In My Father's Shadow

by Chris Welles Feder

  Stefan told me that a major retrospective of my father’s work, in fact the largest to date, was going to take place the following summer in Locarno, Switzerland, during its international film festival. While he was still working out the details with the festival directors, what he had in mind was a combination of daily screenings and workshops so that certain aspects of my father’s work could be examined in greater depth. He turned to me expectantly: Would I be interested in coming to Locarno? I could come for a few days or the whole time. I could remain incognito and my privacy would be respected, or I could take an active, public role. It was entirely up to me, but he hoped I would take advantage of this opportunity to see a far wider range of my father’s work than could be shown at the Film Forum. I would also have the chance to meet the Welles scholars and former associates who would be participating in the workshops.

  “Will Oja Kodar be there?” I asked him. Her image was fresh in my mind from having seen F for Fake once again, especially the segment where a captivating Oja passes Picasso’s window at different times of the day and drives the artist into a frenzy.

  Chris with Oja Kodar at Oja’s home in Primosten, Croatia, September 2005.

  “She will probably come for a few days.” Stefan explained that Oja rented out her house in the summer, which made it difficult for her to be away from home for any length of time.

  Stefan was sure I would enjoy staying in Locarno, a lovely small town nestled on a lake and encircled by snowcapped mountains, one of the most scenic spots in Switzerland. Surprised and flattered, I was not sure how to respond. Half of me wanted to say yes at once, while the other half held back. I told Stefan I would like to think about it and let him know closer to the time. Yet already I knew. The old Christopher might be tempted to hide in the familiarity of her private cave, but the new Chris was not going to let her. The time had come for me to step out of obscurity and joyously celebrate my father with the rest of the world. The time had also come to reconnect with Oja Kodar.

  I FIRST MET Oja Kodar in 1994 when she came to New York to show Don Quixote at the Museum of Modern Art. Inspired by the tragicomic adventures of Miguel de Cervantes’ eccentric knight errant and his more earth-bound retainer, Sancho Panza, this was a film my father began in the 1950s and shot intermittently over several decades, whenever he could cobble together the funds, but it was left unfinished at his death in 1985. Meanwhile, the film-in-progress had aroused such speculation and assumed such legendary proportions that my father joked he was going to retitle it “When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?” Barely a year after his death, when Oja showed some of the footage in her possession at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, she described it in these words: “Don Quixote is a dream which Orson never finished, a dream from which he was never able to rouse himself.”

  Although I had seen Oja from afar at the 1988 tribute to my father at New York University, I had not been able to step forward then. In some ways I was still “the old Christopher,” shy and private. Nonetheless, I had taken away from that occasion a lasting image of an intelligent, articulate, and passionate woman who lived close to her emotions and was not ashamed to show them. Tall, slender, and blessed with a body a goddess would envy, Oja was, as they used to say in Hollywood, “drop-dead gorgeous.” It was all in her eyes — dark, wide-spaced, and aglow with her playful wit and nimble mind. I did not need too many glimpses of Oja to understand what a bright, engaging companion she had made for my father during the last twenty-odd years of his life, nor was it in the least surprising that of all the women he had known and loved, Oja had been the most important to him.

  Now that I had laid to rest the painful feelings that rose up in me after my father died, I was eager to meet Oja. As it happened, our encounter at MOMA on October 13, 1994, was not only brief but took place under troubled circumstances. Looking strained and exhausted, Oja seemed privately distressed, which I put down to the fact that Yugoslavia, where she had returned to live after my father’s death, was then at war. She had also struggled under near impossible conditions to make a film about children affected by the war, which she was going to show at a film festival in Canada. This seemed reason enough for her wan appearance that evening, but it turned out that she was upset about something else entirely: the English-language version of Don Quixote edited by Jess Franco, which she had just seen for the first time. “I went to New York to introduce the film to the audience,” she would tell me years later, “but when I saw the film myself, I was appalled.” Taking the footage that Oja had given him, Franco “just threw it together,” and he and his underlings “also changed things” in the footage Orson had already edited himself. “Who are they to change Orson’s material?” demanded the outraged Oja. She had believed in Franco, who had worked as assistant director on Chimes at Midnight and claimed to be Orson’s admiring friend, never imagining he would prove himself so unworthy of the precious footage that had been entrusted to him.

