My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  HJ: There was that rock that you brought on Carson.

  OW: I went to a shop that sold exotic minerals. I got one of those funny-looking stones. And I came on Carson and I said, “There are only seven of these in the world. And I have permission, just for tonight, to show it on television, because these stones are being studied at leading universities. The writing on the spine of this stone is extraterrestrial, and we have no idea how either got there. But if you have a watch or a clock which doesn’t work anywhere in your house, or on your person, this stone will make it go.” At that moment, when I held up the stone, the clock in the studio at NBC, which had gone on the blink, started to tick.

  HJ: Love it!… Bogdanovich called. He told me—

  OW: Wait a minute! I’ll tell you what he talked about. He talked about Bogdanovich!

  HJ: He said, “I’m having a problem.” He was using Springsteen for the picture he’s finishing, Mask. “The studio made me take all my music off…”

  OW: Yeah, I read about that.

  HJ: So he’s suing the studio for a couple of million dollars.

  OW: It’s a great thing to do after you’ve been out of work.

  HJ: So I said, “Peter, do you really think this is a good idea?” He said, “Well, I’ve done it.” Apparently the boy that the movie is about loves Springsteen. So he sent a letter to Frank Price at Universal, where the film is set up, demanding that he not interfere with his creative rights, that filmmakers have the right to put any music they want in their movie, and he would like you to—

  OW: Fat chance.

  HJ: To sign it!

  OW: No.

  HJ: I have to find a graceful way to decline for you.

  OW: No. Ask him to call me and I’ll tell him. You know, if we were in France, he’d have the law on his side. According to French law—

  HJ: He’d own the movie.

  OW: Here a movie is the property of the people who are hiring you. And you cannot invoke a right which doesn’t exist.

  HJ: They gave him final cut, so they promised him a certain kind of—

  OW: A promise! Where is a letter like that gonna get you, you know? Everybody’ll say he’s a pain in the neck. Who’ll want to work with Bogdanovich?

  HJ: He can’t win this. The movie’s out. There’re hundreds of prints going around.

  OW: And good notices. First good notices he’s had in years.

  HJ: The movie relates to the book Peter wrote about Dorothy Stratten. You know, the Playmate he met at Hef’s. Who was murdered by her husband. Peter is very emotionally involved with this material.

  OW: I read that book.

  HJ: I think it’s called The Killing of the Unicorn, or something like that.

  OW: For a man to betray himself that way, in front of the world, is really disturbing. She was a semihooker, you know.

  HJ: Which is not Peter’s thing at all.

  OW: And he implicates himself as a stooge of Hefner.

  HJ: He says he owes it to Dorothy.

  OW: Oh, no. After I finished the book, I don’t believe he was in love with her. He was in love with himself being in love with her.

  HJ: You’re being too hard on him. I think it’s part and parcel of the Kane thing, the great man thing, which has been fed to him by you. It’s all your fault.

  OW: A little bit, yeah.

  HJ: And it’s not just him. Von Sternberg with Marlene, Hitchcock with Grace Kelly, Woody Allen with Diane Keaton, Fellini with Giulietta Masina, Bergman with Liv Ullmann. People think that part of their job now, to be a great artist, is to find one of these young ingénues and mold them. It has entered his subconscious. Because he did the exact same thing with Cybill [Shepherd]. And now he—

  OW: He’s never gonna get over Cybill.

  HJ: Dorothy was the great romance of his life. She was a nineteen-year-old who had a brutal husband, and for the first time she was being treated nicely—by Peter.

  OW: It’s all so Ernest Dowson—the last of the romantic poets—who spent his life mooning around because he was hopelessly in love with a girl who served him beer in a pub. “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.” You know? “I called for madder music and for stronger wine, /But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, /Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine.” And this is all about Adelaide the barmaid. Who was bored to death with it, you know? It always has to be with an unworthy object. That’s a necessary part of all this. It’s never with some marvelous girl who’s clearly worth it. It’s always somebody that you just happened on. He’s gonna spend his life on this.

