OW: I saw it. It was a riot. Art Buchwald came on, and for seven minutes drove it up Ronnie’s ass and broke it off. He didn’t have one joke that Ronnie could even laugh at. He said, “And Mr. Reagan…” you know, with that voice of his, “We have to be careful. We ought not to treat the arts the way you treat Central America.” And he said, “Because, if the Kennedy Center goes Communist, the next thing is the Hollywood Bowl!” You could see the audience wondering whether they’d be photographed by the FBI on their way out if they laughed too hard.
HJ: Did they cut to Reagan at all?
OW: At the very beginning, doing a kind of wince, and then never again. The whole dressed-up audience had these frozen smiles. Art was the licensed jester. They couldn’t cut. I wanted to see how Old Blue Eyes was taking it. But we didn’t even get to see that.
HJ: Who else was there?
OW: It was a great group. Besides Sinatra—Kazan, Katherine Dunham, Jimmy Stewart, and Virgil Thompson. First we had a speech by Reagan, from the White House, instead of his speaking from his box or coming on the stage. They’d written a very short, gracious speech, which he read with that Reagan skill, which can be very good. Followed by Warren Beatty, who introduced Kazan, calling him “our greatest living film director.” A very bad speech. And badly delivered. He looked terrible. Any thought that he’s gonna be president was written off last night. Katherine Dunham is a fake dancer if ever there was one. And Virgil Thomson, introduced by John Houseman. I didn’t stay for that. They roomed together—they were lovers. Why shouldn’t he introduce him?
HJ: Yeah, yeah. They were lovers, really?
OW: Oh, yes.
HJ: Is he that old?
OW: Houseman is eighty-one. Something that gives me comfort every night. Every night when I get a twinge of rheumatism. He’s holding up awfully well, though.
HJ: More extraordinary, that Warren would choose to introduce Kazan!
OW: Kazan gave Warren his first job, Splendor in the Grass. Why couldn’t he have pretended that he wasn’t in town, or something? When I saw Gadge it made me sick. I still can’t forgive him. The people I got most mad at were people from my side who gave names. And he was one of the biggest sellers of people up the river in the whole bunch. I am not a vengeful person, but Kazan is one of the people that I feel really badly about. I was—in fact, in a terrible way, I’m still fond of him—I like Gadge. But I think he behaved so badly that it’s just inexcusable. I cannot honor him. Or sit with him.
HJ: You won’t give anything to On the Waterfront?
OW: Nothing. Because it’s so immoral.
HJ: Forgetting the politics for a moment …
OW: I wish I could. But that was made at a time when I was very sensitive on those subjects, and it was an excuse for all those people who gave names. All those collabos with McCarthy, of which Kazan was one. And this film was to show that the hero is the man who tells.
HJ: And Budd Schulberg, who wrote it, was another.
OW: That’s right—all that. So I’m bigoted. Then we had Zorba the Greek. Straight from Broadway. Tony Quinn came out and neither danced nor sang. But kind of stood there, as though we’re all supposed to think that this is the biggest set of balls that’s ever been seen in New York. And then he told us that he loved Kazan more than any man alive. Zorba the Testicle, to Gadge.
HJ: I’m trying to think when they even worked together.
OW: In Viva Zapata! He played Zapata’s brother. He was quite good.
HJ: I love that movie.
OW: Above all, not a good movie. Zapata is so important to me, and I have such a clear picture of what the story is, that I was profoundly offended by the movie. On the grounds of its—
HJ: I just took it as a progressive fairy tale.
OW: I was not free to appreciate it on those terms. And it wasn’t progressive. Zapata—here’s a true story. Did I ever tell you what happened when he heard about the trouble Lenin was in? Because at one point Lenin had said, “If we can hold out another sixty days, the revolution is won. If we don’t, it’s lost.” And word of this got to Mexico, where Zapata was fighting. So Zapata says, “Where is he? We will ride over and help him.” He thought Moscow was somewhere over the hill.
HJ: I guess Viva Zapata! was another anti-left film, if you think about it. Because the revolution is betrayed by the arch revolutionary, the Lenin figure. And better to have had no revolution at all. Do you think Streetcar Named Desire is a good film?
OW: No. I think Gadge did it better in the theater. I don’t think he’s a very good filmmaker compared to his work in the theater.
HJ: You don’t make allowances for people with talent, like Kazan?
OW: Let me tell you the story of Emil Jannings.
HJ: I know who he is. He played opposite Marlene in The Blue Angel. He won a Best Actor Oscar for something or other, I think the first one ever awarded. Not only did he collaborate with the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels named him “Artist of the State.”
OW: When the allies got to Berlin in the last days of the war, he fled to his hometown. As the American troops entered the town with their tanks looking for collaborators, he stood in front of his little house waving his Oscar over his head, yelling, “Artiste, artiste!”
You know, Gadge has begun to look like a minor figure in a Dostoevsky novel. His face has become long, like a junior inquisitor. And he was standing on that stage like some terrible bird. The face he deserves, with a beak, a beak—it’s a beak. A face that turns into a beak.
HJ: My mother once said, “All old people look Jewish.”
OW: True. You either look Jewish or you look Irish—you have your choice. It has nothing to do with the nose. It’s an expression that happens to people when they get past sixty—they usually look like their Jewish or Irish mother. Like Mailer, who looks exactly like his Jewish mother. He never looked Jewish before at all! He looked like an Irishman, if anything. If you met him and his name had been Reilly, you would have said, “Sure—that’s Reilly.” And Lenny Bernstein is getting to look like his mother, too, you know.
HJ: I just saw him in New York. He conducted—
OW: They don’t look like their fathers, they look like their mothers! Lenny’s really—I mean, he’s developed this flourish with the baton, that he started a couple years ago.
HJ: His pinkie is up?
OW: Way up all the time. And he can’t jump as high anymore. It’s as if he’s announcing to the world that he can still jump, but he doesn’t really leave the floor! He used to leave the floor!
HJ: He did the most extraordinary thing. I went to a concert at Carnegie Hall and it started with Bernstein playing some Chopin. And he started crying in the middle of playing. I never saw him do that before—he just wept.
OW: Yes, he’s very emotional—genuinely.
HJ: It was incredibly touching. It made the music stronger, in some way. He’s so theatrical. Does he know? He must know.
OW: Of course he knew he was going to choke back the tears. He’s a ham. I’ve known him since he started.
HJ: He’s still a wonderful-looking man.
OW: Less so now. More and more like his mother. The last couple of years have been very cruel to him. Have really made him look like the old lady, you know. And, brashly, he’s cut his hair shorter, hoping to look less like her.
HJ: And it doesn’t work.
OW: No, now Lenny looks more like Gertrude Stein. It’s a terrible fate that comes to men—and, particularly, very masculine men. And that’s the cruelty, you see? You could see him in a dress, without any trouble at all, you know?… Oh, Kiki.
HJ: What’s the matter?
OW: It’s Kiki. She’s forgotten herself.
HJ: She’s farting?
OW: Oh, yes. Ooh, yes—oooh! Isn’t that terrible?
WAITER: Shall we show you desserts?
HJ: (To waiter) It’s not us—it’s the dog. We just want you to know.
OW: Don’t bring us a dessert for the next two minutes.
&
nbsp; HJ: Oooh! That one came clear across the table.
OW: This is a real … like atomic warfare. Mmm, boy—that was one.
HJ: It’s great to have a dog around in case one ever does it oneself.
OW: Well, in the eighteenth century, they always did.
HJ: For that reason?
OW: Yes. Do you know the Arabian Nights story?
HJ: No.
OW: A young man goes to a wedding feast, the most important wedding feast in the village. Everyone is on their best behavior. And just when the mullah is about to pronounce his blessing, and everything is quiet, he lets rip the loudest fart that’s ever been heard. He is so embarrassed that he turns and flees. He steals a camel, and rides away from the village, out of the kingdom, and goes to the farthest reaches of the known world. And there, over the years, he prospers. Finally, as a rich old man, he comes back to the village with a great caravan. As he approaches it, a couple of women are working in the fields. They look up and say, “Look, there’s the man who farted at the wedding.”
HJ: Oh, God!
PART TWO
1984–1985
Welles and Jaglom in Someone to Love, Welles’s final screen appearance.
“I always acted as if everything was going to go great for him. I needed to act that way to feel that way, so that I could make him feel that way, and hopefully make someone else, or some combination of many someone elses, give him the money to work, to live. I was hustling me and him, and hopefully them, into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I told him deals were done, all that was needed was for so and so to fly in and confirm them, when it wasn’t true. I didn’t make it up out of whole cloth, but where things were iffy, I made them sound much less iffy.”
—HENRY JAGLOM, e-mail, June 8, 2012
1984
15. “It was my one moment of being a traffic-stopping superstar .”
In which Orson recalls that director Carol Reed wanted him for The Third Man. He reflects on Joseph Cotten’s career, and wonders what the excitement over Alfred Hitchcock was all about.
* * *
ORSON WELLES: You’re eating already. Your mouth is full, which is a disgusting sight.
HENRY JAGLOM: And how are you today? You’re late. That’s why I ordered.
OW: Angry at a lot of things going on in my household. You know those wild stupidities that happen to everybody who lives longer than they should. I have a thing I have to put on my leg that compresses it, and I put it on at night. Somebody has to get me out of it in twenty minutes or I go nuts. But somebody went to sleep, and there was no getting out, and I had to fight my way out of this machine. It took me about forty minutes to get untangled. I’m a little out of breath from rage. You know, simple, quiet, domestic rage.
HJ: I saw The Third Man last night. I don’t think there’s another movie of Carol Reed’s that’s in its class.
OW: I think Odd Man Out is close to it.
HJ: That’s a good movie. But James Mason’s performance is weak.
OW: Well, Carol didn’t think he was good enough. He talked me out of using Mason in something I wanted to do. He said, “Mason hasn’t got the range. He drove me crazy in Odd Man Out. He can’t do from here to there. He can only do from here to here.” So I believed him, because he really knew acting. Loved actors.
HJ: The longer you look at Mason’s performance—
OW: The less and less good it gets.
HJ: The character of Harry Lime fit you like a glove.
OW: It’s a hell of a picture. Alida Valli. Boy, she’s great. She’s Austrian, you know, raised in Italy. She started very young.
HJ: What happened to her?
OW: She was the biggest star in Europe. She was huge during the fascist period, all through the war. In Rome. Then she was taken up by Selznick. Selznick destroyed her. He brought her to America, tried to make a big star out of her here, thought he’d have another Bergman, and put her in three—
HJ: After The Third Man?
OW: No, The Third Man was in the middle. He loaned her and [Joseph] Cotten to Alex Korda, who produced it. Alex had to have two American stars besides me to sell the picture. So he made this deal with Selznick, giving him all American rights. That’s the only good picture she made here. You can’t look at the others.
HJ: What else did he put her in?
OW: A terrible trial movie, Hitchcock, The Paradine Case. And something else terrible. She came back to Europe, and nobody would hire her. They said, “She can’t be any good. She failed in Hollywood.” After that, it was just, “A special appearance by Alida Valli.” She should never have come here in the first place.
HJ: Carol Reed had never directed you before. Were you his idea?
OW: Yes. Selznick had bitterly fought against having me in it. He was so dumb. He wanted Noël Coward for the part. He was impressed by Noël. And not by me. Noël was a little mysterious, but he saw me around all the time.
HJ: Well, you did fuck up his charades.
OW: Alex held out, said it had to be me, and so did Gregg Toland. I took the Orient Express from Venice or from Paris, I don’t remember which, and arrived in the morning in Vienna at about eight o’clock. I had my wardrobe. We went right out to the Ferris wheel, and by nine o’clock I had shot a scene. Then we shot for six days, five in Vienna and one in London. There were three complete A-film units shooting at once. Because Carol needed an entire crew to shoot one huge scene, where you saw down four blocks at night, and then, in another part of Vienna, the second crew was working. And a third was down in the sewer. That’s how come we got it done so fast.
HJ: You don’t appear until near the end.
OW: All the characters do is talk about Harry Lime. Until the last reel. Then I come on.
HJ: But it’s not the last reel.
OW: Yes, it is the last reel.
HJ: No.
OW: I have one appearance—a silent appearance—in the reel before. I’m in shadow, and the light suddenly hits me when the window is opened. Jo Cotten sees the cat sitting on my shoe. That was the greatest entrance there ever was. We did it in Vienna, but not in a real location. Carol had a little set built just for that, on which we shot at the end of every day, towards dusk. We would look at the rushes, and then Carol would say, “Not yet,” and we’d do it again, to get it perfect.
HJ: How much of The Third Man was Grahame Greene’s, how much was Korda’s?
OW: The real makers of that film were Carol Reed and Korda. Greene was nowhere near it. His authorship is greatly exaggerated. The idea for the plot was Alex’s.
HJ: Really? Everyone assumes, automatically, that the Graham Greene novel came first, and then somebody adapted— It’s not from Graham Greene?
OW: Korda gave him the basic idea. Said, “Go and write a movie script set in a bombed-out, nightmare city after the war, with the black market and all that. He just wrote a rough-draft sketch for the movie, and Carol did the rest of it. There’s an example of a producer being a producer. Carol deserves much more credit than people give him. Graham wrote the novel after the movie was made. Also, he conceived the character as one of those burnt-out cases, one of the Graham Greene empty men, which was not my vision of him at all.
HJ: Maybe that’s why Selznick thought of Noël Coward for the character that Greene wrote.
OW: Maybe. But I said, “No, he has to be fascinating. You must understand why he’s got this city in his hand.” And Carol took a flyer on that idea and changed the character completely. Greene’s Harry Lime was nothing like the way I played it. Every word that I spoke, all my dialogue, I wrote, because Carol wanted me to. Including the “cuckoo clock.”
HJ: I remember that verbatim. Lime says, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they have five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”
OW: I have to admit
that it’s unfair, because the cuckoo clock is made in the Schwarzwald, which is not in Switzerland at all! And I knew it when I wrote the line! And did the Swiss send me letters!
HJ: You have a generation of Swiss hating you because of that.
OW: But pretending to laugh. You know how the Swiss laugh, when they want to show they have a sense of humor? It’s like the Swedes. They go, “Ho ho ho. Ho ho—your joke about the cuckoo clock. You know, the cuckoo clock is not made in Switzerland.” I say, “I know, I know.” It was as misleading a statement as has ever been made for a laugh in a movie. I came to Carol the morning we shot it and said, “How about this?” And he said, “Yes! And so we did it.”
HJ: Greene has script credit. Did he give you any problems about your writing your lines?
OW: No. Because he didn’t take the movie seriously. It wasn’t a “Graham Greene” work. He gave me a line that I was supposed to say from atop the Wiener Riesenrad, the Ferris wheel: “Look at those people down there—they look like ants.” Well, that’s about as clichéd as you can get.
HJ: So how much of The Third Man is Korda, and how much is Reed?
OW: It’s full of ideas that everybody thought up on the set. Because Carol was the kind of person who didn’t feel threatened by ideas from other people. A wonderful director. I really worshipped him.
HJ: How was The Third Man received?
OW: In Europe, the picture was a hundred times bigger than it was here. It was the biggest hit since the war. It corresponded to something the Europeans could understand in a way the Americans didn’t. The Europeans had been through hell, the war, the cynicism, the black market, all that. Harry Lime represented their past, in a way, the dark side of them. Yet attractive, you know.
You cannot imagine what it was, a kind of mania. When I came into a restaurant, the people went crazy. At the hotel I was staying in, police had to come to quiet the fans. It was my one moment of being a superstar, a traffic-stopping superstar. The best part ever written for an actor. Had I not been trying to finish Othello, I could have made a career out of that picture. From all the offers I got. But by the time I finished Othello, the fever was over, you see.
My Lunches with Orson Page 15