In the nearly 80 years since its release, Citizen Kane is still regarded as one of the – if not the greatest film ever made. So much so, a handful of related films have sprung up in its wake, as well as a shelf of books exploring the life and work of the film’s rightly celebrated director, Orson Welles.
The latest is Mank, David Fincher’s cinematic look at the life of hard-drinking screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Its story centers on Mankiewicz’s life as he was writing the script for Citizen Kane (1941), and the difficulties which arose between the screenwriter and Welles, the producer, director and star of the film who is also credited as co-screenwriter. Fincher’s film, which is now streaming on Netflix, is based on a script by his late father, Jack; it stars Gary Oldman as Mankiewicz and Amanda Seyfried in the role of Marion Davies, a famed actress of the time who is widely thought to be the model for a key character in Citizen Kane.
It is not known exactly when or where Brooks and Mankiewicz first met, but the showgirl and the writer likely became acquainted in 1925, around the time Brooks, a dancer in the chorus, was appearing in the Summer edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. According to the Barry Paris biography of Brooks (who cites earlier letters the actress wrote in the 1970s), Brooks’ Follies dressing room was regularly visited by a number of somewhat older men who enjoyed the company of the vivacious 18 year old. Among them were writer Michael Arlen, producer Walter Wanger, film star Charlie Chaplin, and Herman Mankiewicz, then a drama critic for the New York Times.
The showgirl and the writer-critic hit it off. She was a high school dropout with a literary bent. He was a wordsmith, part and parcel of NYC’s Jazz Age intelligentsia and someone who seemed to know just about everybody, including the personalities associated with the Algonquin Roundtable. (For a short time, Brooks lived at the Roundtable’s main stomping ground, the Algonquin Hotel ..., and perhaps that is where Mank and Louise met.) However they first became acquainted, Mankiewicz took Brooks under his wing, and gifted her with conversation as well as books by the likes of Aldous Huxley. She gifted him with her presence. They were literary friends. She called him “my favorite person.” (In the New York Times in 1982, John Lahr described Mankiewicz's mentor-ship as the "Louise Brooks Literary Society.")
Brooks’ restlessness – usually in the form an invitation to a night out, led to an increasing number of absences from the Follies. One such occasion was an invitation from Mankiewicz to attend the September 16th Broadway opening of No, No, Nanette, a stage play which Mankiewicz was assigned to review. At dinner before the show, Mankiewicz downed a number of cocktails, and according to the Paris biography, he was “too drunk to stay awake, much less write a coherent review.” And so, the Paris biography notes, “the secretly literate Louise rose to the occasion, took notes, and wrote it for him.” Brooks’ review, “No, No Nanette Full of Vigorous Fun,” which appeared under Mankiewicz’s byline, was published in the New York Times on September 17, 1925. At the time, no one knew the piece, which largely mirrored the opinion of other New York critics, was actually penned by a teenage chorus girl with a penchant for slightly purple prose.
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| Brooks, around the time she knew Mank in NYC |
Brooks and Mankiewicz each headed to Hollywood around the same time. Brooks, then under contract to Paramount, relocated to Los Angeles at the beginning of 1927. And by the end of that same year, Mankiewicz was there as well as head of Paramount's scenario department. In 1927 and 1928, Mankiewicz wrote the titles (the printed dialogue and explanations) for a few dozen films starring the likes of Clara Bow, Wallace Beery, Adolphe Menjou, Esther Ralston and others – and beginning in 1929, the script and dialogue for dozens more talkies. In fact, Mankiewicz wrote the titles for two of Brooks’ films, The City Gone Wild (1927), the lost James Cruze-directed gangster film, and The Canary Murder Case (1929), the celebrated murder mystery based on the bestselling book by S.S. van Dine. Brooks had starring roles in each.
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| Brooks's arrival in Los Angeles on Jan. 6, 1927 |
In the 1920s and 1930s, newspaper and magazine columnists regularly reported on the Hollywood social scene. But surprisingly, Mankiewicz and Brooks’ name never show up together in reference to their attendance at a movie opening, Hollywood nightclub, or party. The closest the two came to any sort of documented contact was in August, 1930 when Los Angeles Times columnist Myrna Nye reported that Brooks attended a Russian themed party at the home of Dimitri Tiomkin in Los Angeles. Also in attendance among the many guests** was Herman Mankiewicz’s younger brother Joseph, another prominent character in Mank. I would assume that Brooks and Joseph Mankiewicz were, at least, acquainted, if only because one says hello to the brother of friend. But whether Herman Mankiewicz and Brooks met again after New York City we don’t know.
A significant part of Mank is set at San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s estate on the Central Coast of California. Brooks spent time there in the late 1920s, at the height of her fame in America. Brooks recalled those visits in her essay “Marion Davies’ Niece,” which first appeared in Film Culture in 1974 and later in her 1982 book, Lulu in Hollywood. Brooks’ essay centers on Pepi Lederer, Davies’ niece and the brother of screenwriter Charles Lederer (another friend of Mankiewicz, and another character in Mank). Brooks and Pepi, a distraught personality who later committed suicide, were close – likely as close as or even closer than Brooks was with Marion Davies, Hearst’s longtime mistress. Brooks knew them all as a regular guest at both Hearst Castle and Davies’ Santa Monica beach house. (The home movie screen capture below shows Brooks sipping a drink at Davies' Santa Monica beach house sometime in 1927 or 1928.)
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| Brooks at Davies' Santa Monica beach house |
Brooks spent only a few years in Hollywood in the 1930s, mostly at the beginning of the decade and then at the end. She left Hollywood for good in 1940, right around the time Mankiewicz was penning the script for Citizen Kane. About two-thirds through the Netflix film, Mank's brother Joe visits him after reading the script. He asks whether Mank wrote the script as a way of getting back at Hearst for various personal and political slights, and if the rumors are true that “Rosebud” is actually named after Hearst’s “pet name for Marion’s genitalia," adding, “I know you would never stoop to that.” Mank laughs it off, and says “only because I haven’t heard.”
In “Remembering Orson Welles,” a 1989 piece by Gore Vidal which first appeared in the New York Review of Books (and later in his book, United States: Essays 1952-1992), the famed novelist states, “In actual life, Rosebud was what Hearst called his friend Marion Davies’s clitoris.” Really? How does Vidal, a latter day figure who claimed no interest in the sex lives of others, know this to be true? Inquiring minds want to know.... Or at least I do. In a follow-up letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books in defense of his claim (which otherwise seems a tossed off sentence in Vidal's remembrances of the director), Vidal notes he had met both Hearst and Davies, but admits neither told him about the significance of Rosebud. Vidal also notes Herman Mankiewicz was a visitor to San Simeon and friend of Davies, and then leaves it at that, but not before referencing some of Louise Brooks' observations of San Simeon and the then just published biography by Barry Paris.
Vidal is being coy… and inquiring minds still want to know who told Vidal Rosebud was Hearst’s pet name for Davies’ clitoris? And ever so long ago, how might that information have gotten to Mankiewicz? If in fact it did? Vidal mentions that he would spill the beans “at a later date” (but seemingly never did), and relates how he also knew Charles Lederer, Davies’ screenwriter nephew. Vidal’s friendship with Lederer came about in the late 1950s, around the time according to Vidal the “matter of Rosebud was much discussed”. The only other clue Vidal offers readers is this, “After all, alcoholic ladies often discuss intimate matters with intimates.” Is Vidal referring to Davies, Brooks, or even himself?
Between the lines, Vidal infers that Davies let slip the meaning of
Rosebud to another women friend who also liked to drink. But who might
that other female drinking buddy have been? Inquiring minds still want to know. It might have been Pepi Lederer, who is known to have had problems with substance abuse.
Or it could have been someone we don't know about, or don't suspect. Brooks is also a possible, or even a probable, candidate. She was friendly
with Marion and knew her circle of friends; and significantly, she had been friendly with Mankiewicz. And
she also liked to drink. However, the question remains, did Mankiewicz and Brooks have any sort of contact in the late 1920s or 1930s?
But let's get back to Gore Vidal. I don't think Vidal ever met Brooks, or corresponded with her. But I do know that she knew who he was. In a March 1977 letter to biographer Tom Dardis, she wrote: "I hope you got more nourishing stuff out of me on Keaton and Schenk than I got out of Ish-Ish on Auden and Vidal." Starved for gossip in her Rochester, New York apartment, Brooks is referring to the English novelist Christopher Isherwood, whom she had met just the month before in February 1977 when he and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, came to visit. At the time, Isherwood told Bachardy, "She's much the most intelligent actress I've ever met."
In his highly regarded 2016 book, Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey, film historian and Welles scholar Harlan Lebo states “‘Rosebud’ may have been Hearst’s personal nickname for Davies’ genitalia—a bit of gossip that Mankiewicz supposedly learned from silent screen star Louise Brooks." The keywords in this sentence are not "Rosebud" and "genitalia," but "may have been" and "supposedly." Lebo doesn't know for sure, and he is making sure we note both his caution and his uncertainty. Lebo also states that Rosebud could also have been the name of a racehorse Mankiewicz knew of, as has been suggested by others, or the name of Mankiewicz's childhood bicycle. In Welles' film, Rosebud is the name of Kane’s childhood sled. Or perhaps. . . . this significant prop could merely be a McGuffin. For Welles, “It didn’t mean a damn thing … We inserted that as a dramatic gimmick, nothing more.” But if it was just a dramatic gimmick, or simply the name of Kane’s childhood sled, why did Hearst (as Vidal wondered) react as strongly as he did back in 1941, wanting at one point to destroy every known print of Citizen Kane?
