My Lunches with Orson (23 page)

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
.

*   *   *

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
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—

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
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 funny 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?