• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2324 0

Pauline’s essay as “twaddle.” The testimony of an actor in thrall to Welles might be questionable. But Bernard Herrmann, the composer of the film’s musical score, and famously not a man to play politics in any way, denounced Pauline’s research of the film’s classic opera sequences, in which Susan Alexander miserably fails her New York debut. Pauline claimed that Welles had pressed Herrmann to create the film’s fictional French opera-within-the-film, Salammbô, because the first choice, Thaïs, involved the expensive proposition of obtaining musical rights. Here she jumped to a conclusion, pointing out that Hearst had once been engaged briefly to Sibyl Sanderson, the American soprano for whom Jules Massenet had written Thaïs. Also she reported that Samuel Insull, one of the models for Kane, had built the Chicago Opera House in 1922, and that it had been managed for one disastrous season by the retired diva Mary Garden, in her day a famous Thaïs. But according to Welles, he had simply needed an opera that opened with a big dramatic aria for Susan Alexander, to drive home the point that her career is all but finished the minute the curtain rises. There were no operas in the standard repertory that fulfilled this requirement, since they all had lengthy introductory passages, mostly involving the chorus—so Herrmann simply had to write one.

Bogdanovich suspected that for all of Pauline’s knowledge of film history, she did not know much technically about how movies were really made. She had taken Sara Mankiewicz’s word for it that the script of Kane had changed very little from the first draft, but she had failed to grasp the degree to which scripts change in their long, tortuous evolution. Kane’s associate producer, Richard Barr, claimed that “The revisions made by Welles were not limited to mere general suggestions, but included the actual rewriting of words, dialogue, changing of sequences, ideas, and characterizations, and also the elimination and addition of certain scenes.”

Bogdanovich’s essay for Esquire was extremely courageous: For a rising young director, so dependent on popular and critical support, to take on the most celebrated movie critic in the United States showed great conviction and a brave lack of concern about the possible consequences of writing such an article. “The Kane Mutiny,” however, did surprisingly little damage to Pauline’s reputation. It did, however, represent a serious breakdown of The New Yorker’s fact-checking process. Significantly, no transcripts of Pauline’s purported conversations with John Houseman, George Schaefer, or Rita Alexander have survived—perhaps because she took no notes. The only research materials in her personal archive, housed at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, are copies of Howard Suber’s interviews. And Bogdanovich’s revelation of her inadequate research efforts did nothing to dissuade her from continuing to chip away at Welles’s achievements: In the future she would tell numerous colleagues that she did not believe that the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons had ever existed—that she felt Welles had simply abandoned the picture.

Decades after the publication of “The Kane Mutiny,” Bogdanovich happened to be having dinner with Woody Allen in New York. Allen, who was once quite friendly with Pauline, recalled that he had been with her when she had finished reading “The Kane Mutiny.” She was shocked by the evidence that Bogdanovich had stacked up against her.

“How am I going to answer this?” she asked Allen.

“Don’t answer,” Allen told her.

And she never did.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

By the time Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller opened in June 1971, regular readers of “The Current Cinema” were well accustomed to Pauline’s antipathy for the movie Western. In her capsule reviews in the front of The New Yorker, she dismissed one revered Western classic after another—She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Gunfighter, The Searchers, Two Rode Together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (Stagecoach was an exception.) Given her distaste for the genre’s conventions and sentiments,