Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  Howard’s grand concept died when no finances could be found, perhaps because potential investors feared to offend such great British press lords as Northcliffe, Rothermere, and Beaverbrook.

  * * * So that Houseman and Mank could work without interruption and keep Mank sober, the two men exchanged the distractions of LA for a quiet off-season resort near rustic Victorville some 85-miles East in the high Mojave Desert. They brought only a typewriter, reference materials, Mank’s crutches, a German nurse, and an English secretary, Mrs. Rita Alexander, who’d been hired for this job by Sara Mankiewicz. Beginning in late February the two men labored steadily for 12½ weeks without interruption except for Orson’s occasional phone calls and one mid-way visit. Mank was so pleased with his progress on the script, which he’d titled American, that he limited himself without complaint to a single scotch each evening with Houseman at a Victorville bar.

  Houseman had managed to ingratiate himself with Mank. This was easy because he brought two welcome gifts. First, Mank needed a Muse and Houseman played that role to perfection: “Once Mank had come to trust me, my editing, for all our disagreements, gave him more creative freedom than his own neurotic self-censorship.”53 Second, Houseman played Iago to their shared resentment of Orson, whom they secretly tagged “Maestro, the Dog-Faced Boy”.54

  On May 8th Mank and Houseman returned to Hollywood and handed Orson the second full draft typescript. The blue title page read: “AMERICAN / by / Herman Mankiewicz”. Hollywood scriptwriter Charles Lederer, then Mank’s close friend and later Orson’s, would tell Peter Bogdanovich that he’d read this version, handed to him by Mank, and “thought it was pretty dull.”

  50 Meryman (1978), 77-79.

  51Welles in Bazin, Bitsch, & Domarchi (1958), as reprinted in Comito (1985), 205.

  52Howard interview in Film Weekly, 17 Sep 1938, as quoted in Kevin Brownlow, David Lean (New York: St. Martin.s Press, 1996), 127-128.

  53Houseman (1972), 455.

  54Houseman interview in Meryman (1978), 263.

  Meanwhile in Beverly Hills, Orson had been editing and rewriting the script. Now he continued with even greater vigor, revising and adding more than 170 pages and drastically hacking out some 75 pages of Mankiewicz flab to get it down to a still hefty 214 pages. This was the first "FINAL" script of 18/19 June. It was the first to carry the title Citizen Kane and credited with Orson's approval (at least implicit) to "Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles". 55

  Afterward, neither Orson nor Mank could clearly recall who had contributed which idea. Mank’s biographer, Richard Meryman, concluded, “To each man, everything seemed his own, perhaps because, like most great conceptions shared by two people, many of the basic elements already existed in the brains of both Mankiewicz and Welles.”56 This is a fair reading of the surviving evidence. But Mank would increasingly claim near-total credit. For example he wrote to his and Orson’s mutual and influential friend, Aleck Woollcott:57

  I feel it my modest duty to tell you that the conception of the story, the plot, the characters, the manner of telling the story and about 99 percent of the words are the exclusive creations of

  Yours, Mank. Mank’s typist, Rita Alexander, told the credulous Pauline Kael, as the latter paraphrased her, that “Welles didn't write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of Citizen Kane.”58 But Mrs. Alexander had no personal knowledge of what Orson had been contributing from Hollywood. Miss Katherine Trosper did. She’d been Orson’s typist on Kane and years later, when Bogdanovich mentioned Kael’s charge that Mank was sole author, she'd replied “Then I’d like to know what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles!”59 And Richard Baer, Kane’s associate producer, swore in a contemporary affidavit (May 1941) that:60

  The revisions made by Welles were not limited to mere general suggestions, but included the actual rewriting of words, dialogue, changing of sequences, ideas and characterizations, and also the elimination and addition of certain scenes.

  Three decades later Baer (who’d renamed himself Barr) repeated his testimony to Meryman, adding that “I know Orson touched every scene.” Meryman, Mank’s biographer, agreed, which is good because few commentators have trusted Orson or his biographers on this controversial point.

  On June 16th, within a month after returning from Hollywood to New York. Houseman had wired Mankiewicz about new Kane cuts and additions he’d just received. He discloses Orson’s extensive involvement in writing several “new scenes”, proving that “all three worked on the script.” Moreover, he even says “I like all Orson’s scenes ... with the exception of Kane Emily sequence.”61 This new material of Orson’s was then incorporated in that "FINAL" script of 18/19 June mentioned above. Had Houseman’s memory simply slipped in the three decades between that cable to Mank and his autobiography? Not likely, as he drew heavily from his file documents, including his correspondence with Mank.

  55 Carringer (1985), 16-35, gives the most detailed analysis of the changes between the successive scripts.

  56Meryman (1978), 246.

  57Quoted in Meryman (1978), 255.

  58Kael (1971), 38.

  59Trosper early 1970s interview in Bogdanovich (1972), 498-499. Miss Trosper had been film writer Dalton Trumbo's lover in 1935-36 while both were at M-G-M. After Kane she went with the Mercury group to New York and later married lawyer Martin Popper, one of the lawyers who defended the "Hollywood Ten" in 1947.

  60Baer affidavit and later interview as quoted in Bogdanovich (1972), 498-499; and Brady (1989), 239. And Barr [Baer] interview in Meryman (1978), 258.

  61Houseman telegram to Mankiewicz as quoted in Brady (1989), 238-239. See Leaming (1985), 204, fora brief summary and the date..

  Orson always gave Mank full credit for the Rosebud gimmick. And the snow-filled glass paperweight was almost certainly inspired by one that Mank’s wife had given her husband. Orson even credited Mank with his own favorite passage—Bernstein’s poignant lines about the briefly glimpsed but never forgotten girl on a Jersey ferry.

  But who deserves credit for that crucial and dramatic “manner of telling the story”—that gradual revealing of the dead Kane’s complex personality through the differing viewpoints of the five people who’d best known him? The three claimants are Mank, Orson, and (surprise!) Geraldine Fitzgerald:

  Mank, as seen, pressed his own “exclusive” claim for what he called the “prism” viewpoint. And his claim did have a basis in fact. Sometime between ’34 and ’37, he’d drafted the first act of a neverproduced play titled The Tree Will Grow as a portrait of recently (1934) killed gangster Dillinger reconstructed from the conflicting memories of people who’d known him.62

  But Orson’s claim, although he’d forgotten his own conclusive documentation, takes priority over both Fitzgerald’s and Mankiewicz’s. He’d already used this device back in late 1932, at least two years before Mank, in his own play script, Marching Song, which wasn’t produced until four decades later and then only at Todd School.

  The young Irish stage and film actress, Geraldine Fitzgerald, had made her American debut on Broadway the previous year with Orson’s Mercurians. Now Fitzgerald was a Hollywood contract player. She told Meryman she’d long had the multiple-viewpoint idea in mind for a play and had suggested it to Orson when he was thrashing about for something to replace The Smiler with a Knife. This would have been back around the last days of 1939 when she was temporarily living at Orson’s estate while awaiting the arrival of her Irish horse-breeder husband and their son (who’d be born next May 5th). Two years later, on meeting Orson soon after Kane’s release, she said cheerily, “You know, that’s taken from that idea I gave you.” This drew his ambiguous but, so she felt, somehow sinister reply: “I don’t want you talking about it.”63

  Orson’s (and Mank’s and Fitzgerald’s) multi-perspective plot device was one of those grand ideas that had been “in the air” for quite some time. It had first been published in 1915 in a Japanese short story, “Rashomon", by Ryunosuke Akutagawa as a m
urder story told by the four eye-witnesses. His tale appeared in English translation in 1930. That same year British author Claude Houghton’s novel, I Am Jonathan Scrivener, explored the elusive protagonist’s life from the viewpoints of several people who knew him. Professor Richard France notes that the 1931 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Alison's House by Susan Glaspell, had a reporter interview the protagonist's survivors with differing results from each. Orson had most likely seen or at least heard in some detail of Glaspell’s play—after all it had played in Manhattan at the popular Civic Repertory Theatre, directed by the celebrated Eva La Gallienne, and won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize. Moreover the cast had included Howard Da Silva whom Orson would hire in 1938 to act in The Cradle Rock. Whatever the source of Orson's exposure to this multiple viewpoint device, he adopted it the following year for his own play, Marching Song.

