In My Father's Shadow

by Chris Welles Feder

  I had told Bill that, while I wanted to participate fully in the retrospective, I also wanted to remain incognito, and he respected my wishes. I continued to stay in the background even when people attending the retrospective sought me out. Dick Wilson, who had been my father’s assistant in the Mercury Theatre and later followed him to Hollywood, seemed especially eager to establish a connection with me. He had known me as a child, he reminded me. We had been together on the set of Macbeth, and how “thrilled” he was to meet me again as an adult. And did I know, he exulted, that he had “copied Orson” by naming his son “Christopher”? I regret it now, but at the time I could not warm to him. Something about Dick Wilson reminded me uncomfortably of people I had known in my Hollywood childhood and wanted to avoid in my present life.

  MY INCLINATION TO remain in hiding was blown away one morning in May. I received a call from the public relations firm that was organizing the opening ceremony for the new Radio Hall of Fame being established by Emerson Radio Corporation. Would I accept an award being given my father for his Mercury Theatre on the Air series? Orson Welles was one of eighteen “radio legends” to be inducted into Emerson’s Radio Hall of Fame on May 17, 1988. The black-tie ceremony would take place in the lobby of the Empire State Building.

  “I was so stunned when they called that I forgot to ask what the award was,” I wrote Bonnie Nims. “Anyway it’s a black-tie affair … which raised shrieks from me (‘I’ve got nothing to wear!’) and grumbles from Irwin (‘Do I really have to wear a black tie?’), a question I relayed to the public relations person. My father never wore one, I pointed out. She said she’d get back to me. I rather hope we can go in our non-designer jeans, striking another blow for artists and mavericks.”

  However, by the time the evening of May 17 rolled around, we had bowed to convention. Irwin wore a borrowed black tie, and I decked myself out in a black lace formal gown, hastily purchased a few days before and never to be taken off the hanger again. A sleek limousine was dispatched to our door to convey us in style to the Empire State Building. When we got there, it was media mayhem, the lobby jammed with photographers and reporters, klieg lights blazing from all corners, and cables snaking across the floor.

  Before I knew it, I was spirited away by a bevy of press photographers and was posed standing beside Arthur Marx, son of Groucho. Arthur was a pleasant, nice-looking man who bore only a slight resemblance to his famous father, made slighter by the absence of horn-rimmed glasses and a black mustache. He had flown into town to accept the posthumous award for Groucho’s popular quiz show, You Bet Your Life.

  “Well,” I told him sotto voce as the klieg lights bore down on us and the flashbulbs went off in our faces like muted gunfire, “whatever problems we had with our famous fathers, this makes up for it a bit, don’t you think?”

  “Not really,” he deadpanned back, sending me a sad smile.

  I gathered that, like me, he had been fatherless for fame, but in the dazzle of the moment, what did it matter? We were there to honor our fathers and I, for one, was thoroughly enjoying myself. To my surprise, I found that I not only liked being in the limelight, I felt calm and sure of myself.

  “I had no idea you were such a ham,” a bemused Irwin whispered in my ear as I was led away by a documentary filmmaker from Chicago who wanted an interview.

  “Neither did I!” I admitted, laughing, and yet it felt so natural, as though I had been doing this all my life.

  “It must be genetic,” Irwin decided.

  “Are you proud of me?”

  “I’m always proud of you.”

  The award turned out to be a handsome miniature replica of an early Emerson radio. A golden plaque read RADIO HALL OF FAME — 1988, ORSON WELLES, ANTHOLOGY SERIES — “THE MERCURY THEATER” [sic]. I was proud to take the award home and display it on the bookshelves in our living room.

  A few days later, the public relations firm sent me the press releases for the induction ceremony, and I was pleased to see that I had not entirely blown my cover. Several newspapers reported that the Radio Hall of Fame award given to Orson Welles had been accepted by his daughter Rebecca.

