De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

20: On Death

202 20 On Death The circus is over, and the tent is coming down. —De Grazia1 in 1970, aT aGe sixTy-one, De Grazia started pondering his mortality . He later recorded some of his reflections in a phonograph album called His Thoughts and His Philosophy: I respect a good doctor—and for the young, a good doctor should be the very best—for life is precious. He should be a biblical type, a healer, an extender of life. But a man my age should have a medicine man, a curandero [folk healer or shaman], a mechanic who looks under the hood, and if it can be fixed with bailing wire, okay—if not, let it go to hell. This machine is old, and all you can hope for is a few extra miles. I consider myself old with a lot of miles. I am ready to go—nobody, nothing —lives forever. But I want to die in peace. No prolonging of natural life. I want to die in peace, and when I die I want a plain redwood coffin—a monk’s coffin. No people do I want around, no ritual, no talks. Maybe just a prayer. Let it be known I’ve died after I’m buried, but only if they ask.2 Despite these rather melancholy contemplations, De Grazia still had a lot of life in him. He was raking in money, painting pictures, writing books, and making movies. But he’d begun to slow down, On Death 203 with age creeping up on him. Chores he had previously done with ease had become harder. He didn’t care for it. “I’d give anything if I could go back twenty-five years,” he said when he tried to saw a branch off a tree and after ten strokes couldn’t do it anymore. “I hate that. I just cracked off the son of a bitch.”3 He knew he couldn’t live forever, but he wasn’t ready for the “ugly, rickety rocking chair” of retirement, either. “Peace of mind, love and contentment,” he said about retirement. “It ain’t there.”4 One of the last books he illustrated was the second edition of an earlier one he had collaborated on with Rita Davenport, hostess of the TV show Open House in Phoenix. The book almost didn’t get done because of De Grazia’s fears about painting after the burning, during his three-year sabbatical from oils. Davenport said that after she called his concerns “hogwash,” he phoned her in the middle of the night to tell her, “We’re going to do the cookbook. Get the recipes ready, and I’m going to do the art.”5 The eighty-six-page book, De Grazia and Mexican Cookery, was published in 1981 by Northland Press in Flagstaff, Arizona. Also in 1981 a second biography came out, The World of De Grazia by Harry Redl. Redl, a photographer whose work had appeared in Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post, photographed and wrote the 200-page book containing 199 full-color plates of De Grazia’s artwork. It sold for $49.50, or about $125 in 2011 dollars. Redl had to charge that much because it reportedly cost $250,000 to publish.6 Redl said he was skeptical when he first began shooting photographs of De Grazia because “I had the feeling that he was a phony in a cowboy hat.” But after watching for De Grazia to make a wrong move, he eventually decided, “It was no pose.”7 Redl said he wrote the book because “when you look at him, you see sagebrush, cactus, and broncos. . . . He appears a naïve ruffian, but then he has the most complex, sophisticated thoughts. The amazing thing was, when I first met him, he had this interesting dignity underneath the hat and the cowboy boots. He is an American original.”8 Redl said he also came to see De Grazia in a different light as he photographed his paintings, laid out the images, and saw them printed. “You get a feeling of a very serious painter. I like the man. I think we ought to look at him before he dies and pay tribute to him.”9 chapTer 20 204 In the late 1970s De Grazia visited Carol Locust at her home, complaining about his back, hands, shoulders, and feet hurting. He often worked...