Orson Welles Parkinson: The Interviews

Do you know what Shirley Temple's mother used to say to her before every take?

For every take... This is God's truth. She used to say... "Sparkle, Shirley." You know?

Well, I don't think I'm going to sparkle tonight, Michael!

But I have my stick, and if you try one of those in-depth interviews... you ought to know that I'm armed.

That was Orson Welles laying down the law. He liked interviewers to know their place.

When we met, he looked with despair at the sheet of paper in my hand.

"What's that?" he said. "My questions." "Throw them away. I'll talk instead. Much better."

And it was. Who was I to argue with the man who, at 26, made and starred in Citizen Kane,

and who followed that landmark with The Magnificent Ambersons,

The Lady from Shanghai, and A Touch of Evil

to consolidate his reputation as one of the giants of cinema.

Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper!?

-I don't know how to run a newspaper, I just try everything I can think of.

-You've no proof of this...

-Mr Kane...

-Hello, Mr Bernstein. Can you prove it isn't? Mr Bernstein, meet Mr Thatcher.

-Sir, a cable from Cuba...!

-We have no secrets from our readers. Mr Thatcher is a devoted reader.

-He knows what's wrong with each copy since I took over. Read the cable.

-"Girls delightful in Cuba stop.

"Could send prose poems about the scenery stop. There is no war in Cuba stop. Wheeler." Any answer?

-Yes, tell Wheeler, "You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war."

-Right away!

Orson Welles spent the rest of his life trying to avoid talking about Citizen Kane.

He hated talking about any of his movies. But he loved talking. And there's much to say.

He revolutionised American theatre. He terrified the nation with his War of the Worlds broadcast.

He made cinema history. He was a political animal, a friend of FDR, a speechwriter and commentator.

He married Rita Hayworth, had an affair with Judy Garland,

and a deep and close relationship with Marlene Dietrich.

He was a magician, a mind-reader, and a bullfighter. One friend called him "a multitude of a man."

I found him the most fascinating talker of them all. These are the highlights of our 1974 interview.

It was the time of Watergate and I asked his views on politicians.

-I don't think politicians are natural crooks.

-Not all of them?

-No, I don't think MOST of them are.

I think they are actors, and actors are neither men nor women. Actors belong to a third sex.

Actors are actors, and one aspect of it is the political game.

But that kind of acting is not lying

as long as it...refers to and reflects and exhorts...

the essential...commonly held ideals of a culture.

Those performances are part of our culture, even though they are performances,

even though some of the actors themselves may be cynical about their performance.

-But what we have now cannot be excused in those terms.

-Mm.

But you said last time you wouldn't mind the job of President. And now?

Well, they haven't been burning up the wires.

-AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

-No.

-Eh... I'm really not in a position at this point in time,

eh, to state that I am ready for candidacy for President.

One thing that amused me about that, really, was...I was watching TV the other night,

-and the vice-president designate... I can't remember his name...

-Ford.

-Ford. Gerald Ford.

-Should be easy.

-And...

-Gerald is the tough part of it.

-Eh, yeah...

-We call him Gerry.

-Gerry...

And he was up before some preliminary Senate investigatory committee

and said some extraordinary things about, "You can investigate me, my children, my bank manager..."

I'd love to be there when you're President and they're investigating you.

-I mean...

-You mean me?

-You.

-Well, I've BEEN investigated over and over again by the Americans,

-by all kinds of American committees and the FBI and everybody.

-Really?

-Sure. Sure. It's a... You know...

It's one of our favourite indoor and outdoor sports.

What else were we doing in the doctor's office during Ellsberg's trial but investigating?

-Yes.

-You know? My trouble, during the investigation period...

When I was investigated a lot was during the anti-American McCarthy period, you see.

And I never got to testify because I kept begging to be allowed to. This was a line nobody else took.

And that stumped them. I said, "Oh, please let me go and explain why I'm not a communist."

And earlier in the day, there was one Congressional committee

run by a fella who ended up in jail for one of those minor crimes

that seem to tempt our people in elective office...

LAUGHTER And he was a strong patriot. He wrapped himself in the American flag

as fully as it was possible to do.

He had an UnAmerican - or whatever it was called - Affairs Committee long before McCarthy started.

And he sent a few louts over to see me in my office in Hollywood.

And they were particularly dumb, and they fell into a marvellous trap.

They said, "Are you a card-carrying communist?" Of course, I've never been faintly pro-communist, but...

but I am on the progressive side, as I imagine you've guessed...

But I said, "Will you define what a communist is?" And this is where they fell in the trap.

They said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I want to answer honestly.

"How can I answer your question if you don't tell me what you mean?" "Well...what's a communist?

"Well, I guess it's where whatever you make goes to the government."

I said, "Well, I'm 86% communist."

"The rest is capitalist."

You see, that's the income tax that one pays in America.

Have you ever been bugged?

Oh, yes, but that was by Harry Cohn, the head of a studio. He bugged my office in such an obvious way...

I had a radio programme in those days

and I used to come into my office in the morning and say, "Good morning, everyone!

"This is Orson Welles' office welcoming you to another day..."

And at night I'd say, "Orson Welles signing off." And play a little music... Just like a radio show.

Cohn got rather angry. He thought the buggee ought to take it seriously.

-"Buggee".

-And when I ran the federal theatres in the days of the WPA,

we were all bugged, of course, and our phones were...

It's hard to imagine anything more primitive than Watergate and the "disappearing tapes"...

but it was so primitive then that you heard buzzing and screeching on the phone when they were listening.

I put on Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus.

And a Congressman got up on the floor and said that Orson Welles is producing and acting in a play

by the notorious communist Christopher Marlowe.

-Extraordinary.

-But it took a lot of electronic work to get that information.

The reason you've worked and lived for such a long time in Europe, then...

-Not to avoid McCarthy.

-No.

-No.

-It's been because the work's been there?

-Yes. Really.

And because I like living on this side of the Atlantic very much, but I like living in America too.

I'm not a refugee, either politically or emotionally, from my country.

I'm neither very hot about... nationalistically inclined, because I hate that in anybody.

I hate... I do truly believe that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

And I don't feel that way. But I'm very happy in America.

-But it happens that America's not as happy with me as I am with it.

-Why do you live in Spain at present?

-I don't. I'm shooting a picture there.

-But you spend a lot of time there.

-Not as much as I did.

Again, like the fruitpickers, I go where the work is.

But I don't live in Spain at all. I don't have an establishment there.

I'm old-fashioned and Spain is an old-fashioned country.

But I hadn't been in Spain, when I talked with you, for a long time. And I've been there now.

And in the last six months, it's joined the glory of the present world to such an extent,

that you don't know if you're in LA or Madrid. A great deal of the grace and pleasure of life is gone.

Are you still interested - I know you were in previous years - in bullfighting?

Yes, but less... I'm interested in what I remember. I don't like it much any more.

-Why's that?

-Well... Two things.

First of all, bullfighting, as somebody once said very well,

-is indefensible and irresistible.

-Hm.

And, eh... It is irresistible when everything is as it ought to be,

both with the beast, the sacrificial beast,

and with the brave man who meets that brave animal for... a ritualistic encounter...

-I'm not going to go into all that mystique which has been pretty worn out by now.

-Mm.

The fact is, it has become an industry which depends, for its existence, on the tourist trade.

So it's become folkloric. And I hate anything which is folkloric.

But I haven't turned against bullfighting

because it needs a lot of Japanese in the front row to keep going.

I've turned against it for very much the same reason that my father was a great hunter and suddenly stopped.

He said, "I've killed enough animals and I'm ashamed of myself."

And I was a bad torerito myself, you know, and I've seen hundreds of bullfights, thousands, I suppose.

And wasted a lot of my life, now that I look back on it.

And although it's been a great education to me in human terms and many other ways,

em...I begin to think that I've seen enough of those animals die.

But WAS it a waste? Such an exciting...

It WAS all of that.

But wasn't I living secondhand, through the lives of those toreros who were my friends?

-Yes.

-Wasn't I living and dying secondhand? Wasn't there something finally voyeuristic about it?

I suspect...my aficion.

I still go to bullfights, I'm not totally reformed,

and I can't ask for the approval of people who have good reasons to argue against it,

and, by the way, almost all Spanish intellectuals have been against bullfighting for the last 150 years.

Very few... Lorca is one of the few Spanish intellectuals who ever approved of bullfighting.

Waste, waste, waste, you ask me. Waste because I wasn't doing anything.

My little short period of doing it was just for the fun of it. As a kid, I never expected to be a Belmonte,

and the rest of my life that I spent among bull-breeders and bullfighters was enormous fun,

but what have I extracted from it that's of any value to anybody?

What qualities in them attracted you to them?

Well, you know, there are two kinds of people who "follow the bulls", as they say in Spanish.

There are those who follow because they love the bullfighters,

and there is a small minority who are interested in the bulls. I was always most interested in the bulls.

That may seem incomprehensible - to be interested in the animal who is going to be killed.

It's like the interest of somebody who is very keen and knowledgeable about horses.

I am much more interested in bulls than in the men who fight them,

even though some of my dearest friends have been bullfighters.

You shared this passion with another famous American, Hemingway. Did you ever meet him?

-He was a very close friend of mine.

-Was he?

-Yeah. I knew him on and off for many years.

We had a very strange relationship. He was, eh... I'd never belong to his clan,

-because I made fun of him, and nobody ever made fun of Hemingway.

-Mm.

-But I did.

And he took it, but he didn't like me to do it in front of...the club.

We met at the projection of a movie which he had made and which he wanted me to narrate.

-And he had written the commentary. This is many years ago.

-Yeah.

And we hadn't seen each other. This was a dark projection room. And I was reading the text.

And I said, "Is it really necessary to say this? Wouldn't it be better to just see the picture?" And so on.

And I heard this growl: "Some damned faggot from an art theatre trying to tell me how to write...!"

So I began to camp it up.

"Oh, Mr Hemingway, you think that because you're so big and strong and have hair on your chest...!"

So this great figure stood up and swung at me! So I swung at him.

You have the Spanish Civil War on the screen,

and these two heavy figures swinging away and missing most of the time...

The lights came up and we looked at each other and burst into laughter and became great friends.

Not a friendship that was renewed every year, but over many years.

I saw him in the last year that he was entirely in control of himself.

But we never discussed bullfighting because we disagreed profoundly on too many points.

And he thought he'd invented it, you know.

-He really did.

-Yes...

-Maybe he did!

-His book, of course, is still...

-Is superb. He's a great, great, great artist.

I... My admiration for... I was enormously fond of him as a man too.

-The thing you never get from his books is his humour.

-Yes.

There's hardly a word of humour in a Hemingway book, because he's so tense and solemn,

-and dedicated to what's true and good and all that.

-Mm.

-But when he relaxed, he was riotously funny.

I enjoyed being with him, keeping him company when he went duck-shooting in Venice in autumn.

I have many strange memories of him like that. I was enormously fond of him.

But as an artist, I think that it's really...

There are few important writers, with the exception of Nabokov...

who have not been influenced to some degree by him. I think it's impossible to write the same

-as we did before he wrote.

-Has he not become an old-fashioned figure?

-He's come back again, I think.

-Really?

-I don't know about England, of course. Different countries vary.

In America, he was in total eclipse for the last ten years.

The sun is rising again, critically, for him. He's been dead long enough.

-I think it's mainly true, isn't it, that writers do go into total eclipse right after their death.

-Yes.

-I wonder why.

-He was ultimately a tragic figure, wasn't he?

-His end was complete counterpoint to all that he stood for...

-He was sick. He was sick.

But he did talk about suicide, you know. His father killed himself with a gun in the same way.

And he talked to me about it several times in a sort of obsessive way.

But he was a sick man. He wasn't merely... He was not well mentally. He's not to be judged as himself.

He didn't... The Hemingway we are talking about did not choose his death.

-Yes.

-He MIGHT have. But he wasn't that man.

-Do you have any heroes?

-Oh, yes, many.

-Who are they?

I suppose the great... There are... You know, in England, Churchill is the...

I know he's a little out of fashion with a lot of young people,

who send him up a lot.

And I'm an abject hero-worshipper of Winston's.

-I think the greatest man I ever met was George Marshall.

-Really?

-Yes. The greatest human being.

-Why was that?

-I don't know.

He just struck me as being everything I would like to be myself, or like everybody to be.

-He was just...

-Yes.

One night, we were... We were at a big dinner, a banquet...

All the brass. The war was still on.

I was the only civilian who was going to sit on the... dias, as we call it in America.

And there were the admirals and everyone else, and Mr Roosevelt was going to be wheeled in in a moment...

And we were waiting. It was in the Mayflower Hotel. And a door opened...and a GI looked in.

Just by accident, he opened the door, and he saw George Marshall, the highest ranking officer in the world.

And he said, "You're General Marshall!"

Now, Marshall didn't know anybody was watching this. I was. Everybody was having drinks and talking...

He said, "Yeah, come in, son." And he went off in the corner with the boy, who was an ordinary GI,

and sat talking with him for 15 minutes, and sent the boy home.

-Now, there are not many generals of the army who could do that with simplicity...

-Mm.

And without the slightest hint of, eh...demagoguery or playing.

He didn't think one of us was admiring him for being a human being.

And he was such a human being that that little boy from the prairies of Kansas or wherever...

instantly saw that he could talk to him without embarrassment. As he could never have talked to his major,

-or to General MacArthur, you know?

-Or Patton...

-Certainly not Patton.

Not unless he had his guard up!

I asked you about heroes because I know that a lot of people would say YOU were their hero.

I can't imagine why, but I LOVE hearing it.

I sincerely can't see how anybody could make a hero of me.

You have, many times, been called a genius...

It's one of those words, you know.

-I suppose there have only been two or three geniuses this century. We all know who they are.

-Really?

What - Einstein, Picasso and someone from China we haven't heard about.

-So you don't accept the...

-Oh, I accept anything I get!

But, between friends, there aren't many of them.

And I really wouldn't want to try to edge my way into an elevator that was for geniuses only -

going up, you know!

Well, we were talking earlier about "experts". Experts. That would be, eh...

Film critics would call themselves experts, one imagines.

Now, they judged a film of yours, twice running, Best Film Ever Made.

That shows you how crazy experts are. No, it shows you how fundamentally sound film criticism is.

No, I don't... I never talk about critics, because there isn't anything to be said about them.

If they criticise you, anything you say is sour grapes.

If they like what you do, you should shut up, you know? There's no way to criticise critics. They're immune.

-Do they ever wound you?

-Deeply. Yes. I can remember every bad notice I've ever had.

I remember one I got when I was 18 in Salt Lake City, when I played Marshbanks,

and I was described as "a sea calf whining in a basso profundo."

I'm sure it's an absolutely accurate description of that performance,

but it still goes through my head before I go to sleep at night, with a thousand other similar litanies.

I have a misfortune which is that... It isn't out of modesty. It's, I suppose, some form of masochism.

If so, it's the only thing that I'm masochistic about.

But I do remember all the bad notices and I do forget, or take not very seriously, the good ones.

-And you genuinely do not like talking about your movies?

-No. Because it's done.

You know that's true. My family has never heard me say a word about any picture I've ever made.

I just find that very curious. Most directors, and actors especially - that's all they can talk about!

I'm sure they can talk about other things but they LIKE to talk about...

A lot of directors, actors - their idea of a happy night at home is to watch one of their pictures!

And I can't think of anything more horrifying.

Because you can't change it. What can you do about it? There it is. Forever.

If you're a writer and you've written a bad chapter,

if they bring out another edition, you might get to fix up that chapter.

