How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (15 page)

On our way into town we'd noticed a nice Wal-Mart with two RVs parked under each of the two tiny trees on the parking strip, signaling that this was one of those Wal-Marts where RVs could park free overnight. Even though it was only early May and the sun wasn't anywhere near setting, it was still late enough in the day to cruise the Wal-Mart lot for a good spot.
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We closed the shades and put out the slide-out living room and the slide-out bedroom, and lay down to nap, but every time a shopping cart trundled by outside, I woke up. I read some of the literature on the MDL house given us by the lady with the beautiful white hair, and suddenly sat up straight. For $125 a night, you could stay in the same room O'Keeffe had stayed in when she'd visited Mabel. Moreover, I looked at the date and realized that Georgia and Beck Strand had arrived in Taos eighty-two years ago
to the day.

This was something; this was cosmic. I woke Jerrod. The sound of the trundling shopping carts clearly posed no problem for him. He phoned the MDL house and yes, the O'Keeffe room was available that night. We threw open the shades, pulled in the living-room slide-out and the bedroom slide-out and roared out of the lot, back to the MDL house, to check into the very room Georgia herself had slept in.

The room was in the long low wing of guest rooms, facing the big cobblestone courtyard. It had two high squeaky twin beds, and a framed and signed color poster
******
called
O'Keeffe at Ninety,
which showed her in her massively wrinkled, bushy-browed, thin-lipped glory, staring out from beneath her trademark black Zorro hat, giving the photographer her death glare. It was terrifying. We slid into our respective beds and turned out the lights. The elevation of Taos is almost 7,000 feet and the population is almost 5,000. For some reason, I imagined this helped to explain why the Georgia O'Keeffe room at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and Conference Center is as dark as the back of a cave. There was no moon. I kept trying to feel something light and creative and brilliant and inspired, but all I could think of was Georgia O'Keeffe at Ninety glaring over my squeaky bed, and how much she would disapprove of this book, and view my admiration
††††††
for her as a species of the same swooning, dim-witted, floppy-haired, back-to-the-land-inspired devotion that thousands of people who were very young in the 1970s had had for her. I slept poorly.

Sometime around three a.m. I heard an animal scrabbling around in the courtyard. I got up and peered out the window and saw that a storm had moved in, and tiny ice crystals were drifting down from the sky.

9

BREAK

My feeling about life is a curious kind of triumphant feeling about—seeing it bleak—knowing it is so and walking into it fearlessly because one has no choice.

While O'Keeffe was in Taos, Stieglitz lived in a state of constant
fuming. He was jealous of everything: Georgia's fine moods; her high jinks with Beck Strand; her new friends; her new art. Beck reported that Georgia was happiest when she was free, which Stieglitz took to mean free from him. Georgia reported that Tony Luhan had taken her and Beck on a wonderful camping trip, which Stieglitz took to mean she was having an affair with Luhan. He was afraid Georgia was never coming back. One night, alone at Lake George, he built a bonfire, and in a melodramatic gesture befitting a fourteen-year-old girl, burned his old work—prints and negatives and hundreds of old issues of
Camera Work.

“Freedom is necessary to sincerity,” he intoned to someone or other, doing his best to mean it as it pertained to Georgia, but believing it really only pertained to himself. He still wrote daily love letters to Dorothy, who disapproved of O'Keeffe's adventure, especially a camping trip she took to the Grand Canyon with filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz, his wife Marie Garland, and some of their Hollywood friends. Rodakiewicz drove O'Keeffe in his Rolls-Royce. Dorothy sniffed that people shouldn't indulge in that sort of thing
just because they wanted to
. To console Stieglitz for being abandoned, she chartered a private plane for him to come visit her in New York.

In the fall of 1929 O'Keeffe returned to Stieglitz. They were genuinely happy to see one another—perhaps because it relieved some of the guilt from which they both suffered, for different reasons. To celebrate their reunion, he took some pictures of O'Keeffe, including a three-quarter profile in which she's leaning against the side of a car, her curled fingers resting against her chin, a suppressed smirk upon her lips. She was badass. “The relationship was really very good,” O'Keeffe said much later, “because it was based on something more than just emotional needs . . . of course, you do your best to destroy each other without knowing it.”

The Part Where They Destroy Each Other: An Object Lesson

No one is inside someone else's marriage, and no marriage is perfect. Still, O'Keeffe's stubborn refusal to acknowledge the full-throttle infidelity going on under her nose, and Stieglitz's nutty brand of narcissism—which forbade him from admitting that he was having an affair, despite the fact that he was boffing Dorothy Norman several times a week
‡
in the back room of the Intimate Gallery—ruined not just their marriage, but their friendship, and possibly the good memories of their early years together.

I realize that a few chapters back I made what I hope is a convincing case for the power of sublimation. But, like anything in life, it can be taken to an extreme. Sometimes, rather than funneling our frustrations and forbidden feelings into our work, we must let the crockery fly. We must stand our ground and open our mouths and let the truth roll out and scorch everything in the room. To refuse to say anything is often to burn down the city. O'Keeffe knew what was going on, and yet she said nothing.

Because O'Keeffe and Stieglitz were frugal, and their investments modest, they didn't suffer much when the stock market crashed in October; however, Stieglitz was forced to give up the Intimate Gallery. This did not sit well with Dorothy Norman, who needed Stieglitz to be ensconced in a gallery if she was going to continue to worship him as a guiding luminary of the American art scene. She was able to squeeze $3,000 from her husband, Edward, to underwrite the opening of a new space. She solicited money from Paul and Beck Strand and a few other investors, and in December 1929, An American Place opened in a new office building on Madison Avenue. Stieglitz authored its manifesto: “No formal press reviews, no special invitations, no -isms, no theories, no game being played.”

Norman had realized her dream of being indispensable to Stieglitz. She managed the gallery, wrote the bills, kept track of the exhibition artwork. O'Keeffe banished herself. The only time she set foot in the place was to hang the shows, which Norman had neither the skill nor guts to do.

Once again Mabel Luhan had invited O'Keeffe to Taos for the summer. O'Keeffe agonized over her decision, remembering how tortured Stieglitz had been the summer before. But she was still and always a
feminist. That same year she had participated in a public debate with Michael Gold, editor of
New Masses
, during which he excoriated her for failing to take up the cause of the oppressed
§
in her art, and she coolly informed him that women were among the oppressed and always had been, and that as a woman expressing a female aesthetic—just read the critics!—she was furthering the cause of all women. He blustered and quoted Karl Marx, or one of those guys. She said she thought perhaps he was simply confused, and invited him to come to dinner with her and Stieglitz.

Still, when it came to her personal life, things weren't quite so cut and dried. O'Keeffe had not wanted to get married, but now that she was, she felt like a “heartless wretch” to just up and leave her husband for months at a time. She wasn't such a modern wife that she could justify leaving simply because he was cheating on her. It didn't seem right to go, but she couldn't forget the euphoria of the previous summer, the sense of coming back to what was truest about her, every day.

Before leaving for Taos, she made a special trip to Lake George to open the house for the summer. She was frustrated, wounded, anxious, and guilty. Still, her habits of creativity were deeply ingrained. While taking a walk in the woods near the lake she stumbled upon a patch of maroon and green jack-in-the-pulpits.
¶
Always up for proving to the world that her paintings were not actually lady parts, she knocked out six oils of the phallic jacks, each one more abstract than the one preceding it, and left them in the care of Stieglitz. The paintings, which would become among her most admired, were a reminder: She was neither young nor wealthy, but she could paint, the one thing Dorothy Norman would never have on her.

After she arrived in Taos, O'Keeffe didn't stay long at Los Gallos. Mabel required intrigue. She suspected her female guests, including O'Keeffe, of angling to steal handsome, chivalrous Tony away from her. Georgia and Tony had developed a genuine friendship: Both were silent types who loved the land and could ride on horseback for hours without talking, but there was nothing else between them. O'Keeffe couldn't stand the drama, and decamped to a nearby inn. Mabel was furious and disinvited her from a special night of entertainment, arranged with difficulty by Tony. A group of peyote singers were coming from the pueblo to perform at one of Mabel's soirees. When Tony heard that his wife had told Georgia she was no longer welcome, he refused to go, which enraged Mabel even further. On and on it went.

O'Keeffe really couldn't have cared less about what went on in Mabeltown. She painted like she was possessed, which she was. Mountains and foothills, black crosses, pueblos, adobe churches, and always, flowers. Stieglitz, for his part, had calmed down considerably. He spent the summer in Lake George playing miniature golf.

Once again, their reunion in the fall was sweet, as was becoming their custom. He made some pictures of her holding a cow skull she had sent back to New York. He didn't think the skull-and-bones phase would last. It was simply too weird.

Dorothy Norman had a second baby. Since O'Keeffe carried on as if nothing were going on, Stieglitz took no pains to hide his concern for Norman and his interest in her pregnancy, nor his sympathy pains. One can only imagine O'Keeffe's cold fury and sense of injustice: Stieglitz had denied her a child, yet here he was behaving like an expectant father. Maybe he
was
an expectant father. Given the amount of times per week Alfred and Dorothy were knocking it out, it's hard to believe he wasn't, but Edward Norman, who'd studied at the O'Keeffe Institute for Turning a Blind Eye, claimed the child as his own.

That year, O'Keeffe bumped up her departure to April. She stayed in Alcalde, forty miles southwest of Taos, at H & M Ranch, owned by Marie Garland. Like Mabel, Marie was flamboyant, but less annoying. Every day for weeks on end O'Keeffe got up at dawn, hopped in her Model A, and drove until she found something she wanted to paint. It was the year she discovered Abiquiu, the village where she would one day own a house. She collected more bones: long thigh bones, horse skulls, entire vertebrae.

Meanwhile, Stieglitz had adjusted to his bachelor summers quite nicely, thank you very much. He who had spent decades proud of his refusal to travel anywhere, except Lake George, visited Dorothy and her husband at their summer home in Cape Cod. He shamelessly trumpeted his adoration of Norman. Even Margaret Prosser, the housekeeper at Lake George, got an earful about “the full-hipped Child-Woman with soul-­brimming eyes . . .” Naturally, O'Keeffe was kept in the dark.

Stieglitz had had lovers before, most of whom wound up naked before his lens, but he'd never embarked on a big photographic portrait like the one he'd made of Georgia when they had first become lovers. Now, he began one of Dorothy Norman. That fall, not long after Georgia turned forty-four, history repeated itself. One day O'Keeffe, who had been at Lake George, returned to New York earlier than expected to find Stieglitz in their apartment at the Shelton, photographing Norman in the nude. Georgia was not Emmy; she was not going to offer an ultimatum. Her natural defense mechanism wasn't hysteria but stone-cold silence. Even though she was supporting Stieglitz by now and could have easily thrown him out on his ear, she refused. I yearn to believe her behavior was mystifying, but I suspect I've fallen prey to Hollywood movie logic, where the only acceptable response to such betrayal is to stuff his clothes in a suitcase, always inexplicably at hand,
*
and throw it out the window. Instead, O'Keeffe did what she always did: She left.

In February 1932, Stieglitz opened a forty-year retrospective of his work. Prominently displayed were pictures of the new Woman-Child in town, next to some new ones of O'Keeffe. Georgia was handsome and interesting-looking, but Dorothy was young. Also, when Stieglitz photographed Dorothy, he instructed her to whisper his name over and over, to capture the proper expression of adoration.
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The result was as you might imagine: The Woman-Child looked dewy and innocent, and O'Keeffe looked like the “before” picture in an ad for banishing fine lines.

Georgia fought back in the only way Georgia could: She created a new aesthetic, completely disavowing Stieglitz's influence. The one thing that had always united them was their art, their ability and willingness to influence one another's work. By the mid-1930s, O'Keeffe's art was completely her own. She might not have been divorced from Stieglitz, but her work was. In midlife, she reinvented herself, just as the current crop of women's magazines advises.

O'Keeffe's fascination with clean, elegant bones was not a passing phase. “To me they are as beautiful as anything I know . . . The bones seem to cut to the center of something that is keenly alive,” she said in one of her increasingly frequent interviews. She painted a horse skull with a powder-pink rose resting jauntily in one eye socket
‡‡
and a cow skull floating over low red hills, red and yellow flowers suspended in the clouds behind it.
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As with her erotic-wait-they-are-erotic-right? abstractions of twenty years earlier, the critics weren't sure what was going on. Dead animal bones? Seriously? And in the same way that back then the theories of Freud were on everyone's mind, so O'Keeffe paintings must be Freudian, now surrealism was all the rage, which meant her work must be related somehow to Salvador Dali's melting clocks or René Magritte's large, lone hats. This isn't to say O'Keeffe wasn't influenced by the times, but even as she came into her own, and was gradually being acknowledged as the weird and singular genius that she was, it was still difficult for the critics to believe she came up with this stuff all on her own.
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A marriage is a civilization, the couple at the center of it, king and queen. When it falls apart, the entire population suffers. In 1932 Stieglitz opened a show featuring the work of his old friends, Paul and Beck Strand—his photographs and her paintings. Dorothy Norman disapproved of them both. She felt that Beck was a bad influence on Georgia (who, by running off to Taos, had caused Stieglitz to suffer), and Paul was a schlemiel to put up with her. She didn't like their art, either. And so their exhibit, which was not even given a catalog, flopped. Strand turned in his key to An American Place, which he'd helped found, and the twenty-five-year-long friendship between him and his mentor was over.

The degree to which O'Keeffe was saddened by this, on top of everything else, is unknown. She believed in forward motion. She believed in living life in the moment, long before the Beatles went to India and returned to the West with a bad case of Eastern thinking. Years passed. Things got worse. No one said a word. Sex is merely sex. Love, too, is mere. Stieglitz, not satisfied with Norman's role in his life as patron, office manager, and lover, gave her a camera. To fully replace O'Keeffe, she needed to be an artist, too.

Stieglitz had hated museums since he was a young man working to convince the establishment that photography was art. His loathing intensified in November 1929, when the new Museum of Modern Art opened on the twelfth floor of a new building on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. The founding members were three women who had married money: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her art-loving friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Stieglitz was hurt and enraged that these . . . these . . .
ladies
would dare to open a museum of modern art without including
him.