My Lunches with Orson (7 page)

HJ:
There was not much fucking around, I would imagine, because it was a Catholic culture?

OW:
Oh, my God, yes. By the girls. I could hardly draw a breath when I visited the Aran Islands. I was all of seventeen. And these great, marvelous girls in their white petticoats, they'd grab me. Off the petticoats would go. It was as close to male rape as you could imagine. And all with husbands out in their skin-covered canoes. All day, while I had nothing to do. Then the girls would go and confess it all to the priest, who finally said to me, “I had another confession this morning. When are you leaving?” He was protecting the virtue of his flock. When I told that story, there was tremendous excitement in America from the clergy, who said it could never have happened.

HJ:
Wasn't Ford very reactionary, politically? Like his pals John Wayne and Ward Bond?

OW:
Yes, but all those guys loved me, for some reason. And I loved them. I have a beer bottle that was put together on Ford's yacht, with different Mexican and American beer labels signed by that gang of people, all dedicated to me. Now this was at a time when I was a well-known Hollywood Red.

HJ:
And their reactionary positions came from what?

OW:
Irish, Irish, Irish. The Irish were taught, “Kill the kikes,” you know. I really loved John Wayne. He had some of the best manners of almost any actor I've ever met in Hollywood.

HJ:
Did you ever speak to him about politics at all?

OW:
Why would I? I'm not like you. I'm not gonna set John Wayne straight. I never had any trouble with extreme right-wingers. I've always found them tremendously likeable in every respect, except their politics. They're usually nicer people than left-wingers.

HJ:
Easy for you to say. You were in Europe in the fifties, during the blacklist, when all that shit happened.

OW:
Yes, I was lucky. I wasn't in America during the McCarthy era. I was on every list in the world. Every time they asked for help for whatever cause, I said, “Sign me up.” But in my
New York Post
column, all during the forties, I was in print attacking Stalinist Russia at a time when everybody thought God was smiling on Stalin. I wanted to explain to HUAC the difference between a Communist and a liberal, so I kept begging, “May I please go to Washington to testify?” But they didn't dare ask me.

HJ:
But you're so forgiving about these kinds of very dangerous—

OW:
Forgiving!? Supposing you go to the Amazon, and you live in a village of headhunters. Now, if you're an anthropologist, you can become very fond of those headhunters, but you're not gonna argue about head-hunting with them.

HJ:
I don't understand how somebody with liberal feelings would not discuss politics with Wayne or Bond or Adolphe Menjou at a time when they had the power to hurt people, and in fact did a lot of damage.

OW:
Well, Menjou was so fighting mad that you couldn't talk to him. But Noël Coward took care of him wonderfully. Menjou was heading a USO troupe. Noël Coward was heading the equivalent of the USO—whatever it was called in England—you know, entertaining the troops. And they met in Casablanca. And they were eating in the mess. Menjou was talking about how terrible it was in England, that those “nigger” soldiers were fucking all the English girls, and you didn't know what kind of race it was gonna be: “Isn't that true, Noël?” And Noël said, “Well, I think it's perfectly marvelous.” Menjou said, “What?” Noël said, “At last there'll be a race of Englishmen with good teeth.” No, with Menjou you couldn't talk. He was a raving maniac.

 

2. “Thalberg was Satan!”

In which Orson is rude to Richard Burton, was bored by Meyer Lansky, and argues that Irving “the Boy Wonder” Thalberg invented factory filmmaking with his producer system.

*   *   *

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
During these last two weeks, two studios have been taken over by their distribution chiefs.

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
Well, if RKO hadn't been taken over by a distribution head, I would never have made
Citizen Kane
. That's why I got that contract with final cut. Because George Schaefer didn't know any better! None of the other guys would ever have given me a contract like that.

HJ:
Were things really better in the old days?

OW:
It's terrible for older people to say that, because they always say things were better, but they really were. What was so good about it was just the quantity of movies that were made. If you were Darryl Zanuck, and you were producing eighty moving pictures under your direct supervision, how much attention could you pay to any one picture? Somebody was gonna slip something in that's good.

I got along well with even the worst of the old moguls, like Harry Cohn. They were all easier to deal with than these college-educated, market-conscious people. I never really suffered from the “bad old boys.” I've only suffered from lawyers and agents. Wasn't it Norman Mailer who said that the great new art form in Hollywood is the deal? Everybody's energy goes into the deal. Forty-five years I have been doing business with agents, as a performer and a director. As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I've never heard one say, “No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.” They will always say, “You don't like him? I've got somebody else.” They're totally spineless.

HJ:
In the old days, all those big deals were made on a handshake. With no contract. And they were all honored.

OW:
In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something. My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society. You see?

(Richard Burton comes to the table.)

R
ICHARD
B
URTON
:
Orson, how good to see you. It's been too long. You're looking fine. Elizabeth is with me. She so much wants to meet you. Can I bring her over to your table?

OW:
No. As you can see, I'm in the middle of my lunch. I'll stop by on my way out.

(Burton exits.)

HJ:
Orson, you're behaving like an asshole. That was so rude. He actually backed away, like a whipped puppy.

OW:
Do not kick me under the table. I hate that. I don't need you as my conscience, my Jewish Jiminy Cricket. Especially do not kick my boots. You know they protect my ankles. Richard Burton had great talent. He's ruined his great gifts. He's become a joke with a celebrity wife. Now he just works for money, does the worst shit. And I wasn't rude. To quote Carl Laemmle, “I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, ‘Go fuck yourself.'”

