How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (10 page)

At first, O'Keeffe argued. She'd tried to disabuse the world of the fact that she was some primitive Midwestern goddess of female genitalia by giving an interview to the
New York Sun
. She talked about her theories of art. She portrayed herself, she thought, as careful and intelligent. Still, the journalist cooed about her work as being first and foremost “the essence of womanhood.” It was that, yes, but so much more. Her forms were the forms of the natural world, her colors part of an inner, genderless vocabulary. Still annoyed, O'Keeffe wrote a piece for
Manuscripts,
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claiming, “I have not been in Europe. I prefer to live in a room as bare as possible. I have been much photographed. I paint because color is a significant language to me.”

It's unknown how many people read her proclamation, but exactly no one took it to heart. As we've learned from hundreds of stand-up comedians over the years, the more hotly you deny being it, doing it, thinking it, the more obvious it is that you
are
being it, doing it, thinking it. The more O'Keeffe protested that, for example,
Blue Line
(1919), even now still Not Safe for Work, is merely an expression of feelings for which she had no words, and not the cunnilinguist's point-of-view, the more people believed that not only was she a sex maniac, but a sex maniac in denial.
¶¶¶
Eventually, O'Keeffe stopped reading reviews and stopped commenting on them. For the rest of her life she went on the offensive, claiming in interviews that what people saw in her pictures was more about them and their issues than about her, thereby using another defense mechanism, projection, to her own advantage.

“Look what you come to if you let yourself be photographed like this.” She was in her eighties when she said this to C. S. Merrill, a poet who was caring for her on weekends. O'Keeffe had become, in the last decades of her life, a wizened, white-haired mystic in black communing with the beautiful, inhospitable wilds of Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She meant: Look how serious and no-nonsense I am; look how austere and humorless; look how my sleeves extend to my wrists, my hem to my ankles. She meant: Look how I have spent my life creating a self directly opposed to the one created by Stieglitz.

Meet the Stieglitzes

During the early summer of 1918, when most of the pictures were taken, Georgia stayed alone in Elizabeth's studio, in bed. Stieglitz tended to her during the day and returned to his wife, Emmy, at night. Their marriage was one in name only; despite Alfred's avant-garde aesthetic, he was an old-fashioned Victorian who, in his heart of hearts, didn't believe that being miserable in a marriage was a reason to leave it. He and Emmy had been estranged for years; he slept in a dressing room. Who knows how long this would have gone on if O'Keeffe hadn't sent him her drawings?

One day while Emmy was out, Stieglitz, resorting to a time-honored technique favored by people who want out of a relationship but can't bear to think of themselves as someone who would initiate a break-up, brought Georgia to the apartment for a photo shoot. Emmy returned from her errand and “surprised” them while Georgia was posed before Alfred's lens. Emmy demanded to know what was going on, in that slightly insane way betrayed lovers always want to know what's going on, when, of course, they know exactly what's going on. Stieglitz was incensed: Couldn't she see they weren't doing anything but making some pictures? Emmy, less savvy about how to play this game than O'Keeffe would be when it was her turn to be the betrayed wife, succumbed to her outrage, ordering them both out.

Later that night, Emmy's behavior illustrated a good life lesson: Never allow yourself to be provoked into issuing an ultimatum. The only time you should ever issue an ultimatum is if you can easily accept the worst outcome. This is a conundrum; if you can accept the worst outcome, you usually aren't moved to issue an ultimatum.

She said, “Get rid of that O'Keeffe woman or it's over, Alfred!”

He said, “Okay.”

In less than two hours it was done: Stieglitz packed up his stuff and fled to Georgia's tiny studio, euphoric over his coup: He could now tell everyone “My wife threw me out over nothing. I am a photographer, and I was simply photographing Miss O'Keeffe.”

The next day Emmy relented, begging him to come back, but it was too late. Alfred and Georgia, for better and much worse, were the love of each other's lives. They gave themselves to one another, but they also gave each other a new view of themselves. She was the red Porsche purchased by his middle-aged man; he was the football hero who falls in love with her awkward new girl in school. Anne Roiphe, in
Art and Madness
, speaks of “the thing of insanity that makes for both trouble and excitement” that's necessary for great, enduring love, and Alfred and Georgia were rich in this regard.

