THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 30, 1996 TAG: 9610300036
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 116 lines
HENRIETTA HOOPES HEATH, 92, who died last week in an Elizabeth City hospital was - above all things - a woman of considerable charm and wit.
I first met her at the home of a mutual friend who lived near her in Kitty Hawk, N.C. He introduced her as an artist with remarkable instincts.
``Henrietta's eye is so good,'' he said, ``that she can enter a room, toss her scarf, and it will land in exactly the right spot, add the precise touch of color to the needed place.''
It was no small compliment. Our host, Huntington Cairns, was an authority on such subjects. He was secretary and general counsel at the National Gallery of Art and co-author of a book on great paintings from that gallery and author of a five-volume work: ``The Limits of Art.''
Nevertheless, Henrietta wasn't buying. She swirled the drink in her hand until the ice tinkled.
``Why in the hell would I want to throw a scarf?'' she asked, filling the void of silence with a ripple of melodic laughter.
To her friends, Henrietta had the character of a flaring scarf tossed into our dull lives - one as vivid and luminous as a crimson streak of cloud in one of her beach sunset paintings.
She was short, like writer Dorothy Parker, a woman she often quoted and admired but resented. They once met, I believe at The Algonquin in New York.
```How sweet,'' is what Parker said when gazing at the much younger Henrietta. Henrietta never quite forgave Parker for it. She considered it the ultimate put-down and wrinkled her face like a prune when repeating it.
Born in Delaware, she shocked her well-to-do parents after graduation from college by announcing her intention to be an artist.
``I might just as well have told them I was going to be a streetwalker,'' she recalled.
She studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and at the Sorbonne. Her range was remarkable - humorous bistro scenes, glorious landscapes, graceful portraiture. Many in Hampton Roads knew her as ``the egg lady'' because of her many paintings of eggs in nests, eggs on beaches, eggs with garters, eggs in seashells, eggs with feathers. Many of her fox-hunting scenes, both serious and fanciful, were printed in Town & Country magazine.
After reading Ernest Hemingway's ``Death In The Afternoon,'' Henrietta was fascinated by Spanish matadors and the bulls they fought. She traveled to Pamplona and other parts of Spain to sketch bullfighting scenes. Her paintings from the bullring ranged from intensely serious and energetic works to comic scenes.
Hemingway admired her bullfighting sketches and paintings when they met. He was so impressed by Henrietta's work that he later wrote an introduction for the catalog of her exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. He ended his tribute:
``Good luck to Henrietta Hoopes, which sounds like the beginning of a very gay poem. I can't finish it but, presumably, she can.''
Her life was a gay poem in many ways, particularly in her youth. The heroine of the Broadway play ``Mame'' once remarked that ``Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.''
Henrietta lived her early life mindful of Mame's point of view. Once, while seeing a friend named Dixie Lee off to Europe aboard a cruise ship, she offended one of the young men at the bon voyage party by praising European art and customs - excessively in his opinion.
``If you like Europe so much, why don't you go there?'' he snapped. Henrietta's face immediately resembled a smile button.
``That's the best idea I ever heard!'' she replied.
Saying nothing more, she left the stateroom where the party was in progress, walked down a passageway and hid in a closet. She stayed there until visitors had debarked and the ship was miles at sea. She stayed in Europe for many months.
``That was the end of my marriage,'' she later observed.
Writer Bill Ruehlmann, who interviewed her in 1981, said the studio in her hilltop Kitty Hawk, N.C., home - filled with battered art objects, stuffed scrapbooks and unanswered correspondence - resembled a ``museum that exploded.'' He noted that a small sign taped to her 1937 Corona typewriter read: ``A cluttered desk is the sign of genius.''
Her cluttered studio - with its tubes of twisted paint scattered over tabletops, its slumping cot, wobbly table and the broken stuffed sofa - shocked those who had previously known her only by the precise detail of her colorful but extremely well-organized paintings.
It was speculated that when she took up her brush, listening to Mozart from a classical radio station as she painted, the furniture - out of Thurbersque perversity - quietly arranged itself into chaos before collapsing like exhausted beasts.
Parker was right. Henrietta was sweet. She was gracious to most strangers and remembered her friends - who ranged from a magician to a concert pianist - with the most tender acts of kindness.
Her good friend Maggie Brydges, of Portsmouth, has a store of anecdotes about Henrietta.
``She was, despite her age, fascinated by the fads of the modern world,'' Maggie recalls. She remembered Henrietta had been astonished to read an ad in a magazine for a pair of pants for women which were padded to make their buttocks appear larger while bicycling.
``Henrietta told me she simply couldn't believe that ad,'' Maggie recalls. ``She shook her head at the thought of it. Then, a few seconds later mused that `Anybody who thinks America needs those pants has never shopped at the Food Lion on Route 158.' ''
Henrietta found that alcohol was a remarkable curative for the ailments of life. She told me her mother had been the same way.
``When someone offered her a drink she always cupped her hand to her ear and said: `Did I hear an angel speak?' ''
Maggie said she and Henrietta were having lunch at a restaurant in Duck, N.C., not long ago. The artist observed that she had lived a life with ``absolutely no regrets.''
Maggie replied that she didn't recall having known anyone who lived a life without any regret.
``And Henrietta said `Well, I do regret that I didn't order a bourbon Old-Fashioned the last time that waitress went through here.' ''
Henrietta's death left a hole in the lives of those who knew her. One much larger than that shipboard closet where she was a stowaway.
And we hope our dear friend has gone to one of those Old-Fashioned heavens - where the angels speak frequently. ILLUSTRATION: Photo courtesy of William McIntosh
Henrietta Hoopes Heath, 92, died last week in an Elizabeth City
Hospital.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE OBITUARY DEATH by CNB