Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (2 page)

Still, the baby
was
special from birth. Not every newborn in Kenosha was welcomed to the world on the front page of the local newspaper. But there it was, in the very next edition after his birth: hearty congratulations to the parents and the proclamation of his name, George Orson Welles.

The child wonder. The boy genius. The maker of
Citizen Kane.

The words “genius” and “gene” share an etymology. In ancient Rome, the
genius
was the guiding deity of the family, or
gens.
The words derived from the Latin verb
generare
, to create. When individuals exhibited extraordinary traits that indicated the presence of the family’s guiding spirit, the word “genius” came to mean someone who was
inspired
or
talented
—suggesting that the creativity of a genius began with the qualities of his or her family. By that light, the lasting depth, complexity, and power of
Citizen Kane
might be traced to the filmmaker’s family. They launched a singular life story, one with the richness, layers, and texture of a novel.

The father of George Orson Welles was forty-two-year-old Richard Head Welles, known to all as Dick Welles. The boy’s mother was thirty-five-year-old Beatrice Ives Welles. Together Mr. and Mrs. Welles would carve the destiny of their second son, pointing him toward greatness from the cradle.

Beatrice Ives Welles had inherited a family legacy of artistry, spirituality, self-fulfillment, and civic-mindedness. The story of her Ives ancestors—dating back to seventeenth-century New England—reflected, and in some ways personified, the first years of American history.

In the early nineteenth century, one branch of the Ives family made its way to Oswego, New York, where J. C. Ives established himself as a builder of town walls, settlers’ stone residences, and lighthouses on Lake Ontario. His son John G. Ives traveled from Oswego south to Auburn, New York, to learn the jewelry trade, and then at age twenty-one he headed west to Springfield, Illinois. The year was 1839, and Springfield, settled as a trapping and trading outpost, had just been named the state capital. Ives and a fellow New Yorker, Isaac Curran, opened a watch, jewelry, and silverware store called Ives and Curran, on the west side of the Springfield public square.

In Springfield, Ives met Abigail Watson, whose English ancestors had traveled from New Jersey to Tennessee and Missouri before landing in Illinois. Abigail’s father, William Weldon Watson, lugged a soda fountain in a prairie schooner from Philadelphia to Nashville, using money from sales of the soda water (“to counteract the local whisky demon,” as his Nobel Prize–winning descendant James Watson put it) to build a church, establishing the first Baptist ministry west of the Appalachians. After his spouse died, Watson and his five children moved first to Saint Louis, then Springfield, where he remarried and opened a confectionery store. His oldest girl, Abigail, was twenty years of age when she married John G. Ives in Springfield in 1843.

Springfield was also home to a prairie lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, and the place was growing into a stronghold of liberal opinion about slavery, the gold standard, and high tariffs. The Ives and Watson families were both friendly with the Lincolns and shared their political views. Lincoln is said to have enjoyed the macaroon pyramids baked in the Watson sweet shop. The oldest Watson son, Ben, was an early booster of Lincoln, and a neighbor who helped renovate the one-story cottage on Jackson and Eighth into the iconic Lincoln family residence: a two-story house with a kitchen, two parlors, and a dining room. The Ives family also lived nearby, about one block away from the Lincoln home on the north side of Market (later Capitol) Street. The rooms and space above Ives and Curran, which included the residential quarters of Isaac Curran, served as a political watering hole for Republicans, hosting community socials whose attendees included Mary Todd Lincoln.

When Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, he was accompanied on his train trip east by Abigail’s older brother Ben. Abigail handcrafted a U.S. flag with thirty-one stars, the last for California, that decorated the engine of the train. Abigail Ives treasured a rare photograph of the Great Emancipator from these days; eventually, like many Welles talismans, it would end up in the hands of Dr. Maurice Bernstein.

Abigail Ives served admirably on the board of the Springfield Soldiers Aid Society, assisting Civil War soldiers before and after the war. The Ives family saw itself as playing an active role in history, and she and John passed on the Lincolnesque tradition of good citizenship to their one daughter and three sons.

Orson’s maternal great-grandfather led “a quiet tick-tock, tick-tock existence,” in the words of Lincoln’s biographer, the poet Carl Sandburg, “and looked like a clock of a man.” John G. Ives’s progress toward prosperity was also metronomic. Beyond his jewelry and silverware shop, Ives dabbled profitably in the coal and grain markets, and he became a leader of the Springfield branch of the Republican Party. Twice he served as treasurer of Sangamon County, “elected on the Republican ticket against a usual Democratic majority of several hundred,” according to a local history, and twice he was voted onto the county board of supervisors.

The youngest of the Ives children, Benjamin, was born in 1850. He worked for his father as a notary and accountant, and in 1876, when he was still living under his parents’ roof, married a woman ten years his junior. No older than seventeen when she married, Lucy Alma Walker was a Springfield native from a farming family; not until she bore her first child did the couple move into their own home on South Seventh Street. Though accounts vary, the baby girl was most likely born on September 1, 1883. Her parents named her Beatrice Lucy, although as an adult Beatrice would rarely use her middle name.

The home where Beatrice Ives grew up was just a few blocks from the state capitol, hailed as one of the great buildings of the Midwest after its completion in 1889. One of her father’s boyhood playmates was his cousin William Weldon Watson III, who went on to marry a banker’s daughter named Augusta Crafts Tolman in an Illinois town called Kane in the county of Kane. Beatrice, too, would find many playmates amid her seemingly limitless Watson cousins.

Much of what we know about Beatrice’s girlhood was handed down by Dr. Bernstein, who adored her and filled in the gaps in her story with embellishments. Bernstein insisted that Beatrice as a young woman “rode horseback like a man,” and that she was a “splendid marksman” who engaged in regular target practice and country shooting, though “never at birds.” (Orson sometimes parroted this received version of events in interviews.) In Beatrice’s day and age people were raised close to the land, but such expertise was not as common among girls, and Beatrice’s poise and physical appearance—she was a tall young woman, people remembered, ladylike but with a strong chin, always smartly dressed—were part of her mystique.

Beatrice also had an unusually husky voice; newspapers later praised its musical lilt, and her son, Orson, finding the mot juste, likened it to a “cello” in tone. Even as a teenager, Beatrice was recognized as something of a musical prodigy. Musicianship ran in the family: her mother, Lucy, played piano, as did her aunt Augusta, who had been a recitalist, and who encouraged her own progeny to dedicate themselves to artistic self-expression through art and music. Like her aunt, with whom she was close, Beatrice would favor classical over popular music; though she would oblige partygoers with a Sousa march, delivering the straightforward music with a smile and a flourish, she preferred to challenge herself with complex piano pieces.

One photograph of the beautiful and intelligent young Beatrice, seated at her piano, suggests a sweeter, more vulnerable side to her strong personality. By the time the photo was taken, her father, Benjamin Ives, had found a business foothold in Chicago, making regular trips there to promote his Illinois Fuel Company, with stock capitalized at $1.5 million—most of the stock his—and mines in Minnesota and in Sangamon County, where Springfield was located. Ives doted on his promising daughter, who soon set her sights on attending a fine arts academy in the city.

After Beatrice finished secondary school in Springfield—probably at the Academy of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, the Catholic girls’ school—she and her mother joined the head of the family in Chicago. The Iveses found a flat in the Hyde Park area. Beatrice enrolled in the Chicago Conservatory, the city’s most reputable school of music and dramatic arts, located in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s monumental Auditorium Building, touted as the tallest and largest building in America when it opened in 1889.

Beatrice took private tutoring from a Russian Lithuanian–born former child prodigy, Leopold Godowsky, then at his peak as a prolific composer of daunting virtuoso piano pieces. An eclectic teacher who inspired loyalty among his many students, Godowsky was a champion of Chopin, Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, and a performer of impeccable technique whose novel percussionist approach relied on weight release and relaxation rather than muscular impetus. Beatrice basked in his guidance, and under his eye her technical playing developed emotional expressiveness, alternating power with delicacy and feeling. She also studied music theory under the German-born Adolf Weidig, an authority on theories of composition and harmony, citing his influence in her publicity materials later in life.