A few weeks later, the couple was summoned to Oaklawn, the Stieglitz estate in Lake George, by Hedwig, Stieglitz's mother and the family matriarch. After Edward, Stieglitz's late father, made his riches in woolen goods, he bought a “cottage” in the country, twelve acres of waterfront property
***
on Lake George, in the southern Adirondacks. The lake is long and narrow, surrounded by forested hills and studded with small islands. Stieglitz had spent summers there for thirty years, in a turreted, many-roomed Gilded Age monstrosity, furnished with gloomy oil paintings in gilt frames and heavy furniture designed in a way to make sure you banged your knee every time you passed through one of the dark rooms. He was more attached to Lake George than he was (or would be) to any woman in his life. It would cause problems, but Georgia didn't realize that yet.

It was a little awkward, as you can imagine. Then, as now, no one knows what to say when one of the brothers shows up with a Woman Not His Wife, and everyone is supposed to pretend nothing's different. But Hedwig knew better than to cross her favorite son, and at dinner she placed Georgia at her side.

This first visit was charmed, as it always is when you're in the love shack. Alfred and Georgia tramped around the lake and took the rowboat out after dinner, and after lunch they left the table before everyone else was quite finished, giggling—­
giggling
—and skipped upstairs to take a “nap,” slipping out of the sleeves of their sweaters as they went. Their afternoon routine consisted of sex and photography. He took a picture of her sitting on the ground before a flower bed, her paper and watercolors at her side. She is wearing a white dress and a dark cardigan. One hand is around her knees and she holds a small brush. Her head is turned. She looks back and up at Stieglitz in an expression that says, to me anyway, “You're interrupting me. You will always be interrupting, and my heart will allow me no choice but to be interrupted by you.”

They marveled at the signs that proved their unlikely union was meant to be. Georgia remembered how she had studied at Lake George one summer, on the scholarship she received from the Art Students League. Alfred realized that years earlier, his father, Edward, who had become a respected patron of the arts and amateur painter, had been asked to judge an art contest. Since Alfred was the family-appointed artist, his father had asked him to choose the winning entry. The fifty-dollar first prize went to Eugene Speicher's portrait of a young woman named Georgia O'Keeffe.

The first visit ended in a flourish of typical Stieglitzian drama. Alfred's daughter, Kitty, had spent the early part of the summer at camp, after which she was expected at Oaklawn. Emmy had begged Alfred to allow their daughter, who was traumatized by their separation, to enjoy her visit without being forced to deal with the presence of her father's new lover. Alfred promised Emmy, then either forgot, or assumed that once Kitty met Georgia she would love her just as he loved her. Kitty arrived and pitched a red-faced fit, and Georgia and Alfred fled to New York.

O'Keeffe had fully recovered from her “flu,” or whatever it was she'd suffered from in the spring. She was expected back in Canyon to teach the fall term. Stieglitz had no intention of letting her go, and made an extravagant offer: He wanted to underwrite a year of painting for her. Would she accept that? Would she allow him to be her patron of the arts?
††††
She said yes. How could she not? She sent to Texas for her things, giving up everything that nourished her: the sense of liberation that comes with wide, windswept places, her agency over her own life. Was it worth it?

How to Manage Living with the In-Laws

In our modern world that believes in the power and righteousness of romantic love, no one looks past her lover to see the army of irritating people with linked arms standing behind him: his family. Every mother-in-law joke is about someone else. So blinded by love are we, usually, we never stop to think that unless our beloved was grown in a petri dish, he's got a mother.

As long as possible, find the in-laws entertaining.

Hedwig Stieglitz ruled Oaklawn. Every day she served three artery-clogging meals, plus a full tea with cakes and sweets, to a table of sons and daughters, their sons and daughters and nieces and nephews, and a handful of guests Stieglitz had invited to stay for the month. There could be twenty people at a meal, all talking at once, preferably arguing. The best meal would be one with a heavy sauce and an emotional outburst. If someone left the table in tears, the meal would be considered a complete success.

