She is 18, pretty, talented, and desperate to find her place in the world. Born out of wedlock to a Jewish language tutor in Vienna, she has just met her father for the first time. A successful Jewish businessman who managed to flee the Romanian pogroms, Herman Klempfner anglicized his name to H.K. Kempton and now runs a company in Manchester, England, that brings him regularly to Vienna. Back home, he has a wife and six children, but he embraces young Martha and cheerfully introduces her as his illegitimate daughter.
Has he helped support her all these years? We can only hope so. She does not bear his name; hers is Martha Beer. But no matter; she is about to change that name. She has accepted the marriage proposal of a darkly handsome, 30-year-old rogue who calls himself Sandor Vago. Like him, she dreams of a larger life, sparkling with art and graced with cash.
Three years later, she gives birth to a daughter they call Daisy. But Vago’s sleight of hand soon catches up to him. To avoid a prison sentence, he packs up his wife and daughter and flees, eventually settling in Mexico. There, he opens a jewelry shop he calls Alexander Taylor’s, using his father’s (and no doubt his) legal surname. (“Vago” was probably a middle name he used to toy with the Hungarian police.) He begins buying jewels in Mexico and selling them in California.
The shine is already gone from the marriage. In 1926, Martha decides she cannot stand Vago’s infidelity and irresponsibility any longer. When little Daisy comes down with typhoid fever, she takes her across the border to Los Angeles to recuperate, entering the country illegally. When they return, Martha packs for good, scooping up rather a lot of jewelry she claims is hers by right. Vago walks in before she can leave. He refuses to let her take Daisy. Martha leaves alone and goes into hiding for two weeks, watching for her chance. Then she grabs the little girl and vanishes into the U.S., again entering illegally.
Enraged, Vago has Martha arrested and deported. Daisy is to be deported, too, but he kidnaps her instead. It will take Martha three years to get her daughter back, helped by her half-brother, Arthur Kempton.
First, Arthur gets Martha out of prison and brings her to his home. For the first time in, well, maybe ever, she can relax. They stay up late into the evenings, drinking and talking. Arthur’s wife, Nellie, glares at Martha, young and lithe, sitting on the floor in a silk kimono, fondly running a hand down Arthur’s back. Soon they are going out to party together and coming home so late it is early morning. Nellie’s lips press tight. When she eventually explodes, Martha offers to leave.
Arthur follows her.
She enters the United States as Mrs. Arthur Kempton, and the couple set up housekeeping together on Long Island. One might expect legal consequences, but after poking around, an immigration agent decides she is a woman of “good moral character.” After Vago fails to show up in court, she is even allowed to keep, for a slight customs fee, the jewels she pocketed.
When Daisy returns, it is not to a woman brimming with maternal love. “It cost us $6,000 to get the child back,” Martha writes to a friend, adding that she cannot understand why the child’s father wanted her so badly: “It certainly is not love, because Daisy was the most awful looking mess you ever saw…her teeth were of the most unearthly dark green color and had ten cavities.”
Once the child is fixed up, her mother packs her off to boarding school in Canada and turns to her next challenge: U.S. citizenship. For this, her lawyer arranges a marriage to a U.S. citizen, Otto Zimmand. What’s in it for him? A Mexican divorce that will allow him—once the sham marriage ends—to marry his true love, his stenographer.
And so Martha Beer Vago Taylor Kempton Zimmand receives her citizenship and her second divorce. She begins taking art classes. In L.A., she sold silk paintings; in New York, arty postcards. Now she paints a little neighbor boy on Long Island. His parents show everyone, and commissions start to flow. She exhibits for the first time at the Salons of America in 1931. “Greta” strikes her as a more artistic name, so she begins to sign her work “Greta Kempton.”
The following year, Vago/Taylor is arrested in Mexico City and charged with posing as a special agent of the police, buying stolen jewelry at insignificant prices, and threatening the robbers with arrest if they revealed the sale. Indifferent to his fate, Greta is out in Los Angeles painting portraits of Hollywood studio heads. By 1940, she will be back in New York with her own studio on West 74th Street. She paints a portrait of sculptor Mario Korbel that is presented to the National Academy of Design. She paints a portrait of Guy Bailey, president of the University of Vermont. She paints every day, eager and restless. “I have never done a painting that I am completely happy with,” she will say later—yet she keeps even the canvases she abandons.
Ambrose Michael MacNamara, an Irish immigrant 17 years older than Greta, towers over her, a safe bear of a man with a soft brogue. They meet at an art exhibit, and he shyly asks about her work. Manager of several Cuban sugar companies and president of a molasses company, he is piling up money, loves art, and is smitten with elegant Greta.
