In My Father's Shadow (39 page)

There was only one occasion I remember my father talking about me and my two half sisters on television, and that was during a ninety-minute interview with Dick Cavett. His genial, low-key host asked him how many children he had. “Like King Lear, I have three daughters,” my father replied, “but unlike Lear, they have all been kind to me.” He beamed like a man who has said it all and is ready to move on to the next subject, but Cavett prompted him to describe each one of us. A long pause. Then I heard myself characterized as the eldest, who was “frighteningly bright” and a writer living in New York. Rebecca was “a flower child.” Beatrice was “a horse woman.”

The phrase lodged in my mind:
frighteningly bright
. Did my intelligence scare my father away? Would he feel closer to me if I were not as bright? I could speculate endlessly and arrive at no satisfactory answer. I could also spend the rest of my life wondering why, when my father was alone with me, he could not be as relaxed and natural, as seemingly “himself,” as he was on talk shows. Could it be that the “real” Orson Welles was not the father I met in hotel rooms but the one I saw on television?

I
T WAS
G
RANNY
Hill who had taught me to look for a loving mother outside my immediate family. From her I also learned that the children I would come to cherish in my life did not have to be biologically mine. Yet
of all the pieces of wisdom she gave me, the greatest was this: “If you make those you love happy, then you will be happy, too.” These were the words she lived by, this plain, stout woman whose only vanity was that she hated to be photographed — it reminded her that she did not look like Rita Hayworth. Yet on the many occasions when I poured out my troubles and found courage in her profound understanding of life and human nature, I would look at her through my tears and think I had never seen a woman with a soul as pure and beautiful as Granny Hill’s.

My father shared my feelings, and the fact we had both been loved and nurtured by Granny Hill made a bond between us. He couldn’t speak of her without saying he “adored” her and that she was his “ideal woman”; at the same time, he couldn’t resist poking fun at the long letters she wrote him, filled with the doings of her family, friends, and burgeoning tribe of children and grandchildren. At various times, he read one of her letters aloud to me, shaking with laughter. “But I don’t
know
any of these people,” he protested. “Why does Hortense think I want to hear about them in such detail?” He was perplexed by her consuming interest in others and her own lack of ego. And why, in her old age, had she added the children of her cleaning woman to her already enormous brood? “I wouldn’t put it past her to send them all through college,” he told me, shaking his head. Then, his eyes misting, he murmured, “I was always in love with Hortense, you know. I would have married her in a minute if she hadn’t married my best friend.” (I assumed he meant he would have married her at least twenty years after Skipper did; at the time of the Hills’ wedding, my father was still in diapers.)

I thought I had prepared myself for Granny’s death. Toward the end, I had visited her several times in Rockford, Illinois, where she and Skipper had relocated to be near their family, and I had seen her ravaged face. I had listened to Skipper complain that she was becoming “ornery” and that he didn’t know her anymore. Ill health was fast eroding her sweet, compliant nature. I had agreed with the relatives that “it was time for her to go,” and on each of my visits to Rockford, convinced it was the last, I had parted from Granny in tears. Yet, when she died on February 5, 1982, the grief that swept over me made me know how unprepared I was to lose her.

An April memorial service was planned in Rockford. A few days before Irwin and I were to fly there, my father called from Los Angeles. “I’ve written some words to be read at Hortense’s memorial service.” he began. “I assume you’re going with uh …”

“Yes, Irwin and I are going.”

“I don’t want Skipper to have to read my tribute, so I’m sending it to you by express mail. You should get it tomorrow.”

“But aren’t you going, Father? Shouldn’t you be the one who reads — ”

“No, Skipper doesn’t want me there.”

“I can’t believe that! Skipper knows what Granny meant to you. Did he really say he didn’t want you at her memorial service?”

“He didn’t have to. It’s the fame thing.
You
know. It’ll be pandemonium the moment I appear. Reporters, TV cameras. I’ll only upstage the proceedings if I show up, and Skipper wouldn’t want that.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I was stunned into silence. “Even if Skipper begged me to go, I couldn’t face his children and grandchildren, that whole tribe of people who
hate
me.”

