Significant Others - Gala Dalí

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Lover and muse to multiple artists, Gala notoriously spit on people she didn’t like—or worse. Her marriage to the renowned artist Salvador Dalí was as surreal as his paintings, which he signed with both of their names even though she never held a brush.Starring Laura Ramoso as Gala Dalí and José  Arroyo as Salvador DalíAlso featuring Stephen K. Amos, Nigel Daly, Neve O’Brien, and Tavis Doucette Source List:MUSE: Uncovering the Hidden Figures Behind Art History’s Masterpieces by Ruth Millington, ©2022, Pegasus Books, Ltd.The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose, ©2002, Harper Collins E-booksThe Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali, Trans. By Haakom M. Chevalier, ©1993, Dover PublicationsBiography.com, The Surreal Romance of Salvador and Gala DalíThe Paris Review, When Your Muse is Also a Demonic DominatrixThe Art Story, Gala Dalí: Russian-Spanish Art Patron and MuseWikipedia, Gala DalíFahrenheit Magazine, Anna María and Salvador Dalí, Different Paths for the Same BloodThe Dalí Org, Gala DalíPoetry Foundation, Paul ÉluardThe Art Story, Salvador DalíBriannica, Salvador DalíEl País, Dalí and Lorca’s Games of SeductionGazette du Bon Ton, The Surreal Life of Salvador DalíArt Hive, Love Story in Pictures: Salvador Dalí and GalaTime, Salvador Dalí The New York Times, Gala Dalí’s Life Wasn’t Quite Surreal, but It Was Pretty StrangeYang Gallery, Dalí & Gala: The Love Story

Before we begin, we just wanted to let you know that there are a few references to sexual activity in this episode, so it might not be great listening for kids. Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and today we hear about one of the most important figures of the surrealist art movement. This woman, who influenced everything from French poetry to American film and advertising, was actually a Russian expatriate who wasn't an artist at all. Married for nearly 50 years to a man with whom she only slept once, mother of a movement who abandoned her own child, credited painter who never held a brush, this time on Significant Others,

meet Gala Dali. Imagine that your husband, a poet, drags you and your young daughter to a holiday at the beach with a bunch of his friends, all artists, and some new guy you've never met before, but who makes paintings your husband finds interesting. You show up to the beach, and the painter is wearing clothes he's carefully cut to expose his shoulder, nipple, and belly button. his shoulder, nipple, and belly button. For cologne, he's applied a homemade concoction of fish glue and goat shit, and he's shaved his armpits roughly on purpose

because he likes the way the blood looks when it dries. Every time he opens his mouth to speak, he can't stop laughing hysterically. And he's wearing a pearl necklace, swimming shorts, and a red geranium tucked behind one ear. This is after he rethought his outfit and toned it down. You find him unbearably obnoxious.

His whole shtick feels like a performance. Little do you know, you will soon give up everything for him. Gala Dali was born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in Russia in 1894. When she was 10, her father went off to dig for gold in Siberia, which apparently at that time was a thing, and he perished. Some think this seeded an early fixation on money and security in the woman who would come to control a vast fortune. But her mother remarried a man with money and still she was bent on escape. At the age of 17, she contracted tuberculosis and was sent to recover in Switzerland, where she met a teenaged poet she would soon cross war-torn Europe to marry. Paul Éloard, the only son of a bourgeois family in Paris and a future founder

of the surrealist movement, was the first artist to discover Elena's power as a muse, and the one who began calling her Gala. They both wanted to get married, but they had each recovered and returned to their respective home countries. It was 1914, and war was complicating things. Gala's family tried to keep her home, but she longed for Paul so much it made her physically ill. When things in Russia started to fall apart, they relented, and finally, in 1916, the 21-year-old Gala made a long and risky journey from Russia to France to be with Paul. The next year, while he was on a four-day furlough from the army, they got married. And a year after that, Gala gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Cecile.

