Citizen Keane by Cletus Nelson

Author:Cletus Nelson [Nelson, Cletus; Parfrey, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936239962
Publisher: Feral House

CHAPTER SIX

The Split: Going Their Separate Ways

When Margaret and Walter finally gave up on the marriage, it was an uneventful affair. Just a few months before the Life magazine article ran, Margaret’s request for a legal separation was heard in San Mateo County Court. She testified in court that her husband was for the most part “jealous, critical and unpleasant.”107 Keane didn’t contest her claims and the decree was granted. Walter was apparently so unconcerned by the proceedings that he skipped his court date and was off in the South Seas enjoying one of his Gauguin-with-a-Scotch-tumbler artist retreats. It’s likely he felt he had little to worry about—Margaret waived all claims for financial support and the couple agreed to continue their existing business arrangement.

So the marriage was over. If Walter didn’t exactly come off as the model husband in the courtroom, he wasn’t worried about it. Little would change, he believed, once they’d parted. His ex-wife would continue producing his trademark waif paintings just like before. Except now there weren’t any matrimonial entanglements. He was single again, a swinging bachelor with a fat bank account.

Margaret wasn’t quite so optimistic about the future. For ten long years, she had lived in Walter’s shadow and that didn’t do a lot to bolster her confidence. She later admitted that one of the primary reasons she’d stayed in the marriage for so long was because she wasn’t sure she could make it on her own. “I didn’t know what to do,” the artist explained to a television interviewer in 2012, “I didn’t think I could support myself and my daughter, and he’d brainwashed me it was my fault he couldn’t paint.”108

Yet now she’d taken that momentous first step. Margaret would later reveal that the legal separation was part of a larger plan to permanently break free from Walter’s grasp. “I got a separation to begin with and went to Honolulu to get as far away as I could,” she recalled in a later interview. “When I got more courage, I came back and filed for the divorce. I was just happy to get out alive.”109

Now that she’d made that first major break, Margaret began rebuilding her life in Hawaii. Yet she wasn’t sure what to do next, being a bit shell-shocked. She would later say that she’d come to dread Walter’s controlling behavior and explosive temper. “Now, looking back on it,” she reflected in the interview, “[I was] really abused…not abused physically but emotionally—totally abused. I wasn’t even allowed out of the house.”110

Margaret was also a 38-year-old single mother with two failed marriages behind her. Though she didn’t know it at the time, her best years were ahead of her. She enrolled Jane in summer school, and took time off to get much-needed rest and to collect her thoughts. She was often depressed and found it hard to paint. “After I filed for divorce,” she recalled, “I painted a few paintings and mailed them to Walter. I was so afraid of him I thought if I kept mailing him then he wouldn’t have me killed.

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