For years, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the only son of actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, suspected that his real father was Orson Welles. Though Fitzgerald insisted until her death that Hogg’s father was Edward Lindsay-Hogg, she did live with Welles while pregnant. And let’s be frank: the resemblance is striking.
After a childhood spent rubbing elbows with Humphrey Bogart, William Randolph Hearst and Olivia de Havilland, the possible-son-of-Welles went on to direct videos for the Rolling Stones and, in 1970, the Beatles documentary Let It Be. Now 71, he’s released his memoir, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond. The book documents what the San Francisco Chronicle refers to as a “casual and unrelenting search for the identity of his father.”
In a final Silver Screen twist, the book spurred family friend Gloria Vanderbilt to confirm once and for all that, indeed, Welles is the dad—and in another juicy tidbit, that she and the younger Lindsay-Hogg had been bed buddies for a short time. Yes, truth can be stranger than fiction.
Michael Lindsay-Hogg appears on Saturday, Dec. 3, at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. 6780 Depot St., Sebastopol. 7pm. $15, or buy a book and get two admissions and two drink tickets. 707.829.4797.—Leilani Clark
