Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  Venus is getting dressed. Dali kisses her on the forehead, and she leaves. He says to me, “Let me draw you. Would you pose for me?” My clothes fall off. I recline in the warm mold of Venus. Dali approaches to rearrange my untamed hair. He gives me a quick kiss on my lips, briefly stinging my cheeks with the pomaded points of his stiff, upturned mustache.

  Perched on the very edge of his chair, with one knee to the ground, he devours me with thunderous, fiery glances, and with the precision of a clockmaker—tic, tic, tic—he sketches me. A mirror on the back wall reflects our tableau vivant. He shows me the sketch. I admire the astonishing way, with a few strokes of an ordinary pencil, he has conveyed shadows, reflections of light, and has captured my whole personality. He says, “Born an impressionist, I refused my father’s advice to be taught how to draw.”

  He slips to his knees at my side and says, “Jouons à nous toucher les langues. Let’s play tongue touching.” Under his spell, I let him again sting my cheeks as his beautifully curved lips meet mine. His tongue, tasting like jasmine, touches mine, sending me into a zone of bliss where flesh rejoices.

  “Mon amour,” he says, “bonjour.”

  I feel like a billowing net below the ocean of his passion. He seizes the golden lobster and caresses my midriff with it. He turns its tail along my thigh, inflaming my imagination. I raise myself to embrace him completely. With a touch, he signals, “Not yet.” He drops the lobster on my mount of Venus. He moves to kiss my knees. I hear him say, “Isabelle, la catholique, je t’adore.”

  I raise myself again to take him to me. Again he signals, “Not yet.” I am boiling with passion. I think: This is a lobster trap. Nothing is normal about this man.

  He must read my mind, for he now caresses me with the jointed armor of the lobster tail. I begin to wish we could make love like two ordinary people. When will this amorous torment end? “I adore your papyri,” Dali says. Papyri is the plural of papyrus. I don’t know what part of my body he is referring to.

  Trapped under his lobster claws, I am his erotic prisoner. His lips near the legs of the crustacean, he says, “René Thom, le père de la théorie des catastrophes—”

  The telephone rings, making us both jump. As he reaches to grab it, his mustache hooks the lobster’s antenna. The creature dangling at his chin, he says, “A-l-l-o.” Then he snatches at the lobster and throws it across the room. It sails right out the open window. The love scene has ended. The good thing about it is that it is safe—there is no way I can get pregnant.

  That evening we have dinner at La Caravelle. On our way in, paparazzi snap our picture. Dali talks nonstop over the grilled wild mushrooms, the duck with plums, the Nuit-St.-Georges wine. He says, in French, “The magic of divine Dali, me, the illusionist, stands on a sheet of glass stilted by steel poles, making believe, reassuring yourself.… My rhinoceros horns are indestructible, they endure the persistence of memory.”

  I am intoxicated by his words. For dessert, Dali orders chocolate profiteroles for me. “Comme toi, chaude et froide,” he explains. Out of the blue, he says, “Freud’s brain is like a snail without condiments, tasteless from a gastronomical point of view.” He tells me that in 1938 he took a train across half of Europe to meet Freud in London. “I wanted to psychoanalyze him, using my paranoiac critic method. He would not let me.” I give a brief sigh of thanks.

  The dessert is delicious, icy and hot at the same time. Dali touches my elbow and says, “Your elbow is as edible as the heel of a loaf of bread.”

  I reply, “Your lips are as edible as peeled muscat grapes.”

  “No,” says Dali, “as Phidias’ testicles, which I am now painting.”

  As we leave the restaurant, Dali signs the tablecloth instead of the check. He says, “Let’s have lunch tomorrow and every day.” Paparazzi photograph us again. I realize how famous Dali is.

  I move into a small room, a former maid’s room, at the St. Regis for the winter, to be near Dali. Yes, he has a wife, the sinuous Gala, whom he has painted many times. Dali took Gala away from the French poet Paul Eluard. In between, Gala took the painter Max Ernst away from his wife. Now Gala is busy with young boys.

  I am dazzled by the elegance of Dali’s suits, the drama of his cape, the symbolism of his Fabergé gold-knobbed cane, which he holds up in a pontifical gesture. My ear delights in the way he overpronounces every vowel, adding a few of his own on top, so that the word “limousine” comes out “li-moi-ri-si-ne.”

