The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Picasso’s Lovers by Jeanne Mackin

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Picasso's Lovers by Jeanne Mackin https://amzn.to/47flzD3 A tangled and vivid portrait of the women caught in Picasso’s charismatic orbit through the affairs, the scandals, and the art—only this time, they hold the brush. The women of Picasso’s life are glamorous and elusive, existing in the shadow of his fame—until 1950s aspiring journalist Alana Olson determines to bring one into the light. Unsure of what to expect but bent on uncovering what really lies beneath the canvas, Alana steps into Sara Murphy’s well-guarded home to discover a past complicated by secrets and intrigue. Sara paints a luxurious picture of the French Riviera in 1923, but also a tragic one. The more Sara reveals, the more cracks emerge in Picasso’s once-vibrant social circle—and the more Alana feels a disturbing convergence with her own life. Who are these other muses? What became of them? What will become of her? Desperate to trace the threads, Alana dives into the glittering lives of the past. But to do so she must contend with her own reality, including a strained engagement, the male-dominated world of art journalism, and the rising threat to civil rights in America. With hard truths peeling apart around her, it turns out that the most extraordinary portrait Alana encounters is her own. About the author Jeanne Mackin is the author of several historical novels. Her most recent is The Beautiful American. She has worked as a journalist for several publications, and as a university research and science writer. She lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, with her husband, artist Steve Poleskie. Jeanne was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and her journalism has won awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you being here and thank you for coming by because without you, we could not do it at all.

We couldn't do anything. We just sit around and just look at the wall, which is pretty much Fridays around here. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing show for you today. We are going to be talking about Picasso. You may have heard from him or heard of him. I don't know. Maybe you've heard from him. Maybe you're one of his lovers.

And that's what we're going to be talking about today uh she's the author of the newest book that just came out jean mackin uh has her book out called picasso's lovers we're going to get into some interesting tangled vivid portrait of women caught in picasso's charismatic charismatic orbit. Clearly, I flunked English. Before we do, we want to remind you once again, please refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to iTunes, give us the five-star reviews over there.

We really appreciate it. You know, we talk about how you guys, when you come to the show for the last 15 years, you get to listen to CEOs, billionaires, White House advisors, Pulitzer Prize winners, Congress members, governors, U.S. ambassadors, astronauts, all the top journalists in the world come by and say hello. You guys join an elite crowd, and I hope you know that, where you guys get to bask in what we call the Chris Voss Show glow,

where there's this wealth of knowledge that's dispersed unto you in this concentrated form of these brilliant minds we have on the show and uh we're thinking about calling uh the people the people that bask in the chris voss show glow our listeners if you will you know because like taylor swift has her thing and i don't know some other people have their thing for their fan we're thinking about calling the people who bask in the chris voss show glow the globe bites or the globies or something like that i don't know i don't know maybe that's not gonna work write me and tell me i don't care uh go to facebook.com um chris voss facebook.com uh go to linkedin.com uh ford says chris voss youtube.com ford says chris was all those places you know we're at goodreads.com. Anyway, guys, we're going to get into her book, Picasso's Lover, by Jean Mackin.

And it's going to be pretty cool, some of the details that are in here. She is the author of eight historical novels, the most recent one we just mentioned, coming out on Penguin Random House in January 2024. So this one's up for pre-order, and you can get it now pre-ordered so that you can have it as soon as it comes off the presses. Other subjects for fiction have included Eleanor of Aquitaine. Aquitaine. I think Jethro Tull did a song about that in the 70s.

What's that? Oh, that was Aqualung. Oh, I'm sorry. I got that wrong. I didn't. Marie Antoinette and Maggie Fox, founder of Aqualung. Oh, I'm sorry. I got that wrong. I didn't. Marie Antoinette and Maggie Fox, founder of American Spiritualism. Now that song is stuck in my head.

Jean was the recipient of Creative Writing Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society. There's a lot of antiquarian stuff going on here. Her advocacy-based journalism received awards from the Council of Advancement and Support of Education in Washington, D.C. She taught creative writing and mentored non-traditional students, which I must be one. She lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Welcome to the show, Jean. How are you? I'm fine, and thank you so much for inviting me. There you go. You'll never be able to think of your title of your book about Eleanor of Aquitaine

without thinking of Aqualung. Sorry, my bad. So give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the internet? I have a website. It's jeanmackin.com J-E-A-N-N-E M-A-C-K-I-N dot com. There you go.

I'm on Twitter. I have an author space on Pagebook. On Facebook, sorry. Facebook, Pagebook. Somebody an author space on Pagebook. On Facebook, sorry. Facebook, Pagebook. Somebody should make something called Pagebook. That sounds like a good website. There's probably something going on. And, of course, Goodreads. So give us the 30,000 overview.

Picasso's Lover. Well, it's Picasso's Lovers. The title is a reference to a painting that he made. And the model is kind of, you know, is it this woman? Is it that woman? I wanted to play with it a little bit. But mostly I wanted to think about Pablo Picasso. I mean, you think of the 20th century, you think of art, you think of Pablo Picasso.

So there were two facets of him that I wanted to research, read about, think about. And one is that, was he the greatest artist of the 20th century? And was he as cruel to women as his reputation says he was? I know, I know. So I spent a lot of research and time thinking about that. And I actually came to the conclusion that, yes, actually, I do believe he was the greatest artist of the 20th century. You look at his body of work, 20,000 pieces you know involving four or five different eras and styles of work, different mediums, everything from paper to ceramic to paint to metal. I mean he could do anything and I know

there were artists, American artists in the 1950s who were still kind of complaining about him because they couldn't do anything that Picasso hadn't already done. He just covered the territory. And his reputation with women, that was complicated. I mean, I wrote a first draft. I don't write from outline. I write instinctively, organically, because for me, it's a journey. It's an adventure. If I know where it's going to end, I don't want to write the book. I want to find out, too. By the end of the first draft, I realized I had written about the three women who left Picasso, not vice versa.

Was this historical or fiction? The three women are historical. I always incorporate a fictional narrator in with historical figures. As a historical novelist, I don't like to play fast and loose with facts. I kind of stick to the groundwork and what we know and what is verifiable. So I incorporate fictional characters to, you know, make room for the imagination, the what if situations. But, you know, a bottom line to me was that I think he gets a bad rep

when it comes to women. And I think people are starting to reconsider that. I mean, yeah, he had a lot of mistresses. He was not known for fidelity, but it was the 1920s and 30s and the 40s. And, you know, who was, aside from my parents, right? Yeah, pretty much. Everyone's sister is a virgin. Well, everyone was faithful except Pablo Picasso. I don't think so. He was wild. But, you know, yeah, he was an artist,

and he was in Paris. It was between the wars, and they partied heavily. There you go. Where is most of the book set in? What area of the world? In southern France, because one of the characters is Sarah Murphy, who was an American socialite, historical character, and she's the one who actually made the Riviera popular. This is a summer vacation spot. Before that, people from Paris in the north would go down to the Riviera for the winter for a vacation. No one was there over the summer. And Sarah Murphy kind of started, and her husband Gerald was an artist, kind of started this trend of spending the summer on the Riviera.

They started the trend of sunbathing, which was not popular before then. So I wanted, and Sarah was one of the women involved with Pablo, with my Picasso. So, yeah, it is in New York City. So that's a little part of it, too. But she ends up going to the south of France to track things down. There you go. And do we find out if he's also a great lover as much as he is a great painter?

Artist? Well, my father was always bitching. I don't do bedroom scenes. I'm assuming he was. The woman he had, they adored him. Even when the affair ended they tended to stay friends for life so in addition to charisma i think he was capable of of excuse me

good sex and deep friendship there you go well you know artists are always into the spiritual and all that stuff and they're all you know uh they're always doing stuff it's interesting um you know they're not caught up in the day-to-day they're kind doing stuff that's interesting. They're not caught up in the day-to-day. They get to explore and delve themselves into life. So how did you flesh out the characters and study up for, I mean, did you try and follow Picasso as his true nature of who he was or did you embellish it all? Well, I tried to stick as close to pablo picasso as a historical figure

as i could um i read a lot of biographies i mean there are dozens and dozens and dozens of biographies about him and from different points of view you know from women who left him from women who wished he hadn't left them, from his relatives, from his children. So I kind of put it all together into a mishmash. I think kind of what happened towards the end of his life when he started to get this rep for being aloof and maybe even a little cruel, he was with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, who was really possessive and protective of him. And she would turn people away who wanted to see him.

And I think that might have been the start of his kind of aloof, go away, don't touch me reputation. Oh, wow. Well, you know, she probably knew about all the old lovers. Oh, she did. I didn't want anybody getting near this guy. And he's mine now. There you go.

Yeah. Jealousy is always a great little tool. So there you go. And so you paint this luxurious picture of the French Riviera in 1923, very romantic, and the different things that he does and how he does them. What do you think readers are going to come away with that might surprise them or really intrigue them? I would like readers to think again about what exploitation and coercion really is in sexual politics and what it isn't. I was very concerned with that. There is such a broad distance between actual rape and seduction.

