In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  Every time there’s a new Amelia book or movie, people get whipped up all over again about her disappearance. There are think pieces about her character: America’s sweetheart was not as pure of heart as we once imagined, but selfish and self-aggrandizing. Or she took that last, fatal flight for her own pleasure. Or she enjoyed self-promotion a little too much. And what about her very modern marriage? There are stories about the obsessives who’ve devoted their lives to “finding” her, and updates on how the latest in advanced technology can be employed in the ongoing search. (If we can’t find Malaysia Flight 370 with all the goodies in the search and rescue box, I think it’s unlikely anyone will find the 80-year-old Electra.)

  Though Amelia has been gone all these years, her difficult woman philosophy lives on. “Adventure is worthwhile in itself,” she said. Men have always done things because it gave them pleasure and a sense of achievement. So why shouldn’t women be granted the same privilege?

  *1She was well aware that she hadn’t done any of the heavy lifting, and in every interview about the flight she credited Bill Stultz and Slim Gordon.

  *2Sometime in the 1930s, in response to a reporter’s remark that “I still think the smart woman is the one who can get some man able and willing to provide for her,” Amelia snapped back, “Why should marriage be a cyclone cellar into which a woman retreats from failure in other spheres?”

  *3She got bonus points for worrying about this alleged flaw. It made her seem like every other woman, vain and a little silly, and that reassured everyone.

  *4The telltale artifacts, including skeletal fragments, parts of shoes, and a box that looked as if it might have contained a sextant, used for celestial navigation, were discovered in 1940, then somehow misplaced. In 2014, a square of metal from the alleged wing of Amelia’s alleged plane was found on Nikumaroro.

  CHAPTER 21

  FRIDA KAHLO

  Fervid

  LEGENDARY ARTIST FRIDA KAHLO spent most of 1950 in a hospital bed in Mexico City, recovering from a series of spinal surgeries. Her recuperation involved bed rest, during which her torso was immobilized in a heavy plaster cast. In a telling contemporary photograph of the painter and future global feminist icon, she is propped up against her pillows, embellishing the front of her latest plaster corset with the aid of a hand mirror and a tiny brush. Her pointy nails are lacquered with dark polish. Her center-parted hair is pulled back neatly. A pile of satin ribbons and flowers adorns the crown of her head. She sports dangly earrings, chunky rings on every finger, and a pair of bracelets.

  Regardless of the degree to which she was suffering, Frida Kahlo always enjoyed the spectacle of herself. She was a playful exhibitionist, a fervid and erotic provocateur dispatching updates from the land of female suffering. It was part of what made her difficult: She forced people to look at her, to share her feelings, when they would prefer to look away.

  Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón was born in Coyoacán, a tidy suburb of Mexico City, in July 1907. Until the day Frida (she dropped the “e” in 1922) was hit by a streetcar—literally, at the age of 18—nothing in her upper-middle-class background would disclose her future: that she would one day become Mexico’s most celebrated painter, a sexy international art megastar and pop icon who would produce unnerving masterpieces that would hang in the world’s major museums.*1 Or that she would “enjoy” a passionate, tumultuous marriage to Mexico’s most famous muralist and womanizer, Diego Rivera. Frida and Diego married for the first time in 1929, divorced in 1939, remarried in 1940, and remained wed until Frida’s untimely death in 1954, at the age of 47. Years after both artists were dead, a travel squib appeared in the New York Times, which included the sentence: “Though they created some of Mexico’s most fascinating art, it’s the bizarre Beauty-and-the-Beast dynamic that has captivated the world and enshrouded both figures in intrigue.”

  It’s often said that girls who grow up to be women at ease with themselves had loving, nurturing relationships with their fathers. To be appreciated and accepted by the first man in our lives gives us confidence to march that self out into the world, to feel that we will not be shunned for being both a woman and a complex human being. Frida’s father, German-born Guillermo Kahlo, was one such dad. Among his five daughters, Frida—high-spirited, clever, and entertaining—was his favorite. Frida would steal fruit from a nearby orchard in lieu of attending catechism class, or sneak up on her sisters when they were using the chamber pot and shove them off. But these high jinks ended when she contracted polio at age six.

  Frida was confined to her bed for nine months—an eternity for an active six-year-old. Her father tended to her with care, and when she was finally given the go-ahead to return to school, Guillermo prescribed sports. Frida excelled in soccer, swimming, roller-skating, and boxing. She grew stronger, but her right leg remained puny and withered. She was ostracized at school for her “peg leg.” To help compensate for her loneliness, her father, who believed her to be the most like him of all his daughters (smart, artistic, strong-willed—practically a son!), gave her books from his library and taught her how to take and develop photographs.

  Frida’s relationship with her mother, Matilde, was fraught—as is generally the case with clever daughters poised to escape the limited existence of an older generation who played by the rules. Beautiful, pious, and illiterate, Matilde had dutifully married a man with “prospects,” managed the household, and kept the babies and delicious meals coming. Frida dared to hope for a bigger life.

  When she was 15, Frida was enrolled in the prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, where she focused on biology with the hope of one day becoming a doctor. Still shy about her smaller right leg, she wore extra pairs of socks to help disguise it. But she seemed to have more or less recovered. She was bright, engaged in her studies, and a star of the Cachuchas, an elite club of brainiacs and mischief makers. She had a popular boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias.

  On September 17, 1925, Frida and Alex were riding home from school on the bus when it was T-boned by a streetcar. She was impaled by a handrail that entered her just above her left hip and exited through her vagina. Her back and pelvis were each broken in three places. Her collarbone was broken. Her withered, polio-afflicted leg was fractured, her smaller foot dislocated and mangled. Someone at the scene thought it was a good idea to pull out the handrail before the ambulance arrived. Frida’s screams, and the sounds of bones cracking, were louder than the approaching sirens.

  Alex, who suffered only minor wounds, recalled it this way: “Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her, they cried, ‘La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer.”

  For a month, Frida lay in a plaster body cast. No one expected her to survive. When she was released from the hospital, the treatment was bed rest—at first, months of bed rest. Then, two solid years of bed rest. Gone was Alex the boyfriend, gone were Frida’s dreams of becoming a doctor. The medical bills piled up, and her father mortgaged the house to pay them. Her life of chronic pain began. The next year, a new set of doctors examined her spine and realized the first set of doctors had failed to see that several vertebrae had healed incorrectly. This would become a running theme, new doctors shaking their heads at the ineptitude of previous doctors. The solution: another plaster body cast and more bed rest.

  “I never thought of painting until 1926, when I was in bed on account of an automobile accident,” she wrote to gallery owner Julien Levy before her 1938 show. “I was bored as hell in bed…so I decided to do something. I stoled [sic] from my father some oil paints, and my mother ordered for me a special easel because I couldn’t sit down [the letter was written in English; she meant sit up], and I starte
d to paint.”

  Frida’s letter was crafty, disingenuous. After the accident, flat on her back in bed, painting presented itself as one of the only activities available to her. She pretended not to care about the quality of her work, but in 1927, once she was up and around, she sought the professional opinion of the celebrated artist Diego Rivera. As popular lore and the 2002 biopic Frida*2 would have it, she cornered the artist one day while he was atop a ladder working on a mural; she demanded he come down, have a look, and tell her straight out whether she was good enough. “Look, I have not come to flirt or anything, even if you are a woman-chaser,” she told him. “I have come to show you my painting. If you are interested in it, tell me so; if not, likewise.” (More likely, Frida met Diego at a party hosted by photographer and activist Tina Modotti. But the story of tracking him down and challenging him from her place beneath the ladder better suited her sense of self-drama.)

  Rivera and Frida were both members of the Mexican Communist Party, and Rivera was captivated by Frida’s bohemian élan. She was one of those tiny women who could drink men twice her size under the table. She lived on a diet of candy, cigarettes, and a daily bottle of brandy. When this diet (and, presumably, casual dental hygiene) caused her teeth to rot in early middle age, she promptly ordered two sets of dentures: one solid gold, another studded with diamonds. As anyone who’s ever purchased a Frida tote bag, postcard, coffee mug, or T-shirt knows, she was proud of her unibrow and her mustache, which she kept neat with a small comb reserved for that purpose.

  On a sweltering August day in 1929, Frida and Diego were married, to the consternation of her family and friends. Frida was a somewhat sheltered 22—she had spent three of those years bedridden—and Rivera was a 43-year-old man of the world, an established artist whose murals celebrating the 1910 Mexican revolution had made him famous. He came equipped with two ex-wives and three daughters; when he and Frida first fell in love, he was still married to wife number two.

  People are rarely surprised when a beautiful woman marries an average-looking man. Even so, people were mystified by Frida’s adoration of and devotion to Diego Rivera. I’m reluctant to objectify Diego in the same way men routinely objectify women, but despite some fairly extensive research I’ve been unable to find a single photograph of the great muralist in which he isn’t completely repulsive. “Twenty-one years older, 200 pounds heavier, and, at more than six feet, nearly 12 inches taller than she, Rivera was gargantuan in both scale and appetites,” wrote Amy Fine Collins in Vanity Fair. “As irresistible as he was ugly, Rivera was described by Frida as ‘a boy frog standing on his hind legs.’ ”

  (It’s safe to say that of all the traits men possess that are catnip to women—sense of humor, great hair, nice shoulders, lead guitar player in a band—“boy frog standing on his hind legs” rarely makes the average woman’s must-have list.)

  There was a window of time during the first years of their marriage when Frida, more or less recovered from her accident, happily and with fervor performed the role of exemplary wife. She devoted herself to cooking for her husband, fussed over his clothes and comfort, gave him his nightly bath in which she floated bath toys for his amusement. Her 1949 painting “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl,” in which she cradles a naked Diego in her lap while she is in turn cradled by Aztec Earth Mother Cihuacoatl, pretty much sums up the way she viewed their marriage: Her husband was a giant baby.

  In 1930, Frida traveled with Rivera to San Francisco, where he’d been commissioned to paint a mural for the San Francisco Stock Exchange Luncheon Club.*3 This required him to seek out a female model that would represent the essence of California womanhood. He was put in touch with international tennis star Helen Wills. She was the real deal, having won 31 Grand Slam titles and two Olympic gold medals. In the name of making a “study” of Wills for the mural, Rivera disappeared with her for a few days.

  Frida wept at Diego’s endless extracurricular canoodling, which he had no intention of giving up despite the anguish he caused. He would explain patiently that for him monogamy was simply out of the question, and that he viewed sexual intercourse as essential and uncomplicated as taking a piss. Frida would howl in fury, hurling the occasional ceramic plate against a brightly painted wall, then lock Rivera out of her bedroom. He would retaliate by throwing himself into his latest mural commission, and maybe take on another mistress or two. Sometimes, upon discovering the identity of the new mistress, Frida would enjoy a little spicy revenge by seducing the woman. Then they would have another argument in which Frida hurled another ceramic plate, and so on and so forth.

  Frida’s hot temper was the most generic aspect of her difficult nature, handily reinforcing the stereotype of females as prone to hysteria. A teary, pissed-off woman slouched on the sofa eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s is exhausting and irritating, but acceptable—in part, because a weeping woman doesn’t have to be taken seriously.

  Consider this: A recent study of jury dynamics conducted by the journal Law and Human Behavior found that although an angry man can influence the feelings and opinions of his fellow jurors, the same is not true for women. In fact, the angrier a woman gets, the more jurors were convinced their own opinions were correct. The more furiously a woman juror behaved, the less anyone listened to her. Translated into the domestic realm, this means that husbands don’t actually mind the type of behavior Frida often displayed. It turns their woman into someone they don’t have to take seriously, and it also allows them to do something they rather enjoy, which is to throw up their hands, go to their local bar, order a stiff drink, and complain with other men about the impossibility of women.

  But Frida had other, less predictable traits. She could be sly and misleading. A now infamous 1933 profile in the Detroit News, headlined “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art,” was written during the couple’s sojourn in Detroit that year (Diego was painting “Detroit Industry,” a celebration of the city’s workers). The accompanying black-and-white photo shows Frida at the easel, her head turned toward the camera at an angle that mirrors exactly the one in the self-portrait she’s painting. She wears an apron tied around her waist, as if she’s come straight from the kitchen. Regarding hubby Diego, her quote reads: “He does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.”

  She was being facetious—something that was lost on the writer, who wasn’t prepared for Frida’s wit. But the joke contains the beating heart of her ambition. Frida may have started painting to amuse herself during her convalescence, but by the early 1930s she was determined to make her mark. During her time dabbling in Detroit, she painted two pictures that would one day be considered masterpieces: “Henry Ford Hospital” and “My Birth.” The latter depicts a woman, presumably Frida, giving birth to herself. The picture is startling, even today. The figure on the bed is covered by a white sheet from the waist up. Her legs are splayed open, and a full-grown female head bearing the distinctive unibrow protrudes from her vagina. Pop icon Madonna currently owns the painting. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Madonna said, “If somebody doesn’t like this painting, then I know they can’t be my friend.”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1938, at the age of 31, Frida made her first sale. The actor Edward G. Robinson was also an art collector, and while he was in Mexico City he purchased four little pictures, for $200 apiece. French artist André Breton also discovered her work, and heralded it as surrealist. Her paintings, he enthused, were like “a ribbon around a bomb.”

  You might imagine that after laboring in the shadow of her husband for almost a solid decade, Frida would be thrilled and even grateful to be tapped for inclusion in a big-deal art movement that included powerhouse painters Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and René Magritte. But she wasn’t much interested. She found the French to be insufferable, cold, and bourgeois. And anyway, she was her own movement.

  In the fall of that year, Frida traveled
to New York for her first solo exhibition, at the Julien Levy Gallery. Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Time magazine magnate Henry Luce, was enjoying a moment with her hit Broadway play The Women and attended the opening. Frida was notoriously charming, even among the capitalist gringos she disparaged. She and Clare hit it off, and by the end of the evening Clare had commissioned Frida to paint a portrait. The subject was the late Dorothy Hale, a depressed young socialite and friend of Clare’s who had lived beyond her means in an upper-floor apartment at the newly opened Hampshire House on Central Park South. Key details that will become important: On the night before she died, Dorothy threw herself a farewell cocktail party. After the last guest left, she put on her favorite black velvet dress and a corsage of tiny yellow roses. Then, at 5:15 a.m. or thereabouts, she threw herself out the window.

  Clare and Frida had both known Dorothy and agreed that the situation was tragic. Clare also felt guilty. Her relationship with Dorothy had been complicated by money; Clare would loan her rent money, and Dorothy would spend it on a cocktail dress. Dorothy was that annoying friend. At some point Clare had cut Dorothy off. And now she was dead. To help assuage her guilt, and as a kind gesture, Clare intended to give Frida’s beautiful portrait of Dorothy to Dorothy’s bereaved mother, as a remembrance.

  Time-out for a thought experiment: You are Frida, perpetually strapped for cash. Your marriage is shakier than usual. You also have an ongoing cavalcade of medical problems. You are beginning to gain an audience for your paintings, and the only way you can or want to earn some extra money is by selling them. Clare Boothe Luce is rich and powerful, and if she’s happy with the picture she has commissioned, she will tell her rich and powerful friends, who then might also commission a picture from you. You know this is how it works. It’s the golden rule: He who has the gold, rules.