Ahlstrand: Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing this interview with us.
Frankforter: Thank you, Pennington.
Ahlstrand: Would you please tell us where and when you were born?
Frankforter: Well, I was born a number of years ago in Toledo, Ohio. The date was June 23, 1920. Just missed midsummer’s eve. My grandmother wanted her grandchild born in her house and it so happened that my mother, God knows why, wanted her first child born in her own bed. Father, caught between these two evils and being a good sport, picked up mother’s bed, carried it down the stairs, out the front door, down to the corner, turned right, and went up Bancroft to Scottwood Avenue to grandmother’s great big red brick house. Father, not being Goliath, enlisted the support of Uncle Sidney and Uncle Sidney, being very lazy, prevailed upon grandmother’s chauffeur to help and thus I was born. The ensuing siblings, and there were 4 brothers, were not treated with such panache.
Ahlstrand: I like it. Tell me a little bit about your parents. What were their names? Where did they come from? Obviously your grandparents were nearby.
Frankforter: Well, my parents, Charles Edward Swartzbaugh, was born in Toledo as was my mother, Katharine Lamson. She went to Wells College. He met her when she graduated from Wells and they were married. It was World War I, I believe, at that time. They were always in love all their lives. They loved each other very much. They loved their children and we loved them. We had an absolutely marvelous family life, four boys and one girl.
My grandparents lived close and we were all a very close family. My grandfather, Julius Gustavus Lamson, owned a large department store comparable to, say, the White House, I. Magnin, Saks. Think of a seven story department store bounded by three main streets in Toledo, Ohio. He was a teetotaler and a very frugal man who collected string but had millions of dollars. He went to work every day without fail. He read the Bible everyday without fail. If you sat with him at breakfast you heard verses from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and you had to listen before you ate your Grape Nuts.
Grandmother was a perfect match for him because she loved to spend money. She spent all of his money and he was grateful. She spent it on us; we were spoiled. I’ll never forget the story about my mother and her sisters who went to Wells College; they were called the Seal Sisters because grandmother bought them seal coats to wear in the wintertime. I won’t forget one Christmas when three beautiful convertible Buicks were driven up under the porte cochere of grandmother’s house and each of her daughters received a Buick automobile, much to the horror of their husbands who then had to support them. (Laughs) So, we were close to grandpa and grandma and our other grandparents too. Grandfather, as I said, was a merchant, and he had an obelisk Cleopatra’s needle like the one in Paris carved for him when he was in his 30’s and shipped to Toledo from France. He put it in the cemetery and it said, "J.G. Lamson, Merchant.”
My father was a manufacturer and he was president of the Swartzbaugh Manufacturing Company in Toledo. They made electrical equipment. His father had invented the steamless cooker before electricity and later he made electrical equipment. He was a very active man, president of the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, this that and the other thing. My grandfather and father were very important men and they were quite rich men, I think. Until the crash of ‘29. My mother had a beautiful voice; she sang, played the piano, and was very talented and lovely. Everyone adored her. I was quite jealous of her. Besides being popular she had many talents. She was the best high jumper in Wells College. (Laughs)
Ahlstrand: Wow…
Frankforter: That always surprised me. At any rate, what else shall I say?
Ahlstrand: How about your brothers?
Frankforter: Oh! I had four wonderful brothers: Charles Edward, William Lamson, John David, and James Munro. Charles was born one year after I was born, and I was a little mother to him. He really got mad when he grew up and learned that I had taught him a lot of things backwards because I was always facing him when I taught him to tie his shoes and his tie and things like that. He could have killed me later when he discovered that he was doing it backwards. At any rate, we fought all the time but of course we loved each other. He’s dead.
All of my brothers are dead except Bill, he was the second brother, William Lamson. He, like Charles, graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Then Bill went to Yale Divinity School because he was going, at one time, to be a minister. He received his Ph.D. at Yale. Then he did what he loved doing most: he was on the faculty of Denison University and served as the Dean of Students at the University of Pittsburgh, Amherst College and Harvey Mudd College in Southern California. So, his life was on college campuses being dean of students. He’s now living in Essex, Connecticut, where he loves boats and sailing. I’m going to visit him soon, and we’re going sailing on the Connecticut River.
