My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles is one of the most unexpectedly moving and laugh-out-loud funny books to be published this year. Those who recall Welles as the pitchman in those old ubiquitous Paul Masson ads, promising with his faux gravitas that he would drink “no wine before its time,” are in for a revealing, and pleasant, surprise. Welles comes across as witty, barbed, impish and affectionate. He could also be mean. He revels in being ornery. He could go on at monologue length about how awful his rivals are (Welles kept a steady roster of both contemporary and old Hollywood bêtes noires) but he is also unguarded and occasionally, candidly desperate to make money. In My Lunches with Orson, he is, in short, the contradictory person we would expect of an actor who drank in Shakespeare so consummately, though we never fully saw the complex shadings of his character in public (despite his frequent appearances on talk shows in his later years). “He put so much effort into constructing his own myths that you rarely got to see the ‘real’ Orson Welles,” Biskind says. This book fills the gap. A raft of biographies have attempted to depict the complete Welles, but that’s a tall order. Being in conversation with Welles “was often surreal and always cryptic,” Gore Vidal is quoted saying in the introduction to My Lunches With Orson. “Either you picked up on it or you were left out.” Jaglom says even he has wondered why he and Welles got along so well. “We were both artists who were very adamant, and we weren’t that concerned with commercial success,” he offers, adding that “we made each other laugh all the time. I could get him out of his sadness, and I could offer him youthful hopefulness.” The fact that Jaglom hid his tape recorder allowed Welles to feel less self-conscious. He only gave himself away once, Jaglom says, in 1984. “Is it on?” Welles asked. He was talking at that moment about John Houseman, the actor who had been Welles’ great friend in the past but was his bitter rival as their lives came to a close. Being recorded by Jaglom “was a very handy way for him to get his truth out,” Jaglom says. “He had been reviled by so many people for so many things, and he wanted to set the record straight, and this is the way I think he thought he would do it.”
Welles of Wit My Lunches With Orson reminds us how insightful and devilish Welles could be (and that he had an opinion on everything under the sun). Here’s a sampling of some of Welles’ remarks from his lunch conversations with Jaglom. A longer selection of his Wilde-an wit will appear on Kirkus’ website when this article is published there on August 7. “I’ve always felt there are three sexes: men, women, and actors. And actors combine the worst qualities of the other two.” “People would say, ‘So nice to see you.’ He would say, ‘So nice to see you too, but that’s enough.’ ” – Henry Jaglom On reading books about himself: “They make me wince. Either because they’re too nice, or not nice enough.” “To my great sorrow, I’ve got to the age now where all my old minority opinions are ceasing to be minority.” On Humphrey Bogart: “He was a brave man. He was amusing and original. Very opinionated, with very dumb opinions and not very well read and pretending to be.” “Nobody’s written well about Central America. Well, there’s Joan Didion. She spent seven days in Central America. Wrote a best seller [Salvador]. It should be called Seven Days in Central America.” – C.S.
My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles Biskind, Peter—Ed. Metropolitan/Henry Holt (320 pp.) $28.00 | Jul. 16, 2013 978-0-8050-9725-2
Claiborne Smith is the features editor at Kirkus Reviews. My Lunches with Orson was reviewed in the May 15 issue of Kirkus Reviews. |
kirkus.com
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nonfiction
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1 august 2013
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