Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1932

  She found the strength to pose for Alfred but did not attempt to paint. “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again,” she told Russell Vernon Hunter. “I seem to have nothing to say….I read and sew and fuss about at much of nothing—walk a little—drive a little and the day is gone—sleep only a very little—eat a great deal—Not much of a life.” The only thing that stirred her was the thought of going west: “I must go back to it….The pull is so strong.”

  Georgia kept in touch with Beck, envisioning her in the land that meant so much to both of them. She wrote about things that Beck would appreciate—her convertible, the goldenrod in bloom, her pride in her ability to bear the strain of daily life once Alfred’s family came to the lake. By the end of summer, she confessed that she would have to put off the idea of going west: “I just sit in my effortless soup and wait….The worst of my fatigue is a suffering in my nerves that is much worse than physical pain.” Georgia would stay at the lake for most of the year with their housemates, a white cat and her rambunctious kittens.

  From Taos, Beck sent Georgia a series of thoughtful gifts—more handkerchiefs, a blouse, a pair of Mexican sandals, and an artificial flower of the kind that both women liked to paint—and wrote of doings there without saying much about her life. In November, when Georgia heard rumors about the Strands’ divorce, she asked how she should present Beck’s version of the story to refute what was being said by “the garbage carriers” (chief among them, Mabel). Georgia did not need details, “but if you wish me to pass any news I’ll pass it—otherwise I am quite pleased to say…that I know nothing about it.”

  When Beck replied that the rumors were true, Georgia offered her the advice that she was herself trying to adopt:

  Try not to take it too seriously—or maybe I mean take it more seriously—imagine that it is two years from now—and in the meantime don’t do anything foolish. Only time will make you feel better—and don’t talk about it to people if you don’t want to….Why should you be expected to explain your personal life to anyone—It is rather difficult to even explain it to oneself….Don’t look ahead or behind and maybe you can enjoy the “now.”

  Rather than fret about the future, Georgia suggested that Beck should think of joining her for a long stay on a warm, restorative island.

  By the time Beck received Georgia’s counsel, she was already immersed in her new life. Often at Los Gallos, she was teaching Mabel’s friend Muriel Draper to drive and typing volume two of Mabel’s memoirs, but she was living in town and socializing with artists who were not in Mabel’s thrall—such as John Young-Hunter and Nicolai Fechin, whose vivid portrait of Beck at that time accentuates her silvery locks and bright red lipstick. Acutely sensitive to the controversies unleashed when marriages end, Beck tried not to take sides when the Fechins divorced. And while she could not always rely on Bill, who was traveling between Taos and Denver, his plan to start a wholesale liquor business seemed likely to succeed after the repeal of Prohibition. Meanwhile, she told Paul (they maintained a correspondence), she planned to join Bill on a hunting trip: “I am supposed to try shooting but I really don’t believe I can!”

  Beck had many reasons to stay in Taos that winter—among the most compelling, a one-woman show at the Denver Art Museum’s Chappell House. The exhibition, no doubt arranged by Bill’s sister, ran for the last two weeks of December, while Bill’s family entertained her and the local gossips speculated about their relationship. In the Chappell mansion’s opulent setting—it had a grand staircase leading to a ballroom, a conservatory, and a marble fountain—Beck’s paintings struck a curious note. “Unique Exhibition of Paintings on Glass,” a Denver paper announced. Donald Bear, the museum’s curator, mused, “If one were tempted to place these pictures in a category, one would be forced to conclude that they are of themselves so much a part of the personality of the artist who painted them that they belong only to themselves.” He ended with remarks on the oil entitled Portrait of Bill: “an amusing, ingenious arrangement of attributes and habits which contribute the picture of a personality, without the necessity of actual portraiture.”

  From Denver, where Beck spent some weeks while her show was up, she sent Bear’s review to Alfred along with a letter downplaying her pride in her exhibition. “I do manage to hobble ahead, in spite of this and that,” she wrote. Denver was “a crazy place—the world’s champion booze-fighters roll around in it.” Her new life was “swell…but tough at times.” She continued: “Part of the toughest part has been concerned with the suffering caused by what seems to be a difference in feeling between the three of us—you, Paul and myself. I know there really is no difference and hope you feel the same.” Moreover, Beck’s heart ached when she thought of Georgia’s long convalescence; it was hard to admit that the four of them were no longer close.

  By return mail, Alfred expressed his regret for the misunderstandings that had arisen among them. “I see very clearly how they came. I am much alone & have had much chance to see straight…above all without any theories about life.” He hoped that the breach with Paul would one day be mended and thought fondly of him working with Beck and Georgia to hang so many shows: “It was all very fine. And remains so…an integral part of the Place’s spirit.” As he contemplated the new year (when he would turn seventy), Alfred still believed in “something beyond all of us…The Idea. —And The Idea is as alive as ever.”

  * * *

  . . .

  The idea paramount in Georgia’s mind was to see if she could bear the pace of life in New York. “I feel as if I’m waking up from a long queer sleep,” she told Beck in November. After eight months spent in restful settings, she was ready to test the waters. Alfred had made several trips to Lake George, including a surprise visit for her birthday. At the end of the month, she went to New York, where she saw Marin’s retrospective at the Place and spent time with Duchamp, Toomer, and the Stettheimers. When people asked about the Strands, she reassured Beck, “I said nothing….One has to be very strong to stand ones friends and enemies.” She wished her luck for her Denver show and asked her to visit if she came east. Georgia’s foray into town had rekindled her spirits: “I feel more free to take myself any place I want to go.”

  Georgia also kept in touch with Paul. Of her exploratory trip to New York, she wrote, “The principal things about it all for me were that I could again walk the street a little without fear of losing my mind.” By then, she was back at the Hill with Toomer, who needed a calm place to complete the essay he was writing about Alfred. Georgia thought well of Jean: “an unusually beautiful—clear person—with an amusing streak.” They were comfortable together without needing to converse: “The not talking seems to give a real quiet that seems to make the whole house feel good….The world here is very lovely white it is all white.” Alfred looked ill when he arrived for Christmas but recovered by the time he left four days later, bucked up by Jean’s reading aloud of his paean to him. “I really wish you could have been here for everything,” Georgia concluded.

  “The greatest Christmas I could have received was your being virtually your old self,” Alfred told Georgia once he was back in New York. One wonders whether he saw Georgia’s transformation as the result of time spent “not talking” with Jean, who was not only an attractive man but had a soulful way about him. In the last days of December, their rapport deepened into an emotional intimacy compounded by the erotic charge felt by both. Jean left on the last day of the year, after a stirring exchange the night before, during which Georgia made it clear that she would not act on her feelings for him despite their intensity. After his departure, Georgia teased him about her cat’s need for a tom now that she was in heat: “I never saw such a performance before—and right at this moment I don’t need it—troubles enough with myself—I do have to laugh when I think of your possible remarks if it had happened when you were he
re.” She confessed, “I like you much. I like knowing the feel of your maleness and your laugh.”

  Other letters between them imply that they decided not to consummate their relationship because of Georgia’s sense that her “troubles” needed to be resolved before she could risk intimacy. After Toomer left, she recognized his effect on her: “I seem to have come out of my daze into another world today—feeling very good—as tho there is nothing the matter with me any more.” While the rapport that had developed between them could not be sustained, she had come to life “in such a quiet surprising fashion….Everything in me begins to move.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Another Way of Living

  1934

  Alfred greeted the new year by himself. Writing to Georgia from his bed while listening to the street noise below, he was amazed that they had come this far. At midnight he sighed pensively, “Oh Georgia…I am seventy finally. —I never expected to see that age—Yes seventy. —And you on the road to full recovery.” He would spend January 1 at the Place: “Whether anyone comes or not is immaterial.”

  In the coming year, each of the four would spend more time apart from the others. The two couples would disentangle themselves from their familiar ways of being together; their bonds would loosen yet survive, variously, the near dissolution of relations. “I hope 1934 will be a year of relative peace for all of us,” Alfred wrote wistfully to Beck. It would be the year in which his intimates recognized that he was a man of the previous generation—for whom seventy meant the start of extreme old age rather than the prospect of the new beginning he dreamed of for himself and Georgia.

  * * *

  . . .

  A few weeks after putting Beck on the train back to the United States, Paul began work on his next project—a government-sponsored film about the fishermen of Alvarado, a coastal village forty miles south of Veracruz. Henwar Rodakiewicz, who had been borrowing his Akeley, joined him in Mexico City with the camera. At the end of October, the two men traveled to Alvarado with Augustín Chávez to scout locations. In the new year, Paul was named director of Photography and Cinema at the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), with a contract to produce a series of forward-looking films over the next five years.

  His first project was a tale of collective action, he told the Baasches: “solidarity—something I believe in—and a criticism of capitalism, a system I detest.” He continued:

  My interest in the social forces of to-day has grown considerably in this year….I don’t see how anyone, the artist particularly, can stand aside….I don’t know whether I can be labeled a Communist but I find the ideas of Marx which I have been reading very true to me—an ideal to be sure far distant even in Russia—but the only one left, that has any hope in it for a decent human life.

  He urged the like-minded to join him. When Ansel Adams wrote that Stieglitz was encouraging him to find his own way in photography, Strand replied, “These are critical years for anyone who is alive—aware—has not insulated himself in some ‘esthetic’ rut.”

  Strand returned to Alvarado in January 1934, full of hope that his film experience would allow him to engage with the world around him. His contract specified that he was to collaborate with his Mexican colleagues to practice in production the same values the film would depict. But the combination of this high-minded approach and the shoestring budget proved challenging. The film, initially called Pescadores, was to culminate in the fishermen’s strike against the profiteer who kept them impoverished; its realism would be enhanced by hiring locals—a tactic that would also hold down costs. It did not escape Strand that as the man who paid the wages, he was in the position of the film’s bad guy: “In a world in which human exploitation is so general it seems to me a further exploitation of people, however picturesque, different and interesting to us they may appear, to merely make use of them as material.”

  Not surprisingly, he soon found himself in conflicts occasioned by his employment of the very people he wanted to represent as converts to the cause. Having promised to pay the minimum wage, he had to bargain to buy the boats, nets, and fish needed in filming at the same time that he was laboring to portray the value of solidarity. The film’s scenes of the fishermen working to toss out their nets or haul in their lines are choreographed set pieces focused on male camaraderie: They share an idyllic (homoerotic?) spirit that is at odds with the film’s political goals. At the same time, the fishermen, all amateurs, are often more believable than the actors who play the profiteer and the handsome rabble-rouser whose death deepens the men’s determination to strike.

  In addition to Strand’s problems with his crew (compounded by his poor Spanish), some found him difficult to work with. Strand was “always a little on the slow side,” Rodakiewicz recalled. A still photographer more than a cinematographer, he thought in terms of single frames rather than of action shots, which gives the film a static quality. Augustín Chávez left because of differences of opinion with Strand, whose insistence on his way of doing things may have seemed to him like yanqui imperialism. Others complained of his rigidity. To Fred Zinnemann, the film director who took Rodakiewicz’s place after he, too, left, Strand was “the most doctrinaire Marxist I had ever met.”

  Ned Scott, Paul Strand filming Redes, Mexico, 1934

  Despite Paul’s embrace of socialism, his Mexican partners’ objections to his painstaking ways threatened to undermine the project. After Augustín Chávez’s departure, one of his colleagues from Mexico City arrived to replace him; he, too, left in a matter of months. In September Augustín claimed full credit for the production and, with the support of the SEP’s new director, took control of all material aspects, including the music. Strand was informed that he had to complete the film in a month, after which he must leave Mexico. In November, he wired Carlos Chávez, whose film score was to be replaced by that of another composer, “There is plenty of Trickiness and Dishonesty Around As I now see but please Believe that I have Never Been Deliberately or Consciously Disloyal to you.” The film, still in postproduction in Mexico City, would be released in 1936 under the title Redes (“Nets”).

  * * *

  . . .

  During these months, Paul kept in touch with Beck. She offered support when he mentioned Henwar’s lack of enthusiasm for his politics: “If H[enwar] is not interested in the social aspect of the scenario…don’t let him deflect you.” She also helped in practical ways, ordering the agar-agar Paul used in the sizing of platinotype prints and sending boxes of his work to Kurt Baasch for safekeeping.

  Later that year, Paul let her know that Barbara (“Bobby”) Hawk, a friend from Taos, had come to work as his assistant, and, in the process, become his companion. Beck hoped that they would take the film to Hollywood. Although Augustín had taken control, Paul should stay in Mexico for the premiere:

  By that time perhaps all will be straightened out and the dept. de Ed. persuaded that it’s the film, its import & not who made it….If all of you, as Americans, had the insight & ability to put the message into form, they should be glad to give you credit. The US have been generous & kind to Mexico’s representatives in the arts—Rivera, Orozco, Tamayo—and Mexico can well afford to return the compliment—!

  She closed this missive with the hope that Paul and Bobby would then come back to Taos: “If my being here would stand in the way of that, I can easily be elsewhere—Though why all 4 of us, as mature people, could not meet, I don’t see.”

  Beck could now present herself as a mature person (she was nearly forty-three). Bill’s divorce was about to be finalized despite his wife’s “double-crossing” (she kept the funds he gave her to go to Reno and bought a mail-order divorce of the kind that had just been ruled invalid). Beck confessed to Paul, “Truly I don’t want to marry. It’s all right this way.” In a note to Bobby on that letter, she said how glad she was that Paul had a new partner. Bobby could help him deal with the machinations of people like A
ugustín: “I never could teach him that myself because I was so often muddled & resentful.” But now, in her new guise as a maverick, she declared herself ready to take on the “bastards.”

  It is of interest that at this time Beck was also taking on Mabel, whose dominance made Taoseños think twice about crossing her. For some time, Beck had been helping Mabel organize her correspondence. When she came across a letter that referred dismissively to “the Strands,” she took issue with her: “There is a decided balking on my part at wishing to continue working for you,” she wrote. “I do not now and never have been a person to you that meant much, apart from being ‘useful’ and therefore, feeling this way, it would be painful and dishonest for me to continue.” Leaving Mabel to her own devices, Beck also took her to task for gossiping about the Strands’ divorce after promising to keep it a secret: “Yours is a repulsive spirit and I am glad to be through with it.” From then on, she referred to her former friend as “Dodge Mabel Luhan.”

  Beck’s defiant attitude had become an important part of her “western” self. With no one to object to her peccadilloes, she smoked constantly and outdrank most of the customers at Mike Cunico’s rough-and-tumble nightclub, where she and Bill joined in the poker games. The regulars’ enthusiasm for hard living spurred her to act like a latter-day Annie Oakley, the sort of woman her father might have admired. She soon became notable among the town’s more picturesque residents. “She had begun to act tougher and wilder that it was her true nature to be, simply out of delight in finding herself ‘free,’ ” Spud Johnson recalled.

  In this spirit, Beck let it be known that she answered to “Becky”—her devil-may-care nickname from girlhood—but continued to show her work as Rebecca Strand—the surname she had once avoided so as to be judged on her own merit. By summer, she had completed ten more reverse paintings to complement the twenty-one shown in Denver for a solo show at the Museum of New Mexico, in Santa Fe. The catalog included tributes by Augustín Chávez (written before his break with Paul), Elizabeth McCausland, and Paul. Chávez paid her a backhanded compliment: “The innocence of her feeling has not been touched by preconceived or sophisticated ideas.” Her paintings, McCausland wrote, were the result of “spiritual honesty.” Paul defended them against the charge of being decorative—that is, feminine and of minor import: “There is much room in this world for songs as well as symphonies. There are few enough of both that have life and give life. This having and giving exists for me in these unpretentious and lovely paintings of Rebecca Strand.”