Thanks for that link, Slithy Tove. Walloon if you have further questions, Walloon, I can tell you that when I was helping a film student search high and low for further details on this, we found that the “well-known story” suddenly appears… I can’t remember when, but it was decades after the film was released. I think the 70s. Additionally, Welles spent the last half of his life bitching and moaning about how the studio had screwed up his film. If the heavy hand of corporate editing indeed came down, don’t you think it would have looped a salacious rosebud right out? (Incidentally, if you compare paperwork from the filmmaking and editing with the final product, Wells seems to have been, once again, making noise for publicity.)
If you’re thinking that such a story wouldn’t have been printed in the old days, you haven’t seen many copies of Confidential and early smut tabloids. Sometimes they show up on eBay.
Hey,Tuckerfan, how can you say that? When my grandmother died, she wasn’t begging for cock. She said, “Hey doc, on your elbows!”
The Pinocchio nose-growing award goes to Gore Vidal in that letter linked above, in which he claims, “Unlike today’s journalists and tell-all biographers I have very little interest in the sex lives of others.” In interviews and in his writings, Vidal is positively obsessed with the sex lives of celebrities and historical figures.
Notice that although Vidal says he knew Marion Davies’ nephew Charles Lederer in the 1950s, he never claims outright that Lederer told him the alleged hidden meaning of “Rosebud”. Instead, Vidal suddenly switches to the ambiguous passive case: “The matter of Rosebud was much discussed at that time.” Discussed by whom, to whom?
Vidal’s a bitchy old queen (though he claims there’s no such thing as a gay man) who LOVES to be provocative (though he is quite good at it). The most irritating thing about him is that 20 years after Capote died he’s still attacking him as a gossipy little liar when Vidal is worse in both senses of the word.
OTOH, he really was a very good friend of Orson Welles and at one point knew everybody in Hollywood, so he probably was party to most of the really good salacious gossip.