In My Father's Shadow Read online

  “Virginia was all ambition and no talent,” my father rumbled. “Thank God she finally came to her senses and gave it up.”

  “You didn’t think so once,” Granny observed. “The way I remember it, the two of you set off for New York to make theater history, and God himself couldn’t have stopped you …”

  The adults went on to talk of other things. “May I be excused, please?” I asked.

  “Yes, honey, run along now.”

  In the doorway, I turned to look one last time at my father, closing my eyes and then opening them again to make sure he was still there. Then I lingered long enough to catch Granny’s loving smile and Skipper’s approving wink — long enough to feel them reassuring me that I could be anything and anybody.

  “All he had to keep him company … was his dog, Caesar.”

  I LIVED WITH the Hills for almost two years while my mother was between marriages. Along with unstinting love and encouragement, they gave me my first taste of being part of a family and living a normal life. As an adult, whenever I presented Skipper with my gratitude, he would drawl, “You weren’t with us nearly long enough,” but those few years had been crucial to me, and the relationship they began with the Hills would have meaning and importance for the rest of my life.

  The Hills were also my major connection to the young Orson Welles. As an adult I often visited them in their Woodstock farmhouse. Over the years they brought alive for me the remarkable boy my father had once been. Typically, I sat beside Granny, the two of us pouring over her scrapbooks and photo albums while she exclaimed, “If only you could have known him back then, Chris. Your dad was such a sweet boy before fame spoiled him.”

  “Now, Horty,” Skipper never failed to correct her, “you know damned well he was a ham and a phony even then.” Too restless to sit with us on the sofa, Skipper was invariably pacing up and down, combing his mane of white hair with an impatient hand, picking up this and that and putting it down again. “Don’t you remember Orson told us he was born at six a.m. in Kenosha, when all the factories are supposed to open up? The moment he was born—he got this from his mother, he says—every factory bell and whistle went off for miles around.” Skipper snorted. “Well, I believed this malarkey until Doctor showed me Orson’s birth certificate, and it turns out our boy was born at 7 a.m.” (Doctor was the way we referred to Maurice Bernstein, a Russian émigré who practiced medicine and had insinuated himself into the Welles household.)

  “Well, Orson was born in the morning and in Kenosha,” Granny observed with a chuckle. “That much is true anyway.”

  We were all agreed that George Orson Welles came into the world on May 6, 1915, the second child of Beatrice Ives Welles and Richard Head Welles. Beatrice was thirty-three when Orson was born and Richard forty-two. Orson’s only sibling, Richard Ives Welles, was ten years older and, for reasons even the Hills could not explain, a profound disappointment to his parents. At the age of eleven, brother Richard was packed off to Todd School, leaving the field clear for baby Orson.

  “Orson told us when he was a child that he didn’t have any friends his age,” Granny recalled, pointing to a photo of an intense little boy in a sailor suit, leaning against a mongrel taller than he is. “All he had to keep him company, he said, was his dog, Caesar.”

  “He looks so sad and serious,” I commented, thinking he could not have been more than five when this picture was taken. “You’d think everyone had deserted him except Caesar.”

  Granny chuckled. “No wonder Orson has always been crazy about dogs. I suspect he likes them a lot better than people.”

  “Dogs don’t let you down,” Skipper observed with a wry laugh.

  ANOTHER RELIABLE SOURCE of information about my father’s early life was Ada Henderson, a cultivated, elderly widow I knew in Chicago through my maternal grandmother. Ada, who had been a close friend of Beatrice Ives Welles, described her to me as “a cool, self-centered woman who had little tolerance for children in their natural state.” It was customary in the 1920s, she explained, for well-to-do parents to leave their children in the custody of nannies and see them, at most, once a day. In any case, Beatrice did not have much time for her younger son. A gifted pianist and composer, she devoted herself increasingly to her music.

  Hailed as a genius at the age of two.

  From Ada, I also learned that Dick Welles was a remote figure, not often home, and it did not take long for the charming émigré, Maurice Bernstein, to fill his place. Whether to flatter Beatrice or console her for her disappointment in her older son, Doctor pronounced Orson a genius.

  Armed with this information, I had more questions to put to the Hills on my next visit with them in their Woodstock farmhouse. “Is it true, that story Doctor tells about how he knew my father was a genius when he was two years old?” I posed the question to Skipper roaming about the room. Doctor claimed that on first meeting Orson in his crib, the toddler had solemnly declared, “The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguishes men from animals.”

  Skipper hooted. “Doctor’s the only person I know who can go one better than your dad when it comes to myth and obfuscation.” Only an English teacher, I thought, could blithely drop a word like obfuscation into a casual conversation. “We’ll never know, one way or the other, since no one but Doctor was on hand to hear this astonishing proof of genius.”

  My own impression of Doctor, whom I had met as a child, was that he was an oily, silver-tongued phony. Now, aware it was none of my business, I asked Skipper, “Did Doctor really have an affair with my grandmother Beatrice or is that more myth and obfuscation?”

  “Well,” Skipper drawled, “Beatrice was Doctor’s patient all right. She was in poor health for a long time before she died, but maybe she was able to go to bed with him all the same. Does it matter? Whether Doctor slept with Beatrice or not, he wrecked her marriage, which Orson never forgave him for.”

  I had learned from Ada that my father was four years old when his parents separated. He and his mother moved to Chicago, where they were quickly followed by Maurice Bernstein. Dick Welles, who stayed behind in Kenosha, was now financially independent, having been handsomely rewarded when his manufacturing firm was sold to a larger concern. He promptly retired from his job as the company’s treasurer and began a life of drinking, gambling, and womanizing. Increasingly, Maurice Bernstein took over the role of Orson’s father, to the point that the boy started calling him “Dadda.”

  “Orson never talked about it,” Granny mused, “but he had to feel as every child does when his parents separate and his mom takes up with someone new.”

  In one camp stood Orson’s tall, dark-eyed mother, a strong woman ahead of her time, more handsome than beautiful. “She had a voice like an oboe,” my father once told me, “and she could mesmerize you with her charm.” In the other camp was Orson’s father, a diffident man who drank too much.

  “What was my grandfather like?” I asked Skipper, who had met him many times.

  “Kind of dull, to tell the truth. Also kind of pathetic once the drinking got heavy. And he was dead set against Orson having anything to do with the theater. He’d come to Todd to see Orson in a play, and then he’d stand in the back of the auditorium and sneak away before the final curtain. That really hurt your dad, that his father wouldn’t come backstage. Damn it, Dick should have gone backstage and said hello to his kid!”

  “Maybe he was too drunk,” I offered, but Skipper would accept no excuses.

  “No, he was a lousy father, but I have to say this for him. He was a class act, a real gentleman. Orson loved him a lot more than he deserved and never stopped trying to turn him into something he wasn’t.”

  True. Whenever I asked my father to tell me about his father, I was treated to another tale about Dick Welles, the brilliant inventor, or Dick Welles, the business tycoon. Warming to the subject, he went on to describe his father as the urbane world traveler relaxing in first-class limbo on ocean liners; or the internation
al playboy who broke the bank at Monte Carlo; or the witty raconteur who kept bars and pubs throughout the British Empire open until dawn.

  On the other hand, Ada had told me the real Dick Welles would have preferred that his wife give up her musical aspirations after their marriage and devote her mornings to the dressmaker and her afternoons to bridge games and ladies’ teas. He was dismayed by reports from Chicago that Beatrice was holding weekly musical soirees and exposing young Orson to a bunch of “long-haired arty types.”

  “It was my mother who wanted me to learn the piano,” my father once told me when he was reminiscing about his childhood. “She made me practice for hours on end every day—scales, scales, and more scales. She hired a wretched spinster lady who stood over me and made sure I did it. You have no idea how I hated the piano—not like you, Christopher. You owe your musical gifts to your grandmother Welles, you know.” One day, my father went on, he was so fed up with practicing that he climbed out the window and stood on the narrow ledge, threatening to jump if he was made to play another scale. “The spinster lady screamed hysterically for my mother who was in the next room.” He paused dramatically.

  “And … what happened?”

  “I heard my mother say, as cool as you please, ‘Well, if he wants to jump, let him jump.’ “ He began to laugh uproariously.

  “She said that?”

  “If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here to tell about it.” When I still looked disbelieving, he explained that his mother, who knew him “inside out,” understood how the melodramatic gesture of “stepping off into space” would have appealed to him. “So, she had to kill my act, you see. When I realized she wasn’t going to rush to my side, fall on her knees, and weep and plead with me not to take my life, I climbed back into the room.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I sat down at the piano and started playing those dreadful scales again.”

  Unlike the endless practicing, my father recalled how much he enjoyed mingling with the musicians and theater people who flocked to his mother’s home in the evenings. At these gatherings he was treated like an adult, encouraged to recite epic poems by heart or otherwise amaze his mother’s friends. The moment he became “boring,” it was back to the nursery. So young Orson learned to be nimble-tongued and entertaining — traits he would retain long after he had escaped into fame and adulthood. “I was always determined,” he told me in the voice of one who had thrown off a terrible illness, “to rid myself of childhood.”

  Beatrice Ives-Welles, as she billed herself, became a performing artist of some renown, devising a unique one-woman show in which she played her own compositions on the piano while reciting poetry. Unfortunately her career was cut short by increasing bouts of ill health. On May 10, 1924, just four days after Orson’s ninth birthday, Beatrice Welles died at the age of forty-two. “Ever since then,” my father confided, “I’ve never wanted to celebrate my birthday.”

  Beatrice Ives Welles—“his mother and his muse.”

  Granny believed he never got over losing his mother at such a young age. “She had been dead two years when he came to us at Todd, and already he was making up stories about her.”

  It no longer mattered who Beatrice Welles had been in real life. In her son’s eyes, she grew ever more beautiful, brave, and amazing, until she became a crack shot who could shoot straighter than Annie Oakley, and a suffragette who had staged more protest marches than Susan B. Anthony. True, she had not loved him enough; she had exiled his father and thrown open the door to Doctor, the fox in the chicken coop; but she lived on in his memory as tough, exciting, glamorous. The woman, real and invented, who had opened his ears to music, his eyes to art, and his mind and heart to the theater. His mother and his muse.

  TODD SCHOOL WAS a strong point of connection between my father and me. “You were the lucky one,” he laughed during one of our reminiscences in later years, “because when you went to Todd, Skipper was the headmaster and the place had become a paradise for boys.” I didn’t want to point out that when I went to Todd, it was not exactly a paradise for girls. “I had to contend with Nobel Hill, you see,” my father went on, referring to Skipper’s stern, Bible-pounding father, “the same headmaster who’d expelled my older brother, Richard. You have no idea how terrified I was when I heard they were sending me to Todd.”

  (Fortunately for Orson the schoolboy, by the time he arrived at Todd, Nobel was becoming a figurehead, and Skipper was in the process of assuming command, a job he later said he took on with deep reluctance, having envisioned a big-city life in Chicago and a sprightly career in advertising.)

  “Do you know what my greatest coup was at Todd?” my father asked me with shining eyes. After an expectant pause, he answered his own question: “Winning Skipper’s love. I was just a kid in knee pants, and Skipper was a married man in his midthirties, but it was what the French call un coup de foudre. We were fatally attracted to one another, you see. The difference in our ages didn’t matter, because Skipper was always younger than me. He had the kind of youth I never had.”

  “There is something ageless about him,” I agreed.

  “Oh, he’ll never grow old. He’ll outlive us all!”

  “You’ve often joked that he’s a leprechaun in disguise.”

