Belinda Vidor Holliday

On January 24, artist Belinda Vidor Holliday slipped quietly out of a most exceptional life, surrounded by family and friends in her sunlit Carmel-by-the-Sea cottage, absent the fanfare she had earned but eschewed. She was 92.

The first time she saw the classic Carmel cottage rising out of an unruly garden sheltered by elderly oaks, the fine-art painter knew she’d come home. Built in 1923 by a young Michael J. Murphy for artist Ada Belle Champlin, a Laguna Beach transplant who’d come to Carmel to establish an art association, the cottage carried the energy of creative intent.

Belinda Vidor Holliday joined the juried membership of the Carmel Art Association in 1990.

The property subsequently belonged to renowned artist Frank Montague Moore and his wife, where they had lived until his passing, in 1967. Moore had established his art studio in a room where natural lighting came in through a north-facing window. Belinda Vidor planned to do the same. Yet first, she had to secure the property, having found herself in second place behind a buyer whose offer had been accepted.

Undaunted, she was determined to move to Carmel from Modesto, to reinvent her life in the community introduced to her by her parents when she was a child.

She knew the house was meant to be hers, even if it was going to take time to convince the seller—three and a half years, to be exact.

In the meantime, Vidor took to visiting the vacant home, sweeping the paths and maintaining the grounds of the property for which she had already assumed emotional ownership. She bought herself a one-bedroom cottage in town, where she wrote a letter to the widow Moore, campaigning for the opportunity to preserve the property as an artist’s cottage. Mrs. Moore, enchanted by the Carmel art colony connection, wanted Vidor to have the house. Particularly after she flew to La Jolla, where Mrs. Moore had relocated, bearing the gift of a painting. Ultimately, Vidor prevailed.

Although she learned, decades later, that Champlin had named the cottage “The Sketch Box,” the name Vidor gave it when she moved in was “En Fin” or “In the End,” a prescient harbinger of her own intentions to live out her life in her artist’s cottage by the sea.

Today, an unfinished painting sits on her father’s French easel, lit by winter sunlight streaming into the living room where Vidor painted, into her last days.

Becoming Belinda Vidor Holliday

Belinda Vidor was born in Los Angeles, three years behind her sister, Antonia Vidor, to legendary Hollywood film director, producer, and screenwriter, King Wallis Vidor (1894-1982), and gamine actress Olive Eleanor Boardman (1898-1991), whose career began as a model for artist John R. Neill, legendary photographer Arnold Genthe, and Eastman Kodak. Elegant, willowy, beautiful, actually, Belinda Vidor clearly got her mother’s wideset eyes, lit by her father’s glycerin blue.

King Vidor’s 67-year career brought the silent film era to a close and ushered in the age of sound. Nominated five times for Best Director at the Academy Awards, he was considered an “auteur” director, one whose approach is so personal, it’s as if he were the author of the film. He reportedly won eight national and international film awards, including the Screen Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1979, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his “incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.”

Belinda Vidor was just a year old when her parents divorced, and her mother, done with the halcyon days of Hollywood, escaped with her children to France, where she married a French filmmaker and assigned a governess to her children. This launched a peripatetic upbringing for the children, between two continents.

Vidor ultimately returned to California, where she attended Mills College before transferring to UCLA, where she studied under Academy Award-winning artist the late Jan Stussey, and commenced with a degree in art.

“Whether one is viewing Belinda’s small plein air landscapes, her distinctive large abstracts constructed from fanciful shapes, her portraits of large groups of people, or her most recent series of florals, one thing is for certain,” said Sally Aberg, gallery manager of the Carmel Art Association. “There is a freshness and boldness in all of Belinda’s paintings.”

Coming Home to Carmel

After college, Belinda Vidor was invited to dine at the family home of her beau, Dean Jones, where she realized his parents actually knew his friends and interests, and participated in his life. She watched as dinner was served family style, and folks got up from the table to help with the dishes and reach for cookies hidden above the refrigerator. And she wanted that. After she married Jones, with whom she moved to Modesto and had three children, her mother said, “I see what you wanted; a classic California home and a conventional family.” She didn’t understand it at the time, but in retrospect, she knew her mother was right.

After losing a child in an accident, Vidor chose to reinvent her life in Carmel, where her parents had summered by the sea. When she arrived in town, she saw painters poised at their easels by the bay, cafes where people were leaning into the conversation, and an older woman, wearing a hat and brightly colored socks, walking uptown with her dog. Vidor was only 43 at the time, but she knew, ultimately, she wanted that.

What she didn’t realize she also wanted until she met him was finding the love of her life. Vidor met Jacquelin Smith Holliday II, who preferred “Jim,” in March 1982, at his book signing for what is still considered a masterful history of the California Gold Rush era with “The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience,” published in 1981.

Born in Indianapolis in 1924, Jim Holliday graduated from Yale in 1948 with a degree in history, his curriculum having been disrupted by WWII, during which he served as a lieutenant in the Navy. A decade later, he achieved his doctorate in history from Cal Berkeley. He later served as founding director of the Oakland Museum of California and two terms as executive director of the California Historical Society.

In July 1982, Belinda Vidor went on her first date with the dashing California historian. Three weeks hence, they exchanged their first “I love you,” as recorded in her diary of significant dates with the man she married on June 11, 1983. Equally scholarly and social, Jim Holliday was, first and foremost, a family man, whose children and stepchildren considered him a mentor, a force, and a wonderful father. Belinda Vidor Holliday said he was her “husband, her champion, her best friend, her dream come true.”

After Jim Holliday’s passing in 2006, Belinda Vidor Holliday left her heart with him, and turned her attention to her family and friends, her art, and her devotion to dogs. She leaves behind “Buster,” a Parsons Jack Russell she rescued, but she always believed he rescued her. As she moved into her senior years, she continued to celebrate life, firmly believing, “If you sit back and complain about being old, that’s when you deteriorate. I don’t dislike where I am; I just need to keep practicing a vital life.”

Belinda Vidor Holliday was preceded in death by her son, Kenny, and is survived by her son, Stephen Jones (Laurie Flanagan) and their sons, Austin, Connor, and Quintin; daughter, Deverah Tipton (Ron), and their sons Michael (Karen), Jon (Stephanie), and Stephen (Mindy); beloved friend Lilli Dean; stepchildren Tim Holliday (Lucia), Brett Holliday, and Jack Holliday; great grandchildren Avery, Hayden, Holly, Riley, and Wyatt; a circle of dear friends, a wide community of art collectors, and Buster.