iN MY FATHER'S SHADOW: Christopher Welles Emerges to Assert Herself.
Written: Nov 03 '09 (Updated Nov 13 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: A perspective on Orson Welles that almost no one else could have.
Cons: Though unavoidable, "tears well up" a few times too often, creating "Mrs. Norman Maine Moments."
The Bottom Line: Throughout her formative years, Great Director Orson Welles' eldest daughter struggles to secure his love and company, appreciate his accomplishments. She matures to assert her independence and recognize his complexity.
macresarf1's Full Review: Chris Welles Feder - In My Father's Shadow: A Daug...
. . . milly befriended a stranded star / whose rays five languid fingers were . . . .
-- ee cummins -------
Orson Welles like a Magus, his bearded face half in the dark, as if hidden by an advancing or retreating cloud, stares out at us from the handsome black and gold dust jacket of Christopher Welles Feder's new memoir, IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW; A DAUGHTER REMEMBERS ORSON WELLES. His hand, claw-like, caresses his trademark large black cigar, as if it were the barrel of an assassin's pistol. He is for all the world not Harry Lime, but MR. ARKADIN.
[Mrs. Feder, it is said, insisted that the portrait of her father's face be half-shaded, and the subtitle of her book, "A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles," be placed on a golden strip.]
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"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music." -- Sasa Devcic.
That observation may also apply to film editors, film actors, and film directors, or their children.
Chris Welles Feder, the firstborn daughter of World-renowned Film and Stage Director Orson Welles, HEARS the music, and O How She Dances, even when her feet leave bloody marks in the sand!
Long after the general public had forgotten Orson Welles, or had at least stopped caring about him (as they had about his greatest original character, Charles Foster Kane, but not Harry Lime) -- for decades after his death -- idolators and critics argued about his reputation. They swallowed whole his legend and myth, or threw up vicious charges for or against him. [More often than not, they launched veiled or snide attacks upon each other.] They insinuated reasonable and not so reasonable speculations about his career arc, heaped up special pleadings of statistics and scholarly papers on this scale or that to determine his relative worth as an artist and as a man. New revelations, articles, books and movies appeared yearly, often monthly, on some aspect of his life or work.
They still do.
For instance, the poignant memoir by one of Welles' two surviving daughters, subject of our review, has been published just this week, And a new movie, ME AND ORSON WELLES, directed by Richard Linklater (BEFORE SUNSET, 2004; THROUGH A SCANNER DARKLY, 2006), starring teen heartthrob Zac Efron (with Claire Danes), premieres in American theaters at the end of this month (November 2009).
Individuals who never heard of Welles or his works (a very few), who never cared much about him or what he accomplished (many more of them, in our frivolous world), certainly the defiant number who find even CITIZEN KANE cold and overrated, may dismiss these new works, like the older ones, as spilled "fanboy/fangirl" love or vitriol. They might turn away from the book and film as superfluous when compared to a snickering Youtube clip of a drunken Welles' wine commercial.
But for the rest of us, Christopher (Chris or Chrissie) Welles Feder's contribution to the growing pile of Art and Scholarship is . . . different.
She chooses to make her book "a story" about growing up, divided from her father, her two half-sisters, and almost all semblance of the united family she hoped for; a memoir of her sometimes unrequited love for her father and how she achieved maturity and independence; and it is an interesting story that she tells:
" maggie and milly and molly and may / went down to the beach (to play one day) . . . ."
In fact, the first line of "A Note to the Reader" (which reminds me foolishly, I know, of the stark opening for Jules Dassin's NAKED CITY) assures us:
"The book you are about to read is not another biography of Orson Welles. It owes nothing to scholarly research and everything to firsthand knowledge . . . . "
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". . .molly was chased by a horrible thing/ which raced sideways while blowing bubbles . . . ."
The Old Orson would have liked that direction. Despite his admirably voluminous research -- his mandated task to educate the masses, his progressive crusade to stop fascism's takeover of America, his introduction of Jazz to American audiences, and his charming "nice-to-knows" -- the schema of gothic storytelling was his method: Whatever his supposed project, the real Orson Welles, the self-created Orson Welles, in his darkest, most fearful and charming intimations of himself, was his sub rosa obsession, his vehicle for telling the truths he had to give us. It was always George Orson Welles, hero and villain, "warts and all" (to use Chris Welles' words about herself).
Chrissie, as she liked to be called as a child, begins forthrightly with a chilling and affecting description of family loss and funeral, another favorite focus of the Old Master Welles. It's an ironic comment on one of his favorite late-in-life predictions: "Oh, how they're going to love me when I'm dead!" The scene summons up both CITIZEN KANE and that famous lamented missing sequence which was supposed to cap Welles' butchered masterpiece, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS:
On October 10, 1985, Chris learns of her father's lonely, somewhat unexpected passing, not at a crowded familial bedside in Las Vegas or Los Angeles, as she might have hoped for -- but from television, alone herself, 2,000 miles away in New York, where she lives with her husband, English Professor Irwin Feder. After a day of dazed reflection on the event lit by the TV's distortions, "the soap bubble" in which she had lived many of her 47 years . . . "burst and I began to cry."
A few days later, she and her husband find themselves in that seedy area known as "downtown LA," at a motel-like structure, in a side room of a utilitarian funeral home, with a small, awkward group of mourners: the great director's cremated remains in an oversized box sits before his widow, his acknowledged children, his cameraman, his recent director on TV, his latest gofer, and his great early mentor, the experimental educator Roger "Skipper" Hill." It is the first time during her life that Chris has been in the same room with her two half-sisters, Beatrice and Rebecca. The youngest, Beatrice, who has been living with her mother in Las Vegas, explains that this shoddy send-off is necessary because "Daddy left no money for funerals or anything else," and her mother, the third Mrs. Welles, Paola Mori (an Italian Contessa), would boycott the funeral entirely if her husband's mistress, Croatian actress and sculptor Oja Kodar with whom he lived in LA the last five years of his life -- or even "the Hollywood types" with whom Welles had forged his public career and reputation -- were present.
Mentor Skipper Hill delivers a slightly demented eulogy, and Chris is largely left out of the proceedings, almost like the hapless Aunt Fanny lamenting her lost love in the equally lost climax of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.
[Chris Welles Feder did not attend nor was she really invited to the more well-known memorial for her father, later that week, where Oja Kodar castigated the old Mercury Theater contingent and Hollywood false friends for not seeing Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND and KING LEAR projects through to their completion.]
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". . . may came home with a smooth round stone / as small as a world and as large as alone. . . ."
Cut from that prologue to Hollywood, 1942, over forty years earlier, where four year-old Chrissie, daughter of the first Mrs. Welles, Virginia Nicolson, is watching her world-known father. He is sawing in half before thousands of American Servicemen his soon-to-be-second-bride, the most gorgeous, desirable "pin-up" of her day, the "Love Goddess" Rita Hayworth. Then IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW introduces, with a kind of Upstairs/Downstairs intercutting, a series of characters and scenes worthy of Welles' THE STRANGER, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, MR. ARKADIN, or TOUCH OF EVIL. There are, in skillfully casual order:
the beautifully simple, funny and childlike Rita Hayworth,Marie the Scottish nanny, Pookles the dog, little half-sister Rebecca (more forlorn in some ways than Chris);
Mother Virginia Nicolson Welles, that lady's second husband, "real pro" screenwriter and practical joker Charles Lederer (nephew of Marion Davies, mistress of Welles' nemesis William Randolph Hearst), Virginia's third husband, British war hero/polo player/gold merchant Major Jack Pringle, another inadequate father substitute;
"Aunt Geraldine" Fitzgerald (beautiful Irish movie star, who turns out to be a Welles' mistress and possible mother of an unacknowledged Welles' son), maternal grandparents -- the snobbish "self-made" Leo and Lillian Nicolson;
and most of all, Skipper and Hortense Hill, to whose Todd School Chrissie is sent like her father before her.
They are Heroes, Heroines, Villains, all mixed up in the changing perspective of a very observant child's eyes.
And they keep coming on: more characters, many more, while she grows to womanhood and maturity -- a cast of . . . well, perhaps not thousands -- but an awful lot, Toto.
Orson Welles' pictures shrank in production values as he became older, but never less so for a lack of interesting people or in a lifestyle with which to reflect those values for his daughter: Champagne before noon, a hired junk to take her and her husband for a sail on the China Sea, a limousine to carry her and her father to luncheon with the Oliviers at their country home. Most of all, a week here and there with him in Paris, Rome or London. But somehow it is never enough, and she is always shyly in her father's shadow, known to her humiliation as "Orson's kid," or only "the daughter of Orson Welles."
We learn through the author's skillful use of narrative dialogue (sometimes, tricky summary dialogue), occasional metaphors, asides, and well-crafted scenes that Orson Welles was a kind of combination of the Cheshire Cat and the Wizard of Oz. Almost always when he was present, she was besotted with him, reaching out for him, desiring to learn from him, be accepted by him. And he was always the disarming magician or the demanding director, enveloping her in his illusions. Then, he would be gone, distant, barred from her by a thicket of nannies, parents or step-parents and their excuses: lack of money, lack of time, lack of convenience. Excuses, excuses, excuses, which she loyally, bravely, rationalizes, and which Welles' old friends and colleagues tell her she must always expect. And always, too, there is his need to get back to, to get on with, "THE WORK."
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The life of an an artist, of any professional, can be time-consuming, more so for one hailed as a genius in his/her field. The weight falls particularly hard on his or her children.
Orson Welles was adjudged a genius before age two, a prodigy on the piano a few years later; was revising and directing Shakespeare when a teenager, a star of the Dublin stage at seventeen; and he was to transform the Broadway stage, convince America of a Martian invasion, and create the most significant American film of the early sound period -- all by the age of twenty-six. Then, following his refusal to compromise his projects artistically or politically, Welles' career seemed to slow down. His life, if one were to follow the news and gossip columns, fell apart. He lost his Mercury Theater Company, his fabulous movie contract, his radio series, his marriage to Hollywood's greatest screen beauty. He became an outcast, left America, spent the final forty years of his life on a myriad of personal works, returning to this country to make money to enable him to fuel his WORK, always ambitious for one more attempt at Hollywood greatness.
All of us who care will know the oft-repeated facts of Welles' life.
But Chris Welles gives us more: the image of his little daughter, playing alone on the sands of Malibu Beach, plunging heedlessly, confidently, into the surf, thinking of her father. That image is worth a thousand "facts."
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". . . and maggie discovered a shell that sang / so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles . . . ."
Chris Welles reprises the highs and lows of her life with personal anecdotes, and weaves into them her own struggle to emerge from her father's emotional domination, to cast off the discouraging attitudes of her elders, the disappointment of her first marriage; to achieve her own independence as an Encyclopedia Britannica Senior Editor, and as a respected professional writer (a bit ironically) of children's books (THE BRAIN QUEST SERIES, almost two dozen various units). But not until after she has come to terms with her father's death does she fully appreciate the artistry of Orson Welles' creations and interests. In that task, she is helped by such equally loyal spear carriers as Jeff Wilson and Roger Ryan of Wellesnet.com; Norman Corwin, Welles' mentor in the Golden Age of Radio; Producer of the unreleased THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, Dominique Antoine; Curator Stefan Droessler of the Munich Film Museum; her only true functional parents, Skipper and Hortense Hill; and a major heroine, Oja Kodar, the great love and artistic partner of Orson Welles' later life. It is Oja, through her own fierce love, who proves to be for Chris Welles Feder the most understanding of what it meant to exist as Orson Welles' daughter. Through her, Chris learns of the esteem in which Welles is held by people of taste and passion around the earth. She also learns of a grandson which Welles himself never knew, the son her half-sister Rebecca never met as an adult.
[See PRODIGAL SONS, 2008.]
During her epiphany, Chris then created over a period of six years, following on from the grief over her father's death, a marvelous volume of poetry (privately printed): THE MOVIE DIRECTOR. It is a cohesive psychodrama of her struggle to understand her experience and milieux -- a book worthy of comparison with Browning, Edwin Arlington Robinson, or Edgar Lee Masters' SPOON RIVER. It should be reprinted for a wider audience.
Most of us, one way or another, have heard of Welles' few early masterpieces recognized by the World -- but not those works which consumed his later life. If we did not, during his lifetime, at least, he always tried to be there, in the press, in the columns, in the photo magazines, or on late night TV, trying to tell us about them -- building upon his legend, long after it had lost much of its luster -- showing his latest results, announcing new plans, telling ironic and increasingly self-deprecating stories about his childish neglect of details, promising to go on forever, always upward. We may follow his progress as he passed from leading man status to that of a dominant character actor, putting on weight steadily, until he was at times a parody of himself and his best roles, and increasingly a huckster. Always ploughing his earnings back into THE WORK (and, yes, sometimes a couple of good steaks or liters of vintage red wine). Then, though he had been ill with heart, lung, and kidney problems for decades, had been confined to a wheelchair in order to travel for five years, suddenly, it seemed to many, this big, commanding individual, still a genius in our minds, was dead at seventy.
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In a sense, Welles was like a movie cut in staccato-like CITIZEN KANE fashion, rather than in the long takes which made up TOUCH OF EVIL. Chris Welles' gives us both styles in parts of her book, possibly most of all, over the entirety of IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW, a combination of the two styles, like the method he used in his second greatest masterpiece, F FOR FAKE.
Christopher Welles Feder may consider Frank Brady's book the best one about her father (as she believes CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, his Shakespearean lament for rejected filial love, to be his best film), but whatever others may say, I'm convinced that IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW is the most informative study from a personal perspective of Orson Welles that we are likely to have. Chrissie was there "at the beginning, [almost] before the beginning," but as she so brilliantly and movingly admits, Christopher Welles Feder was not there at "the end." The True End for her came after her father's passing, in a flood of understanding and acceptance. And she labors to reveal how she gradually understood, long after his death, the Orson Welles most of us know a bit about. But the heart of IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW lets us partake in the often unrequited, sometimes neglected, but always proud and magically transforming love she maintained for her father. That experience provides us the empathy and insight no outside observer now alive can fully equal.
Chris Feder builds on half a dozen or so periods when she was with . . . not just Orson Welles . . . but her father. The young and yearning daughter, now a successful professional writer, will always "have Paris" with him.
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". . . For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) / it’s always ourselves we find in the sea. . . ."
To sum up, in that proverbial seashell, what is at the heart of IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW? What puzzles remain?
For myself, I think the most profound truth that Chris Welles reveals is when she attends with her father in London a private, personal screening room projection of THE THIRD MAN. [His star performance (as Harry Lime) is his best remembered, better regarded by far than his most distinguished movie characterization of Falstaff in his little known CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, and as remarked upon as his Charles Foster Kane, for which he will always be remembered.] When the lights come up, Orson Welles, still a handsome leading man in his mid-thirties, asks his excited 13 year-old daughter, "But what did you think of Harry Lime?"
Chris loves the skulduggery of THE THIRD MAN's suspense, but she doesn't like the idea that her father was the villain of the picture. And so, as if to cheer him up, she rationalizes, "I know he was bad and deserved to be caught, but I still felt sorry for him at the end."
". . . You mean you couldn't help liking him in spite of the terrible things he'd done?"
She nodded "vigorously."
"Well, that's wonderful, Christopher. That's what makes this movie work and any other one, for that matter -- that you can feel sympathy for the villain."
Welles is delighted.
THE KID HAS GOTTEN IT!
He always believed, as most actors do, that villains were more interesting than heroes, but the trick, he has told her, is to leave the audience some sympathy for the wrongdoer. That remark is a deeply telling observation by Orson Welles the Creator, the Actor and the Man himself.
And then, Chrissie asks her father if he liked Harry Lime.
"Like him? I HATE him! . . . He's utterly cold and without passion."
And here is the moral judgment and self-condemnation that we hear a score of Orson Welles characters express: Charles Foster Kane, Franz Kindler, Macbeth, Gregorie Arkadin, Hank Quinlan . . . .
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IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW is well-illustrated with photos, some of them quite rare, a number of which most of us have never seen before.
And what about those included photos? What do they tell us? What questions do they leave?
A number of times, they show us a Chrissie Welles who is utterly proud to be even in the proximity of her father. Her body language in those pictures conveys almost so much as her words do.
And what questions do the text and photos' leave?
Well, the text, even between the lines, is clear, sensitive, and in the end, triumphant.
And questions raised by the photos?
Not many.
Well, p. 22: Who is that man, the porcine, villainous Glenn Anders? What does he symbolize? He stands close beside the hero of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, two-fisted "Black Irish" Welles (in a yachting outfit), on a tourist trail, high above the "bright, guilty world" of Acapulco, while little Chrissie is "buying ice cream" during a scene which Welles would discard from the picture? Who was Glenn Anders' Villain, George Grisby, really? Who or what was he supposed to represent?
And then, on p. 277, there is a photo taken at a posthumous retrospective in Locarno, Italy. The picture shows Welles' last Magic Teacher Abe Dickson, Munich Film Museum Curator Stefan Droessler, his collaborator Oja Kodar, her sister Nina Palinkas, Cinematographer Gary Graver, and "Alexander Welles."
Who is Alexander Welles? Is he the Dimitrios Makropolous, the Third Man, of Chris Welles' story? Is he, aka Sasha Welles, Alex Welles or THE Sasa Welles? At least one of them wrote about his music video creations:
"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
Is he another prodigal son searching for a father? Is he continuing to edit THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, as he is so credited in the IMDB? Possibly, Alexander Welles is all of the above.
Just those damnable speculations again --
Only The Shadow, Larry French, Todd Baesen, or Wellesnet denisons may know for sure! And finally, the Big Question: What HAS happened to Welles' potentially great but uncompleted picture about a despairing movie director, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND?
Chris Welles Feder answers more personal, indeed more human questions with IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW: A DAUGHTER REMEMBERS ORSON WELLES. We must be patient to learn the ineffable answers to other enigmas.
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In bookstores and at Amazon now!
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After you have read Mrs. Feder's memoir, perhaps you would like to check out Wellesnet.com for more information about films written, directed and starring Orson Welles.
The daughter of Hollywood icon Orson Welles presents a moving and insightful look at life in the shadow of a legendary figure. Illustrations throughou...More at Buy.com
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