Susan Alexander
Movie tycoon Jules Brulatour's second and third wives, Dorothy Gibson and Hope Hampton, both fleeting stars of the silent screen who later had
marginal careers in opera, are believed to have provided inspiration for the Susan Alexander character.
Orson Welles also 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.[16] The film's composer Bernard Herrmann also suggests that Kane is based on McCormick but also in great part on Welles himself.[17]
Other sources say the Alexander role — and the disastrous opera singing — is a composite of Hampton, Davies, Walska, and the story of Samuel Insull,
who built the Chicago Civic Opera House in 1929 for his daughter, who hoped to become famous and sing at the Metropolitan Opera but never did.
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