Chris’s maternal grandfather, Leo Malcolm Nicolson.
I also loved my grandfather in spite of his prejudices. An earthy, self-made man of shrewd intelligence, he had not lost touch with his humble beginnings as a farm boy in Alma, Kansas — unlike my grandmother, who could barely bring herself to tell me about her Quaker parents, dismissing them as “simple nobodies” with an airy wave of her hand. On the surface my grandfather seemed more charming and easygoing than my grandmother until, after a few too many highballs, he began spewing poisonous remarks about blacks, Jews, Democrats, “pansies,” and “theater people.” At such moments I intensely missed my father. Until I came to live with my grandparents, I had not realized how much I had modeled myself on my father’s freedom from prejudice.
Although Leo Nicolson had friendly dealings with Jews in his industrial real estate business, he would never dream of inviting them to his home. “You must always keep your business life separate from your personal life,” he advised me during the many evenings he spent coaching me on how to conduct myself in the business world. I noticed that he drank steadily from the time he came home from the office until he lumbered off to bed, but I did not think anything of it. Then, one night, I was awakened by his incoherent shouting and my grandmother screaming, “No, Leo, no!” There was a scuffle in the hall outside my door. I sat up in bed, terrified that my grandfather was going to burst into my room in a drunken rage, but somehow my grandmother stopped him. The next morning she had a black eye — the result, she said, of “banging into a door.” I knew she was lying, and she knew that I knew. It was understood between us that I had been given this haven only until I could afford a place of my own — and the sooner that happened, the better.
WHILE I WAS living in Chicago, I often visited Granny and Skipper Hill, who had remained a vital link between me and my father. Grandmother disapproved of my having anything to do with the Hills. She had never forgiven them for encouraging the romance between young Orson and Virginia, but what really bothered her were the Hills’ lifestyle and values, which stood in direct opposition to her own.
The Hills were still living in their rambling farmhouse outside Woodstock, Illinois. It felt like coming home to sit once more in their cozy living room paneled in knotty pine, or to curl up in the window seat, gazing out at fields of alfalfa tossing in the wind, remembering how I had romped in them as a child, pretending the wind was the sound of ocean waves. Of course, everything had shrunk in the intervening years, but how comforting it was to sit again at the harvest table covered with a red-checked cloth in Granny’s kitchen, watching her bustle around the stove and waiting for the cuckoo clock to sound the hour.
On one of these visits I learned my father had married Paola Mori in London two days after his fortieth birthday. Skipper showed me some recent photographs of my new stepmother, whom I had first seen when my father showed me the rushes of Mr. Arkadin. She had been striking in the role of Raina, with her huge, expressive eyes, heavy brows, and short, curly hair, but now she was a full-blown beauty, soft and womanly. Her hair was long and sleek, swept up in a French twist. She had a lovely smile and looked warm-hearted. Would I ever get to meet her, I wondered, and if I did, would she like me?
Skipper reminded me that Paola Mori was a stage name. She was really the Countess di Girfalco and came from a distinguished Italian family. When her parents learned Orson had made her pregnant, they were horrified and insisted he marry her. “It was a shotgun wedding all right,” Skipper chuckled.
“What a thing to say!” Granny objected. “Why, you know how devoted Paola is to Orson and how much she’s helped him cut back on his drinking. Why, she worships him and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do — “
“That may all be true, Horty, but I doubt Orson would have married her if she hadn’t gotten herself pregnant and her family hadn’t made him feel he had to do the honorable thing.”
“I don’t see how you can say that, Skipper.”
“I just did!” He laughed like a mischievous schoolboy.
Six months after my father married Paola, my half sister Beatrice was born in New York, and once again it was the Hills who gave me this news. Although my father could have easily called me up in Chicago and told me I had a new sister, he did not. Was he turning his back on me, or had he forgotten all about me?
I could not bear to think my father had erased me from his life when he was so present in mine. Even if he hadn’t been in the news, there were always people meeting me for the first time and exclaiming, “Are you really Orson Welles’s daughter?” Yes, I really was, but now it was becoming a source of shame and humiliation. I felt the whole world knew he had abandoned me.
MY MOTHER’S SISTER Caryl came to Chicago to visit for a few days. My father had once told me that when he first met Caryl, he found her better looking than Virginia and that Caryl had been blessed, he felt, “with a sweeter nature.” Tall, blond, and extremely attractive, my aunt certainly wore her years better than my mother; but at the moment, she told us, she was “totally exhausted and fed up to the gills with Orson.” Her latest encounter with my father had been a financial disaster for New York’s City Center and a professional embarrassment to her.
Caryl worked in public relations as a fund-raiser and was friendly with Jean Dalrymple, director of the City Center on West Fifty-fifth Street. “I talked Jean into putting on Orson’s adaptation of King Lear,” Caryl told us, “and after she agreed to do it and we raised the horrendous amount of money Orson said he needed, he injured both his feet. It was bad enough that he broke one foot and had to hobble around with a cane on opening night, but then he tripped over a prop on his way off the stage and sprained his other ankle. I never knew anyone as clumsy and just plain self-destructive as Orson.”
“But Aunt Caryl,” I chimed in, “could he really help it? I mean, anyone can have an accident, and my father’s always had weak ankles.”
“Listen to this child. Defending the father who hasn’t lifted a finger for her.” Caryl turned her lovely blue-gray eyes on me, the same color as my mother’s but with more warmth and laughter behind them.
“But it was such bad luck that he hurt himself twice.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it. What’s the matter with you, Chrissie? You’re a smart girl. Don’t you see Orson’s a fuckup?”
“Caryl, watch your language,” my grandfather said disapprovingly, but my aunt just shrugged. She lived in New York City now.
“Seriously, Chrissie,” Caryl went on, “what’s Orson ever done for you?”
I looked down at my hands on my lap, not knowing how to explain that it wasn’t what my father had done or not done but who he was and what he believed in: being tolerant of others, for instance, and being kind and considerate while living a life in which the making of art was supreme. There wasn’t a mean bone in him; if he hurt people along the way, it was always unintentional. How could I persuade my grandparents and Aunt Caryl that the Orson Welles I knew was not “irresponsible” and “self-destructive”?
“Orson ended up having to perform King Lear by himself in a wheelchair,” my aunt was telling us with exasperation. “We lost oodles of money, and I don’t think Jean Dalrymple will ever speak to me again. That’s the last time I’m going out on a limb for Orson.” (As my father would tell me years later, Caryl was not appeased by the fact that her ex-brother-in-law had tried to put on a good show for the sold-out performances, even if he was confined to a wheelchair. He recited lengthy passages from King Lear and told his most amusing anecdotes, a bravura performance which he repeated for twenty-one nights, but that was not long enough for City Center to recoup its investment in Orson Welles.)
After my aunt’s visit, it was a relief to spend another weekend with the Hills, and it was on this visit that I finally broached the subject that had been causing me such distress. Why hadn’t I heard from my father in over a year? My question hung in the air. After a long, uncomfortable silence, Skipper sprang out of his chair and began his
restless pacing. “Well,” he drawled, “we weren’t going to tell you, Chrissie, but since you brought it up . . .” He stopped short and looked at Granny for guidance.
“It was that time you called Orson in Paris and told him you couldn’t see him anymore,” Granny explained. “Paola was with him when you called, and she said she’d never seen Orson so upset.”
“He reacted like a wounded King Lear,” Skipper observed.
“You mean overreacted,” Granny added tartly.
“Well, now Orson’s got this idea in his head about Chrissie being ‘a thankless child,’ and you know how he is, Horty, once he feels betrayed.”
So that was it. In my father’s mind, I had become the embodiment of the lines from King Lear, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.”
“That’s all nonsense, Skipper, and you know it,” Granny snapped. “If anybody’s put ideas about Chrissie into Orson’s head, it’s Paola.”
“Now, Horty, you don’t know that for a fact.”
“I do know it’s all Paola can do to get Orson to pay attention to little Beatrice, and the last thing she wants is competition from our Chrissie.”
I stopped listening. It had nothing to do with Paola or Beatrice and everything to do with my father’s reaction to that fatal phone call. Why hadn’t he understood I was acting against my will and under my mother’s threats to disown me? Didn’t my father understand what it had cost me to be in Paris, a short Metro ride away, and prevented from seeing him? Apparently not. Instead he saw me as the “thankless child” who had rejected him, wounding his heart beyond any hope of forgiveness.
“I always trust people with all my heart and think the best of them,” he had told me once, this child-man who was my father, “until they give me a reason not to.”
From his point of view, I had given him a reason. Knowing this, I could not go ahead with my plan: to ask Skipper to call my father and then, after a brief exchange of pleasantries, put me on the phone. I could not be sure what kind of reception I would get from the father who now believed I had cast him aside, but I feared it might be a cold one, and that would have hurt far more than his continuing absence.
I BEGAN TO be afraid that no one in Chicago would give me a job, without which I could not afford to live on my own. In interview after interview, I was turned away because I did not have a high school certificate, let alone a college degree. My knowledge of languages and ability to take shorthand in French were of no use to me in Chicago. So much for Jack Pringle’s plans for my “future.”
To improve my chances of being hired, my grandfather enrolled me in a business school in Chicago’s Loop. A certificate from such a school, he reasoned, would count more with a prospective employer than all my foreign languages and exotic travels. Yet the exact opposite turned out to be the case.
One of the companies where I sought employment was Container Corporation of America. The personnel director there, a pleasant woman who immediately put me at ease, spent our entire interview asking me about living in Rome and Johannesburg, going to school in Lausanne and traveling all over Europe. “What a fascinating life you’ve had,” she exclaimed, “but I guess that’s no surprise since you’re Orson Welles’s daughter.” Once again “Orson’s kid” was stamped on my forehead, but this time I didn’t mind. Paying no attention to the holes in my education, the personnel director gave me my first job: junior secretary in the advertising department.
That I survived even a week I owe entirely to the amazing patience of my boss, Mr. Doughty, the short, sandy-haired director of advertising. Every letter of his that I took down in rapid shorthand and typed up at the furious speed of 120 words per minute had to be corrected and retyped—two, three, sometimes four times. My main problem was that I confused the spellings of similar English and French words and used British spellings, such as substituting colour for color. To avoid having Mr. Doughty summon me yet again into his office, peer wearily over his horn-rimmed glasses, and then hand back the letter in which my errors had been circled, I kept an American dictionary at my elbow. Weeks passed, my spelling improved, and to my astonishment I was still on the payroll.
Another stride toward independence came after my grandfather had a serious heart attack and needed absolute quiet at home. We were all agreed that it was time for me to move out, but my grandparents felt I was still too young to be living on my own. So my grandmother found the perfect solution: the Three Arts Club. This attractive residence for young women in the arts — singers, dancers, actors, artists, musicians — was housed in a stately mansion on North Dearborn Parkway, a stroll away from Lincoln Park and the lakefront with its spectacular view of Chicago’s skyline winding into the distance. (My grandmother would not have been pleased to learn that Hugh Hefner lived up the block in his Playboy palace.) Offering room and board at reasonable rates, the Three Arts Club was designed for students on scholarships or young artists who came from families of modest means, but I was accepted thanks to my grandmother, who was on the board of directors and presented me as a budding pianist.
I had a large, pleasant room to myself on the second floor. It was handsomely furnished with everything I needed, including an upright piano, which I diligently played as soon as I got home from work and for hours on weekends. The Three Arts Club could not have been too different from a college dorm or sorority house, and, for the first time since arriving in Chicago, I was making friends my own age who were bright, cultivated, and who shared my passions for music and art. After dinner, which was served on the main floor in the communal dining room, we hung out in each other’s rooms, sharing favorite recordings of classical music. At last I had someone besides my grandmother, someone as young and enthusiastic as myself, to accompany me to Orchestra Hall and sit in the cheap seats, clapping and cheering after we heard Bruno Walter conduct Mahler’s symphonies, or the incomparable Artur Rubinstein interpret Chopin.
It was a giddy time of feeling young and free to do what I wanted. I could go out with any man I fancied, and, at the end of the evening, I would not find my grandmother sitting up in the front hall like a guard dog waiting to pounce. I knew it distressed her that I was drawn to Jewish men, and to one in particular who had aspirations to be a painter but eventually became a prominent art dealer. Grandmother had made every effort to introduce me to the “suitable” young men of her acquaintance, but I had found them extremely dull. I could not imagine myself married to one of them, yawning my life away in the wealthy suburb of Lake Forest.
Yet when I allowed myself to look more than a few weeks ahead, I felt confused and not a little apprehensive about the direction my life should take. Should I go to New York and become an actress, as any number of theater people who had known me since childhood were urging me to do? I felt a strong pull toward the stage, yet at the same time it terrified me. Even in my most confident moments, I knew it was madness to try to beat my father at his own game. Instead, I was hungry to accomplish something on my own, something that owed nothing to Orson Welles — except the gift of his exceptional genes. I hadn’t any idea what this great accomplishment might be, but it hovered in the air like a deceptive mirage.
SEVERAL MONTHS HAD passed and I had not thought once of my father. Now that I had a job, a place to live, and friends my own age, I was forming a life that owed nothing to Orson Welles. Just when I felt I was beginning to walk free of my father’s shadow, I got a call from my godfather, Chubby Sherman. Chubby had been my father’s close friend and an actor in his Mercury Theatre company. Now he was passing through Chicago and wanted to take me to lunch at the Drake Hotel. If hearing from Chubby had not reminded me of my famous parent, then meeting him at the Drake certainly would have. It was the kind of grand hotel with an Old World atmosphere that my father loved.
The last time I had seen my godfather, I had been eleven years old and visiting my mother in New York, so he could not get over the change in me. “How old are you now, Chrissie?” he exclaimed. “Are you really ei
ghteen? I just don’t believe it, that’s all!” He, on the other hand, looked exactly the same, a round-faced man of medium height and build whose main characteristic was his affability. Shortly after I was born, he had appointed himself my godfather, blithely ignoring the fact that I was never going to be christened. “Any child of Orson’s needs a godfather,” he liked to say.
“Now tell me about your dear mother,” Chubby began as soon as we were seated in the Drake’s elegant dining room. “Does she like living in South Africa? Is she happy with her new husband?” After I had assured him that she was, he went on in his amiable way, “I’m very glad for her. The poor dear was so miserable when she was married to Orson.”
“But weren’t my parents happy together before I was born?”
Chubby considered this for a moment. “I suppose they were, dear, but their happiness didn’t last long. It never does with Orson. When it comes to women, he’s worse than an ally cat . . .” He bit his lip. “Oh dear, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I know about the ballerinas,” I said evenly. “My mother told me.”
“She did?” For a moment, he let his affable mask slip. “Well, I thought it was the pink limit, Orson running around with all those hussies and leaving your poor mother to fend for herself. It got to the point where I couldn’t stand to hear about another of Orson’s ballerinas.”
“Then you knew?”
“We all did, dear.” He recalled the time when my father had been four and a half hours late for a rehearsal at the Mercury. “None of us believed Orson’s preposterous story about flying to Boston in a snowstorm and having to take over the plane and land it himself after the pilot passed out. Everyone knew Orson had spent the night in Chicago with his latest lady love.” Chubby clucked his tongue. “So Virginia found out he was cheating on her. I hoped she never would. What a sweet thing she was in those days. So pretty, too.” He looked at me closely. “You know, Chrissie, you look a little like your mother did at your age, although you have Orson’s eyes and his dark coloring.”
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