City of Nets Page 15

  Of such burgeoning and unquiet are best-sellers made, but when Warners bought the novel and turned it over to one of the studio’s favorite writers, Casey Robinson, he judged the whole project hopeless. The Hays Office would never allow it. He cabled this verdict from Hong Kong, where he had docked briefly on a vacation cruise through the Far East. Hal Wallis, the prospective producer, cabled back to ask Robinson to read the novel again. Robinson was not easily persuaded. “While sailing between Manila and Bali,” Wallis recalled, “he finally tossed the book into the sea, thinking that I was crazy to have bought so downbeat a property.” Nothing, perhaps, could so quickly change a writer’s mind about a difficult challenge as the sight of that challenge disappearing into the ocean. “As he saw the book floating on the waves,” Wallis said, “he suddenly realized how he could lick the subject: make it the story of an idealistic young doctor challenged by the realities of a cruel and horrifying world.”

  Wallis was naturally delighted at the prospect of small-town sex turning into the saga of an idealistic doctor. He began hiring. He hired Sam Wood, recently acclaimed for Kitty Foyle, as his director; and William Cameron Menzies, the real creator of much of Gone With the Wind, as art director; and Erich Korngold as the composer of moody music; and the celebrated James Wong Howe as cameraman. Then came the usual casting problems. Wallis wanted Henry Fonda or Tyrone Power as the idealistic doctor, Parris Mitchell, but Darryl Zanuck at Fox owned them both, and owned their idealistic images as well, and declined to rent them to Warners. The nymphomaniac Cassie Tower presented interesting possibilities. Wallis offered the part to Ida Lupino, but she was busy making Ladies in Retirement for Columbia. Bette Davis hungered to play Cassie, but Wallis was afraid that she would dominate the picture. Drake McHugh, the hero’s amiably pleasure-loving friend, was a secondary role destined for one of Warners’ contract players—Dennis Morgan, or Jack Carson, or perhaps Eddie Albert. Robert Preston and Franchot Tone were also considered. Or maybe Ronnie Reagan. Why not Reagan?

  Joseph I. Breen, a professional Catholic who headed the Hays Office, and who had not yet seen a page of the script that Casey Robinson was writing, interrupted all this planning by forbidding the entire project. In a lengthy memo to Wallis, he began by complaining of “illicit relations” between various characters, and “much loose sex everywhere.” And there was a “sadistic characterization” of a doctor, that villain who was to amputate Drake McHugh’s legs. “Any suggestion of sex, madness, syphilis, illegal operations, incest, sadism, all must go,” Breen declared. “If this picture is made . . . decent people everywhere will condemn you and Hollywood.”

  Jack Warner, Wallis, and Robinson all had to go to Breen’s office and argue with a hypocrisy worthy of characters in Kings Row, or even in some novel by Balzac himself. They were not just trying to make money, much less to earn the condemnation of decent people everywhere, but rather, in Wallis’s words, to “illustrate how a doctor could relieve the internal destruction of a stricken community.” Breen, said Wallis, “was impressed.” If Warners agreed to take out all references to nymphomania and incest—and no mercy killings, and no nude swimming either—then maybe approval could be granted. Robinson wrote a new version; Breen rejected it; Robinson wrote a third version; Breen rejected it; Robinson wrote a fourth version; Breen reluctantly approved. “In the long run I felt it was all to the good,” Wallis declared with the stoicism of the continually censored. “Too much grimness might have wrecked its chances at the box office.”

  There was one scene that managed to survive all this moral improvement. That was the scene in which Drake McHugh, having been swindled out of his inheritance by the local bankers, having been rejected as unworthy to marry the daughter of the town’s preeminent doctor, had to get a job at the railway station, suffered an accident that crushed his legs, and woke to find that the doctor who had rejected him as a suitor for his daughter had now amputated both his legs. Randy Monaghan, Drake’s current girl, was trying to nurse him. “It was then that the dreadful sound came from the upper room,” Bellamann wrote. “Randy knew even in that terrifying instant that she would never forget the sound of Drake’s voice. It was a hoarse scream—almost a yell in which there was horror, and pain, and something worse—sheer animal terror. She tore up the narrow staircase and flung the door open. . . . Drake’s eyes were rolling and his face worked violently as if the very bone structure had been shattered. Randy saw with a sick horror that his hands were groping frantically under the blankets. She almost leapt across the room and seized his hands. . . .

  “ ‘Randy!’

  “ ‘Yes, I’m here, Drake. I’m here with you . . .’

  “Randy—where—where’s the rest of me?’ ”

  Ronald Reagan, having finally been chosen to play the part, saw something important in that scene of symbolic castration, in all the implications of the question itself. “No single line in my career has been so effective in explaining to me what an actor’s life must be,” he said in the ghostwritten autobiography that he produced twenty-five years later. He made Drake’s question the title of the book. At the time, however, Reagan saw that scene primarily as a chance to make his mark. Wallis had by now hired a rather remarkable cast. Though Robert Cummings was barely adequate as the young doctor, he was surrounded by experts. His mother was Maria Ouspenskaya, and his mentor was Claude Rains, and the mentor’s lustful daughter was Betty Field. There was even Judith Anderson as the wife to the wicked doctor, Charles Coburn, and Ann Sheridan was captivating as Randy Monaghan. Against this array of talent, Reagan had only the one great scene, the one great opportunity.

  “I felt I had neither the experience nor the talent to fake it,” Reagan recalled. “I simply had to find out how it really felt. . . . I rehearsed the scene before mirrors, in corners of the studio, while driving home, in the men’s rooms of restaurants, before selected friends. At night I would wake up staring at the ceiling and automatically mutter the line before I went back to sleep. I consulted physicians and psychiatrists; I even talked to people who were so disabled, trying to brew in myself the caldron of emotions a man must feel who wakes up one sunny morning to find half of himself gone.”

  After all this self-rehearsal, there inevitably came a day when the scene had to be played out. The night before, Reagan lay in bed and worried. He couldn’t sleep. He came to the studio looking pale and haggard—which was, of course, exactly the way he was supposed to look—and approached the set where the scene would have to take place.

  “I found the prop men had arranged a neat deception,” he recalled. “Under the patchwork quilt, they had cut a hole in the mattress and put a supporting box beneath. I stared at it for a minute. Then, obeying an overpowering impulse, I climbed into the rig.” Reagan seems to have undergone some strange emotional crisis there in that bed. He simply lay, “contemplating my torso and the smooth undisturbed flat of the covers where my legs should have been.” Ten minutes passed. Twenty. “Gradually,” Reagan said, “the affair began to terrify me. In some weird way, I felt something terrible had happened to my body.” By now, the camera crew had gathered around. They didn’t seem to know what to do. Somebody lit the lights. Reagan lay there in a kind of trance. The director, Sam Wood, finally approached the prostrate actor and bent over him.

  “Want to shoot it?” he murmured.

  “No rehearsal?” Reagan asked, just as though he hadn’t been rehearsing brilliantly for the past hour.

  “God rest his soul—fine director that he was, he just turned to the crew and said, ‘Let’s make it.’ There were cries of ‘Lights!’ and ‘Quiet, please!’ I lay back and closed my eyes, as tense as a fiddle-string. I heard Sam’s low voice call, ‘Action!’ There was the sharp clack which signaled the beginning of the scene. I opened my eyes dazedly, looked around, slowly let my gaze travel downward. I can’t describe even now my feeling as I tried to reach for where my legs should be. ‘Randy!’ I screamed. Ann Sheridan (bless her), playing Randy, burst through the door. She wasn’t i
n the shot and normally wouldn’t have been on hand until we turned the camera around to get her entrance, but she knew it was one of those scenes where a fellow actor needed all the help he could get and at that moment, in my mind, she was Randy answering my call. I asked the question—the words that had been haunting me for so many weeks—‘Where’s the rest of me?’ ”

  One take was enough. “It was a good scene,” Reagan said with some satisfaction. It was good enough, in fact, to lift him out of the ranks of pleasant young men and make him a star. Warners realized that and promptly renegotiated his contract to triple his pay to three thousand dollars per week. By the time Kings Row was released in February of 1942, however, the war had just begun and Reagan was subject to call-up by the army. The stardom that he seemed to have won had to be postponed, and he was never able to capture it again.

  “As in some grotesque fable,” one of Time’s nameless writers wrote in March of 1941 about a new movie called Citizen Kane, “it appeared last week that Hollywood was about to turn upon and destroy its greatest creation.” That judgment has withstood quite well the passage of nearly half a century. If it is possible to single out any movie as Hollywood’s “greatest creation,” then the best choice is probably Citizen Kane. Even now, squeezed into television and repeatedly interrupted by commercials, it still shows immense confidence, high spirits, vitality. It was hardly a Hollywood creation, though, but rather the creation of Orson Welles, who didn’t want to come to Hollywood at all when he was invited there late in 1938, after the wild success of his radio version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. George J. Schaefer, whom Nelson Rockefeller had just helped to install as the new president of the foundering RKO studio, made Welles an irresistible offer: $100,000 to produce, direct, write, and star in one movie per year, with total autonomy for himself and the whole theater company that he had organized in New York, the Mercury Theatre. Welles was then twenty-three.

  The saga of Citizen Kane is by now one of Hollywood’s most beloved legends—a somewhat more intellectual version of A Star Is Born—and scholars of the cinema have analyzed not only cameraman Gregg Toland’s striking use of 24 mm wide-angle lenses, stopped down to achieve deep focus, but even the sources for the libretto for the fake opera, Salammbo, briefly and badly sung by Kane’s second wife (a text that was excerpted, as a sort of private joke, from Racine’s Phèdre: “Ah, cruel! tu m’as trop entendue!”). At the time of Welles’s spectacular arrival, though, Hollywood keenly resented the celebrated newcomer, particularly when he took a tour of RKO and called it “the biggest electric train a boy ever had.” A popular Hollywood ditty by a minor actor named Jean Hersholt ridiculed the fact that “Little Orphan Annie’s come to our house to play,” and when Welles invited Hollywood’s notables to his own house for a party, almost nobody came. Welles nonetheless set up his command post in the virtually bankrupt hulk of RKO and began experimenting. He worked on a film of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—what a movie that would have made!—then on a thriller by C. Day Lewis called The Smiler with a Knife, which was vaguely based on the life of the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley and involved a pro-Axis putsch in Mexico. There was even talk of his filming a life of Christ.

  By a series of turns of fate, Welles soon joined forces with Herman J. Mankiewicz, a onetime New Yorker theater critic who had served as the Pied Piper leading many of the Algonquin writers to Hollywood. (“Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots,” Mankiewicz had announced in a famous telegram to Ben Hecht back in 1926.) Mankiewicz was so dedicated to his own wit that he would sacrifice a job for a joke, as he did when he actually dared to remark, after Harry Cohn had declared to his assembled sycophants at Columbia that he could always foretell the future success of a movie by whether it caused a tremor in his own rear end: “Imagine! The whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!”* Mankiewicz was also a dedicated gambler, who borrowed in order to gamble and lied in order to borrow and drank in order to lie. Drinking got him fired from several good jobs (as producer of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera, for example), but it was gambling that brought his final downfall at M-G-M. He had not only begged Louis B. Mayer for a thirty-thousand-dollar advance on his new contract but sworn to give up gambling (“A compliment from Mayer,” he once said of his patron, “is like having Nathan Leopold tell you that you’re lovable”), and then he looked up from the poker game that he had organized in the M-G-M dining room and found himself confronting the implacable eye of his employer. Fired the next day, and more or less blackballed among the major studios, Mankiewicz left his wife to deal with his gambling debts and started driving back to New York with another writer, who skidded off the road and smashed up the car. That was how Herman Mankiewicz, jobless, penniless, hung over, and imprisoned in a plaster cast from hip to ankle, received a visit from Orson Welles, who charitably offered him five hundred dollars a week to convert tales like Rip Van Winkle into radio scripts. It was only a matter of time before they began talking about movie possibilities. Mankiewicz had wanted for years to write a story that he called American. It was about William Randolph Hearst.

  Hearst was one of the liberals’ bogeymen of that era, a man whose control of a large newspaper empire devoted to reactionary politics and cheap crime seemed to make him a demagogue of towering menace. The fact that his newspapers generally lost money and had very limited power did not deter his detractors from worrying about the potentialities of his sinister influence. Mankiewicz knew all the newspaper gossip, of course, but he also knew his subject firsthand. Hearst had enjoyed his company, and so had Marion Davies, the charming and funny actress whose relationship to Hearst was conventionally disguised as mere friendship. “One last thing to remember [is that] writers are always selling somebody out,” Joan Didion once observed. And so Mankiewicz proceeded to include in his cruel portrait of Charles Foster Kane the portrait of an untalented and alcoholic young protégée who liked to spend her time, as did Miss Davies, on jigsaw puzzles.

