Falstaff's daughter reviewed
Dec. 2nd, 2011 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenak"In place of yourself, you had offered an act of magic:/ first we all become Cordelia. Then we all disappear."
These two lines Chris Welles Feder wrote about her father, her sisters and herself in a poem about him don't appear in her book "In My Father's Shadow", and I find that regrettable, because they contain more ambiguity and anger towards him than she permits herself in prose. Reading Michael Lindsay-Hogg's memoirs has reminded me I've been meaning to get around to those of Welles' oldest daughter (guest starring in MLH's book as a childhood playmate, as he does in hers). Hers is a less well-written but at the same time immensly compelling book, the difference in gender crucial in how they relate to step parents, their mothers, and goals in life, but only partly in how they deal with Orson, with enchantment followed by a life long habit of hopeless longing. The first Mrs. Welles, Chris' mother Virginia, who comes in for a lot of anger and criticism from her daughter (some I felt unfair, some justified) nonetheless frequently gets the best and most acerbic lines in this book when it comes to her ex, and in the big traumatic showdown when Chris was 16 and made by Virginia to choose between her parents, she eviscerates young Chris' "but Daddy is the most wonderful man in the world" protests thusly:
No one knows better than I how seductive Orson can be. (...) He can make you believe you're the most important person in the world to him and he can't live without you. Then the next thing you know, he's fallen in love with somebody else.'
'But he's not in love with me,' I protested. 'I'm his daughter.'
'The trouble is that Orson has no idea how to be a father. Does he behave like a father when you're with him?'
'Well...' I hesitated. 'Daddy treats me like an equal, but I can't say he always behaves like a father.'
'At least you see that much. (...) I'll just say this for now: as long as you think you really matter to Orson, you're in for a lot of heartache and dissappointment.'
No kidding. And thus we get an unsettling father-daughter romance in which she does go Cordelia on him in several senses of the word: offering silence at the one point where he is willing to turn his frequent showing up in her life, whisking her away for some charmed weeks, leaving again act into something more permanent by giving in to her mother's "Orson or me" ultimatum and telling him she can't see or talk to him for a while. Being banished by him as well as a result. Reconciling when he's the powerless globetrotting former king thoughtmad wasted (to a degree). There is even a showdown with her sisters, though it's after his death, not before, at his funeral, to be precise, and there just who plays which daughter keeps getting reshuffled, because it's Chris and Rebecca (Rita Hayworth's kid) versus Beatrice (daughter of the third Mrs. Welles) and her mother Paola, who get the worst press in the entire book other than Chris's second stepfather, Major Pringle, and her mother, and are described as hypocrites wailing loudly but giving Orson a shabby, cheap cremation without even flowers or anyone saying anything if his over 90 years old fantasy father Roger "Skipper" Hill hadn't improvised something then and there. Then there is the reclamation of the kingdom by Chris coming to her dead father's defense at film festivals, pointing out that his creative life did not end with "Citizen Kane", championing the later work and forming a close relationship with Oja Kodar, Welles' companion for the last 20 years of his life, until Orson the flawed is transformed to Orson the magnificent again, all is forgiven, and you almost expect her to mutter Cordelia's "no fault, no fault".
The trouble with casting Welles as Lear is that he makes a far better Falstaff (and one suspects he knew it, too). His gift for improvising, spinning ever new stories to get himself out of tight spots, the living on credit for so long, and the sense of humour that luckily never deserted him are as unlike Lear as they come. Early in the book, when Chris recalls a conversation about her name (which is Christopher - she has the reverse of the "Boy named Sue" problem), about which she's horribly teased at school, Dad charmes her with the story of how when she was born he sent telegrams to everyone saying CHRISTOPHER SHE IS HERE. Only at his funeral does it occur to her she never saw evidence that these fabled telegrams ever existed.
So: imagine Falstaff as the father of a daughter who tries to see him as Lear, and you have the Orson Welles featured in this book. There is a supporting ensemble of memorable characters as well, notably Virginia (prone to bitter aphorisms between cigarettes, a 20s Noel Coward person when she's not a terrifying Tennessee Williams mother), her two post Orson husbands, amiable Charlie Lederer and revolting Edward Murdstone like Jack Pringle, half of Hollywood in acting and scriptwriting terms, the Hills (frequently the heroes in any Welles biography as the one example of a functional parental unit in the entire Welles saga, both to Orson and to his oldest daughter, and they of course were not related to either) and the two husbands Chris collects, the first of whom is gay which her father spots before she does (go figure). Quotes, as ever, below the cut.
