In My Father's Shadow (4 page)

Rita Hayworth holding Rebecca, born on December 17, 1944.

To ease her loneliness, Rita acquired a large white and gold cocker spaniel. She named him Pookles, which had been my father’s pet name when he was a boy. While I had nothing against Pookles, I saw no reason to make such a huge fuss over him. I felt the same way about my half sister Rebecca Welles, who arrived in the world on December 17, 1944. She was a cute baby, who smiled, gurgled, and looked exactly like our father, but what did we need her for?

Although I no longer had Rita to myself, I still lived for my weekend visits with her and my father when he was around. I was more than ready to put up with Becky, Pookles, even the Mexican bullfighter who mysteriously appeared one weekend and monopolized Rita for hours. She pretended to be a bull, pointing her fingers on either side of her head, while he danced around, snapping a red tablecloth. Rita charged, the bullfighter pivoted, and my father and I stood on the sidelines shouting “Olé.” “I’ll take you to a real bullfight one of these days,” he promised me, and years later, when we traveled together in Spain, he kept his word.

As each weekend drew to a close, I nourished the dream that one day I would not return to my mother, stepfather, and Marie. I would live
permanently with my father and Rita. Although I never spoke of my dream to anyone, it was caught in a photograph taken when Becky was almost six months old and I was a few months into my seventh year. We children, barefoot and dressed in matching pinafores with ruffled sleeves, are nestled in the garden swing with our father and Pookles. The dog licks my father’s chin, but it is Becky who claims his lap, her baby feet kicking, her arms stretched out to embrace the world. She gently touches Pookles, her fingers exploring his soft, curly ear. I, too, pet the dog, strictly for the camera. Our father is thinner than usual, having been on a crash diet, and he is growing a mustache for the part he will soon play as the Nazi spy in
The Stranger
. But in this golden moment, he is playing Daddy, and I am smiling up at him, my face radiant with hope.

Visiting Daddy, Becky, and Pookles on South Carmelina Drive.

I
WAS EIGHT
and a half when my mother put me on a plane to Acapulco, Mexico, where I was to join my father and Rita for several weeks. As it was a short flight, I was traveling by myself. This was my first trip on an airplane, and when we began to soar above the clouds, I felt it was the start of a grand adventure.

When I arrived in Acapulco and Rita met me at the airport, I almost didn’t recognize her. Her hair had been cropped short and bleached whiter than bone. “Why did you cut off your pretty red hair?” I wanted to know.

“I’m supposed to look evil and cold in the movie I’m making with Orsie,” she explained. “Besides, my hair isn’t really red, you know. When I was your age, it was almost black.” I tried to imagine Rita as an eight-year-old, let alone Rita with almost black hair, but at the time it was too much for my imagination.

The movie being filmed in Acapulco was
The Lady from Shanghai
in which Rita played the title role. Although she had decided to divorce my father the year before I joined them in Acapulco, she had delayed filing the papers. Making
The Lady from Shanghai
with her husband as her director and costar was Rita’s last attempt at a reconciliation.

Although I knew none of this at the time, I did notice Rita was not as relaxed and fun-loving as she had been on South Carmelina Drive, but I told myself it must be very hard for her to pretend she was “evil and cold” during the long, grueling hours she had to spend in front of the camera. Also something was different about the way my father and Rita were behaving with each other. There was too much hugging and kissing going on, and every other word was “darling.” One day, in Rita’s dressing room, my father used up half her lipsticks scrawling impassioned words all over her mirror. I wondered if Rita would get mad and scream at him for ruining her lipsticks—my mother certainly would have—but Rita acted as though my father had filled her dressing room with armfuls of roses. The gooey red messages stayed on her mirror for days.

I don’t think I had ever been bored as a child until I started hanging around my father’s movie sets. Not only did it take forever to set up a shot, but then he wanted it done over and over and over. Sometimes he changed a line of dialogue or the angle of the shot, but for endless stretches of time, as far as I could see, nothing changed from one take to the next. How could they all stand it? I wondered.

The set that was in constant use during my visit was a yacht, which the actor Errol Flynn had generously loaned my father. It was anchored in the bay near our hotel. In one sequence of takes, Rita lay on the deck in her wet bathing suit, drops of moisture glistening all over her body. The Mexican sun beat down on her, the shimmering drops turned to salt, and my father began hollering, “Get some water sponges over here and make it snappy!” I was struck by Rita’s patience as she lay there calmly while several assistants attacked her with waterlogged sponges. In fact, no one seemed to be getting restless but me. All eyes turned to my father with the rapt attention of musicians in an orchestra pit who stare up at their conductor. And my father strode up and down, issuing directives, joking with the actors, the crew, putting everyone at ease while he wiped his face with a bandana, booming, “My God, it’s hot!”

During a break, I ran up to him, asking, “Can I go swimming, Daddy?”

“Later. We’ll all go swimming.”

“But I want to go now.”

“I can’t let you go swimming by yourself, Christopher, and nobody’s free to take you right now.”

“But, Daddy, in Santa Monica, I go into the ocean by myself all the time. When a big wave comes along, I just hold my nose and duck.”

