In My Father's Shadow

by Chris Welles Feder

  Oja Kodar’s drawing of Orson holding a pet bird on his hand.

  Our rooftop apartment was spacious, charming, and flooded with light from two walls of sliding glass doors, one leading to a private terrace and the other to a walkway on the roof. One of Oja’s bold oil paintings hung over a round, king-size bed. We even had our own kitchenette. “I wanted you to have this apartment,” Oja was telling us, “because it has the best view.” She slid open the glass doors and the wind swept in from the Adriatic, a dry, exhilarating wind that woke up my senses and made me feel good to be alive. We walked onto the terrace, partly shaded with hanging vines. Two huge oval lounge chairs, padded with blue and white striped cushions, invited us to sink into their depths and never get up again. Irwin and I would spend many hours here, gazing at the sea before us, mesmerized by the blue siren glinting in the sun and showing off her jewels. There were islands off shore — wild, green, mysterious places where no human seemed to live — and hills all around, covered with villas and vineyards. But what animated the scene were the boats — yachts, sailboats, motor launches, an endless flotilla that drifted in and out of view. How my father would have loved this view, this house, this enchanted place!

  EARLY EVERY MORNING, the man who worked for Oja brought our breakfast on a tray. Then, a leisurely hour later, while we were still sitting around in our bathrobes, Oja would appear at our door, fresh-faced and beaming. She did not bother with makeup and wore her dark hair pulled back in a casual twist. In spite of her exposure to Hollywood, I was glad to find that she had remained herself. “Can I come in?” she would ask, as though we could possibly say no.

  These were precious hours, when she and I could talk in private and share our “Orsons.” Yet, inevitably, the moment came when tears swam into her eyes and her voice began to tremble. I could see that this reminiscing was hard for her. Her love was still fresh — and passionate — for a man who had been dead twenty years. After half a week of seeing Oja’s lovely eyes awash in tears, I suggested that perhaps we should stop talking about my father. The last thing I wanted to do was upset her.

  “Oh, but you are his daughter,” she cried, wiping her eyes, “you have the right to know!”

  “Yes, but I don’t have to know everything at once. We’ll have other visits, won’t we?”

  “Oh yes, I want you to come and stay with me every year.”

  “Then we’ll have years to talk about him. So let’s put the subject aside for now.”

  “That would be better,” she agreed, her face lighting up with a smile of relief.

  Yet in the days that followed, Oja brought my father up in every other sentence. Orson had said this. Orson had done that. Her thoughts, her memories were welded to him. Something one of us said would remind her of the time she and Orson had been in Paris. In Rome. In Split. The more she shared with us, the more clearly we saw the nomadic life she had led with him: moving from country to country, hotel to hotel, with several dogs and battered suitcases in tow, then settling for a time in houses Oja bought and sold. How willingly she had left her country, her former life, and thrown herself into the tempestuous adventure of sharing Orson’s days and nights, his triumphs and joys, frustrations and disappointments. In spite of the age difference — she had been twenty-one when they met and he forty-seven — they proved to be entirely compatible in habit and temperament. And he had never seemed old to her. “There was such youth in him,” she recalled, “such vitality.”

  During my father’s last and most difficult years, Oja was at his side, keeping illness and despair at bay, doing whatever needed to be done to keep him going, including staying up most of the night to massage his bloated legs so that he would be able to walk the next day. “His doctor told me I added ten years to his life,” she told us with pride, “and I know it was true.” She sighed. “Orson was a good man, a kind man. So few people know what a big heart he had …”

  But you and I know, I thought, putting my hand over hers. The bighearted man Oja was describing closely resembled the Daddy I had known at sixteen. And then I realized the beautiful thing that had happened: Oja had given him back to me.

  “I WISH WE could have met while my father was alive,” I told Oja while she was visiting with us in our apartment one morning. She was wearing a purple beach dress that fell to her ankles, not a trace of makeup, her raven black hair swept off her face and held in a hair clip.

  “It’s obvious why we didn’t,” she replied.

