"In my father's Shadow" by Chris Welles Feder

[mido505]

Reading Jonathan Rosenbaum's sympathetic review of IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW reminded me of two recollections in Ms. Feder's remarkable memoir that did strike me as somewhat jarring and anomalous, in that Ms. Feder's interpretation (and Rosenbaum's tacit agreement with her interpretation) of those incidents appear surprisingly obtuse for such a sensitive and accute interpreter of the human soul. The first is the infamous "oyster" incident, where Welles pressures his three-year-old daughter into trying oysters on the half shell. As Ms. Feder describes the incident, it (in Jonathan Rosenbaum's words) "shows her father at his least empathetic". Perhaps it did, to a young girl, but it looks to me like an intermittent Dad trying to do what Dad's are supposed to do, i.e. get his daughter to try new things. As an incredibly picky eater as a child (tho a voracious pig now), I was always being told to eat this and eat that and to clean my plate by Mom and Dad; it's a normal part of parenting. At least it was oysters Welles was trying to foist on her, and not frozen peas (he saved those for later, for the nation at large).

The second incident is the Dick Cavett interview, where Welles describes Christopher as "frighteningly bright". Ms. Feder reflection on those words of praise were that 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."

Oja Kodar could have provided Ms. Feder with the answer. Did her intelligence scare Daddy away? Of course not. Welles essentially abandonned three delightful women who could not keep up with him artistically and intellectually. He stuck with the one that could. If anything, Welles worshipped intelligence in women. His description of Ms. Feder's intelligence as "frightening" was at once a compliment and a warning, in that others, not he, would likely be put off by her extraordinary mind.

Welles tried to dissuade his daughter from following in his rebellious, itinerant footsteps. He repeatedly advised that she marry a nice guy and settle down. It makes me wonder: did some part of Welles regret his vagabond life? Did he long for a little peace? Was he trying to tell Ms. Feder that it wasn't worth it, that he could have stopped after Citizen Kane, and lived as he eventually did with Oja, making commercials, fiddling about on experimental projects, mounting the occasional theatrical piece, painting, and being happy? It doesn't hurt to ask...

[mido505]

That is the meaning behind Welles's unfair outburst at Ms. Feder when she praised Citizen Kane to him after finally getting the chance to see it. Welles could have been more diplomatic, but his point was clear: why keep struggling to make movies, fighting and compromising and settling for less, abasing oneself before people one cannot abide, if no one sees, appreciates, or remembers the damned things. Think of it from the proud artist's point of view:

Ambersons - mutilated
It's All True - buried
The Stranger - made with both hands tied behind his back
Macbeth - hacked and badly redubbed
Othello - barely seen
Mr. Arkadin - butchered and barely seen
Touch of Evil - recut, reshot, and dumped
The Trial - barely seen
Falstaff - barely seen

Othello, Touch of Evil, The Trial, and Falstaff are arguably greater films than Kane but - barely seen. I understand Ms. Feder's reaction to her father's outburst, but I also understand her father's outburst.

[Alfred Willmore]

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[Alfred Willmore]

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[Glenn Anders]

Yes, mido505, you make excellent points, as our colleague Alfie attests (I think).

Let me mitigate a bit.

There are numerous (telltale?) lunches in Chris Feder's memoir, and I may be confusing the one you discuss with another, but if I have the right one in mind, Welles kept ordering more and more -- Wait a minute! I do have the book, right here . . . Whoever said the editors should have included an index -- subversive as one would be to Ms. Feder's purpose -- was surely right . . . .

Ah! On pages 47-50, she describes her last lunch in Hollywood with her father. Welles advised always ordering the specialty of the house, which in The Brown Derby's case was the owner's creation: The Cobb Salad. Chris would have settled for a hamburger and a milkshake. Instead, she was coerced into eating raw oysters.

While you may be correct, mido505, about encouraging children to be more adventurous in their eating experiences, the oysters took away from the really rare treat of her being exclusively with her father, especially since he was wolfing down not one, not two, but three orders of what he himself wanted, The Cobb Salad. Though she eventually got her burger and shake, the occasion was disturbed further by an autograph seeker, to whom Welles seems to have paid as much attention as he did his "Chrissie," giving a mixed message in return for her honest reaction to the essential silliness of autograph collecting.

Your example of Welles' calling Christopher "frighteningly bright" strikes me as a frank judgment by a man of his time and place. Welles grew up with (and lost), whatever his exaggeration of her accomplishments, a talented, highly intelligent mother. She set an unusually high standard for another woman to meet. In the 1930's and 1940's, women were not supposed to be intelligent, but if they were, all the romance and marriage manuals of the day urged them to hide their intellect in order "to get a man," to build up the egos of the men they aspired to. Women like children of the day were "meant to be seen and not heard," except among themselves or on precisely social occasions.

Welles' marriages (not to mention his affairs) were with women of beauty and social brilliance, not intellectuals or artists on his level: Virginia Nicolson, Rita Hayworth, and Paola Mori. He may well have compensated for his imaginative artistry by pursuing women who would be more conventional than himself, who would fit in socially, and not be competitive with him. [He doesn't seem to have liked much being challenged by people at close quarters.] Hard as any marriage is, he of course became quickly bored with these women. Only quite late in life (when his own fleshly charisma was fading), as Skipper Hill shrewdly observes in the book, did he find (and return to again, several times) a partner he thought equal to his own intellectual and artistic capabilities. Oja Kodar was indeed able "to keep up with him."

And finally, I agree that Welles' revulsion toward the constant praise given CITIZEN KANE is understandable. A true artist always wants to look ahead to the next project. To be categorized by one accomplishment, or even the last one, is a form of death. That is especially true in a society like America's where the most common response to career progress is, "What have you done lately?" His inability to produce, or if to produce, to show new works must have been an obviously constant goad and frustration, as it would be to many an artist much less blessed with gifts than he was.

Welles was trapped in the often expressed truth that in America, unlike European society (where he always seems to have been respected and generally admired), the reputation of a movie director (or star) is dependent upon his/her last success or failure. We don't expect our luminaries to fail, and when they (inevitably) do, we are quick to kick them downstairs, and keep kicking them back down the stairs, if they try to rise up again. Welles had to live with F. Scott Fitzgerald's mordant curse: "There are no second acts in American lives."

[And in remedy for the above truth, that's why groveling books of confession (unlike Chris Feder's memoir) and "reality shows" have become so popular in our nation. Orson Welles was at least spared that ignominy.]

Glenn

[Phil Rosenthal]

Unlike Jonathan Rosenbaum, I found the last few chapters of this book the least exciting - they're interesting, especially Christopher's visits with Oja, and I'm glad they're included, but once Orson Welles has died, I think much of the drama has gone out of the narrative. Chris Welles Feder is a very good writer, and presents her life - with and without her father in the picture - as a compelling story. It sounds like a cliche, but I think Orson would have appreciated her talent, had he been able to read the book, and been proud of what his daughter had created. It's a book you don't want to stop reading.
A couple of the quotes on the back cover say, this is "Orson Welles as we have never seen him before". The picture isn't always flattering. Welles was a man who never lost his passion for his art. It's inspiring to see how true he remained to his artistic vision - that's one of the things that has inspired me (and I'm sure a lot of other people) most about his life. But the book also shows he failed pretty badly as a father. To go for years (8 years at one point) without seeing your child is a little hard to understand. It's to the author's credit that she was able to appreciate what her father did offer, as a parent and an artist, and come to the positive place she seems to be at now.

[Glenn Anders]

Well said, Phil. I agree, to a point.

For me, the later chapters were about Chris Welles Feder's emergence in her own right, and as a personal memoir that has great value. You may be right that some of the tension and eclat goes out of the writing because her Cheshire Cat of a father has disappeared from the narrative.

But for me, too, the book retains some of its momentum simply because of what now, through Wellesnet, is a fairly long cyber or (in one or two cases) personal association with some of those whom she meets. Chris Feder's full realization of what her father had created during his sometime neglect of her was quite moving.

I think we may agree that IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW is an enticing read, whether one knows much about Orson Welles or not.

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

Chris Welles Feder makes reference to her father's heavy amphetamine use in the forties and how it ruined his metabolism and may have contributed to his excessive weight gain in later years.

According to Wikipedia, producer David O. Selznick was a heavy amphetamine user, and would often dictate long and rambling memos under the influence of amphetamines to his directors. Several film historians report that Gone With the Wind would never have been made without Selznick's 22-hour Benzedrine-fueled work days. The documentary Shadowing The Third Man relates that Selznick introduced Third Man director Carol Reed to the use of amphetamines, which allowed Reed to bring the picture in below budget and on schedule by filming nearly 22 hours at a time. Selznick died of a heart attack in 1965 at the age of 63.

And then there's the tragic story of actor Laird Cregar, who could have been Orson Welles' twin brother. Cregar was a big man, well over six feet tall and weighing in at 300+ pounds. Like Welles, he often played characters much older than himself. With Hangover Square, Cregar saw an opportunity to become a romantic leading man. In weeks, he lost over 100 pounds with the help of amphetamines and a crash diet. The drugs and rapid weight loss so damaged his body that he died of a heart attack at age 31, shortly after finishing Hangover Square.

[Magentarose67]

Laird Cregar's story is so sad...I wonder if Orson heard about him and what happened to him...it could have made a difference in Orson's decision on how he handled own his health...

[Christopher]

Glenn, In this thread, as in many others, I am struck once again by your insightful and intelligent commentary. Thank you.

[ToddBaesen]

An NPR Radio interview with Chris Welles Feder can be listened to here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... t=1&f=1033

[Magentarose67]

An NPR Radio interview with Chris Welles Feder can be listened to here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... t=1&f=1033

Excellent interview, Todd - thanks for posting!

[ToddBaesen]

Sunday's NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW section reviews Chris Welles Feder's new book on OW, ironically right before a notice on Charles Higham's fictional "autobiography," which Ada Calhoun notes, "feels like a vanity project."


IN MY FATHER’S SHADOW
A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles.
By Chris Welles Feder.
Algonquin, $24.95.

By Ada Calhoun

Ms. Calhoun is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Instinctive Parenting,” which will be published next year.

This memoir by Orson Welles’s daughter — whom he eccentrically named Christopher — is remarkably kind toward Welles, even though he was by all evidence a terrible father. In one heartbreaking scene, the young Christopher sits all dressed up in the front hall of her mother’s house from noon until dusk awaiting her father’s arrival for their lunch date; he never shows. At other times he materializes like a genie and lavishes her with attention, making her delirious with joy, as though he were not her father but the love of her life. “To feel this way about your father is not natural or desirable,” a headmistress tells her. Feder’s glamorous, miserable childhood and the pain it caused her will be familiar to anyone who’s read “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” While Welles dismissed her acting ambitions and vanished for years at a time, Feder’s stepfather constantly belittled her; her mother beat her and called her “a little bore.” Positive relationships — for example, with her stepmother Rita Hayworth or her crush Danny Kaye — were short-lived. With only occasional help from kindly relatives or friends, Feder essentially raised herself. Still, until Welles’s death in 1985 she maintained hope that he would come around to fatherhood. “In addition to being a director, actor, magician and one of the most spellbinding personalities of the 20th century,” she wondered, “why couldn’t he also be Dad?” And yet she is far more loving than bitter. Miraculously, Feder seems to have become a well-grounded adult, with a “steadfast” husband and a good career, first as an encyclopedia editor and an educational writer and now as an accomplished memoirist. Along with providing Welles’s fans with behind-the-scenes insight, the book is a testimony to one woman’s exceptional gift for self-preservation.

[Alan Brody]

In My Father’s Shadow notes

I’ve never had a big interest in Orson Welles’s personal life, and he himself told his daughter Christopher that 'an artist's work is the important thing, not the way he lived his life.' Nevertheless, this is a fascinating and beautifully written book that sheds a lot of light on many aspects of Welles that were hidden before, although I suspect that Chris Welles Feder may have been one of the major sources for Barbra Leaming’s Welles book, as this new book offers variations on some stories that were also present in that book. But we should be grateful to Christopher for telling her full story to us in her own words.

The early chapters, that take place at the height of Welles's marriage to Rita Hayworth, are fairy-tale like, and her father is presented as the benevolent ruler of a magic kingdom, with Rita as his queen. Her description of their home in Santa Monica and especially of the pool in the back yard (with an island in the middle of it!), is awe-inspiring to imagine. But even in these scenes as described by Chris, one can sense Welles’s rapidly growing boredom with domesticity, no matter how gilded. However, her descriptions of their Santa Monica paradise, including her own little beach, are wonderfully evocative. Obviously, Santa Monica was to Chris what Grand Detour, IL was to her father: one of those Edens you get kicked out of. Once they do, moving to Hollywood, the Welles/Hayworth marriage breaks up and Chris begins to see less and less of her father. Chris's mindset during this part of the book reminded me a bit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where the young girl adores her irresponsible dreamer of a father even though he is rarely around. Of course, Chris is privileged, and her parents a success, while the kids in “Brooklyn” are underprivileged, and their father an abject failure.

We also get a more fleshed-out portrait of Virginia Nicolson then we’ve ever been given before. This is not insignificant, since Virginia was not only a member of the radio Mercury, including playing Cossette in Les Miserables (one of Welles's greatest radio acheivements), but is also mentioned in all of the Welles biographies, and is a major character in Welles’s own screenplay for The Cradle Will Rock, where, interestingly enough, she is depicted in one scene as having a dalliance with a 'young Brando type', probably as revenge for all of Welles's own sexual indiscretions. However, the portrait in Chris’s book is even less positive then that, and one gets the sense that Chris was closer to, and had more affection for, her nanny then she had for her mother. One senses this especially at the scenes at San Simeon, where 'Welles's kid' (as Ben Hecht called her) and her nanny are banished from Hearst's sight most of the time, eating their lonely dinners together quietly, while Virginia and her second husband, Charlie Lederer (Marion Davies' nephew) are royally entertained at Hearst's court.

When Virginia's marriage to Lederer collapses, Chris gets sent to the Todd School in Woodstock, IL for awhile, and here she finds out a lot about her wonderful, mysterious father, as Skipper and Hortense Hill offer some fascinating insight into Orson Welles’s strange adolescence, and the Hill’s own ambivalent attitude toward the young Welles, which was a curious mixture of fear and pity (Skipper described him as an old gentleman trapped inside a hurt little boy). One can imagine how difficult it would have been for The Hills to know what to make of the little monster of precocity that young Orson was. Furthermore, reading the descriptions of Welles’s own 'cool and self-centered' mother Beatrice, one is reminded of Truffaut’s statement (in his foreword to the Bazin book) that-

'His mother fostered his precociousness by making him act at being precocious. This probably gave him a taste for acting.'

-a taste for acting and performing that never left him, and served him well throughout life, including his seduction of the Hills into giving him special privileges at Todd. One gets the sense that Orson Welles was always acting, but his ‘act’ as father was something he could sustain for only short periods of time without getting bored. Sad to think that a daughter would have to anxiously try and prove her worthiness of attention (by trying some yucky oysters at the Brown Derby at her father's insistence, for example), but one thing that is common in all Welles biographies is the sense that his many friendships and relationships were like a giant Dickens novel, with a constantly revolving door of side characters randomly flying in and out of his story, including his own family members.

Skipper and Hortense (“Granny”) also provide good insight into the bitter custody battle between Welles’s father Richard and Dadda Bernstein. Dick is described by Skipper as dull, and pathetic when drunk. But Orson gave his father much more love then he deserved, and never stopped trying to mythologize him. According to Skipper, Welles never forgave Bernstein for breaking up his parents’ marriage. His attitude toward Bernstein seems to have been the same love/hate attitude that he had toward John Houseman and others. Contemptuous but tolerant of his older suitor’s infatuation. To evade Dadda's insistence that he go to college, and perhaps to leave such a shaky and uncertain domestic situation, Welles embarked on a tour of Ireland at age 16, the start of a lifelong passion for travel. As he later tells Christopher, "the best education is to travel and live in foreign countries." Throughout the book, The Hills can always be counted on to explain all things with the plain, common-sense wisdom of good Midwestern folk, like the Greek-chorus of townspeople in The Magnificent Ambersons.

The glimpses Chris gives us of Apartheid in 50's South Africa, where she moves with her mother and her mother's third husband, a British military veteran, make a disturbing contrast with Welles’s various crusades for civil rights for black people in America. It also shows how “chameleon-like” Virginia was in conforming to her third husband‘s racist views, and yet how profound and powerful Welles’s liberal influence remained on Chris, despite him having exerted it only on rare occasions. The South Africa years show Chris missing her father terribly, bearing the burden at school of being "Orson Welles’s daughter”, without Orson Welles. To compensate, she creates in her mind a rose-colored image of her father, to the point of becoming besotted and infatuated with him herself, a’la Dadda Bernstein and Houseman. Her description of their brief reunions together in such European capitals as Rome, Barcelona, Paris, and especially St. Moritz are described with a tremendous sense of pent-up joy, but also have an almost perversely romantic tone to them, like the quasi-incestuous missing scenes in Ambersons. They also bring to mind Marlene Dietrich’s statement that being with Welles made her feel "like a plant that had just been watered." The most striking of all these reunion scenes, however, is the luncheon at the estate of Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh that Welles takes her to near London, with Danny Kaye, Spencer Tracy, and Katherine Hepburn. In theatrical terms, almost like a summit meeting at Mount Olympus.

Sadly, their relationship becomes badly damaged by Chris’s eventual refusal to see her father, owing to what she claims was a cruel ultimatum on the part of Virginia. Chris's 'fatal' phone call to her father seems reminiscent of young Orson refusing to see his father Richard at roughly the same age, but then, for some reason, something seems missing here, as if Chris is either fictionalizing part of the story or not telling the whole story. Roger Hill's memiors at Lilly say simply that the estrangement between Chris and her father was caused mainly by her father’s failure to make child support payments, which is not implausible. Clearly this is the most painful part of Chris’s story, and not surprisingly, their relationship would never be quite the same again. Ironically, this seems to have a positive effect in some ways, as Chris begins to take her first independent steps away from her father’s influence. However, this comes while staying with her maternal grandparents, the Nicholsons, in Chicago. They are the antithesis of the Hills, living some fifty miles away in Woodstock. The Nicolsons are, if anything, even more narrow-minded and reactionary then her mother and British stepfather in South Africa, and dismiss Orson Welles as just another unreliable, theatrical fruitcake. Her father's influence still remains heavy with Chris, but now gets looked at more soberly, no longer through rose-colored glasses.

By the time she does see him again four years later, in a Hong-Kong reunion arranged by Granny Hill, she finds that she has been all but replaced in her father’s affections by his third wife Paola Mori and their 3-year-old daughter Beatrice. The Freudian complexity of Chris's relationship with her father is illuminated in still more depth once Paola and Beatrice enter the scene. Chris and Paola clearly feel threatened by each other, and in another weird irony, Paola, only seven years older then Chris, had begun her relationship with Welles while playing his daughter in the film, Mr. Arkadin. When Chris and her father are traveling alone together in a limo on the way to the film set, he tells her in a low voice that she looks very beautiful in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. But he also gives her a fatherly scolding for not remembering people from her school in South Africa when a former classmate invites them to lunch and shows them old pictures in a school album. "But I remember all my times with you" she thinks, but refrains from saying.

The reunion in Hong Kong, on the set of Ferry to Hong Kong, one of the lousy commercial projects Welles was forced to act in in order to raise money for his own films, comes right after Chris has lived with her new husband in the post-war hellhole of South Korea, an experience that gives her much valueable perspective on life, but that her father takes no interest in. She begins to sense that, although her father is happy to see her, his personality has already begun to change drastically, from the fun-loving, magical mentor and teacher, into a sadly grounded and defeated has-been, increasingly aware of the 'criminal waste of his talents', growing alarmingly overweight, and tired of the charade of having to act like a “celebrity” in order to function as an artist. This is a change she describes with amazing, poignant eloquence on pages 193-4:

"For the first time, I was finding it difficult to reach him, as though he had erected a barricade of preoccupations and sorrows between himself and everyone else...After awhile, I felt that, although I happened to be the one sitting across from him, another being could have slipped into my skin and it wouldn't have made any difference. This was not the father I had been missing so acutely, but a world-famous personality who had graciously consented to spend a few moments with me, recounting the same witty anecdotes he had told only weeks before on British television."

After this, she doesn't see him again for another eight years, and one gets the impression that Chris has become almost more of a side character to Orson rather then a daughter. He takes only a fleeting, superficial interest in her, and very little interest in her two marriages, not attending either wedding. Over these years, however, she does come into her own, carving out a respectable career as an educational writer for the Encyclopedia Britannica and the children's game Brain Quest. And in the 70’s, with Orson's health declining, she does manage to get some occasional visits and luncheons with him, although as her second husband said, Orson talked AT them instead of TO them, and it was “like visiting a king holding audience at his court, deciding when we should enter his presence, and when we should take our leave”. Still, Chris is grief-stricken at her father's death in 1985, and justifiably outraged at the paltry funeral arrangements made by Paola and Beatrice, who by that time according to Chris, had also long been replaced in Welles‘s affections by yet another woman, Oja Kodar.

It's a sad and bittersweet story that Chris tells, but it ends on a positive note, as Chris, unlike the young girl in Brooklyn, is able in a sense to be with her father, and take solace in his artistic dreams, as she forms an appreciation for Orson Welles's enormous body of work in many different media. She also becomes a sought-after fixture at various Welles events around the world, including the massive Welles festival at Locarno, Switzerland in 2005, where she reflects how much she has become a 'stand-in' for her father. She even becomes good friends with Oja Kodar, the final and perhaps most important woman of Welles's life, and offers a remarkably beautiful description of Oja's home on the Adriatic, the "Villa Welles", that makes you wish you could get an invitation too. Overrall, a compelling and illuminating read, and a very welcome chance to read about what happened to some of these side characters when they stepped out of the giant Dickens novel that was Orson Welles's life.

[Glenn Anders]

A superb, insightful review, Alan.

Professional and realistic in a way that we seldom see here.

If you ever make your way along the Dalmatian Coast between Split and Dubrovnik, especially by sea, you will find little outlooks where you put in, places which can make your life, no matter how filled with travail it may have been, seem worth the trouble. I agree, Chris Feder and her husband Irwin seem to feel some of that. You never forget it.

At least, I have not.

Glenn