The Citzen Kane Book

by Pauline Kael

  Welles had a vitalizing, spellbinding talent; he was the man who brought out the best in others and knew how to use it. What keeps Citizen Kane alive is that Welles wasn’t prevented (as so many directors are) from trying things out. He was young and open, and, as the members of that crew tell it—and they remember it very well, because it was the only time it ever happened for many of them—they could always talk to him and make suggestions, as long as they didn’t make the suggestions publicly. Most big-studio movies were made in such a restrictive way that the crews were hostile and bored and the atmosphere was oppressive. The worst aspect of the factory system was that almost everyone worked beneath his capacity. Working on Kane, in an atmosphere of freedom, the designers and technicians came forth with ideas they’d been bottling up for years; they were all in on the creative process. Welles was so eager to try out new ideas that even the tough, hardened studio craftsmen were caught up by his spirit, just as his co-workers in the theatre and in radio had been. Citizen Kane is not a great work that suddenly burst out of a young prodigy’s head. There are such works in the arts (though few, if any, in movies), but this is not one of them. It is a superb example of collaboration; everyone connected with it seems to have had the time of his life because he was able to contribute something.

  Welles had just the right background for the sound era. He used sound not just as an inexpensive method of creating the illusion of halls and crowds but to create an American environment. He knew how to convey the way people feel about each other by the way they sound; he knew how they sounded in different rooms, in different situations. The directors who had been most imaginative in the use of sound in the early talkies were not Americans, and when they worked in America, as Ernst Lubitsch did, they didn’t have the ear for American life that Welles had. And the good American movie directors in that period (men like Howard Hawks and John Ford and William Wellman) didn’t have the background in theatre or—that key element—the background in radio. Hawks handled the dialogue expertly in His Girl Friday, but the other sounds are not much more imaginative than those in a first-rate stage production. When Welles came to Hollywood, at the age of twenty-four, his previous movie experience had not been on a professional level, but he already knew more about the dramatic possibilities of sound than most veteran directors, and the sound engineers responded to his inventiveness by giving him extraordinary new effects. At every point along the way, the studio craftsmen tried something out. Nearly all the thirty-five members of the R.K.O. special-effects department worked on Kane; roughly eighty percent of the film was not merely printed but reprinted, in order to add trick effects and blend in painted sets and bits of stock footage. The view up from Susan singing on the opera stage to the stagehands high above on the catwalk, as one of them puts two fingers to his nose—which looks like a tilt (or vertical pan)—is actually made up of three shots, the middle one a miniature. When the camera seems to pass through a rooftop skylight into the El Rancho night club where Susan works, the sign, the rooftop, and the skylight are miniatures, with a flash of lightening to conceal the cut to the full-scale interior. The craftsmen were so ingenious about giving Welles the effects he wanted that even now audiences aren’t aware of how cheaply made Citizen Kane was.

  In the case of the cinematographer, Gregg Toland, the contribution goes far beyond suggestions and technical solutions. I think he not only provided much of the visual style of Citizen Kane but was responsible for affecting the conception, and even for introducing a few elements that are not in the script. It’s always a little risky to assign credit for ideas in movies; somebody is bound to turn up a film that used whatever it is—a detail, a device, a technique—earlier. The most one can hope for, generally, is to catch on to a few late links in the chain. It was clear that Kane had visual links to James Wong Howe’s cinematography in Transatlantic (Howe, coincidentally, had also shot The Power and the Glory), but I had always been puzzled by the fact that Kane seemed to draw not only on the Expressionist theatrical style of Welles’s stage productions but on the German Expressionist and Gothic movies of the silent period. In Kane, as in the German silents, depth was used like stage depth, and attention was frequently moved from one figure to another within a fixed frame by essentially the same techniques as on the stage—by the actors’ moving into light or by a shift of the light to other actors (rather than by the fluid camera of a Renoir, which follows the actors, or the fragmentation and quick cutting of the early Russians). There were frames in Kane that seemed so close to the exaggerations in German films like Pandora’s Box and The Last Laugh and Secrets of a Soulthat I wondered what Welles was talking about when he said he had prepared for Kane by running John Ford’s Stagecoach forty times. Even allowing for the hyperbole of the forty times, why should Orson Welles have studied Stagecoach and come up with a film that looked more like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? I wondered if there might be a link between Gregg Toland and the German tradition, though most of Toland’s other films didn’t suggest much German influence. When I looked up his credits as a cameraman, the name Mad Love rang a bell; I closed my eyes and visualized it, and there was the Gothic atmosphere, and the huge, dark rooms with lighted figures, and Peter Lorre, bald, with a spoiled-baby face, looking astoundingly like a miniature Orson Welles.

  Mad Love, made in Hollywood in 1935, was a dismal, static horror movie—an American version of a German film directed by the same man who had directed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The American remake, remarkable only for its photography, was directed by Karl Freund, who had been head cinematographer at Ufa, in Germany. He had worked with such great directors as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau and G. W. Pabst, and, by his technical innovations, had helped created their styles; he had shot many of the German silent classics (The Last Laugh, Variety, Metropolis, Tartuffe). I recently looked at a print of Mad Love, and the resemblances to Citizen Kane are even greater than my memories of it suggested. Not only is the large room with the fireplace at Xanadu similar to Lorre’s domain as a mad doctor, with similar lighting and similar placement of figures, but Kane’s appearance and makeup in some sequences might be a facsimile of Lorre’s. Lorre, who had come out of the German theatre and German films, played in a stylized manner that is a visually imitated in Kane. And, amusingly, that screeching white cockatoo, which isn’t in the script of Kane but appeared out of nowhere in the movie to provide an extra “touch,” is a regular member of Lorre’s household.

  Gregg Toland was the “hottest” photographer in Hollywood at the time he called Welles and asked to work with him; in March he had won the Academy Award for Wuthering Heights, and his other recent credits included The Grapes of Wrath and the film in which he had experimented with deep focus, The Long Voyage Home. He brought along his own four-man camera crew, who had recently celebrated their fifteenth year of working together. This picture was made with love; the year before his death, in 1948, Toland said that he had wanted to work with Welles because he was miserable and felt like a whore when he was on run-of-the-mill assignments, and that “photographing Citizen Kane was the most exciting professional adventure of my career.” I surmise that part of the adventure was his finding a way to use and develop what the great Karl Freund had taught him.

  Like the German cinematographers in the silent period, Toland took a more active role than the usual Hollywood cinematographer. For some years, whenever it was possible, he had been supervising the set construction of his films, so that he could plan the lighting. He probably responded to Welles’s penchant for tales of terror and his desire for a portentous, mythic look, and since Welles didn’t have enough financing for full-scale sets and was more than willing to try the unconventional, Toland suggested many of the Expressionist solutions. When a director is new to films, he is, of course, extremely dependent on his cameraman, and he is particularly so if he is also the star of the film, and is thus in front of the camera. Toland was a disciplined man, and those who worked on the set say he was a steadying influence on Welles; it is
generally agreed that the two planned and discussed every shot together. With Welles, Toland was free to make suggestions that went beyond lighting techniques. Seeing Welles’s facial resemblance to the tiny Lorre—even to the bulging eyes and the dimpled, sad expression—Toland probably suggested the makeup and the doll-like, jerky use of the body for Kane in his rage and as a lonely old man, and, having enjoyed the flamboyant photographic effect of the cockatoo in Mad Love, suggested that, too. When Toland provided Welles with the silent-picture setups that had been moribund under Karl Freund’s direction, Welles used them in a childlike spirit that made them playful and witty. There’s nothing static or Germanic in Welles’s direction, and he had such unifying energy that just a couple of years ago an eminent movie critic cited the cockatoo in Citizen Kane as “an unforced metaphor arising naturally out of the action.”

  It’s the Gothic atmosphere, partly derived from Toland’s work on Mad Love, that inflates Citizen Kane and puts it in a different tradition from the newspaper comedies and the big bios of the thirties. Citizen Kane is, in some ways, a freak of art. Toland, although he used deep focus again later, reverted to a more conventional look for the films following Kane, directed by men who rejected technique “for its own sake,” but he had passed on Freund’s techniques to Welles. The dark, Gothic horror style, with looming figures, and with vast interiors that suggested castles rather than houses, formed the basis for much of Welles’s later visual style. It suited Welles; it was the visual equivalent of The Shadow’s voice—a gigantic echo chamber. Welles, too big for ordinary roles, too overpowering for normal characters, is stylized by nature—is by nature an Expressionist actor.

  Twenty-eight

  TWO YEARS AFTER the release of Citizen Kane, when Herman Mankiewicz had become respectable—his career had taken a leap after Kane, and he had had several major credits later in 1941, and had just won another Academy nomination, for his work on Pride of the Yankees—he stumbled right into Hearst’s waiting arms. He managed to have an accident that involved so many of the elements of his life that it sounds like a made-up surreal joke. Though some of his other calamities are lost in an alcoholic fog—people remember only the bandages and Mankiewicz’s stories about how he got them, and maybe even he didn’t always know the facts—this one is all too well documented.

  Driving home after a few drinks at Romanoff’s, he was only a block and a half from his house when he hit a tiny car right at the gates of the Marion Davies residence. And it wasn’t just any little car he hit; it was one driven by Lee Gershwin—Ira Gershwin’s wife, Lenore, a woman Mankiewicz had known for years. He had adapted the Gershwins’ musical Girl Crazy to the screen in 1932, and he had known the Gershwins before that, in the twenties, in New York; they were part of the same group. It was a gruesomely comic accident: Hearst was living on the grounds of the Marion Davies estate at the time, in that bungalow that Marion had used at M-G-M and then at Warners, and he was conferring with the publisher of his New York Journal-American when he heard the crash. Hearst sent the publisher down to investigate, and as soon as the man reported who was involved, Hearst went into action. Lee Gershwin had had two passengers—her secretary, who wasn’t hurt, and her laundress, whom she was taking home, and who just got a bump. Mrs. Gershwin herself wasn’t badly hurt, though she had a head injury that required some stitches. It was a minor accident, but Mankiewicz was taken to the police station, and he apparently behaved noisily and badly there. When he got home, a few hours later, his wife, Sara, sobered him up, and, having ascertained that Lee Gershwin had been treated at the hospital and had already been discharged, she sent him over to the Gershwins’ with a couple of dozen roses. Marc Connelly, who was at the Gershwins’ that night, says that when Mankiewicz arrived the house was full of reporters, and Ira Gershwin was serving them drinks and trying to keep things affable. Mankiewicz went upstairs to see Lee, who was lying in bed with her head bandaged. Amiable madman that he was, he noticed a painting on the bedroom wall, and his first remark was that he had a picture by the same artist. He apparently didn’t have any idea that he was in serious trouble.

  Hearst’s persistent vindictiveness was one of his least attractive traits. Mankiewicz was charged with a felony, and the minor accident became a major front-page story in the Hearst papers across the country for four successive days, with headlines more appropriate to a declaration of war. It became the excuse for another Hearst campaign against the orgies and dissolute lives of the movie colony, and Hearst dragged it on for months. By then, the Hearst press was on its way to becoming the crank press, and Hearst had so many enemies that Mankiewicz had many friends. When Mankiewicz appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union, there had already been stories in Time, Newsweek, Variety, and elsewhere pointing out that the persecution in the Hearst papers was a reprisal for his having written the script of Citizen Kane. Mankiewicz, however, had to stand trial on a felony charge. And although he got through the mess of the trial all right, the hounding by the Hearst papers took its toll, and his reputation was permanently damaged.

  In a letter to Harold Ross after the trial, Mankiewicz asked to write a Profile of Hearst that Ross was considering. “Honestly,” he wrote, “I know more about Hearst than any other man alive. (There are a couple of deaders before their time who knew more, I think.) I studied his career like a scholar before I wrote Citizen Kane.” And then, in a paragraph that suggests his admiration, despite everything, for both Hearst and Welles, he wrote, “Shortly after I had been dragged from the obscurity of the police blotter and—a middle-aged, flat-footed, stylish-stout scenario writer—been promoted by the International News Service into Gary Grant, who, with a tank, had just drunkenly ploughed into a baby carriage occupied by the Dionne quintuplets, the Duchess of Kent, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt (the President’s wife), and the favorite niece of the Pope, with retouched art combining the more unflattering features of Goering and Dillinger, I happened to be discussing Our Hero with Orson. With the fair-mindedness that I have always recognized as my outstanding trait, I said to Orson that, despite this and that, Mr. Hearst was, in many ways, a great man. He was, and is, said Orson, a horse’s ass, no more nor less, who has been wrong, without exception, on everything he’s ever touched. For instance, for fifty years, said Orson, Hearst did nothing but scream about the Yellow Peril, and then he gave up his seat and hopped off two months before Pearl Harbor.”

  Twenty-nine

  IN 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg sued Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and R.K.O. Radio Pictures, Inc., for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for copyright infringement, charging that Citizen Kane had plagiarized his book Imperial Hearst. On the face of it, the suit looked ridiculous. No doubt (as Houseman admits) Mankiewicz had drawn upon everything available about Hearst, in addition to his own knowledge, and no doubt the Lundberg book, which brought a great deal of Hearst material together and printed some things that had not been printed before, was especially useful, but John Dos Passos might have sued on similar grounds, since material that was in U.S.A. was also in the movie, and so might dozens of magazine writers. Hearst himself might have sued, on the basis that he hadn’t been credited with the dialogue. The defense would obviously be that the material was in the public domain, and the suit looked like the usual nuisance-value suit that Hollywood is plagued by—especially since Lundberg offered to settle for a flat payment of $18,000. But R.K.O. had become one of Howard Hughes’s toys in the late forties, and a crew of expensive lawyers was hired. When the suit came to trial, in 1950, Welles was out of the country; he had given his testimony earlier, in the form of a deposition taken before the American vice-consul at Casablanca, Morocco. This deposition is a curious document, full of pontification and evasion and some bluffing so outrageous that one wonders whether the legal stenographer was able to keep a straight face. Citizen Kane had already begun to take over and change the public image of Hearst; Hearst and Kane had become inseparable, as Welles and Kane were, but Welles possibly didn’t really know in
detail—or, more likely, simply didn’t remember—how close the movie was to Hearst’s life. He seemed more concerned with continuing the old pretense that the movie was not about Hearst than with refuting Lundberg’s charge of plagiarism, and his attempts to explain specific incidents in the movie as if their relationship to Hearst were a mere coincidence are fairly funny. He stated that “I have done no research into the life of William Randolph Hearst at any time,” and that “in writing the screenplay of Citizen Kane I drew entirely upon my own observations of life,” and then was helpless to explain how there were so many episodes from Hearst’s life in the movie. When he was cornered with specific details, such as the picture of Jim Gettys in prison clothes, he gave up and said, “The dialogue for the scene in question was written in its first and second draftings exclusively by my colleague Mr. Mankiewicz. I worked on the third draft.” When he was read a long list of events in the film that parallel Hearst’s life as it is recorded in Imperial Hearst, he tried to use the Insull cover story and came up with the surprising information that the film dealt “quite as fully with the world of grand opera as with the world of newspaper publishing.”

  Mankiewicz, in a preparatory statement, freely admitted that many of the incidents and details came from Hearst’s life but said that he knew them from personal acquaintance and from a lifetime of reading. He was called to testify at the trial, and John Houseman was called as a witness to Mankiewicz’s labor on the script. Mankiewicz was indignant that anyone could suggest that a man of his knowledge would need to crib, and he paraded his credentials. It was pointed out that John Gunther had said Mankiewicz made better sense than all the politicians and diplomats put together, and that he was widely known to have a passionate interest in contemporary history, particularly as it related to power, and to have an enormous library. And, of course, he had known Hearst in the years of his full imperial glory, and his friends knew of his absorption in everything to do with Hearst. According to Houseman, he and Mankiewicz thought they were both brilliant in court; they treated the whole suit as an insult, and enjoyed themselves so much while testifying that they spent the time between appearances on the stand congratulating each other. Mankiewicz, in a final gesture of contempt for the charge, brought an inventory of his library and tossed it to the R.K.O. lawyers to demonstrate the width and depth of his culture. It was an inventory that Sara had prepared some years before, when (during a stretch of hard times) they had rented out their house on Tower Road; no one had bothered to look at the inventory—not even the R.K.O. attorneys before they put it into evidence. But Lundberg’s lawyers did; they turned to “L,” and there, neatly listed under “Lundberg,” were three copies of Imperial Hearst. During Mankiewicz’s long recuperation, his friends had sent him many books, and since his friends knew of his admiration for many sides of the man he called “the outstanding whirling pagoda of our times,” he had been showered with copies of this particular book. The inventory apparently made quite an impression in court, and the tide turned. The jury had been cordial to Mankiewicz’s explanation of how it was that he knew details that were in the Lundberg book and were unpublished elsewhere, but now the width and depth of his culture became suspect. After thirty days, the trial resulted in a hung jury, and rather than go through another trial, R.K.O. settled for $15,000—and also paid an estimated couple of hundred thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees and court costs.