Who is Nina Palinkas?

[Glenn Anders]

Quite true, Cornstarch, but that's why I make the distinction between public fantasy and artistic reality. At a time when Welles was scraping up any penny to keep his family comfortable and his art projects on the road, he couldn't afford to have some brash reporter make the obvious allusion of Welles/Kane to Kodar/Alexander.

Things were tough enough, as it was.

Glenn

[Tony]

But that's what happened, in a way, Glenn: an Italian newspaper exposed his affair with Oja, and he packed up his family (and Oja) and took them to America: the family to Los Vegas, Oja to Los Angeles; curiously, though, everything seemed to stop at that time: Don Quixote, The Deep, The Merchant of Venice, Orson's Bag, and he never again completed a feature film.

Do you guys remember Welles ever mentioning Oja in an interview? I can't, but maybe I'm wrong.

[Glenn Anders]

Exactly, Tony. You reinforce my point.

Glenn

[Christopher]

Tony,

There was a special French edition of Paris Vogue, dated Dec./Jan. 1983, in which Welles contributed an entire section, entitled "Vogue par Orson Welles." Included is his tribute to Oja Kodar, part of which I shall translate from the French:

"A true sculptor is a woman (half Hungarian, half Yugoslav) who completed her training, begun in Zagreb. at the Beaux-Arts academy in Paris, where she was the only female student in the sculpture class. Her name is Oja Kodar."

"Women may become painters," she tells us, "that's always been permissible, but men still nurture the belief that sculpture, like operating a bulldozer, is a man's work." Welles goes on to say in the piece that another handicap facing Oja is her beauty because "beautiful women are very rarely taken seriously." He ends by saying that Oja decided to have a show of her work in the United States which met with enthusiastic critical acclaim.

I lost my Internet connection for ten days and was only able to get back online last night. My Spanish isn't as good as my French, but I will see if I can translate the article you scanned, or at least give you a general idea of what it says.

[Christopher]

Here is a very loose translation of the article accompanying the photo of Nina Palinkas which Tony scanned into this thread. I was not able to translate every sentence, but I think you will get the general idea. All corrections and additions welcome!

"Although born in the United States, Nina Palinkas is of Greek origin and very proud of that fact...She has risen rapidly as a photography model, admitting that it wasn't easy when so many pretty girls are invading the modeling agencies in Los Angeles every day, looking for work. But Nina's preferred work has always been the cinema. Ever since she was a little girl, she has spent many hours in dark movie theaters, losing herself in celluloid fantasies and dreams...Her work as a fashion model has opened some studio doors for her, not very big doors but doors all the same. And now she has the satisfaction of having been chosen by Orson Welles to work under his direction on "The Other Side of the Wind" with John Huston and a large number of important movie people. Her job is very small, but that doesn't matter to her because it will be a learning experience for her and, even more, working with such well-known people in the field will give her an aura of prestige that will undoubtedly improve her chances in the future and allow her to make a great step forward in her career."

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you, Christopher. It's good to have you back. Your insights and talents are estimable.

What you give us does not invalidate my point that Welles took care not to flout his (assumed) romantic relationship with Oja Kodar to the detriment of his marital ties to Paola Mori Welles. If what you translate is the extent of his statement about Miss Kodar, he is properly admiring her for her professional talents and courage as sculptor. He celebrates that she has broken into "the men's club."

BTW, Christopher, do you know where a complete translation of that Paris Vogue issue may be found? I understand that it is as close to an autobiography on paper as we have for Welles.

Glenn

[Tony]

Christopher:

Thanks so much for the translation; it is greatly appreciated! I thought the article might say that Nina was both a model and an editor, but this seems to confirm that she is on-camera in "Wind"; so: she helped edit "Merchant" and "Deep", and she's on-camera in "Fake" and in "Wind": she was a real member of Welles's crew for several years, perhaps '69-76 (The Deep through TOSOTW) and perhaps longer; we shall have to watch for her when TOSOTW finally fits the screen, big or small!

