In My Father's Shadow (17 page)

“It’s the curse,” she whispered. “It’s come so early, I wasn’t prepared.” I had heard about “the curse” from girls at school but had never expected to see a woman menstruating in the middle of a Roman intersection, inspiring every male driver who had braked in time to add to the serenade of catcalls and obscenities. “I’ve got to get back to the hotel as quickly as I can. Please help me, Chrissie.”

Perhaps, I thought, frantically hailing a taxi, June
would
be better off back in Johannesburg. When the day came for her to leave us, I did not protest. With June gone, my father made an effort to spend more time with me. He was delighted by my love of art and took me to many of the museums and art galleries in Rome.

“What Italian artists do you like the most?” he asked me on one of these excursions.

“Michelangelo,” I responded without hesitation. “He’s my favorite.”

“Good choice, Christopher, but why Michelangelo and not Leonardo da Vinci?”

“Well, Daddy, it started when I saw his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.”

He immediately broke into a wide grin. “That’s my girl!”

The very next day, we spent hours studying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, my father helping me identify what was happening in every inch of it: “Look up there, Christopher, that’s God creating the sun, the moon, and the planets, and there he is creating the first man. Isn’t it lovely, Christopher, how that act of creation is shown by the fingers of God and man about to touch? What an inspired idea that was! There’s Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden of Eden—do you see the serpent with the woman’s face coiled around the Tree of Knowledge? And there’s Noah lying in a drunken stupor. Now look very closely at the Great Flood right next to it. Isn’t it marvelous what Michelangelo did with that?” My father was so boyish at these moments, so filled with enthusiasm, that I wanted to laugh out loud for the sheer joy of being with him and sharing his passion.

For the rest of our stay in Rome, we made it our project to see any work of art we could find by Michelangelo. I had already admired his
Pietà
in St. Peter’s; in those days you could walk right up to the statue of the Madonna tenderly holding the dead body of Christ on her lap. You could even lay a cautious finger on the cold white marble robes of the Madonna or the foot of Christ. It amazed me that every vein showed in Christ’s foot, and my father explained that Michelangelo had stolen corpses from the city morgue in order to perfect his knowledge of anatomy.

After St. Peter’s, my father took me to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. It houses the enormous tomb of Pope Julius II, which Michelangelo designed but never completed, and his famous statue of Moses is seated at the base of the tomb. “Moses looks so alive,” I exclaimed, staring at the muscles bulging in the statue’s arms and the prominent veins in his hands, “but why does he have horns on his head?”

“I can’t remember the reason, but art critics are always complaining about those horns. They
do
make Moses look like a goat.” We both laughed at this, my father’s hearty laughter echoing up and down the church’s dim interior.

Before we left Rome, my father bought me two art books, one of Michelangelo’s paintings and the other of his sculptures. In one of these
books, he inscribed the flyleaf: “For Christopher (the art-lover) from her ever-loving Daddy.” Then he drew a charming cartoon of the two of us standing at the base of a statue. Looking much too serious, I am holding a lorgnette to my eyes, and towering above me is my fabulous father, puffing away on his Havana cigar.

“… he drew a charming cartoon of the two of us standing at the base of a statue.”

F
ROM ROME WE
flew to London where we were to spend several weeks before I was due back at school in Johannesburg. I look back on those whirlwind weeks, as I do on all the times I spent with my father in Europe, as both the pinnacle of my life up to that point and the foundation of my life to come. In our often fleeting times together, Orson Welles did more to shape my character, values, and aspirations than Virginia and Jack Pringle could have accomplished in a lifetime.

Wherever my father went in London in those days, he was instantly recognized as Harry Lime, the character he had played in the British thriller
The Third Man
. The role had made him more famous than anything he had ever done, including
Citizen Kane
. When I told my father I had not seen
The Third Man
, he immediately arranged for a private screening at Shepperton Studios. There we were in the darkened projection room, just the two of us, enveloped in cigar smoke and watching the credits roll.

“That’s you!” I cried, when the name of Orson Welles appeared on the screen. He put a finger to his lips, but I was irrepressible. “What part do you play, Daddy?”

“The villain.”

“But Daddy, I want you to be the hero.”

“Villains are a lot more fun, Christopher.”

My father’s close friend, Joseph Cotten, played Holly Martins, an American writer who goes to Vienna in search of his old school chum, Harry Lime. The beautiful Italian Alida Valli played Harry Lime’s girlfriend. The film was directed by Sir Carol Reed from an original screenplay by the novelist Graham Greene.

“Why didn’t
you
direct it, Daddy?”

“Shush, I’ll tell you later, darling girl.”

As the movie began, I leaned forward eagerly in my seat, but long moments passed and still my father had not appeared on the screen. “Daddy,” I whispered, “why aren’t you in the movie yet?”

“Shush, my love. Be patient.”

Almost an hour into the film, when I thought I could no longer bear the suspense, I watched as a cat rubbed itself against a pair of highly polished black shoes. A man’s shoes. Who could be hiding in the darkened doorway? Suddenly a light flicked on in an upstairs window, catching a man in its beam for an instant: slim, smiling, sardonic, devilishly handsome. It was “the third man” of the title, who had faked his own death to escape from the law and continue his life of crime. It was Harry Lime, an American black marketeer in postwar Vienna who spread illness and death by selling inferior penicillin. But was it also my father? For once he was not wearing a false nose or anything else that disguised his looks, and yet he was nothing like his real self. He had turned into the heartless, unscrupulous, wickedly charming Harry Lime. I was so fascinated by the transformation that I paid scant attention to the story or the hypnotic zither music in the background. I was mainly impressed by Harry Lime’s long-awaited first appearance in the doorway, and the heart-stopping chase through the gritty sewers of Vienna that ends in his capture. In the final scene the wounded Lime hauls himself up the sewer’s iron staircase. He struggles to remove the manhole cover but does not have the strength. In a last attempt at salvation, his fingers reach imploringly through the grating. It made me think of the damned souls in Michelangelo’s hell reaching toward heaven.

“Well, what did you think?” my father asked as the lights came up in the screening room. I told him I’d found the movie very exciting, especially the chase through the sewers. “But what did you think of Harry Lime?”

“I know he was bad and deserved to be caught, but I still felt sorry for him at the end.”

“You did?” He broke into a broad grin. “You mean you couldn’t help liking
him, in spite of the terrible things he’d done?” I nodded vigorously. “Well, that’s wonderful, Christopher. That’s what makes this movie work and any other one, for that matter—that you can feel sympathy for the villain.” From the way he was chomping his cigar, I could tell he was pleased with me.

“What about you, Daddy?” I asked as we left the screening room. “Do you like Harry Lime?”

“Like him? I
hate
him!” He spoke with a vehemence that startled me. “He’s utterly cold and without passion.”

Orson playing the villain Harry Lime in
The Third Man
(1949).

A
S OLD AS
my father seemed to me at the time, he was actually at the peak of his youthful vigor and optimism. Tall and burly, he was not yet the monolith he would become in later years when his flat feet and delicate ankles could no longer support his enormous weight and he had to be ferried about in a wheelchair. Now he was fully capable of shepherding me around on foot. Just as he had deepened my love of art during our visits to the churches and museums of Rome, so in London he brought to life the Tudors and the Stuarts. It would remain my favorite period in English history.

We began at the Tower of London, the grim fortress on the Thames where so many were imprisoned and executed during the reigns of Henry VIII and his daughters, “Bloody” Mary and Elizabeth I. We stood looking down at the Traitors Gate, the entry point from the Thames where boats unloaded new prisoners. “Just think of the thousands who passed through here,” my father intoned, “never to return to the world.”

Then he told me about Anne Boleyn whose personal tragedy appealed to our shared romanticism. King Henry had been so determined to marry pretty, high-spirited Anne that in order to divorce his first wife, Catharine of Aragon, he had split with the Roman Catholic Church and founded the
Church of England. Then, Anne, not knowing when she was well off, had dared to cuckold the king and been sent to the Tower. Only twenty-nine years of age, she lost her lovely head on the Tower Green.

On another fine day, my father took me to Hampton Court. It had been built by the archbishop of York, Thomas Wolsey, he told me. On completion, the manor house and its grounds were so grand that Wolsey feared King Henry might suspect the archbishop was trying to outdo his sovereign and live above his station. So, to save his neck, Wolsey made a gift of Hampton Court to the king. My father led me through the palatial rooms, pointing out the fine antiques, chandeliers, and paintings. We lingered in rooms with leaded windows that looked out on the serene gardens and the Thames beyond. What fascinated him the most, though, was the vast kitchen complex with its three fireplaces and adjoining pastry house, confectionery, saucery, spicery, boiling-house, larders, and sculleries. “Think of the banquets they prepared here for the king,” he murmured with more than a touch of envy.

Our next excursion was prompted not by English history but my father’s memorable role in
The Third Man
. The moment he appeared in a public place, anyone with a musical instrument struck up the theme from the movie. It seemed that the face of Orson Welles had become synonymous with the zither’s insistent tune. It also seemed that every musician in London knew the tune, and every restaurant, lounge, tearoom, or hotel lobby possessed a piano, gypsy violin, or three-piece band. So there was no escape since my father was not about to give up his leisurely lunches and dinners, a hearty tea with scones, raspberry jam, and clotted cream at four in the afternoon, cocktails before dinner, brandy after dinner, and a pint of stout at any time of the day.

Each time we were subjected to yet another rendition of the theme from
The Third Man
, my father would heave a sigh. Patient as he tried to be—and in dealing with his fans, he showed remarkable patience and courtesy—the breaking point came when we were waiting to cross Piccadilly Circus one afternoon. An organ-grinder on the corner spotted Harry Lime and began to play the tune my father never wanted to hear again. “That does it!” he roared. “We’re getting out of London!”

The very next day, a chauffeured limousine drove us into the English countryside. A lavish picnic hamper, lap rugs, cushions, a folding table, and chairs occupied the trunk. About an hour out of London, a suitable grassy knoll was found by a winding stream in open country. It was a glorious late spring day
with not another human in sight and no car but ours parked to one side of the country road, bordered by tall hedges. The table and chairs were set up under a shade tree, the picnic hamper unpacked, and we settled down to the serious business of eating. My father was wolfing down the gull’s eggs he loved, while the chauffeur, in impeccable uniform and white gloves, uncorked the vintage wine. “Can I have a sip, Daddy?”