Peter Biskind, ed., My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson
Welles (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2013), pp. 94-5.
OW: Let me tell you a story about George Jean Nathan,
America’s greatest drama critic. George Jean Nathan was the tightest man who
ever lived, even tighter than Charles Chaplin. And he lived for forty years in
the Hotel Royalton, which is across from the Algonquin. […] He never tipped
anybody in the Royalton, not even when they brought the breakfast, and not at
Christmastime. After about ten years of never getting tipped, the room-service
waiter peed slightly in his tea. Everybody
in New York knew it but him. The waiters hurried across the street and told the
waiters at the Algonquin, who were waiting to see when it would finally dawn on
him what he was drinking! And as the years went by, there got to be more and
more urine and less and less tea. And it was a great pleasure for us in the
theater to look at a leading critic and know
that he was full of piss. And I, with my own ears, heard him at the 21 [Club] complaining
to a waiter, saying, “Why can’t I get tea here as good as it is at The
Royalton?” That’s when I fell on the floor, you know.