In My Father's Shadow (5 page)

Geraldine Fitzgerald—Aunt Geraldine to me—was a different animal. There was something elusive about her, something that made me suspect I could never know the real person hiding behind the soft-spoken Irish charm and the dazzling smile. She seemed to live in a vast reservoir of calm known only to herself. On the other hand, I had no trouble figuring out her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Two years younger than I was, Michael was a lovable scamp with a mop of dark hair, eager to join in any adventure I might propose. We were in and out of each other’s houses every day. Sweet and amenable most of the time, Michael was also an only child who liked doing things
his
way. The inevitable moment came when he got tired of being bossed around.

“Are they fighting
again
?” The question rose, incredulous, from the nook on the open-air porch where my father had buried himself in papers, scripts, pencils, and pads. “Can’t I get any quiet around here? I
must
get this work done!” Heaving himself to his feet, sweeping up papers, scripts, et al., he vanished into the serene depths of Geraldine’s house.

“You naughty children!” Geraldine descended from the porch to the sandy backyard, where Michael and I were staging our current battle. She pulled us apart as we continued to shriek and flail at each other, then pronounced the sentence we knew by heart. “You are not to play together until you can play nicely. Chrissie, you are to go home at once, and Michael, you are to go to your room.”

We did as we were told, but it was not long before Michael and I had crept out of our houses and stood on opposite sides of the picket fence that separated our adjoining properties. We held hands through the fence, crying pitifully and swearing to be kind to each other, until Geraldine relented.

When I recall those sunlit days in Santa Monica, I am almost always outdoors and in my bathing suit. The houses along our strip of coastal highway were built to face the ocean, and I couldn’t remember when I had not fallen asleep to the sound of waves or woken up early in the morning with the fierce desire to see the ocean emerging from the fog. It meant running out of the house in my pajamas, dashing across the backyard—a rectangular plot of sand stolen from the beach and enclosed by a high, white wall—then scrambling up the steps that led to an elevated landing and locked gate. There I would stand barefoot and shivering on the wooden platform, peering into the fog, which rolled in from the ocean like fallen clouds, listening to the rhythm of waves, how the little ones hushed as they burst into spray while the big ones boomed like faraway guns.

I remember far less about being in school, fully clothed, for the better part of the day. Life resumed when I was back home and racing through my homework so that I could run over to Aunt Geraldine’s before having supper in the kitchen with Marie. My father might or might not be there, or if he was, he might or might not have time for me; but I could always go for a walk by myself on the beach. It lifted my spirits just to skip along the tide line, just to feel the wet sand yielding under my feet. It was that magical hour at the end of the day when the light turned everything to gold. I pretended the sun was a red-orange balloon that someone in the ocean—a mermaid?—was pulling down from the sky. It came down so slowly, so slowly, that it was always with a shiver of surprise that I saw it drop beneath the waves.

In those days the beach belonged to the people who lived on it. It was rarely crowded, except on weekends, and so safe that I was allowed to come and go once I grew old enough to understand that the ocean I loved with my whole being could also drown me. Yet even as a young child, with Marie standing by, I had been allowed to paddle around in the foamy leavings of waves. Later on, when the surf was not too rough, I held my nose and rolled around and around in the undertow until I came up coughing and spitting sand. This was my idea of fun. Some days the breakers were so huge there was nothing to do but sit far back on the sand in awe. I could not conceive then that my days would not always begin and end on the beach at Santa Monica.

On weekends I was more sure of seeing my father. Often on a Saturday I ran over to Aunt Geraldine’s after breakfast and found him already at work, reading and scribbling in his favorite nook on the porch, unshaven and wearing only his bathing trunks. He didn’t seem to hear the hush and thunder of waves, the screeching of gulls, the soothing, familiar sounds that drifted over the high, white wall. The wind uncombed his dark hair, and yet I felt he was untouchable, imagining a glass wall had risen around him. I sat down in a wicker chair, careful to be quiet, and waited with all the patience I could muster, which was not very much. I watched his every move, wondering why he slashed through some pages with a furious pencil and then smiled at others or doodled in the margins. Much as I wanted to draw closer and peer over his shoulder, I didn’t dare.
If I sit here long enough
, I thought,
he’ll look up and notice me
…

It did happen. “Hello, darling girl! How’s my clever daughter today?” His voice was so welcoming that I began to tell him at once and in great detail how I was. I never felt more intelligent, more sure of myself, than when I was alone with my father and had his full attention. Then I could tell him anything, and he listened, not as one listens to a child but as though he were hearing a younger version of himself. This was heady stuff, and to have such moments with my father made me hunger for more.

D
URING THE MONTHS
he lived next door, my father had an open invitation to wander over to our house whenever he pleased. He and my mother seemed perfectly friendly, at least in my presence, and he also seemed to be great pals with my stepfather, Charlie Lederer. No one observing them together would have guessed that my mother and Charlie had sued my father for an increase in my child support. In fact, they had taken him to court several times, the judge had ruled in their favor, my father had agreed to an increase, and then it had never materialized. Finally Mother and Charlie had given up, and so it was back to “Orson, darling!” and a daily invitation to join them in the ritual of martinis on the front porch at sunset.

