In My Father's Shadow

by Chris Welles Feder

  Undeterred by my mother, I wore the “bad luck” wedding dress on December 14, 1957, when, at the age of nineteen, I became Norman’s wife. We were married in the lovely chapel of the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue in a small ceremony attended by family and a few friends. I did not want anything to mar my wedding day, but as I walked down the aisle on my grandfather’s arm, keeping my eyes on the Viking who stood waiting for me with a radiant smile, the question nagged with every step: Where was the father who should have been here to give me away?

  As he would tell me years later, he was writing a memorandum that ran fifty-eight pages in which he pleaded with the moguls at Universal Studios to keep his directorial vision of Touch of Evil. Yet even as he wrote, he knew with a heavy heart that they wouldn’t listen. He had been locked out of the editing room and lost artistic control. Already so many changes had been made to his picture that he no longer felt it was his. Still he wrote the memo, for himself if no one else, and then, in January of 1958, he gathered up his little family, which he could no longer support in Hollywood, and returned to Italy. While Norman and I were beginning our married life in Seoul, South Korea, the Orson Welles family was settling in Fregene, outside Rome.

  The chance that my father and I might find ourselves in the same city at the same moment in time seemed more remote than ever.

  9

  Reunion in Hong Kong

  BEFORE ARRIVING IN SEOUL in January of 1958, I had never seen a city devastated by war. In the weeks that followed, I was numb with shock. For every reconstructed building Norman pointed out to me, I saw block after block of bombed-out skeletons. The poorest of the poor camped in these ruins, finding what food they could. The first time I saw a cluster of refugees roasting a mangy dog on a spit over an open fire, I didn’t know whether to cry or vomit. In those days it was impossible to imagine that Seoul would become the thriving metropolis that it is today. In 1958, most of the downtown area was a morass of unpaved streets swarming with army jeeps, rickety bicycles, and the occasional sleek sedan of a foreign dignitary. Plodding down the middle of the muddy road were farmers hauling their wares on A-frames strapped to their backs.

  It was heartbreaking to see so many filthy, ragged children playing in the gutters. Norman explained they were mixed-blood orphans, the offspring of American soldiers and Korean prostitutes, forced to live in the streets because no self-respecting Korean family would adopt them. We couldn’t walk more than a few steps without being surrounded by these children shouting Mikook! Mikook! (American! American!), then running after us, tugging on our clothes, pleading to shine our shoes for a few miserable hwan. Norman kept his pockets filled with coins to give these children while I resolved to do volunteer work for the orphanages.

  Norman was tied up in meetings with government officials most days, leaving me to fill the hours as best I could. Anxious to get out of our hotel room, which was overrun with cockroaches and stank of sewage backing up in the drains, I began to explore the surrounding streets. I found a dressmaker’s shop where a perfect copy of a Christian Dior evening dress could be made in exquisite silk for a mere seven dollars. I spent hours browsing in the art and antique shops that offered Korean folding screens, hanging scrolls, black lacquered boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and ancient funerary urns in bronze turned powdery green. What appealed to me most of all were the delicate, sea green celadon bowls.

  One afternoon I walked past a movie theater, and there on the marquee was the title of my father’s film Othello written in Korean Han-Keul characters and a handsome blowup of Orson Welles playing the Moor. Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that my father’s fame could reach as far as South Korea — or that I might wish it hadn’t. I had been hoping I had found a remote corner of the world where no one had heard of Orson Welles. At the same time, it filled me with pride that my father’s haunting rendition of Shakespeare’s Othello was playing in Seoul with Korean subtitles. We went to see it several times, and Norman took photographs of the theater marquee, which we mailed to my father and Paola in Fregene.

  I would have liked to hide my connection with Orson Welles, but almost everyone I met in Seoul, whether Korean, American, or European, already knew who my father was. This was obvious from the feverish excitement they showed, grinning at me and pumping my hand when we were introduced at the diplomatic functions we were required to attend. It had been happening all my life, of course, but now it bothered me in a way it never had before. In a few months I would be twenty, and I was determined to be accepted on my own merits.

  Newly arrived, I was obliged to pay “courtesy calls” on the wives of the American ambassador and the economic coordinator for South Korea. Being unfamiliar with diplomatic protocol, I found it ridiculous that I had to have calling cards printed up before I could show my face at the American embassy. Nonetheless, invited for midmorning coffee, I dropped my calling card on a silver platter in the entrance hall. Then I was ushered through double doors into a sitting room so typically American that for a moment I thought I was in Washington, D.C. There was not one folding screen or celadon bowl to remind us of the splendid art and culture that had flourished in Korea for thousands of years.

  I sat on the edge of the deep sofa, a coffee cup trembling in my hand, waiting for the inevitable questions — Where’s your father now? What’s he doing these days? — and the embarrassment that flooded through me because I had no idea. I could not even be sure he was still living in Fregene as he had not responded to my letters or Norman’s photographs. So I talked instead about the unique experience of seeing Othello in a Korean movie theater, suggesting to the roomful of women that they might also want to see it while it was playing downtown. They stared at me, open-mouthed. Did I really walk around in downtown Seoul on my own? I assured them that I did. Didn’t I mind the beggars, the filth, the “slicky boys,” as thieving urchins were called? I had minded in the beginning, I admitted, but now I was used to it. Relieved to have moved the topic away from my father, I went on to describe the lovely music one could hear in tearooms and the pleasure of browsing in antique stores. But it was clear my listeners did not comprehend why I would want to go to such places. They were not likely to venture out of their foreign compounds or shop in any place except the post exchange or PX, as we called it, on the Eighth U.S. Army base.

