Robert Wise : Shadowlands [1&nbsp;ed.] 9780871953476, 9780871952967
Born in Winchester, Indiana, Robert Wise spent much of his youth sitting in darkened movie theaters enthralled by the sw...
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Three Roberts: Robert Wise (center) on the set of Blood on the Moon (1948), with stars Robert Mitchum (left) and Robert Preston.

Images courtesy Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection

Indiana Historical Society Press Indianapolis | 2012

© 2012 Indiana Historical Society Press This book is a publication of the Indiana Historical Society Press Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center 450 West Ohio Street Indianapolis, Indiana 46202-3269 USA http://www.indianahistory.org Telephone orders 1-800-447-1830 Fax orders 1-317-234-0562 Online orders @ http://shop.indianahistory.org The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gehring, Wes D. Robert Wise : shadowlands / Wes D. Gehring. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and filmography. ISBN 978-0-87195-296-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Wise, Robert, 1914-2005. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. I. Title. PN1998.3.W569G46 2012 791.4302’33092— dc23 [B] 2011034751

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

To my daughters, Sarah and Emily, who suggested I write this book many years ago.

Robert Wise: Shadowlands is made possible through the generous support of Margot Lacy Eccles.

Margot Lacy Eccles (far left) and her mother Edna Balz Lacy (left) joins Robert Wise (center) at Franklin College in 1968 upon the occasion of Wise receiving an honorary degree.

“A Robert Wise Film is . . .” Where even the best battlers are told, “You’ll always be just one punch away.”* A setting where desperate characters are “just trying to find a hole in the fence like everyone else.” About passionate people who try to make a difference but often die asking, “What the hell happened?” Where even a Christlike character talks tough, “Live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.” Where “the hills are alive with the sound of music” but the valleys are full of Nazis. A world where the motto might be, “Life is like coffee; the aroma is better than the . . . [taste].” — Wes D. Gehring *All quotes are drawn from Robert Wise films and appear in the following order: The Set-Up, Odds Against Tomorrow, The Sand Pebbles, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sound of Music, and Born to Kill.

Contents Foreword Preface Prologue Chapter 1 The Early Years

xi xiii xxiii 1

Chapter 2 A Career Detour: 1930s Hollywood

17

Chapter 3 Orson Welles

31

Chapter 4 Val Lewton and Becoming a Director

59

Chapter 5 Lewton and Maupassant: A Template Picture

83

Chapter 6 Wise’s First Noir Classic: Born to Kill 101 Chapter 7 Signature Cinema: The Set-Up 117 Chapter 8 Life After RKO: The Day the Earth Stood Still and Genre Diversity

135

Chapter 9 Melodrama in Various War Settings: Run Silent, Run Deep as Metaphor

155

Chapter 10 “Portraits” and Biographies Doubling as Melodramas and/or Noirs

175

Chapter 11 Wise’s Brass-Ring Decade: The 1960s

207

Chapter 12 Filmmaking: “A Terribly Expensive Paint Box”

245

Epilogue

279

Filmography

287

Notes

293

Select Bibliography

315

Foreword David L. Smith A film colony worker of some repute once said of Robert Wise, “For all his genius and success, Bob’s a very shy man. Sometimes that’s the way it is with giants.” When I first met Robert Wise on the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I, too, was impressed with his quiet demeanor and his soft voice. At that time he was a double Oscar winner twice and one of the world’s foremost film directors and producers. After we began our interview in his office on the Paramount lot, it became apparent in many ways that he was just a grown-up little boy from rural Indiana. He put me at ease, as he must have put hundreds of actors at ease over the years when he was making such films as The Body Snatcher (a horror masterpiece), The Set-Up (perhaps the finest film on boxing ever made), and his wonderful adaptation of West Side Story. These are impressive credentials for three directors, but the versatility of Wise is mirrored throughout his body of work. Like his fellow Hoosier, Howard Hawks, Wise cannot be pigeonholed. In an American Film Institute seminar in 1980 Wise told students, “People ask me, do I prefer to do musicals to drama or comedy? I like them all. If it’s good, exciting, gripping, original material, that’s what’s important, what counts.” It is indeed fortunate that author Wes Gehring has at last given us a biography that places Wise in the company of other great and distinguished directors who brought their creativity and skill to projects large and small. Wise brought something more than routine treatment to what would have been otherwise routine pictures. His films have explored a whole spectrum of subject matter, from strong personal drama to movies of mass dimensions, but through it all Wise controlled his films with a sure hand and personal vision.

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This book provides us with a serious, comprehensive study of a great director. Gehring is a prolific author and a preeminent scholar of motion picture history. He presents compelling evidence for Wise to take a deserved place in the ranks of auteur directors. After a long career in broadcast television where he wrote and hosted a pioneering movie series titled When Movies Were Movies, David L. Smith became a professor of telecommunications at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 1998 he was designated a professor emeritus and has since written two books on movies, Hoosiers in Hollywood (2006) and Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb (2011).

Preface “I made my decision in art school; if I’m going to be an artist of whatever description, I want the maximum exposure,not just paint-your-little-pictures-in-theattic-and-don’t-show-them-to-anybody.” 1 John Lennon

As the following pages document, filmmaker Robert Wise, like most popular artists, had formulated a similar creative philosophy at an equally young age. After all, Wise’s favorite childhood moments were spent in darkened movie theaters watching the action-adventure comedies of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. But one component of this Wise biography chronicles how such a seemingly simple entertainment philosophy could, on occasion (when it involved Orson Welles or a musical set in Austria), cause controversy. My personal catalyst, however, for writing this life, is to thoroughly chart the recurring patterns in Wise’s pictures. The standard modus operandi on Wise limits him to being a great craftsman. While having professional proficiency is no small achievement, more important, Wise put his signature upon a large divertingly diverse body of work. The consistent themes and characters that link his films have long been neglected by cinema history. A wordsmith might rephrase the opening sentence of this paragraph to read, “My personal catalyst is to write/ right a representation of Wise’s life.” Sadly, some otherwise wonderful books about Wise’s work have minimized his auteur status.² Moreover, like many commercial “name” artists, some critics/historians feel more comfortable elevating misfires over milestones, such as John Baxter calling Wise’s Star! (1968) the director’s “most satisfying musical,” instead of either West Side Story (1961) or The Sound of Music (1965).³ The case for Wise the auteur might start with his most iconic movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). This science-fiction classic is a landmark antinuclear weapons warning from a Christlike alien who assumes the earthly name of Carpenter. Playing upon populist Frank

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Capra overtones, it is reminiscent of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), with laser guns. But unlike Capra’s stereotypical “we can work it out” finale, The Day the Earth Stood Still closes with the planet’s future very much in doubt. Wise, however, was involved in creating countless earlier watershed films, starting with his Oscar-nominated editing of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Because his initial home studio was the modest RKO, Wise was allowed to move into directing at a time when a castelike situation existed at the major film factories, á la once an editor always an editor. Wise is best known for producing and directing two of the most memorable movie musicals in cinema history, West Side Story (codirector Jerome Robbins) and The Sound of Music, for which he won four Academy Awards—two Best Picture and Best Directors Oscars. Yet, other than Howard Hawks, Wise was arguably Hollywood’s most versatile director of various celebrated genre films. For example, his roots in horror go back to a tutelage under the great producer Val Lewton, with Wise directing Boris Karloff’s chilling The Body Snatcher (1945) for Lewton. Years later Wise brilliantly adapted a Shirley Jackson novel as a homage to Lewton, The Haunting (1963). No less a horror aficionado than Stephen King later gave both Jackson’s novel (originally titled The Haunting of Hill House) and the film his highest praise in his nonfiction study of horror, Danse Macabre. Other pivotal pictures by Wise often qualified for unique status in multiple genres. For example, The Set-Up (1949) is both a compelling example of film noir and the problem film—dissecting the sport’s brutality and manipulation by the mob. Paradoxically, Set-Up is also possibly the best boxing picture ever made. No less an auteur than Martin Scorsese was a huge fan of Wise’s work, and he made his fight film, Raging Bull (1980), distinctly different from Set-Up in order to avoid comparisons with Wise’s movie, which won the Critic’s Prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Later film historians were unanimous in their praise for Set-Up. In their study of Hollywood in

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the 1940s, Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg wrote: “The film was staged at night and haunted by a vivid range of nocturnal characters. . . the boxing scenes have a harshness, a sure feeling for cruelty and mob hysteria that have seldom been surpassed.”⁴ Along similar multiple genre lines, Wise’s I Want to Live! (1958, for which Susan Hayward won a Best Actress Oscar) is both a biography film of convicted murder Barbara Graham and a gutsy problem film

Robert Wise directing Marayat Andriane in The Sand Pebbles (1966).

