by Nora Ephron
In all fairness, Mrs. Dawson is almost a grouch in comparison to Leone “Call Me the Pollyanna of Palm Beach” King, who until her retirement in 1973 could not find enough good things to say about the place. Where else, Mrs. King once asked in a long series of rhetorical questions, “could you find families offering living quarters to people of low incomes, without at least making some sort of charge? … Where could you find friends with splendid flower gardens leaving a message with their gardeners to send certain people bouquets during the winter while they are off on a trip around the world? Where could you find big bags of fruit from a Palm Beach orange grove on your doorstep at regular intervals? … Don’t let fabulously rich people throw you. They are just the same as anyone else except they can do what they jolly well please when they jolly well please. They have likes and dislikes, aches and pains, problems. They are just people.”
Maria Durell Stone has left the Palm Beach Social Pictorial—she has been stolen away by the West Palm Beach daily paper—but her two years on the weekly coincided, and not coincidentally either, with what I think of as the Pictorial’s Golden Era, so I cannot leave her out of this. Mrs. Stone is a Latin-looking lady with a tremendous amount of jet-black hair who is divorced from architect Edward Durell Stone and has taken not one but two of his names along with her. She began writing for the Pictorial three years ago, and no one writing in any of the Palm Beach publications comes near her gift for telling it like it is. “I’ve done nothing but praise the Poinciana Club since it opened,” she wrote last year, “but being a critic means that every now and then one must speak the truth and I am sorry to say it, but Bavarian Night there was a disaster.”
Mrs. Stone’s main problem in life—and the theme of her column too—had to do with being a single woman in a place where there are few eligible men. There are a lot of us with this problem, God knows, but she managed to be more in touch with it than anyone I know. Not a column passed without a pointed remark to remind the reader that this Mrs. Stone was looking for a Roman spring. “I met Vassili Lambrinos this week and he’s divine,” she wrote one week. “Dorothy Dodson, petite, refreshing and vivacious, gave a luncheon for him and I got to know him better—unfortunately not as much as I would like to, but what’s a poor bachelor girl to do?” Another week, Mrs. Stone went to a charity auction: “There were numerous items to bid on and I did covet that stateroom for two on the S.S. France, but as luck would have it, someone else got it. I wouldn’t have known who to take with me anyway, so it’s probably just as well.” Age was no barrier: “One of the best things of the evening,” she wrote of the Boys’ Club Dinner, “was the Boys’ Club Chorus, which consisted of adorable little boys of unfortunate circumstances who sang many lively numbers at the top of their divine adolescent voices. It was heartwarming to hear.” Apparently, Mrs. Stone’s subtlety was not lost on her readers: “Stanton Griffis, that amazing ex-ambassador who sat next to me at the Salvation Army luncheon the other day, told me that if I really wanted to get the right man, I should put an ad in my column saying, ‘Wanted: Intelligent, handsome, lean, tall, romantic type with kindness and money.’ Well, now that I’ve said it, let’s see if my octogenarian friend is right.”
From time to time, something sneaks into the Pictorial that has to do with the outside world, and when it does, it is usually in Liz Smith’s column. Miss Smith writes for the publication as if she were addressing a group of—well, a group of people who winter in Palm Beach. She interrupts her column of easygoing gossip and quotes to bring her readers little chautauquas; last year’s were about Richard Nixon (“Hope all you people who couldn’t stomach poor old Hubert are happy these days,” one of them concluded) and this year’s are about oil and the Middle East. (“So here are the most fascinating and frightening statistics I’ve read recently, from The New Republic. You remember The New Republic—it’s liberal, left, and riddled with integrity, but even so, don’t ignore the statistics.”)
The rich are different from you and me; we all know that, even if some of the people in Palm Beach don’t. But it is impossible to read the Social Pictorial without suspecting that the rich in Palm Beach are even more different. One of my friends tells me that Palm Beach used to be a rather nice place and that now it’s become a parody of itself; I don’t know if she’s right, but if she is, the Social Pictorial reflects this perfectly. If there were more communities like it, I don’t think I would find the Palm Beach Social Pictorial so amusing. But there aren’t, so I do.
The Palm Beach Social Pictorial, P.O. Box 591, Palm Beach, Florida. By subscription, $10 a year.
—May 1975
The Boston Photographs
I MADE ALL kinds of pictures because I thought it would be a good rescue shot over the ladder … never dreamed it would be anything else…. I kept having to move around because of the light set. The sky was bright and they were in deep shadow. I was making pictures with a motor drive and he, the firefighter, was reaching up and, I don’t know, everything started falling. I followed the girl down taking pictures … I made three or four frames. I realized what was going on and I completely turned around, because I didn’t want to see her hit.”
You probably saw the photographs. In most newspapers, there were three of them. The first showed some people on a fire escape—a fireman, a woman, and a child. The fireman had a nice strong jaw and looked very brave. The woman was holding the child. Smoke was pouring from the building behind them. A rescue ladder was approaching, just a few feet away, and the fireman had one arm around the woman and one arm reaching out toward the ladder. The second picture showed the fire escape slipping off the building. The child had fallen on the escape and seemed about to slide off the edge. The woman was grasping desperately at the legs of the fireman, who had managed to grab the ladder. The third picture showed the woman and child in midair, falling to the ground. Their arms and legs were outstretched, horribly distended. A potted plant was falling too. The caption said that the woman, Diana Bryant, nineteen, died in the fall. The child landed on the woman’s body and lived.
The pictures were taken by Stanley Forman, thirty, of the Boston Herald American. He used a motor-driven Nikon F set at 1/250, f 5.6–8. Because of the motor, the camera can click off three frames a second. More than four hundred newspapers in the United States alone carried the photographs; the tear sheets from overseas are still coming in. The New York Times ran them on the first page of its second section; a paper in south Georgia gave them nineteen columns; the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Washington Star filled almost half their front pages, the Star under a somewhat redundant headline that read: SENSATIONAL PHOTOS OF RESCUE ATTEMPT THAT FAILED.
The photographs are indeed sensational. They are pictures of death in action, of that split second when luck runs out, and it is impossible to look at them without feeling their extraordinary impact and remembering, in an almost subconscious way, the morbid fantasy of falling, falling off a building, falling to one’s death. Beyond that, the pictures are classics, old-fashioned but perfect examples of photojournalism at its most spectacular. They’re throwbacks, really, fire pictures, 1930s tabloid shots; at the same time they’re technically superb and thoroughly modern—the sequence could not have been taken at all until the development of the motor-driven camera some sixteen years ago.
Most newspaper editors anticipate some reader reaction to photographs like Forman’s; even so, the response around the country was enormous, and almost all of it was negative. I have read hundreds of the letters that were printed in letters-to-the-editor sections, and they repeat the same points. “Invading the privacy of death.” “Cheap sensationalism.” “I thought I was reading the National Enquirer.” “Assigning the agony of a human being in terror of imminent death to the status of a side-show act.” “A tawdry way to sell newspapers.” The Seattle Times received sixty letters and calls; its managing editor even got a couple of them at home. A reader wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Jaws and Towering Inferno are playing downtown; d
on’t take business away from people who pay good money to advertise in your own paper.” Another reader wrote the Chicago Sun-Times: “I shall try to hide my disappointment that Miss Bryant wasn’t wearing a skirt when she fell to her death. You could have had some award-winning photographs of her underpants as her skirt billowed over her head, you voyeurs.” Several newspaper editors wrote columns defending the pictures: Thomas Keevil of the Costa Mesa (California) Daily Pilot printed a ballot for readers to vote on whether they would have printed the pictures; Marshall L. Stone of Maine’s Bangor Daily News, which refused to print the famous assassination picture of the Vietcong prisoner in Saigon, claimed that the Boston pictures showed the dangers of fire escapes and raised questions about slumlords. (The burning building was a five-story brick apartment house on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay section of Boston.)
For the last five years, the Washington Post has employed various journalists as ombudsmen, whose job is to monitor the paper on behalf of the public. The Post’s current ombudsman is Charles Seib, former managing editor of the Washington Star; the day the Boston photographs appeared, the paper received over seventy calls in protest. As Seib later wrote in a column about the pictures, it was “the largest reaction to a published item that I have experienced in eight months as the Post’s ombudsman….
“In the Post’s newsroom, on the other hand, I found no doubts, no second thoughts … the question was not whether they should be printed but how they should be displayed. When I talked to editors … they used words like ‘interesting’ and ‘riveting’ and ‘gripping’ to describe them. The pictures told something about life in the ghetto, they said (although the neighborhood where the tragedy occurred is not a ghetto, I am told). They dramatized the need to check on the safety of fire escapes. They dramatically conveyed something that had happened, and that is the business we’re in. They were news….
“Was publication of that [third] picture a bow to the same taste for the morbidly sensational that makes gold mines of disaster movies? Most papers will not print the picture of a dead body except in the most unusual circumstances. Does the fact that the final picture was taken a millisecond before the young woman died make a difference? Most papers will not print a picture of a bare female breast. Is that a more inappropriate subject for display than the picture of a human being’s last agonized instant of life?” Seib offered no answers to the questions he raised, but he went on to say that although as an editor he would probably have run the pictures, as a reader he was revolted by them.
In conclusion, Seib wrote: “Any editor who decided to print those pictures without giving at least a moment’s thought to what purpose they served and what their effect was likely to be on the reader should ask another question: Have I become so preoccupied with manufacturing a product according to professional traditions and standards that I have forgotten about the consumer, the reader?”
It should be clear that the phone calls and letters and Seib’s own reaction were occasioned by one factor alone: the death of the woman. Obviously, had she survived the fall, no one would have protested; the pictures would have had a completely different impact. Equally obviously, had the child died as well—or instead—Seib would undoubtedly have received ten times the phone calls he did. In each case, the pictures would have been exactly the same—only the captions, and thus the responses, would have been different.
But the questions Seib raises are worth discussing—though not exactly for the reasons he mentions. For it may be that the real lesson of the Boston photographs is not the danger that editors will be forgetful of reader reaction, but that they will continue to censor pictures of death precisely because of that reaction. The protests Seib fielded were really a variation on an old theme—and we saw plenty of it during the Nixon-Agnew years—the “Why doesn’t the press print the good news?” argument. In this case, of course, the objections were all dressed up and cleverly disguised as righteous indignation about the privacy of death. This is a form of puritanism that is often justifiable; just as often it is merely puritanical.
Seib takes it for granted that the widespread though fairly recent newspaper policy against printing pictures of dead bodies is a sound one; I don’t know that it makes any sense at all. I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism; the fact is, however, that people die. Death happens to be one of life’s main events. And it is irresponsible—and more than that, inaccurate—for newspapers to fail to show it, or to show it only when an astonishing set of photos comes in over the Associated Press wire. Most papers covering fatal automobile accidents will print pictures of mangled cars. But the significance of fatal automobile accidents is not that a great deal of steel is twisted but that people die. Why not show it? That’s what accidents are about. Throughout the Vietnam war, editors were reluctant to print atrocity pictures. Why not print them? That’s what that war was about. Murder victims are almost never photographed; they are granted their privacy. But their relatives are relentlessly pictured on their way in and out of hospitals and morgues and funerals.
I’m not advocating that newspapers print these things in order to teach their readers a lesson. The Post editors justified their printing of the Boston pictures with several arguments in that direction; every one of them is irrelevant. The pictures don’t show anything about slum life; the incident could have happened anywhere, and it did. It is extremely unlikely that anyone who saw them rushed out and had his fire escape strengthened. And the pictures were not news—at least they were not national news. It is not news in Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles that a woman was killed in a Boston fire. The only newsworthy thing about the pictures is that they were taken. They deserve to be printed because they are great pictures, breathtaking pictures of something that happened. That they disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that’s why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.
—November 1975
Russell Baker
I HAVE COME to my devotion to the columns of Russell Baker later than most of the people I know, and I’m not sure whether this is because I am slow to catch on, or because Russell Baker is even better than he used to be. The answer, I suspect, is a little of both. In the last year, Baker has moved from Washington to New York, and the column he writes for the New York Times and its news service has shifted away from politics and toward urban life in general. I was about to go on to say something or other about that, but I realize that I have already begun to be unfair to Baker. Which is one of the problems of writing about him: as soon as you start to describe what he does, you do him an injustice. Urban life indeed. Baker did a column the other day that began with Franco dying and going straight to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles; it was brilliant, and there is no way to distill or describe it. You had to be there. And in any case, when I went to interview Baker and told him that column was a perfect description of urban life in New York, he assured me it was about urban life in Russia.
Baker is, of course, usually referred to as a humor columnist and usually lumped together with Art Buchwald, and that, too, is unfair. He is to Buchwald what Saul Steinberg is to Peter Arno: he tends to humor that is abstract, almost flaky, off the wall, cerebral, a bit surrealistic. He almost never writes a column that is a long joke; because of this, and because he builds on mood and nuance, a neat paragraph summary of a typical Baker column doesn’t work at all. So I thought I would just go see him and let him talk, and the hell with anyone who wants a decent description of his writing. I should probably tell you that Baker is fifty, a tall, skinny man who looks a little like a hayseed. He is extremely low-key, terribly nice, and often seems on the verge of being embarrassed, particularly by praise of any sort.
Q: How did anyone at the Times know you would write a funny column?
BAKER: Nobody knew what the column was going to be. I didn’t, the Times didn’t. I was in the Times Washington bureau, and I had a reputation for being
a “writer” in quotation marks—the quotation marks implied that there were reporters and then there were writers. I did a lot of feature-type stuff. There was no expectation that the column was supposed to be funny. I’d outlined what was essentially an idea for a casual essay column, the sort of thing The New Yorker had done in the late forties in “The Talk of the Town.” The style would be casual, monosyllabic, simple sentences, small ideas. I did know at the outset that I was interested in the ironies of the public condition. I was fascinated by irony. But what you project on a piece of paper and what finally emerges are two wildly different things. When I sat down to write, what came out was what was in me. The first column ever printed was a spoof, a send-up of a Jack Kennedy press conference. Very quickly I began doing basic satires, traditional forms like dialogues, fantasies, hoaxes, parodies, burlesques.
Q: Was it difficult?
BAKER: At the start, yes. I didn’t know what it was going to be. Now it has a rigid identity, and there are days when it writes itself. When you start a column, you’re in a very creative state; you’re building a personality in a piece of writing. It’s a strange kind of business. After a while the column becomes a tyrant. You’ve created a personality that is one aspect of yourself, and it insists on your being true to it every time you sit down to write. As time passes and you change, you may become bored with that old personality. The problem then is how you escape the tyranny of it. In a way, it’s always a struggle between you and this tyrant you’ve created that is a piece of yourself. In the last year I’ve gone back to the essay form and abandoned the satirical form.