My third brother was John David who became president of father’s factory. Those three boys were always told that one of them would have to follow in grandfather’s footsteps and be an officer of grandfather’s store, on my mother’s side of the family. The other one would have to become president of the manufacturing company. There was no choice; they had to. Bill and I were the rebellious ones. Bill said, "I won’t go into business." I said I was going to be an artist. He was going to be a minister. Father said, "I’m sorry but we’ve never had an artist in our family, and we’ve never had a minister in our family; neither of you will live very well. You won’t make a living doing what you choose to do and you may not be accepted socially. If you want to be that way, okay, but don’t think I’m going to support you all your lives." (Laughs)
James Munro was born much later. I think we were all in high school. He only lived to be 4, but we all had a glorious life together. We were trained as Olympic swimmers. We swam all the time. Each one of us had our own sailboat in the summer and we sailed. We all liked winter sports, skiing and so on. We just had an extremely happy family and we were all quite successful. I think that’s very important. Ahlstrand: Tell me more about what you remember about life with your family and your early years in Toledo.
Frankforter: Well, we lived a few blocks from the Toledo Museum of Art which is one of the best in the world. It’s a beautiful museum. When I was old enough I was allowed to walk those 2 or 3 blocks to the museum. There were children’s programs. There was a School of Design. If you went to an art talk you would receive a ticket to a movie-- Douglas Fairbanks, for example. It was very exciting. I spent every Saturday at the Toledo Museum of Art, and there I had a chance to be in classes with other children. I learned to paint. I loved the smell of paint. I loved brushes. I loved going to the art store for crayons and paints. I also found that I could go into the print shop and the printer would give me scads of paper, stacks of colored paper. It was thrilling. It was so wonderful. I knew I wanted to be an artist and I painted all the time.
There was a chance to learn about history of art without it being a bore. The Egyptian gallery appealed to children, especially the mummy cases (laughs) and the beautiful hieroglyphics on the cases. We were allowed to go through the galleries of the museum and the famous glass gallery. There was a beautiful Peristyle where concerts were held. We went to concerts there. There was also a cloister and you could learn about Medieval art and, of course, galleries of paintings and sculpture. It influenced me very much when I was a child and I always knew that I would be an artist. There was no question: I always thought of myself as one. I knew that I had to go to art school but I had to fight with my parents about that because they believed that we should finish college and learn history and languages and mathematics and so on before we began a career as an artist or whatever we were going to be. I never was allowed to go to an art school per se. I had to go to an Eastern college for four years and graduate with some knowledge of history and so on.
My brothers went to Dartmouth and Yale, and the third brother went to Ohio State and U. C. Berkeley. After high school I went to a very strict boarding school, Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. There I learned to study. I loved to study. I became a very good student. Then I went to Smith College and had a wonderful time at Smith. I just decided that’s where I would like to go so one day I took a train to Northampton, Massachusetts. I had an appointment with the dean. I said, "I like your college very much and I would like to study here." He said, "Fine, you’re in." My parents could not believe it.
So there I was at Smith College, which I loved. I became very involved in extracurricular activities. I was president of the Studio Club. I was art director and scene designer for the Theater Association. I studied, and I passed (laughs). I wasn’t always on the dean’s list but I was a member of the Honorary Art Society while I was there. It was quite interesting to my parents because they had many interviews with scholars or heads of schools and colleges. They were always told that because of the type of person I was, whatever that was, I should go to a very small school and I ended up going to the largest women’s college in the nation, and loved it, because there were so many opportunities and a great library and great teachers. I fell in love with one of my art professors and after I graduated, he asked me to marry him.
At any rate, I studied art; it was mainly history of art, years of Medieval art and years of Italian Renaissance but fascinating, very exciting. I did study photography with a very important photographer and I studied sculpture and I studied painting. My first exhibition of painting was after college in 1944. I graduated in ’43 and had an exhibition in ’44. A critic said that I was influenced by Van Gogh. That was just the beginning of my becoming a professional artist. My family still didn’t believe that I was going to be any good. (Laughs)
Ahlstrand: So…
Frankforter: I was girl! Girls weren’t supposed to do anything like that…
Ahlstrand: …but you said you got that from your brothers, not from your parents.
