“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 shou
ld 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. Myster
ious, 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!”
A Christmas Wedding Page 21
