My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  This evening just hangs over me now. With his stroke, and with all the people who are going to be there that I don’t know, I don’t really want to— All those socialites from Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. And they all hate me, because I’m the oldest friend. What I’m really gonna be doing is entertaining them. It’ll be just ghastly. If I could just go and visit him on another day. But how could his best friend not be there? The feeling is not how nice that I come, but how could I not come.

  HJ: Did you see that made-for-TV movie Malice in Wonderland, where Elizabeth Taylor plays Louella Parsons and Jane Alexander plays Hedda Hopper? There are two characters named Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

  OW: You know, they sent the script to me and Jo, and they said, “What do you think of it? Do you like it?” And he said, “No.” So then they called me and said, “Do you approve of this?” I hadn’t read it, so I just said, “No.”

  HJ: There’s this scene where the Cotten character gets furious, because Hedda said something about his wife.

  OW: Well, no. What Hedda was doing was printing that he was balling Deanna Durbin, which he was. In cars, in daylight, where everybody could see!

  HJ: There’s also this wonderful, strange scene where Cotten pushes Hedda’s face in a plate of food.

  OW: No, he kicked Hedda Hopper in the ass. The truth is that Jo Cotten was a Southern gentleman, with extremely good manners. That’s what makes this story so good. He came up to her at a party and said, “Hedda, I just want you to understand, if you say that again, I’m going to kick you in the ass.” She didn’t believe it. She kept talking about it, and he just came and kicked her in the ass. The last man in Hollywood that you’d think would behave that way to a woman.

  HJ: They made you the more reasonable one. Which is also not your reputation.

  OW: That’s true. I did say, “You mustn’t kick Hedda in the ass.” I told him I would kick her in the ass instead. But he insisted.

  HJ: And in another scene, Hedda walks in on you when you’re about to screen Kane, and you say, “What are you doing here?” And she was the one, according to this, who tipped off Hearst. She’s portrayed as this insane woman running roughshod over the whole town, terrifying everybody.

  OW: She was. And she destroyed Louella. Hedda had always been my defender, because I’d hired her as an actress when she was out of work. She always said, “I know you’re a dirty Commie Red. But you were good to me and good to my son, and I won’t—” Then she added, “But you’ve got to stop fucking Lena Horne.” And I said, “I don’t take instruction about things like that.” And she said, “You have to, if you care about your career, and care about your country!” Nobody who knew about it gave a damn that Lena was black. Except Hedda, you know. But what was she gonna do? Write it in a column? I didn’t give a damn. So I said, “Hedda, you can go boil your head.” She always laughed when I insulted her. That’s show business.

  HJ: She was that reactionary, that she really believed these things?

  OW: Violently, much more than Louella. She was wittier. She was smarter. You know what Jack Barrymore called Louella Parsons, who was terribly ugly. He said, “Louella—that queer udder.”

  HJ: “Queer udder.” What a horrible description!

  OW: This great truck used to come up to your house, just before Christmas with gifts from her. And you must never have given the news of your divorce to anybody but Louella. She would never forgive you. She always had to have the divorce. That was hers. You don’t know the power those two cows had in this town! People opened the paper, ignoring Hitler and everything else, and turned right to Louella and Hedda.

  HJ: How did she know about things like you and Lena?

