The White House of Donald J Trump
is a curiously inert place. For most other presidents, active engagement with
culture and the arts has been a means of presenting a more human image to the
American public.
Indeed, the celebration and
promotion of American popular culture has been an integral part of most recent
administrations. Nixon accompanied the singer Pearl Bailey on piano; Dizzy
Gillespie brought jazz to the Carter White House; Fleetwood Mac reformed to
play at Bill Clinton’s inaugural; James Brown took it to the bridge for George
W Bush; and Obama’s time in office saw a veritable festival of stars perform
for the president.
Trump, meanwhile, has so far
hosted visits (but not performances) from two right-wing rock stars, Kid Rock
and Ted Nugent, and enjoyed a Kanye West rant in the Oval Office.
As well as musicians, writers,
academics, filmmakers and artists have been regular guests of previous
administrations, while many presidents have actively engaged with comedians at
the annual White House Correspondents Dinner since 1921. Trump, however, has
declined to attend any during his tenure in office. (His famous roasting by
Barack Obama at the 2011 event forms part of the extreme animus he holds for
the former president.)
In fact, Trump seems to be unmoved
by any form of culture. This was clearly displayed in Paris at the Bastille Day
performance of a Daft Punk medley by a French army band in 2017. The amazing
precision of both the playing and movement of the band resulted in joyous
whoops and clapping from members of the French government and armed forces,
whilst Trump sat with his arms folded, bored and tetchy. It seemed to be an
utter mystery to him.
Since his election in 2016, the
White House has been without any sense of cultural activity or appreciation.
This disconnection with the arts is an alarming aspect of Trump’s character.
He rarely makes any reference to
popular culture apart from boasting about the viewing figures for his former
reality TV show The Apprentice. Mass entertainment platforms have previously been
used to promote his own brand, with appearances as himself in Home Alone 2,
Zoolander and Sex and the City, and TV commercials for Pizza Hut and McDonald.
But we know little about his actual tastes.
In interviews published in the
book Trump Nation: The Art Of Being The Donald, there are moments where Trump
expounds on his favourite music (The Beatles) and film (Citizen Kane). These
are choices that display a familiar Trump trope: associating himself with
whatever is regarded as the biggest and the best.
Choosing Citizen Kane is
particularly fascinating in the context of the ongoing (at the time of writing)
government shutdown which has seen Trump become ever more Kane-like – but
perhaps not in a way he would have wanted.
The parallels between Charles
Foster Kane and Donald J Trump have often been documented. Both Kane and Trump
inherit their wealth, they do not earn it themselves. Kane is a purveyor of
fake news, not via Twitter but by his extensive yellow press empire. Both are
hounded by sex scandals – Kane has his political career ruined by one, Trump
has (so far) survived several.
Trump himself has commented on
Citizen Kane’s character, saying: “[Kane] is about accumulation … and it’s not
necessarily all positive … he had the wealth but he didn’t have the happiness.”
Such comments could be taken as
being insightful, even revealing a degree of self-reflection. But Trump’s
delivery of these words implies something else – Kane couldn’t handle it, but I
can.
In fact, Trump’s analysis leaves
one to wonder if he has actually watched the entire film. Rumours of the
president’s short attention span make it hard to imagine him getting through an
entire Looney Tunes cartoon without losing interest, let alone a two-hour black
and white movie.
His lack of context about the film
is made clear when he expounds on the meaning of “Rosebud”, claiming it is
“maybe the most significant word in film”. He says nothing about the film being
a critical portrait of another businessman, William Randolph Hearst, the
tyrannical media mogul.
Hearst was incensed by Welles’s thinly
veiled attack on him, and mobilised all the might of his media outlets in an
attempt to close down the release of Citizen Kane in 1941. Hearst’s hatred of
the film and its maker centred on the word Rosebud – it was, some say, the pet
name he gave to the clitoris of his lover, film star Marion Davies. Trump
appears oblivious to this.
Although Trump seems to lack any
understanding of the film (it is a critique, not a celebration of power) it is
impossible not to be reminded of it as the government shutdown of recent weeks
has dragged on. Trump has retreated to the White House, often alone but
tweeting incessantly and self-pityingly. On Christmas Eve he tweeted: “I am all
alone (poor me) in the White House.”
