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My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, by Peter Biskind
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BASED ON LONG-LOST RECORDINGS, A SET OF RIVETING AND REVEALING CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICA'S GREAT CULTURAL PROVOCATEUR
There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.
Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing career, the people he knew―FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more―and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse―sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above― because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.
Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles―if such a creature ever existed.
- Sales Rank: #737044 in Books
- Brand: Biskind, Peter (EDT)
- Published on: 2014-06-24
- Released on: 2014-06-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.24" h x .87" w x 5.43" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From Booklist
When his first film, Citizen Kane, was released, Welles had already achieved fame in theater and radio. He followed Kane with several masterpieces, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Touch of Evil (1958) and was famous as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). By the 1980s, his films already classics, he hadn’t made a new film in nearly a decade, making it impossible to get funding for future projects, which led to lending his voice to wine commercials. Dining frequently with filmmaker Henry Jaglom, Welles allowed him to record their conversations. These recordings reveal Welles, the raconteur, as he recalls lovers (Rita Hayworth, Lena Horne); disses actors and directors (John Houseman, Joan Fontaine, Chaplin); tells outlandish stories (Carole Lombard’s plane was shot down by Nazi agents in America); and bemoans lack of respect from his peers. He is unguarded in his comments, revealing a vain, prickly personality, uncompromising and brilliant. Film buffs will find Welles’ commentary endlessly fascinating, though the director’s fans might be saddened to see him as a washed-up has-been. A worthy addition to the Bogdanovich, Leaming, and Callow accounts of Welles. --Ben Segedin
Review
“Addictive and entertaining.” ―Vanity Fair
“Welles was obviously uninhibited by the invisible tape recorder. The book is a trove of classic-era Hollywood gossip, but if it were only that, it would be, at best, candy. Instead, it's a treasure, both as a portrait of the artist and as a copious record of his ideas--it is, in fact, a key source for understanding Welles, the director and the man.” ―Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“If it wasn't bad enough that I--and every other director--have to compete historically with Orson as a filmmaker, now we have to compete with him as a pure storyteller and a true raconteur, a man whose breadth of knowledge and experience may never be equaled again in this industry. The good news is that his declamations on every subject are alternatively penetrating, illuminating, shocking, rude, funny, true, or all of the above. I read this in one sitting; I can't imagine anyone doing otherwise.” ―Steven Soderbergh, director of Side Effects
“My Lunches with Orson offers the experience of sitting in on a particular historical-cultural moment. Read with your Netflix on hand, as Welles's wealth of knowledge inspires re-viewings of both his own films and those of his favorite actors like Buster Keaton and Carole Lombard.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“A wonderfully fluid peek into Welles' mind. Rich with acerbic observations about cinema, theater, filmmakers, actors, politics and the essence of storytelling, My Lunches With Orson might be the elephantine storyteller's last great work.” ―Indiewire
“It's time to add another line of adjectives to our descriptions of Orson Welles. In this remarkable collection of conversations, we come upon Welles the conversationalist provocateur who can't open his mouth without saying something outrageously funny, fiercely opinionated, and always off-center about the men and women he claims to have known, played with, worked for, slept with, been courted and betrayed by, and admired or detested (often simultaneously) during his half century in show business. I laughed so hard I had an asthma attack.” ―David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch
“We don't often get close to a legend, but here we have lunch with one week by week, in the last years of his life. Welles's conversations with Henry Jaglom glitter with memory, intelligence, and malice, and above all offer a magnificent act of self-impersonation: Orson Welles playing Orson Welles.” ―Michael Wood, author of Film: A Very Short Introduction
“When Henry Jaglom sent me the galleys, I was skeptical about their entertainment value. But as soon as I picked them up, I was hooked. Welles was an ornery, sometimes unpleasant genius, but his opinions on just about everything and everyone were unvarnished. You can almost hear the silverware clinking and the waiters delivering lunch as the likes of Richard Burton drop by to pay their respects…For those not fortunate enough to have Hollywood running through their family tree, this book may be the next best thing.” ―Ralph Gardner Jr., The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Peter Biskind is the acclaimed author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Down and Dirty Pictures, and Star, among other books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. He is the former executive editor of Premiere and the former editor in chief of American Film, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. He lives in upstate New York.
