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fused to abandon until at long last he finished it. But even Orson's perseverance in this regard was used as evidence against him. ''Because it took me so long to get all the money together, I had to keep stopping," says Orson, ''and friends of mine, people who before and after had been very loyal to me, like Darryl Zanuck, said, 'We don't know what's wrong with Orson. He keeps making a picture and stopping because he gets bored with it and goes away.' / had no moneyr' —^this last a perfectly rational explanation for why Orson had to make Othello in the intermittent way he did. Years after Othello, when a lawyer of Orson's approached Zanuck to back a picture Orson had in mind, Zanuck said that although he was fond of Orson and thought him a genius, his having taken four years to finish Othello suggested that backing him would be an unsound investment. To Orson's horror, Zanuck seemed to have forgotten the terrible financial difficulties that had beset Orson during Othello —difficulties that he certainly should have recalled, since he had been among the people Orson had hit for cash! "I even got money from him for Othello/' says Orson, "and he'd forgotten that, and had swallowed the story that somehow Othello took four years to make because Crazy Welles took four years to make it."

Crazy Welles —^it is an image of himself that Orson thinks especially unjust because, as he argues, rather than growing bored with his films, he grows obsessed with them, with finishing them against all odds. "Once I get into it," says Orson, "I'm like a mud turtle, I don't move. The legend is so detached from the facts that it's absurd. I've never been bored. I have a sense of obligation to anything I start." As to the source of Orson's notorious reputation for being unbridled, this in part he ascribes to what had been his public persona in the early theatrical days in New York: "I took over the mantle of John Barrymore and Von Stroheim. That's a sort of ready character and the public wants somebody like that." From the outset this Crazy Welles with whom Orson sincerely finds himself unable to identify had attracted a vast amount of pubHcity to his stage productions. "I didn't like the publicity," Orson claims (although one suspects that this is something he feels more in retrospect than he did at the time). "But there was nothing I could do about it, because Houseman and people like that were on their way up the ladder by showing that they were able to control me. I had to be wild in order for their function to be important. I had to be irresponsible, capricious, unreliable, and so on for wise old heads like that to

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have their value. It was greatly to the advantage of anybody who became a producer or associate of mine to be the steadying influence to this brilliant but out-of-control force. People don't understand that you can't really put on a play if you're out of control, or direct a picture or finish it unless you're more in control than anybody."

And indeed by the time he got to Genoa early in 1958, he had to his credit an amazing number of major plays and pictures: a record of artistic achievement that clearly belies the now-popular idea that Orson tended to grow weary of, and wantonly abandon, projects before bringing them to consummation. Quite simply, what other figure in America could lay claim to a long list of the greatest accomplishments in film, theater, and radio? Still, for Orson, that illustrious career had been tinged with sadness. Besides feeling alienated from the public perception of him, he also could not always recognize himself even in his own films because too often they were mutilated, reedited, or rescored in the end by others. In both his style and sensibility Orson was plainly an artist of self-assertion, so that it was all the more painful for him when it was not always his own self that his films asserted. Still, they were all films by Orson Welles in which, to varying degrees, he recognized an imperfect version of what he had wanted to do. By the end of his stay in Hollywood, he believed that Touch of Evil was somehow no longer his picture, but he took a different line when at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, much to the surprise of the studio, which had shown little interest in seeking the proper distribution or publicity for it in America, the film won top prize in the international competition, and Orson cheerfully accepted. The award was particularly gratifying to Orson in light of the film's having virtually disappeared in the States. But however much he seemed in public to have changed his tune about precisely whose picture it was, still his gratitude for the award was mingled with a secret sense of loss, of alienation from a work of art that both was and wasn't his.

''It will turn to hate by the time you get me to Genoa," Orson had predicted of my feelings about him, as I worked my way through his life. Although he would flit in and out of Hollywood in the ensuing years, and although eventually he would even unofficially resettle there (while maintaining his official residence in Las Vegas), there was also a sense in which, after Genoa, there was really no turning back. As far as Hollywood was concerned, Orson had proved the validity of, had en-

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tirely become for all time, the image of him that they had had all along. "Sometimes he's just out there and I don't know who he is," says Orson of that image—^as if it were one of the many often-ridiculous roles he has played in other men's movies, as if—^Brechtian to the bitter end— he has resisted identifying with the part he has generally been assigned to play in his own life story.

From Genoa the Welleses headed south toward Rome. Orson had no clear idea of where—or if-—he wanted to settle down. They talked of making a home either in Sicily or Tuscany, but nothing was certain. Orson remained terribly confused about all that had just happened in Hollywood. The partial vindication of the Brussels World's Fair was still several months away, so he was filled with anxiety about the fate of his new picture. For Orson, Italy meant exile, rootlessness, but for Paola it was home. She said that although Orson wanted her to act with him again, she preferred the role of wife. The scornful response to her performance in Arhadin, the intimations that Orson had cast her only because she had been his girlfriend, these could not have been easy for her. But if Paola chose now to throw herself into the role of wife, it was also because some semblance of home, of an establishment, however precarious, was what Orson needed now that he took up a life of ceaseless peregrination, as often as not with his little family in tow. His first daughter, Christopher, compares Orson and Paola's marriage to Skipper and Hortense Hill's, which in some small part was probably its model. Hortense had allowed Skipper entirely to immerse himself in his projects, to stay out all night if he had to get things done. Now, on a far grander scale than Skipper had, Orson would steal away for days, weeks, at a time, usually to make a well-paid cameo appearance in another man's movie. But always he would return home, which, eventually, meant Fregene, outside Rome, where besides the addition of Orson's mother-in-law, the Welles menage included a bevy of cats, who, like Orson, periodically came and went. ''We had about two hundred cats, it seemed to me—^I suppose it was twenty," says Orson. *'But there was one absolutely wonderful cat that I'd found and brought back, who was uncatlike in that when we would drive up he would run to meet the car and do uncatlike things. He depended so much on us." But Orson's delight in this creature was to end in terrible sadness. "When we had to leave," Orson recalls, "he had gone away on one of

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his three- or four-day binges, and I said to my mother-in-law, 'You drive out there and wait till he comes back and pick him up and take care of him and bring him back to Rome.' And she never did, and I'll never feel the same about her, that's all! So he came back and there was nobody there, and he just died of hunger and a broken heart. That's just too awful to think of!"

Orson sustained a more serious loss while living in Italy, when he heard of the death of Dadda Bernstein, who had fallen off a ladder in his yard. Once before, Dadda had had a similar accident but survived it. "He got up early in the morning and went to his office to fix the wiring," says Orson, "and went down in the cellar and climbed a ladder and fell down. That was the accident he lived from. Then he was told by everybody never to get up on a ladder again." Apparently, however, Dadda failed to heed these warnings, so that, not long afterward, he suffered the fall that killed him. Recalls Orson: "On this day he leaned a ladder against a tree and went up to prune it and fell down and killed himself. Poor Hazel found him dead." When he heard the news, Orson had mixed feelings about this first of his mentors. Mingled with his profound regret, with his memories of their early days together, was something else. Indeed, much as he genuinely loved Dadda, Orson also resented him for having kept much of the money Dick Welles had left Orson in his will (a fact of which Skipper did not hesitate to remind Orson). Says Orson: "There is a moment when you wonder how he can possibly have justified keeping all that money. He bought a big house in Los Angeles out of my money, and decorated it entirely with furniture which had belonged to my mother." Not that Dadda ever consciously thought of himself as having stolen from Orson. "I do not think that Dadda Bernstein had any notion that he was actually stealing from me," says Orson. "It was all for my own good. I don't think he could have had a moment of conscience. It was all justified in his mind." Probably Dadda honestly believed that the money was best spent maintaining the home for Pookles that had been lost when Beatrice died (whether that new home was in Ravinia or Los Angeles!). To illustrate how Dadda was able to rationalize a somewhat smaller theft from his Pookles, Orson tells the story of a visit Dadda and Ashton Stevens paid to his dressing room in Philadelphia during Five Kings. "I had a box of very expensive Havana cigars on my dressing-room table," Orson recalls, "and when I came back after the show to get my

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makeup off, I saw that three-quarters of the cigars were gone. It turned out that Dadda Bernstein had taken them all, and his justification was that the stage hands could walk in and steal them from me. Now he kept these cigars, but he had protected me from the theft of them by the stage hands." The news of Dadda's death made Orson dream of the possibility of retrieving some of his mother's possessions, especially her piano, to haul about with him in Europe. '*The house was entirely decorated with things I had seen as a child in my mother's house," says Orson of Dadda's Beverly Hills home. "And there was a famous prayer rug—of museum quality—^which my father tried to get out of Dadda Bernstein, and I remember their quarrels about it as a child. The famous prayer rug! There it was in Los Angeles! It was the only thing my father really thought he wanted. He'd bought it, you see, himself. It was the kind of thing he'd like. He used to travel with it. When he would be on a Pullman car, he liked to have it to put his feet on when he'd get out. 'Where's my goddam prayer rug?' " Orson recalls his father's habitually lamenting, when Dadda had taken it after Beatrice's death. But neither the prayer rug nor the piano nor any other of his mother's things found their way into Orson's possession, for Hazel dispersed them among Dadda's Hollywood friends before she repaired to a retirement home. 'T would have liked to have had my mother's piano!" Orson grumbles, still obviously miffed by its having gone to perfect strangers who weren't about to return it to him. "He always painted me as hopelessly ungrateful," says Orson of how Dadda talked about him to friends late in life. "They all looked steely-eyed at me and regarded him as a kind of saint. And all he talked about, day and night, was me to them. 'When have you seen him last?' 'Oh, not in years!' " But even if Orson had managed to get his hands on the prayer rug, or any of the other family heirlooms he coveted, still he would be left with the practical problem of earning a living, of supporting his mobile menage, and perhaps even of scraping together the cash to resume work on Don Quixote. Orson had not been back in Europe for long when, in quest of cash, he found himself briefly in the States again, to narrate a Cinerama picture, and to talk up a possible deal (of which nothing ever came) with some TV panjandrums in New York. Then it was back to Italy, and off to Africa where, in the 125° heat of the Cameroons, he was to act opposite Errol Flynn and Trevor Howard in another of Zanuck's pictures. The Roots of Heaven, directed by John

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Huston. As if the unbearable and unrelenting heat was not enough to drive everyone batty, Errol Flynn's desperate need for fixes of heroin, which the shocked hospital nuns refused to provide, threatened to impede the production, until Zanuck shrewdly offered the grateful Mother Superior a new wing for her hospital in exchange for her providing Flynn all the dope he wanted. Flynn had deteriorated substantially since Orson had taken cocaine with him on the Zaca during the making of Lady from Shanghai. (Orson knew in detail about Flynn's drug habits from Dadda Bernstein, who, for a time, had served as Flynn's doctor in Hollywood. But although Dadda was perfectly willing to prescribe speed for Orson, he balked at supplying the hard drugs Flynn routinely asked for, and subsequently lost him as a patient.) In Africa, Flynn was also drinking heavily, as was Trevor Howard, with whom one night on the set he became far too groggy to continue shooting. Next morning, when they returned to the same set, neither seemed to remember having been there the night before. "Errol, have I seen this set before?" asked Howard. "No, no, absolutely not!" insisted Flynn—and he wasn't kidding. However awful was his health, Flynn managed to impress Orson with the beautiful young lady he had in tow. Not that Orson had been particularly impressed by Flynn's taste in women in the past: "He had, in my opinion, spent his entire life, this man over whom girls swooned, picking dogs. I went on a cruise with him and when we would come into the port all the crew, including myself, would get dibs on the good-looking girls in the port, and the dog that was left would go to Errol." But in Africa Orson changed his tune: "He turned up with a fifteen-year-old girl who would have made a Po-lanski of anybody! She was sensational! It made a very strong impression on everybody that he was sustaining the interest of this healthy young child since he was coked to the gills, and on the big H, and drunk. He was still managing to get around, looking pretty awful."

When the production moved on to Paris, Orson was installed at the Ritz, which struck him as a far more congenial setting than the bush. Having recovered sufficiently from the heat to talk of his imminent plans to the French press he announced that, besides Don Quixote, he hoped soon to direct a TV special he envisioned with Gina Lollobrigida. In between shooting, he squeezed in stops at Cannes for the film festival, and at Brussels where he saw, and was hailed for. Touch of Evil. Notwithstanding the acclaim with which Touch of Evil was garlanded at

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Brussels, and elsewhere in Europe, where almost instantly it became a cult classic, it was mostly overlooked in America. So when Orson accepted an acting job from Zanuck, which meant his returning to the States for the major role of defense lawyer Clarence Darrow in Compulsion, to be produced by Zanuck's son Richard, and directed by Richard Fleischer, it was not without a certain amount of bitterness that he had not been asked to direct. ''He was jealous of my directing the picture," says Fleischer with understanding of why this would be so, ''because why shouldn't he be directing Compulsion?^^ From the first, Fleischer was acutely sensitive to the awkwardness of the situation. "We were all worried," he says about the anxious anticipation on the set before Orson came over from Europe. "Orson Welles had always been a great idol of mine, and I was in awe of him for my whole life. Citizen Kane —I believed then as I do now—is the best picture ever made, and the idea of working with Orson Welles was quite overwhelming. I was very nervous about it!" To make matters worse, Orson's contract required him to work on the picture for exactly ten days, after which he had booked passage on a freighter to the Orient, where he was scheduled to arrive in time to act in a film in Hong Kong. Fleischer knew that if he did not get everything he needed from Orson in that time his picture could be ruined, and this added to his agitation, which did not abate in the slightest when at long last Orson arrived. "You don't know how to grab on to him," says Fleischer of his first physical impression of Orson. "You don't know how to handle him. You don't know which way he's going to jump. He's got this overpowering voice and presence. You really have to feel your way for a while to see whether you can direct him or whether he's going to direct you. He knows so damn much. He knows what you're doing before you think of it yourself." Fleischer sensed that Orson's first impression of him would be crucial in determining the success or failure of their ten days together. "You have to be very careful directing Orson," Fleischer says. "You have to gain his confidence. If he has no confidence in you, he will steamroller you, flatten you right out. So he has to get to feel that he can trust you. He watches the director to see how the director has prepared and how he handles the crew and the other actors—^he's very mindful of that." Fleischer mentions one incident in particular to illustrate the subtle struggle for power between them. Orson was to make an exit at the end of a corridor, on the left side.

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Never imagining that this could pose a problem, the director told the actor what he wanted him to do: "Orson, you go down to the end of there and turn left and go out the door." "I'd rather go out the right side," Orson replied. "You can't go out the right side," said Fleischer. "Why not?" "There is no set on the right side. If you turn right and we pan with you, there's no set. You'd see the stage wall. Nothing there." Orson seemed to think deeply about it for a minute. Then: "You know what rd do if I were directing this picture?" he asked. "No," Fleischer replied. "I don't know. What would you do?" "I would wait until they built the wall for me." "Orson," said Fleischer, "this is the reason why I am directing this picture and you are not." "You are absolutely right," said Orson. "I will exit through the door." And he did.

Whatever tension there may have been between them, the work they did together on the film was extraordinary. "I don't think Orson/ee/5 any great emotion when he's acting," says Fleischer, "but he is very intellectual and very technical. I don't care how an actor gets a performance. I don't care whether he feels it or he doesn't feel it, as long as it's what you're looking for. I don't think Orson works internally, but his technique is a master's." A good example of this distanced technique is the lengthy and dramatic speech that Clarence Darrow delivers at the end of the movie's murder trial. Fleischer's likeliest approach would have been to film the speech in sequence. But considering the numerous changes in camera setup and lighting that would have been required, doing the speech in sequence would have taken much too long, and Orson was available for only ten days. Thus Fleischer decided to shoot the courtroom speech out of sequence so that all segments of the speech to be covered by a particular camera angle would be shot together, thereby cutting out much of the time it would otherwise take to shift the cameras and lights. But as Fleischer points out, this time-saving device "required great concentration on Orson's part because we might do one part of the speech where he's speaking very quietly, and then the next section, which might have been two or three pages down, where he was back in relatively the same angle, and he might have had to come in in the middle of a sentence, very emotional and very excited." From the outset of his moviemaking career in Citizen Kane, Orson had viewed film as an assemblage of parts, the myriad relations among which he kept constantly in mind while working. Because of this, and because his distanced approach to acting typically

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kept him from inhabiting, from feehng, the role, he was able painlessly to shift gears while performing out of sequence different parts of the speech. Says Fleischer: "I don't think I could have done it with anybody other than Orson."

Sometimes Orson's ability to put his technique into practice was not without its peculiar requirements, such as asking that other actors not look him in the eye when he was in the middle of a speech. '*Orson has a great deal of trouble looking people in the eye," said Fleischer. In one scene, for instance, when Orson was supposed to address E. G. Marshall, whose back would be turned to the camera, he asked Marshall to keep his eyes closed so that he would not flub his lines. Since no one would see him doing so, Marshall complied. Equally unbearable to Orson was to have an actor watch him from off-camera. '*When he has to do a scene where he is talking to someone off-camera," Fleischer explains, "he does not want that other person there." Fleischer points out that most actors prefer talking to someone whom they can see, and who actually dehvers the appropriate dialogue in response to what they have just said—^but not Orson: ''Orson doesn't want anybody there," Fleischer continues. ''He doesn't want the actor on the set! And he doesn't want anything in his eye line right to the stage wall. You have to clear that side of the camera where that other actor would have been, and then he will do the scene perfectly, with the proper pause for the other actor's dialogue and with the overlap in the right place. He'll react to something the other actor is saying. He'll laugh or he'll get angry or whatever. He'll play the whole scene without the other actor's being there or the dialogue being read, and it'll be perfect!" Never was it clearer that Orson was intensely conscious of every move off-camera than when, in the middle of rehearsing a scene in which he interrogated a witness, Orson spotted the publicity man who, much to Orson's ensuing embarrassment, had not followed his instructions to cancel an appointment with an important journalist. Breaking off in the middle of a line of dialogue, Orson suddenly lashed out at the publicity man, whose eyes actually welled with tears at the humiliation to which Orson's mighty barrage subjected him. No sooner had he violently broken out of character than Orson was Darrow again, shrewdly interrogating the witness on the stand. By then the moment's evanescent rage seemed more like acting, like artifice, than the measured legal patter that had so suddenly replaced it. Was the explosion merely a performance for

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the benefit of cast and crew^-or did Orson really feel the fury that he had just enacted? Precisely as Orson intended, it was impossible to tell —although shifting gears like that had indeed made his little tirade all the more effective. The intentional ambiguity of his actions contributed substantially to the "Crazy Welles" image that has persistently done him so much harm. People couldn't always read him—^nor did he want them to. "He is mercurial," says Fleischer of Orson. "You think you know him, you think you've got a hold on him, you don't. Maybe he doesn't want you to. I just don't think that you can ever understand him."

The publicity man's inefficiency was not the only source of Orson's irritation. It was on this trip to the States that he discovered that, much as he had feared, there was no chance of retrieving his mother's piano or the other property that Hazel had freely dispensed before settling into a retirement home. Orson was so annoyed that after the first visit with Hazel he did not want to go back to see her again, but Paola insisted that it was his duty. (Orson points out that in the end his pretend-devotion paid off when Hazel left him some money in her will. Says Orson: "Since all of it was stolen from me I was glad to have it!") Besides working on Compulsion and visiting Hazel, Orson also found the time for a swift foray into Mexico to shoot additional footage for Don Quixote. Like Kane^ Don Quixote was to be as much about the telling of the tale as the tale itself, whose frame was Orson's narrating the adventures of the Don to a little girl played by Patty McCormack, the brilliant child-star of The Bad Seed. She appears to have seen a side of Orson Welles that eluded many others. "The impression I had of him through others was someone to be feared," Miss McCormack recalls. But to the youngster there was nothing fearful about him—on the contrary, his manner with her was extraordinarily gentle. Where others saw the public persona that Orson calls "Crazy Welles," she saw only the "twinkle in his eye" that gave it all away as an act. She knew he was playing.

But he wasn't always playing; there were moments when his rages were spontaneous, deeply felt—and more often than not caused by economic pressures. At the end of Orson's work on Compulsion, he hoped to collect his check and sail for China the next day. All that remained was for him to look at the dailies and do the looping. But first, Fleischer had assembled a little farewell party for Orson, who was

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holding court with some members of the company across the room when Fleischer spotted Richard Zanuck arrive. The producer looked stricken. The Internal Revenue Service to whom Orson still owed an immense sum in back taxes had stepped in at the last minute to garnishee his salary. If Orson had blown up at a publicity man for a relatively minor offense, what would he possibly do when he did not get his money? Zanuck feared telling him, lest Orson balk at doing the looping. But Fleischer figured that they had to, since Orson might want to call a lawyer, and because they might be legally liable if they withheld the news. But whatever trepidation they had about telling him appeared to have been unnecessary. Fleischer held his breath as Zanuck crossed the room toward Orson, who kept laughing and talking even after the producer had obviously disclosed the bad news. They even had a convivial drink together after which Zanuck went back to Fleischer to say that Orson seemed somehow to have expected the tax people's action against him, and had thanked Zanuck for telling him about it. Fleischer, however, said that he was still going to hold his breath, and as things turned out he had good reason to do so. In what must have been a delayed reaction to the bad news, while screening the dailies Orson exploded at what he claimed was the utter incompetence of the footage. Each of them in turn, Fleischer, Zanuck, and the cameraman, fell victim to his eloquent tongue-lashing. But if Fleischer and Zanuck refrained from fighting back because they knew the real source of Orson's agitation, the cameraman grew enraged at the furious spate of abuse, and was ready to smack Orson when Fleischer grabbed his arm and told him to be quiet. By then Orson had blustered outside where he sped away in a jeep. Having sworn off driving the momentous night the woman fell out of his car and accused him of trying to rape her, Orson was again behind the wheel, disappearing in a cloud of smoke. What was Fleischer to do without Orson's looping in the necessary dialogue? The sound work scheduled for that evening was absolutely essential. After a drink to calm their agitated nerves, Fleischer and Zanuck went to the looping room to dismiss the crew. There however they discovered Orson, who, in a great huff, had started work without them. The session was an unmitigated disaster. Orson's bitterness about not having been asked to direct the picture had been compounded by this final humiliation of not even getting paid for his acting. He covered—or thought he was covering—the pain he felt with a great

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show of asperity. In a boiling rage, he sped through his lines, refusing to backtrack when the soundman complained that he was all out of sync. One particularly difficult speech that Orson had already done to perfection was unusable because of the camera noise. Now he really boiled over when asked to try it again. The camera noise hadn't been his fault. "I refuse to loop this scene!" he fumed. "Orson, listen to it," said Fleischer, trying to reason with him. "It's not acceptable." "I refuse to loop it! This is now a matter between you and the Screen Actors Guild. Good night!" Orson wasn't kidding. He barreled off, never to return. Within hours he was on his way to Hong Kong, and Fleischer was left with a small but indispensable part of his sound track badly marred by camera noise. Since the scene could not be cut, the editor reconstructed it out of words, even syllables, culled one by one from Orson's dialogue elsewhere in the film, in an arduous process that Fleischer compares to "hand-knitting." "We screwed Orson!" exults Fleischer of their having salvaged the scene. But Orson's nasty exit notwithstanding, Fleischer did not bear a grudge. Says Fleischer: "I got a letter from Orson from the ship really apologizing for his behavior the last day of the picture, and saying what a wonderful experience it was, and how patient we all were with him, and how much he appreciated it." Having cooled off a bit at sea, Orson must have suspected the artistic importance of the performance he had just turned in, and which, along with The Third Man, would generally come to be thought of as the apex of his acting in pictures other than his own. Indeed, with his two co-stars in Compulsion, Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell, Orson would share the prize for best actor at Cannes in 1959. Much of his other acting work, however, was far less creatively rewarding. But as he liked to say, he had to "pay the rent."

Next, while filming in Hong Kong, Orson had a happy reunion with Christopher that compensated somewhat for acting in a picture that held little artistic interest for him. On the ferry to Macao with Orson, Christopher met an old schoolmate from Europe, a Portuguese girl whose family lived there, and to whose home Christopher and her famous father were invited. Although the large Portuguese family was clearly quite nervous about entertaining Orson Welles, he quickly— and skillfully—^put everyone at ease by showing them the sunny side of his personality. The more food they brought for him to eat, the more he sweetly sang their praises. Missing was the haughtiness, the air of su-

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periority, one might have expected, and in its place, a warmth and genuine lack of pretension he rarely exhibited in pubhc but which was, in its way, every bit as much a part of his personality. This was the private Orson, who could be as sweet and self-effacing as the public Orson was often quite the opposite.

Orson was neither sweet nor self-effacing the day in Paris when, a few pictures later, he reported to work for Fleischer again. ''You're going to have a much more difficult time with me!" Orson announced at the outset of the new picture. Crack in the Mirror. "Why?" Fleischer asked. "Because my interest span on a picture is very short," Orson explained. "The ten days we had on Compulsion was just about right, but this is a much longer thing. I'm going to get very impatient and short-tempered because I don't like being on a picture this long." In the interval since Compulsion, his resentment about it had been festering, so much so in fact that, one Friday night during Crack in the Mirror, after he and Fleischer had had several drinks, Orson blurted out his conviction that it had been he, not Fleischer, who was responsible for the success of Compulsion. Fleischer of course hotly denied it, and, thinking better of what he had said, Orson apologized after a long painful pause. But Orson had needed to say it, perhaps not so much because he believed he had somehow directed Compulsion, but because, more than ever, he believed he should have directed it. Fleischer tried to ease some of the tension by saying how much he admired him: "I think I really won him over when I told him in all sincerity that he'd made the greatest movie ever made and that was good enough." But it was not good enough. Perhaps it might be for history, but not for forty-four-year-old Orson, who was not about to start thinking of himself in the past tense. His restlessness, his discontent manifested itself in the way he seemed to sabotage the other cast members by telling them elaborate stories just before a take, so that when the cameras went on, the actors were so immersed in what Orson had been saying that they flubbed their lines. "He was devilish that way," says Fleischer. "He did that over and over again and made them look very foolish. I felt he was doing this on purpose. It's playful—he's so accomplished an actor that he can outmaneuver other actors if they're not really on top of things." To Orson this was just a little game to amuse himself. It was not really a question of sabotaging the others, however, as much as it was of demonstrating how easily he could shift

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gears from telling a wild tale to acting his part in the picture. If the others stumbled while he soared, so much the better.

But Orson did not always soar, and one time on the picture he stumbled badly. In one scene the character he played was supposed to fall into an excavation. At the bottom of the fifteen-foot drop were mattresses resting on cardboard crates. At first there had been no question of Orson's actually taking the fall, which would be done by a stunt man, but Orson insisted that he wanted to do it himself so that the camera could move in close for the accident. "Orson, you can get hurt!" the director protested. "You know you have very weak ankles and you're not the lightest-weight person in the world." "It's perfectly safe," Orson shot back. "I insist on doing it!" Fleischer relented. When it was time to get the shot, Orson approached the edge of the excavation, which crumbled on cue so that he disappeared into the big hole. "Okay, Orson!" Fleischer called after he cut—^but much to his alarm, there was no reply. Panicked, everyone rushed to the edge of the hole. At the bottom they saw that Orson was wedged in the very narrow space between one of the mattresses and the wall. The possibility of his falling just there, let alone his getting stuck in so small a space, had never occurred to anyone, least of all to Orson, who looked mortified at his plight. "We couldn't get him out for a while," Fleischer recalls. "It was his own damned fault. It was so funny seeing him wedged in there!" Apparently, only Orson was unamused by the delicate operation of dislodging him.

