Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  There were amusements: meeting friends before lunch at the Ritz Bar, with the mural by Covarrubias of Xochimilco. One day it snowed, and customers and barmen alike rushed out into the street to see this unique spectacle.

  Going to the Tenampa at three in the morning after a party to drink caldo de pollo and hear the mariachis. The fun of being serenaded, with a group of mariachis singing “Las Mañanitas” under one’s window.

  There were fascinating discoveries: the remarkable photographs of Manuel Álvarez Bravo (he photographed me up on his roof with the vast Mexican sky as background).

  Rufino Tamayo was not living in Mexico at the time. I got to know him later in New York, and in Paris, which he heartily disliked. His ambitious wife, Olga, wanted him to have a Paris exhibition on his résumé, so, very much against his will, Rufino spent a winter in Paris. He found the light depressingly dark compared with Mexico. There were no compensating elements from his point of view, but Olga did get that exhibition catalog to show around. David Alfaro Siqueiros was not in Mexico at that time, either.

  The artist whom I got to know well was the splendidly cantankerous José Clemente Orozco, whose life was entirely and willfully apart from the Rivera-Covarrubias circle and the current artistic scene. It seemed appropriate that he had blown himself up at sixteen making a chemical experiment. Particles remained in his eyes—he wore very thick spectacles—and he had lost a hand. He used the remaining stump to spread pigments on his canvas.

  We became friends, in spite of his total lack of English and my still rudimentary Spanish. I visited him often, despite another hurdle: his conviction that chewing raw garlic was the best way to preserve one’s health. He painted three portraits of me. I never knew what happened to them.

  Mexican muralists were rediscovering the art of fresco painting on a large scale. José Clemente used to talk to me about early tempera techniques and his own discovering of Giotto’s follower Cennino Cennini. He himself had covered vast walls both in Mexico and in the United States (at Dartmouth College and in Pomona, California), but he was virtually ignored at that time in Mexico. He was quite unable, in fact unwilling, to attract the kind of limelight that bathed Rivera and Siqueiros. Frida was still an unknown quantity.

  Another favorite, of Frida’s and mine, was José Guadalupe Posada, the nineteenth-century printmaker. His point of view was all that was most Mexican. Skull and skeleton ranked high in his cast of characters. He also specialized in freaks, assassins, and suicides. Posada’s world was one in which skeletons went to confession, attended the funerals of other skeletons, took part in bicycle rallies, and doubled as frisky waitresses.

  Of course there was a Never Never Land quality to this parallel life to the grim realities of wartime Europe. My husband, as a foreign resident, was not drafted, but once the United States entered the war, he volunteered and left for America. Bette Davis had fallen in love with him and followed him from army camp to army camp, causing quite some ink to flow. I stayed behind for a while to look after his interests. If I had not, Mexico being Mexico at that time, he would not have found much on his return.

  We had divorced in a very Mexican offhand way. There had been no venom; we simply agreed that having married very young, we had grown in different directions.

  A lawyer friend drove us to a small neighboring town, where an ordinary house doubled as a town hall. We gave our names and thumbprints, there was a fine-looking stamp affixed with a flourish to a document, and that was that. We were divorced. I presumed it was legitimate; I didn’t look at it too closely.

  Vogue—First Job

  I didn’t go to school until I was ten years old. Instead, a French governess was imported to teach me at home, in what came to be called “the schoolroom.”

  She ruled over me, abetted by two correspondence courses. One from France, the Cours Boutet de Monvel, came in the kind of purple ink that was then used for French bistro menus. The other, from Baltimore, was the Calvert Correspondence School.

  The latter was a favorite because, along with the pages for regular lessons, there came small sepia photographs of famous monuments: the Sphinx, the Parthenon, the Lion Gate of Mycenae.

  I awaited their arrival in high anticipation. I would pin them up on the board in my schoolroom, arranged with care. New arrivals would require new arrangements.

  Little did I know that in one form or another, I would be doing the same thing the rest of my life. The fact is, I remained fascinated by images, and not only from high art. Traveling, I invariably acquired postcards and would stack them up in my hotel room in an improvised layout.

