by Karen Karbo
It’s possible she was consumed with her career, her painting, her suddenly bumpier-than-usual marriage. She’d had some health issues. She had other bigger and better fish to fry. Isn’t that the way of it? Someone makes us feel like crap when we’re already vulnerable and not making much progress in life. We vow that one day we’ll make them pay! call me nerd today, boss tomorrow goes the popular T-shirt saying. The irony is that once you get there, once you’re the boss, or shown in the same gallery as the self-important twit who’d written you off because you were a girl, you’ve moved on.
If you haven’t moved on, you should have. Yes, I know. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but that only really holds true for people in countries where much of the day is spent dozing in the heat, brooding. Anyone with a to-do list simply can’t be bothered . . . or she shouldn’t be.
I went to a big Southern Californian suburban high school where I was the friend of the homecoming queen. I was the perennial sidekick, and friend to all the cute boys who had crushes on my friends. Even my mother wondered why, since I wasn’t bad-looking, I never had any dates. Off I went to college, where I also had no dates. I vowed that one day I would come back and show them! Those girls would have boring husbands, colicky babies, and the ten pounds of post-pregnancy belly fat that went with them, and I would have—well, not that. Since I never had any dates, I would be unlikely to have a husband, even a boring one, and the resultant babies.
By the time my twenty-year high school reunion rolled around, I’d published two novels. I’d moved away from the Southern California suburb to Portland, Oregon, where I lived with (surprise!) my husband and little baby. Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” was playing, and I strode into that reunion in my purchased-just-for-the-occasion strappy bronze sandals, and I got myself a cocktail and lay in wait for the first person to ask me what I’d been up to. I’d left the husband and baby at home, even though some girls (losers!) brought theirs.
It happened in the ladies’ room, which was packed with girls-now-women, peeing and primping. Someone asked what I was up to. This was it. Here was my moment to shine. I would make her feel the way Speicher must have felt upon learning that Georgia O’Keeffe had twice the career he could ever hope to have. But the moment the word writer left my lips, the girl who asked looked away and said, “Yeah, well I mean to read more, I really do. But I just don’t. I have a library card, though.” This happened over and over again. No one wanted to hear about my books, except Mr. Pendell, the art teacher. Everyone else avoided the subject. I had gone from being the friend of the homecoming queen (who looked as beautiful and queenly as ever), to the person on the corner in front of your favorite Starbucks who works for a well-meaning underfunded grassroots organization that saves puppies from global warming, whose eyes you can’t meet and who nevertheless makes you feel guilty as hell. You’re probably ahead of me on this one, but the girls with the chubby husbands and boring babies loved them. They loved their lives.* They didn’t envy my being a writer. Why would they?
It is unknown whether O’Keeffe ever attended a class reunion at the Art Students League, but if she did, I feel confident in saying that she never cornered Speicher and informed him that she was an artist, and not an art teacher, ha ha ha.
In any case, 1928 was a banner year for O’Keeffe, despite the fact that the art market wasn’t as frisky as it had been several years earlier, perhaps a portent of the belt-tightening that was to come.†
On April 16, 1928, a slightly disingenuous New York Times headline read artist who paints for love gets $25,000 for 6 panels.‡
Maybe one of the reasons “everyone” is writing a book about O’Keeffe, and people remain as interested in her life as they are in her work, is because certain key experiences remain tantalizingly open to interpretation. This is one of them. The sale was headline-worthy because it was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. Stieglitz had a dramatic story to go along with the high purchase price: The six panels had hung in a row at her 1928 show. A dashing, well-dressed stranger pulled Stieglitz aside and told him he wanted to buy the lot of them. Stieglitz was flabbergasted. His heart beat dangerously fast. He was extraordinarily picky about who could own an O’Keeffe, and he wasn’t sure this flashy gent met his standards. He threw out a number: $25,000.§ Without a moment’s hesitation, the man agreed. Stieglitz made him promise to display them together, and never to sell them. The man agreed to this as well. The panels were whisked off to Paris, never to be seen again.
It’s likely that Stieglitz made this up, to cover up the true, non-headline-worthy sale. It’s one of the things he was best at, and for which, despite her many mixed feelings, O’Keeffe felt grateful: getting press. He knew that once a headline was run, the news was out. He was like those TV lawyers who throw out some damning statement that the judge then instructs the jury to pretend they’ve never heard. The paintings going to Paris is a nice embellishment, especially since for decades, the movement of masterpieces had been in the opposite direction, from Europe to America. Now there would be paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, American, hanging over a blue velvet récamier in some swanky flat in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
The Noted O’Keeffe Expert, whom I respect (even if she did make me feel like a brainless, red-poppy-poster-loving nincompoop), believes that the secret, anonymous buyer was Stieglitz wingman, Mitchell Kennerley, owner—until he went bankrupt—of the Anderson Galleries. Kennerley was British, but in every other way he was like someone out of The Great Gatsby, by which I mean a larger-than-life man-of-means. In addition to being an art auctioneer and gallery owner, Kennerley was also a publisher, famous at the time for having been sued by Harper & Brothers, the publishers of Mark Twain, for copyright infringement. Kennerley published Jap Herron, written by Twain from beyond the grave, and transmitted to Kennerley author Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings by Ouija Board.
His literary exploits were dubious, but over the years he’d been a friend to Stieglitz. When Stieglitz moved into Elizabeth’s tiny studio with O’Keeffe, Kennerley stored the rest of his stuff for him, and it was Kennerley’s idea to mount a retrospective exhibit of Stieglitz’s photographs, which included the famous forty-five pictures that launched Georgia’s career.
Kennerley bought the Calla Lily pictures for $25,000, but Stieglitz agreed that he could pay in installments. Kennerley couldn’t afford the pictures at the moment, but he was engaged to a wacky heiress,¶¶ Margery Durant Campbell Daniel, the daughter of the one-time CEO of General Motors, and his plan was to woo her with a gift of them; after they were married he would use her money to pay the balance. While wacky Margery was in Reno getting her divorce, she kept two of the smaller Calla Lilies with her for company, but alas, once she returned she fell in love with someone else and returned the pictures to Kennerley, who stopped making his payments a short while later, and was forced to return them to Stieglitz.
By then, all the newspapers had picked up the story, and O’Keeffe was besieged by interviews. She sat for them reluctantly. For the length of her long life she agonized over her mixed feelings about publicity. She knew it was important, but she was so private. She was never able to successfully convince herself that it didn’t matter, or become more open. Her reputation, carefully crafted by Stieglitz, as Pure, Feeling Woman-Child Ruled by Intuition, was no less manufactured than his photographs and her paintings. O’Keeffe was a pragmatic Midwesterner. Like everyone who does not suffer from a personality disorder, her heart could lead her astray when it came to love, but when it came to her work, she was practical and hardheaded. She knew that regardless of whether the headline about the sale of the pictures was true or not, it would be foolish not to leverage the attention.
Her celebrity was thus refreshed. Only this time, instead of being a newspaper personality known for her naked torso and love affair with a married older man, she became famous for her work, and the high prices it c
ommanded. To further burnish her growing and glowing image as one of the best, most exciting living American artists, male or female, she traveled to Washington, D.C., at the behest of her old friend Anita Pollitzer, to address the National Woman’s Party.
O’Keeffe really was a staunch feminist, as the NOKE insisted. I’m tucking this tidbit in here because I fear that if I lead off a chapter with it, or create a highlighted section within a chapter, calling it How to Be a Feminist, readers who love art, strong women, fascinating characters, life lessons, and cheeky modern narratives,** will run from this book the same way my dog does when she poops in the neighbor’s yard.
When I was in college, and disco, not feminism, was king,†† someone defined feminism for me as “believing the lives of women matter as much as the lives of men.” Can anyone argue with that? If what women are posting on Facebook these days is any indication,‡‡ I think we can say that we now believe that pretty much everything that happens to us is at least as important as anything that happens in the lives of men. Like the word gay, which evolved from meaning “joyful” to “stupid or lame” in a few short decades, feminism has come to mean Humorless Female Who Will Never Wear Stylish Shoes and Has Issues with Waxing.
The concept must be rebranded. Might we call it something like esprito?§§ From the French word esprit, which means “liveliness of mind and spirit.” The added “o” places the concept across the universe from an -ism (boring!) of any kind, instead evoking a party atmosphere, making esprito sound like something you might enjoy with salsa, after a shot of tequila. It could also be spelled phonetically, espreeto. This makes it sound like it could be related to a shopping spree, and less like a religion that involves animal sacrifice.
O’Keeffe’s brand of espreeto emphasized self-reliance. She felt that women should earn their own living, but, more important, that they had a responsibility to their true selves to find out what they were good at, and to pursue it.
A Lesson on Envy
Right about now you would be forgiven for envying Georgia O’Keeffe. It’s one thing to read about her struggles living at the far end of the world, and borrowing money to go to school, and then having to quit school because the money ran out, and sleeping in a series of dingy, rented rooms, and carrying on a long-distance relationship with a man belonging to the Stop It Some More School of Courtship and then, just when it looks like things are finally going her way, being embarrassed by naked pictures made public by yet another man. We could root for her then, and empathize.
By 1930 however, she was famous. Her yearly exhibits garnered plenty of notice, and her paintings sold. Increasingly, critics wrote about her work and not her gender; even the ones who thought she was overhyped and undertalented came at her for complicated issues related to her painterly technique, the quality of her brushstrokes, her choice of colors. She had realized her life’s dream of earning a living by her art and was the first American woman painter to do so. To the world she appeared unflappable and weirdly elegant in her black vestments and flat shoes, her gleaming black hair always pulled straight off her face in a bun at the nape of her slender neck. Did I mention, she was also thin?
But all was not well. Indeed, everything else in her life pretty much sucked.
Her health had not been good. O’Keeffe could be as robust as a cowgirl, then would fall mysteriously ill from something undiagnosable that probably only affects geniuses. One time, she was felled by a smallpox vaccination. Shortly after being vaccinated her legs became swollen and Lee, Alfred’s brother and the family physician, “cured” her by tightly binding them from thigh to ankle and ordering full bed rest. After nine weeks, she recovered (a cold pack and some aspirin would have solved the problem overnight). There was no middle ground, it seemed, no days when Georgia was feeling a little rough around the edges but soldiered on. She was either getting up before dawn to do her many-miled walk, planting a garden, writing eighty-seven letters, then dashing off a masterpiece, or flat on her back in bed for months at a time. Maybe echinacea and zinc really do ward off colds, like the hippies say.
In December 1927, she underwent surgery for what turned out to be a benign lump in her breast.¶¶¶ It was her second such operation, and her recovery was slower than it had been before. Stieglitz wasn’t doing so hot, either. Shortly after the success of the Calla Lilies sale, he suffered a kidney-stone attack, his second in as many years. Stieglitz was a lifelong hypochondriac, but now that he was in his sixties, his imaginary aches and pains were becoming real aches and pains. He had little accidents. He fell and hurt his back. He tore a ligament in his finger. In the late summer of 1928, he had an angina attack.
Eighty-five years from now, I’m sure people will look back in disbelief on our current, standard medical treatment,*** but how anyone survived doctor’s orders back then is a genuine mystery. When Stieglitz was recovering from his attack, his regime included three weeks of complete bed rest and a complicated regimen managed by O’Keeffe that required “strained spinach, peas, squash—ground lamb and beef—strained this—five drops of that—a teaspoon in a third of a glass of water—or is it half a glass—pulse this—heart of that—grind the meat four times—two ounces—1 oz.—½ zwieback—will all those dabs of water make up two qts—is this too hot—that white stuff must be dissolved in cooler water—the liquid mixed with hot—castor oil every fifteen minutes and so on—divide those 25—or is it 21—ounces into five meals . . .” as she mock-complained.
If O’Keeffe sounds a little hysterical, she was.
Stieglitz, the impossible love of her life, had fallen for someone else.
Dorothy Stecker Norman was a dark-haired young woman looking for meaning, who wandered into the Intimate Gallery†††one day in 1927, heard Stieglitz lecturing someone about the meaning of art, and fell under his spell. His intensity, his charisma,‡‡‡ his passion for his subject, was the bright flame to her lost moth. She was smitten. She became obsessed.
It would be one thing if Dorothy Norman had been a twit, but she was not. Like Stieglitz, Norman had been born into a wealthy German Jewish family. Her parents were typical parents of their time and socioeconomic class: They wanted their daughter to find a suitable mate and start breeding. The primary lesson they imparted to their only child was never wear glasses, and marry a Jew. But Norman was curious, rebellious, and not stupid; aside from her penchant for hero-worship, she was committed to social reform and had worked as a researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union. After high school she enrolled in Smith against her parents’ orders. At nineteen, she had dropped out and married Edward Norman, an heir to the Sears, Roebuck & Co. fortune. From the first month it was obvious the marriage was a disaster, although Dorothy still managed to orchestrate an Oops, hoping against hope, as disappointed young brides have been known to do, that a baby would salvage the relationship.
When Dorothy discovered Stieglitz she was twenty-one, seven years younger than his own daughter, and pregnant. In Stieglitz’s eyes she was perfection: naive, yearning, fertile, with both an unformed mind, which he could fill, and a husband, which freed him from responsibility. She hung around the gallery for a year, offering to do clerical work, buying pieces of art, taking notes §§§ during their conversations.
It’s to Stieglitz’s credit that he didn’t succumb to temptation sooner. After all, he was about nine hundred years old, his time was long past, his younger wife was a huge success who also supported them and was grumpy when she had to interrupt her painting to prepare his special old-man heart-attack-prevention meals, and then also referred to him as “a funny soft little gray creature.” Really, how could the man resist?
Learning all of this, doesn’t any envy you may feel for O’Keeffe’s success subside? If not, you should consider the Otto Rule of Envy developed by American novelist Whitney Otto,¶¶¶¶ who’s both enjoyed a staggering amount of success and struggled through hard times.
**** According to the Otto Rule of Envy, if you’re going to allow yourself to succumb to envy, you must agree to envy the person’s entire life. You don’t get to cherry-pick the good parts. You aren’t allowed to envy the reviews in the New York Times or the ski cabin in Aspen without also considering the husband who’s a bit of a windbag, or the chronic colitis. Following the Otto Rule, it becomes clear in a matter of moments that you don’t want the enviable person’s whole life; you only want one particular thing that the other person has—professional success, youth, money, or beauty.
The Land of Enchantment
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were not bohemians, but they knew bohemians. Lady Dorothy Brett lived one floor below them at the Shelton Hotel. She was a genuine lady, born into the British aristocracy, and eccentric as only British nobility can be. She was incidentally a painter, but her true calling in life was as an acolyte of D. H. Lawrence. Brett, as she liked to be called, was plump, heavy-browed, and deaf enough to require the use of an ear horn. Brett and the O’Keeffe-Stieglitzes often had lunch together on Sundays. O’Keeffe ate onion soup; Brett ordered duck. She often sang the praises of Taos, New Mexico, where she’d lived with D. H. and Frieda in 1923, and she pressed Georgia and Alfred into visiting. Stieglitz, who never went anywhere but Lake George, was completely uninterested. Georgia had always loved the West. As an old woman she would say that the happiest times of her life were those few years spent in the Texas Panhandle. She also didn’t think she could stand another summer at Lake George, where she’d run out of things to paint. There was also the fact of her husband’s affair with Dorothy Norman.††††