As Smith’s isolated deliriums grew over time in the loft, he began sending telegrams to a live overnight radio talk show hosted by Long John Nebel on WOR in New York City. The show mixed legitimate guests such as Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan with discussions and phone calls from listeners about UFOs, voodoo, hypnotism, and other paranormal activity and esoterica that reflected the paranoia of the postwar times, often more intense among people awake from midnight to 6:00 a.m., which is when, of course, Smith was often up and listening. His telegrams, ranging from passionate to comic, were efforts to connect with the outside world and glean some affection. Nebel would read the telegrams over the air, and Smith would be back in his loft with a microphone next to his radio making tapes.
Here’s one from 1960:
Long John Nebel: All right, this is good, this is from Gene Smith, one of the greatest photographers: “I’m busy photographing out of my window and within the building adding to a present nine thousand or so photographs. Some are fuzzy, and so am I. But I still find the challenge exciting. As usual I’m enjoying and arguing the show. Personal regards, Gene Smith.” Isn’t that nice? I’ll tell you, he got so hot one night, he went forty-three bucks [$360 in 2017 money] for a telegram. He got so steamed. I don’t know if I said something or if somebody said something, and, he, you know, boom, he fired it right up. Forty-three dollars. We checked it because it was so long.
I couldn’t be sure of finding the precise telegram Nebel referred to—there were so many—but one from May 1961 piqued my interest. It’s the longest one I found recorded from the Nebel show on Smith’s tapes and it reveals one of Smith’s lifelong preoccupations: health care and caregiving.
Nebel: I have a telegram here … from … This is a long one, too, in fact, we’re making bets on what it cost … this was sent to us by one of the top photojournalists in the country. I know he listens from time to time and he’s Eugene Smith, he’s without a doubt one of the finest photojournalists in the country.
Nebel then spends a few seconds debating on the air about whether to have his producer, Anna, read the whole telegram because it will take so much time. Finally, he agrees to have Anna read it in its entirety.
First, believe my respect for medicine as one of the great professions. Secondly, let me harp on a point or two and I hope Western Union does not transpose the word “harp” in this particular sentence. It should easily be known that adequate medical facilities are not available to a great many persons in some parts of this country. Some of these areas I personally know from having walked and ridden and worked with and pitied those who are lucky enough to be visited in what was a maximum of even being noticed.
I have also seen a baby brought to a medical center highly fevered and dehydrated and needing an immediate transfusion, for which the relatives [I imagine there’s a word left out there] inadequate in blood, were told that they would have to find a way, forty miles out, to where they were acquainted, and forty miles back with a blood donor if one could be found. Also arose a resentment of me when I stepped from my role of photographic journalist to give the transfusions. A resentment in this particular instance because the child was Negro. However, this is not racial. For in a respected name hospital in this our great name city I too had to commit “malpractice” and to “coerce” the one overworked nurse. And when she tried to stiffen the rules, attempting surprise at my still being there when a doctor arrived at midnight to visit the patient I was interested in, I had to re-coerce—or more kindly and probably more accurately in the emergency of the circumstances—to convince the doctor it was acceptable for the nurse to allow me to stay and aid through the night with the patient, and so I stayed. My medical knowledge being based upon my journalistic experiences, a lifetime interest, and the fact of having been shot up during the war, I stayed giving glucose injections and blood transfusions as well as constantly checking such as the drainage tubes making certain they were not causing poisons to dam up in the critically ill patient. The nurse took a chance because she was desperate, without help. The doctor took a chance because he knew something of my background and he knew as well as I that hospital ethics in such emergency would have listed the death of the patient under the heading of “unforeseen complications.” Rather than face the scandal of what it was necessary for the three of us to connive in so that the patient might live. (I can almost feel the itch of some of my fellow journalists on certain publications.) It was gambling for the life of the patient with two or possibly three careers directly at stake and with the reputations of the hospital as well. Yet if man at times is not willing to gamble reputation and future that there may be life or if a good name must be maintained at the cost of lives, my conscience would be heavily burdened with conflict. Please, where the wrong is, I am not fully prepared to enter into and I must make clear that I reluctantly would have understood if the doctor and nurse had insisted upon playing by the same rules, even it had cost the life of this person close to me. It was a dilemma not of their making. I am simply concurring in my belief that much advance must be made within our medical system and with a slight carping at too early a dismal of the vast need for conscientious general practitioners and that good medical aid is often more a theory than a fact.
In fact, in those years since I was shot up, and since the doctors who originally worked on me have died, I have had a most difficult time trying to find medical treatment for conditions from the injuries which still plague me. And I have been fortunate in personal advice as to who to go to from medical friends well thought of in high places. It is all difficult and though I can wend my way with some understanding and appreciation of these difficulties, it must be terribly bewildering to the outsider. But I still give deepest honor to the profession of medicine and have sympathy with its problems as long as its practitioners refrain from cold-blooded arrogance. Arrogance is not a fault of your panel tonight for their apparent sincerity comes over quite strongly.
Warmest regards, and I hope this telegram is easier to read, W. Eugene Smith.
A guest on Nebel’s show: He did a thing on a midwife in a rural, Negro section of the South … it was one helluva story.
Nebel: This man, he can do no wrong with a camera. Just great, a fantastic photographer.