Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  ESCAPE FROM FRANCE

  I sail for New York in 1953 to visit my older sister, Catherine, who is attending the Sacred Heart finishing school on Fifth Avenue. The moment I step onto the crumbling dock, I feel at home. I sniff the New York air. It smells free. I am free. For a while I stay in Bronxville, with friends of my family. Then Catherine and I move into an apartment on the east side of Manhattan.

  When my sister finishes school, she goes to work for a year in the office of the commercial counselor at the French Embassy, on Fifth Avenue. I get a job in the office of the French cultural counselor, on Seventy-ninth Street. I receive visitors and field inquiries. It’s a good way to meet people and pick up tickets to cultural events. I am invited to more teas, receptions, and openings than I can attend. Naturally, I’m more interested in the social than the desk side of my job.

  I am on my own—at last. I have no plan for myself. I was raised in a family and in a time and place that never thought of careers for women. It was assumed that I would marry and marry well. That was the main goal, the only goal. But I’m not interested in marriage at this point. I want only to live for the moment and enjoy this blessed escape from the authority of parents, teachers, nuns, elders. I want only to be free, to make romantic conquests, to explore sexual pleasures. I am eighteen and I am told I am very beautiful. I know I am wild. I am in heaven.

  My sister pays the rent. I have a little spending money from a tiny inheritance. I almost never pay for a meal. If I am not invited out to dinner, I fill up on hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party or a gallery opening. I dress like a million on next to nothing. My sister, her friends, and I swap clothing so we all seem to have extensive wardrobes. My flair for originality leads me to swath myself for evening in lengths of copper-green moiré and scarlet velvet. (A woman in sables asks me who designed my wrap.) My best evening dress, one that lasts four seasons, is a marked-down floor-length nightgown with spaghetti straps and a huge silk flower, which I remove from the waist and sew to one of the wispy straps. I add lace cuffs half covering my hands to a plain black dress that has been marked down to five dollars. I glue together two pairs of dime-store earrings to make one, spectacular, dangling pair.

  Photographers follow me around as I haunt art galleries and museums. Art is my love. Back in France, whenever my family traveled my father shepherded all of us through museums. One summer when we were vacationing in the south of France I went to Vallauris, an art center near our home, and knocked on the door of Picasso’s studio. Caught by surprise when he opened the door himself, I said dramatically, “Here I am.” Then I found myself speechless under the blazing fire of the master’s eye. He invited me to look around. I stared at the paintings, numb with the sense that I was living a moment of history. Every summer I visited museums and galleries in the south of France and in Paris. Avidly I read books about art and art history.

  In New York, art becomes my entree to meeting people. The art scene is just getting under way, and gallery openings are festive social occasions. I am lively and speak to everyone. I make people laugh. I see someone at a gallery one day, at a cocktail party the next. We greet each other by our first names, then one calls the other, I soon become part of a crowd. As the pretty new French girl in town, I find that the city opens its doors to me. I am quickly caught up in a glittering social circle. In one way or another I meet everybody. I take it for granted that this is how New York works.

  Soon I see my photograph and articles about me in Town and Country magazine, the New York Times, Interiors magazine. I am photographed at charity events wearing diamond jewelry borrowed from Van Cleef and Arpels. Someone asks me to serve on a committee, then on another. The following year I gather a table of guests. I get involved with the April in Paris Ball, the Botticelli Ball, Parke Bernet openings, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney. I meet the whole French colony, Baron this, Marquis that, Vicomte Tra La La. Far more exciting to me are the artists I am meeting—Barnett Newman, Andrew Wyeth, Willem de Kooning, Miró, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Chagall, Louise Nevelson.

  I soon fall in love. My first love is Antonio Pellizzari, an Italian artist who is passing through New York. Antonio and I fly to Nantucket to spend an idyllic and ecstatic week holding each other day and night at the White Elephant Inn. For years I remain intensely in love with that first great love of mine. I take time out from the New York merry-go-round to fly to Paris or Milan to see Antonio. Off and on from 1957 to 1960 I am in Paris, where I stay in the flat of my uncle, René Capitant, a former minister of education and a close friend of General de Gaulle. I do not go to see my family.

