When all was well between Frida and Diego, the day usually began with a long, late breakfast in Frida’s house, during which they read the mail and sorted out their plans—who would need the chauffeur, which meals they would eat together, who was expected for lunch. After breakfast, Diego would go to his studio; occasionally he would disappear on sketching trips to the countryside, from which he would not return until late at night. (Sometimes such trips were Diego’s way of showing his boundless hospitality to female tourists who were “fascinated” to see the environs of Mexico City in the company of the great Mexican master.)
Occasionally after breakfast, Frida would go upstairs to her studio, but she did not paint consistently, and weeks went by when she did not work at all; in 1936 she completed, as far as we know, only two paintings, My Parents, My Grandparents and I and a self-portrait (now lost) that was to have been a gift for Dr. Eloesser. More often, once the affairs of the household had been settled, the chauffeur would drive her into the center of Mexico City to spend the day with a friend. Or she might join a friend for an excursion, as she put it, “to some little village where there is nothing but Indians, tortillas and beans and lots of flowers and plants and rivers.”
Frida frequently visited with her sisters Adriana and Matilde but it was Cristina whom she saw most often. By the time in 1935 when she returned to San Angel, Frida had forgiven Cristina, as perhaps she would never totally forgive Diego, for their liaison, and her younger sister became once more her chief companion, her ally in adventure and solace in pain. When Frida needed a confidante or an alibi, Cristina was ready; when Frida was to undergo surgery, she always insisted on holding Cristina’s hand while the chloroform mask was placed on her face.
Together with her offspring, Cristina became so much a part of the Rivera household that her daughter Isolda’s recollection is that “Always, from the age of four on, I lived with Diego and Frida.” Frida was the perfect aunt, showering her niece and nephew with love and presents and helping to pay for schools as well as music and dancing lessons. They returned her love. In 1940, Frida placed Isolda and Antonio among her closest companions in The Wounded Table (figure 55), and when she was away they wrote her loving letters full of little drawings of lovebirds labeled “Frida” and “Diego” and hearts pierced by arrows and bleeding into a chalice. Isolda’s letters are particularly coquettish. “Frida. How are you, I want you to tell me the truth do you love me or not, answer me please. . . . one never forgets in all one’s life a person as pretty as you, precious, lovely, enchanting, my life my love I give to you.”
Indeed, Cristina and Cristina’s children came to represent for Frida both family and the familiar world of her own childhood. Whereas the adolescent Frida had complained that Coyoacán was a sleepy, boring “village” with nothing to offer except “pasture and pasture, Indians and Indians and huts and huts,” the adult Frida now saw that world as a refuge from the demands of Diego and his high-powered entourage. At least, that is the way she painted it in My Parents, My Grandparents and I. At twenty-eight or nine, Frida clearly relished her familial roots and the remembered contentment of being enclosed in the patio of her Coyoacán home.
The Riveras’ home in San Angel was, by contrast, a mecca for the international intelligentsia. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians, actors, refugees, political activists, and people with money to spend on art all found their way to the pink and blue houses on the corner of Palmas and Altavista. John Dos Passos and Waldo Frank were among the foreign visitors who sought out the Riveras. Among their fellow countrymen, they could count as friends such people as President Lázaro Cárdenas, the photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and the beautiful film star Dolores del Rio. Although Rivera’s fame made some of Mexico’s other celebrities jealous, most of them delight in their memories of Diego and Frida, who, in her Tehuana finery, presided over the heterogeneous but generally bohemian milieu. Often there was a festive midday comida which took place in Rivera’s pink house at a long table covered with flowers, fruit, and earthenware crockery. Marjorie Eaton, who went to Mexico at the Riveras’ invitation in the fall of 1934, remembers: “I came for lunch, and a spider monkey promptly sat on my head and took the banana out of my hand. I had to balance the monkey, whose tail was around my neck, as I was showing my sketches.”
The bold spider monkey, probably Fulang-Chang (meaning “any old monkey"), a great favorite of Diego’s, was remembered by another frequent luncheon guest, Ella Wolfe, who had come to Mexico with her husband while he was working on Portrait of Mexico (a collaboration with Rivera) and on his biography of the muralist. The monkey, its long tail held high for equilibrium, would leap through an open window, jump on the dining table, pick out a piece of fruit from the bowl, and as if he thought his softhearted masters might try to repossess his loot, flee into the garden to hide and feast. Sometimes the Riveras’ monkeys were not so nice. One had a crush on Rivera, and when a famous movie actress came to lunch she discovered, to her dismay, that monkeys are jealous creatures and are apt to bite their rivals. Rivera, ever pleased to be the recipient of love, thought the spat between monkey and beauty queen hilarious.
In the evenings, Frida often went with friends to night spots in the center of the city, and her taste for the culture of la raza came out in her enthusiasm for the circus, street theater, movies, and boxing matches. Jean van Heijenoort, who became an intimate friend of Frida’s in 1937, remembers that “some evenings, Frida and Cristina and I would go dancing at the Salón México, a popular working-class dancing place. I would dance with Cristina. Frida watched.” Frida would sit and smile that mysterious, seductive half-smile, her feline eyes absorbed in the sway and swirl of couples, the sweat of courtships, the thump, bounce, and cry of the popular music that inspired Aaron Copland’s symphonic piece El Salón México.
Despite Lupe Marín’s “memory” that, as a girl, Frida “drank tequila like a mariachi,” it was probably at this time that she began to carry a little flask of cognac in her purse or hidden in her petticoats. Sometimes she carried liquor in a perfume bottle, which she whisked out from inside her blouse as if she wanted to douse herself with cologne, downing a swig so quickly that most people did not notice what she was doing. It was generally held that “Frida could drink any man under the table,” and various of Dr. Eloesser’s letters to her contain affectionate admonitions to cut down on alcohol. She had given up her “cocktailitos,” she would reply, and was drinking only a daily beer. To Ella Wolfe, who believes her to have been an alcoholic, she wrote (in 1938): “You can tell Boit [Bert], that I am now behaving reasonably well in the sense that I do not drink so many copiosas [copious ones, huge goblets]. . . tears . . . of Cognac, Tequila, etc.. . . this I consider to be another advance toward the liberation of . . . the oppressed classes. I drank, because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim, and now decency and good behavior weary me!”
As Frida drank, her behavior became more and more “indecent,” and less and less bourgeois. She adopted the mannerisms of what she saw as the true people of Mexico, the pelados (penniless Indians or city bums), peppering her speech with popularisms and four-letter words—groserías—that she picked up in the marketplace. She was not unique in this: Mexican women from the art or literary world bent on being as colloquially Mexican as possible often use foul language. But Frida used it with a special exuberance and biting wit. And, as with many of her compatriots, wild conviviality and laughter frequently carried a flip side of loneliness and the fatalistic acknowledgment of poverty and death: expressions that burst frequently from her lips, like hijo de la madre chingada, or pendejo or cabrón, have a kind of violence to them, a mixture of joy and despair, and a defiant affirmation of the curser’s pride in being Mexican.
Increasingly during the months that followed her return to San Angel, Frida became Diego’s compañera and his helpmeet. She indulged him, nursed him when he was ill, fought with him, punished him, and loved him. He supported her, took pri
de in her accomplishments, respected her opinions, loved her—and continued to philander. And now, increasingly, so did she. As often as not, when Frida took the car for the day, it was to keep a rendezvous with a lover, male or female.
Frida’s homosexuality, which had caused a trauma when it began during her last year at the National Preparatory School, had reemerged after she entered Diego’s bohemian, freethinking world, where love affairs between women were common and condoned. Men had their casa chica, women had each other. In these circumstances, Frida felt no shame about her bisexuality. Neither did Diego. Lucienne Bloch remembers the morning in Detroit when, dawdling over Sunday breakfast, Rivera suddenly astonished Lucienne by pointing to Frida and saying, “You know Frida is homosexual, don’t you?” The only one who was embarrassed was Lucienne. Frida just laughed as Diego went on to tell how she had teased and flirted with Georgia O’Keeffe at Stieglitz’s gallery and how he believed that “women were more civilized and sensitive than men because men were simpler sexually.” Men’s sexual organ was “just in one place,” said Rivera. Women’s, on the other hand, was “all over the body, and therefore two women together would have a much more extraordinary experience.”
