In My Father's Shadow Read online

  On the other hand, I dreaded having to stand before the tall, imposing man I was instructed to call Mr. Hearst. No matter how many times we had already met, I shook his hand and dropped a curtsy as though it were the first time. Something in his manner suggested I was not being formal enough, and, if I knew what was good for me, I would kneel before him and put my forehead to the floor. He looked so old to me—well over a hundred, I figured—that I couldn’t meet his gaze. His hand felt as cold as his blue eyes bearing down on me. “How do you do, Miss Welles?” He had a high-pitched, squeaky voice that didn’t go with the rest of him.

  “How do you do, Mr. Hearst?”

  “I hope you will enjoy your stay at San Simeon.” He attempted a smile, and I assured him that I would try my best.

  I was too young to appreciate the irony of my position—both the child of the man who had made Citizen Kane and the stepchild of Marion Davies’s beloved nephew. Marion, Charlie, and my mother feared that the mere sight of “Orson’s kid” might give Pops apoplexy, and so, whenever we stayed at San Simeon, I was kept out of the way as much as possible. Not understanding why I was being isolated made it hard for me to enjoy myself during these visits.

  Years later, of course, I knew along with the rest of the world that Citizen Kane had so enraged William Randolph Hearst that he became determined to wreck my father’s career and drive him out of Hollywood. What is still not clear to me is whether Hearst ever saw the offending movie himself. My father told me that while in San Francisco for a showing of Citizen Kane, he happened to find himself in the same elevator with Hearst. “I invited him to come to my picture, and he pretended not to hear me.” While the story might vary each time my father told it, it was inevitably accompanied by a burst of wheezy laughter and the lighting of a fat cigar.

  Mother told me she had seen a pre-release print of Citizen Kane with Hearst and Marion at San Simeon a year after she and Charlie were married. It was customary to show pre-release features after dinner in Hearst’s private movie theater with its red plush seats and wood-paneled walls lined with gilded statues. “The theater looked like a small version of one of those garish, overdone movie palaces from the 1920s,” Mother recalled. “After the screening, WR and Marion retreated to their private suite without saying one word to anyone, while Charlie and I held our breath in horror.”

  Yet Charlie had no memory of this screening. He insisted to me on several occasions that neither Hearst nor Aunt Marion ever saw Citizen Kane. Their condemnation of the picture rested on the outraged reactions of loyal friends who saw it as a cruel and unwarranted attack, particularly on Marion. In Charlie’s view, Hearst was more distressed by the movie’s insinuation, through the character of Susan Alexander, that Marion was a failed and pathetic alcoholic than he was by any unflattering references to himself.

  So who was telling the truth? I’ll put my money on Charlie.

  Certainly the San Simeon I knew bore little relation to Xanadu, the fictitious castle in Citizen Kane. While we sometimes drove up to San Simeon—Mother, Charlie, Marie, and I—we usually took the train from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo, a distance of some two hundred miles. We were met at the station by one of the hired cars Hearst used to ferry his guests to the castle. The last leg of the journey took about an hour and a half over bumpy dirt roads. It didn’t matter how many times I had made the trip. Each visit I felt as excited as a child on her first African safari.

  We entered the wilderness of foothills, valleys, and open plains that was San Simeon, at the time a vast estate of about 240,000 acres. From the edge of the property to the castle on the hill, Hearst’s private road stretched more than six miles, but even from far away, we could see the twin towers of the main house, La Casa Grande. In poor weather when the towers were wrapped in mist, it looked like a hilltop castle in a fairy tale. As our car bumped along in low gear, we had to roll up the windows to keep out the dust.

