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

continuous motion, pieces being hauled from one spot to another, like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle pulled apart and reassembled. The crew never stopped hollering, “Look out! Watch your backs! Coming through!” At least three scenes were being shot at the same time, just one of the Wellesian ways to make a picture in twenty-one days. There were no long breaks for meals, no time for racy jokes, and boredom was a liability. I had to be alert every minute not to trip over a cable or be knocked to the floor by a piece of heavy equipment “coming through.”
    I had never seen my father work so intensely or sweat so profusely. Where did all his joyous energy come from? How was he able, at one and the same time, to direct the picture, play the title role, and hand-hold any actor who needed a word of encouragement? How, in the midst of nonstop frenzy, did he know exactly what was going on at every moment in every corner of the studio? One day, as I was watching him perform in one of his scenes with Lady Macbeth, he suddenly yelled, “Cut!” and rushed over to a set on the other side of the sound stage. Out of the corner of one eye, he had seen something hedidn’t like. “Your daddy has eyes in the back of his head,” one crew member told me with a mock grimace. “I don’t think he’s human.”
    “Yeah, he’s the human fly,” joked another. “Watch your back now, little lady . . .”
    Of all the scenes I watched in the making, I was most impressed by the banquet scene attended by Banquo’s ghost. The heavy wooden table was piled high with platters of real food, pewter pitchers, and goblets. Suddenly the ghost appeared, and in terror Macbeth sprang to his feet, upended the table, and sent the food and dishware clattering to the floor. Then he did the scene again. Again. And yet again. Between takes, assistants scrambled to collect the scattered food, pitchers, and goblets and put them back on the table exactly as they were before. How was my daddy able to upend that heavy table take after take without showing any sign of exhaustion? I was awestruck.
    When I came to realize the rocky cliffs were made of cardboard, the wind came from a wind machine, and the sky was a painted backdrop, I understood how Dorothy must have felt when she discovered the Wizard of Oz was a fake. On the other hand, the horses were very real and they peed all day long on the flimsy sets. By the end of the day, the stench was unbearable.
    So this was life in the movies: waiting out the day in a hot, itchy costume while holding my nose from the stink of horse pee. “When are they going to do my scene?” I kept asking anyone who would stop long enough to talk to me, but no one seemed to know, not even my stepfather. Barely recognizable in his creepy makeup as one of the three ghouls, Charlie delighted in pouncing on me with a fiendish cackle that never failed to make me scream. I was beginning to wish I had never begged my father to give me a part in
Macbeth
.
    I was thankful when another young actor arrived on Stage 11 and soon became my boon companion. A few years older than I was and several heads taller, Jerry Farber had been engaged to play the part of Fleance, Banquo’s son. “I’ve been in lots of pictures already,” he told me with undisguised pride, “because I’m a professional child actor.” I did not envy him. The time he had spent on sound stages had given Jerry a pale and spindly look. Now he studied our barely controlled commotion with a practiced eye and decided
Macbeth
was going to be “a big flop.” Even if you could figure out what was going on, you couldn’t understand half of what the actors were saying. They were speaking in a heavy Scots brogue. (My father maintained that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would not understand the overly refined English accentscultivated by Old Vic actors. “It’s marvelous when a well-spoken Irishman or a Scotsman does Shakespeare,” he told me. “Why shouldn’t all the Scotsmen