In My Father's Shadow (43 page)

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. Everywhere 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.

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!

E
ARLY 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.

E
VERY 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.”