Orson Welles, Vol I (94 page)

The Stage
reported the completion of filming on
Citizen Kane
under the somewhat passé headline
BOGEYMAN MAKES A MOVIE.
The piece says
that the story is based on the Faust legend (which is accurate as far as it goes); there is of course no mention of Hearst. It was almost the last time that would happen. RKO had become increasingly jumpy about the connection and Welles had ordered, in November 1940, the names of Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, Patterson, McCormick, Hearst, Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, Rockefeller and Ford to be removed
from the film. It was as if he suddenly wanted to take the movie out of the real world. There were rumours that Hearst knew that the movie was about him, and was simply biding his time. In an almost incomprehensible action, Mankiewicz had shown a copy of the script while the film was being shot to his chum Charles Lederer now, by extraordinary coincidence, Virginia Welles’s new husband. Lederer
just happened to be Marion Davies’s nephew; he and Virginia were, accordingly, married at San Simeon, guests of Marion Davies. And this was the man to whom Mankiewicz, always irresistibly drawn to danger, showed his screenplay. Lederer returned it, according to Mankiewicz, covered with pencil marks made by Hearst’s lawyers. Lederer denies this; certainly nothing was heard from Hearst.

The
exigencies of magazine publication made it necessary to show the more important editors some version of the film, even an incomplete one, and this was duly arranged. Inevitably, either Parsons or Hopper would get wind of this showing. It was Hopper. ‘Dearest Hedda,’ wrote Welles, ‘I owe you the biggest apology of my life and here it comes.’
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He says that Herb Drake insists on showing the magazine
people the movie in incomplete form. ‘I fully realise I have broken a solemn promise that you’d be the first to see
Kane
. Please understand and forgive. Come tonight if you must but it still stinks. Many shots are missing or only tests are cut in and we need music like Britain needs planes. Love Orson.’ She came, and what she saw did not please her. ‘Not only a vicious and irresponsible attack
on a great man,’ she said, ‘but the photography is old-fashioned and the writing very corny.’ Thus armed with a magnificent weapon against her rival, she called Hearst. ‘As the story was reported to me,’
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Louella Parsons recalled, ‘Hopper said “Mr Hearst, I don’t know why Louella hasn’t told you this picture is about you.” Mr
Hearst thanked her.’ Parsons now had some ground to make up, particularly
since the newspapers’ silence was suddenly broken by the maverick magazine
Friday
. Seeking to attack Hearst, it ran a preview piece on
Citizen Kane
, describing it as a straightforward portrait of him. The piece culminated in a supposed quote from Welles saying that Louella Parsons was a great fan of his and the film: ‘This is something I cannot understand. Wait until the woman finds out the picture’s
about her boss.’ Shown a preview copy of the magazine, Welles tried to stop publication. Failing that, he demanded and was given a right of reply, meanwhile dashing off a letter to Parsons: ‘It has been assumed that
Citizen Kane
is about Mr Hearst. People seem to have forgotten Bennett, Munsey, Pulitzer and McCormick, to mention only a few you could name. Not that it matters;
Kane
isn’t any of
them. Of course if there hadn’t been great publishers, I couldn’t have created a fictitious one, and some similarities to these men. I do hope you can help me to make this distinction clear. May we have lunch sometime next week, and when may I show you
Citizen Kane
? My sincerest gratitude for all the wonderful things you have done for me and my very best to you. As always, Orson.’
³⁷
Too late:
Hearst (or his lieutenants) read the magazine as soon as it appeared; that day (8 January) a directive was issued to all his titles to ban mention of any RKO picture.

Now they were in serious trouble. Hollywood and the press had a symbiotic relationship; they needed each other deeply. At the height of its glamour, Hollywood and its doings took up half of all the pages in the popular papers.
Hearst, though less financially powerful than he had been, was prepared in this matter to cut off his nose to spite his face; for RKO it was much more serious. Welles went into action immediately, taking the agreed line that
Citizen Kane
had no connection with Hearst apart from the coincidence of the central character’s profession. To do so, he described in detail the plot of the unseen film. ‘
Citizen Kane
is the story of a search by a man named Thompson, the editor of a news digest (similar to
The March of Time
) for the meaning of Kane’s dying words … the truth about Kane, like the truth about any man, can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him … he is never judged with the objectivity of an author, and the point of the picture is not so much the solution
of the problem as its presentation …
Friday
’s constant reference to the career of William Randolph Hearst … is unfair to Hearst and to Kane.’
³⁸
Welles was not being entirely disingenuous. Kane had travelled a long way from Hearst, and the film is no crude
denunciation of its central character, anyway. It is also true that the finished film, far from being an anatomisation of a press lord, suggests
that Kane is essentially unknowable. The mysteriousness of personality was a profound conviction of Welles’s; he believed it of himself. None the less, he was obliged, more and more stridently, to deny any relationship whatever between Charles Foster Kane and William Randolph Hearst.

