I was in Korea when Kevin Patrick O’Malley was born eleven months and twenty days after his sister—a classic Irish twin.
I did arrive at St. Ursula’s only five minutes late for the beginning of the baptismal rite. It was a baby boom baptistery, already occupied by Charley and Ted McCormack, Carlotta Antonelli, and a very dubious April Rosemary O’Malley, not at all sure that a little brother was a very good idea.
“Don’t mind, Monsignor,” his mother said, a touch of anger in her sweet voice, “it’s only the child’s father. He’s always been a bit late.”
“Galoot,” Mugsy Branigan observed affably.
“He just wants to try for Irish triplets,” the mother said. “Then he’ll flit off somewhere else in the world. Serves me right for marrying a professional photographer.”
After Kevin’s baptism and just before Christmas my first exhibit was to open in a gallery on Michigan Avenue, more proof that I was a professional photographer.
Dwight Eisenhower had been elected (without my vote). Vince was on the prisoner-of-war list and his daughter, Carlotta, and our April Rosemary vied for attention at “poor little Kevin Patrick’s” initiation into the Church. The “monster battalion,” as his mother deliberately misunderstood my reference to the “monstrous regiment of women” (“and John Knox meant ‘rule,’ not a military unit”), had already begun to dominate his life.
It was the fault of President-elect Eisenhower that I was not present for Kevin’s birth. The President-elect and Kevin himself, who arrived two weeks after he was scheduled to arrive.
“I see no problem with you going to Korea.” Rosemarie was holding April Rosemary in her arms, fighting with the grinning girl-child about whether her index finger belonged in her own possession or in A. R.’s mouth. “This little demon came on time, I assume her brother will too.”
Note that once again the question of the child’s sex was not subject to discussion. Poor little April was to have a brother “to take care of” and that settled that.
Dwight David Eisenhower was not my favorite president. On the other hand he was not certifiably mad, as were a couple of his successors. His treatment of Truman on inauguration day was bush league: he would not talk to the outgoing chief executive because the latter had arranged for Colonel John Eisenhower, the new president’s son, to be assigned to duty at the inauguration. “Ike,” incapable of being gracious himself, could not recognize graciousness in others and interpreted his son’s presence at the inauguration as an attempt to embarrass him.
That should have been a tip-off of what was coming. Consider three important issues of his administration: McCarthy, integration, and Suez. “Ike” left it to Congress to deprive the drunken junior senator from Wisconsin of his powers to preside over anticommunist witch-hunts; he lent campaign support to Joe McCarthy and William Ezra Jenner even though both men had smeared his patron and mentor General George C. Marshall. He never spoke a word in support of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, other than to say that you couldn’t change people’s attitudes by law. Finally, he double-crossed our British, French, and Israeli allies when they invaded Egypt and, with barracks-room language, he pulled the rug out from under them, saving the hide of our implacable enemy Gamal Abdel Nasser, the scruffy Egyptian dictator.
He was also a drunk, as everyone in the Washington press knew and no one ever wrote. Mind you, he was not a compulsive womanizer like Jack Kennedy or a flaming nut like Johnson and Nixon. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a bourbon-swilling back-barracks gambler and a mean-spirited military bureaucrat who by accident had become a national hero. (The accident was that Roosevelt could not spare George Marshall from Washington to let him lead the invasion of Europe.) In his favor, it could be said that Eisenhower was not that other and even more dubious war hero, Douglas MacArthur, whom Truman had fired when he began publicly to disagree with his orders from Washington.
I often wondered during the hysteria of the welcome-home celebration for MacArthur whether the Republicans in Congress, the Luce magazines, and the people cheering in the street wanted to remove civilian control of the military—the issue at stake in the Truman-MacArthur fight.
Another good thing about Ike was that he probably will be the last war hero elected president. Televised politics has at least the merit of revealing the worst of the phonies and fakers.
All of this is by way of preliminary explanation of why I was not eager to accept Look’s assignment to accompany the President-elect on his promised trip to Korea.
The promise was a clever but petty public relations gesture—though more honest than Nixon’s “secret plan” twenty years later to end the Vietnam War. Eisenhower would have buried poor, hapless Adlai Stevenson anyway, because the public was fed up with the war and the seeming corruption of the Truman administration. (The Communism-in-government issue, like the abortion debate years later, attracted much attention from the press but never much affected the way people voted.) Eisenhower could not, however, promise to end the war because peace requires two sides to agree and he had no control over the North Koreans or the Chinese. So instead he promised that if elected, “I shall go to Korea,” a commitment devoid of meaning, but a wonderfully clever election campaign trick. (His secret warning to the Chinese that if they didn’t end the war quick he’d drop atomic bombs on them was much more effective in bringing to an end the Panmunjom negotiations.)
Look wanted me to do a photo story, “Ike Goes to Korea.”
“You’re an artist, not really a photojournalist.” Rosemarie considered the offer thoughtfully. “I suppose you have to do some of these things for the recognition. Your opening in December is more important.”
“I’ll be back in time for that” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go on a phony trip to Korea with a man I already considered a phony president. “I’m worried about being here when Kevin appears.”
“I’m the one who gives birth.” She frowned as though I had raised an unimportant question. “Who needs you?”
