The first vignette takes place three years after their marriage. Seated at the breakfast table, Kane, dressed “in white tie and tails,” lovingly pours a morning glass of milk for Emily, who is similarly “formally attired.” “As he finishes, he leans over and playfully nips the back of her neck.” Bantering flirtatiously, Kane says he will call Bernstein and put off all appointments till noon. “What time is it?” Kane asks. “I don’t know—it’s late,” replies Emily. “It’s early,” says Kane; the scene dissolves with the implication that the happily married pair are retiring to bed.
The next exchange was briefer, less sweet. It follows the first immediately, but is one year later, according to the script—1902—with “different clothes—different food.” This time Emily is seen blandly complaining that her husband left her dinner party in the lurch the night before, rushing off mysteriously to the Inquirer. “What do you do on a newspaper in the middle of the night?” Emily asks. “My dear, your only co-respondent is the Inquirer,” Kane responds mildly.
Two years later, the third vignette reveals the couple, seated farther apart, with a “change of costume and food.” Emily is unhappy that Kane’s newspaper has been “attacking the President.” Kane corrects her: “You mean Uncle John,”55 he says, a “fathead” who is “letting a pack of high-pressure crooks run his administration. This whole oil scandal—” Emily interrupts: “He happens to be the President, Charles—not you.” Kane rejoins: “That’s a mistake that will be corrected one of these days.” Another dissolve.
As further subtle changes advance the marriage to 1905, 1906, and 1908, the couple separate both emotionally and physically, their breakfast table growing longer as they grow apart. Emily grouses about Mr. Bernstein visiting the nursery with “the most incredible atrocity” as a gift for Junior, letting the audience know in passing that the Kanes now have a son. Reacting to this hint of distaste (and anti-Semitism) from his aristocratic wife, Kane tells Emily curtly, “Mr. Bernstein is apt to pay a visit to the nursery now and then.” Emily: “Does he have to?” Kane (shortly): “Yes.”
The last installment occurs in 1909, with the couple breakfasting in silent tension. As Kane reads his Inquirer, Emily flaunts its rival, the Chronicle.
“I did the breakfast scene thinking I’d invented it,” Welles recalled. “It wasn’t in the script originally. And when I was almost finished with it, I suddenly realized that I’d unconsciously stolen it from Thornton [Wilder].” Like many of the details of Citizen Kane, it was something he borrowed from his boyhood—in this case, from Wilder’s 1931 one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner, which he saw as a youth. Orson phoned Wilder to confess the appropriation, and they laughed about it together.
The woman playing Emily Monroe Norton had to be a patrician beauty, someone Orson himself found attractive. After testing a number of Hollywood actresses, Welles remembered a young singer whose path he’d crossed in New York. Her name: Ruth Warrick. “She looked the part of Emily,” Welles told Henry Jaglom. “And I’m one of those fellows who thinks, if they look it, then you can make them act it. Particularly a small part.”
Warrick was a fellow midwesterner, twenty-three years old, a University of Kansas graduate with only stock theater, commercial advertising, and broadcasting on her résumé. Orson had his staff track her down, then flew to New York to meet with her at the Waldorf-Astoria. Orson told Warrick he was looking for “a lady of breeding” to play his character’s first wife in his new film, but after the usual casting calls he’d come to the conclusion that “there are no ladies in Hollywood.” Would she be willing to come to Hollywood for a screen test?
Warrick felt tension emanating from Orson when she arrived at RKO for her camera audition—as she later recalled in her autobiography, The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler—in part because her test was being monitored by “New York brass” visiting the studio lot that day. But Warrick demonstrated the same poise Emily Monroe Norton might have shown in the situation. Instinctively, she reached out to Orson, putting him at his ease. “I chatted, laughed, asked questions, made suggestions, and all the while moved close to him and touched his arm. Little by little I felt the tension begin to drain away.”
She won the part, and also his trust. Emily appealed both to Kane and to Orson. “Ruth was a wonderful girl,” Welles told Henry Jaglom. “And when she was young, she was quite sexy.” In fact, “one night” years later in Hollywood (Warrick is vague on the chronology but suggests it was after Welles’s separation from his second wife, Rita Hayworth), Orson phoned Warrick and “begged” her to pay him a surreptitious visit. “He had no one to talk to, he said, and he repeated the line he had used when we first met: There were no ladies in Hollywood, no one with the depth and compassion to understand him,” Warrick wrote in her autobiography.
Orson dispatched his limousine to fetch Warrick. She arrived to find him “lolling in great mounds of pillows, looking pale and sallow, as if playing a scene from Mayerling,” she wrote. Orson spoke morosely about the crass “money men” ruling Hollywood. “Any man whose ability is simply to make money should get down on his knees and beg a man with creative talent to make something of value with that money,” he fumed to Warrick. “But they don’t seem to know that their money has absolutely no value in itself.”
“I, too, in my own life was beginning to have some need of comfort,” Warrick’s account continued, “and we soothed and held each other through a long evening. And yet, returning to my home later, I knew that somehow I, too, had been used by Orson, that I was a handy balm for a momentary hurt. It was not a role I felt good about.” The actress resolved to avoid Orson in the future—until 1980, when Welles made amends by agreeing to appear on Good Morning America to help promote her book. Host David Hartman interviewed him by satellite, along with Warrick and Paul Stewart in the studio. (“God save me from my friends,” Welles complained to Jaglom the following day. “[Stewart] telling Hartman how much the picture [Citizen Kane] cost. He’s got it wrong, of course. And sounding as though he were associate producer . . .”)
Warrick praised Citizen Kane on the TV show; Orson didn’t mind the praise, but he insisted to Jaglom that her otherwise flattering memoir couldn’t be trusted. “What is interesting about her book is that the reader is likely to think that we had a love affair. She’s practically saying it.” But Welles himself was elusive on the subject. When Barbara Leaming teased him out about his putative dalliance with Warrick, Welles first strenuously denied an “amorous encounter” (Leaming’s careful wording) with the actress. Later, however, he admitted, “It’s true.”
Why, then, had he denied it? his biographer asked him.
“You don’t tell on those kinds of things,” Welles explained to Leaming. “I think stout denial—at all times.”
After the series of breakfast room vignettes, Emily Kane would have only one big scene—a doozy, the film’s emotional watershed. On the night of Kane’s triumphant speech at Madison Square Garden, Emily receives an anonymous note. She sends Junior home in a limousine, then lures Kane into a taxi bound for an apartment house on West Seventy-Fourth Street. When they arrive, they find Susan Alexander waiting with Jim Gettys, the corrupt political boss, who threatens to reveal the “love nest” to the rival press unless Kane withdraws from the race for governor.
On occasion, as in the bedroom-wrecking scene at Xanadu, Orson filmed and completed a major scene in one miraculous take. More often, the scenes were written, rewritten, staged, rehearsed, and restaged many times, in a process that could take days or weeks. This was partly because Orson eschewed the traditional studio approach of filming master shots and “coverage” (alternative angles) for each scene, instead building his scenes around the complicated moving shots that became the film’s visual signature. “I was constantly encouraged by Toland,” Welles recalled, “who said, under the influence of [John] Ford, ‘Carry everything in one shot—don’t do anything else.’ In other words, play scenes through with cutting and don’t do alternative versions. That
was Toland in my ear.”
As a money-saving tactic, Welles rehearsed the actors over and over, then shot multiple takes but printed as few as possible. (Printing was a major expense, as he had learned on Too Much Johnson.) It was not uncommon for Orson to shoot fifty or more takes of a scene while making Kane, the actor Paul Stewart recalled. “One day he shot a hundred takes and exposed 10,000 feet,” Stewart claimed, “without a single print!”
The curious thing about this method was that the multiple takes usually had little to do with camera placement. Often the camera stayed just where Orson initially decided it would go. The retakes were more likely to fine-tune the performances, and the pacing and tone of the scene.
The camera’s positioning is “the only thing I’m certain of,” Welles told Bogdanovich. “I’m never certain of a performance—my own or the other actors’—or the script or anything. I’m ready to change, move anything. But to me it seems there’s only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately. If it doesn’t come immediately, it’s because I have no idea about the scene, or I’m wrong about the scene to begin with.”
The “love nest” scene brought together four important characters: Kane, Emily, Susan, and Boss Gettys. It was Warwick’s last scene in the film, and the only substantial one for Ray Collins, who is merely glimpsed at Madison Square Garden during Kane’s speech. But the scene marked a rare instance when the correct camera decision eluded Orson. The first time he tried staging the scene, Welles recalled, he had to halt the filming abruptly and “just quit for the day—and went home,” he confessed to Bogdanovich. “Made a big scandal. I just had no idea what to do. Came back the next day . . . it seemed to me so boring.”
“When you came back, it worked?” asked Bogdanovich.
“Yeah,” said Welles. “And I didn’t figure it out on paper.” Even so, Orson claimed to be dissatisfied with the end result, calling the “love nest” confrontation scene “overstated.” He told Bogdanovich that the scene showed “some kind of insecurity, I think, visually.”
He did not mention what happened during the filming: as Kane hurtled down the steps of the apartment building, shouting at Gettys, the actor playing him stumbled forward, injuring himself badly enough that Orson was whisked off to Good Samaritan Hospital, where tests revealed broken chips in his ankles. For the next two weeks he directed from a wheelchair, acting some scenes with metal braces supporting him.
If the scene is at all “insecure,” with stiff groupings and studied angles, it is also one of the film’s acting highpoints. For the first time, Kane reveals the fundamental violence and solipsism of his character. Susan Alexander, plaintively crying, “What about me?” foreshadows her later victimhood. Collins, as the corrupt but not unsympathetic Boss Gettys, achieves an almost noble poignancy, while Emily, arguing for her marriage and their son, loses with dignity.
The plot of Citizen Kane was stacked against Emily, and Warrick had to keep her likability and poise under the most trying conditions. “You decided what you were going to do, Charles, some time ago,” Emily says with calm strength—her last words in the film. In Warrick, Welles had found the purposeful lady of the script, a woman he could imagine as his wife.
Another claim that Orson hated in Ruth Warrick’s autobiography was her comment that he had isolated Dorothy Comingore, the actress who played Susan Alexander, from the rest of the cast, treating her “with a discourteous contempt that was often painful to watch, while making an obvious display of elaborate courtliness in his dealing with me.”
But he “hardly knew” Warrick at the time, Orson protested to Henry Jaglom, while “Comingore and I were great friends.” He dismissed Warrick’s observations as those of “one actress in a movie talking about another.”
Susan Alexander was the true leading lady of Citizen Kane, a role that could determine the success or failure of the picture. And Comingore was a virtual unknown in Hollywood. Two years older than Welles and now, at twenty-seven, past her ingenue prime, Comingore had been noticed by Charles Chaplin in a revival of The Cradle Song at Carmel’s Little Theater. Warner Brothers signed her to a weekly contract, giving her the screen name Linda Winters, but then shuffled her over to Columbia, which released her in turn to freelance for the studios of Poverty Row. As Linda Winters, the actress starred in cheap programmers like Prison Train while decorating the background of A pictures on the order of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where she has a line or two greeting Jimmy Stewart at the train station. Her career was languishing when Orson first met her in the summer of 1939.
Herbert Drake had arranged a publicity date for them, following Orson’s arrival in Hollywood. They were photographed at Chasen’s, and when the photo was published they were misidentified as “Mr. and Mrs. Welles.” Comingore “sat and listened” to Orson all night, a reporter later wrote, “quite content to be entertained.” But she was taken aback when the younger man left her on her doorstep with, “God bless you, my child.”
Orson told Peter Bogdanovich that he tested “a lot of people” for the part of Susan Alexander, including “a lot of strippers, about ten, none of whom were any good.” “You wanted that kind of cheapness?” asked Bogdanovich. “Yeah,” replied Welles. When Herbert Drake reminded him of his publicity date with Linda Winters, Orson brought her in for a meeting and a series of auditions. The actress had just finished emoting in a Three Stooges two-reeler, and she and Orson shared a good laugh about it. Welles was instantly reminded of how sweet and vulnerable she was, and her test showed that she could laugh on cue, with that infectious laughter Orson remembered from the arranged date. She had the look he wanted for the character: the look of a waif Charles Foster Kane might adopt as a cause.
“Was she an intelligent actress?” Bogdanovich asked.
“Yes,” Welles replied without hesitation. “Of course, her old-age scenes were tremendously tricked-up. We blew dangerous drugs in her eyes and sprayed her throat so she couldn’t talk and everything else. But she was still great.” (At this point in the interview with Bogdanovich, Welles recited from memory one of Susan’s last lines in the film: “Well, what do you know—it’s morning already,” adding his own reflection, “That’s another favorite moment.”56)
By now, it was nearly July 1. Orson brought Herman Mankiewicz in to weigh some of the remaining casting decisions, inviting him to hear Comingore read in Orson’s office. “She looks precisely like the image of a kitten we have been looking for,” Mank told Welles. Orson told Comingore the job was hers. But not as Linda Winters: Orson disliked such Hollywood tomfoolery—and, besides, as Linda Winters she wouldn’t be a “fresh face.” Orson wanted her in the film, but as Dorothy Comingore.
That’s when Comingore made a confession to Welles: she was pregnant. (She had married screenwriter Richard Collins in 1939.)
“What?” Orson howled.
“A baby,” Comingore said timidly.
“When?”
“About seven months.”
“It’s all the better!” Orson reportedly crowed. “You’re hired. If you start in the part, it’ll really prove to those bums that I’m going to finish the picture on time.”
Comingore had to be a courageous as well as an intelligent actress. Her scenes were among the most painful and darkest in Citizen Kane. Her character was central to one of the film’s bravura sequences: Susan Alexander Kane’s opera debut, among Orson’s most magnificent concoctions. “INSERT,” reads the published shooting script, “FRONT PAGE CHICAGO ‘INQUIRER’ with photograph proclaiming that Susan Alexander opens at new Chicago Opera House in Thais . . . On sound track during above we hear the big expectant murmur of an opening night audience and the noodling of the orchestra.”
In the first half of Kane, Susan’s debut is glimpsed briefly from the point of view of drama critic Jed Leland, who distracts himself from the tedium by cutting his program to ribbons. Later, the humiliating debut is seen again from Susan’s point of view and from Kane’s. As the per
formance ends, the camera moves out into the audience with the “ghastly sound of three thousand people applauding as little as possible,” pushing in close on Kane, embarrassed but defiant, standing alone and “applauding, very, very hard,” according to the script.
The backstage portion concludes with a memorable shot in which the camera rises into the rafters to reveal “two typical stagehands . . . looking down on the stage below. They look at each other. One of them puts his hand to his nose.” Welles took script ideas from anyone who crossed his path, and that closing gesture—the stagehand holding his nose—was suggested by a property man working on Citizen Kane. “His name was Red,” Welles recalled. “We were just going to go up to them looking disgusted or something. Anyway, it was a big contribution.”
Comingore had a cracked voice, which added authenticity to her persona. But she wasn’t enough of a singer to handle the arias in the script—even as badly as Susan Alexander would. That was no problem for an opera fan like Welles, who found a voice double: the Pasadena-born opera singer Jean Forward, who was appearing in the cast of Meet the People.
The meticulous dubbing of Comingore’s singing took place entirely in postproduction. Comingore never met Forward until the San Francisco premiere of Citizen Kane. Complicating matters, the classically trained Forward had to sing her arias in a voice that was “really pathetic,” in the words of the script. “The reason Susan is struggling so hard is not that she cannot sing,” composer Bernard Herrmann explained later, “but rather that the demands of the part are purposely greater than she can ever meet.” The dubbing was “big work,” Welles recalled proudly, “very well done by the girl [Forward]. Worked a long time on that.”
If not for the ingenious opera pastiche, the sequence would not have been as effective. Orson drew on his many nights at the opera to dictate the feel of the music, detailing his thoughts in long phone conversations and exhaustive telegrams to Herrmann, who did the initial scoring from New York. The Promethean composer was Orson’s musical ace in the hole. “If Herrmann was a neophyte to film,” as his biographer Steven C. Smith wrote, “it was in practice only. No snob about the cinema, he was familiar not only with American films and film composers but also with their European counterparts.” Herrmann had been poised for the go-ahead as the script was being finalized; he and Welles were both comfortable with urgent deadlines.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 81