The shipping crate was the beginning of a collection of tests. After he finished, O’Keeffe presented Hamilton along with a gallon jar of bent nails and asked him or her to straighten them. “I told her that I would certainly if she wanted me to, yet she could buy brand-new ones for much less money,” he remembers. “She said, ‘You didn’t go through the Depression. Straighten up the nails.’ So I did.” O’Keeffe was pleased, and began assigning him or her much more personal tasks. “She paid me 5 dollars an hour to job in the garden, 6 dollars an hour to drive her places, and seven dollars an hour to type,” says Hamilton. “It wasn’t a high-paying job, yet I didn’t have actually anything else going on in my life—I was recently divorced and starting a brand-new life, and Georgia was one of the most interesting women I had ever met.” On top of organizing her own estate, O’Keeffe had a lot of unfinished business along with Stieglitz’s, and Hamilton began helping along with the paperwork. “The next thing I knew, I was there 10 to 12 hours a day,” he says.
Their partnership grew much more complicated a few months later, however, as quickly as the architect Alexander Girard and his wife, Susan—old friends of O’Keeffe’s—invited her to Morocco and told her she could bring a friend if she wanted. “So she asked me to come along with her,” recounts Hamilton. “And that’s as quickly as the trouble started.”
According to Hamilton, O’Keeffe’s longtime agent spine in brand-new York, Doris Bry, was already alarmed by the growing presence of the artist’s strapping, mustachioed young companion, and much more so as quickly as he usurped exactly what she considered to be her rightful spot on the Morocco trip. “Others individuals were upset that Georgia didn’t invite them, yet she was simply being practical. She wanted someone she could boss about and that could carry her suitcases, somebody that could go on a walk along with her,” he explains. “So we went off to Morocco and traveled almost 3,000 miles with each other throughout a month and a half or two. We went everywhere together, and we got along. I could suggestions her feel independent. She would certainly tell people, ‘He is my eyes and my ears.’ ” The task wasn’t constantly a picnic, though. “She was very demanding,” he adds. “She was no flower. And as quickly as she joined a bad mood, boy, she was tough! yet over time she made an affection for me that I wasn’t expecting or looking for.”
“She was no flower. as quickly as she joined a bad mood, boy, she was tough!”
Hamilton still isn’t very sure exactly why O’Keeffe took to him or her over her several admirers, yet he has actually a few theories. “I believe it was because I was available, I was young, and I was tall and thin—she liked thin people,” he says. “She didn’t want any over weight individuals about her. She was high-minded concerning everything, not simply art. She was pretty personal concerning the dimensions of things, the placement of a window, where the light comes in. The magic of exactly how you put a flower in a vase, exactly how you put the vase on a table.” Hamilton was sensitive to her needs, and easy to be around. “I didn’t put her on a pedestal or say, ‘Oh, I’m so honored,’ or any of that stuff,” he says. “I was simply a handyman that became her ally. Whenever I walked in the door, she would certainly say, ‘Oh, Juan, I’m so glad to see you.’ And after having my very first wife run off along with yet another man, it was nice to be appreciated.”
Hamilton was additionally a sponge for O’Keeffe’s stories. “Her mind was sharp and bright, and she remembered every detail concerning the very first time she went to Stieglitz’s gallery—exactly what she said, exactly what he said, and exactly what the elevator was like,” says Hamilton. “She loved to talk concerning her past. I believe her marriage to Stieglitz was difficult. He insisted on them getting married, and she agreed to it. yet she said she cried all night prior to it, and simply didn’t feel it was right.”
O’Keeffe’s partnership along with Hamilton grew increasingly intimate, to the mounting suspicions of O’Keeffe’s friends and neighbors. “individuals struggled believing that a man and a woman almost 60 years apart could make a friendship like we had. They’d say, ‘That guy should have actually ulterior motives. He should be after her money,’ ” Hamilton says. O’Keeffe’s cook was among his enemies, and she even tried to starve him or her out as quickly as he began spending nights at the house. “The cook said, ‘Skip O’Keeffe, I will certainly prepare dishes for you, yet not for your help.’ yet Georgia wouldn’t stand for that, and the cook left and told a newspaper that as quickly as I stayed at Georgia’s house, the floor of my room was a sea of beer cans in the morning,” says Hamilton. “I did like to drink beer—yet not a sea of it!” O’Keeffe additionally got anonymous phone calls from disapproving locals. “They’d say, ‘That young man of yours, he was driving 90 miles an hour and he almost hit me.’ And Georgia said, ‘Oh, really? Why ought to I take you seriously if you won’t even tell me your name?’ The funny thing was that Georgia liked to drive fast too.”
O’Keeffe was protective, yet she could additionally be possessive. “Once, as quickly as we were in brand-new York, a wealthy friend of Georgia’s asked to borrow me to hang pictures in her penthouse,” Hamilton says. “I went over and did it, and it wasn’t a big deal, yet Georgia was so angry as quickly as she found out. She said, ‘The nerve of her. I know she had Others intentions.’ I’m not going to speculate concerning exactly what those intentions were, yet the woman had recently separated from her husband, so you can easily guess. yet that’s all trash talk, and that’s exactly what individuals like to do—gossip.”
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