In My Father's Shadow

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Contents

A Note to the Reader......................................................................XIPrologue..................................................................................1CHAPTER ONE Growing Up in Movieland.......................................................11CHAPTER TWO Orson's Kid...................................................................36CHAPTER THREE Going to Daddy's School.....................................................51CHAPTER FOUR My Father Lost and Found.....................................................74CHAPTER FIVE The Visits...................................................................95CHAPTER SIX Together Again................................................................120CHAPTER SEVEN The Phone Call..............................................................140CHAPTER EIGHT In His Absence..............................................................163CHAPTER NINE Reunion in Hong Kong.........................................................185CHAPTER TEN Reconnecting with My Father...................................................205CHAPTER ELEVEN The Final Years............................................................219CHAPTER TWELVE After His Death............................................................237CHAPTER THIRTEEN Meeting Oja Kodar........................................................250CHAPTER FOURTEEN "Darling girl, they're gonna love me when I'm dead!".....................269ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...........................................................................281PHOTO CREDITS.............................................................................283

Chapter One

The first time I saw Rita Hayworth, my father was sawing her in half. It was the final and most spectacular trick he performed on the opening night of his Mercury Wonder Show. It was August of 1943, the summer we were at war with Japan, and the magic show was for the benefit of our servicemen who were about to be shipped to the Pacific theater. It was held in a big circus tent erected on Cahuenga Boulevard in downtown Hollywood.

I can still smell the popcorn and the sawdust, still remember my excitement throughout the show, and how, unable to contain myself, I kept climbing up on my seat, ignoring my Scots nanny Marie who kept tugging on my dress and hissing, "Now you sit down again, madam, and behave yourself!" But I had to tell the people sitting in the row behind us, "That's my daddy up there. My daddy!" I had never seen him on the stage before that night.

Billed as Orson the Magnificent, he wore a fez and a voluminous black-and-white striped robe. He might look like the genie escaped from Aladdin's lamp, a genie whose smile seemed to say, "Be careful what you wish for," but his disguise didn't fool me, and I made sure, in spite of Marie's shushing, that it didn't fool anyone else within earshot. I was five years old that night, the perfect age for the magic arts of Orson Welles, or as he preferred to call them, "hocus-pocus, mumbo jumbo, and hanky-panky." I sat there enthralled while he swallowed fire, read minds, hypnotized a rooster, pulled a rainbow of knotted scarves out of his sleeve, made a bouquet of yellow roses appear in an empty vase and a white rabbit wiggle out of a black top hat. When a man in a turban and baggy pants marched out of the wings and aimed a rifle at him, I held my breath, then screamed when the gun went off and his head snapped back. Seconds later, Orson the Magnificent turned to face the audience, and there was the bullet caught between his teeth!

Then came the moment the troops had been waiting for. A shapely young woman with copper red hair appeared on the stage. Dressed in a skimpy harem outfit, she, too, might have stepped out of the Arabian Nights. The moment she was in full view, the servicemen in the audience went wild, stamping and cheering for Rita Hayworth, their favorite pinup girl. Then the dazzling redhead folded herself into a long, rectangular box until only her head and her feet stuck out from either end. At that point, Orson the Magnificent began to wield a horrific saw and presto! The box split down the middle! Rita's top half went spinning to one side of the stage while her bottom half took off in the other direction. Yet the severed head was still smiling; the feet with the pretty painted toenails were still wiggling. Then bingo, bango, her two halves were reunited and she emerged in one piece! (I never did learn how my father performed this trick. All he would tell me years later about his Mercury Wonder Show was that he was as proud of it as anything he ever did.)

After the show's opening night, Harry Cohn, Rita's tyrannical boss at Columbia Pictures, forced her to withdraw. He argued that if she were performing late at night in a magic show, she would be exhausted early the next morning, when she was due on the set of Cover Girl, the movie she was making at the time. Rita pleaded that, after spending sixteen weeks rehearsing for Orson's show, she couldn't let him or the troops down. She was sure she could do the magic show and also fulfill her contractual commitment on Cover Girl. (Although she was too modest to admit it, Rita's star power was the Mercury Wonder Show's biggest draw and would have ensured it a long run.) But Cohn remained deaf to Rita's pleas, reminding her that it was not the role of a contract star to decide where she would work but to do as she was told. Not only did Cohn have no intention of letting his studio's most profitable star stay up late every night, working for free, he was even more opposed to her having anything to do with Orson Welles. (By the time my father met Rita, his reputation in Hollywood had plummeted from "boy genius" to "enfant terrible.")

Rita was so furious with Cohn she was ready to walk out on him and Columbia, but my father persuaded her not to throw away her movie career for the sake of his show. Once Rita calmed down, she worried about who could possibly replace her at a moment's notice. That was when my father thought of his loyal friend, Marlene Dietrich, the femme fatale from Germany with the husky voice and the beautiful long legs. It was said that posters of Marlene were banned in Paris Metro stations because any Frenchman who spotted her legs was in danger of missing his train. In any event, when my father called Marlene about performing in his magic show, she simply said, "Come teach me the tricks, and I do it."

If Cohn was gloating that he had managed to save Rita Hayworth from the insidious charms of Orson Welles, he did not gloat long. Hollywood's gossip columnists let it be known that "Beauty and the Brain" had been seen dining at a table for two at Ciro's, Romanoff's, the Brown Derby, and other restaurants popular with the stars. They had been caught holding hands across the table and gazing soulfully into each other's eyes. The only question was when wedding bells were going to ring ...

They rang on September 7, 1943. During her lunch break from Cover Girl, Rita was whisked away in my father's chauffeured car before Harry Cohn could throw himself in front of the wheels. They were married in Santa Monica in what they hoped was going to be a quiet, civil ceremony....