“Citizen Kane” is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher. A great deal in the movie that was conventional and almost banal in 1941 is so far in the past as to have been forgotten and become new, and the Pop characterizations look modern, and rather better than they did at the time. New audiences may enjoy Orson Welles’ theatrical flamboyance even more than earlier generations did, because they’re so unfamiliar with the traditions it came out of. When Welles was young—he was twenty-five when the film opened—he used to be accused of “excessive showmanship,” but the same young audiences who now reject “theatre” respond innocently and wholeheartedly to the most unabashed tricks of theatre—and of early radio plays—in “Citizen Kane.” At some campus showings, they react so gullibly that when Kane makes a demagogic speech about “the underprivileged,” stray students will applaud enthusiastically, and a shout of “Right on!” may be heard. Though the political ironies are not clear to young audiences, and though young audiences don’t know much about the subject—William Randolph Hearst, the master jingo journalist, being to them a stock villain, like Joe McCarthy; that is, a villain without the contours of his particular villainy—they nevertheless respond to the effrontery, the audacity, and the risks. Hearst’s career and his power provided a dangerous subject that stimulated and energized all those connected with the picture—they felt they were doing something instead of just working on one more cooked-up story that didn’t relate to anything that mattered. And to the particular kinds of people who shaped this enterprise the dangers involved made the subject irresistible.
“Citizen Kane,” the film that, as Truffaut said, is “probably the one that has started the largest number of filmmakers on their careers,” was not an ordinary assignment. It is one of the few films ever made inside a major studio in the United States in freedom—not merely in freedom from interference but in freedom from the routine methods of experienced directors. George J. Schaefer, who, with the help of Nelson Rockefeller, had become president of R.K.O. late in 1938, when it was struggling to avert bankruptcy, needed a miracle to save the company, and after the national uproar over Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds” broadcast Rockefeller apparently thought that Welles—“the wonder boy”—might come up with one, and urged Schaefer to get him. But Welles, who was committed to the theatre and wasn’t especially enthusiastic about making movies, rejected the first offer; he held out until Schaefer offered him complete control over his productions. Then Welles brought out to Hollywood from New York his own production unit—the Mercury Theatre company, a group of actors and associates he could count on—and, because he was inexperienced in movies and was smart and had freedom, he was able to find in Hollywood people who had been waiting all their lives to try out new ideas. So a miracle did come about, though it was not the kind of miracle R.K.O. needed.
“Kane” does something so well, and with such spirit, that the fullness and completeness of it continue to satisfy us. The formal elements themselves produce elation; we are kept aware of how marvellously worked out the ideas are. It would be high-toned to call this method of keeping the audience aware “Brechtian,” and it would be wrong. It comes out of a different tradition—the same commercial-comedy tradition that Walter Kerr analyzed so beautifully in his review of the 1969 Broadway revival of “The Front Page,” the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, when he said, “A play was held to be something of a machine in those days. . . . It was a machine for surprising and delighting the audience, regularly, logically, insanely, but accountably. A play was like a watch that laughed.” The mechanics of movies are rarely as entertaining as they are in “Citizen Kane,” as cleverly designed to be the kind of fun that keeps one alert and conscious of the enjoyment of the artifices themselves.
Walter Kerr goes on to describe the second-act entrance prepared for Walter Burns, the scheming, ruthless managing editor of “The Front Page”:
“Citizen Kane” is made up of an astonishing number of such bits of technique, and of sequences built to make their points and get their laughs and hit climax just before a fast cut takes us to the next. It is practically a collection of blackout sketches, but blackout sketches arranged to comment on each other, and it was planned that way right in the shooting script.
It is difficult to explain what makes any great work great, and particularly difficult with movies, and maybe more so with “Citizen Kane” than with other great movies, because it isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece. Those who try to account for its stature as a film by claiming it to be profound are simply dodging the problem—or maybe they don’t recognize that there is one. Like most of the films of the sound era that are called masterpieces, “Citizen Kane” has reached its audience gradually over the years rather than at the time of release. Yet, unlike the others, it is conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style (unlike, say, “Rules of the Game” or “Rashomon” or “Man of Aran,” which one does not think of in crowd-pleasing terms). Apparently, the easiest thing for people to do when they recognize that something is a work of art is to trot out the proper schoolbook terms for works of art, and there are articles on “Citizen Kane” that call it a tragedy in fugal form and articles that explain that the hero of “Citizen Kane” is time—time being a proper sort of modern hero for an important picture. But to use the conventional schoolbook explanations for greatness, and pretend that it’s profound, is to miss what makes it such an American triumph—that it manages to create something aesthetically exciting and durable out of the playfulness of American muckraking satire. “Kane” is closer to comedy than to tragedy, though so overwrought in style as to be almost a Gothic comedy. What might possibly be considered tragic in it has such a Daddy Warbucks quality that if it’s tragic at all it’s comic-strip tragic. The mystery in “Kane” is largely fake, and the Gothic-thriller atmosphere and the Rosebud gimmickry (though fun) are such obvious penny-dreadful popular theatrics that they’re not so very different from the fake mysteries that Hearst’s American Weekly used to whip up—the haunted castles and the curses fulfilled. “Citizen Kane” is a popular masterpiece—not in terms of actual popularity but in terms of its conceptions and the way it gets its laughs and makes its points. Possibly it was too complexly told to be one of the greatest commercial successes, but we can’t really tell whether it might have become even a modest success, because it didn’t get a fair chance.
Orson Welles brought forth a miracle, but he couldn’t get by with it. Although Hearst made some direct attempts to interfere with the film, it wasn’t so much what he did that hurt the film commercially as what others feared he might do, to them and to the movie industry. They knew he was contemplating action, so they did the picture in for him; it was as if they decided whom the king might want killed, and, eager to oblige, performed the murder without waiting to be asked. Before “Kane” opened, George J. Schaefer was summoned to New York by Nicholas Schenck, the chairman of the board of Loew’s International, the M-G-M affiliate that controlled the distribution of M-G-M pictures. Schaefer had staked just about everything on Welles, and the picture looked like a winner, but now Schenck made Schaefer a cash offer from Louis B. Mayer, the head of production at M-G-M, of $842,000 if Schaefer would destroy the negative and all the prints. The picture had actually cost only $686,033; the offer handsomely included a fair amount for the post-production costs.
Mayer’s motive may have been partly friendship and loyalty to Hearst, even though Hearst, who had formerly been associated with M-G-M, had, some years earlier, after a dispute with Irving Thalberg, taken his investment out of M-G-M and moved his star, Marion Davies, and his money to Warner Brothers. M-G-M had lost money on a string of costume clinkers starring Miss Davies (“Beverly of Graustark,” et al.), and had even lost money on some of her good pictures, but Mayer had got free publicity for M-G-M releases out of the connection with Hearst, and had also got what might be called deep personal satisfaction. In 1929, when Herbert Hoover invited the Mayers to the White House—they were the first “informal” guests after his inauguration—Hearst’s New York American gave the visit a full column. Mayer enjoyed fraternizing with Hearst and his eminent guests; photographs show Mayer with Hearst and Lindbergh, Mayer with Hearst and Winston Churchill, Mayer at lunch with Bernard Shaw and Marion Davies—but they never, of course, show Mayer with both Hearst and Miss Davies. Candid cameramen sometimes caught the two together, but Hearst, presumably out of respect for his wife, did not pose in groups that included Miss Davies. Despite the publicity showered on her in the Hearst papers, the forms were carefully observed. She quietly packed and left for her own house on the rare occasions when Mrs. Hearst, who lived in the East, was expected to be in residence at San Simeon. Kane’s infatuation for the singer Susan Alexander in the movie was thus a public flaunting of matters that Hearst was careful and considerate about. Because of this, Mayer’s long-time friendship for Hearst was probably a lesser factor than the fear that the Hearst press would reveal some sordid stories about the movie moguls and join in one of those recurrent crusades against movie immorality, like the one that had destroyed Fatty Arbuckle’s career. The movie industry was frightened of reprisals. (The movie industry is always frightened, and is always proudest of films that celebrate courage.) As one of the trade papers phrased it in those nervous weeks when no one knew whether the picture would be released, “the industry could ill afford to be made the object of counterattack by the Hearst newspapers.”
There were rumors that Hearst was mounting a general campaign; his legal staff had seen the script, and Louella Parsons, the Hearst movie columnist, who had attended a screening of the film flanked by lawyers, was agitated and had swung into action. The whole industry, it was feared, would take the rap for R.K.O.’s indiscretion, and, according to the trade press at the time (and Schaefer confirms this report), Mayer was not putting up the $842,000 all by himself. It was a joint offer from the top movie magnates, who were combining for common protection. The offer was presented to Schaefer on the ground that it was in the best interests of everybody concerned—which was considered to be the entire, threatened industry—for “Citizen Kane” to be destroyed. Rather astonishingly, Schaefer refused. He didn’t confer with his board of directors, because, he says, he had good reason to think they would tell him to accept. He refused even though R.K.O., having few theatres of its own, was dependent on the other companies and he had been warned that the big theatre circuits—controlled by the men who wanted the picture destroyed—would refuse to show it.
Schaefer knew the spot he was in. The première had been tentatively set for February 14th at the Radio City Music Hall—usually the showcase for big R.K.O. pictures, because R.K.O. was partly owned by the Rockefellers and the Chase National Bank, who owned the Music Hall. The manager of the theatre had been enthusiastic about the picture. Then, suddenly, the Music Hall turned it down. Schaefer phoned Nelson Rockefeller to find out why, and, he says, “Rockefeller told me that Louella Parsons had warned him off it, that she had asked him, ‘How would you like to have the American Weekly magazine section run a double-page spread on John D. Rockefeller?’ ” According to Schaefer, she had also called David Sarnoff, another large investor in R.K.O., and similarly threatened him. Schaefer was stranded; he had to scrounge for theatres, and, amid the general fear that Hearst might sue and would almost certainly remove advertising for any houses that showed “Citizen Kane,” he couldn’t get bookings. The solution was for R.K.O. to take the risks of any lawsuits, but when the company leased an independent theatre in Los Angeles and refurbished the Palace (then a vaudeville house), which R.K.O. owned, for the New York opening, and did the same for a theatre R.K.O. owned in Chicago, Schaefer had trouble launching an advertising campaign. (Schenck, not surprisingly, owned a piece of the biggest movie-advertising agency.) Even after the early rave reviews and the initial enthusiasm, Schaefer couldn’t get bookings except in the theatres that R.K.O. itself owned and in a few small art houses that were willing to take the risk. Eventually, in order to get the picture into theatres, Schaefer threatened to sue Warners’, Fox, Paramount, and Loew’s on a charge of conspiracy. (There was reason to believe the company heads had promised Hearst they wouldn’t show it in their theatres.) Warners’ (perhaps afraid of exposure and the troubles with their stockholders that might result from a lawsuit) gave in and booked the picture, and the others followed, halfheartedly—in some cases, theatres paid for the picture but didn’t play it.
By then, just about everybody in the industry was scared, or mad, or tired of the whole thing, and though the feared general reprisals against the industry did not take place, R.K.O. was getting bruised. The Hearst papers banned publicity on R.K.O. pictures and dropped an announced serialization of the novel “Kitty Foyle” which had been timed for the release of the R.K.O. film version. Some R.K.O. films didn’t get reviewed and others got bad publicity. It was all petty harassment, of a kind that could be blamed on the overzealous Miss Parsons and other Hearst employees, but it was obviously sanctioned by Hearst, and it was steady enough to keep the industry uneasy.
By the time “Citizen Kane” got into Warners’ theatres, the picture had acquired such an odd reputation that people seemed to distrust it, and it didn’t do very well. It was subsequently withdrawn from circulation, perhaps because of the vicissitudes of R.K.O., and until the late fifties, when it was reissued and began to play in the art houses and to attract a new audience, it was seen only in pirated versions in 16 mm. Even after Mayer had succeeded in destroying the picture commercially, he went on planning vengeance on Schaefer for refusing his offer. Stockholders in R.K.O. began to hear that the company wasn’t prospering because Schaefer was anti-Semitic and was therefore having trouble getting proper distribution for R.K.O. pictures. Schaefer says that Mayer wanted to get control of R.K.O. and that the rumor was created to drive down the price of the stock—that Mayer hoped to scare out Floyd Odlum, a major stockholder, and buy his shares. Instead, Odlum, who had opposed Nelson Rockefeller’s choice of Schaefer to run the company, bought enough of Sarnoff’s stock to have a controlling interest, and by mid-1942 Schaefer was finished at R.K.O. Two weeks after he left, Welles’ unit was evicted from its offices on the lot and given a few hours to move out, and the R.K.O. employees who had worked with Welles were punished with degrading assignments on B pictures. Mayer’s friendship with Hearst was not ruffled. A few years later, when Mayer left his wife of forty years, he rented Marion Davies’ Beverly Hills mansion. Eventually, he was one of Hearst’s honorary pallbearers. “Citizen Kane” didn’t actually lose money, but in Hollywood bookkeeping it wasn’t a big enough moneymaker to balance the scandal.
