Charles Lederer

American film director and screenwriter
the illustrator

Charles Davies Lederer (December 31, 1910 – March 5, 1976) was an American screenwriter and film director. He was born into a theatrical family in New York, and after his parents divorced, was raised in California by his aunt, Marion Davies, actress and mistress to newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. A child prodigy, he entered the University of California, Berkeley at age 13, but dropped out after a few years to work as a journalist with Hearst's newspapers. Lederer is recognized for his comic and acerbic adaptations and collaborative screenplays of the 1940s and early 1950s. His screenplays frequently delved into the corrosive influences of wealth and power. His comedy writing was considered among the best of the period, and he, along with writer friends Ben Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz, became major contributors to the film genre known as "screwball comedy". Among his notable screenplays which he wrote or co wrote, were The Front Page (1931), the critically acclaimed His Girl Friday (1940), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), Ocean's 11 (1960), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

Charles Davies Lederer was born in New York City to two prominent figures in the American theater, Broadway producer George Lederer and singer Reine Davies. After his parents were separated, Lederer and his older sister Pepi moved to California and were raised by his mother's sister, actress Marion Davies. He grew up in Hollywood, spending much time at San Simeon, the "enchanted castle on the hill", where his aunt reigned as publisher William Randolph Hearst's mistress. He was a child prodigy and was admitted to UC Berkeley at the age of 13, but dropped out a few years later to work as a journalist for Hearst's newspapers. According to biographer William MacAdams, "Hollywood was home to Lederer, where for most people it was a place they moved to in order to work for the movies. Virtually none of the film community had grown up in Los Angeles, but Lederer had been brought there when he was 11 by Marion Davies, his mother's sister Lederer thus knew the movie colony inside out as seen from the top and wasn’t impressed "

Welles biographer Barbara Leaming states that after Lederer married Welles's first wife in 1940, "earnestly trying to protect the best interests of Virginia and particularly of his daughter Chris, Lederer had angry run ins with Orson, whom he accused of not living up to the divorce settlement. Now, in the unlikeliest of turnarounds, Orson and the witty, intelligent Lederer became great chums." Welles himself said of the Lederers, "I liked them together," and he soon entered into a friendly relationship that he describes as a "strange design for living at the beach." Welles became famous in the movie world after the release of Citizen Kane in 1941, a story based in part on the life of William Randolph Hearst. The story attempts to solve the mystery of newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane's last dying word: "Rosebud". Film critic David Thomson calls the word "the greatest secret in cinema." In 1989, author Gore Vidal disclosed that "Rosebud" was in fact a nickname which Hearst playfully used for the clitoris of his mistress, Marion Davies. Vidal said that Davies told this intimate detail to Lederer, who mentioned it to him. The claim about the meaning of "Rosebud" was repeated in the 1996 documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane and again in the 1999 dramatic film RKO 281. Years later, after Welles's second marriage to actress Rita Hayworth ended in 1948, he moved to a beach house next door to the palatial Marion Davies estate where his first wife Virginia and Lederer, her husband, resided. quote|He seemed to be great pals with my stepfather, Charlie Lederer. No one observing them together would have guessed that my mother and Charlie had sued my father for an increase in my child support. . Mother and Charlie had given up, and so it was back to "Orson, darling!" and a daily invitation to join them in the ritual of martinis on the front porch at sunset. He was more likely to arrive unannounced and then madden the cook by staying for lunch or dinner. Always casually dressed in summer slacks and an open shirt, he behaved as though he were a member of our household, coming and going as he pleased with no need to give an account of himself. There were also awkward periods that Welles remembers:

According to Mankiewicz' biographer Richard Meryman, Lederer "isolated himself in his last years, contorted from arthritis, addicted to narcotics." He died in 1976, aged sixty five.

City Lights (1931) (In unused scene) Telegraph Delivery Boy, included in 1983 Unknown Chaplin documentary.