When Orson Welles got too drunk to sell cheap wine: “He was so obviously pissed”
Movie stars might be impossibly rich and famous and get to go to amazing parties, but they’re still just as subject to some of life’s rules as the rest of us. They have to eat. They have to sleep. They put on their underwear in the morning the same way we do, and importantly, for today’s story, if they drink enough alcohol, they’re going to end up hammered.
These days, thanks to the presence of agents and PR people and carefully managed tape delays, we don’t see quite as much televised inebriation of famous faces as in times gone by, which some might say is a shame. It’s definitely a shame when you look back on some of the stellar work put in by the late, great Oliver Reed, for instance, who, for a while in the 1980s, seemed to make it almost a personal crusade to make as many calamitous chat show appearances as smashed as possible.
His astonishing five-minute drunken whirlwind moment on ‘80s evening chat show Aspel is still something to behold even now, from the moment he steps out from backstage clutching a huge jug of vodka and orange to managing to get the house band to back him on an impromptu shouted version of ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs.
Rat Pack legend Dean Martin was another actor who would regularly rock up to the likes of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, clutching a whiskey and slurring his words; although some believed he knew exactly what he was doing for laughs. Eventually, after a decade of Martin turning up half-cut for every interview on the show, Carson decided to call him out on it, accusing him of using apple juice for a prompt and having a sip of Martin’s drink in order to check. His reaction indicated that Martin was, in fact, on the hard stuff, and it led to the crooner telling the audience: “I drink moderately, in fact, I’ve got a case of Moderately in the back”.
More recently than that, we’ve seen the likes of Twins star Danny DeVito bravely take on the full cast of daytime chat show The View while admitting that he was worse for wear, to put it mildly, after drinking all night with George Clooney. And Dax Shepard was so far gone on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that he got himself banned from the programme for three years.
Another bon viveur was Citizen Kane director Orson Welles, a larger-than-life figure with a love of booze (especially Negronis, long before they were discovered by millennials) and steak dinners. Despite having been a huge name since the early ’40s, Welles’ predilection for the finer things in life had begun to take a toll both physically and financially by the ’70s, which leads us to his tie-in with Paul Masson, an American winemaker.
The winery was seen as something of a budget producer and wanted to go more upmarket, which was why they felt a partnership with a hallowed name like Welles was required, especially for their brand of champagne. Welles, for his part, simply needed cash; he had struggled to get acting parts for some time due to his ever-increasing weight and was only seen on screens in advertisements for products ranging from photocopiers to Shredded Wheat. But his voice still carried a good deal of authority and class.
Initially, things went smoothly. The first Masson ads to feature Welles were a great success and earned the Third Man star a contract worth half a million dollars, reportedly boosting sales by 30%. But increasingly, Welles would struggle to maintain sobriety on set. British film producer Peter Shillingford was behind the camera when Welles, most dramatically, turned up having not slept at all and after having consumed a huge amount of alcohol.
Shillingford said of Welles: “He was puffing on a cigar and looking very untidy. His hat was on the floor, his tie was loose, and his shirt was buttoned up wrong. He was pissed, he was sleepy, and he was mumbling. He finally asked me, ‘What do you suggest?’, I told him that the camera and the extras were already in place, so let’s give it a try. I knew he couldn’t do it, but I told him that I had to put him on camera for insurance reasons.”
Things went predictably badly, with very amusing results. Said Shillingford of the process, “We did three takes, and what you see on camera makes it clear how they went. After I came in with the clapper on the first take and the director yelled, ‘Action please’, Orson had no idea he was supposed to begin.”
Once the director said, “Action” again, the actor referred to the other actor at the table behind him and mumbled, “He doesn’t do anything?”, and that was that for that take. Once the second take ensued, he let out an “Ah!” before rambling on about the French champagne, slurring his words, while the other players around him tried to stifle their laughter.
“Finally, on the third take, Orson let out this sort of chuckle at the beginning. He went on to say most of the dialogue right, but he was so obviously pissed that we couldn’t use it,” recalled Shillingford.
Surprisingly, when Paul Masson eventually decided to sever their relationship with Welles, it wasn’t because of his on-set demeanour but because he had simply quit drinking wine. The actor continued to flog other products right up until his death in 1985, even appearing posthumously in a commercial for a home computer.