Welles was recently quoted as saying, “Theatre is a collective experience; cinema is the work of one single person.” This is an extraordinary remark from the man who brought his own Mercury Theatre players to Hollywood (fifteen of them appeared in “Citizen Kane”), and also the Mercury co-producer John Houseman, the Mercury Composer Bernard Herrmann, and various assistants, such as Richard Wilson, William Alland, and Richard Barr. He not only brought his whole supportive group—his family, he called them then—but found people in Hollywood, such as the cinematographer Gregg Toland, to contribute their knowledge and gifts to “Citizen Kane.” Orson Welles has done some marvellous things in his later movies—some great things—and there is more depth in the somewhat botched “The Magnificent Ambersons,” of 1942 (which also used many of the Mercury players), than in “Citizen Kane,” but his principal career in the movies has been in adaptation, as it was earlier on the stage. He has never again worked on a subject with the immediacy and impact of “Kane.” His later films—even those he has so painfully struggled to finance out of his earnings as an actor—haven’t been conceived in terms of daring modern subjects that excite us, as the very idea of “Kane” excited us. This particular kind of journalist’s sense of what would be a scandal as well as a great subject, and the ability to write it, belonged not to Welles but to his now almost forgotten associate Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the script, and who inadvertently destroyed the picture’s chances. There is a theme that is submerged in much of “Citizen Kane” but that comes to the surface now and then, and it’s the linking life story of Hearst and of Mankiewicz and of Welles—the story of how brilliantly gifted men who seem to have everything it takes to do what they want to do are defeated. It’s the story of how heroes become comedians and con artists.
The Hearst papers ignored Welles—Hearst may have considered this a fit punishment for an actor—though they attacked him indirectly with sneak attacks on those associated with him, and Hearst would frequently activate his secular arm, the American Legion, against him. But the Hearst papers worked Mankiewicz over in headlines; they persecuted him so long that he finally appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union for help. There was some primitive justice in this. Hearst had never met Welles, and, besides, Welles was a kid, a twenty-five-year-old prodigy (whose daughter Marion Davies’ nephew was bringing up)—hardly the sort of person one held responsible. But Mankiewicz was a friend of both Marion Davies and Hearst, and had been a frequent guest at her beach house and at San Simeon. There, in the great baronial banquet hall, Hearst liked to seat Mankiewicz on his left, so that Mankiewicz, with all his worldliness and wit (the Central Park West Voltaire, Ben Hecht had called him a few years earlier), could entertain the guest of honor and Hearst wouldn’t miss any of it. Mankiewicz betrayed their hospitality, even though he liked them both. They must have presented an irresistible target. And so Hearst, the yellow-press lord who had trained Mankiewicz’s generation of reporters to betray anyone for a story, became at last the victim of his own style of journalism.
In the first Academy Award ceremony, for 1927-28, Warner Brothers, which had just produced “The Jazz Singer,” was honored for “Marking an Epoch in Motion Picture History.” If the first decade of talkies—roughly, the thirties—has never been rivalled in wit and exuberance, this is very largely because there was already in Hollywood in the late silent period a nucleus of the best American writers, and they either lured their friends West or were joined by them. Unlike the novelists who were drawn to Hollywood later, most of the best Hollywood writers of the thirties had a shared background; they had been reporters and critics, and they knew each other from their early days on newspapers and magazines.
In his autobiography, Ben Hecht tells of being broke in New York—it was probably the winter of 1926—and of getting a telegram from Herman Mankiewicz in Hollywood: “WILL YOU ACCEPT THREE HUNDRED PER WEEK TO WORK FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES? ALL EXPENSES PAID. THE THREE HUNDRED IS PEANUTS. MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. DON’T LET THIS GET AROUND.” A newspaper photograph shows Mankiewicz greeting Hecht, “noted author, dramatist, and former newspaperman,” upon his arrival. After Hecht had begun work at Paramount, he discovered that the studio chief, B. P. Schulberg—who at that time considered writers a waste of money—had been persuaded to hire him by a gambler’s ploy: Mankiewicz had offered to tear up his own two-year contract if Hecht failed to write a successful movie. Hecht, that phenomenal fast hack who was to become one of the most prolific of all motion-picture writers (and one of the most frivolously cynical about the results), worked for a week and turned out the script that became Josef von Sternberg’s great hit “Underworld.” That script brought Hecht the first Academy Award for an original story, and a few years later he initiated the practice of using Oscars as doorstops. The studio heads knew what they had in Hecht as soon as they read the script, and they showed their gratitude. Hecht has recorded:
The bait that brought the writers in was money, but those writers who, like Mankiewicz, helped set the traps had their own reason: conviviality. Mankiewicz’s small joke “Don’t let this get around” came from a man who lived for talk, a man who saw moviemaking as too crazy, too profitable, and too easy not to share with one’s friends. By the early thirties, the writers who lived in Hollywood or commuted there included not only Mankiewicz and Hecht and Charles MacArthur but George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and Nathanael West and his brother-in-law S. J. Perelman, and Preston Sturges, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Kober, Alice Duer Miller, John O’Hara, Donald Ogden Stewart, Samson Raphaelson (the New York Times reporter who wrote the play “The Jazz Singer”), Gene Fowler, and Nunnally Johnson, and such already famous playwrights as Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, and Sidney Howard. Scott Fitzgerald had already been there for his first stretch, in 1927, along with Edwin Justus Mayer, and by 1932 William Faulkner began coming and going, and from time to time Ring Lardner and Moss Hart would turn up. In earlier periods, American writers made a living on newspapers and magazines; in the forties and fifties, they went into the academies (or, once they got to college, never left). But in the late twenties and the thirties they went to Hollywood. And though, apparently, they one and all experienced it as prostitution of their talents—joyous prostitution in some cases—and though more than one fell in love with movies and thus suffered not only from personal frustration but from the corruption of the great, still new art, they nonetheless as a group were responsible for that sustained feat of careless magic we call “thirties comedy.” “Citizen Kane” was, I think, its culmination.
Herman J. Mankiewicz, born in New York City in 1897, was the first son of a professor of education, who then took a teaching position in Wilkes-Barre, where his second son, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was born in 1909, and where the boys and a sister grew up. Herman Mankiewicz graduated from Columbia in 1916, and after a period as managing editor of the American Jewish Chronicle he became a flying cadet with the United States Army in 1917 and, in 1918, a private first class with the Fifth Marines, 2nd Division, A.E.F. In 1919 and 1920, he was the director of the American Red Cross News Service in Paris, and after returning to this country to marry a great beauty, Miss Sara Aaronson, of Baltimore, he took his bride overseas with him while he worked as a foreign correspondent in Berlin from 1920 to 1922, doing political reporting for George Seldes on the Chicago Tribune. During that time, he also sent pieces on drama and books to the New York Times and Women’s Wear. When he came home, he took a job as a reporter for the New York World. He was a gifted, prodigious writer, who contributed to Vanity Fair, the Saturday Evening Post, and many other magazines, and, while still in his twenties, collaborated with Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, and others on a revue (“Round the Town”), and collaborated with George S. Kaufman on a play (“The Good Fellow”) and with Marc Connelly on another play (“The Wild Man of Borneo”). From 1923 to 1926, he was at the Times, backing up George S. Kaufman in the drama department; while he was there, he also became the first regular theatre critic for The New Yorker, writing weekly from June, 1925, until January, 1926, when he was offered a motion-picture contract and left for Hollywood. The first picture he wrote was the Lon Chaney success “The Road to Mandalay.” In all, he worked on over seventy movies. He went on living and working in Los Angeles until his death, in 1953. He left three children: Don, born in Berlin in 1922, who is a novelist (“Trial”) and a writer for television (“Marcus Welby, M.D.”) and the movies (co-writer of “I Want to Live!”); Frank, born in New York in 1924, who became a lawyer, a journalist, a Peace Corps worker, and Robert Kennedy’s press assistant, and is now a columnist and television commentator; and Johanna, born in Los Angeles in 1937, who is a journalist (on Time) and is married to Peter Davis, the writer of the Emmy Award-winning TV program “Hunger in America.”
Told this way, Herman Mankiewicz’s career sounds exemplary, but these are just the bare bones of the truth. Even though it would be easy to document this official life of the apparently rising young man with photographs of Mankiewicz in his Berlin days dining with the Chancellor, Mankiewicz in his newspaperman days outside the Chicago Tribune with Jack Dempsey, and so on, it would be hard to explain his sudden, early aging and the thickening of his features and the transparently cynical look on his face in later photographs.
It was a lucky thing for Mankiewicz that he got the movie job when he did, because he would never have risen at the Times, and though he wrote regularly for The New Yorker (and remarked of those of the Algonquin group who didn’t, “The part-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits”), The New Yorker, despite his pleas for cash, was paying him partly in stock, which wasn’t worth much at the time. Mankiewicz drank heavily, and the drinking newspaperman was in the style of the World but not in the style of the Times. In October, 1925, he was almost fired. The drama critic then was Brooks Atkinson, and the drama editor was George S. Kaufman, with Mankiewicz second in line and Sam Zolotow third. Mankiewicz was sent to cover the performance of Gladys Wallis, who was the wife of the utilities magnate Samuel Insull, as Lady Teazle in “School for Scandal.” Mrs. Insull, who had abandoned her theatrical career over a quarter of a century before, was, according to biographers, bored with being a nobody when her husband was such a big somebody. She was fifty-six when she resumed her career, as Lady Teazle, who is meant to be about eighteen. The play had opened in Chicago, where, perhaps astutely, she performed for charity (St. Luke’s Hospital), and the press had described her as brilliant. The night of the New York opening, Mankiewicz came back to the office drunk, started panning Mrs. Insull’s performance, and then fell asleep over his typewriter. As Zolotow recalls it, “Kaufman began to read the review and it was so venomous he was outraged. That was the only time I ever saw Kaufman lose his temper.” The review wasn’t printed. The Times suffered the humiliation of running this item on October 23, 1925:
Mankiewicz was in such bad shape that night that Kaufman told Zolotow to call Sara Mankiewicz and have her come get him and take him home. Mrs. Mankiewicz recalls that he still had his head down on his typewriter when she arrived, with a friend, to remove him. She says he took it for granted that he was fired, but nevertheless went to work promptly the next day. Zolotow recalls, “In the morning, Herman came down to the office and asked me to talk to Mr. Birchall, the assistant managing editor, on his behalf. Herman had brought a peace offering of a bottle of Scotch and I took it to Birchall. He had a red beard, and he tugged at it and he stabbed the air a few times with his index finger and said, ‘Herman is a bad boy, a bad boy.’ But he took the bottle and Herman kept his job until he got the movie offer.”
The review—unsigned—that the Times printed on October 24, 1925, was a small masterpiece of tact:
Scattered through various books, and in the stories that are still told of him in Hollywood, are clues that begin to give one a picture of Herman Mankiewicz, a giant of a man who mongered his own talent, a man who got a head start in the race to “sell out” to Hollywood. The pay was fantastic. After a month in the movie business, Mankiewicz —though his Broadway shows had not been hits, and though this was in 1926, when movies were still silent—signed a year’s contract giving him $400 a week and a bonus of $5,000 for each story that was accepted, with an option for a second year at $500 a week and $7,500 per accepted story, the company guaranteeing to accept at least four stories per year. In other words, his base pay was $40,800 his first year and $56,000 his second; actually, he wrote so many stories that he made much more. By the end of 1927, he was head of Paramount’s scenario department, and in January, 1928, there was a newspaper item reporting that he was in New York “lining up a new set of newspaper feature writers and playwrights to bring to Hollywood,” and that “most of the newer writers on Paramount’s staff who contributed the most successful stories of the past year were selected by ‘Mank.’ ” One reason that Herman Mankiewicz is so little known today is, ironically, that he went to Hollywood so early, before he had gained a big enough reputation in the literary and theatrical worlds. Screenwriters don’t make names for themselves; the most famous ones are the ones whose names were famous before they went to Hollywood, or who made names later in the theatre or from books, or who, like Preston Sturges, became directors.
Mankiewicz and other New Yorker writers in the twenties and the early thirties were very close to the world of the theatre; many of them were writing plays, writing about theatre people, reviewing plays. It’s not surprising that within a few years the magazine’s most celebrated contributors were in Hollywood writing movies. Of the ten friends of the editor Harold Ross who were in the original prospectus as advisory editors, six became screenwriters. When Mankiewicz gave up the drama critic’s spot, in 1926, he was replaced by Charles Brackett, and when Brackett headed West, Robert Benchley filled it while commuting, and then followed. Dorothy Parker, the book reviewer Constant Reader, went West, too. Nunnally Johnson, who was to work on over a hundred movies, was a close friend of Harold Ross’s and had volunteered to do the movie reviewing in 1926 but had been told that that job was for “old ladies and fairies.” Others in the group didn’t agree: Benchley had written on movies for the old Life as early as 1920, and John O’Hara later took time out from screenwriting to become the movie critic for Newsweek—where he was to review “Citizen Kane.” The whole group were interested in the theatre and the movies, and they were fast, witty writers, used to regarding their work not as deathless prose but as stories written to order for the market, used also to the newspaperman’s pretense of putting a light value on what they did—the “Look, no hands” attitude. Thus, they were well prepared to become the scenarists and gag writers of the talkies.
The comic muse of the most popular “daring” late silents was a carefree, wisecracking flapper. Beginning in 1926, Herman Mankiewicz worked on an astounding number of films in that spirit. In 1927 and 1928, he did the titles (the printed dialogue and explanations) for at least twenty-five films that starred Clara Bow, Bebe Daniels, Nancy Carroll, Esther Ralston, George Bancroft, Thomas Meighan, Jack Holt, Richard Dix, Wallace Beery, and other public favorites. He worked on the titles for Jules Furthman’s script of “Abie’s Irish Rose,” collaborated with Anita Loos on the wisecracks for “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and did the immensely successful “The Barker” and “The Canary Murder Case,” with William Powell, Louise Brooks, James Hall, and Jean Arthur. By then, sound had come in, and in 1929 he did the script as well as the dialogue for “The Dummy,” with Ruth Chatterton and Fredric March (making his screen début), wrote William Wellman’s “The Man I Love,” with Richard Arlen, Pat O’Brien, and Mary Brian, and worked for Josef von Sternberg and many other directors.
