Read My Lunches with Orson Online
Authors: Peter Biskind
My Lunches with Orson
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For Steve Bloom
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Contents
Introduction: How Henry Met Orson by Peter Biskind
 Â
1.
“Everybody should be bigoted.”
 Â
3.
“FDR used to say, âYou and I are the two best actors in America.'”
 Â
4.
“I fucked around on everyone.”
 Â
5.
“Such a good Catholic that I wanted to kick her.”
 Â
6.
“Nobody even glanced at Marilyn.”
 Â
7.
“
The Blue Angel
is a big piece of shlock.”
 Â
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.”
14.
“Art Buchwald drove it up Ronnie's ass and broke it off.”
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.”
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
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Introduction
How Henry Met Orson
by Peter Biskind
O
RSON
W
ELLES
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 filmâthe deep focus, extreme camera angles, striking dissolves, ingenious transitionsâthat 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 looksâhe was over six feet tall, with blond hair and a face like a baby with a little snub nose that always embarrassed himâhe 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.
Controversyâwelcome and unwelcomeâcontinued 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 partâRosebudâthe 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.
