In My Father's Shadow Read online

  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 luggin
g 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.

  IN 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.

  Geraldine Fitzgerald—Aunt Geraldine to me—was a different animal. There was something elusive about her, something that made me suspect I could never know the real person hiding behind the soft-spoken Irish charm and the dazzling smile. She seemed to live in a vast reservoir of calm known only to herself. On the other hand, I had no trouble figuring out her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Two years younger than I was, Michael was a lovable scamp with a mop of dark hair, eager to join in any adventure I might propose. We were in and out of each other’s houses every day. Sweet and amenable most of the time, Michael was also an only child who liked doing things his way. The inevitable moment came when he got tired of being bossed around.

  “Are they fighting again?” The question rose, incredulous, from the nook on the open-air porch where my father had buried himself in papers, scripts, pencils, and pads. “Can’t I get any quiet around here? I must get this work done!” Heaving himself to his feet, sweeping up papers, scripts, et al., he vanished into the serene depths of Geraldine’s house.

  “You naughty children!” Geraldine descended from the porch to the sandy backyard, where Michael and I were staging our current battle. She pulled us apart as we continued to shriek and flail at each other, then pronounced the sentence we knew by heart. “You are not to play together until you can play nicely. Chrissie, you are to go home at once, and Michael, you are to go to your room.”

  We did as we were told, but it was not long before Michael and I had crept out of our houses and stood on opposite sides of the picket fence that separated our adjoining properties. We held hands through the fence, crying pitifully and swearing to be kind to each other, until Geraldine relented.

  When I recall those sunlit days in Santa Monica, I am almost always outdoors and in my bathing suit. The houses along our strip of coastal highway were built to face the ocean, and I couldn’t remember when I had not fallen asleep to the sound of waves or woken up early in the morning with the fierce desire to see the ocean emerging from the fog. It meant running out of the house in my pajamas, dashing across the backyard—a rectangular plot of sand stolen from the beach and enclosed by a high, white wall—then scrambling up the steps that led to an elevated landing and locked gate. There I would stand barefoot and shivering on the wooden platform, peering into the fog, which rolled in from the ocean like fallen clouds, listening to the rhythm of waves, how the little ones hushed as they burst into spray while the big ones boomed like faraway guns.

  I remember far less about being in school, fully clothed, for the better part of the day. Life resumed when I was back home and racing through my homework so that I could run over to Aunt Geraldine’s before having supper in the kitchen with Marie. My father might or might not be there, or if he was, he might or might not have time for me; but I could always go for a walk by myself on the beach. It lifted my spirits just to skip along the tide line, just to feel the wet sand yielding under my feet. It was that magical hour at the end of the day when the light turned everything to gold. I pretended the sun was a red-orange balloon that someone in the ocean—a mermaid?—was pulling down from the sky. It came down so slowly, so slowly, that it was always with a shiver of surprise that I saw it drop beneath the waves.

  In those days the beach belonged to the people who lived on it. It was rarely crowded, except on weekends, and so safe that I was allowed to come and go once I grew old enough to understand that the ocean I loved with my whole being could also drown me. Yet even as a young child, with Marie standing by, I had been allowed to paddle around in the foamy leavings of waves. Later on, when the surf was not too rough, I held my nose and rolled around and around in the undertow until I came up coughing and spitting sand. This was my idea of fun. Some days the breakers were so huge there was nothing to do but sit far back on the sand in awe. I could not conceive then that my days would not always begin and end on the beach at Santa Monica.

  On weekends I was more sure of seeing my father. Often on a Saturday I ran over to Aunt Geraldine’s after breakfast and found him already at work, reading and scribbling in his favorite nook on the porch, unshaven and wearing only his bathing trunks. He didn’t seem to hear the hush and thunder of waves, the screeching of gulls, the soothing, familiar sounds that drifted over the high, white wall. The wind uncombed his dark hair, and yet I felt he was untouchable, imagining a glass wall had risen around him. I sat down in a wicker chair, careful to be quiet, and waited with all the patience I could muster, which was not very much. I watched his every move, wondering why he slashed through some pages with a furious pencil and then smiled at others or doodled in the margins. Much as I wanted to draw closer and peer over his shoulder, I didn’t dare. If I sit here long enough, I thought, h
e’ll look up and notice me …

  It did happen. “Hello, darling girl! How’s my clever daughter today?” His voice was so welcoming that I began to tell him at once and in great detail how I was. I never felt more intelligent, more sure of myself, than when I was alone with my father and had his full attention. Then I could tell him anything, and he listened, not as one listens to a child but as though he were hearing a younger version of himself. This was heady stuff, and to have such moments with my father made me hunger for more.

  DURING THE MONTHS he lived next door, my father had an open invitation to wander over to our house whenever he pleased. He and my mother seemed perfectly friendly, at least in my presence, and he also seemed to be great pals with my stepfather, Charlie Lederer. No one observing them together would have guessed that my mother and Charlie had sued my father for an increase in my child support. In fact, they had taken him to court several times, the judge had ruled in their favor, my father had agreed to an increase, and then it had never materialized. Finally Mother and Charlie had given up, and so it was back to “Orson, darling!” and a daily invitation to join them in the ritual of martinis on the front porch at sunset.

  My father was well aware that Charlie Lederer was not only a highly paid screenwriter who could easily afford my upkeep, he was also the nephew of movie star Marion Davies, one of the wealthiest women in Hollywood and the mistress of the press baron William Randolph Hearst. Charlie was destined to inherit Marion’s fortune, whereas my father was fated to be short of cash his entire life. It was not that he didn’t earn enormous sums, whether as an actor in other people’s movies, a radio personality, or a lecturer traveling around the country. For a radio appearance alone, he might earn as much as three thousand dollars, a lot of money in the 1940s. In fact, his annual earnings were reported to be the highest in show business, which had prompted my mother and Charlie to sue him in the first place.