His children. I wanted to say that Becky and I should have been sitting beside Paola and Beatrice during the ceremony, that we were also his family. I wanted to ask if he had any idea how much it hurt to be repeatedly overlooked as though I were a footnote he had lost somewhere in the voluminous pages of his life. But I knew that whenever I surfaced in his mind, his impulses toward me were kind, generous, and loving. He could never be cruel to me, as my mother so easily was, any more than he could be vulgar, even if he used vulgar words. There was a shining innocence about Orson Welles that the world could not tarnish. And that was what I loved in him and why, in the end, I was always able to push aside anger and hurt.
“I’m going to be coming to New York soon,” he was saying, “so I’ll be calling you again, Christopher.”
“Please come to our place for dinner.”
“No, no, I don’t want you slaving all day over a hot stove.”
“I’d love to make dinner for you, really I would.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
“And I want you to meet Irwin.”
“Irwin?”
“My husband.” We’ve been married for five years and you still haven’t met him.
“Oh, yes, of course. Well, you can bring him with you when you come to my hotel.”
“Then you’re not going to come to our home?”
“I’ll call you again soon. Until then, darling girl, my dearest, dearest love.”
A YEAR AND a half later, my father had neither called nor met Irwin. But he did think of me at Christmas. A tall, ungainly houseplant arrived with a gift card, not in his handwriting.
That Christmas, I wrote the Hills, “Needless to say, O.W. has not called me since Irwin’s sister Marlene cornered him in a restaurant. That was over a year ago. The chances of Marlene once again finding herself sitting a table away from O.W. in a Hollywood restaurant are rather slim. Therefore, I do not expect another call for years.”
“You should call Paola now and then,” Skipper urged me in reply. “Orson has pretty much abandoned her.”
In time I did reconnect with Paola, but during the early years of my marriage, I had a life of my own to forge. I was now in my thirties and gradually establishing myself as an educational writer for schoolchildren. After the project at Encyclopaedia Britannica ended, I had gone to work for a small publishing firm that produced elementary reading materials. When that company folded, I became a freelance writer, and soon I met Patricia Cusick, an editorial vice president at the Scott Foresman publishing company. She believed so strongly in my talent that she gave me the opportunity to write a language arts program for elementary schoolchildren.
After the success of the language arts books, there was talk of my doing a spelling series, which I happened to mention in a letter to my father. Soon afterward I received his first letter to me in eight years. “The news that a child of mine is to be given responsability [sic] for a text book on spelling is dizzying proof that genetic determinism is more a hurdle than a handicap. Congratulations.” He signed the letter “your errant and admiring father.”
“So you’ve finally impressed your father,” Irwin observed, reading his letter, “but why should the fact that you’re going to write a spelling book make him prouder of you than anything else you’ve done?”
“Because he never learned how to spell.”
ALTHOUGH I COULD never persuade my father to come to our home, he did finally meet Irwin in 1980. My father was then sixty-five, and Irwin was fifty-seven. (It didn’t occur to me until years later that having a son-in-law close to his own age might be a problem for Orson Welles.) On the day my father called to invite me to lunch at his hotel, I decided to take a stand. It would mean a lot to me, I said, if he would meet my husband. It didn’t seem right that Irwin and I had been married almost ten years and my father had never met him. “Has it really been that long?” His voice rose in astonishment. “Then you must both come to my hotel and have lunch with me tomorrow.”
“But couldn’t you possibly come to our place instead? Just this once? It would be so wonderful to make lunch for you here.”
“No, I can’t do that.” There was a long pause. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I’ve been ill, and it isn’t easy for me to get around.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t, but now that you do, I hope you understand why I want you and your husband to come to my hotel.”
“But if you aren’t well, perhaps we shouldn’t come — ”
“No, no, I’m well enough to see you, just a little weak and shaky on my pins these days. They have to push me around in a wheelchair, you know.”
