Xanadu
Our trip to California this week included a tour at William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon. You'll be interested to know that the citadel of the long-dead American fascist is in the possession of the state of California-- not the Hearst family or the Hearst Corporation-- and yet there is no mention of the film Citizen Kane on the tour.
Of course Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz's main character Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 picture was based on Hearst, and Kane's "Xanadu" was based on San Simeon, even though the castle of Kane is located upon the spurious "deserts of the gulf coast of Florida." The movie that taught filmmakers how to make movies- and audiences how to watch them-- surely warrants a mention at the site, especially when the tour guide is expounding upon subjects like Hearst's mistress Marion Davies (the film's infamous phrase "Rosebud" was reportedly chosen because it was Hearst's pet name for Davies' clitoris), his media empire, or his vast collection of stolen historic items (what the film's iconic opening "newsreel" refers to as the "loot of the world"). When the guide at San Simeon is telling tales of Charlie Chaplin and Dolores Del Rio cavorting at the tennis courts or in the Neptune pool, she could certainly throw in a reference to the Oscar-winning Mankiewicz, who had been a celebrity visitor there himself during the 1930s when he witnessed many of the real-life scenes that would become iconic additions to the screenplay, such as Davies deciphering jigsaw puzzles on the floor of a vast, mostly-empty room. In the movie, Kane remarks at one point about the castle's grand scale, "I think if you look carefully in the west wing, Susan, you'll find about a dozen vacationists still in residence." Citizen Kane was a vicious assault upon the original residents of Hearst Castle, but what a glittering, towering assault!
Hearst descendants are still able to visit and use the grounds of "the ranch" when they wish to retreat. That was a condition of the estate's transfer of the property to the state in 1957, but shouldn't California (and their millions of taxpayers) be able to demand a presentation of history on their property that is without flagrant omissions. Citizen Kane, after all, is itself a product of California of which its residents can justifiably boast.
posted by CM @ 8:15 PM
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