-There's nothing you can do about a movie. It's locked in forever.

-Yes.

You will talk generally about movies. About the industry.

I'm not as interesting as I'd like to be. I don't see enough movies.

I was just wondering about the changes you've seen in the industry since you started in Hollywood.

Do you think it's still an industry, Michael?

-Not an industry like it used to be.

-And I wonder if it really was. I think it always was showbusiness.

And when there were big studios, which still existed when I went to Hollywood,

but were in their very last days as Golden Age big studios,

I think they were PRETENDING to be factories and it was still showbusiness.

It's true they were grinding them out and all that,

but the true industrial process cannot be as helterskelter and idiotic

as every form of showbusiness is.

Otherwise, every car we get in would break down after the second block!

I can't believe everyone else is as stupid as we are!

But...how do you get the product if it's all as mad as that?

Well, it sort of happens. Movies are terribly easy to make. It's much harder to put on a play.

-Really?

-Oh, yes. What's hard to do is to make a very good movie.

-Yes.

-A GOOD movie, even, is easy to make. If you have a good cameraman, a cast that happens to be right,

if you have a story that happens to be vaguely interesting...

that is the art form that works in our day and age.

So it would be very hard to write a great play in blank verse today.

But I think it would be pretty easy in Elizabethan days to write a GOOD verse play. Not great, but good.

-And it's damned near impossible now because it has nothing to do with our culture.

-Yes.

But somehow a good movie gets itself made even by a lot of second-rate people.

A VERY good one is another thing.

If you look back at when Hollywood really was the dream factory...

-Yes.

-Are you nostalgic about those days, or were they just comic relief?

-I loved them!

-Really?

-I thought it was great! I never belonged to it. I was this terrible maverick that they all...

You know, I was... I represented... I was, sort of, forty, thirty years ahead of my time...

There was this sort of Ghost of Christmas Future. There was one beatnik.

There was this guy with a BEARD who was gonna do it all by himself.

I represented the terrible future of what was going to happen to that town.

So I was hated and despised, theoretically,

but I had all kinds of friends among the real dinosaurs,

-who were awfully nice to me.

-Really?

-Yes! I had a very good time.

But I believe that I've looked back too optimistically on Hollywood.

My daughter has some books on Hollywood, probably vainly looking for references to her father,

and I took to reading them, and I realised how many great people that town has destroyed

since its earliest beginnings.

How almost everybody of merit was destroyed or diminished,

and the few people who were good who survived - what a minority they were.

And I suddenly thought to myself, "Why do I look so affectionately on that town?"

It was funny and it was gay and an old-fashioned circus, and everything that we're nostalgic about,

but really it was a brutal place. And when I take my own life out of it and see what it did to others,

-I see that the story of that town is a dirty one and its record is bad.

-Yes...

-What about the great stars they had in those days that people always say we don't have now?

-We don't.

-That's true, because they're not processed the same way.

-I... They don't exist.

-They don't exist?

-Why's that?

-They exist as singers. In the old days, the greatest thing in the world to be was a movie star.

Today the greatest thing is to be a pop singer.

-There will never be a great star unless the greatest thing to be is that kind of star.

-I see.

Before World War I, the greatest thing to be was an opera singer.

People used to faint in the streets when they saw an opera singer. And then came the movie stars.

You see, I think... Any form of entertainment only exists because it corresponds to a moment in time.

You know? So that, of course there are actors who are as good,

or as remarkable or as space-displacing or whatever...

but the world doesn't think being a movie star is the everlasting end.

-No...

-And it used to. That's why they don't exist.

-That brings us back to the beginning.

Were they in fact great stars or just part of an illusion?

They were great. They were great.

I think that, eh...Keaton and Garbo... My goodness. Cagney...

I won't talk about Bogart because everybody does. I loved him very much,

but I think we can get along without talking about Bogart for three years, and his shade will be relieved.

-But Cagney, in my view, is maybe the greatest actor ever on film.

-Really?

-Yes.

-James Cagney?

-Yes.

-What makes you say that?

-First, he broke every rule about movie acting.

The first thing that every stage actor says -

"You can't do what you did for the National Theatre. You act for the camera." And so on.

Cagney came on as if he were playing to an audience of 4,500 people.

He acted at the top of his bent and he never hammed for one moment.

Thus proving my point that hamming is not over-acting. It's FALSE acting, it's fakery.

There's not a fake MINUTE in a Cagney movie. PLEASE have a season of him and study what he was.

I was thinking of people I haven't interviewed who I'd love to. And he...

-He won't come.

-He's a complete recluse now, isn't he?

-No, but he won't come in front of a camera.

He goes out and does his, eh, thing. He goes to Hollywood for six months every year and sees his old cronies.

But he was like Tracy and a lot of people. He never went to a nightclub. He was invisible.

-Garbo wasn't the only one.

-No...

There was just a small group who slugged photographers and all that scene...

The rest of them were home-bodies, you know?

-They defend what they've got at home, of course!

-Yes...!

You said that Akim Tamiroff said, "Either the camera loves you or..."

-Oh, yes.

-I presume that was more true about Garbo than anybody else?

-Yes, I suppose, than anybody.

-

-I don't know if you've ever seen those commercials she did.

-No.

When I went to Stockholm years ago, they showed me in their film institute there,

two commercials for bread that she made to be shown in movie theatres.

There's this great gallumphing... Swedish cow...

There was nothing of the most divine creature that would ever be on the screen.

-Two years later, she was Greta Garbo. I have no explanation whatsoever for that.

-Surgery(?)

-Just...

I have no idea what there is about the camera, what that box does,

what made Cooper so thrilling on the screen and convincing,

and when you'd visit Gary Cooper on the set, and see him do a take,

as I did, waiting to go to lunch with him, and the director would say, "OK. That's a print."

And I'd think, "They can't use that! That's nothing!"

Then you'd see the rushes. Magic!

-Mm.

-You know? Showing that there isn't any rule at all that explains it.

-No...

Can I ask you, finally, how many films you're working on at present?

-You always seem to be juggling four or five.

-Yes, I am always.

Because the hope is that one of them will work out!

LAUGHTER Eh... We're finishing a picture now.

Or will be. I'll be going into final photography with it very shortly...

Which is called The Other Side of the Wind. A lot of it has been filmed. Most of it.

-It's about the last day in the life of an old movie director.

-Oh, yes.

Older than me. Everybody will think it's autobiographical, but it's not.

-I saw a bit about this! It was described as your first erotic movie!

-I know how that happened.

There was a press conference on behalf of some project of mine,

and it was clear that there wasn't any copy being given to a group of hardworking journalists,

-and having been a journalist myself, I thought I'd invent something.

-I see.

-It's just sheer fakery.

Sheer fakery!

I wonder if he knows. But why do you keep working so hard?

-There's an awful compulsion in you, it seems to me, to work all the time.

-Oh, no! No, no.

I think... You've put your finger on a basic failing of all lazy people.

They have to work too hard or they won't do anything at all.

-You know?

-Yes.

-Once I stretch out in a hammock, you'll never hear from me again! I like it that way!

Is that your last line tonight, or could I ask...

is there any one single line in any play you've done, any movie, anything you've ever read,

that you've thought, "That's true. That's really what I'm about."

What I'M about... eh...I don't know.

Plato told us that we should know ourselves

and the object of every artist, good, bad or indifferent,

is a lifelong inquiry into that subject,

and his work is testimony to that effort.

But I'm in no position to sum myself up

and I would be appalled if the truth could be offered to me at this moment.

-You'll carry on inquiring?

-Yes!

Orson Welles, thank you very much indeed.

Orson Welles died in 1985.

I think a friend described him best: "a totally original creation,

"endowed with more gifts than any human has a right to expect or hope for.

"Unfortunately, among the gifts was a talent for self-destruction."

Next week - David Niven, in our new slot, Sunday night at 11.15.

Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 1995