The True Facts of Citizen Kane

Ever since he was a little boy, Orson Welles had been told that he was a great creative genius—and by the time he reached his twenties, he seemed well on his way to fulfilling every extravagant expectation People had of him. In 1935, his so-called voodoo Macbeth—a revolutionary staging of Shakespeare's classic set in Haiti and featuring an all-black cast of Harlem actors—was the talk of New York City shortly afterward, he stunned theatergoers with a version of Julius Caesar that turned the play into a powerful allegory about the rise of modern fascism. He was only twenty-three years old when he was feted the cover of Time magazine, which hailed him as "the brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in many years."

Perhaps his greatest coup occurred on Halloween night, 1938, when, along with his Mercury Players, he broadcast a radio rendition of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. Millions of listeners, tuning in to the program (which took the form of realistically simulated news bulletins), believed that Martian invaders had landed in New Jersey and were obliterating everything in their path. The show set off a nationwide panic and made Welles a household name.

In 1939—at the age of only twenty-four—the "Boy Wonder of the American theater" headed west to conquer Hollywood. RKO studio rolled out the red carpet for him, offering him the kind of contract other filmmakers could only dream of. complete creative control of two motion pictures of his choosing. At first, Welles planned to do a version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but the project was eventually scrapped (Conrad's classic tale about a man who journeys deep into the savage jungle to find a power-mad renegade wouldn't make it to the big screen until 1979, when Francis Ford Coppola used it as the basis of his Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now). Next, Welles considered filming a British thriller, Smiler with a Knife, but that project also fell through. For a while, it seemed as if his Hollywood experience might end in an unprecedented defeat for the wunderkind. And then, Welles's screenwriter pal, Herman Mankiewicz, proposed an idea that had been percolating in his head for a while—a cinematic saga based on the life of media magnate William Randolph Hearst. Welles immediately leaped at the notion.

Hearst was a figure of epic proportions. Born into enormous wealth (his father, George, had amassed one of the largest mining fortunes in the west), he had been raised by an adoring mother who instilled in him an inordinate sense of his own greatness and destiny. (During his first grand tour of Europe at the age of ten, he was deeply disappointed that his mother couldn't buy him the one souvenir he wanted most—the Louvre.)

After two notably undistinguished years at Harvard, he turned his attention to the newspaper business, taking control of the San Francisco Examiner (one of his father's many properties) and immediately boosting its circulation by filling it with sensational stories, lurid illustrations, and other features that made it appealing to the working masses. But San Francisco wasn't a big enough stage for Hearst's overweening ambition—or his colossal ego. In 1895, at the age of thirty-two, he moved to New York City to take on newspaper czar Joseph Pulitzer. purchasing a failing paper, the Morning Journal, Hearst quickly turned it into the city's biggest-selling daily by stealing away the best writers on Pulitzer's staff and filling the Journal's pages with lurid crime stories, blaring headlines, jingoistic sentiments, colored magazine inserts, and Popular comic strips. Before long, he had become the most dominant newspaper publisher in the world, a man with the power not only to shape public opinion but to determine the destiny of the whole nation. To a large extent, it was the Journal's sensationalistic newspaper coverage of supposed Spanish atrocities in Cuba that led to the Spanish-American War. (According to one widely told story, when artist Frederic Remington was dispatched to Cuba to provide illustrations for Hearst's papers, he wired back that he couldn't find any war. "You furnish the pictures," Hearst heatedly replied. "I'll furnish the war.")

As the twentieth century got under way, Hearst began establishing newspapers in cities throughout the country-Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Los Angeles. By the early 1920s, one out of every five Americans read a Hearst paper. Eventually, his empire expanded to include every branch of the media—books, magazines, radio, motion pictures. With unprecedented control of the public's news and entertainment sources, he began to pursue his ultimate ambition-to preside, not just over the nation's media, but over the nation itself. But his repeated campaigns for high political office-mayor of New York City, governor of New York, U.S. president-all ended in failure. By the time the country entered World War I, his enemies mockingly referred to him as William Also-Randolph Hearst.

