My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  * * *

  (Susan Smith, from HBO, joins them.)

  ORSON WELLES: I’ve been working on a book, and I’ve only got it in outline form, with some scenes blocked in. And as I was getting excited about it, my friend Henry here told me about you and your interest in miniseries. I have two ways I can go with what I have. One is to do it as a novel, and then sell it, and let the network development system do its thing—

  SUSAN SMITH: You mean, do an injustice to the mat—

  OW: Without me having anything to do with it. Because I could not stand to work under that committee system. I’d just take the money and run. But when I heard about you, I thought even though it might be economically suicidal for me, maybe I should do it directly for HBO.

  SS: Tell me what you have in mind.

  OW: In one sentence, it’s a miniseries set in Majorca or San Tropez, where the richest people in the world go. Or better, a dictatorship in a Central American country that is overthrown by a coup d’état, and there is a revolution. Much of it offstage, but some of it is in the story as a background for all the things that happen to people in a kind of Acapulco-type place. There are two cities on the island. One is the port, and the other is the resort. The resort is on the Atlantic side, and the story is basically the life of a resort. The kind of people who are there range from [Robert] Vesco to a presidential candidate. Everybody who is anybody.

  SS: I’m very interested in doing something about the Dominican Republic. Because I think that it’s kind of an interesting—

  OW: I wouldn’t be remotely interested.

  SS: Why?

  OW: Because I have my own story, in my own Dominican Republic. I’ve invented my Dominican Republic. I’m not interested in real history, because I know Latin American politics to an unbelievable degree. I’m an expert on it. And you cannot tell that story using any individual country. You must combine them to do it properly, and it must be fictional.

  SS: Oh, I only said Dominican Republic more than Acapulco, ’cause—

  OW: I don’t understand why you don’t understand it, frankly.

  HENRY JAGLOM: There’s a resort like Acapulco in the Dominican Republic.

  OW: We’re not getting anywhere.

  HJ: No, no. Wait, wait, wait—wait! We’re just trying to understand—

  OW: I’m not gonna go on. ’Cause if a resort doesn’t immediately interest her, it won’t, even if I go on for an hour.

  HJ: Wait a minute, I don’t agree. I don’t agree.

  OW: She doesn’t like rich people! Doesn’t want a story about rich people. That’s what doesn’t get anywhere with her, is that it?

  SS: I think you should go on. I want to hear it.

  OW: I can’t sell it. I’m a bad seller.

  HJ: No, it’s not a question of selling.

  OW: I quit.

  HJ: Tell it, rather than selling it.

  OW: No, I can’t.

  HJ: Okay. Well, then maybe if she could read something …

  OW: I haven’t got anything. It’ll take me six months. It just didn’t ring a bell with her, so no use talking about it.

  SS: Well, it does interest me very much. I think you’re wrong.

  OW: You’re wrong. You’re really wrong! Boy, are you wrong.

  HJ: You’re not being fair. You’re not being fair.

  OW: Her eyes went dead when she heard resort.

  HJ: Her eyes didn’t go dead.

  OW: Sure they did.

  HJ: You’re being too sensitive about that.

  OW: I am, yes. I can’t sell a thing. Forget it. We’ll think of something else. You don’t see what a resort— You didn’t like Grand Hotel?

  SS: I loved Grand Hotel.

  OW: Well, then, that’s it.

  HJ: Instead of a hotel, it’s in a resort.

  SS: I understand that. I just want to hear the story.

  OW: There isn’t a story.

  HJ: Wait a minute. Orson, there is a story. I mean, there is a story about a presidential candidate; there’s a story about the revolution going on outside. The opening on the airplane.

  OW: There are a lot of stories. But when I get that dead look, I’m dead! I can’t do it. I begin to wonder what I’m talking about. I have to get a little spark from somebody. If I don’t get it, that’s it. I’m lost. Because I have nowhere else to go with it. You’re my only market. You’re the only game in town.

  SS: There are a number of different alternatives. As I told you earlier, there are basically like six or seven half hour—

  OW: I couldn’t work in a half hour. You didn’t tell me that.

