My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  Jaglom studied at the Actors Studio, and then joined the mid-1960s migration from New York to Los Angeles, where his friend Peter Bogdanovich had promised him the lead in his first feature, Targets (1968), a role Bogdanovich later decided to play himself. His acting career ended abruptly when he was washing his feet in the sink of his apartment and the phone rang, the caller notifying him that Dustin Hoffman had gotten the lead in The Graduate (1967), a role he was convinced he was born to play. He muttered an epithet and turned his attention to writing and directing.

  In the wake of a worldwide explosion of film culture in the 1960s, movies became the medium of choice for aspiring artists. Under the sway of the French, Jaglom, like many of his contemporaries, wanted to do it all: not just act or write, but edit, direct, and produce as well. They didn’t want to be directors for hire by some baboon in the front office with a big, fat cigar; they wanted to be filmmakers or, as the French would have it, auteurs, a term popularized in America by Andrew Sarris in the sixties. Simply put, an auteur was to a film what a poet was to poetry or a painter was to painting. Sarris argued, controversially, that even studio directors such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, or bottom-of-the-bill toilers like Sam Fuller, displayed personal styles, were the sole authors of their pictures, and were therefore authentic artists. Welles, of course, was the very avatar of an auteur. Jaglom and his friends venerated him as the godfather of the so-called New Hollywood. He recalls, “We used to talk about him as the patron saint of this new wave of filmmaking.”

  Partial to long, colorful scarves and floppy hats, Jaglom swiftly fell into bad company. He smoked dope at the Old World Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard with Jack Nicholson and was drawn into the orbit of Bert Schneider. Schneider, along with Bob Rafelson, had made a lot of money off the Monkees, and with the addition of Steve Blauner, ran a small production company called BBS. Schneider gave Jaglom a crack at editing the company’s second picture, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider (1969).

  Easy Rider was a hit, and BBS was on its way. Jaglom discovered in himself the ability to talk people into things they didn’t want to do. On the basis of his work on Easy Rider, he convinced Schneider to allow him to finance his first feature, A Safe Place (1971), with Nicholson and Tuesday Weld. Jaglom was desperate to add Welles to the cast. Bogdanovich was conducting a series of exhaustive interviews with Welles that would become a book and had become very friendly with him. Jaglom asked his friend to introduce the two of them. Bogdanovich warned him, “He won’t do it.”

  “Well, tell me where he is, and I’ll go meet him.”

  “He’s in New York at the Plaza Hotel. But you musn’t go to him without a script. He hates that. And you don’t have a script.”

  Welles was an intimidating presence with an imperious manner, a slashing wit, and a reputation for not suffering fools. Jaglom was no fool, but he didn’t have a clue how he was going to persuade the great man to join his cast. Undeterred, he flew to New York and went up to his hotel room. Welles opened the door wearing purple silk pajamas. Jaglom remembers, “He looked like this huge grape.” Welles demanded, “What do you want?” in an unwelcoming way.

  “I’m Henry Jaglom.”

  “Yes, but does that tell me what you want?”

  “It should, if Peter Bogdanovich has spoken to you.”

  “Peter speaks to me often.”

  “The reason I’m here is because I’m making a film for Bert Schneider who Peter is making a film for. Which I arranged.”

  “I know who Bert Schneider is.”

  “Peter is making The Last Picture Show—”

  “Yes, good for him.”

  “And I want to make my film, A Safe Place. With you in it.”

  “Where’s the script?”

  “I don’t have a script.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you’re going to be in it, it’s going to be completely different than if somebody else is going to be in it.”

  “No script? No interest.”

  “Your character is a magician.”

  “A magician? I’m a magician. An amateur magician, of course. But I don’t do first scripts by first-time directors.”

  “What do you mean you don’t do them? Citizen Kane was your first script.”

  “Did you really say ‘A magician’?”

  “Yeah. And I think I want him with a little Jewish accent. I know you go to lunch in London at that Jewish restaurant all the time. There are rumors that you think you’re Jewish—”

  “I am Jewish. Dr. Bernstein was probably my real father.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Can I wear a cape?”

  “Sure, wear a cape.”

  “OK, I’ll do it.”

  Needless to say, the old-timers on the set, which meant most of the crew, looked askance at the young director, whose hair was gathered in a long pony tail and whose feet were squeezed into white Capezio dancing shoes. The second day of shooting, they all turned up wearing American flag lapel pins. (This was, after all, 1971, the middle of the Vietnam war.) During a lunch break, Jaglom was sitting with Schneider, Nicholson, and Weld. Welles joined them, saying, “You’re the arrogant kid who pushed me into this. How’s your arrogance doing?”

  “Not very well. The crew hates me. They’re totally negative. Everything I tell them to shoot, they say, ‘It won’t cut,’ or ‘it’s not in the script.’ I have to fight to get every single shot. I’m exhausted.”

  “Oh, my God, I should have prepared you. Tell ’em it’s a dream sequence.”

  Jaglom talked a reluctant Welles into appearing in A Safe Place, his first film. Here, he directs Welles and Tuesday Weld in Central Park, c. 1971.

  “What?”

  “Just do as I tell you. Trust me. You trusted me enough to hire me. Do it.” After lunch, they returned to the set. Jaglom had mapped out an intricate shot. The cameraman said, “Can’t do it.”

  “Why?”

  “It won’t cut.”

  “It’s a dream sequence.”

  “A dream sequence? Why didn’t you say so? I’ll get on my back and do it like this. It will be psychedelic.” Jaglom went to Welles that night, and said, “What the fuck is this? Everything I want to do, I say, ‘Dream sequence,’ and they’re pussycats.”

  “You have to understand, these are people who work hard for a living. They have tough lives. Structured lives. They work all day, then they have dinner, put their kids to bed, go to sleep, and get back to the set at five o’clock the next morning. Everything else in life except for dreams has rules. The only place they’re truly free is when they fall asleep and dream. If you tell them it’s a dream sequence, they will be freed of those rules to be creative, imaginative, and give you all kinds of stuff that they’ve got inside of them.” That was the best advice Jaglom would ever get.

  Welles taught Jaglom two other lessons: First, “Make movies for yourself. Never compromise, because those compromises are going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” And second, “Never give Hollywood control over your tools because sooner or later, they will take them away from you.”

  When Jaglom screened A Safe Place for Schneider, the lights came up and Schneider was crying. Jaglom thought, “Oh, that’s great, I moved him.” Schneider said, “Yeah, I’m very moved. I’m also an asshole.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “This movie can’t possibly make a penny. Too abstract and poetic. The only person more self-indulgent than you in making this picture is me, for letting you. Why? Because it made me cry.”

  * * *

  Jaglom was cutting his second film, Tracks, with Dennis Hopper when he ran into Welles in 1978 at Ma Maison, where the great man was having lunch with Warren Beatty. Now no more than a tarnished monument to an illustrious but checkered career, pursued by creditors, overweight and afflicted with depression—the “black dog” as he called it—Welles had pretty much given up. Schneider had been willing to finance a picture for him early in the decade, starr
ing Jack Nicholson. As he put it, “Jack was ready to work for nothing, but when push came to shove, Orson just didn’t have the courage to work anymore. It didn’t matter what you put on his plate. He was frozen.” Schneider was right. Welles’s high hopes for F for Fake had been dashed on the rocks of public indifference. As he himself explained, “I had begun to think I should stop and write my memoirs of twenty volumes so I could be paid for something and stop this misery.” Or, as he put it to Jaglom, rather more succinctly, “I’ve lost my girlish enthusiasm.”

  Still, much as he might have wanted to, Welles couldn’t or wouldn’t give up. Welles’s attitude toward the studios was ambivalent. He admitted to Jaglom that he had something to prove to a Hollywood that had turned its back on him. And vanity aside, he had an expensive imagination, and he was eager to take advantage of the resources only the studios could provide. On the other hand, he knew that he was temperamentally and aesthetically unsuited to the factory filmmaking practiced by the studios. He was forced to work as an independent filmmaker outside the system even in the late sixties and early seventies, when mavericks were courted, if only momentarily. But by the late seventies and eighties, when the studio system reasserted itself, his chances of finding a studio home vanished entirely.

