In My Father's Shadow

by Chris Welles Feder

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Welles, but we have a men-only policy at lunchtime,” explained the flustered maître d’.

  “Your policy is medieval and should be banned at once!” Then with a sigh, “Since I can’t take my daughter here, what do you suggest?”

  “The main dining room, sir, but I’m afraid you will need to wear a tie.” Obligingly, the maître d’ whipped one out of his pocket and handed it to my father who carelessly flung it around his neck.

  “Everywhere I go in this hotel, they lie in wait for me with their neckties,” my father grumbled, giving me a bear hug. “Come along, Christopher, we’re not wanted here.” I smelled liquor on his breath during our embrace and couldn’t help wondering how many drinks he’d had while I was pacing off my nerves in the lobby. Could he be anxious about seeing me again?

  My father ambled down the hall with the innate grace I remembered from Hong Kong, a man carrying so much height, bulk, and charisma that people turned to stare, whether or not they knew he was Orson Welles. I hung back for a moment to get a quick look at the Oak Room. It reminded me of a sedate London pub with its oak-paneled walls, its booths and tables packed with men in expensive business suits, smoking and drinking in the semidark, speaking in the lowered voices of those entrusted with wealth, power, and weighty decisions. I was glad we would be eating lunch instead in the airy dining room with its chandeliers and enormous windows overlooking Central Park.

  “So,” my father began after we had been ceremoniously seated in a quiet corner. “I’m curious why you left Rome and decided to live in New York.”

  “Well, I’m not sure how long I’ll stay here,” I began.

  “You’re as bad as I am,” he laughed, “moving from one place to the next. How do you expect your aging father to keep up with you?” As a matter of fact, I had been struck by how much he had aged, quickly calculating that he was now fifty-two, although the weight made him look older. The years had streaked his dark hair with gunmetal gray, and carved lines around his expressive eyes and sensuous mouth. Yet his round face with its button nose still had the innocent look of a baby’s. Not for the first time I thought, There isn’t a mean bone in him.

  I started to tell him I had chosen New York because I knew I could stay with a girlfriend here until I found a place of my own. “You’ve barely arrived in town and already you sound like a New Yorker,” he said, interrupting me. “It’s that marvelous ear of yours, which you get from me.” And he laughed so heartily that all heads turned in our direction.

  “I also came to New York because I knew I could get work right away with Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

  “Work is crucial,” he agreed. “That’s the only reason I’m going to be on Dean’s show, you know. To pay the rent.”

  “Tell me about it. What are you — ”

  “I’d rather not. What I have to do these days to keep my name alive won’t make you proud of me.”

  “But I am proud of you, Daddy. Very proud of you!” The “Daddy” had slipped out before I could stop it.

  “That’s my darling girl!” His eyes twinkled at me across the table, and for a moment it was like old times. “Let’s not talk about me,” he went on. “I’d much rather hear about you.”

  So I told him we editors were compiling an international edition of the encyclopedia that would be sold in Europe and Japan. I had been assigned the articles on theater and motion pictures. “In fact, I’m going to be editing an article on you,” I told him.

  “Really?” He looked astonished. “And just how are you going to edit me?”

  “Well, what I mainly do is make sure everything in the article is accurate and up-to-date, and take out parts that are repetitive or too opinionated.”

  “That’s right! We can’t have opinions in an encyclopedia.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how long-winded and biased some of the original articles are.”

  “Does the article on me mention Chimes at Midnight?”

  “I think so, but I haven’t looked at it closely yet. I just know I’m going to be — “

  “Then you make sure it does, Christopher, because I believe it’s the best work I’ve ever done. I can’t tell you how sick I am of people raving about Citizen Kane and not saying anything positive about the film I consider my true masterpiece.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Have you seen it, by the way?”

  “Oh yes, I saw it in Rome, several times. I thought it was fantastic. The battle scene moves like a ballet. It’s one of the most poetic — “

  “Thank you. But you haven’t told me yet why you left Rome.”

