Orson Welles, Vol I (99 page)

Hearst and his men had gone too far, finally. He had succeeded only in arousing public interest
in Welles and
Citizen Kane
by methods of vilification transparent even to his natural supporters. Schaefer was finally able to convince his board that they must take advantage of the overwhelming amounts of increasingly positive publicity; Rosamond Gilder later observed that ‘William Randolph Hearst served as voluntary press agent in the largest unsought publicity build-up since
Gone with the
Wind
.’ Inspired by a four-page spread in
Life
magazine detailing the technical innovations of
Citizen Kane
, Schaefer announced the release of the picture for the beginning of May 1941, the week, as it happens, of Welles’s 26th birthday. There would be four premières, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. The advertising campaign was immediately mounted, underlining in extravagance
everything that had gone before. This is publicity about publicity: ‘America’s most talked-about man presents long-awaited film debut marked by unique story, clever technique, brilliant acting.’ Even balder:
‘THE MOST TALKED ABOUT PICTURE IN YEARS
! Nothing deleted! Nothing changed! So different it’s best to see it from the beginning.
I HATE HIM
!
I LOVE HIM
!
HE’S A DIRTY DOG
!
HE’S A SAINT
!
HE’S
CRAZY
!
HE’S A GENIUS
!’ It was Kane they were describing; but it might as well have been Welles. The posters stress his fine manly posture and noble – if false – profile.

The trailer, however, has great playful charm. Welles never appears, but is omnipresent as the narrator: a joke – a rather knowing one – in itself. Shot by Toland at the same time as the film, it is a miniature documentary,
almost an introduction to the cinema, in the manner of the opening section of the unfilmed
Heart of Darkness
. The scene is an empty, moodily lit sound stage. A voice – guess whose? – calls for lights. Lights are snapped on. ‘Get me a mike.’ It swings in on its boom. ‘Thank you,’ says the director-as-God. ‘How do you do, ladies and gentlemen,’ God continues, unseen. ‘This is Orson Welles. I’d like
you to meet the actors.’ Cut to the chorus girls from the
Inquirer
part scene. ‘I’m just showing you the chorus girls for ballyhoo. Still, what lovely chorus girls they are.’ Cut back to the darkly lit soundstage. Joe Cotten is standing in the shadows. ‘Light!’ cries God. There is light, by which Joe is dazzled. ‘Smile,’ says God. And he does. One by one the cast, in their street clothes, are
introduced – ‘you don’t
know Dorothy Comingore, but you soon will; we’ve caught Ruth with her hair up: smile for the camera Ruth!’ – and each is disposed of with a rapid wipe, which introduces the next: Erskine Sandford with a parrot on each shoulder, Agnes Moorhead (‘the best actress in the world’) and finally, Everett Sloane, who appears at the other side of the studio at a canter, running straight
into his own reflection. ‘You see, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all done with mirrors.’

‘What’s the film all about?’ asks God. ‘It’s a modern American story about a man called Charles Foster Kane.’ A montage of the characters in extreme close-up talking about Kane – spluttering, smiling, grimly denouncing – is rounded off by Welles (still unseen) saying: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I can’t imagine
what you’ll think about him, but you’ll have a chance to find out when
Citizen Kane
comes to this theatre.’ Teasing, charming, completely original, it is a sort of conjuring trick: without his face appearing once on the screen, Welles entirely dominates its five minutes’ duration. The approach is entirely characteristic; Welles seeks to fascinate the audience with the process. Now they’re actors,
now they’re the characters: magic! Sloane seems to be running towards us: he’s actually running into a mirror, as you see when I move the camera. The film appears to be taking place in real life: actually, it’s shot in a studio. The voices are transmitted by microphones, the faces lit by lamps. To describe what Welles is up to here as Brechtian is too stuffy. Nor is it Pirandellian; there is no
metaphysical dimension to it. It is, to be precise, a trick.

If anything, it is a bit of Chinese opera. The dragon thrillingly devours the stage; a switch is thrown and you see twenty men dressed in black holding aloft a lot of colourful fabric and ribbon and painted papier-mâché; another switch is thrown and there the dragon is again, ten times as terrible and beautiful as life. The charm
of Welles’s trailer is that he, the magician, like many youthful conjurors, is keen to demonstrate how the trick works; otherwise how will you know how clever he was? The poster campaign was more traditional; the focus was directly on Welles. The central image was of him as the twenty-five-year-old Kane, arms outstretched (Welles had protested when the image of the older Kane was used: ‘a pretty
serious mistake by way of exploitation’). The key slogan blazed everwhere answered the question supposedly on everyone’s lips:
IT’S TERRIFIC
!

