Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (16 page)

Influenced by Tagore’s mysticism, Beatrice developed “a calm of understanding” about her life, according to Dr. Maurice Bernstein. Turning forty, the woman who once wrote a meditation on a child’s death now reflected on her own mortality. “She somehow knew that her life line was not long, and therefore talked constantly about what life had in store for all of us,” Dr. Bernstein recalled. She grew interested in “the other world: the world of infinity and the preservation of the spirit. She was a great believer in the order of the universe, its moral and spiritual expressions. She constantly speculated about reincarnation and wondered if people come back to the earth with the experience of a former existence. . . .

“She believed,” Bernstein continued, “that we come back richer with each return to this life. When she would hear of someone going on [dying], she would say perhaps it is but they have outlived their usefulness. She did not fear death.”

Inspired by Tagore, Beatrice launched yet another artistic reinvention of herself. Early in 1923, she sat for a Hyde Park photographer who took portraits of Chicago musicians and stage personalities. Having her piano tuned by the most qualified expert in the tristate region, who came from Iowa to tune her Steinway grand piano, she plunged into a fresh round of lessons with Julia Lois Caruthers, preparing a novel form of recital that would combine her pianism, her elocution skills, and her newfound identification with spirituality and foreign cultures.

But her plans were interrupted in May 1923 when she went into the hospital for an undisclosed operation. Perhaps she underwent a hysterectomy—a fairly common procedure in those days for women over forty, sometimes as an elective preventive measure, at other times to remove malignant tumors. The operation was performed by Dr. Charles Kahlke, head of the Chicago Surgical Society, and a founder of and chief of staff at Chicago Memorial Hospital, where her surgery took place.

As part of her recovery, and in the spirit of their recent truce, Beatrice accepted Dick Welles’s invitation to bring the family back to Grand Detour for a few weeks in June. Dick, still legally Beatrice’s husband, said he was thinking about buying a hotel.

The larger of Grand Detour’s two hotels was the Sheffield, at an intersection of Route 2, the serpentine road connecting northern Illinois with southern Wisconsin, lying adjacent to the John Deere homestead, site of America’s first plow factory. The hotel, an L-shaped, two-story wood-frame building with more than thirty guest rooms, was owned by Charles Sheffield, a local character whose big smile and overalls fixed with a safety pin masked the fact that he was among the area’s wealthiest citizens. By the early 1920s Charlie Sheffield was getting on in years, and had started talking about selling the hotel, but he was taking forever to make his move, and Dick Welles was trying to nudge him toward the sale. Beatrice, in turn, encouraged her long-idle husband, cheered that he was contemplating a return to business.

The hotel arranged boating and fishing for guests, who also had the use of a croquet green and tennis court. There was sunbathing across the highway on the shore of the Rock River, with nearby whirlpool rocks. Artists, business travelers, and farmers came from miles around for the weekend fried chicken and catfish suppers, famous throughout Ogle County.

Seventeen-year-old Richard was back that summer, though no one knew for how long. Dick Welles bunked with his sons at the hotel, while Beatrice and the omnipresent Dr. Maurice Bernstein stayed in a rented colonial house nearby. Richard was an agreeable fellow on the surface, according to people in Grand Detour, and his parents both hoped he would commit to a regular job and begin to support himself. But the often contrary Richard now changed his mind, writing letters to various colleges pleading for admission. Though his letters were heartfelt, they were also full of misspellings, and when Chicago Latin and Northwestern Academy were asked for his references and transcripts, the schools had no choice but to report that the young man never had satisfied their requisites.

The ten-year age difference between Richard and Orson was like that between Dick Welles and his half brother, Jacob Rudolph Gottfredsen, with much the same consequences. Their lives barely intertwined during Orson’s boyhood, and Richard’s problems went over Orson’s head most of the time. Although they set up their easels and painted alongside each other, their relationship was not close.

Richard’s mysterious afflictions and difficult temperament made his parents all the more anxious to coddle Orson, whose every illness was regarded as life threatening. Dr. Bernstein, who was consulted about the boy’s slightest twinge, fostered the impression that Orson was “sickly.” Welles told his biographer Barbara Leaming that he was born with anomalies of the spine—Bernstein specialized in these—and his other childhood conditions and illnesses, chronicled with more or less accuracy in other books, included sinus headaches, hay fever, asthma, diphtheria, scarlet fever, mumps, malaria, weak ankles, and flat feet. There was nothing too out of the ordinary about this list, but over time the general preoccupation with his health made Orson an opportunist, more than once faking illness when it was to his advantage.

