How Georgia Became O'Keeffe

by Karen Karbo

  The trip wasn’t easy to negotiate. She would be gone for months. Stieglitz was sixty-five and increasingly frail. Life without Georgia made him anxious. She once remarked that Stieglitz loved it when she was sick in bed, because that way he always knew where she was.

  How to Have a Life-Changing Experience

  O’Keeffe arranged to travel west with Beck Strand, the wife of Paul and former Stieglitz model with whom Alfred did or did not have an affair in the summer of 1923. It was a mark of Georgia’s basic equanimity‡‡‡ that she was thrilled to have Beck as a companion, even after the business with Stieglitz.

  O’Keeffe and Beck arrived in Santa Fe in May 1929, and within forty-eight hours, Georgia knew without question that her life was going to change for good. To her sister Catherine she wrote, “I am West again and it is as fine as I remembered it—maybe finer. There is nothing to say about it except the fact that for me it is the only place.”

  Go with a friend.

  Georgia and Beck were invited to stay at Los Gallos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s adobe compound in Taos. Mabel, the heiress to the White Sewing Machine fortune, was a kooky, middle-aged patron of the arts and collector of the famous, whose “intimate” memoirs ran to 1,600 pages. She’d moved to Taos with her third husband, then divorced him for Tony Luhan,§§§§ a full-blooded Pueblo Indian, who was tall, imposing, and kind. Both D. H. Lawrence and Willa Cather had stayed in “Mabeltown,” and she was thrilled to have the most famous woman painter in the country under her roof. Initially, Georgia and Beck had been given The Pink Cottage, across a big alfalfa field from The Big House, but only a few weeks after they arrived, Dodge Luhan required an emergency hysterectomy and left for New York, leaving Georgia and Beck to their own devices.

  This is the part where I extol the virtues of northern New Mexico. The light, the heat, the purple mountains majesty, the excellent enchiladas. But first, we’ve reached yet another juncture in the life of O’Keeffe, where no one is quite sure what happened, paving the way for endless conjecture that continues to this day: Did Georgia and Beck have an affair?

  The main evidence seems to be that they were high-spirited and partook of some nude sunbathing. In addition, according to prim and disapproving John Marin, also a guest at Mabel’s that summer, they washed Georgia’s new black Ford sedan¶¶¶¶¶ while naked. They may have been giggling. It appeared there were no wash rags handy, so Georgia suggested they use sanitary napkins, which they found even more hilarious. As a resident of Portland, Oregon, which hosts the World Naked Bike Ride every June,***** I’m not sure having a good, giddy time while naked is enough proof. So they did or they didn’t. I’d like to think that we’ve reached a point where it’s immaterial.

  Beck was easygoing and had the energy of ten teenagers. Together, she and Georgia hiked, camped, and rode horses over the Taos plateau, a broad, high-altitude lava field covered with grayish-green sagebrush and surrounded by mountains. At night, when they weren’t sleeping under the stars, they sat in front of the fire and sewed and talked. They ate quesadillas and smoked. They drank whiskey and played practical jokes on each other.

  They set up their easels and painted. Beck lacked both Georgia’s artistic gift and her staggering confidence; however, she had a great eye. Some believe it was Beck who discovered the great black Penitente crosses that became the subject of some of O’Keeffe’s most striking and memorable pictures.

  Learn a new skill.

  There’s a reason why all those cruise commercials on TV emphasize rock-climbing, salsa dancing, and other stuff you never do in your daily life, and why there’s a whole subgenre of getaways known as Learning Vacations. The best vacations are always the ones where you learn to do something new. It has something to do with the novelty of both the place and the activity hooking up in the brain that creates pleasure.

  Seventy-two hours after O’Keeffe had arrived in Taos, she coerced Tony Luhan into teaching her how to drive. She was terrible and fearless. She ran into fences, took out gateposts, drove into irrigation ditches. She sweated and swore. She had no natural aptitude for driving a car, but after a few weeks of practice, she was roaring all over the countryside. She then bought the car, which she named Hello!

  Get a tan.

  O’Keeffe was a sun lover. Whoever invented sunscreen hadn’t even been born when O’Keeffe and Beck would drive Hello! out into the middle of nowhere, take off their clothes, and hike around in the brush. She loved the feeling of the sun beating down on her, burning her skin “clean to the bone,” and would eventually have the deep wrinkles to prove it.

  These days exposing yourself to the sun in the manner of O’Keeffe seems as wise as having unprotected sex with a local during your vacation in Bangkok. Strolling down the beach in midday sans SPF is living on the edge. Do it! Everyone looks better with a tan, but no one wants to pay the price anymore in wrinkles and possibly melanoma. But ask yourself: What are you saving yourself for?

  In the Georgia O’Keeffe Room

  The change in O’Keeffe’s life after her summer in New Mexico was cataclysmic. The empty, dramatic landscape of the desert Southwest had done its mysterious number on her. Even in the worst of times O’Keeffe always knew who she was and what she was about; still, during those months she rediscovered her passions, strengths, and sense of humor. She had discovered her Place, something which most of us are never fortunate enough to do.

  It’s no wonder people††††† feel compelled to make a pilgrimage to northern New Mexico to see if perhaps the crystalline air, fantastic geography, and artsy/spiritual mojo will change one’s life.

  Jerrod and I drove to Taos in his parents’ twenty-five-foot RV. Our original destination had been Ghost Ranch,‡‡‡‡‡ but we’d missed the turnoff driving north from Santa Fe. By the time we reached the Rio Grande Gorge—an 800-foot-deep mini Grand Canyon that bisects the Taos plateau—we knew we’d made a mistake. No worries! Part of the reason we’d driven the RV was so that, in the spirit of O’Keeffe, we could keep our options open. We’d headed south from Oregon with no plans, other than to see if we could see what Georgia saw. Jerrod, who drove the RV, was fine with this. The only thing he needs in life, really, is an Internet connection and a bottle of Maker’s Mark.

  We decided to continue on into Taos, spend the night, then go to Ghost Ranch the next morning. The Mabel Dodge Luhan house sits at the end of a quiet, narrow road, just off Kit Carson Road. The day was bright and warm and the lilacs were in bloom. The Big House looks just as it does in pictures, like a big adobe birthday cake, flanked by a long low wing of guest rooms. Like everything else in Taos, it is charming-verging-on-too-adorable-for-words. The main entrance is a double door of whitewashed wood, with teal and red trim, and a four-paned window in the top half of each door. Inside, the doors are low and arched—people must have been much shorter in 1922 when the Big House was finished—and the floor is tiled and the high ceiling is lined with wooden beams, or vigas, as they are known here.

  One thing you should know: If you are a woman of a certain age, and you like to wear your white hair long and parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun, with big turquoise earrings and maybe a dash of red lipstick, this is the place for you. A beautiful woman with just this hair walked out from the small gift shop, offered us a cup of coffee, and reminded us that the MDL house was now a hotel and conference center. Meaning, you can’t just come in and wander around, soaking up the artsy vibes.

  We immediately followed her back into the gift shop, which was small and, yes, charming—although there were a few too many of those deadly Penguin classic editions of D. H. Lawrence titles on display for my taste. They had the same effect on me that I imagine I had on my classmates at my twenty-year high school reunion: I felt a sudden flush of slacker guilt for only having read Lady Chatterley’s Lover,§§§§§ and not remembering a single thing about it, not even the dirty bits. To compe
nsate, I bought a pretty, cream-colored Vintage Classics edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, and a Mabel Dodge Luhan stainless-steel Go cup.

  On our way into town we’d noticed a nice Wal-Mart with two RVs parked under each of the two tiny trees on the parking strip, signaling that this was one of those Wal-Marts where RVs could park free overnight. Even though it was only early May and the sun wasn’t anywhere near setting, it was still late enough in the day to cruise the Wal-Mart lot for a good spot.¶¶¶¶¶¶ We closed the shades and put out the slide-out living room and the slide-out bedroom, and lay down to nap, but every time a shopping cart trundled by outside, I woke up. I read some of the literature on the MDL house given us by the lady with the beautiful white hair, and suddenly sat up straight. For $125 a night, you could stay in the same room O’Keeffe had stayed in when she’d visited Mabel. Moreover, I looked at the date and realized that Georgia and Beck Strand had arrived in Taos eighty-two years ago to the day.

  This was something; this was cosmic. I woke Jerrod. The sound of the trundling shopping carts clearly posed no problem for him. He phoned the MDL house and yes, the O’Keeffe room was available that night. We threw open the shades, pulled in the living-room slide-out and the bedroom slide-out and roared out of the lot, back to the MDL house, to check into the very room Georgia herself had slept in.

  The room was in the long low wing of guest rooms, facing the big cobblestone courtyard. It had two high squeaky twin beds, and a framed and signed color poster****** called O’Keeffe at Ninety, which showed her in her massively wrinkled, bushy-browed, thin-lipped glory, staring out from beneath her trademark black Zorro hat, giving the photographer her death glare. It was terrifying. We slid into our respective beds and turned out the lights. The elevation of Taos is almost 7,000 feet and the population is almost 5,000. For some reason, I imagined this helped to explain why the Georgia O’Keeffe room at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and Conference Center is as dark as the back of a cave. There was no moon. I kept trying to feel something light and creative and brilliant and inspired, but all I could think of was Georgia O’Keeffe at Ninety glaring over my squeaky bed, and how much she would disapprove of this book, and view my admiration†††††† for her as a species of the same swooning, dim-witted, floppy-haired, back-to-the-land-inspired devotion that thousands of people who were very young in the 1970s had had for her. I slept poorly.

  Sometime around three a.m. I heard an animal scrabbling around in the courtyard. I got up and peered out the window and saw that a storm had moved in, and tiny ice crystals were drifting down from the sky.

  ¶The first O’Keeffe that Phillips had purchased was My Shanty (1922).

  *They didn’t even seem too concerned about their baby weight.

  †Provided you were lucky and still had a belt, and hadn’t cut it up to add to your bear stew.

  ‡As if she had never sold any pictures before—as if she was a woman who pottered about with her paints on Sunday afternoons.

  §$328,810 in today’s dollars.

  ¶¶It being the twenties, there was certainly no other kind.

  **Who might be one of those people who inexplicably start a sentence with “I’m not a feminist or anything, but I think it’s unfair that women still don’t get paid the same as men for the same work.”

  ††Queen?

  ‡‡A random sampling from my page, taken just this minute: new haircuts; shoes that one friend covets but that are no longer available; best methods for potty training; cute quips made by one’s preschoolers regarding cat poop; eighteen pictures of someone’s infant dozing in his stroller; a question about whether it’s okay to drink beer or wine while breastfeeding, and if so, does it make any difference whether the beer is a microbrew?; pictures of a homegrown carrot; a dream wherein the dreamer is talking to Jon Stewart about how best to organize her home office; home pedicures.

  §§There’s already a Wikipedia entry for esprito, in a language I don’t recognize.

  ¶¶¶The elegant Black Abstraction (1927), with its pinpoint of white light at its center, was inspired by her experience of being put under.

  ***Put ice on a sprain—are you kidding me? Get up and walk as soon as possible after surgery? Barbaric.

  †††He ran this too appropriately named gallery from 1925 to 1929.

  ‡‡‡Whenever I imagine encountering Stieglitz, I think of the famous image from the ’70s Maxell cassette ad: “Blown-Away Guy” is slouched in a high-armed leather chair in front of a stereo speaker, presumably issuing such awesome sound that he’s forced to hang on to the arms of the chair for dear life while his curls and tie are blown straight out behind him.

  §§§Please forgive the italics. I’m doing my best to present an impartial portrait of someone who had many fine qualities, I’m sure, and in many ways was probably far nicer than O’Keeffe, who, let’s face it, could be caustic and coldhearted, but really, this is nauseating.

  ¶¶¶¶Also a friend and neighbor.

  ****Her first novel, How to Make an American Quilt, sold over two million copies worldwide, and was made into a movie produced by Steven Spielberg, starring pre-­shoplifting Winona Ryder and the late, great Anne Bancroft. Since then publishers have been waiting for a sequel that features Nice Women Doing Crafts, but Otto wanted to explore new, less-commercial subjects, and she’s never reached the heights of that first success.

  ††††Which Alfred denied. How could be possibly be having an affair with her? They were both married!

  ‡‡‡‡Except when it came to the matter of Dorothy Norman, which, as you shall see, made her batshit crazy.

  §§§§His name was actually spelled Lujan, but at Mabel’s insistence he anglicized it to Luhan.

  ¶¶¶¶¶A week after her first driving lesson, Georgia purchased the black sedan with blue interior for $678.

  *****There were eight thousand participants in this year’s ride; police do encourage the riders to wear helmets.

  †††††Okay, me.

  ‡‡‡‡‡Where O’Keeffe lived from 1949 until shortly before her death.

  §§§§§A fat copy with yellowing pages sat in a wire holder, listing forlornly to one side.

  ¶¶¶¶¶¶Near the other RVs, but not so close that you can see inside someone else’s vehicle, in a level spot, facing west.

  ******From a photo by Malcolm Varon, 1987.

  ††††††Okay, adoration.

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  American (1887–1986)

  Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory, 1938

  Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 in.

  Promised gift, the Burnett Foundation. L.2002.2.1

  © The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

  Photograph by Malcolm Varon

  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM

  Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe/Art Resource, NY

  9

  BREAK

  My feeling about life is a curious kind of triumphant feeling about—seeing it bleak—knowing it is so and walking into it fearlessly because one has no choice.

  While O’Keeffe was in Taos, Stieglitz lived in a state of constant fuming. He was jealous of everything: Georgia’s fine moods; her high jinks with Beck Strand; her new friends; her new art. Beck reported that Georgia was happiest when she was free, which Stieglitz took to mean free from him. Georgia reported that Tony Luhan had taken her and Beck on a wonderful camping trip, which Stieglitz took to mean she was having an affair with Luhan. He was afraid Georgia was never coming back. One night, alone at Lake George, he built a bonfire, and in a melodramatic gesture befitting a fourteen-year-old girl, burned his o
ld work—prints and negatives and hundreds of old issues of Camera Work.

  “Freedom is necessary to sincerity,” he intoned to someone or other, doing his best to mean it as it pertained to Georgia, but believing it really only pertained to himself. He still wrote daily love letters to Dorothy, who disapproved of O’Keeffe’s adventure, especially a camping trip she took to the Grand Canyon with filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz, his wife Marie Garland, and some of their Hollywood friends. Rodakiewicz drove O’Keeffe in his Rolls-Royce. Dorothy sniffed that people shouldn’t indulge in that sort of thing just because they wanted to. To console Stieglitz for being abandoned, she chartered a private plane for him to come visit her in New York.

  In the fall of 1929 O’Keeffe returned to Stieglitz. They were genuinely happy to see one another—perhaps because it relieved some of the guilt from which they both suffered, for different reasons. To celebrate their reunion, he took some pictures of O’Keeffe, including a three-quarter profile in which she’s leaning against the side of a car, her curled fingers resting against her chin, a suppressed smirk upon her lips. She was badass. “The relationship was really very good,” O’Keeffe said much later, “because it was based on something more than just emotional needs . . . of course, you do your best to destroy each other without knowing it.”

  The Part Where They Destroy Each Other: An Object Lesson

  No one is inside someone else’s marriage, and no marriage is perfect. Still, O’Keeffe’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the full-throttle infidelity going on under her nose, and Stieglitz’s nutty brand of narcissism—which forbade him from admitting that he was having an affair, despite the fact that he was boffing Dorothy Norman several times a week‡ in the back room of the Intimate Gallery—ruined not just their marriage, but their friendship, and possibly the good memories of their early years together.