My two half-sisters and my stepmother stood huddled and weeping in the corridor. Beatrice, transformed into a statuesque blonde, was wailing '"Oh my God!" and was standing with a protective arm around her mother. Becky was taller than I remembered, but she still had a wealth of dark hair and carried herself with a quiet dignity that reminded me of her mother. Although tears were streaming down her face, she was not eliciting sympathy. I gave her a hug anyway.
Just in case we're in doubt about which sister she likes better. And which stepmother. Speaking of:
Rita was everything a child could wish for in a stepmother: sweet-natured, affectionate, fun-loving and, in many ways, a child herself. While my father buried his nose in a heavy book, Rita read 'the funnies', as she called the daily comic strips in the newspapers. She read them religiously every morning while she breakfasted in bed, snuggled under the covers with my father, who was immersed in the rest of the Paper. (...) 'Hello, darling girl,' my father would boom in his basso profundo as I stood hovering in the doorway. 'Well, am I going to get a kiss this morning?' Soon I was snuggled down between them in the warm, rumpled bed, reading the funnies with Rita and wishing I could stay there for the rest of the day.
Alas, Rita isn't to stay. Which brings us to Geraldine. It's interesting that whereas Michael Lindsay-Hogg runs in endless circles whether or not trying to guess his paternity, and whether or not his mother and Welles were a more than friends item, Chris remembers the man Geraldine Fitzgerald was married to not at all but does remember Geraldine being her father's long term mistress without a doubt.
Geraldine Fitzgerald - Aunt Geraldine to me - was a different animal. There was something elusive about her, something that made me suspect I would never know the real person hiding behind the soft-spoken Irish charm and the dazzling smile. She seemed to live in a vast reservoir of calm known only to herself. On the other hand, I had no trouble figuring out her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Two years younger than I was, Michael was a lovable scamp with a mop of dark hair, eager to join in any adventure I might propose.
We also get to know Virginia's take on the Orson/Geraldine affair, which refreshingly is not to blame the woman, despite said affair starting when Orson was still married to her. (Which btw also means it predated Rita.) Virginia claims to have found out the classic way, via a love letter in Orson's desk.
'It seemed every ballerina in New York had written to him, and there were also letters from my good friend Geraldine.' (...)
I didn't know which revelation upset me more - my father two-timing my mother with Geraldine or my mother and Geraldine remaining close friends. 'But once you knew Geraldine had betrayed you, how could you want to have anything to do with her?'
'I couldn't hold it against her, you see, because in those days, you simply fell in bed with anyone who asked you to, especially if you were an actress trying to get ahead, although how Orson found the time to be unfaithful to me with Geraldine or anyone else, I will never understand.'
Time being rare because in his early 20s Orson with busy with the Mercury Theatre, radio shows, and a book about staging Shakespeare. Of course, in those days he had John Houseman at his side. Geraldine Fitzgerald is the source for the following memorable description of the Welles/Houseman partnership to Chris:
Geraldine astonished me by comparing my father to a broken water pipe, his talent pouring out of him in torrents while Houseman chased after him, trying to scoop it up in cups, pitchers and buckets.
While Orson married and divorced Rita Hayworth and carried on his on/off affair with Geraldine Fitzgerald, Virginia was married to scriptwriter Charlie Lederer, which is a neat irony because Charlie Lederer was Marion Davies' favourite nephew, which meant frequent visits at San Simeon even while Hearst was fuming over Citizen Kane. Charlie Lederer comes across as witty and amiable, which he does in everyone's memoirs (I think the only person I've seen refer to him in a negative manner was Raymond Chandler, and that was because they were arguing over Billy Wilder). Indeed Orson liked him, too, to the point of casting him as one of the three witches in Macbeth, and inviting himself repeatedly to his ex-wife's house. Writes Chris about this domestic situation, quoting her mother years later:
We couldn't stay mad at Orson, you see. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm...' My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. 'Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated towards one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only 16. My God, Orson and I never even WENT to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me.' She gave her husky, ironic laugh. 'But when it came to their personalities, they couldn't have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn't have Orson's crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.'
