Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (90 page)

In New York, Houseman had served as a buffer with Campbell’s representatives, but now Welles shielded his partner from the drama with Wheelock, ordering him to focus on the
Heart of Darkness
script. Orson opted to handle the matter himself, and Wheelock’s “dissension and general unpleasantness” forced him to devote “several hours a day to letters and wires” trying to mediate the crisis, as he wrote to Virginia. Hoping he could placate Wheelock in person, Welles booked his first flight back east, looking forward to “one of the really outstandingly wretched weekends of my career.”

At the last moment, however, Weissberger’s diplomacy defused the crisis. He had negotiated a clause in Welles’s RKO contract that excused him from the studio for radio work for one weekday each week, and that commitment moderated Wheelock’s anger and dispelled his threatened injunction. Orson agreed to launch the new
Campbell Playhouse
season in New York, paying the transcontinental travel expenses himself, and he promised to liaise more closely than ever with the agency over every aspect of the show, from script to casting to production. Wheelock assigned a new agency minder, Diana Bourbon, to work with Welles in New York; Orson liked Bourbon and expected to be able to work productively with her. Another agency representative, Ernest Chappell, would consult with him on the West Coast.

In return, Wheelock agreed that the broadcast could gradually shift to the West Coast, later in the season, once the show’s rhythm had been reestablished. After all the contretemps, the new season premiere on September 10 would be practically an anticlimax: an adaptation of George du Maurier’s twice-filmed novel
Peter Ibbetson
, starring Helen Hayes in her third guest appearance on Welles’s radio show.

Howard Koch and other writers working on the radio show had stayed behind in New York, so Welles and Houseman had to engage a few West Coast writers to initiate scripts for the series—a move that would have long-term repercussions. One of the journeymen Orson hired was Roger Q. Denny, a veteran Hollywood rewrite man who specialized in narration for nature documentaries, making him a natural to chip in with authentic touches for
Heart of Darkness.

More important, MGM had just laid off the estimable screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, owing to his long slide into alcoholism, insubordination, and nonperformance.

Of medium build, with a beefeater face, a lofty brow, blue eyes, and a mischievous grin, Mank would turn forty-three in November 1939. The son of a stern professor of education, he had grown up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and graduated with honors from Columbia College in New York before he was eighteen. He was then already a chain-smoker (Camels), was known to classmates as “Mank the Tank” for his capacity to absorb alcohol (Scotch), and even in college was an inveterate gambler (poker, horses, anything), perpetually trailed by IOUs. Drunk or sober, broke or flush, Mank was a nonpareil conversationalist, a scathing debunker of anyone and everyone, and a spellbinding recitalist who could reel off pages of Shakespeare and verse from memory.

After dropping out of graduate school, Mank wrote theater reviews for the
American Jewish Chronicle
, then joined the Marines and served in Germany and France during World War I. After the war he worked in the press office of the Red Cross in Washington, D.C.; married his wife, Sara Aaronson; and moved to Berlin, the birthplace of his father. In Berlin, Mank strung for the Associated Press,
Women’s Wear Daily
, the
Chicago Tribune
, and the
New York Times
(feeding “News of the Berlin Stage” to the editor of the drama section, George S. Kaufman). He moonlighted as a press agent—including a brief stint for dancer-choreographer Isadora Duncan.

Returning to New York in 1922, Mank accepted an offer from Kaufman to work as a literary and drama critic for the
Times
, and was soon elevated to Kaufman’s assistant editor. Kaufman also sponsored Mank’s membership in the Algonquin Round Table, a sparkling circle of New York scribblers who met for lively lunches at the Algonquin Hotel, trading vicious barbs and witty maxims. The circle included the likes of Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, and Alexander Woollcott. Although he was younger and lower on the ladder of success than the others, Mank fitted right in: Woollcott once described him as “the funniest man in New York.”

