“As a card-carrying member of the Pepsi Generation”—my wife sipped her Pepsi blissfully—“husband mine, I could get used to this life.”
The P.A. finished the soothing and suggestive sounds of “Hernando’s Hideaway.” The next song was the appropriately romantic “Three Coins in a Fountain.”
“Hmmm…” The Southern California sun, compassionate and gentle, penetrated my muscles and bones, caressing and renewing my soul. “You think you could live in the Beverly Hills Hotel for the rest of your life?”
“And eat in the Polo Lounge Bar every day. Order me another Pepsi, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I waved my hand like I was perhaps a Turkish sultan or a degenerate Roman emperor. “And people would stare at you during the lunch hour every day because they would be sure you were some famous actress only they didn’t quite know which one.”
“Any mother of three children”—she shifted on her lounge—“would be flattered to be confused with a star, even more so with a starlet. … How old do you have to be before you are no longer a starlet?”
“Twenty-five,” I made up the answer. “It is written in the ordinances of Beverly Hills. You have another year.”
“I did say three children, didn’t I? Do I really have three children?”
“You do. In fact, we do.” I ticked them off on my fingers: “April Rosemary, Kevin Patrick, and James Michael, aged three, two, and six months. Not quite Irish triplets.”
“How did that happen?”
“Beats me.”
We both laughed. Our February 1955 trip to Southern California, in later days known appropriately as LaLa Land, had begun as business and was now ending on a note of intensely renewed sexual pleasure. Rosemarie and I had fallen in love again. We were experiencing the natural rhythms of married love without yet realizing that there are such rhythms and that the secret of happiness in marriage is to be sensitive and responsive to their ebb and flow.
She opened one eye. “You ought to rub on more suntan cream. You know what sun does to your skin.” She removed Vogue from its fortunate place on her belly, sat up, and reached for the tube. “I know, you’re waiting for me to do it.”
The subtle shifts in her body as she moved recalled the powerful emotions of the previous night. Rosemarie was a woman of infinite willpower. She had determined that three pregnancies would not noticeably affect her figure and that was that.
Only one human frailty seemed immune to the strength of her will—her occasional disastrous drinking bouts. And that had not been a major problem since the terrible week after the scene with her father at my first exhibition.
“I’m not an alcoholic,” Rosemarie had insisted without rancor when I finally asked why she had stopped going to A.A. meetings. “It might be easier if I were.”
I let the matter drop.
We pretended by mutual and implicit agreement that her father did not exist. He was excluded from family rituals and celebrations, stricken from the Christmas card list, banned from conversation. We dealt with him through lawyers and heard on the grapevine that he was spending more time in Las Vegas.
Vince Antonelli, who now held my seat on the Board of Trade, reported to me that Jim Clancy rarely appeared on the floor. His old ring of cronies had broken up; Jim was now more than ever a lone wolf trader, a fat, angry, reckless little man who, for all of his lack of “impulse control,” still possessed the instincts of a successful bandit and continued to pile up profits.
Vince, worn and haunted, had come back from Korea with a hero’s medals and a determination, more furious than mine, to make up for lost time. He’d abandoned his plans for law school and plunged into the commodities game with passionate enthusiasm. The redolute tenacity that kept him alive in the P.O.W camp served him well on the Exchange. He learned quickly and soon was making as much money in a month as his father, a shoemaker on Division Street, would make in a year. I turned over my account to him with instructions that I didn’t want to worry about it anymore.
“Unless I see Ed Murray charging after you.”
“If you can’t beat ‘em, hire ‘em. Ed and his father are my lawyers. Now that Ed’s married to Cordelia, he’s settling down to become one of the best lawyers in town.”
“Still the clever one,” Vince said with a grin. “Always thinking and planning?”
“Just a simple snapshot taker, trying to earn an easy buck.”
Despite the torments of the Korean camp, Vince seemed to adjust easily to civilian freedom. Peg and Carlotta were clearly happy, and now the latter had a little brother, Vincent, to complain about to her cousin April Rosemary, who knew all about the problems of little brothers.
There were times, however, when the distant, haunted look in Vince’s eyes worried me, as did the strained silences between him and Peg. I kept my worries to myself.
My parents were showing their years at last. Dad was fifty-five, Mom fifty-one, young by my standards today, but terribly old when you’re twenty-seven and basking under the sun of Southern California in February. They were aging elegantly, however, Dad with a white beard and Mom with carefully groomed silver hair that made her look even more like an exiled duchess. With their whole generation, they were still making up for the lost time of the Great Depression, never quite forgotten; but their vacations and cars and fur coats and new furniture were never vulgar. The two of them were, I thought, entitled to it.
Try as I might, I could not exclude the fear that my growing old would not have such grace.
At the side of the Beverly Hills pool, my wife rubbed the suntan cream into my skin as tenderly as she would rub baby oil into the skin of James Michael, a premature baby who seemed mortally terrified of the world. Her fingers gradually became demanding.
“I think you’re more interested in seducing me than protecting me from the sun.” I pretended to twist away.
She leaned toward me. “Southern California sun is dangerous. We have to do a good job of protecting the poor little redhead’s sensitive skin, don’t we?”
“You know what’s going to happen to you if you keep protecting me that way?”
“No, what?”
“You’ll be ravished.”
“Can I count on it?” Her caresses assumed a lascivious rhythm, her eyes grew soft and round, her lips parted, her body tensed. I imagined her loins moistening in preparation for me.
“Keep on, woman, and we won’t make it back to our cottage.”
“Really?” Her hand darted underneath my trunks. “I thought you were a rational man who wrote down all his bright ideas in a notebook.”
In the two years since Kevin’s birth, Rosemarie and I had begun to experience the same problems that affected most couples in our generation. On the one hand, we had invested our emotions heavily in the vision of domestic happiness—family, home, suburban affluence. On the other hand, the demands that we imposed on ourselves made sexual bliss at the family hearth almost impossible.
For us there was less excuse than for most.
Rosemarie had help with the children. We had more money than we needed. We were good at our sexual commedia when we bothered to play it out.
Nevertheless, I worked long and hard at my new profession. I did portraits for affluent Chicagoans who did not understand my vision but liked the results. I flew around the country on assignment for magazines. Occasionally I found time for my own “studies”—meditations and reflections like “The Conquered” and “Traders” and “Under the Golden Dome.” I stayed up often till after midnight working on prints for my books and exhibits. I had finished my course work at the University and was grinding away at a dissertation on the Marshall Plan. I would try to explain why the relatively small contribution from the United States had jumpstarted (as we would say now) the German economy.
Why did a professional photographer need a Ph.D. in economics? There was no good answer except that I had started it and I would finish it.
I realized even then that Rosemarie was right, as by her own admission she always was: the studies and the portraits were my strongest skills. Still I felt that I was not proving myself as a photographer unless I could earn a decent living for myself and my family with my camera, a monumentally difficult task as any photographer will tell you even today. (Unless you are among the few who can charge in five figures for two hours of work!)
For all my frenzied work, I still fell short of that goal. I would not listen to Rosemarie when she pointed out, not without acerbity, that I didn’t have to work that hard. The money from my investments, not to mention hers, was more than enough to supplement my earnings.
“The photographer is, or at least ought to be, a member of Plato’s leisure class, a man who does what he wants to do because he doesn’t have to do anything.” She then developed a long argument from Plato’s Republic about leisure as the basis for society and culture.
It was a powerful argument, like all her arguments, although I cannot, to tell the truth, remember its details.
“We don’t need them because we have a much broader base of capital. You’re the economist. You should know that.”
She was right, naturally. I was exhausting myself to honor standards that I had made up, probably because I did not know any other way to live. In the process of chasing this new will-o’-the-wisp, however, I did learn some things about the eye of the photographer that would serve me well later on.
“Well,” I took the offensive, “you don’t have to work as hard with the kids as you do. You have help and you have Grandma.”
“I don’t want to ruin it for April.” Her lower lip turned down stubbornly. “And the help are not the kids’ mother.”
