A journalist once asked me if, when young, I had a toy which I especially treasured. I heard myself tell her that I had owned a small sled on which my father had lovingly painted the word "Rosebud", and that it was most cruelly taken from me. She wept, went away and printed the story. Why did I do it? Perhaps I wanted an explanation for my life that was as simple and all explanatory as a sled.
"Rosebud" is not simply the sled in Citizen Kane; it is Charles Foster Kane's lost boyhood and his ruination as a man. And it is a gimmick: a McGuffin, a plot device, an exit, a sop, a flourish, the film's summit. Kane gasps out the word as he dies. There is no one to hear it except us, the audience, and yet a reporter is sent out to discover the word's significance. His quest is the film.
To David Thomson, the sled is a kind of Pandora's box. The boy Kane, he insists, was sold by his mother, who cannot wait to be rid of him. Over and over, as if it were a personal betrayal, Thomson repeats Agnes Moorehead's line: "I've got his trunk all packed. I've had it packed for a week now. It is this cold and wanton cruelty that begets the adult Kane's inability to love and his need for betrayal. In short, it explains "Rosebud" and vindicates the author's theme.
Not so fast. There are those, this reviewer included, who feel that Thomson, having first marked out his destination, has gone back and engineered a new road that will lead nowhere else. And yet in Citizen Kane, it is clear to any reasonable eye that a tough and selfless mother gives her child away to save him and his fortune from a shiftless father - the bit part player, Harry Shannon, glowers in the background. And, having eaten his cake, Thomson proceeds to have it, too, by suggesting that the more disagreeable qualities of Kane were a part portrait of none other than Orson Welles himself - who never had a sled or was given away when young, and yet grew up as a self made monster.
To begin at what was not the beginning: Welles, the one man orchestra and boy genius, was brought from New York to Hollywood, where RKO Radio gave him carte blandie to make a film of his choice. Behind him were the Negro Theatre Project and its voodoo Macbeth, his own Mercury Theatre, and a vast number of radio plays, including The War of the Worlds. This caused a panic among the kind of listener who believes that intelligent extra terrestrials would set foot or antennae in New Jersey. (The ventriloquist Edgar Bergen had been competing on a rival network, prompting Alexander Woollcott to send Welles a cable: "THIS ONLY GOES TO PROVE, MY BEAMISH BOY, THAT THE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE WERE ALL LISTENING TO A DUMMY, AND ALL THE DUMMIES WERE LISTENING TO YOU.")
In Hollywood, Welles made a couple of false starts, then met Herman Mankiewicz, who had an idea for a film debunking a so called great man. "Mank" was a screenwriter, a wit, a drunk and a social disaster. (Famously, he vomited while a dinner guest at the home of the producer Arthur Hornblow, Jnr., who considered himself a gourmet. "It's all right, Arthur Mankiewicz said, "the white wine came up with the fish.") He and his wife - known as "Poor Sara" - had on several occasions been guests at William Randolph Hearst's "medieval" castle, San Simeon. A hand could not feed Mankiewicz and go unbitten; he was a bitter little man and a have not, and Hearst would be his revenge on all the haves.
Welles dispatched "Mank" into the desert to write the script and summoned John Houseman from New York to serve as editor and nursemaid. It was strange that he sent for him; it was even stranger that he came. In the Mercury Theatre days and earlier, Houseman had tempered Welles's genius with his own patient talent; he brought order to the other's chaos. He was necessary to Welles and on that account was hated. When, in a restaurant, he showed signs of restiveness, the Boy Wonder threw two dish heaters at him, starting a fire and speeding Houseman's departure. And yet he came - one almost writes hot foot - from New York to wet nurse Herman Mankiewicz while Welles remained in Hollywood bedding Delores Del Rio.
One wonders if Houseman responded in the spirit of an Iago. Certainly, he regaled "Mank" with stories about Welles, and they showed up in the character of Charles Foster Kane. For an ogre, Hearst was not the worst of his breed. He had loved his wife when he married her, and he adored Marion Davies, who was a sweet, rather beguiling comedienne, She was generous, lending money to Hearst when he fell on hard times: a far cry from the film's hard, hysterical and untalented Susan Alexander. Unlike Hearst, Kane never loved anyone but Charles Foster Kane, a trait he had in common with Orson Welles.
