My Lunches with Orson (39 page)

Orson was dead.

All day the hypocrites got on radio and TV and eulogized him. I kept wanting to call him and tell him, “You won't believe what Burt Reynolds said, what Charlton Heston came up with.” One by one each of those who wouldn't help him when they could, now stepped forward to praise him. I cried and tried to hear his laugh.

Even in death he did his “dancing bear” act for them. I got furious and gave a few angry interviews of my own.

Then I watched him on my editing machine in
Someone to Love
, which I am cutting together, saying that you are born, live, and die alone.

“Only through love and friendship can you create the illusion that you are not entirely alone,” he said, in what turns out to be his last appearance in a movie, his last acting job.

I'm having a harder time now, creating that illusion.

“You have your ending now,” he says to me, on my screen.

“Can't I have an ending after the ending?” I ask, essentially.

“No,” he says.

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because,” he finishes, with a smile, “this is The End.”

And he blows me a kiss.

And to the cameraman he shouted, “Cut!”

And the screen went black.

 

Appendix

Welles had so many unfinished or unmade films, scripts, treatments, and pitches, in addition to trailers, tests, shorts, fragments, and filmlets of every sort, it's nearly impossible to determine how many there were at the end. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum's meticulous inventory of Orsoniana,
Discovering Orson Welles
, when he died, Welles left approximately nineteen projects in various states of completion. What follows are thumbnails of the four that figure in his conversations with Jaglom, as well as a partial cast of characters.

NEW OR UNFINISHED PROJECTS

Don Quixote

Welles transposed Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Franco's Spain. The juxtaposition of the two throws into stark relief both the pathos of their quest, rendered anachronistic by the march of history, particularly the rise of fascism, as well as its timeless significance. Child actress Patty McCormack played a little girl visiting Mexico City who encounters Welles. Soon after he tells her the story of the two windmill tilters, she meets them herself. The shooting began in 1956 in France, and continued, fitfully, until the late 1960s, early 1970s. Welles kept running out of money. Over the course of lengthy production delays, McCormack grew up, and Welles had to drop her from the film. He repeatedly changed the concept, at one point exposing Quixote and Panza to a nuclear holocaust, and at another sending them to the moon. Welles claimed he originally shelved the film because he was waiting for Franco to die, saying, “It's an essay on Spain, not Don Quixote.” He worked on it on and off until he himself died.

The Dreamers

The Dreamers
was a script written in 1978 by Welles and his companion Oja Kodar based on two short stories by Isak Dinesen, “The Dreamers” and “Echoes.” In the course of his years-long attempts to find financing, Welles shot two ten-minute segments around his home. In the first, fully made up and costumed as a nineteenth-century Dutch-Jewish merchant, Welles tells the story of Pellegrina Leoni, an opera diva who loses her voice. It was shot in black-and-white. In the second, shot in color, Leoni, played by Kodar, appears herself. She bids the merchant farewell, explaining that she is off to seek a new life.

King Lear

Welles was also anxious to put his version of
King Lear
, for which he had very definite ideas, on the screen. “Up to now, everybody, myself included, felt we had to extend the visual elements of
Lear
instead of doing what the movies make possible, which is reducing it to its essential so it becomes a more abstract and intimate
Lear
,” he explained. “It's about old age and it's not about somebody trying to outsing the Metropolitan [Opera] and outshout the thunder.” He intended to do a less-is-more production, shot in 16 millimeter black-and-white, mostly in close-up. He continued, “I believe the key to
Lear
and his extraordinary behavior at the beginning of the play, which is the toughest thing to swallow, is the fact that he probably had three wives, anyway probably two, and his last wife died in childbirth and he has lived for at least 25 years without the company of women. He lives with his knights, he's going to pieces. The absence of women, of the civilizing element of life, is the thing that blinds him and makes the tragedy.”

