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Makah Whaler, 1915. On the far western edge of the continent, Curtis loved the inherent drama of fishing and whaling. The whaler is Wilson Parker, dressed in traditional bearskin, with the spear and floats used in the hunt.
IN THE GOOD YEARS, when she was Clara the bright, she alone shared his idea to accomplish something great and lasting, and she alone assured him he could do it. His passion was for her before it was for images on platinum. He wrote hundreds of letters to her in those days of struggle, sharing his doubts, living the Big Idea in words. Clara had saved the letters, her children explained later, because they made her feel close to him at times when she didn’t know where he was or what tribe he was with, and because it reminded her of what she loved, and because—yes, he was a genius, damnit. Look at how he agonized. Consider the torture, on body and mind. And here and there, some sweet touches. But Clara Curtis eventually destroyed the letters, as family lore has it, leaving behind very little from the days when they were one. What lives beyond her years, the lasting words, come from a pad of court documents in Seattle, divorce case number 118324 in King County, the first filing on October 6, 1916. Here she makes the legal claims that stab at a marriage when it is down and already dead. Here she goes public with a view of a man no one would like.
“He has been guilty of inhuman treatment,” refusing to communicate with her in any way, she alleges. He was an absentee mate: “The defendant has been at home but little for ten years.” He gradually reduced her role in the business, pushed her out even as he brought the children in. He was “incompetent” to put their “minor daughter in charge of the studio” while leaving Clara in the dark. Everything they own in common—the studio, the Seattle house, the land across the sound—is not just mortgaged, but facing possible foreclosure. Through twenty-four years of marriage “this plaintiff has been a faithful wife to the defendant,” while he “associated with other women.” This last claim was news, of the screaming variety.
WIFE SUES ED S. CURTIS FOR DIVORCE
CHARGES FAMOUS MATE LIKED OTHER WOMEN’S COMPANY
The Seattle Star put the above two-stack headline on page one, a full eight columns across the top of the fold. It was bigger news than bootleggers paying off detectives, Mother Jones stirring up New York or speculators cornering tickets to the World Series. No names of other lovers were listed. She may simply have been trying to meet the legal threshold for divorce, charging Curtis with adultery and cruelty. In any event, “Morgan’s friend,” as Curtis was called by the papers, was a lout. “He made every effort to turn the children against me by false stories,” Mrs. Curtis was quoted as saying. The loaded terms of broken love never make for nuanced reading in the papers. And because Curtis could not be reached for comment when Clara asked for a divorce, his side of the story went unreported.
He did respond later, in a court filing listing his assets. Clara had asked for the studio, the house and alimony payments for the one child still at home. Harold, the oldest at twenty-three, was living in New York. Beth, twenty, and Florence, seventeen, were in Seattle, though both had moved into a boarding house, and taken their father’s side. “They were devastated,” recalled James Graybill, the surviving grandson of Edward and Clara Curtis. “It was a real bad deal for the girls because of all the publicity,” Graybill said. “My mother [Florence] was a freshman at the University of Washington, and she ended up dropping out of school because of the divorce.” Only little Katherine, seven, remained with Clara.
Whatever Seattle society thought of the best-known resident of the city, they could not have imagined he was anything like the pauper who told his story in the grim detailing of his financial plight submitted to the court. For The North American Indian “he receives no salary” and is working without financial incentive, for he has “no contract to get returns.” He is essentially living off the kindness of others: Morgans in New York, the Rainier Club in Seattle, loans from friends like Meany and Pinchot. The film, so well reviewed, so revolutionary, made no money, and in fact put him deeper into debt. Finally, he denies that he has ever been unfaithful.
Curtis was lucky to get anything fresh for The North American Indian in 1916. Volume X, on the Kwakiutl, published the previous year, was as impressive in narrative, illustration and breadth of information as anything he had yet done. With the new offering, Volume XI, Curtis returned to his home region for a third and final time, devoting most of it to the Haida and the Nootka, people who lived on the western side of Vancouver Island. It was almost spare, this volume, not nearly as rich in variety as prior offerings. It didn’t feel quite so luxurious, and for this Curtis blamed the war. When the powers of Europe started slaughtering one another, Curtis was unable to get the handmade Dutch paper he had used in all the other books. Worse, the war froze the economy, and all subscription sales came to a halt.
Curtis made no mention of his personal troubles in writing to Jack Morgan, nor did he allude to them in Volume XI. Regardless of the turmoil, Curtis presented a handful of remarkable pictures, most of them taken in 1915. One subject was the Makah, who lived in the village of Neah Bay, Washington, a sodden place that can get nearly two hundred inches of rain a year and is as far west as a person can go on the American mainland without falling into the ocean. He found the people there a match for the weather, and wrote that “their later reputation for exceptional surliness” was deserved. They lived in unpainted plank houses, which he showed in unglamorous poses, looking slapdash and weather-worn. Village Scene—Neah Bay was the title of that one, with a mongrel dog foregrounding a row of low-slung, windowless shacks built around a muddy street. It was an exceptional composition for Curtis, who often went out of his way to avoid an impression of squalor, even as he tilled the theme of last days. By contrast, the houses of the snug harbor across the strait on Vancouver Island, in an image titled Village of Nootka, are the picture of settled native prosperity. And he certainly was more fond of the Indians on the island than those hugging the savage coast of Washington. In his history of the area, he wrote how five flags—of Spain, Russia, Great Britain, the United States and Canada—had flown over some of the coastal villages of Vancouver Island, each power prompting little more than a collective shrug from the longtime inhabitants. An odd culture was now taking shape, though Curtis hinted at its transient nature.
“The parade ground cleared of the heavy forest by Spanish soldiers is now used by Indian boys in the American game of baseball.”
For all of his less-than-complimentary photos of the coastal natives in repose on the American side of the saltwater border, Curtis put his best shine on those same people when they took to the sea. His pictures of deep-water fishing, salmon-spearing and archers firing at sea otters from rocking canoes—these action sequences also capture an anthropologic moment. He found picnic-table-sized fillets of halibut, laid out on the beach for drying in the unreliable Neah Bay sun. Here was a woman cooking whale blubber over a driftwood fire, surf on the horizon. And a partially butchered humpback on the shore, eyed by two tiny women in silhouette, conveys the enormity of the creature and of the task at hand. His best work is called The Whaler—Makah, a full-length portrait of a barefoot, grim-faced, rat-haired man wearing what looks like a bearskin cloak. The picture was staged for Curtis, based on oral history. The man is holding a heavy wooden harpoon shaft, five inches in diameter, maybe twenty feet long, attached by rope to a pair of floatable sea lion bladders.
In his introduction, Curtis credits “the increasingly valuable assistance and collaboration” of Myers, his cowriter and chief ethnologist, and tips his hat to Edmund Schwinke for gathering the notes on Makah customs. Actually, Myers was now writing most of the text. When Hodge wanted editorial changes, the requests went straight to Myers. Meanwhile, Curtis had patched together another short-term plan for money. He contracted with Leslie’s Illustrated, a popular weekly, to do a series of short films on the national parks, which would be shown in theaters, and pictures for the magazine. He wrote Schwinke, urging him to be ready to “leave on the shortest possible notice” to assist him with the filming. He was to meet him at the Grand Canyon, and venture from there to Yosemite, Yellowstone and other scenic wonders of the West, dividing up their work. It would be the usual Curtis dash, a pace that never slowed: “lose no time in getting everything in such shape that you can pull out for a trip of a month or six weeks.”
But Schwinke had other ideas. The young, buoyant Curtis aide had not been paid for two years, since late 1914, though he didn’t seem particularly upset by that. After six years of service to Curtis, working as a stenographer on the Columbia River, a cameraman on the Kwakiutl film and a field journalist among the coastal tribes, Schwinke was mulling over a career change. He was twenty-eight, unmarried, without savings. It was time to do something about his own life. One of his proposals was to have Curtis sell the studio in Seattle—the whole operation—to Schwinke and Ella McBride. It would remain the Curtis studio in name, offering Curtis Indians, but all obligations and profits would go to the pair of assistants. Curtis turned him down. No, never. The studio was his base. Without it, he had nothing. Schwinke replied with a rebuff of his own: he was through with The North American Indian, through with Curtis—and please don’t take it personally. He informed Myers of his plans to quit before he told Curtis. “I notice you don’t think much of photography as a vocation,” Schwinke wrote Myers. “You may rest assured that mine will not be motion photography. I have had enough of that to last me at least three lifetimes.” When Curtis got word, he tried to persuade Schwinke to stay on, sending a check for his North American Indian work, explaining that he was trying to recover money lost on the movie. “As to the Film Co: we have sued World Film for $148,000 and anything else the court might see fit to give us but like all legal matters it will be rather long and drawn out. So far we have never had one cent on the picture and I am now endeavoring to carry through other activities.”
Schwinke insisted his decision was irreversible. Though the fieldwork thrilled him, beginning with those heart-stopping rides down the rapids of the Columbia River, he was tired of all the deadlines, telegrams and stress, tired of seven-day weeks, no love life, no social life, no fun. He took the summer off to hike in the mountains, sail around the islands of Puget Sound and the San Juans to the north, canoe and laze by campfires—a tonic, all of it. When he returned, he took up business with McBride, who quit the Curtis studio just as the divorce was making news. But the wartime economy was a crusher for business start-ups. Schwinke then moved to Ohio, married, and joined the army after the United States entered the war in 1918.
Now, Myers and Hodge were all Curtis had left on the payroll, though it was a stretch to call it that. Myers was dispatched to California to start research on the hundreds of small tribes of the state, essentially working for free, the lone pulse of The North American Indian. After editing Volume XI, Hodge had nothing more in the Curtis pipeline. He took a prestigious job in New York, moving to the Museum of the American Indian. He agreed to put his red pen through Curtis’s work, vetting it as before, should anything new be forthcoming. Their correspondence fell away. Updates were rare, and vague. “Myers is here with me,” Curtis wrote at Christmastime, 1916, from Bouse, Arizona, a mining camp in the Sonoran Desert, just the place for two lonely men. A year later, he informed Hodge that he was trying to gin up some work on the Cherokee, who’d been forcibly transplanted from the Georgia pines to the Oklahoma prairie in the nineteenth century, and now lived on an ever-shrinking reservation. He then went dark with his editor. After more than a year, Hodge did hear from Myers with news of Curtis’s whereabouts. From New Mexico, the field assistant told the editor that the Shadow Catcher was “riding on work trains and carrying his luggage across arroyos.”
Curtis also fell out of contact with Belle Greene. She had admonished him, just after Morgan’s death, for appealing to her in such a personal way. Secure for the long term in the Morgan book palace, she became strictly businesslike with Curtis, while telling others of her fabulous love life. She continued her affair with the Renaissance art expert, yet found time to entertain marriage offers from wealthy suitors. “I sent word that all such proposals would be considered alphabetically after my 50th birthday,” Greene wrote a friend.
Curtis seemed to have disappeared. Queries to the New York office were met with cryptic replies that he was “out west” and could not be reached. That was true for many months, and may have been therapeutic as much as it was an attempt to dodge Clara’s lawyers in Seattle. He managed to get back on Mount Rainier, a beloved aerie, for the pictures he owed Leslie’s, and cobbled together that work with another contract, with the U.S. Forest Service. His nights were spent on the rim of the Grand Canyon, alone, or in the welcoming embrace of the Sierra’s light in Yosemite, waterfalls lulling him to sleep, or next to geysers in Yellowstone, a tired mule for company, or in a dusty train station in the Southwest, waiting for the local to carry him to the next destination. Meany received an occasional note postmarked from a national park, the divorce not mentioned, Curtis’s enthusiasm focused on Indians or the love they both shared for the big volcano south of Seattle. Meany’s group, the Mountaineers, was leading a number of first ascents up Rainier, and Curtis daydreamed of spending climbing days with his old friend. Several times, Curtis slipped into Seattle, sleeping at his usual bunk at the men’s club, checking in with daughter Beth at work.
The studio was the crown jewel, for now, of what had been a Curtis empire. In 1916, just before the divorce papers were filed, it had moved to a new location, at Fourth and University, perhaps the most prestigious address in the city, where the University of Washington had its original campus. Across the street were the Indian terra-cotta heads of the Cobb Building, a Beaux Arts beauty completed in 1910. The Indian heads were a tribute to Curtis. A hotel that was destined to be the city’s finest, the Olympic, was rising on another corner. The studio was a must-stop for educated tourists visiting Seattle. Inside, light flowed through large windows, illuminating the inlaid wood floor, the stunning designs of Navajo rugs and the numerous portraits in the gallery. Beth Curtis, just out of her teens, oversaw the operation. In a few short years she had gone from apprentice to boss, a source of many disputes with her mother, who had tried to keep a hand in the family’s most valuable asset. Here, orotone prints were refined and rebranded as Curt-tones. This process, used only rarely by Curtis, involved printing an image directly onto glass instead of paper, then backing it with a gold-tinged spray. Curt-tones were more fragile, but could also command a much higher price; the finish jumped out of the frame.
