Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (109 page)

“When you came back, it worked?” asked Bogdanovich.

“Yeah,” said Welles. “And I didn’t figure it out on paper.” Even so, Orson claimed to be dissatisfied with the end result, calling the “love nest” confrontation scene “overstated.” He told Bogdanovich that the scene showed “some kind of insecurity, I think, visually.”

He did not mention what happened during the filming: as Kane hurtled down the steps of the apartment building, shouting at Gettys, the actor playing him stumbled forward, injuring himself badly enough that Orson was whisked off to Good Samaritan Hospital, where tests revealed broken chips in his ankles. For the next two weeks he directed from a wheelchair, acting some scenes with metal braces supporting him.

If the scene is at all “insecure,” with stiff groupings and studied angles, it is also one of the film’s acting highpoints. For the first time, Kane reveals the fundamental violence and solipsism of his character. Susan Alexander, plaintively crying, “What about me?” foreshadows her later victimhood. Collins, as the corrupt but not unsympathetic Boss Gettys, achieves an almost noble poignancy, while Emily, arguing for her marriage and their son, loses with dignity.

The plot of
Citizen Kane
was stacked against Emily, and Warrick had to keep her likability and poise under the most trying conditions. “You decided what you were going to do, Charles, some time ago,” Emily says with calm strength—her last words in the film. In Warrick, Welles had found the purposeful lady of the script, a woman he could imagine as his wife.

Another claim that Orson hated in Ruth Warrick’s autobiography was her comment that he had isolated Dorothy Comingore, the actress who played Susan Alexander, from the rest of the cast, treating her “with a discourteous contempt that was often painful to watch, while making an obvious display of elaborate courtliness in his dealing with me.”

But he “hardly knew” Warrick at the time, Orson protested to Henry Jaglom, while “Comingore and I were great friends.” He dismissed Warrick’s observations as those of “one actress in a movie talking about another.”

Susan Alexander was the true leading lady of
Citizen Kane
, a role that could determine the success or failure of the picture. And Comingore was a virtual unknown in Hollywood. Two years older than Welles and now, at twenty-seven, past her ingenue prime, Comingore had been noticed by Charles Chaplin in a revival of
The Cradle Song
at Carmel’s Little Theater. Warner Brothers signed her to a weekly contract, giving her the screen name Linda Winters, but then shuffled her over to Columbia, which released her in turn to freelance for the studios of Poverty Row. As Linda Winters, the actress starred in cheap programmers like
Prison Train
while decorating the background of A pictures on the order of
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
, where she has a line or two greeting Jimmy Stewart at the train station. Her career was languishing when Orson first met her in the summer of 1939.

Herbert Drake had arranged a publicity date for them, following Orson’s arrival in Hollywood. They were photographed at Chasen’s, and when the photo was published they were misidentified as “Mr. and Mrs. Welles.” Comingore “sat and listened” to Orson all night, a reporter later wrote, “quite content to be entertained.” But she was taken aback when the younger man left her on her doorstep with, “God bless you, my child.”

Orson told Peter Bogdanovich that he tested “a lot of people” for the part of Susan Alexander, including “a lot of strippers, about ten, none of whom were any good.” “You wanted that kind of cheapness?” asked Bogdanovich. “Yeah,” replied Welles. When Herbert Drake reminded him of his publicity date with Linda Winters, Orson brought her in for a meeting and a series of auditions. The actress had just finished emoting in a Three Stooges two-reeler, and she and Orson shared a good laugh about it. Welles was instantly reminded of how sweet and vulnerable she was, and her test showed that she could laugh on cue, with that infectious laughter Orson remembered from the arranged date. She had the look he wanted for the character: the look of a waif Charles Foster Kane might adopt as a cause.

“Was she an intelligent actress?” Bogdanovich asked.

“Yes,” Welles replied without hesitation. “Of course, her old-age scenes were tremendously tricked-up. We blew dangerous drugs in her eyes and sprayed her throat so she couldn’t talk and everything else. But she was still great.” (At this point in the interview with Bogdanovich, Welles recited from memory one of Susan’s last lines in the film: “Well, what do you know—it’s morning already,” adding his own reflection, “That’s another favorite moment.”
⁵⁶
)

By now, it was nearly July 1. Orson brought Herman Mankiewicz in to weigh some of the remaining casting decisions, inviting him to hear Comingore read in Orson’s office. “She looks precisely like the image of a kitten we have been looking for,” Mank told Welles. Orson told Comingore the job was hers. But not as Linda Winters: Orson disliked such Hollywood tomfoolery—and, besides, as Linda Winters she wouldn’t be a “fresh face.” Orson wanted her in the film, but as Dorothy Comingore.

That’s when Comingore made a confession to Welles: she was pregnant. (She had married screenwriter Richard Collins in 1939.)

“What?” Orson howled.

“A baby,” Comingore said timidly.

“When?”

“About seven months.”

“It’s all the better!” Orson reportedly crowed. “You’re hired. If you start in the part, it’ll really prove to those bums that I’m going to finish the picture on time.”

Comingore had to be a courageous as well as an intelligent actress. Her scenes were among the most painful and darkest in
Citizen Kane.
Her character was central to one of the film’s bravura sequences: Susan Alexander Kane’s opera debut, among Orson’s most magnificent concoctions. “I
NSERT
,” reads the published shooting script, “
FRONT
PAGE
CHICAGO
‘
INQUIRER
’ with photograph proclaiming that Susan Alexander opens at new Chicago Opera House in
Thais
. . . On sound track during above we hear the big expectant murmur of an opening night audience and the noodling of the orchestra.”

In the first half of
Kane
, Susan’s debut is glimpsed briefly from the point of view of drama critic Jed Leland, who distracts himself from the tedium by cutting his program to ribbons. Later, the humiliating debut is seen again from Susan’s point of view and from Kane’s. As the performance ends, the camera moves out into the audience with the “ghastly sound of three thousand people applauding as little as possible,” pushing in close on Kane, embarrassed but defiant, standing alone and “applauding, very, very hard,” according to the script.

The backstage portion concludes with a memorable shot in which the camera rises into the rafters to reveal “two typical stagehands . . . looking down on the stage below. They look at each other. One of them puts his hand to his nose.” Welles took script ideas from anyone who crossed his path, and that closing gesture—the stagehand holding his nose—was suggested by a property man working on
Citizen Kane.
“His name was Red,” Welles recalled. “We were just going to go up to them looking disgusted or something. Anyway, it was a big contribution.”

Comingore had a cracked voice, which added authenticity to her persona. But she wasn’t enough of a singer to handle the arias in the script—even as badly as Susan Alexander would. That was no problem for an opera fan like Welles, who found a voice double: the Pasadena-born opera singer Jean Forward, who was appearing in the cast of
Meet the People.

The meticulous dubbing of Comingore’s singing took place entirely in postproduction. Comingore never met Forward until the San Francisco premiere of
Citizen Kane.
Complicating matters, the classically trained Forward had to sing her arias in a voice that was “really pathetic,” in the words of the script. “The reason Susan is struggling so hard is
not
that she cannot sing,” composer Bernard Herrmann explained later, “but rather that the demands of the part are purposely greater than she can ever meet.” The dubbing was “big work,” Welles recalled proudly, “very well done by the girl [Forward]. Worked a long time on that.”

If not for the ingenious opera pastiche, the sequence would not have been as effective. Orson drew on his many nights at the opera to dictate the feel of the music, detailing his thoughts in long phone conversations and exhaustive telegrams to Herrmann, who did the initial scoring from New York. The Promethean composer was Orson’s musical ace in the hole. “If Herrmann was a neophyte to film,” as his biographer Steven C. Smith wrote, “it was in practice only. No snob about the cinema, he was familiar not only with American films and film composers but also with their European counterparts.” Herrmann had been poised for the go-ahead as the script was being finalized; he and Welles were both comfortable with urgent deadlines.

The film’s brooding, neo-Romantic main theme was destined to become a composition against which all other screen music is still compared. The main theme was “a simple four-note figure in the brass,” according to Herrmann, that was heard at the opening and reprised at the end of the film. It is the motif of “Kane’s power.” The second important musical motif is “that of Rosebud,” in Herrmann’s words. “Heard as a solo on the vibraphone, it first appears during the death scene at the very beginning of the picture. It is heard again and again throughout the film under various guises, and if followed closely, is a clue to the ultimate identity of Rosebud itself.”

