CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “La Musique”
A stunningly handsome poet had set Mitchell family life on edge. The story is long and complex, and it must have been hazy to Joan. In that era, what was private was private, and adults did not confide in their children. But having witnessed certain scenes and half understood certain phrases, she was at least aware that her mother too had a secret life.
Marion Strobel Mitchell had met George Dillon in 1925, a few months after Joan’s birth, when the University of Chicago junior took a summer job at Poetry and so impressed Harriet Monroe that she published his work, awarded him the Young Poet’s Prize, assigned him the review of Marion’s first book (which he praised), and coaxed him into the associate editorship when Marion resigned. Mentoring her inexperienced successor was reason enough for Marion’s frequent lunch meetings with George, whose Persian lamb hair, silent film star eyes, full lips, soft jaw, and lean swimmer’s body—not to mention his sensitivity, nervousness, and impeccable southern gentleman’s manners—roused her every girlish and maternal instinct. (George was twelve years her junior, and she fourteen years younger than her own grayed husband.) For giggles, as Marion put it, the two poets collaborated on a play, but George poured his real writing energies into the lyric poetry published by Viking in 1927 as Boy in the Wind, widely acclaimed by critics as the year’s best first book of verse.
Poet George Dillon a few years after he met Marion Strobel, 1930 (Illustration credit 3.1)
In the fall of 1928, Dillon was tapped to introduce legendary poet Edna St. Vincent Millay at a University of Chicago reading that he had helped to arrange. A tiny, incandescent figure in lustrous black silk, which dramatized her milky skin and burnished copper hair, Millay sent chills up and down listeners’ spines with her melodious voice and lyrical verse. At a party afterward, she and George (fourteen years younger than Millay) felt the first stirrings of the deep passion to which they fell prey. Believing that routine and convention gnawed away at his wife’s genius, her husband, Eugen Boissevain—a charmer, a fixer, her rock—indulged Edna’s secret affair and understood when to make himself scarce. Marion, of course, knew all.
The Boissevains were soon reensconced at their farm in upstate New York, and the lovers saw each other infrequently, though passionate letters and sonnets flew between them. Then in 1932, the same year Marion and Jimmie celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary, George won the Guggenheim that would buy him an interlude with Vincent in Paris. No sooner had he departed Chicago than word shot over the wires that his second book, The Flowering Stone, had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He was the youngest person ever to receive it. A card postmarked Le Havre landed on Harriet Monroe’s desk: “I’m having the time of my life!”
Glamorous author Marion Strobel Mitchell, c. 1931 (Illustration credit 3.2)
For Marion, in contrast, the early 1930s were painful, both personally and professionally. Slotted as a Chicago poet, she struggled for wider recognition, yet her career had stalled. Editors and anthologizers were passing on her verse, producers rejecting her plays, and reviewers knocking her novels (rightly so: peopled with socialites, sycophants, and cads, Marion’s fiction is airless and unconvincing). Moreover, a new round of health problems arrived on the heels of the publication of her third novel. One summer day she was rushed to a Lake Forest hospital for surgery to remove infected mastoid air cells behind the ears, a condition today treated with antibiotics. She lost most of her hearing, already so impaired by childhood mastoiditis that she had tried lip-reading lessons. Up and about but “feeble as a rag,” she crawled back to the hospital only a week later when Joan needed an emergency tonsillectomy. (Barely out of surgery, the obstreperous child kicked up a fuss over the coarseness of the hospital sheets and the odd taste of the junket served for dessert.)
Grappling with near deafness, Marion nonetheless threw on her pearls, tested an ear trumpet and a hearing aid, and, with a brisk “I don’t like mentioning my no-good ears … the darn things,” returned to an active life. Joan, on the other hand, experienced panic-button alarm over her mother’s hearing loss and couldn’t stop brooding about “what kind of silence must be inside a deaf person.” Characteristically, she pictured that silence as landscape: cold and vast January fields, icy blue shadowed crystalline drifts, twisting tourniquets of white.
A similar stillness pervades the second stanza of “Autumn,” a lyric poem Joan wrote when she was ten and whose ending she would remember (more or less accurately) all her life: “Bleakness, through the trees and bushes, / Comes without sound.” And “that eerie line, its mood of grieving silence—that shivering of landscape,” wrote Washington Post art critic Paul Richard in his 1988 review of her traveling retrospective, “still haunts her abstract art.”
Growing up in a home where famous poets read in the living room and volumes of Dickinson, Donne, MacLeish, Frost, Millay, Thomas, Yeats, and Eliot abounded, Joan not only wrote poetry—“a perfectly normal way to express oneself,” she felt, “perfectly clear”—but read it nonstop. Like her mother, she had settled upon T. S. Eliot as her favorite poet. Marion once compared reading Eliot’s Poems to ascending a mountain with much “perilous leaping from crag to crag” and pointed out that Eliot required “a dictionary, an encyclopedia, an imagination, and a martyr’s spirit.” While she did not discount the difficulties of the great poet’s work, her daughter, in contrast, saw little need to wrestle meaning out of a “Prufrock” or “Hippopotamus.”
Indeed, for Joan, poetry had to do with treasuring sounds (or rather sound-colors), interlacing nature and self, and experiencing language as resonant, vital, and pure. She had learned from her mother that in a good poem each word is “weighed and balanced and each phrase suggestive of so much more than appears on the surface.”
Thus, when Joan wrote in “Autumn” of fields “matted with suntanned stalks,” she would have been acutely aware of “stalks,” with its ruddy s throwing light upon its yellow-greenish t, dry and angled like l and k (whose glottal crunch seized up the throat). The word would also have conjured up pictures: a spent October cornfield perhaps, half-broken shafts, a haughty hunter in pursuit of his prey. And her poem’s last line—“Comes without sound”—may have brought a frisson of fear for its “sound” as well as its silence. In one Strobel novel, a character asks, “Have you ever thought of the words that frightened you as a child?” Yes, comes the reply—surely Joan’s—the word “sound,” for its ow, a cry of pain.
The rusty leaves crunch and crackle,
Blue haze hangs from the dimmed sky,
The fields are matted with sun-tanned stalks—
Wind rushes by.
The last red berries hang from the thorn-tree,
The last red leaves fall to the ground.
Bleakness, through the trees and bushes,
Comes without sound.
The next morning Marion fired off a note to Harriet Monroe:
Dear H.M.—My infant Joan (aged ten) wrote this last night and I—with five years’ experience as associate editor of THE magazine of verse—thought it good, in fact I still do! WHAT the hell—it IS good—and if you don’t think so, Lady, lady, I’ll be ready to cut you into small quarters and feed you to the Bandy-Bandy.
With tentative love—ST.
Incidentally the infant does not know I’m sending this to you so the murder is to be between us if there is one.
The publication of “Autumn” in the December 1935 issue of Poetry earned Joan a modest place in the magazine’s annals as the second-youngest writer ever published and brought a generous fan letter from Dillon, who was now freelancing as an advertising copywriter in New York. Joan replied,
I got your letter and I liked it very much. I am glad you liked my poem. I have read some of your poems too. I loved “Fall of Stars” in “A Boy in the Wind.” The line … “The air like a great glittering tree, bloomed noiselessly with light” was one of my favorites. “Toe Ballet” reminds me of the Ballet Russe that I saw just a little while ago. Thank you for writing to me.
Love, Joan Mitchell
For Marion, the publication of her daughter’s poem that December raised the curtain on a singularly eventful year. In April 1936, Charles Louis Strobel died, leaving her heiress to two-thirds of his $500,000 fortune. Days later, she won the coveted Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Poetry. September saw the devastating loss of her mother figure, too, when Harriet Monroe, traveling in South America, succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage. Before departing Chicago, Monroe had judged submissions to the prestigious new Oscar Blumenthal Prize and selected as its winner a group of nine lyrics by Marion Strobel—“splendid” work, raved one of her colleagues, “by far the best she has ever done … as though she had started in all over again on a larger scale.” From this pinnacle of distinction, Marion established the Harriet Monroe Prize for Poetry, naming George Dillon the sole permanent member of its panel of judges.
The “bridge money” brought a flurry of partying to 190 East Chestnut Street, where the Mitchells served up dry martinis, thick steaks, juicy gossip, and readings by poets like Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, Louise Bogan, May Sarton, and George Dillon. The Poetry crowd, the Gold Coast culturati, Jimmie’s colleagues, and a handful of University of Chicago people counted among their well-heeled guests. Regulars included writer Dorothy Aldis and her husband Graham; poet and teacher Gladys Campbell; Chicago Daily Tribune literary critic Fanny Butcher Bokum; writer and philanthropist Inez Cunningham Stark (the angel of the Renaissance Society); novelist and dandy Arthur Meeker; poet and editor Morton Zabel; socialite “Bobsy” Goodspeed (the president of the Arts Club) and her husband Charles, a Republican stalwart; Alice Roullier (another Arts Club powerhouse and friend to artists like Alexander Calder and Fernand Léger); future Arts Club president Rue Winterbotham Shaw; and Janet and Robert McCormick Adams, who was running for Congress that year on the Republican ticket.
One of their visitors—an avuncular type with a big forehead, owlish glasses, and a lively expression—took particular notice of Sally and Joan. An adviser to Poetry and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago (hence, he joked, the bottles of Teacher’s Highland Cream he brought as hostess gifts), Thornton Wilder, the author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, would amble down the hall to read them bedtime stories.
When there were no guests, Jimmie liked to quip, “Now we are having dinner in the best society.”
That June, the Mitchells decamped as usual to Lake Forest, but now they rented a tree-canopied Italianate villa with eight bedrooms, a playroom, a darkroom, a bar, a lush garden, and the oleomargarine king for a next-door neighbor. From that same home the following summer, Marion prepared for the family’s three-week August vacation at the Hot Foot Dude Ranch in Wyoming as she launched the next phase of her one-woman crusade to lure George back to Chicago. His affair with Millay having nearly exhausted itself, Dillon had inexplicably shrunk back from full-blooded, self-assertive living. “Let loneliness be mute. Accuse / Only the wind for what you lose,” he wrote, sounding old before he turned thirty. Millay’s brother-in-law, painter Charles Ellis, was not alone in finding George “weak, queer as a three-dollar bill.… He was a handsome boy, a very good-looking boy. But weak all the way through.” Suffering from acute writer’s block, George speculated that returning to Chicago might jolt him into working again.
In a drumbeat of letters, Marion now urged him to make use of their apartment during an upcoming visit to evaluate his prospects. He demurred, but she insisted:
NOTHING is pleasanter than being of use without having to go to any trouble, so I most certainly shall not reconsider my offer. I’m delighted. I’ll be perfectly honest about the whole matter—it’s the only way to be after all—and tell you exactly when I wish you to leave, which will be about Sept 1st (possibly August 27th) when the decorators come in and would calcimine you if you didn’t. Till then the place is yours. I won’t even unshroud it. Take either Jimmie’s bed or mine (Mine’s best, I think). Oh, really, it’s all so simple and so nice and I can’t wait to see you.
Love, Marion
The Ford can rest under an elm outside the door. I do appreciate your offer but please don’t make it with Joanie around or she’d probably try to drive your Ford at once and I should worry more than I do already.
George’s sojourn at 190 East Chestnut that summer brought leisurely lunches tête-à-tête with Marion during her weekly excursions to the city.
Working from another angle, she had also set her fine hand to easing Morton Zabel out of the editorship of Poetry, which he had assumed after Monroe’s death, and persuading the trustees to replace him with her young protégé. After Zabel resigned that fall to pursue a teaching career, Marion jubilantly dashed off to Adah Dillon in Richmond, Virginia, the news that her son had sewed up the job that would bring him to “his full stature.” As a witty rejoinder to Adah’s observation that she was George’s lamp, Marion quipped—alluding to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous line, “My candle burns at both ends”—“if I find I’m unequal to a lamp I’ll try to be a candle (burning only at one end however).”
With his wife fawning over Dillon and running the show financially and certain people whispering that he owed his professional success to her social status, Jimmie was feeling jealous and emasculated. Moreover, though publicly deferential, Marion was often privately disparaging. And the two fought over sex, Jimmie demanding it, Marion refusing. In the language of the day, she was frigid. (A self-appointed authority on the male sex drive, Jimmie had once entered into discussions with publisher John Farrar about writing a sex guide for men. The book never materialized, however.)
So Jimmie held on to family authority by riding herd on his daughters. The two were expected to not only compete like boys but also, confusingly, behave like little ladies. Sally, to her credit, dressed immaculately. Joan did not, though she sometimes changed outfits several times a day in order to please her father. As time went on, rules multiplied. Elbows had to be covered. Mosquito bites were not to be scratched: a lady never touches her own body. And discipline was stern. Once Jimmie punished Joan by tying her to her bed, yet she worshipped him all the more. In fact, the Oedipal moment played itself out with such force that when Parker’s psychology teacher, Alfred Adler, came for dinner he noted that Marion was “practically jealous—as if Joan had been in a, um, love affair with her father.” Erasing Sally’s presence during their many excursions with Paw, the ever-competitive Joan would rattle on about “my father and I …,” “my father and I …,” “my father and I …”
In thinking back to this era decades later, Joan identified primarily with her mother, caught in a mesh of conflicting feelings. But for now Marion took second place to Jimmie, whom Joan tried to protect when her mother made lofty remarks, even as the girl secretly wondered how much respect her father deserved. At the same time she learned to disdain men’s weaknesses, to play off one against the other, and to lapse, now and again, into bitter and exaggerated submissiveness. “You do what the man wants, don’t you, sweets?” the sixty-six-year-old veteran of more battles with male partners than she could remember once mordantly minced to an interviewer.
A late-life letter from Joan to Sally suggests how early family dynamics had fueled her rage:
Do you remember … that Paw made us afraid (we were not supposed to be like females) candy was for women and children—elbows—oh horror—moitié cachée moitié pardonnée (half hidden-half pardoned)—meaning us—poor slobs. Well I realize you idealized him but really I was supposed “to run like a boy”—“had no hips”—beautiful etc. and [later] liked to fuck unlike our Mother. I wish he had been stronger. Well who wants to be rammed when one is sick? One can jerk off—no?
Relentlessly faultfinding—Sally was too heavy, Joan too scrawny (“no hips”)—Jimmie photographed his daughters primping at the bathroom mirror or modeling their gowns before a club dance. His sometimes devastatingly negative comments about Joan’s efforts to make herself attractive sealed her conviction that she was ugly. When he turned around and called her beautiful, she felt condescended to, hence her overreaction, years later, to a casual comment by writer and photographer John Gruen at a Thanksgiving party in New York: “And then [after dinner],” remembers Gruen,
as was the custom among the young New York painters [of the early 1950s], there would be a lot of dancing, and we would put on recordings of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and we would dance. And I recall being mellowed probably by drink and being, what?, twenty-four years old, asking Joan to dance with me. And she did. She was a good dancer. We danced quietly. I was the more sophisticated dancer, so I would glide … and she was in my arms. And we glided. And she was pleasantly high, I guess. The only really poignant thing I remember about her is that during our dancing she had her eyes sort of half closed, and we were dancing to a slow beat. A slow piece of music. And her eyes were half closed, and her head was very back. And at this moment she looked wonderful … and I said, “Joan, you look beautiful!” I said that to her. I remember that vividly. And she suddenly opened her eyes wide, stopped, stopped dancing, left my arms, and walked into the next room. “Oh, my God! What have I done? Now what?” Because she was so unpredictable. So, in fact, I followed her into the bedroom. And she sat down where all the coats were. On a mountain of coats. And she sat there at the edge of the bed looking down. And I said, “What is your problem?” She said, “First of all, I’m not beautiful.” And I said, “Well, you seemed beautiful at that moment.” She said, “Well, that was your imagination. I am not and don’t say that to me ever again.” And I said, “OK.” And then she said, “And fuck you too.”
Tears spilled from Joan’s eyes. She refused to speak to Gruen for the rest of the night.
As for George Dillon, he edited Poetry until his induction into the armed forces in 1942, the same year the Mitchells celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary. As he was wrapping up his affairs in Chicago, Marion penned for him the poignant “Bon Voyage,” its long floating lines powerfully stopped short at each stanza’s end:
That you take yourself overseas, who have taken
Love from my heart, who were never my lover—
The cry of love to which I awaken,
The dream of love which my eyelids cover—
That you take yourself overseas shouldn’t grieve me:
What can I lose who have nothing to lose?
I knew, for me, you were gone: that you leave me
Isn’t news.
I knew long ago though at many a meeting,
In the place where the yellow awning obscures
A table at which one loiters at eating
The vivid face in the shadows was yours.
That your boat blurs out from a widening harbour
Shouldn’t alter the sky from the blue that it was,
Shouldn’t strip the green from an April arbor,
As it does.
After the war, George and Marion coedited Poetry until 1949, when George quit Chicago for his native South. Once among the most promising voices of his generation, he had never published another book of verse, nor had he married. For the next seventeen years, letters packed literary gossip between the grand apartment in Chicago and the modest bungalow in Charleston, even as the two soulmates grew old and stodgy and sad. Both literary reputations had tumbled (as had that of Edna St. Vincent Millay, albeit from much greater heights), passions on all sides had flamed out (Millay died in 1950), and the Mitchells’ marriage had survived. For their wedding anniversary in 1947, Marion had written “To James,” a wry poetic self-congratulation at the “long and lovely thought of five-and-twenty years all lit by flames / Five-and-twenty years in one four-poster, Here’s to James.” Jimmie treasured her gift as he did his 1933 award naming him Chicago’s “best progressive father of the year.”
Besides writing poetry, twelve-year-old Joan had begun drawing upon her prodigious powers of observation and recollection in prose vignettes with an American Scene flavor. “The Inn” was among those published in Parker’s literary annual:
The day was hot and sultry and the smell of fish hung heavily around a small inn with a meandering river beyond … The sound of a motor disturbed the stillness, followed by the grating of wheels stopping on the gravel road. A hard looking woman stepped upon the well worn doorstep. She had a great deal of make up on and had her hair slicked back from her forehead with Brilliantine. Her eyebrows were plucked and she wore French heels. A very cheap fancy dress adorned her slim figure and a small hat was perched on the back of her head. Her heels clicked over the unpolished floor and her gleaming ruby nails clicked impatiently on the counter … [This provincial Mae West then bought some soda-pop and gum from a testy old clerk.] When she had finished the Coca-Cola, she tore open the package of gum and popped a piece into her mouth and chewed on it savagely. She clambered into her car and drove quickly onto the road.
Never a good storyteller, Joan nonetheless excelled at the kind of visual language that also enlivens her “Street Scene,” in which Chicago businessmen with “beet red noses”—literary versions of the characters in Jimmie’s sketches—stride through the Loop in snow-dusted coats and “tall apartment houses were leaning forward and almost touching the others across the street, there was such a narrow ribbon of sky between.”
Marion beamed at her daughter’s most recent accomplishments, while, curiously, Jimmie expressed concern. Though he was a Renaissance man himself, he again wielded the old saw “Jack of all trades, master of none,” warning his wunderkind that one did not “diddle with things” and instructing her to choose between writing and painting. Behaviorist John B. Watson saw “no reason why a boy shouldn’t pick out his career at the age of 12 or earlier,” and so should Joan.
Hit with this paternal fiat to decide upon her life’s work, Joan felt “pressure to become, quote, a professional.” “I’ve got to be something,” she fretted. “What is it? It’s going to be either painting or writing, and it can’t be both. I mean, Jack of all trades, master of none.” So it was painting. But Jimmie retorted, “You can’t draw! How can you be an artist? You can’t draw!”
Such peremptoriness would turn many twelve-year-olds into self-pitiers or rebels, but not Joan; nor did she later drift from painting into something else but lived the rest of her life by the decision her father demanded. He was talking career, however, and, to Joan, painting as a career would sometimes seem a bust: “a solitary arrangement and without the chicken in the pot at the end of the day—queer kind of life.” On the other hand, painting as a way of being would prove indispensable. It beguiled her, solaced her, and literally kept her alive.
Joan had made her decision against the backdrop of Chicago art of the Depression era, an undigested mix of towering ambition, complacent sentimentalism, Francophilia, provincialism, North Side salons, South Side saloons, eccentric individualism, and WPA politics. At the School of the Art Institute, the Regionalism of Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton—a vigorous rendition of rural life larded with nostalgia for a simpler past—served as the house style. Egalitarian in both its subject matter and its easy appeal, Regionalism proved immensely popular too with Chicago audiences. Meanwhile, the city’s most powerful critic, Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Daily Tribune, an acquaintance of Marion’s since their Chicago Latin days, was dismissing not only Regionalist painting and other vital work emerging from local studios but also European modernism. An agriculture major in college who owed her job to the fact that she was the cousin of the Tribune’s publisher, Jewett waxed poetic over the beauty of academic art while labeling van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne “brutal, primitive, and childish.” On the day they hung her in effigy, School of the Art Institute students brandished signs reading “Nervous Hysteria Is Not Art Criticism.”
More than its artists and critics, its great art was the major advantage of growing up in Chicago rather than, say, Bismarck or Peoria. In 1933, the Art Institute had presented the Century of Progress Exhibition, a seven-century chronology that filled forty-one galleries and, for the first time, admitted the School of Paris to its narrative of art history. Picasso and Duchamp in the Grand Staircase, no less! Even more consequential to Joan was the first major U.S. exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh, which opened at the Art Institute in August 1936. As intoxicated by van Gogh’s colors as he had been by the colors of the South of France, she lit into her first serious oil paintings—“violent” pictures. “All those reds and yellows!”
If the Art Institute was cautiously moving in the direction of European modernism, the Renaissance Society and the Arts Club regularly presented dazzling and controversial vanguard art. Founded in 1915, the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society had remained true to its mission of encouraging and promoting understanding of the avant-garde. As for the Arts Club, it had transcended its original swank tea-party style to focus on literature, drama, dance, painting, film, and sculpture unavailable elsewhere in Chicago. Buckminster Fuller lectured on Dymaxion design, Léger presented his Ballet mécanique, Martha Graham danced, and the work of Braque, Calder, Hartley, Chagall, Noguchi, Dalí, Picasso, and Gorky made its debut in the Midwest or, in some cases, the United States.
Joan was no stranger to either venue. At the Arts Club she would be powerfully impressed by Picasso’s Guernica, which was touring the United States to raise funds for Spanish Civil War refugees. (Two years before viewing this impassioned response to the Fascist bombing of a Basque village, Joan had written a compassionate short story about the final hours of a Chinese orphan killed in the savage Japanese bombing of Shanghai.) She was no less overwhelmed by the abstract sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, shown at the University of Chicago’s Goodspeed Hall.
Occasionally Joan and Marion walked up Michigan Avenue from the Arts Club’s Wrigley Building quarters to Chicago’s third venue for modern art, the Katharine Kuh Gallery, electric with the work of Klee, Kandinsky, Léger, Nolde, Tamayo, Le Corbusier, Noguchi, Albers, Picasso, and Miró (whom the Tribune’s Eleanor Jewett once accused of framing and exhibiting a used desk blotter). A one-woman outpost of advanced art, the Kuh Gallery fought at the front lines of Chicago’s battle over modernism: philistines smashed its windows, and the Society for Sanity in Art (founded by clubwoman Josephine Logan, with Jewett’s endorsement, to combat “the menace” of abstraction) kept the gallery in its crosshairs. From a distance, Joan worshipped Kuh, a polio survivor, recent divorcée, and fiercely independent intelligence.
The child was better acquainted with another target of the art vigilantes, painter Hubert C. Ropp. The Mitchells’ close friendship with Ropp’s patrons, the Aldis family, gave Joan entrée to the private, supposedly adults-only classes at the Ropp School, held each summer at the Aldises’ lively Lake Forest compound. Ropp encouraged his students not to copy but rather to interpret their subjects in a semiabstract or surrealistic style. Struggling at her easel planted under the Aldises’ venerable oaks during the summer after seventh grade, Joan experimented with new visual ideas while gaining an “in” at the School of the Art Institute, where Ropp was about to assume the powerful deanship.
Parker too figured prominently in Joan’s early art education. In 1938, a group of juniors launched the Mezzanine Gallery to showcase contemporary Chicago art, and, though she was only a freshman, Joan got herself into the act. In one snapshot, this skinny bobbysoxer in her regulation Marshall Field sweater and skirt and her saddle shoes from A. G. Spalding hangs a show with a trio of schoolmates, looking as if she might break into a little jitterbug of happiness.
The Mezzanine Gallery had opened that spring with a dozen paintings and drawings by Chicago artist Aaron Bohrod, richly anecdotal, slightly screwball depictions of ordinary street corners, tenement blocks, and derelict farms. Bohrod had studied at New York’s Art Students League with Ashcan School artist John Sloan, who sought freedom from European conventions by painting what was real in everyday life. Then Bohrod returned to his native city resolved to “do for Chicago what Sloan had done for New York.” Identified with the Regionalists, Bohrod approached art as neither a vehicle for self-expression nor a means of formal experimentation but rather a site of shared human experience. In a talk at Parker, the artist focused on his methods, explaining how he inlaid his fuzzy gouache washes with precisely rendered figures and dabbed his oils with fire-engine reds and neon magentas to make them sing.
Joan’s encounter with Bohrod’s art offered her yet another point of entry into painting. Her own exhibition at Parker shortly thereafter, of works on paper using casein (a fast-drying medium similar to gouache), depicted, Bohrod style, the Midwest-plain Main Streets and Elm Streets of Chicago’s blue-collar suburbs. Her paintings, like his, emphasized her subjects’ small-town qualities, yet, filled with the gnarled trees and curdled skies of adolescent expressionism, lacked the older artist’s tongue-in-cheek humor. Setting for herself the daunting task of representing staircases, railroad tracks, awnings, fences, jalopies, and buildings at various angles, Joan painted awkwardly and got the perspective wrong yet pulled off complex compositions that allowed no dead space. For the show, her paintings were expensively matted and framed in pale varnished wood, another token of her parents’ and her own vaulting ambition. When one sold, she swelled with pride.
Bobbysoxer Joan Mitchell (right) at Parker’s Mezzanine Gallery, c. 1938 (Illustration credit 3.3)
Her earnest striving notwithstanding, Joanie was no grind. In the eighth grade, this blur of lithe limbs distinguished herself by either falling or jumping down a manhole. Boys wanted to hang out with her. “I loved the way she looked,” remembers John Holabird of the plucky tomboy three years behind him at Parker. “She was just fun to be with and fun to see.” With her big brown eyes and tawny pageboy blending into flawless milk-with-coffee skin, Joan was, in truth, attractive. And coyly flirtatious: “Seventh and eighth grade girls like to tease high school boys, so she was teased back,” continues Holabird. But, speaking for other classmates, Connie Joerns characterizes Joan’s wry humor as camouflage for an “aggressive, masculine quality. She could be charming, but even if she was putting on the charm, you were always on your guard.”
That Joan, the one you wanted to pick up with tweezers, dominates a color picture splashed across the society page of one Sunday’s Herald and Examiner. “Five little sub-debs all in a row,” begins its caption in jump rope cadence, “taking their ease and a sun bath at the same time, after a swim in the pool up at Saddle and Cycle Club.” From their deck chairs lined up on the left, Sally Mitchell and three Chicago Latin pals, young matrons in their flowered sundresses and heavy saddle shoes, uneasily half turn toward the slouching little glamour-puss, all attitude in her striped frock and poppy-red lips, all scornful insolence behind the baby starlet sunglasses.
Yet this same twelve-year-old charmed all who read Marion’s 1937 poem “Joan”:
Joan, in a dream, is sliding up
The silver side of her cocoa cup.
What does she see from over the dim
Curve of her lips and a silver rim?
Where does she go? … If I do not stir,
I, who am old, may follow her.
“I think,” she says, and her parted lips
Open a door, and her breathing dips
Over a hill and into a glade
Against the moss where flower and blade
Are clipped apart by sun and shade.
“I think,” she says, and her lowered hand
Has opened wide the hidden door
Into the lost and silver land—
“I like this cocoa. I want more.”
More cocoa, yes. But also more—more of what matters and cannot be named.
In Marion’s poem, Joan slips, like lyric poetry itself, from mundane living to “the lost and silver land,” and back again. That interiority also set her apart. Schoolmates knew her, said one, only “as well as you could know Joan. I’m not sure that anyone could know her. I think she was very introverted.” Another, typically, wasn’t “close enough to Joan to [gain an] … understanding of what made her tick.” Whether joking around, speaking seriously, or dismissing others with barbed-wire brusqueness, she remained chary and guarded.
Moreover, one wrong turn and that “lost and silver land” became a bewildering swamp. Unable to take for granted, get rid of, or comprehend her perceptual differences, despairing at her inarticulateness, and frequently overwhelmed by adolescent angst, Joan cast about for who she really was. What was hers was hers in a fiercely territorial way. (No wonder she was wild about Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”) But what was hers? She liked to stick it to snobs yet acted like a snob; she fiercely valued honesty yet felt fraudulent, especially with her parents, who loved her—or not—but wouldn’t if they really knew her. She would sum up her youth in terms of discontinuities: “I was very competitive, very afraid, very isolated, very bright.”
In September 1938, Joan entered the upper division at Francis W. Parker School. Her intelligence, competitiveness, and conscientious study habits (she was a meticulous note taker) made her a first-rate student, though she could never shake the feeling that she wasn’t working hard enough. Jimmie kept pushing. In that era, Parker issued written evaluations rather than letter grades, a practice so frustrating to Joan’s father that he hounded teachers and administrators until finally they placated him by sending home grades for her alone.
“Five little sub-debs all in a row” at the Saddle and Cycle Club: Carol Blossom, Barbara McNulty, Sally Mitchell, Mary Cornelia Aldis, and (far right) Joan (aka Bullethead), c. 1938 (Illustration credit 3.4)
On the sports field, as in the classroom and the art studio, Joan spared no effort. A crack softball player who made merciless “irritated-at-the-uncoordinated-slob” faces when a teammate flubbed the ball, she was also skilled enough at field hockey (she played center and wing) to win berths on the All-Chicago Girls’ Team in her junior and senior years. These brought regular afterschool practices in Jackson Park, on the South Side, and an important Thanksgiving Day championship match at Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium. But, more than team sports, individual competition, with its requisite self-reliance, appealed to Joan, and, in the 1930s, no athletic endeavor appeared more deserving of a young woman’s attention than figure skating.
Skating’s rise in popularity had begun at the 1924 Olympics, where the Norwegian Sonja Henie shortened the traditional ankle-length dress, substituted white skates for black, and replaced simple acrobatics, then standard fare in a free-skating program, with a rousing sequence of jumps, twirls, spins, rockers, and counters choreographed like ballet. Having reinvented her sport, Henie went on to win three Olympic gold medals and a decade’s worth of world championships. After she skated the “Dance of the Dying Swan” before a 1934 Chicago audience of eighteen thousand, no doubt including the Mitchells, the ranks of midwestern skaters swelled with little misses yearning to be ice princesses. While girls’ athletics remained controversial (mainly on grounds of potential harm to the reproductive organs), smart Chicago looked favorably upon this half sport/half art that demanded grace, spotlighted beautiful bodies, and inspired glamorous attire. In 1936, a Streeterville riding academy was transformed into the Chicago Arena, a state-of-the-art indoor rink for the Figure Skating Club of Chicago, which thereby gained the wherewithal to train champions.
Having first put blades to ice as tots at their Lake Shore Drive playground, Joan and Sally were already longtime members of the Figure Skating Club. With the opening of the arena, the family went gangbusters: the girls drilled their school figures and passed one after another USFSA proficiency test; Marion joined the ranks of skating mothers (a subset of stage mothers); and Jimmie underwrote the club’s trophies and documented its every event using 8 mm film, lantern slides, and black-and-white photographs. He worked the edge of the rink at the jubilee ice show in which Joan and Sally came whizzing out of the gates of Old Fort Dearborn and into a marvelous pair; at the winter carnival where Joan soloed, then linked up with Sally for a pair; and at the next winter carnival, in which an elaborate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs routine featured one hundred tykes on skates and Joan in the unlikely role of Snow White. One Jimmie Mitchell shot of his spinning daughters, stony-faced and stagy in heavy lipstick, Dietrich brows, and bellhop outfits, made the pages of a big Chicago daily, whose readers learned that the “little girls have such fun in the Chicago Arena.”
Participation in benefits and ice follies was expected of the club’s best, but Joan had not gone into skating for the powder puff numbers. Fiercely determined to become a great skater, she rolled out of bed at five o’clock each weekday morning, drove with her father through the predawn streets, and opened up the arena, flicking its switch to floodlight the vast milk-blue rink. (How many skaters were entrusted with the key to the Chicago Arena? The Mitchells had pull.) She would put on and lace up her skates, her eyes, in Marion’s words, going “remote like a musician’s tuning a stringed instrument,” then, with a snap of her skate guards and flash of her blades, launch herself onto the ice and begin warming up. She arrived earlier and trained harder (both with Jimmie and a series of top coaches) than did any of her rivals and made damn sure she got perfect ice.
Surprisingly, Joan lacked balance and coordination. Muscular yet slightly pigeon-toed and occasionally clumsy (she was capable of tripping on her way across an empty room), Joan was “a marvelous athlete, but not the skating kind of athlete,” thought one schoolmate. “That takes balance. A great ballerina could become a great skater if she had the strength. But not Joan. She could have been a great hockey player. Skating was against every rule of her body.” Quitting, however, was against every rule of her mind. What she lacked in natural ability, Joan made up for in hard work, self-discipline, and nerve, the same tools she would use to offset her lack of native talent in drawing. At times, her synesthetic experience of sensory overload—the simultaneous movement, music, rumble of the crowd, and glare at center ice—added to her problems; other times, the sensory-motor-aural dynamism of skating brought surrender to a feeling of absolute rightness.
Watching Joan perform, one family friend had an epiphany: skating could be something more than he had ever imagined. He was not alone. Many saw in her muscular elegance on ice a specialness that meant she was on her way to something important. Wrote one Chicago Daily Tribune reporter, “Chicagoans often [watch Joan] floating over the ice of the Arena like a butterfly over a poppy field—making incredibly beautiful swoops.”
In the first championships ever held at the Chicago Arena, thirteen-year-old Joan made short work of skaters with twice her experience to take home the Senior Ladies’ trophy. But she was only warming up: the following January she pulled down second place in the junior division of the Midwest Regionals in Cleveland, and, two weeks later, fifth among novices at the U.S. championships in St. Paul, Minnesota.
For the finest coaching, Joan and Marion traveled that summer to the famous figure skating school at Lake Placid, New York. Staying at the tony Lake Placid Club, they plunged into ten weeks of training (Marion gamely skated too) in the Olympic Arena, where Joan worked with the legendary Gustave Lussi. A Swiss ex–ski jumper who was arguably the world’s foremost skating coach, Lussi conceived of skating as physics, taking moves apart to improve them and singling out spinning as the essence of the skater’s art. What’s a jump, after all, but a spin in the air? His method focused on leading with the core of the body rather than with an extremity. Moreover, Lussi insisted that every move be deliberate—nothing hit-or-miss. Deliberate and gutsy and beautiful. “Do the best that you can every time,” he would urge. Like Henie, he transformed the sport itself: in 1948, Lussi student Dick Button would successfully execute a double axel for the first time in competition, thereby ushering in the era of technically advanced skating in which Dorothy Hamill and many other Lussi-trained champions would shine.
Opening its doors at dawn, the Olympic Arena was quickly aswirl in skaters punishing the ice with spins and jumps or dancing to jazz piped in over loudspeakers. Serious skaters like Joan put in five patch sessions a day, worked with Lussi in the “bull pen,” squeezed in a demonstration or lecture, and occasionally relaxed at Little Alps, Gus’s camp in the Adirondacks. Always they hit the sack early, “courting their nine hours of sleep with the tender regularity of counting a rosary.”
Besides skating, Marion took advantage of her long weeks in Lake Placid to dream up murder mysteries set in the skating world. Two were eventually published. Marion’s signature character is natty detective A. Lincoln Lacy, but the real protagonist of Ice Before Killing is Chicago skater Liz Soames, “who had had tough luck in the Nationals,” and of Kiss and Kill, Nina Alexander, a sportswoman vacationing at the Adirondack Club, both based on Joan. Well aware that her opinionated daughter would find fault with the way in which she was portrayed, Marion preempted their arguments by making Joan promise, in advance of publication, never to read the two books, a promise Joan characteristically kept, even after her mother’s death.
Back in Chicago to start tenth grade, Joan ramped up her commitment to her sport, adding pair skating with Bobby Specht, the friendly, dimpled Nordic-looking son of a Wisconsin dentist. In his first major competition, the men’s novices at the 1938 Nationals, Bobby had won third place with the most difficult free-skating program in anyone’s memory. The following year he took the novice gold, and, shortly after linking up with Joan, captured the U.S. men’s junior crown. That the rising star of American men’s figure skating would choose Joan as his partner is one measure of her excellence.
Not only is pair skating one of the rare sports in which men and women compete together, but it is also arguably the most demanding and dangerous of the figure skating disciplines. Whipping around at hazardously close range, partners draw upon stores of power, speed, grace, balance, timing, and trust as they mix mirror skating, shadow skating, and individual maneuvers, among them the crowd-pleasing death spiral in which the arching woman orbits the man at breakneck speed.
Despite their intense training, new partners Mitchell and Specht did not place at the 1940 U.S. Championships. Worse, Joan fared no better than tenth in the junior division. She would have ranked much higher, however, had not one judge knocked her out of contention for a top spot: her scores were 10, 8, 10, 10, and 5—“tough luck in the Nationals.” (On the other hand, she was featured in Skating magazine’s fashion column for the severely cut pale blue crepe dress she wore in the singles and the red-lined white satin number with matching tiny red cap with which she turned eyes in the pairs.) Training in Canada that July and August, Joan redoubled her efforts.
They paid off. She performed brilliantly at the 1941 Midwesterns in Cleveland, missing the women’s crown by a razor’s edge. In the pairs, she and Bobby trounced a local couple with a gutsy routine that captured the lyricism of the music and achieved a beautiful line. “To Bobby Specht and Joan Mitchell, goes acclaim for their superb Senior Pair number,” raved the head of the Cleveland club. “It was a beaut!”
At the Nationals in Boston two weeks later, however, they faltered. Joan failed to place, Bobby fell short of a grand slam (novice-junior-senior in three years) because of an infected ankle, and two Angelenos skimmed to first in the pairs. The contest for second then shifted into a battle between Mitchell-Specht and Vaeth-Might. The Chicagoans hit the ice like a wildfire and, with Bobby skating through the pain and the crowd roaring, put in a performance blazing with daring and fight—yet slightly off. They left town bearing third-place trophies.
The previous summer, the Mitchells had moved from their East Chestnut Street apartment to a co-op on North State Parkway, a short, leafy avenue more tranquil than its name suggests. Lined by Richardson Romanesque mansions like portly old gentlemen cheek by jowl, North State Parkway was anchored at its Lincoln Park end by the splendid Queen Anne residence of the Roman Catholic cardinal of Chicago. Diagonally across the street stood the fifteen-story Beaux-Arts building at 1530, a world of stability, order, and politesse where the distinguished architect David Adler occupied the sixth floor and the Mitchells had purchased the tenth.
Before decorating, Marion had the spacious public rooms coffered in dark wood, adding to the apartment’s rarefied, old-money atmosphere. In the living room, artfully placed silver bowls caught the late-afternoon light; in the library, expensively bound volumes stood at attention in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Most impressive to visiting classmates and Jimmie’s relatives from the suburbs, the front elevator opened directly into the foyer, where the Mitchells’ Irish American maid, Nellie, or her husband, their butler and chauffeur, stood at the ready—“just like in the movies!”, as some guests put it.
Cousin Sally Turton still remembers herself as a girl stepping saucer-eyed out of that elevator for a luncheon visit one day with her mother, grandmother, and aunt. Intimidated by the sight of the dining-room table gleaming with fine china, crystal, and silver, she had finally relaxed to the point of feeling sophisticated as she sipped ice water from a long-stemmed goblet when Joan flew through the room, ignoring her parents’ guests in a mad dash for the elevator. Startled, Sally missed her mouth, and the water plopped into her lap. No one noticed, yet she was mortified. Would they think she had wet her pants? Surreptitiously she channeled the liquid onto the Persian carpet.
Pairs champions Joan Mitchell and Bobby Specht on the ice, c. 1940 (Illustration credit 3.5)
Neither Persian carpet nor any other superfluity adorned Joan’s bedroom, however, so Spartan and unorganized that it looked like a storeroom for odd pieces of furniture. Yet it possessed a luxury rare in the metropolis: its own small balcony. From this aerie, Joan spent long hours contemplating the city and sky, marvels of spatial complexity and fugacious color and light.
Decades later, a conversation among three painter friends turned to the topic of their first deeply felt art experiences. Hard-edge abstractionist Shirley Jaffe spoke of the stenciled wallpaper in her childhood home in Brooklyn, while Zuka Mitelberg, whose paintings frequently enlist history and myth, remembered an icon of St. Michael and the Dragon at the Russian Orthodox church she had attended as a girl. Joan said: the Chicago sky from my balcony. In a sense, she would spend the rest of her life painting that panorama.
Lake Michigan was visible too, just barely, but she could feel it in the quality of the light. The windows and terrace at the front of the apartment, on the other hand, commanded magnificent views of the lake, interrupted near its shore by a breakwater, a flattened backwards C. Lincoln Park stretched far to the north, the jumble of downtown Chicago filled the view to the south. “Damn beautiful city all below”—as Joan once put it—“and clouds running against the birds.” As for the lake, it “looked vast. No, infinite. Bleak. In winter it was icy, broken ice. Sometimes it’s very blue. It has a lot of quality to it. It’s changing, alive. Not just a dull body of water. Even summers, it’s very dangerous.” Often she set up an easel on the front terrace and painted the lake.
Lake Michigan had been present at East Chestnut Street too: to walk east on Chestnut and across Lake Shore Drive (not yet the thunderous highway that swallowed up half the beach) had been to wriggle out of Chicago and into a primal place of blasting winds and furious whippings of spray. Now, from her perch on the tenth floor at North State Parkway, Joan became an eye in the sky. She watched rain clobber the lake, ice lock it up, thunderheads billow above it, storms as fast moving as freight trains speed across it. It shimmered, turquoise and sapphire like a tropical lagoon, or pulsed with dark ochre along its edges, or withdrew behind enormous curtains of gray. At night, the lake might fold itself up like a length of black velvet upon which was laid out a twinkling string of far-distant Indiana towns. It both delighted and scared her.
With so many pictures of Lake Michigan stamped on her brain, Joan would never be without it. “The Lake is with me today,” she would assert, years after leaving Chicago. “The memory of a feeling. And when I feel that thing, I want to paint it.” Indeed, every painting she ever did began with Lake Michigan.