"When I was seventeen, Diego began to fall in love with me," Frida once explained to a journalist (subtracting three years from her age). "My father didn't like him because he was a Communist and because they said he looked like a fat, fat, fat Breughel. They said it was like an elephant marrying a dove. Nevertheless, I arranged everything in the Coyoacan town hall for us to be married on the twenty-first of August, 1929." To a friend, Frida said, "I have suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me.... The other accident is Diego." It was Diego Rivera's first legal marriage, although there had been many women in his life and two other long-term relationships. The Russian artist Angelina Beloff lived with him as his common-law wife for ten years in Paris during the 1910s; she bore him a son, who died at an early age. Another lover, Marievna Vorobiev-Stebelska, also had a child by him, a daughter, whom he did not acknowledge as his own for many years. In 1922 in a church ceremony, Diego married the beautiful Mexican Lupe Marin, with whom he had two daughters. According to Mexican law, which required a civil ceremony, this union was not legal, but it was considered a serious commitment by the couple. However, a divorce was not necessary when Diego decided to marry Frida. "I borrowed petticoats, a blouse, and a rebozo from the maid, fixed the special apparatus on my foot so it wouldn't be noticeable, and we were married. Nobody went to the wedding, only my father, who said to Diego, 'Now, look, my daughter is a sick person and all her life she's going to be sick. She's intelligent but not pretty. Think it over awhile if you like, and if you still wish to marry her, marry her, I give you my permission."' According to Diego, Frida's father added he rightfully had to warn him that she was un demonio, a devil. "Then they gave us a big party in Roberto Montenegro's house. Diego got horrendously drunk on tequila, waved his pistol about, broke some man's little finger, and destroyed some other things. Afterward, we got mad at each other; I left crying and went home. A few days went by and Diego came to get me and took me to his house at 104 Reforma." Tina Modotti wrote to Edward Weston in September 1929: "Had I not told you Diego had gotten married? I intended to. A lovely nineteen-year-old girl, of German father and Mexican mother; a painter herself." Modotti added in Spanish, "A ver que sale!" (Let's see how it works out!) Many others were struck by the incongruity of the petite, young Frida marrying the overweight, middle-aged artist. When her school friends heard about her marriage, they were shocked and surprised, considering it una cosa monstruosa, a hideous thing. But Frida was the last unmarried daughter of ill parents in sad financial straits. Her decision had pragmatic as well as romantic repercussions; in fact, Diego paid off the mortgage on her parents' home. Certainly the striking pair's marriage, reported widely in the international press, offered Frida an opportunity to move not only in Mexican but leading European and American artistic and intellectual circles; she relished the contacts she made and the attention she received as the wife of a famous artist. But perhaps ultimately she was attracted by an attribute described by each of Diego's previous companions, his dynamism, by which he vitalized everything and everyone who came near him. He was possessed of a great and genuine warmth along with a capacity for charmingly tender gestures.

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