Rosemarie was a superb mother until she became compulsive about the role. She led the kids as the first among equals rather than trying to rule them like the empress she was with me. She presided over the revels, organized the gang, laid down the rules for the game, and rallied the population against “him.”
Meaning Daddy, who had to be treated very gently lest he break.
Then her conscience would catch up with her and she would become “responsible,” compulsively watching, supervising, worrying.
“Mommy, go take a nap with Daddy and leave us alone,” April Rosemary told her, maybe a little after 1955.
Paralyzed with laughter, Mommy did what she was told. Delighted with her success, the little monster often used the same line on her mother in later years.
The two older children treated me like I was a sibling too, a younger brother who was funny and entertaining, but hardly to be taken seriously.
When I tried to be angry with them, they laughed at me.
As the man says, you get no respect.
We would both have done better in our self-assigned roles if we had been able to approach them with greater relaxation and self-confidence. I should have given myself time to think and wander and reflect and observe. Rosemarie should have pursued her singing and her reading and her sometime role as my assistant. The culture of the 1950s and our own personalities did not permit such relaxation.
It is fashionable now to ridicule and blame the fifties for their emphasis on suburban domesticity and material affluence.
To which I reply, often infuriating April Rosemary and Kevin and their siblings, that suburban domesticity is preferable on both aesthetic and ethical grounds to the relentless narcissism of Halsted Street yuppiedom.
And I add, above the uproar, that the decision made by our society in the postwar years to provide higher education for everyone, including women and blacks, was the most important social choice of the century and is responsible for the shape of American society today more than anything done during the Big Chill years.
Except possibly, I sometimes add, the interstate highway program.
I defend the right of women to have options. I’m glad my daughters have other models available as alternatives to the suburban domesticity of our time—a domesticity in which, as someone said, women agreed to have more children in less space and with less help than their mothers, in return for the promise that men would provide for them with greater affluence.
Yet I am not sure that the availability of options has made women any happier, on the average. Those who are capable of making choices are surely happier, but those who are not are much less happy, drifting as they do through life with neither career (in any meaningful sense) nor family. The one option offered for women in our time at least protected some of the weaker from having to make their own decisions.
There are costs to freedom. And casualties in a revolution that offers more freedom.
Nonetheless, while I will defend the fifties from the criticisms directed at the lonely crowd (a reality only long years after David Riesman wrote about) produced during the “me” decade and from the slander of shallow reporters like David Halberstam, I still have to admit that Rosemarie and I messed up badly during the fifties—that era of bobby sox and hula hoops, of Ozzie and Harriet and The Honeymooners, of Billy Graham and Elvis Presley, of tail fins and conical bras, of Estes Kefauver and the Davy Crockett craze, of the Bunny Hop and Sputnik.
We messed up because we compulsively assumed unnecessary responsibilities, as did most of our generation (better behavior, I would still argue, than the compulsive rejection of necessary responsibilities that marked our successors). There was nothing wrong with the vision of suburban domesticity. The mistake was in blighting the vision with our own hang-ups.
“I made a mistake,” she said in bed once. “I was completely wrong, that’s all.”
“Call the press, sound the trumpets!”
“Silly.” She slapped my arm and closed The Blackboard Jungle, which she had been reading. “The mistake was about you and it was really dumb.”
“About me?”
“About you.” She sighed and took off her reading glasses. “I assumed that because you are an artistic genius, the accountant part of you was just an act. It took me all these years to figure out that it isn’t an act and that the picture taker needs the accountant too.”
“Uh-huh.” The idea had never occurred to me.
“So you probably ought to do what you want to do.”
“And, other than disrobing you and ravishing you, what is that?”
“Finish your dissertation. It will make your pictures even better. I’m not sure why, because I haven’t figured you out completely yet. But I know it will.”
“You read minds too?”
“Only about sexual desires in men, and that’s pretty easy. Don’t tear my gown, please.”
Thus it was decided—even if it took me several months more to wrap up the first draft.
So Rosemarie and I were close and loving partners, but in marriage that’s not quite enough, not when there are serious problems that are never discussed.
We joined the Christian Family Movement, as did many Catholic couples in that era. We were the “babies” of the group, assured by the other couples that we had no idea yet what “life is really like.”