M
EANWHILE, HAVING
at last achieved a release date for his film, Welles collapsed. Dr Dudley Bumpus’s medical exam of 24 April reports his chief complaint: ‘Attacks of knife-like pain behind the sternal notch with sensations of smothering.’
¹
The physical examination (which records his height as 72 inches, three and a half inches shorter than his usual reported
height, and his weight as 218 lbs: 15½ stones) further reveals scoliosis of the spine, and spina bifida occulta. ‘These congenital anomalies of the spine give rise to backache resulting from trauma.’ In addition he has ‘a very marked degree of pes planus [flat foot: everted] which accounts for the great amount of foot and ankle trouble which you experience.’ Dr Bumpus discovers tenderness over the
duodenum. ‘There is nothing very serious with the heart action but you cannot afford to abuse that organ because of a tendency to be susceptible to damage.’ It must have been a relief to discover that, despite a vast alcoholic intake, coupled with regular infusions of benzedrine and amphetamines, the sorely abused organ in question was holding up so well. The report was doubly reassuring to Welles;
not only did it explain the great physical discomfort that he had experienced in his corsets, and the continuing weakness in his ankles, it also offered perfect grounds for him to avoid being drafted. The Roosevelt government had slowly, and by means of an elaborate lottery system, been conscripting able-bodied men into the armed forces in anticipation of America’s entry into the war. Since the
inception of this drive, Welles and Arnold Weissberger had anxiously tried to find ways by which Welles could avoid being recruited. Weissberger sent him a letter of congratulation in October of 1940 on being 5,283rd in the draw. By April of 1941, however, the prospect was not so distant: despite his later claims that he was deeply disappointed not to have fought in the war, he, Dick Baer and Arnold
Weissberger were frantically looking for ways to get him out of it. Bumpus’s diagnosis of pes planus ensured that Welles need never get into uniform. For the present the good doctor proposed that ‘you get
away from Hollywood for at least 60 days and follow a strict diet’. With the New York première of
Citizen Kane
fixed for May 1st, the advice was only partially effected, though he did manage
to get away for a fortnight; he was scarcely going to be absent from one of the longest-awaited events in the history of film.

In newsreel footage of the various gala openings, Welles appears in glowing good health and, as well he might, triumphant, surrounded by his Hollywood stalwarts, actors, mostly, and a few directors, as well as the usual group of gala folk. John Barrymore was his guest
in New York; they had become a sort of unofficial double act on the
Rudy Vallee Show
in which they were billed as
THE TWO GREATEST SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS IN THE WORLD TODAY
(Barrymore: ‘Orson Welles?! He’s an exhibitionist, a publicity seeker, a headline hunter, a cheap sensationalist … why, he’s another John Barrymore!’)
²
At the New York première, Welles told Bogdanovich, Barrymore, to Welles’s
immeasurable delight, informed a reporter who had asked him why he was there ‘you might say I’m a relative,’
³
continuing with perfect dead-pan, ‘I think it’s time the public heard the truth – Orson is, in fact, the bastard son of Ethel and the Pope.’ Over Barrymore, as he spoke, and over the milling crowds and the limousines and the police escorts, loomed the marquee of the Palace Theatre on Broadway,
with Welles, legs akimbo, arms outstretched, reproduced ten times over, each representation larger than the one in front of it, till Kane seems to stretch backwards to the crack of doom,
IT’S TERRIFIC,
the slogan cried, above the last and largest Kane, and above that, written with electric bulbs in letters six foot high

The whole carnival was repeated in Los Angeles, where
he appeared, finally fully public, with Dolores del Rio (her divorce now through) at his side. According to Welles himself, the only one of the premières that was not triumphant was the one in Chicago, where ‘no one came’. He had wanted to bring del Rio to what he still regarded as his hometown, but it proved a damp squib. He had outgrown the Mid-West, and the Mid-West wanted none of him. Roger Hill
did his best, mustering a chorus of Todd-ites headed by his own fifteen-year-old son, singing

Happy Birthday to you
⁴

Felicitations we strew

On our dear friend Orson

From the boys old and new

Let the Hearst face turn blue

Shouting red bunk at you

Those who know you Orson

Know you’re white through and through.