  In Paris, I spend days in galleries and museums, meet dealers and artists, explore studios, lofts, and garrets. I support myself buying a few paintings by French and Spanish artists and selling them at a modest profit. In a short time, I am dealing in art. I buy and profitably sell a small, enchanting Sisley, a little church painted from the back. I have stumbled upon an occupation that I practice to this day in an offhand way—buying and selling paintings that please me, that bring me joy while they are on my walls and profit when they move to someone else’s.

  When Antonio leaves me, I am absolutely desolate and live in the hope that we will be together again. Eventually I realize that I have been just a passing fancy for him; I will never be part of his life. To forget this fierce, burning love, I fall into the arms of one lover after another, or three at the same time—black, white, yellow, red.

  One of my boyfriends—I meet him on a yacht in the harbor at Cannes—is an electronics wizard and a yachtsman. For a while I lead the glamorous seagoing life, follow the America’s Cup races, put in at glorious ports from Newport to Palm Beach to Venice. In Venice, I am introduced to Aristotle Onassis. In Paris, he invites me to his apartment on the Avenue Foch for a drink. When I ring the doorbell, I expect to step into palatial surroundings. I am disappointed. Although the furniture is antique and probably signed—I dare not lift the chairs to check—the place is cold and charmless.

  Later, I have dinner with Onassis and Maria Callas at Maxim’s. Callas seems to be surrounded by a musical aura. Melodies and harmonies seem to envelop her. I think I hear classical music as we sit at our table, even though the orchestra is playing light dance music. I suspect she is rehearsing in her head and the music just leaks out.

  In 1959 I fly to Los Angeles from New York with Johnny Meier, a round chunk of a man who plays court jester and promoter of dubious enterprises for many tycoons. At this point he is working on special projects for Howard Hughes and doing some work for ex-president Miguel Alemán of Mexico. Miguel is lonesome. He is retired and has no country to govern. His days are spent at the bar and swimming pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Because Johnny has an unlimited expense account, he is very popular. Everyone stops at our table: Natalie Wood, Orson Welles, Warren Beatty, George Hamilton.

  The hotel garden is magnificent—manicured palm trees, cactus, mimosa, begonia, in a clutter of blooms. Johnny points to a small bungalow with permanently closed shutters. It seems inhabited, but barely. “That’s Howard Hughes’s bungalow. Would you like to meet him?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll meet you there at five.”

  A little after five, I knock on Hughes’s door. Johnny lets me in. We sit in a typical motel living room. Through a partly open door I hear a vacuum cleaner in the bedroom. “Howard is cleaning his room,” Johnny explains. “You know how he is.” I don’t, but I wait to see what will happen.

  The sound of the vacuum stops, and I hear a strange rhythmical shuffling. A man enters the living room, his legs slightly apart. Each foot is encased in a box of Kleenex. Clean tissues surround his immaculate socks. His dark gray pants are rolled at the bottom as he silently slides across the floor. The Kleenex boxes, I am told later, are to prevent contamination from the floor. He wears an immaculate white shirt buttoned to the top and holds a sheer white veil in front of him in the provocative manner of a belly dancer.


  This weird-looking person sits beside me at arm’s length; Johnny is on my other side. The side-by-side seating is to keep us from aiming germs at one another. I feel I am at confession.

  Johnny says, “Howard, this is my friend Isabelle Dufresne.”

  My tongue is paralyzed. How can I talk in this pew position? “Would you like a drink?” Johnny asks.

  “I’ll have a large fresh coconut milk, no ice, please.”

  Hughes says, “Get me my sterilized water in the icebox and a sterilized glass.”

  I say to Hughes, “I like your shoes.”

  He sneezes, pulls out some Kleenex from the box under his right foot, and blows his nose. “This permits me to have dust-free feet,” he explains. “I pull out the top layer of tissues every hour. Most germs are absorbed through the feet. The pores are open because of perspiration.”

  Howard is attractive in a strange, spooky way.

  Back in New York in 1959, in the elevator at 4 East 77th Street, on my way to a show at the newly opened Leo Castelli Gallery, I meet John Graham, a painter. I am coming in, he is going out. I am still, in many ways, an infant playing at being grown up. He is seventy-eight; I am twenty-four. Or is he 2,078 years old? For all I know, he may be.

