In My Father's Shadow (32 page)

To ward off loneliness, I often spent the entire morning writing letters to my mother in Johannesburg, my grandparents in Chicago, or the Hills in Woodstock, Illinois. Filled with cheerful attempts to make light of such experiences as finding a rat in our hotel room, bed bugs in our bed, and having
to take “the worm cure” at the U.S. Army dispensary, my typed, single-spaced letters often ran as long as ten pages.

My special confidant was Granny Hill, the only person to whom I could write about my father, because I knew that no matter how much she criticized him, forever nagging him to pay more attention to me, she truly loved him. One passage from my voluminous letters to her catches the person I was struggling to become. “Norman has given me so much confidence — you can’t imagine. I feel I am now on the brink of doing something creative, but I can’t decide what it is right now, but one of these days I shall do something worth noticing. I’m sure of it. I should so like my father to be proud of me one of these days instead of feeling his daughter is a bourgeois vegetable.”

I still believed I had to do something extraordinary before my father would sit up and notice me — that it was all up to me. It was also getting harder to deny that, while the world would not let me forget Orson Welles, he had surely forgotten me.

L
IVING IN
S
EOUL
during a crucial period of its reconstruction gave me opportunities I could never have had in Chicago. For example, I began giving private lessons in English and French to Korean businessmen. I also went several times a week to Changdeok Palace where I taught English to Princess Yi, the widowed sister of the last Korean emperor. What would my father think, I wondered, about my teaching English to one of the last surviving members of the Yi dynasty?

In addition to teaching, I put on an evening of theater with a group of American teenagers during their summer vacation. I proposed to them that we stage a play to raise money for an orphanage of mixed-blood children. Thrilled at the prospect of leaving their dull compounds and venturing into downtown Seoul, they agreed at once.

I swung into action with my customary zeal and chose two one-act plays whose titles I no longer remember. What I do recall is the fun I had working with these young people who had never acted before, and showing them how good they could be. In the end, our amateur show was a huge success, and we raised over three hundred dollars for the orphanage.

After the show, the man who ran the American missionary school came up to congratulate me. How would I like to teach dramatics at his school? I thanked him for the offer but said no. How could I possibly teach dramatics, I wondered to myself? And would he have offered me the job if my father had
been John Smith instead of Orson Welles? Once people knew who my father was, they seemed to expect impossible things of me. Yet it was I who expected the impossible of myself.

M
Y FATHER HAD
not written, called or made any attempt to contact me in four years. He had left it up to Paola to send us a wedding present and an occasional postcard. Then, in early December as our first anniversary was approaching, Granny Hill wrote that Orson, Paola, and Beatrice were going to be in Hong Kong, where Orson was starring in a British film. Norman and I had been debating where to celebrate the fact that we had been married a whole year — Tokyo or Hong Kong? Granny’s letter decided our destination.

Compared to Seoul, being in Hong Kong was almost like being back in London or Paris. This sophisticated British colony boasted luxurious hotels, smart shops, gourmet restaurants, and nightclubs . . . except that beneath its layers of European influence, it had remained Cantonese. The square sails of Chinese junks dipped and swayed in Victoria Harbor alongside yachts, motor-boats, and passenger ferries crossing back and forth between the island city of Hong Kong and Kowloon on the mainland. For every French and Italian eatery, there was one where the menu, if it existed at all, was in Cantonese, and we had to order by pointing to mouthwatering dishes being consumed at a nearby table.

We were staying in Kowloon in a small but well-appointed hotel that we learned had been built by the eccentric Chinese multimillionaire who lived next door and whose hobby was raising orchids. Late at night, we were told, he slipped into the hotel and painted yet another orchid on the walls of the downstairs public rooms.

Every morning at breakfast, we scoured the newspapers to find out if Orson Welles and family had arrived yet. The Hills had not been sure of the exact date, but they had alerted my father that our stay in Hong Kong would coincide with his. “I don’t want Daddy dropping dead of shock at the sight of me,” I had written Granny and Skipper, trying to make a joke of it. Finally, when we had been in Hong Kong almost a week and ordered enough tailor-made clothes to last us the rest of our lives, Norman spotted the news item we had been waiting for: Orson Welles was arriving the following day and would be staying at the Peninsula Hotel. As luck would have it, the grand old Peninsula was within walking distance of our small hotel.

