Will digging up Dali’s body after 28 years prove this is his daughter?
ASpaniSh judge made the extraordinary decision yesterday to exhume Salvador Dali’s body — or what is left of it — 28 years after it was interred in the crypt beneath the Theatre-Museum Dali in Figueres in Spain.
The sensational order was handed down so that Dna tests could be carried out to show once and for all whether a lady who used to read tarot cards for a Spanish television channel is his daughter.
pilar abel, 61, claims her mother had a secret affair with the Spanish surrealist painter while a servant for friends of his.
indeed, she insists the family likeness is so strong that, when he first laid eyes on her, one of Dali’s associates told her she looked just ‘like Dali without the moustache’.
She’s been fighting for years — ever since her mother told her about the love affair — and will now find out if the man who inspired andy Warhol, and an entire generation of post-modern artists, is her father.
Medical experts have been granted the right to open Dali’s tomb and remove a sample of his corpse for testing.
While this is without doubt a shocking development, the real surprise to anyone who actually knew Dali is that he could ever have fathered a child at all.
although he boasted an array of sexual proclivities and perversities that would make hugh hefner blush, built a vast swimming pool shaped like an erect phallus at his Spanish home, and threw parties attended by some of the most beautiful girls in the world, Dali was apparently terrified of the female body.
he made love to his Russian wife Gala only once during their tempestuous 48-year- old marriage, for goodness sake. (Though he happily watched while plenty of other people did — even procuring some lovers for her).
Many of Dali’s friends — who included Beatle George harrison and actor Kirk Douglas — assumed he was physically incapable of having sex with a woman.
But pilar abel says otherwise. She claims her mother antonia worked as a maid in the mid-Fifties for a family who spent summers in Cadaques, near Figueres, and was one day invited back to the Dali house, where they embarked upon ‘a friendship that developed into clandestine love’.
it would certainly have been a departure for the artist. For Dali was more a voyeur than an active participant when it came to sex.
he had a penchant for sourcing lovers for his wife, then watching from a distance as they enjoyed liaisons. Sometimes he would even beg his wife to perform unmentionable sex acts on him and humiliate him in the bedroom.
Dali’Sappalled contemporary, George Orwell, once suggested the only way to view him was as two characters — one a brilliant draftsman of classics such as the lobster phone, the melting watch and Mae West lips settee, the other a disgusting human being.
he was always more than a little different, and his upbringing in Figueres, in Catalonia, must surely be at least partly to blame.
he was born exactly nine months after his three-year- old brother died of gastroenteritis and, when he was five, his parents took him to the grave and told him he was his brother’s incarnation.
he was artistic, haughty — he was expelled from school for saying none of the staff was sufficiently competent to examine him — and riddled with sexual anxiety.
Dali spent much of his youth fretting about the size of his manhood — which he described in his autobiography as ‘small’ and ‘pitiful’, comparing it in size with those of his classmates and fearing he was impotent.
art became his release, and he was just 16 when his lawyer father organised an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in the local town.
he worshipped his mother, and was distraught when she died from breast cancer two years later — but oddly happy when his father married his mother’s sister soon afterwards.
Dali was never the sort to blend in. By the time he left home to study painting in Madrid in 1922, he was modelling himself on a 19th-century country gentleman with long hair, sideburns and knee breeches.
he was studiedly eccentric and made friends with film-maker luis Bunuel, with whom he later collaborated, and the gay poet Federico Garcia lorca.
Many assumed Dali was gay — including lorca who made many sexual advances, though all of them were rebuffed.
it was in 1929 that he met Elena ivanovna Diakonova, or Gala, who at the time was married to a surrealist poet.
Gala, described as ‘dragon-like’ by one acquaintance, wasn’t the sort to let a husband or boring old monogamy get in the way — she and her husband had already lived in a menage- a- trois with the German painter Max Ernst.
When she met Dali, 11 years her junior but already a talented painter, she spotted his financial potential and abandoned her husband and their young daughter on the spot.
in 1934, she married Dali, and theirs was one of the strangest — and most commercially successful — relationships imaginable.
HEWaS a virgin with an almost phobic aversion to ‘ breeding’; she had a hysterectomy immediately after they married and helped turn him into a money-making superstar.
he became even more studiedly eccentric — a professional exhibitionist. he turned up to a lecture in london leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds and wearing a deep sea diving outfit that left him gasping for breath. They moved to america where he made increasingly outrageous appearances.
his fellow surrealists criticised him for being too commercial. andre Breton, the founder of the movement, rearranged the letters in ‘Salvador Dali to make ‘avida
Dollars’ — which means hungry for dollars in Spanish.
after nine years the couple moved back to Spain, where they built a house in Figueres and put it firmly on the map of the international jet set.
For Dali was famous, charismatic and exciting, and the bright and the beautiful flocked to his infamous parties, jumped into his phallus-shaped pool and hoped to be painted by him.
his routine for anyone who
caught his eye was well tested. He’d ask them to disrobe — they almost always obliged, hoping he might paint them in return.
But instead, a ‘ male model’ would appear out of nowhere and, before the guest knew it, she (or he) were having sex and, yet again, Dali was watching. But never actually taking part.
This was very much the scene during the Fifties when Pilar Abel’s mother allegedly met Dali and began the relationship which would produce Pilar in 1956.
Whether Dali knew he had conceived a daughter — if indeed that is what happened — is unclear.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that around this time — and suddenly obsessed with the concepts of chastity and virginity — he became a Roman Catholic.
Indeed, in 1958, when Pilar would have been two years old, he and Gala remarried in a Catholic ceremony — after obtaining special dispensation from the Pope because of his wife’s earlier marriage.
There seems little doubt that if he had produced Pilar and had become aware of her birth, he would have made a terrible father.
Utterly self- obsessed and horribly selfish, he was not used to considering other people, far less a child.
Everything in his life revolved around him, his work and his schedule.
He got up at the same time every morning and went to bed at exactly 11pm, wherever he was. He would leave dinners in the middle of the main course; leave conversations in mid-flow.
The thought of him embracing any sort of familial domesticity is absurd. Even more so, one might argue, is that anyone would want him for a father.
But Mrs Abel has spent the past decade trying to claim him as hers, though she has not had much luck so far.
She took a DNA test in July 2007 in Madrid, using skin and hair remains she had obtained from a death mask of the painter — but it turned out to be inconclusive.
She is said never to have received the results of a second test carried out in Paris five months later with the help of Dali’s friend and biographer, Robert Descharnes.
Throughout, Mrs Abel has insisted she is motivated neither by Dali’s global fame or the vast fortune he left to the Spanish state and Dali Foundation.
She says: ‘I just want to know who I really am, where I come from and who I belong to’.
Whatever, nearly three decades after Dali’s death, Mrs Abel is about find out if he was her father.
Let’s hope that, if he was, she has inherited the more palatable side of his personality, if there ever was one.