by Ann Wroe
The church Pope John Paul treasured and promoted was essentially the one he had known in Poland. He was born in 1920 in the town of Wadowice to a mother who died young and a father who first sowed the idea of priesthood in him, making him study in a cold room to improve his concentration. He began his priestly training, in 1942, in an underground seminary kept secret from the Nazis; after his ordination, in 1946, he worked in a church that was a brave alternative to atheistic secular power. Priests were heroes, and the ordinary people, making acts of political defiance as much as faith, went to Mass, communion and confession with a frequency already dying out in western countries. Some of Pope John Paul’s most admirable acts were speeches made to oppressed peoples, within earshot of their leaders, appealing to them to treasure their human rights and agitateto be free. He did this in Chile, Cuba and the Philippines, as well as in communist Poland.
This was also a pope who could spring surprises. He was good at ecumenism, visiting both synagogues and mosques. As a Pole from a town once full of Jews, he felt a special obligation to respect them, and was the first pope to push a folded prayer-note between the stones of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. In 2000, startlingly, he read out a long apology for the church’s bad behaviour over the centuries. Some noted that it was church members, not the church itself, for whom he apologised. Nonetheless, it was a rare marvel that a man so certain of the church’s possession of the truth should criticise those who had believed it with equal fervour, but had taken things a bit too far.
The most frequent surprise, however, was the strength of spirit – of soul, he would say – that kept him going. He carried on largely in order to display, to a cynical world, the power of God at work in him and the needlessness of the fear of death. Now that he has been called back to source, his bruised and worried church feels, more than anything, the lack of his confidence.
Lady Bird Johnson
Claudia Alta (Lady Bird) Johnson, first lady and environmentalist, died on July 11th 2007, aged 94
NOVEMBER 22nd 1963 started in drizzle, but soon turned bright. The sun shone on Dallas, the breeze was light, and Lady Bird Johnson enjoyed the drive in the open limousine, even when the Secret Service man thrust her husband down to the floor, even when the car screeched so violently round the corner by the hospital that she feared they would be flung out of it. Looking towards the first limousine, she saw what looked like “a drift of pink blossom” on the back seat. It was Jackie Kennedy lying across her dying husband.
Mrs Johnson saw beauty even at that moment, when her life turned upside down. It was instinctive; she could not help it. Her lonely, motherless childhood had been made bearable by roaming the pinewoods, fields and bayous round Karnack in east Texas, delighting in magnolia blooms and the first spring daffodils and the touch of Spanish moss against her face. She found beauty, too, in a marriage to Lyndon Baines Johnson that seemed to friends, at least for its first 20 years, to be a sojourn in hell.
She knew he was a handful at first sight: lanky and good-looking, impossibly full of himself and his political ambitions, bossing her about from the first date onwards, rushing her so precipitately into marriage in November 1934 that they had neither a proper ring nor flowers. But he gave her “a queer sort of moth-and-flame feeling”, so she followed. The orders continued: to bring him breakfast in bed, to have a hot meal ready whenever he and his congressional cronies came home, to serve him seconds instantly (“Bird, bring me another piece of pie!”). A snap of his fingers, and she would run across the room. A public dressing down for her dowdiness and shyness (“Bird, why can’t you look nice, like Connie here?”), and she would take it on the chin. Her unwavering smile would make the house beautiful. Her steadiness would calm Lyndon down. And it was love and orderliness, rather than subservience, that made her lay out his clothes each morning with his pen, filled up, in one suit pocket and his cigarette lighter, filled up, in another, and the cufflinks in the shirt-cuffs, and the shoes shined.
She applied the same sense of grace and neatness to America. Long before it was fashionable, she encouraged Americans to care for the place they lived in. From 1938 onwards, as Lyndon rose from congressman to senator to vice-president to president, she fretted about the junkyards and billboards that lined the highways between Texas and Washington, DC, vowing to replace them with bluebonnets and pink morning primroses. Driving through Washington itself, she imagined the weed-filled parks and triangles filled with dogwoods, azaleas, tulips and chrysanthemums, red oaks rising on Connecticut Avenue, crape myrtles throwing shade over F Street. As first lady, starting in 1964, she filled the city with flowers.
It seemed to some a lightweight occupation, especially at a time when her husband was being sucked into the slough of Vietnam. But Mrs Johnson had the solid core of a determined southern liberal. She had brought her own money to the marriage (money enough to give her, at 16, a Buick to drive to school and an unlimited charge account at Neiman Marcus), and used it both to bankroll Lyndon’s first run for Congress and to buy a low-power radio station, KTBC, which made the family a telecoms fortune. The mouse, ignored at her own parties, would note the books people mentioned and go away and read them herself. For months at a time, when Lyndon was on navy service or felled in 1955 with a heart attack, she ran his office. During the 1964 campaign shefound the strength to make speeches and train tours through the South in the cause of civil rights. In the White House, as her husband battled with demons of drink, heart disease, depression and the war, she became indispensable to him.
Just as beauty was indispensable to the country. When she first conceived “beautification” (a “prissy” word, one that never pleased her), she found it was like “picking up a tangled skein of wool; all the threads are interwoven – recreation and pollution and mental health, and the crime rate, and rapid transit and the war on poverty, and parks ... everything leads to something else.” Her efforts in Washington included clearing rubbish and trapping rats in run-down projects, in order to plant white azaleas there. Her own version of Lyndon’s great social programmes began, as her Aunt Effie had begun with her, by “opening [the] spirit to beauty”.
Lyndon, too, was now on board, pushing her bills through Congress for her. A presidency remembered for horror abroad and disintegration at home also made green politics legitimate. She made sure her husband withdrew from the Democratic race in March 1968, inserting into his speech the words that made it irreversible, but did not keep him long thereafter. More than 30 years of widowhood were spent campaigning nationally for preservation and conservation of the landscape and wild flowers.
At the end of her life, almost blind, she saw what she could: the “mighty big” clouds above Texas, or single blooms through a magnifying glass. Failing this, she would listen to the birds. Before that beauty, the years of chaos at the heart of American politics would recede like some extraordinary dream.
Yousuf Karsh
Yousuf Karsh, photographer of the famous, died on July 13th 2002, aged 93
So much praise has been heaped upon Yousuf Karsh that it is tempting to believe that he was the world’s greatest photographer. But then you think of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Ansel Adams and a dozen others, all of whom produced pictures that have an enduring quality. Mr Karsh was, though, for half a century perhaps the greatest portrait photographer in the monumental manner. Unlike Mr Cartier-Bresson, the master of the Leica, Mr Karsh preferred to use a camera that looked hardly different from the weighty apparatus of the Victorian pioneers. It stood on a hefty tripod and the image was captured on a glass negative almost the size of this page.
Intimidated by this awesome instrument the sitter was expected to be patient as Mr Karsh composed the lighting, a hot light here, a softer one there. The camera is focused, and Mr Karsh emerges from under a dark cloth. The negative holder slides in. The sitter is expectant, and probably restless. It can’t be long now. But Mr Karsh is not quite ready. He once said, “Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind ar
e the true lens of the camera. If it is a likeness alone, it’s not a success.”
Mr Cartier-Bresson would no doubt concur. Whether the image is falling on 35mm film or on a glass plate, the aim is to capture what Mr Karsh called the “brief moment” of truth. How is it done? No one is sure, not even the photographer. Whatever it is, great photographers have it. The many millions of happy snappers do not.
Mr Karsh’s portraits have been faulted, by those reckless enough to criticise him, for all looking the same: impressive, solemn, usually in black and white to heighten the feeling of drama. It is said he could make the woman next door look like Queen Elizabeth. His admirers retort that this was his style. It was like complaining that Rembrandt’s paintings did not make you laugh. No one expressed surprise that Karsh and Rembrandt could be mentioned in the same breath.
