Girl with a Camera

by Carolyn Meyer

  Word got around quickly via the corporate grapevine of my stunning pictures of the steel mill. Now everyone wanted my photographs. I got my own telephone line and no longer had to rely on the stationery store on the ground floor of my apartment house to take messages. Newspapers ordered my pictures for special features. Trade publications featured my photographs on their covers. Home and garden magazines asked for pictures of estates. I was confident that this was just the beginning.

  Terminal Tower was already a landmark in downtown Cleveland. The Vans hired me as their official photographer with permission to go anywhere I chose, to highlight the grandeur of the great edifice but also to capture the intimate spaces. My prices climbed even higher. They were paying me a small fortune for my work, but I had to earn every penny of it.

  I assembled a wardrobe of fashionable clothes, made to my design by a dressmaker. I visited a hairdresser regularly to keep my hair stylishly trimmed, bangs artfully curved above one eyebrow to flatter my eyes. My nails were manicured and lacquered in clear polish.

  My pathetic little apartment with the bed that folded into the wall was obviously no place to meet clients. I needed an elegant studio. I showed up at the office of the agent in charge of renting suites in Terminal Tower and told him that I wanted a studio at the top of the tower.

  He smiled at my boldness. “Sorry, Miss Bourke-White,” he said, “the top floors belong to the Van Sweringens. Nobody, but nobody, lives on a higher floor than the Vans. However, I do have a place that I think would be just the thing for a lady of your accomplishments.”

  He escorted me to a suite on the twelfth floor with great views. Not as high as I wanted, but perfect, nevertheless. Now I had to negotiate a satisfactory rent. I talked him down as much as I could, and then I sweetly demanded certain concessions, like tiles and paint in my favorite colors. I ordered carpets, draperies that would set off my view of Public Square, a smoked glass tea table, and a plush armchair upholstered in silk mohair. Clients would feel so comfortable in that chair that they wouldn’t be tempted to get up and walk away when I named my price for a series of photographs.

  When everything was in place, I invited my mother and Roger to visit my new home. Roger whistled approvingly when he saw it. But Mother shook her head. “It’s nice to know that you’re doing well, Margaret, and that you’re successful and you can afford all these … things. Even if you don’t need them. But will they make you truly happy?”

  I had hoped she would seem a little more excited, pleased, proud. Maybe that was too much to expect. “I don’t know if it will make me happy. Right now, it’s my work that makes me happy. And if it hadn’t been for you buying me that secondhand camera, I wouldn’t be here, Mother. I wouldn’t have any of this. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “All right.”

  When I wasn’t putting in long hours on an assignment or spending whole nights in the darkroom, I began entertaining a steady stream of admirers—artists, architects, writers, businessmen—men I had met professionally who now wanted to go out with me. I enjoyed the company of men, and it was flattering to have so many men attracted to me. But I was not interested in romance. I was not quite twenty-four years old, and I’d made up my mind not to get fond of anyone until I was at least thirty. I wanted to establish myself in the next half-dozen years as a groundbreaking artist before I allowed myself to fall in love again.

  In May of 1928, Mr. Kulas’s favorite photograph of the enormous, overflowing ladle of molten steel took first place at a show at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Newspaper articles and magazine stories praised my work. I decided to throw a party to celebrate.

  Wearing a beaded silk dress cut to show off my bare shoulders, I chatted with my guests as a waiter passed flutes of champagne and silver platters of hors d’oeuvres. One of my regular visitors arrived late. The maid, taking his hat, greeted him: “Good evening, Mr. Chapman.”

  Chappie bent down and kissed my cheek. “Hello, Peg. You’re looking beautiful, as always. Congratulations.”

  My former husband and I had run into each other by accident when I was on assignment, and then we’d begun to meet occasionally for coffee. Now that we were no longer struggling with the burdens of marriage and his despicable mother, we’d managed to become friends. It amused us that none of my other visitors ever suspected our relationship. No one in Cleveland had any idea we had once been husband and wife.

  “To Margaret Bourke-White, the most accomplished photographer in Cleveland!” cried a gentleman, raising his flute of champagne.

  “The best anywhere!” shouted Chappie, and he caught my eye and winked.

  21

  New York, New York—1929

  PHOTOGRAPHY WAS MY WHOLE LIFE. FOR TWO YEARS I explored Cleveland with my camera, capturing images of all kinds of industrial subjects—railroads, docks, mines—and it was paying off as my reputation grew. My work was in high demand. I charged high prices, and companies had plenty of money to pay for them.

  I wasn’t rich yet, but I was on my way. In May of 1929, I received a telegram from a man named Henry Luce, the publisher of a news magazine called Time. He had seen my steel-mill photographs, and he wanted to talk to me. “Request you come to New York soonest at our expense,” he wired.

  At first I wasn’t much interested. I knew a little about Time, enough to notice that the only photograph in the magazine was a stuffy portrait of a boring politician on the cover. I didn’t want to leave the work I was doing, and I didn’t bother to reply to the telegram.

  Later I began to reconsider. Here was the offer of a trip to New York, and even if nothing worked out with Mr. Luce and his magazine, I could call on architects around the city. Photographing buildings was where my career had begun back in Ann Arbor, and my pictures of Terminal Tower in Cleveland had helped to cement my success. New York architecture was sure to be even more exciting. I packed up a portfolio of recent work and boarded a train to New York.

  The Time offices were not impressive, but the two men I met there certainly were. Henry Luce was perhaps a half-dozen years older than me, broad-shouldered, with a fast and furious manner of talking. Leaping from subject to subject, he peppered me with questions about my background, my personal life, and my professional goals. I could hardly keep up with him.

  Mr. Luce planned to launch a business magazine called Fortune, using elegantly composed photographs showing what I called patterns of industry. He boasted there was no other magazine like it. “You know what President Coolidge said: ‘The business of America is business.’ It’s the right time to start a magazine like this, and you’re the right person to take pictures for us.”

  The more he talked, the more I was intrigued by his ideas.

  Parker Lloyd-Smith, the managing editor, spoke up. He was in his twenties, handsome as a Greek sculpture but better dressed. “I want to show your steel-mill pictures to potential advertisers as examples of the kind of quality we plan to feature in the magazine. Will you agree to that, Miss Bourke-White?”

  “Of course.”

  “We want to hire you,” said Mr. Luce. “The question is, can you start right away?”

  I stalled for time, deciding how to reply. The Bourke-White Studio in Terminal Tower was very profitable. I hated to leave Cleveland, the business I had worked so hard to establish, and my suite in Terminal Tower. More importantly, I didn’t want to be tied down by a full-time job.

  Luce and Lloyd-Smith were waiting for an answer.

  There was a knock on the door. “Yes?” barked Mr. Luce. A girl poked her sleek blond head into the office with a message. “Come on in, Ellie,” he said. “I want you to meet Miss Bourke-White.”

  “Hello, Peggy,” she said.

  I looked at her sharply. The violet eyes seemed familiar. “This is our art director, Miss Treacy,” Mr. Luce told me.

  My jaw dropped. “Eleanor?”

  Eleanor Treacy—crystal-chandelier girl, Madame Bol in the drama club play—extended her pale han
d and smiled.

  “You two know each other?” asked Mr. Luce.

  “We were in the same class in high school,” I explained.

  “How nice that we may be working together, Peggy,” said Eleanor, scanning me from head to toe. “I’m not sure I would have recognized you. You’ve become quite … chic.”

  What a delicious moment that was!

  “Well, what do you say?” Mr. Luce demanded impatiently when she’d gone. “Will you come to work for us?”

  I began replacing the photographs in my portfolio. “I need time to think about it, Mr. Luce,” I said.

  “Don’t take too long,” Mr. Luce growled, and I had the impression that he wasn’t used to people who didn’t jump when he said the word.

  A few days later, back home in Cleveland, I wrote to Mr. Luce proposing that I work for him half time. I wanted a thousand dollars a month. It was a huge sum, and when two weeks passed with no reply, I thought I’d demanded too much. After a long delay, Parker Lloyd-Smith responded, saying that my proposal had been approved. A month later, in July of 1929, I went to work for Fortune and made the trip back to Cleveland between jobs.

  My first assignment was to photograph shoe manufacturing in Lynn, Massachusetts; followed by glassmaking in Corning, New York; then orchid-raising in New Jersey, and on to fisheries in Connecticut. Each time I was accompanied by a writer assigned to provide the text for the pictures and an assistant to haul my heavy equipment.

  Sometimes my assistant was Mr. Luce himself. Harry—Mr. Luce had asked me to call him by his nickname—went with me to South Bend, Indiana, to work on an enormous project: “The Unseen Half of South Bend,” documenting the entire city. He carried my cameras and once, when a ladle of molten metal spilled too near, dashed in and snatched the cameras from harm’s way.

  Since Fortune would not begin publication for another six months and many people had never even heard of Time, we were not treated like celebrities. Often we ended up joining a line of workers at a pushcart to grab a sandwich and coffee for lunch. Sometimes I was regarded as just another nuisance to be dealt with, not too different from my nights at Otis Steel.

  I was on the road constantly. When I wasn’t working for Mr. Luce, I took pictures for advertisers, who paid more than the magazine did. In October of 1929, a bank in Boston hired me to photograph the new lobby. I went to the bank on Thursday the twenty-fourth, planning to work all night, when I wouldn’t be disturbed. But as I moved around the ornate lobby, selecting details, experimenting with the best angles, people continually rushed past, back and forth, getting in my way. This went on throughout the night interrupting shot after shot. I was exasperated. I stopped one of the clerks in mid-stride. “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  “The bottom has dropped out of the stock market! Haven’t you been reading the papers?”

  I hadn’t. I rarely read newspapers, except for headlines. I frankly had no interest in world affairs or politics—all I was concerned with was my work. I just kept taking photographs. I had no idea that the Crash of ’29 triggered that night was a financial disaster that would lead to the Great Depression and affect all of our lives. Especially mine.

  The assignments were never dull but they were anything but glamorous. The major feature Fortune assigned on the Chicago stockyards was an example.

  It had been Parker Lloyd-Smith’s idea, but a lot of his initial enthusiasm evaporated when we arrived at the Swift and Company meatpacking plant. Twenty thousand pigs were slaughtered there every single day.

  Parker was in his fine clothes, carrying a notebook, and I had my mountains of cameras, tripods, cables, and lights. Hundreds of hogs were strung up by their hind hooves on a conveyor belt—Parker called it a “disassembly line.” Each porker hung like the next in an endless repeating pattern, and patterns always attracted my eye. I took photograph after photograph, while Parker scribbled notes.

  We spent several days photographing. On our last day we discovered a warehouse we hadn’t yet explored. When we opened the door and peered in, an awful smell smacked us in the face. We stared at mountains of ochre-yellow dust. Parker reached for a linen handkerchief to hold over his nose.

  “What is that?” Parker asked a worker.

  “Pig dust.”

  Parker raised an eyebrow. “Pig dust? Meaning … ?”

  “Well, you know what they say,” drawled the worker, leaning on a shovel, “Swift uses every part of the pig but the squeal. You’re looking at the scraps, the leftovers that can’t even be made into sausage. It’s ground up fine and mixed with meal for livestock feed.”

  “You mean, it’s fed to other animals?” Parker looked queasy.

  “Yeah. To other pigs.”

  “Good lord!” He backed out fast. “I’ll wait in the car, Margaret,” he called over his shoulder, and fled.

  I set up my camera in the warehouse. The exposures had to be long, and I worked for over an hour. Parker must have thought I’d been overcome by the stench. But I got my pictures—piles of yellow pig dust resembling sand dunes that glowed in the filtered light.

  These photographs were chosen for the lead story in the first issue of Fortune, and they helped to firmly establish my reputation. Photographers like Edward Weston used such simple objects as a pepper or a shell for his sensuous images. But I could find beauty even in something as disgusting as ground-up pig leavings.

  I loved being a trailblazer, not only in the field of photography but as a woman finding success in a man’s world. I loved the attention, and I knew how to get even more of it. I began dressing entirely in black—silk, linen, cashmere—with one stunning piece of jewelry. I acquired a pair of elegant Afghan hounds and took them for walks in Public Square whenever I was in Cleveland, but I traveled so much that the dogs suffered from neglect, and I had to give them to a friend. Sometimes I carried a silver-headed walking stick, until I decided that it was a nuisance. I enjoyed having men make it a point to be with me because it made them feel important to be seen with a glamorous and accomplished woman. That plain old linsey-woolsey girl of high school days could now have practically any man she wanted.

  But I didn’t want a man.

  I was afraid that, like my walking stick, he might get in my way. Maybe he’d be jealous of my work, object when an assignment kept me out all night or took me away for days or weeks. He might believe my place was at home, caring for the children, caring for him. Maybe he wouldn’t put up with me working with other men. I was twenty-five, and I decided that someday, when I was in my thirties, if the right man came along, then I might risk falling in love again. Meanwhile each new assignment absorbed all my attention.

  When the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929, the wealthy people I worked for did not seem to be concerned. Mr. Walter Chrysler was one of those people. After I was hired to photograph the Chrysler automobile assembly line in Detroit, my pictures came to his attention. Mr. Chrysler was building a skyscraper in New York, and he wanted its construction to be documented week by week.

  Summoned to his New York office, I assumed I would meet with an underling, so I was surprised when Mr. Chrysler greeted me. A shaggy-browed man with a reputation for a fearsome temper, he greeted me with a smile.

  “Let me tell you something, Miss Bourke-White,” Mr. Chrysler said. “I intend for this to be the tallest building in the country, maybe in the world. You’ve got that Terminal Tower in Cleveland, seven hundred and seventy-one feet high. The Bank of Manhattan is nine hundred twenty-seven feet high. And now the Empire State Building is going up—more competition. I had the Chrysler Building designed to reach one thousand forty-six feet. I need photographs taken at every stage to show that the steel tower on the top is an integral part of the structure, and not just a decoration stuck on to claim the title of ‘tallest.’ Will you do it?”

  He pushed the architectural drawings across the conference table and leaned back, watching me keenly. I looked at the drawings and knew instantly that I wanted to do it. “Of course,”
I said.

  What a rough job I’d let myself in for! All through the winter months of 1930, I worked in temperatures that regularly dropped well below freezing. My fingers stiffened and my eyes watered. I sometimes climbed a long, unfinished stairway and perched in a tower, eight hundred feet above the ground, that swayed in the wind, several feet in one direction and then in another. It took three men to hold the tripod for my camera. I was not afraid of heights, but at first the swaying unnerved me. One of the riveters taught me to remember how I felt walking along fence tops as a child. It worked. The experience was exhilarating.

  Enormous stainless steel gargoyles in the shape of eagles’ heads glared down at the ant-sized pedestrians sixty-one floors below. I fell in love with the Chrysler Building, and I wanted an apartment near one of those gargoyles. It was time to give up my studio in Cleveland. I was still making plenty of money, even as the Depression worsened the lives of many people, and I could afford to make New York my base.

  I submitted my application to the rental agent, who said sympathetically, “Sorry, Miss Bourke-White, but private persons cannot live in office buildings. It’s a New York City law.” Then he added, “The only person permitted to live in an office building is the janitor.”

  “Is that so?” I thanked him and left, returning an hour later with a neatly typed application for employment—as janitor of the Chrysler Building. I had exaggerated my qualifications somewhat, but I could hire people who had the skills to maintain the building. It wouldn’t be a problem. I knew I could pull it off.

  The rental agent glanced at my application. “You’re serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious.” I tapped the paper on his desk. “You may check my references.” At the top of the list was Mr. Walter Percy Chrysler, president of the Chrysler Corporation.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you, ma’am, but the position has already been filled.”