They named her Margaret Louise Comingore, like the kind of name you’d see stitched into the inside of a coat—private, practical, meant for life before the spotlight. But the world met her as Dorothy Comingore, and if you’ve seen Citizen Kane, you’ve seen the moment she steps into immortality and gets punished for it. She was born in Los Angeles in 1913, but childhood wasn’t some sunlit studio-lot postcard. Most of it unfolded in Oakland, where a person learns to keep their head on a swivel and their opinions close until they’re ready to fight. Her father was an electrotyper—hands-on, ink-and-metal work—and a union organizer, which means politics wasn’t a dinner-table abstraction in that house. It was a way of breathing. You grow up around that and you learn early that power doesn’t like being questioned, and it really doesn’t like being challenged by a woman with a backbone. She had a sister, Lucille, running a nightclub in San Francisco—another kind of education: music and smoke and the social machinery of nightlife. Dorothy’s mind, though, tilted toward philosophy. At UC Berkeley she studied it, the old questions that don’t pay rent but can keep you alive when your circumstances turn mean. It’s a detail that matters. Philosophy doesn’t make you famous, but it can make you stubborn. It can make you refuse the easy lie. Before Hollywood put its hands on her, she lived elsewhere for a while—Taos, New Mexico—one of those places people drift to when they’re not sure whether they’re escaping themselves or trying to find themselves. Then she returned to California and went into theater, which is where real actors tend to start: the small rooms, the honest sweat, the applause that comes from strangers sitting close enough to see you breathe. In 1938 she was acting in Carmel, in a small playhouse, alongside Robert Meltzer—her love interest, and likely her husband at the time, depending on which version of the story you hold up to the light. Charles Chaplin noticed her. That’s the kind of sentence that sounds like destiny, but destiny is often just a famous man glancing in your direction. Chaplin urged her to come to Hollywood. The papers tried to make her his “protégé,” and she pushed back—denied the myth, minimized the contact, refused to let publicity write her life for her. Still, the encounter did what encounters like that do: it turned her face toward film. A friend helped her find an agent. There was a screen test. There was a contract—Warner Bros. at first—then the long stretch of minor roles and cheap pictures, bit parts and B movies, sometimes uncredited. She was billed as Linda Winters, and before that she’d worked on stage and radio as Kay Winters. Names, like costumes. The kind of thing a young actor tries on because the business always insists you can be remade, rebranded, simplified for easier sale. Then Orson Welles cast her. It’s hard to explain what Citizen Kane did to the people inside it. The film is a machine that turns everyone into legend—Welles, Mankiewicz, the cinematography, the whole grand haunted mansion of it. And in the middle of that machine, there’s Susan Alexander Kane: a woman pulled out of ordinary life, polished into a symbol, and then slowly broken into something brittle. Dorothy Comingore played her not as a joke, not as a caricature, but as a human being trapped in a gilded cage with the door locked from the outside. Her performance got praised—real praise, the kind that makes a career. Critics called her an important acquisition. Trade papers wrote that she was put through a punishing range of emotions and delivered without a letdown. The movie should have made her a star. That was the story on the surface. Underneath, it got complicated fast. RKO became her studio home, and studios were not homes—they were bosses, landlords, wardens. She was in demand from other places, but loan-outs were denied. She fell ill, was ordered to bed rest, then suspended by her own studio, and when she came back, the parts weren’t there like they were supposed to be. Hollywood loves a discovery. Hollywood also loves a lesson. One minute you’re the new face; the next you’re “difficult.” Too selective. Too political. Too something. And then there was Hearst. Whether Citizen Kane was directly “about” Hearst has been argued and re-argued forever, but Hearst’s influence—his newspapers, his reach—was real enough to leave bruises. Comingore’s portrayal of Susan Alexander was widely taken as an echo of Marion Davies, Hearst’s companion, and it reportedly earned her an enemy with a megaphone. Rumors and smears started to circle. Accusations of Communist sympathies. The kind of talk that doesn’t have to be proven to be effective—just repeated until doors stop opening. She wasn’t exactly invisible in politics, either. She worked on causes. She championed union solidarity. She involved herself in desegregation efforts around USO clubs. She supported committees and campaigns. The specifics became ammunition later, packed into files, labeled, carried around like a weapon waiting for the right moment. That moment arrived with the HUAC era, when suspicion became an industry and naming names became a career move. Comingore’s file grew “thick,” as the story goes, and the air around her got toxic. Work began to dry up, not with a clean announcement, but with that quiet cruelty Hollywood does best: calls not returned, offers evaporating, “We’ll see,” and then never seeing. There’s another thread, uglier because it’s personal: a custody battle with her ex-husband, screenwriter Richard J. Collins. Two children. Divorce. And a courtroom ready to turn a woman’s politics, her rumored associations, and her private struggles into a public indictment. Collins cooperated with HUAC and named colleagues—more than twenty, according to accounts—an act that fit the era’s reward system. Comingore, by contrast, refused the script. When she was called before HUAC in 1952, she declined to answer questions or name names, invoking constitutional grounds. “Unfriendly witness,” they called it, like decency was a character flaw. She lost more than work. She lost ground. There were claims in custody hearings that she drank heavily, that she was an unfit mother—accusations that can be both weapon and truth in the same breath, because life is rarely clean. Then came the 1953 arrest in West Hollywood for solicitation. Some suspected it was a setup—an attempt to destroy her credibility, to break her will, to turn her into a cautionary tale with handcuffs. Comingore herself suggested as much publicly, saying it was part of punishment for being “unfriendly.” The charge was dropped, but the price was brutal: she agreed to commitment at Camarillo State Mental Hospital and spent around two years institutionalized. After that, there was no comeback. No triumphant return. No soft-focus redemption montage. She never acted on stage or screen again. In the 1960s, a professor researching the history of Citizen Kane interviewed her—one of those quiet, late-life moments where the past comes knocking because it never really leaves. Her recollections fed into later debates about the film’s authorship and mythology. But that kind of scholarship doesn’t pay back the years taken. It just keeps the story circulating like a ghost that refuses to lie down. Her personal life kept moving, because it had to. A brief marriage to Robert Meltzer in the late 1930s. Marriage to Richard Collins, two children, divorce in 1946. Another husband, screenwriter Theodore Strauss, with whom she had one child. Later, a different kind of life with John W. Crowe in Connecticut—rural, quieter, a store called the Crowe’s Nest, sea air instead of studio air. By then, arthritis and failing health were pressing in, but some accounts say she found a measure of contentment in that seclusion. Not happiness like a movie ending—more like peace through exhaustion. She died in Stonington, Connecticut, on December 30, 1971, of pulmonary disease, fifty-eight years old. Her ashes were scattered in multiple locations. No grand monument. No plaque for a long time. Just the strange fact that you can give the world a performance that lives forever and still vanish from the world’s gratitude. Dorothy Comingore’s story isn’t tidy. It isn’t polite. It’s a cautionary tale and a tragedy and, in a grim way, a testament. She had talent, she had timing, she had the kind of on-screen truth that can’t be manufactured. And then she ran headfirst into the machine that decides who gets to survive a scandal, who gets to be forgiven, who gets to keep working. She refused to play along when the room demanded betrayal. For that, they took her career. They worked on her reputation. They worked on her family. They worked on her mind. But if you watch her in Citizen Kane, really watch her—watch the way she tries, the way she collapses, the way she becomes a person turned into a symbol—you can see something the blacklist couldn’t erase: A woman telling the truth in a world built to punish it.
