In My Father's Shadow (16 page)

I clapped my hands in delight. He
knew
it was my favorite story! On our last visit, having seen the Walt Disney movie, I had amused him by singing Snow White’s song, “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” Now Jane Powell was going to sing it for me on my birthday. My father’s radio play moved forward in a fast-paced, thrilling way. The wicked queen was as scary as Snow White was innocent and beautiful …

For a long time after the program ended, I had sat by the radio, lost in a magic world of poisoned apples and happy endings. Five years had elapsed since then, but no one—not even Jack Pringle—could take that memory away from me.

So now I knew what I had to do. Whenever being without my father began to hurt too much, I would come and sit quietly in my room, close my eyes and remember.

O
NE MORNING WHILE
my mother and I were having our “elevenses” on the veranda and Jackie was away at his office, she announced that I was going to boarding school. “But why, Mommy? I thought I was going to live with you and Jackie.”

“You
are
, silly. You’ll be home for the hols.” She was beginning to sound more British than Queen Victoria.

“But why can’t I live at home and go to school during the day?”

“Jackie thinks the discipline of boarding school will be good for you. It will smarten you up, he says.” She smiled gaily and gave me an extra biscuit with my tea, but I was not fooled. Jackie had found the perfect way to remove me from the scene and, at the same time, convince my mother that the banishment was for my own good.

There followed months of misery at Kingsmead College, an all-girl school
modeled on the English system of treating young girls like military recruits. We wore hideous green tunics that had to be two inches above our knees—we would periodically kneel on our desks while a teacher came around with a measuring tape—pale green bloomers to protect our modesty when it was windy, and opaque brown stockings. No makeup or jewelry was allowed. While kneeling meekly on her desk, a girl might have a ribbon or barrette yanked out of her hair and be sharply reprimanded by the teacher with the measuring tape. On Sunday mornings, when we marched two abreast to the church in town, wearing brown bowler hats and green blazers over our uniforms, the boys from a neighboring boarding school leaned out the windows, shouting, “Here come the frogs!”

Up to this point in my life, whenever I found myself in a new place, not too much time passed before I made at least one friend. Kingsmead was the exception. As my first term wore on, the girls continued to treat me as an outsider and a freak. They made fun of my American accent and the hours I spent practicing the piano. At night, I would find my bed short-sheeted. Worse, I would find it crawling with the infinite variety of insect life that thrived in South Africa. I knew better than to report these activities to the matron, a scrawny, bespectacled woman who ran our dormitory like a boot camp.

One evening, to my surprise, the matron summoned me to her office and handed me the telephone. “Your mother wants to speak to you personally,” she sniffed, communicating how highly irregular this was.

“How are you, darling? Are you liking school?” At the sound of my mother’s voice, I burst into tears and the matron yanked the phone away from me.

“Hello, Mrs. Pringle, this is the matron speaking. Chrissie is quite overcome, hearing from you, but some of our girls
do
get weepy when they hear from home. They need time to adjust to being here, so it
would
be better if you didn’t call her again, since it will only upset her and she
is
such an emotional child, isn’t she?”

I
T WAS NOT
until my second term at boarding school that I made my first friend, a sweet-natured Jewish girl named Wendy Miller. On Saturdays, Wendy and the handful of other Jewish girls at the school went to synagogue, and I would have liked to accompany them. Having been brought up with no religion, I was curious about all of them. The Christian girls in my class were
attending confirmation classes, and I wondered if being “confirmed” would make me more acceptable. Then, in his sermon one Sunday, the priest ranted on that only the members of the High Anglican Church had any hope of going to heaven; everyone else was headed straight for hell. I wanted to leap to my feet and shout, “How dare you people send Wendy to hell?” It was the end of my flirtation with the Church of England.

During the “hols,” I found a haven with the Epsteins, a family Jack Pringle did not altogether approve of—they were unusually liberal for white South Africans. However, he did not object to the great amount of time I spent at the Epsteins or to anything that kept me out of his own home. He and my mother had now adopted two children in their infancy, a girl and a boy they named Angela and Simon. They had formed a family unit of four that excluded me.

While my mother and Jackie would have protested that of course I was a welcome member of their family, their unceasing criticism delivered the opposite message. I was fat, lazy, ignorant, selfish, inconsiderate. Nothing I did was good enough. Even my obvious gift for playing the piano came under attack. How “frightfully boring” of me to want to be a music teacher instead of a concert pianist. Was I really serious about making a career out of giving piano lessons? In that case, they might as well sell the grand piano they had bought especially for me. My mother actually carried out this threat, but then bought another grand piano as she liked to play show tunes by ear, in between sips of her martini and puffs on her cigarette. “Your mother has a real gift for music,” Jackie made a point of telling me, “not like you.”

When I was home from boarding school, what a relief it was to stay with the Epsteins. Harry Epstein was our doctor. He was a good-hearted man with whom I felt at ease. His wife Iris was pretty and fun-loving, but it was their daughter, Barbara, who was my special friend. Barbara was extraordinarily gifted, musical, brilliant, and precocious. We were united in our passion for classical music and the piano, Barbara’s knowledge of music and her skill at the keyboard far exceeding mine. It was she who introduced me to madrigals, Bach cantatas, and Handel operas at a time when they were rarely performed, igniting an intense love of early music that has never left me. When we weren’t lying on our stomachs on the living room rug, listening to recordings, we were pounding out duets on the Epstein’s upright piano.

Most of my good memories of Johannesburg took place in the Epstein household. Along with the hours of glorious music, here I found warmth, spontaneity, humor, and just plain nonsense. Much as I thrived on Barbara’s sharp mind and the lively discussions that went on at the Epsteins’ dinner table, after a day of being serious, we girls collapsed with the helpless, unstoppable laughter that came over us for no good reason other than our age. The frivolity continued when I stayed overnight in Barbara’s room and instead of sleeping, we were whispering in the dark, making up silly jokes and stifling our giggles in our pillows. We were soul mates, Barbara and I, enjoying the passionate friendship of young girls. How innocent we were in those long gone days! Yet we could begin to imagine our future as women—the first glimpse of a ship in full sail rounding the horizon.

O
VER A YEAR
had passed with no communication from my father, and I was finding it painful to talk about him—or even to think about him. When asked, “Is it true you’re Orson Welles’s daughter?” or “What is your father doing these days?” I looked away, mumbling, “Yes,” or “I don’t know.” Then, on March 27, 1951, my thirteenth birthday, I was home from school and reading in my room when I heard my mother calling me. “Chrissie, there’s someone on the phone for you.” To my surprise, she suggested I take the call in her bedroom and close the door.

When I picked up the phone and heard my father booming, “Hello, Christopher,” I could hardly believe it. For a moment, I didn’t know how to respond. “Is this my daughter Christopher?” he asked, louder than before.

“Is that really you, Daddy?”

“You bet it is. I’m calling from London, and you can’t imagine how difficult it’s been to get a clear connection to Johannesburg. I’ve had to move heaven and earth.”

“Then you’ve tried to call me before?”

“Many, many times. I was beginning to think I’d never get through to you …”

“I’m sorry.”

“… but I’ve finally reached you, and what luck that my call went through today. Happy birthday, darling girl.”

“Oh, Daddy!”
He’d remembered!
Swallowing hard, I went on, “It’s just wonderful to hear from you and I … I miss you so much.”

“I miss you, too. In fact, that’s another reason why I’m calling. How would you like to come to London and stay with me for a while?”

“Oh, could I, Daddy? When?”

“Just as soon as we can arrange it.”

I hung up the phone in a happy daze. My father had done it again. Somehow he always knew exactly what I wanted for my birthday.

I
WAS OVERJOYED WHEN
my mother arranged a month’s visit for me with my father in Europe. He and I would begin our time together in Rome and then travel to London, where we would stay for several weeks. “Now you’re thirteen, I think you’re finally old enough to cope with Orson’s blazing intellect,” my mother declared, “but you’ll need a chaperone. You’re too young to fly to Rome by yourself.”

In those days the trip took more than thirty-six hours as the plane had to land several times to refuel, but that didn’t count the delays en route. When engine trouble developed, we passengers had to sit for hours in steamy waiting rooms, watching flies blacken strips of flypaper pasted on grimy walls, listening to the whir and creak of slow-turning ceiling fans. We were offered tepid tea with condensed milk or ghastly soft drinks made with bottled lime juice. At one refuelling stop the engine trouble grew serious enough that I had to stay overnight in a rickety hotel room that was little more than a tin shack. I could feel the nearness of the jungle as I lay awake in the torpid air, watching the mosquito net draped over my bed sag with the steady accumulation of exotic insect life.

My chaperone, June Besso, was a long-faced woman in her late twenties, shy and gentle. She was tall and gangly with a loping walk that made me think of a giraffe. My mother had befriended “poor June” after an unhappy love affair led the young woman to an attempt to take her life. “Poor June’s had a rotten time of it,” my mother had confided before we left, “so a trip to Rome is just the thing to cheer her up. She’s terrified of meeting Orson, but I’m sure you’ll smooth the way for her, won’t you, Chrissie, and do take good care of her in Rome.”

“Isn’t poor June supposed to be taking care of me?”

“Oh, really, Chrissie, you
are
so tiresome!”

My father saw through my mother’s ruse of wangling a trip to Rome for her friend, all expenses paid by him. He was furious. The first moment we were alone, he reminded me I had flown by myself from Los Angeles to Acapulco when I was only eight years old; more recently I had made a solo flight from New York to Rome. “There is absolutely no reason on earth why you need a chaperone,” he thundered. “So I’m sending her back to Johannesburg on the first plane.”

“Oh, Daddy, she’ll be so unhappy if you do that, and Mummy will be upset, too.” (In spite of myself,
Mommy
had become
Mummy
, and other anglicisms had crept into my speech.)

“The round-trip fare for your chaperone has already cost me a bundle, you know, and now your mother expects me to shell out for her hotel room and three meals a day.” He stopped when he saw my stricken face. “I’m not blaming you, darling girl, but I can’t afford to pick up the tab for May.”

“June,” I whispered.

“Whatever her name is. Oh, all right, she can stay a week, but no longer, or I’ll end up in the poorhouse!”

“Oh, thank you, Daddy!” I flung my arms around him, but my relief did not last long. In the days that followed, my father subjected June to relentless teasing. The moment she appeared, he began to hum the tune from
Carousel
, “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” and each time he did, he had the satisfaction of watching her grow red in the face and flail about, more awkward and gangly than ever. He made fun of her South African accent, her dowdy clothes, her ignorance of all things Italian. Too late I wished I had not played a role in keeping June in Rome. This desperately shy woman who lived on the edge of depression must have been wondering how she could ever have wanted to meet handsome, glamorous Orson Welles. It was the first time I had seen him be cruel to anyone—not that he was aware of it. As far as he was concerned, June was fair game and it was all in good fun.

I, at least, was glad of June’s company, especially on those days my father was not able to spend much time with me. Although he was always working, he would sandwich me in whenever he could between long-distance phone calls, interviews with journalists, and the many solitary hours he spent working on treatments and giving visible form to the latest “ribbon of dreams” that glistened in his imagination.

Usually he was able to make time for me at lunch and dinner. In fact, when
I recall being with my father anywhere in Europe, we are invariably eating our way through a five-course meal in an excellent restaurant. These meals were long, leisurely affairs during which I discovered what my mother had meant about “Orson’s blazing intellect.” His conversation was so dazzling that I felt my mind was being bombarded by shooting stars. More often than not, I had to confess my ignorance of the subject he had raised, which never failed to astonish him. Why hadn’t I heard of such-and-such or so-and-so? What on earth were they teaching me in that English school in Johannesburg? Not very much, he concluded. That was why most schools were a waste of time, in his opinion, and I should take my education into my own hands as he had done.

While my father was tied up with work during the day, I took June to my old haunts—the Colosseum, the Forum, St. Peter’s—and showed her around. She was impressed by how much I knew. She was also terrified of Roman traffic. “How do you know they’ll stop?” she asked me, quavering on the curb. It was true that most Roman drivers tore around the piazza, wheels screeching, horns blaring, and stopped only if you threw yourself in front of them with the utmost confidence that their brakes were working. “Don’t look,” I ordered June. “Just start walking and they’ll stop, I promise.” So she covered her eyes with one hand, gave me her other one, and let me drag her across the intersection, more like a blind, balking mule than a gentle giraffe. In the middle of one of these maneuvers, I suddenly noticed blood on the bottom half of her dress and streaming down her legs. “What’s wrong, June? Did you hurt yourself?”