City of Nets (20 page)

The saga of
Citizen Kane
is by now one of Hollywood's most beloved legends—a somewhat more intellectual version of
A Star Is Born
—and scholars of the cinema have analyzed not only cameraman Gregg Toland's striking use of 24 mm wide-angle lenses, stopped down to achieve deep focus, but even the sources for the libretto for the fake opera,
Salammbo,
briefly and badly sung by Kane's second wife (a text that was excerpted, as a sort of private joke, from Racine's
Phèdre:
“Ah, cruel! tu m'as trop entendue!”). At the time of Welles's spectacular arrival, though, Hollywood keenly resented the celebrated newcomer, particularly when he took a tour of RKO and called it “the biggest electric train a boy ever had.” A popular Hollywood ditty by a minor actor named Jean Hersholt ridiculed the fact that “Little Orphan Annie's come to our house to play,” and when Welles invited Hollywood's notables to his own house for a party, almost nobody came. Welles nonetheless set up his command post in the virtually bankrupt hulk of RKO and began experimenting. He worked on a film of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
—what a movie
that
would have made!—then on a thriller by C. Day Lewis called
The Smiler with a Knife,
which was vaguely based on the life of the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley and involved a pro-Axis putsch in Mexico. There was even talk of his filming a life of Christ.

By a series of turns of fate, Welles soon joined forces with Herman J. Mankiewicz, a onetime
New Yorker
theater critic who had served as the Pied Piper leading many of the Algonquin writers to Hollywood. (“Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots,” Mankiewicz had announced in a famous telegram to Ben Hecht back in 1926.) Mankiewicz was so dedicated to his own wit that he would sacrifice a job for a joke, as he did when he actually dared to remark, after Harry Cohn had declared to his assembled sycophants at Columbia that he could always foretell the future success of a movie by whether it caused a tremor in his own rear end: “Imagine! The whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!”
*
Mankiewicz was also a dedicated gambler, who borrowed in order to gamble and lied in order to borrow and drank in order to lie. Drinking got him fired from several good jobs (as producer of the Marx Brothers'
Night at the Opera,
for example), but it was gambling that brought his final downfall at M-G-M. He had not only begged Louis B. Mayer for a thirty-thousand-dollar advance on his new contract but sworn to give up gambling (“A compliment from Mayer,” he once said of his patron, “is like having Nathan Leopold tell you that you're lovable”), and then he looked up from the poker game that he had organized in the M-G-M dining room and found himself confronting the implacable eye of his employer. Fired the next day, and more or less blackballed among the major studios, Mankiewicz left his wife to deal with his gambling debts and started driving back to New York with another writer, who skidded off the road and smashed up the car. That was how Herman Mankiewicz, jobless, penniless, hung over, and imprisoned in a plaster cast from hip to ankle, received a visit from Orson Welles, who charitably offered him five hundred dollars a week to convert tales like
Rip Van Winkle
into radio scripts. It was only a matter of time before they began talking about movie possibilities. Mankiewicz had wanted for years to write a story that he called
American.
It was about William Randolph Hearst.

Hearst was one of the liberals' bogeymen of that era, a man whose control of a large newspaper empire devoted to reactionary politics and cheap crime seemed to make him a demagogue of towering menace. The fact that his newspapers generally lost money and had very limited power did not deter his detractors from worrying about the potentialities of his sinister influence. Mankiewicz knew all the newspaper gossip, of course, but he also knew his subject firsthand. Hearst had enjoyed his company, and so had Marion Davies, the charming and funny actress whose relationship to Hearst was conventionally disguised as mere friendship. “One last thing to remember [is that] writers are always selling somebody out,” Joan Didion once observed. And so Mankiewicz proceeded to include in his cruel portrait of Charles Foster Kane the portrait of an untalented and alcoholic young protégée who liked to spend her time, as did Miss Davies, on jigsaw puzzles.

Welles was pleased with Mankiewicz's script, but he also thought it somewhat wordy and slow-moving. He was accustomed to making substantial revisions himself, even on Shakespeare, and now he cut out whole scenes, whole subplots. He wrote in others that derived from his own instincts—Kane's disastrous attempts to make his new wife an opera singer, for example. The megalomaniac Charles Foster Kane was, after all, to be at least partly Orson Welles. Yes, and as both writers kept revising each other's drafts, Mankiewicz also had views of Welles that he wanted to include. Kane's great furniture-smashing tantrum, for example, was a reenactment of one of Welles's own explosions.

Once they had created their marvelous script, of course, they had to fight over who should get the credit. Welles's RKO contract specifically said that “the screenplay for each picture shall be written by Mr. Orson Welles,” and Welles probably thought that an old drunk like Mankiewicz should be content with his five hundred dollars a week for collaborative ghostwriting. But Mankiewicz knew that
Citizen Kane
was an accomplishment that made up for all the wasted years of hack work and drunken jokes. It made him unhappy to hear Welles quoted in Louella Parsons's column, before the question of screen credits was officially settled, as saying, “So I wrote
Citizen Kane.
” So Mankiewicz went to the Screen Writers Guild and declared that he was the original author. Welles later claimed that he planned on a joint credit all along, but Mankiewicz claimed that Welles offered him a bonus of ten thousand dollars if he would let Welles take full credit. Since Mankiewicz was chronically in debt, he asked Ben Hecht what he should do about this proposal, and Hecht gave him a characteristic answer: “Take the ten grand and double-cross the son of a bitch.” The Screen Writers Guild eventually decreed a joint credit, with Mankiewicz's name first.

Welles, who prided himself on his skill as a practicing magician, engaged in some extraordinary legerdemain to get
Citizen Kane
on film at all. Schaefer had granted him creative autonomy, but only subject to RKO approval of each script and budget, and there was considerable question whether a nearly bankrupt studio would approve a thinly disguised attack on one of the nation's most powerful newspaper publishers. Welles thought up the remarkable expedient of shooting repeated “tests,” which needed no official approval, until the accumulated “tests” represented such a large portion of the prospective movie that Welles was able to bluff Schaefer into approving what was almost a
fait accompli.
It may be, as some say, that RKO knew perfectly well what Welles was doing, but his bluff was a kind of prank, typical of the youthful exuberance that pervades
Citizen Kane.

Welles relied just as much on bluff in winning the approval of Hearst's elephantine movie columnist, Louella Parsons. It is almost impossible now to realize the power once exercised by Mrs. Parsons, and her rival, Hedda Hopper, but in the 1940's, these two vain and ignorant women tyrannized Hollywood. Mrs. Parsons (née Ottinger) was already a twice-divorced woman
*
of twenty-nine when she first came to Chicago in 1910, got herself a job on the
Tribune,
and began spending her nights writing movie scenarios. She more or less invented the idea of a movie gossip column in the
Chicago Record-Herald,
then moved to the
New York Morning Telegraph,
then, in 1924, went to cover Hollywood for Hearst. There is a popular legend that Mrs. Parsons owed her job to the death of Thomas Ince, a successful director whom Hearst had just hired to take charge of his Cosmopolitan Films. Ince died suddenly aboard Hearst's yacht, the
Oneida,
and although the official cause of death was angina, some gossips claimed that Hearst had shot him after discovering him in flagrante delicto with Marion Davies. According to an even more colorful version, Hearst had discovered Miss Davies with Charlie Chaplin, began shooting wildly, and killed Ince by mistake. In either case, Mrs. Parsons was said to have been aboard the yacht and to have kept Hearst's secret. Unfortunately for this story, Ince seems actually to have died of too much food and liquor, and Mrs. Parsons seems to have been in New York at the time. Her chief appeal to Hearst was her gushing enthusiasm for the movies, and specifically for all movies featuring Marion Davies.

What Mrs. Parsons now asked Welles, on behalf of her thirty million readers, was whether his new movie dealt with William Randolph Hearst. Why, of course not, said Welles. It was entirely a work of fiction. Perhaps because Welles was feeding her a five-course lunch in his dressing room, which had belonged to Gloria Swanson and was still lined with red satin, or perhaps because he was young and handsome, Mrs. Parsons believed him. And so it was not until the official press screening in New York in early January of 1940 that Hedda Hopper first saw
Citizen Kane
and said to Welles, “You can't get away with this.” Said Welles: “I will.” When Hearst read Mrs. Hopper's column, he hastily asked Mrs. Parsons what was going on, and she rushed to a special screening with two lawyers. Then she began telephoning. She telephoned Schaefer, and Rockefeller, and every member of the RKO board of directors, and Will Hays, and Louis B. Mayer, and Darryl Zanuck—anybody she could think of. She said, among other things, “Mr. Hearst says if you boys want private lives, I'll give you private lives.”

