Picture Palace

by Paul Theroux

  In this phase of my career I was drawn to writers. The first of them, the biggest son-of-a-bitch I was ever to photograph, was the poet Frost. I had met him at Edmund Wilson’s house up in Wellfleet (Bunny owned several of my pictures and was partial to my rear view of Lawrence’s head, which hung in his study). Frost spent the entire evening monologuing to a group of admirers, a whopping earache of complaints against his family—I had never heard anyone belittle his children like that man. It was hard to reconcile the hayseed and cracker-barrel image and Farmer’s Almanac verse—the counterpart in poetry of Sam Chamberlain at his birchiest, but with a muddy witch riding in on her broom—hard to see a rustic in this gravelly-voiced grump downing whiskies and damning the human race. He looked the part, with his baggy pants and his thumbs hooked on his galluses, but if there was a nastier and more tight-fisted self-promoter in the business I never met him.

  “I wonder if Mister Frost would mind being photographed,” I said.

  “Mind?” said Bunny in a shrill jeer that was so unlike the growl of his prose. He threw his head back and shrieked, “He won’t leave you alone until you do! But don’t expect him to thank you.”

  At the time I was making preparations to go abroad, where I hoped to do our victory. But Wilson, a great arranger of things, gave my name to the editor of a now defunct family magazine and I was sent to Amherst to do Frost. I knew that if I alerted Frost to my intention he would insist on posing for me. I checked into the Lord Jeff and took my time. I bought the newest edition of his Collected Poems and read it and thought hard about him. The picture: I wanted him at the local food store buying a quart of milk and a can of ready-made spaghetti. But though I watched him closely, his daily walk—along the Common, scaring birds—took him always to the Jones Library where he had a friend.

  It was there that I confronted him. I had heard his loud aggrieved voice as soon as I entered the building. He was upstairs, snorting and driveling, and seeing me he turned away.

  “Mister Frost?” I said. I held out his book.

  “Why do you pursue me!” He lifted his elbows and flattened himself against the book stacks. “Go away!”

  The other man, frightened into politeness by Frost’s outburst, interposed himself and said softly, “I think she wants you to sign the book, sir.”

  “I just signed five hundred of those in New York and they’re selling for six dollars apiece.”

  “I’d be really pleased—”

  “She wants—”

  “I know what she wants,” said Frost, and then, “Oh, all right, give me the book. What’s your name?”

  In large shaky upright script he wrote Robert Frost to Maude Pratt, 1944. Before he handed it back, he flipped a few pages, a verifying caress, like a father scratching his child’s head. I had never known an author not to give his book this squinting second glance at signature time, but Frost paused longer than most.

  “There was one other thing,” I said. “I wondered if you’d let me take your picture.”

  “Who sent you?”

  I told him.

  “What’s your usual fee?”

  “Fifty dollars and a year’s subscription.”

  “Stand back,” he said to the cringing man, and gave me a side view. He knew he had a good profile, but his noggin was narrow as a hatchet and I wanted him head-on, with his close-set eyes and unmown hair and frown-marks on his forehead, all his suspicion and vanity apparent on the blade of his face, the trough of his mouth. I wanted a glimpse of his canvas shoes and the complicated apparatus holding up his pants—galluses and leather belt—and his big freckled hands clenched on his own book.

  “Must be something wrong,” I said. “I can’t see you.”

  Naturally, he turned, and just as he said, “Goddammit” I clicked and got the curmudgeon I wanted. He returned his head to show me his profile and I did a dozen more, but I knew that the first one was the best.

  I thanked him for his autograph and apologized for bothering him.

  He said sourly, “When do I get my fifty dollars?”

  There was a further delay to my European jaunt, an assignment that took me to California, I had been asked to do some pictures about morale-boosting movies that were being made in Hollywood, such as Air Force and Bomber Command. I felt I owed it to Orlando to cooperate—he had returned to active duty and the last I had heard he was in the Philippines. The movies were fairly dreadful, but no one seemed to mind except the talented authors whose artless chore it was to work on them. The word was that John Steinbeck had written a script for a Hitchcock war-effort called Lifeboat and that he was distressed by the hash that had been made of it. It was my favorite theme—the good novelist in the meat-grinder of patronage and reduced to hamburg. But the cutting-edges of this meat-grinder were worth examining: patriotism, vanity, debt, greed, and warfare. I wanted Hitchcock and Steinbeck together, fat and skinny on the back lot, the most unliterary picture possible.

  Steinbeck wasn’t around, and no one knew where he was—some said New York, some said Mexico. All that was certain was that he had gone through the roof.

  I kept busy. Hollywood was full of geniuses—inverted alchemists, as Huxley called them, who had been hired to change gold into lead. Going from studio to studio I found actors who were only too glad to make faces for me. And I did my second set of boogie-man pictures. A black bit-part player remembered my Camera Club show. The shock on people’s faces when he took me in his arms and gave me a bear-hug! He was fifty or so and had aged the way blacks do, with a dull grayness on his skin and dark circles around his red eyes, his hands scaly and almost reptilian. He was wearing a U.S. Army uniform.

  “Let’s have a salute,” I said.

  He refused. “I ain’t a soldier and this ain’t a war. This is just a white man’s movie.”

  The uniform, he said, had been issued by the wardrobe department of Universal Studios. As I did him he reminisced and said how glad he had been to see his “people” in my exhibitions, referring to my portraits of Robeson and the negative prints of Doolum, Pigga, and Teets and Negro Swimming to a Raft. He began to cry, and crying revealed everything of himself. The tears splashed down the cheeks of this troubled sentimental soul. Actors are unembarrassed and can cry facing the camera, but crying is impossible to control once the first blubs have started—it is as unselective and telling as anger or lust.

  It gave me a good idea. After he introduced me to other actors—who readily agreed to be photographed—I asked them to cry for me at the end of the session. Alan Ladd, Loretta Young, Charles Laughton, Henry Fonda: I had people crying for me, and with greater effect, long before Philippe Halsman had them jumping. Bogart was the one man who refused to cry for me, but I knew that if he had there would have been no stopping him. All he said was, “Get her out of here.”

  Raymond Chandler said something similar, but he had more reason. I had been taken out to eat by Aldous Huxley, whom I had visited in connection with an assignment I’d asked for, a Saturday Evening Post photo-essay about Huxley’s The Art of Seeing, which had come out two years before. The book had been severely criticized and even ridiculed, but I was in a good position to judge it and I believed much of it to be true. Huxley was interested that I had done D. H. Lawrence and said that he was still in touch with the throbbing turnip, Frieda. At the Mexican restaurant, Huxley read the menu with his cheek against it, looking sideways at it with one swiveled eye.

  “Pass the salt, please,” he said, after we were served our enchiladas.

  I deliberately handed him the pepper. He did not detect this until he shook it. He sniffed and put it down and said, “That is pepper. I’d hate to think you did that on purpose.”

  “Gosh, no.”

  One eye squinting, one bulging, and both clouded and misshapen with a kind of gruesome tissue, he described the Bates Method of seeing. He said, “The eye must be re-educated. I want you to look behind me and tell me what you see.”

  “A man—tiny, tweedy, and drunk—with a lit
tle old lady. He’s dapper, fifty-odd—but, Christ, that woman is seventy-five if she’s a day. She’s walking very upright, as if she’s afraid her wig is going to fall off. Now they’re sitting down and the man’s snapping his fingers at the waiter.”

  Huxley hadn’t turned. He said. “That’s Chandler.’

  “So you have eyes in the back of your head. The Bates Method sure is something!”

  Huxley laughed. I excused myself and, taking my camera and pretending to head for the ladies’ room, I looked for a vantage point to shoot this mismatched couple. I saw concealment between a pillar and palm not far from the Chandlers’ table and did a few preliminary shots. Screwing on my flash attachment I marched up to them. In situations that called for quick timing I always made a prior adjustment, setting the focus for six feet, since it is an easy distance to gauge—focusing is impossible in an emergency.

