How fitting that a film about the elusiveness of truth is the subject of endless argument. The most lauded American movie ever, Citizen Kane was controversial even before it premiered 75 years ago this month—“Within the withering spotlight as no other film has ever been before,” the New York Times intoned, noting William Randolph Hearst's angry effort to bury the movie about a rapacious news magnate clearly based on him—and the roiling continues. In just the last few months there has been plenty of gnashing over the inspiration for “Rosebud,” the movie's central motif. And now two books make starkly opposing claims about the origin of the movie itself.
The screenplay is credited to the director and star, Orson Welles, and Herman Mankiewicz. But a posthumous memoir by his son Frank Mankiewicz charges that Welles wrote “not one word.” In So As I Was Saying, Frank, who served as Robert F. Kennedy's press secretary, channels his father's memory and insists Welles “literally pleaded for at least a joint screen credit ‘so [he] could get paid at all'” under the terms of his contract.
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