“If I’m in Korea, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Regardless.” She waved her hand dismissively. About my career there was no room for jokes, not with Rosemarie anyway. “Well, I suppose you ought to do it. And”—she brightened—“maybe you’ll be able to see Vince and tell him about his adorable daughter.”
“I don’t think they’re going to be released that soon.”
“Still… And, anyway, Kevin won’t keep his poor Mommy waiting, will he, April dear?”
April, unaware of the possibilities of sibling rivalry, cooed soothingly.
The wire caught up with me in Pusan, Korea:
MY BROTHER KEVIN PATRICK BORN AT 3:20 A.M. I TOLD YOU SO. LOVE. APRIL ROSEMARY.
The year between the two births had been a frantically busy one for both of us, needlessly, I conclude with the sophistication of hindsight.
Rosemarie had help in the house. She need not have preoccupied herself so totally with her placid daughter, whose only goals in life were food, adoration, and sleep. Nor did Peg and Carlotta, still at home with Mom, need the constant concern from “Aunt Rosemarie” they were receiving. However, unlike Mom, who thought relaxed attention was the best you could give, my wife felt that you were somehow a failure unless your devotion to others was tinged by frantic anxiety. Mom and Peg (and Carlotta) didn’t need the anxiety and our own brat ignored it. The last-named of the monstrous regiment was content when Mommy played with her, she chose to ignore all signs of maternal anxiety.
“Boring,” the kids would say today.
For my part, I had decided that, now I was a photographer, I must pursue the career with the same compulsive intensity with which I once added columns of figures for the Double O’s—and finish my course work at the University.
I was in the last, or perhaps the next-to-last, generation of photographers who did not “study” somewhere. I was also in the first generation who did not study under someone. The photographers before me learned by apprenticing themselves to someone (and often became unpaid slaves in the process). Those after me did what all the others in their generations do when they want to acquire a skill: they go to school—in the fifties and sixties for a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, since then for a master’s in fine arts. (I suspect that if I live a bit longer I will see the Ph.D. in fine arts as a requirement for earning your living with a camera.)
I had learned the craft and perhaps the art (I’m not sure even today whether I’m an artist) by the simple expedient of pointing a camera at people and places, releasing the shutter, and playing with the results in my darkroom. By the means of a little luck and a lot of my beautiful wife’s charming persistence, I had, without any training or education, progressed sufficiently to publish one book, schedule a second for publication, and plan a one-man exhibition.
There were two possible reactions to this situation. I could have figured that I had earned my early success by sheer raw talent and that I ought to sit back and enjoy the rewards. Or I could have concluded that I had not deserved my initial good fortune and that I would therefore have to earn further triumphs by mastering all the arcane knowledge, vocabulary, and skills of my new profession.
I presume that I have been sufficiently candid about my personality that I hardly need tell the reader what was my choice. I bought and read all the books, did all the exercises, studied all the masters, touched all the bases, with the same compulsive faith with which natives of the South Sea Islands rub their amulets before they paddle canoes out of the calm waters of the lagoon and into the swell of the ocean.
“Why don’t you do your own stuff instead of imitating others?” Rosemarie, visibly pregnant again, had complained as she mixed chemicals in my darkroom. “Did Mozart read books? Did Puccini? Did El Greco?”
“I like the comparisons.” I kissed the back of her neck. “But I don’t have that kind of talent.”
“Kiss me again, please.” She leaned her head forward to make her neck even more available. “I need reassurance … that’s nice. Now what was I saying? Oh yes, I don’t understand why you have to pay your dues by doing junk you don’t enjoy or don’t want to do.”
“Everyone has to pay his dues,” I insisted.
“Nonsense,” she replied.
Her beautiful waist had reappeared as I’d hoped it would. It then disappeared again as Kevin grew inside her. She guaranteed its return. Having experienced her willpower I didn’t doubt that for a moment.
There was only one problem that did not seem to respond to her good intentions and single-mindedness, and that had apparently disappeared, thank God.
Did I learn anything during that frantic year of self-education when I was trying to catch up with what I thought a successful young photographer had to know?
A little bit of history and some of the vocabulary, not much else.
At least I didn’t try to imitate the masters. I didn’t try to do a Matthew Brady with the Army in Korea. I didn’t visit the national parks in the West like Ansel Adams. I didn’t do classical nudes. (My “available model”—lovely even in pregnancy—didn’t fit the classical paradigm either in shape or in personality). I didn’t search the streets of the slums. I didn’t experiment with various combinations of lines and hues. Yet I tried to imitate their work in my own context. If I didn’t succeed in imitating the masters I studied, the reason is not that I felt I didn’t have to. However, I failed in my efforts to discipline myself and become part of someone’s “school.”
I studied their work and tried to see through my lenses what they saw through theirs—but in my own environment. There was no El Capitan for me to photograph by moonlight, so in Oak Park, my Yosemite Park, I tried to capture the stark, liquid beauty of Adams’s work by photographing Frank Lloyd Wright homes. It didn’t work.
Then I turned to Minor White’s more mystical documentation—with L stations as my targets.
The results were even worse.
