The Chief

by David Nasaw

  If loyalty or sympathy were not reason enough for Hollywood insiders like Mayer, Warner, and the Schencks to decline to exhibit the film, fear of retribution was. On January 19, the New York Times reported that Hearst’s representatives had contacted Mayer and Warner for help and begun “an investigation of the alien situation in Hollywood, something about which the industry is most sensitive....A rip-snorting newspaper Americanization campaign could prove embarrassing. A Congressional investigation, hinted at by Senator Burton K. Wheeler on Monday, might be disastrous. Those outside RKO are aware of these possibilities, and if they regard them seriously enough they may align themselves with those who think it inadvisable to release ‘Citizen Kane.’” The Times reported further that Adela Rogers St. Johns was gathering material “for a story of Mr. Welles’s romantic adventures in Hollywood.” Welles was, at the time, often seen with Dolores Del Rio, who was married. The studios were less worried about his being caught in an adulterous affair than about other Hollywood celebrities whose reputations would not survive a full-scale Hearstian investigation of sexual habits in Hollywood. According to Simon Callow, Louella Parsons, “using every ugly tactic she could think up,” had already threatened to print fictional versions of the lives of RKO board members in Hearst papers. “If you boys want private lives,” she was saying, “I’ll give you private lives.” Variety reported in early February that a group of Hollywood executives, organized by Louis B. Mayer, had begun to raise funds to buy and destroy the Citizen Kane negative to forestall the havoc the Hearst press was prepared to unleash on the industry.14

  While Parsons and Mayer did W. R.’s dirty work on the Coast, Richard Berlin, the head of his magazine division, joined the battle from New York. In early January he contacted the general manager of Warner Brothers, who told him that Citizen Kane would not be shown in their theaters. “I spoke to my friend, Spyros Skouras, about the same thing. Spyros has charge of all Twentieth Century Fox Theaters as well as being the largest independent chain owner in America. Spyros told me that Fox will not play Citizen Kane and that none of the Skouras Theaters will play Citizen Kane, that he was going to make it his job to talk to every important independent chain theater operator and see that they boycotted the picture.”15

  Berlin had also put his leading subversive-hunter, Howard Rushmore, on the case. Rushmore, Berlin wrote the Chief, had assembled material that proved that “our friend, Welles, is a pretty bad boy and is mixed up with the Leftists.... Hollywood is due for a good purging as the picture industry, I am sure, has a healthy representation from the Communist Party....It is an important avenue of propaganda and the Party never neglects such an avenue ... It might not be a bad idea if Rushmore would come to California incognito, work under cover ... for a matter of a few weeks in this Communistic activity in the motion picture industry preparatory to an exposé.”16

  Although Hearst asked to see Rushmore’s report, he did not give Berlin the go-ahead to release any material or send Rushmore to California to continue his investigation. Two days later, on a Thursday, Berlin called to tell the Chief that George Schaefer, the head of RKO, had asked for a meeting. Hearst had Joe Willicombe call Berlin back to tell him to avoid Schaefer: “Our friends in the business who are handling this matter do not think it wise for you to see that man. They think that everything is going fine and that the man may do some damage by misrepresenting the interview.... I think they are right and that we should heed them. Can you not conveniently be out of town? I have studiously avoided meeting anybody in order to leave the whole matter in the hands of our friends.”17

  The message arrived twenty-four hours too late, or so Berlin reported back to the Chief. Anxious to insert himself into the negotiations, Berlin had lunch with Schaefer and informed the studio head that “he had a good Leftist for a partner in Orson Welles.”18

  Through January of 1941, the daily press, trade papers, and news magazines were filled with stories about what Newsweek labeled the battle of Hearst vs. Orson Welles. Few in Hollywood or New York had any doubt but that Hearst would prevail. Douglas Churchill in his January 19 New York Times article put the odds at two-to-one that the film would not be released.19

  Though most of the campaign against RKO was fought in private, the Hearst press signaled its intention to retaliate against the studio by refusing to run ads for RKO films in its newspapers or magazines. Variety reported in mid-January that an advertisement for RKO’s latest picture, Kitty Foyle, had been pulled from Hearst’s Los Angeles papers. As Richard Berlin explained to the agent who had tried to place an advertisement for Citizen Kane in Cosmopolitan, he “was refusing the advertisement ... purely on the grounds that it was an unkind gesture against Mr. Hearst and that he, the agent, could tell Mr. Schaefer that Cosmopolitan does not wish to carry advertising on pictures that endeavor to destroy people’s character whether it be Mr. Hearst, Mr. Schaefer, Mr. Schenck or anyone else.”20

  In late January, Welles and his press agent flew to New York City, in Variety’s words, “to huddle with George Schaefer and other RKO execs on the future of Citizen Kane, which is, more or less, stymied by threats of blackouts by the Hearst newspapers.” After screening the film for RKO board members and lawyers, Schaefer and Welles agreed to make a number of cuts and in a gesture of conciliation sent a print of the edited film to Hearst. It was returned with the seals unbroken.21