  Eventually, this led me, a young American, to starting and editing an art review in Paris, in French. I founded L’ŒIL in 1955 and continued until 1970, when a divorce from a French partner ended that phase of my life.

  The events leading up to the creation of L’ŒIL, in retrospect, seem improbable. I had been living in Mexico and had not been back to the United States for several years.

  In Mexico—we are in 1945—I befriended a tall, elegant, neurotic woman, Nada Patcevitch, British born, the wife of the stylish guiding spirit at Condé Nast, Iva Patcevitch. She was recovering from a shipwrecked love affair.

  I offered her my small guest beach house in Acapulco, where I lived at that time.

  Some time later I came up to New York for some personal business, intending to stay two weeks. Nada had already returned to New York. She was about the only person I knew there; my family was scattered elsewhere. I called her up. She invited me to come for drinks.

  That is how I met the Condé Nast high command in one swoop. There were Iva Patcevitch, Russian, and wife; Alexander Liberman and Tatiana, his wife, both Russian; Edna Chase, who would be editor in chief of Vogue for nearly forty years. I was wearing a Mexican skirt and white blouse. Tatiana growled at me in French, “You ought to wear a black blouse with that skirt.”

  In spite of that vestmental gaffe, Pat, as he was known, invited me to go with him to a birthday party for Mrs. Chase the following evening, Nada being away. During the evening, he took me aside and offered me a job on Vogue. During the same evening, Mrs. Chase invited me for lunch the next day.

  She took me to Voisin, the restaurant in vogue (not the magazine) at the time. I was enjoying the chocolate soufflé with its accompanying whipped cream when she surprised me by suggesting I come to Vogue as a fashion editor. I explained that I had been on a beach in Acapulco for the last five years and knew absolutely nothing about fashion. She answered tartly, “My child, I know a fashion editor when I see one.”

  A few days later, I had somehow met the features editor, a bustling know-it-all named Allene Talmey. She offered me a job in the features department.

  I was completely free at that time, unencumbered by attachments. I was so struck by the three offers coming one on top of the other that out of sheer superstition I accepted. I also hoped that an assignment might take me back to France. Incidentally, the fact that I spoke French had a good deal to do with all this.

  My sister, Heather, who was in Mexico, obligingly packed up my things and closed the Mexico City apartment. I didn’t go back to Mexico for thirty years.

  I had my first business talk with Mr. Patcevitch. He offered me the usual starting salary of forty-five dollars a week. I burst out laughing, “Why, Mr. Patcevitch, my ignorance is worth more than that.” He looked surprised and offered me seventy-five dollars. I accepted. It was just enough to buy a hat by Tatiana du Plessix at Saks Fifth Avenue. If you knew what was good for you at Vogue, you bought a Tatiana hat, her husband being the all-powerful Alexander Liberman.

  Apparently, it was routine in those circles that Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar poached on each other’s territory. Sure enough, I got an invitation for lunch with the top editors at Harper’s Bazaar. I was met by several well-hatted and well-suited women, then we were joined by the inimitable Diana Vreeland, who came loping in, announcing, “I’ve just been to the most di-vine funeral.” A job was offered, this tim
e—of all improbable possibilities—as managing editor.

  When I loyally reported this to Mrs. Chase, she literally wept out of fury.

  Although I wanted to write features connected with my own interests, I was slotted as a fashion editor and placed in an office with the top fashion editor, Babs Rawlings, along with her two black-and-white spaniels, which were in permanent attendance. Winter and summer alike, she wore open-toed sandals that showed off her brilliantly painted toenails.

  So my professional life began. With some apprehension, every morning I walked down the long corridor to what was now my office, past the copywriters bent over their typewriters, wearing elaborate hats (Tatiana strikes again)—large up-swooping brims and veils pulled tightly across their faces. Substantial rhinestone chokers seemed to be de rigueur for the daily uniform.

  Incidentally, all the typewriters had a French acute accent so that “Condé Nast” could be spelled correctly.

