Orson Welles wrote “not one word’’ of “Citizen Kane,’’ insists a posthumous memoir by a son of the man who shared a Best Original Screenplay with the director of the 1941 classic.
Frank Mankiewicz — who was Robert F. Kennedy’s press secretary, ran George McGovern’s presidential campaign and co-founded what became National Public Radio — writes in “So as I Was Saying . . .” that his father, Herman Mankiewicz, agreed to a shared credit as a favor to Welles.
The son strongly supports the findings of Pauline Kael, who famously minimized Welles’ contributions to the writing of the film in “Raising Kane,’’ a lengthy essay that originally ran in the New Yorker in 1971. Welles’ many biographers have disputed her conclusions, drawn largely from interviews with John Houseman and Rita Alexander, who helped Mankiewicz edit his overlong script.
According to Kael and Frank Mankiewicz, his father made a preliminary application for credit to the Screen Writers Guild and was advised it would rule in favor of a sole credit for him if he filed for formal arbitration. Frank Mankiewicz — who became friends with Houseman — says his father changed his mind after Welles pleaded that his contract with RKO Pictures required him to write, direct and produce “Citizen Kane’’ to be paid.
Welles’ defenders claim it was the studio that decided on the joint credit, and that the director magnanimously indicated by drawing an arrow on a piece of paper that Mankiewicz should be billed first.
Frank Mankiewicz writes there was no doubt whatsoever in the mind of William Randolph Hearst — the newspaper tycoon on who Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, was primarily based — that Herman Mankiewicz, who had been an overnight guest at Hearst’s castle on the Pacific Coast several times (the inspiration for the film’s Xanadu estate) was responsible for the script.
He writes that the infuriated Hearst used his political clout to have Herman Mankiewicz put on a trial for DUI after a fender bender that the son writes was “luridly’’ covered in the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner. The son, who was stationed at a California army base, says he would buy all five copies of the paper from the post exchange and throw them in the trash every day during the trial.
Frank Mankiewicz, who died in 2014, does call the film “Welles’ masterpiece. His acting performance is magnificent, his direction is near letter-perfect . . . and his production touches were all of Academy Award quality. It’s his movie, marred only by a non-controversy over the script a few of his admirers and relatives choose to keep alive.’’
Why are they doing this? “It is, I think, a piece of postmodernism before its time: the malleability of ‘truth’ to meet whatever needs we have,’’ Mankiewicz writes. “In this case, it is the need to see Orson Welles as one of the first great auteurs of movies . . . We need to believe a creative genius like Orson Welles can do it all.’’
Frank Mankiewicz also disputes the legend that his dad provocatively named the film’s famous Rosebud sled after Hearst’s supposed nickname for a private part of his mistress, actress Marion Davies.
The son writes that Rosebud was actually the brand of his dad’s first bicycle, stolen from in front of the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, public library “the very first day my father had it’’ — a theft that a researcher confirmed in police records from 1908. The father was traumatized because his parents refused to replace the bicycle and often discussed this with his psychoanalyst around the time he was writing “Citizen Kane.’’
Welles, who never publicly disputed Kael’s book, presented Mankiewicz — who died in 1953 — with a replica of the Rosebud sled at the film’s wrap party. It was sold by his son Don’s family at auction for $149,000 last December. Frank Mankiewicz sold his father’s Oscar for $588,455 in 2012.
“The Oscar cost so much to insure that he kept it in a safe-deposit box,’’ one of Frank Mankiewicz’ sons, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, told The Post at the time. (His other son is “Dateline NBC’’ correspondent Josh Mankiewicz.) “He figured that if we couldn’t see it, there was not much point in hanging on to it.’’