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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  It was indeed the last time, because The Invasion from Mars was published as scheduled on April 15, with the full script of “War of the Worlds” permanently attributed to Howard Koch. Koch held the copyright according to the terms of his contract, and he would republish the script multiple times in the decades ahead. (As of this writing, it is still in print.)

  The nuances of authorship were lost on reviewers, who routinely referred to the famous episode as “the Orson Welles broadcast” and rarely mentioned Koch. But it was an untimely defeat for Welles, already feeling beset and beleaguered in Hollywood while struggling to launch Citizen Kane. And he might have felt a premonition: the dispute over the credits for “War of the Worlds” foreshadowed the controversy over the writing of Citizen Kane.

  The published scripts of “War and The Worlds” and Kane both drew from a common source: John Houseman. Back east in New York, nursing a grudge against Welles, Houseman was Cantril’s primary informant, as he would be years later for Pauline Kael. “After the notoriety he had achieved with ‘The War of the Worlds,’ how could [Welles] let it be known that a $60-a-week scribbler had, in fact, been responsible for the script?” Houseman wrote in Run-Through. “Following a year of false starts and international suspense over his entrance into motion pictures, how could he acknowledge that his first film was based on the work of a well-known Hollywood hack?”

  Seven years after Kael’s book, in Richard Meryman’s corrective account in his Mankiewicz biography, published in 1978, Welles is quoted as saying he believed that Houseman carried his grudge to Victorville, planting seeds against him in Mank’s mind as the two worked on the first draft of Citizen Kane. Houseman encouraged “Mank’s latent hatred of anybody who wasn’t a writer,” Welles told Meryman, “directing it at me. When Mank left for Victorville, we were friends. When he came back, we were enemies. Mank always needed a villain.”

  Houseman and Mankiewicz delivered the first official draft of “John Citizen U.S.A.,” which they gave the new title “American,” in the same week that The Invasion from Mars appeared in bookstores.

  Run-Through cattily compressed Orson’s contribution to the first draft. “Orson telephoned at odd hours to inquire after our progress,” Houseman recollected. “On the appointed day, at the end of six weeks, he arrived in a limousine driven by Alfalfa [his chauffeur at the time], read a hundred pages of script, listened to our outline of the rest, dined with us at The Green Spot, thanked us and returned to Los Angeles. The next day he informed the studio that he would start shooting early in July.”

  In fact, eight weeks would elapse from assignment to delivery of that first draft. There were several crucial later script drafts that Houseman glossed over in his account. And, as Houseman told the lawyers in the Lundberg case ten years later, “during that time [in Victorville], we received several visits—I can’t remember exactly how many52—from Orson Welles, and then I went down to Los Angeles at least once or twice and spoke with Welles, and reported our progress to him.” Welles said consistently through the years that he spent much of the Victorville time working on a parallel script draft at home, combining his original pages with revisions of their output.

  Yet Orson was pleased by the first draft of “American,” dated April 16. The self-destructive Mank had proved himself “extremely constructive,” Welles said years later, contributing exceptional material “even where I didn’t agree, either at first or later.” He always bent over backward to give Houseman credit for the groundwork done at Victorville as well. “Actually [Houseman] was a junior writer,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, “and made some very important contributions. But for some curious reason he’s never wanted to take that bow. It gives him more pleasure just to say I didn’t write it.”

  Possibly because he was concerned about legal repercussions to himself in the Lundberg case, Houseman insisted in his testimony that he himself functioned only as a dramaturg in Victorville. “I did not originate any scenes or any of the text,” Houseman told the court. “I corrected it, edited it, I made suggestions about it. I did not originate any script.”

  What Houseman surely did not originate were any of the incidents and character traits patterned after the life of William Randolph Hearst, which lawyers for Ferdinand Lundberg insisted had been cadged from Lundberg’s 1936 book, Imperial Hearst. If Houseman knew most of the Mercury Theatre players intimately, he was blithely ignorant about Hearst.

  Mankiewicz, on the other hand, had read dozens of books about Hearst; his private library of more than two thousand books was full of volumes on the tycoon, many of them written by personal or professional friends of Mank’s. Of course, Mank told lawyers in the Lundberg case, he had read On the Great Highway: The Wanderings and Adventures of a Special Correspondent by the former Hearst reporter James Creelman, one of the progenitors of “yellow journalism”; Creelman’s book contained a definitive account of the telegram about the Spanish-American War—an incident Mank referenced in Citizen Kane. Creelman’s son James Ashmore Creelman was a Hollywood scenarist, a contributor to King Kong, who had collaborated on several scripts with Mank. And of course Mank had read Oliver Carlson and Ernest Sutherland Bates’s Hearst: Lord of San Simeon; Carlson had once worked under Mank as a movie critic for the New Yorker.

  Mank had read Lundberg’s Imperial Hearst, too, he admitted, largely because a Columbia professor, Charles A. Beard, whose seminar he had taken, wrote the introduction. Though he respected Beard, he could not understand why the distinguished American historian praised Lundberg’s book, which Mank found “a tendentious, one-dimensional tract,” bent on proving Hearst an “exploiter.” He could not explain the odd fact that there were two copies of this book in his library, but Mankiewicz declared repeatedly that he did not derive a single incident in his script from it, nor did he bring a single book pertaining to Hearst to Victorville. Mank had no need to consult books about Hearst, he said: testifying in court in 1950, he discussed Hearst knowledgeably and in detail, furnishing names and dates from memory.

  For his part, Houseman said he read only one nonfiction book in Victorville: Forty Years, Forty Millions: The Career of Frank A. Munsey by George Britt. The name of Munsey, an eccentric early twentieth-century publisher of pulp fiction, had come up in the pre-Victorville discussions with Welles and Mankiewicz. Intrigued, Houseman packed Munsey’s biography with his belongings. The News on the March footage alluded briefly to Munsey’s ownership of grocery stores (“An empire upon an empire. The first of grocery stores, paper mills, apartment buildings, factories, forests, ocean liners . . .”), the rare line by himself that Houseman recalled surviving into the script—and proof, he said, that Kane was not Hearst, who owned nary a grocery store.

  Houseman had never read a single book about Hearst, he said, and claimed no expertise on the subject. According to his testimony, he and Mankiewicz discussed Hearst no more than they did “many other famous people,” who were folded into various characters in the film.

  Mank crafted Walter Parks Thatcher, for example, to bear an intentional resemblance to corporate financier J. P. Morgan, especially in the scene when Thatcher is the target of a congressional hearing. In 1933, a press agent for Ringling Brothers had taken advantage of a lull in similar proceedings to pop the midget circus performer Lya Graf onto the lap of the astonished J. P. Morgan Jr., son of the celebrated banker. In the News on the March footage, “a baby alligator has just been placed in [Thatcher’s] lap,” according to the published Citizen Kane script, “causing considerable confusion and embarrassment.” If this scene was ever filmed, though, it was cut—and at any rate, Houseman testified indignantly, it would be “obviously absurd” to link Thatcher too closely with Morgan. Morgan was merely one of several models for Kane.

  Still, Mankiewicz admitted in his testimony that Hearst was directly or slyly evoked in many scenes of Citizen Kane, and he was proud of it. Details were borrowed from numerous sources, Mank insisted, often dating back decades; many of the tidbits were common knowledge
, none of them unique to Lundberg’s book.

  As for Houseman, who prided himself on knowing little about Hearst, he was ill-equipped to spot the script’s many real-life references and inside jokes. In Victorville, for example, Houseman wondered aloud whether the idea of a publisher like Kane running for public office would strain credulity. Were there any “precedents” of “a molder of public opinion running for public office”? Yes, Mankiewicz told him: William Randolph Hearst. And Houseman marveled at the clever scene Mank devised for the composing room, after Kane has lost his gubernatorial race—it survived every draft—with Bernstein (“actually crying,” according to the published script) as he chooses between two newspapers with rival headlines held up by the composing room foreman: KANE ELECTED or FRAUD AT POLLS! “I thought this was an extremely amusing episode,” said Houseman, “and I asked him if he had thought it up; and his reply [was that] this was a true story,” another actual Hearst anecdote.

  Reading the scene Mankiewicz had written, in which Kane sends a wire to a reporter covering the Spanish-American War—“You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war”—Houseman again was vastly “amused.” Once more he asked the writer if the dialogue was “original with him,” and Mank replied that it was a paraphrase of Hearst’s legendary telegram to illustrator Frederic Remington: “You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war.” (In his own deposition in the Lundberg case, Welles said that the telegram and Kane’s “crazy art collection,” a detail “much too good to resist,” were the only two “pure Hearstian” elements he recognized in Citizen Kane.)

  In the first draft script, Mankiewicz had written a scene involving the assassination of President McKinley, whose killer, when captured, has a Kane editorial in his pocket. This was Mank’s allusion to the fact that McKinley was mercilessly denounced by the Hearst press until his assassination in September 1901, after which the publisher became the target of public rage for having incited the assassination. A provocative poem by the famous Hearst journalist Ambrose Bierce, published months earlier and referring to the assassination of a Kentucky governor in 1900, was widely credited with foreshadowing the shooting of McKinley. Hearst was hanged in effigy, and the circulation of his papers plummeted. “I asked Mr. Mankiewicz, since I was not familiar with any such incident in American history,” explained Houseman, “if that had any foundation in fact, and he told me of the Ambrose Bierce quatrain.” (Bierce’s poem was another bit of writing that Mank easily recalled at the Lundberg trial—well enough to recite it at length from memory.)

  Orson expected and welcomed the script’s allusions to Hearst, but only up to a point. He wanted Kane to serve as an archetype, not a replication of Hearst. Houseman had failed this part of his task, allowing too many real-life references to Hearst to sneak into the script.

  And the Victorville draft failed in another important way: “Outrageously overwritten even for a first draft,” in Meryman’s words, “American” ran over three hundred pages. “Houseman blandly ignores this fact” in his self-aggrandizing account, as Meryman noted in his book. The first draft was overstuffed with plot, including scenes featuring Kane roistering in college in Germany, and the first meeting between Kane and Mr. Bernstein in Paris. One scene even featured Kane living decadently abroad, in a palace in Rome, surrounded by art treasures and guests including “pimps, Lesbians, dissipated Army officers, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs and international society tramps.” (It is “what we call the Elsa Maxwell scene,” Houseman explained drolly to Lundberg’s lawyers.)

  Also in the first draft, Thatcher’s son, Walter Parks Thatcher Jr., hounds Kane about financial matters after his father’s demise. The generations multiply: Kane’s father, Charles Foster Kane Sr., reappears dramatically, and Kane has a right-wing son who joins a domestic fascist conspiracy and dies in a violent uprising. Susan Alexander meanwhile takes a young lover while sequestered at Xanadu. Under orders from Kane, the sinister butler Raymond has the lover murdered.

  Overwriting was not the draft’s worst flaw, however. “By far the most serious dramatic problem in ‘American,’ ” according to Robert L. Carringer’s astute assessment in his authoritative The Making of Citizen Kane, “is its portrait of Kane. Mankiewicz drew a good deal of his material directly from Hearst without really assimilating it to dramatic need. . . . ‘American’ is by and large a literal reworking of specific incidents and details from Hearst’s life.” Kane was too Hearstian and not fully realized as a character.

  After Welles gave his critique, Houseman and Mankiewicz went back to work on the script, their salaries extended. They would spend several more weeks in Victorville, implementing cuts, additions, and improvements without solving the length problem. The main results of their second pass at the script, according to Carringer, included the elimination of the first Mrs. Charles Foster Kane as a narrative witness, with much of her storytelling reassigned to Jed Leland; the addition of a scene in Madison Square Garden, with Mrs. Kane insisting that she and her husband visit his “love nest” for their fateful encounter with Susan Alexander and Boss Gettys; and a change in Kane’s political fortunes, with his stolen gubernatorial victory becoming a wholesale rejection by the electorate.

  Still, despite its length and its too-literal Hearstiana, Orson recognized the first draft, in the words of Meryman, as “the blueprint of a masterpiece.” And the draft also gave Orson something to show RKO’s president George Schaefer as evidence of progress, even as he reassured Schaefer that he would sharpen the drama and rein in the most blatant references to Hearst.

