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Goddard hid him under canvases in her station wagon. She smuggled him out of his studio when police pinned earlier attempts on Trotsky’s life on him (bear with me!) Rivera always said it was Paulette Goddard – Chaplin’s wife – who’d saved his life. Good news: City College is planning a $200 million state-of-the-art theatre, and after decades of neglect the mural will take pride of place. “My mural will picture the fusion between the Latin American lands deeply rooted in the soil, and high mechanical developments of the United States.”Īlbert Bender: Dublin-born patron of the artsĪlas, it hangs where few see it, at the community college where I teach. Fascinating and vast, it teems with history from Montezuma to Ford, and features Diego's wife Frida Kahlo and Chaplin acting as Hitler. Subtitled The Marriage Between North and South America, all 1800sq ft of his mural expressed his beliefs. Polite and unassuming, he climbed down to chat, endearing himself and blowing his deadline by three months. At the same time he was fleeing Mexico's federales on suspicion of murdering his former friend Leon Trotsky. With a paintbrush in one hand and a pistol in each pocket, he was hoping for a thousand dollars a month to paint his epic Pan American Unity for the World's Fair. Seventy-seven years ago, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera climbed a ladder on San Francisco's Treasure Island.