My Lunches with Orson (8 page)

OW:
Yeah. He was never called “Lucky,” except by the press.

HJ:
In my mind, Luciano had forty people around him who would kill anyone who came near him.

OW:
Not Brannigan—they all ran. They all had to go to the men's room when he came in with a baseball bat. He was just a tough Irishman. He said, “Fuck 'em.”

HJ:
But on the plus side, didn't Mayer create Thalberg, the greatest producer who ever lived?

OW:
Thalberg was the biggest single villain in the history of Hollywood. Before him, a producer made the
least
contribution, by necessity. The producer didn't direct, he didn't act, he didn't write—so, therefore, all he could do was either (A) mess it up, which he didn't do very often, or (B) tenderly caress it. Support it. Producers would only go to the set to see that you were on budget, and that you didn't burn down the scenery. But Mayer made way for the producer system. He created the fellow who decides, who makes the directors' decisions, which had never existed before.

HJ:
Didn't the other studio heads interfere with their directors?

OW:
None of the old hustlers did that much harm. If they saw somebody good, they hired him. They tried to screw it up afterwards, but there was still a kind of dialogue between talent and the fellow up there in the front office. They had that old Russian-Jewish respect for the artist. All they did was say what they liked, and what they didn't like, and argue with you. That's easy to deal with. And sometimes the talent won. But once you got the educated producer, he has a desk, he's gotta have a function, he's gotta do something. He's not running the studio and counting the money—he's gotta be creative. That was Thalberg. The director became the fellow whose only job was to say, “Action” and “Cut.” Suddenly, you were “just a director” on a “Thalberg production.” Don't you see? A role had been created in the world. Just as there used to be no conductor of symphonies.

HJ:
There was no conductor?

OW:
No. The
konzertmeister
, first violinist, gave the beat. The conductor's job was invented. Like the theater director, a role that is only 150, 200 years old. Nobody directed plays before then. The stage manager said, “Walk left on that line.” The German, what's his name, Saxe-Meiningen, invented directing in the theater. And Thalberg invented producing in movies. He persuaded all the writers that they couldn't write without him, because he was the great man.

HJ:
F. Scott Fitzgerald must have been impressed by him, to make him the model for
The Last Tycoon
.

OW:
Writers always fell for his shtick, knowing better. Writers are so insecure that when he said, “I don't write, but I'll tell you what's wrong with this,” they just lapped it up. He could cut them off at the knees with all his “genius” stuff, and making them sit for three hours before he allowed them to come in to see him, and all that. By the way, there were better scripts written, on the whole—this is a generalization, but it's my opinion—even when writers considered that they were slumming by coming out here. Faulkner and everybody. “We're going out there to get some money.” Still, they did an honest job for that money, because instead of going back to their little place up in the Hollywood hills to write their scripts, they had to eat with each other every day in the studio commissary, which made for a competitive situation. It was collegial—“What are you working on?”—and they shared funny stories about how dumb the producer was, how bad the director was, and all that. But they didn't want their peers to do better than they did, so they worked hard. Harder than these people now who want to be directors, who have done nothing but look at movies since they were eight years old, who have never had an experience in their lives. Or experienced any culture beyond movie culture.

HJ:
But Thalberg was also creative. At least from Fitzgerald's point of view.

OW:
Well, that's my definition of “villain.” He obviously had this power. He convinced Mayer that without him, his movies wouldn't have any class. Remember that quote Mayer gave? All the other moguls were “dirty kikes making nickelodeon movies.” He used to say that to me all the time.

HJ:
When Mayer found you, you were very young, and very attractive, very magnetic.

OW:
That's why he loved me; he thought I was another Thalberg.

HJ:
Did you know Thalberg?

OW:
I didn't know him. I was out here, playing in the theater, when he was alive, but I didn't meet him. Then he died.

HJ:
Irene Mayer Selznick says in her book about L.B., her father, that everybody knew Thalberg had this sort of death sentence hanging over him from the beginning. He started at MGM knowing that at thirty he was gonna die. He had rheumatic fever. A bad heart.

OW:
I know a lot of people who expect to die early. Thalberg turned it to his advantage.

HJ:
He must have been incredibly skillful at manipulating Mayer.

OW:
Thalberg used to manipulate everybody, brilliantly. Not only Mayer, but actors, directors, writers. He used his death sentence, his beauty, everything.

HJ:
He was also beautiful, apparently, yeah?

OW:
Yeah. Enormously charming and persuasive. Thalberg was Satan! You know, the classic Satan. And, of course, Norman worked around the clock.

HJ:
Irving.

OW:
Irving, yeah. I always think of him as Norman, and I don't know why. He would reduce people; and, having reduced them, flatter them. He was obviously a weaver of spells who was able to convince everyone that he was the artist. Thalberg was way up here, and the director was way down there. The result was that he negated the personal motion picture in favor of the manufactured movie. He was responsible for the bad product of Metro, and the style which continued afterwards: the Thalberg style.

HJ:
That's true. Nobody knows who directed
Gone With the Wind
. Or, there were many directors on the same movie, like
The Wizard of Oz
. Metro's great, great movies somehow just happened.

OW:
Yes. And they still look like any one of the Metro directors could have made them. At lunch in the commissary, you could play musical chairs with every movie—move every director to another movie—and you would not be able to tell the difference in the rushes the next day. Now, Warner's made the good pictures. It was rough there. Jack Warner tortured and murdered everybody, but he got great pictures out of them, obviously.

HJ:
What directors managed to work under Thalberg that way?

OW:
Vic Fleming, or Woody Van Dyke, whoever.

HJ:
Were any of them gifted?

OW:
George Cukor was.

HJ:
Not as much as they say. His films were signature-less. Even the good ones.

OW:
He was a very competent stage director. But it's true, you can't tell a Cukor picture.

HJ:
Holiday
,
Philadelphia Story.

OW:
Writers' pictures.

HJ:
Or Tracy pictures, or Hepburn pictures; they're star pictures.

OW:
Exactly—all of them. That's why, to me, Thalberg is the number-one villain. I think he was a real destroyer.

HJ:
Okay. But, he didn't do anything to hurt people.

OW:
Well, he destroyed [Erich] von Stroheim, as a man and as an artist. Literally destroyed him. And von Stroheim at that moment was, I think, demonstrably the most gifted director in Hollywood. Von Stroheim was the greatest argument against the producer. He was so clearly a genius, and so clearly should have been left alone—no matter what crazy thing he did—

HJ:
But he was so extravagant that he reached the point where economically, it was impossible. If the stories about him are true. Or was he just so original he threatened everyone?

OW:
They had to make him into a monster. I had a very interesting experience when I was making
Touch of Evil
. I had a scene in a police archive, and they let me shoot it in the real archive of Universal. And while they were setting the lights, I looked up von Stroheim, the budgets of his movies. They weren't that high. The idea that he was so extravagant was nonsense. Anita Loos wrote a brilliant book about Hollywood—
Kiss Hollywood Goodbye
. And she thinks [Josef] von Sternberg is a marvelous man. Sorry, not von Sternberg. Von Stroheim. Von Sternberg was a real louse. But nevertheless, the portrait of von Stroheim was a hatchet job. She said, “We all loved Von,” and then she presents a picture of this terrible Prussian. Once she said to me, “The nicest Jewish actor you ever met in your life.” You know?

HJ:
Did you know von Stroheim?

OW:
Yes, very well. But later, when he had become an actor and was living in France, Charlie Lederer and I wrote a movie for him in Paris, with Pierre Brasseur, and Arletty. It was called
Portrait of an Assassin
. It was about those guys that ride around on motorcycles inside a cage, going faster and faster. Kind of carny shit. They didn't use one word we wrote. But we wrote the story, which they did use. And we got paid by a black-market producer who came to the Lancaster Hotel with the money wrapped in newspapers—soaking wet; it was always raining in Paris. That's how we got to live it up in Paris, writing this story.

HJ:
And you liked von Stroheim?

OW:
Loved him. He was a terribly nice fellow. A French script girl who worked on
Grand Illusion
told me that he was the greatest prop actor she'd ever known. Because he'd have a newspaper, a swagger stick, a monocle, a cigarette—all of these things. And he would do a scene where he would put them down and pick them up on certain lines. You can't have that number of props and get it all right. But every time [Jean] Renoir would shoot a take, he'd do it right. On the syllable.

HJ:
Did von Stroheim direct any movies in his later life?

OW:
No, he didn't. He became purely an actor. He became a star in France in the thirties, but in bad pictures. A terrible loss. 'Cause there was a gigantic gift, really. No question.

HJ:
Was he very frustrated? Was he very angry or sad?

OW:
He didn't seem to be. By the time I knew him, he'd come to terms with it, so he didn't treat people badly out of his frustration. He was not a jolly fellow, but he was not brooding. He was very fond of being a star. And even after the war, he was still a star. That compensated a lot for him.

HJ:
And he did that wonderful turn in
Sunset Boulevard
. That brought him back.

OW:
Only in terms of Hollywood. In America it seemed as though he'd been reclaimed from obscurity, when the reality was he was coming from continuous stardom in France. But the success of
Sunset Boulevard
meant nothing to him, because it was Swanson's picture, and Billy Wilder's—compared to what he was getting in France.
VON STROHEIM
on top of every marquee.

HJ:
So all the stories about von Stroheim were made up?

OW:
He did some crazy things, but he didn't do anything as crazy as the young directors of the fifty-million-dollar pictures do today.

HJ:
But his pictures were without precedent—eight hours long.

OW:
Yes, they were, but Thalberg was the one without precedent. Without him, von Stroheim would never have been ruined. D. W. Griffith did much crazier things. But he was in charge, because he was the director, and “D. W. Griffith.”

 

3. “FDR used to say, ‘You and I are the two best actors in America.'”

In which Orson recalls sabotaging David O. Selznick's charades, claims that Carole Lombard's plane was shot down by Nazis, and says FDR's biggest regret was not having intervened in the Spanish Civil War.

*   *   *

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
You were trashing Thalberg the other day. It's funny, because the myth gets handed down that Thalberg had great taste and culture.

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
In his whole career he didn't make a picture that will last fifty years from now, and still he's revered.
Romeo and Juliet
, as produced by Thalberg, and directed by Cukor, was the cultural high point of his ten years of moviemaking. Now, you cannot sit through four minutes of it, it's so terrible. Norma Shearer with those tiny eyes, and Leslie Howard, a Hungarian Jew, as Veronese teenagers?

HJ:
But he was so foppish, and so, so British. God, Hungarians made great Englishmen, didn't they? I wonder why.

OW:
Well, there was a period during the Austro-Hungarian empire when the older aristocracy had all their clothes made in London. They spoke French with great chic, but their shoes were made in London; their hats were made in London; the nanny who raised their children was from London—and the greatest thing to be was an English gentleman. And I'm sure that's why Lord Leslie Howard, as Sir Winston [Churchill] used to call him, trilling his
r
's, was such a good Englishman. And then to die in a plane crash, because of Churchill … Not killed by some angry Magyar peasant.

HJ:
That was the incident where Churchill couldn't reveal that they'd broken the German code, so he let the Nazis shoot down the plane? Wasn't that the same plane that Norma Shearer was on? Thalberg's widow?