Conservatory students were expected to immerse themselves in a rounded curriculum that included elocution, oratory, poetry reading, dramatics, and even fencing and pantomime. Beatrice studied the plays of Shakespeare, along with the fashionable Delsarte system of acting, which associated inner emotions with specific gestures and movements. The students were also expected to develop a working knowledge of French, Italian, German, and Spanish, which was crucial in familiarizing themselves with the work of contemporary foreign-language composers. And they were steered to the nearby Art Institute of Chicago where they could find inspiration in a wealth of masterpieces; Beatrice walked through the gallery halls for long hours, and returned there for years thereafter.

The conservatory was like a finishing school; even students like Beatrice, who arrived with considerable social poise, received instruction on proper deportment in public situations: how to walk, bow courteously, shake hands. Many of the musicians aspired to be educators, and the curriculum included mandatory lessons in civic responsibility, rhetoric, and parliamentary procedure, so that graduates would “be able to organize a public meeting and direct its business,” according to one brochure. The conservatory’s ambitious goal was to nurture “a cultivated voice and a cultivated body, the harmonious development of which enables one to enter upon any vocation in life, either social or artistic, and to add to natural talents those rare advantages—ease and confidence.”

The conservatory experience reinforced Beatrice’s natural ease and confidence. She made friends without difficulty among her peers and just as easily among the society figures and benefactors who attended recitals in the school’s magnificent main hall. Performing at local luncheons and club events also afforded young Beatrice a small income, increasingly vital by the end of the decade as her father’s career began to suffer a series of setbacks.

Benjamin Ives poured all of his savings and inheritance into his business plans, but one by one his investments turned out to be no more than pipe dreams. As early as 1893, impatient creditors filed mismanagement claims against his fledgling Illinois Fuel Company. Ives fought the claims in Chicago courts, fending off lawsuits for the better part of a decade, but oil discoveries in Texas and Alaska depressed fuel prices throughout the 1890s, and Ives’s enterprise never gained traction. By 1900 Ives was forced to declare bankruptcy with liabilities of $44,000 and assets of only $700. Beatrice’s father never recovered his health or his optimism, and the family’s ordeal left a deep impression on the girl; her example of stoicism bordering on fearlessness was not lost on her son during his own reversals of fortune.

Her father’s woes forced Beatrice, in her late teens, to make certain adjustments. She may briefly have taken work as a “typewriter,” as stenographers were known in that era, as Welles claimed in later interviews. At the Chicago Conservatory she shifted from Godowsky—who charged $140 for two thirty-minute lessons a week—to Julia Lois Caruthers, who offered two
hour
-long lessons for $120.

But there were consolations. Whereas Godowsky was a brusque instructor, Caruthers was a nurturer, beloved by her students. As a performer—she had made a spectacular debut in Chicago in 1887 playing the Schumann Quintet—Caruthers alternated strength with delicacy. As a teacher, she recommended deep study of each composer along with individualized expression, and she encouraged her students to explore the spiritual component of their art. One of her specialties was piano instruction for children; she was at work on a manual called
Piano Technic for Children.

Though her father was reduced to working as an accountant, the forward-looking Beatrice never seemed to miss a step. Blossoming as a performer, she mingled effortlessly with the arts patrons of Chicago, the traveling players she met backstage at theatricals, and the earthy newspapermen who covered local concerts and shows. On weekends she traveled throughout northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, and often spent summers in the North Shore towns of Lake County in Illinois or at rustic Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, where Aunt Augusta and her husband had run a showplace, the Whiting House hotel.

By the turn of the century, as she entered her twenties, Beatrice Ives had crossed paths with the man who became her husband: Richard Head Welles.

The Welles name arrived with the filmmaker’s forebears on the
Mayflower.
Orson Welles’s early American ancestors called themselves “Wells,” sometimes “Welles,” the spelling changing at the whim of individual family members and record keepers. Orson’s father’s ancestors were not especially artistic-minded; like the Ives family, though, they were patriotic and commercial-minded, while also scarred by misfortune and—a darker tendency—recklessness.