54 p o r t l a n d monthly maga ine the arts file photos ly never looked at my canvas, concentrating entirely on my condition… When [Igna- cio] Zuloaga came in he was terrifically im- pressed. He said it was by far the best pic- ture I’d ever done. From then on, whenever I’d reached the finishing touches, I would drink black coffee and turn the matter over entirely to my subconscious.” Dorothy’s canvases grew close to room size. lassmate George Biddle intro- duced her to her future husband during her second winter in Paris, when she was 23. “It seemed he had a friend called Waldo Peirce who, he assured me, was just as crazy as I was,” Dorothy writes in her 1938 autobiography Curiouser and Curiouser. “I was interested… I inquired Waldo’s height—he was six feet two. This seemed a dignified height. I told George to produce Waldo, which he did. “We got married in Madrid, in a Ger- man Methodist Church, with the Amer- ican vice-consul, who was a Filipino, to make it legal.” How droll. Why did the world press channel their romance so deeply? To be- gin with, these sexy ex-pats were a perfect match as risk-takers. Harvard football star Waldo had once hopped aboard a freight- er bound for England with classmate John Reed, then dove overboard halfway out of Boston Harbor, leaving Reed to defend himself from charges of Waldo’s “disap- pearance” and “murder.” Waldo’s punch- line for that prank was to meet Reed at the docks when he reached England, having caught a faster ship. They also shared vast fortunes (for Wal- do, it was timber money on both sides of his family). They were a dream couple, with talent overload. Nothing could stop them. “We lived in Spain in the summer and Paris in the winter, but we fought in both places,” Dorothy writes. “We couldn’t agree who was the better artist. In 1914 Father and Mother and the family were in St. Pe- tersburg. I was on the way up to meet them when the War broke out, so I went with them to England, and then home. Waldo joined an ambulance corps and stayed be- hind.” In France. nder the net an aMeriCan ven s “But while her husband was away, the ad- venturous Dorothy learned to fly at the Wright School in Mineola, New York, and earned pilot’s license No. 561 from the Aero Club of America on August 23rd, 1916, becoming the tenth woman in the United States to be licensed to fly,” reports check-six.com. Dorothy was seven full years ahead of Amelia Earhart, tearing up the clouds with her dashing flight instruc- tor, a Navy lieutenant junior grade whose Peirce uses some free time to paint while an ambulence driver during theWar.