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By Root 2406 0

remember it: John Houseman, Welles’s collaborator at the Mercury Theatre, had introduced Welles and Mankiewicz to each other around 1937 in New York. Welles had actively solicited story ideas from him, and Mankiewicz had come up with the idea for Kane. Sara maintained that Kane himself was intended as an amalgam of Hearst, Insull, and John P. Morgan. In the early spring of 1940, Mankiewicz had gone off to a desert retreat near Victorville, California, and finished the script in several weeks. With him were his secretary, Rita Alexander, and Houseman, who essentially functioned as a story editor. (He was also there to make sure that Mankiewicz, a prodigious drinker, stayed sober enough to complete the job.) Not long before Kane was shot, Welles and Houseman had an enormous argument at Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood, which caused a permanent rift between them.

When Pauline read Suber’s interview with Sara Mankiewicz, it confirmed her belief that Kane had really been Herman’s personal and unique vision—not Welles’s. Armed with Suber’s research, plus what she had undertaken on her own—including an interview with Rita Alexander—Pauline set to work on her essay. Along the way she had discovered a deposition given by Welles in April 1949, when Ferdinand Lundberg, Hearst’s biographer, had filed suit against the director, Mankiewicz, and RKO, claiming that his book Imperial Hearst was the real basis of Kane. Welles maintained in the deposition that his intention was “to write and produce a work of fiction. As in the case of a great deal of fiction we drew to some extent on our observations of certain aspects of American life and our knowledge of certain types among influential Americans.”

It quickly became apparent that three thousand words would not be sufficient to accomplish what was now Pauline’s primary goal—to prove that Herman Mankiewicz was indeed the dominant creative force behind Kane. A scribbled note on her research papers indicates the direction in which she was heading: “When an actor becomes the role offstage, something fake trails around him, like a magician’s cape.”

Dorothy Comingore’s interview, in particular, yielded some gems, including her recollection that Welles hadn’t directed her in the drunken café scene: Comingore insisted that it was a test scene, which was simply put into the film and never retaken by Welles. This information fascinated Pauline, and she delved deeper into her theory that Welles had been misleading people for decades about his omnipotent role in Kane.

At some point in 1970 Pauline flew to Los Angeles for her annual lecture at UCLA. Suber met her at the airport and drove her directly to the party in her honor. On the way there he brought up a point he was fond of using to test his students: He asked Pauline how the characters in Kane knew that “Rosebud” was Kane’s dying word. She answered, as his students normally did, that “Rosebud” is overheard, but Suber pointed out that no one actually hears him say it—he is alone in the room when he utters the word. Thus, the entire puzzle that Kane is built around doesn’t, strictly speaking, make dramatic sense. As he pulled up to a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard, Suber looked over to check Pauline’s response.

“Well,” Suber recalled her saying, “it’s a trivial point.”

Suber finished his essay and mailed it off to Pauline in New York. After that, her phone calls became more sporadic. Then they stopped altogether.

One week in February 1971, Suber’s copy of The New Yorker arrived in his mailbox as usual. In the section “Onward and Upward with the Arts,” he discovered part one of a two-part essay on Citizen Kane by Pauline Kael. Some months earlier Pauline had shown her work-in-progress to William Shawn, who agreed on the spot to publish it in the magazine. She made use of the Sara Mankiewicz, Dorothy Comingore, and Richard Wilson interviews. Even worse, she claimed to have discovered, when the picture was released in 1941, that no one actually heard Kane whisper “Rosebud.” Nowhere in the piece was Suber’s name mentioned. He had not received—nor