Who Is William Walton?
An American Artist of the John and Jackie Kennedy Era
Ernest and Mary Hemingway, the Kennedys, Katherine Graham and I. M. Pei were among the close friends of the artist and journalist William Walton. With President Kennedy and the first lady, in particular. However, finding the text of Frank O’Hara’s poem Who Is William Walton? has become the more important goal here today at Two Sycamores.
It’s where we’ve decided to begin telling all of the stories that swirl around this “Bill” Walton painting for us. Why on earth is it so very difficult to find the text of the O’Hara poem? It doesn’t feel like simple pesky roadblock that’s interrupting discoveries about this intruiging painting. For now, we consider it to be Walton’s reaction to his friend Ernest Hemingway’s suicide at that writer’s home in Ketchum, Idaho on July 22, 1961.
Tragedy soon followed tragedy for Walton when his friend and confidant Jack Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963.
We acquired the “Hemingway” painting in March of 2013. Later, learning that a Lynn Magruder had owned it 41 years before only because she kindly wrote a note, in pencil, on the back of the framing “Painted by Bill Walton — given to me in 1972”.
The O’Hara poem is of keen interest because “critical sources” date the poem to 1961 (that evidence isn’t yet definitive) and, we haven’t learned of any publication of the poem before “The Collected Poems” was published in 1971. Frank O-Hara died from injuries related to a late night “accidental” death on Fire Island on July 25, 1966 while Walton was chairman of the Fine Arts Commission in Washington, DC., having been appointed by Kennedy earlier in ‘63 and then re-appointed by Johnson in ‘67.
While We Wait on Finding the Poem
To refresh all the other interesting details about the life of William Walton, we are also now reading “The Evidence of Washington” published by Harper & Row, NY in 1966 (text by Walton with photographs by Evelyn Hofer) and reading again “William “Bill” Walton a charmed life” published in 2013 by Branden Books, Boston (by Mary Hackett and edited by Mary Claire Kendall).
