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[edit] Citizen Kane

I removed the following text from the article, as I removed a similar version a couple months ago:

Some aspects of Insull's life were used by Orson Welles for the character of Charles Foster Kane. In 1929 Insull built the huge Chicago Civic Opera House, supposedly for his lover soprano Mary Garden.

While the first sentence is true, the second repeats a long-discredited "Citizen Kane" myth. Insull built the Civic Opera House, but it was a monument to his own ego, not a showcase for a specific opera singer. As any Chicagoan can tell you, the "opera house" is actually a huge office building. Insull, an opera lover, came up with the idea that if you built an opera house at the base of a skyscraper, the rental income from the office space would subsidize the opera. Once the Civic Opera House was built, he moved his headquarters to the new building and ran his industrial empire from there.

As for Citizen Kane, screenwriters Mankiewicz and Welles have said they based the character of Charles Kane on several American industrialists, including Hearst, Insull, and Harold McCormick. McCormick, another wealthy Chicagoan, divorced his heiress wife (a Rockefeller) and married a mediocre opera singer whose career he desperately tried to promote. McCormick's story was clearly the model for the fictional Kane's 1st and 2nd marriages.

I don't know if Insull had an affair with Mary Garden. They were both part of the Chicago social scene and certainly knew each other. But when the new opera house was constructed, Mary Garden was already a world-renowned opera singer who had been a big draw in the city for 20 years. She was 55 years old and close to retirement - hardly in need of a showcase for her talents.

I suppose all this could be included in the article, but I think it's inappropriate to muddy up a biography with a mixture of fact and fiction.InNuce 15:43, 2 June 2006 (UTC)