The Magic World of Orson Welles (18 page)

We may begin by noting that
Kane'
s splendidly artful ambivalence toward its central character is not shared by the major biographies of Hearst written during the thirties; in fact these books are as much in conflict as Thatcher and the labor spokesman in the
Kane
newsreel. The authorized portrait, Mrs. Freemont Older's
William Randolph Hearst, American
(1936), makes Hearst a paragon of civic virtue, a sort of philosopher-king. Ferdinand Lundberg's
Imperial Hearst
(1937), which I have already mentioned and which became the object of an absurd plagiarism case against Mankiewicz and Welles, is a muckraking journalist's account of Hearst's crimes. Interestingly, W. A. Swanberg's “definitive”
Citizen Hearst
, which appeared in 1961, takes a middle-of-the-road view; although Swanberg does not acknowledge it, his title and the structure of his narrative clearly were influenced by the movie.

All of this data about Hearst is valuable to students of
Kane
, not only for its own sake but also because it shows how the film delights in making references to its primary source. Even the
New York Inquirer
is significant. In real life Hearst owned a paper with that title, which was published by the Griffin brothers. “From the legal standpoint,” newspaper columnist Irving Hoffman wrote, “they might as well have referred to the paper in the picture as the
Journal-American
.” Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Kane and Hearst are not identical. Welles was at least technically correct when he said that Kane was a fictional character partly based on several turn-of-the-century tycoons. In translating the yellow journalist into a creature of fiction, he and Mankiewicz had borrowed freely from other lives. They had departed from biographical fact in a number of crucial ways, each of them important to the dramatic and perhaps also the ideological effect of the film.

Unlike the biographers, Welles and Mankiewicz chose to concentrate on a private life rather than the public structuring of an empire. They also gave Kane a humble birth, which was not true of any of his possible models; it was certainly not true of Hearst (the whole point of John Dos Passos's famous sketch had been that W. R., born into Phoebe Hearst's “richly feathered nest,” could never understand his public), and it was not true of McCormack or Insull or Welles or Mankiewicz. Last, and in some ways most significant because more than anything else it aroused the ire of the Hearst press, they made Susan Alexander into a tormented, unhappy creature who walks out on her supposed benefactor—this in contrast to the Hearst-Davies relationship, which was generally happy. Indeed when death finally came to Hearst, it was very different from Kane's death in the film. Hearst did not spend his last days alone in the caverns of his estate; several years earlier he had moved
to the less resplendent Beverly Hills mansion of his mistress, and he died with her close at hand. His last words were unrecorded.

These changes imply that Welles and Mankiewicz were trying to create sympathy for Kane by playing down his menace. As a tycoon in the grip of a psychological compulsion, as a poor boy suddenly given wealth, he becomes less, not more, representative of his class. To some viewers he has looked like a great man doomed by his own good fortune, an embodiment of the same “American Dream” myth that is often applied to Welles. When the script is summarized, Welles's and Mankiewicz's sense of melodrama appears to have displaced their politics.

Of course Hearst's life
was
in some sense melodramatic, and writers of the left in the thirties took relish in giving his career the structure of a Hollywood-style morality play. Dos Passos saw Hearst as a “spent Caesar grown old with spending,” and Charles Beard, in his introduction to the Lundberg biography, predicted that the old man would die lonely and unloved. By showing Kane as a tragicomic failure, Mankiewicz and Welles were doing no more than what these writers had done, and when they changed the facts to suit the demands of melodrama, they were, in principle at least, entirely justified; after all, they were conveying political attitudes through fiction, not through biography. Thus
Citizen Kane
might have been an answer to the plea made toward the end of
Imperial Hearst
:

Down through the years [Hearst] has played a great and ghastly part in shaping the American mind. He could, more truthfully than any other man, say, “The American mentality is my mentality.” This is not because Hearst has become “the voice of the people,” speaking their unformulated thoughts and desires. It has been because adequate, widespread and
popularized
criticism of his innumerable deceptions has been lacking.

The italics here are Lundberg's, and they convey his feelings of urgency.
Kane
, however, emphasizes the failures of Hearst more than the deceptions; as Charles Eckert has remarked, the hero dies on a “mystified bed of capital.” Harry Wasserman has been more explicit: “It is safe and reassuring,” he writes, “to think of Citizen Kane and his sled . . . but unsettling and dangerous to discover the sometimes insidious results of such innocent obsessions. What is more important to remember about a character like Kane is not how the loss of a sled influenced his life, but how the newspapers published by his real-life counterpart Hearst might have influenced a war.”

One response to such comments is to say that the film clearly does satirize Kane's public life and that its “mystifications” are at least partly ironic. It exposes
Kane's manipulative interest in the Spanish-American War, it reveals his exploitative “philosophy” of journalism, and it makes several references to his attacks on organized labor. In the election scenes it depicts the corruption of machine politics with the force of a great editorial cartoon. Moreover, it links the press to the politicians themselves, showing Kane hoist on his own petard. In regard to Kane's so-called progressive youth, the film is explicit in its denunciation; his democratic aspirations are seen as in reality a desire for power, a means to extend paternalistic benevolence to the “people.” We even see Kane on a balcony conferring with Hitler, an image that colors the audience's reaction to everything the character does. What is more radical and more interesting, however, is that
Citizen Kane
brings its own workings under scrutiny, questioning the whole process of popular entertainment, including the “image making” of the movies. From the beginning, when “Rosebud” is introduced as a cheap means of spicing up a newsreel, until the end, when Thompson confesses the futility of searching out the meaning for a single word,
Kane
casts doubt on its own conclusions. Moreover, Welles's brilliant manipulation of cinematic technique keeps reminding us that we are watching a movie, an exceedingly clever and entertaining manipulation of reality, rather than reality itself. This is not to say, of course, that Welles hated Hollywood movies; on the contrary, it was precisely his delight in the conventions of the medium that gave his self-consciousness and self-criticism such poetic force.

Even so, the film is primarily about Kane's private life. It shows that the characters are determined by their material existence, and yet it seems fatalistic about this condition, suggesting that there is no way to radically transform human consciousness. It treats the political issues allusively, aiming relentlessly at “Rosebud” and making Kane a sympathetic, if frightening, character, a dead failure rather than a living threat. Because of its all-inclusive ironies, its sentimental mythology, and the sheer gusto of its Hollywood craftsmanship, it has always been open to a certain amount of justifiable criticism from the left; indeed the most doctrinaire critics have suggested that
Kane
is a pernicious influence on its audience, leaving us complacently and ignorantly believing that money can't buy happiness.

There are, of course, several possible reasons why the film takes a personal and psychological approach and loads itself with plot conventions from earlier movies—Welles's own ambivalence about the Kane type, for example, or Mankiewicz's methods of working, or the simple wish to stay within the realm of fantasy and entertainment. Doubtless one of the more important reasons why
Citizen Kane
is not a more didactic film is that from the time
of the modern-dress
Julius Caesar
, Welles had contended that the problem with left-wing melodrama was its “cardboard, Simon-Legree villains.” But a still deeper reason is suggested by the fact that
Kane
often seems to be very much about Orson Welles himself. It was Welles, after all, who was known as the enfant terrible, and this may account for
Kane
's emphasis on infantile rage. It was Welles, not Hearst, who was raised by a guardian, and the guardian's name has been given to a character in the film. It was Welles who made a famous comment comparing the movies to his own personal electric train set, almost like Kane remarking that it would be “fun” to run a newspaper. According to John Houseman, who worked on an early version of the script, “the deeper we penetrated beyond the public events into the heart of Charles Foster Kane, the closer we seemed to come to the identity of Orson Welles.” Houseman, Mankiewicz, and Welles himself deliberately set about filling the script with parallels and private jokes about the film's director; even Raymond the butler was modeled on a suspicious servant who used to lurk around Welles's big Hollywood house. Bernard Herrmann once summed up all the evidence when he noted that the film is “in a way . . . a dream-like autobiography of Welles”; hence, it is no surprise that the film should have been more about psychology than about the structure of an empire, more sympathetic than purely destructive to the central character.

And yet certainly the political and even the personal significance of the film was not lost on the man who was the other chief model for Kane. For all of its rich poetic sentiment and its mixing of Hollywood convention with iconoclastic social commentary, the most important fact about Welles's first film is that it proved to be a fundamentally dangerous project. Unlike films of the previous decade, it was at least loosely based on a live and kicking subject, a proto-fascist demagogue whose power in Hollywood was second only to his power over a newspaper empire. The dimensions of that power can be assessed by simply glancing through
Variety
for the ten years or so before
Kane
was produced. In November 1928, for example, one reads that “any time the Hearst paper gets in back of a picture it is a box office natural. . . . They did it last week on Marion Davies (
Show People
) and the gross jumped to $33,000.” In February 1932 one finds a note on Hearst's interest in movie content: “To avoid trouble with the Hearst papers as in the case of ‘Five Star Final,' Warners sent a script of its new newspaper story, ‘The Ferguson Case,' to William Randolph Hearst.”

In this atmosphere
Kane
was remarkable, and the results were about what could have been expected. Hearst was rumored to have taken it lightly, but the reprisals taken by his press are a matter of record; he even sent a personal note
to columnist John Chapman suggesting that anyone who admired the film unreservedly was a “treasonable Communist” and not a “loyal American.” No doubt prompted by Hearst, J. Edgar Hoover's decade-long FBI investigation of Welles began when Kane was released. The critical response was mostly favorable and sometimes adulatory, but RKO had difficulty finding bookings. If L. B. Mayer had been successful in buying the rights, the film would never have been shown at all.
Kane
received sensational publicity from Hearst's rivals (probably this was part of Welles's strategy), but not enough to calm the fears of distributors, who began to grumble ominously that Welles was more interested in courting critics than in selling the picture where it counted. In 1941
Motion Picture Herald
wrote, “Mr. Welles is showing the picture to almost anyone who might be interested except the showmen who might have to deal with it. . . . It is possible that he has not yet, in his preoccupations, heard about the exhibitor.” The condescension in these remarks does not conceal the fact that theater managers were concerned about Hearst's wrath, to say nothing of what they regarded as the potential artiness of the film. Ultimately,
Citizen Kane
was recognized by the reviewers, by certain Hollywood professionals, and even, somewhat reluctantly, by the Motion Picture Academy. It established Welles as a major talent, but at the same time it made his future in American movies problematic.

The paradox—and one of the biggest contradictions of them all—is that Welles had no desire to wreck the motion picture industry. He was a devoted worker who had studied the Hollywood masters and whose film, despite its complexity, was in the best tradition of American popular entertainment. As he himself put it, he was never inclined to “joke with other people's money.”
Kane
was held to a relatively modest budget ($749,000) and was praised by journals like the
Hollywood Reporter
for its frugality. Nevertheless, various Hollywood bosses had perceived Welles as an “artist” and a left-wing ideologue who
might
bring trouble.
Citizen Kane
may not have been a thoroughgoing anticapitalist attack, but it was close enough to ensure that Welles would never again be allowed such freedom at RKO.

As
Citizen Kane
was about to appear, the Hearst press made a number of heavy-handed threats, at one point claiming they intended to expose Hollywood's practice of hiring “refugees to the exclusion of native Americans.” Whatever anxiety this sort of publicity may have created at RKO, it certainly had an effect upon exhibitors. On September 7, 1941, for example, the
New York Times
reported that
Kane
had been sold to the Fox West Coast theater chain but that it would “not be displayed by any of the circuit's 515 theaters on the Pacific Coast, Mountain States, and Midwest”—this despite the fact that the picture had outgrossed RKO's other new releases when it was shown in San Francisco, Denver, and Omaha. Welles declared that he would sue, but his film had already been kept away from circuit bookings for too long.