  62Meryman (1978), 172, 245; Houseman (1972), 449. 63Fitzgerald interview in Meryman (1978), 246.

  * * * At least one of the scenes in Kane that Orson claimed he alone contributed was inspired by his current social life. Among other activities he renewed in Hollywood was his old love affair with jazz music. Nat "King" Cole and his Trio had begun a year-long stand at the Radio Room, a small club on Vine Street across from the Hollywood studios of NBC. Cole was then doing straight jazz to the delight of such aficionados as Frank Sinatra. One night there Orson heard the Trio do Rogers & Hart's "This Can't Be Love" and that song gave him the idea for the climactic scene in a picnic tent where we see the collapse of Kane's marriage to Susan. That this bit of business ("colored man singing —- music") is the director's and not any scriptwriter's is evidenced by the fact that it doesn't appear until the post-filming Cutting Continuity document.64

  The singer and band aren’t mentioned on the film credits nor have they been identified by any of that film’s students. Luckily, the biography of a band member reveals they were Cee Pee Johnson’s popular local black jazz-swing group. Led by Johnson, a veteran drummer-singer of Lionel Hampton’s band, this nine-piece group was playing Hollywood’s Del Mar Club and private parties plus working in two or three movies per year like Kitty Foyle (1940) and Mystery in Swing (1940). At that time Johnson’s band included Marshal Royal on clarinet or sax, his younger brother Ernie Royal on trumpet, and probably Jack McVea on tenor sax. Soprano saxman Buddy Collette explained:65

  Orson Welles knew about our band and it was his decision to use us in Citizen Kane. We played a little blues number at a big party near the end of the film. It’s a quick scene and in a dark setting, so it’s probably hard to pick anyone out. Welles did something different in that scene. You never recorded on the set then, but he insisted that we play and that it be recorded with the scene.

  The song’s nine lines that we hear while watching the party were sung by Cee Pee himself. A photograph in the Whaley collection shows Orson as Inquirer publisher “Kane” joshing with the chorus line while the newspaper’s staff watch and Cee Pee Johnson’s musicians, acting the part of a jazz marching band, play in the background. This scene had been substantially rewritten at the insistence of the Production Code Censors who wouldn’t permit the original hints that “Georgie’s Place” was a bordello.

  On 1 February 1940 Virginia Welles had received her quickie divorce in Reno. Although the then-standard legal grounds had been given as “mental cruelty", she immediately, generously, and pretty much truthfully explained to the press that Orson had never been cruel to her, just that their marriage hadn't mixed with his career. No mention by her of his philandering. And no public airing of his belief that she’d married him only to exchange the dull life of a socialite for the fabled excitement and money of Broadway. Despite later squabbles over alimony, child support, and property, Virginia and her new husband would become Orson's good friends. Her choice for her second spouse reveals much about the unusual lack of bitterness over their divorce. It even flatters Orson, for Charles Lederer was about as close to being an Orson clone as Virginia could have found. He too had been a child prodigy who became a young star in the entertainment world, initially as a journalist, then as a Hollywood scriptwriter. Like Orson, he was also a caustic wit, practical joker, and imaginative creator—he’d invented the ComeAs-You-Are party fad. The main differences between them were that Charles was four years older, prematurely bald, and Virginia found him refreshingly lacking in Orson’s callousness. She was also delighted when her new husband introduced her to sporting events. In one sense, she’d merely exchanged the fabled excitement and money of Broadway for that of Hollywood. Moreover she’d done so within weeks of her freedom from Orson during which she’d also moved to Hollywood. There this bright and beautiful young divorcée attracted many suitors before picking Lederer. By ironic coincidence Charles was the favorite nephew of comic film star Marion Davies, the mistress of mega-millionaire publisher William Randolph Hearst. This fact immediately brought Virginia into Hollywood’s most elite social circle, one that overlapped those in which Orson moved.

  64OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 56.

