IN MY FATHER’S SHADOW

One of Orson Welles’s daughters spins a sad, self-serving story about her few but intense times with her globetrotting father.

Feder—the author of the Brain Quest series for children—is the daughter of Welles and his first wife, Virginia Nicholson, who divorced two years after she was born. Feder remembers most agreeably the years when her father was married to Rita Hayworth, who frequently invited the little girl over to swim and play. The author met celebrities, visited the sets where her father was working, listened to the initial read-through of Macbeth, visited other continents, stayed in the best hotels, ate the best food and felt both intimidated and inspired by her charismatic father. Feder writes that at her public school, her bitter classmates taunted her with cries of “Hollywood brat!” and later, when she was the only girl in a boys’ school, some of the nastier ones called her “Orson’s little brat.” Years would pass between paternal visits, and her mother, remarried, became increasingly resentful of her daughter’s patent affection and preference for Welles. So she said mean things and denied her daughter a college education by not paying for it. (Readers may wonder why the author didn’t attempt to pay her own way.) Still, the author was brilliant, beautiful and talented, as we hear many times throughout, often via Welles himself. Feder ends her account with a standing ovation she and her late father received at a recent tribute to him in Italy.

Another dull tale by a celebrity’s child.