Perhaps I thought I was really an impressionist at heart, like my father. Maybe I needed some of the misty atmosphere of the English in my shots. So I turned to D. O. Hill and Alvin Langton in the Thatcher Woods Forest Preserve on the banks of the Des Plaines River.
Disaster.
I tried to imitate Weston’s shots of wrecked cars. A little better.
As Dad explained to me when I discussed the problem with him, “Chuck, you see what you see, not what Callahan or Stieglitz saw. And you see it pretty clearly. You can’t blot out your own vision even when you try.”
“Confusion, fear, hope,” Mom interjected as she plucked something from Handel on her new harp.
“Pardon?”
“April,” my wife, never silent for long, offered her exegesis, “means that is what your eye sees… and not a lot of silly calculation.”
“In me?”
“No, silly, in the people. That poor little blonde in Germany; the young trader. They’re both calculating all the time. And the thing is that they don’t need to. Either God will take care of them or they’ll destroy themselves. So they shouldn’t calculate.”
“I’m telling stories?”
“Don’t all photographers tell stories?”
“Well”—I thought about it—“Ansel Adams says that something gets into his pictures beyond what he sees when he takes them. Some people think it’s sex. But maybe it’s only a story we have to read into every picture.”
“What kind of story?” Rosemarie now considered me with interest—I was saying something philosophical for a change, no longer just the empirical shutter-snapper.
“Dad, do you know Fox Talbot’s picture of his wife and kids, standing at a door that seems to be set in a tree?”
“I don’t think so.”
Now they were all listening to me, even, it seemed, a satiated Carlotta.
“Fox Talbot was one of the founders—along with Louis Daguerre—of photography. Indeed, his calotype or talbotype, unlike the daguerreotype which was a two-step process, really is a lot closer to what we do today. Well, anyway, he has this wonderful shot, one of his earliest, of the wife and three kids standing by what looks like a door in a garden. In fact, it is based on Richard Bentley’s illustration of Gray’s Elegy. Talbot conceals what Bentley reveals: the entrance is to the cemetery.”
“Wow!” Rosemarie shivered.
“The passage in Gray goes something like this:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e‘er gave,
Awaits, alike the inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
They were silent, pondering that insight. I finally saw what I was driving at and continued. “So maybe every photographer tells a story of some sort, at least a story of trying to preserve something from the corruption of time and death.”
“Precisely what I was saying,” Dad agreed amiably.
“So maybe I see something of myself in those people who are so compulsive and I want to preserve them and me from our compulsions?”
Everyone laughed at that. Uneasily.
“The trouble with you, Chucky”—Peg was nursing Carlotta, as contentious and feisty a young woman as her cousin was genial and relaxed—“is that you do all the calculation and then disregard it by doing something outrageous.”
“Like marrying me,” Rosemarie put in.
“Or planning that wild show,” Jane concluded.
“I think what they’re saying”—Ted McCormack was now in his psychiatric residency and using baseball metaphors with his clients—“is that you carefully touch each base till you get to third; then you ignore the coach and race desperately for the plate.”
“Sliding to make it just under the throw.” Michael looked up from the French theology book he was reading. “Safe, so far.”
“That part of it”—I thought they were all mad—“doesn’t show in my work, does it?”
“Not yet.” Dad filled my port glass; Rosemarie waved him away.
“Thank God.”
“It will in the show,” my wife added. “‘Rosemarie and April,’ wow!”
“When do we get to see it?” Mom took her fingers off the strings.
“When it’s ready.”
“I hope Vinny is home for it,” Peg said with a sigh.
We all promised her that he would be. Our guarantees, it would turn out, were not much good.
At least my year of academic self-training didn’t hurt my work. I suspect Dad was right: I couldn’t imitate anyone else. When I tried to the result was so bad that I threw the negatives away.
That night as we were undressing, Rosemarie returned to the subject of Fox Talbot.
“You were brilliant tonight, Chucky…unzip my dress, will you please …I mean about Talbot’s picture.”
“Didn’t know I could be philosophical, did you?”
“I never doubted that … Thank you.” She shrugged out of her maternity dress. “I was surprised how deep…are you trying to preserve me from corruption?”
Tears stung my eyes. I kissed the back of her neck.
“Forever and ever, amen.”
So I was busy learning how to do something I already knew and Rosemarie was busy being a mother, something that she did with natural and unselfconscious ease.
Her maternal preoccupations kept her out of the darkroom, where she had been learning how to develop and print with the same quick skill that she had acquired her competency in French cooking—now we had meat with Bernaise sauce in those weeks we didn’t have pasta. Soon she would be better in the darkroom than I was.
“I can’t do it,” she complained tearfully one night in the darkroom after she had run upstairs to make sure that A. R. wasn’t crying. “I can’t raise kids and be your assistant at the same time.”
“You can do anything, Rosemarie,” I said cautiously, not having realized that she had signed on as my assistant.
“That’s my line to you.”
I bought more cameras, notably a new Hasselblad and an old Speed Graphic, experimented with color, and flew off to the Western Pacific with the President-elect and his massive entourage.
“Remember,” Rosemarie told me as we fought our way through the crowds at Midway Airport (then the busiest in the world) this is not your career. You are not a journalist. You’re an artist. You do studies and portraits, not candid pictures of presidents getting off airplanes for the cover of Life.”