My father was well aware that Charlie Lederer was not only a highly paid screenwriter who could easily afford my upkeep, he was also the nephew of movie star Marion Davies, one of the wealthiest women in Hollywood and the mistress of the press baron William Randolph Hearst. Charlie was destined to inherit Marion’s fortune, whereas my father was fated to be short of cash his entire life. It was not that he didn’t earn enormous sums, whether as
an actor in other people’s movies, a radio personality, or a lecturer traveling around the country. For a radio appearance alone, he might earn as much as three thousand dollars, a lot of money in the 1940s. In fact, his annual earnings were reported to be the highest in show business, which had prompted my mother and Charlie to sue him in the first place.

Orson as Rochester in
Jane Eyre
(1944) with Joan Fontaine in the title role.

As my mother saw it, “Orson’s hopeless with money and couldn’t save a nickel if you held a gun to his head.” In her eyes, his huge earnings were sucked into oblivion like elephants disappearing in quicksand. She did not want to acknowledge that it was Orson’s passion for making movies and his other vital concerns that consumed most of his income. As one example, after making a hundred thousand dollars when he starred in
Jane Eyre
as Mr. Rochester, one of the few times in his movie career that he played the romantic lead, he spent every penny of it developing footage for
It’s All True
, a doomed documentary he shot in Brazil that was never released. And when his artistic imperatives didn’t empty the coffers, his altruistic impulses did. In 1943 he had lavished forty thousand dollars of his own capital on the Mercury
Wonder Show, which servicemen saw for free. Before the show closed, it entertained close to fifty thousand troops stationed in the Los Angeles area. In September of 1944 he joined the Democratic Party’s effort to reelect President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a fourth term. Orson Welles gave campaign speeches all over the map, donating his fame to the cause and paying his own travel expenses.

That my father was somehow finding the money to campaign for Roosevelt while evading his responsibility to me made my mother furious. “Charlie adored you,” she told me years later. “He was sweet about paying for anything you needed, including those braces on your teeth which cost a pretty penny, I can tell you!” Her blue-gray eyes flashed with an anger the intervening years had not diminished. “It was terribly unfair of Orson to let Charlie pick up the tab for you!”

“But you were all so friendly,” I recalled. “Was it just an act for my benefit?”

“Yes and no. We couldn’t stay mad at Orson, you see. Nobody could. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm . . .” My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. “Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated toward one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only sixteen. My God, Orson and I never even
went
to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me . . .” She gave her husky, ironic laugh. “But when it came to their personalities, they couldn’t have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn’t have Orson’s crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.”

I returned my stepfather’s affection in full measure, but I never called him Charlie, not even when we reconnected later in our lives. Because he was prematurely bald and I had been two years old when he married my mother, I had concluded he must be very old and called him Granddaddy. He found this so funny he never let me call him anything else.

Charlie had the doleful brown eyes and deadpan expression of a born comedian. Known in Hollywood as a master of screwball comedy, he was famous in his private life for playing practical jokes on the unsuspecting. Whenever we visited San Simeon, the grandiose castle William Randolph
Hearst had built on a hilltop in northern California, Charlie could not resist pulling the old man’s leg.

“WR is the perfect fall guy,” I remember Charlie telling my father one evening while the adults were having martinis on the porch. Then, to illustrate his point, my stepfather launched into his favorite story. Late one night at San Simeon, when everyone else was asleep, Charlie stole out to the gardens and dressed the marble statues of naked women in bras and panties. Early the next morning when Hearst set out on his usual brisk walk before breakfast, he was brought up short by the underwear adorning his Greek nymphs and Roman goddesses. Who on earth would dare do such a thing? He began shouting for his companion, Marion Davies, who rarely emerged before noon, to come and see what had happened and to help find the culprit . . . as if he didn’t already know who it was. “The grand old gentleman stood there bothered and befuddled as each of his guests stumbled half-asleep into the garden and began to howl with laughter.” Charlie gave us his doleful, deadpan look, our cue to laugh as hard as the stumbling guests.

During the months my father was our neighbor, he became Charlie’s willing accomplice. There was the night my mother and Charlie were giving an important dinner party for some high-powered studio executives and my father suddenly appeared outside our dining room windows. He had traded his bathing trunks for a dinner jacket, shirt, and tie. Freshly shaved, his wavy dark brown hair slicked back, he stood with his nose pressed against the glass like a wistful boy shut out of a candy store. My mother pretended not to notice. Then, dramatically clutching his stomach, my father began to whimper and groan.

“Oh, do make him stop, Charlie!” My mother was near tears. “He’s ruining dinner for everyone!”

“But, Virginia, you can see the poor wretch is starving.”

“Make him go away!”

“Well, I can’t turn away a man in a dinner jacket. It wouldn’t be civilized. We’ll have to invite him to join us.”

“Oh, all right.” My mother had finally caught on that it was a gag. So had the dinner guests, who had fallen into an embarrassed silence but now erupted in gales of laughter, while Charlie calmly examined his fingernails, then looked up in mild surprise as if to say,
Is it really that funny
? And that, of course, made it even funnier.

M
Y NEXT FORAY
into motion pictures began in June of 1947 when I was nine years old. My father was still staying next door with Aunt Geraldine, and he was about to film his freely adapted version of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
. One afternoon I came home from school to find the entire cast assembled in the living room and getting ready to read through the shooting script. I ran up to my father standing at the front of the room like a benevolent teacher who waits for the class to settle down. “Can I stay and listen, Daddy?”