Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (104 page)

“Everything else—the principal as well as all monies earned—is to be administered by the bank in trust for your son, Charles Foster Kane,” as Walter Parks Thatcher explains to Mr. and Mrs. Kane in the Kane boardinghouse in the deep backstory of
Citizen Kane
, “until his twenty-fifth birthday, at which time he is to come into complete possession.”

The loss of weekly radio income; the Mercury Theatre’s considerable debt; the five figures or more that he owed in back taxes; and the increased obligation to his ex-wife, Virginia, and their daughter, Christopher—all this, on top of the lost income from his canceled lectures, made Welles’s financial situation desperate. His money blew out the door as fast as it blew in. While the studio was liberal with its overhead allowances, RKO refused to pay out any additional moneys to Welles until principal photography on
Citizen Kane
began.

Throughout March and April, Richard Baer and Arnold Weissberger struggled to pay Orson’s bills while conspiring to force him into exigent measures that he continued to resist.

“I have tried to sound as dire as possible,” Weissberger wrote to Baer in early April. “The minute he were to believe that the situation was only bad and not terrible, he would fail to take any cognizance of restrictive measures. For his own protection, therefore, I shall continue to be completely pessimistic in my advices to him.”

The small amounts of money that Orson loaned to friends, or payments he authorized for occasional onetime services—payments that looked suspiciously like handouts—Welles refused to itemize or track down for collection. The loans he made to friends he considered gifts, more or less. Meanwhile, the Mercury Theatre was in nearly fathomless arrears. “You have paid over to the Mercury Theatre in the aggregate of $50,000,” his lawyer explained to him in a letter. “The cost of
Danton’s Death
alone was about $50,000. This will explain to you why Mercury is still so much in debt.”

Orson had asked Weissberger to seek an early distribution of his inheritance, which for months leading up to his birthday was believed to be in the neighborhood of $30,000. That was still relatively substantial, if disappointing, and Orson hoped to spend it on overdue bills and sprinkle a little on “American” while pouring the remainder into his future plans. Weissberger warned against dipping into the money—Orson’s only money—prematurely.

Finally, in April, Orson dismissed his maid, butler, and gardener. He scouted out a lower-cost house away from Brentwood in the Coldwater Canyon neighborhood of Beverly Hills. He agreed to downsize the Mercury offices in New York, cutting by a third the salaries of both remaining staff members (including Weissberger’s long-serving sister, Augusta), and subletting part of the space. And he trimmed the West Coast staff down to Richard Baer and Herbert Drake.

When Weissberger finally reported back on the trust fund, the news was grim. Orson was indeed owed $33,438.18 on his twenty-fifth birthday. But $15,000 of that total was earmarked to repay the several bank loans Orson had negotiated against his inheritance in recent years, and included $2,000 from Columbia Artists that Orson had borrowed as an advance against his various earnings, whose note of guarantee was also held by the bank. Another $12,000 had to be set aside for overdue income taxes, as the federal government was threatening to impose a lien on Welles. Finally, Dr. Maurice Bernstein held a chit for a personal loan to Orson of $1,233.76, which the doctor insisted upon recovering.

That left a mere $5,000 as the residue of the fortune bequeathed to this onetime “rich boy,” as Chicago newspaper headlines had called him. Weissberger begged Welles to keep the paltry sum in the bank, where it would earn interest. Orson wanted nothing further to do with the Chicago bank. He gave Weissberger instructions to withdraw the $5,000 and send it his way, where it was quickly sown in the wind. Orson ordered the bank to turn over his father’s personal effects—including the grip Dick Welles had carried with him around the world—to Dr. Bernstein.

Virginia was another person keenly attuned to the date of her ex-husband’s inheritance. After leaving the hospital and recovering her health, she no longer spoke of returning to New York, nor of acting anymore under the name Anna Stafford. These days she was frequently glimpsed at Hollywood nightspots in the company of writer Charles Lederer. Still contriving to hold on to his mansion, Orson arranged for Virginia and his daughter to live in the lower-cost Beverly Hills house he had rented; in lieu of paying child support he let them use it free.

