"Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or something he lost. Anyway, I don't think it would have explained everything. I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle . . . a missing piece." —Thompson

"[William Randolph] Hearst’s secret, pet, love name for his ‘little girl’ lover’s pussy-poo, his shared fun-tag for the (clinically) Douras genitalia and its perky ‘love bump’— Marion Davies’ clitoris— was the adorable, and quite graphic, Rosebud. Marion, of course, drank (the only character trait she shared with the fictional Susan Alexander) and someone—was it Louise Brooks?—shared the giggled confidence; well, as secrets will, one whisper led from mouth to ear to the steel-trap mind of Herman Mankiewicz—and he made a mental note: Marion Davies=Rosebud. We all know where Rosebud ended up—on the dying lips of Charles Foster Kane. To the crusty old ‘role-model’ for this fictional RKO photoplay (originally titled simply American), the slightly sagging totem pole W.R. Hearst, it was rotten enough that Marion’s clitoris was mentioned throughout the Kane picture—everybody is always harking back to Rosebud, niggling away at the word like a kid with a loose tooth—but for Hearst it was even worse that old man Kane died with Rosebud on his lips! Much worse, that cinematic cunnilingus, than the final sight of Rosebud frying and blistering on the flaming sled in Xanadu’s furnace!"

—Hollywood Babylon II, Kenneth Anger, 1984