17. “I can make a case for all the points of view.”
In which Orson waits on Jack Nicholson, looks for financing for Lear, explains why he dropped his knee-jerk contempt for Nazi collaborators and became friends with Oswald Mosley, and recalls that General Charles de Gaulle was a brave but pompous fool.
* * *
HENRY JAGLOM: I spoke to Jack about The Big Brass Ring. He was up in Aspen with Bob Rafelson. I said, “Have you read it yet?” And he said, “No.” But with great cheeriness, despite not adding anything more; just, “No.” It’s clearly on the agenda, though. I just don’t know when he’s going to read it. I have my fingers crossed. I’m worried about Jack. He’s the last one. Even if he says, “Yes,” he won’t want to reduce his asking price … Any news on Lear?
ORSON WELLES: Just to keep you up on all the different situations, we now have the French. This fellow sends me almost daily wires, saying, “If wanted, we’ll give you a million dollars of our money, and then go into an arrangement with other people, and so on, anything you want to do.” A million dollars! And begging me to take it. Begging me, wiring me.
HJ: Well, you were awarded the Légion d’honneur, after all. Did you see [James] Cagney receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronnie?
OW: He didn’t even seem pleased, you know? He looked like he’d been dragged screaming, out of bed. Very hard to have an award in a republic. A decoration really needs a king. It’s like a title. You need a fellow up there with a crown on. The only reason the Légion d’honneur works is that it’s old. It goes back to Napoleon. What was so smart about Napoleon was that he realized the necessity of creating a new aristocracy. And he set up the Légion d’honneur for that. He knew his Frenchmen.
HJ: You and Jerry Lewis are the two American film stars who the French have given this award to. I remember when you said, “They give you good reviews and then you see what else they like and it takes away all the value of it.” They’ve given Jerry Lewis every award you can imagine.
OW: Yes, every award that I’ve gotten. And he got all the publicity. I got no publicity at all. But he didn’t get his award from the president.
HJ: It’s probably your Légion d’honneur, probably, that has finally awakened the French to your Lear.
OW: Yes. And for Lear—they want to be the patrons that make it happen. They say they’ll do anything. I said, “There’re two parts for French actors: the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, but only if they speak English. That’s all. The grips—head grip, head cameraman, sound, all of that—my choice. Any nationality.” They said, “Fine, we don’t care.”
HJ: So what’s stopping you from saying yes?
OW: The fact that I don’t know all that goes with “yes.” So I keep saying to them, “Wonderful! Delighted! We’re willing to let you be the central producing outfit, but please remember that you have to agree in return that none of our key people are French, unless we want them to be,” and so on.
We also have another firm offer of $350,000 from Italy. Of course that doesn’t begin to make the picture, but it’s a terribly good cornerstone. Because it’s government money set aside for the Commedia dell’Arte. If they don’t spend it, the government takes it back. And the reason why it’s so great is that we get it in dollars, and we get the tremendous exchange advantage against the lira.
HJ: So the total figure that you’d be most comfortable with is what? Can you give me that?
OW: Supposing that, as I think, the most efficient and cheapest way to make the picture, is in Italy or France, bringing in the whole English cast. It is three million four. Something like that. That includes money for contingencies. If you take out contingencies, it’s a lot less. Nobody gets rich, but that isn’t the point.
HJ: Right. At Cannes, everybody hears “Welles-Lear” and they go crazy. If I knew who to talk to, I know I could get a small fortune from China. It seems to me that the way to complete the picture would be to have an American nontheatrical sale in advance, cable and so on. And then put that together with a combination of Italy, France, and Germany, and maybe Spain, and maybe somebody else. But if Spain is only putting in fifty or seventy-five thousand, no opening night in Madrid. If Germany puts up a million dollars, and they want a big thing at the Berlin Film Festival, why not?
OW: A festival is not an opening.
HJ: Right. We reserve the opening for whoever gives us the most money.
