By LAWRENCE FRENCH
Orson Welles appearance on The David Frost Show recorded on May 12, 1970 came before most of the numerous biographies about Welles had been published, providing us with Welles’ own point of view on some very interesting aspects of his life and work.
This interview also took place in the midst of the cultural revolution of the late sixties, when Welles was still at work on his planned TV show, Orson’s Bag, and in a few months would begin shooting on The Other Side of the Wind. Both projects related rather heavily on various aspects of the counter-culture and youth movement that was so much a part of the zeitgeist of the time, yet rather ironically, neither project was to be seen while Welles was still alive. Thus, as Welles notes in the interview, when excerpts were finally shown, they were hardly “fresh.”
Why Orson’s Bag was never seen is especially puzzling in light of Welles expressed delight with the contract he received to make the show from CBS. At the time of the Frost interview, Welles had already been working on the show for nearly a year, so it seems rather strange that if he had the freedom to go away and make the show however he liked, and he wanted the show to be topical and “now,” he was taking a rather long time to finish it.
TV columnist Cecil Smith talked to the producer of the show, Greg Garrison and reported on it’s inception, a year earlier, on May 10, 1969, noting that Garrison had proposed the idea to Welles after he got him to first appear on The Dean Martin Show in 1966. Smith quotes Garrison as saying, “The last time Welles was in town (to work on Catch-22), Orson said to me, ‘I’m really astonished at this medium (TV). Whenever I get off a plane in the airport, people don’t say, ‘who is that fat man,’ they say ‘that’s Orson Welles. I saw him on The Dean Martin Show!’ Maybe we should do a TV show.”
Greg Garrison was a long time fan of Welles work, and noted that, “When I was in school at Princeton, I hitchhiked to Philadephia to see Orson’s great stage production of Around the World in 80 Days. That was the germ of the idea. I got a good writing team, of Tom and Frank Waldman (who wrote many comedy shows for Blake Edwards), and we put together an idea for a series of Orson Welles TV specials (originally to be called Around the World with Orson Welles). Mike Dann at CBS went for it, and here we are.”
According to the 1969 report from Cecil Smith, Welles had already shot the Spying in Vienna episode, as well as footage in Yugoslavia and Barcelona, so for it to still be unfinished a year later was certainly unusual, especially if Welles wanted the show to be “fresh.” Unfortunately, before the project was completed, Mike Dann left CBS for NBC, and then tax problems developed, presumably over payments Welles received in Europe (and probably failed to report), leaving Orson’s Bag another orphaned project.
To promote Orson Welles appearance on his show, David Frost recorded this 30 second TV spot:
DAVID FROST: We have a great line-up for the next edition of The David Frost Show. The cast includes an actor, a director, producer, author, designer, cartoonist, a magician, columnist, a wit and bon vivant. That’s how the current biography describes Mr. Orson Welles, a giant in every sense of the word, who we shall be welcoming on the next edition of The David Frost Show. Don’t miss it.
DAVID FROST: Is it really true that you never see your own pictures after you’ve finished them?
ORSON WELLES: I know it sounds like a terrible pose, but it’s really a terrible neurosis, I suppose.
DAVID FROST: Why don’t you see them afterward, to swell with pride or…
ORSON WELLES: Because they’re on film, in a tin can, and they can never be changed.
DAVID FROST: And if you saw them again…
ORSON WELLES: For example, if you direct a play, it’s opened, and you see it again after it’s been running awhile, and you don’t like it too well, you can take the cast and say, “Well, we’ll have a rehearsal tomorrow, we’ll rewrite that scene, we’ll play that a little differently,” but a movie is locked up forever. You can always do it better. But you can’t change a finished movie.
DAVID FROST: You said once that you’d been “seduced away” from politics by the movies. Do you still wish you’d been in politics?
ORSON WELLES: I suppose that only very intelligent people don’t wish they were in politics, and I’m dumb enough to want to be in there.
DAVID FROST: And why do you want to be in?
ORSON WELLES: Well, you know, you always think that you might be able to help a little. I suppose it’s an ego trip. It is like an audience in a theater that sees an actor and says, “I could do that pretty well, too.” An actor sees a congressman and says the same thing. Of course, you’ve got a few actors in politics now.
DAVID FROST: Do you want to go on?
