Read In My Father's Shadow for Free Online

long enough
, I thought,
he’ll look up and notice me
…
    It did happen. “Hello, darling girl! How’s my clever daughter today?” His voice was so welcoming that I began to tell him at once and in great detail how I was. I never felt more intelligent, more sure of myself, than when I was alone with my father and had his full attention. Then I could tell him anything, and he listened, not as one listens to a child but as though he were hearing a younger version of himself. This was heady stuff, and to have such moments with my father made me hunger for more.
    D URING THE MONTHS he lived next door, my father had an open invitation to wander over to our house whenever he pleased. He and my mother seemed perfectly friendly, at least in my presence, and he also seemed to be great pals with my stepfather, Charlie Lederer. No one observing them together would have guessed that my mother and Charlie had sued my father for an increase in my child support. In fact, they had taken him to court several times, the judge had ruled in their favor, my father had agreed to an increase, and then it had never materialized. Finally Mother and Charlie had given up, and so it was back to “Orson, darling!” and a daily invitation to join them in the ritual of martinis on the front porch at sunset.
    My father was well aware that Charlie Lederer was not only a highly paid screenwriter who could easily afford my upkeep, he was also the nephew of movie star Marion Davies, one of the wealthiest women in Hollywood and the mistress of the press baron William Randolph Hearst. Charlie was destined to inherit Marion’s fortune, whereas my father was fated to be short of cash his entire life. It was not that he didn’t earn enormous sums, whether asan actor in other people’s movies, a radio personality, or a lecturer traveling around the country. For a radio appearance alone, he might earn as much as three thousand dollars, a lot of money in the 1940s. In fact, his annual earnings were reported to be the highest in show business, which had prompted my mother and Charlie to sue him in the first place.

    Orson as Rochester in
Jane Eyre
(1944) with Joan Fontaine in the title role.
    As my mother saw it, “Orson’s hopeless with money and couldn’t save a nickel if you held a gun to his head.” In her eyes, his huge earnings were sucked into oblivion like elephants disappearing in quicksand. She did not want to acknowledge that it was Orson’s passion for making movies and his other vital concerns that consumed most of his income. As one example, after making a hundred thousand dollars when he starred in
Jane Eyre
as Mr. Rochester, one of the few times in his movie career that he played the romantic lead, he spent every penny of it developing footage for
It’s All True
, a doomed documentary he shot in Brazil that was never released. And when his artistic imperatives didn’t empty the coffers, his altruistic impulses did. In 1943 he had lavished forty thousand dollars of his own capital on the MercuryWonder Show, which servicemen saw for free. Before the show closed, it entertained close to fifty thousand troops stationed in the Los Angeles area. In September of 1944 he joined the Democratic Party’s effort to reelect President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a fourth term. Orson Welles gave campaign speeches all over the map, donating his fame to the cause and paying his own travel expenses.
    That my father was somehow finding the money to campaign for Roosevelt while evading his responsibility to me made my mother furious. “Charlie adored you,” she told me years later. “He was sweet about paying for anything you needed, including those braces on your teeth which cost a pretty penny, I can tell you!” Her blue-gray eyes flashed with an anger the intervening years had not diminished. “It was terribly unfair of Orson to let Charlie pick up the tab for you!”
    “But you were all so friendly,” I recalled. “Was it just an act for my