Oral history interview with Rachel Rosenthal, 1989 Sept. 2-3

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Rachel Rosenthal, 1989 Sept. 2-3, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Rachel Rosenthal
Conducted by Moira Roth
In Los Angeles, California
September 2, 1989

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Rachel Rosenthal on September 2, 1989. The interview took place in Los Angeles, and was conducted by Moira Roth for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

[Tape 1, side A; 45-minute tape sides]

MOIRA ROTH: This is a recording with Rachel Rosenthal in Los Angeles at her house, and it’s a recording for the Archives of American Art for the Oral History Program, September 2, 1989. If we could begin with your birth, where you were born, when, and a context.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I was born in Paris in 1926, and my parents were both Russian Jews. My father was twenty years older than my mother. He was an emigré at age fourteen, which means that if he was born in 1874 he arrived in Paris in 1888, right? And went through “La Belle Epoque” [referring to Paris in the 1890s and turn of the century—RR] in Paris as a young man. He came penniless, and by the age of twenty-five he was a multi-millionaire. He had made a fortune in precious stones and Oriental pearls and became a wholesaler importer. The House, the business—was called Rosenthal et Frères, was himself and his brothers, and operated out of Paris; he sent his brothers all over the world to pick up these objects and bring them back to Paris where he prepared them for retail. And my mother was an emigré of the Bolshevik Revolution, so she came to Paris around, I think, 1920, ‘21, something like that. And she had had a very difficult escape from Russia with a very small child—my half sister Olga, from her first marriage. She had almost been executed and quite by chance managed to escape, so it was very harrowing. And they met, also quite by chance, because some person, a French woman, told my mother that my father helps Russian emigrés and she thought that (she had no idea who he was) and she thought he was like an agency, you know, and went to see him, and the concierge said to her, “But do you have an appointment?” and she said “No,” and he said, “Well, you can’t see Monsieur Leonard without an appointment.” At that point my father was coming down the stairs—it was his mansion, near the Parc Monceau—and it was love at first sight! [laughs] They fell madly in love the moment they set eyes on each other. My father was married and his first wife wouldn’t give the divorce, so he lived with my mother and built this absolutely lovely little “hotel particulier” for her where I was born. I was born out of wedlock and they married when I was seven years old.
[Interruption in taping]

MOIRA ROTH: What were relationships like, both with your parents and with Olga, your stepsister, no, your half sister?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I was a poor little rich girl in the sense that in those days a little girl of my class was not brought up by her parents and didn’t partake of the life of the parents the way American children do, which I always envied, but was given over to a “nounou” at first and then a governess. Unfortunately those women were, most of them, really poor frustrated women who were taking it out on the children, and my case was no exception. And so I was pretty much abused by my governess, particularly, who systematically went about breaking my spirit. All my life I have been trying to undo the damage that this woman did. And I adored my parents, but it was always a relationship of being on show, and so I think that my performing skills were [chuckles] honed very early on, because in those days you didn’t see your parents unless you were all dressed up and pretty and combed and clean and ready to be on show, like a little pink poodle. And I remember that my mother, because of the fact—consciously or unconsciously—because of the fact that my parents were not married, I think that she used me to keep my father interested and close to her. And so she pushed my father and myself into a very, very close relationship while holding back, and so my very early recollections are never of my mother. They’re always of my father. And he took me to Le Louvre every Sunday. He was a wonderful, wonderful father, even though generationally he could have been my grandfather. But he was such a vital and youthful man that I remember nothing but fun and games and delight with him. He was really quite an amazing person. I was madly in love with him. I wanted to marry him. And we were a lot alike. And later on that created a lot of clashes in our personalities, but early on it was considered quite lovely to see the two of us looking so much alike. It was sort of a feather in my mother’s cap.

MOIRA ROTH: Were you physically alike. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes.

MOIRA ROTH: . . . or psychologically?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Both, both. We looked alike and we had the same way of being, I think. And, unfortunately because I was a girl, all the things that he was, I wasn’t allowed to be, and that was a real problem. Actually I address that in a piece that I called The Arousing: Shock Thunder, which I did in, I think it was ‘79. It was very much of a problem because he was my role model and I tried to emulate him in all things, and of course he was the totally wrong role model for the time because I couldn’t be a man.
And my identification with him was such that for decades, I had a lot of gender identity problems. I just couldn’t accept being a woman at all. And even as a child I couldn’t accept being a woman. I hated having menstruation. I hated having breasts, pubic hair, et cetera. I was very much a tomboy, I was very male-identified, and yet I never became a lesbian, because I wasn’t really attracted to women that way. I tried to be a lesbian when I was a girl, growing up. Particularly after the war in Paris, I tried to make love to women and it was wrong. It was just not a physical thing. It was a power thing. I wanted to establish power over someone. And so I was emulating men. And it was really a problem all my life: the fact that my mother was who she was. . . . She was. . . . In those days you called them “professional beauties,” you know, that’s all she was. [chuckling] And yet, here was a woman who was filled with talent, none of which was ever used, because as a child she was denied access to learning how to dance or how to sing or music—or any of the things that she really wanted to do—by her mother, who was jealous of her, and she never had the courage to stick up for herself in that way. And so all her life she got things through men and through being beautiful and charming and manipulating men with her charm. That was her whole life. And so it was a terrible thing for her to grow old because she couldn’t use that tool anymore; it was a real catastrophe. Whereas for me seeing this, I purposefully avoided being fashionable and interested in clothes, and being all the things that she was, because she was never a role model for me. And, in a way, although I did love her very much, I also despised her, and that was a really terrible thing, you know. At the same time, when I grew much older, before she died, I realized what a tragedy this woman’s life had been, which she would probably never have acknowledged. She had a very happy marriage to my father and it was a real, totally traditional marriage with him being very virile, with her being very feminine, and the two of them having a totally separate division of labor [chuckles] in the couple, and that worked very well. It was for me a pure example of a traditional marriage and how well it worked when everybody knew their place and their role and how those roles combined. And yet for a long, long time I despised the idea of marriage and thought that I would never marry. And when I married I did it really as a joke and it was a strange thing—but that’s in the future. So about my relationship to my brothers and sisters (because my father had two sons and a daughter by his first marriage, and my mother had, of course, Olga by her first marriage): Olga was about twelve years older than I was, and she lived with us when I was little. She was the child of rape. My mother’s first husband raped her on their wedding night, and my mother hated him and never loved Olga. Gave her all the material things that were available in those days.
[Interruption in taping]

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: In those days, of course, material things were plentiful, and Olga had them all, but the one thing that she really wanted—her mother’s love—she never got and she was a very angry personage. She was both a remarkable person and a monster, and my relationship with her was very ambiguous because we sometimes played and loved each other and she was continually betraying me and trying to do me harm, which continued all [of] the life that she had to live.

MOIRA ROTH: Did she, as she was older than you, not have a governess in the sense that you did?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: When I was very little, she still had a governess. She had a governess until she was sixteen or seventeen, I think. But at age ten I said, “No more,” and declared my independence. Shortly afterwards, she married, just to get away from the house. She hated my father and she was very, very jealous of me because I was obviously a love child. So that was that. And then the other side of the family? Because of the fact that my father had deserted his family for my mother and lived with my mother, they tried everything in their power—the whole tribe (because he had brought over his whole family from Russia, and it was a very extended family, lots of brothers and sisters and lots of nephews and nieces and aunts and, you know, an enormous tribe, and he was really the provider for everybody, because he had the money). They tried to really pry him away from her by every means at their command—and they tried very, very hard. They were even sending my father nude photographs of women, of other women, I mean just insane things. And when they saw that it didn’t work, years later, they began to fawn on my mother and fawn on me and so on. So in my early days I don’t remember any of these people at all. And certainly not the children by my father’s first marriage, except for one, Pierre, who was the middle child and he was many, many years older than I was. I don’t know why, but for some reason he made the effort and the gesture of bridging, and he came to the house and I remember him when I was very little. And he was very, very good to me and I was as madly in love with him as I was with my father. I adored the man. He was a musician, a poet, a very political, socially conscious person and just a very erect soul, a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person. And he was killed in 1943 in the Sahara Campaign, and that was a big tragedy in my life. It was like, you know, “don’t love anybody or else they die” kind of thing. A lot of the recollections that I have of him are just so, so intimate, and so loving and so wonderful really that even to this day, it’s painful just thinking about his death. So. . . .The rest of the family I really had almost no contact with. And very early on I developed all kinds of nervous disorders. Probably from isolation, from a lot of anxiety and fear and from all kinds of infant needs not being met. And I had nervous ticks and nervous disorders and insomnia and upset stomach and all kinds of symptoms of that nature. Of course, in those days, nobody could tell what was really wrong, which was very simply, “Pick up the child and love it for God’s sakes!” you know! But they didn’t do that, and so I remember being always on diets and being even more isolated for they wouldn’t let me play with little children my own age because that would “excite” me too much. And all kinds of things, which were so absurd. And then I remember that when I was about five or six I was the leader of a gang of little boys who were the sons of the concierges and of the shopkeepers in my quartier [neighborhood—RR]. Our house was in a cul-de-sac and there were no cars and they came to play in front of the house. I would go out and play with those little boys and I was always the instigator of extraordinary games. I was directing them, actually, in plays, and when I would go with my nounou on walks in the neighborhood there were always chalk graffiti on the walls saying “Vive Rachel!”
My first British governess came when I was six and put an end to that, and I couldn’t play with those little boys anymore, which was very, very bad and I had no friends at all. I went to school when I was seven and started to have little girl friends, and realized early on that being a girl was fun, but it was also very puerile and I had that sense of puerility, which comes from being with these little women. And it was true, let’s face it, because that’s how we were brought up; we were really little nothings.

MOIRA ROTH: Was this a girl’s school that you went to. . . ?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No.

MOIRA ROTH: A mixed school?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: A mixed school, but, you know, the boys were in the younger classes—I think, if I remember correctly—and then in higher classes there were no more boys. It was a private school. I remember things like there were big long tables in the center covered with green felt, with little sunken ink stands and pens and everything, and I loved everything about school. I had a real sensual take on it. I loved the smell of ink and I loved the smell of notebooks and I loved the sound of the chalk on the blackboards and I loved learning. I loved writing carefully, because we were taught penmanship and all of that. And I really loved every part of it except one part, which was that we were taught very early on when we had little tests to barricade ourselves completely with mountains and walls of books on all sides so that others couldn’t copy and cheat. And I never accepted doing that. I always got into trouble because I never put up these books and I would always show my stuff to the other little girls if they wanted to copy. And got into all kinds of trouble. I also got into trouble once because going down during recess in the stairs. . . . There was, you know, a spiral staircase I remember; for some reason my lips pursed and the air in my lungs came out my mouth and I whistled. They brought my parents to school and made a real big thing. And I remember having hot and cold flushes for days afterwards and not being able to sleep because I had nightmares of whistling in spite of myself. That’s the kind of nonsense that went on.
And other nonsense that went on: At the end of the school year there was “la distribution des prix.” We would get prizes, and according to how many times we were first or second during the year, we got first prize or second prize or whatever, and there were books and “des images” and I had a marvelous collection of images I remember. (When I had my Instant Theatre, whenever somebody did a good improvisation or whatever, I would always say, “Well, you get an ‘image’!”)[laughter] So I and another little girl were always contenders for first prize. When I was first she was second; when she was first I was second. And we never knew exactly how we stood until the end of the year when all was tabulated, and I turned out to be first, she turned out to be second; I probably had one more “first” than she had. So after the prizes were given out, she came back to her seat and her governess gave her a horrible resounding smack on the face in front of everybody because she wasn’t first. It just took away all my sense of competitiveness. It was so traumatic for me, and that little girl started to cry and it was just awful. She was a very good, good student and a good person. So then. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Then, in this context of a very strict school—in fact a very harsh school—what kind of teaching went on? Was it a very traditional French education?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes.

MOIRA ROTH: Racine, the classics. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: It was like grammar school, you know. It was very simple. We learned how to read and write and we learned arithmetic and we learned grammar and history and geography. And some home ec [home economics—Ed.], I remember. We had to actually cook things and, of course, I never did. My mother did, and she put salt instead of sugar in the chocolate. Things like that!
Later on I had tutors at home and actually those tutors taught me things which were way, way more advanced than my age, because when I came to New York to high school, even after a year of not learning anything in Brazil, I still was way ahead of my class. I really knew all the things that we were learning, and I should have gone into a higher class, but to tell the truth I held back and didn’t even try because I was enjoying myself too much. I loved high school.

MOIRA ROTH: And the way that your parents lived, both before they got married and afterwards, on a public level, was very gracious, social, charming. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, we had a house which was a model of the gracious house. It was, first of all, filled with art and objets d’art—my father loved art. Although a businessman, he was really a frustrated artist, and he loved art. He collected, and had Impressionists and 18th century things, and the whole house was decorated by Jean Dunand, who was a very very famous decorator and lacquerist.
My father always had tons of people around him. I remember we never had a meal really with just us. There were always zillions of people. And my parents were very social. My mother, of course, was very, very social. My mother was always going to fittings, I remember. Her clothes came from Schiaparelli and Paquin and Patou and all the big designers. They were always going out and doing things. And I remember watching my mother take a bath and getting dressed and putting on her jewelry. It was absolutely like a religious ritual. And the life that they led. . . . My father was enamoured of creative people and scientists, and since he was rich he was accepted in all these circles. He was a philanthropist and gave a lot of money to these people. So there were always artists and musicians and writers and politicians and scientists, and they all came to the house. And when I was finally allowed downstairs, and didn’t eat upstairs with my nurse, those were the people who were there—along with some of my mother’s family who were always hangers-on and very charming ones at that. My mother’s family, incidentally, were all in movies and theater, and they were very famous too. Granowski, Alexei Granowski, was her first cousin, and he was blacklisted by the Communists because he left Russia. But he was a very, very big director in France and Germany. And his brother, his younger brother, Leonid Azar, was a prizewinning film editor before and after the war. And the—I think he was the youngest—Boris Ingster—was a film maker, and he emigrated to America very early on and came to Hollywood and did a lot of writing, directing, producing in Hollywood—up to the sixties actually. American Immigration changed and Americanized his name. And, interestingly enough, in spite of all of that, I don’t remember any talk of politics at the table—ever.

MOIRA ROTH: And no sense of impending Fascism?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No. No sense at all, and this is something which I used in my piece and in my radio performance, Charm, where I talk about the fact that they never discussed fascism; just as in my personal life, all the uglies were like swept under the rug and you never could really talk about them. I was always very guilty about feelings that were not fully sunny and positive and charming. The same way on the global level. I had no sense at all that my parents were either aware or even wanted to address the fact that this terrible thing was happening. And I remember that the same girl who was slapped by her governess said to me one day, “Those poor Czechs,” and I didn’t know what she was talking about. And I was afraid to ask, not to look stupid. But I had no concept of politics whatsoever. And that went along with the territory, because I think my parents. . . . They may have been concerned and they may have talked about all those things, but never in front of me. And I don’t remember, as a child, being taught anything other than politeness. That was the main thrust of my education. I don’t really think that anybody tried to teach me anything about how to relate to other people, how to behave in terms of ethics. I was repressed sexually, like all little girls. That was the idea of teaching morality, I suppose. There was no religion. My father was an atheist.

MOIRA ROTH: So there was no sense of being Jewish?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No sense of being Jewish at all. We were completely “assimilated” Jews. My first seder was here in California—and I had no idea of what it was to be a Jew. I didn’t even know I was Jewish until I noticed that the little girls who took their First Communion had these lovely little dresses and little white hats and everything. I asked my mother, “When am I gonna do that? This looks neat,” you know, and she said, “You can’t. You’re Jewish.” And I said, “What’s that?” [laughs]
So my background was a very strange one, because it really had only to do with the sunny side of life with my parents, and all the bad feelings with the servants. There were a lot of parties. There was a lot of dressing up. There was a lot of playacting. We would do little plays at home and things like that for our friends. And there were wonderful vacations in extraordinary vacation places all over Europe, and learning ballet and learning piano and sports and horseback riding and golf and all those things.
The ugly side was my life with my governesses and my nurses, and boredom, discipline, repression, isolation, frustration, anxiety—none of which I could ever disclose to my parents. And I remember that my mother’s sister, who was a doctor who lived in Poland, came on a visit, and she said to my mother, “You know, I think that Rachel’s afraid of her governess,” and my mother said, “Don’t be silly.” And then she went and asked me and, of course, you know, with my pride, would I say, “Yes, I’m afraid of my governess”? No way! So my aunt sensed that, but my mother didn’t ever and neither did my father, so I was really not protected by them in any sense of the word. And, interestingly, it got worse. My governess got worse and worse with me, and it turned out that she was pregnant from the gardener in the south of France. And we found out because she fell on the skating rink, and my mother called the doctor, and the doctor said to my mother, “She’s fine considering her condition.” And mother said, “What condition?” He said, “Don’t you know?” [laughs] And my mother sent her down there to the south, and there was a shotgun wedding, and she had this little boy who was like a little English lord, with the father who was a Basque gardener. And my mother told me later—which is an amazing thing—that Bridie, after her son was born, said to my mother, “Mrs. Rosenthal, now that I have a child, I must tell you that I can’t understand how women like yourself and others entrust your children to strangers like us.” After she had damaged me for life, right? [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: So this childhood, this mixture of, what?—luxury and elegance as a veneer and everything else underneath—got very disrupted when you left Europe?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Or did it continue?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: . . . I was thinking that if one has to choose one major event in one’s life that colored one’s entire life, for me it was World WarII; there’s no question about it. It loomed as such an enormous event. First of all, because it completely broke the course of my life. It changed it a hundred and eighty degrees—and on every level. On every level. First of all, when we left. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: And you left in. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: We left in June, ‘40, right before the Germans took over Paris and France. The afternoon that we had left, the swastika was hanging on our villa in the south. We were really very lucky. But it was the first time that I had my parents to myself, because the three of us were alone in the world. We first went to Portugal and then we went to Brazil and then to New York.

MOIRA ROTH: Olga by that time was married?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Olga was married and divorced by that time, and she was in the north of France when we were in the south and the Germans cut us off so she couldn’t emigrate with us. And she accused us of abandoning her, of course. But she remained and we left. During that period before getting to New York I was thirteen and fourteen—in Brazil. That’s the period when you start to separate yourself from your parents, and with me it was just the opposite. I had found my parents for the first time in my life and I became a baby. The baby I never was. And that was, psychologically, terrible, absolutely terrible. And at the same time for me it was ecstasy. And I was babied by my mother, and I was close to my father, and it was just amazing. There they were all the time, all to myself! Then there was the fact that suddenly all of the constraints were gone, and particularly in New York when I started to go to high school and I realized what freedom was. I hardly ever had gone out in the street without either a governess or my mother until then. And suddenly I was totally free. I went to school on the subway all alone, with the kind of freedom people don’t realize here. . . . They just don’t. They can’t imagine what it’s like to be brought up in a European way and the contrast with the American way. And when I see little children, infants, and babies, very young children today, how they follow their parents everywhere and how they’re carried on their parents’ backs or chests in those carriers and how they go to bed whenever going to bed happens to be and all of that, and there’s such intimacy and this sharing of the life, I am jealous. I am absolutely physically jealous when I see that, and I hate those little kids! [laughs] I have a real sense of wanting to murder them. [laughing]

MOIRA ROTH: The first thing you did when you left France was you went to Brazil, and your experiences there are what the performance, My Brazil, is based on. Was that the beginning of freedom?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, it was part of it, of course. That whole period in Brazil was both such a contrast and such a change—first of all physically. The look of the environment. After the grayness of Paris, being in this tropical explosion of colors and explosion of sounds and rhythms and warmth and foods and naked people. Because I remember we had a black woman who was our maid, and her boyfriend used to come sometimes and help out and he would serve at table with a completely bare torso and just his pants on. And he was a gorgeous man, right? Beautiful man, and here I was thirteen and just looking at this Pedro! [laughs] (In Paris, our butler always wore a white jacket and striped pants.) And Pedro was so sensual, and it was such an awakening of the senses. And at the same time I was so unhappy. I had such nostalgia and such a sense of grief and loss for my country and for my home and for—mainly for my brother. I was grieving and grieving and missing him.

MOIRA ROTH: Oh, Pierre.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Pierre. And wanting to see him so badly. Every day I would think, when the war is over I’ll see him again.

MOIRA ROTH: Did your parents have that same sense of loss about France?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Oh, yeah, I think so, yes. I don’t know to what an extent actually; it’s hard to say. But I know that they were very worried about their people and what was happening. Of course we had no news of anybody at that time. And so there was a big curfew on communication and a tremendous amount of worry. As you know, when the “drôle de guerre” was over and the war started in earnest, the news at the beginning was so dreadful that it really looked very, very bad. It was constant anxiety and constant fear.

MOIRA ROTH: You were in Rio de Janeiro.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes. And you know the reason we were there is because the Russians had invaded my mother’s country of origin, which was Latvia, and disbanded the American Consulate and so we couldn’t get the quota numbers from her country of origin, and so when we were in Portugal, trying to get escape visas to go somewhere—of course the first logical thing was to come to America because, again, my mother’s cousins were already here and we had sponsors, but because of that technicality, we couldn’t. We were not allowed to stay in Lisbon, because Lisbon was so full of refugees that it was closed at the time. At the border, when we took the train from Spain to go into Portugal, we were told we have a choice of three places, Coimbra, Luso, and Porto. And my father asked the train conductor, he said, “I don’t know these places. If you were me, which one would you choose?” [laughs] And so the train conductor said, “Oh, I would go to Luso, it’s a real neat place.” And sure enough we went to Luso, and Luso was a little spa. It was a lovely little village. And the Jewish refugees all banded together, the men, and they rented this little jalopy. Every night they would drive all the way to Lisbon to be there first thing in the morning, and then they spent all day going from consulate to consulate to try to get escape visas, because in three months we were going to be sent back. Next night they would drive back, spend a day recuperating, and then the next day they would do it all over again. So that’s how my father did it.
The three months were almost over, when he, quite by chance, met an old friend of his who had been a French ambassador to Brazil, and the man said, “Leonard, what are you doing here?” And my father told him and he said, “Well, come on, we’ll get you your visas,” and so we ended up in Brazil. That was total serendipity.

MOIRA ROTH: Did you father manage to bring money out?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, that was another interesting thing. My mother was reliving the horror of the Bolshevik Revolution, and she was vetoing all the ideas that my father and I had about smuggling things out of the country. My father was a super patriot, and he was probably the only rich Frenchman who had no money outside of France. [chuckles] He never wanted to take money and put it in the U.S. or Switzerland, because he felt it was unpatriotic. Because France had adopted him and given him his fortune and all that. And so there was nothing outside, except what we could bring. My mother was literally dying of fear. My father and I said, “Okay, we won’t even ask her anymore.”
[Interruption in taping]

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: So my father and I decided not to discuss it with my mother, and I hid three thousand dollars behind photograph frames. Father had a couple of emeralds and a couple of diamonds, I remember, and I put them in my paint tubes. My mother thought it was going to be just like the Russian Revolution; she said, “No, no, they go up your ass. . . .” because I wanted to put things in Kotexes. . . . So, of course, we got to the border and the people there were crying and hugging us and wishing us well and we could have taken anything we wanted. In the meantime, all of mother’s jewels and some jewelry that father had taken from Paris, he entrusted to a smuggler, a Basque smuggler, because my father was friends with all these guys. And we waited three days at the border when the tanks, the German tanks, were coming from Spain. And I remember my father and I—Mother was having a nervous breakdown—and my father and I would go every day to this bar, which was a real low-down dive, to wait for the smuggler, and the smuggler never came. After three days and three nights, and all the Germans at the border, we decided we had to leave. And much later we found out that the reason the smuggler didn’t come is that the whole border had been peppered with Germans, and they were patrolling all the mountains and the coast, the sea, everything; and there was no way they could pass. So he gave back all the jewelry to my father’s sister. And so we lived like that in Brazil from the proceeds of these things that we had taken out. And my father, who always saw very big, had extraordinary plans, which he tried to involve the Brazilian government in, and they were seemingly very receptive. One was about the diamond and emerald mines in Brazil. He had this idea: Since the problem was that they mined the stones and then sent them to South Africa or to Holland to be cut and then sent back, and all of this was very expensive, my father wanted to bring over some of the refugee cutters—which would have helped, you know, some of the families that were trying to leave Europe—and create a school and stone- cutting factory right there on the spot where the stones were being mined. And it would have been a great thing for them. Then there was a big real estate deal that he wanted to do with a lot of incredible virgin land south of Ipanema. And, of course, in subsequent years, that whole area got developed anyway, but he wanted to develop it then. And either of those deals would have made him a very, very rich man.
Well, what happened, of course, was that Brazil had been taken over by the Nazis, and it was a covert thing in the government. All of the techniques that they used for both taking over a government and suppressing the Jews had begun in Brazil, and a lot of the refugees were disappearing. They were being sent to the interior, or they were jailed. And this was happening and, again, as usual, my father was a real ostrich. Finally, as luck would have it, the American Consul—because by then we had gotten the quota number back—the American Consul called him and said, “Mr. Rosenthal, this is off the record, but there’s a ship leaving in four days for the U.S., and if I were you, I would be on that ship with your family.” And my father perked up his ears, and in four days we were on the boat coming to America.
So he left all these big deals that would have made him very rich. But he was the kind of man—when later on he found out that somebody else had actually done these things, he was not sour about it at all. On the contrary, he said, “I’m very happy because this proves that I was right, that they were good businesses!” [laughs]

Tape 1, side B

MOIRA ROTH: So you came to America in 1941?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: ‘41.

MOIRA ROTH: At age?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Fourteen. On the boat we met some people, and befriended them, Americans. A dentist and his wife. They told my mother about the High School of Music and Art. Because they saw, everybody saw, that I was always drawing and sketching, and they said that that would be the place for me to go to school. So when we got to New York—it was in June, I think—and it turned out that it was too late for the entrance exams, the group entrance exams, but because of the fact I was a refugee and I had shown them my portfolio, they made an exception for me and gave me an entrance exam all by myself and I was accepted. So that summer we came to Beverly Hills and my father wanted to see if he’d prefer to live in New York or in Beverly Hills, because family was here; my mother’s family. After the summer went by, he said, “I love it here, but if I stay I won’t do a stitch of work, so I’m going back to New York.” [laughter] So I ended up going to the High School of Music and Art.

MOIRA ROTH: Did you quickly adjust? You said that, for instance, you went to school by subway. Did you make a lot of friends? Did you act “American” as a teenager?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: At first, I was very, very different. First of all, I had a British accent, a very strong British accent. Secondly, I acted like a little European girl, and I prided myself in my differences. I never tried to be like others. And so I didn’t wear makeup. I didn’t date. I didn’t do any of the things that American girls my age did. I was a real bluestocking. I loved to learn and I was always very interested in the arts, and of course we continued being close to artists. My parents had known, for instance, people like Jascha Heifetz and Vladimir Horowitz and they knew Sol Hurok very well, and so Sol Hurok would let me in with my little girlfriend at the Ballet Theater at the Met for free, in the “standing room only.” And I remember that during the season, it was total hysteria. I adored, adored dance. I adored ballet and so. . . . (When I was little, I learned, of course, ballet with Olga Preobrajenskaya, and I was always dancing at my birthdays for the family.) We waited, when all the people were in, and Sol Hurok would give us a very, very subtle sign with his head like that [demonstrating—Trans.] through the glass doors, and we would dash in and try to get the best standing room we could! Every night we were there during the season, and we saw all the big openings of all the big ballets, including Fancy Free, you know, with Leonard Bernstein’s music and I remember everybody in all the big ballets. It was just so intoxicating. It was just so great. And, of course, the old Met was wonderful too. And my parents knew a lot of really lovely people. [Marc—Ed.] Chagall was one of their friends and we were always very close to Feodor Chaliapin’s children. Lydia [Chaliapin—Ed.] was a singing teacher and she was a very, very funny woman. She was a lesbian, and she lived with this other woman who was also a singing teacher. And the older brother was a painter who did. . . . Do you remember in the old days, Time magazine always had painted covers. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Um hmm.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: . . . which were very realistic, and he, [Boris—RR] Chaliapin, was one of the painters who did these. And Fedya [Fyodor Chaliapin—Ed.], the youngest, was an actor, and recently I saw him in several movies. He’s still going strong. He lives in Italy and he was in The Name of the Rose. He played the blind monk—the bad guy. [Later he was in Moonstruck!—RR] So we had all these friends who were Russians and some who were French. The years of high school were very interesting. It took three years for me to change. In my last year the reason I changed was from a dare, in a sense, a challenge. One of the teachers said to me, “Rachel, are you human?” And that was a shock to my system. Apparently, it wasn’t human for me to be interested in learning, to always have straight A’s, not to be interested in dating and partying and smoking and all of those things, and to be devoted to the arts as I was. That was not human. And to be human meant to be popular, to go to parties, and not be a straight- A student. And so in the last year of my high school days, I decided that I would show them that I could be human just like the next fellow, and so my grades went down and I became the most popular girl in the class, and I did it totally in a lucid and very willful way, to show that it could be done just as easily as not, you know. [laughs] I still won the Gold Medal of Art, but it was one of those things, you know, where. . . . And a lot of things in my life were done like that—very head-motivated. I lost my virginity in the same way, in a completely . . . a real head-decision to do that! And. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Is that true of your art?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: [pauses] I think my art is a really good blend, because I’m very, very intuitive and impulsive also, and a great deal of it is extremely intuitive and a lot of it is very manipulated by the head. So I think it’s both. But that I reached only much, much later, many, many years later. For a long period of time, I had a lot of problems in my art because I just was not integrated between my emotions and my head, or between my unconscious and my conscious, or whatever you want to call it. And, as a matter of fact, I was so conflicted because of my upbringing that I remember when I was, when I first came to Beverly Hills when I was fourteen, a graphologist looked at my handwriting and said to me, “My goodness, how can you live with yourself? What a terrible thing it must be to be you, because you are in such conflict with yourself.” And it’s true. All my life it was like that. If I said “Yes,” the next minute I said, “But it’s no.” And I could see just as clearly the two sides and be completely in one and the other and not being able to put the two together, you know. So. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Well, to get back to the loss of virginity.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Oh. [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: I meant that as an example. I don’t mean that you talk about it on tape, but that period of your life, when you had become the most popular girl in the class.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: That wasn’t when it happened. It happened afterwards in France, when I went back to France after the war. See, what happened was right after the high school days, my parents wanted me to become an American, and I could do that very easily. Having gone through high school, it was almost automatic. And so I got naturalized. As a result, I couldn’t go back to live in my country of origin longer than a year at a time. And my nostalgia for France was such that I wanted badly to go back and to be French, and I couldn’t anymore. When I did go back after the war, it was a very, very traumatic event for me, I must say, because I realized that just as I had not been integrated as an American, I was no longer a French person either. I was a DP [displaced person—Ed.] everywhere I went. I was just totally the outsider. I was not accepted, because I had not experienced the Occupation, and people were rejected who had not been part of that. So it took a while, and what happened then was that for eight years, I went through this business of going back and forth between Paris and New York. I stayed a year in Paris, two years in New York, or two years in Paris, a year in New York, you know, when my father’s lawyer could get me an extension, and every time it seems that I would put in roots, it was almost like a knee-jerk reaction. I would pull up and return overseas. And there were several reasons for that I think. One was because the scene in New York was the arts scene, and it was flourishing. It was opening up, as you know, and establishing New York as a great art center, and that was a very new thing for America and for New York.

MOIRA ROTH: And did you have access to it?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, yes, I did. I was pretty close to, not the very first wave of Abstract Expressionists, although I knew them; I knew [Paul—Ed.] Guston, and I knew [Franz—Ed.] Kline, and I knew [Jack—Ed.] Tworkow, quite a few of these guys. But not intimately. I just knew them peripherally. It was the second wave that I was close to, with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and all of those people, through my association with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, so I was really into all of that. And in Paris was the flourishing of theater, the Absurdists, and Antonin Artaud, and Jean-Louis Barrault, and all those people. And that whole. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: And you also had access to that?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I had access to them, because I was going to school there. I was studying under Roger Blin, who was the creator of Waiting for Godot, the first production. And a lot of others. It was agony, because I wanted those two places to be one. It would have been much simpler in my life. [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: Did you also want to combine being in theater and being in art?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, this was another thing. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Which had split between two continents?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: It was just like everything else in my life. It was a split. Because in those days you really couldn’t afford to have two loves or more, or you were a dilettante. I’d always felt terrible that I just couldn’t chose between one or the other. And it wasn’t just theater and art, it was music, and it was dance, and it was literature; it was all the things that I loved. I realized that I was always flitting between one thing and another thing, because I just couldn’t decide where I wanted to alight finally. And it’s only when I read Antonin Artaud’s Le Théatre at Son Double, I think it was 1947, that suddenly it came to me, I came to my senses, and I realized that the kind of theater that he envisaged was an integration of all the things that I loved, and that it can be done through the medium of theater. And so that’s when I decided, “Okay, I will be in theater, because through theater I can use all those things and I can put them all together.” And that was for me a tremendous liberation and a tremendous opening up, because it led eventually to my doing Instant Theatre and all my performances. And I don’t know if one can even realize today what a revolutionary concept that was at the period, at the time, because, particularly in France, theater was so literary, and was so built on words.

MOIRA ROTH: Then, of course, Artaud’s Theater and Its Double got picked up by Cage, I mean when it was translated here in 1960.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: My friend M. C. Richards translated it in ‘57 but I had, of course read it in French, and when I started my workshop in 1955 and ‘56 here, nobody had read it and there was no access to it because it hadn’t been translated yet, so a lot of the concepts and ideas that I brought with me were totally new for people. You see, I had had long discussions with Robert Rauschenberg before that—like in ‘54, ‘55, when we lived together below Soho. We had one of the first lofts down there. And he and I had wanted to collaborate on certain things, and we talked at length on these matters, and then eventually, of course, Bob started to do his own Happenings, after I moved to California in 1955, and a lot of it was influenced, I think, by some of those concepts. And then, and only then, M.C. [Richards—RR] came up with the translation.

MOIRA ROTH: Maybe you could talk a little more about that period, and how you met Rauschenberg, Cage, Cunningham, Johns?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Okay, well, I met Merce and John in Paris, because Merce came to do a master class there. Now I had been a tremendous fan of Merce’s long before that, when he was still with Martha [Graham—RR]. And I had followed him very closely when he split from Martha, when he and John began to do their collaborations. Merce began to perform recitals of solo works with John at the prepared piano. I was totally taken by their work, and was a big fan from afar. And then when I went to Paris I started to study there at that school, and suddenly there he was, coming to give a master class; for me that was a biggee. Well, it was great for him too. because I and Marianne [Preger—RR] (who also ended up in his company later) were the only Americans there, and so we could speak English with him. And so we struck up a friendship. And then when I came back to New York, I continued the friendship with him, and for some reason got really included in their circle, which was mostly made up of gay men. There were very few women. There was M.C., who was a very wonderful creature actually. She was a poet, a potter, and a philosopher. She lived with. . . . Oh god, I always have name amnesia.

MOIRA ROTH: We all do! Mr. X?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: The man who worked with John and Merce all the time; he was a musician.

MOIRA ROTH: David Tudor.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: David Tudor. Thank you, thank you. She lived with David, and so there was M.C., and there was Sari Dienes, and Sari Dienes was a real pushy Hungarian, and people couldn’t stand her. Yet she was always there, you know, part of everything. [laughs] And she was madly in love with John, but of course John was not at all interested.

MOIRA ROTH: Do you know that my mother had a love affair with her ex-husband, Paul

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: You’re kidding?

MOIRA ROTH: No.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Really? Ah!

MOIRA ROTH: I’ll tell you about it some other time!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Okay, well, it’s a small world. So there were very few other women. Fance Stevenson was another. We would all spend weekends at her place up the Hudson. Bob was still married at the time, and sometimes his wife would surface, but not often. And his kid. Anyway, I was part of this whole thing, and then I ended up (I was studying with Merce) I ended up in Merce’s Junior Company, along with Marianne and with Remy Charlip and a few others who eventually became part of the real company. I was always going off to Paris and coming back, and so there was no way that I could integrate myself into a company. But when I was there I was there. And Bob was like John’s “find,” you know, from Black Mountain College, and when I came back from Paris during one of my returns, Bob was the new addition to the circle. He was John’s fairhaired boy. And my impression of Bob and his work was very, very strong. I identified with his work totally. Particularly at that period, I thought it was. . . . At the time, he had just finished the white and black paintings. He was going into red paintings.

MOIRA ROTH: And he hadn’t done The Bed yet.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No, no. At the time, he was with Cy Twombly, and he and Cy had gone to Italy, and Bob came back with a lot of these extraordinary objects, of which I’d bought a few. And I realized, you know, that had I stuck to visual art and had I had the “balls” to do what I felt I should be doing, that is the kind of work that I would have put out. I felt totally identified with it, and I was both jealous and at the same time extremely admiring and very impressed with Bob. He was very impressive and sometimes bewildering. You know, he would dazzle you with his double talk. He was a marvelous double talker. He could talk you into anything, and you never knew what he said or why and what had happened and you did his bidding. He was a big charmer. And then again I disappeared [chuckles], and the next time I came back suddenly Jap [Jasper Johns—Ed.] was on the scene. And Jap was on the scene because Bob had discovered him. He had discovered him when he had a job at the bookstore. I forgot the name of the bookstore now, which was at Carnegie Hall—Marlborough? It was a kind of big art bookstore there, and he was a salesman. And apparently he did some secret drawings—his famous potato drawings—and he had this little coldwater flat somewhere, and every night Bob would wait for him when he ended his day, around 57th Street and 7th Avenue, and then brought him into the circle. And, for reasons that I can only guess at psychologically, perhaps Jap’s fear of getting involved in a homosexual situation, he made a play for me. And I knew he was gay—he was very obviously gay—so at first I was very surprised. And then that summer my parents were away, and. . . . I was alone in the apartment which we had.

MOIRA ROTH: So you would still live with your parents if you were in New York?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: For a while I had an apartment in Greenwich Village, and then because of the fact that I was always leaving and coming back I would end up living with them, because it was difficult not to. And at that period, I was looking for a loft. I wanted to find a loft downtown, and when I got involved with Jap, we decided to look together because he—very much encouraged by Bob and by me—was going to become a full-time artist. And so we decided to look together and that summer, with my parents away. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Which summer was this?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: That was ‘54.

MOIRA ROTH: Johns had been doing the flag paintings?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No. No, no. That was still in the future. No, he was just doing these. . . . He had done a lot of drawings, and he was just beginning to do these little shredded newspaper type things, which were painted over. You know, he would shred them in certain ways and then paint them over in a single color. And he did that in his little flat, and he did that work of me with my face, you know, in his flat. So I fell in love with him and . . . was very. . . . I don’t know. There was something about him which was unbelievably mysterious and compelling. He was a beautiful, beautiful young man. He was younger than I was, and at the same time I was so stupid in such matters, you know. If I knew then what I know today, I probably would have been able to pursue a relationship with him. But I was not able to because of my sense of male-woman relationship and romance. The whole politics of those intercourses were so colored by totally traditional ideas—and by my mother’s “tapes” in my head and by my own inhibitions and by my own gender ambiguities, and by my “volonté de pouvoir,” as they call it in French, which was, you know, my need for power. All of those things just made it impossible for me to ever have anything resembling a true abandonment to love or lust or any of those things. So it was one of those real head things as usual, where I really had kind of glommed on to the “idea” of Jap. And so. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Did you share a place briefly?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No. That summer he came to the apartment because my parents were away, and so we had a very brief affair, and then we found lofts in the same building. I had the upstairs and he had the downstairs. By that time, I think he and Bob had totally decided to be together, and this was, of course, never stated or said. But actions spoke louder than words anyway. And I went through a kind of replay of infant abandonment [laughs] and a lot of grief. Really bad, bad, bad period. And I was doing a lot of sculptures, and he was, of course, becoming Jasper Johns. And doing all these wonderful things with Bob. They did windows, earning a living doing windows then. And then he started to work with encaustic. He had found the book at the bookstore where he worked, about artists’ materials and he discovered encaustics, and that’s how he started with the flags and the targets in encaustic. And, you know, I saw the making of all these masterpieces [chuckles], and I have a lot of photographs of us in the loft and of him having breakfast. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: So the three of you would see a lot of one another?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: All the time.

MOIRA ROTH: On a daily basis.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Daily basis, yeah. First of all, I was the only one who had a bathtub, and I had. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: [laughs] What a hold on them!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: And I had a hold on that whole group! [laughter] My facility was extremely popular. So, I remember everybody in my bathtub.

MOIRA ROTH: And what sort of work were you doing at that time?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I did a bunch of sculptures that were made of metal and tar. Metal and other things actually: metal, wood, glass, and tar. And they were black. They were kind of elegant, and they were really interesting in terms of concept. They were conceptual and sensual, very much like Bob’s objects were. And I. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: And did you show them?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Interestingly, Jap and I showed at the Tanager Gallery in a group show, and I got a better review than he did. [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: And you had the bathtub!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: And I had the bathtub, so I was on top of the world. Anyway, so that went on for a while, and I remember that winter. . . . See, my parents had these parties, these mad Russian parties, where they invited all their Russian friends and they would sing gypsy songs and dance and have Russian food and all of that, and I invited my people to those parties, and I remember at first I thought, “Oh, it’s never gonna work.” I remember Merce and John adoring these parties, and Merce dancing with all my parents’ Russian friends and everything. It was just marvelous. And I remember that during the winter it was very, very cold, as you know, in New York. And my father gave Jap one of his overcoats, because Jap was so poor he had no coat, and he was freezing, so my father took pity on him and gave him one of his overcoats. [laughing] So anyway, it was a strange mixture of worlds, and. . . . And I always, again, I felt the two major things, two major thrusts, in my life were, one, where do I belong? And two, how can I make myself ingratiating, how can I be accepted? So the performance aspect was part of not only my daily life, but minute-to-minute life. And it was exhausting because I was always “on,” and I amused and entertained, and this is how I thought—since I had no sense or belief that my accomplishments would be enough to sustain anybody’s love or admiration for me—I had therefore to earn their friendship in some other way. And so through my personality and through the way I performed my life, I felt that I could have a reason for being accepted. And so I was always pushing that out. And, as I say, it was totally exhausting, and I was easily depleted and easily went into total depression because of this constant effort and pressure to be “on.”

MOIRA ROTH: Did anyone know that, or was that something that happened to you in private?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I was not encouraged to have therapy. At one point, I felt that I needed it, and I went to a therapist for a very brief period, and he was a Freudian, and he was stupid as hell and I realized early on that it was ridiculous, you know, and so I stopped and didn’t pursue that at all. At the time, I was too proud and too afraid to try to get help from peers or friends, and so I didn’t really delve into those things, nor did I disclose these things, and so they were always there eating at me. And I remember writing a lot about them in diaries, but never really taking care of business to try to find a way out of my dilemma. And my other big, big thing was “Am I an artist?” And the problem was always, “If I’m a woman, I can’t be an artist because women are not artists. Men are. And if I’m not a woman, then what am I, you know? If I’m an artist, then I must be a man.” So the whole thing was tied together and very confusing and very disturbing. And so for a long time I felt incapable of really producing. The other thing was my father’s prejudice toward theater. He was so old-fashioned that he felt that women in the theater were whores. So I had internalized some of that, and I was very afraid of getting into theater. And that was my real talent. My talent was as a performer. And for a long time, I just refused to give in to that, and I tried to be a visual artist, but I wasn’t temperamentally suited for the life of a studio artist, alone, working with an object, even though I was talented in that direction. But temperamentally I just couldn’t cut it. And so I never had a body of work, because I could never stay long enough with what it took to make one. So I was very much down on myself because of that and felt very ashamed that I wasn’t coming through with the expectations of what I was capable of doing. And so there was an inordinate amount of guilt in my life, because of that, and that lasted a long time. It’s only when I started Instant Theatre that I began to feel that I was beginning to put out some of what I was capable of putting out.

MOIRA ROTH: Did you have women friends at this time or were you mainly mixing with the Cunningham and Rauschenberg circle?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I never had women friends really. I had lovers in Paris but, again, there was this thing of wanting to lord over them. It’s only much later that I discovered women as friends, so mainly it was the gay men that I was friends with. And what happened was that I got so confused that at one point I remember going down Fifth Avenue and seeing a handsome man and saying, “Oh! What a pity I’m not a man.” [laughter] And so at that point I said, “Time to leave.”

MOIRA ROTH: And so you left for Los Angeles?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Right.

MOIRA ROTH: Which year was that?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: That was ‘55. My father died here in Beverly Hills. My mother moved here.

MOIRA ROTH: Your father had moved to L.A. first?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No. He just went for the holidays, for the vacation, the summer. But he had had a bad heart for many years, and so he had the final heart attack that killed him here, and my mother, after he was interred here, wanted to move to be close to his grave, and every week go to the grave and all of that, so. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: And that must have been devastating to you, his death.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, it was interesting because for about three months before he died, I had a total intimacy with him. It was very lucky. I’m so grateful that it happened. What happened was that over the years my mother—probably unconsciously, and certainly, until I realized it consciously, I wasn’t aware of it either—had so maneuvered that she had intercepted our relationship to the point where in order to relate to my father I had to pass through her, and in order for him to relate to me he had to pass through her, and she was always in the middle—as though we couldn’t reach other directly.

MOIRA ROTH: Although you had when you were a child?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Of course. And. . . . Because we were always clashing naturally, she had interceded, in ways which I think were really well-meaning of course, but totally wrongheaded, because had I been able to deal with my father directly I would think that I would have learned some harsh lessons which would have been extremely beneficial to me. And because that didn’t happen, there was a lot of muddy-headedness that went on and a lot of gray areas that were never really cleared up and a lot of really slovenliness of action and thought that could have not been. But anyway, after I realized that, I said, “No more, I’m going straight to my father,” and I did that and he and I began to relate to each other directly. And the result was incredible. First of all, he and I became total friends and no longer father and daughter. And my mother had a nervous breakdown! And it never was really laid out on the table, and I never found out if she realized what had actually happened. But it was like the carpet was yanked from under her. She no longer had her reason for being. And she just became absolutely like crazy. And in the meantime, he was mainly in bed, and he was writing a book at the time, dictating a book. And I sat on the bed, and we talked and talked and talked and talked, and we had a real true adult relationship for about three months, and then he left and he died here. And it was both a big loss, and at the same time total liberation for me, and I realized what a liberation it was at the time. As a matter of fact, as a result of that liberation, I was able to create Instant Theatre. And the same thing happened with my mother’s death, because as a result of her death, I started my. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: And when did she die?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: In ‘75, twenty years later. And as a result of her death, I started to do my performances, so both of their deaths liberated me on different levels.

MOIRA ROTH: Tell me about Instant Theatre, or the first time that you did Instant Theatre, because you’ve done it twice.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Right. The first time was the heroic period.

MOIRA ROTH: You’d just come out to L.A.?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I had come out to L.A., and I had taken a job at the Pasadena Playhouse, and they just couldn’t handle me. [laughs] They couldn’t cope at all. I came in, you know, with all my ideas fresh from France, and it was like whoa! [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: Including Artaud.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Everything, you know. Everything I did was too much for them, and I did some really good work. I directed some shows and of course I was teaching the classes. And my shows were very avant garde, and they were very interesting and they were well directed—I mean, for somebody who had never done that before. I was faking it all the way and doing great work, you know. But they just couldn’t handle it. The students adored me, but it was the old guard. The faculty, just couldn’t take it. And, also, I was teaching in. . . . I had black culottes, black tights—because in those days, of course, you didn’t have panty hose—and denim workers’ shirts—because in those days you didn’t have the denim that you have today, you know. So I bought workers’ shirts, in order to have denim shirts. And that was how I taught, because I was doing a lot of movement, and I didn’t want to have skirts that they could look up at. [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: I see.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: And I was called in by the dean of women and told that I must not wear what I was wearing, and I said the equivalent of “fuck you,” you know. And that was not well received. So it was just one of those things. I was asked to resign by the dean who had hired me, and a few months later he was asked to resign, poor man. And at first it was devastating, and then I realized it was all for the best. So I started to look around. I was doing photography at the time, and as I was in a store on Santa Monica Boulevard buying supplies I ran into this photographer, this young photographer, who became very famous later—and, again, I have to remember his name. With Magnum or one of those big agencies. And he gave me some of his old paper, I remember, and he’s the one who mentioned Vanessa Brown’s Salon. Vanessa Brown was this old—well, she was not old, but she was old comparatively because she had been a Quiz Kid. Remember the old Quiz Kids? She was one of the Quiz Kids, supposedly very intelligent and stuff, and an actress, and she had married a very rich doctor or dentist or whatever, and had this absolutely palatial, beautiful glass mansion north of Sunset [Boulevard—Ed.]. Every Wednesday afternoon she had a salon. And all these stars and starlets and people in Hollywood would congregate there in their bouffants! She had one of those architectural jewels, you know, the place where the outside comes in, all the plants were coming in to the house, and the house was filled with birds. But they were not in cages; they were just flying around. And all the starlets in their bouffants would kind of, you know [laughing], duck [gesturing—Ed.] every time the birds would divebomb them. [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: Seeing a nest!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: It was very funny. And she presided over all of this, in the middle. There was a big circle, and then there was this chair in the middle, with a tape recorder, and she appeared with curlers and a bathrobe—a dirty old bathrobe—and slippers when everybody else was really trying to spiff up in order to be seen at their best and all of that. She would just talk and sound off and . . . bore everybody. So this went on for a while, and apparently she also had a workshop, which at the time was directed—or at least managed by a young starlet or an actress, who was just beginning in pictures---never made it. . . . And we met in some place, I forgot where. Then we moved to the banquet room of. . . . What was it called? The Gaiety Delicatessen or something like that, which was across the street from the Chinese Theater [now Groman’s Chinese—RR/MR]. And so, as we were working on scenes, we could hear all the click-clack of the waiters carrying stuff.

Tape 2, side A

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: So we were in this ridiculous place trying to do scenes, and I said to her, “Vanessa. . . .”—I have to say that very soon I was, for some reason, elected to conduct these meetings—I said to her, “We have to find a decent place to work in.” Because she was always saying how we would form a company and we would go touring and we were always going to tour to Israel, for some reason. There were a lot of people like, you know, Vic Morrow and all those young, aspiring actors. People like Mark Damon, who made it in spaghetti westerns, a lot of young directors, who became big directors since then. So I started looking and I found this place which turned out to be what is now called the Cast Theater and was at the time the little workshop space adjacent to the Circle Theater on El Centro. It belonged to George Boroff. And George Boroff had just had some problem. He was in the hospital, and he had to rent. So it was this wonderful little box. Do you know the Cast Theater on El Centro?

MOIRA ROTH: [shakes head negatively—Trans.]

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Just a little box with risers, just perfect. And so I came back and said, “Vanessa, we’ve got this real great place.” I told her what it was, and she said, “No.” I said, “No? Why?” And she wouldn’t tell me why. And only in a totally round-about way did I find out why, and that was because a lot of the people who had worked with Boroff at the Circle Theater had been blacklisted. And she was, of course, a Republican, and was completely into that McCarthy scene, and this was the mid-fifties. I said, “Fuck that shit. If you don’t want it, I’m gonna get it.” And I rented it. And I stopped seeing her, and half of the people came with me and half stayed with her. And some did both. And so we continued meeting at the Circle Workshop. And, of course, I was so incapable of dealing with money issues that I don’t think that anybody ever paid me to do this. They would come and get these long, fabulous workshops with me for nothing. So. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: And how did you support yourself? Did you inherit money?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I had not very much because my father told me that he would give everything to my mother, and I said that’s fine. But I had insurance [policy—Ed.], and I remember that I cashed that insurance. I think I had about $10,000 insurance money. So until the money ran out, I just paid no attention whatsoever to either earning or whatever, you know. I was never really taught how to live in this world in a practical way. I began to run the workshops in the traditional way, with people coming in with scenes. But then you know how lazy people are, and they wouldn’t come prepared, and so I gave them exercises and improvs which I would think up. And these were so fascinating to them that after a while nobody was bringing in scenes and they all wanted to do my exercises. And this is how little by little the work became Instant Theatre. And little by little I developed this whole notion of lighting, for instance, which was completely unorthodox, with people carrying the lamps and very slowly moving lights over the action and being integrated with the action. And then I started to color the lamps with gels, which nobody did at the time. It was always straws and pinks and blues and, in a sense, I did the first psychedelic lighting. Very strong colors and strobes and things like that. And we used all kinds of objects and things that we found in the garbage in the alleys. In those days they didn’t have garage sales, so we would find real treasures everywhere. And the use of objects was not like props. They were really like extensions of ideas and conceptual ways of handling everyday objects. The look of the work we did became the parallel of the sensibility of the visual arts of the period, which was assemblage and collage and all of that stuff. More and more I got into costume and, again, people would donate scraps and with these scraps we would take safety pins and assemble these things on ourselves. Again, creating the most extravagant costumes and then just taking off the safety pins and going back to scraps, and using the same things over and over, but never the same way twice. And using space and time, using voice, using movement, using sound. We worked a lot with records, and with found sounds, just noise sounds and really pushing the form. And we created a dream world on stage, which was really magical and astonishing. And the kind of thing, again, that when it works it is so extraordinary that it’s like the best theater you’ll ever see. When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. It’s just not blessed. And so it was an improvisational theater, and it was remarkable. And there people like Vic Morrow, as I said, and Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, Dean Stockwell, Susan Harrison—all these people were there, and the upshot of it was that one day I see this group thing happening on stage and it was. . . . I just can’t tell you. It was just intoxicating to watch, and after it was over, I got the group together and said, “You know, I think we’ve got something here, which will revolutionize the history of theater and we have to go public,” And everybody left. They all left.

