In My Father's Shadow (25 page)

When at last I stopped sobbing, I realized I could not join my father in Paris if it meant losing my mother. (Knowing her, I took her threat to cut me off “just like that” very seriously.) Maybe at eighteen or nineteen I could have done it, but not at sixteen.

The days that followed were the most distressing of my life. My friends at the
pensionnat
kept taking me aside and asking what was wrong. Was I ill? Had there been a death in my family? I forced myself to smile and pretend everything was fine. Meanwhile, Jack Pringle was communicating from Johannesburg with Madame Favre. In a copy of his letter, which fell into my hands a good forty years after it was written, he wrote, “We were pleased to receive your letter … regarding Christopher’s development. Her last visit with her father was, we fear, rather unsettling. Chrissie has written us several letters with which we are not altogether pleased. They exhibit an unattractive conceit, and a tendency to forget the reasons why she was sent to Florissant. This has led us to reply in a somewhat sharp manner. You may find that she is somewhat upset in the next weeks, and it could well be that it is our letters which have upset her. We fully realize that our letters may have this effect, and I would ask you not to intervene if you notice that she is unhappy.”

In spite of my stepfather’s directive, Madame Favre invited me to have tea with her one afternoon in her private apartment. I was no longer intimidated by this gaunt, white-haired woman with piercing blue eyes. She had put herself out to be kind to me ever since, at the behest of Jack Pringle, she had given me a bad report. My stepfather claimed that if I got a good report, I would turn into “a slacker,” whereas a bad report would make me work harder.

It happened like this. The entire school was assembled in the lounge and Madame began reading our reports aloud, one by one. When she got to mine, my immediate reaction was that there had to be some mistake. Everyone knew I was the best student in the school, the only one, in fact, who took her classes seriously. So it was ludicrous to say that I was “not applying” myself or “not progressing rapidly enough.” The gross unfairness of my report turned my cheeks a flaming red.

Barely able to suppress my indignation, I waited until Madame Favre had finished and then asked if I might speak to her in private. She immediately confessed that the “bad” report had not been her idea but my stepfather’s, and that I deserved not only a good report but an excellent one. From that moment on, Madame Favre was my friend.

“Now tell me, Christophare,” she began while pouring our tea in her pleasant living room, “why are you so unhappy these days?” I burst into tears and told her everything. When I had finished, she kept stirring her tea, twirling the spoon around and around in her cup while she gazed out the windows at Lac Léman and the towering Alps beyond. What would it be like, I wondered, to have such a view every day of one’s life? I mopped my eyes, determined to lift myself out of my misery. At last Madame said in a quiet voice, “I think your mother is very frightened.”

“Frightened?”
Furious, hysterical —
those were the adjectives that sprang to my mind.

“Yes, she is afraid of losing you, don’t you see? And so she threatens you in this way to make you stay with her. She is also afraid of what might happen if you go to Paris to be with your father. I think she is trying to protect you from him, Christophare, and that is why she does not want you to see him.”

“But Madame, Daddy is the kindest, most generous, most wonderful …” My voice broke, and I buried my face in my hands. She leaned over and patted my shoulder.

“Now Christophare, I am going to say something that perhaps I shouldn’t, but somebody needs to say it to you. The feelings you have for your father are not natural. You do not feel about him the way a daughter normally feels about her father.”

“What do you mean?” I did not intend to address her so sharply, but I suddenly felt under attack.

“I mean that when you are expecting to see your father or stay with him — and I have observed this several times since you have been with us at Florissant — you get much too excited and overwrought, as though you were going off to see a lover.” She gave a little laugh. “Then, when you return from these visits, you are much too dejected, again as though you have been parted from a lover. Don’t you see, Christophare? To feel this way about your father is not natural or desirable. If I were your mother, I would also be thinking about limiting your visits with him.”

“But, Madame, my mother wants to
end
my visits for good.”

“That is what she says now, of course, but I do not think she means forever.”

That gave me some hope. Perhaps if I gave my mother time to calm down, she would come around. As Madame Favre had suggested, she may have been overreacting out of her fear of losing me.

Although I managed to say “Au revoir” to Madame and thank her for the tea, I left more troubled and confused than I had been before our tête-à-tête. If what Madame had said about me and my father were true—and I suspected it was—what was so wrong about it? How was I supposed to feel about him, a man who, quite apart from being my biological father, was an extraordinary human being and a great creative force? Hadn’t my mother always said Orson Welles was not to be judged by normal standards? “Orson is a genius, Chrissie, and you can’t expect a genius to behave like an ordinary father.” Always my mother had been my father’s champion, explaining away the long lapses when I didn’t hear from him. Always she had encouraged me to think well of him, no matter what he failed to do. How often she had told me I would never have a better companion in the world than my father … how often, until now.

S
TUNNED BY A
blistering letter he received from my mother, my father turned to his staunch allies, Hortense and Roger Hill, in the firm hope that they would come to his defense. (I knew nothing of this until years later when Skipper gave me the correspondence.) First my father appealed to Granny, writing, “I sent a very happy and loving Christopher back to school this Spring. We exchanged letters … and she begged me to keep a week free for her before school this fall. Then she went to South Africa, and after that silence.” He told Granny that, not understanding why he was no longer hearing from me, he had wired my mother repeatedly and finally received “a communication” bursting with “hysterical anger.” “[Virginia] seems to have the idea that I have been poisoning Christopher against her,” he wrote to Granny. “This charge is utterly false… I have never spoken anything but warmly of Virginia to anyone … and certainly it would be unlike me to begin with Chrissie.” He went on to explain that although he had discussed my future with me on several occasions, he and I had talked “only in general terms as I should think any father or even friend would have the right to with a young lady of sixteen.” He assured Granny that his conversations with me had always been qualified by his “pointing out to Christopher that she must talk these things over with her mother as a point of final authority” (which is not how I remembered it). He concluded, underlining words for emphasis, “Now Virginia writes (and I quote exactly), ‘
If I could prevent your seeing Chrissie until she is of age I should do so. The Hills agree with me. I am in
constant touch with them
.’” He signed it “in great haste and unhappiness” with a huge, dashing capital O.

Granny promptly replied with a letter my father read as a scolding lecture on his failure as a parent. Although he had been reluctant to involve Skipper in this matter, he now sent him a heartrending appeal. “Virginia wants me to stop seeing Christopher,” he began,

and she quotes “The Hills” as agreeing with her. I wrote Hortense asking her to deny—or at least
hoping
she’d deny this astonishing claim of my ex-wife’s. Her answer frankly horrified me. She states that it is “hard” for Chrissie to have a “part-time” father, that the “wonderful times” she had with me last Christmas and spring only made my absences more difficult. This is obviously nonsense. I am not responsible for the child having spent her summer holidays in South Africa, and I don’t suppose Hortense would say that I should have made an attempt to keep Christopher from seeing her mother. She—Hortense—then goes on to quote Christopher as saying “wistfully” that she “doesn’t know how to reach me.” This is more nonsense. The same business address which Christopher has had for almost two years will forward my mail, when I’m not in Paris, within a matter of days.

My father urges Skipper to read the letter he wrote to Hortense “and then see if you, too, feel that ‘it would be better if I didn’t see Christopher at all.’”

Under the heading
Supplementary Information Dept
., he enumerates the points in his defense. First, he has paid in full my school tuition and other expenses. Second, he has written “many more letters to Christopher than she has written to me.
There is honestly no question of neglect on that matter.
” (Nor was there any truth in his claims to have paid for my schooling and showered me with letters.) Third and fourth, he has never uttered a word of criticism against my mother or the way she has brought me up—quite the reverse—nor has he shown the slightest disapproval of my Swiss school or any other school. “My only conversations with Christopher regarding education have had to do with the necessary limitations of
all schools.
”

He goes on to tell Skipper that after appealing to Hortense, she “has only seen fit to send me little lessons on how to be a good parent.” While he fully
grants her the right to do this, he also recognizes that Hortense thinks men are usually in the wrong. “Well, God knows, I’m wrong a lot more times than I’m right—but this time there really is some justice on my side,” my father concludes.

