Tamar, our half-sister, also came down from San Francisco to be with us that summer of 1949. She was fourteen, blonde with pretty blue eyes, and seemed to me almost like a grown-up. She was beautiful, and I loved it when she came to play and live with us. She was our secret and trusted friend, and she knew much more about grown-ups than we did. She was smart, and would tell us stories, most of which I no longer remember.
But there was one incident with Tamar that I shall never forget. It was early afternoon on a hot summer day in August 1949. Tamar and I were sitting on the steps at the front of the Franklin House. I can still feel the soft breeze that came from the west and the smell of the eucalyptus trees that helped guard the entrance. Tamar and I were sitting side by side and she was smoking a cigarette like real grown-ups did. She asked me, "Do you want to try?" I did. She handed the lit Lucky Strike to me, and I held it for a moment, then put it to my mouth. And as I started to suck on it, I looked up and there was Father. He approached us with his black bag in hand, and he was not three feet away. There I was, holding the cigarette in my hand, frozen with fear. He looked down at us both, nodded his head, and simply said, "Steven, Tamar," and walked by. He had not seen me holding the cigarette. We both sat, stock-still and silent, as if making any sound would change our luck. When he was safely out of sight we looked at each other and burst out laughing at our good fortune. I threw down the cigarette, stomped on it, and we ran off to play.
Formal dinners were common for our family. We had a live-in maid and cook, and that night when Dad returned from his office we sat in a formal arrangement at the large table: Dad at the south end, the head of the table; Mother at the north; I to Dad's immediate right; my brothers across from me; and Tamar to my right. That night, we had just finished dessert, after the large four-course meal, when Father said, addressing us with his accustomed formality, "I have an announcement to make." He paused until all our heads were turned his way and the attention was undivided.
"It seems that Steven, who is not quite eight, has decided he wants to smoke," he continued. I looked anxiously at Tamar, realizing Father had indeed seen me holding her cigarette. Dad reached inside his jacket pocket and withdrew a cigar. "So," he said, "we are all going to sit here while Steven smokes this." fie slowly and ceremoniously unwrapped the large Havana that he usually enjoyed after dinners, cut off the end, carefully lit it so that the tip was a bright orange glow, and handed it to me in a cloud of exhaled smoke. All eyes at the table were locked on me as I took it from him and held it in my hand. He continued in a firm, hard tone, "Go ahead, Steven, smoke it." I fought back the tears as I looked at him, my hands now shaking, as his voice descended into a menacing, controlled anger: "Smoke it!"
I drew on the cigar and coughed loudly. Mother attempted to intervene: "George, I don't think —" He shot back at her, "No, we are all going to sit right here, all of us, until Steven finishes that cigar." There was silence around the table as I was made to take more drags of smoke. I was sick, turning green, and I was afraid of Father, but I tried to hide it. Dad, believing he had made his point, finally said to me, "Well, Steven, what do you think of smoking now?"
I tried to look directly at his face, but could not quite manage it as I responded, "That was good, Dad. Can I have another?" My brothers and sister laughed, he stared hard at me, then looked at them. "You are all excused from the table. Steven, I will see you in the basement in five minutes."
My brothers and I hated the basement. It was a place we never explored and kept out of our minds, because it was a place of punishment. The basement meant the razor strap, and the razor strap meant a searing pain until Father decided we'd had enough.
As noted, among my parents' closest friends during the war years and after were Man Ray and his wife, Juliet. Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia in 1890, was one of the world's leading surrealists. In his early twenties, influenced by the nineteenth-century avant-garde French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, he began drawing and painting. Also while still in his twenties, he became acquainted with the American poet William Carlos Williams, as well as artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the burgeoning New York Dada movement. He had a number of one-man shows in New York and became associated with American modernist painters.
In 1921 he went to France, where Marcel Duchamp introduced him to a number of Dadaists. In Paris, he began his photographic work, establishing himself as a portrait artist, photographing such important literary figures as the expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein, as well as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau summoned his friend Man Ray to the deathbed of Marcel Proust, to photograph and immortalize Proust's passing. His fame steadily increased and soon he was an established artist in the surrealist and Dada movements, each of which has its own relevance in the relationship between Man Ray and my father.
Surrealism, for example, stressed the subconscious and nonrational, principally through its representation of unexpected juxtapositions that defy reality. The Dadaists also stressed the incongruity of artistic representation, while at the same time challenging convention and traditional morality.
Along with their mutual passion for France, its people and language, my father shared with Man Ray an interest in the life and work of the Marquis de Sade. During the mid-1930s, Man Ray devoted six or eight paintings and sculptures to the notorious French writer and debauchee, whom he called his "inspiration." During his twenty years in Paris, Man Ray read and studied all of Sade's erotic writings, and through his personal interpretation of the man, the artist represented him as an example of "one of the world's freest of thinkers." Man Ray worshiped what he believed was Sade's complete freedom from convention, from the morals society imposes, and even from the constraints of literary taste. It is believed that while in Paris in the early 1920s, Man Ray was asked to photograph, for preservation purposes, a rare original handwritten manuscript by Sade entitled The 120 Days of Sodom, which had been discovered in the French government's archives at the turn of the century.
Man Ray's fame increased as his camera lens continued to capture many of the world's rich and famous personalities, including Virginia Woolf, Henri Matisse, Coco Chanel, Henry Miller, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. Portraits, however, while a nice source of income, were not really what Man Ray claimed to be about. He was an artist, a very special artist. But now, with the shadow of war lengthening across Europe, he felt it was time to go home.
After his successful one-man show in Los Angeles in 1935, Man Ray decided to settle in L.A. Perhaps he was also attracted to the home of the film industry because he had experimented in filmmaking in Paris. He arrived in Hollywood in November 1940. His artistic return was not auspicious. In 1941, he had a museum show in L.A. that was not well received. The Los Angeles Times's art critic, H. Millier, in a review of Man Ray's painting entitled Imaginary Portrait of D.A.F. de Sade in the April edition of Art Digest, equated the subject matter to "crime and torture magazines."
Man Ray's reverence for Sade is documented again and again throughout his works. A 1933 silver-print photograph entitled Monument à D.A.F. de Sade depicts a woman's buttock framed within an inverted cross, an obvious reference to Sade's preference for sodomy and his utter disdain for the church.