“We are not in Santa Monica, Christopher, and if anything were to happen to you, I would never forgive myself, so I want you to promise me that you will not go into the water by yourself. You will wait until I or Rita or someone else is free to go in with you. Do we understand one another?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

I do not remember ever getting to swim in Acapulco. Instead, when I wasn’t watching my father and Rita make their movie, I was exploring the winding paths and terraced gardens near the hotel. The grounds sloped gently down from the hilltop hotel to a white, sandy beach in a sheltered cove. Much as I liked being there with Daddy and Rita, I began to wish something I had never wished before: to go home to our beach house in Santa Monica before it was time. I was running out of ways to amuse myself in Acapulco—how many more times could I count the rowboats busily ferrying cast and crew members from the yacht to the shore and back again? As I stood on the hotel terrace, looking down at the sparkling bay, then following the curves of mountains that leaned against the sky, I felt homesick for
my
beach and
my
ocean with its thunderous waves, its wheeling, squawking gulls.

Yet I still looked forward to eating meals with my father and Rita in the hotel dining room. Especially at lunch, my father seemed more relaxed, expansive, and ready to laugh at almost anything I said, even when I wasn’t trying to be funny. Then one day a new busboy named Pablo was assigned to our table. He was a dark-skinned boy of twelve or thirteen with coal black eyes, and I felt drawn to him without knowing why. I could not help smiling at him whenever he came to fill our water glasses, and he smiled back in an easy, natural way. At that point my father, who noticed everything, began teasing me about “falling in love with Pablo.” The more I protested that falling in love was “silly,” the more he insisted it was “love at first sight.” Hadn’t I just smiled at Pablo again, ho, ho. What was a smile from a lovely young lady but an invitation to flirt with her?

Once it had begun, the teasing went on at every meal. Finally, near tears one day, I begged him, “Daddy, please stop it! I’m not in love with Pablo. Honest …”

“The lady doth protest too much!” He laughed with such gusto, crinkling up his eyes, yet at times it was also the high, wheezy sound of a man close to pain.

“Do let up on her, Orsie.” Rita laid a comforting hand on my arm.

I pushed the food around on my plate, my appetite gone. At last the plates were whisked away. “May I be excused, please?”

“What, no dessert? Ah, what love will do!” my father roared to one and all as I fled red-faced from the dining room.

The constant teasing left me feeling humiliated. I was not good at being teased by anyone, but when my father teased me, I was unable to laugh it off because I could not be sure, deep down, if he really loved me. I knew that he found me amusing and precocious. Unlike my moody, volatile mother, he was consistently warm with me and openly affectionate. But was he proud of me? He did not seem that impressed when I played the piano for him, or showed him my latest drawing, or gave him one of my illustrated stories at Christmas. How was I going to make him proud of me?

The answer came to me when the location for the day’s shoot was moved from Errol Flynn’s yacht to a dusty mountain road overlooking the bay. My father was telling the crew to move the camera here and set up the lights there, then changing his mind and making them move everything to another spot. The men were grunting, “Yes, Mr. Welles,” and “No, Mr. Welles,” as if lugging around heavy equipment in the hot sun was how they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. It was clear to me, young as I was, that the entire cast and crew saw my father as an exalted being. As he stood around in his open-neck shirt and baggy pants, laughing his wheezy laugh, waving his cigar, he acted as though he were giving a party. “I want everyone to have a marvelous time,” he seemed to be saying, “and I’m going to have more fun than all of you put together!”

Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I ran up to my father and tugged on his shirt until he looked down at me. “What is it, Christopher?”

“I want to be in your movie, Daddy.”

“You … what?” He stared down at me with a kind of horror.

“I want to be in the movie with you and Rita.”

“Oh, no! Oh, my God, no!”

I was as taken aback by his reaction as he had been by my request. We looked each other in the eyes for a long moment. Then I persisted, “I’ll do anything, Daddy, but please let me be in your movie.”

“Looks like she’s a chip off the old block, Mr. Welles,” observed one of the crew.

Mr. Welles winced as though a fly had landed on his nose while he continued to stare at me as though he had never seen me before. At length he sighed. “Oh, all right, Christopher. You can be an American brat eating an ice cream cone.”

This wasn’t exactly the role I had in mind, but already one of the minions had been sent in search of anything resembling an ice cream cone. He came back with a frozen glob of fruit juice on a stick. Suddenly I was standing in a blaze of lights and being ordered by a father, turned imperious, to “whine and snivel” like the brat I was supposed to be. The camera rolled and I gave it my all while the glob melted down my arm. In less than a minute, it seemed, my father-director had yelled, “Cut!” Then he stood with his back to me, talking to the cameraman.

I waited for him to say something. Had he liked the way I had played it? “Do you want another take?” I called out. Slowly he turned and stared at me, but I saw no spark of pride in his hazel eyes. “Do you want another take?” I piped up again. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me the first time.

Orson (in white suit and sailor’s hat), Glenn Anders (on his right), and Chris (in front, second from right), buying ice cream in Acapulco, Mexico, while filming
The Lady from Shanghai
in 1947.

His answer came in a soft, dismissive voice on the edge of a hollow laugh. “No, that will be all, Christopher. You’ve had your big moment on the silver screen. Now run along and find something better to do.”

Quite a few years passed before I found myself in a movie house, watching
The Lady from Shanghai
for the first time and wondering when a bratty little girl eating an ice cream cone was going to appear on the screen. She never did.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1947, for several months my father lived in the beach house next door to ours in Santa Monica. He had ended his relationship with Rita Hayworth and had moved in with another lovely redhead, the Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. While I loved having my father next door, I did miss Rita. She had the quality, rare in Hollywood, of being herself, whether her hair was copper red or platinum blond. She was the same unaffected person in spangles and furs that she was in faded jeans and bare feet. I knew where I stood with Rita. She liked me and liked having me around.