The Other Side of the Wind

The Other Side of the Wind
was cowritten and coproduced by Welles and Kodar. Shot between 1969 and 1976, it is Welles's satirical take on the state of film, circa 1970, and a film à clef in which he skewers his enemies, including John Houseman and Pauline Kael. It features John Huston as Jack Hannaford, an over-the-hill director trying to make a comeback with a New Wave-y film-within-a-film called
The Other Side of the Wind
that parodies fashionable European directors of the moment, such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. Guests are on their way to Hannaford's seventieth birthday party, staged in all its extravagant, Aquarian glory, but he is killed in a car crash immediately thereafter. The movie is a mash-up of stills; various film gauges and formats—Super 8, 16, 35 millimeter, as well as video—black-and-white and color; and different genres. Before
The Other Side of the Wind
could be completed it became embroiled in a legal fight over ownership between Welles and the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, who invested in it. It has not been released to this day. Henry Jaglom, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Susan Strasberg, Paul Mazursky, Lilli Palmer, Stephane Audran, Cameron Crowe, Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol, and more make appearances.

PARTIAL CAST OF CHARACTERS

Joseph Cotten
, one of Welles's oldest friends, hooked up with him for the Federal Theatre production of
Horse Eats Hat
. Cotten was a founding member of the Mercury Theatre. His breakout role, playing the part that Cary Grant would later make famous in the movie, was that of C. K. Dexter Haven in
The Philadelphia Story
on Broadway opposite Katharine Hepburn. He then played Jedediah Leland in
Citizen Kane
(1941), and went on to have a long and varied career in Hollywood. He played Eugene in
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942), and appeared in Hitchcock's
Shadow of a Doubt
(1943), as well as
Gaslight
(1944), and four movies with Jennifer Jones, including
Duel in the Sun
(1946). He also played Marilyn Monroe's husband in
Niagara
(1953), and even showed up in Michael Cimino's notorious
Heaven's Gate
(1980).

Samuel Goldwyn
formed Samuel Goldwyn Pictures in 1916. In 1924, it was folded into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. (Roaring Leo the lion, the MGM trademark, was originally his.) He subsequently became a successful independent producer. William Wyler made his best films for Goldwyn, including
Wuthering Heights
(1939),
The Little Foxes
(1941), and
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1948). Many of Hollywood's finest writers worked for him, including Ben Hecht, Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellman. He was also notorious for mangling the English language, coming up with locutions affectionately known as “Goldwynisms.” Trying to cheer up Billy Wilder after a flop, he once said, “You gotta take the sour with the bitter.”

Charles Higham
, a prolific biographer, published two books on Welles,
The Films of Orson Welles
and
Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius
. Welles and his admirers detested Higham for perpetuating the view that Welles was a failure. Welles delighted in mispronouncing his name “Higgam.”

Lena Horne
was Hollywood's Jackie Robinson, so to speak, the first black movie star, in an era when most black performers were relegated to the roles of butlers, nannies, cooks, or cannibals. She began her career in the chorus line of the legendary Cotton Club in 1933 when she was sixteen. She was known for her silken voice, and eventually replaced Dinah Shore on NBC's jazz show
The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street
. She signed with MGM, becoming the first black star under a long-term contract. Horne appeared in numerous films, but her scenes were excised in states that banned movies with black performers. She gained considerable fame for playing Georgia Brown in the all-black musical
Cabin in the Sky
(1943), and for singing the title song in
Stormy Weather
(1943). She was an outspoken civil rights activist. She worked closely with Paul Robeson in the 1930s; and during the war, entertaining the troops, she refused to perform before segregated audiences or those in which black GI's were seated behind German POWs, as was sometimes the case. Her later career, in the 1950s, was blighted by the blacklist that forced her out of Hollywood into clubs and television.

Garson Kanin
wrote and directed for the stage and screen. He is best known for
Born Yesterday
(1950). With his wife, actress Ruth Gordon, he wrote two Tracy-Hepburn comedies,
Adam's Rib
(1949) and
Pat and Mike
(1952).

Elia Kazan
was a towering figure of the American stage and screen. He was closely associated with “the Method” school of acting, and cofounded the Actors Studio in 1947. He directed its most famous graduate, Marlon Brando, in three films,
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951), the risible
Viva Zapata!
(1952), and the brilliant
On the Waterfront
(1954), in which the actor gave the greatest performance of his career. Even Kazan's lesser works, like
Panic in the Streets
(1950),
Baby Doll
(1956),
A Face in the Crowd
(1957), and
Wild River
(1960) are compelling. The director also gave Warren Beatty his first starring role in
Splendor in the Grass
(1961). But Kazan was an old lefty from the Group Theatre, and in 1952 he sullied his reputation forever by naming names, that is, throwing his old friends and colleagues to the wolves by testifying against them before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Many of his associates never forgave him.