  “Applesauce!” I yelled. They looked up and froze, as people do when surprised by a camera, and I snapped. Chandler, bug-eyed in the light, had the gape of a man in a mug shot. His wife, Cissy, being elderly, was slow to react. Her face had been plaster, but the flesh whitened it further: she had no lips, no shadows, only the faintest dusted lines of panic, like cracks in a porcelain monkey. Then the light abated, her face slackened, and she looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday’s oatmeal.

  “Jesus, who do you think you are!” Chandler snarled.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My mistake. I took you for Jiggs and Maggie.”

  Cissy, who was rigid, touched at her face as if to make sure it was still there, and she began to whimper. Chandler cursed me and put his arm around her. She inched over into a swoon, a richly grotesque pieta I could not resist snapping.

  “Waiter!”

  Already I regretted the pictures. They were perhaps the cruellest ones I had ever done, taken in the most hammer-hearted way—faultless timing, nastily motivated.

  “Meet you outside,” I said to Huxley, and dashed out of the restaurant.

  “What was that kerfuffle all about?” he asked in the taxi, undermining my respect for his treatise on the Bates Method.

  “A case of mistaken identity,” I said. I looked out the window and seeing that we were on Hollywood Boulevard I said, “Mind if we stop?”

  “Not at all.” Huxley loved the sleazy glamor of Hollywood. As an intellectual he could have it both ways, be mocking about the cheap glitter, and blamelessly wallow in it because he knew it was cheap. His streak of vulgarity was a mile wide in any case: he secretly lusted after a huge whorish success, since having it was the only convincing way of despising it. But success, even vulgar success, is denied to those who belittle it as they drool.

  We got out of the taxi and I did my Huxley pictures there on the sidewalk, using available glare—Huxley sticking out like a sore thumb among the bellowing movie marquees, the clip joints and dives and neon curlicues. This pecker-up Englishman in his wrinkled suit and shapeless wool tie, with his hair raked back Russian-style and his ears sticking out and in the glare a dozen blurred criminal faces: he looked owlish and prim. It was how he wanted to be photographed, yet another slumming foreigner who thought he was a real devil. But how was he to know that his eyes would appear as two useless polyps, and that he would look—smiling there on Hollywood Boulevard—like a blind man who had lost his way and wandered into a fleshpot and praised it because it sounded jolly. The title was Huxley, but I thought of it as Eyeless in Gaza.

  He had convinced himself that he could see and persuaded others of his belief. I think myself that he was partially sighted and that the rest, like much of his writing, was sheer nonsense. It was not the Bates Method, but drugs, will power, brains, and bullshit, and if my picture of him showed anything it was a man kidding himself.

  “You should stop awhile in Los Angeles,” he said. “This is one of the great cities of the world, a mixture of Babylon, Vienna, and—”

  “Cleveland?”

  “I was going to say Chichén-Itzá, but have it your way.”

  “I have to go to Europe.”

  “Europe is here,” he said. “The thinkers, I mean, and they’re the only ones who matter. But not only them—Schönberg, Einstein—”

  “He’s in New Jersey.”

  “Thomas Mann.”

  “He’s here? I’d love to do him.”

  “You’ll need an introduction,” said Huxley. “But I might be able to help you.”

  Two days later my taxi was bowling along San Remo Drive, Mann’s street in Pacific Palisades. I fought my way through the palms in the front yard and rang the bell.

  “He is expecting you,” said the German girl at the door. “He will be down presently.”

  It was one of those reverently old-world households in which one detected a great hidden presence. The German girl had whispered; another tiptoed in and smiled at me. The house was private, and dense with bourgeois upholstery and family intimacy, sanctified with feather dusters and furniture polish. Somewhere, in a room I could not see, a concentrating man was preparing his entrance.

  But when it happened the spell was broken. He shuffled into the room, a stooping mustached man of about seventy, his face creased into thoughtful planes. He had a storekeeper’s kindliness, he could have been a haberdasher.

  “Delighted,” he said. He shook my hand, then looked at his pocked watch.

  “Let me do you holding that pen.”