  Soon I was taking what were called sittings, although this meant standing up, in the big photographic studio Vogue used at the time. No makeup artists or hairdressers hovered. The editors, I discovered with dismay, were expected to wreak transformations on the compliant models, so I plunged in with brush, hairpins, and that old-fashioned lacquer, like glue, that had to be coaxed out of the bottle. Nothing remotely sexy was tolerated. Not even a breast outlined discreetly. Beware of the nipple suggested by wool jersey. One editor in chief, Jessica Daves, once axed a summer shot of a girl in a short beach coat “because people might think she had nothing on underneath.”

  I was eventually able to swerve from the fashion beat and got to work with top photographers, including the invaluable Irving Penn, to photograph such subjects as John Cage (almost disappearing into an open grand piano) and the unlikely duo—neither spoke the other’s language—of Arshile Gorky and Wifredo Lam.

  Chick Austin

  It was probably in the first week of my first job, at Vogue. We are in 1945. To my surprise, I had been acquired by the Condé Nast Publications network and invented as a fashion editor, a distinction for which I was totally unqualified.

  I was sitting in the office I shared with the head fashion editor, Babs Rawlings. “Go to Knize and take a look,” she said vaguely.

  All I knew about Knize was that several European men friends used a delicious cologne made by Knize. But Knize was a famous tailor in Vienna before the war, I learned. And a branch had opened in New York when the Vienna store had to close.

  Off I went and met Mr. Wolf, director of the shop. We chatted, and I told him I had just arrived from Mexico. It turned out that he was a collector of pre-Columbian objects. He was highly interested to learn that I had not only taken courses on the subject at the University of Mexico but also worked on some minor excavations myself.

  “I have some good pieces at home,” he told me. “A few people are coming for drinks next week to see them, won’t you join us?”

  Of course I went. I didn’t know anybody, but was delighted to see some characteristic Colima pottery, a good Teotihuacán mask, and some idolitos from Guerrero, the region where I had lived.

  Soon I was joined by an elegant man, about forty, who was equally interested in Mr. Wolf’s collection. We talked. There was a compelling gaiety and charm about him. As usual at a cocktail party, there had been only cursory introductions. I hadn’t caught his name. But when he asked me to come to Hartford for the weekend to look at paintings, I immediately accepted.

  When I thanked Mr. Wolf for the evening, I asked him, “By the way, who was that nice man I was talking to over by your Guerrero pieces?”

  He was not the Pied Piper, although there was some common ground there, but he turned out to be A. Everett Austin Jr., known to everyone as Chick. He had been the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum of Hartford from 1927 through 1944.

  Off I went to Hartford. Chick met me at the station platform. He was an unmistakable figure: in magnificent Mandarin costume, with the embroidered Chinese hat that went with it, and a long pigtail. Completely impervious to the astonished stares from the regular commuters crowding the platform, he explained breezily he was on his way to give a magic show at a local high school.

  “My wife expects you; I’ll drop you at the house and come back later to take you to dinner.”

  The house was as unlike its neighbors on Scarborough Street as its owner. It had a small-scale Palladian facade with slender central columns and a triangular pediment. Once inside, I discovered it was only one room deep. As Chick commented cheerfully, “Like me, all facade.”

  Downstairs was rococo fantasy and floating colors. Upstairs, my room and bathroom were strict Bauhaus modern. Mrs. Austin, Helen, a charming woman, seemed totally unfazed that her husband had brought home a new acquaintance for the night.

  She explained that Chick had invented an alter ego, “the Great Osram,” and as a magician did magic performances. This seemed perfectly in character.

  The Great Osram returned and, dressed like a soigné Westerner, escorted me to an Italian restaurant. No Mrs. Austin.

  The conversation flowed seamlessly. The wine flowed too. Soon Chick was telling me the heartbreaking account of his struggles with his board: how he had built the Atheneum’s collection from nearly nothing to an extraordinary group of Italian baroque and modern masterpieces only to be unappreciated by the trustees. With great emotion, he evoked some of the exhibitions that had broken new ground: Surrealism (1931), the first comprehensive Picasso exhibition in the United States (1934), the concerts of new music, the costume balls, the theatrical performances with him, the impresario, often onstage, having painted most of the scenery. The cinema department was the first in a museum—seven years before MoMA, he said.

  Then, with tears rolling down his cheeks, he told me he had been fired.

  I was moved to tears too. Impulsively, I reached into my handbag, pulled out a little pre-Columbian bronze of a small man in a conical hat that was my good-luck charm, and handed it to him. “Keep this.” He took it.

  It was close to midnight, but he said, “Let me show you the museum.” He still had the keys to the building.

  The night watchman of course recognized him and stepped aside. Chick led me into the galleries, turning on the lights as we went from one to another.

  He showed me scores of pictures that he had bought, from Fra Angelico’s Angel to Dalí’s Apparition; masterpieces by Piero di Cosimo, Cranach, Caravaggio (a great ecstasy of Saint Francis), Poussin, Le Nain, Tiepolo, Goya, Degas. He had bought the first important Max Ernst for America, Europe After the Rain, the painting that Max had rolled up in wartime Europe and mailed to the Museum of Modern Art—it was there when he arrived as an émigré. Few people had heard of Balthus at that time. Chick bought the only Miró sold of the splendid 1933 series shown by Pierre Matisse. And there was a Mondrian. The Picasso exhibition opened the same night that he presented Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts with Virgil Thomson’s music. What a night that must have been!

  These were not just canvases to him but his own flesh and blood—his children. Seeing them with him was the most extraordinary experience.

  Years later, in 1957, I was in Paris editing the art review I founded, L’ŒIL. I had heard that Chick had taken over the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. I wrote to him and asked if he would write an article about it for me. He answered promptly that he would.

  There was a delay, then came an ominous letter from a secretary saying I would have to wait for the article because Mr. Austin was going into the hospital for an operation.

  Next thing I knew, he was dead.

  In 1969, I had left Paris for personal reasons. Before I even had time to catch my breath in New York, my friend Michael Mahoney launched me on a new, totally unexpected career. He was the head of the art department at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He announced that I was giving a series of fourteen lectures on the background of twentieth-century art.

  I learned from the printed program
that my talks were called the “A. Everett Austin Fine Arts Lectures.” Michael knew nothing of my connection with Chick.

  In 1972, I was invited to the Wadsworth Atheneum to give a lecture on Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. It was in conjunction with an exhibition of costume designs by Léon Bakst.

  Along with the Russian material, there was a display in memory of Chick, with objects and papers that had belonged to him.

  And what did I discover? My little pre-Columbian figure was right there among the memorabilia. The curator told me that Chick had always kept it with him, right by his bed.

  Virgil, Aaron, and Nadia Boulanger

  I was sent to Paris by Vogue in 1947 to report on what had been happening in the arts since the isolation of the war years.

  I knew Virgil Thomson, who had lived many years in Paris but was now installed in New York at the Chelsea Hotel. I went to see him to get his advice. Virgil was small, rotund, cherubic of cheek, and acerbic of tongue. He had always been nice to me, although he would say with a slight edge, “Oh, she’s Aaron’s girl.”

  At that time Virgil was writing brilliant music reviews for the old New York Herald Tribune. The mystery was that no sooner had he settled in his seat for a concert than he fell soundly asleep. To all appearances, he only woke up at the end of the performance, at the noise of the applause. Yet the most lucid, perspicacious account of the concert would appear the next day.

  Equally mysterious was how he managed to produce the most memorable food in what was literally a small hotel closet transformed into a kitchen. Luckily, he didn’t take up much room himself, and his organization was a marvel of ingenuity.

  Thanks to Virgil, I had an introduction to Olivier Messiaen, who allowed me to sit in on some of his music analysis classes at the Paris Conservatoire. This composer of rhapsodic works of religious inspiration, with an assist from birdsongs, was dissecting Bach’s counterpoint like a surgeon. And I got lost backstage at the Paris Opéra with Eric (Vogue’s dessinateur) looking for Roger Désormière (another Virgil Thomson connection), the conductor of an unforgettable Pélleas et Mélisande (we finally found him).