Other screenwriters made large contributions, too, but probably none larger than Mankiewicz’s at the beginning of the sound era, and if he was at that time one of the highest-paid writers in the world, it was because he wrote the kind of movies that were disapproved of as “fast” and immoral. His heroes weren’t soft-eyed and bucolic; he brought good-humored toughness to the movies, and energy and astringency. And the public responded, because it was eager for modern American subjects. Even those of us who were children at the time loved the fast-moving modern-city stories. The commonplaceness—even tawdriness—of the imagery was such a relief from all that silent “poetry.” The talkies were a great step down. It’s hard to make clear to people who didn’t live through the transition how sickly and unpleasant many of those “artistic” silent pictures were—how you wanted to scrape off all that mist and sentiment.
Almost from the time the motion-picture camera was invented, there had been experiments with sound and attempts at synchronization, and the public was more than ready for talking pictures. Many of the late silents, if one looks at them now, seem to be trying to talk to us, crying out for sound. Despite the legend of paralysis of the medium when sound first came in, there was a burst of inventiveness. In musicals, directors like René Clair and, over here, Ernst Lubitsch and, to a lesser degree, Rouben Mamoulian didn’t use sound just for lip synchronization; they played with sound as they had played with images, and they tried to use sound without losing the movement of silents or the daring of silent editing. Some of the early talkies were static and inept; newly imported stage directors literally staged the action, as if the space were stage space, and the technicians had to learn to handle the microphones. But movies didn’t suddenly become stagebound because of the microphone. Many of the silents had always been stagebound, for the sufficient reason that they had been adapted from plays—from the war-horses of the repertory, because they had proved their popularity, and from the latest Broadway hits, because the whole country wanted to see them. The silent adaptations were frequently deadly, not just because of construction based on the classical unities, with all those entrances and exits and that painful emptiness on the screen of plays worked out in terms of absolutely essential characters only, but because everything kept stopping for the explanatory titles and the dialogue titles.
Even in the movies adapted from novels or written directly for the screen, the action rarely went on for long; silents were choked with titles, which were perhaps, on the average, between ten and twenty times as frequent as the interruptions for TV commercials. The printed dialogue was often witty, and often it was essential to an understanding of the action, but it broke up the rhythm of performances and the visual flow, and the titles were generally held for the slowest readers, so that one lost the mood of the film while staring at the dialogue for the third scanning. (It seems to me, thinking back on it, that we were so eager for the movie to go on that we gulped the words down and then were always left with them for what, to our impatience, seemed an eternity, and that the better the movie, the more quickly we tried to absorb and leap past the printed words, and the more frustrating the delays became.) The plain fact that many silent movies were plays without the spoken dialogue, plays deprived of their very substance, was what made the theatre-going audience—and the Broadway crowd of writers—so contemptuous of them. Filmed plays without the actors’ voices, and with the deadening delays for the heterogeneous audience to read the dialogue, were an abomination. Many of the journalists and playwrights and wits of the Algonquin Round Table had written perceptively about motion pictures (Alexander Woollcott, who managed to pan some of the greatest films, was an exception); they had, in general, been cynical only about the slop and the silent filmed plays. But though they had been active in the theatre, there had been no real place for them in movies; now, with the introduction of sound, they could bring to the screen the impudence that had given Broadway its flavor in the twenties—and bring it there before the satirical references were out of date. Sound made it possible for them to liberate movies into a new kind of contemporaneity.
There is an elaborate body of theory that treats film as “the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious,” as Luis Buñuel called it, and for a director such as Buñuel “the cinema seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious.” Some of the greatest work of D. W. Griffith and other masters of the silent film has a magical, fairy-tale appeal, and certainly Surrealists like Buñuel, and other experimental and avant-garde filmmakers as well, have drawn upon this dreamlike vein of film. But these artists were the exceptions; much of the dreamy appeal to the “subconscious” and to “universal” or “primitive” fantasies was an appeal to the most backward, not to say reactionary, elements of illiterate and semi-literate mass society. There was a steady load of calendar-art guck that patronized “the deserving poor” and idealized “purity” (i.e., virginity) and “morality” (i.e., virginity plus charity). And all that is only one kind of movie anyway. Most of the dream theory of film, which takes the audience for passive dreamers, doesn’t apply to the way one responded to silent comedies—which, when they were good, kept the audience in a heightened state of consciousness. When we join in laughter, it’s as if the lights were on in the theatre. And not just the Mack Sennett comedies and Keaton and Chaplin kept us fully awake but the spirited, bouncy comediennes, like Colleen Moore and Marion Davies, and the romantic comedy “teams,” and the suave, “polished” villains, like William Powell. My favorite movies as a child were the Bebe Daniels comedies—I suppose they were the movie equivalent of the series books one reads at that age. During 1927 and 1928, Paramount brought a new one out every few months; Bebe, the athletic madcap, would fence like Douglas Fairbanks, or she would parody Valentino by kidnapping and taming a man, or she might be a daredevil newsreel camerawoman or a cub reporter.
I did not know until I started to look into the writing of “Citizen Kane” that the man who wrote “Kane” had worked on some of those pictures, too—that Mankiewicz had, in fact, written (alone or with others) about forty of the films I remember best from the twenties and thirties (as well as many I didn’t see or don’t remember). Mankiewicz didn’t work on every kind of picture, though. He didn’t do Westerns, and once, when a studio attempted to punish him for his customary misbehavior by assigning him to a Rin Tin Tin picture, he turned in a script that began with the craven Rin Tin Tin frightened by a mouse and reached its climax with a house on fire and the dog taking a baby into the flames. I had known about Mankiewicz’s contribution to “Kane” and a few other films, but I hadn’t realized how extensive his career was. I had known that he was the producer of “Million Dollar Legs” (with W. C. Fields and Jack Oakie and Lyda Roberti) and “Laughter” (with Fredric March and Nancy Carroll), but I hadn’t known, for example, that he had produced two of the Marx Brothers films that I’ve always especially liked, the first two made in Hollywood and written directly for the screen—“Monkey Business” and “Horse Feathers”—and part of “Duck Soup” as well. A few years ago, some college students asked me what films I would like to see again just for my own pleasure, and without a second’s thought I replied “Duck Soup” and “Million Dollar Legs,” though at that time I had no idea there was any connection between them. Yet surely there is an iconic spirit that links them—even the settings, Freedonia and Klopstokia, with Groucho as Prime Minister of one and Fields as President of the other—and now that I have looked into Herman Mankiewicz’s career it’s apparent that he was a key linking figure in just the kind of movies my friends and I loved best.
When the period of the great silent comedians, with their international audience, was over, a new style of American comedy developed. One couldn’t really call a colloquial, skeptical comedy a “masterpiece,” as one could sometimes call a silent comedy a masterpiece, especially if the talkie looked quite banal and was so topical it felt transient. But I think that many of us enjoyed these comedies more, even though we may not have felt very secure about the aesthetic grounds for our enjoyment. The talking comedies weren’t as aesthetically pure as the silents, yet they felt liberating in a way that even great silents didn’t. The elements to which we could respond were multiplied; now there were vocal nuances, new kinds of timing, and wonderful new tricks, like the infectious way Claudette Colbert used to break up while listening to someone. It’s easy to see why Europeans, who couldn’t follow the slang and the jokes and didn’t understand the whole satirical frame of reference, should prefer our action films and Westerns. But it’s a bad joke on our good jokes that film enthusiasts here often take their cues on the American movie past from Europe, and so they ignore the tradition of comic irreverence and become connoisseurs of the “visuals” and “mises en scène” of action pictures, which are usually too silly even to be called reactionary. They’re sub-reactionary—the antique melodramas of silent days with noise added—a mass art better suited, one might think, to Fascism, or even feudalism, than to democracy.
There is another reason the American talking comedies, despite their popularity, are so seldom valued highly by film aestheticians. The dream-art kind of film, which lends itself to beautiful visual imagery, is generally the creation of the “artist” director, while the astringent film is more often directed by a competent, unpretentious craftsman who can be made to look very good by a good script and can be turned into a bum by a bad script. And this competent craftsman may be too worldly and too practical to do the “imaginative” bits that sometimes help make the reputations of “artist” directors. Ben Hecht said he shuddered at the touches von Sternberg introduced into “Underworld���: “My head villain, Bull Weed, after robbing a bank, emerged with a suitcase full of money and paused in the crowded street to notice a blind beggar and give him a coin—before making his getaway.” That’s exactly the sort of thing that quantities of people react to emotionally as “deep” and as “art,” and that many film enthusiasts treasure—the inflated sentimental with a mystical drip. The thirties, though they had their own load of sentimentality, were the hardest-headed period of American movies, and their plainness of style, with its absence of false “cultural” overtones, has never got its due aesthetically. Film students—and their teachers—often become interested in movies just because they are the kind of people who are emotionally affected by the blind-beggar bits, and they are indifferent by temperament to the emancipation of American movies in the thirties and the role that writers played in it.
I once jotted down the names of some movies that I didn’t associate with any celebrated director but that had nevertheless stayed in my memory over the years, because something in them had especially delighted me—such rather obscure movies as “The Moon’s Our Home” (Margaret Sullavan and Henry Fonda) and “He Married His Wife” (Nancy Kelly, Joel McCrea, and Mary Boland). When I looked them up, I discovered that Dorothy Parker’s name was in the credits of “The Moon’s Our Home” and John O’Hara’s in the credits of “He Married His Wife.” Other writers worked on those films, too, and perhaps they were the ones who were responsible for what I responded to, but the recurrence of the names of that group of writers, not just on rather obscure remembered films but on almost all the films that are generally cited as proof of the vision and style of the most highly acclaimed directors of that period, suggests that the writers—and a particular group of them, at that—may for a brief period, a little more than a decade, have given American talkies their character.
There is always a time lag in the way movies take over (and broaden and emasculate) material from the other arts—whether it is last season’s stage success or the novels of the preceding decade or a style or an idea that has run its course in its original medium (This does not apply to a man like Jean-Luc Godard, who is not a mass-medium movie director.) In most productions of the big studios, the time lag is enormous. In the thirties, after the great age of musical comedy and burlesque, Hollywood, except for Paramount, was just discovering huge operettas. After the Broadway days of Clifton Webb, Fred Astaire, the Marx Brothers, Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, and all the rest, M-G-M gave us Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, and Universal gave us Deanna Durbin. This is the history of movies. J. D. Salinger has finally come to the screen through his imitators, and Philip Roth’s fifties romance arrived at the end of the sixties. It may be that for new ideas to be successful in movies the way must be prepared by success in other media, and the audience must have grown tired of what it’s been getting and be ready for something new. There are always a few people in Hollywood who are considered mad dreamers for trying to do in movies things that have already been done in the other arts. But once one of them breaks through and has a hit, he’s called a genius and everybody starts copying him.
The new spirit of the talkies was the twenties moved West in the thirties. George S. Kaufman was writing the Marx Brothers stage shows when he and Mankiewicz worked together at the Times; a little later, Kaufman directed the first Broadway production of “The Front Page.” Kaufman’s collaborators on Broadway plays in the twenties and the early thirties included Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, Morrie Ryskind, and Moss Hart as well as Mankiewicz—the nucleus of the Algonquin-to-Hollywood group. Nunnally Johnson says that the two most brilliant men he has ever known were George S. Kaufman and Herman Mankiewicz, and that, on the whole, Mankiewicz was the more brilliant of the two. I think that what Mankiewicz did in movies was an offshoot of the gag comedy that Kaufman had initiated on Broadway; Mankiewicz spearheaded the movement of that whole Broadway style of wisecracking, fast-talking, cynical-sentimental entertainment onto the national scene. Kaufman’s kind of impersonal, visionless comedy, with its single goal of getting the audience to laugh, led to the degeneration of the Broadway theatre, to its play doctors and gimmickry and scattershot jokes at defenseless targets, and so it would be easy to look down on the movie style that came out of it. But I don’t think the results were the same when this type of comedy was transplanted to movies; the only bad long-range consequences were to the writers themselves.
