“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 mornin
g 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?”
A Christmas Wedding Page 25
