The bleak unreality of the space in which the suicide takes place is characteristic of Frida’s paintings where the true subject is loneliness or despair. The dead Dorothy Hale lies on the empty, brown ground. Not a city street, not the sidewalk in front of Hampshire House, this anonymous space is simply a stage, unconnected in terms of scale or perspective with the skyscraper looming behind it. In this space, no concrete objects give us our bearings in the “real,” normal world. Nothing is available to touch, to confirm sanity. Everything looks insubstantial and unfamiliar, as in a bad dream.
For all the gruesomeness, Suicide of Dorothy Hale has a curiously gentle, lyric aspect to it, too. The dead woman’s delicate, fresh beauty is intact even after the fall. So are the signals of Dorothy’s feminine charms—the Madame X “femme fatale” dress, the corsage of yellow roses that had been a token of a man’s admiration. Perhaps Dorothy Hale was the victim of a set of values that Frida Kahlo did not share, but Frida’s compassion for her fall—literal and figurative—and her identification with her dead friend’s plight gives Suicide of Dorothy Hale a peculiar intensity. Abandoned by Diego, Frida could easily understand why the jilted woman might give a farewell party, and then, clad in her most beautiful dress, plunge to her death. In the months of separation from Diego, Frida often thought, as she had after her accident, that it might be preferable if la pelona would take her away. But Frida was a survivor: “No hay remedio, one has to put up with it.” She wrote to Nickolas Muray: “Let me tell you kid, that this time has been the worst in my whole life and I am surprised that one can live through it.” But of course, she did.
Chapter 18
Remarriage
ON MAY 24, 1940, Trotsky’s bedroom was machine-gunned by a group of Stalinists that included the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. The assassination attempt failed—Trotsky and Natalia rolled behind their bed to escape the bullets. “They acted like firecracker makers,” said Frida of the assassins. “They killed a gringo called Shelton Harte, they buried him in the Desierto de los Leones, and they fled. Naturally the police caught them; they put Siqueiros in jail but Cárdenas was his cuate. " (Siqueiros was released less than a year later on the condition that he leave the country. He went to Chile to paint murals.)
Because of his much publicized falling-out with Trotsky, Rivera immediately came under suspicion, and not long after the assassination attempt, Paulette Goddard watched from her hotel window as the police assembled to cordon off the San Angel studio. She telephoned Rivera to warn him, and Irene Bohus, who was with him at the time, stuffed Diego onto the floor of her car, covered him with canvases, and drove right past Police Colonel de la Rosa and his thirty men. During his weeks in hiding, Paulette Goddard was, Rivera said, the only person (besides Irene) who knew his whereabouts. "[She] brought delicacies and wines on frequent visits. Her lovely presence alone was enough to make my retreat a delight.” Like Siqueiros, Rivera had his friends among government officials. Two of them discovered his hiding place and, as he told it, came to warn him that he was in danger and to give him a passport prepared for entry into the United States. “I quietly slipped out of Mexico and headed for San Francisco.” Actually, it was not such a quiet departure. Rivera left Mexico from the Mexico City airport, and he went with a regular passport and with the promise of a commission to paint a mural for the library of San Francisco Junior College—to paint it, in fact, in public, at Treasure Island, as part of the Golden Gate International Exposition’s “Art in Action” show.
Soon he was installed with Irene Bohus in a studio apartment at 49 Calhoun Street on Telegraph Hill. (He planned to put Bohus in his mural—she was to symbolize the woman artist—but she left his employ and his studio before his portrait of her was finished, because, it is said, her mother objected to her cohabiting with the artist without benefit of judge or clergy. Rivera substituted a portrait of Emmy Lou Packard, another assistant—one who did not inhabit his studio.)
With its theme of Pan-American Unity, the Treasure Island mural expressed Rivera’s current approach to politics. Though he had split from Trotsky, he remained (for a few years) an ardent anti-Stalinist, and after the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939, he became an impassioned advocate of inter-American solidarity in opposition to totalitarianism. His real political aim, he told Sigmund Firestone in a letter dated January 30, 1941, was to establish “a common citizenship” for everybody in the Americas and to destroy the leading totalitarians of the era: Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. He wanted to create a single democratic intercontinental culture, a union, he said, of the ancient traditions of the South and the industrial activity of the North.
In his mural, he painted his personal form of pan-Americanism: Rivera and Paulette Goddard hold each other’s hands while also embracing the tree of love and life. Her blue eyes and his brown ones are amorously interlocked, and her virginal white dress is pulled up to show her lovely legs. She represents “American girlhood,” Rivera explained in his autobiography, ". . . shown in friendly contact with a Mexican man.” Rivera’s back is turned to Frida, who stands alone with brush and palette in hand, looking out into space with a gaze that is as abstract as that of the Statue of Liberty. She is “Frida Kahlo, [the] Mexican artist with [a] sophisticated European background who has turned to native plastic tradition for inspiration; she personifies the cultural union of the Americas for the South.”
Frida became severely ill after the attempt on Trotsky’s life and Rivera’s subsequent departure for the U.S. When, three months later, Ramón Mercader, who had finally succeeded in gaining Frida’s confidence and friendship, murdered Trotsky by plunging an ice ax into his skull, she was distraught. She called Diego in San Francisco to give him the news. “They killed old Trotsky this morning,” she cried. "Estúpido! It’s your fault that they killed him. Why did you bring him?”
Because she had met the assassin while in Paris, and had invited him to her house in Coyoacán to dine, Frida was under suspicion. The police picked her up and interrogated her for twelve hours. “They sacked Diego’s house,” she remembered. “They stole a magnificent clock that I had given him, drawings, watercolors, paintings, paints, suits—they looted the house through and through. There were thirty-seven policemen here prying into everything in the house. I had known that they would come, and I arranged the papers and threw all political papers into the cellar of the big house under the kitchen. Then they brought the police and we—my sister and I—cried for two days in jail. And meanwhile, this house was left empty, and my sister’s little children had been left alone, without food, and we begged a policeman: ’Be good enough to just go and give the children something to eat.’ After two days they freed us because we were not guilty either of the assassination or of the shooting [Siqueiros’s assassination attempt].”
After the war, in his efforts to be readmitted to the Communist party, Rivera proudly claimed that he had secured Trotsky’s asylum with the purpose of having him assassinated, and some people have argued that Diego and Frida might in fact have had a part in the plot to kill Trotsky. This seems farfetched: the Riveras may not have subscribed to conventional morality, but they were not amoral, and they loved life too passionately to be capable of murder, no matter what the dictates of the Comintern. Rivera’s boast was typical of his clownish political opportunism, similar to his saying that he fought alongside Zapata or Lenin or, as he told the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who visited Mexico in 1940, that he was part Jewish and was the real father of the Nazi general Rommel (he told others that Pancho Villa was Rommel’s father), a “fact” that he warned Neruda must be kept secret for fear that its disclosure would have disastrous international consequences. Politically Diego was a weather vane. When, in the 1950s, he heard the news of the murder of Beria, chief of the Soviet GPU, he turned to his friend the art critic Raquel Tibol and said: “Raquelito, we must open a bottle of vodka to toast the return of the Trotskyites to power in the Soviet Union.” What he thought about the long-range political implications of Trotsky’s mu
rder at the time, he kept to himself. But the short-range, personal implication was clear: he ordered an armed guard to protect him while he was painting on Treasure Island, for he was convinced there would be reprisals against him.
If Diego did not spend many hours mourning his ex-comrade, he was profoundly upset when he heard about Frida’s arrest and her worsening illness. He went to Dr. Eloesser for medical advice on her behalf. The doctor recommended that Frida come to San Francisco, and he telephoned her to tell her that he did not approve of the medical treatment she was receiving in Mexico. In his view, her problem was a “crisis of nerves” for which surgery, recommended by her Mexican doctors, was no remedy.
Diego loves you very much [Dr. Eloesser wrote], and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves— 1) Painting 2) Women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous, something that is imbecilic and anti-biological.
Reflect, Frida, on this basis. What do you want to do?
If you think that you could accept the facts the way they are, could live with him under these conditions, and in order to live more or less peacefully could submerge your natural jealousy in a fervor of work, painting, working as a school teacher, whatever it might be . . . and absorb yourself until you go to bed each night exhausted by work [then marry him].
One or the other. Reflect, dear Frida, and decide.
Frida decided. Early in September she flew to San Francisco, where Diego and Dr. Eloesser met her at the airport. After spending a few days with Diego in his apartment, she was admitted to Saint Luke’s Hospital, where Dr. Eloesser rejected the grave diagnoses of the Mexican doctors and prescribed rest and abstention from alcohol. He also recommended electro and calcium therapy. Her health and spirits were soon restored. “I was very ill in Mexico,” she wrote Sigmund Firestone in November from New York City, where she had gone to arrange with Julien Levy the proposed 1941 exhibition and to testify in the suit that Lupe Marín had brought against Bertram Wolfe and his publisher for maligning her in various ways in his biography of Rivera. Frida went on (in English):
Three months I was lying in an awful apparatus on my chin which made me suffer like hell. All the doctors in Mexico thought I had to be operated on my spine. They all agreed that I had tuberculosis on the bones due to the old fracture I suffered years ago in an automobile accident. I spend all the money I could afford to see every specialist on bones there, and all told me the same story. I got so scared that I was sure I was going to die. Besides, I felt so worried for Diego, because before he left Mexico I didn’t even know where he was for ten days, shortly after [before] he could finally leave, Trotsky’s first attempt of assassination took place, and after, they killed him. So the whole situation for me, physically and morally was something I can not describe to you. In three months I lost 15 pounds of weight and felt lousy all together.
Finally I decided to come to the States and not to pay any attention to Mexican doctors. So I came to San Francisco. There I was in the hospital for more than a month. They made every possible examination and found no tuberculosis, and no need for an operation. You can imagine how happy I was, and how releved [sic]. Besides, I saw Diego, and that helped more than any thing else. . . .
They found that I have an infection in the kidneys which causes the tremendous irritation of the nerves which go through the right leg and a strong anemia. My explanation doesn’t sound very scientific, but that is what I gathered from what the doctors told me. Anyhow I feel a little better and I am painting a little bit. I will go back to San Francisco and marry Diego again. (He wants me to do so because he says he loves me more than any other girl.) I am very happy. . . . We will [be] together again, and you will have us together in your home [she refers to the pair of self-portraits Firestone had commissioned].
Frida announced the remarriage matter-of-factly, but the final decision had not been that simple. Among the complications was her love affair with the young Heinz Berggruen, now a much respected art dealer and collector, then a twenty-five-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany. In his capacity as public relations officer for the Golden Gate International Exposition, he had met Diego Rivera, and the two men had become good friends. One day Rivera mentioned that Frida had come to San Francisco to have her leg examined by Dr. Eloesser. “He took me to the hospital,” Berggruen recalls, “and I will never forget the way he looked at me when, just before we went into Frida’s room, he said, ’You are going to be very much taken by Frida.’ He said it in a pointed way. Diego was extremely perceptive and intuitive; he knew what would happen. Perhaps he even wanted it to happen. There was something diabolical in him. He led me on. He took me by the hand.”
When the slender youth with large seductive eyes, a fragile poetic beauty, and an almost feminine, romantic sensibility entered Frida’s room, “there was a click,” says Berggruen. “She was stunning, just as beautiful as in her paintings. I stayed and Rivera went away. I visited Frida every day for the month that she was hospitalized.”
They had little privacy—it was a hospital rule that patients could not lock themselves in, and the room had a swinging door—but “the risk of discovery,” says Berggruen, “only heightened the intensity of our being together. For rather wild young people—and Frida was a very wild, passionate person—danger gave an added incentive.”
When Frida went to New York, Heinz Berggruen traveled with her, departing discreetly one day ahead, then waiting for her at a stop along the route. The couple spent nearly two months together at the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel. “We were very happy. Frida was a tremendous revelation to me. She dragged me to parties. In Julien Levy’s milieu, there were lots of parties. Although her leg hurt, she could move around very easily.”
They shared a ready sense of humor and a foreigner’s perception of the oddities of the U.S.A. In the mornings, for example, when they read newspapers, Frida would burst into laughter over the little photographs of columnists that accompanied their texts. “Look at those crazy heads!” she would say. She could not imagine why the newspaper bothered to print photographs of these often unattractive faces. “It’s not possible. They must be crazy in this country!” she cried. Something else that Frida found uproariously funny was the hotel room’s automatic breakfast chute. After placing an order, one pushed a button and, Berggruen explains, “Wham. A thermos of coffee and a plate of toast dropped into the trap!”
“God, these Americans,” Frida exclaimed. “Everything in this country is mechanized, even breakfast!” But as the weeks passed, there were violent fights. “Frida was a tempestuous woman. I was impressionable and immature.” Partings were followed by reconciliations. Not so completely in love as her companion, and older than he by eight years, Frida was perhaps a little cavalier. “She took the relationship more casually than I did,” says Berggruen. “There was much misery in it for me. But it is possible, also, that she was asking for more from me than I could give. I was not adult enough to guide her. I wanted to get ahead in my own life, and I sensed that with Frida there could be immense complications and hindrances. She was in such agonies. Her relationship with Diego was extremely difficult. Things didn’t click anymore. She was deeply unhappy with him. On the other hand, she felt she needed someone strong to lean on. He was a heavy man physically; in a way he was a huge animal, and she was so fragile both physically and mentally. He gave her something solid to lean on.”
The New York idyll ended painfully. Frida accepted Rivera’s remarriage proposal, and Berggruen returned to San Francisco before she did. They never saw each other again.
Actually, Diego had asked for her hand several times, with Dr. Eloesser acting as go-between, warning her that Rivera would not reform, telling Rivera that the separation had exacerbated Frida’s illness and that by marrying her again he could help her stay well. Diego knew that Frida’s health was deteriorating. “I’m going to marry her,” he said to Emmy Lou Packard, “because she really needs me.” But the truth was he need
ed her too. The separation, he said, “was having a bad effect upon both of us.”
Frida received advice from other friends as well. Anita Brenner wrote to her of Diego’s “foolishness,” and speaking from the point of view of a woman who truly knew what independence was, as well as a woman with keen insight into human nature, she said (in Spanish):
He is basically a sad person. He looks for warmth and a certain air which are always in the exact center of the universe. Naturally he looks for you. Although I am not sure if he knows that you are the only one of all of them that really loved him. (Possibly Angelina [Beloff], too.) It’s natural to want to return to him, but I wouldn’t do it, since what attracts Diego to you is what he doesn’t have, and if he doesn’t have you tied down completely, he will keep on looking for and needing you. One wants, of course, to be near him and to help him, take care of him, accompany him, but this is what he is unable to tolerate. Every time he turns a corner he is moonstruck. And you would be the moon if you were in this elusive position. . . . it seems to me that for you it would be best to be coquettish. Don’t let yourself be tied down completely; do something with your own life; for that is what cushions us when the blows and falls come. Above all, inside, the blow is not as strong if there is something which allows one to say: Here I am, I am worth something. I am not so completely identified as someone else’s shadow that when I cannot be in their shadow I am nothing, and I feel that they have insulted and humiliated me until I can’t stand it any longer. Basically what I am saying is that one depends only on oneself, and from there must come everything that is needed to be able to put up with things and to do things, for good humor, for everything.
Despite Brenner’s advice Frida cabled Dr. Eloesser from New York on November 23, 1940, telling him that she would arrive in San Francisco on November 28 and asking him to reserve her a room in a “not very elegant” hotel. Her weeks in Manhattan had “lifted her spirits.” She had seen old friends and even managed to finish a few paintings. She asked him not to tell anyone of her arrival: “I want to escape from going to the inauguration of the fresco. I do not want to meet Paulette and other dames.” The doctor replied that Frida should send her luggage directly to his house, which was at her disposal.
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