Frankforter: Got what?
Ahlstrand: That boys are better than girls.
Frankforter: Oh, yes. Of course they told me boys were better than girls.
It really swamped me because we all swam and I was in a swimming race once. I closed my eyes, I was doing the freestyle, I think, or the crawl, and I ran into the edge of the pool in this very important race. My father said, "Well, dear, why did you have your eyes closed?" And I said, "Because girls can’t swim under water with their eyes open." He said, "Who told you that?" "Well, Charles told me that." "Well, why did you believe him?" Well, I did.
Charles and I were very competitive. I decided not to swim in competitions because he was a faster swimmer than I. I would become a great diver because Charles didn’t dive. So I became Toledo’s best girl diver. I had a ribbon saying that. This was at the age of 12, I guess. My brother, seeing me dive, knew he could do better. Charles could do half-gainers and back flips and a lot of things like that. I think that my having brothers gave me a sense of being competitive because I wanted to be good at things, too. But mother and daddy thought that girls, you know, they just grew up and had babies and on the side they could play bridge or whatever. I thought, "no, I want to have an exciting life. I want to do interesting things. I want to have a career." After graduating from Smith I said, "I’m going to be career girl."
See, now this is very dated but that’s what I said. It’s really funny. It’s curious now that I knew I was going to go east to New York from Toledo and be a career girl. And I did (laughs).
Ahlstrand: Okay, talk about that a little bit. What did you do in New York?
Frankforter: I went after a year of teaching at the Toledo Museum of Art where I had been inspired as a child and where I now inspired other little children. The Director of the museum asked me to write an article for Art News magazine. It had to do with re-attributing a painting by an Italian Renaissance artist, Filippo Lippi to the artist Pesellino. I had to do research and that was my way of getting out of Toledo and to Washington and New York because there was the Library of Congress and there were facilities in New York. It was an excuse, really. I did write the article and it was published under the Director’s name, Blake-More Godwin, in Art News with a full color reproduction of the painting on the cover.
At any rate, that was the beginning of my really being a serious art historian, too. When I went to New York, I stayed at the Biltmore, where father had a charge account. I kept staying and mama and papa said, "When are you coming home?" I said, "I like it here." Father said, "But it’s my charge account." I said, "Well, all right, I’ll find a place to live." So, I left the Biltmore one day.
I’d always lived in the family home and I didn’t know where I’d live but I wanted to go to Greenwich Village because I was an artist. So, I started door to door, first on Washington Square, where a friend of my aunt’s, Mrs. Roosevelt, lived. (Laughs) I didn’t know who else lived there but I really went from door to door. People looked askance at me and were somewhat horrified. I don’t know how old I was, maybe 23 or 24 or something, and I was saying, "I’d like to rent a room." (Laughs).
Well, late in the afternoon I was at 72 Bank Street which is in the Village and a woman came to the door. I said, "I’m looking for a place to stay. I’m from Toledo, Ohio, and I’m staying at the Biltmore; I can’t stay there any longer. Do you have a room I could rent? She said, "Well, what are you doing here?" And I told her. She said, "Won’t you come in?" She was wearing a tank suit and holding a can of paint which she put down on the grand piano. This was a lovely Victorian mansion. Her name was Marian Tanner. We had both gone to Smith College. She graduated magna cum laude. She became Mame. Her nephew came to stay. His name was Patrick Tanner but he changed it to Dennis, and he wrote the story about his aunt, Auntie Mame, who was this Marian Tanner. So I lived there the first summer I was in New York and it was (laughs) terribly exciting. It was fantastic. I can’t imagine a more bohemian, interesting way to live. I don’t know whether I paid her any rent or not. She was older than I and very domineering. She’d had five husbands who couldn’t stand that. I was happy to do what she said because I had an introduction, and so I became a critic for the Village Voice and interviewed artists and writers.
At any rate, I finished writing the article and then I eventually moved out of her house and into my own flat and decided to become a communist. I pawned my fur coat and bought an easel. I had no furniture at that time because I’d just come with my suitcase, but I found furniture immediately. There were warehouses around 10th Street in the Village and so I got a cable spool for a coffee table and one of those pallets that they use in warehouses and added a mattress. I put flowers and books on the spool. Auntie gave me a Victorian chair. When my father came to visit he had to climb five flights of steps, and the only place to sit was this Victorian chair. I loved it. If I needed to use the telephone I tapped on the window of the adjacent apartment building and the lady handed out her telephone. I left a nickel on her windowsill and I called home. Father finally said, "Now you’re not going to go on living this way." It was a dangerous but exciting neighborhood.
At any rate I moved to Stuyvesant Square where I had a penthouse apartment and I asked three girls to be my roommates. We had a duplex penthouse apartment with a wonderful deck overlooking Stuyvesant Square with a statue of Peter Stuyvesant on his wooden leg. We looked down on the Quaker Schoolhouse, St. George’s church, St. Andrew’s infirmary, Dvorak’s house and Little Sisters of the Poor. I wrote pages and pages of poetry about all of this. One of my roommates worked at the Metropolitan Museum. I landed a job at Time, Inc. Do you want to know what year that was?
Ahlstrand: Sure.
Frankforter: That would have been 1945…
Ahlstrand: So this was still during the war?
Frankforter: Yes, yes, because I remember all the great things that happened in Stuyvesant Square: VJ Day and so on. I went to work for Time, Inc., and there I had a job with really basically Life magazine. I was director of photographic exhibitions for Life magazine and I designed and produced 10 exhibitions which traveled worldwide to universities and museums. They first opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It was a very exciting job and I thought I would stay in New York forever. I was just going to be given a raise and I was thrilled. Then I met a young man who asked me to marry him. His name was George Frankforter. My boss, Mr. Mabry, and his secretary, Penelope Budd, said, "Well, you’ve reverted to type," when they met him because I had been going with all sorts of unusual, kind of, Russian poets, English artists and well, unusual types of people, very exciting and unusual. Suddenly, I had met a Harvard graduate who wore Brooks Brothers button down shirts (laughs), had been a captain in the Air Force, flew a P-38. He came from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Well, the family was breathless, in a state of shock, because I said, "We’re going to get married. I’m quitting my job and he’s quitting his." He worked for Life. I came home for Christmas and nobody knew whether he’d ever show up. He wired and said he was coming for New Year’s Eve, and we announced our engagement. We were married in April of 1947 in Toledo, Ohio. He said he was going to take me to San Francisco. We had a wonderful wedding and a glorious time and left Toledo and drove across the country and arrived in beautiful San Francisco and never left. (Laughs) I never wanted to leave.
Ahlstrand: Did you actually live in the city or did you live in Marin right away?
Frankforter: We had apartments in San Francisco for three years, first on Broadway and then Green Street. San Francisco was a very small town at that time. We knew everyone, everyone, older people as well as people our age. We were immediately invited to parties and, oh, it was fascinating, it was wonderful. I was asked to be on various art museum Boards and we chaperoned house parties for people who were slightly younger than we were at Pebble Beach and in Carmel and so on. We just knew everyone because that’s the way it was then. Ladies wore gloves and men wore hats. No one wore blue jeans or Levi’s. I don’t know what else to say now. Oh yes, then we gravitated to Marin County. At that time everyone went to San Mateo or Burlingame to live and I’m talking about rich people; we were not rich. We were really poor. We had no money at the time. We loved Marin, it was rather reminiscent of the east where I’d always wanted to live. I immediately gravitated to Wolfback Ridge where there’s a spectacular view and happened to meet the man whose house was at the top of Spencer Avenue-Wolfback Ridge Road. I invited him home to dinner immediately that night which infuriated my husband. I said, "Look, we’ll have to go and see him and see how he lives." Eventually he went back to New York and we rented his house and lived there for three years.
Ahlstrand: And this is Mario Corbett?
Frankforter: No, this was Bill Crocker who owned KDFC, the radio station, on Mount Beacon. We lived just below Mount Beacon. My husband, George Frankforter, loved living on Wolfback Ridge because he liked open spaces. He had his ID card from wartime and even though all the batteries and bunkers, Spencer Battery and Fort Cronkhite, all of them had soldiers guarding them with loaded guns and ready to shoot any trespassers, George Frankforter managed to hike across that land, Marin Headlands, without being shot. (Laughs)
[End Tape 1, Side A]
[Begin Tape 1, Side B: Wednesday, September 2, 1998]
Frankforter: I’m trying to think of the time…1950. We came to San Francisco in ’47 and moved to Wolfback Ridge in 1950. I was known as an artist but I didn’t have the one-man show until ’55.
Ahlstrand: Okay.
Frankforter: The exhibition was at the DeYoung Museum in December of 1955, and Kitty and Molly were in school. One of the points, questions you asked, how did I know all these people, I’m wondering that myself. I think, looking at those two notebooks that are over there, there was loads of publicity about the exhibition probably because I was a woman; men didn’t get that kind of publicity, but women got it on the society pages and a lot of other columns, too. It was such a new idea because women in San Francisco didn’t do anything. They were just like Toledo women. They were debutantes. Most didn’t even go to college.
Ahlstrand: Let’s back up just a little bit. When you moved to Wolfback Ridge in 1950 you were aware of the Army’s presence, that was pretty obvious if they’re standing around with loaded guns. Were you aware that Gulf Oil was also buying up property around there?
Frankforter: Yes, we should mention that because we lived up there when it was the 2200 acre Silva Cattle Ranch and cows grazed on what’s now the Gerbode Preserve.
Ahlstrand: Earlier, you talked a little bit about this dated idea about women. I like to think of you as a pioneer. You were doing things that people…you know, it’s normal now for a woman to try and juggle family and work and art or whatever they are interested in but that was not normal in the late 40’s and early 50’s when you were starting that. Talk a little bit about how that experience was…
Frankforter: But I never thought [about it in that way]. The life I had chosen for myself was that of an artist. Then I became a wife. When I had children, I added another dimension. It was exciting to me to be an artist, a wife and a mother. It was a life of fulfillment.
Ahlstrand: You became a mother in 1950 when Kitty was born and in ’53 when Molly was born, I think.
Frankforter: Kitty was born in San Francisco in 1950 and then we moved up to Wolfback Ridge. While we were there the Silva Ranch was in what is now the Gerbode Preserve. Sometimes cattle would come across the cattle guard on Mount Beacon and we’d find a cow in our front yard as it were. It wasn’t a yard, it was a steep hillside. At any rate, I went to the auction of cattle, I’m not exactly sure what year it was, but between ’50 and ’53. That was a very exciting part of Marin County history, seeing the cattle auctioned off in this old barn. Some of the ranch land was sold to Gulf Oil Corporation. We weren’t too well aware of what was happening at the time and I think Gulf wanted to keep it quiet. I know now that Gulf wanted to acquire access to the sea for offshore drilling.
I had bought a parcel of land on Wolfback Ridge. While we lived up there I commissioned Mario Corbett, who was quite a famous architect then and had won many AIA awards for his buildings and houses, to design a house for us on my property which was adjacent to the Crocker House in which we were living. It was to be a spiral staircase house with a great curving glass wall and the only divisions in the house being shoji, Japanese screens and the fireplace. It was very exciting, really a thrilling house, with views of the Pacific Ocean on one side and San Francisco Bay on the other, 80-mile-an-hour winds on the deck, but beautiful sunshine and beautiful fog. It was where I wanted to live. We did not build that house because of financial restrictions. In 1953 we bought a house in Mill Valley, where we lived with our two daughters, Katharine Lamson Frankforter and Mary Spalding Frankforter.
Ahlstrand: Where did the Spalding come from?
Frankforter: That was from my husband’s family. She was named after my husband’s mother and Kitty was named after my mother. I haven’t said anything about George Frankforter’s family. They were very, very interesting. His father was Dean of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota and quite a famous violinist. He studied in Germany and, of course, in the German language. He was a doctor, a Ph.D., a great teacher. I admired him. I adored him. I admired Mrs. Frankforter also. They were quite elderly when we were married. So, now we have 2 children and about 9 or 10 dogs (laughs), Norwegian Elkhounds, and we lived in Mill Valley.
Ahlstrand: So how did you raise two little girls and still do your art?
Frankforter: I love children and I, well, this is a question Kitty asked. I was painting one day, a huge canvas, and she said, "Mama, are you an artist or a mama?" I said, "Kitty, I’m both. Being a mama makes it much more exciting being an artist and being an artist makes me a more interesting mother. When you grow up you can be an artist and a mama or you can be a musician. You can be anything you want to be. You just have to be motivated." Well, she was three so I didn’t use the word motivated but I said, "It just makes me a better and more interesting person." I never neglected them. I always carpooled and chauffed them to their piano lessons and their dancing lessons and Girl Scout meetings and so on. When Kitty started school she went to kindergarten at Miss Hamlin’s School in San Francisco. Molly went to Rhoda Kellogg’s nursery school at the age of two. I took them both to San Francisco every morning, two years old and five years old, dropped Kitty at Miss Hamlin’s School on Broadway and took Molly to the Golden Gate Nursery School in North Beach.
This was a period of Beatniks. I was a North Beach artist and a Beatnik and I had a perfectly splendid studio over Reina’s Venice Drug Store in North Beach on Washington Square. There were wonderful bookstores springing up and wonderful coffeehouses. Once a week I invited friends to my studio for a luncheon. We sat on the floor around a big table and a waiter came up from the Fior D’Italia, which was a restaurant underneath my studio and took orders for fabulous Italian luncheons. Each person paid for his own luncheon. The restaurant brought all the linens and silver and great bowls of figs and melons and we had pasta primavera. It was wonderful. I would invite a cross-section of people, literary people, doctors, artists. It was just a great deal of fun. Actually, I was in a North Beach studio being an artist, in the Beatnik period, when the curator of the DeYoung Museum came to ask me if I would like to have an exhibition at the DeYoung Museum. Of course, I would. I had the exhibition in 1955, I think. It was called a one-man show because in those days there weren’t such things as one-woman shows. So we always called it a one-man show. (Laughs)
Ahlstrand: I have to ask, what was George doing while you were hanging out in your studio?
Frankforter: He was working for the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. He was a marine insurance broker, which I consider rather dull but he had to make a living and support his family so he did. He always said that part of the reason he was in love with me was because I was an artist and he thought that was very interesting. He accepted it and actually endorsed it and backed me until I had my one-man show. Then he felt threatened. He was really upset. Because I was on my way to becoming famous. Most of my paintings sold. I got lots of publicity and loads of letters and this was very hard on him. He was very, very threatened. After awhile, when I could see the way things were going, I said I would stop painting for five years until he became an officer of the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. People really advised me against this, they thought I was throwing in the towel, I should not do this, I should continue painting. People would say it was a God-given talent. It isn’t given to you by God. It’s hard work to be an artist and I spent years studying photography and ceramics and sculpture and painting, and I would have liked being an architect. I would have liked being an interior designer. It was my career, it was my profession and suddenly I personally was being threatened because I had this career. This is what men did to you, though. A little nucleus of women who were successful career women and I had meetings occasionally and talked about how our husbands suffered because we were doing something worthwhile and were recognized. I’m not saying we were famous or rich or anything like that but we were recognized as career women and our husbands did not like it. Ahlstrand: One more thing. Did either of your daughters take after you and become artists or do anything artistic?
Frankforter: Well, Kitty is an artist. She lives in Kona, Hawaii, and has many talents. She is hoping to exhibit her beadwork in a gallery in New York City. She wrote poetry as did I and she painted and is an extremely talented ceramic artist. My grandson, Trevor Fee, is an artistically talented young man. Molly is a linguist and she is musical. She plays piano. She has a beautiful singing voice. She has studied the French language for years and received her degree from U.C. Santa Barbara. She originally went to Tours, France to study the French language. So she is a linguist and musician like my mother. People always ask children if they take after their parents and children don’t like that, but it’s okay for you to ask. I think they are both very independent and they’re achievers and we are all very good friends which is important. Molly is now a corporate travel consultant in San Francisco and Kitty is a business consultant as well as an artist who supports herself. None of us have a man in our life right now.
Ahlstrand: Except for Trevor.
Frankforter: Right! (Laughs)
Ahlstrand: One more thing and then we have to stop [for today]. What is your favorite medium to work in? Is it painting or do you like the found objects? What’s your favorite?
Frankforter: What I want to do now all the time is paint.
Ahlstrand: Thank you. We’re going to stop for today and we will pick up and do some more tomorrow.
Frankforter: Okay.
