In My Father's Shadow (36 page)

“Gorgeous, isn’t she?” Skipper drawled, taking back the snapshots. “But it wasn’t just her looks that got Orson interested in her. He can’t get over how smart she is, and how talented. Why, at one point, he took me aside and told me in that stage whisper of his, ‘At last I’ve met a truly intelligent woman!’”

“What about Virginia?” Granny asked, no doubt for my benefit. “She’s no fool.”

“You’re right, Horty,” Skipper agreed, “Virginia’s a bright gal all right, but even she couldn’t keep up with Orson, and he got bored with her in the end — sorry, Chris, to say that about your mother, but it’s true.”

“Rita’s as sweet as they come, but I have to admit she’s no whiz kid,” Granny observed with a fond laugh. She had always felt warm and mothering toward Rita Hayworth.

“Let’s face it, none of the women who came after Virginia knew how to keep Orson interested and faithful.”

“And when I think of how many women he’s had . . .” Granny muttered, sounding disgusted.

“All of them gorgeous, too, but the point I’m trying to make is that Oja is different. He’s never going to get tired of her.”

“Why not, Skipper?” I asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know, honey. It’s just a feeling I have about her. And the way the two of them are when they’re together.”

“Well,” Granny said, sighing, “this much is clear anyway. Now Orson’s with Oja, there’s no hope for our Chris.”

“What do you mean, Granny?” I asked her.

“Why, she’s even younger than you are, dear.”

“But Granny . . .” I began to protest that a daughter is a daughter and a lover, a lover, but I stopped myself. Better not to wander into that dark territory where one might be mistaken for the other.

Skipper stopped his pacing long enough to give me one of his penetrating looks. Then he began: “There’s something I should tell you now you’re in touch with Orson again. With a man like your dad, you’ve got to concentrate more on what he’s achieved and less on who he is or isn’t. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”
But I’m not sure I can do it
.

“Good. And another thing, kid. Orson may not be the father you’ve always been looking for, but in his own way, he cares about you. As much as he can, that is.”

Then the conversation turned to Skipper’s involvement in the film my father had begun shooting the year before in Yugoslavia. First called
Dead Reckoning
and later renamed
The Deep
, it told a lurid tale borrowed from a British thriller. A honeymoon couple (Oja Kodar and Michael Bryant) have been blissfully cruising on their yacht until one stormy day they pull a man out of the sea (Laurence Harvey), not realizing they have rescued a psychopath who will lead them into a nightmare of kidnapping and attempted murder. The two other characters on a second boat were played by my father and his old friend, Jeanne Moreau, who had recently starred in
The Immortal Story
, his first movie made in color.
The Deep
was also shot in color, but in my father’s mind it had one purpose only. “My hope is that it won’t be an art house movie,” he told an interviewer after filming began off the Dalmatian coast near Primosten, the small village where Oja lived, and on the island of Hvar. “I felt it was high time to show the world I could make some money.” It was a hopeless quest that he had pursued since the days of
The Lady from Shanghai
, also intended to be a box office success. It would be like asking Leo Tolstoy to write pulp fiction.

Skipper had been “suckered into Orson’s folly,” as he put it with a mock grimace, because of his lifelong knowledge of boats and sailing. “We started getting telegrams pages long and transatlantic phone calls at all hours of the day and night,” he grumbled, “picking my brain about this and that. Of course, Orson’s up all night anyway — he’s had insomnia ever since I could remember — and in his urgency to ask me something, he’d forget that ten in the morning in Yugoslavia is three or four a.m. here in Miami. Well, Horty
and I were getting pretty tired of being waked up in the middle of the night, so I told him to just send me the shooting script with his questions written in the margins and I’d take care of it pronto.” Skipper spent considerable time going over the script, making corrections and suggestions. “I worked like a dog, and then Orson paid no attention to anything I said. After a while, I felt he was playing a game of one-upmanship with me. He’d sought me out in the first place because he sees me as the Old Man of the Sea and the world authority on sailing, but then he had to prove he knew more than I did!”

Skipper gave a wry laugh, shaking his head. “I thought that was the end of it, and I was well out of it. Then I get a frantic call from Orson, another crisis, another catastrophe, and before Horty can stop me, I’m off and running again, this time to the Bahamas.” Skipper agreed to meet Orson and Oja with a yacht, cameraman, and deep-sea divers willing to double for the characters played by Orson and Laurence Harvey, who fight an underwater battle among the sharks. After the sequence was shot, happily without the sharks, it had to be scrapped because the fake blood came out green instead of red. It was another mishap in the unending stream that had plagued the production of
The Deep
since its inception.

Skipper was left complaining about the canisters of film that he was storing in his freezer while awaiting instructions from Orson. “I don’t know what the heck I’m supposed to do with it or if Orson even remembers I’ve got it.” I felt sure my father remembered every frame and was only waiting for the money to materialize so that he could go forward. I was equally convinced that no matter how much Skipper grumbled about the film taking up room in his freezer, he would do it all again in a minute. What could match the excitement of the phone ringing before dawn, telegrams arriving daily, and then a week of mayhem in the Bahamas?

Before I left Coral Gables, Granny put her arm around me. “Skipper and I are so proud of you, Chris. We feel you’ve become what you are almost single-handedly, and we hope you see that about yourself.”

“That’s right, kid,” Skipper put in. “You’ve made it on your own with no help from Orson or Virginia.”

“And now you’re a grown woman with your own life,” Granny went on, “you don’t need Orson the way you once did. I hope you see that.”

