My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  GJ: Also, I have the feeling that some directors have only ten years, fifteen years, before they’re finished. Don’t you think so?

  OW: Directors are poor fellows, carrying not much baggage. We come in with only our overnight bags, and go out with nothing. There are names in those old lists of the greatest movies that have totally vanished, you know? Now, when my career is only a memory, I’m still sitting here like some kind of monument, but the moment will come when I’ll drop out of sight altogether, as though a trapdoor had opened, you know? Although I’d prefer a Verdi ending.

  HJ: What’s that?

  OW: Verdi did great work when he was young. Very early. Highly acclaimed. Spent his middle years overseeing productions of his music, orchestrating his earlier work. Trivialities. Then, in old age, one day someone came and told him, “Wagner is dead.” He lit up. Did his greatest work in the following years, after decades of nothing.

  HJ: Who would your Wagner be? Who would have to die to set you free?

  OW: I’m not going to answer that.

  Orson Welles died on October 10, 1985, five days after his last lunch with Henry Jaglom, in the middle of the night, with his typewriter in his lap. It was a heart attack.

  Epilogue

  Orson’s Last Laugh

  by Henry Jaglom

  OCTOBER 11, 1985, 1:00 AM, HOLLYWOOD

  Saturday afternoon, Oct. 5th, at lunch, Orson told me that the attacks were beginning to come in, in response to the books out on him, especially Barbara Leaming’s wonderfully supportive—to his mind, largely accurate—biography. The success of the book as it was about to go into its second printing had cheered him, setting the record straight on Houseman and so many things, and he was philosophical about the attacks: “Once they decide they’re for you or against you, it never changes. Hope and Crosby they always loved. Me and Sinatra they decided against early on, and they never let up.” He talked of Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post.

  He complained that in a year and a half, Ma Maison would be moving into a new hotel, and “What will we do then?” Kiki growled and he fed her a small cookie, while warning her that if she kept on crying he’d never take her out again.

  He told me that Paul Masson wanted him back to endorse its “terrible wine again,” but on a one-year contract instead of three, at lesser money and with required performances-cum-appearances around the country. He’d turn it down, but slowly, seeing how good he could make the deal.

  Welles never let anyone capture his likeness, but made an exception for Jaglom, provided his friend use a grease pencil on black paperboard that Welles sent a Ma Maison waiter to procure.

  We talked of Israel’s raid on Tunis and Gorbachev’s public relations talents as evidenced in Paris, how “Reagan was going to be made to look like an amateur,” and how the French bungling of the Greenpeace ship business in New Zealand was “going to cost Mitterand his job.” And what a shame that was. He made me have dessert by dramatically reading the menu and we laughed at stories of people’s odd pomposity and pretensions and he let himself have a dessert plate full of lime sherbet.

  A typical few hours—in short—some stories, some hopefulness, some creative ideas, some anecdotes, some sadness, some old memories, much shared understanding, many communicative smiles. As always.

  But for some reason I didn’t have my little tape recorder on in my bag. I remember thinking as I drove over that I’d done almost every lunch for a few years and I didn’t feel I had to anymore. I remember wondering if he’d notice that it wasn’t there, and what would he think it meant if he did.

  The tape recorder was one of the only two things we didn’t speak about. The other was his weight and its health implications. The closest we got was, “You’re looking well,” or “I swam my laps,” or “I can’t eat that anymore; you have to eat it for me and describe it to me.” We did a lot of that in the south of France.

  In fact, he looked a bit tired. He said, “Time is passing,” but he said it lightly, sadly but lightly, in relation to our ongoing inability to get a film financed for him to direct.

  This morning my phone rang; it was my office. There was a rumor he was dead; the press was calling. I called him on his private number. His man, Freddie, answered, said how sorry he was, yes it was true, he found him on the bedroom floor at ten this morning, and he couldn’t rouse him. Freddie called the paramedics. He apologized to me (in lieu of Orson) for calling them, as if he had violated the trust for privacy that he still somehow felt he was expected to honor, even now.

