Read In My Father's Shadow for Free Online Page A

benefit?”
    “Yes and no. We couldn’t stay mad at Orson, you see. Nobody could. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm . . .” My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. “Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated toward one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only sixteen. My God, Orson and I never even
went
to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me . . .” She gave her husky, ironic laugh. “But when it came to their personalities, they couldn’t have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn’t have Orson’s crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.”
    I returned my stepfather’s affection in full measure, but I never called him Charlie, not even when we reconnected later in our lives. Because he was prematurely bald and I had been two years old when he married my mother, I had concluded he must be very old and called him Granddaddy. He found this so funny he never let me call him anything else.
    Charlie had the doleful brown eyes and deadpan expression of a born comedian. Known in Hollywood as a master of screwball comedy, he was famous in his private life for playing practical jokes on the unsuspecting. Whenever we visited San Simeon, the grandiose castle William RandolphHearst had built on a hilltop in northern California, Charlie could not resist pulling the old man’s leg.
    “WR is the perfect fall guy,” I remember Charlie telling my father one evening while the adults were having martinis on the porch. Then, to illustrate his point, my stepfather launched into his favorite story. Late one night at San Simeon, when everyone else was asleep, Charlie stole out to the gardens and dressed the marble statues of naked women in bras and panties. Early the next morning when Hearst set out on his usual brisk walk before breakfast, he was brought up short by the underwear adorning his Greek nymphs and Roman goddesses. Who on earth would dare do such a thing? He began shouting for his companion, Marion Davies, who rarely emerged before noon, to come and see what had happened and to help find the culprit . . . as if he didn’t already know who it was. “The grand old gentleman stood there bothered and befuddled as each of his guests stumbled half-asleep into the garden and began to howl with laughter.” Charlie gave us his doleful, deadpan look, our cue to laugh as hard as the stumbling guests.
    During the months my father was our neighbor, he became Charlie’s willing accomplice. There was the night my mother and Charlie were giving an important dinner party for some high-powered studio executives and my father suddenly appeared outside our dining room windows. He had traded his bathing trunks for a dinner jacket, shirt, and tie. Freshly shaved, his wavy dark brown hair slicked back, he stood with his nose pressed against the glass like a wistful boy shut out of a candy store. My mother pretended not to notice. Then, dramatically clutching his stomach, my father began to whimper and groan.
    “Oh, do make him stop, Charlie!” My mother was near tears. “He’s ruining dinner for everyone!”
    “But, Virginia, you can see the poor wretch is starving.”
    “Make him go away!”
    “Well, I can’t turn away a man in a dinner jacket. It wouldn’t be civilized. We’ll have to invite him to join us.”
    “Oh, all right.” My mother had finally caught on that it was a gag. So had the dinner guests, who had fallen into an embarrassed silence but now erupted in gales of laughter, while Charlie calmly examined his fingernails, then