Jacobus "Ko" Koedijk

Jacobus Marinus Koedijk

Ko

10-30-1933 – 3-24-23

I called him Maephisto. Mae-Mae or just Mae for short.  And those who knew him know I wasn’t wrong for calling him so…

Ko was the devil incarnate. The most charming kind of devil if ever there were one. And devil-be-damned, the damned best sort of heavenly devil to walk among us! That devil lived in his eyes and the deep dimple in his cheek. He showed up with a twinkle of mischief that said, “I like you; let’s play!” And if you smiled back, oh boy! Were you in trouble! Wonderful trouble!  Heavenly trouble! For Ko, there was something in every day – even the worst of days – that brought cause to celebrate.

The joy he took over a meal was infectious, and it was an experience he always wanted to share. Actually, he took pleasure quite seriously – steadfast in his whimsy, teaching us all how to enjoy ourselves, assuring us there was no shame in indulgence. Life was meant to be savored, relished. Embraced.  There was not much that “another” couldn’t make better…another bottle, another bite, another dessert, another… mm-hmmm… Yes.  That too! A man of appetites was he…All appetites. Yes.

“Naughty, dirty, stinking, and rotten!” Ko would exclaim…Well, sex is dirty if you do it right.  Right?!  Honi soit qui mal y pense, eh?

Shame on him who thinks it’s bad.  For Ko, nothing “Human disgusted him, unless it was cruel or unkind.”*Tennessee Williams paraphrased

My Maephisto, my MaeMae.  No, I was not wrong for choosing this sobriquet.

But what goes into making a mortal spend his life giving Bacchus a run for his money?

And how do I whittle a nearly ninety-year life – a life so much larger than life – into a few short pages?  This is me writing, remember? 

So, if I can’t make it short, I promise to do my best to paint and capture for you a depiction which renders Ko alive again, if only for the time that you listen.

I once asked him what was the worst thing that ever happened to him. “The first time is the worst thing,” Ko said.  “The first time.”  I didn’t understand.  “When some older boys stole my only toy,” he explained, “when my kitten Mickey ran away…when my mother said, ‘oh well’ and didn’t help me find him…the first time something bad happens is always the worst thing that ever happened.”

Thus, two formative experiences, two “first times” surely birthed in Ko his penchant for joy seeking …the hunger he knew as a boy under the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and the deep bond he had with his big brother Bertus. Bertus, whom Ko called Bep…

Ko had two big brothers, actually, ten and fifteen years older than he.  Talk about a late surprise baby!  But it was the brother ten years older with whom Ko had a special connection.  Bep was a vaudevillian.  He had an act with another fellow where they’d accompany each other on the accordion and do acrobatic tricks…And Bep loved going to the cinema. He would return home late to the bedroom they shared and nudge his little brother awake. There was a funny, oddly placed transom window in their room leading to the kitchen.  Bep would lift Ko up through the transom, to climb down onto the kitchen counter, to steal homemade cookies from the cookie jar…and then, once returned to his bed, Bep would re-enact the entire film for Ko, scene by scene, line by line, moment to moment…cookie crumbs riddling their bed sheets…

But that was before the war.  When there was still sugar and flour and butter…Before the Nazis moved in and took over the Netherlands. Many of us can only imagine all the first worst things Ko experienced then.  Ko was just seven, but would often recall his last bite of chocolate before the war, and his first taste of it after. 

He remembered the view from his second floor window, at their home, over a pub, on the Celebestraat.  That view, a railway stop. Ko watched as the SS violently, cruelly, herded his pals and their families onto trains…shoving, shoving, shoving butts of rifles into backs, into rib-cages, or worse, into heads… His mother Hendrika would pull Ko away from the window, instructing him not to look, but Ko stood witness.  Devastated.  His friends hauled away. 

Then the Nazis took his father and brothers to work camps in Poland and Germany, leaving his mother alone with Ko to fend for themselves. Ko remembered the sirens.  The air raids.  He remembered the freezing cold.  He remembered starvation.  He remembered fear.

Upsetting Hendrika to the depths for the danger he’d put himself in, Ko would steal coal from the Nazis to warm their home. And with the worst, most vile words a small boy could muster, Ko would curse at the SS officers, kick them in the shins, throw rocks at them, then run for his life; Nazi bullets skidding past him, ricocheting off the cold, wet and slippery cobble stone streets… Tough little boy he grew to be, but Ko would have life-long nightmares of those bullets.

And yet then, somehow, all five Koedijks survived the war.  Ko, his parents and two brothers reunited, only to lose brother Bep, his favorite brother, to an amputated leg that went gangrene when Ko was just thirteen. Bep’s death bed instruction to Ko was, “You have fun.  Just have fun, that’s your job. Have fun.” Ko loved Bep so much, he spent his life honoring his big brother’s instruction.

As a student and young man, Ko would explore his many, many gifts.  His good looks and quick wit made him the most charming salesman at the flower stall his family operated in the Amsterdam open market. He excelled in French, even before setting foot in the country that would become his life-long spiritual home. He showed incredible promise musically, playing the accordion, piano, upright bass, and singing.  It was thought he would go on to become an arranger, and Ko often wondered, even as recently as a month ago, where that path might have taken him.  He was a gifted boxer, and also played catcher on his military baseball team.

When Ko was nineteen, with his mandatory military service behind him, he and a friend, riding tandem by motorcycle, ventured to France. Ko, in the bitch seat, as we say here in the States. When his poor friend returned to Holland without Ko, and had to explain to Ko’s mother that Ko had met a girl and stayed behind, Hendrika promptly slapped the poor chap across the face!  For Ko, France was like Dorothy waking up in the Land of Oz.  Suddenly the world had color, and senses he didn’t know he had were awakened.  France was the perfect land for a budding gourmand, bon-vivant, beau garcon like he.

But the girl…that girl whose allure kept Ko in Paris, was, get this, a film star!  Estella Blain.

Ko enrolled at the IDHEC (The Institute for Advanced Cinema Studies) and before long, was working on sets.  He proved to be a very talented editor, and even worked for Orson Welles on a project for NATO.  Ko’s good looks, however, almost got in the way.  Someone in the French studio system spotted him, then tried to lure Ko in front of the camera, and into giving Alain Delon a little friendly competition…but Ko would have none of it!  His eye was firmly set on directing!

Ko had a steady seven-year sprint in France, honing his craft, and working his way up to first assistant director on feature films, when Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle stopped reissuing work visas to foreigners. This forced a terribly disappointed Ko to return to the drizzly land of his birth. 

All was not lost, however…when the most beautiful girl in all of Amsterdam stumbled into him exiting a shop, Ko said, “Just for that, you have to have a coffee with me.”  Meet cute. Her name was Cornelia, but Ko, ever the Francophile, would rename her Corinne.  They married and it wasn’t long before she was to make him a father!

As there was no film industry in Holland, Ko found work in the busy port as a long-shoreman. But while he had the physical prowess for the brutal labor of the docks, the artist in him suffered.  Then one morning, just like in a movie!, out of the mist emerged, a wealthy, well-dressed man who approached Ko. “Hey kid, I hear you know how to make pictures…”  Deus ex machina!

That man hired Ko to make commercials in the CinemaScope format for Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes.  Gorgeous technicolor films that played before the feature in the movie house!  For the next three years, the Turmac Tobacco Company would be Ko’s exclusive employer.  He trotted the globe shooting, editing, and producing with the National Screen Services in Hollywood and the English Film Laboratories. 

Fortunately, Ko loved to fly, and would go on to become a pilot himself, proudly city-hopping in his Cessna 172! In fact, Ko was a great world traveler and knew instinctively how to be a good guest in a foreign country.  When in some Northern African Arab city, he was presented, as the most honored guest, the testicles of some wild beast, he knew to dig in and enjoy, graciously accepting the esteem they showed him.  Big smile, twinkle in his eye!

Ambitious, disciplined, talented, Ko formed his own production company, Koedijk Partners. And in the twenty-seven years of its existence, he garnered over one hundred and fifty awards - among which were five gold, six silver, and three bronze Lions in Cannes and Venice, and two Clios in New York! 

His documentary about the painter Corneille plays in Holland’s COBRA museum to this day. And Ko got a particular chuckle when in the 2012 debates, President Barack Obama said, “This isn’t a game of ‘you sunk my battleship’…” Ko understood then that the Milton Bradley commercials he made – Rock’em Sock’em Robots and Battleship… – had become part of the American zeitgeist. How he loved his adopted country!

How often I’ve heard that work on a Ko set was a much-coveted position. And without dropping any names, I will tell you that there are many successful film-makers in Hollywood today who cut their teeth learning the craft from Ko.

I know I learned from him not to be offended when someone offers an idea about your creative endeavor. It means they are excited about what you’re doing. Accept the compliment!

He’d always say, “Take a decision!  No.  You don’t make a decision, you take it.  Bang!”  Punctuated like some comic book hero!  He was a self-made man of decisive action, who’d oft lose patience with my wavering reticence, my tendency toward the tentative.

And though Ko was not forgetful, he was good at forgetting.  As in any life, there were slights and betrayals both petty and grand, but Ko could, would, forget – a willful forgetting so that what he enjoyed in you, what he loved about you, remained intact.

In one of our last conversations, Ko asked if he had been a good man.  I assured him he had been, that he'd given so much to so many… he responded, “So many have given so much to me.”

Corinne would go on to give Ko four beautiful children, and while his career meant he was travelling for much of their childhoods, how he loved to spoil Daphne, Maarten, Jacobine, and Florence, always returning home with the latest Levis and Nike tennis shoes, Sony Walkmen, and towers and towers of Tower Records!  (Yes, he was a shopaholic!) Ko delighted in his adult relationships with his children. And while he didn’t often brag about them, he had no qualms boasting big time about his seven grandchildren!  Zoe, Tim, Zoran, Amber, Nadege, Bo, and Zeb. Ko even recently became a great-gran to a little girl named Eiza.

Ko was witty and had a playful turn of phrase.  Remember that “just for that…” he threatened his first wife Corinne with when she stumbled into him.  Well, I, too, fell for the line.  My own meet cute.  In my ignorance of cars, as a concierge at the Mondrian Hotel, I’d rented him a Lincoln Town Car as opposed to the Cadillac he’d requested.  “Just for that,” he said, “you must have lunch with me.”

I couldn’t have known then that here I’d be thirty-two years later.  But he seemed to know it. 

At the end of that lunch date, Ko told me he loved me.  “You’re crazy,” I said. “Well, you better get used to it,” he teased, “you’re gonna have a crazy husband!”  Decisive action.

Yes. Crazy and playful, he wrote one-of-a-kind letters - in his equally unique handwriting. I have a messenger bag full!  When we’d get ready to go somewhere, he’d sometimes ask, “Are you sure you’re going out with me? What are you doing with this ship wreck?”  He was always so cheerful and generous, I wondered what the hell he was doing with old melancholy me…

Now, let’s go back to Ko, the boy.  This time he’s twelve. The war has just ended. Imagine him, as I often do, scrawny from starvation, standing, head high, on the bow of a big, steel ship.  Painted white with big Red Crosses on its hull, Ko had been deemed a war child, malnourished, and was sent, along with many other Dutch children, to homes across England to fatten them up.  Most of the kids on that ship, so frightened, having just said goodbye to their parents, sobbed as they crossed the North Sea to the English coast…and though he wanted to, Ko did not cry.  No, he stood face to the wind, taking in everything that was awaiting him ahead.

No guts, no glory!

Several times on the crossing, that ship would slow to a halt and all would go quiet. The sniffling children terrified into silence.  A Luftwaffe bomb discovered on the sea floor just ahead would have to be detonated…Pow! A rupture bursting through the choppy waves of the sea’s surface…. Gigantic plumes of water shooting into the sky with a loud clap against the horizon!!!

Old Ko would become a boy again as he described his excitement witnessing such a fright…

No guts, no glory!

Ko’s death was not an end.  There is no Fade To Black for a man of Ko’s spirit.  I could feel it in him… what he was seeing, what he was approaching…

“Cut, print, check the gate, moving on…”

His last exhale was the beginning of his next big adventure, and he could wait for it no longer.

Bon voyage, my darling MaeMae.  Keep having fun. We must keep having fun.

I have a devil on my shoulder.  The most heavenly of devils.