My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles

by Henry Jaglom

Everything else in life except for dreams has rules. The only place they’re truly free is when they fall asleep and dream. If you tell them it’s a dream sequence, they will be freed of those rules to be creative, imaginative, and give you all kinds of stuff that they’ve got inside of them.” That was the best advice Jaglom would ever get.

OW: Measure them. Measure them! I never could stand looking at Bette Davis, so I don’t want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man. HJ: I’ve never understood why. Have you met him? OW: Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.

HJ: He’s not arrogant; he’s shy. OW: He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. HJ: Does he take himself very seriously? OW: Very seriously. I think his movies show it. To me it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.

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?

Women are another race. They’re like the moon, always changing. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you’re not. You can’t tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I’ve never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn’t have to play a game. I’ve never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.

There can be nothing more sterile than an extended conversation between two people who basically agree. If we basically disagreed we’d be getting somewhere.

HENRY JAGLOM: I have good news and bad news. I’ll tell you the good news first. Jack said yes to The Big Brass Ring, but he won’t reduce his salary. I said, “Jack, it’s Orson fucking Welles. Imagine it’s 1968!” He said, “If this were 1968, I would do it for nothing. I really want to do it, but it will totally throw me into the art movie world again and I’ve been working to get out of that into the big, mainstream things, where they pay me millions and millions of dollars. If I do a picture for half that, how do I explain to the next person that I’m demanding four million?”

I’ve always felt there are three sexes: men, women, and actors. And actors combine the worst qualities of the other two. I can’t go on waiting for stars.

HJ: I’m afraid you may be right. And it’s a shocking thing to think this about my friends, you know? OW: But that’s the way friends are, if they’re stars.

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: 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.”

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: The movie relates to the book Peter wrote about Dorothy Stratten. You know, the Playmate he met at Hef’s. Who was murdered by her husband. Peter is very emotionally involved with this material. OW: I read that book. HJ: I think it’s called The Killing of the Unicorn, or something like that. OW: For a man to betray himself that way, in front of the world, is really disturbing. She was a semihooker, you know. HJ: Which is not Peter’s thing at all. OW: And he implicates himself as a stooge of Hefner. HJ: He says he owes it to Dorothy. OW: Oh, no. After I finished the book, I don’t believe he was in love with her. He was in love with himself being in love with her.

HJ: Mask is about a boy born with a deformed face. He apparently picked this subject because the first play he took Dorothy to see was The Elephant Man. She identified with it, because her great beauty was similar to the grotesque ugliness of the Elephant Man. In that the extremeness of each of them—extreme beauty and extreme ugliness—separated them from the common folk of the world. OW: Shit! HJ: This is his movie for Dorothy. It’s the myth of how horrible it is to be beautiful. But despite it all, I’m very fond of Peter. He’s uniquely gifted. And he’s as much a victim as everyone else.

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can’t admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

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.

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.

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.

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: There’s a picture on the back of you and your lady of the time,

“Only through love and friendship can you create the illusion that you are not entirely alone,” he said, in what turns out to be his last appearance in a movie, his last acting job.