by Karen Karbo
Everyone who knew O’Keeffe as she aged said she was abrupt to the point of rudeness and increasingly obstinate and impatient with anything that was not to her exact specifications. Then I think of her negotiating the chaos of India for days on end, traveling in her flat shoes and black suit from Bombay to Kashmir to the foothills of the Himalayas, and I think she was simply a genuine introvert. She was direct and had no time for nonsense, both traits that are respected in men, but in women, not so much.
When she was seventy-four she took an eleven-day trip down the Colorado River with a gang of old friends and their children and children’s spouses, including Tish Frank, the granddaughter of Mabel Dodge Luhan. By day they floated downstream in a raft, stopping in the afternoon so that O’Keeffe could hike along the ribbon of sandy shore in her red sundress and PF Flyers. During the 185-mile float, she occasionally manned the oars, saying that if she couldn’t row, she shouldn’t be there. It was sweltering. The sun felt hot enough to melt their scalps. Thunderstorms flooded their raft, the drops falling hard enough to hurt. O’Keeffe was in heaven.
O’Keeffe’s Secrets to Aging Well
Even people who don’t like O’Keeffe’s work, or who only like some of O’Keeffe’s work,‡‡‡ can’t help but be amazed by the way O’Keeffe marched through her life with complete disregard for prevailing fashions. She was a beautiful woman who had no real interest in enhancing her beauty. She never wore makeup or dyed her hair. In 1936, when she painted Jimson Weed for the exercise room at Elizabeth Arden, Elizabeth insisted O’Keeffe submit to a makeover. She did, then promptly scrubbed all the makeup off. Which isn’t to say she didn’t take care of herself. Her lack of lipstick did not signal a lack of self-regard, which those of us who grew up with Glamour magazine find hard to accept.
It all comes down to the skin.
Like all of us, O’Keeffe was more insouciant about her skin care when she was younger. But, in 1929, at the age of forty-two, she was still baking herself for hours at a time under the New Mexican summer sun without a care. She was so ahead of the times when it came to food and exercise, you would think she would have figured out that daily, year-round sun exposure was turning her slowly into a piece of living, human jerky. In her fifties she got a hat, but by then the damage had been done. This did not, however, prevent her from taking care of her skin. She put cream on her exquisite hands, morning and night, and also used a special moisturizer on her face. She continued to do this long after she could no longer really see her face. We, of course, live in the age of SPF 9000. My larger point is that regardless how freckled we may become, how lined and spotted, it’s good to take care of what we have.
Motion is the lotion.
O’Keeffe never abandoned her body, simply because it was growing older. She believed in the power of movement, whether through exercise or massage. She walked, hiked, gardened, rode horseback until she was in her seventies and after that, she was still of the opinion that you could add years to your life by walking a mile a day. When she was very old she measured the distance around her Abiquiu property with small stones; with every lap she moved a stone from one pile to another. Georgia was also an early devotee of Rolfing, a system of (excruciating) soft tissue manipulation§§§ founded by Dr. Ida Rolf, meant to improve your posture and the way your body moves through space. Rolfing was big in the 1970s, and as I write this, is enjoying a resurgence in the form of a recent article in the New York Times Style Section. O’Keeffe would drive to Santa Fe for her monthly sessions.
Experience your experiences.
Perhaps O’Keeffe was just a woman of her time—by which I mean a time when it wasn’t a character flaw to look your age; when women didn’t swear off any activity that might cause a wrinkle; when we didn’t spend all our free time and discretionary income doing whatever it takes to look no older than thirty-eight. An argument can be made—and I’ve made it—that looking young isn’t just a matter of vanity: For women, still, youth and beauty are our top currency. To be effective in our jobs, it’s better to look young and beautiful; ditto to having the self-confidence to venture out and try new things, expand our horizons—all the things women’s magazines advise women in midlife to do, failing to mention that unless you do look thirty-eight, you’ll be attempting to strike out into a world in which you’re viewed with near contempt for having the lack of self-discipline and bad manners to look middle-aged.
