“In that desert limbo,” wrote Meryman, “Herman found the perfect circumstances in which he could function. He was quarantined from everything that had always plagued and immobilized him. Trapped in his cast, he could not go drinking. Studio ignoramuses were not degrading him. His family was not riddling him with guilt.
“There was little to do except write.”
Rita Alexander, for one, was impressed by Mank’s great creativity, and her account of the trip to Victorville would be used by Pauline Kael in her later argument against Welles’s authorship of Citizen Kane. (Although Alexander was among the few eyewitnesses Kael consulted, Kael did not learn—or care to mention—that another secretary substituted for Alexander for several weeks in Victorville.)
“He began with the title,” Alexander recalled, “the description of the scene, the indications of the camera movement, the dialogue and so on. It was really extraordinary. It all came out not fast, not slow—at a continued pace as though he had it all in his mind.”
The word “Rosebud” came at the end of the scene.
“Who is Rosebud?” the secretary asked innocently.
“It isn’t a who, it’s an it,” Mank replied gruffly.
“What is Rosebud?” she said.
“It’s a sled.”
CHAPTER 19
February–May 1940
“The Script Is a Source of Some Gratification”
“Rosebud” is the first word of dialogue in Citizen Kane, the word barely whispered by Charles Foster Kane, his giant lips filling the screen, as he takes his final breath before dying.
There is no mention of those giant lips in the published shooting script of Citizen Kane, nor of literally hundreds of other visual embellishments and dialogue alterations that substantially distinguish the published version of the script from the finished picture. When the New Yorker’s critic Pauline Kael sought authorization to include the shooting script by Mankiewicz and Welles in her 1971 The Citizen Kane Book, Welles gave his necessary permission—in return for a pittance, because he badly needed the money, as he told Peter Bogdanovich—little suspecting how drastically Kael’s book would undermine his reputation.
Yet even in its published form, the script’s opening sequence reads as though it was devised primarily by Welles, who from his earliest talks with Mankiewicz conceived of scenes in terms of the camera as well as of the story. The fade-in of exterior shots reveals the faded glories of Xanadu in the faint dawn. This “series of setups,” in the words of the script, reveals golf links, a zoo, a monkey terrace, an alligator pit, a lagoon, a huge swimming pool, cottages, and a drawbridge, “all telling something of . . . THE LITERALLY INCREDIBLE DOMAIN OF CHARLES FOSTER KANE.” Moving slowly, the camera rises to an illuminated window, “very small in the distance.”
“All around this,” the published script continues, “an almost totally black screen. Now, as the camera moves towards this window, which is almost a postage stamp in the frame, other forms appear: barbed wire, cyclone fencing, and now, looming up against an early morning sky, an enormous iron grillwork. Camera travels up what is now shown to be a gateway of gigantic proportions, and holds on the top of it—a huge initial ‘K.’ ” Dissolving inside the window, the camera reveals Kane’s enormous bed, then a snow scene inside a glass ball (“big impossible flakes of snow” with “the jingling of sleigh bells in the musical score”). The music freezes, and “Kane’s old voice” speaks the single word. After the word is murmured, Kane’s hand relaxes visibly. “The ball falls out of his hand and bounds down two carpeted steps leading to the bed, the camera following.”
Kane has died a lonely death in the fairy-tale mountaintop castle, Xanadu, his final utterance the mysterious “Rosebud.” Then the screen explodes with footage from News on the March, “a typical news digest” that establishes the man’s life story against a parade of tricked-up American history. After the end of this newsreel—which Mankiewicz described as an idea left over from the unfilmed Smiler with the Knife, but which might just as reasonably be described as left over from Welles’s life and earlier career and as inseparable from Citizen Kane as “Rosebud”—an editor complains about the newsreel’s conventional approach. “What it needs is an angle.”
A reporter is assigned to dig into the meaning of “Rosebud.”
After this compelling prologue—which composer Bernard Herrmann would treat as an overture—the reporter seeks out five or six key characters to offer their reminiscences of Kane in flashback.
