“Afternoons Lucile and I rested our museum feet and had drinks at an outdoor cafe, sketching the passing scene. Being broke, we spent evenings taking parts in Shakespeare plays, declaiming the great lines to the walls of our penzioneroom.”
Finally they reached Rome, and if the surviving lithograph Roman Boardinghouse in anyway indicated the level of deLappe’s precocious achievement, her rediscovery was all but guaranteed.
At last her memoir zeros in on the specifics of her art. Glorified herein, the seven-month pregnant, do-it-all maid, has slept on the bathroom floor so the boardinghouse owners might inhabit the maid’s quarters, while Lucile and Pele shared the flea-infested “Master suite.” Pele won’t know any of this ‘til check out…
But Roman Boardinghouse is no mere travelogue piece. deLappe had rendered the languidly lecherous underbelly of Italy, complete with Il Duce’s short lived if all-supreme countenance scowling down on the genteel squalor…a tour de force!
Unfortunately, our memoirist remained politely silent concerning what must have been quite the buzzing bee hive of a cheap Parisian hotel, when the five artists re-united for their last month in Europe. Woodstock great Emil Ganso and his wife, Fanny, led the odd troupe on a tour including the whorehouses of Rue Blondel, where working girls — sociable if poorly clad — sat patiently for portraits. No wonder Ganso has no equal when it comes to portraying his beloved “fanny”!
Nor did the comedy absurd reach full climax before tragedy — all the more absurdly — threatened. Overcome with guilt at betraying Lucile with Doris and certain he has helped corrupt Pele, Arnold attempted to hang himself on the boat home, tying one end of his bathrobe around his neck and the other around the doorknob to his cabin, before “slumping.” Pele concluded the adventure with a toss away line: “He was saved in time, and spent the rest of the voyage wearing dark glasses, having suffered only dreadfully bloodshot eyes.”
Soon she was back in San Francisco, ever more involved with strikes, protest art and usually involved with some brave soldier of change, Pele’s meteoric journey-of-art drew to a close. By the time she was 19 her father had grown a bit weary of supporting her and suggested marriage, introducing her to a Leftist lawyer. In the meantime Pele had strayed far enough away from good and great mentors to finally slip from her graced streak of ever-more-accomplished work. Provided a first one-woman show filled with paintings finished too quickly, she later agreed with uncharitable criticism raining on her parade. By towage 22 — according to my lights — Pele deLappe had completed her best work, but not a moment sooner. An all-American Popular Song, looks hauntingly like a retro New Yorker cover of today. And have you ever seen a more perfect a portrait of slime as Big Business?
Leading an ever more exhausting existence, the Communist Party (which liquidated her before she could quit in 1991), work (28 years as a business form layout operator — her toughest stretch) and children (her first born, pianist Nina Sheldon, seeming ever an inspiration) Pele deLappe lived a long life marked by few regrets and glowing early achievement. Had she been only slightly less committed to the working class, her double-threat status as writer and graphic artist might have bloomed as an earthier Janet Flanner (the New Yorker’s lady of letters in Paris who wrote under “Genet).
As it is? I will always love her for the fact that…On a hot July Saturday in 1932, having watched painters mow lawns and clean windows all day, Pele placed a honey suckle blossom behind an ear, dressed herself in a white silk evening gown and, after downing a few beers at the Sea Horse to calm her nerves, teetered into the Woodstock Artists Association on a pair of high-heels. Sitting down, she suffered through a haughty speech by President of the WAA, Carl Eric Lindin. Then came another by Vice President Alice Wardwell. Then, as a third began — probably by that blowhard my Great Uncle Norbert Heerman, intended — no doubt — to impress the important critics and gallery owners sprinkled through the crowd, and his “new, wonderful friend,” Juliana Force, herself…All at once the entire scene seemed completely faked and forced — absolutely none of it having anything to do with passion or truth or art.
To keep herself from jumping up and yelling something rude, Pele very consciously remembered being a small girl, sitting on her father’s lap drawing caricatures of couples eating dinner out…down near the pier in San Francisco. She remembered women all dolled up with their dates walking by and stealing glances at their paper table-cloth exploding with faces almost, but not quite life-like. Pele remembered the squawking sound such women invariably made, turning to their ‘fella to say, “Well, will ‘ya just look at the way that little girl draws!” And she remembered the small, pleased, darting-eye’d smile that would light her mother’s face, and the proud look stealing over her father’s haggard features, as he glanced up from his drink to brag, “Got it in her bones — this girl does. Don’t doubt it for a second! Our Pele?…is a natural!” And she was, too. She was sure of it. For she could feel her talent growing like a tree on the street tearing up the concrete attempting to contain its roots. She was a natural…born…artist. Unlike all these smiling, empty-headed fools with their endless talk. Where did they all come from? These pompous idiots — all out to impress each other and what fancy city folk they could collar…driving up in new cars to sort out the what the drunken bohemian artists were up to…What a disappointment! ‘Cause this wasn’t what artists looked or sounded like!…Not true artists!
And suddenly young Pele could contain herself no longer, but jumped up onto her long, tan, not so-terribly-steady fifteen year old legs and yelled into the dropped jaws and shocked, unblinking eyes of Woodstock’s Association of Artists, “You’re all nothing but a bunch of ass-kissers!”
