So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (6 page)

Houseman had a loose, informal partnership with Orson Welles, dating from even before the early days of Welles’s work at the modern Mercury Theatre’s experimental project, and he spent lots of time in Hollywood casting about for a suitable vehicle for Welles’s film debut, once RKO offered the plan for a feature film. My father, a veteran author of more than a hundred movie scripts, was an observer of the political scene with strong opinions, and an intense student of American political history. He was fascinated with the story of William Randolph Hearst, the enormously wealthy press lord who had lived at least two lives—first, as a rising politician of the liberal Left and, later, as the dominant spirit in his ferociously right-wing chain of newspapers.

Over the months of the radio scripts, as the men grew closer, my father got Houseman and then Welles to share his enthusiasm for doing a sort of documentary (we didn’t know that word) drama (we certainly did not speak of “docudramas”) on the life of a man like Hearst—with a few Freudian explanations thrown in. My father, after all, was one of the first people in Hollywood to be psychoanalyzed (by Dr. Ernst Simmel, an eminent German refugee, who, along with Freud and others, was one of the pioneers of modern psychotherapy), and people forget that in the early 1950s, ten years after
Kane
came out, some critics still dismissed it as “crackpot Freud.” Houseman sold the idea to Welles, and Welles agreed to use
Kane
—the movie’s tentative title was
American
—as the vehicle for his own spectacular contract with RKO, under the terms of which Welles would star in, produce, direct, and write a motion picture. The writing, however, would actually be Pop’s.

And so began the production; not a propitious start. My father had suffered a badly broken leg in an auto accident and was in a cast from chest to thigh. Houseman decided he and Pop would go to “the desert” for the few months it would take my father to dictate the script, with Houseman functioning as sort of an on-scene script supervisor and editor. Pop, I’m sure, thought “the desert” meant Palm Springs, where, even immobile, he could manage access to both alcoholic beverages and organized gambling, pleasures he held in high regard. When “the desert” turned out to be an inn owned by a Mrs. Campbell in Victorville, he knew that Houseman was serious about the script. Victorville was on what Southern Californians call the high desert—working class, residential, and determinedly unchic. The low desert is Palm Springs, then as now a den of low iniquity and high fashion. It was clear Houseman saw his role as that of social cop as well.

So there on the high desert,
Citizen Kane
took form during what must have been the longest period of enforced sobriety for my father in his adult years. They shared a bungalow, with two bedrooms and a living room they used as their office. Jack would ration the whiskey. I called Houseman “Jack”; all his friends did. We became friends that year and stayed friends for more than fifty years. In his memoirs, Welles describes Herman Mankiewicz as “a legendary figure in Hollywood,” and borrows from John Houseman, who described him as “one of the highest paid and most troublesome men in the business.… A neurotic drinker and a compulsive gambler, he was one of the most intelligent, informed, witty, humane and charming men I have ever met.” Houseman got it about right, especially when he later said of my father, “In twelve and a half weeks, for a few thousand dollars, he created
Citizen Kane
.”

The first script, Houseman later said, was more than four hundred pages long—“very rich, repetitious, loaded with irrelevant, fascinating detail and private jokes” he and my father loved. They spent two more weeks, according to Jack, “hacking away, trimming, and yelling at each other.”

Welles came out to visit them once at their desert hideaway, liked what they were doing, and urged them to continue. He and Houseman had their celebrated break during the making of
Kane
—punctuated by a grand scene at Chasen’s restaurant in which Welles literally hurled fire (well, cans of lit Sterno) at his old friend. The rupture ended whatever obligation Houseman might have felt to keep up the absurd fiction that Welles had written any of
Citizen Kane
. After all, if anyone could claim credit for helping shape that script, it was he, not Welles, whom both Houseman and my father came to refer to in frequent ribald conversation as “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy,” after a famous vaudeville character of their youth.

