From a recording of a 1983 meeting between Orson Welles, the film director Henry Jaglom, and an HBO executive. Beginning in 1978, Jaglom met Welles regularly for lunch, and at Welles’s request he began recording their conversations in 1983. Welles died in 1985. My Lunches with Orson, a collection of transcripts of the recordings, edited by Peter Biskind, will be published next month by Metropolitan Books. Susan Smith is a pseudonym for the HBO executive; Robert Vesco was an American financier who fled the United States in 1973 to avoid an embezzlement investigation.

orson welles: I’ve…