QI The Book of the Dead

he was seventeen. Dalí would call this ‘the greatest blow I had experienced in my life’. Eight years later, in 1929, things came to a head when his father was made aware of an early Surrealist sketch by Dalí called Sacred Heart which contained an outline of Christ covered by the words: Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother . His father asked him to renounce it publicly. Dalí refused and was physically thrown out of the family home and told never to return (although he claimed he came back soon afterwards with a condom containing his own sperm and handed it to his father saying, ‘Take that. I owe you nothing any more!’).
    The year 1929 proved a turning point for other reasons. It was the year that Dalí joined the Surrealists and made, with Luis Buñuel, the first and best Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou . The most shocking imagery in the film – an eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade, the dead donkeys on the piano – leapt straight from Dalí’s fertile dream life. This was also the year he first met Elena Diakonova, better known as Gala, the violent Russian nymphomaniac who became his muse, business manager and chief tormentor. Though she was married to the writer Paul Eluard at the time, Dalí immediately set out to seduce her. He concocted a malodorous paste from fish glue and cow dung, and daubed himself with it so that he smelt like the local ram. He then shaved his armpits, and stuck an orange geranium behind his ear. The strategy worked: they remained together as a couple until Gala’s death in 1982.
    The relationship probably wasn’t ever consummated – at least not in the usual way. Dalí was (like Andersen) addicted to masturbation and much preferred to offer the oversexed Gala toother men (a practice known as candaulism, after the ancient Lydian king Candaules, who arranged to have his friend surreptitiously watch his wife undress). In return Gala looked after the practical side of their lives, as Dalí was incapable of even paying a taxi fare.
    By 1936 Dalí had become an international sensation, even featuring on the cover of Time magazine. Fame only encouraged him to stage ever more ridiculous stunts. For Christmas, in 1936, he sent Harpo Marx a harp with barbed-wire strings as a present. (Harpo replied with a photograph of himself with bandaged fingers.) When he came to London to deliver a lecture, he wore a full diving suit with plastic hands strapped to the torso and a helmet topped with a Mercedes radiator cap. Sporting a jewelled dagger in his belt, he held two white Russian wolfhounds on a leash with one hand and a billiard cue in the other. He looked fantastic, but it nearly killed him. Dalí hadn’t taken into account the fact that he couldn’t breathe inside his helmet. He started the lecture but soon began to run out of oxygen. The audience didn’t know he was suffocating and Gala had gone out for a coffee. He collapsed and his friends tried to hammer the bolts on the helmet, to no avail. Finally, when Dalí was nearly dead, a worker with a spanner was found who freed him.
    This clownish side to Dalí annoyed the other Surrealists and, in the run up to war, his infantile fantasies quickly lost their charm: ‘I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me.’ When he declared his support for Franco in 1939 the other Surrealists expelled him. His response was typical: ‘There is one difference between the Surrealists and me. I am a surrealist.’
    The other thing that angered his colleagues was his (or rather,Gala’s) knack for making money. André Breton had already christened him ‘Avida Dollars’ (an anagram meaning ‘I want dollars’) and Dalí himself confessed to ‘a pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash’. The next two decades saw him transform himself into the first and biggest ever artist-celebrity, living in New York, working with Walt Disney and Hitchcock, designing the Chupa Chups lollipop wrapper and appearing on a host of TV adverts. He even created his own range of merchandise: artificial fingernails containing mirrors; Bakelite furniture which could be moulded to fit the body; shoes fitted with springs to increase the pleasure of walking; and dresses with anatomical paddings to make women look more attractive. Outrageously he also signed sheets of blank artists’ paper for $10 each (there may be as many as 50,000 still in circulation). By the mid-1960s,