Like her father, Virginia was by now convinced that Orson stood to gain riches beyond imagining on his twenty-fifth birthday. She had agreed to a temporary reduction in alimony when she thought Orson was engulfed by crisis (and she herself was in the hospital in a vulnerable state). Now she withdrew that concession, submitted a bill for back alimony and other costs, and threatened to hire a lawyer.

Arnold Weissberger had the unpleasant task of sorting out Virginia’s financial claims, and an alimony agreement that morphed as often as Orson’s RKO contract. This job was further complicated when, a mere ten days after Orson’s birthday, Virginia eloped with Lederer; they were married at the home of a justice of the peace in Phoenix, Arizona. The marriage came just four months after her divorce, and her claim to reporters that there was no other romance in her life.

Everyone else saw it coming. Nor was Orson surprised: the couple had privately announced a June ceremony before dashing off to Phoenix. And Welles liked Lederer—a dapper, amusing man in the Hecht-MacArthur circle—as much as everyone else in Hollywood did. But when Virginia moved in with Lederer, she moved out of Orson’s rented house—and sublet it to other people at a profit to herself. She then escalated her demands for more alimony, with her unpaid hospital costs a major sticking point. “I consider at this distance from the event that I was ill treated and duped in the whole matter of the divorce settlement,” Virginia wrote to Weissberger.

May 6, 1939, was just another unhappy birthday for Orson. His inheritance had proved a mirage. He owed incomprehensible amounts of money to his wife, the banks, the Mercury Theatre’s creditors, and the tax collector. The man with a golden contract was very nearly broke.

Show business columnists who had chronicled Orson’s life story—the trust fund left to the wunderkind by his wealthy father—chortled publicly over his comeuppance. “Orson Welles received oodles of publicity over the legend that on May 6 he would inherit” a windfall, wrote Walter Winchell, “but taxes, erosions, time and etcetera made him the receiver of the magnificent sum of $28.40.”

When, in
Citizen Kane
, Thompson remarks of Charles Foster Kane, “He made an awful lot of money,” Mr. Bernstein the business manager offers a piercing rejoinder: “It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money. You take Mr. Kane—it wasn’t money he wanted. Thatcher never did figure him out. Sometimes, even I couldn’t.”

Although Welles hated parallels between himself and Kane, that was as close as the film came to a declaration of Orson’s own principles. It was no trick to have, or to make, a lot of money. Orson, who knew many tricks, often quoted that as one of his favorite lines—the work of Herman Mankiewicz, another pearl dropping from the mouth of Mr. Bernstein.

According to Richard Meryman’s biography of Mankiewicz, John Houseman “departed for New York just four days after delivering ‘American’ to Welles.” Although Orson would keep him apprised of successive drafts, asking for his advice and input, Houseman was absent from the substantial rewriting that occurred over the next two and a half months.

Their partnership was still precarious, but around the time the script was delivered, Orson made several public announcements about the future of the Mercury Theatre. Welles told the press that the Mercury was planning a fall Broadway season, to open with his own adaptation of Shakespeare’s
King Lear
, presented in two acts on one set. He also announced that he, Houseman, and Mankiewicz would open a West Coast branch of the Mercury to be known as United Productions, with the New York Mercury furnishing two of the five plays to be produced in Los Angeles; the other three would originate locally.

One of the properties Welles set his sights on was a stage version of
Native Son
, Richard Wright’s incendiary new novel set in the Negro slums on Chicago’s South Side. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Orson had read the novel while Houseman and Mankiewicz were in Victorville; he now persuaded Houseman that, with his help and Mankiewicz’s, he could turn the acclaimed but difficult-to-dramatize novel into a first-rate stage play. The title role would be perfect for a black actor such as Canada Lee. Houseman agreed to approach Wright quietly, to negotiate the rights.

With Welles, it was always hard to know which of his ideas were real and which were feints. The bicoastal Mercury was a magnificent gesture of confidence in and gratitude to Houseman and Mankiewicz as a script team. Only one United Production would ever come to pass, however, and that was
Native Son.
Early in June, Houseman wrote to say that he’d obtained permission from the author. Miraculously, then, Welles, who conferred with Mankiewicz and worked like a madman after dark, promised by telegraph a “tentative cut-down version [of the
Native Son
script] first two hundred pages tomorrow for your information and suggestions.” Although playwright Paul Green eventually earned the credit for the adaptation, Houseman, Mankiewicz, and Welles all contributed to the script; Mank was listed on the eventual stage production credits as associate producer.