Alexander Korda
was a Hungarian-born producer and director. After his career floundered in several countries—Hungary, Austria, Germany, and the United States—he relocated to England, where he had immediate success directing Charles Laughton in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
(1933). He went on to direct many more films, including
Four Feathers
(1939) and
The Thief of Bagdad
(1940). He bought into British Lion Films, and entered a coproduction deal with David O. Selznick in 1948. A good friend of Welles's, he hired him for
The Third Man
, released in 1949.

Irving “Swifty” Lazar
, one of the first so-called superagents, was reportedly so nicknamed by Humphrey Bogart when he put together three deals for him in one day on a bet. Separated at birth from Mr. Magoo, he was tiny, bald, and wore thick glasses in heavy black frames. But he was an immaculate dresser, and despite his unprepossessing appearance, counted among his clients, at one time or another, Lauren Bacall, Moss Hart, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, and even Madonna. He was known for his abrupt phone manner, called everybody “kiddo,” and even the biggest stars killed for invitations to his Oscar parties.

Charles Lederer
was the writer, cowriter, or contributor to several classic comedies, including
The Front Page
(1931),
His Girl Friday
(1940),
I Was a Male War Bride
(1949),
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1953), and
Monkey Business
(1952), as well as Richard Widmark's chilling debut film,
Kiss of Death
(1947), and Howard Hawks's sci-fi landmark,
The Thing
(1951). Even more precocious than Welles, Lederer entered college at the age of thirteen, and was entangled with Welles throughout his life. Lederer was raised by Marion Davies, his aunt, who was, of course, Hearst's mistress and one of Welles's ostensible targets in
Kane
. He married Welles's first wife, Virginia Nicholson, at Hearst Castle. Lederer and Welles became great friends. After Rita Hayworth threw Welles out, he lived next door to the Davies estate, where Lederer and Nicholson were living, and dined with them nearly every night. Occasionally, when Davies joined the couple, Welles was barred from the table, and stood outside the window watching them eat. Both he and Lederer were fond of practical jokes.

In 1924,
Louis B. Mayer
became head of the combined Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Mayer Pictures—soon to be Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer reported to Nicholas Schenk in New York, whom he disliked and resented, invariably referring to him as “Mr. Skunk,” but he ran the lot, located in Los Angeles, like his own fiefdom. Mayer built MGM into the most successful studio in Hollywood, the crown jewel of the golden age of movies, and he is credited, if that's the right word, for inventing the star system. MGM was home to Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Judy Garland, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and a host of other stars, all of whom the studio held in virtual thralldom. Mayer was extremely conservative and a lifelong Republican.

Louella Parsons
and
Hedda Hopper
. Parsons was a preternaturally powerful Hollywood gossip columnist who went to work for William Randolph Hearst in 1923. Before long she was syndicated in more than six hundred papers worldwide, and was read by an estimated 20 million people. Parsons reigned supreme until Hedda Hopper emerged as an equally if not more powerful rival in 1937, writing for competing newspapers. Hopper called her Beverly Hills house “the house that fear built.” Long before Bob Dylan mocked Jackie Kennedy's “leopard-skin pill-box hat,” Hopper was famous for her flamboyant headgear. An avid supporter of HUAC, Joe McCarthy, and the blacklist, her relentless attacks on Charlie Chaplin for his lefty politics and predilection for young women is at least partially responsible for driving him into exile in Switzerland. She was rumored to have tried to out Cary Grant and Randolph Scott as a couple, and one Valentine's Day she was the recipient of a skunk, courtesy of actress Joan Bennett. Both Parsons and Hopper attacked
Kane
, even before it opened in 1941. Parsons was particularly vituperative, and took an active part in her boss's campaign to block the release of the film, even smuggling one of Hearst's lawyers into a private screening.