Happily Ever After

Death has no sting for 73-year-old Sculptor Carl Milles.

To prove it, he has been working nine years on the most ambitious project of his life. By last week, 14 of the 36 life-size nudes, posturing and prancing on their plaster pedestals, were ready to be crated up for the foundry to be cast into bronze. A rich private cemetery in Falls Church, Va. had ordered the figures for a fountain, and Carl Milles had decided to model them on friends he had known long ago. The friends were all dead, but not to Milles. He had shown them in some pleasant afterworld living happily on forever.

It was not an attitude toward death that English Satirist Evelyn Waugh would approve (TIME, July 12). Milles is a follower of the late spiritualist, Sir Oliver Lodge.

Welcome to a Wife. Two years from now, anyone entering the Virginia cemetery will find the fountain in a courtyard, surrounded by a marble wall. "The idea," explains Milles, "is to help people overcome the tragedy of death. To show that people have a good time there, too." There will be a young husband, arms out stretched to welcome his wife into the afterworld; a mother greeting a daughter; a French family which had been killed in an auto accident; two sisters who had drowned; an American mother who had died in childbirth, and her baby who had died three weeks later.

But Milles' favorite figure is that of an old hermit philosopher, squatting like a gnome, as the sculptor had known him 50 years ago. "He had been a teacher at some university," says Milles. "But he preferred to live where people didn't know so much, and were not so conceited." Just before he died, the philosopher had poisoned his two dogs, so that they would always be with him. "So," says Milles, "I represent him sitting with his dogs, in the first moment when he arrives in the new world, and they are all united. I'd like to live as a philosopher in nature, like that vagabond. But I prefer my studio."

Carl Milles has always preferred a studio. Born in Sweden, he started modeling early, baking his clay in his mother's oven and avoiding school as much as possible. His father began to think his delicate son was a dullard. "Send the boy to me. I'll make a man of him," a friend wrote the father. Milles set out, "but I stopped in Paris. I stopped in Paris forever. For six years, I didn't write home. I was excited about art."

Assistance from the Master. For a while, he earned a living as an assistant to a coffin maker. But he still plugged away at his sculpture. One day an old man with a flowing beard called on him to congratulate him on a statue he had seen. "I have come to offer my assistance. My name," the old man added, "is Rodin."

Carl Milles accepted Rodin's offer, and he traveled a long way in the master's steps. In time, his own statues were bursting out of bushes, rising from fountains, standing as monuments in city parks and squares all over Europe. Academies honored him; King Gustav V of Sweden called him Carl.

Now, Carl is a stooped old man with long white hair, who has lived and taught at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1931. Some of his best-known U.S. works: the Fountain of Diana, Chicago; the "Meeting of the Waters" fountain in St. Louis; the 37-ft. Peace Memorial, St. Paul; a granite monument to early Swedish settlers of Wilmington, Del.

Besmocked, and mounted upon his ladders, he remains in his studio most of the day. Beyond a few intruders ("Mothers and children," he mutters with disgust), nothing worries him--not even his age. Surrounded by his ghost-white figures, Carl Milles says serenely: "I don't believe in death."

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