How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (14 page)

In December 1927, she underwent surgery for what turned out to be a benign lump in her breast.
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It was her second such operation, and her recovery was slower than it had been before. Stieglitz wasn't doing so hot, either. Shortly after the success of the Calla Lilies sale, he suffered a kidney-stone attack, his second in as many years. Stieglitz was a lifelong hypochondriac, but now that he was in his sixties, his imaginary aches and pains were becoming real aches and pains. He had little accidents. He fell and hurt his back. He tore a ligament in his finger. In the late summer of 1928, he had an angina attack.

Eighty-five years from now, I'm sure people will look back in disbelief on our current, standard medical treatment,
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but how anyone survived doctor's orders back then is a genuine mystery. When Stieglitz was recovering from his attack, his regime included three weeks of complete bed rest and a complicated regimen managed by O'Keeffe that required “strained spinach, peas, squash—ground lamb and beef—strained this—five drops of that—a teaspoon in a third of a glass of water—or is it half a glass—pulse this—heart of that—grind the meat four times—two ounces—1 oz.—½ zwieback—will all those dabs of water make up two qts—is this too hot—that white stuff must be dissolved in cooler water—the liquid mixed with hot—castor oil every fifteen minutes and so on—divide those 25—or is it 21—ounces into five meals . . .” as she mock-complained.

If O'Keeffe sounds a little hysterical, she was.

Stieglitz, the impossible love of her life, had fallen for someone else.

Dorothy Stecker Norman was a dark-haired young woman looking for meaning, who wandered into the Intimate Gallery
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one day in 1927, heard Stieglitz lecturing someone about the meaning of art, and fell under his spell. His intensity, his charisma,
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his passion for his subject, was the bright flame to her lost moth. She was smitten. She became obsessed.

It would be one thing if Dorothy Norman had been a twit, but she was not. Like Stieglitz, Norman had been born into a wealthy German Jewish family. Her parents were typical parents of their time and socioeconomic class: They wanted their daughter to find a suitable mate and start breeding. The primary lesson they imparted to their only child was never wear glasses, and marry a Jew. But Norman was curious, rebellious, and not stupid; aside from her penchant for hero-worship, she was committed to social reform and had worked as a researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union. After high school she enrolled in Smith against her parents' orders. At nineteen, she had dropped out and married Edward Norman, an heir to the Sears, Roebuck & Co. fortune. From the first month it was obvious the marriage was a disaster, although Dorothy still managed to orchestrate an Oops, hoping against hope, as disappointed young brides have been known to do, that a baby would salvage the relationship.

When Dorothy discovered Stieglitz she was twenty-one, seven years younger than his own daughter, and pregnant. In Stieglitz's eyes she was perfection: naive, yearning, fertile, with both an unformed mind, which he could fill, and a husband, which freed him from responsibility. She hung around the gallery for a year, offering to do clerical work, buying pieces of art,
taking notes
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during their conversations.

It's to Stieglitz's credit that he didn't succumb to temptation sooner. After all, he was about nine hundred years old, his time was long past, his younger wife was a huge success who also supported them and was grumpy when she had to interrupt her painting to prepare his special old-man heart-attack-prevention meals, and then also referred to him as “a funny soft little gray creature.” Really, how could the man resist?

Learning all of this, doesn't any envy you may feel for O'Keeffe's success subside? If not, you should consider the Otto Rule of Envy developed by American novelist Whitney Otto,
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who's both enjoyed a staggering amount of success and struggled through hard times.
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According to the Otto Rule of Envy, if you're going to allow yourself to succumb to envy, you must agree to envy the person's entire life. You don't get to cherry-pick the good parts. You aren't allowed to envy the reviews in the
New York Times
or the ski cabin in Aspen without also considering the husband who's a bit of a windbag, or the chronic colitis. Following the Otto Rule, it becomes clear in a matter of moments that you don't want the enviable person's
whole
life; you only want one particular thing that the other person has—professional success, youth, money, or beauty.