O’Keeffe, who looked fifty when she was forty, and continued to look fifty for the next twenty years, never would have deprived herself of experience for the sake of looking younger. To the end, she preferred to focus on how she felt over how she looked, while at the same time having enough self-respect to take care of herself.
During her final years she had a lovely companion, a young artist named Christine Taylor Patten. Once Patten heard O’Keeffe on the phone with a friend, saying, “They tell me I look good, like I have no right to look good. Everyone’s mad at me . . . I have three more years until I’m a hundred.”
O’Keeffe never lost her spunk, or her conviction that what she was up to at any given moment was somehow less important because she was older. This was also true of her fellow extreme seniors Katharine Hepburn and Coco Chanel. Hepburn lived to be ninety-six; Chanel, who smoked, died young at eighty-eight. Like O’Keeffe, they were skinny, busy, and irritated until they declined a bit, then died. They were active, didn’t eat a lot, and followed their interests. They never let anyone tell them what to do. They were always a bit pissed-off. I can only assume that this is the real recipe for longevity.
Georgia O’Keeffe is Alive and Groovy
The brief eclipse of O’Keeffe’s career in the fifties ended in 1962, when O’Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One of only five women, she was the lone painter. Four years later, in 1966, she became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vogue ran a feature story on her in 1967. In an interview in the Chicago Daily News she said, “You turned page after page of beautiful young things leaping through the hay before coming to eight pages—eight pages!—of this old face. I thought it was rather grand.”
Meanwhile, back at the only place that really mattered to her, her studio at Ghost Ranch, she was painting what would be the last great series of her career, Sky Above Clouds, seven paintings of clouds as seen from a jetliner at cruising altitude. The last painting in the series was the largest of her entire career. The canvas was twenty-four feet long and took four days, and a few assistants, to help stretch. When the painting itself began, O’Keeffe worked twelve hours a day, from dawn until dusk, working from top to bottom. She stood on a ladder, then a table, then a box, then a low chair, then lay on the ground. She was seventy-eight. Despite the fancy awards and the occasional magazine story, people wondered whether she had died. She would live another twenty years.
In 1970, the Beatles broke up. Earth Day was established. Four unarmed college students were killed by the Ohio National Guard during antiwar protests at Kent State. The Chicago Seven were convicted of having crossed state lines in order to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, two years earlier. Patton won the Oscar for Best Picture, and the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a career retrospective of the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. The show was arranged thematically rather than chronologically. There were her early abstractions in watercolor, charcoal, and oil; her landscapes of Lake George, Maine, and New Mexico; her flowers, cornstalks, clamshells, and skyscrapers; her floating skulls; her puffy clouds. O’Keeffe was eighty-three. To the opening she wore a gray silk suit and a pair of purple velvet slippers.
The second wave of feminism was on the rise. Is it any wonder that the same year Our Bodies, Ourselves was published, when women all over the country were gathering for consciousness raising parties, where not infrequently one of the activities included peering at their own cervixes with the aid of a make-up mirror clamped between their thighs, that the woman who painted all those abstractions about “what every woman knows
,” all those irises and pansies that reminded people of genitalia, who had chosen to live freely with a married man back when it was a serious scandal, and who also made her own money, became instantly and once again famous?
After the show at the Whitney, O’Keeffe gained sudden and powerful cred with the counterculture—both with feminists who worshipped (there is no other word) her as a strong, independent role model, and with the back-to-the-land crowd who found the life O’Keeffe had made for herself to be properly cosmic and groovy. Letters arrived by the bagful, written by earnest young people who wanted advice on becoming an artist. She always said the same thing: Go work. When the feminists came calling, even though she was behind their cause long before they were born, she told them a version of the same thing: “Too much complaining and too little work.” These women further annoyed her by wanting to celebrate her as a woman artist without realizing that she’d been spending her whole life fleeing from that limiting label.
