My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  Now, after this huge European success, it comes out in America—Selznick’s version—saying: “David O. Selznick presents The Third Man. Produced by David O. Selznick.” About three of those credits.

  HJ: It was Chaplin all over again.

  OW: I took Alex and David to dinner one night in Paris, right after it opened, and Alex said, “My dear David. I have seen the American titles.” And David started to hem and haw, “Well, you know…” Alex said, “I only hope that I don’t die before you do.” David said, “What do you mean?” Alex replied, “I don’t want to think of you sneaking into the cemetery and scratching my name off my tombstone.”

  When I was up for Best Actor for The Third Man, I was nearby, in Italy, a few hours away from Cannes. Alex called me and said, “If you’ll come to Cannes, you’ll get the prize.” That’s the way it works. I said, “Why don’t I stay here and get the prize?” And he said, “If you don’t come, they’ll have to give it to Eddie Robinson, because he’s been here the whole two weeks.” I didn’t believe him. And then I talked to [Robert] Favre Le Bret, who was president of the festival in those days, who said, “Yes, you come and you’ve got it. You don’t come—” So I said, “Give it to him,” and didn’t go. And Eddie Robinson won.

  HJ: Joseph Cotten is rather amazing in The Third Man.

  OW: He was very good.

  HJ: I’ve never particularly liked him, except in Kane and Ambersons.

  OW: Shadow of a Doubt. He’s awfully good in that.

  HJ: Oh, my God! He’s great in that. I completely forgot about it.

  OW: That’s the one good Hitchcock picture made in America. Hitchcock himself said it was his best. The English ones are better than the American pictures, the very early ones, like The 39 Steps. Oh, my God, what a masterpiece. Those pictures had a little foreign charm, because we didn’t know the actors very well. But I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies. I don’t recognize the same director!

  HJ: He decided to become popular.

  OW: Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows. About the time he started to use color, he stopped looking through the camera. I saw one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen the other night. Hitchcock’s movie where Jimmy Stewart looks through the window?

  HJ: Rear Window.

  OW: Everything is stupid about it. Complete insensitivity to what a story about voyeurism could be. I’ll tell you what is astonishing. To discover that Jimmy Stewart can be a bad actor. But really bad. Even Grace Kelly is better than Jimmy, who’s overacting. He’s kind of looking to the left and giving as bad a performance as he ever gave. But, then, you see, the world was so much at Hitch’s feet that the actors just thought, “Do what he says and it’s gonna be great.”

  HJ: If you think that one is bad, there’s another terrible one with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.

  OW: Vertigo. That’s worse.

  HJ: And then the other one—what was the other one? His much praised comedy, The Trouble with Harry.

  OW: By then it was senility.

  HJ: No, it wasn’t senility—that movie came earlier.

  OW: I think he was senile a long time before he died. He was in life, you know. He kept falling asleep while you were talking to him. When I would go to Jo’s, Hitchcock would be there for dinner. I’d go because Jo was fond of him, not because he was interesting. When he first came to America, I looked him up and took him to lunch at 21.

  HJ: He must have been a different person then.

  OW: No, he wasn’t very interesting then, either. I was disappointed.

  HJ: There’s a movie I know you would hate that Jo’s in with Jennifer Jones.

  OW: Portrait of Jennie. He and I laughed at it when it was being made!

  HJ: Jennifer Jones really could not act. Would you agree with me about that?

  OW: Yes. She was hopeless. But the poor girl is nuts, you know. Something is wrong there.

  HJ: So how did you know Reed could get that kind of a performance out of Cotten?

  OW: Because I thought he was wonderful.

  HJ: From something you saw him in?

  OW: No, no. He’d been with me for years in the theater! He was a great farceur. His character was funny, and that’s Jo’s thing. He was brilliant at that! Brilliant! The problem with Jo was that he was never a romantic leading man. He was a character actor. Nothing could make him a leading man. And that’s all he played in Hollywood. He looked stiff and wooden. Uncomfortable. It wasn’t because he got bad, it was because he was doing something outside his range. And the fact that he was attractive and looked like he could play a leading man, made them think he must be one. Plus he had this big success in Philadelphia Story on Broadway, so they thought that would translate to screen. Jo’s career was made not by Citizen Kane but by Philadelphia Story. Selznick picked him up and said, “We’ll have another Cary Grant.” But nobody ever wrote him another part like that, you see. So that was his career—doing what he couldn’t do.

