![]() Walter grilled Parfrey about his sex life and offered suggestions on how to improve it. He was bitter and vindictive when he spoke of Margaret, calling her a liar and claiming she had had sex with a car hop on their wedding day, Parfrey says. He kept comparing himself to Michelangelo. “He had just published his ridiculous autobiography,” Parfrey recalls of Walter, who died in obscurity at age 85 in Encinitas in 2000. Parfrey’s account is based on a story he wrote for the San Diego Reader in the early 1990s, when he met and interviewed Walter, who was languishing in an unkempt La Jolla bungalow, still claiming he was the artist behind the big eyes. In sharp contrast, “Citizen Keane,” which Parfrey co-wrote with Cletus Nelson, contains a much darker version of events. Like many Hollywood creations, Burton’s version of Keane’s unhappiest days - the film stars Christoph Waltz as Walter and Amy Adams as Margaret - has likely been sanitized for mass consumption, says Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey. “I felt very guilty that I allowed it to happen, and, of course, it destroyed Walter, and I could have stopped that if I had been stronger.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with lying ever again,” she says, adding that the truth finally redeemed her. The Bible, she says, has a thing against lying. She said it gave her the strength to expose the lie she had been cornered into telling for more than a decade.Ī fervent Jehovah’s Witness, Keane wears a JW.org button on her coat lapel and speaks with passion about the scriptures. In the nearly 50 years since Margaret filed for divorce from Walter, leaving their home in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco for Hawaii, she experienced a religious conversion. Keane added.“Now, I try to paint happy children and animals playing together in paradise scenes, like here in L.A., looking out the window,” she says, shaking off the darkness, her voice becoming musical and sweet. ![]() “That is really a blessing.”īut reliving the turbulent marriage that ultimately brought her worldwide fame, and the choice she made to go along with her husband’s deception, wasn’t easy, Ms. “I’m able to sign my name to the paintings,” she said, sitting in a suite at the Four Seasons here recently. Keane is finally seeing her story come to the forefront. At 87, with more than 60 years as a painter, Ms. After a high-flying, liquor-soaked California life, the real Walter Keane died nearly penniless in 2000, bitter that his ex-wife had mustered the gumption to sue him and reclaim her career. The film stars Amy Adams as Margaret, a shy woman in thrall to her domineering husband, and Christoph Waltz as Walter, a master manipulator who convinced everyone from Wayne Newton to Madame Chiang Kai-shek that he was a portraitist. The rise of the Keane aesthetic in the ’60s, and the gradual and extravagant unraveling of their lie, nearly two decades later, is the subject of Tim Burton’s new biopic, “ Big Eyes,” opening Christmas Day. Her canvases were all signed simply “Keane,” and that allowed her husband, Walter Keane, a charlatan and salesman par excellence, to take credit for the work. Keane was the painter behind the big-eyed waifs that were gracing rec rooms and lounges all across America, the mother of a legion of adorable, forsaken children. ![]() LOS ANGELES - In 1964, Margaret Keane was among the most famous living artists in the country, only no one knew it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |