Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond [Hardcover]

What's it like to grow up fatherless in a family with a surfeit of fathers? Michael Lindsay-Hogg writes about never knowing who was his father in his fascinating memoir, "Luck and Circumstance". Lindsay-Hogg, now in his early 70's was the son of the Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald and...someone. Maybe Fitzgerald's husband at the time, Edward Lindsay-Hogg, or possibly director Orson Welles. Michael's mother never quite told the story of his conception and admitted and denied facts all her life. Edward Lindsay-Hogg, divorced from Fitzgerald after WW2 was the "distant father", Orson Welles was the "fantasy father", and Geraldine's second husband, "Boy" Scheftel, was the "acting father" who raised him.

Between writing of both physical and psychological search for his father, Michael Lindsay-Hogg tells of growing up the son of a famous Hollywood actress who then segues into theater acting. He, too, was initiated into the theater world early, skipping out on organised school classes to work as a professional behind the stage. He became a noted director and worked with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on videos in the 1960's and 1970's. He also directed movies and many stage plays in his long career. He moved from being Geraldine Fitzgerald's and - maybe - Orson Welles's son to being a remarkable producer, director, and writer, famous and successful in his own right.

Lindsay-Hogg is an excellent writer and tells his story with a quiet intensity that belie the many questions he has about his own identity. Was Welles Michael's real father? Certainly there was a physical resemblance of sorts and Welles dropped in and out of Michael's life at odd times. Michael's mother hinted at his true parentage but stepped back from firmly identifying the man. Maybe she didn't know herself; she was married to Edward Lindsay-Hogg while - possibly - having an affair with Welles. However, in the end, does it matter who Michael Lindsay-Hogg's true father was? I suppose it does, to Michael, but to the reader, Michael Lindsay-Hogg emerges as a man with a full life. And what more can a person ask for than that.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg has led a life that led him to working in entertainment in both the U.S. and England, and because his mother (Geraldine Fitzgerald) was in the movies and on Broadway, he has met many well known people during his life, but a lot of his personal energy has been directed toward the identity of his father. The man he called "father" was not much of a presence in his life, and the man whispered to be his father (Orson Welles) was only an occasional presence. His mother always denied the rumors that surrounded him and raised him to believe that she always spoke the truth. His look into family dynamics and the necessity to play a role in this world is a fascinating read. I really enjoyed this book, and bought it in the first place because I saw a newspaper article in 2010 where Lindsay-Hogg had announced that he was going to take a DNA test and because I had read the book by Chris Welles Feder where she speculated about Lindsay-Hogg's paternity. This is also an interesting look at The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the rock and roll artists from the sixties. It is an easy read and very entertaining.

In 1985, I wanted to make a film directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. I never got anywhere with my idea. But there were dinners that were almost as satisfying, with Michael talking, talking, and the rest of us listening, listening. He was a great storyteller, and although the stories were about famous people, you never thought he was name-dropping, because his mother was Geraldine Fitzgerald, who was so sensational in "Dark Victory" and "Wuthering Heights," and her friends were Hollywood and theater royalty, and, in a rock and roll way, so was Michael.

And now, all these years later, we have his memoir, "Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond." It's a curious book. On the surface, it's an exploration of Michael's paternity, about which his mother had persistently lied. His father, she insisted, was Edward Lindsay-Hogg, an English baronet who was tall and dark and thin and lived in Ireland. Michael was to ignore all rumors to the contrary. "We [Orson and I] would go out for dinner together," she told her son. "And you know how people can put two and two together and make three."

Well, they did make three, as Michael learns at the end of the book from his mother's friend and his own sometime lover, Gloria Vanderbilt. I spoil nothing by telling you this, for the link is everywhere in the reviews and publicity. But the frame of the book that reviewers are praising obscures its real charm, which is Michael Lindsay-Hogg, talking, talking for 272 pages.

Picture a Brit, cigar in his fingers, a glass half full of some golden liquid, the meal finished, the night getting on. He is slim and elegant now, but he is telling you about his childhood, when his nickname was Pudge Hoag. Then, when he is fourteen, his mother takes him to a play rehearsal. He meets an actor, Roddy McDowell. And the director, Sidney Lumet. "A few days later, I, Michael, was back at school and was again Pudge Hoag, but it didn't matter because I knew where I was going."

The next year, his mother is Goneril in "King Lear," directed by Orson Welles. Again she takes her son to a rehearsal. And here...well, let me quote:

"As he passed behind the seat I was sitting in, my left arm over the seat behind me, Orson stopped.
I felt a quick aware tension with him behind me, unmoving in the dark.
A moment. Then, as if to clarify his presence, he laid his right hand on my shoulder and squeezed it, kneading it twice, the second pressure stronger than the first, and then he continued on.
I was not used to being touched by male family members. My stepfather had taught me how to shake hands and look the other person in the eye, but he had not been brought up to be a hugger of males and this was in the middle of the five-year period when I was not to see Edward Lindsay-Hogg at all."

A space break. Then: "I suppose I longed for a father."

Could you listen to that voice a little longer? I could.

Sixteen. Michael leaves school and goes to work at the Shakespeare Festival. A brief bit of Oxford. A few encounters with Welles. ("He finished his main dish and looked down balefully as though the plate, now empty, had somehow deceived him.") And then, at 24, the big break --- directing the English TV show, "Ready Steady Go!" with guests like the Stones, The Who, the Everly Brothers, Otis Redding, James Brown, Paul Simon, the Supremes --- you get the idea. And the occasional phone call: "Mr. Welles wanted to know if you could join him and Marlene Dietrich for dinner at Le Caprice tonight at eight."

The middle of the story is milk and cookies: "With Mick Jagger, I'd suggest, he'd question, I'd clarify, and he'd agree, usually. But with The Beatles, that evening, I found an idea was something to be mauled, like a piece of meat thrown into an animal cage. They'd paw it, chuck parts of it from one to the other, chew on it a bit, spit it out, and then toss the remnant to me, on the other side of the bars."

"Rain." "Paperback Writer." "Hey Jude." "Revolution." He did them all for The Beatles. "Jumpin' Jack Flash" for the Stones. And their concert film, "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus," which didn't see the light of day for 28 years. And "Brideshead." And, and... Scott Fitzgerald said personality was "an unbroken series of successful gestures." Well, for a few decades there, Michael Lindsay-Hogg defined personality. And has the stories to prove it.

As for Orson Welles and the lost father theme, it's secondary, for me, to his love for his mother, who worked to keep him in school and married to assure his security. Near the end of her life, she suffers dementia, and Michael weeps for her and for himself:

"I never got her. Not when I was a little boy, she was always earning the rent; . . . not when she'd married my stepfather; . . . and now that Boy [his stepfather, Stuart "Boy" Scheftel] is dead, I could have had her. We could have gone to the theater, or for a walk, or out for a meal together, and I could finally be with her, the two of us only. And now I'll never have her, to myself, alone."

Yes and no. Missed her in life, got her here.

It's the rare memoir you finish and think you really know the people because the writer really knows the people. And more, that he's taken their measure, done the necessary tabulation of flaws and weaknesses, and then decided that the "lies and deceptions" miss the point. The point --- and every tell-all memoir that crosses my desk misses this --- is that he loved them. And, in the process, learned to love himself.

Great story. Beautifully told. Would that there were an audio book so you could hear the voice.