My Lunches with Orson (37 page)

HJ:
The level of trivia is truly wonderful. Why do you suppose he hates you so? Because you are Orson Welles and he's not? I think envy of the gifted colors all these books. He's just jealous. Like Houseman.

OW:
You know, in the beginning, when I should have been playing Hamlet, Houseman kept saying, “These plays are not vehicles for you. Remember, we're an ensemble company, not the Orson Welles Players.” So Martin Gabel plays Danton, instead of me. And so on, you know. But in the profession which I have chosen, my only real disappointment is that I feel I've never been properly appreciated as an actor. Mostly my own fault, for giving my energy to the production, rather than to my performance. Also, my own fault for pretending I wasn't a star actor and was just there.

HJ:
I've wondered about that, why you didn't capitalize on your great notices. So it was mainly Houseman, then?

OW:
All Houseman. But I had no argument with that, you know? That seemed right to me.

HJ:
The spirit of the times dictated a kind of group, or collective mentality.

OW:
You know, Houseman's become so famous now that Rich Little does an imitation of him.

HJ:
A terrible comic. Houseman is so pompous and pretentious.

OW:
That's what he's like. Pomposity is his basic characteristic.

HJ:
Where did that absurd accent come from?

OW:
He's a Rumanian.

HJ:
Jewish, right?

OW:
Yeah. But a Rumanian who was born and raised in Buenos Aires.

HJ:
What about that accent?

OW:
In Buenos Aires, there's this whole population of people who have been speaking English for generations and have never been back to England. So they've developed their own English accent. Besides being Rumanian. Which, as Alfonso XIII said, “Being a Rumanian is not a race. It's a profession.”

HJ:
In the past years, have you ever found yourself in the same place with him?

OW:
No. If I know he's going to be someplace, I don't go. Not because I don't want to speak to him, but because it's uncomfortable.

HJ:
He's made such a reputation off you, in a way. It's infuriating when history is revised. It's not only the Stalinists in the Soviet Union. He's rewritten his whole life, using his memoires, so that he's become central to everything you've achieved. And now he's enjoying his senior citizenship as a grand old actor. He is dreadful. As an actor he can't read a line.

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 ago, 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.

*   *   *

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
Now, what is with
Lear
today? What's happening?

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
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?