Free Some of My Lives by Rosamond Bernier Page A

danzón . (In those days there was a big nightclub with a permanent band. Agustín Lara reigned supreme. I can also still hear his sepulchral voice crooning “Noche de Ronda.”)
    Roberto Montenegro was also about the only artist who had painted Frida. Surprising as it seems, Diego had never painted a proper portrait of her, although he included her in several frescoes.
    Diego did paint a portrait of Miguel Covarrubias’s wife, a darkhaired exotic woman who called herself Rosa Rolando, but was plain Rose from Brooklyn. She was a spirited cook, and there were memorable meals at Tizapán, where the Covarrubiases lived.
    On one occasion when we went to lunch at the Covarrubiases’, besides the usual cast there was the utterly beautiful Dolores del Río, who had left Hollywood to star in a long series of Mexican filmed revolutionary romances. Another guest was a dashing, handsome key figure in the Mexican movie industry, Emilio Fernández, always known as El Indio. He and Dolores had never met.
    This was a society in which instinctual drives were promptly acted upon. There were a lot of people at table, the food was delicious,
and there was a tumult of lively talk. Nobody noticed that El Indio and Dolores had slipped away from the table. But then, after lunch, Rosa showed us around the house. When she opened the door to one of the guest rooms, there were Dolores and El Indio in bed together.
    (Some years later, Lew Riley and Dolores del Río were married.)
    I was in Mexico for my first wedding anniversary. In Mexico, the best man at a wedding, the padrino , has a special relationship with the new couple. Living up to this, Miguel Covarrubias gave us joint caricatures in a double frame made of shells—my husband was a devil, I was an angel.
    I asked Frida, who—withered leg or not—would climb up the several flights of my Mexico City apartment to visit me, what I could give him to thank him. She thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Get a shoe box. Fill it with earth. Bury an idolito [a little figurine] in it. Tie a toy shovel on top of the box and write on a card: ‘Dig here, you old archaeologist.’” So this is what I did, although what I buried did not live up to the Covarrubias standard.
    Miguel Covarrubias was already renowned at nineteen as a caricaturist. The original Vanity Fair magazine invited him to come to New York, where he made witty, wicked drawings of the celebrities of the moment. One was a series called Impossible Interviews: Sally Rand (the fan dancer) with Martha Graham, for instance, or Jean Harlow being analyzed by Sigmund Freud.
    But his remarkable eye led him to explore completely new fields. He became an expert ethnologist, recording in texts and drawings the civilization and folkways of peoples as varied as the Balinese and the women of Tehuantepec.
    We went with him to the Veracruz region, where in steamy tropical heat we hunted up remnants of the Olmec civilization. It was almost inevitable in Mexico at that time to become interested in pre-Columbian archaeology; it was part of the rediscovery of Mexico’s extraordinary heritage. I had found some little clay figurines when ground was broken for our Acapulco swimming pool. To learn something about them, I went to Mexico City to follow the classes of Alfonso Caso, the father of Mexican archaeological studies.

    When a highway was being carved out of the surrounding mountains, I used to go out with my little geologist pick and look for traces of shellfish in the cut. Any remnants indicated that people had once been living there.
    Frida told me that Miguel and Diego were fierce rivals as collectors of pre-Columbian art. She described their going on expeditions together to hunt for idolitos , each trying to get up earlier in the morning than the other to be first on the chase.
    Another great interest at that time was architecture. Mexican architects were boldly