ORSON WELLES: Need we? Ask the students in California to fill in. (Ronald Reagan was the Gov. of California in 1970).
DAVID FROST: Do you share the feelings of the students, in fact? When you were young you said that the youth in America could demand anything. Do you think young people demand too much?
ORSON WELLES: No, certainly not. There isn’t a specific virtue in being young. What is right about them is that they’re demanding what we should have had a long time ago. They may be making some mistakes, but they are mistakes of tactics and strategy, not of human feeling. The hopeful thing is that maybe a generation as alert and alive as it is may bring some changes. We’d better see them quick, because things are going to get worse than they are now.
DAVID FROST: What sort of advice as a parent do you give to your own children?
ORSON WELLES: I don’t think we are in very good shape to give advice, with the mess that kids are inheriting. I don’t know how to “come on” as a parent. Encourage the gifts of love and discourage what is negative, accentuate the positive. Remember that old song? But advice? Did you listen to your parents advice?
DAVID FROST: Yes, I think so.
ORSON WELLES: Did you? I didn’t, really. I think it was their example that meant something to me, not what they told me. I can remember being lectured to, but I can’t remember a word of it. I remember what I thought of them and how inspired I was, by what was good, but not from when they started wagging a finger. Then I turned off the sound.
DAVID FROST: Do you think young people today live in a world that is easier or more difficult than the world you grew up in?
ORSON WELLES: It’s both much easier and much more difficult. They have more freedom, but freedom isn’t easy. It’s a very difficult thing. Slavery is what is easy.
DAVID FROST: What are your predictions about our future? You’ve got a sort of predictive power, haven’t you? Didn’t you once predict, for instance, Oona Chaplin was going to marry Charlie Chaplin before she even met him?
ORSON WELLES: Yes, but politics is tougher than that area.
DAVID FROST: How did you know that?
ORSON WELLES: It was one of those guesses. It’s a kind of spooky area I don’t like much. I suppose Oona looked like the kind of girl that would be happy with Charlie, and instead of thinking, “Maybe you’ll meet him,” I just looked at her and said, “You’re going to marry him,” and she did. But you asked me about a political prediction and I couldn’t make one.
DAVID FROST: What’s the last premonition you had?
ORSON WELLES: I like to forget them, like my movies.
DAVID FROST: Which movie are you proudest of, the best one?
ORSON WELLES: Oh, let’s change the subject. I don’t want to clam up and spoil the show. I’ll answer anything you want but don’t ask me “proudest” or anything like that. The trouble is that I like to think that my films are so much better than they were, and I say, “Oh, that great movie.” But if I have to see it, I’d find out that maybe some of those bad notices were right!
DAVID FROST: But do you think you’ve achieved great things in your life, or do you not even like to think of it?
ORSON WELLES: You know, we’ve only got so much energy to go on, and I think it’s a waste of energy. to think about whether they are good—that’s a consolation of real old age, so let’s save that.
DAVID FROST: You once said Hollywood is a golden suburb for golf addicts, gardeners, men of mediocrity and satisfied stars.
ORSON WELLES: Really? Well it isn’t anymore.
DAVID FROST: How do you feel about Hollywood?
ORSON WELLES: Do you know, I’ve always liked Hollywood very much—it just wasn’t reciprocated. When I came out to Hollywood, which was just before World War II, there was still enough of the old atmosphere, the old Golden Age that hadn’t rubbed off, and it was a crazy town, but was enormously entertaining—a friendly and wonderful place. And the great legend of my battles with Hollywood are greatly exaggerated. I think I was well treated and I enjoyed myself there. I’m not saying that because my next picture is there—I’ll probably never make another picture there, so I’m free to say it, without anybody thinking I’m (insincere). No, it’s so easy to rap Hollywood, as it’s too easy to take a knock at television. There were an awful of of bad movies made and a lot of monsters who were in charge of them, but a lot of very nice people and very gifted people were there too. And if there were still an industry they would still be there—but there isn’t any more. Hollywood is just a memory.
DAVID FROST: Is it true that you once threatened to throw yourself out of Hotel window, because you didn’t want to do your music lessons?