On a much debated question, i.e. whether or not Hearst evet actually saw Citizen Kane:
Mother told me she had seen a pre-release print of CK with Hearst and Marion at San Simeon a year after she and Charlie were married. It was customary to show pre-release features after dinner in Hearst's private movie theatre with its red plush seats and wood-panelled walls lined with gilded statues. "The theatre looked like a small version of one of those garish, overdone movie palaces from the 1920s," Mother recalled. "After the screening, W.R. retreated to their private suite without saying one word to anyone, wile Charlie and I held our breath in horror."
Yet Charlie had no memory of this screening. He insisted to me on several occasions that neither Hearst nor Aunt Marion ever saw Citizen Kane. Their condemnation of the picture rested on the outraged reactions of loyal friends who saw it as a cruel and unwarranted attack, particularly on Marion.
speaking of whom:
Marion had been 13 when Charlie was born on 31 December 1910. 'We're more like partners in crime than aunt and nephew,' he liked to say. They certainly shared the same irreverent humour and irresistible urge to tease 'Pops', Marion's affectionate name for Hearst. During a long dull evening at San Simeon, Charlie and Marion would exchange a wicked glance and then begin turning somersaults in unison on one of Hearst's priceless Persian rugs. (...) Marion reminded me of Rita because she was so genuine, so incapable of artifice or pretension.
Alas, Charlie and Virginia divorce as well. Up to this point in the book, I thought Chris was unfair towards her mother, being far more unforgiving towards her while Orson has a get out clause on account of being a genius. Yes, saying, "Oh, Chrissie, what a little bore you can be," as she quotes Virginia more than once is cruel, but Orson sometimes standing her up for pre-arranged visits is excused as thoughtless instead of being equally seen as cruel, and because if he IS there, he's funny, charming, magical etc while Virginia has the more thankless job of laying down everyday rules. However, once we enter the post Charlie era it becomes clear that Chris has some genuine causess for resenting her mother, starting with being dumped on Roger and Hortense Hill for two years.
The Hills, as mentioned before, are invariably the heroes of every Welles biography. After child!Orson is being competed for by Richad Welles the alcoholic and Maurice "Dadda" Bernstein the long term lover of his mother and living the unschooled life of a miracle child, presto entrance of Roger "Skipper" Hill when Orson ends up at his first regular school where Hill is in the process of becoming headmaster, with the result that Skipper rapidly becomes father figure Number 3, as well as Orson's first massive crush. Says Orson years later to his daughter:
"Do you know what my greatest coup was at Todd?" my father asked me with shining eyes. After an expectant pause, he answered his own question:"Winning Skipper's love. I was just a kid in knee pants and Skipper was a married man in his mid-thirties, but it was what the French call un coup de foudre. We were fatally attracted to one another, you see. The difference in our ages didn't matter, because Skipper was always younger than me. He had the kind of youth I never had."
The secret to Skipper's life long success with Orson seems to have been that he let Orson do the wooing and while always affectionate was never over the top impressed. Accordingly, the Hills are the only people talking to Chris about her father who neither hero worship nor demonize. Case in point:
Hortense once said, "If only you could have known him back then, Chris. Your dad was such a sweet boy before fame spoiled him." Skipper never failed to correct her by responding, "Now, Horty, you know damned well he was a ham and phony even then."
After two years chez Hill, Virginia remarries and takes her daughter back, at which point the biggest villain of the book makes his appearance:Edward Murdstone Jack Pringle, aka the Evil Stepfather. He's a soulless arch reactionary who systematically destroys Chris's confidence by seeing it as his mission to "take you down a peg" (in order to fight the suspected Wellesian tendency to be "puffed up", telling her constantly she's stupid, ordinary and not worth a college education because the best she can hope for is becoming a secretary and marrying quickly. As he moves the entire family to South Afrika, he turns out to be a racist to boot, going on about the inferiority of the blacks while he's at it and eyeing Chris' friendship with a Jewish classmate suspiciously. Virginia follows suit with sarcasting put downs and quickly adopted prejudices, and of course this would be when Orson is at his most seductive, offering impromptu lectures on Michelangelo in Rome, flamenco dances in Spain, ski and ice skating lessons in St Moritz, lots of fascinating people to meet and a horrified response when he hears about every day racism chez Pringle:"Even if you're forbidden to speak to the Africans working in your house, I hope you'll remember they are human beings, just like you, and always treat them with respect!"
(This in Welles was not mere easy talk. He walked the walk, too, from his early Macbeth in Harlem onwards, most notably in responding to the beating of a black soldier by a white police officer in the 40s by making the whole thing public on his radio shows and campaigning for the prosecution of the police officer despite the fact his sponsors threatened to abandon him if he didn't stop with the "negro talk"; he didn't, and they did.)
Events come to a head when Orson makes the offer that 16 years old Chris could live with him and get to go to college after all, the Sorbonne, no less. This causes Virginia to write thusly to her daughter:
I can survive your ingratitude in spite of all we have done for you; I can even brush aside your disloyalty to us as the by-product of your pathetic schoolgirl crush on Orson (for which I am partly to blame), but the one thing I cannot tolerate is having a daughter who is a bloody fool. You are worse than a fool if you really believe Orson will set you up in an apartment in Paris and will pay your tuition at the Sorbonne. He will promise you the moon and the stars - he is very good at that - and then leave you high and dry. You are much too young, at sixteen, to be left anywhere on your own. So if you join your father in Paris, you can forget about seeing me ever again. I'll cut you off just like that! On the other hand, if you still want a relationship with me, you must stop seeing Orson or having anything to do with him. There will be no more visits, letters or phonecalls from now on. Jackie and I will not tolerate Orson's interference in our plans for your future.
Older Chris, the narrator of the tale, concedes her mother probably had a point about the likelihood of Orson ( who at 16 had his theatrical debut at the Gate in Dublin) pulling a dissappearing act in Paris or something like that, but still considers the form of Virginia's reaction unforgivable. The right thing, in her opinion, would have been to say "find out for yourself, and if he leaves you, you can still come home to me", not the ultimatum. In any case, it ends as badly as you can imagine. Virginia is relentless, Chris when made to choose between her parents is unable to forget that sharp tongued and newly racist or not, her mother was a constant presence, and her father sometimes not even an address on an envelope because those changed so quickly, and when push comes to shove, she adores him but doesn't trust him enough. Cue the Wellesian version of I know thee not on the telephone. For Orson, who was made to choose between Richard the alcoholic and his other two fathers at age 14, it must have looked like nemesis and deja vu one, especially since he was always convinced his decision killed his father.
It's the turning point of the tale, because while they patch up a few years later, at which point Chris is already married to closet!gay Norman, she never has the feeling again she's getting more than public Orson Welles, personality and conversationalist. There is also another secondary villain in the story, Paola the Schemer and very nearly evil stepmother, who loses no time in telling Chris her phonecall broke Orson's heart while Chris in a Freudian's delight treats Paola as competition from the get go and suspects her of having fueled Orson's resentment over the years in order to push the cause of her own daughter, Beatrice. Meanwhile, there is this sad summary of relationships with no-longer-Daddy-but-Father:
I was like an aspiring actress on her way to an audition, desperate to please, determined to be chosen. Geraldine Fitzgerald had once said to me, 'Orson will be anything you want him to be,' and now it was the same to me. I was ready to play the part of Eldest Daughter any way he wanted until the show folded.
The show doesn't fold for some years to come, and she gains some adult confindence via her job, plus it makes her furious when he refuses to meet her second husband (who is his own age) for years, but because they never openly quarrel (instead, he pulls another disappearing act for some years) and he always gives her public!Welles, they never really reconcile, either. The closest they get to intimacy is when he confesses the embarassment and shame at some of the jobs he has take in order to finance his own films by now, and even then, there is the question of manipulation, because he comes up with these confessions when not wanting to go somewhere or do something. And so she doesn't feel like really having him back until he's dead and she can rediscover him as an artist together with his partner, Oja. (Who was banished from the funeral by Paola the Schemer.) It's cathartic, and she even comes to some peace with her mother as well, who writes another letter, and this is the last quote:
I understand perfectly the upset your father's death caused you. You feel you never got through to him and you are right. You didn't, anymore than his other daughters did, or his wives. When you were a little girl in Santa Monica and Orson planned to pick you up for lunch, he'd forget and I have many memories of you standing in the hall all dressed up, waiting and crying. What could I say to you? I sent you to Todd hoping that Hortense and Skipper could explain him better than I could. They adored you and you became one of the family there. (...) I remember how unhappy you were in South Africa - so far away from your father. I wrote so many letters to him organizing visits for you in France, Spain, Italy etc. You went but he was often busy and left you with his secretaries. He loved you when you were in front of him, but he forgot you when you were out of sight. Just like everyone else in his life.
(...) But now I must tell you that there was nothing you could have ever done with your life or your talents that would have got through to him. And I know how you have driven yourself all these years. And they have paid off from your point of view. You are very successful and must now write for yourself. Not for Orson's approval. Do you understand what I'm saying? I have a great fear I could hurt your feelings and that I would hate to do.
These two lines Chris Welles Feder wrote about her father, her sisters and herself in a poem about him don't appear in her book "In My Father's Shadow", and I find that regrettable, because they contain more ambiguity and anger towards him than she permits herself in prose. Reading Michael Lindsay-Hogg's memoirs has reminded me I've been meaning to get around to those of Welles' oldest daughter (guest starring in MLH's book as a childhood playmate, as he does in hers). Hers is a less well-written but at the same time immensly compelling book, the difference in gender crucial in how they relate to step parents, their mothers, and goals in life, but only partly in how they deal with Orson, with enchantment followed by a life long habit of hopeless longing. The first Mrs. Welles, Chris' mother Virginia, who comes in for a lot of anger and criticism from her daughter (some I felt unfair, some justified) nonetheless frequently gets the best and most acerbic lines in this book when it comes to her ex, and in the big traumatic showdown when Chris was 16 and made by Virginia to choose between her parents, she eviscerates young Chris' "but Daddy is the most wonderful man in the world" protests thusly:
No one knows better than I how seductive Orson can be. (...) He can make you believe you're the most important person in the world to him and he can't live without you. Then the next thing you know, he's fallen in love with somebody else.'
'But he's not in love with me,' I protested. 'I'm his daughter.'
'The trouble is that Orson has no idea how to be a father. Does he behave like a father when you're with him?'
'Well...' I hesitated. 'Daddy treats me like an equal, but I can't say he always behaves like a father.'
'At least you see that much. (...) I'll just say this for now: as long as you think you really matter to Orson, you're in for a lot of heartache and dissappointment.'
No kidding. And thus we get an unsettling father-daughter romance in which she does go Cordelia on him in several senses of the word: offering silence at the one point where he is willing to turn his frequent showing up in her life, whisking her away for some charmed weeks, leaving again act into something more permanent by giving in to her mother's "Orson or me" ultimatum and telling him she can't see or talk to him for a while. Being banished by him as well as a result. Reconciling when he's the powerless globetrotting former king thought
The trouble with casting Welles as Lear is that he makes a far better Falstaff (and one suspects he knew it, too). His gift for improvising, spinning ever new stories to get himself out of tight spots, the living on credit for so long, and the sense of humour that luckily never deserted him are as unlike Lear as they come. Early in the book, when Chris recalls a conversation about her name (which is Christopher - she has the reverse of the "Boy named Sue" problem), about which she's horribly teased at school, Dad charmes her with the story of how when she was born he sent telegrams to everyone saying CHRISTOPHER SHE IS HERE. Only at his funeral does it occur to her she never saw evidence that these fabled telegrams ever existed.
So: imagine Falstaff as the father of a daughter who tries to see him as Lear, and you have the Orson Welles featured in this book. There is a supporting ensemble of memorable characters as well, notably Virginia (prone to bitter aphorisms between cigarettes, a 20s Noel Coward person when she's not a terrifying Tennessee Williams mother), her two post Orson husbands, amiable Charlie Lederer and revolting Edward Murdstone like Jack Pringle, half of Hollywood in acting and scriptwriting terms, the Hills (frequently the heroes in any Welles biography as the one example of a functional parental unit in the entire Welles saga, both to Orson and to his oldest daughter, and they of course were not related to either) and the two husbands Chris collects, the first of whom is gay which her father spots before she does (go figure). Quotes, as ever, below the cut.
My two half-sisters and my stepmother stood huddled and weeping in the corridor. Beatrice, transformed into a statuesque blonde, was wailing '"Oh my God!" and was standing with a protective arm around her mother. Becky was taller than I remembered, but she still had a wealth of dark hair and carried herself with a quiet dignity that reminded me of her mother. Although tears were streaming down her face, she was not eliciting sympathy. I gave her a hug anyway.
Just in case we're in doubt about which sister she likes better. And which stepmother. Speaking of:
Rita was everything a child could wish for in a stepmother: sweet-natured, affectionate, fun-loving and, in many ways, a child herself. While my father buried his nose in a heavy book, Rita read 'the funnies', as she called the daily comic strips in the newspapers. She read them religiously every morning while she breakfasted in bed, snuggled under the covers with my father, who was immersed in the rest of the Paper. (...) 'Hello, darling girl,' my father would boom in his basso profundo as I stood hovering in the doorway. 'Well, am I going to get a kiss this morning?' Soon I was snuggled down between them in the warm, rumpled bed, reading the funnies with Rita and wishing I could stay there for the rest of the day.
Alas, Rita isn't to stay. Which brings us to Geraldine. It's interesting that whereas Michael Lindsay-Hogg runs in endless circles whether or not trying to guess his paternity, and whether or not his mother and Welles were a more than friends item, Chris remembers the man Geraldine Fitzgerald was married to not at all but does remember Geraldine being her father's long term mistress without a doubt.
Geraldine Fitzgerald - Aunt Geraldine to me - was a different animal. There was something elusive about her, something that made me suspect I would never know the real person hiding behind the soft-spoken Irish charm and the dazzling smile. She seemed to live in a vast reservoir of calm known only to herself. On the other hand, I had no trouble figuring out her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Two years younger than I was, Michael was a lovable scamp with a mop of dark hair, eager to join in any adventure I might propose.
We also get to know Virginia's take on the Orson/Geraldine affair, which refreshingly is not to blame the woman, despite said affair starting when Orson was still married to her. (Which btw also means it predated Rita.) Virginia claims to have found out the classic way, via a love letter in Orson's desk.
'It seemed every ballerina in New York had written to him, and there were also letters from my good friend Geraldine.' (...)
I didn't know which revelation upset me more - my father two-timing my mother with Geraldine or my mother and Geraldine remaining close friends. 'But once you knew Geraldine had betrayed you, how could you want to have anything to do with her?'
'I couldn't hold it against her, you see, because in those days, you simply fell in bed with anyone who asked you to, especially if you were an actress trying to get ahead, although how Orson found the time to be unfaithful to me with Geraldine or anyone else, I will never understand.'
Time being rare because in his early 20s Orson with busy with the Mercury Theatre, radio shows, and a book about staging Shakespeare. Of course, in those days he had John Houseman at his side. Geraldine Fitzgerald is the source for the following memorable description of the Welles/Houseman partnership to Chris:
Geraldine astonished me by comparing my father to a broken water pipe, his talent pouring out of him in torrents while Houseman chased after him, trying to scoop it up in cups, pitchers and buckets.
While Orson married and divorced Rita Hayworth and carried on his on/off affair with Geraldine Fitzgerald, Virginia was married to scriptwriter Charlie Lederer, which is a neat irony because Charlie Lederer was Marion Davies' favourite nephew, which meant frequent visits at San Simeon even while Hearst was fuming over Citizen Kane. Charlie Lederer comes across as witty and amiable, which he does in everyone's memoirs (I think the only person I've seen refer to him in a negative manner was Raymond Chandler, and that was because they were arguing over Billy Wilder). Indeed Orson liked him, too, to the point of casting him as one of the three witches in Macbeth, and inviting himself repeatedly to his ex-wife's house. Writes Chris about this domestic situation, quoting her mother years later:
We couldn't stay mad at Orson, you see. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm...' My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. 'Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated towards one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only 16. My God, Orson and I never even WENT to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me.' She gave her husky, ironic laugh. 'But when it came to their personalities, they couldn't have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn't have Orson's crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.'