These were the first shots fired in what became a verbal war of unrelenting intensity, during which the film,
its plot, characters, themes, techniques and meaning were described, discussed, analysed, applauded and denounced for the benefit of a reading public who had never seen it, but who must soon have felt that they had. Never can a film have held less surprises for its public when they were eventually allowed to see it. Being a cause célèbre is a mixed blessing at many levels. Earlier in his article,
Welles wrote, with some urgency ‘
Friday
says my “antic voyages ate into the night with a hundred technicians hooraying for the fun.” This means I haven’t been doing my job at RKO, and if it were true, I should be fired. I can’t help it if
Friday
doesn’t take me seriously. I don’t take myself seriously but I’m very serious about my work. Maybe it stinks, but I don’t joke with other people’s money.’
Even more important, perhaps, than rebutting charges that Kane was Hearst, was the need to establish that he didn’t go over budget or schedule. Lèse-majesté Hollywood could take; over-spending, never. The awful example of Stroheim loomed again.

Meanwhile, Louella Parsons, goaded by her rival and betrayed by the ‘hometown boy made good’ whom she had praised and encouraged, sprang into action,
demanding an instant screening. Schaefer immediately acceded. Attending with lawyers (and her chauffeur, who, famously, thought it ‘a fine picture’), she reported back to Hearst that it was worse than anyone feared. Hearst telegrammed her: ‘stop citizen kane’. Using every ugly tactic she could think up, Parsons did her best. ‘If you boys want private lives, I’ll give you private lives,’ she told
Schaefer, threatening to print fictional versions of the lives of RKO board members in Hearst papers. Her next calls were to Schaefer’s fellow producers. Mankiewicz described the strategy in a characteristically dry letter to Alexander Woollcott: ‘Mr Hearst casually gave them a hundred examples of unfavourable 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. General observations were made – not by Mr Hearst but by high-placed Hearst subordinates – that
the proportion of Jews in the industry was a bit high and it might not always be possible to conceal this fact from the American public’
³⁹
Live by the press, die by the press. Hearst, this episode makes clear, operated a
sort of journalistic cosa nostra, a protection racket in print.

There is no clear evidence as to whether Hearst himself ever saw the movie. Bill Hearst Junior denies it. Virginia Welles, on the other hand, told Brady that she had been present when Hearst ran the film at San Simeon for her, her husband, and Marion Davies. At the end of the film, he simply grinned and took Davies upstairs. It
is certainly true that Schaefer sent a copy of the film to Hearst, to prove how innocent it was. It was sent back to him without comment – whether seen or not. Other versions have him sneaking into a cinema in San Francisco; yet others insist that he never saw it. Welles liked to say that he travelled with Hearst in a lift on the day of the premieres, and offered him a ticket. Hearst refused to
acknowledge him. If he had seen it, it might well have given him something of a turn. The first ten minutes of the film are so unmistakably based on his life, and feature so prominently what is obviously his house, that it must have been a nasty shock to witness his own premature obituary. ‘Then last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane,’ says the newsreel narrator, in startlingly
life-like fashion. On the screen, in case he’d missed it, he would have seen
CHARLES FOSTER KANE
–
DEAD
spelt on a moving electric screen atop a newspaper building. For anyone, this might be somewhat disturbing; for a seventy-eight-year-old man, preoccupied by and terrified of death, it must surely have been very upsetting. After these opening scenes, Kane’s life (as Welles was always keen to
point out, right up to the end of his own life) diverges somewhat from Hearst’s. The central relationship, with Susan Alexander, is clearly a parallel to his relationship with Marion Davies – a very inexact parallel, and all the more wounding for that. Susan Alexander is a no-talent whom Kane pushes into trying to be an opera star, finally building an opera house for her; Marion Davies was a very
successful and talented comedienne for whom Hearst built a studio and whom he over-promoted to preposterous levels. Kane’s love for Susan dies; she leaves him. Hearst, on the other hand, worshipped Davies, despite the alcoholism which so dismayed him.

