by Adam Gopnik
Sometimes, those Saturday walks could be joyful. I went on long walks with Dick Avedon, a champion walker, who loved to set goals, ambitions. Once, he called me on such a morning, when Martha was away in Iceland with her mother, and suggested that we “walk the length of Manhattan, and look for masterpieces.”
Dick didn’t, it turned out, really mean to walk from Spuyten Duyvil to the harbor, but just the length of Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum to Washington Square—the navigable river of commerce and art on which most of his sixty-odd years had been spent.
Dick, planted in the middle of the cobblestones on the park side of Fifth, with the traffic going around, flowing around him, seemed to be watching the parade of buses on the avenue. “Do you know,” he said, looking east, “I grew up over there. At Fifty-five East Eighty-sixth. And my father and I always used to ride the double-decker buses together right here on Fifth Avenue on Sundays. I remember once we were on the bus and I had my autograph album with me. I always did in that period; I was maybe twelve. My father suddenly looked out the window, on the upper deck, and said, ‘There’s the mayor’s brother!’ Of course, it was the sort of knowing thing that fathers are supposed to say. Mayor La Guardia was fat, so another fat man had to be his brother. But I thought, The mayor’s brother!—and leapt from the upper deck, down the stairs, and jumped out onto Fifth Avenue, with my autograph book. I twisted my ankle as I landed, but I kept going, limping terribly as I raced after this poor, anonymous fat man.” Dick became for a moment his own younger self on the same pavement—crippled by his leap, dragging his wounded leg, autograph book still gamely held out before him, like a pilgrim’s cross. “I held out my autograph book to the fat man, and he looked at me in amazement. Of course, I eventually had to limp back to the bus. It was the sort of overeager thing I did that embarrassed my father.
“My God, how I loved autographs!” he went on, as we began to walk south along the park. “I had the most amazing collection of autographs. I had a whole section called ‘Great Jews and Great Judges.’ Rabbi Weiss, Governor Lehman. I had Oliver Wendell Holmes and Chief Justice Hughes, who signed on their beautiful Supreme Court cards. George S. Kaufman wrote on a blue card, ‘For Richard Avedon, and very glad to do it.’ I had Rachmaninoff and e. e. cummings. The only movie stars who interested me were Toby Wing and Lyda Roberti. No one has even heard of them now. Lyda Roberti introduced the Gershwin song ‘My Cousin in Milwaukee’ in a movie musical, which I thought was major. I had them both. Today, whenever anybody asks me for an autograph, I always send it back and write ‘signed with pleasure.’
“Let’s make a day of masterpieces!” he said suddenly, emphatically. “We’ll look at nothing but masterpieces. When we moved to Eighty-sixth Street, I practically moved into the Met. I would visit all the time when we lived near here, to look at certain things—the Fayum portraits from Egypt. The Modiglianis. The Soutines. And those figures—the Etruscans with their tiny waists and hips and their smiles. The Modiglianis and the Etruscans, above all.”
As we approached the Frick, Dick peered down Fifth toward the Empire State Building. “Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Did you know that that was what my father’s store was called? It was on Thirty-ninth and Fifth. I used to go into my father’s room, after he lost the store in the Depression, just to look at the stationery and the envelopes and the sales slips and smell the carbon paper. Diane Arbus and I both came from department-store families—there was still a myth of the department store in our time.
“There was a certain kind of Jewish Broadway world of the period just when I was born, back in the twenties, that for our parents was a sort of an ideal. There was a family called the Strunskys—Simeon and English Strunsky. I think Simeon was the editor of the Times Book Review or something, and related to the Gershwins by marriage. I always heard about the Strunskys—the reach of the Strunskys and the depth of the Strunskys and the style of the Strunskys. I wanted to be a Strunsky, not a Dick. Years later, I was in a lonely little inn on Cape Cod and saw the most elegant elderly couple, gravely waltzing by themselves in Hyannis. I suddenly thought: Strunskys! They must be Strunskys. And they were!
“There was a certain Strunskyite ideal that governed my childhood; it’s hard to describe, and I’ve rediscovered it only fitfully. It was Gershwin and O’Neill and Dorothy Parker and crossword puzzles and Moss Hart and George Kaufman playing cards. The Marx Brothers when they were still in New York, and my mother couldn’t stop talking about them.”
We went into the Frick. Dick first took in a Memling portrait of a young man. “It doesn’t really work, does it? The trick with portraits…It has to be serious, to keep the romance of the surface—and deepen it at the same time. It’s those Germans: all that rigor and precision. It stays on the surface, though. It doesn’t look romantic at first, but it’s far more romantic in its materialism than—I don’t know—than Fragonard. Fragonard is all spirit.”
He walked a little farther into the next room and was stopped cold by a pair of Gainsborough portraits, a man and a woman. “My God, what doesn’t he know about aristocratic people! The silver hair and wigs, and the mismatch of the black eyebrows on her. It’s not the technique he employs, though it’s a perfect technique. It’s what he knows about that man, and that woman. Gainsborough comes close to certain Goyas—to Goya’s Condesa de Chinchón” (a touchstone for Dick). “That same kind of freedom, and welcoming contradiction. Gainsborough is as close to Goya as anyone, though you’re not supposed to say that.”
