AMELIA DAVIS
AMELIA DAVIS by Jim Marshall, 1998
I MET JIM IN 1998 at my childhood best friend’s thirtieth birthday party. Her father was one of Jim’s attorneys. She called him Uncle Jim, but for some reason I had never met him before that night. I studied photography at U.C. Davis, and it was all about Helen Levitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Frank. I had no idea who Jim Marshall was.
This little man with a Leica ‘round his neck made eye contact and came right over to me, saying, “Hi, I’m Jim Marshall, who are you?” I told him I was a photographer working on a book about breast cancer survivors because my mother had breast cancer. I was going through the journey with her photographically. He said, “Wow, I think that’s really important. I know a lot of my friends have had breast cancer, and a Thanksgiving turkey looks better than what they do to these women. However I can help you, I’d love to.”
Then we discovered I lived a block away from his 16th Street apartment. He’d been checking me out the whole time, but all of a sudden he looked at me extra closely and said, “Wait a minute, are you gay?” I said I was, and he lamented that he was always attracted to gay women or married women. I looked at him and said, “That’s your problem, not mine.” He laughed really hard and told me he thought we were going to be really good friends.
Before long, I became his assistant. I remember the first time he showed me his apartment. I looked down this long hallway and on the walls were Johnny Cash flipping the bird, the Beatles coming off the stage at Candlestick Park, Jimi burning his guitar, so many iconic images he had taken. He was staring at me as I said, “Oh my God, I had no idea that this was you.” And he laughed: “Yes, that’s what I thought, but that’s why I liked you.”
Jim was not photographing very much anymore. I was more office manager than photo assistant, organizing his archive, coordinating his gallery shows and print sales, scheduling and attending meetings with clients. Basically, Jim’s “Girl Friday.”
MARSHALL and DAVIS, San Francisco, 2006
JIM MARSHALL and AMELIA DAVIS, San Francisco, 2000. Photo by Terry Heffernan.
WHEN I FIRST STARTED WORKING FOR HIM, I had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Jim had no idea what MS was. “What the fuck is that?” he said. So I explained to him I was self-injecting every other day. He got to see what it was like for somebody living with a chronic illness and trying to work, and he became very supportive of me and everything I did regarding MS.
Also, my mother had just died. My dad died when I was seven, so my mother had been both a mother and a father at that point in my life. She was a huge force, an intelligent, witty, talented, beautiful woman who always had to be the center of attention—and she swore like a sailor. There was a big hole in my life for that kind of person, and Jim was very similar to my mother in that he was this larger-than-life personality, with real talent, humor, and a colorful, abrasive vocabulary.
In our lives we meet people at the right time; there’s no coincidence. I really believe in fate. Jim needed me just as much as I needed Jim at that point in our lives, and that’s why we bonded so much and really loved each other.
I’ve been with my wife Bonita for twenty-eight years now, so we were together when I met Jim. Bonita also became a good friend of Jim’s. Jim and I were very emotionally intimate without any sexual tension. He was able to really open up and share feelings with me knowing that he could be vulnerable and it would be OK.
WHEN I STARTED WORKING FOR JIM, he was in a good place and a not-so-good place. He was in his late sixties, and he was still hooked on cocaine. It was very destructive and one of those things that he couldn’t get away from. He would lock himself up alone in his apartment, do an eight ball, and then, to come down after the cocaine, take two Ambien sleeping pills, two Benadryls (just in case the Ambiens didn’t work), some wine and half a bottle of whiskey. And he woke up in the morning, usually without a hangover!
Anybody else who did that would be dead, but not Jim. I would not tolerate that kind of behavior from any of my other friends, and I can’t explain why I tolerated it with Jim. But for me, there was this vulnerable, caring person inside him, and he was abusing because he wanted to escape. Jim was miserable because he was no longer shooting, and alone because of his drug addiction. I stayed because I wanted to let him know that somebody in his life really cared and would come back no matter what.