Tony :;):

[Christopher]

Hi, Glenn,

I don't know where you could find a complete English translation of the Orson Welles section of Paris Vogue issue, but parts of it may exist in the various biographies. I seem to remember reading quotes from it here and there. The thing to remember about Welles's reputed "autobiography" is his love of invention and his wish, above all, to entertain his audience...so we really can't be sure if any of it is true; or there may be a kernel of truth lurking somewhere in the confabulation -- there usually is with Welles -- but who can tell what or where it is?

I just wanted to add that everyone who knew Welles in Hollywood in his later years knew he was living openly with Oja Kodar at the same time that he was making infrequent but dutiful visits to Paola and Beatrice in Las Vegas. In other words, he wasn't trying to hide his relationship with Oja, whom he adored, but he was trying to preserve what I can only describe as a gentlemanly facade so as not to embarrass Paola or any of his daughters, none of whom met Oja while he was alive.

[Christopher]

Tony,

You are right! Nina had a small part in "The Other Side of the Wind," which I didn't know until you figured it out. Here is a translation of the blurb next to her photo which confirms it:

"At the right is a photo of Nina Palinkas taken during a break on the set of "The Other Side of the Wind," a film directed by Orson Welles which represents her first big opportunity in the movies...Although the character she plays in Welles's film appears very seldom, the fact that the film is so important marks a great step forward in her career."

[Glenn Anders]

Christopher: I'm sorry to hear that you don't know of an English translation because, entirely accurate or not, it must provide a sense of what he thought his life was about. All of what we know about him from his lips, as you suggest, seems to come off the cuff in the form of anecdotes. It woud be interesting to know what he had to tell, when he had a chance to sit down and fashion the raw experience a bit.

I've always tried to be truthful about my own life, but a favorite saying of mine years ago, which sometimes got me in trouble, was "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."

Some of the things I've written here and elsewhere might give people the impression that I've followed the above dictum, but bar the odd fuzzy detail, I would stand by everything I've written.

Welles, however, strikes me as the same kind of person. Certain details may have tended to blend in his memory in order to tell a good story, but the essential truth of what he said, amazingly, was often there.

As for Welles, Oja Kodar, Paola Mori Welles, and Beatrice Welles, you put the situation much more diplomatically and elegantly than I. Welles, in other words, wanted to do nothing to encourage the tabloids. [Incidentally, I'm embarrassed to tell you, I once worked in lowly way (it would have had to have been lo-w-w-w-ly) for Confidential Magazine.] Given Welles' political attitudes and courage, what a field day the tabloids and talkshows would have with him today, when nothing can be denied them.

I'm also surprised that neither Christopher, Rebbeca or Beatrice ever met Oja during his lifetime. That must have required compatmentalization and considerable logistics at times. But I can see his point. In that regard, he was being a good father.

Thank you for the information, Christopher.

Glenn

[Christopher]

Glenn,

You are right that what people want to be true about themselves or their past is often as revealing, if not more so, than the facts themselves.

While it would be an enormous task to translate the entire Welles entry in the 1983 December/January issue of Paris Vogue, fortunately the fragment of the autobiography he was then writing is in English. I have decided to post this for you and eveyone on the board and will do so in a new thread. I think you will find it fascinating.

[Glenn Anders]

And indeed we have, I'm sure.

I've just read the first installment on the other thread.

One might hope that there is a draft of the entire, in some dusty left luggage, perhaps at the Haydarpasa Terminal in Istanbul!

Thank you for the Wellsian memoir.