After the war, Gala and Paul fell in with the Dadaists, a group of artists and thinkers that was the first colonel of the Surrealist movement, and they quickly discovered that they shared more than just a love of literature and art. They both liked it when Gala had sex with other men. She had never had conventional goals as a wife, having written him, I'll never have the appearance of a housewife. I'll be a proper coquette, bright, perfumed, and with manicured hands. I'll read a lot, a lot. I'll work in design or translation. I'll do everything, but have the air of a woman

who doesn't exert herself. Paul carried a naked photo of her around in his wallet, which presumably could serve both as bragging rights and an invitation. In 1921, Gala and Paul met the painter Max Ernst,

and within weeks, they were a thruple. According to Ernst's wife at the time, Gala and Paul met the painter Max Ernst, and within weeks they were a thruple. According to Ernst's wife at the time, Gala was That Russian female, that slithering, glittering creature with dark falling hair, vaguely oriental, with luminant black eyes and small, delicate bones, who had to remind one of a panther. This almost silent, avaricious woman, who having failed to entice her husband into an affair with me in order to get to Max,

finally decided to keep both men, with Éloard's loving consent. Ernst left his wife and their two-year-old son Jimmy to move in with Gala and Paul. left his wife and their two-year-old son Jimmy to move in with Gala and Paul. Friends began to refer to Gala as their wife, both Éloard's and Ernst's, and Ernst covered the interior of the bourgeois home they shared with surrealist explicit murals which freaked out the eight-year-old Cécile. They lived like this for about 18 months until Éloard, who was taking a lot of heat from his parents about the unconventional living situation and was also starting to feel edged out by Ernst and Gala, stepped out of a bistro one day in the middle of lunch with all their friends,

said he was going to get matches, and disappeared. As it turns out, Paul Éloard had set out on an impromptu trip around the world, which was either a radical rejection of social conformity or a temper tantrum aimed at his lovers, and the threesome did not survive the trip. Paul and Gala's marriage, however, did, at least for another five years until they met the man who would change their lives forever. And who was that man exactly?

In 1929, the year he would enter Gala's life, Salvador Dali was 24 years old. And to this day, much of what we know about him comes through the lens of his autobiography, which is a shaky source in the best of circumstances, since who among us can tell a purely factual story of our own origins? But this is a man whose career was built on the subversion of reality. He trafficked in strangeness and shock. This may have been his pathology, but it also became his medium,

and a very lucrative one at that. His memoir has one chapter called False Memories and another entitled True Memories, so keep in mind as you listen that any quote from Dali's mouth should be taken with a surrealist sized grain of salt. He had been kicked out of art school in his final year for, essentially, insubordination, moved to Paris for Madrid, met Picasso, who liked his work, and been taken under the wing of the painter Joan Miró, who was trying to fold him in to Parisian society. This is a little like trying to turn a cartoon character into a political candidate, or maybe taking a parrot to the opera. Dali was, in a word, unusual. In Madrid, he had befriended filmmaker Luis Buñel and poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

At first, those two and their gang were too cool for him, like preppy villains in a teen comedy. They got butch haircuts at fancy hotels and called him mocking names behind his back like the artist, the musician, and the pole. They were the country club set. He was the long-haired weirdo who dressed in velvet and bows. He described them as possessed by a complex of dandyism combined with cynicism. But even as he saw them clearly, he still wanted to be part of their clique.

They inspired me at first with such great awe that each time they came to fetch me in my room, I thought I would faint. He won them over by accident when one of them happened to see some cubist works he had painted. Then, suddenly, he was their icon, their pet. They turned Dalinian into a word. As soon as he won their admiration, he lost respect for them, saying they could teach him nothing but how to drink. Except for Lorca. Lorca was special. The poetic phenomenon in its entirety and in the raw presented itself before me suddenly in flesh and bone,

confused, blood-red, viscous and sublime, quivering with a thousand fires of darkness and of subterranean biology, like all matter endowed with the originality of its own form. There's been a lot of conjecture about the sexual relationship between Dali and Lorca. Here's what Dali himself said about Lorca in an interview. He was madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice. I was extremely annoyed because I wasn't homosexual and I wasn't interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. Deep down, I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the divine Dali's asshole. Whether or not that debt was paid, we can't know for sure. Again, Dali was not only a fabulous, but a professional eccentric.

But the nurse who cared for him in his final days said the only intelligible phrase she ever heard him utter was, My friend, Lorca. Dali also reports having been in love with a boy named Buchakis when they were children. But still, Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual. And the stories of Buchakis. The handsomest of all the boys. Without any doubt, I was in love with him.

Do come from the false memories chapter of his autobiography. What is a false memory, you might be wondering? For Dali. The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels. It is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. Other false memories include events happening in Russia where Dali never went, the image of a swarm of ants on a naked child's buttock, and reminiscences of a teacher who used to put the seven- or eight-year-old Dali on his lap. Señor Traite would seat me on his knees and awkwardly stroke my chin with its fine glowing

skin, grasping it with the forefinger and large thumb of his hand, which had the lusterless skin, the smell, the color, the temperature, and the roughness of a potato wrinkled and warmed by the sun and already a little rotten. In a footnote, Dali claims that at this exact point in time, Gala was, across the continent, sitting on another potato of a man named Count Leo Tolstoy. Among the memories not designated by Dali as false are I wet my bed till I was eight for the sheer fun of it. a scene in which he bites his beloved pet bat, who has died, in two, and a vivid memory of a pair of eggs fried in a pan without the pan,

which he says he witnessed while in the womb. He also writes that he loved to pose before the mirror in his youth with his genitalia tucked between his legs. I felt that the real absence of the male sex organs in the idealized Dali constituted one of his most advantageous attributes, for I have desired ever since to be like a beautiful woman, and this in spite of the fact that since my first disappointed love for Buchakis, I have continued to feel a complete sexual indifference toward men. And that the continuous desire of his childhood was represented in the double and jealous image of myself as king and as young girl.

Suffice to say, he was difficult to categorize. Occasionally, he grew his hair. Long as a girl's. Hair, in fact, is another major element in Dali's young life, which is only worth mentioning because if you're looking to get the flavor of Dali's character, these anecdotes are like perfect little bullion cubes. In the lead-up to his meeting Gala, he says he imagined that a white cat hair

was growing out of his fingernails. At 21, he decided suddenly to cut off his signature flowing locks after realizing that what he wanted most in life was to become... Attractive to elegant women. Like the one he had noticed in a cafe the day before. An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms. On her,

for the first time, I had discovered a depilated armpit, and its color, so finely and delicately blue-tinged, appeared to me as something extremely luxurious and perverse. Getting his own hair shorn and watching it fall from his head was, he said, the first and last time in my life that for several minutes I lost faith in myself.

But in the wake of that experience, he emerged as if from a cocoon of childhood. I spat the last unprepossessing hair of my adolescence upon the pavement of time. Taking himself straight to the bar at the Ritz, he ordered a cocktail. What kind? asked the bartender, to which Dali answered, a good one, because he didn't know there was more than one type. Then he discovered what he thought was a white hair in his cocktail, which he assumed must be his. The thought that at the age of 21 he was already growing white hairs moved him to tears.

He tried to scrape the white hair from the bottom of the glass, but finally realized it was a crack on which he had cut his finger, and his blood was everywhere. on which he had cut his finger, and his blood was everywhere. Trying to leave the bar in grand fashion, he gave the bartender a 700% tip, and after observing the disarming power of his own extravagance, asked to buy a single cherry for the same amount. He then turned to an older woman at the bar and asked for one of the cherries from her hat. He then twined the two cherries, the false and the real, together, plopped them into the glass with his blood in it, presented it to the bartender, and said, Observe this cocktail carefully. This is one you don't know.

Walking away from the bar, he noted, I thought over what I had just done, and I felt as greatly moved as Jesus must have felt when he invented Holy Communion. As George Orwell wrote about these kinds of episodes, Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters. The point is that this is the kind of thing Dali would have liked to do. So there he was in Paris, going to stuffy dinners with Miró and meeting Picasso, meanwhile he and Buñuel were making a film called Le Chien Andelou

that involved donkey carcasses and hanging pianos. The film produced the effect that I wanted, and it plunged like a dagger into the heart of Paris, as I had foretold. Our film ruined in a single evening ten years of pseudo-intellectual post-war avant-gardism. All in all, for a young artist, things were going pretty well. But also, he had struggles. He had no security, professionally or socially. He could not find even one of what he called a truly elegant woman.

In the elegant woman, there is always a studied compromise between her ugliness, which must be moderate, and her beauty, which must be evident, but simply evident and without going beyond this exact measure. What else defines an elegant woman, you might ask? Elegant women have no noses. It is beautiful women who have noses. And? The hair is the only thing about the elegant woman that must be healthy.

And? The elegant woman must be totally tyrannized by her elegance, and her dresses and her jewels, while they are her chief raison d'être, must also constitute the chief reason for her exhaustion and her wasting away. But this creature, sadly, eluded him. He was lonely and anxious. He had recently, during a fever, cut a mole off his back, believing it to be a burrowing parasite. He could only find pleasure while masturbating in front of a mirror, and he had developed a habit of collapsing into hysterical fits of laughter whenever he tried to have a conversation with someone. It is when he was in this state that half the surrealist contingent from Paris showed up to visit him at his family's little beach town, wanting to see what he was

working on. Buñuel was there, as was the well-known painter Magritte and his wife, an important art dealer who was planning a show for him in Paris, Paul Éloard, and his wife, Gala, who Dali had not yet met. This was a lot for the anxious, eccentric 24-year-old. Anxiety, in fact, was the reason for his uncontrollable laughter. Dali had recently fallen into the habit, when he was speaking to someone, of picturing an owl on top of their head,

and on top of the owl, a small piece of his own excrement. He found it debilitatingly hilarious, much to everyone else's annoyance. He was also working hard on a painting that featured a character in the corner of the canvas who had feces on his pants. Gala had been tasked by the rest of the group with determining whether his fecal fascination was a compulsion or a performance. Gala and Paul had been settled back in their marriage for years at this point since splitting from Ernst. There's no reason to think that Gala had stopped taking lovers, as this was always her M.O., and there's no evidence that this practice had become problematic for Paul. But the speed with which she was about to exit their union does speak to an intense dissatisfaction. Perhaps it was an early middle-aged restlessness, an allergy to domesticity, or a plateau of interest amid the steady rhythm of daily sameness.

Perhaps she found herself wondering, is this all there is? Years later, she was known to say, See, didn't I do well to spurn Ernst? He won't amount to much, while Dali, after I got my hands on him, what a success. So on the day Gala met Dali, she was, perhaps, wanting a bit more out of life. She craved intensity and meaning and notoriety and, probably, money. And she was about to hit the jackpot. But she didn't know that yet. What she did know is that her husband had dragged her to an unglamorous beach town with their sickly preteen daughter in tow, and that the guy they were there to visit was turning out to be a deeply weird bundle of nerves

ten years her junior. But he was, she learned, undeniably talented. And unique. And he already had everyone talking, which is more than half the battle in the art world. And when she asked him directly, what's up with all the scatological stuff, he wanted to go for shock value, but found that he couldn't. Instead, he responded, I consider scatology as a terrorizing element, just as I do blood or my phobia for grasshoppers.

Her answer to this? My little boy, we shall never leave each other. Her answer to this? Whether or not Dali reported this dialogue faithfully, that is pretty much what came to pass. So what was it in this moment that Gala saw in Dali? Talented young artist? Beautiful 20-something quivering with pent-up sexual tension? Or simply a genius for PR? young artist, beautiful 20-something quivering with pent-up sexual tension, or simply a genius for PR. If it was just physical attraction,

Gala would simply have added him to the list of her conquests. But it was much more than that. Dali himself wrote of that moment, She wanted the fulfillment of her own myth. And this thing that she wanted was something that she was beginning to think perhaps only I could give her. She took his hand, she gave it a squeeze, and then she gave up everything for him.

Adoring husband, young daughter, nice house in the suburbs. Well, actually, she didn't entirely give everything up. She and Éloard continued to have sex whenever they saw each other, even after their divorce.

But aside from that, she threw everything away so that she could concentrate solely on Dali. By the end of the summer, everyone but Gala and poor Cecile, that perpetual third wheel, had gone back to Paris. Cecile, who was chronically unwell, mostly stayed alone in her hotel room while Gala worked on cementing her connection to Dali. She had identified him as a genius and decided to make him hers. Of course, for her, this necessarily involved sex. Gala was beginning to make repeated allusions to something which would have to happen inevitably between us, something very important, decisive in our relationship.

But on this count, Dali was unlike anyone Gala had encountered since her teenage days in the Swiss sanatorium. Never in my life had I yet made love, and I represented this act to myself as terribly violent and disproportionate to my physical vigor. This was not for me. He kept saying things like, meaning physically. But Gala was playing the long game. He must have been quite the conundrum for a woman who had had so much success seducing male geniuses. But finally they both agreed it must be gotten over with.

So they climbed a high rocky cliff. And then Dali reports that he said, What do you want me to do to you? I want you to croak me. Or as translated elsewhere, I want you to kill me. Actually, Francine Prose notes that the verb he claims she used is faire crever,

which means, according to Prose, to kill and make burst. But French was not her native tongue, so was she misusing the verb? Did she really mean the kill part? Did she even say it at all? If it did go down, as Dali says, it aligned magically with a fable he liked to reference,

in which a king chooses a different girl each night to lie naked with, who he then beheads in the morning. Since childhood, Dali had identified as a king, and here was a woman offering herself for his necromantic pleasure. He says that he had already entertained a fantasy of pushing Gala off a cliff while they were, in fact, on a cliff. And now Gala was confessing to him that she had a fantasy to be killed cleanly, without warning, and at a moment of great happiness. This alignment excited him no end, and he began to run through possible scenarios. But he said that pushing her off a bell tower was deemed too scary for her, that poison was an unappealing option, and that murder in Africa,

while picturesque, would be too hot. Then he claims that her request for him to perform the thing he desired most, and of which he was terrified and ashamed, cured him of the wish to do it at all. Apparently, they were then finally

able to consummate their relationship physically, and his hysterical symptoms evaporated. It would be the first and last time Salvador Dali ever made love with anyone. Immediately afterward, he sent her back to France so he could work and completed a portrait he was painting of Paul Éloard to make up to him for stealing away his wife and muse. In addition, he completed a large piece called The Great Masturbator, which is one of his better-known works and now hangs in a museum in Spain. So Salvador Dali did not kill Gala Eluard. Instead, he married her. By 1934, she had become his agent, his muse, his assistant, and a type of mother figure. She read to him while he painted, sourced his materials, introduced him to wealthy collectors, and reminded him to focus on his technique. He began signing her name as well

as his own to canvases, telling her, It is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures. The early years were lean for them. They had lived for a while on money from her ex-husband. Then Dali tried his hand at becoming an inventor. Anyone need a set of false breasts made to be worn on the back? Or maybe a table made out of boiled eggs? Gala got sick and had tumors removed from her lungs and uterus. Then in 1933, she cooked up a lottery scheme to keep them afloat that involved rich patrons putting money into a pot and drawing straws to see who would get to take home a painting.

