Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  Eventually, we actually moved into Luis Alfredo’s ramshackle house. We were offering our services for the Latin American venture without a fee; as a contribution to the war effort, the Modern was to provide a per diem for expenses. This was so small, and the cost of living in Venezuela was so high, that the only way to survive was to accept his hospitality.

  What I most remember about our stay as his guest was that he had a maid with a harelip who bellowed an idiotic local song called “Aurora” all day as she dusted absentmindedly.

  I also remember the bus signs to a neighborhood called Paraíso: “Paraíso Directo.”

  We were in charge of publicity and sent a selection of photographs to the local newspaper. This included Speicher’s magisterial portrait of Katharine Cornell as Candida and a lush nude by Bernard Karfiol. The newspaper printed the nude with the caption “Katharine Cornell as Candida.” Very naughty. The reactions we heard were usually a highly amused “Ay, qué cándida!”

  It became evident to us that the most interesting artist was an eccentric figure who lived on a beach off Macuto. We saw his work in the Caracas Museum: mainly white landscapes, delicate yet firm. His name was Armando Reverón. So we drove off to find him.

  We found him at work on the beach, an emaciated figure painting at an easel propped in the sand. There was a second easel and a second figure busily painting away: his pet monkey. This was accepted by all as the most natural thing in the world.

  We were invited to lunch in his tent with his companion, a shy, dusky native woman. He explained to us that there were no knives, he didn’t believe in them, so we used objects carved in wood by our host. He didn’t believe in tea or coffee either, but offered a drink I remembered from my childhood: Postum. The food consisted of vegetables and fruits. No meat—so who needs knives? The only other guests were some life-sized dolls Reverón had sculpted.

  I reported my impression of Reverón’s work to the Modern. This was in 1941. The museum put on a Reverón exhibition in 2007. No one remembered that it was my idea. (And no one at MoMA remembers that they have Orozco’s Dive Bomber and Tank because of me.)

  We reached our last stop, Cuba, in December 1941. Days were already short. It was quite dark when we were met by a distinguished Cuban intellectual, José María Chacón y Calvo—round of person and serious of mien. He took us on a motorized tour of Havana, pointing out the important landmarks, such as the National Capitol, a Washington Monument (D.C.) look-alike. The only trouble was that by then it was pitch-dark and the Cubans had only a halfhearted interest in illumination.

  Much was made of the arcane fact that a diamond was buried under the floor of the National Capitol, at the precise point from which all roads in Havana were centered. I was disappointed to learn later that the diamond was synthetic.

  When we were leaving Havana some time later, Chacón y Calvo sent a formal letter of thanks to Lew (to the man, not the woman, mind you) ending (it sounds better in Spanish): “Will you do me the favor of throwing me at the feet of your wife?” Since he was distinctly chubby, I wondered if he might bounce.

  It was symphony orchestra season, and for the chic women of the capital this was the cue to bring out their furs—regardless of the tropical temperature. And the family diamonds (real, these). The orchestra’s conductor at that time was a personable Italian, much favored by the ladies.

  But the real music came from the streets. There seemed to be literally music in the air, with rumba rhythms pulsating from every café and street corner. A favorite number described a hearse being pushed along a street with its burden, but when a rumba is heard, the corpse springs out of its coffin and gets up and dances.

  No one appreciated the uninhibited rhythmic vitality more than Aaron Copland. He was in Havana for a Good Neighbor Policy tour similar to ours—to my good fortune, we had coincided in Bogotá, Caracas, and now Cuba.

  For economy, I had rented an apartment to avoid hotel bills. I took over the kitchen and bravely entertained. “Everybody” came, including the American ambassador, Spruille Braden. I served an orange ice cream of my own invention. It had a somewhat unusual texture. “How amusing, fur ice cream,” one of the guests was heard to remark.

  I acquired, briefly, a taste for Cuban cigars: Romeo y Julieta, Partagás, and Bolívar were the best, I thought. I had gone to watch them being rolled into shape by young women at long tables. They were being read to aloud by a person on a high stool.

  These were still the days of the reprehensible dictator Fulgencio Batista, much admired by the State Department as a bulwark against Communism. Fidel Castro would emerge a few years later.

  Of course I visited studios. Unfortunately, the most interesting Cuban artist, Wifredo Lam, was not back in Cuba from Europe. I did like the work of Amelia Peláez, elements of Cuban architecture, and decorative arts peering from a strong black grid. I know there is a vibrant art scene now, and I hope to return to see what is going on with a whole new, talented generation today.

  The Cuban visit was cut short by the horrific news of Pearl Harbor. I had been walking along the famous Varadero Beach outside Havana with Aaron Copland when we heard a broadcast from a beach shack.

  As soon as possible, we packed up the exhibition and headed for home.

  More Mexican Moments

  When I returned to Mexico after my marriage, I found that because of the war in Europe, whole new groups had arrived to diversify and enliven the scene. There were gifted émigrés from France—particularly the Surrealists, who found what the imperious Surrealist leader André Breton called “a country in which myth is still alive.” Breton was followed by the poet Benjamin Péret and his wife, the painter Remedios Varo; the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen and his French wife, Alice Rahon, who wrote poems and developed into a painter; and the scene designer Esteban Francés.

  There were Spaniards escaping from Franco and central Europeans fleeing the Nazis. There were brilliant people and, as always at such times, dubious people escaping responsibilities or the law (or both).

  I did a stint at a canteen benefiting the Red Cross. I followed the red-haired mistress of the ex-king Carol II of Romania, Magda Lupescu. She warned me, “Always be sure to weigh the sugar before you leave.” It took a Romanian to think of that one.

  By this time Diego and Frida had left the double-cube house. Home was now the Casa Azul in Coyoacán—at least for Frida. This house was built by her father; she was born there in 1907, although she always fudged on her birth date and pretended she was born in 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution.

  Since 1958, it has been the Frida Kahlo Museum, and as such it has also soaked up a certain amount of amiable nonsense along with the Mexican sunshine, as Hayden Herrera pointed out in her pioneering biography of Frida.

  Many a visitor has gone away believing what we read in the inscription at the entrance to the museum—that Frida and Diego lived together here from the day of their marriage in 1929 until her death in 1954.

  Not mentioned is the year of great upheaval in which they separated, divorced, and remarried. Or the many stays in New York and Paris, San Francisco and Detroit. Or the long periods when Diego found it more convenient to live in his studio, or elsewhere.

  Frida did not on the whole care for “gringos,” as we are called in Latin America. If I was exempt from that, it may have been because of our shared love of animals.

  Frida’s garden in Coyoacán had thickets of trees and splashes of flowers and hanging vines, populated by a cherished cast of monkeys, parrots, little Mexican dogs (escuincles), and even a small deer.

  Living in the tropics with plenty of room, I too collected animals. I had a large and varied menagerie. She would ask me for news of my boarders as if they were family members.

  Diego had lent the Blue House, rent free, to Leon Trotsky (Diego and Frida were still in the O’Gorman double house at the time) when Trotsky and his wife arrived in Mexico in 1937, very much thanks to Diego having interceded for them with the Mexican president, L
ázaro Cárdenas.

  Trotsky at that time was the world’s most unwanted man. As an agitator in the service of worldwide revolution he had no equal. But when Diego was thoroughly roused, there was no limit to his generosity.

  Diego and Trotsky were the best of friends, and when Diego was away, as he often was, Trotsky enjoyed the attentions of the brilliantly costumed Frida.

  Trotsky’s enemies seemed for a time to leave him alone. In fact, he led “a normal life,” and as part of that normal life he went to bed with Frida Kahlo. That came naturally to both of them.

  Frida was never in love with Trotsky, but undoubtedly she saw him as a considerable catch. Once it was over and done with, life went on as before, minus the love letters that Trotsky had slipped into her hand and the assignations in a house nearby.

  The affair had been brief. “I have got sick of the old man,” Frida wrote to a friend.

  But in April 1939, Trotsky broke with Diego Rivera on political grounds. The visitors moved out, just down the street, as it were.