*   *   *

When Pop wrote
Citizen Kane
, he wrote about newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst based on firsthand knowledge. Even the sets of the movie resemble the rooms and grounds of Hearst’s San Simeon, California, estate. My father and mother were guests there on more than one occasion. In the 1930s, it was possible to have the “movie colony” invited to a party—perhaps a few hundred, writers, directors, actors, and producers—and Hearst enjoyed their company.

My parents described to us kids the weekend extravaganzas with Hearst, which began with a private train for the guests to travel the few hundred miles up the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles. Each couple had a private room at San Simeon, complete with a butler, a maid, costumes, and everything else they might need for the obligatory Saturday-night costume-party dinner—and always the right size for each guest. Otherwise, time was available—on the grounds—for swimming, golf, tennis, shooting, deep-sea fishing, or watching a recent movie. I remember how my mother looked as they set out for those weekends. She looked beautiful.

Experts, after all, tell us that movies, like all other forms of art, are really about the people who create them and the times in which they, the creators, live.

True enough,
Kane
was not good history. It was in no way, and never pretended to be, a rendition of Hearst’s life. The screenplay was a product of my father’s experience and his imagination. But that experience included actually knowing Hearst and certainly knowing a lot about him.

*   *   *

The opening of the shooting script for
Citizen Kane
reads,

DISSOLVE: INT. KANE’S BEDROOM - FAINT DAWN - 1940

A very long shot of Kane’s enormous bed, silhouetted against the enormous window.

DISSOLVE: EXT. KANE’S BEDROOM - FAINT DAWN - 1940

A snow scene. An incredible one. Big, impossible flakes of snow, a too picturesque farmhouse and a snow man. The jingling of sleigh bells in the musical score now makes an ironic reference to Indian Temple bells - the music freezes.

KANE’S OLD OLD VOICE:

          Rosebud …

The camera pulls back, showing the whole scene to be contained in one of those glass balls which are sold in novelty stores all over the world. A hand—Kane’s hand, which has been holding the ball, relaxes. The ball falls out of his hand and bounds down two carpeted steps leading to the bed, the camera following. The ball falls off the last step onto the marble floor where it breaks, the fragments glittering in the first rays of the morning sun. This ray cuts an angular pattern across the floor, suddenly crossed with a thousand bars of light as the blinds are pulled across the window.

The foot of Kane’s bed. The camera very close. Outlined against the shuttered window, we can see a form—the form of a nurse, as she pulls the sheet up over his head. The camera follows this action up the length of the bed and arrives at the face after the sheet has covered it.

FADE OUT

Hollywood lore includes tales and conjecture about what exactly served as the basis for Herman Mankiewicz’s choice of the word “Rosebud.” Rumor at the time the movie came out, repeated ever since, is that Rosebud was the name William Randolph Hearst had given to his favorite part of his longtime lover, the actress Marion Davies.

When asked about it at dinner by one of her guests, my mother said, “I know exactly what ‘Rosebud’ means to my husband, Herman.” But she was just being playful. My father would describe how many of his sessions with Simmel focused on a bicycle he had received as a gift when he was ten years old. The bike was stolen from in front of the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, public library the very first day my father had it, and to teach him responsibility, his parents decided not to get him another one. In fact, someone called me recently; he’s researching a book on “Rosebud” and found in the Wilkes-Barre police records that a Mankiewicz family had reported the theft of a Rosebud brand child’s bicycle in 1908.

*   *   *

People are still interested in “Rosebud.” It has been copied and mimicked in numerous movies and episodes of television programs. And there are countless bicycle shops named Rosebud in the world today.

The critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1998 that “Rosebud is the emblem of the security, home and innocence of childhood like the green light on Gatsby’s pier.” And “finding a Rosebud” has apparently become part of the language. To “find a Rosebud” about someone means to find something that reveals something important about him.

Pop would find that amusing. He’d also think it was strange, but he’d love to hear it.

