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Summary
Summary
Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateur
There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.
Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing Hollywood career, the people he knew--FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more--and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse--sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above-- because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to movies to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.
Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles--if such a creature ever existed.
Author Notes
Peter Biskind is the author of "The Godfather Companion" & "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." A contributing editor at "Vanity Fair," he has written for "The New York Times," the "Los Angeles Times," "The Washington Post," & "Rolling Stone," among other publications. He lives in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
When his first film, Citizen Kane, was released, Welles had already achieved fame in theater and radio. He followed Kane with several masterpieces, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Touch of Evil (1958) and was famous as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). By the 1980s, his films already classics, he hadn't made a new film in nearly a decade, making it impossible to get funding for future projects, which led to lending his voice to wine commercials. Dining frequently with filmmaker Henry Jaglom, Welles allowed him to record their conversations. These recordings reveal Welles, the raconteur, as he recalls lovers (Rita Hayworth, Lena Horne); disses actors and directors (John Houseman, Joan Fontaine, Chaplin); tells outlandish stories (Carole Lombard's plane was shot down by Nazi agents in America); and bemoans lack of respect from his peers. He is unguarded in his comments, revealing a vain, prickly personality, uncompromising and brilliant. Film buffs will find Welles' commentary endlessly fascinating, though the director's fans might be saddened to see him as a washed-up has-been. A worthy addition to the Bogdanovich, Leaming, and Callow accounts of Welles.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The amateur magician and the magical beauty. Their first names alone conjure a time when the words Hollywood and glamour still held hands. Ava Gardner was "essential to the Hollywood myth about itself," as her friend Dirk Bogarde observed, and so was Orson Welles. Orson was "his own greatest production," as the Hollywood chronicler Peter Biskind writes, and so was Ava. Two new books - "My Lunches With Orson" and "Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations" - unearth vintage conversations with the stars in their final years, when they were broke, in bad health, unable to get work and mourning their lost grandeur. But oh, What gorgeous wrecks they were, and what mesmerizing stories they told, these Sunset Boulevard Scheherazades. Even washed up and so heavy and arthritic he had to use a wheelchair, the 68-year-old Welles knew he was more interesting than anyone else in Hollywood. So he asked his pal Henry Jaglom, an indie filmmaker, to tape their lunch conversations at Ma Maison - with his ill-tempered toy poodle Kiki at the table - discussions that indolently roamed from chicken salad capers to chic romantic capers. The tapes span 1983 to 1985, when Welles died of a heart attack with a typewriter in his lap writing a script; they languished in a shoe box for years until Biskind learned about them in the 1990s and started bugging Jaglom to transcribe and publish them. In 1988, living on her own in London, recovering from a couple of strokes and fearing she had pulmonary emphysema, Gardner asked the British journalist Peter Evans to ghostwrite her memoir. She had no money and didn't want to sell the jewels that Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes and other famous men had lavished on her. "Pretty damn soon," she frets to Evans, "there's gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby." Both books make you feel as if you're eavesdropping, the one about Ava in a more invasive way. Unlike the chummy rambling chats between Welles and Jaglom, Gardner was in a constant tug of war with Evans, agonizing in vinous 3 a.m. phone calls, as he surreptitiously took notes, about whether she really wanted "strangers digging around in my panties drawer." Watching this Venus ply her mind games, sensuality and stubborn will on Evans, it's easy to imagine what it was like to be a love object jerked on her marionette strings in her prime. You wouldn't have a chance. "You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey," she tells Evans in her throaty voice. "She made movies, she made out and she made a [expletive] mess of her life. But she never made jam." Some of the colorful stories Welles tells have appeared elsewhere, with sharper aperçus. But what makes "Lunches With Orson" appealing is the piquancy of the much younger, skinnier actor and director taking on the Sisyphean job of reviving the Falstaffian outcast - a mitzvah another Welles interviewer and acolyte, Peter Bogdanovich, didn't bother with, Welles thought, when Bogdanovich was on top. Even maudlin, Welles and Gardner are magnificent. "A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework," Ava says. Both hit the big time as teenagers, Boy Genius and Girl Vamp, landing Time covers in their 20s. They had in common a bawdy honesty, a desire to shock and a lust for living extravagantly. The lion and lioness in winter are poignant. The cosmopolitan man who made "Citizen Kane" could not get financing to make a movie. The green-eyed woman who dazzled in Technicolor in "The Barefoot Contessa" was drinking, smoking, coughing and listening to old Sinatra-Tommy Dorsey recordings that Sinatra sent her after her strokes. "Who'd have thought the highlight of my day is walking the dog," dryly notes Gardner, who once danced all night and then began drinking Dom Pérignon in the studio makeup room at 5 a.m. "I miss Frank," she says, even the fights. She knows he will outlive her: "Bastards are always the best survivors." When Richard Burton walks up to Welles's table at Ma Maison to humbly ask if Elizabeth Taylor can come over and say hi, Orson brusquely brushes them off, even though he had been entranced by Taylor as a child, when they were both in "Jane Eyre." Pointing to his pug nose - which he elongated with fake noses in "Citizen Kane" and "Jane Eyre" - Welles explains to Jaglom: "You have to do something to let them know that you're not just a little creature. You have to be the ruler of the forest. People want me to be 'Orson Welles.' They want the dancing bear show." If he's that insecure, Jaglom asks, why does he seem so sure of himself? "Yes, I'm sure of myself," Welles replies, "but I'm not sure of anybody else." Ava's dancing bear shows have a tinge of Norma Desmond. When the 65-year-old first met Evans at her apartment, she appeared clad only in a towel. At another point, unable to trust any man she couldn't seduce, she kissed the married writer, and then told a friend he put the moves on her. She was a vamp with ire, devouring and brawling with lovers and coming alive at dusk when she was drinking. "If anyone tried to possess me - oh boy, I was outta there," she says. The woman once promoted as "the world's most beautiful animal" mulls euthanasia. "Actors get older," she sighs. "Actresses get old." But she was proud of being a survivor. "Life doesn't stop because you're no longer a beauty, or desirable," she muses. "You just have to make adjustments. Although I'd be lying to you if I told you that losing my looks is no big deal. It hurts, goddamn it, it hurts like a son of a bitch." Partially paralyzed on her left side, she was nervous about meeting a "suit," as she called Dick Snyder, the head of Simon & Schuster, who was interested in buying the memoir. "I've got more lines on my face than Lana Turner," she worried, the day before Snyder was set to visit her Knightbridge flat. She instructed Evans to call Jack Cardiff, the British cinematographer who had worked with Ava at her most delectable, in "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" and "The Barefoot Contessa." "That afternoon," Evans writes, "the world's finest cinematographer rearranged the lamps in her drawing room - and placed a key light above the chair on which she'd sit for her meeting with Snyder." The next day, Gardner sat under her key light, which cast the frozen side of her face into shadow, and beguiled. "Elizabeth Taylor is not beautiful, she is pretty," Ava informs Snyder. "I was beautiful." Evans's agent wanted him to verify with Ava a ribald line attributed to her about Frank Sinatra's being a bantamweight but not where it counted. Asked about it, she dismisses the line as "vile" and "smut." BUT it's hard to know what is a true reflection and what is theatrical. As Jaglom notes of Welles, the self-mythologizing is reminiscent of the funhouse mirrors in the climactic scene of the film noir "The Lady From Shanghai," which Welles made with his wife at the time, Rita Hayworth. Ava, the daughter of a sharecropper, recalled "a charmed childhood" in a house in Grabtown, N.C., with no electricity, running water or indoor bathroom. She tells Evans that madness, booze and depression ran in her family. Her older sister, Bappie, moved to Hollywood with her to look after MGM's 18-year-old "hillbilly starlet," as Evans calls her, and chaperoned her first dates with Mickey Rooney. Although the Rooney-Gardner romance always seemed incongruous, Ava speaks of the 5-foot-2 Rooney fondly, noting that he went through the ladies like "a hot knife through fudge." Andy Hardy wined and dined the shy, gauche starlet with the thick Tarheel accent at Chasen's, Ciro's, the Coconut Grove and Don the Beachcomber. He stood up to Louis B. Mayer to marry her and taught his virgin bride how much she liked sex. "In bed," she says, "I've always known I was on safe ground." They laughed a lot in bed and she kept up a dalliance while they were getting a divorce. Mickey held on to his little black book and Ava punished him by mocking him as a midget, but as soon as they split, Howard Hughes was ringing her doorbell. Or rather, the guy who checked out his dates was. She called the owner of TWA "a low-key guy sexually," yet an insanely jealous control freak. She said he was bigoted and "never really aware of his personal hygiene even then," but she thought he had "plenty of guts." He lavished her with jewels, furs, limos, planes and a Caddie. The relationship was, of course, volatile. One night Howard dislocated Ava's jaw and Ava nearly "put a lily in his hand" by throwing an onyx ashtray at his head. There was blood everywhere, Ava recalls, even "real blood in the Bloody Marys." Following her friend Lana Turner again, as she did by getting involved with Rooney and Hughes, she married Lana's ex, Artie Shaw, an autocratic autodidact who constantly put her down. "I lost complete confidence in myself," she said, adding: "I got drunk because I was so insecure." In a year, he dumped her for the author of "Forever Amber," which she had been reading to improve her mind. Then she went to what a friend called "the University of Sinatra," where the pair were "kissing the bottle," drinking martinis in big Champagne glasses with Scotch and bourbon chasers, making "woo-poo" and scrapping and making up. They shot up a California town with .38s. She had an abortion. He got fired by MGM and had cry-for-help feints with suicide, including overdoses and firing a gun into a pillow to scare her while she was in the next room. As they waited for his divorce to Nancy to come through, she punished him by telling him about a fling with a bullfighter, which drove him nuts. Sinatra always said that when people looked at them as a couple, every guy wanted to be him and every girl wanted to be her. But it doesn't sound so great from the inside. She visited Frank when he was playing to half-empty houses in Italy. "I had to have been in love with him to sit through those performances," she recalls. "Let's say he was not at his best." She adds: "He did a record with Harry James that was so bad, I cried when I heard it. I couldn't listen to it with him." Frank was in a downward spiral as "Mr. Gardner." "Poor baby, I was the star in the ascendancy and he was on his ass. No matter what I did, his having to rely on a woman to foot some of the bills - most of them, actually - made it all so much worse." Ava disputes stories that the Mafia was taking care of Frank. The "so-called Family was nowhere to be seen when he needed them," she says. She says they were too much alike. Bappie told her she was "Frank in drag." Lana warned Ava not to marry him, but Ava explains that "you don't pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy's good in the feathers." She says the song he helped write the year they were married epitomized their relationship - "I'm a Fool to Want You." "I tried to be a good wife," she tells Evans. "I tried to be any kind of wife; the plain fact is, I just wasn't meant to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after." Asked if she regretted not having kids, she replies wearily, "How many people do you know who haven't made mistakes in their lives, who've lived completely without vices, baby?" She may have missed fighting with Frank but not with George C. Scott. When he was loaded, he would beat her, and the next morning, "I'd be lying next to him, black-and-blue and bleeding, and he couldn't remember a thing." She dropped Evans as a collaborator when she learned that he hadn't told her that Sinatra sued and won a settlement and apology for a statement Evans made on a BBC show repeating speculation that Frank got the Maggio role in "From Here to Eternity" thanks to the Mafia. Evans conjectures that Frank, who made a pact with Ava when they were together not to write their memoirs, must have given her the amount she would have earned from the book. She later produced a bowdlerized version of her life with another writer. After she was "pushing clouds around," to use her phrase, Evans got permission from her former manager, now in charge of her estate, to print their conversations, although you can imagine Ava turning the air blue with a savage diatribe at that reversal of her wishes. Evans himself died last year as he was finishing the book. WELLES, born in Kenosha, Wis., to an inventor and a pianist, got off to a fast start, forsaking a chance to go to Harvard for the theater. Then came "War of the Worlds," his radio simulation of a Martian invasion in New Jersey that panicked millions of Americans; "Citizen Kane," which lost RKO $150,000 after William Randolph Hearst forced the movie into smaller, independent venues; and "The Magnificent Ambersons," which got butchered by RKO after Welles abruptly left for Brazil before he finished editing the picture. The movie flopped, and as Biskind notes in the introduction to "My Lunches With Orson," "Welles never entirely recovered his footing." He used his rolling thunder voice to find acting work. Welles was pretty much washed up. The Third Man had become the Forgotten Man. He was making ends meet with ads, roasts and talk shows - reading Shakespeare on Johnny Carson - when the new wave of hot '70s filmmakers came along. They venerated him, Biskind writes, as the "avatar of an auteur." Jaglom showed up at the Plaza Hotel in New York to ask Welles to be in his first movie, "A Safe Place," which didn't even have a script. Welles answered the door in purple silk pj's, looking, Jaglom recalled, "like this huge grape." Jaglom won over the imperious grape by asking him to play a magician. "Can I wear a cape?" Welles asked. Welles generously helped Jaglom with his films and Jaglom sweetly became Welles's de facto agent and ego fluffer. "I've lost my girlish enthusiasm," Welles told Jaglom, wearily noting at another point that "they always want earth-shattering from me." Welles, who had made films of "Macbeth" and "Othello," and "Chimes at Midnight" about Falstaff and Prince Hal, talks a lot about his struggle to get financing from Europeans to make a movie of "King Lear." "Shakespeare was clearly tremendously feminine," he says. "Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him." "They all want to have dinner with me, but when it comes time to fork over the money, they disappear," Welles says. "It's always the same thing, I'm unmanageable, I walk away from films before they're finished, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So boring." Jaglom fields an offer for Welles to do a guest shot on "Love Boat" and gets him a contract to play the voice of God in a John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John movie. Welles whinges that John Gielgud and his old partner-turned-nemesis John Houseman are getting rich off commercials. Meanwhile, he has lost his gig with Paul Masson rumbling "We will sell no wine before its time" after mentioning on a talk show that he had slimmed down by giving up wine. "If Wesson Oil would let me say that Wesson Oil is good, instead of Houseman, I'd be delighted," he complains, "but nobody will take me for a commercial," not even for radio. Welles wrote a script for a political movie called "The Big Brass Ring," about an older gay Roosevelt political adviser who mentors a young Kennedyesque senator. The tireless Jaglom finally got the producer Arnon Milchan to agree to give Welles $8 million and final cut if he could get one of seven A-list actors to play the senator. Welles and Jaglom break open some Cristal because Orson knows that many of the top actors revere him. But one by one, they all turn him down, even his friend Warren Beatty, who was exhausted from "Reds," and Jack Nicholson, who refused to reduce his salary. "Every 'no' hurts me more than I let on," Welles admits. He wasn't interested in Dustin Hoffman ("no dwarfs") or Robert De Niro ("I really don't see De Niro carrying Kansas"). He says little about his ex, Rita Hayworth, except that she didn't like to go out. He dishes about how he can't stand Woody Allen's "therapeutic" movies; how he loved his old girlfriend Dolores Del Rio's underwear; how "Thalberg was Satan!"; how he enjoyed John Wayne and other Hollywood right-wingers because they were nicer than left-wingers; how Kate Hepburn talked candidly about having sex with Howard Hughes; how Bogie told him while filming "Casablanca" that it was the worst movie he'd ever been in; how the Hollywood moguls ignored a girl he was dating named Marilyn Monroe until she hit it big; and how much he admired Carole Lombard, a beauty who "behaved like a waitress in a hash house." Both Welles and Gardner pushed racial boundaries in Hollywood: Ava posed with Sammy Davis Jr. for what she recalls was an Ebony Christmas cover, making Sinatra jealous. Welles dated Lena Horne and told Hedda Hopper to "go boil her head" when she advised him to stop. Welles cheerfully admits to being a hypocrite, sellout and racist, offering impishly outlandish views. "Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers," he says. "Bosnians have short necks." He loves Hungarians "to the point of sex," but considers the Irish mean, citing Spencer Tracy as an example. He thought of running for the Senate in 1952 because, he said, "I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness." He confesses that he believes everything bad he reads about himself, and that he has no faith in posterity. "I don't think what's good," he says, "is necessarily recognized in the long run." Yet "Citizen Kane" abides. And so does Orson Welles. Even maudlin, Welles and Gardner are magnificent. 'A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework,' Ava says. Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
Kirkus Review
Tape recordings made in the three years before Orson Welles' death in 1985 capture the legendary film director's outsized personality. As editor Biskind (Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, 2010, etc.) explains in his introduction, Henry Jaglom talked Welles into acting in his first feature, A Safe Place, in 1971, and they became friends. Jaglom's generation worshipped the creator of Citizen Kane as a groundbreaking auteur who pioneered their sort of personal filmmaking; Welles liked to be worshipped. By the time Jaglom began recording their conversations over lunches at Ma Maison, Welles hadn't made a movie in 10 years, and F Is for Fake (1974) had flopped. Aided by Jaglom, he was trying to get financing for a film version of King Lear or his political script, The Big Brass Ring. But nothing came through, and Welles' income from TV commercials had also dried up; his reputation was at a low point. In conversation, Welles shows himself eager to disprove his critics, as well as to savagely gossip about his bitterly estranged theatrical partner, John Houseman, and to comment unflatteringly on the talents of friends/rivals, from Laurence Oliver and John Huston to Marlon Brando and Peter Bogdanovich. Jaglom, an admirer but not a sycophant, occasionally protests such judgments, but he's unfailingly supportive of a friend they both know is in the twilight of his career. Welles could be mean-spirited and insufferable, but he was also blazingly intelligent. His nailing of Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin as sharing "that particular combination of arrogance and timidity [that] sets my teeth on edge" is characteristic of his sharp wit about every aspect of moviemaking, and he's just as smart about history, music and fine art. You can understand why his friends were so devoted. Like most oral histories, a tad self-indulgent but filled with insights and good dish that movie buffs will relish.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Toward the end of his life, Orson Welles (1915-85) enjoyed an unlikely friendship with independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom. Editor Biskind (Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film) collects long-lost tapes of Welles and Jaglom's conversations over lunch at Hollywood's Ma Maison restaurant. The wide-ranging talks cover Welles's reflections on food, politics, religion, and his many unrealized projects. The book clearly reflects the man's wit, disdain for the Hollywood studio system, and what one admirer called his "crushing ego." Among the many Hollywood legends Welles disparages here are Charlie Chaplin, Elia Kazan, Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunne, Laurence Olivier, Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, actor-producer John Houseman, and MGM producer Irving Thalberg and his wife, actress Norma Shearer. Some of the people Welles admires include his frequent costar Joseph Cotten, Carole Lombard, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, and Welles's ex-wife Rita Hayworth. VERDICT Some readers will be put off by Welles's sharp-tongued remarks on gays, Jews, and certain ethnic groups, particularly Irish Americans, and his negative view of many Hollywood icons. However, on balance, this is an entertaining, revealing look at a Hollywood legend. Recommended.-Stephen Rees, formerly with Levittown Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Part One 1983 At lunch at Ma Maison, I encountered Orson standing with difficulty to embrace me after several months with great warmth (or what seems like great warmth, I have never been quite sure), and I am always moved, as I was today. And as always, amazingly for me, I was somewhat at a loss for what to say, and all I came up with was some general pleasantry/banality on the order of, "How is everything?" Orson answered me with, "Oh, I don't know, do you?" And I, acknowledging that my question had been excessive in scope, reduced it to, "How is everything today?" To which he answered, happy that he had forced greater specificity: "Fine . . . as of this hour." Then tonight, two hours ago as I twirled the television dial, I was astonished to find myself watching the opening newsreel segment of Citizen Kane . I have just finished watching him grow old with makeup and acting skill on a body in its twenties, in a film designed by his mind in its twenties, and the film--and he in it--are so affecting and so near-perfect that the idea of watching anything else after seemed incomprehensible. I wonder, Was there nothing for him to do with the rest of his life after making it, is that his secret and does he know it? Citizen Kane his "rosebud"? --HENRY JAGLOM, Journal Entry, April 2, 1978 1. "Everybody should be