It’s a stark reminder of Kane and
the famous scenes of his nocturnal angry ramblings around his deserted palace
of Xanadu. This time, in real life, it’s Trump, forlornly trundling around the
empty corridors of a darkened White House, faintly illuminated by the
flickering blue light of Fox News on the television screens.
Citizen Trump: the president shuns
the arts – but increasingly resembles one of cinema’s greatest creations. By Martin
Carter. The Conversation. January 25,
2019.
Previously unpublished documents
have revealed the scale of a plot by the media mogul William Randolph Hearst to
discredit Orson Welles and destroy Citizen Kane, the 1941 film about the rise
and fall of the fictional newspaper proprietor Charles Foster Kane.
Welles and RKO Pictures faced
extortion, media manipulation and other underhand tactics in a plot that was
much darker and began earlier than was previously known, according to research
by Harlan Lebo for a forthcoming book.
The book cites a memo of 1941, in
which Welles’s lawyer-manager, Arnold Weissberger, warned his client that the
Hearst empire would stop at nothing: “This is not a tempest in a teapot, it
will not calm down, and the forces opposed to us are constantly at work.”
Elsewhere, Weissberger said:
“[Hearst] may decide to use all his legal machinery to harass RKO.”
Records show that Welles felt
Hearst was not linked to the attacks on him and Citizen Kane, but that his
minions wanted “to show the boss that they were on the ball”. On a lecture tour
before Citizen Kane’s release, Welles was warned by a police investigator: “Don’t
go back to your hotel. They’ve got a 14-year-old girl in the closet and two
photographers waiting for you to come in.” But the director at the time blamed
a “hatchet man” from a local Hearst paper.
Lebo, who acted as historical
consultant to Paramount Pictures for Citizen Kane’s 50th anniversary, told the
Guardian: “It’s typically been assumed that Hearst probably didn’t know about
it and it was probably just his lackeys trying to protect the boss. But it’s
clear he knew about it the entire time.”
He described the plot as “much
more complicated and dark than has been recognised before”, with evidence
showing Hearst’s executives conspiring to undermine Welles’s personal
credibility and stop the film’s release.
In one memo, Richard Berlin, the
ambitious head of Hearst’s magazine division, wrote to his boss about his
“preliminary, and rather hasty” investigation of Welles, telling Hearst that
the film-maker “acted as a front for the Communist party”.
Lebo said Welles was no Communist,
yet “it was a Communist witch-hunt that was planned and managed at the top
level of the Hearst organisation”.
A letter from Berlin to Hearst’s
assistant shows the media baron was colluding with Congressional investigators
hunting Communists in Hollywood: “We have the complete assurance from our
friends in Washington that the result of the investigation made by them … of
the motion picture industry is available to us … This should be extremely
valuable.”
From the beginning, Welles never
denied that his picture was about a newspaper publisher. But, as his film
progressed, word spread of an exposé of Hearst, one of the most powerful men in
the US, whose empire included 26 newspapers, 16 magazines and 11 radio
stations.
Lebo said: “There are numerous
parallels between Kane and Hearst, including their respective fortunes built on
the discovery of precious metals, their age, their private pleasure palaces.
Both were overbearing, manipulated the media and used sensationalist journalism
to sell papers.”
But the film was not solely based
on Hearst, and Weissberger advised his client: “It is essential that we
maintain consistently, emphatically and unequivocally that Hearst has nothing
to do with this picture.”
Unpublished letters are at Indiana
University Bloomington, among other archives. “Thousands of pages about Citizen
Kane have never really been written about in any length, if at all”, Lebo said.
The conspiracy against Citizen
Kane is generally assumed to have started after footage was seen by Hollywood
columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Lebo said: “As the story goes,
Hopper, after seeing a rough cut … alerted the Hearst organisation to the
‘dangers’ of Citizen Kane, and Parsons, who wrote for Hearst, then saw the film
and took up the Hearst cause.”
The documentary evidence includes
a note from Hearst’s assistant to Parsons confirming that “the Chief” had
received her letter. It also shows that the Hearst organisation had been
investigating the film for weeks earlier. Berlin wrote of going after Welles
and stopping “this vicious picture”, adding: “It looks to me as if Citizen Kane
will not have much of a showing.”