In the spring of 1942, she marries him—briefly. Five months later, she divorces him and two days later marries a gee-whiz-naïve fawning Chicago businessman. No one knows why. Two months later, on Halloween no less, she files for divorce and remarries MacNamara.
They travel between New York and New Orleans for his business, and she paints portraits of society folk in both cities. The marriage lasts only eight years, but of all her husbands, MacNamara clearly loves her best. In 1944, overseeing one of her exhibits, he brags, “You ought to see some of the flower pieces she does when she is supposed to be resting.” In 1949, he nags the director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art to write Greta a note documenting President Truman’s visit to her exhibit. The two continue visiting friends together after their 1950 divorce, and in 1976, he gives an address praising her portrait of John Snyder. Before he dies, he sends her a poem about art enduring, adds that her paintings were “good art,” and signs the letter, “Affectionately, Mac.”
So why did they split? Greta reportedly confided in a friend that MacNamara refused to have sex with her. A priest had told him that her prior divorces would make it a sin.
Ambrose MacNamara never remarried. Greta, alas, did. But that is getting ahead of our story.
World War II is just over, and Greta prefers not to think of the hell she escaped in Europe. She has joined friends at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., and one day she lingers in the gilded lobby. In the soft-bright light of its crystal chandeliers, she peers through a columned archway and sees John and Evlyn Snyder crossing the lobby with their 21-year-old daughter, Drucie. Such fresh loveliness! Greta rises to greet them. “I’d love to paint her,” she murmurs to Drucie’s parents, and they exchange pleased glances. They are already aware (she has made sure) that Greta Kempton was “born in Austria of rather well-to-do parents, and had been given art lessons with several noted European portrait painters.”
Greta claims to have studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the august institution that twice refused admission to a young artist named Adolf Hitler. She describes her father as H.K. Kempton, an Englishman. She presents herself as Episcopalian, well-born, and at ease in the world of money and taste. “I was in boarding school in Vienna,” she will later say for an oral history. She will recall “the sound of the horses through the palace” and the exquisite shops. She will describe her first art tutor: “I was her only student…and then the most wonderful thing was that she took me to the museum.” She will say she made her finishing-school teachers come to her so she could keep her mornings free to paint. She will smile softly as she recalls traveling to the great museums of Italy, France, and England.
“Greta” strikes her as a more artistic name, so she begins to sign her work “Greta Kempton.”
After painting Drucie, she paints Evlyn. Then John commissions his own portrait, one with the gravitas befitting President Harry S. Truman’s secretary of the treasury.
“In the meantime she asked would it be possible to paint the president’s portrait,” John will say later, “and I talked with him about it, and he said, ‘Why, yes, it would be all right.’”
Greta’s recollection is a bit different: “I was told unofficially that a group of friends were considering asking me to do a portrait of President Truman, and that, in his typical frank humor, he had said to Mr. Snyder, ‘Because you need your portrait for the Treasury, why don’t you go first? Maybe that little lady artist can only paint little girls!’”
The first time Greta arrives at the White House, she finds her easel and supplies already set up for her in the Cabinet Room. Sparing not a thought for the usual weighty discussions held in that room, she shoos away Truman’s Secret Service agents. When he walks in clutching papers, she smiles up at him, gestures him toward a chair, and tells him this is a time for him to relax and let her work. Not the sort to succumb to a wink and a soft Viennese accent, Truman gives her a thoughtful, summing-up look. She holds her ground. No, he cannot peek. Yes, of course she will work within his schedule. One day he bursts in and warns her that he only has 11 minutes. “Mr. President,” she replies dryly, “in 11 minutes anyone can paint a masterpiece.” He grins and promises to come back right after his meeting if she is willing to wait.
They never lack for conversation. Some days he vents his frustration, saying, “It seems almost impossible to please everybody,” or, “People as well as nations can be quite unreasonable.” Other days he asks her about colors, her various brushes, the work of other painters. He and Bess visit Greta’s log cabin in Virginia, where he falls in love with her portrait of Chief Frank John of the Paiute Nation. She later presents it to him.
When the official White House portrait is finished, the Democrats make hundreds of thousands of prints, using them in his 1948 reelection campaign. The painting is traditional, the likeness almost photographic. His arms, clad in a dark suit, look a little stiff, but his features are clean and intelligent. The Capitol is in the background. A tree at the edge and darkness on the other side give a European feel that should have been incongruous. But plainspoken Americans are, with their usual inconsistency, delighted to have a “court painter,” an émigré from the Old World, recording their history as it is made.