“They don’t hate you, Father. How could anyone hate you? They’re just jealous of you.”

“I’ve already told you, Christopher,” he said quietly. “I can’t go to Rockford, and you’ll have to take my place.”

His reasons for not going to Granny’s memorial service did not sit well with me. It was hard enough to go myself without having to stand up in front of a roomful of people and deliver my father’s tribute. He was the one to do it. After he hung up, I wished I had said Irwin and I would be there to fend off the reporters and blinding flashbulbs. I would push my father in a wheelchair to the podium, hand him the microphone, and stand beside him while he shared his vision of Hortense Hill with the hushed audience.

It was not to be. When the time came, I was the one at the podium to read aloud my father’s words, but I did not get very far. Grief overwhelmed me. Irwin rushed to my side, took the paper from my hand, and delivered the following eulogy in his clear, strong voice.

Children … and their children … and their children after them … Like the seed of Father Abraham, it does almost seem that the descendants of Mother Hortense are to be numbered as are the sands of the desert. Her
adopted
children are truly beyond counting.

For myself, I don’t believe I can lay claim to more than an honorary membership in that community. A semi-orphan with something close to a surplus of foster parents before I even went to Todd, I was, in my childhood, determined to rid myself of
childhood, a condition I conceived to be a pestilential handicap. I counted Hortense — not as any kind of mother, but from the first as the very dearest kind of friend. What was an infantile presumption soon became, with the passing of a few brief years, a grown-up fact. And so it is that I join your voices today — not really as a member of that enormous tribe which was (and is) her family — but from a smaller and dwindling choir. Ours is the simple song of friendship. A corny old ballad sums it up: “You Are My Sunshine.” That’s what I share with you today, and always: She was our sunshine … For sixty odd years my friend, your mother, was the radiant blessing of my life.

She has gone away and left a black hole in our universe. And yet to mourn is to remember. Our grief brings memories. That shining, vivid, marvelously living presence is back with us again, and our hearts are stabbed with happiness. For just to think of her can never be anything but an occasion for joy.

Of everyone I’ve known she was the most truly
passionate
. Yes, passionate in every good meaning of a word I choose with care. Other great and good souls may be described as “warm,” or warm-hearted. That’s too tepid sounding for Hortense. Warmth is a word for comfort and consolation … a blanket and nice cup of soup. The word for her was
heat
. Fire. The very element itself … The fire in the hearth.

Given her own earthy, intensely personal preoccupations, it’s a safe guess that for most of her rich and lengthy career on this planet, she had little time for the sticks and carrots of religion. But if there is a heaven after all, then it’s a sure thing that she’s in it … I like to think of her barefooted (she had such tiny ankles) wading along some celestial strand, searching for seashells … and waiting for her children …

A few days after the memorial service, my father called to find out how it had gone. I confessed that, although I had practiced reading aloud his beautiful eulogy a number of times, when the moment came to deliver it, I broke down and Irwin had to finish reading it for me.

“But I didn’t want you or that husband of yours to read my eulogy!” he admonished me. “I wanted Skipper to read it!”

“But you sent it to me and you said — ”

“I sent it to you because you were going to Rockford and I wasn’t, and I told you to give it to Skipper the moment you got there.”

You told me no such thing
.

When I had said goodbye to Skipper in Rockford, he had muttered he was glad Orson hadn’t come to the memorial after all; but Skipper was lying to hide his deep disappointment. When Orson Welles could spare a moment for his children or his oldest friend, he wrote words shining with love, as he did for Hortense Hill; or he created an extraordinary book of drawings, a miniature movie on paper that he called
Les Bravades
and gave to his daughter Rebecca, the one who wrote in her diary, “I will always count it as a great loss that I never got to know Father, but it is just as great a loss that he never got to know me.”

T
OWARD THE END
of his life, my father began calling me more often. At first, we were overly polite, but with each phone call we became more relaxed and spoke at greater length. Once he called because he needed to cheer himself up, he said. A movie deal he’d been trying to negotiate for nine months had fallen through. “I’m still hoping it can be renegotiated.” He gave a deep sigh. “I’m awfully good at hoping.”

“I think it’s terrible you’re having such a hard time raising money. A great movie director like you!”

His laughter rolled across the continent, and what a life-affirming sound it was. I could imagine him at that moment: his eyes lit with the joy of laughing, his boyish face wagging an incongruous beard streaked with gray, his huge belly trembling. “Now don’t you worry your pretty head about me.” A soft chuckle. The tide of his laughter ebbing. “They may turn their backs on me now, but you wait and see, darling girl. They’re gonna love me when I’m dead!”

It was one of the last things my father ever said to me.

L
ESS THAN THREE YEARS
after he failed to attend Hortense Hill’s memorial service, Orson Welles was dead. Of all my losses at the time (Granny, my grandmother, and my Aunt Caryl had all died within a year of each other), none of them hit me with the cruel force of my father’s death. He had died at seventy — much too young for a man still at the height of his creative powers — and I was totally unprepared.

It took me considerable time to come to terms with the sudden loss of my father and what that meant in terms of my own life, but when I was finally able to look beyond what might have been, I saw myself in relation to him with a new, hard-won clarity. I realized that for much of my life, I had been driven by hopes and expectations that were unachievable. I had wanted Orson Welles to be Dad — not Father with its echo of an age when children of well-to-do parents were shunted off to the nursery with their governess. I had seriously believed that one day I would call him Dad, and we would achieve the same cozy relationship I had observed between Irwin and his adult children. And once this miraculous transformation had taken place, we would be able to tease each other good-naturedly and discuss just about anything. I would bring him my problems and share with him my triumphs. We would have many a serious talk. Then he would have no difficulty accepting an invitation to dinner in our home and getting to know Irwin. I had heard secondhand from the Hills and even from Paola that my father was proud of me. “Dad” would tell me so himself. He would also take pride in his son-in-law, a respected professor of English who made a lasting impression on many of the minority students he taught at LaGuardia Community College, helping them to find more productive lives. Didn’t Orson Welles claim to admire the teaching profession, and hadn’t he always been on the side of minorities and the
underprivileged? Yet when he called our home and Irwin happened to answer the phone, he treated my husband like a houseboy and demanded to speak to me. Once he was so rude to Irwin that he called back later to apologize. That would never have happened with the person I wanted to be “Dad.”

Like Saul Bellow’s character Henderson the Rain King, I had been lost in the jungle of my dreams, crying “I want! I want! I want!” I had been incapable of seeing Orson Welles as the phenomenon he was, even though, since childhood, I had been told he was not like other men and one had to make allowances. He had no time to be a father, they all said again and again, because he was a genius who lived for his work alone and I should not hold it against him. I should try to understand. When my mother got her divorce in Reno on February 2, 1940, she told the press that, while it was all very friendly, it was also true that Orson “doesn’t have time for marriage.” So I had tried hard to put Orson Welles in a special category that relieved him of having to be anyone’s father, husband, or friend for more than a few incandescent hours. As Geraldine Fitzgerald once told me, “Being with Orson is like having a lovely light shine down on you … but then the light moves on.” Yet in spite of every argument I used to defend and excuse him, my stubborn heart would not yield to reason. It kept repeating: Why can’t he find more time for me? In addition to being a director, actor, magician, and one of the most spellbinding personalities of the twentieth century, why couldn’t he also be Dad?

Some time after my father’s death, I confided in Bonnie Nims, an old friend from Chicago, that the loss had been more “traumatic” than I had expected. “I have seen so many things about myself,” I wrote Bonnie, “the choices I’ve made in my life, my particular struggles and dilemmas, and these insights have been painful.” In particular, I recognized the strong hold my father had had on me all my life and how hard I had fought to win his attention. I was not grieving for the man who had died but for a marvelous being who lived entirely in my imagination.