  HJ: Mask is about a boy born with a deformed face. He apparently picked this subject because the first play he took Dorothy to see was The Elephant Man. She identified with it, because her great beauty was similar to the grotesque ugliness of the Elephant Man. In that the extremeness of each of them—extreme beauty and extreme ugliness—separated them from the common folk of the world.

  OW: Shit!

  HJ: This is his movie for Dorothy. It’s the myth of how horrible it is to be beautiful. But despite it all, I’m very fond of Peter. He’s uniquely gifted. And he’s as much a victim as everyone else.

  OW: But he mustn’t go writing manifestos. He certainly isn’t doing himself any good.

  HJ: Then why is he? Why?

  OW: Well, I think the chief reason for most self-destruction is the death wish, which almost everybody has, to one degree or another. And people who are actively creative, or actively and fruitfully in love, or involved in the living world, escape it. But it’s always there. And people who assume attitudes of a romantic nature, that have to do with ego, are particularly prone, I think, to the death wish. Like Narcissus who drowned in his own image. The ultimate act, in some way, of self-love. I can choose the time and manner of my death. Romantic suicide. The world will be sorry it didn’t treat me better. I think it’s very common.

  HJ: Are you conscious of it in yourself?

  OW: Oh, yes. Two or three times I’ve thought I had a fatal disease. And I’ve thought of it with a certain relief. In other words, no more obligation to take care of people. I’ve felt that cold deathly wind from the tomb blowing over me. It’s the real voice of the devil, you know? It’s why people invent the red guy with the horns. It’s the death wish, the opposite of life. It’s surrender. Which is, I think, a very egotistical thing to do. I turned that voice off quickly, when I heard it and felt that.

  HJ: Did you happen to see this six-part thing on Freud on the Arts and Entertainment Channel? Wonderful, wonderful program. And a very well-written script by the son of Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer.

  OW: Lilli Palmer is very good in The Other Side of the Wind. She plays Marlene. But don’t let’s go into that this lunch.

  HJ: Well, can we just mention one thing about that? California magazine wants to know if you’ll tell the story of what happened with The Other Side of the Wind. I thought that to have all of that out might help the situation in France.

  OW: The opposite. It’s just because of France that I wouldn’t do it. I cannot tell the truth without attacking the French judicial system. But I am in no position right now to get the French angry at me.

  HJ: But can’t you give an account leading up to how it got into the vault in Paris? Pending arbitration with the Shah’s brother-in-law, who is claiming he owns it, the French refusing to release it to you, all that.

  OW: No, I can’t. If Lear is off for any terrible reason, I’ll do it instantly. You know, it’s just a scandal …

  HJ: I thought that you had won the rights to The Other Side of the Wind.

  OW: Yes, I did.

  HJ: But then I heard just this week that there was somebody new assigned—

  OW: Yes, a new arbitrator. And it has to be all done all over again.

  HJ: If you got it away from the Iranians and the French, could you finish it? The cast is dying off.

  OW: Yes. Edmond O’Brien just died. Tony Selwart is blind. John Huston can’t move. I
don’t want to think about it now. The film has become strangely dated. But in an interesting way. I’d have to turn it into an essay film on that period. Because that’s when all the young movie people wanted to be auteurs. And not to be Spielberg, as they do now. It was a different time.

  HJ: Speaking of France, Gilles Jacob, who’s now the head of the Cannes Film Festival, wants to stop by and say hello to you.

  OW: Sucking up to the Cannes Film Festival people, eh?

  HJ: I don’t have to suck up to him. They love me. Now I just want you to be nice, Orson.

  OW: He’s a member of the “criminal class.” Anybody connected with the Cannes festival is a crook.

  HJ: Please, Orson, don’t be ridiculous.

  OW: Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle. You have no idea. I’m a hypocrite. A sellout.

  HJ: Michael York asked, did I convey to you what he said about his indefinite availability. Especially for Lear.

  OW: I like him very much.

  HJ: Oh, he’s a fine actor. And a truly modest actor. You can do with him, more or less, what you want.

  OW: English actors are more modest than Americans, because they’ve never had Lee Strasberg to teach ’em that they know better than the director. I’m always making fun of Method, but I used a lot of that Stanislavski stuff in my work with actors, making Iago impotent, for instance, and giving that to Mac Liammóir to “use” in Othello. Othello is destroyed easily because he has never understood women—like Lear. Shakespeare was clearly tremendously feminine. Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can’t admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

  HJ: So what is the status of Lear?

  OW: They are passionately anxious to make it. But after having promised me that I would be the producer, I have been given, with no choice in the matter, a French producer they want, a successful and intelligent man who I dislike intensely. Very cold. The only thing in his favor is that he’s producing a lot of different things—he’ll be awfully busy. What I don’t have yet is a contract, and that’s what I have to have. I’m not just demanding that I have artistic say-so, but also that I have production say-so—if I stay within the budget. I don’t want somebody telling me, as he already has, that this or that costs a lot of money. They are shocked by the fact that I want to know everything about the production. They want me to be the artist and not concern myself with all of that. Well, the first thing they did with me as the artist not concerned with all of that was to take me to an enormous studio outside of Paris and say, “This is your studio.” It’s the biggest studio in Europe. It was filled with a set. I said, “When is the set gonna be out?” They said, “Well, maybe in August, but we don’t know.” So I said, “Well, I can’t make the picture in one studio. I must have two studios, because while we’re shooting one scene, they have to build what’s gonna be the set for the next scene.” Obviously, two studios. They’d never thought of that. That’s the kind of leave-it-to-us mentality.

  HJ: Just like Michael Fitzgerald. Is there anything to be done about that situation, in terms of—

  OW: Not with him in the Bahamas. I don’t dare deal with Cradle without Michael. I don’t want to seem to be speaking for him. But he’s not gonna be trying very hard in the Bahamas.

  HJ: Do you get any feel from him about where he is on Cradle? Is it—?

  OW: He claims he’s got it all together, which isn’t true. He’s got it all together if we’re willing to shoot in Berlin, because Berlin is offering a million dollars. But it’s ridiculous to shoot this picture in Berlin. I’m not gonna do it, until I’ve done at least one other picture. Nothing can convince me otherwise.

  HJ: Is there a reason?

  OW: I’ve told you, and you don’t agree. And that’s the end of it. I don’t think the first thing I should do after being absent from the business for ten years should involve mining my own past. There’s an inherent weakness in this as a comeback movie. Politically it’s wrong.

  HJ: Because it looks like, instead of plunging forward—

  OW: That’s right. I’m going backwards. My feeling about Cradle is that I’d like to do it. But I would be perfectly happy to sell the script.

  HJ: It’s such a brilliant script, now that you’ve reworked it. I’d hate to see anyone else directing it.

  OW: I wish you’d be more complimentary. The truth is I haven’t got anything unique to offer it as a director. I’ve done it as a script.

  HJ: So you feel good about Lear? I mean, it looks good?

  OW: I don’t dare say. But I fear they’ll never come through. They all want to have dinner with me, but when it comes time to fork over the money, they disappear. It’s always the same thing—I’m unmanageable, I walk away from films before they’re finished, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So boring. I don’t want to hear about it. More disappointment. Lang, who last year was receiving people in his office in an open-necked shirt, is now dressed by [Pierre] Cardin. Has bought an apartment on Place des Vosges, which costs about a million and a half. The Socialist Minister of Culture! On the other hand, he’s talked about Lear again to Mitterand, so from that point of view, it looks good. There’s nobody fighting it. It’s just me trying to make sense of the deal. I don’t want to sign a deal in which I discover that there’s any possibility of disaster, of miscalculations which put it over budget, or anything. That’s why I’ve been difficult, because I want to know the ground I’m gonna walk on.

  HJ: Have you made it clear to them that that’s the reason you’ve been difficult?

  OW: Yes. But they don’t listen very much. They listen to themselves. I hope I have a contract with the Lear people in the next week or two. If it doesn’t go first, it’ll never happen. But I think the French situation is very delicate. If the people who are now in the government and television change … There’s a real fascist element rising in France. And because this is a socialist government—and of course, it’s nonsense to call him a socialist—all the centrist conservatives are afraid, as they always are, that it is the weak wall through which communism will break. The French always put the blame on their president for everything that could possibly be wrong. So they may join them, even though the Communist Party has become a joke.

  HJ: (Calls out) Excuse me—Hello!

  OW: He’s not our waiter.

  HJ: Oh.

  WAITER: Here is your kiwi.

  OW: My God, that’s beautiful. It’s not as beautiful as a plain peeled one, but it’s beautiful. Thank you. I made a discovery about the kiwi.

  HJ: Which is?

  OW: That it’s the greatest fruit in the universe, but it’s ruined by all the French chefs of the world who cut it up into thin slices. You cannot tell what it tastes like unless you eat it in bulk. Then it is marvelous. And it has the highest vitamin content of any fruit in the world.

  HJ: You look much better than when you went to France. I mean, you’re looking particularly well, and healthy and fit.

  OW: What’s that?

  HJ: That’s my mint carrier. As others might have cigarettes or toothpicks, I carry mints for my coffee. It’s a little eccentricity, I suppose.

  OW: If Ronnie can have his jelly beans … God, I’m worried. I hope that his checkup turns out all right, because I’m more worried about [George H. W.] Bush than I am about Reagan! I want Reagan to live! Bush is a creep, a real creep. Especially compared to Gorbachev. Bush thinks if he doesn’t ignore Gorbachev he’ll lose the Jesse Helms group, so he has to kowtow. What’s amazing is that not one American Kremlinologist … Krem … Krem-lin-ologist … had a word to say about Gorbachev. He popped out of a box.

  HJ: The great thing that Reagan has is a sense of personal security about himself. God knows based upon what.

  OW: But he has it, and it’s absolutely genuine. He comes bouncing into the room. You know Tom Wicker’s line “My favo
rite thing about Reagan is that he’s a genuine phony.” And that’s what he is. But he has this security, which we haven’t seen in a president in a long time. Even Eisenhower was stuttering around, not sure what it was to be a politician, you know?

  HJ: People have always liked him. He knows he’s a nice guy.

  OW: Yeah. He made one funny joke not long ago. In the cabinet room he says, “We ought to have a plaque saying, ‘Ronald Reagan slept here.’” He can make any kind of mistake. He could promise anything and have it fall apart, and the public goes right on adoring him. Anybody who could get out of that retreat from Lebanon, with two hundred eighty Americans killed for nothing, without a scratch on his popularity or anything, is amazing.

  24. “Jo Cotten kicked Hedda Hopper in the ass.”

  In which Orson recalls his affair with Lena Horne, who was black, gifted, and radical. Hopper warned him against it. When the owner of the 21 Club told him Horne was unwelcome, he played a nasty joke on him.

  * * *

  ORSON WELLES: I have to go to a social event that I … dread.

  HENRY JAGLOM: What is that?

  OW: A surprise party for Jo Cotten’s eightieth birthday. It’s in Santa Monica, at seven thirty. Black tie. Jo has had a stroke, you know. The last time I talked to him was about four days ago, and I said, “Well, what are you reading?” He said, “I can’t read. I can follow conversation; I can talk; but I cannot read.” Now, that’s awful. I thought you could still read after a stroke.

  HJ: Depends what kind of a stroke.

  OW: Every kind of a stroke.

  HJ: Why can’t he read? It must be—

  OW: I don’t know. Somehow the process of turning letters into words is blocked. You have to help him with words. And he has to have therapy four times a week to keep that up. But he has something in Pat, a very devoted, attentive wife. He’s always been very lucky. He had one other wife, who died, who worshipped him for twenty-five years. He’s been coddled all his life.