Wild sex, mad antics and even crazier art — Salvador Dali was the real deal
WHEN superstar singer Cher found a fish-shaped object at Salvador Dali’s New York apartment, she could be forgiven for assuming it was one of his surreal works of art.
After all, this was a man who had painted floppy clocks and designed a telephone with a lobster as a receiver.
But the eccentric artist, who is being played by Sir Ben Kingsley in new biopic Dali Land, startled Cher by revealing it was a sex toy — and telling her exactly what she could do with it.
Recalling arriving at the penthouse Dali shared with his wife Gala, the singer said: “People were in different stages of undress, but mostly dressed.
“So I have my hand on the chair and I see something in the crack, and it’s a beautiful, painted rubber fish. Just fabulous.
“It has this little remote-control handset, and I’m playing with it, and the tail is going back and forth, and I’m thinking it’s a child’s toy.”
An artistic genius, Dali was as brash and bizarre in person as anything he committed to canvas.
He liked to watch, pleasuring himself, as Gala was ravished by young lovers.
Dali insisted the waxed tips of his moustache were actually antennas for contacting aliens.
He once shackled his pet ocelot — a striped American wildcat — to a Manhattan restaurant table in front of wide-eyed diners.
And he boasted: “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs.”
Now the artist, who died in 1989 aged 84, is being given the Hollywood treatment in a new movie being filmed on the windswept Anglesey coast in Wales.
With twirled moustache and straggly, shoulder-length hair, Oscar-winning actor Sir Ben is a spit for the art legend.
Quite a transformation for the man who played pious Gandhi in 1982 as well as snarling gangster Don Logan in 2000’s Sexy Beast.
Dali Land will be told through the eyes of young gallery assistant James, played by London-born Frank Dillane, who starred as Tom Riddle in 2009 film Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince.
James is excited to help one of the world’s most famous artists prepare for a big New York show.
But instead, he finds himself becoming immersed in Dali’s distinctly unconventional world.
The artist’s sex-obsessed muse, Gala, will be played by Lesley Manville, who is about to star as Princess Margaret in the next series of Netflix hit The Crown.
Born into a middle-class family in the Spanish town of Figueres in 1904, Dali, whose father was a lawyer, believed he was a reincarnation of his 22-month-old brother, also called Salvador.
He had died nine months previously.
Dali said of him: “We resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections.”
The artist had sadomasochistic tendencies and as a young child would enjoy throwing himself down the stairs, explaining: “The pain was insignificant, the pleasure was immense.”
His introduction to sex was a medical book left out by his authoritarian father, which showed graphic photos of women who were suffering from gruesome sexually transmitted diseases.
He developed a fear of both castration and female genitalia.
Dali was still a 25-year-old virgin when he met Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, known as Gala, in 1929.
The “dragon-like” Russian — 11 years his senior — was cruel and calculating as well as partial to group sex.
They married and she became his agent, turning him into a superstar.
With a loan from fellow artist Picasso, Dali made his first trip to the US in 1934 with Gala.
Arriving by ship in New York, he unveiled for reporters a nude painting of Gala with lamb chops on her shoulder.
Asked about the chops, he replied: “Very simple. I love her and I love lamb chops. Here they are together. Perfect harmony.”
A few days later, he conducted a lecture while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet.
He explained: “The better to descend into the depths of the subconscious.”
At another lecture he told the audience: “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”
Perhaps not. But he was certainly eccentric — and not lacking in confidence.
He once said: “Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure — that of being Salvador Dali.”
At a fancy dress ball thrown by heiress Caresse Crosby, the inventor of the modern bra, Dali and Gala surpassed themselves.
He wore a glass case on his chest containing a bra and she came as a woman giving birth through her head.
Brash New York fell in love with the surreal Spaniard, and he and Gala would winter there every year for 40 years. They stayed in a suite at the St Regis hotel on East 55th Street.
In 2008, Scott Geraghty, general manager of the hotel, said of the parties Dali threw: “He would hire models, and he would put them in extremely low-backed dresses and he would paint them.
“They would stroll through the room and their purpose was to be living art. He did strange things.”
There were complaints when Dali paraded around the hotel with a bear on a chain.
Dali would become a fixture of the New York party scene, befriending fellow artist Andy Warhol, Beatle George Harrison and actor Kirk Douglas.
And he was not one for living the life of an impoverished artist.
When at dinner he would sketch on the back of the cheque, knowing a restaurant boss would not cash it with a Dali original on the reverse side.
Dali would prepare for a big night out by shaving his armpits until they bled, splattering himself with perfume that smelled of goat dung and placing a red geranium behind his ear.
While he was an obsessive about watching others have sex, he did not like to be touched himself.
He was obsessed with humiliating his friends, tricking them into stripping naked by suggesting he would paint them.
Dali was fascinated with faeces, and once wrote that Adolf Hitler “turned me on”.
He was also accused of cruelty and selfishness, with writer George Orwell labelling him “a disgusting human being”.
Dali would actively encourage Gala to take other lovers and she was always on the lookout for young men.
Dame Edna Everage star Barry Humphries remembers running into the couple at the Gotham Book Mart in New York in the 1960s.
Barry, then 29, told how 69-year-old Gala “began to stroke my none-too-lustrous hair and proposed that we all go back to the St Regis Hotel immediately”.
Knowing her reputation as a sexual predator, Barry was “a little apprehensive” but took up the invitation.
To his surprise, once in the suite, Gala began hacking away at his hair with a pair of scissors.
When Dali and Gala began arguing, he took his chance to slip out of the room without being noticed.
Later, Dali would become more and more jealous of Gala’s young lovers, who she would lavish with his money.
He once beat her so severely that he broke two of her ribs.
Gala would give him large doses of Valium and other drugs to calm him down — and they nearly killed him.
In 1980, aged 76, Dali’s health deteriorated.
He retired after suffering from depression and having a severe tremor in his right arm.
Gala died in 1982, aged 87.
She was having an affair with a 22-year-old actor at the time.
Dali went into severe decline following her death.
No comments: