May 5, 2025 • 39 mins
Altina Schinasi is known as the inventor of cat-eye glasses, but she was also an artist, a documentarian, and an activist. And she was very frank about her own faults and bad decisions.
Research:
- “Altina Schinasi 1924 (1907-1999).” Helen Temple Cook Library. Dana Hall School. https://library.danahall.org/archives/danapedia/alumnae/altina-schinasi-1924-1907-1999/
- “Altina Schinasi's 116th Birthday.” Google Doodle. https://doodles.google/doodle/altina-schinasis-116th-birthday/
- “Altina Schinasi, The Harlem Girl Who Knew Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Salvador Dali And Invented Cat-Eye Glasses.” Harlem World. June 21, 2023. https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/altina-schinasi-the-harlem-girl-who-knew-martin-luther-king-rosa-parks-salvador-dali-and-invented-cat-eye-glasses/
- “Artist Altina Schinasi Miranda Dies at 92.” Ventura County Star. Aug. 17, 1999. https://www.newspapers.com/image/935509837/?match=1&terms=Altina%20Schinasi
- Bachz, Betty. “From Audrey Hepburn to Hailey Bieber: How cat-eye frames became a timeless look.” Vogue Scandinavia. Oct. 8, 2021. https://www.voguescandinavia.com/articles/history-of-the-cat-eye-sunglasses
- “Heiress Asks Divorce.” The Cleveland Press. June 21, 1933. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1164656661/?match=1&terms=Altina%20Schinasi
- “The League’s Legacy.” Art Students League of New York. https://www.artstudentsleague.org/timeline#timeline
- “Mengel Module Furniture - Morris B. Sanders.” Modernism 101. https://modernism101.com/products-page/industrial-design/mengel-module-furniture-promotionalsales-ephemera-for-morris-b-sanders-furniture-designed-in-1946-produced-by-the-mengel-furniture-company-of-louisville-ky/
- “Morris Schinasi.” The Daily Times. Sept. 13, 1928. https://www.newspapers.com/image/724032205/?match=1&terms=Morris%20Schinasi
- “Morris Schinasi Leaves $1,300,000 to Institutions.” The Daily Times. Sept. 28, 1928. https://www.newspapers.com/image/724032801/
- Ravo, Nick. “Altina Schinasi Miranda, 92, Designer of Harlequin Glasses.” The New York Times. Aug. 21, 1999. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/21/arts/altina-schinasi-miranda-92-designer-of-harlequin-glasses.html
- “Rose-Colored Glasses.” Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Sept. 12, 1939. https://www.newspapers.com/image/88914623/?match=1&terms=%22harlequin%20eyeglasses%20%22
- Sander, Peter. “Altina.” 2014.
- Schinasi Estate Put at $8,014,962.” The Springfield Morning Union. May 2, 1930. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1067224117/?match=1&terms=Altina%20Schinasi
- Peabody, Pam. “Visions: sculptor Altina interviewed by Pam Peabody.” American Women Making History and Culture. WFPW. 1978. https://archive.org/details/pacifica_radio_archives-WZ0295.01
- Zaltzman, Lior. “The Pioneering Sephardic Jewish Mother Invented the Cat-Eye Glasses.” Kveller. Aug. 4, 2023. https://www.kveller.com/this-pioneering-sephardic-jewish-mother-invented-the-cat-eye-glasses/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Altina Shanazi has been
on my list for a while for the simple fact
(00:21):
that she spoiler alert, invented cat eye glasses. She called
them harlequin glasses. It's one of those things that comes
up kind of annually on her birthday, like there's been
a Google doodle about her, and people sometimes will like
to write, like a in fashion magazines and stuff a
quick like the birthday of the woman who dah, And
I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. She sounds interesting. She's so
(00:44):
much more interesting than I knew, because once I dug
into her story, I was really entranced by how much
she had done in her life and how many historical
events she bumped up against. And we're pretty lucky in
this case because she is recent enough that there are
even video interviews with her. There's an entire documentary that
was made by her grandkids. I call them grandkids. They
(01:07):
are adults and you know, filmmakers. But yeah, I don't
want anybody to think it's like little kids that made this.
They did not a kindergarten project. It is an actual film.
And that's also fascinating because this is a woman who
had faults like anybody does. She made some bad decisions.
(01:28):
In interviews, she's so casually frank about all of it.
She never seems to want to gloss over the things
about her that some people would find less appealing. That's
honestly quite refreshing. It's also a little wild. I just
the candor is really disarming in a way, but it's
(01:48):
it made it all the more funny to me that
in most you know, blurbs you'll see about her, it's
all about the cat eye glasses and none of the
other things, some of which are really interesting. So today
we're going to talk about the glasses, but we will
also talk about her art that she did, the documentaries
that she worked on, her activism, her politics, and just
(02:11):
a whole lot more. There are a lot of husbands,
so buckle in. Yeah. I wasn't quite prepared for that
part of it. Altina Sannazi was born on August fourth,
nineteen oh seven, at three point fifty one Riverside Drive
at one hundred and seventh Street in New York City.
Her parents were Musa and Laurette Shnazi, and they already
(02:34):
had two daughters, Victoria and Juliet. Altina's father, Musa, was
born in Turkya and americanized his name to Morris after
moving to the United States. Her mother had been born
in what was at the time the Ottoman Empire, so
Morris had left his village at the age of fifteen
and gone to Egypt to find work. He went there
(02:56):
by cattle boats and learned about shipping. While living in Egypt,
That's also where he learned about tobacco, which would become
an important part of his life later on. Altina later
recounted that while in Egypt, a Greek man named Garoffalo
had taken Morris under his wing and basically raised him
as a son. When Morris was around thirty. It was
(03:19):
that man who told him that he really should head
to the United States because of all the opportunities there. Yeah,
and I want to say, I'm not one hundred percent
sure on that name of Graffalo. She says it in interviews.
I only saw the one interview where she talked about
that man, and it's a little unclear. It's not super
(03:40):
well enunciated, so there's a possibility that the name might
be wrong there. But Morris did emigrate at that man's
urging to the United States in the late eighteen hundreds
and he became very wealthy. Morris's story is kind of
a storybook immigrant rags to riches tale due to disadvantaged
(04:00):
circumstances in his early life. He didn't have any formal education,
but he was incredibly smart. He reportedly spoke eight different languages,
and after he moved to the United States, he saw
a need for something. This comes with some baggage, but
at the time it was very very commonplace and accepted
(04:23):
that a lot of people smoked and they had to
roll their own cigarettes. And he invented a cigarette rolling machine.
And this was a completely new idea at the time.
He had just noticed that, you know, it was a
big sloppy mess most of the time when people rolled
their own cigarettes. So he invented this machine that would
do it for them, make it a very neat package.
(04:43):
He patented it and it took off. His brother Saul
joined him and they opened a factory at one hundred
and twentieth in Broadway, and al Tina would later estimate
that the two men had become millionaires within just five
or six years of business. And that's millionaires in the
very early twentieth century. So that's a lot of money,
very fast. Yeah, if this were an ad for immigrating
(05:05):
to the United States, it would have results not typical
and very small. Let us under the bottom of the screen.
Shanazi them built on the success of that rolling machine
by manufacturing a line of cigarettes, and by the time
Altina was born, he had moved the family into a
twelve bedroom marble mansion. That is where Altina was born.
(05:28):
Morris didn't marry until he was fifty. His bride was
a lot younger than he was, more than thirty years younger.
The two of them had met through Laurette's father after
Morris had made a return trip to Turkya. Laurette's father
said that she would have no interest in an old
man like Morris, and the two of them are said
(05:48):
to have just let her decide for herself. She was
seventeen years old at that time, but Morris was handsome
and dashing, and apparently he really won her over. Obviously,
there were all there's some power politics and dynamics in
play here. The two of them got married in Turkey
and then traveled to the United States, and it was
(06:08):
for Laurette that he built this mansion. It was designed
by the same architect who built Carnegie Hall. But while
this seemed like a good match initially, the marriage turned
out to be mostly unhappy. Morris was not faithful to
his wife, but he was also very jealous because she
was very young and pretty. Lorette lived a unique life.
(06:32):
She had everything she could ever want, but she didn't
really have her own freedom. She could, for example, charge
any purchase she might need, but she wasn't allowed to
carry cash. Altina later described her mother as being like
a prisoner. Lorette did not particularly care for that giant
house and lavish life. It all felt like too much
(06:53):
for her, and at one point, Lorette in an effort
to kind of get away from it, although sort of
this is a weird way to get away from a
life of luxury, she rented an entire floor of the
Plaza hotel for an entire year and took Altina and
her two older sisters with her to try to get
(07:13):
a taste of independence. I mean, I would love to
do that, but I don't think I would feel like
I was getting away from my beings of an over
overblown life at that point. My read on that was
that it more gave her a break from the day
to day of her marriage, more so than the expanse
(07:35):
and luxury of the mansion. Yeah. I think she really
did just want to not deal with her husband for
a minute. Yeah, although it was his money paying for
the entire whole floor of the hotel. Oh. Yeah. So
in her early years, Altina, who went by Tina, had
private tutors providing her education. Then she went to the
(07:57):
horse Man School until it was time to start high school.
In the early nineteen twenties, she was enrolled at the
Dana Hall School, that's a private all girls school in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
While there, she was active in a lot of school groups,
but none of them really hinted at the art career
that she would eventually choose. She was part of the
(08:17):
Athletic Association and the varsity hockey team, the French Club,
and the Christian Association. And that one's a little odd
because Altina was Jewish. She was one of the school's
only Jewish students, and she generally hid that fact. So
her membership in the Christian Association might have just been
an effort to try to blend in. She mentioned that
(08:39):
she always felt isolated there and noted in a later
interview quote it was high Episcopalian and I was the
token Jew there. Nonetheless, she seems to have been well liked.
She was the class vice president in her junior and
senior years. When Altina graduated from high school in nineteen
twenty four, she went to Pair and she spent some
(09:01):
time there with her older sister, and it's there that
she first began to study art. But she still didn't
think art was really going to be anything for her
other than a hobby. While she acknowledged that she had
in her younger years thought about being an artist, she
also noted that quote, sometimes I thought I wanted to
be a scientist. What she knew she did not want
(09:23):
was to only be a housewife and mother. After returning
to New York, she started studying at the Art Students League.
This organization also came up in our recent two parter
on Wanda Gog. Although Shnazi was there more than a
decade after Gog was, we didn't really talk about this
school in the earlier Wanda Gog episode, but it does
(09:46):
merit some backstory. The Art Students League of New York
was formed in eighteen seventy five. It was an association
formed by art students from the National Academy of Design
after the Academy stopped classes for a real organization during
a tumultuous time. The students, with no study options available,
formed the League quote having for its objects the attainment
(10:09):
of a higher development in art studies, the encouragement of
a spirit of unselfish and true friendship among its members.
The imparting of a valuable knowledge pertaining to art, as
acquired by any of the members. The accumulation of works
and books of art, and such properties as will best
advance the interests of the members. Mutual help and study,
(10:31):
and sympathy and practical assistance if need be in times
of sickness and trouble. From that beginning, the Art Students
League of New York has persisted, and it's become a
school where both professionals and amateur's study art. It continues
through to today. Shnazi's time at the Art Students League
was defined by two teachers. First German artist George Gross,
(10:53):
who she later described as inspiring but not necessarily a
good teacher. She said that he didn't really teach any thing.
He would become very important in her later life, though.
The other was fellow student Howard Warshaw, who she said
actually taught her a great deal about painting and technique.
At twenty one, Altina's life changed in multiple ways, and
(11:15):
we will talk about them after we pause for a
sponsor break. In nineteen twenty eight, Altina's father died. He
was wealthy and important enough that there were many mentions
in the paper about the estate that he left behind.
(11:38):
Morris Shnazi had set aside three hundred thousand dollars for
Jewish and Christian hospitals in the US, and one point
three million dollars to establish and maintain a hospital for
the poor in Turkya. That was a bequeathment that Altina's mother,
Laurette oversaw personally. She traveled to Turkia, saw the hospital
get built, and then administered the upkeep money from there.
(12:02):
The rest of his considerable estate, ranging from about three
point five to seven million, depending on the source that
you read, was distributed among Lorette, Altina, Victoria, and Juliet
so at this point Altina was kind of set for life.
The same year that Morris died, Altina got married to
designer and architect Marris B. Sanders. They had met at
(12:25):
a party while he was still a student. She also
had a French suitor who wanted to marry her, and
she choked about flipping a coin to make the decision
between the two of them. However, she arrived at it.
She decided to marry Sanders, and for a moment, it
really seemed like the two of them were the it
couple of the New York design scene. Their apartment was
(12:47):
the Penthouse at five point forty four East eighty sixth Street,
and it was featured in Architecture magazine not long after
their wedding. But later in life, Altina noted that they
were really both to young, explaining quote, we really didn't
know each other at all. They welcomed their first child,
a son named Dennis, on January twenty first, nineteen twenty nine.
(13:09):
They had a second son, Terry, on December thirtieth, nineteen
thirty one. But this was not a happy time in
her life. Morris was not a great husband, and Altina
felt very lonely. She would later write of this time quote,
I have three strong currents running in my life. One
A strong sex drive in curiosity, it cannot be that
(13:31):
this is the only man I will know too. A
strong creative drive that kept pushing me to inventions, creations,
writing objects, et cetera. Three a strong attachment to my
two children. Dennis was like a rooster and Terry was
soulful and shy. After four years of marriage, al Tina
(13:52):
filed for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty and
insulting treatment. Her divorce attorney, Mac Brandwin would become i'm
an important figure in her life for many years. As
this divorce played out, there were rumors that her ex
husband was very angry and might become violent, so she
took the boys and went to Europe. This early nineteen
(14:14):
thirties crossing of the Atlantic was made aboard a German ship,
and Altina later told the story of several conversations aboard
where people engaged her in discussions about the issue of
the so called Jewish question. It was the ongoing debate
about the status that Jews should have in Germany, and
(14:34):
it was of course obviously stoked by anti Semitism. The
people asking Altina about it. Clearly did not know that
she was Jewish. Yes, she tells one story where she
was talking to a woman that she met on board,
and she was like, she seemed very lovely, and we
were having a lovely conversation, and then she asked me
about the Jewish question, and then I realized I didn't
(14:55):
like her at all, and she's so matter of fact
about it. Once the divorce was settled, though, and Shnazi
was back in New York, she took a job as
a window dresser, working under Peter Copeland, who designed windows
for retailers on Fifth Avenue. To be clear, she didn't
really need to take this job. Like I said, she's
kind of set for life, but she also did not
(15:16):
want to be idle, and she wanted to do things.
Window trimming gave her a sense of usefulness, and this
was really the beginning of considering art as a career.
In this job, she also rubbed shoulders with well known
artists Salvador Dali. When Dali got a contract to design
a window for the luxury department store Bonwit Teller, Altina
(15:37):
worked with him on the project. This was not a
project that resulted in a lifelong friendship or a collaboration.
The whole thing went sort of terribly, although it doesn't
sound like that had anything to do with Shannazi's work.
The store management just did not like Dalli's concept and
they tried to change things. Dali apparently had a very
passionate reaction, and somehow window glass ended up broken. During
(16:01):
this period in her life, Altina started an affair with
her attorney mac Branwin. She would reflect years later quote
it set up in me a very big conflict. It
wasn't so much that this man had been her divorce attorney.
It was that Max's wife was her friend. She didn't
want to be a mistress, and she wanted him to
leave his wife. He didn't, but the affair continued. Whilst
(16:25):
talking about it in a twenty fourteen documentary directed by
her grandson Peter Sanders, Altina sort of coolly and matter
of factly discussed that her sex drive was just too
powerful to override it. As a divorced woman who had
her own money and a staff to look after her children,
Shanazi was free to cultivate the life that she wanted
(16:46):
in Manhattan. Her home was very open and her social
circle was artsy and fun. She hosted sketch classes once
a week and people would sometimes just drop in for dinner.
Her son Terry later said, quote, I grew up to
looking every family on Thursday night had a nude in
the living room, referring to the nude models who would
come and sit for the sketch class. And now we
(17:08):
get to the story of the glasses. This is a
story that gets told a number of different ways. One
is that she had to work on a window display
for an optician. Another is that while she was working
on one window, she saw another one nearby that featured
women's glasses. A newspaper account from nineteen thirty nine had
(17:29):
kind of a wild story, quote, the glasses were born
the day Altina s. Sander went to a bridge party
and found that her esthetic sense was offended by the
glasses her friends wore. But the way she told the story,
she was not at work when inspiration struck, and she
was certainly not at a bridge party. Here is her
account quote and then one day I was walking from
(17:51):
a movie with some guy I don't remember his name,
and I passed a shop an optician, and I saw
this oil painting with glasses glued onto the face, and
I thought, that is really so ugly. And then Dorothy
Parker was writing verses men never make passes at girls
who wear glasses, and I felt, well, something better could
be done than just these awful glasses that looked like
(18:13):
the time of Benjamin Franklin. And then I thought, well,
what's good? What would be good on the face? And
I thought of a mask, a harlequin mask. They're really
beautiful on a face. She had been in Venice during
Carnival and the imagery of the harlequin mask had really
stuck with her, so she started playing with that shape
and papercut, and then she had prototypes made. When she
(18:35):
thought she had the design just right, Shanazi thought she
was onto something with these glasses, and she started to
approach I wear companies with this design. She later recounted
being told, quote, well, when we're ready to sell glasses
to lunatic asylums, we'll let you know. But Altina was
not dissuaded, and she eventually approached a shop in Manhattan
(18:56):
called lou Jeans. Initially, this meeting, which was what the
shop's head salesman, looked like a bus just like every
other meeting but by pure happenstance, the owner of the
shop happened to walk through as their meeting was concluding,
and he saw the photos of Shnazi's prototype, and he
saw the potential, and he spoke with her about her
(19:17):
new style of glasses, and then at the end of
that conversation he asked to be the exclusive distributor of
the design. She took that deal. Mister Luzhin was wise
to do so. The new Harlequin glasses, as they were called,
became very popular, very quickly. Their rise to prominence was
helped by the fact that a lot of high profile
(19:39):
people were early adopters of Shnazi's glasses design. Claire booth
Loose is often said to have bought one of the
first pairs. Peggy Guggenheim wore them. Soon they were getting
write ups in magazines, and this was really a huge moment.
Glasses for women up to that point had been seen
as kind of a curse. They were not designed for
(20:00):
or anything other than utility. It was sort of universally
acknowledged that they would never look good on basically anybody.
But with Shanazi's innovation, glasses had become a fashion accessory.
The ad campaigns for the glasses really reflected this shift.
One magazine ad read quote, be glad you wear glasses.
(20:21):
Wear Harlequins. No longer is the girl who wears glasses
doomed to look owlish, bookish or just plain dull flattering.
Harlequins are so gay and debonair. They give your very
spirits a lift. Remember it is Harlequin's exclusive design that
makes the difference. Look for the tag on the frame.
In nineteen thirty nine, Shannazi won the Lord and Taylor
(20:43):
Annual American Design Award. While she certainly could have stayed
in the eyeglass game for the rest of her life
at the top of her game, after winning this award,
Shannazi decided to sell the company and get out of
the industry altogether. Many years later, after Altina's death, her
granddaughter said of this choice quote, she could have been
(21:05):
one of the wealthiest women in the country, if not
the world, if she had stayed in that business. She
never loved the business of a business. She loved the art.
Altina Shnazi was a person at this point of wealth
and importance, living a very successful life in New York
as a designer of the new Sheikh glasses that everyone
seemed to want. And then World War II broke out
(21:28):
and she actually used that success to help others. When
a friend asked her if she would sign affidavits that
could be used to get people out of Europe, she
readily agreed and estimated that she signed thirteen of them.
These affidavits were required for people to immigrate. It basically
was a document that vouched for the person named as
being of good character, and it said that the signer
(21:50):
would look after the person coming over so that they
would not become a burden. So to sign more than
a dozen of them was actually a pretty significant act,
and it was because of that act that she met
Eric Barrett, a doctor she had signed an affidavit for.
When he got to the United States, he phoned her
and said, Madam, I have arrived. Up to this point,
(22:11):
Altina was still in her relationship with her lawyer Mac Brandwin,
who was still married to her close friend, but Eric
started visiting her, and she later described their growing acquaintance
as quote eating away at her connection to Mac. Eric was,
by all accounts a very kind and sweet man. He
was a great piano player in addition to being incredibly smart,
(22:34):
and Altina fell very hard for him. But not long
into their relationship, while he was working in a tuberculosis
hospital in New England, he came down with tuberculosis himself,
and the two of them didn't see each other for
two years. But then Eric wrote to Altina and he
told her that his health had actually improved, and he
(22:54):
asked if she wanted him back in her life, and
she absolutely did. The pair got married soon after. She
worried she would later confess about possible transmission of the
disease to herself or, more concerningly, to her boys, but
none of them ever contracted tuberculosis. Eric had spent time
working at a hospital in Los Angeles, and he fell
(23:17):
in love with California. When he returned to New York,
he pitched the idea to Altina that they should move there,
and she went for it. They bought a house in
Coldwater Canyon with a view of the city, though there
were ongoing issues with Eric's health and Altina needing to
learn to keep house after having had a staff her
whole life. She later described this period as peaceful and
(23:40):
one of the nicest times in her life. She wanted
to really focus on her art. So one of the
rooms in the California house was made into a studio
with a sign on the door that read, do not
come in unless there's a catastrophe. She would say that
she wanted to have just three hours a day to
herself without interruption, that she really did work very hard
(24:02):
for a brief time. Altina actually started a factory to
make sunglasses in her signature Harlequin shape in La According
to a story that she later told, her employees were
a mix of black and white workers, and there was
tension when some of the white employees made the racist
complaint about sharing a bathroom with her black coworkers. Shanazi
(24:24):
solution was simple, the black employees could just use the
executive bathroom that only she used. She reportedly, though, closed
the factory after realizing once again she really hated all
the day to day aspects of running a business. There's
a secondary funny story involving the mob that I will
tell on Friday. Okay, in a moment, we'll talk about
(24:44):
Shanazi's connection to the McCarthy era Red Scare, but first
we will pause for a sponsor break. As we've mentioned
on the show before, in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties,
the Red Scare was a blaze in the US. Altina
(25:06):
described this as a very bad time when, according to
McCarthy quote, everybody was a communist. Ten Hollywood screenwriters Alva Bessie,
Herbert Bieberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dimitrix, Ring Lardner Junior, John
Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton
Trumbo had all refused to answer questions before Congress after
(25:29):
having been subpoenaed by the House on American Activities Committee.
They were held in contempt, blacklisted, and they got the
nickname the Hollywood ten. Director John Barry, who went by Jack,
made a documentary about these men that was sympathetic to
their situation, and soon he too was on the list
to be called before the committee, but he dodged the
(25:50):
subpoena by hiding in Altina and Eric's guesthouse. They kept
their friend hidden until one night he just left quietly
and made his way to Europe. Eric's health concerns had
a fresh ray of hope when streptomycin was introduced as
a treatment for tuberculosis. He went to the Mayo clinic
for treatment, and initially it was a huge help, but
(26:13):
over time he built up a resistance to the drug
and his health started to decline. He died in nineteen
fifty eight, after which Altina said, quote, the world sort
of fell apart. She met Charles Carey, who went by Charlie,
a few months after losing Eric, and at the time
he had just started all of the proceedings of getting
a divorce. In an interview in the documentary that We've
(26:36):
Restaurenced a couple of times, Charlie actually started crying while
relaying a story about Altina caring for him. During this
time when they had just met, she had kind of
negotiated with his landlord to be let into his apartment,
which she wasn't supposed to have access to, but it
was so she could supply his kitchen with groceries. Charlie
eventually moved into Altina's house. His job was in political science,
(27:00):
so their social group became this very curious mix of
artists and people in politics. Soon the two of them
were married. Altina was not in love with Charlie, although
she did like him. She became depressed in their marriage,
and this was a period when she painted a lot.
