In My Father's Shadow Read online

  Orson as Rochester in Jane Eyre (1944) with Joan Fontaine in the title role.

  As my mother saw it, “Orson’s hopeless with money and couldn’t save a nickel if you held a gun to his head.” In her eyes, his huge earnings were sucked into oblivion like elephants disappearing in quicksand. She did not want to acknowledge that it was Orson’s passion for making movies and his other vital concerns that consumed most of his income. As one example, after making a hundred thousand dollars when he starred in Jane Eyre as Mr. Rochester, one of the few times in his movie career that he played the romantic lead, he spent every penny of it developing footage for It’s All True, a doomed documentary he shot in Brazil that was never released. And when his artistic imperatives didn’t empty the coffers, his altruistic impulses did. In 1943 he had lavished forty thousand dollars of his own capital on the Mercury Wonder Show, which servicemen saw for free. Before the show closed, it entertained close to fifty thousand troops stationed in the Los Angeles area. In September of 1944 he joined the Democratic Party’s effort to reelect President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a fourth term. Orson Welles gave campaign speeches all over the map, donating his fame to the cause and paying his own travel expenses.

  That my father was somehow finding the money to campaign for Roosevelt while evading his responsibility to me made my mother furious. “Charlie adored you,” she told me years later. “He was sweet about paying for anything you needed, including those braces on your teeth which cost a pretty penny, I can tell you!” Her blue-gray eyes flashed with an anger the intervening years had not diminished. “It was terribly unfair of Orson to let Charlie pick up the tab for you!”

  “But you were all so friendly,” I recalled. “Was it just an act for my benefit?”

  “Yes and no. We couldn’t stay mad at Orson, you see. Nobody could. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm . . .” My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. “Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated toward one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only sixteen. My God, Orson and I never even went to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me . . .” She gave her husky, ironic laugh. “But when it came to their personalities, they couldn’t have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn’t have Orson’s crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.”

  I returned my stepfather’s affection in full measure, but I never called him Charlie, not even when we reconnected later in our lives. Because he was prematurely bald and I had been two years old when he married my mother, I had concluded he must be very old and called him Granddaddy. He found this so funny he never let me call him anything else.

  Charlie had the doleful brown eyes and deadpan expression of a born comedian. Known in Hollywood as a master of screwball comedy, he was famous in his private life for playing practical jokes on the unsuspecting. Whenever we visited San Simeon, the grandiose castle William Randolph Hearst had built on a hilltop in northern California, Charlie could not resist pulling the old man’s leg.

  “WR is the perfect fall guy,” I remember Charlie telling my father one evening while the adults were having martinis on the porch. Then, to illustrate his point, my stepfather launched into his favorite story. Late one night at San Simeon, when everyone else was asleep, Charlie stole out to the gardens and dressed the marble statues of naked women in bras and panties. Early the next morning when Hearst set out on his usual brisk walk before breakfast, he was brought up short by the underwear adorning his Greek nymphs and Roman goddesses. Who on earth would dare do such a thing? He began shouting for his companion, Marion Davies, who rarely emerged before noon, to come and see what had happened and to help find the culprit . . . as if he didn’t already know who it was. “The grand old gentleman stood there bothered and befuddled as each of his guests stumbled half-asleep into the garden and began to howl with laughter.” Charlie gave us his doleful, deadpan look, our cue to laugh as hard as the stumbling guests.

  During the months my father was our neighbor, he became Charlie’s willing accomplice. There was the night my mother and Charlie were giving an important dinner party for some high-powered studio executives and my father suddenly appeared outside our dining room windows. He had traded his bathing trunks for a dinner jacket, shirt, and tie. Freshly shaved, his wavy dark brown hair slicked back, he stood with his nose pressed against the glass like a wistful boy shut out of a candy store. My mother pretended not to notice. Then, dramatically clutching his stomach, my father began to whimper and groan.