On a much debated question, i.e. whether or not Hearst evet actually saw Citizen Kane:
Mother told me she had seen a pre-release print of CK with Hearst and Marion at San Simeon a year after she and Charlie were married. It was customary to show pre-release features after dinner in Hearst's private movie theatre with its red plush seats and wood-panelled walls lined with gilded statues. "The theatre looked like a small version of one of those garish, overdone movie palaces from the 1920s," Mother recalled. "After the screening, W.R. retreated to their private suite without saying one word to anyone, wile Charlie and I held our breath in horror."
Yet Charlie had no memory of this screening. He insisted to me on several occasions that neither Hearst nor Aunt Marion ever saw Citizen Kane. Their condemnation of the picture rested on the outraged reactions of loyal friends who saw it as a cruel and unwarranted attack, particularly on Marion.
speaking of whom:
Marion had been 13 when Charlie was born on 31 December 1910. 'We're more like partners in crime than aunt and nephew,' he liked to say. They certainly shared the same irreverent humour and irresistible urge to tease 'Pops', Marion's affectionate name for Hearst. During a long dull evening at San Simeon, Charlie and Marion would exchange a wicked glance and then begin turning somersaults in unison on one of Hearst's priceless Persian rugs. (...) Marion reminded me of Rita because she was so genuine, so incapable of artifice or pretension.
Alas, Charlie and Virginia divorce as well. Up to this point in the book, I thought Chris was unfair towards her mother, being far more unforgiving towards her while Orson has a get out clause on account of being a genius. Yes, saying, "Oh, Chrissie, what a little bore you can be," as she quotes Virginia more than once is cruel, but Orson sometimes standing her up for pre-arranged visits is excused as thoughtless instead of being equally seen as cruel, and because if he IS there, he's funny, charming, magical etc while Virginia has the more thankless job of laying down everyday rules. However, once we enter the post Charlie era it becomes clear that Chris has some genuine causess for resenting her mother, starting with being dumped on Roger and Hortense Hill for two years.
The Hills, as mentioned before, are invariably the heroes of every Welles biography. After child!Orson is being competed for by Richad Welles the alcoholic and Maurice "Dadda" Bernstein the long term lover of his mother and living the unschooled life of a miracle child, presto entrance of Roger "Skipper" Hill when Orson ends up at his first regular school where Hill is in the process of becoming headmaster, with the result that Skipper rapidly becomes father figure Number 3, as well as Orson's first massive crush. Says Orson years later to his daughter:
"Do you know what my greatest coup was at Todd?" my father asked me with shining eyes. After an expectant pause, he answered his own question:"Winning Skipper's love. I was just a kid in knee pants and Skipper was a married man in his mid-thirties, but it was what the French call un coup de foudre. We were fatally attracted to one another, you see. The difference in our ages didn't matter, because Skipper was always younger than me. He had the kind of youth I never had."
The secret to Skipper's life long success with Orson seems to have been that he let Orson do the wooing and while always affectionate was never over the top impressed. Accordingly, the Hills are the only people talking to Chris about her father who neither hero worship nor demonize. Case in point:
Hortense once said, "If only you could have known him back then, Chris. Your dad was such a sweet boy before fame spoiled him." Skipper never failed to correct her by responding, "Now, Horty, you know damned well he was a ham and phony even then."
After two years chez Hill, Virginia remarries and takes her daughter back, at which point the biggest villain of the book makes his appearance:
(This in Welles was not mere easy talk. He walked the walk, too, from his early Macbeth in Harlem onwards, most notably in responding to the beating of a black soldier by a white police officer in the 40s by making the whole thing public on his radio shows and campaigning for the prosecution of the police officer despite the fact his sponsors threatened to abandon him if he didn't stop with the "negro talk"; he didn't, and they did.)
