Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Meanwhile, there was money to be earned. Newly shaven (Five Kings was clearly now abandoned), he set out on his travels: Pasadena, Kansas City, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Wenatchee. These engagements, though they may have helped his overdraft, did little to improve his position in Hollywood. Herb Drake described the event in press briefing-ese: ‘Lecture is informal. Invites hecklers from outset. Is obliged. Welles approves films; also stage. Points out errors both mediums. Besides talking, reads speeches Hamlet, Richard III, Congreve etc. Believe me audience shocked and amused. Welles opens and closes with jokes. All this done without benefit of beard.’ This was a rather different event from Charles Laughton’s famous lecture programme, designed to communicate some of his almost carnal passion for the arts, theatrical, literary, visual. Welles was in the business of punditry. He was out to opine, to provoke and to instruct, and of course it got him into trouble. The United Press Association reported from Kansas City – only his second date – that he had said ‘I’ll speak only in terms of contempt. Hollywood is just like any other small town. Movie actors have ceased to think of themselves as servants. As a matter of fact, they are really in the same class as those who wait on tables. The average person goes to the movies because it is better than drink.’ This provoked a flurry of much publicised resentment from leading Hollywood actors and industry spokesmen, the last thing he needed at this delicate moment. ‘As you can imagine,’ he wrote in an open letter to his host in Kansas City, ‘these misrepresentations of my sentiments place me in an acutely embarrassing position as regards my work in Hollywood.’ What he actually said, he claims, was that movies were a better bargain than the theatre and aesthetically more valid; that 90 per cent of the theatre talent was in Hollywood; that he personally preferred the movies of today to the theatre of today; and that actors should always remember that they are the servants of the public. It seems that Welles could embrace something only by renouncing something else. His Kansas City host, confirming his account of the lecture, adds ‘Let me know when you are ready to come to Kansas City again. Next time you will have an audience of ten thousand instead of five thousand, though five thousand is nothing to sneeze at. There are not half a dozen people in the country who could draw this number.’ The paradox continued. His fame, even in relatively out-of-the-way places, was growing daily, while his achievements remained invisible. The lectures were so successful that, Drake told the press, though there were no definite Broadway plans for Welles’s talk-in he intended to play New York with it for at least six weeks in the coming season. Depending on how American turned out, that might be all he had to look forward to.

  The script, all 350 pages of it, was waiting for him on his return. It was, according to Robert Carringer, whose brilliant researches on the making of Citizen Kane have finally put paid to speculation about the genesis of the screenplay, a literal reworking by and large of specific incidents and details from Hearst’s life, most of it first-hand observation on Mankiewicz’s part, but some evidently derived from a current biography, Ferdinand Lundberg’s Imperial Hearst. Comprehensive and over-literal though it might be, it was not lacking in cinematic boldness: much of the story was told in montage form. Among many striking scenes, there was a particularly audacious one in Rome where the young Kane has taken up residence, surrounding himself with ambi-sexual decadents and works of art of dubious propriety. A sub-plot involved Kane’s father, a rip-roaring, globe-trotting old party determined to marry the young tart (Miss Henrietta La Salle) with whom he is travelling; he runs across his son, who, finding out about the marriage, attempts to throttle him. It is hard not to see some sort of sly allusion by Mankiewicz and Houseman to Welles’s own father in the figure of Kane, Senior.

  The screenplay as presented was a rich pudding; Welles immediately went to work as editor. He slashed through Mankiewicz’s text just as he had slashed through Shakespeare’s and Dekker’s. As with those writers, he added none of his own words, preferring to isolate or rearrange someone else’s. His skill, and, equally important, his courage in this department was unparalleled. Sometimes (as in his Mercury scripts) he would slash whole pages of writing, ending up only with one line, or none. He had now been thinking about and working on films for nine months; he had begun to have pretty clear ideas about how a scene is constructed and how best to tell his story. His first task was not an aesthetic one, however. It was legally impossible to shoot this script: Hearst was absolutely, unmistakably and actionably the central character. A great deal of Welles’s initial work consisted simply in smudging that clear profile. There was, too, something of a hole at the centre. Welles maintained later to Richard Meryman (in one of his more analytical, less defensive interviews on the subject of Citizen Kane) that Mankiewicz, for all the brilliance of his writing, and the excellence of his structure – which remained basically the same throughout the many versions of the script – had not found the essential character of the man. ‘In his hatred of Hearst, or whoever Kane was, Mank didn’t have a clear enough idea of who the man was … I felt his knowledge was journalistic, not very close, the point of view of a newspaperman writing about a newspaper boss he despised.’13 Welles, both as director and as actor, was eager to create a distinctive character: one, moreover, that was not entirely unsympathetic.

  This was to be a continuing source of negotiation between Welles and Mankiewicz. A classic instance of their different views of Kane (and also of the nature of Welles’s contribution) is the scene in the Inquirer’s offices, where Leland falls asleep drunk over his bad review of Susan Alexander Kane’s operatic debut. This incident, drawn from Mankiewicz’s own experience, ended, in Mankiewicz’s draft, with Leland being fired by Kane. It was Welles who insisted on the ending eventually filmed, with Kane personally finishing and then publishing the bad review. ‘I always wanted Kane to have that sort of almost self-destructive elegance of attitude which, even when it was self-regarding and vain, was peculiarly chic. Mank fought me terribly about that scene: “Why should he finish the notice? He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t print it.” Which would have been true of Hearst.’ In one of the most pertinent of all observations about Citizen Kane, Welles remarked to Meryman that their disagreement over the character of Kane ‘probably gave the picture a certain tension: that one of the authors hated Kane and one of them loved him’. He added something which exactly describes what we see on the screen: ‘There is a quality to the film – that was Mank and that I treasured … it was a kind of controlled cheerful virulence.’

  Welles returned the script with his many suggestions to Mankiewicz, who, working in his continuing bed-bound isolation at Victorville, completed the second draft, duly delivering it on 9 May. Now off the payroll, Mankiewicz went to work on Madam X, for which, as Carringer points out with nice irony, he was uncredited. Houseman departed for New York, and Welles settled down to read the new version with the yelping of the press pack echoing in his ears. His twenty-fifth birthday had fallen a few days before, and the hacks rushed to offer their own acid greetings. ‘Orson Welles is 25 years old tomorrow and comes into an inheritance. Uncle Sam gets most of it for taxes. Well, the boy wonder needn’t worry too much since he almost inherited RKO in salary checks without making a single picture there.’ ‘Orson Welles, celebrating his 25 birthday,’ said another, ‘made a resolution to produce that picture if it takes him another 25 years.’ Never mind; the latest draft of American was highly encouraging, and Welles, in a somewhat theatrical procedure, read it out loud to Schaefer and RKO’s corporate lawyer, Edington.

  Schaefer was understandably pleased with the reading: a film of this magnitude, scope, daring and originality was precisely what he had brought Welles to Hollywood for. Edington was happy to note a general moving away from the facts of Hearst’s life. He was relieved to discover that an earlier sequence in which Kane has Raymond, the butler, murder a suspected lover of his wife had gone; it was modelled all too directly on a widely rumoured scandal involving the death of the director, Thomas Ince, on board Hearst’
s yacht. (Typically, Mankiewicz had insisted that keeping the sequence in the movie would deter Hearst from suing: how could he admit then that the character was him?) In order to move the movie still further away from Hearst, Schaefer (whose contract with Welles gave him title approval) suggested that they drop the provocative American in favour of – his idea – Citizen Kane. Welles enthusiastically accepted the new title; apart from anything else, no one had been able to think of a suitable one (his secretary’s proposal of A Sea of Upturned Faces being only the least satisfactory). Adopting Schaefer’s title had another advantage: psychologically, he would feel that it was his project. The film got the go-ahead, with an authorisation to proceed to third draft.

