My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  OW: Guilt is an entirely masculine invention. No female has guilt. And that’s why the Bible is so true!

  HJ: How can you say that? The Bible was written by men!

  OW: Yeah, I know. But the Garden of Eden story is such a perfect embodiment of the fact that—who feels guilty? Adam!

  HJ: Yeah. But the men who wrote the Bible make Eve give him the apple.

  OW: Sure. But she doesn’t mind it!

  HJ: Because it’s a male’s idea of a female.

  OW: No, I think it’s true. I think guilt is a vice, to a large extent, and I think it is a typically masculine vice. You may find it in women, but rarely. If you were religious, your absence of guilt would be a crippling thing.

  5. “Such a good Catholic that I wanted to kick her.”

  In which Orson remembers entertaining the troops with Marlene Dietrich, explains why he detested Irene Dunne, and why movie-going in the thirties was like watching television today.

  * * *

  HENRY JAGLOM: You toured for the USO during the war? With Marlene?

  ORSON WELLES: Yeah. I said, “Why don’t we have you do a song? And she said, “Oh, I’ll play my musical saw.” “Play what, Marlene?” “My musical saw.” I said, “Well, all right.”

  HJ: She knew how to play the saw?

  OW: Very well. It was the funniest thing. And she didn’t do it to be funny. Toward the end of the war, I went to the South Pacific, and she went to Europe. She felt so lost being alone—“How can I go on without you?” and so on—so she began to sing, and that’s how her cabaret act was born. Though she never sang with me.

  HJ: And is it true that she’s gained so much weight that she won’t let anybody see her now?

  OW: No, she won’t. Not even her close friends. She makes dates to see people and breaks them. I made six trips to Paris to see her, and ended up talking to her from a phone booth. Every time she said she was ill. Once she said she had typhus!

  HJ: Oh, so she probably plans and prepares—

  OW: And then looks at herself and feels terrible. I’m sure Max Schell will never speak to me again. I’m going to have him as an enemy forever. He’s doing a documentary about Marlene, and he has got all this audio of her on tape. But, then, when it came time to photograph her, she stalled and finally refused. So he built a set of her apartment in Paris. It’s all about him—the director—in an empty apartment, with her voice piped in. And then I’m supposed to come as some kind of apparition—I think in double exposure. Well, when I heard that, I suddenly got awfully busy in another movie, you know? I sent word to him that I had a job that was too good to turn down, and I couldn’t do this three-day appearance. He’ll know that I was just pretending. But this movie can’t be any good. It’s a terrible idea for a picture. I admire him very much. But he’s making a big mistake. It’s not like him to be that nutty.

  HJ: I like Schell as a filmmaker. Serious, you know? Very serious.

  OW: Too serious. Too Swiss. He’s a Swiss. He’s not a Kraut. He and Yul Brynner are the two leading Swiss actors. Yul Brynner, however, seems to have—let’s say—gone out to the Caucasus for a few years after leaving Zurich.

  HJ: You mean all those biographies where he was supposed to have been born on—

  OW: The steppes. Half gypsy, half Mongol! He had too much to drink on this long trip he took with me through the snow in Yugoslavia, and late one night he blurted out that his hometown was Brenner near Zurich, where everybody’s name is Brenner. And he should never have said that, because there goes the whole story.

  HJ: He only created one character, but he did it absolutely wonderfully. The King and I. I can’t get over the fact you were offered the role in the earlier version, Anna and the King of Siam, instead of Rex Harrison.

  OW: That’s why he got it. Because I suggested him. Rex made pictures that only played in England, teacup comedies and things. The studio people had never heard of him. Sitting in the steam room at Twentieth? Rex Harrison, who’s that?

  HJ: Did you, by any chance, see The Kingfisher on cable, with him?

  OW: Where he looks as though he’s been on cortisone for eight years.

  HJ: What was your reason for being so sure you didn’t want to do Anna and the King of Siam?

  OW: Because I couldn’t stand Irene Dunne, who had already been cast. That’s why I turned down Gaslight, too. She was going to do it. And then after I turned it down, they got Bergman and I was out. Irene Dunne. Dumb. Dumb, dumb.

  HJ: Why did you have this terrible antipathy toward Dunne?

  OW: You must stop trying to figure out why I have antipathies. Don’t waste our time.

  HJ: You mean just accept them?

  OW: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Irene Dunne was so dry-toothed and such a good fucking Catholic that I wanted to kick her in the crotch. Such a goody-goody. And she was always heading the censorship groups, and all that. Conservative, in a terrible Catholic-Christian way that I found peculiarly offensive. To me, she was the nonsinging Jeanette MacDonald, you know. And I hated her as an actress. She was so ladylike that I knew there wouldn’t be any electricity between us.

  HJ: Irene was in A Guy Named Joe with Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson. What do you think of Van Johnson?

  OW: Well, I was responsible for his coming to Hollywood. I never told him that, so he doesn’t know. He was a chorus boy in Pal Joey, and he was such a terrific personality I sent a wire to George Schaefer at RKO and said, “Get this guy Van Johnson,” and they sent for him. They didn’t like him, and didn’t use him. And then he went to MGM and—

  HJ: He wasn’t a great actor or anything.

  OW: Pitiable now. Most men get better looking when they get old. He’s a kind of queen that doesn’t. He had to be young to be attractive.

  HJ: His movies are terrible.

  OW: Oja [Kodar] won’t go to the movies with me; she says that if I stay, I’m making groans, these awful noises.

  HJ: Sitting in front of the television you don’t have that experience?

  OW: No. Total idiot. Other people want to switch channels. I don’t. I’d much rather see junk on the TV than bad movies because bad movies stay with me for too long. And if they get a little good, then they’re gonna haunt me. And who needs to be haunted?

  HJ: Warren Beatty was just saying that TV has changed movies, because for most of us, once you’re in a movie theater, you commit, whether you like it or not. You want to see what they’ve done, while at home …

  OW: I’m the opposite. It’s a question of age. In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn’t stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. Like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began. We used to go after we went to the theater. We’d go down to the Paramount where they had a double bill, and see the B picture, and go to laugh at bad acting in the Bs. You know, childish, stupid things. There was an actor called J. Carrol Naish. Anything he did, we’d laugh at. I didn’t like the screwball comedies, at all, with the exception of Carole Lombard. Anything with her—that was fine.

  HJ: You didn’t feel you had to see a movie from the start?

  OW: No. We’d leave when we’d realize, “This is where we came in.” Everybody said that. I loved movies for that reason. They didn’t cost that much, so if you didn’t like one, it was, “Let’s do something else. Go to another movie.” And that’s what made it habitual to such an extent that walking out of a movie was what for people now is like turning off the television set. Oja and I do it still. Last time we were in Paris, we saw five movies, one or two reels of each one.

  HJ: There was entertainment between the features in those days?

  OW: Sure. There was Kate Smith and travelogues and the newsreel and an Our Gang comedy, you know.

  HJ: So, for people like you, it’s very important that filmmakers grab you in the first reel. The first ten to twenty minutes.

  OW: I
f not, I’m up the aisle.

  HJ: Up and out. No slow and leisurely getting into it, no misdirections?

  OW: No. If you stand in line, of course, you want to see what you were standing in line for. But in those days, we only ever committed like that for Sinatra when he was singing at the Paramount. No movie ever had that kind of business. The truth is, I was not very fond of the movies of the late thirties, the few years just before I went to Hollywood. The so-called “Golden Age.”

  HJ: I’m reading Budd Schulberg’s autobiography, called Moving Pictures. It introduced me to the world of silent movies that I didn’t know anything about.

  OW: I’d rather not read it. I don’t read books on film at all, or theater. I’m not very interested in movies. I keep telling people that, and they don’t believe me. I genuinely am not very interested! For me, it’s only interesting to do. You know, I’m not interested in other filmmakers—and that’s a terribly arrogant thing to say—or in the medium. It’s the least interesting art medium for me to watch that there is. Except ballet—that’s the only thing less interesting. I just like to make movies, you know? And that’s the truth!

  But I do know quite a bit about early movies, because I was interested in movies before I made them. And I was interested in the theater before I went into it. There is something in me that turns off once I start to do it myself. It’s some weakness. In other words, I read everything about the theater before I became a theater director. After that, I never went to plays or read anything. Same thing with movies. I believe that I was threatened, personally threatened, by every other movie, and by every criticism—that it would affect the purity of my vision. And I think the younger generation of filmmakers has seen too many movies.

  6. “Nobody even glanced at Marilyn.”

  In which Orson greets Swifty Lazar, remembers dating Marilyn Monroe when she was just another pretty face and failing to interest Zanuck in her career, even though the mogul’s weakness for starlets nearly wrecked his.

  * * *

  (Swifty Lazar enters.)

  SWIFTY LAZAR: Just wanted to say, “Hello.”

  ORSON WELLES: You look wonderful.

  SL: I feel good. I’m good. Orson, see you Wednesday. You take care of yourself.

  OW: What, do you think I look badly?

  SL: No, you look great.

  (Lazar exits.)

  OW: I don’t like people to say, “Take care of yourself.” He hasn’t changed in thirty years. Lives in a hotel. Orders a whole lot of towels, and when he goes from the bathroom to his bed, he lays down a path of towels.

  HENRY JAGLOM: So he doesn’t have to walk on the carpets? He’s that nuts about germs?

  OW: Yes.

  HJ: And what if he wants to go to the closet?

  OW: Then he’ll make another path. I’ve seen it. With my own eyes.

  HJ: What does he think he’ll get through his feet?

  OW: Hookworm. From the Ritz, you know? Mania.

  HJ: I was going to ask you about Zanuck when Swifty interrupted us. What did you think of his movies when he headed Fox?

  OW: He was the greatest editor who ever lived. But only for his kind of pictures. In other words, he was at a loss if a picture got too good. But he could save any standard picture. He would automatically make it better. He was awfully good making the corniest pictures—which I didn’t like, for the most part. I think the musicals were awful. But if he knew he had an art film on his hands, he left it alone. Including pictures we don’t think are art films, like what is that hanging picture? The western that was considered very high art at the time.

  HJ: Henry Fonda?

  OW: Yeah. And a lot of other good actors, standing around kind of projecting gloom. The lynching. The Ox-Bow Incident!

  HJ: Did Fox make any good pictures during that period?

  OW: Yes. A few. A very few. They made How Green Was My Valley.

  HJ: What was he like?

  OW: Zanuck was a great polo player. When I first came out here, he was using the old polo grounds by the Palisades. It was funny, the head of the studio playing polo. I had the usual New York sneer. You know that for years, on the drive to work and back, he had a French teacher with him? Imagine a movie head wanting to learn something!

  HJ: Why, if Zanuck had that quality as a human being, was that not reflected in the films?

  OW: Because he wanted to be a successful head of a studio, and he was. Until he fell in love with that terrible Juliette Gréco. I made two pictures with her.

  HJ: That Crack in the Mirror picture.

  OW: And another one, that I’ve forgotten. He lost everything over her, his power, left his wife—everything.

  HJ: For Juliette Gréco?

  OW: To serve her. He’d take her little dog and walk it around the lot while we were shooting. So help me, it was awful. I don’t believe a director should ever fall in love with his leading lady. Or at least show it.

  HJ: He had Marilyn Monroe under contract, didn’t he?

  OW: She was a girlfriend of mine. I used to take her to parties before she was a star.

  HJ: I didn’t know that!

  OW: I wanted to try and promote her career. Nobody even glanced at Marilyn. You’d see these beautiful girls, the most chic girls in town, who spent a fortune at the beauty parlor and on their clothes, and everybody said, “Darling, you’re looking wonderful!” And then they’d ignore them. The men, not the women. The men would gather in the corner and start telling jokes or talking deals. The only time they talked about the girls was to say whether they scored with them the night before. I would point Marilyn out to Darryl, and say, “What a sensational girl.” He would answer, “She’s just another stock player. We’ve got a hundred of them. Stop trying to push these cunts on me. We’ve got her on for $125 a week.” And then, about six months later, Darryl was paying Marilyn $400,000, and the men were looking at her—because some stamp had been put on her.

  HJ: God, that’s amazing.

  OW: Then Darryl disappeared to Europe with Juliette Gréco. We thought we’d never hear from him again.

  HJ: When I arrived, in the mid-sixties, in the later part of his career, he was trying to put together a big war movie in Paris, The Longest Day.

  OW: Twentieth was in terrible trouble.

  HJ: With Cleopatra.

  OW: He heard about it, so he rolled up his sleeves and made The Longest Day, which got them out from under—like that, you see. It made a fortune, and brought him back as president of Fox, because he had become a figure of fun, you see. Then his son and another group maneuvered him out.

  HJ: Richard Zanuck maneuvered him out? Richard, who’s partnered with David Brown?

  OW: Yeah. He was the front man for those who were trying to get rid of him.

  HJ: His own son? Not Jewish, in other words. It’s not like Jews to—

  OW: Zanuck? Everybody thought Darryl was Jewish, because Zanuck is sort of a foreign name. He was Christian. The only Christian head of a studio.

  HJ: Except for his boss, [Spyros] Skouras.

  OW: If you could call him Christian. He’s Greek Orthodox. Twentieth was the only Christian studio. It was the worst studio in town. Yes. Zanuck is Czech, from Nebraska. He had begun his career by publishing, at his own cost, a novel. And putting it on the desks of the various producers. At nineteen he became the white-haired boy by writing the Rin Tin Tin movies, which, of course, made a fortune.

  HJ: Isn’t Jane Eyre a Zanuck movie? I watched it last night. You put on a nose for Jane Eyre.

  OW: Yes.

  HJ: Why?

  OW: Because I was so baby-faced. I looked sixteen years old. How was I gonna be Mr. Rochester with this baby face? I had a nose in Kane. Then we made it longer as I got older. Noses do get longer.

  HJ: I didn’t like the acting at all.

  OW: What acting?

  HJ: In Jane Eyre.

  OW: My acting?

  HJ: No, I like your acting immensely.

  OW: Oh, her. Joan Fontaine. No, sh
e’s no good in it. She’s just a plain old bad actor. She’s got four readings, and two expressions, and that’s it. And she was busy being the humble governess—so fucking humble. Which is a great mistake. Because she’s supposed to be a proud little woman who, in spite of her position, stands up for herself. That’s why she interests this bastard of a man.

  HJ: I guess that’s the thing that I always have trouble with in the film, that she looks so mousy and unappealing. And I can’t understand why she appeals to him.

  OW: You should get the feeling that this mouse roars, but you don’t. The trick of the story is that she is, by virtue of the nature of society as it was then, doomed to a position of total servility. But because of her tremendous independence of spirit, she causes the man to become interested in her. Even though she’s not a beauty. It’s her character that makes the impression on him. And that’s why he loves her, finally.

  HJ: What you see is an actress trying to play not a beauty.

  OW: Yeah, that’s all you see. The whole point of the story is ruined by that. Because you’re supposed to see that the visiting lady—what’s her name?—is the great beauty. And that’s the sort of pearl that he ought to have, and all that. And here is this girl who not only is in a position of being a mere hired servant, but she’s not even a beauty. But she finally commands this man’s whole life. Because of her character. Standing up for herself. Being a fierce little girl. And that isn’t the movie at all! It isn’t even indicated. Nobody told her that, you know.

  HJ: Neither she nor her sister Olivia de Havilland could act. I never understood their careers.

  OW: Yes, you do. There are always jobs for pretty girls who speak semi-educated English. I don’t think either one of ’em is worth much—

  HJ: I understand their careers, but I don’t understand how some people hold them in such high regard.

  OW: There are a lot of bad actors.

  HJ: It’s like Merle Oberon is another one for me.

  OW: Yeah. But very beautiful. She was mainly wonderful in one movie, but wonderful because she was not asked to do any acting. It was a very strange French movie. She played a Japanese—before she ever came to Hollywood. I’ve forgotten what it was called. Sayonara 1, or something. Now there’s a bad picture for you—Sayonara 2.