In My Father's Shadow (30 page)

I thought this over while we drank our coffee. “I hope he forgives
me
. Do you think he will, Chubby?”

My godfather patted my hand. “Maybe you’re better off not seeing much of Orson. Did you ever think of it that way, dear?”

T
HE ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT
at Container Corporation of America was in an open area adjacent to the art department. Several times a day, the assistant art director loped past my desk, his mood as buoyant as his step, his infectious laugh ringing to the far end of the hall. It was impossible not to look up from my typewriter and smile at his handsome face shining with good humor. Curiously, I had never been drawn to a tall, blond, blue-eyed man who
looked like a Viking, but I found something very attractive about the assistant art director’s exuberance and, above all, his breezy self-confidence.

Whispered conversations with the other secretaries revealed that the Viking’s name was Norman DeHaan. He was thirty years old and still unattached, although he was dating a woman as tall and blond as he was. So he wasn’t available, I thought, putting him out of mind until the day he stopped at my desk and asked me to go out to dinner with him. “Well?” He gave me a broad grin as I continued to stare up at him. “Or if you prefer, we can walk over to the Art Institute and have lunch.”

I opted for the Art Institute, where we were to have many lunches in the exhilarating weeks that followed, often skipping the meal in favor of wandering the galleries, hand in hand. Norman opened my eyes to contemporary artists I had been unable to appreciate before, and he also pointed out art treasures from Japan, China, India, and Southeast Asia that were a revelation to me. Much as I enjoyed these outings, I felt shy and unsure of myself, but Norman did not seem to notice. He covered my long silences by talking about himself.

He had grown up on Chicago’s south side, he told me, in a rough immigrant neighborhood where a boy who preferred books to sports and wanted to be an architect when he grew up was not appreciated. Although Norman had been sent to a vocational high school, he refused to give up his dream of becoming an architect. At fifteen, he took some courses given by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the innovative German architect from the Bauhaus school of design. After winning a scholarship, Norman continued his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The next defining experience in his life was the Korean War. He spent eighteen months in Korea, working with the Army Corps of Engineers, and during that time, he told me, “I fell in love with Korea and all things Korean.” So after the war, he stayed on and served as architectural advisor to South Korea’s first president, Rhee Syngman. It was Norman who built the Bando, Seoul’s first Western-style hotel. He was twenty-five years old at the time. “After the Bando opened, I became a kind of hero in Seoul.” Wistfully he added, “I’d give anything to live there again.”

Soon after this conversation Norman invited me to his apartment in Old Town, where he unveiled his fantastic collection of Korean art, which included hanging scrolls, bronze funerary urns, and celadon bowls. Yet I was even more impressed by the collector with the taste and refinement to acquire such treasures. Who would suspect that this sophisticated, cultivated man
had begun life on the grim south side? Norman Richard DeHaan was his own creation, I realized, and that struck me as more remarkable than any of his other achievements.

I
SHOULD HAVE
anticipated Norman’s next move, but it came as a complete shock to me. We were spending the weekend with friends of his in their country house by the lake. It was a chilly evening in late August, the air crisp with a premonition of fall, when Norman suggested the two of us go for a walk on the shore. We had not gone far when a storm blew up and it started to pour. Before I could run back to the house, Norman had swept me up in his arms and kissed me hard on the mouth. Then he blurted out that he wanted to marry me.

“C-c-could we be engaged first?” I asked him. I was shaking so hard it felt like malaria. Now the rain was coming down in sheets, but Norman did not release me from his arms.

“Engaged for how long?”

“At least a y-y-year.”

“A year!” He sounded terribly hurt.

Once back at the house, wrapped in blankets but still shivering, I told Norman as gently as I could that I didn’t see how I could marry him until I got to know him better. “There isn’t that much to know about me,” he said, and laughed in his hearty way, “but if it makes you feel better to be engaged for a while . . .” I assured him that it made me feel a lot better.

The next day I was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia complicated by a severe attack of asthma. This put me under an oxygen tent where I lay for days, grateful for every breath and trying to wrap my mind around the idea that the tall, good-looking man arriving daily with armfuls of flowers, books, and magazines was the same man I had promised to marry in a year.

It seemed unreal until the day my grandparents burst into my hospital room, demanding to know who this “Norman person” was. He had telephoned them in Nantucket, where it was their custom to spend the summer, and broken the “shocking news” that I was going to marry him once I got out of an oxygen tent.

“What kind of name is DeHaan?” my grandfather barked, not appeased when I explained between wheezes that it meant “the rooster” in Dutch.

“We don’t know a thing about his people,” my grandmother wailed. “How could you do this to us, Chrissie? How could you be so selfish and thoughtless? You must break off your engagement to this Norman person at once!”

“I’m not going to do that, Grandmother!”

The more I told Grandmother about Norman’s “people,” the more appalled she looked at the inevitability of having to be in the same room with them. As soon as she heard Norman’s father worked the locks on the Chicago River, she sniffed that he must be “common as dirt,” the type who ate dinner in his undershirt. Norman would do the same, she predicted with a sour little laugh. With my newfound serenity, I replied that when he was home, Norman did not eat dinner in his undershirt, but he would certainly look splendid if he did.

Would I have married Norman if my grandparents had not rejected him out of hand? It was more than an act of rebellion against the Nicolsons — the same determination never to be like them that had propelled my mother to elope with my father. By marrying Norman, I resolved the immediate dilemma of whether I should go to college, as the Hills were urging me to do, or move to New York and start a life in the theater.

Through family friends who had known my father in his Mercury Theatre days, I had been offered a job as an assistant to a well-known director who was creating a new dramatic series for television. It was not the prospect of moving to New York that made me hesitate: I was used to picking myself up and starting over again. It was the director’s reaction to my stammering confession during our informal interview on a long-distance phone call that I had no qualifications or experience for the job. “Hey, you’re Orson’s kid,” he responded. “What other qualifications do you need? I bet you’re loaded with talent and just don’t know it.” He went on to tell me how in awe he was of Orson Welles and what a privilege it would be to work with his “kid.”

But that wasn’t how I wanted to get ahead in the world. Whatever I achieved in my life had to be on my own merits and in a field that had no connection with Orson Welles. As I told Norman one evening, “I don’t want anyone whispering, ‘She made it because she’s the daughter of Orson Welles.’“

“So you don’t want to be another Jane Fonda,” Norman said, planting a fond kiss on my cheek. “Good for you!”

W
HILE STILL LIVING
at the Three Arts Club, I was in the habit of going to a neighborhood movie theater that showed art films and foreign imports. It was there that I saw for the first time such masterpieces as Fellini’s
La Strada
and Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries
. It was a raw, windy Saturday and raining hard, I remember, when I ducked into the theater to see my father’s
Citizen Kane
. Although I had been hearing about this movie all my life, I had never actually seen it until that wet afternoon.

Nothing I had ever seen before on a movie screen prepared me for the overwhelming impact of
Kane
. It felt as though I had boarded a runaway train and was hurtling into a dark tunnel where the mounting sense of doom was close to unbearable. At times the actors talked over one another so that it was impossible to understand what they were saying. Yet it didn’t seem to matter. The black-and-white images were so compelling — the gigantic close-up of Kane’s lips as he lies on his deathbed, murmuring “Rosebud,” or the flashback to Kane as a boy, joyously riding his sled down a snow bank. The boy is seen through the window of a shadowy room where his elders plot his future. In that one shot, my father captured youth and age, innocence and corruption, darkness and light. It all moved so fast that I felt swept from one arresting shot to the next, barely able to grasp what was happening.

When the lights came on, I realized that what I had seen was so extraordinary that I had to watch the entire movie again. This time, less dazzled by the movie’s visual effects and unusual camera angles, I was better able to appreciate my father’s superb performance as Charles Foster Kane. His portrayal of Kane as an old man was very moving, especially in the scene where, after his mistress leaves him, he destroys her bedroom in a cold rage. It reminded me of what my father had said after we watched
The Third Man
together: If a picture is to work, the villain has to evoke sympathy from the audience.

When the lights came on again, I was crying. Even though he had been wearing a false nose, the young Kane had looked like the Daddy I had last seen in Europe. It broke my heart to think I might never see him again.

S
OON AFTER WE
became engaged, Norman had to make a business trip to Los Angeles, where my father and Paola had been living for almost a year and a half. “It’s time to break the ice,” declared Norman. He intended to present himself to Orson Welles as his future son-in-law, but he did not get the chance. Paola received him alone in a living room Norman later described as “very large and very Hollywood,” the stuffed sofa and chairs upholstered in flowery chintz and the closed lid of the grand piano covered with photographs in heavy silver frames. Orson, she explained, was tied up in meetings with studio executives. “Paola said Orson would be so sorry he’d missed the chance to meet me,” Norman told me on his return, “and I said I hoped they’d both come to our wedding, and he could meet me then.”

The truth, not revealed until years later, was that my father had plunged into a depression after he lost artistic control of the last movie he would ever
make in Hollywood,
Touch of Evil
. He had hoped this movie would be his comeback, permitting him to settle in tinsel town, the prodigal son welcomed back, forgiven and allowed to make more “ribbons of dreams,” as he called the movies, but
Touch of Evil
was the final debacle. My father may well have been home when Norman came to call on him, but in no mood to meet his “future son-in-law.”

Yet Norman’s visit had not been entirely in vain because it established a connection with Paola. They spent several hours together and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. It was strange to realize that my husband-to-be was two years older than my stepmother.

“What’s she like?” I asked Norman.

“Absolutely gorgeous, a real stunner, and very charming. I know you’re going to like her.”

Somehow I wasn’t so sure.

Our yearlong engagement went up in smoke after Norman was offered a prestigious job that would take him back to South Korea. He was to head up a team of industrial designers. The project, jointly sponsored by the U.S. government and the Rhee regime, involved establishing a design center in Seoul that would be used to work with local artisans, developing handicrafts and other articles for export. Norman had to leave in early January and wanted me to accompany him as his wife. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that where Norman went, I would follow. That left less than three months to plan our wedding and squeeze in a honeymoon.

In
Touch of Evil
(1958), good guy Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) confronts bad guy Hank Quinlan (Welles with a false nose).