Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-306).

How Henry met Orson / by Peter Biskind -- 1983, "Everybody should be bigoted" ; "Thalberg was Satan!" ; "FDR used to say, 'You are I are the two best actors in America'" ; "I fucked around on everyone" ; "Such a good Catholic that I wanted to kick her" ; "Nobody even glanced at Marilyn" ; "'The blue angel' is a big piece of shlock" ; "'Kane' is a comedy" ; "There's no such thing as a friendly biographer" ; "The Cannes people are my slaves" ; "De Mille invented the fascist salute" ; "Comics are frightening people" ; "Avez-vous scurf?" ; "ARt Buchwald drove it up Ronnie's ass and broke it off" -- 1984-1985. "It was my one moment of being a traffic-stopping superstar" ; "God save me from my friends" ; "I can make a case for all the points of view" ; Charles "Laughton couldn't bear the fact he was a homosexual" ; "Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl" ; "Jack, it's Orson fucking Welles" ; "Once in our lives, we had a national theater" ; "I smell a director" ; "I've felt that cold deathly wind from the tomb" ; "Jo Cotten kicked Hedda Hopper in the ass" ; "You either admire my work or not" ; "I'm in terrible financial trouble" ; "Fool the old fellow with the scythe" -- Orson's last laugh / by Henry Jaglom -- Appendix. New or unfinished projects ; Partial cast of characters.

"Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateur. There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing career, the people he knew--FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more--and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse--sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above-- because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles--if such a creature ever existed. "-- Provided by publisher.