The Land of Enchantment

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz were not bohemians, but they knew bohemians. Lady Dorothy Brett lived one floor below them at the Shelton Hotel. She was a genuine lady, born into the British aristocracy, and eccentric as only British nobility can be. She was incidentally a painter, but her true calling in life was as an acolyte of D. H. Lawrence. Brett, as she liked to be called, was plump, heavy-browed, and deaf enough to require the use of an ear horn. Brett and the O'Keeffe-Stieglitzes often had lunch together on Sundays. O'Keeffe ate onion soup; Brett ordered duck. She often sang the praises of Taos, New Mexico, where she'd lived with D. H. and Frieda in 1923, and she pressed Georgia and Alfred into visiting. Stieglitz, who never went anywhere but Lake George, was completely uninterested. Georgia had always loved the West. As an old woman she would say that the happiest times of her life were those few years spent in the Texas Panhandle. She also didn't think she could stand another summer at Lake George, where she'd run out of things to paint. There was also the fact of her husband's affair with Dorothy Norman.
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The trip wasn't easy to negotiate. She would be gone for months. Stieglitz was sixty-five and increasingly frail. Life without Georgia made him anxious. She once remarked that Stieglitz loved it when she was sick in bed, because that way he always knew where she was.

How to Have a Life-Changing Experience

O'Keeffe arranged to travel west with Beck Strand, the wife of Paul and former Stieglitz model with whom Alfred did or did not have an affair in the summer of 1923. It was a mark of Georgia's basic equanimity
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that she was thrilled to have Beck as a companion, even after the business with Stieglitz.

O'Keeffe and Beck arrived in Santa Fe in May 1929, and within forty-eight hours, Georgia knew without question that her life was going to change for good. To her sister Catherine she wrote, “I am West again and it is as fine as I remembered it—maybe finer. There is nothing to say about it except the fact that for me it is the only place.”

Go with a friend.

Georgia and Beck were invited to stay at Los Gallos, Mabel Dodge Luhan's adobe compound in Taos. Mabel, the heiress to the White Sewing Machine fortune, was a kooky, middle-aged patron of the arts and collector of the famous, whose “intimate” memoirs ran to 1,600 pages. She'd moved to Taos with her third husband, then divorced him for Tony Luhan,
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a full-blooded Pueblo Indian, who was tall, imposing, and kind. Both D. H. Lawrence and Willa Cather had stayed in “Mabeltown,” and she was thrilled to have the most famous woman painter in the country under her roof. Initially, Georgia and Beck had been given The Pink Cottage, across a big alfalfa field from The Big House, but only a few weeks after they arrived, Dodge Luhan required an emergency hysterectomy and left for New York, leaving Georgia and Beck to their own devices.

This is the part where I extol the virtues of northern New Mexico. The light, the heat, the purple mountains majesty, the excellent enchiladas. But first, we've reached yet another juncture in the life of O'Keeffe, where no one is quite sure what happened, paving the way for endless conjecture that continues to this day: Did Georgia and Beck have an affair?

The main evidence seems to be that they were high-spirited and partook of some nude sunbathing. In addition, according to prim and disapproving John Marin, also a guest at Mabel's that summer, they washed Georgia's new black Ford sedan
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while naked. They may have been giggling. It appeared there were no wash rags handy, so Georgia suggested they use sanitary napkins, which they found even more hilarious. As a resident of Portland, Oregon, which hosts the World Naked Bike Ride every June,
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I'm not sure having a good, giddy time while naked is enough proof. So they did or they didn't. I'd like to think that we've reached a point where it's immaterial.

Beck was easygoing and had the energy of ten teenagers. Together, she and Georgia hiked, camped, and rode horses over the Taos plateau, a broad, high-altitude lava field covered with grayish-green sagebrush and surrounded by mountains. At night, when they weren't sleeping under the stars, they sat in front of the fire and sewed and talked. They ate quesadillas and smoked. They drank whiskey and played practical jokes on each other.

They set up their easels and painted. Beck lacked both Georgia's artistic gift and her staggering confidence; however, she had a great eye. Some believe it was Beck who discovered the great black Penitente crosses that became the subject of some of O'Keeffe's most striking and memorable pictures.

Learn a new skill.

