Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Herman Mankiewicz had died in 1953, long before Suber began his research, but Suber had spoken with the screenwriter’s widow, Sara Mankiewicz, who was all too happy to acknowledge her late husband as Kane’s real auteur. She confirmed to Suber that she and Herman had been frequent guests at the spectacular palace hideaway that newspaper publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst had constructed at San Simeon, the model for Kane’s Xanadu. Hearst and Herman were never close; among other things, they were poles apart politically, with Hearst opposing the union movement and Herman coming out in favor of reform-minded Upton Sinclair when he was running for governor of California in 1934. Decades later, Herman and Sara’s nephew, the movie producer and director Tom Mankiewicz, recalled that Herman was at San Simeon “all the time, but not as a distinguished visitor—although he certainly was a good screenwriter—but really as a kind of class clown. Herman had this extravagantly famous wit and was always saying outrageous things, and they loved him for that.... He was invited as a paid talent, as a paid wit. That was it. And they expected a certain number of bon mots.”

  Mankiewicz and Marion Davies were drinking buddies, and there were certain details from her life at San Simeon that he appropriated for the character of Susan Alexander—particularly Davies’s passion for jigsaw puzzles, which were spread out everywhere at the estate. It is astonishing that Mankiewicz thought he could get away with such a crude invasion of Davies’s privacy. His portrayal of Susan, in fact, showed a baffling combination of hubris, naïveté, and out-and-out stupidity—along with what seems to have been a desire to get caught red-handed. (Perhaps, in this respect, he was like Dorothy Parker, who “atoned” for her lavish weekends with wealthy society folk by lampooning them in her stories.) Mankiewicz seemed to think that if he made Susan Alexander an opera singer without intelligence, class, or talent, no one would link her to Marion Davies, who was an actress with a flair for comedy and, by most accounts, an affable, charming hostess. He was wrong: Davies was shocked by Mankiewicz’s betrayal. While Hearst himself was angered that Mankiewicz used him for his portrayal of Kane, it was ultimately just one more blow to his reputation, which had already suffered mightily; Mankiewicz’s cruel transformation of Marion into Susan was what determined him to bring down the film.

  One revelation involved “Rosebud,” the name of young Charles’s sled—the symbol of lost childhood happiness that figures in the opening and closing of the picture. “Rosebud,” Sara Mankiewicz claimed, was based on one of the many “bitter experiences” that plagued her husband’s childhood in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Herman’s own “Rosebud” had actually been a bicycle he had as a boy. One day, while he was visiting the local library, the bicycle was stolen. “A brand-new bicycle,” recalled Sara. “And, as he said, he never, never longed for anything as to get that bicycle back. There was . . . a great deal of weltschmerz connected with Herman that few people recognized or realized.”

  Sara also told Suber that the character of Jed Leland, the drama critic and close friend of Charles Foster Kane (played in the film by Joseph Cotten), included many background details from Herman’s own life. In particular, the key scene in which Leland is sent to cover the New York debut of Susan Alexander was taken directly from Herman’s days as a drama critic for The New York Times, when he had been assigned to review The School for Scandal, featuring Gladys Wallis, wife of the railroad and electricity tycoon Samuel Insull. Her performance was inadequate, and Herman got drunk, returned to the Times offices, and fell asleep over his typewriter. The scene was reenacted in Kane, with Jed Leland slumped over his typewriter, unable to finish his review of Susan Alexander’s catastrophic New York singing debut.

  Sara laid out the chronology for Suber as best she could remember it: John Houseman, Welles’s collaborator at the Mercury Theatre, had introduced Welles and Mankiewicz to each other around 1937 in New York. Welles had actively solicited story ideas from him, and Mankiewicz had come up with the idea for Kane. Sara maintained that Kane himself was intended as an amalgam of Hearst, Insull, and John P. Morgan. In the early spring of 1940, Mankiewicz had gone off to a desert retreat near Victorville, California, and finished the script in several weeks. With him were his secretary, Rita Alexander, and Houseman, who essentially functioned as a story editor. (He was also there to make sure that Mankiewicz, a prodigious drinker, stayed sober enough to complete the job.) Not long before Kane was shot, Welles and Houseman had an enormous argument at Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood, which caused a permanent rift between them.

  When Pauline read Suber’s interview with Sara Mankiewicz, it confirmed her belief that Kane had really been Herman’s personal and unique vision—not Welles’s. Armed with Suber’s research, plus what she had undertaken on her own—including an interview with Rita Alexander—Pauline set to work on her essay. Along the way she had discovered a deposition given by Welles in April 1949, when Ferdinand Lundberg, Hearst’s biographer, had filed suit against the director, Mankiewicz, and RKO, claiming that his book Imperial Hearst was the real basis of Kane. Welles maintained in the deposition that his intention was “to write and produce a work of fiction. As in the case of a great deal of fiction we drew to some extent on our observations of certain aspects of American life and our knowledge of certain types among influential Americans.”

  It quickly became apparent that three thousand words would not be sufficient to accomplish what was now Pauline’s primary goal—to prove that Herman Mankiewicz was indeed the dominant creative force behind Kane. A scribbled note on her research papers indicates the direction in which she was heading: “When an actor becomes the role offstage, something fake trails around him, like a magician’s cape.”

  Dorothy Comingore’s interview, in particular, yielded some gems, including her recollection that Welles hadn’t directed her in the drunken café scene: Comingore insisted that it was a test scene, which was simply put into the film and never retaken by Welles. This information fascinated Pauline, and she delved deeper into her theory that Welles had been misleading people for decades about his omnipotent role in Kane.

  At some point in 1970 Pauline flew to Los Angeles for her annual lecture at UCLA. Suber met her at the airport and drove her directly to the party in her honor. On the way there he brought up a point he was fond of using to test his students: He asked Pauline how the characters in Kane knew that “Rosebud” was Kane’s dying word. She answered, as his students normally did, that “Rosebud” is overheard, but Suber pointed out that no one actually hears him say it—he is alone in the room when he utters the word. Thus, the entire puzzle that Kane is built around doesn’t, strictly speaking, make dramatic sense. As he pulled up to a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard, Suber looked over to check Pauline’s response.

  “Well,” Suber recalled her saying, “it’s a trivial point.”

  Suber finished his essay and mailed it off to Pauline in New York. After that, her phone calls became more sporadic. Then they stopped altogether.

  One week in February 1971, Suber’s copy of The New Yorker arrived in his mailbox as usual. In the section “Onward and Upward with the Arts,” he discovered part one of a two-part essay on Citizen Kane by Pauline Kael. Some months earlier Pauline had shown her work-in-progress to William Shawn, who agreed on the spot to publish it in the magazine. She made use of the Sara Mankiewicz, Dorothy Comingore, and Richard Wilson interviews. Even worse, she claimed to have discovered, when the picture was released in 1941, that no one actually heard Kane whisper “Rosebud.” Nowhere in the piece was Suber’s name mentioned. He had not received—nor would he receive—any additional money from Pauline, The New Yorker, or Bantam.

  When Dorothy Comingore read the article, she was livid. She telephoned Suber, demanding to know how her quotes had ended up in Pauline’s piece. Comingore stressed that she had given those recollections to Suber for his use only and threatened to sue Kael. Suber was devastated but also ashamed, feeling that he had somehow been responsible for what had happened. To raise the issue with his
department head, Colin Young, would have been to walk into a political quagmire: Not only was he Pauline’s close friend, but he could be quite acerbic to the younger members of the faculty. Suber told a few close friends—then tried to put the matter behind him.