  THE NEXT TIME I came out publicly as my father’s daughter was at the Museum of Broadcasting on East Fifty-third Street. In mounting its first major exhibit devoted to radio, the museum had decided to honor Orson Welles exclusively. The exhibit ran from October 27 through December 3, 1988, in the year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of The War of the Worlds broadcast, still one of America’s most celebrated radio programs because of the national panic it caused. “Imagine a time when the world still listened,” read the brochure announcing the Orson Welles exhibit, “when it was radio that entertained and informed and, in one historic instance, confused. And imagine one voice on the airwaves, ringing with a sonorous richness and laughing with a sinister knowledge of us all: that one voice belonged to Orson Welles.”

  To recreate the experience of listening to radio in the living rooms of the 1930s, the museum furnished one of its rooms with sets from Woody Allen’s nostalgic film Radio Days. The result evoked a front parlor, where families once gathered after dinner to tune in their favorite radio programs. There was a stuffed sofa and armchair, a coffee table and a magazine rack holding 1930s issues of Time and Life, but the main piece of furniture was the large console radio in the corner. It made me remember that radios were once the size of small refrigerators.

  In the radio exhibition room, visitors could discover the extraordinary talent of Orson Welles. If the public wanted to visit the museum every day for a month, it was possible to hear more than fifty of his radio shows. Most were adapted from literary classics and were performed by members of the Mercury Theatre. Originally called First Person Singular, the weekly show became known as The Mercury Theatre on the Air and finally the Campbell Playhouse after the Campbell Soup Company (“mm, mm, good!”) became the show’s sponsor. Visitors could sample the show that kicked off the series on July 11, 1938, a hair-raising adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the show that made history on October 30, 1938, loosely based on H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. They could also hear a conversation between Orson Welles and H. G. Wells that took place at a radio station in San Antonio, Texas, two years later. There was so much to choose from: the radio drama based on Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling novel Rebecca, which later influenced the movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Or several selections from The Adventures of Harry Lime, a popular series my father had created for BBC radio in the 1950s. It featured the unscrupulous but devilishly charming Harry Lime, arguably my father’s most popular movie role. I wished I could move into the museum with a sleeping bag.

  Tipped off by a friend who worked in the film department at the Museum of Modern Art, I decided to attend the seminar on Orson Welles that was held on the day the exhibition opened. The film critic Andrew Sarris would be moderating a panel discussion on the joys and woes of working with the “boy genius.” The panel included my friend from childhood Geraldine Fitzgerald, whom I was anxious to see again, the Mercury Theatre veteran Arlene Francis, the ubiquitous Dick Wilson, and the writer Howard Koch, who had adapted many of the literary works my father turned into radio drama.

  The moment I walked into the museum’s lobby, I spotted Aunt Geraldine. She immediately recognized me, we hugged each other, and time fell away. She greeted me warmly in her soft Irish brogue, asking for news of my mother, whom she still thought of as her close friend. It did not seem to matter that she had not seen her in years. For my part, I asked her eagerly about her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, once my favorite playmate and now a successful director living in England. Then, leading me by the hand, Geraldine introduced me to Arlene Francis, Howard Koch, and Andrew Sarris as “Orson’s oldest.” Pleasantries were exchanged. A photographer leaped forward to take a group photo. How strange it was! I felt an instant rapport with Geraldine, vividly remembering our times together on that sun-drenched beach in Santa Monica when I saw her and Michael every day,
and at the same time I realized our past connection had little bearing on our present lives. Geraldine and Michael had remained in the theater, and I had moved into a world so far removed from theirs that I might as well have been living on a different planet. “Michael wanted so much to be here today,” Geraldine was saying, “but he’s directing a play in London and couldn’t get away.”

  Why should Michael want to be here? I wanted to ask her. Did that mean the persistent rumors were true and Michael was my father’s natural son? It added to the weirdness of seeing “Aunt” Geraldine again to think that Michael and I might actually be brother and sister, but we would never know one way or the other.

