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

residence in Chicago with Mary and their four-year-old son, Richard.
    Although Richard J. Welles never attained a law degree like his father, his life would give him plenty of exposure to statutes and courtrooms. In Chicago, Welles and some shadowy partners launched a company that was meant to manufacture new harness and bridle wares based on his patents. He had expected to sell his wares to big national distributors like Bain Wagon Works, but Orson S. Head’s death, coupled with Richard’s growing estrangement from his wife, Mary, scotched that connection to relatives. Welles turned to new brainstorms; like other Welleses who never found a true, permanent home, he talked vaguely of opening a hotel for businessmen. But the money he took from investors disappeared like rabbits in a hat.
    By 1878, Welles’s illusory saddlery empire had evaporated. When he wasn’t in court defending himself from aggrieved patent investors, he was heading off on vague trips to other cities drumming up more believers. His indifference to his wife lapsed into hostility, and when young Richard was six, Mary finally took the boy and fled to Kenosha. For a few months Welles sent child support, but it was scanty, and soon it dwindled to nothing.
    At first, Mary Head Welles lacked for little except a husband’s attentions. She had inherited nearly $20,000 from her father’s estate in addition to land and possessions, with a nearly equal sum placed in trust for her son Richard, the eldest Head grandchild. Her trust was doled out in increments by one of the extended Head family, banker Daniel Head, who also came originally from Oneida County, and Mary used the money to invest in oil and grains. By degrees rejoining Kenosha society, she attended soirees and dance parties and vacationed with her little boy, nicknamed Dickey, in Lake Geneva, a favorite getaway for Kenoshans as well as Chicagoans.
    After a year, Mary Head Welles finally filed for divorce. She may have been ignorant of her wayward husband’s mounting crises, because her divorce documents describe Richard not as a scam artist but as a man with superior business acumen climbing the ladder to success. Though Richard was served with divorce papers in Chicago in 1881, he refused to appear at proceedings and made no child custody claims.
    Court records depict him as outwardly in “good health,” although his constitution was already failing. Four years after the divorce filing, living temporarily in Athens, Pennsylvania, he filed for what amounted to a disability pension owing to his aggravated hernia. Examined by a doctor, the Civil War veteran, now in his forties, was found to have a rupture on his right side “larger than a goose egg,” which the medical examiner felt might be controlled by a “suitable truss.” Granted his pension, Welles moved to New York City; he stayed there for the next fifteen years, registering minor patents (“Improvements in Bed Couches” and “Improvements in Bed-Chairs”) and announcing Welles Manufacturing Company products that never saw fruition. He too made ends meet as a bookkeeper.
    In 1904, time finally ran out on him. That October, Welles suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a catastrophic breach triggered by the hernia. He was registered as a pensioner—$12 a month—at the National Soldiers Home in Hampton, Virginia. Doctors diagnosed a hernia, vertigo, eye disease, severe rheumatism, heart disease, and general feebleness. In his early sixties, Orson Welles’s paternal grandfather was a tremulous old man: his hair all white, his muscles flabby. (The doctors took care, however, to attribute Richard’s feeble condition to his hernia, “not to vicious habits.”)
    Discharged in February 1905, Richard Jones Welles died in Washington, D.C., in May of the following year, at the age of sixty-two or -three. Asked repeatedly by government officials whether he had been married or fathered any children, he repeatedly answered no. As his next of kin