“Look”
“Whatever.”
“Be careful.”
“You too.” She returned my fierce embrace.
Much later I would learn that she had been having twinges of pain that suggested that young Master Kevin might burst into the world early. Rosemarie was quite prepared to face childbirth without me if a trip halfway around the world was necessary for building my reputation.
As she said, the hospital was “right down the street.”
“A mile and a half. How will you get there?”
“Drive, how else? Anyway, you’ll be home in plenty of time.”
When I noted the time of my son’s birth in the cable I received in Pusan, I wondered if she did drive herself early in the morning to Oak Park Hospital.
Actually, Mom, who’d alternated with Peg in spending nights at our house on Euclid Avenue, did the driving.
“April almost had to deliver the baby herself,” Rosemarie howled happily. “Wouldn’t that have been fun, little Kevin?”
I suffered from time lag and motion sickness through much of the journey. Remember, we didn’t have jet passenger aircraft yet, so the President-elect, his entourage, and the press suffered in DC-6s and DC-7s. I wore my battered old fatigues and my Legion of Merit ribbon.
“You should have flown in one of the C-47s during the war,” a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle told me. “That was real flying. I was evacuated out of Tulagi in one of them with a bullet in my ass. Lots of fun.”
“No thanks.” I reached for the vomit bag, but had nothing left to contribute.
“Were you in the service?”
“After the war. Germany. Constabulary.”
“Pretty plush duty.”
“Beats Heartbreak Ridge. Or Tulagi.”
“What do you think of this guy?”
“Ike?”
“Yeah.”
“Mean, unprincipled son of a bitch. Drinks too much.”
“Typical peacetime military officer, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“The people like him.”
“The risk you take in democracy.”
I didn’t like him, and I’m afraid that I was not able to keep that feeling out of my photos.
He didn’t like me either at first.
“Who’s that stupid-looking redhead?” he asked one of his many yes-men on Iwo Jima. “What’s he doing here?”
The man consulted his clipboard. “O’Malley, Mr. President, Look.”
“Can we get rid of him?”
“He’s an accredited journalist, sir. It would cause a lot of trouble.”
“Well, keep him away from me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Despite my red hair, I am an inconspicuous photographer. Without even trying I disappear into the scenery. Probably a personality factor. Only the most insecure men and women notice me. The women I’ve been able to placate, even the nervous Hollywood actresses I would shoot later in the fifties. So President Ike was one of the few “models” who were always conscious of my presence; he would watch me irascibly out of the corner of his eye.
“Stay away from him,” ordered his press liaison. “He doesn’t like you.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, putting on my military face and manner.
I still got the picture of him driving up Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima with Ed Power, a Secret Service man from Chicago at the wheel—Ed, as he would confess later to me, driving a jeep for the first time in his life.
The shot does not, to put it mildly, compare with the classic Iwo flag raising by the six marines. But it made the cover of Look. Ike was furious. He saw what the editors of the magazine and the American people did not see: an irritable old man who hated the discomfort and inconvenience of this ritual drive up a hill on which many brave young Americans had died.
Later historians and biographers, however, have seen that image for what it is. Some have excused it with the argument that Ike was not feeling well. One writer remarked, “Charley O’Malley, the famous photographer, was still in his young left-wing days when he took the picture.”
Which led the Mayor (to my generation of Yellow Dog Democrats the only mayor Chicago ever had until young Rich was elected) to comment at an Irish Fellowship lunch, “Ha, Chuck, you are not even, ha-ha, as far left as I am.”
“The truth,” I once told an interviewer who kept pushing me about the shot, “was not that the President was sick on Iwo, but that I was.”
“Did you dislike him?”
“Not as much as he disliked me.”
“I’m glad I didn’t vote for him,” Rosemarie told me in bed that night after Kevin Paddy became a fullfledged Catholic (with rights to Holy Water, Collection Envelopes, and Christian Burial). “He is a nasty man.”
“He will bring Vince home for us.”
“So would that cute Mr. Stevenson.”
“It would be a better country if he had won.”
A position that I still hold.
To give President Ike his due, he tried later in the trip to be friendly with me. The man had a genial side too—authentic, not public relations. One minute he could be tough and mean and the next moment he was your friendly Kansas farmer. I don’t think he could decide himself which was the real Ike. The second one, however, was the one people thought they were electing.
“Were you in the military, Irish?” he demanded at the airport in Seoul.
“O’Malley, Charles Cronin, sir.” I saluted smartly. Well, as smartly as I ever did. “0972563. Master Sergeant, First Constabulary Regiment, Seventh Army, Bamberg.”
“You know my friend General Radford Meade?”
“My C.O. for more than a year, sir. I worked directly for him. Liaison with C.I.D.”
“Huh,” he seemed to find it hard to believe. “Responsible work.”
“Yes, sir. Fine man, General Meade.”
The President’s eyes narrowed. “You’re the fellow who did that book.”
“Yes, SIR.”
“Good pictures, Sergeant.” He returned the salute. “Carry on.”
And walked away.
“Yes, SIR.”
Then he turned around. “That the Legion of Merit you’re wearing?”
“Yes, SIR.” I saluted again.
“At ease, son,” he said, with that famous and quite irresistible Ike grin. “What did you do to earn it?”
I told him in military terms what I had done, more than I told my wife and much less than Captain Polly had told her.
“Well done, son.” He shook my hand.
The poor man even autographed one of my Suribachi prints. “Everyone else likes it,” he said by way of explanation.
“Yes, SIR.”
I sent him an autographed copy of The Conquered, but I never heard that he received it.
Anyway, I was not welcome at the White House for the next eight years and didn’t mind that in the slightest. I was welcome, God knows, in the next presidency, but that gets ahead of the story.
So I took the pictures, collected my five thousand dollars, and rushed home to the baptism of my firstborn son, convinced for different reasons than my wife that I was not a photojournalist. She thought my eye was too strong to be wasted on journalism. I thought my body was too weak to be exposed to the strains of international travel.
I had barely recovered my ability to think reasonably when my new book, Traders, was published and my first exhibition, “Rosemarie and April,” opened at a gallery in the shadow of the old Chicago Water Tower. A cover for Look, a book, and an exhibit, all in the space of a pre-Christmas week in 1952: not bad for a twenty-four-year-old, who, as I look back at him, knew almost nothing about life.
However innocent he might have been about life and about women, the young man was not the kind who would run for home plate without looking at the third-base coach for instructions. In this respect the family was completely mistaken. The third-base coach was my wife and the exhibit was her idea. Given the effect it had on her she should have regretted the sign she gave me as I came lumbering toward third base. Being my wild Irish Rosemarie, she never once expressed regret.
The gallery, much too prestigious for a young man, wanted to do its first exhibit of photos. Though cautious and conservative, the owner decided that if I was good enough for the New York Times I was good enough for him. He did not, however, want any prints that appeared in either of my first two books. Rosemarie, who had wangled power of attorney from me, signed the contract and then told me the details.
“I don’t have any prints,” I moaned.
“If you’d stop imitating other people and do your own work, you’d have prints.”
“Ga, ga, ga,” said my daughter, who was always present when Rosemarie sprang one of her surprises on me. “Ga, ga, GA!”
“Right. See, the kid agrees with me.”
“Why don’t you use some prints of her?”
“Baby pictures.”
“Da, da, da, DA!” The little monster pointed at her mother, who was definitely not Da.
“Special pictures, magic pictures, bewitching pictures.”
“Who’s going to buy baby pictures, especially someone else’s baby pictures, even if the baby”—I poked appreciatively at A. R.—“is the most beautiful in the world.”
“Da-da,” the kid announced, getting it right finally.
“We do have to sell pictures if we want the gallery to ask us back.” Rosemarie paused thoughtfully. “I’ve got it! We’ll do a show with the brat’s pictures and me. Rosemarie and April, the progress from bride to nursing mother, a hymn to life and womankind! Isn’t that wonderful!”
“Exploit my two women?” My stomach twisted into its usual dance of doom.
“Celebrate them!” She kissed me and April Rosemary and then kissed us both again. “I know just the shots. Leave it all to me. You have final approval, but—”
“You don’t mind if people look at those shots of you?”
“Why should I? They’re not obscene.”
“They’re you.”
“So what? Anyway, they’re me seen through the eyes of my loving husband. It will make your reputation, Chucky Ducky.” She kissed me yet again. “It’s your best work anyway, if we’re doing an exhibit at all—”
“Which may be a bad idea.”
“Regardless.” She dismissed my wariness with her usual brisk wave. “We must use your best. Like I said, leave it to me and go back to imitating Stieglitz or whoever—”
“Ansel Adams.”
“Regardless.”
So I left it to her. In fact, I withdrew emotionally from the project and repressed all my curiosity about it. When she showed me the forty prints she had chosen, I merely nodded my approval. When she demanded new copies of them, I produced the copies with little attention to the content. It was her show, not mine.
It would make my reputation, all right, and it would also add a dimension of controversy to my reputation that I did not want. I suppose in the long run the controversy did more good than harm, though I didn’t see it that way then. Rosemarie knew there would be controversy all right, she just underestimated how much. And I should have anticipated it.
Not that the pictures in that exhibition were poor. On the contrary, after all these years they are still hauntingly attractive. Some of the best work I’ve ever done. Immature perhaps, but then so was I. And they make up in vitality and love what they lack in maturity.
When our tired old DC-6 lumbered across the Pacific from Guam to Wake Island, from Wake to Midway, from Midway to Honolulu, and then, with a deep gasp for breath, from Honolulu to San Francisco, my priorities were, first, to inspect Kevin Patrick; second, to see my photo of Ike on the cover of Look; third, to examine my new book; and finally, last of all, to take an advance peek at the “Rosemarie and April” exhibit.
Kevin, I thought, looked like his uncle Michael; the Look cover did what I had wanted it to do, even if most of those who looked at it missed the point; Traders would stir up a hornet’s nest at the Board of Trade; and the exhibit scared the hell out of me.
I was running for home plate, all right, and the throw from left field was coming right at my head.
