Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (99 page)

The members of the Hollywood upper caste were entertained in style by the magnate: picked up by limousine, shipped by special train car to the formal dinners and lavish costume parties he hosted at the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, 250 miles north of Los Angeles. A hotel-size mansion on an expansive estate, the castle boasted upwards of four dozen bedrooms, several tennis courts and swimming pools, a movie theater, the world’s largest private zoo, and an airfield for Hearst and the guests who flew rather than rode the train there. By the early 1930s, Mank had become one of Hearst’s pet invitees, visiting “very frequently,” in Mankiewicz’s words, “from a day . . . to two weeks at a time.” Along with his writer friend Charles Lederer, Mank even churned out parodies of Hearst front pages to amuse the publisher and his mistress, actress Marion Davies, who was Lederer’s aunt. Over time, however, Mank had been dropped from the elite invitation list, banned from San Simeon for drinking and belligerent behavior.

Mank thought the script should focus on Hearst and Davies—“a love story between a publisher and a girl,” in Meryman’s words. To this end, Mank wanted to build an important subplot around the story of Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince, who fell mysteriously ill aboard the Hearst yacht in 1924 and later died, with rumors abounding that Hearst had an accidental hand in the death because of jealousy over another yacht guest’s dalliance with Davies.

“I just kept on telling [Welles] everything” about Hearst and Davies, Mankiewicz recalled. “I was interested in them, and I went into all kinds of details.”

Orson had never made a calculated study of Hearst; nor had he ever visited San Simeon, as far as anyone knows. He did not know Hearst personally. “Any knowledge I have of his career is gained from general and sociological surveys of his times,” Welles testified under oath in the Lundberg case. Orson said he knew what the general public knew and what he had “gained from conversations with people who know him personally or who have worked for and with him.”

Moreover, Orson considered it essential that the central role
not
be Hearst, per se. Rather, Orson wanted to craft a fictional “composite” that would borrow elements from many public figures: a type, an archetype. “There were and are Americans who want to be kings or dictators or leaders,” in Welles’s words. For such men, those he dubbed American sultans, “politics as the means of communication, and indeed the nation itself, is all there for his personal pleasuring.”

Too much Hearst would lock in the script and actor, and create legal problems besides. A fictional archetype, on the other hand, would give Welles broader leeway “to make a serious film,” he believed, “about a certain type of wealthy American and of his impact on his times in America.” Largely for that reason, Mank agreed to fold in allusions to other tycoons, such as
Chicago Tribune
publisher Robert R. McCormick and Chicago business magnate Samuel Insull—not just to make the character more of a composite, but because Orson knew their lives from Chicago. For that reason too, Orson wanted the film’s San Simeon, Xanadu, located not in California but in Florida, where many midwestern and East Coast millionaires preferred to build their ornate palaces.

Making Charles Foster Kane the ward of a banker, the heir to a fortune who enters publishing on a whim, gave Orson a crucial means of relating to the character from his own life story, and another way of differentiating the archetype from Hearst. “It was an essential point we wanted to make about his type of wealthy and influential citizen,” Welles explained in his deposition in the Lundberg case. “We did not want our character to have the resourcefulness and hardness that goes with an industrial leader who has fought his way from the bottom to the top. It was also necessary for the psychological device with which we tied together the story that Kane should be removed from the care of his mother at an early and impressionable age.”

Again drawing on his own experiences and background, Orson wanted the mistress of the American sultan to be pushed into a humiliating opera debut in a Chicago auditorium, which would further distance the script from Hearst (and from screen comedienne Marion Davies), while playing to Orson’s strengths. (Mankiewicz’s opera background was mainly limited to the Marx Brothers film.)

Throughout January, the two men discussed the composite American sultan and the half dozen or so other key characters whose viewpoints would depict the great man’s life story in flashback. They argued and shouted at each other, and Mank often prevailed, but when Orson cared to win there was no question who was the boss.

It was Orson who named the central character, as he would later name most of the major characters in the film. The last name was Orson’s final gracious nod toward the Irish-born actor Whitford Kane, his boyhood idol. He had offended Kane during their Mercury Theatre days, but Orson had a way of crawling into people’s laps to apologize for his bad behavior, and Kane would take pleasure in boasting to the
New York Times
that cinema’s most famous character was named for him.
⁴⁷
(Mankiewicz had wanted and argued for the name “Craig,” insisting that audiences would misread “Kane” as a reference to Cain and Abel. “Do you suppose anybody’s ever thought of that?” Welles teased Richard Meryman. “How could you? Kane.
K.
Nice Irish name. With a
K.
You never fail with
K
in a name.”)

By the end of the month, they had the lead character’s name, the frame of the story, the narrative line, and certain incidents in the plot. Mankiewicz was a night owl like Orson, and sometimes the two men talked deep into the night, with Mank reclining in his bed and Orson perched on the edge of Sara Mankiewicz’s matching bed. On the couple’s nightstand, according to Meryman, was a snow-globe paperweight “containing a minute and wintry Swiss chalet,” which Mank sometimes picked up and shook, watching “the snow swirl up inside and settle down on the tiny scene.”

Like Roger Hill’s wife, Sara Mankiewicz endured these late-night bedroom planning sessions, propped up on pillows, reading a magazine until she fell asleep. If the hour grew dangerously late, Orson would say, “Move over . . .” and lie down next to her. As he and Mank carried on, “goading each other with sarcasms, laughing uproariously, Welles would reach over and massage Sara’s neck,” according to Meryman.

“He was fun,” Sara Mankiewicz told Meryman. “Magnetic, absolutely.”

On February 1, 1940, Virginia Nicolson Welles gained her divorce and custody of Christopher. She emerged from a closed-door hearing in Reno with “only praise for her husband,” according to the wire services, explaining that while her complaint had charged extreme mental cruelty—boilerplate divorce language in those days—“the word ‘cruel’ didn’t fit Welles in the least.” The problem was more simple: “genius and matrimony” did not mix. “Truly,” she said, “I have no plans for another marriage and so far as I know neither does Mr. Welles. He works twenty hours a day and hardly ever sleeps.”

Virginia immediately boarded a plane to San Francisco, en route to Hollywood, where she told the press she was planning a weeklong stay with her friend Geraldine Fitzgerald before returning to New York to resume her acting career under the name Anna Stafford. Orson, meanwhile, was headed in the opposite direction; he was on his way to New York to meet with RKO’s George Schaefer, attorney Arnold Weissberger, and his estranged professional partner, John Houseman.

Only Schaefer, who gave few interviews in his career, could have said how it felt to hear the very first pitch for the project Orson was calling “John Citizen, U.S.A.” It was the life story in flashback of a bigger-than-life newspaper publisher who loses his way in the American dream. Doubtless buoyed by Orson’s infectious enthusiasm—and wholehearted identification with the story—Schaefer instantly recognized the story idea as both serious and sensational. Orson vowed to keep the budget under $1 million and to have the script ready for filming by the first anniversary of his arrival in Hollywood the previous July.

Without a blink, the faithful Schaefer quietly tabled
The Smiler with the Knife.
RKO would say nothing to the trade press for a few months, still touting
The Smiler
as Welles’s initial opus and
Heart of Darkness
as next in line. “John Citizen U.S.A.” would be kept secret for the next three months. But Weissberger could go to work on new contract clauses, and Schaefer would authorize the transfer of seed money from
The Smiler
to “John Citizen, U.S.A.,” to underwrite script development and preliminary planning.

Next, Orson approached Houseman. The producer dodged Welles’s calls at first but finally agreed to meet him for lunch at “21.” “As the two men downed several dozen oysters, Orson filled the room with his enthusiasm and vitality and air castles, and Houseman felt himself softening up. When Welles finally presented his story idea, Houseman had much the same reaction as George Schaefer: his partner had “finally figured out that he had the right kind of picture for himself to make,” as Houseman recalled.

Mankiewicz was on fire to write the script, Welles told Houseman—but that was both good and bad. Mank “was a very prolific writer,” as Houseman testified in the Lundberg suit, who “unless he is carefully controlled tends to turn out a script that is three or four times as long as what you can finally shoot. This is a great waste of time for all concerned and is not a good way to work.” Orson was planning to send Mankiewicz to the California desert, for secrecy and solitude, but Mank needed a minder to keep him from going off the rails with drink or digression—and the only chaperone Mank would accept was Houseman. Orson knew Houseman would be flattered, but it was true: after working with Houseman on the radio, Mankiewicz much preferred the producer’s laissez-faire approach to Orson’s constant second-guessing. “I had gotten along with [Houseman] better,” the screenwriter later told the courtroom in the Lundberg case.

Orson offered Houseman a munificent $1,000 weekly for ten weeks. The contract called for him to fulfill “a very special function,” Houseman explained in the Lundberg case, which he described as a combination “writer” and “associate producer.” In truth, he was being hired to serve as a dramaturg, a story and scene editor, for Mank.

“It was an absurd venture,” Houseman recalled, “and that night Orson and I flew back to California together.”

Houseman’s contract was with Mercury, which was synonymous now with Welles. Mankiewicz’s contract was also with Mercury, and it “assigned all claims of authorship to the corporation,” as Robert L. Carringer has noted. In other words, by agreeing to the terms of the deal, Mankiewicz forfeited any claim to screen credit. “I had no intention of Mank being the coauthor” at the outset, as Welles explained to Meryman years later. “None. Rightly or wrongly, I was still without self-doubt in my ability to write a film script. I thought Mank would do that anecdotal kind of thing about Hearst, give me a few ideas, fight me a little—and mainly would be as destructive as he had been in
Smiler with the Knife.”

Before he was fired from MGM, Mankiewicz had been earning as much as $2,250 a week. Out of the funding authorized by Schaefer, Orson offered to pay him the same salary as Houseman: $1,000 a week for ten weeks, officially starting February 19. Over the next five months, Mankiewicz’s earnings, plus bonuses, would add up to $22,833.35. Over the same period, Orson paid himself $25,000 for his collaboration on the screenplay—money that was also derived from RKO, but like all the salaries was charged back to Mercury as part of its budgetary allotment for the picture.

A good deal of work had been done before the February 19 contract date, with Mank receiving small sums that Richard Baer managed to extract from the coffers of
The Smiler with the Knife
and
Campbell Playhouse
through creative accounting. The lawyers in the Lundberg case were mystified by the complicated, interwoven financial machinations. “The money that I received was always from Mercury,” Houseman tried to explain to the court, “and therefore in essence out of Welles’s pocket . . . the same was true of Mankiewicz.” Orson
was
the Mercury, as he had boasted, and for him money was always a means to an end, paid out liberally whenever he could pay it.

But Baer’s shell games weren’t enough to keep Orson afloat. He had to find ways to stretch the preproduction allotment of “John Citizen, U.S.A.”
The Campbell Playhouse
would make its final broadcast in late March, depriving Welles of his only reliable source of non-RKO income. And now he had his monthly obligations to Virginia as well. Largely for these reasons, Albert Schneider and Herbert Drake had begun to plan a spring lecture tour that would take Orson to several cities around the country, bringing in up to $1,000 weekly in April and May, the anticipated nadir of Mercury’s finances. By late May, then, Orson hoped to have the first draft of the script, which would mean the release of another chunk of preproduction money from RKO.

Yet May 6, which was his twenty-fifth birthday, was also fast approaching. Orson could not help wondering how much money remained in the trust fund bequeathed to him on his father’s death ten years before, in 1930. The inheritance might change his predicament altogether, even saving him from having to give up his Brentwood mansion. He asked Arnold Weissberger to ask the Chicago bank for an advance report on the expected final distribution.

Ten years after the making of
Citizen Kane
, John Houseman told the courtroom in the Lundberg case that on returning to Los Angeles he held “numerous conversations” with Welles and Herman Mankiewicz concerning both the script and his own supervisory role. “We were not starting from scratch,” the producer said. Then, “almost immediately,” Houseman and Mankiewicz set out for the small desert town of Victorville, California, one hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles, about halfway between San Bernardino and Barstow. Richard Meryman estimates their departure date at “around February 1.” Houseman told the lawyers it was “early” February or even possibly “the middle of February,” which was closer to reality.