Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (100 page)

Their destination was the Kemper Campbell Ranch—run by a Los Angeles lawyer couple—“a sort of dude ranch which Mankiewicz had been to before,” according to Houseman, and a “very quiet” and “suitable place to work.” The first car in their small caravan, a studio limousine with a professional driver, carried a German nurse and her patient, Mankiewicz, “excited and groaning cheerfully” in his leg cast. Houseman followed in a sporty convertible, accompanied by a freshly engaged secretary, Rita Alexander, “a patient, efficient, nice-looking English girl,” in Houseman’s words. Mank would reward the secretary’s patience and efficiency over the next months in Victorville by lending her name to Kane’s mistress and second wife—Susan Alexander. It was the only major character’s name that can be traced unequivocally to him.

Houseman testified that “Mr. Welles had given me to understand in New York that nothing had been written” before their departure, but this could have been Orson cheering Houseman on as just the man for the challenge ahead. Orson insisted in later interviews that before the men left he had created a foundational script, “a mammoth, 300-page version” with mostly dialogue and some description, and with what was always meant as a working title—“John Citizen, U.S.A.” “Though everything was reworked throughout, that contained the script as it developed,” Welles told Meryman. “But apparently Mank never showed it to anybody.”

Even Meryman, attentive to every claim of authorship, conceded in his biography of Mankiewicz that “it would have been strange if Welles had not put his
Kane
ideas on paper before Herman began writing,” since that had been his consistent practice since boyhood. Even when collaborating—
especially
when collaborating—Orson wrote his ideas down.

Arriving in Victorville, the visitors from Hollywood took over an adobe bungalow on the ranch. Mankiewicz’s nurse took up quarters in a room next door to his suite. Houseman moved into rooms a few doors away in the same bungalow, while the secretary was housed in a separate building.

Before long, they had established a working routine. Most mornings, Houseman recalled, he went for an early horseback ride. Mank slept in, for as long as possible, then took breakfast in bed before the arduous task of dressing and bathing with his broken leg and cast. After a late breakfast, Mank and his secretary debated “a horrendous decision,” according to Meryman’s account. “Should the dictation take place indoors with Herman in bed? Or now that Herman could hobble on crutches, should he sit in the airy, sunny little patio with his leg up on a stool? . . . In either spot, Herman still contrived to procrastinate.”

Late mornings, Mank usually got together with Houseman, reviewing and critiquing the previous day’s pages. Then, after lunch, Mank indulged in his customary afternoon nap. His most productive time was at night, after dinner, when he dictated passages to Rita Alexander until midnight or 1
A
.
M
. She typed up the pages before retiring.

Booze was verboten, except for “the great adventure of the day,” in Houseman’s words—implicitly every day—which was their joint visit to a bar called The Green Spot, near the railroad tracks, “where we slowly drank one scotch apiece and watched the locals playing the pinball machines and dancing to the Western music of a jukebox.” Once a week the two men took in whatever new picture was playing at the only movie house in Victorville.

“In that desert limbo,” wrote Meryman, “Herman found the perfect circumstances in which he could function. He was quarantined from everything that had always plagued and immobilized him. Trapped in his cast, he could not go drinking. Studio ignoramuses were not degrading him. His family was not riddling him with guilt.

“There was little to do except write.”

Rita Alexander, for one, was impressed by Mank’s great creativity, and her account of the trip to Victorville would be used by Pauline Kael in her later argument against Welles’s authorship of
Citizen Kane.
(Although Alexander was among the few eyewitnesses Kael consulted, Kael did not learn—or care to mention—that another secretary substituted for Alexander for several weeks in Victorville.)

“He began with the title,” Alexander recalled, “the description of the scene, the indications of the camera movement, the dialogue and so on. It was really extraordinary. It all came out not fast, not slow—at a continued pace as though he had it all in his mind.”

The word “Rosebud” came at the end of the scene.

“Who is Rosebud?” the secretary asked innocently.

“It isn’t a who, it’s an it,” Mank replied gruffly.

“What is Rosebud?” she said.

“It’s a sled.”

CHAPTER 19

February–May 1940

“The Script Is a Source of Some Gratification”

“Rosebud” is the first word of dialogue in
Citizen Kane
, the word barely whispered by Charles Foster Kane, his giant lips filling the screen, as he takes his final breath before dying.

There is no mention of those giant lips in the published shooting script of
Citizen Kane
, nor of literally hundreds of other visual embellishments and dialogue alterations that substantially distinguish the published version of the script from the finished picture. When the
New Yorker
’s critic Pauline Kael sought authorization to include the shooting script by Mankiewicz and Welles in her 1971
The Citizen Kane Book
, Welles gave his necessary permission—in return for a pittance, because he badly needed the money, as he told Peter Bogdanovich—little suspecting how drastically Kael’s book would undermine his reputation.

Yet even in its published form, the script’s opening sequence reads as though it was devised primarily by Welles, who from his earliest talks with Mankiewicz conceived of scenes in terms of the camera as well as of the story. The fade-in of exterior shots reveals the faded glories of Xanadu in the faint dawn. This “series of setups,” in the words of the script, reveals golf links, a zoo, a monkey terrace, an alligator pit, a lagoon, a huge swimming pool, cottages, and a drawbridge, “all telling something of . . .
THE LITERALLY INCREDIBLE DOMAIN OF CHARLES FOSTER KANE
.” Moving slowly, the camera rises to an illuminated window, “very small in the distance.”

