And the Rest Is History (14 page)

Frida's destiny, Diego Maria de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez and his twin, Carlos, were born in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1886. When his brother died less than two years later, Diego began drawing on every available surface, including the walls and furniture. In response, his father built him a studio with canvas-covered walls. In 1897 Diego began studying painting at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Art in Mexico City. Prior to graduation Rivera was expelled for leading a student protest against the reelection of President Porfirio Diaz, whose official title was a euphemism for a dictator, of the nonbenevolent variety.

In 1907, offered a scholarship by the Vera Cruz governor, Diego left to study art in Europe. In France he was befriended by the Impressionist painters and continued to pursue his leftist ideals. A man of gargantuan appetites (his six-foot-one frame carried three hundred pounds), his cravings extended to women. Angelina Beloff, a Russian artist, was his first wife, which resulted in the birth of his son Diego, who died at fourteen months in the influenza epidemic. During his marriage he had conducted an affair with another Russian artist, Marevna Vorobieff. The relationship ended when Marevna, then pregnant with their daughter Marika, cut Rivera's neck with a knife and then her own. Her action was the death knell of their union, and he refused all further contact with both mother and daughter. He later wrote of her, “She gave me everything a woman can give to a man. In return, she received from me all the heartache and misery that a man can inflict upon a woman.” Diego returned to his native country, determined that his art should be for the many and not for the privileged few; his story would be told on murals.

The first time Frida met Diego was when he was commissioned for a work entitled
Creation
at the Preparatoria. Although students were forbidden to enter the auditorium while Rivera was painting, Frida was undeterred. Rivera later recalled that he was on a scaffold when he saw a girl who possessed “unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes.” Kahlo, who was sixteen, was infatuated with the thirty-six-year-old Mexican Michelangelo, and, ambivalent about her burgeoning sexuality, took to playing pranks on the artist. She stole his lunch and soaped the steps by the stage where he worked. After he departed, she did not forget him and confided in a friend that she would have his baby “just as soon as I convince him to cooperate.”

Two years later, while Frida was riding the bus to school, the driver approached a risky intersection and decided to take his chances. Seconds later, an electric trolley rammed into their vehicle, launching bodies everywhere. Frida received a number of life-threatening injuries, including a broken spinal column and a crushed foot; in addition, an iron handrail had impaled her pelvis. She later described her injury: “The handrail pierced me as the sword pierces the bull.” And while in the hospital she stated, “Death dances around my bed at night.” During her months-long convalescence in a full body cast, her father gave her paint and her mother ordered a portable easel and attached a mirror to the underside of her bed's canopy so she could be her own model. For the rest of her life, her canvases, filled with innumerable self-portraits, became her visual diary. She turned from her medical studies to art as a form of recovery.

As Frida began to regain mobility, she joined the Communist Party, influenced in part by her friendship with the young Italian photographer Tina Modotti. It was at Modotti's 1928 gathering where Kahlo remet Rivera. With his towering physique, he was hard to miss, even more so when he took out his pistol and for some reason, fired at the phonograph. Frida found this appealing and recalled that it was at that moment “that I began to be interested in him although I was afraid of him.”

Shortly afterward, Frida took three of her paintings to the Ministry of Education where Diego was working on a fresco; her tactic was equal part as an artist and as a woman. When she arrived, she called up to the scaffold on which he was standing and, with characteristic boldness, commanded Diego to come down. Diego's version of the encounter in his autobiography,
My Art, My Life
, states, “Just before I went to Cuernavaca, there occurred one of the happiest events in my life.” He remembered the girl he had met earlier and said of her, “Her hair was long; dark and thick eyebrows met above her nose. They seemed like the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes.” His assessment of her work was that she was an authentic artist. She countered that she had been warned Rivera would compliment her as a segue to seduction. They parted with Diego's promise to visit Casa Azul the following Sunday.

The next week, when he knocked at its door, he heard someone over his head; it was Frida, perched high in a tree, whistling “The Internationale.” Years later, when separated in a crowd, Diego whistled the first bar of the song and from her whistling the second bar, they found each other. Rivera recalled, “I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life. And she would continue to be, up to the moment she died, twenty-seven years later.”

During the subsequent visit they kissed for the first time and he became a regular visitor. Her father, in the spirit of “Forewarned is forearmed,” took Diego aside and cautioned him that his daughter was a devil, to which Rivera responded, “I know.” Diego's second wife, Guadalupe Marin, with whom he had two daughters, was infuriated by Frida, whom she disparaged with the comment that the girl “drank tequila like a real mariachi.” Her husband did not share her contempt and asked Frida to be his wife as soon as he was free of Guadalupe, of whom he had grown tired.

