by Pauline Kael
To his shares in the Homestake, largest gold producer in the United States, his Peruvian copper mines, his 900,000 acre Mexican cattle ranch, and his other inherited properties, he added 28 daily newspapers, 14 magazines here and in England, eight radio stations, wire services, a Hollywood producing unit, a newsreel, a castle in Wales, and one of the world’s largest collections of objects d’art, gathered at a toll of $40,000,000.
Kane’s dialogue is often almost Hearst verbatim; in the margin of the script that Mankiewicz lent to Charles Lederer one of Hearst’s lawyers annotated Kane’s speech beginning, “Young man, there’ll be no war. I have talked with the responsible leaders,” with the words “This happens to be the gist of an authentic interview with WRH—occasion, his last trip from Europe.” Some of the dialogue was legendary long before the movie was made. When Hearst was spending a fortune in his circulation war with Pulitzer, someone told his mother that Willie was losing money at the rate of a million dollars a year, and she equably replied, “Is he? Then he will only last about thirty years.” This is no more than slightly transposed in the film, though it’s really milked:
THATCHER
Tell me, honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise … this “Inquirer” that is costing you a million dollars a year?
KANE
You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year … I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.
(To audiences in 1941, Thatcher, appearing at the congressional-committee hearing, was obviously J. P. Morgan the younger, and the Thatcher Library was, of course, the Pierpont Morgan Library.)
Mankiewicz could hardly improve on the most famous of all Hearst stories, so he merely touched it up a trifle. According to many accounts, Hearst, trying to foment war with Spain, had sent Richard Harding Davis to Havana to write about the Spanish atrocities and Fredric Remington to sketch them. Remington grew restless there and sent Hearst a telegram:
EVERYTHING IS QUIET, THERE IS NO TROUBLE HERE. THERE WILL BE NO WAR. I WISH TO RETURN.—REMINGTON.
Hearst replied,
PLEASE REMAIN. YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES AND I'LL FURNISH THE WAR. —W.R. HEARST.
In the movie, Bernstein reads Kane a telegram from a reporter named Wheeler:
GIRLS DELIGHTFUL. IN CUBA, STOP. COULD SEND YOU PROSE POEMS ABOUT SCENERY BUT DON'T FEEL RIGHT SPENDING YOUR MONEY, STOP. THERE IS NO WAR IN CUBA. SIGNED WHELER .
And Bernstein asks, “Any answer?”
Kane replies:
DEAR WHEELER, YOU PROVIDE THE PROSE POEMS I'LL PROVIDE THE WAR.
These stories were so well known at the time of the movie’s release that in the picture spread on the movie in Life (with captions in the very style that Mankiewicz had parodied in his “News on the March”) the magazine—unconsciously, no doubt—returned to the Hearst original, and flubbed even that:
Kane buys a newspaper in New York and sets out to be a great social reformer. But even at 25 he is unscrupulous and wangles the U.S. into war by fake news dispatches. To a cartoonist in Cuba he wires: “You get the pictures and I’ll make the war.”
One passage of dialogue that is bad because it sounds slanted to make an ideological point is almost a straight steal (and that’s probably why Mankiewicz didn’t realize how fraudulent it would sound), and was especially familiar because John Dos Passos had quoted it in U.S.A., in his section on Hearst, “Poor Little Rich Boy.” (That title might be the theme of the movie.) Dos Passos quotes Hearst’s answer to fellow-millionaires who thought he was a traitor to his class:
You know I believe in property, and you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn’t it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else do it who might not have the same real property relations that I may have?
Hearst apparently did say it, but even though it’s made more conversational in the movie, it’s unconvincing—it sounds like left-wing paranoia.
KANE
I’ll let you in on another little secret, Mr. Thatcher. I think I’m the man to do it. You see, I have money and property. If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged maybe somebody else will … maybe somebody without any money or property.
