PROJECTS — [PART 2] Travels with Dad

Dad Meets his Match by RANDY FERTEL

When I was fifteen, I traveled in Spain with my father. We had the good fortune to meet a woman who introduced us to, of all people, Salvador Dalí. In Dalí my Dad, the Surrealist of New Orleans, met his match.

It happened like this. One rainy night in WHERE, we were desperate for a cab to get us to dinner. We shared a hack a middle-aged woman, a New Yorker. And before cab ride was out, I had an invitation to accompany her to Dalí’s house on the Costa Brava. Dad declined – I’m not sure why. I went, in large part, because during our stopover in New York I had spent many precocious hours at MoMA and had been quite taken by Dalí’s melting clocks and Christs floating above Catalan seascapes.
Two days later, I found myself with just such a seascape before me as we knocked on Dalí’s door. A pink stuffed bear with a purple owl on its shoulder greeted us in the foyer. A German TV crew was in the midst of filming a documentary and all Dalí’s behavior before the camera was insistently meant to shock. Estranged at that time from his beloved wife and muse, Gala, Dalí paraded a leggy, blonde model on his arm, no doubt both his trophy and his revenge. For my fifteen-year-old eyes, it was all that TV had trained me to appreciate and in living color.

A few days later Dalí – complete with entourage – showed up at the Ritz in Barcelona. For my Dad, it was love at first sight. Until then, he had no idea that he had not himself invented Surrealism. Years later, he would campaign for mayor of New Orleans – usually in a safari outfit complete with pith helmet – on the platform that the zoo needed a gorilla. Then, after securing his 308 votes, he found two baby lowland gorillas for sale abroad, brought them back to the zoo, and announced that he was the only mayoral candidate in history who had kept all his campaign promises, even though he’d lost. It was a keepsake moment in a land where political surrealism has been raised to a fine art .

That day in the Barcelona Ritz, Dalí’s capes and wild eyes and outrageous mustache were all it took. Dad had found a soulmate.

The climax of their love affair was the day Dad announced he had a present for Dalí. We were in the Ritz’s grand sitting room, something right out of the twenties with its velvet overstuffed sofas and chairs with anti-macassars. I cringed. What could Dad have in mind? With all the flourish and fanfare that a drama princeling could muster before the drama king of the century, Dad produced his prize compass, a trophy of our visit to Switzerland. Dad was neither Boy Scout nor Rhodes Scholar. But well-made things impressed him — another legacy to me for which I am grateful — and the compass was well-tooled and elegant in its own way. And it always mysteriously pointed north.

But, Jeez, it was just a compass.

Dalí turned it over, bemused. He waited for the punch line, the next step, the magic dust that would turn this mechanical device into the worthy tribute that Dad’s ecstatic look seemed to promise. Would the compass manage to melt away right there in his hand?

It never did. But I tried hard to make up for its inexplicable lapse. I did my best to melt away into that velvet sofa.