Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (5 page)

Under the elder George Yule’s management, Bain Wagon Works would stay independent of Badger Brass, but the established company’s gradual changeover from wagons to modern vehicles was closely intertwined with the new lamp-making concern. By virtue of age, experience, and money, George A. Yule was the senior partner. Dick Welles was the next-largest investor, however, sinking a good deal of his remaining inheritance into Badger Brass. Together the two men owned three-fifths of the new company, initially capitalized at a reported $25,000.

In the coming years Orson Welles’s father was listed variously as the secretary or treasurer of Badger Brass, but from the first he was a key member of the operation and did a little of everything. When he wasn’t traveling to promote the product and firm up contracts, Dick Welles worked daily at the first plant on the corner of Elizabeth and Pleasant. The business ignited like a firecracker, and within two years of its founding Badger Brass boasted ninety employees and had sold more than 200,000 exclusive Solar lamps around the globe.

The wild years of youth were over for Dick Welles, now ensconced with his mother and her husband at Rudolphsheim. He was not yet thirty years of age. Though his son later described him from memory as “a little small-boned man,” Dick was about five feet ten and of medium build, with thin brown hair, dark amber eyes, and a winning smile that lit up his round face like a pumpkin. The young adventurer and
bon viveur
(one of Orson’s pet descriptions of him) had transformed himself into a well-respected businessman who seemed to represent Kenosha’s shining future. Welles was an early proponent of better roads for bicycles and automobiles, and joined fund-raising campaigns for hospitals, city parks, and the city’s crown jewel: its library. He was among the organizers of the Kenosha Country Club. Like Eugene Morgan in
The Magnificent Ambersons
, Welles was a dedicated cigar smoker who favored an inexpensive brand made exclusively for him by a Chicago company. (Amused friends dubbed the budget brand the “Dick Wells.”) On special occasions, however—including the day Badger Brass was incorporated, and the day of George Orson Welles’s birth in 1915—he was known to light up a Havana.

His youth—and flair—set Dick Welles apart from other city leaders. When the very first automobile appeared on Kenosha’s streets in 1899, Welles was behind the wheel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the car was one of Thomas B. Jeffery’s new Ramblers, and the stunt publicized Jeffery’s sale of his bicycle firm in Chicago. Welles had persuaded Jeffery to shift from bicycles to automobiles and move his operations to Kenosha, manufacturing his Ramblers on a national scale—and contracting to buy all its headlights from Badger Brass.

As he turned thirty in 1902, Dick Welles was being whispered about as the consensus candidate for mayor among local Republicans, still the liberal party of Lincoln.

Rudolphsheim was the center of a social whirl that included the Gottfredsens and other well-known Kenosha settler families, many of whom were related through marriage. The larger Pabst Brewing Company of Milwaukee had absorbed the Gottfredsen Brewery, and Frederick Gottfredsen now managed the Kenosha branch of Pabst. Mary Gottfredsen hosted the Dickens Club and artistic discussion groups and musical afternoons at Rudolphsheim. She led theater parties to Racine, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Orson Welles’s maternal grandmother had transferred her religious allegiance from the Episcopalians to the Unitarians, the most open-minded church in Kenosha.

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 Welleses 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.