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ultimately impossible to find the real Orson Welles among all the fun-house mirrors he so energetically set in place.” Welles appeared to prefer it that way. “Wait till I die,” he once told Jaglom at lunch. “They’ll write all kinds of things about me. They’ll just pick my bones dry. You won’t recognize me and if I came back to life and read them, I wouldn’t recognize me myself. I’ve told so many stories, you know, just to get out of situations, or out of boredom or just to entertain! Who can remember them all, but I’m sure they’ll come back to haunt me. Or rather, my ghost. Don’t set them right, Henry. They don’t want to know. Let them have their fantasies about me.”
    Welles’s final turn in front of the camera occurred in Jaglom’s Someone to Love (1987). Jaglom played the lead, a filmmaker, and Welles’s character is known only as “the friend.” “I gave him his farewell to the audience,” Jaglom recalls. “He wouldn’t let me ever show him laughing on screen, because he insisted, ‘Fat men shouldn’t laugh. It is very unattractive.’ Once I caught him laughing, and he actually said, ‘Cut,’ to my cameraman. And my cameraman stopped the camera. ‘What are you doing?’
    â€œâ€˜Orson Welles told me to cut.’
    â€œâ€˜Turn it right back on.’ He turned it back on, and Orson, thinking that it was off, reached behind him, somehow producing a lit cigar. He puffed on it, and started to laugh, a roaring, embracing, wonderful laugh. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it in the film because he would have hated it. When he died, I felt the least I could do was give them his one last laugh.”
    Patrick Terrail closed Ma Maison in the autumn of 1985, a month or so after Welles’s death. The decision had been made before Welles’s heart attack, but regardless, the timing was appropriate. Generally, life goes on when one or another of us sheds this mortal coil, but in this case, the restaurant that was his second home, which sustained him in so many ways, died with him. It did survive, under new ownership in a different location, but in the absence of its most famous patron at his regular table, it was never the same.

 
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    A Note on the Text
    My Lunches with Orson is divided into two parts, 1983, the year in which most of these conversations took place, and then 1984 and 1985. The organization is roughly, but not strictly, chronological. Welles’s ruminations on like subjects, in fact separated by months or even years, have been grouped together. The quality of the tapes varies drastically. Many of them are clear, but some, with the recorder lying muffled in Jaglom’s bag, are indistinct, and so I have taken occasional liberties with the text—adding or subtracting phrases, smoothing out syntax—for the purpose of making the conversations more concise and intelligible. Occasionally, I have attributed material to Welles that is quoted in Jaglom’s diaries or was furnished by him in interviews with me. With his permission, I have sometimes altered his comments with an eye to furnishing context. Welles was, above all, a great entertainer, a fabulator who, like Scheherazade, learned early to sing for his supper. Some of the stories he tells in these conversations will have a familiar ring, and indeed, they have been told elsewhere, but they were too good to go unrepeated, and since he always provided fresh details or new twists in every telling, I have included them.

 
    P ART O NE
    1983

    Lunch companions at a star-studded reception c. 1983, thrown by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, organized by Jaglom to show potential backers that Welles was still viable. Guests included Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Caine.
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    At lunch at Ma Maison, I encountered Orson standing with difficulty to embrace me after several