Me and Mr. Welles: Travelling Europe with a Hollywood Legend

This memoir from Bond (Famous Regiments of the British Army) about working as Orson Welles’s personal assistant during the late 1960s proves an unfortunate, overly hagiographic misstep. The text is confusingly structured and cluttered with extraneous asides (as when, upon climbing into a dinghy during production of Welles’s unfinished oceangoing thriller The Deep, Bond makes the thuddingly obvious point that it’s “nautical custom” to sit down immediately). A degree of Welles’s famous charm comes through—when first meeting Bond, who’d been dispatched to Yugoslavia to bring Welles his cigars, he quips, “With a name like that you’ve just gotta be a movie director!” Likewise, there’s some pleasure to be taken from the sometimes vivid descriptions of the various European countries Bond visits while working for Welles, including a post–Soviet invasion Prague, where he observes the National Museum covered with “the violent pockmarks of heavy machine-gun fire, big scars the size of a human fist.” However, movie buffs, this book’s most obvious intended readers, will be put off when Bond blithely refers to film early on as “a rather tedious subject” (despite professing a love for it elsewhere). While Bond conveys his sincere admiration for a mentor long gone, only the hardest of hardcore Welles fans need apply. (Sept.)