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

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  For Steve Bloom

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction: How Henry Met Orson by Peter Biskind

  A Note on the Text

  PART ONE 1983

  1. “Everybody should be bigoted.”

  2. “Thalberg was Satan!”

  3. “FDR used to say, ‘You and I are the two best actors in America.’”

  4. “I fucked around on everyone.”

  5. “Such a good Catholic that I wanted to kick her.”

  6. “Nobody even glanced at Marilyn.”

  7. “The Blue Angel is a big piece of shlock.”

  8. “Kane is a comedy.”

  9. “There’s no such thing as a friendly biographer.”

  10. “The Cannes people are my slaves.”

  11. “De Mille invented the fascist salute.”

  12. “Comics are frightening people.”

  13. “Avez-vous scurf?”

  14. “Art Buchwald drove it up Ronnie’s ass and broke it off.”

  PART TWO 1984–1985

  15. “It was my one moment of being a traffic-stopping superstar.”

  16. “God save me from my friends.”

  17. “I can make a case for all the points of view.”

  18. Charles “Laughton couldn’t bear the fact he was a homosexual.”

  19. “Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl!”

  20. “Jack, it’s Orson fucking Welles.”

  21. “Once in our lives, we had a national theater.”

  22. “I smell director.”

  23. “I’ve felt that cold deathly wind from the tomb.”

  24. “Jo Cotten kicked Hedda Hopper in the ass.”

  25. “You either admire my work or not.”

  26. “I’m in terrible financial trouble.”

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

  Epilogue: Orson’s Last Laugh by Henry Jaglom

  Appendix

  New or Unfinished Projects

  Partial Cast of Characters

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Editor

  Copyright

  Introduction

  How Henry Met Orson

  by Peter Biskind

  ORSON WELLES has long been regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, more specifically, the most gifted of a long line of gifted Hollywood mavericks that started with D. W. Griffith, or perhaps Erich von Stroheim. Today, his Citizen Kane, over seventy years after it was released in 1941, still finds a place on every Ten Best list. It topped the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine’s survey for fifty years in a row, only to be toppled in 2012 by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a picture that Welles despised.

  But we all know lists and such mean next to nothing in our awards-obsessed, rankings-ridden culture, and there’s a much easier and infinitely more pleasurable way to judge the stature of Welles and his films: just watch them, starting with Citizen Kane. The opening, a dark and doomy shot of the massive iron gates of Xanadu capped by a gigantic K, with the Transylvanian ruins of Kane’s folly looming above and behind it, grabs our attention, but at the same time warns us that there is more going on than meets the eye, so to speak, because it’s all too much, drama shading into melodrama, undermining itself with irony and camp.

  Welles had a genius for the dramatic; he was a master of shock and awe long before they were turned to other, considerably less noble ends, but at the same time he was a skilled miniaturist who worked just as easily on a small canvas with lightness and subtlety. Above all, it was his wizardry with time, space, and light, along with the exquisite tension between his furious, operatic imagination and the elegant, meticulous design and execution of the film—the deep focus, extreme camera angles, striking dissolves, ingenious transitions—that make it crackle with electricity. After Kane, movies were never the same. When asked to describe Welles’s influence, Jean-Luc Godard remarked, simply, “Everyone will always owe him everything.”

  Welles was not only a director, but a producer, a skilled actor and screenwriter, and a prolific author of essays, plays, stories, even a newspaper column. More often than not, he wore several of these hats at once, making him a veritable Bartholomew Cubbins of the arts. One finds oneself reaching in vain for adjectives adequate to describe him. As considerable as his gifts were, he himself was more than the sum of his parts, his own greatest production, a commanding, larger-than-life figure of equatorial girth who in later years sported a beard of biblical proportions that made him every casting director’s first choice for deities and gurus of all sorts, from Jor-El (Marlon Brando eventually got the role) to God.

  George Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His parents, Richard Welles, an inventor, and Beatrice Ives, a pianist, artist, and suffragette, were a mismatched couple with a stormy marriage. Eventually, they separated, and his mother, who raised him, died at an early age. Dr. Maurice “Dadda” Bernstein, Beatrice’s close friend and rumored lover, became his guardian.

  Welles was fiercely precocious. Even as a child, he read widely, showed a keen interest in music, and even became an amateur magician. He finished high school in two years, and got a scholarship to Harvard. He had a prodigious intellect, and was on intimate terms with the great literature of the Western canon, able to recite lengthy swatches of prose and poetry. But he preferred experience to book learning, and persuaded Dadda Bernstein to send him on a walking tour of Ireland when he was only sixteen. Aided by raw talent and boyish good looks—he was over six feet tall, with blond hair and a face like a baby with a little snub nose that always embarrassed him—he talked his way into a small part in a play at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, run by Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir, that started him on his way.

  Returning to the States, he soared through New York’s theater world and was dubbed “the boy wonder” before he was out of his teens. In 1936, Welles was hired by the Federal Theatre. Fascinated by modernist figures like Max Reinhardt and Bertolt Brecht, he was unafraid to surprise the classics by putting them in contemporary settings, like his triumphant so-called “Voodoo” Macbeth, that he produced that year when he was only twenty-one, with an all-black cast. Although he venerated the classics, no text was so sacrosanct that Welles wouldn’t or couldn’t have his way with it. The following year, he produced his “Blackshirt” Julius Caesar, which he turned into an allegory of fascism. (He played Brutus.)