Given Rosemarie’s experiences with her father, I found that argument ridiculous if not offensive.
The religious ideals we discussed in our analysis of the Bible and the liturgy and the world around us (in the paradigm of See, Judge, and Act) were a direct challenge to the compulsive suburban life. If we really trusted a good and loving God, if we really believed in the world view of Jesus, if we really thought that we lived in the palm of God’s loving hand (as the old Irish blessing puts it), then we would have been less compulsive, less preoccupied, less hassled, less impatient with one another and our kids, less irritable when the perfection of our vision was marred by the imperfection of the human condition.
Ted McCormack—also a C.F.M. veteran—would contend later that the movement came apart because of the demands of intimacy. The groups became surrogate families in which all the unresolved childhood conflicts with siblings and parents reemerged to bedevil the community. The vast area of relational problems that husband and wife had ruled off their personal agenda surfaced, if indirectly, at our meetings and scared the hell out of everyone.
“If you really loved one another that way,” Jane said with a shiver, “you could get yourself fucked to death.”
It was a colorful way of describing the risks of intense intimacy, really intense intimacy, that seem to lurk at the core of the Christian message. (Small wonder that priests, even men like John Raven, didn’t dare preach it).
“And that’s the real problem, Ted,” I would add to his analysis. “The unresolved family conflicts are bad enough. Once you understand what Jesus really meant, you run for your life. It would be too scary to live that way.”
Anyway, at twenty-four and twenty-seven, with three kids and my seemingly dubious career as a camera artist (Rosemarie’s description), neither my wife nor I was capable of taking Jesus seriously. We had, we thought, lots of excuses and plenty of time.
A dangerous argument whenever you use it.
Our trip to California was courtesy of Vogue, which had been making up its mind for some two years whether I was a fashion photographer or not.
Curiously, it was an assignment that my wife, who disapproved strongly of my ventures into photo journalism, strongly advocated, and one that I resisted.
I came up from the darkroom to find her nursing Jimmy Mike and talking on the phone.
“My husband might not be worth fifteen hundred dollars a day”—she shifted her son—“but that’s what he gets. If you want him to shoot all those beautiful women, you simply will have to pay his rates.”
She was lying through her teeth about my rates.
“What? No, that doesn’t include expenses. Seventy-five hundred for five days, plus expenses. That includes me. I’m his assistant and I’m very expensive. Huh? My dear young woman”—she winked at me—“I assure you that I am not about to permit my husband to associate with those gorgeous models without my being there to protect him. Ten thousand? Well, that’s more like it.”
“Vogue?”
She nodded cheerfully. “Lingerie shots with ten of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. Sounds like fun.”
“Cheesecake.”
“Dear God, Jimmy Mike”—she disengaged the frail little punk from his source of nourishment—“will you listen to your daddy, the prude? So what’s wrong with a little cheesecake?” she said, giving me a look. “You like it well enough. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how you do. Maybe you should devote your life to studying beautiful women.”
“I’ve already done that.” I kissed her.
“Hmm. … Isn’t Daddy a nice man, Jimmy, even if he spends all his time with those terrible chemicals? You won’t mind if three months from now I go away with nice Daddy for a tiny little week to protect him from all those predatory women, will you?”
He didn’t protest, God knows.
His mother changed her mind several times before we caught the noontime DC-7 from Midway to Los Angeles.
I had to practically drag her out of the house. She sulked for the whole flight.
She wasn’t sulking a week later when she led me from the pool back to our pink-and-green cottage.
I grabbed her arm in front of the steps, whirled her around, and, surrounded by azaleas and palm trees, ravished her with a savage kiss. “That’s what happens to women who tease their husbands at the side of a swimming pool.”
“Oh…”
I recaptured her lips, grasped her bottom with my hands, and overwhelmed her. Somehow the straps came off her suit in our fierce tussle.
“Are you going to make love to me here outside?” She inhaled frantically. “Not that I mind, but I think they have laws out here—”
“Inside, woman.” I boosted her up the stairs.
She had not accompanied me to Washington for my shoot of the Army-McCarthy hearings.
