paternal interest in the boy, bouncing him on his knee, at a time when Dick Welles was persona non grata in the household. “While I prayed to God as a little child,” Welles mused, “I always prayed to Chaliapin dressed for Boris Godunov.”
Welles enjoyed imagining his mother’s illustrious flings; and on another occasion, he hinted that Beatrice may have enjoyed a liaison with Enrico Caruso as well. (The filmmaker in him also imagined a possible extramarital romance for Charles Foster Kane’s mother: it is there deep in the backstory of Citizen Kane, just a hint of Mary Kane’s affair with the boarder who leaves her his fortune—a boarder who might well have been Kane’s real father.)
Whatever their relationship with Beatrice, the visiting luminaries doted on little Orson, seeing in the exuberant boy a reflection of his charming, talented mother—and, perhaps, of themselves as children. A marvel of a boy, little Orson could draw and paint, play the violin and piano, recite verse and drama, sit and listen to artistic shoptalk, and sometimes chip in thoughtfully during the adults’ conversations. He might even crawl into a famous guest’s lap and fall asleep. Dr. Bernstein thought the adorable, mischievous boy was a genius, and said so. His mother merely smiled. “The word genius was whispered into my ear the first thing I ever heard while I was still mewling in my crib,” Welles said, “so it never occurred to me that I wasn’t until middle age.”
The other Welles boy, Richard, did not thrive at Chicago Latin, where he was repeating the eighth grade he’d failed to finish at the Todd School. Indeed, in the spring of 1921 another malady struck the fifteen-year-old, and he was sent home to the care of Dr. Bernstein. Richard claimed later to have aggravated his previous leg fracture, but it is hard to know.
Orson’s older brother was already a smooth confabulator. Later, Richard would boast that he excelled in his home studies, that his grades in French and Latin should have been solid enough for high school credit. But despite the attention and encouragement that came with home schooling, Richard never did complete his course requirements. “No work done by Richard Welles in the Chicago Latin School could possibly be construed as High School Work,” an administrator there wrote in his file. “He missed almost the whole of our Eighth Grade and was never in our High School. It is true that we have French and Latin in our Eighth Grade, but the amount done by him was not enough to constitute a credit in any sense.”
His parents placed their last bet on Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, originally located in Highland Park, but operating since 1915 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where both his parents had summered in days past. Richard was enrolled for the fall term at the academy in 1921, but almost immediately he was sent back to Chicago. The problem, it seems, went beyond adolescent maladjustment; surviving medical records suggest the investigation of a cord lesion, or a central lesion contained within the skull, which could cause mood swings and right side weaknesses. To address the problem, Dr. Bernstein recommended an operation, although its exact nature—and, indeed, whether Bernstein performed it himself—is unclear.
In early November, Dr. Bernstein wrote to inform Northwestern Academy that the operation had been a success. “There were no evidences of an organic nervous lesion,” the doctor said. “The spinal puncture showed clear fluid, and the electrical tests showed no degenerative changes in the muscles. We have, therefore, made a diagnosis of a functional nerve condition, possibly concussion of the spine. He is making a very rapid improvement regaining function in all his muscles. I expect that he will return to school either at the end of next week, or the beginning of the following week. This will undoubtedly relieve your mind of the contagious nature of his trouble.”
The academy furnished a history outline and English and geometry study guides so that the sixteen-year-old could keep up with his education at home. Bernstein assured school officials that Richard was physically sound, though “the muscles of [his] right side have not fully regained their tone and it will be necessary for him to sleep indoors and avoid cold baths or showers.” Mentally, however, the teenager suffered from a neurosis or hysteria that combined periods of high excitement with low discouragement. “I am sending him back to school at this early date, because there is a psychological aspect to a condition of this character that requires a care that you and your splendid school are best able to give him.
“The boy has, of course, suffered a severe mental shock [possibly from the operation], and the remedy is to keep his mind absolutely free from dwelling on this illness. I would suggest that even his periods of full time be indefinitely occupied for a while. It is difficult to tell how much actual soreness and fatigue he will experience when he gets into active school life.”
It was not to be: Richard never returned to Northwestern Academy, or any other school. After coming home from the hospital, he shuttled between his parents’ apartments. Beatrice Welles all but threw up her hands. She was increasingly preoccupied with the boundlessly energetic Orson and her own blossoming career as an elocutionist; convinced that what Richard needed was a father’s strong example, she tossed the gauntlet to her estranged husband.
In the spirit of healing and reconciliation, Dick Welles proposed that the entire family spend the month of June vacationing togeth
er in Grand Detour, Illinois. Beatrice agreed.
A short drive from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the village of Grand Detour—named for the Rock River’s loop around it—was an escape from the summer heat for Chicagoans. Artists from hundreds of miles around were drawn to the picturesque river and elm-shaded streets of the town, called the “Hudson of the West” by feminist author Margaret Fuller. The Chicago Art Institute painter Charles Francis Browne presided over summer classes there. Nearby, on the river’s east bank, stood Eagle’s Nest Bluff, the home of an artists’ colony founded before the turn of the century by a group of Chicago artists and architects led by Lorado Taft, whose towering statue of Sauk Indian leader Black Hawk loomed over the compound.
Having made trips through Grand Detour many times on their way back and forth to Lake Geneva, Dick and Beatrice Welles both felt a connection to the place, and the couple took a rental cabin on the north side of the main bridge. Dr. Bernstein came along as an escort for Beatrice and Orson, but also to monitor Richard’s behavior. The family was hoping that a summer in peaceful Grand Detour might help Richard regain his physical and mental health. Regular long walks, fishing, and river recreation were arranged, along with day trips to the nearby towns of Oregon and Dixon for circuses, county fairs, and moving pictures. Richard enjoyed painting almost as much as Orson, and because of the lifelong gulf between them, they never spent as much concentrated time in each other’s company as during these weeks.
But the vacation was marred by Dick and Beatrice Welles’s persistent quarrels, often revolving around finances. Dick Welles controlled the purse strings for Beatrice’s household, and she regarded her separation allowance as inadequate. Dick balked at underwriting Beatrice’s many dinner parties, music lessons, monthly masseuse appointments, and frequent travel for functions and performances. Nor did he wish to pay for the nanny, Sigrid Jacobsen, who helped her tend to seven-year-old Orson, and also handled sewing and domestic chores.
The couple’s attempt at peacemaking failed, and shortly after July 4, Beatrice and little Orson departed for Highland Park, where they often stayed with the Chicago Tribune music critics Edward “Ned” Moore and his wife, Hazel—at first just for weekends, but by 1922, Beatrice’s stays stretched through most of July and August. Dr. Bernstein, another long-standing friend of the Moores, accompanied Orson and his mother.
This was the first golden age of Ravinia, the beautiful all-purpose park that sprawled across thirty-six woodland acres in Highland Park, twenty-five miles north of Chicago. Since its debut just before the Great War, Ravinia’s ambitious summer program of grand opera and symphony performances had attracted classical music lovers from around the world. The 1922 summer season would reach a peak with thirty-one opera productions—a “colossal achievement,” Edward Moore observed in the Tribune, “even when some are cut to accommodate the Ravinia traditions of time in and time out.”
“Uncle Ned” and “Aunt Hazel” spent the summer hosting musicians, opera singers, and other friends in their large house on Kincaid Street in Highland Park, a suburb of lakefront mansions, forested estates, and bohemian hideaways. A Wisconsin native in his mid-forties, Moore was a witty, discerning critic and a composer himself. He and his wife, who had no children of their own, doted on Beatrice and little Orson. Another fixture at Ravinia was the museum director and “art evangelist” Dudley Crafts Watson, Beatrice’s cousin, who summered with his own family near the Moores. The Moores’ guests included many of the prima donnas, or divas—and their male counterparts—from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, who enchanted Ravinia audiences during the summer, when the Met was dark. The leads that summer in Ravinia included Alice Gentle, Claire Dux, Queena Mario, Edith Mason, tenor Mario Chamlee, who had come to the fore in the opera world after Caruso’s death in 1921, and Chamlee’s wife, Ruth Miller. They gathered at the Moores’ dinner table, the mere mortals genuflecting before the divine performers—“diva” derived from the Italian word for “goddess.” The divas’ elaborate airs and posturing, their scandals and messy private lives, even their tantrums, were all forgiven in deference to their artistry.
Also collecting around the Moores’ table were Uncle Ned’s Chicago newspaper colleagues, including Charles Collins of the Chicago Tribune, Eugene Stinson of the Daily News, Herman De Vries of the American, Felix Borowoski of the Record-Herald, and Ashton Stevens of the Herald-Examiner. Stevens was a slender, dashing critic who came from a family of actors and impresarios in San Francisco and Hollywood. A lifelong theater fan, he had seen Edwin Booth’s Hamlet as a boy and had interviewed all the famous stage artists—Richard Mansfield, Mrs. Fiske, the Drews, the Barrymores, Laurette Taylor, Ina Claire. Also knowledgeable about music, he wrote the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the banjo, and once gave banjo lessons to none other than William Randolph Hearst, who was spurred to employ Stevens at the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Evening Journal before anchoring him at the Chicago Examiner. Stevens had a three-decade store of Hearst anecdotes, replenished several times a year when the publisher stopped by to see his old banjo teacher during his Chicago visits.
Dick Welles’s experiment in reconciliation with Beatrice that summer had fizzled—their discord continued and he rarely visited Ravinia nowadays—but in the stimulating atmosphere of the Moore household, full of show business anecdotes, little Orson found a different kind of close family. As at his mother’s artistic salon in Chicago, Orson had a seat at the table along with the bright, fascinating adults—provided that he had napped, of course—and he learned to be equally adept at piping up or listening quietly. Uncle Ned loved the boy, and more than one Chicago newspaper would describe Orson as “Ed Moore’s protégé.” But in a sense, he was everyone’s.
CHAPTER 4
1922–1926
A Great Shock
In the fall of 1922, moved by his ardent enthusiasm for singing, juggling, and magic, Orson’s older brother announced that he was going to join a vaudeville troupe. In the first of his vanishing acts, teenage Richard Welles packed a bag and went on the road.
Their failed idyll in Grand Detour, and Richard’s disappearance, cast a shadow over the family. On October 13, not long after returning from Ravinia and almost three years after she and Dick had separated, Beatrice Welles filed for divorce. Orson recalled listening “quietly the night of their last quarrel,” Barbara Leaming wrote, “after which, by mutual agreement, Dick and Beatrice separated forever. Orson was neither surprised nor terribly shaken.”
“When they separated,” Leaming quoted the filmmaker as recalling, “I felt no partisanship.” After all, he explained, the divorce meant receiving “twice the love” from his parents.
In her divorce claim, Beatrice accused her husband of drunkenness and philandering, while affirming her own comportment as a “true, faithful, chaste, and affectionate” spouse who had “treated him kindly and affectionately” throughout their almost twenty-year marriage. But it was Dick Welles’s parsimoniousness that had forced Beatrice’s hand. In her divorce filing, she estimated that her husband owned “stocks, bonds and other securities” worth $150,000, and collected another $8,000 annually from his investments, while she herself was “possessed of no property, either real or personal,” and had “no means wherewith to support herself or children.” Closely watched by their friends in the press and high society, the case was reported on page one of the Chicago Herald and Examiner’s city section. Tellingly, Beatrice was represented by a Chicago public defender.
If Dick Welles worried about other men pursuing Beatrice, she did little to allay his fears, suggesting that the count grant her an annulment so that she might be “at liberty to marry again” if the opportunity arose. She also threatened to secure “sole care, custody and education” of her two sons—Richard, who had just turned seventeen; and seven-year-old Orson. If her husband refused to accept her financial demands, she said, she would carry through with the suit. But the record of their dispute is one-sided, as Dick Welles filed no rebuttal to the claim
. It’s clear that he opposed the divorce, but his silence in response is a mystery. Was Orson’s father afraid that open-court testimony about his drinking and womanizing would invite scandal? And what bothered him more: the possibility of forfeiting some of his money, or the threat that his children would be taken away from him?
The answer came within ten days of Beatrice’s filing, when the divorce petition was abruptly withdrawn and dismissed. Dick Welles had turned over to his wife fifty shares each of Goodrich Rubber and Utah Copper, and agreed to deposit a specified monthly sum into Beatrice’s bank account, making her financially stable and independent.
From that point forward, the couple would meet mainly for crises and special occasions. But their divorce was never finalized. Perhaps Dick Welles hoped for one last chance to redeem himself in Beatrice’s eyes.
At the Milwaukee Art Institute, among the many programs launched by museum director Dudley Crafts Watson were his own acclaimed “music picture symphonies,” a series of informative and entertaining lectures on foreign art and architecture accompanied by stereopticon slides from Watson’s travels to European landmarks and more exotic locales including Morocco and Egypt. Watson invited Beatrice to provide piano accompaniment to his main attraction, an opportunity that afforded her a small fee and exposure for her talent.
Their first joint presentation was scheduled for a Sunday in early January 1923, soon after her divorce suit was withdrawn. Beatrice rehearsed long and hard for the program of Wagner, MacDowell, and “very modern compositions by hitherto unknown Spanish and French composers,” according to a Milwaukee newspaper, performing behind Watson as he expounded on Montsalvat and the Holy Grail, illustrating his lecture with his stereopticon slides. This event at the Milwaukee museum was greeted so warmly that the two were able to bring it to women’s clubs in Wisconsin and the Chicago suburbs. Beatrice adored her erudite cousin, even if others found him stuffy, and for a time the two of them were a happy team on the road, with little Orson and his nanny sometimes tagging along.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 11