In My Father's Shadow (7 page)

“But, Orson, I don’t want to hurt your kid,” the actor protested.

“Forget she’s my kid and remember you’re a
murderer
, not Margaret O’Brien
touching a hot stove!” my father thundered. “Now hit Christopher hard this time. Take two!”

As I listened to this exchange, a chill came over me. Didn’t my father care if I got hurt? We did the scene several more times. I got pounded on the back but not so hard that I couldn’t take it, and finally my father-director was satisfied. I scrambled to my feet and looked up at him expectantly, but already he was turning away and talking with his assistant. At that moment, the fun and excitement I had felt at being in Daddy’s movie drained out of me.

I asked myself:
Do I really want to spend my life cooped up on a sound stage, waiting for the director to get around to my scene?
Were weeks of being bored worth the few moments of elation when I stood before the camera, putting my whole heart into it? Maybe I didn’t have to be in the movies like my father, Rita, Aunt Geraldine, and most of the grown-ups I knew. There must be some other way I could make my father proud of me . . .

“W
HEN
’
S
D
ADDY COMING TO
see us again?” I had bounded into my mother’s room early in the morning and settled myself at the foot of her huge double bed. The best time to approach her was while she was having breakfast on a tray. She looked wan and a bit frail without makeup, her fine blond hair in a tangle.

“I don’t know, Chrissie.”

“We haven’t seen him in such a long time. Can we call him, Mommy?”

“I
have
called him!” She smashed out her cigarette in the ashtray by her bed, then immediately lit another, her blue eyes glittering through the smoke. “But don’t worry, darling. I’ll call again and you
will
see your father, I promise you!”

Yet it was not in response to my mother’s pestering that my father appeared in our beach house in Santa Monica and later, after we moved to Beverly Hills, in our mock-Tudor house on Bedford Drive. He was more likely to arrive unannounced and then madden the cook by staying for lunch or dinner. Always casually dressed in summer slacks and an open shirt, he behaved as though he were a member of our household, coming and going as he pleased with no need to give an account of himself.

From the moment my father walked through our front door, everything seemed more vibrant. I could feel his exuberant energy swirling around him and giving off sparks. After the bear hugs, the kisses, the joyous greetings—“How’s my darling girl today?”—I was giddy with excitement, and all he had done was say hello and ease himself into an armchair.

“Shall I play the piano for you, Daddy?” My heart was pounding so hard that I wondered if I would be able to play.

“Not now, Christopher.”

“Do you want to see a drawing I did?”

“Later.” Puffing out his cheeks, he busied himself with the ritual of lighting and relighting his cigar.

“Shall I make you a martini?”

“What?” He turned to my mother in disbelief. “Virginia, did our daughter just offer to make me a martini?”

“Chrissie makes a damned good martini,” Charlie drawled, winking at me. “You should try one, Orson. It’ll put hair on your teeth.”

“Are you two raising her to be a barkeep, or is this your idea of a practical joke?”

“Oh really, Orson, don’t be a bore!” my mother snapped. “Most people think it’s terribly cute when Chrissie offers to make them a martini.”

“Well, I don’t!”

“Would you like some lemonade, Daddy?”

“Dearest child!” He held me in his gaze for a lovely, long moment. Then he glowered at my mother. “If I may be permitted to say so, Virginia, there are more than enough alcoholics in your family without enlisting Christopher while she is still in pigtails.”

“
My
family. I like that! What about
your
family?”

A moment of tense silence. Then my father gave a hollow laugh. “Did you say there was some lemonade?” he asked me, and when I nodded vigorously, “Then bring me a nice tall glass with plenty of ice. That’s my darling girl.”

I ran to the kitchen as though my life depended on it.

A
LTHOUGH
I
WAS
a sunny child with a strong capacity to enjoy myself, I was not nearly as high-spirited in Beverly Hills as I had been in Santa Monica. Now, instead of dashing out in my pajamas to greet the ocean every morning, I stared out the window at the pool in the back garden. Swimming in a pool seemed awfully tame after ducking ocean waves and rolling around in the undertow. I missed the ocean and wandering along the beach, chasing sandpipers or hunting for sea glass in clumps of seaweed. I still had a shoe box filled with my treasures: They had looked like rubies and emeralds when they first glistened in my palm, but once away from the ocean, they had turned strangely dull.

