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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  The character of Charles Foster Kane was a chief focus of the desert getaway. Mankiewicz’s characterization of Kane was still too rigidly tied to the real-life Hearst. And just as Orson waited until the last moment to master his own performance in a stage play, he waited until now to surrender his attention to Kane, transforming the character “from Mankiewicz’s cardboard portrait,” in Robert L. Carringer’s words, “to the complex and enigmatic figure we see in the film.”

  Mankiewicz had written the character as an “egomaniac monster,” Welles told biographer Richard Meryman. “I don’t think a portrait of a man was ever present in any of Mank’s scripts. Everybody assumes that because Mank was an old newspaperman, and because he wrote about Hearst, and because he was a serious reader on politics, then that is the whole explanation of what he had to do with Kane. I felt his knowledge was very journalistic, not very close, the point of view of a newspaperman writing about a newspaper boss he despised. . . .

  “I don’t say that Mank didn’t see Kane with clarity,” Welles continued. “He saw everything with clarity. No matter how odd or how right or how marvelous his point of view was, it was always diamond white. Nothing muzzy. But the truths of the character, Kane, were not what interested him.”

  Orson reworked nearly every scene. By slashing away at the sentimental touches (the little boy Kane crying for his lost mother) and easy laughs, he toughened the central portrait and the tone of the drama. Mank, despite his attraction to some of the scandalous elements of Hearst’s story, had a certain rueful fondness for the man, whom he’d known at close range. “Personally,” Mankiewicz testified in the Lundberg case, “[Hearst] was and is one of the most charming men I have ever known.” In the script, and later through his acting, Orson made Kane’s charm self-serving and self-satisfied. “[Hearst] was, and is, a horse’s ass, no more or less, who had been wrong without exception on everything he’s touched,” Welles told Mankiewicz during one of their many arguments about Hearst.

  Orson wanted to make Kane more sympathetic without sentimentalizing him. He humanized Kane by humanizing his relationships with the other characters. Reworking the script in the desert, he sharpened Kane’s relationship with his first wife, Emily Monroe Norton, and drew out his chance meeting with Susan Alexander that follows in the film, the ear-wiggling and shadow-play that evince the buried heart of Kane and the secret childlike side of Orson.

  He also injected humor and gaiety into the scene in the newsroom after Kane has purloined the famous reporters of a rival newspaper. “Kane puts two fingers to his mouth and whistles,” the published script says. “A band strikes up and enters in advance of a regiment of very magnificent maidens.” Orson knew he could stage the “magnificent maidens” brilliantly, with Kane protesting, “I don’t know how to dance,” as he’s pulled into the line of leggy dancers.

  The published shooting script does not include the lyrics of the toe-tapping ditty “Charlie Kane,” which were jobbed out to songwriter Herman Ruby; and Mankiewicz, testifying in the Lundberg case, was dismissive of the song (by “some Tin Pan Alley lyricist,” he scoffed). But Orson liked to sing and dance a little, and the lyrics recall the foolishments at the Todd School:

  LEAD SINGER

  What is his name?

  BERNSTEIN

  (echoing)

  What is his name?

  DANCERS

  (singing)

  It’s Charlie Kane!

  EVERYONE

  (singing)

  It’s Mister Kane!

  He doesn’t like the Mister!

  He likes good old Char-lie Kane!

  Orson would spend several days filming that scene, using the camera to add layers of richness to the musical number. (“This [scene] was really,” sniffed Houseman in his testimony in the Lundberg case, “one of those personal things about Orson, who always fancied himself a ladies’ man, and to prance around with a large number of beautiful young ladies would be his idea of heaven.”) The scene took time to create, relying on tricky composite photography and layers of sound, but the pretty chorus girls also had to appeal to Orson as much as to Kane. “I threw all the [first] girls out and waited till we got prettier ones,” Welles recalled, “and they were marvelous girls, finally.”

  In every draft of the script, the newsroom party scene was followed by the scene where Kane, Leland, and Bernstein adjourn to the high-class bordello “Georgie’s Place,” which recalled Chicago’s turn-of-the-century Everleigh Club. (Welles imagined that his own father may have cavorted at the Everleigh.) The scene was not at all sexualized, although “it was quite evident the kind of young ladies they were,” Houseman explained in his testimony. In early drafts of the scene at Georgie’s, Kane urged Leland to write a column “saying exactly what you think” while Kane vacations in Europe, promising him that no one will edit his copy in Kane’s absence. (“Leland keeps looking at him with loving perplexity,” the published script says, “knowing he will never solve the riddle of that face.”) Honing that scene in the desert, Orson shifted some of the Kane-Leland dialogue back to the earlier party sequence. The bordello scene was eventually filmed—it was roughly two minutes long, Welles estimated—but Orson deleted it in its entirety during postproduction. He no longer needed the exposition, and he foresaw that it would be a target for the censors. “It wasn’t that good,” Welles told Bogdanovich with a shrug.

  More than once Orson returned to the Kane-Leland scenes, trying to capture the friendship that perplexes Leland. During filming, he worked with Cotten to touch up Leland’s narration, his wheelchair scenes, and the final clash between Kane and Leland after Kane finishes Leland’s damning review of Susan’s opera debut. “Hello, Charlie,” Leland says. “I didn’t know we were speaking.” Kane: “Sure, we’re speaking, Jedediah. You’re fired.”

  Orson revised Kane’s early “declaration of principles,” and his address at the big rally of his gubernatorial campaign, to accord with his own idea of Kane’s politics. Again, his script revisions dictated the way he would eventually stage, direct, and perform the sequence. The rally scene—with its indelible image of Kane onstage in a vast hall, gesturing broadly in front of a gigantic blowup of his face—would be photographed on a bare soundstage, with no crowd. In his performance, Orson adopted “the manner of speaking in a reverberant room waiting for the echoes to die,” as sound man James G. Stewart recalled. The illusion of a packed hall, with the speaker glimpsed from afar by Mrs. Kane and Junior in box seats, was created in postproduction through meticulous editing and sound and visual effects.

  As Stewart recalled, Orson gave him the raw recording of the scene, made on the empty soundstage, and told him to make it “sound like Madison Square Garden.” Anxious to please the director, Stewart reprinted “eight or ten dialogue tracks on film to get the right sound.” He proudly played the result for Welles. “You’re a bigger ham than I am!” Orson barked with a laugh. “Who’s going to look at me with that sound coming at them? It’s great, but give me half as much.” Recalled Stewart ruefully: “He was right. . . . I toned it down.”

  Welles took special care with the culminating scenes at Xanadu, when Kane is a heavy, aging, dethroned despot. “Kane was a spoiled child,” Welles stated precisely in his deposition in the Lundberg case. “Xanadu was his last toy and it was intended as a monstrous place of refuge from a world which had to a large extent rejected him and his words.”

  Kane by this time would be seventy-five years old, according to the screenplay, and the scenes were a Schauspieler’s dream. From the earliest story sessions, Orson had known that these scenes would add both risk and potential greatness to his performance. His makeup would be crucial, and at RKO he stumbled on another ace to assist in his metamorphosis. Maurice Seiderman had been a junior makeup artist on three recent RKO pictures that interested Welles: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gunga Din, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois. (Orson had attended the February premiere of the last-named film with mixed emotions, coveting Lincoln as a subject as much a
s he despised Raymond Massey as an actor.)

  Seiderman, a Russian immigrant, had yet to be granted a single screen credit; he didn’t even belong to the makeup artists’ union. Seiderman was actually sweeping up hair on a soundstage floor when Orson first encountered him. Yet he proved an eager collaborator for Orson, who had loved enhancing his parts with makeup since boyhood. For the early scenes at the Inquirer offices, when Welles was about the same age as the character he was playing, Seiderman sharpened his youth, lacing him into painful corsets to thin him down. But it was the aging Kane that would demand the most of the makeup artist.

  For inspiration, Welles gave Seiderman photographs of the real-life Samuel Insull and William Randolph Hearst. “From Insull,” wrote Frank Brady, “Seiderman took his brush mustache, his baldness and the general contours of his head; from Hearst, he took his aquiline nose, the receding hairline, and many facial contours.” Seiderman thinned Orson’s hair, padded his bulk, and applied plastic sculptured pieces over his nose, chin, and eye sockets. For the final scenes, he added a fearsome bald skullcap. “During Orson’s first sitting, which took hours,” Brady wrote, “Seiderman had William Alland read aloud The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht,” because Seiderman thought it would help Orson relate to the desired image of old-man Kane: a “gigantic man with a large head” and expressionless face, much like the mad, reclusive artist of Hecht’s novel. “Orson loved and accepted the mimesis.”

  Finishing the image with a sheen of liquid greasepaint applied to the plastic masking, Seiderman fitted Welles with false teeth and special contact lenses to dim Kane’s eyes as the character aged onscreen. The contacts “drove you mad with pain,” Orson recalled. Some days during filming, the actor arrived for his makeup at 3:30 A.M., sitting for hours as he was fussed over by Seiderman.

  Seiderman registered many of his makeup inventions, beloved by Welles, for broader use, including a patent on soft contact lenses. Orson would call on Seiderman to handle his makeup in numerous later films, including Journey into Fear, Jane Eyre, Macbeth, and Touch of Evil. (For the last-named film, another masterpiece of metamorphosis, Seiderman pasted plastic bags under Orson’s eyes, replanted his hairline, stuck a big ugly nose on him, and stuffed him with wadding “to make the fat man even fatter,” in Barbara Leaming’s words.)

  Citizen Kane would open and close at Xanadu, and in the desert Orson painstakingly reexamined the last act of the script, the dissolves from 1930 to 1932 showing Kane dwarfed by the Great Hall, Susan bored with her jigsaw puzzles, and the “twenty cars full of picnickers” heading for Everglades Camp, where Kane and Susan share a well-appointed tent overnight.

  Earlier in the month, Orson had gone to see Nat “King” Cole, a jazz musician he’d heard about in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles. Cole and his trio were playing at the Radio Room, the club across the street from NBC in Hollywood. Orson went away humming Cole’s version of “This Can’t Be Love,” a Charlie Barnet–Haven Johnson tune, and when he revisited the scene described in the published shooting script as simply “Long shot—a number of classy tents,” he developed it into something else entirely: an extended interlude of carousing picnickers, serenaded by Cee Pee Johnson’s ensemble performing a louche-sounding pastiche of Cole’s song. Sensing that the moment needed a “beat,” something musical, “I kind of based the whole scene around that song,” Welles recalled.

  The sequence ends in the Kanes’ tent, with the sullen Susan provoking a bitter argument. Orson condensed and rewrote it:

  SINGERS

  It can’t be love. He said, It can’t be love. He said . . .

  KANE

  (quietly)

  Whatever I do, I do because I love you.

  SUSAN

  You don’t love me! You want me to love you—sure—“I’m Charles Foster Kane. Whatever you want—just name it and it’s yours. But you’ve gotta love me!”

  Without a word, KANE slaps her across the face. He continues to look at her.

  Don’t tell me you’re sorry.

  KANE

  I’m not sorry.

  Dissolve.

  The dissolve takes us back to Xanadu, where Raymond the butler enters Kane’s room to tell him that Susan is packing her bags. Welles asked Houseman and Mankiewicz for more than one scene baring Kane’s violent temper, but the moment of his second wife’s desertion was climactic. Without irony, testifying in the Lundberg case, Houseman recounted the “night of the flaming Sternos” and insisted that “this was the incident which gave us our model for that scene.”

  Of course, the scene as filmed bears little resemblance to the trifling incident at Chasen’s the previous Christmas. In the film, “KANE, in a truly terrible and absolutely silent rage, is literally breaking up the room,” according to the published script, “yanking pictures, hooks and all off the wall, smashing them to bits—ugly, gaudy pictures—Susie’s pictures in Susie’s bad taste. Off tabletops, off of dressing tables, occasional tables, bureaus, he sweeps Susie’s whorish accumulation of bric-a-brac.

  “Raymond stands in the doorway watching him.”

  Orson had had his eye on this scene from the beginning, reframing it at each stage. All of the whorish “bad taste” of Susan’s decor that Mankiewicz envisioned was sublimated to the action and performance. It was like one of the radio scenes in “War of the Worlds,” a moment only Welles would dare to stretch out to an impossible length onscreen.

  By chance the room-wrecking scene was one of the last that Orson shot for Citizen Kane, five months down the road in late October. With four cameras filming the action, Welles recalled, he captured it in “one take,” lunging around spasmodically and smashing up the set in a splendidly protracted explosion that stretches for almost three minutes. “Five hours of makeup, and then get on and break it all up,” Welles recalled to Peter Bogdanovich. “Tore my wrists and hands apart. I was bleeding like a pig when I was done with all that glass and everything.”

  As he did on and off throughout the filming, Welles invited Dr. Maurice Bernstein to visit the RKO studio on that day, knowing he might need his former guardian’s medical attention. Bernstein had long since obtained his certificate to practice medicine in California, and by the end of the summer of 1940 he and his wife, Hazel, were living in Beverly Hills, in time to watch Orson as he directed his first film. “Orson cut his fingers and wrists and I had to bandage and plaster the cuts,” Dr. Bernstein wrote to Ashton Stevens the day after the room-wrecking performance. “The scene was so realistic, the electrician who was on a scaffold came down to find out if Orson often lost his temper. It was the most intense scene.”

  In their interview sessions, Bogdanovich asked Welles about an anecdote often told by William Alland, and repeated in many books: that Orson was “exhilarated” after he completed the scene, “and said it was the first time he’d ever felt the emotion while acting a scene.”

  “Naw,” Welles replied. “I’m sure that’s one of those memories after the event that are more creative than accurate.” He conceded that the room-wrecking scene was “very rough,” but added that “the set was wonderfully done by Perry Ferguson. Marvelously dressed—made it very easy to play. My God, it was a wonderful set. I can see it now. [Ferguson] was just brilliant.”

  At the end of the destructive rampage came the payoff. “[Kane’s] eye lights on a hanging whatnot in a corner which had escaped his notice,” according to the published version of the script. “Prominent on its center shelf is the little glass ball with the snowstorm in it. He yanks it down. Something made of china breaks, but not the glass ball. It bounces on the carpet and rolls to his feet, the snow in a flurry.” Clutching the glass ball, within which swirls a snowstorm, Kane “slowly walks down the corridor, the servants giving way to let him pass, and watching him as he goes. The mirrors which line the hall reflect his image as he moves.” Then the published shooting script adds—oddly, since it’s really not the point of the scene—“He is an old, old man!�
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  Then, “KANE turns into a second corridor—sees himself reflected in the mirror—stops. His image is reflected again in the mirror behind him—multiplied again and again and again in long perspectives—KANE looks. We see a thousand KANES.

  “Dissolve.”

  Such moments, now immortal, were worked and reworked in the script for months, then prepared meticulously by art director Perry Ferguson and cinematographer Gregg Toland. Although he would make countless emendations in the weeks and months ahead, it was during his time alone in the desert, furiously cutting and revising, that Welles completed the final script of Citizen Kane for presentation to the Production Code Office and RKO.

  Returning confidently from the desert, Orson focused on his two most important open slots in the cast: Emily Monroe Norton and Susan Alexander.

  He had cast many of the principal speaking parts by the end of May, but the two wives of Charles Foster Kane were more problematic characters. After years of staging all-boy shows at the Todd School, Orson had far more experience casting men than women; even in New York, his productions were often dominated by male figures (especially when he played the lead). He told people he wanted both of these actresses to be Hollywood newcomers, but he couldn’t think of any Mercury actress who was right for either part. Meanwhile, as the script work continued, Susan Alexander’s role grew in importance—while Emily Monroe Norton’s diminished, especially after Orson ditched the subplot involving President McKinley’s assassination. Emily would be glimpsed in News on the March and in front of the Inquirer building in 1898, riding off with Kane to get married. But in the final script she figured in only two major dialogue scenes.

  As a way to compress the drama, Welles came up with the idea of the breakfast room sequence, using a series of dissolves to show the deterioration of Kane’s first marriage. The script says: “The following scenes cover a period of nine years—are played in the same set with only changes in lighting, special effects outside the window, and wardrobe.”