ORSON WELLES: Yes, that was my mother. It shows you the kind of strength of character she had. We were in the Ritz Hotel and she didn’t give me the piano lessons, she got a lady–in this case it was a poor unfortunate spinster–and I saw I could bully her. So I said, “I don’t want to do any more scales, and if you make me I going to kill myself.” The spinster really fed me so well on that, when she asked for another scale, I went out on the balcony and climbed over and stood on the edge, holding on like this. When you are very young you don’t believe in death. All you see are people standing around and saying, “Now we are sorry. We shouldn’t have done that to him.” You don’t think you’re going to suffer, they’re going to suffer. So I was ready to go! So this poor music teacher ran into my mother, who was in another room and said, “He’s out there, he’s going to jump and kill himself.” My mother thought to herself, “If I come in and run at him, he might be idiotic enough to jump.” So I just heard this voice from the other room, saying, “Well, if he’s going to jump, let him jump.” And my mother had enough strength of character to say that. When she told me the story later, she said she waited and there was a long pause and then she heard “Da, da, da, da, de, de, de” on the piano.
DAVID FROST: Do you have any other specific memories of your mother?
ORSON WELLES: Yes, lots of them. She was a very dignified looking lady, very tall and handsome, she was a great beauty. I take after other members of the family. You know she was a great practical joker, something that’s out of style now. She used to take a long piece of cord and she was such a dignified lady, if she came to a street corner and said to a man, “Would you hold this, please,” he would hold it. Then she’d go around to the other side of the street corner and find someone and say, “Would you hold this please.” That was her idea of a fun thing to do. She was so dignified, the men would be standing there all afternoon thinking, “She told me I must hold it,” and slowly they’d be working there way up the line.
DAVID FROST: After she died you toured the world with your father?
ORSON WELLES: Yes and even before that. I lived in China half of the the time, in Peking, for quite awhile. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life not quite unpacked.
DAVID FROST: Did you really write, at the age of 7, an 8,000 word precis on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra?
ORSON WELLES: No. I didn’t like Nietzsche, even then. I’m an anti-Nietzsche fellow, and I certainly never wrote that. It sounds like one of those stories.
DAVID FROST: It was in Ireland that you first started acting, wasn’t it?
ORSON WELLES: Yes, that was to get out of school. I had a scholarship for Harvard. I’m a dropout. I’d been painting in Ireland, and it got to be winter, and the days were getting short and so was my money, and I knew I was going to have to go back to America to this dreaded school of learning. So I went backstage to the Gate Theater and told them I was a famous star from the New York Theater Guild and just for the fun of it I’d like to stay with them and play a few leading roles. Now, you can only do that if you don’t believe that it matters, if you don’t care. I had no desire to be an actor. If I had I would have said, “Could I have a spear to hold?” But because I didn’t think that I would be an actor in my life, I thought it was ridiculous, I just said I am a leading actor. Why not? So I played a star part the first time I ever walked on a stage, and I have been working my way down ever since.
DAVID FROST: You’re working on a television show now–which do you find more exciting, films or television?
ORSON WELLES: I find that television is the most exciting thing, and when it isn’t, it should be, because it is the most “now” thing there is. The trouble with a movie is that it’s old-fashioned before it’s released. You try to make a movie that’s “now” and and by the time it’s cut and processed and out it’s not really fresh any more—it’s not an accident that it comes in a can! But this great box that takes us everywhere and also inflicts so much misery on so many captive people—it’s still an enormously exciting medium. My regret is that I haven’t done more of it. I’ve hardly ever been on it. But now I’ve been given this marvelous chance, an hour and a half with a contract such as I haven’t had since I made Citizen Kane, in terms of freedom, because, you know that built into television is the “committee system.” Not for your kind of show, where you own the store, but there’s always two hundred guys with button-down shirts. I know because I was on radio for years and television is just a continuation of that misery. Mike Dann (CBS Head of programming), who with the courage of the world, has sent me away and said, “Make it and when it’s finished, show it.” I don’t have to tell him what it is. I’ve never met anybody like that! And if it’s no good there isn’t anybody to blame except me. Which is a kind of nice limb to be out on. It’s going to be called Orson’s Bag.
DAVID FROST: Did the fantastic success of Citizen Kane makes things easier or harder for you afterwords?