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against capital punishment. Somebody up There Likes Me (1956, with Paul Newman) excels at biography (chronicling the life of boxer Rocky Graziano), the problem film (Graziano’s juvenile delinquency youth), and the sport of boxing. Wise’s The Sand Pebbles (1966) is an inspired antiwar film keying upon a cynical sailor (Steve McQueen in his only Oscar-nominated role) on a U.S. gunboat in 1926 China. The anti-American imperialism message was really about the country’s 1960s involvement in the Vietnam War. Not since Buster Keaton’s casting in The General (1927) had there been such an organic connection between a star and a giant prop. McQueen’s minimalist acting builds upon his relationship with mechanical objects—a nonverbal way of extending his character. Sand Pebbles allowed McQueen to define his figure through the care of the gunboat’s engine room, just as Keaton had done with his defining maintenance of the steam engine title character The General. The ironic poignancy for both characters (one tragic, one comic), was that each figure preferred the safety/predictability of something mechanical over relationships with chaotic, hurtful humans. In these movies and many others, Wise brought a consistent auteur mindset to a wide assortment of genres. Auteur status is more readily apparent if one focuses upon a single genre, such as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller or a John Ford Western. But Wise themes and characters are consistent picture to picture: a noirish world (even his musicals feature street gangs and Nazis); a positive handful struggle against a boorish mob; a championing of the often melodramatic plight of women, minorities, and the young; and questioning of the military and all wars, including the domestic collateral damage that accompanied even the “good war” (World War II). Still, Wise characters fight against their fate, even if it is pointless. This pointlessness, summed up by McQueen’s dying words in the defining movie moment of Sand Pebbles—“What the hell happened?”—had movingly surfaced throughout Wise’s oeuvre. But since Sand Pebbles is one of the director’s most personalized projects, it

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can be seen as a microcosm of the dark side in Wise’s movies. Starting with the ongoing antiwar message (including the racist subtext inherent to imperialism), Sand Pebbles also examines how prejudice often guarantees heartbreak for biracial relationships. Sand Pebbles provides viewers with two such couples. The conventional romantic variety is played out between an American seaman (Richard Attenborough) and a young forced-into-prostitution Chinese girl (Marayat Andriane). A myriad of circumstances transpire to make this coupling end tragically. Along the way to this sad conclusion, one sees other classic Wise themes. The director is an ardent feminist and Andriane is yet another Wise woman/child protagonist whose life has been an unending melodrama. Hope briefly surfaces in a new relationship (Attenborough), but his death will leave her even more vulnerable. Another twist on a biracial Sand Pebbles couple keys upon Jake (McQueen) and his Chinese assistant Po-Han (Mako, in an Oscarnominated performance). Though it was common for American naval ships in the Pacific theater in the 1920s to take on Chinese laborers, there was often a racist attitude toward these workers. But McQueen’s loner seamen and Po-Han bond over their shared fascination with the care of the ship’s engine. At this time China was in the midst of a civil war involving Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, an embryonic Chinese Communist Party, and assorted regional warloads. The one thing these various factions agreed upon, however, was the need to rid China of foreign powers. American forces, such as McQueen’s ship, were trying to be international policemen yet somehow remain neutral. Late in the movie the Nationalists kidnap Po-Han and begin to torture him on the beach near the American ship in hopes of provoking a military incident. The captain (Richard Crenna) commands that nothing be done. But a distraught Jake disobeys and, taking a rifle from a fellow sailor, mercifully shoots and kills Po-Han. This violent death, predicated upon a rare instance of McQueen’s character letting his emotional guard

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down, foreshadows Jake’s own violent death when he once again comes out of his loner shell. Like the horror and film noir genres in which Wise started his career, survival in the Sand Pebbles world is contingent upon doing as little as possible. To get involved with someone and/or something is tantamount to a death sentence. Despite a dark realism (bordering upon naturalism) that Wise brought to most movie projects, the private man was charmingly upbeat. A proudly passionate liberal, both on screen and off, he championed the extreme long shot in real life, too. Yet, as a true secular humanist, he respected various perspectives, as long as no one’s rights were compromised. For example, the Joseph McCarthy-era blacklisting of Hollywood artists during the 1950s was repugnant to him. He fought against this un-American cancer in every way possible, from resisting pressure to drop an alleged “Red” actor from The Day the Earth Stood Still, to the use of a blacklisted writer (via “a front”) on Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). But later in life Wise was able to accept director Elia Kazan as a friend, despite this filmmaker’s controversial “friendly witness” status as someone who “named names.” Wise agreed with the comments of former blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, who stated upon receiving the Writers Guild Laurel Award (1970) for lifetime achievement: “We were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us—right, left or center—emerged from that long nightmare without sin.”⁵ To borrow a line from critic David Orr, “It’s tough to be a Grand Old Man of—well, anything, really.”⁶ But Wise managed to fill that role for cinema with the same panache as winning Oscars. He gave back to the industry in a multitude of ways, from encouraging and guiding young talent to playing film historian at large, forever providing insights about past screen classics. Writer C. S. Lewis once observed, “I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting.”⁷ This sentiment is also frequently applied to

Elia Kazan (center) and Marlon Brando (left) discussing the stool pigeon scene from On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan’s subtextual defense for “naming names”).

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biographies. And whether or not the best part of the book in hand addresses the early years, it was certainly the most fun to research. This involved the assistance of several people from Wise’s hometown of Centerville, Indiana. From the Connersville Public Library, Fayette County historian Paulette Hayes was invaluable. In the Connersville High School, media teacher Joe Glowacki was equally important, with librarians Kim Giesting and Kathy Caldwell helping me track down Wise’s early writing. Plus, two of the filmmaker’s high school classmates, Charles and Jackie Heck, were kind enough to grant me a long interview, as well as answer random questions through correspondence. A number of special collections immeasurably enriched this study: the Robert Wise Collection in the Cinema Arts Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; the Warner Brothers Archive, USC School of Cinema Arts; the Robert Wise clipping files at the Connersville High School; the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; the Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, New York; and the microfilm “Tombs” (dead newspaper) section of New York City’s Main Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Many people made this project possible, starting with Ray E. Boomhower, Indiana Historical Society Press senior editor. I am forever grateful to his support of my writing. Ball State Emeritus Professors Dave Smith and Conrad Lane provided valuable advice during the writing of the manuscript, with Dave also penning the foreword. In Los Angeles historian Anthony Lane, USC archivist Ned Comstack, and film specialists Joe and Maria Pacino were pivotal to this study. Jean Thurman was responsible for the computer preparation of the manuscript. Janet Werrner was a tireless copyeditor. Kris Scott assisted in additional manuscript troubleshooting. My former chairman, “Dr. Joe” Misiewicz, facilitated university financial travel funds. And friends and family were ever so patient and helpful throughout the long process of researching and writing a book. Thank you one and all.

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As a final fitting addendum to my subject, I must include this anecdote. As I was doing Wise research at USC, I asked directions to the university’s Warner Brothers Archive, located just off campus. I was told to exit the college’s main gate and go to Hope Street, where the warehouse structure would be visable. What struck me about the directions, however, were their poetically appropriate description of my subject’s work—“It’s just beyond Hope.”

Prologue Shadowlands “The beginning and end of the business from the author’s point of view is the art of making the audience believe that real things are happening to real people.” 1 George Bernard Shaw

When RKO’s now celebrated producer Val Lewton gave Robert Wise the opportunity to direct, Lewton gifted his young friend with a creative blueprint to follow, an essay titled “The Art of Rehearsal.” Written by the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, the above quote is the text’s first major tenet. Wise, a former college journalism major and a Lewton disciple, was already predisposed toward realism. Thus, Shaw’s essay immediately becomes Wise’s guide to directing. Plus, with Lewton having already applied the playwright’s “Art of Rehearsal” philosophy to the RKO horror picture department in which Wise found himself, it is hardly surprising that the young filmmaker’s subsequent movies ooze stylized realism. Shaw’s essay, which originally surfaced as the Collier’s Weekly essay, “Make Them Do It Well,” also includes several leadership tips that could now double as a description of Wise’s directing methods.² While I would hesitate in calling the document Wise’s creative Rosetta Stone (see the Lewton-related chapters, 3 and 4), Shaw’s essay could be a description of Wise at work. The playwright’s great emphasis on a director’s thorough preparation would have reinforced Wise’s workaholic blue-collar mentality. Second, unlike a diva director with whom Wise had already worked (Orson Welles), Shaw suggested that leadership is not being disruptive. Like any parent, one must be forever sensitive to the players/coworkers: “If a thing is wrong and you don’t know exactly how to set it right, say nothing. Wait until you find out the right thing to do, or until the actor does. It discourages and maddens an actor to be told you are dissatisfied. If you cannot help

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him, let him alone.”³ As the following pages document, the congenial Wise was a democratically friendly force on his films, with a Wise movie set being known in the industry as a professionally pleasant and efficient work environment. Third, Shaw’s tone is all about nurturing: create a safe rehearsal zone where it is all right to fail. On more than one occasion he cites the danger of being a martinet “schoolmaster,” noting: “If you get angry, and complain that you have repeatedly called attention . . . [to some mistake], like a schoolmaster, you will destroy the whole atmosphere in which art breathes, and make a scene which is not in the play, and a very disagreeable and invariably unsuccessful scene at that.”⁴

George Bernard Shaw (right) with Charlie Chaplin (circa 1930).

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One is tempted to compare actors to children in Shaw’s article, an analogy that has existed since the beginning of “pretend.” The stereotypical performer is talented but very insecure and needs constant positive strokes—first from a director and then from an audience. A metamorphosis into another character is a very delicate process, like trying to grow up. Consequently, such an actor/child subtext is a helpful interpretation of the director as thoughtful parent. But it is noted here for another reason. An inordinately large number of Wise films involve a childlike protagonist. Wise was known as an “actor’s director” (performers felt safe under his leadership—he would not make them look bad), who was also celebrated for his rapport with child actors. Shaw did not necessarily teach Wise those values. But at the least, the essay further encouraged a soft-sell philosophy, especially when Wise’s film mentor (Lewton) was already practicing this approach. Ironically, given this supportive secular humanist method/ environment embraced by Wise, his directing break came in an RKO division specializing in horror films. This is a genre known for its nonpopulist slant on the people. That is, not only are its characters capable of unspeakable acts, a sort of mob mentality/fear governs the rest of the populace. But as the opening chapter demonstrates, Wise had an early appreciation of dark comedy, a component frequently inherent to horror. Thus, he thrived in an RKO/Lewton incubator of horror that made his later transition to the studio’s other specialized related genre (film noir) a natural, with dark comedy being a pivotal element here, too. This biography’s subtitle, “Shadowlands,” is drawn, in part, from both Wise’s dark comedy interests and his early directing in horror and film noir. But to come full circle to Shaw’s opening quote on “making the audience believe that real things are happening to real people,” Wise’s ongoing perspective on cinema stories, regardless of the genre, equated realism with a dark worldview. If one of his movie titles could sum up his filmography it would be Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Yes, there are Wise pictures with happy endings but they are usually

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long shots made palatable by being anchored in true stories, such as Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) or The Sound of Music (1965). Even then, as the former title suggests, it feels like an act of God is necessary for a positive outcome—deus ex machina (Latin for “god out of the machine”).

