by Whitney Otto
“That’s because you’re a man.”
Amadora spent the entire evening in the humorless company of Alice B. Toklas, and the other wives of the writers and painters. When Amadora tried to move away from the clutch of women, to speak to one of the men, an old friend, her attempt was met with such icy disapproval that she immediately retreated, only to be shunned by Alice for the remainder of the evening.
The rest of the trip, however, Amadora was thrilled by the theatricality of these worlds against worlds.
They visited the American Surrealist photographer Tin Type and his muse-lover-assistant, Lenny Van Pelt, by whom they were told that Surrealism was art that accessed dreams, either producing art that resembled dreams or simply tapping into one’s own subconscious.
As they made their way home after their Paris sojourn, George took Amadora’s hand, pressed his lips to the palm before pressing it to his face. “Everything was perfect, darling, like a dream. Those animals and butterflies and Miss Stein’s home and that Surrealist couple and Paris. A dream. I wish we could live there.”
Amadora knew that he wasn’t talking about Paris. And when he kissed her hand once more, told her that he loved her, George said that Van Gogh had told his brother he sometimes felt a terrible need of religion. He said, “Then I go out and paint the stars.”
“You are that to me. You are the stars I paint,” George said.
By the time they arrived home, she knew what she would do: She would make him a world.
Sometimes George was present when he was with her and sometimes he was elsewhere. She preferred it when he would say “I’m stepping out for a smoke,” only to return a day or two later with oversize mixed bouquets of flowers. It went without saying that George didn’t smoke.
He was restless in sleep and in consciousness, with breaks of contentment in between.
She woke to him crying in the kitchen one night, gripping his hair and saying, “I’m blind to all beauty.” Then he allowed her to pull up a chair beside him and cradle him as best she could. He said he couldn’t bear the loneliness of his memories. He said it was like living nowhere.
It didn’t matter to Amadora that so few photographers worked in color because they found it “unacceptable,” or that no “serious photographer would use it.”
Amadora was never far from her understanding of women, glamour, or the fine line between elegant and camp, vulgar and vibrant, life and dreams. She never moved away from her suffragette beliefs; instead she brought them into her work with her usual whimsical eye, that sense of amusement. Color, she believed, was feminine. She said that women were masters of color, evidenced in changing their hair color, using eye shadow, mascara, powder, rouge, lipstick. You could see it in their jewelry—silvers and gold, gems, stones, pearls of every hue. It was in their clothing, from what they slept in to what they danced in. Their shoes. Their purses. Ribbons, barrettes, clips, and tiaras. Veils.
All this color to enhance their sex appeal, while men, she felt, were ill-equipped to handle color with the same ease.
This is why she felt that to truly portray women realistically one must free them from the shadows of black-and-white photography. She wanted the men to stop telling them that they were beautiful only if photographed in a series of grays; color simply made them stand out. Made them unmissable, even if it was all in fun. (Paradoxically, Madame Amadora’s women, once they were portrayed in all those electric levels of color, were later thought to be extraordinary creatures of the imagination.)
Now Amadora didn’t just want color, she wanted amplified color, crazy color, layers of red on red on red, or blues taken with blue cellophaned lights. Color filters. She wanted definition, sharp contrast; none of the gentle blurring of the traditional portrait. She wanted surrealism, whimsy, and Paris. She wanted color as it had never been seen in a photograph—no gentle hues, no heavenly glow, no delicate hand-tinted pictures. She wanted it as a painter may crave color. As an artist.
“You did it,” said George as he and Amadora kicked off their fancy shoes in the wee hours of the morning following her gallery show featuring her color portraits.
“I did, didn’t I?” Amadora stretched and smiled, lying the length of the sofa.
The pictures on display were of her usual stage, movie, and literary stars, the same stiff nobles and their wives. Only this time they were in gowns of every hue, and dark uniforms festooned with gold braid and multicolored medals, red and blue floor-length capes about the shoulders. They stood before backgrounds of tiny gold stars against a field of white drapes.
There was a woman with red hair, red lips, wearing a red dress in front of a red wall.
Another woman appeared lost in thought as she sat before a pale blue sky hung with large, white cutout paper stars as she contemplated an enormous world globe.
All of Madame Amadora’s props were here: the clouds of butterflies in iridescent blues and greens; the stuffed birds and a bull’s head; the schools of glass fish; the masks; the fake flowers; the stars, small and golden, large and white; the tiny songbirds. It was as if she had raided Deyrolles on rue du Bac.
The centerpiece of the show was her series of twenty-four Greek and Roman goddesses. The models were all titled Englishwomen only too delighted to dress up as the immortals of Madame Amadora’s dreamy firmament without understanding her sly, extravagant feminist view. She had learned to charm and flatter years ago, at Lallie Charles’s studio, without ever changing her politics; her pictures were all about equality for women, whether it was a glamorous “housewife” hanging laundry that consisted only of French silk lingerie or a nude woman, plastic flowers in her hair, hard at her sewing machine, running through yards and yards of tulle.
But these women of means missed the humor and wit because they were beguiled by the glamour of Madame Amadora’s interpretation of Andromeda, chained to a rock in a three-thousand-dollar Fortuny gown, girdled with a belt of cheap seashells. They couldn’t see beyond Europa embracing a stuffed bull’s head wearing a crown of silk flowers. Arethusa’s hair was tangled in glossy green metal seaweed as she bent to a bouquet of tiger lilies, a parade of glass fish passing by.
Ceres was a fantasy in orange and gold; Hecate, Dido, Helen of Troy were cold and lifeless statues under blue filtered lights.
Venus was pink tulle and pearls, while Daphne was ladies-who-lunch pearls and lost within a laurel tree.
The Queen of the Amazons was clad in an off-the-shoulder spotted fur bathing suit, with a fur necklace that held a deadly arrow in her neck.
Medusa, the showpiece, was an arresting beauty with unnaturally dark lavender eyes, who stared out from the picture, her hair a mass of painted rubber snakes, studded with the occasional rhinestone, with more snakes coiling around her slender, stunning neck. The background was a hot pink. The model’s measured gaze made the picture alluring and alarming by turns.
“Did you hear the critics?” said Madame Amadora.
“They marveled, I believe it was, at your ‘take on classical figures,’ ” said George.
“It was a very good take, if I may say so,” said Amadora.
They further praised her composition, use of color, and imagination, all of which were clever, unorthodox, and daring. “These pictures,” they said, “change everything.”
George sat in the chair across from his wife.
“I’m doing the zodiac next,” said Amadora. “Then perhaps the tarot—”
“You put in everything,” said George, “the trip to Paris, I mean. The stuffed animals, the lipstick—even that picture of the sewing machine, the one with the naked woman sewing—”
“Machine Worker in Summer, 1937.”
“—what was the material? It reminded me of clouds—”
“Tulle.”
“—all that billowing tulle in those Marie Antoinette colors. The only picture where you used them.” George smiled. “Madame Amadora.”
He rose, went to her as she raised her arms to be lifted up. A happy, sleepy mi
ddle-aged couple who believed that maybe it was possible to change one’s world. If the war could refigure his worldview, then so could she. The Surrealists said that no one had ever seen the atrocities like the atrocities in the Great War; it was a place none of them had ever known. The only response was to harness these nightmares and call them dreams.
Maybe one could forget the war and reinvent a place where it had never happened. Madame Amadora directed all her talents, all her imagination, all her love for her troubled husband into her work. And on this August night in 1939, they both believed that she had succeeded. Their feelings of possibility and well-being about this world would last until September, when they would be completely, and permanently, forgotten.
THE SENTIMENTAL PROBLEM OF CLARA ARGENTO OR MELLA’S TYPEWRITER
I hoped, M., that you would enjoy a good laugh when you heard I was accused of participating in the attempt to shoot Ortiz Rubio—“Who would have thought it, eh? Such a gentle looking girl who made such nice photographs of flowers and babies.”
