By TODD TARBOX
SCENE FOUR
JUNE 6, 1985
I THINK WE FIRST SPOKE, AND THEN SANG, LATER WE TOLD STORIES, AND FINALLY DANCED
Interior of Roger and Orson’s libraries. Roger picks up telephone receiver and dials Orson.
ORSON: Hello.
ROGER: Orson.
ORSON: So, how are you?
ROGER: Fine.
ORSON: How is your updated Rise and Fall coming?
ROGER: Sorting through and writing about the past nine decades is an Augean task, and, from time to time, quite encouraging. I’ve made a good deal of progress during the past month. I was writing this morning about Edwin Embree, about a particularly memorable trip we took with him to New York in the late ’40s and stumbled upon the New Year’s Eve festivities at Times Square. We were engulfed in that crowd, and saw Guy Lombardo and his band bring in the New Year. Is Lombardo still around?
ORSON: No. He joined the majority about two years ago. But they still manage to play that awful song. Was I with you?
ROGER: Oh, no, just Horty, Edwin, and his wife, Katherine. We saw you a few times at Sardi’s and places like that, but I don’t think we ever went out on New Year’s in New York with you.
ORSON: I never ventured out on New Year’s Eve, even in New York, except once, and that time I got in trouble with Virginia. I was preparing a play and we were invited to a New Year’s Eve party. I said to her, “I just can’t go until I get this finished. You go with Chubby and the others, and enjoy yourself. Call me around New Year’s if you feel like it.”
She left at about ten o’clock. At about eleven-thirty, I heard raucous noise outside and it kind of intrigued me. I thought a moment’s rest would be good. So, I went downstairs and took a little walk along Broadway and got near a nightclub which I used to frequent, the Latin Quarter, America’s answer to the Moulin Rouge, which prided itself on having the best and the most beautiful dancers in the world. It was owned by the TV woman, Barbara Walters’ father, Lou. He had a pretty wife working in the chorus line. I came in and said hello just as everybody was singing, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind.” We all got in a line and they put two exquisitely gammed dancers on either side of me in their heavy makeup with feathers and no clothes on. I returned home and continued working. The next morning, there I was on the front page of the Daily News, sandwiched between these two chorus girls.
ROGER: And you had told Virginia you were working.
ORSON: Yes, I said I had never left. I’d forgotten this brief dalliance. It really didn’t seem important that I’d been out for an hour. I told her, “I worked all night, and I’m glad I did.” [Laughter] Of course, after she saw the front page, explaining my brief excursion proved challenging. In fact, it led considerably to my subsequent infidelities.
[Laughter] That was my only night out on New Year’s Eve. You know what they do in Spain on New Year’s? They have a famous clock in Madrid, which is the equivalent of the ball in Times Square. It’s a time-honored custom, you have twelve white grapes in a glass and, at midnight, at each strike of the clock, you eat a grape until the glass is drained. Everybody all over Spain does that. I hate New Year’s myself. Too much drunkenness and not enough thought. It’s a damn Scotch invention. Nobody ever really paid any attention to New Year’s except the Scottish, and it grew from them. The alcoholic intake on New Year’s in Scotland is beyond belief. I was in Edinburgh on a New Year’s Eve, so I know what I’m talking about. It looked like the end of the world.
ROGER: I was kind of a two-bit Bobby Burns scholar. I can’t remember any New Year’s verse of his.
ORSON: I have a terrible hunch that he wasn’t very good. But maybe I’m wrong, probably because I can’t do the dialect. [Laughter]
ROGER: Are you old enough to remember Harry Lauder?
ORSON: Oh, yes. I remember him.
ROGER: He made a fortune on that dialect.
ORSON: I saw him on megaphone in one of those little shorts that people like George Jessel and Burns and Allen used to do. Terrible voice. But he was a big, great man in vaudeville.
ROGER: That’s right. He just had one thing that he milked for years and years.
ORSON: He was one of the highest paid of all the people that was ever booked in vaudeville, and I don’t know why people loved him so, but they did.
ROGER: “A bonnie, bonnie lassie.”