Events come to a head when Orson makes the offer that 16 years old Chris could live with him and get to go to college after all, the Sorbonne, no less. This causes Virginia to write thusly to her daughter:
I can survive your ingratitude in spite of all we have done for you; I can even brush aside your disloyalty to us as the by-product of your pathetic schoolgirl crush on Orson (for which I am partly to blame), but the one thing I cannot tolerate is having a daughter who is a bloody fool. You are worse than a fool if you really believe Orson will set you up in an apartment in Paris and will pay your tuition at the Sorbonne. He will promise you the moon and the stars - he is very good at that - and then leave you high and dry. You are much too young, at sixteen, to be left anywhere on your own. So if you join your father in Paris, you can forget about seeing me ever again. I'll cut you off just like that! On the other hand, if you still want a relationship with me, you must stop seeing Orson or having anything to do with him. There will be no more visits, letters or phonecalls from now on. Jackie and I will not tolerate Orson's interference in our plans for your future.
Older Chris, the narrator of the tale, concedes her mother probably had a point about the likelihood of Orson ( who at 16 had his theatrical debut at the Gate in Dublin) pulling a dissappearing act in Paris or something like that, but still considers the form of Virginia's reaction unforgivable. The right thing, in her opinion, would have been to say "find out for yourself, and if he leaves you, you can still come home to me", not the ultimatum. In any case, it ends as badly as you can imagine. Virginia is relentless, Chris when made to choose between her parents is unable to forget that sharp tongued and newly racist or not, her mother was a constant presence, and her father sometimes not even an address on an envelope because those changed so quickly, and when push comes to shove, she adores him but doesn't trust him enough. Cue the Wellesian version of I know thee not on the telephone. For Orson, who was made to choose between Richard the alcoholic and his other two fathers at age 14, it must have looked like nemesis and deja vu one, especially since he was always convinced his decision killed his father.
It's the turning point of the tale, because while they patch up a few years later, at which point Chris is already married to closet!gay Norman, she never has the feeling again she's getting more than public Orson Welles, personality and conversationalist. There is also another secondary villain in the story, Paola the Schemer and very nearly evil stepmother, who loses no time in telling Chris her phonecall broke Orson's heart while Chris in a Freudian's delight treats Paola as competition from the get go and suspects her of having fueled Orson's resentment over the years in order to push the cause of her own daughter, Beatrice. Meanwhile, there is this sad summary of relationships with no-longer-Daddy-but-Father:
I was like an aspiring actress on her way to an audition, desperate to please, determined to be chosen. Geraldine Fitzgerald had once said to me, 'Orson will be anything you want him to be,' and now it was the same to me. I was ready to play the part of Eldest Daughter any way he wanted until the show folded.
The show doesn't fold for some years to come, and she gains some adult confindence via her job, plus it makes her furious when he refuses to meet her second husband (who is his own age) for years, but because they never openly quarrel (instead, he pulls another disappearing act for some years) and he always gives her public!Welles, they never really reconcile, either. The closest they get to intimacy is when he confesses the embarassment and shame at some of the jobs he has take in order to finance his own films by now, and even then, there is the question of manipulation, because he comes up with these confessions when not wanting to go somewhere or do something. And so she doesn't feel like really having him back until he's dead and she can rediscover him as an artist together with his partner, Oja. (Who was banished from the funeral by Paola the Schemer.) It's cathartic, and she even comes to some peace with her mother as well, who writes another letter, and this is the last quote:
I understand perfectly the upset your father's death caused you. You feel you never got through to him and you are right. You didn't, anymore than his other daughters did, or his wives. When you were a little girl in Santa Monica and Orson planned to pick you up for lunch, he'd forget and I have many memories of you standing in the hall all dressed up, waiting and crying. What could I say to you? I sent you to Todd hoping that Hortense and Skipper could explain him better than I could. They adored you and you became one of the family there. (...) I remember how unhappy you were in South Africa - so far away from your father. I wrote so many letters to him organizing visits for you in France, Spain, Italy etc. You went but he was often busy and left you with his secretaries. He loved you when you were in front of him, but he forgot you when you were out of sight. Just like everyone else in his life.
(...) But now I must tell you that there was nothing you could have ever done with your life or your talents that would have got through to him. And I know how you have driven yourself all these years. And they have paid off from your point of view. You are very successful and must now write for yourself. Not for Orson's approval. Do you understand what I'm saying? I have a great fear I could hurt your feelings and that I would hate to do.