Jim’s coked-out messages to Amelia, a.k.a. Davis
And he had this incredible body of work. It wasn’t just music, it was civil rights, human rights, anti-war protests; you name it, Jim documented it. He seemed to be everywhere that mattered. Seeing those pieces of history that only Jim could capture, I didn’t want him to die. I thought it was really important for him to stay alive and share those experiences with the world, so I stayed.
Not to say that we didn’t have a lot of fights. Jim would be very verbally abusive: “Fuck you, you asshole, you dumb cunt.” For me it was no big deal. He would yell at me, and I’d swear at him back: “Fuck you, Jim, don’t say that to me, how dare you.” It usually took him aback that I could give as good as I got.
From my perspective, I did quit twice. Jim said we just had “two arguments.” But I did quit, and I think that scared him. The first time, he was just being such an asshole, crazy and abusive, and still doing the coke. I told him I was done. I went out and slammed the door—BOOM—and the whole building shook. If he was sorry, he would have to come groveling to me. We didn’t talk for two weeks.
Then 9/11 happened. My sister—whom Jim knew and really, really liked—is an emergency responder. She was at Ground Zero when 9/11 happened, and Jim was one of those people who called me. “Davis,” he said (which is what he always called me; I have no idea why), “is your sister OK? Is Liz OK?” I said, “Liz is fine, thank you for asking. You know, I was able to locate her and talk to her, and she was OK.” There was this big silence, and then he said, “Will you please come back and work for me?” He told me how sorry he was, how much he needed me. I set some new ground rules about the abusive language and agreed to show up at nine the next morning. He truly was a part of my life.
I was with Jim for the last thirteen years of his life. I think I got Jim when he was much mellower, for sure, because I’ve heard all the stories from when he was younger. He’d had a lot of time to reflect on his life and regret some of his choices. I don’t think he regretted his life, because he’d lived it the way he wanted to live it. But there were things along the way that he wished he hadn’t done.
He was still very destructive with drugs and alcohol, but he was also reflective about what he had done and who he had hurt. We talked a lot about that. Jim never responded to nagging; to him it was just noise. One day I just went up to Jim while we were working, and he said, “Don’t nag me!” I told him I wasn’t going to nag him, but that I loved him very much and I was going to miss him when he was gone. And I just walked out.
The very next day he stopped cold turkey, unbeknownst to me. And although he still drank, he did not do coke for the last four years of his life. He said it was because of what I said to him, even though he told other people that he was tired of my nagging him. I guess he never realized that he would be missed. There are a lot of other people who cared about Jim and who would miss him as well. But I don’t think he realized what an influence and a personality and a friend he was to people. He felt so alone, but a lot of people cared about him.
BACK WHEN HE WAS DOING COCAINE and just crazy, he would lock the door from the inside with a deadbolt, so no one could get in. I knew that when that lock was on, Jim was on a bender and I should just go home. He’d call me when he was done.
I was struggling and I needed work; every penny counted. He obviously knew he was going to go on a bender, but he wouldn’t tell me, and I got sick of it after a while. “I can’t stop you from doing this,” I said. “I know that. But if you’re going to do it, you need to let me know so I can plan something else.”
He started writing notes and taping them to the outside of the door. He wrote them after he was fucked up. Some of them are so funny: “No work today, I’ll pay to mow” on a little three-by-five-inch card. This is the best one: “MDW bus today.” He obviously had just done a line of coke, or cut it, so he wrote his note on a stamped envelope and used a piece of heavy-duty packing tape, and then he left the razor blade that he cut it with trapped on the end of the packing tape and the envelope. I have no idea what he was trying to say.
He also would write really sweet notes to me when he wasn’t fucked up and just leave them around for me to find. One said, “Davis, love you.” Another said, “AD, not only do I love you very much, I trust you with no exceptions, love you, Jim. PS, I’m so very lucky to have you as a friend and assistant, never an employee, an assistant and a friend.”
So that was my life with this crazy man, Jim Marshall. We helped each other a lot, and I do miss him quite a bit. But he’s around me all the time because he left me his children. Jim never had kids; his photographs were his children. They were his life, 24/7. His first and only true love was photography. Anybody else was second fiddle. I think that’s why he was never able to have a real, long-lasting relationship.
He used to say, “The only person that I trust to take care of my children when I’m gone is you.” I protected Jim’s legacy during the thirteen years I worked with him. Sometimes I was overprotective, and Jim would say, “Davis, chill out.” I would let him know when people were taking advantage of him and his work. He didn’t always like to hear that but knew I was right.
WHEN I FIRST STARTED WORKING FOR JIM, the music business had completely changed from what he had known in the 1960s and 1970s. There were managers, there were handlers. Every venue had a pit where the photographers sat, shooting up at the musicians, so everybody’s photographs looked the same. Some of the musicians even wanted to keep the copyright to photos of them. Jim said, “Fuck no, this is not how I work.” He put his cameras down.
So by 1998, he was only photographing people if they asked him to. Younger artists who knew Jim’s photos and admired him—Lenny Kravitz, John Mayer, and others—wanted to claim they had Jim Marshall shoot them. Jim would demand to be allowed to photograph them with no restrictions, no managers, and no handlers—true all-access.
Velvet Revolver was playing at the Warfield in San Francisco, and they really wanted Jim to do some live photographs because he was friends with Matt Sorum, the drummer. So he got all-access. So here was this little old man in his penny loafers, his jeans, his corduroy jacket, and his Leica, jumping around the stage with Velvet Revolver. Everybody was asking, “Who’s that grandpa? Why is he up there?” At one point Slash turned to Jim, away from the audience, and mimed strumming the guitar, and Jim—click, click, click—got the photo. It might look like a random moment and Jim getting lucky. But actually Jim knew Slash’s dad, Anthony Hudson, who had made album covers for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Jim and Slash had a connection from when Slash was a kid, and that’s the kind of moment of open trust and love that Jim depended on.
IN HIS FINAL YEARS, Jim made many books, sold his photos thorough big-time agents, had gallery shows, and started to get the recognition that he deserved for his photography. We did a lot of work in his archive: We would go through the photos, and he would talk to me about them and about things that he had done. If a gallery had ordered a photograph, I would pull the negative, get it printed, take it to the framer, and ship it.
Jim’s coked-out messages and random love notes to Amelia
As he aged, I think I became Jim’s security blanket. Once, when he was still doing cocaine, one of the galleries had ordered a print and had even paid for it when Jim went on a bender. The gallery was calling and demanding the print. Jim just didn’t give a fuck. I opened the door to his apartment, really angry, and said, “We’ve got to get this photograph.” In the bedroom, I found Jim on the floor, the TV on the floor, smashed, and the window smashed, too. Jim looked at me and said, “Davis, you need to buy me a new TV today!” I said, “Ya think!”
Forget nine lives, Jim had twenty-four lives. He had gotten really fucked up, grabbed the TV to stabilize himself, knocked it over, and gone over after it. His arm went through the bedroom window and back again. Anybody else’s arm would have been slashed by the glass. Jim? Not a scratch. Then he just decided to sleep on the floor where he fell. But I did get the print, made him sign it, and sent it to the gallery.
JIM WAS SUCH AN INTENSE PERSON, and he was so complicated. He could be the biggest asshole and the next minute the sweetest guy in the world. He would say things to people that you would only think in your head; he could not edit himself at all. It got him into trouble a lot because he would just blurt these vile things out.
I never had children, but reflecting on it now, I realize I did have a child, and his name was Jim Marshall. He was an addict, and he was my man-child. At Jim’s memorial service at the Great American Music Hall a few months after he passed away, I didn’t want to give a whole speech. I just wanted to describe him very simply. The words I chose were: unpredictable, predictable, erratic, compulsive, impulsive, neurotic, paranoid, fiercely loyal, compassionate, tender, endearing, irrational, sensitive, cantankerous, naive, innocent, childish, selfish, giving, a genius, eccentric, caring.