ORSON WELLES: Citizen Kane made my movie life afterward almost impossible. The fantastic success of Citizen Kane didn’t extend to the box-office, because we never played in a single circuit, only in a few independent houses, and in those days there were very few of them. It really couldn’t be described as a “fantastic success.” I can’t ever remember having had one, and I’m still looking forward to it. You see I had the best contract that anybody ever had for Citizen Kane. The only contract equal to it in the history of film is the one that Mike Nichols had to make Catch-22, in which I was honored enough to be involved. He had pretty much what I did, which is nobody comes on the set, nobody gets to look at the rushes—you just make the picture and that’s it. If I hadn’t had that contract they would have stopped me at the beginning, just by the nature of the script. I haven’t had anything remotely equal to those conditions since then. So it isn’t just the success of Citizen Kane that spoiled me, but having had the joy of that kind of liberty once in my life, and never having been able to enjoy it again. That’s why I’m so grateful for a chance to do this television show with nobody breathing down my back.
DAVID FROST: You said you were on radio for years. What memories do you have of that radio program that had such a great impact?
ORSON WELLES: You mean the scandal?
DAVID FROST: Yes. The War of the Worlds. That was what year?
ORSON WELLES: I know no dates. What does it say there? (He looks at Frost’s notes).
DAVID FROST: 1938.
ORSON WELLES: Just after the invention of the electric light, I know that. I have memories of it. The thing that confuses it in my mind is that we had our own radio show with actors and at the same time we had our own theater, the Mercury Theater. And the night after the program I had an opening on Broadway. Now, the day before an opening on Broadway, the only thing that matters is that opening. So when the police came into the control room and traffic stopped and the world came to an end, we were all saying, “Yes, but have you got the light cue for the second act right?” It didn’t quite penetrate until the play had opened that I’d replaced Benedict Arnold as an American villain, and that was because the newspapers, who’d been griping about radio taking away the advertising, finally found somebody to blame. Then they found out that everybody was laughing and thought it was a joke, so in a few days I was suddenly a great fellow, and that’s how I got a sponsor. We were what was called a sustaining program, and then we got a sponsor (Campbell’s Soup) because of that, and then I was on radio for years.
DAVID FROST: What was the part of The War of the Worlds that really terrified people?
ORSON WELLES: I don’t know. Many things, probably. We had an actor who did Roosevelt’s voice terribly well, and we brought him on to assure everybody that there was no cause for alarm. I think that’s when they really ran out on the streets. Then we had a thing that didn’t make any sense if anybody analyzed it. We had a ham radio voice that would come in, identifying himself and trying to talk to other people while this awful thing was happening. We established him, and then we went to a CBS announcer on top of the CBS building who was describing the arrival of the Martians. And then the announcer began to cough; he couldn’t go on and stopped, and then this dead silence. The real trick we did was to hold dead silence on a full network, with no sound at all, and then you’d hear the microphone drop, and then more silence, and then this one little voice, the amateur radio operator, saying, “This is so-and-so. Isn’t there anybody on the air—” And more silence. That is, I guess, when they put the towels on their heads and ran out of the house. I don’t know why they put towels on their heads, but they did. I don’t know what they thought that was going to do. A sort of anti-Martian thing. Then there were all these traffic cops. It was Sunday night and all these guys out in Jersey on their motorcycles waiting, and the people in the cars, driving, had the radio, but the cops didn’t. Suddenly everybody started driving at 125 miles an hour. “Pull over!” “No, I’m going to the hills!”
DAVID FROST: And if you wanted to terrify people today, how would you do it?
ORSON WELLES: I don’t. You know, I didn’t want to then. What a suggestion!
DAVID FROST: No, of course. But if somebody wanted to terrify people today, how should they do it?
ORSON WELLES: Well, I would say unlimited air-time for Spiro Agnew!
DAVID FROST: Back in those early days, after starring on the radio, you fell in love with bull fighting.