Robert Wise’s beloved Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (on top), with Charlie Chaplin (left), director Ernst Lubitsch, and Mary Pickford — the three most popular actors of Wise’s childhood (circa late 1920s).

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The “shadowlands” moniker for Wise also goes beyond the traditional underdog long-shot story. There is a “problem film” component to many of his movies tied to prejudice based upon gender, age, and race. Henry David Thoreau essentially wrote about “shadowlands” when he said, “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Wise films frequently up the “shadowland” ante by the various prejudice factors. “Shadowlands” also works as a moniker for a man, like Wise, who was so consumed by his pictures that his personal life was forever under the radar. Like Lewton, Wise was joyfully consumed by his work. This passion for pictures was originally anchored in his Indiana childhood devotion to the silent films of swashbuckling action comedy star Douglas Fairbanks Sr. The actor once described his athletic screen persona, which openly courted the young, as an attempt “to catch the real spirit of youth . . . [which] doesn’t take the time to walk around obstacles but hurdles them.”⁵ While Wise’s movies often explored topics impossible to hurdle, his climb from manual laborer at RKO to a multiple Oscar winner has a certain Fairbanks flair.

1 The Early Years Robert Wise’s (1914–2005) filmmaking philosophy was also how he lived his life: “Mine is a prepared approach with ample room for improvising as we go along.” 1 Robert Wise’s practical homework-orientated mindset came from a heartland beginning. The Oscar–winning director was born in Richmond, Indiana, on September 10, 1914, just as Europe was becoming engulfed in World War I. He was the third son of Earl and Olive “Ollie” Longenecker Wise, who, like most Americans, were more concerned with building a strong home for their growing family than foreign wars. The couple had married in their late teens (April 14, 1904), with Lloyd being born in 1905, and David following in 1907. Earl found a more lucrative way to support his family when Robert was eight years old. It was early 1923 and the Richmond butcher jumped at the chance to establish his own meat-packing plant in larger nearby Connersville (population 9,901 in 1920).2 Roughly twice the size of Richmond, Connersville had a booming economy and was then known as “Little Detroit,” given that several pioneering automobiles (such as the racing Lexington) were made there. The community’s rapid growth was reflected by the fact that young Robert’s first year in the Connersville school system (1922–23) coincided with the highest enrollment in the city’s history.3 Connersville, which Wise pinpointed for non-Hoosiers as “halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati,” was his beloved hometown

Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s athletic/balletic persona is caught in this pose from The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

The Early Years

for the next decade. Fittingly, given the boy’s eventual Hollywood career, his favorite pastime was going to the movies. This phenomenon had dramatically increased for the general population, too, given the box-office bonanza produced by Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp persona, introduced to film audiences in a series of short subjects the same year Wise was born. Though a fan of Chaplin’s iconic alter ego, Robert was most taken with the comedian’s best friend, swashbuckling screen legend Douglas Fairbanks Sr. The handsome, athletic Fairbanks was the “Indiana Jones” of silent cinema. He brought both grace and humor to such groundbreaking action adventure films as The Mark of Zorro (1920), The Three Musketeers (1921), Robin Hood (1922), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and The Black Pirate (1926). To adequately gauge Fairbanks impact upon Wise’s generation keep in mind that Batman creator Bob Kane credited Fairbanks with being a pivotal influence for his caped crusader, sort of a modern “winged Zorro.”4 In a 1998 interview Wise recalled his own obsession with the actor: I was a big fan of Doug Fairbanks, Sr. in those days. He was just marvelous and did all of his own stunts and everything. I could not wait for his new picture to come out. As a matter of fact, I remember once when I was nine or ten his new picture had come out. . . [Fairbanks’s only new film during that period was The Thief of Bagdad ], and I went that evening to the movies to see it. I decided to stay through and see it again. I was halfway through it when I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder; my older brother [David] had been sent over to drag me home— I shouldn’t have been out that late looking at movies.5 Besides the obvious escapist fun Fairbanks symbolized for young boys such as Wise and Kane, the action star’s righting-wrongs persona is seemingly also reflected in Batman’s pursuit of justice, and the social themes frequently at the heart of Wise’s pictures. New York Times critic and later screenwriter Frank S. Nugent beautifully summarized the Fairbanks multifaceted magic for the young, and the young at heart, in a 1939 tribute after the actor’s death: “There wasn’t a small boy in

3

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the neighborhood who did not, in a Fairbanks picture, see himself triumphing over the local bully, winning the soft-eyed adoration of whatever ten-year-old blonde he had been courting, and wreaking vengeance on the teacher who made him stand in the corner that afternoon.”6 Years before, on the eve of Fairbanks’s greatest triumphs (1921), the actor had described his athletic screen persona in a manner that openly courted the young: “In my efforts to portray the . . . American boy . . . I was trying to catch the real spirit of youth . . . the spirit that . . . dashes impetuously at what it wants, that doesn’t take the time to walk around obstacles, but hurdles them—the fine, restless, impatient, conquering spirit of youth.”7 Both Wise and Kane would, however, later couch their own variations on Fairbanks justice, and/or simply enthusiastically embracing one’s personal salvation, in a noirish world that suggested hope might be a commodity on the way out. After his retirement, Wise briefly touched upon this dichotomy when accepting the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award: “I fell under the spell of the movies [early]. They show us the best we are capable of and the dangers to avoid. I hope I’ve made a small difference.”8 In addition to Fairbanks’s mesmerizingly athletic movie image, the actor also courted the young with a groundbreaking series of inexpensive popular self-help books for boys. Though actually ghostwritten with his personal secretary, Kenneth Davenport, the practical advice about discipline and being all you can be are consistent with Fairbanks’s mindset and movies. With titles such as Laugh and Live and Making Life Worthwhile, the books entertainingly preached a regimen that played particularly well to Middle America. For example, in the former text Fairbanks encourages an ongoing celebration of “inner determination” that “once firmly implanted in one’s nature, cannot be destroyed or conquered.”9 But this “seize the day” mentality is alive in various ways on every page of these books, from praising life experience, “horse sense,” to encouraging scholarship: “These men [like Lincoln] made eternal friends of certain great thinkers and drank in

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their learning with all the fervor of their natures.”10 These are sentiments that would not have been out of place coming from the award-winning Wise, such as the director’s late-in-life summation of his career: “I think many of my films have an importance to them in what they say about man and his condition and the world around him, how he faces it and overcomes it. I always want my films to have a comment to make.”11 The young Wise’s fascination with Fairbanks, and movies in general, was also fueled by the sheer volume of cinema then available. Unlike today, when new films traditionally open on Friday, the small-town world of Wise’s childhood frequently saw three movie changes a week. The theater schedule was often prestige pictures playing Sunday to Tuesday, B films and children’s matinee serials on Friday and Saturday, and the offbeat, hard-to-pigeonhole films Wednesday and Thursday. While Wise’s childhood screening habit of seeing three movies a week remains impressive, given the period’s quick turnover of pictures and Connersville’s then three theaters, he had had a great deal of films from which to choose. Three picture houses, however, did give the Connersville film fans some leeway on the weekly schedule noted above. That is, the city’s Vaudette theater had a greater propensity to play boy-pleasing action adventure films such as Westerns starring Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and Buck Jones—three of Wise’s cowboy favorites. Connersville’s Lyric theater focused upon prestige releases such as Lon Chaney in Laugh Clown Laugh, and King Vidor’s The Crowd (which both played there in July 1928).12 The Auditorium’s film fare fell between these two extremes, but the theater’s special draw was its added attraction of vaudeville acts on Friday and Saturday. All three theaters were within easy walking distance of the Wise home at 520 Eastern Avenue. Providentially, when Wise’s oldest brother, Lloyd, and his father opened a meat market in 1928, the shop was on the same block (Central Avenue) as the children’s matinee friendly Vaudette. While one can imagine Robert dropping by the family business to panhandle movie money from his father, it might not have been a hard sell. Earl and Ollie enjoyed taking their boys to Indianapolis on Sunday for dinner and a movie.13

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Though the practical Wise initially decided to turn his creative interest in writing toward journalism instead of the movies, being a Hoosier in Hollywood was then less of a long shot. One could almost say there was an Indiana pipeline to filmland during the silent era, ranging from Wise’s Western heroes such as Maynard and Jones, to Fairbanks’s Thief of Bagdad leading lady Julanne Johnston. Several Hollywood Hoosiers, such as Jones (Vincennes’s most famous entertainer until Red Skelton), made a point of working with transplanted Indiana natives, including a young Carole Lombard.14 In 1928 this movie migration took on a more personal slant for Wise. That year his older brother, David, went to Hollywood, and his eventual behind-the-scenes employment at RKO ultimately was the catalyst for brother Robert’s move west in 1933. Yet, until just prior to Wise’s economy-driven exit for California, being a newspaper man had been his goal. Thankfully, there is a time-tripping window back to young Wise the journalist—his columns for his high school newspaper, The Clarion. Moreover, keep in mind this was no ordinary senior high publication. Wise’s school newspaper, which also included the nationally syndicated work of prominent columnists and cartoonists, could easily have passed as a medium-sized metropolitan publication. The future filmmaker’s humor column, “Wise Crax,” was a forum in which the teenager addressed an assortment of subjects, from his beloved basketball (seemingly a basic component of Indiana DNA), to provocative popculture references, such as a poem to be recited “to the tune of [Cab Calloway’s street saga] of ‘Minnie the Moocher.’”15 Wise’s comic writing was not unlike that of celebrated period humorist Robert Benchley, who was also a popular screen personality of the 1930s and 1940s. In drawing from a sampling (all from 1932) of both these Roberts, several parallels became apparent. Each has a democratic desire to be pleasingly honest, and initially hopeful. Thus, Benchley optimistically begins a piece upon stress between strangers: “Nobody would like to see the Brotherhood of Man come to pass any more than I would, for I am not a very good fighter and even have

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difficulty holding my own in a battle of repartee. I am more the passive type, and I would be glad to have everybody else passive, too. But I am afraid that can’t be done.”16 That same year Wise wrote, “We hate to disappoint some of you. In fact, it is entirely against our policy to disappoint anybody, but the time has come.”17 Both of these vulnerable antiheroic humorists had, however, a dark side that was often driven by the boorish behavior of others. Wise devoted part of a column to inappropriate audience actions: “After seeing that Jeff [basketball] game we have about decided that a lot of fans could stand a few lessons on ‘How to Act at a Ball Game.’”18 In a later column he then ironically applauded “the new permanent bleachers in the gym. Lots more room to kick the [rude] fellows in front of you in the back.”19 Benchley took his Emily Post payback to a more black humor extreme: “I once heard a woman laugh at that most tragic moment in all drama, the off-stage shot in ‘The Wild Duck,’ and I afterward had her killed, so there will be no more of that out of her.”20 Of course, Wise could be equally surreal in his inspired use of dark comedy: “Our idea of an unpleasant surprise—trying to pull the big roller down at the tennis courts. After an unsuccessful attempt one gets

Robert Benchley, one of America’s favorite humorists during the 1930s and 1940s.

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the impression that the darn thing must be filled with the dead bodies of every tennis player that ever lived, to say nothing of dead balls and old rackets. Fear not. . . . It is filled with some kind of sand. And what sand!”21 Given the topic of boorish behavior, one should note that Wise came of age in an era dripping with satirical commentary on provincial small-town values/prejudices, from the novels of Sinclair Lewis to such iconic Grant Wood paintings as American Gothic (1930). Artists such as Lewis, Wood, and critic H. L. Mencken (who christened conservative middle-class Americans the “booboisie”) could be called that period’s The Daily Show with John Stewart. Like today, younger people are often attracted to edgy antiestablishment entertainment. Fittingly, while Wise’s later movies, regardless of genre, usually include some figure of hope, his general picture of humanity is often as damning as that of Lewis, Wood, and Mencken, or Wise’s favorite humorist, Mark Twain. Wise’s Benchley-like dark-comedy musings are his first expression of this shared mindset. Benchley and Wise also had casually charming manners for refusing to take themselves any more seriously than their target subjects. One might label their technique “parentheses second thoughts.” Consequently, more macabre merriment by Benchley had him observing, “People interested in murders (and who, aside possibly from the victims themselves, is not interested in murders?).”22 Along similarly self-conscious comic lines, the nonworking Wise wrote, “We would have given a week’s salary (what salary?) to have seen [track star] Stranahan’s face.”23 All in all, Benchley and Wise were often timid nonathletes emboldened-by-words voyeurs who fought a fifth-column comic action against an insensitive real world. Over time, Benchley, the veteran, focused his amusing defensive diversions in high-profile screen appearances. In contrast, Wise did just the opposite, as a major Hollywood director his future metaphorical “Wise Crax” would be sublimated through social statements in an assortment of film genres.

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So what was Wise like away from his newspaper platform? High school classmates Jackie Mabee and Charles Heck, long since married and still living in Connersville in 2009, remembered the director “as a quiet student but easy to talk to.”24 In a lengthy interview with the couple, they described a boy obsessed with the movies, a good student (all three youngsters were in college-prep classes not available to mediocre students), and a family-like social scene where “group dating” was the norm. This small-town casual interaction is borne out in one of the letters Wise later wrote to the Hecks. In chronicling the Washington, D.C., premiere of his award-winning musical West Side Story, sponsored by First Lady Jackie Kennedy for the benefit of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Wise shared a pleasing surprise: “It turned out that the Director of the Institute is our old classmate Robert Richman. When Bob saw the information he immediately called me wanting to know for sure if this was the same Robert Wise who graduated from CHS. We talked by phone and saw each other on a couple of different occasions in Washington for long periods of time.”25 Then, as now, the formal dance “prom” was the big event for Connersville High School. But the Hecks shared their era’s propensity to throw numerous informal parties, especially around scavenger and/ or treasure-hunt themes. When I asked the couple about popular hangouts, they both mentioned a downtown ice cream parlor, the “Ideal.” But in a later letter, Jackie added: “a more popular [meeting place] was the ‘Elliott-Hood’ Drugstore, which was across the street from the high school. There was also a [nearby] drugstore named ‘Spicely’s.’ Both of these were very popular . . . after school was out. Not having cars of our own we couldn’t do much running around.”26 Besides shared free time at the drugstores, the Hecks and Wise had other common interests. All three were members of the Aeneid (poetry) club, with young Robert and Jackie also being in the various school choruses. Given that the musical genre later led to four Academy Awards for Wise, the Hecks revealed a telling entertainment fact. The theatrical event of the 1920s was the visit by a world-famous European

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singer, which the city’s front-page newspaper coverage chronicled as the “Golden Voice and the Woman Make Schumann-Heink [a] Truly Great Artist.”27 With a repertoire ranging from “Erlkonig” (Schubert) to “Danny Boy,” the capacity audience at the then new high school auditorium gave Madame Schumann-Heink almost “a continuous ovation.”28 Equally beloved for her lack of ego and earthy humor, something Wise would also undoubtedly have appreciated, one such SchumannHeink tale from her Connersville visit was told and retold locally through the years: “When she appeared here . . . she was trying to get her well upholstered bulk through a narrow doorway and was advised, ‘Try it sideways,’ she exclaimed, ‘Mein Gott! I haf no sideways.’”29 Wise’s fascination with performers, from cinema’s Fairbanks to road-show visitors such as Schumann-Heink, belied his own thespian fears about being in front of an audience. Nearly sixty years after the director’s graduation, when the Connersville School Board decided to name the high school auditorium after him (1990), Wise shared these anxieties with a media instructor at his alma mater: “Joe Glowaski said Wise talked about when he never thought he was good enough to be on stage. Instead, he worked behind the stage all the time. Wise said he regretted [not acting] . . . because having the experience of being directed by someone on stage may have helped him along as a director.”30 While one cannot change the past, the driven director attempted to keep other young artists from making the same mistake. On the 2005 DVD voice-over track for his film The Body Snatcher (1945), Wise advised young filmmakers: “I always tell students who think they want to direct, while you’re here [in school], find some time to go over to the theater department and get in some stage plays. And find out how it is from an actor’s standpoint to be up there . . . [on the stage]. I think that will help you very much in your directing career.”31 Still, to play devil’s advocate, maybe Wise’s acting fears made him more a pure student of performance, teaching him to better appreciate what he would need from his film actors. Regardless, for

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the consummate professional Wise, it was never too late to play catch up. In the early 1940s, on the verge of directing opportunities (after a seminal RKO editing career that included an Oscar nomination for Citizen Kane, 1941), Wise began to audit acting classes. Coupled with this midwestern work ethic, further encouraged by the Great Depression, Wise and his classmates were given an unexpected tutorial on cooperation. Only four weeks into their senior year, what was described at the time as a “fiery catastrophe” (October 2, 1931) gutted Connersville High School.32 From October to midApril, high school students had half-day afternoon sessions at the junior high building, while the largely destroyed structure was rebuilt. This education in shifts was not only a catalyst for the power of making do—travail as the crucible that redeems—but the new, improved facility also produced, according to the student yearbook, both a greater appreciation of and “a more sentimental feeling for their school . . . [and] after six months they were ‘at home’ again.”33 Still, given Wise’s dark sense of humor and prominent involvement on the yearbook staff, the “Wise Crax” columnist probably had something to do with the title selected for the 1931–32 yearbook, the Senior Siren. During this problematic school year, a beautiful, young, dynamic English and drama teacher, Pearl Bartley, joined the faculty. She became a creative arts force at the school and in the community for the next forty years, including being the longtime sponsor and director of the “Strut and Fret” plays.34 Though Mabee, Heck, and Wise only had contact with Bartley during their senior year, nearly eighty years later the Hecks immediately named her as the teacher who had made the greatest impact upon their graduating class.35 In addition to the classroom, Wise worked behind the scenes on at least one theater production directed by Bartley. She might also have given stage directions to the future filmmaker in a Connersville High School production (1931–32) of Miss Cherry Blossom, a Japanese comic operetta in which Wise was part of the chorus. This play was “very popular with American High School theatre departments of the 1920s and 1930s, not unlike Bye Bye Birdie is today,” noted Kim Giesting,

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present-day librarian at the high school.36 Bartley would presumably have directed Blossom, but surviving records only document Wise’s involvement.37 The full extent of this teacher/director’s influence upon Wise is undoubtedly lost in the proverbial “cracks of time.” But it seems safe to assume that, at the very least, Bartley would have reinforced Wise’s interest in the dramatic arts, and possibly even impacted the decidedly feminist direction of many of his later films, including Valentina Cortese moving from World War II refugee to film-noir survivor in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), or the Jane Wyman teacher who raises her son to be self-sufficient in the 1953 adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel So Big. Regardless, one might couple this Bartley connection with a comment Wise made near the end of his life: “[Success is a combination of talent] and the people we meet along the way, that help us . . . [grow, and] I had that throughout my career.”38 Interestingly, maybe Wise’s signature feminist movie, I Want to Live! (1958) had another tie-in with the future director’s senior year, besides the influential Bartley. Live was a strong anti-capital punishment picture based upon the true story of Barbara Graham, a promiscuous party girl habitually tied to petty crime. Implicated in a drawn-out murder case that ultimately sent her to the San Quentin gas chamber, criminal law experts are still debating Graham’s innocence. (The Los Angeles police department even put pressure upon Wise to drop the project.) The director’s acclaimed biographical melodrama stressed that no one deserved to go through the cruel and unusual punishment of the death penalty, especially with the frequent eleventh-hour stays of execution. Wise’s passionate feelings about this subject (Live was one of his two favorite films, along with The Set-Up, 194939 ), might date from two murder trials that paralleled his graduation from high school. Both cases were given front-page coverage in the Connersville NewsExaminer, and each was a heartland tragedy (Crown Point, Indiana, and Rockford, Illinois). One of the men/boys sentenced to death was Wise’s age (seventeen, the other only twenty-three), and the “news”

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factor for both was not the question of guilt or innocence but rather the death penalty itself.40 Indeed, the convicted seventeen-year-old (Russell McWilliams) was sentenced to death in the electric chair despite the fact that the famous and much honored lawyer Clarence Darrow “had pleaded his cause and eminent social workers had interceded because of his youth.”41 An added connection with Wise’s later problem film was that McWilliams had also been given a temporary high-profile stay of execution. Granted, these potential links to Live are conjecture. But the two cases generated a great deal of public interest/sympathy at a very impressionable time for Wise. Moreover, despite his love of film and theater, at this point Wise wanted to be a journalist. He was just a few months away from being a freshman at nearby Franklin College. This hardworking student would have been all over these capital punishment news stories. Fittingly, Live is just one of many Wise films that has a muckraking journalistic tone. If one were looking for a more overt connection between the Connersville of 1932 and Wise’s later liberal tendencies, the muchadmired commencement address that year would be a better starting place. The popular Hoosier speaker, Purdue University’s Louis M. Sears, took the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth (1732 to 1932) as his focus. He discussed the importance of both friendship and humor to the first president. But toward the speech’s conclusion, Sears “called attention to [and expanded upon] the deep affection Washington had for his colored servant, Billy Lee, and whom he regarded as a friend rather than a servant.”42 Wise’s later pictures often showcased the tragedy of racism, such as the underrated crime film Odds Against Tomorrow (1959, with Harry Belafonte), the Nazi evil of The Sound of Music (1965), and the doomed interracial couple in The Sand Pebbles (1966). It would be simplistic, though hardly outside the realm of possibility, to suggest that one memorable speech to an activist-orientated teenager would make such a racial tolerance impact. However, the importance of said speech

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resonates more if one simply scores its racial tolerance theme as yet another example of the culturally open-minded community in which Wise was reared. I am reminded of an observation by film critic David Thomson in his book Try To Tell the Story: A Memoir: “Handling fear is a step towards art.”43 Wise loved to fold a message into a movie. But he was not a starry-eyed populist, à la a young Frank Capra. Wise often portrayed the people with all the frightening negativity of which they are capable, from the angry hateful faces of a ringside fight crowd in his other favorite film, Set-Up, to a film noir femme fatale (Claire Trevor) responding to a murder scene into which she has stumbled (Born to Kill, 1947) with no more surprise than discovering someone had rearranged the magazines on her coffee table. Wise acknowledged man’s dark side very effectively. But he realized bad things often come out of fear—reacting violently to what is different, misunderstood, and/or simply perceived as a threat. One could argue that Wise also felt that “handling fear is a step towards art.” The trick for the filmmaker, which he navigated so successfully when playing the racial card, was a challenge with which all socially conscience artists wrestle: “How do you make an adventure out of a sermon?”44 Wise often sold these “adventures” by playing them realistically. That is, most of the crowd is neither fully cognizant of the pain they cause, nor how they propagate the suffering. Consequently, unlike Capra populism (whose basic supposition was that people are inherently good and deserving of a redemptive second chance), Wise’s often noirish film world, at best, merely allows such insight to a select few. Even then, there is no guarantee of redemption. So where is the feel good, take-a-stand payoff for the art of this former journalism major? One might liken it to secular humanism— you act accordingly because it is the right thing to do. Given that Wise’s most iconic film was the hopeful science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), maybe an H. G. Wells analogy would be appropriate. The literary father figure of serious science-fiction/fantasy

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was a firm believer in Charles Darwin’s writings on evolution. But Wells felt man’s inherent prejudicial fears sentenced him to an eventual selfdestructive fate. Yet, Wells still wanted to believe in hope. At the end of his watershed novella The Time Machine (1895), the time traveler has returned to a distant nightmare future on an almost suicidal mission to somehow alter one possible “survival of the fittest” scary scenario. The story’s narrator then rehashes the traveler’s previous reservations, ironically, about man’s iffy future. If so, why did the traveler go? The narrator’s poignant conclusion might have doubled as a mantra for Wise’s work: “If that is so [man’s prejudices and superstitions will eventually destroy him], it remains for us to live as through it were not.”45

2 A Career Detour: 1930s Hollywood Robert Wise later described his teenage (1933) visit to RKO in search of a job, “I was a little kid from the middle of Indiana; my eyes were like saucers. I took advantage of the fact that I got inside for the interview just to walk around the studio.” 1 The teenage Robert Wise wanted to be a journalist. Although fascinated by the movies and the dramatic arts, his shyness made it easier for him to be creative via the printed page. In 1978 he remembered: “I’d worked for my father first in his meat packing plant and then in his store, and I decided right then I didn’t want to get into anything where I had to deal one-on-one with the public.”2 Wise was sports editor of his high school newspaper, wrote a humor column for the same publication, and was a member of both the yearbook staff and the poetry club. Coupled with his dark sense of humor and liberal-cause nature, being a muckraking journalist seemed a natural career for the college-bound youngster. Wise left Connersville for nearby Franklin College (in Franklin, Indiana), twenty miles south of Indianapolis, at arguably the darkest point of the Great Depression (fall 1932). After the stock market crash of late 1929, Herbert Hoover’s presidency had struggled with all facets of this worldwide economic collapse. Like Jimmy Carter, Hoover is now rightfully celebrated for his humanitarian work while not residing in the White House, such as orchestrating the feeding of a starving Europe after both world wars.

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Sadly Hoover did not seem up to the bold new measures called for by such drastic times. Worse yet, his actions sometimes made his administration seem blunderingly callous. For example, during the spring of Wise’s senior year in high school, thousands of World War I veterans from across the country marched on Washington, D.C. Years before (1924) Congress had overridden a presidential veto to grant these men a bonus in the form of a paid-up twenty-year insurance policy. Now this unemployed “Bonus Army” was demanding either early payment, or asking for loans against the value of the certificates. While waiting for action, these men and their families proceeded to camp out in the capital, creating another “Hooverville” (the satirical Depression-era term for the muddy shantytowns of the unemployed that peppered the nation). Decades later Albert Marrin movingly described Depression migrants with further irony as “tin-can tourists,” who became “refugees in their own lands.”3 In 1932 the U.S. Senate voted down the bonus bill, though Congress allowed the veterans to borrow enough money for transportation home. By July this so-called army had dwindled to between 7,000 to 10,000 in size. Hoover, anxious for this ongoing inthe-shadow-of-the White House embarrassment to go away, ordered the squatters evicted. When violence broke out, the administration called in the army under General Douglas MacArthur. With machine guns, tanks, and tear gas, the veterans and their families were driven from the area, with all the makeshift housing and possessions therein burned to the ground. Whatever one’s feelings about the legality of the veterans’ demands, or their mere squatters’ rights in the capital, this incident became a metaphor for Hoover’s seeming indifference and even hostility toward America’s Depression poor. The resulting media Waterloo for Hoover further guaranteed the election of liberal Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in the fall of 1932. Roosevelt carried Indiana and most of the nation in one of the country’s most sweeping landslides. Even before the election, Roosevelt had dramatically broken precedent by accepting his party’s

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convention nomination in person (a proactive gesture for desperate times), in heartland Chicago. His pledge for progressive change to those delegates soon became America’s mantra: “Let it . . . be symbolic that . . . I broke traditions. Republican leaders not only have failed in material things, they have failed in national vision, because in disaster they have held out no hope . . . . I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”4 The Roosevelt backstory merits belaboring because Wise was already coming out of a progressive community and school system with decidedly liberal views. The New Deal philosophy, therefore, would have further encouraged a climate of thinking outside the box for all citizens on a myriad of subjects. If history teaches us anything, it is that drastic change in one venue, be it social and/or political, inevitably spills into another, from public mores to the popular arts. Wise started college during the most intellectually stimulating of times. (As a footnote to these developments, the mere origins of Roosevelt’s phrase “New Deal” would have caught Wise’s interest. Like this young humor-loving Hoosier, the president was a great fan of Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The phrase “New Deal” comes from this novel.) Being a Depression-era Franklin College student would have been another catalyst for open-mindedness, since this small liberal arts institution had forever accented the term liberal. For example, Franklin was the first Indiana college to admit women as students (1834), and only the seventh to do so in the nation. The school recognized Wise early as one of its own by providing a modest scholarship for his freshman year. Unfortunately, tough times sabotaged the boy’s longterm college career. Wise later recalled that, besides the Franklin funds, “My family managed to scrape together enough money [his mother’s savings] to help me through the first year, but the second year it looked like it was going to be impossible. It was mid-Depression, my father’s [meat] business was kind of on the rocks and there wasn’t any money for that second year of school.”5

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A backup career plan soon presented itself courtesy of a visit from Wise’s brother, David, an accountant at RKO. This was the young man’s first visit home since heading west in 1928. Though David’s initial filmland job was simply as a day laborer, his rapid ascension was no doubt assisted by the father of a high school friend, Joseph Schilling, who managed Connersville’s three film theaters at a time when the various Hollywood studios controlled America’s movie theaters. (The U.S. Supreme Court negated this type of chain monopoly immediately after World War II.) Schilling provided several effective letters of recommendation for his son, Harry, and for David. After a family meeting, it was decided that Wise’s brother would attempt to continue this Hollywood Hoosier pipeline. By late July the two brothers were Hollywood bound. “After we were out in LA,” Wise later recalled, “my brother got me an appointment with the head of [RKO’s] property department. And fortunately, as it turns out, he couldn’t use anybody right then and the next week he got me an appointment with the head of the film [sound] editing department. . . . [After a a stint in studio shipping] editing was my break—getting into that department.”6 Not surprisingly, David would be the brother with whom Wise remained the closest. In later years Wise bankrolled a Hollywood restaurant partnership with his brother. Ever the methodical researchoriented director, Wise spent a great deal of “study” time at their eatery while preparing to make Remember the Night (1957), a movie about a soft-hearted tough guy’s (Paul Douglas) restaurant/nightclub. Interestingly, Douglas’s age and appearance at this time were similar to Wise’s, with the character actor’s ingratiating screen persona matching the occasional Wise testimonials that surface in this book. Before Wise jumped at a chance to direct in the 1940s, this break in RKO’s sound-editing department led to the transplanted Hoosier receiving an Academy Award film editing nomination for Orson Welles’s groundbreaking movie Citizen Kane (1941). But a greater break was simply landing at RKO. Besides RKO’s newcomerfriendly approach and small studio status, it did not have the caste-like

