My Lunches with Orson (2 page)

Welles never entirely recovered his footing. With his directing career sidelined, he found work as an actor, performing in pictures such as
Journey into Fear
(1943),
Jane Eyre
(1943), and
The Stranger
(1946), much of which he unofficially directed, while pursuing an active social life. He eventually married three times—to Virginia Nicholson, Rita Hayworth, and Paola Mori—and fathered three daughters, one by each wife. Welles spent the last twenty-four years of his life with Oja Kodar, a stunning Croatian-Hungarian artist, actress, and collaborator, twenty-six years his junior, although he never divorced Mori. He couldn't have been an easy man to live with, considering his roving eye and what Nicholson called his “crushing ego.”

Hayworth, the former Margarita Carmen Cansino, was, of course, one of the brightest stars of the forties and early fifties, so much so that the crew of the
Enola Gay
is rumored to have used her pinup decal as “nose art” for either the bomber or its payload, Little Boy, before dropping it on Hiroshima. Welles whimsically fell in love with her, so the story goes, when he saw her picture on the cover of
LIFE
magazine, and then and there decided to marry her. Which he did, only to discover that she was, with much justification, insanely jealous, as well as morbidly insecure and depressed. After a few turbulent years, she kicked him out, married Prince Aly Khan, and gave birth to a daughter, Yasmin. Before the divorce was finalized, Hayworth and Welles did a movie together,
The Lady from Shanghai
(1947).

The Lady from Shanghai
does not, of course, take place in Shanghai, nor is the femme fatale Hayworth plays exactly a lady. It is classic film noir with an absurdly intricate plot featuring a dizzying array of twists and turns. The picture ends with a justly celebrated face-off between Welles and Hayworth in the Magic Mirror Maze, inside a fun house. And like
Ambersons
, it was mutilated by the studio.

Welles followed up
The Lady from Shanghai
with one of his most successful turns in front of the camera, in
The Third Man
, which won the Palme d'Or at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Carol Reed, in part from a script by Graham Greene, it is a dark and moody specimen of its kind, shot on actual locations in rubble-strewn, postwar Vienna. An unremittingly grim picture, it is notable not only for the location work, but for Welles's diamond-hard performance as a contemptible black marketeer named Harry Lime who makes his living stealing, diluting, and selling penicillin. It also boasts of a wonderful set piece on Vienna's outsized Ferris wheel, the
Wiener Riesenrad
; a climactic manhunt in the city's sewers, anticipating Andrzej Wajda's
Kanal
by nearly a decade; and a distinctive score, performed exclusively on the zither.

His last studio movie,
Touch of Evil
(1958), was also recut. It is too much of a mixed bag to be considered one of his best efforts. It features Charlton Heston at his most wooden and Janet Leigh playing a character so repellent that it's hard not to root for the ridiculous, black leather jacket clad delinquent refugees from
The Wild One
who menace her with dope-filled needles and worse. On the other hand, the picture can boast of an extraordinary performance by Welles as a border town cop so degenerate he makes Harry Lime look good, an all-too-brief appearance by Marlene Dietrich, lots of vintage Wellesian dialogue, and a bravura opening: a heart-stopping, three-minute-and-twenty-second tracking shot that follows a car as it meanders across the border from Mexico into Texas, where it explodes in a spectacular inferno of fire and smoke. If you can ignore Heston and Leigh, these gems alone are worth the price of admission, not to mention the entire careers of many directors. No exaggeration.

Despite his fitful success behind the camera, Welles directed eleven or so feature-length movies in the course of his career, including his outstanding Shakespeare trilogy—
Macbeth
(1948),
Othello
(1952), and
Chimes at Midnight
(1965), his tribute to Falstaff. The last feature-length picture he made,
F for Fake
, finished in 1973, and not released in the United States until four years later, was financed by Welles himself when he was unable to find backing elsewhere. Both fish and fowl, fiction and documentary, he called it an “essay film,” which meant that it was a melange of everything he could lay his hands on in the vicinity of art forger extraordinaire Elmyr de Hory and faux Howard Hughes biographer Clifford Irving in sun-drenched Ibiza, as well as found footage of Picasso standing in a room behind a venetian blind, edited so that it appears that the artist is ogling Kodar as she parades up and down the street in a variety of chic outfits. Last but not least was Welles himself, dramatically draped in his signature black magician's cape skewering critics, while sharing his thoughts on illusion, art, and authenticity.
F for Fake
is an original, ingenious film, in which Welles bends the medium to his own ends and foreshadows pictures like Chris Marker's
Sans Soleil
(1983) and Banksy's
Exit Through the Gift Shop
(2010) that blur the lines between fact and fiction, but it was all too clever for its own good. However, the public never even got the opportunity to judge for itself since the distributor dumped the film.

These years, despite his more than respectable track record against daunting odds, tell a depressing tale of frustration, often featuring Welles as his own worst enemy. Like Kane, whose Xanadu was never finished, he accumulated a collection of incomplete pictures, earning him a reputation for walking away from his own movies before they were finished. True or false, the bad rap was impossible to shake, and made it difficult—not to say impossible—for Welles to raise money for his films.

Desperate for cash to complete old projects and/or launch new ones, he cobbled together an income by means of his performances in innumerable pictures, some very good and many very bad, ranging from B movies produced by fly-by-night producers in no-name countries to odds and ends like soaps, game shows, and TV commercials. It didn't seem to matter to him, so long as they put money in the bank, although hustling like this took its toll. He made Paul Masson a household name by intoning the slogan, “We will sell no wine before its time.” (Outtakes of an inebriated Welles slurring his way through one of these commercials can be seen on YouTube.) But even Paul Masson turned him out when a slimmed down Welles reportedly explained on a talk show that he had given up snacks—and wine.

