The Germans were parading through Paris when I applied the first brushstroke, and leaving it when I signed the picture after having registered in it as in a seismograph all of the fever of those terrible years which with Catalan fanaticism I refused to take any part in, but of which my genius recorded all the variations. I had in the interim had the fun of painting my Autoportrait Mou Avec Du Bacon Grillé (Soft Self-Portrait With Fried Bacon), which translated my new way of life at Pebble Beach, California.
America had quickly adopted me with the luxury it reserves to its chosen. The New York Museum of Modern Art in 1940 gave a retrospective show of forty-three of my paintings and seventeen drawings, to great success. When I traveled, it was like a Roman emperor going up to the Capitol. For two years, this exhibit toured the United States, appearing in eight of the largest cities. That constituted consecration. Then the Knoedler Gallery for a time took over handling my interests, presenting twenty-nine pictures, all of which were sold.
Europe was being put to the sword from Glasgow to Stalingrad and going through convulsions of rage. This flower of civilization had engendered the miasmas of a political line now devouring it. Nothing was being left of what had been the pride of its noble, prodigal races. An iron collar around its neck was crushing it. I now felt that I had been chosen by God’s angels to keep the great tradition intact and bear witness to the genius of a continent. This certainty gave me great courage and genius-inspired intensity of concentration and creation. I felt the time would come when, on a ravaged earth, reconstruction would be needed and that I owed it to myself to be there with all the gloriousness of my genius to insure a new renascence.
Between the ballet Labyrinth and the illustrating of Maurice Sandoz’ Fantastic Memories, I started to write The Secret Life Of Salvador Dalí, so as to bring my truth to the world and open the doors of knowledge on the vertiginous depths of my life. I knew that through my experience I was answering the basic questions of people of today and giving current responses to the feeling of death, the great time-space crisis that was unsettling sensibilities, the sublimation of sex instincts. I revealed the sources of a method that allowed for the taming of madness, all madnesses, and offered the infinite resources of childhood joys and nobility of living. Never had a human being so revealed his intimacy and the depth of his being. And if, thirty years later, I now go back over those pages of my life, it is not to retract anything, but to add, with the benefit of greater distance in relation to people and things, the wealth of a new season of my life and the light of my ever sharper and more penetrating genius.
The bomb at Hiroshima exploded in an immaculate sky. “Pikadon” (Light and noise), was how the few surviving Japanese described it. I was painting Gala in a nude rear view and Galarina, engrossed in my love and the charm of sensual fulfillment, when I felt the seismic shock of the explosion that filled me with terror. Not for a second did I imagine the two hundred thousand dead, who, being reduced to ash, were not easy to apprehend, anyway, but I thought with horror of a chain reaction that might have ignited the whole world before I finished the perfect bosom of my Galarina, compromising my immortality. The fact of being thus dependent on the hazards of history disquieted me. No one was safe in whatever corner of the world. I resolved to study without delay the best way to preserve my precious existence from the inroads of death and began seriously to be concerned with formulas for immortality. The Melancolia Atomica (Melancholy, Atomic, Uranic Idyll) that I then painted expresses the doubts and uncertainties born in me on August 6, 1945.
My success did not end, and my genius, surprised for a mo ment by the atomic explosion, was quickly called upon again. I was asked to illustrate Don Quixote, and dove into the lithographic plates certain that I was going to renew the whole technique, but never guessing that I had selected a road that would take nineteen years to lead me to Dulcinea.
Publishers, who are like flies attracted to honey, now filled my house; one jumped out the window with the proofs of Macbeth while another was coming in the service entrance to propose that I illustrate Montaigne, or else they were trying to whet my appetite with the fifty secrets of the art of magic or the auto biography of Benvenuto Cellini. I had one answer for all of them: “Cash in hand.”
I am a goldsmith; gold alone inspires me. The richness of the American soil was causing the golden corn of old Europe to rise for harvesting by the Catalan Dalí, in whom desire alone grew more intense – in keeping with his name. It could not be that the sordid massacre which on the other side of the Atlantic was decimating the most noble humanity did not serve some purpose. Preserved, cherished, sated, I stood witness against the generalized stupidity and dominated my period with all the glory of my genius, untamed, haughty, indestructible.
During this time, I truly felt that I did not belong to the race of masochistic insects offering themselves as a holocaust to barbarous gods when they had at their disposal all the possibilities of faith. Yet, I drew from it all a few useful conclusions on how to dominate men, subjugate women, and stupefy children. I think I have shown how my cynicism and genius have been able to make the most of these observations.
“EVERYONE IS A PACIFIST; GOING AGAINST ALL THE PRINCIPLES OF OUR ACTIONS SINCE ANTIQUITY, THE RENAISSANCE, THE MARVELOUS SPEECH BY MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE ON THE ART, THE NOBILITY, THE GRANDEUR OF THE MILITARY ARTS – EVERYONE, WHETHER SOVIET OR AMERICAN. THIS IS THE GREAT DECADENCE! JUST AS IN A MONARCHY I FEEL THAT THE ANARCHIST WHO WANTS TO KILL THE KING IS ULTRA-RESPECTABLE, SINCE BY HIS ACTION HE GUARANTEES THE MAXIMUM OF DIVERSITIES THAT A PERFECT SOCIETY – WHICH IS WHAT ABSOLUTE MONARCHY IS – MUST CONTAIN, SO, IT IS MONSTROUS FOR A HUMAN BEING TO CONTEMPLATE A HUMANITY WITHOUT WAR.”
Chapter Fourteen: How To Become A Super-Snob
When I first met Helena Rubinstein in New York, all I saw was the majesty of a Bourbon nose, as huge as a plowshare, coming toward me, carried hoppingly on short legs, while under the light of the chandeliers there shone a constellation of emeralds that gave one the im pression that her fingers were carrying torches while her neck was girt with flames. This burst of luster told me she had multi-millions. When she laughed, her eyes remained as cold as high-shoe buttons and her skin – as parchmented as the face of Tz’u-hsi, the last Dowager Empress of China, whom she resembled – was furrowed with colored wrinkles, as with the war paint of an old Sioux chief.
In 1942, Helena Rubinstein was worth a hundred million dollars. She had apartments in New York, London, Paris, and Grasse on the Riviera. She ruled over a factory and a string of stores in New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Australia, Europe, from which flowed rivers of beauty creams, ointments, cleansing creams, and clouds of powder. She plastered more than 50 percent of the feminine sex in a carapace of illusions that remade their faces as well as their souls. This noble enterprise had given Helena Rubinstein the character of an unyielding corset.
As an emigrant from Poland, the eldest of eight children, she landed in Australia at age sixteen with a dozen jars of her mother’s beauty cream in her trunk, bent on conquering the leadership of an empire. She directed men and women with an equally iron hand, yet she did not know how to use a telephone: she could not dial a number and screamed into the receiver with Dalínian fieriness. I impressed her mightily and returned the compliment with my royal hauteur.
“You know,” she told me, “that I own the building we are in.” Then, as I did not seem to react, she added: “I liked the apartment, but the landlord would not rent to Jews. So I bought the whole thing.”
She showed me through thirty-six rooms of a triplex on the fourteenth floor of the building. The entryway had been made into a jungle right out of Douanier Rousseau.
From sitting room to picture galleries, it all finally led to her own bedroom. There she nestled like the minotaur in the heart of the labyrinth and waited for her prey in an immense transparent bed, the legs and incurved half-canopy of which were fluorescent. Helena, lying there, seemed to be floating on one of my limp watches, and she strewed
about her emeralds, pearls, amethysts, pell-mell, before going to bed, accumulating the rivières of diamonds night after night, until some mornings her room was a bright galaxy of the first magnitude, blinding in its splendor. Then Helena seemed less wrinkled than usual. The morning she received me in her bedroom, she wiped her nose on the satin sheets.
Helena Rubinstein had just gotten this new apartment on 65th Street in Manhattan – the thirty-six rooms on three floors – when she ordered three frescoes from me for the dining room. As Princess Gourielli, privately often referred to as the Sarah Bernhardt of the beauty world, but Madame to her intimates, she was a Dalínian personage. Her love of jewels and money, her caprices, her demands were deserving of my full attention.
The dazzling jewelry was intended to make her age go un noticed. Each of our encounters was an occasion for me to see more crystalline bottle-stoppers around her neck, hanging from her ears, or ringing her fingers. She was a shrine, a totem, a Javanese goddess...
That was how she went about the world – carrying Ali Baba’s treasure in her hatbox. I, at least, never saw her with less than eight strings of pearls, but she traveled only by taxi.
“Chauffeurs are all robbers,” she said. “The last one stole my Rolls-Royce.”
Her husband, Georgian Prince Gourielli, never opened his mouth except to blow smoke rings; her son by her first marriage, Horace Titus, somber as a character out of a Racine tragedy, seemed always to be reciting the verse reply to some speech of Athaliah’s; Oscar Kolin, her nephew, nodded his head like a metronome set to say only yes. Her niece Mala was a shadow. But her left hand – who knew everything that her right hand did – was a Miss Fox, her secretary, who kept her totally informed like the number one eunuch of a harem reporting to the sultan. Madame was supposed even to have taken Miss Fox along on her honeymoon in 1938 – at any rate, she was there when Helena emerged from her tub in the morning and at night before she got into bed.
She was to hang my three paintings not far from seven Re noirs, two Modiglianis, and a Toulouse-Lautrec that decorated her salon. I was not too happy being in such a neighborhood, but what was much worse was the presence of works by the sculptor Nadelman. In 1930, she had met this Pole in Paris; wanting to do her landsman a favor, Helena, who could sometimes be stupidly sentimental, had set up a New York show for him that was a flop. So she bought the thirty-six pieces that were now in the apartment. Walking along on a Miró tapestry, I glanced about at the Braques, Chagalls, Derains, Juan Grises, Matisses, Picassos, Rouaults, and commented mentally that apart from mine she had only minor works by the most important artists of her period.
In the same way she had bought an icon in Moscow, where at the same time she had married Gourielli, and a carload lot of African sculpture acquired from a German Jew who had had to flee from Hitler.
“But you haven’t seen anything yet,” she told me. “The finest things are in Paris. I hope the Germans are looking out for them. Come see my wardrobe.” There were a hundred dresses in her closet, and as many coats, pairs of shoes in a row, hats on papier-mâché heads that Folies Bergère showgirls would have turned their noses up at, furs that seemed sleeping animals. She ticked them off: Molyneux sable, Somalian leopard, tourmaline mink. In a special small closet there was a mini collection of Poiret, Doucet, and Lanvin creations, draped and beaded, reminiscent of the fashions of 1914.
“Those must be your grandmother’s gowns,” I said. “What a wonderful sense of family loyalty!” The laser she shot out went right through me. My mustache bristled with delight.
“Vertès designed my hat molds for me,” she said. “You know, I never wear them. I just buy them to look at.” Helena Rubinstein slid back the glass panels that protected her millinery display. “I often entertain myself by imagining what I would look like if I wore them. Then I take my little topper,” she added, pointing to the simple cloche she wore all the year around, “and go back to work.” It seemed to me indeed that the difference between the Madwoman of Chaillot and Helena Rubinstein might well be just a hat. Both were weavers of illusions who could easily engulf us in their worlds if we were not careful.
Conversation with Helena Rubinstein was a Napoleonic monologue. She announced her victories, dictated her decisions, and always came back to money.
“I came to London in 1907. In Australia, I had earned half a million dollars. I opened a shop in Paris two years later. That was the time of the great couturier collections. I created tubes of lipstick, tinted powders. I was asked to make up their models. It was a triumph. Poiret created his loose gowns and threw corsets to the dogs. My beauty institute was the ideal solution for superfluous fat.”
But I was no longer listening as she enumerated the three mammaries of her fortune: massages, showers, and colonics. No one could resist her free “consultations.” The famous novelist Colette was the first butterfly caught in her net. Helena Rubinstein got her to make a statement that carried tremendous weight: no woman, she said, could hope to keep her lover unless she knew the magic of massage. This, it seems, created much merriment in stag circles.
Helena Rubinstein spoke of love as I did of the press: “I have always treated men the way they deserved.” Then, dreamily, “I used to have suitors in the old days, in Australia, who wooed me very ardently. When the fellow was really on the hook, I let him come home with me – to spend part of the night helping me fill the jars of cream, and packaging them, and in the morning I would send him out to make the deliveries.”
A multi-millionairess, Helena Rubinstein had a Dalínian sense of money. Her favorite statement (to others) was: “Keep the expenses down; little pennies saved add up to great sums.”
Beyond that, she liked to tell of how she had sold her business to the Lehman Brothers, then patiently, writing privately to hundreds of women who were small stockholders, accumulated proxies – so that, after the 1929 market crash, she was able to buy 50 percent of the stock back from the Lehmans for two million dollars – four million less than she had sold it to them for a year before.
Making money was a religion to her; no profit was too small. One of her secretaries told how when they traveled together, she paid all their joint expenses out of an advance taken from one of her companies, then filed the vouchers with another of the companies, so as to collect twice for the same outlays.
Money to her was the only criterion of success and I could readily have made her my vestal virgin. At the time of one of our first meetings in 1942, she had just launched a new scent with thousands of blue balloons released over Fifth Avenue, carrying samples of the perfume and her card with simply the name of the new product, “Heaven Sent.” Was it a good idea? she wondered aloud, and asked my opinion.
Later, she told me, “It was a good idea: a million-dollar good idea.”
Does Dalí Consider Helena Rubinstein Dalínian?
I think that except for me and Picasso, whom she referred to as “the devil,” she was continually picking everybody’s brains.
She loved to tell how she pirated her best ideas after a good meal, and how Colette, Marie-Louise de Noailles, and Louise de Vilmorin, “over their dead heads,” so to speak, had given her some of the ideas that had made their way as Rubinsteinian slogans. While I kept my mouth tight shut, lest she swipe some Dalínian idea, she evaluated just about everybody, commercially speaking: Modigliani, whom she had known, was “nice but not clean”; Matisse “a rug peddler,” because he bargained too sharply; Hemingway “a big mouth with filed teeth”; Joyce “nearsighted and smelling bad”; D. H. Lawrence “timid, and dominated by women”; while she remembered Proust as a “little Jew in a fur coat smelling of mothballs.”
The value of a work depended on the difference between what she had paid for it and what it seemed she might sell it for now. “I’m a businesswoman,” she constantly repeated. Max Ernst she saw as a twenty-thousand-dollar profit. So she liked him. But when she tried to buy another of his paintings, and now was asked the going price, she balked: that would not be gett
ing a bargain.
One of the subjects of real pride with her was her title of Princess, but she was deeply hurt when one day she overheard one of her lady guests saying: “In Georgia you’re a prince if you just own some sheep.” While the Prince’s title might have been suspect, the Princess’ bank account was coat-of-arms enough. But as patron and collector of art she did not reach the caliber she had as business woman. She needed the paranoiac-critical method to round her out. The jewels that she ornamented herself with as with holy turds satisfied her pride and her thirst for living. But she tried to be “different”. Misia Sert had wanted to help her toward this end. They had met at the turn of the century, when Misia was one of the queens of Paris and Helena was just getting started.
Both being Polish, the language was a link between them. Misia had just married Thadée Natanson, son of the publisher of the intellectually and socially prestigious La Revue Blanche, and was well suited to be her cicerone: in her salon, one met Stéphane Mallarmé, Renoir, Vuillard, Dufy, Helleu, princes, kings, and Marcel Proust who grilled Helena about “how she thought a duchess would make herself up.”
How Dalí Remembers Misia Sert
Misia’s third husband was the Spanish painter José Maria Sert, who lived on the Ile Saint-Louis in a dilapidated eighteenth century townhouse. Misia later sold it to Helena “for a song”, but “it cost me a whole opera to fix it up”, she said. Adding, “Fortunately, I had made those four millions from the Lehmans in the meantime.” All of Misia’s painter friends did portraits of Helena. “It’s excellent publicity and a good investment,” she told me, looking me cynically in the eye. I did not blink. But somewhere fate was preparing a revenge for Misia, her friends, and a few others – a fate signed Picasso.
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