  Welles and Jaglom became fast friends. They were an odd couple, to say the least. Their backgrounds, personalities, ages (Jaglom was in his late thirties, Welles in his mid-sixties)—even their films were discrepant. What they did have in common was a fierce desire to go their own way. Moreover, the relationship was mutually advantageous. Jaglom was dazzled by the legend and seduced by the reality of Welles. Who wouldn’t have been? He treasured his friend’s advice, basked in his reflected glow, relished the role of Welles’s gatekeeper. He also realized that he had something that Welles needed—energy, enthusiasm, and viability as a working filmmaker. He had bankrolled his own films by selling off the rights for foreign territories to a patchwork of overseas distributors and investors in much the same way American independents would do a decade later, and so he was perfectly positioned to navigate the maze of European financing to Welles’s benefit. Although Jaglom had only a few films to his credit at the time he started to help Welles, he went on to make many more.

  Welles blossomed in the warmth of Jaglom’s admiration. As he put it, in the flush of a new optimism, “Henry has brought me back to life. Nothing can stop me now.” With new movies in limbo and mired in unfinished projects, Welles had to know Jaglom was his best bet. More, Welles took a real interest in his friend’s films, spending hours hunched over the flatbed editing machine with him, giving him the benefit of the narrative genius that lived inside him, and in fact, working vicariously through Jaglom.

  Eventually, the younger man became Welles’s sounding board, confessor, producer, agent, and biggest fan. He was the magician’s magician who was going to turn the dross that Welles’s career had become into gold, even if he had—figuratively speaking, more or less—to steal, cheat, and lie to do it.

  Jaglom picked him up and dusted him off, set about buffing his image and laundering his legend. Using the playbook he had followed himself, Jaglom began lining up backers for Welles’s various films. He got him good press, arranging interviews in which both men spoke enthusiastically about the projects on Welles’s plate, many of which were so, so close to production, already cast, just waiting for the check to clear the bank. He energetically rebutted the conventional wisdom, that his friend suffered from cinematic ADD: “It’s not that he didn’t finish the movies. He ran out of money, somebody gave him more money to do something else, but he always planned to go back to everything.” Admit it or not, however, Jaglom had set for himself a Sisyphean task. True, it’s impossible to exaggerate the difficulties facing a filmmaker like Welles trying to get traction in a business dominated by a handful of powerful studios. There were more than enough extenuating circumstances to get Welles off the hook for the butchery of Ambersons, but even Barbara Leaming, his best and friendliest biographer, admits he had little excuse for disappearing to Europe before Macbeth was edited, replicating almost to the letter the Amberson fiasco. And doubly so, after he had made a point of coming in early and under budget to confound the doubters. It was the same old song. Victim of his own prodigious gifts, he was the man who did too much, and thus did, in the end, too little. Not even he—writer, actor, producer, and director—could execute all the films, plays, radio shows, and miscellaneous projects that popped into his head, especially while aiding the war effort and carrying on an energetic love life. His brain was like a boiling cauldron filled with bubbles that rose to the surface and burst—into thin air. He needed someone to yell, “Focus!” and this was the mantle Jaglom assumed.

  Regardless of the reasons for Welles’s spotty, post-Kane record, Jaglom discovered that indeed, none of the deep pockets that flapped about the Wellesian flame were willing to drop cash on the table. Welles found himself in the paradoxical position of being honored as America’s greatest filmmaker yet unable to get backing for his projects. Buffeted by a blizzard of rejections, he struggled like any neophyte filmmaker just out of film school. “Orson couldn’t get a movie done,” says Jaglom. “He wanted to do this wonderful adaptation of these Isak Dinesen stories, The Dreamers. I went around to every studio, every producer, and I couldn’t get him money. So I said, ‘Orson, they don’t want to do an adaptation. But I can sell you with a new movie, and new script. Tell me some stories.’ He said, ‘I can’t write anymore, I’m no longer capable of writing.’

  “‘That’s bullshit. Just put it down on paper. Or just tell it to me; I’ll put it down on paper.’