ORSON WELLES: No, that was before. That was between Ireland and returning to the theater. When I came back from Ireland, aged 17, I went to the Schubert’s office, which was only two doors away from where we used to be and said, “Here I am, ready for some starring roles!” They said, “Sit down” and there were about 300 other people sitting down, and by the time it got to six o’ clock, I had retired from the theater, because I wasn’t used to that, you see. I wasn’t really very anxious to go on, so I quit, and I was still dropping out from Harvard all this time, you understand, so I nipped away to Africa, and by way of Africa got myself to Spain and wrote for what used to be called the pulps. They were printed on cheap paper and there used to be about 80 of them a week. I don’t know how writers live now without them, but I made about 200 bucks a month by working three days. And 200 buck a month in Seville made you a prince; you were Ali Khan. I brought drinks for all of southern Spain every night. In those days that cost about 50 cents, so you can imagine how popular I was. Now, in that area of the world, the only thing that mattered was bulls. So I became a bull fighter, mind you without any great vocation for it. The way to be a bull fighter if you are no good, but are a rich playboy, as I was, is to buy the bulls. You pay for the bull itself, which is an expensive item. Now it costs a lot, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Then, I don’t know what it was, but I fought the bulls, and towards the end, I got paid, not much, and I don’t know why, because in the history of a towering art, there can be very few people who were as bad as I was.
DAVID FROST: Do you still bear the scars ?
ORSON WELLES: This is one (points to a scar on his neck). The others, well this is a family type of program, so… But it isn’t something people are still talking about there, but it was a lot of fun. I hadn’t read Hemingway yet, so I didn’t know there was anything mystical or extraordinary about it. It was just something to do.
DAVID FROST: It didn’t seem cruel?
ORSON WELLES: It is cruel, and anybody who says it isn’t cruel is just kidding themselves. It is cruel and everything said against bull fighting is true. The only thing is that if you love it, you decide “Yes, I am a sinner, I am committing a sin, but it’s to much for me, I like to see them.” you know, I’ve been going to see them for my whole lifetime and in the last two or three years, I’ve lost it. It’s not because the bulls aren’t good enough, or the bull fighters aren’t good enough, it’s because I’m beginning to see what I was blinkering myself against all this time: that it really is cruel. We are exploiting that animal. It’s true that we are showing him at his best, but he’s still fighting a defensive fight and we are still exploiting him for people’s pleasure and there is something wrong about that.
(David Frost shows a clip from the battle sequence in Falstaff and tells Welles he doesn’t have to watch it, but says it is “one of greatest battle scenes ever filmed.”)
DAVID FROST: What are your memories now of the making of Citizen Kane?
ORSON WELLES: Well, of course we had the big scandal, because there was a ridiculous notion that it was based on certain elements in the life of William Randolph Hearst. In those days he owned about seven million newspapers and there was quite a battle. It looked for a while as though they were going to burn the negative and nobody would see it. And that, of course, is the outstanding memory, just getting it on.
DAVID FROST: Where did they get that impression from?
ORSON WELLES: I can’t imagine.
DAVID FROST: Funny, isn’t it, how people get mistaken ideas. What did inspire you to make Citizen Kane?
ORSON WELLES: Well, I’ll tell you how it started. Inspired is too big a word. It began with an idea that was used years later in a Japanese film called Rashomon, which is several different people telling a story, and you see the same story again from their point of view, and each time it’s different. That was the beginning of Citizen Kane, to make a film with different people telling it. We would have the same scenes played again, and you would see that he was an entirely different man because somebody else was telling it, but then as the script developed there was just a residue of that idea. There are still elements, but that’s how it began. The main character had to be a person of enormous importance and power. Now, in an open society like ours, except for somebody in politics, and this was before pop singers, who else has such power, leaving out politics? Of course, we also had Kane trying to get into politics and unable to make it. A funny thing about the reactions to that. For a long time Citizen Kane was banned in all Communist countries as showing much too sympathetically the life of a capitalist hyena. At the same time there was a big effort in America to ban it because it was a Communist movie. That left us a rather small public.
DAVID FROST: If one looks at all you’ve done, do you think there’s any common thread running through it all? Are there some things that you know yourself to be preoccupied with?
ORSON WELLES: That’s the kind of thing that you can see in somebody else’s movies better than you can yourself. If there’s any real validity to a book or film, the creator shouldn’t be too self-conscious about that. Probably there are these threads but I would be the last person to be interesting on that subject.
DAVID FROST: Do you think you’re an optimist in your work and in your life?
ORSON WELLES: No, I’m a pessimist, a great pessimist, but I’m never cynical. It sounds contradictory but it isn’t. I hate cynicism more than anything. It is the bad brother of despair, and that’s another great sin. I think you can be a pessimist and not want to give up. You just think, “We’re in a mess and that’s it.”
