My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  * * *

  Beginning in 1978, Welles and Jaglom had lunch nearly every week—sometimes more often—at Welles’s regular hangout, Ma Maison, where he ate almost every day. A celebrated French restaurant owned by Patrick Terrail, Ma Maison was located at 8360 Melrose Avenue, near Kings Road, in West Hollywood. It opened its doors in 1975 in a tiny, worn, and very unprepossessing bungalow formerly owned by a carpet company. It was set far back from the street, so that the area in between served as a “garden room,” covered with leaky plastic that Terrail fondly referred to as a “shower curtain,” and carpeted by Astroturf, colored a bilious green. The decor of the interior was nothing to speak of either; one critic mocked it as “the fanciest French restaurant in Kingman, Arizona.”

  But none of that mattered. Ma Maison quickly became the hottest restaurant in Hollywood. The kitchen served French cuisine with a nouvelle California accent and was the home of Wolfgang Puck for its first six years. It was so chic that it didn’t even publish its phone number. It was a place where deals were made, where agents conned producers and producers conned agents.

  Welles, who had ballooned to the size of a baby elephant, customarily ditched his wheelchair at the back door and entered the establishment through the kitchen. He used to sit in a mammoth chair to the right of the entrance at one of Ma Maison’s few indoor tables. According to Gore Vidal, who also dined regularly with Welles, he draped himself in “bifurcated tents to which, rather idly, lapels, pocket flaps, buttons were attached in order to suggest a conventional suit.”

  Welles and Terrail were great friends, and Welles used to call upon Terrail to perform every sort of impossible, last-minute service. “The restaurant had become his office,” he recalls. “We used to get all his mail and a lot of his phone calls.” Terrail relayed messages from people who wanted to contact him, like George Stevens, Jr., who produced the telecast of the Kennedy Center Honors, and wanted to know if Welles would accept one of its distinguished awards, which usually meant the recipient was ready for the formaldehyde. Terrail told Welles, “They’ll fly you to Washington. Do you want to do it?” Welles replied, “No. I would have to sit next to Reagan in the box up there.” On one occasion, the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, dining at Ma Maison, asked to be introduced to Welles. As he reached over to shake his hand, Welles’s constant companion, an ill-tempered toy poodle named Kiki that was no bigger than a box of Kleenex, leaped up from his master’s ample “crotch,” as Terrail puts it, and went for his arm. Nevertheless, the orthodox pope invited the portly filmmaker to a high mass he was conducting at the Cathedral of Saint Sophia the following day, offering to dedicate the ceremony to him. Welles replied, “I am flattered by the invitation, but I must decline. I’m an atheist.”

  People of all sorts—friends, fans, and strangers—stopped by his table hoping for a golden word or two. Welles would roar at them, in his resonant, Orsonian voice, “HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?!” But he could also be rude. Recalls Jaglom, “People would say, ‘So nice to see you.’ He would say, ‘So nice to see you too, but that’s enough.’ He would try to intimidate them.” Jaglom asked him why. Pointing at his pug nose, he would answer, “You have to do something to let them know that you’re not just a little creature. You have to be the ruler of the forest. People want me to be ‘Orson Welles.’ They want the dancing bear show.”

  “You don’t need that. You’re not so insecure that—”

  “I’m much more insecure than even you know, Henry.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’re arrogant and sure of yourself.”

  “Yes, I’m sure of myself, but I’m not sure of anybody else.”

  According to Vidal, Welles’s conversation “was often surreal and always cryptic. Either you picked up on it or you were left out.” With Jaglom, he seemed to find a comfort zone that enabled him to show his vulnerabilities. His exchanges with his friend roamed over many subjects—movies, theater, literature, music, politics—of which Welles demonstrated an alarming mastery. There was no topic too insignificant or esoteric for Welles to weigh in on. The words he put in the mouth of Menaker in The Big Brass Ring suited him as well: “I am an authority on everything.” Movies? “Ballet—that’s the only thing less interesting.” Eisenhower? “Underrated.” Art Deco? “I deeply hate it.” Kiwis? “Ruined by all the French chefs.”

