My Lunches with Orson (9 page)

OW:
No, no. Norma Shearer wasn't killed in a plane. That was another thing that is amazing. After Thalberg died, Norma Shearer—one of the most minimally talented ladies ever to appear on the silver screen, and who looked like nothing, with one eye crossed over the other—went right on being the queen of Hollywood, and getting one role after another.

HJ:
Marie Antoinette.

OW:
The biggest bust ever made, you know? And everybody used to say, “Miss Thalberg is coming,” “Miss Shearer is arriving,” and all that, as though they were talking about Sarah Bernhardt. You know, while there were Garbo and Dietrich and Lombard and all the good people. It was a continuation of the magic of this man.

HJ:
But Thalberg was also responsible for careers of people like David O. Selznick, who came after him and who managed to make some extraordinary films.

OW:
They would have been made by the directors, anyway—and better. The man was a simple pain in the ass! I knew him as well as I know you. He was a total monster, the worst of them all.

HJ:
He has the image of somehow being elegant and classy.

OW:
He wasn't elegant. He was gross. Tremendous energy and very intelligent. And very bad taste. He thought he was the greatest thing since Jesus. His job, like Thalberg's, was to efface the signature of the director. The man had a tremendous drive to be more than Thalberg. And he had no conscience. Selznick wanted to be the greatest producer in the world—and would have been happy to do anything to achieve it. It was unbelievable. Once I was on David's yacht, and we were all gathered together after dinner. He said, “We can either go back to Miami tonight, or we can go to Havana. I'd like to see a show of hands. Who wants to go to Havana?” Everybody's hands went up. We all went to bed, woke up in Miami.

HJ:
That's what happens if you own the boat.

OW:
I was close to David because friends of mine liked him. I used to go to his house on Sunday nights. Everybody in Hollywood would be there, and we'd play “The Game,” which was just charades, you know. But Selznick played to
win
. Week after week after week. If our team lost, he would follow us in our cars down the driveway, screaming insults at us for having been such idiots, with his voice echoing through the canyons as we drove away. He would become so violent that it was worth it. It was funny just to watch him. And then he had us back the next week. “Now we're gonna win,” you see?

Once Selznick wanted to have a fight with me. This was at Walter Wanger's house. After the ladies had left, the gentlemen sat around drinking port. He said how disappointed he was not to have Ronald Colman in
Rebecca
. Because he had this fellow Olivier. That irritated me. I said, “What's wrong with Olivier?” He said, “He's no gentleman.” And I said, “David, what kind of shit is this? What are you talking about, ‘no gentleman?'” “Well, he just isn't. You can tell that. But with Ronnie you know right away—he's a gentleman.” And I said, “Why, you pious old fart.” So David stood up, took off his glasses, and assumed the fighting position. We went out into the backyard, and everybody held us back.

HJ:
You were really going to fight?

OW:
Oh, yes. We used to do that all the time in Hollywood, always stepping out into the garden and fighting. While everybody held you, and nothing ever happened.

HJ:
Bogart was always beating up guys, wasn't he?

OW:
Now, Bogart, who was both a coward and a very bad fighter, was always picking fights in nightclubs, in sure knowledge that the waiters would stop him. Making fearless remarks to people in his cups, when he knew he was well covered by the busboys.

The great fistfight of the prewar days, though, was between John Huston and—who was the other fellow? It lasted a long time, and they kept running at each other, but neither one of them ever landed a blow. I only saw one great fighter in my life. I was sitting in Harry's Bar in Venice, in the afternoon, and there were four GIs, and their sergeant. Another soldier came in and made a remark, and the sergeant just turned to the soldier and knocked him out with the neatness of a John Ford movie, and they carried him away. Then another soldier made a remark, and he knocked him out. Now, you know, it is
impossible
to do that. But he did it, right in front of me, and each time the sergeant turned to me and said, “I'm very sorry, sir.”

HJ:
So if it wasn't Norma Shearer, who was killed in the plane crash?

OW:
You're thinking of what's-her-name—the good one. I can't think of anybody's name, ever. Terrible.

HJ:
Gable's girlfriend—Carole Lombard.

OW:
His wife. I adored her. She was a very close friend of mine. And I don't mean to imply that we were ever lovers. I remember when Gable made a picture called
Parnell
, a costume picture. Nineteen thirty-seven, with Myrna Loy. Nobody came. They released it to
empty
theaters! Proving that there's no such thing as the star who can't empty a theater. I think it was the only MGM film that lost money. Not that it mattered to Mayer. Money was almost no object to Metro, 'cause they couldn't lose money.

HJ:
You mean the way they had the distribution set up, owning the theaters, they were so locked in that—

OW:
And when I learned to fly, I flew with Carole over Metro, at lunchtime. We buzzed the commissary, just as everyone was coming out, and she dropped leaflets that said, “Remember Parnell”! That's the kind of girl she was.

HJ:
She looked to me like kind of a road-company Garbo.

OW:
Not at all Garboesque! 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. She wasn't vulgar; she was just … I got to know her when I had to make peace between her and Charles Laughton. I was sort of an emissary for Laughton. They were making a picture called
They Knew What They Wanted
, about an Italian vintner who gets a mail-order wife, played by Lombard, you know? The movie was directed by Garson Kanin. Laughton was the simple Italian peasant. He would come to my office, and sit down across the desk from me, and put his head on the desk and cry.

HJ:
Laughton?

OW:
In the middle of the day. Said, “I can't go on the way they're making fun of me on the set.”'Cause they were sending him up so. And then I would go and talk to Gar, and talk to Carole, and say, “You know, he is a great actor. Take it easy with him. You're gonna ruin your own picture.” Laughton was beside himself. Because he had been such a star in England with Korda. When he played Rembrandt for Korda, years before—a wonderful performance, one of the only times an actor has ever persuaded you he's a genius—he asked to be taken by Alex's brother, the art director, to Holland, to the museum in Amsterdam, to see
The Night Watch
, and other Rembrandt pictures. They arrived on Sunday, and the museum was opened just for Laughton. He walked up to
The Night Watch
, looked at it, and fell into a faint. From the beauty of it all. When he'd make an entrance, they had little sets built for him where he would be sitting, doing what he was doing just before he came on. You see?

HJ:
A very Method actor for his time.

OW:
Well, his own method.

HJ:
Now, Lombard could not have been very bright.

OW:
Very
bright. Brighter than any director she ever worked with. She had all the ideas. Jack Barrymore told me the same thing. He said, “I've never played with an actress so intelligent in my life.”

HJ:
But Gable was certainly not bright.

OW:
No, but terribly nice. Just a nice big hunk of man. If you're working hard that long—if you have to be in makeup at five fifteen, and you get home at seven o'clock—how much brightness do you want? The guys just wanted to stagger home—and, if they could, get laid. Otherwise, a happy smile and get ready for the next day's work.

HJ:
So Lombard was also killed in a plane crash?

OW:
Yes. You know why her plane went down?

HJ:
Why?

OW:
It was full of big-time American physicists, shot down by the Nazis. She was one of the only civilians on the plane. The plane was filled with bullet holes.

HJ:
It was shot down by who?

OW:
Nazi agents in America. It's a real thriller story.

HJ:
That's preposterous. What was she doing on a plane full of physicists? Do people know this?

OW:
The people who know it, know it. It was greatly hushed up. The official story was that it ran into the mountain.

HJ:
The agents had antiaircraft guns?

OW:
No. In those days, the planes couldn't get up that high. They'd just clear the mountains. The bad guys knew the exact route that the plane had to take. They were standing on a ridge, which was the toughest thing for the plane to get over. One person can shoot a plane down, and if they had five or six people there, they couldn't miss. Now, I cannot swear it's true. I've been told this by people who swear it's true, who I happen to believe. But that's the closest you can get, without having some kind of security clearance.

No one wanted to admit that we had people in the middle of America who could shoot down a plane for the Nazis. Because then everybody would start denouncing anybody with a German grandmother. Which Roosevelt was very worried about. The First World War had only happened some twenty-odd years before. He'd seen the riots against Germans. No one could play Wagner—or Beethoven, even. Germans weren't safe on the street. They were getting lynched. And he was very anxious for nothing like that to be repeated. He was really scared about what would happen to the Japanese if all the rednecks got started. Especially in California, with its coastline on the Pacific.

HJ:
So his idea was to protect them? That's why he rounded them up and put them in camps?

OW:
Yes. That was the motivation in his mind. But it was a ghastly mistake. Now, other people—the Pentagon types—thought we were riddled with spies. But his concern was the safety of the Japanese who lived here. Of course, they didn't know that. They're quite rightly indignant. They would never agree that it was a good thing.

HJ:
You knew Roosevelt, right? Were you ever alone with him?

OW:
Yes, several times. And then Missy [LeHand] would come in. And she hated it when I visited the White House.

HJ:
Why?

OW:
Because I kept him up too late. He liked to stay up and talk, you see. He was free with me. I didn't need to be manipulated. He didn't need my vote. It was a release for him, and he enjoyed my company. He used to say, “You and I are the two best actors in America.”

HJ:
Was he bright?

OW:
Very bright.

HJ:
What was that letter he wrote you about Spain?

OW:
A four-page letter out of the blue, only a few months before he died, about the state of the world. It was lost in a fire. I never knew why he'd written it to me. He just sort of sat and dictated it one night.

HJ:
He wrote he felt bad about Spain?

OW:
Oh, no, he didn't write that. That's what he said to me. It was on the campaign train, not in the White House. We were talking about mistakes that other people had made—that [Woodrow] Wilson had made, that [Georges] Clemenceau had made. Yes, Spain. The neutrality with Spain was a big mistake. “That comes back to me all the time,” he said.

HJ:
It always struck me that the fact that some of our more progressive presidents—the Roosevelts and the Kennedys—came from wealthier backgrounds meant that they were less intimidated by other rich people, and therefore, less susceptible to special interests. The poor kids are the more dangerous ones—Reagan is so impressed with rich people—it is such an important part of his life.

OW:
And they had Nixon in their pocket when he was still a congressman. From the beginning. But I still don't think your point is right. It's because of the old tradition of the Whig—of the liberal rich, the old tradition of public service and of liberalism—Roosevelt was a genuine, old-fashioned American Whig. The last and best example of it. And—

HJ:
But I still say you can't be a poor person in the presidency and be surrounded by wealthy people.

OW:
Well, a senator can be a poor person, but it's true, eventually he'll become a puppet of the rich. A senator used to be a tremendous office. Now it's really, more than it's ever been, what the money buys. The special-interest thing.

HJ:
We always heard that Roosevelt really wanted [Henry] Wallace in '44 to run as his vice president again, and it was the reactionary Southern Democrats who forced Truman on him.

OW:
He would have liked to have had a better Wallace.

HJ:
William O. Douglas or someone.

OW:
Yeah. He would have loved to have Douglas. But they did force Truman on him, and he didn't give Truman any kind of break. Roosevelt didn't think much of him. None of us did.

HJ:
Were your sympathies with Wallace when he ran for president in '48 on the Progressive Party ticket?

OW:
Oh, no. I thought it was just fatal. He was a prisoner of the Communist Party. He would never do anything to upset them. Not that I thought that in itself would make him a bad president. But it showed his weakness. I was very, very passionately against him. The left thought I was a real traitor. Had he won, I think we would have had a much bigger reaction after him.