HJ: Candice Bergen has just finished her book on growing up as the daughter of a ventriloquist. I don’t know what reminded me.
OW: Edgar Bergen was an ice-cold fellow.
HJ: He never told her, “I love you.”
OW: I believe that. I knew him very well, because we were fellow magicians. We went every Thursday night to the same magic club! Here’s a story about him. We were in a show—I was doing a run-through with him—he was up there with a dummy. And his two leading writers were sitting in front of me in the CBS Theater, which was empty. They didn’t know that anybody was behind them. One of ’em turned to the other and said, “You know, to look at him, you’d swear that Bergen was real.”
HJ: You know, for the first three years of her life, Candice had breakfast with Edgar and Charlie McCarthy, and thought Charlie was her brother? Charlie would sit there and talk to her: “Drink your milk.” Her father never spoke directly to her. Till one day she opened a closet she wasn’t supposed to open and found five of her brothers hanging there.
JL: Have to leave. It’s been fun.
OW: Bye, Jack.
13. “Avez-vous scurf?”
In which Orson claims Chaplin “stole” Monsieur Verdoux from him, or at least the writing credit, and explains how the Tramp wore out his welcome with the Hollywood set, compares him invidiously to Keaton, and recalls Garbo snubbing Dietrich.
* * *
HENRY JAGLOM: Orson, speaking of comics, I’m dying to hear about Charlie Chaplin. He was the hero of my youth, and I still adore his movies. Do you know whether he planned his jokes in advance, or mainly improvised?
ORSON WELLES: No. He didn’t improvise much, but he wasn’t the one who planned the jokes, either. He had six gagmen.
HJ: Chaplin had six gagmen?
OW: Yes. Oh, yes, of course. I’ll tell you a story. There was a fellow who later became a director, called Mal St. Clair, and he was one of the gagmen. This was a day when Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells were coming to watch the shooting of City Lights.
HJ: My God.
OW: And Chaplin has the chairs out, ready for them, and they sit down. He starts his scene, something they had been shooting the night before and hadn’t finished. He has a brick. And he’s going to throw it through the window of a shop to take something—because he’s hungry or whatever it is—and then realizes a policeman is standing behind him. They start to roll. And Mal comes into the studio and says, “Charlie, I’ve got it! None of us could figure out what to do in that scene you were shooting last night, but I’ve got—” Chaplin says, “Go away.” Mal says, “Charlie, I’m telling you, I’ve got it. What you do with the brick—” Chaplin says, “Get out, please. I told you not to come in.” Mal says, “But we were all trying to find a kicker for this scene last night, and I’ve got it!” Chaplin’s really angry now, says, “Listen, will you get out?” And Mal says, “As you start to raise the brick—” Charlie yells, “Get out of my studio!! I never want to see you again!!” So Mal says, “Yes, I’m going.” Just as he reaches the exit, he turns around, and adds, “You are nothing but a no-good quidnunc.”
HJ: Quidnuck?
OW: Quidnunc. Don’t interrupt. Listen to the story. “No good quidnunc.” Now, Charlie, every day after lunch, went to the can, his private can. And there he had the short Oxford dictionary, and he read a page of it to improve his mind. On this day he turns to Q. He sees that it’s circled, and Mal has written, “I knew you’d look it up.”
HJ: So it doesn’t matter what it means.
OW: Exactly. That has nothing to do with it.
HJ: He did it in advance, was sort of saving it up, to humiliate Chaplin?
OW: Charlie was uneducated, you see, and embarrassed about his vocabulary.
HJ: Right. And he didn’t want anybody to know that he had gagmen.
OW: That’s why he fired Mal St. Clair. Never allowed him on the set again! Because he was blowing it in front of these highbrow, grand people, who thought he was the genius of comedy—
HJ: I’m completely stunned. It makes him Johnny Carson to me.
OW: Of course. He was Johnny Carson! He did think up gags, but he also had gagmen. The only one who didn’t was Harold Lloyd, who was the greatest gagman in the history of movies. If you look at his movies, the gags are the most inventive—the most original, the most visual—of any of the silent comics.
HJ: But they weren’t touching like Chaplin’s were.
OW: C’mon, who’s talking about touching? We’re talking about gags! A gag isn’t supposed to be touching.
HJ: I’m trying to talk about Chaplin’s special genius …
OW: We’re not talking about Chaplin’s genius, we’re not talking about his art, or whether Lloyd is better than Chaplin. We’re talking about gags. The joke. You’ve got to separate jokes from beauty and all that. Chaplin had too much beauty. He drenched his pictures with it. That’s why [Buster] Keaton is finally giving him the bath, and will, historically, forever. Oh, yes, he’s so much greater.
HJ: Because he was not as schmaltzy.
OW: Because he was better—more versatile, more, finally, original. Some of the things that Keaton thought up to do are incredible.
HJ: I feel like a little child told there’s no Santa Claus.
OW: But think what gags are. They’re essential in a slapstick comedy. A picture has to be full of them. Chaplin had a guy who wrote better gags than he did, you see? But still, he made the pictures you admire. With his sensibility, plus all the things he did around the gags.
HJ: To me, nobody else is diminished by having writers, but it’s different with Chaplin.
OW: He understood that. That’s why he wanted people to think that he composed, directed, designed—everything. The day he ran Monsieur Verdoux for me—you know I wrote it—the credits said, “Charles Chaplin presents Monsieur Verdoux, produced by Charles Chaplin, directed by Charles Chaplin, music created by Charles Chaplin, executive producer Charles Chaplin.” And then it said, “Screenplay—Orson Welles.” Story and screenplay. And he said, “Don’t you find it monotonous, my name all those times?” Not thinking he’s being funny.
HJ: I don’t understand. Was that his way of saying he didn’t want Orson Welles?
OW: No. My name had to stay. It was in the contract. He was already being sued for plagiarism by Konrad Bercovici over The Great Dictator—and he did steal. So he came to me, and he said, “I have to, for my defense, say that I’ve written everything I ever did. And if I put it in the credits that you wrote the story and the screenplay, there goes my case. I’ll put you back the minute the case is over.
HJ: But he never did.
OW: Never meant to. But I said, “Okay,” and it opened in New York without my name at all. And all the papers said, as their chief criticism of Monsieur Verdoux, “Whoever put it into Chaplin’s head to do such a thing?”
HJ: You mean to make such a dark movie about a bluebeard?
OW: Of course. So one day later the credits say, “Based on a suggestion by Orson Welles.” Or “a story suggested,” something like that. “Suggest” is in it. In other words, something I said to him one night over dinner. And it has said that ever since! But I wrote the whole script, which he then—
HJ: You wrote the whole script of Verdoux?
OW: I had a script, and I was gonna direct him in it. For two years. And he kept stalling, and finally he said, “I can’t. I have to do it myself.” He didn’t want to be directed. He said, “I want to buy it from you.” I said, “Of course, Charlie. I just want it to happen.” I practically gave it to him. I said, “I’ll leave the price to you.” So a check came for $1,500—something like that. Cheapest man who ever lived. You love him, and I don’t. And you wouldn’t have loved him if you’d been through what I went through with him. It was really rough, and I have real contempt for him, because I worked very hard. Offered him something out of my love for him. It was not a suggestion, it was a screenplay. Do you know why I thought of Chaplin?
There used to be an ad in the subways for something called Eau de Pinot. Which was the sort of thing that barbers put on, that smelled a little, and was supposed to stop dandruff. French. And they had a fellow with a little mustache saying, “Avez-vous scurf?”
HJ: Scurf?
OW: Flaky skin. And I looked at that, and I said, “Chaplin! Got to play [Henri-Désiré] Landru,” you know, the real Bluebeard, eleven killings, all women except one, during World War I. Of course, Chaplin changed the script. Mine was called “The Lady-killer.” Based on Landru, and I called the character Landru. He called him Verdoux. And he had to make it socially conscious, have Hitler, and so he changed the period.
HJ: So you had set it twenty years earlier, World War I?
OW: Yes. I’ve told you about the great sequence in the Alps that he cut out. Landru finally finds a woman whose profession is killing her husbands. His equal. And they go on a honeymoon together, a walking trip in the Alps. And each one wants to kill the other. And he cut it out, ’cause it was too good a part for the woman.
HJ: Oh, my God. Really? Who was gonna play it?
OW: It didn’t matter. Because even those who loved him, and were close to him, have said, “You know Charlie will never let another actor be good on the screen with him, not for one minute.” So he changed the script and came up with what was a very funny scene, but nothing like mine. His was the scene in the rowboat, in the Bois de Boulogne. If you listen carefully, you will hear yodeling in the distance. Because, in my script, I accompanied this scene in the mountains with yodeling, and he never stopped to wonder why the yodeling. That’s how dumb he was!
Actually, Chaplin was deeply dumb in many ways. That’s what’s so strange, great hunks of sentimental dumbness with these shafts of genius. And he blew it, too. He performed Verdoux for two years in everybody’s drawing room, so that there was nothing left when it came time to shoot it. He did the same thing with The Great Dictator. But he didn’t get invited out that often. Because, after a point, people didn’t want their whole party taken over by one entertainer. They knew he’d come, and he’d totally dominate—if you had Chaplin, you had Chaplin performing. That limited his social life terribly.
HJ: He was that insecure, that he had the need to prove himself?
OW: Or had that much pleasure in performing, whatever. He may just have enjoyed showing off. Chaplin showed me the rushes of the original Limelight scene with Keaton, before it was cut.
HJ: Keaton had more to do, I presume.
OW: Not only more to do, but he gave the bath to Chaplin! Washed him right off the screen. You saw who was the best. Just no argument.
HJ: And you think the reason Chaplin cut it was ’cause he was jealous of Keaton?
OW: There’s no “thinking.” I can’t blame him, because it was almost embarrassing.
HJ: You would think that the brilliance of Chaplin would give him the generosity of spirit to recognize—
OW: I don’t think brilliance is the word, genius is.
HJ: His creative brilliance, I mean. I never have understood the word genius.
OW: Well, you can’t—any more than you’d understand soul, love. They’re all the big words that no one understands.
HJ: I mean, he was some kind of genius. Right?
OW: No, not some kind of genius—he was absolutely a genius. But so was Keaton. There’s nothing Chaplin ever made that’s as good as The General. I think The General is almost the greatest movie ever made. The most poetic movie I’ve ever seen. To my great sorrow, I’ve got to the age now where all my old minority opinions are ceasing to be minority. I spent all my life saying, “You’re all crazy—it’s Keaton!” And now I’ve got nothing to argue about! Now Keaton is coming in. I used to say, “What are they doing all that Wagner for? Why don’t they do Don Giovanni? Now everybody’s doing it.
HJ: I don’t know why Keaton to me is more farcical, broader, not as real as Chaplin.
OW: But Chaplin isn’t real. He’s—
HJ: Oh, how can you say Chaplin isn’t real?
OW: Chaplin is sheer poetry, if you want, but it’s not real.
HJ: But it’s poetry based upon reality, a heightened form of reality.
OW: Not for me, no. What Chaplin did is—there are two basic kinds of clown. In the classic circus, there’s the clown who is white-faced, with a white cap, short trousers, and silk stockings. He has beautiful legs, and is very elegant. Every move he makes is perfect. The other clown, who works with him, is called an auguste, and he has baggy pants and big feet. What Chaplin did was to marry them, these two classic clowns, and create a new clown. That was his secret—that’s my theory.
HJ: You look at some of Chaplin’s shorts, and they don’t feel dated.
OW: They don’t date because they were dated then. They were period pieces when they were made. The silent pictures always look as though they happened in a world earlier than they did when they were shot. They all derive from the nineteenth century.
HJ: That must be why, when he tried to tackle anything contemporary it was so bad. That’s why there was such a gulf between his silents and his talking pictures. Limelight is a fake, sentimental film, but I happen to like it very much.
OW: Yeah. Well, as I said, you love him, and I don’t. The visual difference between City Lights and the movie he made with Paulette Goddard is extraordinary.
HJ: City Lights is still the greatest Chaplin film.
OW: No question. But that other film is bad. From that time on, he went down so fast that he’s almost unrecognizable … Limelight!
HJ: Limelight didn’t have Paulette Goddard.
OW: No, no, the picture I’m talking about was made before, when I was still a boy.
HJ: Gold Rush?
OW: No, no.
HJ: No. Which one was it with her? I forget. (Pause) Not Modern Times.
OW: Modern Times! That’s the bad picture. I saw it again just six weeks ago. It doesn’t have a good moment in it. It is so coarse, it is so vulgar. It doesn’t touch—I knew Paulette well.
HJ: So you knew her when she was going down on people at Ciro’s, or was it Anatole Litvak going down on her under the table? Or something like that.
OW: She’s a wonderful girl, but she’s a living cash register, you know.
HJ: You should see Chaplin’s female impersonation movie, The Woman, it was called. A short, about twenty minutes. He was wearing a fur muff and a fur hat.
OW: He looked terrific as a woman.
HJ: He looked gorgeous and he was so incredible and touching and flirtatious and charming and romantic and teasing. And sexual …
OW: He wasn’t effeminate, just totally female as a performer. There was no masculine element there. And he was like that as a man, too, terribly female as a man. It’s that smile, that little female smile. He was so beautiful when he was young. And he didn’t want any of us not to notice it. He beaded his eyelashes. You know how long that takes? He made himself up to be the most beautiful fellow in the world, and then put that little mustache on. Vanity is very much part of that character. He didn’t think he made himself look prissy. He thought he looked beautiful, and delicate and sensitive, and so did all the world. They took it on his terms. I never thought he was funny. I thought he was wonderful—wonderful—but not funny. I thought he was sinister. That’s why I thought of him for Verdoux. I had another idea for Chaplin—with Garbo—but neither one of them would touch it. A farce. They’re in the maze in Hampton Court, and he deliberately loses her.
HJ: Could she have played farce, do you think?
OW: Yes. Well, she played comedy wonderfully. I wouldn’t have made her ridiculous, but I would have made her herself. I would have made her the distinguished actress that she was. I told it first to her, and then to him, and they were just—nothing. So that went nowhere.
HJ: Why did she stop acting? Was it just because of the bad reviews?
OW: Of Two-Faced Woman. No business.
HJ: You mean she was that unprepared for a fl
op? She must have, somewhere along the line, figured that, eventually, one of her pictures wouldn’t work.
OW: No, I think she was getting older, and I think she hated to act. And I think she was waiting for the flop.
HJ: To go out with.
OW: I think so. I was always a wild Garbo fan. But when I saw her in Grand Hotel, at first I thought it was somebody else making fun of her, like somebody taking off on Garbo. She was totally miscast as a ballerina. She’s a big-boned cow. She did everything that you would do if you were a drag queen doing an imitation of Garbo, you know.
Did I ever tell you about the time I introduced Marlene to Garbo? Marlene was my house guest, and for some unaccountable reason had never met Garbo, and she was her hero. I arranged for Clifton Webb to give a party for Garbo so I could bring Marlene. I was living with Rita at the time, and she didn’t want to go. That was very much like her. She never wanted to go anywhere, just stay home. So Marlene and I went without her. Garbo was sitting on a raised platform in the middle of the living room, so that everybody had to stand and look up at her. I introduced them. I said, “Greta, it’s unbelievable that you two have never met—Greta, Marlene. Marlene, Greta.” Marlene started to gush, which was not like her at all. Looking up at Garbo, she said, “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, it’s such a pleasure to meet you, I’m humble in your presence,” and on and on. Garbo said, “Thank you very much. Next?” And turned away to somebody else. Marlene was crushed.
14. “Art Buchwald drove it up Ronnie’s ass and broke it off.”
In which Orson ridicules Ronald Reagan, explains why he lost his respect for Elia “Gadge” Kazan, and argues that old people, especially macho men like Norman Mailer, come to look like their Jewish mothers.
* * *
ORSON WELLES: Did you see the tribute to the five distinguished people at the Kennedy Center the other night?
HENRY JAGLOM: No. I missed it.
My Lunches with Orson Page 14