Everyone has seen or is at least familiar with the great movie Citizen Kane DVD C5813 . But few know just how closely it is based on the life of William Randolph Hearst or the extent to which the ensuing controversy (for Hearst was still alive when the film was released in 1941), badly tarnished its young director Orson Welles.
Little remembered now but once one of the richest men in America, Hearst built a commercial empire founded on newspapers, radio and film. In the late 19th century, in an era long before television and the Internet, he was among the earliest titans of mass communication and entertainment, the media baron of his age, who used his holdings to wield political power and to shape public opinion.
Like a feudal lord presiding over his own kingdom, Hearst lived an outsized, fantasy-filled life in a palatial estate on a property in northern Californian half the size of Rhode Island. But he was a very old man when the young Orson Welles made Citizen Kane and by then his power had diminished.
Orson Welles was a born showman (like Hearst) with a taste for sensation who arrived in New York City in the late 1930s from small-town Wisconsin accompanied by his talent, a large ego and one very big idea: to revolutionize the New York theatre world by staging the great plays for the American masses. And so he did, presenting Macbeth in Harlem with a non-professional, all-black cast and Haitian backdrop financed with a grant from FDR’s administration. He did Julius Caesar (memorably depicted in the recent movie Me and Orson Welles), DVD M47915 but set it in Fascist Italy, the production of which is still regarded by many as the single most important ever done on the American stage. Time Magazine put him on its cover and called him, ”The brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years. Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit to his ambition.”
He was widely proclaimed “the boy genius,” an “enfant terrible,” for whom the New York theatre world was no longer enough. He became a popular and frequent presence on radio; he started his own show on CBS called Mercury Theatre on the Air, on which he staged, most famously, an adaptation of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. It terrified—terrified, quite literally—millions of listeners who thought the alien invasion depicted was a disaster unfolding as a real-time event. Welles feared this would end his career, but it did just the opposite. He became a household name—and Hollywood came calling, offering him unrestricted control to do what he wanted, though he had never made a movie—and all at the age of twenty-three.
In Hollywood, Welles had some very high-brow concepts for various film projects, but abandoned them as unfeasible. His friend and sometime drinking buddy Herman J. Mankiewicz gave him the idea for Citizen Kane. It was a perfect fit—a uniquely American epic about a giant of a man who starts out as an altruistic young social reformer but ends as an isolated old reactionary, bringing ruin to himself and all around him. It would be the classic stuff of tragedy.
Welles must have thought he could get away with it for we know that he ran the idea by his lawyers. Perhaps his experience in New York City suggested to him that in upsetting the apple cart—even one belonging to Hearst—he could do no wrong; that any controversy stemming from the movie’s blatant biographical content could only be beneficial. And if Hearst sued, that would be great, as the film would be news everywhere.
But how wrong he was …
Hearst caught wind of Citizen Kane almost right away and he was absolutely furious: and not just because it striped bare his own life, much as he had done in his tabloid newspapers to countless others (like Fatty Arbuckle, in the 1920s), but most especially because it presented an unflattering portrait of his long-time lover, the actress Marion Davies (depicted in Citizen Kane as a talentless, alcoholic “floozy”) with whom the married Hearst lived quite openly on his San Simeon estate.
Though Hearst was a diminished figure by 1940, made nearly bankrupt by the extravagant sums of money he spent throughout the Great Depression, he still had clout—and lots of it inHollywood. Forget about lawsuits—what Hearst did in response was threaten the studios (and not just RKO, Welles’ backer of the film, but in effect all of Hollywood) with a war of mass sensationalism by releasing to the public, through his gossipy radio shows and the newspaper columnists who worked for him, every secret in Hollywood about its most lucrative assets: the lily-white actors and actresses populating its films. One of his minions, Louella Parsons, is quoted as saying to RKO’s George Schaefer: “Mr. Hearst has authorized me to tell you that if you boys want private lives, he’ll give you private lives.”
Hearst even threatened a thinly-disguised anti-Semitic campaign in his papers decrying the presence of “swarthy foreigners” in Hollywood—an unmistakable attack upon Jewish studio heads and recent émigrés from Hitler’s Europe. He then tried to destroy the film by buying the rights to it and burning every print. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, Hollywood’s biggest studio, assembled his fellow studio chiefs and in their name offered RKO $800,000 for the negative to the film with the express purpose of doing what Hearst wanted: destroying Citizen Kane. RKO responded by sending a print of the film toNew York where the heads of the corporations that owned theHollywood studios would view the film and decide on its future. Orson Welles was there; before the assembled Wall Street titans he made a speech about the need to fight tyranny at loose in the world and the uniquely American value of free speech in doing so.
By all accounts Welles’ heights of oratory made for stirring stuff; but for whatever reason, perhaps a public fight over the Bill of Rights (Welles had threatened his own lawsuit); or perhaps Hearst’s imminent bankruptcy, the corporate heads stood by Citizen Kane. Well, somewhat …. Though the film opened for a short engagement in New York City and even garnered nine Oscar nominations from a sympathetic film community in Hollywood, Hearst was not done with him. His papers threatened the theatre chains: if you run Citizen Kane we will not take advertising for any of your other movies. As a consequence there was a blackout of Welles’ movie; it was little seen outside a few big cities and as a consequence lost lots of money. Finally, RKO retired Citizen Kane to its vaults where it remained for fifteen years.
And that was not all. Welles’ affair with the married actress Dolores Del Rio was made public knowledge; and a whisper campaign initiated that questioned his loyalty to the United States. Reporters started following him everywhere; he was accused of being a communist. The FBI opened a file on him, concluding that he was a threat to the nation’s internal security. RKO yanked control away from him on his follow-up movie, The Magnificent Ambersons, gave it to someone else to finish, and then released it in a badly truncated version.
It is not the least of ironies that Welles success had peaked by the age of twenty-five. Though he was to go on to make some great, if little appreciated, movies in later years, someone who was once as well known as President Roosevelt was now known as America’s youngest has-been. “Alls well that ends Welles,” people would joke; and “Showmanship instead of Genius,” RKO would make their slogan in the year after dumping him. In later years, he became something of a vagabond patching together low budget films like The Trial and Mr. Arkadin based on a salary of acting jobs and TV commercials around the world. He also left behind many unfinished projects. He even once borrowed $250,000 from Marion Davies nephew, the money from whom came from her estate.
While Citizen Kane didn’t come back into public view until the middle of the 1950s; by the early 1960s it started to appear on lists of the greatest movies of all time; and it is still widely regarded as such today. By most accounts, William Randolph Hearst died thinking he had killed the movie. But in the end, the images that Welles and his collaborators created in Citizen Kane are now the images most of us think of, if we think of Hearst at all.
This incredible story is marvelously told in two DVDs: the HBO movie RKO 281 DVD R6265, with Liev Schreiber (as Welles) and John Malkovich (as Herman J. Mankiewicz); as well as the superb PBS documentary, The Battle Over Citizen Kane DVD 791.43 B335, from which much of the above information comes.
Posted by Steven, Movie Librarian
Start the New Year with a great read! Half-blood Blues (F E242h) by Canadian author Esi Edugyan is a compelling novel and winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
