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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  That is what Orson usually said, to his credit. Operatives paid by the Hearst organization dogged Welles on his travels throughout 1941, hoping to trap him in hotel rooms with underage women. One night, while attending the San Francisco premiere of Citizen Kane, Orson wound up in a Fairmont Hotel elevator with one other person: William Randolph Hearst. “He and my father had been chums,” Welles remembered, “so I introduced myself and asked him if he’d like to come to the opening of the picture. He didn’t answer. And as he was getting off at his floor, I said, ‘Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.’ No reply.”

  Welles always insisted that Hearst himself had little or nothing to do with the fight to suppress Citizen Kane. There is scant proof that the publisher ever watched the picture. In a memoir cobbled together and published fifteen years after her death in 1975, Marion Davies said that neither Hearst nor she had seen it.

  Davies was Hearst’s paramour for two decades, until his death in 1951. None other than Welles himself wrote a glowing introduction to her posthumous memoir. Orson said more than once that the one thing he felt guilty about was that anyone conflated Susan Alexander with the charming and talented Davies, who was exactly the kind of free-spirited comedienne he liked onscreen. Welles felt he’d let Mankiewicz allude too closely to Davies in the character of Susan Alexander, giving her Davies’s penchant for jigsaw puzzles—a hobby that was unknown to Welles.

  On the record, Welles never once responded to the provocative rumor that “Rosebud” had a secret meaning—that it was Hearst’s private nickname for Davies’s genitalia. This assertion first gained prominence with the publication of the second edition of Kenneth Anger’s gossipy screen history, Hollywood Babylon, in 1975. (It was not mentioned in the first edition in 1965.) Gore Vidal later picked up this factoid and proclaimed it valid, claiming that either Mankiewicz or Charles Lederer, Davies’s nephew—who was supposedly whispering in the ear of Mank or Orson or both during the writing of Citizen Kane—knew of the nickname, and suggested including it in the film to humiliate or intimidate Hearst.

  Welles may have disputed this privately, but it would have horrified him to make even the slightest public reference to this most preposterous explanation for Rosebud. In all his recorded conversations and interviews, whether his words were being taped surreptitiously or not, he made few ungentlemanly references to the anatomy of women. Many otherwise intelligent people believe the gossip (“It links genesis with our genitalia,” Peter Conrad wrote), but as David Thomson wrote of the notion, “How can fact keep up with such Velcro stories?”

  After a few minutes spent reflecting on Citizen Kane, though, Welles told Griffin, “Let’s change pictures.” The host switched to a still from The Stranger, then a clip from the “cuckoo clock” scene with Joseph Cotten from The Third Man, which elicited a smile and a few proud remarks from Welles. Directed by Carol Reed, The Third Man was a fond highlight of his prolific and checkered acting career, independent of directing. The segment ended fittingly with a still from Chimes at Midnight, his Shakespearean masterwork, which Leaming praised as “Citizen Kane forty times over.” Wasn’t Chimes at Midnight more successful overseas than in the United States? Griffin asked politely. “It was hardly seen in America. It was a huge hit in Europe,” Welles pointed out.

  After the taping, Jim Steinmeyer shook Orson’s hand backstage, congratulating him on his well-performed card trick. Welles invited the young magician to join him for dinner at Ma Maison with Barbara Leaming and Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, a Sicilian aristocrat who for twenty years had assisted Orson with producing his disparate projects. Steinmeyer had to say no, having promised his friend, the stooge, a meal at a humbler eatery.

  “He was in a fantastic mood,” Steinmeyer recalled of the last time he saw Welles. “He had had the time of his life. He was very happy about the book and the show.”

  Merv Griffin walked Welles to the door, where chauffeur Freddie Gillette waited.

  The talk show host thanked him with unusual gravity. One biography of Griffin claims that Orson, sensing his friend’s concern, made this final comment before parting: “I think what gives dignity and tragedy, as well as meaning and beauty, to life is the fact that we all die. It is one of the great gifts of God, if you happen to believe in Him, that we are going to die. It would be terrible if we weren’t.” Welles did utter similar thoughts in interviews, but this anecdote, like the story of the seventeen hot dogs at Pink’s, is too good to be true.

