My Lunches with Orson (34 page)

HJ:
(Calls out)
Excuse me—Hello!

OW:
He's not our waiter.

HJ:
Oh.

W
AITER
:
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 favorite 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.

*   *   *

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
I have to go to a social event that I … dread.

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
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.

This evening just hangs over me now. With his stroke, and with all the people who are going to be there that I don't know, I don't really want to— All those socialites from Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. And they all hate me, because I'm the oldest friend. What I'm really gonna be doing is entertaining them. It'll be just ghastly. If I could just go and visit him on another day. But how could his best friend not be there? The feeling is not how nice that I come, but how could I
not
come.

HJ:
Did you see that made-for-TV movie
Malice in Wonderland
, where Elizabeth Taylor plays Louella Parsons and Jane Alexander plays Hedda Hopper? There are two characters named Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

OW:
You know, they sent the script to me and Jo, and they said, “What do you think of it? Do you like it?” And he said, “No.” So then they called me and said, “Do you approve of this?” I hadn't read it, so I just said, “No.”

HJ:
There's this scene where the Cotten character gets furious, because Hedda said something about his wife.

OW:
Well, no. What Hedda was doing was printing that he was balling Deanna Durbin, which he was. In cars, in daylight, where everybody could see!

HJ:
There's also this wonderful, strange scene where Cotten pushes Hedda's face in a plate of food.

OW:
No, he kicked Hedda Hopper in the ass. The truth is that Jo Cotten was a Southern gentleman, with extremely good manners. That's what makes this story so good. He came up to her at a party and said, “Hedda, I just want you to understand, if you say that again, I'm going to kick you in the ass.” She didn't believe it. She kept talking about it, and he just came and kicked her in the ass. The last man in Hollywood that you'd think would behave that way to a woman.

HJ:
They made you the more reasonable one. Which is also not your reputation.

OW:
That's true. I did say, “You mustn't kick Hedda in the ass.” I told him I would kick her in the ass instead. But he insisted.

HJ:
And in another scene, Hedda walks in on you when you're about to screen
Kane
, and you say, “What are you doing here?” And she was the one, according to this, who tipped off Hearst. She's portrayed as this insane woman running roughshod over the whole town, terrifying everybody.

OW:
She was. And she destroyed Louella. Hedda had always been my defender, because I'd hired her as an actress when she was out of work. She always said, “I know you're a dirty Commie Red. But you were good to me and good to my son, and I won't—” Then she added, “But you've got to stop fucking Lena Horne.” And I said, “I don't take instruction about things like that.” And she said, “You
have
to, if you care about your career, and care about your country!” Nobody who knew about it gave a damn that Lena was black. Except Hedda, you know. But what was she gonna do? Write it in a column? I didn't give a damn. So I said, “Hedda, you can go boil your head.” She always laughed when I insulted her. That's show business.

HJ:
She was that reactionary, that she really believed these things?

OW:
Violently, much more than Louella. She was wittier. She was smarter. You know what Jack Barrymore called Louella Parsons, who was terribly ugly. He said, “Louella—that queer udder.”

HJ:
“Queer udder.” What a horrible description!

OW:
This great truck used to come up to your house, just before Christmas with gifts from her. And you must never have given the news of your divorce to anybody but Louella. She would never forgive you. She always had to have the divorce. That was hers. You don't know the
power
those two cows had in this town! People opened the paper, ignoring Hitler and everything else, and turned right to Louella and Hedda.

HJ:
How did she know about things like you and Lena?

OW:
She offered fifty dollars for information and people called her up. Not friends, but waiters or valet-parking people, anybody. Somebody reported that I went into Lena's house or something. She and I never went out. In those days, you didn't go out with a black woman. You could, they wouldn't stop you, but things were delicate. And I didn't want to hurt her feelings. I once took her out to the 21 Club, thinking it was safe. Jack Kreindler, who looked just like a baked potato, and owned it then with his cousin, behaved correctly. But he took me aside afterwards and said, “Next time, it would be better not to come here.” So when I got back to Hollywood, I told Charlie Lederer what had happened, and said, “What are we going to do about it?” Well, Jack Kreindler used to come to Hollywood on a holiday, and everybody would entertain him. So Charlie and I stopped what we were doing for two weeks and worked night and day on this prank. I gave a party in the private room of Chasen's, honoring the “Maharani of Boroda,” and invited Jack. Now, we got the Maharani from Chicago. She was a hooker. I said she couldn't be local; it would have gotten around. She couldn't even know who the people she'd be meeting were. Everybody you ever heard of was at that table. It was very grand, so that Jack would be at ease, and not get suspicious. I sat him next to the Maharani. And she began giving him a little knee thing. And then the hand on the knee, and all that. And finally she says to him, “You know, I'm here without my husband—he's coming later. But we have a special religion, and it forbids us to stay in a hotel. So we have to buy a private house wherever we go. I'm going to slip you the address. You come there at two o'clock in the morning. Scratch on the window.” So he took this piece of paper. Now, for the previous ten days, we had been searching for a house down on Central Avenue. And we found a big black mammy, like Aunt Jemima, a Hattie McDaniel type, you know? Coal-black, and this big. And we had been sending her obscene letters. Calling obscene things through the window. Generally annoying this poor black woman. By the time dessert was served, the Maharani got up and said she had to leave. And she was taken by a limousine to a plane.

HJ:
She was taken by a limousine to a plane from Chasen's?

OW:
To an airport, so she'd be out of town and couldn't talk. Now, at two o'clock in the morning you've got Jack Kreindler, man about town, all-around American, scratching on the window of this woman's house. Ten cops rush up and grab him, because she's been complaining. They take him downtown to the station house, where they take photographs. Which were never printed, but he thought they would be, so he went through all that. Of course, his high friends got him out, and kept him out of the newspapers. He never knew who did it to him. I think it's the best practical joke I've ever played.

HJ:
This is really true? How did you know, for sure, he would show up? The whole thing wouldn't have worked if he hadn't shown up.

OW:
He had to. She was the greatest hooker you ever saw. You would have shown up, too.
Anybody
would have shown up. We were very sad that she had to leave. And she was very funny. She knew exactly what she had to do—she'd been pretty well educated. It was a lot of work. Very expensive, too—the dinner, everything. But we thought Jack had it coming to him. I never told Lena. I never wanted her to think that anything had ever happened. She's half-Indian, you know, red Indian. If you were black, nobody was ever luckier.

HJ:
For being able to hide the fact that she was black?

OW:
That was never hidden. She was black from the minute she stepped on the stage. I told you what Duke Ellington said about her to me when he introduced us. He said, “This is a girl that gives a deep suntan to the first ten rows of the theater!”

HJ:
She struck me as tremendously repressed.

OW:
Well, no more than any other black, except that she's the one that received storms of applause for forty years. Come on. I'll accept that any black had a rough time, but she didn't, not particularly. Nobody urged her to pass for white. She was a famous black singer her whole career, and nothing else, no matter what she says now. And her marriage, a mixed marriage, was the first famous mixed marriage. Everybody wrote about it as such.

HJ:
But she said that they put makeup on her to look darker in the movies. Because they didn't want her to look white.

OW:
She's leaving out the truth. The movies that they made her look darker in—those were the black movies, the race movies. You know, made only for black audiences. I was on the set, waiting to take her out to lunch, when she was doing
Cabin in the Sky
. And she was made up like she would be with her own skin color. But when she was fifteen, and sixteen and seventeen, she made a lot of those race quickies.

HJ:
It's amazing, those two women, Hedda and Louella, could get that strong.

OW:
And in New York, [Walter] Winchell. Winchell was terrible, but I was very fond of him, because he had great charm. And he was such an egomaniac that it was funny to be with him. As you know, after the
Kane
thing, my name was never, ever printed in a Hearst paper. The Hearst paper in New York was the
Daily Mirror
, and Winchell was forbidden to write my name. So he called me G. O. Welles, George Orson Welles, and nobody ever noticed it. He deliberately put me in almost every day, just for the fun of it. That was his idea of being cute.

HJ:
“George” being your actual first name.

OW:
Of course. And he was such a prominent character in the Broadway of that time that not to be friends with him was to miss a whole side of that life. And you know, it was better to be his friend than his enemy. I had a big enemy among those guys, Lee Mortimer, a sort of second-rate Winchell, who used to print awful things about me every day. And I always greeted him effusively so that he would think that I'd never read a word he wrote.