If you gaze back through swinger history, the founding fathers (or rather father and mother) must surely have been Salvador Dali and his muse Gala, the Russian beauty who had slept with most of the surrealists: Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Man Ray, before setting her sights on young Salvador. Ten years her junior, he was destined, she sensed, for greater things.
Gala divorced Eluard, married Dali and through the half century of their marriage, both lived their lives without anything extra-marital disturbing the core of their relationship. Okay, it was weird to begin with. Dali didn't like sex with other people and claimed only to have indulged twice: once with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, which he found painful, and once with Gala, which he found unpleasant.
Dali was a voyeur and a masturbator: one of his most famous works is The Great Masturbator and when it was first hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York it was said that several women asked: what does that mean? Well, it was in the 1940s, Dali's most prolific period, and a time when masturbating was very much on his mind. It relieves the tension after a long day in the studio and, for Dali, masturbating with his buddies was what he liked to do most.
Gala, meanwhile, was off with her lovers: always young, handsome boys who hoped that through the association they would get something: an invitation, a drawing, a connection, dreams that Gala was able to inspire, rarely with the envisaged pay-off, even into her eighties, with the exception of Jeff Fenholt, star of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, who would arrive in Spain twice a year with an amusing fluffy toy for Gala and leave with a small masterpiece to sell at Sotheby's in New York a few weeks later.
Dali while all this was going on would be busy organizing bacchanalian fiestas with his "ambassador" Carlos Lozano, a tall Colombian with waist-length hair who pitched up in Paris in 1969, worked as a dancer in the musical Hair and remained close to the painter for more than two decades.
Carlos's job was to find beautiful people willing to shed their clothes and their inhibitions and take part in Dali's orgies, an intricate strategy beginning with pink champagne and ending with lots of people naked and making love while the great masturbator did his thing, often accompanied by his friend, the Italian Prince Dado Ruspoli, who was said to have the largest organ in Europe and seduced more women than any Hollywood leading man.
Dali invited young people to his labyrinthine villa in Cadaqués and beguiled them into slipping out of their clothes and having sex beside the penis-shaped pool in the terraced garden behind the house. On warm summer nights beside the Spanish Mediterranean, with the rounded cliffs rising up in silhouette like breasts in the background, with the sea slapping the shoreline, the mood and setting gave the happening a feeling of spontaneity and innocence, although everything was carefully planned, from the glasses of pink champagne to Dali's first playful suggestion that one of his guests was the spitting image of Saint Sebastian or Venus in a Renaissance painting.
With his mesmerizing voice and combining compliments with the vague idea that the chosen guest was contributing to world art, Dali would persuade them to slip out of their clothes. He would pose them naked in a Tableau Vivant, and once one person had shed their clothes, any reluctance the others may have had would be seen as philistine if they failed to join in. From living paintings with couples embracing to live action orgies was only one step away and, like ever journey, the first step had been taken.
Another of Dali's pastimes was to invite actresses to read his play, a tragedy about a beautiful princess in love with both a despot and a priest. It contained passionate soliloquies on Dali's habitual preoccupations: autoeroticism, golden rain and coprophilia, and over the years he managed to lure among others Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot and Samantha Eggar to give voice to the obscene text.
Samantha Eggar truly understood Dali's sense of humor and was one of a select few willing to take off her clothes and crawl through a long rubber tube Dali called his uterus, thus revealing how it was Dali who gave birth to the universe. Totally mad, but fun. The actress then sat hot and sticky on the glass floor so that Dali could photograph her backside squeezed against the glass. Spread bottoms print what Dali called angel's wings and one of the paintings made through this method now hangs in the Vatican, a gift from Salvador Dali to the Pope: "The only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist," Dali once said, and who would deny it?
Sex, Dali said, turns on the light and makes you one with the universe. Gala's affairs were legion: she was believed to have slept with all the fishermen in Cadaqués, and Dali admired her stamina and drew strength from it. It was what inspired him to greatness.
