In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles
by Chris Welles Feder
Rating: 3.0/5.0
Algonquin Books
As an actor, director, beleaguered genius and notorious expatriate, Orson Welles has been celebrated and scrutinized countless times in the public arena. But in Chris Welles Feder's new book, it is Orson Welles the father -- a figure rarely seen, and a role to which the actor never fully warmed -- that we are invited to view through the intimate lens of a child's eyes. As Feder's title suggests, however, theirs was an intimacy continually interrupted and stunted by the encompassing shadow of Welles' iconic persona. Part memoir, part filial love letter, and at times a vehicle for Feder's residual frustration with Welles, In My Father's Shadow is thus a patchwork of childhood recollections and mature realizations by a daughter seeking to reconcile the many sides of a man -- the "dad" of her dreams, the brilliant icon she worshiped, the absent parent she yearned to please - into a worthy memory of the father she loved.
Feder's story begins in a predictable vein: recalling the day of her father's death and detailing the occasion of his funeral, she expresses at once her great love and acute sense of loss, her protective instinct over her father's legacy -- but also an undercurrent of doubt and disappointment that threatens to (wait for it) overshadow even her fondest memories. The developmental groundwork thus laid, she is now free to whisk us back in time; and we find ourselves surrounded by starlets and old Hollywood splendor in Feder's account of "growing up in movieland." What seems likely to be a fairytale picture, however, (complete with none other than a winsome Rita Hayworth for a stepmother, frolicsome afternoons in luxury backyard swimming pools, and the antics of a cocker spaniel called Pookles) swiftly falls out of joint. Feder reveals her all too early exposure to the underbelly of Orson's lifestyle with a seemingly artless subtlety, dropping betrayal, disappointment, philandering and alcoholism into the narrative as par for the course; but as she begins to grow up, we see that, like the smoldering cigarettes her resentful mother obliterates in the ashtray every time Chris asks after her father, each instance burns small but indelible holes in her confidence - holes that will take her years to repair.
Things go on like this for awhile. Saddled with a boy's name (when she asks him why, Orson skirts the gender issue and proudly replies, "Christopher Welles...your name has a marvelous ring to it, don't you think?"), a stint at her father's all-male alma mater and a truly awful stepfather, the stalwart young Feder nevertheless struggles to make friends, be happy and turn a blind eye to her beloved father's multitudinous failings as a parent. But told as they are -- with a patchy, almost childishly erratic tendency -- the emotional highs and lows of this period sometimes lose direction; and it is not until her life takes a turn independent of (though by no means uninfluenced by) Orson that Feder's story begins to come into its own; to peek its head out from under Welles' domineering mantle and take on the world with a strong, distinct voice.
To put it simply, this is when the book gets really good. With age and experience, Feder's speaker achieves enough distance from her subject to offer genuine insight into his world without losing track of her own unique and utterly fascinating life story. What's more, it becomes clear that Feder the writer is an autonomous and accomplished being, one who doesn't even remotely need to draw upon her role as "Orson's kid" or her time "growing up in movieland" for the sake of material. Her work in this book, then, really is to remember - to remember, reconstruct, and redeem her father with and in spite of the joy, inspiration, isolation and heartbreak that alternately defined their relationship. By the final chapters of In My Father's Shadow, she unquestionably succeeds; and we are left with a heartfelt, colorful, adventurous and oftentimes very funny account, not only of Feder's life, but of the lives of many who heretofore existed behind the great cinema icon and who are now brought forward to stand proudly alongside his imposing silhouette.
by Lauren Westerfield
