Orson Welles, Vol I (87 page)

Cantril, wiser than Solomon, suggested an ingenious formula: ‘Script ideas and development by Orson Welles assisted by John Houseman
and Mercury Theatre staff and written by Howard Koch under the direction of Mr Welles.’
¹¹
Welles blasted back with a telegram by return of wire: ‘your suggested revision for the second printing is far too elaborate and incorrect a statement stop i repeat war of the worlds was not written by howard koch’.
¹²
In his earlier letter he had suggested an erratum slip, an idea to which Cantril had not
warmed. ‘Think how much more unfavourable an impression
your book will make as it now stands and try to conceive the effect on my professional prestige and position in the theatre world. Can see no conceivable reason for your steadfast refusal to believe
The War of the Worlds
was not only my conception but also, properly and exactly speaking, my creation. Once again, finally, and I promise for
the last time, Howard Koch did not write
The War of the Worlds
. Any statement to this effect is untrue and immeasurably detrimental to me.’

Cantril replies citing affidavits and a telegram from Houseman’s secretary at the time saying that Koch dictated the script to her from a manuscript in his own handwriting, and that Houseman and Paul Stewart made only minor corrections in it. ‘In view
of all the evidence we have from him,’ Cantril ends, ‘I find no other alternative than to acknowledge him as writer but not as creator.’ Welles blasts back with the magnificently seigneurial statement that ‘I should most certainly think that the word of the producer-director-star and star of the broadcast which is the subject of your book would hold more weight with you than the word of one of the
authors employed by him at the time.’ Cantril has resorted to underlings, Welles continues. ‘I cannot understand why you have so steadfastly refused to believe me.
Mr Howard K. did not do the actual writing of The War of the Worlds script
. He only did some of it.’ He adds ‘my interest in this matter is not to receive credit. My only interest, like yours, is accuracy,’ rather spoiling his objective
stand by adding ‘I’m sure you can appreciate the untold damage done to my professional reputation that the publication of this book in its present form will create. I know that you will understand that I cannot permit this to occur.’

The note of desperation is explained by his public standing at that moment.
Citizen Kane
was not even at first draft stage yet, and like all such things, a tremendous
gamble. It could have gone either way. He was surfing on a tidal wave of publicity which threatened to engulf him, since there was nothing visible to justify it; his most recent work in the theatre had passed either unnoticed or unloved, his radio programme, though commanding solid audience figures, generated little excitement. None of his Hollywood projects had materialised.
The War of the Worlds
was, in effect, his only real claim to widespread fame: it was the reason that he was in Hollywood at all, the real reason that he had been able to negotiate the famous contract, the only living proof of his multi-faceted genius. The revelation that he had not actually written it would deprive his image of one of its crucial dimensions, making him look a fraud; the discovery that
the whole thing
had been an accident would have finished him off for good. Or so it seemed from his pardonably paranoid position. He lost this battle; the book (
The Invasion from Mars
) duly appeared with Koch credited as author of the script. In the event, no one except Welles even noticed; the legend was undented. The level of his anxiety about all this, however, is a good index of quite how vulnerable he felt
in April of 1940.