Yousuf Karsh was a Canadian by adoption: Karsh of Ottawa is how he signed his photographs. But he thought of himself as an Armenian. After hundreds of years as an independent state Armenia had been eventually divided between Turkey and Russia. Mr Karsh had the misfortune to be born in the part ruled by Turkey, whose policy towards Armenians was to exterminate them. In his teens he joined the flow of Armenians who found refuge in North America. An uncle in Canada who was doing well as a portrait photographer gave young Yousuf a job and a cheap camera of the time called a Box Brownie (with which he won a prize). A few years later he was taken on by John Garo, a well-known Boston portrait photographer of that era, who also happened to be an Armenian.
In the 1930s Mr Karsh had his own business in Ottawa. His leisure time he spent with a local drama group, experimenting with lighting. What transformed him from a journeyman photographer into a star was a chance opportunity to photograph Winston Churchill, who in December 1941 was on a brief visit to Ottawa. Mr Karsh set up his equipment in a room in the Canadian parliament. Churchill was led in, grumbling. “Why was I not told of this?” He said Mr Karsh could have two minutes and no more to take his picture and lit a cigar. “Forgive me, sir,” Yousuf Karsh said, removing the cigar from Churchill’s lips, and releasing the shutter on his camera.
Looking at the picture now, and knowing the story behind it, you can imagine Churchill, slightly petulant, deprived of his dummy. But at the time the expression matched the widespread feeling about the Britishleader, pugnaciously leading a brave nation against an all-conquering foe. Life magazine bought the picture for $100. Mr Karsh did not haggle. He just wanted to see his work in print. Eventually it became the most reproduced portrait in the history of photography.
Mr Karsh was never again looking for work. The work came looking for him. Over the years practically anyone who was anyone had their picture taken by Yousuf Karsh. “People of consequence”, he called them, politicians, royalty, popes, writers, scientists, actors. To be “Karshed” proved that you had arrived. It was almost like buying immortality. There are Karsh portraits of a succession of 12 United States presidents. Mr Karsh loved the famous. “It’s the minority that make the world go around,” he said.
He seemed to be aware that his gift could be misused. It was clever to make a politician look like a statesman, but was this artistically truthful? Mr Karsh confronted this tricky question in an essay in which he considered the difference between photographing the merely famous and “the challenge of portraying true greatness adequately”.
He reckoned that he had met the challenge with Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Casals, among others. As a preliminary to a “challenge” he would get to know as much about a subject as possible; read biographies, speak to the subject’s friends. But any photographer could do that. Why did Mr Karsh quite often capture, as he said, “the essential element that has made them great”? He did not know how the magic worked. “And I am not going to make inquiries.”
Genichi Kawakami
Genichi Kawakami, the “emperor” of Yamaha, died on May 25th 2002, aged 90
In the 1970s, Steinway, perhaps the grandest of America’s piano makers, became alarmed at the success of Asian competitors, notably Yamaha of Japan. Yamaha offered well-made pianos at much lower prices than American ones. Several American manufacturers were unable to stand the competition and closed down. Yamaha’s president, Genichi Kawakami, having captured an enviable slice of the American market, was now after a more elusive prize: the sort of status that went with a Steinway piano. And not just equal status. Mr Kawakami predicted that a Yamaha would eventually come to be regarded in the United States and Europe as the piano of choice.
Steinway’s strategy was not to let its worries show. “A Steinway is a Steinway,” said John Steinway, whose family had been making pianos since 1853. The simple, if pompous, pronouncement seemed to strike a faultless chord with its traditional public for whom a grand piano was a necessary icon, whether or not anyone in the family could play it; and, even more distressing to Mr Kawakami, it made sense to ambitious Americans who hoped one day to have a home graced with their own grand piano as a symbol of high achievement and cultural taste.
