In My Father's Shadow (45 page)

“I know I can handle it,” I assured them. “But please tell me about your film festival. I’ve heard of the ones at Cannes and Venice, but I’m sorry I don’t know anything about the one in Locarno.” Irene laughed, admitting that their festival was not as famous or as star-studded as the others I had mentioned, but that Locarno had found its own prestigious niche. “We are known for being avant-garde and showing innovative films,” Teresa added. (
What a perfect venue for an Orson Welles retrospective
, I thought.) Unlike the other festivals, theirs was dedicated to showing films from third-world or developing countries. One of the main events was a juried competition of films from around the world. Finally, there would be the tribute to my father, which was to be called “The Magnificent Welles.”

Toward the end of our lunch, I asked if Irwin might accompany me to Locarno. The two women exchanged a look and a smile. “We don’t usually pay for spouses and companions,” Irene finally said, “but in this case, I think we can make an exception and find the money for Irwin.” It was agreed that Irwin and I would come for the entire festival.

In the months leading up to our departure, I could think of little else. The prospect of being interviewed on television and speaking in public inspired me to slim down and shop for “movie star” clothes, but it did not make me nervous. I confided to my good friend Patricia Cusick, “Put me in the spotlight and the Wellesian genes take over. Fortunately, this is happening at the right time in my life, when I can take satisfaction in representing my father, which I couldn’t have done when I was younger. It should be a wonderful experience from start to finish.”

F
ROM THE MOMENT
our small plane from Zurich set down in the tiny airport of Lugano, Irwin and I stepped into a dream. In Zurich, it had been cold and dismal — we had dashed to the plane through pelting rain — but here it was sunny, dry, perfect. We were met by a festival car that took us the forty miles to Locarno and gave us our first spectacular views of the Alps topped with snow and tidy Swiss towns hugging the slopes. We had come to the land of majestic lakes and mountains known as the Ticino, the Swiss canton that borders Italy and retains a distinctly Italian character. In fact, Italian was the primary language spoken here, followed by French and German. So here I was back in Switzerland where, as a student in Lausanne fifty years ago, I had first learned French, little realizing how useful it would prove.

We were put up at the best hotel Locarno had to offer, the Reber au Lac,
the kind of gracious hotel that my father would have loved. Located on the lakefront with its own dock for swimming or sunbathing, the hotel was far enough out of town to be peaceful, yet not so far from the festival grounds that we couldn’t walk to the Piazza Grande in a leisurely twenty-minute stroll. However, when our driver deposited us at the hotel, he gave us the telephone number to call whenever we needed a car and — pronto! — one would be dispatched to pick us up wherever we happened to be.

It was clear I was getting the celebrity treatment. Our hotel room was spacious, elegantly furnished, with French doors opening onto a balcony that overlooked Lake Maggiore. A table held a welcoming bouquet of flowers, a basket of fruit, our festival programs, and passes that would allow us free admission to whatever we wanted to see. Rifling through the program, Irwin announced that we could be up day and night, rushing from “The Magnificent Welles” offerings in the Cinema Rex to the films screened until dawn in the Piazza Grande.

But first things first: the view from our balcony. Before even hanging up our coats, we threw open the doors and sank into the lounge chairs. It was tempting to sit here all day, letting our eyes sweep across the shining water to the opposite shore where the Alps climbed the sky.

Directly below our balcony was the hotel’s terrace restaurant where breakfast was served every morning in full view of the lake. This became an occasion to strike up conversations with our fellow guests. We soon learned that the jury for the video competition was staying at our hotel and that one of its members was the attractive Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart, who had been married to French director Louis Malle. It turned out she had known my father in Spain. When people who had known or worked with my father were introduced to me, it was clear that it meant a great deal to them. I had anticipated that they would be pleased to meet me, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they would be thrilled.

It was not until months after the festival that I realized the degree to which I had been standing in for my father. As Pat Cusick put it, “A festival about a deceased director can be a little barren without the presence of someone to represent the figure being celebrated. You filled the bill for them and made the event come alive. People could reach out to you and feel they were connecting to Orson Welles himself.”

