Sources for Citizen Kane
The sources for Citizen Kane, the 1941 American motion picture that marked the feature film debut of Orson Welles, have been the subject of speculation and controversy since the project's inception.
With a story spanning 60 years, the quasi-biographical film examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a fictional character based in part upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick.
A rich incorporation of the experiences and knowledge of its authors, the film earned an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles.
John Houseman, who worked with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz on the early draft scripts, wrote that Kane is a synthesis of different personalities, with Hearst's life used as the main source.
"The truth is simple: for the basic concept of Charles Foster Kane and for the main lines and significant events of his public life, Mankiewicz used as his model the figure of William Randolph Hearst.
"[2]: 444 Houseman adds that they "grafted anecdotes from other giants of journalism, including Pulitzer, Northcliffe and Mank's first boss, Herbert Bayard Swope.
[3]: 78 He specifically acknowledged that aspects of Kane were drawn from the lives of two business tycoons familiar from his youth in Chicago — Samuel Insull and Harold Fowler McCormick.
In January 1897 Remington was sent to Cuba by Hearst's New York Journal, to provide illustrations to accompany Richard Harding Davis's reporting about an uprising against Spain's colonial rule.
[9] Hearst biographer David Nasaw described Kane as "a cartoon-like caricature of a man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion, and love of those around him.
Welles's legal advisor, Arnold Weissberger, put the issue in the form of a rhetorical question: "Will a man be allowed in effect to copyright the story of his life?
In the first draft, Raymond literally knew where the bodies were buried: Mankiewicz had dished up a nasty version of the scandal sometimes referred to as the Strange Death of Thomas Ince.
[13]: 47 As a model for the makeup design of the old Charles Foster Kane, Welles gave Maurice Seiderman a photograph of Chicago industrialist Samuel Insull, with mustache.
[15] He was married to a Broadway ingenue nearly 20 years his junior, spent a fortune trying to re-launch her career, and built the Chicago Civic Opera House.
[17] When the performance was repeated on Broadway in October 1925, Herman Mankiewicz — then the third-string theater critic for The New York Times — was assigned to review the production.
[25]: 6 According to composer David Raksin, Bernard Herrmann used to say that much of Kane's story was based on McCormick, but that there was also a good deal of Welles in the flamboyant character.
[4]: 75 Film scholar Robert L. Carringer reviewed the December 3, 1936, script of the radio obituary in which Welles played Zaharoff, and found other similarities.
[28]: 120 In 1940, Welles invited longtime friend and Mercury Theatre colleague Joseph Cotten to join a small group for an initial read-through at Mankiewicz's house.
[4]: 66 Regarded as the dean of American drama critics, Stevens began his journalism career in 1894 in San Francisco and started working for the Hearst newspapers three years later.
After her opening-night performance in the role of Lady Teazle, Mankiewicz returned to the press room "… full of fury and too many drinks …", wrote biographer Richard Meryman: He was outraged by the spectacle of a 56-year-old millionairess playing a gleeful 18-year-old, the whole production bought for her like a trinket by a man Herman knew to be an unscrupulous manipulator.
[38] "According to her 1943 memoirs, Always Room at the Top, Walska had tried every sort of fashionable mumbo jumbo to conquer her nerves and salvage her voice," reported The New York Times in 1996.
"[4]: 497 Lederer noted that Davies drank and did jigsaw puzzles, but this behavior was exaggerated in the film to help define the characterization of Susan Alexander.
[4]: 497–498 Others thought to have inspired the character are film tycoon Jules Brulatour's second and third wives, Dorothy Gibson and Hope Hampton, both fleeting stars of the silent screen who later had marginal careers in opera.
Although Dr. Bernstein was nothing like the character in the film (possibly based on Solomon S. Carvalho, Hearst's business manager[45]: 241 ), Welles said, the use of his surname was a family joke: "I used to call people 'Bernstein' on the radio, all the time, too – just to make him laugh.
"The most basic of all ideas was that of a search for the true significance of the man's apparently meaningless dying words," Welles wrote in a January 1941 press statement about the forthcoming Citizen Kane.
He described the meaning of "Rosebud": "In his subconscious it represented the simplicity, the comfort, above all the lack of responsibility in his home, and also it stood for his mother's love which Kane never lost.
Biographer Richard Meryman wrote that the symbol of Mankiewicz's own damaged childhood was a treasured bicycle, stolen while he visited the public library and not replaced by his family as punishment.
[50][51] Film critic Roger Ebert said, "Some people have fallen in love with the story that Herman Mankiewicz…happened to know that 'Rosebud' was William Randolph Hearst's pet name for an intimate part of Marion Davies' anatomy.
"[52][53] Welles biographer Frank Brady traced the story back to newspaper articles in the late 1970s, and wrote, "How Orson (or Mankiewicz) could have ever discovered this most private utterance is unexplained and why it took over 35 years for such a suggestive rationale to emerge…[is] unknown.
[60] "The March of Time style was characterized by dynamic editing, gutsy investigative reporting, and hard-punching, almost arrogant, narration," wrote film historian Ephraim Katz — who added that it "was beautifully parodied by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane.
[63]: 77 He was well versed in what came to be called "Time-speak",[59]: 84 described by March of Time chronicler Raymond Fielding as "a preposterous kind of sentence structure in which subjects, predicates, adjectives, and other components of the English language all ended up in unpredictable and grammatically unauthorized positions.
