Clifford Thurlow - Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me

Salvador Dali was one of the great personalities of the 20th century. Artist, intellectual, raconteur, a gifted writer and film-maker, he led his life as if upon a stage surrounded by the rich, famous, the bizarre and the beautiful.

Dali was also a voyeur with an irrational fear of being touched by others and with sexual eccentricities he shared with a select few. One of those special friends was Carlos Lozano, an actor from Colombia, who met the painter in Paris at the age of twenty. Dali secured him work as a dancer in the musical Hair and they remained intimate until Dalis death twenty-five years later.

Behind the public persona, the role Dali played, was another personality, the naughty boy, the trickster, the Magician, and in Carlos Lozano he found a playmate.

Carlos entered the Court of the Divine and reveals here for the first time a rich and authoritative portrait of the passions and obsessions that governed Salvador Dalis life and work. While those obsessions are uncovered in mesmerising detail, with humour and complete honesty, it is the human qualities of Carlos Lozanos memoir that make the story of their long association so appealing. Dalis weaknesses and contradictions are carefully laid bare against the joy and exhilaration he brought to those in the charmed inner circle.

Stylishly chronicled by the award-winning writer Clifford Thurlow, this will undoubtedly be one of the most important biographies to appear in this opening year of the new millennium. Laugh, scream in outrage, gasp in wonder, you will not be able to resist this book.

Clifford Thurlow

The Memoirs of Carlos Lozano

ePub r1.0

Titivillus 26.06.18

There are many here among us

Who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I weve been through that

And this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now

The hour is getting late

BOB DYLAN

CLIFFORD THURLOW (born 1952, in London, England) trained as a journalist after failing to get a place at Cambridge and wrote his first book at the age of 23. He has been described by Penny Wark of The Times as one of the UKs best ghostwriters.

Thurlow is noted for creating memoirs in the style of a novel. Recent books are Fatwa: Living With A Death Threat (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), which describes the flight of Jacky Trevane across the desert with two children to escape an abusive husband; Today Im Alice (Sidgwick & Jackson, 2009) the story of Multiple Personality Disorder survivor Alice Jamieson, a Sunday Times Top Ten best-seller; and two books set in Iraq with former infantry captain turned mercenary James Ashcroft, Escape From Baghdad (Virgin, 2009), the rescue of Ashcrofts former Iraqi interpreter and his family from Shia Death Squads; and Making A Killing (Virgin, 2006) on which Andy Martin wrote in The Daily Telegraph: Ashcroft must have formed a good working alliance with ghostwriter Clifford Thurlow, because this diary of death and destruction radiates not just personality but that elusive, lyrical honesty the existentialists used to call authenticity.

Sex, Surrealism, Dal and Me tells the story of two remarkable men Salvador Dal and his ambassador in Cadaqus, the Colombian dancer and gallery owner Carlos Lozano.

First published by Razor Books in 2000, the launch party was held at the Dal Universe, a museum on the South Bank of the Thames in London. It was a warm June evening, the river turning orange in the sunset, and 400 friends came from all over the world for a surreal night of nostalgia and champagne decadence.

Half naked girls served hors doeuvres shaped as lobsters and melting watches. There was a midget masquerading as Dal and the de rigueur transsexual dressed as a Victorian duchess. Sue Guinness was the perfect hostess and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who had crossed swords with Carlos Lozano in the sixties over the ownership of an Afghan coat, appeared to apologise, Carlos whispered.

Carlos looked splendid, thin and ascetic in a white suit with a long wine red scarf that almost reached the floor. He posed for the cameras. He drank champagne, knowing that he shouldnt. With extravagant messages and bold signature, he signed copies of the book we had written, the testament to an amazing life he knew was drawing to a close. Six weeks later, Carlos Lozano died aged 52 from liver failure in Figueres the rural town where Salvador Dal was born.

I had first met Carlos at his art gallery in Cadaqus, the Spanish fishing village where Dal had built a maze-like dwelling from a row of fishing cottages overlooking the bay of Port Lligat. Carlos spoke often of the great voyeur, game player and provocateur, his words guarded, as if there were something painful or private he wanted to conceal.

When The Hayward Gallery showed a Dal retrospective the following year, Carlos stayed with me in London. By this time, I had read countless articles and books about the painter. Inspired by the show, Carlos began to talk more openly and, as he talked, I came to see that he had a far deeper, more intimate understanding of the artists life and work than anything I had encountered. For such a multi-dimensional character, the chronicles had been modestly one dimensional.

Carlos agreed to put his memories on tape and the picture that emerged was a double exposure: the remembrances of Salvador Dal set in counterpoint to his own extraordinary life, a journey from the humble backstreets of Barranquilla in Colombia to New York, Paris and the Court of the Divine.

I was thankful that Carlos lived to see the book that emerged from those tapes in English, although it was sad that he missed the celebrations that marked its publication in Spain. There were more than fifty pages of essays, articles and critiques in the Spanish press and, mimicking Dal, I told friends I was measuring rather than reading the reviews. Sexo, Surrealimso, Dal y Yo spent several weeks in the top-ten best-seller lists. Among the various translations, for reasons that can only be described as surreal, with a grant from the European Union to revitalise publishing in Romania, the book was published by Editura Universal Dalsi in 2003 and launched with a party at the British Consulate in Bucharest. From Ceausescu to Dal in a decade. What a marvellous sense of humour.

The non-English editions of the book have a new last chapter, included here for the first time. It describes the last weeks of Carloss life, the bell chiming for his death in Cadaqus, and the journey of his ashes to the River Ganges in India. It creates, as Spains leading newspaper El Pas noted, the unique circumstances in which the storyteller becomes the ghost and the ghostwriter finds his voice.

CLIFFORD THURLOW

Cadaqus, August 2011

Ttulo original: Sex, Surrealism, Dal and Me

Clifford Thurlow, 2000

Editor digital: Titivillus

ePub base r1.2

In memory of

Hal Landers