Kaufman fathered a movement that is so unmistakably the bastard child of the arts as to seem fatherless; the gag comedy was perfectly suited to the commercial mass art of the movies, so that it appears to be an almost inevitable development. It suited the low common denominator of the movies even better than it suited the needs of the relatively selective theatre audience, and the basic irresponsibility of this kind of theatre combined with the screenwriters’ lack of control over their own writing to produce what one might call the brothel period of American letters. It was a gold rush, and Mankiewicz and his friends had exactly the skills to turn a trick. The journalists’ style of working fast and easy and working to order and not caring too much how it was butchered was the best kind of apprenticeship for a Hollywood hack, and they had loved to gather, to joke and play games, to lead the histrionic forms of the glamorous literary life. Now they were gathered in cribs on each studio lot, working in teams side by side, meeting for lunch at the commissary and for dinner at Chasen’s, which their old friend and editor Harold Ross had helped finance, and all over town for drinks. They adapted each other’s out-of-date plays and novels, and rewrote each other’s scripts. Even in their youth in New York, most of them had indulged in what for them proved a vice: they were “collaborators”—dependent on the fun and companionship of joint authorship, which usually means a shared shallowness. Now they collaborated all over the place and backward in time; they collaborated promiscuously, and within a few years were rewriting the remakes of their own or somebody else’s rewrites. Mankiewicz adapted Kaufman and Ferber’s “The Royal Family” and “Dinner at Eight,” turned Alice Duer Miller’s “Come Out of the Kitchen” into “Honey,” and adapted George Kelly’s “The Show-Off” and James Thurber’s “My Life and Hard Times” and works by Laurence Stallings and other old friends while Ben Hecht or Preston Sturges or Arthur Kober was working over something of his. They escaped the cold, and they didn’t suffer from the Depression. They were a colony of expatriates without leaving the country—and their individual contributions to the scripts that emerged after the various rewrites were almost impossible to assess, because their attitudes were so similar; they made the same kind of jokes, because they had been making them to each other for so long. In Hollywood, they sat around building on to each other’s gags, covering up implausibilities and dull spots, throwing new wisecracks on top of jokes they had laughed at in New York. Screenwriting was an extension of what they used to do for fun, and now they got paid for it. They had liked to talk more than to write, and this weakness became their way of life. As far as the official literary culture was concerned, they dropped from sight. To quote a classic bit of dialogue from Budd Schulberg’s “The Disenchanted”:
Hollywood destroyed them, but they did wonders for the movies. In New York, they may have valued their own urbanity too highly; faced with the target Hollywood presented, they became cruder and tougher, less tidy, less stylistically elegant, and more iconoclastic, and in the eyes of Hollywood they were slaphappy cynics, they were “crazies.” They were too talented and too sophisticated to put a high value on what they did, too amused at the spectacle of what they were doing and what they were part of to be respected the way a writer of “integrity,” like Lillian Hellman, was later to be respected—or, still later, Arthur Miller. Though their style was often flippant and their attitude toward form casual to the point of contempt, they brought movies the subversive gift of sanity. They changed movies by raking the old moralistic muck with derision. Those sickly Graustarkian romances with beautiful, pure highborn girls and pathetic lame girls and dashing princes in love with commoners, and all the Dumas and Sabatini and Blasco-Ibáñez, now had to compete with the freedom and wildness of American comedy. Once American films had their voice and the Algonquin group was turned loose on the scripts, the revolting worship of European aristocracy faded so fast that movie stars even stopped bringing home Georgian princes. In the silents, the heroes were often simpletons. In the talkies, the heroes were to be the men who weren’t fooled, who were smart and learned their way around. The new heroes of the screen were created in the image of their authors: they were fast-talking newspaper reporters.
That Walter Burns whose entrance in “The Front Page” Kerr described was based on Walter Howey, who was the city editor of the Chicago Tribune, at $8,000 a year, until Hearst lured him away by an offer of $35,000 a year. Howey is generally considered the “greatest” of all Hearst editors—by those who mean one thing by it, and by those who mean the other. He edited Hearst’s New York Mirror at a time when it claimed to be ten per cent news and ninety per cent entertainment. The epitome of Hearstian journalism, and a favorite of Hearst’s until the end, he was one of the executors of Hearst’s will. At one time or another, just about all the Hollywood writers had worked for Walter Howey and/or spent their drinking hours with friends who did. He was the legend: the classic model of the amoral, irresponsible, irrepressible newsman who cares about nothing but scoops and circulation. He had lost an eye (supposedly in actual fighting of circulation wars), and Ben Hecht is quoted as saying you could tell which was the glass eye because it was the warmer one. Hecht used him again in “Nothing Sacred,” as Fredric March’s editor—“a cross between a Ferris wheel and a werewolf”—and he turns up under other names in other plays and movies. In a sense, all those newspaper plays and movies were already about Hearst’s kind of corrupt, manic journalism.
The toughest-minded, the most satirical of the thirties pictures often featured newspaper settings, or, at least, reporters—especially the “screwball” comedies, which had some resemblances to later “black” comedy and current “freaky” comedy but had a very different spirit. A newspaper picture meant a contemporary picture in an American setting, usually a melodrama with crime and political corruption and suspense and comedy and romance. In 1931, a title like “Five Star Final” or “Scandal Sheet” signalled the public that the movie would be a tough modern talkie, not a tearjerker with sound. Just to touch a few bases, there was “The Front Page” itself, in 1931, with Pat O’Brien as the reporter and Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns; Lee Tracy as the gossip columnist in “Blessed Event” and as the press agent in “Bombshell”; Clark Gable as the reporter in “It Happened One Night”; Paul Muni giving advice to the lovelorn in “Hi, Nellie”; Spencer Tracy as the editor in “Libeled Lady”; Stuart Erwin as the correspondent in “Viva Villa!”; Jean Harlow stealing the affections of a newspaperman from girl reporter Loretta Young in “Platinum Blonde”; Jean Arthur as the girl reporter in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”; a dozen pictures, at least, with George Bancroft as a Walter Howey-style bullying editor; all those half-forgotten pictures with reporter teams—Fredric March and Virginia Bruce, or Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur, or Loretta Young and Tyrone Power (“Love Is News”); Cary Grant as the editor and Joan Bennett as the reporter in “Wedding Present”; and then Cary Grant as Walter Burns in “His Girl Friday,” with Rosalind Russell as the reporter; and then Cary Grant and James Stewart (who had been a foreign correspondent in “Next Time We Love”) both involved with a newsmagazine in “The Philadelphia Story,” in 1940. Which takes us right up to “Citizen Kane,” the biggest newspaper picture of them all—the picture that ends with the introduction of the cast and a reprise of the line “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”
After years of swapping stories about Howey and the other werewolves and the crooked, dirty press, Mankiewicz found himself on story-swapping terms with the power behind it all, Hearst himself. When he had been in Hollywood only a short time, he met Marion Davies and Hearst through his friendship with Charles Lederer, a writer, then in his early twenties, whom Ben Hecht had met and greatly admired in New York when Lederer was still in his teens. Lederer, a child prodigy, who had entered college at thirteen, got to know Mankiewicz, the MacArthurs, Moss Hart, Benchley, and their friends at about the same time or shortly after he met Hecht, and was immediately accepted into a group considerably older than he was. Lederer was Marion Davies’ nephew—the son of her sister Reine, who had been in operetta and musical comedy. In Hollywood, Charles Lederer’s life seems to have revolved around his aunt, whom he adored. (Many others adored her also, though “Citizen Kane” was to give the world a different—and false—impression.) She was childless, and Lederer was very close to her; he spent a great deal of his time at her various dwelling places, and took his friends to meet both her and Hearst. The world of letters being small and surprising, Charles Lederer was among those who worked on the adaptation of “The Front Page” to the screen in 1931 and again when it was remade as “His Girl Friday” in 1940, and, the world being even smaller than that, Lederer married Orson Welles’ ex-wife, Virginia Nicholson Welles, in 1940, at San Simeon. (She married two prodigies in succession; the marriage to Welles had lasted five years and produced a daughter.)
Hearst was so fond of Lederer that on the evening of the nuptials he broke his rule of one cocktail to guests before dinner and no hard liquor thereafter. A guest who gulped the cocktail down was sometimes able to swindle another, but this is the only occasion that I can find recorded on which Hearst dropped the rule—a rule that Marion Davies customarily eased by slipping drinks to desperate guests before Hearst joined them but that nevertheless made it possible for Hearst to receive, and see at their best, some of the most talented alcoholics this country has ever produced. Not all writers are attracted to the rich and powerful, but it’s a defining characteristic of journalists to be drawn to those who live at the center of power. Even compulsive drinkers like Mankiewicz and Dorothy Parker were so fascinated by the great ménage of Hearst and his consort—and the guest lists of the world-famous—that they managed to stay relatively sober for the evenings at Marion Davies’ beach house (Colleen Moore described it as “the largest house on the beach—and I mean the beach from San Diego to the Canadian border”) and the weekends at San Simeon.
If “Kane” has the same love-hate as “The Front Page,” the same joyous infatuation with the antics of the unprincipled press, it’s because Mankiewicz, like Hecht and MacArthur, revelled in the complexities of corruption. And Hearst’s life was a spectacle. For short periods, this was intoxication enough. A man like Hearst seems to embody more history than other people do; in his company a writer may feel that he has been living in the past and on the outskirts and now he’s living in the dangerous present, right where the decisions are really made.
Hearst represented a new type of power. He got his first newspaper in 1887, when he was twenty-four, by asking his father for it, and, in the next three decades, when, for the first time, great masses of people became literate, he added more and more papers, until, with his empire of thirty newspapers and fifteen magazines, he was the most powerful journalist and publisher in the world. He had brought the first comic strips to America in 1892, and his battling with Pulitzer a few years later over a cartoon character named the Yellow Kid gave rise to the term “yellow journalism.” Because there was no tradition of responsibility in this new kind of popular journalism, which was almost a branch of show business, Hearst knew no restraints; perhaps fortunately, he was unguided. Ultimately, he was as purposeless about his power as the craziest of the Roman emperors. His looting of the treasures of the world for his castle at San Simeon symbolized his imperial status. Being at his table was being at court, and the activities of the notables who were invited there were slavishly chronicled in the Hearst papers.
The new social eminence of the Mankiewiczes, who sometimes visited San Simeon for as long as ten days at a time, can be charted from Louella Parsons’ columns. By the end of 1928, Louella was announcing Mankiewicz’s writing assignments with a big bold headline at the top of the column, and was printing such items as:
It was worth another item in the same column that Herman Mankiewicz had been observed “taking his son down Hollywood Boulevard to see the lighted Christmas trees.” In 1931, the Mankiewiczes were so prominent that they were among those who gave Marion Davies a homecoming party at the Hotel Ambassador; the other hosts were Mr. and Mrs. Irving Thalberg, Mr. and Mrs. King Vidor, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn, John Gilbert, Lewis Milestone, Hedda Hopper, and so on. Hedda Hopper, who worked as a movie columnist for a rival newspaper chain but was a close friend of Marion Davies (to whom, it is said, she owed her job), was also an enthusiastic reporter of Mankiewicz’s activities during the years when he and his ravishing Sara were part of the Hearst-Davies social set.
When writers begin to see the powerful men operating in terms of available alternatives, while they have been judging them in terms of ideals, they often develop “personal” admiration for the great bastards whom they have always condemned and still condemn. Hearst was to Mankiewicz, I suspect, what Welles was to be to him a little later—a dangerous new toy. And he needed new toys constantly to keep off the booze. Mankiewicz could control himself at San Simeon in the late twenties and the very early thirties, as, in those days, he could control himself when he was in charge of a movie. Producing the Marx Brothers comedies kept him busy and entertained for a while. With the title of “supervisor” (a term for the actual working producer, as distinguished from the studio executive whose name might appear above or below the name of the movie), he worked on their pictures from the inception of the ideas through the months of writing and then the shooting. But he got bored easily, and when he started cutting up in the middle of preparing “Duck Soup,” in 1933, he was taken off the picture. When the Marx Brothers left Paramount and went to M-G-M, he joined them again, in the preparation of “A Night at the Opera,” in 1935, and the same thing happened; he was replaced as supervisor by his old boss George S. Kaufman.
His credits began to taper off after 1933, and in 1936 Mankiewicz didn’t get a single credit. That year, he published an article called “On Approaching Forty,” a brief satirical account of what had happened to him as a writer. It began:
He includes those tiny pieces in their entirety, and after one of them—the first three sentences of a short story—he comments:
This is the end of his article:
“On Approaching Forty” didn’t come out in The New Yorker; it appeared in the Hollywood Reporter.
Ambivalence was the most common “literary” emotion of the screenwriters of the thirties, as alienation was to become the most common “literary” emotion of the screenwriters of the sixties. The thirties writers were ambivalently nostalgic about their youth as reporters, journalists, critics, or playwrights, and they glorified the hard-drinking, cynical newspaperman. They were ambivalent about Hollywood, which they savaged and satirized whenever possible. Hollywood paid them so much more money than they had ever earned before, and the movies reached so many more people than they had ever reached before, that they were contemptuous of those who hadn’t made it on their scale at the same time that they hated themselves for selling out. They had gone to Hollywood as a paid vacation from their playwriting or journalism, and screenwriting became their only writing. The vacation became an extended drunken party, and while they were there in the debris of the long morning after, American letters passed them by. They were never to catch up; nor were American movies ever again to have in their midst a whole school of the richest talents of a generation.
We in the audience didn’t have to wake up afterward to how good those films of the thirties were; in common with millions of people, I enjoyed them while they were coming out. They were immensely popular. But I did take them for granted. There was such a steady flow of bright comedy that it appeared to be a Hollywood staple, and it didn’t occur to me that those films wouldn’t go on being made. It didn’t occur to me that it required a special gathering of people in a special atmosphere to produce that flow, and that when those people stopped enjoying themselves those pictures couldn’t be made. And I guess it didn’t occur to older, more experienced people, either, because for decades everybody went on asking why Hollywood wasn’t turning out those good, entertaining comedies anymore.
By the end of the thirties, the jokes had soured. The comedies of the forties were heavy and pushy, straining for humor, and the comic impulse was misplaced or lost; they came out of a different atmosphere, a different feeling. The comic spirit of the thirties had been happily self-critical about America, the happiness born of the knowledge that in no other country were movies so free to be self-critical. It was the comedy of a country that didn’t yet hate itself. Though it wasn’t until the sixties that the self-hatred became overt in American life and American movies, it started to show, I think, in the phony, excessive, duplicit use of patriotism by the rich, guilty liberals of Hollywood in the war years.
In the forties, a socially conscious film historian said to me, “You know, Paramount never made a good movie,” and I brought up the names of some Paramount movies—”Easy Living” and “Trouble in Paradise” and lovely trifles like “Midnight”—and, of course, I couldn’t make my point, because those movies weren’t what was thought of in the forties as a good movie. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere at all if I tried to cite “Million Dollar Legs” or “Mississippi,” or pictures with the Marx Brothers or Mae West; I would be told they weren’t even movies. Though Paramount made some elegant comedies in the “Continental” style, many of the best Paramount pictures were like revues—which was pretty much the style of the Broadway theatre they’d come out of, and was what I liked about them. They entertained you without trying to change your life, yet didn’t congratulate you for being a slobbering bag of mush, either. But by the forties these were considered “escapist entertainment,” and that was supposed to be bad. Many of the thirties comedies, especially the Paramount ones, weren’t even “artistic” or “visual” movies—which is why they look so good on television now. They also sound good, because what that historian thought of as their irresponsibility is so much more modern than the sentimentalities of the war years. What was believed in was implicit in the styles of the heroes and heroines and in the comedy targets; the writers had an almost aristocratic disdain for putting beliefs into words. In the forties, the writers convinced themselves that they believed in everything, and they kept putting it all into so many bad words. It’s no wonder the movies had no further use for a Groucho or a Mae West; one can imagine what either of them might have done to those words.
It’s common to blame the McCarthyism of the fifties and the removal of blacklisted writers for the terrible, flat writing in American movies of recent years, but the writers might have recovered from McCarthyism (they might even have stood up to it) if they hadn’t been destroyed as writers long before. The writing that had given American talkies their special flavor died in the war, killed not in battle but in the politics of Stalinist “anti-Fascism.” For the writers, Hollywood was just one big crackup, and for most of them it took a political turn. The lost-in-Hollywood generation of writers, trying to clean themselves of guilt for their wasted years and their irresponsibility as writers, became political in the worst way—became a special breed of anti-Fascists. The talented writers, the major ones as well as the lightweight yet entertaining ones, went down the same drain as the clods—drawn into it, often, by bored wives, less successful brothers. They became naïvely, hysterically pro-Soviet; they ignored Stalin’s actual policies, because they so badly needed to believe in something. They had been so smart, so gifted, and yet they hadn’t been able to beat Hollywood’s contempt for the writer. (Walter Wanger had put twenty-seven of them to work in groups in succession on the script of Vincent Sheehan’s “Personal History.”) They lived in the city where Irving Thalberg was enshrined; Thalberg, the saint of M-G-M, had rationalized Mayer’s system of putting teams of writers to work simultaneously and in relays on the same project. It had been lunatic before, but Thalberg made it seem mature and responsible to fit writers into an assembly-line method that totally alienated them and took away their last shreds of pride. And most of the Algonquin group had been in Hollywood so long they weren’t even famous anymore.
Talented people have rarely had the self-control to flourish in the Hollywood atmosphere of big money and conflicting pressures. The talented—especially those who weren’t using their talents to full capacity—have become desperate, impatient, unreliable, self-destructive, and also destructive, and so there has always been some validity in the businessman’s argument that he couldn’t afford to take chances on “geniuses.” Thalberg didn’t play around with a man like Mankiewicz; after throwing him off “A Night at the Opera,” he didn’t use him again. The writers who had become accustomed to being assembly-line workers were ready to believe it when, in the forties, they were told that, like factory workers, they were “part of the team on the assembly line” and needed “that strengthening of the spirit which comes from identity with the labor of others.” Like the producers, the Screen Writers Guild respected discipline and responsibility, but though the businessmen had never been able to organize people of talent—producers like Thalberg just kept discarding them—the union ideologues knew how. The talented rarely become bureaucrats, but the mediocre had put down roots in Hollywood—it doesn’t take long in Los Angeles, the only great city that is purely modern, that hasn’t even an architectural past in the nineteenth century. In the forties, the talented merged with the untalented and became almost indistinguishable from them, and the mediocre have been writing movies ever since. When the good writers tried to regain their self-respect by becoming political activists in the Stalinist style, it was calamitous to talent; the Algonquin group’s own style was lost as their voice blended into the preachy, self-righteous chorus.
The comedy writers who had laughed at cant now learned to write it and were rehabilitated as useful citizens of the community of mediocrity. It was just what the newly political congratulated themselves on—their constructive, uplifting approach—that killed comedy. When they had written frivolously, knowing that they had no control over how their writing would be used, or buried, or rewritten, they may have failed their own gifts and the dreams of their youth, but the work they turned out had human dimensions; they were working at less than full capacity, but they were still honest entertainers. Their humor was the humor of those trapped by human weakness as well as by “the system,” and this was basic comedy—like the jokes and camaraderie of Army men. But when they became political in that morally superior way of people who are doing something for themselves but pretending it’s for others, their self-righteousness was insufferable. They may have told lies in the themes and plots of the thirties comedies, but they didn’t take their own lies seriously, they didn’t believe their own lies, the way they did in the forties. In the forties, the Screen Writers Guild and the Hollywood Writers Mobilization (for wartime morale-building) held conferences at which “responsible” writers brought the irresponsibles into line. The irresponsibles were told they were part of an army and must “dedicate their creative abilities to the winning of the war.” And, in case they failed to understand the necessity for didactic, “positive” humor, there were panels and seminars that analyzed jokes and pointed out which ones might do harm. It was explained to the writers that “catch-as-catch-can,” “no-holds-barred” comedy was a thing of the past. “A very funny line may make black-market dealings seem innocent and attractive,” they were told, and “Respect for officers must be maintained at all times, in any scene, in any situation.”
Show-business people are both giddy and desperately, sincerely intense. When Stalinism was fashionable, movie people became Stalinists, the way they later became witches and warlocks. Apparently, many of the Hollywood Stalinists didn’t realize they were taking any risks; they performed propaganda services for the various shifts in Russia’s foreign policy and, as long as the needs of American and Russian policy coincided, this took the form of super-patriotism. When the war was over and the Cold War began, history left them stranded, and McCarthy moved in on them. The shame of McCarthyism was not only “the shame of America” but the shame of a bunch of newly rich people who were eager to advise the world on moral and political matters and who, faced with a test, informed on their friends—and, as Orson Welles put it, not even to save their lives but to save their swimming pools. One might think that whatever they had gained emotionally from their activity they would have lost when they informed on each other, but it doesn’t seem to have always worked that way. They didn’t change their ideas when they recanted before the House Un-American Activities Committee; they merely gave in and then were restored to themselves. And they often seem to regard it not as their weakness but as their martyrdom. Show-business Stalinism is basically not political but psychological; it’s a fashionable form of hysteria and guilt that is by now not so much pro-Soviet as just abusively anti-American. America is their image of Hell (once again, because of Vietnam, they’re in a popular position), and they go on being “political” in the same way, holding the same faith, and for the same reasons, as in the late thirties and the forties. The restoration there is fairly general. In Hollywood recently, a man who used to be “involved” told me he wanted to become more active again, and added, “But, you know, I’m scared. The people who are urging me to do more are the same ones who ratted on me last time.”
Mankiewicz was too well-informed politically to become a Communist Party-liner. Because he didn’t support this line, he was—and only in part jokingly—considered a “reactionary” by the activists of the Screen Writers Guild. Yet he went on to write the movie they point to with pride in Hollywood, the movie they all seem to feel demonstrates what can be done and what movies should be doing, and it’s their all-time favorite because they understand it—and correctly—as a leftist film. Its leftism is, however, the leftism of the twenties and early thirties, before the left became moralistic. There were other expressions of the tough spirit of the thirties that came after the thirties were over. There may be a little of it in the newspaper film of the fifties “Sweet Smell of Success,” but the ambivalence there is harsher, grimmer, more artistically “serious” than it was in the thirties; there’s some in the happy mockery of Hollywood in “Singin’ in the Rain,” which takes off from Kaufman and Hart’s “Once in a Lifetime,” and in the films of Preston Sturges, who alone somehow managed to stay funny and tart. The only writer of this whole group who became a director with an individual style, Sturges kept American comedy alive singlehanded through the mawkish forties. Maybe he was able to because he was a cynic and so politically baroque that he wasn’t torn by doubts and guilts. The political show in Hollywood in the forties was just one more crazy scene to him; he’d grown up rich and eccentric in Europe, the son of that expatriate lady (called Mary in “The Loves of Isadora”) who gave Isadora Duncan the fatal scarf.
But Mankiewicz climaxed an era in “Kane.” He wrote a big movie that is untarnished by sentimentality, and it may be the only big biographical movie ever made in this country of which that can be said. “Kane” is unsanctimonious; it is without scenes of piety, masochism, or remorse, without “truths”—in that period when the screenwriters were becoming so politically “responsible” that they were using all the primitive devices to sell their messages, and movies once again became full of blind beggars, and omens of doom, and accidental death as punishment for moral and sexual infractions, and, of course, Maria Ouspenskaya seeing into people’s hearts—the crone as guru.
Orson Welles wasn’t around when “Citizen Kane” was written, early in 1940. Mankiewicz, hobbling about on a broken leg in a huge cast, was packed off—away from temptation—to Mrs. Campbell’s Guest Ranch, in Victorville, California, sixty-five miles from Los Angeles, to do the script. He had a nurse and a secretary to watch over him and John Houseman to keep him working, and they all lived there for about three months—in a combination dude ranch and rest home, where liquor was forbidden and unavailable—until the first draft of “Citizen Kane,” called simply and formidably “American,” was completed.
That insurance-company doctor who refused to accept Mankiewicz as a risk back in 1927 had no need to be prophetic. Ben Hecht once described a summer earlier in the twenties when he and his wife and Charles MacArthur were living in a borrowed house near Woodstock, New York, with no money, and Harpo, Groucho, Chico, and Zeppo Marx and their wives, sweethearts, and children came to stay, and then Herman Mankiewicz arrived, carrying two suitcases. “He had decided to spend his vacation from the New York Times drama section with us,” Hecht wrote. “He had not been allowed to bring any money with him because of Sara’s certainty that he would spend it on liquor, and thus impair the influence of country air and sunshine. . . . Herman’s larger suitcase contained sixteen bottles of Scotch and nothing else.” A few weeks later, Hecht and MacArthur went into New York to try to sell a play they’d just written, and encountered Mankiewicz, who, having sent his wife and children out of town to escape the heat, was “occupying Prince Bibesco’s grand suite in the Plaza Hotel while his Highness capered in Long Island.” Hecht went on, “We moved in with him, there being no rent to pay. We discovered, while helping Herman to undress the first night, that his torso was bound with yards of adhesive tape. He had slipped while trying to get out of the bathtub and lamed his back. When Herman was asleep, MacArthur and I rolled him on his stomach and with an indelible pencil wrote ardent and obscene love messages on his taping. We signed them Gladys and chuckled over the impending moment in Far Rockaway when Herman would undress before his keen-eyed Sara.”
Not only was Mankiewicz alcoholic and maniacally accident-prone; he was a gambler, constantly in debt. There was a sequence in a thirties movie about a gambling newspaperman that was based on the way the other writers at Paramount used to line up with him when he got his check on Friday afternoon and walk with him to the bank so they could get back some of the money he’d borrowed from them during the week. His old friends say that he would bet from sheer boredom; when he ran out of big sporting events, he would bet on anything—on high-school football games or whether it would rain. He got to the point where he was bored with just betting; he wanted the stakes to be dangerously high. He once explained, “It’s not fun gambling if I lose two thousand and just write a check for it. What’s thrilling is to make out a check for fifteen thousand dollars knowing there’s not a penny in the bank.” James Thurber referred to him as an “incurable compulsive gambler.” He described how Mankiewicz went to a psychiatrist to see if anything could be done about it. “I can’t cure you of gambling,” the analyst told him on his last visit, “but I can tell you why you do it.”
By the late thirties, Mankiewicz had just about run out of studios to get fired from. His friends would get him jobs and he would lose them—sometimes in spectacular ways that became part of Hollywood legend. Perhaps the best-known is his exit from Columbia Pictures. In his biography of Harry Cohn, who was then the head of the studio, Bob Thomas describes it this way:
Mankiewicz’s attitude toward himself and his work is summed up in one very short, very famous story. A friend who hadn’t seen him for a while asked, “How’s Sara?”
Mankiewicz, puzzled: “Who?”
“Sara. Your wife, Sara.”
“Oh, you mean Poor Sara.”
The only evidence of an instinct for self-preservation in the life of Herman Mankiewicz is his choice of keen-eyed Sara. He was in bad shape by 1939, but Mayer kept him on the payroll—some said so that top people at M-G-M could collect their gambling winnings from him. But Mayer also seems to have had some affection for him, and Sara had become a close friend of Mayer’s daughter Irene. Mayer became concerned about Mankiewicz s gambling debts, and, assuming that Mankiewicz was also concerned about them, he concluded that if he got the debts straightened out, Mankiewicz would pull himself together. Mayer called him in and asked him how much money he needed to get financially clear. Mankiewicz came up with the figure of $30,000, and Mayer offered to advance him that sum on a new contract if he would swear a solemn vow never to gamble again. Mankiewicz went through an elaborate ritual of giving Mayer his sacred word, and walked out with the $30,000. The very next day, it is said, Mankiewicz was playing poker on the lot, and he had just raised the stakes to $10,000 when he looked up and saw Mayer standing there. Mankiewicz left the studio and didn’t return. A few days after that—early in September of 1939—Thomas Phipps, a nephew of Lady Astor’s, who was also employed as a writer at M-G-M, was driving to New York to court a lady there, and, with nothing better to do, Mankiewicz decided to go along. As Mankiewicz described the trip some months later, in a guest column he wrote, filling in for Hedda Hopper on vacation, it was fairly giddy right from the start. Mankiewicz said that each song on the car radio sent Phipps swooning, because either he had heard it while he was with his lady or he had heard it while he was not with her. On the outskirts of Albuquerque, the car skidded and turned over. Mankiewicz’s jocular account included as the climax “thirty-four weeks in a cast in bed and thirty-two weeks in a brace.” Phipps had a broken collarbone; when it healed, he proceeded on his romantic way to New York. Mankiewicz had a compound fracture of the left leg, which, together with further injuries suffered while the fracture was healing, left him with a limp for the rest of his life.