  OW: She offered fifty dollars for information and people called her up. Not friends, but waiters or valet-parking people, anybody. Somebody reported that I went into Lena’s house or something. She and I never went out. In those days, you didn’t go out with a black woman. You could, they wouldn’t stop you, but things were delicate. And I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I once took her out to the 21 Club, thinking it was safe. Jack Kreindler, who looked just like a baked potato, and owned it then with his cousin, behaved correctly. But he took me aside afterwards and said, “Next time, it would be better not to come here.” So when I got back to Hollywood, I told Charlie Lederer what had happened, and said, “What are we going to do about it?” Well, Jack Kreindler used to come to Hollywood on a holiday, and everybody would entertain him. So Charlie and I stopped what we were doing for two weeks and worked night and day on this prank. I gave a party in the private room of Chasen’s, honoring the “Maharani of Boroda,” and invited Jack. Now, we got the Maharani from Chicago. She was a hooker. I said she couldn’t be local; it would have gotten around. She couldn’t even know who the people she’d be meeting were. Everybody you ever heard of was at that table. It was very grand, so that Jack would be at ease, and not get suspicious. I sat him next to the Maharani. And she began giving him a little knee thing. And then the hand on the knee, and all that. And finally she says to him, “You know, I’m here without my husband—he’s coming later. But we have a special religion, and it forbids us to stay in a hotel. So we have to buy a private house wherever we go. I’m going to slip you the address. You come there at two o’clock in the morning. Scratch on the window.” So he took this piece of paper. Now, for the previous ten days, we had been searching for a house down on Central Avenue. And we found a big black mammy, like Aunt Jemima, a Hattie McDaniel type, you know? Coal-black, and this big. And we had been sending her obscene letters. Calling obscene things through the window. Generally annoying this poor black woman. By the time dessert was served, the Maharani got up and said she had to leave. And she was taken by a limousine to a plane.

  HJ: She was taken by a limousine to a plane from Chasen’s?

  OW: To an airport, so she’d be out of town and couldn’t talk. Now, at two o’clock in the morning you’ve got Jack Kreindler, man about town, all-around American, scratching on the window of this woman’s house. Ten cops rush up and grab him, because she’s been complaining. They take him downtown to the station house, where they take photographs. Which were never printed, but he thought they would be, so he went through all that. Of course, his high friends got him out, and kept him out of the newspapers. He never knew who did it to him. I think it’s the best practical joke I’ve ever played.

  HJ: This is really true? How did you know, for sure, he would show up? The whole thing wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t shown up.

  OW: He had to. She was the greatest hooker you ever saw. You would have shown up, too. Anybody would have shown up. We were very sad that she had to leave. And she was very funny. She knew exactly what she had to do—she’d been pretty well educated. It was a lot of work. Very expensive, too—the dinner, everything. But we thought Jack had it coming to him. I never told Lena. I never wanted her to think that anything had ever happened. She’s half-Indian, you know, red Indian. If you were black, nobody was ever luckier.

  HJ: For being able to hide the fact that she was black?

  OW: That was never hidden. She was black from the minute she stepped on the stage. I told you what Duke Ellington said about her to me when he introduced us. He said, “This is a girl that gives a deep suntan to the first ten rows of the theater!”

  HJ: She struck me as tremendously repressed.

  OW: Well, no more than any other black, except that she’s the one that received storms of applause for forty years. Come on. I’ll accept that any black had a rough time, but she didn’t, not particularly. Nobody urged her to pass for white. She was a famous black singer her whole career, and nothing else, no matter what she says now. And her marriage, a mixed marriage, was the first famous mixed marriage. Everybody wrote about it as such.

  HJ: But she said that they put makeup on her to look darker in the movies. Because they didn’t want her to look white.

  OW: She’s leaving out the truth. The movies that they made her look dar
ker in—those were the black movies, the race movies. You know, made only for black audiences. I was on the set, waiting to take her out to lunch, when she was doing Cabin in the Sky. And she was made up like she would be with her own skin color. But when she was fifteen, and sixteen and seventeen, she made a lot of those race quickies.

  HJ: It’s amazing, those two women, Hedda and Louella, could get that strong.

  OW: And in New York, [Walter] Winchell. Winchell was terrible, but I was very fond of him, because he had great charm. And he was such an egomaniac that it was funny to be with him. As you know, after the Kane thing, my name was never, ever printed in a Hearst paper. The Hearst paper in New York was the Daily Mirror, and Winchell was forbidden to write my name. So he called me G. O. Welles, George Orson Welles, and nobody ever noticed it. He deliberately put me in almost every day, just for the fun of it. That was his idea of being cute.

  HJ: “George” being your actual first name.

  OW: Of course. And he was such a prominent character in the Broadway of that time that not to be friends with him was to miss a whole side of that life. And you know, it was better to be his friend than his enemy. I had a big enemy among those guys, Lee Mortimer, a sort of second-rate Winchell, who used to print awful things about me every day. And I always greeted him effusively so that he would think that I’d never read a word he wrote.

  25. “You either admire my work or not.”

  In which Orson encounters Mrs. Vincente Minnelli. He tells stories about John Barrymore, and gets a nibble on The Dreamers, but his prospects for financing any of his projects are growing steadily dimmer.

  * * *

  HENRY JAGLOM: I am just reading this book on RKO which you are prominently featured in. It’s the one that Jesse Lasky’s daughter wrote, The Biggest Little Major of Them All.

  ORSON WELLES: I’ve heard about it.

  HJ: There’s a picture on the back of you and your lady of the time, and Schaefer, I guess who was head of RKO when you made Kane.

  OW: Dolores del Rio.

  HJ: Dolores—at the premiere of Kane.

  OW: That was actually in Chicago, the one with Schaefer. The real opening was in New York. That was in the days when the crowd were still screaming, “Here comes Norma Shearer!” The days when there was that kind of opening. Jack Barrymore made the famous joke. A radio reporter announced, “And here come Mr. John Barrymore, and Orson Welles, who made this picture! What have you got to say, Mr. Barrymore?” And he said, “Now it can be revealed. Orson is, in fact, the bastard son of Ethel [Barrymore] and the Pope!” On the air, across the nation. Cold sober. Just sheer mischief.

  You know, Jack was quite mad. His father died at forty-five, in an insane asylum. Jack would get drunk in order to be the drunk Barrymore, instead of the insane Barrymore. He would suddenly realize at the table that he didn’t know where he was or how he got there. A tragic situation.

  One day I got a call: “Jack is in Chicago, dying. Get on a train and go there.” So I got on a train, went to Chicago. Went to the Ambassador East, where Jack was staying, but he wasn’t there. But Ethel was there and Lionel was there. Ethel and Lionel and I went around Chicago looking for Jack. We finally located him in a whorehouse on the South Side. He wasn’t dying, but God knows, we could see he was going to. And then all of us were stuck in his hotel for the weekend. I just sat there and listened to them talk, because they hadn’t been together, the three of them, in forty years. Or very seldom. They began reminiscing about their childhoods, and so on, these three extraordinary people with their gargoyle laugh, like creatures on the front of a cathedral. It was unbelievable.

  Did I ever tell you the story of the love affair between Jack and Katharine Hepburn? Now I’ve checked this story with both Jack and Katie, and it’s true. Her first picture, A Bill of Divorcement. He was still a top-of-the-bill star. He hadn’t yet descended to, you know, “Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye.” After a day’s shooting, he said, in that Barrymore voice, “Miss Hepburn, would you like to come to my dressing room for lunch?” She said, “Well, I, I, I…” So she did. She arrived at the door and is met by Jack in a dressing gown. He opens the door, and she comes in and she looks around, and there’s a couch, and nothing else. And she says, “Well, I, I think, you know … there must be a mistake.” Jack, all very proper, said, “Oh, yes, I made a mistake.” He went to the door, opened it, bowed, and she went out. That’s the whole affair!

  HJ: A real gentleman.

  OW: Not gonna fumble around. He went on making those terrible movies, in order to pay his creditors. If he’d gone into bankruptcy, he wouldn’t have had to make them. I saw Grand Hotel again the other day. They had it on the cable. It was almost the last picture he made, where he was still highly considered, was still “John Barrymore.” You know what Garbo did the first day of shooting? When he came to work in the morning, she was waiting outside the stage. To say good morning to him, to escort him to the set. It is the only nice thing I know about her.

  (Lee Minnelli enters.)

