De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

8: Life after Divorce

71 8 Life after Divorce I paint because there is a drive and because it’s the will of God. —De Grazia1 de Grazia sTruGGled To make ends meet after the 1946 divorce. He would leave paintings outside his small, rustic Tucson studio overnight with “For Sale” signs, but nobody would even steal them.2 When his children came to visit him at the studio, they ate salad for dinner and sugarcane for dessert, all he could afford. The children complained they were tired of being given the same meager dinner repeatedly, but he told them, “I’m sorry, that’s all I have.” He might take them out for Chinese food if he sold a painting. Sometimes he bought them coats after making a sale. When he picked his children up after school for visitation and they stayed overnight at his Campbell studio, the only heat in wintertime came from a fireplace that would burn out, and they would wake up to bitter cold in the morning.3 No matter the hardship, De Grazia paid attention to his kids. He wanted to see report cards, and each “A” would earn a dollar.4 At times he took them along when he went to Indian country to look for painting ideas. They slept in his car and ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and if he managed to sell a painting, “we would eat in a real drugstore,” said his daughter Kathy Bushroe.5 Nick told a reporter in 1980 that his father sat him at a table at age six or seven with a paintbrush and had him fill in colors on Indian items he had made, which Ted then sold. Neither of his two daughters chapTer 8 72 showed an interest in painting, while Nick dabbled in artwork over the years.6 Ted begged the children to go to college, but none did. Not all of the neighbors were happy with De Grazia’s studio and the other storefronts he built. The Prince Road Improvement Society passed around a petition in the late 1940s to get him out of the neighborhood, but nothing came of it. Toward the end of the 1940s, a developer decided to put a drive-in theater across the street from De Grazia’s studio. Enraged, he formed a neighborhood group to oppose the plan. They lost. Afterward, De Grazia began thinking about moving to the Catalina Foothills to once again escape encroaching civilization.7 He didn’t hold grudges, though. Instead, he became a longtime friend of the drive-in’s manager , Dick Frontain, whom he met for drinks every night about 5 p.m. when Frontain arrived to open the drive-in.8 On Thanksgiving in 1940 in New York City, a ten-year-old boy named Hal Grieve turned to his mother and said, “Let’s get out of this dirty city.” His mother, Marion Sheret, said, “Hey, all right. Where shall we go?” Young Grieve looked at a jigsaw puzzle map of the United States and pointed at Tucson. Not long thereafter, they arrived. Or so the story goes.9 Fifty-seven years later, Grieve said he had no recollection of that event and that it might be legend. “That’s Figure 14. During the mid-1940s De Grazia built a studio at North Campbell Avenue and East Prince Road in Tucson. Life after Divorce 73 just a story I’ve heard often,” he said.10 He said he believes someone suggested Tucson because it had a growing art community.11 Grieve’s mother, one of nine children of a stonecutter and a housewife , was born May 8, 1905, in New Albion, New York, about fifty miles south of Buffalo. “I was,” she said, “what they call an apple knocker from upper New York.”12 She graduated in 1927 from Buffalo State University and then married a sales engineer. They divorced soon after Hal’s birth. She and Hal moved to New York City so she could study at Columbia University to become a sculptor. “They were nice teachers,” she said, “but I learned nothing.”13 They lived mostly on alimony and child support in a loft on Fifth Avenue across from the main New York library. She worked for Macy’s, where she sold office equipment, and attended school at night.14 In February 1941, they hopped a train headed for Tucson, arriving around Valentine’s Day...