Orson Welles, Vol I (89 page)

Another concomitant of Toland’s belief in realism was the notion of seamlessness, something on which Welles had placed considerable stress in his screenplay of
Heart
of Darkness
. Welles, said
Toland admiringly, ‘instinctively grasped a point which many other far more experienced directors and producers never comprehend; that the scenes and sequences should flow together so smoothly that the audience should not be conscious of the mechanics of picture-making.’ This, too, seems very nearly the opposite of what was achieved, though technically it is true that
Citizen Kane
is a film of a thousand transitions, all of them carefully worked out and then shot in the camera, with lights on individual dimmers to facilitate the smoothness that Toland so desired. Toland knew that everything they were attempting must be planned to the last detail. He and Welles, co-conspirators, set to with evangelical determination. ‘To put things with brutal frankness, these
things simply cannot be done by conventional means. But they were a basic part of
Citizen Kane
and they
had
to be done.’ In order to achieve the sharp focus that he believed was the essence of realism, he experimented with high-powered arc lights, coated lenses, super-speed (XX) film and low f= stops. He describes the shot of a man and a loving-cup which would, he said, normally be cut ‘between
close-up and cup. Yet we were able to keep the man’s face fully defined, while at the same time the loving-cup was in such sharp focus that the audience was able to read the inscription from it,’ he writes. ‘Also beyond this foreground were a group of men from 12 to 18 foot focal distance. These men were equally sharp.’ His excitement is palpable even now; it must have knocked Welles sideways.

He was preparing to demonstrate nothing less than the future of film in
Citizen Kane
. There was no universal agreement that his developments constituted progress. Within the cinematographic profession, there was a large body of practitioners who regarded the principles of ‘good photography’ as hard won and not to be easily traded for flashy sharpness: ‘that illusion of roundness which – fully
as important as depth of definition – is a necessity in conveying the illusion of three-dimensional reality in our two-dimensional pictures.’
²¹
There was concern, too, that so-called universal focus, whereby the whole screen was equally sharp in focus (the Holy Grail of Toland and like-minded cameramen), would confuse the eye, which would scarcely know where to look. These debates recall those
that raged around the introduction of stereophonic sound and, later, compact discs: warmth, naturalness, mellowness would all be banished. These, of course, were the very last things that Welles or Toland were interested in: sharpness, fluidity and contrast were their ideals. They gloried in their Brave New World. It was pan-focus this, and pan-focus that – a phrase which, Welles delightedly confessed
to
Bogdanovich, didn’t mean anything at all. ‘We called it pan-focus in some idiot interview – just for the fun of it.’
²²

Perry Ferguson was party to all Toland’s experimentation; they were of pressing concern to his department, as floors were cut up, sets built on parallels, muslin ceilings (to allow both light and sound to pass through them) installed. His particular problem was one of budget.
The scale conceived by Welles was one which the film could not afford; it became necessary to cheat many of the settings, particularly those at Xanadu, as Mankiewicz and Welles had named Kane’s castle (having first toyed with calling it Alhambra). This he proposed to do by borrowing many of the crucial architectural elements of the set from the RKO stores; other settings would simply have to
be filmed from cunning angles to conceal the fact that they were only partly there, the larger part of them shrouded in darkness created by velvet drapes. Ferguson, too, seems to have got into the swing of all this with great enthusiasm. Imagination and technical cunning were taking the place of sheer expenditure.

As the three collaborators thrilled each other with their daring, work on the
script continued, Welles constantly feeding back developments in pre-production to Mankiewicz, who did his best to absorb them. Welles had by now cast all the leading roles, as much as possible from his usual pool, but slightly differently in composition to the
Heart of Darkness
cast: the
Five Kings
contingent had thinned out (Emery, Readick and Barrier had no parts in
Citizen Kane
), the old pals,
Sherman and Carter had gone. Joe Cotten, who had been triumphantly playing in
Philadelphia Story
with Katharine Hepburn in New York (she had seen him in
Too Much Johnson
and obviously not held it against him) was cast in the crucial role of Jedediah Leland. Welles remained desperately eager that the actors should be unknown faces in Hollywood. Only Coulouris, somehow typically, had let his celluloid
virginity go, but in heavy disguise. Agnes Moorhead came to Hollywood to play Kane’s mother after having worked with Welles for some years on radio: she had been Margot Lane to his Lamont Cranston, the Shadow’s shadow. The two newcomers to the group were Ruth Warrick and Dorothy Comingore as Kane’s two wives. Warrick, a radio singer and off-Broadway actress (and former Miss Jubilesta) was to
play Kane’s first wife, Emily: ‘I’m not looking for an actress who can play a lady,’ he said to her. ‘I want an actress who
is
a lady.’ Comingore he cast as Susan Alexander Kane (‘probably the most important character in the picture’, he told her, alarmingly). He was looking for someone
who could convincingly be ‘frightened, whining, pathetic’. Stepping outside his regular troupe, he obviously
sought to cast to type.

With Comingore, particularly, he detected something within her own personality that he knew would be invaluable to Susan Alexander. An old girlfriend of Chaplin’s, her career had failed to take off despite his attempts to advance it. She had even changed her name; Welles insisted that she change it back. To an extent he reproduced in his behaviour to her Kane’s behaviour
to Susan; but to a large degree he sought to root all of the characters in the specific actors he had cast, just as he had meant to in
Heart of Darkness
. In the case of his old team, the parts had been precisely tailored to them: to some aspects of them that Welles perceived. Now, in mid-June, he held unofficial rehearsals at Mankiewicz’s house (to avoid paying full salaries as required by Equity)
with any of the actors who were available; more modifications took place. The Revised Final Draft was delivered on 24 June. By 7 July, the accounts department gave their verdict: the script as it stood would cost $737,740, fully 50 per cent over the agreed figure. Schaefer none the less gave the film the go-ahead. His anxieties of the previous year had given way to a much more bullish mood; thanks
to 1939’s royal flush of successes, RKO finally freed itself from official receivership in January 1940. ‘The new RKO’ was much publicised under Schaefer’s headline: ‘Quality Pictures at a Premium Price’. To confirm the new mood, he spent $390,000 in seven days.
Citizen Kane
would be the living proof of RKO’s new-found status.

The script had further evolutions to undergo, each resulting in
greater concision. The Second Revised Final Draft dropped an attempted assassination sequence. In this draft the celebrated breakfast scene between Kane and Emily, covering in one brief montage the whole history of their marriage, was introduced. This was Welles’s idea, stolen, as he was always delighted to admit, from Thornton Wilder’s then famous experimental one-act play
The Long Christmas
Dinner
written seven years earlier, in which ninety years of a family’s life, over several generations, are played around the same unchanging seasonal table. Under financial pressure, the scene in which Susan plays with a jigsaw puzzle had to be moved from a dining-room set, which could not be afforded, to the Great Hall, which was already being used for several other scenes; it is the location
which, as Carringer says, makes the scene. In the Third (and Final) Revised Final script the newspaper party and opera review scenes which had both been broken up by other scenes, were, for
financial reasons, both played straight through. This is the script that was filmed; even then, of course, changes were made. Robert Carringer’s detailed exposition of the development of the screenplay is an
entirely convincing account of the nature of creation in a collaborative art: there was no master script, neither Welles’s nor Mankiewicz’s nor indeed Toland’s – no pure concept, unswervingly followed and masterfully realised. Under legal and financial and creative pressure it had changed and changed and changed. All was compromise: adaptation, alteration, condensation; trimming, sharpening, honing.
In this, as in all of the lively arts, the readiness is all: the ability to accommodate new inspiration and to shed what no longer works, to recognise solutions wherever they come from, to be willing shamelessly to beg, borrow or steal whatever is useful to you. At this stage of his life, Welles was supremely responsive to all this, a creative opportunist without peer.

Now, approaching countdown,
he was about to put the script (and his own abilities) to the proof. Toland was not available to shoot the tests; instead another distinguished cameraman, Russell Metty (later to shoot
A Touch of Evil
), was responsible for them. Make-up was a crucial consideration. Welles had come across Maurice Seiderman literally sweeping the cut hair off the floor of RKO’s make-up department. The twenty-five-year-old
Russian immigrant, who had worked on
Gunga Din
and
Swiss Family Robinson
, had no official job in the department; he was not a union member, never became one and is thus uncredited on the film. Welles noticed him experimenting with latex and, passionately interested as he was and always had been in make-up, discussed its possibilities. He became convinced that Seiderman was the man for the job.
Once again, he added someone to his team who was bursting with ideas and theories and would go to any lengths to explore them; someone, too, who would respond to
his
ideas and theories, rather than fob him off with routine applications. Welles was convinced, for example, that film stars represented types rather than detailed individuals; it would therefore be necessary for his actors to learn
to concentrate and simplify their personas – particularly, their appearances. Accordingly, he had Seiderman sculpt make-up portraits for them that, in Frank Brady’s phrase, ‘followed Hollywood genre types’.

His own make-up was based on photographs of Samuel Insull, the Chicago magnate, and, inevitably, Hearst. (Seiderman made a cast of Welles’s head: looking like a young pharaoh, large-eyed,
large-eared, bald and boyishly imperious, it is an essence of his young self.) Ageing from twenty-five to seventy on camera presents huge
challenges; in this case, the actor was as heavily made up young as he was old. He was certain that Kane should be beautiful as a young man, and equally certain that he would need a great deal of help in order to fool anyone into believing that he was. He had,
for a start, a false nose. Like Laurence Olivier, he had always found the organ with which he was born disappointing, and rarely appeared in character without augmenting it in one way or another. For Kane it was nobly aquiline. Then, conscious of his jowls despite the fierce diet (supplemented by Benzedrine) that he had been following, he had Seidermann apply fish skin behind his ears to pull back
his facial flesh. The effect is of cheeks being permanently sucked in, but it achieves the desired result: he looks very dashing. ‘Norman Mailer wrote that when I was young, I was the most beautiful young man anyone had ever seen,’
²³
he told Bogdanovich. ‘Yes! Made up for
Citizen Kane
! And only for five days!’ The ageing process called for skull caps upon skull caps, a network of rubber bands
to create the flexibility of flesh, artificial jowls on top of the natural ones, contact lenses (just invented) on contact lenses. Technically, Seiderman, like Toland, was passionately for realism; given the materials available to him, he succeeds to a striking degree. But his real concern was to create a bridge between the actor and his character.

To this end, he had William Alland read aloud
from Ben Hecht’s curious, uncharacteristic
The Kingdom of Evil – A Continuation of the Journal of Fantasius Mallare
, so that Welles might imaginatively connect with what his face was becoming. Pauline Kael strongly suggests that the high bald dome of the later Kane, one of the most memorable of the film’s images, may have been fashioned after Peter Lorre’s in Karl Freund’s film,
Mad Love
, on which
the second cameraman was Gregg Toland; more to the point, as with all the ingredients of
Citizen Kane
, is the expressive purpose. The egg-head of Kane’s lonely old age renders him strangely frustrated, an unexploded bomb of a man, endowed with an archaic quality, out of time and out of place. He seems (as he roams the vast echoing halls of his palace) a Fairy Tale King inconsolably mourning. The
spirit of Fantasius Mallare lives.

Of great value in refining the make-ups were the screen tests. Ruth Warrick’s was played opposite Welles: his debut on film. He could neither remember the lines nor play the scene. It was all right, though; he had the part.

T
HE OFFICIAL
starting date for the movie was August 1st. Perry Ferguson shrewdly suggested that since they were attempting so many new things, it might be a good idea to shoot the first few scenes under the guise of screen tests. Welles can only have been relieved by the suggestion; RKO were planning to make a great to-do about the first day of shooting. So,
three days earlier, the crew and Welles, with a couple of actors piled into a screening room on the RKO lot, and attempted to shoot the scene immediately following the
NEWS ON THE MARCH
newsreel: the crucial scene in which the editor sends Thompson out to discover the meaning of Rosebud. (Welles was always rather sniffy about Rosebud, attributing it and everything to do with it to Mankiewicz;
it is, in fact, an almost perfect McGuffin in the classic definition of Hitchcock: something which greatly exercises the characters but is not crucial to the plot.)