There's a reason why all those cruise commercials on TV emphasize rock-climbing, salsa dancing, and other stuff you never do in your daily life, and why there's a whole subgenre of getaways known as Learning Vacations. The best vacations are always the ones where you learn to do something new. It has something to do with the novelty of both the place and the activity hooking up in the brain that creates pleasure.

Seventy-two hours after O'Keeffe had arrived in Taos, she coerced Tony Luhan into teaching her how to drive. She was terrible and fearless. She ran into fences, took out gateposts, drove into irrigation ditches. She sweated and swore. She had no natural aptitude for driving a car, but after a few weeks of practice, she was roaring all over the countryside. She then bought the car, which she named Hello!

Get a tan.

O'Keeffe was a sun lover. Whoever invented sunscreen hadn't even been born when O'Keeffe and Beck would drive Hello! out into the middle of nowhere, take off their clothes, and hike around in the brush. She loved the feeling of the sun beating down on her, burning her skin “clean to the bone,” and would eventually have the deep wrinkles to prove it.

These days exposing yourself to the sun in the manner of O'Keeffe seems as wise as having unprotected sex with a local during your vacation in Bangkok. Strolling down the beach in midday sans SPF is living on the edge. Do it! Everyone looks better with a tan, but no one wants to pay the price anymore in wrinkles and possibly melanoma. But ask yourself: What are you saving yourself for?

In the Georgia O'Keeffe Room

The change in O'Keeffe's life after her summer in New Mexico was cataclysmic. The empty, dramatic landscape of the desert Southwest had done its mysterious number on her. Even in the worst of times O'Keeffe always knew who she was and what she was about; still, during those months she rediscovered her passions, strengths, and sense of humor. She had discovered her Place, something which most of us are never fortunate enough to do.

It's no wonder people
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feel compelled to make a pilgrimage to northern New Mexico to see if perhaps the crystalline air, fantastic geography, and artsy/spiritual mojo will change one's life.

Jerrod and I drove to Taos in his parents' twenty-five-foot RV. Our original destination had been Ghost Ranch,
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but we'd missed the turnoff driving north from Santa Fe. By the time we reached the Rio Grande Gorge—an 800-foot-deep mini Grand Canyon that bisects the Taos plateau—we knew we'd made a mistake. No worries! Part of the reason we'd driven the RV was so that, in the spirit of O'Keeffe, we could keep our options open. We'd headed south from Oregon with no plans, other than to see if we could see what Georgia saw. Jerrod, who drove the RV, was fine with this. The only thing he needs in life, really, is an Internet connection and a bottle of Maker's Mark.

We decided to continue on into Taos, spend the night, then go to Ghost Ranch the next morning. The Mabel Dodge Luhan house sits at the end of a quiet, narrow road, just off Kit Carson Road. The day was bright and warm and the lilacs were in bloom. The Big House looks just as it does in pictures, like a big adobe birthday cake, flanked by a long low wing of guest rooms. Like everything else in Taos, it is charming-verging-on-too-adorable-for-words. The main entrance is a double door of whitewashed wood, with teal and red trim, and a four-paned window in the top half of each door. Inside, the doors are low and arched—people must have been much shorter in 1922 when the Big House was finished—and the floor is tiled and the high ceiling is lined with wooden beams, or vigas, as they are known here.

One thing you should know: If you are a woman of a certain age, and you like to wear your white hair long and parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun, with big turquoise earrings and maybe a dash of red lipstick, this is the place for you. A beautiful woman with just this hair walked out from the small gift shop, offered us a cup of coffee, and reminded us that the MDL house was now a hotel and conference center. Meaning, you can't just come in and wander around, soaking up the artsy vibes.

We immediately followed her back into the gift shop, which was small and, yes, charming—although there were a few too many of those deadly Penguin classic editions of D. H. Lawrence titles on display for my taste. They had the same effect on me that I imagine I had on my classmates at my twenty-year high school reunion: I felt a sudden flush of slacker guilt for only having read
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
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and not remembering a single thing about it, not even the dirty bits. To compensate, I bought a pretty, cream-colored Vintage Classics edition of
Death Comes for the Archbishop
, by Willa Cather, and a Mabel Dodge Luhan stainless-steel Go cup.