To art buff and art historian alike, Salvador Felipe y Jacinto Dali is one of the most compelling and paradoxical figures of our time. As the most famous living exponent of surrealism, he has been hailed by one critic as “chief cartographer of the mind’s hidden country, and perhaps its chief custodian.” His seemingly inexhaustible flood of nether-worldly images—drawn, he says, from dreams, nightmares and paranoiac visions—has left its mark, for good or ill, on almost every field of the contemporary graphic arts. He has been a fountainhead of avant-garde designs for jewelry, stage sets, automobiles, ballet costumes, restaurants, store windows, magazine covers, prototypal pop-art sculpture and experimental films. In 1929, with fellow Spaniard Luis Buñuel, he filmed “Le Chien Andalou,” a surrealist classic that still startles art-film audiences with a gory sequence in which an eyeball is slit open with a straight razor. Though his grotesque and hallucinatory subject matter—ranging from limp watches and fur-lined bathtubs to rhinoceros horns and flaming giraffes—has been denounced as “diseased and disgusting,” his technical brilliance as a painter has been compared by some to that of the Flemish masters, with whose works many of his own hang in museums around the world.
Dali’s most conspicuous claim to fame, however, is a bizarre and highly publicized private life, played at stage center for most of his 60 years, which has annoyed his detractors almost as much as it has amused the public. The flamboyant trademarks of his carefully cultivated public personality—brocade vest, silver-headed cane, scimitar mustaches and outrageous exhibitionism—have inspired such epithets as “sensation-seeking charlatan,” “the noisiest artist of our generation” and “a great talent corrupted and devoured by a sickness that forces him to impersonate a clown.” Dali remains impervious to such slings and arrows—and unswervable in his sense of “divine destiny.” In his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, he declares that at the age of seven “I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”
The son of a notary, Dali was born in Figueras in the Spanish province of Upper Catalonia, a land whose people have been known since medieval times for their fierce spirit of independence. True to this heritage, he wasted no time in alienating his elders—and presaging his future: He was expelled from elementary school for incorrigibility, and after five stormy years as an art student, was thrown out. of college (Madrid’s prestigious Escuela) Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Fernando) for militant nonconformity. Drawn to Paris in search of artistic succor and self-determination, Dali took root and grew swiftly. His first one-man show there was a sensation—news of which preceded his first visit to America in 1934. By the time of his return in 1940, both he and his limp watches had become fashionable fixtures in the elegant salons and drawing rooms of Manhattan, where he has remained ever since, parlaying eccentricity and egocentrism into world-wide fame and considerable fortune. Still stylish, still surrealistic and still enormously successful, he was on hand when one of his more recent canvases, “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus,” was added to the permanent collection at Huntington Hartford’s newly opened Gallery of Modern Art, and another (jawbreakingly entitled “Galacidalacide-oxyribonucleicacid”) was placed on display in the Spanish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.
When we approached the artist late this spring with our request for an exclusive interview, Dali was busy preparing to leave his baroque apartment in Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel for his home in Port-Lligat, a fishing village on the northeast coast of Spain, where he and his wife spend the summer and autumn months each year. Nevertheless, confessing an inability “to resist the opportunity to talk about myself,” he readily consented to take time out for a few hours with Playboy.
For our first meeting, he suggested the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, where the appointed hour of four found us seated with our tape recorder among the decorous afternoon cocktail crowd which was beginning to convene. Promptly at five, the murmuring and clinking of glasses suddenly hushed and all eyes riveted on the famous mustache and cane as our subject appeared in the doorway, paused theatrically for a long moment, and then strode briskly to our table. Shaking our hand with courtly formality, he took a chair, snapped his fingers for the waiter and immediately instructed him to plug the cord of our tape recorder into the nearest outlet. Ignoring our request to repair to the relative solitude of his suite, he announced: “No, no. This is perfect, perfect. We do the interview here. The more confusion the better.” Everything set, we placed the microphone before our subject and turned on the machine. A thin gray vapor curled out from the vent and wafted over the bar, blanketing the nearby patrons with an acrid pall that smelled faintly of burning plastic toothbrushes. Dali was visibly delighted. A belated inquiry informed us that the King Cole Bar, in keeping with its air of Old World charm, was wired for direct current only. So our first session passed unrecorded; but it served as a peculiarly fitting introduction, we thought, in the best style of the surrealist master himself.
A few days later we tried again—this time with more success—in the comparative seclusion of the St. Regis library, which is amply equipped with A.C. outlets. Erectly seated on a Louis XVI armchair, Dali leaned forward with feet together and both hands on his silverheaded cane, widened his piercing eyes, and invited us to begin. We did so. It was not long, however, before it became apparent that any intention we may have had of maintaining our accustomed role of objective interrogator in a conventional question-and-answer session would have to be abandoned; for Dali’s conversation—laced with psychiatric and technological terminology, and spoken at roller-coaster speed in a peculiar brand of English almost undecipherably accented with Spanish pronunciations and French inflections—proved to be a surrealistic stream of consciousness, and subconsciousness, as unpredictable and unclassifiable as his own inimitable art. We think you’ll find the experience as refreshing as we did.
PLAYBOY: In your autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, you begin the account of your life by stating that your first recollections are of the womb. Would you restate them for us?
DALI: Mostly it was like fried eggs but with no frying pan. In my prenatal vision, the yellow part of these eggs, the yolk, is almost normal—but with plenty of viscosity and reflections—while the whites are completely divine because they are full of iridescent colors. Everything is soft, everything is dark; it isn’t necessary to be troubled about reality. It is the best thing we ever know. In the moment when we are born, we lose paradise. Suddenly there is too much light and everything becomes too dry. It is violence—the trauma of being. Almost everyone has these prenatal influences, but not in the way of Dali.
PLAYBOY: Speaking of prenatal influences, do you feel that there may be some connection between your own intra-uterine vision of fried eggs and the recurrent image of limp watches in your paintings?
DALI: In a way, yes. The symbol of the limp watches, like all of my symbols, has many meanings—though I never know what they mean when I first use them. Only after years appears an explanation—sometimes three or four explanations. In the beginning, when I first made the limp watches in Paris, I believed they were only an illustration of the anguish of time and space. I had just finished eating a slice of camembert cheese one evening and I became obsessed with its softness, with the nature of softness itself; So I added the soft watches to a landscape of Port-Lligat in Spain that I had already begun. I never believed the painting was so important. But now I am sure that this painting is also an exact prophecy of the discovery of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, the hereditary code of life found in the nucleus of the cell, which was described by the Scientists Watson and Crick in 1953—the most important scientific event of our time, 30 years after Dali’s painting. This is really fantastic, because this is the painting that everybody believes is the craziest, the most irrational and the most incomprehensible of Dali.
PLAYBOY: That is fantastic. But you said that the limp watches have many meanings. What else do they represent?
DALI: The limp watches are also a prefiguration of Christ, because they resemble the soft cheese that obsessed me, and Dali has discovered that the body of Jesus is the same as cheese. This is not only Dali; the first man who talked about this was Saint Augustine, who once compared the body of Christ to mountains of cheese. So Dali has merely reintroduced the concept of cheese back into the body of Christ. In the communion, there have always been the bread and the wine for the body and blood. In the same way, the soft watches, like soft cheese, are the presence of the body of Christ in my painting.
PLAYBOY: Of course. Crutches are another prominent prop in many of your paintings. Is their symbolism equally complex?
DALI: When I was very small, I discovered a pair of crutches in an attic storeroom. They became for me the symbol of death and resurrection. But contrarily, they are also related to an impotence complex—something to hold something up. In my early life, you see, I believed that I was impotent. Since then, of course, I learn that this is not true. But I continue to use the crutches in my painting, only now it is sublimation.
PLAYBOY: What does the rhinoceros—another familiar subject—represent to you?
DALI: It is for me the symbol of cosmic goose flesh. Its skin has plenty of granulations. I like this. Already I have received as gifts two living rhinoceroses. But Madame Dali did not accept them, because they are too much trouble to keep in my New York apartment.
PLAYBOY: The unicorn horn is another of your favorite symbols. Isn’t it phallic?
DALI: The horn of the unicorn is at once phallic and a symbol of chastity, as in the most paradoxical of my paintings, Young Virgin Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity. I’m sorry to say that I have not yet received as gift a living unicorn. Perhaps one of your readers would offer one as a token of esteem for Dali.
PLAYBOY: Madame Dali might raise the same objection she did to the rhinoceroses.
DALI: I withdraw the request.
PLAYBOY: To return to your symbolism—in another of your most famous, and to many, most perplexing, paintings, A Giraffe Aflame, is the figure of a woman bristling with what appear to be dresser drawers emerging from her body. What did you intend to convey with this image?
DALI: The same as in an earlier painting of the Venus de Milo, which I made the same size as the Greek original in the Louvre, but with the improvement of many drawers. In the Greek civilization, you see, there exists no introspection, no Freud, no Christianity. With the addition of drawers it is possible to look inside the body of the Venus de Milo to the soul: Thus Dali creates a Freudian and Christian appearance in the Greek civilization.
PLAYBOY: How does the inspiration for these symbolic images actually come to you?
DALI: Dali every morning wakes at six o’clock to make pee pee, and in this peepee moment I understand everything with tremendous lucidity. This is the most divine moment for knowing everything most clearly. One morning while I make pee pee I am absolutely sure that Dali’s machine for thinking—a rocking chair from which hang on strings many little goblets filled with hot milk—foreshadows the invention of cybernetics. The next day I check and discover that Norbert Wiener’s manifesto on cybernetics was written fifteen years after Dali constructed his thinking machine. But my machine is never manufactured because I am not at all concerned with electronics, and it is only a crazy idea.
PLAYBOY: The word crazy has occasionally been used by others to describe you as well as your ideas. Are you really as eccentric as your paintings and public personality have led many to believe—or, as some suspect, have you merely employed eccentricity as a calculated device of self-advertisement?
DALI: I am not actually crazy. A psychiatrist in Paris worked for seven years to determine whether Dali is crazy or not. After many conversations he decided that Dali possesses one of the best organized brains he had ever encountered. He said that my brain contains the characteristics of paranoiac delusion structure; but paranoiac delusion, of course, is absolutely creative, the best kind of crazy. The whole difference between a crazy man and Dali is that Dali is not pathological. But even in true pathologic paranoiac delirium there exists some contact with reality. For instance, a good example of pathologic delirium: A man feels that his family is against him and that they want to poison his food. He begins to look around very closely at his family and discovers many things about them that are absolutely true. His fundamental assumption, of course, is wrong: Nobody wants to kill him. This is delirium and is crazy. But from this obsessional idea comes a marvelous quantity of perceptions of truth. He discovers many real things, thousands of insights and relationships that are unavailable to the average person, that usual people never perceive. Because I have this power of discernment, I discover things that other people could not possibly suspect exist.
PLAYBOY: For example?
DALI: Look at the mouth of the girl in that painting on the wall, and at this lamp on the table, and at your hand on the recording machine. Most people see no connection between these things. But Dali, on the contrary, establishes immediately a complete system of interpretation relating these objects. The difference between Dali’s paranoiac delusion and the other kinds of craziness is his ability to communicate his visions of delirium to other people. This is the ability to see clearly, which is at the basis of every artist. The clearest such vision was that of Leonardo da Vinci, who could create, for example, an entire battle scene just by looking at random water spots on a damp wall—sometimes for an hour or more. This is the true paranoiac phenomenon, because if you can see something in this way, it is possible for you to tell other people “This is the nose of a man,” for example—and they will see it exactly the same as you. In the other kind of crazy it is the contrary: You may have a vision or a dream, but after it passes, you cannot communicate it to other people, because it is not systematic or organized. The most important thing in my life is this ability to organize systematically the most complex elements of my environment; to create a cosmos.
PLAYBOY: Lucid visions such as you describe—even to the creation of a private cosmos—have been reported by many of those who have experimented with such hallucinogenic drugs as mescaline and LSD 25. Have you ever tried them?
DALI: No, no, no, because I am not courageous at all—and I don’t need drugs to make the visions. There are many other methods to stimulate the vision. I now work with Dr. Jayle of Marseilles on contact lenses to create the dream in Technicolor.
PLAYBOY: In Technicolor?
DALI: Exactly. The eye never experiences total darkness. There are always little patterns. These patterns are the origin of the images you see before you go to sleep. You are completely awake, but you close your eyes and you see many extraordinary vivid images and abstract shapes, which are called hypnagogic images. They are the product of residual retinal patterns. In the dream state they become concrete patterns. Dr. Jayle is making contact lenses to irritate these images, to make more of these patterns and more vivid ones. And here is my all-time crazy idea which I tell Dr. Jayle for the quick approach to create hypnagogic images: Between two lenses you place living flies. And on the back of every fly is one drop of phosphorus. You put on the lenses and close your eyes and watch the flies jumping and romping in every direction: an abstract movie inside your eyelids, much better than mescaline or LSD 25.
PLAYBOY: What was Dr. Jayle’s reaction to the idea?
DALI: Dr. Jayle says this is genius. But, of course, it is not practical to put flies in your eyes every day. He says instead it is very easy to put a liquid directly in the eyes to activate electrically more of the patterns. And now I learn that science has developed a fantastic monocle called Electrocular, based on this lens idea by Dali. But the monocle is placed on the outside of the eye. And on it are projected images from closed-circuit television, so instead of seeing through this monocle you see images projected onto it. But I have an even better idea: closed-circuit contact lenses, so that you receive images while you sleep; this is the more compatible thing. Dr. Jayle comes to see me about this idea of Dali two or three times and says everything is cooking very well. It is still in an experimental state, but when he finishes the lenses, it will be possible to put them on the market. Imagine—contact glasses for dreaming in glorious Technicolor.
PLAYBOY: Some critics feel that your artistic gifts have been eclipsed by your devotion to such fanciful notions as this, and by your predilection for bizarre acts of exhibitionism. To recall only a few: Dressed in a gold space suit, you once arrived by ship in New York in a transparent plastic egg symbolic of your intrauterine “paradise.” In Paris you pulled up to the Sorbonne in a white Rolls Royce filled with a thousand white cauliflowers—to deliver a lecture on “Vermeer and the Rhinoceros.” And just last year in New York you held up traffic by appearing in the window of a Fifth Avenue bookshop in a hospital bed, wearing a golden leather dressing gown while your pulse was being recorded for public view on an electrocardiograph. Can you tell us what compels you to—
DALI: You didn’t mention my most triumphant appearance. Just after I arrived in New York many years ago from Europe, Bonwit Teller’s store on Fifth Avenue asked me to design something for two of their windows. I am to do whatever comes into my head. One of the windows I call “Day,” and the other “Night.” I use very old wax mannequins covered with dust. In the “Day” window a mannequin is stepping into a bathtub completely lined with fur and full of water. There are also mirrors and many flowers—narcissus—growing from the floor. In the “Night” window, a mannequin rests on a bed made of a buffalo. The canopy is the head of the buffalo, the feet of the bed are buffalo feet. The model’s head rests on a pillow of live coals. And there are many jewels, symbols of desire and dreams. The next day I went to see the window, and they have changed everything without telling me. The mannequins are gone, the buffalo bed is gone. I demand that they remove my name from the windows and change the display completely. But they refuse. So I go into the window, where it is my idea to empty the tub with the water and thus force them to change the display. A great crowd has gathered outside the window on Fifth Avenue to watch this extraordinary apparition of Dali lifting the bathtub. But the bathtub slips from my hands and crashes through the window, breaking it into many little pieces and flooding the sidewalk with water. I step through the window to see what has happened and I am arrested by a detective and taken to jail. But the judge acquits me, and this causes a great sensation in the newspapers.
PLAYBOY: Why do you do these things?
DALI: Dr. Rumaguere of Paris, whom I told you about—the one who proved Dali is not crazy—explains this need for everybody to pay attention to Dali. He says Dali possesses a sublime complex, a Dioscuri complex: Castor and Pollux. In Greek mythology Zeus was transformed into a swan and he made love with Leda. From this lovemaking Leda produced two eggs, one divine and the other an ordinary egg. In the divine egg are twins, Pollux and Helen. This doctor discovered that Pollux and Helen are Dali and Madame Dali. In the other egg are two usual, mortal people, Clytemnestra and Castor. Castor, the mortal brother of Pollux, is the mortal effigy of Dali, actually my brother, who died of meningitis at the age of seven, three years before Dali was born. His name was also Salvador, and the family called me, the next child, Salvador, too. For me this is the trauma, the greatest tragedy of my life, but also the greatest good. After I was born my family told me every day, every moment about the other Salvador. They never talked about me, but about him. It became a tremendous obsession. I believed that my flesh and my soul were a part of the dead brother, the mortal Salvador. And this was the beginning of the eccentricities of my life, the source of my exhibitionism. It is necessary for Dali constantly to prove to everybody that the real Salvador is not the other, the dead brother. I must put bread on my head, grow a mustache, everything to create a hyperexhibitionism, to make everybody pay attention to Dali, to prove that I am alive. From this exhibitionism I become, like Pollux, immortal, while the other Salvador becomes dead, finished. This is why the egg is so important as a symbol in my life. In my house in Spain there is a room in the shape of an egg.
PLAYBOY: You say you need public attention. But do you genuinely enjoy making a spectacle of yourself?
DALI: Very much. At this moment when you catch me with the tape recorder I like very much; this is very good. But the most fantastically happy day in my life was when two photographers from Paris Match came to see me in London. They want one complete day of Dali, every detail. The next day we begin. Even while I eat in a restaurant they take the pictures. I lift a little piece of camembert to my mouth and “pop” with the camera. Every single moment is absolutely extraordinary. But the next day is a thousand times better. When I receive the contact prints I look again all day long and I relive exactly every little moment of this day. It is like Proust writing his autobiography. My life is like millions of people watching me on television, every moment, every second. This is the most divine thing.
PLAYBOY: Whom do you consider the world’s greatest living artist?
DALI: In all the arts today, the only good is Dali—but for conception, not for realization. There is no time to realize good paintings. I am afraid to create something good, a masterpiece, because if I do the next year I will be dead— creatively, at least. For everybody it is the same. Raphael after painting something marvelous and Vermeer after painting his View of Delft found it impossible to do more. The same is true for Mozart. For Leonardo every painting was a disaster, but he kept painting, because he felt that perhaps next year he would achieve something marvelous. I feel so, too.
PLAYBOY: Most art historians regard Picasso rather than Dali as the greatest living artist. Do you rank him second?
DALI: He is a genius, but he is destructive, anarchistic. He works in an ugly way, in caricature. He destroys beauty. For me the most important thing is the classic beauty of Raphael, Velázquez, Goya and Vermeer. This classical ideal, with its exacting disciplines of technique, is the most essential thing for a painter to study; but the painter cannot learn it today, and this is a most tragic thing. The best abstract painters today commit suicide because they do not have a classical background. Now the figure is again returning to art, but for most artists this is impossible because they have no knowledge of drawing. And so they involve themselves with extrapictorial ideas such as pop art, which is concerned with the common object—the soup can, the comic strips. The actual painting of these objects is less important than the idea of the utilization of these objects.
PLAYBOY: Couldn’t many of your own early surrealist works, which were assembled from the same kind of throwaway items—old shoes, bottles, pieces of furniture—be called forerunners of contemporary pop art?
DALI: Yes, yes. I wish to tell everyone of the Dalinian antecedents of pop art. Most important were the symbolic mechanisms which I created with Alberto Giacometti. In 1936 I constructed a surrealistic object using an old slipper of Madame Dali’s, which contained a glass of warm milk. Above this was suspended one lump of sugar which disintegrates in the milk. There is also in this assemblage a little piece of excrement and an extra lump of sugar containing several of my pubic hairs, which float around in the milk when the sugar dissolves. At this same time I created another fantastic object from a chair given to me by a friend. The leather place where you sit down I replaced with one of chocolate that turns white with age. Under one leg of the chair I placed a doorknob, and another leg I plunged into a big glass of beer. All of which creates a very unstable equilibrium and causes the chair to lean far over and topple easily. I call this antecedent of pop art Dali’s Atmospheric Chair.
PLAYBOY: That’s very interesting, but—
DALI: Let me tell you also about my Hypnagogic Clock. This is beautiful. It is formed by one enormous piece of French bread set on a pedestal. I made holes in the bread into which I put one dozen bottles of ink, each holding a pen. On the bottom of this bread were sixty little strings from which I suspended little cards with sixty little water-color pictures of the ink bottles and pens. And once I exhibited a mannequin with a very long loaf of bread on her head; on her face were many ants. But Picasso, destroyer of beauty, destroyed this, too—his dog jumped up and ate the bread. You can see that I am preoccupied with the symbolism of bread. In Paris I had the idea for a Dalinian secret society to create a new movement of spiritual value in every nation. The idea was to bake a loaf of bread fifty feet long—it is necessary, of course, to build a special oven long enough to bake it in—which would be placed one night in the gardens of the Palais Royal. It would have a highly demoralizing effect on its discoverers. The bread would be examined for explosives and poisons. It would become the subject of conversation and newspapers. Who had done it? Why? And then another loaf of bread sixty-five feet long would suddenly appear in the courtyard at Versailles. And on the same day loaves of bread one hundred feet long would appear in all the capitals of Europe, in America, in Shanghai, everywhere. Everyone would think this is the work of a dangerous international conspiracy.
PLAYBOY: You’re probably right, but—
DALI: I must tell also about the truly fantastic siphon which I create for a soda-dispenser bottle. It has a plunger twenty-five feet long. Everything else is normal. It was exhibited in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, one of my first exhibits in this country. But nobody notices it at all. The people came and looked at this object and nobody paid any attention because it creates an insuperable problem: out of reality to create a completely irrational object. Nobody cared. But now with pop art everybody makes a tremendous reputation with these things.
PLAYBOY: Why, in your opinion?
DALI: Because pop art is part of the healthy trend away from abstract expressionism—which has become a caricature—back to the maximum of visual reality with no modifications, back to painting everything exactly as it appears with no changes. Such objective copying is not new. Vermeer, in the 17th Century, was more pop art than the best-known modern pop artists, like Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein is subjective, a romantic. He paints an ice-cream soda in a kind of old-fashioned glass that no longer exists in the drugstore. He does this because he remembers an ice-cream soda as a nostalgic memory of a happy childhood, a Proustian kind of art, a remembrance of things past. But Vermeer, no; Vermeer is not sentimental or romantic at all. He is completely objective, completely classical. When he painted his View of Delft, he changed absolutely nothing. No optical instrument could give a clearer, truer picture. The great masters of art never changed the visual appearance, they did not distort. Even with the Greeks, such as Praxiteles, this was true. The finest art is always the most photographic.
PLAYBOY: Objectivity and subjectivity aside, are you saying that the current vogue of pop art presages a revival of classicism comparable to that of Vermeer and Praxiteles?
DALI: Would that it did. But I have no such hope. After pop art has passed, however, there will be coming a period of very objective painting in the style of Meissonier [a French academic painter of the late 19th Century, popular for his photographic, highly detailed style]. This will not be sentimental, but classical painting. Of course, the Meissonier of tomorrow will not express the same reality as the Meissonier of yesterday. With the knowledge of our times he will create a new cosmology. Using the scientific knowledge and experience gained through such developments as the electron microscope, he will have new insight to paint the macrocosmos, the universe of the human face—and that which lies behind it.
PLAYBOY: Do you feel that your belief in the central role of science in shaping the art of the future is shared by other contemporary artists?
DALI: Some painters of today are concerned about the developments of science. But most work in a perfectly intuitional manner, reflecting the cosmology of today with no real scientific knowledge of it. But this is not important. Sensible people know that it is not necessary to learn from books, but from sensitivity and intuition. In the case of Dali, of course, painting is but one single small mode of expressing his own original cosmology, which enables him, through his genius and his paranoia, to create a synthesis of nature impossible even for the scientist, because the scientist is too much involved in his specialization. The important thing for Dali is everything: the painting, the pop art, the lenses, the French bread—a complete cosmology, a single Dalinian continuity in every field—in morals, in philosophy, in religion, in science.
PLAYBOY: How does the Dalinian cosmology reconcile the traditional incompatibility between science and religion?
DALI: Dali reached religion because of his study of science. In the beginning of my life, I was very atheistic, because my father was a freethinker, very much influenced by the anticlericalism, the rationalism of the French Revolution. He would not let me go to Christian schools when I was a child. The real start of my interest in religion were the days beginning with my interest in nuclear physics—the discoveries in quantum physics of the nature of energy, that matter becomes energy, a state of dematerialization. I realized that science is moving toward a spiritual state. It is absolutely astonishing the mystical approach of the most eminent scientists: the declarations of Max Planck and the views of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit scientist: that man in his constant evolution is coming closer and closer to a oneness with God. And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God. All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.
PLAYBOY: With all of your extrapictorial interests, how much time do you have left to devote to your painting?
DALI: About six months a year, which is the time I spend at my home in Port-Lligat. I awake with the sun and work until it sets.
PLAYBOY: How do you spend the six months a year in New York?
DALI: In New York I sleep mostly.
PLAYBOY: For six months?
DALI: Yes, yes, yes. I sleep all the time. When the hour came for this interview I was in bed.
PLAYBOY: Is that why you chose New York as your second home?
DALI: That, and other reasons. Also I like New York because there are more ideas here than anywhere else—a fantastic quantity of ideas. But more importantly, after Madame Dali, I most love money. In New York it is possible to catch a tremendous quantity of money all the time. The origin of this joy of money is my Spanish mysticism. In the Middle Ages the alchemists wanted everything they touched to turn to gold. This transmutation of material things is the best kind of spiritualization.
PLAYBOY: You mentioned your love for Madame Dali. In contrast to many famous figures in the arts, you have maintained a quiet and continuous history of married life with the same woman.
DALI: For thirty years, or something like that. A very remarkable marriage in every way—from the very beginning, when we were married with only a civil rite, not a religious ceremony, because the first husband of Madame Dali is Paul Eluard, the poet. It is not possible in Catholic countries to remarry in a church. But after Eluard is dead, in that moment we perform a Catholic marriage in a little church with an archbishop. And I love so tremendously the organ, the trumpet, the bishop, all the ceremony, that I wanted to be married again immediately. I would like all of my life to become a ritual. But there is only one archbishop in Port-Lligat, so we can’t be married again. But the archbishop tells me it is possible to marry the lady again in a Coptic ceremony, the most beautiful of all. It doesn’t improve anything, but it also doesn’t take away anything. So we had three ceremonies: civil, Catholic and Coptic. I absolutely love this idea. Dali is the contrary of everybody because everybody makes divorce over and over, while I marry my wife again and again. Also another curious thing: I never make love except with Madame Dali.
PLAYBOY: Not even during your student days in Madrid?
DALI: In my whole life never before I met my wife, because I was fantastically afraid about sex, even though there were tremendous opportunities. I was afraid that I was impotent, because I read an erotic book in Spain which discussed in the very brutal Spanish manner how to make love—not in the front but only in the back—and it says the girl produces a noise as if you had broken a watermelon. I felt that for me to cause such a noise was impossible, and this created a complex of impotence. But later, as I told you before, I discover that I am not impotent.
PLAYBOY: Do you plan on having any children?
DALI: I don’t like the child. I don’t like the dog, the cat, nothing small. Only the flounder—and only in my dreams, where the flounder is living in the carpet and not in the sea. But I am nevertheless tremendously interested in everything erotic. Everything in my painting and everything in religion is very erotic. There is a religious book proving that all the great Spanish mystics, Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross, were completely chaste but they had erotic ecstasies like orgasms when they saw angels and most beautiful things. Erotic ecstasies and religious ecstasies are very close: One is mechanical, the other is spiritual. But my voice disappears. Madame Dali says I use my voice too much.
PLAYBOY: One final question, then. Would you tell us about any plans you may have for the future?
DALI: Yes, yes—but first I have thought of a tremendous idea for you, for a most beautiful pop-art cover for
PLAYBOY: photograph of Dali’s fantastic Aphrodisiac Jacket. It consists of one regular smoking jacket—but with plenty of little jigger glasses fastened onto the front. All of the glasses are filled with crème de menthe, and in every glass is a dead fly in the bottom. Very luxurious, very brilliant object. Only two days ago Dali discovers the real mathematical significance of this creation in the Scientific American magazine, about the smell of peppermint: It shows every kind of smell arranged mathematically, according to the constitutional geometry of its molecules, including the molecular arrangement of the smell of peppermint.
So one of my greatest pop-art objects is now becoming completely scientific. Add to this creation plenty of straws, each in the middle of the green crème de menthe. Then put inside the jacket a nude model, showing the legs and the beginning of the bosoms; her sex is not showing, but almost, almost. It is possible instead of a coat hanger to show the girl’s face—but not the whole face, just up to the mouth. But you decide. Perhaps it is best to use a smoking jacket of moire silk pattern. Some people tell me that in a shop for theatrical supplies you can get a “twist” jacket, which is more fancy and extraordinary than the usual ones—the kind twist boys like the Beatles would wear. Since the sexes of the Beatles is so ambiguous—nobody knows if it is boy or girl with the hair so long—the quintessence of ambiguity is this smoking jacket of Dalinian pop art. I propose that this is the most beautiful, the most fantastic cover for Playboy.
PLAYBOY: Thanks for the suggestion. We’ll take it under advisement. Now will you tell us about your plans for the future?
DALI: Yes. In two years, I plan a tremendous agony: to cut off my mustache. I will do this because my hair collapse on top, and I wish to wear a wig. But it is not possible to have both a mustache and a wig—this is too much. So I must cut off my mustache. The ceremony will take place in Venice, and there will be television and everybody will come—a completely liturgical scene. I will then have not one but two wigs made—one gray for the daytime, one black for night; and with this gesture, the monarchy will arrive back in Europe. General Franco will decide to re-establish the monarchy in Spain, and in this moment of the return of the monarchy, everybody will wear wigs again, and there will be a renaissance of ornamentation and plumes and tremendous quantities of little cakes and candies. Art and painting will flourish. And so will Dali.