Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (108 page)

As he did on and off throughout the filming, Welles invited Dr. Maurice Bernstein to visit the RKO studio on that day, knowing he might need his former guardian’s medical attention. Bernstein had long since obtained his certificate to practice medicine in California, and by the end of the summer of 1940 he and his wife, Hazel, were living in Beverly Hills, in time to watch Orson as he directed his first film. “Orson cut his fingers and wrists and I had to bandage and plaster the cuts,” Dr. Bernstein wrote to Ashton Stevens the day after the room-wrecking performance. “The scene was so realistic, the electrician who was on a scaffold came down to find out if Orson often lost his temper. It was the most intense scene.”

In their interview sessions, Bogdanovich asked Welles about an anecdote often told by William Alland, and repeated in many books: that Orson was “exhilarated” after he completed the scene, “and said it was the first time he’d ever felt the emotion while acting a scene.”

“Naw,” Welles replied. “I’m sure that’s one of those memories after the event that are more creative than accurate.” He conceded that the room-wrecking scene was “very rough,” but added that “the set was wonderfully done by Perry Ferguson. Marvelously dressed—made it very easy to play. My God, it was a wonderful set. I can see it now. [Ferguson] was just brilliant.”

At the end of the destructive rampage came the payoff. “[Kane’s] eye lights on a hanging whatnot in a corner which had escaped his notice,” according to the published version of the script. “Prominent on its center shelf is the little glass ball with the snowstorm in it. He yanks it down. Something made of china breaks, but not the glass ball. It bounces on the carpet and rolls to his feet, the snow in a flurry.” Clutching the glass ball, within which swirls a snowstorm, Kane “slowly walks down the corridor, the servants giving way to let him pass, and watching him as he goes. The mirrors which line the hall reflect his image as he moves.” Then the published shooting script adds—oddly, since it’s really not the point of the scene—“He is an old, old man!”

Then, “
KANE
turns into a second corridor—sees himself reflected in the mirror—stops. His image is reflected again in the mirror behind him—multiplied again and again and again in long perspectives—
KANE
looks. We see a thousand
KANES
.

“Dissolve.”

Such moments, now immortal, were worked and reworked in the script for months, then prepared meticulously by art director Perry Ferguson and cinematographer Gregg Toland. Although he would make countless emendations in the weeks and months ahead, it was during his time alone in the desert, furiously cutting and revising, that Welles completed the final script of
Citizen Kane
for presentation to the Production Code Office and RKO.

Returning confidently from the desert, Orson focused on his two most important open slots in the cast: Emily Monroe Norton and Susan Alexander.

He had cast many of the principal speaking parts by the end of May, but the two wives of Charles Foster Kane were more problematic characters. After years of staging all-boy shows at the Todd School, Orson had far more experience casting men than women; even in New York, his productions were often dominated by male figures (especially when he played the lead). He told people he wanted both of these actresses to be Hollywood newcomers, but he couldn’t think of any Mercury actress who was right for either part. Meanwhile, as the script work continued, Susan Alexander’s role grew in importance—while Emily Monroe Norton’s diminished, especially after Orson ditched the subplot involving President McKinley’s assassination. Emily would be glimpsed in
News on the March
and in front of the
Inquirer
building in 1898, riding off with Kane to get married. But in the final script she figured in only two major dialogue scenes.

As a way to compress the drama, Welles came up with the idea of the breakfast room sequence, using a series of dissolves to show the deterioration of Kane’s first marriage. The script says: “The following scenes cover a period of nine years—are played in the same set with only changes in lighting, special effects outside the window, and wardrobe.”

The first vignette takes place three years after their marriage. Seated at the breakfast table, Kane, dressed “in white tie and tails,” lovingly pours a morning glass of milk for Emily, who is similarly “formally attired.” “As he finishes, he leans over and playfully nips the back of her neck.” Bantering flirtatiously, Kane says he will call Bernstein and put off all appointments till noon. “What time is it?” Kane asks. “I don’t know—it’s late,” replies Emily. “It’s early,” says Kane; the scene dissolves with the implication that the happily married pair are retiring to bed.

The next exchange was briefer, less sweet. It follows the first immediately, but is one year later, according to the script—1902—with “different clothes—different food.” This time Emily is seen blandly complaining that her husband left her dinner party in the lurch the night before, rushing off mysteriously to the
Inquirer.
“What do you do on a newspaper in the middle of the night?” Emily asks. “My dear, your only co-respondent is the
Inquirer
,” Kane responds mildly.

Two years later, the third vignette reveals the couple, seated farther apart, with a “change of costume and food.” Emily is unhappy that Kane’s newspaper has been “attacking the President.” Kane corrects her: “You mean Uncle John,”
⁵⁵
he says, a “fathead” who is “letting a pack of high-pressure crooks run his administration. This whole oil scandal—” Emily interrupts: “He happens to be the President, Charles—not you.” Kane rejoins: “That’s a mistake that will be corrected one of these days.” Another dissolve.

As further subtle changes advance the marriage to 1905, 1906, and 1908, the couple separate both emotionally and physically, their breakfast table growing longer as they grow apart. Emily grouses about Mr. Bernstein visiting the nursery with “the most incredible atrocity” as a gift for Junior, letting the audience know in passing that the Kanes now have a son. Reacting to this hint of distaste (and anti-Semitism) from his aristocratic wife, Kane tells Emily curtly, “Mr. Bernstein is apt to pay a visit to the nursery now and then.” Emily: “Does he have to?” Kane (shortly): “Yes.”

The last installment occurs in 1909, with the couple breakfasting in silent tension. As Kane reads his
Inquirer
, Emily flaunts its rival, the
Chronicle.

“I did the breakfast scene thinking I’d invented it,” Welles recalled. “It wasn’t in the script originally. And when I was almost finished with it, I suddenly realized that I’d unconsciously stolen it from Thornton [Wilder].” Like many of the details of
Citizen Kane
, it was something he borrowed from his boyhood—in this case, from Wilder’s 1931 one-act play
The Long Christmas Dinner
, which he saw as a youth. Orson phoned Wilder to confess the appropriation, and they laughed about it together.

The woman playing Emily Monroe Norton had to be a patrician beauty, someone Orson himself found attractive. After testing a number of Hollywood actresses, Welles remembered a young singer whose path he’d crossed in New York. Her name: Ruth Warrick. “She looked the part of Emily,” Welles told Henry Jaglom. “And I’m one of those fellows who thinks, if they look it, then you can make them act it. Particularly a small part.”

Warrick was a fellow midwesterner, twenty-three years old, a University of Kansas graduate with only stock theater, commercial advertising, and broadcasting on her résumé. Orson had his staff track her down, then flew to New York to meet with her at the Waldorf-Astoria. Orson told Warrick he was looking for “a lady of breeding” to play his character’s first wife in his new film, but after the usual casting calls he’d come to the conclusion that “there
are
no ladies in Hollywood.” Would she be willing to come to Hollywood for a screen test?

Warrick felt tension emanating from Orson when she arrived at RKO for her camera audition—as she later recalled in her autobiography,
The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler
—in part because her test was being monitored by “New York brass” visiting the studio lot that day. But Warrick demonstrated the same poise Emily Monroe Norton might have shown in the situation. Instinctively, she reached out to Orson, putting him at his ease. “I chatted, laughed, asked questions, made suggestions, and all the while moved close to him and touched his arm. Little by little I felt the tension begin to drain away.”

She won the part, and also his trust. Emily appealed both to Kane and to Orson. “Ruth was a wonderful girl,” Welles told Henry Jaglom. “And when she was young, she was quite sexy.” In fact, “one night” years later in Hollywood (Warrick is vague on the chronology but suggests it was after Welles’s separation from his second wife, Rita Hayworth), Orson phoned Warrick and “begged” her to pay him a surreptitious visit. “He had no one to talk to, he said, and he repeated the line he had used when we first met: There were no ladies in Hollywood, no one with the depth and compassion to understand him,” Warrick wrote in her autobiography.

Orson dispatched his limousine to fetch Warrick. She arrived to find him “lolling in great mounds of pillows, looking pale and sallow, as if playing a scene from
Mayerling
,” she wrote. Orson spoke morosely about the crass “money men” ruling Hollywood. “Any man whose ability is simply to make money should get down on his knees and beg a man with creative talent to make something of value with that money,” he fumed to Warrick. “But they don’t seem to know that their money has absolutely no value in itself.”

