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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  The film reaches a turning point in the scene when Kane meets the oily power broker Gettys—big and heavyset, like Collins, as the script describes him—who is wounded by the fact that his wife and children have seen the Inquirer caricature of him drawn “in a convict suit with stripes.” Gettys uses Kane’s wife Emily to lure him to the “love nest” apartment where he threatens to expose Kane’s affair with Susan. The scene had to be written as perfectly as possible, and the first draft was crafted “exclusively by my colleague, Mr. Mankiewicz,” as Welles said in the Lundberg case. But Orson also consulted Collins. “We also closed the picture for a day in order to rewrite this scene,” Orson said. “This rewriting was done by myself and the cast of actors involved.”

  KANE

  There’s only one person in the world to decide what I’m gonna do and that’s me.

  EMILY

  You decided what you were going to do, Charles, some time ago.

  GETTYS

  You’re making a bigger fool of yourself than I thought you would, Mr. Kane.

  KANE

  I’ve got nothing to talk to you about.

  GETTYS

  You’re licked. Why don’t you . . .

  KANE

  Get out! If you wanna see me, have the warden write me a letter.

  GETTYS

  With anybody else, I’d say what’s gonna happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re gonna need more than one lesson. And you’re gonna get more than one lesson.

  KANE

  Don’t worry about me, Gettys. Don’t worry about me! I’m Charles Foster Kane! I’m no cheap crooked politician, trying to save himself from the consequences of his crimes! Gettys! I’m gonna send you to Sing-Sing! Sing-Sing, Gettys!

  The film called for dozens of lesser speaking parts, and Welles plugged holes with many performers who were not Mercury veterans. One small but important role was that of Kane’s father. In the first “American” drafts, Kane later encountered his long-lost father with a “young tart” one night at a stage show. Orson cut that reappearance from the script, against Mank’s protests, but the role was still pivotal, and when Harry Shannon appeared at a casting call, Orson remembered the comic vaudeville dancer from his boyhood days and gave him the part.

  With so many roles to fill, the casting would go on throughout the filming. Orson collected people wherever he encountered them. After seeing the left-wing musical Meet the People in Los Angeles, he went backstage to pluck new players from among the singers and dancers. He found parts for his secretaries; cameos for Herman Mankiewicz and cameraman Gregg Toland; and roles for everyone in the Mercury retinue, including Richard Wilson and William (no longer “Vakhtangov”) Alland, who had long been penciled in as Thompson, the colorless reporter. Alland also imitated the stentorian broadcaster Westbrook Pegler for the News on the March footage.54 “Great imitation,” Orson told Bogdanovich, even if Pegler was “pretty easy to imitate.” (Welles then proceeded, from memory, to boom out his own imitation of the imitation: “This week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane. . . .”)

  One bit of casting that had personal meaning for Orson was the uncredited cameo he set aside for sixty-three-year-old actor Landers Stevens, who is glimpsed as an investigator in the Senate hearing that is part of News on the March. His casting meant nothing, except to Landers himself; his brother, Ashton Stevens; and his son, George Stevens. After ailing for months, actor Landers Stevens would die in December 1940 from complications during surgery. Citizen Kane was his last job.

  Not everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Orson cast his net deep into his past, reaching out to William Vance, who had acted in his summer theater; had shot his first short film, The Hearts of Age; and had adapted Everybody’s Shakespeare into half-hour radio shows produced for WTAD in Quincy, Illinois. Orson had stayed in touch with Vance, and now phoned him to invite him to audition for Citizen Kane; but Vance’s wife was seriously ill, and he had decided he didn’t want to be an actor anyway.

  Welles also contacted William Mowry Jr., the former Todd School footballer and Mercury Theatre regular. But Mowry had married and moved back to Chicago, and had grown ambivalent about a theatrical career. When Mowry demurred, Welles wired to say no hard feelings: LOVE, ORSON.

  CHAPTER 20

  June 1940

  The Big Brass Ring

  As was customary for him, and not uncommon in Hollywood, Welles had to plan ahead, coordinating his ideas for staging and cinematography with the RKO departments even as he was still working on the script. With president George Schaefer’s backing, he had the vast studio machinery at his beck and call. In particular, he needed a team of technicians with whom he could commune artistically. Luck served him in that regard—if luck also involves long waiting and studying, and a sharp instinct for reaching and scratching an itch.

  Most books say that Van Nest Polglase, the head of RKO’s production design department, assigned art director Perry Ferguson to Orson’s still-undisclosed project. “There are Citizen Kane alumni who maintain to this day that assignment to the Welles unit at RKO was a sure mark of studio disfavor,” wrote Robert L. Carringer in The Making of Citizen Kane. “Ferguson’s case demonstrates the contrary. At the time, he was the RKO art department’s rising star.”

  In at least one published interview, however, Welles said he asked for Ferguson. Born in Texas, long a draftsman before rising to unit art director at RKO in 1935, Ferguson had distinguished himself working with top director Howard Hawks on the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby in 1938 (“one of the costliest pictures made by the studio up to its time,” according to Carringer) and on a number of George Stevens productions, culminating in 1939 with Gunga Din. Stevens gave the unassuming Texan high marks for ingenuity and cost-efficiency.

  Ferguson listened as Orson outlined his unusual ideas for creative camerawork. Welles envisioned using miniatures to conjure the towering Xanadu, for instance, and matte backgrounds to fake crowd scenes. Illustrating his thoughts with quick pencil drawings, Orson explained that he wanted to shoot certain scenes from extremely low angles, and wanted the camera to show the ceilings of rooms. “I suppose I had more low angles in Kane just because I became fascinated with the way it looked,” Welles said decades later, “and I do it less now because it’s become less surprising.” His ideas would require unusual adjustments: soundstage floors would have to be dug up for the camera crew, and the sound and light would have to pass through false ceilings.

  Ferguson met every idea halfway, suggesting that they could try crafting the ceilings from dyed muslin—a material that was both flexible and, crucially, inexpensive. The script had not yet been evaluated for costs, but Orson and everyone else worried about limiting expenses as much as possible. “It became necessary to cheat many of the settings, particularly those at Xanadu,” Simon Callow wrote. Ferguson knew how to design only what the camera would show, with Orson’s extreme low angle shots leading the eye into darkness, where the unconstructed borders could be shrouded in velvet drapes, recalling the “black art” of magicians.

  Ferguson listened amiably, nodding. He was already preparing preliminary storyboards by the time another man strolled into Orson’s studio office in early June. God had sent Orson a gift in the form of cinematographer Gregg Toland—God, or perhaps the veteran director John Ford, one of the unlikely patron saints of Citizen Kane. Toland had just shot Ford’s films The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home, both released in 1940. Did Ford encourage Toland to visit Orson and volunteer his services? Ford knew that Welles had been studying his pictures, screening them repeatedly, and the veteran director visited the set of Citizen Kane on one of the first days of shooting to say a brisk hello. (He also warned Welles that Eddie Donahoe, his assistant director, was a front-office snitch: “Old Snake-in-the-Grass Eddie,” Ford muttered.)

  Toland was about ten years older than Welles but they had much in common. Both were from Illinois, both were the children of divorced parents. Toland’s hometown
—Charleston, Illinois, about two hundred miles southeast of Chicago—was not far from Orson’s mother’s hometown, Springfield, yet it was so far south it was almost Kentucky. (During the Civil War, half the Tolands joined the antiwar “copperheads.”) When Toland was about ten, his parents had separated bitterly, his father moving to Chicago, his mother taking Gregg to California.

  As a young man Toland showed an aptitude for electrical engineering, and at fifteen he dropped out of school to work at the Fox studios, first as an office boy, then joining George Barnes’s camera crew, becoming an assistant cameraman in 1920. Since his first cinematography co-credit in the mid-1920s, Toland had established himself as one of the outstanding practitioners of his craft, and in the last five years he had earned five Academy Award nominations, winning for Wuthering Heights in 1940, a short time before he reported to work on Citizen Kane.

  A mustachioed, diminutive figure in thick, buggy glasses, Toland was a man of “extreme reserve,” according to one newspaper profile. Although soft-spoken and easygoing, he was highly disciplined at work, with a regular crew that followed his every slight gesture or whispered instruction. (By contrast, Welles told Bogdanovich, Toland was “quite a swinger off the set.”) Toland had studied acting, makeup, and costuming to understand the challenges they posed for cinematographers, and he kept up with the theater scene in New York. (One of his Oscar nominations was for the faithful Hollywood adaptation of the Broadway hit Dead End.) Toland had been impressed by Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth, the Nuremberg lighting of his Julius Caesar, and the striking scene and lighting designs of several of his other plays. When he met Welles, the cameraman stuck out his hand. “My name is Toland,” he said: “I want you to use me on your picture.”

  Orson, of course, knew Toland’s name. When the cameraman asked about the spectacular lighting of Welles’s New York productions, he raised an eyebrow at the reply: Orson said that he always designed his own lighting, and that it was common practice for the finest stage directors. Later, during the filming of Citizen Kane, Orson initially tried to supervise the lighting himself, with Toland “behind me, of course,” in his words, “balancing the lights and telling everybody to shut their faces.” Toland wanted to make Welles’s ideas work without deflating him, and was infuriated when a subordinate told Welles that the lighting was Toland’s job. After that, however, Orson deferred to his cinematographer.

  Orson told Toland that the film he was preparing would involve many interior shots with both sharp foregrounds and pristine backgrounds, as well as hung ceilings to strike “the desired note of reality,” Toland recalled. The challenge lay in lighting from the floor as much as possible, and obtaining what was then called a “universal focus,” bringing clarity to both foreground and background. Toland called it “pan-focus,” a technique that kept everything in focus even when the camera was panning (moving from side to side). And the camera, much like Welles himself, would be moving often, almost continuously.

  Orson said he wanted to avoid the standard master shots; to limit the use of close-ups; and as often as possible to combine the elements of a conventional two-shot setup into “a single, non-dollying shot,” in Toland’s words. One example that Toland later cited was the “big-head close-up of a player reading the inscription on a loving-cup” in the scene where Kane displays the photograph of celebrated reporters from a rival newsroom—a shot in which the inscription on the loving cup and the faces of Bernstein and Leland are closest to the viewer. “Beyond this foreground,” framing the loving cup, “a group of men from twelve to eighteen feet focal distance” is revealed with equal crispness—as is, finally, a young man in a doorway at the back of the room, far from the camera, shouting, “Here he comes!”

  Always the innovator, Welles was eager to test the limits and break the rules of standard camera practices. And Toland was tired of the limits and rules followed by even the very best Hollywood directors—with their studio overseers often forcing their hands. “I want to work with somebody who has never made a movie,” Toland explained. Welles, who never forgot Toland’s generous gesture, frequently repeated those words to interviewers later in life.

  Toland and Ferguson had never collaborated before, and together with Welles they developed a creative team spirit. Like Welles, Toland and Ferguson were fast and flexible. When Orson told them his idea for the fake newsreel News on the March, Toland started planning techniques to replicate the scratchy image of a real newsreel. (When Citizen Kane was shown in Italy, Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich, audiences “stood up and hissed and booed” during the News on the March sequence because the footage appeared “so bad.” He added: “You know the total run in Rome in the entire life of Citizen Kane is three days—since it was made!”) Ferguson made lists of stock set pieces and props the filmmaking team could poach during the filming: train platforms, high balconies, painted backdrops. “There was a big back lot,” Welles remembered, “and as we were moving from one place to another, we’d say, ‘Well, let’s get on the back of the train and make [a shot of Kane] with Teddy Roosevelt, or whoever it was. It was all kind of half improvised—all the newsreel stuff. It was tremendous fun doing it.”

  They had the same fun on a shoestring with the home movie–type trailer Orson concocted during the filming about the filming. It’s probably the greatest trailer ever made, four minutes long, voiced by Welles, unseen, who wittily introduces the other leads as they don their makeup or bump into microphones backstage. (Here’s Agnes Moorehead—“one of the best actresses in the world”—and Joseph Cotten: “Hey, give Jo a little light. Now smile for the folks, Jo!”)

  Orson completed his production team with a sensible young editor who later would sit patiently alongside him for months, shuffling through the footage, looking for the perfect combination of shots. Robert Wise, a midwesterner the same age as Welles, had worked genially with Garson Kanin on small comedies and he also had edited The Hunchback of Notre Dame. With so many shots that required images to be composited, or overlapped with another image (“One informed estimate is that fifty percent of the film’s total footage involves special effects of one kind or another,” Robert L. Carringer wrote), Welles also relied heavily on RKO special effects chief Vernon L. Walker and Linwood G. Dunn, the optical illusion master on King Kong who had helped with the Heart of Darkness tests.

  Although Ferguson was entirely responsible for Citizen Kane’s art direction, studio tradition mandated that his department head, Van Nest Polglase, be given the onscreen credit, with Ferguson listed only as “Associate Art Director.” Mindful of this slight, Orson often took care to lavish praise on Ferguson in later interviews. When it came to Toland, however, Orson honored him with an onscreen credit that was almost unique: Welles placed his own credit, “Orson Welles, Direction-Production,” on the same card as “Gregg Toland, A.S.C., Photography.”

  When Welles boasted about the gesture in one of their later interviews, Peter Bogdanovich pointed out that John Ford had given Toland the same special credit on The Last Voyage Home.

  Welles didn’t blink. “Gregg deserved it, didn’t he?” he rejoined.

  On May 28, RKO issued a program announcement listing fifty-three feature films the studio planned to produce in 1940–1941. Among them was “John Citizen, U.S.A.,” the title it was still using for the project. The cameras were scheduled to roll on Orson Welles’s first production on June 10. According to the announcement, Welles would star as a “crusading publisher,” aging from twenty-two to seventy-five in the course of the story. “Maybe he’ll even have the chance to wear a beard again,” Edwin Schallert speculated in the Los Angeles Times.

  Orson went to New York for a studio sales convention at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he joined RKO stars Anna Neagle, Lee Tracy, and Jean Hersholt and director-producer Herbert Wilcox for a luncheon with exhibitors and distributors in the grand ballroom. Afterward, Welles met privately with the studio president George Schaefer. Neither man was enamored of the title “John Citizen, U.S.A.,” or the alte
rnative, “American,” and it was at this meeting that Schaefer proposed a keeper: “Citizen Kane.” Orson leaped at the suggestion. “The head of the studio, imagine that!” Orson recalled to Peter Bogdanovich. “It’s a great title.” By the time Welles returned to Hollywood, the new title was in place. “One of the quickest title changes on record,” noted Thomas M. Pryor in his Hollywood column in the New York Times.

  Except for the brief flap over his supposed contempt for Hollywood, expressed in his speech in Kansas City, the press had been unusually quiet about Orson since February. The studio had stopped issuing progress reports on The Smiler with the Knife. Now the news of the imminent filming of Citizen Kane flew across the wires and stirred anticipation in the screen trade.

  But June 10 was overly optimistic, Orson told Schaefer in New York. Welles renewed his pledge to start photography before the one-year anniversary of his RKO contract, but first he had to finish work on the script—and to finish it properly he had to get away from the studio and Hollywood. After a night at Ciro’s with Dolores Del Rio, who became more conspicuous in his life as the start of filming neared, Orson left town—not for Victorville, more likely for Palm Springs.

  “Am just now polishing up a script that needs it very badly,” Welles reported in a June 8 telegram to Ashton Stevens in Chicago, “and during the past week have been mostly and literally in the desert pursuing a strict, even fanatical isolationist policy.”

  Orson’s periods of isolation always fueled his creativity. Here, in the California desert, he would finalize the script, although the rewriting and refining would continue throughout the filming. (“I saw scenes written during production,” said Orson’s secretary, Kathryn Trosper. “Even while he was being made up, he’d be dictating dialogue.”)