Citizen Kane - Sources - Susan Alexander

Susan Alexander

The common assumption that the character of Susan Alexander was based on Marion Davies was a major reason William Randolph Hearst tried to destroy Citizen Kane. In his foreword to Davies's autobiography, published posthumously in 1975, Orson Welles draws a sharp distinction between the real-life actress and his fictional creation:

That Susan was Kane's wife and Marion was Hearst's mistress is a difference more important than might be guessed in today's changed climate of opinion. The wife was a puppet and a prisoner; the mistress was never less than a princess. Hearst built more than one castle, and Marion was the hostess in all of them: they were pleasure domes indeed, and the Beautiful People of the day fought for invitations. Xanadu was a lonely fortress, and Susan was quite right to escape from it. The mistress was never one of Hearst's possessions: he was always her suitor, and she was the precious treasure of his heart for more than 30 years, until his last breath of life. Theirs is truly a love story. Love is not the subject of Citizen Kane.

Welles cited Samuel Insull's building of the Chicago Opera House, and business tycoon Harold Fowler McCormick's lavish promotion of the opera career of his second wife, as direct influences on the screenplay. McCormick divorced Edith Rockefeller and married aspiring opera singer Ganna Walska as her fourth husband. He spent thousands of dollars on voice lessons for her and even arranged for Walska to take the lead in a production of Zaza at the Chicago Opera in 1920. Contemporaries said Walska had a terrible voice; New York Times headlines of the day read, "Ganna Walska Fails as Butterfly: Voice Deserts Her Again When She Essays Role of Puccini's Heroine" (January 29, 1925), and "Mme. Walska Clings to Ambition to Sing" (July 14, 1927).

"According to her 1943 memoirs, Always Room at the Top, Walska had tried every sort of fashionable mumbo jumbo to conquer her nerves and salvage her voice," reported The New York Times in 1996. "Nothing worked. During a performance of Giordano's Fedora in Havana she veered so persistently off key that the audience pelted her with rotten vegetables. It was an event that Orson Welles remembered when he began concocting the character of the newspaper publisher's second wife for Citizen Kane."

Charles Lederer, Marion Davies's nephew, read a draft of the script before filming began on Citizen Kane. "The script I read didn't have any flavor of Marion and Hearst," Lederer said. "Robert McCormick was the man it was about." (Lederer confuses Walska's husband Harold F. McCormick with another member of the powerful Chicago family, one who also may also have inspired Welles – crusading publisher Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.) Although there were things based on Marion Davies – jigsaw puzzles and drinking – Lederer noted that they were exaggerated in the film to help define the characterization of Susan Alexander.

"As for Marion," Orson Welles said, "she was an extraordinary woman – nothing like the character Dorothy Comingore played in the movie."

Movie tycoon Jules Brulatour's second and third wives, Dorothy Gibson and Hope Hampton, both fleeting stars of the silent screen who later had marginal careers in opera, are also believed to have provided inspiration for the Susan Alexander character.