Samuel Insull - Legacy

Legacy

Although it is commonly thought to be a fictionalized biography of William Randolph Hearst, Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane is in part based on the life of Samuel and Gladys Insull.

In June 1925, after a 26-year absence, Gladys Wallis Insull returned to the stage in a charity revival of The School for Scandal that ran two weeks in Chicago. When the performance was repeated on Broadway in October 1925, Herman J. Mankiewicz — then the third-string theatre critic for The New York Times — was assigned to review the production. After her opening-night performance in the role of Lady Teazle, drama critic Mankiewicz returned to the press room "full of fury and too many drinks," wrote biographer Richard Meryman:

He was outraged by the spectacle of a 56-year-old millionairess playing a gleeful 18-year-old, the whole production bought for her like a trinket by a man Herman knew to be an unscrupulous manipulator. Herman began to write: "Miss Gladys Wallis, an aging, hopelessly incompetent amateur, opened last night in…" Then Herman passed out, slumped over the top of his typewriter.

Mankiewicz resurrected the experience in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane, incorporating it into the narrative of drama critic Jedediah Leland. After Kane's second wife makes her catastrophic opera debut, Leland returns to the press room drunk and passes out over the top of his typewriter after writing the first sentence of his review: "Miss Susan Alexander, a pretty but hopelessly incompetent amateur…"

Like that of Samuel Insull, the life of Charles Foster Kane ends in bankruptcy and disgrace.