Meanwhile, there was money to be earned. Newly shaven (
Five Kings
was clearly now abandoned), he set out on his travels: Pasadena, Kansas City, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Wenatchee. These engagements, though they may have helped his overdraft, did little to improve his position in Hollywood. Herb Drake described the event in press briefing-ese: ‘Lecture is informal. Invites
hecklers from outset. Is obliged. Welles approves films; also stage. Points out errors both mediums. Besides talking, reads speeches
Hamlet, Richard III
, Congreve etc. Believe me audience shocked and amused. Welles opens and closes with jokes. All this done without benefit of beard.’ This was a rather different event from Charles Laughton’s famous lecture programme, designed to communicate some
of his almost carnal passion for the arts, theatrical, literary, visual. Welles was in the business of punditry. He was out to opine, to provoke and to instruct, and of course it got him into trouble. The United Press Association reported from Kansas City – only his second date – that he had said ‘I’ll speak only in terms of contempt. Hollywood is just like any other small town. Movie actors have
ceased to think of themselves as servants. As a matter of fact, they are really in the same class as those who wait on tables. The average person goes to the movies because it is better than drink.’ This provoked a flurry of much publicised resentment from leading Hollywood actors and industry spokesmen, the last thing he needed at this delicate moment. ‘As you can imagine,’ he wrote in an open
letter to his host in Kansas City, ‘these misrepresentations of my sentiments place me in an acutely embarrassing position as regards my work in Hollywood.’ What he actually said, he claims, was that movies were a better bargain than the theatre and aesthetically more valid; that 90 per cent of the theatre talent was in Hollywood; that he personally preferred the movies of today to the theatre of
today; and that actors should always remember that they are the servants of the public. It seems that Welles could embrace something only by renouncing something else. His Kansas City host, confirming his account of the lecture, adds ‘Let me know when you are ready to come to Kansas City again. Next time you will have an audience
of ten thousand instead of five thousand, though five thousand is
nothing to sneeze at. There are not half a dozen people in the country who could draw this number.’ The paradox continued. His fame, even in relatively out-of-the-way places, was growing daily, while his achievements remained invisible. The lectures were so successful that, Drake told the press, though there were no definite Broadway plans for Welles’s talk-in he intended to play New York with it
for at least six weeks in the coming season. Depending on how
American
turned out, that might be all he had to look forward to.

The script, all 350 pages of it, was waiting for him on his return. It was, according to Robert Carringer, whose brilliant researches on the making of
Citizen Kane
have finally put paid to speculation about the genesis of the screenplay, a literal reworking by and
large of specific incidents and details from Hearst’s life, most of it first-hand observation on Mankiewicz’s part, but some evidently derived from a current biography, Ferdinand Lundberg’s
Imperial Hearst
. Comprehensive and over-literal though it might be, it was not lacking in cinematic boldness: much of the story was told in montage form. Among many striking scenes, there was a particularly
audacious one in Rome where the young Kane has taken up residence, surrounding himself with ambi-sexual decadents and works of art of dubious propriety. A sub-plot involved Kane’s father, a rip-roaring, globe-trotting old party determined to marry the young tart (Miss Henrietta La Salle) with whom he is travelling; he runs across his son, who, finding out about the marriage, attempts to throttle
him. It is hard not to see some sort of sly allusion by Mankiewicz and Houseman to Welles’s own father in the figure of Kane, Senior.

The screenplay as presented was a rich pudding; Welles immediately went to work as editor. He slashed through Mankiewicz’s text just as he had slashed through Shakespeare’s and Dekker’s. As with those writers, he added none of his own words, preferring to isolate
or rearrange someone else’s. His skill, and, equally important, his courage in this department was unparalleled. Sometimes (as in his Mercury scripts) he would slash whole pages of writing, ending up only with one line, or none. He had now been thinking about and working on films for nine months; he had begun to have pretty clear ideas about how a scene is constructed and how best to tell his
story. His first task was not an aesthetic one, however. It was legally impossible to shoot this script: Hearst was absolutely, unmistakably and actionably the central character. A great deal of Welles’s initial work consisted simply in smudging that clear profile. There was,
too, something of a hole at the centre. Welles maintained later to Richard Meryman (in one of his more analytical, less
defensive interviews on the subject of
Citizen Kane
) that Mankiewicz, for all the brilliance of his writing, and the excellence of his structure – which remained basically the same throughout the many versions of the script – had not found the essential character of the man. ‘In his hatred of Hearst, or whoever Kane was, Mank didn’t have a clear enough idea of who the man was … I felt his knowledge
was journalistic, not very close, the point of view of a newspaperman writing about a newspaper boss he despised.’
¹³
Welles, both as director and as actor, was eager to create a distinctive character: one, moreover, that was not entirely unsympathetic.

This was to be a continuing source of negotiation between Welles and Mankiewicz. A classic instance of their different views of Kane (and also
of the nature of Welles’s contribution) is the scene in the
Inquirer
’s offices, where Leland falls asleep drunk over his bad review of Susan Alexander Kane’s operatic debut. This incident, drawn from Mankiewicz’s own experience, ended, in Mankiewicz’s draft, with Leland being fired by Kane. It was Welles who insisted on the ending eventually filmed, with Kane personally finishing and then publishing
the bad review. ‘I always wanted Kane to have that sort of almost self-destructive elegance of attitude which, even when it was self-regarding and vain, was peculiarly chic. Mank fought me terribly about that scene: “Why should he finish the notice? He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t print it.” Which would have been true of Hearst.’ In one of the most pertinent of all observations about
Citizen Kane
, Welles remarked to Meryman that their disagreement over the character of Kane ‘probably gave the picture a certain tension: that one of the authors hated Kane and one of them loved him’. He added something which exactly describes what we see on the screen: ‘There is a quality to the film – that was Mank and that I treasured … it was a kind of controlled cheerful virulence.’

Welles returned
the script with his many suggestions to Mankiewicz, who, working in his continuing bed-bound isolation at Victorville, completed the second draft, duly delivering it on 9 May. Now off the payroll, Mankiewicz went to work on
Madam X
, for which, as Carringer points out with nice irony, he was uncredited. Houseman departed for New York, and Welles settled down to read the new version with the yelping
of the press pack echoing in his ears. His twenty-fifth birthday had fallen a few days before, and the hacks rushed to offer their own acid greetings. ‘Orson Welles is 25 years
old tomorrow and comes into an inheritance. Uncle Sam gets most of it for taxes. Well, the boy wonder needn’t worry too much since he almost inherited RKO in salary checks without making a single picture there.’ ‘Orson
Welles, celebrating his 25 birthday,’ said another, ‘made a resolution to produce that picture if it takes him another 25 years.’ Never mind; the latest draft of
American
was highly encouraging, and Welles, in a somewhat theatrical procedure, read it out loud to Schaefer and RKO’s corporate lawyer, Edington.

Schaefer was understandably pleased with the reading: a film of this magnitude, scope,
daring and originality was precisely what he had brought Welles to Hollywood for. Edington was happy to note a general moving away from the facts of Hearst’s life. He was relieved to discover that an earlier sequence in which Kane has Raymond, the butler, murder a suspected lover of his wife had gone; it was modelled all too directly on a widely rumoured scandal involving the death of the director,
Thomas Ince, on board Hearst’s yacht. (Typically, Mankiewicz had insisted that keeping the sequence in the movie would deter Hearst from suing: how could he admit then that the character was him?) In order to move the movie still further away from Hearst, Schaefer (whose contract with Welles gave him title approval) suggested that they drop the provocative
American
in favour of – his idea –
Citizen
Kane
. Welles enthusiastically accepted the new title; apart from anything else, no one had been able to think of a suitable one (his secretary’s proposal of
A Sea of Upturned Faces
being only the least satisfactory). Adopting Schaefer’s title had another advantage: psychologically, he would feel that it was his project. The film got the go-ahead, with an authorisation to proceed to third draft.

Welles followed up the reading with a memo describing the film’s structure – the four interviews and the quest for Rosebud – adding revealing comments on the different aspects of the character of Kane as revealed by the various interviewees. It is interesting to note his view of the screenplay before he had even shot a frame. Leland, says Welles, shows Kane’s dual personality: ‘the tremendous
vitality, gaiety and joie de vivre combined with the idealism which expresses itself in such a document as the Manifesto’.
¹⁴
In the Boss Gettys scene ‘Kane’s monomania finally exerts itself: his enraged conviction that no one exists but himself, his refusal to admit the existence of other people with whom one must compromise, whose feelings one must take into account.’ There is some sense here
of an overlap between Kane and Welles. Like a first novel, a first movie is more than likely to be autobiographical; in this instance the elements
that had gone into the brew were many: Mankiewicz, Welles, even Houseman, working from a central perception, were adding more and more personal ingredients, partly in order to cover up the resemblance to Hearst’s life, partly because the narrative thread
they had established offered innumerable opportunities for personal detail. The screenplay is a tapestry of private references.