A “Citizen Kane” sled that has been in screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s family for more than seven decades goes up for auction on Monday — but his grandson, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, never rode on it as a child.
“I never even saw it until I was a teenager staying at my Uncle Don’s house in Beverly Hills for the summer,” he told me Thursday night at a preview for the auction , which will be held Monday at Bonhams, where the sled is estimated to sell for between $100,000 and $200,000.
According to family legend, the 1840s keepsake with the iconic “Rosebud” painted in faded letters was presented to Herman at a wrap party for the Orson Welles classic by his friend and fellow screenwriter Ben Hecht. It was fitting, because Herman was the one who lured Hecht to Hollywood in 1925 — “with a telegram that read, ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around,’ ” Ben says.
The “Mankiewicz sled,” while authentically vintage, never actually appeared in the♈ film and differs in design from the one presented to young Charles Foster Kane, who uses it to shield himself from his new guardian in the 1941 film.
According to Welle꧂s, three balsa wood reproductions of that one were made for the scene at the end where the sled is fed into a furnace. Steven Spielberg bought one that survived for $50,000 in 1982. (At least one of the other sleds was burned for the scene.)
When Herman Mankiewicz died in 1953, the memento went to his son Don (the Oscar-nominated screenw൩riter of 1958’s “I Want to Live!”), who died in April. The sled was consigned by Don’s s🐓on, John, a screenwriter best known as the executive producer of “House of Cards.”
Herman’s Oscar for writing “Citizen Kane” went to his other son, Frank (Ben’s father), who died in 2014. In 2012, he put it up for auction, where it fetched $588,455.
“My dad was not a sentimental man,” Ben says of his political-adviser father, who was Robert F. Kennedy’s pre🦋ss secretary for his 1968 campaign. “The Oscar cost so much to insure that he kept it in a safe deposit box. He figured that if we couldn’t see it, there was not much point in hanging onto it.”
The TCM host says he wasn’t interested♒ in old movies when he first saw the “Citizen Kane” sled.
“We didn’t talk about show business around the dinner table,” recalls Ben. “If you wanted attention, you’d have to complain about how disappointing President Carter was.”