My Lunches with Orson (29 page)

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].

P
ATRICK
T
ERRAIL
:
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 climb 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.

HJ:
I love the older New York skyscrapers.

OW:
I don't think that most of them are any good, either. I think they were only good at the very start, with [Louis] Sullivan. And those buildings weren't skyscrapers.

HJ:
You don't think that the Chrysler Building—

OW:
I like the Chrysler Building, but it's a little kitschy. A little Art Deco.

HJ:
I love Art Deco.

OW:
I hate it, you see? I deeply hate it.