Because he has earned the complete confidence of several key players in the Frida story, Grimberg has been entrusted with some startling Kahlo documents—in particular a soul-baring clinical interview conducted over many sessions between 1949 and 1950 by a Mexican psychology student named Olga Campos (a classmate of Diego Rivera’s daughter by Lupe Marín). Additionally, Grimberg has the transcripts of a full battery of psychological tests Kahlo underwent, in preparation for a book Campos planned to publish on the theory of creativity. Kahlo was, Campos writes, “cooperative” with her, not only because of their friendship but also because the young psychologist had begun her research at a devastating juncture in Frida’s life. In response to a sudden announcement by Diego Rivera that he wanted a divorce to marry the Mexican film siren María Felíx, Kahlo, Campos reports, overdosed.
The text of Campos’s interview—in which Frida candidly discusses her life and her paintings—forms the core of Grimberg’s unpublished book manuscript. Kahlo’s intimate revelations are then fleshed out by Grimberg’s psychobiographical account of Kahlo’s life, Campos’s personal reminiscences about the artist, the results of the artist’s Rorschach, Bleuler-Jung, Szondi, and TAT psychological tests, Kahlo’s medical records, and Grimberg’s line-by-line analysis of the 170-page diary. For many years and from several sources he has been accumulating photographs of the journal pages (some barely the size of a playing card), assembling them in sequence, and studying the results nightly for hours at home after work. His reading of the diary, as outlined in his unpublished book, is a much closer, more thorough, and more accurate interpretation than the one offered by the Abrams volume. More astonishing still, his compilation of the diary pages is probably more complete than the Abrams facsimile. Grimberg has discovered three missing pages that Frida had torn from the diary and given to friends—lost leaves represented in the Abrams book only as jagged, ripped edges.
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Though she gave her birth date as July 7, 1910, Frida Kahlo was actually born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico, now a suburb of Mexico City. This most basic lie alone qualifies her for a name she goes by in the diary: “the Ancient Concealer.” Her epileptic father, Guillermo Kahlo, and her mother, Matilde, had another daughter, Cristina, 11 months later. Before Frida arrived, Matilde had had a son who died a few days after birth. Unable, or too ambivalent, to breast-feed her, Matilde passed Frida on to two Indian wet nurses (the first, Frida told Campos, was fired for drinking). Probably because of the confusion of having three erratic caregivers, and her mother’s general depression over the loss of a son (Frida called her family’s household “sad”), Kahlo had from earliest infancy a very damaged sense of self.
In the absence of a Kahlo boy, Frida assumed something of a son’s role in the family—certainly she was her father’s favorite, and the one who identified most with him. Frida told Campos in her clinical interview, “I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.” Lucienne Bloch, a close friend of Kahlo’s and disciple of Diego Rivera’s, recalls that “she loved her father very much, but Frida did not have these same feelings for her mother.” In fact, in 1932, when Kahlo returned to Mexico from Detroit upon hearing that her mother was dying (Bloch accompanied her on the journey), she failed to visit Matilde or even view her body. The painfully obstetric work My Birth (now owned by Madonna), in which Frida’s head emerges from the vagina of a mother whose face is covered by a shroud, was most likely her painted response to Matilde Kahlo’s death.
At age six or seven, Frida contracted polio, an illness not detected immediately by her parents. When her right leg began thinning, the Kahlos attributed the withering to “a wooden log that a little boy threw at my foot,” Kahlo told Campos. She tried to hide the deformity by wrapping her atrophied leg in bandages, which she then concealed with thick woolen socks. The young Frida, however, never wore a leg brace or orthopedic shoe. Her unbuttressed limp led her pelvis and spinal column to twist and deform as she grew, according to Grimberg, who does not agree with another doctor’s recent diagnosis that she suffered from spina bifida, a congenital condition. The etiology of her later problems with childbearing and spinal malformation, he feels, can therefore be traced all the way back to her polio. She herself presents this idea in her painting The Broken Column, in which a crevice opens in her body to reveal a backbone in the form of a ruined Ionic column. Says Grimberg, “The steel corset she wears in this painting is a polio corset,” not the kind she later used when recuperating from back operations.
Though her peers maliciously nicknamed her “peg leg,” Frida nevertheless found some solace in her disease. “My papa and mama began to spoil me a lot and love me more,” Kahlo told Campos. This statement, extraordinary in its pathos, provides one sorrowful key to the artist’s psyche. For the rest of her life, Kahlo would associate pain with love (she read one Rorschach as “male genitals with fire and thorns”), and use illness to extract from others the attention she so desperately craved. Family photographs from her adolescence show she found another unusual technique to gain attention and at the same time disguise her gimpy leg. Surrounded by primly dressed relatives, she appears nattily turned out in the full masculine attire of a three-piece suit and tie. Kahlo’s early cross-dressing, of course, also reflects her ambiguous gender identity. In a poignant section of Campos’s interview entitled “My Body,” Frida responded, “The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face I like the eyebrows and eyes. Aside from that I like nothing. My head is too small. My breasts and genitals are average. Of the opposite sex, I have the moustache and in general the face.” (Lucienne Bloch says Frida always carefully groomed her mustache and unibrow with a little comb.)
Kahlo also intimated to Campos that her first sexual experience occurred at age 13 with her gym and anatomy teacher, a woman named Sara Zenil. Noticing Frida’s stricken leg, Zenil declared the girl “too frail,” pulled her out of sports, and initiated “a physical relationship” with her. When Kahlo’s mother discovered some compromising letters, she removed Frida from the school and enrolled her instead in the National Preparatory School, where she was one of 35 girls in a student body of 2,000. Tellingly, when she had her first period it was a male friend who took her to the school nurse. And, she recounted to Campos, when she got home it was to her father, not her mother, that she reported the news. While Frida was attending the National Preparatory School, the government engaged the celebrated muralist Diego Rivera to paint the walls of its auditorium. Frida, about 15, developed an obsessive crush on the 36-year-old, internationally famous, and prodigiously fat Michelangelo of Mexico. She declared to her school friends that her ambition was to have his child.
Frida’s affair with Diego would begin later, however, for the course of her life was diverted by a cruel twist of fate. In 1925, Frida, now apprenticing (and sleeping) with an artist friend of her father’s, was riding in a wooden bus with her steady boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, when an electric trolley car crashed into it. Frida’s boyfriend told Hayden Herrera, “The bus . . . burst into a thousand pieces.” Trapped under the trolley, Gómez Arias sustained comparatively few injuries. But Frida, probably destabilized by her bad leg, was pierced by the trolley’s metal handrail, which entered her lower body on the left side and exited through her vagina, tearing its left lip. Her spinal column and pelvis were each broken in three places; her collarbone and two ribs broke as well. Her right leg, the one deformed by polio, was shattered, fractured in 11 places, and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Somehow, in the impact, Frida’s clothes had also been yanked off, and she was left completely nude. Even more freakish, Gómez Arias recalled, “someone in the bus, probably a housepainter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida.” Kahlo was hospitalized for a month (her mother visited only twice), and then sent home to recuperate. During her convalescence she bombarded Gómez A
rias with lovelorn letters, and took up painting. Her letters show how intertwined her anguish over Gómez Arias’s waning attentions was with her physical suffering. She created her first self-portrait, a gift for her lukewarm beau, as a way to force him to think of her and look at her. “If, after her polio, Frida ever had the chance to separate the idea of love from the experience of pain, the accident destroyed that chance,” says Grimberg. Beginning a pattern that would recur with the 30-odd operations performed on her in the course of her beleaguered life, Frida ended her bed rest prematurely and healed poorly.
Around 1927, through mutual Communist acquaintances, she remet Diego Rivera. Their affair began after she showed up one day while he was frescoing Mexico City’s Ministry of Education building. With paintings tucked under her arm, she demanded that he critique her work. In 1929 they married, launching an obsessive, earthy, and doomed union that turned them into the Liz and Dick of the international art world. 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. As irresistible as he was ugly, Rivera was described by Frida as “a boy frog standing on his hind legs”—women flung themselves at him. (Actress Paulette Goddard was perhaps his most famous conquest.) Casual as well as compulsive in his philandering, he compared making love to urinating and declared he could well be a lesbian because he loved women so much. Frida was hopelessly attracted to him (she returns to the theme constantly in her diaries), and developed a special fondness for his huge stomach, “drawn tight and smooth as a sphere,” she wrote, and for “the sensitivity” of his pendulous, porcine breasts.
