My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles

by Peter Biskind

  OW: Absolutely dreadful! And he got the Academy Award! It drove Cotten mad with rage. But he laughed all through the show. Laughing mad, you know? He was in some movie with Houseman and he said, “Jack made a tremendous fuss about where his dressing room was going to be.” And Jo couldn’t look at him! If a gypsy had told us, “One of you will get the Academy Award. Who will it be?” he would have been the last one any one of us would have chosen. My first wife, who was a very clever lady and understood people awfully well, said from the beginning of my partnership with Houseman that there was something of Iago in him. She said, “He’s destructive! He’s trying to destroy you. Listen to me!” And I said, “This is pure mischief! The malice of a wife! Houseman is my valued partner.” But she was right! About three weeks after we met, he said to me, “I keep dreaming of you riding bareback on a horse.” And I should have taken that more seriously. But I just laughed. Before he rose to his present eminence, he had about twenty years when he wasn’t doing much of anything, except dining out and knocking me. And then he slowly built himself up to what he is now: elder statesman, Academy Award–winning actor, and leading salesman of anything you have.

  HJ: Life is full of amazing turns.

  OW: Houseman has had twenty commercials on camera. I’ve had one. I’m in terrible financial trouble. And I keep trying to make a decent movie that will also make me money.

  HJ: I know this irritates you, but I keep getting back to the fact, Orson, that I don’t fully understand why, with all the frustration that you have to deal with, you don’t invent a film like F for Fake, which you know you can do brilliantly, while you’re waiting for these projects to go forward.

  OW: I need money. When I had F for Fake, I had money.

  HJ: How much did F for Fake cost?

  OW: Very little, but I had it. And F for Fake was such a flop in America, you know.

  HJ: I keep thinking that whether they get it or not at the exact time that you make it, eventually, they’ll get it!

  OW: We don’t agree, you see. Essentially, I don’t believe in a film that isn’t a commercial success. Film is a popular art form. It has to have at least the kind of success that European and early Woody Allen movies had. People should be in those tiny theaters, lining up to see it. And they didn’t do it with F for Fake.

  HJ: So why don’t you—I hope you don’t mind my bringing it up—cut one of your unfinished films and release it? Or why don’t you do some commercials again?

  OW: No personal essay film will make any money, you know that. F for Fake proved it. If Wesson Oil would let me say that Wesson Oil is good, instead of Houseman, I’d be delighted, but nobody will take me for a commercial. It’s just a closed door, and I don’t understand why. He must have made five or six million dollars. I don’t understand that man’s continued success. And when he isn’t making a big commercial, he makes a small one. He’s now selling automobiles for a local automobile dealer in New York. While I cannot seem to crack it. Why I can’t, I do not know. A real mystery: why they prefer Houseman, with his petulant, arrogant, unpleasant manner. I don’t know what is the matter. It’s a very weird and terrible situation. I don’t know where to turn. Except I can’t … I can’t …

  HJ: During the period when you’re preparing for Lear, or for Dreamers— Orson, I’m not— Please don’t be mad at me.

  OW: No, I’m not mad at you. I’m explaining to you that it’s not like I’m just sitting around doing nothing. I’m working on scripts that might make some money. And they take all kinds of time. I’ve been fighting the income tax people for a long while now. The deals for Lear, even, include very big salaries for me that would get me out of trouble with them. And that’s what I need. I can’t afford to sit down in the cutting room with my old films. I have the cheapest competent editor, who’s willing to work as a kind of favor for eight hundred dollars a week. But I haven’t got eight hundred dollars a week to give the man. And I have big obligations, so that—that’s the awful thing—I’m not a free soul. I’m doing the impossible thing of trying to make money off the kind of movies that don’t make money.

  HJ: Please understand, I don’t mean to minimize your situation. I’ve told you that I’m working on this problem now. I know you’re taking care of a lot of people, and—

  OW: You know, I had it made with that damn brandy company, the French cognac.