If Fleischer and company rescued Orson from the hole into which he had thrown himself, it was up to his erstwhile mentor Hilton Edwards to bail Orson out of his more general and far more painful plight. When Edwards visited Paris during the making of Crack in the Mirror, Fleischer glimpsed an aspect of Orson he had not so far observed: "He has a fagade that he puts up, he has an image—^but not with Hilton. With Hilton he was just a little boy." Once again, then, Orson played the little boy to Edwards's mentor type. That this was as much a mask as any other, and always had been, Fleischer could not have suspected. Once again, Orson needed a stage from which to launch himself, and once again Edwards provided it. In partnership they would patch together a new version of the Shakespearian crazy quilt Orson had attempted in the botched Five Kings. "It's the essential idea I had for

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Five Kings^^^ says Orson of this ambitious new production, which he called Chimes at Midnight, ''except that Five Kings made the dramatic mistake, I think, of going and doing Henry V in the same evening, which it shouldn't have done. The basic idea to do the two Henrys as a single play and take the main theme and stay with it is what I was trying for." That main theme, as Orson isolated it in stitching together bits and pieces of the history plays, was the complex relationship between young Prince Hal and his mentor, Falstaff. Under the auspices of the Dublin Gate, Orson would play Falstaff to Keith Baxter's Hal in Belfast and Dublin—and then, if all went well (which it would not), in London. Finally, if all went exceedingly well, and a backer materialized, Orson hoped to translate the stage production of Chimes into a film, to be shot in Yugoslavia, which had begun to rival Italy as a cheap place to make movies.

On February 13, 1960, Chimes had its world premiere at the Grand Opera House in Belfast. A week later, it moved on to the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin where, in a typical critical reaction, the correspondent for Variety hailed it as ''an evening of considerable entertainment" in which Orson gave "a standout performance" as Falstaff. But still, Orson recalls the production as having been "a terrible flop in Ireland" where the theatergoing public gave it a chilly reception after a massive public-relations blunder. Hoping to economize on the living arrangements for his family, Orson decided not to stay in a hotel in Dublin. Instead he secured an old house, which had come highly recommended to him by several prominent Dubliners. Unfortunately, he had not actually inspected the house before renting it, so that when he and Paola arrived in Dublin on the eve of rehearsals, they were dismayed to find that it was "thick with dust" and that none of the lights inside worked. Far worse, when they repaired to the bedroom, they discovered that the chamber pots beneath the bed had not been cleaned. There was no question of Orson's subjecting his wife to even a night of such unbearable filth, and the Welleses promptly left in disgust. Having checked into a hotel for the duration, Paola made the fatal mistake of passing a snide remark or two in public about the memorable chamber pots. "In this case it was really the fault of my beloved wife," says Orson. "She was the one who in that uninhibited Italian way allowed herself to tell the world exactly how dirty this house was. / would have crept quietly to the Shelbourne and shut up." She should have been more discreet.

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The eminent Dubliners who had heartily recommended the house to them in the first place took great offense at their being offended. And so, as these things happen, word quickly spread about Dublin that Orson Welles thought the Irish dirty—a rumor that Orson blames for the ensuing box-office failure of his production. In addition to the dismal box-office receipts, none of Orson's former friends came backstage to congratulate him, which suggested the intense ill-will with which Dublin seemed to regard Orson as a result of the chamber-pot incident. To make amends with the Irish, he tried declaiming a national classic by J. M. Synge from the stage of the Gaiety. ''By the second week," Orson recalls, "I was reduced to reading Riders to the Sea in order to keep the theater open. " But even that did not seem to help much. The only locals who did not seem suddenly to hate him were those who confused Orson with James Mason, who, years before, had appeared as Brutus on the Dublin stage. "I had an occasional good word in a pub," laughs Orson. "Somebody would say, 'We'll never forget your Brutus, sir!' And of course James Mason is the one who played Brutus. We looked a lot like each other back in those days! Yes, he was very bitter about it. He has a square face, and /have a round one, and he doesn't have much nose. When we were young, people mistook him for me—^to his great irritation. He looked like I tried to look in stills when I sucked my cheeks in." By 1960, however, even if Orson sucked in his cheeks there was little hope of his looking much like James Mason. Following two entirely unsuccessful stays at the fashionable Italian spa Monteca-tini—"Everybody walks around carrying glasses of that stinking water," he had complained to the press—Orson seemed to have despaired of ever slimming down.

Orsoits weight —^this is the inescapable issue. People want to talk about it far more than they do about who wrote Citizen Kane or why Orson Welles could not work in Hollywood or what happened to The Other Side of the Wind. ''How did you get so fucking fat?*' commercial director Harry Hamburg once asked, to which Orson glibly replied that, having created works of art when he wa^ a young man, he* d finally decided to make himself into a work of art. If in a curious way Orson's weight provokes anger in some people, I suspect it's because they resent a once exceedingly handsome man's having let himself turn into what strikes them as grotesque. ''There is no reason to be that gross for Orson Welles who was such a beautiful man!" director Henry Hathaway says indignantly. "He's like a heap of Jello!" comments a^tor-producer Martin Gabel. "Idon't understand all that. As a kid he used to be fat and thin within a month — literally thin to very fat. But nothing like this. This is grotesque!" "It's like an addiction," says screenwriter and novelist Wolf Mankowitz of Orson's eating. "It's like a drug addict who hasn't reached rock-bottom and can't face the fact that he's an addict. He has an addiction to food."

Orson and I are having dinner at Pat's Fish House, another of his pet names for Ma Maison, based on the first name of its owner, Patrick

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Terrail. As a regular, Orson depends on the chef's recommendations for the day. Today it is a fish St. Pierre with a lobster sauce. Orson accepts, but specifics that for him, not me, the sauce is to be *^on the side." The days of the legendary Lucullan feasts are over. Orson eats well but — as far as I can see — sparingly. Not only does his fish arrive plain but, also by request, it is unsalted. Even the vegetable (which is spinach) has come ^^au natural. " The chef can't resist sending Orson a little silver boat of a ''special'' sauce in addition to his lobster sauce, but Orson is not tempted. He barely tastes either. I have learned to dread the moment of dessert when dining with Orson; he will insist on something profoundly caloric and sinful for me, and fruit for himself. Tonight it is sliced kiwis. "Toujours simple," he laughs when ordering. As usual, there is a bottle of champagne for me, but he drinks only glass after glass of Perrier. The people who see him regularly in Los Angeles observe the same thing I have: at least in public, Orson eats relatively little and drinks nothing remotely alcoholic.

I dare not ask him about his weight, however — certainly not in the first stages of our friendship. I would be much too embarrassed even to mention it. Sometimes, surprisingly, he brings it up himself, as he does tonight in Ma Maison, when he jokes about what he describes as ''the thousands of pounds" he has lost and gained back in his life. He is a bit less mirthful about the diet pills that were routinely prescribed to him in the early Hollywood years when no one, he reminds me, seemed to have the faintest idea that they were harmful.

People who have never met Orson Welles often presume that his size is almost all one can think about in his presence. But my experience is very different from that. In fact, I have considerable trouble identifying the man I am talking to with the outsize creature he has become. It is as if he is buried somewhere inside himself. I am repeatedly startled by how intact is the beauty that others lament has entirely disappeared. Although he is a veritable Gargantua, at least twice the bulk of many men, if you watch him from the right angle, you find yourself glimpsing the old sex-symbol Welles of decades back — the dashing star o/Citizen Kane or The Third Man. At such unsettling moments, one face suddenly emerges from within the other, then slips back inside again. Just as when telling stories at the dinner table Orson is capable of perfectly impersonating, of becoming, Greta Garbo

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or Charlie Chaplin, is this merely one Orson Welles impersonating another?

The more Orson and I talk over many months, the more I realize how much anguish his fat causes him — anguish at being laughed at because of his size. '*Fat jokes** is what he bitterly calls the mockery to which he is subjected — even by a friend like Burt Reynolds, of whom he was an early supporter in Hollywood. Appearing with Reynolds on a television show, Orson made a joke about the actor* s having named a theater after himself in Florida. ''It was meant as what the Spanish call rough kidding, which in life he likes, ** says Orson, who is silent for a moment as if suddenly remembering another part of the story, which he had originally repressed. His voice alters noticeably, there is a catch in his throat as he tells me, ''He immediately did a fat joke — just as a knee-jerk. Quick— did a fat joke and then went on.** Orson can take plenty of rough kidding himself, but clearly, I realize suddenly from the brooding tone of his voice, fat jokes don*tfall into that category. Until the '70s, when Orson *s weight shot up beyond a point of no return, he had still been quite capable of joking in public about his size. It was clear back then that he felt more joy in eating than he did pain in the fat jokes. All that is very different today — which is why, even when we finally know each other well enough for me to feel comfortable asking him just about anything, his size is one subject I steer clear of.

One day, however, I find myself talking to him openly, and in a fairly lighthearted manner, about his feelings about being fat. It starts by our discussing, of all things, the many people in Hollywood who have had cosmetic surgery, much of it very bad.

''I think the worst plastic surgeons in the world come to Hollywood because they seem to be in a sort of conspiracy to make everyone look worse, ** Orson laughs. "There are some good ones somewhere, because every- once in a while I meet some girl that Fve known in the prehistoric period who looks absolutely divine, as though the years havent passed at all. So somewhere, in some towns, there must be good ones. **

I know the particular girl he*s thinking of, an actress with whom he had a fling some forty years ago. Just the other day she came up to his table at lunch and looked much as she had decades before. From the way he told me about this, I sensed that, even as he marveled at how

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very much the same she appeared, he trembled to think of how entirely different he must look to her.

**There's one who's supposed to be the greatest in London/' he continues on the subject of plastic surgeons. **He doesn't like to do it because he's an old war hero. He's the best man at putting a face back on a man who has no face, and he spends all his time doing that. He does one or two cosmetic operations a week, and you have to book two years ahead of time or something. He looks at you with contempt because you have a face to begin with." I'm beginning to wonder how Orson knows all this when he says, *7 went to see him because I wanted to know if I could get my fat cut off."

''You were just going to have it cut off?" I say, as startled by his talking about it so candidly as by the idea itself.

''Yes," says Orson, "they can really do it. But he said it was a very major operation, and that nobody should have a major operation unless it were life and death. They do it all the time very cheerfully. People have slabs of lard cut off daily, you know."

By now we are both giggling — I, a bit nervously — but still I know he is absolutely serious about having wanted to get his fat cut away.

"It's a terrific idea," I laugh.

"Yes," he laughs back. When I suggest that it would of necessity be only a temporary measure, because new fat would soon take its place, Orson says philosophically, "That's true of anything to do with fat. That's automatic." And what about the physical pain of the operation? "It isn't that so much," he says to explain why he didn't try it, "as just that the shock of the surgery is considerable. "

As long as we are on the subject, I mention a television talk show I watched the other morning about a doctor who suctions away fat in his office. "Yes, that's the new one, and I've thought of doing it," he says. "I was very pleased with that, and I went hurrying, hurrying for advice. " He can't resist another gale of laughter here. "And they said the same thing: Big Shock."

"That really looks ugly and unpleasant," I say of what I saw on television.

"It was very ugly, that awful vacuum cleaner," Orson agrees. "But it seemed to me an awfully nice idea, theoretically— just turn on the Hoover, and away goes the fat, you know."

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I wonder aloud now how the doctor possibly suctions off the same amount of fat from the different parts of the body.

^'Oh, you're going to be oddly shaped/* Orson explains authoritatively, as if I were the prospective patient. ''The point is that you'll be thinly oddly shaped. *'

CHAPTER 35

So Snail tne World Perceive

The financial failure of Chimes at Midnight in Dublin precluded Hilton Edwards's taking the production to London. But having finally solved the aesthetic problem of focus that had stumped him in Five Kings, Orson did not abandon the dream of eventually raising money for a film version of the Fallstaff-Hal relationship that had come to preoccupy him. In the meantime, however, if Chimes was not going on to London, Orson was—for he had just received a timely invitation to put on the London premiere of Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros, which Wolf Mankowitz was producing, an invitation that pleased Orson all the more for the long-awaited opportunity it afforded to direct Laurence Olivier, who was set to play Berenger. Playing the role of Daisy was Joan Plowright, whom Orson had directed in the London production of Moby Dick in 1955, and with whom Olivier, still married to Vivien Leigh, had fallen in love when they appeared together in The Entertainer. It was during the run of Orson's Rhinoceros that their affair would erupt into the open when Vivien Leigh shocked the press and public by disclosing that her husband wanted a divorce. But all this was still in the future when Orson happily embarked on rehearsals late in March. As it turned out, Rhinoceros was a dreadful disappointment for Orson, who had initially intended to outdo Jean-Louis Barrault's hit production then running at the Odeon in Paris. But the more he la-

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bored on the production—directing, designing sets, and even reworking some of the action, transposing the setting to England—^the less sympathy he seemed to feel for lonesco's play, in which he had taken no onstage role for himself. ''It's a terrible play," says Orson. ''I hate it. But I wanted to do it because of Larry." Although, in London, there was much keen anticipation of the production, when it opened in April of 1960, it was quite surprisingly overshadowed by what had been the far less trumpeted premiere of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. "Nothing could have been more fatal," says Orson of the effect of the other production on his. As for the golden opportunity to direct Olivier, this was the worst disappointment of all. ''He behaved terribly during the show," says Orson of Olivier. "He's always very sinister and does strange things. The way he got me in this was to take all of my directions like a perfect soldier, never argue with them, and always do them—I gave him some wonderful things to do, I must say—and he took every actor aside and told them that I was misdirecting them." Orson explains Olivier's strategy thus: "Instead of making it hard for me to direct him, he made it almost impossible for me to direct the cast. He got them off in little groups and had little quiet rehearsals having nothing to do with me." For all his notoriety as an actor who was not averse to taking over another man's production and directing it himself, Orson did not like it one bit when someone else did the same to him. Orson says that eventually Olivier sent him away from his own production, and that for some inscrutable reason he heeded the actor's command. "Then he did something which he had done to John Gielgud before, when he was playing Twelfth Night with Vivien," says Orson. "He told John Gielgud four days before the opening that he shouldn't come for any more rehearsals, he was upsetting them. And he didn't come! Then he [Olivier] did the same thing to me. He told me to stay home, and I did! I was so humiliated and sick about it that you can't imagine. I had to come for the dress rehearsal because I'd designed the sets, and I had to supervise that, and light it, and so on." Afterwards, however, Orson couldn't bear to return to the play, which he felt had been wrested away from him in rehearsal. "I never went back to the play," he recalls. "They changed the cast, and they had Maggie Smith in, and they had Alan Bates, and they moved to another theater. But I didn't go to rehearsals. All those actors think very badly of me because they think that I simply wasn't interested—I was so humiliated, I didn't

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know how to come back! All those actors thought that I was just un-thinkably cavalier, but I didn't have the guts! He's the leader of the English stage, he's playing the leading role, and directing it all the time! What was /going to do? Yes, it was a black moment." As to why Olivier would do any of this, Orson has his theory. "He had to destroy me in some way," says Orson. "He did it to John G., and he took it perfectly cheerfully!" But why possibly would Olivier want to destroy Orson? "Well," says Orson, "he doesn't want anybody else up there. He's like Chaplin, you know. He's a real fighting star."

