It was not to be. When the time came, I was the one at the podium to read aloud my father’s words, but I did not get very far. Grief overwhelmed me. Irwin rushed to my side, took the paper from my hand, and delivered the following eulogy in his clear, strong voice.
Children … and their children … and their children after them … Like the seed of Father Abraham, it does almost seem that the descendants of Mother Hortense are to be numbered as are the sands of the desert. Her adopted children are truly beyond counting.
For myself, I don’t believe I can lay claim to more than an honorary membership in that community. A semi-orphan with something close to a surplus of foster parents before I even went to Todd, I was, in my childhood, determined to rid myself of childhood, a condition I conceived to be a pestilential handicap. I counted Hortense — not as any kind of mother, but from the first as the very dearest kind of friend. What was an infantile presumption soon became, with the passing of a few brief years, a grown-up fact. And so it is that I join your voices today — not really as a member of that enormous tribe which was (and is) her family — but from a smaller and dwindling choir. Ours is the simple song of friendship. A corny old ballad sums it up: “You Are My Sunshine.” That’s what I share with you today, and always: She was our sunshine … For sixty odd years my friend, your mother, was the radiant blessing of my life.
She has gone away and left a black hole in our universe. And yet to mourn is to remember. Our grief brings memories. That shining, vivid, marvelously living presence is back with us again, and our hearts are stabbed with happiness. For just to think of her can never be anything but an occasion for joy.
Of everyone I’ve known she was the most truly passionate. Yes, passionate in every good meaning of a word I choose with care. Other great and good souls may be described as “warm,” or warm-hearted. That’s too tepid sounding for Hortense. Warmth is a word for comfort and consolation … a blanket and nice cup of soup. The word for her was heat. Fire. The very element itself … The fire in the hearth.
Given her own earthy, intensely personal preoccupations, it’s a safe guess that for most of her rich and lengthy career on this planet, she had little time for the sticks and carrots of religion. But if there is a heaven after all, then it’s a sure thing that she’s in it … I like to think of her barefooted (she had such tiny ankles) wading along some celestial strand, searching for seashells … and waiting for her children …
A few days after the memorial service, my father called to find out how it had gone. I confessed that, although I had practiced reading aloud his beautiful eulogy a number of times, when the moment came to deliver it, I broke down and Irwin had to finish reading it for me.
“But I didn’t want you or that husband of yours to read my eulogy!” he admonished me. “I wanted Skipper to read it!”
“But you sent it to me and you said — ”
“I sent it to you because you were going to Rockford and I wasn’t, and I told you to give it to Skipper the moment you got there.”
You told me no such thing.
When I had said goodbye to Skipper in Rockford, he had muttered he was glad Orson hadn’t come to the memorial after all; but Skipper was lying to hide his deep disappointment. When Orson Welles could spare a moment for his children or his oldest friend, he wrote words shining with love, as he did for Hortense Hill; or he created an extraordinary book of drawings, a miniature movie on paper that he called Les Bravades and gave to his daughter Rebecca, the one who wrote in her diary, “I will always count it as a great loss that I never got to know Father, but it is just as great a loss that he never got to know me.”
TOWARD THE END of his life, my father began calling me more often. At first, we were overly polite, but with each phone call we became more relaxed and spoke at greater length. Once he called because he needed to cheer himself up, he said. A movie deal he’d been trying to negotiate for nine months had fallen through. “I’m still hoping it can be renegotiated.” He gave a deep sigh. “I’m awfully good at hoping.”
“I think it’s terrible you’re having such a hard time raising money. A great movie director like you!”
His laughter rolled across the continent, and what a life-affirming sound it was. I could imagine him at that moment: his eyes lit with the joy of laughing, his boyish face wagging an incongruous beard streaked with gray, his huge belly trembling. “Now don’t you worry your pretty head about me.” A soft chuckle. The tide of his laughter ebbing. “They may turn their backs on me now, but you wait and see, darling girl. They’re gonna love me when I’m dead!”
It was one of the last things my father ever said to me.
12
After His Death
LESS THAN THREE YEARS after he failed to attend Hortense Hill’s memorial service, Orson Welles was dead. Of all my losses at the time (Granny, my grandmother, and my Aunt Caryl had all died within a year of each other), none of them hit me with the cruel force of my father’s death. He had died at seventy — much too young for a man still at the height of his creative powers — and I was totally unprepared.
It took me considerable time to come to terms with the sudden loss of my father and what that meant in terms of my own life, but when I was finally able to look beyond what might have been, I saw myself in relation to him with a new, hard-won clarity. I realized that for much of my life, I had been driven by hopes and expectations that were unachievable. I had wanted Orson Welles to be Dad — not Father with its echo of an age when children of well-to-do parents were shunted off to the nursery with their governess. I had seriously believed that one day I would call him Dad, and we would achieve the same cozy relationship I had observed between Irwin and his adult children. And once this miraculous transformation had taken place, we would be able to tease each other good-naturedly and discuss just about anything. I would bring him my problems and share with him my triumphs. We would have many a serious talk. Then he would have no difficulty accepting an invitation to dinner in our home and getting to know Irwin. I had heard secondhand from the Hills and even from Paola that my father was proud of me. “Dad” would tell me so himself. He would also take pride in his son-in-law, a respected professor of English who made a lasting impression on many of the minority students he taught at LaGuardia Community College, helping them to find more productive lives. Didn’t Orson Welles claim to admire the teaching profession, and hadn’t he always been on the side of minorities and the underprivileged? Yet when he called our home and Irwin happened to answer the phone, he treated my husband like a houseboy and demanded to speak to me. Once he was so rude to Irwin that he called back later to apologize. That would never have happened with the person I wanted to be “Dad.”
