My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  HJ: Wolfit was Sir in The Dresser, [Ronald] Harwood’s play. But Harwood was actually his dresser.

  OW: You’d have to pretend to be homosexual to get ahead. Either be queer or act like you were queer. Larry kind of did that.

  HJ: And you think it was a political move.

  OW: Absolutely.

  HJ: Richardson was certainly not homosexual.

  OW: Well, you see, they didn’t really take to him until his old age. Not when he was at the Old Vic. Not until he did his great hit, Dangerous Corner, written by [J. B.] Priestley. He was one of the very few straight actors flying the flag for the heteros. As was Jack Hawkins. I wanted Hawkins to play Iago for me in the theater.

  HJ: That was in ’51? When you were Othello?

  OW: Yeah. And I would have had him. Jack would have loved to do Iago, as anybody would. But Larry didn’t want him.

  HJ: Because he was straight?

  OW: It was Larry’s theater, and the leading actors had to be approved by him. So I had to use [Peter] Finch.

  HJ: He was straight.

  OW: But he was fucking Vivien.

  HJ: Did Larry know that?

  OW: He knew it, sure. He wanted to go away on a yachting trip with Vivie, and keep Finch busy on the London stage. And Finch was a wonderful Iago. But not as good as Hawkins would have been. He played him as eaten up with bitterness. I’d rather play Iago than any part in Shakespeare, but I’m not built for Iago. That’s the part, though. Not Othello. You know, everything Iago says is in prose, and everything Othello says is in poetry. Now, look at the advantage that gives the actor right there. And—did I tell you this? [Henry] Irving and [Edwin] Booth played Othello on alternate nights in London. One night Iago, one night Othello. Booth was famous for his Iago. So they expected him to steal it. Then Irving did the same thing. Each of them stole the play as Iago. Stole it, no matter which one played it. But you need great, big actors like that.

  HJ: I saw the film version of the The Dresser last night. At one point, Wolfit or Sir, says, “Lear is the greatest tragic part of all time.”

  OW: Of course. The Dresser is a parody of Lear. The dresser is the fool—

  HJ: Oh, my God. You know, I never even got that. I feel stupid.

  OW: It’s a little clumsy, but that’s what it is. The writer, Harwood, is trying to say a lot more than he needed to say to make a very good vehicle play. You mustn’t look too closely at it. But that’s what it is.

  HJ: Albert Finney is magnificent.

  OW: Stick a dagger in me! I tried so hard to get the rights to that play. You’ve ruined my lunch.

  HJ: You’ll be even more upset when you see it, because you’ll think about what you could have done with it.

  OW: I have no intention of seeing it. I know it’ll be good, and I know Finney will be great in it—that’s why I won’t see it. Why should I make myself sick? If I had any hope that it was bad, I’d go. Do you know how I screwed it up? I had the idea of having the dresser played by Michael Caine, not Tom Courtenay. I thought Michael would be something. Instead of Courtenay’s flagrant queen performance. But Courtenay had a kind of lock on the property. And that’s how come I lost it.

  HJ: The money guy who put it together was a friend of mine. I remember, he said, “It has to be Courtenay.” Because he played the role on the stage.

  OW: If only I had said, “Courtenay is all right with me,” I might have got it. Courtenay was a friend of mine. But I was so keen on it being Michael Caine, because I don’t think anybody had any idea how good that play would be if it were not played the way Courtenay plays it. If it had the kind of richness and comedy and warmth, furious tenderness mixed with bitchiness that Michael would have brought to it. Because he’s maybe the best actor on the screen now, he’s so good. I’m sure Finney is great as Sir, but that part should have been done by any one of a number of actors who are the right age, and don’t have to act it. It would have been wonderful with Richardson. Can you imagine Michael Caine and Richardson in that thing? And it would have been a great way for Richardson to go out, you know. Because he never made it in Shakespeare, except as Falstaff, which is written in prose. It would have blown the roof off. It would have broken your heart! There wouldn’t have been that slightly mean feeling that you get.

  HJ: I thought you didn’t see it. Oh, you’ve seen clips from it, you said.

  OW: Long clips.

  HJ: What I thought was wrong with the movie was that Finney was too good playing Sir playing Lear. He couldn’t resist grabbing you, when he’s supposed to be the epitome of every bad actor’s need for the audience.