Rosemarie’s choice of prints was brilliant. The theme of celebration of beloved women as the source of life could not have been more powerfully traced. The gallery owners were so taken with her skill at arranging the exhibit—their prerogative, not hers, by the way—that they had actually offered her a job. But there was a lot of human flesh, wonderfully attractive woman flesh, in the display. In the swing of the pendulum today, few would object, but in that time, I knew there would be an outcry.
Even today, I suspect, some of the lobbies of Chicago bank buildings—willing galleries for art shows—would ban “Rosemarie and April.”
The men in our family—Dad, Ted, Michael, and I—walked through our preview in embarrassed silence. None of us would have denied the power of the show. I think that for the first time I believed in the depth of my soul that Rosemarie was right: I did have some talent with a camera. But we all could hear the outrage of those who, to quote the novelist Bruce Marshall, think that God made an artistic mistake in ordering the mechanics of human procreation.
The womenfolk—Mom, Rosemarie, Peg, Jane—who ought to have been offended if anyone was, thought the exhibit was “wonderful.”
Peg conceded, “You sure have guts, Rosie.”
“Nonsense, darling.” Mom examined very closely the cartwheel shot. “If you look like this, and you do, by the way, you don’t have to be afraid of the camera.”
“Guts is not what I noticed,” I remarked in a stage whisper.
“Chucky!” The women screamed in chorus.
All except April Rosemary, who pointed at herself in every picture in which she appeared and uttered vowel sounds of uninhibited narcissistic enthusiasm.
Traders was reviewed with modest praise and it sold well for a book of prints. Many of my sometime colleagues at the Board of Trade would not speak to me for years after its publication. Others congratulated me on the “wonderful job you did, Chuck, great snaps.”
Neither judgment was based on artistic considerations. Those who objected were convinced that anyone who photographed the pits was “against” commodities trading (like the Russian customs officials who banned G. K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy in the conviction that it was about the state church and therefore almost necessarily against it). Those who approved were so convinced of the excellence of themselves and their work that they could not imagine any photo study being anything but favorable.
Both sides missed, I would like to think, the mixture of hope and terror I always felt in that place—in my own stomach and emanating from the bodies of the men around me.
I guess the pros won out over the cons. Three of my shots hang today in places of honor in the gallery overlooking the floor of the Board of Trade.
As my priest says, “Anyone can be a prophet in his own time, if he can arrange to live long enough. John Henry Newman lived to be ninety and was made a cardinal at eighty-nine when they figured he was too old to do any harm. But now he’s always hailed as a cardinal. The secret of being hailed as a prophet is to outlive your contemporaries.”
Similarly, the book that eventually came out of my first show is still in print and used as a text in many fine arts programs around the country. I suspect some kids are trying to imitate me the way I tried to imitate Ansel Adams’s Yosemite in my Oak Park prints.
Give it up, kids, I say. Don’t imitate anyone. Show us what you see. Not what someone else sees.
The cartwheel picture was on the cover of the catalog and also in the window of the gallery. It brought in viewers and clients literally by the thousands.
I don’t know how many folk who stared at that shot—some in fascination, some in horror, some in admiration, some in outrage—realized that it was intended to be comic. It said, if it said anything at all, that my teenage wife was a funny, flaky, fun-loving creature. Mysterious, yes; possibly tragic, yes; radiantly lovely, yes indeed. But also, in her best moments, gloriously comic.
The Chicago critics were guardedly positive.
Tribune: “A hymn of adoration by the artist to the women he loves and to all womankind.”
Daily News: “Young Charles C. O’Malley is a celebrant of life and the life-giving forces of the universe.”
The art critics have always been a little less angry and precious than their colleagues in the book sections.
The good, gray New York Times sent its own august critic all the way to Chicago. He was dazzled:
It would not be fair to this magical display of youthful talent to reduce Mr. O’Malley’s work to a celebration of the stunning beauty of his wife and daughter. He praises their appeal and, through them, the appeal of the ingenious mechanisms by which our species attracts men to women. His work is a hymn to life, but it is a hymn that ends with a question mark. No one can deny the beauty of his Rosemarie or his April, but he knows, even more surely than we who walk hypnotized through the gallery, that such beauty is transient. It will not last forever.
Will young Rosemarie and even younger April mature so that there is sufficient inner beauty to shine even more brilliantly as the years slip by? Is their loveliness a promise or a deception? At this most fundamental level, the art of Charles C. O’Malley is religious. Perhaps only a Catholic artist could see so much religious quest implicit in the bodies of two adored women. Mr. O’Malley is a photographer of sacraments.
Precisely, even if I could not have found those words to describe my intent in those days.
I suppose this whole story I’m trying to write is my way of answering, tentatively and ambiguously, the questions the Times man found posed in that first show.
I was sky-high after I read the review. Rosemarie wept for joy, not, I fear, because the writer posed a challenge to her even more than he had to me, but because he had understood my purpose.
“You did it, Chucky Ducky,” she exulted. “You did it!”
“Right! I signed the contract, I picked the shots, I arranged the displays, I did it all!”
“What… ? You did not! Oh, you’re kidding. I love you, I love you, I love you!”
We had much to celebrate that Christmas of 1952—two healthy children, success in my new career beyond any reasonable expectation, the promise that Vince would be home soon to meet his spunky daughter.