  We filed into the auditorium where the seminar would be held. The panel members seated themselves in a row on the stage. Andrew Sarris began by saying how unfortunate it was that John Houseman, Welles’s partner in “the golden age of radio,” was too ill to participate. This led to a discussion of how crucial Houseman had been to Orson’s early successes. Geraldine astonished me by comparing my father to a broken water pipe, his talent pouring out of him in torrents while Houseman chased after him, trying to scoop it up in cups, pitchers, and buckets. The audience laughed, but I found the analogy ludicrous. Everyone on the panel seemed to feel Welles could not function without Houseman and that once their partnership had been dissolved, “Orson was all washed up.” Howard Koch put it this way: “Houseman was the base on which Orson’s statue was erected, and from the time they separated, Orson lived more the life of a celebrity than that of an artist.” I felt myself beginning to bridle.

  The discussion moved swiftly from radio to the movies. Suddenly everyone on the panel had a negative opinion of Orson’s “rise and fall” as a filmmaker. “He was a poor custodian of his talent,” remarked Arlene Francis. “He just let it go.” Then Andrew Sarris expounded his theory of Orson Welles as “the failed genius.” How could that be? I wanted to point out, Once a genius, always a genius. My father did not wake up one morning and discover that his genius had vanished like an attack of hay fever. To the end of his life, far from being “a broken water pipe,” he was a fountain overflowing with ideas that would have been realized had he found the financial backing.

  Unable to sit quietly in my seat another moment, I rose to challenge Mr. Sarris and the rest of the panel. What followed was written up in the November 14, 1988, issue of Television/Radio Age.

  Later, when this “failed genius” part of the discussion surfaced again, there came an understandable reaction from Welles’ eldest daughter, Chris Welles Feder, a writer living in New York, who just happened to be attending the seminar.

  “His career did not abruptly end with Citizen Kane,” she said, and she accused the panel, particularly Sarris, of ignoring her father’s middle and late period of development, particularly his European-made films, many still unfamiliar to American audiences. Unfortunately, Sarris took it upon himself to argue rather than draw the daughter of the great producer into the discussion. But Welles-Feder persisted, and the packed theater cheered as she made her point. Welles would have been proud.

  I WAS BEGINNING to find my father in the one place I had not looked for him while he was alive: his work. Starting in 1988, every tribute to Orson Welles was a source of immense satisfaction to me. I gloried in his triumphs and felt dismay when he was misunderstood or underappreciated. I was also informing myself about him at every opportunity. In the fall of 1989, I visited the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, and spent days pouring over the Orson Welles archives, but it was not enough time to do more than dip into the vast collection of correspondence, scripts, speeches, and memorabilia. I came away with some items of personal value, such as a photograph of my father’s mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, when she was young and winsome. I was also touched to discover one of the stories I had written and illustrated as a child and given to my father for Christmas.

  Growing bolder as time went on, I fired off a letter to the editor of the New York Times, challenging certain statements columnist Vincent Canby had made about my father. I was pleased that, on March 11, 1990, the Times reprinted my letter, which read in part:

  To the Editor:

  I must object to your portrayal of my father, Orson Welles, in your article “Oscar is sometimes a grouch” [Feb. 25]. As you might imagine, I have researched my father’s life extensively, and, until your article, nowhere have I heard or read that, as you state, “Orson Welles first went to Hollywood with the announced intention of showing the natives how to make movies.” From my personal knowledge of my father, such an announcement would have been out of character. To portray him as an arrogant “big mouth” does him a great disservice, and it saddens me to see perpetuated, five years after his death, the kind of wrong impressions that dogged him all his life… .

  Mr. Canby replies: I erred in writing that it was Mr. Welles’s “announced intention” to show Hollywood how to make movies. Rather, this was the way that the Hollywood natives perceived him as the result of all of the publicity surrounding the success of his unorthodox productions for radio and theater….

