The Citzen Kane Book Read online

  THE

  CITIZEN KANE

  BOOK

  Cast of characters: Orson Welles, Herman Mankiewicz, Joseph Cotten, Louella Parsons, Everett Shane, William Randolph Hearst, Robert Wise, Ben Hecht, Marion Davies, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart and hundreds more!

  THE

  CITIZEN KANE

  BOOK

  “A singular contribution to an interpretation of the Thirties, to the literature of that time (as well as the films), to the whole world of newspapers and writers and to the Holly- wood of that period as well . . . The glory of Citizen Kane has got to be seen in the context of the time itself And really that is what Pauline Kael has done. She has set that film for us, enabling those who were not there to see it now through her eyes. Her . . . work has added a very great deal to the knowledge we have of what exactly was involved in the making of this masterpiece.”

  —Ralph Gleason, Rolling Stone

  “A richly detailed and analytical account of the film's conception and production and repercussions . . . Miss Kael gets at the reasons for the notoriety and the reality behind many of the legends.”

  —Gary Arnold, Washington Post

  Pauline Kael

  Raising Kane

  The Citizen Kane Book

  Also by Pauline Kael

  _______

  I LOST IT AT THE MOVIES

  KISS KISS BANG BANG

  GOING STEADY

  THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK

  DEEPER INTO MOVIES

  REELING

  WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN

  5001 NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES

  TAKING IT ALL IN

  STATE OF THE ART

  HOOKED

  MOVIE LOVE

  FOR KEEPS

  RAISING KANE, AND OTHER ESSAYS

  THE PAULINE KAEL READER

  THE AGE OF MOVIES (Library of America)

  THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK

  A Bantam Book

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown edition published October 1971

  Bantam edition published March 1974

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 1971 by Little, Brown

  The introduction by Pauline Kael “Raising Kane”appeared originally in The New Yorker; Copyright © 1971 by Pauline Kael.

  Frames from "Citizen Kane" copyright 1941, renewed © 1968 by RKO Radio Pictures.

  The notes on the shooting script were prepared by Gary Carey.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  _____

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trade- mark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the por- trayal of a bantam, is registered in the United States Patent Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  _____

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  IXX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  Pauline Kael

  Raising Kane

  The Citizen Kane Book

  One

  CITIZEN KANE IS PERHAPS the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher. A great deal in the movie that was conventional and almost banal in 1941 is so far in the past as to have been forgotten and become new. The Pop characterizations look modern, and rather better than they did at the time. New audiences may enjoy Orson Welles’s theatrical flamboyance even more than earlier generations did, because they’re so unfamiliar with the traditions it came out of. When Welles was young—he was twenty-five when the film opened—he used to be accused of “excessive showmanship,” but the same young audiences who now reject “theatre” respond innocently and wholeheartedly to the most unabashed tricks of theatre—and of early radio plays—in Citizen Kane. At some campus showings, they react so gullibly that when Kane makes a demagogic speech about “the underprivileged,” stray students will applaud enthusiastically, and a shout of “Right on!” may be heard. Though the political ironies are not clear to young audiences, and though young audiences don’t know much about the subject—William Randolph Hearst, the mast jingo journalist, being to them a stock villain, like Joe McCarthy; that is, a villain without the contours of his particular villainy—they nevertheless respond to the effrontery, the audacity, and the risks. Hearst’s career and his power provided a dangerous subject that stimulated and energized all those connected with the picture—they felt they were doing something instead of just working on one more cooked-up story that didn’t relate to anything that mattered. And to the particular kinds of people who shaped this enterprise the dangers involved made the subject irresistible.

  Citizen Kane, the film that, as Truffaut said, is “probably the one that has started the largest number of filmmakers on their careers,” was not an ordinary assignment. It is one of the few films ever made inside a major studio in the United States in freedom—not merely in freedom from interference but freedom from the routine methods of experienced directors. George J. Schaefer, who, with the help of Nelson Rockefeller, had become president of R.K.O. late in 1938, when it was struggling to avert bankruptcy, needed a miracle to save the company, and after the national uproar over Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds broadcast Rockefeller apparently thought that Welles—“the wonder boy”—might come up with one, and urged Schaefer to get him. But Welles, who was committed to the theatre and wasn’t especially enthusiastic about making movies, rejected the first offers; he held out until Schaefer offered him complete control over his productions. Then Welles brought out to Hollywood from New York his own production unit—the Mercury Theatre company, a group of actors and associates he could count on—and, because he was inexperienced in movies and was smart and had freedom, he was able to find in Hollywood people who had been waiting all their lives to try out new ideas. So a miracle did come about, thought it was not the kind of miracle R.K.O. needed.

  Kane does something so well, and with such spirit, that the fullness and completeness of it continue to satisfy us. The formal elements themselves produce elation; we are kept aware of how marvelously worked out the ideas are. It would be high-toned to call this method of keeping the audience aware “Brechtian,” and it would be wrong. It comes out of a different tradition—the same commercial-comedy tradition that Walter Kerr analyzed so beautifully in his review of the 1969 Broadway revival of The Front Page, the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, when he said, “A play was held to be something of a machine in those days…. It was a machine for surprising and delighting the audiences, regularly, logically, insanely, but accountably. A play was like a watch that laughed.” The mechanics of movies are rarely as entertaining as they are in Citizen Kane, as cleverly designed to be the kind of fun that keeps one alert and conscious of the enjoyment of the artifices themselves.

  Walter Kerr goes on to describe the second-act entrance prepared for Walter Burns, the scheming, ruthless mana
ging editor of The Front Page:

  He can’t just come on and declare himself…. He’s got to walk into a tough situation in order to be brutally nonchalant, which is what we think is funny about him. The machinery has not only given him and the play the right punctuation, the change of pace that refreshes even as it moves on. It has also covered him, kept him from being obvious while exploiting the one most obvious thing about him. You might say that the machinery has covered itself, perfectly squared itself. We are delighted to have the man on, we are delighted to have him on at this time, we are aware that it is sleight-of-hand that has got him on, and we are as delighted by the sleight-of-hand as by the man.

  Citizen Kane is made up of an astonishing number of such bits of technique, and of sequences built to make their points and get their laughs and hit climax just before a fast cut takes us to the next. It is practically a collection of blackout sketches, but blackout sketches arranged to comment on each other, and it was planned that way right in the shooting script.

  It is difficult to explain what makes any great work great, and particularly difficult with movies, and maybe more so with Citizen Kane than with other great movies, because it isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece. Those who try to account for its stature as a film by claiming it to be profound are simply dodging the problem—or maybe they don’t recognize that there is one. Like most of the films of the sound era that are called masterpieces, Citizen Kane has reached its audience gradually over the years rather than at the time of release. Yet, unlike the others, it is conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style (unlike, say, Rules of the Game or Rashomon or Man of Aran, which one does not think of in crowd-pleasing terms). Apparently, the easies thing for people to do when they recognize that something is a work of art is to trot out the proper schoolbook terms for works of art, and there are articles on Citizen Kane that call it a tragedy in fugal form and articles that explain that the hero of Citizen Kane is time—time being a proper sort of modern hero for an important picture. But to use the conventional schoolbook explanations for greatness, and pretend that it’s profound, is to miss what makes it such an American triumph—that it manages to create something aesthetically exciting and durable out of the playfulness of American muckraking satire. Kane is closer to comedy than to tragedy, though so overwrought in style as to be almost a Gothic comedy. What might possibly be considered tragic in it has such a Daddy Warbucks quality that if it’s tragic at all it’s comic-strip tragic. The mystery in Kane is largely fake, and the Gothic-thriller atmosphere and the Rosebud gimmickry (though fun) are such obvious penny-dreadful popular theatrics that they’re not so very different from the fake mysteries that Hearst’s American Weekly used to whip up—the haunted castles and the curses fulfilled. Citizen Kane is a “popular” masterpiece—not in terms of actual popularity but in terms of its conceptions and the way it gets its laughs and makes its points. Possibly it was too complexly told to be one of the greatest commercials successes, but we can’t really tell whether it might have become even a modest success, because it didn’t get a fair chance.

  Two

  ORSON WELLES BROUGHT forth a miracle, but he couldn’t get by with it. Though Hearst made some direct attempts to interfere with the film, it wasn’t so much what he did that hurt the film commercially as what others feared he might do, to them and to the movie industry. They knew he was contemplating action, so they did the picture in for him; it was as if they decided whom the king might want killed, and, eager to oblige, performed the murder without waiting to be asked. Before Kane opened, George J. Schaefer was summoned to New York by Nicholas Schenck, the chairman of the board of Loew’s International, the M-G-M affiliate that controlled the distribution of M-G-M pictures. Schaefer had staked just about everything on Welles, and the picture looked like a winner, but now Schenck made Schaefer a cash offer from Louis B. Mayer, the head of production at M-G-M, of $842,000 if Schaefer would destroy the negative and all the prints. The picture had actually cost only $686,033; the offer handsomely included a fair amount for the post-production costs.

  Mayer’s motive may have been partly friendship and loyalty to Hearst, even though Hearst, who had formerly been associated with M-G-M, had, some years earlier, after a dispute with Irving Thalberg, taken his investment out of M-G-M and moved his star, Marion Davies, and his money to Warner Brothers. M-G-M had lost money on a string of costume clinkers starring Miss Davies (Beverly of Graustark, et al.), and had even lost money on some of her good pictures, but Mayer had got free publicity for M-G-M releases out of the connection with Hearst, and had also got what might be called deep personal satisfaction. In 1929, when Herbert Hoover invited the Mayers to the White House—they were the first “informal” guests after his inauguration—Hearst’s New York American gave the visit a full column. Mayer enjoyed fraternizing with Hearst and his eminent guests; photographs show Mayer with Hearst and Lindbergh, Mayer with Hearst and Winston Churchill, Mayer at lunch with Bernard Shaw and Marion Davies—but they never, of course, show Mayer with both Hearst and Miss Davies. Candid cameramen sometimes caught the two together, but Hearst, presumably out of respect for his wife, did not pose in groups that include Miss Davies. Despite the publicity showered on her in the Hearst papers, the forms were carefully observed. She quietly packed and left for her own house on the rare occasions when Mrs. Hearst, who lived in the East, was expected to be in residence at San Simeon. Kane’s infatuation for the singer Susan Alexander in the movie was thus a public flaunting of matters that Hearst was careful and considerate about. Because of this, Mayer’s longtime friendship for Hearst was probably a lesser factor than the fear that the Hearst press would reveal some sordid stories about the movie moguls and join in one of those recurrent crusades against movie immortality, like the one that had destroyed Fatty Arbuckle’s career. The movie industry was frightened of reprisals. (The movie industry is always frightened, and is always proudest of films that celebrate courage.) As one of the trade papers phrased it in those nervous weeks when no one knew whether the picture would be released, “the industry could ill afford to be made the object of counterattack by the Hearst newspapers.”

  There were rumors that Hearst was mounting a general campaign; his legal staff had seen the script, and Louella Parsons, the Hearst movie columnist, who had attended a screening of the film flanked by lawyers, was agitated and had swung into action. The whole industry, it was feared, would take the rap for R.K.O.’s indiscretion, and, according to the trade press at the time (and Schaefer confirms this report), Mayer was not putting up the $842,000 all by himself. It was a joint offer from the top movie magnates, who were combining for common protection. The offer was presented to Schaefer on the ground that it was in the best interests of everybody concerned—which was considered to be the entire, threatened industry—for Citizen Kane to be destroyed. Rather astonishingly, Schaefer refused. He didn’t confer with his board of directors, because, he says, he had good reason to think they would tell him to accept. He refused even though R.K.O., having few theatres of its own, was dependent on the other companies and he had been warned that the big theatre circuits—controlled by the men who wanted the picture destroyed—would refuse to show it.

  Schaefer knew the spot he was in. The premiere had been tentatively set for February 14th at the Radio City Music Hall—usually the showcase for big R.K.O. pictures, because R.K.O. was partly owned by the Rockefellers and Chase National Bank, who owned the Music Hall. The manager of the theatre had been enthusiastic about the picture. Then, suddenly, the Music Hall turned it down. Schaefer phoned Nelson Rockefeller to find out why, and, he says, “Rockefeller told me that Louella Parsons had warned him off it, that she had asked him, ‘How would you like to have theAmerican Weekly magazine section run a double-page spread on John D. Rockefeller?’ ” According to Schaefer, she had also called David Sarnoff, another large investor in R.K.O., and similarly threatened him. In mid-Februa
ry, with a minor contract dispute serving as pretext, the Hearst papers blasted R.K.O. and Schaefer in front-page stories; it was an unmistakable public warning. Schaefer was stranded; he had to scrounge for theatres, and, amid the general fear that Hearst might sue and would almost certainly remove advertising for any houses that showed Citizen Kane, he couldn’t get bookings. The solution was for R.K.O. to take the risks of any lawsuits, but when the company leased an independent theatre in Los Angeles and refurbished the Palace (then a vaudeville house), which R.K.O. owned, for the New York opening, and did the same for a theatre R.K.O. owned in Chicago, Schaefer had trouble launching and advertising campaign. (Schenck, not surprisingly, owned a piece of the biggest movie-advertising agency.) Even after the early rave reviews and the initial enthusiasm, Schaefer couldn’t get bookings except in the theatres that R.K.O. itself owned and in a few small art houses that were willing to take the risk. Eventually, in order to get the picture into theatres, Schaefer threatened to sue Warners’, Fox, Paramount, and Loew’s on a charge of conspiracy. (There was reason to believe the company heads had promised Hearst they wouldn’t show it in their theatres.) Warners’ (perhaps afraid of exposure and the troubles with their stockholders that might result from a lawsuit) gave in and booked the picture, and the others followed, halfheartedly—in some cases, theatres paid for the picture but didn’t play it.

  By then, just about everybody in the industry was scared, or mad, or tired of the whole thing, and though the feared general reprisals against the industry did not take place, R.K.O. was getting bruised. The Hearst papers banned publicity on R.K.O. pictures and dropped an announced serialization of the novel Kitty Foyle which had been timed for the release of the R.K.O. film version. Some R.K.O. films didn’t get reviewed and others got bad publicity. It was all petty harassment, of a kind that could be blamed on the overzealous Miss Parsons and other Hearst employees, but it was obviously sanctioned by Hearst, and it was steady enough to keep the industry uneasy.