Quote of the Day: BIG
On collecting a young Orson Welles for lunch:
‘He and Virginia, the beautiful young wife he had found in Chicago the previous year, had moved into a curious one-room residence on Riverside Drive. I went there one day to collect Orson for lunch. He said he had been working all night and when I arrived he was still in his bath — a monstrous, medieval iron cistern which, when it was covered at night with a board and mattress, served them as a marriage bed. Orson was lying there, inert and covered with water, through which his huge, dead-white body appeared swollen to gigantic proportions. When he got up, full of apologies, with a great splashing and cascading of waters, I discovered that his bulk owed nothing to refraction — that he was, in reality, just as enormous outside as inside the tub which, after he had risen from it and had started to dry himself, was seen to hold no more than a few inches of liquid lapping about his huge, pale feet.’ ~ John Houseman, Unfinished Business.
Welles at this point had not really started putting on all that weight, so when Houseman is going on about his “enormity”, as a good friend of mine pointed out, it’s not absolutely certain what he means…
