Orson Welles Recounts Crossing Paths With Hitler And Churchill! | The Dick Cavett Show

talking with Orson Welles I guess I just can't get over that childhood of yours the little scraps I've read about it sitting at tables at your age with people who were wealth in other countries for one thing but sometimes world leaders I suppose Oh were there any worldly oh yes out of the the world leader that that that really came to nothing as far as my memory is concerned was Hitler all right well I was being escorted this I went twice through the through the tea roll and Austrian German hiking country once with a with one teacher and once with another and one of the two teachers was it turned out a sort of a budding Nazi and there was a big Nazi rally in near Innsbruck in the days when the Nazis were just a very comical kind of minority party of nuts that nobody took seriously at all except my hiking companion this gentleman and his knapsack and he wangled a place at the table with the great men of this tiny little party of cranks and I remember very well afterwards Stryker was the leader of the big anti-semitic campaigns and two or three other well-known people to this day the man sitting next to me was Hitler and I he made so little impression on me that I can't remember a second of it he had no personality whatsoever wonderful it was invisible one if I under hypnosis it would come out do you know I think there was nothing there that anybody'd remember did you add five thousand people yelling seeker i oh yeah i'll hitler that's the point of the story that there wasn't anything to remember what about those films that were made about him by Laini riefenstahl very good films are they they often hear that they they are awfully well made yes is she alive yes have you met her no I haven't met her but she's living I think in England there's someplace like that and yeah and hustling around trying to get you know to flog a documentary here and there you know almost any subject I never met Stalin I would I never met Stalin but I Roosevelt I knew very well and Churchill and lots of during childhood and then use of course yes very lucky that respect what age were you when you were orphaned well my mother died when I was six and no seven and my father died when I was 15 beginning of my 15th birthday then I ran away tried to stay out of school a lot of Harvard I had a scholarship and desperate not to be educated I went into the theater it made it I wasn't educated what if you what if you were now I mean what if you wanted to go to school what would you have any idea what you want to study now that's a good question everything I guess but yeah if I wanted to be a to study seriously you know and get good at a subject I think it would be anthropology don't you think that's fascinating so yeah yeah yeah I I don't know maybe I would do I don't know where maybe philosophy I never thought about it very much I'm suspicious of philosophy I have a grill Philistine doubt about its worth you know but anthropology seems to me to be just its beginnings and philosophy kind of at its end who else stands out from that that time in your life in it what phases come to mind well you mean famous ones sure or infamous yes famous or any of that well we had sickle Gruber but I you know um you do you know you know wonderful people that that aren't famous I guess one of the most remarkable people I ever knew was somebody called Cornelia Lunt and Alfred Lunt used to pretend to be her cousin they weren't related at all they loved each other and she was when I knew her in her middle 90s and had been a hostess of great importance although very young in the civil war in America and knew intimately all the great names of the Civic a tell you all about what Lincoln said and what my great-grandfather Gideon Wells said to his secretary of Navy in the cabinet should great kind of rocontour on the Civil War that she went over to London where she was at the American Embassy and where she knew everybody in England all those fabulous people that seemed to have been dead for 200 years you know in the Victorian age and it was you could only get it to tell about these things whose great difficulty she didn't go on and on like I do you had had to drag it out of her and she was delicious she was an old lady when she gave a big party sat on a little stool and she gave you a big chair if you can imagine an old lady like that she was very beautiful must have been not so beautiful when she was young but one of those people at old age glorifies and she had a little bill and when she wanted everybody to be quiet so she could say something she'd ring her Bell and then we'd all be quiet and she'd make her little statement then ring it again and everybody could talk and she's one of the great people I've known you know as great certainly as as Churchill or Roosevelt or George Marshall and I suppose Marshall is the greatest man I ever met really yes I would think what would you admire what about him above everybody else human being I think he's the he's the greatest human being who was also a great man well I was ever privileged to meet have you known something that were can I tell a little story about him certainly we'd been campaigning for Roosevelt not George Marshall but some of the rest of us and one of our rewards when he got in again one of those many times that he did was to go to a big party a very big brass and sit on the Dyess and be treated as though we were part of the High Command just for one night and there were all these tremendous names from the Second World War two or three civilians Truman the vice president who was playing the piano we were rather embarrassed about that because he didn't seem to be awfully good on the piano and we didn't know that he was going to be a great president you see that's it and it didn't look as though he did either but he and my said they're only about four or five civilians all the rest were tremendous brass gripping was gold braid and medals and everything else and it was in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington and a door opened and GI more innocent looking than anything you could possibly imagine and younger than anything you could dream of stuck his head in at the moment when General Marshall happened to look toward the door and the boy looked at him he said gee general Marshall can I come in and say hello to you Marshall said yeah come in and Marshall didn't know anybody was watching this wasn't a grandstand play I was in a position my camera was angled so he didn't know he was getting photographed to anybody's film of memory yeah and he took the boy aside away from everybody and sat down with him and I heard as he went that the boy had been away from home was when the boy recognized Marshall as somebody like a family now this was the commander of the only allied forces and he sat with this boy without any grandstanding at all and just put him at ease and made him feel at home again for half an hour and left all the rest of us he was that kind of film wonder what the difference is between two men like that and the ones who are impressive publicly but couldn't be bothered to talk to anyone that isn't important to them look flat well I I don't know those those kind of people are all second-rate who can't be bothered at all ever but there are those who can't be bothered sometimes you know and that's you had a feeling with Marshall that if it were possible to be bothered he would let himself be bothered he was a tremendous gentleman you know an old-fashioned institution which isn't with us anymore okay you almost never want to ask anyone the question who's impressed you the most it's one hell to have a guest who can give you the answer well I never do know the answers to those kind of parents you know but I just happened to know that one of course I was immensely impressed with Churchill and but but he was quite another thing you know he was he had great humor and great irony he went to see me when I played Othello on the stage in London and I heard a low murmuring in the front row I thought he was talking to himself and then he came backstage afterwards and sat down in the dressing room and said most potent grave and Reverend senores my most approved masters and began the halls of Othello spark which he had memorized and including the cuts which I had made which he read with a good deal of extra emphasis mm-hmm and then a few years afterwards I happened to be in Venice trying to get some money for a movie during the festival and poor Churchill had been right after the war you know crest of the greatest victory that in a single man had ever presided over in modern history was voted out of office quite properly probably but it was a tragic blow for him and there he was in the hotel at the Lido with Clemmy his wife alone and he'd go swimming out in the beach one day at lunch I came in with a Russian businessman I was trying to hustle for some money for this picture and as we passed mr. Churchill's table mr. Churchill saw me and made that little gesture and the Russian went out of his mind this is a White Russian not a red Russian this is a this is a you know hustling semi Armenian Russian when he saw that mr. Churchill not only knew me but gave around a special acknowledgment it was clear to me that I had the money for my picture so the next morning I was out swimming in the beach and I fire and I found myself paddling in the water right next to mr. Churchill and I hadn't gone up to speak to it there we were in the water and I had known him on and off during the war in a humble capacity and I said mister sir and he had come backstage to see me and I said mr. Churchill I think you ought to know what you did for me and I told him about how this acknowledgment had meant so much to me with my fin and Cyr and that day at lunch I came in with a financier again and mr. Churchill rose and bow [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Dick Cavett Show

Views: 2,582,508

Keywords: The Dick Cavett Show, Talk Show, Celebrities, Dick Cavett, Chat Show, Interview, Orson Welles 1970, Dick Cavett 1970, Orson Welles Interview, Orson Welles Hitler, Orson Welles Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Orson Welles Dick Cavett, Schicklgruber, alfred lunt, cornelia lunt, George Marshall, orson welles george marshall, Theodore Roosevelt, orson welles, dick cavett - orson welles - 1970, orson wells, orson welles español, classic interview

Id: G_PUUHLknDI

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019