Still no ChessBase Account? learn more > Thousands of hours of high class video training. Openings, Middlegame, Endgame Lessons. The only trouble was, I had been taking birth control pills for the first and only time in my life, and not only had I puffed up like a blimp but my breasts had swollen to look like two pink footballs. Plus they hurt. On the other hand, it would be a great contrast—this large, too-LA surfer girl with an extremely tiny old man in a French suit. Playing chess. Mirandi Babitz: Julian was off doing his thing, taking pictures, so I was pretty much on my own. It was O.K. because I knew the L.A. artists. At least I knew Ed. Evie had already brought him home for Thanksgiving. He loved my mother’s cooking. “Mae Babitz sure is good to her boys,” is what he used to say. The photo with Marcel Duchamp was shot in October 1963 in the Pasadena Art Museum. The director of the museum, Walter Hopps, 31, celebrated Marcel Duchamp's oeuvre with a retrospective. On 7. October the exhibition started with a party to which Hopps had invited a number of hip Californian artists. Among the guests were Marcel Duchamp and his friend and co-worker Man Ray, art dealer Irving Blum, Pop-Art-artist Edward Ruscha, the artists Larry Bell and Billy Al Bengston, the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Hopper, his wife Brooke Hayward, the English Pop-Art-artist Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol. Another guest was Beatrice Wood, "femme fatale" and model for the character of Catherine in Henri-Pierre Roché's novel "Jules et Jim", known through the screen adaptation by Francois Truffaut. Still, Nazi Paikidze flipped the bird at a country forcing Sharia law. Wanting her to wear a garb and cover herself. And she’s like nah I’m hot and I want everyone to see it.

I saw George Herms sitting alone across the room—he was one of the dark-of-the-night Ferus artists. I sat beside him and he said, “You know, Chico is supposed to come to this.” And because we were in Southern California—in Hollywood even—there was no history for us. There were no books or traditions telling us how we could turn out or what anything meant.

Since Walter had left LA, I’d seen him twice in Washington, but then he’d gone to organize the Menil Collection, in Houston, which is famous for having more money than the mere Smithsonian. He was probably down there, filling Mrs. de Menil’s head with his digressions. Anyway, I knew that a couple of days later there’d be the public opening of the show and my parents had been invited, so I could go with them. My father didn’t care about Duchamp but he did have this interest in chess, and since Marcel had announced that he was “retired” from art to only play chess, my father thought he might go and see just what a master this guy was. Maybe this was just Julian trying to get the clothes off one more girl—which he was famous for doing.

Walter was like Proust, he had so many story lines going on in his head. He didn’t restrict his story lines merely to the past and present, he sort of projected them into the future, and once, when we were in Kenny Price’s studio, Kenny told me, “I don’t like Walter to come here like this; when he sees what you’re doing, he suddenly is seven jumps ahead of you. Like he knows what you will be doing. And then, he leans.” He proceeded to digress into a story about how this Lautrec guy was the one who had long ago shown him the work of a teenage artist whose last name was Ferus, but how before Walter could meet Ferus, Ferus committed suicide. Perhaps in Walter’s mind, the reason he killed himself was because nobody encouraged him, nothing in LA existed where someone strange and weird could feel safe. And although Walter never said this out loud, I think the reason the gallery was called Ferus was so never again would someone in Los Angeles have to kill himself over art. A month or so later, I went to Barney’s and found Walter sitting at the counter alone with tacos and a beer, and I said, “So, are you going to forgive me?” Eve Babitz: I don’t know why I didn’t want to go with Julian. I guess because it would have felt like crashing and it didn’t seem like the kind of party you could crash.Some have drawn parallels between her image and Nude Descending a Staircase while others have compared it to Manet’s monumental Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, with its casual approach to nudity. “It’s nothing like that,” Wasser sets the record straight. “It’s Hollywood. Girls got naked, man. It was not artistic, it was sexual.” As for Duchamp’s reaction to the beauty before him: “He was very cool.” Otherwise, I’ll just be “and friend.” Anyone who thinks the nude should have been thinner, or in any way different—to them, I’ll be a floating image of “elsewhere.” Not drugs,” George said. “Art. He was holding art. Probably stuff he stole from me or some other guy’s studio. If you caught him, he’d always say he was saving things from being stepped on, but I always knew he was stealing!”

Maybe it was the spectacle of Walter playing chess with Duchamp “for art” that gave Julian the idea. After all, by 1963 it had been about forty years since Marcel had retired to play chess (or so he wanted the world to think). For forty years someone could have come up with the idea of photographing the master of Nude Descending a Staircase playing chess with a naked woman. But nobody in Paris or New York thought it up. Laurie Pepper: I didn’t know Myrna, but Evie always had the best female friends. They were so far out. The photo remains a powerful symbol of liberation and self-expression. This image captures a unique moment in time when two individuals from different worlds came together to play a game of chess and, in doing so, created an image whose representation and importance will forever echo. The attitudes and actions of Duchamp and Babitz continue to inspire generations to be bold and true to themselves, and the photo remains a testament to their spirit and the times in which they lived. Walter’s kiss goodbye was filled with history. He even asked, “Do you still have that silver bullet I gave you?”Laurie Pepper: When Mirandi was young, she looked just like Brigitte Bardot. She was Brigitte Bardot’s twin. Late in 1990, when the Duchamp-on-the-West-Coast book ( West Coast Duchamp, Greenfield Press) was being prepared, the Shoshana Wayne Gallery used our picture, blown up big on silver paper, to announce its own show of his work in conjunction with a symposium to be held in the Santa Monica Public Library. Unlike the party at the Green Hotel, to this thing I was very invited. In 1937, when my father was still playing in the L.A. Philharmonic, Stravinsky came to conduct. And Stravinsky so loved my beautiful and funny father that later on he became my godfather, and his wife, Vera, and my mother were great friends. My parents and Stravinsky and Vera used to go see Jelly Roll Morton or mariachi bands, or my father would jam with Stuff Smith in dives—they double-dated, you might say. Not that Vera ever got over there being no clothes in L.A. or anything else to remind her of Paris, the only city, in her opinion, where anyone sensible would want to live. But Stravinsky loved the climate, and after World War II, when everyone else who had been on the lam (like Brecht and Thomas Mann and Jean Renoir) returned to Europe, Stravinsky stayed—he wasn’t going anyplace it snowed ever again.