Orson Welles, Last Take

Director Henry Jaglom was a friend of Orson Welles for several years before his death, and also considered Welles a mentor. What follows are excerpts from Jaglom’s journal from 1985, from the days surrounding Welles’ death on Oct. 11 of that year.

Saturday afternoon at lunch, Orson told me that the attacks were beginning to come in, in response to the books recently out on him, especially Barbara Leaming’s wonderfully supportive--and to his mind, largely accurate--biography. He still hadn’t read it, wasn’t going to, he said, because he knew he’d be mad as he came across several of his best stories which “she really shouldn’t have used, I was saving them to use myself.”

Nonetheless the success of the book as it was about to go into its second printing had cheered him. Setting the record straight at long last on [“Citizen Kane” producer John] Houseman and [“Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman J.] Mankiewicz (and so many other things) pleased him and he was philosophical about the attacks: “You know, once they decide they’re for you or against you, it never changes. Hope and Crosby they always loved. Me and Sinatra they decided against early on, and they never let up.”

He was happy about the one-man show he was about to do, and I called John Goldstone in London about cassette distribution, starting things in motion.

“King Lear” was still on hold, but [Gordon] Getty was promising certain things, and the book was about to come out in England, which might help push Getty over into giving us the money, was his hope.

Several groups were beating several different bushes looking for the financing for “The Dreamers,” and one might come through. One actually looked likely, all of a sudden.

Orson was most happy to hear me say that Oja [Kodar, Welles’ companion] was such a strong presence in the rough cut I was putting together of “Someone to Love,” and he kept telling me I should use as much of her as possible, “the film will gain so much from her extraordinary beauty and presence.” I told him that I was excited at the cutting process as never before, that I’d figured out how to end the whole thing with his character telling mine all about it, summing it all up for me--and for the audience. He smiled and said: “Don’t forget, we can always shoot more if necessary. It just takes a bit of red cloth and putting the background well out-of-focus.”

He complained that in a year and a half, Ma Maison would be moving into a new hotel and “what will we do then? Where will we eat? Where will we meet and scheme our schemes?” he laughed. He claimed pride in the success of “Always” and insisted that he’d never read and heard so many glowing things and “so deserved,” insisted on quoting back to me from memory some of the nicest things critics said about me and my film.

Kiki growled and he fed her a small cookie, complaining, as so often before, that if she kept on crying he’d never take her out again. She quieted down and he patted her approvingly.

He told me that Paul Masson wanted him back “to endorse its terrible wine again,” but on a one-year contract this time instead of three, at lesser money and with required performances-cum-appearances around the country. He would turn it down, of course, but slowly, seeing how good he could make the deal. “You never know,” he said. Meanwhile he’d shoot his one-man show, which was exciting him.

We talked of Israel’s raid on Tunis and Gorbachev’s public relations talents as evidenced in Paris, he said how the French bungling of the Greenpeace ship business in New Zealand was going to cost Mitterrand his job and what a shame that was. He made me have dessert by dramatically reading the menu and we laughed and gossiped about different stories of various people’s pomposities and pretensions. And then he let himself have a dessert plate full of lime sherbet, and relished it.

A typical few hours, in short, some stories, some hopefulness, some creative ideas, some anecdotes, some sadness, some old memories, much shared understanding, many warm and knowing, communicative smiles. As always.

But for some reason I didn’t have my little tape recorder on in my bag. I remember thinking as I drove over that I didn’t have to any more, I wasn’t emotionally tied to it any longer, as I had been for years, ever since he first suggested it. He said it would help him a lot “down the road, when I write my autobiography.”

“When will that be,” I asked.

“When I’m too old to make movies.”

But for some reason I didn’t feel I had to have it on that day. And I remember being relieved that none of his stories or memories at this particular lunch were so great that the absence of the tape recorder peeking out of my bag need concern me. I wondered if he would ask about it, we played this game for years of pretending it wasn’t there. “Keep it out of my sight, I don’t want it to make me self-conscious, I want to forget it’s there. But keep it running. . . . “

He suddenly sighed and said “Time is passing.” But he said it lightly, sadly but lightly, in relation to the ongoing inability to get a film financed, as he had said it so often before.

He asked after my mother. He knew she was going into the hospital a few days later for an operation to find whether she had benign or malignant polyps on her colon. He had signed a copy of Barbara’s book on him to her: “From your honorary nephew, Orson,” and I told him how much pleasure it had given her, and he liked that.

Last night on my answering machine when I came home around 3 a.m. there was just one message: “This is your friend,” said his wonderful booming voice. “Don’t forget to call your mother first thing in the morning, find out what the results of her operation are, then call and tell me!”

This morning I spoke with her, the results of her operation were happy and after hanging up, as I was about to call and tell him, the phone rang. It was Judith [Wolinsky, Jaglom’s producer], there was a rumor that Orson was dead, the press was calling our office, it was pandemonium. I called him, on Oja’s private number. Freddie [Welles’ driver] answered, said how sorry he was, yes it was true, he had found him on the bedroom floor at 10 this morning and he couldn’t rouse him. He then called the paramedics. He apologized to me for calling them, as if he had violated a trust for privacy that he still somehow felt he was expected to honor, even now.

Orson was dead.

All day the hypocrites got on TV and eulogized him. I kept wanting to call him and tell him “You won’t believe what Burt Reynolds said, how so-and-so held forth, what Charlton Heston came up with, etc.” One by one each of those who wouldn’t help him when they could, now stepped forward to praise him, celebrate his genius, mourn his passing.

Even in death he did his “dancing bear” act for them, the one he felt he had to do for them in life.

I got furious and gave a few angry interviews of my own.

Then I watched him on my editing machine, saying that you are born, you live, and you die alone.

“Only through love and friendship can you create the illusion that you are not entirely alone,” he said, in what turns out to be his very last acting job in a movie, his last appearance in front of the audience that he has been wooing and battling for 50 years.

“You have your ending now,” he said to me, on my editing machine.

“Can’t I have an ending after the ending?” I asked, essentially.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because,” he finished, with a smile, “This is The End” And he blew me a kiss.

And to the cameraman he shouted:

“Cut!”

And the screen went black.