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He waited for three years after the war before returning to France. With him went a slender, married English girl, Virginia Haggard MacNeil, a theosophist and vegetarian. Chagall fell in love with her. After seven years, she ran off with an indigent photographer older than Chagall. It was an immense blow to his ego, but soon after, he met Valentine Brodsky, a Russian divorcee designing millinery in London, who became his second wife. "Vava," as he calls her, is a forceful, intelligent woman, and the guidon of his life. He says she is "my procurer general," for she has brought order into his life. When they disagree, Chagall cries, "Divorce!" Vava shrugs, "He divorces me many times a day."
Campari & Cats. Vava only incurs her husband's wrath when she tries to tidy his studio. After she straightens up, "I can't find anything," he says. "Vive disorder!" He works amidst a clutter of art books, racks of canvases, dozens of palettes laden with globs of dried paint, photographs of relatives and postcards of great paintings that dot the walls, and—of course—a samovar. There are dozens of classical records—Mozart, Bach, Stravinsky and Ravel—which the artist, who had first dreamed of growing up to be a violinist, plays while he paints. Large pen and ink sketches, prototypes for his Metropolitan Opera murals, are tacked up in the studio. On a nearby stool lie booklets on flowers and birds, also a picture pamphlet on a kindred effort that Chagall hopes to match in the Manhattan murals—Michelangelo's Last Judgment.
At his age he finds the 21 steps leading to his separate studio difficult, and he is now building another house in nearby Saint-Paul-de-Vence, despite his own misgivings. "At my age," he confesses, "I'm absolutely mad to build this new house." When completed at the end of the year, it will provide room for a ground-floor studio and his staff of three—cook, chauffeur and maid—who will share the tasks of providing the master with his occasional Campari and soda and chastening his roaming semi-Siamese and alley cats. For Chagall, work always comes first. Says Daughter Ida, now married to Franz Meyer, director of the Basel museum, "Sometimes I think the only thing I learned from Father is a terrible guilt feeling when I am not doing something. When I was a child there was always a timetable above my bed." Adds Vava: "He gets furious at people loafing around. When our charwoman is busy scrubbing floors, Marc can go to work too."