  Orson was dead.

  All day the hypocrites got on radio and TV and eulogized him. I kept wanting to call him and tell him, “You won’t believe what Burt Reynolds said, what Charlton Heston came up with.” One by one each of those who wouldn’t help him when they could, now stepped forward to praise him. I cried and tried to hear his laugh.

  Even in death he did his “dancing bear” act for them. I got furious and gave a few angry interviews of my own.

  Then I watched him on my editing machine in Someone to Love, which I am cutting together, saying that you are born, live, and die alone.

  “Only through love and friendship can you create the illusion that you are not entirely alone,” he said, in what turns out to be his last appearance in a movie, his last acting job.

  I’m having a harder time now, creating that illusion.

  “You have your ending now,” he says to me, on my screen.

  “Can’t I have an ending after the ending?” I ask, essentially.

  “No,” he says.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because,” he finishes, with a smile, “this is The End.”

  And he blows me a kiss.

  And to the cameraman he shouted, “Cut!”

  And the screen went black.

  Appendix

  Welles had so many unfinished or unmade films, scripts, treatments, and pitches, in addition to trailers, tests, shorts, fragments, and filmlets of every sort, it’s nearly impossible to determine how many there were at the end. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s meticulous inventory of Orsoniana, Discovering Orson Welles, when he died, Welles left approximately nineteen projects in various states of completion. What follows are thumbnails of the four that figure in his conversations with Jaglom, as well as a partial cast of characters.

  NEW OR UNFINISHED PROJECTS

  Don Quixote

  Welles transposed Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Franco’s Spain. The juxtaposition of the two throws into stark relief both the pathos of their quest, rendered anachronistic by the march of history, particularly the rise of fascism, as well as its timeless significance. Child actress Patty McCormack played a little girl visiting Mexico City who encounters Welles. Soon after he tells her the story of the two windmill tilters, she meets them herself. The shooting began in 1956 in France, and continued, fitfully, until the late 1960s, early 1970s. Welles kept running out of money. Over the course of lengthy production delays, McCormack grew up, and Welles had to drop her from the film. He repeatedly changed the concept, at one point exposing Quixote and Panza to a nuclear holocaust, and at another sending them to the moon. Welles claimed he originally shelved the film because he was waiting for Franco to die, saying, “It’s an essay on Spain, not Don Quixote.” He worked on it on and off until he himself died.

  The Dreamers

  The Dreamers was a script written in 1978 by Welles and his companion Oja Kodar based on two short stories by Isak Dinesen, “The Dreamers” and “Echoes.” In the course of his years-long attempts to find financing, Welles shot two ten-minute segments around his home. In the first, fully made up and costumed as a nineteenth-century Dutch-Jewish merchant, Welles tells the story of Pellegrina Leoni, an opera diva who loses her voice. It was shot in black-and-white. In the second, shot in color, Leoni, played by Kodar, appears herself. She bids the merchant farewell, explaining that she is off to seek a new life.

  King Lear

  Welles was also anxious to put his
version of King Lear, for which he had very definite ideas, on the screen. “Up to now, everybody, myself included, felt we had to extend the visual elements of Lear instead of doing what the movies make possible, which is reducing it to its essential so it becomes a more abstract and intimate Lear,” he explained. “It’s about old age and it’s not about somebody trying to outsing the Metropolitan [Opera] and outshout the thunder.” He intended to do a less-is-more production, shot in 16 millimeter black-and-white, mostly in close-up. He continued, “I believe the key to Lear and his extraordinary behavior at the beginning of the play, which is the toughest thing to swallow, is the fact that he probably had three wives, anyway probably two, and his last wife died in childbirth and he has lived for at least 25 years without the company of women. He lives with his knights, he’s going to pieces. The absence of women, of the civilizing element of life, is the thing that blinds him and makes the tragedy.”