  “I know, but I can’t help wishing it. And you know what I wish even more, Oja? That you’d married him.”

  She giggled, her dark eyes dancing. “Orson asked me when we were in Spain if we shouldn’t get married, but I told him everything was fine the way it was.” In any case, she went on, she had always been a little against marriage and more than a little mistrustful of men, especially after her own sister’s ugly divorce. As soon as a woman signed a marriage contract, Oja believed, the relationship changed, and in a way, the woman became her husband’s property. “Much as I loved and trusted Orson, I preferred to keep my independence so I could always say, ‘I’m Oja Kodar, not Mrs. Orson Welles, and I’ll go my own way.’ “

  We sat a while in silence, each of us contemplating what might have been. Then Oja said, “I can be with people, go out at night and enjoy myself, but by nature I am a loner. That’s another reason why Orson and I were so well suited to each other.”

  During his last years in Hollywood, when ill health kept him close to home, Oja didn’t miss the parties or any part of Hollywood’s social whirl. In fact, she preferred staying quietly at home with Orson. She had her sculpture, her writing, and the many projects they worked on together.

  “Perhaps you’re not really a loner but a person who needs time alone, which is not the same thing,” I suggested. “Most creative people need periods of solitude.”

  “No, Chrissie, I am happiest when most people leave Primosten, not just the tourists but the many Croatians who have summer homes here, and then I have the place all to myself!”

  “But don’t you ever get lonely, Oja?”

  “No, I have my memories. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Orson … and I still miss him very much.”

  Her eyes were brimming with tears again, but by now I realized there was no way to avoid this. My father had enfolded her into his life while she was still very young. He had put his mark on her. Forever.

  EVERY MORNING AFTER our visit with Oja, Irwin relaxed on our terrace while I went swimming in the clear waters of the Adriatic. Then, at lunchtime, we convened in Oja’s apartment, one flight down from ours. We saw at once that we were in the home of a cultivated woman, the walls lined with books and art, the comfortable leather sofas and chairs inviting us to stay a while. Several of Oja’s handsome wooden sculptures stood on tabletops, and, when I admired them, she said that although she no longer worked in wood — it had become too difficult to find good materials and she no longer had a proper studio — she kept a few of her pieces on display “to prove that I really was a serious sculptor.” That anyone would doubt it or mistake Oja for a dilettante struck me as sad, but I remembered my father’s remark: “Beautiful women are not taken seriously.”

  Of the many reminders of Orson Welles in Oja’s living room, I was most drawn to an intimate portrait taken by his cameraman, Gary Graver. Gary had caught my father in a moment of serene contemplation when he was most himself. This was the face of Orson Welles that few were privileged to see, and I remembered Gary’s remark to an interviewer: “Oja and I were his real family.” Once, such a remark would have hurt me, but now I understood how crucial Oja and Gary were to my father during his last years. Without them, my father would have been hard-pressed to make F for Fake, The Other Side of the Wind, The Dreamers, and all the other works, complete or incomplete, that filled his days and nights from 1970 until his death fifteen years later.

  Oja had a bookcase dedicated to books about Orson Welles, and I had brought her a copy of Les Bravades to ad
d to her collection. This was the “portfolio of pictures,” as he called it, that my father had made for Rebecca when she was eleven years old and given to her for Christmas in 1956. His delightful drawings in watercolor, crayon, ink, and gouache were sketched on whatever paper came to hand and accompanied by his equally delightful text — sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten — which told the story of the festival held each year on the feast day of Saint Tropez “in the pretty little fishing village which proudly bears his name.”

  During one of our lunches, I told Oja how Les Bravades had been transformed from “a portfolio of pictures” made for Rebecca alone into a published book available to everyone. In 1990, desperately in need of money, Rebecca decided to part with our father’s gift, and while it was upsetting to think of this treasure leaving the family, I understood her predicament. So when Becky asked if Irwin and I would help her sell Les Bravades, we agreed. We offered it first to the head of the well-endowed Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, but he pleaded poverty, claiming he could not compete “with wealthy private collectors.” Then Irwin and I helped Becky auction off the work at Swann Galleries in New York. Although we advised her against it, Becky was persuaded to sell her publication rights as well. In the end, Les Bravades sold for thirty thousand dollars, which I felt was the bargain of the century, but Becky was thrilled. Living as simply as she did, thirty thousand was a lot of money.

