In My Father's Shadow (10 page)

On school mornings, I steeled myself when it was time to get into Skipper’s dusty, old rattletrap of a car. Hunched over the wheel and humming under
his breath, he took the turns as though we were in a stagecoach being chased by bandits, but it wasn’t the car ride that bothered me. It was the prospect of walking into my fifth-grade class and hearing someone hiss at my back, “Here comes the
girl
!” This invariably set off a chorus of moans. They could not have sounded more miserable if they had heard all school vacations would be cancelled for the next year.

It was useless to discuss my predicament with Skipper, who thought being the only girl in his school for boys conferred a high degree of distinction on me. “You should be mightily proud of yourself,” he had told me more than once. “How many girls get a chance like this?”

“But the boys don’t like me, Skipper.”

“They will, honey, they will. Just give ’em time to get used to you.”

They’d had plenty of time, it seemed to me, and my situation was not improving. If being a girl wasn’t enough of a crime in their eyes, I was also the child of Todd’s most famous alumnus, a fact I had hoped to keep secret but which everyone on campus had known long before I set foot in the place. During recess some older boys lay in wait for me and began bruising my ears with “Yah! Yah! Orson’s little brat. Go back where you came from!”
If only I could
…

My efforts at playing first baseball and then football with my classmates failed to win me any converts. Then a bighearted boy named Louis Bernhardt appointed himself my friend and protector. One afternoon after class, we walked around the football field, discussing my predicament. “You can’t help being a girl,” sympathized Louis, shaking his head, “or having a famous father. It’s really a shame …”

“What can I do to make the boys like me? There must be something.” We trudged on a while in silence.

“I know!” he finally exclaimed. “You can give a party and we’ll invite …” He reeled off the names of the few boys in our class who were beginning to waver in their opinion of me.

So we went into town, where I spent my entire allowance on candy and other treats. When school let out the next day, Louis and I held our “party” behind some bushes in a secluded corner of the campus grounds. The three boys we had invited started to talk excitedly about the Superman movie they had seen the previous Saturday, and to speculate about what was going to happen when the sequel was shown this coming Saturday. “Shall we let her come with us to the movies?” The hands helping themselves to the last of the
candy froze in midair. The boys looked at one another, tentative, while I held my breath. Then, slowly, one by one, they nodded. “Okay, she can come, if she doesn’t scream or anything. Girls always start to scream when …”

“Chrissie won’t scream,” Louis assured them. “I’ll sit next to her and hold her hand so she won’t be scared.”

So ended my days of taunts, snickers, and hissed insults in the schoolroom. My new friends saw to it that the other boys left me in peace.

On Saturday mornings, we insatiable fans of Superman, Batman, and Spiderwoman trooped to the picture show in town, stopping first at the candy store to stock up on Mars bars. And I am proud to say I watched these movies with as much gusto as the boys around me, stamping and yelling when our heroes triumphed over evil, falling silent during the suspense-ridden scary parts, and though I had to clutch Louis’s hand from time to time, not once did I scream. Not once.

S
KIPPER CONTINUED TO
send reports of my activities to my father in Rome in which he indulged his love of hyperbole. “Last Saturday, in my innocence,” he wrote him, “I suggested she write a play for Valentine’s Day presentation. Now her once beloved ice skates lie in the corner like empty saddles in the old corral. I rather expected this activity would open up a new vista of delight, but I was unprepared for the completeness, nay violence, of her ecstasy. Over the weekend Hortense had to resort to force-feeding her while her hand still clutched a poised pencil and her brain still clutched a dancing ballerina’s problem of outwitting a horrible giant. She couldn’t possibly have been as thrilled and excited if she had just discovered the ultimate rewards of sex. Where this will lead, God knows. And when she tells me she plans to be: Author, Producer, Director, and Principle [
sic
] Actor, you will sympathize, I trust, with my solemn wonder.”

Did Skipper really believe I was growing up in my father’s likeness, or was he merely flattering his former protégé? In any event, I was experiencing, as my father had before me, Skipper’s remarkable ability to instill confidence in the young and make them believe they can do anything.

One day he took me to the airfield where he kept his own cub plane. Once aloft, he turned over the controls to me and said, “Now it’s your turn to fly, honey.”

“But I don’t know how,” I wailed.

“Now, Chrissie, there’s nothing to be scared of. You’re a smart gal and flying
is a cinch. Look, put your hands here, that’s right, move this a little to the left, that’s it, hold her steady now …”

How calm he sounded, how sure of me. He had moved out of the pilot’s seat to sit behind me, and a sudden suspicion made me swing around. “Am I flying this plane, Skipper, or are you?” As I spoke, the plane took a sudden dip downward.

“Lesson number one,” drawled Skipper in his Midwestern twang. “Don’t look over your shoulder when you’re piloting a plane. Keep your eyes fixed on the horizon, that’s the girl, and use it as your guide.”

“I’m flying! Look, Skipper, I’m really flying!”

“Told you it was a cinch.”

Skipper took the same breezy approach with me when I wanted to be in the school talent show. “Of course, you can be in the show,” he assured me. “You were born for the stage like your dad. How old are you now?”

“Ten.”

“Well, then, you’re a year ahead of him.” Skipper showed me some stills from 1920 productions of the Todd Troopers, as the show was called in my father’s time. I was amazed to see a chorus line of young Todd boys sporting wigs, makeup, dresses, and silk stockings. “Folks found it hilarious in those days,” Skipper explained. “Believe it or not, we weren’t the only all-male school putting on a girlie show.”

“Did Daddy dress up like a girl, too?”

Skipper laughed, shaking his head. “By the time he was eleven, Orson was just the right shape and size for the chorus, but once you heard him speak, it was out of the question. He had that
same
remarkable voice back then, and he already had an adult stage presence. No, we gave our prodigy the juvenile lead in our show called
Finesse the Queen
even though he was shorter than his leading lady.” And Skipper fished out a photo of my chubby, eleven-year-old father, radiating confidence in his dress suit, white shirt, and tie as he stands surrounded by female impersonators looming over him in veils and harem outfits.

By my day, the Todd Troopers had evolved into the Bach to Boogie Show, which included anything and everything except boys imitating girls. Once a year Skipper took the show on the road, and we played to full houses in Chicago, Detroit, and other Midwestern cities. It was an incredible opportunity for a young person to experience the theater in a professional setting.

I had my own act impersonating Ethel Merman, the star of
Annie Get Your
Gun
. I had seen the musical during a visit with my mother in New York, and for the rest of my stay I had amused her and her friends by imitating Merman’s brassy voice, swagger, and sass. As a parting gift, my mother gave me a recording of the show, which I played until I knew every song by heart.

Dressed in buckskins, boots, and a cowboy hat, I toted a rifle and belted out two of Merman’s hit songs: “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Accompanying me were half a dozen Todd seniors in cowboy outfits, forming a half circle behind me, crooning and strumming on guitars. I threw myself into my Ethel Merman impersonation with the same enthusiasm and lack of self-consciousness I had felt playing Macduff’s son. And what fun it was, being on the stage, much better than being in the movies. There was no waiting around day after day, wondering when they would get to my scene, no endless takes when they finally did. I could stride out in my cowgirl outfit, do my act once, and then bow to waves of applause. What would Daddy think of me now?

“Y
OUR FATHER
’
S HERE
, Chrissie …”

“He’s come all the way from Rome to see you …”

“He’s busy with Skipper now, but you’ll see him later at the farmhouse.”

The school day passed in a delirium. A teacher helped me find Rome on a spinning globe, but I had no clear idea of how far away it was from Woodstock, Illinois. Rome might as well be in another galaxy. Nor did I dare believe that when the school day was over at last and I burst through the farmhouse door, I would smell cigar smoke and hear a bass voice booming, “Is that my darling girl?”

And yet that is exactly what happened.

There was my father in Granny’s kitchen, more handsome and imposing than ever, seated at the head of the oak table as though he sat there every day. “Daddy!” I shrieked, flinging my arms around his neck. At that precise moment, the door of the Swiss cuckoo clock on the wall flew open, the wooden cuckoo popped out, and sang its two notes, making us laugh. (I was to wonder in later years if the speech about the cuckoo clock that my father contributed to the character of Harry Lime in
The Third Man
originated in Granny Hill’s kitchen.)

How strange it was to be eating dinner with my father as if no time had passed since our last meal together at the Brown Derby in Hollywood! He had put on weight since then, and his eyes were bloodshot, but he was still
a vital presence. As old as he looked to my ten-year-old eyes, he was barely thirty-three. “How’s my darling girl?” he asked, but before I could tell him the story of my life, he began talking to Granny and Skipper as though I were not there. That, at least, was familiar.

Flushed in the face, an apron tied around her ample waist, Granny was bustling from oven to table and back again. “Now this is what I call real food,” my father exclaimed each time she set down a dish before him.

“Oh, get on with you,” Granny scoffed, wiping her hands on her apron. “There must be plenty of real food in Rome by the look of you.”

“Now Horty, let’s not have any cracks about my weight.” He gave one of his loud laughs that had no humor in it. “Let’s talk about Christopher instead. I hear she’s been pounding the boards in your variety show. May a concerned Todd parent ask why he was not informed of your theatrical designs on his child?”

“You should have seen her, Orson,” Skipper enthused. “She was a real trooper. Brought down the house, too.” Then turning to me. “Come on, Chrissie, show your dad what you can do.”

“Now, Skipper, don’t make the child sing for her supper.”

“I don’t mind, Daddy.”

“Well, I do.” He laid a restraining hand on my arm. “Pay no attention to Skipper, whatever he tells you, and stay away from the stage.”

“Why, Daddy?”

“A life in the theater will only make someone like you unhappy.”

“But it was such fun …”

“What did I tell you, Orson?” Skipper grinned.

“Well, I can see I’m outnumbered here.” He paused to spear another piece of Granny’s fried chicken. “Seriously, I wish you two would point Christopher in another direction. She’s much too bright to be an actress. I tell you, she’ll be
miserable
in that kind of life.”

“But
you’re
not miserable, Daddy, and
you’re
an actor.”

“How do you know I’m not miserable? As a matter of fact, I
hate
acting and I only do it because I have to.” He held me in his gaze, and I wondered if he could see I did not believe him.

“Chrissie does like to write stories,” Granny put in. “You should hear what her English teacher says.”

“There you go!” my father roared delightedly.

“She also loves to play the piano. She’s taking lessons with—”

“No, no, a musician’s life is almost as bad as an actor’s. Frankly, I don’t care what she does as long as she doesn’t end up in Hollywood with all those cretins.”

“What’s a cretin?” I asked without getting a response.

“Well, acting does run in the family,” Skipper drawled, surveying me with his keen, sailor-blue eyes. “Chrissie gets it from her mother, too.”

“Virginia was all ambition and no talent,” my father rumbled. “Thank God she finally came to her senses and gave it up.”

“You didn’t think so once,” Granny observed. “The way I remember it, the two of you set off for New York to make theater history, and God himself couldn’t have stopped you …”

The adults went on to talk of other things. “May I be excused, please?” I asked.

“Yes, honey, run along now.”

In the doorway, I turned to look one last time at my father, closing my eyes and then opening them again to make sure he was still there. Then I lingered
long enough to catch Granny’s loving smile and Skipper’s approving wink — long enough to feel them reassuring me that I could be anything and anybody.