MICHAEL McDERMOTT: In 1979 I received an assignment from Newsweek to photograph J. D. Salinger. I’d photographed other people for Newsweek before, so I just asked the editor for the telephone number and address; I thought it was a regular assignment, but it wasn’t. “It’s not that easy, Mike,” he told me. “We don’t have personal information. He doesn’t like to be photographed, we don’t have an address to send you to or a telephone number to give you, but we do know he picks up mail in Windsor, Vermont.”
I went to the public library, did a little research on Salinger, and found the photograph Lotte Jacobi took of him in 1951 for the book jacket of The Catcher in the Rye. Life magazine ran a photo in ’61. Those weren’t too much help. I started to realize this was a very reclusive person I was supposed to photograph, but I wasn’t worried. I was a brash twenty-year-old, you know?
So, first day, after sitting there for four hours in my 1978 light metallic-green Volkswagen diesel Rabbit, drinking Pepsi and eating Cheetos, making myself sick, I didn’t have him. I decided, it’s five-thirty, the post office is closed, nobody’s going to come and get their mail that day.
Then I just walked the streets late at night. I started to wonder if somebody tipped him off.
I never felt like I was chasing him or stalking him. It wasn’t really a paparazzi shot. It was a very private photograph that I took from across the street. He never even knew I took his picture. He was probably really surprised when he saw it in Newsweek. He never saw me, and just as I got the first few shots off and thought I was going to get a better shot at him coming to his car, a couple of teenagers came up and stopped him and began to talk to him. He was friendly—chatted for a couple of minutes—then he said goodbye to them and I pulled the camera back around and I snapped off a couple more frames as he walked to his car. I knew I had it. He was even smiling a little. It was a beautiful photograph, perhaps the only candid photograph of J. D. Salinger that was ever taken, and I had it. On the drive back to Brattleboro, I was so happy, but I needed to make sure that the license plate number from the car he got into came back as Jerome David Salinger, and it did.