In My Father's Shadow by Chris Welles Feder Read Free Book Online

studio.
    My mother had readily agreed to my accompanying my father every day during the three-week period it would take to film
Macbeth
. “I can’t think of a better way for you to spend your summer vacation or to get to know Orson,” she told me. Then I overheard her telling Charlie, “I think Orson’s finally taking an interest in Chrissie.”
    So it was with high hopes that I stood shivering in the driveway, listening to the ocean pound through the morning fog, and waited for Shorty, as we called my father’s driver, never wondering if the name might offend him. Shorty was a hunchbacked dwarf who drove with blocks of wood strapped to his feet so he could reach the pedals. His real name was George Chirello, and he would also have a part in
Macbeth
, which was fast becoming a family enterprise. I was a bit afraid of this sour little man who rarely spoke to me, though he always jumped down and held the door until I had plopped myself in the backseat beside my father. Seat belts had not yet been invented, and the opening and shutting of windows still required a human hand to turn the handle. As I tended to get carsick, especially when the car reeked of cigarsmoke, I could not open a window fast enough. I rode with my nose sticking out the window as though I were a dog instead of a nine-year-old girl dressed up like a Scottish lad from the time of the Druids.

    “Christopher, if you insist on being in
Macbeth
, you’ll have to be a little boy.”
    So we set out from Santa Monica and tore along to the studio, the sun barely risen, the highway almost deserted. Except for a grim-faced Shorty at the wheel, I was alone with the big, handsome man I called Daddy. I had been saving up so many things to tell him, things that would make him laugh. Here was my chance to shine, and he was staring out the window or making doodles on the script on his lap. I had not known until that moment that a person could be sitting right next to you and yet be as far away as the moon. Was he displeased that I had clamored for a part in
Macbeth
and, before that, in
The Lady from Shanghai
? I did not know how to tell him what I really wanted: to move from the periphery of his attention to the center of his world.
    At the time I was too young to understand that my father had much to preoccupy him on our daily drives to the studio. After the box-office failure of his masterwork,
Citizen Kane
, followed by the equally unpopular
TheMagnificent Ambersons
, most of the major Hollywood studios wanted nothing to do with the art films of Orson Welles. They had all turned down his proposal for
Macbeth
. Anything by Shakespeare was far too highbrow for the average moviegoer. Then Welles’s notion of turning this antiquated tale into a horror movie was “just plain screwy,” even if there was a ghost in it, along with a series of grisly murders.
    To be able to make his
Macbeth
, my father had struck a near impossible deal with Republic Pictures, a small, low-budget studio that churned out Grade B Westerns. He had agreed to film his picture in twenty-one days. The result was pandemonium on Republic’s Stage 11, where most of
Macbeth
was shot, and yet—and how this amazed me as a child—my father remained calm and in full command throughout it all. Though he often had to yell to make himself heard, he was the unflappable general issuing orders to the troops in the din and smoke of battle.
    My notions of moviemaking had been formed the year before in Acapulco, where shooting had moved at an easy pace, with midday breaks for five-course lunches and an afternoon siesta. Sometimes, between takes, my father had told ribald stories that made everyone laugh but that I was too young to understand. If I had been bored at times, I had also been outdoors in Acapulco and free to wander around most of the day. Here in Hollywood, I was confined all day long in a hot, stuffy sound stage. At least eight sets were crammed under one roof, and they seemed to be in