In My Father's Shadow (28 page)

W
HENEVER ANYONE MENTIONED
Orson Welles, my grandmother would sniff and press her lips together as though one had said something in bad taste. My grandfather would begin his diatribe about the emotional unreliability of “theater folk.” He was convinced they were all “pansies.” You couldn’t count on a “damned fool actor” for anything, he liked to say, and if you did, you were “a damned fool yourself.” He had told my mother the same thing years ago, when she was my age and all starry-eyed about Orson. Well, he hoped to God his granddaughter had more sense than her mother. “You know, Chrissie, I offered your dad a job on the stock exchange, a good solid job that would have put meat on the table when he and your mother were practically starving in New York —“

“That
dreadful
apartment in the basement where Virginia told me they slept in the bathtub,” Grandmother sniffed.

“ — and Orson told me he couldn’t be a stockbroker, because he was
already an actor. The fact that he was an out-of-work actor when he could have been an employed stockbroker didn’t enter into his thinking, of course. And he was so damned polite about telling me to go to hell with my job on the stock exchange.”

Chris’s maternal grandmother, Lillian Wayman Nicolson, at age thirty.

“When I
think
of what poor Virginia went through, having to pawn all her pretty dresses and her jewelry just to pay the rent on that
dreadful
. . .”

It saddened me that my grandparents saw my father in such a negative light and that they were so narrow-minded in general. Now that I was seeing the Nicolsons at closer range, I understood why my mother had rebelled against them and eloped at eighteen with Orson Welles. “I was her ticket out of town,” my father had told me once, as though the main reason Virginia Nicolson had run off with him was to escape from her family. She had been at constant odds with her social-climbing mother, whom she still referred to as “that silly woman,” and although she had been her father’s favorite and, by her own admission, “thoroughly spoiled” by him, she had recoiled from his racist and ultraconservative views.

Now that I had come to take my mother’s place, I saw how maddening Grandmother could be. Although she had a good mind and was a gifted pianist — “her one and only accomplishment in life,” my mother liked to say with a scornful laugh — she was obsessed with trivia and social niceties. She was the only person I knew who kept a meticulous list of every menu she had served at every dinner party to assure that no guest would eat the same dish twice. Yet I did not lose sight of her virtues: She was thoughtful, generous, a woman of elegance and exquisite taste. We shared a love of classical music and went to many splendid concerts together. And because I knew my grandmother really loved me and would do anything she could for me, no amount
of fundamental disagreement could diminish the special closeness between us.

Chris’s maternal grandfather, Leo Malcolm Nicolson.

I also loved my grandfather in spite of his prejudices. An earthy, self-made man of shrewd intelligence, he had not lost touch with his humble beginnings as a farm boy in Alma, Kansas — unlike my grandmother, who could barely bring herself to tell me about her Quaker parents, dismissing them as “simple nobodies” with an airy wave of her hand. On the surface my grandfather seemed more charming and easygoing than my grandmother until, after a few too many highballs, he began spewing poisonous remarks about blacks, Jews, Democrats, “pansies,” and “theater people.” At such moments I intensely missed my father. Until I came to live with my grandparents, I had not realized how much I had modeled myself on my father’s freedom from prejudice.

Although Leo Nicolson had friendly dealings with Jews in his industrial real estate business, he would never dream of inviting them to his home. “You must always keep your business life separate from your personal life,” he advised me during the many evenings he spent coaching me on how to conduct myself in the business world. I noticed that he drank steadily from the time he came home from the office until he lumbered off to bed, but I did not think anything of it. Then, one night, I was awakened by his incoherent shouting and my grandmother screaming, “No, Leo, no!” There was a scuffle in the hall outside my door. I sat up in bed, terrified that my grandfather was going to burst into my room in a drunken rage, but somehow my grandmother stopped him. The next morning she had a black eye — the result, she said, of “banging into a door.” I knew she was lying, and she knew that I knew. It was understood between us that I had been given this haven only until I could afford a place of my own — and the sooner that happened, the better.

W
HILE
I
WAS
living in Chicago, I often visited Granny and Skipper Hill, who had remained a vital link between me and my father. Grandmother disapproved of my having anything to do with the Hills. She had never forgiven them for encouraging the romance between young Orson and Virginia, but what really bothered her were the Hills’ lifestyle and values, which stood in direct opposition to her own.

The Hills were still living in their rambling farmhouse outside Woodstock, Illinois. It felt like coming home to sit once more in their cozy living room paneled in knotty pine, or to curl up in the window seat, gazing out at fields of alfalfa tossing in the wind, remembering how I had romped in them as a child, pretending the wind was the sound of ocean waves. Of course, everything had shrunk in the intervening years, but how comforting it was to sit again at the harvest table covered with a red-checked cloth in Granny’s kitchen, watching her bustle around the stove and waiting for the cuckoo clock to sound the hour.

On one of these visits I learned my father had married Paola Mori in London two days after his fortieth birthday. Skipper showed me some recent photographs of my new stepmother, whom I had first seen when my father showed me the rushes of
Mr. Arkadin
. She had been striking in the role of Raina, with her huge, expressive eyes, heavy brows, and short, curly hair, but now she was a full-blown beauty, soft and womanly. Her hair was long and sleek, swept up in a French twist. She had a lovely smile and looked warm-hearted. Would I ever get to meet her, I wondered, and if I did, would she like me?

Skipper reminded me that Paola Mori was a stage name. She was really the Countess di Girfalco and came from a distinguished Italian family. When her parents learned Orson had made her pregnant, they were horrified and insisted he marry her. “It was a shotgun wedding all right,” Skipper chuckled.

“What a thing to say!” Granny objected. “Why, you know how devoted Paola is to Orson and how much she’s helped him cut back on his drinking. Why, she worships him and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do — “

“That may all be true, Horty, but I doubt Orson would have married her if she hadn’t gotten herself pregnant and her family hadn’t made him feel he had to do the honorable thing.”

“I don’t see how you can say that, Skipper.”

“I just did!” He laughed like a mischievous schoolboy.

Six months after my father married Paola, my half sister Beatrice was
born in New York, and once again it was the Hills who gave me this news. Although my father could have easily called me up in Chicago and told me I had a new sister, he did not. Was he turning his back on me, or had he forgotten all about me?

I could not bear to think my father had erased me from his life when he was so present in mine. Even if he hadn’t been in the news, there were always people meeting me for the first time and exclaiming, “Are you really Orson Welles’s daughter?” Yes, I really was, but now it was becoming a source of shame and humiliation. I felt the whole world knew he had abandoned me.

M
Y MOTHER
’
S SISTER
Caryl came to Chicago to visit for a few days. My father had once told me that when he first met Caryl, he found her better looking than Virginia and that Caryl had been blessed, he felt, “with a sweeter nature.” Tall, blond, and extremely attractive, my aunt certainly wore her years better than my mother; but at the moment, she told us, she was “totally exhausted and fed up to the gills with Orson.” Her latest encounter with my father had been a financial disaster for New York’s City Center and a professional embarrassment to her.

Caryl worked in public relations as a fund-raiser and was friendly with Jean Dalrymple, director of the City Center on West Fifty-fifth Street. “I talked Jean into putting on Orson’s adaptation of
King Lear
,” Caryl told us, “and after she agreed to do it and we raised the horrendous amount of money Orson said he needed, he injured both his feet. It was bad enough that he broke one foot and had to hobble around with a cane on opening night, but then he tripped over a prop on his way off the stage and sprained his other ankle. I never knew anyone as clumsy and just plain self-destructive as Orson.”

“But Aunt Caryl,” I chimed in, “could he really help it? I mean, anyone can have an accident, and my father’s always had weak ankles.”

“Listen to this child. Defending the father who hasn’t lifted a finger for her.” Caryl turned her lovely blue-gray eyes on me, the same color as my mother’s but with more warmth and laughter behind them.

“But it was such bad luck that he hurt himself twice.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it. What’s the matter with you, Chrissie? You’re a smart girl. Don’t you see Orson’s a fuckup?”

“Caryl, watch your language,” my grandfather said disapprovingly, but my aunt just shrugged. She lived in New York City now.

“Seriously, Chrissie,” Caryl went on, “what’s Orson ever done for you?”

I looked down at my hands on my lap, not knowing how to explain that it wasn’t what my father had done or not done but who he was and what he believed in: being tolerant of others, for instance, and being kind and considerate while living a life in which the making of art was supreme. There wasn’t a mean bone in him; if he hurt people along the way, it was always unintentional. How could I persuade my grandparents and Aunt Caryl that the Orson Welles I knew was not “irresponsible” and “self-destructive”?

“Orson ended up having to perform
King Lear
by himself in a wheelchair,” my aunt was telling us with exasperation. “We lost oodles of money, and I don’t think Jean Dalrymple will ever speak to me again. That’s the last time I’m going out on a limb for Orson.” (As my father would tell me years later, Caryl was not appeased by the fact that her ex-brother-in-law had tried to put on a good show for the sold-out performances, even if he was confined to a wheelchair. He recited lengthy passages from
King Lear
and told his most amusing anecdotes, a bravura performance which he repeated for twenty-one nights, but that was not long enough for City Center to recoup its investment in Orson Welles.)

After my aunt’s visit, it was a relief to spend another weekend with the Hills, and it was on this visit that I finally broached the subject that had been causing me such distress. Why hadn’t I heard from my father in over a year? My question hung in the air. After a long, uncomfortable silence, Skipper sprang out of his chair and began his restless pacing. “Well,” he drawled, “we weren’t going to tell you, Chrissie, but since you brought it up . . .” He stopped short and looked at Granny for guidance.

“It was that time you called Orson in Paris and told him you couldn’t see him anymore,” Granny explained. “Paola was with him when you called, and she said she’d never seen Orson so upset.”

“He reacted like a wounded King Lear,” Skipper observed.

“You mean overreacted,” Granny added tartly.

“Well, now Orson’s got this idea in his head about Chrissie being ‘a thankless child,’ and you know how he is, Horty, once he feels betrayed.”

So that was it. In my father’s mind, I had become the embodiment of the lines from
King Lear
, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.”

“That’s all nonsense, Skipper, and you know it,” Granny snapped. “If anybody’s put ideas about Chrissie into Orson’s head, it’s Paola.”

“Now, Horty, you don’t know that for a fact.”