My Lunches with Orson (38 page)

OW:
I'll tell you all about it, if you'll give me the time. Rather than answering—

HJ:
Okay. Sorry.

OW:
I'd rather do a monologue than submit myself to an interrogation. I have a problem with Jacques Lang, of course, because he thinks his producer is the best producer in France. He'll believe the producer's side of the story, and not mine. And Lang is not putting up enough money to make the difference anyway. He's just giving his blessing. The producer, as described to me by my old cameraman, is indeed very successful and very intelligent, but he's a weather vane. He'll tell you one thing at ten in the morning, and another at noon.

The budget was five million dollars. Then they began to talk about how it was hard to get the last million. I said, “I'll give up three hundred thousand up front, and defer it.” Then they wanted me to do postproduction, all the editing, in Paris. I explained to them that I have back income tax that I have to pay for another year, and that I can only do that by finding some money in America. I cannot spend a year in France cut off from my other sources of income. And since we are doing it on tape as well as film, I said I'll give them a very good rough cut before I leave, but I'll do the final cut and mix in America. They agreed to that and the compensation, so then I said, “In all of your correspondence, you have called me the producer, but now you're giving me this man.” They said, “We have to, by French law.” I said, “But I must have the right to decide how the money is spent within the budget. Not just artistically. If I want to spend one day on one thing and ten days on another, it's my decision. That makes me the producer.” They said, “All right.”

Yesterday came the telex—yesterday! My entire compensation is seven hundred thousand, instead of a million plus the cassette rights we agreed on, and I am not to get one cent of that until the entire film is delivered. Which is the first I ever heard of that. And I must do all the postproduction in Paris—a total violation of our understanding. So, there's no way of patching it up in France. My immediate problem is public relations. How is this bombshell going to go off in the French press? All the newspapers in Paris are ready to say, “He doesn't really want to make a movie. He's running away after we—a million dollars isn't good enough for him.” So what I want to do is to tell Jacques Lang, and the French press, that it's not that I'm walking away from
King Lear
. It's that my producer has changed the conditions under which I am to make the picture, unilaterally. It's a diktat. The telex is not, “We regret that we are forced to change—” Rather, it's take it or leave it. Now, the big money from French television had been earmarked for a miniseries called
Ali Baba
, and they had to take a big hunk from
Ali Baba
for
Lear
. So I suspect that this producer
wants
me to say no, so he can get the money back for
Ali Baba
. How do you like those apples?

HJ:
Those are bad apples. Have you heard from the English about
Lear
at all?

OW:
This morning I talked to the daughter of the producer, who is my liaison. She said, “Well, we have the money in London, but we have to move it to Switzerland. And until it gets to Switzerland, we'll be unable to give you a starting date.” Which is about as unlikely a story as I've ever heard. Just a bad lie.

HJ:
Look, this might cheer you up. Do you know about the videodisc of
Kane
? With the narration and the explanation?

OW:
No, I don't know about narration and explanation. I don't like that. Why didn't they invite
me
to do it?

HJ:
Every single cut you made is validated now by this professor who comments on the film. This is why you couldn't have done this.

OW:
Well, theoretically, that's good for teaching movies, so long as they don't talk nonsense. “Do you see why this camera's in the wrong place? Do you see why this cut is bad? Do you see why the pace drops here?” That would really be teaching people. I could do it with somebody else's film—but you're right, I couldn't with my own. You can't say why it's good. You can only say why it's bad! You could teach the ordinary grammar of moviemaking using a fairly respectable bad film, you know. Cukor would be a very good director for that. Because he doesn't stand up under a hard look.

I noticed that the new movies for television, which are obviously made by young directors out of film school, are technically much better than they were five, six years ago. And inventive. They're just, of course, doomed, because they're for television, and these directors are being clever with garbage. But you get to a point—I have, all my life, not just now—when you make something that's really quite good, not wonderful, but a very good mediocre play or movie, and you settle for it.

HJ:
The great thing about what's happening with these laser discs and video things, is that it gives film permanence. As opposed to when you started working, when you could easily expect that film would be gone twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now. Now you know that they're gonna last.

OW:
I regard posterity as vulgar as success. I don't trust posterity. I don't think what's good is necessarily recognized in the long run. Too many good writers have disappeared.

(Gilles Jacob enters.)

G
ILLES
J
ACOB
:
I just saw you on the French TV talking to students.

OW:
It was all a little too reverent for me, you know?

GJ:
You know, we have not too many people to revere. So we are not so used to revere someone.

OW:
I don't know. I think it is a French instinct to revere or to neglect, with nothing in between.

GJ:
Probably.

OW:
The giants of French culture suddenly don't exist anymore. Nobody has attacked them; they just aren't there, you know. Look what happened to Anatole France—disappeared. Malraux—vanished.

HJ:
But they're dead.

OW:
Well, look at Scottie Fitzgerald here, in America. He disappeared in his own lifetime. For the last five years of his life, none of his novels was in print. You could not buy a Fitzgerald novel. Faulkner is vanishing. He used to totally dominate the whole world, not only America, but the Continent, particularly. My God, he's starting to become invisible. Steinbeck, poor fellow. He was a bigger talent than anybody gives him credit for. But his faults have overshadowed his talent to such a point that he's vanished, you know? He was a terribly sweet man. Writers are not necessarily the sweetest people in the world. Robert Frost was an angry man—but who knows—maybe just rude to bores. When someone came up to him, he'd say, “Yes? Get out.” My trouble is that I say, “Stay another ten minutes,” and people still say I'm a shit!

HJ:
Their natural lives exceeded their creative lives.

OW:
It's no wonder Fitzgerald and Hemingway and O'Hara hated the fact of aging. They simply couldn't bear to be forty-two years old. The fear of death. They wanted to fool the old fellow with the scythe.

HJ:
Filmmakers disappear all the time.

OW:
René Clair was a good friend of mine. He was very bitter at the end of his life. He used to say to me: “You know, there has never been a movie which isn't out of fashion after fifteen years. It's like journalism where you write on sand. It disappears; it's nothing.” He was really revered, in the English-speaking world particularly. My God, René Clair was, you know, what Fellini was twenty years ago.

HJ:
What was the reason for Clair's decline?

OW:
He made some commercial movies at the end, which were not “René Clair” movies. So that hastened the deterioration of his reputation, until it disappeared entirely. Because we all had a picture of a “René Clair” movie. Then he began to make amusing sort of …

HJ:
Entertainments.

OW:
You couldn't tell the difference between those movies and any other well-made films. It's like Olivier choosing to make
Dracula
rather than disappear from view. That hurt him very much. If you make that choice, your reputation is gonna suffer.

GJ:
Also, I have the feeling that some directors have only ten years, fifteen years, before they're finished. Don't you think so?

OW:
Directors are poor fellows, carrying not much baggage. We come in with only our overnight bags, and go out with nothing. There are names in those old lists of the greatest movies that have totally vanished, you know? Now, when my career is only a memory, I'm still sitting here like some kind of monument, but the moment will come when I'll drop out of sight altogether, as though a trapdoor had opened, you know? Although I'd prefer a Verdi ending.

HJ:
What's that?

OW:
Verdi did great work when he was young. Very early. Highly acclaimed. Spent his middle years overseeing productions of his music, orchestrating his earlier work. Trivialities. Then, in old age, one day someone came and told him, “Wagner is dead.” He lit up. Did his greatest work in the following years, after decades of nothing.

HJ:
Who would your Wagner be? Who would have to die to set you free?

OW:
I'm not going to answer that.

Orson Welles died on October 10, 1985, five days after his last lunch with Henry Jaglom, in the middle of the night, with his typewriter in his lap. It was a heart attack.

 

Epilogue

Orson's Last Laugh

by Henry Jaglom

OCTOBER 11, 1985, 1:00 AM, HOLLYWOOD

Saturday afternoon, Oct. 5th, at lunch, Orson told me that the attacks were beginning to come in, in response to the books out on him, especially Barbara Leaming's wonderfully supportive—to his mind, largely accurate—biography. The success of the book as it was about to go into its second printing had cheered him, setting the record straight on Houseman and so many things, and he was philosophical about the attacks: “Once they decide they're for you or against you, it never changes. Hope and Crosby they always loved. Me and Sinatra they decided against early on, and they never let up.” He talked of
Time
,
Newsweek
, the
Washington Post
.

He complained that in a year and a half, Ma Maison would be moving into a new hotel, and “What will we do then?” Kiki growled and he fed her a small cookie, while warning her that if she kept on crying he'd never take her out again.

He told me that Paul Masson wanted him back to endorse its “terrible wine again,” but on a one-year contract instead of three, at lesser money and with required performances-cum-appearances around the country. He'd turn it down, but slowly, seeing how good he could make the deal.

Welles never let anyone capture his likeness, but made an exception for Jaglom, provided his friend use a grease pencil on black paperboard that Welles sent a Ma Maison waiter to procure.

We talked of Israel's raid on Tunis and Gorbachev's public relations talents as evidenced in Paris, how “Reagan was going to be made to look like an amateur,” and how the French bungling of the Greenpeace ship business in New Zealand was “going to cost Mitterand his job.” And what a shame that was. He made me have dessert by dramatically reading the menu and we laughed at stories of people's odd pomposity and pretensions and he let himself have a dessert plate full of lime sherbet.

A typical few hours—in short—some stories, some hopefulness, some creative ideas, some anecdotes, some sadness, some old memories, much shared understanding, many communicative smiles. As always.

But for some reason I didn't have my little tape recorder on in my bag. I remember thinking as I drove over that I'd done almost every lunch for a few years and I didn't feel I had to anymore. I remember wondering if he'd notice that it wasn't there, and what would he think it meant if he did.

The tape recorder was one of the only two things we didn't speak about. The other was his weight and its health implications. The closest we got was, “You're looking well,” or “I swam my laps,” or “I can't eat that anymore; you have to eat it for me and describe it to me.” We did a lot of that in the south of France.

In fact, he looked a bit tired. He said, “Time is passing,” but he said it lightly, sadly but lightly, in relation to our ongoing inability to get a film financed for him to direct.

This morning my phone rang; it was my office. There was a rumor he was dead; the press was calling. I called him on his private number. His man, Freddie, answered, said how sorry he was, yes it was true, he found him on the bedroom floor at ten this morning, and he couldn't rouse him. Freddie called the paramedics. He apologized to me (in lieu of Orson) for calling them, as if he had violated the trust for privacy that he still somehow felt he was expected to honor, even now.