Orson — a tyrant who ate people for lunch

ME AND MR WELLES

WHeN Orson Welles died in 1985, it was the first complete stranger’s death that touched me personally. Welles was — and remains — the one person I wish I’d met and known.

How I envy Dorian Bond, therefore, an exotic-sounding, well-connected figure whose stepmother’s father was court jeweller to the King of Serbia.

At a loose end after leaving Oxford in 1968, Bond worked for Welles as an unpaid factotum (‘just being with him is enough’), running errands and obeying regal requests.

‘I want you to go to London,’ said Welles, when he and Bond were installed in Rome, ‘and bring me some cigars.’ Bond asked: ‘When?’ Welles replied: ‘Now.’ When was Bond to return? ‘Today. This afternoon.’

Bond had first fallen happily into Welles’s orbit after having acceded to a similar demand.

‘Can you go to Yugoslavia tomorrow for Orson Welles?’ a family neighbour in Maida Vale, Ann Rogers, had asked out of the blue. She was Welles’s business manager, who kept him in funds with bundles of ready cash.

CARRYINg suitcases crammed with rolls of Kodak celluloid and boxes of Montecristo cigars, Bond flew to the Adriatic port of Split where Welles was shooting a thriller called The Deep with Michael Bryant and Laurence Harvey.

Once there, Bond was made to bleach his hair and play Bryant’s role in reverse-angle shots.

Before he knew it, he was absorbed into Welles’s entourage and a great deal of time was spent eating in fancy restaurants. The actor/director’s standing joke was: ‘Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.’

Welles ate huge meals, accompanied by ‘rich red wine from the most exclusive chateau vineyards in Bordeaux’.

It was never clear, however, who was picking up the tab.

During the period Bond spent with Welles, they were frequently having to vacate hotels in a hurry, skip town, flee without paying bills, keeping one step ahead of the bailiffs.

On one occasion, Welles, dodging creditors, got into a taxi in Split on the Dalmatian coast and shouted to the driver in a panic: ‘Take me to Milan!’ — about 15 hours away.

As Bond says: ‘Orson Welles was a moveable feast.’

The gluttony was figurative, as well as actual. He’d eat people up, then spit them aside. One of his lovers, Lea Padovani, said: ‘He was so enveloping, so wanting to consume me, like one of his gigantic meals.’ Marlene Dietrich described Welles to Bond as ‘a feast of a human being’.

But, as Bond bears witness, Welles’s tragedy was that, as a director, ‘the mechanics of filmmaking bored him’.

He was happiest discussing his schemes in restaurants, over cognac and cigars. But when it came to sustaining the sober practicalities and technicalities, frankly, Welles couldn’t be bothered. The Deep was never finished and not only because Laurence Harvey died in 1973. Welles ‘had long since got bored with it’, says Bond.

‘Often, film projects were discarded for months, even years on end,’ we are told.

In a shuttered warehouse in Rome, Bond found mouldering cannisters containing miles of material for a project about Don Quixote; Welles’s Othello was so disorganised that there were seven different Desdemonas.

He could easily be distracted from his own movies — he was always happy to give a cameo performance in a blockbuster, particularly if he’d been offered a $300,000 fee, plus first-class air fares, five-star hotel accommodation and all-expenses paid (in cash).

For about two years, Bond traipsed after his master. At first, the lavish gypsy behaviour was exciting. But by ‘continually avoiding, continually evading’ his responsibilities as a professional, viewed up close, Welles’s glamour grew thin.

Indeed, in Bond’s book, he finally stands revealed as a nasty piece of work.

There is a particularly horrible scene when a waiter sprinkled parmesan cheese on his pasta.

‘Take the waiter away!’ screamed Welles. ‘Take him away, out of my sight!’ He then pulled out a $100 bill from his pocket and put a match to it, adding: ‘That would have been yours if you’d given us better service.’ He was a tyrant who demanded full loyalty and obedience, while goading people, testing them.

According to mood, he could look like a gigantic, innocent baby or a crimson-faced devil.

‘Mr Welles in full throat was an impressive sight and sound, combining the volume of Pavarotti and the physical presence of the Incredible Hulk,’ says Bond.

AFTeR about two years, Bond had had enough and walked out. He also suspected Welles’s mistress, Olga Palinkas (known as Oja), was whispering against him, jealous of his friendship with her lover. (Welles was susceptible to presentable young men, hence his friendship with Keith Baxter, Hal to his Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight.)

This is an authentic insider’s portrait of a genius who selfdestructed and became a fraud and charlatan.

Nevertheless, errors abound. Welles never played Macbeth in London, still less with Churchill in the audience, nor did Shaw write a play called Captain Courageous.

Welles was not in Repulsion (though he was in Compulsion).

He did not write the script for John Huston’s film of Moby Dick, as that was credited to Ray Bradbury.

When Welles says of The Third Man, ‘shooting in those sewers was no fun’, he was perhaps forgetting that his scenes as Harry Lime were completed on the soundstage at Shepperton. He did not actually descend into the Vienna drains.