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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  The film’s brooding, neo-Romantic main theme was destined to become a composition against which all other screen music is still compared. The main theme was “a simple four-note figure in the brass,” according to Herrmann, that was heard at the opening and reprised at the end of the film. It is the motif of “Kane’s power.” The second important musical motif is “that of Rosebud,” in Herrmann’s words. “Heard as a solo on the vibraphone, it first appears during the death scene at the very beginning of the picture. It is heard again and again throughout the film under various guises, and if followed closely, is a clue to the ultimate identity of Rosebud itself.”

  Herrmann also wrote memorable bridges and transitions. Letting music convey the passage of time was a standard radio technique. For example, the subtly complex underscoring of the breakfast table vignettes integrated “the old classic form of theme and variations,” Herrmann recalled. The first vignette referenced a waltz in the style of French dance composer Émile Waldteufel (“a Welles favorite,” as Steven C. Smith noted). Then, in the later vignettes, “variations begin. Each scene is a separate variation. Finally, the waltz theme is heard bleakly in the high registers of the violins.”

  For Herrmann’s opera pastiche—“Kane’s supreme musical sequence,” in Smith’s words—Welles knew exactly what he wanted. Susan’s character “sings as [the] curtain goes up in the first act,” he wrote to Herrmann, “and I believe there is no opera of importance where soprano leads with chin like this. Therefore suggest it be original . . . by you—parody on typical Mary Garden vehicle.” He suggested that Herrmann model his pastiche on Mussorgsky’s nineteenth-century opera Salammbô,57 “which gives us phony production scene of ancient Rome and Carthage, and Susie can dress like grand opera neoclassic courtesan. . . . Here is a chance for you to do something witty and amusing—and now is the time for you to do it. . . .

  “I love you dearly,” Orson closed gratefully.

  Almost all the music would be composed and recorded before the filming, then deployed as “an enormous playback,” in Herrmann’s words. The entire “score, like the film, works like a jigsaw,” Herrmann said, with all the pieces whirling around in Orson’s head.

  Despite RKO’s roster of exceptional actresses, production head George Schaefer approved Orson’s choices of Ruth Warrick and Dorothy Comingore, two leading ladies whose names would mean nothing to the American public. Despite the studio’s own small army of composers and musicians, Schaefer also said yes to Herrmann, as long as his salary came out of the picture’s budget. When it came to Orson’s creative choices, the studio president almost always said yes.

  “Schaefer was a hero, an absolute hero,” Welles told Bogdanovich.

  On June 14, the studio issued a preliminary budget estimate showing “a total picture cost of $1,081,798,” according to Robert L. Carringer—above the dangerous million mark. (As one budget department memo noted, the studio had already paid Mercury $55,000 for Citizen Kane, and had spent “about $100,000” on Heart of Darkness and The Smiler with the Knife—both figures in addition to the million-dollar cost projection.) The estimate plunged Welles and Herman Mankiewicz, now back on salary, into a final frenzy of pruning and polishing.

  Whenever Orson made a significant change to the script, he and Mank had to rethink the jigsaw one more time to make the pieces fit, sorting out “what each narrator could report based on what only he or she could have known firsthand,” in Carringer’s words. “The time element is extremely difficult in a picture of this kind,” as Houseman later told Lundberg’s lawyers. “This is the hardest kind of picture to write.”58

  Two heads were better than one, and Orson relied on Mankiewicz right up to the start of filming. “Revised pages were passed back and forth between the two,” wrote Richard Meryman, “Welles changing Herman, who changed Welles—‘often much better than mine,’ says Welles.”

  “Without Mank it would have been a totally different picture,” Welles told Meryman. “It suits my self-esteem to think it might have been almost as good, but I could never have arrived at Kane as it was without Herman. . . .

  “There is a quality in the film—much more than a vague perfume—that was Mank and that I treasured. It gave a kind of character to the movie, which I could never have thought of. It was a kind of controlled, cheerful virulence; we’re finally telling the truth about a great WASP institution. I personally liked Kane, but I went with that. And that probably gave the picture a certain tension, the fact that one of the authors hated Kane and one loved him. . . .

  “My Citizen Kane would have been more concerned with the interior corruption of Kane. The script is most like me when the central figure on the screen is Kane. And it is most like Mankiewicz when he’s being talked about. And I’m not at all sure that the best part isn’t when they’re talking about Kane. Don’t misunderstand me! I’m not saying I wrote all of one and Mank wrote the other. Mank wrote Kane stuff and I wrote . . . who knows . . .

  “I don’t suppose that authors ever agree on how much they did when they finish. In their secret selves they all think they wrote what they didn’t. I’m sure of that. I’m sure I do.”

  Once the filming began, however, it was a different story. Mankiewicz found himself on the outside, and his natural paranoia and bile kicked in. Although Orson brought the actors over to his house to meet the writer, Mank was never a full-fledged or wholehearted member of the Mercury family—a role that would have required deferring to Orson as the patriarch of the clan.

  Mank visited the set on a few occasions, and for a while he continued to do spot work on the script. As filming continued, he also watched the dailies of important scenes, but his memorandums quickly became unconstructive. He worried about Comingore’s pregnancy, criticizing the way she looked. After watching a scene between Bernstein, played by Everett Sloane (“an unsympathetic looking man,” Mank wrote), and Thompson the reporter (William Alland), Mank warned Orson against framing “two Jews” in the same shot. “There are not enough standard movie conventions being observed,” he told Herbert Drake (who passed on the comments to Welles), “including too few close-ups and very little evidence of action. It is too much like a play.”

  Mank carried the chip of an underachiever on his shoulder like an epaulet. When Louella Parsons visited the set in late August, she quoted Welles as saying that “I wrote Citizen Kane” because the expectations and costs for his first film had grown out of proportion, sabotaging his chances to make Heart of Darkness and The Smiler with the Knife.

  After Parsons’s column appeared, Mankiewicz threatened privately to “come down” hard on Welles “because you are a juvenile delinquent credit stealer beginning with the Mars broadcast”—a remark that suggested Houseman had been whispering in his ear. (The two men stayed in touch.) Speaking through Herbert Drake, the aggrieved Mank threatened to take out a full-page advertisement in the trade papers asserting his credit, and to give interviews to the wire services saying the same. (“Said story is prepared,” Drake reported, “sez he!!”) And he would “permit” Ben Hecht to write a story for the Saturday Evening Post, exposing Welles’s credit stealing on Citizen Kane.

  “When Mank turned into a real writer,” Welles told Meryman with a sigh, “it was immediately understood between us that he would get first billing since he was a distinguished screenwriter. And I’ve always said that his credit was immensely deserved.

  “But then Mankiewicz persuaded himself that he was the sole and only writer. He wanted his name to be the only name. He wanted mine off. I didn’t want mine off.

  “And I tried to persuade Houseman to put his name on, since he’d been working all this time. But Houseman was more interested in mischief than glory. And there wasn’t any way of discussing it with Mank. I felt that some kind of awful magic mirror had been placed between us.”

  According to Meryman, Mankiewicz made “angry phone calls to influential friends” and “lodged a protest” with the Screen Writers Guild. Welles’s lawyer, Arnold Weissber
ger, advised Orson that contractually he was entitled to sole credit. But the Guild never became involved: Mank “withdrew his arbitration request,” according to Roy Alexander Fowler, whose slender 1946 volume Orson Welles was the first book devoted to Welles’s life and career, because the screenwriter feared eventual legal retribution from Hearst. Mankiewicz, of course, had fought the very notion of the Guild tooth and nail, alongside the worst reactionaries in Hollywood, so he may have realized he could hardly be assured of a sympathetic hearing. (The Guild, known today as the Writers Guild of America, has no record of any filing by him.)

  As late as his testimony in the Lundberg case in 1950, Mankiewicz clung to his grudge. When asked what Orson Welles contributed to the writing of Citizen Kane, he replied, “It is a kind of Hollywood definition of writing, I am afraid. . . . He contributed substantially, but in the form of editing and typing. In other words, he was not part of the original dictation.”

  Though he mocked the writer gently as “Herman J. Mangel-Wurz” in private communications with Drake, Welles did not let the friction warp his moral compass. When RKO began the process of apportioning credit for the film, in 1941, the studio sent Welles a sheet for approval that listed his name first as the screenwriter, and Mankiewicz’s second. He circled Mankiewicz “with a pencil,” according to production manager Richard Wilson, “and drew an arrow putting him in first place.”

  One crucial piece of the jigsaw that belonged indisputably to Her-man J. Mankiewicz was “Rosebud,” the brand name of young Kane’s sled, which gives the film its most potent through-line as Kane’s mysterious final word.

  Never mind the ice skates Orson’s mother gave him as his last birthday gift before her death, or the sleds supposedly manufactured for seniors in the Todd School machine shop. For that matter, never mind the claim Richard Meryman makes in his biography of Mankiewicz: that “Rosebud” alluded to a prized Christmas gift, a bicycle (a “vehicle intrinsic to childhood freedom”) that was stolen from where it was parked in front of the Wilkes-Barre public library when Mank was ten years old.

  In the Lundberg case, Mankiewicz himself stated plainly that he took the word from a famous racehorse of which he was “unjustifiably fond.” Old Rosebud was the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1914. In his first year at Columbia, Mank had bet on Rosebud, won, and celebrated.

  Mankiewicz had been scarred by his childhood, and as an adult he became convinced that long-brewing neuroses had driven him to drink and gamble. In 1937, he started seeing Hollywood psychiatrist Dr. Ernst Simmel, an “eminent German refugee who had been a close friend of Freud’s,” according to Meryman. His sessions with Dr. Simmel lasted two years before they “ultimately failed,” but Simmel helped Mank trace his personal problems back to his domineering father and his boyhood. Old Rosebud symbolized his lost youth, and the break with his family. “I had undergone psycho-analysis,” Mankiewicz testified, “and Rosebud, under circumstances slightly resembling the circumstances in [Citizen Kane], played a prominent part.”

  As the son of a man who lent his name to a famous racehorse—a horse that sired another Kentucky Derby winner, Wintergreen, in 1909—Welles had no problem with the name itself. The cleverness of the conceit was that anyone who saw Citizen Kane could relate to a childhood Rosebud—be it a racehorse, a bicycle, a pair of ice skates, a sled, a favorite summer vacation, or the death of one’s parents. But perversely, Orson often dismissed the storytelling device as a cheap gimmick. Shakespeare needed no lost sled, after all, to explain Falstaff or Lear.

  “It was the only way we could find to ‘get off’ [the stage], as they used to say in vaudeville,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “It manages to work, but I’m still not too keen about it, and I don’t think that [Mankiewicz] was, either.”

  Early in the script process, Orson proposed an alternative to Rosebud: “a long quote from Coleridge,” wrote Meryman. Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” is referenced elsewhere in the script, and inspires the name Xanadu. “There was a scene in a mausoleum that I wrote—it was a quotation from a poem or something, I can’t remember,” Welles said, “and Mankiewicz made terrible fun of it. So I believed him and just said, ‘All right. It’s no good.’ It might have been good—I don’t remember it, because I was so ashamed from Mankiewicz’s violent attack on it.”

  Orson and Mank not only hotly debated Rosebud but also fought over how often the device should recur during the film. In the Lundberg case, Mankiewicz told the courtroom that he wanted to add scenes “every now and then” in which Kane picked up a paperweight like the one the writer had on his nightstand, shaking it and staring with fascination at the swirling snow. “[Kane] had no idea what this means, what this really meant to him,” Mankiewicz said, “and what I would like to have brought out in the picture much better than I had was the identification in his mind of the moment when he was torn from the only true, relaxed, complete, unquestioning happiness he ever had.”

  Welles too wanted Rosebud planted more firmly in the viewer’s mind, but through different means. (“If I were to see Orson today,” Mankiewicz mused in the Lundberg courtroom, “we would argue about it some more.”) According to Mankiewicz, Welles wanted to include a close shot of the sled as the snow begins to blanket it at the beginning of the film—so close a shot that the audience could read the name Rosebud. Then, “for the rest of the picture,” in Mank’s words, “while Kane would, to his dying day, not know what his subconscious motivation was, the audience would have [known], and the picture would have thereby gained in clarity, gained in understanding.”

  Welles ultimately decided against revealing “Rosebud” in the early scene. He did accept Mank’s paperweight, but deployed it more subtly. The glass globe can be glimpsed on a table as Mrs. Kane signs away her son; and later another globe appears on Susan Alexander’s makeup table on the night she meets Kane, subliminally drawing a connection between Susan and Kane’s mother. The sled is left forlornly behind in the snow early in the film, its inscription buried under fresh flurries. Midway through the picture we learn that Kane’s dead mother’s belongings are stored in a warehouse, where Kane is headed before he meets Susan. The sled then returns in the film’s magisterial final moments, lying forgotten next to a picture of Kane and his mother in the treasure- and junk-cluttered basement of Xanadu.

  After Kane’s death, newspapermen, a photographer, and their assistants gather at Xanadu, pawing over Kane’s possessions in a last-ditch effort to find their news angle. They spot a Donatello (“Cost: 45,000 lire”), a fourth-century Venus (“Cost: $23,000”), pieces of a Scottish castle and a Burmese temple, along with “one desk from the estate of Mary Kane, Little Salem, Colorado (“Value: $6.00”), and boxes upon boxes of jigsaw puzzles, according to the shooting script.

  The reporter, Thompson, is searching the vast basement with a group of other newsmen, photographers, and assistants. Sharp-eyed movie fans may spot a hatted, pipe-smoking Alan Ladd, making his first screen appearance as one of the newsreel minions. (“We’re supposed to get everything,” he remarks, “the junk as well as the art.”) Talent agent Sue Carol fought to get a part for the diminutive, soft-spoken Ladd, whom she would later marry—any part—in Citizen Kane. “He read for me, and I thought he was very good,” Welles remembered. “His first movie part, and there he is, wearing his hat the way he wore it for thirty pictures afterwards.”

  Welles mused about meaning of Rosebud in his deposition in the Lundberg case. “I have some vague recollection of the conversations concerning the possibility of some character in the story being able to finally lead Thompson in the right direction,” Welles said, but “since Rosebud itself is both somewhat inconsequential and in no wise a total explanation of the character of Kane, it was better to present such explanation as the sled itself offered in as random and unnoticed a method as possible.”

  “I wonder,” says one of the newsmen in the basement at Xanadu; “you put all this stuff together, the palaces, paintings, toys, and everything. What would it s
pell?”

  “Charles Foster Kane . . . ?” Thompson replies.

  “Or Rosebud? How about it, Jerry?” asks the newsman played by Alan Ladd, finally, in the last reel giving audiences Thompson’s first name.

  “What’s Rosebud?” asks someone else.

  “Did you ever find out what it means?” the newsman persists.

  “THOMPSON has turned around. He is facing the camera for the first time,” reads the published version of the script.

  THOMPSON

  Charles Foster Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost, but it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word explains a man’s life. No—I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

  “I guess you might call that a disclaimer,” Welles shrugged, talking to Bogdanovich about the scene. “A bit corny too. More than a bit. And it’s [my writing,] I’m afraid.”

  As Thompson and his team leave Xanadu dispiritedly, laborers with shovels move in to clean the place up, throwing useless and discarded possessions into a huge roaring furnace. The butler hovers behind them. “Throw that junk in too,” Raymond says.

  The camera moves dreamlike toward the junk pile Raymond has indicated, “mostly bits of broken packing cases, excelsior, etc.,” according to the published shooting script. (In the script, the sled is lying “on top of the pile”; in the finished film, it is one detail in an ocean of forgotten belongings.) “As camera comes close, it shows the faded rosebud and, though the letters are faded, unmistakably the word ‘Rosebud’ across it. The laborer drops his shovel, takes the sled in his hands and throws it into the furnace. The flames start to devour it.”