My Lunches with Orson Read Online Free PDF Page A

than a box of Kleenex, leaped up from his master’s ample “crotch,” as Terrail puts it, and went for his arm. Nevertheless, the orthodox pope invited the portly filmmaker to a high mass he was conducting at the Cathedral of Saint Sophia the following day, offering to dedicate the ceremony to him. Welles replied, “I am flattered by the invitation, but I must decline. I’m an atheist.”
    People of all sorts—friends, fans, and strangers—stopped by his table hoping for a golden word or two. Welles would roar at them, in his resonant, Orsonian voice, “HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?!” But he could also be rude. Recalls Jaglom, “People would say, ‘So nice to see you.’ He would say, ‘So nice to see you too, but that’s enough.’ He would try to intimidate them.” Jaglom asked him why. Pointing at his pug nose, he would answer, “You have to do something to let them know that you’re not just a little creature. You have to be the ruler of the forest. People want me to be ‘Orson Welles.’ They want the dancing bear show.”
    â€œYou don’t need that. You’re not so insecure that—”
    â€œI’m much more insecure than even you know, Henry.”
    â€œI don’t believe that. You’re arrogant and sure of yourself.”
    â€œYes, I’m sure of myself, but I’m not sure of anybody else.”
    According to Vidal, Welles’s conversation “was often surreal and always cryptic. Either you picked up on it or you were left out.” With Jaglom, he seemed to find a comfort zone that enabled him to show his vulnerabilities. His exchanges with his friend roamed over many subjects—movies, theater, literature, music, politics—of which Welles demonstrated an alarming mastery. There was no topic too insignificant or esoteric for Welles to weigh in on. The words he put in the mouth of Menaker in The Big Brass Ring suited him as well: “I am an authority on everything.” Movies? “Ballet—that’s the only thing less interesting.” Eisenhower? “Underrated.” Art Deco? “I deeply hate it.” Kiwis? “Ruined by all the French chefs.”
    Although Welles was generous with his praise for people he respected, he invariably peppered his conversation with amusing if often unflattering anecdotes about those he didn’t. He was particularly biting when his attention was directed toward former friends and enemies. Welles’s outsized personality, as well as his early, dazzling success in the theater, radio, and movies, made him the envy of everyone in the arts, and a target of more than a few. Rightly or wrongly, and in the course of the lunches, he settled scores with those he thought had done him wrong. One of them was Pauline Kael, who became something of a celebrity in the sixties and seventies for her movie reviews in the New Yorker . Kael engaged in a decade-long feud with fellow critic Andrew Sarris. Pace Sarris, Kael argued that film is a collective art form, the fruit of a collaboration among many talents. A writer herself, she particularly lavished praise on the long-suffering screenwriter. Kael knew that if she could chip away at Welles’s credit block, she could reduce the auteur theory–and Sarris–to a pile of rubble. In a notorious two-part essay published in the New Yorker in 1971 called “Raising Kane,” she made the case that Herman J. Mankiewicz, not Welles, was largely responsible for the script of Citizen Kane . (On the film itself, both men are credited with the script.) To add insult to injury, the essay, since discredited, was republished that same year in The Citizen Kane Book as the introduction to the shooting script. Welles was deeply wounded. As Jaglom put it, “Everyone treated Orson badly, but the one thing that he had was that he made the greatest movie ever made, and she tried to undermine that by creating this