Greta Kempton has just become the first woman to paint an official portrait of a U.S. president.
The painting fits easily into the conservative décor of the Truman White House, where the only nod to modernity is a kitchen soundproofed for radio and TV broadcasting. She will paint Truman again and again: once for his family; once in his Masonic regalia; once for President Gerald Ford, who had always admired him. Later, the official White House portrait will be used to print a 1983 commemorative postage stamp and mint a Harry S. Truman commemorative bronze medal.
Greta also paints Bess Truman, who is indifferent to her appearance and loathes posing. When the White House asks for a second portrait of Bess to hang in its gallery, she refuses to sit again: “I like everything about the painting you made. I like the eyes, the hands, the dress; I even like the background. Why should I have a new portrait painted?” She runs up to the attic to get the dress she posed in so Greta can use it as a reference. “I was licked,” Greta recalls later, laughing.
Meanwhile, she paints the Trumans’ daughter: “Margaret Truman is really a very lovely girl,” she insists, “and she’s growing lovelier as she grows older. Her pictures do not do her justice.” Greta’s paintbrush remedies that, showing Margaret leaning against the gold piano in the East Room of the White House, the green of her eyes echoed in the wallpaper. “She has a quick, lively mind and great personality,” Greta says, glad that despite all the pomp, Margaret has “remained unspoiled.”
She has the sort of life young Martha yearned for.
Greta moves through life by securing introductions, lavishing praise, throwing fabulous parties, and painting, often quite well, whomever she is commissioned to paint. None of these people ever dream she is anything other than the self she presents. They have no idea she was illegitimate, or Jewish, or most likely self-taught, or that at 18, she married a man of slippery ethics and fled Vienna with him to avoid his arrest. She is giving the world a very different self-portrait, lightening the darkness of her past and reaching for pastels to pretty it and blur the facts’ hard edges.
Her paintings are good, but her life is her masterpiece.
She cultivates what today we would call her brand: the cultured European artist. She carries on light and charming conversations, her diction flawless, her words carefully selected. For a census report when she is 37, she lists her birth year as “abt 1903,” adding two bonus years before she turns 40. She swings luxe furs around her neck and dangles corsages nonchalantly, rather than stick them to her bosom as Bess Truman did. Greta’s hair is usually upswept, and she adores frothy little hats. “Every hat I see I feel is the hat I must own,” she says. “If I’m low or miserable, I put on a silly hat and feel wonderful again.”
Feminine couture suits her petite frame, but she also knows that in the country of blue jeans, formality spells a more elegant and disciplined way of life. A European way of life. Greta shuns smocks and paints wearing velvet hostess gowns. When a fellow artist, Mary Black Diller, asks, “Aren’t you afraid of ruining your gown with paint daubs?” she replies serenely, “Oh, my, no. All my paint goes onto the canvas.”
Beneath the velvet gowns, though, is a raw practicality. Greta is surprisingly workmanlike, perfectly happy to paint whatever anyone wanted her to paint: “a darling little old lady socialite…and businessmen and the families and a lot of children, and the usual mixture of nice people that can afford it and have the interest in either decorating their home or in owning a piece of art, I don’t know which. Those things didn’t bother me.”
What she cares about is having the chance to paint. Flattery and a strategic use of connections keep the momentum going.
“It’s nice to know nice people,” she reminds one of her husbands. She never compromises her dignity, though, or tries to evade the costs of self-promotion. Years later, advising her grandson to be cautious in accepting help, she will say tartly, “Young man, if I wanted publicity, I would buy it!”
Greta’s own PR is word of mouth, made easy by her willingness to make every portrait flattering. Women, she points out, already see themselves a certain way. “The trick is to try to portray them as they visualize themselves.” Men, on the other hand, have no preconceived ideas about their appearance, which made them easier to please: “The artist must make them look as strong and important as possible…they don’t insist on beauty. Women do. So with women you have to cheat a bit.” This is tricky because she insists on true likeness: “If the painting doesn’t look like the subject, I don’t think it’s worth having.” Still, she reassures herself, “we can find something lovely in almost everyone.”
And the other challenge, how to endow her portraits of pasty-faced, heavy-jowled, middle-aged men with strength and importance? “Strength usually is accentuated in the eyes,” she explains. Eyes are the key to personality and thus to portrait painting: “Once a painter gets the eyes right, the rest of the painting takes care of itself.” Bess Truman’s blue eyes show her to be “a woman of real character,” Greta maintains. Thomas Dewey’s eyes prove his “power of concentration, and his intention to get things done speedily and effectively.” Harry Truman has “expressive blue eyes…and the kind of fair skin that reflects the light.”