Beth tried to keep her mother, who was full of rage, at arm’s length. As Beth had risen, Clara had been marginalized. She would show up at the studio steaming, and start harassing employees. Beth was embarrassed; customers were shocked at the shouting matches, the accusations. To Beth it seemed that her mother was on a campaign of intimidation designed to drive the daughter from the business or to bring the whole enterprise down. On an April day in 1919, Clara stormed into the studio, moving with a single crutch. She had been injured, she said, and it was because of the strain of the broken marriage and family strife. When Beth approached her, Clara attacked her with the crutch. Employees were stunned—mother and daughter coming to blows, a combustion of screeching and flailing arms.
When Curtis v. Curtis was finally settled in June of 1919, Clara got the house and the studio. The judge ordered Curtis to pay her $100 a month in child support. She had been unrelenting in going after what she felt was rightfully hers after nearly a quarter century of marriage, and the court agreed with her. Since filing to end the marriage in 1916, she had requested preliminary financial help, but Curtis was unresponsive. In 1918, she asked that he be held in contempt for failing to pay alimony. “I am practically destitute and dependent upon friends and relatives for support,” she wrote. As one example of her sorry state, she said her youngest child was in need of dental work, but there was no way to raise the $300 for it. She had also sued Beth, claiming her oldest daughter was in cahoots with Curtis to deprive her of income. In Beth’s response, she said Clara had gone mad. She detailed the ugly visits in the studio when Clara tried to “harass patrons” and “greatly embarrass” Beth. It came to a head with the assault. Yes, there was plenty of vitriol, even some violence, Clara agreed—but for good reason. She said Beth had been secretly funneling money to her famous father. “He is in the habit of going from place to place all about the country, living in a manner befitting his reputation and his pretentions.” In truth, Curtis was living more like a hobo, sleeping under the stars more often than he was beneath the roof of a hotel; without permanent address or paycheck, he wandered the West.
That same year, Curtis lost the most powerful and influential of all his backers, Theodore Roosevelt. The president died in his bed at Sagamore Hill at the age of sixty, a relatively young man who had lived a dozen lives in his three score years. Curtis had tried to maintain his ties to Roosevelt after the president left office in 1909. He sent him notes and pictures, always addressing him as “My Dear Colonel Roosevelt,” as T.R. preferred to be called postpresidency. But starting about 1915, the notes became excuses of a sort, Curtis apologizing for being late with a promised photograph or claiming once that he had nothing to do with someone who had petitioned Roosevelt to speak on Curtis’s behalf. This most energetic, athletic and prolific of presidents died of an embolism in the lung—a blood clot. Other maladies surely took their toll. He had carried a bullet in his chest since a would-be assassin shot him during a speech in the frenetic 1912 Bull Moose election campaign. The gunman’s slug was deemed too deep, too close to vital organs, to remove. Roosevelt’s trip to an uncharted and malarial river in the Amazon—“I had to go, it was my last chance to be a boy”—had nearly killed him, and he never had the same vigor afterward. But it was the death of his son Quentin, an aviator for the Allies who was shot down by the Germans in a war Roosevelt righteously promoted, that left him so bereft of spirit, a Shakespearean ending.
For Curtis, losing the studio was the lowest blow. His countless negatives and glass plates, the many prints he had labored over with Muhr—they were part of “the property.” What would Clara, still seething and capable of assaulting her own daughter, do with these treasures? Beth, apparently, was unwilling to take that chance. Rushing to act before the keys were turned over to her mother—and moving ahead with the approval of her father—Beth and several employees worked nonstop to print up dozens of Curt-tones of some of the more iconic images and shepherd them off for safekeeping. Then, trunkloads of glass negatives were taken across the street to the basement of the Cobb Building and destroyed. It is unclear why this was done—was it to prevent Clara from going out on her own with all the Curtis property she’d won in the divorce, as some family members have said?—but what is known is that hundreds of plates were smashed to pieces.
The tired sun of Hollywood was not the ideal cast for a man who once waited days for a single instant when natural light held the world a certain way. But Curtis was now being paid by how quickly he produced a picture, and so better to move it along. Here was Tarzan in 1921, looking ridiculous in leopard-skin loincloth, fake vines in the foreground, blowing a flute. A flute! The job that kept Curtis going in 1921 found him shooting the actor Elmo Lincoln, who starred in a series of Tarzan movies at the height of the silent picture era. Lincoln had made a name for himself in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, two of the best-known works of D. W. Griffith, and he could be a pain.
