The Chicago stories Netflix’s ‘Mank’ didn’t get around to telling
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Orson Welles says it to Joseph Cotten in “Citizen Kane."
“I warn you, Jedediah, you’re not going to like it in Chicago,” Kane says. "The wind comes howling in off the lake, and gosh only knows if they ever heard of Lobster Newburg.”
An intriguing collection of Chicago backstories can be found just off-camera in Welles’ 1941 masterwork. How “Kane" was wrestled into existence by its first-billed screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz,serves as the basis of director David Fincher’s “Mank," a Netflix feature premiering this week in a few theaters, including Chicago’s Landmark Century Centre Cinema. It makes its Netflix streaming bow Dec. 4.
Here are a few Chicago angles that didn’t make the cut in “Mank."
Remember the KANE BUILDS OPERA HOUSE headline in “Citizen Kane?” Mankiewicz and Welles pulled much of their “Kane” story material from the life and exploits of publisher William Randolph Hearst. Hearst and his longtime lover, actress Marion Davies, hosted the garrulous, hard-drinking screenwriter Mankiewicz many times for gatherings at the Hearst castle, San Simeon.
In “Citizen Kane” the fictionalized version of Hearst builds a Chicago opera house as a lauching pad for his second wife, Susan Alexander Kane. The plot development has roots in Chicago history. In 1929 utilities magnate Samuel Insull built the Chicago Civic Opera House. Residents of Libertyville, Ill., Insull and his wife were conspicuous patrons of the Chicago arts, though his wife wasn’t a singer. She was, in fact …
… An actress, which brings us to the story of Mank passing out at the keyboard. In 1925, after many years away from the legitimate stage, Gladys Wallis (Insull’s wife) starred in a Chicago revival of “The School for Scandal” as Lady Teazle, an ingenue role for which she was a tad mature. Four months later she took the production to Broadway.
Mankiewicz, then third-string critic for The New York Times reviewed it, or tried. After several drinks, he plunked himself down in the press room, typed the sentence "Miss Gladys Wallis, an aging, hopelessly incompetent amateur, opened last night in … " and passed out cold. Years later, Mankiewicz recycled the incident for “Citizen Kane,” in the scene depicting Leland’s unfinished review of Susan Alexander Kane’s operatic debut being finished by Kane himself.
Herman J. Mankiewicz, foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily Tribune. True or false?
Various biographical references state that Mankiewicz worked for the Chicago Daily Tribune as Berlin correspondent from 1920 to 1922, under the auspices of longtime European correspondent George Seldes.
The truth was more complicated. In 1920, spending a good chunk of his bride Sara Aaronson Mankiewicz’s $2,500 dowry on a luxe cabin, the newlyweds crossed the Atlantic and ended up in Berlin. From the book “The Brothers Mankiewicz” by Sydney Ladersohn Stern: “Contrary to what he had told everyone, Herman did not really have a job with the Chicago Tribune … He had planned to tell Sara on the way over, but somehow he kept losing his nerve.”
Once settled in Berlin, Stern writes, “When it was time for Herman to go to work, he put on a suit and tie and pretended to leave for the Tribune. Then he took the first job he could find, which was unloading trucks for a department store.”
Prior to Berlin, Mankiewicz acquired considerable journalism experience, writing for the New York Tribune and working for the American Red Cross News Service in Paris. Nearly broke, and gambling away what little he had, in Berlin he started hanging around the Hotel Adlon, described by biographer Stern as “the unofficial headquarters for Berlin’s American correspondents and theater people. (He talked) to reporters in the bar and (acted) as if he were one of them, and soon he was.” He started contributing “News of the Berlin Stage” columns for The New York Times. And Mankiewicz eventually got some work as an unsigned contributor and “legman” for Chicago Tribune correspondent Seldes, who later helped Mankiewicz get a job as dance sensation Isadora Duncan’sAmerican press agent.
Ben Mankiewicz, longtime host of Turner Classic Movies, is Mankiewicz’s grandson. “I love that he just told everybody he had a job waiting for him," he says. "He had such confidence in that part of his life. And he always considered newspaper writing a noble cause, something that was important to people. But he did not think writing for the movies was a serious way to make a living. And he was under intense intellectual pressure from his father that made things even more complicated.”
The Berlin adventure, Ben says, "aligns with everything I came to understand about the grandfather I never knew. He had complete confidence. And he could talk his way into almost everything.”
“Mank” opens Friday at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St. It premieres on Netflix Dec. 4.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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