My Lunches with Orson (32 page)

HJ:
Perhaps, more than anything else this afternoon, that's what I have to ask you about. Naturally, I admit I am tempted to use—

OW:
Don't do it.

HJ:
Not allegorically in an intellectual way, but in an emo—

OW:
Not in
any
way.

HJ:
Too heavy-handed? Too schematic? But stuff about memory, and the past, and time and loss—that's the kind of thing I've been thinking about, and I'm quite obsessed with my childhood, my past, and so on.

OW:
I just don't know about the documentary.

HJ:
All right, let's leave that open. I forgot to mention one thing. The very opening of the movie you're probably gonna hate. Which is, I sit in a chair, in my living room, speaking into the camera. I say I was completely happy, I was positive that I had the best relationship in the world, and there was nothing that I wanted. Then one day she came home from yoga class. And the camera whirls to the door, and Patrice comes in. This is a flashback. I see that she is worried. “What's wrong?” “Nothing.” “What's wrong?” “Nothing.” “Something is obviously wrong. You look upset.” I keep probing, which is what actually happened in real life. And she says, “I'm thinking that I don't know if we can live together anymore.”

Then the camera comes back to me in a chair—present time—and I say, “After that came the most devastating two years of my life. I cried, I experienced the most incredible pain that could be imagined. Eventually I felt better, I got stronger, I went about my life. And tonight she's coming over to sign the divorce agreement. I've gotta cook her dinner.” I get up and go into the kitchen, and the doorbell rings. That kind of thing. Basically, to try to cover, in perhaps a minute and a half, the whole two years we were together. And bring it from when she says, “I can't live with you anymore,” to now. Any thoughts on that?

OW:
I don't like it at all.

HJ:
Why?

OW:
I smell director. I smell director. It's getting too neat. You're setting yourself up for a terribly tight, well-constructed piece of clockwork. You see how the whole movie could be like that.

HJ:
Oh, I would hate the whole movie like that.

OW:
So, don't lead us to expect it. Don't set us up for something we're
not
gonna get, and that looks cleverer than its content. The content should be more important than the ingenuity of the director.

HJ:
I didn't mean to make the shot too smart. I wanted to take care of the past that way, quickly, in one setup.

OW:
Now, I would suggest that the past—I don't think this is too precious—the past should have her coming in with a Chinese dinner in buckets—or you doing that. In other words, so we see how they lived. You know, they're kind of intellectual gypsies. “I went out to the Imperial Palace and got all the stuff you like.” So we've seen that the happy past consisted of takeout food. And the dinner and the notarized divorce is, you know, Lubitsch. And I would suggest—only because you asked—that if you do do that dinner, when she is expressing her appreciation and surprise at this effort, that you turn against what you've done, and condemn it as a piece of Lubitsch nonsense. So, in effect, you start arguing with her about her appreciation of what you've done for her.

HJ:
That's very good—very, very good.

OW:
Sure. You say, “All I lack is, you know, three fiddles and a cimbalom.”

HJ:
Three fiddle players and a what?

OW:
And a cimbalom.

HJ:
What's that?

OW:
That's the thing that—
(sings a few notes)
. Pronounced ZIM-ba-lom. It's a funny word.

HJ:
But what about my jukebox?

OW:
You shouldn't say, “I've got the jukebox.” She should say, “You've got the jukebox.” And she stands there. Not asking you to dance, but with her arms out. So it's the easiest thing to go and take her …

HJ:
Now, the next day we wake up together in the same bed. I fell asleep next to her, close to her. And she wakes up shocked that I'm there.

OW:
Has it been made clear to us that there's gonna be no rising magoo in the bed?

HJ:
That there wasn't any what? Oh, sex, you mean? That would be clear.

OW:
She sits up, maybe, because she's gotta go to the can. And she says to you, “I know that you fed me”—whatever it is—“papaya,” you know? “It's all gone, and it wasn't fun getting rid of it. I've told you at least nine hundred and ninety-nine times that I'm allergic to papaya. I think I should go to the office.”

HJ:
She's just taken a job in Los Angeles at the Yoga Center which, in fact, is where Patrice now lives. She likes it. She feels it's part of the search.

OW:
The search, the terrible search. Wait a minute. I have an idea. You must let me tell it. It has nothing to do with the plot at this point. It's an argument for you to give her, somewhere. This great search is mainly being conducted on the West Coast. And it is because people, pioneers, have been fighting their way to get here for one hundred and fifty years. Finally they're here, and there's nothing here.

1985

 

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

In which Orson refuses to embrace Henry because he is afraid of catching AIDS.
Lear
is going forward, but he thinks the political situation in France is unstable. He fears
Wind
is dated.
Cradle
is stalled.

*   *   *

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
You look troubled? What? No hug?

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
If we could figure out a way to hug without kissing, that would be fine.

HJ:
Why no kissing?

OW:
You know, we could have AIDS.

HJ:
Well, neither of us, as far as I know, has AIDS. Is there something I should know about you, Orson?

OW:
They don't know how it's transmitted, and saliva is one of the responsible parties.

HJ:
We don't drool on each other when we kiss.

OW:
I'm not kissing anybody. I'm not even sure about shaking hands. But I can hug you in such a way that we each face in opposite directions.

HJ:
Orson, what is this, a comedy routine?

OW:
I'm deadly serious. I haven't gone through my life to be felled by some gay plague. We might be carriers. You never know.

HJ:
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. If people are going to start doing that …

OW:
I might be a carrier. For every thousand guys with AIDS, five thousand are carriers who will never have it.

HJ:
Yes, but those are people who have homosexual relationships, the carriers.

OW:
There are 6 percent of the people that have it for which there is no explanation.

HJ:
I'm going to pee.

OW:
Then what are you going to do?

HJ:
Zip up, wash my hands, and come back.

OW:
That's not good enough. Are you going to touch the knobs?

HJ:
Orson, you're becoming a fanatic.

OW:
Yes, a fanatic to save my life. Did you touch Kiki?

HJ:
Yes, I petted her.

OW:
I don't know if dogs can catch it.

HJ:
If dogs could get it, they'd be dying. All gay guys have dogs.

W
AITER
:
Qu'est-ce que vous aimez manger?

OW:
Rien.
I'm not too well. I don't think I'm going to eat.

W:
Do you want a little turnip soup? Very nice.

OW:
I don't like soup.

W:
OK, then. Maybe a salad or something mild?

OW:
Never salad in a restaurant …
(To HJ)
I'm determined never again to eat a salad in a restaurant. Because I've watched them in the kitchen, and I've been told that's how you get hepatitis. It's the dirty-fingers disease. The first courses are only salads. There must be something else they could come up with for a first course. Goddamn nouvelle cuisine; they only think in terms of salad. They make salad out of every goddamn thing in the world—salad of roast beef. What salad generation do you belong to?

HJ:
What?

OW:
This emphasis on greenery, and all that. The 'sixties. The Great Health Movement. Oh, I'm sure it's done everybody good. And it's probably good that people don't drink the way they used to. Everybody was drunk when I was young. It wasn't fun. It was boring. You just got used to dealing with your drunken friends.

HJ:
I came from a generation where everybody was high all the time.

OW:
Equally boring. Although I think that more middle-class Americans and fewer show-business people are stuffing it up their nose these days.

HJ:
What's that painting on the wall?

W:
A David Hockney.

OW:
Patrick asked me to do a drawing as well, and I'm ashamed that I didn't do it. I have a bad hand. For the last three months, I can hardly sign my name. I have this pinched nerve. I got it in Paris, for no reason at all. Agonizing pain. I'm crippled—these two fingers are almost dead. Oh, boy, I'm scared.

HJ:
Chiropractors are good for that.

OW:
Or acupuncture. I got into the hands of a fake acupuncture man in Paris who came with incense. And he said, “What house are you?” And I said, “What house?” And he said, “Astrologically.” I was, already, “Goodbye.” And he wasn't even Chinese or anything. On the other hand, I also think that there are many areas in medicine where the proper quack is the right fellow to go to. But I have a foolish prejudice against anybody who isn't a doctor, because my father believed in everyone who wasn't a doctor. He lived his life by his horoscope, which was done for him by very expensive people. He believed in everything—

HJ:
But science.

OW:
But God, you know? It's often the people who are not religious who are the most superstitious. There are more clairvoyants in Paris than in any city in the world, four clairvoyants to one doctor, even though the French don't believe in God. It's the old Chesterton remark, “If you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything.” It's true. Because if you don't believe in God, you will substitute every mystery that is outside of yourself, however nonsensical it may be. And, of course, astrology is so maddening, because it was all laid down at a time when the planets were in another position. An Aries is now actually a Pisces, and so on. I'm old enough to remember when everybody had their palms read, the way they now have their charts done. And in palmistry as practiced in the West for the last two hundred years, every line is different from the old palmistry of the Hindus. The lifeline was here, the love line there, but it's still supposed to work. The place with the greatest number of believers in this sort of thing is the Soviet Union, supposedly ruled by dialectical materialism. The hunger to believe has not been filled by Lenin, mummified in the Kremlin. The time may come when we'll be able to live without mystery, but then we'll have to question whether we'll still be capable of poetry. It's pretty hard to imagine—a world or an art without any kind of deception.

HJ:
There was that rock that you brought on
Carson
.

OW:
I went to a shop that sold exotic minerals. I got one of those funny-looking stones. And I came on
Carson
and I said, “There are only seven of these in the world. And I have permission, just for tonight, to show it on television, because these stones are being studied at leading universities. The writing on the spine of this stone is extraterrestrial, and we have no idea how either got there. But if you have a watch or a clock which doesn't work anywhere in your house, or on your person, this stone will make it go.” At that moment, when I held up the stone, the clock in the studio at NBC, which had gone on the blink, started to tick.

HJ:
Love it!… Bogdanovich called. He told me—

OW:
Wait a minute! I'll tell you what he talked about. He talked about Bogdanovich!

HJ:
He said, “I'm having a problem.” He was using Springsteen for the picture he's finishing,
Mask
. “The studio made me take all my music off…”

OW:
Yeah, I read about that.

HJ:
So he's suing the studio for a couple of million dollars.

OW:
It's a great thing to do after you've been out of work.

HJ:
So I said, “Peter, do you really think this is a good idea?” He said, “Well, I've done it.” Apparently the boy that the movie is about loves Springsteen. So he sent a letter to Frank Price at Universal, where the film is set up, demanding that he not interfere with his creative rights, that filmmakers have the right to put any music they want in their movie, and he would like you to—

OW:
Fat chance.

HJ:
To sign it!

OW:
No.