These were the words Clara Argento wrote to her former lover, Morris Elliot, in 1929 while incarcerated in the Penitenciaría in Mexico City just before her deportation by the Mexican government, before they loaded her onto a Dutch cargo ship bound for Rotterdam as if she herself were just so much cargo. The first port of call was in the Caribbean, where the ship delivered six crates rumored to contain artifacts of New World gold purchased by an island dictator with the usual monarchical aspirations. Clara was confined to her quarters for the time it took to unload the boxes. The second port was New Orleans, where the ship docked for five days to empty and reload its cargo. Clara was detained in a holding cell, which she described in another letter to Morris Elliot as a cross between a jail and a hospital with its long row of empty beds.
The good news, she wrote, was that New Orleans was nothing like the horror of the Mexican prison where she had been held for two weeks, with its iron bed and filthy toilet and endless darkness, which had taxed her inner resources, leaving her to wrestle with her own sanity. The window of this latest location looked out on what she said was an American lawn, complete with flag and flagpole and, she wrote, a sight which should—were I not such a hopeless rebel—remind me constantly of the empire of “law & order” and other inspiring thoughts of that kind.
She was reticent to write about how a rather exquisite thirty-four-year-old Italian woman, finely built, sophisticated, and full of grace, who’d first sailed to America from Italy in 1913 as another hopeful immigrant at age seventeen—could end up in a New Orleans prison, in the midst of her deportation from Mexico. She, a woman who had been an actress and a model and a muse, an elusive beauty, a successful photographer, willed herself not to think about where she was being taken—to Mussolini (more imprisonment, possible execution)—because she was thought to be behind the assassination attempt on the new Mexican president. And why, with her family having lived in San Francisco for the past twenty-three years, wouldn’t she use her American passport, sidestepping the terrible fate awaiting her in Fascist Italy?
The sentimental problem of Clara Argento began with her father, Gian Antonio Argento, who was, at various times, a mechanical engineer, a machinist, a marble cutter, a photographer, and an inventor.
The photography studio was the first thing Gian Antonio attempted once he settled into San Francisco, and the only thing to fail, which was all for the best since it motivated him to establish his own machinist shop. It was located not too far from the Italian district of North Beach, where he lived with his two eldest daughters. In his shop he invented useful objects to his heart’s content and made enough money to send for Clara, her two younger brothers, and his adored wife—one or two at a time—their eventual arrival making him the happiest man alive.
Not bad for a man who, back home, had been involved with the Socialists, protesting working conditions and eventually joining a radical group encouraging strikes and walkouts, until he was unable to find another factory job and was forced to emigrate to Austria, where he and his family had lived the lives of barely tolerated immigrants. There Clara had learned firsthand what it meant for someone to want your labor yet not want you.
It was also in Austria, while working at the factory, that Gian Antonio Argento invented the bamboo bicycle frame, giving the bike a lightness that helped in hilly terrain. However, when a worker does not own the means of production, then all patents and profits go to the owner of the business and not to the worker. Even when everyone was riding Gian Antonio’s bamboo bicycle and thanking him whenever they saw him on the street.
This state of affairs—a large family with declining fortunes combined with having to surrender his dream machine ideas to someone with less imagination but more capital—resulted in a return to Italy, where Gian Antonio rejoined his hometown’s Socialist Circle. Gian Antonio believed in fairness for the worker. He believed in the righteousness of a socialist system. He understood that, without significant political change, his five children would be factory labor before the end of their childhood. Clara Argento remembered being held high on her father’s shoulders as he attended workers’ rallies with their calls to arms and holiday atmosphere.
Not long after returning to Italy, Gian Antonio traveled to San Francisco, settling in North Beach. In 1911 North Beach was a crowded district of Italian bakeries, Italian cafés, Italian theaters, Italian tailors, Italian laundries, Italian markets, Italian coffee roasters, and Italian ice cream parlors, scenting the air with melted sugar, coffee, garlic in oil, cigarettes, engine exhaust, the sea, and the sweat of workers. An impressive Catholic church dominated the central square.