"Being in show business today is like being a cherry picker," Orson told the press that May as he prepared to leave London. "We go where the crops are." Given the lack of money to film Chimes as, more and more, he longed to do, Orson had no choice but to hire himself out for the usual round of acting chores. "It's like the cherry crop," he added. "Whatever's going, we take. Except that I'm choosier about what I direct than what I act in." Surely he was not being choosy when, for instance, he pursued the crop to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, where he appeared with Victor Mature in The Tartars. Not that Orson and his long-ago rival for Rita Hayworth's affections would actually appear together very much. The artful use of doubles could make it seem that both of them were onscreen when only one was really there. The few times they did work together however did not quite work out. The production schedule called for Orson to shoot his entire part first, then for Mature to arrive to do his. Whatever work they had to shoot together, they did shortly before Orson left. Their first big scene began with Orson seated on a raised throne toward which Mature marched down a long aisle lined with palace guards, at the end of which Orson would dramatically descend the steps from his throne to meet him. It was simple enough direction, but not for these two, who appeared to be worried about which of them would seem the larger when they stood side by side. "Orson was a really big man, and so was Mature," says the production manager. Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, "but Mature wasn't satisfied. He had to be even bigger. So we started the scene, and I saw Mature come in wobbling —^he had heels several inches high so that he'd be much taller than Orson and dominate him! Orson saw this. He came down—but not all the way down. He stayed on the last step, so that he was one step above, and played the scene, all throughout, one step above Victor Mature!" Even after Orson departed from Zagreb, Ma-

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ture seemed determined not to let himself be overshadowed by him. Told that there was a crisis on the set, Tasca rushed there to find Mature engaged in a furious dispute with director Richard Thorpe. ''You son of a bitch!" Mature was heard to address the gentlemanly director. "What's wrong, Mr. Mature?" interjected the prince, who deliberately refrained from ever calling him Victor. "You're a son of a bitch too!" he replied. "Well, Mr. Mature," Tasca said calmly, "maybe I am a son of a bitch, but what is this all about?" "In this scene you shot two close-ups of Orson Welles, and the son of a bitch wants to do only one close-up of me!" said Mature, "I want three close-ups!" With which request Tasca loudly advised the director to comply, while more quietly instructing the cameraman only to pretend to film the extra shots.

"It was a terrible picture!" the prince wryly admits of The Tartars. Unsatisfying work like acting in The Tartars made Orson more resentful of his temporary inability to direct, to make the movies he wanted to, while kitsch like this seemed to have no such trouble attracting funds. Back in Italy after his stint on The Tartars, Orson was perhaps more anxious than ever to get behind the camera again. But with no one as yet in sight to put up the cash for Chimes, he had little choice but to unpack six years' worth of disparate footage for his "home movie" of Don Quixote and start tinkering. The more pieces there were, the more Orson liked experimenting with new combinations, new permutations. His interminable approach to telling the tale of Don Quixote was an apt (if ultimately impractical) response to the Cervantes masterpiece, which is itself the most vertiginous of narrative structures: a series of stories within stories, frames within frames, that threatens never to end, to keep multiplying, to keep reworking itself from within—^and in a curious way, this is exactly what happened in Orson's ill-fated version. Now, however, determined as he was to finish it, to come up with the right combination of images, Orson kept creating new images that he hoped would make the parts of the puzzle fit together. With this in mind he enlisted the services of Prince Tasca, who, having completed his labors as production manager on The Tartars, happily joined Orson on Don Quixote. In order to shoot more footage Orson even accepted an offer from Italian television to do some documentary work in Spain that would enable him to work on his "home movie" on the side.

Then something unexpected happened. Having employed Orson as

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an actor in the past, the father-and-son producing team of Michel and Alexander Salkind proposed to back him in a picture of his own. Presented with a list of literary classics that were in the public domain, Orson was asked to choose one quickly. 'The only thing that was conceivable for me was The Trial/' says Orson of his choice. "I never would have picked it out." Despite what he describes as his own "lack of profound sympathy for Kafka," he agreed to do The Trial in Yugoslavia with Anthony Perkins as Joseph K. But even now he was harried by money problems; not long after he started shooting exteriors in Zagreb, the Salkinds ran out of cash. Worst of all, the moment they suspected that the production was in financial trouble, the Yugoslav authorities, who had agreed to put some money into Orson's picture, balked at constructing the elaborate sets he had designed. With the exteriors already shot, the production was at a virtual standstill. Another director might have panicked, but not Orson, who had great experience with financial calamities. But it did seem to him that fate must have had something to do with his being out of funds again, even when he had begun the picture with what looked like perfectly stable backing and the best will in the world from his backers, who hadn't foreseen the sudden crisis.

Orson's state of mind in the midst of this crisis may have been helped by his having recently met a young woman in Zagreb who instantly struck him as among the loveliest and most intelligent he had ever encountered. A gifted sculptor, Oja Kodar had also tried her hand at script writing, and Orson was genuinely impressed by the original scenario of hers that he read. He was also impressed by what he recognized as her unusual independence of spirit. From the first she came to him as an equal—^and so he accepted her. "He's very impressed that she doesn't need him to exist," says producer Dominique Antoine, who has known them both for more than a decade. "He worships her, he really worships her, because it's the first intelligent woman he has had in his life." Having discovered such a woman, he was determined not to lose her. In time he would make her his companion, his artistic collaborator, his confidante. But for now they had only just met. Besides, Orson had serious decisions to make immediately about The Trial, the production of which old Michel Salkind had sadly suggested he close down.

But Orson had other ideas. He explained to Salkind that if they

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could get the company to Paris, he could finish up for next to nothing. Orson proposed they all skip town on a train that left in half an hour. "You pay the hotel bill, and we won't pay anything else," Orson recalls his having told Salkind. "We'll just go home and find a way to shoot it." In Paris, Orson improvised brilliantly by seizing upon the derelict Gare d'Orsay to shoot interiors. Because of the dire shortage of funds, Orson sometimes found himself paying actors out of his own pocket lest they refuse to continue. He edited the film that summer of 1962, commuting between the cutting room in Paris and Malaga, where he had rented a retreat for Paola and Beatrice, and where he could attend the bullfights in August. Originally set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the early fall (the festival management threatened to sue him when, at the last moment, he disappointed them). The Trial was not ready until winter. When it opened in Paris, Orson was widely criticized for having badly miscast Anthony Perkins as K. "I think everybody has an idea of K. as some kind of little Woody Allen. That's who they think K. is," speculates Orson. "But it's very clearly stated in the book that he is a young executive on his way up." It was K.'s "aggressiveness," as Orson calls it, that he specifically had in mind in casting Perkins, and against which he is convinced people reacted.

Soon Orson had a new project; he longed to make a movie of Joseph Heller's Catch 22. "It's the movie of the century," a hopeful Orson told the press in Paris, but his vigorous efforts to secure the film rights proved unsuccessful. (He is still wistful when he speaks of having missed out on Catch 22, which he argues could have been "a groundbreaking movie"—exactly the sort of movie Mike Nichols did not succeed in making when, several years later, he, not Orson, directed it. "You can't watch it," complains Orson of the Nichols version, in which, ironically, he played a small role. "It's really dreadful!") For a while, it looked like instead of doing Catch 22y Orson would direct the Jacob segment of Dino De Laurentiis's superproduction of The Bible. But that too failed to happen, although Orson had thrown himself into writing the segment, and his uncredited script material would eventually find its way into the finished film. The closest he came to directing anything from the Bible was portraying a Hollywood director of a biblical epic in a movie titled RoGoPaG. But he seems to have played the part too well, for upon viewing the satirical sequence in which he appeared, the Italian authorities took umbrage at what they deemed a

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travesty of the crucifixion and ordered the arrest of the real director. Pier Paolo PasoHni.

To direct another picture of his own, Orson would have to wait until he had moved his family from Italy to Spain where, in 1964, he and Tasca finally managed to lure backers for Chimes at Midnight. "Spain was the only country that didn't know that black-and-white wasn't commercial!" jokes Orson about why he made Chimes there, although in truth he was glad to have the chance to do it anywhere. "This was the picture he had in his heart," says the prince to explain why they forged ahead with the production, although they feared from the outset that the financing was to be a precarious affair in which Orson would never really see all the cash that he had been promised by the Spanish money men. The idea was to make the movie for whatever small sums they could extract, and at length Orson did it for a measly $800,000, when he had expected, and any other director would certainly have needed, at least several times that. Having made Othello as he had, Orson was perfectly accustomed to cutting corners without looking as if he had done so. Two of the film's stars, Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tear-sheet, and John Gielgud as Henry IV, were available to him for only five and ten days respectively, so that, as he had on Othello, Orson made very extensive use of doubles. "Whenever it's not her face, it's a double," says Tasca of Jeanne Moreau. ''Even in the love scene. Every reverse shot is a double." Orson reports that Gielgud achieved his splendid portrayal of the king in spite of the constant carping of an apparently malicious Hungarian friend "with a bright orange complexion coming from some medicine he was taking to make himself look sunburned," says Orson. "All this terrible Hungarian kept saying to him was"—^here Orson slips into a mock-Hungarian accent—" 'John, you are terrible old fashion! Old hat, old hat! Nobody wants you.' All day long! And Gielgud was saying"—^here the exact voice of Gielgud—" 'I know, I know, it's perfectly true, perfectly true, every word of it is true!' "

Orson's own experience as an actor who typically alighted on a given movie set for only a few days at a time did not hurt when it came to his using actors with maximum efficiency. He knew exactly where he needed their faces, and where he could get away with a double. To keep costs down, Orson released actors the moment he could. Whether in Barcelona, Madrid, or elsewhere on location, there were always locals

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willing to rent their backs to him if he needed to double the real actors later. He also used them to simulate vast numbers of people by means of clever cutting. Perhaps the most dazzling example of Orson's ingenuity was the crowded canvas of the vivid battle sequence. ''We never had more than one hundred and eighty people on the battlefield," says Orson, although at a glance it seems like many, many more. "And that took a lot of doing!" Still, he could not entirely compensate for the in-eptness of certain of his local technicians, whom he did not have the funds to replace. One particularly irritating incident occurred when a tearful Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly brilliantly declaimed her sad little speech upon the death of Falstaff. There was a spontaneity, a tender beauty to her performance that Orson was instantly afraid might be marred by the persistent hum of the generator. But the technician profusely assured him that there was no problem since the mike wouldn't pick up the offending noise. "Either this man is a genius or he is an idiot," Orson told Tasca, both of them strongly suspecting the latter. Unfortunately, their worst suspicions were confirmed when, long after Miss Rutherford had gone, they discovered that the generator was indeed audible. Later, meeting with the prince in Paris, she tried desperately to lip-sync the speech, but she couldn't do it. Somehow she couldn't recapture the passion, the authenticity, of the original, which, at length, Orson decided to use despite its flaws, which he obscured wherever he possibly could. If you listen to Miss Rutherford's speech in the finished film you can indeed hear the hum of the generator in the background, but the eloquence of her performance is such that you barely notice it. A technical blunder that particularly nettles Orson, and understandably so, is that the entire first reel had come back from the lab slightly out of sync. The sound was off only slightly, but this made all the difference in the world. Nor were there funds available to redo the reel, which would be shown in America in its imperfect form. This technical ineptness, and the lack of funds to rectify the ensuing errors, were a source of immense agitation to Orson, who, in the editing, had been relentlessly 5e(/'-critical. It vexed him enormously to have to accept defects in the fabric of his film. Although they would hardly be as noticeable to audiences as they were to him, Orson saw these spot defects as an indication of his sorry fate as a filmmaker, whereas the grace, the grandeur, of the film as a whole indicates for us how mightily he had transcended that fate.

Orson Welles

But there is another kind of transcendence here as well. That Chimes at Midnight was for Orson an intensely personal film is widely accepted. But precisely why it is so personal a statement cannot be ascertained without a knowledge of Orson's past, of his personal mythology. During the making of the film Orson described its focus as "the triangle between the king, his son, and Falstaff (who is a sort of foster father)." This focus he had finally hit upon while preparing the Irish stage production. Concentrating on the triangle solved the aesthetic problem that had stymied Orson in years past when both his Todd and Mercury productions of the history plays seemed somehow to lack an organizing principle. But the triangle was more than just a formal solution. With it Orson managed to bring into the foreground a dramatic story that had personally obsessed him all along: the story of the father, the mentor, and the young man's quandary about which of them to reject for the other. For this is the story Orson tells in Chimes at Midnight: Hal's renunciation of drunken Falstaff in favor of the father, the king. In a curious way this was also the story that as a youth he had lived out when he rejected drunken Dick Welles in favor of Skipper Hill. In Shakespeare it is the mentor whom the young man throws over, and who dies as a direct result, while in life it was his father whom Orson rejected, and for whose ensuing death he would always feel responsible. Both men elicited a mixture of love and embarrassment. It was the Hills who had encouraged Orson not to see Dick Welles on account of his chronic alcoholism (the same ''excess of wine" for which Hal spurns Falstaff), and when Dick suffered a lonely death Orson ultimately felt guilty of having killed his father. So it is not too much to suppose that the reversal of his actual situation that Orson discovered in Shakespeare—^the young man's rejecting the mentor, the foster father, rather than the real father—^unconsciously appealed to him as a way of artistically denying the guilt that nagged at him. Significantly, Orson's Falstaff mingles traits of both Dick and Skipper. Like Orson's father, he drinks and frequents whores (where Hal, like Orson, observes him); also like Dick he misleads youth and takes young Hal carousing. He depends on the young man to bail him out. Like Skipper, Falstaff is the beloved mentor, the desired foster father (following Dick's death, Orson had asked Skipper to be his legal guardian), the exuberant director of travesties in which the protege performs. Like Skipper, he sometimes seems younger than his protege. Not by acci-

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dent, in May of 1964, shortly before he began shooting Chimes at Midnight, Orson wrote to Skipper, whose sixty-ninth birthday came days after Orson's forty-ninth: ''I am so disastrously old that the mind boggles at the thought of what the age must be that you are celebrating—if 'celebrate' is the word I'm looking for. But then (in the best sense) you will always be younger than I was when I first checked into Clover Hall." The betrayal of Falstaff in Chimes is not only a restaging of what Orson considered to have been the betrayal of Dick Welles; by making Falstaff a peculiar amalgam of Dick and Skipper, he allowed himself to repeat the scene of rejection while changing the outcome, so that, in the film, the father is not spumed. The drunkard is spurned, yes, but not the father.

In Hal's dramatic renunciation of Falstaff, Orson heard an echo of his own. "I think it's one of the greatest scenes ever written," says Orson, "so the movie is really a preparation for it. Everything prepares for it." Having learned that his boy is the new king, Falstaff rushes to observe him from the crowd, much as when a drunken Dick Welles alighted on Woodstock between his far-flung journeys—''stained with travel" is how Falstaff describes himself—he had slipped into the theater at Todd to watch Orson from the back of the auditorium. But Hal is his boy no longer: ''Presume not that I am the thing I was;/ For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,/ that I have turn'd away my former self;/ So will I those that kept me company." Betrayed by the one who was his boy, sternly warned to reform himself, Falstaff hopes that this was all just a public display, that Hal will send for him in private. But this was not to be—^just as Orson, having betrayed Dick in hopes that he would reform himself, never again saw him alive. Turning away from one's former self, as Hal announces that he has, was a theme of special interest to Orson who would perceive himself as doing so more than once in life—^not only with Dick Welles, but with Skipper and Dadda as well. While writing to Skipper and Hortense from Europe that first season after Todd, Orson would consciously think of himself as having changed, as merely acting the part of the boy they'd known before. And with Dadda there was the same explicit sense of having abandoned a former childish self named Pookles. As he had not with his father, with his two boyhood mentors Orson would oscillate between his old and new selves. He would watch himself enact what he once was—much as he does in the film when, as Falstaff, he watches

Orson Welles

Keith Baxter's Hal make the same mistake he had in youth. Watching himself like that was the kind of built-in distancing device that inherently appealed to an actor like Orson, who had so often resisted losing himself in the dramatic parts he played, all the better to maintain a critical distance from them. In Chimes Orson achieves perhaps the most mordant irony of all by costuming his daughter Beatrice as a boy and making her FalstafTs page, who as the film draws to a close is principal mourner at his master's death. That she vividly resembles the boy Orson once was—quite literally his "former self'—^will be evident to anyone who has seen his early childhood photographs. Thus one version of young Orson, Hal, is responsible for the drunkard's death (as Orson thought he was), while another version, the page boy, mourns it (as in fact Orson did). At the end of the film it is said that Hal has "killed his heart"—which, in a realized metaphor, Orson remorsefully shows himself to have done by playing the part of the one who is killed. As Prince Tasca says. Chimes at Midnight was the film Orson "had in his heart"—^words that take on new meaning in light of the autobiographical allusions that underpin this magisterial work. Unfortunately, the aftermath of Chimes at Midnight was less satisfying to Orson than the making had been. Bad press, as well as inadequate distribution, kept it from reaching the wide audience he had hoped for—and deserved. "Almost nobody has seen it in America, and that drives me nuts," says Orson of the picture in which through a battery of self-distancing devices he manages to explore, and to involve us in, his most personal preoccupations as intensely perhaps as an artist can. In this delicate balance between critical distance and painful intimacy lies the source of the film's resounding greatness.

CHAPTER 36

Fact ana Fiction

After his experience making Chimes at Midnight with relatively little cash at his disposal, it seemed odd to Orson, not long afterward, to act in a lavish production like Charles Feldman's James Bond spoof. Casino Royale, in which expense was clearly no object. Everything about the misguided production was so utterly absurd—"a frightful mess" is how scenarist Wolf Mankowitz describes it—^that it left Orson little time to brood about the absurdity of his personal situation. '*What criteria do you use for selecting acting roles offered to you?" the press had asked Orson at the Cannes premiere of Chimes at Midnight. ''Money," he replied. For Casino Royale, Feldman, who had produced Macbeth, hired a bunch of script writers, Orson and Wolf Mankowitz among them, but tried to keep them from learning of one another's existence. "We were not supposed to know the other one was working on the picture!" says Orson. But it was not difficult to find out, since the scenarists had been installed on different floors of the same hotel, and could not help but bump into one another in the elevator. Feldman's scheme had been to keep them from discussing the script because he was convinced that they would only dilute one another's best ideas. This way he figured he was getting the most for his money. Without telling Feldman, the scenarists lunched together daily, where, quite naturally, they discussed the picture, which, says Orson, was supposed to

Orson Welles

be "the Bond that out-Bonded Bond. But it was the worst one. It didn't even have Bond in it!" Feldman never found out about the Uttle lunches he had hoped to prevent. Recalls Orson: "We would arrive at various hours at Charlie's house with our secret scripts, which he would take and put in the safe on the theory that our ideas were so brilliant that people would try to steal them." Orson thought this highly unlikely since the popular television show The Avengers was, week after week, clearly superior to anything they were doing in terms of spoofing Bond.

In addition to the writers Feldman had hired, actor Peter Sellers hired several writers of his own to work only on his scenes. When Sellers refused to work with Orson, their scenes together had to be shot separately. On-camera Sellers spoke to a double's back, while Orson spoke his lines at another time. Orson was used to working this way for convenience, not because the other actor hated him. A further peculiarity of this awkward situation was that Sellers's having hired his own writers sometimes created curious disjunctions when he and Orson seemed to be talking about two different things. "When he asked me a question my answer didn't make any sense at all," says Orson, who was working from another script. "Now this gave a marvelous surreal quality to the whole thing because there had been no coordination whatsoever between us. Since we weren't on the set together, there was very little we could talk over." Mankowitz thought that Sellers refused to play with Orson because he was intimidated by him. "He was a treacherous lunatic," says Mankowitz of Sellers, with whom he had had a business partnership that had ended unpleasantly shortly before Casino Royale, "and he became more so after The Millionairess^ which is the film we did together with Sophia Loren. He fell in love with Loren and it drove him right over the top. He went completely balmy. My advice to Charles Feldman was not in any circumstances to get involved with Sellers. But Sellers was at his peak at that time. I told Charlie that Sellers would fuck everything up: he wanted different directors, he wanted to piss around with the script. He knew nothing about anything except going on and doing funny faces and funny voices, and he wasn't really a great actor. He was terrified of playing with Orson and converted this into an aversion for Orson before he even met Orson." He made his aversion perfectly clear when he and Orson encountered each other in the elevator of the Dorchester; Sellers was descending from

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his penthouse suite when the elevator stopped, and Orson and Man-kowitz got in. Sellers took one look at Orson's outsize proportions and wondered aloud whether the elevator might not drop from the weight. "Sellers had got very thin and thought he looked like Casanova/' says Mankowitz by way of explanation. Orson may have been the greater actor by far, but from the first he was an easy target for Sellers on account of his considerable heft.

On his part, however, Orson was not especially impressed by Sellers, whom he found pretentious. **He wasn't terribly bright, but he came on as a great actor/' says Orson who had had several run-ins with him before Sellers had ruled out their being filmed together. The first incident occurred when Sellers arrived on the set and heard one of the beautiful girls remark of Orson, '"Isn't he sexy?" This remark enraged Sellers, who was, since his weight loss, unbearably narcissistic. Then there was a session in Sellers's hotel suite during which he tried unsuccessfully to make Orson laugh. He was not only defensive about acting with Orson, but he also feared that Orson did not find him funny. What finally came between them, however, was Princess Margaret with whom, unbeknownst to Sellers, Orson had become quite friendly when he directed Othello in London. ''The fact that she was stopping by every day at my house was unknown to him,'' laughs Orson. Never suspecting that Orson could be acquainted with her. Sellers darted about to tell everyone he could find that he had invited Princess Margaret to lunch and that she would be there presently. "Then Princess Margaret came/' recalls Orson, "and walked on the set and passed him by and said, 'Hello, Orson, I haven't seen you for days!' That was the real end. That's when we couldn't speak lines across to each other. *Orson, I haven't seen you for days!' absolutely killed him. He went white as a sheet because he was going to get to present me. "

For a director like Orson who had worked for four years on a single picture it was strange to see directors come and go on this production: "A director would say, 'Excuse me just a minute' and he'd go off and a door would open, and in would come another director!" is how he describes it. "Then at the end of it," Orson continues, "having fired several directors—they used to be led off the set—Charlie hired John Huston, and John immediately mo\ed everybody to Ireland because he wanted to do fox hunting." People thought Feldman had lost his senses to keep putting immense sums of money into a film like this. But they

Orson Welles

were proved wrong when Casino Royale was a smashing success at the box office. It must have given Orson pause—^why did he have the madman image when a picture could get made in this perfectly irrational manner and no one complained? What accounted for a "frightful mess" like Casino Royale ^ becoming a big hit with the public? "I think it was the poster," says Orson, /ia//-kidding. "It was a great naked girl entirely covered with tattoos. Very sexy, superb poster! That's the only explanation. There were so many of us on it that they had to put us down in tiny letters, so people had no idea that there wasn't any Sean Connery." Of his not very strenuous acting role in the picture, Orson sums up, "For two months I sat in a white dinner jacket, for a very high salary, on alternate days. It was all very cheerful except for Peter, because he was whirling and giving off little clouds of smoke."

The Welleses were living in an eighteen-room stucco villa named Mi Gusto that Orson had bought in Aravaca, outside Madrid. For Orson, the high life, the endless rounds of bullfights and fashionable hoites, to which he tirelessly devoted himself in Spain, was a way of forgetting, of temporarily escaping, what he saw as his professional plight. In Spain he was thought of as just another frivolous American emigre. "That's why I lived happily in Spain in a bullfighting and aristocratic ambience, which is not stimulating in any way," says Orson, "but it is a complete world in which I was accepted without questions. Nobody asked me what I was doing, and I wasn't doing anything. I didn't have any movie or anything, but nobody asked me. . . . My whole conversation was just about bulls."

Before long, however, he had a new project: a modest adaptation of Isak Dinesen's The Immortal Story for French television. Once before, Orson had hoped to put Dinesen onscreen, and had thought he had proper backing from a Hungarian emigre in London who claimed to have arranged for him to film an anthology of Dinesen stories in Budapest. Orson and his cronies spent several weeks there, living it up in preparation to start shooting. But when Orson realized that the self-styled emigre producer was actually quite penniless, and that, shock of shocks, the tab at the hotel was entirely in the name of Mr. Welles, he had little choice but to slip away quietly at four o'clock in the morning. In addition to The Immortal Story, which he filmed from September through November, and which, despite its being intended for televi-

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sion, would eventually also find its way into theatrical distribution, Orson was immersed in plans for a full-length film based on Charles Williams's suspense novel Dead Calm that, if all else failed, he planned to finance out of his own pocket. He sent the script to Skipper who, having sold Todd, had retired with Hortense to Florida where they ran a charter-boat service. Orson asked Skipper to check for technical accuracy those portions of the script that pertained to yachting. After a string of acting jobs, the proceeds from which Orson had hoped to use in part at least to begin filming Dead Calm, he quite unexpectedly received an offer from Dean Martin to appear on his television show back in the States. Delighted as he was, Orson could not figure out why Dean Martin wanted to pay his passage all the way to America just to do a television spot. He gathered that someone named Greg Garrison had been responsible for the invitation, but Orson knew no such person. In September of 1967 Orson made the first of what would be many guest appearances on the Dean Martin Show. It was his second opportunity to become a television personality. The first had come in the '50s when a quiz-show producer invited Orson to his suite at the Hampshire House in New York, where he guaranteed that Orson would win immense sums of money if he would appear as a contestant. Orson's reputation as a genius would be perfect for the program. When Orson expressed doubt that he would be able to answer the kind of questions they'd probably throw at him, the producer told him not to worry since he would know the questions and answers in advance. Orson wisely passed up the generous offer, and he was glad he had when several years later he read about the chap from Hampshire House when the big quiz-show scandal broke in the press. As for the mysterious producer Greg Garrison, who had sought out Orson in Europe to go on television with Dean Martin, Orson seemed to recognize him now, but could not place where they had met. Whereupon Garrison told the story of their initial encounter many years before when, as a young college student, he had taken a job as a stage hand on the ill-fated Around the World when it played Philadelphia. His first day on the job he saw Orson throw a tantrum about one of the innumerable things that were going wrong with the production. So enraged was Orson that he hurled his walking stick in no particular direction. It hit Garrison, who in turn took the stick, marched up to Orson with it, and whacked him back. "Out! Get him out!" Orson bellowed, at which Garrison practically

Orson Welles

found himself thrown out on his ear. Very late that night, Garrison was asleep in the boardinghouse where he lived, when a knock at the door to his room awakened him. It was the landlady to say he had a visitor. A moment after he had sent her away saying he was not expecting anybody at that hour, there was another knock. "Who is it?" asked Garrison. "It's Orson Welles," came the unmistakable voice. "May I come in?" Orson was there to apologize. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize the cane hit you. I was wondering if you would come back to work tomorrow." That was in 1946. Now, in 1967, Garrison was a top television producer and able to return the kindness by inviting Orson to come to work for him. "That brought me to Hollywood twice a year when I was Europe-bound/* says Orson of his association with the Dean Martin Show that led to his working with Garrison on other TV projects later on, among them a talk-show pilot for which there were, alas, no buyers. In Europe after this first stint for Garrison, Orson repaired to Yugoslavia, where, between acting roles in pictures by local directors who were overjoyed to have him, he worked on Dead Calm, or The Deep — work that was ultimately never to be completed, Orson says, because of the death of leading man Laurence Harvey in 1973, after the production had dragged on and on because of the usual financial calamities. The unorthodox manner in which he patched together the ill-fated film is suggested by his enlisting Skipper to shoot some footage in the Bahamas, where Orson arranged briefly to appear with Oja Kodar, and a collection of costumes, in tow. Although he remained married—^and quite devoted—^to Paola, and although to all intents and purposes he continued to live with her, his presenting Oja to Skipper was a significant gesture. For Orson it bestowed a private legitimacy on a relationship that had flourished since The Trial. But this was not the principal reason for the trip. Before he rushed back to Zagreb to appear as Winston Churchill in a World War II movie about battling Yugoslav Partisans and the Nazis, he filmed a scene in which he toppled off" the ketch Skipper had secured. That was to be followed with a bloody underwater knife fight between Orson and an adversary—except with Orson gone, it was Skipper's job to find a jumbo double for the underwater action. Finding someone big enough for Orson's enormous trousers would be hard enough, but the chubby would also have to know his way around underwater. It was a tough set of requirements. When at last Skipper found someone who was fat and could dive well he also turned

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out to be blond. Skipper talked him into dying his hair. Unfortunately when Skipper filmed the sequence the fake blond went green underwater.