During the long recuperation—very long, because on his first night out on the town after his cast was removed, he went on crutches to Chasen’s, got drunk, slipped and broke more bones, and had to be put in another cast—Mankiewicz, bedridden and in exile from the studios, began to write the Mercury Theatre’s “Campbell Playhouse” radio shows, with the actors often gathered around his bed for story conferences, and even rehearsals. Welles, having come to Hollywood in July to fulfill his contract with Schaefer, had been flying to and from New York for the series; in October he arranged to have the shows originate in Los Angeles, and in November he hired Mankiewicz to write five of them. Welles had met Mankiewicz sometime earlier in New York. This is John Houseman’s recollection of those events, set down in a letter to Sara Mankiewicz after her husband’s death:
Tower Road was where the Mankiewiczes lived and the Mercury group gathered. The Dog-Faced Boy is, of course, Orson Welles (Cocteau once described him as “a dog who has broken loose from his chain and gone to sleep on the flower bed”), and the Mickey Finns were a medical concoction that was supposed to make Mankiewicz hate alcohol. It failed. The secretary, Mrs. Rita Alexander (she lent her name to the character of Susan Alexander), recalls that during her first week, before Sara Mankiewicz had had a chance to give her a briefing, Mankiewicz persuaded her to take him into the town of Victorville, where he could get a drink. She withstood his wiles after that. He really wasn’t in condition to do much drinking; the broken bones included a hip break, and he was in such poor condition that even eating presented problems. Mrs. Alexander recalls spoon-feeding him bicarbonate of soda, and recalls his courtly, formal apologies for the belches that rocked the room.
There are monsters, and there are also sacred monsters; both Welles and Mankiewicz deserve places in the sacred-monster category. Some writers on film—particularly in England—blithely say that Kane wasn’t based on Hearst, using as evidence statements that Welles made to the press in early 1941, when he was trying to get the picture released. But those who think Louella Parsons got the mistaken idea that the picture was about Hearst don’t understand what kind of man the young Welles was. Welles and Mankiewicz wanted to do something startling, something that would cap the invasion of the Martians—which had, after all, panicked only the boobs, and inadvertently at that, though Welles now makes it sound deliberate. This time, he and Mankiewicz meant to raise cain. The pun is surely theirs, and Hearst had walked right into it; he was so fond of a story called “Cain and Mabel,” which he’d bought and produced as a Cosmopolitan Picture back in 1924, that he remade it late in 1936, at Warners’, starring Clark Gable and Marion Davies. It had been one of her last pictures before her retirement. Cain and Mabel—it was a perfect description of Hearst and Marion. In 1960, when Welles was interviewed on British television, he said, “Kane isn’t really founded on Hearst in particular.” I suppose he was feeling rather expansive at that moment, and it may have seemed to limit his importance if his Kane had been based on anyone “in particular.” In the same interview, he said, “You asked me did Mr. Hearst try to stop it. He didn’t. . . . He was like Kane in that he wouldn’t have stooped to such a thing.” This was rather droll, but Welles seemed to mean it. He didn’t seem to know much about Hearst anymore; probably he’d forgotten. One may also fairly conclude that Welles, with that grandeur which he seems to have taken over from the theatre into his personal life, was elevating Hearst, lending Hearst some of his own magnitude. More characteristically, however, his grandeur is double-edged, as in this typical statement on Gregg Toland:
Welles was thus telling us that he learned all there was to know about camerawork in half a day. What, one wonders, was the craft that Toland needed to master? Welles, like Hearst, and like most very big men, is capable of some very small gestures. And so was Mankiewicz, who brought his younger, more stable brother, Joe, out to Hollywood and helped him get started, but, as soon as Joe had some success, began behaving atrociously, referring to him as “my idiot brother.”
Mankiewicz’s ambivalence was generally on a higher level, however. There are many different kinds of senses of humor, and the one that sometimes comes through Mankiewicz anecdotes is the perverse soul of Kane himself. There is, for example, the story that Ezra Goodman tells in “The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood.” Hollywood was not often elegant and correct, but the producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., was known for the finesse of his social functions. At a dinner party that he gave for Hollywood notables, Herman Mankiewicz drank too much and threw up on the table. “A deadly hush descended over the assembled guests. . . . Mankiewicz broke the silence himself: ‘It’s all right, Arthur; the white wine came up with the fish.’ ”
The man who in those circumstances could put his host down was a fit companion for Welles. They were big eaters, big talkers, big spenders, big talents; they were not men of what is ordinarily called “good character.” They were out to get not only Hearst but each other. The only religious remark that has ever been attributed to Mankiewicz was recorded on the set of “Citizen Kane”: Welles walked by, and Mankiewicz muttered, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.”
Herman Mankiewicz didn’t—to be exact—write “Citizen Kane”; he dictated it. The screenwriters may have felt like whores and they may have been justified in that feeling, but they were certainly well-paid whores. In New York, they hadn’t had secretaries, but the movie business was mass culture’s great joke on talent. The affectation of “Look, no hands” became the literal truth. Mankiewicz dictated the script while the nurse watched over him and John Houseman stood by in attendance. This was a cut-rate job—Mankiewicz was getting $500 a week for his ghostly labors—but it was still in the royal tradition of screenwriting. Outside the movie business, there has probably never been a writer in the history of the world who got this kind of treatment. There was an urgency about it: Welles and most of the Mercury Theatre company were in Hollywood doing their weekly radio shows and waiting while this odd little group spent the spring of 1940 in Victorville preparing the script for Orson Welles’ début in films.
Welles had come to Hollywood the previous July in a burst of publicity, but his first two film projects hadn’t got under way. Within a few months of his arrival, he was being jeered at because nothing had happened. Although his contract with R.K.O. gave him freedom from interference, Schaefer and his legal staff had to approve the project and clear the shooting script and, of course, the budget. It had been agreed that his first project would be Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which he had already done as a radio drama. He was to play both Marlow and Kurtz, the two leading roles, and it was reported in the trade press that he was working on the script with John Houseman and Herbert Drake, who was the Mercury’s press agent. In the latter part of 1939, Welles brought actors out from New York and shot long test sequences, but the budget looked too high to the poverty-stricken studio, and the production was repeatedly postponed. He decided to do something while he was waiting—something that he could start on right away, to get the Mercury actors on the R.K.O. payroll—and he hit on a spy thriller with a political theme: “The Smiler with the Knife,” from the novel by Nicholas Blake (C. Day Lewis). Welles adapted the book himself—“in seven days,” according to the trade press—but this project was abandoned almost at once because of differences with Schaefer over casting. (Welles wanted to use Lucille Ball, then a contract player at R.K.O., in the lead, and Schaefer didn’t think she could carry the picture. As the whole world knows, she wound up owning the studio, but Schaefer wasn’t necessarily wrong; she never did carry a picture.) There was still hope for “Heart of Darkness”—and a lot of money had already been spent on it—but things seemed to be falling apart for the Mercury group. By the end of 1939, Welles was desperate for a subject that would be acceptable to R.K.O. The movie plans were up in the air, and there was dissension within the Mercury group about staying on in Hollywood with nothing definite in sight to work on. Some of the actors left to take jobs elsewhere, and some were beginning to get film roles—a development that upset Welles, because he wanted them to be “new faces” in his first film.
A policy meeting was arranged to discuss the failing fortunes of the group and to decide whether to keep them all in Los Angeles or send some of them back to New York. The more or less administrative heads of the Mercury Theatre met for dinner in an upper room at Chasen’s. The group included Welles; Houseman, who had founded the Mercury Theatre with him; two all-purpose assistants, Richard Wilson and William Alland; the press agent, Drake; and several others. Houseman argued that the actors should return to New York, but nothing had been settled by the time the coffee and brandy arrived, and then Welles, in a sudden access of rage, shouted that Houseman wanted to desert him, that Houseman had always been against him, and he threw the coffee warmers—full of Sterno canned heat—at Houseman. He did not throw them very precisely, it seems; he threw them not so much with intent to hit as in Houseman’s general direction. Dave Chasen, having been summoned by a waiter, opened the door, and, with the aplomb he had used back in the thirties in vaudeville, when he was the stooge of the comedian Joe Cook, he took one look—a curtain was on fire by then—and closed the door. The men in the room stamped out the fire, and Houseman went home and sent Welles a letter of resignation. The partnership was ended, and a week later Houseman left for New York.
Welles’ tantrum and how it ended the partnership that had created the Mercury Theatre was the talk of the actors who gathered around Mankiewicz’s bed, and it must have registered on Mankiewicz in a special way: it must have practically thrust on him the recognition of an emotional link between Welles and William Randolph Hearst, whose tantrums had been the stuff of legend among newspapermen for half a century, and whose occasional demonstrations of childishness were the gossip of guests at San Simeon. A week or two after the Chasen’s dinner party, Mankiewicz proposed to Welles that they make a “prismatic” movie about the life of a man seen from several different points of view. Although Mankiewicz had been talking to friends for years about what a movie Hearst’s life would make, his first suggestions for the “prismatic” movie were Dillinger and, when Welles was cool to that, Aimee Semple McPherson. Only after Welles had rejected that, too, and after they had discussed the possibilities in the life of Dumas, did he propose Hearst. Mankiewicz must have been stalling and playing games to lead Welles on, because although he was interested in both Dillinger and Aimee Semple McPherson, and subsequently did prepare scripts on them, this movie had to be a starring vehicle for Welles, and what major role could Welles play in the life of either Dillinger or Aimee? From what Mankiewicz told friends at the time, when he sprang the name Hearst, Welles leaped at it.
Welles had grown up hearing stories about Hearst from Dr. Maurice Bernstein, who was his guardian after his parents died. Dr. Bernstein was a good friend of Ashton Stevens, who had originally been the drama critic on Hearst’s flagship paper, the San Francisco Examiner, and had gone on to work for Hearst in Chicago. Welles himself was a Hearst-press “discovery;” it was Ashton Stevens, whom Dr. Bernstein got in touch with, who had publicized the nineteen-year-old Orson Welles when he produced “Hamlet” on a vacant second floor in Illinois. But Welles, being a knowledgeable young man, would have known a great deal about Hearst even without this personal connection, for Hearst was the unifying hatred of all liberals and leftists. Welles, with his sense of the dramatic, would have known at once what a sensational idea a movie about Hearst was. Aimee and Dillinger just didn’t have the dimensions that Hearst had; Hearst was even right for Welles physically. Welles and Mankiewicz must have enjoyed thinking what a scandal a movie about him would make. Mankiewicz didn’t need to have misgivings about repercussions, because the risks would all be Welles’. Schaefer had signed Welles up to a widely publicized four-way contract as producer, director, writer, and actor. It was understood that he would take the credit for the script, just as he did for the scripts of the radio plays. His R.K.O. contract stated that “the screenplay for each picture shall be written by Mr. Orson Welles,” and Welles probably took this stipulation as no more than his due—a necessity of his station. He probably accepted the work that others did for him the way modern Presidents accept the work of speech-writers.
The title “American” suggests how Mankiewicz felt about the project. Several years before, in 1933, his friend and drinking companion Preston Sturges had written a big one, an original called “The Power and the Glory,” which, when it was produced, with Spencer Tracy and Colleen Moore in the leading roles, made Tracy a star. “The Power and the Glory” was about a ruthless railroad tycoon who fails in his personal life, and it was told in flashbacks and narration from his funeral. It was an impressive picture, and it was lauded in terms similar to those later used about “Kane.” “Its subject,” William Troy wrote in the Nation, “is the great American Myth, and its theme is futility.” The ballyhoo included putting a bronze tablet in the New York theatre where it opened to commemorate “the first motion picture in which narratage was used as a method of telling a dramatic story.” (Hollywood, big on ballyhoo but short on real self-respect, failed to transfer the nitrate negative to safety stock, and modern prints of “The Power and the Glory” are tattered remnants.) Not only is the tycoon treated ambivalently by Sturges but in the boyhood sequence he is injured through his own arrogance, so that he acquires a jagged, lightninglike scar on his hand—the mark of Cain. The idea of the big-businessman as a Cain figure was basic to this genre, which had become popular in the Depression thirties, when many business giants of the twenties were revealed to be swindlers, or, at the very least, ruthless. In another 1933 film, “I Loved a Woman,” a tycoon’s mistress sang at the Chicago Opera House. (It was where the tycoons’ mistresses did sing in the twenties.) In 1937, Mankiewicz himself had done a trial run on the tycoon theme (with Edward Arnold as a lumber baron) in “John Meade’s Woman.” To do Hearst, a much more dangerous man—the only tycoon who was also a demagogue—in a technique similar to Sturges’s but from several different points of view would make a really big picture.