  The new villa was turned into a fortress: windows blocked up and lookout posts overhead. But to no avail. In August 1940 a trusted associate who doubled as an agent for Stalin came into Trotsky’s study, took out an ice pick, and thrust it deep into the back of Trotsky’s skull.

  I visited the house recently. Nothing has been moved. His heavy bulletproof vest still hangs in the closet; the old-fashioned Dictaphone is still on his desk. Trotsky was buried in the garden in which he enjoyed taking little walks, his only diversion.

  When I lived in Mexico in the early 1940s, we became bona fide members of the Rivera-Covarrubias circle. There was Diego’s old friend Roberto Montenegro, who had lived in Europe and spoke nostalgically of Juan Gris and Jean Cocteau. Roberto was an early enthusiast for Mexico’s endlessly varied and inventive folk art.

  Roberto’s contemporary Adolfo Best Maugard, Fito to us, was another pioneer in the reassessment of mexicanidad. He was an elegant dancer; I can still see his narrow brown suede shoes moving through a danzón. (In those days there was a big nightclub with a permanent band. Agustín Lara reigned supreme. I can also still hear his sepulchral voice crooning “Noche de Ronda.”)

  Roberto Montenegro was also about the only artist who had painted Frida. Surprising as it seems, Diego had never painted a proper portrait of her, although he included her in several frescoes.

  Diego did paint a portrait of Miguel Covarrubias’s wife, a darkhaired exotic woman who called herself Rosa Rolando, but was plain Rose from Brooklyn. She was a spirited cook, and there were memorable meals at Tizapán, where the Covarrubiases lived.

  On one occasion when we went to lunch at the Covarrubiases’, besides the usual cast there was the utterly beautiful Dolores del Río, who had left Hollywood to star in a long series of Mexican filmed revolutionary romances. Another guest was a dashing, handsome key figure in the Mexican movie industry, Emilio Fernández, always known as El Indio. He and Dolores had never met.

  This was a society in which instinctual drives were promptly acted upon. There were a lot of people at table, the food was delicious, and there was a tumult of lively talk. Nobody noticed that El Indio and Dolores had slipped away from the table. But then, after lunch, Rosa showed us around the house. When she opened the door to one of the guest rooms, there were Dolores and El Indio in bed together.

  (Some years later, Lew Riley and Dolores del Río were married.)

  I was in Mexico for my first wedding anniversary. In Mexico, the best man at a wedding, the padrino, has a special relationship with the new couple. Living up to this, Miguel Covarrubias gave us joint caricatures in a double frame made of shells—my husband was a devil, I was an angel.

  I asked Frida, who—withered leg or not—would climb up the several flights of my Mexico City apartment to visit me, what I could give him to thank him. She thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Get a shoe box. Fill it with earth. Bury an idolito [a little figurine] in it. Tie a toy shovel on top of the box and write on a card: ‘Dig here, you old archaeologist.’” So this is what I did, although what I buried did not live up to the Covarrubias standard.

  Miguel Covarrubias was already renowned at nineteen as a caricaturist. The original Vanity Fair magazine invited him to come to New York, where he made witty, wicked drawings of the celebrities of the moment. One was a series called Impossible Interviews: Sally Rand (the fan dancer) with Martha Graham, for instance, or Jean Harlow being analyzed by Sigmund Freud.

  But his remarkable eye led him to explore completely new fields. He became an expert ethnologist, recording in texts and drawings the civilization and folkways of peoples as varied as the Balinese and the women of Tehuantepec.

  We went with him to the Veracruz region, where in steamy tropical heat we hunted up remnants of the Olmec civilization. It was almost inevitable in Mexico at that time to become interested in pre-Columbian archaeology; it was part of the rediscovery of Mexico’s extraordinary heritage. I had found some little clay figurines when ground was broken for our Acapulco swimming pool. To learn something about them, I went to Mexico City to follow the classes of Alfonso Caso, the father of Mexican archaeological studies.

  When a highway was being carved out of the surrounding mountains, I used to go out with my little geologist pick and look for traces of shellfish in the cut. Any remnants indicated that people had once been living there.

  Frida told me that Miguel and Diego were fierce rivals as collectors of pre-Columbian art. She described their going on expeditions together to hunt for idolitos, each trying to get up earlier in the morning than the other to be first on the chase.

  Another great interest at that time was architecture. Mexican architects were boldly striking out in new ways. They were not hesitant about color. Foremost was the elegant Luis Barragán, then quite unknown outside of Mexico. He was forging his unique blend of pared-down rigorous garden design at the Pedregal and creating luminous spaces.

  Luis was a devout Catholic. He had a crucifix hung over his bed. An attractive young woman I knew told me that when she went to bed with him, he would turn the crucifix around to face the wall.

  A much-talked-about event in the spring of 1940 were the lectures given by a distinguished Spanish refugiado philosopher, José Gaos. He had translated Heidegger, and Heidegger of course was his subject.

  Several young men I knew, perhaps more familiar with the bridge table than with existentialism, valiantly tried to follow. I am not sure how much of Gaos’s Filosofía de la Angustia permeated—but how can you resist a title like that?

  Neither Diego nor Frida was interested in classical music. She loved the pulse-raising blare of the mariachis and had the mariachis come over to play at the slightest provocation—or without any. But both were fond of the composer-conductor Carlos Chávez. They cherished him for his championship of Mexican composers and his role in building up the Sinfónica de México—which incidentally, at that time, played more contemporary music than could be heard in New York. They had a warm friendship with Aaron Copland, who lived quite some time in Mexico and was completely at home there. He wrote his Salón México based on those experiences.

  Diego was monstrously ugly, but his girth was matched by his charm, his overwhelming vitality, and the gusto he brought not only to his work but also to eating, talking, flirting, collecting, and rather amateurish political activity. He took it for granted that he ought to sleep with every attractive woman he met, and most often he did. Sex for him was natural, inevitable, and if ever a woman refused to share his bed, he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

  Naturally, Frida suffered from his constant infidelities, in spite of her own. When they were passing affairs, she tried to overlook them. One of his more public attachments was to María Félix, the sultry ruling Mexican movie star of the period. When a reporter asked if he was in love with her, he said, “All of Mexico is.” When he tried to marry her, she was flattered and amused but unresponsive
. The publicity didn’t hurt, though.

  In her memoirs, she had a lot to say about his well-known and highly inventive mythomania. There were the long conversations with Stalin (whom actually he had never met). There was the human flesh that he had eaten with African cannibals. Better yet, there was the story of how he had been born as a pair of Siamese twins and had hidden his sister under an enormous cape. He claimed that when he fell in love with her, they had to be separated without anesthetic.

  In the matrimonial tit for tat, Frida kept up her side. When she found out that Diego was having an affair with her beloved younger sister, Cristina, it came as a hideous shock. She retaliated by leaving the house and beginning an affair with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, then a young man. A secret apartment had been taken for the purpose.

  Although Diego didn’t care about her many lesbian affairs, he was violently jealous of any male intruder. He came after Isamu with a loaded pistol. A scene out of a French farce occurred when Isamu got away over the roof. Unluckily, Frida’s dog came trotting up with one of Isamu’s discarded socks, thereby giving the show away. Eventually, Frida managed to forgive her sister and broke off her affair with Noguchi. Order of a kind was restored.

  There was an international flavor to the entertainment on offer at that time because of touring foreign companies and performers, cut off by the war from their home base. There was an admirable season of French theater when Louis Jouvet brought his company to Mexico. Jouvet himself in Molière’s Tartuffe, for instance, was unforgettable. It was poignant hearing the French, knowing the conditions in Paris under the occupation.

  The Mexican scene was wonderfully varied. Sometimes, I went to the bullfights: “el domingo en la tarde” (García Lorca), the women dressed to kill, the men with their obligatory big cigars. I knew of all the bullfighters: Armilla with the skinny bandy legs and the big hooked nose; the handsome El Soldado, who always had a pretty girl in the president’s box. I enjoyed reading the newspaper write-ups of the bullfights, with their highly colorful vocabulary.