HJ: Where you just want to get a straight answer. But clearly, it’s apocryphal. I mean, it can’t … Who could have been there?
OW: He told it to his mistress, said, “I got off a pretty good one the other day, with a moronic mayor,” and she told it—
HJ: To her lover, who was a writer.
OW: And somebody improved it, some Jewish writer … I tell that story when I make a movie, always. When somebody starts with the excuses, I say, “Bells in the steeple.” It stops them every time. That’s one of those you can die with, you know. Like Alex Korda’s “any bloody duke,” you know?
HJ: No, you never told me that one.
OW: Well, I’ve ruined it, ’cause that’s the tag line. It won’t be as funny, but it’s still funny. I heard it only a few months ago, in Paris. Well, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was asking to see Korda.
HJ: Which Korda?
OW: Alex.
HJ: The director, or producer, or whatever he was.
OW: And Korda said, “My God, he’s such a snob and a bore.” But his secretary says, “Please see Douglas. You know, you’ve been refusing to see him and giving him evasive answers. And it’s rude.” So Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., comes in and sits down. There’s a long silence, and then Douglas says, “Well, I think it’s going to clear up.” Or, “Even for England it’s been raining an awful lot. But, still, when you see that green…” Another moment of silence. Suddenly Korda says, “Tell me, how’s the duke?” And Fairbanks replies, “Which duke?” Korda says, “Any bloody duke,” to this famous snob.
12. “Comics are frightening people.”
In which Orson suggests that John Huston was little more than a hack, and recalls Olivier and John Barrymore. When Jack Lemmon pulls up a chair, he describes his encounters with Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers.
* * *
HENRY JAGLOM: You know, Miloš [Forman] is making Amadeus into a movie. I don’t know why he wants to do that. It’s the stupidest play in the world.
ORSON WELLES: Well, you know, it’s been a worldwide hit. Paris, London, New York.
HJ: People are describing Roman [Polanski]’s performance in Paris as Mozart as—
OW: It’s terrible. Embarrassing. He’s a bad actor.
HJ: I liked him when he cut Jack’s nose in that movie that I didn’t care for, Chinatown.
OW: He was all right in that. Because he did nothing but stand still, you know. I hated the movie. That’s John [Huston] at his worst. I have to make the big speech for him at his tribute. He’s been campaigning for four years now for the AFI Life Achievement Award, and he’s got it.
HJ: Did he ask for you specifically?
OW: Probably. I’m almost sure. After all, I’ve acted in four or five movies of his, and he’s acted in some of mine. So—
HJ: And he’s stolen from you so liberally.
OW: His first picture, The Maltese Falcon, was totally borrowed from Kane. It was made the next year, you know.
HJ: It’s hard to look at it now without thinking of your shots. I mean, the lighting; the angles; the setups; the ceilings …
OW: For three or four years, everybody was doing that.
HJ: I just saw Annie yesterday, with Huston directing.
OW: It’s really bad. On every level, I think. Don’t you?
HJ: No—I was entertained, in some way.
OW: I wasn’t. I thought it missed all over the place.
HJ: But the real point is, how can he bring himself to work with the studios?
OW: What you don’t understand is that he doesn’t. He just knows how to make a picture without directing it. He just sits and lets the choreographer or somebody else do it. He stays up and plays poker all night, and when he’s shooting, that’s when he’s resting.
HJ: You mean he’s able to step back, because he doesn’t have a need to really be the creative artist. The fact that you’ve not been able to do that is testimony, in many people’s minds, to a kind of—you’re gonna hate the word—purity. It comes from a kind of insistence on making your own films … I’m disgusting you with my effusiveness … All right, so what are you reading?
OW: I was reading Montaigne last night again. I was reading the great passage where he says something like, “If you walk on stilts, you’re still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you’re still sitting on your ass.” He was a beautiful, beautiful man.
HJ: You have an actor’s memory.
OW: Not really. I can read any detective story a year later with perfect pleasure, because I totally forget the plot. So I never have to buy another book. I don’t even remember the names of the characters in my own scripts, you know? I say “the girl,” or whoever is playing the part. I have a terrible time with fictitious names.
HJ: You have a bad time with the names of real people, too.
OW: No. I just have a selective— It’s usually the one I know best whose name I can’t remember. That’s what really drove me out of the theater, because of the way you’re trapped in the dressing room. People come backstage—and they come from every period of your life and they’re all gathered together. There’s dear old Pete—or whatever his name is—and his wife, standing there, waiting to be introduced to the celebrity who’s next to them. And waiting to be shown that you’re a snob and won’t introduce them. I’ve perfected the mumbling now. “You all know each other”—all that.
What I do like is when they come up to me and don’t know who I am. I was in the airport in Las Vegas last year, and a man on crutches, an older man, looked at me with that finally-found-his-favorite-movie-star expression, and started limping toward me. Of course, I met him halfway, and he said, “Milton Berle! I’d know you anywhere.” So I signed Milton Berle for him. True story. I swear. I finally figured out that he meant Burl Ives, who is a big fat bearded fellow. And out came “Milton Berle.”
(Jack Lemmon enters.)
OW: THERE HE IS!
JACK LEMMON: May I invade for a moment?
OW: Please.
JL: You know, if I had to pick a single moment of any performance—let alone just a reading—of anything that Shakespeare ever wrote, that was you one night on the Johnny Carson Show, a number of years ago. Now, you take an average, goddamn audience of the Johnny Carson Show, and you have a knowledge of Shakespeare that is that of a newt. But you were reading, and, bang! The fucking place gave you an ovation! And I was sitting at home applauding. It was brilliant—it was fucking brilliant! And I don’t remember what you were reading.
OW: I remember what it was—it was the speech to the players from Hamlet.
JL: Fucking wonderful.
OW: I screwed it up in the middle.
JL: Nobody realized it. And there was a great lesson in it. Because, you know, most actors create characters they want you to identify with, and all of that shit. But you just did it like you were talking to Johnny. I think it was Johnny.
OW: Yes, it was Johnny. That was just before Ken Tynan wrote a profile of Johnny in the New Yorker, in which he quoted somebody on Johnny’s show—one of the assistants—as saying there was only one guest that Johnny was visibly in awe of, and that was Orson Welles. Since then, I haven’t been on the show. For five years. There goes two million copies of my autobiography when I publish it, because I can’t even get on to plug it!
HJ: Well, you can if somebody else hosts. Joan Rivers.
OW: I did go on once with “John Rivers,” as she ought to be called, when she was replacing Carson. After four and a half years. Obviously, just so that I couldn’t go around Beverly Hills saying I was blackballed by Carson. And I knew she was all set for me; I knew. Before I even sat down I began telling her how my wife thought she was the best-dressed woman in show business. And so on. Cut her right off at the knees. She couldn’t do a fat joke to save her life.
HJ: So she was on good behavior.
OW: She had to be, after that! How could she sail into me?
JL: She runs on impulse. God knows, she’s got balls.
And talent. Very, very bright and talented.
OW: Yes, I’m sorry to say. In her terrible way, she’s very talented.
HJ: I just heard her do this incredible line. I couldn’t believe I was hearing it on television: “Brooke Shields is so dumb, she flunked her Pap test.”
OW: To me it sounds like you’re bugging the girls’ bathroom in a particularly low-class establishment.
HJ: She really makes incredible reaches, and has no sense of limits, of stopping before—
OW: Well, she has a sense—she senses it’s gold! That’s the trick.
HJ: You know, the talk shows have really gone down tremendously.
OW: In the days when there were four talk shows, and I was on Carson every other week, and I was approached for magazine interviews, who needed an interview? I used to say, “I don’t give interviews. You want to know about me, tune in to Carson.” Now I’m getting in a tough spot with this line. Today, tune into what? I better start getting nice to these cocksuckers with typewriters.
I saw a very long interview with your friend Richard Pryor. Interviewed by a not stupid, but rather square and dull, black man. Pryor had decided to open up and talk. He is very moving. I’ve always been very fond of him as a person, without knowing him.
HJ: I used to sit with Richard Pryor every night at the Improv in New York when we were starting out, and we had a game, which was that one of us had to make the other laugh. And you couldn’t go to the bathroom, you couldn’t go home, you couldn’t do anything until the other person laughed. So I did something, and then it was his turn to do something. It was very funny, but I didn’t laugh. An hour went by, and a second hour. By then we had a crowd around us, a third hour, and he was doing everything he could think of. Richie is brilliant, but fuck it, I was refusing even to smile. There was a relish tray on each one of the tables. He took the mustard. Poured it on his head. He took the ketchup and splashed it on his face. It was a horrible mess. He had every possible color of condiment dripping down his face. Hysterically funny, but I was able to control myself until he took a napkin and with infinite delicacy, dabbed the corner of his mouth. Just like Charlie Chaplin. That got me. Five hours. He ran to the bathroom—he’d been waiting all that time to go—and I realized I would never be a standup comic.
JL: I’ve always been fascinated by the phrases that we all used, that are so destructive, like “I killed them!”
OW: “I murdered ’em.”
HJ: “Destroyed them.”
OW: It shows the hostility of the comic. Comics are frightening people. Do you know the story about the comedians sitting around the table at Lindy’s? They’re all telling jokes. A fellow comes in very sad. He just sits there. He says, “Well, I just finished three weeks at the Paramount—held over another week—and they booked me down in Philadelphia. I guess I shouldn’t complain, but, you know, everything I earn goes to my poor kid, who’s been in a wheelchair all of his life. He has polio.” There’s a long silence. Then somebody said, “That’s good. Have you heard this one?”
HJ: I remember in childhood, when I was really lonely and scared, I fell off chairs in school to get laughs. The harder I fell, and the more I hurt myself, the bigger the laugh. There’s such a clear relationship between getting attention, getting that laughter, and hurting yourself. I used to be compelled by Jerry Lewis for that reason.
OW: He plays a spastic. And he will die to make you laugh. He will do anything! Cut his head off if he needs to, you know. The speech to the players, where Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “Let not those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them”—he must have had a big problem with some of his successful clowns. With his Jerry Lewises. Got on there in Macbeth as the porter and wouldn’t get off. Right in the middle of the murder.
HJ: I remember seeing Milton Berle take bow after bow after bow. He had the world at his feet. Then he came on for his last bow, and he blew his nose on the curtain. He just couldn’t not do it, that’s all. And he didn’t even get a laugh!
JL: Yeah, that’s the thing of it: the tremendous need to get the attention of the audience.
OW: But, also, you know, with a comic it’s different than any other form of show business, because you are instantly rewarded by laughter. You are on the greatest high in the world. And if you are not rewarded, you’re dying. Even playing in a comedy, getting a good laugh on Thursday, is not the same thing as being a comic.
HJ: (To Lemmon) You did the TV version of The Entertainer?
JL: Yes, I did.
OW: I loved it. But it’s an overrated play. You would be astonished at what a rattletrap piece of crap it is. It does not hold up at all! It’s all vehicle.
HJ: It was Americanized, right?
OW: No—yeah. But that wasn’t important—it was essentially the same play. Fakey and off-pitch. Like Larry. The thing that was better about Jack’s performance, and the great mistake that Larry made— You see, Larry can’t bear to fail, even if he’s supposed to fail. So when he played the comic onstage, he played for real laughs from the paying audience, instead of giving the feeling that he was in a half-empty theater where nobody was laughing. He did not play a failed comedian. Success to Larry demanded being an effective comedian, even though it made no sense! Because if he was that good, what was he doing out in a Brighton theater? What was his problem? But Jack played it like the theater was empty and nobody was laughing. A couple of guys with raincoats on, and that was it, you know?
HJ: Did you see Olivier’s Lear on the BBC?
OW: The first two scenes are the worst things I ever saw in my life, bar none. Remember, this is the man who, when he played Hamlet, began the movie saying, “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.”
HJ: I understand that Olivier plays Lear as senile in the first scene.
OW: And he mustn’t be senile in the first scene! He has to fall from grace, you see. Such a vulgar conception. You know, Larry is in competition even with the people who were doing Shakespeare before he was doing it.
HJ: Dead actors! Your Jack Barrymore did Hamlet.
OW: When Larry talks about Jack Barrymore, he says, “That ham.” But Jack is wonderful! There’s nothing remotely hammy about him. He was the greatest Hamlet of the century, and the greatest Richard the Third, without any doubt. I can still hear it. And I’ve heard his records, too. (As Barrymore):
“Ay, Edward will use Women honourably:
Would he were wasted, Marrow, Bones, and all,
That from his Loynes no hopefull Branch may spring,
To crosse me from the Golden time I looke for…”
Jack never intended to be an actor. He began as a newspaper cartoonist, you know, and he was just a guy around town. And Arthur Hopkins said, “You’re it.”
HJ: Arthur Hopkins the director?
OW: Yes. And they did The Jest, the Sam Benelli play. He and Lionel did Richard III and Hamlet, and they did Justice by [John] Galsworthy. Those were the great years of acting in the American theater. In order for Jack to play Richard III, Hopkins sent him to Margaret Carrington, who had been the first singer of [Claude] Debussy’s songs and was a great authority on voice production. She was a millionaire and the aunt of John Huston. Jack spent four months, summer months, with her, every day, saying, “Mee, mee, mam, mum,” and, suddenly, this great organ was born, you see.
HJ: How did you first meet Olivier?
OW: We met when he was playing in the The Green Bay Tree, in New York, and I had just finished playing Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. It was a very nice gathering of people, and we were sitting talking together. The hostess was Margaret Carrington, who had been my voice teacher as well as Jack’s. That’s why I can imitate Barrymore, because I took lessons from her. She charged neither Barrymore nor me, and ruined me and made Barrymore. It took me years to recover. But anyway, she came up to us and, according to me, said, “Mr. Olivier, you must stop boring Mr. Welles.” And, according to Larry, she said, “Mr. Welles, you must stop boring Mr. Ol
ivier.” And both of us believe that our version is right! To this day, I honestly don’t know who is right.
HJ: How is Larry? Has anybody heard anything more about his health?
OW: I hear all kinds of stories, none of them very cheerful. He has three kinds of cancer. It’s particularly a shame, because Larry wanted to be so beautiful. I caught him once, when I came backstage to his dressing room after a performance, he was staring at himself with such love, such ardor, in the mirror. He saw me over his shoulder, embarrassed at my catching him in such an intimate moment. Without losing a beat, though, and without taking his eyes off himself, he told me that when he looked at himself in the mirror, he was so in love with his own image it was terribly hard for him to resist going down on himself. That was his great regret, he said. Not to be able to go down on himself!
He was supposed to be in this last movie I was in, and he couldn’t make it. And he’s supposed to be in another movie they want me in, and they guess he won’t be able to do that, either. And that’s rough on him, because he has to act. He doesn’t care if it’s a bad movie or a bad play. He has to work. Which is admirable. That’s why he went so far beyond me as an actor. I envied him that so much, but that was the great difference between us. He was—and is—a professional, whereas I don’t see acting as a profession, as a job, never have. I am an amateur. An amateur is a lover—amateur, the word, comes from “love”—with all the caprices and the difficulties of love. I don’t feel compelled to work. And Larry does. A professional turns up on Wednesday afternoons.
HJ: I never asked you—how did you get into acting in the first place?
OW: I finished high school in two years and had a scholarship to Harvard. I hated school! Hated school! The trouble with school is that it’s very good for some minds, and very bad for others. It’s giving you opinions. All the time, opinions about history, opinions about people, opinions about everything. Schools are opinion factories. So I went into the theater so as not to go to Harvard!
My Lunches with Orson Page 13