Ep. 16: Anaïs Nin and Stan Smith
Living in Acapulco, Annette immersed herself in an active social life among locals, Hollywood celebrities, and other famous travelers.
Annette with her daughter, Cherry.
In Acapulco, Annette designed and sold her jewelry from a small shop in the lobby of Hotel Mirador, took on small acting parts, and continued to paint. Her casita overlooking the city’s stunning crescent-shaped harbor and turquoise waters was often filled to overflowing with visitors from the United States.
During these years Annette would meet two people who would become important in her future.
The first was Anaïs Nin, an essayist and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France, where she was raised. Most people know nothing of Nin today, but in her day she became quite notorious for writing candidly about her own sex life at a time when most writers didn’t go there. She was an enthusiastic financial supporter of Henry Miller, whose erotic works (such as Tropic of Cancer) were shocking but widely read. It was not until she was in her sixties that Nin’s own writing became popular. In 1966, The Diary of Anaïs Nin was published. It spanned 7 volumes and 50 years and contained juicy anecdotes about famous friends, plus narcissistic details of her own life, unusual in her day but common today as the spread of tell-every-dirty-little-detail memoirs have gone viral. A long-form article from 2015 in The Guardian relates Nin’s rise and fall as an author and fills in a lot of fascinating details as it discusses today’s trend for writers to delve deeply into private matters, telling more, perhaps, than readers care to know.
One of the problems in my research about Annette was that many of the people who’d known her outside her family were dead. At times it was difficult to find outside primary sources, people still living who knew her or documents to confirm stories about her adventures. When I stumbled onto word of her friendship with Nin, I flew out to California to dig into UCLA’s special collections to see if I could find any mention of Annette in Nin’s diaries. It was so exciting when I discovered Annette’s name in Anaïs’s handwriting!
Anaïs Nin was impressed by Annette from their first meeting and wrote:
Anais Nin
I met Annette at the Hotel Mirador. . . . My eyes were caught by the brilliant colors and the textures of her dress. . . . She used the full palette of Mexican colors. She wore barbaric jewelry . . . had a mass of short, curled hair aureoled around her head, unruly, in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec women, and under this a delicately chiseled face, a small straight nose, fawn-colored eyes, and a slender neck poised on a voluptuous body. Her movements have a flow and sweep and vivacity and seductiveness. She undulates her hips, her breasts heave like the sea, she is never still. . . . We became friends.
Within the two women’s circle of mutual acquaintances, a young man who had hitchhiked to Acapulco all the way from Chicago confided to Anaïs that Annette’s freedom fascinated him: “She bubbles, her talk is like the foam of the sea, her laughter dispels all concerns.”
Annette and Anaïs would continue their friendship in both Acapulco and New York until Nin’s death in 1977. Wherever Annette went she transported Mexico and her irrepressible gaiety and enthusiasm for life with her and these qualities never ceased to fascinate her friends.
A second meeting that proved life-changing occurred during a season in Acapulco when Annette had a houseful of guests. One of her Mexican boyfriends serenaded her with his guitar and then drove her to the Club de Pesca where she met a group that was on a scientific sea exploration. Among the men was Stan Smith, the Rod & Gun editor of the New York Daily News. Stan wrote stories in sports magazines about wealthy businessmen who joined scientific groups to explore the southern seas. They also competed at sports fishing.
Stan turned out to be skilled in areas that held more interest for Annette, including being an excellent Latin dancer. After a quick drive to the telegraph office to file his story, they went for a ride to enjoy the tropical, starlit night sky. Stan Smith would become Annette’s fourth husband.