Christopher and I have been getting along so marvelously together . . . Well, anyway, I do think that this is a moment when “The Hills” ought to be flocking around my banner without any prior attempt to judge me, and if there are to be attempts to keep me away from my daughter, I hope “The Hills” will make it pretty strongly clear that they’re not part of the plot.

Although she had not hesitated to chide my father for not meeting his responsibilities to me and would continue to do so as long as she was alive, Granny did not feel she could come between him and my mother. “It wasn’t any of our business,” she told me years later.

“That’s right,” Skipper agreed, “and besides we hadn’t seen Virginia in years, and we didn’t even know that English gent she’d married … major somebody or other.”

“Jack Pringle,” I put in.

“Right. Well, this Pringle guy was making all the decisions where you were concerned, Chris—“

“Like deciding you weren’t ‘college material,’ “ Granny huffed.

“—and Virginia was going along with whatever this Pringle guy said, and we didn’t feel we could stick our oar in.”

While I understood the Hills’ position, it hurt my father deeply at the time. He saw their refusal to come to his defense as their lack of faith in him as a parent. He had been counting on them to put matters right with my mother because, as he had confessed in his letter to Skipper, “I’m in no condition for this Christopher business.” He was going through “fairly hysterical times” with “millions of troubles and so little dough that I’m actually facing a winter without an overcoat.”

A
CHILLY RECEPTION
was waiting for me in Johannesburg when I returned that summer of 1954. Although Jackie could not dispute the excellent report he had received from Madame Favre, he found constant fault with my behavior, being determined to snuff out the “unattractive conceit”
he thought he had detected in my letters home. Whether we were having our afternoon tea on the veranda or were gathered around the dinner table, I could not open my mouth without being told my ideas were “half-baked,” I was “wet behind the ears,” and that at my age it was “unattractive” to put forward my opinions. What could I possibly contribute to the conversation that would be of the slightest interest or importance? I would do better to drink my tea, eat my dinner, and listen attentively to those who were older, wiser, and better informed.

Yet learning to keep my thoughts to myself did not win approval either. “Chrissie hasn’t said a word all evening,” my mother observed to Jackie one night during dinner, speaking as though I were not in the room. “Do you think she’s sulking about something? What a bore it is having to live with a moody adolescent!”

“Why are you so sullen, Chrissie?” Jackie demanded, staring me down across the table. “Why are you being so tiresome, and upsetting your mother?”

Not knowing what to answer, I burst into tears.

“There she goes, crying again,” my mother complained. “What
is
the matter with her, Jackie? I really can’t take too much more of this. It isn’t good for my nerves.”

“Either you stop crying this instant, Chrissie, or go to your room!” my stepfather commanded. Then, turning to my mother with his most charming smile, “Perhaps in the future, Virginia, we should have dinner by ourselves.”

Later that evening my mother came to my room, where I was lying facedown on my bed but no longer crying. She perched on the edge of the bed, one tentative hand smoothing my back. “I know Jackie’s being hard on you,” she began, “but it’s for your own good, darling. You’re much too full of yourself after you’ve been with Orson, and that’s why Jackie has to take you down a peg, don’t you see?”

“Yes, Mummy,” I lied.

Where inside this puffy-faced, dowdy British matron was the slim, glamorous American mother who had been married to Orson Welles and Charlie Lederer? Yet what upset me more than the loss of her looks was the change in her personality. There was a new hardness about her, a suspicion of everyone’s motives and particularly those of Orson Welles. Whenever I mentioned my father, which I was careful to do out of Jackie’s hearing, my mother glared at me as though I had defected to the enemy.

I waited for a morning when my mother seemed in a better mood than usual and Jackie was safely out of the house, exercising his polo ponies. The African houseboy in his crisp, white uniform had brought us our “elevenses” on a silver tray. It seemed as good a time as any to open up the subject that had been tormenting me. “Mummy, you’ve always encouraged my visits with Daddy and told me how wonderful he is, and now, all of a sudden, you don’t want me to see him anymore. If I stay in Florissant and complete the secretarial course—“