OW: That’s a very important distinction.
HJ: So, we should put all the energy now into getting Lear.
OW: My energy is being put into it. There’s nothing I can do now, except react warmly to these people as they come in. I think we have to have every kind of gun cocked and ready now, so that one of them will go off. Otherwise, we’ll just go on talking forever.
HJ: Not just one, we need three or four of them to go off, so we can get to three and a half million dollars.
OW: The French—there’s no doubt that the French—
HJ: Also, there’s no reason not to film in France. There are ideal locations.
OW: That is the great argument against it for me. That’s why I wish we didn’t have the French money. I don’t want France to be so attractive. Because living in Paris is so expensive. Whereas if we shoot in Cinecittà, we don’t have to live in Rome. Here is Rome, and here is Cinecittà—and we can live out here, outside of Rome. We just go to the studio and back. I dread spending four or five months of my life living in Paris and driving through the traffic to work and back. The thought of it gives me the willies, because it’s forty-five minutes of hell before you get to work and forty-five more for the return. And where would the actors stay? We know what the hotel bills will be for everybody. You can’t live in Paris for less than two thousand a week. So the actors will object, saying they’re slaves. They’ll get so angry that I won’t be able to work with them. They’ll work for five hundred a week—
HJ: But they won’t put up with cheap accommodations.
OW: I see the whole budget going to hell. You blow it on hotels alone; that’s what scares me. There’s no use saying we’ll get great prices, and Jacques Lang loves me and all that.
HJ: You’re absolutely right. Jacques Lang may be the Minister of Culture and [François] Mitterand’s favorite puppy, but even he can’t do anything about the prices of hotels.
OW: That’s why I have always been nervous about it, but they have been battering the door down. And there’s no place else in France to shoot! There’s a big studio in Nice, but it’s built right next to the airport.
HJ: Which makes it impossible to record sound.
OW: The planes fly in every two minutes. You couldn’t get through one Shakespeare speech.
HJ: Oh, you mean the Victorine studio? They built it knowing the airport was there? Knowing—
OW: No, Victorine is a very old studio. It was built years before there was an airport, or when the airport was very little—no more than four flights a day. And now, of course, people fly direct from New York to Nice. It’s a great location, and you can make wonderful deals, but only if you’re making a silent picture. Or else dub it afterwards which, if you do that with Shakespeare, it comes off as totally fake. You simply cannot do it.
HJ: Cinecittà is fine.
OW: Well, it’s the best bargain in the world, and the best studio in the world. Built by Mussolini, you know.
HJ: The French deal doesn’t prohibit shooting in Cinecittà, does it? Or it’s not clear?
OW: We’re trying to get that clear. I think they’re hurt, because it seems to imply that Italy is better suited for movie production. And the Italians, who always despised me, are now for some reason particularly anxious to be nice. They want to give me the highest award known to Italy. Whatever that is. The something or other, that makes me an honorary citizen of Rome.
HJ: It could still be a French movie, because it’ll open in France.
OW: Maybe we could just get on the train from Rome to France, and shoot there fo
r three weeks, just to get that French money, even though it will cost a little more. But you see how all these things are interdependent. You can’t nail down one without having the others in hand. I think I’ll make another phone call to France, to see how everything stands. I’ve made all my conditions as tough as I could, on the theory that there’s no use going ahead and then being disappointed afterwards.
HJ: I sent you something about the reorganization of Gaumont. They’re saying they want to be the home for all the great international directors.
OW: Well, they were talking about that four years ago, in this restaurant. I say, “Let’s see some action.” They told me once, “We are aristocrats. We simply don’t breathe the same air.” It’s impossible to talk to somebody like that. “We don’t breathe the same air”! Another thing is a French deal would have to be in the Common Market. The Common Market, in my opinion, is about to collapse. I think, seriously. Thanks to Mrs. Thatcher and—
HJ: You’re talking about two different—
OW: No, I’m not. I’m telling you the different things that I know.
