De Niro: A Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

In the summer of 1940, Admiral made her way back east, putatively to study for a master’s degree at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Before the term began, she visited Duncan in Woodstock, in upstate New York, where he was living on a communal farm dedicated to personal liberty and artistic experimentation. Then she moved on to Maine to teach art at a summer camp before finally settling in Manhattan in the fall to begin school.
    Or at least that was the idea. Admiral was living, in part, on money that her mother had borrowed from her grandfather, and she was supposed to find a room at International House, a dormitory on the Columbia campus that was considered a safe zone for unattached young women in the big, mean city. But her housing plans went the way of her academic career. Admiral began to live exactly the sort of bohemian existence that she, Duncan, the Fabillis, and their new friend Janet Thurman had dreamed of, renting a cold-water walk-up apartment facing Union Square on 14th Street, waiting tables in a Greenwich Village restaurant, visiting a psychotherapist (even among starving student artists, psychoanalysis was a fad), and focusing on her painting and writing. It was a fairy tale of the artistic life. Indeed, as Duncan would describe Admiral’s flat in his journal,“This is our last nursery—this is today’s, 1941’s projection of a Berkeley Paradise.”
    A mottled account of Admiral’s
vie bohème
would come courtesy of Anaïs Nin, the not-yet-famed writer who befriended Duncan in Woodstock and, in time, served as something of a mentor to him and his circle, calling them “les enfants terribles.” Like so many other European leftists and aesthetes, Nin had migrated to the United States to flee the burgeoning war, bringing with her sophisticated and even radical ideas about art and life. She was an intense draw for Admiral and her friends, who had never, of course, met anyone like her, and she introduced them to a variety of new experiences and faces to which they might otherwise never have had access.
    Nin taught Admiral, Duncan, and their set, particularly the youngwomen, about writing, about nightlife, about sexual freedom, about behaving in empowered and assertive ways. But Nin was not entirely a beneficent presence in the lives of her new acolytes. For one thing, she felt wholly superior to Virginia and the other young women in her circle. As she wrote in her diary:
    Virginia and her friends dress like schoolchildren. Baby shoes
,
little bows in their hair
,
little-girl dresses
,
little-boy clothes
,
orphan hats
,
schoolgirl short socks
,
they eat candy
,
sugar
,
ice cream. And some of the books they read are like schoolchildren’s books: how to win friends
,
how to make love
,
how to do this or that.
    And when she described her visits to Admiral’s loft on 14th Street, she was again condescending:
    The place is cold
,
but the hallways and lofts are big and high-ceilinged and the only place possible and available to a painter.… There is a lavatory outside
,
running water and a washstand inside
,
and that is all. On weekends the heat is turned off. The enormous windows which give on the deafening traffic noise of Fourteenth Street have to be kept closed. There are nails on the walls for clothes
,
a Sterno burner for making coffee. We drink sour wine out of paper cups.… The setting is fit for
Crime and Punishment,
but the buoyancy of Virginia and Janet and their friends
,
lovers
,
is deceptive. It has the semblance of youth and gaiety. They are in their twenties. They joke
,
laugh
,
but this hides deep anxieties
,
deep fears
,
deep paralysis.
    For her part, Virginia would claim, years later, that she and her friends saw Nin as more of a sugar mama than an inspiration. Duncan was the only one among them truly smitten by Nin, both erotically and intellectually. But Admiral had other ideas.“My role,” she told Nin’s biographer Deirdre Bair, “was to string along with Anaïs as long