The death of Kane, “Rosebud,” and News on the March—the opening sequences of the film—all this had been agreed on by Welles and Mankiewicz before Victorville. But what happened next would depend a lot on the five or six key characters, who took over the film for long sections of subjective memory. Welles and Mankiewicz had discussed the characters, but the different personalities had to be fleshed out, and their accounts had to fit together and overlap just a little, without too much repetition or contradiction—a point Orson conceded to Mank.
The structure of the narrative was tricky, because the story had to be chronological, with the thread passed like a baton to each of the key characters as the reporter visits them to hear about Kane. The sequencing was a major challenge, and although Welles and Mankiewicz had discussed the through-line, this was Mank’s biggest job. And with each successive draft the difficulties would multiply, as changes in their evolving conception of Kane’s story forced them to invent new plot ideas, reshuffle the sequencing, and “re-characterize” the various narrators.
The order in which the reporter called on the key characters would guide the sequencing. Thompson, the News on the March reporter assigned to investigate “Rosebud,” was the first running character—albeit the only one who never knew Kane. Orson envisioned him as a cardboard figure, a man without background or individuality: “Not a person,” as Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, but simply “a piece of machinery” used to tease the audience through the story.
Even Raymond, Kane’s butler, who is the last of the witnesses to talk to Thompson, has more color. John Houseman insisted that Raymond, who looms importantly at the end of Citizen Kane, was based on Welles’s own vaguely sinister butler in Brentwood, although Orson’s butler there was French, and Raymond was effectively the kind of stock butler character glimpsed in hundreds of Hollywood films, the household servant who observes and hears all and whose loyalty is unquestioned unless a gratuity is involved. “If you’re smart, you’ll talk to Raymond,” Susan Alexander tells Thompson the reporter. “He knows where all the bodies are buried.”
The first source Thompson approaches is Susan, but she is drunk and morose and throws him out. (She will return to the film later through a shrewd bit of structuring.) Thompson then visits the hushed archives of the banker Walter Parks Thatcher, Kane’s guardian. Thatcher plays a crucial role as the sole, if biased, eyewitness to Kane’s boyhood.48 Though Thatcher has long been dead by the time Kane dies, the film uses a device that harks back to Orson’s original concept for “First Person Singular”: Thompson reads out loud from the banker’s unpublished memoirs in the vault of his library, “a room” with a repellent personality much like Thatcher’s, “with all the warmth and charm of Napoleon’s Tomb,” in the words of the script.
Arguably the most transparent character is the next witness, Mr. Bernstein—who has the same last name as Welles’s guardian. (His first name is never mentioned.) Bernstein, the comptroller who has risen to become general manager of Kane’s empire, tells Thompson that he was at Kane’s side “from before the beginning, young fellow . . . and now, it’s after the end.” Bernstein is devoted to his boss; he never stops rooting for Kane, even after the tycoon’s death, with a viewpoint that is nonjudgmental—indeed, for a businessman, profoundly sympathetic, even loving.
One thing the writing team happily agreed on, after the film was done, was that Bernstein’s was the one character most indebted to Mankiewicz. Although “I sketched out the character in our preliminary session
s,” Welles remembered, “Mank did all the best writing for Bernstein. I’d call that the most valuable thing he gave us.”
Mankiewicz had a professional exemplar in mind: Louis Wiley, the business manager of the New York Times from 1906 until his death in 1935. Wiley, along with publisher Adolph Ochs and managing editor Carr Vattel Van Anda, formed the triumvirate that made the Times “what it has become,” in Mank’s words. As a former newsman Mank knew all three men from his days in New York. Houseman concurred: “Bernstein was [Mank’s] favorite character in this whole script.”
THOMPSON
If we can find out what he meant by his last words—as he was dying—
BERNSTEIN
That Rosebud, huh? (Thinks.) Maybe some girl? There were a lot of them back in the early days and—
THOMPSON
(amused)
It’s hardly likely, Mr. Bernstein, that Mr. Kane could have met some girl casually and then, fifty years later, on his deathbed remembered—
BERNSTEIN
Well, you are pretty young, Mr.—(Remembers the name.)—Mr. Thompson. A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in—(Slowly.)—and on it was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on—she was carrying a white parasol—I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all—but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.
“That was all Mank,” Welles told Bogdanovich of the above exchange. “It’s my favorite scene . . . the best thing in the movie . . . I wish it was me . . . If I were in hell and they gave me a day off and said, ‘What part of any movie you ever made do you want to see?’ I’d see that scene of Mank’s about Bernstein.
“All the rest could have been better but that was just right.”
Bernstein also frames Jed Leland sympathetically, but he has fallen out of touch with “Mr. Leland,” who emerges as Kane’s oldest, most conscientious friend, though the film makes clear that Kane has betrayed him. At the end of his talk with Bernstein, Thompson tells the comptroller where Leland is: “In case you’d like to know . . . he’s at the Huntington Memorial Hospital on 180th Street,” adding thoughtfully, “Nothing particular the matter with him, they tell me. Just . . .”
“Just old age,” Bernstein says, finishing with one of Mank’s sublime one-liners. “It’s the only disease, Mr. Thompson, that you don’t look forward to being cured of.”
This leads Thompson and the film to the next witness to Kane’s past: Leland, “wrapped in a blanket . . . in a wheelchair . . . on the flat roof of a hospital.” To block the sun he is wearing a visor, which helps call attention to his baldness. Although Leland already has been glimpsed in Bernstein’s flashbacks, the betrayed friend looks old and feeble now. This was crafted as a shocking moment for the viewers, who had previously glimpsed him as a carefree, debonair young man.
Because Mankiewicz had been a newsman, and because of the scene where the drunken Leland collapses over his typewriter (as Mank had done when writing his abortive denunciation of Gladys Wallis for the New York Times), some sources have credited the development of Leland more to Mankiewicz. From the get-go, however, the Leland character was “founded on a personal friend of Orson’s who had been a newspaper man,” as Houseman testified in the Lundberg case.
That was Ashton Stevens: “practically my uncle,” as Welles told Bogdanovich. “The last of the dandies—he worked for Hearst for some fifty years or so and adored him. A gentleman . . . very much like Jed.” In addition, Orson wanted Leland to be a Southern gentleman—like Joseph Cotten, his close friend, the actor he imagined for the role from his first talks with Mankiewicz. “As author of the film,” Welles said, he regarded the character of Leland “with enormous affection. . . . He’s the only true aristocrat [in the story]. . . . He’s talking my language. I have deep sympathy for him.”
As with most of the key characters, Orson even put his stamp on this character’s name, changing it from Bradford Leland in Mank’s first draft to Jedediah “Jed” Leland for the film. The name was an amalgam of Broadway producer Jed Harris and agent Leland Hayward, Margaret Sullavan’s husband, both of whom had made forceful impressions on Orson during his rounds in New York in 1934. (Mankiewicz knew both men, too, and this made it easy for him to agree.)
Three women loom importantly in Kane’s life, but Thompson visits only two of them. The first is seen only in flashback, as part of Thatcher’s archival reflections. She is Kane’s mother, known only as “Mrs. Kane” in the published version of the script, although she is Mary in the film. In 1870, Mrs. Kane inherits the Colorado Lode from a former renter who once skipped out leaving his bill unpaid. Implicitly sparing her son a provincial upbringing and removing him from an abusive father, Mrs. Kane signs five-year-old Charlie (his middle name, “Foster,” is a master touch) over to Thatcher in the parlor of her boardinghouse. In exchange for $150,000 a year, she will never see him again.
MRS. KANE
I’ve got his trunk all packed—(She chokes a little.)
I’ve had it packed for a week now.
(She can’t say any more. She starts for the hall door.)
The second female character, chronologically, in Kane’s life story is Emily Monroe Norton, his first wife, whom he marries in 1898. The niece of the incumbent president of the United States (in real life, this would have been William McKinley), Emily would have more scenes than Kane’s mother and would participate in major events in Kane’s adult life. This was particularly true of Mank’s first script draft, generated at Victorville: that draft—which included a honeymoon scene on a Wisconsin lake, and various other family tableaux—saw Emily survive her husband to tell her side of the story.
But it was Susan Alexander, Kane’s mistress and second wife, who would emerge as the film’s most prominent female character as the script evolved. After becoming a powerful press lord, Kane meets Susan, “aged twenty-one, neatly but cheaply dressed,” outside a drugstore in 1915. When a passing carriage splashes mud on his finery, she can’t help giggling at his offended dignity. Her reaction diverts Kane from his errand: sifting through his deceased mother’s possessions in a Manhattan warehouse. “In search of my youth,” he jokes—the wistful joke of a man who never really had a childhood.
Although the good-hearted Susan has no idea who Charles Foster Kane is, even when he mentions his famous name (“I’m awfully ignorant, but I guess you caught on to that”), she invites him to her rented flat to wash up. His “shadowgraphs” (a quaint word in the script for finger puppetry on the wall) and joking help to alleviate her painful toothache.
One reason Houseman was an important choice to supervise the writing in Victorville was that he knew the actors—many of them Mercury Theatre stage and radio players—whom Orson had cast in major roles even before the script was written. Since Mankiewicz lacked that awareness, Houseman was there to prod him toward their strengths. For example, as Houseman explained in the Lundberg case, casting George Coulouris as Thatcher helped shape the writing of that character: “We might have made Thatcher differently if this rather lean-faced man had not been going to play it. These are intangibles. It is hard to know at what point you are trying to accommodate the actor and at what point you make the actor fit the part.”
The part of Bernstein—undersized but spry, Jewish with intense eyes, as the script dictated—was molded for the similarly undersized (and Jewish) Everett Sloane, another member of the Mercury family. “It was extremely desirable, because Sloane had been a faithful collaborator of ours, that a good part be found for him,” Houseman explained in his testimony in the Lundberg case, “and undoubtedly the particular coloration and particular character of Bernstein was affected by the fact that we knew that Everett Sloane was going to play the part.”
Houseman noted in his deposition, “The same is true of Joseph Cotten” as Leland. “He had
never done anything [in Hollywood], and Orson had long been convinced that Cotten could be a star if he were properly cast as a rather aristocratic, moral, but not very active man.” Although the character of Leland sprang from Ashton Stevens, he was also consciously “tailored after the personality of” Cotten, in Houseman’s words.
The part of Kane’s mother likewise was molded for one of Orson’s favorite underrated actresses: Agnes Moorehead. As often as possible in his career, Orson created roles for Moorehead, whose persona combined grace and steel. Who should portray Wilbur Minafer’s sister Fanny, hopelessly in love with Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), in the film of The Magnificent Ambersons? “There wasn’t any question about it,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “How could there be? She’d been all those years with us—it was going to be her great part.” Moorehead, known to her Mercury friends as “Aggie,” would cavort onstage (and even play the calliope) in the Mercury Wonder Show during World War II, and she would also appear in Jane Eyre and Journey into Fear. Moorehead even would have starred as the Nazi-hunting federal agent stalking Welles’s character in The Stranger if RKO hadn’t insisted on a more bankable and conventional choice, Edward G. Robinson.
But as Houseman and Mankiewicz rolled up their sleeves and got down to work in Victorville, Welles had no early idea of whom he might cast as the first and second Mrs. Charles Foster Kane. With the Mercury stage company low on leading ladies under long-term contract, he was forced to rummage through his former radio costars and the familiar Hollywood casting pool for these two actresses—a circumstance that helps explain why they were the most mutable characters as the script progressed.
While Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman were toiling away in Victorville, once again Welles was beset by unexpected crises, both personal and professional.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 75