HJ: Well, we’ll hear from Paris within a week.
OW: We’ll proceed with them or without them. In the meantime, we keep anybody who is cooking warm on the stove. I don’t care who it is. Even the Chinese—we can do it in Peking. And we’d certainly have all the right equipment, and serious assistants.
HJ: You know, I’m going to meet the Chinese representatives in Berlin.
OW: Let’s make a deal.
HJ: Who said to me that Lear is one of the few things they know they want. “We only charge twenty-five cents a ticket. But we have a billion people.” He actually said, “Rear.”
OW: Rear. King Rear! And his daughter Legan.
HJ: I don’t know what they can give us. I’ll listen.
OW: Who cares?
HJ: Huh?
OW: Who cares? Just to have it in Red China.
(The check arrives.)
HJ: Here, I’ve got this.
OW: No, you don’t.
HJ: That means I’m next.
OW: What? What about your neck?
HJ: I said, “That means I’m next.”
OW: I thought you said, “That means my neck.” You know, despite all of the telegrams from France, I would be happier with the Germans in the driver’s seat than the French. I just don’t trust that whole Lang situation.
HJ: You think the French offer is gonna disappear?
OW: I think the government is gonna keep on cutting Lang’s funds for the arts. Not the way Reagan is—
HJ: You mean for ideological reasons …
OW: But out of economic necessity. In other words, we’re gonna find ourselves enmeshed in French politics, in situations we can’t resolve. Whereas, Italy has somehow pulled itself out of near bankruptcy, and now they’re in great shape again, making movies like mad! I would be much happier if this could be done without the French.
HJ: Really? Because I would love France to be involved. The film would get a real boost from opening in Paris as a French co-production.
OW: It’ll still get that. I’m just scared. Because you don’t make arrangements with the French. But the Italians, you can always make an arrangement with them. In other words, if I went in with dollars into Cinecittà—oh, boy. On the other hand, I must tell you an interesting thing about Italy. It’s a country that has never had an old star. Never a Wallace Beery. Never. The Italians don’t support anybody over forty years old. They’re like America. Everything must be about young people. So they may change their minds about a movie about an old man. Lear is about old age. And France is actually the only country in the world where old, ugly actors are stars. Everywhere else, they have to become supporting players.
HJ: Raimu.
OW: Yeah, Raimu. And that awful actor that they all love. Michel Simon. Jean Gabin, even when he was too feeble to move. He was wonderful doing nothing. There’s another one, earlier than him. Baur—Harry Baur.
HJ: Was Harry Baur any good?
OW: He had four eyebrows over each eye, and he could work each of them separately.
HJ: He was killed by the Nazis, right? In a concentration camp?
OW: He came to some bad end, yeah—because he always talked about how he was Jewish—so, of course, they grabbed him quick. The French police did it all. The Germans didn’t have to lift a finger. Horrifying, when you realize that. The French made a lot of movies during the war. The Germans, too. And a lot of French actors who would rather not be reminded of it went to Berlin.
When I visited France and Italy right after the war, I was full of that righteous antifascist feeling that we all had in the safety of America. I didn’t want to meet the people who had, if not exactly collaborated, certainly had not fought the Nazis. I was too prissy. And then, as I began to learn more about Europe under the occupation, and what it was like, and to compare it to us, I became less prissy about it. Because the people who were defending their children and their lives were in a different situation from the people who were defending their swimming pools and their contracts at Metro. They weren’t brave enough to be partisans, but they hadn’t sent any Jews to Auschwitz, either. I wasn’t gonna be the one from America to tell them they were wrong. Of course, I never forgave the people who sent Jews to the camps. But I did get so I could forgive the people who entertained the German troops. What else were they gonna do—not entertain them? Not entertain, and go where? If you had no group, if you were a group of one, what could you do? I can make a case for all the points of view.