  When Dali enters a room, every head turns to take in his famed mustache and his luxuriant dark hair, falling to a tie patterned in gold brocade. His tawny leashed ocelot prances ahead of him. He travels with a bizarre entourage of dwarf hermaphrodites, cross-eyed models, twins, nymphets, incredible beauties, always offset by a single creature of surpassing ugliness.

  In the spring of 1962 I fly with him to Paris and stay at his hotel, the Meurice. We then fly to Cadaqués in Spain to spend the summer. In the fall we fly back to Paris for the height of the season and live the life of millionaires, then on to New York. A surreal friendship unfolds. We share art, fame, ideas, politics, literature, people. Our lovemaking is Daliesque, theatrical, inventive, but never penetrating in the conventional way. I eventually realize that he has a fear of impregnation verging on the paranoid.

  At the Hotel Meurice, on the Rue de Rivoli, Dali occupies a magnificent first-floor apartment that was formerly reserved for King Victor Emmanuel of Italy. Many other royal heads of state have occupied this suite. The living room ceiling is richly ornamented with a fresco of white rococo cupids. There are engraved mirrors seventeen feet high, a white stone balcony overlooking the garden of the Louvre. Rich, faded gold silk covers every wall. The doors are immense, carved out of wood. The room is a relic of turn-of-the-century splendor.

  I stay in a much simpler room, on the fourth floor. The elevator I take is pure 1900 filigree. An attendant in livery opens the ornate door of forged steel and bronze. Inside, the lift is decorated with metallic bouquets of iris worthy of Violette-le-Duc, restorer of Notre Dame. A Louis XV armchair, upholstered in deep burgundy damask, gently welcomes my behind, and like a rocket in slow motion I am lifted to a soft landing at my floor.

  Before my daily lunch with Dali, the hotel florist supplies me with a fresh camellia crown, which I wear over my chocolate-colored corkscrew ringlets of hair. I have made this uncut, uncombed, unbrushed hairdo famous, and it in turn has made me famous. An 1885 plate of Cupid hunting, in a Pre-Raphaelite book, served as model for my flower crown.

  Dali is very fond of my hairdo. It frames my face romantically and is not touched by modern fashion. So adorned, one day I meet Dali in the company of Prince Dado Ruspoli, an Italian nobleman, in the lobby. The three of us are driven by a Russian taxi driver to the restaurant Lasserre. We take a small elevator to the second floor and find our table, set with stunning sterling silver and fresh flowers, where we are warmly welcomed almost daily for lunch.

  I look around the elegant room and see André Malraux, the minister of culture, having lunch with Marcel Achard, a playwright, and another gentleman. Dali writes a note to Malraux: “Bravo for digging Le Louvre to its roots. Now it can stand. Bravo for lightening those historical facades to give Paris a clean face.” (Malraux has just excavated the foundation of the Louvre and refurbished the outside of many of Paris’s ancient stone buildings.) I am to deliver the note.

  Dali says, “Keep your face still when you deliver it, for his face has a nervous twitch.”

  I deliver the note and say in stately tones, “The cathedral is not just architecture, it is a drama, a struggle against gravity.” I figure this is what you say to a minister of culture. He nods gravely.

  We order caviar and blini, and ortolans, tiny birds cooked whole, guts and all, to be held by the beak and swallowed. The wine is Chateau Petrus 1947. I cannot get those roasted feathers into my mouth, but Dali not only adores this curious delicacy, he discourses on the supplicating, fixed white eyes, the perfect shape, the delectable t
aste of the infant birds. When an ortolan disappears beneath Dali’s ornate whiskers, I feel I am lunching with a large cat, right out of Alice in Wonderland. For dessert we have lemon soufflé with raspberry sauce and a marvelous wine with the bouquet of violets that I sip with pleasure, although I normally do not drink.

  As we leave the restaurant, three photographers snap our picture. Next day it appears in France-Soir.

  Dali returns to the hotel for his siesta—that’s how he keeps going well into the night with sparkling energy—and drops me at Roger Vivier, the custom shoe and boot maker. I order the most expensive silver leather boots, with square toes and two seams running from tip to top. My feet are measured with infinite care and sketched. The boots resemble the foreleg of a horse’s suit of armor. I pay seven hundred dollars for the pair, une foile financière, never to be repeated. (I use the money from the commission I receive from selling a Dali sketch.) They turn out to be so excruciatingly painful that I only wear them about three times.

  The boots are bought to go with my silver outfit—silver metal miniskirt, silver blazer, silver stockings, silver boots. Sometimes I paint my front teeth silver, streak my hair with silver spray, and wear silver eye shadow. I carry a sterling-silver attache casé. I also have a silver evening coat with a silver-fox collar, silver underwear, handkerchief, nightgown. Make no mistake about it: I will be noticed. I crave recognition. Recognition is as necessary to me as oxygen. Without it, I will wither and die.

  Why? you may ask. I can’t really explain. In part, it’s the giddiness of youth. In part, it’s the ambience I’m caught up in—you can’t be drab and mousy and spend your days and nights with Dali. Perhaps it’s because I have not yet developed any inner strength, and to make up for the vacuum inside I must plaster the outside with ornament upon ornament. It will be a long time before I reach my introspective days.

  At five that afternoon, Dali and I are to have tea with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the tearoom of the Meurice. The Duchess and I arrive first. We sit at a table, order tea and toast. Wallis Windsor looks like a cartoon of the Duchess of Windsor. (Why shouldn’t she, for that is who she is.) I feel I know them both from their press photographs. Here she is with her hair neatly parted, not too long, not too short, skin well attended to and carefully powdered.

  “How did you enjoy your cruise?” the duchess asks me.

  I have just returned from a cruise aboard the yacht Malanée, owned by movie mogul Sam Spiegel and manned by a modest crew of 101. Greta Garbo, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, Baroness Helen de Rothschild, and Brigitte Bardot are frequent guests aboard.

  I tell the duchess that Sam, the overweight parakeet, wanted me to share the grand bed in his cabin with him and a blond bombshell.

  “How did you escape?” she asks.

  “I told him I don’t like bombs or blondes.”

  The duchess is wearing a gold wedding band and a diamond-and-sapphire ring. I know she was born on June 19, a Gemini on the cusp of Cancer; her stone is the pearl. I tell her she should wear pearls every day of her life.

  “Is there any truth in those superstitions?” she asks.

  “They are based on scientific facts,” I tell her with faked assurance. “You must lack calcium. Pearls are composed chiefly of that mineral. By wearing pearls, you absorb tiny doses by osmosis. That gives you better balance and a better destiny.” Look to whom I’m offering a better destiny.

  “I never wanted to be Queen of England,” she says, coming right to the point. “It’s the duke who lacks calcium. Ever since I’ve known him, he wakes up with stiff joints.”

  Dali arrives with the duke, who also looks like a cartoon of himself. His face remains unlined by the passage of time. He has an absent, noncommittal expression. His beautifully cut suit has a tiny red stripe against a background of dark and light gray. He does not say very much. The rest of us make vapid conversation about the comings and goings of the beautiful, name-brand international people.

  The first time I visit Dali at Port Lligat on the Costa Brava, in 1962, I am amazed by his house. A multilevel agglomeration of purest white-chalk fishermen’s cottages, it looks like a miniature Moorish fortress. I call it the White Labyrinth. As I approach the narrow entrance door, it opens. Inside, I fall back at the sight of a gigantic, ten-foot-high white bear glaring down at me. His eyes glitter and his fangs gleam. He is the protective guardian of the house. I am very excited at the thought of seeing Dali again. We have been apart for all of three months.

  Tristan und Isolde in the Furtwängler recording fills the corridor with a sense of boundless delight. Like a magician, Dali appears. He is magnificent. His skin is a golden tan. His immensely vivid eyes are an indefinite hazel color. The tips of his mustache are erect to the sky. His teeth are evenly distributed. His lips are perfectly proportioned. His nose, too, is perfect.

  He is wearing a black cowboy shirt trimmed with white and twinkling multicolor flowers in a mingling of gypsy and American wild West fashion, black pants, and marvelous Spanish espadrilles made in Catalonia of beige cloth, with black ribbons tied around the ankle.

  Dali leads me along unevenly curved stairs to a small whitish patio. Delicate white jasmine in bloom delights my senses. Dali selects the most beautiful blossoms, kisses them, gets on his knees, and with a theatrical gesture presents me with the heavenly flowers. From the patio, a wide panorama of azure sea reminds me of the first day of creation. The sun shines with golden brilliance for us. I see the curve of the earth.

  Arturo, Dali’s homme à tout faire, announces lunch. We both place jasmine behind our ears, so that all through the day the divine scent follows us. The dining room is a tiny six feet by four feet, no bigger than a scatter rug. Against one white wall there is a built-in cement bench, in front of it a table a foot and a half wide. Dali slides into a tiny chair that fits into an excavated niche in the opposite wall. We are lunching in a dollhouse that is as unreal as if it were inside our heads.

  We are served raw sea urchins, chocolate chicken, and crystallized ants. Dali holds up a spiny sea urchin and says in his unique phraseology, “Shape is always the result of an inquisition process of matter. Freedom is shapeless. Morphology, a word invented by Goethe, has infinite consequences.”

  Late that year, 1962, back in New York, Dali bursts into my bedroom at the St. Regis, walks to the window, opens the drapery to let the sun flood in, and says, “Get ready. We are having lunch at Le Pavilion with two Nobel Prize winners, Crick and Watson. They know all the secrets of DNA. Be ready in fifteen minutes.” Swiftly Dali draws a double helix on my wall with a Magic Marker and signs it. I am thrilled at meeting the American genetic researcher James Dewey Watson and his English counterpart, Francis H. Crick, of Cambridge University, who have revealed how genetic material in living cells duplicates itself. The newspapers have been full of their accomplishment.

  In the limousine, driving the two blocks to the restaurant, Dali cannot contain his excitement. “Those two geniuses will go down in history, just as I will. Their discovery is superior to the invention of fire and the written alphabet.”

  At the restaurant, our two geniuses are young and puzzled at Dali’s appearance and English. The menu is in French. Dali orders puree of string beans for them, claiming it will nourish their own deoxyribonucleic acid. He pronounces it “Deee-oxyyrrriiii-bouo-se-nuclickkk acid. I can read in their eyes that they find Dali’s genetic code another puzzlement. “He’s coded in Catalonian,” I explain.

  Dali takes a lobster out of his pocket. Crick and Watson drop their forks. Dali says, “I have dipped this lobster in a bath of gold to suspend it in immortality.”

  This can’t be the golden lobster of our first meeting—that one left by the window. Perhaps this is a descendant. Dali places it on the table as a centerpiece. Crick looks at Watson. Dali continues, “The laws of heredity are of divine origin. Your discovery is the most important since the famous painting by Dali of Soft Watches, which was a prophetic announcement of your cracking t
he genetic code.” Dali frequently speaks of himself in the third person.

  Dali points to my face and says, “Gentlemen, can you improve in any way on the beauty and perfection of this face?”

  Crick says, “The right eye is not the same as the left.”

  Worried, I look into my compact mirror and start laughing. In my haste to put on my makeup I glued false eyelashes on only one eye.

  Dali explains that he is fascinated with scientific literature and read recently that the urine of geniuses contains a large amount of nitrogen. I tell our Nobel Prize winners, “He once talked me into drinking his urine to raise my genius level. All I got was pimples.” Crick and Watson suddenly remember they have a plane to catch. They make a hasty escape.

  In the limousine ride back from Fifty-seventh to Fifty-fifth Street, Dali says, “The day will come when I will be able to reproduce many little Dalis, all comparable in genius.” I meditate on the displacement of God from the center of the universe.

  One day in 1963, as I am having tea at the St. Regis with my phantasmagoric companion, a near albino wearing a synthetic shaggy wig—white on top, silver in the middle, and black underneath, with rattails hanging lopsided on the side—approaches our table. The little man, with one blue eye and one gray eye, clay skin, chalk complexion, a glazed, hollow stare, and a hipster naïveté, greets Dali.

  Dali introduces us. “Isabeau, I’d like to present Andy Warhol. Andy, this is La Comtesse Isabeau de Bavière, née Collin Dufresne.” In an odd, almost irresistible way, I like the little cartoon man. I feel as if I know him. I feel drawn to him.

  “Oh, you’re so beautiful,” Warhol says, “you should be on film. Can we do a movie together?”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  ULTRA, THE GIRL IN ANDY WARHOL’S SOUP