*   *   *

Why we remember some things and forget others is one of the things my father was writing about in
Kane,
in large part because of his psychotherapy. The movie has a great scene in which Everett Sloane as Bernstein, who’d worked with Kane since they were young together, is asked by the movie’s reporter what he, now an older man, remembers, and he’s trying to make the point that memory can be random and mysterious. He tells a story about taking the ferry across the Hudson River in the late nineteenth century, when he was a young man; that was before bridges had been built from Manhattan to New Jersey. Bernstein describes how they momentarily passed another ferry near the dock, and there on the other deck was a young woman in a white dress carrying a white parasol. Bernstein says he only caught a glimpse of her and never saw her again, never saw her face, but, he says, there has never been a month in his life in all the years since when he did not think of that woman with the white parasol in the white dress. I think about my mother. Someone once asked my father if there really had been a woman in a white dress. “I don’t know about Herman,” my mother interrupted, “but there hasn’t been one month gone by when
I
haven’t thought about that woman and her white dress.”

*   *   *

Houseman would later talk about my father’s “prism notion”—“the idea of telling a man’s private life (preferably one that suggested a recognizable American figure) immediately following his death, through the intimate and sometimes incompatible testimony of those who had known him at different times and in different circumstances.”

*   *   *

Where does great art originate? How and why do the gods of creativity make things come together in a special way? Richard Corliss, a leading film critic, calls
Citizen Kane
“the
Hamlet
of film,” but before and after making it, did anyone involved do anything “great”? It is almost as though Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet
and then nothing else that rose to its level.

Kane
cost relatively little to make, so money was not key. Nor was experience; for most of the cast, it was their first film. Pop, who conceived the story and wrote the screenplay, was known not for political writing or serious social commentary but for lighter works like the Marx Brothers comedy movies. He was, furthermore, fighting problems with alcohol and gambling and nursing a broken leg. And yet, in 1962, when movie critics around the world started to vote for the “greatest film of all time,”
Citizen Kane
won and has won nearly every decennial ballot since then—for more than fifty years. Changes in movie technology, storytelling techniques, and audience expectations have been revolutionary, yet
Kane
remains number one.

Citizen Kane
may be an example of that rare phenomenon, the inadvertence of great art, when time, place, people, and passion come together for one special moment. Such moments do not happen often and have not happened often in the modern United States. The only recent example I can think of is Maya Lin and the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

But maybe I’m pushing all this too hard. The novelist Flannery O’Connor, when pressured by an academic researcher to explain why she had given a character a particular name, wrote back to say, It’s just a name I thought of. Sometimes you folks stir things too fine.

*   *   *

The fitful but lasting battle over screen credit for the writing of
Citizen Kane
had been going on for several decades by the 1970s, when Pauline Kael’s two-part article on the subject first appeared in
The New Yorker
. So far as I knew, Kael had no contacts with our family, and indeed I was familiar with her only as the film critic of the magazine at the time. The “controversy” had, I thought, just about run its course because Welles’s defenders, confronted with the fact of no script, no notes, no scribbling on envelopes, with—according to both Jack Houseman and Rita Alexander, Pop’s original amanuensis and thereafter the keeper of the script as it developed from Victorville all the way to the screen—“not one word” attributed to Welles ever appeared. But his stout defender Peter Bogdanovich, a Hollywood director who idealized Welles’s work and befriended him in later years, was often good for a contentious word or two—as were other of Welles’s acolytes, including his daughter—and has been quoted as referring to a phantom script, out of which Welles had somehow “blended” Pop’s original script with his. There was, alas, not one page of this phantom Welles script ever to appear.

So, I began to thumb through, and then read more closely and excitedly, Ms. Kael’s effort, called
Raising Kane
, a book based upon a series of articles she wrote for
The New Yorker
. I became delighted and even overjoyed as she set forth, in often meticulous detail, not only the process by which
Kane
was first conceived, then written, entirely by Pop, but the rest of his career as well. I was astonished to read, for instance, that he had written well over one hundred screenplays in Hollywood and the “titles” (now called “subtitles”) for lots of silent pictures, as well as having his own career as a journalist, including assignments as a reporter and as a drama critic.