Salvador Dalí and Ultra Violet were often described as lovers by gossip writers and hacks who didn’t know Dalí did not have lovers.
Ultra Violet with Salvador Dalí.
The claim was even made by Anita Gates in the New York Times and Emmanuelle Jardonnet in Le Monde in their obituaries when Isabelle Collin Defresne died in 2014 at the age of 79.
Dalí, according to Dalí, only had sex twice, once with Lorca, the poet, possibly the only person he ever loved, which he found painful, and once with his wife, Gala, possibly the only person he ever feared, which he found unpleasant.
The arch illusionist and manipulator was a voyeur whose greatest pleasure came from what he liked to call the coup de grâce. Dalí would invite a young couple to his house of mystery and illusions in Port Lligat and feed them with the pink champagne the poison of praise and promises. He would persuade them to strip down to swim in his penis-shaped swimming pool, hint that lucky ones left his abode with a small painting, and urge them to make love on one of the sofas around the pool while he watched; his hand slipping up and down his walking cane in mock masturbation.
Ultra Violet Light
Salvador Dalí enjoyed the company of beautiful women and admired most Amanda Lear, a beautiful boy who became a beautiful woman. Women were props, camera fodder, agents of gossip and rumour, the oil of social intercourse. Dalí might arrive at a fiesta or an opening with a pair of ocelots or a baby hippopotamus, but a sexy young woman bearing lots of bare flesh served the same purpose and didn’t poo and pee on the sidewalk. Well, not often.
Just as Dalí fought hammer and sickle with his overbearing father, Isabelle Collin Dufresne rebelled against her posh religious family. She was moved from the Sacred Heart Convent with its strict nuns with moustaches and rough hands to a school for bad girls where she was exorcised at 15 and was struck by the light. The ceremony nourished the devil in her and she turned to the devil’s favourite pursuit: art. She studied at Le Sacré Cœur in Grenoble and turned up in 1954 at the age of 19 at Dalí’s door in Port Lligat.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I was expecting you.’
Isabelle Defresne became Dalí’s pupil, muse and sparring partner. She mixed paints, posed nude and fought in the trenches of surrealism. In 1963, she moved to New York and knocked on the door at The Factory.
Ultra Violet and Andy Warhol
‘Come in,’ said Andy Warhol. ‘I was expecting you.’
Actually, it wasn’t quite like that. Dalí introduced them at the Saint Regis Hotel. Isabelle adopted the name Ultra Violet at Warhol’s suggestion – it was the colour of her hair at the time – and played multiple roles in numerous films between 1965 and 1974 at the weird and wonderful Factory. Perhaps that should read the decadent and destructive Factory.
Ultra Violet appeared in Picasso’s surrealistic play ‘Desire Caught by the Tail,’ and starred in ‘The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez,’ shot in Mexico with Taylor Mead, who became her lover, as did Milos Forman, Nureyev and John Chamberlain. She played roles in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taking Off (1971, directed by Forman).
By her own admission she was an ‘unleashed exhibitionist chasing headlines’ and embodied Warhol’s famous dictum that ‘everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,’ which she borrowed to title her autobiography ‘Famous For 15 Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol,’ published in 1988 and translated into 17 languages.
After being dethroned at the Factory by Warhol’s lively new muse Viva, Ultra Violet drifted away from the Factory scene and concentrated on her own art. After 9/11, the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, she became obsessed with the Roman numerals IX and XI. ‘I’m a New Yorker and I’m an artist,’ she said. ‘I had to do something about 9/11, and the question was what to do, which is not simple. I have infinite imagination. Maybe I don’t have too much technique.’
oOo
While you are here, my book Sex, Surrealism, Dalí and Me, the Memoirs of Carlos Lozano,
is free on Amazon UK, US, Spain, etc.
Print and audible versions are also available.
Amazing what people will do in the pursuit of art.
I enjoyed the repetition of “Come in. I was expecting you.” Very interesting piece.
Thank you for this intriguing glimpse of Dali and Ultra Violet. I, too, was duped by the tour guides at Port Lligat into believing Dali was in love with his wife and didn’t even ponder too deeply the separate beds. It was only when my friend set us straight later and told us to read your book that I understood more about his relationship with women. Thanks for the link and the insight.
Amazing what religion can do to people…