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I went up to see Stieglitz Wednesday afternoon, May 3, 1944. He had recently had two bad heart attacks, but on this day he seemed especially well and strong. His mind was clearer than usual, although he was anxious to talk, especially about himself. It seemed to me that he wanted to make clear his relationship with O'Keeffe although I had never questioned it or inquired. 

He said this wife was jealous, wealthy daughter of a wealthy brewer and his life with her was 27 years of hell - jealous of O'Keeffe, accused him of using her money to support his penniless friends - not Marin, not Hartley, not Weber - she must have meant O'Keeffe. "When you asked me to marry you, I told you I didn't work, I didn't earn money. She had six hundred thousand dollars. I had the income from that to spend. Her brother offered me fifty thousand dollars in cash one day if I would put up a sign somewhere, "Alfred Stieglitz-Photographer" I wouldn't have to work, I wouldn't have to snap one picture, merely a place which could be called my business as a visible evidence of money making. The fifty thousand I could use to convince my wife that I had an income, although I need never go near the photo shop. I refused this offer. My wife threw me out. In 1904 I predicted prohibition; in 1918 my wife lost everything she had in the brewery business. O'Keeffe gave up school teaching and came to New York to paint. She sold me one for $150.00 to a banker and, on his advice, put the money in Florin's. Thirty days later it was gone. I asked my mother and the family if I could bring O'Keeffe to Lake George for the summer. My mother said, "Alfred, you are an attractive man. Two people with the same interests at Lake George all summer will get in trouble and it will be your fault." I told her the man is always to blame. (Stieglitz says, "You and I are men. We can show our feelings. Women can't. They don't dare. If they do, men take advantage of them")

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz went to Lake George. His wife was then so jealous that she told everything everywhere that O'Keeffe was no good. Here it was that Stieglitz spoke with great feeling and said that in being with O'Keeffe there was no intimacy, there were no grounds at all for his wife's jealousy. There had been no living together, no sleeping together, although his wife was insisting that O'Keeffe had seduced him. Later his wife asked him to come back with her for the sake of 16 year old Catherine. Stieglitz sent word to her that if she would invite O'Keeffe to her home to have dinner with him, his wife and daughter and publicly acknowledge that O'Keeffe was not intimate with him, he would come back. This she refused to do.

I had to leave at this point as it was train time, but I think that Stieglitz wanted to give me a complete assurance that O'Keeffe was standing on her own feet as an artist and had not become famous because of his personal feeling towards her.