  HJ: You had it, and then it went away.

  OW: Do you know why? The owner went to Hong Kong, checked into his hotel, turned on the TV, and saw an old commercial, which they were not supposed to show anymore, by contract, of me talking about Japanese whiskey. The local station figured, “Who’s gonna catch us at this?” and put it on the air.

  HJ: Oh, God! So they fired you.

  OW: And that was five years, that contract.

  HJ: Okay. We’ll get another one. We’ll get another one.

  OW: I’ve worked with advertising agencies all my life. In the old days in radio, you worked for them, because they were the boss, not the network. And I have never seen more seedier, about-to-be-fired sad sacks than were responsible for those Paul Masson ads. The agency hated me because I kept trying to improve the copy.

  HJ: Whoever heard of Paul Masson before you—

  OW: And now we have John G.

  HJ: Who is that?

  OW: John Gielgud. He’s doing his butler, from the little dwarf’s movie.

  HJ: From Arthur.

  OW: That’s one of our profound disagreements—Dudley Moore.

  HJ: I don’t have anything against short people.

  OW: Nor do I. I just know what they have against me. There’s never been a tall dictator—never.

  HJ: Oh, my God.

  OW: Name one. They’re all under normal height.

  HJ: Was Mussolini short?

  OW: Very short.

  HJ: Franco?

  OW: Short. Hitler was short. Including those that you might feel more sympathetic to. Like Tito—tiny. Stalin—tiny.

  HJ: The height theory of history.

  OW: Remember that the melancholy freaks are all giants, not midgets. The midgets and dwarfs all have delusions of grandeur.

  HJ: How tall are you?

  OW: I used to be six-three and a half, and I’m now about six-two. Six-one and a half, maybe. My neck keeps disappearing. Gravity, you know? Like Elizabeth Taylor. She has no neck left! Her shoulders come to her ears. And she’s still young! Now, look, imagine where her face will be when she’s my age. In her navel, you know?

  HJ: They’ll have a special man in Beverly Hills who pulls—elongates necks.

  OW: She had a neck like a swan when she was in Jane Eyre. That’s how I understood Lolita, when I read it later. I used to offer to read lines with her. “Wouldn’t you like to go through that with me?”

  HJ: How old was she?

  OW: Oh, something disgraceful!

  HJ: You had a touch of … a touch of …

  OW: Your Polish fella.

  HJ: A touch of Roman. And Chaplin.

  OW: More Roman. Chaplin was like that only in his old age.

  HJ: Getting back to your financial situation—

  OW: I’m a wage earner who— You know, I live from week to week. My wife and her establishments cost me six thousand dollars a month, apart from anything else. And I’ve got a daughter—one of my daughters, who has to be helped all the time, and I have, you know, every kind of obligation. And that’s the hell of it. If I were free of any financial obligation, I would have done essay films, because that’s what I would rather do now, more than story films. It’s what I think has not been done. But essay films are like essays. They are never going to compete with fiction features, just as books of essays have not been able to compete with novels, ever.

  If I got just one commercial, it would change my life! And that’s why my failure as a performer in commercials hurts me so much, because of the difference it would make in my life. I don’t even get the radio ones anymore! My whole income has gone from—three years ag
o, I made a million seven hundred thousand dollars … You know, I could comprehend it, in this youth-oriented world, if my ex-partner wasn’t getting so rich on it.

  HJ: Let me try to do what I can to find out about that. I really didn’t understand. I have to assume that people don’t know that you’re available. In the meantime, you could—

  OW: There is no “meantime.” It’s the grocery bill. I haven’t got the money. It’s that urgent. That’s what drives me off my … nut. I can’t afford to work in hopes of future profits. I have to hustle now. All I do is sweat and work. I’m imprisoned by a simple economic fact. Get me on that fuckin’ screen and my life is changed.

  HJ: Okay, I understand the priorities.

  OW: The priorities are personal; they’re not an artistic choice. For some reason, there are people all over the world who think Welles-Lear is a great idea. So I’ll get paid big money for that. And, you know, there are five or six people scattered all over the world who think The Dreamers is a wonderful script. Then there’s The Big Brass Ring. They’re all things that, if they come through, there’s money up front. But we haven’t got the deals.

  27. “Fool the old fellow with the scythe.”

  In which Orson realizes that his prospects will most likely evaporate, contemplates the evanescence of fame, which ebbs and flows with the regularity of the tides, and peers into the future.

  * * *

  HENRY JAGLOM: Now, what is with Lear today? What’s happening?

  ORSON WELLES: Dead.

  HJ: Well, it’s not dead, because this producer is trying to come up with terms.

  OW: No, no, it’s dead.

  HJ: Why?

  OW: No way of doing it in France. He’s changed every single point in the agreement that we made.

  HJ: So there’s no use communicating with Jacques Lang?

  OW: I’ll tell you all about it, if you’ll give me the time. Rather than answering—

  HJ: Okay. Sorry.

  OW: I’d rather do a monologue than submit myself to an interrogation. I have a problem with Jacques Lang, of course, because he thinks his producer is the best producer in France. He’ll believe the producer’s side of the story, and not mine. And Lang is not putting up enough money to make the difference anyway. He’s just giving his blessing. The producer, as described to me by my old cameraman, is indeed very successful and very intelligent, but he’s a weather vane. He’ll tell you one thing at ten in the morning, and another at noon.

  The budget was five million dollars. Then they began to talk about how it was hard to get the last million. I said, “I’ll give up three hundred thousand up front, and defer it.” Then they wanted me to do postproduction, all the editing, in Paris. I explained to them that I have back income tax that I have to pay for another year, and that I can only do that by finding some money in America. I cannot spend a year in France cut off from my other sources of income. And since we are doing it on tape as well as film, I said I’ll give them a very good rough cut before I leave, but I’ll do the final cut and mix in America. They agreed to that and the compensation, so then I said, “In all of your correspondence, you have called me the producer, but now you’re giving me this man.” They said, “We have to, by French law.” I said, “But I must have the right to decide how the money is spent within the budget. Not just artistically. If I want to spend one day on one thing and ten days on another, it’s my decision. That makes me the producer.” They said, “All right.”

  Yesterday came the telex—yesterday! My entire compensation is seven hundred thousand, instead of a million plus the cassette rights we agreed on, and I am not to get one cent of that until the entire film is delivered. Which is the first I ever heard of that. And I must do all the postproduction in Paris—a total violation of our understanding. So, there’s no way of patching it up in France. My immediate problem is public relations. How is this bombshell going to go off in the French press? All the newspapers in Paris are ready to say, “He doesn’t really want to make a movie. He’s running away after we—a million dollars isn’t good enough for him.” So what I want to do is to tell Jacques Lang, and the French press, that it’s not that I’m walking away from King Lear. It’s that my producer has changed the conditions under which I am to make the picture, unilaterally. It’s a diktat. The telex is not, “We regret that we are forced to change—” Rather, it’s take it or leave it. Now, the big money from French television had been earmarked for a miniseries called Ali Baba, and they had to take a big hunk from Ali Baba for Lear. So I suspect that this producer wants me to say no, so he can get the money back for Ali Baba. How do you like those apples?

  HJ: Those are bad apples. Have you heard from the English about Lear at all?

  OW: This morning I talked to the daughter of the producer, who is my liaison. She said, “Well, we have the money in London, but we have to move it to Switzerland. And until it gets to Switzerland, we’ll be unable to give you a starting date.” Which is about as unlikely a story as I’ve ever heard. Just a bad lie.

  HJ: Look, this might cheer you up. Do you know about the videodisc of Kane? With the narration and the explanation?