  HJ: Did he know that he was unsuited for this?

  OW: No. If he did, he wouldn’t tell me. And why should he—he was a success. Remember, he started as a professional football player, and then became a stage manager for Belasco, and then a radio actor. We shared this one job—on a radio show called School of the Air. It was a show for children in the morning, and it paid $32 a week. So we were both living on this—both married. Then one day we did an episode that broke us up. It was on the Olympic Games. And we had to say things like, “Let me see your javelin. It is by far the biggest in all Athens.” We couldn’t stop laughing. The word went out that we couldn’t be in the show at the same time. So that meant $32 every second week for each of us.

  I had one radio job, a show called Big Sister—God, I loved it. I was the cad. And I had this girl in the rumble seat. And the suspense was, was I gonna make her? And it went on for about three months. That’s the longest session in a rumble seat, you know. We had to do two shows, one in the morning, at ten, and one in the afternoon—for the different time zones. One day I was sitting in the barbershop, and I heard the theme song come on, and Martin Gabel was playing my part. I’d forgotten about the second show! That was the end of that job! But soon I got my own radio show and then my own theater.

  HJ: What happened to Cotten when you made it?

  OW: That was a difficult period for me, as a friend, at least, because suddenly I was making a fortune. Jo was still making those smaller salaries, and I was big stuff. I felt uncomfortable, because he hadn’t got up there with me. Here I was in a country house, with a chauffeur and a Rolls-Royce, and Jo was still in the—you know. So I helped him, a good turn that many people would have regarded as an unforgivable thing to do. But he wasn’t uncomfortable, he was delightful about it. I was the one who felt bad. So I was thrilled about Philadelphia Story, because it reduced the distance between us.

  HJ: I think it’s always harder for the one who’s moving on.

  16. “God save me from my friends.”

  In which Orson battles his reputation, talks about the importance of casting fresh faces in Kane. He explains that he never shot coverage so that the studio couldn’t recut his films, although that didn’t stop RKO from mutilating The Magnificent Ambersons.

  * * *

  HENRY JAGLOM: I just saw Othello again, in New York, in a theater, the Thalia, on the Upper West Side. The audience was standing and cheering. Kids, twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds. It’s superb. It doesn’t look dated, like so much Shakespeare does, because of the way you did it. It’s not a costume fifties movie, or a sixties movie. I know that’s why you didn’t like Brando in Julius Caesar, for instance, because it looks like a picture that was made—

  ORSON WELLES: At Metro in 1950, yeah.

  HJ: The togas, and the haircuts and the makeup were …

  OW: So Max Factor.

  HJ: Exactly. But you so rooted your Othello in some imaginary ancestral land that—

  OW: Because a f
unny thing happens in costume pictures. You sense the lunch wagon next to the set.

  HJ: You should see Othello now. I think you’d feel very good about it.

  OW: I’d rather hear about how good it is than see it.

  HJ: Right. If you saw it, you’d find things you don’t like.

  OW: I know one thing that’s no good, which is the first sequence in Venice after the crawl. I think it doesn’t have the same authority as the rest of the film. It’s because that’s where we ran out of dough. That’s the reel of “no dough.” The film is good again the minute we’re in Cyprus.

  HJ: There’s a soap opera—All My Children—do you know it? Your lady from Citizen Kane is in it.

  OW: Which one?

  HJ: The one who played Kane’s first wife, Emily, Ruth Warrick. She’s incredibly bad.

  OW: She looked the part of Emily. And I’m one of those fellows who thinks, if they look it, then you can make them act it. Particularly a small part.

  HJ: The breakfast scene, my favorite, she was wonderful in that.

  OW: She was!

  HJ: Wonderful. By the time it was all finished, the editing, and so on.

  OW: There was nothing to edit. It was just cut from shot to shot. Because after each shot I went and changed my makeup, and she changed her dress. Then we came back again, and did the next line. They’d all been rehearsed. There was nothing to monkey around with. The camera never moved. It just waited.

  HJ: Did you use master shots?

  OW: I never shot a master in my life. Gregg told me that Jack Ford never did it, so I never did it, either. I stop where I know I’m going to cut. I don’t ever shoot through it and then go back for cuts.

  HJ: You stop shooting and do the close-up?

  OW: Yeah, I stop. I don’t give myself anything to play with.

  HJ: How do you know what you’re going to need?

  OW: Because I decide what I want. In advance. In the areas I don’t decide, then I shoot all kinds of things, but I still don’t shoot a master. There’s no protection, ever.

  HJ: So the studio can’t fuck with you, cut it without you?

  OW: That’s what Jack Ford told me. What can they do? They don’t have anything to go to.

  HJ: Is that why he did it?

  OW: Sure. But of course he had a cutter. He never cut a picture himself. Never paid any attention to it. Could not give a shit.

  HJ: How long did the breakfast scene take?

  OW: Less than a day. Starting in the morning. I’d say we were done about three in the afternoon. Because there were no light changes, you see? Or only very slight ones. Ruth was a wonderful girl. And when she was young, she was quite sexy.

  HJ: I didn’t see that in her. In Kane you didn’t emphasize it at all.

  OW: No. Nor did I notice it. Only a couple years later when she came and visited me on the set.

  HJ: You never noticed she was attractive when you were working together?

  OW: I never allow myself to notice any of that.

  HJ: Smart, yeah. That’s not the time to let yourself be distracted.

  OW: No. Particularly not if you’re, by accident, successful. Because then everybody hates you. All the other girls, and their friends.

  HJ: Dorothy Comingore, another fresh face, was so great as Susan Alexander, Kane’s mistress and second wife, the one based on Marion Davies. How did you find her?

  OW: Chaplin, you know, told me about her.

  HJ: What was she in?

  OW: Nothing. He just found her. He’d seen her in some little play or something. Her singing “Come and Go” was a real fabricated performance, because we sprayed her throat before every take with some dangerous chemical that made her hoarse. Her performance as the younger version of the wife was herself. The older one was chemical. That scene with her singing in the nightclub was the first shot I ever made in a movie. That’s what we began with.

  HJ: That’s the first thing you shot? When she was supposed to be older, and her throat was sprayed?

  OW: Yes, we began with that. Because we had the nightclub set which had been built for some B movie. So we pretended I was shooting tests, practicing how to make movies, for ten or twelve days.

  HJ: That’s great. And you learned everything you needed to know.

  OW: Yeah.

  HJ: And how much of that did you use, actually?

  OW: Everything. We were really shooting the movie. It was a trick. We weren’t testing anything. It was Gregg’s idea. But I made one mistake. I was stuck with one terrible piece of casting that broke my heart, because none of the faces in the movie had ever been seen before on a screen. But in that nightclub scene they gave me a waiter from New York who had been seen in every movie for twenty years, completely ruining my dream of total …

  HJ: I can’t even remember his face.

  OW: Oh, you wouldn’t. But if you’d been going to movies at that time, you would have recognized him. He was the waiter, you know?

  HJ: RKO’s waiter.

  OW: No, not just RKO’s, he was everybody’s waiter.

  HJ: So what happened to Comingore?

  OW: For two or three years she just refused everything, waiting for another Susan Alexander. Well, you know, those parts don’t come along so often.

  HJ: God, in a way, it’s the worst thing that can happen, to get that at the beginning of your career, isn’t it?

  OW: It’s the old, old problem in show business. Once you’re a hit as the Irish busboy, nobody wants you as the gangster. Everybody loved her in Kane, so she was in a good situation. She had that pathos that could turn into bitchiness because it came from insecurity and vulgarity. She ended up, you know, being arrested for prostitution. She was picking people up in bars. It was tragic.

  HJ: I recall she was married to screenwriter Richard Collins, who told HUAC he divorced her because she refused to name names. She was blacklisted in 1951, which ended her career.

  OW: Speaking of Ruth Warrick, yesterday I was being interviewed by David Hartman, by satellite. For Good Morning America. With her and Paul Stewart. God save me from my friends.

  HJ: Stewart played Raymond, the slippery valet in Kane, yes?

  OW: Yes, and he’s telling Hartman how much the picture cost. He’s got it wrong, of course. And sounding as though he were associate producer, whereas he was brought in for a week’s work as an actor. And Ruth Warrick is saying that I’m the greatest thing since Jesus, and that I walk on water, and all of this. And I’m trying to shut her up, because I know she’s wrecking the show by going on and on. And after we’re off the air she gives me her book, in which she writes all these wonderful things about me, like, “He was terrific to all the actors. And we all loved him—we were a family,” and all that. “Except for Dorothy Comingore. He was terrible to her.” So I said, “This is all invented.” Because I hardly knew Ruth Warrick, but Comingore and I were great friends. And according to Ruth I was cruel to her. Now, this is one actress in a movie talking about another. It gets worse. A little later, she writes that I abandoned Ambersons, which I was editing, and went off to South America to make Journey into Fear, which Ruth was in, and It’s All True. And that I had already begun that wastefulness which … And then she says, “Poor Orson.” In fact, I went to South America right after Pearl Harbor, because Nelson Rockefeller, whom Roosevelt had named head of Inter-American Affairs, sent me down there. So here was Ruth Warrick overpraising me on the show, and then giving me the book to sign! What is interesting about her book is that the reader is likely to think that we had a love affair. She’s practically saying it.

  I don’t know how many ways there are to direct a movie, but let’s say there are a hundred. And mine happens to be, I direct a movie by making love to everybody involved in it. I’m not running for office—I don’t want to be popular with the crew—but I make love to every actor. Then, when they’re no longer working for me, it’s like they’ve been abandoned, like I’ve betrayed them.

  HJ: Do those last reels of Ambersons exist
anywhere, do you think?

  OW: Somebody told me the big scene in the boardinghouse with Aggie [Moorehead] and Jo has been found, but I’ve never tracked it down.

  HJ: How many reels were missing?

  OW: It would’ve played another fifteen minutes.

  HJ: You know the guy who books the Z Channel is trying to get permission to show Ambersons without all that nonsense RKO stuck on to the end of the film.

  OW: We had shot one complete reel—the party scene, without a cut. RKO chopped two minutes out of the middle of it, because it didn’t further the plot. This little thing about olives, and people not being used to them. A cut in the middle of a one-reel shot. It’s a very skillful cut—it plays all right—but the scene was much better before. And, of course, nobody can find the two minutes they cut out of the reel. It’s a bit of sour grapes, because I did it before Hitchcock did it in Rope. The first reel in the history of movies made without a cut was in Ambersons.

  HJ: And that’s the only change, besides all the stuff at the end?

  OW: No, there’re other changes, but very few in the beginning and the middle. It’s only when the story begins to get too dark. I don’t know when I found the letter sent me by George Schaefer, who’d been to the preview in Pomona where they laughed at Agnes Moorehead. Half of her scene is cut forever, because the audience fell on the floor laughing.

  HJ: That was the test in front of the Esther Williams audience in the Valley.

  OW: And Schaefer said, “We really have to make it more commercial.” Poor guy—he was in a terrible spot.

  HJ: So they added their new ending.

  OW: By the way, somebody’s published a new Kane book and sent it to me, with a lot of essays and criticism written around the time it was being released. I realized that I’ve misquoted O’Hara all my life. He didn’t say, “This is the best picture ever made. And the best picture that will ever be made.”

  HJ: Really?

  OW: Yeah. He didn’t say anything as good as that. I made it better. What he said was, “This is the best picture ever made, and Orson Welles is the best actor alive.” I know why I changed it. Because he said the other to a lot of people at the Stork Club in my presence. So I pasted it onto the review, the way one does.