In My Father's Shadow

by Chris Welles Feder

  During the “hols,” I found a haven with the Epsteins, a family Jack Pringle did not altogether approve of—they were unusually liberal for white South Africans. However, he did not object to the great amount of time I spent at the Epsteins or to anything that kept me out of his own home. He and my mother had now adopted two children in their infancy, a girl and a boy they named Angela and Simon. They had formed a family unit of four that excluded me.

  While my mother and Jackie would have protested that of course I was a welcome member of their family, their unceasing criticism delivered the opposite message. I was fat, lazy, ignorant, selfish, inconsiderate. Nothing I did was good enough. Even my obvious gift for playing the piano came under attack. How “frightfully boring” of me to want to be a music teacher instead of a concert pianist. Was I really serious about making a career out of giving piano lessons? In that case, they might as well sell the grand piano they had bought especially for me. My mother actually carried out this threat, but then bought another grand piano as she liked to play show tunes by ear, in between sips of her martini and puffs on her cigarette. “Your mother has a real gift for music,” Jackie made a point of telling me, “not like you.”

  When I was home from boarding school, what a relief it was to stay with the Epsteins. Harry Epstein was our doctor. He was a good-hearted man with whom I felt at ease. His wife Iris was pretty and fun-loving, but it was their daughter, Barbara, who was my special friend. Barbara was extraordinarily gifted, musical, brilliant, and precocious. We were united in our passion for classical music and the piano, Barbara’s knowledge of music and her skill at the keyboard far exceeding mine. It was she who introduced me to madrigals, Bach cantatas, and Handel operas at a time when they were rarely performed, igniting an intense love of early music that has never left me. When we weren’t lying on our stomachs on the living room rug, listening to recordings, we were pounding out duets on the Epstein’s upright piano.

  Most of my good memories of Johannesburg took place in the Epstein household. Along with the hours of glorious music, here I found warmth, spontaneity, humor, and just plain nonsense. Much as I thrived on Barbara’s sharp mind and the lively discussions that went on at the Epsteins’ dinner table, after a day of being serious, we girls collapsed with the helpless, unstoppable laughter that came over us for no good reason other than our age. The frivolity continued when I stayed overnight in Barbara’s room and instead of sleeping, we were whispering in the dark, making up silly jokes and stifling our giggles in our pillows. We were soul mates, Barbara and I, enjoying the passionate friendship of young girls. How innocent we were in those long gone days! Yet we could begin to imagine our future as women—the first glimpse of a ship in full sail rounding the horizon.

  OVER A YEAR had passed with no communication from my father, and I was finding it painful to talk about him—or even to think about him. When asked, “Is it true you’re Orson Welles’s daughter?” or “What is your father doing these days?” I looked away, mumbling, “Yes,” or “I don’t know.” Then, on March 27, 1951, my thirteenth birthday, I was home from school and reading in my room when I heard my mother calling me. “Chrissie, there’s someone on the phone for you.” To my surprise, she suggested I take the call in her bedroom and close the door.

  When I picked up the phone and heard my father booming, “Hello, Christopher,” I could hardly believe it. For a moment, I didn’t know how to respond. “Is this my daughter Christopher?” he asked, louder than before.

  “Is that really you, Daddy?”

  “You bet it is. I’m calling from London, and you can’t imagine how difficult it’s been to get a clear connection to Johannesburg. I’ve had to move heaven and earth.”

  “Then you’ve tried to call me before?”

  “Many, many times. I was beginning to think I’d never get through to you …”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “… but I’ve finally reached you, and what luck that my call went through today. Happy birthday, darling girl.”

  “Oh, Daddy!” He’d remembered! Swallowing hard, I went on, “It’s just wonderful to hear from you and I … I miss you so much.”

  “I miss you, too. In fact, that’s another reason why I’m calling. How would you like to come to London and stay with me for a while?”

  “Oh, could I, Daddy? When?”

  “Just as soon as we can arrange it.”

  I hung up the phone in a happy daze. My father had done it again. Somehow he always knew exactly what I wanted for my birthday.

  5

  The Visits

  I WAS OVERJOYED WHEN my mother arranged a month’s visit for me with my father in Europe. He and I would begin our time together in Rome and then travel to London, where we would stay for several weeks. “Now you’re thirteen, I think you’re finally old enough to cope with Orson’s blazing intellect,” my mother declared, “but you’ll need a chaperone. You’re too young to fly to Rome by yourself.”

  In those days the trip took more than thirty-six hours as the plane had to land several times to refuel, but that didn’t count the delays en route. When engine trouble developed, we passengers had to sit for hours in steamy waiting rooms, watching flies blacken strips of flypaper pasted on grimy walls, listening to the whir and creak of slow-turning ceiling fans. We were offered tepid tea with condensed milk or ghastly soft drinks made with bottled lime juice. At one refuelling stop the engine trouble grew serious enough that I had to stay overnight in a rickety hotel room that was little more than a tin shack. I could feel the nearness of the jungle as I lay awake in the torpid air, watching the mosquito net draped over my bed sag with the steady accumulation of exotic insect life.

  My chaperone, June Besso, was a long-faced woman in her late twenties, shy and gentle. She was tall and gangly with a loping walk that made me think of a giraffe. My mother had befriended “poor June” after an unhappy love affair led the young woman to an attempt to take her life. “Poor June’s had a rotten time of it,” my mother had confided before we left, “so a trip to Rome is just the thing to cheer her up. She’s terrified of meeting Orson, but I’m sure you’ll smooth the way for her, won’t you, Chrissie, and do take good care of her in Rome.”

  “Isn’t poor June supposed to be taking care of me?”

  “Oh, really, Chrissie, you are so tiresome!”

  My father saw through my mother’s ruse of wangling a trip to Rome for her friend, all expenses paid by him. He was furious. The first moment we were alone, he reminded me I had flown by myself from Los Angeles to Acapulco when I was only eight years old; more recently I had made a solo flight from New York to Rome. “There is absolutely no reason on earth why you need a chaperone,” he thundered. “So I’m sending her back to Johannesburg on the first plane.”

  “Oh, Daddy, she’ll be so unhappy if you do that, and Mummy will be upset, too.” (In spite of myself, Mommy had become Mummy, and other anglicisms had crept into my speech.)

  “The round-trip fare for your chaperone has already cost me a bundle, you know, and now your mother expects me to shell out for her hotel room and three meals a day.” He stopped when he saw my stricken face. “I’m not blaming you, darling girl, but I can’t afford to pick up the tab for May.”

  “June,” I whispered.

  “Whatever her name is. Oh, all right, she can stay a week, but no longer, or I’ll end up in the poorhouse!”

  “Oh, thank you, Daddy!” I flung my arms around him, but my relief did not last long. In the days that followed, my father subjected June to relentless teasing. The moment she appeared, he began to hum the tune from Carousel, “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” and each time he did, he had the satisfaction of watching her grow red in the face and flail about, more awkward and gangly than ever. He made fun of her South African accent, her dowdy clothes, her ignorance of all things Italian. Too late I wished I had not played a role in keeping June in Rome. This desperately shy woman who lived on the edge of depression must have been wondering how she co
uld ever have wanted to meet handsome, glamorous Orson Welles. It was the first time I had seen him be cruel to anyone—not that he was aware of it. As far as he was concerned, June was fair game and it was all in good fun.

  I, at least, was glad of June’s company, especially on those days my father was not able to spend much time with me. Although he was always working, he would sandwich me in whenever he could between long-distance phone calls, interviews with journalists, and the many solitary hours he spent working on treatments and giving visible form to the latest “ribbon of dreams” that glistened in his imagination.