Like Saul Bellow’s character Henderson the Rain King, I had been lost in the jungle of my dreams, crying “I want! I want! I want!” I had been incapable of seeing Orson Welles as the phenomenon he was, even though, since childhood, I had been told he was not like other men and one had to make allowances. He had no time to be a father, they all said again and again, because he was a genius who lived for his work alone and I should not hold it against him. I should try to understand. When my mother got her divorce in Reno on February 2, 1940, she told the press that, while it was all very friendly, it was also true that Orson “doesn’t have time for marriage.” So I had tried hard to put Orson Welles in a special category that relieved him of having to be anyone’s father, husband, or friend for more than a few incandescent hours. As Geraldine Fitzgerald once told me, “Being with Orson is like having a lovely light shine down on you … but then the light moves on.” Yet in spite of every argument I used to defend and excuse him, my stubborn heart would not yield to reason. It kept repeating: Why can’t he find more time for me? In addition to being a director, actor, magician, and one of the most spellbinding personalities of the twentieth century, why couldn’t he also be Dad?
Some time after my father’s death, I confided in Bonnie Nims, an old friend from Chicago, that the
loss had been more “traumatic” than I had expected. “I have seen so many things about myself,” I wrote Bonnie, “the choices I’ve made in my life, my particular struggles and dilemmas, and these insights have been painful.” In particular, I recognized the strong hold my father had had on me all my life and how hard I had fought to win his attention. I was not grieving for the man who had died but for a marvelous being who lived entirely in my imagination.
At the same time, being Orson Welles’s daughter had given me riches denied the children of ordinary men. I was beginning to swing my eyes away from the flawed human being who had disappeared into a box of ashes and to gaze instead at the solid treasure he had left behind. By 1988, a year overflowing with tributes to Orson Welles, I was able to write Bonnie that I was attending a retrospective of his films in a different spirit. “Even though I’ve seen the films before, some of them many times, I’ll be seeing them in an entirely new light. All this is happening at a good time for me, when I have resolved as much as I can the pain and difficulty that my personal relationship with my father caused me; when I can now value him as a genius and take pride in being his daughter, something I couldn’t fully do when he was alive.”
“YOUR FATHER’S DEATH will liberate you in the long run,” predicted my brother-in-law, Jack Feder, when I was still in the depths of mourning. As a psychologist, he had seen it happen with patients of his and others he knew who had been overshadowed by a famous parent. Then the parent died and the child stepped out of the shadows. “You’re going to come into your own now, Chris.” I was forty-seven when Jack made his prophecy.
My father’s death had released me from the misery of wanting what I could never have, and the relief I felt in those first weeks was physical. It was as though an intolerable burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Returning to the comfort of work, I began to write poems in odd moments, trying to give form to the chaos swirling around in my head and heart. To my surprise and delight, I found that I was working with more freedom and confidence than I had ever felt before. Writing used to be a struggle — like trying to wrestle a fabulous winged creature to the ground — but now the process was becoming exhilarating, whether I saved the day’s pages or tossed them into the wastebasket.
Of those closest to me, only Irwin and my mother truly understood what was happening to me. On March 4, 1986, almost five months after my father’s death, my mother wrote me from Tisbury, England, where she and Jackie were living in a Palladian mansion converted into a retirement home. It was a rare moment of empathy on her part, one that led to our establishing a more satisfying relationship.
I understand perfectly the upset your father’s death has caused you. You feel you never got through to him and you are right. You didn’t, anymore than his other daughters did, or his wives… . When you were a little girl in Santa Monica and Orson planned to pick you up for lunch, he’d forget and I have many memories of you standing in the hall all dressed up, waiting and crying. What could I say to you? I sent you to Todd [School] hoping that Hortense and Skipper could explain him better than I could. They adored you and you became one of the family there. The Hills were the nearest he ever came to having parents, but when Hortense died, Orson was not at her funeral. That to me is not understandable and it must have hurt Skipper deeply. I remember how unhappy you were in South Africa — so far away from your father. I wrote so many letters to him organizing visits for you in France, Spain, Italy, etc. You went but he was busy and left you with his secretaries. He loved you when you were in front of him, but he forgot you when you were out of sight. Just like everyone else in his life.
If Orson had been Joe Dokes, you might easily have been able to handle this kind of neglect and written him off. But because he was who he was, you found it harder and harder as you grew up and his fame spread.
