Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  When she got home, Paul asked for a divorce. Katharine cried but agreed.59 She soon learned that her former lover Herbert Rowell Stolz was divorcing his wife and marrying another woman, which only added to her pain. Katharine stored the household goods and went to Carson City, Nevada, for six weeks—with Maynard Dixon. This was his idea, stemming from his “sympathy with his ‘Pal o’ Misery’ ”—just the kind of phrase Maynard would use to simultaneously express and hide his grief. In Carson City, Maynard and Katharine became lovers, and her memoir noted that his “entertaining stories, often salacious, and interesting incidents about his life in San Francisco’s art colony” entertained her and helped her pass the time. She enjoyed watching him paint, and later he gave her a painting of a mountain they had both found beautiful.

  Dorothea and Paul married on December 6, 1935, while on the road, a justice of the peace in Albuquerque officiating. They married in the morning and went back to work in the afternoon. As Paul put it, “And our work went on from there, together.”60 There was no honeymoon, but just as political and personal passion joined, so did work and pleasure. Yet the wedding was not really that matter-of-fact or casual. Dorothea spent sixty or seventy dollars (memories may have exaggerated the cost) on a made-to-order beige gabardine suit to get married in—a big expenditure for Dorothea at this time.61 She wore, as always, the heavy Indian silver bracelet and her beret.

  New lives for Dorothea and Paul required dismantling old ones, of course. There were bruising consequences. Dixon and Taylor children alike were placed out with other families while Paul and Dorothea were on the road and Katharine was in Nevada with Maynard. Dan and John, at least, were placed together, but the Taylor children were each with a different family.62 The children’s experience could hardly have been more stressful. The “orphan” Dorothea was orphaning the Taylor children, in their view. The Dixon children, already living apart from their parents, felt what seemed to be the permanent dissolution of their home.

  10

  Blending a Family

  For the next thirty years, Dorothea and Paul would do everything possible together, so naturally they influenced each other. They made a marriage of love, commitment, respect, and mutual attraction. There was only one problem: Others were included in this journey. Had they been childless, their relationship might have been as near to ideal as marriages get.

  Both Dorothea and Paul treated their ex-spouses with sensitivity and caring, and neither criticized their exes in front of the children. Paul wrote to Dorothea how much he appreciated her “attitude toward K during her last days in California.”1 Maynard and Paul played golf together at least once. Showing me a snapshot of Maynard and Paul sitting on the lawn of the children’s school, John Dixon remarked, “This was a very civilized divorce.”2 Dorothea worked at promoting Maynard’s work, and got Paul to encourage Survey Graphic to use Maynard as an illustrator.3 Maynard even went on a few photographing and researching trips with Dorothea and Paul after they were a couple, but he admitted that it was not easy for him. On one such trip, Lange recorded, he “threw his hat violently on the ground saying this [amiability] doesn’t work. Not when you still love the girl!”4

  The divorces and remarriage were kept out of the Berkeley courts, but not out of its gossip. Paul particularly feared publicity, worried that the divorce would be used by the growers’ organizations to smear him politically. He also found it hard to tell his colleagues. Yet the disapproval mainly smeared Dorothea—the marriage breaker, the husband stealer. Those who knew Paul Taylor could not imagine that he would have been the initiator, although those who knew about Katharine’s affairs could sympathize.

  Dorothea made a home for the blended family. She found a striking house built just after the 1906 earthquake at 2706 Virginia Street, a two-story redwood, tucked behind and above a larger house, approached by a narrow brick pathway. It contained only three small bedrooms—one for Dorothea and Paul, one for the three boys, one for the two girls—but its large sunken living room focused on a big stone fireplace. Designed by California’s most renowned residential architect, Bernard Maybeck, its rustic quality made it cozy.5 Rooted in English cottages, the Maybeck style added motifs from California’s Japanese and Spanish colonial influences, a sensibility that characterized upscale home building as earthquake refugees moved east across San Francisco Bay. He and his followers, early members of the Sierra Club, designed houses that expressed their conception of harmony with nature—a seemingly unlimited supply of cheap redwood helped—and marked Berkeley’s residential landscape permanently. These houses were often dark inside, due to large overhanging soffits, an effect intensified by the natural wood floors, window sashes, and wall paneling, but the views from the windows brought the outside in. From the upper floor of the Virginia Street house you could see a canyon, the campus, and the Bay in the background. That fall of 1935, Dorothea scrubbed and furnished it so that they could move in immediately after their marriage and celebrate Christmas there—a holiday she cherished. She set up a darkroom in the unfinished basement.

  She had six children and stepchildren now: Consie Dixon, from Maynard’s first marriage, was twenty-five and on her own, but came to the Berkeley home occasionally, especially on holidays. Kathy Taylor was thirteen, Ross Taylor ten, and Margot Taylor just six; Dan Dixon was ten and John Dixon seven. These five children were all placed out with paid foster parents for the winter and spring of 1936. These placements disturb present-day parents even more than the earlier ones. Today’s child development wisdom, and most people’s common sense, consider the moment of a divorce as the worst possible moment to send children away from their parents. When children fear loss of parents, they need reassurance that their parents won’t desert them and that the breakup is not their fault. The four parents involved in this story did not share today’s psychological understanding of children’s needs, not even Katharine, an expert in childhood development. Rather they assumed, as most early twentieth-century experts did, that children were resilient and adaptable so long as their physical care was good. Progressives in child development at the time were more concerned that children not be deprived of freedom to explore than worried about emotional security.

  Today, parents with Dorothea’s and Paul’s work on the road would be likely to hire a full-time nanny to care for their children at home. Taylor’s and Lange’s combined salary of $5,800 (worth $87,000 in 2007) was not luxurious for a seven-person household, but they could have afforded a nanny, given the Depression’s low wages. They did not choose that option. Live-in servants had been common in the upper-middle class into the very early twentieth century, but by the 1930s only the most elite lived that way. Lange’s decision was not conflicted: she simply could not turn down the FSA opportunity. Even had she been able to return home every evening, her child-care options would have been limited. Careers were still uncommon among mothers—poor mothers, by contrast, had jobs, not careers.

  So Paul and Dorothea agreed without second thoughts that the children would be placed with others; Maynard took no responsibility and expressed no opinion; Katharine simply announced her intention to head to New York for the year and left the children to Paul and Dorothea.

  Where the children would go was a subject of research, discussion, and some vacillation. Dorothea had learned—probably from Katharine—about the Ojai Valley School, a progressive private boarding school located east of Santa Barbara, 350 miles from Berkeley. Paul remained entirely passive about the decision, telling Dorothea repeatedly that he trusted her entirely, was leaving the decision up to her, and had no opinion on the relative merits of boarding school and foster care. Light-headed with love, Paul could not focus on his children, and he had never been accustomed to taking much responsibility for them. He even proposed taking another leave and traveling with Dorothea for a full year.

  Dorothea decided against the school in favor of foster care near Berkeley. She made only shorter trips that spring 1936 school semester, so that the children frequently cam
e home to the new blended family on weekends. Ross Taylor and the Dixon boys went to live with a lawyer, Ted Gay, and his wife. The Gays ran a summer camp for kids in the Sierras, and were comfortable as foster parents. The girls were moved several times—none of the three Taylor siblings was placed with either of the other two.

  Each of the children’s four parents discussed the children’s arrangements somewhat differently, but none of them objected. This is how Katharine saw it: “There were of course my children, whom I deeply loved, but whom I would have to leave for a year in order to find myself in a completely new way of life.”6 Like Dorothea, she spoke as if she had no choice. She went to New York to work on a degree in clinical psychology and developed, over the years, a distinguished career in child psychology.7 She moved from place to place for her studies and her work, with the result that when her children were with her, they, too, were itinerant.8

  Paul would never speak for the record on this decision. (In his oral history, he barely mentioned Katharine.) This is as personal as an interviewer could get him to be: “After we were married you mean? Well there were family situations to face. There were the children of two families. Yes, it was not altogether easy . . . to pull up stakes of two families and recreate relationships, but on the whole, it was done.” He also felt it important that “when he married Dorothea they should be free to work out their relationship without any of the five children involved. . . .” This could be read as not very child-centered, or as an expression of how helplessly in love he was, or, less charitably, as irresponsibility for his children because he assumed that the mothers would make the arrangements. He thought it was better for the kids to be away from the new house most of the time because it allowed them to connect gradually.9

  Dorothea also refused to accept responsibility for her choices, although her guilt leaked out. She reversed the causality, explaining that being separated from the children drove her to work.10 She suggested to others that the children had gone to a friend’s home, never mentioning that she and Paul paid virtual strangers to care for the children.11 How did this behavior square with her acute sensitivity to the suffering of poor children? Perhaps the comparison made her own children’s pain less significant. None of Lange’s many interviewers dared press her on the foster-care issue. But her actions spoke loudly. Her drive to take on this adventure, to be free of domestic responsibilities, was as strong as Paul’s.

  Maynard never commented. He felt neither responsibility nor voice in the matter, and he likely did not even think about what would be good for the children. He never contributed child support—Dorothea and Paul supported all the children.

  THE CHILDREN’S EMOTIONAL memories were not unanimous. Since the children were all in Berkeley that first year, they got to know one another on some weekends. None of them had an easy time. Blended families were new and strange. When John Dixon’s girlfriend and then wife, Helen, first visited the household, she was amazed and perplexed by the family connections, having never heard of anything so complicated, she told me.

  John Dixon’s painful memories are vivid. He recalled driving with his mother in their station wagon onto the ferry, then onto the Berkeley pier (the Bay Bridge was not yet open), “crying and shouting, didn’t want to go, didn’t like this new man who was responsible for her leaving on these trips.” Dan, in contrast to his anger about his first placement, in 1932, justified this one to me, remarking that Dorothea and Paul “broke the kids in pretty easy” to their new relationship. Dan and John both remembered friction with Ross, this stranger who had suddenly become a brother; John remembers Ross “jumping up and down on the bed waving a scimitar; a wild man.” John has other painful memories: a case of boils, and being terrified when he missed the bus home from school.

  The Dixon boys had lost a father. Maynard saw them occasionally, usually along with the Taylor children. In his own way, Maynard tried to minimize the divorce’s pain for everyone, and since he had always traveled so much, the boys were not acutely conscious of missing him. Dorothea spoke of him easily and casually, and kept his butcher-block roll of drawing paper in a closet for children and grandchildren to use. Once, the boys had Thanksgiving in Maynard’s studio, with their beloved eccentric uncle Harry St. John Dixon, who would sing Scottish songs. Mainly they saw their dad at Dorothea’s grand holiday dinners, now crowded with Dixons, Taylors, Partridges, and often academics whom Paul was hosting. The Dixon boys did not always love these Berkeley gatherings. Not only was there tension about executing Dorothea’s instructions just so, but Maynard could not be counted on to be polite. “No two women were ever more vulnerable to Maynard’s wit,” John recalled, than Paul’s mother and her older sister, Ethel Rose. Dan described the latter as “still a maiden at fifty or more, and virginal in an upright, corseted way that made her an irresistible target. . . . He twitted them and taunted them and tormented them all the time we were there. . . . If I’d have been Paul, I think I might have punched him in the mouth.”12 Maynard took his sons on one summer camping trip, which they loved. John recounts a vivid memory of Maynard visiting them at the Gays’. As he was helping the boys make some arrows out of wooden shingles, he cut his left hand, the one he drew and painted with. John remembers the blood running down his fingers, and saying worriedly, “Are you okay, Dad, are you okay?” He was anxious about a father wounded by more than a cut to his hand.13

  Maynard took up with another recently divorced artist, Edith Hamlin, and they soon married. A nurturing woman who subordinated her own painting to care for Maynard as his health declined, Edie became as much of a stepmother to the boys as she could, and they remember her fondly. Dorothea liked Edie, treated her warmly, and felt grateful for her care of Maynard. A few years later, Maynard and Edie moved to Tucson, for the sake of his emphysema, and because he was tired of being a public figure and of playing a theatrical role, Dan explained. They built themselves a log cabin at Mount Carmel, Utah, for the summers. He enjoyed his children but felt no need for regular contact. He wrote them occasional letters, with charming anecdotes and sketches.14

  Ironically, the Taylor children also felt that they had lost a father. Paul treated the Taylor and Dixon children evenhandedly, but having always considered the children to be Katharine’s responsibility, he instantly transferred that responsibility to Dorothea—as Maynard had done with Consie. All five children knew that he would never defend them against her. The result was a whole household of children who sometimes felt unparented. Paul’s grandchild Dyanna’s conclusion is grim: Paul was simply not focused on his children’s well-being. Imogen Cunningham’s son Rondal, who remembers the new blended family in their living room, paints avivid picture of Paul’s detachment: Ross playing the French horn, John the clarinet, Dan another instrument, and Paul obliviously writing a report in the midst of it; at other times they might be playing basketball in the living room while Paul napped, then woke and said, “Well, well” or “My, my,” always doubling his words, and resumed his work. Dan Dixon characterized Paul’s role even more critically: his and Dorothea’s partnership was so strong that the children seemed like intruders.

  Dorothea, by contrast, could fly into rages, as she had done with Consie. Margot’s husband thought she had two personae, Jekyll and Hyde. Kathy, the eldest Taylor child, irritated Dorothea by dressing and behaving in a flirtatious, conventionally feminine way, dreaming of a career as actress or movie star—and also, perhaps, because she resembled Mother Rose in her looks and style. Once when Ross talked back to Dorothea, she slapped his face and said, you won’t get insolent with me; yet it was Dorothea who bought him his first instrument, a bugle, and encouraged his formidable musical talent. (He would become the principal French horn player for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.) Dorothea worried about her temper and once confessed to her daughter-in-law Onnie that “sometimes I am possessed of the devil.” It was not that the Taylor children felt Dorothea favored her own boys; it was just that Paul had ceded all parenting to her, and she could be unpredict
ably harsh.

  Ross’s behavior, if Dan’s and John’s account of it is accurate, signaled his anger. Ross’s daughter Dyanna thinks he was his mother’s favorite, Katharine’s “golden prince”; Margot’s husband thought it more accurate to say Ross was his mother’s Parsifal, a hero unique and incomparable. He suffered deeply from being farmed out, and from the sense of abandonment by his father. After living with his mother in the second school year after the divorce, Ross asked to be allowed to go live with his father, and his mother allowed it. But he was bitterly disappointed, as once again he could get nothing from Paul, and his only real parent was Dorothea.

  Margot became a distinguished psychotherapist, so her recollections were shaped by expertise. The youngest child, she had the fewest emotional resources. She found the “wrath of Dorothea” terrifying, and recalled how she “looked at you with snake eyes.” Sixty years later, Margot recounted a bitter memory as if it were yesterday: Once, soon after the new blended family had formed, she was crying—she couldn’t remember why—and wanted to be picked up and comforted. Dorothea said no. Margot went crying to Paul, and Dorothea said to her, “No, you won’t get anywhere with that.” To Paul, Dorothea said, “No, Paul, she has to do this on her own,” and Paul complied. (Years later, Margot would come to understand the primal meaning of “on her own” for Dorothea.) Paul would not defy Dorothea, as he never defied his mother, and Margot concluded that if she defied her stepmother, she would be “cut off” from her father; Paul was both father and son to Dorothea, Margot thought, and Dorothea’s role in that relationship was to be adored.

  It is a sign of this family’s complexity that despite these angry and painful memories, Margot felt that she had been Dorothea’s favorite, and remembered that Dorothea could be loving, warm, and expressive toward the children. Mary Spivey, a friend of Margot’s from junior high, remembered Margot’s complaints about how her stepmother intruded, eclipsed whatever the child was interested in, and turned attention back to herself. Mary said that she “met the pain in Margot” before meeting Lange. Yet Mary adored going to Margot’s house and experiencing Dorothea’s warmth and charisma. “I felt I had come home,” she said. Dorothea was always explaining things, something her own children found tedious, but Mary loved it because Dorothea had a way of expressing the feelings “that lay behind things.” But those intense feelings for what lay “behind” fed Dorothea’s need to control. Once, Mary was helping in the kitchen and picked up a ceramic serving dish to carry it to the dining room; Dorothea took it from her, saying, “Oh no, you must hold it this way to respect its shape.”15