In My Father's Shadow (14 page)

“This is absolutely appalling!” he went on to my mother while I walked glumly behind them, the sidewalk being too narrow to walk three abreast. “No wonder you Americans are so ignorant” (a remark she would not have let pass in the old days).

That evening, while my mother and Jackie were having their cocktails before dinner, my stepfather asked me to draw a freehand map of the United States and then put as many cities as I could on it. I had never drawn such a map before, and it was soon apparent that it was not one of my skills. The only places I was able to include with any certainty of where they were located were New York, Chicago, Woodstock, Los Angeles, and Reno. “Reno!” laughed Jack derisively as he surveyed my pathetic map.

“Well, I did live there twice, you see, to get a divorce,” my mother explained in her new, overly bright voice.

“Oh, I see.” How the two of them laughed while I sat silently by, wondering why it was
that
funny.

Shortly after that evening, Jackie devised his plan to educate me while we lived in Rome. Even though I was learning more Italian every day, enrolling me in a local school was out of the question. It was also unclear how long we were going to be living in Rome. So Jackie gave me an “assignment” every day: I was to visit one of the city’s spectacular sights in the morning, pay close attention to everything I saw there, note my impressions in a notebook I was to carry with me, then come home and write an essay about what I had seen.

I began with the Colosseum, continued with the Forum, which required several visits to explore thoroughly, and gradually progressed to St. Peter’s where I spent day after day in the Sistine Chapel, enchanted by Michelangelo’s
frescoes. There were no lines in those days, no mobs of tourists straining at the ropes, and an eleven-year-old girl could spend hours undisturbed in the chapel, craning her neck toward the magnificent ceiling and scribbling away in her notebook. It amazes me now to recall that in all those solitary days and hours spent wandering around the monuments and splendors of Rome, no one ever bothered me: not a single child molester came forward to interrupt my reverie or note taking for the dreaded essay. At first Rosina accompanied me to the place appointed for my assignment that day, and then came back later to collect me; but once I knew my way around the city, I went everywhere alone. I felt as completely safe walking the streets of Rome by myself as I had in that lost and long-ago time, walking the beach of Santa Monica.

I worked hard on my essays, rewriting and copying them several times before I was satisfied. At Todd School, I had excelled in English composition, and I wanted to show Jack Pringle what I could do. I was still bristling at his reference to “ignorant Americans.” So, knowing I had done my best, I waited expectantly while he began reading my composition aloud to my mother during their usual cocktail hour before dinner. He had not finished two sentences before he was convulsed with laughter. My errors in spelling, which he delighted in pointing out to my mother, who assured him she couldn’t spell either, produced fresh gales of merriment while I sat there, crushed and humiliated.

This performance was repeated every time Jackie read one of my essays, and each time it sapped my confidence a little more. His need to put me down, which he would have called “taking me down a peg,” was as strong as his need to remove “Orson’s kid” from the scene by sending her all over Rome with a notebook. In his eyes I was too full of myself, too forward with adults, too quick to join in the conversation instead of sitting quietly in my corner. Major Pringle lost no time in trying to turn me into a model of manners and British reticence, and on the surface he succeeded. I soon learned to curb my natural exuberance and silence my tongue, but in my heart I fought him like a tiger.

I
HAD BEEN
in Rome long enough to write several essays about its historical and cultural treasures when one day my mother invited my father to lunch. From the moment he walked through the door, I was struck by the contrast between my burly father with his tousled hair, his crumpled slacks and open-neck shirt, and my suave stepfather with his trimmed mustache,
his corduroy pants hot off the ironing board, and an ascot knotted around his neck. How strange it was to see the two men together and feel the tension between them. There was none of the easy camaraderie I had observed between Orson Welles and Charlie Lederer, who had remained good friends. In fact, shortly before my mother and Jackie got married in Paris in May of 1949, my father and Charlie were also in Paris, collaborating on a script for a French film.

While I sat silently at the dining room table, learning to be “seen but not heard,” the adults’ conversation ranged from the discovery of the extraordinary ceiling in our apartment to what Orson was doing in Rome. “I’m shooting some scenes for my
Othello
at the Scalera Studios,” my father told us, then turned his radiant smile on me. “Would you like to come and watch one afternoon, Christopher?”

“Oh yes, Daddy!” I exulted. Jackie gave me a reproving glance. “Yes,
please
.”

Jackie leaned forward in his chair with a feigned show of interest. “Orson, I didn’t know you were filming
Othello
. Will it be anything like your
Macbeth
?”

“
I
was in
Macbeth
,” I loudly volunteered, ignoring the stony look from my stepfather. “I played Macduff’s son,” I added, ready to brave anything with my
real
father close at hand.

“We all know that, Chrissie,” said my mother in a tired voice.

“Well,
Othello
and
Macbeth
are very different plays, you know, so I could hardly treat them in the same way.” My father spoke softly, with careful courtesy, as though addressing a complete idiot.

“Yes,
of course
!” Jackie gave his self-deprecating laugh. “What I meant was, will your
Othello
be in the same marvelous
style
?”

“If you mean, will the picture look as though I directed it, then I guess the answer is yes. It’s like asking: Does Ella Fitzgerald always sound like Ella Fitzgerald when she sings, or does she suddenly open her mouth and sound like Bing Crosby?”

I laughed delightedly at this, and my father joined me, his great guffaw of wheezy laughter making the dining room feel so alive that I imagined I saw the baby angels on the ceiling flutter their wings. Then, all of a sudden, he rose from the table, signaling to my mother and stepfather frozen in their chairs that the interview with Orson Welles was now at an end. “You’ll forgive me if I eat and run but I must be getting to the studio. We start work around two in the afternoon and I don’t like to keep my actors waiting.”

“Oh, won’t you stay for coffee, Orson?” my mother pleaded.

“Well, all right, but just one cup to be sociable.”

My father eased himself into the sofa and I perched on the arm nearby, asking him in a whisper, “When can I come with you to the studio, Daddy?”

“Any time you like,” he boomed.

“Tomorrow?”

“Fine. Is that all right with you, Virginia?”

“Of course. Will you send someone to fetch her?”

“‘Fetch’? Did you say ‘fetch’? I say, old girl, we
are
getting veddy British all of a sudden.” My father delivered this remark in a perfect imitation of an upper-class English gentleman while I watched Jackie stiffen and suck in his breath.

Recovering his composure, he turned to my father. “Before you go, Orson, there’s something I’d like to show you.” He left the room and came back with my freehand map, which he gave my father, holding it at arm’s length as though it might be contaminated.

“You asked her to draw a map of the United States?” My father sounded incredulous. “I don’t think
I
could draw a freehand map of anything, even though the word ‘genius’ was whispered in my ear from the time I began to walk.”

“You may be right about that, Orson, but I still found it shocking that Chrissie couldn’t put more than a few cities on her map. What do they teach American schoolchildren?”

“Why don’t you ask an English child to draw a freehand map of Great Britain and see what you get? I think Christopher did very well, considering …” A wonderfully warm feeling had begun in my toes and was working its way through my whole body.

“Then have a look at these essays she wrote.” Jack thrust them into my father’s hands, explaining how they had come to be written.

“You’re sending her to the Forum and all the way to St. Peter’s by herself?” My father sounded incredulous again.

“Please just read the essays, Orson,” my mother put in.

“I haven’t got time to read them all, you know …”

“Then just read the first one.”

He did. And he didn’t laugh. “I think this is very good!” he announced. “As you Brits would say, ‘Well done.’ ‘Jolly good.’ ‘Yoicks, tally ho!’ ”

“Oh, really Orson,” my mother sighed.

“What about Chrissie’s spelling mistakes?” Jackie asked, very stiff and British.

“What about them? Emily Brontë couldn’t spell either, you know. What’s important is that Christopher expresses herself in an original way. Surely originality is more important than
spelling
, but perhaps you don’t agree.”

“Who’s Emily Brontë, Daddy?”

“Ask me, tomorrow, darling girl. Now I really must go.”