Sidestepping the war, they went to America twice and the second time stayed for seven years. Each visit was a triumph of public relations. Dali decorated department store windows and then got arrested for smashing them when his work was censored, painted portraits of movie stars, collaborated with Hitchcock, sold out to Madison Avenue,

and made the cover of Time magazine long before any other artist could make the same claim. They made a fortune, spent much of it, and generally made good on the prognostication of an important British collector who had said in 1935, What a wonderful thing it is for an artist to find exactly the right wife for him. This must only happen once in a hundred times only. It has happened to Dali, and I think it is going to make the entire difference to his career.

In fact, all the difference between him remaining an interesting phenomena of a distorted decade or in him becoming one of the two or three leading figures of the coming age. In his autobiography, Dali claims he dreamed of Gala his whole life. The day they met, he said he looked out the window and saw her from behind and knew exactly who she was. It was she, Galuchka Rediviva. I had just recognized her by her bare back. Galuchka was the name he gave to a sort of memory sprite, a phantom girl he dreamed up and or caught glimpses of throughout his youth. a phantom girl he dreamed up and or caught glimpses of throughout his youth. The point here is not so much the literal reality, but the destiny, the oneness. He and Gala were, in Dali's version of events,

psychically intertwined nearly as long as he could remember. Merging was a theme for him. In 1922, when the king of Spain visited his school, the same school from which the same king would sign his expulsion papers two years later, he wrote, I was completely identified with him. I was he, and since he was the real thing, all my autocracy was directed against the false one. He imagined himself and his brother, the original Salvador Dali, who died three years before he was born, as iterations of one another. My brother was probably a first version of myself. He said they both had the facial structure of a genius.

But of course, Gala was his ultimate other half. He writes that before they were even a couple, Suddenly she put her hand on one of my feet and ventured an almost imperceptible caress with her trembling fingers. I jumped up, my mind clouded by an odd feeling of jealousy toward myself, as though all at once I had become Gala. I pushed away my admirer, knocked her down, and trampled on her with all my might until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach. He had many nicknames for Gala, including Bee. Because she discovers and brings me all the essences that become converted into the honey of my thought in the busy hive of my brain. She was his muse, his business partner, his wife.

But she wasn't just his inspiration. She was legitimately inspiring. Before she even met Dali, Gala was seen as the muse for the whole surrealist group. Man Ray photographed her. In Au Rendez-Vous des Amis, Max Ernst immortalized her, among others, like himself, Dostoevsky, André Breton, and Jean Arp. She was the only woman

pictured. Her ex-husband, Paul Éloire, said, Her compliments are the only ones that matter. And if a surrealist made a good piece of art, people would say, Ah, well, he was in love with Gala then. But for all his talk of oneness, Dali and Gala were deeply incompatible when it came to sex. Over the decades, as his fame and influence grew, his kink scaled up, but he never got more interested in actual contact. He rented palaces and filled them circus-style with human forms that represented the vast spectrum of creation. He had rooms devoted to every genderized permutation of sexual activity. He had always entertained and or been haunted by psychologically baroque fantasies. Now he had practically no barrier to realizing them.

He once had a couple perform sodomy in front of him, getting as involved as a perfectionistic porn director, measuring the depth of penetration with his cane, and then ordering them to stop just before climax so he could throw them out of the studio, whereupon he laughed hysterically. He was cruel. They both were. To each other, to animals, to people. Gala liked to adopt a pet rabbit and then make a show of having it served to her for lunch. In her later years, she spit at people when she didn't like what they said and put cigarettes out on their arms.

But she was cruelest to those closest to her. She abandoned her daughter and then stopped speaking to her entirely, refusing to see her even on her deathbed. Dali writes of having pushed a playmate off a bridge at the age of five and then going into a reverie. At six, he says he kicked his sister in the head, which gave him delirious joy. At 16, he threw himself down the stairs screaming to get attention and said he once kicked a blind man just to see what would happen. He claims that in his early 20s,

he once led a beggar woman all over Madrid before finally spending a hundred pesos on gardenias and then turning to give them to her. She was, he says, so stunned she was immobilized. So he walked on. When he turned back to look at her, she appeared to him as a little black mass with a white smudge in the middle. Was he sociopathically detached from the

suffering of others? Did he do these things? Was he as eccentric as a child as he would have us believe? Was he as cruel as he makes himself out to be? This is the same man who claimed to remember being in the womb. His sister and original muse, Ana Maria Dali, published four books to debunk his version of their childhood. They were already deeply at odds when she did this. She really didn't like Gala. But Dali was so mad that she had challenged his narrative, he painted a portrait of her being sodomized by flying phalluses to get his revenge. Well, it's not conclusive that the portrait is meant to be of her, but many art historians believe that it is, if only because the setting is a direct echo of an earlier portrait.

While her husband was busy building pornographic palaces, Gala was just as devoted to her own sexual pursuits. She began seducing young men very early in her marriage to Dali and continued into her 80s. It was no secret he blithely referred to himself as King of the Cuckolds. She had a nearly endless stream of these lovers, always young, usually compensated, occasionally resembling Dali in his early years. The word nymphomaniac bears the mark of the patriarchy, but it has been used to describe Gala more than once. Her sexual appetite is called monstrous by her own

biographer. But from whence this need derived, we can only guess. Was it pleasure-based or meant to provoke? Did she feel rejected by a husband who only liked to watch or liberated? She herself gives us no insight. Historians seem largely to have landed on vilifying her. Demonic dominatrix is the headline of one article about her. But it's hard not to wonder what really drove her. When she and Dali were falling in love that first summer in Caracas, he was a virgin who was terrified of sex. He says, I knew that I was approaching the great trial of my life. The closer the hour of sacrifice came, the less I dared think about it. He describes himself as dying of fear. He describes himself as dying of fear.

He began painting The Accommodation of Desires, in which the desires have terrorizing lion's heads. He said that Gala told him what she wanted from him, and he responded by reminding her that they promised not to hurt each other. Their negotiation about what he called getting the lovemaking over with sounds legitimately tortured, and couldn't have made much sense to Gala, who had been juggling multiple men for years. Finally, as Dali recalled the scene, Gala looked at him tearfully and said, If you won't do it, you promise not to tell anyone? Unlike some of Dali's more blatant embellishments, this bit of dialogue has the ring of truth. There's nothing particularly shocking or hallucinogenic about it. If it's authentic, it does seem to peel back the cover

a bit more on who Gala was and what she cared about. Clearly, sex held a lot of power for her, and when that power was threatened, she was wounded. In later years, this vulnerability was calloused over, and anyone who rejected her sexual advances could expect fury in response. When a teenaged Jimmy Ernst, the son of her former lover Max, turned down an offer of sex from the then middle-aged Gala, she was reportedly furious and called him a shit and a monster. By the 1960s, Dali was as established and wealthy as any artist could ever hope to be. Angala's influence in his world had slipped.

Embittered, she raged at his groupies, supporters, and sycophants. She largely exempted herself from his world, spending increasing amounts of time with her young lovers. She reportedly took up with a heroin addict she plucked off the street in Brooklyn when she was 67 and he was 24 and tried to help launch his career as an actor. There were others who she dumped

when she decided things had gotten too serious or that they were going to jeopardize Dolly's career or she simply got bored. She became addicted to gambling. She insisted on being paid in cash for Dolly's career, or she simply got bored. She became addicted to gambling. She insisted on being paid in cash for Dali's work, all the better to pay her lovers with, some said, and kept the money physically close to her, stuffing it inside her clothing to go through customs, or shoving it under her buttocks during negotiations. Sex, money, security, she would never have enough of any of it, even as the world laid it all at her feet. She worked her husband mercilessly at times, locking him in his studio

without food until he finished a piece. She struck legitimate and lucrative deals at the cost of his artistic integrity. He designed a corporate logo for a Spanish candy company and reportedly earned $50,000 to belch on camera in a Pepto-Bismol TV spot. She defrauded dealers and buyers by running off more than the printed number of certain limited editions. And finally, she had Dali sign hundreds of blank pieces of paper so she could hire forgers to fill in the rest. hundreds of blank pieces of paper so she could hire forgers to fill in the rest. Her final affair was a doozy. She fell in love hard, at first sight, with an actor named Jeff Fenhold, who was newly famous for starring in Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway. She was in her 80s by this point, and he was 22 with a wife and kid in New Jersey. In 1968, Dali bought Gala a castle in Spain.

To enhance the monarchical vibe, Dali said, She would reign like an absolute sovereign, right up to the point that I could visit her only by handwritten invitation from her. I limited myself to the pleasure of decorating her ceilings so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find me in her sky. But Jeff came and went as he pleased. There were no visitation rules for him.

Gala had her lawyers hand-deliver thousands of dollars to him, bought him a million-dollar house on Long Island, and invested in his budding music career. One day, Dali saw two of his own paintings being auctioned off at Christie's. Gala had given them to Jeff without Dali's knowledge. Dali became so angry that, according to biographer Tim McGurk, he beat Gala with his cane, breaking two of her ribs. She was 86. Gala and Dali were together until the end, though the end was not pretty. She controlled his medication, even as she lost her cognitive function.

And some think she may have been sedating him, and or dosing him with something that gave him Parkinson's-like symptoms. She had a broken leg at one point that may have been the result of his pushing her down the stairs. And when she finally died, he locked himself in the castle where she lay in the crypt he had designed for her, refusing to eat or see anyone. He almost died from malnutrition and never quite recovered from the loss. McGurk notes that while Dali painted Gala many, many times and spoke and wrote about her erotic allure, he never put any of that into the paintings. His images of her render her dumpy, severe,

grinning demonically, and drained of sensuality and humanity. Her back is her most sensual side. This woman, barely five feet tall and with eyes that could pierce walls, according to her first husband, does remain a bit of a cipher. We know everything about what she did, but almost nothing of how she felt. For a woman so well-documented, there is no record of her interiority. Was she running from a financially insecure childhood? Did she

crave the immortality that genius can confer? Or was she simply on an endless quest for physical satisfaction? Some talk of her need for money, others her thirst for power. An acquaintance said he was impressed by Gala's idea of life that every instant had to represent a revenge, a conquest, or an advantage. And she was clearly motivated, at least twice in her life, to run from her circumstances, once fleeing Russia to be with Paul Éloard, and then again in casting off the family she had created with him. Did Dali merge with her, or was she simply the perfect canvas onto which he could project his fantasy of a truly elegant woman? In his autobiography, he likens her to a stone temple. One single being has reached a plane of life whose image is comparable to the serene perfections of the Renaissance.

And this being happens precisely to be Gala, my wife, whom I had the miracle to choose. She is composed of those fleeting attitudes, of those Ninth Symphony-like facial expressions which, reflecting the architectonic contours of a perfect soul, become crystallized on the very shoreline of the flesh, at the skin's surface, in the sea foam of the hierarchies of her own life, and which, having been classified, clarified by the most delicate breezes of the sentiments, harden, are organized,

and become architecture in flesh and bone. Special thanks to Lauren Ramoso and Jose Arroyo for bringing Gala and Salvador Dali to life. I'd also like to thank Tavis Doucette, Stephen K. Amos, Nigel Daly, and Neve O'Brien for lending their voices to the story. And I'd like to thank my significant other for keeping his fantasies about throwing me off a cliff to himself.

Mostly. Join us tomorrow for a follow-up conversation with author Claire Dieterer, whose book Monsters examines the question, What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources, but most often I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles

which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about and you'd like to Thank you. dot com. History is filled with characters, and we tend to focus on just a few of them. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples. Our executive producers are Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Colin Anderson. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez, Rich Garcia, and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown. Research and fact-checking by Michael Waters and Hannah Sio. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, Jason Chalemi,

and Joanna Solitaroff. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista.