‘Rosebud’: The ‘Citizen Kane’ Mystery Explained

In the opening scene of Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane, the film’s leading character, Charles Foster Kane, whispers a single word while lying on his deathbed in his cavernous mansion:

“Rosebud.”

The cryptic utterance sets off the film’s central mystery: Who was Kane, really? Determined to decode the life of the powerful newspaper magnate and failed politician, a team of journalists tries to chase down the meaning of his last word, hoping it will unlock the enigma of the man. 

As the film unfolds, viewers are shown fragments of Kane’s life—from his childhood separation from his mother, who placed him under the guardianship of a Dickensian New York banker, to his rise as a media titan. Only in the film’s closing moments does the audience see what the journalists never do: Kane’s childhood sled, painted with the word Rosebud, tossed into a furnace. It lands not just as a plot twist, but as a quiet revelation—hinting that all his power and ambition masked a deep longing for an innocence lost.

With all that mystery and drama, Rosebud has taken hold in moviegoers' imagination as one of the most storied props in film history. In July 2025, one of three surviving sleds used onscreen in Citizen Kane sold at auction for $14.75 million, the second-most highly valued piece of movie memorabilia after Dorothy's ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz, which sold for $32.5 million in December 2024. “These aren’t just props. They’re mythic objects,” said Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions’ executive vice president, in a statement after the Rosebud sale.

Far from just a toy, Citizen Kane’s movie sled serves as a poignant symbol of the emotional cost of the protagonist's rise to power.

Welles, in a February 1941 statement released by RKO Pictures, said of the sled: "'Rosebud' is the trade name of a cheap little sled on which Kane was playing on the day he was taken away from his home and his mother."

“The sled symbolizes everything that Kane lost in life,” says author Harlan Lebo, who wrote Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey. “This is a story about power, about the gaining and loss of power, influence and friendship. Even though he had everything possible, Rosebud symbolizes the life he left behind, what he missed out on, and shows what he really wanted was love on his own terms.”

William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful American media baron of the first half of the 20th century, is widely believed to have inspired the character of Charles Kane. The fictional titan builds himself a lavish hilltop estate called Xanadu, overstuffed with art and antiques and featuring a private zoo, echoing the real-life Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, which sprawled over property nearly half the size of Rhode Island. Kane builds a national newspaper empire relying heavily on sensationalist yellow journalism, similar to Hearst. Both pursued political careers and had scandalous affairs with performers whose careers they tried to control.

The many parallels incensed Hearst, who worked relentlessly to suppress the film. Welles, meanwhile, denied his film was a thinly veiled biopic. "Citizen Kane is the portrait of a public man’s private life. I have met some publishers, but I know none of them well enough to make them possible as models," countered the 25-year-old wunderkind director, known for stirring controversy with projects like his terrifying 1938 radio broadcast "War of the Worlds." Lebo notes that Welles—who co-wrote, starred in, produced and directed the film—frequently explored the nature of power and ambition in long conversations with his Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz. They endlessly discussed “powerful men and what drives them,” Lebo says.

When it came to naming the sled, several competing theories have emerged as to why Mankiewicz and Welles chose Rosebud. Mankiewicz once claimed it referred to Old Rosebud, the horse that won the 1914 Kentucky derby—a race he bet on and won. According to Competing With Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, A Dual Portrait by writer, producer and Mankiewicz scion Nick Davis, the screenwriter’s family later suggested it was actually named after a bicycle that was stolen from him at age 10.

Then, in 1989, Gore Vidal added a more salacious twist in his essay, “Remembering Orson Welles,” for The New York Review of Books. In it, he claimed Rosebud was a private nickname Hearst used for the genitalia of his paramour, actress Marion Davies—a rumor that has clung to the film’s mythology ever since.

Cinematically, Citizen Kane is regarded as one of the most innovative films in the history of the medium. Gregg Toland, the film's cinematographer, described their pioneering use of deep focus photography—a technique that keeps both foreground and background simultaneously in sharp focus—as a way to immerse audiences in a scene more deeply, allowing them to decide where to look rather than having the director guide their attention. Lebo says the film’s mixture of nonlinear storytelling, innovative editing and dramatic lighting techniques showed “the possibilities for art and communication in film more than any other movie,” says Lebo. 

The scene of Rosebud burning at the end of Citizen Kane further illustrates Welles’ cinematic prowess. “Welles says an awful lot more about power, friendship, loss and love in the final frames with Rosebud burning than most filmmakers do in entire movies,” says Lebo. The sled’s name went on to become a cultural shorthand for the hidden key to a person’s soul—the one private symbol that explains everything. Referenced in countless films, shows and essays, it helped push cinema into more introspective territory, where ambiguity and emotional depth mattered as much as spectacle.

But while cinephiles and filmmakers have endlessly analyzed the ending of Citizen Kane for more than 80 years, there was at least one person who thought the Rosebud reveal rang a little hollow. According to film scholar Laura Mulvey in her book Citizen Kane, Welles himself referred disparagingly to Rosebud’s psychoanalytic overtones as “dollar-book Freud.” Sometimes, the most enduring mysteries are the ones even their creators didn’t take too seriously.