Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [103]
Herman Mankiewicz had died in 1953, long before Suber began his research, but Suber had spoken with the screenwriter’s widow, Sara Mankiewicz, who was all too happy to acknowledge her late husband as Kane’s real auteur. She confirmed to Suber that she and Herman had been frequent guests at the spectacular palace hideaway that newspaper publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst had constructed at San Simeon, the model for Kane’s Xanadu. Hearst and Herman were never close; among other things, they were poles apart politically, with Hearst opposing the union movement and Herman coming out in favor of reform-minded Upton Sinclair when he was running for governor of California in 1934. Decades later, Herman and Sara’s nephew, the movie producer and director Tom Mankiewicz, recalled that Herman was at San Simeon “all the time, but not as a distinguished visitor—although he certainly was a good screenwriter—but really as a kind of class clown. Herman had this extravagantly famous wit and was always saying outrageous things, and they loved him for that.... He was invited as a paid talent, as a paid wit. That was it. And they expected a certain number of bon mots.”
Mankiewicz and Marion Davies were drinking buddies, and there were certain details from her life at San Simeon that he appropriated for the character of Susan Alexander—particularly Davies’s passion for jigsaw puzzles, which were spread out everywhere at the estate. It is astonishing that Mankiewicz thought he could get away with such a crude invasion of Davies’s privacy. His portrayal of Susan, in fact, showed a baffling combination of hubris, naïveté, and out-and-out stupidity—along with what seems to have been a desire to get caught red-handed. (Perhaps, in this respect, he was like Dorothy Parker, who “atoned” for her lavish weekends with wealthy society folk by lampooning them in her stories.) Mankiewicz seemed to think that if he made Susan Alexander an opera singer without intelligence, class, or talent, no one would link her to Marion Davies, who was an actress with a flair for comedy and, by most accounts, an affable, charming hostess. He was wrong: Davies was shocked by Mankiewicz’s betrayal. While Hearst himself was angered that Mankiewicz used him for his portrayal of Kane, it was ultimately just one more blow to his reputation, which had already suffered mightily; Mankiewicz’s cruel transformation of Marion into Susan was what determined him to bring down the film.
One revelation involved “Rosebud,” the name of young Charles’s sled—the symbol of lost childhood happiness that figures in the opening and closing of the picture. “Rosebud,” Sara Mankiewicz claimed, was based on one of the many “bitter experiences” that plagued her husband’s childhood in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Herman’s own “Rosebud” had actually been a bicycle he had as a boy. One day, while he was visiting the local library, the bicycle was stolen. “A brand-new bicycle,” recalled Sara. “And, as he said, he never, never longed for anything as to get that bicycle back. There was . . . a great deal of weltschmerz connected with Herman that few people recognized or realized.”
Sara also told Suber that the character of Jed Leland, the drama critic and close friend of Charles Foster Kane (played in the film by Joseph Cotten), included many background details from Herman’s own life. In particular, the key scene in which Leland is sent to cover the New York debut of Susan Alexander was taken directly from Herman’s days as a drama critic for The New York Times, when he had been assigned to review The School for Scandal, featuring Gladys Wallis, wife of the railroad and electricity tycoon Samuel Insull. Her performance was inadequate, and Herman got drunk, returned to the Times offices, and fell asleep over his typewriter. The scene was reenacted in Kane, with Jed Leland slumped over his typewriter, unable to finish his review of Susan Alexander’s catastrophic New York singing debut.
Sara laid out the chronology for Suber as best she could