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

millstones.”
    Another politician in the Welles family tree, Head served a short stint in the Wisconsin State Senate in 1851, making a name for himself in the capital, Madison, as an enemy of fraud and corruption. “Outspoken” and “brusque,” according to local opinion, Head was seen as a “hard-hearted” fellow by some, by others as a good man with “a peculiar vein of tenderness” that tempered his toughness, a product of struggle and rectitude. He doted on his horses and—like the Iveses—revered Abraham Lincoln, more than once breaking into tears as he recited the Gettysburg Address. Above all, his obituaries noted, Head was a kindly father and a providing one. After his death, the fortune he had made in agriculture, land, and speculation was divided equally among his six children. According to most documents, Mary, his oldest child, was born in Kenosha in 1845; she was neither fourteen nor a runaway when she met and was beguiled by Richard J. Wells—a man not much older than she.
    Nor was she unattractive. In her early twenties, Mary Blanche Head was pretty and cultivated, probably classically tutored at home, and she was interested in art, music, and literature. Her father had business interests in Chicago, where the Head family traveled for recitals, entertainment, and shopping. She met Wells when he visited Chicago, searching for investors in the biggest city in the Midwest, which was mushrooming with newcomers and trade since the Civil War.
    Richard J. Wells’s first visit to Kenosha, however, was undoubtedly for his wedding to Mary Head on October 29, 1868. The minister was Episcopalian, as were (since birth) the bride and groom. The new Mrs. Wells moved to Saint Joseph, going to work as a cashier for the Pacific House, the residential hotel where her husband lived. Her husband’s first patent, registered from the address of the Pacific House in August 1869, was for “certain new and useful Improvements in Car-Couplings” for trains. His next patent, for an improvement in umbrella holders, showed his versatility, and in more ways than one: For the first time he added an “e” to his surname, transforming himself into “Richard J. Welles.” Perhaps the change was an affectation, perhaps a subtle flourishing of a new pride and identity.
    According to Higham’s research, the couple moved from elegant hotels to expensive houses to failed land developments and finally to bare lodgings, all within a few years. On November 13, 1872, still living in Saint Joseph, Mary gave birth to a son. The couple gave the boy a name that knitted the two family histories together: Richard Head Welles. Yet trouble was already in the air: “within a month Richard had been fired,” Higham notes, and their marriage was doomed.
    Mary Head Welles wanted children and a stable family life, but her husband was fixated on patents and get-rich schemes. At first their marriage was convenient for Richard, who relied on his father-in-law for investment and for other opportunities. One of Welles’s inventions was for “certain improvements in harness-trimmings,” and Mary’s sister Harriet was married to the son of the superintendent of Kenosha’s Bain Wagon Works, in which the Head family had invested. Bain was the largest manufacturer and supplier of wagons in the United States and perhaps the world, at a time when wagons were the principal means of transportation.
    Upon marrying Orson S. Head’s daughter, Richard J. Welles borrowed $7,000 from his father-in-law, a goodly sum at the time; when Head died in 1875, Welles was able to dodge the debt. Welles was also accused of embezzling another $20,000 from the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad; this was the charge that got him fired soon after his son’s birth. But a jury believed his version of events, and crowds cheered the popular ex–station agent as he departed by train for Chicago in July 1876. After intermediate stops in Kenosha and elsewhere, Welles took up