In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  What do you do? Do you give Clare Boothe Luce what you know she wants—a pleasant, decorative picture to present to her friend Dorothy’s grieving mother? Or do you respect your own talent and vision and give her the shocking “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale,” as well as a near heart attack?

  Unlike Frida, I have been permanently scarred by the number one rule drilled into my head at every retail and fast-food job of my youth: Customer satisfaction is our number one goal. In other words, like many women (like you?) I was conditioned to please from a young age. I would have been delirious with joy to have received a commission from someone like Clare Boothe Luce. Keeping in mind that I was painting the portrait for Dorothy’s poor mother, I would have made Dorothy look even prettier than she had been in real life. My goal would have been to make everyone weep with joy, including the spirit of Dorothy herself.

  But then, I’m not difficult. Frida was.

  In the center of the painting, behind what appears to be a feathery layer of cirrus clouds, the cream-colored Hampshire House rises up with its many small windows and mansard roof. In the background, a tiny figure plummets past the upper stories. In the middle ground there is another, larger falling woman, clearly Dorothy Hale, her arms extended, her skirt billowing around her knees. In the foreground, resting on the brown earth is Dorothy in her black velvet dress and yellow corsage, her neck clearly broken. The banner running along the bottom of the painting says, In the city of New York on the 21st day of the month of October, 1938, at six o’clock in the morning, Mrs. DOROTHY HALE committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory [a strip of missing words] this retablo, executed by FRIDA KAHLO. Blood flows from beneath Dorothy’s head and dribbles onto the banner and frame.

  Horrified does not begin to describe the reaction of Clare Boothe Luce. “I will always remember the shock I had when I pulled the painting out of the crate,” she wrote later. “I felt really physically sick. What was I going to do with this gruesome painting of the smashed corpse of my friend, and her blood dripping down all over the frame?”

  Clare Boothe Luce’s first impulse was to cut up “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” with a pair of shears. But at the last minute she called an illustrator friend who did covers for the New Yorker. Intrigued, he rushed over and took it off her hands.

  Currently the picture hangs in the Phoenix Art Museum and is routinely cited as one of Frida Kahlo’s masterpieces.

  Frida may have been thrilled to receive a commission, but her gratitude didn’t poison her vision. Frida obeyed her own heaving feelings, always, and could only paint what they dictated. If people were alarmed, so much the better. She wasn’t about to make an exception, thinking, “I’ll hold off doing my wacky Frida thing just this once.” Nope. Frida expressed what was in her heart with every brushstroke, and what was in Frida’s heart that fall of 1938 was despair. Her marriage was over. The final straw had been Diego’s latest affair. Of all the women available to Diego in Mexico City—and according to historians, that would have been all the women in Mexico City, so charming and irresistible was he—his choice for an extramarital affair was Frida’s sister, Cristina.

  In 1939, Frida and Diego Rivera were divorced. Perhaps they would have remained forever estranged, if not for the assassination of exiled Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky.

  Several years earlier, while Frida and Diego were still relatively happy, Trotsky and his wife arrived in Mexico City to live with them, having been expelled from the Soviet Union. The short version of the Trotskys’ time with the Riveras: tequila, tequila, tequila; Trotsky and Rivera argue politics; Trotsky and Frida have a fling, sending Madame Trotsky into an understandable depression; Trotsky escapes several assassination attempts by Stalinist operatives dispatched from the Soviet Union, only to be murdered on August 20, 1940, by a demented local man with an ice ax. Frida and Diego, now living separately, were both suspects! Rivera fled to San Francisco, while Frida was taken into custody for questioning. She was released after a few days, and also left for San Francisco to consult Dr. Leo Eloesser about some kind of chronic fungal infection; Eloesser had treated her for various maladies in 1930, and had become a trusted friend.

  So devoted was Frida to “doctorcito,” as she liked to call him, that she painted two pictures for him: “Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser” (1931), a somewhat straightforward and inexpert rendering of the good doctor standing with his elbow on a high table in front of a sailboat (Frida was never as good painting other people) and “Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser” (1940), which displays her trademark nightmarish razzle-dazzle. She captures herself in her favorite three-quarter angle, looking straight at the view from beneath her infamous unibrow. Dangling from her one visible ear is a golden earring of an open palm. A choker of thorns digs into her neck, drawing a few drops of blood.

  In San Francisco Frida and Diego got back together. Perhaps the calamity of being persons of interest in Trotsky’s homicide reunited them. Or maybe the romance of the City by the Bay was just impossible to resist. In any case, they remarried in 1940 at a small civil ceremony. Trying to parse the logic behind their reconciliation is above my pay grade.

  DURING FRIEGO 2.0, Frida painted most of her masterpieces.

  Inspiration is mysterious in its complexity. What fires up any given artist is as unique as a fingerprint. Frida seemed to require a carefully titrated mixture of despair at Diego’s disappearing acts, loneliness, and active engagement with her own broken body. To date, her complete medical history remains unknown. She is said to have had 30 surgeries over the course of her lifetime, most of them attempts to repair the damage from the bus accident she’d suffered at 18. She saw a round of doctors, most of whom contradicted each other. Mexican doctors once declared she had “a tuberculosis in the bones” and wanted to operate; Dr. Eloesser disagreed. In 1944 her chronic back pain worsened (treatment: steel corset prescribed to reduce “irritation of the nerves” that she wore for five months).

  In the first part of 1946, she sought out a “high-up doctor of Grin-golandia” to perform a complicated surgery in which four vertebrae were fused using bone from her pelvis. The operation was performed in June. Her recovery was a success, but eventually she suffered again from shooting pains. A new doctor in Mexico examined her and claimed the New York doctor had performed the fusion on the wrong vertebrae. But there’s another version of this story: The fusion was a success and Frida made a full recovery. Then one night Diego didn’t come home, and in a fit of rage and frustration, she either opened her own incisions or else threw herself on the ground and compromised the barely knitted bones.

  Frida’s bone grafts developed infections, requiring exquisitely painful injections. Her circulation suffered so much from inactivity and a terrible diet that one day she woke up to find that the tips of the toes on her right foot were black. Eventually, they were amputated, followed by her leg, amputated below the knee in 1953, a year before she died.

  Diego’s love for Frida seemed directly related to her invalidism. The worse his wife’s pain—the more she suffered—the less Diego philandered. He would sit beside her bed and read poetry aloud, or hold her as she fell asleep. When the pain became manageable (often with the aid of heavy-duty meds to which she would eventually become addicted), he would go back to work, become distracted by a new lover, and leave her alone. Again.

  Then, she would paint. Some of Frida’s most arresting work—her certifiable masterpieces—come from this period. “The Broken Column” (1944) shows her naked form split jaggedly in half, her skin pierced with nails. Inside her open body, crumbling steel replaced her spine, her torso held together by the white straps that run under and above her pretty breasts. In “The Wounded Deer” (1946) her face, in its standard three-quarters angle, has been placed atop a wounded deer running in the forest. Antlers extend from either side of her head, and nine arrows pierce the deer’s body. Her anguish a
t being force-fed what was essentially baby food is on display in “Without Hope” (1945). She lies in a four-poster bed in what appears to be a postapocalyptic landscape; a wooden frame looms over her, holding a funnel overflowing with fish heads, a strangled chicken, some kind of offal, and a skull. She gazes at the viewer with her classic stare, tears on her cheeks, the end of the funnel pressed between her lips.

  The degree to which Frida helped facilitate her own misery will forever remain a mystery. Her questionable medical care is inferior only in retrospect. Her doctors were for the most part top-notch, practicing the most up-to-date methods of the time. But regardless of how she came by her suffering, Frida wasn’t about to do it in silence. She wasn’t interested so much in communicating her situation as expressing it. This is how it feels to be in this broken female body. This is how it feels to be alone and without my beloved. This is how it feels to be me. I dare you to look—and once you look, I’m going to make sure you cannot look away.

  “I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work,” Diego once wrote to Picasso. “Acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.”

  When Frida died in 1954 at the age of 47, she was known primarily as Diego Rivera’s exotic little wife. The rise of feminism in the late 1970s brought with it the question “Hey, where are all the women artists? Where are all the women of color?” and the answer was the rediscovery of Frida Kahlo.

  In 2016, Frida’s 1939 painting “Two Nudes in the Forest (the Earth Itself)” sold at Christie’s for a record eight million dollars—the most expensive Latin American art piece sold at auction to date. A small, somber oil on metal, the painting depicts one naked Frida resting her head in the lap of another naked Frida, amid the thick vines and heavily veined leaves of a voluptuous jungle that existed only in her mind.

  Fifty-five of Frida Kahlo’s 143 pictures are self-portraits. Many of them depict the woes of living in a human female body, including the mess of female reproduction and its sometime failures. Metal hospital beds, bloody instruments, a snarl of internal organs she seems to be vomiting in despair. A delicate, anatomically correct image of her own heart beating inside her chest, her naked body splayed open, giving birth to her mustachioed adult self. The female nude, so beloved of fine artists, had never been nude like this.

  Then as now, it’s a well-known truism that men are uncomfortable when women cry. One can only imagine how squirmy they must have been—how squirmy they are—in the presence of Frida’s pictures. But Frida was a woman comfortable among the chaos of her feelings. She never denied them, never dialed them down. It made her strong. Or, in the view of some—difficult.

  *1Also inspiring cultlike devotion and the manufacturing of any number of decorative mugs, key chains, T-shirts, socks, sweatshirts, swimsuits, leggings, paper dolls, earrings, bedding collections, curtains, throw pillows, rubber stamps, coloring books, bottle openers, umbrellas, nail decals, cell phone cases, aprons, floral crowns—and of course, tote bags.

  *2Directed by Julie Taymor, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina.

  *3American capitalists, taken with the prestige of having a Rivera mural grace the side of their building, turned a blind eye toward his radical left-wing politics.

  CHAPTER 22

  NORA EPHRON

  Exacting

  NORA EPHRON WAS THAT RAREST of difficult women: the lovable bitch. I’m not disrespecting the dead. I’ve had a girl crush on Nora since I first read Heartburn in 1984. The rainy afternoon I finished her best-selling, lightly fictionalized memoir, I took the bus downtown to the library where I spent the afternoon reading her as-yet-uncollected magazine and newspaper pieces (she wrote many memorable pieces for Newsweek, Esquire, New York magazine, and many others, before going on to become a best-selling author and one of Hollywood’s most successful directors). These days, that kind of devotion would violate stalking laws.

  Years later I met her at a party in New York. It was perhaps the late 1990s. She was enrobed in her usual black finery. Her hair was a little fluffy—I don’t think she was getting it blown out weekly yet. I shook her very slender hand, felt myself blush, and whispered, “So nice to meet you.” The only other option was to weep with love and throw myself on her narrow, polished black shoes. She said, “So nice to meet you.” She may have been mocking me. I then turned to feign interest in the drinks table, because I feared I might further embarrass myself. Behind me I heard her ask someone, “Who was that again?”

  This wasn’t why Nora was a bitch. (She had every reason to wonder whether I’d actually been invited to the party or had recently escaped from the closest minimum-security facility.) She was bitchy because she was exacting and perfectionistic—and because even though she was a woman who reveled in her femininity, she refused to be mawkish or sentimental. She called it as she saw it, and her prose was so sharp you could cut yourself. In a 2010 piece for Slate, “Who Gets to Be a Feminist?” the other esteemed authors dutifully weighed in on this very serious matter. Nora wrote: “I know that I’m supposed to write 500 words on this subject, but it seems much simpler: You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.” Take that, Earnest Content Providers.

  Nora was born to a couple of screenwriters on May 19, 1941. Henry and Phoebe Ephron were theater people who liked Hollywood money, and moved their family to Beverly Hills. After graduating from Beverly Hills High in 1958 and breezing through Wellesley, graduating in 1962, she returned to New York, where she went on to become the new and improved Dorothy Parker. (With respect to Mrs. Parker, Nora was consistently funnier on more topics, and never stank up the joint with her self-pity. Nora didn’t believe in self-pity.)

  She started in the mail room at Newsweek, then moved to the New York Post; her career caught fire in the late 1960s. By 1972 she had a regular column in Esquire, writing personal essays about the Beatles, the small size of her breasts, a silly feud between Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. She was called one of the early practitioners of New Journalism, but claimed not to know what that meant. “I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms,” she observed. She was all about women power, but wasn’t above poking fun at the parts of the women’s movement she found to be ridiculous. That impulse to point out the ludicrous aspect of things she generally approved of was part of her exacting nature. She wasn’t one to let anyone get away with anything if she could help it. She could be both ally and merciless critic.

  In 1976, Nora married Carl Bernstein, the hotshot Washington Post reporter who, along with Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate scandal and brought down down the Nixon presidency. Nora and Carl were a Washington, D.C., writer power couple. (Such a thing no longer exists.) They had a son, Jacob. Then, when she was very pregnant with a second child, she discovered Carl was cheating on her with a friend.

  One of the great advantages of having a smart, sophisticated screenwriter mother is that the kind of wisdom passed down to you is not how to fold a fitted sheet but that everything is copy. Phoebe taught Nora that everything that happened to her in life could be transposed for fun, profit, and revenge, into art. In 1983, Nora published the aforementioned modern classic, Heartburn, the blistering roman à clef about the end of her marriage to Bernstein. It became a best seller, and in 1986, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred in the movie version, for which Nora wrote the screenplay.

  (Things turned out less well for Bernstein. He went from superstar investigative journalist to gossip column fodder, which led to a rank-and-file position at ABC News. In 1987, he was not invited to Washington Post editor Katharine Graham’s 70th birthday party. He consoled himself by dating Bianca Jagger. I don’t want to make you feel too sorry for Carl. Everything is copy, and who knew that better than Carl Bernstein?)

  A year later, in 1987, Nora met screenwrite
r Nicholas Pileggi. They adored each other; she was more delightful under Nick’s devoted eye. When asked to contribute to an anthology of six-word memoirs, Nora wrote: “Secret to life: marry an Italian.”

  In 1992, Nora directed her first film, This Is My Life, from a screenplay she co-wrote with her sister, Delia, based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer. It was a flop. Nora hated failing. She did not take flops in stride. She was not philosophical about them. “Flops stay with you in a way that hits never do,” she wrote. “They torture you. You toss and turn. You replay. You recast. You recut. You rewrite. You restage. You run through the what-ifs and the if-onlys. You cast about for blame.”

  But in 1993 came Sleepless in Seattle. Nora made directing seem effortless—but then as now, Hollywood was the consummate boys’ club. She had begun directing because as a child, she’d seen firsthand how poorly the film business treated writers (which probably contributed to her parents’ steep slide into alcoholism when she was a teenager). Also, she enjoyed directing because she was exacting. She was famous for firing people. She fired children.

  Nora became famous primarily for her trinity of old-fashioned romantic comedies: When Harry Met Sally…(1989, directed by Rob Reiner); Sleepless in Seattle (1993); and You’ve Got Mail (1998). The more recent Julie & Julia (2009) is a valentine to both Julia Child and Nora’s love of cooking. Modern classics though they may be, the “Nora edges” were by necessity rounded off in the Hollywood router. Her writing is much bitchier, and thus better, all the way around.

  DURING THE FILMING OF Julie & Julia in 2008, Nora was already sick. In 2006 she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow. She told her family and swore a handful of intimates to secrecy, but otherwise continued on with her life. No one—close friends who’d produced her movies, editors, not even Meryl Streep, who played Nora in Heartburn—had known.