My Lunches with Orson (13 page)

HJ:
Nonetheless, say hello for me.

OW:
Yeah—if I get a chance to say anything.

HJ:
You'll have a few moments before, in the dressing room.

OW:
Oh, but by then he'll be telling me about himself, you know. He knows that I'll listen to it all.

HJ:
By the way, before I forget, I got your contract for
Two of a Kind
. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are set, along with your favorite, Oliver Reed, playing the devil. They want you for the voice of God, for two consecutive days. I love playing your agent. They said to me originally, “What kind of price do you think would be right?” I said, “If he does it at all, it's because he's interested in the work. The money is not what he would do it for. But, of course, you can't make it an insulting offer.” And they said, “Well, we were thinking ten, fifteen…” I said, “Really. For the voice of
God
? Maybe you should get somebody else. I don't even want to submit that to him. I don't think it's fair. Why don't you round it out at $25,000.” And they did. Now I have this agent's fantasy, which is: Could I have gone to thirty-five?

OW:
Well, I once had a radio director get mad at me. Sent me a wire saying, “When I want God, I'll call heaven!”

HJ:
What is it with Oliver Reed, that you like him so much? Weren't you stuck in Greece with him on some B movies?

OW:
A movie, for which the money never arrived. It was a Harry Alan Towers production. 1974. Harry Alan Towers is a famous crook.

HJ:
He's the guy who was charged with running a vice ring out of a New York hotel in the sixties, and also of being a Soviet agent!

OW:
I worked for him for years. He always took the money and ran. He once fled Tehran, leaving a mountain of unpaid bills. When we made
Ten Little Indians
, Towers stuck Oliver Reed with the hotel bill. Oliver went down to the nightclub at the Hilton, which was in the basement, and broke it up. All the mirrors, chandeliers; wrecked the whole place. Destroyed the whole nightclub. Everyone was in such awe of the violence that they all just stood back in horror, including the police. And he just walked out—and went to the airport. Nobody ever laid a hand on him! I admire him greatly!

Then there were the Salkinds, who produced
The Trial
, that I directed. I ended up paying the actors out of my own pocket to stop them from walking off the set all the time. About seventy thousand bucks.

HJ:
The Salkinds? I assume this was way before they made
Superman
?

OW:
Yeah. Oh, they were broke, they had nothing. To this day, I can never go to the Meurice, in Paris. I can't go to Zagreb because the Salkinds never paid my hotel bill for
The Trial
. I was in Belgrade, making a terrible version of
Marco the Magnificent
with Tony Webb—a whole lot of tatterdemalion actors of that sort. There was a big snowstorm. And word came that the manager of the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb was on his way to Belgrade to get me for my hotel bill on
The Trial
. But he was stuck in the snow. And I managed to finish the picture and fly out before he arrived!

HJ:
You'd think, after
Superman
, they could retroactively take care of these things.

OW:
Not for a minute. Not for a minute. And when they did those all-star
Three Musketeers
, I was the only star from
The Trial
not in those. They could've given me a job, at least, for all the money I'd put into
The Trial
.

This kind of thing happened to me all the time. My Spanish producer never paid my hotel bill for the three months that he kept me waiting in Madrid for the money for
The Other Side of the Wind
. So I'm scared to death to be in Madrid. I know they're going to come after me with that bill.

HJ:
Why do they go after actors? You'd think it would be good for business to have them stay at their hotels.

OW:
Actually, actors are rather well thought of in Spain. Particularly in the theater. Although, how theater actors manage to get along in Spain I don't know, because they do two shows a night. Same thing in a lot of Latin American countries, still—two shows a night. I had a friend who was the last really great illusionist, whose stage name was Fu Manchu. His real name was Bamberg, and he came from seven generations of great magicians. Born in Brooklyn, played a Chinese magician, with a Chinese accent in Spanish, you know? He had to finish a movie he was making. And he said, “I've got this show. And if I close it, I'll never get it open again with any business. Will you do it? What'll you take?” And I said, “I'll do it for free.” So for a week I did his show, while he finished his movie, but there were two performances a night. And at the end of that week, I didn't know how I—or he—lived through it. He died at seventy-five last year. His father, who worked silently, was a famous magician called Okito, and played as a Japanese.

HJ:
All these Jews from Brooklyn playing Japanese and Chinese!

OW:
Dutchmen—Dutch Jews. The father was born in Holland, and a great variety-hall star. And he had the most ter—

HJ:
(Calls out)
Excuse me! Waiter! Can I talk to you?

W
AITER
:
Talk to me, monsieur.

HJ:
Uh, you gave me cold chicken. And I wanted warm chicken salad, like it's advertised—and it's cold chicken. The plate is very good and hot—the plate is excellent. If I were eating the plate, I would have been happy. But the chicken—

OW:
Terrible thing happened to him. Whenever I have any trouble professionally, I remember Okito, 'cause I know that I will never be in the trouble he was in. He and his father and his grandfather had all been magicians to the court of Holland. And he was playing a show for the King and Queen of Holland, as well as the visiting King and Queen of Denmark. And his opening trick was producing a large bowl of water from a cloth—no, a large duck from a cloth. To complicate the story, even though he worked under the name of Okito, he wore Chinese clothes.

And he had that Chinese robe that's open here, and the duck was between his legs, in a sack. And on this occasion, the duck got its head out of the sack and grabbed him by his jewels. A death grip. Just as he made his entrance. Now that is what I call being in trouble. He said, “I did a lot of jumping around. I acted like a sort of crazy Chinaman.”

