Marriage to Elsie Whitaker, 1907

Martinez

After three months with us Marty, I think, decided that a poor writer's daughter would make a poor artist's wife and fit nicely into his studio. My father was a little bit disturbed about the age difference. I wasn't a bit, and protested. He said, "Well, if you will wait a year, I'll consider it." He thought I might get over it in a year, but I wasn't going to get over it.

At sixteen I was a blonde beauty, medium height, lithe and slim, with perfect features that our artist friends called classic Greek; and some, inclined to romanticism, declared I resembled the "Blessed Damozel" of Rossetti. But to our Piedmonters and our friends, used to seeing me flitting about the hills with my long golden braids, I was the little Valkyrie. One admirer in whom I was not interested, who had survived a five mile walk with me instead of the tete à tete he hoped to have, called me Artemis and promised to send me a dart as a souvenir of the occasion. When going to the City, I wove my long braids about my head like a crown and with a quiet dignity and gentle detachment, was ready to meet the world. Brought up by an English father, I had a proper respect for age, and having always felt the loss of grandparents, to the elderly I was always smiling and attentive; with youth I was pleasant but indifferent; and with the worldly wise and sophisticated and intellectuals, to them, a good listener and surprisingly intelligent and responsive. At seventeen

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I won the admiration, a difficult feat with our satirist, Ambrose Bierce (which meant more to me than any tribute to my beauty), for having read twice the superb Morley's English Edition of ten volumes of his "master", Voltaire, and was familiar with the Greek, Latin, French and English satirists culled from my histories and European literature! There were none of the distractions of today in my youth—no autos, no TV or radio, none of the many time-consuming, highly organized clubs and associations, so nature and a literary life with my father was my life.

At that time, at sixteen years of age, I promised to marry four of my father's friends. I decided to pick out the one who would give me the most interesting life. So, Marty was the most picturesque, so I picked him. One was a young writer who had published a book that had made a hit at the time and was going to South America. One was an engineer. I liked engineers because I had known so many who used to come from Canada to see my father. The third one was an interesting fellow: he was a painter at the time; his father was the lawyer for the "Six Chinese Companies" in San Francisco and Shanghai. My beau was born and spent his youth in China. He was the interpreter for his father and an artist for pleasure.

Baum

They were all older then, all your father's age.

Martinez

Yes, all his age.

Baum

You didn't like young fellows.

Martinez

Oh no, I wasn't interested in youth in the slightest.

So at the end of about nine months, I was seventeen, I'd had

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enough of my stepmother, so Marty and I went over to Judge Dunn, who was a friend of his, and we were married in the Synagogue — the courts were then in the Synagogue after the San Francisco fire. The ceremony was performed by Judge Dunn. He took it for granted that I had permission (being under eighteen) because Marty was such a figure in San Francisco, that it never occurred to him to inquire whether there was any opposition. Of course my father would not be likely to give too much opposition, because he knew I'd advertise our unpleasant relationship with my stepmother.

So we were married, and we returned to the studio. I soon found, married to Marty, I had taken on a Mexican Revolution. Marty was a Latin lover — a charming book of poetry exquisitely illustrated — hours of drawing me — singing love songs in the rest periods — tempestuous declarations of love — and jealousy well-controlled, but gently demonstrated until after our marriage — then the passion took over!

I forgot to say that during that nine months my father and friends, pioneer-style, built Marty a studio in the woods over by the old reservoir. He loved the life with us in Piedmont — the closeness to nature that stirred his Indian blood. Often, at sunrise he would go with me to the top of the hill on our ridge, enveloped in the warm sun, and caressed by the soft breezes filled with the fragrance of the Yerba Buena, our wild mint, mingled with the pungent odors released at the touch of the sun, of the stands of redwood and tall eucalyptus trees, recall in the sky, meadows and primeval forests our

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great Sierras, dimly glimpsed on a clear day across the wide central valley. As the sunlight flowed in a golden stream over the wild hay on the steep hillsides, the lush green shrubbery in the little hollows and canyons, there emerged out dusty old road weaving through the canyons and meandering along the hillsides of our glorious landscape.

The quiet hours of work during the week, and the gay week-ends with his friends from the City staying with us for an outdoor outing. After the first two months with us, Marty expressed the wish to live near us. Father promptly laid the plans for his studio. Wickam Havens gave him a lot for a picture, just over the knoll from our house. Father gathered together several friends who could be counted on to know how to use tools, and with the necessary lumber donated by friends, the studio was soon up and Marty installed

Marty settled happily into his new surroundings, called the studio his "Hogan" and savored the undisturbed beauty to the full. Opposite was the reservoir, a small lake surrounded by young redwoods and pines from which the raucous blue jays whirling and screeching off any intruders in their preserve, and finally would light on the eucalyptus limb near his door to study this strange addition to their landscape. Below him was a small canyon with its tangle of blackberry vines interlaced with the wild thimble berries, the hazel nut thickets and its babbling brook — a shelter for large flocks of quail and a refuge for the many varieties of small birds in migration. Near the study the pretty trails that wound around the hill with its chattering

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squirrels in the oak trees, and shy little cottontails frisking in and out of the shrubbery, and the tiny lizards stretched on the rocks warmed by the sun all soon became friends of his including the friendly gopher snake who let him stroke it. While sketching, he would pause, luring them in true Indian fashion with a pocket of seeds and bits of bread — a rapport — a gift of his Indian people.

Pioneer style, the only addition that Marty made to his studio, which was one big room with a porch and a little kitchenette off the porch, was a four-cup coffee pot instead of the two-cup pot he had. That was the only thing he added to the studio beside myself. So I moved into the studio and that seemed perfectly natural to me. None of this modern idea of fancy weddings and fancy preparations and fancy honeymoons and fancy everything. It just never occurred to me. I just took my little suitcase and went over there, settled down in Marty's studio as part of it — nothing was changed in it.

We settled down and had a very amusing and pleasant full life. Marty's friends in San Francisco would come over for the weekends, and then we spent much of the time in San Francisco with them. Sometimes three days and nights a week we'd be over in the city for luncheons, teas, dinners. Marty's marriage created quite a sensation so San Francisco wanted to see this picturesque pair we were. Of course, Coppa was wailing that Marty was going across the Bay and deserting San Francisco. So we promised him we'd be at Coppa's two or three nights a week for dinner. We had so many friends in San Francisco it was part of our life, trotting over there.

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Baum

How long did it take you to get there?

Martinez

Well, it was five cents on the streetcar right down here to the Key Route, which is at lower Piedmont, 40th; then it was ten cents on the train and boat to go to San Francisco. We walked down to the streetcar, just like we do now. It would take about an hour to go to San Francisco, but what was an hour in those days? And we loved the boat, so that was pleasant. And if we missed the last Key Route, which was 11:45, something like that, we took the newspaper boat at two in the morning, and we walked from Water Street down at the foot of Broadway in Oakland, now Jack London Square, up here to Piedmont. We thought nothing of that. Many is the time we'd stay to a late party and at two o'clock take the newspaper boat which came to the bottom of the Bay there at Jack London Square.

Life ran along. Marty had one very unfortunate habit, he was exceedingly jealous, so life wasn't all a bed of roses, because he was always getting jealous and he was always being troublesome. Arnold Genthe in his book "As I Remember" tells of one episode. I was talking to an old friend in the studio when Arnold arrived. He found Marty with a target on a tree, blazing away at it. He said, "Martinez, what do you think you're doing?" He replied, "I'm going to shoot that fellow who's talking to my wife." Only the language wasn't quite so polite. Genthe did not finish the episode. He said, "Well, now listen, don't you think that's a bit foolish?" So Marty calmed down a little, went inside, and our friend said, "Listen here, Marty, I'll talk to your wife any time I want to because I can assure

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you that your wife's in no danger of me. I'm one of your oldest friends and I object to that." So ended the episode.

Whenever overcome by one of these fits of jealousy he would burst out in song. When he began to sing Pagliacci, which he did beautifully, I began to study the door because I knew the knives and gun were coming out very shortly. Many a time I lit out the door and into the woods, sat on the hillside until he cooled off. In the summer I took refuge in a sweet smelling haycock and in the winter under the wide-spreading oak tree nearby.

That never bothered me. I grew up among boys and men, my father was a two-gun man in the early days and my brothers all had guns, guns were always going off, so they didn't mean much to me. I was not overly disturbed. I was annoyed because I didn't like it. I was quite dignified and I didn't want to have to run like a rabbit out into the bushes. Then I'd wait till he calmed down and came back in again, very dignified and very annoyed. I had tried to be a Spanish lady, but at the end of the first year I'd had enough. I could box — I'd learned to box with my brothers. My father said only one thing to them, "If you break her nose, I'll kill you. So you'd better be careful of her nose." They were very careful. But I learned a skill that came in handy later.

I had spent a year dodging knives and I got kind of tired of it and changed my tactics. So I told him, "This is the end of this period of being a lady." One day, to his complete surprise, I went up to him, took the gun out of his hand and gave him a wallop on the

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side of his head that knocked him out for two hours. I didn't have to run for quite a while. [Laughter] I also told him the next time I used it it would not be the butt end, but the firing one. I told him, "This is only the beginning. Next time you'll never recover, what you'll get is a bullet from the gun." I think he took it quite seriously for a while. I was beginning to get very tired of the rampages and the roars and the scenes he raised in public. Oh Heavens! They were very often. He'd have a few drinks and he'd raise a scene every time any man paid any attention to me. Anyhow he quieted down. When anyone protested, "How could you let that child marry that old savage?", my father replied, "Don't worry about Elsie, you worry about Marty; she'll tame him".

When Gelett Burgess came up the first time after we were married, he said to me, "I don't approve of this marriage". I wanted to say, "Neither do I", but I wasn't quite so brash in those days. He said, "It's going to ruin Marty as a painter. He's got his mind on you, not on art". I said, "I agree with you." So that sort of startled him.

Anyhow, I had already figured out that marriage was not good for Marty as an artist because he was too obsessed with me and too jealous. It was not good for him. [Laughter] Then my studies irritated him. I was a person full of ideas and was studying madly. He told me I didn't know anything about art. That was a challenge, so I studied all about art and then I'd contradict him with quotations from the greats of the past, and that was worse! After that I was just plain annoying, which

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was too much for him. He wanted a nice Indian squaw sitting by the fireside with her eyes on the floor, but with me it just didn't work out, that's all. But he didn't want me to leave him when I suggested it. It was a very difficult situation for I had a great deal of admiration for Marty as an artist and a picturesque figure; but I knew this friction all the time wasn't good for him.

For instance, he didn't want me to learn Spanish. I had taken Spanish in high school and I got to where I could speak it after a fashion with his friends — but he didn't approve of that. He ridiculed my Spanish and made it rather difficult for me. He never would teach Kai Spanish either, though I used to try to make him speak Spanish to Kai, but he never would. It was something that belonged to him, I suppose, and the Indian in him wanted to keep us out of it.

When we were to be married he promised to take me to Mexico, and then after we were married, decided he wouldn't. I was a brilliant blonde, you know, a glamour girl of a kind — not a glamour girl in the sense of a sex symbol, but I was beautiful and intelligent, and that was dangerous enough for Marty. He wouldn't take me to Mexico because he said either he wouldn't come out of Mexico or I wouldn't. Well, I think it's very likely to have happened. (Laughter) I loved the Latins - and they loved blondes, you know — and Marty was a very romantic Latin during the courtship. So we never went to Mexico, and I dropped Spanish. He had conversations with his Spanish friends and I got a great deal more than he ever knew out of it, but I never let him know.

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Baum

What did you do all day? You didn't do much housework, it doesn't sound like.

Martinez

There was little work to be done in a one-room studio, so now I had the time and opportunity for the studies I longed for. Having been brought up only on the English group singing of folk songs, ballads, carols, madrigals, and hymns, traditionally English, well rendered and touchingly beautiful, my knowledge of music and art was limited. I went in heavily for music — both piano and theory — that is, beginners harmony and counterpoint. For theory I was very fortunate to have an old friend of Marty's in Edward Strickland, professor and later head of the Music Department of the University of California. Strickland often took me to concerts with him. With a score in his lap and a pencil in hand he would guide me through the mysterious intricacies of orchestral technique and several times he had permission to take me to rehearsals of a quartet group — friends of his — working out and analyzing the score with them while they practiced, which greatly enlarged my knowledge of music. To be with them was a sort of musical intimacy in which you followed them, exploring the depths and intensity of the great composers.

For the piano, David Alberto led me patiently through the first steps of piano playing and after he left for Carmel, Robert Tolmis, protégée of Mrs. Hearst. He had just returned from his scholarship in Europe and carried me on to within reach of my goal to play well and with some musicianship.

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Brought up by an English father with emphasis on the classics, especially Greek, for whom the English had an adoration — on our walls at home there were large reproductions of the Elgin Marbles and scattered about in the bookcases plaster casts of Greek sculpture; on occasional cursory flights into philosophy; and with a detailed study of England's conquests, I had already covered much ground, but none of it from the standpoint of art.

So, to fill the gap I was pursuing a cultural background with archaeology, anthropology and art books to study to enlarge my knowledge of art — Marty's field — and about which he felt very possessive. I considered it a challenge. Of course, much time was spent in San Francisco for exhibitions and concerts to give my studies vividness and a grasp of the essentials that makes of a composition a creation.

Baum

And Marty would be off in another part of the room painting?

Martinez

Yes, he'd be at school half a day and the rest working at his desk writing, drawing, or painting.

Marty had wide interests and loved poetry, music and philosophy and the great cultures. To him the struggle for fame was not worth giving up the hours he devoted to them. He was not obsessed with art, but quite satisfied to communicate his love of nature in vivid impressions on canvas. In later years he wrote a column on the arts for the Spanish paper in San Francisco, which was reprinted in several Mexican and South American papers. On his trip to the Navajo Country, he acquired much Indian lore, whose humor and pathos he simplified and made visual for his little daughter — and used for his column.