Legally, I could not live there, but I knew how to get around the city law: make the apartment a workplace, not a home. I rented space on the sixty-first floor, next to one of the gorgeous gargoyles, and hired a designer to transform it into a studio, all graceful curves and dramatic angles with an aquarium for tropical fish built into one wall.
Now I had to get enough big assignments to pay the rent on my fabulous—and fabulously expensive—penthouse studio.
After the first edition of Fortune came out in February 1930, featuring my photographs of the meatpacking plant, my name became well known by the richest and most powerful people in the country. After that, every issue of Fortune featured at least one, and sometimes several, Margaret Bourke-White photographs. Early in my life I had announced my ambition: to be rich and famous. I was now well on my way. Not often, but once in a while, I stopped and dared to ask myself, Are you happy, Margaret? I had every reason to be—I was achieving everything I’d dreamed of.
But I had few true friends. I confided in no one. I liked men, and a great many male admirers were always pleased to be in my company. There was no time to develop the kind of friendships with women I’d once had with Madge at Barnard and Camp Agaming, or with Tubby and Sara Jane back in high school. I had almost no contact with my sister, Ruth, who was unmarried and still working and living in Chicago. In fact I didn’t much like women. I thought they lived dull lives, and they were inevitably jealous of me, my success, my exciting life.
Sometimes I thought of the people I’d left behind in Cleveland. Beme, for instance, and Earl, who had cheered me on. I often missed them.
My mother did not fail to let me know what she thought of the life I was leading. “I’m proud of your accomplishments, Margaret,” she told me before I gave up my studio in Cleveland and left permanently for New York. “But I worry about your values. I see that you’ve become self-indulgent. The clothes, the jewelry and expensive furniture, and those silly dogs. Such personal display does not become you. And that automobile!”
I had replaced Patrick with an almost-new Nash roadster. “Mother, I need a car to haul my equipment,” I explained.
I tried to dismiss her criticisms, but nevertheless, they stung.
22
From Russia to the Dust Bowl—1930
BY THE SUMMER OF 1930 I WAS SPENDING HALF THE year in the crazy world of advertising, where I could make the most money, and the other half working for Fortune, where I found the most satisfaction. After I’d wound up the Chrysler project, Harry decided to send me to Germany to photograph that country’s thriving industries. I had another idea: I wanted to go to Russia—the Soviet Union, as it was now called.
Russia’s Five-Year Plan, launched two years earlier, was intended to turn an agricultural country into an industrialized nation able to compete with the United States. Communist collectives replaced peasants’ farms, and factories with production quotas sprang up all across the huge country. I wanted to be the first American to photograph the changes.
“You’ll never get in,” Harry said when I proposed the idea. “Foreigners aren’t welcome in Russia—especially foreigners with cameras. Focus your energy on Germany.”
There was nothing like a closed door to make me want to pry it open.
At the Russian tourist bureau in New York I asked if I’d need any special visas to visit Russia. “Your photographs will be your passport,” said the official in charge who recognized my name and knew my work. “The Russians will love your pictures. The sweep! The grandeur! Your style is so—so Russian!” I took his response to mean that I’d have no problems getting permission.
Harry gave in, and Parker Lloyd-Smith and I sailed to Germany on the SS Brémen and went to work on our assignment. For almost six weeks, as we moved from town to town photographing German factories, I waited anxiously for word that the paperwork had been approved and I had permission to go on to Russia. Weeks passed without any sign of my visa.
In the meantime I was running into problems in Germany. Not every factory would allow a woman inside to take photographs. One day, while I was setting up my cameras in a wheat field to take a picture of a line of smokestacks on the horizon, the police swooped in and arrested me. I was accused of being a spy. Even when the State Department in Washington wrote in my defense, the police refused to release me. Frantic, but also inspired, I showed them my pictures of those hogs in the Chicago stockyards. That convinced them I was not a spy and let me go.