  Stunned by my own disappointment in Don Quixote, I did not know what to say. In any case, Oja and I had no more than a few minutes together before the photographers descended. Yet, years later when we recalled that sorry night at MOMA, we had both known in an instant that we liked each other. “I had the feeling we could become great friends,” Oja told me. I had felt the same way and had given her my address, but I did not hear from her in the years that followed. The time was not yet right.

  I believe things happen in one’s life when they are meant to, not before. When I invited Stefan Drössler to my home in early March of 2004 and it became apparent that he was in frequent contact with Oja, I decided to ask him for her address, which he gave me. Then, when I mentioned that I did not feel I could write Oja “out of the blue,” almost a decade having passed since our last meeting, Stefan gallantly offered to call her on my behalf and let me know how she felt. A few weeks later, he relayed the message that Oja would welcome hearing from me, and I should feel free to write or call. Here is most of the letter I sent her on March 21, 2004, a week before my sixty-sixth birthday:

  Dear Oja,

  I often think of you and how important you were to my father during the last twenty years of his life. Then, a few weeks ago, I met with Stefan Drössler. … Here was an opportunity to get in touch with you, which I have been wanting to do since we first met. … Although we have been living in different cities and on different continents ever since, I have continued to hope our paths will cross again.

  I wish very much that you and I had met while my father was alive, although I understand why we did not. I want you to know, though, that I see you in the most positive light, and that I am extremely grateful to you for having gladdened the last years of his life to the extent that you did. It was you who continued to give him hope and courage, who worked by his side, who became the most important woman in his life. …

  I concluded with the hope that my letter would open a dialogue between us:

  I knew Orson Welles best in his vibrant twenties and thirties. … And you knew him in his later decades. … So I feel we each have much to tell the other.

  Weeks passed, and then, one morning, the telephone rang and I heard an effervescent voice with the hint of a foreign accent on the other end. “Hello, Christopher? This is Oja.” She began by saying how much my letter had meant to her. “A family member” had finally recognized what she had done for Orson. We talked at some length, and then she invited me to come and stay with her in Croatia, an invitation she was to extend again and again in the months ahead.

  Meanwhile, at Irwin’s suggestion, I sent Oja a copy of my book, The Movie Director. I was a little nervous about what her reaction might be. Several weeks later Oja called to say how much the book had meant to her and how profoundly it had moved her. There was a tremor in her voice, and she paused as if to clear her throat. Then she said, “I heard Orson speaking through your words, and I felt you gave him back to me.”

  The writer in me rejoiced. If my book had given Orson back to Oja, that was reason e
nough to have written it.

  OVER THE YEARS and from various sources, including my father’s tribute to her in the December 1983 issue of Paris Vogue, I pieced together the early life of Olga Palinkas before she evolved into Oja Kodar. Half Hungarian, half Croatian, she came from a close-knit family, the middle daughter of three. Her father was an architectural engineer and her mother a teacher. Oja was especially close to her younger sister, Nina — “We are like two peas in a pod,” Nina assured me when we finally met. A tall, striking blond, Nina’s shapely legs had once so distracted pianist Artur Rubinstein during a recital that he had asked her to move from her seat in the front row — a story Oja loved to tell with her merry laugh.

