At the End of the Street in the Shadow Read online

  Too Much Johnson (Unfinished, 1938)

  Welles never finished editing the material, so it is difficult to come to definitive conclusions about the urban spatiality of his first cinematic city, and whether he would have remade geography as cavalierly as he did in later years. Nevertheless, the surviving workprint proves that before his Hollywood stint Welles had already explored the possibilities of location shooting, and did so while working completely outside Hollywood’s industrial norms, apparently filming without a script.5

  When Welles came to recreate historical New York again for Citizen Kane – this time the 1890s and the late 1910s – he did so with the full technical resources of a Hollywood studio and with contractually assured independence from executive oversight. Historical stock footage was used in a number of parts of the newsreel, but otherwise urban spaces were created in the studio. Urban exteriors are rare; in fact, usually limited to doorways and glimpses through windows. Some settings, including the Manhattan street where Kane first meets Susan, are conventional and slightly artificial backlot constructions, even though Welles films the set in unconventional long takes.

  Welles’s key creative collaborators in the production of Kane were cinematographer Gregg Toland and art director Perry Ferguson. Robert L. Carringer calls the trio the “creative nucleus of the production”.6 Toland was not an RKO staff cinematographer. His contract with Samuel Goldwyn allowed him to shoot projects at other studios. He had worked for John Ford on The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home (both 1940), and had won an Academy Award for William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939). He was a bold innovator and quietly instructed Welles in the fundamentals of cinematography. He’d seen Welles’s stage version of Julius Caesar and was eager to experiment for Citizen Kane.7 Welles later lauded Toland at every opportunity.

  Welles and Toland’s visual scheme for Kane was dominated by high-contrast, deep-focus cinematography. The distortion produced by the very wide-angle lenses made close-ups tricky. Welles hardly used them, favouring long takes of carefully choreographed camera movement and blocking. Toland used extra-sensitive black-and-white film stock and arc lamps to light the various spatial planes of the deep image.8 Sharp from forefront to the far distance, the images were more in line with the tradition of German Expressionism than contemporary Hollywood conventions.9

  Deep focus in Citizen Kane: the Inquirer newsroom (1916)

  Carefully planned long takes ensured that only the essential fragments of the numerous sets required by the script needed to be built. Perry Ferguson, an RKO staff art director, marshalled a team of illustrators and draftsmen. Under Ferguson, the sets for Kane were built with exceptional economy – less than seven per cent of the overall cost of the film.10

  A great deal of the world of Kane was created through special effects, including optical printing. Miniatures and matte paintings by Mario Larrinaga were sometimes used to complete fragmentary sets. Several shots of the exterior of the New York Inquirer building, for example, were a composite of built structures and matte painting.11

  * * *

  Welles’s collaborator on the Kane screenplay was Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had written scripts for the Campbell Playhouse and had worked on many Hollywood screenplays, often without screen credit. Robert Carringer’s extensive archival study of the Kane drafts conclusively establishes that Welles contributed at least as substantially as Mankiewicz to what became the final shooting script – contrary to claims made by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael which attempted to elevate Mankiewicz to the status of sole author.12 Mankiewicz’s role had actually been to develop a rough draft. With help from John Houseman, Mankiewicz wrote the first two drafts of the screenplay in Victorville, California, in the spring of 1940. Carringer suggests Mankiewicz’s first draft was heavily indebted to two published Hearst biographies, and that a “de-Hearstification of the material” would have been necessary for legal reasons alone. Welles’s extensive rewrites fictionalised the characterisation of Kane, eliminating Mankiewicz’s “à clef plotting”. Nevertheless, the released version of the film was later subject to a plagiarism lawsuit by Ferdinand Lundberg, author of Imperial Hearst (1936), which was settled out of court.13

  The Inquirer exterior: sets and matte paintings

  Surely with the intention of warding off the identification of Kane-as-Hearst, Welles elaborated his process of developing the character in a contemporary statement. Only published in full after his death, the statement is a typically diplomatic piece of game-playing, and Welles never mentions the tycoon by name.

  Ignoring Mankiewicz’s role in the early writing process, Welles wrote that his impulse had been to depict on film the “failure story” of a character who had in a long life exercised great power in American democracy – “a man imposing his will upon the will of his fellow countrymen” – and to show the “back stairs” aspect of that story. Not interested in pursuing the subject of a fictional president, Welles had to choose an individual with access to “some important channel of communication”. Radio was too recent a technological invention; he therefore was forced to create a newspaper tycoon. And if this character resembled certain real-life yellow journalists at key moments in American history, so be it: “I declined to fabricate an impossible or psychologically untrue reaction to American historical events.” In fact, “[Kane’s] dealings with [these historical] events were determined by dramaturgical and psychological laws which I recognize to be absolute. They were not colored by the facts in history. The facts in history were actually determined by the same laws which I employed as a dramatist.” And on the matter of Kane as an impulsive collector of objects – Hearst shared this characteristic – Welles explains it as a necessary gimmick to explain the survival of Rosebud for seventy years.14

  Hearst looms over Citizen Kane, first as the key biographical inspiration (despite early protests to the contrary) and eventually as its attempted censor. But what was widely perceived on release as a muckraking exposé of the private life of the tycoon is complicated and enriched by Welles’s fictionalisation of the material.

  George Hearst, born to a well-off slave-holding Missouri farming family in 1820, had built enormous wealth through mining investments in Nevada, Utah, Montana, and South Dakota. His son, William Randolph Hearst, was born in 1863. Expelled from Harvard, the younger Hearst took over his father’s neglected San Francisco Examiner in 1887. He triumphantly boosted circulation by a combination of exploitative human interest stories, prize draws and giveaways, and crusades for populist causes such as better school systems and improved sewage and road infrastructure. He also campaigned against the Southern Pacific Railway.

  Already a success in the newspaper business, Hearst entered the New York news market with the purchase of the failing Morning Herald in 1895, financed by the sale of the Hearst shares in Anaconda Copper. He repeated the process he had used so successfully in San Francisco to boost circulation. Deep-pocketed Hearst, heir to the family millions, poached top editorial staff from his main rival, Joseph Pulitzer’s Sunday World, including the cartoonist Richard F. Outcault, creator of The Yellow Kid, which gave its name to the genre of ‘yellow journalism’.

  Hearst began to print totally false stories, especially about events in Cuba, in his campaign for the American government to launch what would become the Spanish-American War. By the late 1890s Hearst had moved away from direct day-to-day management of his papers and into the political arena as a campaigner and eventual Democratic candidate himself.15

  In Kane, Thompson investigates the inner life of Charles Forster Kane. The rough cut of the newsreel is restricted to a summary of the publicly known facts about Charles Forster Kane, which are ambivalent. Who was Kane? What were his politics – communist, fascist, or merely “American”?

  As J. E. Smyth has argued, Kane is a film about American historiography and the limits of contemporary forms of news reporting. “Rosebud” is thought to be the key that might unlock the real story of Charles Forster Kane. Welles’s film of
Thompson’s quest becomes that real story. In this way the film is both historical fiction and a critique of historiography.16

  A historiographical reading of Kane itself reveals the film’s limits as a thinly disguised biography of Hearst – and, by extension, as American economic and industrial history. Kane’s greatest crimes in the public sphere are irresponsible journalism, support for American imperialism, and links to European fascists; on a personal level he is a lonely man whose narcissistic need to be loved is not matched by a capacity to return it. It is a critical yet sympathetic portrait, not the radical film one might have expected from a prominent anti-fascist.

  Naremore reflects that Kane may give us “the definitive satire of a certain American type” but he is presented “with a fascinating ambivalence, using Freud as much as Marx in order to understand him”.17 The newsreel tells of Kane’s “empire upon an empire”, ultimately encompassing many and varied industries. It was “an empire through which for fifty years flowed, in an unending stream, the wealth of the earth’s third richest goldmine”. But after Kane seizes on the Inquirer as his vocation, we do not hear again of the western source of the capital that drives his urban newspaper business, initially at a loss of a million dollars a year.

  Hearst was similarly obsessed with the newspaper business at an early age and rejected his father’s proposals that he assume managing ownership of the family ranches in Mexico and California, the Anaconda copper mine in Montana, or the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota.18 Before World War I, Hearst papers had at least publicly supported unions and progressive reforms. In later years, particularly during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, his newspapers openly took the side of big business over organised labour.19 Ferdinand Lundberg’s muckraking biography, supposedly one of Mankiewicz’s key sources, argued that all along Hearst had been anti-labour in his business practices. Hearst had connections to union-baiting Chicago gangsters and exploited his workers at the Homestake mine in South Dakota. With his army of newsboys, Hearst was “the biggest employer of child labor in the United States, and one of the biggest foes of a Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution.” Lundberg claimed that hired thugs beat striking newsboys at Hearst’s instigation.20

  Even worse were the conditions in the Cerro de Pasco copper mine in Peru, partly owned by Hearst along with various New York banking interests (including J. P. Morgan), where miners worked in conditions of near-slavery.21

  The earliest Mankiewicz drafts depict a more violent milieu. Kane appears to be responsible for the murder of one of Susan’s would-be lovers, a sequence based on Hearst’s connection to the mysterious death of the film director Thomas H. Ince. Kane’s son dies not in an automobile accident with his mother but as a member of a fascist militia.22 But the final version of Kane focuses on the fictional tycoon’s relationship with Susan Alexander, which Naremore reads as a symbol for Kane’s treatment of society as a whole.23 Welles’s revisions and also his performance create a more sympathetic portrait of the powerful tycoon, a man capable of tender moments, even if they are usually self-pitying and narcissistic.