One October night in 1925, Mank returned from a revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s
School for Scandal.
In the role of the “young” Mrs. Teazle was the superannuated Gladys Wallis, whose husband, Samuel Insull, the Chicago utilities and railroad tycoon, had bankrolled the Broadway show. “Outraged” by the spectacle of a millionairess cavorting as an ingenue in a production gift-wrapped by a shady magnate—and “full of fury and too many drinks,” according to his biographer Richard Meryman—Mank passed out at his typewriter after launching a damning critique of “an aging, hopelessly incompetent amateur.” This vignette, with certain alterations, would figure prominently in
Citizen Kane.

Kaufman sent Mankiewicz home in anger, and the
Times
went to print without his notice. But Mank survived the episode, which formed a cornerstone of his legend in the New York press world. Mank’s vitriolic tongue, and his drinking, would get him fired more than once—at the
Times
and later as one of the founding members of the
New Yorker
, where he got himself dismissed again after pushing editor Harold Ross to the limit.

By 1926, Mankiewicz had relocated to Hollywood, where he was paid handsomely to write title cards for Paramount silent pictures. He brought with him his gift for effervescent one-liners and synoptic summary. For Clara Bow’s picture
Three Weekends
in 1928, for example, Mank wrote this title card: “Paris—Where half the women are working women,” followed after a beat by the punch line: “And half the women are working men.”

Mank wired his East Coast pals, including fellow newsmen Louis Weitzenkorn, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Ben Hecht, urging them to come to Hollywood; his famous invitation, “
MILLIONS
ARE
TO
BE
GRABBED
OUT
HERE
AND
YOUR
ONLY
COMPETITION
IS
IDIOTS
,” captures his opportunism and superiority. Many of his friends hopped trains at his urging, and most had Mank to thank for prosperous Hollywood careers.

After lighting up the skies with his intertitles for two dozen silent pictures, Mank served as an uncredited producer on the early 1930s Marx Brothers comedies
Monkey Business
,
Horse Feathers
, and
Duck Soup.
But one day Mank offended the usually unflappable Harpo with a sarcastic put-down—and once more he was let go. He had bounced around the studios for years, accumulating a checkered history of brilliance, disaster, and resilience, but when MGM rendered him newly unemployable, he announced he was heading east to pursue his lifelong ambition of writing a Broadway play. Welles and Houseman, who both knew Mank from New York, agreed to help him—and themselves—by hiring him to work on the
Campbell Playhouse
series, pitching in on the scripts in Hollywood and helping with rewrites in New York.

On the first weekend of the new broadcast season, though, Mankiewicz and fellow writer Thomas W. Phipps were driving east when their car skidded on a wet stretch of Route 66 and overturned near Grants, New Mexico. With a badly fractured leg, Mank spent a month in the hospital, and even after he was sent home to his Tower Road residence in Beverly Hills, he was encased in “a heavy cast from under my armpits to my feet,” in his words. Now Mank had little to look forward to except lying in bed for months.

Broke even before his accident, Mankiewicz had to lease out his home and move to a smaller, cheaper place in Beverly Hills. His medical bills were piling up, and the Mercury partners resolved to give him as much radio work as possible at $200 a script. Mank soon turned “demanding and impatient” about the assignments, according to his biographer, Richard Meryman; but Houseman supervised the writer tactfully—first in person and later by phone from New York—while Welles also treated him “with consummate and disarming charm.”

Mankiewicz’s first job for
The Campbell Playhouse
was Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackryod” (broadcast November 12, 1939)—“not an unqualified success,” according to Simon Callow, as the still-green radio scenarist “left out one of the crucial clues.” Mankiewicz was hired to work ahead on adaptations of Sinclair Lewis’s
Dodsworth
(the November 26 show), William Makepeace Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
(January 7, 1940), and Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
(March 17, 1940).

Mankiewicz had a pet idea for a Broadway play or a feature film, and he talked about it compulsively whenever Welles or Houseman dropped by to visit. The script he envisioned would offer a kind of composite portrait of a well-known public figure, recently deceased, as viewed through the contrasting reminiscences of friends, family, and associates.

“A certain man can be a whirling pagoda,” Mank liked to muse. “You look this way and see one side; turn your eyes away, look again and see another side, so that people looking at it from different angles see ostensibly the same man but not the same man at all.”

Mank had worked forever on just such a “whirling pagoda” script, focusing on a criminal in the mold of John Dillinger. The story began with the news of the criminal’s death, brought by reporters to the Kansas farmhouse where his parents still lived; then the entirety of the man’s life was revealed through the eyes of his mother, his father, his sweetheart, the girl he almost married, and so on. The idea had captured the interest of a Hollywood producer, but when the producer dropped the project and moved on, the script was shelved, unfinished.

At the same time that Welles was fending off Ward Wheelock’s complaints about the radio series, he was being bombarded with phone calls and letters from another unexpected petitioner: Dr. Maurice Bernstein. The doctor, who had been ambivalent about Orson’s moving to Hollywood, suddenly felt bereft after Christopher Welles passed through Chicago with her nanny on the train heading west. Deciding he missed Orson terribly, Bernstein expressed an overwhelming curiosity about his ward’s new life in Hollywood. A summer trip to see father and daughter together in their new surroundings would cheer him up. Didn’t Orson owe him that much?

A visit from the exhausting Dr. Bernstein did not rank high on his wish list, but Orson still felt fondness for his guardian—who also happened to control his inheritance until Orson turned twenty-five in May 1940. Welles sent the Bernsteins a night telegram with two air tickets and a booking at the Chateau Marmont. The doctor “became a different man” when he received the telegram, Hazel Bernstein reported back to Orson, “the sun breaking thru the clouds in effect.”

The Bernsteins arrived inconveniently on a Monday, August 14, and Orson had to interrupt all work on the radio series and
Heart of Darkness
to arrange the day and most of his week around their vacation. Ashton Stevens and his wife, FloFlo, were back in town looking after Ashton’s ailing brother, and the Stevenses joined the Bernsteins along with
New York Post
columnist Leonard Lyons and his wife, Sylvia, for a get-together at Welles’s Brentwood mansion. “The whole caboodle stayed on all day and had a lovely time,” Orson wrote to Virginia. The next day Orson arranged a car for the Bernsteins (“as insurance against this kind of thing”) and set them off on a round of sightseeing, hoping to get back to the studio without interruption and make up for “lost work.”

Throughout the Bernsteins’ two-week vacation—which included a guided tour of RKO; the studio premiere of
Nurse Edith Cavell
, followed by a party for executives and stars at the Trocadero; an Arthur Rodzinski concert at the Hollywood Bowl; and another Brentwood dinner party with Ashton and FloFlo Stevens and the Mario Chamlees—the doctor oohed and aahed about Hollywood. Orson couldn’t really begrudge him his enjoyment, especially after Bernstein, with his remarkable timing for such accidents of fate, recognized symptoms of appendicitis in the “pale lemon yellow” appearance of William “Vakhtangov” Alland, then rushed the “slave” off to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where the Chicago doctor performed a successful appendectomy.

Bernstein kept dropping hints about moving to California, which Orson pretended not to hear. Writing from Chicago afterward to thank Orson for the “most wonderful vacation,” Hazel Bernstein apologized if they had monopolized his time. “I hope you didn’t feel inconvenienced, and I don’t believe that Dadda talked out of turn too much either,” she wrote. “The trip did make him realize that you are not his little Pookles, but Orson and a personage in your own right.”

Everyone doted on Christopher Welles, who had arrived in Hollywood the week before the Bernsteins after three days of cross-country train travel. Not quite a year and a half old, Orson’s young daughter was his sunshine, her arrival “the most important event you can imagine,” he wrote to Virginia. He and Christopher would share precious little father-daughter time in their lives, and even during these first weeks in Hollywood, Orson spent most of each day at the studio. Writing to Virginia from RKO in mid-August, he admitted, “I haven’t seen your daughter today, but hope to before she’s put up for the night.” Life was hectic at the house, with its incessant flow of visitors and newcomers from the East taking up temporary quarters. Even so, Orson cooed over Christopher in letters to his wife, perhaps to keep Virginia’s attention.

“Your daughter is behaving like a famous beauty,” the proud father wrote amusingly. “Good tempered only, I suspect, because it becomes her, independent, and shamefully fickle. Her big, beautiful, gray eyes have the serene look of a lady who confidently expects to get what she wants for the rest of her life.”