  OW: Just like Larry was too good as The Entertainer. But, you see, I didn’t read it as a play about a bad actor. Sir had to go on tour because he wasn’t queer, you know. But The Dresser absolutely annihilates any possibility of my doing my movie, which is about a very different kind of actor. They wouldn’t like it as much.

  HJ: It doesn’t annihilate it, Orson. As you say, it’s completely different. Yours is an Ameri—

  OW: No, in mine, Sir is not American. He’s Irish. It was based on [Anew] McMaster, who was the most beautiful man who ever lived. He looked like a god! He had blond hair, and he had the most marvelous voice you ever heard in your life! McMaster really was gay. So I couldn’t play him. I could only direct it. And when he was about twenty-three years old, he got panned in the West End, went back to Ireland, and played pinups—little platforms built in church halls, and so on—for the rest of his life.

  HJ: So he didn’t tour because he was straight, he toured because his feelings had been hurt on the stage in Lon—

  OW: And each year he could go to fewer and fewer places, because he would have fucked more and more choirboys. So his tour was increasingly reduced. And then he would play four or six weeks in Dublin. He played Othello with nothing but a little G-string. Mac Liammóir, who was his brother-in-law—

  HJ: Mac Liammóir was married to his sister?

  OW: His sister was a bull dyke. And these two wild queens were known in Dublin as Sodom and Gomorrah. I beg your pardon, I ruined that joke. Sodom and Begorra.

  HJ: I’ve heard about Mac Liammóir all my life. I never heard of McMaster.

  OW: Nobody heard of McMaster, nobody, ’cause he stayed in the smalls of Ireland. And he had all these famous people who worked with him at one time or another, including [Harold] Pinter, who was his stage manager. And when he died, Pinter wrote a book about him. I would love to get a copy. I’ve never met Pinter. I saw him at the guild hall this last time when I was speaking. And he was near, and I wanted to go up to him, but no way could I push my way past His Royal Highness and say, “Mr. Pinter, how can I get a copy of your book?”

  19. “Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl!”

  In which Orson argues that Cooper and Humphrey Bogart are stars, not actors, and goes on to explain the difference. Bogart thought Casablanca was the worst picture he ever did while it was in production.

  * * *

  HENRY JAGLOM: Is Bogart as good as I think he is?

  ORSON WELLES: No. Not nearly as good as you believe. Bogart was a second-rate actor. Really a second-rate actor. He was a fascinating personality who captured the imagination of the world, but he never gave a good performance in his life. Only satisfactory. Just listen to a reading of any line of his.

  HJ: What about The Caine Mutiny?

  OW: I saw Lloyd Nolan play it on the stage. He was hair-raising. He made Bogart look sick. There’s no comparison. Bogart in the thirties did the worst thing with Bette Davis, when he had that Irish accent, that I’ve ever seen anybody do.

  HJ: I think that was Dark Victory. To me, he gives the perfect performance in Casablanca. And he was good in In a Lonely Place.

  OW: Oh, come on, he had that little lisp. Bogart was a well-educated, upper-class American trying to be tough. You didn’t believe him as a tough guy. Anybody who knew him as I did …

  HJ: Do you always have to add “as I did”?

  OW: I kne
w him in the theater, before he went to Hollywood as just another out-of-work leading man. We were so glad he got a job, you know.

  HJ: You didn’t like him in The Petrified Forest?

  OW: Well, I didn’t hate him. I was glad he got by with it, but Warner Brothers had five tough-guy actors who could’ve done it just as well.

  HJ: They had that horrible guy they offered Casablanca to. George Raft.

  OW: Yeah, he was a terrible actor, too. What’s interesting is that George Raft knew he was the world’s worst actor. He told me that all the time. He’d say, “I’m just lucky, you know. I can’t say a line.”

  HJ: I know you love Gary Cooper, but to me, he was just a very pretty George Raft. All I see is a man stumbling over his lines, trying to remember what’s going on. But you’re queer for him.

  OW: I am. Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl! And you love Bogie. Neither one of them were much good. But we’re in love with ’em.

  HJ: And yet, you tell me Gary Cooper is great, and …

  OW: Well, no, just that he’s a great movie star, a great movie creation. That’s the thing about a movie star. We really don’t judge them as actors. They’re the creatures that we fell in love with at a certain time. And that has to do with who we want to have as our heroes. It’s absolutely impossible to have a serious critical discussion about enthusiasms for movie stars. Because a movie star is an animal separate from acting. Sometimes, he or she is a great actor. Sometimes a third-rate one. But the star is something that you fall in love with …

  HJ: We don’t have movie stars like that these days. I agree Bogart was lousy in Dark Victory.

  OW: Dark Victory was the first Broadway play that I lit.

  HJ: Lit? I didn’t know you did lighting. You were a lighting director?

  OW: That’s why Gregg Toland wanted to do Kane, because he had seen my lighting and—

  HJ: You always gave Toland the credit for lighting Kane, for being the greatest lighting director ever.

  OW: Yes. But I lit it.

  HJ: All right, but you have to admit Bogart is phenomenally good in The Maltese Falcon.

  OW: Somehow we always get back to Bogart. No, for me, [Sydney] Greenstreet is the great performance. I had seen Greenstreet all my life in the theater. He was the most extraordinary supporting actor in the Theatre Guild. A short, little tubby man just right for small drama. Then, in The Maltese Falcon I suddenly saw this gigantic screen-filling personality, and from then on, for the rest of his career, he was wonderful in every part he did. I adored him as a person. Adorable. Adorable man.

  HJ: What about that movie with [Lauren] Bacall, her first movie? To Have and Have Not?

  OW: It’s a wonderful Hemingway story that they screwed up badly. So ridiculous compared to the story.

  HJ: The hurricane one was Key Largo, wasn’t it?

  OW: I like that movie better.

  HJ: Do you have that in the theater, too, stars who don’t necessarily act?

  OW: Oh, yes. The Lunts. The last play they did was so embarrassing I didn’t know where to look. When they were good, they were—you saw The Visit?

  HJ: Yes.

  OW: They were among the greatest actors I’ve ever seen in my life. Truly, truly. They were unbelievable.

  HJ: In what way? I wish I could understand.

  OW: It was like having roses thrown at you. But the Lunts got too old. They were sour toward the end. They got bad. Actors either get better or worse as they get old.

  HJ: And while we’re talking about this, you’re not crazy about Ingrid Bergman.

  OW: No, she’s not an actress. Just barely able to get through a scene.

  HJ: But when she and Bogart get together in Casablanca—

  OW: I admired Casablanca very much. I thought it was a very well put-together piece of Schwarmerei, with just the right measure of every ingredient and all that crap, and of course, tremendous luck, because they were making it up as they went along. They were playing it not knowing how it was going to end. They didn’t know who she was going to end up with, or why. And all of them wanted out. Bogart used to tell me, “I’m in the worst picture I’ve ever been in.”

  HJ: You liked him personally?

  OW: Very much. And once he made it in movies, I saw he was a real star. Ingrid Bergman, too. And when you start to dissect a real star, one person will say they can act, another person will say they can’t. What is indelible is the quality of stardom. And whether it’s acting or not is a useless argument. Because the star thing is a different animal. It breaks all the rules.

  HJ: Are you saying Bogart never took himself seriously as an actor?

  OW: I think Bogart thought he was as good as anybody around.

  HJ: And he was a decent man?

  OW: I wouldn’t say decent. He was a brave man. He was amusing and original. Very opinionated, with very dumb opinions and not very well read and pretending to be. You know, a lot of people who aren’t interesting on the screen were very bright. Paul Henreid is very bright. He was supposed to be the star of Casablanca. The antifascist hero. Bogart was the second guy. The fellow who owned the restaurant, you see. But Casablanca ended Henreid’s career.

  HJ: Because everybody remembers Bogart, Bergman—and oh yeah, that other guy. After that movie, Henreid played a supporting character for the rest of his life.

  OW: You know the mean joke played on him by Walter Slezak, and a bunch of other actors on a subsequent movie? Henreid is sitting there, in his chair, waiting between takes. And the other actors get into a conversation—that he can hear—saying: “It was Ralph Bellamy in Casablanca. “No, no, it was…”

  HJ: Who directed Casablanca? Michael Curtiz?

  OW: No idea about dialogue, but a very, very good visual sense. Very Hungarian. You can’t imagine how Hungarian he was.

  HJ: Jewish, I’m sure.

  OW: No, Hungarian. Real Hungarian. One of the stories about him was when they had an extra call with some blacks in a group, he says, “All the whites over here and all the niggers over there.” There was a terrible silence and the assistant director says to the director in a low voice, “Mr. Curtiz … you say ‘all the Negroes or you say colored.’ So Curtiz says, “All right, all the colored niggers over there.” Tracy told me that story. He was on the picture.

  HJ: What’s handled so well in Casablanca are those big scenes in the casino where all the French are milling about and the Germans come in.

  OW: Awfully well done. Curtiz used to be an assistant to Max Reinhardt, so he knew what he was doing.

  HJ: Did Reinhardt deserve the reputation that he enjoyed in Europe?

  OW: He deserved it. I regarded Reinhardt with awe. He was a great, great director. A great master of spectacle as well as intimate comedy. He could do anything. I saw his production of Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet with Elisabeth Bergner, who was superb.

  HJ: You saw Romeo and Juliet with Elisabeth Bergner? Oh, my God!

  OW: My father took me, as a child. I also saw an [Arthur] Schnitzler comedy that Reinhardt did in a small theater in Vienna. Marvelous performances. Wonderful.

  HJ: But was he as great a force as you say?

  OW: You can’t imagine. Nobody, before or since, has ever had such a commanding role in the theater in as many countries at once. He had four or five theaters he ran at the same time. Hugely successful, The Miracle made a fortune.

  HJ: The Miracle?

  OW: The Miracle was a huge piece of pageantry, in which the theater was totally transformed into a cathedral. In Vienna. He collapsed the proscenium long before anybody else did. He had a theater at his castle in Salzburg, and the greatest actors in Europe would come to play there every year. Bill Dieterle was one of his assistants also. And [Ernst] Lubitsch.

  Reinhardt came to see my production of Danton’s Death when he arrived in New York. I was playing a small part, about eight lines—Saint-Just. Danton’s Death had been one of the biggest successes of his career. He did it in a sports arena with an audience of abo
ut five thousand people each night. [Vladimir] Sokoloff played Robespierre for him in Berlin and he also played it with me in New York. I was very nervous because here was a production totally unlike his, you know. Reinhardt came backstage, sat with the director, talked for a while while I waited, and then said to me, “You are the best Schauspieler in America. You must do the great parts.” Nothing about the production. So all he could do was tell me what a great actor I was.

  HJ: So he didn’t like the production.

  OW: Of course not. Couldn’t blame him.

  When he got to Hollywood, he couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he was a nobody refugee. He was lost. Probably didn’t have enough respect for the medium, either, I think. Although he had the sense to know that Mickey Rooney was one of the most talented people in Hollywood and to cast him as Puck. So this man ruling over everything in Mittel Europe had no chance in America. None of the refugees did. Only the writers, who could just sit and write. Think, what did Brecht do? What did Kurt Weill do? What did any of them do?

  HJ: Well, Weill had another career. I mean, you may not like it, but it was another career.

  OW: Not much of one until just at the end. He was out of work most of the time. So was Thomas Mann, ruling over everything. You don’t know what America was like during the war. It was the pits. The stage died. People flocked to the theaters, but the movies died, too. Because all you had to do was turn the projector on. No movie failed. But they got worse and worse. The war flattened everybody’s taste in a very curious way. The best thing they could do in the movies was some delirious piece of fabrication like Casablanca. That was the great work of art, during the whole period of the war. Nothing else.

  HJ: Why has that picture taken on such a—?

  OW: It has nothing to do with anything except Hollywood’s dream of the war. But that’s its charm. To me, it’s like The Merry Widow, which is a great work of its kind. There never was a Vienna like the one in The Merry Widow, and there never was a Casablanca like the one in Casablanca. But who gives a damn, you know? It was just commercial enough, so everybody was happy. And it had a wonderful cast of actors. But a great film? You can’t call it that. It’s not a great film. It’s just great entertainment. The person who loved it when it opened, who persuaded me to take it more seriously, was Marlene. She’s the one who said, “They’ll be showing that thirty years from now. You listen to me.” So then I had to think, and say, “I guess you’re right.”