Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Read Online Free

claim; no eyewitness could attest to the horse-riding accident. Wells—who had been too embarrassed to tell any of his blue-uniformed comrades about the wound in his private parts—would later be investigated repeatedly with regard to pension and medical benefits.
    But his injury was real, and Richard J. Wells spent two months convalescing in the hospital before being discharged with what was considered a permanent disability. (A groin hernia tends to enlarge over time, leading to swelling and inflammation in the scrotum.) Richard spent his convalescence sketching ideas for patents he had dreamed up in hopes of striking it rich. (The oft-repeated claim that one of Welles’s forebears invented a military mess kit may have its fuzzy origins here.) Still recovering, Richard returned to Quincy in mid-1863, working for both the railroad and American Express.
    When Richard’s older brother William took a job with the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad in Saint Joseph, Missouri, about two hundred miles west on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy route, Richard joined him, hoping his new position as a station agent would help him find investors for his inventions. Like other Welles men Richard was a born salesman, handsome and charming, and he would make “hundreds of friends” working for the railroad, according to one local newspaper account. About 1868, probably in Chicago, where so many train lines—and human paths—converged after the Civil War, the twenty-six-year-old Richard J. Wells met and courted a young woman, a few years younger than himself, from Kenosha, Wisconsin.
    This young woman, Mary Blanche Head, has been ill-served by film historians and biographers. Charles Higham claimed in his 1985 biography of Orson Welles that she was only fourteen and a half, a sullen, stocky runaway from a “harsh and terrifying father,” when she encountered the dashing Wells in Saint Joseph and “entered immediately into an affair” with the older man. “Soon after,” Higham wrote, “with great daring, [she] decided that they would get married.” According to this biographer, Mary Head had a “fierce and ambitious disposition” and was “uncontrollable . . . ill-tempered and harsh when crossed.” This colorful fiction was essential to Higham’s portrait of the Heads as the family who introduced the gleam of fanaticism into Welles’s genealogy. Although Higham’s life of Welles has been discredited in many respects, this portrait of Mary Head and her family has persisted in subsequent accounts.
    In truth, the Heads were sobersided Yankees living the American dream; their family roots ran as deep as those of the Iveses, the Watsons, and the Welleses. The Heads, too, had come over on the Mayflower. Mary’s father, Orson Sherman Head, was a former Oneida County, New York, farm boy with flaming red hair and a robust physique. He studied law in the office of a local attorney before pulling up roots and heading west. In 1841, at twenty-four, he landed in the Wisconsin village of Southport. Head’s rise to wealth and local prestige was symbolized by the imposing two-story brick dwelling he built there, the home where his daughter Mary Head was raised, at the corner of Chicago and Prairie, in the burgeoning city soon to be renamed Kenosha. Many relatives from New York followed Orson S. Head to Southport, opening the first foundries, lumberyards, and wagon works.
    After being admitted to the Wisconsin bar, Orson Welles’s maternal great-grandfather and namesake was elected district attorney of Kenosha several times. “A desirable ally and a dangerous enemy in the courts,” according to one obituary, Head was known for his dedication to clients (“it mattered not how poor and humble”) and for cross-examinations that could be brutal and intimidating. “There was no more chance for falsehood to survive one of his examinations than for a kernel of wheat to pass unbroken between the upper and nether