Before long the press had spotted Oja. Orson's openly traveling about with a woman of such exceptional beauty could not go unnoticed. But Oja's presence did not mean that his marriage to Paola was finished as some observers mistakenly presumed. Orson needed both relationships. Paola and Beatrice continued to mean home. He might wander far afield, but he always came back. Even when he was with Oja, his home address was wherever Paola and Beatrice were. For many years Orson would divide his time between the two women in his life, so that, in its own way, his relationship with Oja was every bit as stable as that with Paola. In collaboration with Oja, Orson successfully reworked a film script of his titled The Sacred Beasts. In its original form it concerned an old Hollywood filmmaker who, much as Orson perceived himself to have done, had given himself over to bullfights and cafe society in Spain. Now Orson and Oja wrote a new version of the script titled The Other Side of the Wind, the making of which was to be one of the most personally vexing—and widely misunderstood— episodes of his career.

In The Other Side of the Wind the action of The Sacred Beasts is transposed to Hollywood, where the old director is trying to launch a comeback. At the suggestion that he might have modeled the character of Jake Hannaford on himself, Orson insists otherwise: ''He's based really more than anybody on Rex Ingram," he says. "He was considered a great filmmaker at one time—and he wasn't. He made terrible movies. They're awful! He was a great/a5cmotor like John [Huston], in the high style of a great adventurer, a super-Satanic intelligence, and so on. He was a great director as a figure, in the way that John is. That's why John is so perfect for it." But even before he had cast the film Orson was convinced that, perhaps more than The Deep, The Other Side of the Wind was capable of restoring his reputation in Hollywood. With its possibilities for satire and parody, it seemed suddenly the more audacious idea. Also there was an openly erotic element in the script of the sort that had been mostly absent from his earlier work. Dominique Antoine says that this was Oja's influence: 'This is a new thing in Orson's oeuvre, that it's erotic. He never touched all that before. He couldn't touch it, and she opened all that in him." Confident that

Orson Welles

this was the right project for the moment, Orson was ready once again to invest his own money. But this time it looked Uke there would be a source of funds besides his acting jobs, for CBS had invited Orson to direct several specials during the next few years. When he arrived in Hollywood he tried to lure backers to put up some of the money for The Other Side of the Wind; there were no offers, but Orson was undeterred. The television money would keep him going. Shooting intermittently, Orson and Oja together sank what he says was about $750,000 of their own funds into the picture.

Then his old tax trouble from Around the World came back to haunt him. For his European films he had used a production company based in Switzerland to which he had asked that the television producer at CBS send the money owed him for one of the specials. Says Orson to explain the Swiss address: "If you're shooting in different European countries you have to have a banking place of origin. It was not at all a company to siphon off money so I could go off on my yacht." But the tax people did not agree, and much to Orson's amazement, they seized the money, saying that what he claimed was a production company in Switzerland was really a holding company. ''That was a real nightmare," says Orson of finding himself embroiled in the tax troubles that had kept him in Europe for so long. While he haggled with the Internal Revenue Service, trying somehow to work off, and perhaps to renegotiate, his vast debt, he had little choice but to seek investors again— but to seek them with a desperate need that may have made him ripe for falling victim to a swindle. In hopes of diminishing his monstrous tax bill, in Paris he hit upon a plan to assemble a new television special from footage Frangois Reichenbach had shot of an art forger in Ibiza named Elmyr de Hory, about whom Clifford Irving had written Fake. As a filmmaker Orson was adept at taking shots that meant one thing by themselves, and making them mean something quite different by cutting them up and juxtaposing them. But while in the past he had worked with film footage for which he had been responsible, this time he used found footage. Affording shape and meaning to someone else's footage appealed to the bricoleur in Orson.

Reichenbach provided Orson with an editing room in Paris, where, driven by the desire somehow to get back to The Other Side of the Wind, he worked at the feverish pace that had astonished people in the early days in New York and Hollywood. When he was not locked up in

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the editing room he was busy sniffing out potential investors among fihn people in Paris. Meanwhile his wife and daughter lived in London, where the Welleses had moved after renting the Spanish villa. Orson was nearly finished putting together the television documentary about de Hory when news broke in the press about Clifford Irving's spurious claims to have had Howard Hughes's cooperation for a new book about the recluse's mystery life. ''My God, we're absolutely in the middle of this!" said Orson, since the Reichenbach footage included a brief interview with Irving. ''Let's forget about TV, and do a long feature about Clifford!" It was a bold move. Not only had Reichenbach initially shot the footage expressly for French television, but there was liot very much of it, and certainly not enough about Irving, for a full-length feature film. Until now the art forger de Hory had been the center of attention. Irving's role had been limited to commenting on de Hory. Orson quickly decided to shift the balance of the material to give equal weight to Irving and de Hory. The new picture would be about both fakers, and since there still was not enough here to make a feature film, by shooting additional footage he would add a third faker to the cast of characters: himself.

As long ago as his radio program First Person Singular, Orson had enjoyed turning up on both sides of the frame by oscillating between the roles of narrator and character, thereby calling into question the line between fact and fiction—^which was precisely the vertiginous effect now in Ffor Fake when he and Oja appeared both as themselves and as actors in a purely fictive scenario about Oja's bogus encounter with Picasso that Orson had shrewdly improvised to fill out the film. When toward the end of Ffor Fake they jointly tell the tale of Oja's purported involvement in the dissemination of Picasso forgeries, the spectator assumes it actually happened. For, in the first moments of the picture, Orson announced that everything he was about to recount in the next hour would be true. That hour is a frame. By the time Orson and Oja recount the Picasso affair, although we probably have not noticed, that hour is over, having been filled with diverting accounts of hoaxes: Elmyr's, Irving's, and, as it turns out, Orson's (the Martian scare that makes of Orson as much a faker as the other two). As the film draws to a close, having just laughed at the victims of a triptych of famous frauds, we fall victim ourselves to a fiction that we take for truth. Orson, who has just gleefully confessed to being a charlatan, still

Orson Welles

deftly puts one over on us. It is his old theatrical trick (a favorite device from the early days in New York) of making us forget the frame.

Throughout F for Fake Orson wears away a whole series of frames by intercutting footage from a variety of sources so that for instance he, Elmyr and Irving appear to converse when they were very obviously filmed at different times and different places. Here the unabashed artifice of the technique bears ironically on Orson's experience as a film actor who had often only seemed to converse, to occupy a single space, with the other actor in the scene; and as a director who out of necessity had often assembled his films from quite disparate footage so that, for instance, when his actors weren't really there he had had to fool us into thinking that they were. In Ffor Fake, however, Orson took immense pleasure in baring the device, in making it work, and exposing it at the same time—^much as he had as early as Citizen Kane when, for instance, still a little boy, Charles says ''Merry Christmas," and in the "reverse" shot (actually many years later) Thatcher adds "And a happy New Year!" But if like Kane, Ffor Fake delights in its own artifice, it does so in a way that is at times even richer than its very venerable predecessor. The shock effects in Kane bespeak the wonderment, the excitement of a new toy. Young Orson wanted to try everything— and he did so with the fluency, the sophistication of a master's touch. In Ffor Fake, by contrast, the acknowledged master examines his medium in retrospect; he shows how, through cutting, a filmmaker can make something out of next to nothing. But for all Orson's supreme virtuosity there is an endearing roughness to it all, more than ever a fearless sense of improvisation, of experimentation, of not only showing but of seeing for himself what he can do. It is the film of a collagist, a composer of sounds and images, an artist who had waged a relentless battle for the final cut because for him perhaps therein lay the art of cinema.

CHAPTER 37

Again!

The news of the Hughes case had been opportune for Orson, who was understandably proud of himself for having seized the moment. He began to get the feeling that perhaps he had finally reversed his long run of bad luck when, on the verge of finishing Ffor Fake^ he seemed to have found the investors he had been seeking for The Other Side of the Wind. Suddenly it looked like he would be finishing not one, but two pictures in swift succession. This was a particularly comforting thought, for he had been badly stung by the 1970 publication of Charles Higham's book, with its assertion that he actually feared completing pictures. Then, in 1971, Pauline Kael's disparaging essay had brought him to tears in a conversation with his lawyer, who advised him against a lawsuit, which would only attract more attention to the piece. The travesty of the Hollywood milieu in The Other Side of the Wind included wicked caricatures of both Higham and Kael. But Orson knew that he was best vindicated in having two big new films to his credit. "Bad luck is unforgivable," says Orson of how the public regarded his adversities. He had to show them that, once and for all, he had shaken the bad luck that had hounded him—and with Ffor Fake almost finished, and two major new sources of money for The Other Side of the Wind in the offing, he seemed about to do just that.

The first of the backers Orson managed to find in Paris was a Span-

Orson Welles

ish acquaintance of his from the international film community who enthusiastically agreed to kick in $350,000, a little less than half of what Orson and Oja had already invested. Shortly thereafter an equivalent sum was pledged by a French-based Iranian group headed by Medhi Bouscheri, the brother-in-law of the Shah. Part of the Shah's program for modernizing his country was to cultivate the arts, film among them. In addition to beefing up local film production, the Iranians hoped to enter into prestigious co-productions with eminent Western directors. Hence they were on the lookout for a filmmaker of Orson's stature. Dominique Antoine, a Frenchwoman, made the deal with Orson on behalf of the Iranians, for whom she was setting up a film production company in Paris, and for whom she also bought F for Fake, which they subsequently distributed under the Iranian imprint of Les Films de I'Astrophore. In the negotiations for The Other Side of the Windy Orson explained that he had already shot about an hour and a half of film, and that once the Iranian deal was clinched, he and Oja would repair to Spain to shoot some more. The Iranians' having signed on made it a three-way co-production. After he put the finishing touches on Ffor Fake, Orson left France with the understanding that the Spanish partner would act as his intermediary with the Iranians in Paris. As the money was ready, the Iranians would give it to him, and he would bring it to Orson.

But no sooner were Orson and Oja in Spain than trouble started. "We were perfectly all right as long as I was using Oja's money and mine," says Orson, "but the moment we got associates!" The Iranians appeared not to be living up to their end of the deal. Orson heard from the Spaniard who had flown in from Paris, that the Iranians had not given him the money they had promised. There were heavy rains and flooding in Spain, so Orson and Oja were basically cooped up in their hotel, where they worked on a new script together. The Spaniard returned to Paris to try again. "In a minute they're going to have it," he told Orson later. "It looks all right." In lieu of the Iranian funds, he gave them very small sums of money, which he said were part of the investment he had agreed to make. Not until afterward did Orson discover that the Iranians had indeed been giving the Spaniard the promised money, which had come from Iran in cash, and that, instead of bringing it to Spain, the sly fellow was pocketing it. Says Orson: "We just sat, month after month, while he went to Paris, received the

Barbara Learning

money, and came back and told us that they wouldn't give him any money. He was very convincing to us, and very convincing with them in Paris. He kept flying back and forth extracting money from them. We didn't know them^ you see. We knew him/* The small sums of money he had been giving Orson as if from his own pocket actually came out of the Iranian funds. His constant reassurance to Orson that the Iranians were about to come through was calculated to keep Orson in Spain out of contact with them. On his part, Orson did not want to interfere in what he presumed were his emissary's delicate negotiations with them. It simply never occurred to him that the fellow was lying—and had never had any money of his own to invest in the first place.

Meanwhile, on account of the foul weather, Orson had decided to abandon Spain for Arizona, where John Huston and a host of other faithfuls joined him and crack cameraman Gary Graver to shoot in the desert. Resigned to his lot, Orson had begun to put his own money into the production again, but by now his personal funds had just about run out. "Orson found himself completely lost in Arizona," says Dominique Antoine of his wearily forging ahead without backing. The swindler continued his game of collecting cash from the Iranians who, having heard only from him, still did not know that anything was wrong. When they received a telex purportedly from John Huston's agent to ask for a $60,000 advance, Dominique Antoine did ask for further verification. But this did not deter the swindler, who sent her a Screen Actor's Guild form with a bogus Social Security number and signature from the States. The Iranians dispatched the $60,000, which was pocketed by the Spaniard rather than by Huston, who, out of friendship for Orson, was actually working for much less. After having sent the money, Dominique Antoine had second thoughts about it. Until now she had deliberately left Orson alone because she sensed he preferred it that way. But now something told her that there was a problem. **I think I have to go there," she told Bouscheri, *'even if Orson isn't pleased." Since Orson had yet to receive a penny from the Iranians, their French representative was the last person he expected to see in the Arizona desert. He could not have been happy to see her. When almost instantly he asked her where the money was, and she nervously told him that she had been making regular payments to the interme-

Orson Welles

diary, who obviously hadn't passed them on to him, he broke down. *'Again!'* Orson muttered to no one in particular. ''It's happening again!" He felt like such a terrible fool. Over and over he tried to make sense of what had happened, and, even more, of why irrational disaster was repeating itself in his life. He oscillated between incredulity and anger. Orson grew especially furious when, after all the swindler had done, he brazenly resisted being written out of the partnership. Back in Paris, however, a new agreement was drawn up between I'Astrophore and a company formed in Oja's name. (Orson's Swiss company remained a matter of dispute with the tax people.)

