NEW YORK — No posters or photographs of Orson Welles hang in the living room of his eldest daughter, Chris Welles Feder. His memory is preserved, imperfectly, through a shelf of books that Feder says have yet to capture her father’s many-sided life.
Feder, author of the popular “Brain Quest” series for young people, may be one of the reasons Welles’ story remains incomplete.
She acknowledges that she has had a hard time reconciling the genius of “Citizen Kane” with her dynamic, but distant father, who died in 1985.
But in recent years, she has reached her “great goal” of peace with Welles and found the words. In 2002, she privately published “The Movie Director,” a collection of poems. She now has written a memoir, “In My Father’s Shadow,” the darkened cover showing a gray, bearded Welles, hand holding a cigar before his mouth like an old king pointing a sword.
“I wanted to write a book that would give Orson Welles a human face,” said the 71-year-old Feder, interviewed on a rainy afternoon at her apartment in downtown Manhattan. “I wanted to show him with all his warts and holes, but also with the qualities that don’t come through in the other books.”
Her father’s spirit flickers in Feder’s eyes, but she more resembles her mother and Welles’ first wife, actress Virginia Nicolson. Feder’s features are refined, her voice light, her diction even and untheatrical.
Welles was married three times and had three daughters But Feder is the first blood relative to write about him.
In her memoir, Welles is a performer even in real life, a maker of bold entrances and sudden exits, a composite of his most famous characters — as imperious as Charles Foster Kane, as unknowable as Harry Lime of “The Third Man,” as wounded as Falstaff in “Chimes of Midnight.”
Growing up, Feder was awed by her father, wondering just where she fit in his life. They rarely lived under the same roof, and didn’t see each other for years at a time.
But when together, he would call her “darling girl,” and bring her for a day in the English countryside with Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
Feder writes about her famous stepmother, Rita Hayworth, remembers her brief times on the sets of his movies and confirms a rumored liaison Welles had with actress Geraldine Fitzgerald that nearly ended Feder’s life before it began.
Virginia Nicolson and Welles were fellow actors who met as teenagers, worked together in an early, unreleased Welles movie, “Hearts of Age” and eloped, in 1934, before either had turned 20.
In 1937, Virginia became pregnant with Chris and she and Welles moved to a farmhouse outside the city. Welles worried enough about his pregnant wife to suggest she keep company with Fitzgerald, whom he would soon cast for the theater in “Heartbreak House.”
Fitzgerald was apparently closer to Welles than his wife realized. She discovered letters from the actress that revealed they were having an affair. As Virginia Welles explained years later to her daughter, she tried to throw herself out of a hotel window, but couldn’t get it open.
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