The Cat's Meow - Background

Background

Film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, editor of the 1992 book This is Orson Welles — a record of interviews Peter Bogdanovich conducted with Orson Welles — began his April 2002 review of The Cat's Meow with this exchange about Citizen Kane (1941):

OW: In the original script we had a scene based on a notorious thing Hearst had done, which I still cannot repeat for publication. And I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film and wasn’t in keeping with Kane’s character. If I’d kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn’t have dared admit it was him.
PB: Did you shoot the scene?
OW: No, I didn’t. I decided against it. If I’d kept it in, I would have bought silence for myself forever.

"The incident Welles alluded to in this exchange is the subject of The Cat’s Meow, directed by Bogdanovich and adapted by Steven Peros from his own play," Rosenbaum wrote. "Bogdanovich may see Welles as the inspiration for his film, but I have no idea where Peros got his facts."

Rosenbaum did find a similar story in the 1979 edition of The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz, in the entry on Thomas Ince; and in the 1971 essay on Citizen Kane by Pauline Kael:

Her principal source was John Houseman, script supervisor for cowriter Herman Mankiewicz, and it seems safe to conclude, even without her prodding, that some version of the story must have cropped up in Mankiewicz’s first draft of the script, which Welles subsequently edited and added to. According to Kael, the only trace of the subplot left in the script is a speech made by Susan Alexander, who was loosely based on Davies, to the reporter Thompson about Kane: “Look, if you’re smart, you’ll get in touch with Raymond. He’s the butler. You’ll learn a lot from him. He knows where all the bodies are buried.” Kael writes, “It’s an odd, cryptic speech. In the first draft, Raymond literally knew where the bodies were buried: Mankiewicz had dished up a nasty version of the scandal sometimes referred to as the Strange Death of Thomas Ince."

"I don’t think we’re likely ever to know for sure what happened on Hearst’s yacht on November 19, 1924," Rosenbaum concluded.

"No director is more steeped in Hearst/Welles/Kane/Hollywood lore than Bogdanovich," wrote film critic Roger Ebert, who heard the Orson Welles version of Thomas Ince's death from Bogdanovich. "It happened that as Bogdanovich told me this story, we were aboard the QE2, crossing to Southampton on the 25th anniversary voyage of the Telluride Film Festival in 1998. When Bogdanovich returned to New York, there was a script waiting for him. It was an adaptation of Steven Peros' play about the very same scandal. Fate was sending him a message."

In a 2008 interview Bogdanovich said, "I was talking to Orson for my book, This is Orson Welles in 1969 and he said, “You know about the thing that happened on Hearst’s yacht?” He said Welles had been told the story by screenwriter Charles Lederer, Marion Davies's nephew, and that Bogdanovich subsequently confirmed the account with Lederer. "And when Orson told me that story it was virtually the same story as what Steven Peros has written. The particulars in terms of the letter or the hat, those where details hypothesized by Steven, based on his research, but the actual plot — of what happened and who was doing what and why — that was all the same.