DAVID FROST: What’s a cynic?
ORSON WELLES: He thinks it’s no good, it’s not worth it. All human effort is useless. To him all human virtue is based on ego. He’s the fellow who’s too smart for everything. I hate that attitude.
DAVID FROST: A cynic is also a fellow who doesn’t believe in anything?
ORSON WELLES: Yes. Whose view of life and of human values is a cheap one. He under prices the good things of the world.
DAVID FROST: What, most of all, do you believe in? God?
ORSON WELLES: I suppose that anybody who does not deny the existence of God must finally admit that he does believe in him.
DAVID FROST: You once said you respected both atheists and religious people, but not agnostics.
ORSON WELLES: That’s right.
DAVID FROST: Because an agnostic says he doesn’t know and you’ve got to decide one way or the other?
ORSON WELLES: I think you should, because the question is are you a religious man or not? I don’t think there’s a good way of living in the world unless you are one of the two. You make a decision that you are a religious man, which is more important actually than a personal God, or you must make the tragic decision that we are totally alone in an indifferent universe. The true atheist belief is a noble and splendid position to take, one requiring great courage and great character. Or you must be a religious man. The fellow who doesn’t do either is copping out in both directions.
DAVID FROST: And you made the decision to be a religious man?
ORSON WELLES: Tune in next week and you will hear Orson Welles on that subject on a very small station. You know that I hate to hear people talking about God, unless they have a vocation for talking about it.
DAVID FROST: But on the other hand, you said how important it is to make a decision.
ORSON WELLES: But I don’t have to inform our listeners and viewers about it. It’s not because I don’t want to tell you my views, but I think the minute you start on that there is a whiff of preaching, and I’m very allergic to that. I’m also embarrassed by expressions of religion in the movies. I hate it when people pray on the screen. It’s not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I’m lost. There’s only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and I really can’t say it. But they’re doing it all the time in movies, and that’s sex. You just can’t get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen!
DAVID FROST: I hesitate to draw any conclusions from that, but is that an indication of the limitations of movies? Loving and praying are two of the most important things in the world. Why can’t you do them in the movies?
ORSON WELLES: Because they are both ecstatic. They are conditions of ecstasy, and I think that is not to be communicated by a couple of people, or one person, or any combinations there of, unless it’s actually happening, in which case it belongs in a monastery or in a bordello. Ecstasy is really not part of the thing we can do on celluloid. Any kind of thing that gets up to that pitch of human experience.
DAVID FROST: Can you do your passion for politics in movies?
ORSON WELLES: You can do any passion, including love. I’m just talking about the act of love. I’ve done a scene with an act of love in it, in The Immortal Story, because the movie absolutely required it, but I know that moment is where I don’t believe the picture.
DAVID FROST: Someone said that your films are studies of men in their various conditions, but that there doesn’t seem to be enough in them about loving. Do you think that’s true?
ORSON WELLES: I think it is true, and it’s too bad it’s true. I think it’s a very fair criticism. I don’t think it’s because it reflects a lack of interest in the subject on my part. The truth is that I’ve made so many fewer movies than I’ve wanted to in my life, because they take a long time to make and cost a lot of money, and it takes a long time to find the money to make them. If I’d made more I’m sure some of them would have included that subject, and now that you’ve told me about it we’ll try and arrange it.
DAVID FROST: What is your definition of love?
ORSON WELLES: I wish I had a good one. Tell me something somebody else said.
DAVID FROST: I think Erich Segal, who wrote Love Story, said “Love means not feeling you’ve got to say I’m sorry,” and Richard Burton said, “Love means an extraordinary degree of tolerance.”
ORSON WELLES: Oh, no. If you love somebody you love them for their faults, not in spite of them.
DAVID FROST: I think that’s what Richard was trying to say. That love is all-embracing.
ORSON WELLES: Well, let’s buy it that way, then.
DAVID FROST: Go on a bit more.
ORSON WELLES: No, tell me another one. It’s always easier to be a critic than a philosopher.
DAVID FROST: You don’t have to come up with a definition of love, but what are your thoughts?
ORSON WELLES: It’s too big for thought and much too big for words. I don’t think anybody who has every truly loved, ever finds the words for the object of that love. We say those same old terrible things you can hear in any B-picture, or read in anybody’s sampler on the wall. There is no cliché in the world bigger the words we use.
DAVID FROST: What makes a woman beautiful to you?
ORSON WELLES: Dignity, without which nobody can be beautiful. Human dignity and the dignity of women, because they are clearly a superior sex, you know. I really mean that. I’m not trying to make a funny remark or sound smart. I really do think they’re much better than we are. The only thing they’re not as good at, are the few little things we do.
DAVID FROST: Why?
ORSON WELLES: If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys. We’re on one of them now.
DAVID FROST: How are they superior?
ORSON WELLES: If you don’t know that, David, nobody will ever be able to tell you. That’s a cop-out, I know, but—
DAVID FROST: I disagree with you. I think they’re wonderful and different, but not superior.
ORSON WELLES: When I was your age that was my opinion.
DAVID FROST: What changed your mind?
ORSON WELLES: The passage of the years and the evidence of my senses and of my observation.
DAVID FROST: But what did you observe that convinced you?
ORSON WELLES: Well, let’s not have that kind of conversation! I don’t know. No matter what the Bible says—and I’m not a fundamentalist—I just don’t think that men were the first. I don’t think that Eve was made out of Adam’s rib. I think the first sex, biologically, is the female sex, and there are many creatures in our world who are female and only become male as long as is necessary and then revert to the original and superior condition. I think we’re a kind of decoration. We’re sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we’re doing is trying to brighten up the place. That’s why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers—because we have got to try and justify are existence. Look how little we do to keep the race going.
DAVID FROST: I find that absolutely fascinating, and I don’t agree with a word of it.
ORSON WELLES: And I don’t blame you. David, can I tell a story about you? I want to tell about the first day we ever met. David was an actor for that day, and a very good one. It was a lamentable picture with Liz Taylor and Burton and Maggie Smith, and all of us were starred, except for David, because I think this was your first picture, wasn’t it?
DAVID FROST: Oh, yes.
ORSON WELLES: It was one of those all-star pictures. I’m one of those actors who if I don’t like the way something goes, I ask the director “Could I have it another time?” Now you can only do that if your name is above the title, and firmly, and you have a star dressing room, and even then you’re a little embarrassed about asking for it. We came to David’s scene and he had three lines to say that day, and we did it and the director said, “Fine.” David said, “Can I have that over.” Now, when he said that I knew he was going places. The sheer nerve. With three lines to say and he wanted one to do over again: “Yes, alright, Mr. Whatever your name is, take it.” He took it, and we knew he was launched.
DAVID FROST: I had completely forgotten about that. That was a film called The V.I.P’s.
ORSON WELLES: Yes, and that was even worse than Airport!
DAVID FROST: When they were on the program Richard and Elizabeth were fantastic, and that was obviously the first time I met them, as well. That Was the Week That Was had just started in England, in 1962, so The V.I.P’s was in early 1963. You mentioned money before, are you good with money?
ORSON WELLES: Terrible with my own money. But I’m good about the budget on a picture. But the money I run away with, I’m just awful with. Now you’re going to ask me a question I don’t want to hear.
DAVID FROST: I’m going to ask you to pick a Shakespearean role and give us a short excerpt which we’d like to hear, wouldn’t we? (Applause)
ORSON WELLES: You know, doing Shakespeare I get a vision of hundreds of TV sets turning over to something else.
DAVID FROST: David Frost doing Shakespeare, sure, but not Orson Welles doing Shakespeare.
ORSON WELLES: I’m not so sure about that. You know, the first successful production of Shakespeare I ever did was at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, with an all Negro cast. We did Macbeth and set it in Haiti at the time of the original independence of Haiti. The entire cast was marvelous, none of them had ever heard a Shakespearean actor, and I directed it without ever reading them a line so they found the way to speak it out of their own experience, instead of from the accumulated bad habits of 300 years of hamming it up. So I don’t think it’s true at all that David Frost reading Shakespeare wouldn’t be very interesting, because I’m sure you haven’t got all those terrible old hammy things that we fellows got stuck with.
DAVID FROST: We really want to hear you. Will you do it?
