Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (116 page)

What about
Citizen Kane
, Griffin asked: “A great boon to your career or a detriment?”

“It was a great piece of luck, because people liked it,” Orson replied mildly. “If they hadn’t liked it, it would have been bad, it’s as simple as that.” He was still uncomfortable discussing
Citizen Kane
, squirming over it even with Peter Bogdanovich, who returned to the subject relentlessly over the course of their many interviews. Welles resented the fact that some regarded it as his one real success in film, and he did not care to sing his own greatness.

“Which movie are you proudest of, the best one?” asked David Frost during his own televised interview with Welles.

“Oh, let’s change the subject,” Orson replied. “I don’t want to clam up and spoil the show. I’ll answer anything you want but don’t ask me ‘proudest’ or anything like that.”

Not that he was a perfectionist. Indeed, he enjoyed drawing attention to the imperfections. There was the scene after Kane is splashed by a passing wagon, when he and Susan Alexander “meet cute” for the first time. (“The close-up when I had the mud on my face. That’s a real phony movie moment.”) There was the scene when Kane rushes into Susan’s room after she has overdosed on pills. (“You see this ID bracelet I had on by accident because I had a girlfriend who made me wear it. Every time I think of that scene, I think of my reaching down and you see this awful love charm—nothing at all to do with Kane.”) Then there was Rosebud itself, which he usually dismissed as “corny,” and the “unjustified visual strain at times” in his overall camera direction, “which just came from the exuberance of discovering the medium.”

The success of
Citizen Kane
was a result of good luck, he always said with undue modesty—the good luck of having an RKO contract with George Schaefer at the helm of the studio; the good luck of working with people like Herman Mankiewicz, Bernard Herrmann, and Gregg Toland; the good luck of having the Mercury Theatre family of actors, all of them with one thing in common: trust in his creative spark. His luck had turned bad only later, after
Citizen Kane
was finished. Louella Parsons crashed an early screening. Offended by the picture’s allusions to William Randolph Hearst, the columnist rallied the Hearst press and radio organization against
Citizen Kane
; as a result, the film was banished from the Hearst newspapers’ pages and airwaves. Reacting to a veiled blackmail threat from Hearst officials, Hollywood studio chiefs, led by Louis B. Mayer, tried to buy the negative and destroy it. Under enormous pressure, Schaefer was forced to skip the bigger chains, releasing
Citizen Kane
to only a small number of theaters.

Orson would never forget the film’s dismal Chicago premiere, scheduled to coincide with his twenty-sixth birthday. He had hoped to impress Dolores Del Rio with a glorious homecoming, and dignitaries from Kenosha and the Todd School were invited, along with local newspaper people. But the public attendance was sparse, and Ashton Stevens was not allowed to write about the film, or even mention it. Instead, Stevens covered the touring
Twelfth Night
with Welles’s favorite actress, Helen Hayes, and, of all people, Maurice Evans as Malvolio.

The discerning local reviews could not cheer him up, even though C. J. Bulliet in the
Chicago Daily News
compared Orson’s film to the work of Shakespeare, and wrote presciently that “a century from now
Citizen Kane
will be stored away in the archives of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. There will be Orson Welles scholars in those days.”

Nor could Welles forget the Oscar ceremonies nine months later, when he hoped for vindication.
Citizen Kane
was nominated for nine Academy Awards, surely a record for a first-time director. Orson himself was nominated for Best Screenplay, as cowriter with Herman Mankiewicz, and also for Best Actor, Best Director, and (as its producer) Best Picture. But
Citizen Kane
took only one trophy that night, for Best Screenplay. Orson often recalled people booing whenever his name or the film’s title was mentioned from the stage—surely the exaggeration of an unhappy memory, as Welles was not in attendance that night; he was off filming in Brazil.
⁶⁰

“Hearst?” asked Griffin on the talk show. “Did he hurt your career, Orson?”

“Sure,” he replied quickly, “but I didn’t do him any good either.”

That is what Orson usually said, to his credit. Operatives paid by the Hearst organization dogged Welles on his travels throughout 1941, hoping to trap him in hotel rooms with underage women. One night, while attending the San Francisco premiere of
Citizen Kane
, Orson wound up in a Fairmont Hotel elevator with one other person: William Randolph Hearst. “He and my father had been chums,” Welles remembered, “so I introduced myself and asked him if he’d like to come to the opening of the picture. He didn’t answer. And as he was getting off at his floor, I said, ‘Charles Foster Kane would have
accepted.
’ No reply.”

Welles always insisted that Hearst himself had little or nothing to do with the fight to suppress
Citizen Kane.
There is scant proof that the publisher ever watched the picture. In a memoir cobbled together and published fifteen years after her death in 1975, Marion Davies said that neither Hearst nor she had seen it.

Davies was Hearst’s paramour for two decades, until his death in 1951. None other than Welles himself wrote a glowing introduction to her posthumous memoir. Orson said more than once that the one thing he felt guilty about was that anyone conflated Susan Alexander with the charming and talented Davies, who was exactly the kind of free-spirited comedienne he liked onscreen. Welles felt he’d let Mankiewicz allude too closely to Davies in the character of Susan Alexander, giving her Davies’s penchant for jigsaw puzzles—a hobby that was unknown to Welles.

On the record, Welles never once responded to the provocative rumor that “Rosebud” had a secret meaning—that it was Hearst’s private nickname for Davies’s genitalia. This assertion first gained prominence with the publication of the second edition of Kenneth Anger’s gossipy screen history,
Hollywood Babylon
, in 1975. (It was not mentioned in the first edition in 1965.) Gore Vidal later picked up this factoid and proclaimed it valid, claiming that either Mankiewicz or Charles Lederer, Davies’s nephew—who was supposedly whispering in the ear of Mank or Orson or both during the writing of
Citizen Kane
—knew of the nickname, and suggested including it in the film to humiliate or intimidate Hearst.

Welles may have disputed this privately, but it would have horrified him to make even the slightest public reference to this most preposterous explanation for Rosebud. In all his recorded conversations and interviews, whether his words were being taped surreptitiously or not, he made few ungentlemanly references to the anatomy of women. Many otherwise intelligent people believe the gossip (“It links genesis with our genitalia,” Peter Conrad wrote), but as David Thomson wrote of the notion, “How can fact keep up with such Velcro stories?”

After a few minutes spent reflecting on
Citizen Kane
, though, Welles told Griffin, “Let’s change pictures.” The host switched to a still from
The Stranger
, then a clip from the “cuckoo clock” scene with Joseph Cotten from
The Third Man
, which elicited a smile and a few proud remarks from Welles. Directed by Carol Reed,
The Third Man
was a fond highlight of his prolific and checkered acting career, independent of directing. The segment ended fittingly with a still from
Chimes at Midnight
, his Shakespearean masterwork, which Leaming praised as “
Citizen Kane
forty times over.” Wasn’t
Chimes at Midnight
more successful overseas than in the United States? Griffin asked politely. “It was hardly seen in America. It was a huge hit in Europe,” Welles pointed out.

After the taping, Jim Steinmeyer shook Orson’s hand backstage, congratulating him on his well-performed card trick. Welles invited the young magician to join him for dinner at Ma Maison with Barbara Leaming and Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, a Sicilian aristocrat who for twenty years had assisted Orson with producing his disparate projects. Steinmeyer had to say no, having promised his friend, the stooge, a meal at a humbler eatery.

“He was in a fantastic mood,” Steinmeyer recalled of the last time he saw Welles. “He had had the time of his life. He was very happy about the book and the show.”

Merv Griffin walked Welles to the door, where chauffeur Freddie Gillette waited.

The talk show host thanked him with unusual gravity. One biography of Griffin claims that Orson, sensing his friend’s concern, made this final comment before parting: “I think what gives dignity and tragedy, as well as meaning and beauty, to life is the fact that we all die. It is one of the great gifts of God, if you happen to believe in Him, that we are going to die. It would be terrible if we weren’t.” Welles did utter similar thoughts in interviews, but this anecdote, like the story of the seventeen hot dogs at Pink’s, is too good to be true.

Around 10
P
.
M
., after their celebratory dinner, Orson was chauffeured back to his Hollywood hills home, where he plunged into a round of telephone calls, including a long conversation with Roger Hill. Their friendship stayed strong. The Hills vacationed wherever Orson camped out over the years, visiting all his homes, solicitous to his wives and children. Skipper Hill was persuaded into various film projects, including an unfinished 1970 project of Welles’s called “The Deep,” based on a novel by Charles Williams, which involved his heavy participation and called on his love of boating. Tape-recording their talks was nothing new: Orson had created a mock talk-show set in his Arizona living room in the early 1970s, and filmed long reminiscing interviews with Roger and Hortense Hill on the pretext that it might be a pilot episode.

Tonight Orson told Skipper he had just returned from dinner at the “company cafeteria,” as he called Ma Maison. “It’s been a long day and I’m beat,” Welles admitted. Hill told Orson he did sound weary. “I am,” Orson agreed, “but will admit it to no one but you. My God, Roger, I look as drained as I feel.”

His prize pupil was in a wistful mood, Hill later told his grandson Todd Tarbox. This last phone call between the lifelong friends was not tape-recorded, but Tarbox meticulously reconstructed it over the following days, interviewing his grandfather, and later publishing the conversation as part of his 2013 book
Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts.

“How young I once was,” Welles mused to Hill that night, echoing words he had spoken during his interview segment on
The Merv Griffin Show.
“Today I am feeling disastrously old. The mind boggles at the thought that you have always been twenty years my senior. But then, in the best sense, you will always be younger than I was when I first checked into Clover Hall. But neither of us can deny that we both suffer the curse of excessive years.

“De Gaulle likened old age to a shipwreck. Isn’t that wonderful? He’s so right. We can, in our declining years, either sink slowly, clutching to hope and fighting like hell to hold on, or we can sink swiftly in panic and despair.”

Orson still dreamed of finishing new work, and his boyhood mentor wished the same. “I would like to live long enough to see
The Other Side of the Wind
and
The Magic Show
completed,” Hill replied. “I fear I’m too old to ever see your
Lear
and
Cradle.
But I’ll have no regrets if I don’t live to see any more of your pictures because I’ve experienced so very much of your work.” Hill reminded Orson of the many highlights: the Todd School plays, the Federal Theatre and Mercury productions in New York, the radio shows and films. His only regret, Hill said, was having missed
Around the World in Eighty Days
, the gigantic stage musical—Welles’s “personal favorite among all his stage productions, inspired by the films of Georges Méliès,” in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum—which drew mixed reviews during its 1946 Broadway run and then closed after seventy-five performances, leaving Welles with years of debt.

“I have the [LP] to your show somewhere,” Hill said.

“You’re one of the few,” Welles responded humorously.

“Many of my projects have foundered for the lack of financial resources,” Welles went on. “In the mid-fifties, I began financing and shooting [a film of]
Don Quixote.
Coupled with having to scurry for financing, it wasn’t long before a gaggle of howling critics began demanding to know when it would be finished. Novelists and biographers aren’t asked every other day, ‘When are you going to finish your book?’ As you know better than anyone, Quixote and Sancho Panza took a grip on my imagination in my youth. Over the years, I kept changing the movie and throwing the pieces away. You remember, I came close to completing the film, with Quixote journeying to the moon, at about the time astronauts actually accomplished the feat. That spoiled the movie and I threw away ten reels.”

“What’s the focus now?” asked Hill.

“The film now centers on the pollution and corruption of old Spain and hope for a new Spain. It’s developed into a very personal essay, which I’m renaming ‘When Are You Going to Finish
Don Quixote
’?”

“What a wonderfully comic and bittersweet designation,” said Hill.

“I should do a similar renaming of ‘The Other Side of the Wind,’” said Welles, referring to his ambitious film about filmmaking that he had shot between 1970 and 1976, but had been unable to complete because of financial and legal complications.

The two men discussed the differences between performing before a live audience and a camera lens, with Welles comparing James Cagney (“a commanding screen presence”) with the great Neapolitan actor Eduardo De Filippo, who was spellbinding onstage but made “many films, without distinction.” They talked a little about Joseph Cotten’s memoir in progress, which Welles had been reading: “gentle, witty, and self-effacing,” Orson said, “just like Jo.”