In My Father's Shadow (29 page)

“I
do
know it’s all Paola can do to get Orson to pay attention to little Beatrice, and the last thing she wants is competition from our Chrissie.”

I stopped listening. It had nothing to do with Paola or Beatrice and everything to do with my father’s reaction to that fatal phone call. Why hadn’t he understood I was acting against my will and under my mother’s threats to disown me? Didn’t my father understand what it had cost me to be in Paris, a short Metro ride away, and prevented from seeing him? Apparently not. Instead he saw me as the “thankless child” who had rejected him, wounding his heart beyond any hope of forgiveness.

“I always trust people with all my heart and think the best of them,” he had told me once, this child-man who was my father, “until they give me a reason not to.”

From his point of view, I had given him a reason. Knowing this, I could not go ahead with my plan: to ask Skipper to call my father and then, after a brief exchange of pleasantries, put me on the phone. I could not be sure what kind of reception I would get from the father who now believed I had cast him aside, but I feared it might be a cold one, and that would have hurt far more than his continuing absence.

I
BEGAN TO
be afraid that no one in Chicago would give me a job, without which I could not afford to live on my own. In interview after interview, I was turned away because I did not have a high school certificate, let alone a college degree. My knowledge of languages and ability to take shorthand in French were of no use to me in Chicago. So much for Jack Pringle’s plans for my “future.”

To improve my chances of being hired, my grandfather enrolled me in a business school in Chicago’s Loop. A certificate from such a school, he reasoned, would count more with a prospective employer than all my foreign languages and exotic travels. Yet the exact opposite turned out to be the case.

One of the companies where I sought employment was Container Corporation of America. The personnel director there, a pleasant woman who immediately put me at ease, spent our entire interview asking me about living in Rome and Johannesburg, going to school in Lausanne and traveling all over Europe. “What a fascinating life you’ve had,” she exclaimed, “but I guess that’s no surprise since you’re Orson Welles’s daughter.” Once again “Orson’s
kid” was stamped on my forehead, but this time I didn’t mind. Paying no attention to the holes in my education, the personnel director gave me my first job: junior secretary in the advertising department.

That I survived even a week I owe entirely to the amazing patience of my boss, Mr. Doughty, the short, sandy-haired director of advertising. Every letter of his that I took down in rapid shorthand and typed up at the furious speed of 120 words per minute had to be corrected and retyped—two, three, sometimes four times. My main problem was that I confused the spellings of similar English and French words and used British spellings, such as substituting
colour
for
color
. To avoid having Mr. Doughty summon me yet again into his office, peer wearily over his horn-rimmed glasses, and then hand back the letter in which my errors had been circled, I kept an American dictionary at my elbow. Weeks passed, my spelling improved, and to my astonishment I was still on the payroll.

Another stride toward independence came after my grandfather had a serious heart attack and needed absolute quiet at home. We were all agreed that it was time for me to move out, but my grandparents felt I was still too young to be living on my own. So my grandmother found the perfect solution: the Three Arts Club. This attractive residence for young women in the arts — singers, dancers, actors, artists, musicians — was housed in a stately mansion on North Dearborn Parkway, a stroll away from Lincoln Park and the lakefront with its spectacular view of Chicago’s skyline winding into the distance. (My grandmother would not have been pleased to learn that Hugh Hefner lived up the block in his
Playboy
palace.) Offering room and board at reasonable rates, the Three Arts Club was designed for students on scholarships or young artists who came from families of modest means, but I was accepted thanks to my grandmother, who was on the board of directors and presented me as a budding pianist.

I had a large, pleasant room to myself on the second floor. It was handsomely furnished with everything I needed, including an upright piano, which I diligently played as soon as I got home from work and for hours on weekends. The Three Arts Club could not have been too different from a college dorm or sorority house, and, for the first time since arriving in Chicago, I was making friends my own age who were bright, cultivated, and who shared my passions for music and art. After dinner, which was served on the main floor in the communal dining room, we hung out in each other’s rooms, sharing favorite recordings of classical music. At last I had someone besides my
grandmother, someone as young and enthusiastic as myself, to accompany me to Orchestra Hall and sit in the cheap seats, clapping and cheering after we heard Bruno Walter conduct Mahler’s symphonies, or the incomparable Artur Rubinstein interpret Chopin.

It was a giddy time of feeling young and free to do what I wanted. I could go out with any man I fancied, and, at the end of the evening, I would not find my grandmother sitting up in the front hall like a guard dog waiting to pounce. I knew it distressed her that I was drawn to Jewish men, and to one in particular who had aspirations to be a painter but eventually became a prominent art dealer. Grandmother had made every effort to introduce me to the “suitable” young men of her acquaintance, but I had found them extremely dull. I could not imagine myself married to one of them, yawning my life away in the wealthy suburb of Lake Forest.

Yet when I allowed myself to look more than a few weeks ahead, I felt confused and not a little apprehensive about the direction my life should take. Should I go to New York and become an actress, as any number of theater people who had known me since childhood were urging me to do? I felt a strong pull toward the stage, yet at the same time it terrified me. Even in my most confident moments, I knew it was madness to try to beat my father at his own game. Instead, I was hungry to accomplish something on my own, something that owed nothing to Orson Welles — except the gift of his exceptional genes. I hadn’t any idea what this great accomplishment might be, but it hovered in the air like a deceptive mirage.

