On a tape recording Smith made in January 1964, an intriguing argument can be heard between him and his loft neighbor, the bass player from Detroit, Jimmy Stevenson. Smith is forty-five years old, his legend diminished by patterns of failed grandiosity. Stevenson is twenty-four and scrambling for footing in the jazz world.
The argument concerns security in the loft. Smith complains about his equipment being stolen; he questions Stevenson’s policy of handing out keys to other musicians. Stevenson responds, exasperated: When I first moved in here [1961], it was nothing but a dope fiend pack of rats up here, all kinds of weird people who were up here when I first came up here. I mean, it was like open havoc. I mean, it was ridiculous. And I myself changed the lock on it and ordered all those people away from this place. You know, because there wasn’t any door downstairs. You had thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment, and there wasn’t even a door downstairs to lock at night.
The argument is heated, but when the telephone rings or people stick their heads in the door and interrupt them, the two men instantly turn civil and friendly, clocking in and out of the argument like Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf in the Warner Bros. cartoons.
A few minutes later, Stevenson made this comment: You had given keys to Will Forbes and you had given keys to that other woman—what’s her name?
Smith responds: Well, if there’s anyone in the world that I trust, it’s Ruth. The only person I thoroughly trust besides Carole at this moment is Ruth Fetske.
Fetske wasn’t mentioned in previously published articles or books on Smith. In his archive, copies of letters exist that she wrote to accompany checks to people that Smith owed money. Otherwise, she was a mystery.
Using public records, I tracked down Fetske in October 2004. She was eighty-two years old and living alone in a rural, wooded setting on the bank of the Connecticut River near Haddam Neck, Connecticut. I made a trip to visit her with my colleague Dan Partridge, who recorded our interview on video.
Ruth Fetske was born Ruth Bumgarner in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1922. Her father was from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and her mother migrated to New York from Hungary when she was six or seven years old. They met in New York when her father was in the army, and went on to have three daughters.
Ruth married an engineer named Bill Fetske, and they lived in various apartments in New York City over the years. In 1951, they bought property on the river near Haddam Neck and spent weekends and summers there. After she retired and her husband passed away, she moved to the river house permanently.
It was a beautiful New England fall day, so we decided to do the interview on Fetske’s wood-planked deck outside the house. Wearing a bright red sweater, Fetske sat down and began telling us how her life intersected with Smith’s.
I was in my late thirties in 1959 or 1960 and working as an account executive for an advertising agency when I decided to take a photography course. I had to do a lot of editing of photographs for fashion ads in my work, and I figured the more I learned, the better off I’d be. The first course I took was with Alexey Brodovitch, who was for many years the art director for Harper’s Bazaar. He taught a course about what you look for in a photograph. And, of course, his end goal was to sell products.
After that course was finished, I saw that “W. Eugene Smith” [her emphasis] was going to give a course called “Photography Made Difficult” at the New School. I had known and admired his work from Life magazine. So I signed up, and that’s how I met Gene.
Of course, Gene’s course had nothing to do with selling products. [Laughs.] The way he introduced himself to the class, he just got up and read something that he’d written about the first time he’d gone out to take a picture after his war injuries had healed and the results were The Walk to Paradise Garden. He was not a good-looking man, and whatever injuries he had during the war hadn’t improved anything. He was a physically ugly man. The back of his nose and the back of his sinuses were injured in the war and he had a postnasal drip as a result, I guess. He told us that when he bent over the camera he had this, you know, profusion of nasal fluid that dripped down onto the camera. Finally, he got what he thought was the right photograph, which is the one everybody knows today. That’s how he introduced himself. That took the entire first class meeting.
The next class—he brought us to his loft, which was a disaster. There were prints all over the place, dust was this thick (using her fingers to demonstrate), and there were negatives and things like that kind of spread all over the place. It was a period of time when he also was painting. Have you seen any of those terrible paintings? Oh, my, he was a terrible painter.
Anyway, that’s how I met Smith and his loft. And, you know, I’ve always been Miss Helper, so I started helping Gene. My office was on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. My husband, Bill, and I had an apartment at the time that was on Twenty-fifth between Second and Third avenues. So Gene’s loft was kind of right in the middle. It was easy for me to stop by there coming and going.
Let’s say Gene had to mail something, a photograph or something, and he didn’t have any money: I’d get a call from the receptionist saying, “There’s a Mr. Smith here to see you.” I’d go down, and if he needed stamps, I’d give him stamps, not from the office but my own personal stamps. Or I would say, “I’ll mail it for you.”
My husband, Bill, was an engineer and he had projects all over the world—bridges in Peru, floating docks in Ohio, wells in Texas, a synthetic plant in Philadelphia. He was a very talented man and we had a good long marriage, and we really loved this house here on the river, but we never had enough time to have any kids. If Bill was busy or out of town, I would go over to the loft and help Gene.
When Gene went to Japan in 1961, I just made it my business to pick up the mail while he was gone and to see that we fended off the [laughing] monetary demands in some way. I wasn’t his bookkeeper or his lover. I was just a photography student in my late thirties, with no kids, looking for extra things to do to keep busy and help out. Gene was in awful shape financially. I just helped him organize things. Somehow we managed to stay ahead of the game until he got back from Japan.
Before he left for Japan, I said, “Gene, you know, you’re going on a long trip. You have to do two things for me. You have to make a will. You have to leave your photographic assets to somebody of consequence, somebody who would be responsible.” So he made me his power of attorney while he was in Japan.
Anything that came in the mail, any kind of a check, I could deposit. And every once in a while, there wasn’t any money, and I put some of my own money in. You know, what the hell? [Laughs.] And so, when he came back, the place was still there. I just made sure that, financially, they did not close out his loft.
And the other thing I did for him—he was always complaining about how he couldn’t find the negatives or this or that. So, I said, “I’ll give you a system. You know, it’s very easy. You have numbers. The first number is the month; the second number is the date; the third number is the year. And if you shoot more than one roll, you can go ‘a,b,c,’ or you can go ‘one, two, three’ at the end. If it’s going to be color, you can just put a ‘c’ in front of the first number.”
Fetske’s organizational system was the starting point for professional archivists when Smith’s materials arrived at the University of Arizona just before his death in 1978. Some of her original handwritten notes survive.
I asked Fetske why she volunteered to help Smith to this extent.
I was willing to help Gene, I think, because he was talented. And he was sick. He was very, very sick. When you see somebody with such great talent—and he had enormous talent—who kind of couldn’t get out of his own way, you wanted to help him. All of us—everybody who was helpful—were all photographers ourselves, and so it was a pleasure to help. And I think Gene was a great salesman of himself. There were a lot of people who don’t like him because they felt they were used. But nobody can use you if you don’t stand there and be willing.
Gene was also very bad about feeding himself. He had better things to do. So usually, I would stop across the way, and because his teeth were so bad—you know, his whole face was a mess—I would sometimes take up a piece of Boston cream pie or something soft, you know. He would say, “Oh, I don’t need this,” and then gobble it up.
He was always in debt, but somehow the money always came when he needed it the most. He did a series of photographs for Jack Daniel’s in Tennessee. I don’t know what his financial arrangement was, but I know that it helped him. One of the men around the loft at the time offered to drive Gene down to Tennessee. I think his name was Phil [Dante]. But first, Gene had to get his cameras out of hock, and I don’t know how he finessed that. Maybe he gave prints to the pawnshop owner—I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Then he got a call to go to Japan. He was very excited. And again, he had to pull his cameras together out of hock. The money he got from Hitachi in Japan went a long way. I don’t know how much they gave him but for a while he had some money. He bought a lot of expensive art books and a lot of taping equipment.
While he was in Japan, there was a lady—her name was Jas. Do you know her? (It was Jasmine Twyman, the live-in housekeeper at the Smith family home in Croton-on-Hudson.) She called me, and I couldn’t help her because I didn’t have any spare money. He had this place up in Croton-on-Hudson, and his wife and children, I think, were there. And, of course, he was not very good about sending them money. I don’t know how they lived. He knew that Carmen and Jas were calling me, looking for help, and he—you know, it just was not critical to him, just not important. Whatever he was doing at the time, it was more important. I just don’t think he wanted the responsibility.
Fetske paused to note the sounds of a bird in the trees near the river. That’s a pileated woodpecker. They’re big and they’re gorgeous.
We could hear rhythmic waves of boat wake lapping on the bank of the Connecticut River on the south edge of her yard.
In the first cool spell of winter, said Fetske, there is a thin skin of ice that forms up along the edge of the river, and it tinkles. It’s the prettiest—it’s something you should record, really. It’s just beautiful. There’s a lawyer I know that used to live along the river, also. And he said to me, “You’ve heard it, too, Ruth?” And I said, “Yes!” Every year, you wait for that. It’s only the first [freeze] because it’s just a shell of ice. It’s very light and tinkly. Once the ice gets thicker it doesn’t make the same sound.