bigoted." In which Orson turns restaurant reviewer, confesses that he never understood why Katharine Hepburn disliked him, but knew why he disliked Spencer Tracy. He detested the Irish, despite his friendship with John Ford, and liked right-wingers better than left-wingers. (Jaglom enters, Welles struggles out of his chair to greet him. They embrace, kissing each other on the cheek in the European way.) Henry Jaglom: ( To Kiki ) How are you, Kiki? Orson Welles: Look out--she'll bite you . . . All right, what are we gonna eat? HJ: I'm going to try the chicken salad. OW: No, you aren't! You don't like it with all those capers. HJ: I'm going to ask them to scrape the capers away. OW: Then let me tell you what they have on their hands in the kitchen. HJ: It must be nuts in the kitchen. I've never seen it this packed. OW: They're so busy, this would be a great day to send a dish back to the chef. HJ: You know, Ma Maison is not my idea of the legendary restaurants of Hollywood. The romance for me was Romanoff's. And then I got here and there was no Romanoff's. OW: Yeah! Romanoff's only stayed open until forty-three or forty-four. It had a short life. Romanoff's and Ciro's were the two restaurants that we did all the romancing in, and they both closed. Everybody was photographed with the wrong person coming out, you know? Romanoff's is a parking lot now, and when it was going broke, Sinatra came with sixteen violins and sang every night for three weeks for free, to try and help the business. We all went every night. It was sensational. Don the Beachcombers was another great place to take the wrong girl because it was dark. Nobody could see anybody. HJ: What about Chasen's? OW: Chasen's was a barbecue place, originally. I was one of the original backers of Chasen's--and Romanoff's. HJ: You owned Romanoff's? OW: Yes, and he never gave me anything. Nor did Chasen. I was a founder of both those restaurants. Me and a lot of suckers. We didn't expect anything from Romanoff because he was a crook. And Dave Chasen somehow forgot the original barbecue backers when his became a big restaurant. Ma Maison was started in 1973, and continues. I wouldn't go for a long time because of the unlisted phone number. It irritated me so. It's a snobbish business not having a phone number. Somebody gave the number out on television, just to be bitchy. I don't envy these guys, though. It's a tough, tough business to run a restaurant. Waiter: Going to have a little lunch today? We have scallops, if you want, Mr. Welles. Plain, or we have them prepared with a petite legume. OW: No, it would have to be plain. Let's see what other choices I have. W: Just in case, no more crab salad. OW: No more crab salad. Wish you hadn't mentioned it. I wouldn't have known what I wasn't gonna get! W: Would you wish the salad with grapefruit and orange? OW: That's a terrible idea. A weird mixture. It's awful--typically German. We're having the chicken salad without . . . without capers. HJ: They ruined the chicken salad when they started using that mustard. It's a whole different chicken salad. OW: They have a new chef. W: And roast pork? OW: Oh, my God. On a hot day, roast pork? I can't eat pork. My diet. But I'll order it, just to smell pork. Bassanio says to Shylock: "If it please you to dine with us." And Shylock says: "Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." HJ: Isn't there something about the devil taking the shape of a pig in the Bible? Or did Shakespeare invent that? OW: No, Jesus did put a whole group of devils into the Gadarene swine. Shakespeare was just trying to give Shylock a reason for not eating with them. HJ: I would like the grilled chicken. W: Okay. OW: And a cup of capers. W: Capers? HJ: No, no--that's his joke. OW: So I'll have a soft-shell crab. Alas, he breads it. I wish he didn't, but he does. I'll eat it anyway. Est-que vous avez l'aspirine ? Have you any aspirin? W: Of course. Here you are, Monsieur Welles. HJ: Do you have some pain or something? OW: I have all kinds of rheumatic pains today. The knees. I always say it's my back, because I get more sympathy. But I've got a bad right knee, which is what makes me limp and walk badly. The weather must be changing. I never believed that, until I became arthritic. I just started to ache the last half hour. I think it's gonna rain or something. Aspirin is great stuff. I have no stomach problems, and no allergy to it. (Waiter exits.) HJ: Isn't that terrible, the Tennessee Williams thing? Did you hear how he died? OW: Only that he died last night. How did he die? HJ: There was a special kind of pipe that he used to inhale something. And it stopped him from being able to swallow or breathe, or . . . OW: Some dope? Or maybe a roast beef sandwich. HJ: "Natural causes." Then they went to "unknown causes." So mysterious. OW: I'd like to be somebody who died alone in a hotel room--just keel over, the way people used to. Ken Tynan had the funniest story he never printed. He and Tennessee went to Cuba together as guests of [Fidel] Castro. And they were in the massimo leader's office, and there are several other people there, people close to El Jefe, including Che Guevara. Tynan spoke a little fractured Spanish, and Castro spoke quite good English, and they were deep in conversation. But Tennessee had gotten a little bored. He was sitting off, kind of by himself. And he motioned over to Guevara, and said (in a Southern accent), "Would you mind running out and getting me a couple of tamales?" HJ: Do you think Tynan made it up? OW: Tynan wasn't a fantasist. Tennessee certainly said it to somebody. But I've suspected that he improved it, maybe, by making it Guevara. Did I ever tell you about the play of his I lost, like a fool, to [Elia] Kazan? Eddie Dowling, who used to be a producer on Broadway, sent me a play by a writer called Tennessee Williams. I didn't even read it. I said, "I can't do this; I just can't consider a play now." It was called The Glass Menagerie . HJ: The Glass Menagerie --my God. OW: If I had done The Glass Menagerie , I would have done all those others. A big dumb mistake. HJ: A pity . . . By the way, I was just reading Garson Kanin's book on Tracy and Hepburn. OW: I blurbed that book. I thought if I wrote something, I'd finally make it with Katie! But instead, I found out it was the worst thing I could have done! HJ: I must say, reading it, I didn't understand why she was so upset about it. OW: I think it was that he said she and Tracy lived together that-- HJ: A lot of people knew that. OW: Particularly since she laid around the town like nobody's business. HJ: Hepburn? OW: Hoo boy! I sat in makeup during Kane , and she was next to me, being made up for A Bill of Divorcement . And she was describing how she was fucked by Howard Hughes, using all the four-letter words. Most people didn't talk like that then. Except Carole Lombard. It came naturally to her. She couldn't talk any other way. With Katie, though, who spoke in this high-class girl's finishing-school accent, you thought that she had made a decision to talk that way. Grace Kelly also slept around, in the dressing room when nobody was looking, but she never said anything. Katie was different. She was a free woman when she was young. Very much what the girls are now. HJ: I wonder what she's got against you. Did you ever do anything to Tracy, or say anything about him? OW: I was never a fan of his. When I was a young man, I got up and made a fuss at Captain Outrageous --uh, Courageous . HJ: Well, you see, that probably got back to Hepburn at some point, and that's why she doesn't like you. OW: Come on. Nobody knew who I was when I did that. I was nineteen years old. I stood up in the Paramount Theater and said, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" when he was doing the Portuguese accent. With the curled hair! The usher told me to get out because I was making such fun of his performance. HJ: Did you bark? OW: No, I was imitating his accent as he went along. HJ: The single lapse in his career. OW: That was not the only one. He had several. I'm having a hard time trying to think of a great Tracy performance. Well, he was gigantic in Judgment at Nuremberg , although it is not a great picture, but I couldn't stand him in those romantic things with Hepburn. HJ: You didn't find him charming as hell? OW: No, no charm. To me, he was just a hateful, hateful man. Tracy hated me, but he hated everybody. Once I picked him up in London, in a bar, to take him out to Nutley Abbey, which was Larry [Olivier] and Vivien [Leigh]'s place in the country. Everybody came up to me and asked for autographs and didn't notice him at all. I was the Third Man, for God's sake, and he had white hair. What did he expect? And then he sat there at the table saying, "Everybody looks at you, and nobody looks at me." All day long, he was just raging. Because he was the big movie star, you know. When he was on the set it was, "Why is that actor distracting everyone while I'm talking?" But I don't think that's it, really. I think Katie just doesn't like me. She doesn't like the way I look. Don't you know there's such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them. See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks. HJ: Orson, that's ridiculous. OW: Measure them. Measure them! I never could stand looking at Bette Davis, so I don't want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man. HJ: I've never understood why. Have you met him? OW: Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge. HJ: He's not arrogant; he's shy. OW: He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he's not. He's scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It's people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. HJ: Does he take himself very seriously? OW: Very seriously. I think his movies show it. To me it's the most embarrassing thing in the world--a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic. HJ: That's why you don't like [Bob] Fosse either-- All That Jazz . OW: Yes, that's right. I don't like that kind of therapeutic movie. I'm pretty catholic in my taste, but there are some things I can't stand. HJ: I love Woody's movies. That we disagree on. We disagree on actors too. I can never get over what you said about Brando. OW: It's that neck. Which is like a huge sausage, a shoe made of flesh. HJ: People say Brando isn't very bright. OW: Well, most great actors aren't. Larry [Olivier] is very--I mean, seriously--stupid. I believe that intelligence is a handicap in an actor. Because it means that you're not naturally emotive, but rather cerebral. The cerebral fellow can be a great actor, but it's harder. Of performing artists, actors and musicians are about equally bright. I'm very fond of musicians. Not so much of singers. All singers think about is their throats, you know? You go through twenty years of that, what have you got to say? They're prisoners of their vocal cords. So singers are the bottom; actors are at the top. There are exceptions. Leo Slezak, the father of Walter Slezak the actor, made the best theater joke of all time, you know? He was the greatest Wagnerian tenor of his era. And the king--the uncrowned king--of Vienna. He was singing Lohengrin --if you're a Wagnerian, you know that he enters standing on a swan that floats on the river, onto the stage. He gets off, sings, and at the end of his last aria, is supposed to get back on the swan boat and float off. But one night the swan just went off by itself before he could get on it. Without missing a beat, he turned to the audience and ad libbed, "What time does the next swan leave?" HJ: How can those people have such charm without any intelligence? I've never understood that. OW: Well, it's like talent without intelligence. It happens. HJ: If Tracy was hateful, none of that comes across in the work. OW: To me it does. I hate him so. Because he's one of those bitchy Irishmen. HJ: One of those what? OW: One of those bitchy Irishmen. HJ: I can't believe you said that. OW: I'm a racist, you know. Here's the Hungarian recipe for making an omelet. First, steal two eggs. [Alexander] Korda told me that. HJ: But you liked Korda. OW: I love Hungarians to the point of sex! I almost get a hard-on when I hear a Hungarian accent, I'm so crazy about them. HJ: I don't understand why you're saying that about the Irish. OW: I know them; you