  The Other Side of the Wind

  The Other Side of the Wind was cowritten and coproduced by Welles and Kodar. Shot between 1969 and 1976, it is Welles’s satirical take on the state of film, circa 1970, and a film à clef in which he skewers his enemies, including John Houseman and Pauline Kael. It features John Huston as Jack Hannaford, an over-the-hill director trying to make a comeback with a New Wave-y film-within-a-film called The Other Side of the Wind that parodies fashionable European directors of the moment, such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. Guests are on their way to Hannaford’s seventieth birthday party, staged in all its extravagant, Aquarian glory, but he is killed in a car crash immediately thereafter. The movie is a mash-up of stills; various film gauges and formats—Super 8, 16, 35 millimeter, as well as video—black-and-white and color; and different genres. Before The Other Side of the Wind could be completed it became embroiled in a legal fight over ownership between Welles and the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, who invested in it. It has not been released to this day. Henry Jaglom, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Susan Strasberg, Paul Mazursky, Lilli Palmer, Stephane Audran, Cameron Crowe, Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol, and more make appearances.

  PARTIAL CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Joseph Cotten, one of Welles’s oldest friends, hooked up with him for the Federal Theatre production of Horse Eats Hat. Cotten was a founding member of the Mercury Theatre. His breakout role, playing the part that Cary Grant would later make famous in the movie, was that of C. K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story on Broadway opposite Katharine Hepburn. He then played Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane (1941), and went on to have a long and varied career in Hollywood. He played Eugene in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and appeared in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), as well as Gaslight (1944), and four movies with Jennifer Jones, including Duel in the Sun (1946). He also played Marilyn Monroe’s husband in Niagara (1953), and even showed up in Michael Cimino’s notorious Heaven’s Gate (1980).

  Samuel Goldwyn formed Samuel Goldwyn Pictures in 1916. In 1924, it was folded into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. (Roaring Leo the lion, the MGM trademark, was originally his.) He subsequently became a successful independent producer. William Wyler made his best films for Goldwyn, including Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1948). Many of Hollywood’s finest writers worked for him, including Ben Hecht, Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellman. He was also notorious for mangling the English language, coming up with locutions affectionately known as “Goldwynisms.” Trying to cheer up Billy Wilder after a flop, he once said, “You gotta take the sour with the bitter.”

  Charles Higham, a prolific biographer, published two books on Welles, The Films of Orson Welles and Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. Welles and his admirers detested Higham for perpetuating the view that Welles was a failure. Welles delighted in mispronouncing his name “Higgam.”

  Lena Horne was Hollywood’s Jackie Robinson, so to speak, the first black movie star, in an era when most black performers were relegated to the roles of butlers, nannies, cooks, or cannibals. She began her career in the chorus line of the legendary Cotton Club in 1933 when she was sixteen. She was known for her silken voice, and eventually replaced Dinah Shore on NBC’s jazz show The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. She signed with MGM, becoming the first black star under a long-term contract. Horne appeared in numerous films, but her scenes were excised in states that banned movies with black performers. She gained considerable fame for playing Georgia Brown in the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky (1943), and for singing the title song in Stormy Weather (1943). She was an outspoken civil rights activist. She worked closely with Paul Robeson in the 1930s; and during the war, entertaining the troops, she refused to perform before segregated audiences or those in which black GI’s were seated behind German POWs, as was sometimes the case. Her later career, in the 1950s, was blighted by the blacklist that forced her out of Hollywood into clubs and television.

  Garson Kanin wrote and directed for the stage and screen. He is best known for Born Yesterday (1950). With his wife, actress Ruth Gordon, he wrote two Tracy-Hepburn comedies, Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952).

