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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  That left a mere $5,000 as the residue of the fortune bequeathed to this onetime “rich boy,” as Chicago newspaper headlines had called him. Weissberger begged Welles to keep the paltry sum in the bank, where it would earn interest. Orson wanted nothing further to do with the Chicago bank. He gave Weissberger instructions to withdraw the $5,000 and send it his way, where it was quickly sown in the wind. Orson ordered the bank to turn over his father’s personal effects—including the grip Dick Welles had carried with him around the world—to Dr. Bernstein.

  Virginia was another person keenly attuned to the date of her ex-husband’s inheritance. After leaving the hospital and recovering her health, she no longer spoke of returning to New York, nor of acting anymore under the name Anna Stafford. These days she was frequently glimpsed at Hollywood nightspots in the company of writer Charles Lederer. Still contriving to hold on to his mansion, Orson arranged for Virginia and his daughter to live in the lower-cost Beverly Hills house he had rented; in lieu of paying child support he let them use it free.

  Like her father, Virginia was by now convinced that Orson stood to gain riches beyond imagining on his twenty-fifth birthday. She had agreed to a temporary reduction in alimony when she thought Orson was engulfed by crisis (and she herself was in the hospital in a vulnerable state). Now she withdrew that concession, submitted a bill for back alimony and other costs, and threatened to hire a lawyer.

  Arnold Weissberger had the unpleasant task of sorting out Virginia’s financial claims, and an alimony agreement that morphed as often as Orson’s RKO contract. This job was further complicated when, a mere ten days after Orson’s birthday, Virginia eloped with Lederer; they were married at the home of a justice of the peace in Phoenix, Arizona. The marriage came just four months after her divorce, and her claim to reporters that there was no other romance in her life.

  Everyone else saw it coming. Nor was Orson surprised: the couple had privately announced a June ceremony before dashing off to Phoenix. And Welles liked Lederer—a dapper, amusing man in the Hecht-MacArthur circle—as much as everyone else in Hollywood did. But when Virginia moved in with Lederer, she moved out of Orson’s rented house—and sublet it to other people at a profit to herself. She then escalated her demands for more alimony, with her unpaid hospital costs a major sticking point. “I consider at this distance from the event that I was ill treated and duped in the whole matter of the divorce settlement,” Virginia wrote to Weissberger.

  May 6, 1939, was just another unhappy birthday for Orson. His inheritance had proved a mirage. He owed incomprehensible amounts of money to his wife, the banks, the Mercury Theatre’s creditors, and the tax collector. The man with a golden contract was very nearly broke.

  Show business columnists who had chronicled Orson’s life story—the trust fund left to the wunderkind by his wealthy father—chortled publicly over his comeuppance. “Orson Welles received oodles of publicity over the legend that on May 6 he would inherit” a windfall, wrote Walter Winchell, “but taxes, erosions, time and etcetera made him the receiver of the magnificent sum of $28.40.”

  When, in Citizen Kane, Thompson remarks of Charles Foster Kane, “He made an awful lot of money,” Mr. Bernstein the business manager offers a piercing rejoinder: “It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money. You take Mr. Kane—it wasn’t money he wanted. Thatcher never did figure him out. Sometimes, even I couldn’t.”

  Although Welles hated parallels between himself and Kane, that was as close as the film came to a declaration of Orson’s own principles. It was no trick to have, or to make, a lot of money. Orson, who knew many tricks, often quoted that as one of his favorite lines—the work of Herman Mankiewicz, another pearl dropping from the mouth of Mr. Bernstein.

  According to Richard Meryman’s biography of Mankiewicz, John Houseman “departed for New York just four days after delivering ‘American’ to Welles.” Although Orson would keep him apprised of successive drafts, asking for his advice and input, Houseman was absent from the substantial rewriting that occurred over the next two and a half months.

  Their partnership was still precarious, but around the time the script was delivered, Orson made several public announcements about the future of the Mercury Theatre. Welles told the press that the Mercury was planning a fall Broadway season, to open with his own adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, presented in two acts on one set. He also announced that he, Houseman, and Mankiewicz would open a West Coast branch of the Mercury to be known as United Productions, with the New York Mercury furnishing two of the five plays to be produced in Los Angeles; the other three would originate locally.

  One of the properties Welles set his sights on was a stage version of Native Son, Richard Wright’s incendiary new novel set in the Negro slums on Chicago’s South Side. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Orson had read the novel while Houseman and Mankiewicz were in Victorville; he now persuaded Houseman that, with his help and Mankiewicz’s, he could turn the acclaimed but difficult-to-dramatize novel into a first-rate stage play. The title role would be perfect for a black actor such as Canada Lee. Houseman agreed to approach Wright quietly, to negotiate the rights.

  With Welles, it was always hard to know which of his ideas were real and which were feints. The bicoastal Mercury was a magnificent gesture of confidence in and gratitude to Houseman and Mankiewicz as a script team. Only one United Production would ever come to pass, however, and that was Native Son. Early in June, Houseman wrote to say that he’d obtained permission from the author. Miraculously, then, Welles, who conferred with Mankiewicz and worked like a madman after dark, promised by telegraph a “tentative cut-down version [of the Native Son script] first two hundred pages tomorrow for your information and suggestions.” Although playwright Paul Green eventually earned the credit for the adaptation, Houseman, Mankiewicz, and Welles all contributed to the script; Mank was listed on the eventual stage production credits as associate producer.

  The script for “American,” meanwhile, was delivered to RKO president George Schaefer. On May 18 Orson mailed another sealed copy—the only copy that circulated outside Hollywood—to Roger Hill in Woodstock, Illinois, asking for his old headmaster’s feedback. Although it was merely a working draft, Orson wrote to Skipper, the script was “a source of some gratification.”

  With Mankiewicz “off to MGM on another assignment,” according to Robert L. Carringer, doctoring without credit the Ben Hecht–Charles Lederer script of the anticommunist comedy Madame X, Welles had to clear his desk and roll up his sleeves. The 325-page script for “American” was cluttered and overlong; it had to be reduced by at least half. Even if Mankiewicz had not been otherwise occupied, Orson would have had little choice but to bypass him: Mank was mulishly stubborn when asked to make even the slightest changes to his prose. (“Herman would rather talk for three days than change two innocuous lines of dialogue,” Bert Granet, the producer of one Mankiewicz film, told Richard Meryman.)

  The drama had to be paced the way Orson lived: like an express train. Orson cut away at the periphery, starting with the flashbacks to Kane as a boy and young man. (One sequence Orson deleted, which showed Kane expelled from a German university for a prank, also echoed too closely an incident in Hearst’s life.) He compressed many scenes into “snappy and arresting montages,” in Carringer’s phrase, including the memorable flash-forward that covered all of Kane’s youth. Thatcher is seen bestowing an unwanted sled on Kane as a boy, and trilling, “Well, Charles, Merry Christmas”—with the boy returning his salutation coldly. The screen cuts to Thatcher dictating “. . . a very Happy New Year” to his secretary on Kane’s twenty-fifth birthday. (In Mankiewicz and Welles’s “shooting script,” as published by Pauline Kael, this masterful device is not only missing; it is replaced by Mank’s sentimental image of the boy Kane sobbing into a pillow, “Mom! Mom!”) Orson’s version foreshadowed the sled at the end of the film, fortified the “Rosebud” conceit, and jumped shrewdly past Kane’s e
mpty boyhood.

  Welles’s storytelling strategies, full of tricks he’d gleaned in his years as a stage and radio director, were foreign to Mank. Orson knew how to cut scenes to save screen time and money, often employing sound and visual effects that only he could dream up and pull off. Another striking time lapse in the final film, for example, shows Susan Alexander singing for Kane in her humble apartment; dissolves to her singing within better surroundings set up for her as a kept woman by Kane; then cuts to a group of people applauding Leland as he concludes a speech introducing Kane during his campaign; and finally moves to Kane finishing Leland’s sentence from his podium at Madison Square Garden—all done “faster than you could do in radio,” as Welles boasted to Peter Bogdanovich.

  Often, decisions made during production were crucial contributions—as in the opening sequence at Xanadu, just as the camera reaches the window of Kane’s bedroom, when the room light flicks off and then on again. The published shooting script says nothing about the light going off. Why did Welles choose to do that? asked Peter Bogdanovich. “To interest the audience,” Orson explained. “We’d been going on quite a while there with nothing happening. You see a light in the window—you keep coming nearer—and it better go off, or a shadow had better cross, or something better happen. So I turned the light off—that’s all. . . .

  “Maybe the nurse turned it off because it was getting in [Kane’s] eyes. Who knows? Who cares? The other answer is that it symbolized death. Got that? All right.

  “He was supposed to die when the light went off, and then you go back a few minutes and see him alive again—if you really want a reason. The other, low-class reason was to keep the audience interested. And they’re both valid.”

  Over and over again, where Mankiewicz simply had jotted “Dissolve out . . . dissolve in,” Orson added theatrical effects that made the scene changes memorable. Another example is the abrupt and startling image of a white cockatoo, shrieking in close-up, as Raymond the butler starts describing Kane’s tantrum after his second wife leaves him.

  “Why did you use the shrieking cockatoo?” asked Bogdanovich.

  “Wake ’em up,” answered Welles.

  “Literally?” said Bogdanovich.

  “Yeah. Getting late in the evening, you know,” Orson replied. “Time to brighten up anybody who might be nodding off.”

  “It has no other purpose . . . ?”

  “Theatrical shock effect,” answered Welles; “if you want to be grand about it—you can say it’s placed at a certain musical moment when I felt the need for something short and exclamatory. So it has a sort of purpose, but no meaning. What’s fascinating, though, is that, because of some accident in the trick department, you can see through the bird’s eye into the scenery behind.”

  “I always thought that was intentional,” said Bogdanovich.

  “We don’t know why that happened,” said Welles. “Some accident.”

  These were small touches. Far more important was Orson’s work in dropping big chunks of the adult Kane’s story from the script. Mank argued fiercely to preserve a series of scenes referencing the McKinley assassination, which would have set up an argument between Kane and Leland demonstrating the widening gulf in their friendship. But Orson knew what he wanted and what would work. “I was the one who was making the picture, after all—who made the decisions,” Welles recalled. “I used what I wanted of Mank’s and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.” Although the McKinley scenes were a perfect example of what Meryman called Mank’s “banked-up political-historical expertise,” they took the script too far away from the main story, while also adding to the cost and length of the production. Besides, the McKinley assassination was dicey territory—a clear swipe at Hearst and his newspaper empire, which Orson recognized, even if Houseman had not. The assassination scenes went into the circular file.

  Mank also fought to retain the idea that Kane had Susan’s lover murdered—an obvious allusion to Hearst and his possible connection to the death of Thomas Ince aboard Hearst’s yacht in 1924. Ince’s death was officially attributed to a heart attack, but according to the Hollywood rumor mill Hearst shot Ince by accident, mistaking him for Charles Chaplin, after discovering Chaplin in a romantic clinch with Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies. Mank advanced an interesting argument for keeping the allusions to Ince in the script: doing so, he claimed, would dissuade Hearst from attacking the picture with a lawsuit, because such a suit would entail airing the gossip about Chaplin and Davies in public. Welles and Mank often argued like boys on a seesaw; if one rode up, the other plunged down. In this case, perhaps Mankiewicz should have been left on top. “I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film, and wasn’t in keeping with Kane’s character,” Welles mused years later. “If I’d kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn’t have dared admit it was him [being referenced].”53

  In late April, even before Houseman and Mankiewicz finished the second draft of “American,” Orson had started testing actors for the important roles that he knew would survive the script process. Much of the rewriting revolved around refining the key characters offering their remembrances of Kane, tailoring them expressly for Orson’s Mercury players, whom he—as head of that troupe, and as a fellow actor—knew best.

  The Mercury players functioned as “a close family,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, but it was “an Anglo-Saxon type of family where the members leave each other pretty much alone. We had our fun together during working hours—and it was fun, you know. The atmosphere was like a sort of house party. To give you an idea, we always kept a good jazz-piano man on the set. Between jobs, though, we tended to go our separate ways.”

  Joseph Cotten had been on tour in The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn. With the tour scheduled for a summer break, Orson arranged the production calendar in order to squeeze Cotten’s major scenes in before he had to return to the road in the fall. A former newspaperman himself, Cotten was always helpful about the characters he played, and Orson brought him to Mank’s house so the two could relax and get to know each other by the swimming pool. Cotten was encouraged to make little changes in his dialogue during the filming.

  The scene “Mankiewicz was proudest of in the picture,” according to Houseman, was the one when Leland confronts Kane after he has lost the gubernatorial election because of the “love nest” scandal. (“You talk about the people as though you own them . . . as though they belong to you.”) But the difference between the discursive version of the published shooting script and that of the film’s is striking. Welles and Cotten both worked on the crucial scene, with Welles pruning it to make it more concise, but also rewriting the dialogue for force and clarity.

  The last climactic encounter between Kane and Leland occurs in the scene when Kane finds the newspaperman slumped over his typewriter, his devastating pan of Susan Alexander Kane’s opera debut unfinished. It was Welles who insisted that Kane then would sit down and complete Leland’s damning review. “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.” Orson talked the scene out, and Mank was obliged to write it; the final version is close to the published version of the script. As Carringer noted, though, Orson’s addition was “an inspired touch,” transforming it from Leland’s scene to Kane’s. “The big moment is when [Kane] types the bad notice,” Welles reflected. “That’s when he’s faithful to himself.”

  As the actors were lined up, their scenes were reworked. George Coulouris—the only Mercury player who already had appeared in a Hollywood film—was still in Hollywood and eager to play Thatcher. Agnes Moorehead and Everett Sloane, who had always been radio players—not part of the Mercury stage ensemble—were paying their bills with broadcast work; but they were patient and ready and waiting whenever Orson summoned them. Another radio stalwart who now would be blended into the Mercury film contingent was actor-director Paul Stewart. Orson phoned St
ewart in New York, and asked him to come out to Hollywood and “do a part for me in my picture.” “Yes . . . but what’s the part?” Stewart asked. “Never mind. Just come out,” Welles said. “Well,” Stewart recalled, “when Orson said he had a part for you, you went.”

  The part in question was Raymond, the butler. (“Knows where all the bodies are buried,” says Susan Alexander Kane—one of the final script’s few allusions to the Ince affair.) Years later, Stewart recalled that his very first shot in Citizen Kane was “a close-up in which Orson wanted a special smoke effect from my cigarette, but somehow the contraption wouldn’t exude smoke.” Orson cried out: “I want long cigarettes—the Russian kind!” Everything halted while the prop man went in search of Russian cigarettes.

  “Just before the scene, Orson Welles warned me: ‘Your head is going to fill up the screen at the Radio City Music Hall,’” Stewart continued. (The film’s premiere would be held at Radio City.) “Then he said in his gruff manner: ‘Turn ’em,’ ” meaning the cameras.

  “Just before I started, he added quietly in his warm voice, ‘Good luck.’

  “I blew the first take,” Stewart recalled, freezing at the prospect of seeing his face on the big screen at Radio City Music Hall. But he blew it in style, saying, “Goldberg? I’ll tell you about Goldberg . . .” Orson and everyone else roared with laughter.

  “It was thirty-forty takes before I completed a shot that Orson liked,” Stewart remembered, “and I only had one line. That was almost thirty years ago, but even today I have people repeat it to me, including young students. The line was:

  “‘Rosebud? I’ll tell you about Rosebud . . .’”

  Gus Schilling, Erskine Sanford, and Ray Collins said yes. Schilling would play the headwaiter at El Rancho, where Susan Alexander Kane is found drowning her sorrows. Sanford would portray the addle-pated veteran editor Carter (“an elderly, stout gent”), whom Kane quickly displaces at the Inquirer. Orson needed someone with gravitas for Boss Gettys. (In Mank’s published script, the character had the bland name Boss Roberts; Orson replaced “Roberts” with Hortense Hill’s maiden name.) He tapped Collins, his rock in radio.