Naked Chess: How to Win

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A month or so later, I went to Barney’s and found Walter sitting at the counter alone with tacos and a beer, and I said, “So, are you going to forgive me?”

In 1937, when my father was still playing in the L.A. Philharmonic, Stravinsky came to conduct. And Stravinsky so loved my beautiful and funny father that later on he became my godfather, and his wife, Vera, and my mother were great friends. My parents and Stravinsky and Vera used to go see Jelly Roll Morton or mariachi bands, or my father would jam with Stuff Smith in dives—they double-dated, you might say. Not that Vera ever got over there being no clothes in L.A. or anything else to remind her of Paris, the only city, in her opinion, where anyone sensible would want to live. But Stravinsky loved the climate, and after World War II, when everyone else who had been on the lam (like Brecht and Thomas Mann and Jean Renoir) returned to Europe, Stravinsky stayed—he wasn’t going anyplace it snowed ever again. After the symposium Julian Wasser showed up looking younger than he did when he took the pictures. He’s now such an adept paparazzo he hired a helicopter to crash Madonna’s wedding. We all walked over to the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, where Julian had a display of his pictures, the ones he’d taken at the party, the public opening, and that day I played chess with Duchamp and surprised Walter. Looking at the pictures of Walter in those days, so pale, almost unearthly, I said, “If I’d known you were so young, I wouldn’t have been so mad at you.” He was a very singular type of person,” recalls Ruscha, an artist whose career was just beginning at the time of the first retrospective. “He was very mysterious. And compared to other artists, like the abstract expressionists who were two-fisted tough guys, suddenly Duchamp comes along and he is a more suave continental answer to aesthetic questions. Anyway, he proved to be a real guiding light. All of his works, they kind of went counter to what we learned in school. The fact that all of these works finally got together in this very unlikely little museum in Pasadena was a surprise and also a real jewel.” George was one of the people who called Walter by his secret name, Chico, like a lot of the artists who knew him early on.) Not drugs,” George said. “Art. He was holding art. Probably stuff he stole from me or some other guy’s studio. If you caught him, he’d always say he was saving things from being stepped on, but I always knew he was stealing!”

Of course, by now even I have forgiven Walter for leaving LA, and we are happy to give him any chance we can, and though most of those Ruscha fans probably had no idea the man sitting beside him was really the One as far as art in LA is concerned, we who were there realize that Ed couldn’t have happened without the strange days of long ago. By 1966 his parents—or his mother, anyway—finally agreed to let bygones be bygones about his dropping out of medical school. “They figured if I was at the Smithsonian,” he said, “I had a job.”

Since Walter had left L.A., I’d seen him twice in Washington, but then he’d gone to organize the Menil Collection, in Houston, which is famous for having more money than the mere Smithsonian. He was probably down there, filling Mrs. de Menil’s head with his digressions.

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Mirandi Babitz: Evie wasn’t going to go with Julian so she arranged for me to go with him instead. I already knew Julian. He’d photographed me before. He had an assignment for Time to take pictures of girls in their boots on Rodeo Drive, and I was one one of the girls. Actually, come to think of it, so was Myrna Reisman. In the years I spent listening to Walter—from 1962 to 1966, when he left LA and went to Washington, DC, where he was with the Smithsonian—I lived in a sea of his digressions. And though I never saw what he saw, I at least learned to see through things and into and under and over what was in plain sight. Being with him, looking at anything, was an experience, and though when he left LA I felt he had forsaken us, I now feel grateful we had him for so long, since after the Duchamp show everyone on the East Coast suddenly noticed how brilliant he was and wanted him there, where art was art and people knew a genius when they saw one.