By Rick Segreda

Art, like politics, can make for strange bedfellows. Particularly when married to a populist medium. One of the most striking examples of such strangeness happened in 1940 and 1941, during the production and distribution of the film Citizen Kane, and the controversy it created both in the press and the motion picture industry. It is a striking illumination of a historical friction in American culture between high brow and low brow, and elitism versus populism.

Citizen Kane, a film a clef on the life of William Randolph Hearst, was an uncommonly audacious project for a Hollywood movie studio for its time. Not only did it court controversy but it was willing to put the film industry at risk.

Then as well as now, Hollywood film studios were averse to creating controversy or ill will of any kind. The focus on bottom line profits from a mass audience demanded it. Not that Hollywood was unwilling to tackle social or political issues, as in films like The Grapes of Wrath, but only if the message conveyed was populist, sentimental, and didn’t call for an upset of the status quo.¹

American print media was no different in this regard in its kowtowing to profit margins. As Gerald J. Baldasty points out in The Commercialization of the News in the Nineteenth Century, print media’s dependence on advertisers virtually sealed the fate of popular American journalism as a thought-provoking catalyst for the advancement of "public debate and knowledge."²

Indeed, the 1921 scandal, which, despite his acquittal, destroyed Arbuckle’s career through press notoriety, led to the establishment of the puritanical (and, it could be argued, tyrannical) Hays Commission, and conclusively defined which medium had the upper hand over the other. Wanda Felix indicates that Hearst himself had a double-fold and mercenary purpose in destroying Arbuckle: 1) to punish the film industry for not going with his wish to move its base of operations to San Francisco and 2) profit. Voila Dana, a colleague of Arbuckle is quoted thus: "Hearst crucified Arbuckle for another reason -- circulation -- Hearst was gratified by the Arbuckle scandal; he said later that it had ‘sold more newspapers than any event since the sinking of the Lusitania.’"³

In this context, the risk that George Schaefer, president of RKO took in allowing Orson Welles and his co-scenarist Herman J. Mankiewicz, to take on Hearst and, with even greater temerity, slander Hearst’s beloved mistress, Marion Davies, was considerable. But Schaefer had faith that Welles, having scored brilliantly with the critics and the public in the realm of theatre and radio, would create a film that could both restore RKO recent financial losses and enhance its prestige.⁴

Welles maintained a tight control of the production of Citizen Kane, not even letting cast members read the script en toto. ⁵However, in post-production word eventually leaked out.⁶ In a pre-emptive move that backfired, Welles offered invitations to the film industry's two rival and reigning gossip columnists, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, to separate, private screenings. They were not amused.⁷ Parsons, Hearst's official and nationally syndicated Hollywood columnist, out of loyalty to her employer and Davies, she exploited all the authority and influence she had acquired as the film industry’s most feared power broker to stop Citizen Kane and destroy Welles. ⁸ She threatened to publish scandals, albeit invented ones, about the lives of the major studio executives, as well as stories on Welles.⁹

For his part, Hearst stopped all advertising in Hearst media for RKO productions and did not print any reviews of RKO films.¹⁰ He insinuated to the FBI that Welles was a communist, triggering an investigation.¹¹ Furthermore, in order to get other studios to put pressure on RKO, he threatened to publish stories about the film studio's hiring of illegal aliens.¹² In addition, Hearst would use an anti-Semitic angle to the latter story by relating it to how all the major studios were managed by Jewish immigrants.¹³

The other studios, ever fearful of their image, not to mention congressional investigations, responded on Hearst's behalf.¹⁴ They refused to book Citizen Kane in their own theatres, and pressured independent theatre chains to follow by not showing Kane.¹⁵ MGM president Louis B. Mayer even offered Schaefer one million dollars to buy and destroy the negative of the film.¹⁶

Schaefer refused Mayer's offer and was determined to protect his investment.¹⁷ Indeed, Schaefer even felt as word leaked out to the press about the war between Hearst and the "boy wonder," that the publicity might help the film turn a profit.¹⁸

The response of the press to the Hearst/Welles struggle varied. Frank Brady, in his Welles biography notes that both "the major wire services, AP and UPI, which might have lost a number of important clients if Hearst cut off using their services, stopped mentioning the film altogether."²⁰