  Welles was pleased with Mankiewicz’s script, but he also thought it somewhat wordy and slow-moving. He was accustomed to making substantial revisions himself, even on Shakespeare, and now he cut out whole scenes, whole subplots. He wrote in others that derived from his own instincts—Kane’s disastrous attempts to make his new wife an opera singer, for example. The megalomaniac Charles Foster Kane was, after all, to be at least partly Orson Welles. Yes, and as both writers kept revising each other’s drafts, Mankiewicz also had views of Welles that he wanted to include. Kane’s great furniture-smashing tantrum, for example, was a reenactment of one of Welles’s own explosions.

  Once they had created their marvelous script, of course, they had to fight over who should get the credit. Welles’s RKO contract specifically said that “the screenplay for each picture shall be written by Mr. Orson Welles,” and Welles probably thought that an old drunk like Mankiewicz should be content with his five hundred dollars a week for collaborative ghostwriting. But Mankiewicz knew that Citizen Kane was an accomplishment that made up for all the wasted years of hack work and drunken jokes. It made him unhappy to hear Welles quoted in Louella Parsons’s column, before the question of screen credits was officially settled, as saying, “So I wrote Citizen Kane.” So Mankiewicz went to the Screen Writers Guild and declared that he was the original author. Welles later claimed that he planned on a joint credit all along, but Mankiewicz claimed that Welles offered him a bonus of ten thousand dollars if he would let Welles take full credit. Since Mankiewicz was chronically in debt, he asked Ben Hecht what he should do about this proposal, and Hecht gave him a characteristic answer: “Take the ten grand and double-cross the son of a bitch.” The Screen Writers Guild eventually decreed a joint credit, with Mankiewicz’s name first.

  Welles, who prided himself on his skill as a practicing magician, engaged in some extraordinary legerdemain to get Citizen Kane on film at all. Schaefer had granted him creative autonomy, but only subject to RKO approval of each script and budget
, and there was considerable question whether a nearly bankrupt studio would approve a thinly disguised attack on one of the nation’s most powerful newspaper publishers. Welles thought up the remarkable expedient of shooting repeated “tests,” which needed no official approval, until the accumulated “tests” represented such a large portion of the prospective movie that Welles was able to bluff Schaefer into approving what was almost a fait accompli. It may be, as some say, that RKO knew perfectly well what Welles was doing, but his bluff was a kind of prank, typical of the youthful exuberance that pervades Citizen Kane.

  Welles relied just as much on bluff in winning the approval of Hearst’s elephantine movie columnist, Louella Parsons. It is almost impossible now to realize the power once exercised by Mrs. Parsons, and her rival, Hedda Hopper, but in the 1940’s, these two vain and ignorant women tyrannized Hollywood. Mrs. Parsons (née Ottinger) was already a twice-divorced woman* of twenty-nine when she first came to Chicago in 1910, got herself a job on the Tribune, and began spending her nights writing movie scenarios. She more or less invented the idea of a movie gossip column in the Chicago Record-Herald, then moved to the New York Morning Telegraph, then, in 1924, went to cover Hollywood for Hearst. There is a popular legend that Mrs. Parsons owed her job to the death of Thomas Ince, a successful director whom Hearst had just hired to take charge of his Cosmopolitan Films. Ince died suddenly aboard Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, and although the official cause of death was angina, some gossips claimed that Hearst had shot him after discovering him in flagrante delicto with Marion Davies. According to an even more colorful version, Hearst had discovered Miss Davies with Charlie Chaplin, began shooting wildly, and killed Ince by mistake. In either case, Mrs. Parsons was said to have been aboard the yacht and to have kept Hearst’s secret. Unfortunately for this story, Ince seems actually to have died of too much food and liquor, and Mrs. Parsons seems to have been in New York at the time. Her chief appeal to Hearst was her gushing enthusiasm for the movies, and specifically for all movies featuring Marion Davies.