Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  In 1946, having consulted numerous Mexican doctors, she elected to undergo major surgical intervention on her spinal column in New York. There an orthopedic specialist named Dr. Philip Wilson performed a spinal fusion using a metal plate and a bone graft sliced from her pelvis. The operation filled her with an eerie euphoria. “He is so marvelous this doctor, and my body is so full of vitality,” she wrote to her childhood sweetheart Alejandro Gómez Arias, in a letter illustrated with diagrams of the cuts Dr. Wilson had made into her back and pelvis. In her painting Tree of Hope (1946) these gaping wounds reappear, bleeding exhibitionistically on her almost Christlike body, wrapped as if in winding-sheets and resting on a hospital gurney.

  There were several causes for the almost morbidly elated tone of Kahlo’s note to Gómez Arias. Surgery always gave her a strange high—she gleefully soaked up the ministrations of doctors, nurses, and visitors (in bed she entertained guests like a hostess at a party). She also was receiving huge doses of morphine, which left her addicted to painkillers for the rest of her life. But, most pertinent to the genesis of her diary, she had embarked on what would be her last and most satisfying romance with a man.

  In 1946, just before she left Mexico to see Dr. Wilson, Frida fell in love with a beautiful Spanish refugee, a gentleman of great discretion and a painter like herself. Still alive today, he is, as when Frida knew him, a peripatetic soul—and he remains infatuated with Frida. In an old cigar box he preserves a relic of their love, a huipil, the loose Mexican blouse Frida often wore. When they were both in Mexico, the couple trysted at the house of Kahlo’s sister Cristina, and corresponded by means of a post-office box in Coyoacán. She confided to one of her friends, “He’s the only reason why I’m alive.” This confidante says that the Spaniard was the love of Frida’s life. By contrast, the relationship with Diego was, she insists, an “obsession”—a kind of complicity of needy souls. An unpublished incantatory poem Frida addressed to Diego, which her reputed late-in-life lesbian lover Teresa Proenza gave him a few months before he died, bears witness to the kind of raw, perverse emotional ties that bound her to her husband: “Diego in my urine—/ Diego in my mouth /—in my heart, in my madness, in my sleep . . .” she wrote.

  The diary is conventionally understood to have originated in 1944—that date, it is true, appears on one page. But Frida often referred to past events in the diary, and sometimes copied old material—such as the missive to Jacqueline Lamba—into the book. And her letters and diary entries show how frequently the imprecise Frida made chronological, and other, slips when she wrote. One date in the diary, for example, first written as “1933” is then corrected to 1953. On the opening page of the diary, Frida scrawled, “Painted from 1916,” an inscription that has mystified scholars, but that Grimberg feels is merely a slip for 1946. The recollection of her Spanish lover, who met Frida that year, is, however, certain proof of the 1946 dating. He recalls that Cristina Kahlo was in the habit of buying little notebooks—for addresses, accounts, etc.—for her sister from a stationery store in Coyoacán. One day when he visited Frida at Cristina’s house, he found her pasting a collage of flowers onto the first page of a dark-red leather book, larger than the others, with her initials stamped in gold on the cover. The collage in question is the frontispiece of Kahlo’s diary. The memory of the initials is also accurate—and shows up the persistent blindness of most readers of the diary, who have, despite its crossbar, routinely mistaken the monogrammed F on the cover for a J. In fact, a preposterous story has even sprung up around this misreading and clung to it tenaciously—that the book had once belonged to John Keats. From cover to cover, the signals given off by the diary have been misunderstood, misinterpreted, or disregarded—as if “the Ancient Concealer” has posthumously been covering people’s eyes with her heavily beringed fingers.

  Frida’s Spanish flame remembers next seeing Kahlo with the diary in New York, at the hospital. A comparison of the drawings and handwriting in the book with sketches and letters she gave him at the time bears this out. What is more, several of the diary’s more mysterious entries, once deciphered, clearly refer to the Spaniard, whom she saw until 1952 (the affair ended because he needed to travel and she was incapacitated). But by no means is this to say that he was the only lover referred to in the book or its sole subject. (Diego, naturally, is mentioned far more frequently; she, as always, is her own main subject.) Of particular interest, as far as the Spanish lover goes, is a page, partially obscured by a naughty French postcard, where fragmentary words are still legible on the right. The first of these, “. . . ra villa,” Grimberg explains, in its entirety reads, “mara villa,” a private pun. The Spaniard’s nickname for Frida was “Mara”—in Hindu mysticism, the temptress who entices the soul through the senses. (Many of the strange words in the diary are in arcane languages—not only Sanskrit, but also Nahuatl, an Aztec tongue—and even Russian. Far from being a naïf, Kahlo was extremely sophisticated about language, art history, and culture.) She added the Spanish suffix villa, Grimberg says, because when people heard her secret lover call Kahlo by her nickname, Frida and he would pretend it was short for maravilla, the Spanish word for “marvel.” Similarly, the word árbol, or “tree,” clearly discernible beneath “mara villa,” is a reference to the Mexican song “Tree of Hope Stand Firm” (also the title of one of her paintings), which the Spaniard had taught Frida to help her overcome her despair. “Voyage” refers to a trip her errant lover took, the one that occasioned the postcard. “There’s always an underlying theme in the diary,” Grimberg says. “You just need to find it.”

  Another coded reference to her clandestine lover appears on a page which begins with “September at night. Water from heaven, the dampness of you. waves in your hands, matter in my eyes . . .” Farther down Kahlo writes the words “Delaware and Manhattan North,” an allusion, Grimberg says, to the northbound trip the Spaniard took from his home in that state to visit his paramour. Perversely, sometimes Kahlo’s obscure scribblings weave several lovers together, in rebuslike fashion. A few pages after the one on which she pasted the French postcard, she writes, “Anniversary of the [Russian] Revolution / 7th of November 1947 / Tree of Hope / stand firm! I’ll wait for you—b. / . . . your words which / will make me grow and / will enrich me / DIEGO I’m alone.” The song and painting title “Tree of Hope,” of course, evokes the Spanish lover—but so does the lowercase b, the first initial of one of his names. (The faintly marked b is left out of the Abrams transcription of that page.) Frida’s plaintive invocation of her husband is obvious. Less so is the reference to Trotsky, whose birthday fell on the same autumnal day as the revolution. There is something undeniably disturbed about the way she conflated these men in the space of a few sparse lines—as if on an unconscious level they were all interchangeable.

  Kaleidoscopic, dissociative, and fractured, the writing and drawings—floating networks of penises, faces, ears, mystical symbols, and anthropomorphic beasts—may be “automatic” in the Surrealist sense, and sometimes even funny, but they are hardly intellectually calculated avant-garde exercises. They demonstrate, Grimberg feels, the kind of chaos unleashed in Kahlo’s psyche when she was left in the one state she could not bear—solitude. The word ICELTI, Nahuatl for “alone”—untranslated in the Abrams notations—blazes in large red letters amid the disembodied heads and eyes of one page. Left to her own devices, she often summoned up the name or image of Diego to allay her interior sense of disorder. “Diego was her organizing principle, the axis around which she spun,” Grimberg says, pointing out another mantra-like diary entry: “Diego = my husband / Diego = my friend / Diego = my mother / Diego = my father / Diego = my son / Diego = me / Diego = Universe.”

  The psychiatrist continues: “Anything, no matter how banal, that emanated from the great Rivera was sacred to her. She picked his crumpled drawings out of the trash, and asked him to inscribe in her diary his recipe for tempera,” an ancient, egg-based artist’s medium. (The Abrams book mistakenly a
ssumes this uncharacteristically orderly entry was written by Frida.) Similarly, a feverishly carnal message (“I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated all my blood . . .”), addressed to “Mi Diego” and assumed in the Abrams volume to have issued directly from Frida, is in fact a medleylike pastiche of erotic poems by her intimate friend Elías Nandino (she even scrawled the poet’s name up the right margin of the page). Some of these verses he later published in the collection Poems in Loneliness, dedicated to Kahlo.

  Inevitably, Frida’s profound ambivalence about her inordinate emotional dependence on Diego bubbles to the surface, along with all the other flotsam and jetsam streaming from her unconscious. “Nobody will ever know how much I love Diego. I don’t want anything to hurt him. nothing to bother him or to sap the energy that he needs to live,” she writes on another leaf. This is a classic case of what psychoanalysts call “negation” and what Shakespeare called “protesting too much.” Why bring up “hurting,” “bothering,” and “sapping” at all, unless it is in fact a secret wish?

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  The only one whom she ever effectively “hurt” or “bothered,” of course, was herself; the only vital energy Frida succeeded in sapping was her own. In the diary she obliquely compared her personal auto-da-fé to that of the Jews of the Spanish Inquisition. The Israeli art historian Gannit Ankori has detected that a cryptic drawing labeled “ghosts” has its source in an illustration of Jews (a few are weeping females with long black hair) being humiliated by Spanish soldiers that Kahlo lifted from a book about the Inquisition in her Coyoacán library. (This revelation, published in the 1993–94 issue of Jewish Art, is not mentioned in the Abrams book.) Kahlo had good reason to identify with these wretched victims, for her final years added up to a Passion of her own.

  A 1950 examination suggested that in the 1946 New York operation the wrong vertebrae may have been fused. Kahlo’s back was thus reopened and another fusion was performed, this time with a donor graft. When the incisions became abscessed, the surgeons had to operate again. She lay in the Mexican hospital for a year, her wounds once more healing badly because of a fungus infection, and her right leg exhibiting early signs of gangrene. But in her own baroque variation of the Munchausen disorder, Frida turned her hospital stay into a festival. Diego took a room next to hers, and doctors noted that on those rare occasions when he was attentive her pains disappeared. Like Christ with Saint Thomas, Frida exhorted her guests to look at her oozing sore, and when doctors drained it, Hayden Herrera wrote, she would “exclaim over the beautiful shade of green.” After her release, the exhibitionism of Kahlo’s illness reached a bizarre apogee when, warned against attending the opening of her first Mexican one-person show, at the Galería Arte Contemporáneo, she was ceremoniously brought in on a stretcher and installed in the room on her four-poster bed as a live display.

  Whatever warped satisfaction Kahlo had habitually derived from illness and operations was unavailable to her when she underwent the most drastic of her 30-odd procedures (Kahlo had at least as many doctors as lovers) in August 1953—the amputation of her right leg. Kahlo’s injured spinal column was already metaphoric proof that she was indeed “rotten at the core.” But, unlike her backbone, the stump was an outwardly visible sign of her defectiveness. The incorrigible egomaniac Rivera wrote in his autobiography, “Following the loss of her leg, Frida became deeply depressed. She no longer even wanted to hear me tell her of my love affairs. . . . She had lost her will to live.”

  Though she painted, mostly still lifes, whenever she had the strength, and, if the occasion warranted, could summon up her diabolical humor (in a quarrel with Dolores Del Rio, she announced, “I will send her my leg on a silver tray as an act of vengeance”), she tried several times to kill herself by hanging or overdose. But even in her livelier moments, she was doped up on Demerol; between the scabs from previous injections and her surgeries, it was impossible to find a virgin spot of skin in which to insert a needle. Vain to the finish, she continued her daily makeup ritual—Coty rouge and powder on the face, Talika eye pencil on the unibrow, and magenta lipstick—but her expert touch failed her, and, like the surfaces of her last canvases, the cosmetics were grotesquely caked and smeared. Her features coarsened and thickened, giving her countenance, in the past compared to an effeminate boy’s, a distinctly masculine cast.

  In her delirious despair, Frida became an ardent Stalinist. The Soviet tyrant, who died not long before Kahlo, was somehow merged in her agitated mind with Rivera—and with her father. “VIVA STALIN / VIVA DIEGO,” she wrote on one diary page. Her last known painting is an unfinished likeness of the Russian leader. With his brushy hair and drooping mustache, he resembles, Grimberg observes in his unpublished manuscript, the posthumous image she had made in 1951 of her father.

  All signs point to the fact that Kahlo’s death on July 13, 1954, was a suicide by overdose. As art historian Sarah Lowe says, “Enough was enough.” Many factors, the diary not least among them, support this theory. Her last written words include a long list of doctors and companions whom she thanks, and then the lines “I hope the leaving is joyful—and I hope never to return—FRIDA.” The diary’s last self-portrait shows a green face, which looks like an amalgam of her features with those of Diego, under which Kahlo inscribed “ENVIOUS ONE.” And the book’s last image is a bleak and transcendental study of a dark winged being—the Angel of Death.

  Through a doctor friend, Rivera obtained a death certificate that listed the cause as “pulmonary embolism,” but Kahlo’s body was cremated before an autopsy could be performed. In Grimberg’s text Olga Campos recalls that when she leaned over to kiss the corpse’s cheek Frida’s mustache hairs bristled—for a moment the psychologist thought her friend was still alive. After the cremation, when Frida’s ashes slid back out on a cart from the oven doors, Rivera, some witnesses claim, scooped up a handful and ate them.

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  With her diaries now bared to the world, what, finally, can we make of Frida, the Ancient Concealer? Was she victim, martyr, manipulator—or even a great artist? Certainly her pain, her tears, her misery, her talent were authentic—but so was her need to exploit them. Which is not to deny Frida the essential tragedy and heroism of her life. Says the psychologist Dr. James Bridger Harris, who interpreted the Rorschach tests administered by Olga Campos, “It is Kahlo’s heroic battle in the face of feeling defective, deformed, and unloved that everyone taps into.” Frida projected onto one of these Rorschach cards a poignant, metaphoric description of herself. Its ambiguous shape suggested to her “a strange butterfly. Full of hair, flying downward very fast.” Her remarkable response to an even murkier gray inkblot eloquently reveals Kahlo’s longing to transcend her afflictions with dignity and grace: “Very pretty. Here are two ballerinas without a head and they’re missing a leg [this was several years before the amputation]. . . . They’re dancing.”

  JULIA CHILD

  OUR LADY OF THE KITCHEN

  By Laura Jacobs | August 2009

  The mirror was always in the drawer, the little handheld signal mirror, to use if one is lost. It was standard issue for Americans working in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the dashing precursor to the C.I.A., active during World War II. In 2001, when Julia Child’s entire kitchen was relocated from her house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the first floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., the rescue mirror went, too. It is displayed on a wall in the exhibit, forever near the kitchen drawer where she kept it—a leap of light, an SOS, symbolic of the point in her life when she was found.

  It is at this point—the two years she spent in the O.S.S.—that Noël Riley Fitch begins her 1997 biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life. “I asked myself,” Fitch remembers, “What’s the critical moment that changed her life and initiated her into the woman we know—the adult Julia?” The answer was Paul. In ear
ly 1945, the O.S.S. had transferred Julia McWilliams from Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to Kunming, China, where she continued her work as head of the Registry, processing all top-secret communications. She was glad of the transfer because fellow O.S.S.-er Paul Child had been sent to China some months before. A worldly intellectual with a poetic sensibility, an artist and photographer who relished wine, women, and song, he designed war rooms for General (Lord) Mountbatten in Kandy and for General [Albert C.] Wedemeyer in Kunming. Paul thought Julia unworldly, unfocused, and doubtless a virgin—“a hungry hayseed” is how she would describe herself—but also steady, game, a “classy dame,” and “brave,” he wrote his twin brother, Charlie, “about being an old maid!” He was 42 to her 32, five feet ten to her six feet two. He was looking for a soulmate, but had counted Julia out. And yet their sure-footed friendship, forged over Indo-Asian food and shared danger, was climbing, slipping, into love. Which led to bed. And then, in 1946, when the war was over, marriage.

  It is at a later life-changing moment that the historian Laura Shapiro begins her biography, Julia Child, of 2007. She describes one of Julia’s performances on The French Chef, a television show that first aired nine months after the 1961 publication of Child’s momentous Mastering the Art of French Cooking (co-authored with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). Presented on Boston’s fledgling educational channel, WGBH, The French Chef was an instant success—the first cult cooking show in America. It was the only time the word “instant” would attach to this embracing, warm, spontaneous yet methodical woman, who stood firm against the priggish, frozen, in-minutes cooking of midcentury America.