To his joy, Welles learned that he could order up almost any film in the world: an RKO picture from the studio vaults, a loaner from another studio, even an obscure foreign film could be tracked down and shipped to Hollywood for his pleasure and study, to be screened at any time of day or night. He made lists of the pictures he wished to see; lists of ideas for the script, and visuals for its key scenes; lists of other possible subjects for the second film on his contract.
“I am learning thousands of things about the moving picture business every day,” Orson wrote to Virginia in Ireland, with a humility that was rare in his public persona, “and I am tremendously impressed by the efficiency and cooperativeness of moving picture people.”
On the last Saturday afternoon of July, at the end of his first full week in Hollywood, Orson attended an exclusive lunch and tea at the home of English author Aldous Huxley, who lived in nearby Pacific Palisades. Huxley had turned forty-five earlier in the week, and the lunch was one of several fetes celebrating both his birthday and his latest novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which he’d just completed.
The astronomer Edwin Hubble and Huxley’s fellow English expatriate, the writer Christopher Isherwood, were sprinkled among the picnic guests, along with show business luminaries such as Lillian Gish, Paulette Goddard, and Charles Chaplin—Hollywood’s previous model of a powerful, truly independent actor-writer-director-producer, though skeptical columnists rarely raised his name in connection with Welles. Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes, who helped to facilitate Orson’s invitation, were also present. Goddard brought an eight-pound English cake, MacArthur a case of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge.
The talk that afternoon dwelled on Hitler’s depredations in Europe—at least until Chaplin delighted the group by performing his hilarious balletic globe dance from The Great Dictator, his mistaken-identity comedy about a Jewish barber who looks like Hitler (with Chaplin in both roles). Chaplin and Goddard had been filming The Great Dictator for months.
Huxley teased the crowd with hints about his new novel, whose main character was inspired by William Randolph Hearst. The rich and powerful publisher was well known in Hollywood, where his movie company, Cosmopolitan, produced vehicles for the deft comedienne Marion Davies, his mistress. Huxley’s novel was set partly at a castle-like estate mimicking Hearst’s grand castle, San Simeon, and involved a millionaire and his mistress.
The tea-party picnic was the kind of sophisticated, artistic gathering that made Welles feel almost at home in Hollywood, despite the blazing sun and the canyon vistas beyond the Huxley garden, which also made the place slightly surreal.
Attending significant industry events, parties, and premieres was part of the job in Hollywood, and the next weekend, the first Saturday of August, Orson attended his first such diamond-encrusted gala. The literary and artistic elite he encountered at Huxley’s tea were a minority at this glittering occasion: a joint birthday party for mogul Jack Warner of Warner Brothers and actress Dolores Del Rio.
The ballroom, garden, and grounds of Warner’s Brentwood estate were dressed like a Venetian carnival. Tap dancer Paul Draper and harmonicist Larry Adler entertained the hundreds of partygoers, including first-echelon directors (Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, Rouben Mamoulian, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang), top producers and studio heads (Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger), and the highest-paid actors and actresses in the business (Errol Flynn, Joan Crawford, and Claudette Colbert among them). Welles’s old friends Vera Zorina and George Balanchine were there, along with the ubiquitous Hedda and Louella.
Despite being a newcomer, Orson felt at ease in this glamorous Hollywood fishbowl. He was eager to meet Del Rio, who was celebrating her thirty-fifth birthday, which fell on August 3, the day after Warner’s.
A black-eyed goddess born into an aristocratic family in Durango, the Mexican actress had been in Hollywood since 1925. Some of the pictures she starred in were fluff, but Del Rio had also worked with respected directors. Welles recalled her vividly in Bird of Paradise, a steamy South Seas romance directed by King Vidor, which Orson enjoyed in the late summer of 1932, shortly before taking “Marching Song” to New York. In one famous scene from the movie, the actress was shown swimming, apparently nude. “That’s when I fell in love with her,” Welles recalled. “She was as undressed as anyone I’d ever seen on the screen, and maddeningly beautiful! I had some young lady in the back row with whom I was fumbling. It changed my life!”
Del Rio looked equally ravishing at the birthday party, in a white chiffon gown with rose stripes. A sophisticated woman who counted Mexican muralist Diego Rivera among her friends, Del Rio knew of Welles’s reputation in radio and theater. Their eyes met—“that sightless beautiful look of hers which was a great turn-on,” in Welles’s words. The two talked easily; she found him sweet, likable, and unpretentious. Del Rio, who frequently served as a tabula rasa for the men in her life, enjoyed listening to Orson almost as much as he enjoyed listening to himself.
The hundreds of guests dined buffet-style under tents until midnight, with another buffet at ten in the morning for those “who had enjoyed themselves too much to go home.” Two of the latter were Del Rio and Welles, who joined other revelers for a late-night dip in Warner’s swimming pool. “Oh, she swam beautifully!” Welles recalled.
Del Rio’s husband did not seem to mind. For nine years the actress had been married to Cedric Gibbons, the design and decor guru who supervised the look of the MGM studio’s pictures. Their marriage was childless, however, and rumored to be unstable. Perhaps this was because it was in some ways a sham: Gibbons’s “sexuality was questionable,” wrote Linda B. Hall in Dolores Del Rio: Beauty in Light and Shade.
Though Orson wrote almost daily letters to his wife, Virginia, in Ireland, he mentioned neither Huxley’s lunch nor the lavish birthday party where he met the gorgeous Mexican actress.
Orson’s first days in Hollywood were smooth sailing. But the honeymoon ended abruptly.
Suddenly, he found himself beset by problems that were not of his own making: issues both personal and professional, some connected with his new career in film, but others emanating from New York and afar.
Though Welles apparently never expected it, Ward Wheelock, the New York advertising agent who represented the Campbell soup company, took umbrage at the fact that the star of his client’s radio program had decided to move to Los Angeles and go to work for a movie studio. When Arnold Weissberger proposed that The Campbell Playhouse shift its broadcasting operations to the West Coast, to accommodate Welles and the Mercury players joining him in California, Wheelock hotly refused. The New York and Broadway orientation of The Campbell Playhouse was a vital counterpoint to what the agency saw as its principal rival, Cecil B. DeMille’s Lux Radio Theatre, which was based in Los Angeles and featured Hollywood stars re-creating their movie roles for radio. Wheelock also resisted the idea of having the scripts for Campbell Playhouse written and rehearsed three thousand miles away from agency oversight. In the first week of August, he threatened an injunction against Welles and RKO, arguing that the studio had usurped the Campbell contract.
In New York, Houseman had served as a buffer with Campbell’s representatives, but now Welles shielded his partner from the drama with Wheelock, ordering him to focus on the Heart of Darkness script. Orson opted to handle the matter himself, and Wheelock’s “dissension and general unpleasantness” forced him to devote “several hours a day to letters and wires” trying to mediate the crisis, as he wrote to Virginia. Hoping he could placate Wheelock in person, Welles booked his first flight back east, looking forward to “one of the really outstandingly wretched weekends of my career.”
At the last moment, however, Weissberger’s diplomacy defused the crisis. He had negotiated a clause in Welles’s RKO contract that excused him from the studio for radio work for one weekday each week, and that commitment moderated Wheelock’s anger and dispelled his threatened injunction. Orson agreed to launch the new Campbell Playhouse season in N
ew York, paying the transcontinental travel expenses himself, and he promised to liaise more closely than ever with the agency over every aspect of the show, from script to casting to production. Wheelock assigned a new agency minder, Diana Bourbon, to work with Welles in New York; Orson liked Bourbon and expected to be able to work productively with her. Another agency representative, Ernest Chappell, would consult with him on the West Coast.
In return, Wheelock agreed that the broadcast could gradually shift to the West Coast, later in the season, once the show’s rhythm had been reestablished. After all the contretemps, the new season premiere on September 10 would be practically an anticlimax: an adaptation of George du Maurier’s twice-filmed novel Peter Ibbetson, starring Helen Hayes in her third guest appearance on Welles’s radio show.
