De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

4: The Bisbee Years

35 4 The Bisbee Years I’m not a joiner. I belong to no group. —De Grazia1 soon afTer The weddinG the newlyweds moved to Bisbee, a booming mining town of twenty thousand people about ten miles from the border with Mexico, where Nick Diamos had made Ted manager of the Lyric Theater at 10 Naco Road, at the very bottom of the notorious Brewery Gulch. In Bisbee’s heyday, Brewery Gulch had as many as forty-seven saloons and countless houses of ill repute. The southernmost milehigh city in the United States, it was widely considered one of the liveliest spots between El Paso and San Francisco.2 Bisbee in the 1930s produced half of Arizona’s gold, silver, and copper. Phelps Dodge mined the Copper Queen at the edge of town. The mine had an average annual payroll of $5 million. As was true in many mining towns, Bisbee residents called Phelps Dodge “The Company,” primarily because it also owned the largest hotel, the hospital, the only department store, the library, and more. The town, three times larger than it is today, had 218 businesses.3 Bisbee sits at the confluence of Brewery Gulch and Tombstone Canyon, where houses cling to the sides of steep hills. The topography provoked an old saying that “most any fellow with a chaw in his jaw can sit on his front porch and spit down the chimney of his neighbor’s house.”4 chapTer 4 36 When the De Grazias moved into a rented one-bedroom apartment , Alexandra took an almost immediate dislike to the town. “Bisbee made me feel like I was in some foreign country,” she wrote in her memoir, “and I told Ted I’d never venture forth after dark,” apparently referring to the menace of miners who frequented saloons and houses of ill repute.5 Most of the miners—immigrants from Mexico , Italy, England, and middle European countries—spoke English poorly, if at all. De Grazia became a businessman. He dressed in a suit and tie, joined the civic clubs, and even played a round of golf or two— although not very well—at the Bisbee Country Club, eight miles south of town on the road to Naco.6 John Alexander, a professional magician who performed in Brewery Gulch saloons, described De Grazia as “a big shot in town.”7 He oversaw two showings at the theater every evening and matinees on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, with new movies twice a week. He kept to a schedule, rising at 6:30 a.m., eating breakfast, and heading out the door by 8:00. De Grazia’s inexhaustible energy and drive went into high gear. It didn’t take him long to find a place to paint, a space in the theater between his office and the movie projector booth where boxes of film were stored. He would paint two or three hours at the theater, usually in the early morning, and then do his banking and run errands. The Figure 6. While living in Bisbee, De Grazia painted this mural depicting life in the mines. The Bisbee Years 37 family would eat dinner at 5 p.m., and then he would go back to the theater until 11 or midnight.8 De Grazia seemed at this time to be seeking a way to use art as a social statement about class struggle. Mining, one of his first paintings after moving to Bisbee, is a three-panel, black-and-white triptych that clearly depicts the companies’ indifference toward workers. The first panel depicts huge mining equipment in the foreground with a line of small, anonymous workers entering a mine shaft in the background. The second panel presents a close-up look at a miner operating a hydraulic hammer. The third panel illustrates a modern industrial site with a smokestack fouling the air above while a worker toils below. The three panels together also was De Grazia’s attempt to demonstrate to mining companies the indispensable role of the workers who operated the machinery. The painting had similar qualities to a 1930 painting, Steel, by Thomas Hart Benton, who became De Grazia’s friend later in their careers.9 As well known as they were in town, Ted and Alexandra shied away from social gatherings. Even after De Grazia became more famous, he felt uncomfortable socializing. “He never was really very much for that kind of life,” one...