  “Oh, do make him stop, Charlie!” My mother was near tears. “He’s ruining dinner for everyone!”

  “But, Virginia, you can see the poor wretch is starving.”

  “Make him go away!”

  “Well, I can’t turn away a man in a dinner jacket. It wouldn’t be civilized. We’ll have to invite him to join us.”

  “Oh, all right.” My mother had finally caught on that it was a gag. So had the dinner guests, who had fallen into an embarrassed silence but now erupted in gales of laughter, while Charlie calmly examined his fingernails, then looked up in mild surprise as if to say, Is it really that funny? And that, of course, made it even funnier.

  MY NEXT FORAY into motion pictures began in June of 1947 when I was nine years old. My father was still staying next door with Aunt Geraldine, and he was about to film his freely adapted version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. One afternoon I came home from school to find the entire cast assembled in the living room and getting ready to read through the shooting script. I ran up to my father standing at the front of the room like a benevolent teacher who waits for the class to settle down. “Can I stay and listen, Daddy?”

  “Yes, if you’re very quiet.”

  Our homey living room was stuffed with actors. Most were Mercury Theatre regulars who had first worked with my father on Broadway and then followed him to Hollywood, but there were a few new faces: Jeanette Nolan, a well-known actress in radio about to make her film debut as Lady Macbeth, and Dan O’Herlihy, fresh from the Gate Theatre in Dublin and playing Macduff. Then there was a lean young man of nineteen who called himself Roddy McDowall. He had won fame as a child actor in How Green Was My Valley and Lassie Come Home, and now he was about to make his Shakespearean debut as Malcolm in my father’s Macbeth. Although I recognized Roddy from his Lassie movies, which Marie and I had wept through more than once, he was ten years older than I, which, as far as I was concerned, put him on another planet.

  I found myself some space on the floor and was prepared to be mute for the next hour when, to my surprise, Charlie sauntered into the room and was handed a script. He sat down on the floor next to me. “Are you going to be in the movie, too, Granddaddy?” I asked in a whisper. Then, when he nodded, “Who are you going to be?”

  “One of the three witches.”

  I thought he was kidding me. How could a bald man play a witch? On the other hand . . . before I could stop myself, I scrambled to my feet and ran up to my father, the only person left standing in the hushed room. “May I have a script, too, please? I want to be one of the three witches.” To my dismay, everyone laughed.

  “We have all the witches we need, Christopher.” Although my father spoke with measured calm, the look he gave me was one of irritation. “Now please sit down like a good girl and don’t interrupt us again.”

  “Please, Daddy, can’t I be in the movie? Please, can’t I, Daddy—“

  “There are no parts for little girls in Macbeth!”

  “Let her read a few lines, Orson,” Charlie put in mildly. “She reads pretty well for a kid her age.”

  “Oh, all right.” My father
handed me a script with the sigh of a man submitting to an unreasonable demand against his better judgment. “Christopher, if you insist on being in Macbeth, you’ll have to be a little boy.”

  “Okay!” I sang out with an alacrity that made everyone laugh again. And that was how I landed the part of Macduff’s son.

  Having satisfied my father that I could rattle off my lines with aplomb, even though I had little understanding of what they meant, I began my movie career in earnest. First I was fitted for my costume. I was used to wearing not much more than a swimsuit or summery dress, and now, beginning with the wool hat on my head, I was layered in heavy clothing meant for unheated castles and windy Scottish moors. Under my long wool tunic, I wore a woolen shirt and tartan plaid trousers. Then a tartan shawl, which matched my trousers and the headband on my hat, was draped over the tunic, tied around my waist, and held in place by a metal ornament pinned to one shoulder. My costume was made still more uncomfortable by the scratchy feel of wool against my skin, yet every morning, when Marie helped me into it, I was merry with excitement. It was cool and crisp that early in the day, and soon my father’s chauffeured car would come to collect me, and I would ride beside him all the way to the studio.