Leo Kelly had come home too, not dead after all. He had been brutally tortured by the North Koreans and had lost two fingers on his left hand. He was a physical and emotional wreck. Dad pulled some strings with someone at Fort Sheridan (he was Colonel O’Malley was he not?), who pulled some strings at Great Lakes Naval Hospital so that Rosemarie and I got in to visit Leo.
At first we did not recognize him. Then he opened his eyes, recognized us, and smiled.
“Hi… nice of you to come way up here . … You two married yet?”
“Two healthy children!”
“Wonderful.” He closed his eyes. “Sorry I couldn’t bring Christopher back for you, Chuck. He was the bravest marine of them all.”
What should we say to him? We didn’t dare mention Jane Devlin. Convinced that Leo was dead, she had married a real creep named Phil Clare. It was said that he cheated on her during their honeymoon.
“You’re a photographer now, Chuck?” he opened his eyes again.
“Kind of.”
“Would you send me your book up here? I’ve love to look at it. Not much good at reading yet.”
He closed his eyes. He seemed to be asleep. Rosemarie and I looked at each other and turned to leave.
“I’m going to make it,” he said. “I’ll show them all. When I get out of here, I’m going to Harvard to get my doctorate in political science.”
“We know you’re going to get better,” Rosemarie said fervently.
He smiled again.
“Stay in touch,” I urged him.
He mumbled something that we didn’t hear.
Then the nurse eased us out of the room.
I sent him copies of my two books. I don’t know whether he ever received them. We didn’t hear from Leo for many, many years.
The verdict wasn’t in on my exhibition. The river wards had not yet voted. They weighed in with their verdict the day after Christmas.
Monsignor James Mitchell, the “spiritual adviser” (read “Boss”) of the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Action celebrated Saint Stephen’s Day by branding the exhibit “an obscene insult to all virtuous Catholic women” in a statement carried in The New World, our Chicago Catholic newspaper (which, in an earlier and far more liberal manifestation, had supported the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War).
The Monsignor was a specialist in dirty books and magazines. In fact, according to Father Raven, he was known in clerical circles as “Dirty Pictures Mitchell.”
The Council of Catholic Action was a paper organization, a front for Monsignor Mitchell’s crusade to keep drugstore magazine racks “pure enough for the Blessed Mother to look at them.”
It seemed that art galleries were in the same category as drugstores.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Mugsy Branigan trumpeted. “He’s a prude.”
John Raven assured us that Mugsy, a master at ribbing, would hound Dirty Pictures for the rest of his life.
The Monsignor had not bothered to visit our gallery. “You don’t have to look at filth,” he told the secular press in a conference on Chicago Avenue across the street, “to know that it is filth.”
Neither would the band of thirty or so Catholic women who picketed us come through the door. “It would be a mortal sin,” one of them told the American, the Hearst afternoon paper that often appeared on pink newsprint.
CATHOLICS PICKET NUDE “ART” it announced in thick black headlines appropriate for the death of a pope or a president. Below the headline was a picture of the woman with a placard reading PUT SOME CLOTHES ON, ROSIE!
Next to that was a murky, dark, badly reproduced print of the cartwheel shot, copied through the window, which made it appear that instead of a two piece swimsuit, Rosemarie was wearing nothing at all.
The New World weighed in with an editorial damning the show on the grounds that children walking down Michigan Avenue during the Christmas season would be led into “grave sins of the flesh” by the lascivious picture in the gallery window.
In those days the avenue was not the Magnificent Mile it would later become; children did not amble down Michigan Avenue at Christmastime. Even if there were a few ambling kids, they probably would not have noticed the gallery if it had not been for the pickets; no one ever saw a young person peeking in the window, and, finally, the picture was utterly chaste.
But as I would learn in years to come, what matters often is not what reality is, but what the papers (and more recently TV) say that it is. The publicity was free and it brought us more patrons. All the prints in the collection were sold; we were assured that we would always be welcome at the gallery.
But none of us were quite prepared for the newspaper attention. We found it hard to believe that the press could so falsify the actuality of my prints and that our Church would engage in such irresponsible criticism.
Some things don’t change. The great Godard film Hail Mary was picketed by Catholic women who refused to view it. They knew it was immoral and blasphemous because they had been told that it was. The opinion of Catholic reviewers, some of whom were priests, did not change their mind.
Rosemarie remained cooler than I did, indeed cooler than any of the rest of us. She simply walked in and out of the gallery as though the pickets were not there. None of them recognized her in her white mink coat. Mom and my sisters glared fiercely at the parading women but said nothing. Dad joined the line of marchers to sow discord.
I was the only one who took them on directly. I remember very clearly my words to them, but they were so childish and ill-tempered that I will not bother the reader with a verbatim transcript.
Well, I did say to one woman in her thirties, her eyes filled with hatred, “Don’t you know the passage in the Gospel that says ‘Judge not that you be not judged’?”
“Jesus was talking to the scribes and Pharisees, not to good Catholics like us.”
I then said some very ungentlemanly things.
The next day I had a much better idea. I photographed the demonstrators.
Much later I would do a show called “Twenty-five Years of Protest,” which portrayed marchers from 1952 to 1977. The striking aspect of the faces in such shots is that, whatever the cause, the hate is always the same.
I would see the same women many times in the next quarter century. I never did like them.
Then the New York Herald Tribune appeared. I suppose because the Times had liked the show, its rival, which had not deigned to send a critic originally, had to dislike it. He went out of his way to cast a different vote.
One must admire the courage it takes for a man not quite twenty-five to display in a prominent Chicago gallery what are essentially family snapshots. Charles O’Malley has plenty of courage, no doubt. But like most men who achieve fame too young (in his case by working for Life and Look, journals that ought to stick with veteran photojournalists), he is devoid of sensibility and taste.
His prints are, not to put too fine an edge on the matter, vulgar. Mr. O’Malley is well within his rights to think that his wife and daughter are pretty. But there is reason to question whether it is proper for him to impose them on the rest of us. His wife is commonplace, not to say coarse, with the kind of face and figure we would have expected in Irish serving girls of a generation ago. His daughter is simply one more baby, ugly as all babies are.
Chicago is hardly a city where one would expect to find a promising young artist with a camera in his hand. In this respect alone, Mr. O’Malley does not challenge one’s expectations. Young he may be, but innocent of promise he also is.
His prints are surely not worth the price of a trip on the Broadway Limited. As a matter of fact, they are not worth the price of a ride on one of the city’s intolerable trolley cars.
Chicago Catholics, not the sort of people one would look to for guidance in matters of taste, are protesting the so-called exhibit as obscene.
They give too much credit to their co-religionist. Obscenity can sometimes have a certain appeal. Mr. O’Malley is not capable of rising to the level where his work can even be called obscene.
Few people in Chicago in those days read the New York Herald Tribune or even knew that it existed. However someone at The American must have read it because the next day its headline announced:
NUDE ART NOT WORTH
TROLLEY RIDE:
NEW YORK CRITIC CALLS
ARTIST’S NUDE WIFE “COARSE”
The show of Chicago nude photographer Charles O’Malley is so bad, according to a prominent New York critic, that it doesn’t even deserve to be called obscene. Calling O’Malley’s wife “commonplace” and “coarse,” the art critic of the New York Herald Tribune said the show was not worth the cost of a ride on a Chicago streetcar—twelve cents.
Years later at a civic dinner I encountered the man who was the editor of the Hearst rag at that time. He was a cordial, charming little Irishman about my height.
“Glad to meet you, Charlie.” He grinned happily. “I’ve always enjoyed your work. You’re a great credit to our city.”
“Oh?”
“Something wrong?” He frowned.
“What kind of a memory do you have, sir?”
“Pretty good, I think. Why?”
“Not as good as mine. I remember when you sent my wife to bed sobbing.”
“Your wife?” He seemed genuinely surprised and dismayed.
I quoted the story almost verbatim.
“Geez, I don’t remember that. I’ve seen the book. Everyone has. Great book.”
“You don’t remember what you did to us in January of 1953, just before Eisenhower was inaugurated?”
“That was a long time ago, Charlie.”
“If I edited a paper in which I said in screaming headlines that your naked wife was commonplace and coarse, would you remember?”
“It was a Hearst paper, you gotta remember, Charlie. We had our own formula that sold papers. Nothing personal.”
“Oh, yes, there is.”
I turned on my heel and with as much dignity as a five-foot-seven-and-three-quarters-inch man in black tie can muster stalked away from him.
You will note that he did not offer to apologize.
I exaggerated a little: Rosemarie did not break down because of the headline in The American. Peg did. Mom did. Jane did. Rosemarie smiled gamely. “It’ll fill the gallery all day tomorrow.”
“You’re not coarse.”
“‘Course I’m not coarse.” She jabbed at my ribs. “And it’s a commonplace that I’m not commonplace.”
She had stayed in the background earlier in the exhibit because she said that the model ought not to interfere with the artist’s work. The day after the headline, however, dressed in an electrifying white knit dress with red-and-green trim, she was at the door defiantly welcoming both the serious patrons and the morbidly curious.
Virtually all the members of both groups liked the pictures. Scores of men and women told her that she was lovely, a truism that caused her to blush and smile happily.
Until her father, loaded to the gills as we Irish say, stalked in, an outraged little bull charging into a china shop with snow clinging to his black coat (with felt lapels) like oversized flakes of dandruff.
“You worthless little slut.” He hopped up and down in front of her. “I’ll never be able to show my face in a decent home in Chicago ever again. I’ll be laughed off the Board of Trade. You’ve ruined my life.”
He smelled like a cheap tavern on West Madison Street.
“Please, Daddy, don’t—”
He slugged her in the chest and sent her reeling against the wall.
“Cunt!” he shouted, and whirled around to leave.
“No impulse control,” Ted would explain later. “Indulged totally as a child. Never learned to delay satisfaction of instant urges. He has the money to gratify himself, but is hampered by his physical appearance. That increases his rage impulse.”
I had my own rage impulse. I grabbed his coat on the way out. “I’ll kill you!” I shouted, intending only to throw him bodily out of the gallery.
Michael and Ted pulled me off him.
The American’s headline said:
DAD DENOUNCES DAUGHTER’S
NUDE “ART”
Rosemarie’s binge lasted six days.