  Oja began studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. “I’m proud to say that I was the first woman ever accepted by the sculpture department,” she once said in an interview. In Vogue, my father pointed out that Oja was also the only female student in her sculpture class. After quoting her — “Women are allowed to paint … but most men are still convinced that sculpture is a man’s work, like driving a bulldozer” — my father laments that beautiful women are rarely taken seriously. Then he shows a full-page color photograph of one of Oja’s sculptures, a rounded, sensuous form carved out of a magnificent piece of wood with a grain that melts from cream into golden brown. Clearly it is the work of a sculptor to be taken seriously.

  Oja Kodar’s statue of Orson Welles in Split, Croatia, 2007.

  It was while Oja was studying in Zagreb that she reconnected with the cameraman Edmond Richard. They had met the year before in Belgrade, where she had taken time off from school to work in television and earn money to help support her family. Although both her parents were professionals, they were poorly paid in communist Yugoslavia, and money was tight for the three girls. As it happened, Edmond was working in Zagreb for Orson Welles, shooting scenes for The Trial.

  One evening Edmond invited Oja to go with him to a nightclub, which she found very exciting, having never been to one before. It was there that she first saw Orson Welles. Edmond pointed him out: “Don’t look now, but there’s Orson Welles!” Orson was wearing a dark suit, and in the blinking light of the nightclub, all Oja could see were his eyes, but as she later remembered, “His eyes were his most important feature.” He must have seen her remarkable eyes as well, because he came over to her table a few minutes later.

  After that first encounter, the two of them met several times in Zagreb. Oja visited Orson on location in a cavernous hall where hundreds of people were sitting like robots behind hundreds of desks, pounding away on typewriters. One of the more chilling scenes in The Trial, it captured the facelessness of bureaucracy and its lumbering, unstoppable momentum. She remembered that Anthony Perkins, the American actor who plays the antihero Joseph K., was running around and around the building. When she asked Orson why he was doing this, he replied that he wanted Tony “totally out of breath” in the scene he was about to shoot.

  On another day, over lunch, Oja showed Orson some of her stories. One of them, entitled “F for Fake,” was about a painter inspired by a beautiful young girl he had been observing from afar. “Orson said he liked it and found it very amusing,” Oja recalled, “but I didn’t really believe him, because it was obvious that he liked me and found me attractive. You know, you can be young, but you don’t have to be a fool.” It was not until many years later, when Orson incorporated Oja’s story in his film, F for Fake, using her title as well, that she realized he really had liked her story and found it amusing.

  After Orson left Zagreb, Oja wrote to him a number of times and was upset when she never got a reply. Then, in 1963, the talented sculptor of twenty-three was accepted as a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In those days, many young Yugoslav women were marrying Italians to escape the communist regime, but Oja made it out of the country on her own. To support herself in Paris, she worked in a department store, modeling bathing suits and lingerie. The work was so well paid that she was able to send money home to her parents who set it aside for her. (Later Oja used the money she had earned from modeling to buy land on the Dalmatian coast and build a home near Primosten.)

  Meanwhile, my father was in Paris, editing The Immortal Story, his first movie in color, which he had made for French television. Starring Jeanne Moreau, the film was based on a short story by the Danish writer Karen Blixen, who wrote her Gothic tales in English under the pen name of Isak Dinesen. My father professed a wild passion for the Baroness Blixen, which I have never fully understood. He told me his own Gothic tale of traveling to Denmark to meet her in person, only to discover at the last moment that he could not go through with it. It would be too brazen an invasion of her privacy, he felt, to knock on her door and lay his intense admiration at her feet.

  Somehow my father found out that Oja was living in Paris. She is still not sure who told him — she had been going to great lengths to avoid him — but it may have been his cameraman, Edmond Richard, with whom Oja had stayed in touch. In any event, my father immediately hired a private detective to track her down, which struck Oja as “a very American thing to do, but to me, coming from a communist country, it seemed so extravagant and unbelievable.” When he showed up at her apartment one day, she refused to let him in. She was still mad at him for not having answered her letters, but her extravagant, unbelievable suitor banged on her door until he actually broke it down. He then took her to the Hotel Raffael, where he was staying, and showed her an aluminum briefcase in which he had saved all her letters to him as well as his unmailed letters to her.

  “Why didn’t you send me these letters?” Oja demanded.

  “I thought you’re so young and I’d interfere with your life,” he replied.

  “And now you break down my door and don’t worry about interfering in my life?”

  “My bad nature got the better of me … and I desperately wanted to see you again.”

  It was the beginning of a love affair and creative collaboration that did not end until my father died twenty years later. Sadly, of the many projects they worked on together, the only one that came to fruition was the brilliant essay film, F for Fake. In addition to being a guided tour through the maze of truth and fakery, art and illusion, it is also my father’s tender love poem to Oja Kodar.

  “I AM SO touched that you would like me to come and stay with you at Villa Welles, and that is something I would very much like to do,” I wrote Oja in April of 2004, suggesting that Irwin and I might come the following summer. Our initial plan was to go to the Locarno festival in early August of 2005, join up with Oja there, and travel back with her to Croatia, but this turned out to be impossible. We could not stay with Oja in August because she had already rented all the apartments in her house until the end of the month. She proposed that we come instead in early September, when the renters would be gone along with most of the tourists who were flocking to Croatia in unprecedented numbers. The weather would still be lovely then, she told me. “But come early in September, before the rain starts.”

  So we decided to make two separate transatlantic trips, an exhausting proposition for my husband of eighty-two, but knowing how important both these trips were to me, he bore up valiantly. Because of the difficulty of booking our flight to Split, we could not arrive at Oja’s before September 13, 2005, but we were in luck. The gods smiled on us and gave us glorious weather for the entire week of our stay.

  Oja lived within walking distance of Primosten, a small fishing village that had once been an island. From the moment the taxi dropped us off at her front gate in a private cul-de-sac and she rushed out to embrace us, leading us merrily inside, we knew we had come to a special place. The villas in that part of the world are built into rocky cliffs that drop precipitously to the sea below, and Villa Welles is no different. We had actually arrived at the top of the house, where the driveway was situated. We would be staying in the roof-level apartment, which had its own entrance, a walkway thickly covered with hanging vines. Ever
ywhere I looked I saw a jungle of greenery, trellises, and plants in profusion, which increased my feeling that we had entered a secret world hidden from prying eyes. When I exclaimed at the beauty of “the jungle,” Oja told us she had done the planting with her mother years before, when both her parents were living here.

  “Did my father ever live here?” I asked her.

  “No, he was planning to, but …” Tears welled up in her eyes. On another day, she would show me the small swimming pool she had built especially for Orson. It was finished a few days before he died. Now the pool stood empty and unused.

  Yet the spirit of Orson was everywhere in Oja’s house. The first thing I noticed in our glamorous quarters were Oja’s pen-and-ink drawings that recorded her life with him. They hung in a row in the entrance hall, revealing the artist’s saucy love of life and mischievous eye for detail. Here was Orson directing a naked Oja in the erotic scene that erupts in the front seat of a car in The Other Side of the Wind. Oja’s drawing shows the tricks Orson used to get this incredible shot and to make the viewer believe it was taking place on a Los Angeles highway rather than in the garden of Orson and Oja’s home in Orvilliers near Paris. A number of other drawings capture the joy and mayhem of their movie life together, but I was especially moved by Oja’s tender glimpses of the private Orson. In one, he stands at the picture window of their home in Los Angeles in his voluminous white caftan, puffing on his cigar, a bear of a man, who looks gentle and pensive, holding a tamed bird on his raised hand. In another, conquering insomnia for a few hours, he sleeps in a tousled bed, the eye of calm in a hurricane of mess: clothes, newspapers, empty mineral water bottles strewn on the floor, several pairs of eyeglasses scattered about and one pair dropped in the precise spot where they will be crushed underfoot when Orson gets out of bed.