20. “Jack, it’s Orson fucking Welles.”
In which Jack Nicholson finally responds to The Big Brass Ring. Orson voices his admiration for Jacobo Timerman, considers the paranoia of Jews, and laments the destruction of Paris by the automobile.
* * *
HENRY JAGLOM: I have good news and bad news. I’ll tell you the good news first. Jack said yes to The Big Brass Ring, but he won’t reduce his salary. I said, “Jack, it’s Orson fucking Welles. Imagine it’s 1968!” He said, “If this were 1968, I would do it for nothing. I really want to do it, but it will totally throw me into the art movie world again and I’ve been working to get out of that into the big, mainstream things, where they pay me millions and millions of dollars. If I do a picture for half that, how do I explain to the next person that I’m demanding four million?”
ORSON WELLES: I should have known better. They all said no, and each kept me waiting weeks before each “no.” And every “no” hurts me more than I let on. They always want earth-shattering from me. They want Touch of Evil from me. And I’m not ready with any Touch of Evil. They’re thinking, “Orson is old-fashioned. He’s lost it. He used to be an innovator.” But I tell you, every script I’ve ever written, if you read it before I made it into a movie, it would look straight and conservative. I’ve always felt there are three sexes: men, women, and actors. And actors combine the worst qualities of the other two. I can’t go on waiting for stars.
HJ: I’m afraid you may be right. And it’s a shocking thing to think this about my friends, you know?
OW: But that’s the way friends are, if they’re stars.
HJ: You said that from the beginning—and I didn’t believe it. I just thought everybody would be so excited at the chance. I’d like to kill the bastards.
HJ: What about Jack Lemmon?
OW: He’s old-looking.
HJ: Really? I was just thinking that he looks good. Because he’s actually not. What is he? Fifty-five?
OW: Yeah. He looks good in this restaurant, under these rosy lights. But you see him on TV—he’s always giving long interviews, he loves to talk, as we know—and he looks every minute of his age because they blast him with light, so we don’t recognize him. Fifteen years ago, Lemmon would have looked credible as a young candidate, but Kennedy changed the image of how a presidential candidate should look.
HJ: If we don’t get the response we want on Big Brass Ring, would you sell the script?
OW: Well, before I went to Europe, I started improving it, and I got a third of the way through. And my improvements were so great that I was sure that I should continue in case it should ever be made. I do still have doubts about it, but I would like to see Jack play the candidate, the guy who throws himself in front of the car running against Reagan. Jack is a great loser character, you know.
HJ: What about Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman? They are two of the greatest actors of my generation, both highly respected, and excuse me, they’re a lot better than Burt Reynolds and a lot of the others on your list.
OW: Not your friend Dusty Hoffman. No dwarfs. Besides, they’re ethnic.
HJ: They’re what?
OW: They’re ethnic.
HJ: You mean, they’re not Irish leading men? Aren’t the Irish ethnic?
OW: You know what I mean. No dark, funny-looking guys. I want an Irish leading man like Jack, or at least an all-American WASP.
HJ: Why?
OW: It’s the president of the United States. Were you born yesterday?
HJ: That’s all changed. Everyone said a Catholic couldn’t get elected president, then Kennedy got elected. Everyone said a divorced guy couldn’t get elected, and then Reagan did.
OW: This will never change. Never. You can’t do a story like this and have some Italian play that role: “Cazzo, you gotta respect-a the president, and that’s-a me.”
HJ: That’s disgusting.
OW: Oh, you want Dusty Hoffman? “Oy, vey, don’t be such a putz, kill ’em.”
HJ: You’ve got a very fifties, fucked-up idea of what looks American.
OW: You’re my bleeding heart. I was more left than you’ll ever be.
HJ: What about Paul Newman?
OW: Paul Newman would work.
HJ: Newman’s Jewish.
OW: He’s not ethnic. I don’t care if they’re Jewish; I don’t care if they’re Italian, but they can’t be ethnic. Hoffman is ethnic, Pacino is ethnic.”
HJ: So no Jews, no Italians …
OW: No. This has to be a guy from the heartland of America. Or we don’t have a movie.
HJ: The one who was totally willing to do it was De Niro, without even reading the script, and you just—
OW: Don’t try to sell me on De Niro. I don’t care how great you think he is.
HJ: He’s too ethnic also?
OW: Not just ethnic, though that’s part of it. More, it’s that the great things he does on the screen … none of them look to me like the qualities of a candidate. You’re writing off an awful lot of the country with him. My candidate is a fellow who’s got to carry Kansas. I really don’t see De Niro carrying Kansas.
HJ: OK. Here’s more news. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I had a call from Love Boat. They want you from May twenty-first until June twelfth, that’s twenty-one days. I said to them, “Well, are you going to make an offer?” “No. We want to know his availability.” I said, “Mr. Welles’s availability depends on whether you make an offer. I’m not telling him anything, honestly, until you come up with a concrete offer.” I also said, “You know, I’m sorry, I’ve never watched your program.” Complete silence. They had the main man call me, because I was dismissive of the first person. So the deal is, you fly to London—shoot in London—they then fly you to Paris—shoot in Paris for a few days—then you fly back to London. And then you board a ship to Stockholm! He said, “Have you ever been through the Kiel Canal?” I said, “No.” He said, “It’s meant to be fabulous!”
OW: Oh, boy! You’d have to pay me to go through the Kiel Canal.
HJ: He was like selling a cruise. He was a cruise director. But it’s not a heavy shooting schedule. In other words, it’s a party—that’s what it is.
OW: One big party.
HJ: I wonder what they’ll offer for that?
OW: Maximum twenty-five, probably twenty. It’s amazingly small money.
HJ: I assumed $100,000 for a big-name guest.
OW: Yes, well … Let me tell you the history of American television in a few well-chosen words. As soon as CBS and William Morris and NBC and MCA—those four—saw what television was, they made a secret pact. I don’t believe in conspiracy stories, but this one is true! Which was that nobody in a series was ever going to get anything like movie money. Nobody. So that when Henry Kissinger came on, they gave him $5,000 for one day. And even if you’re a top actor, and willing to do Love Boat—there’s always somebody—for a long time the top salary for anybody, for any length of time, in any hour show, was $7,500. That was broken by the Beatles, when [Ed] Sullivan paid them twenty-five, or something, for their first appearance on American television. But despite that, the fee has remained low all this time. You’ll find that most of the guest stars on shows like this are getting $2,500, $3,000, $3,500. And glad to get the exposure.
HJ: Why would June Allyson want to do that? Or why would—
OW: Why not? Who’s hiring her for anything else?
HJ: They ask you to go on a cruise—
OW: And they think that’s the payment. They don’t know that I can go on any cruise in the world free, if I’ll lecture, or do magic one night, and then sign autographs.
HJ: Love Boat has been on the air forever, hasn’t it?
OW: I’m unable to watch even one segment. Because I don’t like the man who plays the captain. From Mary Tyler Moore. He has a kind of New York accent that gets my hackles up. I can’t stand it! I liked old boring—what’s his name—Lou Grant. What’s his real name?
HJ: Oh, Ed Asner. He’s wonderful
on Mary Tyler Moore. I spent a very interesting evening with him and Jacobo Timerman the night before last at Michael Douglas’s house—it was a fund-raiser for El Salvador. Timerman wrote a book critical of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and now he says he can’t stand it in Israel anymore. He said, “They were spitting at me in the streets.” I said, “If you’re gonna be a conscience, you’re gonna have to suffer some of this.”
OW: Timerman is a real conscience.
HJ: What he’s lived through—jail, torture, electroshock—in Argentina where he grew up, for speaking up against the generals during the Dirty War. Now he’s a man without a country.
OW: Isn’t everybody? He’s got a country, and it’s wherever he is.
HJ: I said, “Where are you gonna live?” He said, “I’m going to see what is going on in Argentina. I want to make sure that every one of those criminals is tried.”
OW: I am really in awe of him.
HJ: At Michael’s, he was talking about how upset he was at the American Jewish leadership and the American Jewish community for supporting Reagan’s reactionary policies in Central America. Because Israel provides arms, at America’s behest, to Honduras. It was a living room full of progressive Jews, but a lot of them were very uncomfortable with being singled out. It got them worrying about anti-Semitism. And Asner did a wonderful thing. He talked about the fact that the Jews have become part of the establishment to the point where they’ve forgotten their whole liberal humanitarian tradition.
OW: They won’t speak out about Lebanon. Or Central America. You know, there are large sections of that community who don’t like the word Jew. Jewish or Jewish persuasion, or Jewish culture are fine, but not the word Jew! Don’t call a Jew a Jew. That’s really strange. And sad.
HJ: I didn’t read Timerman’s Lebanon book, so I don’t know to what extreme he went. Is it fair? Reasonable?
OW: To me it is. From my point of view, it’s saying what I would say as a non-Jew. America has missed absolutely no opportunity, not only during the Reagan administration, but in my lifetime, to render it impossible for us to be anything but the deathly enemy of all Arabs, and, of course, all Latin Americans. We can never polish that image. I don’t care how much money we pour into it.
HJ: Timerman is going to cover Central America for the New Yorker now.
OW: Nobody’s written well about Central America. Well, there’s Joan Didion. She spent seven days in Central America. Wrote a best seller. It should be called Seven Days in Central America.
HJ: Here’s Patrick [Terrail].
PATRICK TERRAIL: What’s do you call a pole with a twenty-five-million-dollar mansion? The Pope.
HJ: What?
PT: The Pope.
HJ: That’s a rather bigoted joke.
PT: It’s sweet.
OW: What it has is that it’s clean. I expected some filthy punch line.
PT: I would never tell a filthy joke to Mr. Welles. Not coming out of my mouth …
(PT exits.)
OW: You have no idea how close I am to signing for Lear. And I’ve got, I think, a deal in Mexico for The Dreamers. I don’t dare believe it—you know what it’s like. The world is too full of disappointments to celebrate these kinds of things till they happen. They’ll probably all collapse.
HJ: They won’t all collapse.
OW: I think my future is in advertising. I did Carlsberg beer in England for five years. Then they decided they could do it cheaper by getting a man who could imitate my voice. They had him for two years and I’ve been back for the last three years. I did one yesterday.
HJ: Have you seen [John] Gielgud’s ads for Old Spice?
OW: Yes. They’re not using him well at all, you know.
HJ: He plays a sort of strange butler or something.
OW: That’s because of the thing he did with Dudley Moore, Arthur. Well, they thought, if that went well with the movie, that’ll go good with Old Spice … Gielgud used to play Shakespeare as though he were dictating it to his secretary. I told him that myself.
HJ: You did?
OW: In Hamlet, when Fortinbras is marching by, it sounded particularly that way: “Witness this army … ‘Have you got that, Miss Jones?’ Such mass and charge, led by a delicate and tender prince … ‘Am I going too fast for you?’”
HJ: Funny!
OW: I’m exchanging telegrams during the next three days with the French TV guy I told you about.
HJ: And do you have a better inkling about his capacity to raise that money?
OW: If he can’t, nobody can. He has to. His job kind of depends on it. And Jacques Lang has come in on it with some government money. So let’s hope it works.
HJ: Well, I heard a story in Paris, from the people who seem to know what they’re talking about, that Mitterand has seven or eight cassettes that he puts on at night, over and over again. Five or six of them are about very complex intellectual subjects of some sort. But there are three movies, and two of them are yours—Kane and Touch of Evil.
OW: You know that the president in France is not like a president in America. He is more like a king, you know? As somebody once said, de Gaulle established a monarchy in a republic, because the president makes the decisions. When everybody said, “We don’t like that, a pyramid in the middle of the Louvre,” he said, “I like it,” and that’s the end of it. There’s a pyramid in the middle of the Louvre.