Like Alfred, they talked at you until you felt as if your eardrums would break from simple usage. They seemed to possess the gene that compels you to say every thought that comes into your head, especially if it provokes an argument. The O'Keeffes were Midwesterners who tended toward stoicism, silent keepers of the elephants in the room. Georgia's crazy love for Alfred was a case of opposites attract: The huge tribe of Stieglitzes was opposite her as well.

At first, O'Keeffe found the Stieglitzes to be eccentric and energetic. One of O'Keeffe's greatest gifts was her ability to delight in the ordinary things of this world, and the wild and crazy Stieglitzes were, for a time, one of the things that amused her. She had spent so much time alone in Texas that it was fun to be part of this huge, rollicking gang.

Eventually, of course, her essential introversion reasserted itself, and she began to find the chaos first exhausting, then annoying. She survived, I think, by watching their antics as though she was watching a play or a movie. She didn't spend much time at the theater, and there is no evidence at all that she liked movies. The Stieglitzes seemed to meet whatever need she had for madcap entertainment. Admittedly, this only works for so long, or only works intermittently.

Find a shack of one's own.

It pays to have a good sense of how much you can take of your beloved's family before you do something everyone will regret. If your beloved's family is more along the Stieglitz model than the O'Keeffe model, pitching a fit probably won't cause much upset. Your contribution to the bedlam might even be appreciated. But Georgia internalized everything. She was inclined toward silent resentment, which always evolved into some psychogenic ailment that felled her like a redwood: brutal headaches, insomnia, weight loss.

This was a dilemma. Every year from 1918 on, Alfred and Georgia spent the late spring, summer, and early fall at Lake George. There was no question they would go anywhere else. Alfred despised travel. Georgia was torn. She preferred any countryside to New York, where she never felt at home, but Lake George was not really her landscape: The crush of foliage, the tall pine and oak that crowded the house, the undergrowth, the humidity and smell of composting leaves, even in summer, didn't float her boat.

In 1920, Hedwig suffered a stroke. Georgia read her confusion and trembling accurately, called for medical help, and saved her life, or so Alfred claimed. But in 1922, Hedwig died; the Victorian-era days at Oaklawn were over, and the mansion was sold.
‡‡‡‡
Fortunately, there was a farmhouse on the property suitable for refurbishing.
§§§§
It was called The Hill, because the Stieglitzes belonged to a class of people who could only summer at a place with a name. The Hill was homier, more in keeping with what Georgia was used to, but much smaller. The staff was also reduced to a trustworthy local couple of a certain vintage, who worked as cook and caretaker.

Can you see where this is going? The same herd of family and friends came and went every summer, packing themselves into the smaller space, eating, sleeping, debating, shouting, making up, tromping in, tromping out. Georgia found herself unable to breathe.

Two things kept her from a rubber room. The first was the garden, which she made her own. It spoke to the farm girl in her, and she found herself restored by digging in the earth and all that hard, sweaty labor. The Stieglitzes, who believed in hiring people to do the sweaty work, watched her from a distance, mystified.

The other thing she did was claim one of the outbuildings as her studio. Stieglitz wanted to share “The Shanty” with her, but she told him no and closed the door, thus predating Virginia Woolf's radical call for a room of one's own by ten years. It hardly matters which cultural icon got there first: It still holds true. What neither of them realized is that having your own place to go to, where you don't have to answer to anyone, where you don't have to make conversation or listen to family squabbles, or eat heavy tea cakes every afternoon at four o'clock, helps to preserve everyone's good feelings for each other.

Bury Judith.

It never hurts—and indeed, it can help to solidify your position with the in-laws—to ally yourself with the most popular member of the family, which is usually the youngest.

In this regard, Georgia lucked out. She was fond of Alfred's younger sister Agnes, who had a teenage daughter also named Georgia who was energetic and sassy and pretty much everything teenagers would be known for forty years down the road, when the concept entered popular culture.
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Everyone started calling her Georgia Minor, and Georgia Minor called O'Keeffe GOK. Alfred was a strict teetotaler, and sometimes GOK and Georgia Minor would meet up at The Shanty for a drink or two. The best prank they ever pulled, in concert with a few of the other younger Stieglitzes, was the burying of Judith.