Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by McGilligan, Patrick

  After the broadcast, Orson headed to a nightclub to spend Christmas Eve with Richard Baer. When the two men bumped into a young fellow with a hard-luck story, Orson opened his wallet and offered him the contents: a grand total of $31. Welles promised the fellow “a couple more payments,” Baer wrote ruefully to Arnold Weissberger.

  ’Twas not a season to be very jolly. But celebrating the New Year was a long-standing Welles tradition, and Orson attended Errol Flynn’s annual holiday bash on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills. Among the glamorous revelers that night were Dolores Del Rio and her husband, Cedric Gibbons. Orson’s date was Richard Baer.

  The Smiler with the Knife had a shorter shelf life than anyone expected. In mid-January, Orson’s quick-and-easy substitute for Heart of Darkness suffered a crippling blow when Carole Lombard begged off. Already overcommitted for the year, she could not—or would not—squeeze in another starring role for RKO. And Orson was stuck with his deadlines.

  Though some accounts say Lombard vetoed Orson as a director, Welles himself insisted otherwise. “We became tremendous friends,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, “saw a great deal of each other, and performed many practical jokes. And she was all for me. She simply couldn’t get released” from productions already scheduled. Another RKO leading lady might have leaped at the chance to play the “madcap heiress” who infiltrates an American fascist movement, but the rush job under a first-time director found no takers among the studio’s top tier. “Rosalind Russell may well have turned me down,” Welles said. “I seem to remember somebody did.”

  Orson’s fallback choice was Lucille Ball, his first publicity “date,” who had recently worked her way up from uncredited glimpses and lesser roles to leads in low-budget pictures. A dozen years before she entered the television pantheon as the producer-star of I Love Lucy, Orson was a lone voice hailing Ball as “the greatest female clown around,” he recalled. “She would have been just superb in this picture.” To RKO, however, Ball was simply a B player without box office clout. “Imagine how idiotic they were,” Welles said. Though her name was dangled in public, by mid-January the Los Angeles Times confirmed that Ball had “no chance” of landing the part. Orson tried to wangle Dita Parlo or Uta Hagen for the lead, but RKO was no more enthusiastic about either of them—they were not marquee names. Though choices were announced for the supporting cast—Vladimir Sokoloff, Robert Coote—without a star the film’s momentum stalled.

  If Heart of Darkness had been completed, or The Smiler with the Knife launched, the three-part profile of Welles that started in the January 20, 1940, issue of the Saturday Evening Post would have been a well-timed publicity coup. By now, Mercury’s publicity man, Herbert Drake, was doing the kind of thing Dr. Maurice Bernstein once did, in this case supplying the reporters—Alva Johnston and Fred Smith—with a steady stream of colorful anecdotes, as well as Orson’s letters and newspaper clippings from Bernstein’s scrapbook. While the tone of the Saturday Evening Post article was patently tongue-in-cheek (“He talked like a college professor at two. . . . At eight, he started making his own highballs”), later pieces cribbed from it, and Welles spent a lifetime rebutting its effusions. In 1970, when David Frost asked Welles whether it was true that at age ten the “child genius” engaged “in a critical analysis of Thus Spake Zarathustra,” Welles sighed. “I’m an anti-Nietzsche fellow and certainly never wrote that. It sounds like one of those stories . . .”

  The article mostly focused on his boyhood and his youthful conquest of New York. His nascent career in Hollywood and his two unfilmed projects were scarcely mentioned. When Hedda Hopper mocked the Saturday Evening Post series, reminding her readers that Welles still wore the beard from his first unproduced film project, Welles invited her to lunch to win her back. He assured her he was trimming his beard “scientifically an inch a day,” and that he was still looking for a leading lady for The Smiler with the Knife. When was Orson going to direct one of his three promised pictures? “When I’m good and ready,” he declared, but charmingly. Orson invited Hopper to join his radio series one of these days and see how well he directed her. Hopper readjusted her thinking: “Orson Welles, as I said months ago, has a shrewd head on those shoulders and I think he’ll make the critics eat their words. And I for one hope he does.”

  Regardless of the troubles he was having mounting his first two projects, Orson was still on the hook to find a third story RKO would approve to follow The Smiler with the Knife and Heart of Darkness. In interviews and studio meetings after the first of the year, he revived the possibility of Cyrano de Bergerac; he talked about directing the first screen Macbeth since Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s silent version in 1915; he floated a Pickwick Papers starring W. C. Fields. But the kinds of established literary properties Orson loved faced the most stubborn opposition from some RKO studio officials, for whom familiarity with a title bred contempt. George Schaefer was open to Macbeth, sensing the publicity value of revisiting the Harlem production, but Shakespeare was an uphill slog with other studio muck-a-mucks. Orson was unable to overcome the persistent doubts about Cyrano, and the splendid notion of Fields as Mr. Pickwick was scuttled by the comedian’s firm contract with Universal.

  Orson found sanctuary, increasingly, at Herman Mankiewicz’s rented residence, ostensibly working on the script for The Smiler, although it was fast losing its viability and allure. Lying in bed in a room whose air conditioner had been rigged by their friend Margaret Sullavan, Orson relished the boon companionship of the cranky, abusive, hilarious Mank. “When the bitterness wasn’t focused straight on you,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, “he was the best company in the world.”

  The common wisdom about Mank was that his loathing for Hollywood and its crass commercialism had paved the way for his downfall. But what Mank really despised about Hollywood was not the machine itself, but his own fall from the machine’s grace. His major credits after the silent era tended to be adaptations of Broadway hits such as Dinner at Eight, which came complete with sharply chiseled dialogue by his old friend George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. One of his best-known pictures, John Meade’s Woman, from 1937, did contain “elements of a criticism of riches in the story of a tycoon who suffers from personal isolation and loneliness,” according to Richard Meryman; and many later critics have characterized it as a precursor to Citizen Kane. Simon Callow saw John Meade’s Woman as a “savage assault” on the lumber baron at the center of the drama; Pauline Kael called it “a trial run on the tycoon theme.” But the original story of that B picture was the work of another Chicagoan, the staunchly left-wing scenarist John Bright—not Mank. Indeed, few of Mank’s sixty-plus credits before Kane were his originals, and the vast majority of his credits were comedies or romances. He was, most often, an uncredited polish man, brought in to touch up dialogue in other people’s scripts just before filming. He worked on assignment. He rarely started and finished a script alone.

  What haunted Mankiewicz most of all was his failure as a playwright, the source of a lifelong chip on his shoulder. Like many writers of his generation, Mank had grown up regarding the theater as an honorable profession and movies as a form of prostitution; according to Meryman, Mank dreamed of the day Americans would ask, “Have you seen the new Herman Mankiewicz play?” Among his few original screen credits were The Good Fellows and The Wild Man of Borneo, adaptations of two plays he had cowritten in the 1920s, both of which failed on Broadway but were revived for the screen after his Oscar for Citizen Kane. A third play he’d written on his own—The Meal Ticket, a satirical portrait of a vaudeville family in Hollywood—closed on the road after blistering reviews. Mank had a stack of unproduced plays. One was a satire about American politics called “We the People.” Another was “an uncompleted play about [William Randolph] Hearst,” Meryman wrote, without further elucidation. A third was the script about John Dillinger, “The Tree Will Grow,” of which he’d written only about enough to constitute the first act.

  Mank was the underachiever of the Algonquin circ
le, which was one reason the others rooted so hard for him. In Hollywood, he gave free rein to his faults. He drank to excess, privately and publicly. Time and again he gambled away his earnings. A know-it-all about history and politics, he scolded inferiors. And his anticommunist beliefs were so intractable that he perversely opposed the struggle to form a Screen Writers Guild, led partly by a faction of communist writers. He sided instead with the right-wing Screen Playwrights, a group that was beholden to producers and, many believed, sympathetic to fascists. Mank himself voiced pro-German sentiments too often and too strenuously in the long buildup to World War II—making people wonder. (Mank himself was proudly Jewish, though, and had married his wife in an Orthodox ceremony.) On top of it all, the playwright’s younger brother, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was rising fast in Hollywood as a writer and producer, and threatening to eclipse his sibling’s reputation.

  Mank’s admirers overlooked his faults or cherished them as evidence of his iconoclasm. To them, he was the perfect symbol of what was wrong with Hollywood: too brilliant for the industry that had cast him aside, he was forced to save his best wit for private conversation, dinner parties, and soirees. Yet anecdotes about him often turned on bad behavior and crude humor: once, purportedly, when he vomited at an elegant dinner, he hastened to reassure his hostess: “It’s all right. The white wine came up with the fish.” And some of his best-known bons mots were apocryphal or borrowed, including his supposed crack about Welles that appears in Pauline Kael’s essay “Raising Kane”: “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” As Orson himself was at pains to point out in a 1972 letter to the London Times, the quip “was made not by Mr. Herman Mankiewicz of me, but by Sir Winston Churchill of Sir Stafford Cripps,” a World War II–era British Labour politician. (And, doubtless, by many others.)

  Yet Welles counted himself, fervently and forever, among Mank’s admirers. When Peter Bogdanovich confronted Welles with “the list of [Mank’s] other credits,” many of them unimpressive, Orson responded with a flare of anger: “Oh, the hell with lists—a lot of bad writers have wonderful credits.” He did not care what other people said about Mank, or, ultimately, what Mank said about him. Alcoholism usually brought out Orson’s sympathy—it reminded him of his father and of John Barrymore too—and alcoholism allowed him to rationalize all manner of outrageous behavior. Mank was like a writer’s Barrymore.

  “Mankiewicz was some sort of tremendous performer in a Hieronymous Bosch landscape of his own,” Welles said elegiacally when Meryman interviewed him. “There was always the feeling that you were in the presence of thwarted violence. It was this thrashing of some great creature, some beached creature. Some magnificent creature. You didn’t know what it was because you had never seen one of those before. It was Mank. . . .

  “He liked the attention he got as a great, monumental, self-destructing machine. That was his role, and he played it to the hilt. He was a performer, as I think all very successful personalities are. He couldn’t be affectionate or loving outside his family. You never felt you were basking in the warmth of his friendship. So it was his vulnerability that brought out the warmth from his friends. And people loved him. Loved him.

  “That terrible vulnerability. That terrible wreck.”

  By the end of January 1940, Orson was eager to get another studio project going. Having vetted Herman Mankiewicz with his work on the radio scripts and The Smiler with the Knife, he now enlisted the writer to start batting around the possibilities for an original script.

  Mank was still hipped on “The Tree Will Grow,” his idea for a multiple-viewpoint portrait of the gangster John Dillinger. Orson identified with “the many-sided gimmick,” as he put it, having nursed a similar notion ever since his abortive play about John Brown from 1932—“the idea of telling the same thing several times,” as Welles explained it to Bogdanovich, “and showing exactly the same scene from wholly different points of view.” But Welles had no interest in making a gangster picture. He wanted to make “a more important movie than that,” as John Houseman later noted in Lundberg’s lawsuit over Citizen Kane.

  Welles and Mankiewicz held long, passionate debates about the strategy of the many-sided structure. Orson thought it would be more interesting for “the man to seem a very different person depending on who was talking about him,” in his words, while Mank wanted the subjective viewpoints to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, eventually cohering into a whole. Mank won that argument, but Orson won the debate over “a more important movie.”

  Orson wanted a Big Idea concerning “a man of large affairs and much influence in the world,” as he testified in the Lundberg case, an “American sultan.” Setting The Smiler with the Knife aside, he and Mank started rummaging through possible Big Ideas for their American sultan story. They considered a politician, even a president—as in Of Thee I Sing, the presidential campaign musical that had excited Orson in the fall of 1932, when he was finishing “Marching Song.” They talked for a while about choosing a statesman like William Jennings Bryan, who ran unsuccessfully several times for president. Mankiewicz’s family had hosted Bryan at their home in Wilkes-Barre during Mank’s boyhood, and he considered himself an expert on Bryan’s life. Another idea they “fooled around” with was the life story of French novelist Alexandre Dumas père, a pet subject of Orson’s, according to Mankiewicz. They also mulled the possibility of a famous soldier, or “an industrialist,” recalled Houseman, “but that had been done before in The Power and the Glory,” a famous film about the life of an industrialist. Orson and Mank even discussed “a shop picture about Hollywood,” Houseman testified in the Lundberg case, but the “recently made A Star Is Born,” starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, was “as good a picture of its kind as you could get.”

  Eventually, the two men came around to William Randolph Hearst, the publisher and media business magnate. Both men had read After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Aldous Huxley’s recently published new novel, with its portrait of a wealthy, eccentric empire-builder modeled on Hearst. Huxley’s fiction was largely allegorical and philosophical, however, and the novel offered little narrative inspiration beyond reminding them of Hearst.

  Not that they needed reminding: Hearst was constantly in the news. After decades of dominance, the publisher had overreached and fallen on hard times. His media chain was shedding newspapers and radio stations; his famous art collection had been pieced off for auction; he had just sold the twelve-story apartment house at the corner of Riverside Drive and Eighty-Sixth Street in Manhattan, where for a quarter century he had stored art treasures and occupied the upper floors and penthouse. (A photograph of that building, well known to New Yorkers, would be incorporated in the “News on the March” sequence in Citizen Kane.) Hearst’s once mighty empire was shrinking.

  “Welles himself had always been interested in mass communications and the power of propaganda,” as Houseman testified in the Lundberg case, “so [Welles and Mankiewicz] arrived, by fairly logical steps, at eliminating all these other public figures and ended up with the picture of a man of great power engaged in the molding and the swaying of public opinion.”

  Hearst was deeply embedded in both men’s consciousness. But the idea of “a man like Hearst” may have been Mank’s specific suggestion for the central figure, as Welles admitted to Mankiewicz’s biographer Richard Meryman. “I suppose I would remember if it had been me,” Orson wistfully told Meryman.

  Hearst, “the outstanding whirling pagoda of our times,” in Mankiewicz’s words, was the perfect choice for Orson’s American sultan who lives to a “ripe age.” This would give Welles the Schauspieler a chance to indulge his penchant for playing aging kingly men, and Welles the director the opportunity to create a sweeping panorama of the early twentieth century. Not only would Citizen Kane tell the tale of “seventy years in a man’s life,” as one of the News on the March reporters says; it would immerse that life in seventy years of American headlines and history.

  They were both aware of an earlier f
ilm about an American sultan: The Power and the Glory, which opened with the death of a Chicago railroad magnate and then unfolded in flashback. Preston Sturges, the fellow Chicagoan whose career Orson had followed since boyhood, wrote the screenplay for that film, his first original for the screen. The story line of the 1933 picture was unusually mature fare for Hollywood, with two suicides and a child whose illegitimacy is kept from his father. But Sturges’s script had featured a single narrator; it had no multiple viewpoints, and not much else from which to draw inspiration—except perhaps the performance of Spencer Tracy, who aged through four decades in the film, as Orson intended to do.

  Their own many-sided story would also begin with the American sultan’s final breath. Welles would introduce three of his films this way, with the death scene of a public figure: Citizen Kane, Othello, and Mr. Arkadin. Why did he repeat that conceit? asked Peter Bogdanovich.

  “Just shows a certain weakness of invention on the part of the filmmaker,” Welles replied.

  “You can give me a better answer than that,” prodded Bogdanovich.

  “Peter,” Welles returned, “I’m no good at this sort of stuff. I either go cryptic or philistine. All I can say is, I thought it was a good idea: Whether you get me in the morning or evening, I’m always going to say that.”

  The American sultan’s last, mysterious words would tease the audience, much like Kurtz’s last phrase in Heart of Darkness. Then the film would jump abruptly to a March of Time–style newsreel—a long-nurtured idea of Orson’s—anchoring the narrative before it fragmented into viewpoints. He knew the mock newsreel would be a snap to create, and great fun, giving him a chance to show the deceased public figure against the backdrop of historic events the great man had participated in or tried to manipulate. Presenting the fake newsreel would “invest this dead man with the atmosphere of reality,” as Welles said in the Lundberg case, and “suggest that Kane was a real person.”