For Oscar Wilde, the one unforgivable sin was to be boring. “Dull” was never an adjective that society could pin on a centenarian ceramist. She lived and loved in her own way, and served as inspiration for one of film’s most iconic characters.
Beatrice Wood was born in San Francisco; when she was five, her family relocated to New York, to an exclusive zip code on the Upper East Side. Her mother’s main parental concern was preparation for her daughter’s debut to Manhattan society, which entailed a year in a convent school in Paris, enrollment in a finishing school, and summer trips to Europe to visit art galleries, museums, and theaters. Ironically, this exposure to the arts sabotaged Mrs. Wood’s vision of Beatrice following in her well-heeled footsteps. In 1912, the teen spurned the idea of becoming a trophy wife and dreamed of a future as a painter. Realizing the futility of argument, her mother sent her—nanny in tow—to France to study at the Académie Julian. Finding the curriculum tedious, Beatrice ran away from her chaperone and moved into an attic room. Never short on nerve, she peered through a hedge to watch Claude Monet painting amidst his flowerbeds. She moved to Paris, where she turned her attention to the theater, enrolled in the Comédie-Française, and shared the stage with Sarah Bernhardt.
With the storm clouds of World War I hovering, the Woods insisted that Beatrice return home, and to their chagrin, they were unable to dissuade her from a career as an actress. Bilingual and beautiful, she obtained a position in the French National Repertory Theatre under the stage name Mademoiselle Patricia, a necessary move as acting was not a reputable profession for a girl from the right side of the tracks. During her tenure, she rubbed shoulders with fellow thespians; she shared a dressing room with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and knitted a scarf for Isadora Duncan. Beatrice was grateful for her work, as she wanted money to escape her home where ‘’I was a good little girl. Nothing is more revolting.”
After performances, she hung out with the most adventurous artistic characters in town, such as Man Ray and film star Myrna Loy. When informed that Edgard Varèse, a French vanguard composer, was in a hospital with a broken leg, she paid him a visit. Through him she met Henri-Pierre Roché, a diplomat and writer, who became her first lover, and who broke her heart. The problem was that she “was a monogamist woman in a polygamous world.” After their breakup, she fell for Marcel Duchamp, best known for Nude Descending a Staircase. He was an integral part of the Dada movement, an avant-garde trend that traditionalists considered blasphemy. Its adherents found patrons in the stratospherically wealthy Walter and Louise Arensberg—the first American collectors of modern art—who held evening soirées at their luxurious duplex apartment. Duchamp served as their star attraction; other guests were Beatrice Woods, Isadora Duncan, and William Carlos Williams.
A 1917 photograph shows Duchamp and Wood at Coney Island; Beatrice is seated on a fake ox, while behind her, in an oxcart, against a painted background, her lover is perched. Beatrice reminisced, “With Marcel’s arm around me, I would have gone on any ride into hell with the same heroic abandon as a Japanese lover standing on the rim of a volcano, ready to take a suicide leap.” Duchamp gave Wood her initial push into the world of modern art. After her remark that “anyone can do such scrawls,” he dared her to try. Impressed with Marriage of a Friend, he submitted it to Rogue magazine. Their romance ended when his relationship mantra echoed Henri-Pierre’s; lust can be divorced from love.
Roché, Duchamp, and Wood organized the Society of Independent Artists and published the avant garde journal The Blind Man, leading to Beatrice’s moniker, the Mama of Dada. Her life attracted attention when Roché’s novel about an amour a trois, Jules and Jim, inspired Francois Truffaut’s 1961 movie of the same name, where actress Jeanne Moreau played the role of Ms. Wood. Beatrice denied its verisimilitude, claiming she was a serial monogamist. Despite numerous heartbreaks, she held steadfast to romantic illusions. As she told an interviewer, “If a man says he loves me, I fall into his lap like a ripe grape.”
In 1918, fed up with her mother’s meddling in her on and off stage life, Beatrice ran away to Montreal, Canada, with her friend Paul, a theater manager. He convinced her the way to achieve autonomy from family was to marry him, which she did at age twenty-five. They shared a marriage of convenience, mostly for hubby, who used his wife’s earnings to support his gambling habit. The union was declared void when it was discovered that he already had a wife in Belgium. After the divorce, Beatrice rarely spoke of Paul, and identified him only by his first name. Beatrice returned to the Big Apple; however, the worm in its core was the fact that the Dada movement had died down, Marcel was traveling in Europe, and Roché had returned to Paris. Theater also had lost its lure; as an art form, it remained fascinating, but she disliked the role of actress because “You become so concentrated on yourself, your smile, and the way you look. And, really, it’s a pain in the ass.” In 1938, after another love, the British director Reginald Pole, left her to marry an eighteen-year-old, she moved to California to be near the Indian guru Krishnamurti, of whom she had become a disciple. The move segued into her great second act.
On a trip to Holland, Beatrice had purchased a set of baroque dessert plates with a lustrous glaze. Unable to find a matching teapot, she decided to create one, and at age forty, she enrolled in a ceramics course at Hollywood High School. Intrigued with the process, it became her new art medium, and she became the pupil of Otto Natzler, a Jewish artist who had fled his homeland when the Nazis annexed Austria. Her work—reminiscent of Dada—poked fun at social hypocrisy and the battle of the sexes, while others were heavily erotic. A favorite subject was Shakespeare’s red-headed patron, and in one of her brochures for an exhibition, she wrote, “Did you know what Queen Elizabeth I did with ambassadors? Each had to spend a night with her, and the one with the best qualifications got the job.” Wood also fashioned chalices and bowls, the shapes culled from Greek, Japanese, and Indian sources. Endlessly experimental, she said, “Knowing what one’s about to take out of a kiln is as exciting as being married to a boring man.” Anais Nin remarked that her works were “iridescent and smoky, like trail-ways left by satellites.” Beatrice said of her medium, “Women who have diamonds—it can’t touch the joy and excitement of opening a kiln.” The ceramics supported her through the Depression (she did not inherit family money), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and upscale stores such as Neiman Marcus carried her works signed Beato, her nickname.
In 1948, taken with its purple mountains, pink-blue sunsets, and “unique aura,” the bohemian Beatrice found her forever home in Ojai, California. Krishnamurti had introduced her to the area. Later, he, Beatrice, and another resident, Aldous Huxley, founded the Happy Valley School, a no-grades progressive institution in the Upper Ojai Valley, where Wood taught pottery. She also took another trip down the aisle with Steven Hoag, with whom she shared an amicable, platonic marriage that lasted for several years until his passing. The prosaic reason for their nuptial was that it allowed them to apply for Red Cross funding (married couples had a better chance) when the house they owned in North Hollywood washed away in a flood. In her autobiography, I Shock Myself, published when Wood was ninety-two, she wrote, “In a way my life has been an upside-down experience. I never made love to the two men I married, and I did not marry the men I loved. I do not know if this makes me a good girl gone bad, or a bad girl gone good.” Beatrice’s last grand passion was with an East Indian scientist with whom she fell in love at age sixty-eight, on the first of her three trips to India. She refused to name him to protect his conservative family. Wood described the affair with the mystery man who told her that “our trains move in opposite directions” in her fourth book, 33rd Wife of a Maharajah, published in India.
Beatrice’s ninth decade was her most artistic exploratory period, and her mental agility remained as sharp as ever; as a ninety-year-old, she learned to use a personal computer for her correspondence. Far from dressing her age in conservative fashion with a prim gray bun, Wood wore her hair in a long thick braid, sported a challenging amount of silver jewelry, and dressed in brightly colored saris. Her ranch-style studio home in the Topa Topa Mountain area doubled as a gallery that drew 300 visitors a month. Wood did not allow her failing health to prevent her from ever being anything other than a gracious hostess. When asked the key to her longevity, she attributed it to “art books, chocolate and young men.’’ (Hence guests arrived with gifts of the former.) In all likelihood, her vegetarian diet and avoidance of alcohol and tobacco had something to do with the fact she appeared far younger. Beatrice explained the reason she was a teetotaler: “I don’t drink because I decided long ago, if I was going to be seduced, I wanted to be sober.” In her autobiography, she highlighted a life that had embraced the road less travelled; she had befriended ballet figures Nijinsky and Pavlova, the artist Brancusi, and the director Stanislavsky. The artist insisted that, since scientists had proved time and space did not exist, she was “actually only thirty-two.’’ One fan of Camp Wood was Governor Pete Wilson of California, who deemed her “a national treasure.” Another was film director James Cameron—a neighbor in Ojai—who used her as the model for the 101-year-old Rose in Titanic, played by Oscar nominee Gloria Stuart. Despite her acclaim, she still retained her youthful romanticism, and said with a sly smile, “I still would be willing to sell my soul to the devil for a nice Argentine to do the tango with.”
Unlike many older people who dwell on the past, to her, the good old days were always the current ones. A premiere in Los Angeles featured a documentary on her life, Beatrice Wood: Mama of Dada, produced by Diandra Douglas (the ex-wife of actor Michael.) Three years later, she celebrated her 103rd birthday with a retrospective exhibition of 103 objects, many recently made, at La Jolla’s Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art. Her pieces are on display in the permanent collections of twelve major museums, including the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and command prices of $40,000 per piece. When an interviewer asked why people still found her interesting, Ms. Wood replied, “I’d be interested in any old bag who was still working at age 100.”
Beatrice’s 105th birthday bash drew 250 guests, including James Cameron and Gloria Stewart. Ms. Wood passed away soon after, but her heart, like the celluloid Rose’s, “will go on and on.”