  Although Welles was generous with his praise for people he respected, he invariably peppered his conversation with amusing if often unflattering anecdotes about those he didn’t. He was particularly biting when his attention was directed toward former friends and enemies. Welles’s outsized personality, as well as his early, dazzling success in the theater, radio, and movies, made him the envy of everyone in the arts, and a target of more than a few. Rightly or wrongly, and in the course of the lunches, he settled scores with those he thought had done him wrong. One of them was Pauline Kael, who became something of a celebrity in the sixties and seventies for her movie reviews in the New Yorker. Kael engaged in a decade-long feud with fellow critic Andrew Sarris. Pace Sarris, Kael argued that film is a collective art form, the fruit of a collaboration among many talents. A writer herself, she particularly lavished praise on the long-suffering screenwriter. Kael knew that if she could chip away at Welles’s credit block, she could reduce the auteur theory–and Sarris–to a pile of rubble. In a notorious two-part essay published in the New Yorker in 1971 called “Raising Kane,” she made the case that Herman J. Mankiewicz, not Welles, was largely responsible for the script of Citizen Kane. (On the film itself, both men are credited with the script.) To add insult to injury, the essay, since discredited, was republished that same year in The Citizen Kane Book as the introduction to the shooting script. Welles was deeply wounded. As Jaglom put it, “Everyone treated Orson badly, but the one thing that he had was that he made the greatest movie ever made, and she tried to undermine that by creating this mythology that he had nothing to do with the script, that he was taking false credit. He was furious.”

  Ironically, even Bogdanovich, who was a confirmed auteurist, was not proof against his ire. He had followed up The Last Picture Show with What’s Up Doc, starring Barbra Streisand in 1972, and Paper Moon, featuring Ryan O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, in 1973. With three hits in a row, he could have filmed the phone book and still found studio backing. His friendship with Welles endured throughout this period, but in the late seventies, it cooled. Welles complained that Bogdanovich never helped him when he was riding high and had the power to do so.

  After his trifecta of hits, Bogdanovich went into a dramatic decline. Welles took a dim view of his late-seventies tabloid romance with Dorothy Stratten, a former Playboy centerfold, as well as the book he wrote about her, titled The Killing of the Unicorn, after she was shot to death by her estranged husband.

  John Houseman, whom Bogdanovich called his “single most destructive enemy,” was the target of Welles’s most venomous barbs. He felt that his former partner had built his reputation with bits and pieces scavenged from the wreckage of his own. It was Houseman who had brought Welles into the Federal Theatre in 1934, where Welles quickly eclipsed his benefactor. “Houseman started out being in love with me, and then turned to hate,” he once said. For the next decade or so, the two, like the proverbial scorpions in a bottle, were uneasily paired in a variety of projects, including the Mercury Theatre, until the ill will between them boiled over while Welles was at RKO. At a dinner at Chasen’s, Houseman claimed Welles threw plates of food at him, including “two dishes of flaming methylated spirits,” and accused him of stealing money.

  In later years, when Welles’s career went into free fall, Houseman’s soared. After a lengthy career as a producer and director on both stage and screen, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Paper Chase (1973) and segued into the long-running TV series of the same name. Houseman published several volumes of memoirs that to some degree framed the accounts of Welles’s career thereafter, not to his benefit. The two remained enemies for the rest
of their lives.

  With Bogdanovich unable or unwilling to help him, Welles found himself only fitfully employed throughout much of the post-Kane period. He had decades to contemplate his mistakes and missed opportunities. He was never comfortable in Hollywood. Or perhaps it was the other way around: he was too comfortable, and despised himself for it. He loved to instruct Jaglom in the subtle ways the town distorted the values of the people who lived and worked there. A week or so after Welles delivered a tribute to Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner came up to the table. Welles asked, “Are you OK?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Such a terrible thing.”

  “But you know, you were great.”

  “I was?”

  “You were the best one.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The best one. It had so many elements. You were strong; you were poignant.” After Wagner left, Welles turned to Jaglom and said, “You understand? You have just seen what Hollywood is really about. The man is in tears, he feels the tragedy, but he is so inured to reality, that for him it’s a show. And I gave the best performance. He’s giving me a review.” Says Jaglom, “Even Orson was shocked.”

  In the spring of 1984, the movie version of The Cradle Will Rock, which Welles was slated to direct, and which was already cast, came crashing down when the main backer withdrew. Welles was desolate. He told Barbara Leaming, “It just shows me that I really shouldn’t have stayed in this business … We live in a snake pit here. I’ve been keeping a secret from myself for forty years—from myself, not from the world—which is that I hate it.”

  * * *

  Welles knew that Jaglom had recorded his own father’s reminiscences for thirty years, and asked him to record their conversations as well. His only proviso was that the recorder be out of sight, concealed in Jaglom’s bag, so he didn’t have to look at it. Jaglom began taping the conversations in 1983 and continued until Welles was struck down by a fatal heart attack in the middle of the night of October 10, 1985. He died with a typewriter on his lap, working on a script. The conversations survived. Jaglom stashed the tapes—about forty of them—in a shoebox where they gathered dust for almost three decades.

  I first met Jaglom in the early 1990s, when he shared his recollections and diaries with me while I was researching my history of the New Hollywood of the seventies, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. He told me about these tapes, and I urged him to have them transcribed, but there was always another film to make, and of course that took precedence. The tapes sat and sat, even though he was eager for them to see the light of day. Eventually, they did. I read the transcripts with an eye to whether or not there was a book in them, and decided that there most definitely was.

  Jaglom’s tapes, a record of the last three years of Welles’s life, may be the last undiscovered trove of Welles on Welles. Eavesdropping on Welles and Jaglom is the next best thing to sitting at the table. And what a table it was. Welles comes off as a fascinating bundle of contradictions, at once belligerent and almost childishly vulnerable, a schemer who often behaved impetuously at great cost to himself, a shy man who hid behind an endless array of masks but loved to display himself and liked nothing better than the thunderous roar of applause. He was forgiving and generous but tenaciously held grudges against those he felt had done him wrong. He could roar with anger one minute and laughter the next. Who knows to what darkness he was prey in moments of depression, but he rarely gave in to self-pity, at least not in these conversations with his friend.

  The Welles who emerges here is a different Welles from either the fraud his detractors pilloried in their biographies or the genius his admirers enshrined in theirs. Because Jaglom was not interviewing Welles, but conversing with him, we have a Welles unguarded and relaxed, with his hair down, unplugged, if you will, willing to let fly with all manner of politically incorrect opinions—sexist, racist, homophobic, vulgar (let’s be kind, call it “Rabelaisian”)—driven, perhaps, by the impish pleasure he took in baiting his liberal friend, offending his progressive susceptibilities, or just by native, irrepressible ebullience. The more perverse Welles’s views, the more fiercely he argued them. His antic wit, stringent irony, and enormous intelligence shine through these conversations and animate every word, making it difficult not to love the man.

  “Orson is an enigmatic figure to most people,” Jaglom wrote. “He presents a compelling challenge: how to reconcile the brilliant child prodigy, the precedent-shattering stage director, the iconoclastic radio figure, the celebrated Shakespearean artist, the groundbreaking filmmaker credited by almost everyone with having made the greatest movie of all time with the TV talk show buffoon, the corny wine commercial huckster, the willing participant in tasteless low-comedy “roasts,” the bloated, seemingly self-destructive outcast whose unfinished works and aborted projects became legendary?”

  These two may never be reconciled. And unplugged or not, this book makes no claim to discover the “real” Welles. There may never have been a real Welles. As Jaglom puts it, “The final scene of The Lady from Shanghai is perhaps the most autobiographically truthful metaphor in all of his work. It is ultimately impossible to find the real Orson Welles among all the fun-house mirrors he so energetically set in place.” Welles appeared to prefer it that way. “Wait till I die,” he once told Jaglom at lunch. “They’ll write all kinds of things about me. They’ll just pick my bones dry. You won’t recognize me and if I came back to life and read them, I wouldn’t recognize me myself. I’ve told so many stories, you know, just to get out of situations, or out of boredom or just to entertain! Who can remember them all, but I’m sure they’ll come back to haunt me. Or rather, my ghost. Don’t set them right, Henry. They don’t want to know. Let them have their fantasies about me.”

  Welles’s final turn in front of the camera occurred in Jaglom’s Someone to Love (1987). Jaglom played the lead, a filmmaker, and Welles’s character is known only as “the friend.” “I gave him his farewell to the audience,” Jaglom recalls. “He wouldn’t let me ever show him laughing on screen, because he insisted, ‘Fat men shouldn’t laugh. It is very unattractive.’ Once I caught him laughing, and he actually said, ‘Cut,’ to my cameraman. And my cameraman stopped the camera. ‘What are you doing?’

  “‘Orson Welles told me to cut.’

  “‘Turn it right back on.’ He turned it back on, and Orson, thinking that it was off, reached behind him, somehow producing a lit cigar. He puffed on it, and started to laugh, a roaring, embracing, wonderful laugh. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it in the film because he would have hated it. When he died, I felt the least I could do was give them his one last laugh.”

  Patrick Terrail closed Ma Maison in the autumn of 1985, a month or so after Welles’s death. The decision had been made before Welles’s heart attack, but regardless, the timing was appropriate. Generally, life goes on when one or another of us sheds this mortal coil, but in this case, the restaurant that was his second home, which sustained him in so many ways, died with him. It did survive, under new ownership in a different location, but in the absence of its most famous patron at his regular table, it was never the same.

  A Note on the Text

  My Lunches with Orson is divided into two parts, 1983, the year in which most of these conversations took place, and then 1984 and 1985. The organization is roughly, but not strictly, chronological. Welles’s ruminations on like subjects, in fact separated by months or even years, have been grouped together. The quality of the tapes varies drastically. Many of them are clear, but some, with the recorder lying muffled in Jaglom’s bag, are indistinct, and so I have taken occasional liberties with the text—adding or subtracting phrases, smoothing out syntax—for the purpose of making the conversations more concise and intelligible. Occasionally, I have attributed material to Welles that is quoted in Jaglom’s diaries or was furnished by him in interviews with me. With his permission, I have sometimes altered his comments with an eye to furnishing context. Welles was, above all, a great entertainer, a
fabulator who, like Scheherazade, learned early to sing for his supper. Some of the stories he tells in these conversations will have a familiar ring, and indeed, they have been told elsewhere, but they were too good to go unrepeated, and since he always provided fresh details or new twists in every telling, I have included them.

  PART ONE

  1983

  Lunch companions at a star-studded reception c. 1983, thrown by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, organized by Jaglom to show potential backers that Welles was still viable. Guests included Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Caine.

  At lunch at Ma Maison, I encountered Orson standing with difficulty to embrace me after several months with great warmth (or what seems like great warmth, I have never been quite sure), and I am always moved, as I was today. And as always, amazingly for me, I was somewhat at a loss for what to say, and all I came up with was some general pleasantry/banality on the order of, “How is everything?” Orson answered me with, “Oh, I don’t know, do you?” And I, acknowledging that my question had been excessive in scope, reduced it to, “How is everything today?” To which he answered, happy that he had forced greater specificity: “Fine … as of this hour.”

  Then tonight, two hours ago as I twirled the television dial, I was astonished to find myself watching the opening newsreel segment of Citizen Kane. I have just finished watching him grow old with makeup and acting skill on a body in its twenties, in a film designed by his mind in its twenties, and the film—and he in it—are so affecting and so near-perfect that the idea of watching anything else after seemed incomprehensible. I wonder, Was there nothing for him to do with the rest of his life after making it, is that his secret and does he know it? Is Citizen Kane his “rosebud”?