Herrmann also wrote memorable bridges and transitions. Letting music convey the passage of time was a standard radio technique. For example, the subtly complex underscoring of the breakfast table vignettes integrated “the old classic form of theme and variations,” Herrmann recalled. The first vignette referenced a waltz in the style of French dance composer Émile Waldteufel (“a Welles favorite,” as Steven C. Smith noted). Then, in the later vignettes, “variations begin. Each scene is a separate variation. Finally, the waltz theme is heard bleakly in the high registers of the violins.”

For Herrmann’s opera pastiche—“
Kane
’s supreme musical sequence,” in Smith’s words—Welles knew exactly what he wanted. Susan’s character “sings as [the] curtain goes up in the first act,” he wrote to Herrmann, “and I believe there is no opera of importance where soprano leads with chin like this. Therefore suggest it be original . . . by you—parody on typical Mary Garden vehicle.” He suggested that Herrmann model his pastiche on Mussorgsky’s nineteenth-century opera
Salammbô
,
⁵⁷
“which gives us phony production scene of ancient Rome and Carthage, and Susie can dress like grand opera neoclassic courtesan. . . . Here is a chance for you to do something witty and amusing—and now is the time for you to do it. . . .

“I love you dearly,” Orson closed gratefully.

Almost all the music would be composed and recorded before the filming, then deployed as “an enormous playback,” in Herrmann’s words. The entire “score, like the film, works like a jigsaw,” Herrmann said, with all the pieces whirling around in Orson’s head.

Despite RKO’s roster of exceptional actresses, production head George Schaefer approved Orson’s choices of Ruth Warrick and Dorothy Comingore, two leading ladies whose names would mean nothing to the American public. Despite the studio’s own small army of composers and musicians, Schaefer also said yes to Herrmann, as long as his salary came out of the picture’s budget. When it came to Orson’s creative choices, the studio president almost always said yes.

“Schaefer was a hero, an absolute hero,” Welles told Bogdanovich.

On June 14, the studio issued a preliminary budget estimate showing “a total picture cost of $1,081,798,” according to Robert L. Carringer—above the dangerous million mark. (As one budget department memo noted, the studio had already paid Mercury $55,000 for
Citizen Kane
, and had spent “about $100,000” on
Heart of Darkness
and
The Smiler with the Knife
—both figures in addition to the million-dollar cost projection.) The estimate plunged Welles and Herman Mankiewicz, now back on salary, into a final frenzy of pruning and polishing.

Whenever Orson made a significant change to the script, he and Mank had to rethink the jigsaw one more time to make the pieces fit, sorting out “what each narrator could report based on what only he or she could have known firsthand,” in Carringer’s words. “The time element is extremely difficult in a picture of this kind,” as Houseman later told Lundberg’s lawyers. “This is the hardest kind of picture to write.”
⁵⁸

Two heads were better than one, and Orson relied on Mankiewicz right up to the start of filming. “Revised pages were passed back and forth between the two,” wrote Richard Meryman, “Welles changing Herman, who changed Welles—‘often much better than mine,’ says Welles.”

“Without Mank it would have been a totally different picture,” Welles told Meryman. “It suits my self-esteem to think it might have been almost as good, but I could never have arrived at
Kane
as it was without Herman. . . .

“There is a quality in the film—much more than a vague perfume—that was Mank and that I treasured. It gave a kind of character to the movie, which I could never have thought of. It was a kind of controlled, cheerful virulence; we’re finally telling the truth about a great WASP institution. I personally liked Kane, but I went with that. And that probably gave the picture a certain tension, the fact that one of the authors hated Kane and one loved him. . . .

“My
Citizen Kane
would have been more concerned with the interior corruption of Kane. The script is most like me when the central figure on the screen is Kane. And it is most like Mankiewicz when he’s being talked about. And I’m not at all sure that the best part isn’t when they’re talking about Kane. Don’t misunderstand me! I’m not saying I wrote all of one and Mank wrote the other. Mank wrote Kane stuff and I wrote . . . who knows . . .