Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (101 page)

“That was all Mank,” Welles told Bogdanovich of the above exchange. “It’s my favorite scene . . . the best thing in the movie . . . I
wish
it was me . . . If I were in hell and they gave me a day off and said, ‘What part of any movie you ever made do you want to see?’ I’d see that scene of Mank’s about Bernstein.

“All the rest could have been better but that was just right.”

Bernstein also frames Jed Leland sympathetically, but he has fallen out of touch with “Mr. Leland,” who emerges as Kane’s oldest, most conscientious friend, though the film makes clear that Kane has betrayed him. At the end of his talk with Bernstein, Thompson tells the comptroller where Leland is: “In case you’d like to know . . . he’s at the Huntington Memorial Hospital on 180th Street,” adding thoughtfully, “Nothing particular the matter with him, they tell me. Just . . .”

“Just old age,” Bernstein says, finishing with one of Mank’s sublime one-liners. “It’s the only disease, Mr. Thompson, that you don’t look forward to being cured of.”

This leads Thompson and the film to the next witness to Kane’s past: Leland, “wrapped in a blanket . . . in a wheelchair . . . on the flat roof of a hospital.” To block the sun he is wearing a visor, which helps call attention to his baldness. Although Leland already has been glimpsed in Bernstein’s flashbacks, the betrayed friend looks old and feeble now. This was crafted as a shocking moment for the viewers, who had previously glimpsed him as a carefree, debonair young man.

Because Mankiewicz had been a newsman, and because of the scene where the drunken Leland collapses over his typewriter (as Mank had done when writing his abortive denunciation of Gladys Wallis for the
New York Times
), some sources have credited the development of Leland more to Mankiewicz. From the get-go, however, the Leland character was “founded on a personal friend of Orson’s who had been a newspaper man,” as Houseman testified in the Lundberg case.

That was Ashton Stevens: “practically my uncle,” as Welles told Bogdanovich. “The last of the dandies—he worked for Hearst for some fifty years or so and adored him. A gentleman . . . very much like Jed.” In addition, Orson wanted Leland to be a
Southern
gentleman—like Joseph Cotten, his close friend, the actor he imagined for the role from his first talks with Mankiewicz. “As author of the film,” Welles said, he regarded the character of Leland “with enormous affection. . . . He’s the only true aristocrat [in the story]. . . . He’s talking my language. I have deep sympathy for him.”

As with most of the key characters, Orson even put his stamp on this character’s name, changing it from Bradford Leland in Mank’s first draft to Jedediah “Jed” Leland for the film. The name was an amalgam of Broadway producer Jed Harris and agent Leland Hayward, Margaret Sullavan’s husband, both of whom had made forceful impressions on Orson during his rounds in New York in 1934. (Mankiewicz knew both men, too, and this made it easy for him to agree.)

Three women loom importantly in Kane’s life, but Thompson visits only two of them. The first is seen only in flashback, as part of Thatcher’s archival reflections. She is Kane’s mother, known only as “Mrs. Kane” in the published version of the script, although she is Mary in the film. In 1870, Mrs. Kane inherits the Colorado Lode from a former renter who once skipped out leaving his bill unpaid. Implicitly sparing her son a provincial upbringing and removing him from an abusive father, Mrs. Kane signs five-year-old Charlie (his middle name, “Foster,” is a master touch) over to Thatcher in the parlor of her boardinghouse. In exchange for $150,000 a year, she will never see him again.

MRS. KANE

I’ve got his trunk all packed—(
She chokes a little.
)
I’ve had it packed for a week now.

(
She can’t say any more. She starts for the hall door.
)

The second female character, chronologically, in Kane’s life story is Emily Monroe Norton, his first wife, whom he marries in 1898. The niece of the incumbent president of the United States (in real life, this would have been William McKinley), Emily would have more scenes than Kane’s mother and would participate in major events in Kane’s adult life. This was particularly true of Mank’s first script draft, generated at Victorville: that draft—which included a honeymoon scene on a Wisconsin lake, and various other family tableaux—saw Emily survive her husband to tell her side of the story.