HJ:
So you're saying he sold out, and you didn't.

OW:
If I would have gone and done their scripts, I could've worked for any of the big studios. I was perfectly bankable even when the bad Welles legend was at its most virulent. I could still make pictures.

HJ:
As long as it was somebody else's picture, and not an “Orson Welles picture.” So would you have made a movie based on one of their scripts?

OW:
No. I wouldn't. I was offered
Porgy and Bess
and—Sam Goldwyn offered me two or three pictures.

HJ:
What was he like?

OW:
In his time, he was considered a classy producer. Because he never deliberately did anything that wasn't his idea of the best quality goods. I respected him for that. He was an honest merchant. He may have made a bad picture, but he didn't know it was a bad picture. And he was funny. He made me laugh. He actually once said to me, in that high voice of his, “Orson, for you I'd write a blanket check.” He said, “With Warner Brothers, a verbal commitment isn't worth the paper it's written on.” He was there for me all the time. But Gregg Toland, who shot so many Goldwyn pictures, told me that in Russia, if you didn't see every actor's face brilliantly, they had to go back and reshoot it. Sam was the same way. Whenever there wasn't a bright light on a star's face for thirty seconds he went nuts: “I'm paying for that face! I want to see the actor!” Long shots, all right, but no shadows. It was all too much for me. I was just not constituted to deal with him.

HJ:
You were never tempted?

OW:
Never. To go through what Willie Wyler went through with him? Life is too short. Charlie MacArthur and Ben Hecht wrote
Wuthering Heights
in my house in Sneden's Landing, and Goldwyn was with 'em all the time. I was trying to sleep in the afternoon, before my radio show. And I heard the way Sam behaved with them. And I thought, “Never will I put myself through that.”

He was really a monster. The last night I ever spent with him turned me against him forever. He was a guest at my house. I had come back to Hollywood, after years away, and I invited all these old dinosaurs, who were still around, and some other people. And he left right after dessert, because there were a number of guests who weren't on the A list. You know, he wouldn't have done that before. He got old.

HJ:
Did anyone else offer you movies besides Goldwyn?

OW: [
Louis B.] Mayer offered me his studio! He was madly in love with me, because I wouldn't have anything to do with him, you know? Twice he brought me over—spent all day wooing me. He called me “Orse.” Whenever he sent for me, he burst into tears, and once he fainted. To get his way. It was fake, absolutely fake. The deal was, I'd have the studio but I'd have to stop acting, directing, and writing—making pictures.

HJ:
Why wouldn't you have anything to do with him?

OW:
Because he was the worst of them all. The rest of them were just what they were. The thing about Harry Cohn was: he looked like such a villainous Hollywood producer, there was nothing he could do that would surprise you. But L.B. was worse than Harry Cohn. He was self-righteous, smarmy, waving the American flag, doing deals with the Purple Gang in Detroit—

HJ:
The Purple Gang in Detroit?

OW:
Before the unions, it was all Mafia. But no one called it the Mafia. Just said “the mob.” And, mainly, the Purple Gang. They controlled all the blue-collar guys who projected the movies, pushed the dollies, swept the floors. They controlled the Teamsters. They didn't control directors or anything—didn't need to. And when L.B. needed extra money, he got it from the Purple Gang. When he wanted strong-arm work, he'd call the Purple Gang, who'd send their tough guys into town.

HJ:
Louis B. Mayer had people hit?

OW:
Beat up. I wouldn't put it past him to have people killed. He liked to think of himself as a founding father and capo of the Mafia.

HJ:
Did you know any of them? Meyer Lansky?

OW:
Very well. He was probably the number-one gangster in America. I knew them all. You had to. If you lived, as I did, on Broadway during that period, if you lived in nightclubs, you could not not know them. I liked screwing the chorus girls and I liked meeting all the different people who would come in, and I liked staying up until five in the morning, and they used to love to go to nightclubs. They would come and sit at your table.

HJ:
How did Lee Strasberg do with Hyman Roth, remember, in
Godfather II
?

OW:
Much better than the real thing. Meyer Lansky was a boring man. Hyman Roth is who he should have been! They all should have been like that and none of them were.
The Godfather
was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed. The best of them were the kind of people you'd expect to drive a beer truck. They had no class. The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention. The classy gangster was the ideal of every real gangster, who then started to dress like George Raft, and tried to behave like George Raft, and so on.

HJ:
They must have had something to get to the top.

OW:
Energy, guts, luck, and the willingness to kill your friends in the interest of business. All this code of honor, and all that shit—pure invention. There was a famous cop on Broadway called Brannigan. I think I've got his name right, because his name was slightly changed by Damon Runyon and used as a character in
Guys and Dolls
. He used to go down Broadway every few weeks with a baseball bat, and I went with him a couple times, to watch it happen. Followed him, not went with him. He'd come into Lindy's—“Mindy's” to Runyon—and places like that, late at night. And if he'd see anybody, no matter who, he'd grab him, take him out in the street, and beat him up. Meaning: Get out of town. Don't sit around here—you make the town look bad. I saw him put Charlie Luciano, head first, into a garbage can outside of Reuben's, at five thirty in the morning.

HJ:
“Lucky” Luciano?