That’s how Peter Aspden describes the gossip dished out by Orson Welles, collected in a new book, My Lunches With Orson:
Here is Welles on Woody Allen: “I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.” On Laurence Olivier: “Larry is very – I mean, seriously – stupid.” On the pianist Arthur Rubinstein: “The greatest cocksman … [he] walked through life as though it was one big party.” On Rear Window (1954): “Everything is stupid about it. Complete insensitivity to what a story about voyeurism could be … Vertigo. That’s worse.”
But beyond those headlines, there are fascinating pointers to how Welles viewed himself, and his work. What, asks [Welles’s friend Henry] Jaglom, did they think of [Citizen] Kane in England? “It was not gigantically big in England. Auden didn’t like it,” replies Welles, obviously preferring to stew on the verdict of a single poet rather than the bathetic business of box office returns. “I always knew that Borges … hadn’t liked it,” he continues. “He said that it was pedantic, which is a very strange thing to say about it, and that it was a labyrinth. And that the worst thing about a labyrinth is when there’s no way out. And this is a labyrinth of a movie with no way out.”
And then we can imagine that famously booming voice turn warm with the sudden discovery of a good joke. “Borges is half-blind. Never forget that.”
Peter Biskind, the book’s editor, speaks about Welles’s legacy:
The 70s generation worshipped Welles because he was a maverick, an independent filmmaker. He did what they aspired to do, but he didn’t really succeed. They had it easier because the studios were in such bad straits in the late 1960s that they just opened their doors to these kids, whereas Welles by that time had a reputation of someone who walked away from his movies and got bored and never finished. He had a really rough time. Of course, drugs were not an issue with Welles. His problems were power and success, I think, and ego. If you’re the smartest guy in the room your whole life, it makes you a difficult guy to get along with—he was tremendously arrogant.
The Dish 