But now I must tell you that there was nothing you could ever have done with your life or your talents that would have got through to him. And I know how you have driven yourself all these years. And they have paid off from your point of view. You are very successful and must now write for yourself. Not for Orson’s approval. Do you understand what I am saying? I have a great fear that I could hurt your feelings and that I would hate to do. I am sure Irwin is a great help to you about this. An honest, down-to-earth man who understands you perfectly and loves you. You are very lucky to have him in your life.
My mother tended to oversimplify, and she knew nothing of Oja Kodar, the one person in my father’s life who most definitely “got through to him.” Nonetheless, she had given me the golden key to the kingdom — “You … must now write for yourself. Not for Orson’s approval.” Feeling like a bird swept out of its cage, I began the series of poems and monologues that would grow over the next decade into a book I called The Movie Director.
While the central character stood in for Orson Welles in the beginning, he gradually moved into the realm of fiction. Even so, writing in the movie director’s voice allowed me to slip into my father’s skin. It helped me to see the world through his eyes and experience his triumphs, frustrations, and regrets. Creating a semifictional Orson Welles moved me so close to the heart and soul of the real one that I forgave him.
I MET FRANK Brady, whom I still consider one of the best and most evenhanded of my father’s biographers, while visiting the Hills in their retirement home in Coral Gables, Florida. An earnest, mild-mannered man with a scholar’s gray-streaked beard and heavy-rimmed glasses, he had come to interview Granny and Skipper. By a coincidence, Frank’s wife was teaching at the same community college as Irwin, and it turned out the Bradys lived in Manhattan, not far from us. We all became friends.
Frank’s biography, Citizen Welles, was eventually published in 1989. Although not the first book to tackle the vast subject of Orson Welles, it was the first comprehensive overview of the man and his work to come out in a single volume. It served me as an excellent introduction to my father’s artistry, filling in many gaps in my knowledge of his achievements in radio and the theater before I was born. Frank’s book also made me more aware of my father’s intense involvement in American politics during the 1940s, but, most important, it deepened my understanding of Orson Welles as an independent artist and a man dedicated to liberal causes. Toward the end of the book, I came to Brady’s comment about me: “And after becoming friends with Christopher … I found that although she had a deep love for her father, there were major gaps in the information that she had about him. ‘You probably do know more about my father than I do,’ she told me.”
That was certainly true when I first met Frank. It was disconcerting to realize that someone who never got closer to Orson Welles than a long-distance phone call possessed more in-depth knowledge of his life and work than I did. I resolved that I would better inform myself by reading every book and article I could find on my father. Through Skipper, I also obtained a wealth of materials, which included my father’s personal letters and his Shakespeare playbooks originally published at Todd School.
In the spring of 1988, the film school at New York University held an extensive tribute to Orson Welles that honored his work in radio, theater, and film. For me, it was an invaluable crash course in the artistry and importance of Orson Welles, and it also put me in touch with William G. Simon, the amiable chairman of the cinema studies department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. A sincere admirer of my father and the prime organizer of the tribute, Bill felt Orson Welles was seen as “a misunderstood genius” and that the time was ripe for a critical reappraisal. As he told the New York Times, “Welles is very famous for Citizen Kane and one or two other works, but we went on the presupposition that there was much more of interest and it was worth digging for it. We thought that to bring back into the foreground some of the lesser-known work and to deal with the relationships between the radio, theater and film work would be especially useful. I don’t think there’s anything like a full appreciation of his accomplishments in the public eye.”
The retrospective ran
from April 22 to May 15. “Orson Welles’s creative output on stage, on film and on the radio was so voluminous that it’s taking three weeks to cover all the bases,” pointed out a reporter for New York Newsday. Several of the events ran concurrently: an exhibition of Welles’s theater productions in the 1930s, which included rare photographs, costume and set designs, posters and playbills; the Radio Listening Room, which offered daily selections from Welles’s radio broadcasts, including the famous (or infamous) War of the Worlds; and the rare opportunity to see all of Welles’s films at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, not just those made in Hollywood but the six films he had completed in Europe, which were almost never shown in the United States: Chimes at Midnight, F for Fake, Othello, The Trial, Mr. Arkadin, and The Immortal Story. Finally, a three-day conference at the end of the retrospective was devoted to lectures and panel discussions, one of them led by Oja Kodar, whom the director of the Public Theater presented to the audience as “one of the most extraordinary women it has been my privilege to meet.” Afterward I was tempted to walk up to Oja and introduce myself, but I felt too shy. I knew her only as the alluring young woman in F for Fake who moved with a dancer’s grace and revealed her naked body without a trace of self-consciousness. Now in her late forties, Oja had blossomed into a fully mature, stylish, and still beautiful woman who had spoken passionately about her years with my father.
Throughout the retrospective, Bill Simon was kind and generous, sharing books, articles, and his own knowledge with me and treating me to a private showing of the filmed interview my father gave to the press the morning after The War of The Worlds broadcast. Tousled and exhausted from having been up all night making history, Orson Welles seemed genuinely contrite while the newsmen circled him like a pack of hungry jackals. At the same time, Bill and I agreed, it could not have upset him that he became a household word overnight.
In My Father's Shadow Page 29