The Citzen Kane Book

by Pauline Kael

  Both Houseman and Mankiewicz unquestionably had mixed feelings about Welles by the time they found themselves at the guest ranch. Houseman admits that right from the beginning, when Mankiewicz started on the script, they planned to have Welles re-enact his tantrum. It was set for the scene in which Susan leaves Kane (Welles’s wife, Virginia, had brought suit for divorce during the month Welles had his tantrum), and Mankiewicz wrote it up rather floridly and with explicit directions, in a passage beginning, “Kane, in a truly terrible and absolutely silent rage …” When it was time shoot the scene, the various members of the group who had been at Chasen’s—or had heard about what happened there, and everybody had—encouraged Welles to do what he had done that night. Last year, William Alland, describing the making of the film in an interview printed in the magazine of the Directors Guild of America, said:

  There was one scene which stands out above all others in my memory; that was the one in which Orson broke up the roomful of furniture in a rage. Orson never liked himself as an actor. He had the idea that he should have been feeling more, that he intellectualized too much and never achieved the emotion of losing himself in a part.

  When he came to the furniture-breaking scene, he set up four cameras, because he obviously couldn’t do the scene many times. He did the scene just twice, and each time he threw himself into the action with a fervor I had never seen him in. It was absolutely electric; you felt as if you were in the presence of a man coming apart.

  Orson staggered out of the set with his hands bleeding and his face flushed. He almost swooned, yet he was exultant. “I really felt it,” he exclaimed. “I really felt it!”

  Strangely, that scene didn’t have the same power when it appeared on the screen. It might have been how it was cut, or because there hadn’t been close-in shots to depict his rage. The scene in the picture was only a mild reflection of what I had witnessed on that movie stage.

  Writing that scene into the movie was a cruel trick on Welles, designed to make him squirm. He had been built up so much that he was by then the white hope (as it used to be called) of the theatre. In 1938, even George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart had taken him to be that; they had written one of their worst maudlin “serious” plays (and a flop)—The Fabulous Invalid, a cavalcade-of-the-American-theatre sort of play—and had modelled its hero on Welles. The hero—the leader of a new acting company—made a classic final curtain speech to his actors:

  We haven’t got very much money, but we’ve got youth and, I think, talent. They’ll tell you the theatre is dying. I don’t believe it. Anything that can bring us together like this, and hold us to this one ideal in spite of everything, isn’t going to die. They’ll tell you it isn’t important, putting makeup on your face and playacting. I don’t believe it. It’s important to keep alive a thing that can lift men’s spirits above the everyday reality of their lives. We mustn’t let that die. Remember—you’re going to be kicked around, and a lot of the time you’re not going to have enough to eat, but you’re going to get one thing in return. The chance to write, and act, say the things you want to say, and do the things you want to do. And I think that’s enough.

  For the people who did much of the work on Welles’s projects, the temptation must have been strong to expose what they considered this savior’s feet of clay.

  The menagerie at Mrs. Campbell’s being scarcely a secret, they had many visitors (Welles himself came to dinner once or twice), and several of these visitors, as well as Houseman and Mrs. Alexander, describe how Herman Mankiewicz turned out the script that became Citizen Kane. Mankiewicz couldn’t go anywhere without help; he sat up, in the cast that covered one leg and went up to his middle, and played cribbage with Mrs. Alexander during the day, while telling her stories about Hearst and Marion Davies and San Simeon. Then, at night, from about eight-thirty to eleven-thirty or twelve, he dictated, and she would type it out so he could have it the next day. Mrs. Alexander recalls that during the first days on the job, when she was fascinated by the romantic significance of “Rosebud” and asked him how the story would turn out, he said, “My dear Mrs. Alexander, I don’t know. I’m making it up as I go along.” Welles was so deeply entangled in the radio shows and other activities and a romance with Dolores Del Rio at the time the script was being prepared that even when he came to dinner at Victorville, it was mainly a social visit; the secretary didn’t meet him until after Mankiewicz had finished dictating the long first draft. Welles probably made suggestions in his early conversations with Mankiewicz and since he received copies of the work weekly while it was in progress at Victorville, he may have given advice by phone or letter. Later, he almost certainly made suggestions for cuts that helped Mankiewicz hammer the script into tighter form, and he is known to have made a few changes on the set. But Mrs. Alexander, who took the dictation from Mankiewicz, from the first paragraph to the last, and then, when the first draft was completed and they all went back to Los Angeles, did the secretarial work at Mankiewicz’s house on the rewriting and the cuts, and who then handled the script at the studio until after the film was shot, says that Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of Citizen Kane.

  Toward the end of the period at the ranch, Mankiewicz began to realize that he’d made a very bad financial deal, and that the credit might be more important than he’d anticipated. After talks with Mrs. Alexander and the Mercury people who visited on weekend, he decided he was going to get screen credit, no matter what his bargain with Welles had been. Meanwhile, Houseman, who says that according to his original agreement to go off to the ranch he was supposed to get some kind of credit, discovered once again, and as so many others had, that it wasn’t easy to get your name on anything Orson Welles was involved in. Houseman was apparently fed up with arguments, and he says he waived his claim when he saw how determined Welles was; he left for New York and got started on the preparations for Native Son. But Mankiewicz was an experience Hollywood hand and veteran of credit brawls who kept all his drafts and materials, and a man who relished trouble. He had ample proof of his authorship, and he took his evidence to the Screen Writers Guild and raised so much hell that Welles was forced to split the credit and take second place in the listing.

  At the time the movie came out, Mankiewicz’s contribution to the film was generally known. The screen credit was to Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles. The Hollywood Reporter simplified the credit to “Written by Herman Mankiewicz”; Burns Mantle, in his newspaper column, referred to Mankiewicz’s having written it; and, of course, Ben Hecht explained to the readers of PM, “This movie was not written by Orson Welles. It is the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz.” In that period, it was well known that if the producer of a film wanted a screenplay credit it was almost impossible to prevent him from getting it. So many producers took a writing credit as a droit du seigneur for a few consultations or suggestions that the Screen Writers Guild later instituted a rule calling for compulsory arbitration whenever a producer sought a credit. Under the present rules of the Guild, Welles’s name would probably not have appeared. And so it was by an awful fluke of justice that when the Academy Awards night came, and Welles should have got the awards he deserved as director and actor, the award he got (the only Academy Award he has ever got) was as co-author of the Best Original Screenplay.1

  Fourteen

  THE MERCURY GROUP wasn’t surprised at Welles’s taking a script credit; they’d had experience with this foible of his. Very early in his life as a prodigy, Welles seems to have fallen into the trap that has caught so many lesser men—believing his own publicity, believing that he really was the whole creative works, producer-director-writer-actor. Because he could do all these things, he imagined that he did do them. (A Profile of him that appeared in The New Yorker two years before Citizen Kane was made said that “outside the theatre … Welles is exactly twenty-three years old.”) In the days before the Mercury Theatre’s weekly radio shows got a sponsor, it was considered a good publicity technique to
build up public identification with Welles’s name, so he was credited with just about everything, and was named on the air as the writer of the Mercury shows. Probably no one but Welles believed it. He had written some of the shows when the program first started, and had also worked on some with Houseman, but soon he had become much too busy even to collaborate; for a while Houseman wrote them, and then they were farmed out. By the time of the War of the Worldsbroadcast, on Halloween, 1938, Welles wasn’t doing any of the writing. He was so busy with his various other activities that he didn’t always direct the rehearsals himself, either—William Alland or Richard Wilson or one of the other Mercury assistants did it. Welles might not come in until the last day, but somehow, all agree, he would pull the show together “with a magic touch.” Yet when the Martian broadcast became accidentally famous, Welles seemed to forget that Howard Koch had written it. (In all the furor over the broadcast, with front-page stories everywhere, the name of the author of the radio play wasn’t mentioned.) Koch had been writing the shows for some time. He lasted for six months, writing about twenty-five shows altogether—working six and a half days a week, and frantically, on each one, he says, with no more than half a day off to see his family. The weekly broadcasts were a “studio presentation” until after the War of the Worlds (Campbell’s Soup picked them up then), and Koch, a young writer, who was to make his name with the film The Letter in 1940 and win an Academy Award for his share in the script of the 1942 Casablanca, was writing them for $75 apiece. Koch’s understanding of the agreement was that Welles would get the writing credit on the air for publicity purposes but that Koch would have any later benefit, and the copyright was in Koch’s name. (He says that it was, however, Welles’s idea that he do the Martian show in the form of radio bulletins.) Some years later, when C.B.S. did a program about the broadcast and the panic it had caused, the network re-created parts of the original broadcast and paid Koch $300 for the use of his material. Welles sued C.B.S. for $375,000, claiming that he was the author and that the material had been used without his permission. He lost, of course, but he may still think he wrote it. (He frequently indicates as much in interviews and on television.)

  “Foible” is the word that Welles’s former associates tend to apply to his assertions of authorship. Welles could do so many different things in those days that it must have seemed almost accidental when he didn’t do things he claimed to. Directors, in the theatre and in movies, are by function (and often by character, or, at least, disposition) cavalier toward other people’s work, and Welles was so much more talented and magnetic than most directors—and so much younger, too—that people he robbed of credit went on working with him for years, as Koch went on writing more of the radio programs after Welles failed to mention him during the national publicity about the panic. Welles was dedicated to the company, and he was exciting to work with, so the company stuck together, working for love, and even a little bit more money (Koch was raised to $125 a show) when they got a sponsor and, also as a result of the War of the Worlds broadcast, the movie contract that took them to Hollywood.

  If there was ever a young man who didn’t need unearned credits, it was Orson Welles, yet though he was already too big, he must have felt he needed to dazzle the world. Welles was hated in Hollywood long before he’d made a movie; he was hated almost upon his arrival. From time to time, Hollywood used to work up considerable puerile resentment against “outsiders” who dared to make movies. The scope of Welles’s reputation seems to have infuriated Hollywood; it was a cultural reproach from the East, and the Hollywood people tried to protect themselves by closing ranks and making Welles a butt of their humor. Gene Lockhart composed a stupid, nasty ditty called “Little Orson Annie,” which was sung at Hollywood parties; the name stuck and was used by the columnists, though Hedda Hopper supported him and suggested that Hollywood reserve judgment, and Louella Parsons, on December 31st, selected him as “the most discussed personality to come to films in 1939.” Yet for Welles, with his beard (he was growing it for the Shakespearean production he intended to stage as soon as he could pick up his Hollywood loot), to be ensconced in the Mary Pickford-Buddy Rogers estate, right next door to Shirley Temple, was too much for Hollywood. Welles became the victim of practical jokers. One night when he was dining at Chasen’s, an actor cut off his tie with a table knife. Not all the jokes were so Freudian, but they were mostly ugly. Welles had come with an unprecedented contract. Probably the old Hollywoodians not only expected him to fall on his face but hoped he would, so that their mediocrity and prosperity would be vindicated. But Welles was the braggart who makes good. And, despite their resentment, they were dazzled by Citizen Kane.

  Fifteen

  THE PICTURE GOT a thunderous reception, even in the Hollywood press. In recent years, the rumor has spread that Citizen Kane opened to bad reviews—presumably on the theory that it was so far ahead of its time that it wasn’t understood—and this is now recorded in many film histories. But it was very well understood by the press (who would understand a newspaper picture better?), and it got smashing reviews. It isn’t, after all, a difficult picture. In some ways, it was probably better understood then than it is now, and, as far as I can determine, it was more highly praised by the American press than any other movie in history. The New York opening of Citizen Kane, which had been scheduled for February 14, 1941, finally took place on May 1st, and a week later it opened in Los Angeles. In January, Hedda Hopper had “doubted” whether the picture would ever be released, and some of the trade press had predicted that it wouldn’t be. Possibly it wouldn’t have been except for the screenings that Welles arranged and the publicity that he got.

  The whole industry was already involved in the picture. Although technically Welles had the right of final cut, the editor, Robert Wise, was instructed by the studio, with Welles’s consent, to take a print to New York in January. Wise ran it for the heads of all the major companies and their lawyers, and for six weeks he and his then assistant, Mark Robson, who was on the Coast, fussed over the movie, making tiny, nervous changes—mostly a word here or there—that the executives and lawyers hoped would render the picture less objectionable to Hearst. Meanwhile, Schaefer had engaged Time, Inc.’s legal specialist on invasion-of-privacy suits; the lawyer instructed Schaefer that if he made one small cut in the film, no one could win such a suit. The dangerous section was a bit of dialogue by Raymond, the butler, suggesting that the old man was senile. Schaefer says he had no difficulty persuading Welles to agree to the cut. However, at the beginning of March, Hearst sent for Walter Howey, and no one was sure what they might be poking into. “Nor are private lives to be overlooked,” Hedda Hopper predicted; and her predictions were the same as threats. Hearst’s maneuvers were in the true Kane spirit: In January, Hedda Hopper had warned that “the refugee situation would be looked into,” which meant that there would be pressure for a legal review of whether various imported stars and directors should be allowed to remain in the country, and the industry would be attacked for employing foreigners; that is, refugees from Hitler. Three days after the press previews, the Hearst newspapers, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other patriotic organizations went into action to rid radio of “subversives.” The “subversives” they were after were William Saroyan, Maxwell Anderson, Marc Connelly, Robert E. Sherwood, Stephen Vincent Benét, Paul Green, Sherwood Anderson, and James Boyd, who were involved with Welles in a series of C.B.S. radio plays on the general theme of freedom, which, although it had been encouraged by the Justice Department, was now condemned as un-American and as tending to promote Communism. Before Citizen Kane was released, PM reported that Hearst photographers were following Welles “in G-man style,” trying to get something on him, while Variety reported “persistent inquiries at the draft board as to why Welles hadn’t been drafted.” It was along about this time that Hearst himself saw the picture. Schaefer says, “Hearst personally sent to me at the studio and asked to see a print, and we let him have it. This
was before it opened. There was no response, no comment. Orson knew this.” Welles may have feared that Schaefer would buckle unless he squeezed him from the other side, or, as Schaefer claims, it may have been Welles’s way of getting more publicity, but, for whatever reason, Welles began to issue threats: he gave R.K.O. the deadline of March 30th for releasing the picture or facing a lawsuit. On March 11th, Welles called a press conference to alert the press to the danger that the film might be suppressed, and gave out this statement:

  I believe that the public is entitled to see Citizen Kane. For me to stand by while this picture was being suppressed would constitute a breach of faith with the public on my part as producer. I have at this moment sufficient financial backing to buy Citizen Kane from R.K.O. and to release it myself. Under my contract with R.K.O. I have the right to demand that the picture be released and to bring legal action to force its release. R.K.O. must release Citizen Kane. If it does not do so immediately, I have instructed my attorney to commence proceedings.

  I have been advised that strong pressure is being brought to bear in certain quarters to cause the withdrawal of my picture Citizen Kane because of an alleged resemblance between incidents in the picture and incidents in the life of Mr. William Randolph Hearst.

  Any such attempts at suppression would involve a serious interference with freedom of speech and with the integrity of the moving picture industry as the foremost medium of artistic expression in the country.

  There is nothing in the facts to warrant the situation that has arisen. Citizen Kane was not intended to have nor has it any reference to Mr. Hearst or to any other living person. No statement to the contrary has ever been authorized by me. Citizen Kane is the story of a wholly fictitious character.