  MAY 1, 1991, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Citizen Kane, still considered by many critics to be the greatest of all American films. To commemorate the occasion, Paramount Pictures and the Turner Entertainment Company released the picture for an unlimited run in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Palo Alto. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a special showing, and thanks to our friend in the film department, Irwin and I got excellent seats. “What a thrill to see a museum quality print on a large screen!” I shared with my sister Rebecca in Tacoma, Washington, urging her to drive into Seattle and see it herself. “It was a very moving experience.”

  I was also overjoyed that Ted Turner had failed in his attempt to colorize Citizen Kane. A group of film directors led by Woody Allen had protested that it was sacrilege to even think of colorizing Kane, but in the end what stopped Turner was my father’s powerful contract with RKO. Turner may have acquired Kane when he bought RKO’s film library in 1987, but he could not undo the contract that had contributed to making it such a unique work of art. In the words of a spokesman for Turner Entertainment, “Orson Welles’s contract with RKO provided sufficient creative control that we felt our right to colorize this picture was questionable and therefore we decided not to do it.”

  Not to be undone, Turner himself told the crowd at a celebrity screening in Hollywood that he still thought Citizen Kane should have been made in color. “If they had known how good it was going to turn out, they would have made it in color,” proclaimed Mr. Turner, determined to have the last word.

  But the last laugh belonged to Orson Welles.

  13

  Meeting Oja Kodar

  IN MARCH OF 2004, a fascinating Orson Welles retrospective was held at the Film Forum in lower Manhattan. It was a rare opportunity to view footage from his incomplete films, such as Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, and The Deep, which I had never seen before. I imagine it would have distressed my father, the most meticulous of film editors, who preferred to work in secrecy, had he known people were jamming the Film Forum every day to view films he had set aside, waiting for finishing money that never materialized, or that had still been evolving in his mind.

  What artist wants the world looking over his shoulder before he is ready to unveil his creation? But once he is dead, what can he do to stop the endless scrutiny? Every scrap of film Orson Welles had produced during his lifetime was of intense interest to film scholars and sophisticated moviegoers. In the nineteen years since his death, he had changed from a celebrity into a legend, finally attaining the status of an icon. This was brought home to me when a friend sent me an advertisement for Apple computers. It shows a black-and-white photograph of Orson Welles in his beguiling youth, reading a movie script, cigar in hand. Under the Apple logo, the text reads, “Think different.” These words stand for the independent spirit of the true artist t
hat my father has come to symbolize.

  I had been attending the screenings at the Film Forum every day but remaining incognito. Then one evening, on an impulse, I decided to introduce myself to the tall, handsome German who had been presenting the films and providing us day after day with enlightening background information. He was Stefan Drössler, director of the Munich Film Museum, distinguished film scholar, and the man who had organized the Welles retrospectives here in New York as well as in Los Angeles. When I stepped out of the shadows and introduced myself as Orson Welles’s eldest daughter, Stefan seemed delighted to meet me. He readily accepted my invitation to come to our home the following afternoon and bring along his attractive companion, the French actress and director Anne Le Ny.

  Comfortably settled in our living room with Anne sitting quietly beside him, Stefan made himself at home. For all his knowledge and air of authority, there was a shy reserve and sensitivity about him that I liked at once. As the afternoon wore on, he told Irwin and me a great deal about the work of the Munich Film Museum, which had acquired from Oja Kodar most of the footage my father had left to her in his will. This included not only his incomplete films but programs he had made for BBC television, pilots he had made for American television, and other glittering fragments from the mosaic of his life’s work. Oja had given the footage to the museum in Munich with the proviso that it had to be shown at a film festival or other noncommercial venue every two or three years. So the enormous and ongoing task of restoring, assembling, and, in some cases, editing the work had fallen into the capable hands of Stefan and his staff. Their plan was to show at each successive Orson Welles retrospective footage that had not been seen before.