And I think we need to keep that in mind that they so much are not the same thing. And, you know, Picasso was a seducer, but I never read him as exploitive or even predatory. He could be actually quite gentlemanly, I thought. That's my take of him. I'm a novelist, not a historian or a biographer, right? So I insert my own take into these things. But I would like, you know, a lot of the book is about sexual politics and what they actually are.

And that's one of the things I would like people to, you know, to take away from and to think about and to realize, too, the depth of Picasso's work. I mean, I know I have a friend who took her mother to see a Picasso, and it was his Cubist period, which is very brutal. And the woman said, boy, he really hated women. But what you need to look at is his neoclassical work, which is very real. You know, it's representational, it's voluptuous, it's loving, it's affectionate. So there's this huge breadth of his work that, you know, I would like people to reconsider. You know, I always say Picasso, he's the artist that people love to hate or hate to love. They hate to love her.

You know, I mean, women chase guys who are famous. And if they've got money, I mean, that just adds to it. Usually fame and money go together, I suppose. And, you know, women throw themselves at famous men. That's just the way it is. Women are hypergamous. They date upward. And so, you know, I i mean it's not like he probably

had to do a lot to get these women interested in him you know he's he's a fairly good looking guy and uh you know he makes fame and money and you know i've i've hung out with very good looking men uh that had some fame but they were just incredibly good looking and you know they had that james bond sort of look and standing near them i mean it was just to hang out with them was just panties and underwear bras going past our heads 24 7 i mean it's just like that women throwing themselves at him from every turn uh and i mean he was good looking enough where i'd be like yeah if I was Maybe not straight I would He's a good looking man

I mean you know I would have to admit to it But And women just adored him And he didn't have to do anything You know just women would Just flock to him Just be like hey I'm talking to him can you wait There's a line

It was kind of annoying. Yeah. Well, you know, that's the way it goes. So, you know, maybe that's part of the element of Picasso is, I mean, he really did. I mean, when you're famous, man, women come to you. You don't have to do a lot of seduction. You know, they're kind of seduced by your famousness.

He had more than fame, though, and more than looks. There was a real charisma there. One of his early lovers, one of his long-term lovers who became a lifelong friend was Marie Theresa Mayer. She had never heard of him when they first met. He had to take her to a bookstore and say, look, there's a monograph of my work. Look, I'm famous. So it was more than woman chasing fame. And he himself was discriminatory.

He was not out for any skirt that would walk by. He was looking for an interesting face, not necessarily a beautiful face, but something that he could work with as an artist. So that was always a large part of it. So it's not that he was, I think, a discriminately promiscuous, that women kind of threw themselves at him the way they do with rock stars or anything like that. I think there were real relationships going on there. Yeah.

And they inspired a lot of his art, I guess, too. Do you, I guess, talk about that in the book, play it out in the book, the inspiration to his art and what he created? Oh, absolutely. I think, I don't know if it's a strength or a weakness, but I don't think Pablo Picasso could differentiate between loving a woman and wanting to paint her. I think to him they were the same thing. And, you know, his second wife, Jacqueline,

he painted her dozens and dozens and dozens of times. And with most of his women, he did the same. There are whole eras of his work that are dedicated to certain women, to Francois Gillot, who just died in June. Lots and lots of portraits of her. And very nice ones. He called her the flower woman. So she was often painted as a flower or with flowers involved with her because she's so lovely. Marie Theresa was the soft, voluptuous woman. And he sometimes painted her as a bowl of fruit.

I was thinking about that. I went back to the Song of Songs in the Old Testament, testament you know which is a totally erotic poem in the bible and yeah women and men you know their bodies are fruit to their lovers so that's true uh you know i've had some women drive me bananas oh the uh i'm looking at some of his work you know some of his i i don't know he might have needed his glasses checked though he's the boobs in all the wrong places i don't know i have might have needed his glasses checked, though. He's got his boobs in all the wrong places. I don't know what's going on there. I have a theory about that. And one reason why I love his work is that, you know,

I think that one of our weaknesses as human beings is that we are linear and we think of time as linear. That doesn't mean that time is linear. It's just the way we perceive it. And I think a lot of Pablo Picasso's work is outside of linear time. You have the same woman, but in this position and then in that position, it's like he compresses time and shows the same person in different stages of time. Almost like motion, I guess.

And emotion. And there's that famous portrait you did of Gertrude Stein. And he showed it to her and she said, I don't like it. It doesn't look like me. And he told her, well, you will look like it. And he was right. So in terms of time, a lot of his work is visionary and nonlinear. And that's why it has kind of these things out of place. Because he's seeing

different angles simultaneously i really i'm looking at his artwork right now online and i can see that now oh thanks for explaining to me no no no things are starting to make sense at first i was like that's not where the boobs go um you know i was lucky enough when i grew up where uh i uh grew up in a religious cult that taught me that, you know, sex is evil and bad and shameful and nude bodies are shameful. And a guy's lawn that I used to mow, his first name was Art. I forget his last name. But he was an artist. Kind of like, it wasn't, you know, big like picasso but he was he worked mostly with uh

he did some painting but he mostly worked with clay and he would have women come model for him in his studio this beautiful studio in in california at the block from us and uh the whole house set like some sort of hollywood mansion at the time and the beautiful yards and stuff. And, and so I would go to his house and, and, you know, after mowing his lawn and wander through his thing, and I'd be like, Oh, there's some naked sculpture women there. That's bad. And he recognized, you know, what I'd been taught. And he said, and told me, he goes, no, the female body is beautiful. And so, you know, look at the lines and the you know and and he really

kind of helped me see a different world of what i've been taught and and appreciate art and the beauty of women um the beauty of the body too but he mostly he mostly did uh clay you know these these huge things of women and clay where he would carve it and all that stuff and um so you know i learned a lot about art. I learned about artistry. And artists, they just have this real cool vibe in the world. They do. I mean, one reason I like to write about artists is because I am not a visual person.

I'm so verbal that sometimes I dream all in words with no images. Oh, yeah. So, you know, I do a lot of reading when you're trying to sleep. So, you know, I try to I try to perceive the world the way artists do, because for me, it's a whole different world. It's a foreign country. And I so admire, you know, how they were able to to what they see into something that's a work of art and share that vision with other people. But, you know, I grew up Irish Catholic. I had 12 years of Catholic education, so I had a lot to overcome. You feel my pain. I now share your pain.

There you go. So what's holding in the future for you? Is there anything else you're working on as well? I'm starting to work on something new, but I'm superstitious about that until I have the first draft done. I kind of don't talk about it. I think you can talk the energy out of a project if you talk about it too soon. Ah, there you go. Yeah. You don't want to get too far ahead of yourself down the road too. So you wrote the last collection, A Lady of a Good Family and The Beautiful American. I think, boy, that last collection cover looks good. We must have asked to have you on the show back in 2020.

And maybe we didn't get you booked because that cover looks so familiar to me. I apologize if I missed something. Oh, it's probably, you know, the big publishing houses, they love to lose their emails. But they're really great, though. They book so many great people. And sometimes we've learned

if we don't get in at just the right time before the book launch, then we kind of miss all the bookings because you guys are busy with all the stuff you do. But the last collection, do you think you're going to stick with a theme of historical fiction then? I think so. I mean, I wrote a lot of journalism when I was working as a journalist, but it was short pieces. And, you know, I've tried to work on non journalist, but it was short pieces. And, you know,

I've tried to work on nonfiction and it's not where my, my mind goes. I am by nature, a liar. I see a situation and I start to make up stories about it. My mind goes to the imaginative rather than the factual. So yeah, I'm sticking with this.

You're a storyteller. That's right. I am a storyteller. That's what you're doing. I am a storyteller. Absolutely. You weave stories and magic into the form of text. I don't know why I got poetic there, but it sounded really good in my head at the time. It came out well.

Absolutely. There you go. Every now and then I get stuff right, even though I flunked second grade. So, Jean, anything more you want to tease out as we go out and give people a final pitch on the book to order it up? Well, the name of the book is

Picasso's Lovers. It's available now for pre-order. It's coming out officially on January 23rd, so please, please run, don't walk. Get my book. Support your local writer. There you go. Support your local writer, folks. Writer books and amazing stories. The cover's pretty hot, too. There's even one nipple of Picasso on it.

So that's all the more reason if you're, I don't know, people who like hot people on the French Riviera photos. It's a beautiful cover, actually. It's a hot cover. There you go. Give us your dot coms, Jean, so that people can find you on the interwebs. So it's www.jeanmackin.com www.jeanmackin.com J-E-A-N-N-E-M-A-C-K-I-N J-E-A-N-N-E-M-A-C-K-I-N

There you go. Thank you very much, Jean, for being on the show. It's been fun, and please come back for the next one. Thank you. I would be delighted. There you go. Maybe it could be Picasso's other lovers, or more lovers or the sequel we can get the other nipple on picasso on this on the cover all right so thank you to my audience for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys as well go to goodreads.com fortress chris foss

linkedin.com fortress chris foss youtube.com fortress chris foss chris foss one of the tiktokity uh and what is it uh choss Facebook, the new thing there. You can talk to the show on Facebook. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.