Despite the fake childhood events, Kane’s life story follows Hearst’s much more closely than most movie biographies follow acknowledged and named subjects. Kane is burned in effigy, as Hearst was, and there is even a reference to Kane’s expulsion from Harvard; one of the best-known stories in America was how young Willie Hearst had been expelled from Harvard after sending each of his instructors a chamber pot with the recipient’s name handsomely lettered on the inside bottom. Even many of the subsidiary characters are replicas of Hearst’s associates. For example, Bernstein (given the name of Welles’s old guardian) is obviously Solomon S. Carvalho, the business manager of Pulitzer’s World, whom Hearst hired away, and who became the watchdog of the Journal’s exchequer and Hearst’s devoted business manager. There was no special significance in the use of Mankiewicz’s secretary’s last name for Susan Alexander, or in naming Jed Leland for Leland Hayward (Mankiewicz’s agent, whose wife, Margaret Sullavan, spent a weekend visiting at Victorville), just as there was no significance in the fact that the actor Whitford Kane had been part of the nucleus of the Mercury Theatre, but the use of the name Bernstein for Kane’s devoted, uncritical friend had some significance in relation not only to Welles but to Hearst, and it was Mankiewicz’s way of giving Hearst points (he did it in the breakfast scene when Emily is snobbish about Bernstein) because, whatever else Hearst was, he was not a snob or an anti-Semite. (For one thing, Marion’s brother-in-law—Charles Lederer’s father—was Jewish.) No doubt Mankiewicz also meant to give Kane points when he had him finish Jed’s negative review of Susan’s singing in the same negative spirit—which was more than George S. Kaufman had done for Mankiewicz’s review back at the New York Times. This episode is perversely entertaining but not convincing. Kane used so much of Hearst’s already legendary life that for liberals it was like a new kind of folk art; we knew all this about Hearst from books and magazines but gasped when we saw it on the big movie screen, and so defiantly—almost contemptuously—undisguised.
The departure from Hearst’s life represented by Susan Alexander’s opera career, which is a composite of the loves and scandals of several Chicago tycoons, didn’t weaken the attack on Hearst—it strengthened it. Attaching the other scandals to him made him seem the epitome of the powerful and spoiled, and thus stand for them all. Opera—which used to be called “grand opera”—was a ritual target of American comedy. It was an easier target for the public to respond to than Hearst’s own folly—motion pictures—because the public already connected opera with wealth and temperament, tycoons in opera hats and women in jewels, imported prima donnas, and all the affectations of “culture.” It was a world the movie public didn’t share, and it was already absurd in American movies—the way valets and effete English butlers and the high-toned Americans putting on airs who kept them were absurd. George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind had worked opera over in two of the Marx Brothers pictures; Mankiewicz had been taken offA Night at the Opera, but what he and Welles—with the assistance of Bernard Herrmann—did to opera in Citizen Kane was in almost exactly the same style, and as funny.
Mankiewicz was working overseas for the Chicago Tribune when Harold McCormick and his wife, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, were divorced, in 1921. The McCormicks had been the leading patrons of opera in Chicago; they had made up the Chicago Opera Company’s deficits, which were awe-inspiring during the time the company was under the management of Mary Garden (she chose to be called the “directa”), rising to a million dollars one great, lavish season. After the divorce, McCormick married Ganna Walska, the preëminent temperamental mediocre soprano of her day. Mankie
wicz combined this scandal with a far more widely publicized event that occurred a few years later, replacing Hearst and Cosmopolitan Pictures with Samuel Insull and his building of the Chicago Civic Opera House. Insull didn’t build the opera house for his wife (dainty little Gladys Wallis didn’t sing), but there was a story to it, and it was the biggest opera story of the decade. After the McCormick-Rockefeller divorce, their joint largesse to opera ended, and the deficits were a big problem. Insull, “the Czar of Commonwealth Edison,” who also loved opera (and dallied with divas), wanted to put it on a self-supporting business basis. He concluded that if an opera house should be built in a skyscraper, the rental of the upper regions would eventually cover the opera’s deficits. The building started in 1928; it had forty-five stories, with the opera company occupying the first six, and with Insull’s office-lair on top. The structure was known as “Insull’s throne,” and it cost twenty million dollars. The opening of the new opera house was scheduled for November 4, 1929; six days before, on October 29th, the stock market crashed. The opening took place during the panic, with plainclothesmen and eight detective-bureau squads guarding the bejeweled patrons against robbers, rioters, and the mobsters who more or less ran the city. (The former Mrs. McCormick attended, wearing, according to one newspaper report, “her gorgeous diamond necklace, almost an inch wide and reaching practically to her waist”; Mrs. Insull wore pearls and “a wide diamond bracelet.”) Mankiewicz must have placed the episode of the opera house in Chicago in order to give it roots—to make it connect with what the public already knew about Chicago and robber barons and opera. (Chicago was big on opera; it was there that the infant Orson Welles played Madame Butterfly’s love child.) Insull’s opera house never really had a chance to prove or disprove his financial theories. Mary Garden quit after one year there, calling it “that long black hole,” and in 1932, when Insull’s mammoth interlocking directorate of power plants collapsed and he fled to Greece, the opera house was closed. Insull was extradited, and in the mid-thirties he stood trial for fraud and embezzlement; he died two years before Citizen Kane was written.