This was certainly true of the people who came up to me in the Cinema Rex and elsewhere, asking for my autograph. At the time, though, I found this
bewildering. “But I’m not famous,” I would protest. “My autograph isn’t worth anything.” The autograph hunters just smiled at my foolishness, thrust their pens and festival programs under my nose, and pleaded, “Please sign here, Miss Welles.” And while I was signing away, photographers appeared out of nowhere, flashbulbs popping.

So this was what my father’s life was like
, I told myself.
Always in the public eye, having to smile for the camera, be nice to strangers, field impertinent questions, and hand out one’s signature as though it were candy
. I could see that being the center of attention was a turn-on for a while, but wouldn’t it get tiresome in the end?

Before one of the screenings in the darkened theater, while I was resting my head on Irwin’s shoulder, an unknown photographer rushed up to record our private moment. I remembered that my father had never seemed to mind the continual invasion of his privacy. But I did. While it was a lark to be here for eleven days, nothing was more wonderful than the life awaiting me back in Greenwich Village. There my public appearances would be confined to the supermarket, post office, gym, or dry cleaner’s, and it would no longer matter what I was wearing or if I was having “a bad hair day.” No one would dream of coming up to me in the checkout line to ask for my autograph.

“You know,” I told Irwin at dinner one evening, “I could have easily become an actress and gone the celebrity route, and now that I’m getting a taste of what it’s really like, I’m so glad I didn’t! And yet it feels so natural to be in the limelight, it’s almost scary. I guess I must get that from my father.”

“But you’re not your father. You’re you.” Irwin took my hand across the table and held it fast. He told me how proud he was of the way I was handling myself at the festival, and then he teased that if I kept on “busting his buttons,” I was going to have an awful lot of sewing to do when we got home.

We laughed at this as we wandered down to Locarno’s lakefront and sat on a bench bathed in moonlight. It was a balmy night. Ferryboats glided by and the sound of dance music drifted across the water. On the opposite shore, the lights of faraway villages blinked like fallen stars.

N
O MATTER HOW
many times I have seen my father’s films, I welcome the opportunity to see them again, especially my four favorites of the six he made in Europe:
Chimes at Midnight, F for Fake, The Trial
, and
Othello
. My father would have been gratified to see the enormous crowd that turned out for
Chimes
. “If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s
the one I would offer up,” he once said to me of this picture, in which he plays lovable Jack Falstaff, then breaks our hearts when Falstaff is spurned — “I know thee not, old man” — by the young king he had served so well. Perhaps his most poignant moment on the screen, it never fails to bring tears to my eyes, for it reminds me of the personal betrayals Orson Welles had to endure in his final years.

The retrospective offered an overwhelming bounty of features, shorts, documentaries, and assembled footage from the Welles archives at the Munich Film Museum. To take it all in, I would have had to arrive at the Cinema Rex at nine a.m. and camp out there until one a.m. Happily, I could be selective, having seen many of the offerings the year before at the Film Forum in New York. Even so, there was too much to absorb, and here and there I had to give up a workshop or screening at the Rex, no matter how interesting, for a siesta or revitalizing swim.

In planning the most comprehensive Orson Welles retrospective held to date, in a year that marked the ninetieth anniversary of his birth and the twentieth anniversary of his death, it was Stefan’s intention to show the full scope of my father’s achievement. He felt that
Citizen Kane
and
The Third Man
hovered “like shadows” over Welles’s career, while the rest of his work was often neglected. So, as Stefan wrote in the festival program, the Magnificent Welles retrospective would reveal that, in addition to his twelve completed films, Welles had already shot material for at least that many more, as well as television productions, commercials, appearances in films by other directors, his work narrating, commentating, dubbing, and other creations. Orson Welles “was incredibly prolific,” the program said, “and it will be a long time before any complete listing of his work is possible.” Yet to spend even a few days viewing the offerings in the Cinema Rex was to understand why director Martin Scorsese once said, “Welles has inspired more people to become filmmakers than anybody else in the history of cinema.”

Throughout the retrospective, it was Stefan’s idea to run a workshop every morning. “If the retrospective had comprised nothing but workshops, Wellesians would have gotten their money’s worth,” wrote Leslie Weisman, reporting for the Washington, D.C. Film Society newsletter. “In addition to hearing, observing, and taking part in live discussions with renowned scholars and legendary performers … participants found their experience incalculably enriched by films, videotapes, home movies, slides, and radio programs illustrating the often first-person testimony. An added bonus was the presence
and invaluable contributions of Welles’s eldest daughter, Chris, both onstage and occasionally from the audience.”

The first workshop was led by Jeff Wilson, webmaster of Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource (wellesnet.com). He gave a fine presentation on my father’s years in radio, playing excerpts from a wide sampling of his radio shows — over a thousand in all, Jeff told us. By the time my father went to Hollywood to try his hand at making movies, he had become one of the best-known stars in radio. In fact, it was the national furor he had caused with
The War of the Worlds
that had interested Hollywood moguls in hiring him.

What I found of particular interest in reviewing my father’s radio career was that it reflected his political growth at a crucial stage in his life. By the time he launched his radio show
Orson Welles’ Almanac
in 1944, he had become strongly opposed to fascism and racism. Although he never joined the Communist Party, the FBI had a file on him and was following his every move. It was typical of my father’s appreciation of African-American life and culture that he used the
Almanac
to promote jazz. At the time, he was among the few who considered it an art form and major contribution to world culture.

In the summer of 1946 he made fervent political broadcasts on a new weekly series,
Orson Welles Commentary
. His purpose was to make the American public aware of the injustice done to a black war veteran, Isaac Woodard, who, shortly after his honorable discharge, was brutally beaten and blinded by a policeman in South Carolina. Woodard’s “crime” was wanting to use the restroom at a bus stop. My father’s eloquent appeals on his behalf helped identify his attacker, Sheriff Lynwood Shull, and bring him to trial. (The sheriff was eventually acquitted.) Because my father refused to stop championing Woodard’s cause on his show, the sponsor withdrew, and the American Broadcasting Company took the show off the air. I had not known this before coming to Locarno. That my father had put his principles above his career made me feel especially proud of him.

Also of great meaning to me was a filmed interview with Norman Corwin, the well-known writer, producer, and director. On the day my father was scaring the nation with
The War of the Worlds
broadcast at CBS, Corwin was working on the floor above. He knew my father well and had no scores to settle with him. Speaking in the measured tones of a man in his ninth decade, he recalled my father in the full vigor of his youth, much as I myself remember him, and declared without hesitation that Orson Welles was one of the major talents of his time … or any time.

At the end of each workshop, I would join Stefan and whoever had been on the panel that day. We would troop up the hill into town and gather for lunch at the Manora, a buffet-style restaurant. Here most of us settled in for the rest of the afternoon, continuing the lively discussions that had begun in the workshops. As Roger Ryan, an admirer of my father, would write to me later, “The highlight of each day was the chance to share lunch with those who share a love of your father’s work.” (Roger had brought to Locarno his fascinating reconstruction of my father’s film
The Magnificent Ambersons
.)

It was a great pleasure for me to meet Welles aficionados who had devoted years of their lives to my father’s work, such as the distinguished French film scholar François Thomas and his colleague Jean-Pierre Berthomé. As coauthors, they have published extensively on the oeuvre of Orson Welles. I took an instant liking to the shy, modest François, who joined our daily lunches at the Manora, where he hardly said a word. However, on the day we saw a short film that captured Orson Welles’s appearance at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, François told me he had been a film student in the audience. It had been the same day — February 24, 1982 — that my father received France’s highest award, the Légion d’Honneur, and then proceeded in the best of humor to address the students at the Cinémathèque. Seated on stage, at his most relaxed and charming, he answered the students’ questions, gave sound advice, and shared his experiences as a filmmaker. It was one of those moments in life when time collapses like an accordion: We had just seen my father on film in 1982, and now François, who had been in that audience, was reliving the experience with me twenty-three years later in Locarno.