HJ: How do you feel about that pyramid?
OW: I hate it.
HJ: I’m wondering if I hate it only because I want to hold on to the past.
OW: My answer to myself, when I ask myself that question is, “Balls. It looks ridiculous!”
HJ: But maybe it’s just because we want a more traditional look.
OW: But it is a traditional look. I just don’t believe in mixing up traditional materials that way. I think if you have to have a shape there to let the light in, a box would have been less offensive. There is something assertive about that pyramid. It’s making a statement. Everybody said, “You’re gonna think the [Georges] Pompidou thing is beautiful. You just have to get used to it.” But the more you look at it, the more impossible it is. It’s a big piece of junk. But I remind myself that half of aesthetic France threatened to leave Paris when they started to build the Eiffel Tower. So maybe I’m just as reactionary. If I am, it doesn’t bother me much, though. I’m perfectly content to be reactionary—to belong to my own time.
HJ: Everybody thought the Eiffel Tower was a piece of junk. Now it’s something so beautiful—
OW: But, you see, the Eiffel Tower is marvelous because it has an historical meaning. It is the last great work of the Age of Iron.
HJ: Still, at the time, you can imagine people who wanted the vista uncluttered being—
OW: But now it’s destroyed anyway because all the good views have been ruined by the Tour Montparnasse. If you stand and look through that small Arc de Triomphe—that little miniature, which is in front of the Louvre, and look up the Champs-Élysées, you used to be able to look right through the Arc de Triomphe into blue sky. Now what you see looks like Detroit.
HJ: But I’m curious. Is taste objective or subjective?
OW: Subjective, basically. But it’s an interesting question. I remember my darling Louise de Vilmorin, who always swore that Paris was one of the ugliest cities in the world, a terrible nineteenth-century atrocity. She could only stand the things that dated from before then, and there were few enough of those. If your taste is back there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then Paris is an ugly city. The automobile did it, with all those underpasses and the highway by the Seine. Do you remember what the Seine was like when you could stroll along it with your girl? God, that was another world.
I’ve been asked to write some little thing in Paris Vogue, along with a lot of other people who don’t know anything, about why I love Paris. And I can’t think of anything to say. It should be “Why I Loved Paris.” When I could walk on the sidewalk in Paris, I loved it, but now I have to c
limb over automobiles. Taking down the Halles was the beginning of the end. Les Halles was a good building. The new one is already falling apart. It looks older than Notre Dame! The paint is peeling off it. Soon there won’t be any real Paris left, you know. Or real London or real Rome. Because a few untouchable monuments are not gonna keep a city … I think all the cities of the world are in decline. Because the idea of supporting cities has ceased to be part of world culture. We’re all moving into shopping malls …
HJ: The old concept of the city as a cultural magnet has been abandoned. And they’re overcrowded.
OW: And, of course, the traffic has ruined the sex life of the French. There’s the famous cinq à sept. You know what that is? The businessmen, when they finished at five, before they went home to their wives had a cinq à sept, which was with a mistress. Now, you can’t do that and get back home by seven. You can’t move in the city. I think architects are bums nowadays. I’m convinced of it.
HJ: I. M. Pei is a bum?
OW: A show-off, anyway. I’m very interested in architecture, and I’m absolutely persuaded that I’m right. I don’t have a moment’s doubt. Architects have achieved marvelous theatrical effects with their mirror-glass buildings. But then you realize that they’re built over volcanic earthquake faults. And that they depend on high-energy usage. You cannot open a window on a spring day. You could be locked up in there with no heat, or no air-conditioning, or whatever it is. And, therefore, these are bad buildings. For a moment, a group of people in Brazil was making interesting modern buildings with big louvers that you could open to the air, which gave them a kind of human feeling. I don’t believe buildings should dehumanize us. By definition, they have to belong to us, on some level. Otherwise, they’re just monuments to greed.
My Lunches with Orson Page 20