MOIRA ROTH: Because they were scared?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Because their agents told them that they couldn’t be seen in anything so weird. And, you know, at the time it was a big heartbreak for me, and at the same time I thought, “Well, to hell with it,” you know. Three people stayed, and they were non-actors. One was Lee Mullican, the painter, who teaches at UCLA now. His wife, Luchita Hurtado, was in Mexico, and so he was sort of playing hookie. And I had a little dancer [Sally Ann Linton—RR/MR] who was a leftover from my days at Pasadena Playhouse. And this guy who was an Israeli. . . . No, he was a Jew from India who had studied. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: [laughs]

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: . . . who had studied at MIT as an engineer [________—Ed.].

MOIRA ROTH: A great trio to begin with!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: And they were all wonderful, you know. They were not actors, but they were wonderful theater people. And Lee was wonderful! He was really great. And the MIT guy was real little, and Lee was real tall, and between the two men and two women we all looked so weird! We were just four people, and I said, we’ll do Instant Theatre, just the four of us. And we did! So we started to do the weekend shows and the people who came were the Ferus Gallery. And all the guys. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: This is now. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: ‘56. All the people of the Ferus Gallery came, because I was friends with them. I knew Ed Kienholtz and Walter Hopps and Billy Al Bengston and [John—RR/MR] Altoon and Wally Berman and, you know, Ed Moses, all these guys who were showing there. And we were the only places—Ferus and me—where you could find the avant garde in Los Angeles. There was nothing else. It was a desert. And so we supported each other in a sense. The people that they knew who were not in the visual arts were poets and musicians, and everybody was high on pot and getting stoned. And I had no concept of that whatsoever. I never did it. My consciousness wasn’t in that at all. But low as this consciousness was, I allowed people to smoke in my theater. And I took out all the chairs from the risers, because the risers had carpeting on them, and I got as many cushions as I could and the people would lie on those cushions and watch this dream-like theater and get high. [laughter] It was like an opium den!
There was this cloud of smoke and who knew what that was! It smelled good, you know, and, of course, we probably got high on the smell of it, but I had no idea of that and nobody wanted to believe that we did this work without being stoned. Nobody. And that went on for the ten years that we did Instant Theatre. Nobody wanted to believe us when we said that we were straight, because it was so crazy and “way out” and people couldn’t imagine that a straight mind would come up with that stuff. But of course we did.

MOIRA ROTH: Did your group shift from the original members?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes. First of all, at the end of ‘57, after a year, I quit. All the personalities had gotten totally out of hand, as they are wont to do, and I bought a little house in the hills, and I said, “I’ve had it with all this bullshit. I’m taking my cats and I’m leaving.” So at the time I had maybe seventeen cats and I got this little rickety house in the hills, and I looked around and figured, “Well, maybe I’ll do some directing.” And that never came through because I really didn’t know what I was doing in terms of the practicalities. I didn’t know how to get financing. I didn’t know how to deal with Equity [the theater union—RR/MR]. I didn’t know anything, you know. All I knew was that “I want to direct.” Well, great, now what? So in one of those moments of lucidity where I wanted to direct, I had chosen a Ionesco play. And I had cast, among other people, my ex-husband, King Moody, who was a very good actor. And so during the rehearsals that led nowhere with the Ionesco, during the breaks I would tell him about Instant Theatre. He got very excited about it and begged me to start it again. And I did. And then he and I became partners, and eventually we got married. And we mortgaged the house. We did everything, you know, to keep going, and I, unfortunately, sold my beautiful collection of [Jasper—Ed.] Johns’s and Rauschenbergs for peanuts. And we just did it, you know, every which way we could. We did it in storefronts. We did it in lofts. We did it in dance studios. We did it in homes. We did it in garages. We did it all over the place. Of course always in an underground way. And the work was remarkable. We had many different companies. It was always the two of us—the core—and then different people came in and went. And then, after having done it in Venice for a while, we decided to transform our own home into a theater in the hills. And it was really amazing, because we lived where there was no parking within two miles, and people really trekked, you know, in the hills. I don’t know where they parked, somewhere way up on the mountain, and trekked down, to come and see these shows every week. And sometimes it was so full that we couldn’t even accommodate the people who came, and they would stand in the stairwell. They couldn’t even see. They would just listen to what was happening during the entire show. It was really amazing. And we found these old abandoned car seats, you know, and we had all these car seats on the floor. We lived in a theater—virtually. Our own home was no longer our home, you know. So that went on for a while and finally we said, “Gee, we really have to do something about this.” And, again, we mortgaged the house, and we went legitimate. We got the Horseshoe Stage Theater on Melrose [now called the Zephyr—RR], which was a ninety-nine seater. And in those days there was no “Equity Waiver.” And so we had to work around that, and that was very difficult. At the end of the run, it created a situation which was ridiculous, where we needed a bigger theater because our audiences had grown so much, yet in order to get to the next rung we would have to pay two more Equity salaries and we couldn’t afford that. So we were right in the middle. We were not big enough and we were too big at one and the same time, you know.

MOIRA ROTH: The theater was called the Horseshoe?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Horseshoe Stage Theater. And it was a horseshoe. We lived there, virtually, for three years. Every weekday we had workshops that started at seven, after people left their jobs, and lasted sometimes until two, three in the morning. And every weekend we had two adult shows and four children’s shows, four matinees. So when I emerged from that in ‘66, I felt like Methuselah, because for me life had stopped. For years I did nothing but Instant Theatre. I hadn’t seen any art. I hadn’t seen any shows. I hardly ever read the paper. I didn’t know what was going on. I was reading fairy tales continually in order to prepare for the next fairy tale that we did. When I emerged, I was forty, I think, and it was like, where’s it all gone? [laughs] But it was an extraordinary period, and the work we did was really amazing.

MOIRA ROTH: Did your husband emerge too?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Um, yeah. Actually. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: What sort of marriage was it?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Aah! Must I talk about that? [laughter]

MOIRA ROTH: No, you certainly don’t have to.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, no, I’ll tell you what it was. When the partnership in the theater existed and the relationship was really a triangle where we worked toward this goal of the theater, it was fine. When the theater was no longer there and we were left to just this short-circuiting between two people, it didn’t work anymore. And yet we remained together really because of the children, the fourleggeds [meaning their cats and dogs—Ed.], and it should have ended. We pursued very different directions and, of course, when the feminist thing came it was very rough. But. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: So why and when did your Instant Theatre end?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: It ended in ‘66 for the two reasons: One was the Equity situation, and the other reason was my knees. Because in the late fifties already, they had begun to deteriorate very badly. As a matter of fact, I was told that I would be in a wheelchair by the end of the year if I didn’t stop and I kept going. I paid no attention. Actually they didn’t even say wheelchair. They said I would be in bed, lying horizontal and not being able to move. Of course, that was pure bullshit. But I remember the nurse looking at the x-ray and saying, “I’ve never seen such old knees on such a young person.” [laughing] And it’s true. They were in terrible shape. I was in such pain that I. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: What was it?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: It’s degenerative osteo-arthritis. And I was just in too much pain. I just couldn’t continue doing the kind of activity that Instant Theatre demanded. I just felt that I couldn’t continue, and I needed the change. It was enough. So, much to our chagrin, we stopped. It was a loss, a big loss. So we stopped, and King began to. . . . Well, he had an agent, and he started to try to get work in the industry, and I got a few jobs myself. And I began to do a lot of visual art again, went back to visual work. And in ‘71 we moved from Laurel Canyon because the house had become too small and we had too many animals. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Did you have a lot of animals?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yeah, I always had tons of animals. Lots and lots of cats, lots and lots of dogs. And it was both a blessing and a real difficulty because we couldn’t ever leave together. We never went on vacations together, because one of us would stay home and take care of the animals, usually me!
So we decided that we needed a bigger place, and the only place that was still affordable and that had big properties was in the valley, so in ‘71 we started to look and we found this place in Tarzana, which was pretty far away. But in those days there was still a lot of big cornfields there, and it was really lovely. We had two-thirds of an acre and a lovely house. It was just perfect for us. And it was not on the street. It was up a driveway behind another house. So the animals weren’t close to the road. And this was a big concern because in Laurel Canyon one of the reasons why we left was that all our animals were getting smashed in the street, and everybody else’s too. Because people were dragging the cars up and down. It was absolutely awful. So we moved on this one day, and all our stuff was in boxes and we had the mattresses on the floor, and we slept on the floor. The very next morning was the big earthquake of 1971! It was so funny because, you know, that whole area was barnyards. And so I remember just before six waking up because of all this squawking of the barnyards, and suddenly this big silence—not a peep—and then this noise under the house, this rumbling, deep rumbling, under the house, and I go, “What is this? Is this a subway under there?” And then I thought, “No wonder they sold it to us so cheap! Every morning we’re gonna get that noise?” And then the house began to shake, right? [laughing] And King jumps up, says, “Earthquake!” And I grabbed my cat, because Dibidi was paraplegic, and whenever we had any kind of emergency, first thing I’d do is grab her. And I remember not being able to stand, having to sit and lean against the door. And I remember looking out the door and seeing the whole yard move. It was unbelievable. But, of course, all our stuff having been in boxes we got no breakage. We were very near the epicenter. We thought we were going to be told to evacuate, but we didn’t. And all the cats were freaked out, and all the dogs were running around the house barking at the big giant who was moving their house. It was insane. And I was genuinely frightened. I had a real visceral fear, you know, and I’m never afraid of anything, but that really, you know. . . . The heart was going, and oh! But it was exhilarating at the same time. It was wonderful. It was like riding a big serpent, particularly after the initial shock, the aftershocks. It was really like being on this huge, marine monster, and just going [makes a growling sound] like that. It was really amazing. And in ‘72, Dibidi died, my cat. And she was so important in my life that later on I called all my business DBD. And then in ‘72, a little bit after that—I think it was the fall of ‘72—Cal Arts had this big conference of women artists from all over the nation.
[Interruption in taping]

MOIRA ROTH: We’re looking at the book by Faith Wilding, which is called By My Own Hands, and it surveys the Southern California Women’s Movement from 1970 to 1976. And a photograph that Rachel took of this very special West Coast conference of women artists. What do you remember of the conference?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Here’s a photo by me also, the first Womanspace. It was another event that changed the course of my life. And that’s another one of my photos. It was a really, really important time, because that conference was about women artists. It was a national conference. Women came from all over the country, and they were hundreds of women. It was, again, a total shock for me. It was a total surprise that there were so many good artists among women. They showed slides continuously during three days. And either the artists presented their own, or there were slides and people talked about other artists. Apparently Mimi [Miriam Schapiro—RR] and Judy [Chicago—RR] had gone in the field and gathered all these people. They had gone into people’s kitchens and pantries and garages and all of that where they worked and just ferreted them out. And I was astounded, because I was still under the very sexist notion that there were no women artists. I was still going round and round with my own insanity. “What am I? Am I an artist? If I’m an artist, I can’t be a woman. If I’m a woman,” you know, “What is this?” And then during those three days my head was just turned around. And it became very clear to me that I had been totally deluded and that I had to reassess all my beliefs. And it was aided and abetted by the fact that Judy organized us into CD groups, and I started one in the area that I lived in in Tarzana.

MOIRA ROTH: CR? Consciousness-raising group.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes, I mean CR. I said CD—my head is elsewhere obviously. [laughs] Here, you want another piece? [They have been eating candy—Trans.]

MOIRA ROTH: Thank you.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: And then I was brought into Mimi Schapiro’s art discussion group [eating while talking], which met pretty often. My connection with Mimi was from years back when she was learning engraving with William Hayter. I was also there at Atelier Seventeen. So our connections were from the late forties. We renewed our acquaintance, and she was at the time just turning around her art from very male-oriented kind of art to a totally female-oriented style, which I thought was extremely risky and extremely courageous. And she created beautiful, beautiful art. [To a cat:] C’mon, darling. Come on up. Come, come! There’s a good girl.
[To MOIRA ROTH:] So at that conference several women who became very important in my life subsequently were there. One was Josine Ianco-Starrels. The other one was Barbara Smith. Betye Saar, whom I had already known before from living in the Canyon, was there. June Wayne, with whom I did “Joan of Art” subsequently. [“Joan of Art” were seminars offered free to women artists by June Wayne, to teach them to become professionals—RR/MR] And of all of them the one that impressed me so much that I really wanted to get close to her was Barbara Smith. Mostly because she was a performance artist. And because I admired her concepts and her approach to the form. I was already beginning to toy with the idea of doing some performance myself because, having seen some at the time, I realized that a lot of Instant Theatre had been performance art, only under another name and another aegis, and that it would behoove me to do that. So I wanted her as a friend and as a mentor. And the other woman I connected with was Bella Feldman, with whom I had gone to high school. She had been in a younger class, but I remembered her from Music and Art [High School in NYC—RR].

MOIRA ROTH: You said you’d also gone to school with. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Allan Kaprow.

MOIRA ROTH: Morton Feldman and Allan Kaprow.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Right.

MOIRA ROTH: Yeah.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: So I became very close to all of these women, and today I am still very close to Bella Feldman, to Josine, to June Wayne, and some of the other connections that I made through the woman’s movement have remained with me. Bruria [Finkel—RR] is a woman that I knew in the early sixties. I think I met her in ‘61 when we were doing Instant Theatre. Somebody brought her. I think Jack Hirschman brought her to see our shows, and so I knew her then and I’m still very close to her. Gilah Hirsch I met through Joan of Art—and quite a lot of other women actually through Joan of Art too.
So that whole period was a real turnaround for me. I began to question all my notions. I began to read all the feminist literature.

MOIRA ROTH: What did you read?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Well, everything, you know. . . . [laughs] From The Feminine Mystique to all of the books that were. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Adrienne Rich?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Adrienne.

MOIRA ROTH: Susan Griffin.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes, right. All these women. Mary Daly and. . . . Whoever, you know. All the ones who were writing. And Deena Metzger also, and. . . . And it became very clear to me that so many of my problems that I had considered were really very personal problems were really not. And I think that this influenced very much my approach to performance and what I did subsequently, because when I began to do performance in ‘75 I embarked on a quest for redeeming my life. Because it had been so distorted by my problems, my angst about “Am I artist? What am I? Is this. . . .” Aaah, you know.

MOIRA ROTH: Right.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: That I felt that I had really missed the boat and that I had not fulfilled expectations, that I had not become what I should have become, that I had just taken too many wrong turns and wasted too much time, and I felt. . . . I was very down on myself and felt that I had sinned, in a way, against talent, which to me was the. . . . Since I had no religion, talent was always the thing that I held up as the “ne plus ultra.” When you hear the call of talent and you don’t answer it, then you really get punished, and I felt that way. I was feeling very guilty and punished. So I think that getting into the feminist movement lifted a lot of that weight from me and made me realize that it wasn’t all my fault, and that indeed I had been a victim of the kind of society and beliefs that were prevalent. It was a political issue. And because of that I was able to do in my performance work what I had never been able to do in my life, which is to reveal myself, to disclose, to air, to put out all this garbage and turn it around and make it into art, and in a sense reveal all the dark secrets that I had kept locked up all these years. It was redemption and exorcism. And this was the direction that I took during the first part of my career as a performance artist.

MOIRA ROTH: Do you think that was a strong motive for other women at that time in L.A. making art?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I don’t know if they were redeeming their life the way I was redeeming my life, but I know that most of the women did take the stance that the personal was the political and vice versa, and I was really going in step with that belief and that philosophy. But at the time I didn’t realize that. It was all very unconscious.

MOIRA ROTH: Did you have a sense of California feminist art as opposed to New York feminist art?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No, because I really didn’t hook into any New York stuff, you see. Again, I was aloof and didn’t dip into a lot of the stuff that was happening. I think that my pain, which I never really acknowledged, my pain at never having been recognized as a creator, neither locally nor nationally by New York publications or whatever, was such that it was not easy for me to expose myself to the knowledge of what was going on elsewhere, which was being so highly publicized and so adulated and so recognized and so talked about. I think that I did a lot of hiding and sulking at that time, because I felt that for ten years I had pioneered so much and that none of it was left. I had no documentation. I had no proof.

MOIRA ROTH: Except people’s memories.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Except people’s memories, you know, and who were these people? How do you get to them? Surely, if I had had any brains I would have tried to find people and interview them and recorded them, to have something. But I didn’t do that, and so nothing was left of it. It seemed it was absolutely like ashes in the wind. And when I would hear about all these great things that had been done in New York, and when I read about them, I would say, “We did that,” you know. We did that even before, long before. We did even better than that. We did that repeatedly—and more, you know, and nobody recognized it, nobody paid attention. So I think that very possibly I shut myself off from a lot of that. And now that I speak to you today, I’m able to say that. I’d never said that to anybody or in any interview, but I think that part of my hiding was that it was just too painful. It took me years to be able to talk about Instant Theatre and toot my own horn. I never did it. I never did it, because I had nothing to show for it, no proof. At the time I did it, I was so imbued with Zen Buddhism, which was a very big thing in my life—which I should have mentioned before—that it seemed that the ephemeral and the now and, you know, doing things just for the doing and all of that, was part of the philosophy. It was important to keep it that way, and it’s what fueled Instant Theatre. That was the philosophy behind it. And it’s only afterwards, when I stopped and when I looked around and saw the world and realized how people were cashing in on any little pissy thing they did. And it was all hyper documented. People didn’t fart without having it on tape, you know! And it was like everybody was—particularly on the East Coast—everybody was adulated and getting rich. On what? On things that were nowhere near as interesting as some of the things we did. So I think that a lot of that really hurt me, and I just never wanted to acknowledge that, because it was part of my upbringing, of never acknowledging the bad feelings.

MOIRA ROTH: Um hmm.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: You certainly don’t acknowledge the feelings of regret and envy. . . . So that was that. And the other thing was, again, part of my makeup where I never felt that people were justified in loving me just for who I was, but only for what I did. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Or performed.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Or performed. But when I wasn’t performing, since nothing was left of it, there was nothing left to love, you see? And so there was a lot of that going on with me, and that was what was happening at the time when I met Barbara, so I was very vulnerable at the time and had a bit of hero worship for her. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: You were telling me at one point the story of how you became close to Barbara by getting involved in a performance she did.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes, yes.

MOIRA ROTH: A Week in the Life Of.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes, which is interesting because it’s sort of symbolic also of our relationship that it should have happened through art, you know. She did this wonderful auction, where she auctioned off pieces of her life—pieces of time in her life—and I wanted so much to get close to her that I went to the auction and spent a lot of money bidding against people and got three of the. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: . . . best times.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: . . . the best times, and one of them was a doggie walk and one of them was a correspondence of three letters each, and the other one was two or three—I don’t remember—kind of show-and-tell things where we had to show each other some very unusual, extraordinary sights.
And so we did that. We went through all that, and I don’t know, you know, what she did with all of that. She was going to put it in a book but I don’t know if that book ever happened.

MOIRA ROTH: I don’t think so.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I don’t think it ever happened. I know she works on it or worked on it a lot.

MOIRA ROTH: Yeah.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: But it never did materialize. I still have some of the correspondence that we did together, and I think that some of it is really interesting. I could have used it, but anyway. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: What attracted you to her? Her sensibility? Her aesthetic?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Mainly what I felt I lacked, which is the conceptual side. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Meaning. . . .?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Meaning that I had a sense of conceptual art and I had a lot of admiration for it, and I felt that a lot of my work was very visceral and theatrical and sensual and was not sufficiently conceptual. And so I naturally gravitated toward somebody who had what I felt I lacked, and I tried to observe and analyze and understand how she was working in those ways. And did learn a lot from her, actually.

MOIRA ROTH: Do you feel that the performances that you’ve done since the mid-1970s are conceptual? Is that a word you’d use about them?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: No, I think that there are conceptual components. As total pieces, they are not conceptual statements. I think the only one which is possibly a strong conceptual statement is KabbaLAmobile. [And perhaps also Soldier of Fortune—RR] But I don’t think that my performances are simple enough. . . . And when I mean simple I mean that their components are minimal enough to create one strong conceptual statement, which I think you need for conceptual art. Mine are so layered and they’re so intricately structured and have so many components, you see, that it’s a different kind of approach. It’s more the assemblage sensibility. That’s a carryover, I think. But I think that, within that, parts are conceptual.

MOIRA ROTH: Something you’ve also mentioned. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Before I forget, I think that to be fair with myself, I think that I may have done a lot of conceptual work in Instant Theatre that I didn’t recognize as conceptual, because what later on was called conceptual, I used to call “collision.” And collision comes from Artaud. A lot of the stuff that we did was collision of totally disparate things put together as two ideas that created a resultant. That was part of my work, but I didn’t see it that way at the time.

MOIRA ROTH: I was going to say that I was curious about what else you were seeking out at that time.

Tape 2, side B

MOIRA ROTH: Continuing the conversation, on third of September 1989, with Rachel Rosenthal. We’d ended the last conversation with my asking you, in addition to your contact with Barbara Smith and your interest generally in performance and its conceptual aspects. What else were you thinking about at that time? What else was going on in experiences of the mid 1970s?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I was at that time, if I remember correctly—and you know I never reread my journals, which is a stupid thing.

MOIRA ROTH: And you keep journals?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I keep journals, and I never reread them. [laughs]

MOIRA ROTH: Oh.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: It’s sporadic, but I have kept them over the years. And, at that period, if I remember correctly, I was very dissatisfied with my life, because I lived in the big house in Tarzana and King was making a lot of money, and things were materially better for us than they had ever been. But I still was not comfortable with myself as an artist, and I felt that I was wasting my time being a housewife, taking care of the animals and the husband and the grounds and the food and the marketing and the cleaning and everything. And I just felt buried. Tarzana was pretty far away from things, so that even though I remember that there was a period—and I don’t remember exactly when—there was a period when I was in Tarzana where I was really trying to see everything and would take the car and go to, you know, as far as San Diego, Newport Beach, and all the outlying shows—Downey Museum—all the shows that were not only in town but peripheral. . . . But I still felt like an outsider so that when I got involved with the women it was really my entry into the art world.

MOIRA ROTH: So that happened simultaneously, being involved with feminism and. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: And entering. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: . . . .becoming part of the art world.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes, yes. And I credit the women for my entire career, actually, because—and I’ve said that in many interviews—because there was no other way for me to get into the art world, and I did it through the women and the woman’s movement. And that was not my primary intention for getting involved [laughs] in the movement, but that was the result in the long run. My first audience were women, when I started to do my performances. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Which was where? The first performance.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: At the Orlando Gallery in the valley. They asked me to do a performance in ‘75. When I was at Womanspace, I had gotten. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Could you describe Womanspace, the origins of it? You’d once said that as an activist and organizer you just automatically got involved in creating things.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Right. It came out of that group that was the discussion group that Mimi and Judy [Chicago—RR] had, and there was a consensus that what was needed was a space. As we all know, the art market was sewn up by men, and there was no entry really for women, and so it was important to create a space where women could show their work, come, discuss, listen to lectures, become involved and so on and so forth. And so there was a search for a space and, and I really, as I remember it, I think it was Fran Raboff’s husband, whose place that was. He had this space which used to be a laundromat or something like that on Venice Boulevard. On the west side. A woman called Lucy Adelman donated a year’s rent. A lot of the younger women then got involved in fixing it up and painting and doing all that work. I was a member of the board, as we all were. Eventually, after a few chairwomen, I ended up co-chairing it with the woman who ran Cart and Crate [Eugenia Osmun—RR].

MOIRA ROTH: What kind of exhibitions did you put on? Did you put on one-person exhibitions or group ones?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: We did everything. You know, the space was really remarkable, if I may say so myself. Because, first of all, it was so diverse. Secondly, it gave a space and a visibility for groups that were really disenfranchised in those days, like lesbians and black women and so on. It wasn’t like today where everybody’s talking diversity of backgrounds and ethnic mergings and all of those things, which are à la mode now. When I think of it, we were so in advance of our time. So the shows that were put on were at first group shows and had themes. They were theme shows.

MOIRA ROTH: Such as. . . .

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Such as women’s sexuality, of which I was a part, amazingly enough! And there was Opulence. There was Taboos, which was curated by this really strong, strong woman [Jessica Jacobs—RR].

MOIRA ROTH: Great topic.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes. And then there were groups, such as lesbians and black women. There was a lovely black show. All these different kinds of groupings which no other space would have shown. And they were always coupled with events, talks, question and answer with artists, lectures, shows of slides, and shows of videos—whatever. And so the space was extremely active and drew women like a magnet. There were always tons of women, and the upshot of it was that we created a new vocabulary in art because the work was so different from the mainstream male work. Specific. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Specific meaning gender-specific?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Gender-specific, for the period. It was specific because later on the men began to do works just like we did. But in those days it was very revolutionary because the emphasis was on all the things that men eschewed and did not want to deal with. And there was no sense at all of having to do a certain kind of art in order to be shown, and so it really opened a dam to all this outpouring of really exquisite work, some of which was decorative, a lot of which was collage, a lot of which was personal and autobiographical, some of which was illustrative, some of which was very expressionistic, long before neo-expressionism. A lot of it dealing with imagery that was central, you know, part of Judy and Mimi’s theories—which were applicable for a certain kind of art, but not all. A lot of it was political and even shocking. And using materials and means which were not mainstream. And a lot of it was diaristic, like pages out of personal journals and using mementos and all the things that were really at that time never seen. And some of it was really exquisite. And so it drew a great deal of attention and then controversy, and in the meantime within the organization were all of these clashes and poles in different directions and disagreements and tremendous conflicts.

MOIRA ROTH: That doesn’t surprise me!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yeah! These were part of the development and growth. But for me personally this was such a strong “learning experience”—in quotes—because again I had to fit into a very democratic mold and deal with all this diversity, whereas I had been so isolated in my own work as a loner or as the head of my company, which was a completely fascistic company. . . . [laughter] You know, what I said went. In a sense it was a paradox, because Instant Theatre was totally improvised and we never did the same piece twice. It was a very spontaneous form and spontaneous collaboration. Everybody worked together for the piece, so that in a sense it was extremely democratic—as democratic as one can get I suppose. But in order to get to the point where a company was able to perform like that, consistently, the grueling workshopping and studying and practicing and exercises and continual classes that I had to give, was extremely disciplined and. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: And fascistic!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: And fascistic. There was definitely a feeling of whip, because you had to get people to do certain things in a certain way. Otherwise, you couldn’t function like that. And so it was a real mixture between total freedom and total discipline. And, as I said, I was the artistic director and what I said went. So when I got into the women’s movement and I realized that there was no acceptance of leadership, I was first of all appalled at the waste of time, at the pussyfooting around and at the continual beating around the bush and turning around the subject. My impulse was always to say, “Okay, girls, let’s cut the bullshit. Let’s do this and that and the other,” you know. And that, of course—just like the term “girls”—was not acceptable and it drove me nuts. I would come home from those meetings to my house and scream, just scream, and tell my husband, “I can’t stand it anymore. I’m never going back,” you know, and of course I always went back.

MOIRA ROTH: How long did Womanspace continue for?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I think that it moved, if I remember correctly, with the move from the west side onto the old Chouinard Building on Grandview Street and then became more and more engulfed by the so-called Woman’s Building, which became the dominant force. Grandview held its own for a while.

MOIRA ROTH: And you were involved with Grandview, too?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: I was involved with Grandview, and. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Which was another space for women.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes. It was, it was a more specialized space, because it didn’t have the diversity that Womanspace had. It was just a gallery. It was a collective, so it was no longer open to everybody. There was a definite roster of women who were the collective that was called Grandview. And that was it, and that’s who we showed. There was double the amount of women as exhibition time and so two of us would double up for each exhibition time, and we had two big galleries, so one of us took one and one of us took the other.

MOIRA ROTH: Who was in the collective?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Barbara and Sherry Brody and. . . . [pauses] You’ll have to look at this. Wanda [Westcoast—RR] and, you know. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: The group!

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: The group, the usual, Judy and Mimi and, you know, and. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Was that seen as elitist?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Nancy Youdelman. And Janice Lester—and Faith [Wilding—RR], Suzanne [Lacy—RR]. . . . You know, just a bunch of the old. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Yeah. How was that viewed by women who weren’t in the collective?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Not with great happiness, and, you know, we were criticized at the time for being elitist. The problem was that you couldn’t include everybody, and this happened to be a collective of this particular group, and the point was “make you own collective with another group” and the more the better, you know, the more the merrier.

MOIRA ROTH: Had you helped organize Grandview?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: We all did. You know, it was always a group effort, and I was part of that. And we all took turns doing specific things, publicity and. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Gallery sitting?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: . . . gallery sitting and mailing and whatever, you know, so it was the same old stuff. It was a collective. So Grandview got very good reviews, and the shows were excellent, very high caliber. And that was another thing, you know, which was always the question about the quality. What is quality? Are we going to be like the male establishment, blah blah blah, or are we going to show everybody? And that was the big bone of contention in the whole feminist movement, always, and particularly in the art movement, you know. Is everybody welcome, no matter who and what? Or are we going to be selective and be part of the art community? And the two were really mutually exclusive philosophically, you see, and so there was always a great deal of contention about that. Grandview tried to somehow solve that dilemma by saying, “Well, galleries like this one are like groups that feel affinity and that feel that we’re in similar places in our careers and in our development and we want to show together and be in the same space. We can have many of these developed.” Well, no others developed. So, because of that, we remained in the spotlight and probably became target of a lot of people’s resentment. But, in the meantime, Judy [Chicago—Ed.] and Cheryl Swannack, who were very instrumental in making policy, were really kind of blocking out the Woman’s Building, and the Woman’s Building became more and more prominent and more and more all-inclusive and did open its doors to almost everybody in some shape or form. So that answered that need, you see. And being in the same building sometimes was difficult, because there were a lot of clashes and a definite kind of class distinction—in a weird way, you know. Most of the people in Grandview were sort of bourgeois white girls, and. . . . Except for Betye Saar. I think she was in it, if I remember correctly. . . . But Betye was the token everywhere, you know! At the time there were no other black women who were really accepted or who were in that category, so she was it. We were all European-style ladies, you know. And there were quite a few actually who were of European descent. . . . The other part of the building, then, was “The Proles”! [Rhymes with role—Proletariat!—RR] There were quite a few carryovers, you know, because I remember, for instance, a performance that Barbara did, which included a lot of people behind white masks and that she did in the courtyard. The courtyard was like the hearth, the hogan. [laughs] And a lot of people participated in some of those. And then there were public speaking and a lot of events and feasts and potluck feasts. And then there was that auction, You Art What You Eat, which I chaired, you know, and more or less helped to create, which was a really lovely event and. . . .

MOIRA ROTH: Which was what?

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: It was an auction. It was for Womanspace, which was in big financial trouble, and people brought in edible art. And there were some really exquisite food art done, and there was a lovely exhibition and first everybody got to see it and then it was auctioned off and eaten. [laughs] And we got some money out of it.

MOIRA ROTH: Tell me about the Joan of Art seminars, because they were very key for you, but also for many other women.

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Oh, yes, they were so amazing. Well, June Wayne was really a remarkably generous person, not only with her time and her money and her space, but with all of her know-how.

MOIRA ROTH: Her space being Tamarind [Lithography Workshop—MR].

RACHEL ROSENTHAL: Yes. She perceived the lack, you know, which was so apparent in women artists, who really were like babies. We were babies. We didn’t know how to go about doing anything in terms of marketing our art or being professionals. We just had no sense whatsoever. All we knew is that we liked to draw and paint and sculpt, you know, and that was it. And so, having herself been through all of that and having the expertise and the knowledge and everything, she decided to spread it around. She had sent a release to the paper, and there was this little item, you know, that I saw in the paper—and I didn’t see the first one unfortunately, but I saw the second. And what she offered was a free—I mean it was totally free—a free seminar of six sessions, and each session was about a different aspect of marketing. There was budgeting, and there was your relationship to the gallery, your relationship to the collector, how you behave—and there was a lot of roleplaying—how you behave with a buyer, a collector, a gallery director. How do you sell yourself? How do you make your own publicity? All of those things. And she taught the first one, and then her idea was that out of each session one woman would come out and teach that particular session and she (June) would supervise. An