  OW: No, I don’t know about narration and explanation. I don’t like that. Why didn’t they invite me to do it?

  HJ: Every single cut you made is validated now by this professor who comments on the film. This is why you couldn’t have done this.

  OW: Well, theoretically, that’s good for teaching movies, so long as they don’t talk nonsense. “Do you see why this camera’s in the wrong place? Do you see why this cut is bad? Do you see why the pace drops here?” That would really be teaching people. I could do it with somebody else’s film—but you’re right, I couldn’t with my own. You can’t say why it’s good. You can only say why it’s bad! You could teach the ordinary grammar of moviemaking using a fairly respectable bad film, you know. Cukor would be a very good director for that. Because he doesn’t stand up under a hard look.

  I noticed that the new movies for television, which are obviously made by young directors out of film school, are technically much better than they were five, six years ago. And inventive. They’re just, of course, doomed, because they’re for television, and these directors are being clever with garbage. But you get to a point—I have, all my life, not just now—when you make something that’s really quite good, not wonderful, but a very good mediocre play or movie, and you settle for it.

  HJ: The great thing about what’s happening with these laser discs and video things, is that it gives film permanence. As opposed to when you started working, when you could easily expect that film would be gone twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now. Now you know that they’re gonna last.

  OW: I regard posterity as vulgar as success. I don’t trust posterity. I don’t think what’s good is necessarily recognized in the long run. Too many good writers have disappeared.

  (Gilles Jacob enters.)

  GILLES JACOB: I just saw you on the French TV talking to students.

  OW: It was all a little too reverent for me, you know?

  GJ: You know, we have not too many people to revere. So we are not so used to revere someone.

  OW: I don’t know. I think it is a French instinct to revere or to neglect, with nothing in between.

  GJ: Probably.

  OW: The giants of French culture suddenly don’t exist anymore. Nobody has attacked them; they just aren’t there, you know. Look what happened to Anatole France—disappeared. Malraux—vanished.

  HJ: But they’re dead.

  OW: Well, look at Scottie Fitzgerald here, in America. He disappeared in his own lifetime. For the last five years of his life, none of his novels was in print. You could not buy a Fitzgerald novel. Faulkner is vanishing. He used to totally dominate the whole world, not only America, but the Continent, particularly. My God, he’s starting to become invisible. Steinbeck, poor fellow. He was a bigger talent than anybody gives him credit for. But his faults have overshadowed his talent to such a point that he�
��s vanished, you know? He was a terribly sweet man. Writers are not necessarily the sweetest people in the world. Robert Frost was an angry man—but who knows—maybe just rude to bores. When someone came up to him, he’d say, “Yes? Get out.” My trouble is that I say, “Stay another ten minutes,” and people still say I’m a shit!

  HJ: Their natural lives exceeded their creative lives.

  OW: It’s no wonder Fitzgerald and Hemingway and O’Hara hated the fact of aging. They simply couldn’t bear to be forty-two years old. The fear of death. They wanted to fool the old fellow with the scythe.

  HJ: Filmmakers disappear all the time.

  OW: René Clair was a good friend of mine. He was very bitter at the end of his life. He used to say to me: “You know, there has never been a movie which isn’t out of fashion after fifteen years. It’s like journalism where you write on sand. It disappears; it’s nothing.” He was really revered, in the English-speaking world particularly. My God, René Clair was, you know, what Fellini was twenty years ago.

  HJ: What was the reason for Clair’s decline?

  OW: He made some commercial movies at the end, which were not “René Clair” movies. So that hastened the deterioration of his reputation, until it disappeared entirely. Because we all had a picture of a “René Clair” movie. Then he began to make amusing sort of …

  HJ: Entertainments.

  OW: You couldn’t tell the difference between those movies and any other well-made films. It’s like Olivier choosing to make Dracula rather than disappear from view. That hurt him very much. If you make that choice, your reputation is gonna suffer.

  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.