Raising Kane
"Raising Kane" is a 1971 book-length essay by American film critic Pauline Kael, in which she revived controversy over the authorship of the screenplay for the 1941 film Citizen Kane. Kael celebrated screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, first-credited co-author of the screenplay, and questioned the contributions of Orson Welles, who co-wrote, produced and directed the film, and performed the lead role. The 50,000-word essay was written for The Citizen Kane Book (1971), as an extended introduction to the shooting script by Mankiewicz and Welles. It first appeared in February 1971 in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker magazine. In the ensuing controversy, Welles was defended by colleagues, critics, biographers and scholars, but his reputation was damaged by its charges. The essay and Kael's assertions were later questioned after Welles's contributions to the screenplay were documented.
Reception[edit]
The mainstream press accepted Kael's essay based on her credibility as one of the country's top film critics.[13]: 206–207 New York Times reviewer Mordecai Richler praised Kael for "cutting Orson Welles down to size, denying his needlessly grandiose claim to having been solely responsible for everything that went into Kane, including the script and photography."[19][c][20]
"Orson was vigorously defended," wrote biographer Barton Whaley, "but in less prominently placed articles; so, again, the damage was immense and permanent."[7]: 394
Response[edit]
"Raising Kane" angered many critics, most notably Peter Bogdanovich, a close friend of Welles who rebutted Kael's claims in "The Kane Mutiny", an October 1972 article for Esquire. Bogdanovich later acknowledged that Welles made significant contributions to the article, while Jonathan Rosenbaum has claimed that Welles ghost-wrote the entire piece.[d][e][f][23][22] "The Kane Mutiny" included the revelation that Kael had used Suber's work and did not credit him. Bogdanovich reported Suber's response to "Raising Kane", that he considered the authorship of Kane as an open question but that Kael's failure to consult Welles "violates all the principles of historical research".[15]: 30
Other rebuttals included articles by Sarris,[24] Joseph McBride[25] and Jonathan Rosenbaum,[22] interviews with George Coulouris and Bernard Herrmann that appeared in Sight & Sound,[26] a definitive study of the scripts by Robert L. Carringer[27][2] and remarks in Welles biographies by Barbara Leaming[6]: 203–204 and Frank Brady.[5]: 553–554 Rosenbaum also reviewed the controversy in his editor's notes to This is Orson Welles (1992).[3]: 494–501
"The major focus of Kael's essay is its defense and celebration of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as the principal, neglected creative force behind Kane," Rosenbaum wrote. "According to Kael, the script was written almost entirely by Mankiewicz, and Welles had actively plotted to deprive him of any screen credit."[3]: 494
Kael reported what she was told by Mankiewicz's secretary: "Mrs. [Rita] Alexander, who took the dictation from Mankiewicz, from the first paragraph to the last, and then, when the first draft was completed and they all went back to Los Angeles, did the secretarial work at Mankiewicz’s house on the rewriting and the cuts, and who then handled the script at the studio until after the film was shot, says that Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of Citizen Kane."[10]: 38 In "The Kane Mutiny", Bogdanovich/Welles discloses that Kael did not interview Katherine Trosper, who worked as Welles's secretary from the script's rough draft through the completion of the film. When Bogdanovich repeated Kael's assertion that Mankiewicz was the sole author of the script, Trosper replied, "Then I'd like to know, what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles?" Kael likewise did not interview associate producer Richard Baer, who stated that he himself was "in the room and saw" Welles writing important parts of the script.[21]: xxvi [g]
Kael wrote that the idea to use Hearst as the basis for Kane was Mankiewicz's idea, a claim supported by Houseman.[2]: 17 She reported that a former babysitter for the Mankiewicz family said that in 1925 she had typed portions of a screenplay Mankiewicz dictated to her that involved Hearst, organized in flashbacks.[10]: 35 Welles claimed it was his idea, which was supported by Baer in sworn testimony taken at the time Citizen Kane was released.[2]: 17 [h]
Kael wrote that Mankiewicz "had ample proof of his authorship, and he took his evidence to the Screen Writers Guild and raised so much hell that Welles was forced to split the credit and take second place in the listing."[10]: 38 Charles Lederer, a source for Kael's essay, insisted that the credit never came to the Writers Guild for arbitration.[3]: 499
Kael reported that before the film was finished, without Welles's knowledge, Mankiewicz gave the script to Lederer, who was Marion Davies's nephew. "But Lederer, apparently, was deeply upset and took the script to his aunt and Hearst. It went from them to Hearst's lawyers … It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz's idiotic indiscretion that the various forces were set in motion that resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall [and] the commercial failure of Citizen Kane."[10]: 45 Lederer told Bogdanovich that Kael never bothered to check with him about the facts, that he did not give Davies the script Mankiewicz loaned him: "I gave it back to him. He asked me if I thought Marion would be offended and I said I didn't think so."[3]: 557
Kael reported that Mankiewicz "probably didn’t get more than eight or nine thousand dollars for the whole job; according to the cost sheets for the movie, the screenplay cost was $34,195.24, which wasn’t much, even for that day, and the figure probably includes the salary and expenses of John Houseman and the others at Victorville."[10]: 50 Mankiewicz was paid $22,833.35 for his work.[6]: 202
Kael wrote that the production could not afford the fee to perform the opera called for in the script, Jules Massenet's Thaïs—a work written for Sibyl Sanderson, one of Hearst's mistresses—so composer Bernard Herrmann had to write something instead.[28]: 79 "But Miss Kael never wrote or approached me to ask about the music," Herrmann said. "We could easily have afforded the fee. The point is that its lovely little strings would not have served the emotional purpose of the film." Herrmann disagreed with Kael's entire premise: "She tries to pretend that Welles is nothing and that a mediocre writer by the name of Mankiewicz was a hidden Voltaire. I'm not saying that Mankiewicz made no contribution … but he could not have created Citizen Kane."[29]
Kael also related an anecdote from Nunnally Johnson, who said that during the filming of Citizen Kane Mankiewicz told him that Welles offered him, through a third party, a $10,000 bribe to relinquish screen credit. Mankiewicz, ever in need of money, was tempted by the offer. Mankiewicz reportedly said that Ben Hecht advised him to take the money and double-cross Welles. "I like to believe he did," Johnson replied when Kael asked if he believed the story. Kael left it at that: "It's not unlikely", she wrote.[10]: 49–50 The unsubstantiated claim became part of the record,[3]: 497 repeated as fact in a book by film historian Otto Friedrich[30]: 91–92 and a documentary by Barry Norman.[31]: 42:50–43:00
Attorney Arnold Weissberger advised Welles not to file suit for libel. Proving malice would be difficult; Welles was a public figure, and Kael's ideas were theories and matters of opinion. A complicating factor was that Welles was receiving a portion of the royalties of The Citizen Kane Book, which contained the script as well as Kael's essay. "As it turned out, much to his sorrow, the book sold extremely well and has been reprinted many times", wrote Brady.[5]: 554
"'The Kane Mutiny' … did surprisingly little damage to Pauline's reputation", wrote Kellow. "It did, however, represent a serious breakdown of The New Yorker's fact-checking process."[11]: 166
Reevaluation[edit]
Decades after the controversy over the essay, Woody Allen told Bogdanovich that he had been with Kael immediately after she finished reading "The Kane Mutiny" in Esquire. Kael was shocked at the case made against her—including the revelation that she had taken credit for the work of Suber, something Bogdanovich learned through his own connections at UCLA. Kael asked Allen, "How am I going to answer this?"[11]: 165–167
"She never responded," Bogdanovich wrote. He noted that Kael had included "Raising Kane" in a recent collection of her essays[32]—"untouched, as though these other people's testimony didn't count or exist, as though Welles's feelings or reputation didn't matter."[21]: xxvi–xxvii
By the time of Kael's death 30 years after its publication, "Raising Kane" was highly contested.[33][34] Film historian Richard B. Jewell, chronicler of RKO Pictures, concluded that Welles deserved his credit as the screenplay's co-author and that Kael's arguments were "one-sided and unsupported by the facts."[35]: 164 Largely forgotten since it was revealed in 1972, the story of Kael's appropriation of the research for "Raising Kane" became news again after it was included in a 2011 biography.[18][36]
Reviewing Kellow's biography for The New York Times, critic Frank Rich remarked on Kael's "sloppy professional ethics" and the fortuitous omission of the essay from the 2011 anthology The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael. "'Raising Kane' was omitted from the Library of America volume for reasons of space … but Kellow's account suggests it should have been eliminated in any event for its improprieties."[36]