  “‘I can’t. I know what I can do, I know what I can’t do.’ Then “three weeks later, the phone rang at four in the morning,” Jaglom continues. “‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re making me do this for. I can’t sleep, but I’ve written three pages. They’re terrible!’

  “‘Read them to me.’ Of course they were great. So for the next three or four months, I got him to write this whole script.” It was called The Big Brass Ring, and it was about an old political advisor to Roosevelt, a homosexual named Kimball Menaker, who has mentored a young, Kennedy-esque senator from Texas with presidential ambitions named Blake Pellerin, who runs against Ronald Reagan and loses. Pellerin, according to Welles, as if describing himself, “is a man who has within him the devil of self-destruction that lives in every genius … Like all great men he is never sure that he has chosen the right path in life. Even being president, he feels, may somehow not be right: ‘Should I be a monk? Should I jerk off in the park? Should I just fuck everybody and forget about everything else?’ That is what The Big Brass Ring is all about.”

  Adds Jaglom, “The Big Brass Ring was about America at the end of the century, the way Kane was America at the beginning of the century. I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it—I’ve got the bookend to Kane.” Now Jaglom was sure the wallets would open. “I told Orson, ‘You know, all the people I came up with and struggled side by side with have become stars and production heads. I know them; they’re my friends. They all worship you.’ I went around to everybody, and I couldn’t get anyone to do it. Every studio turned it down. The times had changed. Instead of talking about Orson Welles, they were talking about grosses. Orson understood this. He said, ‘I expected the studios to turn me down. Why wouldn’t they? I’ve never made any money for them.’”

  After Jaglom failed to get the studios to show even a glimmer of interest in The Big Brass Ring, producer Arnon Milchan agreed to give Welles $8 million and final cut—for the first time since Kane—“if I got one of six or seven A-list actors to agree to play Blake Pellerin,” Jaglom continues. “We celebrated, opened a big bottle of Cristal, because one thing Orson thought was that actors wouldn’t betray him. He said, ‘I know actors.’” But apparently not well enough. Clint Eastwood turned down the film because it was too left wing for him. Robert Redford said he already had another political thriller lined up. Burt Reyno
lds’s person just said, “No.” “Orson was really pissed about that,” Jaglom continues. “He said, ‘Burt Reynolds owes me so much, I wrote the foreword to a book about him, and he didn’t have the guts to phone me himself and simply say, “It’s not for me.” His agent told me. Big money is the problem with these stars. When they get too rich, they behave badly.’

  “One by one each of these actors came up with reasons, including my two friends Warren and Jack. Warren behaved better than anybody. He was very honorable, and Orson never blamed him. He had just come off of Reds, which Orson thought was the stupidest idea for a movie he’d ever heard. Warren said to me, ‘Oh, God, tell Orson it’s like coming out of a whorehouse after being there all night fucking, you’re exhausted, and you walk out in the sunlight, and there’s Marilyn Monroe with her arms out. I’d love to, but I just can’t.’”

  The best bet was Nicholson. Welles was ready to go in July 1982. He had a budget and a shooting schedule, as well as a crew and locations. Half a million dollars was slated to go to Nicholson. But the bigger the stars, the slower they are to respond, and by 1984, Welles still hadn’t gotten an answer from him.

  Welles was disappointed, but Jaglom refused to give up. In his words, unlike Hannibal, “he needed to bring the elephants over the mountains to Rome.” Jaglom arranged a “coming out” press conference for Welles on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. Within ten minutes the great man had attracted a flock of journalists. To demonstrate that Welles was ambulatory, Jaglom hid his wheelchair.

  Welles’s unveiling was a success, generating a flurry of good press, but in some ways, the trip to Cannes was too much of a good thing. His diet had been drastically restricted by his doctor. Dining with his friend at L’Oasis, Welles ordered a salad, a light fish with lemon, and Perrier. “Then he made me order everything, three entrees, six desserts,” Jaglom recalls. “‘Just take a bite, and describe the taste to me,’ he told me. What I didn’t know was that he was going back to the hotel, waking up the chef, and ordering four steaks, seven baked potatoes, and a whole lot more in the middle of the night.”