The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (75 page)

I had just decided exactly what I would do. I was going to go down, enter the display room, and upset the bathtub filled with water. With
the place inundated, they would certainly be forced to lower the shade and take everything out. This appeared as the sole solution, for the idea of starting a suit against Bonwit-Teller struck me as childish.

The gentleman explained to me that they had changed my displays because they had been too successful; that there had been a constant crowd gathered around them which blocked the traffic; and that now they were just right, and that he would not for the world remove them after all the expense they had gone to.

I bowed my head with the utmost correctness and walked out, leaving each of the two gentlemen wearing a smile expressive of the most complete scepticism. I went down to the main floor and very calmly headed for the display-window where the bath-tub stood and stepped inside. I paused for a moment to savor the act I was about to commit, and looked through the window at the bizarre crowd which at this hour literally inundated the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. There must have been something very unusual about my apparition in the window, for a large crowd gathered to watch me.

I took hold of the bath-tub with both hands, and tried to lift it so as to turn it over. I felt like the Biblical Samson between the pillars of the temple. The bath-tub was much heavier than I had calculated, and before I could raise one side it slipped right up against the window so that at the moment when with a supreme effort I finally succeeded in turning it over it crashed into the plate glass, shattering it into a thousand pieces. The crowd immediately fell back in a wide semicircle with a movement of instinctive terror, dodging the glass-splinters and the water from the bath-tub which now was spilling onto the sidewalk. Then I coolly appraised the situation and judged it much more reasonable to leave by the hole in the window bristling with the stalactites and the stalagmites of my anger than to go back through the door in the rear of the shop window. Barely had I jumped through the frame and landed on the sidewalk than a large piece of glass which must have held up by a miracle became detached and cut down across the space I had just passed through-and it was another miracle that I was not guillotined by it, for judging by its dimensions and weight it might very easily have split my head wide open.

XV. Last Days of Happiness in Europe

Gala in sailor costume at Cadaques, the day she caught 15 lobsters in a single morning.

The Homeric luncheons at Palamos. From left. lo right: Charlie Bestegui, Rouss e sett, Bettina Berger, Salvador Dhli, Countess Madina Visconti, Jose-Maria Sert, Gala ’Dali, Baroness von Thyssen, Prince Alexis Mdivani.

René Crevel, observing a snail, foreshadows the distress felt in Europe when he committed suicide.

My best friend, Mademoiselle Chanel, at Rochehrune. House of Salvador and Gala Dali at Port Lligat.

Roussie Sert and Dali at Palamos.

Gala: The Olive.

Dali, Princess Nathalie Paley, and Gala at Palamos.

XVI. My Heteroclite Life in America

I draw Harpo Marx in Hollywood.

I invent a hallucinatory mask, during breakfast in bed at the Hotel St. Regis in New York.

At Caresse Crosby’s place in Virginia, a black piano, black dogs, and black pigs are assembled on the snow, and negroes sing while I work. Caresse is at the piano. (Courtesy Eric Schaal-Pix.)

Based on my plans, “The Dream of Venus” is constructed at the Amusement Park of the World’s fair in New York. (Courtesy Eric Schaal-Pix.)

Having reached the sidewalk, I slipped on the coat that I was carrying over my arm, for the air was sharp and cool and I was afraid of catching cold. With a slow step I headed for my hotel. I had only gone some ten paces when an extremely polite plainclothesman delicately placed his hand on my shoulder, and explained apologetically that he had to arrest me.

Gala and my friends came running to the station to which I was taken, and my lawyer presented me with two alternatives: I could either be immediately released on bail, and the trial would take place much later; or if I preferred, I could remain for a short time in jail, together with the other people who were being held, and then my case would come up within a few hours. I was anxious to have this matter over with as soon as possible, and decided on the second alternative.

The promiscuity in which I was forced to live with the other prisoners terrorized me. Most of them were drunks and professional bums, who vomited and fought among themselves with an admirable optimism. I kept running from one corner to another to escape the spatterings of all that swarming ignominy, and my distress must have been noticed by a small gentleman loaded with rings and gold chains which hung ostentatiously from all his pockets, and whom in spite of his slight stature and his effeminate look all those brawny, two-fisted fellows seemed to respect.

“You’re Spanish,” he said to me, “I can see that right off. I’m from Puerto Rico. Why are you here?”

“I broke a window,” I answered.

“That’s nothing. They’ll fine you a few dollars, and that’s all. It was a saloon, wasn’t it? In what part of town did you break the window?”

“It wasn’t a saloon, it was a shop on Fifth Avenue.”

“Fifth Avenue!” exclaimed the small gentleman from Puerto Rico, in a manner indicating that I had suddenly risen in his estimation. Immediately taking me under his protection he added, “You can tell me all about it later. Right now stay close to me and don’t be afraid of anything. Nobody’ll touch you while you’re here.”

He must certainly have been an important figure in these circles.

The judge who tried my case betrayed upon his severe features the amusement that my story afforded him. He ruled that my act was “excessively violent” and that since I had broken a window I would have to pay for it, but he made a point of adding emphatically that every artist has a right to defend his “work” to the limit.

The following day the press reacted, giving me a warm and moving proof of its sympathy, and I received a shower of telegrams and letters from artists and private individuals all over the country, telling me that by my act I had not only defended my “personal case” but also that of the independence of American art, too often subjected to the incompetence of intermediaries of an industrial and commercial type. I had thus unintentionally touched one of the country’s open wounds.

Immediately after I had broken my Bonwit-Teller window, I received an offer to do “another one,” entirely to my taste–a monumental one, that would not have to be broken, in the New York World’s Fair which was to open in another month and a half, and I signed a contract with a corporation,
²
a contract which appeared to me unequivocally to guarantee my “complete imaginative freedom.”

This pavilion was to be called
The Dream of Venus,
but in reality it was a frightful nightmare, for after some time I realized that the corporation in question intended to make
The Dream of Venus
with its own imagination, and that what it wanted of me was my name, which had become dazzling from the publicity point of view. I still did not speak a word of English, and the whole struggle to impose the least of my ideas had to be carried out through my secretary, who sweated blood! Each day there was a new explosion. I had designed costumes for my swimming girls executed after ideas of Leonardo da Vinci’s, and instead of this they constantly kept bringing me horrible costumes of sirens with rubber fish-tails! I realized that all this was going to end up in a fish-tail–that is, badly. I explicitly stated a thousand times that I would not hear of those sirens’ tails that the corporation wanted at all costs to impose on me, claiming that I did not know the psychology of the
American public. I shouted, I lost my temper–all through my secretary. The sirens’ tails would disappear for a while and suddenly they would reappear, like the bitter after-taste of some greasy and indigestible foods.

Realizing that the explanations and the letters of protest that my secretary typed every evening to the point of exhaustion were becoming more and more ineffective, I told him to stop all these explanations, and to buy me a large pair of scissors. I appeared the following morning in the workshop where
The Dream of Venus
was being set up. My contract granted me the supreme right of supervision, and I was going to use and abuse this right with the challenging force of my scissors. The first thing I did was to cut open, one after another, the dozen sirens’ tails intended for the swimming girls, thus making them totally unusable. After this I attacked the fluorescent gold and silver wigs which I had not called for either–a wholly gratuitous and anonymous fantasy of the corporation’s. I cut them into braids which I dipped in tar, to be stuck to umbrellas turned inside out which were to line the ceiling of the pavilion. Thus these umbrellas appeared as if covered with a lugubrious Spanish moss in mourning. After having transformed the wigs of the sirens into Spanish moss, I used my scissors, which were but the cutting symbol of the vengeance of my personality, to cut, snip, puncture and annihilate everything, sticking them finally right into the heart of the “anonymous” corporation, which in the end cried “Ay!” and raised its arms in sign of surrender.

Resigned, they agreed to do whatever my royal will commanded them. But my struggles were not over, for sabotage was about to begin. They did “approximately” what I ordered, but so badly and with such bad faith that the pavilion turned out to be a lamentable caricature of my ideas and of my projects. I published on this subject a manifesto:
Declaration of Independence of the Imagination and of the Rights of Man to His Own, Madness
(New York, 1939), to rid myself of the moral responsibility for such an adulterated work, for it was not possible to break the windows a second time (in spite of the fact that, given the dimensions of the swimming pool in which my exhibit was placed, this was tempting, and would have produced a fine effect, with the flooding of the entire pavilion).