Eight Girls Taking Pictures (12 page)

At Deyrolle, the taxidermy shop that was over one hundred years old, they saw a pair of gazelles, standing on their hind legs and dressed like shopkeepers. Upstairs they found glassed drawers and cases of butterflies—thousands of butterflies in every color: shimmering, iridescent blues, fiery oranges, a shock of red, a shot of green, a spark of yellow, the cool touch of purple. Two polar bears standing on a counter faced off over a pair of relaxing deer, while a lioness stretched on top of a chest of drawers, ignoring a nearby fox and geese and a flamingo.

Another lion with an impressive mane stalked between the cases, accompanied by a tiger and an Arctic wolf.

Sheep wandered around with badgers. Elands, dik-diks, and a wildebeest had a tea party with four zebras, one of whom sat on the table among the china. A llama looked out the window on the rue du Bac, while a horse poked its head through an interior oval opening over the stairwell.

“The butterflies,” said Amadora. “The stuffed animals.”

The place was provocative. Like a beautiful, disturbing masquerade ball.

They walked by the Seine. They had dinner, then walked the boulevards at night, listening to the sounds of cafés and bars and taking in the lights.

They walked the Galerie des Glaces, and Marie Antoinette’s hamlet at Versailles. They strolled the gardens, circled the fountains, their shoes crunching gravel.

Amadora loved the eighteenth-century palette of the clothes, upholstery, wall coverings, and clothing; of Watteau and Boucher: powder blue, eggshell white, pale pink, light dusty green, the faintest trace of yellow.

They visited the Palais des Mirages, where they stood among a small crowd in an exotic mirrored room, in which they would be plunged into darkness only to find a new location in the mirrors each time the lights came on. They were in an Indian palace; they were lost in the forest. The mirrors provided depth and repetition and the effect of being held within an enormous, tumbling kaleidoscope.

They went to the Bois du Boulogne, the Tuileries, and the Luxembourg Gardens. Along with the writers and artists they knew, they visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s painting-filled atelier.

“I rather liked Miss Stein,” said George, who could barely hide his disdain for the rich in the beautiful apartment where they had been dinner guests the night before, no one there the least affected by the ruined economy.

“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 middle-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.