The movie “Citizen Kane” is often found on lists of the greatest American films, and anyone who has taken a college level course on American cinema has probably seen it and become familiar with the detailed story it tells of a Charles Foster Kane, who is a thinly disguised American press baron William Randolph Hearst, who claws his way to great power through his chain of newspapers but his ultimate ambition to achieve public office is thwarted due to his personal failings. The movie was made by a very young Orson Welles who plays Kane, and also featured as his mother Agnes Moorehead, who would be known to a future generation of Americans as Samantha’s mother in the television show “Bewitched,” who in the film operates a boarding house and subsequently becomes incredibly wealthy when she inherits from a former boarder a stake in a mine. As a little boy Kane has a small sled with the word “Rosebud” embossed on it. “He did not like the real world, so he created his own,” one of the characters says of Kane who builds himself a castle in Florida and fills it with art works and wild animals that he purchased from around the world just as the real life Hearst did in California. “Rosebud” Kane mutters as he dies, and much of the narrative is focused on what that word may have meant to him. After his passing, some of the items that he had acquired that were deemed to have little value were being burned in a large fireplace in the structure, and one of them is his boyhood sled with that word on it that slowly dissolves in the flames. Citizen Kane was recently shown on the TCM Channel and when one Oklahoma city resident who had formerly served as an assistant district attorney for Steven Suttle, who was a two term Oklahoma district attorney based in Jackson County was watching the final scenes of it received a phone call from a former colleague who told him that Suttle had passed away the day before in New Mexico at the age of 75. Suttle resembled Charles Foster Kane in some respects in that both of them were men of talent, intelligence, and ambition, and they also shared failings that would ultimately thwart their political ambitions. Both individuals where collectors of art, and Suttle had collections of political memorabilia, Native American art and Volkswagen beetles. Suttle was a skilled and conscientious prosecutor who cared deeply about protecting the public from crime, and would strongly support his assistants and other staffers if they became entangled in controversies with opposing defense attorneys. Gertrude Stein said of young Ernest Hemingway that he was surprisingly sensitive in nature, but sought to conceal it through a façade of boxing and violence, and Suttle had a similar sensitivity that he sought to camouflage through often angry outbursts directed at others that accounted in large part for his trouncing in his bid for reelection decades ago. After his defeat the former officeholder constructed a new life in New Mexico with his wife and daughter and served as a assistant district attorney and assistant attorney general there, “I hope that you never have to see what I have had to see,” Suttle once told a civic group as he recalled pictures from crime scenes that included murdered children and knives protruding from dead bodies. A statement that Shakespeare made about a character in one of historical plays may also apply to Steve Suttle; “His faults lay gently on him.”
Against the Grain 