Eight Girls Taking Pictures (13 page)

I hoped, M., that you would enjoy a good laugh when you heard I was accused of participating in the attempt to shoot Ortiz Rubio—“Who would have thought it, eh? Such a gentle looking girl who made such nice photographs of flowers and babies.”

These were the words Clara Argento wrote to her former lover, Morris Elliot, in 1929 while incarcerated in the Penitenciaría in Mexico City just before her deportation by the Mexican government, before they loaded her onto a Dutch cargo ship bound for Rotterdam as if she herself were just so much cargo. The first port of call was in the Caribbean, where the ship delivered six crates rumored to contain artifacts of New World gold purchased by an island dictator with the usual monarchical aspirations. Clara was confined to her quarters for the time it took to unload the boxes. The second port was New Orleans, where the ship docked for five days to empty and reload its cargo. Clara was detained in a holding cell, which she described in another letter to Morris Elliot as a cross between a jail and a hospital with its long row of empty beds.

The good news, she wrote, was that New Orleans was nothing like the horror of the Mexican prison where she had been held for two weeks, with its iron bed and filthy toilet and endless darkness, which had taxed her inner resources, leaving her to wrestle with her own sanity. The window of this latest location looked out on what she said was an American lawn, complete with flag and flagpole and, she wrote,
a sight which should—were I not such a hopeless rebel—remind me constantly of the empire of “law & order” and other inspiring thoughts of that kind.

She was reticent to write about how a rather exquisite thirty-four-year-old Italian woman, finely built, sophisticated, and full of grace, who’d first sailed to America from Italy in 1913 as another hopeful immigrant at age seventeen—could end up in a New Orleans prison, in the midst of her deportation from Mexico. She, a woman who had been an
actress and a model and a muse, an elusive beauty, a successful photographer, willed herself not to think about where she was being taken—to Mussolini (more imprisonment, possible execution)—because she was thought to be behind the assassination attempt on the new Mexican president. And why, with her family having lived in San Francisco for the past twenty-three years, wouldn’t she use her American passport, sidestepping the terrible fate awaiting her in Fascist Italy?

The sentimental problem of Clara Argento began with her father, Gian Antonio Argento, who was, at various times, a mechanical engineer, a machinist, a marble cutter, a photographer, and an inventor.

The photography studio was the first thing Gian Antonio attempted once he settled into San Francisco, and the only thing to fail, which was all for the best since it motivated him to establish his own machinist shop. It was located not too far from the Italian district of North Beach, where he lived with his two eldest daughters. In his shop he invented useful objects to his heart’s content and made enough money to send for Clara, her two younger brothers, and his adored wife—one or two at a time—their eventual arrival making him the happiest man alive.

Not bad for a man who, back home, had been involved with the Socialists, protesting working conditions and eventually joining a radical group encouraging strikes and walkouts, until he was unable to find another factory job and was forced to emigrate to Austria, where he and his family had lived the lives of barely tolerated immigrants. There Clara had learned firsthand what it meant for someone to want your labor yet not want
you
.

It was also in Austria, while working at the factory, that Gian Antonio Argento invented the bamboo bicycle frame, giving the bike a lightness that helped in hilly terrain. However, when a worker does not own the means of production, then all patents and profits go to the owner of the business and not to the worker. Even when everyone was riding Gian Antonio’s bamboo bicycle and thanking him whenever they saw him on the street.

This state of affairs—a large family with declining fortunes combined
with having to surrender his dream machine ideas to someone with less imagination but more capital—resulted in a return to Italy, where Gian Antonio rejoined his hometown’s Socialist Circle. Gian Antonio believed in fairness for the worker. He believed in the righteousness of a socialist system. He understood that, without significant political change, his five children would be factory labor before the end of their childhood. Clara Argento remembered being held high on her father’s shoulders as he attended workers’ rallies with their calls to arms and holiday atmosphere.

Not long after returning to Italy, Gian Antonio traveled to San Francisco, settling in North Beach. In 1911 North Beach was a crowded district of Italian bakeries, Italian cafés, Italian theaters, Italian tailors, Italian laundries, Italian markets, Italian coffee roasters, and Italian ice cream parlors, scenting the air with melted sugar, coffee, garlic in oil, cigarettes, engine exhaust, the sea, and the sweat of workers. An impressive Catholic church dominated the central square.

The transatlantic move did nothing to curtail Gian Antonio’s involvement with radical politics. “This is the land of the free,” he told Clara. “Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. What good are these freedoms if they’re only talk?” He would joke and say that he was “doing the country a favor by accepting what they are offering.”

Clara Argento, seventeen and newly arrived in California, enjoyed the political meetings that were held in her father’s house. “Later, the people who came were called “anarcho-syndicalists.” There was always talk about workers and organizing and property.” The meetings reminded her of Italy, with their high spirits and festive feeling. When asked if his New World successes—his shop, his inventions, his house—didn’t make Gian Antonio rethink his political leanings, Clara answered that, because he had known enough of economic hardship, there were no circumstances—no matter how fortunate—that made it possible to think any other way.

Though Clara was comfortable discussing her father’s politics, she did not talk about having worked in a silk factory at age fourteen, when there wasn’t enough money to allow her to remain in school. Nor did she mention the family’s time in Austria, so many years that she spoke
German with greater fluency than she did Italian. How strange it was to think that traveling to another country, speaking the language, and doing the jobs that they think only you are fit to do can carry such a lack of respect. You are a mule, a coal miner’s pickax, the most unbeautiful, the most necessary machine.

Clara sat on the enormous low-lying branch of a California oak that grew parallel to the ground. She wore a vaguely ethnic dress, printed in batik; silver bracelets adorned her wrists. The costume belonged to her (had been sewn by her and batiked by her “husband,” Laurent Cluzet), as was frequently the custom in the era of silent movies. The smudges of smoky eyeliner, combined with the dark, wavy hair framing her flawless face, gave her an almost exaggerated sexuality. She looked predatory and world-weary. Clara tried to angle her face away from the sun, using the canopy of leaves while waiting for the film crew to set up the next shot. A disagreement between the director, the cinematographer, and her leading man was becoming more heated.

As she sat, she thought about nothing more important than what she and Laurent would have for dinner, guessing at who would be dropping by their large studio apartment, which had become a kind of ongoing impromptu salon for many of the painters, writers, poets, philosophers, and parlor radicals in the inner Los Angeles area. These daily parties were occasions for laughter and music and a shifting of partners that went beyond dancing. Some discussions blew like storms, and others were softer, more intimate. The apartment usually attracted friends, and acquaintances of friends, just after the dinner hour.

Clara and Laurent liked it that way, Clara because she was from Italy and a large family and unable to remember a life without political debates. Having people passing through the house, looking for company and conversation, a little food and drink, was the only home life she had ever really known.

Hers was unlike the childhood of her husband, an American by way of Quebec, whose quiet family homesteaded small farms in the Pacific
Northwest. Farm life can be tough and isolating, so Laurent decided at an early age that, while he loved his family, he wanted, as he said, “to cast my lot in with beauty.” He said, “I conceived of a beautiful life, which I knew had to be somewhere because it wasn’t where I was.” With that in mind, he settled in San Francisco, changed his name from Lawrence to Laurent, wrote poetry and sketched, and later designed fabrics.

And, eventually, met Clara Argento, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition being held in San Francisco in 1915 to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal.

The exposition was a fabulous world’s fair, a fantasy city within a city where it bordered the San Francisco Bay. The Liberty Bell was there. There was a promenade of mature palms called the Avenue of Palms; the Court of the Four Seasons; an Italian Pavilion with a courtyard recalling the Renaissance. An impressive, small-scale version of the Panama Canal offered boat rides with a piped-in recording of statistics. The Court of the Sun and Stars had an Arch of the Rising Sun. Visitors strolled the colonnade in the Palace of Fine Arts, and ate sweets at a fair within a fair called Toyland, which featured colorful flags creating an arched entrance. There were fountains and pools, and statues mourning “a life without art.” There were paintings, murals, souvenir stalls, and food from every continent.

Nothing, however, outshone the Tower of Jewels: a 435-foot-tall structure with a ground-floor archway resembling the Arc de Triomphe—that is, if the arc had held a stack of progressively smaller round tiers like a collection of fancy hatboxes. Each level was adorned with smooth Italianate columns, carved Japanese eaves, Moorish arches, or a wraparound terrace that held an assembly of gold statues, star maidens in diamond diadems. An enormous sphere rested upon another enormous sphere at the top.

It wasn’t the star maidens and architectural details that made the tower extraordinary—it was that each tier was wrapped in imported cut-crystal “gems” of ruby, emerald, sapphire, aquamarine, citrine, and diamond, backed with tiny mirrors and hung from individual brass hooks that allowed them to shimmer and knock against each other when caught
in the bay breezes, eventually causing the smallest, most inconsequential damage to the gems. It was the way the sunlight refracted through the jewels, and the way the fifty-four searchlights took over for the sun each night.

On her day off from I. Magnin’s luxury department store, where she was both seamstress and model, Clara sat on the edge of the large reflecting pool that faced the tower. The pool, an exaggerated affair with its stone globe in the center, accurately depicting the land and water masses of Earth with a mythical rider bearing two angels blowing trumpets and spewing water upon his shoulders, was crowded around its perimiter with exhibition visitors having a rest. Clara sat among them, flanked on one side by one of the dozen fish statues situated around the perimeter and, on the other, by a young man.