In My Father's Shadow (31 page)

Orson and Virginia Welles on their second wedding day, December 23, 1934.

M
Y MOTHER FLEW
from Johannesburg to attend our wedding. (I did not mind at all that Jackie stayed home.) When I told her I was planning to wear the same wedding dress she had worn when she married my father, she exclaimed, “But that old thing must be full of moth holes by now!” I assured her it was in perfect condition; Grandmother had kept it in tissue paper all these years. The close-fitting white satin gown in a classic Grecian style fit me as though it had been custom-made, and I loved the idea of being married in my mother’s wedding dress.

“But, Chrissie, I didn’t wear that dress when Orson and I were really married at city hall soon after we got to New York. I wore it months later at our phony second wedding. You know, the one at Aunt Adelaide’s house in New Jersey to make everything look respectable.”

Adelaide Gay was Lillian Nicolson’s oldest friend and my mother’s godmother. A woman of enormous wealth and generosity, Mrs. Gay offered her spacious mansion in West Orange to the runaway pair, who had braved the wrath of the Nicolsons and eloped to New York in a rattletrap car they borrowed from the Hills. The “phony” wedding took place on Sunday, December 23, 1934. The bride was eighteen and the bridegroom nineteen.

“It meant nothing to Orson and me, but we went through with it to please Mother and Daddy, who were still furious with us,” my mother continued with a wicked laugh. “Mother insisted Orson wear a cutaway. She was
such
a bore, and poor Orson didn’t own one and couldn’t afford to buy one, but his actor friend, George Macready, came to the rescue and lent him his. The pants were too short on Orson but I don’t think anyone noticed, except Mother, of course. In any case, Chrissie, I can’t think why you want to wear that old wedding dress of mine. It will probably bring you bad luck.”

In “the bad luck wedding dress,” the same dress that her mother wore, Chris marries Norman DeHaan in Chicago, 1957.

When my mother met Norman, she was none too thrilled with him, treating him with icy politeness and a British accent thicker than marmalade. On the other hand, she was delighted to see her old theater friends from New York, Chubby Sherman and Paula Laurence. My Aunt Caryl also flew to Chicago for our wedding, but my father and Paola did not. They did send us an elegant set of matching luggage, though, an appropriate gift for a couple destined to travel around the world, but I suspected it was Paola and not my father who had chosen it. Orson Welles was known to travel with cheap cardboard luggage tied with rope on the theory that no one would be tempted to steal such worthless bags, for what could they contain of value? Only his unsold scripts, his scribbled notes, his charming drawings, his genius.

Undeterred by my mother, I wore the “bad luck” wedding dress on December 14, 1957, when, at the age of nineteen, I became Norman’s wife. We were married in the lovely chapel of the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue in a small ceremony attended by family and a few friends. I did not want anything to mar my wedding day, but as I walked down the aisle on my grandfather’s arm, keeping my eyes on the Viking who stood waiting for me with a radiant smile, the question nagged with every step: Where was the father who should have been here to give me away?

As he would tell me years later, he was writing a memorandum that ran fifty-eight pages in which he pleaded with the moguls at Universal Studios to keep his directorial vision of
Touch of Evil
. Yet even as he wrote, he knew with a heavy heart that they wouldn’t listen. He had been locked out of the editing room and lost artistic control. Already so many changes had been made to his picture that he no longer felt it was his. Still he wrote the memo, for himself if no one else, and then, in January of 1958, he gathered up his little family, which he could no longer support in Hollywood, and returned to Italy. While Norman and I were beginning our married life in Seoul, South Korea, the Orson Welles family was settling in Fregene, outside Rome.

The chance that my father and I might find ourselves in the same city at the same moment in time seemed more remote than ever.

B
EFORE ARRIVING IN
S
EOUL
in January of 1958, I had never seen a city devastated by war. In the weeks that followed, I was numb with shock. For every reconstructed building Norman pointed out to me, I saw block after block of bombed-out skeletons. The poorest of the poor camped in these ruins, finding what food they could. The first time I saw a cluster of refugees roasting a mangy dog on a spit over an open fire, I didn’t know whether to cry or vomit. In those days it was impossible to imagine that Seoul would become the thriving metropolis that it is today. In 1958, most of the downtown area was a morass of unpaved streets swarming with army jeeps, rickety bicycles, and the occasional sleek sedan of a foreign dignitary. Plodding down the middle of the muddy road were farmers hauling their wares on A-frames strapped to their backs.

It was heartbreaking to see so many filthy, ragged children playing in the gutters. Norman explained they were mixed-blood orphans, the offspring of American soldiers and Korean prostitutes, forced to live in the streets because no self-respecting Korean family would adopt them. We couldn’t walk more than a few steps without being surrounded by these children shouting
Mikook! Mikook!
(American! American!), then running after us, tugging on our clothes, pleading to shine our shoes for a few miserable
hwan
. Norman kept his pockets filled with coins to give these children while I resolved to do volunteer work for the orphanages.

Norman was tied up in meetings with government officials most days, leaving me to fill the hours as best I could. Anxious to get out of our hotel room, which was overrun with cockroaches and stank of sewage backing up in the drains, I began to explore the surrounding streets. I found a dressmaker’s shop where a perfect copy of a Christian Dior evening dress could be
made in exquisite silk for a mere seven dollars. I spent hours browsing in the art and antique shops that offered Korean folding screens, hanging scrolls, black lacquered boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and ancient funerary urns in bronze turned powdery green. What appealed to me most of all were the delicate, sea green celadon bowls.

One afternoon I walked past a movie theater, and there on the marquee was the title of my father’s film
Othello
written in Korean Han-Keul characters and a handsome blowup of Orson Welles playing the Moor. Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that my father’s fame could reach as far as South Korea — or that I might wish it hadn’t. I had been hoping I had found a remote corner of the world where no one had heard of Orson Welles. At the same time, it filled me with pride that my father’s haunting rendition of Shakespeare’s
Othello
was playing in Seoul with Korean subtitles. We went to see it several times, and Norman took photographs of the theater marquee, which we mailed to my father and Paola in Fregene.

I would have liked to hide my connection with Orson Welles, but almost everyone I met in Seoul, whether Korean, American, or European, already knew who my father was. This was obvious from the feverish excitement they showed, grinning at me and pumping my hand when we were introduced at the diplomatic functions we were required to attend. It had been happening all my life, of course, but now it bothered me in a way it never had before. In a few months I would be twenty, and I was determined to be accepted on my own merits.

Newly arrived, I was obliged to pay “courtesy calls” on the wives of the American ambassador and the economic coordinator for South Korea. Being unfamiliar with diplomatic protocol, I found it ridiculous that I had to have calling cards printed up before I could show my face at the American embassy. Nonetheless, invited for midmorning coffee, I dropped my calling card on a silver platter in the entrance hall. Then I was ushered through double doors into a sitting room so typically American that for a moment I thought I was in Washington, D.C. There was not one folding screen or celadon bowl to remind us of the splendid art and culture that had flourished in Korea for thousands of years.

I sat on the edge of the deep sofa, a coffee cup trembling in my hand, waiting for the inevitable questions —
Where’s your father now? What’s he doing these days?
— and the embarrassment that flooded through me because I had no idea. I could not even be sure he was still living in Fregene as he had not
responded to my letters or Norman’s photographs. So I talked instead about the unique experience of seeing
Othello
in a Korean movie theater, suggesting to the roomful of women that they might also want to see it while it was playing downtown. They stared at me, open-mouthed. Did I really walk around in downtown Seoul on my own? I assured them that I did. Didn’t I mind the beggars, the filth, the “slicky boys,” as thieving urchins were called? I
had
minded in the beginning, I admitted, but now I was used to it. Relieved to have moved the topic away from my father, I went on to describe the lovely music one could hear in tearooms and the pleasure of browsing in antique stores. But it was clear my listeners did not comprehend why I would want to go to such places. They were not likely to venture out of their foreign compounds or shop in any place except the post exchange or PX, as we called it, on the Eighth U.S. Army base.

Would I find even one American or European woman in Seoul who shared my interests and was close to my age? Failing that, would I be able to cross the cultural barrier and find friends among Koreans? Those I had met so far seemed open and welcoming. As I wrote a friend back in Chicago, “Whenever Norman and I are invited to a Korean home, we can’t help feeling that we have been admitted into a more evolved civilization. In all my life, I have never felt such warmth and respect for a people as a whole.”

D
UE TO A
mix-up in our government contract, Norman and I had to spend our first six months living in hotels. We began at the Bando, where my husband was welcomed with great fanfare, only to discover that his beloved hotel was going to seed — hence the cockroaches and smell of sewage in our otherwise comfortable room. It also became apparent that the Bando was too expensive for our housing allowance. So we moved a few blocks to the much cheaper Dong A House. Here we were absurdly happy in a small room where the bed was lumpy, the bathroom window overlooked the bed, and the toilet was mounted on a high platform so that your legs dangled when you sat on it. But at least it was a Western-style flush toilet, still a luxury in Seoul. The entire bathroom got wet when you took a shower, and so did the bed if you had forgotten to close the bathroom window. As we could not drink the tap water at the Dong A, we had to lug our tin water cans over to the Chosun, a U.S. Army hotel several blocks away, where the kind manager allowed us to fill them as often as needed. I was learning to cook on a hot plate. When the power failed in the middle of making dinner, I was learning to shrug my
shoulders and get out the candles. Or else we walked over to the Chosun. “Last night,” I exulted in one of my letters, “we had a filet mignon dinner with wine, potatoes, vegetables, salad, apple pie, and coffee for a
GRAND TOTAL
of $2.90!!!” That was dirt cheap even in 1958.

T
HE NEWS GOT
around that Orson Welles’s eldest daughter had arrived in Seoul and was living in a Korean hotel. The Dong A House had a pleasant garden, and it was here that an amiable young Korean reporter came to interview me for his newspaper. I had agreed to the interview hoping that a touch of celebrity might help Norman untangle the red tape that was not only keeping us in hotels but threatening to strangle his project before it got off the ground.

This was my first interview on the subject of my father, and to my surprise, I found much to say about his films, having seen all the ones he had made to date, but my interviewer soon interrupted me. “What is it like to have Orson Welles for a father?” I fell silent. How could I put into a few words the joys and heartache, confusion and certainties that assail the child of fame? “How do you feel about your father?” the reporter persisted with the directness I had come to recognize as a Korean trait.

“I don’t know. How do you feel about
your
father?”

He laughed and scribbled away on his pad. (He would include my lame attempt to evade his question in his published article.)

Almost every week brought a fresh reminder of my father. The manager of the Chosun, whose many kindnesses to us included the loan of a fan when the temperature in our hotel room soared past 104 degrees Fahrenheit, now asked if I could possibly get him a recording of my father’s
War of the Worlds
radio broadcast. I relayed his request to Granny and Skipper, confessing in a letter, “I don’t have Daddy’s latest address (it’s so hard to keep up with him). I got a postcard from Paola months back from Italy and wrote them there but never got an answer . . . Also, I’m afraid if I wrote them about the recording that Daddy wouldn’t do anything about it.” Skipper promptly mailed us the recording, as I knew he would, and our benefactor at the Chosun was thrilled.