  “You won’t believe what happened next,” I told Oja. In 1995, Workman Publishing agreed to publish Les Bravades and the editor assigned to the project, Sally Kovalchick, was the same editor who had worked closely with me on Brain Quest, a series of children’s games I did for Workman. One day I got a phone call from Sally. She had found some spelling and punctuation errors in my father’s text, and she wondered what she should do about them. “Leave them,” I told her. “Print the text exactly as my father wrote it, errors and all.”

  “But this is not possible,” Oja objected. “Orson had a superb command of the English language. He would never make a spelling mistake.” She seemed deeply offended.

  “They were typographical errors,” put in Irwin, the diplomat.

  “Oh, well, that’s different.”

  Irwin and I exchanged looks while Oja began clearing the table. It was not the first time she had bridled at the suggestion that her Orson was capable of error. On another occasion, I had mentioned that, when my mother was Mrs. Orson Welles, my father would arrange to meet her for lunch at Sardi’s or for dinner at 21, and then arrive hours late — if he arrived at all.

  “With me, Orson was never late,” Oja retorted.

  Alas, dear Oja, he was not as perfect with others as he was with you.

  ON SEVERAL EVENINGS during our weeklong stay, we took Oja to dinner in Primosten. From her house, it was a twenty-minute walk over a rocky path that hugged the shoreline and was shaded by pines with twisted limbs leaning toward the sea. Jasmine and oleander grew by the wayside, their perfume mingling with the tang of salt in the air.

  “Look!” exclaimed Oja as we rounded a corner, and there, before our eyes, was Primosten aflame in the setting sun. The village rose in layers of stone houses topped with salmon-colored tiled roofs. We lingered to enjoy the view, the feeling that we had stepped back in time and were seeing Primosten as it must have looked centuries ago. Then we continued on our way.

  Soon we were settled at an outdoor table in Oja’s favorite restaurant. The specialty of the house was grilled fish fresh from the Adriatic. To dine outside on a balmy night added to the pleasure of the meal.

  “Did you ever live with Orson?” Oja asked me during dinner.

  “Only when I was a toddler.” I explained that before my father went to Hollywood in the summer of 1939, he and my mother had agreed to a trial separation. My mother had gone to stay with Geraldine Fitzgerald in Ireland, and I had been left with my nanny in New York. However, as soon as my father was settled in a rented house in Brentwood, he sent for me. “It turned out we were living next door to Shirley Temple,” I went on, referring to the child movie star who was a national idol. “I was about sixteen months old and just beginning to walk. One day, while I was playing on the lawn with my father, Shirley Temple’s mother wandered over with Shirley by her side. ‘When are you going to put Christopher in pictures?’ Shirley’s mother asked my father. ‘Oh, I’m going to wait until she’s two years old,’ he answered. ‘I want her to have a normal childhood.’ “

  Oja laughed. “Orson was such fun, always making jokes. People don’t realize what a wonderful sense of humor he had …”

  Before tears could fill her eyes, we asked her to tell us about Primosten. It used to be a remote island, she began, but in the sixteenth century, it was settled by farmers and fishermen who were fleeing from the Turks. Eventually they built a bridge to the mainland and Primosten ceased to be an island. “Today, everyone who lives here depends on tourism, especially during the summer months.” She sighed, remembering the still undiscovered village she had known as a child.

  Yet Irwin and I found Primosten relatively unspoiled. One day, we went exploring on our own, and once we had distanced ourselves from the souvenir shops with their outdoor racks of postcards, we found the part of the village that retains its authentic flavor. Here were narrow, winding streets paved with cobblestones worn smooth from centuries of fishermen in heavy boots, tramping home with the day’s catch. One street led us to a sleepy square lined with restaurants and outdoor cafés, a place to linger over a cup of Turkish coffee and listen to the rustling leaves of the shade trees. It was past noon and we decided to stop and rest.