Although when he left Arizona he was nearly broke, Orson had managed to shoot a substantial portion of the footage he wanted, and was ready to start editing. The Iranians stipulated that he work in Paris, but Orson went to Rome to labor on the footage in peace. He had good reason. The American Film Institute had notified him that he was to be the next recipient of the coveted Life Achievement Award, and while at first he was struck by the immense irony of the film industry's rewarding him for artistic achievements that, in the course of years, it had not exactly helped him to bring about, he was also struck by the possibility of this being the perfect opportunity to sell The Other Side of the Wind to the Hollywood money men. Perhaps in the end the making of The Other Side of the Wind would not have been such a disaster after all. When the Iranians moaned about his having violated their agreement by secluding himself in Rome, Orson patiently explained that if all went well both he and they could instantly recoup their investment. Nor were the substantial fringe benefits of Hollywood-style publicity and distribution to be sneered at. It could be everything they had hoped for. Led by the Shah's brother-in-law, a party of Iranians excitedly prepared to accompany Orson to Hollywood, where they would charge all of their considerable travel expenses to the picture. As his departure for Los Angeles approached, Orson redoubled his efforts to assemble enough of the footage to give the moguls a good idea of what he was selling. So deftly had he edited that to anyone else the picture might have appeared nearly finished. At least that was how it looked to the Iranians. But for the perfectionist in Orson all this was only a preliminary step. It seemed as if The Other Side of the Wind might conceivably be the turning point for him and he didn't want to

Barbara Learning

bungle it with anything less than the major work of art for which he had been striving. Orson likes to say that when he was a young man in New York and Hollywood he was in competition with all the other jerks, but that when he grew older, it was the young Orson Welles who was judging him. On some level Orson saw The Other Side of the Wind as his contest with the man who made Citizen Kane —it was a contest he had to win. But he needed more footage to work with, or so he had decided. The Iranians agreed to put up the money for him to film in Los Angeles, but that meant I'Astrophore would have to get a bigger percentage of the profits later. He agreed that each time he took an advance from them he forfeited part of his percentage which had begun at fifty percent. Eventually, the Iranians would end up owning more than eighty percent of the film.

In February of 1975, led by the Shah's brother-in-law Bouscheri, the Iranian contingent gleefully arrived at the Los Angeles Room of the Century Plaza Hotel where the American Film Institute was about to give Orson its trophy. Film clips of the first two winners, director John Ford and actor James Cagney, flashed on a giant screen, as the announcer said, "Tonight, we honor the third man. " Nelson Riddle and his orchestra struck up the theme from Welles's most famous acting role. The Third Man. Spotlights focused on the paneled door, as the announcer continued: 'The American Film Institute spotlights a director, an actor, a writer, a producer—and here they are—Orson Welles."

Into the glare slid the massive, gray-bearded Orson. For all his bulk, he rolled quickly and forcefully ahead, his great flat feet as close to the ground as the treads of an armored tank. His hair slicked back, he wore a jumbo tuxedo and flowing silk tie nearly the size of a pillowcase, and carried a script under his arm. He took his place at the red-draped dais facing a stage plastered with blowups of his many eminent film roles: the young shirt-sleeved maverick in Citizen Kane; the white-haired hulk of a Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight; the handsome Irish rogue in Lady from Shanghai; the obscenely fat, dissipated slob in Touch of Evil.

To his right sat the darkly beautiful Paola and to his left his towering blond look-alike daughter Beatrice. Oja Kodar may have been his partner in all this, but Paola was still Mrs. Welles, and the place of

Orson Welles

honor was hers. Pecking wife and daughter on the cheek, Orson turned to acknowledge the electric applause of the banquet hall, whose round pink tables were filled with Hollywood elite like Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Johnny Carson, Natalie Wood, Rosalind Russell, Groucho Marx, as well as assorted moguls and money men who had come to toast his filmmaking as having "stood the test of time."

Frank Sinatra sang "The Gentleman Is a Champ," which Sammy Cahn had set to "The Lady Is a Tramp"—an unfortunate irony in light of Orson's having tramped about Europe for years. America's greatest living filmmaker had not been able to make a movie in Hollywood since Touch of Evil in 1957; and before that he had spent another down-at-the-heels decade making marvelous low-budget pictures in Europe whenever he could scrape together the cash. Excerpts from Orson's now-classic pictures were screened—including the one from Touch of Evil in which Marlene Dietrich predicts he has no future— a. line that turned the crowd's applause to embarrassed silence.

Said Ingrid Bergman in testimonial: "I think that it must have been a great burden for him to have made a masterpiece when he was twenty-four years old. And it must have been very hard to live up to it all those years. . . . I've been working in Europe when Orson Welles was working in Europe, and we had hardships—^both of us. ... I knew how he was working, and we saw pictures produced by Orson, directed by Orson, written by Orson, arranged by Orson, acted by Orson, clothes by—^he had done everything. Still, he had his troubles. And the joke started in Europe saying that Orson Welles is running out of countries."

There was much laughter at this, indicating how aware all Hollywood was of Orson's plight; and no one howled more than he, his pudgy eyes crinkling with delight. For Orson grasped the evening's irony better than anyone, and was prepared now to milk the occasion for all it was worth. He was here for the honor, of course, but for something else as well.

"Now he has come back to his own country," Bergman continued, "and in great style. I'm so happy that the American Film Institute has asked me to come so I also can pay my tribute to you and thank you that you have shown the world what real courage is and tenacity and, of course, your dazzling talent. So therefore I say. Bravo Orson, and hit us again with your talent."

Barbara Learning

But to do that^-everyone knew—Orson needed money. This being an industry affair, money was on everybody's mind—^why a supreme fibn artist like Orson hadn't made money, and why nobody in Hollywood was willing to back him now.

''Too often we measure a film only by its bank account," said then AFI-head George Stevens, Jr., broaching the indelicate subject in his introductory- address. "Remembering the stormy seas that Orson Welles has weathered in his long career, hear what the writer John Ruskin said, a hundred years ago, in noting that many of the most enduring works in art and literature are never paid for. 'How much,' he asked, 'do you think Homer got for his Iliad or Dante for his Paradiso. Only bitter bread and salt and walking up and down other people's stairs.' "

So tonight all Hollywood gathered to offer Orson something more than bitter bread and salt—a big meal, plenty of booze, and a ''handsome" trophy.

"He reminds us," said Stevens, "that it is better to live one day as a hon than a hundred years as a sheep."

Now, clasping Orson's hand, Sinatra led him to the transparent Plexiglas rostrum, where he pressed the trophy to his great stomach.

"My father once told me," gentleman-Orson began, "that the art of receiving a compliment is of all things the sign of a civilized man. And he died soon afterward, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete."

If the crowd tittered somewhat nervously, it was because they were not sure whether this was supposed to be a joke—a joke about someone's father dying? —a typically Wellesian effect calculated to throw people off.

Still—and this is also typically Wellesian—Orson was the perfect gentleman, at least during this first part of his speech.

"My heart is full," he cooed, "with a full heart—with all of it—I thank you."

He seemed to have finished now, but no sooner had everyone applauded than he picked up again.

"There are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of ours," he said, "who still trudge stubbornly along the lonely, rocky road and this is, in fact, our contrariety. We don't move nearly as fast as our cousins

Orson Welles

on the freeway. We don't even get as much accompHshed, just as the family-sized farm can't possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better. It's just different. No, if there's any excuse for us at all, it's that we're simply following the old American tradition of the maverick. And we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you—^to the givers—^to the ones with fixed addresses."

Fixed addresses.

On these words Orson paused, raised his eyebrows and stared intently at his evening's benefactors, who were not unaware that he was playfully indicting them, using the occasion to remind them that they had shut him out, that they had been cozily ensconced in Hollywood while he—^the genius, the dazzling talent —^had kicked around the world.

Generosity.

What generosity had they shown, denying him the money to make films all these years?

"A maverick may go his own way," Orson continued, "but he doesn't think that it's the only way or ever claim that it's the best one—except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which / am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work. In other words, I'm crazy. But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or if otherwise—^well, they might have been better. But certainly, they wouldn't have been mine."

Finally, "just by way of saying goodnight," he introduced a clip from his unfinished movie. The Other Side of the Wind —about a legendary director named Jake Hannaford and his desperate struggle to raise funds.

This was what he had really come for. Suddenly intense, he was a salesman making a pitch, which he hoped the evening's embarrassment would help put over.

Barbara Learning

"The scene that you're going to see," explained Orson, clasping his hands, and glancing about him, "takes place in a projection room, and waiting there is the capital "B" Big Studio Boss."

The director, Orson went on, "has a stooge, and the stooge is trying to sell the unfinished movie that Jake is making which needs end money —"

End money.

This was what Orson really wanted from them—and deserved —not the trophy with the silver star on top. But whether after the applause and the tributes and the toasts, he would get the Hollywood cash he had come for remained to be seen. Would one among them heed his unorthodox appeal?

Not long after, the offer Orson had been dreaming of did indeed come from one of the moguls who, on the basis of what he had seen and heard at the AFI banquet, wanted to buy The Other Side of the Wind. It was, says Orson, a "wonderful offer," but I'Astrophore turned it down on the assumption that an even better offer would come. "I am really sorry," says Dominique Antoine of the calamitous decision, "because I think the picture would have been finished now and released"—^that is, if they had accepted promptly. Says Orson: "The whole story would have been over!" Instead Antoine settled in to wait for a better offer, which did not come. "And of course the phone never rang!" Orson groans.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to Orson, the mood at I'Astrophore in Paris had changed drastically, and by no means in his favor, when a new administrator arrived from Iran. His job was mainly to represent the film-production company that had been newly formed in Iran to complement at home the international co-production activities based in Paris. Events in Iran put Bouscheri at a disadvantage against the officious newcomer. In an attempt to cast himself in a more favorable political light, the Shah had ceased uniformly to protect the hitherto unassailable interests of family members, which meant that brother-in-law Bouscheri could expect no support in the ensuing internal power struggle with the new administrator at I'Astrophore. No sooner had the new man inspected the books in Paris than he began to raise a great fuss about, of all people, Orson Welles and why he had not yet finished The Other Side of the Wind. He singled out Orson as a prime example of the inefficiency that had blighted I'Astrophore until now, and that he

Orson Welles

was determined at all costs to expel. Little did he care that the Spaniard had swindled Orson, or that the Iranians had just blundered by turning down the deal that they had all presumably been waiting for. Although Orson did not know it, the newcomer at I'Astrophore was about to launch a holy war against him as part of a power play against Bouscheri.

In Paris at Christmastime, Orson met with Dominique Antoine in his suite at the Plaza Athenee, where, entirely unaware of the trouble he was in with the Iranians, he talked of his anxieties about his and Oja's rapidly diminishing percentage of the film, which was down to less than twenty percent. For all their tireless labors, neither he nor Oja (who appeared in the picture, as Orson had declined to do lest people say Hannaford was a self-portrait) had made any money whatsoever. It seemed terribly unfair to him to be forced to sign away bit by bit their half of the picture. Immensely sympathetic to his plight, Antoine was inclined to agree. But she also knew that given the climate at I'Astrophore, it was imperative that he swiftly edit The Other Side of the Wind and be done with it. So she offered him a deal whereby she would propose to the Iranians that the fifty-fifty percentage split be restored, as long as he agreed to supply her with a post-production budget, and to finish cutting by a stipulated date. The date could be anywhere up to a year away, but for every month he was overdue he would lose ten percent. Accordingly, Orson agreed to finish by May of 1976. It remained only for Antoine to solicit the approval of the Iranians and to meet Orson with the new contract in Los Angeles, where, contemplating an end to his years of self-exile, he planned to edit.

But not only was the new administrator at I'Astrophore unwilling to renegotiate the percentages, he wanted to take the picture from Orson and finish it himself. In a fit of anger, Antoine blurted out that before he did that he would have to walk on her frozen corpse. But the Iranian persisted. He had a lawyer in Los Angeles draw up a contract whereby Orson would indeed be allowed to edit a version of the footage, which he could screen privately for friends three times only. Afterward, however, the footage was the Iranians' to reedit as they pleased. In the peculiar detail of Orson's being permitted just three private screenings of his cut before the man from Teheran forever undid his labors there was a note of perverse condescension. Antoine warned that if the Iranians dared to insult Orson with such a contract, they would probably never hear from him again, nor indeed should they. Her adamant objections

Barbara Learning

notwithstanding, the Iranians went ahead with the ugly proposal, and as she had predicted, Orson retreated into silence. Eventually, a contingent from I'Astrophore met with Oja Kodar in Los Angeles, but nothing was settled. For Orson, losing final cut when he had given so much of himself to The Other Side of the Wind was unthinkable. After I'Astrophore botched the Hollywood deal, Orson's spirits had picked up again when he had agreed to finish the film by May with his proper percentage restored. But this new letdown was too much for him to bear.

His ensuing attempts to buy out I'Astrophore's share of the picture were unsuccessful. Orson did manage to interest a Canadian backer in making a deal with the Iranians, but because of the precarious political situation in Teheran, where the Shah might fall at any moment, Bous-cheri wanted to be paid entirely in cash before he would give up the negative and I'Astrophore's percentage of the picture. Any hope of a deal was extinguished, however, when the Shah fled, after which title to Iranian foreign assets was put in jeopardy by Khomeini's taking power. Watching helplessly from afar Orson knew that these assets included I'Astrophore—^which meant that the negative of The Other Side of the Wind might end up as the property of the Iranian people. In that event he would be unlikely ever to get his hands on it again. There was nothing Orson could do but wait until Khomeini's representatives inspected Bouscheri's files to determine which of I'Astrophore's properties they wanted. Only then would Orson have any idea of who had possession of the film that, in better days, was to have been his Hollywood comeback.

