11. HE APPEARED ON GAME SHOWS.
Dalí was a guest on several game shows during his lifetime. In 1957, he made an appearance on the show What’s My Line, serving as the unnamed guest whose career a panel of blindfolded guests had to identify. Despite host John Daly’s best efforts to rein in the artist, he proved to be a difficult nut to crack, since he tried to answer “yes” to every question, including “Do you have anything to do with sports, or any form of athletic endeavor?” He was ultimately identified by a final question about whether or not he had a “rather well-known” mustache.
12. HE AND MARCEL PROUST REPORTEDLY LIKED THE SAME HAIR PRODUCTS.
Dalí’s gravity-defying facial hair became a topic of conversation when the artist appeared on a 1954 episode of The Name’s the Same. Host Robert Q. Lewis called the mustache "quite beautiful” early in the show, and when panelist Gene Rayburn brought it up later—“Are you kidding with the thing?” he asked, gesturing as if twirling a mustache—Dalí answered exactly how you might expect him to. “This is the most serious part of my personality,” he said. He then went on to explain that his facial hair had some literary influence. “It’s a very simple Hungarian mustache. Mr. Marcel Proust used the same kind of pomade for his mustache.” As for the physics of the thing, it was all in the pomade, he said. He declined to discuss exactly how he got his facial hair to grow to such insane lengths.
13. HIS MUSTACHE HAS ITS OWN BOOK …
In 1954, Dalí published a book with photographer Philippe Halsman entirely devoted to his mustache, featuring 28 images of the iconic facial hair. Halsman and Dalí met in 1941 and collaborated for decades, creating what are still some of the most recognizable portraits of the artist, including Dalí Atomicus, featuring the artist suspended in midair along with several cats, an easel, a bucket of water, and a chair. Each page of Dali’s Mustache: A Photographic Interview presents a short question from Halsman, with answers from Dalí printed on the next page, below the photograph. The results are, as one would expect, often absurd. “Dali, what makes you tick?” one page asks, for instance. “My hairspring, of course,” Dalí answers. The photographs showed Dalí with a mustache twisted into an infinity symbol, dressed as the Mona Lisa, and using his facial hair as a paintbrush, to name a few examples.
14. … AND REMAINS INTACT TO THIS DAY.
In July 2017, Dalí’s body was exhumed as part of a paternity suit brought by a woman who claimed to be his daughter. The exhumation proved the woman wrong, but it did yield one unexpected discovery: His mustache lives on. According to the forensic experts who saw the body, his trademark waxed 'stache has remained intact since his 1989 death. “The mustache preserved its classic 10-past-10 position," Lluís Peñuelas of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation told the Spanish paper El País (as translated by NPR). The doctor who embalmed Dalí in 1989 called it “a miracle.”
15. HE DID A PAINTING FOR RIKERS ISLAND.
In 1965, Dalí was scheduled to make a visit to the prison at Rikers Island to give an art lesson to inmates. But on the day the lesson was supposed to take place, sickness confined him to his New York hotel room, and he canceled. Instead, he made the prisoners a painting, a Surrealist take on the crucifixion of Jesus. The painting, unknown to the outside world, hung near a cafeteria trash can in the prison until the 1980s, when it was put away, then rehung near the prison’s entrance where the inmates couldn’t access it. That spot proved more dangerous than the ketchup-splattered wall by the trash cans—in 2003, a group of prison officers stole it, replacing it with a cheap imitation. The officers were prosecuted, but the painting was never recovered. One of the thieves pointed fingers at his conspirator, an assistant deputy warden named Benny Nuzzo, saying that Nuzzo panicked and destroyed the painting after they committed the crime.