Still, there were consolations. On his "ranch" in the mountains north Of Hollywood-—an expanse of land half the size of Rhode Island-he built his princely estate, San Simeon. He stocked his castle with antiques, artworks, and monuments purchased from around the globe (at one Point, Hearst alone accounted for an astonishing 25 percent of the world's art market). He installed the world's largest private zoo for the enjoyment of his guests. And he installed something—or rather, some one else for his own enjoyment: his eighteen-year-old mistress, former chorus girl and self-avowed gold digger, Marion Davies.

A charming, vivacious beauty, Davies was a natural-born comedienne. Hearst, however-in an effort to turn her into the next Sarah Bernhardt-cast her in a series of elaborate vanity productions: stuffy, overblown costume dramas which (in spite of all his efforts) he was unable to shove down the public's throat. Davies quickly became a critical laughingstock. But she was genuinely devoted to Hearst. And with her great joie de vivre and Tinseltown friendships, she turned San Simeon into a gathering place for Hollywood's elite. Every Saturday night, Hearst and Marion hosted riotous costume parties, attended by some of the most glamorous stars and powerful men in the world. Hearst might have turned San Simeon into "the place God would have built, if He had the money" (as George Bernard Shaw described it), but it was Marion who filled it with gaiety and life.

By 1939, Hearst was a seventy-six-year-old man whose fortune had been seriously damaged by the Great Depression. But he was far from over-the-hill, and the killer instincts that had turned him into one of the most feared men in America hadn't diminished at all-as the twenty-four-year-old Welles would soon discover to his everlasting regret.

Though Mankiewicz and Welles made no bones about basing their main character on Hearst, there are important differences between the fictional Charles Foster Kane and his real-life counterpart. For one thing, their backgrounds are different—Hearst was born into enormous wealth, whereas Kane is the son of poor boardinghouse proprietors who accidentally come into a fortune and ship their son off to be raised as the ward of a bank executor named Bernstein. (Indeed, as various critics have noted, Kane's childhood is closer to that of Welles, who was orphaned at thirteen and placed in the care of a man named Bernstein.) Welles himself saw Kane as "better than Hearst"—more charming and likable, more genuinely idealistic (at least at first).

Still, from the opening sequence of the film—which shows Kane dying horribly alone in a Gothic mansion that seems more like the House of Usher than San Simeon—Citizen Kane offers a brutal depiction of its Hearst-like protagonist. In reality, Hearst was something of a party animal—a man with a tremendous gusto for and involvement with life. He was far from the stiff, embittered, isolated figure in Wellness’ film. Even so, it wasn't the scathing picture of himself that provoked Hearst's anger. As one of the most powerful men in America, he'd endured far nastier attacks throughout his life. What really enraged him was Wellness’ savage caricature of the woman he adored, Marion Davies, who is represented in the film by Kane's shrill, bubblebrained, utterly talentless mistress, Susan Alexander.

As soon as he learned about Citizen Kane, Hearst did everything possible to have it suppressed. He threatened to expose scandalous doings among studio executives and stars; to prohibit his papers from accepting movie advertisements; to launch a moral crusade against Hollywood. Terrified, Louis B. Mayer and other moguls banded together and tried to buy the negative of Welles's movie in order to destroy it. Citizen Kane became a cause celebre. In the end, it was released to great critical acclaim. By the early 1960s, it was acknowledged as a masterpiece, and in 1998 was honored as the best American movie of all time.

Still, the controversy surrounding the movie cost Welles his career. By the time he was twenty-five, he was known as America's youngest has-been. He would never have total artistic control over another Hollywood film and would spend the rest of his days struggling to scrape together the funding to make his own films. Ironically, many modem critics have come to see Citizen Kane less as a story about William Randolph Hearst than as a grimly prescient fable about the brilliant rise and tragic decline of Welles himself.

excerpt from For Reel, by Harold Schechter and David Everitt ( New York: Berkely Boulevard, 2000)