But there was a sizable hurdle: How could they get R.K.O. to approve this project? Welles and Mankiewicz went on talking about it for a couple of weeks, while Mankiewicz continued writing the weekly radio shows. When they decided to go ahead and try to slip it over on the studio somehow, Welles still had to find a way to get Mankiewicz to do the writing; the Mercury company couldn’t be kept waiting in Los Angeles indefinitely while Mankiewicz wandered loose. Mankiewicz had had to be hauled off to sanatoriums to be dried out too many times for Welles to take chances, and the screenwriters who had worked with Mankiewicz at Metro told too many stories about his losing interest in the scripts he was assigned to and drinking so much during working hours that the other writers would load him into a studio car in midafternoon and have the driver haul him home, where Sara would unload him and put him to bed, and he would sleep it off before dinner and be ready for the night’s drinking. He had just injured himself again, in his fall at Chasen’s, and his bones were being reset, but soon he would be off on the town once more, despite cast or crutches, and there would be no way to hold him down to work. Welles hit on the scheme of packing Mankiewicz off to the country to recuperate. In early January, 1940, Welles flew to New York, and over lunch at “21” the young magician prevailed on Houseman to return to the Coast and do him and the Mercury one last service by running herd on Mankiewicz; only a month had passed since the fiery scene at Chasen’s. (It was to be not the last but the next-to-last collaborative project of Welles and Houseman. A week after “American” was done and the troupe had left Victorville, Houseman and Welles were on bad terms again, but Mankiewicz, who was said to have read every new book by publication date, even when he was in the worst possible shape, told them that they’d be crazy if they didn’t buy a new book that was just coming out, and dramatize it. Houseman went to work on it, and as a result Richard Wright’s “Native Son” was adapted for the stage and produced so quickly that Welles had it playing in New York by the time “Citizen Kane” opened.)
Both Houseman and Mankiewicz unquestionably had mixed feelings about Welles by the time they found themselves at the guest ranch. Houseman admits that right from the beginning, when Mankiewicz started on the script, they planned to have Welles reënact his tantrum. It was set for the scene in which Susan leaves Kane (Welles’ wife, Virginia, had brought suit for divorce during the month Welles had his tantrum), and Mankiewicz wrote it up rather floridly and with explicit directions, in a passage beginning, “Kane, in a truly terrible and absolutely silent rage . . .” When it was time to shoot the scene, the various members of the group who had been at Chasen’s—or had heard about what happened there, and everybody had—encouraged Welles to do what he had done that night. Last year, William Alland, describing the making of the film in an interview printed in the magazine of the Directors Guild of America, said:
Writing that scene into the movie was a cruel trick on Welles, designed to make him squirm. He had been built up so much that he was by then the white hope (as it used to be called) of the theatre. In 1938, even George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart had taken him to be that; they had written one of their worst maudlin “serious” plays (and a flop )—“The Fabulous Invalid,” a cavalcade-of-the-American-theatre sort of play—and had modelled its hero on Welles. The hero—the leader of a new acting company—made a classic final curtain speech to his actors:
For the people who did much of the work on Welles’ projects, the temptation must have been strong to expose what they considered this savior’s feet of clay.
The menagerie at Mrs. Campbell’s being scarcely a secret, they had many visitors (Welles himself came to dinner once or twice), and several of these visitors, as well as Houseman and Mrs. Alexander, describe how Herman Mankiewicz turned out the script that became “Citizen Kane.” Mankiewicz couldn’t go anywhere without help; he sat up, in the cast that covered one leg and went up to his middle, and played cribbage with Mrs. Alexander during the day, while telling her stories about Hearst and Marion Davies and San Simeon. Then, at night, from about eight-thirty to eleven-thirty or twelve, he dictated, and she would type it out so he could have it the next day. Mrs. Alexander recalls that during the first days on the job, when she was fascinated by the romantic significance of “Rosebud” and asked him how the story would turn out, he said, “My dear Mrs. Alexander, I don’t know. I’m making it up as I go along.” Welles was so deeply entangled in the radio shows and other activities and a romance with Dolores Del Rio at the time the script was being prepared that even when he came to dinner at Victorville, it was mainly a social visit; the secretary didn’t meet him until after Mankiewicz had finished dictating the long first draft. Welles probably made suggestions in his early conversations with Mankiewicz, and since he received copies of the work weekly while it was in progress at Victorville, he may have given advice by phone or letter. Later, he almost certainly made suggestions for cuts that helped Mankiewicz hammer the script into tighter form, and he is known to have made a few changes on the set. But Mrs. Alexander, who took the dictation from Mankiewicz, from the first paragraph to the last, and then, when the first draft was completed and they all went back to Los Angeles, did the secretarial work at Mankiewicz’s house on the rewriting and the cuts, and who then handled the script at the studio until after the film was shot, says that Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of “Citizen Kane.”
Toward the end of the period at the ranch, Mankiewicz began to realize that he’d made a very bad financial deal, and that the credit might be more important than he’d anticipated. After talks with Mrs. Alexander and the Mercury people who visited on weekends, he decided he was going to get screen credit, no matter what his bargain with Welles had been. Meanwhile, Houseman, who says that according to his original agreement to go off to the ranch he was supposed to get some kind of credit, discovered once again, and as so many others had, that it wasn’t easy to get your name on anything Orson Welles was involved in. Houseman was apparently fed up with arguments, and he says he waived his claim when he saw how determined Welles was; he left for New York and got started on the preparations for “Native Son.” But Mankiewicz was an experienced Hollywood hand and veteran of credit brawls who kept all his drafts and materials, and a man who relished trouble. He had ample proof of his authorship, and he took his evidence to the Screen Writers Guild and raised so much hell that Welles was forced to split the credit and take second place in the listing.
At the time the movie came out, Mankiewicz’s contribution to the film was generally known. The screen credit said, “Written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles.” The Hollywood Reporter simplified the credit to “Written by Herman Mankiewicz;” Burns Mantle, in his newspaper column, referred to Mankiewicz’s having written it; and, of course, Ben Hecht explained to the readers of PM, “This movie was not written by Orson Welles. It is the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz.” In that period, it was well known that if the producer of a film wanted a screenplay credit it was almost impossible to prevent him from getting it. So many producers took a writing credit as a droit du seigneur for a few consultations or suggestions that the Screen Writers Guild later instituted a rule calling for compulsory arbitration whenever a producer sought a credit. Under the present rules of the Guild, Welles’ name would probably not have appeared. And so it was by an awful fluke of justice that when Academy Awards night came, and Welles should have got the awards he deserved as director and actor, the award he got (the only Academy Award he has ever got) was as co-author of the Best Original Screenplay.
The Mercury group weren’t surprised at Welles’ taking a script credit; they’d had experience with this foible of his. Very early in his life as a prodigy, Welles seems to have fallen into the trap that has caught so many lesser men—believing his own publicity, believing that he really was the whole creative works, producer-director-writer-actor. Because he could do all these things, he imagined that he did do them. (A Profile of him that appeared in The New Yorker two years before “Citizen Kane” was made said that “outside the theatre . . . Welles is exactly twenty-three years old.”) In the days before the Mercury Theatre’s weekly radio shows got a sponsor, it was considered a good publicity technique to build up public identification with Welles’ name, so he was credited with just about everything, and was named on the air as the writer of the Mercury show. Probably no one but Welles believed it. He had written some of the shows when the program first started, and had also worked on some with Houseman, but soon he had become much too busy even to collaborate; for a while Houseman wrote them, and then they were farmed out. By the time of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, on Halloween, 1938, Welles wasn’t doing any of the writing. He was so busy with his various other activities that he didn’t always direct the rehearsals himself, either—William Alland or Richard Wilson or one of the other Mercury assistants did it. Welles might not come in until the last day, but somehow, all agree, he would pull the show together “with a magic touch.” Yet when the Martian broadcast became accidentally famous, Welles seemed to forget that Howard Koch had written it. (In all the furor over the broadcast, with front-page stories everywhere, the name of the author of the radio play wasn’t mentioned.) Koch had been writing the shows for some time. He lasted for six months, writing about twenty-five shows altogether—working six and a half days a week, and frantically, on each one, he says, with no more than half a day off to see his family. The weekly broadcasts were a “studio presentation” until after “The War of the Worlds” (Campbell’s Soup picked them up then), and Koch, a young writer, who was to make his name with the film “The Letter” in 1940 and win an Academy Award for his share in the script of the 1942 “Casablanca,” was writing them for $75 apiece. Koch’s understanding of the agreement was that Welles would get the writing credit on the air for publicity purposes but that Koch would have any later benefit, and the copyright was in Koch’s name. (He says that it was, however, Welles’ idea that he do the Martian show in the form of radio bulletins.) Some years later, when C.B.S. did a program about the broadcast and the panic it had caused, the network re-created parts of the original broadcast and paid Koch $300 for the use of his material. Welles sued C.B.S. for $375,000, claiming that he was the author and that the material had been used without his permission. He lost, of course, but he may still think he wrote it. (He frequently indicates as much in interviews and on television.)
“Foible” is the word that Welles’ former associates tend to apply to his assertions of authorship. Welles could do so many different things in those days that it must have seemed almost accidental when he didn’t do things he claimed to. Directors, in the theatre and in movies, are by function (and often by character, or, at least, disposition) cavalier toward other people’s work, and Welles was so much more talented and magnetic than most directors—and so much younger, too—that people he robbed of credit went on working with him for years, as Koch went on writing more of the radio programs after Welles failed to mention him during the national publicity about the panic. Welles was dedicated to the company, and he was exciting to work with, so the company stuck together, working for love, and even a little bit more money (Koch was raised to $125 a show) when they got a sponsor and, also as a result of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, the movie contract that took them to Hollywood.
If there was ever a young man who didn’t need unearned credits, it was Orson Welles, yet though he was already too big, he must have felt he needed to dazzle the world. Welles was hated in Hollywood long before he’d made a movie; he was hated almost upon his arrival. From time to time, Hollywood used to work up considerable puerile resentment against “outsiders” who dared to make movies. The scope of Welles’ reputation seems to have infuriated Hollywood; it was a cultural reproach from the East, and the Hollywood people tried to protect themselves by closing ranks and making Welles a butt of their humor. Gene Lockhart composed a stupid, nasty ditty called “Little Orson Annie,” which was sung at Hollywood parties; the name stuck and was used by the columnists, though Hedda Hopper supported him and suggested that Hollywood reserve judgment, and Louella Parsons, on December 31st, selected him as “the most discussed personality to come to the films in 1939.” Yet for Welles, with his beard (he was growing it for the Shakespearean production he intended to stage as soon as he could pick up his Hollywood loot), to be ensconced in the Mary Pickford-Buddy Rogers estate, right next door to Shirley Temple, was too much for Hollywood. Welles became the victim of practical jokers. One night when he was dining at Chasen’s, an actor cut off his tie with a table knife. Not all the jokes were so Freudian, but they were mostly ugly. Welles had come with an unprecedented contract. Probably the old Hollywoodians not only expected him to fall on his face but hoped he would, so that their mediocrity and prosperity would be vindicated. But Welles was the braggart who makes good. And, despite their resentment, they were dazzled by “Citizen Kane.”
The picture got a thunderous reception, even in the Hollywood press. In recent years, the rumor has spread that “Citizen Kane” opened to bad reviews—presumably on the theory that it was so far ahead of its time that it wasn’t understood—and this is now recorded in many film histories. But it was very well understood by the press (who would understand a newspaper picture better? ), and it got smashing reviews. It isn’t, after all, a difficult picture. In some ways, it was probably better understood then than it is now, and, as far as I can determine, it was more highly praised by the American press than any other movie in history. The New York opening of “Citizen Kane,” which had been scheduled for February 14, 1941, finally took place on May 1st, and a week later it opened in Los Angeles. In January, Hedda Hopper had “doubted” whether the picture would ever be released, and some of the trade press had predicted that it wouldn’t be. Possibly it wouldn’t have been except for the screenings that Welles arranged and the publicity that he got.
The whole industry was already involved in the picture. Although technically Welles had the right of final cut, the editor, Robert Wise, was instructed by the studio, with Welles’ consent, to take a print to New York in January. Wise ran it for the heads of all the major companies and their lawyer, and for six weeks he and his then assistant Mark Robson, who was on the Coast, fussed over the movie, making tiny, nervous changes—mostly a word here or there—that the executives and lawyers hoped would render the picture less objectionable to Hearst. Meanwhile, Schaefer had engaged Time, Inc.’s, legal specialist on invasion-of-privacy suits; the lawyer instructed Schaefer that if he made one small cut in the film, no one could win such a suit. The dangerous section was a bit of dialogue by Raymond, the butler suggesting that the old man was senile. Schaefer says he had no difficulty persuading Welles to agree to the cut. However, at the beginning of March, Hearst sent for Walter Howey, and no one was sure what they might be poking into. “Nor are private lives to be overlooked,” Hedda Hopper predicted; and her predictions were the same as threats. Hearst’s maneuvers were in the true Kane spirit: In January, Hedda Hopper had warned that “the refugee situation would be looked into,” which meant that there would he pressure for a legal review of whether various imported stars and directors should be allowed to remain in the country, and the industry would be attacked for employing foreigners; that is, refugees from Hitler. Three days after the press previews, the Hearst newspapers, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other patriotic organizations went into action to rid radio of “subversives.” The “subversives” they were after were William Saroyan, Maxwell Anderson, George M. Cohan, Marc Connelly, Robert E. Sherwood, Stephen Vincent Benét, Paul Green, Sherwood Anderson, and James Boyd, who were involved with Welles in a series of C.B.S. radio plays on the general theme of freedom, which, although it had been initiated by the Justice Department, was now condemned as unAmerican and as tending to encourage Communism. Before “Citizen Kane” was released, PM reported that Hearst photographers were following Welles in “G-man” style, trying to get something on him, while Variety reported “persistent inquiries at the draft board as to why Welles hadn’t been drafted.” It was along about this time that Hearst himself saw the picture. Schaefer says, “Hearst personally sent to me at the studio and asked to see a print, and we let him have it. This was before it opened. There was no response, no comment. Orson knew this.” Welles may have feared that Schaefer would buckle unless he squeezed him from the other side, or, as Schaefer claims, it may have been Welles’ way of getting more publicity, but, for whatever reason, Welles began to issue threats: he gave R.K.O. the deadline of March 30th for releasing the picture or facing a lawsuit. On March 11th, Welles called a press conference to alert the press to the danger that the film might he suppressed, and gave out this statement:
Several of the magazines responded to his plea for the pressure of publicity by reviewing the picture before it opened, obviously with the intention of helping to get it released. A review in Time on March 17, 1941, began:
It continued:
In Newsweek, also on March 17, 1941, John O’Hara began his review with
Along the way, O’Hara said such things as
The same day—March 17,1941—Life, which was to run several more features on the movie in the following months, came out with four pages of pictures and a review:
Hearst must have known he would be in for a bad time if the picture should be withheld; the Luce magazines—Time and Life—had always been eager to embarrass him, and certainly wouldn’t let the subject drop. (The financial backing that Welles said he had to buy the picture was probably from Henry Luce.) One surmises that Hearst decided not to try to block its release—though the petty harassment of R.K.O. and others involved went on, like a reflex to a blow.
