HAROLD FOWLER McCORMICK : THE REAL "CITIZEN KANE"

HAROLD FOWLER McCORMICK, The son of Reaper-inventer Cyrus McCormick, was the CEO of International Harvester of Chicago, Illinois. Harold had married Edith Rockefeller,daughter of multimillionaire John D. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Co. and was a very generous philanthropist when it came to funding causes in his interest. He was an early supporter of aviation, purchasing property to create the Cicero Airfield and even founded an aircraft manufacturing company. After years of marriage to Edith, he divorced and married famed Polish opera diva Ganna Walska. Ganna Walska had a reputation of not being able to carry a single note while singing, but Harold nevertheless poured millions of dollars into her career for singing lessons and stage bookings.

                                                               Ganna Walska circa 1920

   Many folks have heard of the RKO classic movie "Citizen Kane", a movie written by and starring actor/screenwriter Orson Welles. "Citizen Kane" is considered by many to have been one of the greatest motion pictures of all time. Popular opinion has assumed that the fictional character of Charles Foster Kane was based on the real life antics of millionaire publisher William Randolph Hearst, with the role of Susan Alexander based on Hearst's real-life mistress, actress/singer Marion Davies.

                                                              Susan Alexander and Kane

   It has been revealed by many persons related to the making of the movie, movie historians, and even Orson Welles himself, that Welles' chief inspiration came from the highly-public lives of Harold F. McCormick and Ganna Walska.
  Orson Welles claimed that business tycoon Harold Fowler McCormick's lavish promotion of his second wife, Ganna Walska, was a direct influence on the screenplay. McCormick 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. Like the Susan Alexander character, she had a terrible voice, pleasing only to McCormick. But unlike Alexander, Walska got into an argument with director Pietro Cimini during dress rehearsal and stormed out of the production before she appeared. Roger Ebert, in his DVD commentary on Citizen Kane, also suggests that the Alexander character was based on Walska, and had very little to do with Marion Davies. The film's composer Bernard Herrmann also suggested that Kane is based on McCormick but also in great part on Welles himself.
   Also from an article about the making of "Citizen Kane" titled "RKO 281"(The secret codename of the pre-production picture) :
   One detail which has been lost with time is that the character of Susan Alexander, Kane's mistress, was nothing at all like the beloved Marion Davies, Hearst's mistress. Many of the details of the Kane/Alexander relationship did come from Welles, but those embellishments had nothing to do with William Randolph Hearst. Welles appropriated details from the lives of two magnates from the Chicago area, where Welles had grown up.

"The story of how Kane built Chicago's opera house for his wife was partially derived from the true story of Samuel Insull's construction and funding of Chicago's Lyric Opera building which featured performances by Insull's own wife, Gladys.

The Insull story was simply folded neatly into the story of another Chicago baron whose relationship with his mistress was directly appropriated for Citizen Kane. Harold Fowler McCormick, chairman of International Harvester, was the youngest son of the inventor of the McCormick reaper. He was married to Edith Rockefeller, but fell in love with an aspiring opera singer named Ganna Walska. He spent millions on Walska and her opera career despite the fact that she was known to lack the necessary talent. McCormick went so far as to finance an entire Chicago Opera production starring Walska, although the ill-fated production never did open. McCormick eventually divorced his rock-solid society wife and married Walska. Walska eventually abandoned him. If you know the story of Citizen Kane, you will recognize the correlation".

Shown above is a typed letter from my personal collection signed by Harold Fowler McCormick. It is dated May 12, 1927 mentioning Ganna while away in Paris and is addressed to Mrs. Aida de Acosta Root, wife of magnate Orin Root. Even before Wilbur and Orville Wright’s epochal flight in December 1903, Aida de Acosta became the first woman to pilot a gasoline-powered airship. Born in Elberon, New Jersey on July 28, 1884, de Acosta grew up in New York City, the daughter of a prominent immigrant family. Her Cuban-born father was raised in Spain, then subsequently returned to Cuba to help drive out the Spanish during the Spanish-American War of 1898. A daughter of privilege, Ms. Acosta became fascinated with Brazilian-born aviation pioneer Santos-Dumont’s airship while traveling in Paris in the summer of 1903. After striking up a friendship with the airman, she convinced Santos-Dumont to allow her to pilot his famed dirigible "IX." Because the basket was so small, she would have to fly solo. After three lessons, on June 29, 1903 de Acosta became the first woman to pilot a powered aircraft, nearly six months before the Wright brothers’ flights at Kitty Hawk. Santos-Dumont’s "handy little runabout" traveled at about 15 miles per hour, and the Brazilian tracked the dirigible while riding a bicycle. The flight lasted "considerably over a half mile."  Aida de Acosta Root has many other credIts to her name, the most noteworthy is the formation of the famous Wilmer Opthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

                                                            Aida de Acosta Root   Aida had famous siblings, sister Rita de Acosta Lydig, a socialite considered "The Most Picturesque Woman In America", and sister Mercedes de Acosta, Author, Screenwriter, Social Critic, and famous lesbian who was the lover of many top female movie stars, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, and Tallulah Bankhead.