Was my marriage to Elmore good? At the beginning, it was heavenly. At the end, it was purgatorial—if not quite hellish (hell would come later, with Dart). What could be more joyful than two artists living together, doing their work, nurturing their babies, cooking, loving, walking through the churches and art galleries of Italy?
We lived in a friend’s farmhouse in Chianti, looked out on fields of silvery olive trees and vines that danced crookedly across the hillsides. We slept every night in each other’s arms—until my pregnancy made that impossible—and then we slept spoonlike, Elmore’s chest to my back and his cock to my buttocks, nudging me from the rear and often waking up inside me.
Oh, how sweet love is when it is sweet! Two salty, sweaty lovers waking up in a shared bed that is rutted with love. And how rare it is! At the times in our lives when we have it, we scarcely appreciate it. It is appreciated more in the loss than in the having—like so many things we reckless humans have, including our lives.
I remember us as we were then: Elmore was fifty-two to my thirty-four and as besotted with me as I with him. He wore his dark hair long, his graying beard long, and his red lips poked out of it like a cunt. (Bearded men often have cuntlike mouths; perhaps that is why they so love to eat pussy: it is like kissing themselves in a mirror.)
We lived that year in a tangle of thighs, art history, and extra-virgin olive oil. We drank the wine of our own campagna; we slathered olive oil on our own tomatoes. We puttered down to Florence in our old Fiat to stroll arm in arm through the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Pitti; we ate
bistecca alla fiorentina
(for the sake of the babies) and huge grilled porcini (for the sake of ourselves); and we painted our hearts out in the same drafty studio, Vivaldi and Monteverdi blaring out of the radio.
We lived for love, for art, for bed, for babies. It is easy to do that in Italy, a country whose priorities are in order—in
that
order, in fact. I can still remember the rapture in Elmore’s dark eyes as he lay listening to my belly as if to the sound of the sea in a nautilus shell. Our work prospered, our babies grew, our love grew. Our song was “Our Love Is Here to Stay”—and we never doubted for a moment that it was. Ah, the Rockies might crumble, Gibraltar might tumble (“They’re only made of clay . . .”), but our love was here to stay. Or so we thought at the time. Actually, it was our
babies
who were here to stay.
I remember the day in July when we loaded up the Fiat with food, clothes, radio, and dog to begin our drive to Switzerland and to the clinic in Lausanne where we had decided the twins should be born. We were both singing (we were often both singing). Life, we thought, held nothing sweeter—and we were right.
It took us three days to get to Switzerland. We were not racing the clock, because it had long since been decided that when I was eight months pregnant we would drive to Switzerland and stay in a hotel near the clinic—twins are often born prematurely (I might live and paint in Italy, but I would, like Sophia Loren, have my babies born in Switzerland). As it happened, a week or so after we arrived, I started leaking amniotic fluid, and it proved prudent to put me to bed at the clinic to preserve the pregnancy. Elmore and Boner (our German shepherd) just about moved into the clinic with me (the rules being bent, as usual, for the famous), and Elmore read to me while we waited to see whether I should have a caesarean or wait to go into “natural” labor.
It was the most glorious time of my life! I lay in bed like a queen, waiting to bear my princesses (amniocentesis had informed me of their health and sex), while Elmore read
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience.
We both kept notebooks. And we both drew. I kept a pregnancy notebook in which there are many sketches of Elmore reading to me, listening to my belly, painting in his studio, and he kept a pregnancy notebook in which there are many sketches of me in differing degrees of pregnancy. (I have both notebooks back to back—or belly to belly—on a shelf in my studio in Connecticut, and I still cannot look at them without a twinge. What a blessed, blissed time that was! How could it have ended?)
It began to end on August 1, when, the pregnancy having been endangered by the rupturing of the amniotic sac, it was decided by us and by our surrealistic doctor—Dr. Breton, believe it or not!—to bring the little sweeties into the world by caesarean.
I went into the OR an artist and a lover and came out an artist and a mother. From the moment those little pink twins were delivered to me in their little pink blankets, the universe of love began to shift—irrevocably.
Or perhaps it was not only parenthood that began to erode the marriage. Perhaps it was the fact that my star was in the ascendancy while Elmore’s was in eclipse. On the crest of the interest in women’s art generated by the women’s movement, my paintings (which at that time were erotic canvases of ordinary objects—shells, flowers, stones, bones, made into monumental icons in a manner reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s) began to generate a great amount of interest, at a time when Elmore’s Hans Hofmann-like abstractions were beginning to seem passé. Or perhaps it was alcoholism, for Elmore was drinking more and more heavily. Or else he was drinking the same as always, yet had crossed that invisible line. It is hard to say just which of these three factors delivered the coup de grace.
We moved back to New York, set up house, studio, and nursery in the loft Dart now uses for his liaisons, and began the challenge of raising twins, managing twin careers, and battling the New York art world.
Suddenly I was the token woman artist of the moment, the exception that proved the rule, the flavor of the month. Vaginal art was in, and my forms—shells or bones, flowers or stones—seemed to be what everyone required. The fact that I had two beautiful twin daughters didn’t hurt, either. Photographed like a double madonna in my studio before a fuchsia lily’s painted lips, I represented the perfect image of the artist for that vaginal age. I blossomed and Elmore sulked. Less and less was his tongue felt on my clit or his cock on my buttocks.
Less and less did we sing “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” More and more did we find excuses to go to dinner parties alone, to complain of each other to our friends, to snap at each other in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the nursery.
Who can say why a marriage breaks down? The reasons for it are as ineffable as the reasons a couple is created in the first place. We live in a world in which all the rules of love and marriage have changed drastically and continue to change in ever-shortening cycles. Marriage used to be for the having and growing of children; now there are few marriages that can withstand the pressures of those events. Children are pesky interruptions to addiction and narcissism, the twin obsessions of our age. If one child is an interruption—imagine two! For the fact is that nature has made human beings too complex and too intelligent for their own good. We are creatures desperately in need of priorities in order to thrive, even survive, and in the modern age, our priorities have grown too murky. Love is too mutable a thing to live for. And art is too lonely. Love and art are sufficient. But when one artist is a woman and the other is a man, whose work shall come first? The male ego, the rush of testosterone, and most of society’s rules dictate that the man must be central, or he will sulk. But what if, for the moment, the woman’s work is in the ascendancy? And what if it is she who puts the food on the table as well as the tits into the babies’ mouths? Can she also pretend, for his ego’s sake, that she is
not
doing these things even as she continues to do them? Reader, I
tried.
But I could not maintain the illusion. When the babies were two, I had my most successful show ever, in the same year that Elmore had a fight with his dealer and left his gallery, and it was those twin events that delivered the coup de grace to the marriage.
Elmore moved out, leaving me with my success, the terrible twos times two (for Mike and Ed were not easy babies), the big brown standard poodle Boner (named for both Michelangelo Buonarroti and Rosa Bonheur), and the easy anodynes of gin, vodka, wine, and dope. For it was then that I began to get into trouble with drink and drugs.
I was alone with my babies and my work, and my sense of abandonment was fierce. I felt I had been punished for my success (and, in fact, I
had
). For the first time in my life, I found it hard to cope. In other words, for the first time in my life, I (who had thought myself exempt) submitted to the fate of most women: I began to feel like a victim.
How I hated that feeling! All my life, I had despised women who whined, women who cursed woman’s lot, women who claimed to be through with love. I had never
called
myself a feminist. I abhorred the label. But motherhood had radicalized me in a strange new way. And abandonment with two female babies had opened up feelings so terrifying I did not know what to do with them. So I drank.
On the surface, life went on. My life was hardly destitute. I had a glorious loft, a house in the country, an assistant, a nanny. If I felt abandoned with this support system in place, imagine what other women must feel! A deep blow had been struck to the heart of my humanity. I had fulfilled my destiny as an artist and a woman, and to punish me for it, Elmore had left.
Let’s be fair. Elmore had problems of his own. It should be a plank in the NOW platform that men turning fifty ought to be given special dispensation, and Elmore was already turning fifty-five. He worried a lot. His heart, his penis, his career, all were failing—and there was I, at thirty-six, on the top of the world (or so it seemed). He couldn’t bear it, and neither, it seemed, could I.
So to make it all that much worse, we split. And we both drank more and more. And we both fucked around. And none of these things made us feel anything but worse (though this is all hindsight), and the little babies suffered from our selfishness, as little babies are wont.
I went through a number of lovers—younger, older, the same age—but nothing really stuck. I was seeking ecstasy, skinlessness. When the truth was that marriage to another artist is the greatest ecstasy of all, and I had lost it. I was mourning a death—the death of my sweet little family—and nothing could replace that. I bumped along for a few years, trying to do my work, trying to raise my little ones, with the increasing obstacle of alcohol (which I denied was an obstacle at all)—and I then met Dart.
Dart was not just a great lay; he was a knight on a white charger. He found me when my confidence was at its lowest, and he bucked me up. Fucked me up—or bucked me up: it’s all the same, really, for what he gave me was nothing less than an infusion of life force, and he squirted it both out of his penis and out of his pores.
I loved him. How I loved him! The film stills were born of my love for him—and so were the cowboy canvases. For out of my adoration of this beautiful man I did what Rembrandt did for Saskia, what Wyeth did for Helga, what Leonardo did for Mona Lisa: I painted him (or photographed him) and made him famous as my muse.
The film stills were born of my love
and
my desire to keep him near. When he was posing, at least he was
there.
His narcissism demanded it; my art demanded it—and they had found a place where they could fit together, every bit as well as our bodies did.
From the moment I met Dart, I was sketching him. He beguiled me so. I was fascinated with him, in the archaic sense of the word—enchantment—bound to him with magic, with rapture, with invisible ropes of allure.
From the sketches of him, I evolved the cowboy canvases—enormous mixed-media close-ups of Dart as the Lone Ranger, Dart as Roy Rogers, Dart as Gary Cooper in
High Noon.
I took these cultural icons of my childhood and superimposed this beautiful young man upon them. I hybridized this man born in the fifties with these images from my fifties childhood, and the passion with which I did this was lost on no one.
Of course not everyone loved these paintings. Some people hated them—a proof that they were
alive.
But the passion was undeniable—and passion is the key to art as it is the key to everything in life. Without it, people, paintings, plants, books, babies, die.
Dart had given me back the gift of life, and so I returned the favor. After the cowboy canvases were exhibited—and sold out almost instantly—I sought other ways to memorialize my lover, which is how I hit upon the film stills.
I had always been fascinated by photography, had not thought of it as a lesser art but as a manipulation of light upon the retina, containing every bit as much of its own integrity as oil painting or the carving of marble.
In art school, I had studied with a disciple of Moholy-Nagy, who had opened my eyes to the possibilities of photographs—silver bromide prints, gold-toned platinum prints, and the entire arsenal of photographic effects available to the artist who would see photography as art. I had tucked these lessons away in my brain for future reference—and now I remembered them in my passion to memorialize Dart.
Providing myself with an old-fashioned camera ca. 1910 (not unlike the one I had experimented with in my Yoko Ono days), I began photographing Dart in various costumes, which were metaphors for his multiple personalities: Arlecchino in motley; the Lone Ranger (again); rock star as heartthrob (with Elvis Presley pelvis thrust at the camera); fifties truckdriver in T-shirt, with beer can in hand; young WASP in black tie; Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows; Hell’s Angel in black leather; Jesus in a loin-cloth on the cross. I photographed him in my studio (where I could perfectly control the light and the background), and I printed in either platinum or silver, depending on the look I sought. The best prints were blown up to the overlifesize C prints, like movie posters. This series, called simply
Film Stills of Dart/Trick Donegal
, was even more successful than the cowboy canvasses and made Dart, by my hand, a star.