HJ: F. Scott Fitzgerald must have been impressed by him, to make him the model for The Last Tycoon.
OW: Writers always fell for his shtick, knowing better. Writers are so insecure that when he said, “I don’t write, but I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this,” they just lapped it up. He could cut them off at the knees with all his “genius” stuff, and making them sit for three hours before he allowed them to come in to see him, and all that. By the way, there were better scripts written, on the whole—this is a generalization, but it’s my opinion—even when writers considered that they were slumming by coming out here. Faulkner and everybody. “We’re going out there to get some money.” Still, they did an honest job for that money, because instead of going back to their little place up in the Hollywood hills to write their scripts, they had to eat with each other every day in the studio commissary, which made for a competitive situation. It was collegial—“What are you working on?”—and they shared funny stories about how dumb the producer was, how bad the director was, and all that. But they didn’t want their peers to do better than they did, so they worked hard. Harder than these people now who want to be directors, who have done nothing but look at movies since they were eight years old, who have never had an experience in their lives. Or experienced any culture beyond movie culture.
HJ: But Thalberg was also creative. At least from Fitzgerald’s point of view.
OW: Well, that’s my definition of “villain.” He obviously had this power. He convinced Mayer that without him, his movies wouldn’t have any class. Remember that quote Mayer gave? All the other moguls were “dirty kikes making nickelodeon movies.” He used to say that to me all the time.
HJ: When Mayer found you, you were very young, and very attractive, very magnetic.
OW: That’s why he loved me; he thought I was another Thalberg.
HJ: Did you know Thalberg?
OW: I didn’t know him. I was out here, playing in the theater, when he was alive, but I didn’t meet him. Then he died.
HJ: Irene Mayer Selznick says in her book about L.B., her father, that everybody knew Thalberg had this sort of death sentence hanging over him from the beginning. He started at MGM knowing that at thirty he was gonna die. He had rheumatic fever. A bad heart.
OW: I know a lot of people who expect to die early. Thalberg turned it to his advantage.
HJ: He must have been incredibly skillful at manipulating Mayer.
OW: Thalberg used to manipulate everybody, brilliantly. Not only Mayer, but actors, directors, writers. He used his death sentence, his beauty, everything.
HJ: He was also beautiful, apparently, yeah?
OW: Yeah. Enormously charming and persuasive. Thalberg was Satan! You know, the classic Satan. And, of course, Norman worked around the clock.
HJ: Irving.
OW: Irving, yeah. I always think of him as Norman, and I don’t know why. He would reduce people; and, having reduced them, flatter them. He was obviously a weaver of spells who was able to convince everyone that he was the artist. Thalberg was way up here, and the director was way down there. The result was that he negated the personal motion picture in favor of the manufactured movie. He was responsible for the bad product of Metro, and the style which continued afterwards: the Thalberg style.
HJ: That’s true. Nobody knows who directed Gone With the Wind. Or, there were many directors on the same movie, like The Wizard of Oz. Metro’s great, great movies somehow just happened.
OW: Yes. And they still look like any one of the Metro directors could have made them. At lunch in the commissary, you could play musical chairs with every movie—move every director to another movie—and you would not be able to tell the difference in the rushes the next day. Now, Warner’s made the good pictures. It was rough there. Jack Warner tortured and murdered everybody, but he got great pictures out of them, obviously.
HJ: What directors managed to work under Thalberg that way?
OW: Vic Fleming, or Woody Van Dyke, whoever.
HJ: Were any of them gifted?
OW: George Cukor was.
HJ: Not as much as they say. His films were signature-less. Even the good ones.
OW: He was a very competent stage director. But it’s true, you can’t tell a Cukor picture.
HJ: Holiday, Philadelphia Story.
OW: Writers’ pictures.
HJ: Or Tracy pictures, or Hepburn pictures; they’re star pictures.
OW: Exactly—all of them. That’s why, to me, Thalberg is the number-one villain. I think he was a real destroyer.
HJ: Okay. But, he didn’t do anything to hurt people.
OW: Well, he destroyed [Erich] von Stroheim, as a man and as an artist. Literally destroyed him. And von Stroheim at that moment was, I think, demonstrably the most gifted director in Hollywood. Von Stroheim was the greatest argument against the producer. He was so clearly a genius, and so clearly should have been left alone—no matter what crazy thing he did—
HJ: But he was so extravagant that he reached the point where economically, it was impossible. If the stories about him are true. Or was he just so original he threatened everyone?
OW: They had to make him into a monster. I had a very interesting experience when I was making Touch of Evil. I had a scene in a police archive, and they let me shoot it in the real archive of Universal. And while they were setting the lights, I looked up von Stroheim, the budgets of his movies. They weren’t that high. The idea that he was so extravagant was nonsense. Anita Loos wrote a brilliant book about Hollywood—Kiss Hollywood Goodbye. And she thinks [Josef] von Sternberg is a marvelous man. Sorry, not von Sternberg. Von Stroheim. Von Sternberg was a real louse. But nevertheless, the portrait of von Stroheim was a hatchet job. She said, “We all loved Von,” and then she presents a picture of this terrible Prussian. Once she said to me, “The nicest Jewish actor you ever met in your life.” You know?
HJ: Did you know von Stroheim?
OW: Yes, very well. But later, when he had become an actor and was living in France, Charlie Lederer and I wrote a movie for him in Paris, with Pierre Brasseur, and Arletty. It was called Portrait of an Assassin. It was about those guys that ride around on motorcycles inside a cage, going faster and faster. Kind of carny shit. They didn’t use one word we wrote. But we wrote the story, which they did use. And we got paid by a black-market producer who came to the Lancaster Hotel with the money wrapped in newspapers—soaking wet; it was always raining in Paris. That’s how we got to live it up in Paris, writing this story.
HJ: And you liked von Stroheim?
OW: Loved him. He was a terribly nice fellow. A French script girl who worked on Grand Illusion told me that he was the greatest prop actor she’d ever known. Because he’d have a newspaper, a swagger stick, a monocle, a cigarette—all of these things. And he would do a scene where he would put them down and pick them up on certain lines. You can’t have that number of props and get it all right. But every time [Jean] Renoir would shoot a take, he’d do it right. On the syllable.
HJ: Did von Stroheim direct any movies in his later life?
OW: No, he didn’t. He became purely an actor. He became a star in France in the thirties, but in bad pictures. A terrible loss. ’Cause there was a gigantic gift, really. No question.
HJ: Was he very frustrated? Was he very angry or sad?
OW: He didn’t seem to be. By the time I knew him, he’d come to terms with it, so he didn’t treat people badly out of his frustration. He was not a jolly fellow, but he was not brooding. He was very fond of being a star. And even after the war, he was still a star. That compensated a lot for him.
HJ: And he did that wonderful turn in Sunset Boulevard. That brought him back.
OW: Only in terms of Hollywood. In America it seemed as though he’d been reclaimed from obscurity, when the reality was he was coming from continuous stardom in France. But the success of Sunset Boulevard meant nothing to him, because it was Swanson’s picture, and Billy Wilder’s—compared to what he was getting in
France. VON STROHEIM on top of every marquee.
HJ: So all the stories about von Stroheim were made up?
OW: He did some crazy things, but he didn’t do anything as crazy as the young directors of the fifty-million-dollar pictures do today.
HJ: But his pictures were without precedent—eight hours long.
OW: Yes, they were, but Thalberg was the one without precedent. Without him, von Stroheim would never have been ruined. D. W. Griffith did much crazier things. But he was in charge, because he was the director, and “D. W. Griffith.”
3. “FDR used to say, ‘You and I are the two best actors in America.’”
In which Orson recalls sabotaging David O. Selznick’s charades, claims that Carole Lombard’s plane was shot down by Nazis, and says FDR’s biggest regret was not having intervened in the Spanish Civil War.
* * *
HENRY JAGLOM: You were trashing Thalberg the other day. It’s funny, because the myth gets handed down that Thalberg had great taste and culture.
ORSON WELLES: In his whole career he didn’t make a picture that will last fifty years from now, and still he’s revered. Romeo and Juliet, as produced by Thalberg, and directed by Cukor, was the cultural high point of his ten years of moviemaking. Now, you cannot sit through four minutes of it, it’s so terrible. Norma Shearer with those tiny eyes, and Leslie Howard, a Hungarian Jew, as Veronese teenagers?
HJ: But he was so foppish, and so, so British. God, Hungarians made great Englishmen, didn’t they? I wonder why.
OW: Well, there was a period during the Austro-Hungarian empire when the older aristocracy had all their clothes made in London. They spoke French with great chic, but their shoes were made in London; their hats were made in London; the nanny who raised their children was from London—and the greatest thing to be was an English gentleman. And I’m sure that’s why Lord Leslie Howard, as Sir Winston [Churchill] used to call him, trilling his r’s, was such a good Englishman. And then to die in a plane crash, because of Churchill … Not killed by some angry Magyar peasant.
HJ: That was the incident where Churchill couldn’t reveal that they’d broken the German code, so he let the Nazis shoot down the plane? Wasn’t that the same plane that Norma Shearer was on? Thalberg’s widow?
OW: No, no. Norma Shearer wasn’t killed in a plane. That was another thing that is amazing. After Thalberg died, Norma Shearer—one of the most minimally talented ladies ever to appear on the silver screen, and who looked like nothing, with one eye crossed over the other—went right on being the queen of Hollywood, and getting one role after another.
HJ: Marie Antoinette.
OW: The biggest bust ever made, you know? And everybody used to say, “Miss Thalberg is coming,” “Miss Shearer is arriving,” and all that, as though they were talking about Sarah Bernhardt. You know, while there were Garbo and Dietrich and Lombard and all the good people. It was a continuation of the magic of this man.
HJ: But Thalberg was also responsible for careers of people like David O. Selznick, who came after him and who managed to make some extraordinary films.
OW: They would have been made by the directors, anyway—and better. The man was a simple pain in the ass! I knew him as well as I know you. He was a total monster, the worst of them all.
HJ: He has the image of somehow being elegant and classy.
OW: He wasn’t elegant. He was gross. Tremendous energy and very intelligent. And very bad taste. He thought he was the greatest thing since Jesus. His job, like Thalberg’s, was to efface the signature of the director. The man had a tremendous drive to be more than Thalberg. And he had no conscience. Selznick wanted to be the greatest producer in the world—and would have been happy to do anything to achieve it. It was unbelievable. Once I was on David’s yacht, and we were all gathered together after dinner. He said, “We can either go back to Miami tonight, or we can go to Havana. I’d like to see a show of hands. Who wants to go to Havana?” Everybody’s hands went up. We all went to bed, woke up in Miami.
HJ: That’s what happens if you own the boat.
OW: I was close to David because friends of mine liked him. I used to go to his house on Sunday nights. Everybody in Hollywood would be there, and we’d play “The Game,” which was just charades, you know. But Selznick played to win. Week after week after week. If our team lost, he would follow us in our cars down the driveway, screaming insults at us for having been such idiots, with his voice echoing through the canyons as we drove away. He would become so violent that it was worth it. It was funny just to watch him. And then he had us back the next week. “Now we’re gonna win,” you see?
Once Selznick wanted to have a fight with me. This was at Walter Wanger’s house. After the ladies had left, the gentlemen sat around drinking port. He said how disappointed he was not to have Ronald Colman in Rebecca. Because he had this fellow Olivier. That irritated me. I said, “What’s wrong with Olivier?” He said, “He’s no gentleman.” And I said, “David, what kind of shit is this? What are you talking about, ‘no gentleman?’” “Well, he just isn’t. You can tell that. But with Ronnie you know right away—he’s a gentleman.” And I said, “Why, you pious old fart.” So David stood up, took off his glasses, and assumed the fighting position. We went out into the backyard, and everybody held us back.
HJ: You were really going to fight?
OW: Oh, yes. We used to do that all the time in Hollywood, always stepping out into the garden and fighting. While everybody held you, and nothing ever happened.
HJ: Bogart was always beating up guys, wasn’t he?
OW: Now, Bogart, who was both a coward and a very bad fighter, was always picking fights in nightclubs, in sure knowledge that the waiters would stop him. Making fearless remarks to people in his cups, when he knew he was well covered by the busboys.
The great fistfight of the prewar days, though, was between John Huston and—who was the other fellow? It lasted a long time, and they kept running at each other, but neither one of them ever landed a blow. I only saw one great fighter in my life. I was sitting in Harry’s Bar in Venice, in the afternoon, and there were four GIs, and their sergeant. Another soldier came in and made a remark, and the sergeant just turned to the soldier and knocked him out with the neatness of a John Ford movie, and they carried him away. Then another soldier made a remark, and he knocked him out. Now, you know, it is impossible to do that. But he did it, right in front of me, and each time the sergeant turned to me and said, “I’m very sorry, sir.”
HJ: So if it wasn’t Norma Shearer, who was killed in the plane crash?
OW: You’re thinking of what’s-her-name—the good one. I can’t think of anybody’s name, ever. Terrible.
HJ: Gable’s girlfriend—Carole Lombard.
OW: His wife. I adored her. She was a very close friend of mine. And I don’t mean to imply that we were ever lovers. I remember when Gable made a picture called Parnell, a costume picture. Nineteen thirty-seven, with Myrna Loy. Nobody came. They released it to empty theaters! Proving that there’s no such thing as the star who can’t empty a theater. I think it was the only MGM film that lost money. Not that it mattered to Mayer. Money was almost no object to Metro, ’cause they couldn’t lose money.
HJ: You mean the way they had the distribution set up, owning the theaters, they were so locked in that—
OW: And when I learned to fly, I flew with Carole over Metro, at lunchtime. We buzzed the commissary, just as everyone was coming out, and she dropped leaflets that said, “Remember Parnell”! That’s the kind of girl she was.
HJ: She looked to me like kind of a road-company Garbo.
OW: Not at all Garboesque! My God, she was earthy. She looked like a great beauty, but she behaved like a waitress in a hash house. That was her style of acting, too, and it had a great allure. She wasn’t vulgar; she was just … I got to know her when I had to make peace between her and Charles Laughton. I was sort of an emissary for Laughton. They were making a picture called They Knew What They Wanted, about an
Italian vintner who gets a mail-order wife, played by Lombard, you know? The movie was directed by Garson Kanin. Laughton was the simple Italian peasant. He would come to my office, and sit down across the desk from me, and put his head on the desk and cry.
HJ: Laughton?
OW: In the middle of the day. Said, “I can’t go on the way they’re making fun of me on the set.”’Cause they were sending him up so. And then I would go and talk to Gar, and talk to Carole, and say, “You know, he is a great actor. Take it easy with him. You’re gonna ruin your own picture.” Laughton was beside himself. Because he had been such a star in England with Korda. When he played Rembrandt for Korda, years before—a wonderful performance, one of the only times an actor has ever persuaded you he’s a genius—he asked to be taken by Alex’s brother, the art director, to Holland, to the museum in Amsterdam, to see The Night Watch, and other Rembrandt pictures. They arrived on Sunday, and the museum was opened just for Laughton. He walked up to The Night Watch, looked at it, and fell into a faint. From the beauty of it all. When he’d make an entrance, they had little sets built for him where he would be sitting, doing what he was doing just before he came on. You see?
HJ: A very Method actor for his time.
OW: Well, his own method.
HJ: Now, Lombard could not have been very bright.
OW: Very bright. Brighter than any director she ever worked with. She had all the ideas. Jack Barrymore told me the same thing. He said, “I’ve never played with an actress so intelligent in my life.”
HJ: But Gable was certainly not bright.
OW: No, but terribly nice. Just a nice big hunk of man. If you’re working hard that long—if you have to be in makeup at five fifteen, and you get home at seven o’clock—how much brightness do you want? The guys just wanted to stagger home—and, if they could, get laid. Otherwise, a happy smile and get ready for the next day’s work.
HJ: So Lombard was also killed in a plane crash?
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles Page 6
