By the time Citizen Kane finally made its debut on May 1, 1941, Radio City Music Hall had refused to show the picture and the Palace Theater had taken on the premiere instead. Orson Welles had spent the six weeks since his film had originally been scheduled to open directing a Broadway adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son . The controversial play, telling the story of a black man accused of murdering a white woman in Chicago, was well received. It made an ideal distraction for the young director as he waited for the difficulties surrounding Citizen Kan’s release to be resolved.

When the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst learned he was the model for the fictionalized Kane, he scared off wider distribution of the film by allowing friends to make threats on his behalf against RKO Pictures and by calling Welles a “Communist” through his army of newspaper columnists. In early January Hearst gave the order to refuse RKO advertising in his papers nationwide. There were rumors he was conspiring to have every print of Kane bought up. Welles himself publicly offered RKO Pictures a million dollars for the rights to the picture and threatened his own lawsuit against the movie company for delaying its release.

Despite RKO’s attempts to make Kane sound like a harmless love story (“What made this cutie walk out on $60,000,000? … Neither she—nor any woman—could endure his kind of love!”), theater owners were intimidated by rumors of a lawsuit as reported by Louella Parsons, Hearst’s star gossip columnist, who had attended a screening of the film accompanied by two lawyers. The film’s unconventional story line also worried RKO brass: A reporter follows conflicting stories of Kane’s friends and enemies to pursue a mystery he finally abandons. The film blended the lives of Hearst, the publisher Robert McCormick, the financier Samuel Insull, and Welles himself, whose own childhood mentor was the basis for the banker guardian of Charles Foster Kane.

The film grossed nearly twenty-four thousand dollars the week it opened, but it lost a net of eighteen thousand after nine weeks. William Randolph Hearst and the actress Marion Davies, upon whom Kane’s mistress was based, attended the film unrecognized in a small San Francisco theater. Hearst, having watched Kane’s rise and fall in 119 minutes, later told a friend, “We thought it was a little too long.”

Lou Gehrig died June 2 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a little-known and incurable disease of the spine that had left him, at age thirty-seven, sadly diminished from the “hulking figure” he had once been. One sportswriter, describing Gehrig as a rookie, wrote that “the boy picked up a bat—one of Ruth’s, by some curious chance—and advanced to the plate. He was obviously nervous, missed the first two pitches, then bounced one weakly over, second base.