I knew Granny was right, and yet I didn’t feel free of my famous parent. The shadow of Orson Welles still fell across my life — and probably it always would.

A
LTHOUGH
I
NEVER
revealed my father’s identity to my co-workers, more often than not they already knew. Such was the case the first time I walked through the door of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s New York office. Everyone from the man in the mailroom to the director in charge of our project knew that my father was Orson Welles. That included Irwin Feder, the attractive senior editor who would be supervising my work. Had it not been so, would Irwin have assigned me the articles in the encyclopedia that pertained to motion pictures? Despite my father and my Hollywood childhood, I was far from being an expert on the movies. Yet I loved editing this section and making sure, when I got to the article on Orson Welles, that his masterwork,
Chimes at Midnight
, was given its due.

I worked desk to desk with Irwin and four other editors in a large, pleasant room we called “the library.” As we were a congenial group, we usually went out for lunch together. Yet, in spite of being thrown together day after day, Irwin and I managed to ignore each other for several months. Working at such close quarters and with only one telephone in the room, it was impossible not to eavesdrop on everyone’s calls. I gathered from the number of women calling Irwin every day that he was not available. I also learned from chance remarks that he was still married, although separated from his wife, an American artist who was living in Paris with their two children. Whenever I felt myself becoming attracted to Irwin, I had to remind myself,
He’s married
,
forty-four, and too old for me
.

Then one day, to my astonishment, Irwin suggested dinner after work and a popular British film,
A Man for All Seasons
. While I accepted his invitation at once, the fact that he had chosen a movie in which my father played a cameo role put me on my guard. Was Irwin taking me to
A Man for All Seasons
so that he could boast to his friends he had seen Orson Welles in this movie in the company of Orson’s daughter? This had been happening to me all my life, but I sensed that Irwin was different from most people. He was not impressed by celebrity.

I knew Irwin was a man who spoke his mind. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for his opening remark at dinner. “I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time, Chris, that you’re much too nice and polite to everyone. You’re almost
too
well bred. Nobody can be
that
nice and
that
much of a lady. Why don’t you just relax and be more the person you really are?” Rather than being annoyed by his remarks, I found myself intrigued. No one had ever suggested to me before that I fling off my mask and show my warts and moles.

Orson as the corrupt Cardinal Wolsey in
A Man for All Seasons
(1966).

We both enjoyed
A Man for All Seasons
. Afterward, we went for a walk, and Irwin asked me how it felt to see my father on the screen. “Strange,” I told him, not wanting to reveal that, although I no longer dissolved in tears, it still unsettled me. I particularly disliked seeing my father in the villainous roles that had become his stock in trade, including the obese, worldly, and corrupt Cardinal Wolsey.

“What do you mean, ‘strange’?” Irwin persisted.

By way of an answer, I shared with him an anecdote Danny Kaye had told me about the first time his five-year-old daughter saw him perform as a comic on stage. After the show she came backstage, crying as though her heart would break, and when he asked her, “What’s the matter, honey?” she sobbed, “I don’t want people laughing at my daddy.”

Irwin laughed. “When did you meet Danny Kaye?”

“I met him as a child when I was staying with my father in London and then years later we spent an evening together in Chicago. Danny was in town, doing a one-man show, and I was eighteen or nineteen. The strange thing
was that when he was offstage and alone with you, he wasn’t a bit funny. If anything, he seemed mildly depressed. He was awfully sweet, though. You would have liked him.”

I was congratulating myself that I had succeeded in moving the conversation away from Orson Welles when Irwin started to tell me about the first time he saw
Citizen Kane
. He was seventeen or eighteen, he remembered, and he and a friend had wandered into the Nemo movie theater at 110th Street and Broadway in the neighborhood where Irwin had grown up. The second movie of the double feature was
Citizen Kane
. “I was so blown away by it,” Irwin recalled, “that I decided I had to see it a second time even though it meant sitting through the other movie, which I’ve forgotten now. I’d never realized until I saw
Citizen Kane
that movies could be an art form.”

We walked on together in silence. I was struck that Irwin’s initial reaction to
Kane
had so closely resembled mine. It was also curious that we had both discovered this remarkable film at about the same age.

After a few moments, Irwin said, “Of course, I don’t need to tell
you
about your dad, one of the greatest movie directors of all time. What’s it been like for you to have such a towering figure . . . ?”

“Where are we now?” I asked, desperate to change the subject. We had walked more than a mile downtown to Greenwich Village, where Irwin lived. I had never been to this part of New York before, and strolling along the peaceful, tree-lined streets where well-kept brownstones from another century nestled shoulder to shoulder, I felt I was back in Europe, wandering down a London mews. I caught glimpses through open windows of gracious, high-ceilinged rooms with chandeliers, decorative moldings, built-in bookcases, and fireplaces. “I’d give anything to live in this part of town!” I exclaimed.

Little did I know on that balmy night as we strolled along the lamplit streets of Greenwich Village that with every step my nomadic life was retreating further into the past. I had come home.

T
HREE YEARS AFTER
I
RWIN
had introduced me to Greenwich Village, we were married in a quiet ceremony on September 20, 1970. The only members of my family who came to our wedding were my Aunt Caryl and her son David. Horrified that I was marrying a Jew, my grandmother arranged to be visiting my mother and Jackie, who by then had moved to London. On our wedding day, my mother sent a frosty telegram of congratulations. (In another of her famous predictions, she had claimed Irwin would never divorce his first wife and marry me.)