Of course, by then Welles knew that he had the thing
in the bag. The reviews, written days, in some cases weeks before, appeared after the New York opening, and they could scarcely have been more satisfactory; the whole thing was a publicist’s dream come true. There was surprisingly little resentment of the hype; many of the critics even managed to top it.

‘Last Wednesday afternoon, I went to see a picture that had the most terrific critical
build-up of any picture ever made,’ wrote Sidney Skolsky in the
New York Post
. ‘After seeing the picture, I felt that everything that had been said was an understatement.’ The
Hollywood Reporter
, which had so publicly urged Schaefer to ditch Welles altogether, made a complete recantation on its front page: ‘Mr Genius comes through;
Kane
astonishing picture.’
⁵
Bosley Crowther in
The New York Times
also cried vindication: ‘Now that the wrappers are off, it can be safely stated that the suppression of this film would have been a crime …
Citizen Kane
is far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood … he has made a picture of tremendous and
overpowering scope.’
⁶
Other reviewers spoke of
Citizen Kane
as being the culmination of movie history, the summation of all that had gone before – and, at the same time, as a revolutionary work. ‘Welles has built new thresholds for the films,’ said Schallert in the
Los Angeles Times
. ‘He dares to see that things are done with the camera which most picture-makers would shun as bad technique and
these lend a fascination unparalleled to many of the scenes.’ ‘
Citizen Kane
is a great motion picture,’ cried the dramatically repentant
Hollywood Reporter
.

A certain uneasiness began to spread among reviewers even among those who had cheered loudest first, as the waves of hyperbole became tidal. After all, to call
Citizen Kane
the greatest film ever made is like saying that
Love’s Labour’s
Lost
or maybe
Titus Andronicus
is the greatest play ever written. ‘Perhaps,’ said the
Nation
, hedging its bets, ‘when the uproar has died down, it will be discovered that the film is not quite as good as it is considered now, but nevertheless, Hollywood will for a long time be in debt to Mr Welles.’
⁷
There are two contradictory myths about the reception of
Kane
: that it was ecstatically acclaimed,
and that it was a critical flop. The response, taking in both extremes, was more complex, and it evolved by stages. Bosley Crowther returned to the fray two days after his initial notice in
The New York Times
: ‘Now that the returns are in from most of the local journalistic precincts and Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane
has been overwhelmingly selected as one of the great (if not the greatest) motion
pictures of all time’
⁸
he finds himself asking ‘is it a great picture – saying “great” with awe in one’s voice? And does it promise much for the future of its amazing young producer? We, a minority feline, are not altogether certain.’ Acknowledging the film’s technical brilliance (‘he has made use of all the best devices of pure cinema which have been brought out through the years. And he has
invented a few of his own’) Crowther was ‘inclined to suspect that the enthusiasm with which Mr Welles made the film – the natural bent of a first-class showman toward eloquent and dramatic effects – rather worked against the logic of the story … unquestionably, Mr Welles is the most dynamic newcomer in films and his talents are infinite. But the showman will have to acquire a good bit more discipline
before he is thoroughly dependable. When he does – and let’s hope it will be soon – his fame should extend to Mars.’ It was not simply that the film was too clever by half (though this opinion began increasingly to be expressed); there was something wrong at the heart of it.

Even in his first notice, Crowther had observed that the film fails ‘to provide a clear picture of the character and
motives behind the man about whom the whole thing revolves … at the end, Kubla Kane is still an enigma – a very confusing one.’ If this was a flaw, he felt first time round, it was an unimportant one. ‘It is cynical, ironic, sometimes oppressive, and as realistic as a slap. But it has more vitality than 15 other films we could name.’ In the face of the subsequent hosannahs and halleluias, he came
back to it with more concern. ‘Most people who have seen the picture so far have come away with the solid conviction that they have beheld the image of an unscrupulous tycoon. Yet at no point in the picture is a black mark actually checked against Kane … we are bound to conclude that this picture is not truly great, for its theme is basically vague and its significance depends on circumstances.’