In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers by Chris Welles Feder

Orson Welles was, to put it mildly, multifaceted; to the degree, indeed, that his personality almost fails to cohere. The result is that there are many Orsons; everyone who came across him adds another, and each insists that theirs is the real one. To the swelling genre of what might be called "My Orson" books, In My Father's Shadow, by Welles's daughter from his first marriage, is a new and uncommonly valuable addition. When I interviewed her in 1989, only four years after her father's death, Welles Feder spoke to me almost apologetically about the fact that he was more of an absence than a presence in her life. Her book makes it clear that she was then just beginning to come to terms with the degree to which he had in fact dominated her life.

Her parents broke up when she was three; her mother, Virginia Nicholson, married again shortly afterwards, to a very close friend of Welles's, but then that marriage failed too, and Chris was packed off to stay with Welles's surrogate parents, his former headmaster Skipper Hill and his wife Hortense, for two years. Then she travelled to Rome to join her newly remarried mother. At this point, her life – interesting and varied, if not especially stable – took a sharp turn into nightmare. Her new stepfather, Major Jack Pringle, was a cold, harsh autocrat who saw it as his task to tame the bubbly, opinionated child he had reluctantly inherited. After Rome they went to live in South Africa, where the iniquities of colonial life shocked the liberal little girl. In due course she was sent to finishing school in Switzerland, to learn to type and get a husband, on the basis of her stepfather's conviction that she was neither interesting nor intelligent enough to go to college or have any sort of independent professional career. "You're a very ordinary person, and the sooner you accept that, the better off you will be," the major tells her.

Through all of this, she is allowed occasional glimpses of the father she adores. At first, her mother encourages him to be part of her life. She is swept up by him and taken for fabulous holidays, staying in five-star hotels with lakeside views, but then he has to go off and do things, and she is left, more often than not, with the secretary. Now and then she is allowed on to film sets. In The Lady from Shanghai he creates a scene for her that will never be in the film, but in Macbeth she gets to play one of Lady Macduff's murdered children. Welles shoots the scene over and over again, oblivious to her bruises. For the most part, though, he is adorable to her. She is his darling girl, clever and funny. "I am the happiest girl in the world at the moment," she writes to her grandmother. "I have seen a wonderful amount of my wonderful father." But it appears that, as in every other area of his life, his approach to parenting is Don Juan-like: his thrill is conquering her, winning her love, after which he disappears.

Her life with her mother and stepfather is hellish; and Florissant, her Swiss finishing school, is deadly dull. Her longing for her father begins to become an obsession. On one of her visits to him, he promises her that she can leave Florissant and go to the Sorbonne instead, while staying with him in Paris. When she hears about this, her mother turns, Welles Feder writes, into a witch, forcing her to choose between Orson and herself. "I can . . . brush aside your disloyalty to us as the by-product of your pathetic schoolgirl crush on Orson," she says in a letter, "but one thing I cannot tolerate is having a daughter who is a bloody fool." Orson, she tells her, will promise her the sun and moon and then leave her high and dry. Chris is stunned by this reaction, and further shocked by her kindly headmistress's intimation that her feelings for her father are "not natural or desirable". Finally she calls Orson and tells him that she can't see him for a while.

It is some years before father and daughter are reconciled. His death knocks her sideways, but she realises that a great burden has been lifted. She gradually begins to participate in Wellesian commemorative events, seeking to reclaim her heritage; she meets Welles's mistress, Oja Kodar, and they form a bond. It is hard not to feel that once again she has fallen prey to feelings that are not natural or desirable: "With Oja's hand in mine, I thought no one has loved him more generously or understood him more profoundly than the two of us. We saw, without malice or envy, what a towering figure he was . . . We are the ones who trace his silhouette against the sky."

Hers is a curious, somewhat disturbing and often very touching story. The book is intended partly to assert the success of her struggle for personal survival, partly to give the world her father as she knew him. The account of Welles she offers is genuinely revelatory: it shows him for the first time in the domestic situation, and there is nothing quite like that for exposing a man's complexities. The dynamics of his emotional life were, like everything else about him, unique. At the climax of his attempts to reclaim his daughter, the familial forces ranged against him were formidable, all roundly telling him off, a very common experience for him. There's something quite odd about this huge man being almost permanently on the carpet. Welles Feder tries to defend him, but can't quite make it stack up. "No matter how it might appear to my mother and others who saw him living it up in expensive hotels, he had little available cash to spend on himself or me," she writes, almost in the same sentence as describing his lakeside suites at the St Moritz and his use of the Tour d'Argent as his canteen. She thinks "he hasn't got a mean bone in his body", and then describes acts of casual cruelty and shamelessly manipulative behaviour.

She has chosen to recount her journey largely in dialogue, and admits that "while I may not have remembered them word for word, all the conversations I have recreated here took place in real life . . ." Sharp intake of breath from biographer. These worked-up conversations are rather flat and plodding, and are required to convey a great deal of background information. The book suddenly becomes much more gripping when Welles Feder is of an age when she can quote from contemporary letters she has written or received, giving riveting extracts from Welles's letters and contemporary journals. And she can write very well herself. The prologue vividly reports Welles's shabby, disorganised funeral in Los Angeles, and the first line of her first chapter is a cracker: "The first time I saw Rita Hayworth, my father was sawing her in half"; the book is full of illuminating details.

But at the end, the hyperbole can't be held back. In 2005, Welles Feder stands up at the Locarno festival and tells the audience what Welles had said to her, which proved to be the exact truth: "They may turn their backs on me now, but you wait and see, darling girl. They're gonna love me when I'm dead!" After the tsunami of applause this provokes has died down, she adds that the president of the festival had described Welles as "one of the greatest creative forces of the 20th century. And I agree!" The crowd screams its approval. Welles himself, who had a very shrewd idea of his own significance, would have been embarrassed. But the Wellesolators persist in ratcheting up his status to boost their own importance. And so it is, in the last analysis, with Chris Welles Feder: "I could feel waves of love rolling toward me, and it felt as though my whole life had been an arduous journey to this moment – but now I was here. I had arrived. Of course I knew that the ovation was for my father, but it was partly for me." This mawkish solipsism is indicative of the uncertainty of purpose of the book, but it remains an indispensable document.

Simon Callow's two-volume biography of Orson Welles is published by Vintage.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaGlnnZa%2FcH2SaKSyZZaWwamx0axkrKCRmby4ec6rqqimXayyrbjErA%3D%3D