However, the story was reported, albeit in a "neutral" manner, in such non-Hearst media as the New York Times and Time Magazine.²² There has even been a long-standing rumor that Time's Henry Luce, a Hearst rival, offered to buy Citizen Kane in order to ensure its release.²³ On the elitist fringes of the American reading public, left-wing newsmagazines such as The New Republic not only reported Hearst/Kane story, but also provided critical and condemning commentary on Hearst.²⁴

Brady writes that novelist and short story writer John O'Hara "supposedly lost his job at pro-Hearst Newsweek after the following review/feature/editorial appeared under his name: 'It is with exceeding regret that your faithful bystander reports that he has just seen a picture which he thinks must be the best picture he ever saw.'"²⁵

When the film, after months of postponements and delays, did finally open in New York and other large cities, it was showered with encomiums by film critics –except for those in Hearst papers, which made no mention of the film.²⁶

However, even amidst the praise and enthusiasm, many of their reviewers expressed some degree of reservation about what Welles was trying to "say," or more specifically, the lack thereof. A common complaint was that the answer to the "Rosebud" mystery was unsatisfying and/or incomplete and/or sentimental (in film scholarship, the debate continues till this very day).²⁹

In the Stanley Kauffman's anthology, American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to Citizen Kane, Kauffman includes a review from Joy Davidman of The New Masses, representing what could be described as an American Stalinist aesthetic in her criticism of the film:

Davidman, of course, represented a minority of film critics in terms of criticizing the film for not being more explicitly a criticism of capitalism. The majority of reviewers, whatever their reservations, honored Welles and Citizen Kane at the year's end with Best Picture awards.³²

As mentioned previously, Welles shared Hearst's talent flair for exploiting popular media, for making spectacle, and for generating publicity. Epstein and Lennon point out in their documentary, The Battle over Citizen Kane, that Welles saw himself in Hearst and possibly even believed that Hearst might consider Citizen Kane as a left handed tribute from one megalomaniac to another.³³

There is a crucial difference, though, between Welles and Hearst is that Welles, despite his own egotism and publicity coups, ultimately employed his talent in the service of art, specifically highbrow art, which made Citizen Kane a winner with the critics and a loser with the general public. Hearst employed his talent, his skills, his intelligence in the service of nothing more than power. For Hearst it mattered little whether a story was true or untrue, whether a cause was just or unjust, as long as it sold papers.

Thus the biggest irony, however, was that for all of Hearst's efforts to stop Kane, the film ultimately failed at the box office for reasons that had nothing to do with Hearst, but had everything to do with a discord in American culture between urban elitism and rural populism. Indeed it is an identity conflict that extends back to Hamilton versus Jefferson, DeTocqueville’s tyrannical majority versus the imperiled minority, north versus south, and western expansion versus urban growth. As film scholar Andrew Sarris so wittily asked: "Which pair of James brothers were more authentically American, Frank and Jesse, or William and Henry?"³⁵

Citizen Kane was a limited success in large cities, but it did poorly outside of urban markets, and quickly acquired the reputation of being "box-office poison."³⁶

Debates as to whether Kane should be faulted for not adequately advancing the demise of capitalism, or, more generally among reviewers, if it represented a triumph of form over content were notable only in evincing the highbrow preoccupations of film critics. These disputes, however provocative, seemed to have mattered very little to except to that small, and from what Brady and others indicate, mostly urban segment of the American public that actually saw Citizen Kane and had the time as well as inclination to ponder such questions.

Ultimately the unique drama surrounding a drama entitled Citizen Kane pointed up how strongly an American civil war prevailed in two closely allied populist mediums suddenly, though briefly, at cross purposes. But it wasn’t merely a struggle of the press versus the film industry, but rather of the press versus itself (i.e.; Hearst against a John O’Hara) and the film industry, and similarly, the film industry versus itself (Louis B. Mayer versus Welles), as well the press. Or, from a different perspective, the struggle of isolated mandarins (film critics and filmmakers such as Welles) in popular forms of communication struggling to connect over the din of screaming masses.