  Would I find even one American or European woman in Seoul who shared my interests and was close to my age? Failing that, would I be able to cross the cultural barrier and find friends among Koreans? Those I had met so far seemed open and welcoming. As I wrote a friend back in Chicago, “Whenever Norman and I are invited to a Korean home, we can’t help feeling that we have been admitted into a more evolved civilization. In all my life, I have never felt such warmth and respect for a people as a whole.”

  DUE TO A mix-up in our government contract, Norman and I had to spend our first six months living in hotels. We began at the Bando, where my husband was welcomed with great fanfare, only to discover that his beloved hotel was going to seed — hence the cockroaches and smell of sewage in our otherwise comfortable room. It also became apparent that the Bando was too expensive for our housing allowance. So we moved a few blocks to the much cheaper Dong A House. Here we were absurdly happy in a small room where the bed was lumpy, the bathroom window overlooked the bed, and the toilet was mounted on a high platform so that your legs dangled when you sat on it. But at least it was a Western-style flush toilet, still a luxury in Seoul. The entire bathroom got wet when you took a shower, and so did the bed if you had forgotten to close the bathroom window. As we could not drink the tap water at the Dong A, we had to lug our tin water cans over to the Chosun, a U.S. Army hotel several blocks away, where the kind manager allowed us to fill them as often as needed. I was learning to cook on a hot plate. When the power failed in the middle of making dinner, I was learning to shrug my shoulders and get out the candles. Or else we walked over to the Chosun. “Last night,” I exulted in one of my letters, “we had a fil
et mignon dinner with wine, potatoes, vegetables, salad, apple pie, and coffee for a GRAND TOTAL of $2.90!!!” That was dirt cheap even in 1958.

  THE NEWS GOT around that Orson Welles’s eldest daughter had arrived in Seoul and was living in a Korean hotel. The Dong A House had a pleasant garden, and it was here that an amiable young Korean reporter came to interview me for his newspaper. I had agreed to the interview hoping that a touch of celebrity might help Norman untangle the red tape that was not only keeping us in hotels but threatening to strangle his project before it got off the ground.

  This was my first interview on the subject of my father, and to my surprise, I found much to say about his films, having seen all the ones he had made to date, but my interviewer soon interrupted me. “What is it like to have Orson Welles for a father?” I fell silent. How could I put into a few words the joys and heartache, confusion and certainties that assail the child of fame? “How do you feel about your father?” the reporter persisted with the directness I had come to recognize as a Korean trait.

  “I don’t know. How do you feel about your father?”

  He laughed and scribbled away on his pad. (He would include my lame attempt to evade his question in his published article.)

  Almost every week brought a fresh reminder of my father. The manager of the Chosun, whose many kindnesses to us included the loan of a fan when the temperature in our hotel room soared past 104 degrees Fahrenheit, now asked if I could possibly get him a recording of my father’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast. I relayed his request to Granny and Skipper, confessing in a letter, “I don’t have Daddy’s latest address (it’s so hard to keep up with him). I got a postcard from Paola months back from Italy and wrote them there but never got an answer . . . Also, I’m afraid if I wrote them about the recording that Daddy wouldn’t do anything about it.” Skipper promptly mailed us the recording, as I knew he would, and our benefactor at the Chosun was thrilled.

  To ward off loneliness, I often spent the entire morning writing letters to my mother in Johannesburg, my grandparents in Chicago, or the Hills in Woodstock, Illinois. Filled with cheerful attempts to make light of such experiences as finding a rat in our hotel room, bed bugs in our bed, and having to take “the worm cure” at the U.S. Army dispensary, my typed, single-spaced letters often ran as long as ten pages.

  My special confidant was Granny Hill, the only person to whom I could write about my father, because I knew that no matter how much she criticized him, forever nagging him to pay more attention to me, she truly loved him. One passage from my voluminous letters to her catches the person I was struggling to become. “Norman has given me so much confidence — you can’t imagine. I feel I am now on the brink of doing something creative, but I can’t decide what it is right now, but one of these days I shall do something worth noticing. I’m sure of it. I should so like my father to be proud of me one of these days instead of feeling his daughter is a bourgeois vegetable.”

  I still believed I had to do something extraordinary before my father would sit up and notice me — that it was all up to me. It was also getting harder to deny that, while the world would not let me forget Orson Welles, he had surely forgotten me.

  LIVING IN SEOUL during a crucial period of its reconstruction gave me opportunities I could never have had in Chicago. For example, I began giving private lessons in English and French to Korean businessmen. I also went several times a week to Changdeok Palace where I taught English to Princess Yi, the widowed sister of the last Korean emperor. What would my father think, I wondered, about my teaching English to one of the last surviving members of the Yi dynasty?

  In addition to teaching, I put on an evening of theater with a group of American teenagers during their summer vacation. I proposed to them that we stage a play to raise money for an orphanage of mixed-blood children. Thrilled at the prospect of leaving their dull compounds and venturing into downtown Seoul, they agreed at once.

  I swung into action with my customary zeal and chose two one-act plays whose titles I no longer remember. What I do recall is the fun I had working with these young people who had never acted before, and showing them how good they could be. In the end, our amateur show was a huge success, and we raised over three hundred dollars for the orphanage.

  After the show, the man who ran the American missionary school came up to congratulate me. How would I like to teach dramatics at his school? I thanked him for the offer but said no. How could I possibly teach dramatics, I wondered to myself? And would he have offered me the job if my father had been John Smith instead of Orson Welles? Once people knew who my father was, they seemed to expect impossible things of me. Yet it was I who expected the impossible of myself.

  MY FATHER HAD not written, called or made any attempt to contact me in four years. He had left it up to Paola to send us a wedding present and an occasional postcard. Then, in early December as our first anniversary was approaching, Granny Hill wrote that Orson, Paola, and Beatrice were going to be in Hong Kong, where Orson was starring in a British film. Norman and I had been debating where to celebrate the fact that we had been married a whole year — Tokyo or Hong Kong? Granny’s letter decided our destination.

  Compared to Seoul, being in Hong Kong was almost like being back in London or Paris. This sophisticated British colony boasted luxurious hotels, smart shops, gourmet restaurants, and nightclubs . . . except that beneath its layers of European influence, it had remained Cantonese. The square sails of Chinese junks dipped and swayed in Victoria Harbor alongside yachts, motor-boats, and passenger ferries crossing back and forth between the island city of Hong Kong and Kowloon on the mainland. For every French and Italian eatery, there was one where the menu, if it existed at all, was in Cantonese, and we had to order by pointing to mouthwatering dishes being consumed at a nearby table.

  We were staying in Kowloon in a small but well-appointed hotel that we learned had been built by the eccentric Chinese multimillionaire who lived next door and whose hobby was raising orchids. Late at night, we were told, he slipped into the hotel and painted yet another orchid on the walls of the downstairs public rooms.

  Every morning at breakfast, we scoured the newspapers to find out if Orson Welles and family had arrived yet. The Hills had not been sure of the exact date, but they had alerted my father that our stay in Hong Kong would coincide with his. “I don’t want Daddy dropping dead of shock at the sight of me,” I had written Granny and Skipper, trying to make a joke of it. Finally, when we had been in Hong Kong almost a week and ordered enough tailor-made clothes to last us the rest of our lives, Norman spotted the news item we had been waiting for: Orson Welles was arriving the following day and would be staying at the Peninsula Hotel. As luck would have it, the grand old Peninsula was within walking distance of our small hotel.

  The article went on to say that Mr. Welles was playing the part of the skipper of a ferryboat in the British movie Ferry to Hong Kong, being filmed on location in the colony and in Portuguese Macao. It was rumored that Mr. Welles had agreed to be in the picture only after the director allowed him to write his own dialogue. This led to a falling-out with his costar, the German actor Curt Jurgens, who had objected to having his lines rewritten by Welles in their scenes together, to which Welles had retorted, “I hate all actors — stupid, empty-headed creatures.”

  “Do you think your dad really said that?” Norman asked me.

  “No, or if he did, he didn’t mean it.” Perhaps he had blurted it out in a moment of disgust, now he was down on his luck and had to take any work he could get. I reminded Norman of the loyalty and devotion my father evoked in actors who had worked under his direction. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, had agreed to her cameo role in Touch of Evil for no other reason than she loved him as a friend and esteemed him as a director.

  Around noon the next day Norman and I went to the Peninsula Hotel, and there was my father, a monument of flesh in loose black clothing, making the lobby reverberate with the magnificence of his voice while he reminde
d the flustered desk clerk that his suite should have been ready hours ago. I hung back, shocked at the sheer size of him. He must weigh close to three hundred pounds, I thought, trying to remember the Daddy who had squired me all over Rome in search of paintings and sculptures by Michelangelo. And there was Paola, tall and long-limbed with limpid eyes, her dark hair falling to her shoulders. Why did the realization that Paola was so stunning in person make me feel hopelessly inadequate? She had secured a table among the palm fronds and was ordering from a gilt-edged menu. Meanwhile, three-year-old Beatrice was skipping among the tables and white-coated waiters, and to my astonishment, my old nanny, Marie Cunningham, was swooping down on her. I hadn’t known she was now in charge of my half sister and had to repress a pang of jealousy. Older and grayer, Marie had shrunk until she barely came up to my shoulder. Yet I would have known her anywhere from the weary look on her lined face and the stoic patience she exuded.

  Tentatively, I approached my father, fighting an impulse to flee through the doors of the Peninsula, never to be seen again. “Daddy?”

  He turned, his face lighting up. “Christopher? Can this be you, all grown up and so beautiful? Hortense told me you were going to be in Hong Kong, and I still don’t believe it — but here you are!”