For Curtis, Los Angeles was now home. He opened a new office at 668 South Rampart Street, a few blocks from some of the major film studios. It was just Curtis and his daughter. Beth ran the business side. Curtis labored over portraits of character actors and cowboy stars, film directors and minor starlets. He needed a fresh start, and Hollywood, with a steady payroll for pictures, seemed like the best place. It meant something, still, to have “Curtis” written across the bottom of a photograph, with the familiar fishhook signature. The jobs came at an uneven pace and did nothing to stir Curtis’s blood. It was hackwork. He processed the pictures out of his home. One of the great ironies to beset his own film was that shortly after In the Land of the Head-Hunters was released, the commissioner of Indian affairs announced that the government would no longer allow filming of Indians in “exhibitions of their old-time customs and dances.” Hollywood went back to featuring Italians and Mexicans in pulpy westerns shot on back lots not far from where Curtis now lived.
Curtis was a middle-aged, divorced man trapped by bad luck, he told a friend, without spare cash even for a train ride to Arizona. The piecemeal work paid the bills, and kept the “Home of Curtis Indians,” as it said on the stationery, a going concern. What that meant was that—someday—there might be enough money to spring him from Los Angeles. At first he did only movie stills, though he certainly knew his way around any device to record an image. Tarzan was a big client. Curtis tried to bring some dignity to the work. He posed the shirtless actor straddling a stream—the familiar water motif—each leg on a rock. The studio wanted the leopard skin, and the damn flute. Who was Tarzan calling? Would creatures of the African wild respond to a summons from a white guy with a delicate instrument? These were not questions for Curtis to answer. His job was to take the publicity shots and go on his way.
In time, he found work from some of the biggest names in Hollywood, most prominently Cecil B. DeMille. For the great director, Curtis took photographs of The Ten Commandments in production, and also did some of the field research, such as it was. A beach in Santa Monica became the Arabian sands. Much later, DeMille gave Curtis acknowledgment as a second cameraman on the film, though he never got a screen credit. A few of the Hollywood pictures that remain reveal a dash of Edward Curtis—a high-drama chariot scene, blue-toned pictures that convey plenty of betrayal, lust and intrigue, and a handful of arty nudes.
Curtis never thought of Hollywood as anything but a sad, single-business town full of hustlers. He recognized the type. Everyone had a screenplay, of course. Even Meany inquired about getting some of his stories onto the screen. Good God. Curtis responded in blunt terms.
“The scenario schools and rewrite crooks keep leading people to think that there is a market for stories,” he told Meany. “I know good writers who have from a dozen to 50 good stories on the market and have not sold one in three years.”
Meany was by then a beloved figure in the Pacific Northwest; a mountain in the Olympic range would be named for him, as would Meany Crest on Rainier. He’d found it difficult to maintain his friendship with Curtis after the photographer left Seattle in 1919, because Curtis did not hold up his end. He fell out of touch, a slight. He also succumbed to depression, a fog that made him feel helpless and humiliated. In correspondence, and in the eyes of many who had considered him an American master, Curtis was a dead man.
When Meany heard in 1920 that Curtis had slipped into town, he dashed down to the Rainier Club, only to learn that Curtis had already left for the train. The professor ran the half mile to King Street station, but just missed him. Later, he heard that Curtis had suffered a complete breakdown, his depression leaving him unresponsive and unproductive through some of the Hollywood years. That would explain why he was afraid to see Meany, and would go years without writing him.
“My good friend,” Meany wrote Curtis in 1921, “I certainly wish you more happiness than has been your portion of late.” For all the lapses and holes in their friendship, Meany kept working on the relationship, though Curtis continued to shun him. Sam Hill, the quirky railroad millionaire, suggested to Meany that Curtis could make a bit of money touring reservations with an Indian-loving Frenchman of his acquaintance, Marshal Joseph Joffre, an Allied commander during the Great War. Hill lived in Seattle and was an early Curtis backer. He was best known for erecting an enormous castle along the treeless, windswept hills in the eastern part of the Columbia River Gorge and then stuffing it with Rodin sculptures and live peacocks. Curtis felt the suggestion demeaning. What, was he now some tourist guide for entitled toffs?
Hill’s idea prompted the first letter Curtis had sent to Meany in a long time. “I fear this is not possible,” he wrote in January of 1922. He was feeling low, empty and angry, and couldn’t let any of it go. “Mr. Hill, always having an ample bank account at his command, is scarcely in the position to realize the situation where one has to produce something today or not eat tomorrow.”
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