  My mother had readily agreed to my accompanying my father every day during the three-week period it would take to film Macbeth. “I can’t think of a better way for you to spend your summer vacation or to get to know Orson,” she told me. Then I overheard her telling Charlie, “I think Orson’s finally taking an interest in Chrissie.”

  So it was with high hopes that I stood shivering in the driveway, listening to the ocean pound through the morning fog, and waited for Shorty, as we called my father’s driver, never wondering if the name might offend him. Shorty was a hunchbacked dwarf who drove with blocks of wood strapped to his feet so he could reach the pedals. His real name was George Chirello, and he would also have a part in Macbeth, which was fast becoming a family enterprise. I was a bit afraid of this sour little man who rarely spoke to me, though he always jumped down and held the door until I had plopped myself in the backseat beside my father. Seat belts had not yet been invented, and the opening and shutting of windows still required a human hand to turn the handle. As I tended to get carsick, especially when the car reeked of cigar smoke, I could not open a window fast enough. I rode with my nose sticking out the window as though I were a dog instead of a nine-year-old girl dressed up like a Scottish lad from the time of the Druids.

  “Christopher, if you insist on being in Macbeth, you’ll have to be a little boy.”

  So we set out from Santa Monica and tore along to the studio, the sun barely risen, the highway almost deserted. Except for a grim-faced Shorty at the wheel, I was alone with the big, handsome man I called Daddy. I had been saving up so many things to tell him, things that would make him laugh. Here was my chance to shine, and he was staring out the window or making doodles on the script on his lap. I had not known until that moment that a person could be sitting right next to you and yet be as far away as the moon. Was he displeased that I had clamored for a part in Macbeth and, before that, in The Lady from Shanghai? I did not know how to tell him what I really wanted: to move from the periphery of his attention to the center of his world.

  At the time I was too young to understand that my father had much to preoccupy him on our daily drives to the studio. After the box-office failure of his masterwork, Citizen Kane, followed by the equally unpopular The Magnificent Ambersons, most of the major Hollywood studios wanted nothing to do with the art films of Orson Welles. They had all turned down his proposal for Macbeth. Anything by Shakespeare was far too highbrow for the average moviegoer. Then Welles’s notion of turning this antiquated tale into a horror movie was “just plain screwy,” even if there was a ghost in it, along with a series of grisly murders.

  To be able to make his Macbeth, my father had struck a near impossible deal with Republic Pictures, a small, low-budget studio that churned out Grade B Westerns. He had agreed to film his picture in twenty-one days. The result was pandemonium on Republic’s Stage 11, where most of Macbeth was shot, and yet—and how this amazed me as a child—my father remained calm and in full command throughout it all. Though he often had to yell to make himself heard, he was the unflappable general issuing orders to the troops in the din and smoke of battle.

  My notions of moviemaking had been formed the year before in Acapulco, where shooting had moved at an easy pace, with midday breaks for five-course lunches and an afternoon siesta. Sometimes, between takes, my father had told ribald stories that made everyone laugh but that I was too young to understand. If I had been bored at times, I had also been outdoors in Acapulco and free to wander around most of the day. Here in Hollywood, I was confined all day long in a hot, stuffy sound stage. At least eight sets were crammed under one roof, and they seemed to be in continuous motion, pieces being hauled from one spot to another, like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle pulled apart and reassembled. The crew never stopped hollering, “Look out! Watch your backs! Coming through!” At least three scenes were being shot at the same time, just one of the Wellesian ways to make a picture in twenty-one days. There were no long breaks for meals, no time for racy jokes, and boredom was a liability. I had to be alert every minute not to trip over a cable or be knocked to the floor by a piece of heavy equipment “coming through.”