“Frida had many girl friends and lesbian friends,” recalls Jean van Heijenoort. “Her lesbianism did not make her masculine. She was a kind of ephebe, boyish and emphatically feminine at the same time.”
As does everything else in her intimate life, Frida’s lesbianism appears in her art. But not overtly. Along with self-love and psychic duality, it is suggested in her double self-portraits, and it emerges in many of her paintings as a kind of atmosphere, a sensuality so deep that it was stripped of the conventional sexual polarities, a hunger for intimacy so urgent that it ignored gender. Like Picasso, who is reported to have said that the intensity of his friendship with the poet Max Jacob made him able to imagine making love to him in order to know him more completely, Frida, when she loved someone, wanted the absolute connection of physical union. Thus when, in 1939, she painted a pair of loving women in Two Nudes in a Forest (figure 53)—the same light- and dark-skinned women who ride a sponge in the 1938 painting What the Water Gave Me (figure 50)—they could easily represent herself and a woman she loved. She has placed them outside the realms of time, space, and convention, bordered on one side by a lush jungle from which they are watched by a spider monkey (symbol of lust) whose tail wraps around coiling, twisting branches, and on the other by a precipice where roots protrude from the earth as if from a freshly dug grave. In such inhospitable terrain the women cling to each other. One is a seated guardian figure; she wears a red shawl as if she were an Indian Madonna. According to Dolores del Rio, to whom the painting was a gift, “the indigenous nude is solacing the white nude. The dark one is stronger.” Yet it is from the tip of the dark woman’s red shawl that drops of blood (symbol of the woman’s or her people’s suffering) fall into the fissured Mexican earth.
Rivera actually encouraged Frida’s homosexual affairs, some say because he knew that as an older man he could not (or did not want to) satisfy his much younger wife. Others say he wanted to keep her occupied so that he could be free. Jean van Heijenoort surmises that “he considered Frida’s lesbian affairs a sort of safety valve.” He adds: “Frida did not tell me if Diego fulfilled her sexually. She talked about their relationship, but not about that. But there is no question that she had very strong sexual needs. Once she told me that her view of life was ’Make love, take a bath, make love again.’ It was in her nature.”
Frida’s powerful sexual appetite—both homo- and heterosexual—expressed itself in an unmistakable aura that fairly radiates from the surfaces of all of her paintings. It permeates the more visceral of her still lifes, and is the principal subject of works like the 1944 panel Flower of Life (figure 64) and another, from 1947, Sun and Life (plate XXXII). It is, of course, difficult to locate the precise source of this sexual energy; it resides, perhaps, in the paintings’ strange, dense atmosphere, in their vibrancy and magnetism. Even her most innocent self-portraits have a peculiar electric charge that makes viewers pause in front of them in the same way that passersby were attracted to Frida’s vital presence. Another part of the sexual charge lies in Frida’s face—her penetrating, devouring glance beneath those hairy eyebrows, her carnal lips beneath a slight mustache. And, friends have noted, Frida’s most passionate love affair was with herself. Indeed there is a strong element of self-fascinated autoeroticism in her display of wounds in paintings like Remembrance of an Open Wound and in later wounded self-portraits.
Until late in her life, when her physical frailty made heterosexual intercourse difficult, Frida in fact preferred men to women, and she took many as lovers. But although Rivera believed in free love for himself and was cavalier about the openness with which he carried on, he did not, in spite of his general lack of macho attitudes and his great admiration for women, tolerate his wife’s heterosexual affairs. Those she had to hide, carefully locking the door to the bridge that led to Diego’s house, or arranging a tryst at Cristina’s home in Coyoa-cán. Her husband, she warned her lovers, was perfectly capable of murder.
One of the intrepid men who ignored the warnings and fell in love with Frida at this time was the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, whose great talents were even then recognized in New York art circles. Ebullient, charming, exceptionally handsome, he came to Mexico in 1935 with the help of a Guggenheim grant, the loan of Buckminster Fuller’s car (a Hudson), and the prospect of a commission to do a relief mural at the Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market in Mexico City—a site where a number of other muralists were at work on other walls. Eight months later, he had completed a mural in polychrome cement and carved brick.
Given the small size of the Mexican art world in those days, it was inevitable that Noguchi and Frida would meet. When they did, Noguchi was immediately enchanted. “I loved her very much,” he said. “She was a lovely person, absolutely marvelous person. Since Diego was well known to be a lady chaser, she cannot be blamed if she saw some men. . . . In those days we all sort of, more or less, horsed around, and Diego did and so did Frida. It wasn’t quite acceptable to him, however. I used to have assignations with her here and there. One of the places was her sister Cristina’s place, the blue house in Coyoacán.
“Cristina I liked very much. She was smaller than Frida and had charming green eyes. She was more sort of normal. Cristina hadn’t got that fire of Frida. We got along very well, all three of us. I knew Frida well during an eight-month period. We went dancing all the time. Frida loved to dance. That was her passion, you know, everything that she couldn’t do she loved to do. It made her absolutely furious to be unable to do things.”
Noguchi and Frida’s romance sometimes smacked of a French bedroom farce. The two were planning, says Marjorie Eaton, to take an apartment together as a rendezvous spot. The lovers even ordered a set of furniture for the place, but it did not arrive, because the man who was supposed to deliver it assumed that the furniture was for Frida and Diego, and took it upon himself to go to San Angel to present Rivera with the bill. “That,” says Marjorie Eaton, “was the end of the romance between Frida and Noguchi.”
Others say the affair had a different, equally comic end. When Rivera discovered it, he was so enraged that he sped to the Coyoacán house, where the lovers were in bed. Frida’s mozo (houseboy), Chucho, warned his mistress of Diego’s arrival. Noguchi threw on his clothes, but one of the hairless dogs pounced upon a sock and ran off with it. Noguchi, deciding that the better part of valor was discretion, abandoned the sock, scrambled up the orange tree in the patio, and fled over the roof. Of course, Diego found the sock and did what Mexican machos are supposed to do under such circumstances. As Noguchi tells it: “Diego came by with a gun. He always carried a gun. The second time he displayed his gun to me was in the hospital. Frida was ill for some reason, and I went there, and he showed me his gun and said: ’Next time I see you, I’m going to shoot you!’ ”
Those days, Rive
ra often used his gun as a sort of emotional equalizer, brandishing it in defense not only of his macho pride but of his political ego as well. Although the political climate in Mexico had swung to the left with the election of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934 (Cárdenas ejected Calles from Mexico in April 1936, set Mexico back on the road to land and labor reforms, and in 1938 nationalized the oil industry, expropriating numerous foreign investments), Rivera was still under attack by the Communist party. If anything, the attacks had become even more intense, for as early as 1933, when Leon Trotsky, having become convinced that it was impossible to stay in the same international as Stalin, began to form the Fourth International, Diego had declared his sympathies with the Trotskyite movement. And although he did not officially join the Mexican section of Trotsky’s party until 1936, he had painted Trotsky’s portrait in New York City’s Trotskyite headquarters, and had added a portrait of him to the second version of the Rockefeller Center mural at the Palace of Fine Arts. (Trotsky helps to support a banner inscribed with the words: “Workers of the world/ Unite in the IVth International!") Rivera came to agree with Trotsky that the rise of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was harmful, and like Trotsky he was a champion of revolutionary internationalism as opposed to Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in a single country.” No doubt, he had a special sympathy for the heroic figure of the exiled leader because he himself felt exiled from and outraged by the pro-Stalin Mexican Communist party.
The conflict between Trotskyites and Stalinists in Mexico—as everywhere else in the Western world—was virulent and violent. Battles between politicized artists were the talk of the town. Orthodox Communists not only reviled Rivera for his Trotskyism; since it was political, they stepped up their “criticism” of his art as well. He painted in palaces and he painted for gringo tourists: What kind of revolutionary, they asked, was that?
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