  “Well, I was involved with an Italian man, and we lived together for almost a year, but it didn’t work out. I wrote you about it.”

  “Italians make the best wives in the world and the worst husbands,” he pronounced. I took note of the compliment to Paola. “Italian women are also among the most beautiful in the world. Except for their ankles.”

  I stared at him. “What’s wrong with their ankles?”

  “They have a certain thickness around the ankle which is unattractive.”

  “Really?”

  “They also have thick and pudgy wrists.”

  “Are you teasing me?” His eyes were twinkling at me again.

  “I’m dead serious. But how could you live in Rome for a whole year and not notice these things?” I watched him polish off the bottle of wine and then down several brandies with his coffee. “By the way, while we’re on the subject of the men in your life, whatever happened to that husband of yours I met in Hong Kong?”

  “You mean Norman.”

  “Yes. Unless there’s another husband I don’t know about.”

  I told him Norman was living in Chicago where he had started his own architectural firm. After our divorce, he began living openly with another man. Then, tentatively, “You knew he was homosexual before I did, didn’t you, Father, and you were trying to warn me.”

  “I suppose I was trying to hint at it, hoping to soften the blow, because these things always come out in the end. I could see you were very much in love with him — “

  “Oh, I was!”

  “ — so it must have hurt you tremendously when you found out.”

  “It did.”

  “I’m so sorry.” He laid a sympathetic hand over mine. “But now you’re looking marvelous! More beautiful than ever!”

  “Yes, I’ve gotten over it. Although after Norman and my recent fiasco in Rome, and some other disastrous love affairs I’d rather not tell you about, I doubt that I’ll marry again.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Do you know what my mother said about me?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  He got slowly to his feet and suggested we continue on to Toots Shor’s, the celebrity hangout that was more of a saloon than a restaurant on West Fifty-first Street. “Toots is a friend of mine,” he was saying as he squired me out of the Plaza. “We can talk there as long as we want, undisturbed.” While we stood waiting for the doorman to hail a cab, I was tempted to tell him my mother had predicted I would be a success in my work and a miserable failure in my love life. I would have enjoyed hearing another, thundering “Nonsense!”

  What I did tell him in the cab was how very sorry I was about what had happened in Paris years ago, when I had called him up and told him I couldn’t see him for a while. “I never meant to end our visits forever,” I explained, tears springing to my eyes, “just until my mother came to her senses. She was threatening to throw me out of the house if I went on seeing you. I was only sixteen and I didn’t really have a choice. I hope you see that now and don’t hold it against me.”

  “But I always saw it,” he said. “I knew it was your mother’s doing and not your fault. I was furious with Virginia, but never with you. You were my darling girl.”

  And I’m not anymore? While the cab inched forward in midtown traffic, I had an impulse to fling myself on his chest, crying, Daddy, D
addy, take me back! It was the old yearning to be in his life every day and turn him into the Daddy he couldn’t be. Wasn’t it time to lock these feelings away with my childhood toys? Well, at least I had been forgiven for my transgression at sixteen. A wave of relief swept over me. Now my father and I could start afresh.

  I SPENT HOURS with my father that day, and he was more forthcoming than he had been in Hong Kong, but he said nothing about having left Paola to live with the captivating woman he had met in Zagreb in 1962. Part of Tito’s communist Yugoslavia, Zagreb was a magnet for European filmmakers who needed to cut costs, and while it had drawn the ever-impoverished Orson Welles for that reason, the communist-built housing developments on the city’s outskirts also provided him with the stark, impersonal locales he needed to make The Trial, his extraordinary movie based on Franz Kafka’s novel. Although my father was strongly attracted to the lovely young Croatian casually introduced by his cameraman, he did not pursue the relationship until a few years later, when he was working in Paris and heard she was studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Soon afterward, they began the passionate relationship that would last for the rest of my father’s life.

  However, not once, during all the lunches and dinners I was to have with my father in elegant New York hotels, not to mention our numerous long-distance phone calls, did he ever speak to me about his Croatian companion, Oja Kodar. Nor did he ever make it clear that he and Paola were living apart, their marriage reduced to a fiction they both kept alive, presumably for the sake of Beatrice.

  When my father moved back to the United States, he first lived with Paola and Beatrice in Sedona, Arizona. This amazed me. Why Arizona, I asked him? It was Paola’s idea, he explained. She felt the climate would be beneficial for his asthma, and she wanted to create an oasis far from Hollywood where he could come home and not be disturbed. As it turned out, his work took him so frequently to Los Angeles that he needed a home there as well. Since Paola hated Hollywood even more than he did, she and Beatrice moved to Las Vegas to make it easier for him to commute back and forth. What my father did not tell me was that he and Oja were living together in Los Angeles and he rarely put in an appearance at his home on Montecito Drive in Las Vegas.

  I first learned of Oja’s existence from Granny and Skipper Hill. In August of 1968, almost a year after I had seen my father at the Plaza and a few years before his return to the United States, I was visiting the Hills in their retirement home in Coral Gables, Florida. Skipper had met Oja earlier that year and could not say enough about her. Yet even he did not know her name was invented and the story behind it. That I would hear in time from Oja herself.

  Born Olga Palinkas, her baby sister, Nina, who was unable to say Olga, called her Oja (pronounced “Oy-ya”) and the nickname stuck. The invention of Kodar as Oja’s surname came about years later when she and my father were living in her house in Orvilliers near Paris. A visiting Croatian friend asked Orson how he saw Oja and what she meant to him. “She’s a present to me from God,” Orson answered, which Oja translated for her friend. In Croatian, kodar means “as a present,” and the moment he heard that word, Orson cried, “Well, that’s what you should be called: Oja as a present.”

  During my visit with the Hills, Skipper showed me snapshots he had taken of Oja, revealing a black-haired beauty in her midtwenties, her hair pulled straight back in a style that would have been too severe on almost anyone else but accentuated her high Slavic cheekbones and her dark eyes tilting up at the corners. She was tall, slender, and her scanty bathing suit revealed a body of classic proportions.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t she?” Skipper drawled, taking back the snapshots. “But it wasn’t just her looks that got Orson interested in her. He can’t get over how smart she is, and how talented. Why, at one point, he took me aside and told me in that stage whisper of his, ‘At last I’ve met a truly intelligent woman!’”

  “What about Virginia?” Granny asked, no doubt for my benefit. “She’s no fool.”

  “You’re right, Horty,” Skipper agreed, “Virginia’s a bright gal all right, but even she couldn’t keep up with Orson, and he got bored with her in the end — sorry, Chris, to say that about your mother, but it’s true.”

  “Rita’s as sweet as they come, but I have to admit she’s no whiz kid,” Granny observed with a fond laugh. She had always felt warm and mothering toward Rita Hayworth.

  “Let’s face it, none of the women who came after Virginia knew how to keep Orson interested and faithful.”

  “And when I think of how many women he’s had . . .” Granny muttered, sounding disgusted.

  “All of them gorgeous, too, but the point I’m trying to make is that Oja is different. He’s never going to get tired of her.”

  “Why not, Skipper?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I don’t know, honey. It’s just a feeling I have about her. And the way the two of them are when they’re together.”

  “Well,” Granny said, sighing, “this much is clear anyway. Now Orson’s with Oja, there’s no hope for our Chris.”

  “What do you mean, Granny?” I asked her.

  “Why, she’s even younger than you are, dear.”

  “But Granny . . .” I began to protest that a daughter is a daughter and a lover, a lover, but I stopped myself. Better not to wander into that dark territory where one might be mistaken for the other.

  Skipper stopped his pacing long enough to give me one of his penetrating looks. Then he began: “There’s something I should tell you now you’re in touch with Orson again. With a man like your dad, you’ve got to concentrate more on what he’s achieved and less on who he is or isn’t. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.” But I’m not sure I can do it.

  “Good. And another thing, kid. Orson may not be the father you’ve always been looking for, but in his own way, he cares about you. As much as he can, that is.”

  Then the conversation turned to Skipper’s involvement in the film my father had begun shooting the year before in Yugoslavia. First called Dead Reckoning and later renamed The Deep, it told a lurid tale borrowed from a British thriller. A honeymoon couple (Oja Kodar and Michael Bryant) have been blissfully cruising on their yacht until one stormy day they pull a man out of the sea (Laurence Harvey), not realizing they have rescued a psychopath who will lead them into a nightmare of kidnapping and attempted murder. The two other characters on a second boat were played by my father and his old friend, Jeanne Moreau, who had recently starred in The Immortal Story, his first movie made in color. The Deep was also shot in color, but in my father’s mind it had one purpose only. “My hope is that it won’t be an art house movie,” he told an interviewer after filming began off the Dalmatian coast near Primosten, the small village where Oja lived, and on the island of Hvar. “I felt it was high time to show the world I could make some money.” It was a hopeless quest that he had pursued since the days of The Lady from Shanghai, also intended to be a box office success. It would be like asking Leo Tolstoy to write pulp fiction.

  Skipper had been “suckered into Orson’s folly,” as he put it with a mock grimace, because of his lifelong knowledge of boats and sailing. “We started getting telegrams pages long and transatlantic phone calls at all hours of the day and night,” he grumbled, “picking my brain about this and that. Of course, Orson’s up all night anyway — he’s had insomnia ever since I could remember — and in his urgency to ask me something, he’d forget that ten in the morning in Yugoslavia is three or four a.m. here in Miami. Well, Horty and I were getting pretty tired of being waked up in the middle of the night, so I told him to just send me the shooting script with his questions written in the margins and I’d take care of it pronto.” Skipper spent considerable time going over the script, making corrections and suggestions. “I worked like a dog, and then Orson paid no attention to anything I said. After a while, I felt he was playing a game of one-upmanship with me. He’d sought me out in the first place because he sees me as the Old Man of the Sea and the w
orld authority on sailing, but then he had to prove he knew more than I did!”

  Skipper gave a wry laugh, shaking his head. “I thought that was the end of it, and I was well out of it. Then I get a frantic call from Orson, another crisis, another catastrophe, and before Horty can stop me, I’m off and running again, this time to the Bahamas.” Skipper agreed to meet Orson and Oja with a yacht, cameraman, and deep-sea divers willing to double for the characters played by Orson and Laurence Harvey, who fight an underwater battle among the sharks. After the sequence was shot, happily without the sharks, it had to be scrapped because the fake blood came out green instead of red. It was another mishap in the unending stream that had plagued the production of The Deep since its inception.

  Skipper was left complaining about the canisters of film that he was storing in his freezer while awaiting instructions from Orson. “I don’t know what the heck I’m supposed to do with it or if Orson even remembers I’ve got it.” I felt sure my father remembered every frame and was only waiting for the money to materialize so that he could go forward. I was equally convinced that no matter how much Skipper grumbled about the film taking up room in his freezer, he would do it all again in a minute. What could match the excitement of the phone ringing before dawn, telegrams arriving daily, and then a week of mayhem in the Bahamas?

  Before I left Coral Gables, Granny put her arm around me. “Skipper and I are so proud of you, Chris. We feel you’ve become what you are almost single-handedly, and we hope you see that about yourself.”

  “That’s right, kid,” Skipper put in. “You’ve made it on your own with no help from Orson or Virginia.”

  “And now you’re a grown woman with your own life,” Granny went on, “you don’t need Orson the way you once did. I hope you see that.”

  I knew Granny was right, and yet I didn’t feel free of my famous parent. The shadow of Orson Welles still fell across my life — and probably it always would.