I had heard about the wheelchair. On our previous visit, he had joked that he always ordered one at airports and how grand it was to be wheeled in comfort and style from the cab to the plane. Then he had laughed, pretending to be delighted with himself, as though he alone had outwitted the airport gods who decree that we must all stand in a long line at the check-in counter until our knees turn to water. So I had thought what he had wanted me to think: that the wheelchair was a clever ruse. I had no idea how ill he really was or what an effort he was making to see me whenever he passed through New York.
Pages from Orson’s passport, which expired on January 15, 1981, less than five years before his death.
The next day Irwin and I walked down the long hallway to my father’s suite of rooms in the elegant Carlyle Hotel. My palms were sweating. I kept asking Irwin how I looked and if my hair needed combing, and he kept telling me to relax. “Just be yourself, Chris, and everything will be fine.”
Suddenly a door flew open at the end of the hall and my father’s enormous figure stood outlined in the lighted space behind him. He was wearing a voluminous white caftan that fell to his feet. His appearance made me think of an African king, an aging Othello, but one who had spared his own life and Desdemona’s and forgiven Iago his treachery. Smiling broadly, he ushered us into his domain. I made a movement to embrace him, but he warned me away. “Kiki will bite if you come too close.” He stroked the head of the small black poodle nestled under his arm. “She’s more jealous of me than ten mistresses.” Chuckling, he sank heavily into an armchair, depositing Kiki on his lap where she crouched forward, bared her teeth, and snarled at us. “Don’t pet her whatever you do. Poor little thing. She must have been horribly mistreated when she was a puppy.”
How genial he was and how gracious, shaking Irwin’s hand, motioning us to chairs at a good remove from Kiki, suggesting we order from room service right away as it tended to be slow, even in a hotel as grand as this one. And please, we shouldn’t pay any attention to the few bread crumbs he allowed himself for lunch. We should order whatever we wanted and plenty of it. “I like to watch other people eating lunch,” he told us, eyes twinkling.
I was struck once again by my father’s courteous manner and what a true gentleman he was. Had he been less a gentleman, he might have introduced us to Oja, who was undoubtedly traveling with him and, for all we knew, hiding in the next room. But it was inconceivable to a man of my father’s refinement that his daughter and son-in-law should meet his lover, not when we knew he was married to Paola. So on this visit and those that followed, we all pretended Oja did not exist. (Years later, when I finally stayed with Oja at her seaside home in Primosten, she told me that she had seen me more than once, arriving in the hotel lobby on my way to see Orson just as she was going out to shop or spend the afternoon in a museum. We laughed to think how easily we might have met in spite of my father’s precautions.)
A knock on the door announced the arrival of lunch and my father immediately brightened as though we had come to the high point of our visit. A waiter wheeled in a table set with starched linens, silverware, and a few posies nodding in a crystal vase. He ceremoniously removed the silver domes covering our plates and then discreetly withdrew. Now my father settled down not to the business of eating — his lunch was as meager as he had said it
would be — but to entertaining us with a stream of anecdotes. Often the joke was on himself. During the filming of The Third Man in Vienna, he told us, his old buddy Joseph Cotten made a bet with him that he would be unable to entice a certain actress into his bed. Although she was so unattractive she should have been grateful for any man’s attentions, no one had managed to seduce her to date. “So I spent my entire time in Vienna chasing this woman, determined to win my bet with Jo, and all this time I was working with one of the most beautiful women in the world and ignoring her completely. Guess who it was. Alida Valli. Yes, Alida Valli.” He shook his head, chuckling. “Well, I won my bet with Jo, but I lost out with the lady in question who turned out to be terrible in bed. The worst lay of my life, in fact. Then, after I’d left Vienna, I found out Alida Valli had been mad for me, and if I’d given her the slightest encouragement, she’d have hopped in my bed in a minute. How could I have been such an idiot?” We joined in his hearty laughter.
