Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (111 page)

Just before we fade out, there comes again into the picture the pattern of a barbed wire and cyclone fencing. On the fence is a sign which reads:

PRIVATE—NO TRESPASSING

Fade Out.

On June 21, 1940, Arnold Weissberger wrote to Richard Baer to report that Mercury’s combined East Coast and West Coast holdings had fallen to $500. Baer wrote back on June 22, explaining that he was typing his memo himself, having let his secretary go for the day to save money. “I have exactly $2.03 on the coast,” Baer said. “Orson has made enormous demands. . . . If I don’t get a hundred bucks, our credit will really be shot here.”

Orson’s ex-wife, Virginia, was sending almost daily letters threatening to retain a lawyer to obtain back alimony and other claims against Welles. Her new husband, Charles Lederer, had joined in the pressure with his own letters to Weissberger on Virginia’s behalf, mustering all the biting humor of his craft.

Word of Orson’s imminent financial collapse reached Hollywood columnists. The
Hollywood Reporter
said that Welles was retrenching economically and might soon take “one room at a hotel.” Jimmie Fidler reported that Welles was moving into the Hollywood YMCA. Orson saved a little money on food, dieting for his scenes as the younger Kane, even as columnists renewed their gibes about his pale and “plump” appearance. He put out the unlikely word that he was taking boxing lessons to lose weight. He drank coffee all day, popped Benzedrine into the night.

On Monday, July 1, after Welles had made severe cuts in all categories of physical production, the RKO budgeting department issued a revised estimate of $737,740 for
Citizen Kane.
That pleased everyone, including studio president George Schaefer. The next week, Orson cleaned up the budgeted draft, which became known as the “Second Revised Final” (although Robert L. Carringer identifies it as the sixth draft in sequence), and sent it to the Hays Office for the censors’ approval.

With RKO firmly behind him, Orson prepared for the first day of filming.

As broke then as he ever was, or ever would be, Orson was rich in spirit that summer in his all-but-deserted Hollywood home, staying up late, working alone on the script and sketches. He had slept little but had no nightmares. The work was best when it was fun, and the Niagara roar could be heard like an approaching train.

Twenty-five was not extreme youth for a film director. Charles Chaplin had directed his first films by the age of 25. So had Buster Keaton, another clown genius. John Ford was just twenty-three when he directed
The Tornado
, a two-reeler, in 1917. (By contrast, the French filmmaker Jean Renoir, whom Welles admired as much as any English-language director, had waited till he was thirty, in 1924, before directing his own scripts.)

In July, Orson kept his promise to studio head George Schaefer, calling the first take on
Citizen Kane
within one year of his highly publicized arrival in Hollywood. It was Monday, July 15, or maybe Wednesday, July 17—the precise date is lost to history.

Masters such as Chaplin, Keaton, Ford, and Renoir set a high bar artistically for filmmakers, and during his first year in Hollywood, Welles was privileged to watch and study many of their great films as well as films by other superior directors. His predecessors had established rules he had learned and would honor, as well as rules he would ignore and break.

Unlike these other filmmakers, who had all served apprenticeships of various kinds in the profession, Welles was granted the luxury of a full year to prepare his first masterpiece. He often attributed his success to extraordinary good luck in his career, especially when he was young—followed, he liked to say, by equally extraordinary bad luck later in his life. That was a modest pose; it was never just luck, and the good and bad luck often intermingled. Still, an odd kind of good luck had steered Orson’s way in Hollywood, forcing him to postpone
Heart of Darkness
, obliging him to abort
The Smiler with the Knife.
It had taken all that torturous length of time for
Citizen Kane
to germinate as the natural fruit of his imagination and experiences.

He had used the time well, forging a relationship with the prickly scenarist Herman Mankiewicz, and bringing together the creative team of editor Robert Wise, art director Perry Ferguson, cinematographer Gregg Toland, and composer Bernard Herrmann.

With a few marked exceptions, Welles had preserved his Mercury Theatre family, casting most of the film from its ranks while adding new faces to its membership. The family now blended the stage and radio Mercury into a new film family. They gathered at Mankiewicz’s house for the first full read-through of the script, and they would carry on together through many rehearsals before they were done. Such rehearsal was highly unusual in Hollywood, as were the recordings of the rehearsals Orson made so he and the cast could listen to the scenes, refining their tone and tempo.

His lead actors and actresses were largely unknown in the film industry, but most were well known to Welles—some dating back to his boyhood, others from the Mercury company’s radio and stage productions. They could be counted on to work long hours, overnight if need be, having their Scotch and sodas on a silver tray outside the soundstage afterward in the dazzling morning sunlight. Their difficult leader made impossible demands on their patience, goodwill, and talents. Yet many of the players would stay with him through to his final productions—among them Joseph Cotten, Paul Stewart, William Alland, and Richard Wilson, who reunited for
F for Fake
, arguably Welles’s last completed masterpiece, in 1973.

John Ford prided himself on his regular stock company and the many loyal technicians who bolstered his films behind the scenes. Yet directors like Ford existed and thrived totally within the comfortable studio system—no small feat, but Welles faced a greater hurdle, keeping his family together largely by dint of willpower and the occasional work he promised.