  Citizen Kane had been rescheduled for a mid-February premiere at Radio City Music Hall, but no one was surprised when the opening was canceled. Louella had threatened the manager of Radio City Music Hall “with a total press blackout if he showed the movie” and, according to Schaefer, had warned Nelson Rockefeller, whose family owned Radio City, that if Citizen Kane opened there, Hearst’s American Weekly would run a “double-page spread on John D. Rockefeller.”22

  As Schaefer had only postponed the opening, not shelved the film, Louella and the Hearst press continued their attack. When a minor European producer was awarded $7,000 after suing RKO for breach of contract, the story was prominently featured in the Hearst papers, with special emphasis on the fact that George Schaefer had been named as co-defendant. While waiting for his picture to be released, Welles agreed to direct an adaptation of Native Son by the novelist—and Communist party member—Richard Wright. The Hearst papers attacked Welles as a Communist sympathizer. In April, he wrote and starred in a radio drama produced for CBS by The Free Company, a leftist group of radio writers and directors. The Hearst papers reported on their front pages that the American Legion had discovered that the members of The Free Company included several who were affiliated with groups approved by the Daily Worker. In late April, Welles gave the Hearst witch-hunters another opportunity to assail him when he signed on as a “founder” of a defense committee for the union leader Harry Bridges, who was fighting deportation proceedings in San Francisco. From this point on, every reference in the Hearst papers to either Welles or Bridges would prominently mention the former’s support for the latter.23

  The Hearst vs. Welles story was too good to go away. The protagonists were both so “huge” (literally and figuratively) that every rumor got its hearing. In a letter to his friend Alexander Woollcott, Herman Mankiewicz claimed that Hearst had offered Hollywood producers “a hundred examples of unfavorable news—rape by executives, drunkenness, miscegenation and allied sports—which on direct appeal from Hollywood he had kept out of his papers in the last fifteen years,” but would no longer keep out if Welles’s film were released. Welles claimed that his draft records had been investigated and that he had been harassed by suspicious-looking photographers lurking in bushes. “They were really after me,” Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich. “Before Kane was released, I was lecturing—I think it was Pittsburgh, some town like that—and a detective came up to me as I was having supper ... He said, ‘Don’t go back to your hotel ... They’ve got a fourteen-year-old girl in the closet and two cameramen waiting for you to come in.’ And of course I would have gone to jail. There would have been no
way out of it.”24

  Welles and Schaefer held screenings in Hollywood and New York to demonstrate to the press, the industry, and the RKO board that Citizen Kane was a work of art which deserved to be released. So many prominent people were invited to so many screenings that Variety joked that RKO had decided not to open the film at premiere prices, because those who might have been able to afford a high-priced ticket had already seen the film for free. (The story was headlined, “So Many Cuffo Gloms at ‘Kane’ It Kayoes Idea of a $5.50 Preem.”) Hearst, asked by Daily News film columnist John Chapman to describe the film, telegrammed back that he was “the only other guy in Hollywood who has not seen ‘Citizen Kane.’ So I cannot discuss the picture.”25

  For more than four months, RKO, fearful that Hearst would sue for libel or invasion of privacy and win, delayed release of the finished film. Finally, on May 1, Citizen Kane opened in New York City, and in the weeks to come in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.26

  The reviews of the film were outstanding. Time magazine called it Hollywood’s “greatest creation.” John O’Hara in Newsweek, after seeing a screening, reported that it was “the best picture he ever saw.” Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times, said that it was “far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon.”27

  As good as the reviews were, there was, as Robert Carringer has written, trouble at the box office from the beginning. Citizen Kane was not a popular success. While RKO had anticipated being attacked directly in the Hearst papers, that, at least, never happened. “Hearst papers,” Variety reported on May 7, “apparently now figure they can do Welles and the picture more harm by a campaign of silence. They neither mentioned nor printed reviews of the New York opening and apparently have allowed their campaign against Welles as a ‘Communist’ to flag.”28

  There are dozens of half-truths about William Randolph Hearst. One of the most fervently held—and widely disseminated—is that Citizen Kane was crushed by Hearst’s retaliation. As David Thomson reminds us in his biography of Welles, “what is far more instructive about Kane’s failure with the first audiences is the number of ways in which Welles had cut himself off from success.” Although the decision of the major distributors not to book the film made it difficult, if not impossible, to earn back costs, it is doubtful that the film would have been a box-office hit even had Hearst’s associates not interfered with its distribution. “Undoubtedly,” Robert Carringer has concluded, “the distribution problems hurt, but it is unlikely that they made a crucial difference; Citizen Kane is simply not a film for an ordinary commercial audience.” The innovative story-telling techniques that made such an impact on critics and filmmakers may have hurt the film at the box office. “Narrative is steadily denied or evaded by Kane, especially in its opening,” David Thomson has written. “The convention of giving the audience necessary information is ignored; the moods of the first few sequences are deliberately jarring; there are no characters to identify with.” The soundtrack is cluttered with overlapping voices; the lighting and camera angles are bizarre; there are too many flashbacks, and few, if any, close-ups. Audiences, Thomson speculates, must have found the film “obscure, intellectual, overly complex, gloomy or cold.” Citizen Kane, according to Thomson, may also have failed to attract a mass audience because it violated essential American verities: “It maintains that the pursuit of happiness and the search for meaning are futile.”29

  “In the cities business was good initially,” Simon Callow has written, “but quickly slid even in New York, where it closed after fifteen weeks. In the regional theatres, despite a special low-price launch, things were much worse. Among exhibitors, the picture became a byword for disaster.... By the end of the year, it had closed everywhere, not to be seen widely again in America till RKO sold its library to television.”30

  RKO retired the film in 1942, having lost more than $150,000 on it.

  In her 1951 reminiscences, which were later published as The Times We Had, Marion said that neither she nor W. R. ever saw the film:

  My sister Rose did, and she said, “I’ll kill him [Welles], it’s terrible. You can’t even see the picture, because it’s all dark.”

  I said, “Why are you saying it’s terrible?”

  “It’s against you.”...

  I said to her, “Rose, there’s one tradition that I have that was taught to me by W. R. Never read criticism about yourself.”...

  His theory was that no matter what anybody said, no matter what they wrote, you didn’t read it and you didn’t listen....

  But plenty of people talked about Citizen Kane. They would say that it was terrible and I had to go see it. But we never did.31

  In the middle 1950s, the film’s reputation was enhanced by European filmmakers and critics like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and the editors of the British film magazine Sight and Sound, who voted it the all-time best film in 1962. Citizen Kane resurfaced for American audiences and became a fixture on the college and “art house” circuit. In 1956, when RKO became the first movie studio to sell its films to television, Citizen Kane was given a large popular audience.32

  By the time Citizen Kane fully reentered public consciousness, both W. R. and Marion were dead. The film’s new viewers, never having seen one of Marion’s films or lived through Hearst’s heyday as publisher and politician, had no reason to believe that the portrait was not an accurate one. In 1961, when W. A. Swanberg entitled his biography of Hearst Citizen Hearst, another strong link was forged between Kane and Hearst.33

  Although the process by which Hearst became Kane and vice-versa is beyond the scope of this book, the lines between the fictional and the real have become so blurred that today, almost sixty years after the film was made and a half-century since Hearst’s death, it is difficult to disentangle the intermingled portraits of Charles Foster Kane and William Randolph Hearst. Both were powerful; both were enormously wealthy; both had big houses and big egos. But Welles’s Kane is a cartoon-like caricature of a man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion, and love of those around him. Hearst, to the contrary, never regarded himself as a failure, never recognized defeat, never stopped loving Marion or his wife. He did not, at the end of his life, run away from the world to entomb himself in a vast, gloomy art-choked hermitage.

  Orson Welles may have been a great filmmaker, but he was neither a biographer nor a historian. “You know, the real story of Hearst is quite different from Kane’s,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich many years later. “And Hearst himself—as a man, I mean—was very different.”34

  36. Old Age

  UNLIKE ALDOUS HUXLEY’S fictional multimillionaire Jo Stoyte, who was modeled after him, and contrary to the abundant rumors, W. R. was not phobic about old age or death. He greeted the passing of time with untypical insouciance. Aging gave him a license to let down his guard, to compose and publish poetry, to reminisce, to allow elements of playfulness and sentimentality to enter his writing. Old age made everything look and feel a bit different. At his seventy-sixth birthday party, given by Cissy Patterson in Washington, he admitted that he had still not attained the age of discretion, but, having reached the “years of discrimination,” had come to “appreciate the fact that there is nothing so valuable in life as friendship and companionship.... The only thing of genuine importance is friends.”1

  In old age, Hearst had a number of friends, though they were all either on his payroll or connected to him through some sort of business arrangement. Cissy Patterson and Ed Coblentz edited his newspapers; Tom White, Richard Berlin, Jack Neylan, Martin Huberth, and Alice Head were senior executives in the company; Louella Parsons and Adela Rogers St. Johns were syndicated writers.

  Still, while Hearst had any number of men and women he called his friends, he was intimate with none of them. He faced the crises of bankruptcy and liquidation by himself. There is no evidence
that he confided in anyone—not Millicent, not his sons, not his oldest friends. Even Marion, in her memoirs, records only one instance in which he confessed that he was in trouble, on the train that carried them to New York in the fall of 1937.

  As he aged, W. R. looked more than ever to Marion and to his dachshunds for companionship. When Helen, his favorite dachshund, died at Wyntoon, Hearst was, Marion recalled, inconsolable—as she had been on the death of her dog Gandhi. He recovered only after writing about his loss in his “In the News” column:

  A boy and his dog are no more inseparable companions than an old fellow and his dog. An old bozo is a nuisance to almost everybody—except his dog. To his dog he is just as good as he ever was—maybe better ... Anyhow the dog and the old guy understand each other and get along “just swell.” So I do miss Helen, I was very fond of her. She always slept on a big chair in my room and her solicitous gaze followed me to bed at night and was the first thing to greet me when I woke in the morning.... Helen died in my bed and in my arms. I have buried her on the hillside overlooking the green lawn—where she used to run—and surrounded by the flowers. I will not need a monument to remember her. But I am placing over her little grave a stone with the inscription—“Here lies dearest Helen—my devoted friend.”2