Peter Bogdanovich Shares His Memories of Orson Welles, and Who Really Deserves Credit for ‘Citizen Kane’

David Fincher’s new movie, Mank, is about many things, but it all started with an article written by legendary film critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker in early 1971. “Raising Kane” purported to tell the real story behind the writing of Citizen Kane, and sought to prove that Orson Welles didn’t write any of the script, and in fact had tried to steal credit from his co-author, Herman Mankiewicz.

Kael’s article was debunked some years later, but its legacy lives on. Fincher read the piece in middle school, and suggested to his father, Jack, that he write a screenplay based on its contents. While Mank doesn’t quite share all of Kael’s opinions, much of her piece can still be felt in the movie.

Director Peter Bogdanovich, best known for a string of successes in the 1970s–including The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon–was close friends with Welles in those days, and the two recorded many hours of interviews for a book they intended to publish. They also collaborated on a response to Kael’s article, which was published in Esquire in 1972. Decider talked to Bogdanovich about those experiences, and why Kael’s piece has remained in the cultural firmament, even after it had been disproven. [This conversation has been edited for clarity.]

DECIDER: You’re so intimately involved in this story, thanks to your [book of] interviews with Orson Welles and with the Esquire piece you wrote about the authorship of Citizen Kane (“The Kane Mutiny”). What was your impression of Herman Mankiewicz before you started talking to Orson? Was Herman just the other name on the screenplay credit, or did you know his other work?

PETER BOGDANOVICH: I didn’t know his work at all. I assumed that he worked with Orson; otherwise, he wouldn’t have gotten credit. When the Kael piece came out, Orson was quite upset about it. He didn’t like the idea that his [grand]children would think of him as a bald-faced liar. 

He said, “Herman made a tremendous contribution. That’s why I gave him first billing!” He didn’t have to give him that. Orson changed the credit order himself. He reminded me of Bernstein’s story in Kane when he saw the woman in the white parasol, just for a moment, but there wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think of her. Orson said, very emotionally, “That was Mankiewicz! That was my favorite thing in the picture!”

Orson still worked on the script. Orson rewrote Shakespeare! Nothing was going to stop him from rewriting Mankiewicz. 

Pauline Kael’s piece was written in an attempt to destroy the French auteur theory, to show that even the greatest film supposedly ever made in America was not made by a single artist, but rather as a collaboration, and so on and so forth. It was an attempt to take away from the idea of a personal cinema, so to speak.

It was all an attempt to shoot down the critics who believed in personal films, like me, Andrew Sarris, Eugene Archer, and others. Ironically, she would write as though she were an auteur critic. She kept writing about the directors! She was just full of shit. She had an axe to grind.

Orson was very upset when the Kael piece came out. How did you end up writing an article for Esquire telling Orson’s side of the story?

I suggested to Orson that I write something. He liked the idea. I did several interviews and wrote the piece rather quickly and showed it to him before I sent it in. He actually rewrote the last part of it quite a bit. Not so much that it would be particularly noticeable.

You interviewed a couple of people for that piece like Charles Lederer and Welles’s secretary, Katherine Trosper.

Pauline’s only source of information was John Houseman, Orson’s producer for a short time. He became Orson’s biggest enemy when they broke up. Houseman would spread a lot of shit about Orson.

I actually knew John, when I was a teenager. I was in the production of King John that he directed, badly. This was in 1956 at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. He couldn’t direct his way out of a paper bag.

I didn’t talk about Orson because I didn’t know the connection at that point. But when Orson told me that all of Pauline’s source material was basically Houseman–and she didn’t interview anybody else–I made a point of interviewing as many people as I could track down who were around and knew what was going on at the time.

His secretary said, “if Orson didn’t write the script, then what was all that stuff I was typing?” Everyone I talked to, to a person, said Orson rewrote the script.

The historian Robert Carringer found all of the Kane script drafts and was able to prove 100% that Welles was the co-writer. He did that in 1978 (in a Critical Inquiry piece entitled “The Scripts of “Citizen Kane”), yet here we are, more than 40 years later, and in a lot of people’s minds, the issue of credit it still not a settled question. Why do you think that the Kael version of history has been allowed to persist, even though there’s plenty of evidence to say that it isn’t true?

Well, people who read The New Yorker don’t read much else, I guess. The other thing is that everybody likes to say that they found out something that nobody else knows, that everybody else is a fool, all that shit. It’s just a lot of crap.

As Orson said, Houseman had it in for him. I think—and Orson did not say this—that Houseman was in love with Orson. John may have been gay, and Orson wasn’t. There might have been some kind of thing that happened. I don’t know, but I have a feeling that’s what happened. That turned Houseman into a one-man, ruin-Orson’s-reputation department.

“Well, people who read The New Yorker don’t read much else, I guess.”

You have become rather friendly with Mankiewicz’s grandson, Ben, over the years. You both just worked on that podcast series, The Plot Thickens, together. Obviously, Ben has his own views about this story, as do most of the people in the Mankiewicz family. Did you and Ben ever talk about it?

Not really. I love Ben. He’s a good guy, very smart. We work well together. But I wasn’t gonna get into that conversation. I’m not going to change his mind, so talking about it would be a waste of time. He mentioned it once and I just nodded.

David Fincher’s movie, Mank, is putting all of this back into the spotlight. How should Herman Mankiewicz be remembered by history, specifically with regard to Citizen Kane? What should his legacy on that film be?

I think he was a tremendous help in getting that movie made. I’m sure he did a lot of work on it that was very good. Orson never denied it. In fact, Orson gave him top billing, so I don’t know what the problem is. Pauline’s bullshit and Houseman’s treachery live on.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports

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