don't. They hate themselves. I lived for years in Ireland. The majority of intelligent Irishmen dislike Irishmen, and they're right. HJ: All these groups dislike themselves. Jews dislike themselves. OW: Nothing like Irishmen. HJ: That doesn't make them right, Orson, and you know that. And I don't accept this prejudice from you. I know that you don't really have it. OW: I do have it. I do have it. Particularly against Irish-Americans. I much prefer Irishmen from Ireland. If I have to have an Irishman, I'll take one of those. And Irishmen in England are quite good. All the great Irish writers mostly left and went to England, except for [George William] Russell and [William Butler] Yeats. Yeats makes me shiver. I was in Dublin at the time when he was still-- HJ: I didn't realize he was still around in the thirties. OW: Yeah. He was at every party, and you could see him walking in the park. And Lady Gregory. All those people were still around--the famous Gaelic nationalists. I got to know them all. And you know, some of my best friends are Irishmen. HJ: Oh, God! OW: But when I look at Tracy, I see that everything that's hateful about him is Irish. Everything that's mean. Every Irishman will tell you that. Seven hundred years of bitter oppression changed their character, gave them that passive meanness and cunning. All I can say is what Micheál Mac Liammóir said when we were making Othello , and I asked him, "Describe the Irish in one word." He said, "Malice." Look, I love Ireland, I love Irish literature, I love everything they do, you know. But the Irish-Americans have invented an imitation Ireland which is unspeakable. The wearin' o' the green. Oh, my God, to vomit! HJ: That's boring and silly, and-- OW: No, it's to vomit. Not boring and silly. Don't argue with me. You're such a liberal! Of course there's no proof. It's the way I feel! You don't want me to feel that, but I do! I think everybody should be bigoted. I don't think you're human if you don't acknowledge some prejudice. HJ: Yes. But acknowledging some prejudice and really having full-out hate, like you have against the Irish-- OW: Well, not so much that I'm rude to them or would bar them from my house. It doesn't mean anything, it's just a perception of their character. Or of the majority of them. HJ: Okay. But if that's true, then all it means is that there's cultural conditioning. OW: Well, of course there is! HJ: So when they come to America, that changes them. OW: Yes, they become a new and terrible race. Which is called "Irish-Americans." They're fine in Australia; they're fine in England; they do well in Latin America. It's in New York and Boston that they became so frightful. You know, the old Kennedy was a real Irish-American. That's what I mean. HJ: But his kids weren't? OW: No. They escaped it. You can see the Irish ancestry, but their character wasn't Irish. Their life wasn't based on malice. You know, if you're here in America long enough, you lose the faults and the virtues of your original culture. The Italians will lose the sense of family when they finally get to the next generation. They won't hang together, the way they still do now. HJ: It's like in Israel, where there's no art now. All these Jews, they thought they were gonna have a renaissance, and suddenly, they're producing a great air force, but no artists. All those incredible virtues of the centuries-- OW: They left all that in Europe. Who needs it? They get to Israel, and they sort of go into retirement. HJ: Their theater is boring; their film is boring. Painting and sculpture-- OW: Boring. You know, the only time they make good music is when Zubin Mehta, a Hindu, comes to conduct. HJ: It's amazing. When the Jews were in Poland, every pianist in the world-- OW: Every fiddler who ever lived was Jewish. It was a total Russian-Jewish, Polish-Jewish monopoly. Now they're all Japanese and Orientals. [Arthur] Rubinstein is gone. HJ: Last year. OW: I knew Rubinstein for forty years, very well. I told you his greatest line. I was with him at a concert in Albert Hall, and I had no seat, so I listened to the concert sitting in the wings. He finished. Wild applause. And as he walked into the wings to mop his face off, he said to me, "You know, they applauded just as loudly last Thursday, when I played well." HJ: Dying at ninety-five is not bad. He had a full life. OW: Did he ever. HJ: It's true, all that, then? That he fucked everybody? OW: He was the greatest cocksman of the nineteenth century. Of the twentieth century. The greatest charmer, linguist, socialite, raconteur. Never practiced. He always used to say, "You know, I'm not nearly as good a pianist technically, as many of my rivals, because I am too lazy to practice. I just don't like to. [Vladimir] Horowitz can do more than I can. He sits there and works. I like to enjoy life. I play clinkers all the time." But, he says, "I play it better with the clinkers." HJ: And Horowitz hates his life, and for fifteen years hasn't been able to play or even move. OW: Rubinstein walked through life as though it was one big party. HJ: And then ended it with this young girl. Didn't he leave his wife after forty-five years when he was ninety to run off with a thirty-one-year-old woman? OW: Like Casals. Who suddenly, at the age of eighty-seven or something, came up with a Lolita. HJ: Getting back to the Irish, some are liberals, like Robert Ryan. He was a brave man, politically and socially. Tell me Robert Ryan was not a decent man. OW: He's a wonderful actor. I don't think of him as Irish; he just has an Irish name. He must be fourth-generation. HJ: Now, Ford you liked. He was an Irishman. OW: We were very good friends, and he always wanted to do a picture with me. He was a pretty mean son-of-a-bitch Irishman. But I loved him anyway. HJ: When did you first meet him? OW: When I was shooting Kane , he came to the set on the first day of shooting. HJ: Just to wish you well? OW: No, for a reason. He pointed to the assistant director, a fellow called Ed Donahue, who was in the pay of my enemies at RKO, and said, "I see you got snake-in-the-grass Donahue on the picture." And left. He came to warn me that my assistant was a fink. HJ: I've always