THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF THE LIFE OF BRIDGET BATE TICHENOR

CHAPTER VI: ANGLOPHILES IN MEXICO TX, PA, PAU COPYRIGHTS 2006 & 2009 Writers Guild Registration TX 1382590 2008

Zhringen

Derived from Bridget Bate Tichenor The Mexican Magic Realist Painter TX, PA, PAU COPYRIGHTS 1990, 2000, 2006, & 2009 TXU 1 321 112 11/6/06 By Zachary Selig
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Bridget Bate Tichenor Copyright Estate of George Platt Lynnes 1945

INTRODUCTION The mesmerizing story of the Magical Realist painter Bridget Bate Tichenor has not been told. It is not just a story. It is an extraordinary and riveting story of a remarkable female artist who impacted the 20th Century world of fashion, art, and society with enormous contributions. Revealed are the intimacies and secrets of an outwardly beautiful, exotic, bold, and courageous, yet painfully shy and reclusive woman who lived in extraordinary times, hither to the unknown world or her peers and colleagues. Bridgets life was led in an astonishing way in many contrasting countries and in many revolutionary platforms on a level of excellence that has not been recognized or acknowledged outside small eccentric art circles. Bridget adhered to rarefied and noble standards of human pride, integrity, respect, discipline, and compassion. These humane traits she honored above all else in life. Bridgets impeccable personal values in tandem with her determination and prioritization to execute her artistic vision are the essence of her story, which creates historical value as her world message. Bridget inherited a peripatetic world from her self-absorbed, famous, and creatively gifted parents that fueled deep insecurities fed by fears of abandonment. Subsequently, she reinvented herself by necessity and by choice to mold herself into the world that she needed to fit into at any given time in order to survive.
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Bridget's mother, Vera Bate Lombardi (Sarah Gertrude Baring Arkwright Fitzgeorge Bate Lombardi) was an indomitable combination of beauty and bravado with the highest connections. From 1925-1939, Vera became CoCo Chanel's muse and social advisor and liaison to several European Royal Families. Her demeanor and style influenced the 'English Look, the very foundation for the House of Chanel. The beautiful, noble, artistic, and rich are different and misunderstood or condemned, yet granted societal privileges few receive. These very qualities that embodied her unique style influenced and were copied by some of the greatest names of the 20th century, who were capable of creating a mass appeal through their vision that she ignited. She was loved and envied, but most of all she was awe-inspiring. Bridget had an amazing and tragic multidimensional life that was filled with an arranged marriage, fantasies, true loves, romantic and professional rivalries, artistic achievements, mysticism, perfectionism, and shattered dreams. All of which was portrayed in the most glamorous world settings with famous personalities and eccentric nobility that she orchestrated into a dramatic metaphysical theater of magical relationships. Her controversial royal illegitimate background overshadowed her profound artistry and her sense of self worth. In her era and society, it was important to be of royal lineage. Her achievement in the art world was diminished by who she was as an illegitimate royal family member, her ravishing beauty, her refined intelligence, and her commanding personality. Her controversial background was more important and interesting to her friends, which graciously made her celebrated and received on one hand, yet made her hide how great an artist she was on the other
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and never acknowledged. This is why she was so shy about showing who she was as a superlative painter. She compartmentalized her life. She was deathly afraid to remove her complex multiple masks and reveal not only her precious art, but also her deepest intimate feelings to others. She was validated only by those relationships that had a higher profile than she, so that she could retreat behind her provocatively mysterious and seductive persona to hide her acute vulnerability. She was difficult to get to know, guarded, and very secretive. She revealed certain things to socially survive, while withholding her poetically rich emotional and spiritual communications to focus through her dedicated relationship with her sacred and sovereign art. She had a genius gift of observation and execution in cryptic detail, both in her character and painting. Bridget painted for herself, and not for commercial gain or notoriety. Bridget Bate Tichenors life and art lifted Mexican art up to new high point. She was a European royal that was a part of an international society, who rejected her privileged upbringing and background for self-realization and expression as a female artist in rural Michoacan. Bridget reflected the inherent value of Mexico as a mystical ancient cultural magnet filled with authentic artistic and spiritual mosaics of chiascurro passions. Bridget spiritually adopted me and I became her protg in 1971. Among her many gifts, she benevolently trained me in drawing and painting, introducing me to ancient occult religions, which included many lost esoteric sciences of Egyptian, Tantrika, and Mesoamerican Magic and Alchemy. She fed my hunger to learn, and I became her consummate student in a world that had received a death rattle to classically trained artists.

The trajectory in this biography is about the journey of metamorphous we shared together as friends, what Bridget considered important and unimportant, how we impacted each others lives, and what each of us gained from our rapport. Bridgets character is discovered through my eyes and what she taught me, because I had to be taught. The story follows the changing arcs in our characters through the alchemy of our bond. It is a beautiful recovery love story between two people who were destined to have a sacred relationship. Bridgets life stories were one of her great legacies that she imparted to me during the 19 years of our relationship. Over 20 years ago, I began to research and document a small portion of these elaborate, and many times confusing, historical events and their interplay as she described them. In most cases, she would use a particular aspect of her life, a family member, friend, or someone she admired in story telling as an example to teach me something she felt I needed to learn. Bridgets long and entertaining monologues focused on definitive standards and values she felt imperative I absorb. There was a lesson to be learned in every story, which was one of her intimate ways of expressing her love to me. To some that knew her superficially or were envious, she appeared to exaggerate or embellish only to discover that what she said was true, to others that were awe-stricken by her and did not know the obscure details of her secreted life, she was labeled an aristocratic artist, and to those few that knew her well, she was a loyal friend, wise teacher, and genius painter.
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before her death, I promised Bridget that she would be known to the world. - Zachary Selig

ANGLOPHILES IN MEXICO The love of Bridgets life was the old Etonian and horseman Patrick Claude Henry Tritton. Patrick was a British expatriate, who in 1962 had married for the first time in Mexico City the fabulously rich, unstable, and difficult Baroness Nancy Oakes von HoyningenHuene, heiress daughter of Sir Harry Oakes. Oakes was a self-made Canadian gold miner, who became a Bahamian financier victim of the famous unsolved wartime macabre murder in Nassau that gave rise to theories embracing Mafia hit men, black magic, and Nazi gold. Bridget and Patrick were survivors of that vanishing world of society peopled by figures such as Nol Coward, Cecil Beaton, and Lady Diana Cooper. They both had been intimate from childhood with several generations of members of the British Royal Family. Tritton enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for fun, unreliability and attractiveness to women. He was also capable of unexpected kindness and patience. When a student at Cambridge he was apparently known to take his horse to lectures. The novelist Anthony Powell character, Dicky Umfraville, in A Dance to the Music of Time is supposed to be based upon Tritton. Tritton kept a full pack of Irish hounds and hunted jackrabbit in the bleak desert amidst Aztec ruins at an overgrown Agave ranch near Teotihuacn, where Bridgets romantic dream came true with shared Anglo-Mexican colonial eccentricities. Patrick was ugly as hell, blond and blue-eyed, slight of build, sundamaged skin, and bad teeth. He was notorious for being well endowed, which he did not hide in his rumpled khaki trousers. His
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nickname amongst his female admirers was The Weenie King that was taken from the 1942 film The Palm Beach Story. One weekend in 1971, Patrick picked Bridget and I up at her friend Swedish shipping tycoon Eric Norens home on the Calle Tabasco in Mexico City in a decrepit beige Volkswagen Beatlet to drive an hour near the great pyramids of Teotihuacn to his run-down horse ranch. Patrick had a marvelous sense of humor that matched Bridgets, which became further amplified in witty bantering with every shot of tequila as we drove through the surreal Mexican desert landscape. They both were adept raconteurs. Instead of riding horses that day, Patrick insisted we hunt rabbits in the Volkswagen with his dogs sniffing out anything that moved from iguana to wild chicken. A madcap hunt with Patrick barreling the Bug through the Agaves ensued with Bridget holding her baby Terrier Poppet in one hand, Carmencita cigarette and shot glass of Sauza tequila in the other, and myself tossed around in the backseat. The dogs would chase ahead, disappear, only to return to the barefoot servants at the adobe house with their iguana prize catch. The roaring laughter was nonstop, and the love that Bridget expressed with Patrick made her quite vulnerable under a mask of frivolity. That evening a sadly repressed and wet-brained Wasp ex-lover of Bridgets first husband from Long Island invited us for dinner at his home nearby. The dinner was black-tie, and Bridget insisted we simply wash-up and dust-off beforehand, wearing the same clothes we had worn chasing rabbits all afternoon, adding a blazer. The hosts were a banished Spanish Princess with her once handsome and inebriated American husband, who had bought Cortezs hacienda near Patricks ranch. The couple had moved from Madrid into the crumbling 16th Century stone fortress that was under renovation, inclusive of moat and drawbridge, with a hoard of priceless antique and art appointments down to family silver and Sevres. A staff of forty servants was acquired to maintain the
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property. Their collection of Velazquez and Goya paintings were impressive. These were the types of people in Mexico that drooled over Patrick and Bridget with their simple pleasures and no great material wealth, but great passions that brought fulfillment. There were many Mexican anglophiles in Bridgets era, some with European titles that married Mexicans, yet with degrees of family importance, economic background, or whose offspring were not of pure Caucasian blood, who vied for both Bridgets and Patricks attention in a colonial royal court that they aspired to. Inherited social standing from blood or bank balance to many Mexicans, like modern society, engenders arrogance and superiority characteristics - quite un-British. Then there were the transient indulgent American and European expatriates in Cuernavaca, Morelia, San Miguel de Allende, Acapulco, and Mexico City, who lived pathetic and empty lives on family trusts, going from one cocktail party to another, such as Bridgets first husbands friends Barbara Hutton and Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds. The reckless, selfish and vindictive Nancy Oakes had the premiere Anglo-sized Porfirian mansion that was the former Nazi German Embassy during WW II. Prior to Tritton, anti-Semitic Oakes had been married to homosexual Baron Ernst von Hoyningen-Huene, WW II Nazi Ambassador to Portugal. The remarkable Turners, Gainsboroughs, and Reynolds adorned the walls of the grand foyer, and the interior stone courtyard had a mirrored wall 17 ft. high with glass shelving of Pre-Columbian ceramics and statuary that rivaled the Rockefeller collection adjacent to a tiled indoor swimming pool. Nancys bathtub was a giant scallop shell from the Philippines with solid gold fittings. The look was Balmoral gone 50s Palm Beach with a Valley of the Dolls script. Bridget and Nancy had been close friends, through Bridgets cousin the Duke of Windsor, in New York during Nancys family tragedy
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in the 40s. Nancy, fueled by her wealth and temperament to attract admirers, presented Bridget like a trophy British Royal to Mexican society in 1956, yet Nancy never bought Bridgets paintings. Bridgets friend Lady Sarah Churchill, who did collect Bridgets art, argued with Nancy over her taste and selection of decorators such as Bob Brady. Oakes wanted British set designer Oliver Messel to duplicate the fantasy of his 1940 film The Thief of Baghdad sets in her property, but instead hired Brady. Nancy gave a cocktail to honor her guest Princess Margaret when she finished the home, at which Nancy and others fell into the indoor pool, which became the norm at many of her events. Brady and Bridget, who were at odds as Bridget said his proportions and colour schemes were all wrong in the embassy redo, but the truth was that Nancy never wanted to credit Bridget with being an arbiter of good taste with her esoteric talents. Nancy was insanely jealous of Bridget and went into obsessive rages later when she found out Patrick had been having a long clandestine affair with her. Patrick left Nancy for Bridget in a nasty divorce. Bridget and Nancy did not speak thereafter, and Nancy gossiped that Bridget was the lesbian lover of 1940s Mexican actress Maria Felix, which was not true, and her Baring banking ancestors were German Jews, which was true as the Barings were related to the Beit family of 17th century Germany. The Beit families were wool merchants that became bankers. Bridget said, I credit my Jewish ancestry to my quest for knowledge, and the most intelligent and creative people I have known have been Jewish. Barings Bank had close ties with the Hambros, Rothschild, Lazard, Seligman, Perieres, Bischoffsheims families. Nancys gossip at that time was based in historical fact that Bridget had an affair with author Anais Nin and rumor that she had been a lover of silent film star Alla Nazimova during Bridgets WW II years in Hollywood.
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Mixed within the colonial booze and pill crowd were the artists such as Bridget, Alice Rahon, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Pedro Friedeberg, and Tamara de Limpicka, who had no common interests with the idle rich foreigners. Many of the expatriate socialites had known Bridget in New York or Hollywood before and during WW II in relationship to her first husband, when she was an editor at Vogue, or had known her mother Vera in London or Paris at Chanel. They did not embrace her as the great artist she had become, and looked at her as a dilettante to match their own inadequacies. She called them lost parasitical souls that suck the life from the illuminated ones. Bridget was profoundly misunderstood, yet admired for all the wrong reasons by many of Mexicos elite social circles, which were handicapped and limited by their own delusional self-perceptions of importance and only looked at her meticulously exquisite veneer. And on the other hand, there were those insightful Mexicans, artists, intellectuals, and eccentrics such as her British cousin Edward James, surrealist Pedro Friedeberg, Canadian painter Alan Glass, Jean de Laborde, and artist La Bruja Cristina Bremer with whom she resonated completely. Bridget and British/Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington had known each from the time of Bridgets arrival in Mexico. They both shared commonalities in their finely detailed oil glazing painting techniques, interests in the esoteric depths of all things magical and metaphysical, yet were worlds apart in their artistic messages and life journeys. Bridget was directly connected with her spirit guides and portrayed magical worlds that were altruistic and rich with haunting beauty and idealism, expressing through painting her spirit guides' communications in a sensorial manner from her soul, yet never reflecting others' philosophies. Leonora was focused on her visions of spiritual phenomena and its exquisite staging of surreal and sometimes grotesquely chilling characters in theatrical interplay that came from a more mental or intellectualized reference. Bridget introduced me to Leonora in 1971 at Leonoras home on
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Calle Puebla in Mexico City, where we spent a number of visits in which Bridget and Leonora would conduct spiritual sances around a candle lit rustic wood rectangular table in a barren cold and dank stone floor room. Bridget and Leonora were equally connected to the paranormal and loved to demonstrate their mediumistic gifts and interpretations to me. Leonora, dressed in a long white caftan with a tangle of uncombed wiry grey hair, would address tapping sounds and mumbling voices in Nahuatl that would occur in the room, You heard that clearly it is Xochipilli, Aztec god of art! Then, both would elaborate upon their separate interpretations of the spirits messages. A peculiar thing about Mexico at that time, like most of Latin America, was its history of cultural and racial identification that reflected social status, where every level of society pulled rank. A European titled Mexican would portray a non-Indian heritage, when the parenting was mixed and adopt a European identity, while denying Mexican heritage of Indian blood. This point was based upon a racial discrimination that ran through the culture since the Indian holocaust of the Spanish colonization, manipulated by the Catholic Church. Then there is today the reverse snobbery by Mexican nationalists, where only those of mixed indigenous heritage are considered true Mexicans and the European expatriate that becomes Mexican is never considered Mexican. As an example, in certain Latin American Art circles Bridget has not been considered a Mexican artist. Fortunately, Mexican indigenous identification has changed since Bridgets era with more pride in Mexicos rich and diverse cultural history, which has been a political correction. After all, there was a Mexican revolution that was won by Benito Juarez. Like England, social family class of historical value in Mexico wealthy or poor, European or Mexican, still holds a powerful position of respect and honor. The absence of this class value is clear in the United States where
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financial stature is the predominant social barometer for entitlement such as in some great Oil/Gas fortunes of Texas, where money has bought position to otherwise insignificant individuals devoid of any worthy character development or notable personal achievement beyond disingenuous canned philanthropy. Bridget once said, The only thing I share in common with _________ is our family backgrounds, which has nothing whatsoever to do with my art, interests, values, or life-destiny. Bridget had many notable rivals in Mexico from elitist Nancy Oakes to communist Frida Kahlo, who were covetous of her sex appeal, beauty, talent, wit, intelligence, and background. Bridget was notorious for her social scandals, and was not an angel when it came to provoking a direct conflict. Pedro Friedeberg related an event that took place when Bridget first arrived in Mexico, One evening in 1953 Diego Rivera had a dinner in honor of Bridgets arrival in Mexico City with a group of artists and intellectuals, which included his near-death wife Frida Kahlo in a wheelchair full of opiates with her two nurses. At the dinner, Diegos attention was on Bridget and they openly flirted. Bridgets long false eyelashes fluttered like a coy schoolgirl. Frida struck out and attacked Bridget, You capitalist English bitch - stop playing with Diego! Bridget retaliated by slowly opening her purse and tossing Frida a bottle of perfume replying, Darling, you should try bathing with this scent- it does wonders. Pedro Friedeberg later commented on this event, Frida had the most horrid body odor, as she did not bath. She was full of hate and quite the antithesis of the glamorized film Frida. Fridas envy arose from Bridgets friendship with Diego and Bridgets alliance with Fridas former lover surrealist Jacqueline Breton Lamba. Bridgets painting and life were far more beautiful and elevated than Fridas painful monologue - a wretched purgatory that brought her fame. Fridas monkeys were well executed and had great character like the ones painted on 1940s Mexican Tamale street vendors
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carts. Bridgets relationship with Tritton unraveled around 1978 with the sale gone awry of her beloved Di Chirico painting. Tritton then abandoned Bridget and married a relative of Bridgets, UK actress Hon. Georgina Ann Ward in Mexico City, daughter of George Ward, 1st Viscount Ward of Witley, granddaughter of Boy Capel, Chanels first financier, and former wife of Alistair Forbes. Tritton reportedly sold groceries from a van around Mexican villages and died destitute a few months to a year after Bridget in 1990 or 1991. Another great friend of Bridgets was the 1940s Mexican Yaqui Indian actress Francophile Maria Felix from Sonora, Mexico. There were a number of occasions where Bridget invited me for Marias visits in her dank and cold lower apartment of Eric Norens house on Calle Tabasco in Colonia Roma. Bridget would spend hours preparing herself to see Maria. She would wrap her long thick gray hair in a circular manner flat against her head and cover it tightly with a thin silk scarf, then take a hair blow dryer and dry the entire head so her hair would be straightened. Before she removed the scarf, she began the tedious process of applying her long thick false eyelashes with heavy black mascara, detailed eyeliner, pale powder, vermillion lipstick, and a touch of rouge on each cheek. Once during such a preparation, her cap on a front tooth fell off, and she hastily found some quick-drying glue and adhered the tooth, laughing through the ordeal. Then, she would dress rapidly and immediately go to her bed in what she called her favorite location in a horizontal position with down pillows supporting her upright back. She would light a Salem or Carmencita cigarette and impatiently pick up the phone near her bed to call a servant to bring Sauza tequila and Magi. A servant would arrive with a linen covered round silver Tiffany tray with three Baccarat crystal shot glasses, tequila, and Magi. As we waited for Marias arrival, sipping small shots of tequila,
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Bridget would discuss Marias life in Mexico and Paris, detailing her taste for Napoleon III furnishings, jewels, art, and husbands. The buzzer from the street would ring, and the house Portero would go to the front-gated door to let Marias chauffeur in. The portero brought the uniformed chauffeur to Bridgets apartment, where he announced to Bridget that the Senora Felix had arrived. Then, Bridget and I would go to the street with the chauffeur and portero to welcome Maria. Maria sat in the back of a shiny large black Ford with dark tinted windows, upholstered in real leopard skins, with oversized sunglasses, covered in large Harry Winston diamond jewelry, oversized black Kelly bag, and her head covered with an Hermes scarf. We became Marias entourage, who then discreetly escorted her into Bridgets apartment. Bridget and Maria kissed and hugged each other speaking in French and Spanish, waving hand and arm gestures as Maria chose not to speak in English. Bridget positioned Maria in a chair near a table and then returned to her bed. Bridget introduced me to Maria, and then they began a fascinating dialogue between themselves that would go on for 3 hours of slow tequila shots. They were two 1940s divas mirroring each other from hairstyles to makeup, hand gestures, in deep toned raspy cigarette voices. Bridget was original and natural, while Maria was a stylized version of her in later years, skillfully coordinated from her earlier days as a Mexican Movie star. Maria by that time was going blind with a high receding forehead from too many exaggerated face-lifts, and would sit facing Bridget discussing her life, her lovers paintings, her recent travels, and current public interviews. Bridget would respond with total focus on Maria, ravissant, quelle horreur, no me digas, divino, magnifique, horrible, quelle de mage, and so on. The content of their conversations revolved exclusively around Maria, yet it was clear that they both admired one another and emulated each other in appearance and style.
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