Theo Meier-CH23C

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FROM BALI TO THAILAND
(Strangers Came Along)

I remember one night I was in the Safari Club on Patpong in Bangkok’s notorious street of sins when Shrimp leaped up on the stage and did a Charlie Chaplin gig. When he finished, and to everyone’s applause, he did a leap from the stage on to the dance floor. It brought more whoops and howls from everyone but what no one had realized was that Shrimp had broken both his legs in his finale. An ambulance came and took him off.

Shrimp’s forte, however, was not acting a Charlie Chaplin role but it was photography and, to be exact, it was photographing nude women. He was truly a master at nudes; his calendars were his proof I believe he did more to dramatize Thai women than did any other photographer.

Shrimp was Theo’s good friend and whenever he was around, whether it be at Theo’s house or at a bar in town, you could be certain there would be lots of laughs. Shrimp was a natural comedian.

“To liven up his parties,” Shrimp recalled, “Theo would dig out a couple boxes filled with musty old Balinese dance costumes he brought from Bali. He and Prince Sandith would dress up and do some hilarious skits in imitation of the dancers of Bali. They would even paint their faces and put on wigs. Of course, I joined them. Everyone laughed until their sides hurt; they would actually roll on the floor. It was always crazy fun at Theo’s house.”

  • Photo caption on page 231 of the book: Theo relaxing at his home in Chiang Mai

Shrimp recalled that Theo was very protective of his “girls.” For a party at his house he would bring in several dancers from town to perform, girls fourteen and fifteen. When the party was over Theo drove them back into town himself. “This one night I had started out by foot to the main road to where I could get a baht bus into town,” Shrimp continued. “Theo drove up with his girls in his Jeep. I asked if he could give me a lift. There was room for me, but he refused. I guess he didn’t trust me in the same vehicle. “You are young enough so walk into town,” he said and drove off. A minute later Prince Sandith drove up and gave me a lift so that was okay.”

Anyone who visited Theo in Chiang Mai was certain to see a house filled with young Thai girls, many who were not yet in their teens. Theo and Yattlie “recruited” the girls mostly from the hill tribes. Theo admitted he paid money to their families, and in this sense he bought them, but he disliked using the term “bought.” He gave them, he said, an opportunity they would not have had otherwise. Once they were members of Theo’s household, their lives greatly changed. Theo and Yattlie educated them, taught them good manners, how to play musical instruments and groomed them for later employment in the business world. Of course, the young girls also provided Theo with a steady market of models for his painting.

Sometime later when I was at the Singapore Yacht Club talking to members at the bar, I mentioned seeing all the delightful young maidens at Theo’s house in Chiang Mai. The next morning an Australian chap came out to my schooner and asked if he could come board. I had no idea what he could possibly want.

“Perhaps you can help me,” he said as he climbed aboard. He was straight to the point. “I am looking for an Asian wife.”

I had heard this over and over from many farangs, foreign men, asking the same question. But in this case it was a bit different. His name was Jake and at the time I met him I didn’t give him much thought. He was just one of the many passing faces that came and went. Perhaps the fact that there was nothing really distinctive about him was why I didn’t give him second thoughts. If you saw him on the street you probably wouldn’t look twice at him. Everything about him was average. He was average height with hair between brown and blond. He kept it medium length. His sideburns were average. He was always dean-shaven. His clothes were what most people wore in Singapore, slacks and sports shirts.

But what did prove interesting was when he told me why he wanted an Asia wife. He was from a cattle station in the Australian Outback and he found life there boring without a woman. So that was it: he wanted to take back to Australia an Asian wife. He explained that “Aussie Sheila’s” no longer want such a life and he heard about Asian women making good wives. He said, “You don’t know what it is like to be lonely on the Outback, do you?” No, I didn’t know. He explained that he thought he could find what he wanted in Singapore, but that was a mistake. “They’re all glitter here, just like Sydney Sheilas.” He then went to the Philippines and consulted a marriage agent. That didn’t work. Not one of the Philippine ladies turned him down. “They said from the very start that they loved me and wanted to get hitched, right away,” he said, “Never could tell if they were sincere enough.”

Perhaps, he thought, a Japanese woman might be good, but then he reasoned that the climate would be tough on them. He liked Japanese women, the way they took care of their men, but the heat most likely would do them in. He considered a Malaysian wife but to marry a Malay girl he would have to become Muslim. He’d have to say prayers five times a day. Go to Mecca. No eating pork. Same for Indonesia. “They too are Muslims,” he said.

Maybe Bali, he thought, but he didn’t want his woman carrying water around in jugs on her head. Then he thought about Thailand. Thai women, he heard, are adaptable and fun loving. “They make good wives, they say. But not a city girl from Bangkok. No, she has to be an up-country girl. A farm girl like you see working in the fields.”

Poor Jake. He was tied to an image that he himself created. He knew that love was not enough, that there had to be a higher devotion, but his mistake was that he didn’t know what that devotion was.

I simply dismissed Jake’s request and to pacify him I said I’d see what I could do. About a week or two later I was sitting with Theo and Yattlie and in a casual conversation I mentioned Jake, about his looking for a Thai wife. Theo laughed but not Yattlie. No sooner had the words come out than she tore into me like one of those temple dogs tear at farangs.

“You white men, you all same same,” she screamed. “You come Thailand, and tink you can buy woman. What do you rink! You crazy or somep’n?”

“Yattlie,” I said, and threw up my hands in surrender, “no offense. I am sorry. I just know this guy who lives in Singapore and he wants a Thai wife to take back home to Australia. That’s all.”

“Him no good,” she continued. “What him tink!”

“Yattlie, look, I’m sorry. He’s a nice guy, and he’s quite serious.”

I then remembered something that Jake had said to me that night, about his willingness to pay a dowry. I mentioned this to Yattlie.

“How much he pay?” she asked.

“He said that he had five thousand dollars,” I replied. “Five thousand dollah?” she questioned.

“Yes, he’s got plenty of money; he’s not a poor man. In fact, I understand he is quite well off. The money is for the wife’s family. It’s a custom in the West.”

She thought about this for a long time. “Well,” she finally said, “if he want give money pay mama and papa, that okay, maybe.” The subject changed to other topics.

I thought it was over, forgotten, but the next morning, when Yattlie was pouring tea at breakfast, she started talking about a Shan hill tribe girl who would make a good wife. Then, forgetting the anger she displayed the night before, she now began telling me she could arrange such a marriage. She said things like “a good hill tribe girl” and that her family is poor and “needs money.”

When I got back to Singapore, I phoned Jake.

I never did meet the girl, but Yattlie did show me her photograph when she disembarked from the train in Bangkok after arriving from Chiang Mai. Jake was there too. He had come up by train from Singapore and planned to return with Yattlie to Chiang Mai that same evening. Naturally he was anxious to meet his bride-to-be and didn’t want to linger around Bangkok. I spent part of the day with them, and all Yattlie could do was expound on the charms of the hill tribe girl that Jake was about to take for his wife. Yattlie had made the arrangements. I have to admit, judging by the photograph, the girl was quite a beauty, although a trifle young looking. But Jake seemed very pleased and that evening he and Yattlie boarded the night train to Chiang Mai. I was there to see them off. Yattlie was pleased and I had never seen her so happy. She took over Jake like a mother hen does with her chicks, constantly asking him if he was comfortable. She wanted to know was he thirsty, or hungry, and was his passport and his money safe in his money belt. She asked him to check to make sure. A bit annoyed, he zipped open the belt to show her that the money was still there.

I bid them farewell as the train pulled out of Hualampong Station; that was the last time I saw Jake.

Several months had passed before I got back to Chiang Mai and, as always, I was very excited about seeing Theo and Yattlie. But it did not go as well as I expected. Theo was alone in the house when I arrived, working on a new canvas in his studio. He lost no time to tell me that Yattlie wasn’t too happy with my friend Jake.

“My friend, I hardly know him,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Yattlie will get over it. It will take time. “

He then explained what had gone wrong. Jake became obstinate for some reason and refused to let Yattlie help with the matchmaking, and he even insisted that he travel to the girl’s village alone. He also refused to repay Yattlie for the money that she spent helping him. “You know how that sets with Thai women,” Theo said. “Don’t ever try to cheat a Thai woman. You know what they can do!”

I know what Thai women can do, especially when you get caught cheating on them. But I didn’t want to get into that so I quickly asked, “What happened to Jake then?”

Theo didn’t know, which came as a shock. Jake didn’t stop to visit them on his return to Singapore. “He completely avoided us,” Theo said. “He just vanished, without a word.”

I left the house before Yattlie returned, pleased to avoid any argument that was sure to happen. I was terribly disappointed with Jake. It wasn’t very honorable of him to act the way he did. Yattlie had spent time and money helping him but I wondered if he might have felt that she was taking advantage of him. Maybe Yattlie wanted a big cut, a healthy commission and Jake didn’t think it was right. He didn’t understand the Thai mind. I decided I would pay Jake a visit when I returned to Singapore, that is, if he was still there and had not returned with his bride to Australia. When I arrived a couple of weeks later, I took a taxi to Sophia Road. I knocked at the door of his apartment, not knowing who might answer. A new tenant, an Englishman, opened the door. He knew nothing about anybody named Jake. I wasn’t much help when he asked what Jake’s last name was. You know, I never did know Jake’s last name. I don’t think anybody knew his last name. The man suggested I talk to the landlady.

Madam Chew was a nasty Chinese landlady who had no love for foreigners. Like most Singapore Chinese, she called them “foreign devils.” She was as irate as Yattlie had been in Chiang Mai, ranting at the top of her voice, flashing a mouth of gold-filled teeth in anger. What could Jake have done to deserve such wrath? She was not the easiest person to understand, as her English was a mixture with Cantonese. She didn’t speak Mandarin. Eventually, after much effort, I was able to gather what she said.

