I once heard a critic say that she was struck by a great irony when she viewed the film Citizen Kane: the very tool that William Randolph Hearst had used to hurt so many others—the mass media—had now been used against him. But when I think about it now, that irony does not seem to me to be the central irony of the film. The central irony of the film is rather that the storyline follows less the life of Hearst and more the life of the filmmaker himself, Orson Welles.

It was Welles who grew up in a boarding school: his mother died when he was only nine years old, and his alcoholic father died but a few years later. Indeed, the filmmaker never really had a normal childhood, or a childhood at all. When the banker comes to get young Kane in the film, and the boy’s ties are severed from his parents, we know Welles is writing his own past. In that scene, the father seems angry, even abusive; the mother wants the boy to be where the man can’t hurt him. Could this be a subtle caricature of a devoted mother protecting a son from an alcoholic, abusive father? I can’t stop thinking that it would be Welles who would hunger for a relic from the past, a relic of childhood, a time when he had both of his parents together, when he was happy, when he could simply play. Might that relic be…a bobsled?

Certainly, Hearst had a reputation for being cruel, but Welles too tore up people as easily as he tore up rooms. One co-worker of the director once remarked, “You had to have a strong stomach because he was a genius, but he was a very difficult person to work with." When Kane tears up his wife’s bedroom after she leaves him, we are reminded of scenes from Welles’s own biography. In one incident, the filmmaker felt RKO was foiling all of his plans to make a film, so he held an emergency meeting at a restaurant in Hollywood. He didn’t want his contract to expire without having made a film. At the meeting, he got so angry with one of his compatriots that he threw a flaming can of sterno at him.

Hearst never actually married his actress-girlfriend, Marion Davies, as Kane does in the film; likewise, Davies never abandoned him. In fact, Davies may have been a gold-digger at first, but she eventually fell in love with the newspaper tycoon. After the stock market crashed and Roosevelt instated income tax, the actress sold her jewelry and real estate to raise one million dollars to help her struggling lover. In later years, Welles confessed that they had been unfair to her in the film, that he regretted the portrayal; Marion was nothing like Dorothy Comingore’s character, the drunken and pathetic Susan Alexander, destroying Kane’s political aspirations and then leaving him. On the contrary, Hearst threatened to damage Welles’s reputation if Kane were released by exposing the filmmaker’s affair with married actress Dolores del Rio, and Welles had a short-lived, tempestuous marriage with an actress, Rita Hayworth.

In the end, Hearst died in the home of Marion Davies, loved to the last. Welles, who had achieved great fame in his mid-twenties, lived a transitory life thereafter. Hopping around Europe, grossly overweight, running through several wives, piecing together a living, Welles was miserable and once commented in an interview near the end of his life, “I think I made essentially a mistake staying in movies…I would have been more successful if I had left movies…I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work…I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It’s about two percent movie making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It’s no way to live a life." To me, Orson Welles sounds beaten, bitter, and full of regret…just like that most well known of villains, Citizen Kane.

Perhaps therein lies the genius of the film: the writer/director Welles (he shared an Academy Award with Herman Mankiewicz for best screenplay for Kane) was able to pull from his own life experience to find the innermost needs, desires, and regrets of a man, the ultimate truth as he saw it. Or could it be that karmic justice fated the life of the filmmaker who some say brutally injured both Hearst and Davies? Or did the masterwork mesmerize and fixate the filmmaker to such an extent that he had no choice but to play out the very life he had scripted?

August 2002