“All around this,” the published script continues, “an almost totally black screen. Now, as the camera moves towards this window, which is almost a postage stamp in the frame, other forms appear: barbed wire, cyclone fencing, and now, looming up against an early morning sky, an enormous iron grillwork. Camera travels up what is now shown to be a gateway of gigantic proportions, and holds on the top of it—a huge initial ‘K.’ ” Dissolving inside the window, the camera reveals Kane’s enormous bed, then a snow scene inside a glass ball (“big impossible flakes of snow” with “the jingling of sleigh bells in the musical score”). The music freezes, and “Kane’s old voice” speaks the single word. After the word is murmured, Kane’s hand relaxes visibly. “The ball falls out of his hand and bounds down two carpeted steps leading to the bed, the camera following.”

Kane has died a lonely death in the fairy-tale mountaintop castle, Xanadu, his final utterance the mysterious “Rosebud.” Then the screen explodes with footage from
News on the March
, “a typical news digest” that establishes the man’s life story against a parade of tricked-up American history. After the end of this newsreel—which Mankiewicz described as an idea left over from the unfilmed
Smiler with the Knife
, but which might just as reasonably be described as left over from Welles’s life and earlier career and as inseparable from
Citizen Kane
as “Rosebud”—an editor complains about the newsreel’s conventional approach. “What it needs is an angle.”

A reporter is assigned to dig into the meaning of “Rosebud.”

After this compelling prologue—which composer Bernard Herrmann would treat as an overture—the reporter seeks out five or six key characters to offer their reminiscences of Kane in flashback.

The death of Kane, “Rosebud,” and
News on the March
—the opening sequences of the film—all this had been agreed on by Welles and Mankiewicz before Victorville. But what happened next would depend a lot on the five or six key characters, who took over the film for long sections of subjective memory. Welles and Mankiewicz had discussed the characters, but the different personalities had to be fleshed out, and their accounts had to fit together and overlap just a little, without too much repetition or contradiction—a point Orson conceded to Mank.

The structure of the narrative was tricky, because the story had to be chronological, with the thread passed like a baton to each of the key characters as the reporter visits them to hear about Kane. The sequencing was a major challenge, and although Welles and Mankiewicz had discussed the through-line, this was Mank’s biggest job. And with each successive draft the difficulties would multiply, as changes in their evolving conception of Kane’s story forced them to invent new plot ideas, reshuffle the sequencing, and “re-characterize” the various narrators.

The order in which the reporter called on the key characters would guide the sequencing. Thompson, the
News on the March
reporter assigned to investigate “Rosebud,” was the first running character—albeit the only one who never knew Kane. Orson envisioned him as a cardboard figure, a man without background or individuality: “Not a person,” as Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, but simply “a piece of machinery” used to tease the audience through the story.

Even Raymond, Kane’s butler, who is the last of the witnesses to talk to Thompson, has more color. John Houseman insisted that Raymond, who looms importantly at the end of
Citizen Kane
, was based on Welles’s own vaguely sinister butler in Brentwood, although Orson’s butler there was French, and Raymond was effectively the kind of stock butler character glimpsed in hundreds of Hollywood films, the household servant who observes and hears all and whose loyalty is unquestioned unless a gratuity is involved. “If you’re smart, you’ll talk to Raymond,” Susan Alexander tells Thompson the reporter. “He knows where all the bodies are buried.”

The first source Thompson approaches is Susan, but she is drunk and morose and throws him out. (She will return to the film later through a shrewd bit of structuring.) Thompson then visits the hushed archives of the banker Walter Parks Thatcher, Kane’s guardian. Thatcher plays a crucial role as the sole, if biased, eyewitness to Kane’s boyhood.
⁴⁸
Though Thatcher has long been dead by the time Kane dies, the film uses a device that harks back to Orson’s original concept for “First Person Singular”: Thompson reads out loud from the banker’s unpublished memoirs in the vault of his library, “a room” with a repellent personality much like Thatcher’s, “with all the warmth and charm of Napoleon’s Tomb,” in the words of the script.

Arguably the most transparent character is the next witness, Mr. Bernstein—who has the same last name as Welles’s guardian. (His first name is never mentioned.) Bernstein, the comptroller who has risen to become general manager of Kane’s empire, tells Thompson that he was at Kane’s side “from before the beginning, young fellow . . . and now, it’s after the end.” Bernstein is devoted to his boss; he never stops rooting for Kane, even after the tycoon’s death, with a viewpoint that is nonjudgmental—indeed, for a businessman, profoundly sympathetic, even loving.

One thing the writing team happily agreed on, after the film was done, was that Bernstein’s was the one character most indebted to Mankiewicz. Although “I sketched out the character in our preliminary sessions,” Welles remembered, “Mank did all the best writing for Bernstein. I’d call that the most valuable thing he gave us.”

Mankiewicz had a professional exemplar in mind: Louis Wiley, the business manager of the
New York Times
from 1906 until his death in 1935. Wiley, along with publisher Adolph Ochs and managing editor Carr Vattel Van Anda, formed the triumvirate that made the
Times
“what it has become,” in Mank’s words. As a former newsman Mank knew all three men from his days in New York. Houseman concurred: “Bernstein was [Mank’s] favorite character in this whole script.”

THOMPSON

If we can find out what he meant by his last words—as he was dying—

BERNSTEIN

That Rosebud, huh? (
Thinks.
) Maybe some girl? There were a lot of them back in the early days and—

THOMPSON

(
amused
)

It’s hardly likely, Mr. Bernstein, that Mr. Kane could have met some girl casually and then, fifty years later, on his deathbed remembered—

BERNSTEIN

Well, you are pretty young, Mr.—(
Remembers the name.
)—Mr. Thompson. A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in—(
Slowly.
)—and on it was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on—she was carrying a white parasol—I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all—but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.