  SS: Maybe I didn’t. That’s why I’m telling you now.

  OW: I thought you said that you told me.

  SS: You’re not listening, because you’re so angry.

  OW: Yes, I am. Oh, yes.

  HJ: That’s not fair, Orson!

  OW: I don’t like to be iced off like that.

  (Smith exits.)

  HJ: I’m changing the subject. The New York Times called me to ask me what I thought of Charles Higham’s biography of you. Higham got slammed in the reviews.

  OW: Higham has given interviews in which he’s said that I pushed him away from my table. But I’ve never even met him. I did dip into his book, and I couldn’t find one page that didn’t have a glaring factual error, you know? So I didn’t read the book. Everything is wrong. But who remembers anything correctly? That was what Citizen Kane was originally going to be, the film that Kurosawa finally made, Rashomon. It was going to be the same scene, played over and over from different points of view. Higham’s is a book made by a crew of underpaid research people. He didn’t write it. He just pasted together clippings. I don’t know why they’re digging it up now.

  HJ: Because it just came out. It’s his second book on you.

  OW: I know why—because they’re furious at Barbara Leaming for being so successful. And at me, because I’m the first person who has ever been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine who is not a personal friend of the editor-in-chief.

  HJ: I hate the title they used for her excerpt: “The Unfulfilled Promise.” It emphasizes the negative.

  OW: They made it up before they read her book. And they wouldn’t change it. There will be a review of Barbara’s book in The Saturday Review of Literature by Houseman’s boyfriend. He’ll lash out at me.

  HJ: The reviewers are blaming her for falling in love with you. They say that you completely captivated this woman. The only criticism I’ve heard of the book is that she lost her objectivity.

  OW: Well, I told her that. And I warned her against exactly what the publishers wrote on the back of the book. I said, “You must not emphasize my collaboration. You must underplay that, because it’s—”

  HJ: She couldn’t help herself. She wanted them to know that it was authorized, and that she really—

  OW: It was not authorized. An authorized biography is when she hands me her manuscript, and chapter by chapter I say, “No, no, no, yes…” and I get the last word on any point of fact. But I never read a word of it. I said, “I’m saving that pleasure for my old age.” But the truth is, I don’t want to read it, because there’ll be some things I don’t like, and I don’t want to feel quarrelsome. I only read the captions of the pictures. And one made me so furious that I decided that— You know, that my memory of Dolores del Rio is her underwear.

  HJ: Yeah, that was a good line, something like, “It was so erotic it was indescribable.”

  OW: But I’ve got a good piece I want to write, which is a refutation of the reputation she gives me as the great lover. I’m gonna tell about all my failures.

  HJ: The thing that’s really great about the book is that she puts the lie to the myth of your self-destructiveness, dissecting—film by film—what happened, and really making it clear. That’s something they wouldn’t believe coming from you. And she does it not sounding like you.

  OW: That’s also something I wouldn’t want to do myself. It’s whining. B
ut the other important thing is that Barbara’s book kills the “Houseman-Welles production” canard, which you’ve read a million times. Because at the time the plays were done, they were never called the “Houseman-Welles” productions. Apparently, Houseman is trembling with rage. I think he’s deeply wounded. And that’s a good thing, too, after all these years.

  HJ: People are saying, “I didn’t know that Houseman was that insignificant.”

  HJ: The only thing I objected to in the whole book was the Joseph Cotten involvement—complicity, by implication—in the cutting of Ambersons. Where she says RKO used him to persuade you.

  OW: It’s going to be terrible, because he’s my oldest friend. He’ll never forgive me. I kept saying to her, “Put on your thinking cap. Think about my friends who are alive, and don’t hurt them.” The Cotten thing is very serious. I call him a “Judas,” and so on. It’s very unfortunate. Because Jo was acting in my best interests. But I say, “So was Judas.” It’s too tough. I’m going to write him about it. I can’t talk to him about it, because he’ll cut me off and say it doesn’t matter. But it does.

  I don’t want to start picking at Barbara’s book, you know. I’m enormously grateful. She did a nice job.

  HJ: She really captures the truth. So you become this demystified … human, instead of all those terrible— The mythology is so destructive.

  OW: Alex Trauner, the great production designer who I am very fond of, who did Othello for me, was quoted in a review of Higham’s book, saying, “The trouble with Orson is, he’s self-destructive. As soon as the picture is ready to go to the lab, he invents a reason not to send it,” and so on. But Trauner wasn’t around. He was only on Othello the five weeks that we were in Morocco, not on the rest of the picture. But he saw that the picture stopped and started, so he came to a conclusion that this was my caprice.

  HJ: As somebody who’s been spending time going around trying to get financing for your projects, I know just how destructive that particular line is.

  OW: Especially from a man of his position—he designed for Marcel Carne, Billy Wilder—Hôtel du Nord; Le Jour Se Lève; Les Enfants du Paradis; Kiss Me, Stupid—and there he was, knocking me down.

  HJ: And then he’s saying it with love, which is even—

  OW: Worse. And admiration, which is worse yet.

  HJ: Yeah, because it makes it sound like it’s true!

  OW: He actually told me that he’s always admired me. And I said, “I believe that, but it’s not the point.”

  HJ: He’s so apologetic.

  OW: An apology for something like that is worthless. He should have shut his mouth. Even supposing it’s true. Say you believe it’s true. That’s your right. But you should shut up about it, that’s all. Because my point to Alex was not, “Is it true or not?” But rather, it’s not for a friend to say. I may be self-destructive, but I don’t expect my friends to destroy me. That’s the reason I got mad at Peter Brook, who gave a long interview about how I lack the epic sense in my movies. I said to Peter, “Probably I do lack the epic sense, but even so, I think we should leave it to the critics. We’ve got enough of them.” If some other filmmaker says it, all right. At least I don’t know him. But not my close friend. “You were the best man at my wedding! Why are you doing a long interview about my lack of epic sense?”

  Now Gallimard is publishing all of Trauner’s paintings for movies and they want me to write an introduction. I don’t want to write the thing. So I said, “I really don’t see, Alex, what I can say about you. It’s not that I’m cross—we’re still friends—but I can’t do a heartfelt tribute to your work after what you said about mine.” And that got me out of two days’ work. Because introductions, to me, are the hardest things to write.

  HJ: Robert Wise stood up at this big Directors Guild thing for you, and said how wonderful you were, how you had a huge impact on his life and so on, and then made some kind of negative remark, “What a shame that—”

  OW: Who needed that? He was shaking when I ran into him afterwards. He wouldn’t have had to shake if he hadn’t said that. It’s like Chuck Heston, who still claims that Touch of Evil is a minor film. Over and over, every time he’s asked to speak, he says, “Let’s not talk about Touch of Evil as though it’s a major work.” He sincerely believes that. And he’s a horse’s ass, because he’s in a film of mine that other people think is important, so why doesn’t he shut up and pretend it’s important? What besides that has he made that’s important, you know? He speaks wonderfully about me. He’s full of admiration. But he says, “There’s some side to him, that I’ve never seen that we must assume is very abrasive to producers.” That’s his other line. I’ve heard that over and over again. Then, when he’s completely relaxed, he says, “Well, of course, we have to remember that, as it turned out, it’s really Orson’s film as an actor.” He has a bad conscience, too, because he refused to come back to the studio and do the reshoots. He phoned me and told me, “I signed on to do a picture with Willie Wyler, The Big Country.” So he’s got that little guilt. That makes Touch of Evil a minor film.

  HJ: He called Ed Asner “a continuation of what’s been going on in Hollywood since the days of Paul Robeson.” That’s quite a quote. Racist, to boot.

  OW: What the hell is he talking about? The left in Hollywood today is the feeblest—Heston once marched with Martin Luther King, you know. It’s a long way from marching with Martin Luther King to “a continuation of what’s been going on since Paul Robeson.” What a horse’s ass.

  HJ: You know, Touch of Evil is playing on cable this month.

  OW: It’s got all the lost stuff in it! I saw a reel and a half of it last night. And I had to quit. I got too excited. I had forgotten those scenes. I thought they were gone forever. It was such a joy. And it’s so beautiful in black-and-white. Oh, my God.

  HJ: What did you think of Robert Carringer’s book The Making of Citizen Kane, the professor in Indianapolis?

  OW: Houseman has claimed for twenty-five or thirty years that there was no second script—my script—only Mankiewicz’s. He was always a jealous son of a bitch. He never got over the fact that I gave him work to get him money once when he was struggling. But this fellow Carringer found the smoking gun, the telegram from Houseman to me, telling me that my script is better than Mankiewicz’s. Carringer was given the opportunity to go into the RKO archives, and he read everything. And that satisfied him that my version of the controversy is right.

  But I was kind of disappointed in Carringer. He is just as harmful as Higham. He has a description of me putting my arms around him as we sat at a table. Now, I am a nontoucher. It’s just a dream of his. His great discovery is that Kane was made by a number of people, not just by me. He begins his book by saying that “I said to Orson something about movies being a collaborative art. And he immediately flew into a tantrum.” I don’t fly into tantrums. It’s not in my character. I simply said to him, forcefully, that the use of the word collaborative is no more true of films than it is of the theater. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. You know what I’m saying. And as far as the credit goes, I hadn’t seen the beginning of Kane since I made it, or the end—I had forgotten where the credits are—and I saw it yesterday morning. I saw that I shared the director’s title card with Toland. It says: “Directed by Orson Welles; photography by Gregg Toland.” On the same card. I don’t think many people have done that. The cameramen were always listed with the make-up department. And I’m supposed to be the one who wants credit for everything? Carringer pads out his book with a little half-baked chapter on Ambersons, making the point that it’s a failure because I didn’t have the same people with me, the same art director, and the same cameraman, and so on.

  HJ: You know, Houseman was Higham’s source.

  OW: Yes, he thanks Houseman for his collaboration. Higham is really unspeakable. He lists seventeen major untruths in a Vogue piece that I wrote. What are the lies that he’s exploding? I was telling how hard it was for anybody to get a room in
my father’s hotel, that it was one of the most exclusive hotels in America. And he says, “The hotel in Grand Detour was not one of the most exclusive hotels in America.”

  HJ: The level of trivia is truly wonderful. Why do you suppose he hates you so? Because you are Orson Welles and he’s not? I think envy of the gifted colors all these books. He’s just jealous. Like Houseman.

  OW: You know, in the beginning, when I should have been playing Hamlet, Houseman kept saying, “These plays are not vehicles for you. Remember, we’re an ensemble company, not the Orson Welles Players.” So Martin Gabel plays Danton, instead of me. And so on, you know. But in the profession which I have chosen, my only real disappointment is that I feel I’ve never been properly appreciated as an actor. Mostly my own fault, for giving my energy to the production, rather than to my performance. Also, my own fault for pretending I wasn’t a star actor and was just there.

  HJ: I’ve wondered about that, why you didn’t capitalize on your great notices. So it was mainly Houseman, then?

  OW: All Houseman. But I had no argument with that, you know? That seemed right to me.

  HJ: The spirit of the times dictated a kind of group, or collective mentality.

  OW: You know, Houseman’s become so famous now that Rich Little does an imitation of him.

  HJ: A terrible comic. Houseman is so pompous and pretentious.

  OW: That’s what he’s like. Pomposity is his basic characteristic.

  HJ: Where did that absurd accent come from?

  OW: He’s a Rumanian.

  HJ: Jewish, right?

  OW: Yeah. But a Rumanian who was born and raised in Buenos Aires.

  HJ: What about that accent?

  OW: In Buenos Aires, there’s this whole population of people who have been speaking English for generations and have never been back to England. So they’ve developed their own English accent. Besides being Rumanian. Which, as Alfonso XIII said, “Being a Rumanian is not a race. It’s a profession.”

  HJ: In the past years, have you ever found yourself in the same place with him?

  OW: No. If I know he’s going to be someplace, I don’t go. Not because I don’t want to speak to him, but because it’s uncomfortable.