Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (105 page)

“It has no other purpose . . . ?”

“Theatrical shock effect,” answered Welles; “if you want to be grand about it—you can say it’s placed at a certain musical moment when I felt the need for something short and exclamatory. So it has a sort of purpose, but no meaning. What’s fascinating, though, is that, because of some accident in the trick department, you can see through the bird’s eye into the scenery behind.”

“I always thought that was intentional,” said Bogdanovich.

“We don’t know why that happened,” said Welles. “Some accident.”

These were small touches. Far more important was Orson’s work in dropping big chunks of the adult Kane’s story from the script. Mank argued fiercely to preserve a series of scenes referencing the McKinley assassination, which would have set up an argument between Kane and Leland demonstrating the widening gulf in their friendship. But Orson knew what he wanted and what would work. “I was the one who was making the picture, after all—who made the decisions,” Welles recalled. “I used what I wanted of Mank’s and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.” Although the McKinley scenes were a perfect example of what Meryman called Mank’s “banked-up political-historical expertise,” they took the script too far away from the main story, while also adding to the cost and length of the production. Besides, the McKinley assassination was dicey territory—a clear swipe at Hearst and his newspaper empire, which Orson recognized, even if Houseman had not. The assassination scenes went into the circular file.

Mank also fought to retain the idea that Kane had Susan’s lover murdered—an obvious allusion to Hearst and his possible connection to the death of Thomas Ince aboard Hearst’s yacht in 1924. Ince’s death was officially attributed to a heart attack, but according to the Hollywood rumor mill Hearst shot Ince by accident, mistaking him for Charles Chaplin, after discovering Chaplin in a romantic clinch with Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies. Mank advanced an interesting argument for keeping the allusions to Ince in the script: doing so, he claimed, would dissuade Hearst from attacking the picture with a lawsuit, because such a suit would entail airing the gossip about Chaplin and Davies in public. Welles and Mank often argued like boys on a seesaw; if one rode up, the other plunged down. In this case, perhaps Mankiewicz should have been left on top. “I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film, and wasn’t in keeping with Kane’s character,” Welles mused years later. “If I’d kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn’t have dared admit it was him [being referenced].”
⁵³

In late April, even before Houseman and Mankiewicz finished the second draft of “American,” Orson had started testing actors for the important roles that he knew would survive the script process. Much of the rewriting revolved around refining the key characters offering their remembrances of Kane, tailoring them expressly for Orson’s Mercury players, whom he—as head of that troupe, and as a fellow actor—knew best.

The Mercury players functioned as “a close family,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, but it was “an Anglo-Saxon type of family where the members leave each other pretty much alone. We had our fun together during working hours—and it was fun, you know. The atmosphere was like a sort of house party. To give you an idea, we always kept a good jazz-piano man on the set. Between jobs, though, we tended to go our separate ways.”

Joseph Cotten had been on tour in
The Philadelphia Story
with Katharine Hepburn. With the tour scheduled for a summer break, Orson arranged the production calendar in order to squeeze Cotten’s major scenes in before he had to return to the road in the fall. A former newspaperman himself, Cotten was always helpful about the characters he played, and Orson brought him to Mank’s house so the two could relax and get to know each other by the swimming pool. Cotten was encouraged to make little changes in his dialogue during the filming.

The scene “Mankiewicz was proudest of in the picture,” according to Houseman, was the one when Leland confronts Kane after he has lost the gubernatorial election because of the “love nest” scandal. (“You talk about the people as though you own them . . . as though they belong to you.”) But the difference between the discursive version of the published shooting script and that of the film’s is striking. Welles and Cotten both worked on the crucial scene, with Welles pruning it to make it more concise, but also rewriting the dialogue for force and clarity.

The last climactic encounter between Kane and Leland occurs in the scene when Kane finds the newspaperman slumped over his typewriter, his devastating pan of Susan Alexander Kane’s opera debut unfinished. It was Welles who insisted that Kane then would sit down and complete Leland’s damning review. “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.” Orson talked the scene out, and Mank was obliged to write it; the final version is close to the published version of the script. As Carringer noted, though, Orson’s addition was “an inspired touch,” transforming it from Leland’s scene to Kane’s. “The big moment is when [Kane] types the bad notice,” Welles reflected. “That’s when he’s faithful to himself.”

As the actors were lined up, their scenes were reworked. George Coulouris—the only Mercury player who already had appeared in a Hollywood film—was still in Hollywood and eager to play Thatcher. Agnes Moorehead and Everett Sloane, who had always been radio players—not part of the Mercury stage ensemble—were paying their bills with broadcast work; but they were patient and ready and waiting whenever Orson summoned them. Another radio stalwart who now would be blended into the Mercury film contingent was actor-director Paul Stewart. Orson phoned Stewart in New York, and asked him to come out to Hollywood and “do a part for me in my picture.” “Yes . . . but what’s the part?” Stewart asked. “Never mind. Just come out,” Welles said. “Well,” Stewart recalled, “when Orson said he had a part for you, you went.”

The part in question was Raymond, the butler. (“Knows where all the bodies are buried,” says Susan Alexander Kane—one of the final script’s few allusions to the Ince affair.) Years later, Stewart recalled that his very first shot in
Citizen Kane
was “a close-up in which Orson wanted a special smoke effect from my cigarette, but somehow the contraption wouldn’t exude smoke.” Orson cried out: “I want long cigarettes—the Russian kind!” Everything halted while the prop man went in search of Russian cigarettes.

