When Orson Welles Crossed Paths With Hitler and Churchill | The Dick Cavett Show

talking to Orson Welles I guess I can't get over that childhood of yours, the little bits I've read about it sitting at tables at your age with people who were rich in other countries to begin with, but sometimes world leaders, I guess. Oh Was there any mundane oh yeah outside of the world leader that didn't really amount to anything as far as my memory is concerned it was Hitler okay they were escorting me. I passed through the tea roll and the Austrian German hiking country twice. once with one teacher and once with another and one of the two teachers turned out to be some kind of Nazi in the making and there was a big Nazi demonstration near Innsbruck in the days

when

the Nazis were just a very comical minority group of nuts that no one took seriously except my hiking companion, this gentleman and his backpack, and he earned a place at the table with the big men of this little group of nuts and I remember very well that afterward Stryker was the leader of the big group. anti-Semitic campaigns and two or three people best known to this day the man sitting next to me was Hitler and he made so little impression on me that I can't remember for a second he didn't have some wonderful personality He was invisible if he was under hypnosis he would come out, you know ?

I don't think there was anything there that anyone would remember. Did you add five thousand people shouting search engine? Oh yeah, I'll be Hitler, that's the point of the story there was. There's nothing to remember, what about those movies Laini Riefenstahl made about him? Very good movies. They often hear that they are very well made. Yes, is she alive? Yes, have you met her? No, I haven't met her, but she's alive. I think in England there is a place like that and yes, and going around trying to make you know how to make a documentary here and there you know almost any subject.

I never met Stalin. I never knew Stalin, but I knew Roosevelt very well and Churchill and many during childhood and then use, of course, yes, very lucky, respect how old you were

when

you were orphaned, well, my mother died when I was six and I didn't seven, and my father died when I was 15, at the beginning of my 15th birthday, then I ran away. I tried not to go to school for a long time at Harvard. He had a scholarship and was desperate not to receive an education. I entered the theater. I made it. He had no education.

What if you and what if you were now? I mean, what if you wanted to go to? school, what would you have an idea of ​​what you want to study now? That's a good question, I guess everything, but yeah, if I wanted to study seriously, you know, and be good at one subject, I think it would be anthropology, don't you think? that's fascinating, so yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, maybe I would. I don't know where, maybe philosophy. I never thought much about it. I suspect philosophy. I have a grill. Philistine doubt about its value. You know, but anthropology seems. for me, just its beginnings and the philosophy at the end, who else stands out from that moment in your life in what phases come to mind, well you mean the famous, safe or infamous, yes famous or any of those Well, we had a sickle.

Gruber, but you know, you know, you know wonderful people who aren't famous. I suppose one of the most notable people I ever met was someone called Cornelia Lunt and Alfred Lunt used to pretend to be her cousin, but they weren't. related at all they loved each other and she was when I met her in the mid-90s and she had been a hostess of great importance although very young in the civil war in America and she knew intimately all the big names of the Civic a tell you all about What Lincoln said and what my great-grandfather Gideon Wells said to his secretary of the Navy in the cabinet should be a great reference to the Civil War: that she went to London, where she was in the American embassy and where she knew everyone in England.

Those fabulous people who seemed to have been dead for 200 years, you know, in the Victorian era, and you could only get her to tell about these things whose great difficulty, she didn't go on and on like I did, you had to drag around. She took it off and it was delicious. She was an old lady when she gave a big party she would sit on a stool and give you a big chair. If you can imagine an old lady like that, she was very beautiful. She must have been not so beautiful when she was young, but one of those people in the old age is glorified and she had a little bill and when she wanted everyone to be quiet so she could say something she would ring her bell and then we would all be quiet and she would make her little statement and then she would ring again and everyone could talk and she is one of the greats people I've met, I'm sure you know as well as Churchill, Roosevelt or George Marshall, and I suppose Marshall is the greatest man I've ever met, really, yes.

I think he is the greatest human being and he was also a great man. Well, I had the privilege of knowing him. Do you know something? Can I tell a little story about him? We had certainly been campaigning for Roosevelt, not for George Marshall, but for some of us, and one of our rewards when he came back to power, one of those many times he did, was to go to a big party with a very important high command. and sit in the Dyess and be treated as if we were part of the High Command just for one night and there were all these tremendous names from World War II, two or three civilians, Truman, the vice president, who played the piano, that gave us enough shame because he didn't seem to be very good at the piano and we didn't know he was going to be a great president, you see, that's all and he didn't seem to know it either, but he and I said it was only about four or five civilians, the rest They were tremendous brass grips and gold braids and medals and everything else, and I was in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington and a door opened and a soldier looked more innocent than anything you could imagine and younger than anything you could imagine. .

He could dream of sticking his head in at the moment when General Marshall looked at the door and the boy looked at him and said, gee, General Marshall, can I come in and say hello? Marshall said yes, come in and Marshall didn't know. someone was watching this was not a play. He was in a position where my camera was angled so he wouldn't know he was being photographed on film from anyone's memory. Yes, and he took the boy apart from everyone and sat with him and I heard as he was leaving that the boy had been away from home and that was when the boy recognized Marshall as someone like family, now this was the commander of the only forces allies and sat down with this kid without any grandiloquence and just put him in He calmed down and made him feel at home again for half an hour and left the rest of us.

It was that kind of movie. I wonder what the difference is between two men like that and those who are publicly impressive but don't bother to speak up. to anyone who is not important to them it seems flat, well I don't know those kind of people who are all second rate who can't be bothered at all, but there are those who sometimes can't be bothered, you know , and that's what you had with Marshall, the feeling that if it were possible for him to be bothered, he would let himself be bothered, he was a tremendous gentleman, you know, an old-fashioned institution that's no longer with us, okay, you almost never want to ask anyone the question.

Who impressed you the most? It's hell to have a guest who can give you the answer. I never know the answers to those kinds of fathers, you know, but I happened to meet that one, of course, I was immensely impressed with Churchill, but but he was something else, you know, he had great humor and great irony. He came to see me when I played Othello on stage in London and heard a low murmur in the front row. I thought he was talking to himself and then Then he came backstage and sat in the dressing room and said very powerfully grave and reverend gentlemen my most approved teachers and he began the halls of Othello with spark that he had memorized and including the cuts that I had made and which he read very carefully. extra emphasis mm-hmm and then a few years later I was in Venice trying to get some money for a film during the festival and poor Churchill had been right after the war, you know, riding the crest of the greatest victory a only man has ever had. ever president in modern history was removed from office probably quite rightly, but it was a tragic blow for him and there he was in the Lido hotel with Clemmy, his wife, alone and one day he would go swimming at the beach in During the lunch I walked in with a Russian businessman.

He was trying to get some money for this photo and when we passed mr. Churchill's table mr. Churchill saw me and made that little gesture and the russian went crazy this is a white russian not a red russian this is a semi-armenian russian crook when he saw that mr. Churchill not only knew me, but he gave special recognition. It was clear to me that he had the money for my photo, so the next morning I was swimming at the beach, I took a shot and found myself paddling in the water right next to Mr. Churchill and I had not gone up to talk to him, we were on the water and I had met him intermittently during the war in a humble capacity and I said sir sir and he had come backstage to see me and I said sir.

Churchill, I think you should know what you did for me and I told him how much this recognition had meant so much to me with my fin and Cyr and that day at lunch I walked in again with a financier and mr. Churchill stood up and bowed