  Although he never swallowed the Stalinist line, Welles breathed the heady fervor of those Popular Front years. He considered himself a New Deal liberal, and later would brush up against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used him in various ways, taking full advantage of his rhetorical and oratorical skills, most famously his booming voice that sounded like the rumble of not-so-distant thunder.

  In between Macbeth and Caesar, Welles created a scandal with Marc Blitzstein’s operetta The Cradle Will Rock in 1937. The feds padlocked the doors of the theater where it was set to open, apparently because FDR and/or his advisors feared that its full-throated defense of unions in general and striking workers at Republic Steel in particular (ten were shot by Chicago police in
the so-called Memorial Day Massacre), would provoke their enemies in Congress to further slash funding for the Federal Theatre and its parent, the Works Progress Administration. On June 16, 1937, amid a firestorm of press, hundreds of ticket holders marched twenty blocks to New York’s Venice Theatre, where they were treated to a bare-bones production in which Blitzstein played the piano on stage while the cast, scattered about the audience, performed the songs. That same year, Welles founded the Mercury Theatre, another successful enterprise. It seemed that he could do no wrong. Three days after his twenty-third birthday, on May 9, 1938, TIME magazine put him on the cover.

  Controversy—welcome and unwelcome—continued to dog Welles’s footsteps. After creating a name for himself in radio, most famously playing Lamont Cranston, or “the Shadow,” in the series of the same name, he was given his own show on CBS. His Halloween broadcast on October 30, 1938, adapted from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, panicked millions of Americans with its urgent, you-are-there style coverage of a Martian invasion, although the target of the ostensible attack, not Washington, D.C., not New York City, but Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, should have given listeners pause.

  Two years later, the new head of RKO, George Schaefer, gave Welles an unprecedented two-film contract with final cut that shocked and angered the industry. Welles embarked on Citizen Kane, which he wrote (with Herman J. Mankiewicz), directed, and headlined. The picture earned him the enmity of news baron William Randolph Hearst, on whose life it was loosely based, and whose petit nom d’amour for his lover Marion Davies’s nether part—Rosebud—the picture made famous, although, to be sure, there are other claimants to that particular honor.

  Kane premiered on May Day, 1941, when Welles was all of twenty-five years old. Hearst made a feverish attempt to block the release of the movie. According to Hearst columnist Louella Parsons in her autobiography, several studio heads, including L. B. Mayer and Jack Warner refused to book the picture in their theaters. Hearst also threatened to decline ads from RKO. Schaefer held fast, but Hearst did manage to force Kane into smaller, independent, and therefore less profitable venues, damaging the box office. In the last analysis, though, Kane was just too sophisticated for a mass audience, and RKO lost an estimated $150,000 on the picture.

  Before Welles started his next movie, the studio insisted that he sign a new contract that revoked his final cut. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was based on a novel by Booth Tarkington. Production proceeded relatively smoothly, but after he completed part of a rough cut of Ambersons, America entered World War II, and Welles abruptly left for Brazil at the behest of President Roosevelt on a goodwill mission, leaving that cut in the hands of editor Robert Wise to finish according to his instructions, to be delivered via phone calls and telegrams. Wise was then to carry it down to Rio for the director to polish. Welles agreed to do yet another film, It’s All True, in Brazil, at the same time he was busy sampling the pleasures afforded by Rio’s louche lifestyle, for which he confessed more than a passing interest. The war interfered with his plans to polish the film in Brazil himself, and his idyll turned to ashes when unbeknown to him, the studio sneak-previewed Ambersons at the Fox Theater in Pomona, California, on March 17, 1942. The screening turned into a fiasco when a flock of ticket holders walked out, leaving scathing comments on the cards. Running scared, RKO slashed 45 minutes out of Welles’s original 132-minute cut, without consulting him. Then as now, unhappy endings were taboo, so the studio took it upon itself to shoot a new, happier one. What was supposed to be a dark saga of the rise and fall of a wealthy family, left behind by an America forever changed by industrialization, was turned into an inane, maudlin, and totally preposterous tale of reconciliation. The film flopped.

  Welles never entirely recovered his footing. With his directing career sidelined, he found work as an actor, performing in pictures such as Journey into Fear (1943), Jane Eyre (1943), and The Stranger (1946), much of which he unofficially directed, while pursuing an active social life. He eventually married three times—to Virginia Nicholson, Rita Hayworth, and Paola Mori—and fathered three daughters, one by each wife. Welles spent the last twenty-four years of his life with Oja Kodar, a stunning Croatian-Hungarian artist, actress, and collaborator, twenty-six years his junior, although he never divorced Mori. He couldn’t have been an easy man to live with, considering his roving eye and what Nicholson called his “crushing ego.”

  Hayworth, the former Margarita Carmen Cansino, was, of course, one of the brightest stars of the forties and early fifties, so much so that the crew of the Enola Gay is rumored to have used her pinup decal as “nose art” for either the bomber or its payload, Little Boy, before dropping it on Hiroshima. Welles whimsically fell in love with her, so the story goes, when he saw her picture on the cover of LIFE magazine, and then and there decided to marry her. Which he did, only to discover that she was, with much justification, insanely jealous, as well as morbidly insecure and depressed. After a few turbulent years, she kicked him out, married Prince Aly Khan, and gave birth to a daughter, Yasmin. Before the divorce was finalized, Hayworth and Welles did a movie together, The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

  The Lady from Shanghai does not, of course, take place in Shanghai, nor is the femme fatale Hayworth plays exactly a lady. It is classic film noir with an absurdly intricate plot featuring a dizzying array of twists and turns. The picture ends with a justly celebrated face-off between Welles and Hayworth in the Magic Mirror Maze, inside a fun house. And like Ambersons, it was mutilated by the studio.

  Welles followed up The Lady from Shanghai with one of his most successful turns in front of the camera, in The Third Man, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Carol Reed, in part from a script by Graham Greene, it is a dark and moody specimen of its kind, shot on actual locations in rubble-strewn, postwar Vienna. An unremittingly grim picture, it is notable not only for the location work, but for Welles’s diamond-hard performance as a contemptible black marketeer named Harry Lime who makes his living stealing, diluting, and selling penicillin. It also boasts of a wonderful set piece on Vienna’s outsized Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad; a climactic manhunt in the city’s sewers, anticipating Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal by nearly a decade; and a distinctive score, performed exclusively on the zither.

  His last studio movie, Touch of Evil (1958), was also recut. It is too much of a mixed bag to be considered one of his best efforts. It features Charlton Heston at his most wooden and Janet Leigh playing a character so repellent that it’s hard not to root for the ridiculous, black leather jacket clad delinquent refugees from The Wild One who menace her with dope-filled needles and worse. On the other hand, the picture can boast of an extraordinary performance by Welles as a border town cop so degenerate he makes Harry Lime look good, an all-too-brief appearance by Marlene Dietrich, lots of vintage Wellesian dialogue, and a bravura opening: a heart-stopping, three-minute-and-twenty-second tracking shot that follows a car as it meanders across the border from Mexico into Texas, where it explodes in a spectacular inferno of fire and smoke. If you can ignore Heston and Leigh, these gems alone are worth the price of admission, not to mention the entire careers of many directors. No exaggeration.

  Despite his fitful success behind the camera, Welles directed eleven or so feature-length movies in the course of his career, including his outstanding Shakespeare trilogy—Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1965), his tribute to Falstaff. The last feature-length picture he made, F for Fake, finished in 1973, and not released in the United States until four years later, was financed by Welles himself when he was unable to find backing elsewhere. Both fish and fowl, fiction and documentary, he called it an “essay film,” which meant that it was a melange of everything he could lay his hands on in the vicinity of art forger extraordinaire Elmyr de Hory and faux Howard Hughes biographer Clifford Irving in sun-drenched Ibiza, as well as found footage of Picasso standing in a room behind a venetian blind, edited so that it appears that the artist is
ogling Kodar as she parades up and down the street in a variety of chic outfits. Last but not least was Welles himself, dramatically draped in his signature black magician’s cape skewering critics, while sharing his thoughts on illusion, art, and authenticity. F for Fake is an original, ingenious film, in which Welles bends the medium to his own ends and foreshadows pictures like Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) that blur the lines between fact and fiction, but it was all too clever for its own good. However, the public never even got the opportunity to judge for itself since the distributor dumped the film.

  These years, despite his more than respectable track record against daunting odds, tell a depressing tale of frustration, often featuring Welles as his own worst enemy. Like Kane, whose Xanadu was never finished, he accumulated a collection of incomplete pictures, earning him a reputation for walking away from his own movies before they were finished. True or false, the bad rap was impossible to shake, and made it difficult—not to say impossible—for Welles to raise money for his films.

  Desperate for cash to complete old projects and/or launch new ones, he cobbled together an income by means of his performances in innumerable pictures, some very good and many very bad, ranging from B movies produced by fly-by-night producers in no-name countries to odds and ends like soaps, game shows, and TV commercials. It didn’t seem to matter to him, so long as they put money in the bank, although hustling like this took its toll. He made Paul Masson a household name by intoning the slogan, “We will sell no wine before its time.” (Outtakes of an inebriated Welles slurring his way through one of these commercials can be seen on YouTube.) But even Paul Masson turned him out when a slimmed down Welles reportedly explained on a talk show that he had given up snacks—and wine.

  * * *

  Henry Jaglom was born into a family of wealthy German and Russian émigrés. His father, Simon, was imprisoned after the 1917 Russian revolution for being a “capitalist,” and left the Soviet Union with his brothers shortly thereafter, eventually making his way to London, where Henry was born in 1941, and then to New York City, where he grew up. He never knew exactly what his father did for a living, but when he applied to the University of Pennsylvania and was asked his father’s occupation, Simon told him, “Write international commerce and finance.”