The article went on to say that Mr. Welles was playing the part of the
skipper of a ferryboat in the British movie
Ferry to Hong Kong
, being filmed on location in the colony and in Portuguese Macao. It was rumored that Mr. Welles had agreed to be in the picture only after the director allowed him to write his own dialogue. This led to a falling-out with his costar, the German actor Curt Jurgens, who had objected to having
his
lines rewritten by Welles in their scenes together, to which Welles had retorted, “I hate all actors — stupid, empty-headed creatures.”

“Do you think your dad really said that?” Norman asked me.

“No, or if he did, he didn’t mean it.” Perhaps he had blurted it out in a moment of disgust, now he was down on his luck and had to take any work he could get. I reminded Norman of the loyalty and devotion my father evoked in actors who had worked under his direction. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, had agreed to her cameo role in
Touch of Evil
for no other reason than she loved him as a friend and esteemed him as a director.

Around noon the next day Norman and I went to the Peninsula Hotel, and there was my father, a monument of flesh in loose black clothing, making the lobby reverberate with the magnificence of his voice while he reminded the flustered desk clerk that his suite should have been ready hours ago. I hung back, shocked at the sheer size of him.
He must weigh close to three hundred pounds
, I thought, trying to remember the Daddy who had squired me all over Rome in search of paintings and sculptures by Michelangelo. And there was Paola, tall and long-limbed with limpid eyes, her dark hair falling to her shoulders. Why did the realization that Paola was so stunning in person make me feel hopelessly inadequate? She had secured a table among the palm fronds and was ordering from a gilt-edged menu. Meanwhile, three-year-old Beatrice was skipping among the tables and white-coated waiters, and to my astonishment, my old nanny, Marie Cunningham, was swooping down on her. I hadn’t known she was now in charge of my half sister and had to repress a pang of jealousy. Older and grayer, Marie had shrunk until she barely came up to my shoulder. Yet I would have known her anywhere from the weary look on her lined face and the stoic patience she exuded.

Tentatively, I approached my father, fighting an impulse to flee through the doors of the Peninsula, never to be seen again. “Daddy?”

He turned, his face lighting up. “Christopher? Can this be you, all grown up and so beautiful? Hortense told me you were going to be in Hong Kong, and I still don’t believe it — but here you are!”

He folded me in his arms and for one happy moment, it was as though the
four years of silence and separation had never happened. Yet the man I was hugging wasn’t Daddy anymore — not the Daddy I had known in London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Saint Moritz. Now he held me at arm’s length as though I were some exotic creature who had fallen from the sky, and I realized with a shiver what strangers we had become.

“You are so beautiful,” he was exclaiming and beaming down at me while I blushed, “and what’s more, you look
exactly
like your mother. For a moment, you know, when I first saw you, I thought Virginia had come back to haunt me.” He laughed uproariously, his whole body shaking, and I did not want to spoil the moment by pointing out that my mother was a petite, blue-eyed blond, while I, on the other hand, was a brunette with hazel eyes, the same color as his. “Come, Christopher, you must meet Paola and Beatrice.”

“And you must meet Norman.”

“Norman? Ah yes, how do you do.” He shook my husband’s hand distractedly.

Paola and Norman greeted one another like old friends, while Marie and I were so overcome at seeing each other again that we shed a few tears. Beatrice was dancing around the circle of adults, shrieking to get our attention. After all the hellos and the hugs, the hotel manager came scurrying up to inform Mr. Welles that his suite was ready at last. His moon face glistening with embarrassment, the manager had begun to apologize profusely for the delay when my father interrupted him with a lordly wave of his hand. “Never mind the apologies, my good man. Just send up a magnum of champagne.”

“Oh, Orson, not so early in the day!” Paola sounded more dismayed than shocked. I suddenly remembered Granny Hill telling me Paola had been trying very hard to help my father control his drinking. Was she succeeding, I wondered, now that I noticed his ruddy face and bloodshot eyes?

“Just kidding, my love. Just kidding.” He put one jovial arm around her. “But we do have a lot to celebrate, you know, seeing Christopher again and meeting . . . uh . . .”

“Norman,” I supplied.

“Ah yes, Norman.” He turned away from our little group, looking for the elevators. “You must tell me all about yourselves, but right now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go up to our suite and make an urgent phone call.” I wanted to put a restraining hand on his arm but did not feel I had the right to keep him away from the telephone. Then Norman asked the question on my mind.

“When will we see you again, Orson?” I marveled at my husband’s easy familiarity.

“Whenever you like.” Orson treated us to his most captivating smile. “Talk to Paola — she knows my schedule — and arrange it with her.”

As I watched him walk away — and how gracefully he moved for a man carrying close to three hundred pounds — I wondered what I should call him now that
Daddy
was out of date.
Dad
struck me as too familiar, and I could hardly call him
Mr. Welles
.

A
LTHOUGH
I
SAW
a great deal of my father during the rest of our two-week stay in Hong Kong, I could not shake off the feeling that he was keeping me at an amiable distance. That did not mean he was not affectionate toward me, booming “Here’s Christopher!” the moment I appeared and enveloping me in a bear hug. But we were not connecting the way we had years before. For the first time, I was finding it difficult to reach him, as though he had erected a barricade of preoccupations and sorrows between himself and everyone else. Even Paola, who clearly adored him and would have done anything in her power to make him happy, could not distract him from the gloom that descended when he was alone with us in their lavish suite at the Peninsula. Which was worse for him, I wondered: mulling over in private the lost opportunities, the criminal waste of his talents, or having to play “Orson Welles” in public, besieged for his autograph, his photograph, his handshake, while fielding such questions as, “Why’d you leave Hollywood, Orson?” (It infuriated me when strangers appropriated his first name as though it were their right.) As for Beatrice, he treated her like an adorable nuisance to be led away by Marie and not seen again until bedtime, when she made a brief appearance in pajamas, to be hugged, kissed, and promptly dispatched to oblivion.

If my father had asked, I would have told him about our life in Seoul. I was eager to boast about the enormous success Norman had made of his design center in a very short time, and how the economic coordinator for South Korea made sure to show it off to every visiting U.S. senator . . . but my father did not ask. When he talked to me, which he did in his better moments, he was like a man roused from a troubled sleep who suddenly remembers he has a visitor. Then he talked about himself as a schoolboy at Todd or about the Hills and his parents. These monologues took place in the intimacy of his suite where he sat in a free-flowing caftan, the inevitable cigar clamped between his teeth. After a while I felt that, although I happened to be the one sitting across from him, another being could have slipped into my skin
and it wouldn’t have made any difference. This was not the father I had been missing so acutely but a world-famous personality who had graciously consented to spend a few moments with me, recounting the same witty anecdotes he had told only weeks before on British television. Did he really expect me to believe that my grandmother Beatrice Ives Welles had been a crack shot with a rifle or that my grandfather Dick Welles had broken the bank at Monte Carlo? Maybe he was keeping me at a distance because he knew he wasn’t fooling me. Did he see in me that irritating member of his audience who refuses to believe in magic and wants to know how the trick is done? Or perhaps he feared that if he let me get too close, I might pull back the curtains, as Dorothy had done in
The Wizard of Oz
, and expose him for the lovable illusionist that he was.

Of course, I could hardly blurt out, “What were my grandparents
really
like?” No, my role was to listen, laugh, applaud, and discreetly disappear into the next room when the phone rang. Or I could hang around and watch him work. He would scribble away on a yellow pad, pause to stare glumly out of the window, then attack once more the script spread out on his expansive lap.

When I got up the nerve to ask him about
Ferry to Hong Kong
, he sighed and said it was a terrible movie, he hated his part, and he had agreed to it only because he was desperate for money.