Greta also mentions eyes, fortune-teller style, when she hopes to paint someone’s portrait. She tells Jesse Jones she likes “the twinkle in his eyes and his regal manner.” She says Drucie Snyder’s eyes are “most unusual. They slant a bit and disappear when she laughs.”
Commissions stack up: Secretary of the Treasury Carter Glass. Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug. Secretary of the Air Force and future Missouri senator Stuart Symington. New York secretary of state Edward J. Flynn. A banker, a Supreme Court justice, two U.S. postmasters general, industry titans, university presidents, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission….
She travels to Chicago in blazing summer heat to paint Cardinal Stritch—and soon has the poor man climbing the stairs, clad in his ermine cape, all the way up to a loft where the light is good. Genial and patient, he sends the ermine, lace rochet, and scarlet cassock back to New York with her so she can finish the stunning portrait in her studio.
Greta throws herself into every commission. Of Harold Hoffman, governor of New Jersey, she tells reporters, “I did his portrait in three days and collapsed with fatigue on the fourth.” Of her first painting of Harry S. Truman, she says it had to be “a rush job,” timed for a special event, “so I started to paint practically day and night and had it ready in about a month. But I wouldn’t try that again.”
When her portrait of Postmaster General Robert Hannegan is late to its unveiling at Toots Shor’s in Manhattan, Greta takes the mayor aside and speaks quietly. He phones the chief of police. The cops locate the painting en route and escort it to the restaurant.
She understands showmanship, but she also has talent—her work is compared to portraits by George Romney and, by one gushy critic, Rembrandt. She achieves terrific likenesses and knows it. She notes her subjects’ gestures, bearing, and signs of social standing; she registers every lift of the brows, every twitch of the nose or curl of the lip, every glimmer or slant of eye. Their internal storms or sorrows interest her far less.
Asked what women talked about while sitting for their portraits, she says, “Why, men, of course.” And men? “Never about women. Usually about their business, or world affairs, or labor problems—something impersonal.” Women see the world subjectively, making everything personal. And Greta? She has personal ambitions and a cool strategy for pursuing them. Despite all the drama in her marriages, despite all her disappointed fights with Daisy, she seems untouched, at the deepest level, by other people.
“Nobody gets to know Greta well,” an acquaintance observes. She is one of those steely women of the past who grasped the conventional gender roles and used them to her advantage (thereby disproving them). “Men seem a little frightened when they learn I am a portrait painter,” she tells a reporter in St. Louis. “But, then, they find out I haven’t any brains and everything is all right.”
Just as she is filing for divorce from Mac, Greta meets Willard “Stub” Walker, president of the Continental Can Co. He falls hard and leaves his wife for her. Then he insists she stop taking commissions and travel with him instead. Everywhere they go, she visits galleries, museums, and art schools, determined to keep up. But when Walker retires, he whisks her away to a farm in Hinckley, Ohio.
Greta is, as you might imagine, miserable. She sets up a studio in a log cabin on the property and begins experimenting with the looser, more modern techniques she absorbed during their travels. By now, her fourth marriage is soaked in acrimony.
Perhaps prompted by his daughter, Walker sues for divorce in 1965, demanding alimony. His attorney presents Greta as “a fortune-seeking adventuress.” In court, she is forced to admit that Walker made her breakfast. Asked if she did any housework, she draws herself up: “I am not a maid.” She then adds her own complaints: “He spends his time outdoors all the time, leaving me alone, and if I didn’t paint, I would probably have gone crazy…. He doesn’t like social life, as you know. We don’t know anybody, really.” She also claims that he threatened to “wallop” her, did hit her once, had begun keeping an automatic pistol in his bedroom, tried to withdraw money from her brokerage account, borrowed money from her to pay his income taxes, and snuck into her purse and business records to search for, and presumably destroy, the promissory note.
None of these people ever dream she is anything other than the self she presents.
The court finds that Greta “conducted herself as a faithful and dutiful wife,” and Walker is “guilty of gross neglect of duty” and “extreme cruelty.” His appeal is dismissed. In financial trouble, he remarries almost immediately; she does not. She is done with husbands.
She is also estranged from Daisy, who has always grated on her nerves. Daisy is “loud and crude and bitter,” an acquaintance recalls, and thus the opposite of all that Greta aspired to. Also, she insisted on visiting her traitorous trickster father in Mexico.
Greta is easier with her grandson. Strong women often are—the burden of nurture and the creeping guilty knowledge of maternal inadequacy have been lifted, and they can connect in brisk friendship. A musician, Albert Kempton d’Ossché studies, performs, records, and writes about folk music, helping revive the dulcimer. That twang of Americana might make Greta wince, but nonetheless, the boy is an artist.
His coauthor and longtime friend, Robert Force, will later tell a researcher that Greta did not encourage frequent visitors, not even her grandson. She is welcoming, cordial, and polite, but private. Force grows suspicious of her “Austrian” background, suspecting Hungarian or Jewish roots—especially when he notices how fascinated Albert is by all things Hungarian.
Albert dies in 1990, just 43 years old.
Afterward, Greta changes her will, leaving everything to the Truman Library Institute except for a $10,000 bequest for Daisy. This is pure strategy, meant to thwart any challenge to the will.
Clay Bauske, museum curator of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, flies to New York to pay Greta a visit. He makes his way to the Upper East Side and tells the doorman he is calling on her. Ahead, he sees Dan Rather crossing the lobby.
Greta’s two-story studio looks Tudor, with dark wood and mullioned windows. The apartment is crowded with easels and antique Chinese cabinets, and the color scheme is a muted mix of reds and greens. No girlie pink, not even in the bedroom, which is hotel-bland and devoid of sentiment. The studio walls are covered with her paintings, hung two or three deep, one above the other all the way to the ceiling. What would have been a kitchen pantry is stuffed full of stacked paintings. Through the windows is a view of the Whitney Museum of American Art, close enough to plot a heist.
Bauske has met Greta only once before, and he knows she will be cordial, if slightly cool. Now he realizes she is “a master of understatement with meaning.” Settling into the conversation, he finds himself enjoying her wit: “She could shoot knives in the gentlest, most endearing way.” But she shows no inclination to talk about her early life, and he cannot figure out how to break past the formality and reach the personal. Chatting lightly, he pulls a few stories from her. Later, he will wonder how true any of what she said was.
At 89, Greta feels the age settling into her bones. But just a few years earlier, she offered to restore darkened, dulled oil paintings at the Church of the Transfiguration (fondly known by New Yorkers as the Little Church Around the Corner). “We don’t have the money to pay you,” Rev. Norman Catir said nervously, and she brushed him aside and climbed on a ladder, wearing a fur coat to ward off the chill in the drafty Gothic Revival church. She even brought friends to stand behind her and catch her if she fell.
Greta’s religion is Episcopalian; even in a 1987 oral history, she makes no mention of her Jewish heritage. The only acknowledgement of her past that reached the U.S. came when Walker dug up Austrian gossip in their divorce trial, and that never went public. Today, omitting such a large chunk of one’s identity looks disloyal or ashamed, but those were times (and, unfortunately, they have not ended) when being Jewish was a sharp liability. Greta’s father had escaped antisemitism in Romania. When she came to this country, more Americans were members of the Ku Klux Klan than were Jews. By the time people wanted her biography, Hitler was sending Jews to be incinerated.
What comes through her oral history is not so much history as courage and a determination to keep growing. She is in her mid-80s, and when the interviewer points out that her work has “an Old World flavor,” she says, “Yes, it has. And I’ve been trying to get away from it.”
Greta Kempton dies in her New York studio in 1991, just one year after losing her beloved grandson. Her body is cremated, her ashes placed in the columbarium of the Church of the Transfiguration.
She did grow a bit franker at the end. Painting yet another portrait of Truman in 1988, she exclaimed to a friend, “Can you believe they want his tie to match the couch?”
But she made it match.
Did she ever regret her elaborated self, her refusal to ever spill the real story? During one of those oral history interviews, she tells a story, then says, “I know it doesn’t sound true, but why would I make up such a silly story?” Later she remarks, “This also doesn’t seem true. I tell so many stories that don’t seem true to me today.” Is she referring to the slipperiness of memory or her lifelong spinning, the fabrication of self that felt necessary to a Jewish immigrant woman who wanted to become an artist in the 1940s?
Art collectors Kristen and Wesley Jasinski bought at least 400 of Kempton’s paintings at a series of auctions. Increasingly fascinated, they hired researcher and writer Bruce Scivally, who dug up the truth of Greta’s birth. They still wonder, though. “I understand that the façade was dictated by society,” Kristen says, “but what is her real story?”
We will never know. Few were close to her, and she left no diaries that would tell us what scared or saddened, exasperated or frustrated her; what she dreamed, what she longed for, what she loathed. All we have access to is what she accomplished—and what she wanted us to think of her.
This piecing-together of Greta Kempton’s life is based on oral history transcripts, correspondence, court files, newspaper articles, and interviews. Much remains a mystery.