(To waiter)
He's looking for capers in his chicken salad.

HJ:
To make sure that they gave me the right—

OW:
He looks like a customs inspector. Is there a caper in it?

HJ:
It's the exact same as when they had the capers in and took them out. After all this discussion, there is the same taste of caper. Here are capers. They lied to me.

OW:
Don't get tiresome about the chicken salad.

HJ:
Why am I being tiresome, Orson? I want to get it the way it always is, without the capers. The waiter doesn't understand.

OW:
This is the way this chef makes it now.

HJ:
They keep writing in the papers that, ever since Wolfgang left, this place has gone downhill. And his restaurant, in turn, has become the number-one one. He's begging me to get you to come to it.

OW:
I'll never go.

HJ:
Why?

OW:
I don't like Wolfgang. He's a little shit. I think he's a terrible little man.

HJ:
Why?

OW:
I don't know. God made him that way. What do you mean, “Why”?

HJ:
Well, I mean, what makes him terrible?

OW:
I don't need to explain that. It's a free country. Anybody who sits down at my table without being invited is a shit.

HJ:
Wolf did that?

OW:
Yes.

HJ:
You wouldn't want to call him just “informal,” rather than “a shit”?

OW:
What?

HJ:
You wouldn't want to refer to that as informality, rather than being a shit?

OW:
No. Shitty, shitty. A self-promoting little shit. And I'm very sorry he has all this success, because I'm very fond of Patrick. And I wouldn't do that to him.

HJ:
What is wrong with your
moules
?

OW:
It's not what I had yesterday.

HJ:
You want to try to explain this to the waiter?

OW:
No, no, no. One complaint per table is all, unless you want them to spit in the food. Let me tell you a story about George Jean Nathan, America's great drama critic. George Jean Nathan was the tightest man who ever lived, even tighter than Charles Chaplin. And he lived for forty years in the Hotel Royalton, which is across from the Algonquin. He fancied himself a great bon vivant—ladies' man and everything. I heard him say to a girl—as he was dancing by me in the old Cub Room at the Stork Club a thousand years ago—after she laughed at something he said, “I can be just as funny in German and French.” And away he went, you know? He never tipped anybody in the Royalton, not even when they brought the breakfast, and not at Christmastime. After about ten years of never getting tipped, the room-service waiter peed slightly in his tea.
Everybody
in New York knew it but him. The waiters hurried across the street and told the waiters at Algonquin, who were waiting to see when it would finally dawn on him what he was drinking! And as the years went by, there got to be more and more urine and less and less tea. And it was a great pleasure for us in the theater to look at a leading critic and
know
that he was full of piss. And I, with my own ears, heard him at the 21 complaining to a waiter, saying, “Why can't I get tea here as good as it is at The Royalton?” That's when I fell on the floor, you know.

It'd be a wonderful thing to tell somebody you hated, when it isn't true. To say, “Don't you know that the waiters are doing that to your tea?” Then you don't have to even do it! You could drive a man mad! A real Iago thing to do. Better than the handkerchief, you know. I've remembered it, probably, because he was no admirer of mine. He was very anxious for you to know that he'd seen everything ever done in Europe. So whatever I did was done better in Prague in 1929. Those kinds of notices. It probably was better, but he was showing off, too.

 

8. “
Kane
is a comedy.”

In which Orson speculates on why Jean-Paul Sartre disliked
Kane
and snubbed him, remarks on the great number of novelists who wrote film reviews, and recalls that he got his best notice from John O'Hara.

*   *   *

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
I just saw a Renoir film I had never seen. I don't understand why there is such unevenness to the work of—

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
He actually made bad movies.

HJ:
It was a sweet little film, but terribly acted, called
The River
.

OW:
Very bad picture. It's considered one of the great monuments of film. Greatly overpraised. When he isn't on pitch, Renoir comes off as an amateur. It's always mystified me. I have nothing to explain it. I don't talk about it, because it just irritates people.

HJ:
What do you feel about
Grand Illusion
?

OW:
Probably one of the three or four best ever. I burst into tears at
Grand Illusion
every time. When they stand up and sing “The Marseillaise.” And [Pierre] Fresnay is so wonderful—all the performances are divine.

HJ:
What about
Rules of the Game
?

OW:
I love it, too—but, to me, it's a lesser work, by just a tiny bit. I think
Rules of the Game
is a better picture. It's like listening to Mozart. Nothing can be better than that. But I don't like the love story. And
Grand Illusion
just simply grabs me.

HJ:
Did the French know about
Kane
?

OW:
I thought it had been a big success in Paris. When I arrived there, I found that it had not been. They didn't know who I was. They didn't know about the Mercury Theatre, my troupe, which I thought they would, because I knew about their theater. And I was snubbed terribly by them.
Kane
only got to be a famous picture later. And then a lot of people really hated it. Americans got it, but not Europe. The first thing they heard about it was the violent attack by Jean-Paul Sartre. Wrote a long piece, forty thousand words on it or something.

HJ:
Well, maybe it politically offended him in some way.

OW:
No. I think it was because, basically,
Kane
is a comedy.

HJ:
It is?

OW:
Sure. In the classic sense of the word. Not a fall-in-the-aisles laughing comedy, but because the tragic trappings are parodied.

HJ:
I never thought of
Kane
as a comedy. It's profoundly moving.

OW:
It's moving, but so can comedies be moving. There is a slight camp to all the great Xanadu business. And Sartre, who has no sense of humor, couldn't react to it at all.