Mr Kawakami could also play the history game. He pointed out that his firm had been started in 1887 by Torakusu Yamaha. A Yamaha piano and organ won a prize at the St Louis World Fair in 1904. Mr Kawakami’s father became president of the firm in 1927. Ten years later Mr Kawakami joined the firm and subsequently took command, adding many other products, notably motorbikes (now made by a separate company), to the Yamaha brand, and passing the baton to his son Hiroshi in 1983. Three generations in the same family. It was, declared Mr Kawakami, like a symphony in three movements. Americans enjoyed the tussle of the giants, but Steinway’s reputation remained defiantly intact.
Genichi Kawakami was sure that Yamaha pianos sounded every bit as good as the American product. Indeed, he was assured by his experts that they were superior. But this mysterious quality, status, has bewildered, and irritated, many Japanese manufacturers who set out to take on the world. Japanese cameras are among the finest you can get, used by professionals the world over. Yet, for your ordinary rich Japanese Germany’s Leica carries the real prestige. If you can lay your hands on an early one (the miniature camera was invented by Leica in 1925), so much the better. Japanese cars are known for their reliability and style, but a Mercedes or a Rolls, polished until it glows like an old painting, still has the edge. Who would prefer a cumbersome Harley-Davidson motorbike to a slim, racy Japanese model, a Yamaha perhaps? Quite a lot of people.
Mr Kawakami’s worries over status may have cast a cloud over a career that in every other way was extraordinarily successful. He was one of the tycoons who helped to make Japan’s economy the second largest in the world. The beginnings were modest. The firm that he took charge of in 1950 made pianos, mouth-organs and wind-up gramophones. It had a respected name in Japan, but not much else in the way of assets. The Japanese were too busy rebuilding their ruined country after the second world war to indulge much in such luxuries.
In 1953 Mr Kawakami toured the United States and western Europe. He observed that the victorious countries were prospering and spending happily, although perhaps not happily enough to buy a wind-up gramophone, however carefully made. In the culture of the jukebox, even the piano seemed old-fashioned. Playing the piano was something that parents might do, but not their children.
Mr Kawakami decided that to sell his pianos in any number he first had to create a new market. “Put yourself in the shoes of the user and build world-class products,” he said. It was a statement of the obvious; what was special was that, in marketing Yamaha pianos, Mr Kawakami pursued the obvious with great tenacity. In 1954 in Hamamatsu, where his factory was located, he started a class to teach the rudiments of music to young children. This evolved into a worldwide chain of franchised schools of music, many with a showroom for Yamaha musical instruments. More than 5m students are reckoned to have passed through the schools. By the late 1980s, Yamaha had become the world’s leading maker of musical instruments of all kinds, not just pianos. In Japan alone, Yamaha had 55% of th
e piano market. In a country of mostly minute homes, Mr Kawakami was able to persuade many Japanese that a piano was a necessity.
He never seemed to stop. “Diversification was his hobby,” Mr Kawakami’s son remarked. “He got bored with old businesses.” During the 33 years Mr Kawakami ran the firm either as president or “supreme adviser” he kept boredom at bay by expanding Yamaha into all kinds of products. These days, along with Yamaha pianos and motor-bikes, there are water scooters, tennis rackets, golf clubs, machine tools. Japanese newspapers called him the “emperor” of Yamaha. Genichi Kawakami quite liked that.
Noel Keane
Noel Keane, America’s father of surrogate parenting, died on January 25th 1997, aged 58
It was the strangest of requests, even to a lawyer. The couple in Noel Keane’s office wanted a child. The woman was not able to bear one herself, but a woman had been found who was prepared to be impregnated with the man’s sperm and to hand over the baby as soon as it was born. Mr Keane was asked to prepare a document to safeguard the interests of all parties. This, as far as is known, was the first formal contract for surrogate motherhood.
Mr Keane devoted the rest of his life to this speciality: not simply looking after the legal side, but starting what he called “infertility centres” throughout the United States where couples could meet women willing to bear their child. These days there are numerous agencies offering to arrange surrogate parenting, but in 1976 Mr Keane, for better or worse, seems to have been the innovator.