  He showed me the object between his fingers and transformed it into an unlit cigar: magic. He smiled and lit it lovingly. Coffee and chocolate cakes were brought and we were joined, one by one, by people: wife, children, young men and women who weren’t introduced. They watched him attentively and leaned forward when he spoke.

  I said, “You must be happy here. Huxley says it’s like Vienna.”

  “I wonder if he knows Vienna,” said Mann. “It is various in this city. Plastic. But I make no such comparisons.”

  “I’m going to Europe pretty soon.”

  His gaze deepened with thought. He said, “The cockpit.” Then, “What of your family?”

  Before I knew it (perhaps because he was so correct and cultured and I was, in my own defense, trying hard to please) I was telling him how my parents had taken me to the opera and encouraged us to be music lovers. I ransacked my memory for episodes and, relating them, saw that he was particularly struck by the one in which Orlando and I had gone out to the fire escape during the concert at Symphony Hall; and how the man passing below had looked up at us and joined us in some mystical way, not as brother and sister, but more profoundly marrying our souls.

  “I suppose you could say it was a blessing”—what was I saying? I thought I had been talking about music!—“the way this stranger looked up and smiled at the two of us.”

  “I know that young man,” he said. “I could tell you his name.”

  More magic. Did he wink? It certainly looked that way.

  Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was reassured, for just as Huxley had been charmed by my memory of Lawrence, Mann responded to this childhood incident. I was glad that I remembered enough of my past to interest my subjects.

  “If you just stay put,” I said, “the others can sort of group around you.”

  I saw a nice courtly picture, with the friends and relations standing around the great man. But he wouldn’t have it. He insisted on standing, half turned, with one hand in his jacket pocket and the cigar in his other hand and the folks extended between two fringed floor lamps against the drapes—a very corny arrangement, as if they were all waiting for a bus.

  “Erika is in London,” he said, when I was done. “You will send some reproductions for her?”

  I promised I would and he took out his pocket watch: time to go.

  There was only one more picture to do. I had been asked by Life to update their files. Their picture of William Faulkner was a studio shot that had obviously been retouched to make him look like a confederate colonel. “Get him l
ooking human,” the picture editor said. I remembered that Orlando had mentioned him and admired several of his books, one apparently dealing with Harvard, which he had started to read to me during my early blind period and then stopped, saying, “This wouldn’t make any sense to you”—I suspected that he gave it to Phoebe to read, because for the next few days, engrossed in the book, she flicked pages and her body purred.

  Faulkner, I learned, was staying at the Highland Hotel in Hollywood, a semirespectable residential hotel done up in a kind of ulcerated stucco. There was no one at the front desk the day I visited, so—seeing his name and room number on the key board—I went directly to his room. I knocked and waited, and getting no response I tried the door.

  It was unlocked: I stole in. The curtain was half open and through the French windows I could see a bright balcony and an armchair. On a table near me were crumpled pages of typescript, an old newspaper, and two copies of God Is My Co-Pilot. In the air was a sweet rotten-walnut stink of bourbon whisky, but apart from the sound of traffic and the sizzle of California sunlight the room was quiet. I peeked into the next room—an empty unmade bed—and I was about to leave when I saw a half-filled glass next to the telephone and a bottle and ice bucket. It looked like an interrupted boozing session, as if he had just stepped out. The room had the lived-in appearance of a warm mangled nest, the disorder of anticipation, a certain nervous premonition.

  I considered photographing the room—Whose Room?, another series: identify the inhabitant from the dents in the chairs and the dirty glasses and ashtrays and books. I had taken off my dust-cap to act on this impulse, and then I saw him.

  He was lying face up on the floor, one hand across his chest, the other pillowing his head; and his legs were poised in a twinkle-toes angle, as if he had died in a dance-step. My first thought was that he was dead—he had busted a gut or had been robbed and killed. But there was no blood anywhere. I went closer and heard him breathe. A moment ago I hadn’t heard it; now his snores filled the room with the ripsawing of his drunken doze. As he lay there on the cool floor I could see how small he was—tiny feet, tiny mustache, pretty hands, and in his shorts his hairy little legs. He had a typist’s powerful shoulders and though he was flat on his back and unconscious he had a victim’s innocent dignity.