The fretful banality of Susan Alexander is clearly derived from Mankiewicz’s hated old adversary Mrs. Insull—notorious for her “discordant twitter” and her petty dissatisfaction with everything. The Insulls had been called the least popular couple who had ever lived in Chicago, and there was ample evidence that they hadn’t even liked each other. Opera and the Insulls provided cover for Mankiewicz and Welles. George J. Schaefer, who is quite open about this, says that when he couldn’t get an opening for Kane, because the theatres were frightened off by the stories in the Hearst press about injunctions and lawsuits, he went to see Hearst’s lawyers in Los Angeles and took the position that Kane could be Insull. No one was expected to be fooled; it was simply a legal maneuver.
There was also an actual (and malicious) scrap of Hearst’s in the opera idea in the first draft. As Mankiewicz planned it, Susan was to make her début in Massenet’s Thaïs. As a very young man, Hearst had been briefly engaged to the San Francisco singer Sybil Sanderson. In order to break the engagement, Miss Sanderson’s parents had sent her to study in Paris, where she became well known in opera and as the “constant companion” of Massenet, who wrote Thaïs for her. But to use Thaïs would have cost a fee, so Bernard Herrmann wrote choice excerpts of a fake French-Oriental opera—Salammbô. (Dorothy Comingore did her own singing in the movie except for the opera-house sequence; that was dubbed by a professional singer who deliberately sang badly.) The Kane amalgam may also contain a dab or two from the lives of other magnates, such as Frank Munsey and Pulitzer, and more than a dab from the life of Jules Brulatour, who got his start in business by selling Eastman Kodak film. Hope Hampton, his blond protégée and later his wife, had a career even more ridiculous that Susan Alexander’s. After she failed as a movie actress, Brulatour financed her career at the Chicago Opera Company at the end of the twenties, and then, using his power to extend credit to movie companies for film stock, he pushed the near-bankrupt Universal to star her in a 1937 disaster, in which she sang eight songs.
The only other major addition to Hearst’s actual history comes near the beginning of the movie. The latter days of Susan Alexander as a tawdry-looking drunken singer at El Rancho in Atlantic City, where she is billed as “Susan Alexander Kane”—which tells us at once that she is so poor an entertainer that she must resort to this cheap attempt to exploit her connection with Kane—may have been lifted from the frayed end of Evelyn Nesbit’s life. After her divorce from Harry K. Thaw—the rich socialite who murdered Stanford White on her account—she drifted down to appearing in honky-tonks, and was periodically denounced in the press for “capitalizing her shame.”
Twenty-four
DOROTHY COMINGORE SAYS, “When I read for Orson, Herman was in the room, with a broken leg and a crutch, and Orson turned to him and said, ‘What do you think?’ and Herman said, ‘Yes, she looks precisely like the image of a kitten we’ve been looking for.’”
The handling of Susan Alexander is a classic of duplicity. By diversifying the material and combining several careers, Mankiewicz could protect himself. He could claim that Susan wasn’t meant to be Marion Davies—that she was nothing at all like Marion, whom he called a darling and a minx. He could point out that Marion wasn’t a singer and that Hearst had never built an opera house for her—and it was true, she wasn’t and he hadn’t, but she was an actress and he did run Cosmopolitan Pictures for her. Right at the beginning of the movie, Kane was said to be the greatest newspaper tycoon of this or any other generation, so he was obviously Hearst; Xanadu was transparently San Simeon; and Susan’s fake stardom and the role she played in Kane’s life spelled Marion Davies to practically everybody in the Western world. And even though Mankiewicz liked Marion Davies, he was the same Mankiewicz who couldn’t resist the disastrous “Imagine—the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!” He skewered her with certain identifying details that were just too good to resist, such as her love for jigsaw puzzles. They were a feature of San Simeon; the puzzles, which sometimes took two weeks to complete, were set out on tables in the salon, and the guests would work at them before lunch. And when Kane destroys Susan’s room in a rage after she leaves him, he turns up a hidden bottle of booze, which was a vicious touch, coming from Mankiewicz, who had often been the beneficiary of Marion’s secret cache. He provided bits that had a special frisson for those in the know.
One can sometimes hurt one’s enemies, but that’s nothing compared to what one can do to one’s friends. Marion Davies, living in the style of the royal courtesans with a man who couldn’t marry her without messes and scandal (his wife, Millicent, had become a Catholic, and she had also given him five sons), was an easy target. Hearst and Louella Parsons had set her up for it, and she became the victim of Citizen Kane. In her best roles, Marion Davies was a spunky, funny, beautiful girl, and that’s apparently what she was and why Hearst adored her. But, in his adoration, he insisted that the Hearst press overpublicize her and overpraise her constantly, and the public in general got wise. A typical Davies film would open with the theatre ventilating system pouring attar of roses at the audience, or the theatre would be specially redecorated, sometimes featuring posters that famous popular artists had done of her in the costumes of the picture. Charity functions of which she was the queen would be splashed all over the society pages, and the movie would be reviewed under eight-column headlines. In the news section, Mayor Hylan of New York would be saying, “When Knighthood Was in Flower is unquestionably the greatest picture I have seen…. No person can afford to miss this great screen masterpiece,” or “Little Old New York is unquestionably the greatest screen epic I have ever looked upon, and Marion Davies is the most versatile screen star ever cast in any part. The wide range of her stellar acting is something to marvel at.... Every man, woman and child in New York City ought to see this splendid picture…. I must pay my tribute to the geniuses in all lines who created such a maste
rpiece.”
When the toadying and praise were already sickening, Hearst fell for one of the dumbest smart con tricks of all time: A movie reviewer named Louella O. Parsons, working for the New York Telegraph for $110 a week, wrote a column saying that although Marion Davies’s movies were properly publicized, the star herself wasn’t publicized enough. Hearst fell for it and hired Parsons at $250 a week, and she began her profitable lifework of praising (and destroying) Marion Davies. Some of Davies’s costume spectacles weren’t bad—and she was generally charming in them—but the pictures didn’t have to be bad for all the corrupt drumbeaters to turn the public’s stomach. Other actresses were pushed to stardom and were accepted. (The flapper heroine Colleen Moore was Walter Howey’s niece, and she was started on her career when she was fifteen. D. W. Griffith owed Howey a favor for getting The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance past the Chicago censors, and her movie contract was the payoff. She says that many of the Griffith stars were “payoffs.”) Marion Davies had more talent than most of the reigning queens, but Hearst and Louella were too ostentatious, and they never let up. There was a steady march of headlines (“Marion Davies’ Greatest Film Opens Tonight”); there were too many charity balls. The public can swallow just so much: her seventy-five-thousand-dollar fourteen-room mobile “bungalow” on the M-G-M lot, O.K.; the special carpet for alighting, no. Her pictures had to be forced on exhibitors, and Hearst spent so much on them that even when they did well, the cost frequently couldn’t be recovered. One of his biographers reports a friend’s saying to Hearst, “There’s money in the movies,” and Hearst’s replying, “Yes. Mine.”