  “Raising Kane” dominated the pages of the February 20 and 27, 1971, issues of The New Yorker and quickly became one of the magazine’s publishing events of the year. From its strong opening sentence, “Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened”—the essay was a thrilling, audacious piece of writing—if one that indulged in frequent flights of sheer speculation. Early on Pauline launched into an observation sure to rankle many of those who had planted Kane at the top of their all-time-best lists. “Citizen Kane,” she asserted, “isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece.” It was “conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style (unlike, say, Rules of the Game or Rashomon or Man of Aran, which one does not think of in crowd-pleasing terms.)” To use the “conventional schoolbook explanations for greatness,” she explained, was “to miss what makes it such an American triumph—that it manages to create something aesthetically exciting and durable out of the playfulness of American muckraking satire. Kane is closer to comedy than to tragedy, though so overwrought in style as to be almost a Gothic comedy.”

  She linked this idea to what she believed to be Kane’s real onscreen antecedents—the fast-talking screwball comedies of the 1930s, an era that had “never been rivaled in wit and exuberance.... The ’30s were the hardest-headed period of American movies, and their plainness of style, with its absence of false ‘cultural’ overtones, has never got its due aesthetically.” Many of the comedies she cited were set in the newspaper world, depicting tough, aggressive reporters and their hard-driving, duplicitous editors; many of these were written by a small group of smart writers, in exile from the New York newspaper and magazine world, such as Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur—and Herman Mankiewicz. Pauline felt that it was these writers, rather than the directors whom the auteurists loved to credit, who “may for a brief period, a little more than a decade, have given American talkies their character.” She thought it was Mankiewicz’s background in this sort of unsentimental comedy that gave Kane much of its flavor. Shortly after “Raising Kane” was published, she explained in an interview, “When I got into it and started to research it, it opened up so many interesting areas—particularly when I discovered something about Herman Mankiewicz—his background and what his connections were with Hecht and MacArthur and the whole literary tradition the scripts came out of.”

  In “Raising Kane,” Pauline traced Welles’s triumphant arrival in Hollywood, taking care to capture the movie colony’s suspicious attitude toward a self-promoting “boy genius” who had managed to be awarded an RKO contract that gave him unprecedented authority. Her description of the industry’s discovery that the picture was modeled on Hearst and Davies was vivid and suspenseful: According to her, Mankiewicz had foolishly shown the script to his friend the screenwriter Charles Lederer, who happened to be Marion Davies’s devoted nephew—and Lederer had in turn shown it to the Hearsts. She did not hesitate to blame Mankiewicz for his “idiotic indiscretion,” which she believed “resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall, the commercial failure of Citizen Kane, and the subsequent failure of Orson Welles.”

  The ultimate fate of both film and director was, she wrote, sealed by the results of the 1941 Academy Awards, which snubbed Kane for both the Best Picture and Best Director prizes, despite the fact that the film had received the year’s most ecstatic reviews. The picture’s sole Oscar went to its screenplay—and Welles had to share that with Mankiewicz. She believed that this wounded Welles so deeply that he had to spend the rest of his life claiming credit for more than his share of the film. “Men cheated of their due,” she wrote, in a strongly judgmental tone, “are notoriously given to claiming more than their due.”

  In “Raising Kane” Pauline took repeated, barely disguised swipes at the auteurists. She believed that the worship of directors such as Welles and Fellini approached the ridiculous and that “such worship generally doesn’t help in sorting out what went into the making of good pictures and bad pictures.” What she didn’t do—and what enraged Welles’s many champions, devotees, and apologists—was discuss at any substantial length what Welles did achieve in directing the film. She did praise his acting performance as Kane, going so far as to say that The Magnificent Ambersons, beautiful as it was, suffered because “Welles isn’t in it, and it’s too bland. It feels empty, uninhabited.” She also speculated that Gregg Toland, Kane’s cinematographer, had played a previously unsuspected role in the picture’s overall look. She pointed to an obscure thriller from 1935 called Mad Love, in which Peter Lorre appears onscreen in bald pate, much like the aged Charles Foster Kane. She suggested that Toland might have borrowed the “Gothic atmosphere, and the huge, dark rooms with lighted figures” of Mad Love and put them into Kane. She had no real evidence for any of these theories, and she had purposely avoided interviewing Welles for “Raising Kane,” she explained, because she did not think she could trust anything he might say. “I already know what happened,” she had said to Suber when he asked if she would be trying to get an interview with Welles. “I don’t have to talk to him.”

  In fact, the part about Mad Love was basically the same sort of movie detective work she had accused the auteurists of peddling. Interestingly, she did not draw a connecting line to a more recent film that may possibly have influenced Welles—Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. It was released the year before Kane, and the opening—the passing through the front gates of the stately Manderley, the scenes with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine standing in enormous rooms with great fireplaces, and the fiery finale, in which the camera slowly moves in to reveal a pillow with the monogram “R” being consumed in flames, just as “Rosebud” is, may well have influenced the look of Kane.

  At the end of “Raising Kane,” Pauline suddenly shifted to a slightly milder, almost apologetic tone. Welles, she wrote, “had been advertised as a one-man show; it was not altogether his own fault when he became one. He was alone, trying to be ‘Orson Welles,’ though ‘Orson Welles’ had stood for the activities of a group. But he needed the family to hold him together on a project and to take over for him when his energies became scattered. With them, he was a prodigy of accomplishments; without them, he flew apart, became disorderly.” She closed by lamenting that Welles “has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn’t lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him.” This was one point on which Welles could not contradict her: Interviewed in the early 1970s, he characterized his career as “98% hustling and 2% moviemaking—that’s no way to spend a life.”

  The New Yorker launched “Raising Kane” in a celebratory manner, with a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, and letters poured in to The New Yorker from enthusiastic readers. The acclaimed screenwriter Nunnally Johnson had had an epistolary acquaintance with Pauline for some time, and Pauline had spoken with him while preparing “Raising Kane.” Now Johnson wrote to her that the essay was “a first-rate account and I am a better man for having read it.” He added that Sara Mankiewicz wasn’t sure whether she liked it or not; she appreciated Pauline’s advocacy for Herman but “the references to Mank’s drinking must bring up many painful memories.” Mostly, though, members of Mankiewicz’s family were grateful to Pauline for illuminating the man they believed to be Kane’s auteur. “There have always been the Welles idolators,” said Tom Mankiewicz. “We just said, ‘Herman did everything, and thank you so much, Pauline Kael.’ ”

  With all the acclaim greeting “Raising Kane,” Bantam decided the essay was now too important to publish as a paperback original. A deal was made with Little, Brown to bring out a hardcover edition, which would include the shooting script, and in October 1971 The
Citizen Kane Book appeared. Pauline’s essay opened the book, followed by the complete shooting script, illustrated by eighty-one frames from the film, and the cutting continuity of the finished picture.

  In The New York Times, Mordecai Richler called it “a highly intelligent and entertaining study of a bona fide film classic” and praised Pauline for her “wonderfully sensible reconstruction of the making of Kane.” But no matter how persuasively she made the case for Herman Mankiewicz, Richler felt her argument was undercut by the publication of the script, which, despite its merits, he found “superficial and without one quotable line. To Welles, then, however vain and objectionable his manner, rococo his style, must go the ultimate credit for the miracle of Citizen Kane,” since in Richler’s view “he was the one who did in fact put it all together.”

  It appears that Welles never contacted Pauline about the article, but Peter Bogdanovich and others claimed he was deeply wounded by Pauline’s reduction of his role in Kane, feeling that his work on the picture had been undercut once again. The opposition, however, had readied itself on the director’s behalf. When the book appeared, The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris angrily rejected Pauline’s thesis, but the toughest response came from Bogdanovich in Esquire. “The Kane Mutiny” was a lengthy article that was both a levelheaded refutation of Pauline’s ideas and an expression of righteous anger, and the single worst piece of press she had received to date. Bogdanovich condemned “Raising Kane” as being “loaded with error and faulty supposition presented as fact.” Because he had heard Howard Suber’s story through his UCLA connections, he explained that Suber and Pauline “were to collaborate in writing the prefatory material to the published screenplay,” adding that Pauline took “full credit for whatever use she made of it, and gives none at all to Dr. Suber.”