Frida's father approved of her match to the rich Rivera, especially as he knew she would have lifelong medical expenses. Her mother, however, was against Frida's marriage to a man twice her age, the father of three, and an avowed atheist. She refused to attend their August 21, 1929, wedding, declaring it a match between an elephant and a dove. The ceremony was conducted by the town mayor, who doubled as a pulque (a Mexican alcoholic drink) dealer, and through it Frida held a cigarette. During the festivity that followed, a vengeful Guadalupe appeared, lifted Frida's long skirt, and cried out, “You see these two sticks? These are the legs Diego has instead of mine!” The groom, in a drunken tequila-fueled binge, went on a rampage and the bride went home alone. A few days later he came for his wife. The events were to foreshadow the stormy, passionate relationship that followed, serving as the catalyst for many of Frida's portraits.

At the onset of their marriage Frida was content to be the great genius's spouse and brought him lunch in a basket decorated with flowers and love notes—both to show devotion and to ward off any alluring models, always prime temptations for Diego. She also later agreed to a San Angel residence that consisted of two separate homes connected by abridge, as Diego felt a painter needed privacy.

However, although they shared important commonalities such as art, communism, patriotism, and mutual devotion, in many arenas they only agreed to disagree. Frida wanted children and Diego did not; she desired him to be faithful and he subscribed to “machismo.” The child conflict was resolved when Frida, as a result of the trolley tragedy, was unable to bring her pregnancies to term, a fact that tore at her soul. However, the faithfulness issue proved to be the rub.

In 1934, Frida's younger sister, Christina, whose husband had abandoned her and her two children, became Diego's favorite model, and she began appearing in his murals. She also began appearing in his bed. Kahlo began to suspect that Rivera was having an affair; however, she never imagined that the other woman was her sister. In her anguish she cut off her long hair, which she knew her husband loved; of the double betrayal she said she felt “murdered by life.” She took her favorite pet spider monkey and moved out of the house. Kahlo stated, “I suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worse.” They eventually divorced in 1939 but, emotionally destitute without one another, remarried the following year on December 8 (Diego's fifty-fourth birthday) in San Francisco. However, the paradigm in their marriage had now shifted: Frida embarked on her own affairs, with both men and women. One of these liaisons was with the African American Josephine Baker; another with Leon Trotsky, who was eventually assassinated with an ice pick by order of Stalin. Diego tolerated her trysts with women but became enraged at those with men; at one point he threatened one of her male lovers with his pistol.

By this time, Frida had also become a celebrated artist, no longer merely Mrs. Diego Rivera. Her hand, bedecked with rings, appeared on a cover of
Vogue
, and her painting was the first the Louvre purchased from a Mexican artist. Picasso, entranced, gave her earrings in the shape of hands.

In the spring of 1953, Kahlo had at last her one-person show in Mexico City. Bedridden following surgery in which her leg was amputated below her knee, she wanted to stage her final appearance. She dressed in her native costume and jewelry and arrived at her exhibit in an ambulance. Attendants carried her to her canopied bed, which had been transported from her home. The headboard was decorated with photographs of Rivera and papier-mâché skeletons. Surrounded by admirers, the elaborately costumed Frida held court. In his autobiography Diego remembered the exhibition: “For me, the most thrilling event of 1953 was Frida's one-man show. Anyone who attended it could not but marvel at her great talent. Even I was impressed when I saw all her work together.” He also recalled that his great love hardly spoke. “I thought afterwards that she must have realized she was bidding good-bye to life.” It was indeed what she had done, in her own signature style.

In 1954, Kahlo passed away where she had been born, in the Casa Azul, from either an embolism or suicide. Her last diary entry read, “I hope the end is joyful—and I hope never to come back. Frida.” However, as she remains Mexico's most famous artist and a half of a legendary love affair, in a sense she never truly left.

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1923

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

V
audeville was the ticket that allowed aspiring hams such as the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Charlie Chaplin to showcase their talent. However, there was one to whom vaudeville not only brought acclaim; it allowed the entertainer to achieve a state of grace—through love.

The man who was to entertain America for a century, Nathan Birnbaum, was born on Pitt Street in New York, the ninth of twelve children of Polish Orthodox Jewish immigrants. His father worked sporadically as a cantor, and when he passed away Nattie (his nickname) quit school at age seven. He and some friends started the Pee-wee Quartet and sang in saloons, in brothels, on street corners, and on ferryboats.