In My Father's Shadow (27 page)

The Christmas card Orson drew when Virginia was pregnant with Chris, December 1937.

“On New Year’s Eve,” she continued, “Orson and I went dancing at the Waldorf, and many of our friends couldn’t get over how light-footed I was for a woman six months pregnant. It was one of our few times together that Christmas. Orson was working such long hours that he’d begun checking into a hotel for the night. He worried that he was leaving me on my own too much. So he sent Geraldine to keep me company.”

“You mean Geraldine Fitzgerald?”

“Yes, she’d just arrived from the Gate Theatre in Dublin where Orson had made his stage debut when he was sixteen. Well, Orson hired her on the spot. Geraldine was marvelous-looking in those days with her red hair and her green eyes. Orson decided she’d be perfect as the ingenue in
Heartbreak House
, the next play on his list, but before rehearsals began, he sent her to Sneden’s Landing to cheer me up.”

I had always assumed my mother and Geraldine became friends during the years we lived in Hollywood. “I never knew this . . .”

“There’s so much you’ve never known. Anyway, I loved having Geraldine stay with me—she was such good company—but I was still fed up with seeing so little of Orson. So one night I decided to go to the Algonquin Hotel, where I knew he was staying. It was a very cold night in January, and I was in my seventh month.”

Yet she remembered setting out in high spirits, thinking how surprised my father would be when he came back to his hotel room late that night and found her in his bed. “When I got to the Algonquin, I swore everyone at the front desk to secrecy and went up to wait in Orson’s room. I was so sure he’d come back eventually to shower or change, but it got later and later, and still no sign of him. I called down to the desk a couple of times, but there was no message, of course. Why should there be? He wasn’t expecting me. What a silly goose I was in those days!”

My mother gave her husky laugh and reached for a cigarette. “Hand me the lighter over there, will you, darling?” While she went through the ritual of lighting up, I peered through the screen of smoke, trying to imagine my matronly mother in her slim twenties, seven months pregnant with me.

“Well, the sun came up and there was still no sign of Orson,” she continued. “I decided there was little point in waiting any longer, but before going home, I wanted to leave a love note on his pillow. That’s when I opened a desk drawer, looking for some notepaper, and found his love letters from other women.” She laughed again, this time with an undercurrent of sadness
in her voice. “At first, I thought they were fan mail—I was
so
naive in those days—but, of course, that made the shock more terrible, you see, my being so innocent and trusting. It seemed every ballerina in New York had written to him, and there were also letters from my good friend Geraldine. I couldn’t believe it at first, that Orson would actually send Geraldine to stay with me when he’d been having an affair with her.” She smashed out her cigarette in the ashtray with a force that made me shudder.

I didn’t know which revelation upset me more—my father two-timing my mother with Geraldine or my mother and Geraldine remaining close friends. “But once you knew Geraldine had betrayed you, how could you want to have anything to do with her?”

“I couldn’t hold it against her, you see, because in those days, you simply fell into bed with anyone who asked you to, especially if you were an actress trying to get ahead, although how Orson found the time to be unfaithful to me with Geraldine or anyone else, I will never understand.” She had collected herself, sounding as cool and controlled as though she were giving an interview on being the first Mrs. Orson Welles. “I suppose it was because we were both so young and inexperienced when we married that we were never very good at sex. Your father was a virgin when he met me, whatever nonsense he tells his biographers these days … but I never dreamed he would go looking for pleasure with other women. Until I found those letters I honestly thought he was as devoted to me as I was to him.” A few moments passed in silence while I felt the unwelcome weight of all she had told me. But more was still to come.

“Well, Chrissie, you won’t believe what I did next.” She paused, her eyes on my face, and now I knew she was going to tell me what she had sworn she never would. “I tried to throw myself out the window — and you, too, of course, although you weren’t born yet — but I couldn’t get the window open. God knows I tried. I pulled with all my strength, but it was sealed shut, one of those hotel windows that aren’t supposed to open. Oh, Chrissie, I wish you could see the shock on your face!”

I was seeing my pregnant mother falling like a rag doll from an open window, then hitting the sidewalk, lying limp and still, both of us lost in a widening pool of blood.

A
FTER
I
RETURNED
to Florissant, I began going for long walks by the lake, needing time alone to reflect on what my mother had told me. Now that she was far away in Johannesburg, I could hardly believe what she had revealed,
but I was unable to sweep it from my mind. So, at the end of the day, when the light was blue and the Alps were mirrored in the lake, I wandered along the quay, the beauty around me only adding to my misery. Why had my mother told me she had tried to kill herself before I was born? Had she told me so I would understand why she was incapable of loving me? Or had her purpose been to make me feel sorry for her? I could see how devastating it must have been for her—innocent, trusting, still aglow from her happiest summer with my father—to come upon the love letters in his hotel room, especially the ones from Geraldine. But did she stop for a moment to consider how devastating it would be for me to hear she had wanted to kill us both?

She could have made a case against my father without telling me that. As it was, her arguments and predictions made so little sense that I had to conclude she was semihysterical. Obviously she felt my father had ruined
her
life, but that didn’t mean he would ruin mine. How did his inability to be a faithful husband have any bearing on his relationship with me? Nor did it matter in the same way if he stayed home every night with me or was away half the time. I was going to be occupied with my studies at the Sorbonne, and when my father was out of town, I had Alain and plenty of other friends my age to keep me company.

So the worst that could happen was that I would get to Paris and discover my father had done one of his vanishing acts. Then—my mother was right—I would be stranded. But had she been a loving mother, she would have given me the option of returning home to her if things did not work out in Paris. She would never have threatened to cut me off “just like that” and put me in this agonizing position of having to choose between her and the father I adored.