  Welles followed up the reading with a memo describing the film’s structure – the four interviews and the quest for Rosebud – adding revealing comments on the different aspects of the character of Kane as revealed by the various interviewees. It is interesting to note his view of the screenplay before he had even shot a frame. Leland, says Welles, shows Kane’s dual personality: ‘the tremendous vitality, gaiety and joie de vivre combined with the idealism which expresses itself in such a document as the Manifesto’.14 In the Boss Gettys scene ‘Kane’s monomania finally exerts itself: his enraged conviction that no one exists but himself, his refusal to admit the existence of other people with whom one must compromise, whose feelings one must take into account.’ There is some sense here of an overlap between Kane and Welles. Like a first novel, a first movie is more than likely to be autobiographical; in this instance the elements that had gone into the brew were many: Mankiewicz, Welles, even Houseman, working from a central perception, were adding more and more personal ingredients, partly in order to cover up the resemblance to Hearst’s life, partly because the narrative thread they had established offered innumerable opportunities for personal detail. The screenplay is a tapestry of private references.

  Names were culled from whoever was around: Susan Alexander got hers from Mankiewicz’s secretary Rita Alexander, Boss Jim Gettys from Hortense Hill’s maiden name, Mr Bernstein, of course, from Dadda. The central character was renamed. Mankiewicz had favoured Craig; Welles felt it was weak, and he was right: Citizen Craig has the air of a minor sit-com. Kane was Welles’s choice, after his old colleague and sparring partner, Whitford Kane, also perhaps subconsciously recalling Kane County in the state of Illinois; he overrode Mankiewicz’s concern that it would suggest the biblical Cain. It amused Houseman enormously to model the butler Raymond after Welles’s creepily indolent butler, Charles. In the same random way, things were absorbed whenever they seemed appropriate: Mankiewicz’s wife Sara had given him a snow-scene in a glass globe; as he worked on the new draft at home, he would idly pick it up and shake it about. Into the screenplay it went. Perhaps, too, as Carringer and others have suggested, he was vaguely remembering a sequence in Kitty Foyle, 1939’s Ginger Rogers vehicle, which makes much of just such a snow scene in a crystal globe; perhaps not. As for Rosebud, various prurient suggestions have been offered (Hearst allegedly referred to Marion Davies’s pudenda by that name); in fact Mankiewicz had had in boyhood a bicycle named Rosebud. The sled, embodying the normal life from which Kane was ripped, comes, as we have seen, from the Todd School, which represented as near to a childhood idyll as Welles knew. Thus the ingredients were assembled. What is important is that all these things were put together by controlling intelligences who were very aware of what they were aiming for. What came from where hardly matters; the question is why?

  Some years later, Welles was required to make a deposition on the subject of Citizen Kane before a court set up to establish, ironically enough, whether its authors had plagiarised Lundberg’s biography, Imperial Hearst. He outlined the story they were telling in terms which make it perfectly clear that they had a very strong conception of the meaning of the film. ‘We postulated a fairly classic psychological set-up,’ testified Welles, ‘involving the loss of a mother, the failure to make what psychoanalysts speak of as a “transference” to any other woman and the need to wield power as an expression of ego. Kane was a spoiled child, but spoiled without benefit of human affection. In other words, we wished to show a man with an urge to assume a position of responsibility in public affairs but having himself no sense of responsibility, only a series of good intentions, fuzzy sentiments and numb, undefined yearnings … his failure in public life and the transference of his efforts from his own broken political career to those of an untalented woman, a singer at whom audiences laughed, all this grew out of the initial character set up. Kane’s retreat to one of those enormous imitation feudal kingdoms, which his type of public man tends to construct for himself, was another natural result of the character as conceived. If the world did not behave the way he wanted it to behave, then he would build a world of his own where all the citizens were his subjects and on his payroll. Such men as Kane always tend toward the newspaper and entertainment world. They combine a morbid preoccupation with the public with a devastatingly low opinion of the public mentality and moral character.’ The notion of a man who rebuilds the unsatisfactory real world in a parallel world of invention and propaganda was at the heart of the script as they had evolved it; this too was something Welles understood deeply.

  Once the picture had been given the go-ahead, the collaborators, whatever tensions or distrust underlay their work, were in high spirits, so much so that the New York Herald Tribune of 19 May 1940 reported that ‘John Houseman, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles announce the formation of United Productions. UP will present for Pacific Coast runs 5 new productions a year originating in Hollywood … the Mercury Theatre will operate in partnership with the new producing firm, furnishing it with 2 productions a season, directed and produced by Mr Welles.’ This expansion was a sure sign of Welles’s confidence; whenever things were going well, he announced a five-year plan. These were not to be taken seriously: an ambitious press release was for him the equivalent of a shot of vitamin B12. Of this particular plan, like most of them, no more was heard, though Houseman began to sound out properties. Houseman continued to be involved in the three-way collaboration on the script of Kane: a telegram of 16 June 1940 shows both how basic to the project was Houseman’s participation, and how active was Welles’s work on the script: ‘dear mank received your cut version also several new scenes of orsons stop approve all cuts stop still don’t like rome scene and will try to work on it my humble self stop after much careful reading i like all orsons scene including new montages and Chicago opera scenes with exception of kane emily sequence stop don’t like scene on boat stop query any first meeting scene between them before oil scandal comes to shatter it stop simply don’t understand sequence or sense of orsons telescoped kane leland emily assassination scenes stop there again will try and make up my own version stop please keep me posted’.15 Meanwhile, the accounts department had got their hands on the second draft. Their assessment was $1,082,798: twice the agreed budget. The third draft, which had been Welles’s exclusive responsibility, and which was further extensively trimmed, was received gloomily by accounts: Welles’s cuts had made no substantial difference to the cost. It was, they pointed out, fifty to sixty pages longer than any film ever previously shot by RKO. Frustrated but still forging eagerly ahead, Welles was happy to put Mankiewicz back on payroll to work on further condensation and elimination, leaving him to work on it alone while he started to work on the physical aspect of the filming: the art work and, above all, the cinematography.

  The art director assigned to him by Van Nest Polglase, overall head of design at RKO, was Perry Ferguson, a man known, Carringer reveals, for his even temper, his diplomatic skills, his speed and his versatility. From Gunga Din to Bringing up Baby, from The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle to The Swiss Family Robinson he had easily moved from one period to another, from screwball comedy to romance, desert island drama to military epic. This admirable man worked happily with Welles, story-boarding every scene, suggesting, modifying, advising. Welle
s was supremely confident visually; design in the cinema is essentially the same as design in the theatre if you believe, as Welles passionately did, in the expressive importance of it. He had a very clear concept of what he wanted from the settings: they should help to trace the rise and fall of the central character. Making the story-board immediately brought Welles to the fundamental question: the framing of the shots. What would the film look like? He needed the input of his cameraman. The story-board process, which requires crucial decisions, is a severe test of a tyro director. Technically speaking, of course, Welles the superb illustrator naturally thought in terms of groupings, tableaux. The difficulty is that the enormous number of successive images that is a film requires some sort of organic logic, like images in a poem. It is a language, and it has a grammar, but scarcely one that can be taught, except by experience. It is a different way of communicating, and no matter how heightened your visual awareness, a grasp of the language is essential. It may even be said that the more visually sophisticated the aspiring director, the firmer his grasp must be. Proliferating astonishing images is the easiest thing in the world; telling a story through them is another matter. A wonderful vocabulary will get you precisely nowhere if you can’t frame a sentence. The tyro director desperately depends on his cameraman for guidance.