Orson Welles, Vol I (91 page)

As far as his own performance is concerned,
he takes his keynote from Hearst’s life: a high-spirited young radical becomes an angry old reactionary. He plays straight down that line, finding the appropriate texture at every point. The performance amounts to a series of statements about each of the phases of Kane’s life. Even in the scenes of Kane’s young manhood, there is about the performance a stiffness (partly the result of the corsets
and the fish-skin, the arch supports for deportment and the steel brace for a flat stomach), a lack
of spontaneity which is undoubtedly highly appropriate for Charles Foster Kane: the performance, like Kane’s life, is a triumph of will. It is a triumph of another sort, of course: simply logistically, it is staggering to have undertaken the leading part in your first film as a director which is
also your first performance in front of the cameras, especially in a role like that of Kane, where you age over fifty years. The disadvantage is that, however intelligent and sympathetic your colleagues, and no matter what excellent advice they may give you, there can never be a moment in which you are alone, able simply to dwell in the character, to let it flow mysteriously through the underground
chambers of your own personality. The character will never have an independent existence, will simply be a creature of the film itself. You will never, however egotistical and imposing a personality you may be, have the opportunity of being properly selfish as an actor must be, demanding time for yourself, giving yourself over wholly to your intuition and letting your mind rest. Unless you have
a defined star persona (such as Welles only acquired during his later, fatter years) you are condemned to linearity. There is no more linear performance in the history of film than that of Welles in
Citizen Kane
. And what is wrong with that? Nothing; except that what comes only from the mind, reaches only to the mind. Nothing more is stirred.

Naturally, Welles worked with a double. He would
walk through his scenes, then the double would run them for him again and again; finally, he would take over. Always at his side was Bill Alland; when, that is, he wasn’t playing Thompson, the shadowy reporter who takes us through the story. This casting too was some sort of half joke, half calculation: Alland was Welles’s whipping boy, the butt of his unceasing abuse and rage, taunted by him as
a cipher, a nobody. ‘Alland was treated almost as a personal slave,’
⁷
wrote Dick Barr in his memoir. ‘Bill seemed to enjoy the abuse.’ Vladimir Sokoloff had told Alland that he resembled the great Russian director, Vakhtangov; Welles never let him forget this preposterous idea: Vakhtangov! Vakhtangov! he would roar whenever he wanted anything. Alland was also the dialogue director, which meant
above all that he had to run over Welles’s text with him; like all texts, he had the greatest difficulty in memorising it. He was equally unable to remember moves, and almost totally unable to reproduce what he’d done before; these were all critical elements in such a tightly controlled mise-en-scène. Part of the reason for this, Alland maintains, was that he was always terrified of letting go: ‘if
he ever let himself go in a part he’d lose control.’ Alland has often recounted
the story (always denied by Welles) that the only time he did let go as an actor – significantly in a scene without dialogue, but with tightly plotted moves – was in the scene in which Kane destroys Susan Alexander’s apartment. A storm of pent-up violence was released in him as he staggered about the set, not entirely
executing the right moves, smashing the furniture. As he came off the set, clutching the hand he had accidentally cut in the course of the carnage, he was trembling. ‘I really felt it,’ he said. ‘I really felt it.’ The scene, though not, Alland reports, as extraordinary as it was in the flesh, remains uncommonly disturbing, both frightening and feeble, a big man’s impotent rage against things.

Among other injuries, Welles sustained a sprained ankle as he chased Ray Collins (Boss Jim Gettys) down the stairs in their great confrontation scene at Kane’s love nest; Dadda Bernstein was flown in from Chicago to treat him, but shooting itself scarcely broke its stride. Joe Cotten’s scenes in the old people’s home were rushed forward, Welles directing from a wheelchair, as Cotten’s eyes
streamed from his ill-fitting contact lenses and his head smarted from his ill-fitting wig (fortunately concealed by his eye-shade). Other scenes were played by Welles in a plaster cast, framed out of the shot. The energy and high spirits never flagged; for most of the participants in the movie, this was as good as it would ever get. The secrecy surrounding the filming enhanced the sense of community
among the film-makers. Few people had ever seen a complete script; the actors were given their scenes the night before they shot them. Welles’s personal dislike of being watched combined with anxiety about the Hearst connection becoming public made
Citizen Kane
virtually a closed set. If Schaefer visited, Welles would divert him with conjuring tricks and anecdotes, which Mr Schaefer, his assistant
recalls, ‘did not appreciate’. For other visitors, the actors and crew would break and play Softball. Some people were welcome, however. When John Ford arrived on the set, he imparted a useful piece of information: the first assistant director, Eddie Donahue, was an RKO spy. ‘Ford’s greeting to him was the first hint we had of his real status,’
⁸
Welles told Bogdanovich. ‘“Well, well,” he said,
“how’s old snake in the grass Eddie?”’ Whatever Donahue told his bosses, they were powerless to interfere. Welles was protected by his cast-iron contract.

About a month into shooting, he showed a forty-minute rough-cut to John Houseman, who was passing through. ‘It was clearly going to be an extraordinary piece of work. Once again I was astounded at his instinctive mastery, the sureness with
which he
moved into a new medium and shaped it to his own personal and original use.’
⁹
Earlier, his nose as ever pressed against the window of the sweet shop, Houseman had seen Welles at work during the pre-production period: ‘Orson,’ he wrote yearningly, ‘was working again with a concentrated, single-minded intensity that I had not seen since the first years of the Mercury.’ Mankiewicz, the third
of the Victorville collaborators, after demonstrating violent opposition to the casting of Dorothy Comingore and losing, was hardly present on the set, though he occasionally attended rushes. Herb Drake reported to Welles a telephone conversation with him after one of these visitations. The headline on Drake’s memorandum gives a strong flavour of how he was seen by the Mercury team:
‘RE FURTHER
TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WITH HERMAN J. MANGEL-WURZEL RE CUT STUFF HE SAW
.’
¹⁰
The memo also gives the flavour of that idiosyncratic man. ‘1. Everett Sloane is unsympathetic-looking man, and anyway you shouldn’t have two Jews in one scene. (Bernstein’s office with Bill.) 2. Dorothy Comingore looks much better now so Mr M. suggests you re-shoot Atlantic City cabaret scene.’ The third of his observations
is the most striking. ‘There are not enough standard movie conventions being observed including too few close-ups. It is too much like a play.’ This thread of comment runs through a number of early reactions to
Citizen Kane
. Like the cinematographers who opposed Toland for abandoning the painstakingly evolved aesthetic of ‘good photography’, whose essence was that it did not draw attention to
its own techniques, a number of observers felt that Welles had abandoned a truly cinematic language in favour of a bravura technique which had more to do with the theatre, and maybe even the circus, than film. They found it difficult to understand why Welles didn’t take advantage of what is obviously the essence of the freedom the camera gives – the ability to go close, and the ability to cut within
a scene. ‘Mark you,’ continues Drake’s memorandum, ‘he thinks the stuff is “magnificent.” If he says it is “magnificent” I’m beginning to worry. Please understand that he made it a point that he approves very much of what you are doing from the aesthetic point of view, but wonders if the public will understand it.’ Mankiewicz’s doubts were well placed.

There were no doubts, however, on the
floor: ‘picture sensational!’ Dick Baer telegrammed to Houseman, and Welles was sufficiently happy with the work to give himself over, during whatever spare moments he was able to claw from the film, to completing the designs for Roger Hill’s
Macbeth
(they are as fluid and assured and straightforward as all the series, nearer in
feeling to Welles’s 1947 film than the
Caesar
designs were to the
stage production). Sensing something wonderful on his hands, he also became very interested in the question of publicising
Kane
. Towards the end of the first stage of filming, Drake wrote him a mock-aggrieved memo in response to an anxious enquiry: ‘As of Sep 30, there have been eighteen major wire service
FEATURE
stories on you in
CITIZEN KANE.
According to the best advice I can get from my competitors
this is roughly 6 times more than any other star or production ever had in a two-month period … According to Hedda Hopper you have been mentioned in her column since June 27 at least twice as much as any other performer. Since lunch with L. Parsons, you have had better representation there than any other Hollywood performer.’
¹¹
Welles had been handling both ladies with great skill: over dinner
he even invited Hopper to play the
Inquirer
’s Society Editor. She had been a great supporter of his from the beginning, even giving over her radio programme (
Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood
) to a six-part series on his life, complete with full cast, in February 1940.

There were no offers of a part for the rather lumpy Parsons, though he made a great deal of fuss over the fact that she came from Dixon,
Illinois, just up the road from Grand Detour: somehow (one of his greatest acting performances) he managed to convince her that he was ‘just a hometown boy making good’. Over lunch he told her that the film dealt with ‘a dead man … I have everyone voice his own side and no two descriptions are alike’; later, by phone, in response to an anxious enquiry, he categorically assured her that the film
was not about Hearst. This was wise: her loyalty to both Hearst and Marion Davies was extreme; she owed everything to them, having been snatched from obscurity by Hearst to publicise Davies. She was, in fact, more than a little in love with Hearst, whose blessing had been the sine qua non of her marriage; in addition to the blessing, he gave her a $25,000 ring as a wedding present. His loyalty
to her was as great as hers to him: ‘a quarrel with Louella was a quarrel with the entire Hearst Empire,’ in Richard Meryman’s words. Ignorant and unstable, there is something pathetic about the woman that is somehow summed up by the title of her autobiography:
The Gay Illiterate
. It is extraordinary that Welles thought he could softsoap her into believing that
Citizen Kane
had no connection with
Hearst – or softsoap anyone into believing it, for that matter. The rumour was definitely abroad that something out of the ordinary was going on on the RKO lot: for all that the press (supplied by the ever-industrious Drake) was full of statistics (93 sets! 796 extras!)
and tittle-tattle (the Chicago
Sunday Tribune
revealed that Welles’s nicknames on the set were Mr Moneybags, Pappy, and Monstro,
the whale from
Pinocchio
), no one could discover what the film was actually about.

The general mood of buoyancy was threatened by something unexpected. A casual phrase dropped by Welles in an interview with Louella Parsons – ‘and so I wrote
Citizen Kane
’ – provoked a response of surprising vehemence from Mankiewicz. Drake wrote to warn Welles that ‘Mr M. is in the biggest fever yet over Louella’s
Sunday column.’
¹²
Mankiewicz was threatening, Drake told him, ‘to
come down on you
because you are a “juvenile delinquent credit stealer beginning with the Mars broadcast and carrying on with tremendous consistency.” Specifically, he says he has you by the ——s, and that unless you “behave” he will …

1. Take a full-page ad in the trade newspapers.

2. Send a story out on every leased wire
in the country.

3. Permit Ben Hecht to write a story for the
Saturday Evening Post
.

‘Mr Hecht allegedly is in such a state of moral fervour about your delinquent behaviour that he will write it for nothing.’ Shortly after, in early September, Drake wrote more reassuringly to Welles: ‘Mankiewicz says that the last thing he wants is for us to write any stories indicating he is the author
of
Citizen Kane
, co-author or had any connection with it. He says he realises completely that we can’t stop the result of a year’s four-ply publicity. He will take no action when such things appear. What he wants is simply this … he asks that you don’t in a personal interview say that you wrote
Citizen Kane
.’ By a curious irony, this plaintive (and not unreasonable) request is exactly the one
that Welles himself made of Cantril and Koch in the matter of
The War of the Worlds
script: he didn’t want credit himself, but he didn’t want Koch credited. Arnold Weissberger swiftly dealt with Welles’s anxiety, citing the clause in the contract which stated that all material composed, submitted, added or interpolated by Mankiewicz was the property of Mercury Productions who were ‘deemed the
author and creator of this product’. ‘It would seem to me,’
¹³
wrote Weissberger, ‘that the construction of this clause would not entitle Mankiewicz to any credit whatever. If a man chooses to sell his right to be known as the author of a work, he ought not thereafter to be able to come forward and claim that right, especially in view of the fact that this
particular provision in the contract was
put in for the very purpose of eliminating that right.’

After sounding Mankiewicz out, however, Weissberger found him in militant mood: he was claiming that ‘he wrote the entire script, and he will probably take the position that Orson did not contribute even 10 per cent to it, and is, therefore, not entitled to credit.’
¹⁴
The boot was suddenly on the other foot. Weissberger advised Welles
‘It would be unwise to deny Mankiewicz credit on the screen and have him get credit therefore through the press by publicising his complaint,’ which suggests that Welles, who always insisted that he intended Mankiewicz to have a credit, did want to deny him one. In the light of these documents, it is impossible to accept Welles’s pretence that ‘as soon as he started behaving like a real writer’ Mankiewicz
was offered equal credit. Clearly he thought that the situation was identical to his relationship with the radio writers: they proposed, he disposed, and the end result was his. The ugly dispute rumbled on. It was Welles’s misfortune that it came at a critical moment for writers in Hollywood: after years of being trampled on they were just beginning to feel their muscle. Hence Hecht’s passion.
Only recently, a Producers–Writers agreement had been signed which said: