In My Father's Shadow (13 page)

On December 28, 1930, Dick Welles died alone in a Chicago hotel at the
age of fifty-eight. Orson had stayed away from his father during the half year that had elapsed since their return from China. Now he blamed the Hills for exacting such a promise and blamed himself for ignoring his father’s entreaties to come and see him. “If I’d gone to see him, he might still be alive,” he reproached Skipper. It did no good to point out that the causes of death listed on Dick Welles’s death certificate, ironically signed by his arch rival, Maurice Bernstein, did not include filial neglect.

D
ICK
W
ELLES
’
S WILL
stipulated that Orson choose a legal guardian who would be in charge of him and his inheritance until he came of age. My father immediately approached Skipper, never dreaming the older man would refuse. (“I wasn’t even tempted,” Skipper confided in me. “I had enough on my hands already.”) Although it took some doing, Skipper persuaded Orson to make Maurice Bernstein his guardian, pointing out that “it would break his heart” if he didn’t. He made the boy swear he would never let Doctor know he hadn’t been his first choice.

My father’s sixteenth summer was a turning point in his life. He graduated from Todd, which in those days did not go beyond tenth grade, and then he was in limbo. Doctor was adamantly opposed to his having anything to do with the theater and determined to send him to Harvard or Yale as soon as he could be admitted. Why not spend the summer in a college preparatory school, he suggested? That was the last thing the teenager wanted to do since college held no appeal for him. He enrolled instead in painting classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. While he had a flair for art, particularly the quick, humorous sketch or watercolor, he was far more interested in finding work as an actor or painting scenery for a summer stock company. He placed several advertisements in the Chicago papers and made the rounds of theatrical agencies, but nothing came of it.

Meanwhile, the aspiring young actor was learning to his dismay that he had saddled himself with a wily, tightfisted guardian. Dadda Bernstein made his Pookles plead for every dollar, nor did he spare a penny for Orson’s older brother, Richard, who had been locked up the year before in the state asylum in Kankakee, Illinois. One of Dick Welles’s last acts had been to commit Richard at the age of twenty-four for reasons that have never been clear.

“Why did they put your brother in a nuthouse?” I once had the temerity to ask my father, bringing a reproving scowl to his face.

“It would behoove you, Christopher, out of respect for your unfortunate uncle to call it an asylum.” Subject closed.

However tightfisted Doctor may have been with my father, he had no compunction about using his ward’s money to build a lavish home in the leafy town of Ravinia just outside Chicago. The house was for Pookles, he maintained as he moved in his new lady love, Hazel Moore, and her husband Ned, creating yet another domestic triangle. Now that Pookles had a real “home,” why was he avoiding it? Doctor professed to be hurt and offended when Pookles preferred his old room at Todd which Skipper had let him keep. Todd would remain my father’s base of operations for several years.

During the summer, though, Skipper had little time for him, and in the end young Orson was forced to stay with his guardian’s ménage in Ravinia. “It was not a happy feeling to be living in a house furnished mainly with the belongings of my late mother,” he recalled to me. In fact, the threesome in Ravinia made him as uncomfortable as he had been during the screaming matches in Edith Mason’s apartment. “But Ravinia was even worse,” he told me, “because I felt the adults were all against me.”

To add to my father’s misery, the ragweed was rampant that summer and he was suffering from hay fever and asthma. It became clear to everyone that he could not stay much longer in Ravinia. One torpid night, the subject of what he should do for the rest of the summer was hotly debated, and as my father later wrote Skipper, “Dadda arrived at a momentous decision.” It was agreed that Orson should go on a sketching tour of Ireland and Scotland. “Going abroad alone is not quite as unthinkable as joining the theater.”

Little did Dadda know that in allowing his beloved Pookles to go to Ireland that summer of 1931, he was also allowing the unthinkable to happen. It was in Dublin’s Gate Theatre that Orson Welles, at the age of sixteen, made his professional stage debut. And never looked back.

“I
DON
’
T WANT TO
leave you, Granny,” I told her through helpless tears, my arms tightly wound around her waist. “Why do I have to live in Rome with Mommy and her new husband? I’m sure they don’t want me. I’m sure if you ask Mommy, she’ll say—”

“Now, Chrissie, you know your mother loves you and wants you to live with her—”

“No, she doesn’t, Granny. She doesn’t!”

“There, there, dear, don’t get yourself worked up. Just think, you and Orson will be living in the same city again—”

“Daddy’s living in Rome?”

“Well, of course he is. You knew that.”

“Will I get to see him, Granny?”

“Of course you will, dear. There now, dry your eyes. There aren’t many little girls who get to fly to Rome all by themselves on a great big airplane—”

Summer was ending in 1949 when, at the age of eleven, I was put on the plane to Rome with my new passport securely pinned to my undershirt. All the way across the Atlantic, I made up fantastic stories about my life, which I poured into the indulgent ear of the kindly, gray-haired gentleman sitting next to me. He looked at me with growing amazement until, exhausted by my performance, I fell asleep.

En route to Naples, the plane touched down briefly in Rome. When I did not get off with the other disembarking passengers, my frantic mother talked the sympathetic Italian officials into allowing her to board the plane. She found me sound asleep in my seat. It seems my seat companion gave her such an astonished look that when we were out of the airport, she demanded, “What on earth did you tell that man, Chrissie? I won’t have you making
up stories about me to strangers.” I knew it was pointless to explain that my “stories” weren’t about her at all.

My first week in Rome passed in a daze. I could not yet believe I had left behind me, like a room abruptly locked in my absence, the bucolic town of Woodstock, Illinois—the town my father once likened to “a wax flower under a bell of glass in the paisley and gingham county of McHenry.” Surely I would go back there soon and live again among people who thought well of me—the Hills, their children and grandchildren, the many friends I had made at Todd among the faculty and their children. The conviction that my true home lay among decent, caring folk in small-town America kept me going during the early bewilderment of Rome.

What disconcerted me at first was not the change of locale—the shift from the flat farmlands of Illinois to a lively metropolis filled with history, monuments, and deafening traffic. It was my anxiety about my new stepfather, Major Jack Pringle, and whether or not we were going to get along. When I wasn’t worrying about that, I found it exciting to be in Rome. I could see how grand and beautiful it was, unlike anything I had known. We were living in the heart of the city on the Via del Corso, just steps away from the Piazza Venezia. Home was now an elegant second-floor apartment with a ceiling that my mother said belonged in a Renaissance palazzo and looked as though it had been painted by Raphael. In the early morning while I sat alone in the dining room, sipping hot chocolate with steamed milk, I stared dreamily upward at the baby angels flying through rosy clouds and wished hard that I might join them. The frescoes had been discovered by the previous tenants when their maid, dusting for cobwebs, had poked a hole through the false ceiling with her broom, and there they were, as fresh as the day they were painted.

After breakfast I often accompanied Rosina, the woman who cooked and cleaned for us, to the open-air market within walking distance of our apartment. She was stouter than Granny and had a front tooth missing, which did not stop her from beaming at me at every opportunity, and she dressed in black from her head scarf down to her scuffed, lace-up shoes. Although she spoke not a word of English, somehow we communicated with smiles and body language. It was at the noisy, bustling market that I learned my first words of Italian—
pesce
(fish),
peperoni
(green peppers),
pomodori
(tomatoes), and whatever else Rosina was buying that day. How I loved walking through the market, lugging a large, open wicker basket filled with our purchases, admiring the piles of apples or heads of lettuce heaped on the stands,
all the vibrant colors, the warring smells of fish and cheese and freshly baked bread. Around me shoppers were haggling at the top of their voices, vendors were yelling back and throwing their hands in the air, then the shoppers edging toward the next stall, the vendors erupting again in a torrent of emotion, and all this commotion over a kilo of onions or a fat wedge of parmesan cheese.

I could enjoy living in Rome, I thought, if only I could live here with Rosina instead of my new stepfather. Many years would pass before I could finally acknowledge his considerable intelligence and charm, but even on our first encounter, I saw how attractive he was, without being handsome. Slim, dark-haired, with a trim mustache and a military bearing, he was an elegant dresser verging on being a dandy, an upper-class Englishman who aped the prejudices of his class and yet was something of a maverick. Firmly believing women were inferior, he nonetheless treated them with the utmost gallantry. “When Jackie lights my cigarette,” my mother liked to say, “I feel like I’m a member of the British aristocracy.”

My stepfather was a World War Two hero renowned for his six daring escapes from high-security prisons, an accomplished horseman, a crack polo player, and a gifted linguist. While a prisoner of war, he had taught himself Italian, German, Spanish, and French, all of which he spoke fluently. There was much to admire and respect about the man, but I was not his contemporary, nor was I meeting him at a cocktail party when he could have lit my cigarette. Life had cast him as my stepfather, a role for which he had neither the aptitude nor the desire. When Charlie Lederer had married my mother, he had not seen me as a liability, but Jack Pringle’s one thought about me was how to get rid of me so he could have my mother to himself.

The battle lines were drawn on my first morning in Rome. Soon after I woke up, I ran into my mother and stepfather’s bedroom, just as I used to do when I lived with Granny and Skipper, threw my arms around Jack, gave him an affectionate hug and kissed him on the cheek. Then I bounced out again to have my breakfast in the dining room under the cherubim and seraphim. Later that morning, my mother took me aside. “Jackie doesn’t want you rushing into our bedroom in the morning and giving him hugs and kisses, so please don’t ever do that again.”

I stared at her in bewilderment. “But why not, Mommy?”

She sighed. “I don’t know how to explain it to you, Chrissie, but he’s English and he went to Sandhurst.”

“What’s that?”

“A top military academy in England. So, you see, he’s not used to being hugged and kissed by a little girl. What you did embarrassed him …”

“Don’t people hug and kiss one another in England?”

“Don’t be exasperating, Chrissie.” This was said quietly with a sigh, as though my being exasperating was something she had come to expect, but the cold edge to her voice, the old glint in her eye, were gone. “The point is that Jackie doesn’t like it coming from you. He says it’s wet.”

“What does he mean it’s wet?”

“Just don’t do it anymore, okay?”

“Okay.”

I was left alone in my room to reflect that the mother I had found in Rome was not the same person I had last seen in New York. Here she was fluttery, girlish, and a lot more nervous. I wondered why. Most disconcerting of all, she was beginning to sound vaguely British and to use expressions like “jolly good” and “old chap.” She might suddenly come out with a remark like, “I say, we had a ripping time last night at the so and so’s, didn’t we, Jackie darling?”

Soon after I arrived, we all went for a stroll around the Piazza Venezia, Jackie leading the way and pointing out the sights for my benefit. We began at the foot of the enormous monument to Victor Emmanuel II that dominates the square, a frothy confection in white marble of fountains, statues, and a majestic staircase leading up to the monument itself. I craned my neck to see the colonnade that ran its length and on top of that, at either end, a chariot driven by an angel with outstretched wings. “This was put up fifty years after Italy became a unified country, but the Italians don’t like it very much, and I can’t say I blame them. It is a bit overdone,” Jackie was saying. “They say it looks like a wedding cake. What do you think, Chrissie?”

“I suppose it could be a wedding cake … for giants.”

Jackie laughed. “Why don’t you climb to the top and have a look around? You’ll get a splendid view from the terraces. Your mother and I will wait for you here.”

I did as I was told, but the “splendid” view was mainly of the traffic careening around the square and of two people who had shrunk in size, my mother and Jackie, seated at the bottom of the staircase and locked in an embrace. Suddenly I remembered Granny’s warning before I left Woodstock, which now seemed to have happened a long time ago. “If your mother and Major
Pringle don’t want you around all the time, it’s because they’re still on their honeymoon, and you mustn’t let that hurt your feelings, dear.” But it did.

On the way back to our apartment, Jackie pointed to a balcony of an imposing building. “Look, Chrissie. That’s where Mussolini used to stand and deliver his speeches to the crowd below.”

“Who’s Mussolini?”

Jackie looked at me aghast, then turned to my mother. “What on earth did she learn at Todd School?” Then back to me. “Didn’t you study World War Two in your history classes?”

“No,” I mumbled. I could see it would not help to mention that I
had
studied the American Revolution and Civil War since Jackie hadn’t fought in either of those wars.