“Why should I leave three children home alone, just so I can go to a dumb city while you take dumb pictures of a dumb senator?”
“You won’t leave them home alone,” I had shouted at her. “And this is not just a dumb senator. This is a historical episode of major importance. And only we photojournalists can reveal what kind of a man he is. The newspapers are paralyzed because they have to play the news stories straight.”
“Fine. Maybe. Only you’re not a photojournalist. How many times do I have to tell you that?” she shouted back, confident that she would win any shouting match. “You’re a camera artist. That’s spelled—”
“I know how it’s spelled, goddamn it. I have to do this anyway.”
“Well, you can do it without me. In case you haven’t noticed, I have an infant son to protect. He’s lucky, poor little thing, to be alive.”
She stretched the truth a bit there. Jimmy Mike was a frail preemie, but he was healthy enough. There never had been any real danger that he might die.
Exactly how healthy, he would prove in his tight-end days as an Arizona Wildcat, but that comes later.
So I went off to D.C., into the maelstrom of National Airport, over to the gracious old Hay-Adams (selected by my wife, who was also my travel agent, even when she disapproved of my reasons for travel), and finally up to the Hill.
I will not trouble you with the technicalities of the fight between the junior senator from Wisconsin and the United States Army over his two staff members who, it appeared to some, were homosexually involved with one another. The press couldn’t say that. It couldn’t say that the Senator was a blowzy drunk. It couldn’t say that he was a contemptible bully, a cheap ward heeler, and a total fraud.
It couldn’t say that for all the lists of known Communists in the State Department (varying in number from 57 to 81 to 205), he had never uncovered a single real Communist.
He was not, however, wrong: there had been notable Communist infiltration of the American government during the 1930s. “Tail Gunner Joe,” however, did not know the name of a single Communist infiltrator.
So he had become the principal hunter in our national hunt for “red” witches. The search for “pinkos” hurt a lot of innocent or mostly or harmless bureaucrats and film writers and other such folk who were only exercising their freedom of political thought.
And General George C. Marshall, Eisenhower’s mentor.
I had no sympathy then and I have none now for Communists or fellow travelers who were Russian dupes (even when they wore Roman collars). Yet I could tell after the first five minutes that Joseph R. McCarthy was an incompetent fake. Nonetheless, such was the temper of the time and the need to find scapegoats for the “loss of the peace” and the “loss of China” and the “Korean mess” that the former tail gunner, who apparently never fired his weapon once in combat, had terrified the rest of the United States Senate, paralyzed the federal bureaucracy, threatened the rest of the country, kept our war-hero president at bay, and was spoken of as a possible presidential candidate in 1956 or 1960.
And, despite his rating in a press poll as the worst senator in Washington, he became the hero of every nun and anti-Communist cleric in the land, much as the Berrigan brothers would later become heroes of the Catholic left (made up in part of the same people who had worshiped Tail Gunner Joe).
McCarthy, mostly by luck, had learned how to manipulate the mass media, which in those days included the newspapers, the newsmagazines, radio—and television.
I have thought often, in the years since, that the eagerness of Democratic liberals to prove that they were as “tough” on Communism as men like McCarthy and William Jenner and Kenneth Wherry (a senator who had made his money in the undertaking business) was one of the principal reasons they involved themselves in the Vietnam quagmire.
The Luce empire was uncertain. Its working journalists knew what McCarthy was. Its boss, still smarting over the “loss of China” (where he was born, the son of Protestant missionaries) and quite ready to consider the possibility that total war with China and Russia might be a good idea, was inclined to be more sympathetic.
I was hired as a compromise. Irish Catholic like the Senator, I was assumed to be anti-Communist. Known as a liberal Democrat (unfairly, I was merely a Democrat, the kind that would later be called a Yellow Dog Democrat—someone who would vote for a yellow dog if it ran on the Democratic ticket), I could be assumed to have reservations. Why not have that little O’Malley kid get some shots? He’s good, whatever they say about him. Gorgeous wife too, can’t figure what she sees in the little punk. Anyway, everyone liked that cover he did for the other guys, with Ike riding up the mountain.