  He is struck by my youth and beauty. I am intrigued by his eager interest. He escorts me to the show. We exchange views on modern art. He is the author of Systems and Dialectics of Art. He is an aesthetician, a connoisseur, a collector of African art, an early supporter of contemporary American artists. He serves as a link between the European art world of the 1920s and 1930s and the contemporary New York art scene. Because of his phenomenal knowledge of art, he is hired to build collections for private individuals.

  On our way out, he invites me to his basement flat. I accept. When I arrive, he kisses my feet, we make love, I am enchanted, I stay for a week. The walls of his apartment are covered with mirrors of all shapes and sizes, from all countries and centuries. They are convex, concave, unframed, framed in gold and ornate carvings. “Of all objects, mirrors have the best memory,” he tells me.

  Graham is a diabolical-looking man. He has a shaved head, a Cossack mustache, pointed ears. He wears a seersucker suit when he goes out. At home he wears a loose, sarong-type skirt. Sometimes he goes bare-chested. At other times he wears a plain shirt with rolled-up sleeves.

  The apartment is full of marvelous objects. There are Greek statues, a bronze horse by Donatello, precious and semiprecious jewelry, enough Egyptian artifacts to fill a small tomb, African masks, magic wands, dozens of crystal balls, a sparkling, old-cut diamond necklace with stones as big as duck eggs. He knows the history of every object. He shows me file cards that catalogue the staggering collection.

  I see his unfinished shocking-pink self-portrait, in which his delirium and fanaticism pour out with every brush stroke on the large canvas. We practice prana yoga in the lotus position, naked on a tiger skin, facing each other and staring into each other’s eyes. He attempts to psychoanalyze me in order to reveal my psyche to both of us. We invoke the spirit of the Ancient of Days, in the shadowy light of that basement room. When he says he is hundreds of years old, I believe him. He tells me that he removed the right shoe of Marie Antoinette and kissed her foot, to the bewilderment of the whole court of Louis XVI.

  We talk for what seems like days on end. He claims to speak twenty languages, including ancient Aramaic. We never stop talking, mostly in French. We talk about art, we talk about obscure Oriental religions, we talk about the great mysteries, the laws of phenomena. He cooks for me, using laboratory glassware—“That’s where you can create life,” he says—while the phonograph plays Pergolesi’s La serva padrona.

  Graham paints me, courts me wildly. He wants to marry me. I laugh. While this magician at times seems ageless, he is an older man, much older than my father. His sexual powers, once phenomenal, I am sure, are now waning. At times he cannot make love to me. But the minute I step out the door, he becomes terribly excited and calls me back, lifting his skirt to show me his erection. He explains that he deifies me too much to touch me until I threaten to leave.

  We travel together to Mexico, where, in San Miguel de Allende, his friends show me some of his early, Picasso-style works. I follow him to Paris. He wants me to take him to meet my family. But I cannot bring together this wild creature and my very proper parents. They would never understand. Their toes would curl up inside their custom-made shoes. They would upbraid me for days for keeping such peculiar company—if they would receive me at all, for I have not been home since my furious departure after my father led me, sobbing uncontrollably, from the cathedral in Grenoble.

  My tormented relationship with Graham lasts on and off for two years, with many stormy breakups and contrite reconciliations. He dies of leukemia in London in 1961. I have a letter from him, dated the day of his death, in which he eerily depicts in detail his passage from this earth. After his death, he comes to me in dreams, brandishing a flaming sword and threatening to slice me to threads for not having submitted unconditionally to his will. Some time later, I give the hundreds of love letters he wrote me to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

  I soon fall into a passionate affair with a very rich, married man who owns a chain of department stores. I don’t give his wife a second thought. I am too dazzled by the fact that he pilots his own plane, in which we dart off to Palm Beach or Los Angeles whenever we please. His limousine is at my call. He is attentive and wildly sexy.

  I describe this conquest, as I do all my adventures, to Véronique, a worldly, “older” French woman, already past thirty. I meet Véronique through my sister, who by now is married, has a child, and is back in France. Véronique is a marvelous confidante. Nothing shocks her. When I show her a charming pearl bracelet my Mr. XYZ has given me, she is not pleased but indignant.

  “Isabelle, why don’t you grow up?” she scolds. “Don’t you ever think of your future? This very rich man gives you a little bracelet! So? What about security? What about when you lose your looks? Make him give you something serious. If he loves you, he will do it.”

  I am startled. I’m used to getting gifts from men who admire or love me—small pieces of jewelry, flowers, a beaded evening bag. How can I ask for what Véronique calls a “serious” gift? For all my high living, my expenses are low. But maybe Véronique is right. My mother, I am sure, would be saying the same thing, except in terms of marriage. Perhaps I should at least try.

  In a hesitant way, I open the subject with Mr. XYZ. To my surprise, he seems charmed. He appears to take my request as an indirect sign of my devotion. The next thing I know, I am in his lawyer’s office, we are signing papers, and I am the owner of a small apartment building on the east side of Manhattan, worth about a million dollars. He explains that I won’t actually get any income from the building at this time, because of a complicated situation having to do with mortgages and depreciation. I accept his explanation.

  The main thing is that now I own a beautiful little building. A lover has given me a truly serious gift. I can’t believe my good fortune. I feel richer than a Rockefeller. For a season I overwhelm Mr. XYZ with love and affection. I discover that just feeling rich is an aphrodisiac. I am in superheaven. Best of all, for all his generosity, my benefactor is too busy to require a great deal of my time. I continue as a free spirit, for I am not ready to be pinned down to one man.

  One night I dine at the “21” Club in New York with George Jessel, the aging comic, who loves to be seen with pretty young girls. On our way out, George stops to buy a cigar and bumps into Richard Nixon. “Good evening, Mr. Vice President. I’d like to introduce a fine French girl, Miss Isabelle Collin Dufresne. Can I trust you two alone while I turn my back to select a cigar?”

  Nixon swallows me with his eyes and does not let go of my hand. I am still shaking hands with everyone, an old French habit that I eventually give up. “I wouldn’t trust myself for a second,” Nixon says. He has the grim look of Judas in Da Vinci’
s Last Supper. His wife and daughter catch up with him. He lets go of my hand with a quick wink at me.

  The next year, 1960, Mafalda Davis, once a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Egypt, asks me to stop by the St. Regis Hotel to deliver an eighteenth-century Russian enamel spoon to Salvador Dali. I have never met Dali, but of course I know he is the flamboyant master of surrealist painting. The moment we exchange glances we are certain we are made for each other. I tell him that I, too, paint a little, a very little. He invites me to come back to his studio at five, after his siesta. “We’ll draw an extraordinary model,” he says.

  THE DALI YEARS

  Dali’s studio is a suite in the St. Regis, separate from the suite he lives in. An immensely tall nude female model is reclining on a couch draped with burgundy velvet; the fabric shimmers under a lamp shaded by an antique shawl. A large lobster shell, dipped in a bath of gold, rests on the arm of the couch, ready to be incorporated into the portrait of Venus Awaiting a Phone Call, the about-to-be-painted masterpiece.

  Large drawing books and pencils are waiting for us on the seats of two armchairs. Dali adjusts the model’s blond angel’s hair, which flows to below her navel. Then he raises her arm, treating her like a docile mannequin, and places a handful of dried ants in the blond fur of her armpit.

  Dali says, “Je sors la peinture de la routine. I pull art out of daily life. The armpit offers a hollow suavity.” Then he places a telephone next to Venus’s hipbone and sets the lobster on top of the receiver, a decorative handle.

  Immortal Dali is now drawing a sublime nude, with dizzying velocity. His rapid strokes on the paper sound like quick, light whiplashes, tac, tac, tac. In a swift line he contours Venus, puts her hair in place, tac, tac, tac. The ants appear to be busily chewing the furry weeds, rac, rac, rac. He wrests a living Venus from the virgin paper. His drawing is completed at lightning speed.

  I painfully apply my modest skill to draw legs, torso, neck. Dali looks over my shoulder and says, “Not bad, not bad.” He pulls the drawing from my hand and—tac, tac, tac—finishes it, signs it, and keeps it.