Most helpful customer reviews
51 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Good conversation
By Glenn Hopp
People who have read Peter Bogdanovich's THIS IS ORSON WELLES will want to read this book, too. Less a series of intentional interviews, it is, as the title tells, transcriptions of informal table talk at lunch. Welles insisted that the tape recorder be out of sight so that the conversations could be as unselfconscious as possible, and the results are nothing if not candid and opinionated--but also stimulating and insightful. Anyone who has seen an interview with Welles knows what a spellbinding talker he was, and every one of the book's 27 chapters verifies this, nearly every one of the 286 pages. The conversations all come from the last three years of Welles's life.
The overall picture that we get is mostly personal. As one might expect in lunching with a friend, there's gossip, personal opinions, remarks about his current projects, even comments on mid-80's current events (the death of Tennessee Williams, the fear of catching AIDS from casual contact). Sometimes other people (Richard Burton, Jack Lemmon) drop by their table (Welles is rude to Burton, kind to Lemmon). A representative snippet from the book is these sentences about Welles's friend from the Forties, the actress Carole Lombard. He tells Jaglom that Lombard swore freely in an age when the daily discourse was more reserved: "My God, she was earthy. She looked like a great beauty, but she behaved like a waitress in a hash house. That was her style of acting, too, and it had a great allure." The gossip of the first two sentences becomes in the last sentence a smart point about Lombard's art. That happens a lot in the book, as I suppose it could at the lunch tables of America every day: what starts off as dishing dirt transforms into something intelligent. With Orson Welles talking, this change seems to happen much more often, of course.
It would be a mistake not to mention that most of the names and topics arising in the book concern people that Welles views with much less nostalgia and fondness than he held for Carole Lombard. No one in Welles's comments probably fares worse than Laurence Olivier and John Houseman, but he is not one to moderate his opinions, and the opinions can get fairly blunt and blistering. Still, it's a book no one curious about Welles as a person and an artist will want to overlook.
38 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Dazzler
By Steve Schwartz, Austin
For years, actor/director Henry Jaglom hung out with film legend Orson Welles, not only having lunches, but hustling for him and his projects. With Welles's consent, Jaglom taped their conversations by means of a tape recorder hidden in Jaglom's bag.
Unlike filmmakers Hitchcock and Ford, for example, Welles was never able to parley his genius for making some of the best films to come out of Hollywood (or anywhere else) into a flourishing career. Early on, he got tagged by the screw-ups of others -- studio executives, jealous colleagues, government cultural bureaucrats in Europe, small-minded know-it-alls in general -- as a man who could never finish anything, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. The word on Welles, as well as his corporal image of self-indulgence, made it difficult and finally imossible to get financing for any project. At the time of his death, he had 19 scripts, many complete, a few not, including what might have been a great King Lear. It's definitely our loss, but there's always the next witless movie franchise (Fast and Furious XXI, for example) all too available to take up brain space. I never really understood why some billionaire wouldn't just give him 5 mil to make a film, even if the project turned to powder. It still would have been money better spent than on a giant party in the Bahamas catered by the trendiest celebrity chef and adorned with ice sculptures.
Unlike many who called Welles a friend, Jaglom actually went out of his way to be of practical service to Welles's career, shopping Welles's scripts and even casting him in Someone to Love, Welles's last film appearance. Why, especially when most people were more than willing to accept Welles as a talentless sprawl (Welles had passed "obese" decades before) of failure?
Jaglom doesn't tell us, but rather allows Welles to reveal himself as a fascinator of endless charm, a superb storyteller and raconteur, and a fellow with a boy's old-fashioned sense of adventure. "Larger than life" may be a cliche, but it fits Welles, even when you ignore his girth. Welles's personality dwarfed almost any other contemporary, recalling somebody like Dickens. As Welles himself showed in his brilliant F for Fake, he had a "fluid relationship" with facts, I suspect mainly to improve the story he told. The anecdotes, as he brings them out, instantly stick to your memory. I've been relaying to my poor wife one Welles story after another. They're so good, you want to tell *somebody*. That's the price she has to pay for living with me.
You'll learn about Joseph Cotten and Deanna Durbin, Irving Thalberg's tremendous influence on the "film factory" system and how it tended to crowd out the better directors, Laurence Olivier's stupefying narcissism, the reasons behind John Barrymore's drinking, the bat-dip crazy far right in Hollywood (Adolph Menjou, Hedda Hopper, formerly liberal Charlton Heston), and much more. There are affectionate portraits of Welles's friends and his love of good actors, especially the ones who helped him. One also finds frank considerations of his directing competitors. I expected to find the latter, not merely because of Welles's self-absorption, but because of his very individual sensibility. Nobody, after all, likes everything. Why should Welles?
To some extent, there's a bit of score-settling as well. Probably the three most influential Welles detractors, those responsible for the "self-indugent failure" myth -- Charles Higham, John Houseman, and Pauline Kael -- finally get solid pushback. I never liked Higham's book on Welles. It seemed both intellectually shoddy and badly written. Given what I know of its genesis -- Higham underpaid a bunch of research assistants and threw together their index cards -- Welles's antipathy didn't shock me. The book repeated long-debunked myths, went to hostile sources, and in general didn't engage with Welles's films themselves. About John Houseman, who owed his career to Welles, I never found much to admire. His acting seemed less like acting and more like an amateur "turn." To be fair, I didn't know any other part of his work. Here, he comes across as an Iago -- malice without sufficient reason, concealing the poison in the honey of "more in sorrow than in anger."
To me, the strongest anti-Wellesian is Pauline Kael -- I have to admit, my favorite film critic. Indeed, she turned me on to late Welles. I saw the wonderful Chimes at Midnight on her recommendation. Aside from her incredible smarts and great prose, she never gives you the sense that she cuts intellectual corners, like Higham does. Unlike Houseman, she doesn't trade in innuendo but sets out the facts as she knows them. The main charge she levels is that Welles didn't, as he claimed, write the script of Citizen Kane and that he reduced the writing credit of Herman J. Mankiewicz to co-writer. Kael contends that Mankiewicz was responsible for most of the script and should have gotten full credit, and she argued that the egotistic Welles tried to obscure Mankiewicz's contribution. Welles simply points to obvious facts. Mankiewicz received at least part writing credit, and Welles never hid his debt to Gregg Toland, indeed often referred to him as a co-director. So much for the raving egotist. Kael did the most damage with her claim that Welles tried to remove Mankiewicz's screenplay credit completely with a cash payment to the latter. Scholarship has since found evidence to support Welles's claim that he rewrote Mankiewicz's work, and it fits with Welles's practice in other films, even the ones in which he only acted.
Peter Birskind has done a great job putting the mess of conversation into readable, even entertaining form. The great feature of this book is that almost all of the stuff above comes in by the way and that a picture gradually builds up, almost by stealth. Mainly, you just enjoy being at the table with a figure so effervescent and Falstaffian.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting but a bit tedious
By William D. Curnutt
The first portion of the book is a brief history of Orson Wells life and work in the movie business. It also chronicles several other film makers. It is a good brief history of the industry and fairly interesting. If you love the movie business you will certainly enjoy this small short stroll down memory lane.
The main body of the book is a detail structure of the conversations between Jaglom and Wells. While interesting at times it is also a difficult tedious read at times due to the nature of the relationship between the two and their familiarity with each other. Think about a good friend of yours and how when you get together your talks wind their way through a multitude of topics, and something you say has deep meaning for you and your friend where others not privileged to your life would find it difficult to catch the nuance. I found this book that way. The discussions have some poignant insights but often they are tedious, such as the dialogue between Orson and the waiter who obviously have known each other a while but you are left thinking the waiter is either a mind reader or just plain snarky.
If you are a huge Orson Wells fan then you will enjoy this dialogue. If not, then you will find points interesting but it a bit hard and long to get through the text.
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