the first biography of the life of bridget bate tichenor - chapter vi: anglophiles in mexico

7/23/2019 THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF THE LIFE OF BRIDGET BATE TICHENOR - CHAPTER VI: ANGLOPHILES IN MEXICO

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THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF THE LIFE OF

BRIDGET BATE TICHENOR

CHAPTER VI: ANGLOPHILES IN MEXICO

TX, PA, PAU COPYRIGHTS 2006 & 2009 Writers GuildRegistration TX 1382590 2008

Zähringen

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 GeorgePlatt Lynnes 1945

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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.

Bridget’s 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. Bridget’s 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 socialadvisor 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 the20th 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 inthe 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, andher 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, butalso 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 focusthrough 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 Tichenor’s 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 protégé 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, andMesoamerican 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.

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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

other’s lives, and what each of us gained from our rapport. Bridget’s

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.

Bridget’s 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. Bridget’s

long and entertaining monologues focused on definitive standards

and values she felt imperative I absorb. There was a ‘lesson to belearned’ 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.

,Just before her death, I promised Bridget that she would be known

to the world. - Zachary Selig

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ANGLOPHILES IN MEXICO

The love of Bridget’s 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 Hoyningen-

Huene, 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 Noël 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 Teotihuacán, where Bridget’s romantic dream came true with shared

Anglo-Mexican colonial eccentricities.

Patrick was ugly as hell, blond and blue-eyed, slight of build, sun-

damaged 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 Noren’s home on the Calle Tabasco

in Mexico City in a decrepit beige Volkswagen Beatlet to drive an

hour near the great pyramids of Teotihuacán to his run-down horse

ranch. Patrick had a marvelous sense of humor that matched

Bridget’s, 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 back-

seat. 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

Bridget’s 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 Cortez’shacienda near Patrick’s 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 Bridget’s 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 Bridget’s and Patrick’s

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

Bridget’s first husband’s 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. Nancy’s bathtub was agiant scallop shell from the Philippines with solid gold fittings. The

look was ‘Balmoral gone 50’s Palm Beach’ with a “Valley of the

Dolls” script.

Bridget and Nancy had been close friends, through Bridget’s cousin

the Duke of Windsor, in New York during Nancy’s family tragedy

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in the 40’s. 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 Bridget’s paintings.

Bridget’s friend Lady Sarah Churchill, who did collect Bridget’s 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 1940’s 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, Bischoffsheimsfamilies.”

Nancy’s 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 Bridget’s 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 andduring 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 Mexico’s elite social circles, which werehandicapped 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 hadknown each from the time of Bridget’s 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, yetnever 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 Leonora’s 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 séances 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 andinterpretations 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 spirit’s 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

Bridget’s era with more pride in Mexico’s rich and diverse cultural

history, which has been a political correction. After all, there was aMexican 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 Bridget’s 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, Diego’s attention was on Bridget and they openly

flirted. Bridget’s 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’. Frida’s envy

arose from Bridget’s friendship with Diego and Bridget’s alliancewith Frida’s former lover surrealist Jacqueline Breton Lamba.

Bridget’s painting and life were far more beautiful and elevated than

Frida’s painful monologue - a wretched purgatory that brought her

fame. Frida’s monkeys were well executed and had great character

like the ones painted on 1940’s Mexican Tamale street vendors

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carts.”

Bridget’s 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 Bridget’s, UK actress

Hon. Georgina Ann Ward in Mexico City, daughter of George

Ward, 1st Viscount Ward of Witley, granddaughter of Boy Capel,

Chanel’s 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 Bridget’s was the 1940’s Mexican Yaqui

Indian actress Francophile Maria Felix from Sonora, Mexico. There

were a number of occasions where Bridget invited me for Maria’s

visits in her dank and cold lower apartment of Eric Noren’s 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 Salemor 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 Maria’s arrival, sipping small shots of tequila,

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Bridget would discuss Maria’s 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 Maria’s chauffeur in. The portero

brought the uniformed chauffeur to Bridget’s 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 Maria’s entourage, who then discreetly escorted her into

Bridget’s 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 1940’s 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 lover’s paintings, her

recent travels, and current public interviews. Bridget would respondwith 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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the first biography of the life of bridget bate tichenor - chapter vi: anglophiles in mexico

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