STELLA SNEAD
I met Stella in 1967 or 1968. I was living (studying art) in England and for a time at the Dial House, the home of Paul Wengraf and his wife, Dada, and their kids Monica and Peter. Frequent visitor included Uti and Tommy, kids by earlier wives, and Romila, a remarkable Indian woman, who sometimes came for months at a time.
Paul had been a close friend of my mother’s father. Uti was a close friend of my mother’s. They were all originally from Vienna.
I was living in London in 1967, having left home and soon after, my country. I was studying and working. For some months I lived with the Wengrafs.
One day there was an unusual amount of excitement. I was asked to help ‘get Stella’s room ready’. Plans were made for an extra special meal, in a home where meals always received careful attention.
Stella arrived on a sunny day. When I first saw her, she was stretched out on a chaise wiggling her toes; the bright pink polish glittered in the sun. She laughed and talked easily. She was lively and conveyed a kind of freedom that spread throughout the big yard and the house, like flecks of gold leaf.
Paul Wengraf had put together a show of Stella’s work at his gallery on Old Bond Street: The Arcade Gallery, in the Burlington Arcade. This may have been Stella’s first show. It was a significant event. They (and Dada) had been close friends ever since.
The Wengrafs had an Abyssinian cat named Cepri. This cat was the second most remarkable cat I’ve ever met. The most remarkable was Pandolfo, of whom more later. Cepri would move from lap to lap around the table. We all sat around a large oval table, covered with Liberty lawn in a lively flower print. Near the head end a parrot in a cage made conversation a bit strenuous, particularly since Paul would sometimes address his remarks to the bird.
Stella sat at the other end, and made her affection for cats quite clear. Cepri would finally settle down with her, knowing who admired him most of all.
A few weeks later Stella invited me to join her on a boat in the Thames which had been converted into a bar. She introduced me to Campari. Twenty years later when Campari had a big ad campaign asking about ‘your first time’ I inevitably thought back to that day in London, trying not to let pop culture cheapen my memory.
After miscellaneous adventures in Spain, Morocco and North Carolina I moved to New York toward the end of1969. I went through transitions there such as becoming a street vendor after a thankless stint at an upper west side bakery. I studied with Martha Graham’s company and with Lee Strasberg (himself). I often worked till four in the morning selling jewelry; what ever it took to have money for the next day’s classes, food, and subway fare.
Dada wrote to me in 1971, telling me that Stella had taken an apartment near Lincoln Center. She had finally opted to leave her beloved Bombay. We saw one and other often, sometimes when Stella cooked Indian food for a group of friends, sometimes we’d go to a movie and an Indian meal. Sometimes we’d go for walks.
At some point during that same year I moved into the residential hotel near the corner of 54th and Broadway, the Bryant Hotel, with Bob Stone, He and Stella got along very well. He was a photographer himself. He and Stella found the classified ad for a grey cat, in the Village Voice, and Bob (I think by himself) went and picked up the cat. This cat was Pandolfo, who literally flew across the room, from the bookshelves to the cupboard; he was so rich in personality that he provided entertainment and became part of Stella’s circle of friends. Later Pandolfo, who often accompanied Stella on weekends at friend’ country homes, became the subject of a collection of photos with text, titled ‘Pandolfo, the Traveling Cat’.
In 1972 Stella flew into Luxembourg, where Bob and I met her with the car we had bought in Germany a few days earlier, and we toured around a bit and then went to London together. After that Bob and I moved to Boston (in many ways to my regret, if one is permitted such second guessing in the context of a life). Stella came to Boston the following year. We went shopping together and she bought a yellow jacket which became a mainstay of her wardrobe for a couple of decades. I mention this mundane fact because it always gave me pleasure to see it. Corroboration of ties to lovely, or extraordinary people has always helped me enjoy a ‘sense of specialness’. This may be a simple aspect of being human, or a reflection of my very own insecurities; I don’t know-it is a fact that I have observed about myself.
Bob and Stella and I journeyed to New Hampshire and Maine in the heart of winter. We saw (and they photographed) empty shoe factories and snow and ice configurations of all sorts. These factories, each like a small city, signified the enormous economic shifts that have occurred in the United States. Jobs come, jobs go, and with them comfort, security, ease and safety. That’s just the way it is, but it’s very moving, very operatic, to see the shadows of business, to see the relics of trades that do not matter anymore.
About a year after that I went to New York to stay with Stella and hide from pain. Bob and I had broken up. Stella not only welcomed me, she morphed into a protective mother bear; the degree to which it was as though Bob and she had never been friends, as though I could do no wrong, astonished me. The intensity and of her unequivocal loyalty, matched only by the unfairness of her vision, blinded by her devotion to me, were completely new in my experience. Interestingly, this one-sided expression of caring forced me out of my deepest victim mode, and after a week or so I stopped crying and huddling in the corner of the couch, and was ready to go on with life.
I didn’t move back to New York till 1978. When I did, my times with Stella took on patterns. We often met at the farmer’s market at 77th and Columbus on Sundays. Each of us would ride our bikes from our respective apartments. Then we’d go to her apartment for brunch.
I lived way up at 103rd off of Central Park West in a 5th floor walkup. Several times when I was sick, Stella would appear at the door with her bag of tricks: whisky, lemon and honey. Sometimes ginger as well.
During these years I wrote a lot of plays, directed and produced, and Stella was interested as far as my well being was concerned, but she never was particularly crazy about my work. Because she was quite blunt, perhaps, this never really bothered me.
Rahoul was producing gorgeous color prints. I think Stella admired him very much. And his work. I was always a little jealous of him, because Stella’s love for him was so completely unquestioning and rooted in commitment. So he enjoyed a level of security in the world of Stella that even I could not match. As time went by, Stella was sometimes snippy with me if I changed my mind about a plan; sometimes I was so busy I couldn’t show up, and she would be quite angry. I never saw this with Rahoul. Their relationship was truly in the realm of an ideal family tie.
When Rahoul was diagnosed with aids it was still early in the aids drama. Surely a cure would be forthcoming, any minute. There was still secrecy, fear of being fired, of being ostracized, all of that. Just having dealt with trying to keep my mother’s health intact, patching holes, as it were, watching in myself the gradual dominance of a state of panic, of frustration, of vivid helplessness: helplessness made flesh, I look back and understand more deeply some of the expressions I saw on Stella’s face. The loss of Rahoul was a blow unlike any other. Not only her hopes for him and her joy in his talent and in his joy, but her own ideas about her future were decimated. And Stella was close to Rahoul’s family; this was her godson, and this tie was to her family, the one she had chosen, and who had chosen her.
Other friends of Stella who frequented the Lincoln Towers atelier were Mura Dehn, who made a great impression on me. Her amazing movies of black dancers, doing real swing, and other stuff, were really wonderful. She was wonderful; a big woman who wore hats and carried herself with a nice mixture of a sense of purpose and joie de vivre. And Lillian, the poet who was a true friend, quiet, consistent, bright. And Kirin, Rahoul’s sister, who inherited as best she could, his role, his position in Stella’s life. There was Brendan, the very Irish, vivacious friend who accompanied her to many things, there were innumerable others, really, a stream of more or less interesting, exciting people.
One day Stella told me that she faced a big decision: she was debating whether to buy a Magritte, or a flat in London. As it turned out, she bought the flat, thinking it was time to spend more time in London. Her friend June was there, and Lucie Rie, and Hans, and Dada…Paul was dead by now. And England was, after all, where she was from. She ought to want to be there.
This kind of thinking never seems to work. The minute one drinks the elixir of the unctuous, the minute one seeks to align one’s behavior with what is deemed, or what one thinks is deemed, correct, the more the brittle eggshell of one’s psychic life is vulnerable, until one falls down, like Humpty Dumpty, and has to be put together again, and start all over again.
After this foray into British waters, Stella became more and more a diehard New Yorker. She saw things differently, in a subtle way. She and I began a project consisting of photos of me in strange places in our beloved city.
…….to be continued!
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