by Pauline Kael
Marion Davies was born in 1897, and, as a teen-ager, went right from the convent to the musical-comedy stage, where she put in two years as a dancer before Ziegfeld “glorified” her in the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1916.” That was where William Randolph Hearst, already in his mid-fifties, spotted her. It is said, and may even be true, that he attended the “Follies” every night for eight weeks, buying two tickets—one for himself and the other for his hat—just “to gaze upon her.” It is almost certainly true that from then “to the day of his death,” as Adela Rogers St. Johns put it, “he wanted to know every minute where she was.” Marion Davies entered movies in 1917, with Runaway Romany, which she also wrote, and then she began that really strange, unparalleled movie career. She had starred in about fifty pictures by the time she retired, in 1937—all under Hearst’s aegis, and under his close personal supervision. (Leading men were afraid to kiss her; Hearst was always watching.) The pictures were all expensively produced, and most of them were financial failures. Marion Davies was a mimic and a parodist and a very original sort of comedienne, but though Hearst liked her to make him laugh at home, he wanted her to be a romantic maiden in the movies, and—what was irreconcilable with her talent—dignified. Like Susan, she was tutored, and he spent incredible sums on movies that would be the perfect setting for her. He appears to have been sincerely infatuated with her in old-fashioned, sentimental, ladylike roles; he loved to see her in ruffles on garden swings. But actresses didn’t become public favorites in roles like those, and even if they could get by with them sometimes, they needed startling changes of pace to stay in public favor, and Hearst wouldn’t let Marion Davies do anything “sordid.”
To judge by what those who worked with her have said, she was thoroughly unpretentious and was depressed by Hearst’s taste in roles for her. She finally broke out of the costume cycle in the late twenties and did some funny pictures: The Red Mill (which Fatty Arbuckle, whom Hearst the moralizer had helped ruin, directed, under his new, satirical pseudonym, Will B. Goodrich), The Fair Coed, my childhood favorite The Patsy, and others. But even when she played in a slapstick parody of Gloria Swanson’s career (Show People, in 1928), Hearst wouldn’t let her do a custard-pie sequence, despite her own pleas and those of the director, King Vidor, and the writer, Laurence Stallings. (King Vidor has described the conference that Louis B. Mayer called so that Vidor could make his case to Hearst for the plot necessity of the pie. “Presently, the great man rose and in a high-pitched voice said, ‘King’s right. But I’m right, too—because I’m not going to let Marion be hit in the face with a pie.’”) She wanted to play Sadie Thompson in Rain, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and the role went to Gloria Swanson (and made her a star all over again). When Marion Davies should have been playing hard-boiled, good-hearted blondes, Hearst’s idea of a role for her was Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and when Thalberg reserved that one for his lady, Norma Shearer, Hearst, in 1934, indignantly left M-G-M and took his money and his “Cosmopolitan Pictures” label over to Warner Brothers. (The editors of his newspapers were instructed never again to mention Norma Shearer in print.) It was a long blighted career for an actress who might very well have become a big star on her own, and she finally recognized that with Hearst’s help it was hopeless. By the time Citizen Kane came out, she had been in retirement for four years, but the sickening publicity had gone grinding on relentlessly, and, among the audiences at Kane, probably even those who remembered her as the charming, giddy comedienne of the late twenties no longer trusted their memories.
Mankiewicz, catering to the public, gave it the empty, stupid, no-talent blonde it wanted—the “confidential” backstairs view of the great gracious lady featured in the Hearst press. It was, though perhaps partly inadvertently, a much worse betrayal than if he’d made Susan more like Davies, because movie audiences assumed that Davies was a pathetic whiner like Susan Alexander, and Marion Davies was nailed to the cross of harmless stupidity and nothingness, which in high places is the worst joke of all.
Twenty-five
RIGHT FROM THE START of movies, it was a convention that the rich were vulgarly acquisitive but were lonely and miserable and incapable of giving or receiving love. As a mass medium, movies have always soothed and consoled the public with the theme that the rich can buy everything except what counts—love. (The convention remains, having absorbed the Dolce Vita variation that the rich use each other sexually because they are incapable of love.) It was consistent with this popular view of the emptiness of the lives of the rich to make Susan Alexander a cartoon character; the movie reduces Hearst’s love affair to an infatuation for a silly, ordinary nothing of a girl, as if everything in his life were synthetic, his passion vacuous, and the object of it a cipher. What happened in Hearst’s life was far more interesting: he took a beautiful, warm-hearted girl and made her the best-known kept woman in America and the butt of an infinity of dirty jokes, and he did it out of love and the blindness of love.
Citizen Kane, however, employs the simplification, so convenient to melodrama, that there is a unity between a man’s private life and his public one. This simplification has enabled ambitious bad writers to make reputations as thinkers, and in the movies of the forties it was given a superficial plausibility by popular Freudianism. Hideous character defects traceable to childhood traumas explained just about anything the authors disapproved of. Mankiewicz certainly knew better, but as a screenwriter he dealt in ideas that had popular appeal. Hearst was a notorious anti-union, pro-Nazi Redbaiter, so Kane must have a miserable, deformed childhood. He must be wrecked in infancy. It was a movie convention going back to silents that when you did a bio or a thesis picture you started with the principal characters as children and showed them to be miniature versions of their later characters. This convention almost invariably pleased audiences, because it also demonstrated the magic of movies—the kids so extraordinarily resembled the adult actors they would turn into. And it wasn’t just makeup—they really did, having been searched out for that resemblance. (This ispossible in theatre, but it’s rarely feasible.) That rather old-fashioned view of the predestination of character from childhood needed only a small injection of popular Freudianism to pass for new, and if you tucked in a trauma, you took care of the motivation for the later events. Since nothing very bad had happened to Hearst, Mankiewicz drew upon Little Orphan Annie. He orphaned Kane, and used that to explain Hearst’s career. (And, as Welles directed it, there’s more real emotion and pain in the childhood separation sequence than in all the rest of the movie.)
Thus Kane was emotionally stunted. Offering personal emptiness as the explanation of Hearst’s career really doesn’t do much but feed the complacency of those liberals who are eager to believe that conservatives are “sick” (which is also how conservatives tend to see liberals). Liberals were willing to see this hollow-man explanation of Hearst as something much deeper than a cliché of popular melodrama, though the film’s explaining his attempts to win public office and his empire-building and his art collecting by the childhood loss of maternal love is as unilluminating as the conservative conceit that Marx was a revolutionary because he hated his father. The point of the film becomes the cliché irony that although Hearst has everything materially, he has nothing humanly.
Quite by chance, I saw William Randolph Hearst once, when I was about nineteen. It was Father’s Day, which sometimes falls on my birthday, and my escort bumped me into him on the dance floor. I can’t remember whether it was at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco or at the St. Francis, and I can’t remember the year, though it was probably 1938. But I remember Hearst in almost terrifying detail, with the kind of memory I generally have only for movies. He was dinner-dancing, just like us, except that his table was a large one. He was seated with Marion Davies and his sons with their wives or dates; obviously, it was a kind of family celebration. I had read the then current Hearst, Lord of San Simeon and Ferdinand Lundberg’sImperial Hearst, and probably almos
t everything else that was available about him, and I remember thinking, as I watched him, of Charles A. Beard’s preface to the Lundberg book—that deliberately cruel premature “Farewell to William Randolph Hearst,” with its tone of “He will depart loved by few and respected by none whose respect is worth of respect…. None will be proud to do honor to his memory,” and so on. You don’t expect to bump into a man on the dance floor after you’ve been reading that sort of thing about him. It was like stumbling onto Caligula, and Hearst looked like a Roman emperor mixing with the commoners on a night out. He was a huge man—six feet four or five—and he was old and heavy, and he moved slowly about the dance floor with her. He seemed like some prehistoric monster gliding among the couples, quietly majestic, towering over everyone; he had little, odd eyes, like a whale’s, and they looked pulled down, sinking into his cheeks. Maybe I had just never seen anybody so massive and dignified and old dancing, and maybe it was that plus who he was, but I’ve never seen anyone else who seemed to incarnate power and solemnity as he did; he was frightening and he was impressive, almost as if he were wearing ceremonial robes of office. When he danced with Marion Davies, he was indifferent to everything else. They looked isolated and entranced together; this slow, huge dinosaur clung to the frowzy-looking aging blonde in what seemed to be a ritual performance. Joined together, they were as alone as the young dancing couple in the sky with diamonds in Yellow Submarine. Maybe they were that couple a few decades later, for they had an extraordinary romance—one that lasted thirty-two years—and they certainly had the diamonds (or had had them). He seemed unbelievably old to me that night, when he was probably about seventy-five; they were still together when he died, in 1951, at the age of eighty-eight.
The private pattern that was devised as a correlative (and possible explanation) of Hearst’s public role was false. Hearst didn’t have any (recorded) early traumas, Marion Davies did have talent, and they were an extraordinarily devoted pair; far from leaving him, when he faced bankruptcy she gave him her money and jewels and real estate, and even borrowed money to enable him to keep his newspapers. He was well loved, and still he was a dangerous demagogue. And, despite what Charles A. Beard said and what Dos Passos said, and despite the way Mankiewicz presented him inCitizen Kane, and all the rest, Hearst and his consort were hardly lonely, with all those writers around, and movie stars and directors, and Shaw, and Winston Churchill, and weekend parties with Marion Davies spiking teetotaller Calvin Coolidge’s fruit punch (though only with liquor that came from fruit). Even Mrs. Luce came; the pictures of Hearst on the walls at Time-Life might show him as an octopus, but who could resist an invitation? Nor did Hearst lose his attraction or his friends after he lost his big money. After San Simeon was stripped of its silver treasures, which were sold at auction in the thirties, the regal-party weekends were finished, but he still entertained, if less lavishly, at his smaller houses. Dos Passos played the same game as Citizen Kane when he wrote of Hearst “amid the relaxing adulations of screenstars, admen, screenwriters, publicitymen, columnists, millionaire editors”—suggesting that Hearst was surrounded by third-raters and sycophantic hirelings. But the lists and the photographs of Hearst’s guests tell another story. He had the one great, dazzling court of the first half of the twentieth century, and the statesmen and kings, the queens and duchesses at his table were as authentic as the writers and wits and great movie stars and directors. When one considers who even those screenwriters were, it’s not surprising that Hearst wanted their company. Harold Ross must have wondered what drew his old friends there, for he came, too, escorted by Robert Benchley.
It is both a limitation and in the nature of the appeal of popular art that it constructs false, easy patterns. Like the blind-beggar-for-luck, Kane has a primitive appeal that is implicit in the conception. It tells the audience that fate or destiny or God or childhood trauma has already taken revenge on the wicked—that if the rich man had a good time he has suffered remorse, or, better still, that he hasn’t really enjoyed himself at all. Before Mankiewicz began writing the script, he talked about what a great love story it would be—but who would buy tickets for a movie about a rich, powerful tycoon who also found true love? In popular art, riches and power destroy people, and so the secret of Kane is that he longs for the simple pleasures of his childhood before wealth tore him away from his mother—he longs for what is available to the mass audience.
Twenty-six
EVEN WHEN HEARST'S SPEECHES, or facsimiles of them, were used in Kane, their character was transformed. If one looks at his actual remarks on property and then at Mankiewicz’s adaptation of them, one can see how. Hearst’s remarks are tight and slightly oblique, and it takes one an instant to realize what he’s saying. Mankiewicz makes them easier to grasp (and rather florid) but kills some of their sinister double edge by making them consciously flip. He turns them into a joke. And when Mankiewicz didn’t make the speeches flip, Welles’s delivery did. When you hear Kane dictate the telegram to Cuba, you don’t really think for a minute that it’s acted on. And so the movie becomes a comic strip about Hearst, without much resonance, and certainly without much tragic resonance. Hearst, who compared himself to an elephant, looked like a great man. I don’t think he actually was great in any sense, but he was extraordinary, and his power and wealth, plus his enormous size, made him a phenomenally commanding presence. Mankiewicz, like Dos Passos, may have believed that Hearst fell from greatness, or (as I suspect) Mankiewicz may have liked the facile dramatic possibilities of that approach. But he couldn’t carry it out. He couldn’t write the character as a tragic fallen hero, because he couldn’t resist making him funny. Mankiewicz had been hacking out popular comedies and melodramas for too long to write drama; one does not dictate tragedy to a stenotypist. He automatically, because of his own temperament and his writing habits, turned out a bitchy satirical melodrama. Inside the three hundred and twenty-five pages of his long, ambitious first draft was the crowd-pleasing material waiting to be carved out. When one reads the long version, it’s obvious what must go; if I had been doing the cutting I might have cut just about the same material. And yet that fat to be cut away is everything that tends to make it a political and historical drama, and what is left is the private scandals of a poor little rich boy. The scandals in the long draft—some of it, set in Italy during Kane’s youth, startlingly like material that came to the screen twenty years later in La Dolce Vita—served a purpose beyond crowd pleasing: to show what a powerful man could cover up and get away with. Yet this, of course, went out, for reasons similar to the ones that kept Kane, unlike Hearst, from winning elected office—to reassure the public that the rich don’t get away with it.
Welles now has a lumbering grace and a gliding, whalelike motion not unlike Hearst’s, but when he played the role he became stiff and crusty as the older Kane, and something went blank in the aging process—not just because the makeup was erratic and waxy (especially in the bald-headed scenes, such as the one in the picnic tent) but because the character lost his connection with business and politics and became a fancy theatrical notion, an Expressionist puppet. Also, there are times when the magic of movies fails. The camera comes so close that it can reveal too much: Kane as an old man was an actor trying to look old, and Welles had as yet only a schoolboy’s perception of how age weighs one down. On a popular level, however, his limitations worked to his advantage; they tied in with the myth of the soulless rich.
The conceptions are basically kitsch; basically, Kane is popular melodrama—Freud plus scandal, a comic strip about Hearst. Yet, partly because of the resonance of what was left of the historical context, partly because of the juiciness of Welles’s young talent and of the varied gifts and personalities others brought to the film, partly because of the daring of the attack on the most powerful and dangerous press lord known to that time, the picture has great richness and flair: it’s kitsch redeemed. I would argue that this is what is remarkable about movies—that shallow conceptions in one are
a can be offset by elements playing against them or altering them or affecting the texture. If a movie is good, there is a general tendency to believe that everything in it was conceived and worked out according to a beautiful master plan, or that it is the result of the creative imagination of the director, but in movies things rarely happen that way—even more rarely than they do in opera or the theatre. There are son many variables; imagine how different the whole feeling of Kane would be if the film had been shot in a naturalistic style, or even if it had been made at M-G-M instead of at R.K.O. Extraordinary movies are the result of the “right” people’s getting together on the “right” project at the “right” time—in their lives and in history. I don’t mean to suggest that a good movie is just a mess that happens to work (although there have been such cases)—only that a good movie is not always the result of a single artistic intelligence. It can be the result of a fortunate collaboration, of cross-fertilizing accidents. And I would argue that what redeems movies in general, what makes them so much easier to take than other arts, is that many talents in interaction in a work can produce something more enjoyable than one talent that is not of the highest. Because of the collaborative nature of most movies, masterpieces are rare, and even masterpieces may, like Kane, be full of flaws, but the interaction frequently results in special pleasures and surprises.
Twenty-seven
THE DIRECTOR SHOULD be in control not because he is the sole creative intelligence but because only if he is in control can he liberate and utilize the talents of his co-workers, who languish (as directors do) in studio-factory productions. The best interpretation to put on it when a director says that a movie is totally his is not that he did it all himself but that he wasn’t interfered with, that he made the choices and the ultimate decisions, that the whole thing isn’t an unhappy compromise for which no one is responsible; not that he was the sole creator but almost the reverse—that he was free to use all the best ideas offered him.