The date of the first day of filming is uncertain because the press was not alerted. According to many accounts, even RKO was kept in the dark, although that may be too good to be true. The filming began with a bit of fakery, with Orson and the crew pretending to shoot test scenes—Perry Ferguson’s idea, Welles always said in later interviews, though it wasn’t the first time a director did this to avoid unwanted press scrutiny and studio oversight. But the “tests” Welles photographed on July 15 or 17 were real, and some of the surreptitious footage would make it into the final
Citizen Kane
.

The family of actors arrived early for makeup and costumes, and then waited around for a long time for Welles and Gregg Toland to finish tinkering with the lights. Perhaps the small combo was already on the job, playing jazz. When at last the lights were ready, the family members gathered together, as they often had in the theater, or for radio shows, with Orson talking to them as a group, informally at first, reminiscing or telling an anecdote or joke to set the mood.

Exactly what scene did he direct on the first day? That, too, remains elusive. Welles gave differing accounts over the years, telling Peter Bogdanovich at one point, “The first scene I shot in the movie” was the one that takes place in the projection room, after
News on the March
has finished its cavalcade of clips.
Citizen Kane
then cuts abruptly to a projection room, “a fairly large one,” according to the published script, “with a long throw to the screen. It is dark. Present are the editors of a news digest short and of the Rawlston magazines.

“
RAWLSTON
himself is also present. During this scene, nobody’s face is really seen. Sections of their bodies are picked out by a table light, a silhouette is thrown on the screen, and their faces and bodies are themselves thrown into silhouette against the brilliant slanting rays of light from the projection booth.”

The scene in the projection room was photographed in shadowy darkness, with only the “strong single light” (Orson’s words) shining on the far wall. “We didn’t dare turn on the [other] lights,” Welles told Bogdanovich, because “I was supposed to be testing, so in case it was good I wanted to save it.” To save money, and as a kind of in-joke, the shadowy figures in that early scene were the same actors playing the film’s leads—even Joseph Cotten, who mutters “Rosebud!” in a scornful tone. “I used the whole Mercury cast, heavily disguised by darkness,” Welles recalled. “There they all are. If you look carefully, you can see them. Everybody in the movie is in it.” The sole exception was the man playing Rawlston, the newsreel editor—a Dutch-born stage actor named Philip Van Zandt, whose early work as an assistant to the Great Thurston might have caught Orson’s eye.

“Not you too?” Bogdanovich asked Welles.

“Yes, I’m there.”

That may have been the first scene filmed, but then again Welles also told Bogdanovich that his cherished idea of presenting “only new faces” in
Citizen Kane
was “ruined by the first day of shooting” when the director asked RKO to supply an actor for the small part of a waiter for the El Rancho Cabaret scene. He told RKO that he wanted the actor just for tests for the scene, which immediately follows the projection room sequence in the film. The casting department sent him someone on the studio payroll: “a tubby little round-faced Italian,” Gino Corrado, who had been playing waiters and other small ethnic parts in Hollywood as far back as D. W. Griffith’s
Intolerance.
“I couldn’t possibly send him away,” Welles explained, “on the basis that he was too well-known a face because I was claiming to be testing. So there he is—spoiling the whole master plan in one of the first shots I made!”

One thing is certain: on that first day, Orson was ready. He had spent twenty-five years preparing himself to make
Citizen Kane.
He must have thought proudly of his mother and father that day, though lingering sentimentally was never his nature. His older brother was not far away; perhaps Orson even found Richard some day work as a carpenter on the set, as he did later on
The Magnificent Ambersons.
And Roger Hill and Ashton Stevens and Dr. Maurice Bernstein were all in the know, even when the press and RKO were not. The air of expectancy surrounding the boy genius was always electric, and never more so than today.

Orson gathered everyone around, putting people at ease. Everyone waited for the signal.

“Action!” he called.

The most important word of his life.

V

AFTER THE END

CHAPTER 21

October 10, 1985

Joy and Regrets

The president of the United States on October 9, 1985, was the former Hollywood actor and former governor of California Ronald Reagan. The top movie in America was
Commando
, starring the future governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger. Although the forecast for the day in Los Angeles was cloudy and breezy, with a chance of showers, the sun would shine and the temperature would hover between sixty and seventy degrees.

Hope rose with the sun, as always for Orson Welles, who woke in his colonnaded home at 1717 North Stanley Avenue in the Hollywood hills with a full day ahead of him. Today, he was going to a television studio for an appearance in which he would perform a card trick that harked back to one he had taught himself in boyhood out of his first Gilbert Mysto Magic Kit. Welles often performed sleight of hand on variety shows, along with sketching caricatures or reciting Shakespeare. He had stopped the show performing Shylock and Falstaff on
The Dean Martin Show
, and intoned Hamlet’s advice to the players (“Speak the speech . . .”) on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show.
Today it was
The Merv Griffin Show
, where he was a favorite guest (Griffin estimated he had appeared “close to fifty” times over the past ten years). Sometimes, on these shows—as in his first appearance for Griffin—Welles was happy just to talk “about everything under the sun,” as Griffin recalled, “politics, current events, art, cinema (other than his own work), literature, travel.”