HJ: [Maurice] Chevalier entertained the German troops …
OW: That was mild. He was really very little tainted compared to the people who made propaganda movies. I don’t think what he did was noble, I don’t like him for it, but I wouldn’t say, “I won’t talk to Chevalier because he—” That changed in me. And then I found myself getting to know well so many famous villains from my earlier time. You know, I spent a long, four-day weekend at a country house in England, and realized only at the end of the weekend that this man I’d become so fond of and interested in was Oswald Mosley.
HJ: Did you know he used to be a leftist, a Fabian? Then he went all the way over to the right and founded the British Union of Fascists.
OW: A complicated thing. Louis Aragon was also at that house party.
HJ: He didn’t mind being there with Mosley? He fought in the Resistance and was a staunch Communist his whole life.
OW: No. He just said Mosley was a damn fool.
HJ: A lot of the French fled, but some stayed and fought.
OW: Very few, very few.
HJ: There were two Frances, though. There was Vichy, and there was the group of French who were fighting.
OW: Not in Paris. They were all in the Southwest. An old radical stronghold.
HJ: Except that, if it’s true, in all of Europe—aside from Denmark—proportionately, only one-quarter—“only” is a tragic number—of French Jews died. So the other three-quarters survived because of individual Frenchmen who performed great acts of courage.
OW: There were such acts in Belgium and Holland as well. And Italy—enormous quantities. You really can’t give the French credit for that, any more than the other European countries.
HJ: I always have thought of it as two Frances, somehow, occupied and unoccupied.
OW: There’s one France—and in a certain mood, collaboration happens.
HJ: What about the underground and the Resistance? There was Jean Moulin, as well as—
OW: I used to write them a newsletter every two weeks during the war. To the Free French, and to the underground. So I really know a lot about them. Very few of the French resisted. We didn’t hear a moment of courage from the Communists until the invasion of Russia. And then they were as harmful to the underground as they were helpful. Because they were divisive. When the Freemasons and the Catholics were fighting side by side, the Communists wouldn’t stand for it, and turned them against each other. It w
as only by the end of 1941, when Hitler was bogged down in Russia, and it was clear to the entire world that he hadn’t a chance in hell. It was then that you saw these brave movements. Not just in France; I’m talking all over the place. What was surprising was the large number of aristocrats in the Resistance. More than the bourgeois. They weren’t thinking Nazi, fascist. It wasn’t political for them. They were thinking, “Here come the goddamn Boche again,” you know, the Germans again.
HJ: Foreigners.
OW: Not foreigners—Germans in particular. From all the old wars with the Germans.
HJ: They’re very nationalistic.
OW: No, aristocrats are never nationalistic. Because they’re all related to one another. They never have a sense of nation. That’s a typically bourgeois attitude.
HJ: But it’s nationalism. The Germans, Boche or not, are foreigners.
OW: As I was saying, generally, the French were particularly bad. They had the worst history of resistance. And think about the last fifty years of French history? Leon Blum being neutral towards Spain? That was inexcusable. From a Socialist, from the Popular Front? So shameful, really. [Pierre] Mendès France was the exception, and he lasted all of nine months. I told you what de Gaulle said about Mendès France, who was his greatest enemy. De Gaulle said he was the other great man of France—besides himself. De Gaulle was very hard to like. God, how Roosevelt hated him. Roosevelt spoke fluent French, but with an American accent, you see. Roosevelt said to him, “Je suis très heureux d’être avec vous, mon Général,” you know. And de Gaulle said, “Comment?” Constantly. He was so snobbish it was, “If you don’t speak perfectly, don’t attempt it at all.” So they had to translate what Roosevelt said. And this was when de Gaulle was hanging by a thread! He was always a pain in the ass, and he ended very badly. He had plans to run to Germany—to Germany! with his paratroopers—during the so-called revolution in ’68, which he took very seriously, too seriously. After all, the kids were just throwing stones, and all that.
My Lunches with Orson Page 17