“Dalí and Gala occupied room 108: the Royal Suite where King Alfonso XIII had lived in exile when Spain in 1931 voted for a republic…”
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Salvador Dalí was a work of art, his own masterpiece. ‘I work seventeen hours a day,’ he cried. ‘The measure of my genius is the size of the hole I perforate in abstract matter.’
He didn’t believe in inspiration. ‘It is the obsession of repetition the Gods take note of.’ Routine was the watchword, and he maintained the same rigid patterns for thirty years.
In the summer he spent his days in the house constructed from five modest cottages in Port Lligat, a pretty bay along the coast from Cadaqués. At the end of September, he left for the St Regis Hotel in New York where Gala in her thick Russian accent negotiated contracts. When spring came, the old black Cadillac driven by Arturo Caminada – a fisherman who had learned to drive at the tiller of his boat – arrived loaded with luggage at the Hôtel Meurice in Paris where Dalí and Gala occupied room 108: the Royal Suite where King Alfonso XIII had lived in exile when Spain in 1931 voted for a republic.
For three months, the high-ceilinged rooms overlooking Les Tuileries played host to the daily Princes’ and Paupers’ Tea – pink champagne, in fact, served to the art dealers who came to rub shoulders with the wealthy and famous.
One year the management at the Meurice made improvements and replaced the wooden toilet seat in the loo with a shiny new one. Dalí became enraged. ‘You are crucifying me,’ he cried. ‘The essence of putrescence is a soft moving benefaction Dalí turns to gold. They are thieves, filthy French thieves…’
He insisted the correct toilet seat be returned and, when they found an old wooden replica, he knew by the patina of scratches and polish that it was not the right one. They continued the search, bringing one toilet seat after another to the suite until Dalí was satisfied that he had found the one he had shared with the royal buttocks of Alfonso XIII.
‘We are surrounded by moralists, hygienists and philistines,’ Dalí sobbed. ‘I have no confidence in my class. You can trust the aristocracy to be charming. You can trust the peasants to be vulgar. You can trust the true artist to be a madman. You can only trust the bourgeoisie to steal the toilet seat from under you…’
Extract from Sex, Surrealism, Dalí and Me, the Memoirs of Carlos Lozano, by Clifford Thurlow
www.cliffordthurlow.com