Dali Planet #88:
Star-studded evenings
The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, now encloses the buildings and former grounds of the Hotel Del Monte where Dali and Gala stayed in 1941. The military moved there 10 years later from Anapolis, but they missed a hell of a party.
In September that year Dali hosted a now-legendary costume bash in the Del Monte’s Bali Room that had among its guests Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Edward G Robinson, Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable and Gloria Vanderbilt, who flew in from New York for the occasion. Shirley Temple, whom Dali could not have pleased with the portrait seen above, was not among the guests.
In keeping with the evening’s forest-at-night theme, everyone had been asked to come in “a costume copied after your dream or in a costume of a primitive animal”, and found themselves dining among 2,000 trees installed for the party and 4,000 newspaper-stuffed gunny sacks hung from the ceiling for a grotto effect.
On one side of the room was an overturned car with a nude woman inside, for the most part unconscious thanks to the sleeping pill she’d been given to keep her still. At one point a man and a woman emerged from the vehicle to perform the “Dance of Death”, as choreographed by Dali, who’s seen here lunching in his suite in a photo from the website of the hotel’s big brother, The Lodge at Pebble Beach.
Behind the long dining table stood 24 nude mannequins with animal heads from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and at one end was a gigantic bed on which Gala — in a unicorn headdress and feeding milk from a Coca-Cola bottle to a tiger cub — lounged with her entourage among giant clam shells. At the other end was a porcupine in a cage. The repast involved sardines served in evening slippers and, bounding from beneath the covers of silver platters, huge, live frogs.