  At one time Hearst had owned the largest private collection of wild animals in the world. Arriving guests had seen giraffes nibbling on treetops, impala leaping across the road, and yaks lumbering down to a water hole. Except for the bears, lions, tigers, and other dangerous animals that were kept caged in San Simeon’s zoo, the animals roamed free, which made our approach to the castle feel like a daring adventure in the wild. I was fascinated by the llamas grazing near the road, lifting their heads to watch us pass—they looked so haughty and full of themselves—but I also liked the zebras galloping across the plains, the prancing ostriches, and the leaping kangaroos. The road was marked with signs reading ANIMALS HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY, and I remember that one time we sat in the car for close to an hour, waiting for a bison to move out of the road.

  Virginia and her second husband, Charlie Lederer, at San Simeon, 1940.

  When at last we pulled up in front of the castle, we were met by the shouts and hammering of workmen. “When is WR going to finish San Simeon?” Charlie asked of no one in particular. We all knew the answer: “Never!” The building and remodeling would go on until Hearst’s failing health forced him to leave San Simeon forever on May 2, 1947. Until that day, some part of the castle was always covered in scaffolding; the guest villas, swimming pools, and gardens continued to evolve; and the entire castle complex changed from one visit to the next like an epic in endless revision. We might arrive in time to see a fountain being ripped out or a terrace being moved because the newly planted flower beds needed to be in the shade and not in the sun. Whatever we had admired the last time was bound to have changed. An entire floor might be redone to accommodate some works of art Hearst had just acquired, or what had been an overstuffed room a few months ago was now an open space filled with statuary and leafy plants. Yet the overall effect was one of opulent rooms bathed in light, offering unlimited comfort and pleasure. There was none of the gloom my father evoked in Xanadu with its sinister front gate, its lonely, gargantuan rooms.

  As soon as we arrived, Mother and Charlie went off to their guest villa, and I would see even less of them than I did at home. Marie and I were put in “the tower,” which seemed all the more remote because we had to take an elevator to reach our rooms. Mine had a trundle bed and round walls covered in a mural depicting The Massacre of the Innocents. It showed Roman soldiers hacking off babies’ heads, blood spurting from mutilated bodies. Now I realize it was probably a Renaissance masterpiece, but at the time, it filled me with horror.

  During the day I spent as little time as possible in my room. Each morning, Marie and I went down to the dining room where we had breakfast by ourselves. It must have been festive at night, when the immense chandelier was lit and dozens of guests sat around the fifty-four-foot-long table, talking and laughing. In the early morning only Marie and I were there, dwarfed at one end of the table.

  After breakfast we went out to see the gardens, the pools, the fountains, and all the delights of the castle grounds. In fine weather Marie and I spent most of the day outdoors. We might go farther afield and stroll under the mile-long pergola covered with grapevines. The air was fragrant with flowering bushes and the fields bright with lime, lemon, and tangerine trees. Yet, in spite of the loveliness around us, I often felt sad and out of place. The only children at San Simeon were made of stone and stood in the middle of fountains without their clothes on.

  Several times a day I asked Marie when we could go to see Aunt Marion. If it was before lunch, Marie reminded me, “Now you know Miss Davies spends the morning in her room and doesn’t see anyone before lunch.” After lunch Marie’s predictable answer was, “We had best keep to ourselves.” When I persisted that I didn’t see why we had to “keep to ourselves” all the time, Marie sighed. “Now, Madam, I’ve told you a hundred times if I’ve told you once. We’re to stay out of Mr. Hearst’s way and everybody else’s for that matter. You are not to go and bother the big people until they ask for you.”

  “Yes, Marie.”

  There was only one time Mother, Charlie, or Marion asked to see me, and that was before
dinner, usually served at nine p.m. By then I was in my pajamas and ready for bed, but Marie led me to the door of the assembly room, where “the big people” were gathered. Hearst permitted his guests to have one alcoholic drink, and only one, before the evening meal, but as I later learned from Charlie, Marion was adept at hiding bottles of gin in toilet tanks, which accounted for the inordinate number of “powder rooms” at San Simeon. Her friends smuggled bottles of booze in their luggage and hid them in their rooms, but if they were caught, they were likely to find their bags packed and out in the driveway. In any event, by the time drinks were handed around in the assembly room, everyone except Hearst had already had a few. Laughter was loud and long as Charlie demonstrated his skill at standing on his head.

