In My Father's Shadow (12 page)

“There
is
something ageless about him,” I agreed.

“Oh, he’ll never grow old. He’ll outlive us all!”

“You’ve often joked that he’s a leprechaun in disguise.”

“What makes you think I was joking? You know what? I’ve decided he’s really a troll. The kind who lives under a bridge and lies in wait for unsuspecting travelers.” He laughed delightedly at his new and improved metaphor, which called up for us both the mischief in Skipper’s smile and in the way he crinkled up his sky-blue eyes as he stared off into the distance at something known only to himself. Then my father’s face clouded as he remembered what it had cost him to “win” Skipper, universally popular on campus and in constant demand as future headmaster, teacher, and family man. “When Skipper began spending more time with me than anyone else, everyone hated me.”

“Not everyone,” I suggested. “What about Granny?”

“Hortense resented me, too.”

“But Granny loves you like her own son. I know she does.” How much like a little boy he looked when the hurt showed through, a little boy with a round, chubby face and a button nose, but he hadn’t heard me. He was looking through me, back to a time I couldn’t envision, when he had felt the first lashes of hostility, the first stings of envy, when he had learned this was the price he must pay, again and again, for having been born with a superabundance of gifts.

“They all hated me,” he said with the sadness of one who believes nothing can alter his fate, “and they still do.”

“They may not like you as much as they should, but they don’t hate you.”

“Dear child! If only it were so …”

T
HE
H
ILLS
’
THREE
children, all of whom I had come to know well, viewed Orson Welles much as he himself viewed Maurice Bernstein: an interloper grabbing love that didn’t belong to him. From them I learned that Orson the schoolboy did not find many friends among his peers. Although he was widely admired, he was also seen as imperious and full of himself. He was envied because his close relationship with Skipper gave him privileges not conferred on any other Todd boy before or since. These included a room of his own and permission to cut any class that didn’t interest him. Pleading asthma and flat feet, he excused himself from gym and most forms of physical exercise except swimming, which he happened to like. Thus the budding young director was able to devote most of his time and energy to putting on
an astounding number of plays. His talent for self-promotion was equally evident: Under an assumed name, he touted his own productions in the school newspaper.

As for Granny Hill, while she did not resent my father as he believed, she did wonder in retrospect whether she had been too permissive, allowing him to take advantage of her easygoing hospitality. Almost every night, to the consternation of the Hill children, young Orson could be found holding forth at the dinner table. And after dinner, he moved into the Hills’ bedroom, making himself comfortable on their bed and continuing, as Granny recalled “to talk his head off until we had to throw him out.” By that time, it was often two or three in the morning.

“I was always exhausted back then,” Granny remembered, “what with staying up every night with Orson and then having my two girls and baby boy to take care of the next day, not to mention all the school stuff I had to do for Skipper.”

“Then why did you permit it?” I asked her.

“I should have laid down the law more—I see that now—but if you could have heard your dad, Chris, the way he talked at that age. The ideas he had. The words he used. Skipper couldn’t get over it. We’d never had a boy like Orson before. He was so far ahead of himself, it kind of scared us …” And she chuckled, remembering those sleepless nights, then heaved a deep sigh. “It’s never been easy, loving Orson. You know, whenever he came to see us, he expected to be the center of attention, and our own kids were supposed to take a backseat. I couldn’t talk to anyone but him, and if I did, if I turned away or ignored him, he’d look hurt. Why, sometimes he got so upset, he walked right out of the room!”

“Then what happened?”

“Oh, he’d be back before you knew it, ready to charm us again and make us laugh at his stories. Some of them were so preposterous, we couldn’t help laughing.”

“Orson was a born storyteller all right,” chimed in Skipper, who had been listening to our conversation, “but there were times I used to wonder if he was really a kid or a premature old man. Then I’d see how easily his feelings got hurt or how much he wanted everyone to like him, and I’d realize there
was
a kid inside that ancient gent he pretended to be.” Skipper fell silent, conjuring up the boy he had lost.

The Hills, I learned, were not the only adults enthralled by Orson the boy. Among the papers my mother left me after her death, I found the journal entries of a woman who had met the prodigy during a school vacation when he was staying with his father. After their initial meeting, she wrote:

I listened to Orson … just home from school, talk. He seems to me to be a precocious child, very gifted in his use of words and interested in art. I can’t say he is a very lovable child, but it is no doubt because he has been made so much over that he is too desirous of being the center of attention and has that know-it-all attitude. He’s quite interesting, tho, for it’s my first experience with anyone of the kind. Mr. [Dick] Welles just dotes on him, calls him “lamb.” He is so crazy about him that it’s almost pitiful.

The next day, she wrote:

Orson … & I have just come in from a delightful walk. I think it is about 9 [o’clock]. Orson is a great boy—such a complex [mind]. He uses the longest words and talks about things that are most unusual for a boy so young—religion, the universe, etc. He has a great sense of humor, however, which offsets some of this peculiarity, & I like him much better than when we first met. He says even psychologists haven’t been able to figure him out. …

How my father loved the idea that no one could figure him out; yet it is not so difficult to peer through the fog of “myth and obfuscation” and catch a glimpse of the boy torn between the doting father who called him “lamb” and the wily doctor who called him “Pookles.” A boy already troubled by insomnia, who spent a portion of every night measuring how alone in the world he was: his mother dead; his father and Dadda fighting for possession of him but incapable of understanding him; his older brother, Richard, drifting around somewhere, continuing to disappoint his elders.

“That left the burden of achievement on me,” my father remembered, “and I couldn’t let them down, you see. My parents were larger than life to me, wonderful, mythical, almost fantastical creatures, and more than anything I wanted to please them …”

“But your mother was dead,” I reminded him.

“They were both dead by the time I was fifteen,” he said, “but that didn’t change anything, not at all, because the wish to please them has never left me.” Lighting a cigar, he puffed on it thoughtfully, while we shared a moment of silence and, I felt, a rare moment of truth.

“E
VERY SCHOOL VACATION
, I’d get these pathetic calls from Orson’s dad, begging me to let his kid spend it with him,” Skipper remembered. “Then Doctor’d call me in a tizzy and give me an earful about Dick Welles’s drinking and womanizing and what a bad influence he was on the boy.” Skipper shook his head with a rueful laugh. “Doctor wanted Orson to spend all his vacations with him and see pratically nothing of his father. The tug-of-war between those two made it really tough on the poor kid.”

“Where did my father want to spend his vacations?”

“With his dad, of course. He adored him.”

“So what did you and Granny do?”

Orson Welles at fourteen.

“Well, Horty and I couldn’t prevent Orson from seeing his father, but we did swing the contest in Doctor’s favor. We believed he was a better influence, you see.” Granny and Skipper were also impressed by Doctor’s new wife, Edith Mason, an opera singer well known in her day.

The Hills might have seen the situation differently had they been privy to Doctor’s predilection for creating domestic triangles. I learned from my father that during one school vacation spent in Edith Mason’s apartment in Chicago, he found himself living not just with Dadda
and the glamorous Edith but with her former husband, the Italian conductor Giorgio Polacco, and their daughter Graziella, all of whom were yelling at one another in several languages. “I couldn’t wait to get back to my lonely room at Todd,” he recalled with his wheezy laugh. “It was only at Todd that I could be my own person.”

He went on to confide in me that much as his father and Dadda despised each other, they were united in their disapproval of the theater as a career. “God forbid that I should become an actor!” he boomed. “My father wanted me to go into business or high finance, and Dadda wanted me to become a musician like my mother.”

“And you didn’t want to go in either of those directions.”

“You bet I didn’t!” A burst of laughter. “I was passionate about the theater—putting on plays was all I ever wanted to do with my life — and Skipper, God bless him, was the only one of my elders who encouraged my theatrical ambitions. That’s why they call him my mentor, you know.” (“Hell, I was never his mentor,” Skipper would scoff in his old age. “There was nothing I could teach Orson about acting or the theater that he didn’t already know.”)

Yet as time went on, Todd was not always the refuge young Orson needed it to be. His father began appearing on campus unannounced and invariably drunk. “Sometimes Orson was so embarrassed, he hid in his room,” Skipper remembered. “It got to where Dick Welles was drunk pretty near all the time — the main reason Horty and I didn’t think Orson should stay with him. After that hotel burned down, Horty was convinced Orson put his life in danger every time he stayed with him. Well, you know what a mother hen Horty is …”

Skipper was referring to the Sheffield Hotel, which my grandfather Welles ran for a time in Grand Detour, Illinois. It had burned to the ground in May of 1928, soon after my father turned thirteen. There are conflicting reports about the fire. The most colorful one occurs in a memoir my father began toward the end of his life at Skipper’s urging, only to abandon it after a handful of pages. (“I hate writing about myself,” he confided to me at the time. “It’s so difficult. I’d much rather write about all the fascinating people I have known.”)

In the surviving fragment, eventually published in a 1983 issue of Paris
Vogue
that featured Orson Welles, he is up to his old trick of scattering a few shards of truth among the newly polished myths. And how he leads us on a merry dance as we try to catch him out! He himself had missed the fire, he
tells us, having been packed off to boarding school “for the last of my three years of formal education.”
But Father Orson, you were only thirteen when the hotel caught fire. You had three more years ahead of you at Todd before you would graduate at sixteen, remember?
Never mind. He describes the scene as though it had unrolled before his eyes, as though he were leaning forward in his director’s chair, hunched on the edge of the seat, the air around him echoing his roar of “Action!” Look! The gracious old hotel has just caught fire. Smoke is billowing out of windows and doorways. Upper floors begin to teeter and crumble. Monstrous flames lick the night sky like the yellow tongues of dragons. The cold intensifies the harsh light and the “Christmassy fall of snow.”
Christmas in May, Father Orson?
Wait! Here comes Dick Welles, “the suspected arsonist,” who looks so much like Errol Flynn that he probably is. He is staggering out of the flames, wearing only a nightshirt. In one hand he carries a parrot cage; in the other, a hand-tinted photograph of “a lady in pink tights,” a former sweetheart named Trixi Friganza. Close-up of the
empty
parrot cage. Cut!

Two years after the fire, his father took Orson to China on an ocean liner. They had not been at sea very long before the fifteen-year-old boy realized that his father was in an advanced stage of alcoholism. Dick stayed in his cabin, either too ill or too drunk to function, leaving his son to fend for himself. Touchingly, Orson wrote the Hills that he wished he could “find a drink that wouldn’t make him sick.” While he took no moral position about his father’s drinking, it wasn’t easy to travel with a man so drunk that at one point he lost his pants in public.

The Hills maintained that the trip was “pretty much a disaster from start to finish,” but my father told me he did not agree. “That trip introduced me to the exotic theater arts of the Far East, and I can’t tell you what a strong impression they made on me at the time.” When he hadn’t been looking after his father, he had been going to the Chinese opera and every other theatrical entertainment he could find. “I’ll never forget the elaborate costumes, the masks, the revolving stages …” It had been a crash course for him in brilliant stage tricks and exotic effects.

On his return, the Hills made him promise he would not see his father again, unless, by some miracle, Dick Welles reformed. “So I promised,” my father recalled, “not because I agreed with them—I didn’t think my father’s drinking was a terrible thing—but because I wanted to please them.”