As young Charlie plays outside with his sled, Mrs. Learning that she has become wealthy from mining shares left her by a former boarder, she is determined that her son will be reared and educated in the East. Next, Thompson reads the unpublished memoirs of Wall Street financier Walter Parks Thatcher, Kane's guardian and trustee of the mining fortune left to Kane by his mother: Thatcher first meets young Kane in 1871 at his mother's Colorado boardinghouse.
After the drunken Susan orders Thompson to leave, the accommodating bartender reports her claim that she had never heard of Rosebud. Thompson first approaches Kane's second wife, singer Susan Alexander, in the Atlantic City nightclub where she now performs. Seventy-year-old newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane dies in his palatial Florida home, Xanadu, after uttering the single word “Rosebud.” While watching a newsreel summarizing the years during which Kane built a dying newspaper into a major empire, married and divorced twice, ran unsuccessfully for governor and saw the collapse of his newspaper empire during the Depression, an editor decides they have not captured the essence of the controversial newspaperman and assigns reporter Jerry Thompson to discover the meaning of Kane's last word.
