My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  HJ: It is?

  OW: Sure. In the classic sense of the word. Not a fall-in-the-aisles laughing comedy, but because the tragic trappings are parodied.

  HJ: I never thought of Kane as a comedy. It’s profoundly moving.

  OW: It’s moving, but so can comedies be moving. There is a slight camp to all the great Xanadu business. And Sartre, who has no sense of humor, couldn’t react to it at all.

  HJ: Was that really why?

  OW: When he wasn’t being a German philosopher, which he was good at—late Heidegger—most of what he wrote as a critic of the modern scene, political or otherwise, was full of shit.

  HJ: And as a playwright he wasn’t very hot, either.

  OW: Very overrated. But he was such a god at that time. My friends forbade me to go into the Café Philippe, where he used to hang out. They said it would be unpleasant. “Go across the street to Le Dôme, where your people are, the Americans.”

  Years later, I was visiting Dubrovnik with one of my dearest friends in the world, Vladimir Dedijer, who was the number-three man to Tito during World War II. At that moment in the Vietnam War, a group in Europe headed by Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Vladimir Dedijer had formed a committee to bring the Americans to trial for war crimes. The three of them were there for a high-level meeting before going to Paris. As we approached, Dedijer and I saw Sartre and Russell sitting in a café. Dedijer said to me, “Don’t go any closer.” He was one of those fuck-you kind of fellows, who could have just as easily have said, “Come on, Sartre, don’t be an asshole, you’re gonna like Orson.” But no, he says, “Don’t go any closer.” It was strange. I never understood it. As though Sartre was going to take off his kid glove and slap me, invite me to a duel. This wasn’t 1890, you know. You can’t imagine Sartre challenging anybody to a duel.

  HJ: Sartre was profoundly anti-American. I wonder what the roots of that were.

  OW: Well, most Frenchmen are, especially the brighter ones, so his was more carefully worked out. He thought up a lot of reasons.

  HJ: Did you ever know Simone de Beauvoir?

  OW: No, I never met her. How could I? We would have had to meet in secrecy.

  HJ: Maybe that’s the reason. That would have been the way to get even. Maybe she saw the movie, loved it, loved you, and said something like, “I think he’s very attractive.”

  OW: Like Peter Sellers. That was the reason I could never act on the same set together with what’s-her-name, that pinup he was married to, Britt Ekland, during Casino Royale. Because she apparently said, “Look at that Orson. That’s the sexiest man I’ve ever seen.” And someone told him.

  HJ: What did they think of Kane in England?

  OW: It was not gigantically big in England. Auden didn’t like it. Nor Ambersons.

  Some people called it warmed-over Borges, and attacked it. I always knew that Borges himself hadn’t liked it. He said that it was pedantic, which is a very strange thing to say about it, and that it was a labyrinth. And that the worst thing about a labyrinth is when there’s no way out. And this is a labyrinth of a movie with no way out. Borges is half-blind. Never forget that. But you know, I could take it that he and Sartre simply hated Kane. In their minds, they were seeing—and attacking—something else. It’s them, not my work. I’m more upset by the regular, average, just-plain critics.

  HJ: How did you feel about James Agee?

  OW: He didn’t like me. He and Dwight Macdonald, who just died.

  HJ: Didn’t Agee write a negative review of Citizen Kane?

  OW: Yeah.

  HJ: Why did he dislike it?

  OW: I don’t know. Who cares? I don’t want to go into it, you know. He didn’t attack it. He just didn’t like it. Do you know who Indio Fernández was?

  HJ: He was the guy who posed naked for the Oscar statuette?

  OW: Yes. He was the only Mexican director worth anything. While cutting a movie, he once sent an invitation to the critics to see a rough cut. Told them, “Why should I only hear what you people have to say after it’s too late to do anything about it? Come to the rough cut and tell me what you think, while there’s still time for me to do something about it, to improve the film.” So Indio Fernández ran his rough cut for the critics. Asked them afterwards to tell him what they thought. They all liked it except one critic. This guy stood up, said, “It’s no good.” So Indio Fernández pulled out a gun and shot the critic.

  HJ: I can understand that.

  OW: For a couple of years after Kane, every time I walked in the streets in New York they shouted at me, “Hey! What the hell is that movie of yours about? What does it mean?” Not, “What is Rosebud?” but always “what does it mean?” The Archie Bunkers. It was [Michelangelo] Antonioni to them. All those mixtures of things—“What kind of thing is that?” Nobody says that now. Everybody understands.

  I told you about John O’Hara’s review of Kane? In Newsweek. He was the movie critic. You’d be amazed how many novelists wanted to be movie critics. Graham Greene was a movie critic for about six years. His reviews were not very good. They were neither witty, amusing, nor original. They were just intelligent, plain, ordinary reviews. If you’re going to be an interesting critic, you’ve got to have a little zing. It’s all right to be wrong, but you’ve got to be interesting. We’re all in the same business. We’re entertaining the public.

  HJ: What about O’Hara?

  OW: He wrote the greatest review that anybody ever had. He said, “This is not only the best picture that has ever been made, it is the best picture that will ever be made.”

  HJ: What do you do after that?

  OW: Nothing. I should’ve retired.

  9. “There’s no such thing as a friendly biographer .”

  In which Orson says he doesn’t want to know about the lives of his favorite writers. He mourns F for Fake, denies he tried to steal sole writing credit for Kane from Herman J. Mankiewicz, as Pauline Kael said he did, and speculates about his parentage and progeny.

  * * *

  HENRY JAGLOM: Orson, there’s a wonderful writer, Barbara Leaming, who has written a book about Roman Polanski, among other people, who wants to write a book about you. She says it’s going to be a critical biography—your life in relationship to your works, not gossipy.

  ORSON WELLES: God help us. I have turned so against biographies in the last few weeks, because I read the great biography of [Isak] Dinesen and the great biography of Robert Graves—both brilliantly written and very sympathetic. Two of my gods, you see, and Graves’s is written by an adoring biographer, who was close to him for twenty-five years. But I learned a lot of things about him I didn’t want to know. If you do the warts, the warts are gonna look bigger than they were in life. If these people were my friends, the warts wouldn’t be as important to me as they seem in the book. We all have people that we know are drunks, or dopeheads or have bad tempers or whatever, and they’re still our friends, you know? But in a book you focus on it. And these biographies have diminished those two people so much in my mind, I wish I had never read them. They deny me somebody who I’ve loved always. I like Dinesen a lot less, now. In other words, Dinesen was brilliantly careful to present herself as the person I wanted to love. And if she was somebody else, really, I’m sorry to know it. And I suddenly think to myself, “You know, there’s no such thing as a friendly biographer.”

  If it were a military leader or a politician, or somebody who didn’t write—if it were a director—it wouldn’t matter so much. But with writers, they become my friends from the testimony of the pages that they have written. And anything else diminishes what I feel. If I’m enraptured by any writer’s work, I don’t want to know about him. Somebody’s come out with a snide biography of [Joseph] Conrad now. Just reading the review of it made me sick.

  HJ: But doesn’t it add another dimension that—

  OW: Nothing. I know everybody thinks that way, but I don’t believe it. I don’t want to keep hearing that [Charles] Dickens was a lousy son of a bitch. The hateful Dic
kens, you know. I’m very glad I don’t know anything about Shakespeare as a man. I think it’s all there in what he wrote. All that counts, anyway.

  HJ: I’m constantly trying to understand: why has there been nobody since Shakespeare who has approached his genius? And how is it possible that one individual, three hundred years ago—

  OW: Definitively, he wrote all the plays that we need. And he knew it. He knew it. He wrote a short verse in which he said that nobody would match him. He was apparently an enormously charming man. Nobody ever spoke against him. Everybody loved him. And what’s interesting are the new discoveries about his acting career, that he probably played much bigger parts than we had heretofore thought. It’s now almost certain that he played Iago. It was [Richard] Burbage who played Othello. Burbage must have been wonderful, because you don’t get those plays written for somebody who can’t do it. We know he was chubby, of course, to the point of fatness, because of the line in Hamlet, when the queen says, “Our Hamlet is fat and short of breath.”

  The mystery surrounding Shakespeare is greatly exaggerated. We know a lot about his financial dealings, for example. He was brilliant in arranging his finances, you see. He died very rich from real-estate investments. The son of a bitch did everything! And finally he got what his father had always wanted—a coat of arms. His father was a butcher. And a mayor of Stratford.

  HJ: Wouldn’t that make an incredible film, a biography of him? Or is it impossible? ’Cause there’s just too much—

  OW: They hate movies about geniuses. Rembrandt, the only one I ever liked, emptied the theaters, a total failure.

  HJ: Do you read the books about yourself?

  OW: No. They make me wince. Either because they’re too nice, or not nice enough. I’m terribly thin-skinned. I believe everything bad that I read about myself. And even if I reject it, it remains in my mind as probably true. So I protect myself by reading as little about myself as I can, out of cowardice.

  I had to go to court in France this year to stop a book in which that old fellow—Maurice Bessy—who’s always been a kind of professional friend of mine, wrote that I was an impotent latent homosexual.

  HJ: How would he know that?

  OW: Turns out he’s my intimate friend, you know? I never laid a hand on him! He’s a mean, little, crooked fairy. And he’s one of those people who declares himself your friend, follows you everywhere, saying, “I’m a devoted friend.” So he’s made himself your friend, and you can’t say, “No, you’re not a friend.”

  HJ: Is Bessy a homosexual?

  OW: No. Well, it never occurred to me. Maybe he is. What probably happened is that when I was making Othello, I was based in Paris for about six weeks, rehearsing with Micheál Mac Liammóir. And Bessy used to join us for meals. Well, when I am with a homosexual, I get a little homosexual. To make them feel at home, you see? Just to keep Michael comfortable, I kind of camped a little. To bring him out. So he wouldn’t feel he was with a terrible straight. Bessy may have seen that.

  HJ: Homosexuals and Jews both have one thing in common. They want everybody else to be Jewish, or everybody else to be homosexual. I was eavesdropping in a restaurant once and the people at the next table were insisting you were Jewish because—“He has a Jewish father, Bernstein.”

  OW: My biggest success was with Jew Süss, the first play I ever did. In Dublin. And somebody overheard a couple of Dubliners—women—saying, “Orson Welles. Oh, he’s a Jewman, too.” And they all thought Hilton Edwards was, ’cause he had a splendid hook nose. He wasn’t. He was Anglo to the marrow of his bones, but to them he was a “Jewman.” They liked that. A Jewman is a clever fella, you know.

  HJ: So if you went to court to stop Bessy, why didn’t you try to prevent Pauline Kael from using Raising Kane as the introduction to the script in The Citizen Kane Book?

  OW: How could I? You see, I had held out and refused to have the script published for years. But then I was so poor that I couldn’t turn it down—I just had to have some money. And it never occurred to me to think about who would write an introduction. I should have said, “I must have approval of the introduction.” Or, “Let me write it.” But I just took the money and ran, you see?

  I love Pauline, because she writes at length about actors. Which nobody writing about movies does. I think she’s wrong a lot of the time, but she’s always interesting. I wish she hadn’t attacked me, because I’ve studied her, and I’d like to attack her, but now it will be seen as payback. She has a couple of extraordinary bad habits. First of all, she’s spoiled by [William] Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and given more space to talk about movies than anybody gets for the theater, or for art, or for music. She’s allowed to go on and on, and she abuses the privilege. Secondly, she misuses “we” and “us”: “We” feel that, and so on, for entirely subjective criticisms, which are nothing more than her own personal opinions. And she has a third thing, which is a schoolgirl use of language. Everything is “glitzy” and all kinds of things that you’d hear in a girls’ boarding school. That’s the voice she’s developed for herself. It doesn’t work. But I’ve never understood the New Yorker, anyway. The things that they give length to have always amazed me. Like somebody’s memories of a middle-class childhood in Bombay gets a full book-length article.

  You know, four pieces on me were written and not printed before they finally ran the fifth, written by Wolcott Gibbs. And you know why they wouldn’t print the first four? Because they were too sympathetic to me. Harold Ross told me that. One guy wrote a rave review about me. So Ross said, “That’s no good.” And he gave it to another fellow. Finally Ross just gave up and ran Gibbs’s very nice piece. When I was writing a column in the New York Post, Ross used to write me criticisms of the column all the time, as though I were sending it to the New Yorker. In a sort of friendly but hostile way. His basic feeling was, “He’s an actor. What’s he doing writing?”

  HJ: You may not read all this stuff about you, but other people do. When Diane Sawyer interviewed you on TV she asked—

  OW: She was very scared of me for a long time.

  HJ: Yes, because of the mythology around you. That’s what scares the money people away, too. You have to debunk it.

  OW: She said, “In the world, there are only four or five with your kind of legendary—” While I’m trying to think, “Who are they?” This at the beginning. And finally she got to her prepared dirty question, which she held for the end. She looked at me in a hurt way and said, “Why did you try to take Mankiewicz’s name off the credits?” She’d just read Kael.

  HJ: Of course that’s ridiculous. You should have set the record straight. But you can’t if you’re not even interested in your own biography!

  OW: There are a lot of things I don’t remember, you know. I got a letter three days ago from a woman who says that her mother and I had a great love affair. Absolutely no recollection. According to this woman, she is the issue of this affair, and she claims that I offered to support her when she was born, but the mother said, “No.” Nevertheless, she says, I bought a perambulator for her. She has enclosed photographs of what she claims is my grandson. I know it’s a fantasy.

  HJ: You don’t know anything about this?

  OW: Clearly a disturbed woman. Did I ever tell you, once after a matinee performance, I was visited in my dressing room by a beautiful, exquisitely dressed, extremely elegant young woman. She said: “I just wanted to see you … because we are brother and sister.” And then she left. I’ve always wondered about that—about who she was, what she meant. I’ve told you about my doubts about my parentage, who my father really was. I really think it was Feodor Chaliapin, I really do.

  HJ: You mean the Russian opera singer?

  OW: He had an affair with my mother, at just the right time.

  HJ: In England, you know, you have a man named Michael Lindsay-Hogg, of quite considerable stature and prominence, going around insisting that he’s your son. Says that on television.

  OW: It’s extremely unli
kely, which I’ve never told anyone, because I never slept with his mother, Geraldine [Fitzgerald], all the time she was staying with me. She lived in my house when I was divorced from my first wife, for the first six months I was in Hollywood. She was not my type.

  HJ: It’s true, you like the dark, Mediterranean types. People say, “I didn’t know that he was such an extraordinary Don Juan.”

  OW: I used to love everybody thinking I was having sex with everyone. But in this case it would have had to be an immaculate conception. That’s the reason I’ve always said no, and she’s always said no.

  HJ: Maybe you just forgot.

  OW: Well, the dates are right. So there’s just a chance that he is. He believes it. I have no idea. He’s a talented fellow. He acted in a play that I did in Dublin when he was a young boy. I also saw a television movie he made. Awfully well done. He’s a very good director. And he smokes cigars well.

  HJ: He made the first few of those Brideshead Revisited episodes that I like very much. The pilot, and about six others—the best ones.

  OW: Really? I didn’t know that. Brideshead is the only [Evelyn] Waugh novel I don’t like. Waugh was my idea of the greatest writer of the century. I read Waugh through, all the works, except Brideshead, once a year. That’s how much I like him. It’s the greatest therapy. Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies.

  HJ: Back to artists showing themselves in their work, isn’t F for Fake at least partially biographical or autobiographical? Don’t you reveal yourself there? At least it poses as a confessional film. Within which Elmyr de Hory, the art forger, is the fake. And then, on the second level, Clifford Irving is the fake, for having fabricated that biography of Howard Hughes, and then written a biography of de Hory called Fake. And, finally, the filmmaker—you—is the fake.

  OW: Not at all. It’s a fake confessional. I’m not really confessing. The fact that I confess to be a fraud is a fraud. It is just as deliberate and manipulative as that. No, I think I’m absolutely genuine—that’s a lie. I never tell the truth.