Here is a representative selection from the reviews:
Even Kate Cameron, in the Daily News, gave it four stars, and on Sunday, May 4th, Bosley Crowther wrote in the Times, “The returns are in from most of the local journalistic precincts and Orson Welles’ ‘Citizen Kane’ has been overwhelmingly selected as one of the great (if not the greatest) motion pictures of all time. . . .” The Film Daily said, “Welles can prepare his mantel for a couple of Oscars.”
Had it not been for the delays and the nervous atmosphere that made the picture seem unpopular and so become unpopular, it might have swept the Academy Awards. It had taken the New York Film Critics Award with ease, but early in 1942, when the 1941 Academy Awards were given, the picture had the aroma of box-office failure—an aroma that frightens off awards in Hollywood. The picture had been nominated in nine categories, and at the ceremony, each time the title or Orson Welles’ name was read, there were hisses and loud boos. The prize for the Original Screenplay was perhaps partly a love gesture to Herman Mankiewicz, one of their own; the film community had closed ranks against Orson Welles.
While the picture was being shot, Welles, like a good showman, had done his best to preserve the element of surprise, and he had been smart about keeping a tight, closed set. He didn’t want interference from anybody, and even though the R.K.O. executives had read the script, when one of them “dropped in” once to see what was going on, Welles coolly called a halt in the shooting, and the Mercury players went outside and played baseball until he left. There were visitors, of course. Invitations to attend the first official day of shooting were sent to the press, and Welles was simply careful about what he shot that day. And the crew didn’t go out to play baseball when Louella Parsons visited the set a few weeks later; they were just very careful, so that even though she had heard rumors that the picture was about Hearst, everything looked so innocent and Welles denied the rumor so disarmingly that she went on giving him an enthusiastic press. (She later described his outfoxing her on this occasion as “one of the classic double crosses of Hollywood.”) But Mankiewicz, with his “Don’t let this get around,” was practically incapable of keeping a secret. He was so proud of his script that he lent a copy to Charles Lederer. In some crazily naïve way, Mankiewicz seems to have imagined that Lederer would be pleased by how good it was. But Lederer, apparently, was deeply upset and took the script to his aunt and Hearst. It went from them to Hearst’s lawyers (who marked various passages) before it was returned to Mankiewicz, and thus Hearst and his associates were alerted early to the content of the film. It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz’s idiotic indiscretion that the various forces were set in motion that resulted in the cancellation of the première at the Radio City Music Hall, the commercial failure of “Citizen Kane,” and the subsequent failure of Orson Welles. This was how, even before the film was finished, Hearst’s minions were in action, and how there was time for Mayer and his people to set about their attempt to suppress the film, and, having failed in that, to destroy it commercially.
In the aftermath of the pressures, and of the disappointing returns on the film, the members of the Academy could feel very courageous about the writing award. Mankiewicz had become a foolhardy hero in taking on Hearst; “Kane” was Mankiewicz’s finest moment. They wanted him to have a prize; he deserved it and he needed it. Hollywood loves the luxury of show-business sentimentality, and Hollywood loves a comeback. The members of the Academy destroyed Orson Welles that night, but they probably felt good because their hearts had gone out to crazy, reckless Mank, their own resident loser-genius, the has-been who was washed up in the big studios, who was so far down he had been reduced to writing Welles’ radio shows. At the beginning of the thirties, he had been earning $4,000 a week; at the end of the thirties, he was a ghost. What they couldn’t know was that “Kane” was Welles’ finest moment, too; the reason they couldn’t know it was that their failure to back him that night was the turning point. Welles had “Citizen Kane” at twenty-five, and he seemed to have the world before him. They’d had time to get used to Mank’s self-destructiveness, and he’d been down on his luck so long he was easy to love; besides, they admired the pranks that had got him thrown out of one studio after another. Welles was self-destructive in a style they weren’t yet accustomed to.
One may speculate that if the members of the Academy had supported Welles and voted “Citizen Kane” Best Picture of the Year, if they had backed the nation’s press and their own honest judgment, the picture might have got into the big theatrical showcases despite the pressures against it. If they had, “Kane” might have made money, and things might have gone differently for Welles—and for American movies. The Academy had plenty of sentiment but not enough guts. And so Orson Welles peaked early. Later, as his situation changed and his fortunes sank and “Kane” became the golden opportunity of his youth, his one great chance of freedom to accomplish something, then, when he looked back, he may really have needed to believe what he was quoted as saying in France: “Le seul film que j’aie jamais écrit du premier au dernier mot et pu mener à bien est ‘Citizen Kane.’ ” The literal translation is “The only film that I ever wrote from first word to last and was able to bring to a successful issue is ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” but I think that what it means is “The picture came out well.” What else can it mean when one considers the contributions of Mankiewicz and Toland and all the rest? Men cheated of their due are notoriously given to claiming more than their due. The Academy members had made their token gesture to “Citizen Kane” with the screenplay award. They failed what they believed in; they gave in to the scandal and to the business pressures. They couldn’t yet know how much guilt they should feel: guilt that by their failure to support “Citizen Kane” at this crucial time—the last chance to make “Kane” a financial success—they had started the downward spiral of Orson Welles, who was to become perhaps the greatest loser in Hollywood history.
Like D. W. Griffith, Orson Welles came into the movies in order to make money so that he could continue in the theatre, and, like Griffith, he discovered that movies were the medium in which he could do what he had barely dreamed of doing in the theatre. Soon—even before he started on “Citizen Kane”—Welles was desperate for money to make movies. It took guile to get “Kane” approved. Robert Wise, whom the head of the R.K.O. editing department had assigned to the picture because he was close to Welles’ age, says, “Orson sneaked the project onto R.K.O. He told the studio that he was merely shooting tests.” Sets were built, and shooting began on June 29, 1940; the “test shots” were fully produced. The Mercury actors and associates were there anyway, most of them under personal contract to Welles, as Mankiewicz was. But Dorothy Comingore, not a member of the Mercury Theatre but a Hollywood bit player (who, as Linda Winters, had worked in Westerns and with the Three Stooges and in Blondie and Charlie Chan pictures), says that she lived on unemployment checks of $18 a week while she “tested for one month” for the role of Susan Alexander. She adds, “All these tests were incorporated into the film; they were never retaken.” After a month, with the studio buzzing about how brilliant the footage was, the movie was practically a fait accompli, and Welles was able to bulldoze Schaefer into approving the project. All the people who were already at work on “Citizen Kane”—the cameraman, the grips, the composer, the assistants, and the actors—met at Herman Mankiewicz’s house for breakfast, and Welles announced that the picture had been approved and could formally begin. They officially started on July 30, 1940, and they finished “principal photography” eighty-two shooting days later, on October 23, 1940, even though Welles—almost as accident-prone as Mankiewicz—broke his ankle during the scene when he ran down the stairs from Susan’s room while yelling that he’d get Boss Gettys.
Yet it took more than guile to function in the motion-picture business at that time. It helped to be mercenary, of course, but what really counted then was not to care too much about your work. After “Citizen Kane,” the contract that gave Welles the right of final cut was cancelled, so he did not have control of “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and it was shortened and mangled. The industry was suspicious of him, and not just because of the scandal of “Kane,” and the general fear of Hearst, and “Kane’s” unsatisfactory financial returns. Alva Johnston described the Hollywood attitude toward Welles in an article in the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, the year after “Kane” came out:
When you write straight reporting about the motion-picture business, you’re writing satire. Motion-picture executives prefer to do business with men whose values they understand. It’s very easy for these executives—businessmen running an art—to begin to fancy that they are creative artists themselves, because they are indeed very much like the “artists” who work for them, because the “artists” who work for them are, or have become, businessmen. Those who aren’t businessmen are the Hollywood unreliables—the ones whom, it is always explained to you, the studios can’t hire, because they’re crazy. As soon as movies became Welles’ passion, and he was willing to work on any terms, he was finished in the big studios—they didn’t trust him. And so, somehow, Welles aged before he matured—and not just physically. He went from child prodigy to defeated old man, though today, at fifty-five, he is younger by a decade or two than most of the big American directors.
In later years, Welles, a brilliant talker, was to give many interviews, and as his power in the studios diminished, his role in past movies grew larger. Sometimes it seems that his only power is over the interviewers who believe him. He is a masterful subject. The new generation of film historians have their own version of “Look, no hands”: they tape-record interviews. Young interviewers, particularly, don’t bother to check the statements of their subjects—they seem to regard that as outside their province—and thus leave the impression that the self-aggrandizing stories they record are history. And so, as the years go on, if one trusts what appears in print, Welles wrote not only “Kane” but just about everything halfway good in any picture he ever acted in, and in interviews he’s beginning to have directed anything good in them, too. Directors are now the most interviewed group of people since the stars in the forties, and they have told the same stories so many times that not only they believe them, whether they’re true or false, but everybody is beginning to.
This worship of the director is cyclical—Welles or Fellini is probably adored no more than von Stroheim or von Sternberg or De Mille was in his heyday—but such worship generally doesn’t help in sorting out what went into the making of good pictures and bad pictures. The directors try to please the interviewers by telling them the anecdotes that have got a good response before. The anecdote are sometimes charming and superficial, like the famous one—now taken for motion-picture history—about how Howard Hawks supposedly discovered that “The Front Page” would be better if a girl played the reporter Hildy, and thus transformed the play into “His Girl Friday” in 1940 (“I was going to prove to somebody that ‘The Front Page’ had the finest modern dialogue that had been written, and I asked a girl to read Hildy’s part and I read the editor, and I stopped and I said, ‘Hell, it’s better between a girl and a man than between two men’’’). Now, a charming story is not nothing. Still, this is nothing but a charming and superficial story. “His Girl Friday” turned out joyously, but if such an accident did cause Hawks to see how easy it was to alter the play, he still must have done it rather cynically, in order to make it conform to the box-office patterns then current. By the mid-thirties—after the surprise success of “It Happened One Night”—the new independent, wise-cracking girl was very popular, especially in a whole cycle of newspaper pictures with rival girl and boy reporters. Newspaper pictures were now “romantic comedies,” and, just as the movies about lady fliers were almost all based on Amelia Earhart, the criminal-mouthpiece movies on William Fallon, and the gossip-column movies on Walter Winchell, the movies about girl reporters were almost all based on the most highly publicized girl reporter—Hearst’s Adela Rogers St. Johns. Everybody had already been stealing from and unofficially adapting “The Front Page” in the wacky romantic newspaper comedies, and one of these rewrites, “Wedding Present,” in 1936 (by Adela Rogers St. Johns’ then son-in-law Paul Gallico), had tough editor (Cary Grant) and smart girl reporter (Joan Bennett) with square fiancé (Conrad Nagel). This was the mold that “The Front Page” was then squeezed into to become “His Girl Friday,” with Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy (already a favorite square from “The Awful Truth”) in the same roles, and Rosalind Russell was so obviously playing Adela Rogers St. Johns that she was dressed in an imitation of the St. Johns girl-reporter striped suit.
Some things that students now, seeing films out of the context of the cycles they were part of, may take to be brilliant inventions were fairly standard; in fact, the public at the time was so familiar with the conventions of the popular comedies that the clichés were frequently spoofed within the pictures. But today, because of the problems peculiar to writing the history of modern mass-art forms, and because of the jumbled circumstances in which movies survive, with knowledge of them acquired in haphazard fashion from television, and from screenings here and there, film enthusiasts find it simpler to explain movies in terms of the genius-artist-director, the schoolbook hero—the man who did it all. Those who admire “Citizen Kane,” which is constructed to present different perspectives on a man’s life, seem naïvely willing to accept Welles’ view of its making, namely, that it is his sole creation.
Howard Hawks must wonder what the admiration of the young is worth when he learns from them that he invented overlapping dialogue in “His Girl Friday,” since it means that they have never bothered to look at the text of the original Hecht and MacArthur play. Welles too, has been said to have invented overlapping dialogue, and just about everything else in “Kane.” But unearned praise is insulting, and a burden; Welles sometimes says, “I drag my myth around with me.” His true achievements are heavy enough to weigh him down. Welles is a great figure in motion-picture history: he directed what is almost universally acclaimed as the greatest American film of the sound era; he might have become the greatest all-around American director of that era; and in his inability to realize all his artistic potentialities he is the greatest symbolic figure in American film history since Griffith. ♦
(This is the first part of a two-part article.)