  Around 10 P.M., after their celebratory dinner, Orson was chauffeured back to his Hollywood hills home, where he plunged into a round of telephone calls, including a long conversation with Roger Hill. Their friendship stayed strong. The Hills vacationed wherever Orson camped out over the years, visiting all his homes, solicitous to his wives and children. Skipper Hill was persuaded into various film projects, including an unfinished 1970 project of Welles’s called “The Deep,” based on a novel by Charles Williams, which involved his heavy participation and called on his love of boating. Tape-recording their talks was nothing new: Orson had created a mock talk-show set in his Arizona living room in the early 1970s, and filmed long reminiscing interviews with Roger and Hortense Hill on the pretext that it might be a pilot episode.

  Tonight Orson told Skipper he had just returned from dinner at the “company cafeteria,” as he called Ma Maison. “It’s been a long day and I’m beat,” Welles admitted. Hill told Orson he did sound weary. “I am,” Orson agreed, “but will admit it to no one but you. My God, Roger, I look as drained as I feel.”

  His prize pupil was in a wistful mood, Hill later told his grandson Todd Tarbox. This last phone call between the lifelong friends was not tape-recorded, but Tarbox meticulously reconstructed it over the following days, interviewing his grandfather, and later publishing the conversation as part of his 2013 book Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts.

  “How young I once was,” Welles mused to Hill that night, echoing words he had spoken during his interview segment on The Merv Griffin Show. “Today I am feeling disastrously old. The mind boggles at the thought that you have always been twenty years my senior. But then, in the best sense, you will always be younger than I was when I first checked into Clover Hall. But neither of us can deny that we both suffer the curse of excessive years.

  “De Gaulle likened old age to a shipwreck. Isn’t that wonderful? He’s so right. We can, in our declining years, either sink slowly, clutching to hope and fighting like hell to hold on, or we can sink swiftly in panic and despair.”

  Orson still dreamed of finishing new work, and his boyhood mentor wished the same. “I would like to live long enough to see The Other Side of the Wind and The Magic Show completed,” Hill replied. “I fear I’m too old to ever see your Lear and Cradle. But I’ll have no regrets if I don’t live to see any more of your pictures because I’ve experienced so very much of your work.” Hill reminded Orson of the many highlights: the Todd School plays, the Federal Theatre and Mercury productions in New York, the radio shows and films. His only regret, Hill said, was having missed Around the World in Eighty Days, the gigantic stage musical—Welles’s “personal favorite among all his stage productions, inspired by the films of Georges Méliès,” in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum—which drew mixed reviews during its 1946 Broadway run and then closed after seventy-five performances, leaving Welles with years of debt.

  “I have the [LP] to your show somewhere,” Hill said.

  “You’re one of the few,” Welles responded humorously.

  “Many of my projects have foundered for the lack of financial resources,” Welles went on. “In the mid-fifties, I began financing and shooting [a film of] Don Quixote. Coupled with having to scurry for financing, it wasn’t long before a gaggle of howling critics began demanding to know when it would be finished. Novelists and biographers aren’t asked every other day, ‘When are you going to finish your book?’ As you know better than anyone, Quixote and Sancho Panza took a grip on my imagination in my
youth. Over the years, I kept changing the movie and throwing the pieces away. You remember, I came close to completing the film, with Quixote journeying to the moon, at about the time astronauts actually accomplished the feat. That spoiled the movie and I threw away ten reels.”

  “What’s the focus now?” asked Hill.

  “The film now centers on the pollution and corruption of old Spain and hope for a new Spain. It’s developed into a very personal essay, which I’m renaming ‘When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote’?”

  “What a wonderfully comic and bittersweet designation,” said Hill.

  “I should do a similar renaming of ‘The Other Side of the Wind,’” said Welles, referring to his ambitious film about filmmaking that he had shot between 1970 and 1976, but had been unable to complete because of financial and legal complications.

  The two men discussed the differences between performing before a live audience and a camera lens, with Welles comparing James Cagney (“a commanding screen presence”) with the great Neapolitan actor Eduardo De Filippo, who was spellbinding onstage but made “many films, without distinction.” They talked a little about Joseph Cotten’s memoir in progress, which Welles had been reading: “gentle, witty, and self-effacing,” Orson said, “just like Jo.”

  At one point Welles quoted from Two Gentlemen of Verona (“I’ll be as patient as a gentle stream”), and Hill swiftly matched him with a snatch of Othello (“What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”)—the kind of erudite quotation-trading the friends had been doing for more than fifty years.

  “Is work on ‘The Magic Show’ more encouraging?” Hill asked.

  “There is a bright spot on the horizon,” replied Welles. “I’m about to wrap it up, actually. A few more camera set-ups and a slight bit more editing, and that’s it, except—”

  “Except what?”

  “Except I’m tempted to add a new close: the teleportation of a human being along a fiber-optic cable from Los Angeles to New York,” said Welles.

  Hill reminded him that he’d been working on “The Magic Show” for fifteen years.

  “The only real troubles have been the perennial ones of finding money and time,” Welles sighed. “But it’s been more a labor of love than one of necessity. My ‘Magic Show’ troubles pale when I think of Okito, who was one of the greatest magicians. He invented one of my favorite tricks, the floating ball. He opened his act by plucking a duck from a cloth. Before making its entrance, the duck is secured in a bag between Okito’s legs. At a command performance before the Kings and Queens of Denmark and Holland, the duck somehow extricated its head out of the bag, and grabbed, with exceeding force, the very unsuspecting magician under his robe. Over the years, whenever I begin to believe I have troubles, I think of poor Okito. He’s been on my mind a great deal in recent years. But today, there’s no duck under my djellabas and the horizon is bright.”

  Welles always spoke optimistically about the future, and he did so tonight. He had a good role in a new picture coming out soon, called Someone to Love, which was the second time Orson had acted for his friend the independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom. (He had also played a magician in Jaglom’s 1971 film A Safe Place.) Oja Kodar also had a role in Someone to Love, which doubled his pleasure. Welles had improvised some dialogue for his character, a mentor to Jaglom’s character and a philosopher on life and love, and he was proud of his work.

  Orson had reason to believe, he said, that his good luck was returning. He’d heard from an East Coast producer who was interested in putting up finishing money for either King Lear or “The Dreamers”—the latter his adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short stories, for which he had shot a few scenes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He promised to send Hill a “revised script” of “The Dreamers.”

  “Luck plays such a large part in our life,” Hill remarked.

  “Everything to do with an artistic career, from the fellow who eats live lizards for a living to Michelangelo, depends on an element of luck,” Welles said, as modest in private as he had been in public. “There’s nobody who isn’t beholden to luck.”

  As the call wound down, Welles urged Skipper to come and visit him. He had not seen Hill for several years and had been trying to entice him to travel west. “I fear that, if you wait too long, your trip will be to deliver my eulogy,” Welles said.

  “I think of you as immortal,” returned Hill warmly.

  “Maybe in your eyes, but not in the eyes of my doctor,” stated Welles. “But thank God this shipwreck is too busy to be destroyed, let alone sink.” He finished with a passage from Cymbeline: “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered,” he said.

  “Good night and good luck,” said Hill.

  “Good night, Roger.”

  Talk shows like Merv Griffin’s treated Orson royally in a way official Hollywood never had. Orson liked to quip that Hollywood had given him only “half an Oscar,” for cowriting Citizen Kane. But that wasn’t quite true: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences board of governors also voted Orson an honorary Oscar in 1971 for “superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures.” But Welles sent a friend, director John Huston, who was currently acting for him in “The Other Side of the Wind,” to appear instead, accepting the award on his behalf. A maverick filmmaker himself, Huston praised Welles’s career eloquently in his introduction, ending with the ringing assertion that Orson “is truly that most difficult, unforgivable, and invaluable of God’s creations: a man of genius.”

  Since Orson was busy “filming abroad,” Huston told the Academy (and the global television audience), he would accept the Oscar in a special two-minute film clip, the medium he loved most. In fact, Welles was living then in a bungalow in the nearby Beverly Hills Hotel, and he watched the “live” telecast with Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, and Bogdanovich’s girlfriend, actress Cybill Shepherd. Huston said he promised to bring the Oscar to Welles in Spain. Orson yelled good-naturedly at the TV set, “Yeah, bring it right over, John!”

  Orson was more inclined to accept the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award on February 9, 1975, because the event was produced by George Stevens Jr., the institute’s founder. The AFI was dedicated to film education and preservation, a cause Welles believed in, and Stevens’s father was George Stevens Sr., Ashton Stevens’s nephew, who had welcomed Welles so warmly to RKO in 1939.

  As the hour grew late, Welles turned to his typewriter, working fitfully on several projects. Oja Kodar’s nephew, Aleksandar, was asleep in the attic. Professor Howard Suber of UCLA was later told that Orson spent the night drafting his first college syllabi and lectures; other people say he was toiling on the script for “The Magic Show,” developing his plans for a cross-country fiber-optic teleportation sequence. Knowing Welles, he probably spent time on both, and other projects too. He moved restlessly from one piece of work to the next, keeping to his small downstairs back bedroom, wearing “one of his enormous hooded bathrobes,” in the words of Bart Whaley in his self-published Orson Welles: The Man Who Was Magic, “as ever living in the present and planning the future.”

  Sometime after midnight, Welles “left his battered mechanical typewriter and went to the adjoining bathroom,” wrote Whaley, who for his account interviewed Freddie Gillette in 1992. “Returning to his high hospital-type bed, he evidently found it too difficult to climb up into. Managing to clutch a pillow, he lay on the floor, and tucked the pillow under his head.”

  Orson’s “wonderful booming voice,” in the independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom’s words, was discovered by Jaglom on his answering machine when he came home in the early morning. Jaglom had told Welles his mother was undergoing a delicate operation in a hospital. “This is your friend,” the wonderful booming voice said on the recording. “Don’t forget to call your mother first thing in the morning, find out what the results of her operation are, then call and tell me.”

  His last known words, expressing concern about someone else’s mother, were like
a faint echo of Rosebud. When the chauffeur arrived at Welles’s house at 10 A.M. on Thursday, October 10, he found Orson slumped and dead on the floor. One of the first people arriving at Welles’s address, after hearing the news on the radio and television, was Orson’s longtime friend Paul Stewart, the actor who played Raymond, the character who discovers Kane’s body in Citizen Kane.

  “A man is not from where he is born,” Welles said once, “but from where he decides to die.” He had lived, it turns out, “seventy years of a man’s life,” words that reverberate from Citizen Kane. That film, among all his works, was mentioned in front-page headlines and television and radio broadcasts around the world. “Orson Welles, Film Genius, Entertainment Boy Wonder,” read the Boston Globe’s headline reporting his death.

  Citizen Kane alone would have ensured his place in cinema history. In 1997, an American Film Institute jury of 1,500 “film artists, critics and historians” ranked the picture as the greatest American film of all time. It achieved the same ranking in the same survey in 2007.

  For fifty years, Kane also took the top slot in Sight and Sound’s decennial worldwide poll of “critics, distributors and selected academics and professions”—until 2012, when Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo finally displaced it. Vertigo’s winning margin—191 votes to 147 for Citizen Kane—was doubtless bolstered by the magazine’s generous expansion of its voting pool that year, from 145 in 2002 to 846 in 2012. (The totals came from the cumulative tally of films cited in top-ten lists of favorite or best works submitted by each of the participants.) It couldn’t have helped Kane that, the year before, the influential critic David Thomson had wondered in print in Sight and Sound whether Welles’s first picture deserved to hold the top spot forever. “If Citizen Kane wins again in 2012, it would be understandable yet depressing,” Thomson wrote.

  But it is also true that, by 2012, the greatness of Citizen Kane was taken for granted among even some of the elder statesmen among Welles experts. Peter Bogdanovich, for instance, declined to participate in the Sight and Sound poll that year. “Of course, I didn’t know at the time that Vertigo was going to win,” Bogdanovich wrote later. “Personally, it has never been my favorite Hitchcock.” James Naremore voted in the poll—not for Vertigo, but not for Citizen Kane either. Naremore chose Touch of Evil as his Welles selection for the top ten. “I was annoyed by Thomson’s Sight and Sound essay and could sense which way the wind was blowing,” Naremore explained. Even as dedicated a Wellesian as Joseph McBride split hairs in withholding his vote from Citizen Kane. “It pained me not to vote for Kane, which was my cinematic textbook and still is my touchstone,” said McBride, who has written three books about Welles, “but I voted for The Magnificent Ambersons and Chimes at Midnight, which I think are even better, as did Welles himself.”