ORSON: I’ve never been too keen for Scottish music or folklore. I’m not very fond of any folklore. I think dances are exactly the same all over the world. [Laughing] They just change the costumes. Learn one and you know them all, and join right in. I think they’re all based on a couple of basic dances that migrated. One Moorish dance, which became the Morris dance of England, is a particularly shapeless affair. They just hop about like the poor- est students of Adolph Bolm. You’re lucky you haven’t had to sit and watch dancers performing interminably as I was required to do as a special envoy to Mr. Roosevelt, visiting presidents of the Latin American republics. They always took me to the national opera house to see performances of the local ballet troupe, performing dances, which lasted eight and a half hours. I can tell you all about capoeiras, combat dances, of Brazil, and the makuta, a fertility dance, of Trinidad. I’ve been exposed to a great deal of dance, not just in Latin America, but around the globe, and they’re all jiggling almost identically. I have a theory that they’re all heavily choreographed by a lady or a gentleman, officials from the government who picked up a few dancing lessons somewhere and adapted the dances for popular entertainment. I have the feeling that dancing is the last thing we did to express ourselves. I think we first spoke, and then sang, later we told stories, and finally we danced.
It just seems logical that the first thing we would do was to grunt and then we would think. But, maybe the first thing we would do was dance before we would grunt. Nobody knows. Thousands of books have been written on the subject. I think children first make an attempt to speak and, then, they make an attempt to chant, because they can’t dance. What I find fascinating is what the artists along the Spanish/French border left us. They painted exquisitely sophisticated pictures in dozens of caves. There is no relationship to the primitive art that we know among the Indians, blacks, and Asians. The caves are scattered throughout the Pyrenees, in Southern France and Northern Spain. The Altamira cave in Spain is the finest of them all. Paintings of bison predominate, no doubt homage to the hunt.
ROGER: I read something about a cave that was discovered somewhere in the Basque countryside.
ORSON: That’s the Ekain cave. It was discovered in the late ’60s. I’d love to see it.
ROGER: You’re quite familiar with the Basque country, aren’t you?
ORSON: Oh, yes. It’s an enchanting place. In the mid-’50s, I produced a series of travel sketches for British television, and one looked at the Basque country.
ROGER: I think I saw some of those programs.
ORSON: I don’t think so. I believe they were only aired in England. In the Basque episode, I compared our restless, constantly changing, progress-obsessed, technology-driven culture to the contented, grounded Basques, who have lived for centuries satisfied in a static, agrarian society.
ROGER: Civilization and progress are not always synonymous.
ORSON: Not at all. I made the point in the film that the most civilized nations are those where progress is not a primary obsession. The Basques also have a marvelous attitude toward death, which is captured in one of their proverbs, “Live until you die, and, until then, don’t panic.” The Basques don’t care whether or not a man dies wealthy, but they do
care passionately whether or not he dies well, which cues you into your favorite subject.
ROGER: Death, for heaven’s sake? It’s the subject that you think that I overdo.
ORSON: No, I don’t think you overdue it, but it is one that you have faced with a certain gallant loquacity for the past thirty years. [Orson laughs]
ROGER: That’s probably true.
ORSON: You have a kind of old Roman stoic view of it.
ROGER: Exactly. It seems to me so silly that we fear it because decrepitude is inevitable. Death seems so desirable once you’ve had a really fruitful life and there’s nothing left but withering and dying— that’s the only place, as I see it, where God goofed. Everything else is wonderful. We all are born, we grow, we propagate, we flower, and then we wither and we die. But, it’s that penultimate period which is dragged out, and better philosophers than I have talked about it. What I feel is that, not in my lifetime or in yours, there’s going to be an entirely different feeling about the whole thing. The wake is so wonderful. After a person has died, friends and family get together and drink to the deceased’s life, and sing a few songs. Why can’t such a celebration be done ahead of time?
ORSON: You mean invite everybody while you’re still with us?
ROGER: Yes. Only a very few would want it. But, those of us who do would call in a mortician—
ORSON: You’re going to invite the undertaker to the ceremony?
ROGER: Yes, along with—
ORSON: That’s quite a social event. You’re going to be there chatting away with the undertaker at your side?
ROGER: Exactly. And, you’re going to have a few drinks and a few laughs with your friends, and you’re going to say goodbye, and you attend your own wake.
ORSON: A very stoic approach.
ROGER: It isn’t stoic. It’s because I’m a coward. I hate approaching this decline, which is just inevitable.
ORSON: As Hemingway said, “Every story has an unhappy ending.”
ROGER: When you come right down to it, I’m talking suicide, which is unsettling to many people.
ORSON: We always feel resentful to suicides, don’t we?
ROGER: Yes. By contrast, the Romans believed there was something noble about suicide. God knows, there
is nothing noble about it. But, if a person wants to end his or her life to avoid a painful and prolonged decline, where is the moral turpitude?
