FOR ABOUT TWO decades Roloff Beny was Canada’s most famous photographer. He had a reputation for stunning visual effects, spectacular architecture, and lush, operatic scenery, photographs that seemed like Renaissance paintings. He was a perfectionist, often spending a whole day on one image, making sure it was exactly as he imagined it should be.
He was born Wilfred Roy Beny in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and his father still called him Wilf. After a stint of art classes at Banff and later at the University of Iowa, he changed his name and, progressively, his appearance. By the time I met him, he was flamboyantly gay, wore flashy furs and form-fitting suede or leather trousers, leather vests, and beads. Strangely, he seemed to attract older women who thought him romantic and irresistibly entertaining. Several of them even insisted on helping to fund his travels. Signy Eaton of Eaton Department Stores was certainly one of them, as was Peggy Guggenheim, and Lorraine Monk, empress of the National Film Board’s Still Division, which had funded To Every Thing There Is a Season, was another. Published for the 1967 centennial, this stunning book had been a monumental success. An exhibition entitled A Visual Odyssey, 1958–1968: Roloff Beny opened in the Observation Gallery of the new Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1971. His prints and early paintings were acquired by galleries and art museums.
Despite his success here, Roloff said he found Canada restrictive and visually uninspiring. He preferred Rome, where he bought the top two floors of a beautiful late-nineteenth-century building on Tiber Terrace in Trastevere. You could see the Tiber through the windows. Part of the ceiling had a Roman-style mural. Though most of the statuary was imitation, the apartment had the appearance of a Roman villa. Roloff’s books and hundreds of his photographs were arranged on a long, low table. There was a roof garden or terrace with an elegant arrangement of terracotta vases, a pale-ochre changing room, a small dipping pool, a couple of chaise longues, and an assortment of potted plants. There were numerous exuberant visitors, expensively dressed women, Roman friends of Roloff’s, and at least once, Pierre Elliott Trudeau with an entourage of civil servants. His housekeeper offered drinks in Venetian glasses and there was fruit on Venetian platters.
I was there for several days, helping to put together our presentation of Roloff’s books on ancient Persia and, later, on Iran, both commissioned by the Shah and the Shahbanu of Iran.
Jack saw Persia, Bridge of Turquoise as an opportunity to break into the exclusive circle of international art book publishers and as a chance to sell a lot of books to the Iranian royals and hangers-on. There was a one-page “message” from Her Imperial Majesty Farah Pahlavi, the Shahbanu, and an essay by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.I
The slides were magnificently colourful: markets, mosques, the ruins of palaces, lush vegetation, awe-inspiring winterscapes. Roloff saw the work as “an austerely spiritual yet sensual feat that is Persia,” and we would have the honour of producing the book for the world market. His previous big international books, India, Island Ceylon, In Italy, and Rajasthan, had all been produced by the prestigious art books publisher Thames & Hudson. This one was going to be ours.
When I travelled from Rome to Toronto with Roloff, the page layouts, the cover concepts, the massive mock-up, and the slides, my chief job became to not lose any of the pieces and to convince customs that they were of no value. Naturally, I also carried Roloff’s suitcases, his papers, and his camera case, and followed a few steps behind him, as befitted my lesser status. I had no trouble with customs because I was so exhausted I told them they could keep the whole lot, if they really wished to, I didn’t care, so they laughed and let me keep everything. Roloff was not so lucky. What with his fur jacket and small purse, he was a natural target. They demanded to know the value of the delicate plaster cast for a Roman head he carried much too carefully, and when he insisted (several times) that it had no value, that it was a gift from an Italian admirer, one of the customs guys dropped it, then apologized, but since it was of no value . . . Roloff wept all the way to his hotel.
His next book, Iran, Elements of Destiny, was to be an even more lavish production, an overt puff piece about Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty. Jack had been utterly charmed by the Shahbanu, “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen on or off the silver screen.” He was impressed by the glamour, the sheer glitter of the Peacock Throne, by the reception he and Roloff were accorded, and by being part of a world he had never entered before.
We took a mock-up to Frankfurt (it weighed about twenty pounds) and I lugged it around to publishers of high-quality illustrated books. By the time the fair was over, we had managed to share at least some of the horrendous costs of the colour separations, the printing and binding, and, of course, all the extras Roloff insisted would make the book worthy of its subject. Thames & Hudson agreed to take a few thousand, as did most of the publishers who had taken Roloff’s previous books. When I first presented our mock-up to Eva Neurath, the doyenne of Thames & Hudson and an almost ethereal presence at that messy international book fair, she inquired, her soft voice rising, why on earth Jack McClelland had decided to become an international art books publisher and did he know what he was getting into.
There would be specially dyed endpapers (in a design borrowed from a glazed tile and stucco pattern at the entrance to the tomb of a Sufi “saint”), silkscreening, thick dyed paper with gatefolds for the text and black-and-whites and the best available opaque paper for the colour. It was to be printed by Italy’s top printing house, Mondadori, which softened the blow of their exorbitant price by taking a small edition in Italian for themselves.
For Jack, that was just the icing on the cake. He was convinced that the business deal with the Shah and Shahbanu of Iran would bring in enough cash to save M&S. He was wrong, of course, but I am sure not even he could have foreseen the precipitous fall of the Pahlavi dynasty.
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IN EARLY 1977, prior to Jack’s next visit to Tehran, we spent a few days in Rome to prepare the royal presentation. We ate in a local restaurant, where Roloff was greeted with great fanfare and given the best table with a view of the square and the Tiber. Jack paid for Roloff’s lunches, dinners with his friends, and even his electricity bill. I spent most of my time in the basement, in a kind of darkroom the landlord had provided. I was selecting photographs for the mock-up of Iran.
All the participating publishers had been invited to Tehran for some grand receptions, a tour, and long luxury hotel stays. My friend Ken Webb, whose company was in charge of the binding, still talks about that visit as the most extraordinary time of his fifty years in the book business. He also remembers the spectacular reception at the Canadian Embassy, hosted by Ken Taylor, our ambassador who later saved the US embassy staff after the Ayatollah took over.
In the end I didn’t go to Tehran because I was pregnant and we didn’t think it was a look that would appeal to the Iranians.
Jack called after a few days to warn that he might not be back for a while, if at all. He spent most of his time waiting for an audience in a palace where the book was no longer of vital importance. Negotiations took even longer. He thought he might end up swearing at the heavy-set, fully armed men with dark glasses whose job included making sure that guests behaved.
I think the only reason he survived was that the Shah and his well-armed men had more important matters to contend with than a pissed publisher yelling obscenities at microphones embedded in the walls. Iran was Jack’s first visit to a country where surveillance was normal.II
Roloff, himself, had been at his outrageous best in Iran, demanding spectacular accommodation for his cameras and himself, cursing the Shah’s notorious secret service, and complaining to the Shahbanu if something was not to his liking. On the occasion of Empress Farah Pahlavi’s birthday, he had presented her with a photograph of himself naked except for some tropical fruit covering his genitals. Jack had been sure Roloff would be executed, but strangely, that did not happen. Perhaps Iran’s pre-Revolution society was far more tolerant of gay men than the religious rule that followed.
Margaret Laurence, who had joined the M&S board only because Jack begged her to do so, was horrified that M&S was publishing Persia, Bridge of Turquoise, but at least that was a celebration of Persia past. Iran, Elements of Destiny, a “paean of praise to the vision of the Pahlavi dynasty,” was inexcusable. She spoke passionately about the Shah’s brutal tyrannical regime and the violence of SAVAK, his internal security force. The experience of opposing Jack in public pained her so much, she was shaking all over, but she persisted. M&S directors’ meetings were now mired not only in sorrow about our financial situation but also in outrage over Jack’s desire to make up our shortfall from his deal with the Pahlavis. In the end, Margaret resigned from the board, as did Farley Mowat. Much as we needed the money, I found it hard to be supportive of a project that celebrated a regime as repressive as the Shah’s. But since he was determined to proceed, I urged Jack to collect the money for the books in stages, starting with when he signed the agreement and ending when the books went on press.
Sadly, neither Persia nor Iran made money for M&S: Persia because of Roloff’s ongoing demands to improve the quality of the paper, the binding, the colour separations (it was the most beautiful book M&S ever produced); Iran because the Shah’s rule was overthrown in 1978. He and his family were forced to flee by the time the Arabic edition had been air-freighted to Tehran. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was not interested in meeting the exiled Shah’s obligations. M&S lost about $350,000. It was a huge amount at a time when the firm was already in the red. Jack was so distraught that though I had been very tempted, I managed not to say anything like “I told you so.”
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ROLOFF’S NEXT ADVENTURE was to be Egypt. He had outlined a grand book on the beauties of the country—its past, present, and future, the pyramids, the dam—and President Sadat was sufficiently interested in funding the project that he invited both Roloff and Jack to lunch in his presidential retreat. Though I had never wished the president of Egypt any harm, I was relieved when his assassination prevented yet one more of Roloff’s wildly unrealistic projects from costing M&S another fortune.
Roloff died in the marble bathtub of his Trastevere apartment in 1984. Though the Rome police declared it was death by natural causes, Jack remained unconvinced. There had been too many people partying and staying over in Roloff’s apartment, too many of them had keys to get in unobserved, and Roloff, by then, had begun to seem more like a target for ruthless opportunists and less like the great artist he had aspired to be.
I recently looked at Roloff’s People: Legends in Life and Art, published posthumously by his friend Mitchell Crites. It features such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor, John Huston, Ezra Pound, Leontyne Price, Rudolf Nureyev, and Margot Fonteyn. There are a couple of superb portraits of Peggy Guggenheim, taken at her elegant palazzo in Venice where Roloff had been a frequent guest. The book, I believe, refutes critics’ charge that Roloff didn’t know how to photograph people. These surprisingly intimate images, including the one of Noel Coward on the cover, display his unerring eye as well as his affection for his subjects.
I. He is now at George Washington University.
II. Julian had done much the same during our 1973 visit to Hungary when he shouted at presumed microphones in our room in Budapest’s Gellert Hotel. It was Julian’s first trip behind the Iron Curtain.