It seems Jake hadn’t paid his rent for several months and so Madam Chew had sold all his belongings, which she was reluctant to admit.

“You mean he went home, back to Australia, without paying his rent?” I asked.

“No, it wasn’t that,” she explained. “He never returned from northern Thailand.”

Jake never left the hill tribe village. Did the hill tribe people do him in for his money? I did mention it to Theo, but he said it was best to forget it. What had been done had been done.

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Theo Meier-CH23B

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THE HOUSE THAT THEO BUILT
(Welcoming New Friends)

Theo’s masterful use of colors characterized the murals. In all three panels, the world of the gods was painted in bright, light tones, especially in blue and white. The world of men, on the other hand, was two-dimensional, dominated by gold-orange, red, and brown shades.

Theo spent weeks painting the murals, putting his soul into his work. When they were completed, I helped him sadly pack them for shipping which was no easy task. I thought Yattlie was going to break down in tears when they were crated and gone. We had to calm her down. She hated not only to see the murals go, she hated to see any of Theo’s paintings go. “How else can an artist survive unless he sells his work?” Theo explained to her over and over, but still, each time someone came to the house to buy a painting she acted the same. There were times it became downright embarrassing when a customer backed out from a sale at a time when Theo especially needed the money.

Yattlie had her own logic on the subject of Theo selling his paintings.

“Okay then,” she said meaningfully, “me go Bangkok sleep with rich American tourist, and come home with money and buy paintings. Same, same you. You take money for painting. You sell you self”

“Fine, ” Theo said, maybe pointing to a new sarong she was wearing, “no sell. How we make money?”

“Like Thai people,” I remember her saying to Theo. “We go fishing. Sell fish. We cut coconuts.”

Yattlie was serious and Theo loved her for it. In her belief it was no different from a woman selling her body than Theo selling a painting that he put his heart into.

Theo felt much the same as Yattlie. He too hated parting with his paintings. I remember him once saying he wished he had money for then he could buy all his paintings back. It might have been possible for him to buy them at those prices, but not today.

Painting was Theo’s vocation but his avocation extended far beyond that. He was interested in many things that included dance, music and cooking. He and Yattlie traveled more than once to Bangkok see a ballet, and when he painted in his studio he listened to good music and could tell Shostakovich from Borodin. But it was his cooking where Theo excelled.

With his cooking, you can say he was a gourmet, with an amazing knowledge of herbs. A meal at Theo’s was another memorable experience. When I visited him we started lunch at noon and at dusk we were still dining, and getting ready for the evening meal. I enjoyed going to the market with Theo to do the shopping. Many times I drove back to the house trying to balance two squealing, suckling pigs on my lap.

  • Photo caption on page 226 of the book: Theo showing me our snacks for dinner, baby frogs on a skewer.

Theo supervised the preparation of all the dishes himself It might be a special raw fish, a recipe that he learned in the Marquesas called poisson cru, raw fish marinated with lime juice and soaked in coconut milk. Then there was lawar that Theo mastered in Bali. It consisted of boiled young jackfruit, long beans, young papaya, and raw coconut, finely chopped, to which was added cooked minced pork. It took Theo’s good hand to mix the ingredients with perfect proportions of fried sliced garlic, sliced shallots, and at least fourteen different spices. Theo was very strict with the fourteen different spices. And it had to be fourteen, not one less nor one more. And there were sausages from Chiang Mai and a special roast duck, and tiny sweet potatoes, hearts of palm in oil, red cabbage and a salad of six greens.

And in the background when we dined, there were the soft tones of gamelan music off in the distance.

One such get-together I never wanted to miss was Theo’s birthday party every March 30th. Theo would remind me long in advance not to forget it. It was a time not to be forgotten.

The villagers loved Theo’s birthday parties. They had an excuse to celebrate, although Thais never needed such an excuse. Before activities started, they sent to the house their musical and dancing groups. They even provided a display of sword fighting which resulted in real cuts and real bruises. Celebrations would start with five monks coming to pray early in the morning. Theo would stage a big lunch for the villagers, and in the late afternoon the guests would begin to arrive. Bartenders, shopkeepers, people from the diplomatic corps from a dozen countries, artists, writers and many from the royal family including Prince Sandith and his brother Prince Kharsi and their wives. The processions from the village to his house, less than a mile, often took two hours. Singing and dancing and shuffling along, with plenty of bottles of local drink passed around.

The party would go on all night long. The next morning everyone went to the temple where there were more dances and music, and drummers who came from all the temples. “Overwhelming numbers of people came to Theo’s birthday parties.” Vince Fisher, another long-time friend of Theo’s, remembered. “You could find just about anyone there.” Whenever I arrived at Theo’s house there would be no telling who that “everyone” might be. One time I arrived to find that the movie director Roman Polanski was Theo’s houseguest. Prince Sandith’s wife Christine had met him at a party in Paris-just after his wife Sharon Tate had been murdered –and invited him to Bangkok. Once in Bangkok Sandith took him up to Chiang Mai where he met Theo. He and Theo hit it off from the start. Every year thereafter the director would come for a holiday to spend with Theo. There would be big meals, drinking and women.

  • Photo caption on page 228 of the book: Roman Polanski was a frequent visitor to Theo’s place in Chiang Mai.

Polanski was laid back, a slight figure in a floppy beige sweater, jeans and sneakers. In spite of the horrible ordeal he had gone through, he outwardly appeared carefree without a worry, but I wondered if this was only a front. It was near impossible not to reflect on the problems and tragedies that had beset his life. He grew up in the Polish ghetto of Krakow and narrowly escaped the Nazi roundup of Jews in that city. When the Germans sealed off the Jewish ghetto in 1940, his father shouted to him to run which fortunately he did and made good his escape. His mother died in Auschwitz, and young Polanski had a tough time of it in the squalor and brutality of postwar Poland. He took up the study of filmmaking. His first full-length feature film after graduation, “Knife in the Water,” won awards and, most important, his ticket to the West.

He eventually made it to America, and having his ambition fulfilled he began directing movies, The film that brought him fame and world attention was “Rosemary’s Baby,” the story of the young couple who moved into a new apartment, only to be surrounded by peculiar neighbors and occurrences.

After he settled in America, more horrors followed: While he was on a film shoot in London, his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, and her friends were brutally slain by the followers of Charles Manson. Tate had been nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance in “Valley of the Dolls”. She also appeared regularly in fashion magazines as a model and cover girl. Polanski went into shock at the news.

Polanski’s time of troubles were not over just yet. After the death of his wife, his life took a sinister turn. As one reporter said, ”After his wife had been killed by the Charles Manson ‘family’ a few years earlier, he entered into a decade long downward spiral of drugs and debauchery and generally ill-advised behavior. It was not a great time in his career or his personal life.”

While on a photographic shoot at Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood home, he was accused of sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old model.

Maintaining the girl was sexually experienced and had consented, Polanski spent forty-two days in prison undergoing psychiatric tests. Awaiting trial he entered into a plea deal in which he pleaded to a reduced charge. When he learned that the judge had turned sour on the bargain deal, he absconded and became a fugitive of the law from the United States government. The affair was to plague him the rest of his adult life.

Polanski felt very much at home in Chiang Mai, although Yattlie looked with disdain every time he came. His arrival heralded more parties and good times. Yattlie recalled that Theo and Polanski got along fine until Polanski tried to teach Theo how to eat. I could understand Theo’s anger recalling that night when he knocked a glass from my hand after I had mixed brandy and Benedictine, and called the drink B&B. I had made the mistake of saying it was what the good people of Europe drank. “That was why I left Europe,” he reminded me.

Rolf von Bueren was certain to come up from Bangkok when Polanski was there. Rolf was an old friend of Theo’s. Rolf with his family ran a business that sold high-end jewelry and decorations. Originally from Germany, Rolf moved into his Thai traditional house the Soi 23 Sukhumvit in the early 1970s. He lives here with Helen, his half-Thai and half-Scottish wife.

One night, Prince Sandith, Vince Fisher, Rolf, Theo and Polanski went out for a night on the town. They had a blast. Years later the people of Chiang Mai still talk about it. Yattlie was upset for weeks to come. She couldn’t go into town without someone mentioning it to her. Yattlie was not one who easily embarrassed but this time she was. Theo loved to entertain friends and visitors to his house in Chiang Mai. “We had some grand times there,” recalls Patrick Gavin, better known by everyone as Shrimp. He was a marvelous photographer and a longtime resident of Thailand. He had mastered the Thai language so well that he could keep the Thais in stitches with jokes in their own tongue. He could act out a Charlie Chaplin skit better than Charlie Chaplin could.

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Theo Meier-CH23A

Back –   Chapter 23A   – Next →

THE HOUSE THAT THEO BUILT

With all the sadness and grief that came from Bali, Theo fought hard to put his thoughts aside, and what made it worse was his knowing there was nothing he could do about it. He had to grin and bear it as distasteful as it was to him. He found it best to put his energies into his work rather than succumb to self-pity and regrets, and he had to stop questioning himself, that he had done the right thing by leaving Bali and deserting his friends. No, he had his work, his painting, but there was also something else he wanted to do and kept putting off, and that was to finish the designs on the Thai house he wanted to build.

Some years before, in anticipation of building a house one day, he had bought a tract of land on the bank of the Ping River eight miles north of Chiang Mai. When the lot was nothing more than weeds and overgrowth, he and Yattlie would walk the property and pace out the dimensions of their house. The imaginary house became a dream.

Theo had shown me preliminary sketches of the house when I went to visit him and Yattlie when they were still living at Wat Dorn. I could see it was not going to be an ordinary house.

Theo knew exactly what he wanted. The idea came in part from a house that Jim Thompson had assembled on a klong in Bangkok. Thompson was an American businessman cum architect who revitalized the Thai silk and textile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. It wasn’t long after Theo settled in Thailand that Thompson put together what was to be the highlight of his architectural achievement, a new home to showcase his art collection. The house was formed from parts of four old farmhouses that he bought up country, and which had to be dismantled and moved to Bangkok. The house was completed in 1958.

The Jim Thompson House, as it came to be known, wasn’t Thompson’s only architectural achievement. He also built in Bangkok, under the same principle, another Thai house for his friend Connie Mangaskau, an antique dealer. It too became a showpiece, and Connie, too, became a legend.

Theo outlined his plan to me as we sat on the floor on the veranda at Wat Dorn. He spread out his artistically crafted drawings before us, and then to hold them down from a breeze blowing on the verandah, he grabbed my Mekong glass, of course after making me down the drink in one gulp, and placed the glass on one corner of the drawings and put his hastily emptied glass on another corner. His toes served the purpose for the other corners. He called for Yattlie to bring a paintbrush, and when she did, it became his pointer. His traditional Thai house came to life.

Theo took the concept of the Jim Thompson house and expanded it. The floor space had to be right, with ample room for a studio, as well as the ceiling height. He liked high-beamed ceilings. He needed light, plenty of light, yet he wanted the place to be surrounded by trees. That meant it had to be high off the ground, ten feet or more, He wanted a guesthouse and separate cookhouse, plus other quarters for servants. The only modern thing about the house would be a tiled bathroom with tub and shower, and a toilet that flushed.

Much as Jim Thompson had done, Theo wanted to buy old Thai traditional houses and move them to his property on the bank of the river. It sounded like a monumental task and I wondered if the Mekong and soda was speaking. The question was-could he pull it off for Theo wasn’t a Jim Thompson with unlimited funds. But I should have known, you couldn’t underestimate Theo Meier. The next time I visited him and Yattlie they announced they had what they wanted. After months of searching they found two one-hundred-year old houses that would fit Theo’s scheme of things. The fact that one was a hundred miles away in the Mae Taeng District did not bother him. He had workers dismantle the houses with care, marking each timber frame and transport them all to their new location, the empty lot on the river. Now all he had to do was assemble them.

The next thing I heard the construction project had begun.

“It all came possible, financially, overnight,” Theo said. “I had come into some money for building the house from the proceeds for the sale of my paintings at an exhibition at the ‘Karlsburg’ Italian Restaurant in Basel, a restaurant belonging to my friend Enea.” With the money from the sale he was now prepared to make his dream house come true.

  • Photo caption on page 219 of the book:  Theo’s handwritten sign on the gate marking the entrance to his house in Chiang Mai.

I was most anxious to see the new house, and when I did, I thought it was a Theo painting come to life. It was that grand. It was exactly as he had planned and sketched it. “I have to give credit to Yattlie,” he said. Without her I could not have done it.”

The house was unpainted teak, stained red, suspended high above ground on huge poles. Around the house were gardens with flowering plants and patches of bamboo as seen in Chinese paintings. Statues and carvings were everywhere, and all seemed to blend with the pattern. Balinese carvings made up the eaves at the edge of the roof and lintels above the doors. Most carvings were demons, the protectors and “good” demons from the Ramayana story. For decorations Theo brought many pieces direct from Bali. For others he scoured the local market which included many priceless antique pieces. Mrs. Banyen, owner of the largest antique emporium in the north, was a great help. Theo had great respect for Mrs. Banyen. A hill tribe girl who came to Chiang Mai on her bicycle right after the war selling her wares. She then opened a small shop on Wulai Road which continued to grow over the years. All Theo had to do was tell Mrs. Banyen what he wanted and he got it. If she didn’t have it on hand, she had it made up.

  • Photo caption on page 220 of the book:  Theo’s Traditional Thai house in Chiang Mai that he had constructed from old houses he bought upcountry.

It was strange, indeed, for me to be invited by Theo to stay in his guesthouse on the river, and to awake in the morning and momentarily forget where I was. I’d look up at the rafters and ceiling overhead-there were carvings everywhere. It was weird and beautiful.

The river gave the house its mood. In the early morning at dawn a soft mist rose up from the water and lent a feeling of mystery to the place. In the evening Thais on the opposite bank came down to the water to bathe and you could hear their gentle laughter.

  • Photo caption on page 221 of the book:  Yattlie, Theo’s wife, was instrumental in  designing  their Thai house in Chiang Mai. Here she is, clowning around, coming down the steps.

The whole experience of a visit with Theo was something not easily forgotten. I found myself surrounded by a dream that seemed unreal. It was not only the house and environment he created, it was the overpowering dominance of the man himself He radiated authority and you knew immediately if you said something contrary to his belief, He was not going to let you get away with it. I recall taking a Japanese photographer, Mike Yamashita, to visit Theo one evening. The photographer made some innocent remark about painters which no one took seriously, except for Theo. Ten or fifteen minutes passed when Theo, for no obvious reason whatsoever, got up from his chair, walked across the room, and punched Mike right smack in the nose. I had to get Mike out of there before Theo bounced on him again. It’s interesting to note that Mike became a staff photographer for National Geographic magazine, and one of the highest paid photographers in America. Mike was very understanding why Theo did what he did. He was aware of what Theo had gone through during the war.

  • Photo caption on page 222 of the book:  Everyone had fun at Theo’s parties but he topped them all. No one had more fun than he had.

I arrived at Theo’s house another time just as he was putting the finishing touches to three large murals which now hang in a hospital in Heidelberg. In some remote way the paintings might be the reason Theo punched photographer Mike Yamashita in the nose that night. The three murals depicted the Balinese version of how disease came to earth and how it can be cured. Theo had completed a series of similar Bali paintings, although much smaller, which were confiscated by the Japanese and put aboard a ship sailing to Japan. He watched the ship bombed in the Straits and go down with his art. He hated the Japanese after that.

The new murals were truly a masterpiece. Each panel stood seven feet high and four feet wide. When Theo first heard about the legend for the cure for illnesses, he became intrigued. It told of the Balinese version of the Sudamala legend from the Indian cultural area. In time the legend became the basis for folk medicine in Bali. The impact of the legend hit Theo hard. Theo explained to me the legend, which he did with great theatrics, with arms waving, with his whole body acting it out while pointing to the images on the murals. Sir Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” could not have done better.

  • Photo caption on page 223 of the book:  Theo himself prepared his  three murals-depicting the cure for illness-for shipment  to  Switzerland. Each panels was seven feet high and required special care. I took these photographs when Theo was creating the mural.

“On a lotus-throne on the mountain of the gods sits Siva,” Theo explained with emphasis-“the mightiest of the gods.” He continued, now with the tone of sadness. “One day, he felt compelled to test the fidelity of his wife, Uma. He pretended to be ill, and asked her to obtain for his cure the milk of a white cow. Uma descended to Earth, and there met a cow herder with a white cow and a calf. Inflamed with the beauty of the goddess, he would not supply the milk she required unless she granted him her favors. Hesitating, full of shame and guilt, she eventually consented. She had no inkling that Siva himself had assumed the guise of the cow herder. The gods begged Siva not to receive Uma back in Heaven for her body, polluted through sin, would upset the cosmic equilibrium. Siva thus exiled Uma to Earth whereupon she changed herself into a demon, the Goddess of Death. Corpses became her food; but the supply was soon exhausted. Then she begged the God of Fire, Brahma, whose throne is a volcano, to grant her magic powers through which she can make people ill, and cause them to die.” After listening to Theo that afternoon, I walked away exhausted, completely wrung out. Maybe limp would be a better explanation. I could imagine now, after listening to his heartfelt explanation of the Balinese cure for illness, not only the effort but the emotion as well that he put into the paintings. Such creations for Theo were not merely an act of simply applying paint on a canvas. They were pouring out his soul.

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Theo Meier-CH22C

Back –   Chapter 22C   – Next →

FROM BALI TO THAILAND
(Friendship with the Painter)

I have to admit, as I mentioned before, I was a bit disappointed. I found not an eccentric South Sea island painter with a mad look in his eye, but on the contrary a very sober looking gentleman in his mid-fifties. He was dean-shaven and wore knee-length shorts and a bright batik shirt. Except for the strong Shan cheroot he was smoking he could easily have passed for a Swiss banker on holiday. He was very polite, and spoke in a distinctive German accent, and immediately signaled for servant girls to bring us drinks.

That began my friendship with Theo Meier.

At that first introduction Theo and I discovered we had something very much in common-we had both lived in Tahiti. Although Theo lived there some years before me, there were still a few people left whom we both knew. There were the McCullens from Moorea, the shopkeeper Bob McKitteridge from Nuka Hiva and many others. Unfortunately, Nordoff and Hall of the Bounty fame had both passed away but Quinn’s Tahitian Hut on the Papeete waterfront was still stacking them in on boat days. We loved swapping tales about Tahiti and the islands. Theo also delighted in showing me his photographs he had taken in the islands. He was a marvelous and gifted photographer. “Why shouldn’t I be,” he laughed, lighting up a cheroot. “With Henri Cartier-Bresson my teacher, why not?”

  • Photo caption on page 211 of the book:  Here we see Willy photographing a Thai Airways hostess. He was proud of his part time position with the airlines.

Whenever I arrived for a visit in Chiang Mai the routine was always the same. Theo welcomed me and before anything he would lead me to his studio, show me his latest work, generally a dozen or so canvasses, some mural size, and we would then go to the verandah and slump down into comfortable cane chairs with Mekongs and sodas and we would start again about the McCullens and the McKitteridges. We would sit and discuss people we knew and talk about the old times in the islands. We were like two old women gossiping with small talk no one else could understand, but it was the breath of life to Theo. We were frightfully boring to anyone but ourselves. And poor Yattlie, I do believe she dreaded seeing me arrive, although her reception was always very warm.

I learned more about Theo’s early years from old photographs he kept than from our conversations. He had literally hundreds upon hundreds of them, stuffed in envelopes and cardboard boxes which he kept tucked away in drawers and on shelves in his studio.

