Henry Jaglom: The King of Spago

As with much Jaglom lore, the money story is fuzzy around the edges. Jaglom claims he entered Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio upon his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961 (alumni records recall the date as 1959), and very quickly began making his living as an actor. But this was no ordinary struggling actor.

"We went to a party at his parents' place, and his date was Tuesday Weld," says producer Polly Platt, then married to Peter Bogdanovich. "And there were the most incredible paintings on the walls--Gauguins and Renoirs. There was a Picasso in the bathroom, for God's sake. I have never seen so many paintings on a wall. It was like a woman wearing too much jewelry."

Jaglom went to L.A. in 1965, and joined the Actors Studio there. "He was a young, scruffy actor, with the biggest mouth in the Studio--and there were plenty of big mouths," says Lee Grant. "Everything he did was provocative. Our process was to put a scene on, and then the moderator would turn to this charged-up group and say, 'What do you think?' Well, the thing about Henry was, he knew everything these people had done the night before. Everything. I mean, you didn't need to know who they slept with to know about Long Day's Journey Into Night. I found people getting hurt. But it was all part of his attention-getting mechanism."

By the late '60s, he was a contract TV actor for Columbia/ Screen Gems at $500 a week, appearing in "Gidget" and "The Flying Nun." He was also beginning his career of hanging out in a big way--with Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Sally Kellerman, the screenwriter Carole Eastman, Candice Bergen, producer Bert Schneider. In 1967, after losing the lead in The Graduate, a movie he dearly wanted, he thought more and more about directing. He went to Israel with a cheap movie camera to do a homemade movie about the Six Day War; Bert Schneider saw the result and tapped Jaglom to help edit Easy Rider. This in turn led to Schneider's producing Jaglom's first movie, A Safe Place (1971), for Columbia.

With an introduction from Bogdanovich, Jaglom flew to New York and was somehow able to convince Orson Welles to appear in his film. For scale. He also got Jack Nicholson, who after Easy Rider was suddenly the hottest actor in Hollywood, to donate his services in return for a color TV. And he brought in his old obsession Tuesday Weld. The outcome was a soft-edged farrago about a Manhattan girl's romantic awakening, entirely lacking a conventional story or time-sense. It was Ur-Jaglom. The movie was weirdly autobiographical. Some of it was shot in Jaglom's parent's apartment on Central Park West; the art collection was featured.

The upshot was Jaglom's immediate ejection from the studio system. Reviews were uniformly vicious. The picture is said to retain a cult following to this day, but for Jaglom the most salient results were pariah-hood, plus a lasting friendship with Hollywood's pariah-in-chief, Orson Welles.

"My greatest regret is that I was never able to get Orson a picture," Henry Jaglom says. From 1971 until Welles' death in 1985, as Jaglom resuscitated his own career--Tracks (1976), a story about a homecoming Vietnam vet played by Dennis Hopper, won acclaim but no money; in 1980, the light chase caper Sitting Ducks finally got both--he crusaded for the financing necessary to put together one final Wellesian epic. He never succeeded, though he came agonizingly close, in a episode that sealed his animus for Steven Spielberg.

"This particular financial group put up the money for Orson to do a movie," Jaglom says. "There was one condition attached to it. If we could get Spielberg to use his name, either in the form of 'Steven Spielberg Presents,' or 'Executive Producer Steven Spielberg,' the deal was done.

"What Spielberg would get for it is the satisfaction of knowing that he would make it possible for Orson Welles to make one more movie. And he was a man who was going around wildly proclaiming his fealty to Orson Welles' art-- in fact, earlier that year, there had been a big public display on his part about acquiring the sled 'Rosebud.' He paid something like fifty or sixty thousand dollars for it; it was now hanging over his bed, we heard. And Orson laughed at that. He said to me, 'How strange--when you think that anyone who saw the movie would know what happened to Rosebud. I wonder what he thinks that sled is.'

"So he came to have lunch with Orson. And after the lunch I didn't hear from Orson, and I tried to call him, and he didn't answer his phone. Finally I got through, and he was very dejected; he didn't want to speak.

