Tana Takes What She Wants by Rehan Qayoom
Tana de Gámez (9th September 1920 – 5th February 2003) was a Spanish-American author, editor, musician, actress and radio host. She was born in Spain and moved to New York with her family at the age of five. After leaving high school early to support her family, she toured the United States singing and playing the guitar. She won a scholarship to the Theatre of Arts in Hollywood, and appeared in several motion pictures in the United States and Mexico. De Gámez claimed to have attended Nin’s wedding to Hugh Guiler on 3rd March 1923, this is highly unlikely to have been the case since she would have been two years old at the time.
Anaïs Nin and de Gámez first meet on 9th February 1947 at a sexually charged Haitian carnival party the details of which are in The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Tana is one of three ‘woman hungers’ in a group of thirty-five! Nin dresses in a tight white dress without any undergarments, a heavy Arabian gold necklace and is told she had never looked more beautiful, like Cleopatra. Tana is very likely one of the two women who said she makes them wish they were lesbian.
On 19th, Nin asks Tana if she could borrow a Spanish dress that she has. They head to the cellar together. She is so excited to be able to able to borrow it that she kisses her lips ‘childishly’ and Tana responds with fervour. As Nin rushes out, Tana encircles her arms around her from behind and they walk out together. When Nin turns her head back, they share another passionate kiss ‘as lovers, violently and wildly.’ Heading up to Tana’s apartment, she tries on the dress in her bathroom. After she takes off her clothes, Tana dresses her and they kiss again ‘wildly, mouth to mouth, body against body.’ She pulls Nin’s skirt off, saying “Eres una niña, como una niña, like a child” [‘You are a girl, just like a girl, like a child’] and pounces on her, oblivious to her husband who is playing music on his record player next door. In the Diary she is reminded of, or compares Tana to June Miller – ‘the same sun coloring her red-gold hair, tawny, burning eyes, softly curved, but so active, holding my body as a man would. Drunk on desire.’ She tells Nin she is afraid – When Nin returns home, she confides to her diary that this is exactly how she wants to live her life:
This is the way I am! Even if it means death and destruction.
So many desecrations.
In mid-March, Tana invites Nin and her husband Hugh Guiler to a party but when she calls her to confirm, Rupert Pole (who Nin has just begun seeing and would eventually marry) says he is not up to it and suggests they have dinner together instead. So, she makes up an excuse to Tana and they go out in his Ford Model A, later making love in his ‘shabby and unkempt little apartment’.
When Nin’s husband, Hugo greets her at the airport in October 1956 after his short-lived affair with the dancer Faith Dane (3rd October 1923 – 7th April 2020), they visit the beach before shopping. He buys a suit for himself and a cape for Nin, then they dine on champagne and caviar and kisses. She decides to call Karon Kehoe (who she had met at the home of her neighbour Sylvia Ruggles) expecting Hugo would accept her as his mistress. Instead, she becomes infatuated with Nin. Upon arrival, she drinks two martinis, murmurs that she has not slept for two nights and retires to bed. Later, Sylvia, Karon and Nin have lunch in a noisy restaurant. Karon invites Nin with her on a vacation. Nin thinks about it. The next time they meet, they have lunch together with Hugo and visit the beach. Hugo shows no interest in Karon and Nin feels he is not attracted towards her. When she comes dressed in black, heavy bracelets and a silver necklace, Nin identifies with her Siamese cat Mitou with whom Kehoe enacts a violently ‘sensual mock battle’ and sees her as ‘an incarnation of all of my women’. She touches Nin’s arms lightly as they talk on the couch while Hugo is in another room. Nin writes ‘all the musicians and artists of love know the power of that first light touch.’ They head to the bedroom and she confesses that she loves Nin and all at once, she has ‘flowered’ not only into her fictional characters Djuna, Sabina, Lillian (based on people she knew in real life) but her fevered intensity is also that of June, Theruma, Tana.* Over dinner she steals caresses with Nin and holds her hand. Nin responds by sharing two passionate kisses which for her, miss ‘the hardness and firmness of a man.’ She has told Rupert Pole she is living with friends Jim Herlihy and Dick Duane and Jim phones to let her know that Pole has called. Jim told him she was out and that he did not know when she would be back but he instructs the operator to retry in a few minutes as the line is busy. Nin, who is trying to call him from the bathroom is unable to get through while Karon is kissing her hands and nibbling and biting her fingers. She excuses herself and says she has to go to Jim’s to receive Pole’s call. Karon follows and Jim and Dick keep her away while she talks to Pole. She then goes to a bar with Karon who confesses her love again, bordering on obsession but Nin does not desire her. The previous night, she has even dreamt of Karon making love to her but she had a penis and then Karon became Rupert as she was waking up from the dream. Nin is unable to respond to her physically and is put off by the forcefulness of her infatuation even in the face of her unresponsiveness. She recalls the times she has treated men the same way, so she can understand her and respond accordingly. Karon relates her nightmares to Nin and asks permission to imagine her beside her when going to bed (Nin wonders ‘Could anyone say “no”?) She asks if an affair is completely impossible and Nin says it is not but only ‘as one answering to pacify a feverish child.’ Another time, she demands that Nin call her at a given time. She cannot accept that her love is unreciprocated and invites her round to dinner. About her aggressiveness, Nin writes ‘It is strange how possessiveness can suddenly distort the image of a beautiful woman into a faceless force that is ugly.’ But this was not the case when others such as Gonzalo, Rupert or Hugo were possessive because ‘it is different when you love.’ She cannot bring herself to say “I love you.” When they drive past her apartment, Hugo asks why she does not invite her over very often and she reveals that it is because of her possessiveness that she compares to that of her harpist friend Thurema Sokol. Nin still often imagines her and Hugo together ‘To hurt myself, to punish myself for my life with Rupert.’ Daisy Aldan who also had an affair with Kehoe, found her lovemaking to be rough, violent, sadistic and primitive.
It is March 1959 Nin is suffering from a nasty cold and a chesty cough. Just as she is about to hit the bed, Tana calls to inform her she has divorced her husband, closed down her apartment and demands to meet before she leaves for Portugal. She arrives and opens up to Nin for two hours, who is uninterested and feels unable to sympathise with her sorrow. Many years later, Nin recalls the episode as ‘masochistic’ and shocking. Nin wakes up at four in the morning with ‘violent chills’ that would not leave her despite having a hot bath, the electric heating on and two blankets. Running a fever of 104º and vomiting, she calls several doctors, some of whom have answering machines. Dr. Max Jacobson (with whom she once had a ménage à trois) arrives at the crack of dawn and diagnoses double pneumonia. Her maid takes her to the Mount Sinai hospital in a taxi.
By kind permission of The Anaïs Nin Foundation
In March 1964 Hugo writes to Nin reporting that ‘Tana is back from Cuba and talked to me over the phone for about three quarters of an hour’ about the wonders of Cuba and says she would invite him to her apartment along with her friends to show him her photos. Around this time, Nin introduces Tana to Daisy Aldan before they take part in a poetry program at the radio station. Tana reads Spanish poetry ‘magnificently.’ Nin wants to know if Tana and Daisy have made love yet because, as she tells her “Tana takes what she wants”.
* Nin’s biographer Deirdre Bair describes Thurema Sokol as ‘a woman with whom she might have developed a friendship but instead tried to engage in a sort of unfulfilled love affair.’ This is detailed in the volumes of the unexpurgated Diary. She inspired the character of Lillian in the Cities of the Interior novels. In 1947 during her ‘trapeze life’ (when she is continually commuting between her husband and her secret lover Rupert Pole who she has just met) she lies to her husband about Thurema giving a concert recital in Los Angeles and asking Nin to accompany her on a cross-country drive as she is afraid of aeroplanes. When Guiler says he will see her off before going to work, she pretends to speak to Sokol on the telephone and says she is being delayed for two and a half hours, practically pushing him out the door. Seeing him coming back for the umbrella, she rushes out to give it to him. Pole is parking his car as Hugo hails a taxi a mere six feet away. She buzzes Rupert in as she sees Hugo’s taxi turn round the corner from the window. Tristine Rainer records the chain of lies she tells later when Hugo asks as to how Sokol could be performing in New York that evening as advertised in the morning papers – How had she driven back so quickly? She flew. How could she have flown if she was afraid of planes? She had little choice - What about her car? She got someone to drive it back. Rainer muses on how it could be possible that he had not suspected her although recent research carried out by her editor Paul Herron and Kim Krizan suggests that he had eventually become aware of her ‘trapeze’ life to some extent.
SOURCES
Bair, Deirdre. Anaïs Nin: A Biography. (Bloomsbury, 1995).
Fitch, Noël Riley. ANAÏS: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin, (1993).
Krizan, Kim. Spy in the House of Anaïs Nin. (Total Global Domination, 2019).
Nin, Anaïs. Cities of the Interior, (1959).
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Six: 1955-1966. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. (1976).
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Seven: 1966-1974. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. (1980).
Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1939–1947. Edited by Paul Herron. (Swallow Press: Ohio University, 2013).
Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1947-1955. Edited by Paul Herron. (Swallow Press: Ohio University, 2017).
The Diary of Others: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1955-1966. Edited by Paul Herron. (Sky Blue Press, 2021).
Rainer, Tristine. Apprenticed to Venus, (Arcade Publishing, 2017).