I also missed a number of important people who disappeared from my daily life once we moved away from Santa Monica. These included Aunt Geraldine and my constant playmate, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who no longer
lived next door. At times I found myself thinking of Rita and my half sister, Rebecca, and wondering why I didn’t go to visit them anymore. Although I knew Rita had divorced my father, I didn’t see why that should prevent me from seeing her. Besides, I was curious to get to know my half sister now that she was a toddler beginning to talk. When I asked Marie about her, she tartly observed, “Ach, she’s the spitting image of Mr. Welles, which is more than we can say about you, thank the Lord.”

One morning I asked my mother if I could visit Rita, which made her frown and nibble on her fingernails. Then, summoning a smile, she exclaimed a little too brightly, “
Of course
you want to see Rita. She’s an absolute darling, and she’s been so good to you. But . . . well . . . I hate to have to tell you this, Chrissie, but Rita doesn’t want to see you anymore.”

“But why, Mommy?” I was stunned.

“Because she’s mad at Orson, and she has every right to be.”

“But what does that—”

“Rita can’t separate you from Orson, you see.”

I didn’t see.

“Orson should never have married her,” my mother rushed on. “He’s
hopeless
at being married, as I could have told her, and now I hear he couldn’t care less about poor little Becky. Orson’s seeing even less of Becky than he is of you, if that’s any comfort to you.”

It wasn’t.

To cheer me up, Mother and Charlie turned half of the attic into an enormous playroom. In spite of their good intentions, it was here, for the first time in my life, that I felt lonely, isolated from the rest of the household. It was an airy, light-filled room with a carpeted floor and floor-to-ceiling shelves that held my dolls and toys, more than one child could ever play with—and I am sorry to say I didn’t let visiting children play with them either. The superfluous dolls and stuffed animals sat collecting dust on the shelves like unsold goods in a toy store. The playroom was so huge that it dwarfed the full-sized puppet theater that Charlie had built and given me on our first Christmas in Beverly Hills, along with a dozen marionettes in colorful costumes and several changes of scenery painted by my mother. I could have easily invited thirty children up to the playroom to watch an impromptu puppet play, but most of the time I performed for the benefit of Marie, as well as the cook and the other servants. Sometimes I pretended my father was in the audience. “Now that’s my talented daughter!” I imagined him saying with a delighted laugh.
“She takes after me, of course.” After all, the play was written, directed, produced and performed by Christopher Welles, who also played every role.

Sometimes, alone in my playroom, the sound of rain drumming on the windows, I missed my father so much that it felt as though a hole had opened up in my chest—a dark emptiness that might never go away. In the Santa Monica house, I had kept a suitcase packed and hidden away in my closet, awaiting the day my father would arrive and announce, “Christopher, you’re coming to live with me.” How often I had rehearsed the scene in my mind. I would haul out the suitcase, grab a favorite doll, the book I was reading, a sweater in case it got cold, and almost fall down the stairs in my rush to join my father, towering in the hall. Then, as he took my suitcase, I would remember. “Can Marie come, too?”

“Yes, of course,” he would boom. “I wouldn’t dream of separating you from Marie.”

“And what about Grace?” Grace was Marie’s sister, who worked for us as a cook.

“Yes, she can come . . .”

“And Frankie?” He was Grace’s handsome teenaged son on whom I had a crush. “They can all come,” said my magnanimous father. “Even Charlie can come, but not your mother. She has to stay here.” Just before I threw myself into my father’s car, I turned and saw my mother, all alone and weeping in the doorway . . .

In Beverly Hills it was harder to kid myself. Not only was I never going to live with my father, I was seeing less and less of him. Did I occupy such a small corner in his mind that he needed someone to remind him I was his daughter?

Of course, Daddy loves me!
Didn’t he fall to his knees the moment he saw me, fling his arms wide open and sing out in his bass baritone, “Here comes my darling girl”? When I arrived for a daylong visit doggedly arranged by my mother, didn’t he parade me in front of fellow actors, cronies, and hangers-on? “This is my daughter, Christopher, you know, my eldest, my firstborn. Isn’t she wonderful?” And after the hugs and greetings bordering on euphoria, didn’t he immediately hand me over to his secretary, his assistant, or whoever volunteered to look after me?

“Your daddy is really sorry he can’t spend more time with you . . .”

“I know. He has to work.”

Orson Welles could not be my daddy for more than a moment here and
there. That was all I could expect of him. Moments that dazzled and then vanished like fireflies on a summer night.

A
CONSTANT STREAM
of people visited our house on Bedford Drive. Directors and producers came to see Charlie, closeting themselves for hours in his study. Screenwriters came to work with him. Actors dropped by for a drink or a swim. Before I was sent off to bed, my skill as a maker of dry martinis was much in demand. Usually I fell asleep to the sounds of raucous laughter and thunderous splashing as people dived into the pool, with or without their clothes. Sometimes drunken party guests stumbled into my quarters, such as the time I walked into my bathroom and found two naked bodies contorted on the floor. They stopped whatever they were doing long enough to smile up at me, “Oh, hello, Chrissie. What are you doing here?”

“You’re in
my
bathroom,” I told them in the icy voice my mother would have used.

“Oh, are we? Then be a good girl and let us use it for a while. Close the door behind you …”

Then there were Charlie’s bridge cronies, all of them male and as serious about winning as though they were fighting World War Three. The slightly sinister crew began arriving in the late afternoon and usually stayed until three or four in the morning. Sometimes they stayed well past sunrise, and when I came down the stairs in the morning, I found grizzled bodies snoring on the sofas.

Mother had installed gaming tables in an alcove off the living room, and Charlie was forever urging her to be his partner, but she declined the honor. Normally the most mild-mannered of men, he had been known to shout, curse, and threaten divorce when she played the wrong card. So the war games began without her, and before long the air was so thick with tobacco smoke that it was difficult to make out the cards. Still, I did my best, but after the time I ran around the tables, announcing the cards in each player’s hand, I was no longer allowed within ten feet of them.

The well-known screenwriter Ben Hecht often came to our house to work with Charlie. A dour, self-important man, he rarely said more than a terse hello to me, and if I hung around more than a few minutes, he would turn to Charlie with a weary sigh and ask when “Orson’s kid” was going to leave them in peace. It was clear from his tone that his dislike of Orson Welles had become attached to me.

It had never occurred to me before the move to Beverly Hills that being “Orson’s kid” might be to my disadvantage. In my new public school, derisive cries of “Hollywood brat! Hollywood brat!” followed me down the hallways, and a bunch of older bullies took to cornering me and stealing my lunch money. “Where you’d get a name like Christopher, you little snot nose!” they jeered. “Oh, your daddy gave it to you? Did he think you were a boy, yah, yah …”

While I was learning not to reveal to anyone who my father was, the words “Orson’s kid” might as well have been branded on my forehead. One day, as school was letting out, a teacher I didn’t know stopped me in the hall and asked, “Are you Christopher Welles?” I nodded, anticipating her next question.

“Is it true your father is Orson Welles?”

“Yes.” I looked down at my shoes as though I had admitted to something shameful, hearing my inquisitor suck in her breath.

“Oh my,” she said rather lamely, then gushed, “I would
love
to have his autograph.” When I did not offer to get it for her, mumbling that my father was out of town and I did not know when he would return, she let me go.

It wasn’t just the teachers. The same kids who hollered “Hollywood brat!” also wanted my father’s autograph. “Autographs are silly,” I told them.

“So you won’t do it?”

“No. I’m not going to bother my daddy to get you a stupid autograph.”

“Listen to her! Stuck-up Hollywood brat!”

I didn’t tell the autograph seekers that the real reason for my unwillingness was that I had no idea when I would see my father again.

M
Y MOTHER MAY
have given up the battle to get my father to increase my child support, but she held fast to her determination that he was to see me as often as he could manage it. First thing in the morning, even before Marie brought her breakfast tray, she called my father’s secretary. “What do you mean Mr. Welles doesn’t have the time to see Chrissie! Tell him to
make
the time!” The crack-of-dawn calls continued until I had been squeezed into my father’s calendar. Then, on the morning of the appointed day, Mother was once again on the phone with the beleaguered secretary. “Now you be sure to remind Orson he’s having lunch with Chrissie and to send his car for her at noon.”