  I stood in the doorway, watching. Finally Mother noticed me and called out, “Hello, Chrissie darling!” Then Marion rushed over, flushed and out of breath, dropped to her knees, and gave me a welcoming hug. “How are you, darling? Are you having fun? What did you do today? Tell me everything.” I started to, but she was already on her feet, talking to someone else. So I made the rounds, saying good night, shaking hands, smiling at whoever came lurching forward, drink in hand, to holler as though I were deaf, “Good night, Chrissie!” Then Marion, Charlie, and several others began to sing “Good night, Chrissie!” to the tune of “Good Night, Ladies!” The “big people” were howling with laughter when Marie led me away to the tower.

  THE LAST LUNCH I had with my father at the Brown Derby, a popular eatery in Hollywood’s heyday, is the one I remember the best. “I’m going to Italy in a few weeks,” he told me, after we had made our way through the throng of autograph hunters, waiting to pounce on the stars who ate here, some so often they had their designated booths in the lively, smoky interior of the restaurant, shaped like a bowler hat. We were given a less prominent booth near the kitchen, a sign of my father’s lowered status in Hollywood, although it didn’t register on me at the time.

  “Do you know where Italy is, Christopher?”

  “No, Daddy.”

  “No? What on earth do they teach you in that school of yours? What grade are you in now?”

  “Third grade, Daddy. They skipped me again.”

  “Don’t they teach geography in the third grade?”

  “Yes, but we’ve only studied the geography of California.”

  “What? This is appalling!” His thunderous voice made the people in the next booth jump as though they had been shot. Then they swung around and stared at us, open-mouthed. To add to my embarrassment, the waiter appeared, shook out a napkin, and tied it around my neck as though I were a baby in a highchair. “We will have to do something about your education,” my father rumbled, but soon he was lost in the delights of studying the menu and conferring with the waiter. “Hmmm. How is the lobster bisque? Is it made with fresh cream? And how are the oysters served.” I could see him tasting each dish in his mind, lost in delicious hesitation, as though his well-being depended on whether he ordered the bisque, the oysters, the steamed mussels, or something called gazpacho. Meanwhile, I kicked my legs against the hard underside of the booth and studied the signed caricatures of movie stars that covered the walls, looking for people I knew. In the end, I predicted, my father would order what he usually did when we ate here: a Cobb salad, followed by another and another. He would tell me once again that the dish had been invented by the owner of the Brown Derby, David Cobb, and that whenever I ate in restaurants—not a frequent event in my nine-year-old life—I should order what the restaurant was famous for, listed on the menu as the specialty of the house. Now he lowered the menu and bathed me in one of his marvelous smiles. “What will you have, darling girl?”

  “A hamburger and a vanilla milkshake, please.”

  “Again?” The smile faded.

  “Yes, please, Daddy.”

  “Why don’t you be more adventurous today? How about some oysters?” I made a face. “Have you ever eaten one?” I shook my head. “Then how do you know you won’t like it? You may not know where Italy is, but we can certainly do something to educate your palate.” A burst of wheezy laughter and a conspiratorial wink at the waiter. “Bring my daughter a dozen oysters, please.”

  “Oh no, Daddy, I’ll be sick.”

  “Nonsense. Oysters are good for you.”

  The next ten minutes were misery. To distract myself from the impending disaster of gagging on the oysters and then having to run to the restroom to throw up, I asked him why he was going to Italy.

  “To be in a movie,” he said, sighing. “Not mine, unfortunately. Someone else’s. But if I want to keep working as an actor, I have to go where the work is, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that all you have to say? Just ‘oh’? Don’t you want to know what movie or what part I’m going to play?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “I see you’re as blasé as all the other Hollywood kids, and how I make my living doesn’t really interest you.”

