Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [107]
With all the acclaim greeting “Raising Kane,” Bantam decided the essay was now too important to publish as a paperback original. A deal was made with Little, Brown to bring out a hardcover edition, which would include the shooting script, and in October 1971 The Citizen Kane Book appeared. Pauline’s essay opened the book, followed by the complete shooting script, illustrated by eighty-one frames from the film, and the cutting continuity of the finished picture.
In The New York Times, Mordecai Richler called it “a highly intelligent and entertaining study of a bona fide film classic” and praised Pauline for her “wonderfully sensible reconstruction of the making of Kane.” But no matter how persuasively she made the case for Herman Mankiewicz, Richler felt her argument was undercut by the publication of the script, which, despite its merits, he found “superficial and without one quotable line. To Welles, then, however vain and objectionable his manner, rococo his style, must go the ultimate credit for the miracle of Citizen Kane,” since in Richler’s view “he was the one who did in fact put it all together.”
It appears that Welles never contacted Pauline about the article, but Peter Bogdanovich and others claimed he was deeply wounded by Pauline’s reduction of his role in Kane, feeling that his work on the picture had been undercut once again. The opposition, however, had readied itself on the director’s behalf. When the book appeared, The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris angrily rejected Pauline’s thesis, but the toughest response came from Bogdanovich in Esquire. “The Kane Mutiny” was a lengthy article that was both a levelheaded refutation of Pauline’s ideas and an expression of righteous anger, and the single worst piece of press she had received to date. Bogdanovich condemned “Raising Kane” as being “loaded with error and faulty supposition presented as fact.” Because he had heard Howard Suber’s story through his UCLA connections, he explained that Suber and Pauline “were to collaborate in writing the prefatory material to the published screenplay,” adding that Pauline took “full credit for whatever use she made of it, and gives none at all to Dr. Suber.”
Bogdanovich then proceeded to expose, point by point, the weaknesses in Pauline’s research. Not only had she chosen not to consult Welles but she had failed to contact several of the other key players in her story. One was Marion Davies’s nephew Charles Lederer, who claimed that he had never—as Pauline had stated—shown the script to Davies. “That is 100 percent, whole-cloth lying,” Lederer told Bogdanovich, adding that he had returned the script to Mankiewicz, telling him that he didn’t think that Davies would be bothered by the characterization of Susan Alexander. He also told Bogdanovich that the early draft, called American, was lugubrious, and that Welles had “vivified the material, changed it a lot, and I believe transcended it with his direction. There were things in it that were based on Hearst and Marion—the jigsaw puzzles, Marion’s drinking—though this was played up more in the movie than in the script I read, probably because it was a convenient peg for the girl’s characterization.” (Lederer’s version of this episode is regarded by the Mankiewicz family as highly suspect, since the script reportedly was returned with annotations by the Hearst legal team.)
Bogdanovich quoted George Coulouris, who portrayed Thatcher, the man who becomes young Charles Kane’s guardian, dismissing