by Nick Davis
Now, just a few short days later, with “Beer Barrel Polka” playing endlessly on Phipps’s car radio, Herman found himself in too much pain to cry, though he did tell the cops who finally came, “If you can’t give me something, shoot me.” By the time the ambulance arrived and he was in a stretcher on the way back to Los Angeles from whatever godforsaken part of New Mexico they’d made it to, any thought of rescue from anything in the east—that was what this road trip had been, him and Phipps hoping to make it across the country in less than a week—those thoughts had vanished for good. There wasn’t going to be another play. Pop couldn’t help. There was no magazine piece to do for Ross, nothing he could even send off to the Hollywood Reporter. His debts were monumental. There were too many creditors to count, and he’d long since lost track of how many thousands of dollars he owed. Joe said he’d help, though of course not with any actual money; still, Joe and Sam Jaffe were trying to coordinate the debts and maybe talk a few folks into cutting Herman a break on some of them, though Herman wondered why Jaffe, his agent now, wasn’t paying ten percent of the debt.
The truth is, Herman had boxed himself into a corner, and it wasn’t entirely clear that this time he’d find a way out. Sara had moved the family out of Tower Road again—he wasn’t sure how many times they’d had to rent the place out and move into a smaller place, but now they’d be hard-pressed even to find the rent for that one unless Herman found some work somewhere. In the ambulance, he waxed philosophical. Something always seemed to come along, but sometimes that something was just a culvert post to smash Tommy Phipps’s goddamn Buick.
People whizzed through his mind, possible saviors, or just employers. Dore Schary. Harry Cohn. Charles Lederer, for some reason, Marion Davies’s nephew. Lederer had been a friend for a while, back when Herman and Sara had been frequent guests of Hearst and Marion at San Simeon. Now Lederer was working at Fox. He might be able to pull a string or two. Herman thought of others, men at the racetrack, people with deep pockets, a haberdasher who had laughed his head off once as Herman entertained him while being fitted for a suit. But how the hell would he find the guy? Then there was that lunch he’d had a year or so back with that big overgrown monkey Orson Welles at “21” in New York. Brilliant and dynamic, Welles was undeniably charming, and he knew Welles had liked him too. He’d heard from Cukor that Houseman said that Welles told him that he and Herman had both probably left the lunch feeling like they were the two smartest, most brilliant men in the entire Western Hemisphere. Sonofabitch was right, too. He had, and they were.
* * *
—
Welles did come along in the end, of course. The boy wonder had come out to Hollywood a few months earlier, with a huge contract from RKO giving him carte blanche for four movies. In a town notorious for the venomous envy it inspires in others, the twenty-four- year-old Welles was setting world records. He was more than detested and despised, and most likely feared. The guy had such contemptible arrogance, saying that a movie studio was the biggest toy train set any boy ever had. As if! As if years of hard work, of craftsmanship and study and patient devotion to the art and science of making motion pictures was as simple as playing with a toy train set. It was a discipline, even Herman knew that by now. A crazy damn idiotic business, but if you didn’t take it seriously, it would eat you alive.
The whole town had its knives out for Orson Welles. And it was kind of delicious, watching the boy wonder struggle, fail, fall on his face. RKO had promised to do whatever he wanted, but when Heart of Darkness, which Welles had already done for radio and was his first choice to be a movie, proved to be too expensive, RKO dropped it like a hot potato, and the town did a jig. Welles started a thriller, The Smiler with a Knife, but the attempt seemed half-hearted, and the columnists were ripping into Welles with regularity now.
In here, at last, he turned to Herman, flat on his back in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Orson was one of Herman’s many visitors, and the one who rescued him from a feeling that the game had passed him by.*2 At first Welles just needed help with a few radio scripts—Welles and his Mercury Theatre were still doing radio shows, and Orson paid $200 a pop. Herman cranked out as many as he could in the hospital, drinking them up, even if they were uncredited. To anyone who might have wandered into the room and seen a man with his left leg in a cast and hoisted up in traction—it was broken in three places—the wheezy cough, his packet of cigarettes on the bedside table further evidence of the man’s utter disregard for his health—Herman looked like he was ready to be sent out to pasture, the renowned Hollywood screenwriter so down on his luck he was writing uncredited radio scripts.
But in the photographs taken of Herman in this bed during this time—and there are quite a few—it is impossible to ignore the glint in the man’s eye. Something had happened, and it is no accident that for the first time in his adult life he was letting his moustache grow. The moustache was not just an emulation of Franz, though it was certainly that—and it wasn’t just the laziness of personal hygiene that comes after an accident. No, the moustache was Herman finally saying, fine, here I am, world. I’ll work with this kid, because he’s exciting and the whole town hates him too and who knows what’ll come of it but damn if it isn’t more interesting than the swill I’ve been churning out for over a decade.
In time, Herman and Welles, who visited Cedars of Lebanon often and among other things mesmerized my poor grandmother—people forget what a colossally handsome man the young Orson Welles was, but Sara never did, and to read her interview transcripts about the neck massages Welles gave her while she reclined on Herman’s hospital bed is to go to a place no grandson should ever go—the two men began talking about a movie. Where the idea precisely came from is always impossible to discern, and evidence abounds on both sides of the eternal debate over who contributed what to the final script of Citizen Kane. Both Welles and Herman had independently been interested in telling the story of the life of a great man using multiple narrators, and each had their own interests in power and journalism. Herman knew about as much about politics and William Randolph Hearst as any man alive, and he invented the Rosebud gimmick as a way in to the screenplay; as for young Welles, as an actor he was a protean figure capable of conveying immense strength and power in a possibly fallen, possibly tragic, but definitely magnetic hero.
Herman in bed after the crack-up in New Mexico, 1939
So does it matter who wrote what?
The challenge, all these years later, is that of course it does. If it doesn’t matter to a well-adjusted, mystical spiritual being who is trying to live her life in accordance with the truest values of life on this planet, it does matter to the biographer, and it matters to the grandson. Who said “Kane” first matters, and who suggested Hearst as the model matters, and who said “Rosebud” matters, and who came up with “a white dress she had on” and where the breakfast table scene came from, and whose idea was the newsreel, and who contributed the scene about the unfinished review of the mistress’s performance, and who put the dreidel in the nursery, and who “Is Pop governor yet?” and on and on and on.*3 It matters, of course it does, because if we’re all going to be judged by what we leave behind, and who came closest to bringing home the missing three points, if the whole damn thing is a competition, then we play to win, and the only way to win is to beat the other guy, to beat him down into submission until he cries uncle, or great-uncle, and gives up and admits of our overpowering genius.
But in the beginning, Herman is forty-two years old and desperate for work, and all of a sudden he’s discussing a possible film script with one of the most exciting personalities to come along in years. He couldn’t give a rat’s ass, at this point, who was going to be getting what credit. At this stage, the assumption is, it’s a one-man show—Welles’s brilliant PR machine demanded it, really, that he write, direct, produce, and star in whatever movies he was going to make, just as with the radio shows, like the War of the Worl
ds trick the previous fall that had landed him on the cover of Time when he managed to work half the country into a conniption fit because Martians had landed in New Jersey. Herman knew that Welles took credit for everything—the Mercury Theatre was his creation, no one knew about John Houseman, toiling away to keep the great young actor’s ego and wilder impulses in check, and fewer still had heard of any of the Mercury Theatre’s actors—Joseph Cotten or Agnes Moorehead or Everett Sloane or any of the other professionals who had pushed the Mercury to such heights. Everyone at Mercury was aware of the fundamental fact—and Hell, it was hard to be angry at the guy about it, he had such an inclusiveness of spirit—that it was “The Orson Welles Show.” The rest of them—Herman included, now—were just supposed to bask in the Sun King’s glory.
At the beginning, given where Herman was coming from, that was okay. Herman was feeling depleted and low when he first met Welles—the self-confidence and cheek of the young man who had invaded the New York City theatrical and journalistic worlds over a decade and a half earlier had been replaced by a wariness bordering on depression. Herman simply didn’t feel very good about himself or what he brought to any situation anymore, so when he met Welles, as much as he loved entertaining the young genius with his still undimmed wit (and even affectionately bossed the younger man around at times, making him adjust his bedpan at the hospital) and as much as he may have projected a world-weary “Aren’t we the two smartest fellows around, and won’t we show these morons just exactly how it’s done?” he was also nervous that somehow he would manage to blow this opportunity as he had so many in the past. So he took, maybe for the first time in his career, what the defense offered—he didn’t push it when it came to credit or money. He was happy just to be in the game again.
“Herman was able to do the great work at last”: John Houseman, Rita Alexander, and Herman in Victorville, California, 1940
Orson Welles paying a visit to Victorville, where Rita Alexander tends to Herman, and John Houseman watches
As he and Welles had their conversations, a movie idea began to burble and grow, and then, most crucially, they hatched the plan for the delivery of the script. Welles seems to have realized at some point along in here that Mank was too invaluable to the project to let him do half-assed or in any way unsupervised work, and so it was that one morning in early February of 1940, Herman and Houseman crammed into a Pontiac with secretary Rita Alexander and went out to the Kemper Campbell Ranch, a vacation retreat in Victorville, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, eighty miles from Los Angeles. It was there, for the next twelve weeks, that Houseman did whatever it was that Houseman did—organizing and editing the notes Herman and Welles had taken before they’d come to Victorville, keeping Herman from drinking (too much, anyway; there was a canteen not far from the ranch that they often drove down to in the early evening), talking endlessly with Herman about the script, and, according to Welles at least, stoking the fires that Herman would inevitably keep banked toward any authority figure, in this case Welles himself, probably planting the seeds for what would grow into the credit battle that would eventually consume so much needless energy—and Rita Alexander contributed her patience, good spirit,*4 and unflagging ability not to bother Herman, to stay interested in the story: But how is it going to come out? she would ask him at the end of every night’s dictation, and Herman, lips turning up in that characteristic leer, would say, My dear Mrs. Alexander, I’m making it up as I go along—and Herman was able to do the great work at last.
And it is great work. For all its cleverness and wit that can tend to obscure rather than illuminate what lies underneath, for all the sparkling dialogue sitting on its surface, for however much Pauline Kael may have damned it with faint praise by calling it a “shallow masterpiece”*5—that screenplay stands as the bedrock of what with a handful of other films are utter breakthroughs in the medium, and as such it can only have come from someone—not Welles—who had mastered the form. And Herman took the form he’d been practicing, even if it was with one hand behind his back, maybe holding a bottle or a pair of dice, and he broke it wide open. As Moby-Dick was to the novel and Sgt. Pepper to the rock album, so Citizen Kane was to the movies—a piece of work that demonstrated anew the possibilities of the form itself, a work so astonishing that everything that came afterward had to stand, if not in the thing’s shadow, at least in some relation to it, with an understanding of just how much the game had been changed as a result.
Among the script’s many joys is in its unapologetically contradictory presentation of Charles Foster Kane. Unlike most movie characters, Kane comes across as a real, breathing human, sometimes ruthless, sometimes droll, sometimes, as he himself puts it to Thatcher, “a dangerous scoundrel.” In fact, Kane undersells the multiplicity of his roles when he tells his guardian, “The trouble is, Mr. Thatcher, you don’t realize you’re talking to two people.“ He is far more than two people; he is virtually unknowable, an infinity of complexity and unpredictability, as are we all, at least according to Herman’s script. The screenplay—or the screenwriter, Herman—trusts the audience will understand, that they will recognize themselves in his portraits of complicated, messy, irrational creatures. “A fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember,” Bernstein tells Thompson before losing himself in thought, remembering a girl on a ferry he would never see again. Who was she? What did she represent? Where did it go, and would Bernstein ever get it back? Loss suffuses the screenplay—to begin with, we’ve lost Charles Foster Kane, and again and again, the script shows us people aching for things, or people, who are no longer there: memories, youth, vitality. We can never quite have what we want. And those rare instances of grace—Bernstein’s memory of the girl on the ferry, or, equally tenderly, Kane and Susan Alexander’s meeting, her suffering from a painful toothache and laughing at him as he attempts to cheer her up, and the wonder that overtakes him as he realizes she has no idea who he is—those moments are to be cherished; they cannot sustain, but they are all we have. They swirl through our lives, ungraspable and fleeting, like snowflakes drifting in a globe that is about to smash on the floor.
And somewhere in there Herman started to realize what he’d accomplished. This was not, after all, My Dear Miss Aldrich. This was American.
“I am, have been, and will be, only one thing—an American.”
—Charles Foster Kane
The script Herman and Houseman returned from Victorville with was called American, and in an era when a long film script could sometimes run to 150 pages, it was 325 pages long. It was unwieldy, overwritten, and unfinished. But inside it, one can see nearly all the scenes and characters that eventually made their way to the screen, and the thing’s overall revolutionary structure and shape, the time shifting recalibrations and resettings of the same scenes, is already intact. The script is a masterful mess, moving forward with urgency and momentum, so much so that even people who have seen Citizen Kane dozens of times can be surprised, when watching, at what happens next, which flashback or flash-forward follows which. The movie feels constantly both unexpected and inevitable. And while there are a few blind alleys, what seem like mistakes to a reader who knows the finished work—Kane having a lover of Susan Alexander’s killed, Kane’s mourning the death of his son, the attempted assassination of a president that is blamed on Kane—it is easy to read American, see the great man die in a huge abandoned mansion with the word “Rosebud”*6 slipping from his lips and setting the whole plot in motion, and think: okay, it’s all there.
“Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”: Herman and Orson Welles, c. 1940
And yet, of course, it isn’t. It simply wasn’t done yet, and the artist who helped find the figure at the center of the limestone that was shipped back from Victorville, the visionary that drove that part of the making of the screenplay, was most assuredly not Herman Mankiewicz. Not that Orson Welles shaped the final thing alone. The collaborative nature
of filmmaking, even with a boy genius like Orson around, meant that no one person supplied the precision conveyed in the progression of the original screenplay of American to the final shooting script of Citizen Kane. And Herman played a huge role, though not immediately. After handing in his second draft of American in early May, he did some uncredited work on a film for M-G-M—word of his work with Welles, and his exemplary conduct at Victorville, had brought him another chance from the studio—but he returned to the Mercury payroll in late June,*7 and from then through the end of July, when the principal photography began, he was responsible for cutting and trimming, shaving the script. And, at least outwardly, there was no rancor at all between the two men. Many unofficial cast gatherings were held at Herman’s house on Tower Road, where the cast would read aloud parts of the script (these rehearsals were unofficial, in order to circumvent a studio rule that forbade uncompensated rehearsing), Herman with a notebook and pencil, jotting down notes and ideas as everyone shouted them out. But there was no doubt as to who was in charge of the final product. It was Orson Welles’s show now, and no one doubted it.*8
Which brings us to the battle for credit. Herman, of course, knew what his contract said. Everyone who worked at Mercury had the same contract, which stipulated quite clearly that “All material composed, submitted, added or interpolated by you…under this employment agreement, are now and shall forever be the property of Mercury Productions, Inc., who, for this purpose, shall be deemed the author and creator thereof.” However, the issue of authorship was not quite the same as that of screenplay credit. While Mercury had rarely if ever given a writing credit for their radio broadcasts, and when they did the majority were given to Welles, Hollywood had its own customs, and here the irony was that Herman, who had long been opposed to screenwriters unionizing in any way, was ultimately saved from having his name appear nowhere on the film by the existence of the Hollywood guilds. When it became clear that Welles and RKO intended to give Welles sole screenplay credit, Herman began to make noise. A lot of noise. He and Houseman had taken to calling Welles “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy,” and Herman had also joked about the boy wonder’s “decision to make the first full-length revolutionary ‘motion-picture completely without film!’ ” But there was something more serious at work.