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department rigidity that was the norm at the prestige picture factories such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount. Given RKO’s not quite A-picture reputation, moreover, the studio’s unofficial production philosophy had evolved into something not unlike the survivor instincts of this young midwesterner who had just dropped into their midst—a strong work ethic, creative with the materials at hand (such as maximizing RKO’s rare expensive A film sets for the studio’s B pictures), and a willingness to take artistic risks. In fact, RKO’s signature example of the latter point involved Welles. His controversial Halloween Eve 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s science-fiction classic War of the Worlds put the young artist on the national map. Welles moved the original novel from turn-of-the-century England to contemporary East Coast America. But the provocative twist involved presenting this invasion of Martian monsters as if it was really happening. Using a live dance music dummy radio program as a front, fake “news” bulletins periodically interrupted the orchestra with unfolding alien attack updates. While an announcer had opened the production with the bald statement this was a War of the Worlds adaptation, many listeners tuning in later, or merely sampling the various radio dial offerings, were frighteningly fooled. Panicking a nation got the attention of RKO. The studio gave movie novice Welles a carte blanche contract to create similar magic in the movies—a then unprecedented roll of the dice by RKO. The watershed Citizen Kane was the result, and another memorable filmmaker, French New Wave pioneer Francois Truffaut, later beautifully articulated how important it had been for Welles to succeed, given both RKO’s faith in him and how the rest of veteran Hollywood was actively rooting against this rookie: “[He] must have felt that it was necessary to offer the public not only a good film but the film, one that would summarize forty years of cinema while taking the opposite course to everything that had been done, a film that would be at once . . . a declaration of war on traditional [Hollywood] cinema and

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a declaration of love for the medium.”7 Welles and Wise, also a pivotal part of the Citizen Kane production, worked for a studio that inspired artists to greatness. Ironically, the 1933 Hollywood arrival of the liberal young Wise paralleled the push for tougher film regulation by the Catholic Church’s powerful Legion of Decency censorship organization. Initially, movies had seemed to be “Depression Proof,” since the economic collapse had caused people “to seek out escapism more ardently than ever.”8 But by 1931–32, Hollywood’s box office had dropped. Thus, in search of an increased audience, film content became more provocative, from the violence of a new genre (the modern gangster picture), to the sexual innuendo of a new star (Mae West). Couple these developments with the added pressure of policing “talking pictures,” a technological development that coincided with the stock market crash, and middle America started demanding more restrictions on the content of Hollywood pictures. Granted, the progressive Wise was already predisposed to bristle at such desecration of the artistic process. But one can only assume that his arrival in Hollywood, just as a censorship code was forced on an industry fearful of federal intervention, would have made Wise even more passionate about the subject. Many years later Wise noted, “I abhor any kind of censorship in films. I feel that films, books and plays should all be presented at whatever level the creator deems necessary. I think that those who wish to go to pornographic films should have the right to; nobody makes them go to see them.”9 For an artist who later gave the world the ultimate feel good “spoonful of sugar” musical film, The Sound of Music (1965), one can safely say Wise had no self-serving agenda linked to his strong anticensorship views. On a personal level, however, the still teenaged Wise of 1933 would also have been threatened monetarily by a censorship code. After just arriving in Hollywood, and luckily acquiring the most modest of entrylevel positions, the morality police were suddenly menacing all movierelated jobs. That is, the studio system, like most other major American corporations during the Great Depression, was in a tenuous situation.

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For example, RKO’s parent company went into receivership in 1933. Consequently, Hollywood feared that a censorship code would destroy whatever movie market remained. Wise also would have been aware of how even precode morality issues were beginning to restrict the screen persona of a favorite actress, West. Who or what was West? She most resembled a female impersonator, with the verbal wit of Oscar Wilde. Armed with this repartee, West, a small, pleasantly plump, over-forty physical form (through platform shoes and padded 1890s gowns of hourglass proportions), somehow metamorphosed into an inventive parody of sex, transforming an appearance into a performance.

Mae West and Cary Grant in She Done Him Wrong (1933).

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Though conservative America was offended by early West pictures such as She Done Him Wrong (1933, which prevented Paramount from going broke), the film industry got it, as well as appreciated her Depression-era boost to a sagging box office. While Wrong’s controversial success helped to fuel the reinvention of the American censorship code in 1934, which attempted to homogenize West, the enlightened left continued to celebrate her comic artistry throughout the 1930s. Late in the decade, pioneering cinema historian Lewis Jacobs even championed in his seminal work, The Rise of the American Film, an early argument for a feminist defense of the actress (which would have resonated with Wise) along sexual lines: “Mae West averred that women get just as much pleasure out of sexual contact as men . . . [and] that the female can reverse the old custom and cajole the male . . . Mae West eyed a man from head to foot. All the time you knew she was evaluating him in terms of virility, as James Cagney eyed a woman. Neither had any use or time for camouflage. . . . Both knew what they were after, let you know it, and were intent in their playfulness.”10 While Wise was never remotely in a position to work with the legendary West during the 1930s, he never gave up on the possibility. Decades later (1968) he helped orchestrate a University of Southern California salute to the actress. Around this time Wise also signed West to an exclusive contract for a television special. This was no small task, since West had reservations about the medium, noting: “I’ve never liked the idea of television, because people can turn you off.”11 Though funding issues kept the special from being produced, West and Wise hit it off. Two of her biographers later said of this friendship, “She concluded he understood what she was all about,” and then shared the actress’s own humorous third-person take on Wise: “‘Going from [The Sound of Music’s almost nun] Julie Andrews to [brothel broad] Mae West—he’s certainly versatile.’”12 Another tangential link between Wise and the 1934 code involved several of his predirecting assignments at RKO, including being an apprentice sound effects editor on The Gay Divorce (1934, the first

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major movie pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), moving to film editing assistant on Carefree (1938) and Bachelor Mother (1939), and being promoted to film editor on pictures such as My Favorite Wife (1940). All these films have farcical/screwball overtones, with the latter a definitive example of the genre.13 Moreover, producer Pandro S. Berman, who teamed Astaire and Rogers, later even described their musical collaborations as screwball comedies set to song and dance.14 So how does screwball comedy connect to Wise and the first year (1934) of the code? The genre’s emergence is now seen as having direct links to these restrictions. No one is suggesting that Hollywood bosses called an industry huddle and created screwball comedy. But American censorship, even then, has always been more concerned with sexuality than with violence. So it hardly seems a coincidence that a genre (screwball) later referred to as “the sex comedy without sex” (safe titillation) should blossom the same year the code appeared. Benchmarks include Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century and Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (both 1934). But there were screwball overtones in assorted genres, from the aforementioned musical The Gay Divorce, to the sleeper hit adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s celebrated comic couple-driven murder mystery novel The Thin Man (1934). Wise’s Hollywood arrival not only paralleled this censorship transition, his early work was often in farcical films that were a response to the code. (Coincidentally, several prominent screwball players were from Wise’s home state. For instance, the aforementioned Twentieth Century was directed by Indiana-born Hawks and launched the career of Carole Lombard.) To further play devil’s advocate, one could argue that this screwball influence was even a factor in Wise’s later film-noir work as a director, such as his cult classic Born to Kill (1947, from the novel Deadlier Than the Male). Noir is a first cousin to screwball comedy. Both genres often focus on a controlling woman. But whereas the screwball female manipulates the male out of an obsessive love, the noir femme fatale’s obsession is deadly self-interest. Each genre is also anchored in

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a showcase of the wealthy good life, and how all those riches seem to make people crazy funny in screwball and crazy killers in noir. Fittingly, Wise’s natural dark comedy tendencies further complement both genres. Regardless of these big-picture thoughts on Wise’s career, there were a number of fundamentals he learned during his early RKO years. One of the most basic came from being an assistant to the studio’s head sound-effects cutter, T. K. Wood. The veteran sound man eventually rescued Wise from his foray in RKO’s shipping room. Though shipping large film cans was essentially manual labor, Wood admired Wise’s work ethic and invited him to join the sound-effects department. The two men became instant friends, a link forged in their mutual workaholic natures. Starting with Wood in 1934, Wise relished the film overload RKO threw at the department, especially one memorable blitzkrieg to prepare for the sneak preview of George Stevens’s Alice Adams (1935). The pace was always busiest during RKO’s first three months of the year—the most hectic time for postproduction departments such as sound effects. During these ninety days, Wise worked “seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day. In some instances, he would literally toil around the clock.”15 Undoubtedly, such nonstop attention to detail would have been great training for the overwhelming demands of being a film director. At this time Wise learned a key lesson from his first RKO mentor: “Raw film, Wood told him, is the cheapest component of a motion picture. Wise says he has never hesitated to shoot 10,000 feet a day if he felt that much footage might be needed for a proper result.”16 Such an admission might seem odd coming from a director who had graduated from editing. One might assume a former cutter would have such a heightened notion of individual shots that he or she would have a sense of economy with regard to the amount of film footage needed. Ironically, this tip about raw stock being the “cheapest component of a motion picture” seems to be true of several editors-directors. A Wise contemporary, acclaimed British filmmaker Sir David Lean, who also worked his way up the 1930s production ladder to editor, including the occasional farcical material (Pygmalion,

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1938), eventually embraced shooting a great deal of footage as a director, too, such as for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). The added shot selection made possible by extra reels of raw film increased an artist’s chances of editing the material into a masterpiece. But exposing miles of film can sometimes lead to pictures that seem equally long. Critic David Thomson wrote, “Lean [eventually] became lost in the sense of his pictorial grandeur . . . [a] prisoner of big pictures.”17 To a certain degree, this same fate hampered Wise’s own later “big pictures,” such as The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). A sense of Wise the editor always remained. Paradoxically, this is best demonstrated by an affectionate anecdote from novelist Michael Crichton, whose book was the basis for Andromeda. The always sensitive Wise avoided having writers adapt their work to the screen, given the sometimes painful reality that the movie medium often necessitates changes in telling the story. Yet, the thorough director usually attempted to consult with the original author. In Crichton’s case, he was then a medical student struggling over whether he should commit to his writing full time. Flown to Los Angeles for talks with Wise, Crichton relished soaking in the excitement of being on the set—his first novel transferred to the big screen. Like the youngster he was, Crichton requested an Andromeda cameo from Wise. The generous director was immediately receptive to the idea. But his thinking-outloud response spoke editing volumes to the novelist: “Let me see where I can put you so you won’t be cut out.”18 Crichton later recalled this was the precise moment it “really kicked in” that this was the editor of Citizen Kane. (The six-foot, nine-inch Crichton’s cameo is as a seated technician in a shot where one of the scientists is being pulled out of surgery.) Wise’s initial RKO teacher, the aforementioned Wood, was also responsible for the Hoosier getting his first screen credit. Given their movie-obsessed working relationship, and the studio’s mantra of maximizing materials, Wood and Wise worked intermittently over a year on what a later movie generation called a “found film.” The men

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fashioned a ten-minute short subject from RKO footage shot for an abandoned South Seas feature. The “new” short was called A Trip through Fijiland (1935). This something-from-nothing project pleased the studio, which gave both men bonuses, but more importantly it was an epiphany for Wise. The fun he had fashioning a film from random footage made clear to him he preferred editing picture content, versus his normal sound-effects editing assignments with Wood. There was, however, a practical side to Wise’s decision, too. The director later recalled: “I looked around [my sound-related department] and saw guys who had been doing that for eight or ten years. And I didn’t want to stop there, so I asked my boss to put me over on the picture side, so I could become an assistant film editor, which he did.”19 Once again Wise was teamed with an RKO mentor he came to greatly admire, veteran William “Billy” Hamilton. Like a youngster on a farm, Wise was given a great deal of early responsibility, which was part of Hamilton’s gift to him—demystify the process and just do it. Wise later recalled an exemplary situation on his first film with Hamilton, Alfred Santell’s Winterset (1936): “I used to break the film down [by scenes], put it [the separate spools of film] on the [editing] bench for him to cut. He would stand at the movieola [viewer] and I would stand at the synch machine [keeping the picture synchronized with the second track] and he’d mark while I cut. So he came in one day, we had a small sequence . . . and he looked at it and said, ‘Why don’t you throw that together? Let’s see what you can do with it.’ I stumbled through it somehow and he came down and showed me how it could be improved and . . . in about two more pictures I was doing all the first cutting in the room, and he would be up on the set with the director.”20 Wise went on to assist Hamilton on Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937), Mark Sandrich’s Careful (1938), and Alfred Santell’s Having Wonderful Time (1938, which introduced Hoosier comedian Red Skelton to the movies). Wise’s editing workload continued to increase for Hamilton on H. C. Potter’s The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). By the time of their editing collaboration on The Hunchback

Irene Dunne in a scene from My Favorite Wife (1940), with Mary Lou Harrington and Scotty Deckett. Wise’s future wife, Patricia Doyle, was Dunne’s stand-in.

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of Notre Dame and Fifth Avenue Girl (both 1939), Hamilton had his assistant share the screen credit—the first time Wise’s name appeared on a feature film. Just as his working relationship with sound-effects editor Wood produced a pivotal lesson for Wise (concerning raw film footage), the young man received another central axiom from Hamilton: “Always make the scene play when you’re cutting it, even if it isn’t exactly the director’s concept when he shot it. The editor’s job is to make it play at all costs.”21 This directive to always have energy/movement in a film scene became a fundamental tenet for Wise’s later work. But the fifthcolumnist tone to Hamilton’s advice—“even if it isn’t exactly the director’s concept when he shot it”—also would have been good training for someone (like Wise) aspiring to direct movies. In other words, one should always be aware of how each piece fits into the story puzzle, but be forever prepared to improvise. Receiving a screen credit on Hunchback was a major boost to Wise’s career, given that this adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel is one of the acclaimed movies of Hollywood’s most magical years, 1939. His quality assignments continued, with his first solo editing jobs on Garson Kanin’s Bachelor Mother (1939) and Leo McCarey’s My Favorite Wife (1940, with Kanin stepping in as director when an automobile accident sidelined Leo McCarey). Both were critical and commercial hits, with the latter being a sequel-like follow-up to the smash screwball comedy The Awful Truth (1937, for which McCarey won his first directing Oscar).22 As Wise later recalled, working with Kanin also provided more preparation for a future director: “Because Gar[son] was new to films, he always wanted the editor on the set with him to help him with the camera setups, to be sure he got enough coverage. So for Bachelor Mother and My Favorite Wife, my assistant Mark Robson was down in the editing room doing the first cuts while I worked with Gar up on the set.”23 But another major influence, or a creative force of nature, was about to enter Wise’s life—Orson Welles.

3 Orson Welles “Orson Welles was as close to a genius as anyone I’ve ever met. There’d be some outrageous piece of behavior and you’d want to tell him a thing or two and then he’d get an idea that was so brilliant that your mouth was gaping open. It was a tremendous experience.” 1 Robert Wise

By July 1939 Robert Wise had been in Hollywood for six years. Through hard work and a natural affinity for film, he had climbed the RKO ladder from shipping clerk to being on the verge of industry recognition—a solo editing credit on the prestige picture The Hunchback of Notre Dame (released late 1939). That same July, Orson Welles, RKO’s hope for a major box-office future, arrived in the film capital. Though the studio was betting he could create something with the pop-culture punch of his previous year’s radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, RKO had not factored in Welles’s more intellectual tendencies, such as his revolutionary modern staging of Julius Caesar on Broadway (1937). Unfortunately for the studio, though the pattern was not yet obvious, this wunderkind had an aversion to making anything conventionally commercial. Fittingly, Welles later described his best box-office movie as a director, the excellent noirish thriller The Stranger (1946), as “my worst film.”2 RKO wanted Welles to get something into production quickly, however, there was no rushing this Hollywood rookie, who took the time to give himself a crash course in the movies. The “boy genius” was especially taken with the watershed Western Stagecoach (1939).

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The director was one of Wise’s heroes, John Ford. Though there is not necessarily a natural visual link between Ford and Welles’s subsequent work, other than maybe a certain stylized realism, Welles was appreciative of Ford’s kindness at a time most of jealous Hollywood was shunning the novice. Welles later honored this generosity with a witty comment much enjoyed by Wise, and presumably by Ford: “[I most admire] the old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”3 Wise did not, however, meet Welles until early the following year. The Hoosier-born editor and his assistant, Mark Robson, had just shipped the completed negative of the Leo McCarey production My Favorite Wife (1940) to New York. The two men were preparing to go out for a celebratory supper, their postproduction routine, when Wise received a call from RKO’s editing chief James Wilkinson telling him that Welles was interested in having him edit what became Citizen Kane (1941). Wise later recalled: “Orson had been shooting scenes that were thought to be tests for the picture but they turned out to be sequences [used] in the final picture. Orson had an older editor assigned to him for those tests and evidently he was not too happy with the particular assignment. I was roughly Orson’s age, so I went down to Pathe in Culver City and met him; we had a chat between set-ups. He liked me and wanted me to come on the picture.”4 Welles and Wise had more in common than their youth. Both were midwestern and passionate about pictures. Appropriately, however, while Wise the boy had been fascinated by American silent cinema’s most popular swashbuckling star, Douglas Fairbanks, the young Welles was drawn to a signature art-house movie, German Expressionism’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), whose fatalistic use of shadow and light is replicated in Citizen Kane. While Wise was receiving on-the-job film training at RKO, Welles was sporadically improvising in film, too. Much is rightfully made of the classic Kane being his first feature, but the teenage Welles had done an inventive short subject, The Hearts of Age (1934), which both includes many Kane‐like shots and has Welles aping the aging title

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character of Caligari, which brings one full circle back to Welles’s elderly Kane. (Wise’s memory of Welles during their first visit is also a freeze frame of the geriatric Kane, since that was how Welles was madeup at the time of Wise’s interview.) Later in the decade, like Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s, Welles experimented with incorporating film in a staged play, particularly with his production of the William Gillette farce, Too Much Johnson. Another Welles-Wise link was each man’s ability to become so focused upon a project that he pushed the boundaries of human endurance. This book has already chronicled Wise’s Herculean efforts at RKO, a key reason for his rapid advancement. Thus, he was obviously drawn to this trait in Welles, especially given their follow-up Kane collaboration on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, with Wise as editor), with Wise noting: “The whole latter part of Ambersons, he was not only directing in the daytime, he was also many nights shooting [acting] all night on Journey Into Fear [1943]. . . . And sometimes he would come in to run rushes in the morning after a night’s work of acting. I don’t know how he kept going!”6 Though Welles and Wise had midwestern roots, they were both also drawn to a realistically darker perspective on the nature of man. The European angst of a Caligari had already been applied to the American scene in such pivotal pictures as German Expressionist director Fritz Lang’s first films in this country, Fury (1936), and You Only Live Once (1937). Consequently, part of the groundbreaking nature of Welles’s Kane, and his follow-up RKO movie, Ambersons, was revealing fatalistic flaws in characters anchored even more in mainstream Americana—the initially populist Kane and the Indiana Ambersons of Booth Tarkington’s novel, a family whose success was born of Yankee ingenuity. The power of Welles’s personality and artistic vision effected Wise’s later work. Yet, their aforementioned parallels were already in place. Given the observation that opens the chapter, Wise was still breathless with admiration over Welles’s sheer genius forty-plus years after RKO brought them together. But this same Wise quote hints at decisive

The Orson Welles ego captured on film in this staged photograph of a Citizen Kane opening.

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differences: “there’d be some outrageous piece of behavior and you’d want to tell him [Welles] a thing or two.” Wise embraced film in a manner that was the embodiment of renowned French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s approach to art—live as bourgeois a life as possible and put your wildness in your work. In contrast, a wild life and an attempt to juggle too many artistic balls often got in the way of Welles’s greatness. Though his Kane is almost universally acclaimed as cinema’s greatest movie, the personal freefall of a life that followed is a tale to rival his masterpiece. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, another boy genius who hit an artistic home run his first time at bat and then failed to fit into Hollywood, the public’s fascination with Welles is forever linked to his fall from grace. Though Welles and Wise were born only a year apart, there was a Jazz Age-like hedonism to Welles that was the antithesis of the more Great Depression-molded, hardworking Wise. In Budd Schulberg’s autobiographical novel The Disenchanted (1950), the author’s surrogate figure summarizes the two positions in a lecture-like comeback to a character (Manley Halliday) based upon Fitzgerald: “Our machine [society] had been in a smash-up too [the Depression]. But we wanted to remain on the scene of the accident and see if we could fix it. We thought we could save it. Instead of . . . [the 1920s] lost generation [so demoralized by the millions of lives lost in World War I they stopped caring], I guess you might call us a found generation. We found out what was wrong. We were pretty damn sure we’d have something new out of all this mess that would be better than anything you had before.”7 Interestingly, the greatest works by both Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925) and Welles (Kane) would be about flawed business tycoons. One might also draw a Welles-Wise analogy with two iconic contemporaries from the world of baseball—New York Yankee greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Ruth rivaled Fitzgerald for the poster child of Jazz Age excess, yet Ruth is arguably baseball’s greatest player. Gehrig was the unselfish blue-collar alternative to Ruth, a quiet

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company man who approached his job with the same loyal happy-to-be employed dedication of any Great Depression worker. Consistent with this dichotomy, despite Hall of Fame numbers as a hitter and fielder, Gehrig’s defining achievement as a player was his time-clock passion to never miss a day of work, playing in a then record 2,130 consecutive games. Though Woody Allen later joked, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up,” for Gehrig it was a 100 percent of the time. If Welles was Ruthian, Wise was definitely in the Gehrig mold. Fittingly, Wise was an admirer of the Iron Horse, particularly after the dying player’s poignant 1939 “luckiest man on the face of the earth” farewell speech, today now sometimes referred to as “baseball’s Gettysburg Address.”8 As the Yankee teammates eventually had a falling out, the RKO duo would, too. But first one needs to examine Kane and Ambersons. On the surface, Kane is both a mystery and a fictionalized biography of media mogul Charles Foster Kane, patterned loosely upon newspaper publisher/powerbroker William Randolph Hearst, who created a print journalism empire built upon sensationalized reportage, colorized comic strips, and “yellow journalism” (manipulatively melodramatic prose). The film starts with the aging Kane’s dying last word, “Rosebud,” and then follows a reporter’s attempt to determine that term’s significance. This quest involves scrutinizing private papers, newsreels, and interviewing various people from Kane’s life. A mesmerizing mosaic unfolds that correctly sums up his life: “[He] got everything he wanted, and then lost it.” Yet the reporter never discovers the word’s meaning. However, at the picture’s conclusion, as many of the seemingly lesser possessions of this wealthy man are being incinerated in a giant furnace, the viewer realizes “Rosebud” was Kane’s childhood sled—symbolizing not only some universal angst over the lost innocence of youth but also a pastoral period before Kane’s sudden inheritance of a fortune ended his childhood. Such a bittersweet chronicling of a great American’s life as essentially hollow was groundbreaking for Hollywood cinema. Movie heroes did not yet have feet of clay. While Frank Capra, the ultimate auteur of feel-good populism, had revealed the potential for fascist fissures in

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America with Meet John Doe (1941), Gary Cooper’s title character still manages to save the day and convert Capra’s favorite villain (Edward Arnold). Moreover, with the country on the verge of World War II, a nationalistic fervor had jump-started a demand for patriotic pictures, such as the critical and commercial blockbuster biographies Sergeant York (about the American World War I hero) and Pride of the Yankees (Lou Gehrig). Both of these 1941 films starred America’s quintessential populist hero, Cooper, who also won a Best Actor Oscar for the former

The Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper) “Luckiest Man” scene re-created for the screen in the moving biography film Pride of the Yankees (1941).

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film. Naturally, this jingoistic wave continued throughout the war years, with James Cagney succeeding Cooper as the Oscar-winning actor with another patriotic biography, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, about songand-dance man George M. Cohan). Even without the war driving popular culture’s retrenchment to traditional values, a natural knee-jerk need to define and/or underline what one is fighting for in any conflict, Kane’s art house questioning of a seemingly Horatio Alger-like character would have been a hard sell for RKO. As a seminal film historian observed: “Citizen Kane was both shocking and confusing to its audiences in 1941. Instead of Hollywood’s flat gloss, the film was [realistically] somber and grotesque. The action sprawled over more than sixty years, requiring its performers to make tremendous transitions in acting and appearance. There were no last-minute changes of heart, no romantic reconciliations. Citizen Kane followed its tragic premises to their logical, gloomy end.”9 Factor in the heightened period patriotism, and the viable chances for a commercial success were a long shot. Kane was essentially a modern (post-1965) antiheroic picture that arrived in theatres a quarter-century early. Being ahead of the times is good for one’s historical legacy, but it does not guarantee box-office success. Coupled with this less than mainstream audience subject matter, Kane was also handicapped by the anger of mogul Hearst. This Depression-era Ted Turner was livid over being the indirect model for a movie, especially as it related to his long-term relationship with mistress Marion Davies. In Welles’s movie the Davies character (Susan Alexander) is a talentless singer pushed beyond her skills by Kane. In reality, Davies was a gifted comedian whose screen career was sometimes hurt by Hearst’s attempts to showcase her in serious historical epics. But Welles’s invasion of Hearst’s privileged private life—underwritten by newspaper stories feeding upon other people’s private lives—proved to be more combustible for the publisher. Between Davies’s nephew, Charles Lederer, having married Welles’s first wife, and Kane being coscripted by a Davies drinking buddy, Herman J. Mankiewicz, a Welles biographer noted that the filmmaker “had

Young Kane (Buddy Swan) and the then unidentified sled, as he shakes hands with a wealthy future (George Coulouris) but loses his childhood and his parents (Anges Moorehead and Harry Shannon) in Citizen Kane.

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found out the secret name that Hearst used to refer to Marion Davies’s genitalia: Rosebud. To Hearst, it was bad enough that Rosebud be mentioned throughout the picture but even worse was the idea that Kane died with Rosebud on his lips.”10 Making “Rosebud” a sled was satirically suggestive. This bombshell, unknown to the general public at the time, better explains the extremes to which Hearst went to derail the movie. The coast-to-coast Hearst press “refused to print [Kane] ads, publicity or [later] reviews of the film”11 Behind the scenes, Hearst put pressure on RKO not even to release the film. When that did not work, Hearst threatened the whole movie industry, from revealing scandals Hollywood had paid to go away, to documenting to anti-Semitic America just how Jewish filmland was. Over a half century later Wise recalled just how tenuous the film’s future had been: “I was told [by RKO] . . . to take the print of the picture to [New York’s Radio City] Music Hall . . . [It was to be seen] by the chairmen of the boards of all the major studios and their lawyers. The purpose was, after looking at the picture, whether the companies would say to RKO: ‘In the interest of our film industry, put this film on the shelf, don’t release it.’ That was the first time I realized the film was really in danger. Orson was there; he knew what was up. He wasn’t there just by accident. . . . And he spoke to them for a few minutes before we started. I always have to laugh to myself; I was the only person of Hollywood to see Orson give one of his greatest performances.”12 At a time when foreign dictators were trampling all over any sense of an international bill of rights, Welles shamed these movie money men into not capitulating to this homegrown fascist. Given Hearst’s great wealth and power, this was no small accomplishment. As George Bernard Shaw once described Hearst, à la his castle estate San Simeon, which was called Xanadu in Kane, “This is the place God would have built, if he’d had the money.” For a time Kane was a cause célèbre, with acknowledgeable picture people lucky enough to see it (Hearst’s newspaper chain made theatrical bookings difficult) coming away with the same feelings Wise had had

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early in the production process: “You couldn’t look at those rushes coming in, every day . . . without realizing you were getting something quite extraordinary, the photography, the angles, the shooting, it was marvelous.”13 For Wise, the key reason Kane was Welles’s greatest film, and arguably cinema’s most memorable movie, was tied to it being “the only film Orson ever made that he had complete concentration on. . . . The Magnificent Ambersons was a different cup of tea; he had many other distractions.”14 Welles had courted controversy with the Hearst-Kane connection, something with which he had conquered other mediums, from his all-black staging of a MacBeth relocated to Haiti, as a Works Progress Administration production at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, to his notorious War of the Worlds radio broadcast. But in the case of Welles versus Hearst, the verdict might be likened to that old joke about a reactionary Southerner’s take on the Civil War, “It was a tie.” Yet in the long run, the film won, and ultimately Welles’s take on the mogul is what endures. Though all these factors kept Kane from being a commercial success, film reviewers recognized its greatness. One of cinema’s watershed critics, the New Republic’s Otis Ferguson, wrote: “The things to be said are that it is the boldest free hand stroke in a major screen production since [pioneering D. W.] Griffith and [his cameraman Billy] Bitzer were running wild to unshackle the camera.”15 The now legendary Gilbert Seldes, who basically invented insightful pop-culture criticism, observed in a lengthy Esquire piece titled “Radio Boy Makes Good” that while Irving Thalberg was Hollywood’s “producer of genius” (a status that has only further solidified through the years), “not one [Thalberg] picture . . . has the unity of Citizen Kane—the unity inside, which makes everything in it ten thousand times more effective.”16 Consequently, though Hollywood had generally scorned the young upstart when he arrived in the film capital, with Fitz