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| Herman Mankiewicz Pepi Lederer |
Harlan Lebo is a widely respected Welles scholar, an author, and an academic. I mention his book because it is the only one on Welles which I am familiar with which references Louise Brooks in connection with Rosebud. But as is made clear in the above paragraph, Lebo mentions the connection in a qualified manner as one of a few theories (anatomical reference, racehorse, toy, etc...) related to the meaning of Rosebud. That's valid. In an email exchange, Lebo stated "I would like to think that the Rosebud = genitalia story is not true, because if it was, Mankiewicz couldn't have picked a better way to commit career suicide." That is also a valid point.
In his book, Lebo notes his attribution about Davies comes from "Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud's Impact on Early Audiences," a chapter that Robin Bates and Scott Bates wrote for Ron Gottesman's compendium called Perspectives on Citizen Kane. Lebo also noted that Bates' source was Kenneth Anger's 1984 book, Hollywood Babylon II.
As Lebo is certainly aware, and as anyone familiar with film history knows, Kenneth Anger is a problematic figure. His titillating and sometimes snarky books, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II, are full of unsubstantiated gossip. What's in them may be true, or not, or only partly true, but how are we to know? When you place an unflattering picture next to an unsubstantiated claim, a certain amount of implication arises. Like yeast.
On page 159 of Hollywood Babylon II, Anger notes that Rosebud was William Randolph Hearst's pet name for Davies' "pussy-poo". He also notes that Davies drank, and likely shared a "giggled confidence" with someone -- "was it Louise Brooks?" Anger then ads, "as secrets will, one whisper led from mouth to ear to the steel-trap mind of Herman Mankiewicz -- and he made a mental note: Marion Davies = Rosebud." Interestingly, Anger employs a question mark when asking "was it Louise Brooks?" Even he is unsure, or doesn't really know, or won't say.
Despite its unreliability, Anger's 1984 book is worth mentioning as it is the first published source for the Davies-Rosebud-Brooks connection that I have come across. But still inquiring minds want to know, where did Anger get his information? Was it Brooks herself? I think it unlikely, but nevertheless a possibility. Kenneth, if you are reading this, shoot me an email and let me know.
Brooks and Anger met in Paris in the Fall of 1958, while Brooks was being celebrated/rediscovered by Henri Langlois. Anger, along with Lotte Eisner, Preston Sturges, Thomas Quinn Curtis, Man Ray and others visited Brooks, who was holed up in her hotel, reluctant to face the renewed attention to her career. The friendship seemingly continued. Anger went easy on Brooks in Hollywood Babylon (a book first released in France in 1959), describing her as "one of the loveliest visions ever to grace a screen," and only mentioning how she "went from stardom to a Macy's counter in a vertiginous fall from glory." He could have said worse. In 1974, Anger mounted an Art Deco film festival in San Francisco, and among the films he screened was Brooks' sole French effort, Prix de Beaute -- then a rarity. In more recent years, Anger has dropped Brooks' name in reference to comments she supposedly made about his avant-garde films. Notably, when journalist Tom Graves visited Brooks in her Rochester apartment in 1980, one of the books he noticed laying about was a foreign edition of Hollywood Babylon.
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| A first French edition of Hollywood Babylon, like the one Brooks likely owned |
However, in a 1962 letter to frequent correspondent Jan Wahl, Brooks was critical of Anger, and even more critical of Hollywood Babylon, describing it as "A bunch of old dead photographs. A lot of ridiculous mumbo junk. A bunch of old dead gossip. . . ." Had Anger learned the secret meaning of Rosebud during his 1958 meeting in Paris, one might guess that he would have used such a juicy morsel in the first volume of Hollywood Babylon. He didn't. It only shows up in Hollywood Babylon II, which was published in 1984. And so, if Anger deduced the meaning of Rosebud from Brooks, it likely happened in the 1960s or 1970s. And if it was through Brooks, she must have also suggested to Anger that she told Mankiewicz, or someone else, who then relayed it to the screenwriter.
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| "Rosebud" |
With all this said, however, we still don't know and are likely to never know the origins of the tittle-tattle that Brooks supplied Makiewicz with the secret meaning of Rosebud. Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn't. Perhaps Kenneth Anger made it up.
If you haven't seen Mank, be sure and check it out. It is streaming on Netflix, and is an pretty decent if historically problematic film. Gary Oldman is terrific, as is Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst. And if you haven't seen Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, check that out first. It is a great film. And then you'll understand why all the fuss over Rosebud.
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| 1965 portrait of Brooks by Roddy McDowell |
** Also at this notable party were Dashiel Hammett, Humphrey Bogart, Edmund Goulding, King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman, David O. Selznick, Irving Berlin, Colleen Moore, Ernst Lubitsch, Sam Goldwyn, Agnes DeMille, Constance Bennett, Paul Bern, Kay Francis, Benjamin Glazer, Basil Rathbone, Maurice Chevalier, Marie Dressler, and others.
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