It was accurate, interesting, and high-grade. It appealed to intelligent people, who like the movies—and there are lots of them. So many moving-picture commentators write down to the level of the movies, as they call it.
I always figure, however, that these commentators write down because they cannot write up.
Best wishes. I will look for your column.
Sincerely,
(s) W.R.
After the screening Orson asked how I liked it. “You won’t get away with it,” I said. But he arrogantly insisted that he would. It was his arrogance that decided which of two friendships had to come out ahead. I put in a call to Oscar Lawler, a great friend of mine and one of W.R.’s attorneys, to tell him about Citizen Kane and what Orson was up to.
As soon as word was passed along to W.R., he telephoned Louella. When she heard I’d seen the picture already and that, contrary to the assurances she’d given him, it had a great deal to do with the chief’s affairs, the sky fell in on her. He commanded her to have it screened for Oscar Lawler and herself. After the showing she begged the attorney to go home with her to help describe to Hearst what they had seen, but he declined. She had to get on the telephone herself to San Simeon, just as later she made many calls, including one to Nelson Rockefeller, in a battle royal to keep Citizen Kane out of Radio City Music Hall, which is part of Rockefeller Center, and every other movie theater.
If W.R. had taken Oscar Lawler’s advice to ignore Kane, it might never have received the attention it won when, breaking the boycott ten months later, it was shown around the world, won a Best Picture of the Year award, and, as late as 1958, was named as one of the greatest movies ever made. But on W.R.’s orders Orson Welles’ name went on the Hearst Silent List of people about whom Louella could never say a kind word.
The black list constantly makes its presence felt. When Nunnally Johnson aided and abetted in a blistering article about her that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, she hit back at his wife.
“I ran into Dorris Bowdon last night,” she wrote. “She used to be such a pretty girl before she married.” Joan Crawford, Nelson Eddy, Jimmy Cagney, and Ava Gardner have all had the treatment.
Bette Davis and I were administered a slap on the wrist after I tracked her down to Laguna, where she holed up, refusing to talk to newspapers, following the birth of her May Day baby in 1947. The door of the cottage was open, so I walked in, and we talked for hours. The next week Louella wrote: “Since Bette Davis has had so many unwelcome visitors, she has had to have her gate padlocked.”