  Welles was a master editor. He knew what he could do with Mank’s blueprint of a masterpiece. He knew better than anyone else what he could do, as an actor, with Kane, and how to create scenes to show off his strengths. And he knew that the long money was on making Charles Foster Kane an archetype, one that would ensure the greatness of the film for future generations to come for whom the name Hearst would be but a faint echo of a bygone America.

  As for Ferdinand Lundberg, he subsequently accepted a $15,000 settlement from RKO, after his lawsuit ended in a hung jury.

  John Houseman and Herman Mankiewicz returned to Hollywood to deliver the second draft of “American” to Welles “on or about May 9,” according to Robert L. Carringer’s book. That “on or about” opens the possibility that it could have been on May 6, Orson’s twenty-fifth birthday, the long-awaited day when he would come of age and collect the fortune his father had preserved for him in trust.

  “Everything else—the principal as well as all monies earned—is to be administered by the bank in trust for your son, Charles Foster Kane,” as Walter Parks Thatcher explains to Mr. and Mrs. Kane in the Kane boardinghouse in the deep backstory of Citizen Kane, “until his twenty-fifth birthday, at which time he is to come into complete possession.”

  The loss of weekly radio income; the Mercury Theatre’s considerable debt; the five figures or more that he owed in back taxes; and the increased obligation to his ex-wife, Virginia, and their daughter, Christopher—all this, on top of the lost income from his canceled lectures, made Welles’s financial situation desperate. His money blew out the door as fast as it blew in. While the studio was liberal with its overhead allowances, RKO refused to pay out any additional moneys to Welles until principal photography on Citizen Kane began.

  Throughout March and April, Richard Baer and Arnold Weissberger struggled to pay Orson’s bills while conspiring to force him into exigent measures that he continued to resist.

  “I have tried to sound as dire as possible,” Weissberger wrote to Baer in early April. “The minute he were to believe that the situation was only bad and not terrible, he would fail to take any cognizance of restrictive measures. For his own protection, therefore, I shall continue to be completely pessimistic in my advices to him.”

  The small amounts of money that Orson loaned to friends, or payments he authorized for occasional onetime services—payments that looked suspiciously like handouts—Welles refused to itemize or track
down for collection. The loans he made to friends he considered gifts, more or less. Meanwhile, the Mercury Theatre was in nearly fathomless arrears. “You have paid over to the Mercury Theatre in the aggregate of $50,000,” his lawyer explained to him in a letter. “The cost of Danton’s Death alone was about $50,000. This will explain to you why Mercury is still so much in debt.”

  Orson had asked Weissberger to seek an early distribution of his inheritance, which for months leading up to his birthday was believed to be in the neighborhood of $30,000. That was still relatively substantial, if disappointing, and Orson hoped to spend it on overdue bills and sprinkle a little on “American” while pouring the remainder into his future plans. Weissberger warned against dipping into the money—Orson’s only money—prematurely.

  Finally, in April, Orson dismissed his maid, butler, and gardener. He scouted out a lower-cost house away from Brentwood in the Coldwater Canyon neighborhood of Beverly Hills. He agreed to downsize the Mercury offices in New York, cutting by a third the salaries of both remaining staff members (including Weissberger’s long-serving sister, Augusta), and subletting part of the space. And he trimmed the West Coast staff down to Richard Baer and Herbert Drake.

  When Weissberger finally reported back on the trust fund, the news was grim. Orson was indeed owed $33,438.18 on his twenty-fifth birthday. But $15,000 of that total was earmarked to repay the several bank loans Orson had negotiated against his inheritance in recent years, and included $2,000 from Columbia Artists that Orson had borrowed as an advance against his various earnings, whose note of guarantee was also held by the bank. Another $12,000 had to be set aside for overdue income taxes, as the federal government was threatening to impose a lien on Welles. Finally, Dr. Maurice Bernstein held a chit for a personal loan to Orson of $1,233.76, which the doctor insisted upon recovering.