*   *   *

Henry Jaglom was born into a family of wealthy German and Russian émigrés. His father, Simon, was imprisoned after the 1917 Russian revolution for being a “capitalist,” and left the Soviet Union with his brothers shortly thereafter, eventually making his way to London, where Henry was born in 1941, and then to New York City, where he grew up. He never knew exactly what his father did for a living, but when he applied to the University of Pennsylvania and was asked his father's occupation, Simon told him, “Write international commerce and finance.”

Jaglom studied at the Actors Studio, and then joined the mid-1960s migration from New York to Los Angeles, where his friend Peter Bogdanovich had promised him the lead in his first feature,
Targets
(1968), a role Bogdanovich later decided to play himself. His acting career ended abruptly when he was washing his feet in the sink of his apartment and the phone rang, the caller notifying him that Dustin Hoffman had gotten the lead in
The Graduate
(1967), a role he was convinced he was born to play. He muttered an epithet and turned his attention to writing and directing.

In the wake of a worldwide explosion of film culture in the 1960s, movies became the medium of choice for aspiring artists. Under the sway of the French, Jaglom, like many of his contemporaries, wanted to do it all: not just act or write, but edit, direct, and produce as well. They didn't want to be directors for hire by some baboon in the front office with a big, fat cigar; they wanted to be filmmakers or, as the French would have it,
auteurs
, a term popularized in America by Andrew Sarris in the sixties. Simply put, an
auteur
was to a film what a poet was to poetry or a painter was to painting. Sarris argued, controversially, that even studio directors such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, or bottom-of-the-bill toilers like Sam Fuller, displayed personal styles, were the sole authors of their pictures, and were therefore authentic artists. Welles, of course, was the very avatar of an
auteur
. Jaglom and his friends venerated him as the godfather of the so-called New Hollywood. He recalls, “We used to talk about him as the patron saint of this new wave of filmmaking.”

Partial to long, colorful scarves and floppy hats, Jaglom swiftly fell into bad company. He smoked dope at the Old World Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard with Jack Nicholson and was drawn into the orbit of Bert Schneider. Schneider, along with Bob Rafelson, had made a lot of money off the Monkees, and with the addition of Steve Blauner, ran a small production company called BBS. Schneider gave Jaglom a crack at editing the company's second picture, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's
Easy Rider
(1969).

Easy Rider
was a hit, and BBS was on its way. Jaglom discovered in himself the ability to talk people into things they didn't want to do. On the basis of his work on
Easy Rider
, he convinced Schneider to allow him to finance his first feature,
A Safe Place
(1971), with Nicholson and Tuesday Weld. Jaglom was desperate to add Welles to the cast. Bogdanovich was conducting a series of exhaustive interviews with Welles that would become a book and had become very friendly with him. Jaglom asked his friend to introduce the two of them. Bogdanovich warned him, “He won't do it.”

“Well, tell me where he is, and I'll go meet him.”

“He's in New York at the Plaza Hotel. But you musn't go to him without a script. He hates that. And you don't have a script.”

Welles was an intimidating presence with an imperious manner, a slashing wit, and a reputation for not suffering fools. Jaglom was no fool, but he didn't have a clue how he was going to persuade the great man to join his cast. Undeterred, he flew to New York and went up to his hotel room. Welles opened the door wearing purple silk pajamas. Jaglom remembers, “He looked like this huge grape.” Welles demanded, “What do you want?” in an unwelcoming way.

“I'm Henry Jaglom.”

“Yes, but does that tell me what you want?”

“It should, if Peter Bogdanovich has spoken to you.”

“Peter speaks to me often.”

“The reason I'm here is because I'm making a film for Bert Schneider who Peter is making a film for. Which I arranged.”

“I know who Bert Schneider is.”

“Peter is making
The Last Picture Show
—”

“Yes, good for him.”

“And I want to make my film,
A Safe Place.
With you in it.”

“Where's the script?”

“I don't have a script.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you're going to be in it, it's going to be completely different than if somebody else is going to be in it.”

“No script? No interest.”

“Your character is a magician.”

“A magician? I'm a magician. An amateur magician, of course. But I don't do first scripts by first-time directors.”

“What do you mean you don't do them?
Citizen Kane
was your first script.”

“Did you really say ‘A magician'?”

“Yeah. And I think I want him with a little Jewish accent. I know you go to lunch in London at that Jewish restaurant all the time. There are rumors that you think you're Jewish—”

“I am Jewish. Dr. Bernstein was probably my real father.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Can I wear a cape?”

“Sure, wear a cape.”

“OK, I'll do it.”

Needless to say, the old-timers on the set, which meant most of the crew, looked askance at the young director, whose hair was gathered in a long pony tail and whose feet were squeezed into white Capezio dancing shoes. The second day of shooting, they all turned up wearing American flag lapel pins. (This was, after all, 1971, the middle of the Vietnam war.) During a lunch break, Jaglom was sitting with Schneider, Nicholson, and Weld. Welles joined them, saying, “You're the arrogant kid who pushed me into this. How's your arrogance doing?”

“Not very well. The crew hates me. They're totally negative. Everything I tell them to shoot, they say, ‘It won't cut,' or ‘it's not in the script.' I have to fight to get every single shot. I'm exhausted.”

“Oh, my God, I should have prepared you. Tell 'em it's a dream sequence.”