Read My Lunches with Orson for Free Online Page B

if you want, Mr. Welles. Plain, or we have them prepared with a petite legume.
    OW: No, it would have to be plain. Let’s see what other choices I have.
    W: Just in case, no more crab salad.
    OW: No more crab salad. Wish you hadn’t mentioned it. I wouldn’t have known what I wasn’t gonna get!
    W: Would you wish the salad with grapefruit and orange?
    OW: That’s a terrible idea. A weird mixture. It’s awful—typically German. We’re having the chicken salad without … without capers.
    HJ: They ruined the chicken salad when they started using that mustard. It’s a whole different chicken salad.
    OW: They have a new chef.
    W: And roast pork?
    OW: Oh, my God. On a hot day, roast pork? I can’t eat pork. My diet. But I’ll order it, just to smell pork. Bassanio says to Shylock: “If it please you to dine with us.” And Shylock says: “Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.”
    HJ: Isn’t there something about the devil taking the shape of a pig in the Bible? Or did Shakespeare invent that?
    OW: No, Jesus did put a whole group of devils into the Gadarene swine. Shakespeare was just trying to give Shylock a reason for not eating with them.
    HJ: I would like the grilled chicken.
    W: Okay.
    OW: And a cup of capers.
    W: Capers?
    HJ: No, no—that’s his joke.
    OW: So I’ll have a soft-shell crab. Alas, he breads it. I wish he didn’t, but he does. I’ll eat it anyway. Est-que vous avez l’aspirine? Have you any aspirin?
    W: Of course. Here you are, Monsieur Welles.
    HJ: Do you have some pain or something?
    OW: I have all kinds of rheumatic pains today. The knees. I always say it’s my back, because I get more sympathy. But I’ve got a bad right knee, which is what makes me limp and walk badly. The weather must be changing. I never believed that, until I became arthritic. I just started to ache the last half hour. I think it’s gonna rain or something. Aspirin is great stuff. I have no stomach problems, and no allergy to it.
    (Waiter exits.)
    HJ: Isn’t that terrible, the Tennessee Williams thing? Did you hear how he died?
    OW: Only that he died last night. How did he die?
    HJ: There was a special kind of pipe that he used to inhale something. And it stopped him from being able to swallow or breathe, or …
    OW: Some dope? Or maybe a roast beef sandwich.
    HJ: “Natural causes.” Then they went to “unknown causes.” So mysterious.
    OW: I’d like to be somebody who died alone in a hotel room—just keel over, the way people used to.
    Ken Tynan had the funniest story he never printed. He and Tennessee went to Cuba together as guests of [Fidel] Castro. And they were in the massimo leader’s office, and there are several other people there, people close to El Jefe, including Che Guevara. Tynan spoke a little fractured Spanish, and Castro spoke quite good English, and they were deep in conversation. But Tennessee had gotten a little bored. He was sitting off, kind of by himself. And he motioned over to Guevara, and said (in a Southern accent), “Would you mind running out and getting me a couple of tamales?”

    HJ: Do you think Tynan made it up?
    OW: Tynan wasn’t a fantasist. Tennessee certainly said it to somebody. But I’ve suspected that he improved it, maybe, by making it Guevara.
    Did I ever tell you about the play of his I lost, like a fool, to [Elia] Kazan? Eddie Dowling, who used to be a producer on Broadway, sent me a play by a writer called Tennessee Williams. I didn’t even read it. I said, “I can’t do this; I just can’t consider a play now.” It was called The Glass Menagerie .
    HJ: The Glass Menagerie —my God.
    OW: If I had done The