Howard Koch and other writers working on the radio show had stayed behind in New York, so Welles and Houseman had to engage a few West Coast writers to initiate scripts for the series—a move that would have long-term repercussions. One of the journeymen Orson hired was Roger Q. Denny, a veteran Hollywood rewrite man who specialized in narration for nature documentaries, making him a natural to chip in with authentic touches for Heart of Darkness.
More important, MGM had just laid off the estimable screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, owing to his long slide into alcoholism, insubordination, and nonperformance.
Of medium build, with a beefeater face, a lofty brow, blue eyes, and a mischievous grin, Mank would turn forty-three in November 1939. The son of a stern professor of education, he had grown up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and graduated with honors from Columbia College in New York before he was eighteen. He was then already a chain-smoker (Camels), was known to classmates as “Mank the Tank” for his capacity to absorb alcohol (Scotch), and even in college was an inveterate gambler (poker, horses, anything), perpetually trailed by IOUs. Drunk or sober, broke or flush, Mank was a nonpareil conversationalist, a scathing debunker of anyone and everyone, and a spellbinding recitalist who could reel off pages of Shakespeare and verse from memory.
After dropping out of graduate school, Mank wrote theater reviews for the American Jewish Chronicle, then joined the Marines and served in Germany and France during World War I. After the war he worked in the press office of the Red Cross in Washington, D.C.; married his wife, Sara Aaronson; and moved to Berlin, the birthplace of his father. In Berlin, Mank strung for the Associated Press, Women’s Wear Daily, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times (feeding “News of the Berlin Stage” to the editor of the drama section, George S. Kaufman). He moonlighted as a press agent—including a brief stint for dancer-choreographer Isadora Duncan.
Returning to New York in 1922, Mank accepted an offer from Kaufman to work as a literary and drama critic for the Times, and was soon elevated to Kaufman’s assistant editor. Kaufman also sponsored Mank’s membership in the Algonquin Round Table, a sparkling circle of New York scribblers who met for lively lunches at the Algonquin Hotel, trading vicious barbs and witty maxims. The circle included the likes of Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, and Alexander Woollcott. Although he was younger and lower on the ladder of success than the others, Mank fitted right in: Woollcott once described him as “the funniest man in New York.”
One October night in 1925, Mank returned from a revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal. In the role of the “young” Mrs. Teazle was the superannuated Gladys Wallis, whose husband, Samuel Insull, the Chicago utilities and railroad tycoon, had bankrolled the Broadway show. “Outraged” by the spectacle of a millionairess cavorting as an ingenue in a production gift-wrapped by a shady magnate—and “full of fury and too many drinks,” according to his biographer Richard Meryman—Mank passed out at his typewriter after launching a damning critique of “an aging, hopelessly incompetent amateur.” This vignette, with certain alterations, would figure prominently in Citizen Kane.
Kaufman sent Mankiewicz home in anger, and the Times went to print without his notice. But Mank survived the episode, which formed a cornerstone of his legend in the New York press world. Mank’s vitriolic tongue, and his drinking, would get him fired more than once—at the Times and later as one of the founding members of the New Yorker, where he got himself dismissed again after pushing editor Harold Ross to the limit.
By 1926, Mankiewicz had relocated to Hollywood, where he was paid handsomely to write title cards for Paramount silent pictures. He brought with him his gift for effervescent one-liners and synoptic summary. For Clara Bow’s picture Three Weekends in 1928, for example, Mank wrote this title card: “Paris—Where half the women are working women,” followed after a beat by the punch line: “And half the women are working men.”
Mank wired his East Coast pals, including fellow newsmen Louis Weitzenkorn, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Ben Hecht, urging them to come to Hollywood; his famous invitation, “MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS,” captures his opportunism and superiority. Many of his friends hopped trains at his urging, and most had Mank to thank for prosperous Hollywood careers.
After lighting up the skies with his intertitles for two dozen silent pictures, Mank served as an uncredited producer on the early 1930s Marx Brothers comedies Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. But one day Mank offended the usually unflappable Harpo with a sarcastic put-down—and once more he was let go. He had bounced around the studios for years, accumulating a checkered history of brilliance, disaster, and resilience, but when MGM rendered him newly unemployable, he announced he was heading east to pursue his lifelong ambition of writing a Broadway play. Welles and Houseman, who both knew Mank from New York, agreed to help him—and themselves—by hiring him to work on the Campbell Playhouse series, pitching in on the scripts in Hollywood and helping with rewrites in New York.
On the first weekend of the new broadcast season, though, Mankiewicz and fellow writer Thomas W. Phipps were driving east when their car skidded on a wet stretch of Route 66 and overturned near Grants, New Mexico. With a badly fractured leg, Mank spent a month in the hospital, and even after he was sent home to his Tower Road residence in Beverly Hills, he was encased in “a heavy cast from under my armpits to my feet,” in his words. Now Mank had little to look forward to except lying in bed for months.
Broke even before his accident, Mankiewicz had to lease out his home and move to a smaller, cheaper place in Beverly Hills. His medical bills were piling up, and the Mercury partners resolved to give him as much radio work as possible at $200 a script. Mank soon turned “demanding and impatient” about the assignments, according to his biographer, Richard Meryman; but Houseman supervised the writer tactfully—first in person and later by phone from New York—while Welles also treated him “with consummate and disarming charm.”
Mankiewicz’s first job for The Campbell Playhouse was Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackryod” (broadcast November 12, 1939)—“not an unqualified success,” according to Simon Callow, as the still-green radio scenarist “left out one of the crucial clues.” Mankiewicz was hired to work ahead on adaptations of Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth (the November 26 show), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (January 7, 1940), and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (March 17, 1940).
Mankiewicz had a pet idea for a Broadway play or a feature film, and he talked about it compulsively whenever Welles or Houseman dropped by to visit. The script he envisioned would offer a kind of composite portrait of a well-known public figure, recently deceased, as viewed through the contrasting reminiscences of friends, family, and associates.
“A certain man can be a whirling pagoda,” Mank liked to muse. “You look this way and see one side; turn your eyes away, look again and see another side, so that people looking at it from different angles see ostensibly the same man but not the same man at all.”
Mank had worked forever on just such a “whirling pagoda” script, focusing on a criminal in the mold of John Dillinger. The story began with the news of the criminal’s death,
brought by reporters to the Kansas farmhouse where his parents still lived; then the entirety of the man’s life was revealed through the eyes of his mother, his father, his sweetheart, the girl he almost married, and so on. The idea had captured the interest of a Hollywood producer, but when the producer dropped the project and moved on, the script was shelved, unfinished.
At the same time that Welles was fending off Ward Wheelock’s complaints about the radio series, he was being bombarded with phone calls and letters from another unexpected petitioner: Dr. Maurice Bernstein. The doctor, who had been ambivalent about Orson’s moving to Hollywood, suddenly felt bereft after Christopher Welles passed through Chicago with her nanny on the train heading west. Deciding he missed Orson terribly, Bernstein expressed an overwhelming curiosity about his ward’s new life in Hollywood. A summer trip to see father and daughter together in their new surroundings would cheer him up. Didn’t Orson owe him that much?
A visit from the exhausting Dr. Bernstein did not rank high on his wish list, but Orson still felt fondness for his guardian—who also happened to control his inheritance until Orson turned twenty-five in May 1940. Welles sent the Bernsteins a night telegram with two air tickets and a booking at the Chateau Marmont. The doctor “became a different man” when he received the telegram, Hazel Bernstein reported back to Orson, “the sun breaking thru the clouds in effect.”
The Bernsteins arrived inconveniently on a Monday, August 14, and Orson had to interrupt all work on the radio series and Heart of Darkness to arrange the day and most of his week around their vacation. Ashton Stevens and his wife, FloFlo, were back in town looking after Ashton’s ailing brother, and the Stevenses joined the Bernsteins along with New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons and his wife, Sylvia, for a get-together at Welles’s Brentwood mansion. “The whole caboodle stayed on all day and had a lovely time,” Orson wrote to Virginia. The next day Orson arranged a car for the Bernsteins (“as insurance against this kind of thing”) and set them off on a round of sightseeing, hoping to get back to the studio without interruption and make up for “lost work.”
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 67