“Just before the scene, Orson Welles warned me: ‘Your head is going to fill up the screen at the Radio City Music Hall,’” Stewart continued. (The film’s premiere would be held at Radio City.) “Then he said in his gruff manner: ‘Turn ’em,’ ” meaning the cameras.

“Just before I started, he added quietly in his warm voice, ‘Good luck.’

“I blew the first take,” Stewart recalled, freezing at the prospect of seeing his face on the big screen at Radio City Music Hall. But he blew it in style, saying, “Goldberg? I’ll tell you about Goldberg . . .” Orson and everyone else roared with laughter.

“It was thirty-forty takes before I completed a shot that Orson liked,” Stewart remembered, “and I only had one line. That was almost thirty years ago, but even today I have people repeat it to me, including young students. The line was:

“‘Rosebud? I’ll tell you about Rosebud . . .’”

Gus Schilling, Erskine Sanford, and Ray Collins said yes. Schilling would play the headwaiter at El Rancho, where Susan Alexander Kane is found drowning her sorrows. Sanford would portray the addle-pated veteran editor Carter (“an elderly, stout gent”), whom Kane quickly displaces at the
Inquirer.
Orson needed someone with gravitas for Boss Gettys. (In Mank’s published script, the character had the bland name Boss Roberts; Orson replaced “Roberts” with Hortense Hill’s maiden name.) He tapped Collins, his rock in radio.

The film reaches a turning point in the scene when Kane meets the oily power broker Gettys—big and heavyset, like Collins, as the script describes him—who is wounded by the fact that his wife and children have seen the
Inquirer
caricature of him drawn “in a convict suit with stripes.” Gettys uses Kane’s wife Emily to lure him to the “love nest” apartment where he threatens to expose Kane’s affair with Susan. The scene had to be written as perfectly as possible, and the first draft was crafted “exclusively by my colleague, Mr. Mankiewicz,” as Welles said in the Lundberg case. But Orson also consulted Collins. “We also closed the picture for a day in order to rewrite this scene,” Orson said. “This rewriting was done by myself and the cast of actors involved.”

KANE

There’s only one person in the world to decide what I’m gonna do and that’s me.

EMILY

You decided what you were going to do, Charles, some time ago.

GETTYS

You’re making a bigger fool of yourself than I thought you would, Mr. Kane.

KANE

I’ve got nothing to talk to you about.

GETTYS

You’re licked. Why don’t you . . .

KANE

Get out! If you wanna see me, have the warden write me a letter.

GETTYS

With anybody else, I’d say what’s gonna happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re gonna need more than one lesson. And you’re gonna get more than one lesson.

KANE

Don’t worry about me, Gettys. Don’t worry about me! I’m Charles Foster Kane! I’m no cheap crooked politician, trying to save himself from the consequences of his crimes! Gettys! I’m gonna send you to Sing-Sing! Sing-Sing, Gettys!

The film called for dozens of lesser speaking parts, and Welles plugged holes with many performers who were not Mercury veterans. One small but important role was that of Kane’s father. In the first “American” drafts, Kane later encountered his long-lost father with a “young tart” one night at a stage show. Orson cut that reappearance from the script, against Mank’s protests, but the role was still pivotal, and when Harry Shannon appeared at a casting call, Orson remembered the comic vaudeville dancer from his boyhood days and gave him the part.

With so many roles to fill, the casting would go on throughout the filming. Orson collected people wherever he encountered them. After seeing the left-wing musical
Meet the People
in Los Angeles, he went backstage to pluck new players from among the singers and dancers. He found parts for his secretaries; cameos for Herman Mankiewicz and cameraman Gregg Toland; and roles for everyone in the Mercury retinue, including Richard Wilson and William (no longer “Vakhtangov”) Alland, who had long been penciled in as Thompson, the colorless reporter. Alland also imitated the stentorian broadcaster Westbrook Pegler for the
News on the March
footage.
⁵⁴
“Great imitation,” Orson told Bogdanovich, even if Pegler was “pretty easy to imitate.” (Welles then proceeded, from memory, to boom out his own imitation of the imitation: “This week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane. . . .”)

One bit of casting that had personal meaning for Orson was the uncredited cameo he set aside for sixty-three-year-old actor Landers Stevens, who is glimpsed as an investigator in the Senate hearing that is part of
News on the March.
His casting meant nothing, except to Landers himself; his brother, Ashton Stevens; and his son, George Stevens. After ailing for months, actor Landers Stevens would die in December 1940 from complications during surgery.
Citizen Kane
was his last job.

Not everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Orson cast his net deep into his past, reaching out to William Vance, who had acted in his summer theater; had shot his first short film,
The Hearts of Age
; and had adapted
Everybody’s Shakespeare
into half-hour radio shows produced for WTAD in Quincy, Illinois. Orson had stayed in touch with Vance, and now phoned him to invite him to audition for
Citizen Kane
; but Vance’s wife was seriously ill, and he had decided he didn’t want to be an actor anyway.

Welles also contacted William Mowry Jr., the former Todd School footballer and Mercury Theatre regular. But Mowry had married and moved back to Chicago, and had grown ambivalent about a theatrical career. When Mowry demurred, Welles wired to say no hard feelings:
LOVE
,
ORSON
.

CHAPTER 20

June 1940

The Big Brass Ring

As was customary for him, and not uncommon in Hollywood, Welles had to plan ahead, coordinating his ideas for staging and cinematography with the RKO departments even as he was still working on the script. With president George Schaefer’s backing, he had the vast studio machinery at his beck and call. In particular, he needed a team of technicians with whom he could commune artistically. Luck served him in that regard—if luck also involves long waiting and studying, and a sharp instinct for reaching and scratching an itch.