‘Conversations’: The Camera as House Guest
So far as I know, Mark Twain was the first American author to be captured by the motion picture camera. There is brief footage of him, in the familiar white suit on the veranda of his house in Connecticut.
In a new day, hardly anyone will escape not just the camera but the sound camera, recording our unscripted inanities on Christmas morning. Yet for historians as well as sentimental descendants there will come to exist a body of film and tape about the celebrated and the uncelebrated that will let tomorrow know just how yesterday sounded and looked and moved and thought.
Pauline Colbert of Santa Barbara came to know John Huston and John Houseman in their last years. She and they were friends of Howard Koch, the writer who turned a vigorous 87 last month and who wrote the script for Orson Welles’ famous or infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast and later was one of the writers on “Casablanca.”
During visits Koch made to Santa Barbara in the late ‘80s, Colbert arranged reunions with the three old friends, sat them in front of a camera and simply let them talk as long as they would. The hours of talk have been professionally edited into a documentary she calls “Last Conversations.”
Colbert is not a film maker; nothing fancy here. The camera is a watching guest as the men become their own interrogators. Houseman, quite in character, vigorously takes charge and in effect interviews Koch about his troubles with Jack Warner, who begged Koch to write “Mission to Moscow” and a few years later before the House Committee on Un-American Activities cited it as evidence of Communist influence in the industry.
Koch remembers a night in 1935 when a play he had written about Abraham Lincoln was set to go, except that they could not find a Lincoln. “Then late one night, a tall young man appeared at the door of our New York apartment, during a torrential rainstorm. He was hatless, no raincoat, no umbrella. It was as if he’d been driven in by the storm. I didn’t even know whether he’d ever acted before, but after 15 minutes with him I knew that we’d found our Lincoln, a gift from Pluto, the God of Storms.”
It was Huston, who had just returned from a rather roustabout life in London where, he once claimed, he had got by by doing sidewalk sketches. He had met the director, who steered him to Koch. The play had a brief run. The Wall Street Journal review, Huston recalls, was unsympathetic.
Of the HUAC times, Huston tells his friend, “I must say you were very valiant, one of the very rare exceptions, a man who was not a Communist and yet took a stand against the persecution.”
Houseman and Koch met during the Welles days in 1937 and were talking again a half-century later. Koch says he envied Houseman’s many-faceted career. “Not a virtue, you know,” Houseman says. “I did that out of sheer cowardice. I was so terrified of failing in one and starving to death that I always hedged my bets and had two or three things ready to fall into if I flopped in one of them. . . . And in general I lived very much for the moment. . . . That’s the only way you can do that kind of mad and comprehensive career.”
The two men discuss the doing of “War of the Worlds” and its aftermath, when in Houseman’s view, the press, feeling itself threatened by radio, were eager to prove the medium irresponsible. There were so many false reports of deaths caused by panic during the broadcast that, Houseman says, “By the time we left the place that night we were literally convinced we were mass murderers.”
Koch, says Houseman at the end of the conversation, “is one of the pure in heart. . . . (He) has been consistently idealistic and consistently optimistic. This of course is a great error because the world isn’t that way but Howard continues to believe it.”
Visible as well in the film, although briefly, is Maricela Hernandez, the woman in Huston’s life during his last years and to whom he dedicated his last film, “The Dead.” She had met Huston when she was the maid for his fifth wife, Celeste, and went to live with them at Huston’s castle in Ireland. When the stormy marriage broke up, Hernandez and Huston stayed in touch.
She was with him when he died. In a scene that was memorably described by Anjelica Huston at her father’s memorial service, he suddenly asked Hernandez how many rifles they had ready. Having played fantasy games with him before, Hernandez said 30. And ammo? Plenty, she said. “Good!” he said, “Give ‘em hell” and lifted her hand and died.
Hernandez lives in a small house in Hollywood where they spent their last years, with frequent trips to a house Huston also gave her in Puerto Vallarta (not the seaside house which will eventually revert to the Indians whose land it is on).
At the end of his life, having made efforts to help his children in their careers (Anjelica with “Prizzi’s Honor,” Tony with “The Dead,” Danny with “Mr. North”), Huston had advice for Hernandez. He assembled a library for her and urged her to read and study.
Thinking about the biographers who might be eager to invade their privacy, Hernandez remarked during a recent luncheon with Pauline Colbert and a friend, Huston had further counsel. “Let the dogs bark; just don’t let ‘em bite you,” Huston said.
“Last Conversations” awaits a distributor or a televised playdate. It is what it is, a charming, affectionate and valuable glimpse of three invaluable artists.