Willy sometimes came up to Chiang Mai with me. He had become a part time photographer for Thai Airways, and you can be sure he told everyone. He now had status.

Willy loved rummaging through Theo’s photographs but he was very discrete about it. I wondered about this behaviour and then let it pass. Willy was always up to something and often what he said went in one ear and out the other. But this was one time I should have paid attention. The photographs and Theo and my talk about Bali began to have an effect on Willy. Still, I didn’t get the connection with Willy and Theo’s photographs. The next thing Willy ran off to Bali and I hadn’t heard from him for a while. What trouble was he up to now?

Indeed, the photographs and our talk about Bali had so intrigued Willy that he went to the island to see for himself what it was all about. Before long he was making frequent trips to Bali, and then one day when I was in my office at Bangkok World I received a message from Willy in Denpasar. He was getting married to a Balinese dancer and invited me to the wedding. He insisted that I attend. Was this another of Willy’s antics?

“It will be an official Balinese wedding ceremony,” he said. “You don’t want to miss it.”

Willy was right. A traditional Balinese wedding could be interesting. I booked a flight but when I arrived I was running late. I had almost missed the ceremony.

“Never mind, “Willy said.” It’s not over.”

I had to look twice at Willy when I laid eyes on him. It took all I could do to suppress laughing. He was dressed in his Balinese wedding costume. He even had a kris dagger with its curved blade tucked into his waistband. “Come see, we are having the tooth filing ceremony,” he added.

I followed him to a shaded pavilion. A priest stood over Willy’s wife-to-be. She was laid back on a silk-covered mattress so that her head fell back over the edge. I could not see her face.

Placed on a low table next to the priest was an earthen pot from which protruded a couple of large mechanic’s files such as you might find in a motor workshop. One could only look on with horror for what was about to happen.

After intoning a brief prayer, the priest took one of the files and began to grind away at the girl’s upper teeth. A chorus of women chanters sang a monotonous dirge. “She can take it,” Willy said and I wondered what he would do when it was his turn.

“If she can take it, why the tears?” I asked. Before Willy could reply, the girl sat up. I did a double take. I couldn’t believe it. I recognized her from the paintings Theo had made of her. The girl was Rubic, Rubic from Bedulu.

“Rubic,” I exclaimed. “It’s Rubic.”

“Right, now you can meet her,” Willy said.

I didn’t want to meet her. I didn’t’ want to believe it was her. I knew instantly that Theo did not know that she and Willy were getting married. And I was right. Theo didn’t know.

“How did it happen?” I asked Willy. “How did you meet her?”

Willy explained and I wished he hadn’t. It was best I didn’t know. It was a real slap in the face with Theo, and all the while Willy thought it was rather clever on his part. Once he started bragging he couldn’t stop talking. He had been up to his old tricks.

When we were rummaging through Theo’s photographs at his house in Wat Dorn, Willy had seen Rubic’s picture with her name written on the back. He stuck the photograph into his pocket and went to Bali and looked her up. That wasn’t too difficult. Everyone in Bali knew her. Willy lied to her and her family and said Theo had sent him. He was accepted. And why not? Willy came with Theo’s endorsement. When he asked for Rubic’s hand in marriage, they agreed.

  • Photo caption on page 214 of the book:  Rubic, right, and I seen here chatting just after her marriage to Willy Mettler. It was a traditional Balinese wedding, tooth filing and all.  Willy participated but wanted to take pictures at the same time. Theo knew nothing about the marriage.

Theo would, of course, have voiced a different story. I was glad that I wasn’t present in Chiang Mai when Willy took Rubic there for a visit. I never fully got to know what happened, and Rubic never explained it, but Theo received them both with best wishes.

As a travel writer for Bangkok World I had to travel a great deal of the time, and whenever I was away for a while, I enjoyed taking the train up to Chiang Mai to spend time with Theo. As the years passed Theo began to settle quite comfortably in Chiang Mai. He even planned to build a traditional Thai teak house on the Ping River. I knew he missed Bali, but he also realized he was fortunate to have left the island when he did. Bali was witnessing its worst time of troubles in its long turbulent history. In fact one of the biggest massacres in history took place in Indonesia in the years 1965 and 1966, the years Theo began building his Thai house. The record shows that around half a million people were killed in the suppression of the Communist Party of Indonesia, the party of which Sukarno was leader. Bali was not immune, The Balinese felt that their whole culture and religion were threatened and they responded in the worst possible way to save their whole way of life. The peaceful Balinese turned ruthless killers.

When the news filtered out to Theo he fell into great sorrow. The failed coup against Sukarno released all sorts of pent-up communal hatreds, many of which were fanned by the army who quickly blamed the communists. While Theo was planning his new house in 1965, the massacres began in the weeks following the coup attempt, and they reached their peak over the remainder of the year before subsiding in the early months of 1966. They started in the capital, Jakarta, spread to Central and East Java, and later Bali. Thousands of local vigilantes and army units killed not only communists but also suspected communists as well. Often the label communist was used to include anyone who wasn’t in sympathy with the National Party. Local Chinese suffered the most and thousands were killed. Their shops and properties were looted and burned, resulting in anti-Chinese racism on the excuse that the Chinese were affiliated with China.

On Christian islands the clergy and teachers suffered at the hands of Muslim youth. Bali saw conflict between supporters of the traditional caste system, and those rejecting these traditional values. Communists, which meant nearly all Chinese shopkeepers, were publicly accused of working towards the destruction of the island’s culture, religion and character.

Methods of killing included shooting and beheading with Japanese-style Samurai swords. The killings left whole sections of villages empty, and the houses of victims or the interned were looted and often handed over to the military. Sadly, Theo learned that many of his high-cast friends had died.

Between December 1965 and early 1966, an estimated 80,000 Balinese were killed, or roughly five percent of the island’s population at the time. Some of Theo’s friends put the figure much higher.

Arrests and imprisonment continued for years after the purge. Theo feared returning for even a short visit. Those not killed or imprisoned went into hiding while others tried to hide their past. Those arrested included leading politicians, artists and writers, many of whom were Theo’s friends.

Theo’s thoughts turned to Europe years ago. Helga had written telling him that Nolde’s paintings had been confiscated from the museums, and that his works were labeled “Degenerate Art” by Hitler. Theo’s world was falling apart. Was there no place where he could go and find freedom?

Theo knew, deep inside, he had fled Indonesia just in time. He was relieved to learn that his daughters were safe. It would be some time before he would see them again.

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Theo Meier-CH22B

Back –   Chapter 22B   – Next →

FROM BALI TO THAILAND
(Further Trouble with Models , New Thai Wife)

Hua Hin, being a coastal town, was blessed with lovely sea breezes. Theo was often seen sitting on the beach behind his easel-with the high mountains punctuating the background. Most days offered clear blue skies and sometimes billowing white clouds rolled in. Theo was happy and contented in Hua Hin, but, as could be expected, it was not without incident.

He had planned to stay only three months but three months turned into a three-year sojourn in Southern Thailand>His troubles began, as usual, with his choice of models. In this case it was the 13-year old daughter of the caretaker of the property. She was an attractive, pretty girl, willing to pose for him. But as time passed, she turned into a very lovely, desirable woman. Before long she was spending nights with Theo in his bed.

The arrangement, however, did not sit well with the caretaker and his wife. The caretaker was in a difficult predicament being in the employ of Prince Sandith, but he had no choice. He approached Sandith and explained that Theo would have to mend his ways.

But Theo had grown attached to the girl. “What does his age to do with it?” Theo said to Sandith when Sandith confronted him. “She is happy with me, and she makes a good model.”

Sandith could only shake his head. He was as James Michener labeled him, an irredeemable reprobate, but a most likeable reprobate.

The caretaker had no choice but to send his daughter back to the rice fields, but he did come up with a solution. He brought in from the fields the young girl’s older sister, sixteen-year-old Yattlie.

With Yattlie taking the place of her younger sister, Sandith thought it best that he send them away, off to Chiang Mai to live. Theo had no objection and he and Yattlie went to the northern city by train to look for a place for them to live. They found an old Thai house near Wat Suan Dok that pleased Theo very much. Built high above ground on teak posts, it had verandahs that surrounded the entire house. It was ideal for painting. Theo and Yattlie moved in.

One would imagine that the problem was settled, but it wasn’t quite that simple. Yattlie’s mother followed her and Theo to Chiang Mai.

Yattlie’s family was not typical Thai. They were Chinese-Thais with deep-rooted traditions. When Hans Oplander, Theo’s German businessman friend, came to Chiang Mai for a visit, Theo asked him for his advice. Hans would know. He was married to a Thai Chinese girl.

“You have to marry her,” Hans said. He then explained Theo couldn’t possibly live with her unless they were married, and the Chinese custom was that a man had to buy his wife from the girl’s parents. Theo would have to buy Yattlie and then marry her if he wanted her to stay with him.

“Buy her,” Theo ranted. “I can’t afford to buy her.” “Then send her back,” Hans replied.

“I can’t do that,” he answered. “Why not?” Sandith asked.

“I like her,” Theo admitted.

“Then you have no other choice.”

The next time Sandith came to Chiang Mai, Theo told him he wanted to marry Yattlie.

“Are you out of your mind?” Sandith screamed. “Maybe, but I still want to marry her,” Theo replied. “But she is not pretty. Her youthful figure, yes-“

Theo interrupted. “What do I care about her looks? She makes a good model.”

“Yah, she’s a farm girl from up country. Look the way she squats, the way she eats, no dignity,” Sandith shouted.

“But by god she’s natural. What do I care for a pretty face?”

“But you can find another, someone else.” “I don’t want another.”

Sandith knew Theo, and he knew he was fighting a lost cause if he tried to talk Theo into something that he was opposed to. Theo was hardnosed and once he made up his mind there was no changing it. Theo in this case was adamant, very adamant. Sandith knew there was no need to tell his friend that he would be an outcast if he married this girl. To paint her, yes; to make love with her, yes; to even keep her as a mistress, yes; but to marry her, no. To parade her around as his wife, that would be folly. So let him take her, let him be the fool, and then he will see. Theo is a friend, Sandith reasoned, a good friend, and when Theo comes to his senses, he will understand.

So it was decided, by all, that Theo and Yattlie would marry. Hans agreed to go to Hua Hin to see Yattlie’s family as a negotiator, a matchmaker, to ask for her hand in marriage. He went to Hua Hin to meet them.

Yattlie’s parents agreed, but Theo would have to pay the going rate for a wife, 5,000 baht. Hans said, “Look he is a foreigner, a painter and he doesn’t have 5,000 baht.”

“He is your friend,” Yattlie’s father the caretaker said, “and you are a foreigner and all foreigners are rich and have money.”

It was useless for Hans to argue so he bargained with Yattlie’s father to reduce the sum down to 3,000 baht. Once agreed, the date was set and Hans made the wedding arrangements.

“We all went down to Hua Hin,” he said. “It was a marvelous day. Yattlie is Thai-Chinese. Her father and grandfather were full Chinese. Anyway it was a gathering of the whole family and they had to pay respect to their ancestors and line up at the altar. They were all lined up and I was the only one, a white man, on Theo’s side. Theo had learned his lessons very well, and he bowed three times to an ancestor. When he did his trousers split up the back, and he didn’t have underwear on. He couldn’t have cared less. Yattlie was dressed like a Thai actress, long silk dress, golden shoes, and Theo in his torn trousers. Fortunately, he had his long Balinese shorts to put on. We all got terribly drunk, and in the evening we were about to send them off down south on their honeymoon when Theo insisted I go on their honeymoon with them. I did and I was to learn something about Yattlie I didn’t realize before. She was no simple Thai farm girl.

“We were in the dining car heading south,” Hans continued. “Theo had the whole compartment in stitches, everyone, yelling and shouting, holding up their glasses filled with Mekong whiskey, shouting ‘salute’ with each toast. Theo was getting a little too tipsy to suit Yattlie so she told him to take it easy. Theo flared up.

“One thing you must learn,” he scolded his new bride. “You don’t tell me to take it easy. You understand?”

“Yes, me understand,” she replied, “and you no tell me same same.” With that she reached for a Mekong bottle on the table, bit off the cork with her teeth and filled a glass to the brim. She began to drink. Tears flowed down her cheek. Theo attempted to take the glass from her but she resisted. She drank until it was empty. “Salute,” she said wiping away the tears. It was the first hard liquor Yattlie ever had in her life.

“Hey, you can’t do that,” Theo said and snatched away the empty glass from her hand.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you to get drunk.”

“Me same same. No want you drunk.” Theo cut out his drinking that night.

Prince Sandith, with his Thai wife at his side, met Theo and his wedding party-which had been gathering momentum-in Phuket and they all carried on for another three days.

  • Photo caption on page 209 of the book:  Theo and Yattlie married in Hua Hin. They didn’t have cell-phone cameras then. I took this photo several years later.

Theo and Yattlie were married and living in Wat Dorn in Chiang Mai when I finally met Theo in person. I was most anxious to get to know him after having seen his wife Pergi in Bali many years before. She was beautiful and I never could understand why Theo had separated from her and why he had left Bali that he loved so much. When our mutual friend, photographer Willy Mettler told me about Theo living in Chiang Mai, I had to go with him to met Theo. This was the chance, my golden opportunity that I had waited for. Captain Dekoning of the Northwinds had written on several occasions asking if I ever found out about Theo Meier, why he had left Bali. Now I could write and tell him.

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Theo Meier-CH22A

Back –   Chapter 22A   – Next →

FROM BALI TO THAILAND

Prince Sandith Rangsit was one of Theo’s friends who came regularly to Bali. Over the years they became the best of friends, like brothers, and they had no secrets they kept from one another. Theo found Sandith a most interesting man, other than belonging to the royal family of Thailand. Sandith’s father was one of the sons of King Chulalongkorn, Rama V. Sandith was said to be the first Thai professional anthropologist having done, in the 1930s, research work on the Ahka and Meau hill tribes in northern Thailand. His glowing accounts of the hill tribes stirred up Theo’s interest in Thailand.

  • Photo caption on page 201 of the book:  Theo in a discussion with Prince Sandith. They were the best of friends and the prince came often to visit Theo.

It was soon after Theo had returned from Switzerland that Sandith arrived in Bali for a two-week visit. It took him no time to see that Theo was in torment. He had lost Pergi, the love of his life; he was in trouble with the authorities for administering drugs to the Balinese; someone was supposedly attempting to poison him; and most of his friends had left Bali for one reason or another. Sandith listened to Theo with a sympathetic ear and then told Theo he needed a break, a change of scenery, and he suggested that Theo come to Thailand and remain until the climate had settled down on Bali. “I have a house in Bangkok where you can stay and a house on the coast in Hua Hin. You can paint there,” he said to Theo. After two weeks, Prince Sandith left with Theo promising he would think about it.

Theo attempted to hang on to what he had but in the end, when the police threatened to arrest him, he knew he had to take a stand. Fearing that he might be impugned by the authorities and be at their gainsay, he thought it best that he leave and take Prince Sandith’s offer. To remain was to portend disaster.

Theo decided he would take up Prince Sandith’s invitation and go to Thailand but, he reasoned, it would be only a short stay and when it was safe again he would return to Bali. He packed up his belongings and his paintings and left them with Han Snel in Ubud. He rolled up the remaining canvases and his paints in a canvas bag, went overland to Jakarta and from there he flew to Bangkok. He had no address for Prince Sandith but he knew the prince frequented the Oriental Hotel. Theo took a taxi from the airport to the hotel. It was January 1958.

Christine Rangsit, Prince Sandith’s wife-they had not long been married-was down at the Oriental Hotel sitting in the lobby when she saw, in her own words, this very strange looking fellow come in to the hotel. He wore homemade Balinese shorts, which were torn down the back, and a batik shirt. He went up to the desk and tried to phone the Swiss consul but the consul was out. Then he said to the receptionist he wanted to phone Prince Rangsit. Christine’s heart sank. Her heart sank even further when the receptionist pointed to her and said, “You are in luck. There is Prince Sandith’s wife over there.”

“He marched right up to me and introduced himself,” Christine recalled. “I couldn’t get to the phone quick enough to tell Sandith to come to the hotel as soon as possible. I was horrified when Theo said my husband invited him to stay with us.”

Christine was new to Thailand. She was Swiss, a very beautiful lady, but a very delicate lady. She was very prim and proper in her ways and she radiated the charm of European nobility. Prince Sandith had fallen in love with her the moment he first saw her. They married in Switzerland but when they arrived in Bangkok, to take up their new home, Christine had a difficult time reconciling to the fact that she was a second wife. She couldn’t quite accept that “second wives” was standard policy among the Thais. Prince Sandith wasn’t deceiving her; she knew he had a Thai wife and family of long standing. Her mistake was thinking she could change the system. She soon learned she couldn’t. She would have to accept she was a second wife.

It was an agonizing half hour for Christine until Prince Sandith arrived. She was shocked when the two men bear-hugged one another and her husband announced loudly for all to hear that this was his good friend, Theo Meier, from Bali, and that Theo was his guest. Christine made it known she would have to prepare a room for Theo before he could move in. Sandith had no objection, nor did Theo. Sandith said he would rent a room for Theo at the Trocadero hotel around the corner from the Oriental. He escorted Theo to the hotel with his luggage, his single canvas bag, and checked him in.

The very first night Theo arrived there was the opening of Nick’s No. One Restaurant, owned by Nick Zero. Everyone of importance, including the diplomatic corps from all the embassies, was invited for the black-tie affair. Sandith phoned Nick and asked if he could bring a friend along. Nick assured him it would be okay. Christine developed a headache and couldn’t make it when she learned Theo was coming.

Sandith sent his car to pick Theo up at the Trocadero Hotel, and when Theo stepped out of the car he was dressed exactly as he had been when he arrived at the Oriental. All heads turned as he entered the front door, and being good natured as he was, upon seeing everyone staring at him, he waved his hands above his head and shouted out-“Salute.” He then announced for all to hear that he just came from Bali where he lived and he didn’t have a chance to change. Then he added, in his gargantuan voice, “I don’t have anything to change into anyway.” He brought out laughs from everyone. Theo was just what the party needed-an eccentric artist. He was an immediate success and quickly made friends with everyone there.

Sandith put Theo up for a week at the Trocadero and then, after Christine left on a vacation to Switzerland, he moved Theo into his house on Rum Rudee. On the property was a small wooden house which became Theo’s pad. For the next month it was one party after another at the house. The lawn was constantly torn up with pits for cooking pigs. Theo had bought a new shirt and trousers, but his canvas bag with his easel and paints remained unopened.

When Christine returned from Switzerland it was time for Sandith to find Theo new accommodation. He moved him to his summer house in Hua Hin on the west coast of the Gulf of Thailand, a half-day’s journey south of Bangkok. For a painter the choice couldn’t have been better.

Hua Hin was a resort, discovered in the early 1920s by King Rama VII as an ideal getaway from Bangkok. The tranquil fishing village was turned into the Royal resort and consequently became popular among Siam’s nobility and upper class. Many of Bangkok’s rich and famous built their own beachfront summer homes to the north and south along the curving sandy bay. And here too Prince Sandith built his home.

Theo was at home the moment he moved in. The empty beaches and the solitude were what he needed. He missed Bali, of course, but he kept busy enough to keep his mind on his work. Having a gift for languages, in no time he was making friends, speaking Thai with everyone he met. Among his many interests, he became fascinated in classical Thai music and dancing. He didn’t miss a dance or musical festival when they came to town.

  • Photo caption on page 204 of the book:  Prince Sandith helped Theo resettle in Thailand. Here is Prince Sandith with his niece.

Back –   Chapter 22A   – Next →

Theo Meier-CH21B

Back –   Chapter 21B   – Next →

SUKARNO COMES TO BALI
(Hard Times Ahead, Lost Treasures)

Back to Rubic. Like many young Balinese girls who showed talent, she had begun dancing as soon as she could walk. Even before she reached her teens she was a very talented and popular Legong dancer, known from one end of the island to the other. She didn’t read music, but she could feel it. She gave the dance meaning. Theo recalled that she danced enchantingly with unbelievable intensity. “Theo did hundreds of paintings of me,” she said. “Not all were finished but they all sold. In the beginning I didn’t mind him painting me in the nude but later I didn’t like it. I said no but he kept saying he wanted to paint me. Often when I didn’t go to the house to visit Anni he came to my house in Bedulu with all his paints and canvases. I would tell him, ‘There are other pretty girls here.’ He would say, ‘I don’t want to paint them. I want to paint you.’ My parents didn’t mind.”

Once when Sukarno came to Bali, Theo arranged for a gamelan orchestra and dancers to perform for him. Rubic was one of the dancers but when Sukarno began to take a particular interest in her, Theo ushered her away. Theo knew well about Sukarno’s uncanny love for women.

When Theo was in his painting mood, he was oblivious to the world around him. He became completely immersed in his work. He had a great capacity for losing himself while painting, it was if he became part of the canvas before him. It is not a little puzzling that when he returned home one evening he found the canvas he was working on that morning had been slashed to pieces by Pergi. She knew he had slept with the model by the expression on the model’s face. What could Theo say to his wife; he couldn’t deny it. That was not the first nor the last time. Pergi became increasingly unhappy with Theo and his affairs. Theo failed to realize his wife was very jealous of his models, and that included Rubic.

  • Photo caption on page 194 of the book: Legong dancer, Rubic was a favorite model for Theo. He painted and sketched a hundred pictures of Rubic, she later claimed.

As time went on, Prince Sandith made more frequent visits to Bali. He loved Bali and he loved Theo’s companionship. Bali was his escape from the rigors and protocol of the royal life he had to live in Bangkok. Here with Theo he could do what he pleased. No one cared if he drank too much arrack. No one minded when he jumped into the pool behind Theo’s house and frolicked with the young maidens. No one admonished him or questioned him.

But the good times weren’t to last forever. Times were changing, even on Bali. Old friends were leaving; new faces were appearing. The art colony was terribly saddened when Le Mayeur became critically ill and returned to Belgium for treatment. He never saw his beloved Bali again. He died in Belgium. In his will he left the land at Sanur to his wife with special instructions that upon her death, half would be bequeathed to the government to be preserved as a museum. The remaining land was to be inherited by Ni Pollok’s family.

The early 1950s started off well on Bali but by the end of the decade changes were in the wind. Sukarno was finding himself in political troubles and turned a cold shoulder to the foreign artists living on Bali. He made the claim that Western-style democracy was unsuitable for Indonesia. Instead he called for a system of “guided democracy” based on what he called traditional Indonesian principles, principles that gave him absolute power. The Indonesian way of deciding important questions, he argued, was by way of prolonged deliberation designed to achieve a consensus. He proposed a government based not only on political parties but also on “functional groups” composed of the nation’s basic elements, in which a national consensus could express itself under presidential guidance. And he was the president, naturally. During this later part of his presidency, Sukarno came to increasingly rely on the army and the support of the Communist Party of Indonesia. He increased his ties to the People’s Republic of China and admitted more Communists into his government. He also began to accept increasing amounts of Soviet bloc military aid.

  • Photo caption on page 196 of the book: Pergi, Theo’s wife, looking out the window while Theo paints her. She was becoming very unhappy with Theo and his antics.

On November 30, 1957, an attempt was made to assassinate Sukarno by a grenade attack while he was visiting a school in Cikini, Central Jakarta. Six children were killed but Sukarno did not suffer any serious wounds. The perpetrators were members of the Darul Islam rebellious group. In December he ordered the nationalization of 246 Dutch businesses. In February he began a crackdown on rebels in the republic.

He also began to lose favor with the people when he met and married a Japanese hostess, Dewi Fujin, at the Kokusai Club in Akasaka, a place for foreign VIPs. She became Sukarno’s fourth wife.

Sukarno began to spend unlimited funds for public monuments, buildings and for private luxuries for himself and his four wives. The problem was that Indonesia needed to repair its infrastructure devastated by a decade of war and rebellion. Indonesia was not meeting its food needs and shortages were becoming serious. The Government was printing money and inflation began to surge into the hyperinflation range. He did not concern himself with the economic problems. He instead devoted his time to political posturing. He played games in international politics flirting in turn with the Soviets, the Chinese and the West. He verbally abused the West because he found this brought responses, not only from the West but also from the Soviets and Chinese.

For the foreign artists living on Bali the axe fell in 1957 when Sukarno nationalized all Dutch assets and thousands of Dutch citizens were expelled from Indonesia. Han Snel and Arie Smit, even though both men had become Indonesian citizens, were ordered to report to the Indonesian authorities in Jakarta. Only after Theo made a plea to Sukarno were they permitted, after months of waiting, to travel back to Bali.

The pressure for Theo was on. He wasn’t a Dutch national but hanging over his head was uncertainty. He could no longer turn to Sukarno for support.

But it was more than a threat of exile, a threat of getting kicked out of the country, which upset Theo. He could deal with that. But he couldn’t deal with what he learned when he discovered Pergi had fallen hopelessly in love with a young musician. He found it hard to believe until he confronted her. His years of philandering with his models had reached a point of no return with Pergi. In desperation Theo attempted to reconcile with her but without success. She admitted she loved him but love was not enough. She and Theo parted and she moved in with the musician, taking Anni with her.

Theo was devastated, heart broken and he needed time to think. Whatever he decided to do, it was certain to have repercussions. Bali to him had been a thing of beauty, but it was not, as Keats had written, a joy forever. The things that had excited Theo at one time no longer did.

Disenchanted, Theo decided to return to Switzerland for a spell. Perhaps away from Bali he could dear his mind. It was a bad decision. Once he did return home, he did not find the peace and calm he was seeking. On the contrary, it was quite the opposite. When he went to claim the paintings he sent back from Australia with his friend Lucas Staehelin, he learned Lucas no longer lived in Switzerland and his family flatly refused to surrender the paintings to Theo, claiming their son had given them to them as gifts. They were adamant and Theo felt it might be their revenge for taking their son away to the South Seas. He was probably right.

Then Theo was hoping to collect the paintings that he had sent to his sister Helen Meier for safekeeping. He was both appalled and shocked when he discovered that she had given them all away. He couldn’t believe it; she had given them away like they might have been dish towels.

“What did you expect,” she declared in a huff. “We didn’t think you’d ever come back.”

“You had no right to give them away,” Theo cried. “You can give anything away. You can give your jewelry away, your body, but not my paintings.” She only scoffed at him. What had been done, had been done. There was no getting the paintings back. Theo could only postulate on the many hundreds of paintings he had lost. There were the Japanese when they invaded. As a Japanese officer was to explain, did not his soldiers use Theo’s paintings confiscated from his house for covers for card tables, and to make sunshades, and to give others to coolies for payment for their work. And there were his female nudes taken aboard Japanese warships for shipment back to Japan, but could they not be at the bottom of the ocean, the ships sunk by the Allies? Six years of work was lost. How many others? The mulatto woman in Martinique who defaced the oil he painted of her. There was the painting his wife Pergi slashed when she found he was unfaithful and had slept with the model. The savages in the New Hebrides took his paintings and burned them when they believed the canvases had captured their souls. The warlords in China that he had to give paintings to for his safe passage. And how many hundreds had he given away as gifts and favors. Even Milos in far off Tahiti had Theo’s oils hanging in his Robert Luis Stephenson shack. How many had Milos given away to pay his debts? And Schooner Third Sea had a Theo nude hanging in the galley. Theo painted the nude especially for the schooner. And what about the carvings he made for the schooner, two in the main saloon that measure ten feet long, They were donations.

Theo was not the man to give up. He wanted to pick up where he left off. He returned to Bali hoping, perhaps, to reconcile with Pergi and begin all over again. He was sadly mistaken. He was too late. Pergi had married her musician lover. Then he found he was in deep trouble with the authorities. The police had ransacked his house in Sanur and found his drugs and medicine. When he enquired the reason, he was informed he was being accused of practicing medicine without a license. It was true, he had been helping the sick when they came to him for help. The medicine came from friends that he asked to bring when they traveled abroad. There was even talk that Pergi’s husband had hired a bomoh to poison Theo to get rid of him. Theo was disenchanted. He no longer enjoyed food, found it difficult to paint and defending himself was becoming a drain. He was emotionally exhausted. He reckoned he either had to leave or else go to jail. He didn’t fancy the thought of going to jail.

It was Prince Sandith Rangsit from Thailand who came to his rescue.

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Theo Meier-CH21A

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SUKARNO COMES TO BALI

Luckily for the painters living on Bali, Sukarno was a great lover of the arts and he was known to surround himself with painters and artists. Theo had the good fortune to paint two large canvases for Sukarno during his early visits to Iseh, long before he became president. Theo recalled the occasion when Sukarno came to Bali when he was president: “He came to our humble village which was the high-point for everyone. In his company, I met heads of states like Nasser and Nehru, though not all of these VIPs were as enthusiastically disposed towards Bali as Nehru was. Nehru called Bali ‘the morning of the world.’ Khrushchev, on the other hand, was a good deal less responsive to the islands’ beauties. In Denpasar he spoke up in the middle of a native dance performed in his honor: ‘That’s all very well, but it doesn’t bring any foreign currency into the country.’ Sukarno, not surprisingly, immediately ordered the dancers to stop. He had already been shocked by similar philistine remarks of his bulky guest earlier in the tour.”

In a letter to a friend in Switzerland Theo wrote that Sukarno was one of his best clients. “Sukarno was much better in the field of art than he was in politics,” he wrote.

Sukarno loved Bali and the people loved him. Once he traveled over poor, unpaved roads to visit Theo in Iseh. En route he often got down from the car to shake hands with the people. When they came to a temple he would have the driver stop and wait while he walked across rice fields to visit the temple. In Iseh he went to the market with Theo to buy food. He took the time to talk to the people. He ate with Theo and praised Theo for his marvelous cooking.

  • Photo caption on page 186 of the book:  When author James Michener visited Bali with his American wife, and wasn’t getting along too well with her, Theo suggested he find  an Asian wife. Michener did just that. The next visit he arrived with a Japanese, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa.

Despite the time of troubles that brewed after the war, Theo worked no less hard and diligently than before in an atmosphere of uncertainty. His relative seclusion was interrupted by visits that included many well-known personalities. With the war over, visitors by the droves began to arrive and Theo, a survivor of the war and the Japanese occupation, was much sought after. He was taking on the role that Walter Spies had before the war. Many of those who came looking for Theo-photographers, actors and moviemakers-were of international fame, famous in their own right. In particular, visitors included people like Howard Sochurek, Ernst Haas and Henri Cartier Bresson.

Theo found Cartier-Bresson most interesting. Theo admired him for his photography and he learned from him much about taking good pictures. It wasn’t long and they were good pals running around Bali together. In 1937 Cartier-Bresson had married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini. She was his first wife and he adored her. She had a tremendous influence in her husband’s work as a photographer. Being of Hindu extraction she fitted in well in Bali. Theo joined them both on a number of photographic shoots around the island. Like Theo, Cartier-Bresson was keen on light and shadows.

Life Magazine photographer Howard Sochurek, the first Robert Capa Gold Medal awardee, came to Bali with the explicit purpose of photographing Theo at work. There was also James Michener. He and Theo hit it off immediately. The first time Michener came to Bali he was with his American wife. She was not very accommodating and argued with her husband on the most trivial matters. Theo got Michener aside and told him he’d be much better off with an Asian wife. Sometime later when Michener returned to Bali he was with his new wife, a Japanese lady, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa Michener. A second-generation Japanese American, Mari was interned with her family in a California camp during World War II. When she met Michener, he was working on a story for Life magazine about a marriage between a Japanese woman and her American husband. The story became the basis for his novel Sayonara, which later became an MGM movie with Marlon Brando playing the leading role.

“You, see, I followed your advice,” Michener said to Theo. “I married an Asian girl.”

In studying the social repercussions of the times, Michener wrote: “It is no joke for a woman to be taken for just one more American remnant and to see these eastern girls capturing all the men folk of the U.S.A.”

Another one who passed through Bali was the celebrated Charlie Chaplin. Theo had missed out meeting him when he had visited Walter Spies. Now was his chance. Theo was granted an interview before the reception with the Raja of Karangasem. The Raja asked Theo, “Do tell me, who is this man who comes to visit me.?”

“Why, he is the famous Charlie Chaplin,” Theo replied.

“That is obvious,” continued the Raja, “for on the island everyonewith a Charlie Chaplin mustache is called Chaplin. But what else should I know about him?”

“Well, he is a man who takes pictures, moving pictures,” Theo answered.

“That is very clear, for Charlie Chaplin has a camera slung across his shoulders. But is he rich?”

“Enormously,” Theo replied, grinning.

“Where does his money come from?” the Raja asked, still puzzled.

“Well, from the pictures he makes,” said Theo.

“But how can one grow rich by taking pictures. I can see what it costs me with my son who rides the same hobbyhorse.”

Charlie Chaplin arrived, graciously and all smiles. He was polite to Theo and said he had heard about him, the Swiss painter who had outwitted the Japanese. Theo answered questions asked by the Raja.

When Chaplin left after the reception, the Raja remarked he had expected a much bigger man. He was mildly disappointed. Chaplin continued to remain a man of mystery in his eye.

With President Sukarno’s accession to power, his taste for art didn’t wane and if anything, it grew. He acquired, as a gift from Theo, more than a dozen of his masterpieces which became part of the famous Sukarno Collection, an admirable set of volumes entitled; Paintings in Dr. Sukarno’s Collection. From the very first. President Sukarno had taken interest in Theo’s work. In 1950, the Indonesian Ambassador in Switzerland promoted an exhibition of Theo’s works in Basel: and Sukarno, during his state visit to Switzerland, arranged for a private exhibition of some of Theo’s canvases in the salons of the Indonesian Embassy at Bern, to which he brought the entire diplomatic corps. On that occasion, “the Magic Flute,” one of Theo’s major works, was exhibited.

The beginning of the 1950s was a good time for foreign artists living on Bali. Antonio Blanco and Han Snel were making names for themselves and their paintings were selling. Snel was in the process of building a magnificent stone carved house in Ubud. Blanco, who had married a lovely Balinese Legong dancer, was making waves with his nude paintings. And a young entrepreneur named Smeja Neka was setting up one of the island’s first art galleries.

Born in Ubud in 1939, young Neka grew up surrounded by art. His father was a member of the ground-breaking Pita Maha Artists’ Association, founded in 1936 by Walter Spies, Rudolf Bonnet and Prince Cokorda Gede. Neka, naturally, was in constant contact with the many talented artists in the area. Gradually he became aware that through the growth of tourism many of the finest examples of Balinese art were leaving the island, snapped up by foreign collectors. By 1966 his awareness had turned into such concern that he decided to dedicate himself full time to collecting, preserving and promoting Balinese art. His collection started modestly, but it was not long before the Neka Gallery had become one of the finest in Bali.

Jumping ahead, in 1982 the Indonesian Government acknowledged the importance of such a museum and on 7th July that year Museum Neka was officially opened by the then Minister of Education and Culture, Dr. Daoed Joesoef Theo’s portrait of Smeja Neka stands prominently in the museum.

  • Photo caption on page 190 of the book: Artist Han Snel, left, showing me the new carved stone studio and gallery he had just completed. Right, a portrait Theo painted  of Suteja Neka.

In time, Theo, Pergi and daughter Anni moved back to their house at Sanur, traveling back to Iseh only for weekend getaways. Theo adored his daughter Anni who was rapidly growing from child to woman. Anni often invited her young friends to come visit. Theo delighted in all the young maidens running about the house and bathing in the stream behind the building. A painter couldn’t ask for more.

One striking, lovely young girl, the same age as Anni, that captured Theo’s attention more than any other girl was Rubic from the village of Bedulu. Anni and Rubic were often present when Theo and Pergi had foreigners for lunch or dinner. Rubic remembers Theo would tell her and Anni that they must learn to use knives and forks. “It was very funny,” she recalled. “We called Theo papa. He spoke beautiful Balinese, high Balinese and Indonesian as well. He spoke high Balinese mostly because his friends came from the high cast. I owe a lot to Papa for what he taught us. I got along very well with his daughter Anni. We were like sisters.”

  • Photo caption on page 191 of the book: Left, Theo presented with a daughter. Right, his daughter, older now, peeking around the corner.

Theo did in fact speak high Balinese, the language that Rubic mentioned, the language the high cast Balinese spoke. The caste system on Bali originated from Hindu traditions on Java dating back to about 1350, although it was not nearly as strict as the system in India. On Bali, caste determined the roles in religious rituals and the form of language to be used in every social situation. Theo had found in most villages that caste was very much part of life and caste concepts were absolutely essential to religious practices. For that reason Theo found it necessary to learn high Balinese, although around ninety percent of Bali’s ethnic population belonged to the common shudra caste, with the rest belonging to the triwangsa or upper caste. Theo learned to speak both the high and the common dialects equally well.

  • Photo caption on page 192 of the book: In the 50’s Theo was producing some of his finest work.  Here’s a splendid oil painting of women making offerings to a temple.
  • Photo caption on page 192 of the book: Two more of Theo’s paintings from the 1950’s.

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Theo Meier-CH20

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UNDER THE RISING SUN

Another arrival in Sabah after an arduous journey through Java was Theo’s good friend Ernst Schlager. We can only imagine Theo’s surprise when Schlager showed up at his doorstep in Iseh, tired and worn.

Schlager had been sent to the Netherlands Antilles to organize an agency for Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical firm. When war broke out he tried to get on the last outgoing boat from Batavia, but there was no room aboard when he arrived at dockside. It was lucky for him. The ship was sent to the bottom by Japanese aircraft a few hours after it set sail. All hands were lost. The war brought an end to Schlager’s business activities.

Theo and Schlager immediately found a common interest-Balinese music.

The two quickly teamed up and began to make a study of traditional Balinese music. Besides helping Schlager as an interpreter and entertaining the many musicians they interviewed, Theo began to jot down songs and stories and notes about Balinese customs. These later formed the basis of a book he co-authored, My Bali, published by Silva Editions in Zurich.

Theo’s young wife Nurukan helped them in their work. She enjoyed the work as much as the two friends did. They were fortunate that the villagers in Eastern Bali were hospitable to them. Nevertheless, it was always a harrowing moment when a Japanese patrol with their rifles and fixed bayonets made an appearance. Nurukan kept out of sight when they came and Theo knew how to shuffle them off with a bottle or two of cheap rice wine.

It was during this time that Theo helped Schlager write his History of Balinese Music which was published in Encyclopedie de la Pleiade under the heading: History of Music. Schlager had the rare advantage of having both a doctorate of chemistry and a doctorate of philosophy which included the theory of music. In his own words: “Balinese music culture is so rich that the exhibitionists made no efforts to conserve it.”

Compiling the book was no easy task. Bali might share the gamelan and various other Indonesian musical instruments with other islands in the archipelago, but Bali has its own techniques and styles. One example is the Kecak, the monkey dance that Spies choreographed. Nowhere else but on Bali could one see a legitimate Kecak performance. In addition, the island was home to several unique kinds of gamelan, including the gamelan jegog, gamelan gong gede, gamelan gambang, gamelan selunding and gamelan semar pegulingan, the cremation music angklung and the processional music bebonangan. Theo and Schlager had to master them all. Fortunately they had the time to learn.

Balinese gamelan, they discovered, compared to Indonesian classical music, was louder, swifter and more aggressive than Javanese music. Balinese gamelan also featured more archaic instrumentation that included bronze and bamboo xylophones. Gongs and a number of gong chimes were used, such as the solo instrument trompong, and a variety of percussion instruments like cymbals, bells, drums and the anklung, a bamboo rattle. Like school kids they experimented with all the instruments including two sizes of bamboo flutes and two-stringed fiddles. The two white men made an odd couple sitting on the steps of the house in Iseh mastering many of these instruments. Often late into the night Nurukan served them rice wine urging them on. Neighboring Balinese came to join in and more often than not music sessions turned into all night parties.

The war came to an official end in 1945 and finally it was possible now for Schlager to bid his goodbye to Theo and Nurukan and leave the East Indies. It was a sad parting with many tears and promises. In Denpasar Schlager boarded a bus to Jakarta which, unbeknown at the time, happened to be the last bus for many months to come. The very next day, the Balinese frontiers were closed. Not until April 1946 did the Allied landing take place and they were opened again. In the meantime, a lot had happened. Under an agreement with the Allies, the Japanese, from their improvised fortified camps, had been made responsible for upholding law and order and halting feuds between villages that were beginning to flare up. A few traitors were put to death and a resistance movement was organized in the event of the Dutch trying to re-impose their pre-war colonial domination. The only thing that saved Bali from complete collapse in those days was the deeply entrenched structure of Balinese society.

It was during this period at the end of the war that Theo Meier and his wife Nurukan divorced. Slowly over the last months in Iseh they had grown apart. Nurukan wanted to return to her village and the life she had missed. Theo, on the other hand, longed to return to his house at Sanur and concentrate on his painting. The future did not look promising for Nurukan. The divorce, Theo wrote in his journal, was an amicable parting. What he didn’t say was that it was as amicable as any divorce could be. But it was one that Theo never expected. Those who knew Theo at the time claimed he was very distraught and saddened. It didn’t help matters when Nurukan took their daughter Leonie to live with her.

But Theo was destined not to be alone long, not after he laid eyes upon a Balinese maiden named Madepergi. She was the most beautiful woman he claimed he had ever seen, on Bali, on Tahiti or on any of his travels. He was not alone in his judgment. She was an exceptional beauty. Pergi, as everyone called her, was the woman that I had seen when I first arrived in Bali aboard the schooner Northwinds-the time she was marching in a religious procession above the hills of Ubud. She possessed something more than beauty, an almost ethereal quality, some intangible mystical quality that only the gods of Bali could have created. At that time I had yet to meet Theo.

Pergi became the great love of Theo’s life. She was his living goddess, the embodiment of every man’s dreams. That beautiful face, that lovely graceful body, those lines of elegant perfection, they would be etched forever on canvases painted by Theo. A year after they met they married, Pergi bore a daughter named Niwayan Anni Sugandi Nria. “Ni” indicated a girl; “wayan” meant the eldest-born: “Anni” was conferred by a friend of the family who acted as godmother; the name “Sugandi” was given by Sukarno, and Nria, the mountain, was the religious name given by the Brahmin priest. The name Anni was sufficient for Theo.

World War II came to an end but not the fighting. Indonesia wanted independence. On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrendered to the Allied forces, Sukarno read a Declaration of lndependence to a small group of people outside his house in Mente on Java. He demanded immediate independence from the Dutch. But the Dutch weren’t about to give up the Dutch East Indies. It took the Dutch four years of bitter fighting to learn that they were not going to get their colony back. Finally, on December 27, 1949 Netherlands recognized the sovereignty of Indonesia which became the Republic of Indonesia. Sukarno became the first president.

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Theo Meier-CH19

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THE JAPANESE INVASION

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia was swift. Japan had no fear of European interference. Germany had conquered France and Holland, thus the Dutch could not defend French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. Britain was too preoccupied with fighting in Europe to protect her territories in Southeast Asia, mainly Singapore and Malaya. And the American war fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

A few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes flew to the Philippines and destroyed the American air force there, and in the same month of December Japanese troops invaded the Philippines. The American and Filipino troops surrendered to the Japanese on 6 May 1942 due to a lack of additional armed forces that were promised to them.

In December 1941, Japan began its invasion of the Dutch East Indies. In January 1942, they conquered Borneo and gained control of the Dutch and British oil fields. In the Battle of the Java Sea the powerful Japanese naval forces defeated a combined fleet of British, Dutch, Australian and American warships. After that, she successfully conquered Java, Sumatra and other islands in the Dutch East Indies, and that included Bali.

In the beginning Japanese occupation was welcomed by the Indonesians as they were thought to be liberators from the unrighteous Imperial Dutch. During the occupation, the Indonesian nationalist movement increased in popularity. In July 1942, leading nationalists like Sukarno offer to rally the public in support of the Japanese war effort. In 1943, both Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta were invited to Japan where they were decorated by the Emperor of Japan himself.

But let me not get too far ahead. We are back to the beginning of 1942, on one dark night at Sanur beach where Theo lived. It was here that the Japanese landed in full force, right in front of Theo’s house. Was this really happening? Maybe in war-torn Europe but not in peaceful Bali. No, Theo couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He had no time to pack or put things away. He had to flee. There was no telling an advancing army with fixed bayonets that he was Swiss and neutral.

“Immediately, I grabbed hold of my bicycle and pedaled furiously to the home of my friend Prince Rajan Anak Agung in Saba,” Theo later wrote in his journal.

Prince Rajan found Theo refuge in the palace until he could arrange with the Japanese command for Theo’s papers. In the meantime the prince was concerned with the raping and pillaging that was sure to happen. Japanese soldier had a reputation that preceded them. Everyone was aware that Japanese soldiers considered young unmarried maidens as war booty, to be taken at will. The prince was worried too about a young Balinese girl in his charge whom he had hidden out in the palace. Her name was Nurukan. Turning to Theo he said, “Perhaps if I married you two she would be safe.” It was a bold, unexpected suggestion but Theo, out of obligation to the prince, readily agreed. Nurukan was sent for and when she appeared Theo was quite shocked. She was lovely, perhaps not yet twenty years of age, tall and slender and very graceful. Theo’s immediate thought was that she would make a good model.

“Yes, yes,” Prince Rajan said when Theo mentioned about her being a model, “but first things first,”

That same morning Theo and Nurukan were married with the prince officiating himself Theo, being a citizen of a neutral country, received permission from the Japanese high command to stay in Bali, any place except Sanur. A week after the ceremony, when the documents for Theo and his wife were signed by the Japanese in Denpasar, the couple fled to Iseh.

Theo officially leased Walter Spies’ mountain hut from the ruling princely Ksatriya family of Sideman. Tjokorda Gede Gangin, the prince of Sideman, had created a greenbelt to preserve the rural farmland and panoramic backdrop of Mont Agung.

The arrival of the Japanese changed everything. Prince Rajan was successful in arranging for Theo to travel with a Japanese officer and guards to his house at Sanur. Theo was appalled at what he found. The place had been ransacked. Above all his paintings were desecrated. The female nudes, the officer told him, were taken onto Japanese warships and now, for all Theo knew, probably ended up at the bottom of the ocean. Others were used as covers for card tables, as parasols, or as fuel to fire the army’s huge rice stores. Some, too, were given to coolies in lieu of pay. Theo hoped he would later be able to recover some of them. But otherwise years of work was irretrievably lost.

The Indonesians were finding that life under Japanese occupation was not what they expected. The Japanese, it turned out, were not liberators but conquerors. Their occupation became brutal. Those who lived in areas considered important to the war effort suffered the most from torture to sex slavery, and from arrest to execution. Thousands of Indonesians were forced into labor and taken away for Japanese military projects, including the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway. Many were suffering, or had died, as a result of ill treatment and hunger. People of Dutch and mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent were particular targets of the Japanese occupation. Within a few short months all this was happening.

In spite of the deprivation and hardships, life in Iseh was not altogether unpleasant for Theo with his young wife. Although it was not love at first, like in the storybooks, as time passed Theo became more and more fond of her. She never complained about the hardships, nor her having to sit for hours while he painted her, and she was a great help to him in serving him as a wife. Theo was not one to admit the weakness of love, but he was becoming very attached to his young wife. His devotion grew when she bore him a daughter. They named her Leonie.

Theo made the most of what they had. Without materials to paint he turned to mixing his own colors from tree bark, resins and crushed stones. He had no canvas, of course, so he painted on scraps of boards and pieces of glass. Fortunately, the Balinese of Iseh continued with their dance and music, and Theo took up the study of the gamelan. Theo was not one to idle away his time in remorse or regret. He used his time wisely.

Theo kept in contact with Denpasar and a few times, on daring adventures, he traveled the long distance for a visit. Once he took Nurukan. After being arrested by Japanese police for no apparent reason, he was thrown in jail. In his journal, he wrote: “Thanks to Nurukan’s courage, she stood up to the Japanese military police, and my stay in Jail-for which I had been accused of spying-was cut mercifully short.”

With the exception of Theo and Bonnet, no foreign artists were left on Bali. Bonnet did manage for a spell to escape the wrath of the Japanese, but eventually his freedom was cut short. When a new Japanese officer took charge, he had the Dutchman arrested and shipped to Sulawesi. Bonnet spent the rest of the war in internment camps in different places, in Parepare, Bolong and finally in Makassar.

And Theo and Nurukan waited out the war in Iseh.

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