In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles

by Chris Welles Feder

Book Overview

Out of all the many stars and celebrities Hollywood has produced, only a handful have achieved the fame--and, some would say, infamy--of Orson Welles, the creator and star of what is arguably the greatest American film, Citizen Kane. Many books have been written about him, detailing his achievements as an artist as well his foibles as a human being. None of them, however, has gotten so close to the real man as does Chris Welles Feder's beautifully...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565125991
• ISBN13: 9781565125995
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Waiting for Welles

Christopher Feder has written a compelling memoir about her life as the oldest child of Orson Welles. Hers is a story of great joys and perhaps greater disappointments as she repeatedly seeks the love and approval of her largely absent, larger-than-life father. The book contains wonderful stories about growing up in Hollywood. It also shows the degree to which Federer came into her own as a person and writer and, fortunately for us, out of the shadow of her father.

Visionary in More Ways Than One

Having torn through my copy of Mrs. Feder's work, a book that in all honesty I purchased on a lark, I am both stunned and profoundly moved by her story and the story of her father. Mrs. Feder's memoir is not just the memoir of a famous individual, but the memoir of her father, and it is this aspect - a daughter reflecting on the influence of her father - that truly brings this book to life. Because of Welles's frequent absences due to divorce, work, and other family drama, Feder must reconstruct her father; she must fill in the gaps between the man she knows, the man others know, and the man the world admires. Hence, in one memoir, we are treated to family anecdotes, saucy gossip, and painful truth revealed and embraced over time. As one who grew up in a similar environment, Feder's insights into her father helped me see my family in a new and more rounded perspective. For film buffs and amateurs, In My Father's Shadow, is a beautiful and moving book. Ironically, it is a book screaming to be made into a movie. It is hoped that Mrs. Feder will write another book soon.

Wonderful!

This is a wonderful book. How I hated for it to end. I have read many biographies of Orson Welles but I think I learned more about him from this book then from them all together. I thank Chris Welles Feder for writing it and letting us into her very personal world in the shadow of her father. (Sorry I just had to use her words here.) No wonder it took her 6 years to get it to print, it is so deeply touching I am sure it took a personal toll on her to relive some of the memories. Her love for her father and her struggle to come to terms with her life with this extraordinary man are something that will stay with me a long time to come. Thank you Chris Welles Feder.

ANGEL AT THE GATE

All the quotes above spell out what Chris Welles Feder does in this memoir about her childhood, youth and later years with Daddy Orson. I have no quarrel with them. I do question Richard Masloski's sigh for the parts Chris Welles Feder left out of her book. After a few pages it's clear that she's not doing a Simon Callow take on Life with Father and you accept her choice to avoid dense passagework about other leading figures in his life that would distract from what she sets out to do: tell us about her life with father and in his shadow. Wellesians know most of this stuff already---I have a library of maybe fifty books about Welles (1915-1985), and well over 400 of his radio shows, not to mention the usual stuff saved on tape, laser disk and so on, having first become enraptured by him as The Shadow back in 1938 or so. Now that I've read her book it's clear though what a loss I'd suffer not having read her. She must be read, not just as the angel at her father's gate, but also to enjoy her agonies along with her as she offers her heartfelt vision of Welles's soul. I quote below the passage in the book that moved me most, although I got weepy in other places as well. In his early teens Welles was sent to the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois where he first began mounting shows larger than his puppet theatre and began editing Shakespeare for Todd productions. The school was run by Skipper and Granny Hortense Hill, whom Orson took to as godparents and kept in touch with the rest of his life. Later, Chris herself was sent to Todd for two early teen years as the only girl at the boys school. When Granny Hill died during Orson's final years above earth, he wrote a eulogy to be read at her memorial service, which Chris started to read to the attendees at the service, but then broke down and Orson's eulogy had to be read by Chris's husband Irwin. I find Orson's voice in this eulogy to be the greatest possible corrective to thoughts of him as a witless sybarite or that his genius had failed him. I might add that his final film appearance---in the pseudo-documentary "Henry Jaglom's Someone to Love" (1987)---also shows us Welles at his most spellbinding, personal, profound and dazzling---and is, I might add, a corrective to the Welles raconteur marionette suit he wore on his last night alive on the Merv Griffin Show with his biographer Barbara Leaming. Here is his eulogy for Granny Hill: Children. .. and then children. . .and then children after them. . .Like the seed of Father Abraham, it does almost seem that the descendants of Mother Hortense are to be numbered as are the sands of the desert. Her adopted children are truly beyond counting. For myself, I don't believe I can lay claim to more than an honorary membership in that community. A semi-orphan with something to a surplus of foster parents before I even went to Todd, I was, in my childhood, determined to rid myself of childhood, a condition I conceived to be a pestilential h

Compelling Memoir

For anyone who is an avid Wellesian, this is a completely compelling memoir written with passion, frustration, ultimate consummation and undying love by Orson Welles' first of three daughters - Christopher. The memories move...and are moving. The remarkable Mrs. Feder has chronicled herein a most varied and interesting life, moving from shadow to spotlight in being the daughter (again, the first) of the man I (along with many, many others) consider America's greatest film director...as well as its most shamefully neglected (within his lifetime). It is not the authoress' intention in this memoir to chronicle the cinematic career of her fabulous father - but his battles for the integrity of his films (especially the made-in-America "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Touch of Evil") are every bit as desperate and needful and agonized as are his daughter's dilemmas by way of the demands of decision imposed upon her whilst still a child as to who to choose to love: congenially controlling father...or bitter, chain-smoking, controlling mother. While on-the-surface it would seem a complete blessing to be born to such a famous personage, in reading these memoirs we learn that for everything one gains, one also loses...and that the seemingly best of blessings may very well carry curses... by way of other people's baggage. The book is beautifully designed with the perfect half-lit, half-shadowed Rembrandtesque photo of Orson Welles for the topic at hand - and that is showing the shadow and light of his presence and non-presence in his daughter's life. (How ironic that he played "The Shadow" on radio!) There are also many wonderful photos and illustrations illumining the text in all the exact, purposeful places. This is a sensitive, touching, tragic and triumphant memoir. The beginning description of Orson Welles' sad, seedy funeral nearly brought tears to my eyes...and made me think of the veritably unheralded tugging away of Falstaff's enormous casket at the end of Welles' masterpiece "Chimes at Midnight," a portent of the director's own empty-seeming end. But having been so gripped by the people who live within the pages of this book, I wanted to know...what happened to them all. Though not the book's central purpose - which is that of a father and daughter relationship - I really wanted to know what happened to the first Mrs. Orson Welles, Chris' mother who is such a controlling presence throughout much of the book...as well as her third husband, the demeaning, condescending Mr. Pringle. What happened to "Skipper" Hill? Rita Hayworth (the second Mrs. Welles) is in Chris' life for quite-a-bit, but then completely vanishes. Surely, Chris must have known and felt something about the ultimate sad fate of the famous actress: these feelings would have been of deep value to the memoir. I also wonder what happened to the third Mrs. Welles and Orson Welles' third and last daughter. And the mystery of Orson Welles' brother Richard - surely, if ther