Parker Lloyd-Smith left for New York. It was one of the last times I saw him before he died the next year. I worried that I would have to leave too. After weeks of anxiety my visa came through, but now I faced another challenge. Russia had been in the grip of a famine since the farms were collectivized, and food was scarce. Veteran travelers warned me to take my own.
I packed a trunk with cans of beans, meat, cheese, and whatever else I could think of and caught a train to Moscow. I hired a young woman as an interpreter, and for weeks we traveled thousands of miles across the country, living on my cache of canned goods and dealing with endless tangles of red tape.
With every request to go somewhere, see someone, or photograph something, I was told, “Come back the day after tomorrow, and it will be taken care of.” I learned that in Russia it was always “the day after tomorrow.” I’d set up an appointment to photograph a factory and then worry about how I’d get there. If my interpreter and I were lucky enough to find a taxi, it was likely to break down. Or we took a droshky, a carriage drawn by an exhausted horse. Or we crowded onto a streetcar and then did not have the proper fare. Once at my destination, I was usually told that the proper paperwork had not arrived, or the person in charge had the day off, or the manufacturing schedule now made interruptions for photographs out of the question. “Come back the day after tomorrow.” And I did, over and over, until I got my photographs.
I took pictures of blast furnaces in operation and dams under construction, and I met workers curious about America. They loved the conveyor belts and assembly lines that made our country so productive. They were also curious about me. A group of women assembling telegraph machines gathered around me at the end of their shift to admire my pictures and ask questions through my interpreter.
“Ladies want to know if you have husband,” she reported.
I smiled and shook my head. “Nyet,” I said, one of a few words of Russian I’d picked up.
“Ladies want to know if you are in love.”
“Only with my camera,” I told them, laughing. Shaking their heads, they went back to work, and so did I.
By 1932, America was mired deep in the Great Depression. Millions of people were out of work, destitute, and with no way to feed their families. But I was still making lots of money, and I enjoyed spending it. I loved beautiful clothes, and the clothes I loved—suits from Paris, for example—were expensive. But the more assignments I got, the more people I had to hire, and the higher my expenses climbed. Suddenly, reality caught up with me. Many of my advertising clients could not pay what they owed me, and I fell behind on the rent on my glamorous penthouse studio in the Chrysler Building. I’d been paying my brother’s expenses since he started classes at Ohio State, fulfilling my promise to the Mungers to help another student in need, but when he transferred to MIT, I couldn’t keep up. I had to turn to Uncle Lazar for help, and I hated that.
I was working as hard as ever to try to keep my head above water, but like many others I was in debt to almost everybody, and I was broke and desperate. My charge accounts were being closed. I borrowed money from friends and even from Mother, who was also in tight circumstances. I asked her to sell the roadster for me in Cleveland where I’d left it. I moved out of the Chrysler Building penthouse to a cheaper studio on Fifth Avenue. Soon I owed back rent there as well. When an official came around with an eviction notice, I avoided him until I could scrape together what I owed.
It wasn’t just the Depression that brought hard times to the country. During the summer of 19
34, people were talking about the so-called Dust Bowl in the Great Plains of the Midwest. Farmers had plowed up the soil, destroying the native grasses, a prolonged drought had allowed the topsoil to dry out, and now windstorms blew the loose soil in great suffocating clouds. In New York we heard about it, but nobody understood the extent of it. Ralph Ingersoll, who took over as Fortune’s managing editor after Parker’s death, assigned me to fly to Omaha to document the growing catastrophe.
“You have three hours to pack, Margaret,” Ralph growled. “And I want the story in five days.”
The huge swath of devastation stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas was much larger than any of us back East had ever imagined, and five days gave me very little time. I hired a beat-up plane and a beat-up barnstorming pilot to fly it. We covered the vast expanse, jumping from one desolate spot to the next in blistering sun and relentless wind, flying low over mile after mile of baked earth, dry riverbeds, withered corn, and blowing dust that buried everything in its path. I had no time to speak to anyone, but I photographed it all. The gaunt faces etched with despair told the wordless story and affected me deeply.
That experience changed the way I saw the world. When I’d first begun taking pictures of abstract industrial patterns, I sometimes included people to give a sense of scale. The photograph of a man working near a turbine illustrated its hugeness, but the man himself was of no interest to me then. Now it was people who mattered.
For the next two years, from 1934 to 1936, back in the hard-edged world of advertising, I photographed tires for Goodyear and automobiles for Buick, two accounts that paid some of my bills. I did not want to do any more elaborately staged photographs for magazine advertisers, even when they offered me a thousand dollars a picture. I certainly needed the money. I resolved that once I had paid off the bill collectors, I would do only photographic work that was truly important, that meant something. I wasn’t sure what that would be.
Then, in the summer of 1936, two years after my transforming trip to the Dust Bowl, my life and my work were brought into sharp focus by a sad and painful event: my mother’s death. Sixty-two and in good health, she had come to New York to take a summer class at Columbia. With no warning, she had a heart attack and died. As I mourned, I realized how central she had been to my life, even though I had not realized it at the time. My mother’s death helped to crystallize my goals.
I could not forget the faces of the people and the misery I’d witnessed in the Dust Bowl. I vowed to do a book about ordinary Americans. As a photographer I was second to no one, but I didn’t have much experience as a writer. I needed someone first-class with whom to collaborate. But what sort of writer would that be—a novelist or journalist? Someone famous, or some as-yet-unknown talent? He would have to be as serious about the project as I was, and as fully committed to bringing a portrait of America to a wide audience. I felt sure I would recognize him when I met him. It would be intuitive: I would meet a writer, and we would look at each other, and we would both know.
And that is exactly what happened.
23
Skinny and Kit—1936
“YOU SHOULD READ ERSKINE CALDWELL’S BOOK,” a literary agent named Maxim Lieber advised me when we met at a party. “He wrote Tobacco Road as a novel about the South, and he’s thinking about going back to Georgia with a photographer and doing something different.”
I had heard about Erskine Caldwell and Tobacco Road, describing the awful plight of poor white sharecroppers in rural Georgia. The book, published four years earlier in 1932, still had people talking, not just because of the sex and the immoral characters, but because many readers insisted that his portrayal of the South and Southerners was all wrong. They said it painted a distorted picture of the inhabitants and their wretched lives. The book had been made into a Broadway show that was played for laughs and still drew big crowds.
“I want to meet him,” I told Lieber.
I bought Tobacco Road the next day and read it straight through. The story of Jeeter Lester and the often grotesque characters was raw and shocking. It took a strong stomach to read parts of the book, but the clear, unsentimental prose transported me to rural Georgia. The book had been banned in some places, and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a self-appointed group, had tried unsuccessfully to have him arrested at a book signing.
I called Lieber and asked if he’d mentioned me to Caldwell.
“Yeah,” Lieber said, “I have. He’s willing to meet with you. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but Erskine isn’t crazy about your pictures.”
“There are plenty of my pictures I don’t much care for either,” I said. “But when you’re working in advertising, you often have to do things you don’t like. That’s one of the reasons I want to do this book. I’m sick of the commercial stuff. I want to do something that really matters.”
“There’s more, Margaret,” said the agent, “and you might as well hear it now, before you’re in too deep. Erskine doesn’t like the idea of working with a woman.”
I laughed. “I’ve heard that one before from men who didn’t want me to go into their steel mills or down into their mines. But they got over it. Mr. Caldwell will get over it, too.”
Caldwell had recently written a series of newspaper articles about Southern sharecroppers and taken his own pictures. I looked them up. The pictures weren’t much good, but the writing was vivid and powerful. I had no intention of letting Mr. Caldwell’s hesitance stop me from doing what I wanted to do. If he refused, I’d find another writer, but I was confident he would not. I called Lieber again. “Has Mr. Caldwell made up his mind?”
“He has tentatively agreed, but he wants to meet you before he gives a firm yes.”
We met in Lieber’s office in February. I arrived early, and Lieber had just enough time to tell me that his client had overcome some of his doubts about me. Erskine Caldwell was a large man with blue eyes, reddish hair, freckles, a courtly manner, and a soft Southern accent. He seemed shy. I knew that Southern men did not like to be approached head-on, so I took an indirect angle.
“Mr. Caldwell, I admire your work tremendously,” I purred, “and I would consider it a very great honor if you would consent to help me with a project that is so close to my heart.” Honey dripped from my lips.
Erskine nodded soberly. “And I would be honored to work with such a talented woman.”
Now we could talk seriously. With prodding from Lieber and me, we settled a few things. We would drive throughout the Deep South. Erskine would bring along his literary secretary, Sally, to take notes. He was involved in a few projects that he needed to finish up first, and we would leave in five months, on June eleventh.
The delay suited me well. I, too, had unfinished business with advertising clients. We shook hands and went our separate ways.
Not long after that meeting with Erskine, Harry Luce greeted me with exciting news: he was preparing to launch another magazine, a weekly that would feature photographs. He wanted me to play a leading role, although exactly what wasn’t yet clear. Harry and the rest of the team were in the frantic process of putting together dummies of the magazine to show to potential advertisers. They aimed to put out the first issue that fall.
The new magazine’s name was Life. I had one assignment locked up: documenting the life cycle of the praying mantis. That took me back to my early interest in the natural world and the children’s book I’d once worked on and then abandoned.
The five months since my first—and only—conversation with Erskine Caldwell flew by. We had agreed to begin our joint venture on June eleventh, but now I had several additional things to attend to. June came and went, and I needed to postpone the trip. I assumed that Erskine’s life was as hectic as mine, and that a delay of a few days, even weeks, would not be a big issue.
I was wrong. I had no idea that my collaborator was a stickler for dates and deadlines. When I couldn’t reach Erskine, I called Maxim Lieber.
“He’s already
left for Georgia,” said Lieber.
“Where is he?” I cried. “How can I reach him? This is too important! I can’t just let this go!”
“He’s in Wrens, the little town where he grew up. He’s at his father’s home.”
I began to weep. “Maxim, please! Is there a phone? You’ve got to give me the number!”
Maxim sighed. “I promised never to give out this number.” Then he gave it to me.
Erskine answered the phone. Still in tears, I begged for just a little more time. The previously soft-spoken Southern gentleman snapped, “Very well, Miss Bourke-White, the project is hereby postponed—indefinitely!” And hung up on me.
I was stunned. Surely he couldn’t mean it! But his icy voice and abrupt words didn’t bode well for the outcome. I could not bear to let that happen. I would go to Wrens, Georgia, wherever that was, and change his mind.
I always kept clothes and camera equipment packed so that I could leave on short notice, but I had to be prepared to travel with Erskine for who knew how long. Since I would be working on my photo-essay on praying mantises while I was away, I added two large glass jars, each containing a twig with an egg case to my luggage. They were due to hatch soon, and I had to be ready.
At midnight that night I boarded a plane for Georgia and arrived in Augusta at sunrise. While the bellhop carried up my luggage, I sat in the hotel coffee shop and composed a letter to Erskine, emphasizing how serious I was about the project. I set off for the post office. At eight o’clock the sun was already blazing, and my dress was soaked with perspiration. The mail would not go out until late that afternoon, I was told, and would not be delivered until Monday.
“How far is it to Wrens?” I asked.
The postmaster scratched his bald head. “’Bout six miles, I reckon.”
Sick with disappointment, I stepped out onto the sun-blasted sidewalk. A young lad was rearranging the dust on the post office steps. I noticed a bicycle leaning against a tree.
Girl with a Camera Page 15