Two sequences in Kane stand out. In one, rather than back down when his opponent, "Boss" Jim Getty, has him dead to rights, Kane stubbornly destroys his own family, his political future and his public life. In another, he courts, and receives, ridicule by building an opera house for what is his wife's operatic debut and swan song. Such megalomania was far closer to Welles than it ever was to Hearst.
Thomson's "Story of Orson Welles" arrives between the two halves of Simon Callow's biography, and in the wake of Pauline Kael's Raising Kane and full length portraits by Peter Bogdanovich, Charles Higham and Barbara Leaming. It is the kind of biography Welles might have written about David Thomson. It constantly draws attention to its author, waving opinions and theories like banners of certainty and indulging in embarrassing dialogues with its reader/audience.
It has the merit of not hanging around while we are on our way to Kane and Ambersons. By page 35, Welles has arrived at the Gate Theatre. As the Archduke in Jew Sis, he said: "A bride fit for Solomon! And Solomon had a thousand wives, didn't he?" Whereupon (so we read) a male voice cried out from the audience "That's a black Protestant lie!" Perhaps Thomson discovered this twaddle in one of Micheal Mac Liammoir's gilded anecdotes, but he was under no compulsion to use it.
Within a few years, Welles had graduated to the role of one man band. Nothing about him was small; his physique, energy, daring, dramatic flair, personality, versatility, imagination, appetites, were all Brobdingnagian, and his ego and emotional immaturity dwarfed them all. He spent and he owed. When things went awry, he blamed false friends, traitors and Lilliputian conspiracies. Perhaps inside every genius there is a charlatan striving not to get out, and the basis of his hatred for John House man may have been fear that Houseman alone was aware of where the emptiness lay.
Today, Howard Koch is best remembered as one of the writers of Casablanca, He adapted The War of the Worlds for radio, and Welles was incensed at the idea of having to give credit where it belonged. It was greedy and childish, and predictably, he fought to hog the sole writing credit for Citizen Kane. In the event, the film won a single Oscar, and it went jointly to Mankiewicz and Welles for the screenplay.
Welles was hated in Hollywood, not merely because Hearst had powerful friends, but his own arrogance and insistence on autonomy - he described a film studio as "the biggest train set a boy ever had" - had made him enemies amongst those who, after a lifetime working in cinema were still obliged to struggle for artistic control. Workhorse directors could not cast, rewrite or edit, but they need not have worried; Welles had yet to find out that in Hollywood the only criteria of success was, profit.
His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was a disaster in previews - one card said "People like to laff, not be bored to death." - and one out of every three minutes was cut. A new, lame duck ending was tacked on while Welles was far away, filming and enjoying carnival in Rio. Like George Amberson Minafer, he was receiving his come uppance.
The rest was not silence, but far worse anti climax. Welles made a hoots-mon Macbeth and the dreadful The Lady from Shanghai with his second wife (out of three), Rita Hayworth. He moved to Europe and held court in good restaurants. He played a vast number of "guest" roles, not always well, for his voice, deep and seigneurial, had no range. He was uniquely fine playing Harry Lime in The Third Man; once he appeared, caught in a shaft of light from a window, the film was in his pocket, and he even wrote the great "cuckoo clock" speech for himself.
He scraped together the finance for Othello. Much of it was post dubbed and when he could not afford to obtain costumes he staged a scene in a Turkish bath. It was, in short, the kind of film that, alas, wins prizes at Cannes. As one might expect, he made Kalka's The Prisoner, Invited to appear in Touch of Evil, he appeared in it as well, and rewrote it so that it resembled a very long night in a fleabag hotel. To the end, he was that contradiction in terms: a showman who made only one entertainment. This was Citizen Kane, and it is good enough to be sufficient.
It might be said of Mr Thomson that the good parts of his book are not new, and the new parts tend to put one out of patience. Which, come to think of it, and given his chosen task, are virtues that qualify him admirably to write a biography of Welles.