In My Father's Shadow (40 page)

At the same time, being Orson Welles’s daughter had given me riches denied the children of ordinary men. I was beginning to swing my eyes away from the flawed human being who had disappeared into a box of ashes and to gaze instead at the solid treasure he had left behind. By 1988, a year overflowing with tributes to Orson Welles, I was able to write Bonnie that I was attending a retrospective of his films in a different spirit. “Even though I’ve seen the films before, some of them many times, I’ll be seeing them in an entirely
new light. All this is happening at a good time for me, when I have resolved as much as I can the pain and difficulty that my personal relationship with my father caused me; when I can now value him as a genius and take pride in being his daughter, something I couldn’t fully do when he was alive.”

“Y
OUR FATHER
’
S DEATH
will liberate you in the long run,” predicted my brother-in-law, Jack Feder, when I was still in the depths of mourning. As a psychologist, he had seen it happen with patients of his and others he knew who had been overshadowed by a famous parent. Then the parent died and the child stepped out of the shadows. “You’re going to come into your own now, Chris.” I was forty-seven when Jack made his prophecy.

My father’s death had released me from the misery of wanting what I could never have, and the relief I felt in those first weeks was physical. It was as though an intolerable burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Returning to the comfort of work, I began to write poems in odd moments, trying to give form to the chaos swirling around in my head and heart. To my surprise and delight, I found that I was working with more freedom and confidence than I had ever felt before. Writing used to be a struggle — like trying to wrestle a fabulous winged creature to the ground — but now the process was becoming exhilarating, whether I saved the day’s pages or tossed them into the wastebasket.

Of those closest to me, only Irwin and my mother truly understood what was happening to me. On March 4, 1986, almost five months after my father’s death, my mother wrote me from Tisbury, England, where she and Jackie were living in a Palladian mansion converted into a retirement home. It was a rare moment of empathy on her part, one that led to our establishing a more satisfying relationship.

I understand perfectly the upset your father’s death has caused you. You feel you never got through to him and you are right. You didn’t, anymore than his other daughters did, or his wives… . When you were a little girl in Santa Monica and Orson planned to pick you up for lunch, he’d forget and I have many memories of you standing in the hall all dressed up, waiting and crying. What could I say to you? I sent you to Todd [School] hoping that Hortense and Skipper could explain him better than I could.
They adored you and you became one of the family there. The Hills were the nearest he ever came to having parents, but when Hortense died, Orson was not at her funeral. That to me is not understandable and it must have hurt Skipper deeply. I remember how unhappy you were in South Africa — so far away from your father. I wrote so many letters to him organizing visits for you in France, Spain, Italy, etc. You went but he was busy and left you with his secretaries. He loved you when you were in front of him, but he forgot you when you were out of sight. Just like everyone else in his life.

If Orson had been Joe Dokes, you might easily have been able to handle this kind of neglect and written him off. But because he was who he was, you found it harder and harder as you grew up and his fame spread.

But now I must tell you that there was nothing you could ever have done with your life or your talents that would have got through to him. And I know how you have driven yourself all these years. And they have paid off from your point of view. You are very successful and must now write for yourself. Not for Orson’s approval. Do you understand what I am saying? I have a great fear that I could hurt your feelings and that I would hate to do. I am sure Irwin is a great help to you about this. An honest, down-to-earth man who understands you perfectly and loves you. You are very lucky to have him in your life.

My mother tended to oversimplify, and she knew nothing of Oja Kodar, the one person in my father’s life who most definitely “got through to him.” Nonetheless, she had given me the golden key to the kingdom — “You … must now write for yourself. Not for Orson’s approval.” Feeling like a bird swept out of its cage, I began the series of poems and monologues that would grow over the next decade into a book I called
The Movie Director
.

While the central character stood in for Orson Welles in the beginning, he gradually moved into the realm of fiction. Even so, writing in the movie director’s voice allowed me to slip into my father’s skin. It helped me to see the world through his eyes and experience his triumphs, frustrations, and regrets. Creating a semifictional Orson Welles moved me so close to the heart and soul of the real one that I forgave him.

I
MET
F
RANK
Brady, whom I still consider one of the best and most evenhanded of my father’s biographers, while visiting the Hills in their retirement home in Coral Gables, Florida. An earnest, mild-mannered man with a scholar’s gray-streaked beard and heavy-rimmed glasses, he had come to interview Granny and Skipper. By a coincidence, Frank’s wife was teaching at the same community college as Irwin, and it turned out the Bradys lived in Manhattan, not far from us. We all became friends.

Frank’s biography,
Citizen Welles
, was eventually published in 1989. Although not the first book to tackle the vast subject of Orson Welles, it was the first comprehensive overview of the man and his work to come out in a single volume. It served me as an excellent introduction to my father’s artistry, filling in many gaps in my knowledge of his achievements in radio and the theater before I was born. Frank’s book also made me more aware of my father’s intense involvement in American politics during the 1940s, but, most important, it deepened my understanding of Orson Welles as an independent artist and a man dedicated to liberal causes. Toward the end of the book, I came to Brady’s comment about me: “And after becoming friends with Christopher … I found that although she had a deep love for her father, there were major gaps in the information that she had about him. ‘You probably
do
know more about my father than I do,’ she told me.”

That was certainly true when I first met Frank. It was disconcerting to realize that someone who never got closer to Orson Welles than a long-distance phone call possessed more in-depth knowledge of his life and work than I did. I resolved that I would better inform myself by reading every book and article I could find on my father. Through Skipper, I also obtained a wealth of materials, which included my father’s personal letters and his Shakespeare playbooks originally published at Todd School.

In the spring of 1988, the film school at New York University held an extensive tribute to Orson Welles that honored his work in radio, theater, and film. For me, it was an invaluable crash course in the artistry and importance of Orson Welles, and it also put me in touch with William G. Simon, the amiable chairman of the cinema studies department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. A sincere admirer of my father and the prime organizer of the tribute, Bill felt Orson Welles was seen as “a misunderstood genius” and that the time was ripe for a critical reappraisal. As he told the
New York Times
, “Welles is very famous for
Citizen Kane
and one or two other works, but we went on the presupposition that there was much more of interest and it was
worth digging for it. We thought that to bring back into the foreground some of the lesser-known work and to deal with the relationships between the radio, theater and film work would be especially useful. I don’t think there’s anything like a full appreciation of his accomplishments in the public eye.”

The retrospective ran from April 22 to May 15. “Orson Welles’s creative output on stage, on film and on the radio was so voluminous that it’s taking three weeks to cover all the bases,” pointed out a reporter for
New York Newsday
. Several of the events ran concurrently: an exhibition of Welles’s theater productions in the 1930s, which included rare photographs, costume and set designs, posters and playbills; the Radio Listening Room, which offered daily selections from Welles’s radio broadcasts, including the famous (or infamous)
War of the Worlds;
and the rare opportunity to see
all
of Welles’s films at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, not just those made in Hollywood but the six films he had completed in Europe, which were almost never shown in the United States:
Chimes at Midnight, F for Fake, Othello, The Trial, Mr. Arkadin
, and
The Immortal Story
. Finally, a three-day conference at the end of the retrospective was devoted to lectures and panel discussions, one of them led by Oja Kodar, whom the director of the Public Theater presented to the audience as “one of the most extraordinary women it has been my privilege to meet.” Afterward I was tempted to walk up to Oja and introduce myself, but I felt too shy. I knew her only as the alluring young woman in
F for Fake
who moved with a dancer’s grace and revealed her naked body without a trace of self-consciousness. Now in her late forties, Oja had blossomed into a fully mature, stylish, and still beautiful woman who had spoken passionately about her years with my father.