  I didn’t know what blasé meant, but from his tone, I could tell it was a disappointing quality for me to have. At such moments, the euphoria of being with my father became infused with anxiety. What if I didn’t measure up? Could I be myself and also be Orson’s kid? At that moment the waiter set before me a plate of oysters, so fishy-smelling my nose began to twitch. I stared down at the fat, grayish white globs stuck to their shells and told myself I might be able to get them down if I closed my eyes and pretended they were raw eggs.

  “Now use that small fork to dig one out … That’s right, Christopher. Now sprinkle a little lemon juice on it. There you go. Don’t sniff it, for God’s sake. Eat it!”

  “Do I have to chew it, Daddy?”

  “Down the hatch!” He watched while I poured one down my throat and felt it wiggle as though it were an eyeball blinking open. “Now isn’t that delicious?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I lied. Then, after a nervous pause, “Do I have to eat them all?”

  “Just one more. That’s my girl. Now was that so terrible?”

  “No.”

  “You have to try things in life, Christopher. There’s a great big world out there that has nothing to do with Hollywood. Geography doesn’t begin and end with California, you know. Now what shall we order next? I’m going to have another Cobb salad …”

  “I’ll have a hamburger and a vanilla milkshake.”

  “Dear God, it’s hopeless!” He laughed, good-humoredly, though.

  The people in the next booth kept gawking at us and whispering among themselves, which meant they must be “civilians” (as movie people referred to anyone who wasn’t “in pictures” like themselves). While our neighbors made me uncomfortable, my father paid them no more attention than if they had been flies buzzing on the other side of a screen door. He was between his second and third Cobb salad when one of them approached our booth, armed with a menu and a pen. “May I have your autograph, Mr. Welles?”

  “Certainly. Where would you like me to sign?”

  “Right here, Mr. Welles, and I just wanted to say …” Eager to spout his opinions of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, the stranger lingered while my father continued smiling, nodding, murmuring, “Thank you so much. That’s so kind of you.”

  Why does this always have to happen when I’m alone with Daddy?

  “Autographs are stupid,” I burst out after the interloper had returned to his booth.

  “Shhh!” My father put a finger to his lips. “I happen to agree with you, but you can’t tell a person that something he wants is stupid. That would be very rude.”

  “But, Daddy,” I babbled on, “kids at school have autograph books, and they go around showing them off to other kids and boasting they’ve got Elizabeth Taylor or Clark Gable, and sometimes they get into fights about who’s got the biggest stars in their book. It’s so stupid!”

  “Now I know what to get you for Christmas!” He gave me a twinkling look. “An autograph book!”

  “You know, Daddy,
” I rushed on, “one of my teachers asked me to get your autograph, but I told her you were away, making a movie, and I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

  “You shouldn’t have said that.” He looked at me reproachfully, then sighed. “What is your teacher’s name?” After I told him, he scribbled a message on the back of a menu. “Now you give this to your teacher the next time you see her, and don’t ever refuse another request for my autograph.”

  “All right, Daddy.”

  “When someone asks for your autograph, they’re paying you a compliment, don’t you see?”

  “But why do they have to bother us when we’re having lunch? Why don’t you ask them to come back later?”

  He laughed though I hadn’t meant to be funny. “Well, Christopher, I hope for your sake that you never become famous.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to be famous, Daddy.”

  “You don’t? Why not?”

  “I want to be a civilian, like Marie.”

  “So you’re going to grow up to be a nanny. Well, now I’ve heard everything,” and he laughed so long and with such gusto, throwing back his head, his chest heaving, that he had to wipe his eyes with a napkin.

  When my father hugged me goodbye that day and told Shorty to drive me home, neither one of us realized that the next time we met, it would not be in Hollywood. In going to Italy, my father assumed he would not be there any longer than it took to shoot his scenes in Black Magic. While abroad, he also hoped to find financial backing for a movie of his own based on Shakespeare’s Othello. He had no idea that his jaunt to Europe to appear in a movie would stretch into years of wandering from country to country, hat in hand.