But it was Susan Alexander, Kane’s mistress and second wife, who would emerge as the film’s most prominent female character as the script evolved. After becoming a powerful press lord, Kane meets Susan, “aged twenty-one, neatly but cheaply dressed,” outside a drugstore in 1915. When a passing carriage splashes mud on his finery, she can’t help giggling at his offended dignity. Her reaction diverts Kane from his errand: sifting through his deceased mother’s possessions in a Manhattan warehouse. “In search of my youth,” he jokes—the wistful joke of a man who never really had a childhood.

Although the good-hearted Susan has no idea who Charles Foster Kane is, even when he mentions his famous name (“I’m awfully ignorant, but I guess you caught on to that”), she invites him to her rented flat to wash up. His “shadowgraphs” (a quaint word in the script for finger puppetry on the wall) and joking help to alleviate her painful toothache.

One reason Houseman was an important choice to supervise the writing in Victorville was that he knew the actors—many of them Mercury Theatre stage and radio players—whom Orson had cast in major roles even before the script was written. Since Mankiewicz lacked that awareness, Houseman was there to prod him toward their strengths. For example, as Houseman explained in the Lundberg case, casting George Coulouris as Thatcher helped shape the writing of that character: “We might have made Thatcher differently if this rather lean-faced man had not been going to play it. These are intangibles. It is hard to know at what point you are trying to accommodate the actor and at what point you make the actor fit the part.”

The part of Bernstein—undersized but spry, Jewish with intense eyes, as the script dictated—was molded for the similarly undersized (and Jewish) Everett Sloane, another member of the Mercury family. “It was extremely desirable, because Sloane had been a faithful collaborator of ours, that a good part be found for him,” Houseman explained in his testimony in the Lundberg case, “and undoubtedly the particular coloration and particular character of Bernstein was affected by the fact that we knew that Everett Sloane was going to play the part.”

Houseman noted in his deposition, “The same is true of Joseph Cotten” as Leland. “He had never done anything [in Hollywood], and Orson had long been convinced that Cotten could be a star if he were properly cast as a rather aristocratic, moral, but not very active man.” Although the character of Leland sprang from Ashton Stevens, he was also consciously “tailored after the personality of” Cotten, in Houseman’s words.

The part of Kane’s mother likewise was molded for one of Orson’s favorite underrated actresses: Agnes Moorehead. As often as possible in his career, Orson created roles for Moorehead, whose persona combined grace and steel. Who should portray Wilbur Minafer’s sister Fanny, hopelessly in love with Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), in the film of
The Magnificent Ambersons
? “There wasn’t any question about it,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “How could there be? She’d been all those years with us—it was going to be her great part.” Moorehead, known to her Mercury friends as “Aggie,” would cavort onstage (and even play the calliope) in the Mercury Wonder Show during World War II, and she would also appear in
Jane Eyre
and
Journey into Fear.
Moorehead even would have starred as the Nazi-hunting federal agent stalking Welles’s character in
The Stranger
if RKO hadn’t insisted on a more bankable and conventional choice, Edward G. Robinson.

But as Houseman and Mankiewicz rolled up their sleeves and got down to work in Victorville, Welles had no early idea of whom he might cast as the first and second Mrs. Charles Foster Kane. With the Mercury stage company low on leading ladies under long-term contract, he was forced to rummage through his former radio costars and the familiar Hollywood casting pool for these two actresses—a circumstance that helps explain why they were the most mutable characters as the script progressed.

While Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman were toiling away in Victorville, once again Welles was beset by unexpected crises, both personal and professional.

After securing her divorce in Reno, Virginia Nicolson Welles had lingered in Hollywood, staying with Geraldine Fitzgerald for weeks; then, shortly after the writing team left for Victorville, Virginia had fallen ill, with acute abdominal pain. Entering a Los Angeles hospital on February 21, she was diagnosed with potentially life-threatening peritonitis. After emergency surgery, she remained in the hospital for about a month. Her slow recovery complicated the arrangements for the care of Christopher, and placed an additional strain on Orson’s time and finances. Virginia’s medical bills piled up even as his alimony lagged behind.

Orson was solicitous about his ex-wife’s health, however, visiting her often at the hospital (where he often crossed paths with a friend, writer Charles Lederer, who was visiting Virginia even more faithfully). At one point Orson volunteered to pay Virginia’s long-range hospital bills if she would accept a temporary cut in his child support payments. When the medical costs continued to mount, however, Orson retracted his offer, insisting that he’d been misunderstood. Virginia was furious, and her hospital debt became the cornerstone of financial grudges she nursed against Welles for years.