heard that Ford was a drunk. OW: Never when he was working. Not a drop. Just the last day of a picture. And he'd be drunk for weeks. Serious, serious drunk. But for him, drinking was fun. In other words, he wasn't an alcoholic. Went out with all the boys. Irishmen, get drunk and fight. Everybody gets beat up in the pub, you know? I've lived through all that. Went to jail in Ireland for rowdyism. It was a culture where nobody got married until they were thirty-five, because they were always dreaming of emigrating, and they didn't want to be stuck with the kids, financially. So all these poor virgin ladies sat around waiting to get married, and the guys are all swinging at each other, reverting to the bestiality of the male. HJ: There was not much fucking around, I would imagine, because it was a Catholic culture? OW: Oh, my God, yes. By the girls. I could hardly draw a breath when I visited the Aran Islands. I was all of seventeen. And these great, marvelous girls in their white petticoats, they'd grab me. Off the petticoats would go. It was as close to male rape as you could imagine. And all with husbands out in their skin-covered canoes. All day, while I had nothing to do. Then the girls would go and confess it all to the priest, who finally said to me, "I had another confession this morning. When are you leaving?" He was protecting the virtue of his flock. When I told that story, there was tremendous excitement in America from the clergy, who said it could never have happened. HJ: Wasn't Ford very reactionary, politically? Like his pals John Wayne and Ward Bond? OW: Yes, but all those guys loved me, for some reason. And I loved them. I have a beer bottle that was put together on Ford's yacht, with different Mexican and American beer labels signed by that gang of people, all dedicated to me. Now this was at a time when I was a well-known Hollywood Red. HJ: And their reactionary positions came from what? OW: Irish, Irish, Irish. The Irish were taught, "Kill the kikes," you know. I really loved John Wayne. He had some of the best manners of almost any actor I've ever met in Hollywood. HJ: Did you ever speak to him about politics at all? OW: Why would I? I'm not like you. I'm not gonna set John Wayne straight. I never had any trouble with extreme right-wingers. I've always found them tremendously likeable in every respect, except their politics. They're usually nicer people than left-wingers. HJ: Easy for you to say. You were in Europe in the fifties, during the blacklist, when all that shit happened. OW: Yes, I was lucky. I wasn't in America during the McCarthy era. I was on every list in the world. Every time they asked for help for whatever cause, I said, "Sign me up." But in my New York Post column, all during the forties, I was in print attacking Stalinist Russia at a time when everybody thought God was smiling on Stalin. I wanted to explain to HUAC the difference between a Communist and a liberal, so I kept begging, "May I please go to Washington to testify?" But they didn't dare ask me. HJ: But you're so forgiving about these kinds of very dangerous-- OW: Forgiving!? Supposing you go to the Amazon, and you live in a village of headhunters. Now, if you're an anthropologist, you can become very fond of those headhunters, but you're not gonna argue about head-hunting with them. HJ: I don't understand how somebody with liberal feelings would not discuss politics with Wayne or Bond or Adolphe Menjou at a time when they had the power to hurt people, and in fact did a lot of damage. OW: Well, Menjou was so fighting mad that you couldn't talk to him. But Noël Coward took care of him wonderfully. Menjou was heading a USO troupe. Noël Coward was heading the equivalent of the USO--whatever it was called in England--you know, entertaining the troops. And they met in Casablanca. And they were eating in the mess. Menjou was talking about how terrible it was in England, that those "nigger" soldiers were fucking all the English girls, and you didn't know what kind of race it was gonna be: "Isn't that true, Noël?" And Noël said, "Well, I think it's perfectly marvelous." Menjou said, "What?" Noël said, "At last there'll be a race of Englishmen with good teeth." No, with Menjou you couldn't talk. He was a raving maniac. Copyright © 2013 by Peter Biskind Excerpted from My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles by Peter Biskind All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction: How Henry Met Orson by Peter Biskind | p. 1 |
Part 1 1983 | |
1 "Everybody should be bigoted." | p. 31 |
2 "Thalberg was Satan!" | p. 46 |
3 "FDR used to say, 'You and I are the two best actors in America.'" | p. 58 |
4 "I fucked around on everyone." | p. 67 |
5 "Such a good Catholic that I wanted to kick her." | p. 75 |
6 "Nobody even glanced at Marilyn." | p. 81 |
7 "The Blue Angel is a big piece of shlock." | p. 87 |
8 "Kane is a comedy." | p. 96 |
9 "There's no such thing as a friendly biographer." | p. 101 |
10 "The Cannes people are my slaves." | p. 116 |
11 "De Mille invented the fascist salute." | p. 124 |
12 "Comics are frightening people." | p. 130 |
13 "Avez-vous scurf?" | p. 140 |
14 "Art Buchwald drove it up Ronnie's ass and broke it off." | p. 150 |
Part 2 1984-1985 | |
15 "It was my one moment of being a traffic-stopping superstar." | p. 159 |
16 "God save me from my friends." | p. 168 |
17 "I can make a case for all the points of view." | p. 175 |
18 Charles "Laughton couldn't bear the fact he was a homosexual." | p. 189 |
19 "Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl!" | p. 200 |
20 "Jack, it's Orson fucking Welles." | p. 208 |
21 "Once in our lives, we had a national theater." | p. 220 |
22 "I smell director." | p. 230 |
23 "I've felt that cold deathly wind from the tomb." | p. 238 |
24 "Jo Cotten kicked Hedda Hopper in the ass." | p. 252 |
25 "You either admire my work or not." | p. 259 |
26 "I'm in terrible financial trouble." | p. 264 |
27 "Fool the old fellow with the scythe." | p. 281 |
Epilogue: Orson's Last Laugh by Henry Jaglom | p. 287 |
Appendix | p. 291 |
New or Unfinished Projects | p. 291 |
Partial Cast of Characters | p. 293 |
Acknowledgments | p. 301 |
Notes | p. 303 |