Read Online My Lunches with Orson by Peter Biskind - Free Book Online

him? Life is too short. Charlie MacArthur and Ben Hecht wrote Wuthering Heights in my house in Sneden’s Landing, and Goldwyn was with ’em all the time. I was trying to sleep in the afternoon, before my radio show. And I heard the way Sam behaved with them. And I thought, “Never will I put myself through that.”
    He was really a monster. The last night I ever spent with him turned me against him forever. He was a guest at my house. I had come back to Hollywood, after years away, and I invited all these old dinosaurs, who were still around, and some other people. And he left right after dessert, because there were a number of guests who weren’t on the A list. You know, he wouldn’t have done that before. He got old.

    HJ: Did anyone else offer you movies besides Goldwyn?
    OW: [ Louis B.] Mayer offered me his studio! He was madly in love with me, because I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, you know? Twice he brought me over—spent all day wooing me. He called me “Orse.” Whenever he sent for me, he burst into tears, and once he fainted. To get his way. It was fake, absolutely fake. The deal was, I’d have the studio but I’d have to stop acting, directing, and writing—making pictures.
    HJ: Why wouldn’t you have anything to do with him?
    OW: Because he was the worst of them all. The rest of them were just what they were. The thing about Harry Cohn was: he looked like such a villainous Hollywood producer, there was nothing he could do that would surprise you. But L.B. was worse than Harry Cohn. He was self-righteous, smarmy, waving the American flag, doing deals with the Purple Gang in Detroit—
    HJ: The Purple Gang in Detroit?
    OW: Before the unions, it was all Mafia. But no one called it the Mafia. Just said “the mob.” And, mainly, the Purple Gang. They controlled all the blue-collar guys who projected the movies, pushed the dollies, swept the floors. They controlled the Teamsters. They didn’t control directors or anything—didn’t need to. And when L.B. needed extra money, he got it from the Purple Gang. When he wanted strong-arm work, he’d call the Purple Gang, who’d send their tough guys into town.
    HJ: Louis B. Mayer had people hit?
    OW: Beat up. I wouldn’t put it past him to have people killed. He liked to think of himself as a founding father and capo of the Mafia.
    HJ: Did you know any of them? Meyer Lansky?
    OW: Very well. He was probably the number-one gangster in America. I knew them all. You had to. If you lived, as I did, on Broadway during that period, if you lived in nightclubs, you could not not know them. I liked screwing the chorus girls and I liked meeting all the different people who would come in, and I liked staying up until five in the morning, and they used to love to go to nightclubs. They would come and sit at your table.
    HJ: How did Lee Strasberg do with Hyman Roth, remember, in Godfather II ?
    OW: Much better than the real thing. Meyer Lansky was a boring man. Hyman Roth is who he should have been! They all should have been like that and none of them were. The Godfather was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed. The best of them were the kind of people you’d expect to drive a beer truck. They had no class. The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention. The classy gangster was the ideal of every real gangster, who then started to dress like George Raft, and tried to behave like George Raft, and so on.
    HJ: They must have had something to get to the top.
    OW: Energy, guts, luck, and the willingness to kill your friends in the interest of business. All this code of honor, and all that shit—pure invention. There was a famous cop on Broadway called Brannigan. I think I’ve got his name right, because his name was slightly changed by Damon Runyon and used as a character in Guys and Dolls . He used to go down Broadway every few weeks with a baseball bat, and I went with