Free My Lunches with Orson by Peter Biskind Page B

close to David because friends of mine liked him. I used to go to his house on Sunday nights. Everybody in Hollywood would be there, and we’d play “The Game,” which was just charades, you know. But Selznick played to win . Week after week after week. If our team lost, he would follow us in our cars down the driveway, screaming insults at us for having been such idiots, with his voice echoing through the canyons as we drove away. He would become so violent that it was worth it. It was funny just to watch him. And then he had us back the next week. “Now we’re gonna win,” you see?
    Once Selznick wanted to have a fight with me. This was at Walter Wanger’s house. After the ladies had left, the gentlemen sat around drinking port. He said how disappointed he was not to have Ronald Colman in Rebecca . Because he had this fellow Olivier. That irritated me. I said, “What’s wrong with Olivier?” He said, “He’s no gentleman.” And I said, “David, what kind of shit is this? What are you talking about, ‘no gentleman?’” “Well, he just isn’t. You can tell that. But with Ronnie you know right away—he’s a gentleman.” And I said, “Why, you pious old fart.” So David stood up, took off his glasses, and assumed the fighting position. We went out into the backyard, and everybody held us back.

    HJ: You were really going to fight?
    OW: Oh, yes. We used to do that all the time in Hollywood, always stepping out into the garden and fighting. While everybody held you, and nothing ever happened.
    HJ: Bogart was always beating up guys, wasn’t he?
    OW: Now, Bogart, who was both a coward and a very bad fighter, was always picking fights in nightclubs, in sure knowledge that the waiters would stop him. Making fearless remarks to people in his cups, when he knew he was well covered by the busboys.
    The great fistfight of the prewar days, though, was between John Huston and—who was the other fellow? It lasted a long time, and they kept running at each other, but neither one of them ever landed a blow. I only saw one great fighter in my life. I was sitting in Harry’s Bar in Venice, in the afternoon, and there were four GIs, and their sergeant. Another soldier came in and made a remark, and the sergeant just turned to the soldier and knocked him out with the neatness of a John Ford movie, and they carried him away. Then another soldier made a remark, and he knocked him out. Now, you know, it is impossible to do that. But he did it, right in front of me, and each time the sergeant turned to me and said, “I’m very sorry, sir.”

    HJ: So if it wasn’t Norma Shearer, who was killed in the plane crash?
    OW: You’re thinking of what’s-her-name—the good one. I can’t think of anybody’s name, ever. Terrible.
    HJ: Gable’s girlfriend—Carole Lombard.
    OW: His wife. I adored her. She was a very close friend of mine. And I don’t mean to imply that we were ever lovers. I remember when Gable made a picture called Parnell , a costume picture. Nineteen thirty-seven, with Myrna Loy. Nobody came. They released it to empty theaters! Proving that there’s no such thing as the star who can’t empty a theater. I think it was the only MGM film that lost money. Not that it mattered to Mayer. Money was almost no object to Metro, ’cause they couldn’t lose money.
    HJ: You mean the way they had the distribution set up, owning the theaters, they were so locked in that—
    OW: And when I learned to fly, I flew with Carole over Metro, at lunchtime. We buzzed the commissary, just as everyone was coming out, and she dropped leaflets that said, “Remember Parnell”! That’s the kind of girl she was.
    HJ: She looked to me like kind of a road-company Garbo.
    OW: Not at all Garboesque! My God, she was earthy. She looked like a great beauty, but she behaved like a waitress in a hash