"There was no way of explaining it to anybody!" says Orson of his frustration when the press and public kept asking why he had not finished The Other Side of the Wind. Ironically Orson had hoped that this picture would put Higham's thesis to rest. Instead, by not finishing The Other Side of the Wind, Orson seemed only to prove his detractor correct. "You know, I had these long years of trying to justify myself in Latin America," says Orson, "and here it was again. It was a nightmare to end all nightmares!" How could he communicate that The Other Side of the Wind was in limbo through no fault of his own, that it had meant everything to him to finish it properly, and that he had spent virtually his last penny trying to do so? How could he begin to tell anyone about the Spanish swindler, the rain in Spain, the botched Hollywood off'er, the new man from Teheran, the fall of the Shah, and now the long wait for Khomeini's representatives? Says Orson: "It's too

Orson Welles

particular to make a story that anybody could write in a newspaper article, or absorb as an alibi." Hence the fate of The Other Side of the Wind was widely—and unjustly—^viewed as yet another manifestation of his reputedly unreliable and self-destructive character. ''Even when the legend starts to die," Orson broods, "some other damned thing crops up!"

CHAPTER 38

Tne Marionette

Reading a book at a pebbled-glass table on a sunlit patio, there was Orson in a king-sized flame-red sport shirt. "Margaret Mitchell began writing Gone with the Wind in 1926 and she finished it ten years later," he said, as if realizing we'd just joined him. '*The writing of a great book, or" —Orson paused now for what aestheticians call a pregnant moment^ to gaze fondly at the bottle on the table, his studied silence implicitly linking great book and great wine before he'd even said it—"the making of a fine wine takes time," arching his eyebrows as if he had just disclosed something important.

"What was true nearly a century ago is true today," he enunciated. "Paul Masson will sell no wine"—again, the pause; the eyebrows: all to convey meaning to the meaningless—"before its time."

For someone who supposedly could not make a commercial movie, Orson certainly seemed comfortable selling products on television, which, more and more, he began to do as a way of earning what he calls "grocery money." Top commercial director Harry Hamburg, who worked with him on ten or so spots, contrasts him with some of the other stars he has directed who find commercial work "a little unnatural."

"Not Welles," says Hamburg. "He goes into commercials like he's

Orson Welles

thought of the idea. He understands the dynamics of advertising. He respects the craft he's doing. He wants to do the best possible job. He reviews how much the product is selUng from the marketing people. I mean, he really goes into this shit."

In 1978, when Paul Masson hired Orson as spokesman, it was to reassure people that Paul Masson wines were the right choice. ''People have this incredible feeling and insecurity that they're going to serve wine to their friends, and then they're going to start laughing at them," says John Buckingham, the winery's account executive at Doyle Dane Bernbach. "Or they're going to order a wine in a restaurant and the maitre d' is going to laugh at their choice." Orson, says Buckingham, "obviously has the image of a person who likes food, and so people find it very believable and find him very credible when he talks about wine."

Orson would arrive on the set with his makeup already done—^by himself. Acutely conscious of his appearance in commercials, he has very specific ideas about how he should be lit and photographed. "I know what makes me look the best," he told Doyle Dane Bernbach. Before his first day of shooting on the Masson campaign he dispatched written instructions to the cameraman. Hamburg reports that Orson favors the brooding look he gets when the camera is positioned above his eyes so that he has to look up slightly. Also, he likes the hard light, three-quarters on the left side. Hamburg says he would set up everything to Orson's specifications, so that Orson would not balk the minute he showed up on the set: then, once Orson was satisfied, the director quietly altered the lighting and camera angle to his own liking. Hamburg insists Orson never noticed—^although, given Orson's expertise in film lighting, he probably did notice and just decided not to say anything and get on with it.

Orson is agreeable to doing extra takes during shootings, but he insists upon each one's being justified.

"Why do you want it different?" Orson asked Hamburg, who had just ordered another take. "If you say it faster, you can't use it, and if you say it slower, you can't fit it."

"We're getting a hum from a refrigerator," said the director, who did not want to tell Orson the client wanted him to speak louder. "If you talk a little louder, you'll talk above it, and we can drown it out."

Barbara Learning

When Orson did the take, Hamburg decided upon yet another.

"Orson, you sound hke you're really selling," said Hamburg.

"Well, Jesus," Orson replied. "I don't want that. "

Another day, when Orson took sixty seconds to do a thirty-second bit, Hamburg protested.

"It's too long," he told Orson.

Orson disagreed. "It can't be said any shorter," he said.

"Well, we can't cut any copy," said the worried director. "That's what we need."

"I'll give it a try," said Orson, "but it's not going to work."

Orson launched into action, taking forty-five seconds to say the lines. He tried again, and took forty seconds. Again, and he had reduced them to thirty. The astonishing thing was that each time he sounded exactly the same, seeming to speak as slowly and with the identical phrasing.

To maintain his credibility, Orson has been known to balk at saying things that would be entirely out of character for him. Presented with the lines "Stradivarius took three years to make one of his violins; Paul Masson took . . ." Orson was dismayed.

"Come on, gentlemen, now really!" he admonished. "You have a nice, pleasant little cheap wine here. You haven't got the presumption to compare it to a Stradivarius violin. It's odious."

Another time, while shooting a champagne commercial, Orson found himself posed in a living room with a particularly plastic collection of extras, all of whom were overjoyed to be working with the great man. Welles looked disconcerted by their presence.

"Who the hell are these people?" he asked Hamburg.

"They're at a party, Orson," Hamburg explained.

"A party at my house?" Orson said.

"Yeah."

"/ wouldn't have these people at a party," he said. "I mean, this is really lousy. I wouldn't have these people at a party at my house. These people look like a party that Robert Young would have."

When he is making a commercial Orson does not like anyone besides the director to talk directly to him. Even the clients have to communicate with him through the director, or through the cameraman who refers their comments to the director.

Orson Welles

Once when he was working on another commercial in England, a production assistant made the mistake of violating that cardinal rule. Orson and the director were disagreeing over the timing of a voice-over.

"Peas grow there," Orson had said, monitoring the commercial for which he was doing a voice-over.

"I'd start half a second later," interrupted the British director.

"Don't you think you really want to say 'July' over the snow?" Orson asked. "I think it's so nice that you see a snow-covered field and say, 'Every July peas grow there.' "

Without transition Orson launched into the commercial copy as if it were a Shakespearean soliloquy: "We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs. Buckley lives. Every July peas grow there." Breaking again, Orson addressed his director, "We aren't even in the fields, you see. We're talking about 'em growing and she's picked 'em."

Orson cleared his throat.

Then: "Can you emphasize a bit in — in July?" asked the unknowing production person.

''JFhy?'' snapped Orson. "That doesn't make any sense! Sorry, there's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with 'in' and emphasize it! Get me a jury and show me how you can say 'in July' and Fll go down on you! That's just idiotic! If you'll forgive me my saying so. That's just stupid! 7n July!' I'd love to know how you emphasize 'in' in 'in July!' Impossible! Meaningless!*'

Anxious about having lost control, the director sputtered, "I think all they are thinking about was that they didn't want to^"

*7/(e isn't thinking!" Orson said.

''Orson/' the director pleaded, "can we just do one last—"

"Yes," Orson agreed, shifting gears.

"It was my fault," assured the director. "I said, 'in July.' If you can leave 'every July'—"

"You didn't say it!" Orson exclaimed. "He said it— your friend —" making friend sound like a dirty word. " 'Every July.' No, you don't really mean *every July.' But that's bad copy! There's too much directing around here!"

Even with a director like Hamburg, with whom he has worked often and well, Orson can have a bad day. Making a Paul Masson commercial

Barbara Learning

in Los Angeles, Orson was sitting on the edge of his chair as is his custom, so that Hamburg had to get down on hands and knees to instruct him—^a position Hamburg compares to taking communion.

"I want to feel piqued in this thing," said Orson. "You know, 'As old Paul Masson said many years ago^' "

"What do you mean, piqued?** Hamburg asked.

"Piqued," Orson replied, speaking down. "You know what I mean. Now, you're the director, I'm the talent. You create this emotion. Now do something. Do some directing with me. Get me in the mood."

Hamburg looked up at the bearded Buddha for a moment, then asked, "Orson, what are you doing?"

Orson wasn't smiling. "This is your job," he said. "You get me in the mood now. This is your art, and I want to feel it. You tell me now how I can feel this thing."

By now, all the crew and clients were crowding around them for the showdown.

"Why are you doing this?" Hamburg asked.

"Because this is your art," Orson replied, "and this is my art, and we're going to combine our arts now. Come on, do it. Do it. Tell me—"

"Well, you're a fat slob," Hamburg said.

"No," Orson shot back, "that doesn't do it. You're just going to make me laugh."

"You're a has-been," Hamburg continued.

"Nah, nah," Orson complained, "that doesn't do it either. You have some pretty weak acid you're throwing in my face."

Really furious now, Hamburg did not care if he ever worked with Orson again.

Orson kept going: "Say something to me that will make me piqued," he urged.

"Well," said Hamburg, "how come you screwed Mankiewicz out of the credit on Citizen Kane when he actually wrote it?"

Orson went blood red.

"Obviously," he said, "you can't differentiate between making someone angry and making them piqued. Forget it. I'll do it myself!"

Finally, like all good things, Orson's association with Paul Masson came to an end. After three years, he was replaced by John Gielgud. As for the reason Orson got the boot, the introduction of Paul Masson's light wines is among the factors mentioned. "Obviously," says account

Orson Welles

executive Buckingham, "that would not be appropriate." More pointedly, one insider mentions a Welles appearance on a TV talk show whose host inquired about Orson's recent weight loss, to which Orson replied that he had stopped snacking and drinking wine.

A tape recording of the making of the British peas commercial in which Orson explodes at the director subsequently found its way into circulation among advertising executives in New York, who relished it for the candid glimpse of Orson Welles it afforded. Preparing one kind of performance—^a commercial—^he had inadvertently given another, and that behind-the-scenes Orson was what the tape recorder had captured. But exactly how inadvertent was it? How candid? This was the role he calls "Crazy Welles" or "Imperial Welles," and on and off he has been doing it for so many years now that we automatically assume that this really is Orson Welles: that there is no difference between the man and the mask. As an actor, Orson has frequently been accused of not getting inside his characters enough to convince us: a criticism that, ironically, has never been leveled against his rendition of "Crazy Welles," because he does it so perfectly we forget he's doing it at all. To the rest of us it seems natural—^but not to Orson. Since childhood, he has been trying to live up to—^to live —^an image that others, Dadda, his parents. Skipper had of him: the genius. "I used to play Orson Welles all the time on Jack Benny," he says of the extraordinary radio skits of the '40s in which he parodied himself as brusque, snobbish, insolent. "That's the Orson Welles everybody still thinks I am," he continues. "The secretary used to atomize the microphone before I would speak into it! You know, a lot of people believed it. In other words, the comedy figure rubbed off on me." But it would be inaccurate to say that his public persona is just a role. Surely Orson's early comic version of himself on the Jack Benny Show was based on something tangible in his character. Otherwise, it would not have worked effectively as parody.

"I regard it as an enormous and articulated marionette, which is standing in the hallway waiting for me when I am called to do a job," says Orson of his image. "You know, it's completely foreign to me— and the part of it that is like me, I don't recognize even though it's there. You see, of course there must be a lot there, but / don't think there is, because it's an inexpressibly exasperating personage." Having

Barbara Learning

played Kane as a kind of uhermarionette, now this was how he had begun to regard himself—or that aspect of himself that the public sees. But whereas on stage and in films, the distance he maintained from his characters had been entirely deliberate, not so the distance he increasingly felt from himself. Alienation may have been a device in his art for mastering emotion, but the alienation he felt from his mutilated films, from his more banal acting roles, from his public persona, from the fleshy colossus in which he was buried, and in which, at intervals, he was still visible—^these instances of alienation from his work and from himself resulted not in mastery but in pain. Since childhood he had consciously perceived himself as *'playing parts to keep people interested," as he describes it. Now, however, he realized that, more and more, the part he was playing, the "marionette" he activated when he went out into the world, was scaring people away, costing him work. The private Orson is the antithesis of his haughty public persona. His friends know him as warm, caring, strangely shy. He is the man who regards ''Crazy Welles" with horror.

Orson is especially fond of London, where he has happily lived and performed, so I am surprised to hear him say one afternoon that he does not know if he can possibly accept a cameo role in a film because it is being shot there. The problem, it turns out, is Kiki, Orson's inseparable companion.

^^You know,'* says Orson, ''they want me to go to England for this cameo thing and I can't go because of my Kiki."

''That's right," I say. "You can't take her with you. "

"No,"says Orson sadly, "and she would die without me, you know. No matter where I walk she's there next to me, you know. It's a terrible burden."

Orson is not talking about a beautiful woman, but rather his pint-sized black poodle, Kiki. Usually left, as he prefers her, with her fluffy mass of curls undipped, Kiki can look deceptively innocent. His vigorous protests notwithstanding, I think Orson is more than a little amused by Kiki's terrible mean streak — since it is never directed at him. With Kiki, Orson is the picture of pure indulgence. As far as he is concerned, she can do absolutely no wrong. "With dogs I am like with daughters," he admits, "they can have anything they want. "

"I noticed," I say.

Barbara Learning

'*You never saw me command a dog, '* Orson laughs. *7 hate people who do go, 'Down, sir' and all that."

''Somehow or other you get them to mind though,^' I offer.

"No,*' Orson says, "they get me to mind and it gives the impression of obedience on their part.''

For Orson, mean little Kiki is a source of immense comfort: "I can't sleep at night without some animal in the room with me," he points out. "Doesn't have to be a dog, but there has to be a beast in the room with me."

Among the other animals who share Orson's life are his budgies, for whom he has built an unusually large cage at home. "I'm insane about all kinds of birds," says Orson. "Birds are magic/or me. Their energy is so extraordinary because their temperature is about two points higher than ours and their heart rate is very fast, so you're in the presence of some extraordinary explosive energy."

Filled with awe for his budgies, he treats them accordingly: "I can't bear them in a cage where they can't fly," says Orson, who has made sure that his birds have all the room they need. These are not the first birds to whom Orson has been emotionally attached: "I had a marvelous nuicaw in Spain," he says. "We were passionately in love. And he'd sit on my lap, lie in my lap. He loved the cat, and they would roll around together playing, he and the cat. Most wonderful bird you ever knew!" But when the Welleses left Spain, they could not take the macaw with them. "I had to leave him with a cook who adored him and always took good care of him. But she left the door open and the draft killed him." Orson is obviously upset by the sad memory. "About five years before," he continues in the same wistful mood, "he'd had hepatitis and Fd been months feeding him with a dropper and getting him well again. I loved him!"