"Spielberg spent the lunch asking him questions about Citizen Kane, about The Magnificent Ambeisons. About certain shots. A lot of technical stuff. Orson was very happy to explain. Spielberg never brought up the reason he was there. Orson was feeling increasingly as the time went by like he was being put in a position where he was supposed to beg for something. Finally Spielberg said, 'Thank you very much. It was wonderful.' And he got up and left. Never brought up the subject that he was there for. And left Orson with the bill."

Some saw the Welles-Jaglom friendship as distasteful at best, suspect at worst, an unseemly saprophytic minuet between has-been and poseur. Jaglom tape-recorded dozens of their Ma Maison lunches together, with the idea of doing a book on the great man; the accusation has been floated that Welles was taped without his consent. Jaglom pooh-poohs it. "The tape recorder was right there on the table," he says.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Welles consented to make what would be his final screen appearance in Someone to Love (1988), another Jaglom film-within-a-film farrago about loneliness, set--with maudlin poignancy--on Valentine's Day, in a soon-to-be-demolished Santa Monica theater. The movie's virtues are variable and desultory, but the appearance of Welles, as a kind of Shakespearean presiding spirit in the rear seats, commenting on the effect of the women's movement on social relations, is sheer delight--and, not incidentally, speaks highly for Jaglom's editing skills. For Welles found many ways to bore us in his last years, just as he had fascinated us in his youth.

Welles at his best was a Tintoretto of the cinema, a Great Artist working a large canvas. Henry Jaglom, a ragtag intimist, is no Orson Welles. Nor is he a Woody Allen. One might simply say Allen is the better artist. But maybe that's facile. Maybe Allen is compensating for Brooklyn with taste, while Jaglom is exorcising those Gauguins and Renoirs. In any case, there's no doubt who audiences--and critics--prefer.

Henry Jaglom is laughing about his bad reviews. There are some dillies, he says. He mounts and frames them and sends them to friends for Christmas. He wants to show them to me. Later, he sends me a packageful. "If this movie were a horse, you'd shoot it to put it out of its misery," said People magazine, of Always. "Directed by.. Jaglom, who has a cult reputation for making personal films, this one is so personal that only Jaglom would want to see it." "Eating gathers a smorgasbord of the West Coast's most annoying women to bellyache, jaw and gnash their teeth over their various edible complexes," said The Washington Post. "Directed by the touchy-feely Henry Jaglom, this is film as purgative--a hens' party from hell...."

Indeed, for every Jaglom acolyte ("Future scientists studying our times could find no films that tell more directly how we really thought and talked in the late 20th century than those of Henry Jaglom," said the New York Daily News) there appear to be a half-dozen vigorous detractors. "Jaglom is an acquired taste, like goat cheese," wrote one reviewer. Many never acquire the taste at all. "Oh, God," was all one prominent critic would say, when I mentioned Jaglom's name. "His pictures have no guts; they have no point," a major producer told me. "Is his life as empty as his movies indicate?"

Henry Jaglom and I are eating dinner at Spago. Also in attendance is Victoria Foyt, an ethereally lovely actress whom Jaglom met in archetypically Jaglomesque fashion, when, while feeling sorry for himself one night in his editing room, he remembered a mass-mailing postcard invitation to one of Foyt's performances, fished the card out of the trash, called her up, and fell in love over the phone. They squeeze hands a lot.

"My ironic situation right now is that I'm so happy at this moment--it's very complicated," Jaglom says. "Because for a long time I've been dealing with what most people, I think, deal with, which is that we are lied to, from earliest childhood, by our culture, by our parents, by our music, by our movies. Most especially, because of the power of them, by movies. By Hollywood. And I think that to perpetuate that lie is insane. So you have to try to tell the truth."

Yet truth-telling, as Jaglom sees it, does not preclude tablehopping, which he has developed into a minor art form in itself. "He's the king of Spago," Lee Grant says, and there appears to be truth to the claim. To sup here with Jaglom is to be left frequently, as such major distractions as Robert Evans and Joan Collins and Leslie Bricusse and Rob Lowe float by. "As a kid, my fantasy was to come to Hollywood and go to Romanoff's," Jaglom says, re-descending for a moment. "This is my Romanoff's. It's a floor show every night."

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James Kaplan, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, frequently writes about people and ideas in business and popular culture.

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