The glow brought on by my father’s visit lasted for the rest of the day. It had given me a song I would sing under my breath whenever my spirits sagged. The lyrics were simple and to the point:

Daddy doesn’t like Jackie.
Jackie didn’t make a hit and Daddy doesn’t like him, doesn’t like him,
doesn’t like him one bit!

T
HE NEXT DAY
was mellow with September sunlight. I sat beside my father in the backseat of his chauffeur-driven car, breathing in gulps of air from the open window to ward off the nauseating smell of his cigar. “I want to tell you about the actors you’re going to meet today,” he was saying in confidential tones as we left the center of Rome and its honking horns behind us. “There’s my old friend from the Gate Theatre in Dublin, Micheál MacLiammóir, who’s known me since I was sixteen. You may find him a little fey.”

“What’s
fey
, Daddy?”

“Someone not quite of this world, like a leprechaun or magical being. But you know, for all his exaggerated mannerisms, Micheál is a very perceptive and intuitive person—he notices
everything
—and that, of course, makes him the superb actor he is.”

“What part is he playing in your movie?”

“Iago. The evil courtier who tricks Othello into believing his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful to him.”

“And who’s playing Desdemona?”

“A very pretty Canadian actress called Suzanne Cloutier. You’ll meet her as well.”

“Is she nice?” Something in his voice had suggested that she wasn’t.

My father sighed and thought a while. “Suzanne is so stubborn and resistant to everything I tell her to do that I’ve started calling her ‘the Iron Butterfly.’ But I know that if I can just get through to her, she’ll be the greatest
Desdemona the world has ever seen! God knows her
looks
are perfect for the part, and I ran through several Desdemonas before I found her.”

As I would later learn, the first Desdemona had been the Italian actress Lea Padovani, who dropped out to make another film. She was followed by the American actress Betsy Blair, who did not last long, because my father found her looks “too modern” for a Renaissance maiden. Cloutier, on the other hand, was a delicate, wide-eyed blond with an air of innocence that seemed irreproachable. In her period costume, she was such a perfect Desdemona it was impossible to picture anyone else in the role.

We were now driving along the Appian Way, which my father was explaining to me was the most important of the ancient Roman roads because it linked the capital of Rome with the south of Italy. “There are catacombs all around here,” he said, gesturing out the car window at the hulking ruins to the left and right of us. “On another day we’ll come back and have a look at them.” I stared happily out the window at the pines arching over the road, the stands of cypress, and the gentle countryside bathed in the honey-colored light of early autumn. For the first time since I had arrived in Italy, I felt myself again, as though I had never set foot in Jack Pringle’s kingdom of cool restraint.

At a country restaurant in a garden overlooking the Appian Way, we were joined at lunch by Micheál MacLiammóir who
did
seem “not quite of this world.” Slight and angular, he looked as though a puff of wind might carry him off at any moment. I had never met a man before who powdered his face white and lined his dark, expressive eyes in black, turning himself into a tired ghost. But his manner was so genuinely warm and his sense of humor so nimble that I liked him at once. The attraction seems to have been mutual, for in the journal he kept on the making of
Othello
and later published as
Put Money in Thy Purse
, he noted:

Orson’s little daughter Christopher has appeared: an enchantress of the very first order. Not beautiful, which surprises me because her mother Virginia is lovely, and she resembles her closely, except that she is dark instead of fair. And Orson himself, though admittedly no Hermes, is not without a certain lunatic radiance; maybe Christopher will turn into a beauty, or at least a siren, because she already has merely to glance your way (which she frequently does if you’re near enough, whoever you are) and you melt.

As lunch progressed I grew increasingly sure of myself, especially after my father told Micheál with evident pride that I had done an impersonation of Ethel Merman in Todd School’s talent show. “She also knows all the songs from
South Pacific
,” added my beaming father.

“And
Brigadoon
,” I could not resist adding.

“Oh, do sing for us, Christopher,” Micheál implored.

“Do you want me to, Daddy?”

He had
not
wanted me “to sing for my supper” in Granny’s kitchen, I remembered, but now he nodded, and I launched into my repertoire of songs and impersonations. Later Micheál would record in his journal, with some exaggeration: