With Daddy in Saint Moritz, Switzerland, Christmas 1951.
We were staying at the Palace Hotel, the first one in Europe to be called a “palace,” as my father would later inform me, and the only one according to him to deserve such a name. It had opened in 1896 and attracted hordes of the rich and famous ever since. The Grand Hall—the main lounge where we would have hot chocolate and pastries in the late afternoons—soared above two black marble fireplaces and priceless antique furniture.
One of the reasons Phoebe had been sent on ahead of us was to ensure that my father got a suite of rooms overlooking the lake. He had heard the shah of Iran and his retinue were also going to be staying at the Palace. “They’ll give the shah all the suites with a lake view and put us in the back, overlooking the kitchen,” he had warned Phoebe in London, but he needn’t have worried. Our suite was lovely. Not only could we have breakfast in full, dazzling view of the lake, but there was a gaily decorated Christmas tree in one corner of our sitting room.
Seeing the festive tree reminded me that I had not yet bought my father a Christmas present. “What do you think Daddy would like for Christmas?” I asked Phoebe during our first moment alone together.
“A windup toy,” she replied, and when she saw my look of astonishment, continued, “You’ve seen them, I’m sure, the toy soldiers that beat their drums or the animals that dance when you wind them up. Orson adores them, especially the ones they make here in Switzerland. We’ll go to a toy store in town, and on Christmas morning, he’ll be thrilled.”
“Are you sure, Phoebe?” I still couldn’t believe that my father, a grown man after all, wanted a windup toy more than a box of hand-rolled linen handkerchiefs or a bottle of aftershave lotion that smelled like evergreens in a snowfall. I had even thought of giving him a tie so that we would no longer be stopped every time we were about to enter the Palace’s dining room. “I am very sorry, Mr. Welles, but we cannot seat you without a tie,” the maître d’hôtel would say, then snap his fingers to summon a lackey who somehow always managed to produce a tie for such nonchalant diners as Orson Welles. “God, how I hate these things,” my father would say, as he wound it around his neck. No, opening a gift box with a tie inside would not make a hit with him on Christmas morning. Better to follow Phoebe’s suggestion and buy him a fuzzy little bear banging a pair of cymbals together or a pair of mice doing a tap dance.
The toys I actually chose have faded from memory, but not my father’s delight when he opened his gifts from me on Christmas Day. What a charming little boy he suddenly became as he wound up his new toys again and again, making them perform on the table and the rug, while the whole room shook with his delighted laughter. Yet it was strange to feel that, at thirteen, I had outgrown such pleasures—that my life in recent years had taken me too far away from the child who would have laughed as loudly as her daddy.
Soon after Christmas, my father left for Paris. When he hugged me goodbye, he said he would fly back to Saint Moritz as soon as he could. I hung onto this thought as one day melted into the next and there was still no sign of him. Phoebe found me a private ski instructor and we made several forays on the beginners’ slopes, but I was too scared of falling down and injuring myself to enjoy it. On the other hand, I became passionate about figure skating and spent many fearless hours practicing on the hotel’s private rink. The resident skating instructor, a balding, thin-lipped man who spoke English with a heavy German accent, took me in hand. I worked hard to impress him. After executing what I hoped was a perfect figure eight, I waited for the instructor to say something, then blurted out, “Wasn’t that good?”
“Average, Miss Welles. Only average.”
“Do you think if I practice hard every day, I’ll become really good?”
“If you mean, do I think you have a natural talent, the answer is no. There are little children who skate much better than you do, Miss Welles.” I was crushed but continued to skate anyway for my own enjoyment. If nothing else, it gave me something to do in my father’s continuing absence.
In the late afternoon, I would finally leave the ice rink and meet Phoebe in the Grand Hall. There we would sit by one of the picture windows, Phoebe ordering tea for herself and hot chocolate for me, and I’d anticipate the delights of the pastry tray advancing in our direction. While seated there we would talk about the importance of my father’s work and how nothing, not even a visit with his daughter, should be allowed to stand in his way.
“You see, Christopher, one can’t expect a man like Orson, who’s a genius, to behave like an ordinary father.”
“Yes, Phoebe, I know.” I did not tell her I had heard the same argument all my life and it didn’t make me feel any less lonely or abandoned.
Daddy never did return to Saint Moritz, and finally Phoebe accompanied me to London, where I spent a few more days with my father before I had to fly back to Johannesburg. During this time I was careful to conceal how much I had missed him in Saint Moritz. That I succeeded is evident in the letter he wrote my mother shortly after I left. He told her that I
was a huge success in Saint Moritz and was, I think, very happy there. I flatter myself it was a lucky choice for her Christmas. For the last eight or nine days I had to be away in Paris and had hoped to bring her with me but the ice skating and a constantly widening and thickening circle of contemporary friends up in the Alps made it clear that much as I would have adored being with her, the museums and theatres of a big city would have been a definite let-down. I kept hoping to get back to Switzerland but simply couldn’t.
It would be nearly two years before I saw my father again.
6
Together Again
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, my mother and stepfather decided to send me to Pensionnat Florissant, a finishing school for young ladies in Lausanne, Switzerland. I protested that I did not want to go to a finishing school; I wanted to go to college. “Out of the question!” Jackie said. “I can’t afford it, and even if I could, your grades aren’t good enough.” When my grandparents in Chicago and the Hills in Woodstock raised objections to Jackie’s plan, he told them, “Chrissie is not college material.” My grandparents, impressed by a son-in-law who counted barons and earls among his friends, went along with Jackie’s assessment of me, but the Hills were shocked.
“What was wrong with Jackie? Didn’t he know you’d skipped two grades in elementary school?” Granny asked me years later during one of our visits. Believing at the time that money was the issue, the Hills had generously offered to pay for my college education, but Jackie had turned down their offer. “Do you know what he wrote us? The nerve of that man! ‘Dear Hortense and Skipper, It’s extremely kind of you, but I’m afraid you’d be wasting your money. Chrissie is a very poor student, but Virginia and I think that with her flair for languages, she could learn shorthand and typing and become a bilingual secretary.’ Our Chris not to have a college education? I was never so outraged in all my life!”
“So was Orson when he heard about it,” Skipper recalled. “He’d called me from Rome or London or some damned place, and when I told him Pringle was sending our Chris to some phony Swiss school to learn French, shorthand, and typing, Orson was beside himself. ‘How can you let this happen?’ he yelled at me. ‘You’ve got to talk to Virginia. She won’t listen to me, but she’ll listen to you.’ “ Skipper broke off with a rueful laugh, scratched his head, then drawled, “Well, you were in South Africa, we were in Woodstock, Orson was in Europe. Wasn’t much we could do to help you, kiddo, after Pringle turned down our offer.”
Years later, while I was having lunch with my father during one of his trips to New York, we were reminiscing about the school vacations I had spent with him in Europe while I was going to Pensionnat Florissant. Suddenly I blurted out, “You know, Father, I bet what it cost to send me to Florissant for two years, plus flying me back and forth from Lausanne to Johannesburg, would have paid for four years of college. Easily!”
My father eyed me carefully over his gre
en salad. “You sound much too angry, Christopher, after all these years.”
“I have every right to be angry at that bastard Jack Pringle, who screwed me out of a college education!”
“You may have every right, darling girl, but being angry won’t change anything that’s happened to you, you know. It will only make you miserable.”
“But Daddy … I mean Father … oh, I never know what to call you!”
He treated me to the infectious sound of his laughter. Then, wiping his eyes with one edge of his napkin, “Didn’t we agree on ‘Father’ years ago? It’s what I called my father, you know.”
“Do you know what Mother and Jackie did after telling me there was no money to send me to college and I had to support myself? At seventeen!”
“Christopher, you must get rid of your anger at them. It’s a terrible poison that’s eating away at you …”
“They moved into a larger house and built a swimming pool!”
My father considered this information for a moment, while munching delicately on what was left of his salad, then taking a sip of his sparkling mineral water. He looked me in the eyes with a complicit smile. “I was also screwed by my guardian, you know, dear old Dadda Bernstein. He stole most of my inheritance. Did you know that?” I glumly shook my head. “The grownups we love and trust when we are young are so rarely what we want them to be.” He paused to light a cigar, chewing and puffing on the end of it, then blowing out a cloud of noxious smoke before he rumbled on. “What you’re not taking into account is that your fate rested in the hands of an upper-class English gent. Jack Pringle was acting on his notions of what’s proper for a young lady in upper-class English society, don’t you see? From his point of view — and you must always try to see the other person’s point of view, Christopher, no matter how intensely you despise it — finishing school was exactly the right place to send you before marrying you off to some English earl. If Jackie’d had his way, you’d be living in a run-down castle somewhere in Surrey and riding to hounds every morning.” He was off again, laughing uproariously, and this time I joined him.
“But why a secretary, Father? You know, when I finally broke into publishing and became an editor with Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jackie was still going on about how he wanted me to take a secretarial job with a friend of his so I’d meet all the ‘right people.’ He and Mother didn’t seem to realize I’d made it into a profession in spite of them and without a college degree.”
“You just answered your own question, Christopher. Jackie wanted you to hobnob with all the ‘right people’ instead of those undesirable, long-haired types at Encyclopaedia Britannica. Don’t you see? Nothing was more important to Jackie than meeting the ‘right people.’ He was boxed in by his ideas of class and the life of privilege he’d always led.”
“You mean the work itself was unimportant …”
“Of course it was. Offices all over the United Kingdom are stuffed with the daughters of English lords who can’t type or take shorthand worth a damn, but they look pretty sitting at their desks and filing their nails. They have that unmistakable air of class, which simply means they feel superior to everyone else. When they answer the phone, they sound like this.” And he launched into a perfect imitation of a falsetto, upper-class British accent that had the desired effect of making me laugh—and while I was laughing, my anger began to ebb away.
IN THE SUMMER of 1953, before leaving Johannesburg to enroll in Pensionnat Florissant, I wrote my grandmother in Chicago: “You must have heard the wonderful news about my future career in Switzerland. I am so thrilled I feel like broadcasting it on the radio. Mummy and I are shopping lunatics, and I don’t think anyone was ever fitted out more smartly than me. Mummy says she will write soon, but now she is on her knees all day lining a coat for me for Switzerland.” (In fact, my mother sewed most of my clothes, using patterns for women twice my age and choosing fabrics in dull, somber colors. At the time I was unaware of how dowdy I looked in my homemade clothes.) After telling my grandmother there were only forty or fifty students at Florissant, I quoted from the school’s brochure: “Our aim is to develop the intellectual, moral, and physical qualities of the young girls confided to us, to direct them in their studies of French and modern languages, to initiate them in their future part of mistress of the house, complete their general knowledge, in one word prepare them for life.” I ended my letter, “We are taken to all the concerts, art galleries, and plays, and for the winter holidays the whole school is moved up to chalets on the mountains which sounds divine. All lessons, everything is held in French but at first I will room with an English-speaking girl (thank heaven) so I will understand something somewhere sometime.”
I did not tell Grandmother how wrenching it would be to be parted from Barbara Epstein. Barbara and I promised to write each other long letters every week, leaving nothing out, and faithfully scribbling our motto on the back of every envelope — “To hell with the people and the weather”—which at our age we found hilarious.
Nor did I mention my first serious boyfriend, Alain de Courseulles, who had moved with his family into the house next door to ours. His father was an important French banker and his mother a vivacious Italian beauty. Alain was a mixture of the two, a handsome, dark-haired boy with arresting blue eyes. He had beautiful manners, a gentle nature, and was remarkably self-possessed for a boy of sixteen.
After a farewell dinner with his parents and two sisters, Alain had walked me home through the purple African dusk. When we reached my door, he told me in French that he loved me and gave me my first, tremulous kiss. We would have been wretched, clinging to each other in the doorway, had we not known that Alain and his family were being transferred to Paris. His mother had already arranged with mine that I would travel by train from Lausanne and stay with the de Courseulles during my school holidays.
PENSIONNAT FLORISSANT WAS situated at the edge of Lausanne in Ouchy, a residential area that ran parallel to Lac Léman, as the French-speaking Swiss call Lake Geneva. Prosperous and law-abiding, Ouchy did not deserve the drama of the shimmering lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains disappearing into the clouds. Its immaculate homes and gardens wore the self-satisfied air I would come to associate with the Swiss. When I went for solitary walks after classes, I was tempted to shout at the top of my lungs, and once, to the horror of a woman weeding her garden, I did. Otherwise, each day melted into the next, and the only excitement was a stray dog baying at the moon.
Although I was moved by the grandeur of the lake and the Alpine peaks sparkling in the sun, I needed more in my young life than spectacular scenery. Why, when I had wanted so much to go to college, had I been sent to this ridiculous school? Whether German, English, Italian, or Spanish—and each nationality quickly formed its own clique—the girls at Florissant were all the same: excessively rich and spoiled with nothing on their minds but washing their hair, painting their toenails, and meeting boys. They were here not to learn shorthand, typing, or any means of supporting themselves but to acquire a smattering of French and social polish before returning to lives of wealth and privilege.
So it was a happy day for me when Marian Strauss arrived at the pensionnat. Marian was the daughter of wealthy German Jews who had fled the Holocaust and resettled in England. What drew me to her at once was her humor and wicked, uninhibited laugh, but at sixteen, Marian was already mature and possessed an unlimited store of common sense. Here was a friend on whom I could rely in all weathers and seasons, and although we didn’t know it yet, we would remain friends for life.
What we did discover within days of meeting was our shared love of classical music. Soon we were playing duets on the upright piano in the dining hall when it was empty. Now I had a willing companion when we were taken to concerts in town.
Marian and I became inseparable. After lessons and homework, in the cool of the day, we would walk downhill through Florissant’s tidy gardens and slip through the gate that brought us to the Quai d’Ouchy, the tree-lined la
keside promenade that led to a small harbor, bobbing with private yachts.
On balmy days we walked bare-legged and in swishing skirts, hoping to attract the stares of lone males lounging on benches or lingering over espressos at an outdoor café. Although in my heart I believed I would always be faithful to Alain, I wasn’t averse to a whistle or two from any man in the vicinity and neither was Marian. We pretended not to notice, of course, tossing our hair, giggling, safe in our virginity.
I HAD THOUGHT I would be spending Christmas with Alain and his family in Paris when, with no warning, my father reappeared in my life. “After a good deal of excited telegramming and telephoning, Daddy arrived in Lausanne,” I wrote my grandparents. “How wonderful it was seeing this dear father of mine again, after three years. He couldn’t believe the change he saw in me …” (Actually, it had been two years, not three, since I had last been with my father.)
The arrival of the world-famous Orson Welles caused great excitement in our school. At thirty-eight, he was extremely handsome, tall and imposing, his dark hair slicked back, a man who might be described as heavyset but who was far from the gigantic proportions of his later years. From the moment he strode through the front door and stood towering in the lobby, girls were racing up and down the staircase or hanging over the banisters to get a good look at him. The boldest sidled up to him to beg for his autograph before Madame Favre, our elderly headmistress, shooed them away. Normally an elegant woman in complete control of herself, Madame looked as though she had flung on her clothes backward and forgotten to comb her frizzy white hair. A red spot appeared on each of her sunken cheeks as she ushered “Meester Velless” into the lounge reserved for visitors and asked him to wait there for “Christophare.” No need; I was already bounding into the room behind her.
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