There was something about the use that he and Mankiewicz made of Hearst’s story which disturbed Welles; he alluded to it in terms which suggested
that he felt himself guilty of a lack of chivalry. The most comprehensive righting of wrongs was done in his
introduction to Marion Davies’s posthumously published memoirs,
The Times We Had
: ‘William Randolph Hearst was born rich. He was the pampered son of an adoring mother. That is the decisive fact about him. Charles Foster Kane was born poor and raised by a bank … and what of Susan Alexander?
What indeed. It was a real man who built an opera house for the soprano of his choice, and much in the movie is borrowed from that story … as one who shares much of the blame for casting another shadow – the shadow of Susan Alexander Kane – I rejoice in the opportunity to record something which today is all but forgotten except for those lucky enough to have seen a few of her pictures: Marion
Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the entire history of the screen.’ However unattractive a man’s policies and conduct, there is something that gives one pause about displaying his life for public ridicule and examination without him having the right to reply. For all the abomination of the attempt to suppress
Citizen Kane
, there is an injustice embedded in the
film. The reimagining of the basic material could have gone further. But of course the real facts, so colourful and bizarre, were irresistible to the co-authors, particularly, perhaps, to that Lord of Misrule, Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Whether personally directed, or whether merely the knee-jerk reaction of his lieutenants, Hearst’s camp swung into action. RKO were duly terrorised; the lawyers
counselled straightforward denial. Herb Drake was tormented by his impotence: ‘I am going slowly mad because my hands are tied. I want to lead a crusade, I want to get the whole independent and liberal Hollywood element behind us, but the big battle, apparently, is being fought among the money boys. Hopeful indication is the sniffing of Schaefer and his growing annoyance at the pressure.’
⁴⁰
Two
days later, Arnold Weissberger wrote to Welles in more strategic terms, suggesting that RKO could dig up the Mexican birth certificate of Marion Davies’s two twins; there was, he said, no point in creating a crusade of public opinion until there had been an actual move on Hearst’s part. Hearst now had the initiative; he hardly needed to do anything. The threat of action was enough. Floyd Odium and
David Sarnoff, the major shareholders in RKO, began to express their concern. Schaefer gritted his teeth, announcing
Citizen Kane
for February 1941, to open at RKO’s flagship house, Radio City Music Hall. Parsons immediately called the manager, Van Shmus, threatening him with a total press blackout if he showed the movie. He gave in, and the première was cancelled. Next, Hearst’s people
appealed
to the film industry’s internal watchdog, Will Hays, to suppress the film, in line with the ban on films about living persons; surprisingly, Joseph Breen, Hays’s deputy, declared that
Citizen Kane
was not about Hearst; for this he was rewarded, a year later, by being made Schaefer’s head of production at RKO. (Welles amusingly suggested to Peter Bogdanovich that he had contrived to drop a rosary
in Breen’s presence, thus melting the ardent Catholic’s heart.)

The story, having been neutrally reported in
The New York Times
, became public debate with a long piece in the widely read Marxist paper,
New Masses
: ‘Until quite recently,’ wrote Emil Pritt, ‘a lot of people in Hollywood thought that Orson Welles was just a great big beautiful publicity stunt. They knew that a young boy, five
or six years old, had come from planet Mars to Vine Street in the summer of 1939 and was given a contract by RKO studios to make three pictures. They heard vaguely that he was about to make his first picture, and then something happened to it. He grew a beard and shaved it off and broke his ankle and had a radio program sponsored by soup. It was all rather fantastic and other-worldly. And then, early
this year, Mr Orson Welles and Mr William Randolph Hearst collided head-on and everybody suddenly discovered that it was all very real … through an intricate process (referred to by the wise boys as two parts blackmail and one part doddering frenzy) Hearst is in effect trying to prove that
Citizen Kane
is a disruptive force trying to destroy national unity, imperil the defence program and outrage
relations between this country and South America.’
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