  65Buddy Collette, Jazz Generations (London: Continuum, 2000), 53. At the beginning of March, almost exactly one month after Orson's divorce from Virginia, Dolores separated from her husband and immediately began divorce proceedings. She moved with her mother to a house at 1455 Stone Canyon in LA's fashionable Bel Air section.66 And the press feasted, as with Ed Sullivan’s column, which reported, “Whether Orson Welles, after his divorce is final, weds Dolores Del Rio, after her divorce is final, is anybody’s guess, but they’re very much in love.”67

  While Virginia and Dolores flourished, Orson's penchant for high living had so battered his budget that drastic cutbacks became necessary. He surrendered the big estate in Brentwood when CBS stopped paying the tab and rented actor Sidney “Charlie Chan" Toler's rather plain Cape Cod-type house at 8545 Franklin Avenue, low in the Hollywood Hills. Further economies came on April 3rd when he let his servants go and moved briefly into an apartment at 11009½ Strathmore Drive in West LA.

  On May 6th he celebrated his 25th birthday with his entire Mercury gang at yet another rented house in Beverly Hills. The most memorable present was his share of the remainder of his father's estate. After deductions for advances, payment of debts, and Dadda's pilferings, the balance of Orson's initial great expectations of $37,000 reportedly came to exactly twelve dollars.68

  But Orson didn’t act as if money was a problem. Nights out continued. A favorite hangout was The Players, a three-story restaurant-nightclub at 8225 Sunset Boulevard in LA. The owner was celebrated movie scriptwriter-director Preston Sturges, writer by day, restauranteur by night. Celebrity regulars who helped The Players draw crowds since its opening night on 4 July 1940 included such friends and acquaintances of Orson as Howard Hughes, Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rudy Vallee. Their frequent presence in the Blue Room nitery, which featured live music, dancing, and reputedly the most potent drinks in town, were well-documented by the ever-present photographers.

  THE CAMERA AS MAGIC BOX Citizen Kane was due to start filming in a few weeks when, in June 1940, Samuel Goldwyn Studios's virtuoso cameraman Gregg Toland, just four months after winning the Academy Award in cinematography for Wuthering Heights, fulfilled his ambition to work under Orson by voluntarily signing on. Toland brought his entire 4-man camera and lighting crew and a load of specialized equipment. He promised to teach Orson the theory of that craft in one weekend and did just that. Orson said “he showed me the inside of that bag of tricks, and, like all good magic, the secrets are ridiculously simple. ... Like magic again: the secret of the trick is nothing; what counts is not the mechanics, but how you can make 'em work."69 That is, psychologically.

  66 Ramón (1993), 190.

  67Sullivan’s column of 25 Mar 1940, as quoted in Rosten (1941), 117.

  68Noble (1956), 122.

  Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman wrote of his first movie projector: “This little rickety machine was my
first conjuring set. And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye."70 Or brain, as Orson had understood long before Bergman when he wrote, “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world, a world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins.... A film is a ribbon of dreams."71 Although Orson had a streak of romanticism, it isn't present here, because for him dreams are very much part of reality. “A film," he'd earlier explained, “is a dream. A dream that is perhaps vulgar, stupid, dull and shapeless; it is perhaps a nightmare. But a dream is never an illusion."72 Shakespeare and Freud would have agreed.

  It may have taken Orson only hours to learn camera theory from Toland (after weeks of quizzing the RKO techs in the screening rooms). But, as with any art, it now took months for him to master the many hands-on tricks of the trade. In doing so his movie camera became “the old magic box".73 Making Citizen Kane proved an exhilarating but humbling experience. “I thought ‘movies' could do anything. I was wrong. They have limitations. Plenty of them. But that's what makes an art—ability to accomplish things within limitations."74

  Orson brought to filmmaking, as he had to stage and radio, his magician's understanding that the final effect takes priority over the methods to achieve it. “The essential", he explained on more than one occasion, “is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it."75 He shared the philosophy of mentalist-magician Ted Annemann who in advising his magic magazine readers wrote, “I insist that 'anything goes' regardless.... The effect is the thing and don't forget it for a moment. The end justifies the means" in all things magical.76

  69 Quoted in Bogdanovich (1972/1976), 46; repeated in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 60-61. In his 1982 With Orson Welles interview Orson said this lesson took "three hours" one afternoon of the second week Toland was on the set. In a 1960 interview on British TV he mentioned a half day. Kael (1971), 33, misreads this remark as a slur on Toland when Orson obviously meant it as proof of the man's genius.