| 98 Million Dollars! |
Margaret Hooks has written a brief life of the British eccentric and artist who created a surrealistic pavilion in the middle of a Mexican jungle, and did it all with his own money, taking not a drop of public funds. The irony is that today, James dead and his money long ago piddled away, huge impersonal foundations are being asked to underwrite preservation of crumbling, delapidated Las Pozas. The next quarter of a century will tell the tale, as any recent visitor will inform you. Hooks has been there many times, and she stresses the luxury of a visit, but the ordinary backpack traveler can find his or her own way there too, for the area was paved in the 1960s and you don't need an SUV any more to chop your way through the underbrush.
When constructing the folly, Edward James asked the proud Indian workers to strip off their clothes and work naked for him. His Caucasian secretaries were sometimes also asked to type in the nude. Joe LeSueur, once the boyfriend of the US poet Frank O'Hara, remembered the intimate side of Edward James, who took his sensible reluctance to "drink the water" to bizarre Howard Hughes like extremes. Once he watched James wash his hands 38 times within an hour. He kept his pencils plunged into a bar of soft soap to keep them "clean" and had his paper clips parboiled before re-using them.
He had relationships with women, including a stormy marriage to the notorious Austrian dancer Tilly Losch (DUEL IN THE SUN), and spent millions of dollars expanding her career, even hiring George Balanchine to create dances for her. He also had something of a crush on the actress Ruth Ford, lavished money on her as well. Hooks seems ambivalent about James' putative homosexuality, which is the first thing people noticed about him (even Losch married him assuming it was to be a marriage of convenience, and was appalled when he tried having sex with her). Hooks' brief book, no longer than one of those old William Shawn-era New Yorker articles, is written in a peculiar style, almost as if for children, and you probably have not in a long time read a biography with so many exclamation points in it. These punctuation marks appear whenever somethins especially startling happens to Edward James, which believe me, is pretty often, for he is the one who thought of the famous Surrealist "lobster telephone," and he made his own bedsheets carved out of wood, so that when you laid down on them, they were hard and stiff.
He had Tilly Losch's bare feet immortalized in a carpet that climbed the stairs, and later, when their marriage was over, he did the same thing with an Irish wolfhound. He built portholes for windows and installed a fish tank behind them, so you would think you were in a sinking ship. In Las Pozas he built an eighteen-foot tall human hand which is still there, crumbling and needing government assistance. He wrote upwards of thirty books and published all but one of them on his own private press.
The book is grandly illustrated with plenty of color closeups of the different weird things James built in Mexico. Edward James was about as deep as a square of pink satin, but he did know how to spend money like ouzo and that's always fun to read about. |
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