In My Father's Shadow (38 page)

A moment of hilarity on the set of
The Other Side of the Wind
(from left to right: John Huston, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich).

“No, no,” he interrupted me, “the award came much too soon. It was like going to my own funeral while I’m still alive!” I said I understood how he felt, but now that Hollywood had officially recognized his extraordinary talent, I hoped the money would start pouring in so that he’d be able to finish
The Other Side of the Wind
. This feature, which he had begun soon after his return to the United States, starred John Huston, among others. “And
The Deep
. And
Don Quixote
,” he added with a rueful laugh. “You have no idea how many of my children are stillborn for lack of funds.”

His children. I wanted to say that Becky and I should have been sitting beside Paola and Beatrice during the ceremony, that we were also his family. I wanted to ask if he had any idea how much it hurt to be repeatedly overlooked as though I were a footnote he had lost somewhere in the voluminous pages of his life. But I knew that whenever I surfaced in his mind, his impulses toward me were kind, generous, and loving. He could never be cruel to me, as my mother so easily was, any more than he could be vulgar, even if he used vulgar words. There was a shining innocence about Orson Welles that the world could not tarnish. And that was what I loved in him and why, in the end, I was always able to push aside anger and hurt.

“I’m going to be coming to New York soon,” he was saying, “so I’ll be calling you again, Christopher.”

“Please come to our place for dinner.”

“No, no, I don’t want you slaving all day over a hot stove.”

“I’d love to make dinner for you, really I would.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

“And I want you to meet Irwin.”

“Irwin?”

“My husband.”
We’ve been married for five years and you still haven’t met him
.

“Oh, yes, of course. Well, you can bring him with you when you come to my hotel.”

“Then you’re not going to come to our home?”

“I’ll call you again soon. Until then, darling girl, my dearest, dearest love.”

A
YEAR AND
a half later, my father had neither called nor met Irwin. But he did think of me at Christmas. A tall, ungainly houseplant arrived with a gift card, not in his handwriting.

That Christmas, I wrote the Hills, “Needless to say, O.W. has not called me since Irwin’s sister Marlene cornered him in a restaurant. That was over a year ago. The chances of Marlene once again finding herself sitting a table away from O.W. in a Hollywood restaurant are rather slim. Therefore, I do not expect another call for years.”

“You should call Paola now and then,” Skipper urged me in reply. “Orson has pretty much abandoned her.”

In time I did reconnect with Paola, but during the early years of my marriage, I had a life of my own to forge. I was now in my thirties and gradually establishing myself as an educational writer for schoolchildren. After the project at Encyclopaedia Britannica ended, I had gone to work for a small publishing firm that produced elementary reading materials. When that company folded, I became a freelance writer, and soon I met Patricia Cusick, an editorial vice president at the Scott Foresman publishing company. She believed so strongly in my talent that she gave me the opportunity to write a language arts program for elementary schoolchildren.

After the success of the language arts books, there was talk of my doing a spelling series, which I happened to mention in a letter to my father. Soon
afterward I received his first letter to me in eight years. “The news that a child of mine is to be given responsability [
sic
] for a text book on spelling is dizzying proof that genetic determinism is more a hurdle than a handicap. Congratulations.” He signed the letter “your errant and admiring father.”

“So you’ve finally impressed your father,” Irwin observed, reading his letter, “but why should the fact that you’re going to write a spelling book make him prouder of you than anything else you’ve done?”

“Because
he
never learned how to spell.”

A
LTHOUGH
I
COULD
never persuade my father to come to our home, he did finally meet Irwin in 1980. My father was then sixty-five, and Irwin was fifty-seven. (It didn’t occur to me until years later that having a son-in-law close to his own age might be a problem for Orson Welles.) On the day my father called to invite me to lunch at his hotel, I decided to take a stand. It would mean a lot to me, I said, if he would meet my husband. It didn’t seem right that Irwin and I had been married almost ten years and my father had never met him. “Has it really been that long?” His voice rose in astonishment. “Then you must
both
come to my hotel and have lunch with me tomorrow.”

“But couldn’t you possibly come to our place instead? Just this once? It would be so wonderful to make lunch for you here.”

“No, I can’t do that.” There was a long pause. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I’ve been ill, and it isn’t easy for me to get around.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t, but now that you do, I hope you understand why I want you and your husband to come to my hotel.”

“But if you aren’t well, perhaps we shouldn’t come — ”

“No, no, I’m well enough to see you, just a little weak and shaky on my pins these days. They have to push me around in a wheelchair, you know.”

I had heard about the wheelchair. On our previous visit, he had joked that he always ordered one at airports and how grand it was to be wheeled in comfort and style from the cab to the plane. Then he had laughed, pretending to be delighted with himself, as though he alone had outwitted the airport gods who decree that we must all stand in a long line at the check-in counter until our knees turn to water. So I had thought what he had wanted me to think: that the wheelchair was a clever ruse. I had no idea how ill he really was or what an effort he was making to see me whenever he passed through New York.

Pages from Orson’s passport, which expired on January 15, 1981, less than five years before his death.

The next day Irwin and I walked down the long hallway to my father’s suite of rooms in the elegant Carlyle Hotel. My palms were sweating. I kept asking Irwin how I looked and if my hair needed combing, and he kept telling me to relax. “Just be yourself, Chris, and everything will be fine.”

Suddenly a door flew open at the end of the hall and my father’s enormous figure stood outlined in the lighted space behind him. He was wearing a voluminous white caftan that fell to his feet. His appearance made me think of an African king, an aging Othello, but one who had spared his own life and Desdemona’s and forgiven Iago his treachery. Smiling broadly, he ushered us into his domain. I made a movement to embrace him, but he warned me away. “Kiki will bite if you come too close.” He stroked the head of the small black poodle nestled under his arm. “She’s more jealous of me than ten mistresses.” Chuckling, he sank heavily into an armchair, depositing Kiki on his lap where she crouched forward, bared her teeth, and snarled at us. “Don’t pet her whatever you do. Poor little thing. She must have been horribly mistreated when she was a puppy.”

How genial he was and how gracious, shaking Irwin’s hand, motioning us
to chairs at a good remove from Kiki, suggesting we order from room service right away as it tended to be slow, even in a hotel as grand as this one. And please, we shouldn’t pay any attention to the few bread crumbs he allowed himself for lunch. We should order whatever we wanted and plenty of it. “I like to watch other people eating lunch,” he told us, eyes twinkling.

I was struck once again by my father’s courteous manner and what a true gentleman he was. Had he been less a gentleman, he might have introduced us to Oja, who was undoubtedly traveling with him and, for all we knew, hiding in the next room. But it was inconceivable to a man of my father’s refinement that his daughter and son-in-law should meet his lover, not when we knew he was married to Paola. So on this visit and those that followed, we all pretended Oja did not exist. (Years later, when I finally stayed with Oja at her seaside home in Primosten, she told me that she had seen me more than once, arriving in the hotel lobby on my way to see Orson just as she was going out to shop or spend the afternoon in a museum. We laughed to think how easily we might have met in spite of my father’s precautions.)

A knock on the door announced the arrival of lunch and my father immediately brightened as though we had come to the high point of our visit. A waiter wheeled in a table set with starched linens, silverware, and a few posies nodding in a crystal vase. He ceremoniously removed the silver domes covering our plates and then discreetly withdrew. Now my father settled down not to the business of eating — his lunch was as meager as he had said it would be — but to entertaining us with a stream of anecdotes. Often the joke was on himself. During the filming of
The Third Man
in Vienna, he told us, his old buddy Joseph Cotten made a bet with him that he would be unable to entice a certain actress into his bed. Although she was so unattractive she should have been grateful for any man’s attentions, no one had managed to seduce her to date. “So I spent my entire time in Vienna chasing this woman, determined to win my bet with Jo, and all this time I was working with one of the most beautiful women in the world and ignoring her completely. Guess who it was. Alida Valli. Yes, Alida Valli.” He shook his head, chuckling. “Well, I won my bet with Jo, but I lost out with the lady in question who turned out to be
terrible
in bed. The worst lay of my life, in fact. Then, after I’d left Vienna, I found out Alida Valli had been mad for me, and if I’d given her the slightest encouragement, she’d have hopped in my bed in a minute. How could I have been such an idiot?” We joined in his hearty laughter.

The hour passed pleasantly enough and then he rose, signaling that it was
time for us to go. I had hardly said a word, wanting to give Irwin a chance to shine. However, Irwin also had said very little. He had simply told my father how he had been “blown away” by
Citizen Kane
when he saw it for the first time. Otherwise, he had listened politely, as I had, and laughed in the right places.

On my way to use the bathroom before we left, I passed through my father’s bedroom and was shocked by the number of pill bottles on his bedside table. Even then, however, it did not fully register on me that he was a sick man pretending not to be. I was too caught up in feelings of disappointment. Did my father not see how unusually intelligent Irwin was? Irwin had his own inexhaustible supply of stories, but he had not been given the chance to tell even one of them. (Later, I would hear from Skipper the staggering notion that Orson found Irwin “too possessive” of me.)

On our way home, Irwin shared his own disappointment. “Did you notice how your father talked
at
us, not
to
us? He was like a king holding audience, deciding when we should enter his presence and when we should take our leave.” Then Irwin brightened. “Well, at least I can say I’ve finally met my father-in-law.”

I took Irwin’s hand. He agreed with me that, however regal my father may have been in person, he had also been charming and cordial. Although he was not a well man, he had put himself out to entertain us, asking nothing in return. There was something sad about my father regaling us with amusing stories we had heard him tell before — and with greater aplomb — on television.

D
URING THE FINAL
ten years of his life, my father was earning his living, or as he put it, his “bread and butter,” by making frequent appearances on television talk shows. He also found fairly steady employment as a voice-over man, narrating documentaries and doing commercials on radio and television. “I have to keep my name alive and my bills paid,” he told me. While I understood that he had to take whatever work came along, it saddened me that, instead of making his own “ribbons of dreams,” one of the great movie directors of the twentieth century was doing card tricks and selling “no wine before its time” on television.

Yet it was hard not to enjoy my father’s guest appearances on talk shows, whether hosted by David Frost, Johnny Carson, or Merv Griffin. Orson Welles was invariably a witty, charming guest, an oversized but still handsome
man sitting at his ease and ready to entertain the audience all night long, telling one anecdote after another. The exception was one Merv Griffin show. Another guest, the writer Gore Vidal, seemed hostile to my father and kept cutting him off in midsentence. After seeing that show, I wrote my father that he had handled Vidal’s rudeness with admirable poise and good humor. “You came off extremely well,” I told him, “whereas Vidal seemed too angry at the world to listen to anyone.” My father replied that, while he was glad I thought well of him, he was not sure I was right about Gore Vidal. True, Vidal had been angry enough at him to launch a fierce attack in the
New York Review of Books
several months prior to the show. “My refusal to acknowledge any wounds may well have been rather irritating,” my father conceded. Nonetheless, he felt Vidal’s anger was an act. “He breaks in new versions of it every season on the lecture circuit, fine tuning the best of the one-liners for the talk shows; and if he doesn’t listen to anyone it’s not out of rage, just a chronic reluctance to grant his fellow ‘guests’ a second more airtime than he can help.” What a good sport my father was about the pygmies who dogged him, piercing his shins with their poisoned arrows.