The Citzen Kane Book Read online

  By the time Citizen Kane got into Warners’ theatres, the picture had acquired such an odd reputation that people seemed to distrust it, and it didn’t do very well. It was subsequently withdrawn from circulation, perhaps because of the vicissitudes of R.K.O., and until the late fifties, when it was reissued and began to play in the art houses and to attract a new audience, it was seen only in pirated versions in 16 mm. Even after Mayer had succeeded in destroying the picture commercially, he went on planning vengeance on Schaefer for refusing his offer. Stockholders in R.K.O. began to hear that the company wasn’t prospering because Schaefer was anti-Semitic and was therefore having trouble getting proper distribution for R.K.O. pictures. Schaefer says that Mayer wanted to get control of R.K.O. and that the rumor was created to drive down the price of the stock—that Mayer hoped to scare out Floyd Odlum, a major stockholder, and buy his shares. Instead, Odlum, who had opposed Nelson Rockefeller’s choice of Schaefer to run the company, bought enough of Sarnoff’s stock to have a controlling interest, and by mid-1942 Schaefer was finished at R.K.O. Two weeks after he left, Welles’s unit was evicted from its offices on the lot and given a few hours to move out, and the R.K.O. employees who had worked with Welles were punished with degrading assignments on B pictures. Mayer’s friendship with Hearst was not ruffled. A few years later, when Mayer left his wife of forty years, he rented Marion Davies’s Beverly Hills mansion. Eventually, he was one of Hearst’s honorary pallbearers. Citizen Kanedidn’t actually lose money, but in Hollywood bookkeeping it wasn’t a big enough moneymaker to balance the scandal.

  Three

  WELLES WAS RECENTLY quoted as saying, “Theatre is a collective experience; cinema is the work of one single person.” This is an extraordinary remark from the man who brought his own Mercury Theatre players to Hollywood (fifteen of them appeared in Citizen Kane), and also the Mercury coproducer John Houseman, the Mercury composer Bernard Herrmann, and various assistants, such as Richard Wilson, William Alland, and Richard Barr. He not only brought his whole supportive group—his family, he called them then—but found people in Hollywood, such as the cinematographer Gregg Toland, to contribute their knowledge and gifts to Citizen Kane. Orson Welles has done some marvelous things in his later movies—some great things—and there is more depth in the somewhat botched The Magnificent Ambersons, of 1942 (which also used many of the Mercury players), than in Citizen Kane, but his principal career in the movies has been in adaptation, as it was earlier on the stage. He has never again worked on a subject with the immediacy and impact of Kane. His later films—even those he has so painfully struggled to finance out of his earnings as an actor—haven’t been conceived in terms of daring modern subjects that excite us, as the very idea of Kane excited us. This particular kind of journalist’s sense of what would be a scandal as well as a great subject, and the ability to write it, belonged not to Welles but to his now almost forgotten associate Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the script, and who inadvertently destroyed the picture’s chances. There is a theme that is submerged in much of Citizen Kane but that comes to the surface now and then, and it’s the linking life story of Hearst and of Mankiewicz and of Welles—the story of how brilliantly gifted men who seem to have everything it takes to do what they want to do are defeated. It’s the story of how heroes become comedians and con artists.

  The Hearst papers ignored Welles—Hearst may have considered this a fit punishment for an actor—though they attacked him indirectly with sneak attacks on those associated with him, and Hearst would frequently activate his secular arm, the American Legion, against him. But the Hearst papers worked Mankiewicz over in headlines; they persecuted him so long that he finally appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union for help. There was some primitive justice in this. Hearst had never met Welles, and, besides, Welles was a kid, a twenty-five-year-old prodigy (whose daughter Marion Davies’s nephew was bringing up)—hardly the sort of person one held responsible. But Mankiewicz was a friend of both Marion Davies and Hearst, and had been a frequent guest at her beach house and at San Simeon. There, in the great baronial banquet hall, Hearst liked to seat Mankiewicz on his left, so that Mankiewicz, with all his worldliness and wit (the Central Park West Voltaire, Ben Hecht had called him a few years earlier), could entertain the guest of honor and Hearst wouldn’t miss any of it. Mankiewicz betrayed their hospitality, even though he liked them both. They must have presented an irresistible target. And so Hearst, they yellow-press lord who had trained Mankiewicz’s generation of reporters to betray anyone for a story, became at last the victim of his own style of journalism.

  Four

  IN THE FIRST ACADEMY Award ceremony, for 1927-28, Warner Brothers, which had just produced The Jazz Singer, was honored for “Marking and Epoch in Motion Picture History.” If the first decade of talkies—roughly, the thirties—has never been rivaled in wit and exuberance, this is very largely because there was already in Hollywood in the late silent period a nucleus of the best American writers, and they either lured their friends West or were joined by them. Unlike the novelists who were drawn to Hollywood later, most of the best Hollywood writers of the thirties had a shared background; they had been reporters and critics, and they knew each other from their early days on newspapers and magazines.

  In his autobiography, Ben Hecht tells of being broke in New York—it was probably the winter of 1926—and of getting a telegram from Herman Mankiewicz in Hollywood:

  WILL YOU ACCEPT THREE HUNDRED PER WEEK TO WORK FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES? ALL EXPENSES PAID. THE THREE HUNDRED IS PEANUTS. MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. DON'T LET THIS GET AROUND.

  A newspaper photograph shows Mankiewicz greeting Hecht, “noted author, dramatist, and former newspaperman,” upon his arrival. After Hecht had begun work at Paramount, he discovered that the studio chief, B. P. Schulberg—who at that time considered writers a waste of money—had been persuaded to hire him by a gambler’s ploy: Mankiewicz had offered to tear up his own two-year contract if Hecht failed to write a successful movie. Hecht, that phenomenal fast hack who was to become one of the most prolific of all motion-picture writers (and one of the most frivolously cynical about the results), worked for a week and turned out the script that became Josef von Sternberg’s great hit Underworld. That script brought Hecht the first Academy Award for an original story, and a few years later he initiated the practice of using Oscars as doorstops. The studio heads knew what they had in Hecht as soon as they read the script, and they showed their gratitude. Hecht has recorded:

  I was given a ten-thousand-dollar check as a bonus for the week’s work, a check which my sponsor Mankiewicz snatched out of my hand as I was bowing my thanks.

  “You’ll have it back in a week,” Manky said. “I just want it for a few days to get me out of a little hole.”

  He gambled valiantly, tossing a coin in the air with Eddie Cantor and calling heads or tails for a thousand dollars. He lost constantly. He tried to get himself secretly insured behind his good wife Sara’s back, planning to hock the policy and thus meet his obligation. This plan collapsed when the insurance-company doctor refused to accept him as a risk.

  I finally solved the situation by taking Manky into the Front Office and informing the studio bosses of our joint dilemma. I asked that my talented friend be given a five-hundred-a-week raise. The studio could then deduct this raise from his salary….

  I left … with another full bonus check in my hand; and Manky, with his new raise, became the highest paid writer for Paramount Pictures, Inc.

  The bait that brought the writers in was money, but those writers who, like Mankiewicz, helped set the traps had their own reason: conviviality. Mankiewicz’s small joke “Don’t let this get around” came from a man who lived for talk, a man who saw moviemaking as too crazy, too profitable, and too easy not to share with one’s friends. By the early thirties, the writers who lived in Hollywood or commuted there included not only Mankiewicz and Hecht and Charles MacArt
hur but George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and Nathanael West and his brother-in-law S. J. Perelman, and Preston Sturges, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Kober, Alice Duer Miller, John O’Hara, Donald Ogden Stewart, Samson Raphaelson (the New York Timesreporter who wrote the play The Jazz Singer), Gene Fowler, and Nunnally Johnson, and such already famous playwrights as Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, and Sidney Howard. Scott Fitzgerald had already been there for his first stretch, in 1927, along with Edwin Justus Mayer, and by 1932 William Faulkner began coming and going, and from time to time Ring Lardner and Moss Hart would turn up. In earlier periods, American writers made a living on newspapers and magazines; in the forties and fifties, they went into the academies (or, once they got to college, never left). But in the late twenties and the thirties they went to Hollywood. And though, apparently, they one and all experienced it as prostitution of their talents—joyous prostitution in some cases—and though more than one fell in love with movies and thus suffered not only from personal frustration but from the corruption of the great, still new art, they nonetheless as a group were responsible for that sustained feat of careless magic we call “thirties comedy.” Citizen Kane was, I think, its culmination.

  Five

  HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ, born in New York City in 1897, was the first son of a professor of education, who then took a teaching position in Wilkes-Barre, where his second son, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was born in 1909, and where the boys and a sister grew up. Herman Mankiewicz graduated from Columbia in 1916, and after a period as managing editor of the American Jewish Chronicle he became a flying cadet with the United States Army in 1917 and, in 1918, a private first class with the Fifth Marines, 2nd Division, A.E.F. In 1919 and 1920, he was the director of the American Red Cross News Service in Paris, and after returning to this country to marry a great beauty, Miss Sara Aaronson, of Baltimore, he took his bride overseas with him while he worked as a foreign correspondent in Berlin from 1920 to 1922, doing political reporting for George Seldes on the Chicago Tribune. During that time, he also sent pieces on drama and books to the New York Times and Women’s Wear. Hired in Berlin by Isadora Duncan, he became her publicity man for her return to America. At home again, he took a job as a reporter for the New York World. He was a gifted, prodigious writer, who contributed to Vanity Fair, the Saturday Evening Post, and many other magazines, and, while still in his twenties, collaborated with Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, and others on a revue (Round the Town), and collaborated with George S. Kaufman on a play (The Good Fellow) and with Marc Connelly on another play (The Wild Man of Borneo). From 1923 to 1926, he was at the Times, backing up George S. Kaufman in the drama department; while he was there, he also became the first regular theatre critic for The New Yorker, writing weekly from June, 1925, until January, 1926, when Walter Wanger offered him a motion-picture contract and he left for Hollywood. The first picture he wrote was the Lon Chaney success The Road to Mandalay. In all, he worked on over seventy movies. He went on living and working in Los Angeles until his death, in 1953. He left three children: Don, born in Berlin in 1922, who is a novelist (Trial) and a writer for the movies (co-scenarist of I Want to Live!) and television (“Marcus Welby, M.D.”); Frank, born in New York in 1924, who became a lawyer, a journalist, a Peace Corps worker, and Robert Kennedy’s press assistant, and is now a columnist and television commentator; and Johanna, born in Los Angeles in 1937, who is a journalist (on Time) and is married to Peter Davis, the writer-producer of “The Selling of the Pentagon.”

  Told this way, Herman Mankiewicz’s career sounds exemplary, but these are just the bare bones of the truth. Even though it would be easy to document this official life of the apparently rising young man with photographs of Mankiewicz in his Berlin days dining with the Chancellor, Mankiewicz in his newspaperman days outside the Chicago Tribune with Jack Dempsey, and so on, it would be hard to explain his sudden, early aging and thickening of his features and the transparently cynical look on his face in later photographs.

  It was a lucky thing for Mankiewicz that he got the movie job when he did, because he would never have risen at the Times, and though he wrote regularly for The New Yorker (and remarked of those of the Algonquin group who didn’t, “The part-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits”), The New Yorker, despite his pleas for cash, was paying him partly in stock, which wasn’t worth much at the time. Mankiewicz drank heavily, and the drinking newspaperman was in the style of the World but not in the style of the Times. In October, 1925, he was almost fired. The drama critic then was Brooks Atkinson, and the drama editor was George S. Kaufman, with Mankiewicz second in line and Sam Zolotow third. Mankiewicz was sent to cover the performance of Gladys Wallis, who was the wife of the utilities magnate Samuel Insull, as Lady Teazle in School for Scandal. Mrs. Insull, who had abandoned her theatrical career over a quarter of a century before, was, according to biographers, bored with being a nobody when her husband was such a big somebody. She was fifty-six when she resumed her careers, as Lady Teazle, who is meant to be about eighteen. The play had opened in Chicago, where, perhaps astutely, she performed for charity (St. Luke’s Hospital), and the press had described her as brilliant. The night of the New York opening, Mankiewicz came back to the office drunk, started panning Mrs. Insull’s performance, and then fell asleep over his typewriter. As Zolotow recalls it, “Kaufman began to read the review, and it was so venomous he was outraged. That was the only time I ever saw Kaufman lose his temper.” The review wasn’t printed. The Times suffered the humiliation of running this item on October 23, 1925:

  A NEW SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

  The School for Scandal, with Mrs. Insull as Lady Teazle, was produced at the Little Theatre last night. It will be reviewed in tomorrow’s Times.

  Mankiewicz was in such bad shape that night that Kaufman told Zolotow to call Sara Mankiewicz and have her come get him and take him home. Mrs. Mankiewicz recalls that he still had his head down on his typewriter when she arrived, with a friend, to remove him. She says he took it for granted that he was fired, but nevertheless went to work promptly the next day. Zolotow recalls, “In the morning, Herman came down to the office and asked me to talk to Mr. Birchall, the assistant managing editor, on his behalf. Herman had brought a peace offering of a bottle of Scotch and I took it to Birchall. He had a red beard, and he tugged at it and he stabbed the air a few times with his index finger and said, ‘Herman is a bad boy, a bad boy.’ But he took the bottle and Herman kept his job until he got the movie offer.”

  The review—unsigned—that the Times printed on October 24, 1925, was a small masterpiece of tact:

  As Lady Teazle, Mrs. Insull is as pretty as she is diminutive, with a clear smile and dainty gestures. There is a charming grace in her bearing that makes for excellent deportment. But this Lady Teazle seems much too innocent, too thoroughly the country lass that Joseph terms her, to lend credit to her part in the play.

  Scattered through various books, and in the stories that are still told of him in Hollywood, are clues that begin to give one a picture of Herman Mankiewicz, a giant of a man who mongered his own talent, a man who got a head start in the race to “sell out” to Hollywood. The pay was fantastic. After a month in the movie business, Mankiewicz—though his Broadway shows had not been hits, and though this was in 1926, when movies were still silent—signed a year’s contract giving him $400 a week and a bonus of $5,000 for each story that was accepted, with an option for a second year at $500 a week and $7,500 per accepted story, the company guaranteeing to accept at least four stories per year. In other words, his base pay was $40,800 his first year and $56,000 his second; actually, he wrote so many stories that he made much more. By the end of 1927, he was head of Paramount’s scenario department, and in January, 1928, there was a newspaper item reporting that he was in New York “lining up a new set of newspaper feature writers and playwrights to bring to Hollywood,” and that “most of the newer writers on Paramount’s staff w
ho contributed the most successful stories of the past year were selected by ‘Mank.’” One reason that Herman Mankiewicz is so little known today is, ironically, that he went to Hollywood so early, before he had gained a big enough reputation in the literary and theatrical worlds. Screenwriters don’t make names for themselves; the most famous ones are the ones whose names were famous before they went to Hollywood, or who made names later in the theatre or from books, or who, like Preston Sturges, became directors.

  Mankiewicz and other New Yorker writers in the twenties and the early thirties were very close to the world of the theatre; many of them were writing plays, writing about theatre people, reviewing plays. It’s not surprising that within a few years the magazine’s most celebrated contributors were in Hollywood writing movies. Of the ten friends of the editor Harold Ross who were in the original prospectus as advisory editors, six became screenwriters. When Mankiewicz gave up the drama critic’s spot, in 1926, he was replaced by Charles Brackett, and when Brackett headed West, Robert Benchley filled it while commuting, and then followed. Dorothy Parker, the book reviewer Constant Reader, went West, too. Nunnally Johnson, who was to work on over a hundred movies, was a close friend of Harold Ross’s and had volunteered to do the movie reviewing in 1926 but had been told that that job was for “old ladies and fairies.” Others in the group didn’t agree: Benchley had written on movies for the old Life as early as 1920, and John O’Hara later took time out from screenwriting to become the movie critic for Newsweek—where he was to review Citizen Kane. The whole group were interested in the theatre and the movies, and they were fast, witty writers, used to regarding their work not as deathless prose but as stories written to order for the market, used also to the newspaperman’s pretense of putting a light value on what they did—the “Look, no hands” attitude. Thus, they were well prepared to become the scenarists and gag writers of the talkies.