Unforgettable encounters with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera & Leon Trotsky

I sat up straight when Albert Bildner said he knew Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky from his colorful youth.

The write-ups on Frida caught my eye especially with accompanying photos of actress Salma Hayek’s painted eyebrows. While it was repulsive to me, I know that beyond the physical, Frida was a very accomplished woman. "Can I interview you about them, Albert?" I asked. And I did.

Albert, by the way, is a retired businessman who made his fortune in South America. His sense of humor reminds me of a call from the Yale president that went like this, "Hello Albert. Can I see you?" to which Albert replied, "You know I’m 86 years old with one foot on a banana peel. I know what you need."

Albert is obviously into philanthropic causes for education and peace and sits on the board of various universities in Israel and America. What caught my eye was his overwhelming art collection of pre-Colombian textiles and feathered pieces from Peru. The "newest" is over 500 years old. The textiles, colored from vegetable dye, have retained their vividness due to the dryness of the desert and the absence of humidity in Peru.

Albert’s solicitation letters weigh over two pounds. Jokingly he comments, "I need a bigger waste basket with the shysters I have to contend with. I used to be foolish, giving just to get these letters out of the way. Not anymore since I married Lyn."

Albert’s memories would read like this: "The year was 1937. He had just graduated from Yale University. With $200 saved from working in a grocery store owned by his father, he bought a second-hand Packard limousine, color black, 1931 model. It had a roll-up window between the front and back seat. There was a voice tube for the back seat passenger to give orders to the driver. Two little flower vases were on each side at the back of the car!"

With two friends, Albert embarked on a journey starting from New York City for Mexico to meet another Yale graduate, Bernard Wolf, who was translating work for the exiled Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky. Albert is fluent in Spanish, having studied it at Yale. Bernard had also assured him of a job doing Spanish translations perhaps for Trotsky. The trip took eight days from the US border to Mexico City.

Upon arrival in Mexico City, the two of them met up with Kevin Lynch who would later on become a world-renowned professor in the field of urban planning. They checked into what Albert calls a flea joint on Casa Ayuntamiento and they paid $5 a day(!) for a room with three cots. Finally the day came to drive his Packard to the house in Coyoacan, a suburb in Mexico City owned by artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, which was then occupied by Trotsky, his wife and grandson.

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Leon Trotsky arrived in Mexico sometime in 1935. He was ordered into exile by Stalin after being first exiled off the coast of Turkey, then to Norway. Due to the dictator Stalin’s paranoia about the proximity of Trotsky to Moscow, the exiled former Russian leader ended up in Mexico City. Then Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas, known for his socialist views, was the only Latin American willing to receive Trotsky. Diego Rivera, by then already internationally acclaimed as a muralist, and Frida, being both communist sympathizers, offered Trotsky one of their homes as a refuge.

The Coyoacan house became a meeting place for the artist friends of Diego and Frida. One of the regulars was Dr. Atl, the one-legged painter whose specialty was painting Mt. Popocatepatl, a mountain the one-leg amputee would climb in crutches. At that time, there were several, maybe a dozen, young people doing translation work for the exiled leader. Albert was given the job of reading Spanish magazines and newspapers and translating certain articles into English, or vice versa, for Trotsky.

Trotsky, according to Albert, was very intelligent, well-read and an articulate person. He looked like a professor and sounded like one. With a good command of the English language, he had a wide vocabulary, spoke with a heavy accent and mispronounced words. For example, he would say "monses" when he meant "months." One time Albert asked him about Stalin’s statistics on the USSR to increase the production of wheat, corn and other agricultural products. Trotsky answered, "Everyone has a coefficient of exaggeration...and Stalin’s is about 30 percent." Albert says he would come to use this expression of Trotsky many times during his business career.

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Albert met Frida Kahlo on several occasions while working in the Coyoacan house. She and Diego would come in and out of the house and would engage young people in small talk with Albert and Bernard being one of them.

Frida typically wore a Mexican peasant blouse with an ankle-length skirt which covered a leg deformity (as well as a limp) from a car accident where she was impaled on a metal rod. Albert at first thought that her bushy eyebrows were connected and that she had a mustache. "She was friendly," Albert says, "and made small talk with the young people, and would have purposeful conversations with Trotsky." He did not get the impression then that she was a lover of the much older Trotsky. The movie Frida, however, portrays her as such.

Albert’s encounters with Diego Rivera were memorable. He was fat, which is so unlike in the movie. Diego was a jovial character with a pleasant personality, and an eye for women. He loved Albert’s Packard. When he first saw it he asked if Albert would be his chauffeur and drive him to Chapingo some 40 miles away. Diego was then touching up the murals he had painted on the walls of the Agricultural School where his theme was the Goddess of the Waters. Albert would drive Diego twice a week for a month to a house in San Angel to do portraits of women. The latter would stay in the back seat because he was fat and wore a big sombrero. One day, Albert watched him paint a very ugly fat lady but made her appear slim and beautiful. Later, Albert said to him, "Diego, tu sabes que esa mujer no parece guapa y bonita como que tu la pintasate." (Diego, you know that woman does not look pretty or beautiful like the way you painted her.) "I will never forget his answer," Albert says. It was "Nosotros artistas nos gustamos tambien comer." (Us artists like eating, too.)

Four months later, it was time for Albert to return home – where he had a job waiting – to run the Big Ben chain, the first supermarket set up on Long Island. As he was saying his goodbyes to the people at the Coyoacan house, Trotsky came downstairs in his bathrobe and asked him if he wanted a glass (not a cup) of tea. He asked Albert to go to the garden and pluck out a lemon from a tree. When he returned Trotsky had two glasses of tea ready. Albert watched him sip tea "Russian style" with a cube of sugar between his teeth.

In one of his books, Trotsky argues the basic differences he had with Stalin was that he wanted the communist revolution contained in the USSR. Trotsky, who was to be Lenin’s heir, challenged Stalin on this, believing that the revolution should have been exported to the world. Before Albert left, Trotsky gave him an autographed English version of his book, The Revolution Betrayed.

When Albert told Frida he was going back to the United States, she asked him about some hillbilly mountain music which she loved and requested him to send her some hillbilly records. This, Albert did months later. That was the last time Albert saw or heard from her. Frida Kahlo died in 1954 on her bed on the top floor of the Coyoacan house. The last thing she saw was a picture on the wall of Marx, Engel and Stalin. By her bedside were her wheelchair and easel.

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In August 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Casa Azul by Jacques Mercader, a Spaniard who was brought by his mother to the USSR after the Spanish Civil War and raised as a rabid Stalinist. He was trained by the secret police to kill Trotsky. Mercader met an American woman named Silvia near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the meeting set up by the Russians. The two became lovers and Silvia brought Mercader back to Mexico where she knew the Coyoacan group and vouched for Mercader. Mercader entered into the inner circle of Casa Azul.

Mercader split Trotsky’s skull with an alpenstock (an ice-climber’s axe) which he hid inside his raincoat. Trotsky’s body was cremated and his ashes were buried in the courtyard under a stone that reads "Trotsky" above a drawing of a hammer and sickle. Mercader spent 25 years in a Mexican prison. Upon his release, a Czech plane picked him up and brought him to Russia where he disappeared.

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It was in 1939 that Diego and Frida had violent arguments with Trotsky on political grounds. The couple had reverted to Stalinism. Trotsky was forced to leave the house where Albert had met him and moved into Casa Azul a few blocks away.

The house is now a popular tourist stop. Trotsky’s office where he was killed is exactly as he left it – with an old-fashioned typewriter with Russian letters.

Diego Rivera passed away in the late ’50s after a bout with cancer shortly after his return to Mexico from Russia where he was operated on. Before Albert left Mexico, Diego had given him three small drawings.

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"The world has only recently come to appreciate Frida Kahlo’s great artistic talents with the rise of feminism. Details of her personal life have surfaced, particularly her life-long excruciating physical pain and the emotional suffering she endured from her philandering artist husband, and their encounter with the exiled Trotsky. Frida has since been acclaimed in international art circles as a great artist with her self-portraits surrealistically portraying her inner struggles with pain and with Diego," Albert comments. Today, her paintings are valued in the millions of dollars.

It’s amusing to find out little trivia about people that may never appear in print especially in their biographies!