For Beatrice Welles, who believed in the benefits of outdoor life and physical culture, a stay in the country was a tonic. Orson would inherit his mother’s attachment to nature, more than once in his life disappearing into the wilds to recharge himself. Life in Grand Detour was not as stimulating for Richard, however, and as his college prospects dwindled, he started talking about going on the road again. Dr. Bernstein had come to see Richard as delusional, in need of serious medical treatment. His parents hoped the doctor was wrong, but they wrung their hands over Richard. When Beatrice left for Ravinia in July, taking little Orson and Dr. Bernstein with her, Richard quickly fell out with his father, wangled some money out of him, and disappeared again.

When Orson and his mother returned from Highland Park and Ravinia to Chicago in the fall of 1923, Beatrice immersed herself in rehearsals for a Milwaukee Art Institute presentation intended to introduce the bold shift in her career that had been delayed by her operation. This “interpretative concert combining poetry and music” was her first advertised solo recital in years, and the first in which she reclaimed her maiden name in her billing: Beatrice Ives Welles.

A crowd of Milwaukeeans with friends and guests from Chicago and the North Shore gathered that Sunday in mid-November for an afternoon of readings from Tagore and original compositions “of the most delicate and colorful imagination,” according to Catherine Pannill Mead, the music editor of the
Milwaukee Sentinel.
The performance featured cantillation—ritual chanting—and “various charming Spanish dance rhythms,” Mead wrote. “Mrs. Wells [
sic
] is happily the owner of an exceptionally musical speaking voice,” and “is very lovely to look at.”

No doubt her eight-year-old son, Orson, was in the audience that day, immaculately suited with garters and a pressed handkerchief, witnessing what would be the apogee of his mother’s career. In public, however, Beatrice took care not to favor Orson above his brother. In her only known reference to her son in her entire career as a public figure, she supplied this tidbit for the publicity release about her triumphant solo appearance in Milwaukee: “Her interest at the present time is divided between two very talented sons and recitals in and about Chicago.”

After the New Year, Dick Welles brought Orson to New York in what was becoming an annual tradition. Dick took the boy to a matinee of
Hamlet
starring John Barrymore, and after the performance escorted him backstage to greet the actor. Orson’s father had known Barrymore for years, through many backstage visits and postshow revels.

When Orson returned to Chicago, his mother was waiting for him with tickets to a tenth-anniversary screening of D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation.
Her cousin Dudley Crafts Watson, who also wore the hat of film critic for the
Milwaukee Free Press
, where he hailed Griffith as “the genius of his craft,” had urged her to go. The sweeping dramatization of events of the Civil War and Reconstruction was playing in her favorite theater, the Auditorium, backed by a full orchestra including many of her musician friends.
The Birth of a Nation
may have been controversial for its racist distortions of American history, but it was also groundbreaking and thrilling for its time, and Orson always spoke admiringly of Griffith.

“Did his films exert an influence on you, do you think?” Peter Bogdanovich asked him.

“He’s influenced everyone who’s ever made a movie,” Welles replied firmly.

Welles was sensitive about the image of his mother as an overly solemn personality—an artist who was serious to the point of pretension. He liked to point out to interviewers that she was also “a great practical joker”—another of her traits that he folded into his own personality. “She used to take a long piece of cord,” Welles told David Frost, “and she was such a dignified lady, if she came to a street corner and said to a man, ‘Would you hold this, please,’ he would hold it. Then she’d go around to the other side of the street corner and find someone and say, ‘Would you hold this, please.’ That was her idea of a fun thing to do. She was so dignified, the men would be standing there all afternoon thinking, ‘She told me I must hold it.’ ”

The success of her Milwaukee recital fanned Beatrice’s ambitions. She brushed up with Julia Lois Caruthers, the Hyde Park man shot new publicity portraits in January, and the tristate piano tuner returned. She had a brochure printed touting a planned fall tour of her Asian-influenced interpretative poetry and music, with dates in the Midwest and prospectively all the way to New York. But before the tour, early that summer, she was hoping to make her first trip to Europe. Beatrice’s cousin Dudley Crafts Watson had left the Milwaukee Art Institute to join the staff of the Art Institute of Chicago, and one of his initiatives was organizing overseas tours for art lovers. He planned to lead the first such trip in June, and Beatrice, Dick Welles, and Dr. Maurice Bernstein—demonstrating their esprit de corps—all paid deposits for the excursion.

One of Watson’s last days at the Milwaukee Art Institute was April 20, Easter Sunday, and it was announced that Beatrice would appear in his final holiday program there, accompanying a lantern slide lecture reprising his exegesis on the Holy Grail. A few days before Easter, however, Beatrice backed out. She felt unwell.

Almost two weeks passed with Beatrice feeling ill, though she didn’t complain enough to raise serious concern, even within her family. With Orson’s ninth birthday coming up, she dispatched her nanny and housekeeper Sigrid Jacobsen to buy the boy a pair of ice skates, along with a new Gilbert Mysto Magic Kit as a birthday gift from his father. Dick Welles wasn’t informed of his wife’s illness until May 3 or 4. By then, Beatrice had taken to her bed for the last time.

Decades later, in a faux memoir he wrote for
Paris Vogue
, Welles described his birthday celebration that fateful May 6, 1924: the cake candles lit for him in the “black room” where his mother was dying, her cello voice beckoning him to her side. “Well now, Georgie-Porgie . . .” This is the scene that opens
RKO 281
, the 1999 telefilm about the making of
Citizen Kane.

According to Orson’s moving account, his mother recited to him:

These antique fables apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

These were teasing lines from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the Shakespeare play his mother had read to her sweet bright boy ad nauseam during his tender years. “Those great shining eyes looked dark by the light of the eight small candles,” Welles wrote. “I can remember now what I was thinking. I thought how green those eyes looked when it was sunny.”

That year, however, there were actually nine candles on his birthday cake.

According to the
Paris
Vogue
version of events, Beatrice whispered a few more lines from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, then told Orson that the birthday candles on the cake constituted “a fairy ring” and “you will never again in your whole life have just that number to blow out. You must puff hard,” Beatrice urged the boy, “and you must blow out every one of them.

“And you must make a wish.”

The birthday boy puffed hard “and suddenly the room was very dark and my mother had vanished forever.” Not that she had died—not yet—but little Orson must have sensed that the end was near. “Sometimes, in the dead watches of the night, it strikes me that of all my mistakes, the greatest was on that birthday just before my mother died, when I forgot to make a wish.”

Soon after marking Orson’s birthday, Beatrice lapsed into a coma. “Ever since,” Welles told his daughter Chris Welles Feder years later, “I’ve never wanted to celebrate my birthday.”

Taken to Chicago Memorial Hospital, Beatrice Ives Welles was attended by a team of physicians headed by Dr. Charles Kahlke. Two nurses alternated round the clock as her health deteriorated. Dudley Crafts Watson and Dr. Bernstein took turns by her side. Dick Welles hovered nearby. No treatment helped. Orson’s mother slipped away on Saturday, May 10, at 10:30
P
.
M
. She was not yet forty-one.

The hospital physicians were baffled by Beatrice’s symptoms, the sudden onset of her illness, and her death. After conducting an autopsy himself, Kahlke convened a meeting of the top doctors in the hospital to discuss the inconclusive results. “Acute yellow atrophy of the liver” was the diagnosis ultimately recorded on her death certificate, and some books on Welles have interpreted that as evidence of jaundice or hepatitis. But acute atrophy indicates a severely shrunken, scarred liver, which makes other scenarios possible, including infection caused by a blood transfusion, or an earlier operation. Even her dentistry treatments were scrutinized.

Beatrice Ives Welles’s death was front-page news in Kenosha (“A Great Shock,” the
Kenosha News
reported), and it was covered widely in many Illinois and Wisconsin newspapers. Calling her “a pianist of exquisite feeling and polished technique,” Catherine Pannill Mead wrote in the
Milwaukee Sentinel
that Beatrice would be mourned by “hundreds of friends.” The
Chicago Daily Tribune
’s headline noted that “Chicago Musicians Mourn Passing of Mrs. Welles.” The Lake View Musical Society established a fund in her name to benefit aspiring talent and send bouquets to young classical musicians making future debuts.