ORSON WELLES: All right. You’ve got those paperback books (of Shakespeare) but I think I know one… but the one I know from Caesar is so long. Let’s see, maybe I can make some cuts as I go. Yes; this is the one that every kid knows in school, the funeral oration. Brutus has just spoken. Brutus is this impeccable Roman liberal. He says this was an honorable assassination and he’s gone away and Marc Antony, who is a partisan’s of Caesar speaks, and he says:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men-
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend; and that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him:
Here under leave, I’ll show you Caesar’s corpse
Then make a ring about the corpse of Caesar,
And let me show you, Caesar.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on;
‘Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii:
Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb’d;
And as he pluck’d his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar follow’d it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly knock’d, or no;
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!
For when the saw the well beloved Brutus stab,
And, in his mantle muffling up his face, he fell
Even at the base of Pompey’s statue,
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourish’d over us.
DAVID FROST: Orson I never heard silence as pregnant as that in a theater. That was tremendous!
ORSON WELLES: You know, talking about silence in the theater makes me think of what happened to Jack Barrymore once when he was playing Hamlet here in New York. He was a great Hamlet, but the matinee audiences are inclined to be a bit noisier than the other ones, because the ladies are coming in from the suburbs and they haven’t finished telling each other things. So there they are rustling those candies and all of that, and if it isn’t going well they start to cough a lot. Well, the last line that Hamlet has to say, as you know, is “The rest is silence.” So Jack said, “The rest is silence… except for those trained seals out there, who have been barking,” and down came the curtain.
DAVID FROST: Have you ever had moment when you said something like that to audiences?
ORSON WELLES: No, I’ve never given an audience a bad time because I don’t think they behaved themselves. I don’t want to criticize Jack, because his turning on audiences was part of his thing, although I hate going to a nightclub and it gets quiet and a poor soul drops a spoon and the singer turns and looks at you as if you’ve been disgracing yourself in a Cathedral. It seems to me that every performer is literally the servant of the public. The public owes us nothing if it doesn’t want to give it to us. So little speeches about “We’ll thank you to be quiet while I sing my number,” or “”While I recite my speech,” I can’t go along with.
DAVID FROST: What about emergencies that happened to you on stage?
ORSON WELLES: Yes, those are beyond number. I can only remember a few shows that didn’t have them. Tonight, I had to ad-lib my way, because I dried up three times! There is a lot of new Shakespeare you just heard! There are English teachers all over the country who have already uncapped their pens and they are starting to write.
DAVID FROST: Jolly good blank verse, I must say.
ORSON WELLES: Well, you know what George Bernard Shaw said about blank verse. He wrote only one play in blank verse and his explanation was, “I didn’t have enough time to write it in prose.” As long as you keep the rhythm it doesn’t matter what you say.
DAVID FROST: What experience in your life do you look back on with pure pleasure?
ORSON WELLES: I can’t really pick just one. I’m really bad at that type of question, because I’ve been so lucky. I’ve had so many marvelous experiences, that I’d have to start rummaging around in a big treasure box and say, “Oh, there is one better than that,” and then it would be time to get off the air.
DAVID FROST: What would like to do that you haven’t done?
ORSON WELLES: Everything! I would have liked to be more useful in the world and I hope I can be. You finally get to a point where art for art’s sake doesn’t seem to be a good enough flag to be marching under sometimes.
DAVID FROST: What’s a better flag?
ORSON WELLES: You have to believe in something bigger than yourself and you can believe in the theater and any other art that you serve and know that it is bigger than yourself, but there are bigger things than art, particularly in a tortured world like ours, where so many people are in true misery. So sometimes entertaining people doesn’t seem to be quite enough.
DAVID FROST: What more could you do?
ORSON WELLES: That’s what I ask myself every morning. I think a lot of us do. I think it’s part of our problem in the world today, not seeing enough chance to be useful, in a world which is in real crisis, almost bankruptcy.
DAVID FROST: Do you see a glimmer of a clue as to what you could do?
ORSON WELLES: I wish I could. If I get that message I’ll ask for equal time with your guest tomorrow night.
DAVID FROST: You can have it any time! How pessimistic are you these days?
ORSON WELLES: Well, optimism is just thinking, “It’s all going to be great, we don’t have to worry.” I think that is a dangerous social viewpoint, and an idiotic one, given the world we live in. But we can certainly say, “It’s worth it.” Human beings are worth it and the human promise is worth it.
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