T
HE DE
C
OURSEULLES
were wonderful to me when I spent Christmas with them in Paris, but all I remember about that holiday is the phone call I made to my father and the terrible hours of indecision that led up to it. I kept looking for a way to avoid it, knowing there was none, going around and around in my cage like a trapped animal. Nothing in my life thus far had been as bad as this.

On my next to last day in Paris, I turned to Alain, who walked with me for hours in the dismal rain, his sympathetic hand in mine. We crossed to the Left Bank and wandered along the Seine to Notre Dame, our favorite spot, but the sight of the green angels climbing the spires did not lift my heart that
afternoon. Nothing could distract me from the dilemma I spelled out again and again to Alain, who patiently listened and wisely said nothing.

When we were too tired and chilled to walk any farther, we went into a café, where Alain ordered two cups of hot chocolate at the bar and I eyed the pay phone in a corner. I couldn’t put it off any longer. I rummaged in my pocket for the crumpled piece of paper on which I had scribbled my father’s phone number in Paris. I walked to the phone, slowly, then dialed his number with a shaking hand. I prayed my father—not Paola — would answer.

“Hello.” It was my father.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“It’s me, Christopher.”

“Yes?” He sounded guarded, when I had expected to hear him say, as he nearly always did, “Is that my darling girl?”

“Mummy’s very angry …”

“I know. She wrote me …”

“Daddy, I think it would be better if we didn’t see each other for a while and gave Mummy time to calm down …”

“So you want to end our visits, too?”

“Just for the time being. I think it would be best.”

“All right, Christopher, if that’s what you want.”

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t.

A
FTER COMPLETING MY SECOND
year at Florissant and obtaining a secretarial diploma in French and English, I returned to Johannesburg, where I was not to remain for long. Although I was willing to get a job and move out of the Pringle household, my mother felt I was still too young to live on my own. She also saw South Africa as “a backwater country” in which I did not have much of a future. “You’ll be far better off living in the United States,” she told me, and I had to agree. So it was decided that for the next several years I would live with my grandparents in Chicago.

While I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in South Africa, it was not easy to leave my mother, not knowing when I would see her again. Now that she had banished my father, she was the only parent I had left. As cold and mean as she could sometimes be, I believed that in her own imperfect way she really did care about me.

Yet the years of being belittled by my mother and stepfather had had their effect. I had grown painfully shy and unsure of myself, bearing little resemblance to the high-spirited child I had once been, the child who had wheedled her way into her father’s movies. Until recently I had been able to count on visits with my father to restore my self-esteem, but now that I would be living with my grandparents, who heartily disapproved of Orson Welles, there was not much hope of seeing him again. Not for a long time.

During the first weeks I stayed with my grandparents in their elegant apartment half a block down from the Drake Hotel and around the corner from Lake Michigan, I couldn’t believe how kind they were to me and how they accepted me just as I was, without criticisms or reservations. At least once a day they told me I was their “pride and joy” and that my very existence “made up for everything else that’s happened in this family.” This was as close as
they came to expressing their disappointment in my mother and Aunt Caryl, neither of whom had stayed in the fold and married old money in Lake Forest. But now that I was nearly eighteen, Grandmother saw in me a new chance to break into the social register.

Christopher’s last summer with the Pringles in Johannesburg, South Africa (from left to right: Jack Pringle, Angie, Simon, Virginia, Chris).

Although my grandparents were careful not to criticize my mother and stepfather, they made it clear they did not approve of the way I had been treated in Johannesburg. “It isn’t right to give a child an inferiority complex,” Grandmother said more than once, naming no names and pursing her lips in that prim way she had.

“Hell, Chrissie is as smart as they come,” Grandfather exclaimed from the easy chair where he spent his evenings, highball in hand. “Look at how she beats the pants off me every time we play Scrabble.”

Nearing sixty, white-haired and heavyset, his complexion ruddy from alcohol, Leo Nicolson was still a handsome man. While we played our endless games of Scrabble, the apartment was so hushed that I could hear the tick-tock of the antique clock in the entrance hall and the tinkle of melting ice cubes in my grandfather’s scotch and soda. Then, as though thinking aloud, my grandmother looked up from the novel she was reading and murmured,
“Chrissie’s had such a hard life, and look how well she’s turned out in spite of it.”

“She’s a great gal all right,” my grandfather muttered, “but hell, I wish just once she’d lose at Scrabble! This is getting monotonous . . .”

Eager to show me off to society, my grandmother gave a lavish reception at the exclusive Fortnightly Club. That my “debut” became a news item in the gossip columns owed something to my grandparents’ social standing in Chicago but far more to my connection with Orson Welles. In the accompanying photo, I am wearing a formal cocktail dress, too much makeup, and a strained smile. At the reception reporters came up to me, asking questions about my father: Where is he? What is he doing? Is he coming to Chicago to see me? To my embarrassment, I didn’t know the answers. Seeing my confusion, my grandmother led me firmly away by the elbow, saying under her breath, “Don’t
ever
talk to reporters about Orson. They’re bound to pester you the moment they know who you are, but tell them, very sweetly, that you don’t want to be interviewed.”

It was the first time reporters had cornered me, demanding information about my father. It would not be the last time, I realized. My grandmother was right. The moment they knew I was the daughter of Orson Welles, they would descend like buzzing flies. There was no escaping my father’s fame and the intense interest his name evoked. Even in his absence, his long shadow fell across my life.