Throughout the retrospective, Bill Simon was kind and generous, sharing books, articles, and his own knowledge with me and treating me to a private showing of the filmed interview my father gave to the press the morning after
The War of The Worlds
broadcast. Tousled and exhausted from having been up all night making history, Orson Welles seemed genuinely contrite while the newsmen circled him like a pack of hungry jackals. At the same time, Bill and I agreed, it could not have upset him that he became a household word overnight.

I had told Bill that, while I wanted to participate fully in the retrospective, I also wanted to remain incognito, and he respected my wishes. I continued to stay in the background even when people attending the retrospective sought me out. Dick Wilson, who had been my father’s assistant in the Mercury
Theatre and later followed him to Hollywood, seemed especially eager to establish a connection with me. He had known me as a child, he reminded me. We had been together on the set of
Macbeth
, and how “thrilled” he was to meet me again as an adult. And did I know, he exulted, that he had “copied Orson” by naming his son “Christopher”? I regret it now, but at the time I could not warm to him. Something about Dick Wilson reminded me uncomfortably of people I had known in my Hollywood childhood and wanted to avoid in my present life.

M
Y INCLINATION TO
remain in hiding was blown away one morning in May. I received a call from the public relations firm that was organizing the opening ceremony for the new Radio Hall of Fame being established by Emerson Radio Corporation. Would I accept an award being given my father for his
Mercury Theatre on the Air
series? Orson Welles was one of eighteen “radio legends” to be inducted into Emerson’s Radio Hall of Fame on May 17, 1988. The black-tie ceremony would take place in the lobby of the Empire State Building.

“I was so stunned when they called that I forgot to ask what the award was,” I wrote Bonnie Nims. “Anyway it’s a black-tie affair … which raised shrieks from me (‘I’ve got nothing to wear!’) and grumbles from Irwin (‘Do I really have to wear a black tie?’), a question I relayed to the public relations person. My father never wore one, I pointed out. She said she’d get back to me. I rather hope we can go in our non-designer jeans, striking another blow for artists and mavericks.”

However, by the time the evening of May 17 rolled around, we had bowed to convention. Irwin wore a borrowed black tie, and I decked myself out in a black lace formal gown, hastily purchased a few days before and never to be taken off the hanger again. A sleek limousine was dispatched to our door to convey us in style to the Empire State Building. When we got there, it was media mayhem, the lobby jammed with photographers and reporters, klieg lights blazing from all corners, and cables snaking across the floor.

Before I knew it, I was spirited away by a bevy of press photographers and was posed standing beside Arthur Marx, son of Groucho. Arthur was a pleasant, nice-looking man who bore only a slight resemblance to his famous father, made slighter by the absence of horn-rimmed glasses and a black mustache. He had flown into town to accept the posthumous award for Groucho’s popular quiz show,
You Bet Your Life
.

“Well,” I told him sotto voce as the klieg lights bore down on us and the flashbulbs went off in our faces like muted gunfire, “whatever problems we had with our famous fathers, this makes up for it a bit, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” he deadpanned back, sending me a sad smile.

I gathered that, like me, he had been fatherless for fame, but in the dazzle of the moment, what did it matter? We were there to honor our fathers and I, for one, was thoroughly enjoying myself. To my surprise, I found that I not only liked being in the limelight, I felt calm and sure of myself.

“I had no idea you were such a ham,” a bemused Irwin whispered in my ear as I was led away by a documentary filmmaker from Chicago who wanted an interview.

“Neither did I!” I admitted, laughing, and yet it felt so natural, as though I had been doing this all my life.

“It must be genetic,” Irwin decided.

“Are you proud of me?”

“I’m always proud of you.”

The award turned out to be a handsome miniature replica of an early Emerson radio. A golden plaque read
RADIO HALL OF FAME
— 1988,
ORSON WELLES
,
ANTHOLOGY SERIES
— “
THE MERCURY THEATER
” [
sic
]. I was proud to take the award home and display it on the bookshelves in our living room.