  I had never seen my father work so intensely or sweat so profusely. Where did all his joyous energy come from? How was he able, at one and the same time, to direct the picture, play the title role, and hand-hold any actor who needed a word of encouragement? How, in the midst of nonstop frenzy, did he know exactly what was going on at every moment in every corner of the studio? One day, as I was watching him perform in one of his scenes with Lady Macbeth, he suddenly yelled, “Cut!” and rushed over to a set on the other side of the sound stage. Out of the corner of one eye, he had seen something he didn’t like. “Your daddy has eyes in the back of his head,” one crew member told me with a mock grimace. “I don’t think he’s human.”

  “Yeah, he’s the human fly,” joked another. “Watch your back now, little lady . . .”

  Of all the scenes I watched in the making, I was most impressed by the banquet scene attended by Banquo’s ghost. The heavy wooden table was piled high with platters of real food, pewter pitchers, and goblets. Suddenly the ghost appeared, and in terror Macbeth sprang to his feet, upended the table, and sent the food and dishware clattering to the floor. Then he did the scene again. Again. And yet again. Between takes, assistants scrambled to collect the scattered food, pitchers, and goblets and put them back on the table exactly as they were before. How was my daddy able to upend that heavy table take after take without showing any sign of exhaustion? I was awestruck.

  When I came to realize the rocky cliffs were made of cardboard, the wind came from a wind machine, and the sky was a painted backdrop, I understood how Dorothy must have felt when she discovered the Wizard of Oz was a fake. On the other hand, the horses were very real and they peed all day long on the flimsy sets. By the end of the day, the stench was unbearable.

  So this was life in the movies: waiting out the day in a hot, itchy costume while holding my nose from the stink of horse pee. “When are they going to do my scene?” I kept asking anyone who would stop long enough to talk to me, but no one seemed to know, not even my stepfather. Barely recognizable in his creepy makeup as one of the three ghouls, Charlie delighted in pouncing on me with a fiendish cackle that never failed to make me scream. I was beginning to wish I had never begged my father to give me a part in Macbeth.

  I was thankful when another young actor arrived on Stage 11 and soon became my boon companion. A few years older than I was and several heads taller, Jerry Farber had been engaged to play the part of Fleance, Banquo’s son. “I’ve been in lots of pictures already,” he told me with undisguised pride, “because I’m a professional child actor.” I did not envy him. The time he had spent on sound stages had given Jerry a pale an
d spindly look. Now he studied our barely controlled commotion with a practiced eye and decided Macbeth was going to be “a big flop.” Even if you could figure out what was going on, you couldn’t understand half of what the actors were saying. They were speaking in a heavy Scots brogue. (My father maintained that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would not understand the overly refined English accents cultivated by Old Vic actors. “It’s marvelous when a well-spoken Irishman or a Scotsman does Shakespeare,” he told me. “Why shouldn’t all the Scotsmen in Macbeth sound like Scotsmen?”) I knew a few Scots words from Marie, who called me “lassie” and “my wee bairn” when she was pleased with me — and “madam” when she wasn’t—but even Marie might have had a hard time understanding Lady Macbeth. Her famous line, “Out, damned spot. Out, I say!” sounded more like, “Oot, demmed spat. Oot, ay seh!”

  Jerry and I began sneaking out of our sound stage and running over to a nearby lot where the filming of a B Western was in progress. What a swell picture this was! Why couldn’t my daddy make a Western? I must remember to ask him on a day when I was feeling especially brave. Meanwhile, we kids in our tartan plaids watched the hero on the white horse thunder into town in a cloud of dust. We watched him shoot it out, alone and unafraid, with the bad guys in the black hats. Through countless takes we held our breath while he knocked out one of the bad guys and then threw him like a sack of rotting onions through the saloon’s swinging doors. Each time the villain landed in the dust, we cheered. After the gloom and confusion of Macbeth, what a relief to be in the Wild West. Here was a Main Street we knew by heart, with its noisy saloon, its barbershop with the red and white striped pole, its wooden Indian, and its hitching posts for the horses peeing in the great outdoors.