So off I went to Washington, Nikon in one hand, Hasselblad in the other.
“You want to meet the Senator personally?” Roy Cohn, sleaze already carved deeply into his young face, challenged me during the first recess.
“Maybe after I’m finished.” I retreated a step or two. “I don’t like to meet subjects till my shoot is finished.”
“We could take a look at your father-in-law’s operations in Vegas, you know.”
Phony ruthlessness. Any reporter from Chicago could have told him about Jim Clancy.
“Go right ahead. It wouldn’t bother me in the least.”
Later Bob Kennedy ambled over. He was the minority counsel for the committee—of which his brother was a member—and hence no friend of the Tail Gunner.
“Hiyah, Mista O’Malley.”
We shook hands gingerly. I thought that he very possibly was a dangerous reptile, but a reptile with a charming smile. About my age, he had the reputation among the reporters of being a more ruthless politician than his brother. “Bobby,” they said, “is a real hater.”
“You talk funny,” I told him.
“Nah,” he smiled again. “Yah talk funna.”
“I’ll send you some prints. Free.”
“Wanna meet mah bratha?”
“Will I need a translator?”
I agreed that, yes, I did want to meet the Senator, who I assumed along with a lot of others in those days would be the first Catholic president. After the pictures.
“Wadya think of this affah?” He nodded at McCarthy and Cohn, who were walking by us.
“Crooks.”
“Yah.” He smiled for the third time. “Nice to meetcha, Mistah O’Malley.”
“Chuck.”
“Bobby.” He shook hands, favored me with his stunning smile again, and wandered away. It was a long, long time before I learned to like and even admire the man. I prayed for his nomination in 1968 and stood helplessly sobbing over his body that terrible morning in Los Angeles.
At the Army-McCarthy hearings, I had taken enough shots the first day for Life’s purposes, but I could hardly collect a week’s wages for a day’s work, so I lingered in Washington. That evening, feeling as though I had been isolated from the rest of creation, I called home. Rosemarie, always one to take advantage after her point was made, reported cheerfully on the day’s events and put each of the kids on. They all missed Daddy. Which may or may not have been rehearsed. Even Jimmy’s babble was interpreted with that message.
“He’s a terrible man,” Rosemarie observed when she had reclaimed the phone. “I can see why you don’t like him.”
“How do you know he’s terrible?”
“I’ve been watching it on television.” She sighed. “A woman has to do something when her husband isn’t around. He’s a real slime, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he really is.”
I hung up thoughtfully. Television. We had one—relatively small, maybe a little bigger than the kind kids today bring to the Bears games at Soldier Field. We watched Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, The Ed Sullivan Show. You couldn’t see the Bears during the season, since home games were not telecast in those days and away games were banned because the Cardinals (still my team) were playing at home. One could go to taverns and watch the game on sets with antennae high enough to pick up Rockford or South Bend.
I had no time for that. And neither Rosemarie nor I thought we had time to watch the newscasts. We could read the news in the papers and in more detail too. Most of the rest of the stuff, except for an occasional fine drama on Playhouse 90 or The Hallmark Hall of Fame, was junk anyhow.
As I pondered her words, I turned on the small set (black-and-white, as they all were in those days, as hard as it is for kids to believe now) in my room in the Hay-Adams. There was Tail Gunner Joe ponderously demanding a “point of order.” Perfect title for the shot (developed in Life’s Washington lab) that I was sure would be their cover picture. I watched the replay on the news program with fascination. So that’s the way things were going.
I stayed the rest of the week, shook hands with Jack Kennedy, who was even more difficult to understand than his brother, wandered around the Senate taking shots that might make a study someday, and developed my prints late in the evening. It was all over, however, a waste of time.
I later won a Pulitzer Prize for “Point of Order.” My wife admitted that she had been wrong—a rare admission, one to be treasured.
“But only accidentally,” she added.
She was right fundamentally—a concession I did not need to make when I won the prize. For I had acknowledged her superior wisdom when I returned home that Friday afternoon, having crept away from the Capitol after a token appearance in the morning.
“Home early?” she called, when I stumbled into the house, deathly ill from motion sickness.
“To catch my wife with her lover.”
“A lot of opportunity with three kids around.”
“You were right.” I slumped into my leather chair. The three offspring had turned Mommy’s study into a playpen.
“Naturally. But how so?”
“TV will do in the Tail Gunner, regardless of Life’s cover. Indeed, eventually it will do in Life and photojournalists too. Oh, we’ll take pictures, but TV will shape life in the sixties and far more effectively than the picture mags do now.”
She pondered. “Sure. I only realized that you were right about McCarthy when I saw him on television. It will sort out the phonies.”
One kind of phony would be finished. Another kind, the fakers who knew how to appear sincere on TV, would replace the Tail Gunner Joes of the fifties.
I’m not sure that American life and politics are any better because Ronald Reagans can replace Joseph R. McCarthys. There’s been change, if not progress. The demagogues have to be smoother.
A man with a camera, whether photojournalist or camera artist, would not be the man of influence he had been in the thirties and the forties and the fifties.
Photographers would never be able to set up a scene like the one in the Bohemian Alps where we hunted Nazi werewolves for Life. By the late 1960s, however, different setups would be possible, as the camera crews at the Democratic convention in Chicago proved. And the emergence of such national “personalities,” whose sole claim to influence is their ability to manipulate TV, proves that the phonies are still around and maybe as powerful as ever. Different phonies. I would not, in the ordinary course of events, be taking their pictures.
Which did not make me any more eager to photograph Hollywood women in high-fashion underwear.
When we set up camp in the lush California ambience of the Beverly Hills Hotel, I decided that it was not such a bad idea after all.
Rosemarie agreed completely. “I think I could grow to like this vulgarity,” she said as we were ushered through the lobby and out into the garden toward our cottage. “Particularly in the winter.”
“Without the kids?”
“April is entitled to her time with them.”
Once she was away from them, Rosemarie’s compulsions faded rapidly.
We had accidentally stumbled into a romantic renewal interlude, of the sort that is essential to keep a marriage from deteriorating. More accidentally for me, perhaps, than it was for Rosemarie.
We were practicing rhythm, Catholic birth control, without too much difficulty given our preoccupations with career and family. Rosemarie had scheduled the California shoot so that it would occur during the “safe period”—the right half of the month, as she called it.
To regulate human love by the calendar, especially when you excluded anywhere from a third to a half of the month, seemed like “natural law” to the old men in the Vatican. It didn’t seem natural at all to married people or the priests who heard their confessions. Which is why eventually they turned their backs on the Vatican on this issue—and later on almost all issues of sexual morality.
Our first night together in the decadent luxury of LaLa Land (a perfect name even if I use it anachronistically) was warm and pleasant—two long-separated lovers becoming acquainted again.
The second night was another matter.
“How did you feel during the shoot today?” Rosemarie, striking in a white linen suit, asked me at supper that night.
“What do you mean?” I was gobbling a steak, enjoying more of an appetite than I had experienced for months.
“With those women.”
“They were both very lovely, a little old for me, but quite striking. A lot of tastefully applied makeup. Probably requires a lot of time.”
“Bodies?”
“Wonderful. Not in a class with yours.” I tentatively reached for her thigh. I was not rebuffed.
“Not my question …”
“What is your question?”
“Would you like to sleep with them?”
“Well, in principle, sure. I’m a male member of the human race. I know from the philosophical tone of your voice”—my hand crept up and down on her thigh—“that you have thought something out. What is the insight this time?”
“Don’t stop what you’re doing or I won’t talk. Okay? My insight is that the relationship between an artist and a model, woman model anyway, is affective. It’s a love relationship. She must give herself to you, if only to your camera. You must win her over to yourself, if only to your camera. Those two women came into the studio uneasy and defensive. They live by their beauty and they’re scared to share it with a camera they can’t control. Morever, although the lingerie is absurdly chaste, they still are undressing for you. So you have to be warm and tender and gentle with them, so affectionate that after a while they want to share themselves with you.”
“Ah.”
“You’re very good at it.—Yes, chocolate ice cream and coffee, please.—Very good.”
“Really?”
“Really. I think they both would have liked to go to bed with you. I don’t mean they would have. They have the look of happily married women. And the demure, self-effacing wife was there with her lights and film. But they found you very attractive.”
“Little red-haired runt?” My fingers had found an appropriate place to rest—between her legs.
“Sensitive, considerate, cute redhead.”
“So it’s a good thing you came?”
“What troubles me is that your best talent might be for photographing women.” She sighed. “I will have to travel a lot in that case.”
“Do you really want that ice cream?”
“Have them send it over to the cottage. I have the impression I may need nourishment before the night is over.”
As I look at the pictures of those glamorous women many years later, I am more convinced than ever of the correctness of Rosemarie’s insight. There was indeed an affective relationship between me and them. There still is, lingering in the memory traces of my brain. And with every woman I have successfully shot. (It doesn’t work with everyone.) The subdirectory on the hard disk inside my head where those experiences are stored is a pleasant one indeed.
It was also wise for Rosemarie to accompany me.
I would not have been unfaithful, but it would have been much more difficult to do the shoot well.
By happy chance our romance was renewed, imaginatively and powerfully, during the spectacular nights of that week.
During which I did indeed call my adviser at the University to tell him I would have the second draft ready in two weeks. For some odd reason he seemed delighted.
On our last day of shooting, before Rosemarie seduced me with the suntan cream at poolside, the starlet (the only one of the two models allegedly younger than we) canceled at the last minute. The editor from Vogue was dismayed. The set had been arranged, the lights were ready. No model.
“This is terrible,” she said. “We’ll never ask her again. I’m afraid we’ll have to end the shoot.”
“Can I make an alternative suggestion?”
“Certainly.” I nodded toward Rosemarie, who was bustling around with the lights, alternately fighting and flirting with the technicians. “Wonderful! Her rates?”
“Same as the girl who canceled.”
“All right.”
“Rosemarie… come here, darling… see that blue corset, the strapless one?”
“Foundation garment, dear, let me see.” She consulted her clipboard. “Sapphire blue foundation, panel in nylon lace, satin, net, with a latex back section—makes the skin look like alabaster.”
“Right. Put it on. We need a model.”
“No! I never wear that kind of thing. Ugh. It makes me feel all cramped-up just to look at it.”
“Hurry up, we don’t have all afternoon.”
“No.” She did not speak with too much conviction, however. Her refusal was merely for the record. As I knew it would be.
“The actress’s rates, dear,” the editor from Vogue chimed in.
“Do it, Rosie!” a technician yelled.
“All RIGHT.”
Rosemarie played it for laughs, overcoming whatever shyness she might have had. It was the best shot of the series, not a comic figure, but a mysterious, dark-haired, alabaster woman of the world. Afterwards she received several modeling offers, which she promptly and firmly turned down.
“I only work with my husband,” she assured them primly.
Her suggestion that I do the shoot was wise, quite apart from the renewal of our married romance it occasioned. I was very good indeed at capturing women in the eye of the camera. What might have been cheesecake, though in Vogue high-class cheesecake, became art. If I do say so myself.
So there was a lot on our agenda at poolside as the sun began to fall behind the trees. She managed to drag me into our cottage as I frantically kissed her neck and shoulders, but we didn’t make it as far as the bedroom. Not the first time.
We had supper sent to the room. Rosemarie phoned my mother, who was delighted to preside over the playroom till Monday evening.
I was a genuinely happy young man. Despite our compulsions we were still very much in love. I was improving in my career. Rosemarie was a wonderful mother and an ingenious lover. All was right with the world.
I often wonder how our life would have been different if we had been able to stay that weekend.
At eight o’clock the next morning I was shaken out of my well-deserved sleep by a phone call. Where the hell was Rosemarie? She was the early riser.
The shower was running.
Damn the self-indulgent woman.
I picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
“Ed Murray, Chuck. Sorry to bother you. I’m afraid I have some bad news. …”
The kids? My parents? Peg and Vince?
“Jim Clancy got himself blown to kingdom come this morning.”