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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

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BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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On May 31, 1959, she was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. When a nurse found heroin in her room, she was arrested for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided by authorities. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died, from cirrhosis of the liver, on July 17, 1959. She died with seventy cents in the bank and $750 on her person.
Her funeral was held at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on Sixtieth Street and Ninth Avenue. It was a full Catholic Requiem High Mass, with a full choir providing the music. Lady Day was dressed in her favorite pink lace dress and gloves. Three thousand people attended the funeral; five hundred others stood outside the church.
Although she never had a number one hit or was the most popular singer, Billie Holiday probably influenced more musicians than any other singer in the twentieth century. During her career, Holiday collaborated and earned the respect of some of the most noted names in music, a roll call of jazz greats. Her legacy lies not in her story but in the music that she left behind.
 
Frida Kahlo
 
1907-1954
 
They thought I was a surrealist but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
—FRIDA KAHLO
 
 
Frida Kahlo once wrote that she had suffered “two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down . . . The other accident is Diego. And he was by far the worst.” Ouch, that’s harsh. While there is an element of truth in that statement, it’s far more complicated than that. The streetcar accident that Frida suffered at the age of eighteen left her with a lifetime of pain, but it turned her in a new direction. Painting brought her back to life, and in her pain she found one of the most important themes in her work. Diego Rivera was no prize as a husband, chronically unfaithful, but he gave her support both financial and emotional, opened doors for her, and helped to shape her talent.
Frida’s parents, Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, were an odd couple from the start. He was a German Jewish atheist widower, with two children, who suffered from epilepsy. Matilde was a devoted Mexican Catholic who never got over the death of her first love, another German, who committed suicide in front of her. Their third daughter, of four, was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda in July 1907 in La Casa Azul (the Blue House), in Coyoacán, a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City. Frida later liked to claim that she was born in 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution, to emphasize her bond with the rebirth of Mexican culture.
When Frida was six, she contracted polio, keeping her bedridden for nine months. The illness left her with a withered right leg and a limp. Her classmates at school taunted her, calling her Frida
pata de palo
(Peg Leg Frida). For the rest of her life she wore long skirts or pants to hide her leg. Her illness left her with a sense of solitude, but it fired up her imagination. In 1922, she passed the entrance exam for the most prestigious school in Mexico, the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. Her childhood turned Frida into a tough, rebellious teenager. At school she became involved with leftist politics, cut classes that bored her, tried to get teachers fired that she felt weren’t up to the job. By the time she was seventeen, she’d been seduced by both an apprentice engraver who taught her to draw, and a female librarian at the ministry of education. She also became fascinated with Diego Rivera when he was painting a mural in the school’s auditorium, sitting quietly watching him work. Later she embellished this version, claiming to have played tricks on him, spying on his liaisons with models. When her friends asked what she saw in him, she claimed that she would have Diego’s child when the time was right.
Frida’s plans for the future were changed forever when a bus she was riding was hit by an out-of-control streetcar. Frida was impaled by an iron handrail through her abdomen. Somehow her clothes were removed by the collision, and a package of gold powder carried by a worker was scattered across her body. A man at the scene put his knee on her chest and pulled the rail out. Her spine and pelvis were both broken in three places, her right leg in eleven, her collarbone and ribs were broken, and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. The doctors didn’t think that she would survive. They had to put her back together in sections like a collage. She would be in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life.
Showing her extraordinary will to live, Frida was up and walking within three months but suffered a relapse within the year. It seems either the surgeons were negligent in not checking out her spine before discharging her or her parents hadn’t been able to afford certain procedures. Immobilized in a succession of plastic corsets, Frida decided to devote herself to painting. Her mother installed a four-poster bed in her room, with a mirror attached to the underside of the canopy, and had a special easel made up for her so that she could work while she recovered. Other than attending art classes in school, Frida had no formal training but she had developed a keen eye while working with her father, a photographer, who taught her how to use a camera and, later, how to develop and retouch photos. She began to study art books for hours on end, painting portraits of her sisters and friends, but her greatest Muse was herself. In two years, she had executed over a dozen paintings. What is remarkable is that Frida never painted the accident. Only a single pencil drawing, done in 1926, exists to record the life-changing moment. Years later Frida said that she had wanted to paint the accident, but couldn’t; it was too important to reduce to a single image.
The “other accident” occurred when Frida and Diego met again at a party given by a mutual friend, photographer Tina Modotti. Needing to know if she had the goods, Frida took her paintings to Diego to ask him if she had any talent. Soon they were embroiled in a passionate affair. “On a sudden impulse, I stooped to kiss her. As our lips touched, the light nearest us went off and came on again when our lips parted,” Diego later wrote. They kissed over and over under different street lamps with the same fascinating results. Diego was enchanted by Frida’s fiery personality, her quick, unconventional mind, and her cheekiness, but most of all by her talent.
Frida’s family wasn’t exactly thrilled with her new love. Although he may have been the most famous artist in Mexico, Diego was nobody’s idea of a Latin lover. He was forty-two, weighed over three hundred pounds, was a stranger to personal hygiene, and, more important, was married. But he was also full of humor, vitality, and charm, and he sincerely liked women. When Diego asked her father for permission to marry her, her father told him, “Don’t forget that my daughter is ill, and that she will be ill all her life. Think about it.” When they eventually married, her family bitterly described it as the union of “an elephant and a dove.” There were several unsettling incidents at the wedding that seemed to be an omen of things to come. Only her father showed up to the nuptials. At the reception, Diego’s ex-wife, Lupe Marin, turned up and insulted the bride, and Rivera got drunk, drew his pistol, and fired, breaking a man’s finger. Frida was so upset; she burst into tears and went home to her parents. She didn’t move in with Diego for several days.
From the beginning Frida worshipped Rivera, believing him to be a genius. She painted little during these years, content to be Mrs. Diego Rivera. She used to bring his lunch to him while he worked and even went so far as to befriend his former wife to pick up tips on how to please him. When Diego was expelled from the Communist Party, Frida quit, too, out of solidarity. Knowing his interest in the indigenous Mexican culture, she began to wear the Tehuana clothing that he liked; the ruffled and embroidered blouses, long skirts, and enough gold jewelry to make a rap star jealous became her signature look. For Diego, however, Frida came third in his life, after his art and himself.
Their life together was as much a work of art as their paintings. In the San Ángel district of Mexico City, they had a pair of houses built for them, connected by a walkway; Frida’s was sky blue, Diego’s bigger and bloodred. The houses expressed Diego’s idea of independence between a man and a woman. When Frida was angry, she would close the door on her side of the walkway, forcing Diego to have to go downstairs, cross the yard, and knock on her front door. Their home, filled with pets, became a mecca for the intelligentsia, with writers, artists, and photographers frequently visiting.
When Frida became pregnant she was ecstatic, although Diego was less excited. He was a crap father to the children he already had. After telling her that she would probably never be able to carry a child to term, doctors advised a medical abortion. Frida was devastated. During their marriage, she tried at least three more times to have a child, over Diego’s objections. The miscarriage she suffered when they were living in Detroit led to one of her most powerful and intensely personal paintings. With no children of her own, Frida lavished love on her nieces and nephews, as well as a menagerie of animals.
Another torment in Frida’s life was Diego’s infidelities. A doctor once told Diego that he was biologically incapable of being faithful, which he used as a justification for his rampant womanizing. Although Frida knew of his reputation before they married, no doubt she thought that her love would change him. She bore it stoically, even becoming friends with some of his lovers, but Diego’s affair with her sister Cristina finally crossed the line. In his autobiography, Diego wrote, “If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait.”
Frida expressed her feelings about the affair in
A Few Little Pricks
(1935), depicting a man who has stabbed a woman to death. While the man and woman resemble Diego and her sister, it is really Frida wielding the knife. Kahlo once said, “I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best.” As a symbol of her new life, Frida cut her hair and stopped wearing the Tehuana clothing that Diego loved.
Her discovery of this affair freed her to assert herself both artistically and sexually. She moved out of their house and into a flat in town. From then on she began to have affairs, with both men and women, seeming to have lost all her inhibitions. Diego’s jealousy prevented her from flaunting her affairs in public. When Rivera found out about her affair with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, he threatened to kill him. She also had an affair with Diego’s personal hero, Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. Kahlo nicknamed him El Viejo (Old Man) and found his vigorous, intellectual personality stimulating. On his birthday, she gave him a painting entitled
Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky
(1937). Frida didn’t take the affair seriously; it was just a way of getting back at Diego. Rivera suspected nothing of her affair with Trotsky for over a year. When he eventually found out, he broke all ties with his hero.
On the career front, these were some of her most prolific years. Diego encouraged Frida to show and sell her work, which led to the actor Edward G. Robinson purchasing four of her paintings. Her work expanded beyond the personal. Kahlo was influenced by ex-votos (religious paintings) of the previous century, Goya, pre-Columbian statues, Hieronymus Bosch, and Brueghel. She began to paint monkeys, which, though symbols of lust in Mexican mythology, she portrayed as gentle and caring. She created complex, visual symbols, using a primitive style of bright colors. Frida’s art is specific and so personal that it can hurt to look at the images. She bled elements of her life onto the canvas, as though she had opened a vein, tempered by humor and fantasy.
In 1938, an art gallery owner in New York offered her a one-woman show in which she was celebrated as an artist in her own right. She showed twenty-five works and half of them sold. She was now becoming financially independent of Diego although it was he who drew up the guest list for the private showing. Critics were enthusiastic and people began commissioning new work from her. André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, was struck by how similar her work was to the movement despite her never having seen a surrealist painting. He offered her a show in Paris as part of an exhibition called Mexique. And she had a new love in Nickolas Muray, a Hungarian photographer.
While Frida eventually became disillusioned with Breton, she enjoyed meeting other artists. She even inspired designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who was so taken with Frida’s Mexican attire that she created the Madame Rivera dress. When Frida returned to the States it was to discover that not only had Nickolas Muray fallen in love with someone else but that Diego was sleeping with her sister again. It was Diego’s idea to seek a divorce. As he put it, he wanted the freedom to sleep with any woman he chose without having to worry that he was hurting Frida. He also wanted Frida to have more independence, which she neither wanted nor needed. Divorced in the fall of 1939, Frida, instead of celebrating, began to drink heavily instead. She couldn’t live with Diego but she couldn’t live without him, either. “I drank to drown my pain but the damned pain learned how to swim!”
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
11.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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