How publishing magnate Randolph Hearst flexed his media muscle to prevent the release of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane

FOR three months newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst (left) flexed muscle to prevent the release of Hollywood prodigy Orson Welles’ cinematic character assassination.

Orson Welles was producer, co-author, director and star in Citizen Kane in 1941.

FOR three months newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst flexed muscle to prevent the release of Hollywood prodigy Orson Welles’ cinematic character assassination. But when Citizen Kane premiered at New York’s RKO Palace Theatre on May 1, 1941, Time magazine had already praised it as “the most sensational product of the US movie industry. It has found important new techniques in picture making and storytelling’’.

The story Welles told has intrigued film critics for 75 years, inflaming debate and lawsuits over scriptwriting credits, the originality of Welles’ and cameraman Gregg Toland’s techniques, and Hearst’s role in ensuring Citizen Kane was a box-office flop.

Welles consistently denied that Hearst, known to Welles’ wealthy inventor father, was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, although they shared the same birth date. Then there was the film’s opening line, uttered by a dying man. Was “Rosebud” Hearst’s pet name for an intimate part of his lover Marion Davies’ anatomy?

Welles, born at Kenosha, Wisconsin, on May 6, 1915, was the talented second son of Richard Welles and former concert pianist Beatrice Ives. Beatrice had moved to Chicago with her sons when she died of hepatitis in 1924. Richard, then squandering his wealth at Sheffield House, his hotel in Grand Detour resort, took his sons on a world tour.

Filmmaker and actor Orson Welles at CBS Radio in 1938.

Physician Maurice Bernstein, his mother’s lover and already a father-figure, became his guardian after Richard, then an alcoholic, died in 1930.

With little formal schooling, Orson Welles took a sketching tour of Ireland in 1931. Unsuccessful in attempts to join London and Broadway stages, he travelled in Morocco and Spain, fighting in bullrings. Joining actress Katherine Cornell’s theatrical road company, Welles debuted in New York in 1934 and directed his first short film and made his radio debut.

With actor-producer John Houseman he formed the Mercury Theatre in 1937 and in 1938 went to air. Their broadcast of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, as a Halloween prank on CBS Radio on October 30, 1938, panicked the nation and earned Welles Hollywood offers.

Accepting a contract offering creative independence at RKO, Welles’ first film proposal of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness was rejected as too ambitious and expensive. A film about men corrupted by power was suggested shortly after with scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Welles and Mankiewicz, a Hearst acquaintance, worked on separate scripts. Mankiewicz introduced Rosebud in a 250-page draft, entitled American, completed in April 1940.

Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst with actor and mistress Marion Davies.

Hearst was born in San Francisco on April 29, 1863, to millionaire goldmine owner and US senator George Hearst and wife Phoebe. In 1887 he took over the San Francisco Examiner, acquired by George in 1880 to settle a gambling debt.

Acquiring dozens of newspapers and magazines, in 1903 Hearst married chorus girl Millicent Willson and tried to move into politics. He started building Hearst Castle on a 97,000ha ranch at San Simeon, California, in 1919, furnishing it with imported European art and antiques. That year he also started an affair with actress Davies, later separating from Willson.

Hearst’s news empire peaked in 1928. The Great Depression and vast over-extension left Hearst answerable to a board of managers from 1929, when he commissioned Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan to design a $7 million, 34-bedroom Georgian mansion for Davies on a 2ha beachfront at Santa Monica.

Actor director Orson Welles in scene from film Citizen Kane.

An unfinished Citizen Kane, with Welles playing the lead, screened for critics on January 3, 1941, outraged gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who conveyed her disgust to Hearst and his associates. Hearst movie columnist Louella Parsons was also angered by the Kane character, but more offended by Kane’s second wife, a young alcoholic singer with parallels to Davies.

On January 8, Hearst or his associates directed Hearst publications not to run advertisements for the film. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis Mayer, who regularly cast Davies, offered RKO $842,000 if studio president George Schaefer destroyed the negative and all film prints. Schaefer refused and threatened to sue Fox, Paramount and Loews theatre chains for conspiracy after they refused to distribute the film. Although Welles felt the attacks came from Hearst minions rather than Hearst, his lawyer-manager Arnold Weissberger warned early in 1941: “This is not a tempest in a teapot, it will not calm down, and forces opposed to us are constantly at work.”

Hearst newspapers labelled Welles a communist, and before the film release a police investigator warned Welles not to return to his hotel: “They’ve got a 14-year-old girl in the closet and two photographers waiting for you.”

Although the New York Times praised Kane as “far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture ... in many a moon” the film flopped, costing RKO $150,000. Recognised for use of deep-focus photography and nonlinear storytelling, Kane was nominated for nine Academy Awards. Welles was booed at the 1942 Oscars, where he and Mankiewicz won for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). Hearst died in Beverly Hills in 1951. Welles died in Hollywood in 1985.