“I, too, in my own life was beginning to have some need of comfort,” Warrick’s account continued, “and we soothed and held each other through a long evening. And yet, returning to my home later, I knew that somehow I, too, had been used by Orson, that I was a handy balm for a momentary hurt. It was not a role I felt good about.” The actress resolved to avoid Orson in the future—until 1980, when Welles made amends by agreeing to appear on
Good Morning America
to help promote her book. Host David Hartman interviewed him by satellite, along with Warrick and Paul Stewart in the studio. (“God save me from my friends,” Welles complained to Jaglom the following day. “[Stewart] telling Hartman how much the picture [
Citizen Kane
] cost. He’s got it wrong, of course. And sounding as though he were associate producer . . .”)

Warrick praised
Citizen Kane
on the TV show; Orson didn’t mind the praise, but he insisted to Jaglom that her otherwise flattering memoir couldn’t be trusted. “What is interesting about her book is that the reader is likely to think that we had a love affair. She’s practically saying it.” But Welles himself was elusive on the subject. When Barbara Leaming teased him out about his putative dalliance with Warrick, Welles first strenuously denied an “amorous encounter” (Leaming’s careful wording) with the actress. Later, however, he admitted, “It’s true.”

Why, then, had he denied it? his biographer asked him.

“You don’t tell on those kinds of things,” Welles explained to Leaming. “I think stout denial—at all times.”

After the series of breakfast room vignettes, Emily Kane would have only one big scene—a doozy, the film’s emotional watershed. On the night of Kane’s triumphant speech at Madison Square Garden, Emily receives an anonymous note. She sends Junior home in a limousine, then lures Kane into a taxi bound for an apartment house on West Seventy-Fourth Street. When they arrive, they find Susan Alexander waiting with Jim Gettys, the corrupt political boss, who threatens to reveal the “love nest” to the rival press unless Kane withdraws from the race for governor.

On occasion, as in the bedroom-wrecking scene at Xanadu, Orson filmed and completed a major scene in one miraculous take. More often, the scenes were written, rewritten, staged, rehearsed, and restaged many times, in a process that could take days or weeks. This was partly because Orson eschewed the traditional studio approach of filming master shots and “coverage” (alternative angles) for each scene, instead building his scenes around the complicated moving shots that became the film’s visual signature. “I was constantly encouraged by Toland,” Welles recalled, “who said, under the influence of [John] Ford, ‘Carry everything in one shot—don’t do anything else.’ In other words, play scenes through with cutting and don’t do alternative versions. That was Toland in my ear.”

As a money-saving tactic, Welles rehearsed the actors over and over, then shot multiple takes but printed as few as possible. (Printing was a major expense, as he had learned on
Too Much Johnson.
) It was not uncommon for Orson to shoot fifty or more takes of a scene while making
Kane
, the actor Paul Stewart recalled. “One day he shot a hundred takes and exposed 10,000 feet,” Stewart claimed, “without a single print!”

The curious thing about this method was that the multiple takes usually had little to do with camera placement. Often the camera stayed just where Orson initially decided it would go. The retakes were more likely to fine-tune the performances, and the pacing and tone of the scene.

The camera’s positioning is “the only thing I’m certain of,” Welles told Bogdanovich. “I’m never certain of a performance—my own or the other actors’—or the script or anything. I’m ready to change, move anything. But to me it seems there’s only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately. If it doesn’t come immediately, it’s because I have no idea about the scene, or I’m wrong about the scene to begin with.”

The “love nest” scene brought together four important characters: Kane, Emily, Susan, and Boss Gettys. It was Warwick’s last scene in the film, and the only substantial one for Ray Collins, who is merely glimpsed at Madison Square Garden during Kane’s speech. But the scene marked a rare instance when the correct camera decision eluded Orson. The first time he tried staging the scene, Welles recalled, he had to halt the filming abruptly and “just quit for the day—and went home,” he confessed to Bogdanovich. “Made a big scandal. I just had no idea what to do. Came back the next day . . . it seemed to me so boring.”