The Hearst organisation banned
mentions of the film from its publications and dangled the threat of a lawsuit
over the studio and any exhibitor until RKO eventually just released it.
Lebo’s book, Citizen Kane: A
Filmmaker’s Journey, will be published by St Martin’s Press on 26 April.
In it, he writes: “One can only
imagine the flood of national news coverage and highly charged commentary that
would pour forth today if a 21st-century media mogul such as Rupert Murdoch,
for purely personal reasons, banned all mention of a motion picture by his
organisation’s outlets, and then actively tried to suppress or destroy the film.”
Scale of Hearst plot to discredit
Orson Welles and Citizen Kane revealed. By Dalya Alberge. The Guardian , March 28, 2016.
“Citizen Kane” has been hailed for
generations as the greatest movie ever made, but the newspaper mogul who
inspired Orson Welles’ iconic portrait of a reclusive, affluent entrepreneur
who dies alone did everything he could to act as if it never happened.
Throughout his life, William Randolph Hearst kept the movie out of Hearst
newspapers and never discussed it publicly, a tendency that was picked up by
his heirs in the years following his death.
That all changed on Thursday night
at the 60th SF International Film Festival, when Hearst’s grandson, William
Randolph Hearst III, spoke for a half hour before a screening of the film. The
biggest surprise? He’s a huge fan of the movie — and has a lot of ideas about
it.
“Inevitably, someone wants to ask
me what I think and I usually disappoint them by saying how much I love the
movie,” Hearst said in a conversation moderated by film scholar David Thomson.
“It’s just a great movie, a great story. It’s not meant to be a documentary.
But I do think it’s quite accurate in the way it portrays the newspaper
business.”
Hearst doesn’t remember meeting
his famous grandfather who died in 1951, when William Randolph Hearst III was
still a toddler. However, the younger Hearst is certain that the movie was
never mentioned during his childhood.
“It was a forbidden subject,” he
said. “In families where there are dark secrets, I don’t think I ever
remembered overhearing my parents, someone in the family, talking about the
movie, or expressing an opinion on it.”
However, he did mention one
bizarre instance when he was in the car with his parents as they arrived at a
gate and Hearst’s father, William Randolph Hearst II, showed his identification
to a guard. “The guy said, ‘Oh, you’re Bill Hearst, I love that movie about
you!'” Hearst recalled. His father was curt. “He said, ‘It’s not actually about
me, get the hell out of here.’ As a kid, I picked up on his discomfort and
awkwardness as he asked this question. I thought, ‘What was that about?'”
Hearst himself didn’t see the
movie until he was in college, when “Kane” had begun to accrue legendary status
with revival screenings across the country. “I didn’t know what to expect it
was all about,” said Hearst, who at that point had a strong interest in film
history. “I figured it would be a political movie like something by Costa
Gavras.” He went to a midnight screening and was blown away. “You can tell in
the first 15 seconds that you’re in good hands,” Hearst said. “The performances
and the writing are very good. It’s always amazing to me that Orson had this
obvious gift.”
Hearst never met Welles (though
Hearst said critic Michael Sragow tried to arrange a meeting once in the ’80s)
but the heir and longtime San Francisco Film Society board member became a big
fan of the director’s work. “I’ve seen many of his films, including the
lesser-known ones like ‘Mr. Arkadin,’ and they all had that stamp of something
important happening,” Hearst said. “Someone’s in complete control of the story.
They just take you away.”
Hearst was quick to point out that
not every detail of “Citizen Kane” drew from his grandfather’s life. In
particular, he took issue with Welles’ portrayal of Kane’s opulent lair Xanadu,
inspired by the Hearst Castle overlooking the town of San Simeon.
“I always felt like Xanadu was all
wrong,” Hearst said. “That part of the movie is dark, kind of lonely, no one
has turned lights on in the rooms for years. The [castle] that I remember was
light, with white stones, a party place. You can imagine having a party there
for 60 of your closest friends, and two of them are getting to know each other…
it was just a marvelous space for entertainment and fun. Xanadu was dreary and
depressing.”
