The Book of the Dead (35 page)

Another painter with a penchant for self-portraits and monkeys was the mustachioed, monobrowed Mexican Frida Kahlo (1907–54). She is often called a Surrealist, but she never felt comfortable with the label, referring to André Breton and his gang as “coo-coo lunatic sons of bitches.” “I never painted dreams,” she wrote, “I painted my own reality.” From the age of six, when she first contracted polio, this reality was more or less defined by pain.

On November 17, 1925, when she was only eighteen, Frida was traveling home from school on a bus when a streetcar hit it broadside. She broke her back, pelvis, collarbone, ribs, and right leg (in eleven places) and dislocated a foot and a shoulder. A piece of metal handrail also pierced her vagina. Although she was expected to die, after more than a year prostrate in bed, she recovered. Her father, a photographer (and an artist himself), rigged up a mirror and various contraptions over her bed so that she could see and draw objects in the room. It was this that led Frida to become an artist. In the remainder of her life, she underwent thirty-five surgical operations (as well as several abortions and miscarriages) and her art almost always revolved about her body, her pain, and her suffering, sometimes in shockingly realistic detail.

As if the physical pain wasn’t enough, Frida also managed to fall in love with one of Mexico’s most flamboyant and difficult men, the Marxist mural painter Diego Rivera. He was twenty-one years her senior (and twice her size) when they married in 1929,
and while it was definitely a love match, it had more ups and downs than the most lurid Mexican soap opera. For all his talent and chutzpah, Diego had a violent temper and was compulsively unfaithful to Frida—even with her own sister, Cristina. He happily concurred with his doctor’s diagnosis that he was “unfit for monogamy” and it was said that for American women visiting Mexico, sleeping with Diego Rivera was as important a part of the tourist itinerary as visiting the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán.

Not that Frida was any slouch in this regard. She, too, had numerous affairs, with both men and women—most famously with Leon Trotsky, a liaison that started in 1937 while he and his wife, Natalia, were staying as houseguests of the Riveras. Frida called Trotsky her “Piochitas” or “little goat,” because of his beard. Later, she tired of
el viejo
(“the old man”) and broke off the affair, much to his disappointment. Trotsky’s ice-pick-wielding assassin, Ramón Mercader, was invited over to dinner at the Riveras shortly before his arrest for murder. Frida and Diego remained staunch communists and supporters of the Soviet Union all their lives, and Frida hung photographs of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels, and Mao at the foot of her bed.

Their political views didn’t stop their enjoying themselves (or employing a team of servants). Supper at the Riveras’ was a riot of conversation, wine, and tequila with guests ranging from the president of Mexico to Nelson Rockefeller and George Gershwin. Though regularly encased in a steel-and-plaster corset to support her back, Frida dressed flamboyantly in the traditional dress of Tehuantapec (an area in southern Mexico she had never actually visited): vibrant floral prints in bright yellows, blues, and reds. She never appeared in public without makeup, but adamantly refused to remove her trademark mustache, often
using a pencil to make it darker. A lover of gossip and dirty jokes, she had little time for the abstract theorizing of the European art houses:

I would rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than to have anything to do with these “artistic” bitches of Paris. They sit for hours in cafés warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about “culture,” “art,” “revolution” and so on, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories that never come true.

Even allowing for her own extramarital dalliances, the strain of living with Diego became too much for Frida. She found his constant philandering deeply wounding. “I have suffered two grave accidents in my life,” she wrote, “one in which a streetcar ran me over; the other accident is Diego.” For a while, they tried living in separate houses linked by a footbridge. This didn’t work, and when Diego suggested a divorce in 1939, Frida accepted. She started drinking heavily, cut her hair short, and began wearing men’s clothes. They were remarried within a year, largely at the suggestion of her doctor, who was worried about Frida’s mental health. Diego described the deal they came to in his autobiography:

For her part, she asked for certain conditions: that she would provide for herself financially from the proceeds of her own work; that I would pay for one half of our household expenses—no more; and that we would have no sexual intercourse. In explaining this last stipulation, she said that, with the images of all the other women flashing through her mind, she couldn’t possibly make love to me, for a psychological barrier would spring up as soon as I made advances.

They never had children: Frida’s physical condition made it impossible. But she was desperately maternal: She even kept one of her aborted fetuses in a jar by her bedside. Her child substitutes were her pet monkeys, on whom she lavished her affection, particularly the spider monkey, Don Fulang Chang. Her beautiful self-portrait,
Fulang Chang and I
(1937), was bought for $1 million by Frida Kahlo’s number one fan, Madonna, in 1988. Monkeys appear in several of her other paintings. Instead of their usual symbolic baggage of lasciviousness or stupidity, Frida’s monkeys represent natural grace and childlike mischief. They kept her company during Diego’s long absences, along with the rest of her menagerie—Granizo the deer, Bonito the parrot, a miniature hairless dog called Señor Xolotl, and an eagle by the name of Gertrude Caca Blanca.

Frida’s work was not widely recognized while she was alive. Her commercial breakthrough came in 1938, when she accompanied Diego on a tour of the United States (or “Gringolandia” as she called it). She held her first solo exhibition in New York and her first significant sale was to the Hollywood tough-guy actor Edward G. Robinson, who bought four paintings for $200 each. In 1939 Frida went to Paris, becoming the first twentieth-century Mexican artist to have a work purchased by the Louvre. Only one Mexican show was organized in her lifetime, and that didn’t take place until 1953. Forbidden to attend by her doctors, Frida had herself transported to the gallery, still in bed, on a truck, and was wheeled triumphantly into the party.