  LEE MINNELLI: Orson, you’re one of my favorite people in the whole world. Such a beautiful voice.

  OW: Aren’t you nice? Here’s Mr. Jaglom …

  HJ: How do you do. Please sit down.

  LM: You know Vincente is home now.

  OW: Yes, I’m so glad he’s out of the hospital. Well, send him my very best wishes.

  LM: The doctor said in a few weeks, he could have some friends visiting … If you were free?

  OW: Oh, I’d be delighted … if I’m still in the country. We’re leaving in a couple weeks …

  LM: May I give you our address and number?

  OW: Would you please? Yes. Absolutely.

  LM: Because it would mean so much to him. It would be good if he could see his friends. I don’t want him to think he’s forgotten.

  OW: Of course not.

  LM: It’s a right turn at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  OW: Yes.

  LM: But please call me. I would be flattered. We have tea about four thirty. When will I call you?

  OW: Well, I can give you my number. If that doesn’t answer, I have left for Italy. Lovely to see you.

  LM: Well, thank you very much. It would mean a lot to Vincente.

  OW: All my best.

  LM: Goodbye.

  (Lee Minnelli exits.)

  OW: The difficulty with this sitcom is that I’ve never met Vincente. Never once. Even in the golden days, even at a party, I have never met him. Maybe we may have met back in the—but no, I remember very well the people I have never met before.

  By the way, some people have appeared saying that they love The Dreamers. First time I’ve ever heard that from anybody aside from you and me. Two girls and two guys. The gentlemen are 100 percent. The American girl is 100 percent, but the French girl is a bitch.

  HJ: I know. I know. I don’t know if it’s worth it even if they come up with the money. She’s the one who was looking at Oja and said, “Yes, but can she be cold?” I replied, “I didn’t know you were casting this. Are you questioning that Orson Welles can get the performance he wants out of this person? Are you assuming the right to tell him who’s right for—” I was furious at that.

  OW: Now that having been settled, my dear Henry, back they came and said, “We’re worried about the other parts.” And I said, “We really have our choice of the best English actors of that age group, but only if they’re free at the time we shoot.” I’m in no position now to give those people contracts and deliver them in a package.

  HJ: I told them Rupert Everett … Jeremy Irons … Michael York …

  OW: They said, “We would like an option.” And I said, “My dear friends, you pay for an option. An option means you have exclusive rights to something. Nobody in the world gets an option without any recompense.” I added, “What I could do for you, if I decided it was the right thing to do—if—would be to write a letter of intent. I’ll only do that when you give me the feeling that you’re close to the money. And you are n
ot giving me the feeling that you are close to the money, only that you would like to get close to the money. In which case, a letter of intent ties my hands.

  HJ: Because you don’t know that next week somebody is not going to—

  OW: Drop out of the sky. Now, in fact, another group loving The Dreamers has shown up. And one of them is a horse’s ass who lives in Hollywood.

  HJ: Which horse’s ass?

  OW: How to distinguish? If they turn around and show their heads, I can tell better! But well meaning. And the other is an investment consultant, who has intimate contact with big money, but does not pretend to have it himself. But believes that he can raise it in short order. And they sat here and this is what the conversation was like: The horse’s ass said, “I hear all these different stories.” I said, “Do you expect me to sit at this table and prove to you that I’m … you know …

  HJ: Stable?

  OW: I said, “The biggest madman in the world could be very convincing. You either admire my work or not.” And after an hour and a half, it emerged, he doesn’t believe he can raise the money, pretty much because the rich guys won’t like The Dreamers. Then the horse’s ass said, “You must do Lear; that’s the thing,” so on and so on. “And have you anything else?” And I said, “Are we in a souk? I’m going to put out all my things on a rug and then you’ll decide what you want to buy?”

  26. “I’m in terrible financial trouble.”

  In which Orson vainly pitches a project, complains about friends who disparage him, reviews several books about his life, and bemoans the fact that he can’t make a living while his bête noire Houseman, thrives.