She was unmoved by her inclusion in Judy Chicago’s epic and still-impressive mixed-media installation, The Dinner Party,¶¶¶ an imaginary banquet table set for thirty-nine of history’s most creative and innovative women. Each leg of the triangle is forty-eight feet long, and each place setting is set with a chalice and china-porcelain plate fabricated in a manner representative of the woman’s life. O’Keeffe’s setting is a three-dimensional rendering of a vagina, with a nod to its flower-like qualities. As the most-contemporary guest at the party, her setting was also supposed to represent the distance women have come*** since the first place setting, Primordial Goddess.
That sound you hear is O’Keeffe snorting with derision from her perch in Heaven. When art historian John Richardson asked O’Keeffe in an interview how it felt to be the only living guest at the imaginary party she drolled, “You mean Chicago’s still alive?”
The Last Lesson
One day in 1971, O’Keeffe walked out of a shop in Abiquiu and was surprised to see that the sky was dark and overcast. When she’d entered the shop, the sun had been blazing. Then she realized the sky was not dark with clouds; it was her eyesight. The doctor diagnosed macular degeneration. At eighty-four, O’Keeffe was going blind.
Since Maria Chabot had helped her make a life in this unforgivable part of the world, O’Keeffe had always had, in her employ, handymen, housekeepers, cooks, secretaries, and various assistants for special projects around her houses. Doris Bry, who’d worked for Dorothy Norman at the time of Stieglitz’s death, had been hired away by O’Keeffe†††† to serve as her manager, and came to visit every year to attend to business. Her old friends, or the ones who were still alive (and to whom she was still speaking),‡‡‡‡ came to visit, as did her surviving sisters,§§§§ Anita, Catherine, and Claudia. Also, the longer she lived in Abiquiu, the more involved she became in the community. She employed as many local people as possible, and when the local basketball team needed to travel for an away game, she lent them her car.¶¶¶¶ They called her the Empress of Abiquiu.
Despite her well-burnished reputation as a lone woman living her life of Zen simplicity in the mystical high desert, there were always people around, and the guest rooms were usually full. She was never an easy employer. She was exacting, with an unforgiving sense of fairness, but she also had a tendency to want to draw people close, to become friends with her staff, to expect them to want to stay with her long after they were off the clock, to devote themselves to her. And they would do it, her housekeepers and cooks. They would be drawn in by the O’Keeffe mystique, would sit and sip orange pekoe tea out of china cups, and listen to music with her into the night, and sometimes she would talk about Stieglitz or share a memory of a time, now long ago, when she made a painting that now hung in a museum in New York, and they would be bewitched, as she had intended them to be. Then, the next day or week or month, when they’d failed to properly dress the salad, or inadvertently forgot to mail a letter, or had to get home to their child who had a worrisome virus, she would get angry, and that would be the end of them.
As she went blind, she became more inflexible and irascible. It’s impossible not to forgive her this. Her eyes were her work, and her work was her life. She never complained. She tried to make the best of it, painting the walls white, the better to be able to distinguish dark objects before it, and laid a white carpet in the studio of the Abiquiu house. Still, her eyesight deteriorated further; people were hired and fired.
In 1973 O’Keeffe hired a young man to do some odd jobs around the Ghost Ranch house. John “Juan” Hamilton, so called because he’d grown up in South America, where his father had worked as a Presbyterian minister, was a twenty-something poster child for 1970s counterculture America: a college dropout who’d just divorced his old lady, a ponytailed potter**** rambling from town to town, in search of something or other. In 1955, Arthur Pack had given Ghost Ranch to the Presbyterian Church. O’Keeffe had suffered a slight freak-out, never having been much into the Presbyterians, and worried that her privacy would now be invaded. But over the years O’Keeffe had warmed to the new regime, and often people who worked at the ranch offices would help her out. Juan Hamilton, leveraging the connection of his minister dad, had been hired by the church, and one day he showed up at O’Keeffe’s door looking for work. In no time at all he became indispensable to her.
Here is the last lesson: Even when we are very old, all the people we ever were still live inside of us. We are just as surprised as anyone to have thinning hair, strange spots on our skin, folds on our back, and failing eyesight. Her entire life O’Keeffe had harbored a weakness for dark-eyed men who were full of themselves. Her sister Claudia thought Juan was no more than a common gigolo, but O’Keeffe became enchanted. She wasn’t a complete idiot;††††† when Hamilton would try to compare himself to Stieglitz, whom he resembled, she always said the two men had nothing in common but her.
Say what you will about Juan Hamilton (and people have said plenty), he kept O’Keeffe going and connected to the world. He introduced her to ceramics, which she could do by feel. He helped her to complete a book and participate in a documentary about her life. In 1982, he took her to a show in San Francisco where one of her rare sculptures was being exhibited. Hamilton guided her hands along the piece, a large, elegant black spiral of cast aluminum, to help her “see” it. He made her laugh, according to other people who worked for her during that time, and in his presence she began to wear colors, even though she couldn’t see them.
In those last years, pilgrims arrived on a regular basis. Gloria Steinem brought a bouquet of red roses and was turned away. Calvin Klein showed up and was given lunch and allowed to nap on her favorite daybed. Pete Seeger came by and played a song for her on a flute made out of a bird’s leg.
Where should we leave O’Keeffe? Perhaps in her studio, painting one last watercolor, a blue abstraction, every bit as mysterious and compelling as those she made in 1918. As O’Keeffe’s contemporary Dorothy Parker once said, “There are no happy endings.” Georgia O’Keeffe died of natural causes in St. Vincent’s Hospital Santa Fe on March 6, 1986. She was ninety-eight.
I couldn’t write about Georgia O’Keeffe without seeing Ghost Ranch. As per our plans, we arrived the day after our stay at the Mable Dodge Luhan House in Taos. The ice crystals I’d seen falling from the sky that morning had become your standard issue history-making spring blizzard that afternoon. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the heavy flakes. The visibility was five feet, possibly six. At O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch there were no blizzards in May, only sandstone cliffs rising up into the vast blue sky, only beauty so singular it couldn’t help but transform you. We crawled up Highway 68, found the turnoff, and slithered up the slick, red-clay road to ranch headquarters, where we checked into the RV campground.
We were the only people in the place. We sat and watched the snow fall all afternoon. This was no spring squall. It could have been December. We could have been in any snowy place. By late afternoon the snow let up a bit and we
went for a walk. The wet clay adhered to the soles of our boots until our feet became too awkward and heavy to lift. We took pictures of our boots—adobe platforms!—and of ourselves slipping and sliding in the mud, and of the cherry trees in bloom, covered in snow, and of ourselves pretending to admire the nonexistent vistas. Then we scurried back to the RV, where we split a can of chicken noodle soup.
The next morning the western sky had cleared, and there was the Pedernal, blue-gray and flat-topped, looking both close and faraway, just as it did in O’Keeffe’s pictures. We were eager to be on our way and hastily performed all the tasks traveling in an RV demands: pulling in the bedroom and the living area, stowing the plates and glasses. As we drove down the main road to the highway, we saw a man standing in the middle of a wide snowy flat taking a picture of the Pedernal.
As we got closer, the man turned out to be a woman. She was wearing black pants and a black jacket. We were the only vehicle for miles around. There were no cars parked by the side of the road, no horse standing around waiting for his rider. The Indians in this part of the world believe that the spirits of people who died here walk the land after they’re gone. I don’t believe it. I don’t even like New Mexico much. I’m more of an ocean person. But as we approached her we heard something crash at the back of the RV. Jerrod pulled over to investigate. One of the cupboard doors hadn’t been closed properly and a can of soup had fallen out.
Within minutes we were back on the road, but the woman in black had vanished.
† A note O’Keeffe wrote to herself inside the front cover of one of her cookbooks.
‡ These were a new set of nay-saying males. The notable objectors were the painters Edward Hopper and John Sloan.
