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IN MY FATHER’S SHADOW: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles
by Chris Welles Feder
Algonquin. 279 pages. $24.95.
This book about the master filmmaker, director and actor Orson Welles will surely make its reader want to see the new film "Me and Orson Welles," as well as Welles' own work. This could mean "Citizen Kane," which many consider America's greatest film, or his Othello or Macbeth, "The Lady from Shanghai" or "Touch of Evil." Welles was brilliant, imaginative, flamboyant and self indulgent.
This memoir is by the eldest of his three daughters (all of whom had different mothers). "Christopher," as he named his firstborn, her sex notwithstanding, was "his darling girl," but he barely knew her, busy as he always was with dreaming, planning, directing and acting himself. He and her mother, a Chicago socialite who was also an actress, were divorced when Christopher was still a toddler.
He then married the actress Rita Hayworth, who became the mother of his second daughter. For a time, Christopher and her mother and first stepfather were neighbors of Orson's and Rita's, and relations were amicable. But the second marriages of both her parents foundered as the first had. Christopher moved with her mother and a third stepfather to South Africa. The "Daddy" she adored, although she barely knew him, was far, far away.
Sometimes Orson was in Hollywood, sometimes in Italy, sometimes in France at work on this film or that. There were a few deliriously happy times with him. She visited him in Spain and he introduced her to its art. He showed her around London and made the history of England's kings and queens come to life for her. He was a fascinating companion, but an elusive father whom she rarely saw but nonetheless loved indiscriminately. Most of the time she lived with her mother, none too happily, but there were better times spent with her father's old schoolmaster and his wife in the Midwest and with her maternal grandparents in Chicago.
Her adoring life of her father and account of her own rather miserable childhood gets off to a somewhat slow start, but picks up as Christopher tells of the teenage years during which she is estranged -- through none of her own doing -- from her father.
One would like to know more about what made Orson Welles the difficult genius and impossible father he was. This book gives only a tantalizing glimpse, but it is, as its title indicates and its author points out in an explanatory note, an intimate memoir of the daughter who, well into maturity, could not find herself because she could not come out from under her beloved father's shadow.
A fine collection of photographs of Orson Welles, his Hollywood friends, his wives and children enhances this memoir.
Phyllis Meras (pmcocroft@aol.com) is a retired Journal writer and editor who lives on Martha's Vineyard.