The hour passed pleasantly enough and then he rose, signaling that it was time for us to go. I had hardly said a word, wanting to give Irwin a chance to shine. However, Irwin also had said very little. He had simply told my father how he had been “blown away” by Citizen Kane when he saw it for the first time. Otherwise, he had listened politely, as I had, and laughed in the right places.
On my way to use the bathroom before we left, I passed through my father’s bedroom and was shocked by the number of pill bottles on his bedside table. Even then, however, it did not fully register on me that he was a sick man pretending not to be. I was too caught up in feelings of disappointment. Did my father not see how unusually intelligent Irwin was? Irwin had his own inexhaustible supply of stories, but he had not been given the chance to tell even one of them. (Later, I would hear from Skipper the staggering notion that Orson found Irwin “too possessive” of me.)
On our way home, Irwin shared his own disappointment. “Did you notice how your father talked at us, not to us? He was like a king holding audience, deciding when we should enter his presence and when we should take our leave.” Then Irwin brightened. “Well, at least I can say I’ve finally met my father-in-law.”
I took Irwin’s hand. He agreed with me that, however regal my father may have been in person, he had also been charming and cordial. Although he was not a well man, he had put himself out to entertain us, asking nothing in return. There was something sad about my father regaling us with amusing stories we had heard him tell before — and with greater aplomb — on television.
DURING THE FINAL ten years of his life, my father was earning his living, or as he put it, his “bread and butter,” by making frequent appearances on television talk shows. He also found fairly steady employment as a voice-over man, narrating documentaries and doing commercials on radio and television. “I have to keep my name alive and my bills paid,” he told me. While I understood that he had to take whatever work came along, it saddened me that, instead of making his own “ribbons of dreams,” one of the great movie directors of the twentieth century was doing card tricks and selling “no wine before its time” on television.
Yet it was hard not to enjoy my father’s guest appearances on talk shows, whether hosted by David Frost, Johnny Carson, or Merv Griffin. Orson Welles was invariably a witty, charming guest, an oversized but still handsome man sitting at his ease and ready to entertain the audience all night long, telling one anecdote after another. The exception was one Merv Griffin show. Another guest, the writer Gore Vidal, seemed hostile to my father and kept cutting him off in midsentence. After seeing that show, I wrote my father that he had handled Vidal’s rudeness with admirable poise and good humor. “You came off extremely well,” I told him, “whereas Vidal seemed too angry at the world to listen to anyone.” My father replied that, while he was glad I thought well of him, he was not sure I was right about Gore Vidal. True, Vidal had been angry enough at him to launch a fierce attack in the New York Review of Books several months prior to the show. “My refusal to acknowledge any wounds may well have been rather irritating,” my father conceded. Nonetheless, he felt Vidal’s anger was an act. “He breaks in new versions of it every season on the lecture circuit, fine tuning the best of the one-liners for the talk shows; and if he doesn’t listen to anyone it’s not out of rage, just a chronic reluctance to grant his fellow ‘guests’ a second more airtime than he can help.” What a good sport my father was about the pygmies who dogged him, piercing his shins with their poisoned arrows.
There was only one occasion I remember my father talking about me and my two half sisters on television, and that was during a ninety-minute interview with Dick Cavett. His genial, low-key host asked him how many children he had. “Like King Lear, I have three daughters,” my father replied, “but unlike Lear, they have all been kind to me.” He beamed like a man who has said it all and is ready to move on to the next subject, but Cavett prompted him to describe each one of us. A long pause. Then I heard myself characterized as the eldest, who was “frighteningly bright” and a writer living in New York. Rebecca was “a flower child.” Beatrice was “a horse woman.”
The phrase lodged in my mind: frighteningly bright. Did my intelligence scare my father away? Would he feel closer to me if I were not as bright? I could speculate endlessly and arrive at no satisfactory answer. I could also spend the rest of my life wondering why, when my father was alone with me, he could not be as relaxed and natural, as seemingly “himself,” as he was on talk shows. Could it be that the “real” Orson Welles was not the father I met in hotel rooms but the one I saw on television?
IT WAS GRANNY Hill who had taught me to look for a loving mother outside my immediate family. From her I also learned that the children I would come to cherish in my life did not have to be biologically mine. Yet of all the pieces of wisdom she gave me, the greatest was this: “If you make those you love happy, then you will be happy, too.” These were the words she lived by, this plain, stout woman whose only vanity was that she hated to be photographed — it reminded her that she did not look like Rita Hayworth. Yet on the many occasions when I poured out my troubles and found courage in her profound understanding of life and human nature, I would look at her through my tears and think I had never seen a woman with a soul as pure and beautiful as Granny Hill’s.
My father shared my feelings, and the fact we had both been loved and nurtured by Granny Hill made a bond between us. He couldn’t speak of her without saying he “adored” her and that she was his “ideal woman”; at the same time, he couldn’t resist poking fun at the long letters she wrote him, filled with the doings of her family, friends, and burgeoning tribe of children and grandchildren. At various times, he read one of her letters aloud to me, shaking with laughter. “But I don’t know any of these people,” he protested. “Why does Hortense think I want to hear about them in such detail?” He was perplexed by her consuming interest in others and her own lack of ego. And why, in her old age, had she added the children of her cleaning woman to her already enormous brood? “I wouldn’t put it past her to send them all through college,” he told me, shaking his head. Then, his eyes misting, he murmured, “I was always in love with Hortense, you know. I would have married her in a minute if she hadn’t married my best friend.” (I assumed he meant he would have married her at least twenty years after Skipper did; at the time of the Hills’ wedding, my father was still in diapers.)
I thought I had prepared myself for Granny’s death. Toward the end, I had visited her several times in Rockford, Illinois, where she and Skipper had relocated to be near their family, and I had seen her ravaged face. I had listened to Skipper complain that she was becoming “ornery” and that he didn’t know her anymore. Ill health was fast eroding her sweet, compliant nature. I had agreed with the relatives that “it was time for her to go,” and on each of my visits to Rockford, convinced it was the last, I had parted from Granny in tears. Yet, when she died on February 5, 1982, the grief that swept over me made me know how unprepared I was to lose
her.
An April memorial service was planned in Rockford. A few days before Irwin and I were to fly there, my father called from Los Angeles. “I’ve written some words to be read at Hortense’s memorial service.” he began. “I assume you’re going with uh …”
“Yes, Irwin and I are going.”
“I don’t want Skipper to have to read my tribute, so I’m sending it to you by express mail. You should get it tomorrow.”
“But aren’t you going, Father? Shouldn’t you be the one who reads — ”
“No, Skipper doesn’t want me there.”
“I can’t believe that! Skipper knows what Granny meant to you. Did he really say he didn’t want you at her memorial service?”
“He didn’t have to. It’s the fame thing. You know. It’ll be pandemonium the moment I appear. Reporters, TV cameras. I’ll only upstage the proceedings if I show up, and Skipper wouldn’t want that.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I was stunned into silence. “Even if Skipper begged me to go, I couldn’t face his children and grandchildren, that whole tribe of people who hate me.”
“They don’t hate you, Father. How could anyone hate you? They’re just jealous of you.”
“I’ve already told you, Christopher,” he said quietly. “I can’t go to Rockford, and you’ll have to take my place.”
His reasons for not going to Granny’s memorial service did not sit well with me. It was hard enough to go myself without having to stand up in front of a roomful of people and deliver my father’s tribute. He was the one to do it. After he hung up, I wished I had said Irwin and I would be there to fend off the reporters and blinding flashbulbs. I would push my father in a wheelchair to the podium, hand him the microphone, and stand beside him while he shared his vision of Hortense Hill with the hushed audience.
In My Father's Shadow Page 28