  Elia Kazan was a towering figure of the American stage and screen. He was closely associated with “the Method” school of acting, and cofounded the Actors Studio in 1947. He directed its most famous graduate, Marlon Brando, in three films, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the risible Viva Zapata! (1952), and the brilliant On the Waterfront (1954), in which the actor gave the greatest performance of his career. Even Kazan’s lesser works, like Panic in the Streets (1950), Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957), and Wild River (1960) are compelling. The director also gave Warren Beatty his first starring role in Splendor in the Grass (1961). But Kazan was an old lefty from the Group Theatre, and in 1952 he sullied his reputation forever by naming names, that is, throwing his old friends and colleagues to the wolves by testifying against them before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Many of his associates never forgave him.

  Alexander Korda was a Hungarian-born producer and director. After his career floundered in several countries—Hungary, Austria, Germany, and the United States—he relocated to England, where he had immediate success directing Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). He went on to direct many more films, including Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). He bought into British Lion Films, and entered a coproduction deal with David O. Selznick in 1948. A good friend of Welles’s, he hired him for The Third Man, released in 1949.

  Irving “Swifty” Lazar, one of the first so-called superagents, was reportedly so nicknamed by Humphrey Bogart when he put together three deals for him in one day on a bet. Separated at birth from Mr. Magoo, he was tiny, bald, and wore thick glasses in heavy black frames. But he was an immaculate dresser, and despite his unprepossessing appearance, counted among his clients, at one time or another, Lauren Bacall, Moss Hart, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, and even Madonna. He was known for his abrupt phone manner, called everybody “kiddo,” and even the biggest stars killed for invitations to his Oscar parties.

  Charles Lederer was the writer, cowriter, or contributor to several classic comedies, including The Front Page (1931), His Girl Friday (1940), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Monkey Business (1952), as well as Richard Widmark’s chilling debut film, Kiss of Death (1947), and Howard Hawks’s sci-fi landmark, The Thing (1951). Even more precocious than Welles, Lederer entered college at the age of thirteen, and was entangled with Welles throughout his life. Lederer was raised by Marion Davies, his aunt, who was, of course, Hearst’s mistress and one of Welles’s ostensible targets in Kane. He married Welles’s first wife, Virginia Nicholson, at Hearst Castle. Lederer and Welles became great friends. After Rita Hayworth threw Welles out, he lived next door to the Davies estate, where Lederer and Nicholson were living, and dined with them nearly every night. Occasionally, when Davies joined the couple, Welles was barred from the table, and stood outside
the window watching them eat. Both he and Lederer were fond of practical jokes.

  In 1924, Louis B. Mayer became head of the combined Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Mayer Pictures—soon to be Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer reported to Nicholas Schenk in New York, whom he disliked and resented, invariably referring to him as “Mr. Skunk,” but he ran the lot, located in Los Angeles, like his own fiefdom. Mayer built MGM into the most successful studio in Hollywood, the crown jewel of the golden age of movies, and he is credited, if that’s the right word, for inventing the star system. MGM was home to Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Judy Garland, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and a host of other stars, all of whom the studio held in virtual thralldom. Mayer was extremely conservative and a lifelong Republican.

  Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. Parsons was a preternaturally powerful Hollywood gossip columnist who went to work for William Randolph Hearst in 1923. Before long she was syndicated in more than six hundred papers worldwide, and was read by an estimated 20 million people. Parsons reigned supreme until Hedda Hopper emerged as an equally if not more powerful rival in 1937, writing for competing newspapers. Hopper called her Beverly Hills house “the house that fear built.” Long before Bob Dylan mocked Jackie Kennedy’s “leopard-skin pill-box hat,” Hopper was famous for her flamboyant headgear. An avid supporter of HUAC, Joe McCarthy, and the blacklist, her relentless attacks on Charlie Chaplin for his lefty politics and predilection for young women is at least partially responsible for driving him into exile in Switzerland. She was rumored to have tried to out Cary Grant and Randolph Scott as a couple, and one Valentine’s Day she was the recipient of a skunk, courtesy of actress Joan Bennett. Both Parsons and Hopper attacked Kane, even before it opened in 1941. Parsons was particularly vituperative, and took an active part in her boss’s campaign to block the release of the film, even smuggling one of Hearst’s lawyers into a private screening.