S
EVERAL MONTHS HAD
passed and I had not thought once of my father. Now that I had a job, a place to live, and friends my own age, I was forming a life that owed nothing to Orson Welles. Just when I felt I was beginning to walk free of my father’s shadow, I got a call from my godfather, Chubby Sherman. Chubby had been my father’s close friend and an actor in his Mercury Theatre company. Now he was passing through Chicago and wanted to take me to lunch at the Drake Hotel. If hearing from Chubby had not reminded me of my famous parent, then meeting him at the Drake certainly would have. It was the kind of grand hotel with an Old World atmosphere that my father loved.

The last time I had seen my godfather, I had been eleven years old and visiting my mother in New York, so he could not get over the change in me. “How old are you now, Chrissie?” he exclaimed. “Are you really eighteen?
I just don’t believe it, that’s all!” He, on the other hand, looked exactly the same, a round-faced man of medium height and build whose main characteristic was his affability. Shortly after I was born, he had appointed himself my godfather, blithely ignoring the fact that I was never going to be christened. “Any child of Orson’s needs a godfather,” he liked to say.

“Now tell me about your dear mother,” Chubby began as soon as we were seated in the Drake’s elegant dining room. “Does she like living in South Africa? Is she happy with her new husband?” After I had assured him that she was, he went on in his amiable way, “I’m very glad for her. The poor dear was so miserable when she was married to Orson.”

“But weren’t my parents happy together before I was born?”

Chubby considered this for a moment. “I suppose they were, dear, but their happiness didn’t last long. It never does with Orson. When it comes to women, he’s worse than an ally cat . . .” He bit his lip. “Oh dear, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“I know about the ballerinas,” I said evenly. “My mother told me.”

“She did?” For a moment, he let his affable mask slip. “Well,
I
thought it was the pink limit, Orson running around with all those hussies and leaving your poor mother to fend for herself. It got to the point where I couldn’t
stand
to hear about another of Orson’s ballerinas.”

“Then you knew?”

“We all did, dear.” He recalled the time when my father had been four and a half hours late for a rehearsal at the Mercury. “None of us believed Orson’s preposterous story about flying to Boston in a snowstorm and having to take over the plane and land it himself after the pilot passed out. Everyone knew Orson had spent the night in Chicago with his latest lady love.” Chubby clucked his tongue. “So Virginia found out he was cheating on her. I hoped she never would. What a sweet thing she was in those days. So pretty, too.” He looked at me closely. “You know, Chrissie, you look a little like your mother did at your age, although you have Orson’s eyes and his dark coloring.”

We smiled at each other, and I thought how lucky I was that this kind man had adopted me. For a while we concentrated on our food. Then Chubby asked, “Are you in touch with Orson these days?” I told him what had happened in Paris. “And you haven’t heard from him since then?” I shook my head. “That’s so typical of him. You know, of course, that Orson and I were the best of friends until the day he decided I’d done him wrong.”

Hiram “Chubby” Sherman (third from left), Joseph Cotten (center), and other cast members in
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
(1938), Welles’s Mercury Theatre hit that made Sherman a star.

“Tell me about it, Chubby.”

He studied me thoughtfully. “I guess you’re old enough to hear what happened.”

Chubby told me he had joined the Mercury believing that my father and Jack Houseman were forming a repertory theater, but it began to unravel when their first production,
Julius Caesar
, became a smash hit. “I argued with Orson and Jack about moving
Julius Caesar
from our theater into a larger one — that defeated the whole idea of repertory — and I also protested when our next runaway hit was taken off the boards early to make room for
Heartbreak House
.” He was referring to Thomas Dekker’s restoration comedy
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
, which had made Chubby a Broadway star. In the Mercury’s last offering, George Bernard Shaw’s “very talky”
Heartbreak House
, Chubby had not been given a part. “That convinced me we weren’t going to be a repertory company after all but a one-man show. Orson’s show.”

He paused while the waitress cleared away our dishes. After ordering coffee, he continued, “Believe me, there was plenty of grumbling backstage about Orson getting all the credit. What about the rest of us who’d contributed to the success of our theater?” Chubby mentioned the article in
Time
magazine that had featured my father but made no mention of Jack Houseman. “Without Jack, we’d never have made it through the first
week
, let alone a whole
season, and Orson was starting to treat him like a tiresome old uncle. Orson was becoming impossible. All that fame was going to his head.”

“But why did Jack Houseman let my father hog the publicity?”

“Because he knew perfectly well that if he didn’t, he’d be out on his ear.” Chubby laughed, but it had a bitter edge. “Orson has to have it all, dear.
All
the credit.
All
the fame. He doesn’t understand about sharing. A lot of the actors who started out with him didn’t become famous until after they’d left him. Did you ever think of that? Who cares anymore that your Aunt Geraldine was in Orson’s staged production of
Heartbreak House
. She’ll be remembered for her role in
Wuthering Heights
and other movies Orson had nothing to do with.”

“But isn’t that the nature of the theater? When the curtain comes down —”

“Oh, you know perfectly well what I mean!” My godfather had never shown me the slightest irritation until now, when we were discussing his theater days with my father.

“So did you leave the Mercury because you felt my father was taking too much credit for everything?”

“Partly. But I’d also reached the point where I couldn’t go on. Dear God, I couldn’t face another one of those all-night rehearsals!” He rolled his eyes and threw up his hands in mock despair. “And Orson had changed—for the worse, I’m sorry to say. He was no longer sweet or considerate, bringing food to rehearsals or setting up cots in the aisles when we worked until dawn. Oh no. Now he was yelling his head off, drinking a quart of whiskey a day, and cheating on your poor dear mother with all those ballerinas. The whole thing was making me ill. Literally.” He smiled at me sadly. “You know, Chrissie, if I hadn’t left when I did, I’d have had a nervous breakdown. But Orson didn’t understand that, and he’s never forgiven me.”