  All of a sudden, a group of Croatian men sitting at a nearby table burst into song. It was so spontaneous and so lovely. In four-part harmony, their pure and mellow voices filled the little square with the folk songs of their fathers and grandfathers. They were singing for themselves, not for us. Some traditions not even the invasion of tourists could touch.

  JAKOV SEDLAR, A Croatian filmmaker, was directing a documentary about Orson Welles, and I had agreed to be interviewed for it while I was staying with Oja. While Jakov and his crew were setting up the lights and camera in Oja’s living room, I wandered around, as I had before, enjoying the art on the walls and especially the oil my father painted of himself and dedicated to Oja and her family. In this unusual self-portrait, the face of the large man seated in an armchair with a watchful dog on his lap has been left vague, as though covered in white veils, whereas every other detail in the painting is clear and exact. There were photographs everywhere of Oja’s parents and her sisters, who loved Orson and adopted him as one of their own. Oja had given him not only the gift of herself but a home and a family in Croatia.

  During my interview with Jakov, he asked me how I felt about the fact that my father had taken up with Oja Kodar. I smiled. Here was my opportunity to tell the world that Oja had been the most important woman in my father’s life. “Why was she so important?” Jakov persisted. I was glad to elaborate. Oja was far more intelligent and evolved than the other women in his life; so my father could never grow bored with her. As an artist herself, a talented sculptor and writer, she was capable of understanding a man like Orson Welles at a profound level, and of empathizing with his struggles as an independent filmmaker. But one reason above all others made Oja a unique figure in my father’s life. I paused while Jakov leaned forward expectantly. “My father’s life was his work,” I continued, “and of all the women who attempted to live with him, only Oja was capable of entering fully into his creative life. She worked by his side, day after day, acting in his films, collaborating on his screenplays, doing whatever needed to be done at any hour of the day or night.”

  When I had finished the interview, Oja, who had been listening in the next room, came out and hugged me. “It was a poem, what you said. A beautiful poem.” Her eyes were moist with emotion. Then she took me by the hand. “Now we are going down to the sea, and I am going to tell you a story about Orson, and Jakov is going to get it o
n film.”

  It was late afternoon when we walked down the steps to the garden at the bottom of Oja’s house, then passed through the iron gate that led to the sea. In place of a sandy beach, rock formations jutted over the water. Some formed natural platforms for sunbathing, but most were jagged outcrops. Easy as it was to dive off the rocks into the inviting sea, it was almost impossible to clamber out again without the aid of the ladders that hung down into the water.

  Today, though, we were not dressed for swimming. Oja and I were wearing white pants, sandals, and summery tops. Jakov told us to walk slowly down the stone steps carved out of rock and sit together on the bottom step, looking out to sea. Oja and I did this several times while Jakov shouted at the crew rearranging their equipment on the perilous rocks. Soon the sun would set, but now it blazed down on the water. A few sailboats did their stately dance around the islands. “When you and I are dead,” Oja murmured, “we will still be here on film. This is forever.”

  The camera started rolling and Oja told me the story she had been saving for this moment. When Orson was living in Italy and she was in Primosten, he would hire a boat and cross the sea to visit her, a trip that took seven or eight hours. Hoping to come and go unnoticed, he usually arrived at dawn and left in the middle of the night. On the days she expected him, Oja would come down to the sea and sit on the rocks, as we were doing now, and watch the horizon for Orson’s boat to appear. One day, which happened to be her birthday, he arrived with a huge red ribbon tied around his chest. “What do you think I am bringing you for your birthday?” he asked her.

  “Your heart,” she answered correctly. He also brought her a recording he had made especially for her. “Now every year on my birthday,” Oja continued, “I play Orson’s recording, and I come and sit here on the rocks and look out to sea, and sometimes I imagine that if I look long enough, I will see Orson’s boat coming toward me.”