There was a tap on the door of Fetske’s house and in walked an elderly man with a tiny dog in his arms. Ruth introduced them as her neighbor George Peete and his dog, Ruggie. She kindly told Mr. Peete that we were busy with the interview and asked if he could come back later in the afternoon. After he left, Fetske said:
Ruggie’s a story in herself. She ran away from home when she was only—I don’t know—six months old. I was driving through Middle Haddam, and I see this little bitty dog running down the center of the road. I said, “She’s going to get killed.” I couldn’t stop because there were people behind me. I finally stopped at the post office a couple of blocks away.
I went inside the post office and mentioned to the girl that I had seen this little dog. And she said, “Oh, there was a man here. He had the little dog. He picked it up off the street.” And I said, “I know where that little dog belongs.” And I got his phone number from the girl—he had left his phone number, and he had taken the little dog with him.
On my way back to my house, I saw a lady out in the yard, and I knew she was looking for her little dog. So, I stopped and I said, “I know where your little dog is.” I gave her the phone number. A few days later, I met her at the post office, and she told me that they really didn’t want to keep that little dog. They were going to give it away for adoption. And I knew George Peete wanted a little dog, so I convinced him he should adopt this little dog. So we’ve kind of kept in touch. Her full name is Rug Rat, but she goes by Ruggie.
Fetske leans and cranes her neck in a faux-comic attempt to look around the corner to make sure George isn’t still standing there.
Where were we? Gene Smith, oh, yeah. He should have been born in the era when very wealthy people underwrote and subsidized talent, like they did in the Renaissance period in Italy.
He had a problem. He had a lot of problems. He was a perfectionist, and nothing was ever quite good enough. When he made a print, I’m sure he felt if he just had one more hour, one more day, one more week of deadline, you know, having to meet a deadline, he could do better. He had a psychosis about perfection. I don’t know where this came from.
He and I had discussions. He said, “Ruth, there is nothing like—there’s no such thing as perfection because it can always change.” And I said, “Gene, let’s say you take a point in time. At this point, you’ve done something; you’ve made a print. A millisecond before, a millisecond after, that doesn’t count. But right at that point, that is perfect for that moment.”
We never could agree on that. It was one of the discussions that we had. But his problem was that he couldn’t let go of things, he always wanted everything to be better, and it must have been terrible for the editors at Life. They must have hated his guts.
And something else … I think when Gene went to take a photograph or to fulfill an assignment, I think he went with a complete picture of what he wanted to achieve. Like when he went to Africa, you know, for Schweitzer, I think he knew exactly what he wanted, and by Jesus, he stayed there until he got it. This must have been very difficult for the editors. And he wanted to write his own copy. He wasn’t that great a writer, either; he went on and on and on and on. And the one thing that he was able to complete was—it was Popular Photography that did the Pittsburgh story, was it? God, that must have been a pain in their neck.
I think he was a man divided in half. I think fifty percent of his self felt that he was like a god, and the other that he was nothing. And I think he fought with himself mentally all the time, and he had to keep proving one side against the other.
When he was on his way back from Japan, the phone rang in my office, which had moved up to Rock Center, and the operator said, “Would you accept a collect call from Gene Smith?” He was on a freighter, I guess, coming into New York, and could I meet him on Friday? I said, “No. I’m meeting my husband to go to the country,” which is this house we’re sitting in now. The next week, I went to give him back his keys and so forth.
I mentioned to Fetske that she smiled much of the time she was talking about Smith: Oh, sure. My memories of him are fond. He just couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t a mean person. I just—everything was a challenge to him, everything, just getting up in the morning, I guess.
It was now getting to be about two o’clock in the afternoon and Fetske had planned to feed us lunch, so we moved to the kitchen, where she laid out cold cuts, condiments, fresh rolls, and a pie for dessert.
Fetske told us more stories from the years she and her husband spent here along the river. I listened and kept thinking back to her story about helping save the little dog, Ruggie, and remembering that when I began my research on Smith in 1997 I had a conversation with Smith’s first biographer, Jim Hughes, who called him “a junkyard dog.”
After lunch, Dan and I packed up to leave and we drove two hours through gorgeous countryside back to our lodging in Hillsdale, New York. I was moved by Fetske’s spirit and generosity, which seemed so unconditional. She was so content. As I was writing her chapter of this book, listening to the recorded interview with her and reading my original notes, I felt compelled to give her a call. I wanted to tell her what I had just written. As I feared, her line had been disconnected, her number no longer in service. I wonder who lives in her house now, and if they notice the tinkling ice.