Hearst added that he saw some
parallels between his grandfather and Welles, even if both men would have been
unlikely to admit them. “San Simeon was a stage,” Hearst said. “Both Orson and
my grandfather liked to put on a good show. I think Orson would’ve liked to be
there.”
Hearst did acknowledge other
aspects of the movie that drew from his grandfather’s legacy. “There are
parallels,” he said. “My grandfather came very close to losing his business in
the financial crisis. He did become interested in politics and wasn’t very
successful at that.”
Then, of course, there was
Hearst’s decade-long affair with his mistress, actress Marion Davies, who
inspired Kane’s second wife, the untalented opera singer played by Dorothy
Comingore. Hearst was aware of Davies early on in life, though he never met her
prior to her death in 1971.
“I do remember my parents talking
about someone named ‘MD,’ and I thought maybe there was a doctor in the
family,” he said with a chuckle. “It took me much longer to realize who they
were really talking about.” He has made peace with the history of the unseemly
romance, and acknowledged that Hearst’s wife refused to divorce him even as he
carried out the affair in public. “They were a real couple for a long time,”
Hearst said. “I’ve just come to the conclusion that he must’ve really loved her
and was very happy to have her around.”
Thomson also prodded Hearst about
the meaning of the word “Rosebud,” Kane’s final words, which Gore Vidal once
claimed to be Hearst’s pet term for Davies’ vagina. Hearst smirked. “Sounds
like Gore Vidal,” he said, as the audience laughed. “Your grandfather never
discussed that?” Thomson asked. “I don’t think he mentioned it, no.”
But Hearst wasn’t entirely
convinced that his grandfather was as troubled by the popularity of “Citizen
Kane” as official lore suggests. “I can’t find a letter expressing his intense
dislike of the movie,” Hearst said. “My impression is that the people around
him thought that they could curry favor by saying things like, ‘We’ll take care
of this, we’ll get rid of this damn movie.'” However, Hearst said his grandfather
tended to handle criticism with ease, recalling one instance in which Harvard
Lampoon did a parody of the Hearst-owned Cosmopolitan. “They sent a copy to
him,” Hearst III said. “He said, ‘It’s better than the one we put out.’ So I
think he could take a joke. I guess ‘Kane’ just didn’t strike him as funny.”
After Thomson noted that the
original title for the film was “The American,” Hearst explained the value of
scrutinizing his grandfather’s legacy. “The news business has lived off the
missteps, the foibles of public figures for years,” he said. “You become kind
of accustomed to somebody getting on the soap box, telling you that it’s all
about the kids, or ‘I’m just trying to save America.’ People are drawn to it.
My grandfather was. The figure in ‘Citizen Kane’ certainly thinks he’s going to
make a better America.”
Hearst was especially eloquent
when addressing the movie’s perspective on the alienating effect of wealth, a
theme that even Donald Trump has discussed before. “If you’re in a wealthy
situation that causes you to become isolated and to live in a cloistered world,
sadness is not far away,” he said. “But if it allows you to go out into the
world, you can see how you can make a difference.”
Thomson asked Hearst whether the
name Kane or Hearst would last longer. Hearst laughed. “In Hollywood, ‘Citizen
Kane’ has lasted longer, but the Hearst Company is still in business, fighting
for attention,” he said.
The pair also dug into the
changing face of journalism, and it was here that Hearst’s own early experiences
as a reporter and his family’s history in news publishing really came into
play. “My view is that we have left behind the kind of journalism that was
considered a calling for people 20-30 years ago, to some degree because of
Roger Ailes at Fox,” he said. “He discovered it was a lot cheaper to have two
generals in front of a map pushing pins around than it is to send people to
cover the war in Afghanistan. So we’ve substituted dialogue, opinion, and paid
experts debating each other, with no facts or actual reporting, and that, I
think, is a bigger challenge to journalism than left versus right.”
That led Hearst to a rousing
conclusion that was met by warm applause. “I think we’re ready for the pendulum
to swing back from, ‘Everybody’s opinions are equal,’ to, ‘No, some people’s
facts are really facts.'”
‘Citizen Kane’ Was Shunned By the
Hearst Family, But Now One Heir Admits He Loves It — San Francisco Film
Festival. By Eric Kohn. Indiewire , April 7, 2017.
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