  Usually he was able to make time for me at lunch and dinner. In fact, when I recall being with my father anywhere in Europe, we are invariably eating our way through a five-course meal in an excellent restaurant. These meals were long, leisurely affairs during which I discovered what my mother had meant about “Orson’s blazing intellect.” His conversation was so dazzling that I felt my mind was being bombarded by shooting stars. More often than not, I had to confess my ignorance of the subject he had raised, which never failed to astonish him. Why hadn’t I heard of such-and-such or so-and-so? What on earth were they teaching me in that English school in Johannesburg? Not very much, he concluded. That was why most schools were a waste of time, in his opinion, and I should take my education into my own hands as he had done.

  While my father was tied up with work during the day, I took June to my old haunts—the Colosseum, the Forum, St. Peter’s—and showed her around. She was impressed by how much I knew. She was also terrified of Roman traffic. “How do you know they’ll stop?” she asked me, quavering on the curb. It was true that most Roman drivers tore around the piazza, wheels screeching, horns blaring, and stopped only if you threw yourself in front of them with the utmost confidence that their brakes were working. “Don’t look,” I ordered June. “Just start walking and they’ll stop, I promise.” So she covered her eyes with one hand, gave me her other one, and let me drag her across the intersection, more like a blind, balking mule than a gentle giraffe. In the middle of one of these maneuvers, I suddenly noticed blood on the bottom half of her dress and streaming down her legs. “What’s wrong, June? Did you hurt yourself?”

  “It’s the curse,” she whispered. “It’s come so early, I wasn’t prepared.” I had heard about “the curse” from girls at school but had never expected to see a woman menstruating in the middle of a Roman intersection, inspiring every male driver who had braked in time to add to the serenade of catcalls and obscenities. “I’ve got to get back to the hotel as quickly as I can. Please help me, Chrissie.”

  Perhaps, I thought, frantically hailing a taxi, June would be better off back in Johannesburg. When the day came for her to leave us, I did not protest. With June gone, my father made an effort to spend more time with me. He was delighted by my love of art and took me to many of the museums and art galleries in Rome.

  “What Italian artists do you like the most?” he asked me on one of these excursions.

  “Michelangelo,” I responded without hesitation. “He’s my favorite.”

  “Good choice, Christopher, but why Michelangelo and not Leonardo da Vinci?”

  “Well, Daddy, it started when I saw his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.”

  He immediately broke into a wide grin. “That’s my girl!”

  The very next day, we spent hours studying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, my father helping me identify what was happening in every inch of it: “Look up there, Christopher, that’s God creating the sun, the moon, and the planets, and there he is creating the first man. Isn’t it lovely, Christopher, how that act of creation is shown by the fingers of God and man about to touch? What an inspired idea that was! There’s Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden of Eden—do you see the serpent with the woman’s face coiled around the Tree of Knowledge? And there’s Noah lying in a drunken stupor. Now look very closely at the Great Flood right next to it. Isn’t it marvelous what Michelangelo did with that?” My father was so boyish at these moments, so filled with enthusiasm, that I wanted to laugh out loud for the sheer joy of being with him and sharing his passion.

  For the rest of our stay in Rome, we made it our project to see any work of art we could find by Michelangelo. I had already admired his Pietà in St. Peter’s; in those days you could walk right up to the statue of the Madonna tenderly holding the dead body of Christ on her lap. You could even lay a cautious finger on the cold white marble robes of the Madonna or the foot of Christ. It amazed me that every vein showed in Christ’s foot, and my father explained that Michelangelo had stolen corpses from the city morgue in order to perfect his knowledge of anatomy.

  After St. Peter’s, my father took me to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. It houses the enormous tomb of Pope Julius II, which Michelangelo designed but never completed, and his famous statue of Moses is seated at the base of the tomb. “Moses looks so alive,” I exclaimed, staring at the muscles bulging in the statue’s arms and the prominent veins in his hands, “but why does he have horns on his head?”

  “I can’t remember the reason, but art critics are always complaining about those horns. They do make Moses look like a goat.” We both laughed at this, my father’s hearty laughter echoing up and down the church’s dim interior.

  Before we left Rome, my father bought me two art books, one of Michelangelo’s paintings and the other of his sculptures. In one of these books, he inscribed the flyleaf: “For Christopher (the art-lover) from her ever-loving Daddy.” Then he drew a charming cartoon of the two of us standing at the base of a statue. Looking much too serious, I am holding a lorgnette to my eyes, and towering above me is my fabulous father, puffing away on his Havana cigar.

  “… he drew a charming cartoon of the two of us standing at the base of a statue.”

  FROM ROME WE flew to London where we were to spend several weeks before I was due back at school in Johannesburg. I look back on those whirlwind weeks, as I do on all the times I spent with my father in Europe, as both the pinnacle of my life up to that point and the foundation of my life to come. In our often fleeting times together, Orson Welles did more to shape my character, values, and aspirations than Virginia and Jack Pringle could have accomplished in a lifetime.

  Wherever my father went in London in those days, he was instantly recognized as Harry Lime, the character he had played in the British thriller The Third Man. The role had made him more famous than anything he had ever done, including Citizen Kane. When I told my father I had not seen The Third Man, he immediately arranged for a private screening at Shepperton Studios. There we were in the darkened projection room, just the two of us, enveloped in cigar smoke and watching the credits roll.

  “That’s you!” I cried, when the name of Orson Welles appeared on the screen. He put a finger to his lips, but I was irrepressible. “What part do you play, Daddy?”

  “The villain.”

  “But Daddy, I want you to be the hero.”

  “Villains are a lot more fun, Christopher.”

  My father’s close friend, Joseph Cotten, played Holly Martins, an American writer who goes to Vienna in search of his old school chum, Harry Lime. The beautiful Italian Alida Valli played Harry Lime’s girlfriend. The film was directed by Sir Carol Reed from an original screenplay by the novelist Graham Greene.

  “Why didn’t you direct it, Daddy?”

  “Shush, I’ll tell you later, darling girl.”

  As the movie began, I leaned forward eagerly in my seat, but long moments passed and still my father had not appeared on the screen. “Daddy,” I whispered, “why aren’t you in the movie yet?”

  “Shush, my love. Be patient.”

  Almost an hour into the film, when I thought I could no longer bear the suspense, I watched as a cat rubbed itself against a pair of highly polished black shoes. A man’s shoes. Who could be hiding in the darkened doorway? Suddenly a light flicked on in an upstairs window, catching a man in its beam for an instant: slim, smiling, sardonic, devil
ishly handsome. It was “the third man” of the title, who had faked his own death to escape from the law and continue his life of crime. It was Harry Lime, an American black marketeer in postwar Vienna who spread illness and death by selling inferior penicillin. But was it also my father? For once he was not wearing a false nose or anything else that disguised his looks, and yet he was nothing like his real self. He had turned into the heartless, unscrupulous, wickedly charming Harry Lime. I was so fascinated by the transformation that I paid scant attention to the story or the hypnotic zither music in the background. I was mainly impressed by Harry Lime’s long-awaited first appearance in the doorway, and the heart-stopping chase through the gritty sewers of Vienna that ends in his capture. In the final scene the wounded Lime hauls himself up the sewer’s iron staircase. He struggles to remove the manhole cover but does not have the strength. In a last attempt at salvation, his fingers reach imploringly through the grating. It made me think of the damned souls in Michelangelo’s hell reaching toward heaven.

  “Well, what did you think?” my father asked as the lights came up in the screening room. I told him I’d found the movie very exciting, especially the chase through the sewers. “But what did you think of Harry Lime?”

  “I know he was bad and deserved to be caught, but I still felt sorry for him at the end.”

  “You did?” He broke into a broad grin. “You mean you couldn’t help liking him, in spite of the terrible things he’d done?” I nodded vigorously. “Well, that’s wonderful, Christopher. That’s what makes this movie work and any other one, for that matter—that you can feel sympathy for the villain.” From the way he was chomping his cigar, I could tell he was pleased with me.