Film blogOrson Welles

For Orson Welles's daughter, the world was her oyster

What's most impressive about Christopher Welles Feder's memoir of her unconventional childhood in the shadow of the Hollywood titan is how gracefully she appears to have emerged from it

In summer 1947, Orson Welles took his 10-year-old daughter to lunch at the Brown Derby in Hollywood. She asked for a hamburger and a vanilla milkshake. "Again?" sighed Welles as he mulled the gazpacho and the lobster bisque. "Why don't you be more adventurous today? How about some oysters?" Dismissing the girl's objections, he ordered a dozen and coached her through the protocol required to knock a couple down the hatch before allowing her to proceed to her burger and shake, lesson learned. "You have to try things in life, Christopher."

Conventionality was hardly an option for Christopher Welles Feder. Even if she hadn't been given a male name – hard not to think of A Boy Named Sue – her father's monstrous fame would have spared her the option of an average life. No one else's memoir could begin, as Welles Feder's new book In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles does, with the line: "The first time I saw Rita Hayworth, my father was sawing her in half." Nor has any other child visited a castle to play with the person whose supposed besmirchment in her father's movie had ignited a media firestorm – as Christopher did at Hearst Castle following her mother's remarriage to the nephew of Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst's lover and model for Citizen Kane's Susan Alexander.

Hard, come to that, to think of another 10-year-old whose feelings of filial inadequacy included the sneaking suspicion that she wasn't a good enough murder victim. When, during a visit to the set of her father's film of Macbeth, she pleaded for a role, Welles put that masculine name to good use and cast her as Macduff's doomed son. Wanting real menace, he instructed her assailant to make thick his blood – "Now hit Christopher hard this time. Take two!" – but offered no words of approval or appreciation when she surfaced from her pummelling.

It was an extreme example of the roiling emotions Welles's inconstant charisma provoked in his daughter, who craved his attention but not always its consequences; at moments like this, or indeed the meal at the Brown Derby, she writes, "the euphoria of being with my father became infused with anxiety". Similarly, pride in his work was tempered by jealousy of fans' demands on his attention.

Many adolescent girls fall a little in love with Daddy. It's easy to romanticise him if he's away a lot; easier if, when he does find time for you, it involves Christmas in St Moritz, lunch with the Oliviers or a private screening of his latest picture at Shepperton. Easier still if – and the real treasure of the book is how she gets this across – to be with him at the Sistine Chapel or the Tower of London or Las Ramblas is to have the treasures of the world unpacked before you with the erudition, vibrancy and wonder of the outrageously precocious child Welles in some ways remained all his life. And how much harder for that adolescent girl to endure that beautiful man-child's failure to show up for a year or two at a stretch; and then to bear his rejection when he narcissistically reads betrayal into her acquiescence, aged 16, to her mother's insistence that she rebuff his unreliable attentions.

Their relationship would never again be as intimate or enthralling as those adolescent vacations, though they would eventually establish cordial adult terms and, after his death, she would learn to stop defining herself in terms of his opinion. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of In My Father's Shadow is Christopher's ability in retrospect to appreciate her father's gifts and forgive his failings – not by subscribing to Orsonian exceptionalism and accepting that his genius excused him the obligations of a parent ("I had heard the same argument all my life and it didn't make me feel any less lonely or abandoned"), but by accepting his selfishness without taking it personally: "I knew that whenever I surfaced in his mind, his impulses toward me were kind, generous and loving." That gracious "whenever" testifies to a lifetime of emotional heavy lifting leavened by a father's legacy that has nothing to do with fame or the movies: a recognition, born out in Christopher's adult life, of the joy that comes from meeting the world with respect, intelligence, curiosity and enthusiasm. In other words, why not try the oysters?

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