Orson and Dolores Del Rio made a decision to keep a low profile while Virginia was in the hospital. “Welles and his Hollywood love are chilling,” wrote columnist Walter Winchell. But when the beautiful Mexican actress abandoned the home she shared with Cedric Gibbons in March 1940, publicly declaring the end of their “nine-year perfect marriage,” Hollywood columnists speculated that she and Welles were headed for the altar. Del Rio was still denying any heated romance between her and Orson, though, and when the couple traveled together to New York, on at least one occasion, Del Rio’s mother stayed with her daughter in the same hotel room, adjacent to Orson’s.

In the early weeks of 1940, actress Marlene Dietrich, a friend of both, went out on the town frequently with the two rumored lovers. “Marlene was the ‘beard,’ you see, for Dolores when she was married,” Welles boasted to Barbara Leaming. “I would take out Dolores by taking out Marlene too. Who would guess with those two girls what I was up to?” Orson also went out alone with Dietrich often enough to make columnists wonder if he was wooing her. He wasn’t, although their “dates” launched a lifelong close friendship. (Welles, who dubbed Dietrich “Super Marlene,” revered her above all other screen goddesses—with the exception of Garbo, although he rated Dietrich as more intelligent. He would later relish the chance to saw “Super Marlene” in half for delighted servicemen at the Mercury Wonder Show, and he gave Dietrich an unforgettable part in the twilight of her career as the clairvoyant prostitute Tanya, in love with Welles’s corrupt Quinlan, in
Touch of Evil.
)

Another of Del Rio’s close friends was the actress Fay Wray, who suspected Del Rio—raised as a proper Catholic—of using her chaste dalliance with Welles to force Gibbons into a divorce. “She apparently didn’t consider having an affair with Orson, but thought she must leave Cedric, get a divorce,” Wray recalled. “She seemed herself a lady of purity.”

In any case, Del Rio’s divorce suit would not go to court for another six months.

Orson gained time and lost money as the radio series wound down in February and March.

With Paul Stewart in New York and John Houseman in Victorville, Orson had to organize the season’s last
Campbell Playhouse
programs himself, with the assistance of the West Coast staff. Keeping on the show business columnist Hedda Hopper’s good side, Orson gave Hopper a showy part in his radio version of
Dinner at Eight
, broadcast on February 18; Hopper played the character Billie Burke had played in the 1933 movie. Lucille Ball, who had watched her chances for
The Smiler with the Knife
go down the drain, was consoled with Jean Harlow’s role.
⁴⁹

Many of the
Campbell Playhouse
shows in 1940 made use of screen stars who were willing to moonlight on radio, and some were simply radio renditions of Hollywood pictures. Loretta Young starred opposite Welles in an adaptation of the screwball comedy
Theodora Goes Wild
(broadcast on January 14, 1940). William Powell and Miriam Hopkins played the leads (with Orson playing Hopkins’s father) in a freewheeling rendition of Frank Capra’s
It Happened One Night
(January 28). Joan Blondell was paired with Orson, essaying the Cary Grant role, in an abridgment of Howard Hawks’s
Only Angels Have Wings
(February 25). And Orson played second fiddle to Jack Benny in Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman’s
June Moon
(March 24).

Helen Hayes made more appearances on Orson’s radio show in its first two years than any other star, and she returned to the series for “Vanity Fair” (January 7) and “Broome Stages” (February 4). Orson’s friend Geraldine Fitzgerald, not quite a movie star of the first magnitude, then or ever, acted with Welles for a radio version of A. J. Cronin’s
The Citadel
(January 21).

Orson would host the final broadcast on March 31, with mixed feelings. The sponsor, Campbell, had grown fond of tinkering with the stories and the stars, taking a special interest in the lead actresses, and for months it resisted Orson’s attempts to schedule Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre.
The story was “absolute sockeroo,” he told the sponsor in a memo, and he wanted to play Edward Fairfax Rochester, the unbridled master of the manor who falls in love with the lowly servant Jane. In the memo he was reduced to painful pleading: “This may seem a foolish point,” he finished, “but I do think it would be generous to give me opportunity to do something worthwhile myself on last show rather than supporting an actress in a negligible character part.”