OW: Yes. You know why her plane went down?
HJ: Why?
OW: It was full of big-time American physicists, shot down by the Nazis. She was one of the only civilians on the plane. The plane was filled with bullet holes.
HJ: It was shot down by who?
OW: Nazi agents in America. It’s a real thriller story.
HJ: That’s preposterous. What was she doing on a plane full of physicists? Do people know this?
OW: The people who know it, know it. It was greatly hushed up. The official story was that it ran into the mountain.
HJ: The agents had antiaircraft guns?
OW: No. In those days, the planes couldn’t get up that high. They’d just clear the mountains. The bad guys knew the exact route that the plane had to take. They were standing on a ridge, which was the toughest thing for the plane to get over. One person can shoot a plane down, and if they had five or six people there, they couldn’t miss. Now, I cannot swear it’s true. I’ve been told this by people who swear it’s true, who I happen to believe. But that’s the closest you can get, without having some kind of security clearance.
No one wanted to admit that we had people in the middle of America who could shoot down a plane for the Nazis. Because then everybody would start denouncing anybody with a German grandmother. Which Roosevelt was very worried about. The First World War had only happened some twenty-odd years before. He’d seen the riots against Germans. No one could play Wagner—or Beethoven, even. Germans weren’t safe on the street. They were getting lynched. And he was very anxious for nothing like that to be repeated. He was really scared about what would happen to the Japanese if all the rednecks got started. Especially in California, with its coastline on the Pacific.
HJ: So his idea was to protect them? That’s why he rounded them up and put them in camps?
OW: Yes. That was the motivation in his mind. But it was a ghastly mistake. Now, other people—the Pentagon types—thought we were riddled with spies. But his concern was the safety of the Japanese who lived here. Of course, they didn’t know that. They’re quite rightly indignant. They would never agree that it was a good thing.
HJ: You knew Roosevelt, right? Were you ever alone with him?
OW: Yes, several times. And then Missy [LeHand] would come in. And she hated it when I visited the White House.
HJ: Why?
OW: Because I kept him up too late. He liked to stay up and talk, you see. He was free with me. I didn’t need to be manipulated. He didn’t need my vote. It was a release for him, and he enjoyed my company. He used to say, “You and I are the two best actors in America.”
HJ: Was he bright?
OW: Very bright.
HJ: What was that letter he wrote you about Spain?
OW: A four-page letter out of the blue, only a few months before he died, about the state of the world. It was lost in a fire. I never knew why he’d written it to me. He just sort of sat and dictated it one night.
HJ: He wrote he felt bad about Spain?
OW: Oh, no, he didn’t write that. That’s what he said to me. It was on the campaign train, not in the White House. We were talking about mistakes that other people had made—that [Woodrow] Wilson had made, that [Georges] Clemenceau had made. Yes, Spain. The neutrality with Spain was a big mistake. “That comes back to me all the time,” he said.
HJ: It always struck me that the fact that some of our more progressive presidents—the Roosevelts and the Kennedys—came from wealthier backgrounds meant that they were less intimidated by other rich people, and therefore, less susceptible to special interests. The poor kids are the more dangerous ones—Reagan is so impressed with rich people—it is such an important part of his life.
OW: And they had Nixon in their pocket when he was still a congressman. From the beginning. But I still don’t think your point is right. It’s because of the old tradition of the Whig—of the liberal rich, the old tradition of public service and of liberalism—Roosevelt was a genuine, old-fashioned American Whig. The last and best example of it. And—
HJ: But I still say you can’t be a poor person in the presidency and be surrounded by wealthy people.
OW: Well, a senator can be a poor person, but it’s true, eventually he’ll become a puppet of the rich. A senator used to be a tremendous office. Now it’s really, more than it’s ever been, what the money buys. The special-interest thing.
HJ: We always heard that Roosevelt really wanted [Henry] Wallace in ’44 to run as his vice president again, and it was the reactionary Southern Democrats who forced Truman on him.
OW: He would have liked to have had a better Wallace.
HJ: William O. Douglas or someone.
OW: Yeah. He would have loved to have Douglas. But they did force Truman on him, and he didn’t give Truman any kind of break. Roosevelt didn’t think much of him. None of us did.
HJ: Were your sympathies with Wallace when he ran for president in ’48 on the Progressive Party ticket?
OW: Oh, no. I thought it was just fatal. He was a prisoner of the Communist Party. He would never do anything to upset them. Not that I thought that in itself would make him a bad president. But it showed his weakness. I was very, very passionately against him. The left thought I was a real traitor. Had he won, I think we would have had a much bigger reaction after him.
HJ: Bigger McCarthyism?
OW: More dangerous, and more venomous, and more long-lived.
4. “I fucked around on everyone.”
In which Orson and Rita Hayworth, who were separated, were reunited to make The Lady from Shanghai. He recalls that she stuck by him when he tried to leave Hollywood to do good works.
* * *
HENRY JAGLOM: Rita worked for Harry Cohn at Columbia, didn’t she?
ORSON WELLES: Yes, he thought he was a great lover. He chased Rita around the desk all the years she was there. She was always going on suspension.
HJ: I just saw Lady from Shanghai again. She’s so good in it.
OW: Are you kidding? She was magnificent! And she thought she wasn’t. And nobody in the town would give her any credit for it.
HJ: It makes you realize what a waste her career was.
OW: She was a really talented actress who never got a chance.
HJ: They say that you ruined her in that film. Cut off her famous red locks, dyed what was left blond without telling Harry Cohn.
OW: Yes, that was supposed to be my vengeance on her for leaving me. I made her character a killer and cut off her hair, and all that. That’s pretty profound psychological work, isn’t it? Why would I want vengeance? I fucked around on everyone. And that’s hard on a girl, very hard.
HJ: Did she believe that vengeance business?
OW: No, never. She always thought it was the best picture of her life. Defended me, and it. I was gonna make a nice little B picture with a girl I brought over from Paris—and get out, you know, in twenty days. I wasn’t gonna get any money for it. So Rita came and cried, begged to do it. Of course, I said, “Yes.” So suddenly, I’m stuck with the studio’s bread-and-butter girl, from whom I’ve been separated for a year. I was dragged back into the marriage and the movie.
HJ: You were not divorced yet?
OW: No. So then we were reunited. Had to be, no other way to direct the picture. I moved back in with her. It wasn’t really like working with an ex-wife, because we still loved each other. Then the hairdressers and people got after her. They worked her up with stories about who I was screwing. It’s a regular Hollywood thing—all those people who live off of stars. She was deeply suspicious of everybody. She’d been so terribly hurt in her life, she wouldn’t believe that I would not do that to her. So she threw me out. I was devastated.
HJ: Had you the intention of staying with her? Even though she was an alcoholic? And depressed?
OW: Forever? Yeah. ’Cause I knew she needed me desperately. I would have stayed with her till she died. There was nobody else who would have taken care of her like I would. I didn�
��t know that she would be that sick.
HJ: And you didn’t mind that?
OW: It doesn’t matter whether you mind it or not—you do it.
HJ: Some people do it, and some don’t.
OW: Yes. But I’m a terribly guilty-conscience person.
HJ: Yet you loved her, also.
OW: I loved her, yeah. Very much. But, by that time, not sexually. I had to work myself up to fuck her. She had become so—such a figure of lust, and she just wanted to be a housewife. Marlene called her the perfect hausfrau. You know what Rita used to say: “They go to sleep with Rita Hayworth and wake up with Margarita Carmen Cansino.” And she’d been so wonderful to me, absolutely wonderful. When I almost died of hepatitis, she spent five months with me while I recovered. And she never did anything except take care of me. When I said to her, “I want to give up the movies and theater. Will you do that with me?” She said, “Yes.”
Later, when I was in Rome working on Othello, she sent for me. She said, “Come tonight.” To Antibes. She didn’t say why, and I thought something terrible had happened to her. There was no space on a commercial flight, so I flew in a cargo plane, standing up, with a lot of boxes. I arrived at the hotel, you know, that hotel, went up to the one great suite, you know, that suite. She opened the door, stood there in a negligee, hair flowing, gorgeous. The suite was full of flowers. The doors opened out onto the terrace, overlooking the Mediterranean. The smell, you know that smell. It was overpowering. Rita looked at me, tears in her eyes, said, “You were right; we belong together; I was wrong.” But by then I was crazy for this ugly, little Italian girl who gave me so much shit, but I just had to have her.
HJ: The one with the face like a spoon.
OJ: I had to tell Rita, so I said, “I’m so sorry, but there’s this girl. I’m in love; it’s too late.” She cried and said sadly, “OK. Then just be with me tonight, just hold me while I sleep.” And I did. I held her. And nothing else. My arm was falling asleep. I was looking at my watch out of the corner of my eye to see when I could catch the morning flight back to Rome. I left the next day. Five days later Rita married Aly Khan. She was dying to stop being a movie actor. That’s why she ran to him.
HJ: Relationships are so crazy. I’m devastated that Patrice [Townsend] has left me. I thought we had the perfect marriage.
OW: Women are another race. They’re like the moon, always changing. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you’re not. You can’t tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I’ve never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn’t have to play a game. I’ve never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.
HJ: Did you really want to give up the movies and the theater?
OW: Yes, at one point I decided that the best thing I could do, the most use I could get out of what I was born with, for my fellow man—unselfish use—would be in education. So I spent five months going to every big foundation, saying, “I’m going to give up my entire career.” I was then very famous and very successful. I thought to myself, “I’ll discuss with these people how to educate the younger generations, so that they know what’s happening in the world, and the world will be a better place for it. We will use every method we can think of, and I will belong to you.” Nobody wanted it. I got out of that by nobody taking me up on it. But I would have been very happy to do it. I had exhausted my real fire. I’m essentially an adventurer. I’d done all the things I wanted to do, and now I wanted to be of use. You know what I did instead? I made another movie.
HJ: Do you feel guilty for leading the good life in Hollywood while there are so many starving people in the world?
OW: I think most people here are bothered by the fact that in America we are incredibly fortunate. There are lots who have a bad conscience. A romantic conscience, depending on the person.
HJ: If they do, they don’t talk about it.
OW: Because it sounds pompous. How can I sit at the table here with lunch and say, “I was talking to Henry in Ma Maison about these people who are starving in Africa, and thinking how I ought to be in Africa helping out.” The answer is, “Go to Africa and shut up! Nobody is going to sympathize with you when you say that your problem is that you aren’t going.”
HJ: Has it occurred to you that if you went and did certain things, you’d be so caught up in it that you’d have to make dramatic changes in your life?
OW: It occurs to me every day. I am tormented by it. I live with it. The way I live with death, the way I live with old age, all those things.
HJ: What do you say to yourself about it?
OW: Well, you see, I’m not like you. I’m not judgmental. With me, it’s, “Here I am, not going to Africa.” I don’t say to myself, “Why don’t you go to Africa?” I don’t discuss it with myself. Because if I did, I would go to Africa. So it is the self-indulgent devil in me that stops the dialogue.
HJ: I’ve been saying that to myself since I was seventeen, eighteen years old. That is the time you really feel it.
OW: That’s the voice that should be leading you. It takes all the peer pressure and your self-indulgence and everything else to suppress that voice.
HJ: Isn’t it shocking that we all do so little to alleviate all this incredible suffering?
OW: No. No, because it’s only one aspect of our essential sinfulness. We are sinful in so many ways.
HJ: I never want to believe you have a religious bent, but, actually, you do.
OW: I know. I believe that we’re much healthier if we think of our selfishness as sin. Which is what it is: a sin. Even if there is nothing out there except a random movement of untold gases and objects, sin still exists. You don’t need a devil with horns. It’s a social definition of sin. Everything we do that is self-indulgent, and that is selfish, and that turns us away from our dignity as human beings is a sin against what we were born with, the capacities we have, what we could make of this planet. Our whole age has taken the line that if you feel bad about yourself, it’s something that you can be relieved of by your goddamn analyst. Psst!—it’s gone! And then you’ll be happy, you know? But that feeling is not something you should be relieved of. It’s something you should deal with. And there’s no remission for what I mean by “sin,” except doing something useful. The confessional does the same thing as the shrink, rather more quickly and cheaper. Three “Hail Mary”s, and you’re out. But I’ve never been the kind of religious person that thinks saying “Hail Mary” is gonna get me out of it.
HJ: The concept of sin is a difficult one for me, because it implies something other than our animal, material existence. I think we just have impulses, good ones and bad ones.
OW: Yes. But those impulses are controlled by us. I believe in free will. I believe that we are the masters of our fate.
HJ: But that means you do believe in some kind of a plan.
OW: That’s right. You see, I’m religious, but you don’t need God and his angels to feel that way. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
HJ: Well, we have the appearance of free will. But—
OW: It’s real. With my history, why shouldn’t I become a drunk, and a pathetic figure sitting around Hollywood, if there isn’t such a thing as free will?
HJ: Because of, well, chemical balances, which are predetermined.
OW: If they are truly predetermined, you’re more religious than I am. You’re a fatalist. Every moment of life is a choice. I don’t think it is possible to live a moral and civil life unless we accept the possibility of choice.
HJ: That I have never understood. Why do you need the belief in choice? Morality comes from your understanding of what is good. I know it’s good to help people. I know it’s wrong to hurt other people. I don’t need to believe that I have free will in order to be a decent human being.
OW: You think our lives are just ruled by chance? You think that if you want to make this mo
vie and not that one, it’s because of a series of chemical imbalances?
HJ: You’re reducing it. I’m saying that I think that we are all the product of a long, long history of genetic construction that—
OW: But none of that eliminates free will.
HJ: Whether you get struck by lightning or not is—has nothing to do with your free will.
OW: Free will doesn’t mean I can stop the lightning. Free will simply means that I can decide whether I’m going to go to Africa or not! It’s demeaning if you think it’s all a chemical accident.
There can be nothing more sterile than an extended conversation between two people who basically agree. If we basically disagreed we’d be getting somewhere.
(Waiter arrives.)
OW: I’d like a café espresso.
W: Décaféiné?
OW: Oui, décaféiné—oui.
HJ: And I would like a cup … uh …
W: Café au lait.
HJ: Café au lait. Please. With a little steamed milk on the side, as well. Thank you. (To OW) Um … do you want some berries?
OW: (To Kiki) Do you want a little sweet?
Oh, the irony of these kinds of conversations is that they end with: “Do you want some berries?”
HJ: I’m just not clear about why I am so good at doing nothing for those less fortunate than I. I guess it’s because if I did anything, it would be a total commitment. And that would make my life something else.
OW: You see, I’m very clear. I have people whose lives depend on me. If I became some kind of fucking secular saint, I would strew misery among all the people who are close to me. Is the cry of the starving child in Africa louder than the people near me, who depend on me? That’s an interesting moral question.
HJ: I’ve been involved in a lot of political things, and I tend to meet people who are fully involved. And I always find them very neurotic, disturbed …
OW: Politics is always corrupting. Even saints in politics. The political world, in itself, is corrupt. You’re not going to satisfy that urge to spiritual perfection in any political movement without being betrayed and without betraying others. Only service, direct service, say, helping a lot of starving kids in a Third World country, is impeccable.”
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles Page 7