  “What makes you think I was joking? You know what? I’ve decided he’s really a troll. The kind who lives under a bridge and lies in wait for unsuspecting travelers.” He laughed delightedly at his new and improved metaphor, which called up for us both the mischief in Skipper’s smile and in the way he crinkled up his sky-blue eyes as he stared off into the distance at something known only to himself. Then my father’s face clouded as he remembered what it had cost him to “win” Skipper, universally popular on campus and in constant demand as future headmaster, teacher, and family man. “When Skipper began spending more time with me than anyone else, everyone hated me.”

  “Not everyone,” I suggested. “What about Granny?”

  “Hortense resented me, too.”

  “But Granny loves you like her own son. I know she does.” How much like a little boy he looked when the hurt showed through, a little boy with a round, chubby face and a button nose, but he hadn’t heard me. He was looking through me, back to a time I couldn’t envision, when he had felt the first lashes of hostility, the first stings of envy, when he had learned this was the price he must pay, again and again, for having been born with a superabundance of gifts.

  “They all hated me,” he said with the sadness of one who believes nothing can alter his fate, “and they still do.”

  “They may not like you as much as they should, but they don’t hate you.”

  “Dear child! If only it were so …”

  THE HILLS’ THREE children, all of whom I had come to know well, viewed Orson Welles much as he himself viewed Maurice Bernstein: an interloper grabbing love that didn’t belong to him. From them I learned that Orson the schoolboy did not find many friends among his peers. Although he was widely admired, he was also seen as imperious and full of himself. He was envied because his close relationship with Skipper gave him privileges not conferred on any other Todd boy before or since. These included a room of his own and permission to cut any class that didn’t interest him. Pleading asthma and flat feet, he excused himself from gym and most forms of physical exercise except swimming, which he happened to like. Thus the budding young director was able to devote most of his time and energy to putting on an astounding number of plays. His talent for self-promotion was equally evident: Under an assumed name, he touted his own productions in the school newspaper.

  As for Granny Hill, while she did not resent my father as he believed, she did wonder in retrospect whether she had been too permissive, allowing him to take advantage of her easygoing hospitality. Almost every night, to the consternation of the Hill children, young Orson could be found holding forth at the dinner table. And after dinner, he moved into the Hills’ bedroom, making himself comfortable on their bed and co
ntinuing, as Granny recalled “to talk his head off until we had to throw him out.” By that time, it was often two or three in the morning.

  “I was always exhausted back then,” Granny remembered, “what with staying up every night with Orson and then having my two girls and baby boy to take care of the next day, not to mention all the school stuff I had to do for Skipper.”

  “Then why did you permit it?” I asked her.

  “I should have laid down the law more—I see that now—but if you could have heard your dad, Chris, the way he talked at that age. The ideas he had. The words he used. Skipper couldn’t get over it. We’d never had a boy like Orson before. He was so far ahead of himself, it kind of scared us …” And she chuckled, remembering those sleepless nights, then heaved a deep sigh. “It’s never been easy, loving Orson. You know, whenever he came to see us, he expected to be the center of attention, and our own kids were supposed to take a backseat. I couldn’t talk to anyone but him, and if I did, if I turned away or ignored him, he’d look hurt. Why, sometimes he got so upset, he walked right out of the room!”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Oh, he’d be back before you knew it, ready to charm us again and make us laugh at his stories. Some of them were so preposterous, we couldn’t help laughing.”

  “Orson was a born storyteller all right,” chimed in Skipper, who had been listening to our conversation, “but there were times I used to wonder if he was really a kid or a premature old man. Then I’d see how easily his feelings got hurt or how much he wanted everyone to like him, and I’d realize there was a kid inside that ancient gent he pretended to be.” Skipper fell silent, conjuring up the boy he had lost.

  The Hills, I learned, were not the only adults enthralled by Orson the boy. Among the papers my mother left me after her death, I found the journal entries of a woman who had met the prodigy during a school vacation when he was staying with his father. After their initial meeting, she wrote: