Friday, November 6, 2015

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt six)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

One of the beautiful women whom Noguchi encouraged to sit for him in 1932 was the socialist and aspiring actress Dorothy Hale, with whom he had a love affair early the following year. In a 1965 letter to Noguchi his friend Kay Halle recalled what might have been an act of courtship: after dining with Halle and Hale, Noguchi sculpted a “wonderful phallus” as a gift for Hale. The two went on a Caribbean cruise, and she accompanied him to London and Paris in June 1933. “She was a very beautiful girl,” Noguchi recalled. “All of my girls are beautiful.” Though the romance seems to have petered out, they remained friends until her suicide in 1938. “Bucky and I were there the night before she did it. I remember very well, she said, ‘Well, that’s the end of the vodka. There isn’t any more.’ Just like that, you know. I wouldn’t have thought of it much, except afterward I realized that that’s what she was talking about. Dorothy was very pretty, and she traveled in this false world. She didn’t want to be second to anybody, and she must have thought she was slipping.” That night Noguchi gave her a corsage of yellow roses. Unhappy in love and disappointed in her acting career, she jumped from a high window of Hampshire House on Central Park South, an event recorded in one of Frida Kahlo’s most dramatic portraits. Pinned to the black evening gown she had worn that final evening was Noguchi’s rose corsage.



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