Shortly afterward, her health began to deteriorate sharply, the
decline being exacerbated by her drinking and overuse of sleeping pills. In August of that year her damaged right leg was amputated because of gangrene. A year later she was dead, seemingly of pneumonia, though some friends believed she may have taken an overdose. A few days before she died, she wrote in her diary: “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.”

Since then, she has never been away. Frida Kahlo is a one-woman international industry: Feted by feminist critics, her monobrowed, mustachioed visage is used to sell exhibitions, prints, tote bags, mouse mats, and watches all over the world. In 2001, she became the first Hispanic woman to be featured on a U.S. postage stamp—surely the only America-loathing, unrepentant Stalinist to have been so honored. None of this would have surprised Diego. In comparison to Frida’s work, his own socialist realist murals now look rather old-fashioned and politically naive. For all his many sins, Diego understood better than anyone the quality of his wife’s astonishing paintings:

I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.

Cruelty and bitterness are more or less the whole story of Jiang Qing (pronounced “jang ching”),
Madame Mao
(1914–91), wife of Chairman Mao, poster girl for the Cultural Revolution and one of the infamous Gang of Four. So far, we have had monkeys as intimate companions, substitute children, artists’ muses, and
living embodiments of royal wealth and privilege. Madame Mao’s monkey was far more sinister. Hers was the monkey as henchman and accomplice in crime.

Jiang Qing was born Li Jinhai, one of eight names she bore during her life. Her youth in Shandong province in eastern China was tarnished by poverty and neglect. She later blamed her persistent ill health on the fact that she spent most of her childhood hungry. Her mother was a concubine with little love to spare for her pretty daughter, but she didn’t subject her to the grisly ritual of foot binding, either. Jiang’s father was a violent and abusive alcoholic who drove mother and daughter out of the family home, though not before Jiang had demonstrated her fighting spirit, attacking him and biting him viciously on his arms. At the age of fourteen, after being expelled from school for spitting at a teacher, she ran away to Beijing and became an actress.

The details of this part of her life are hazy, not least because she rigorously repressed any mention of them when she came to power, but it seems she married and separated at least twice, became a communist, and was at some point arrested for terrorism. Her enemies always alleged she slept with her captors to ensure her escape. Under the stage name Lan Ping (“Blue Apple”), she landed some major roles, including Nora in Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
, whose self-discovery and rejection of men seemed to resonate with the young actress’s own experience. Jiang developed a love for Hollywood films, copied Garbo in her dress, and wore makeup and high heels. She was also spiteful and had a long memory. Decades after being beaten to a leading role by a girl called Wang Ying (who went on to become a famous actress and performed at the White House for the Roosevelts) Jiang had her arrested and imprisoned, making sure she died in jail.

In 1937 she forsook the stage and volunteered for the revolution, at that time based in the Yunnan caves, the endpoint of the Long March, deep in central China. She soon made herself known to Mao, sitting in the front row of his lectures. Mao, in turn, came to see her perform in an opera organized for his troops. Appearing backstage after the show, he placed his coat around her shoulders. The next day, Jiang visited the Leader to return his coat and ended up staying the night.

The relationship was not a popular one with the Communist high command. Mao was technically still married to a senior party official and Jiang’s past was a heady mix of sex, deceit, and Western-style debauchery. She seemed an unnecessarily controversial addition to the Great Leader’s burgeoning cult, especially when rumors circulated that one of Jiang’s former lovers had tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of surgical spirit and crushed match heads. This didn’t bother Mao. He cut a deal with the party where he got to keep Jiang as his partner on condition that she would not be acknowledged publicly as his wife or hold any political office for twenty years.

The marriage does not seem to have been a particularly happy one. Mao soon lost interest in Jiang sexually (at twenty-three she was a little old for his taste: he had an insatiable preference for teenage virgins). At the same time, he saw that she was fanatically loyal and ruthless enough to be useful to him. As she later commented: “Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.” So it was that, in 1963, when the twenty-year “ban” had passed, Mao chose Jiang to head up his Ministry of Culture.

These were the years of her greatest influence. As the “Great Flag-carrier of the Proletarian Culture” she oversaw the Cultural Revolution, totally suppressing all traditional cultural activities
and organizing mass rallies in which her enemies were humiliated and physically abused by the infamous Red Guards. She drew up the “Kill Culture” manifesto and in 1966 took over as head of the “Revolution Small Group,” responsible for ensuring that the only books, paintings, and films available in China were for propaganda purposes. Jiang herself had a hand in producing the handful of films available. The Revolution Small Group even banned the piano, denouncing it as the most dangerous of all Western instruments.

In her heyday, Jiang—or Madame Mao, as the Western media dubbed her—behaved like the Chairman’s empress-in-waiting: an unsavory combination of paranoia, excess, and hypochondria. She made sure that people who knew about her past were imprisoned or killed. While Chinese peasants struggled in appalling poverty, she would instruct warships to cruise up and down rivers so she could practice her hobby of photography, and roads were built specifically for her to visit beauty spots. Though the masses were fed a bland diet of Maoist propaganda, she busily imported Western films (The
Sound of Music
was her favorite).

Life with Madame was a nightmare. Her rooms had to be kept an exact 70.7°F in winter and exactly 78.8°F in summer. She had an intense fear of strangers and of unexpected sounds, and lived in constant terror of assassination. Servants were jailed for phantom indiscretions. Her nerves were so bad she took three doses of sleeping pills every night, ordering her staff to remove all birds and cicadas from around her house so they wouldn’t disturb her. Servants had to walk with arms aloft and legs apart in case she heard their clothes rustling. At one point, she heard of a technique for promoting youth and vigor that involved transfusions
of the blood from healthy young men. She put dozens of guards through a physical checkup before choosing the best for her “new program.” Fortunately for them, Mao got wind of her plans and put a stop to them—on health grounds: She might be opening herself to infection.