ORSON: In other words, you are saying we should be allowed to go at the time of our own choosing?
ROGER: Yes. In recent years, six of our friends have died. With the exception of one, the common refrain of the mourners was, “Wasn’t it a blessing?” When you are on top of the mountain, that’s the time to go. For those few who want it, you say goodbye, wrap the drapery of your couch about you, and lie down to pleasant dreams.
ORSON: When do you make the decision to end your life, when do you know when the fires are dying?
ROGER: That’s the question that’s the fault in my whole—
ORSON: Very few people have the strength of character to acknowledge that the fire is really dying. I have a friend who I trust with my life, to whom I’ve given the power of life and death, and who will visit me in the hospital, and if I’m a vegetable turn something off if that is possible.
ROGER: You can sign a living will, which says that you don’t want your life extended by any kind of artificial means.
ORSON: You know, when I say my friend is going to do it, I’m talking about what is not covered by that statement. What I’m talking about is a situation where there isn’t a choice, but you’re just lying there after a stroke, motionless.
ROGER: What’s gained by holding on to our population until everyone is one hundred? Maybe it will be possible, medically, to do that, but is it wise?
ORSON: Wouldn’t it be very dangerous, indeed, to start encouraging the dissemination of older people because they are sociologically inconvenient?
ROGER: You’re so right. But, I’m talking about a very few who want to make a decision about themselves.
ORSON: Well, we really have two questions here, don’t we? One is euthanasia in its various forms, the right not to live when life no longer has significance, ending it with some form of dignity. The other is a cool, pagan, Roman, Japanese kind of suicide.
ROGER: A suicide that is noble in some kind of way, instead of disgraceful. I think you know more about that than I.
ORSON: No, I don’t know more about it.
ROGER: Sure you do. You’ve studied Roman history more than I have.
ORSON: What I think is that the Romans and the Japanese were very concerned with their dignity and their nobility.
ROGER: They were macho.
ORSON: Not exactly macho, but Roman gravitas and honor. That is not a Christian or Jewish moral position, which is why it is rarer in our culture. But, I would imagine that you, without attitudinizing about the Japanese, would be emotionally on their side. There’s also the thing you have, luck. Who was it, a revolutionary or a colonial officer who was so lucky and had the famous lines, Stay thy hand Lord! It is more than enough—more than these can bear! quoting the Bible, of course. In other words, don’t give me any more good luck. And, I suspect that’s how you feel. You’ve had so much that you almost can’t bear the thought of more.
ROGER: Let’s face it; it’s a type of fear.
ORSON: What do you mean?
ROGER: Well, the luck can’t last. In Time and Chance, I wrote that my entire life has been a matter of luck, and it starts out with a verse from Ecclesiastes.
ORSON: How does it go?
ROGER: “For I looked again and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift. Nor the battle to the strong, nor yet riches to the men of understanding, but time and chance happeneth to all.” And it happeneth very happily to me. It’s a weakness probably, not to want to get the dirty end of the stick at the end of life.
ORSON: What do you think death is?
ROGER: Sleep, a very wished for and blessed sleep and nothing more. We’re not going to have any reincarnation. We had our chance. Good Lord, one season on earth, isn’t that enough? Isn’t it silly to think that we’re going to come back?
ORSON: You would feel sorry to be surprised?
ROGER: (Laughs) I think so, yes.
ORSON: Just imagine any form of immortality. You would be sorry to find that that existed?
ROGER: I can’t imagine anything but sorrow in looking back on the hopes you had that didn’t materialize. I’d like to end with hope. You, in no small measure, are responsible for my decades-long ruminations on death, beginning when we used to read of the deaths in the Bible, which are some of the most poignant in literature. For instance, the death of David, who had been such a sexual giant. They put the beautiful Shunammite maiden, Abishag, in his bed. Remember the passage, “Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat.” Shakespeare on death is also worth attending. Falstaff, which you’ve played so beautifully since your youth, can bring tears to my eyes.
In Henry V when Nell Quickly reaches up and says—
ORSON: “So a’ bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone;”
ROGER: “Then I felt his knees, and they were as cold as any stone,”
ORSON: “And so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.”
ROGER: “As cold as any stone.” It’s so poignant. It’s scared me all my life.
ORSON: Well, I won’t keep you any longer, but it was lovely talking to you.
ROGER: As always, it was great.
ORSON: Bye.
[Lights dim.]
– Copyright 2013 Todd Tarbox
Published in the USA by: BEARMANOR MEDIA
www.BearManorMedia.com
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