Her work during this third marriage is vibrant and surrealist. Eventually,
(27:22):
she found new projects and new media to work in
which kept her occupied. One of them was moving into
the world of film. She got permission from George Gross,
her teacher from back in New York, to make a
film about his experiences in Nazi Germany. The resulting film,
titled Interregnum, was nominated for an Academy Award. She also
(27:44):
started volunteering as an art therapist at synanon To, an
addiction treatment facility in Los Angeles that has its own
wild story. If you want to look it up, there's
a recent documentary about it kinda turned into a cult.
As for Shnazi's involvement, she and a close friend worked
alongside the people who were getting treatment there. She painted
(28:05):
a huge mural in the facility's open space, and then
she worked alongside residence to create a second large mural.
She also became invested in the work of Martin Luther
King Junior. She and her husband Charlie met doctor King
and a lot of the people in his inner circle
with a proposal that they would like to make a
documentary about the civil rights work that he was doing.
(28:28):
King went for this idea and promised to do anything
he could to help them. Writer John Killens signed on
to write the script. He lived with Charlie and Altina
while he wrote, and was picked up by the police
several times while they were in their upscale neighborhood just
because he was black. This film never got made though
there was a lack of funding. Nobody really wanted to
(28:50):
touch the subject matter because it was so devisive, and
then doctor King was assassinated and the project fell apart.
Altina's activism continued when it came to the recent podcast
topic the Vietnam War. She and her husband Charlie were
both vehemently and very vocally against the war, and they
actually took out an ad in the New York Times
that was like a large statement against the war. This
(29:14):
was really risky, particularly for Charles Carey because of his
political science career. The Bear moved to Washington, d c.
In the nineteen seventies when Carrie got a job in
the State Department. With her life uprooted, Altina once again
threw herself into her art, and she started a series
of sculptures that have become iconic. She called these sculptures
(29:36):
characters because they are sculpted portraits in the form of
chairs and benches. She would make plaster casts of the
sitters and then make a mold and make castings from that,
so that she could use the cast of one model
multiple times with different changes to sculpt and paint. In
a nineteen seventy eight radio interview, Altina said she had
(29:57):
gotten the idea after looking at photograph by Henri Cartier Bresson,
who had taken pictures of chairs as they were used
in various social settings. The first set of these characters
were displayed at the Touchstone Gallery in Washington, d C.
But she continued to make them for years after that.
Throughout her art career she had often gone just by
(30:18):
the name Altina, and though the harlequin frames had made
her well known in the nineteen thirties, she had a
second huge surge of name recognition in the late nineteen
seventies because of these characters. She appeared on television regularly,
including on Good Morning America, where she famously said quote,
I don't know who decreed that art should just be
(30:40):
something you nail up on a wall. In July of
nineteen eighty, a refugee from Cuba named Celestino Miranda arrived
in the US. He was an artist and he was
hired along with his friend Fernando, to help Altina with
her sculptures because she was quite a petite woman. She
was getting older and these casts were often very heavy,
(31:01):
and she and Tino really hit it off. Eventually, after
they had visited Santa Fe briefly on a work trip,
Altina asked him to move to Santa Fe permanently with
her as her assistant, for the rate of one thousand
dollars a week, and he said he would think about it,
and they continued working together in Washington, d c. Altina
was still married to Charlie, but one night, when he
(31:23):
was in La on business, she asked Tino to spend
the night. In his retelling of it, he didn't get
her message. Initially, he thought she was just afraid to
be alone in the house without her husband and that
he would be sleeping in the maid's room, but Altina
clarified that she was interested in him romantically. Before long,
(31:44):
Charlie and Altina were divorced and she married for a
fourth time in nineteen eighty one to Celestino Miranda. This
was scandalous to a lot of people that Shannazi knew
and socialized with, aside from the fact that she had
had an affair and left her husband for her lover,
because there was a concern that this much younger man
who really had nothing in terms of finances, was just
(32:07):
marrying her for her money and social standing. Not long
after they married, Tina was diagnosed with cancer. It was
at this point that they finally moved to New Mexico
permanently for his health. He would later recount that she
let him get all kinds of animals, which he believed
cured him. Al Tina did too, and she made a
(32:28):
lot of artwork about their farm. They also continued to
collaborate on sculpture. While people might have doubted the reasons
that the two of them married each other, they clearly
had found a unique compatibility as artists, and this created
a very deep bond between them. A lot of the
benches still in this character style that they made together
(32:49):
during this time featured couples. Yeah, some of those pieces
are really quite beautiful. Her son Dennis died suddenly of
a heart attack in nineteen eighty seven, and that was
a terrible shock to Altina. She told friends that she
felt paralyzed, and that's something that has echoed in Tino's
later account, where he describes her as never having cried
(33:12):
and said that she kept everything inside. In nineteen ninety five,
Altina Shenazi published her autobiography The Road I Have Traveled.
I could not get my hands on a copy of
this book. It is kind of rare. There was nothing
I could get that wasn't going to take like a
month to come from like Europe, even though it was
(33:33):
a US publication, there just aren't many copies floating around.
That one bit that we read earlier about the three
currents of her life is from it, but it is
from her reading aloud from it that I got that.
On the evening of August nineteenth, nineteen ninety nine, Altina
told Tino that she just thought her dinner was digesting poorly.
(33:55):
She died later that night at the age of ninety two.
In her write up about Altina after her death, her
granddaughter Victoria R. Sanders, who produced the documentary that we've
mentioned a few times, told a newspaper reporter quote, the
thing about my grandmother was she was not like anybody
else's grandmother or mother for that matter. She looked twenty
(34:16):
years younger. She was inquisitive, vibrant, anything was possible. She
was always working on some new project. That's how Tina Shnazi.
I love her. I have so many things to say
about her. On Okay Friday, I have, you know, mixed things.
I have listener mail. Okay, it's about strawberries. We have
(34:37):
gotten a lot of listener mail about strawberries. I'm kind
of surprised at how much. I don't know why, since, yeah,
we talked about how very popular they are, but this
one cracked me up so hard and I loved it.
So this is from our listener Reagan, who notes that
it's pronounced like Megan, but as Tracy and I know
that we both know people who would say it Megan,
so I'm hoping Reagan is correct. Uh. Reagan writes, Hi,
(35:02):
Holly and Tracy, I am a longtime listener who finally
feels as though I have a worthy enough reason to email.
Your episode on strawberries was instantly exciting to me. I
took a screenshot of the episode and sent it to
my husband, who loves strawberries. He eats them every day.
Rainer shine summer or winter. However, as the episode progressed,
I discovered more than one coincidence that tickled both me
(35:25):
and my husband. I was listening to the episode as
I was getting ready for bed, when, right before an
ad break, you teased about the spycraft portion happening in Chile.
With face wash still on my face, I ran to
the living room to tell my husband that the Strawberry
spycraft was happening in Chile. Why would this piece of
information warrant such a response, you ask, Well, my husband's
(35:46):
father is an immigrant from Chile. How exciting. I returned
to my nighttime routine, satisfied with all the excitement for
the evening. Oh boy, was I wrong. The excitement was
far from over. Once back from the ad break, you
don't keeper into Frasier's journey to Chile. When I heard
you say that he landed in Concepcion, Chile, I nearly
fell over. That is the exact town where my father
(36:08):
in law was born and raised. Once again, I ran
to tell my husband about this coincidence. What are the odds? Okay?
So now I was one hundred percent convinced the coincidences
were over for the evening. Again, I was wrong. Dushane
presented King Louis the fifteenth the successful Chilean strawberries on
July sixth, which happens to be my husband's birthday. Then
(36:29):
you shared that Dushane first noticed success with Chilean strawberries
on June sixth, which happens to be my birthday. Now
by this point I was already in bed, so I
did not run to tell my husband these coincidences. However,
I did tell him the next day. We were so tickled.
I hope you both are also tickled to know how
one episode contained so much excitement for me and my husband.
(36:50):
We both attended your live show at the Indiana Historical
Society when you discussed Gene Stratton Porter. I work at
the ISHS and I am the co host on our
institutional podcast, so I couldn't miss the opportunity to see
you two live. You bring so much learning, laughter and
excitement into my life and my husband's. Because I often
share a synopsis of each episode with him, I gladly
(37:11):
share pat Tax. These are our two kiddies, Trot who's
black and white, and Evy Dilute Calico. We're obsessed with them.
Trot is wacky and silly. As you can see, he
has a little mustache. His favorite toys are clothes hangers,
eyeglasses stolen from mom and Dad's nightstand, Maddy Grass style beads,
and anything he can rummage from the basement to bring upstairs.
(37:32):
Honorable mentions of basement offerings are Alan wrenches, work gloves,
and parts to our shop back our evy girl is
much less flamboyant with her silliness. She's sweet and beautiful
and everything is on her terms. She'll squeak at you
if she wants attention. Otherwise, you are permitted to bask
in her beauty from an arm's length, the way she
loves playing with strings, forehead scratches, and napping on her
(37:55):
heated blanket. Evie is a massive fan of the birdcam
on YouTube. Thanks for all you do to brighten the
world is your work and simply by being yourself. Sincerely, Reagan,
This is so darling. Okay listen, Trot is cute and
he looks diabolical, which is exactly my flavor of cat
is also gorgeous. Thank you for sharing this. I just
love the idea of one episode hitting so many unique
(38:18):
notes of someone's life. Yeah, a strawberries. I think in
honor of all of this, you should get a strawberry
cake and just giggle. How many coincidences you have? Reagan? Yeah?
Mostly I just want to eat strawberry cake and bring
people into my web of strawberry cake evil. I just
love it. I like knowing that things resonate with people
(38:41):
in fun ways, and also that it brings joy and
laughter and giggles. We all need more of that. If
you would like to write to us with joy, laughter
and giggles or otherwise, or if you like many people
want to write to us about strawberry information, there's gonna
be more strawberry emails read. I promise you. Uh. You
can do that at history at iHeartRadio dot com. You
(39:02):
can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Altina Shanazi has been
on my list for a while for the simple fact
(00:21):
that she spoiler alert, invented cat eye glasses. She called
them harlequin glasses. It's one of those things that comes
up kind of annually on her birthday, like there's been
a Google doodle about her, and people sometimes will like
to write, like a in fashion magazines and stuff a
quick like the birthday of the woman who dah, And
I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. She sounds interesting. She's so
(00:44):
much more interesting than I knew, because once I dug
into her story, I was really entranced by how much
she had done in her life and how many historical
events she bumped up against. And we're pretty lucky in
this case because she is recent enough that there are
even video interviews with her. There's an entire documentary that
was made by her grandkids. I call them grandkids. They
(01:07):
are adults and you know, filmmakers. But yeah, I don't
want anybody to think it's like little kids that made this.
They did not a kindergarten project. It is an actual film.
And that's also fascinating because this is a woman who
had faults like anybody does. She made some bad decisions.
(01:28):
In interviews, she's so casually frank about all of it.
She never seems to want to gloss over the things
about her that some people would find less appealing. That's
honestly quite refreshing. It's also a little wild. I just
the candor is really disarming in a way, but it's
(01:48):
it made it all the more funny to me that
in most you know, blurbs you'll see about her, it's
all about the cat eye glasses and none of the
other things, some of which are really interesting. So today
we're going to talk about the glasses, but we will
also talk about her art that she did, the documentaries
that she worked on, her activism, her politics, and just
(02:11):
a whole lot more. There are a lot of husbands,
so buckle in. Yeah. I wasn't quite prepared for that
part of it. Altina Sannazi was born on August fourth,
nineteen oh seven, at three point fifty one Riverside Drive
at one hundred and seventh Street in New York City.
Her parents were Musa and Laurette Shnazi, and they already
(02:34):
had two daughters, Victoria and Juliet. Altina's father, Musa, was
born in Turkya and americanized his name to Morris after
moving to the United States. Her mother had been born
in what was at the time the Ottoman Empire, so
Morris had left his village at the age of fifteen
and gone to Egypt to find work. He went there
(02:56):
by cattle boats and learned about shipping. While living in Egypt,
That's also where he learned about tobacco, which would become
an important part of his life later on. Altina later
recounted that while in Egypt, a Greek man named Garoffalo
had taken Morris under his wing and basically raised him
as a son. When Morris was around thirty. It was
(03:19):
that man who told him that he really should head
to the United States because of all the opportunities there. Yeah,
and I want to say, I'm not one hundred percent
sure on that name of Graffalo. She says it in interviews.
I only saw the one interview where she talked about
that man, and it's a little unclear. It's not super
(03:40):
well enunciated, so there's a possibility that the name might
be wrong there. But Morris did emigrate at that man's
urging to the United States in the late eighteen hundreds
and he became very wealthy. Morris's story is kind of
a storybook immigrant rags to riches tale due to disadvantaged
(04:00):
circumstances in his early life. He didn't have any formal education,
but he was incredibly smart. He reportedly spoke eight different languages,
and after he moved to the United States, he saw
a need for something. This comes with some baggage, but
at the time it was very very commonplace and accepted
(04:23):
that a lot of people smoked and they had to
roll their own cigarettes. And he invented a cigarette rolling machine.
And this was a completely new idea at the time.
He had just noticed that, you know, it was a
big sloppy mess most of the time when people rolled
their own cigarettes. So he invented this machine that would
do it for them, make it a very neat package.
(04:43):
He patented it and it took off. His brother Saul
joined him and they opened a factory at one hundred
and twentieth in Broadway, and al Tina would later estimate
that the two men had become millionaires within just five
or six years of business. And that's millionaires in the
very early twentieth century. So that's a lot of money,
very fast. Yeah, if this were an ad for immigrating
(05:05):
to the United States, it would have results not typical
and very small. Let us under the bottom of the screen.
Shanazi them built on the success of that rolling machine
by manufacturing a line of cigarettes, and by the time
Altina was born, he had moved the family into a
twelve bedroom marble mansion. That is where Altina was born.
(05:28):
Morris didn't marry until he was fifty. His bride was
a lot younger than he was, more than thirty years younger.
The two of them had met through Laurette's father after
Morris had made a return trip to Turkya. Laurette's father
said that she would have no interest in an old
man like Morris, and the two of them are said
(05:48):
to have just let her decide for herself. She was
seventeen years old at that time, but Morris was handsome
and dashing, and apparently he really won her over. Obviously,
there were all there's some power politics and dynamics in
play here. The two of them got married in Turkey
and then traveled to the United States, and it was
(06:08):
for Laurette that he built this mansion. It was designed
by the same architect who built Carnegie Hall. But while
this seemed like a good match initially, the marriage turned
out to be mostly unhappy. Morris was not faithful to
his wife, but he was also very jealous because she
was very young and pretty. Lorette lived a unique life.
(06:32):
She had everything she could ever want, but she didn't
really have her own freedom. She could, for example, charge
any purchase she might need, but she wasn't allowed to
carry cash. Altina later described her mother as being like
a prisoner. Lorette did not particularly care for that giant
house and lavish life. It all felt like too much
(06:53):
for her, and at one point, Lorette in an effort
to kind of get away from it, although sort of
this is a weird way to get away from a
life of luxury, she rented an entire floor of the
Plaza hotel for an entire year and took Altina and
her two older sisters with her to try to get
(07:13):
a taste of independence. I mean, I would love to
do that, but I don't think I would feel like
I was getting away from my beings of an over
overblown life at that point. My read on that was
that it more gave her a break from the day
to day of her marriage, more so than the expanse
(07:35):
and luxury of the mansion. Yeah. I think she really
did just want to not deal with her husband for
a minute. Yeah, although it was his money paying for
the entire whole floor of the hotel. Oh. Yeah. So
in her early years, Altina, who went by Tina, had
private tutors providing her education. Then she went to the
(07:57):
horse Man School until it was time to start high school.
In the early nineteen twenties, she was enrolled at the
Dana Hall School, that's a private all girls school in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
While there, she was active in a lot of school groups,
but none of them really hinted at the art career
that she would eventually choose. She was part of the
(08:17):
Athletic Association and the varsity hockey team, the French Club,
and the Christian Association. And that one's a little odd
because Altina was Jewish. She was one of the school's
only Jewish students, and she generally hid that fact. So
her membership in the Christian Association might have just been
an effort to try to blend in. She mentioned that
(08:39):
she always felt isolated there and noted in a later
interview quote it was high Episcopalian and I was the
token Jew there. Nonetheless, she seems to have been well liked.
She was the class vice president in her junior and
senior years. When Altina graduated from high school in nineteen
twenty four, she went to Pair and she spent some
(09:01):
time there with her older sister, and it's there that
she first began to study art. But she still didn't
think art was really going to be anything for her
other than a hobby. While she acknowledged that she had
in her younger years thought about being an artist, she
also noted that quote, sometimes I thought I wanted to
be a scientist. What she knew she did not want
(09:23):
was to only be a housewife and mother. After returning
to New York, she started studying at the Art Students League.
This organization also came up in our recent two parter
on Wanda Gog. Although Shnazi was there more than a
decade after Gog was, we didn't really talk about this
school in the earlier Wanda Gog episode, but it does
(09:46):
merit some backstory. The Art Students League of New York
was formed in eighteen seventy five. It was an association
formed by art students from the National Academy of Design
after the Academy stopped classes for a real organization during
a tumultuous time. The students, with no study options available,
formed the League quote having for its objects the attainment
(10:09):
of a higher development in art studies, the encouragement of
a spirit of unselfish and true friendship among its members.
The imparting of a valuable knowledge pertaining to art, as
acquired by any of the members. The accumulation of works
and books of art, and such properties as will best
advance the interests of the members. Mutual help and study,
(10:31):
and sympathy and practical assistance if need be in times
of sickness and trouble. From that beginning, the Art Students
League of New York has persisted, and it's become a
school where both professionals and amateur's study art. It continues
through to today. Shnazi's time at the Art Students League
was defined by two teachers. First German artist George Gross,
(10:53):
who she later described as inspiring but not necessarily a
good teacher. She said that he didn't really teach any thing.
He would become very important in her later life, though.
The other was fellow student Howard Warshaw, who she said
actually taught her a great deal about painting and technique.
At twenty one, Altina's life changed in multiple ways, and
(11:15):
we will talk about them after we pause for a
sponsor break. In nineteen twenty eight, Altina's father died. He
was wealthy and important enough that there were many mentions
in the paper about the estate that he left behind.
(11:38):
Morris Shnazi had set aside three hundred thousand dollars for
Jewish and Christian hospitals in the US, and one point
three million dollars to establish and maintain a hospital for
the poor in Turkya. That was a bequeathment that Altina's mother,
Laurette oversaw personally. She traveled to Turkia, saw the hospital
get built, and then administered the upkeep money from there.
(12:02):
The rest of his considerable estate, ranging from about three
point five to seven million, depending on the source that
you read, was distributed among Lorette, Altina, Victoria, and Juliet
so at this point Altina was kind of set for life.
The same year that Morris died, Altina got married to
designer and architect Marris B. Sanders. They had met at
(12:25):
a party while he was still a student. She also
had a French suitor who wanted to marry her, and
she choked about flipping a coin to make the decision
between the two of them. However, she arrived at it.
She decided to marry Sanders, and for a moment, it
really seemed like the two of them were the it
couple of the New York design scene. Their apartment was
(12:47):
the Penthouse at five point forty four East eighty sixth Street,
and it was featured in Architecture magazine not long after
their wedding. But later in life, Altina noted that they
were really both to young, explaining quote, we really didn't
know each other at all. They welcomed their first child,
a son named Dennis, on January twenty first, nineteen twenty nine.
(13:09):
They had a second son, Terry, on December thirtieth, nineteen
thirty one. But this was not a happy time in
her life. Morris was not a great husband, and Altina
felt very lonely. She would later write of this time quote,
I have three strong currents running in my life. One
A strong sex drive in curiosity, it cannot be that
(13:31):
this is the only man I will know too. A
strong creative drive that kept pushing me to inventions, creations,
writing objects, et cetera. Three a strong attachment to my
two children. Dennis was like a rooster and Terry was
soulful and shy. After four years of marriage, al Tina
(13:52):
filed for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty and
insulting treatment. Her divorce attorney, Mac Brandwin would become i'm
an important figure in her life for many years. As
this divorce played out, there were rumors that her ex
husband was very angry and might become violent, so she
took the boys and went to Europe. This early nineteen
(14:14):
thirties crossing of the Atlantic was made aboard a German ship,
and Altina later told the story of several conversations aboard
where people engaged her in discussions about the issue of
the so called Jewish question. It was the ongoing debate
about the status that Jews should have in Germany, and
(14:34):
it was of course obviously stoked by anti Semitism. The
people asking Altina about it. Clearly did not know that
she was Jewish. Yes, she tells one story where she
was talking to a woman that she met on board,
and she was like, she seemed very lovely, and we
were having a lovely conversation, and then she asked me
about the Jewish question, and then I realized I didn't
(14:55):
like her at all, and she's so matter of fact
about it. Once the divorce was settled, though, and Shnazi
was back in New York, she took a job as
a window dresser, working under Peter Copeland, who designed windows
for retailers on Fifth Avenue. To be clear, she didn't
really need to take this job. Like I said, she's
kind of set for life, but she also did not
(15:16):
want to be idle, and she wanted to do things.
Window trimming gave her a sense of usefulness, and this
was really the beginning of considering art as a career.
In this job, she also rubbed shoulders with well known
artists Salvador Dali. When Dali got a contract to design
a window for the luxury department store Bonwit Teller, Altina
(15:37):
worked with him on the project. This was not a
project that resulted in a lifelong friendship or a collaboration.
The whole thing went sort of terribly, although it doesn't
sound like that had anything to do with Shannazi's work.
The store management just did not like Dalli's concept and
they tried to change things. Dali apparently had a very
passionate reaction, and somehow window glass ended up broken. During
(16:01):
this period in her life, Altina started an affair with
her attorney mac Branwin. She would reflect years later quote
it set up in me a very big conflict. It
wasn't so much that this man had been her divorce attorney.
It was that Max's wife was her friend. She didn't
want to be a mistress, and she wanted him to
leave his wife. He didn't, but the affair continued. Whilst
(16:25):
talking about it in a twenty fourteen documentary directed by
her grandson Peter Sanders, Altina sort of coolly and matter
of factly discussed that her sex drive was just too
powerful to override it. As a divorced woman who had
her own money and a staff to look after her children,
Shanazi was free to cultivate the life that she wanted
(16:46):
in Manhattan. Her home was very open and her social
circle was artsy and fun. She hosted sketch classes once
a week and people would sometimes just drop in for dinner.
Her son Terry later said, quote, I grew up to
looking every family on Thursday night had a nude in
the living room, referring to the nude models who would
come and sit for the sketch class. And now we
(17:08):
get to the story of the glasses. This is a
story that gets told a number of different ways. One
is that she had to work on a window display
for an optician. Another is that while she was working
on one window, she saw another one nearby that featured
women's glasses. A newspaper account from nineteen thirty nine had
(17:29):
kind of a wild story, quote, the glasses were born
the day Altina s. Sander went to a bridge party
and found that her esthetic sense was offended by the
glasses her friends wore. But the way she told the story,
she was not at work when inspiration struck, and she
was certainly not at a bridge party. Here is her
account quote and then one day I was walking from
(17:51):
a movie with some guy I don't remember his name,
and I passed a shop an optician, and I saw
this oil painting with glasses glued onto the face, and
I thought, that is really so ugly. And then Dorothy
Parker was writing verses men never make passes at girls
who wear glasses, and I felt, well, something better could
be done than just these awful glasses that looked like
(18:13):
the time of Benjamin Franklin. And then I thought, well,
what's good? What would be good on the face? And
I thought of a mask, a harlequin mask. They're really
beautiful on a face. She had been in Venice during
Carnival and the imagery of the harlequin mask had really
stuck with her, so she started playing with that shape
and papercut, and then she had prototypes made. When she
(18:35):
thought she had the design just right, Shanazi thought she
was onto something with these glasses, and she started to
approach I wear companies with this design. She later recounted
being told, quote, well, when we're ready to sell glasses
to lunatic asylums, we'll let you know. But Altina was
not dissuaded, and she eventually approached a shop in Manhattan
(18:56):
called lou Jeans. Initially, this meeting, which was what the
shop's head salesman, looked like a bus just like every
other meeting but by pure happenstance, the owner of the
shop happened to walk through as their meeting was concluding,
and he saw the photos of Shnazi's prototype, and he
saw the potential, and he spoke with her about her
(19:17):
new style of glasses, and then at the end of
that conversation he asked to be the exclusive distributor of
the design. She took that deal. Mister Luzhin was wise
to do so. The new Harlequin glasses, as they were called,
became very popular, very quickly. Their rise to prominence was
helped by the fact that a lot of high profile
(19:39):
people were early adopters of Shnazi's glasses design. Claire booth
Loose is often said to have bought one of the
first pairs. Peggy Guggenheim wore them. Soon they were getting
write ups in magazines, and this was really a huge moment.
Glasses for women up to that point had been seen
as kind of a curse. They were not designed for
(20:00):
or anything other than utility. It was sort of universally
acknowledged that they would never look good on basically anybody.
But with Shanazi's innovation, glasses had become a fashion accessory.
The ad campaigns for the glasses really reflected this shift.
One magazine ad read quote, be glad you wear glasses.
(20:21):
Wear Harlequins. No longer is the girl who wears glasses
doomed to look owlish, bookish or just plain dull flattering.
Harlequins are so gay and debonair. They give your very
spirits a lift. Remember it is Harlequin's exclusive design that
makes the difference. Look for the tag on the frame.
In nineteen thirty nine, Shannazi won the Lord and Taylor
(20:43):
Annual American Design Award. While she certainly could have stayed
in the eyeglass game for the rest of her life
at the top of her game, after winning this award,
Shannazi decided to sell the company and get out of
the industry altogether. Many years later, after Altina's death, her
granddaughter said of this choice quote, she could have been
(21:05):
one of the wealthiest women in the country, if not
the world, if she had stayed in that business. She
never loved the business of a business. She loved the art.
Altina Shnazi was a person at this point of wealth
and importance, living a very successful life in New York
as a designer of the new Sheikh glasses that everyone
seemed to want. And then World War II broke out
(21:28):
and she actually used that success to help others. When
a friend asked her if she would sign affidavits that
could be used to get people out of Europe, she
readily agreed and estimated that she signed thirteen of them.
These affidavits were required for people to immigrate. It basically
was a document that vouched for the person named as
being of good character, and it said that the signer
(21:50):
would look after the person coming over so that they
would not become a burden. So to sign more than
a dozen of them was actually a pretty significant act,
and it was because of that act that she met
Eric Barrett, a doctor she had signed an affidavit for.
When he got to the United States, he phoned her
and said, Madam, I have arrived. Up to this point,
(22:11):
Altina was still in her relationship with her lawyer Mac Brandwin,
who was still married to her close friend, but Eric
started visiting her, and she later described their growing acquaintance
as quote eating away at her connection to Mac. Eric was,
by all accounts a very kind and sweet man. He
was a great piano player in addition to being incredibly smart,
(22:34):
and Altina fell very hard for him. But not long
into their relationship, while he was working in a tuberculosis
hospital in New England, he came down with tuberculosis himself,
and the two of them didn't see each other for
two years. But then Eric wrote to Altina and he
told her that his health had actually improved, and he
(22:54):
asked if she wanted him back in her life, and
she absolutely did. The pair got married soon after. She
worried she would later confess about possible transmission of the
disease to herself or, more concerningly, to her boys, but
none of them ever contracted tuberculosis. Eric had spent time
working at a hospital in Los Angeles, and he fell
(23:17):
in love with California. When he returned to New York,
he pitched the idea to Altina that they should move there,
and she went for it. They bought a house in
Coldwater Canyon with a view of the city, though there
were ongoing issues with Eric's health and Altina needing to
learn to keep house after having had a staff her
whole life. She later described this period as peaceful and
(23:40):
one of the nicest times in her life. She wanted
to really focus on her art. So one of the
rooms in the California house was made into a studio
with a sign on the door that read, do not
come in unless there's a catastrophe. She would say that
she wanted to have just three hours a day to
herself without interruption, that she really did work very hard
(24:02):
for a brief time. Altina actually started a factory to
make sunglasses in her signature Harlequin shape in La According
to a story that she later told, her employees were
a mix of black and white workers, and there was
tension when some of the white employees made the racist
complaint about sharing a bathroom with her black coworkers. Shanazi
(24:24):
solution was simple, the black employees could just use the
executive bathroom that only she used. She reportedly, though, closed
the factory after realizing once again she really hated all
the day to day aspects of running a business. There's
a secondary funny story involving the mob that I will
tell on Friday. Okay, in a moment, we'll talk about
(24:44):
Shanazi's connection to the McCarthy era Red Scare, but first
we will pause for a sponsor break. As we've mentioned
on the show before, in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties,
the Red Scare was a blaze in the US. Altina
(25:06):
described this as a very bad time when, according to
McCarthy quote, everybody was a communist. Ten Hollywood screenwriters Alva Bessie,
Herbert Bieberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dimitrix, Ring Lardner Junior, John
Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton
Trumbo had all refused to answer questions before Congress after
(25:29):
having been subpoenaed by the House on American Activities Committee.
They were held in contempt, blacklisted, and they got the
nickname the Hollywood ten. Director John Barry, who went by Jack,
made a documentary about these men that was sympathetic to
their situation, and soon he too was on the list
to be called before the committee, but he dodged the
(25:50):
subpoena by hiding in Altina and Eric's guesthouse. They kept
their friend hidden until one night he just left quietly
and made his way to Europe. Eric's health concerns had
a fresh ray of hope when streptomycin was introduced as
a treatment for tuberculosis. He went to the Mayo clinic
for treatment, and initially it was a huge help, but
(26:13):
over time he built up a resistance to the drug
and his health started to decline. He died in nineteen
fifty eight, after which Altina said, quote, the world sort
of fell apart. She met Charles Carey, who went by Charlie,
a few months after losing Eric, and at the time
he had just started all of the proceedings of getting
a divorce. In an interview in the documentary that We've
(26:36):
Restaurenced a couple of times, Charlie actually started crying while
relaying a story about Altina caring for him. During this
time when they had just met, she had kind of
negotiated with his landlord to be let into his apartment,
which she wasn't supposed to have access to, but it
was so she could supply his kitchen with groceries. Charlie
eventually moved into Altina's house. His job was in political science,
(27:00):
so their social group became this very curious mix of
artists and people in politics. Soon the two of them
were married. Altina was not in love with Charlie, although
she did like him. She became depressed in their marriage,
and this was a period when she painted a lot.
Her work during this third marriage is vibrant and surrealist. Eventually,
(27:22):
she found new projects and new media to work in
which kept her occupied. One of them was moving into
the world of film. She got permission from George Gross,
her teacher from back in New York, to make a
film about his experiences in Nazi Germany. The resulting film,
titled Interregnum, was nominated for an Academy Award. She also
(27:44):
started volunteering as an art therapist at synanon To, an
addiction treatment facility in Los Angeles that has its own
wild story. If you want to look it up, there's
a recent documentary about it kinda turned into a cult.
As for Shnazi's involvement, she and a close friend worked
alongside the people who were getting treatment there. She painted
(28:05):
a huge mural in the facility's open space, and then
she worked alongside residence to create a second large mural.
She also became invested in the work of Martin Luther
King Junior. She and her husband Charlie met doctor King
and a lot of the people in his inner circle
with a proposal that they would like to make a
documentary about the civil rights work that he was doing.
(28:28):
King went for this idea and promised to do anything
he could to help them. Writer John Killens signed on
to write the script. He lived with Charlie and Altina
while he wrote, and was picked up by the police
several times while they were in their upscale neighborhood just
because he was black. This film never got made though
there was a lack of funding. Nobody really wanted to
(28:50):
touch the subject matter because it was so devisive, and
then doctor King was assassinated and the project fell apart.
Altina's activism continued when it came to the recent podcast
topic the Vietnam War. She and her husband Charlie were
both vehemently and very vocally against the war, and they
actually took out an ad in the New York Times
that was like a large statement against the war. This
(29:14):
was really risky, particularly for Charles Carey because of his
political science career. The Bear moved to Washington, d c.
In the nineteen seventies when Carrie got a job in
the State Department. With her life uprooted, Altina once again
threw herself into her art, and she started a series
of sculptures that have become iconic. She called these sculptures
(29:36):
characters because they are sculpted portraits in the form of
chairs and benches. She would make plaster casts of the
sitters and then make a mold and make castings from that,
so that she could use the cast of one model
multiple times with different changes to sculpt and paint. In
a nineteen seventy eight radio interview, Altina said she had
(29:57):
gotten the idea after looking at photograph by Henri Cartier Bresson,
who had taken pictures of chairs as they were used
in various social settings. The first set of these characters
were displayed at the Touchstone Gallery in Washington, d C.
But she continued to make them for years after that.
Throughout her art career she had often gone just by
(30:18):
the name Altina, and though the harlequin frames had made
her well known in the nineteen thirties, she had a
second huge surge of name recognition in the late nineteen
seventies because of these characters. She appeared on television regularly,
including on Good Morning America, where she famously said quote,
I don't know who decreed that art should just be
(30:40):
something you nail up on a wall. In July of
nineteen eighty, a refugee from Cuba named Celestino Miranda arrived
in the US. He was an artist and he was
hired along with his friend Fernando, to help Altina with
her sculptures because she was quite a petite woman. She
was getting older and these casts were often very heavy,
(31:01):
and she and Tino really hit it off. Eventually, after
they had visited Santa Fe briefly on a work trip,
Altina asked him to move to Santa Fe permanently with
her as her assistant, for the rate of one thousand
dollars a week, and he said he would think about it,
and they continued working together in Washington, d c. Altina
was still married to Charlie, but one night, when he
(31:23):
was in La on business, she asked Tino to spend
the night. In his retelling of it, he didn't get
her message. Initially, he thought she was just afraid to
be alone in the house without her husband and that
he would be sleeping in the maid's room, but Altina
clarified that she was interested in him romantically. Before long,
(31:44):
Charlie and Altina were divorced and she married for a
fourth time in nineteen eighty one to Celestino Miranda. This
was scandalous to a lot of people that Shannazi knew
and socialized with, aside from the fact that she had
had an affair and left her husband for her lover,
because there was a concern that this much younger man
who really had nothing in terms of finances, was just
(32:07):
marrying her for her money and social standing. Not long
after they married, Tina was diagnosed with cancer. It was
at this point that they finally moved to New Mexico
permanently for his health. He would later recount that she
let him get all kinds of animals, which he believed
cured him. Al Tina did too, and she made a
(32:28):
lot of artwork about their farm. They also continued to
collaborate on sculpture. While people might have doubted the reasons
that the two of them married each other, they clearly
had found a unique compatibility as artists, and this created
a very deep bond between them. A lot of the
benches still in this character style that they made together
(32:49):
during this time featured couples. Yeah, some of those pieces
are really quite beautiful. Her son Dennis died suddenly of
a heart attack in nineteen eighty seven, and that was
a terrible shock to Altina. She told friends that she
felt paralyzed, and that's something that has echoed in Tino's
later account, where he describes her as never having cried
(33:12):
and said that she kept everything inside. In nineteen ninety five,
Altina Shenazi published her autobiography The Road I Have Traveled.
I could not get my hands on a copy of
this book. It is kind of rare. There was nothing
I could get that wasn't going to take like a
month to come from like Europe, even though it was
(33:33):
a US publication, there just aren't many copies floating around.
That one bit that we read earlier about the three
currents of her life is from it, but it is
from her reading aloud from it that I got that.
On the evening of August nineteenth, nineteen ninety nine, Altina
told Tino that she just thought her dinner was digesting poorly.
(33:55):
She died later that night at the age of ninety two.
In her write up about Altina after her death, her
granddaughter Victoria R. Sanders, who produced the documentary that we've
mentioned a few times, told a newspaper reporter quote, the
thing about my grandmother was she was not like anybody
else's grandmother or mother for that matter. She looked twenty
(34:16):
years younger. She was inquisitive, vibrant, anything was possible. She
was always working on some new project. That's how Tina Shnazi.
I love her. I have so many things to say
about her. On Okay Friday, I have, you know, mixed things.
I have listener mail. Okay, it's about strawberries. We have
(34:37):
gotten a lot of listener mail about strawberries. I'm kind
of surprised at how much. I don't know why, since, yeah,
we talked about how very popular they are, but this
one cracked me up so hard and I loved it.
So this is from our listener Reagan, who notes that
it's pronounced like Megan, but as Tracy and I know
that we both know people who would say it Megan,
so I'm hoping Reagan is correct. Uh. Reagan writes, Hi,
(35:02):
Holly and Tracy, I am a longtime listener who finally
feels as though I have a worthy enough reason to email.
Your episode on strawberries was instantly exciting to me. I
took a screenshot of the episode and sent it to
my husband, who loves strawberries. He eats them every day.
Rainer shine summer or winter. However, as the episode progressed,
I discovered more than one coincidence that tickled both me
(35:25):
and my husband. I was listening to the episode as
I was getting ready for bed, when, right before an
ad break, you teased about the spycraft portion happening in Chile.
With face wash still on my face, I ran to
the living room to tell my husband that the Strawberry
spycraft was happening in Chile. Why would this piece of
information warrant such a response, you ask, Well, my husband's
(35:46):
father is an immigrant from Chile. How exciting. I returned
to my nighttime routine, satisfied with all the excitement for
the evening. Oh boy, was I wrong. The excitement was
far from over. Once back from the ad break, you
don't keeper into Frasier's journey to Chile. When I heard
you say that he landed in Concepcion, Chile, I nearly
fell over. That is the exact town where my father
(36:08):
in law was born and raised. Once again, I ran
to tell my husband about this coincidence. What are the odds? Okay?
So now I was one hundred percent convinced the coincidences
were over for the evening. Again, I was wrong. Dushane
presented King Louis the fifteenth the successful Chilean strawberries on
July sixth, which happens to be my husband's birthday. Then
(36:29):
you shared that Dushane first noticed success with Chilean strawberries
on June sixth, which happens to be my birthday. Now
by this point I was already in bed, so I
did not run to tell my husband these coincidences. However,
I did tell him the next day. We were so tickled.
I hope you both are also tickled to know how
one episode contained so much excitement for me and my husband.
(36:50):
We both attended your live show at the Indiana Historical
Society when you discussed Gene Stratton Porter. I work at
the ISHS and I am the co host on our
institutional podcast, so I couldn't miss the opportunity to see
you two live. You bring so much learning, laughter and
excitement into my life and my husband's. Because I often
share a synopsis of each episode with him, I gladly
(37:11):
share pat Tax. These are our two kiddies, Trot who's
black and white, and Evy Dilute Calico. We're obsessed with them.
Trot is wacky and silly. As you can see, he
has a little mustache. His favorite toys are clothes hangers,
eyeglasses stolen from mom and Dad's nightstand, Maddy Grass style beads,
and anything he can rummage from the basement to bring upstairs.
(37:32):
Honorable mentions of basement offerings are Alan wrenches, work gloves,
and parts to our shop back our evy girl is
much less flamboyant with her silliness. She's sweet and beautiful
and everything is on her terms. She'll squeak at you
if she wants attention. Otherwise, you are permitted to bask
in her beauty from an arm's length, the way she
loves playing with strings, forehead scratches, and napping on her
(37:55):
heated blanket. Evie is a massive fan of the birdcam
on YouTube. Thanks for all you do to brighten the
world is your work and simply by being yourself. Sincerely, Reagan,
This is so darling. Okay listen, Trot is cute and
he looks diabolical, which is exactly my flavor of cat
is also gorgeous. Thank you for sharing this. I just
love the idea of one episode hitting so many unique
(38:18):
notes of someone's life. Yeah, a strawberries. I think in
honor of all of this, you should get a strawberry
cake and just giggle. How many coincidences you have? Reagan? Yeah?
Mostly I just want to eat strawberry cake and bring
people into my web of strawberry cake evil. I just
love it. I like knowing that things resonate with people
(38:41):
in fun ways, and also that it brings joy and
laughter and giggles. We all need more of that. If
you would like to write to us with joy, laughter
and giggles or otherwise, or if you like many people
want to write to us about strawberry information, there's gonna
be more strawberry emails read. I promise you. Uh. You
can do that at history at iHeartRadio dot com. You
(39:02):
can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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