The transatlantic move did nothing to curtail Gian Antonio’s involvement with radical politics. “This is the land of the free,” he told Clara. “Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. What good are these freedoms if they’re only talk?” He would joke and say that he was “doing the country a favor by accepting what they are offering.”
Clara Argento, seventeen and newly arrived in California, enjoyed the political meetings that were held in her father’s house. “Later, the people who came were called “anarcho-syndicalists.” There was always talk about workers and organizing and property.” The meetings reminded her of Italy, with their high spirits and festive feeling. When asked if his New World successes—his shop, his inventions, his house—didn’t make Gian Antonio rethink his political leanings, Clara answered that, because he had known enough of economic hardship, there were no circumstances—no matter how fortunate—that made it possible to think any other way.
Though Clara was comfortable discussing her father’s politics, she did not talk about having worked in a silk factory at age fourteen, when there wasn’t enough money to allow her to remain in school. Nor did she mention the family’s time in Austria, so many years that she spoke German with greater fluency than she did Italian. How strange it was to think that traveling to another country, speaking the language, and doing the jobs that they think only you are fit to do can carry such a lack of respect. You are a mule, a coal miner’s pickax, the most unbeautiful, the most necessary machine.
Clara sat on the enormous low-lying branch of a California oak that grew parallel to the ground. She wore a vaguely ethnic dress, printed in batik; silver bracelets adorned her wrists. The costume belonged to her (had been sewn by her and batiked by her “husband,” Laurent Cluzet), as was frequently the custom in the era of silent movies. The smudges of smoky eyeliner, combined with the dark, wavy hair framing her flawless face, gave her an almost exaggerated sexuality. She looked predatory and world-weary. Clara tried to angle her face away from the sun, using the canopy of leaves while waiting for the film crew to set up the next shot. A disagreement between the director, the cinematographer, and her leading man was becoming more heated.
As she sat, she thought about nothing more important than what she and Laurent would have for dinner, guessing at who would be dropping by their large studio apartment, which had become a ki
nd of ongoing impromptu salon for many of the painters, writers, poets, philosophers, and parlor radicals in the inner Los Angeles area. These daily parties were occasions for laughter and music and a shifting of partners that went beyond dancing. Some discussions blew like storms, and others were softer, more intimate. The apartment usually attracted friends, and acquaintances of friends, just after the dinner hour.
Clara and Laurent liked it that way, Clara because she was from Italy and a large family and unable to remember a life without political debates. Having people passing through the house, looking for company and conversation, a little food and drink, was the only home life she had ever really known.
Hers was unlike the childhood of her husband, an American by way of Quebec, whose quiet family homesteaded small farms in the Pacific Northwest. Farm life can be tough and isolating, so Laurent decided at an early age that, while he loved his family, he wanted, as he said, “to cast my lot in with beauty.” He said, “I conceived of a beautiful life, which I knew had to be somewhere because it wasn’t where I was.” With that in mind, he settled in San Francisco, changed his name from Lawrence to Laurent, wrote poetry and sketched, and later designed fabrics.
And, eventually, met Clara Argento, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition being held in San Francisco in 1915 to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal.
The exposition was a fabulous world’s fair, a fantasy city within a city where it bordered the San Francisco Bay. The Liberty Bell was there. There was a promenade of mature palms called the Avenue of Palms; the Court of the Four Seasons; an Italian Pavilion with a courtyard recalling the Renaissance. An impressive, small-scale version of the Panama Canal offered boat rides with a piped-in recording of statistics. The Court of the Sun and Stars had an Arch of the Rising Sun. Visitors strolled the colonnade in the Palace of Fine Arts, and ate sweets at a fair within a fair called Toyland, which featured colorful flags creating an arched entrance. There were fountains and pools, and statues mourning “a life without art.” There were paintings, murals, souvenir stalls, and food from every continent.
