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

in
Macbeth
sound like Scotsmen?”) I knew a few Scots words from Marie, who called me “lassie” and “my wee bairn” when she was pleased with me — and “madam” when she wasn’t—but even Marie might have had a hard time understanding Lady Macbeth. Her famous line, “Out, damned spot. Out, I say!” sounded more like, “Oot, demmed spat. Oot, ay seh!”
    Jerry and I began sneaking out of our sound stage and running over to a nearby lot where the filming of a B Western was in progress. What a swell picture this was! Why couldn’t my daddy make a Western? I must remember to ask him on a day when I was feeling especially brave. Meanwhile, we kids in our tartan plaids watched the hero on the white horse thunder into town in a cloud of dust. We watched him shoot it out, alone and unafraid, with the bad guys in the black hats. Through countless takes we held our breath while he knocked out one of the bad guys and then threw him like a sack of rotting onions through the saloon’s swinging doors. Each time the villain landed in the dust, we cheered. After the gloom and confusion of
Macbeth
, what a relief to be in the Wild West. Here was a Main Street we knew by heart, with its noisy saloon, its barbershop with the red and white striped pole, its wooden Indian, and its hitching posts for the horses peeing in the great outdoors.
    Finally I was called to do my scene with Lady Macduff, who was played by Peggy Webber, known in her radio days as “the Girl with One Thousand Voices.” She was an attractive blond with corkscrew curls, and our scene went smoothly. It was all a lark to me, and I felt quite at home in front of the camera.
    The following day my father explained to me that I was to run as fast as I could down a corridor, because a murderer was chasing after me, knife in hand. I was to scream and look terrified. At the end of the corridor, I was to fall facedown on a mattress while the murderer plunged a rubber knife into my back. “Have you got all that, Christopher?”
    “Yes, Daddy.”
    “Okay. Let’s roll ’em. Take one.” I did everything he had told me to do, but at the end of the take, he was yelling, “No! No! No!” Luckily, he wasn’t yelling at me but at the actor playing my assassin. “You’re handling her much too gingerly. You’ve got to make it look like you’re
killing
her!”
    “But, Orson, I don’t want to hurt your kid,” the actor protested.
    “Forget she’s my kid and remember you’re a
murderer
, not Margaret O’Brientouching a hot stove!” my father thundered. “Now hit Christopher hard this time. Take two!”
    As I listened to this exchange, a chill came over me. Didn’t my father care if I got hurt? We did the scene several more times. I got pounded on the back but not so hard that I couldn’t take it, and finally my father-director was satisfied. I scrambled to my feet and looked up at him expectantly, but already he was turning away and talking with his assistant. At that moment, the fun and excitement I had felt at being in Daddy’s movie drained out of me.
    I asked myself:
Do I really want to spend my life cooped up on a sound stage, waiting for the director to get around to my scene?
Were weeks of being bored worth the few moments of elation when I stood before the camera, putting my whole heart into it? Maybe I didn’t have to be in the movies like my father, Rita, Aunt Geraldine, and most of the grown-ups I knew. There must be some other way I could make my father proud of me . . .

2

Orson’s Kid
    “W HEN ’ S D ADDY COMING TO see us again?” I had bounded into my mother’s room early in the morning and settled myself at the foot of her huge double bed. The best time to approach her was while she was having breakfast on a tray. She looked wan and a bit frail without makeup, her fine blond hair in a tangle.
    “I don’t know, Chrissie.”
    “We haven’t seen him in such a long time. Can we call him, Mommy?”
    “I
have
called him!” She smashed