Glenn

[Tony]

Here's a nice piece, a rarity in fact, about Nina's sister Olga and Welles which, while it has some inaccuracies, also has some interesting info not found elsewhere:


THE ADVENTUROUS YEARS OF ORSON WELLES & OJA KODAR
by Laszlo Kriston


While shooting Kafka’s The Trial (1962) in Yugoslavia, Orson Welles went to a nightclub. There he met a young woman, Oja Kodar (born in 1941 as Olga Palinkas to a Hungarian engineer architect father and a teacher mother). She was a student of the Academy of Fine Arts, at the time hanging out in such an establishment the first time, accompanied by Welles’ cameraman, Edmond Richard. The two of them continued to see each other during the shooting. Oja showed Orson her sculptures and her short story called F for Fake about a painter observing a girl which many years later ended up being incorporated in Welles’ feature film of the same title. After the film crew left Yugoslavia, Orson lost touch with Oja who wrote several letters to the actor-director but never got any answer. Years later Oja moved to Paris, and through mutual friends, Welles (who was editing his film adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s The Immortal Story there), learned that Oja was also in town.

In a move that could easily be part of Citizen Kane, in a typically American manner, he hired a private detective to find Oja, as, to her great shock, she later found out. Finally he came to her apartment and banged on the door knowing that she was inside. He actually tore the door down, while the neighbors came to the corridor to see what all the noise was about. Oja went with Welles to the Raffael hotel where he showed her an aluminum box in which he kept not only all the letters that Oja sent her, but also the ones he had written in answering, but never sent. ’I thought that you were so young and that I would interfere with your life’, he said, to which Oja replied: ’And now you break down my door and don’t worry about interfering with my life?’ ’My bad nature overcame me. I wanted to see you’, Orson admitted. This started a relationship lasting until Orson’s death some eighteen or so years later.

Welles came back to Yugoslavia, along with Oja, to shoot The Deep (1967) with Jeanne Moreau about a couple whose honeymoon on a boat is disturbed by a stranger whom they had just picked up from a broken and sinking ship (Philip Noyce used the very same storyline for his thriller Dead Calm (1989) starring Billy Zane and Nicole Kidman). Orson, who made a living from acting in almost every possible film he was offered around the world (he acted in more than hundred movies and over eighty television shows!), usually invested his income in his own directorial projects. Films, concepts and ideas, whose making was surrounded by problems, setbacks and adventurous turns. ‘When talking with Orson there was no impossible’, Oja Kodar notes.

He was a real one-man-band who, by financing these projects mostly out of his own pocket, tried to do everything in the most economic way possible: dubbing locations for other cities, mixing existing locations to turn them into a fictional, cinematic one, shooting certain scene in portions over extensive periods of time, returning to them when he had an actor or a place or a skeleton crew available. These pieces are purely handcrafted, often pieced together from countless numbers of sources. In one instance, he didn’t hesitate to borrow a Super 8 camera from a German tourist to film something for his movie.

Welles also had an incredible capacity for memory. It is incredible how he was able to keep track of all these ongoing projects in his head. Oja describes him as a ‘human computer’. When working with multiple editing tables, he would go around in the room, and easily point at frames and shots, instructing how to put them together, because in his mind he saw what the future movie would look like. He would often take a scene out from one of his films to put it into another one, such an interchange happened in The Magic Show with a scene from F for Fake. Oja Kodar insists that Welles never abandoned projects: everything went side by side, and he kept returning to each of them.

Due to an almost mystical ‘serendipity’ in life, the strange coincidences, meaningful constellations of events always led him into the arms of crooks, producers who soon turned out to be unreliable bastards. Several times during his career he had to flee from unpaid bills left for him by crooked producers. Already back in the 50s, the whole crew of his Macbeth was stuck on location, not a dime coming from the producers, and he had to agree to appear in Alexander Korda’s production of The Third Man (1949) to channel that money into his own picture. Another typical episode happened in Budapest in 1969 when he and Oja went at the invitation of a Hungarian producer to film two works of Isak Dinesen: The Heroine and Full Moon. They shot for only one day at the staircase of the Hungarian State Opera House, and the same evening they discovered that the bills were going to be presented to Orson because the producer didn’t have any money whatsoever. The very next day he and Oja left the country.

Welles had several unrealized plans in the air: one of his scripts was based on two stories by E. A. Poe, namely The Cask of Amontillado and The Mask of the Red Death (1969) which was meant to be a sequence in an omnibus film, which teamed up Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini (Különleges történetek, 1968). Eventually Orson’s segment didn’t get made. He tried his hand on a biographical script called The Cradle Will Rock based on his own experiences in the leftist theater movement in New York in the 1930s. Later it served as the basis for Tim Robbins’ directorial debut that he shot with a stellar cast including Vanessa Redgrave, Edward Norton, Bill Murray and others. He wrote a script of Because of the Cats (1969) based on Nicolas Freeling’s novel, outlined the plot of a historical story called Santo Spirito (1971) which ends with the battle of Waterloo, adapted Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul (1977), Joseph Conrad’s Victory, and Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman. He also wrote Crazy Weather (1972) a road movie of infidelities and sexual games, and Mercedes (1985), a kammerspiel which takes place in a Spanish manor house, a story that bears the characteristics of Eastern European art house films and Latin American magical realism. He saw great potential in television and had intentions of doing a series about the best restaurants in the world. And all those years, he was constantly editing the footage of Don Quixote which he wanted to finish in Spain only when Franco’s dictatorship was over.

In 1970, at the Hilton Hotel in Rome, he met with Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, then at the heights of their career: the producer duo invited the legendary creator of Citizen Kane, the dethroned king of Hollywood, to tinseltown. Upon his return, the adaptation of a novel was out of question, as the price for the rights were too high. But as Orson and Oja was already put up in a bungalow at the chic Beverly Hilton Hotel, they started turning a previous script, a King Lear-interpretation called Sacred Beasts, into a film. An unknown cameraman, just back from the military service, called Orson up, and offered his help. From then on, Gary Graver became an indispensable DP for Orson. Welles last feature film, The Other Side of the Wind commenced in 1970 and featured John Huston in the lead. The film takes place on the last day in the life of a celebrated Hollywood director whose latent homosexuality underpins the story. In this truly amazing feature Welles once again proved to be ahead of his time: comprised of diverse material, it also features a film-in-a-film which displays a fast-paced cutting style that foreshadowed the music video culture of 80s MTV.
As the outcome of a disagreement between the three co-producers -a Spanish, an Iranian and Orson’s company- Welles was accused of embezzling money from the production’s budget. He wasn’t able to finish the film, and this damaged his reputation to a serious degree. It is ironic that Hollywood and its A-class directors have embraced such mavericks as Stanley Kubrick and David Lean, but have been less than ready to rehabilitate Orson Welles who has always been regarded as an outcast there. In her repeated attempts to free Welles’ last movie from a 2-million-dollar-cage (that would be the price to buy out the film’s producers), Oja Kodar turned to virtually everyone in Hollywood who could help. Oliver Stone saw the assembled and roughly edited footage, in which scenes are purposefully shot with multiple camera-angles on different film stocks, and allegedly said, ‘I don’t know what one could do with a film in this style’, just to use the same stylistic approach in his forthcoming Natural Born Killers (1994). Clint Eastwood has also took a look at the film, as it later became clear, only to study John Huston, whom he impersonated in White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). Oja observed he even used a sentence from the script: ‘of course you are’.

Welles died of a heart attack on 10 October, 1985; in Oja’s absence (she was visiting her parents in Croatia). At the time he was about to shoot a monologue from ‘Julius Caesar’. After his death, Oja Kodar directed two films ('Jaded', 1989, and 'A Time for…' 1993). Welles often said that Olga, his muse, collaborator and companion, was a 'gift from God'. Thus he named her as such, in its Croatian equivalent: ‘Oja Kodar’.








:;):

[Roger Ryan]

Thanks for posting that. I should point out, however, that virtually the entire article is based on Stefan Droessler's interview with Oja Kodar published in the Filmmuseum Munchen book "The Unknown Orson Welles" (2003).

[Tony]

Roger: I don't have that book, so... do you think we'd get in trouble if that original interview was posted here? ???