The script for “American,” meanwhile, was delivered to RKO president George Schaefer. On May 18 Orson mailed another sealed copy—the only copy that circulated outside Hollywood—to Roger Hill in Woodstock, Illinois, asking for his old headmaster’s feedback. Although it was merely a working draft, Orson wrote to Skipper, the script was “a source of some gratification.”

With Mankiewicz “off to MGM on another assignment,” according to Robert L. Carringer, doctoring without credit the Ben Hecht–Charles Lederer script of the anticommunist comedy
Madame X
, Welles had to clear his desk and roll up his sleeves. The 325-page script for “American” was cluttered and overlong; it had to be reduced by at least half. Even if Mankiewicz had not been otherwise occupied, Orson would have had little choice but to bypass him: Mank was mulishly stubborn when asked to make even the slightest changes to his prose. (“Herman would rather talk for three days than change two innocuous lines of dialogue,” Bert Granet, the producer of one Mankiewicz film, told Richard Meryman.)

The drama had to be paced the way Orson lived: like an express train. Orson cut away at the periphery, starting with the flashbacks to Kane as a boy and young man. (One sequence Orson deleted, which showed Kane expelled from a German university for a prank, also echoed too closely an incident in Hearst’s life.) He compressed many scenes into “snappy and arresting montages,” in Carringer’s phrase, including the memorable flash-forward that covered all of Kane’s youth. Thatcher is seen bestowing an unwanted sled on Kane as a boy, and trilling, “Well, Charles, Merry Christmas”—with the boy returning his salutation coldly. The screen cuts to Thatcher dictating “. . . a very Happy New Year” to his secretary on Kane’s twenty-fifth birthday. (In Mankiewicz and Welles’s “shooting script,” as published by Pauline Kael, this masterful device is not only missing; it is replaced by Mank’s sentimental image of the boy Kane sobbing into a pillow, “Mom! Mom!”) Orson’s version foreshadowed the sled at the end of the film, fortified the “Rosebud” conceit, and jumped shrewdly past Kane’s empty boyhood.

Welles’s storytelling strategies, full of tricks he’d gleaned in his years as a stage and radio director, were foreign to Mank. Orson knew how to cut scenes to save screen time and money, often employing sound and visual effects that only he could dream up and pull off. Another striking time lapse in the final film, for example, shows Susan Alexander singing for Kane in her humble apartment; dissolves to her singing within better surroundings set up for her as a kept woman by Kane; then cuts to a group of people applauding Leland as he concludes a speech introducing Kane during his campaign; and finally moves to Kane finishing Leland’s sentence from his podium at Madison Square Garden—all done “faster than you could do in radio,” as Welles boasted to Peter Bogdanovich.

Often, decisions made during production were crucial contributions—as in the opening sequence at Xanadu, just as the camera reaches the window of Kane’s bedroom, when the room light flicks off and then on again. The published shooting script says nothing about the light going off. Why did Welles choose to do that? asked Peter Bogdanovich. “To interest the audience,” Orson explained. “We’d been going on quite a while there with nothing happening. You see a light in the window—you keep coming nearer—and it better go off, or a shadow had better cross, or something better happen. So I turned the light off—that’s all. . . .

“Maybe the nurse turned it off because it was getting in [Kane’s] eyes. Who knows? Who cares? The other answer is that it symbolized death. Got that? All right.

“He was supposed to die when the light went off, and then you go back a few minutes and see him alive again—if you really want a reason. The other, low-class reason was to keep the audience interested. And they’re both valid.”

Over and over again, where Mankiewicz simply had jotted “Dissolve out . . . dissolve in,” Orson added theatrical effects that made the scene changes memorable. Another example is the abrupt and startling image of a white cockatoo, shrieking in close-up, as Raymond the butler starts describing Kane’s tantrum after his second wife leaves him.

“Why did you use the shrieking cockatoo?” asked Bogdanovich.

“Wake ’em up,” answered Welles.

“Literally?” said Bogdanovich.

“Yeah. Getting late in the evening, you know,” Orson replied. “Time to brighten up anybody who might be nodding off.”