Frida altered her persona to please Diego, painting works influenced by indigenous Mexican art, dressing in the colorful, feminine costumes of the Tehuantepec peninsula, and arranging her long, black tresses in Indian-inspired styles. Frida became pregnant just before she married Diego, but she aborted at three months, supposedly because of her twisted pelvis. Her second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage—though she had in fact tried to induce an abortion by ingesting quinine. The third pregnancy was also terminated, quite possibly because it was a lover’s child. It is part of the Frida myth that she could not bring a child to term, a situation which caused her much grief and which became the subject of at least two important artworks by her. Yet, in spite of her congenitally underdeveloped ovaries, she was still able to conceive. And though her pelvis had been damaged by both polio and the accident, there still remains the question of why she never considered a cesarean delivery. Diego supposedly worried that childbearing would ruin her delicate health, but, as Grimberg says, “even if she were physically capable of having a child, she was psychologically unable. It would have stood in the way of her bond with Diego,” whom she babied to the point of filling his tub with toys while she bathed him.
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Throughout the early 30s, Kahlo traveled with Diego to San Francisco, Detroit, and New York while he worked for American capitalists on large commissions with leftist themes. Kahlo, meanwhile, with Rivera’s proud encouragement, developed her craft, honed her engagingly sassy persona, and made important contacts in the social and art worlds—from the Rockefellers and Louise Nevelson (with whom Diego probably had an affair) to that other amazon of art history, Georgia O’Keeffe. Frida’s friend Lucienne Bloch remembers that Frida was “very irritated by the famous O’Keeffe” when she met her in 1933—a reaction probably provoked by competitive feelings. But Frida habitually neutralized rivals (usually Diego’s mistresses) with a disarming camaraderie, which in this instance may have flowered into a physical relationship. Art dealer Mary-Anne Martin has in her possession an unpublished letter Kahlo sent to a friend in Detroit, dated “New York: April 11, 1933,” which contains a revealing passage, sandwiched between jaunty gossip about mutual acquaintances: “O’Keeffe was in the hospital for three months, she went to Bermuda for a rest. She didn’t made [sic] love to me that time, I think on account of her weakness. Too bad. Well that’s all I can tell you until now.”
Homesick in the United States, Frida persuaded the reluctant Rivera to return to Mexico. Once there, he retaliated by having an affair with her sister Cristina. (Rivera eventually paid a creepy price for his priapism; in his 60s he was diagnosed with cancer of the penis.) Devastated, Frida began painting herself wounded and bleeding. According to most Frida literature, the artist’s series of vengeful extramarital affairs also date from the Cristina crisis. But Grimberg has discovered that Kahlo very quietly had been keeping up with her husband all along. Grimberg has found a letter among the papers of the handsome, womanizing [Vanity Fair] photographer Nickolas Muray (whom Kahlo probably met through the Mexican-born Vanity Fair [illustrator] Miguel Covarrubias), which proves that Frida and he had begun their passionate affair as early as May of 1931.
Kahlo tried to conceal her heterosexual liaisons from Rivera—not so difficult after they moved into his-and-hers houses, adjacent residences connected by a bridge. Once detected, these dalliances, such as her mid-1930s fling with the dapper Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, usually ended. (In contrast, Rivera boasted to anyone who would listen of her flings with women.) Her brief liaison with Leon Trotsky—whom Rivera, with his potent political pull, had helped bring to Mexico in 1937—infuriated him most. (Kahlo also did not miss the opportunity to seduce Trotsky’s secretary, Jean van Heijenoort.) Friends recall that long after Trotsky’s assassination Kahlo delighted in driving Rivera into a rage by humiliating him with the memory of her affair with the great Communist. The Kahlo-Rivera duet was, a friend says, “heightened torture and heroism.”
After Kahlo’s successful New York exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1938, Rivera—eager for some distance from his overbearing wife—urged her to travel to Paris, where the Surrealist poet André Breton had promised to organize a show. Though Frida professed to feel alone and miserable in France, this “beautiful human magnet” (as a friend called her), decked in ethnic fiestawear, mesmerized Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, and Schiaparelli (who paid homage by designing a “robe Mme. Rivera”). Frida found Breton insufferable, but she had discovered a soul mate in his wife, painter Jacqueline Lamba. Half a decade later Frida even copied into her diary a letter she had written to Lamba after departing France. It is possible to read through the letter’s doubly crossed-out line “We were together . . .” When Grimberg asked Lamba if she and Frida had been close, she replied, “Very close, intimate.” Grimberg feels that Kahlo’s painting The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened is a tribute to Lamba, who had confided in Kahlo the trauma of her wedding night. The little blond doll peering over this still life, and alluded to in the letter, resembles the elegant Lamba.
After her 1939 return from Paris, Rivera demanded a divorce from Kahlo. (Paulette Goddard had by then moved across the street from Diego’s studio.) Kahlo mourned the separation by cutting her hair as she had during the Cristina affair. She painted herself shorn and desexed (she described herself to Nickolas Muray as looking like a “fairy”), wearing a man’s baggy suit capacious enough to be Diego’s—a curious case of identification with the aggressor. In the 1940s, she also embarked on the series of arresting self-portraits that have seared her features so indelibly into the public’s imagination. As Grimberg astutely points out, Kahlo clearly had difficulty being alone. “Even in her self-portraits she is usually accompanied—by her parrots, monkeys, dogs, or a doll,” he says. “She kept mirrors in every room of her house, her patio included, as if she needed constant reassurance of her very existence.”
A painting known today by the descriptive title Two Nudes in the Jungle (1939; originally titled The Earth Herself) is usually interpreted, like the contemporaneous Two Fridas, as a double self-portrait. Painted for [actress] Dolores Del Rio around the time of Frida’s divorce, it may in fact be a slightly veiled sapphic image of Kahlo with the screen goddess. In the Campos interview Frida states that she painted a portrait of
Del Rio, yet in the actress’s estate only two Kahlo pictures turned up: Girl with Death Mask (1938) and Two Nudes. The fairer, recumbent nude, with her sloe-eyed, oval face, bears an undeniable, if somewhat stylized, resemblance to photos of Del Rio from the period. The painting brings to mind a salacious confession Kahlo made to Campos—that she was “attracted to dark nipples but repelled by pink nipples in a woman.”
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Never good, Frida’s health—physical and otherwise—worsened after the divorce. Her endemic infirmity was exacerbated by her bottle-a-day brandy habit, chain-smoking, and steady diet of sweets. (When her teeth rotted she had two sets of dentures made, one in gold and a more festive pair studded with diamonds.) By 1940 not only was she racked with agonizing pain in her spine, she was also suffering from infected kidneys, a trophic ulcer on her right foot, where some gangrenous toes had already been amputated in 1934, and recurrent fungus infections on her right hand.
Rivera, who had fled to San Francisco to avoid embroilment in the Trotsky-assassination-attempt fiasco (he was briefly under suspicion), was disturbed to learn of Kahlo’s debilitated condition and her two-day imprisonment for questioning after the Communist leader’s eventual murder. Rivera sent for Frida, had her hospitalized in California, and, as Frida wrote to a friend, “I saw Diego, and that helped more than anything else. . . . I will marry Diego again. . . . I am very happy.” These tender sentiments, however, did not prevent Frida from carrying on—from her hospital bed—an affair with the noted art collector and dealer Heinz Berggruen, then a boyish refugee from Nazi Germany. Says Herrera, “Remember, Frida’s motto was ‘Make love, take a bath, make love again.’” Nonetheless, the couple re-wed in San Francisco on Diego’s 54th birthday, returned to Mexico, and set up housekeeping in Kahlo’s childhood Coyoacán home.
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