My Lunches with Orson by Peter Biskind

played well.”
    HJ: Dying at ninety-five is not bad. He had a full life.
    OW: Did he ever.
    HJ: It’s true, all that, then? That he fucked everybody?
    OW: He was the greatest cocksman of the nineteenth century. Of the twentieth century. The greatest charmer, linguist, socialite, raconteur. Never practiced. He always used to say, “You know, I’m not nearly as good a pianist technically, as many of my rivals, because I am too lazy to practice. I just don’t like to. [Vladimir] Horowitz can do more than I can. He sits there and works. I like to enjoy life. I play clinkers all the time.” But, he says, “I play it better with the clinkers.”
    HJ: And Horowitz hates his life, and for fifteen years hasn’t been able to play or even move.
    OW: Rubinstein walked through life as though it was one big party.
    HJ: And then ended it with this young girl. Didn’t he leave his wife after forty-five years when he was ninety to run off with a thirty-one-year-old woman?
    OW: Like Casals. Who suddenly, at the age of eighty-seven or something, came up with a Lolita.
    HJ: Getting back to the Irish, some are liberals, like Robert Ryan. He was a brave man, politically and socially. Tell me Robert Ryan was not a decent man.
    OW: He’s a wonderful actor. I don’t think of him as Irish; he just has an Irish name. He must be fourth-generation.
    HJ: Now, Ford you liked. He was an Irishman.
    OW: We were very good friends, and he always wanted to do a picture with me. He was a pretty mean son-of-a-bitch Irishman. But I loved him anyway.
    HJ: When did you first meet him?
    OW: When I was shooting Kane , he came to the set on the first day of shooting.
    HJ: Just to wish you well?
    OW: No, for a reason. He pointed to the assistant director, a fellow called Ed Donahue, who was in the pay of my enemies at RKO, and said, “I see you got snake-in-the-grass Donahue on the picture.” And left. He came to warn me that my assistant was a fink.
    HJ: I’ve always heard that Ford was a drunk.
    OW: Never when he was working. Not a drop. Just the last day of a picture. And he’d be drunk for weeks. Serious, serious drunk. But for him, drinking was fun. In other words, he wasn’t an alcoholic. Went out with all the boys. Irishmen, get drunk and fight. Everybody gets beat up in the pub, you know? I’ve lived through all that. Went to jail in Ireland for rowdyism. It was a culture where nobody got married until they were thirty-five, because they were always dreaming of emigrating, and they didn’t want to be stuck with the kids, financially. So all these poor virgin ladies sat around waiting to get married, and the guys are all swinging at each other, reverting to the bestiality of the male.
    HJ: There was not much fucking around, I would imagine, because it was a Catholic culture?
    OW: Oh, my God, yes. By the girls. I could hardly draw a breath when I visited the Aran Islands. I was all of seventeen. And these great, marvelous girls in their white petticoats, they’d grab me. Off the petticoats would go. It was as close to male rape as you could imagine. And all with husbands out in their skin-covered canoes. All day, while I had nothing to do. Then the girls would go and confess it all to the priest, who finally said to me, “I had another confession this morning. When are you leaving?” He was protecting the virtue of his flock. When I told that story, there was tremendous excitement in America from the clergy, who said it could never have happened.
    HJ: Wasn’t Ford very reactionary, politically? Like his pals John Wayne and Ward Bond?
    OW: Yes, but all those guys loved me, for some reason. And I loved them. I have a beer bottle that was put together on Ford’s yacht, with different Mexican and American beer labels signed by that gang of people, all dedicated to me. Now this was at a time when I was a well-known Hollywood Red.
    HJ: And their reactionary positions came from