by Pauline Kael
Mankiewicz went on writing scripts, but his work in the middle and late forties is not in the same spirit as Kane. It’s rather embarrassing to look at his later credits, because they are yea-saying movies—decrepit “family pictures” like The Enchanted Cottage. The booze and the accidents finally added up, and he declined into the forties sentimental slop. He tried to rise above it. He wrote the script he had proposed earlier on Aimee Semple McPherson, and he started the one on Dillinger, but he had squandered his health as well as his talents. I have read the McPherson script; it is calledWoman of the Rock, and it’s a tired, persevering-to-the-end, burned-out script. He uses a bit of newspaper atmosphere, and Jed again, this time as a reporter, and relies on a flashback structure from Aimee’s death to her childhood; there are “modern” touches—a semi-lesbian lady who manages the evangelist, for instance—and the script comes to life whenever he introduces sophisticated characters, but he can’t write simple people, and even the central character is out of his best range. The one device that is interesting is the heroine’s love of bright scarves, starting in childhood with one her father gives her and ending with one that strangles her when it catches on a car wheel, but this is stolen from Isadora Duncan’s death, and to give the death of one world-famous lady to another is depressingly poverty-stricken. Mankiewicz’s character hadn’t changed. He had written friends that he bore the scars of his mistake with Charlie Lederer, but just as he had lent the script of Kane to Lederer, Marion Davies’s nephew, he proudly showedWoman of the Rock to Aimee Semple McPherson’s daughter, Roberta Semple, and that ended the project. His behavior probably wasn’t deliberately self-destructive as much as it was a form of innocence inside the worldly, cynical man—I visualize him as so pleased with what he was doing that he wanted to share his delight with others. I haven’t read the unfinished Dillinger; the title, As the Twig Is Bent, tells too hoary much.
In his drama column in The New Yorker in 1925, Mankiewicz parodied those who thought the Marx Brothers had invented all their own material inThe Cocoanuts and who failed to recognize George S. Kaufman’s contribution. It has been Mankiewicz’s fate to be totally ignored in the books on the Marx Brothers movies; though his name is large in the original ads, and though Groucho Marx and Harry Ruby and S. J. Perelman all confirm the fact that he functioned as the producer of Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, the last reference I can find to this in print is in Who’s Who in Americafor 1953, the year of his death. Many of the thirties movies he wrote are popular on television and at college showings, but when they have been discussed in film books his name has never, to my knowledge, appeared. He is never mentioned in connection with Duck Soup, though Groucho confirms the fact that he worked on it. He is now all but ignored even in many accounts of Citizen Kane. By the fifties, his brother Joe—with A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve—had become the famous wit in Hollywood, and there wasn’t room for two Mankiewiczes in movie history; Herman became a parentheses in the listings for Joe.
Thirty
WELLES HAS OFFERED his semi-defiant apologia for his own notoriously self-destructive conduct in the form of the old fable that he tells as Arkadin in Confidential Report, of 1955—an “original screenplay” that, from internal evidence, he may very well have written. A scorpion wants to get across a lake and asks a frog to carry him on his back. The frog obliges, but midway the scorpion stings him. As they both sink, the frog asks the scorpion why he did it, pointing out that now he, too, will die, and the scorpion answers, “I know, but I can’t help it; it’s my character.” The fable is inserted conspicuously, as a personal statement, almost as if it were a confession, and it’s a bad story for a man to use as a parable of his life, since it’s a disclaimer of responsibility. It’s as if Welles believed in predestination and were saying that he was helpless. Yet Welles’s characterization of himself seems rather odd. Whom, after all, has he fatally stung? He was the catalyst for the only moments of triumph that most of his associates ever achieved.
Every time someone in the theatre or in movies breaks through and does something good, people expect the moon of him and hold it against him personally when he doesn’t deliver it. That windy speech Kaufman and Hart gave their hero in The Fabulous Invalid indicates the enormous burden of people’s hopes that Welles carried. He has a long history of disappointing people. In the Saturday Evening Post of January 20, 1940, Alva Johnston and Fred Smith wrote:
Orson was an old war horse in the infant prodigy line by the time he was ten. He had already seen eight years’ service as a child genius…. Some of the oldest acquaintances of Welles have been disappointed in his career. They see the twenty-four-year-old boy of today as a mere shadow of the two-year-old man they used to know.
A decade after Citizen Kane, the gibes were no longer so good-natured; the terms “wonder boy” and “boy genius” were thrown in Welles’s face. When Welles was only thirty-six, the normally gracious Walter Kerr referred to him as “an international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been.” Welles had the special problems of fame without commercial success. Because of the moderate financial returns on Kane, he lost the freedom to control his own productions; after Kane, he never had complete control of a movie in America. And he lost the collaborative partnerships that he needed. For whatever reasons, neither Mankiewicz nor Houseman nor Toland ever worked on another Welles movie. He had been advertised as a one-man show; it was not altogether his own fault when he became one. He was alone, trying to be “Orson Welles,” though “Orson Welles” had stood for the activities of a group. But he needed the family to hold him together on a project and to take over for him when his energies became scattered. With them, he was a prodigy of accomplishments; without them, he flew apart, became disorderly. Welles lost his magic touch, and as his films began to be diffuse he acquired the reputation of being an intellectual, difficult-to-understand artist. When he appears on television to recite from Shakespeare or the Bible, he is introduced as if he were the epitome of the highbrow; it’s television’s more polite way of cutting off his necktie.
The Mercury players had scored their separate successes in Kane, and they went on to conventional careers; they had hoped to revolutionize theatre and films, and they became part of the industry. Turn on the TV and there they are, dispersed, each in old movies or his new series or his reruns. Away from Welles and each other, they were neither revolutionaries nor great originals, and so Welles became a scapegoat—the man who “let everyone down.” He has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn’t lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him. No one has ever been able to do what was expected of Welles—to create a new radical theatre and to make one movie masterpiece after another—but Welles’s “figurehead” publicity had snowballed to the point where all his actual and considerable achievements looked puny compared to what his destiny was supposed to be. In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.
—The New Yorker, February 20, 1971 and February 27, 1971
Notes
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Shortly after this article appeared, Welles was voted a special Academy Award for “superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures.”