  * * *

  Attempting to identify the Morning Herald with the interests of the people of New York City, Hearst campaigned for municipal ownership of essential utilities from the 1890s. In February 1899 he presented a plan for ‘An American Internal Policy’ that included the “destruction of criminal trusts” in oil, steel, copper, beef, timber, and railroads, and advocated for the “public ownership of public franchises” including water, gas, and rapid transit. Other causes included improvement of public schools and “expansionism without imperialism”. That year the paper successfully attacked the Amsterdam Light & Gas Company and drove down the price of gas in New York City. It fought and defeated the predatory Ramapo Water Trust in its attempt to secure a twenty-year contract to supply water to the city. The next year Hearst papers exposed Mayor Van Wyck’s corrupt involvement with the American Ice Company – the Ice Trust.24

  Hearst’s campaigns for public control of urban infrastructure went on for decades. In 1917 he managed to launch a stooge, John F. Hylan, into the mayor’s office of New York City. When in office, Mayor Hylan fought the Interborough Rapid Transit and Brooklyn Rapid Transit companies over fare increases.25

  Elements of Hearst’s historical involvement in New York’s urban development survive intact in Citizen Kane, which depicts the Inquirer campaigning for municipal ownership of transit and essential utilities, and against slum lords in the 1890s. We never see the masses who will benefit from Kane’s campaigns. The fight is seen via a montage from the perspective of one of the paper’s “most devoted readers”, Walter P. Thatcher. His infuriation grows as he reads a succession of Inquirer headlines. In 1925 Thatcher will label Kane a communist for such activities to a congressional investigation committee (the shooting script calls the scene a “reproduction of existing J. P. Morgan newsreel”26).

  By identifying with the interests of the impoverished urban working class – even, as he acknowledges, against his own financial interests – Charles Foster Kane angles for saviour status. He explains to Thatcher: “I have money and property. If I don’t defend the interests of the underprivileged, somebody else will – maybe somebody without any money or any property – and that would be too bad.”

  Thatcher is also outraged by Kane’s baseless provocations to encourage war with Spain over Cuba. Kane’s directive to his bemused Cuban correspondent – “you provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war” – may be an apocryphal Hearst paraphrase but it is an accurate indication of Hearst’s modus operandi. Kane winds up central to shaping the dawning American empire. After his death, Mr Bernstein shrugs off Kane’s war-mongering and looks at the legacy; he wonders “do you think if it hadn’t been for [the Spanish-American] war, we’d have the Panama Canal?”

  * * *

  The ‘News on the March’ rough cut credits Kane at his peak with “thirty-seven newspapers, two syndicates, a radio network – an empire upon an empire”. The empire is presented by an animated map with pulsing beacons to signify urban centres of Kane’s newspaper and radio production. This is a simpler and more effective version of the animation described in the shooting script: “Starting from New York, miniature newsboys speed madly to Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, Atlanta, El Paso, etc.”27 A reverse of that animation occurs when the Depression starts to choke the Kane empire.

  The synoptic impression in this early part of the film efficiently conveys Kane’s reach. We see representative images of the various Kane businesses – “grocery stores, paper mills, apartment buildings, factories, forests, ocean liners”. But as Kane tells Thatcher, he is interested in newspapers.

  In an editorial published in the New York Journal on the last day of 1899, Hearst declared that the newspaper’s democratic role was not to be limited to mere Fourth Estate oversight of the powerful. He advocated something more startling and radical: “Government by newspaper”. He argued that dominant newspaper circulation was synonymous with a mandate for political leadership – that citizens voted their support for or opposition to the paper’s editorial line on a daily basis by purchasing the paper, a kind of daily referendum, a far more sensitive register of the public will than the electoral process. Hearst predicted that with this revolution in the twentieth century “we shall see the press fulfill its noble calling, and as the mouthpiece of the people, rule, regulate, and reform the world”. It was an alarming conflation of the market appeal of his scandal sheet with the democratic process.

  Hearst regularly took over what would normally have been municipal responsibilities, often with great generosity but always waving the banner of his newspapers, asserting their central position in urban life. Hearst papers had organised and paid for the inauguration celebrating the 1897 Greater New York City charter, which incorporated the four outer boroughs with Manhattan, making New York the second-largest metropolis on earth; his charitable works included disaster reli
ef – particularly in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire – and clothing, housing, coal, and meals for the poor during New York’s worst winters.28

  Charles Foster Kane pursues an equally megalomaniacal equation of the Inquirer’s editorial line with the interests of “the people”. In the early 1890s, still dissatisfied with his renovations to the format of the Inquirer, Kane tells Bernstein and Leland, “There’s something I’ve got to get into this paper besides pictures and print. I’ve got to make the New York Inquirer as important to New York as the gas [fuelling the light in my office].”

  Stepping out of the editorial shadows, Kane composes a front-page ‘Declaration of Principles’. He asserts his commitment to honest reporting and to championing the rights of his readers “as citizens and as human beings”. Kane, as the film will illustrate, is the sole decider of what constitutes honesty as well as the rights of the masses, and he expects a wave of love from the people in return. Years later, when Kane loses the election and wallows in self-pity, Leland upbraids him:

  You talk about the people as though you own them. As though they belong to you. As long as I can remember you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you could make them a present of liberty, as a reward for services rendered.

  Leland knows organised labour is growing in power, and Kane is psychologically ill-equipped to accept anything but a paternal role in relation to the “working man”.