well re-Hearst

"Jul 28, 2000 | There is a large new biography of William Randolph Hearst in the stores -- "The Chief," by David Nasaw. I saw its excellent reviews, and to the extent that I am qualified I concur with them. I went through the book carefully, and with pleasure, but there is one small, piquant matter it omits. And I think it deserves the attention of this column.

You may recall the existence of a movie, "Citizen Kane," made in 1941 by Orson Welles. Well, among other things that motion picture has always been reckoned to be a comic lampoon on the life of Hearst. [...] Hearst had a mistress, the movie star Marion Davies, whose pictures he produced. [...]

At the start of the movie, Kane says "Rosebud" and drops dead. The film becomes an inquiry into what that word meant -- as a way of understanding Kane. It turns out to be the name of ... well, let's just say "a friendly object."

For decades, the film's impact rested there. But then, in 1989, four years after Welles' death, in a short memoir in the New York Review of Books, Gore Vidal said that "Rosebud" was also Hearst's pet name for Marion's clitoris."