Did Salvador Dalí really sell a blade of grass to Yoko Ono for $10,000?
The thing about Salvador Dalí is that he was so bonkers you can concoct any absurd story about him, and it’ll more or less sound par for the course for the famed Spanish absurdist.
Take the iconic photograph of him taking an anteater for a walk in Paris as a perfect example of this. We know for a fact that he did that, thus the urban legend that the mammal with the absurdly long hooter was his pet spreads as a direct result. The reality is only a little bit less spectacular. The truth is that it was a staged performance art event to honour his friend André Breton, who’d recently passed. Still brilliant, but it’s easy to get caught up in the myth and spread stories that aren’t true.
Which you really don’t have to with Salvador Dalí. The man was mad as a brush, and even his real-life pets prove that. We know for a fact that his most beloved pet was a Colombian ocelot named Babou. He had an irrational, yet pathological fear of grasshoppers. He was once pictured driving a Rolls-Royce stuffed with cauliflowers. He once gave an entire lecture dressed in a Victorian diving suit.
The point is, you really don’t have to make shit up to paint Salvador Dalí as the trickster he absolutely was.
Especially when you’re making stuff up to shame someone who Dalí probably saw as part of his legacy. Someone who has just as many wonderful and ridiculous stunts to their name, but doesn’t get the respect and reverence that Dalí gets for it, because they have the temerity to be two things. The first is something that many art obsessives take issue with, which is being a woman. The second is to have married John Lennon. Something which might have legitimately been something of a mistake, but not in the way millions of misogynist rock dudes have crowed about since.
Yes, one of the most enduring stories of Salvador Dalí’s life is one seemingly made up to make fun of Yoko Ono.
How did Salvador Dalí and Yoko Ono know each other?
For one thing, this story doesn’t come from Salvador Dalí himself.
The guy was a natural raconteur who loved nothing more than spinning tall tales about himself, and yet this particular chestnut remained under wraps until an ex-partner of his, Amanda Lear, spilt the beans about it to the French magazine VSD. Conveniently enough, the model/actress, who was over 35 years Dalí’s junior, waited until long after he croaked it to let anyone in on this story.
This also means that it didn’t come from Yoko Ono, a Dalí obsessive and friend of his since 1969, who would have almost certainly told this story first had it been remotely true. If anyone had seen the funny side of being conned out of a couple of grand by Salvador Dalí, it would have absolutely been her. The story goes that Ono offered Dalí $10,000 for a hair from his moustache. Possibly Ono-ish behaviour, but if we’re going to start analysing the behaviour of all involved, then the story falls apart in what Dalí did next.
You see, Salvador Dalí would have tattooed his own bollocks with the logo of whatever company offered him enough money. The man worshipped money, according to some sources, quite literally. Had Ono offered him that sum, he would have almost certainly parted with a moustache hair and quite possibly a pube to match. According to Lear, he did not. Fearing that Ono (again, a friend of his since 1969) was now a witch and worried about what she could do with a strand of his hair, he sent her a blade of grass. Har har.
Almost certainly total cobblers, but stories knocking the genius that is Yoko Ono pay a pretty penny. Turns out the checks you cash for saying “I was Salvador Dalí’s sloppy seconds after Gala died” don’t go all that far, do they, Mandy?