Citizen Kane
was scheduled to open on February 14, 1941, at Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center (the Rockefellers owned a large share of RKO). Then the theater abruptly canceled the opening. Schaefer called Nelson Rockefeller to find out the reason and learned some details of Mrs. Parsons's threats of retribution. “Rockefeller told me,” Schaefer recalled later, “that Louella Parsons . . . had asked him, ‘How would you like to have [Hearst's]
American Weekly
run a double-page spread on John D. Rockefeller?' ” And then, suddenly, Schaefer had trouble booking
Citizen Kane
anywhere at all. And there was more. Hearst photographers began following Welles through the streets, hoping to catch some moment of indiscretion. Inquiries to his draft board persistently raised the question of why he was not in the army. Hedda Hopper predicted darkly that “the refugee situation would be looked into,” which seemed to threaten a general investigation by the Hearst newspapers and the American Legion and other patriotic organizations into the question of why so many Hollywood studios employed so many foreigners, particularly those of leftist sympathies. “Nor are private lives to be overlooked,” Mrs. Hopper warned.
*

Then came the most extraordinary proposal of all. Nicholas Schenck, the head of Loew's, invited Schaefer to New York and made him an offer. He was making this offer, he said, on behalf of Louis B. Mayer, who considered himself not only a friend of Hearst's but also the patriarch of the movie business. Mayer proposed to pay RKO $842,000 in cash if Schaefer would destroy the negative and all the prints of
Citizen Kane.
Since the film had cost $686,000, Mayer's offer represented a fairly handsome profit on a movie that Schaefer was having trouble in booking anywhere. Schaefer, to his credit, refused. Schaefer, to his credit, didn't even mention this irresistible offer to his own board of directors, for he feared that the directors might order him to accept it. Schaefer, to his credit, responded to the M-G-M bribe by threatening a conspiracy suit against all the major theater chains: Fox, Paramount, Loew's. This was the crisis that roused
Time
and other journals to protest. And since the theater chains were just as terrified of conspiracy suits as they were of Hearst boycotts, they relented enough to provide a few showings for
Citizen Kane,
which, in the final accounting, just barely broke even.

And then, in one of those executive whirlwinds, a major RKO stockholder named Floyd Odlum, a Texas entrepreneur of nebulous ambitions, bought enough additional shares from David Sarnoff to give him control of the whole studio, and that was the end of Schaefer. And two weeks after Schaefer was evicted, Orson Welles was also evicted, given a few hours' notice to move out (the Mercury Theatre's space was needed for a Tarzan film crew). One of the contributing reasons for this upheaval was a widespread rumor, apparently sponsored by Louis B. Mayer, that Schaefer couldn't get good bookings for RKO films because he was anti-Semitic.

 

It is difficult to maintain a sense of perspective. The year 1941—the year in which Hollywood granted its Academy Award not to
Citizen Kane,
nor to
The Maltese Falcon,
nor even to
Kings Row,
but to
How Green Was My Valley
—was the year in which Adolf Hitler betrayed his ally Stalin and sent more than 150
Wehrmacht
divisions plunging eastward on a front that reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Yet the epic overview often fails to see what is really happening. In
Mother Courage,
written in exile in Denmark in 1938, Bertolt Brecht had demonstrated brilliantly that all the grand strategies of the Thirty Years' War could be reduced to one woman wheeling her wagonload of supplies in the wake of whichever army needed food. “Christians, awake! The winter's gone!” she sang. “The snows depart, the dead sleep on . . .”

Brecht himself, who remembered this as “the dark time [when] we went changing countries more often than our shoes,” had fled from Berlin to Prague to Austria to France to Denmark and found refuge at last in a whitewashed and thatch-roofed farmhouse on the island of Langeland. He liked to imagine it as an outpost of anti-Nazi resistance. “Fled under a thatched Danish roof,/My friends, I follow your struggles,” he wrote. “Here I send you—from time to time—/Verses raked up through bloody visions.” Yet here in exile, between 1937 and 1940, he wrote three of his greatest plays,
Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Setzuan,
and
Galileo.
(Andrea: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo: “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”)