He made a quick inspection of the other faces in the room, dismissing the Lawrences (“too much flesh; nobody’s cheeks are that pink”) and the Hogarths, but being moved by a Reynolds portrait of an elderly lady with an elaborate wig, plaited with hanging silver ribbons. “What you can do with a hat—the pathos of the perfect hat against the aging face…”
We turned, and Dick pretended amazement at entering the room of Fragonard’s Progress of Love. “What doesn’t he know about movement!” he said. “What he can do with a kind of sexuality, constantly translating it into perfect controlled movement and yet keeping the nervous edge of it alive always, not simpering or posed. Real movement, rising from inside the lovers. You get past the chalky surface and the pastry in a half-minute, and then everything just takes off, he goes so far.” Dick approached the surface of the panel in The Progress of Love where the girl flees the boy, her arms spread straight out. He peered intently into it.
At last, we reached our destination: the central hall of the mansion, lined with Mr. Frick’s choicest pictures. Dick walked immediately over to “it”—Rembrandt’s Polish Rider. He stood still in front of it. “My mother would bring me to see it when I was nine, and for a long time that picture meant everything in the world to me. I was that young man, and I was in love with him—with myself, my idealized vision of myself, what I might be. I saw him as me, that possibility in life—everything lying ahead, and not yet knowing it, not looking at the road, but out. It sounds so grandiose, I know, when you say it, but the sense I had was so strong that someone else, Rembrandt, had felt everything I was feeling. I was so reassured by that picture. Everything I want for my work is still in it—in that contradiction, the beautiful rider and the broken-down horse.” Then he added, with a smile, but more softly, “I was the rider. And bit by bit, I’ve become the horse.”
Dick slowly disengaged himself from the Rembrandt, and walked up, peeked at the Piero, and then turned left, to look at the shiny blue satin Veronese, The Choice of Hercules. Hercules in Veronese’s picture is a slight, weak-chinned, aristocratic Venetian boy in a ballooning white silk suit, looking pettish as he is pulled between the two imposing, pneumatic goddesses. “Veronese was in the worst kind of bind,” Dick said. “But we’ve all experienced that. It’s one of those things. The guy said to him, ‘Paint me as Hercules. In my white suit.’ ”
We turned off past the Frick and into the park. Dick looked down. “It’s funny, about portraits”—he was still back at the museum—“how
the best portraits are always emperors or postmen. People who are all self-image, or people who have no self-image at all. They come with a kind of dignity to the camera.”
Then on through the dark underpass that leads to the children’s zoo. As we approached it, we came upon an odd, familiar little park personage—the button man. An ageless, white-bearded man, a figure right out of Joe Mitchell, wearing a heavy, stained overcoat covered, studded, with a thousand photo-buttons—Polaroid snapshots of passersby who have come to him to have their pictures taken, wrapped in plastic, and laminated to a tin lapel button: you can wear a picture of yourself.
Dick looked at the photo-button man with a combination of awe, curiosity, and possibility. He sized him up.
“This might be just the thing,” he said at last. “Don’t you think? For Martha? A photograph of us, enjoying a day in the park? She can wear it all over Greenland.” I didn’t correct him as to Martha’s homeland.
He walked up to the button man, who, in his long, studded overcoat, proudly surveyed his domain. He looked like the mayor of Munchkin City, and seemed magisterially unconcerned by the lack of custom.
“How are you?” Dick said, walking up to him, hand outstretched. “Have you been doing this for long?”
The photo-button man in turn sized up the famous photographer. “Awhile,” he said, as one not inclined to give away too much too quickly.
“We were thinking, actually, of having a button made.” Dick said this gaily, affirmatively, eagerly—but with exactly the right inflection of tentativeness and uncertainty to make it clear that he, the patron, was willing but that it was, in the end, in the final analysis, up to the artist—the button man—to decide whether or not this portrait made sense in terms of his mood this morning, and in terms of the corpus of his work.
Understanding this, the button man played his part. He turned and slowly looked over the two men—both schleppy in jeans and T-shirts—gravely. At last he sighed, as one whose gifts are consistently wasted on inadequate material, and said, “Sure.”
Dick and I stepped up. “Stand over there,” the button man said, gesturing to the brick wall of one of the outbuildings of the zoo. His camera was set up on a tripod facing the wall. “The light,” he said shortly.
Dick considered these words with immense gratitude, and looked up, melodramatically, at the hazy overcast sun, as though he had never before considered the possibility that light might affect a photographic portrait, and then allowed himself to be positioned, mug-shot style, against the wall.
“Do you always use this background?” Dick asked. The button man, a little exasperated, stopped just short of rolling his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “The light.”
“Oh,” Dick said. The light was, in fact, coming right into their eyes, causing both men to squint a little as the button man returned to his tripod and slowly settled on the shot.
“You’re using a flash?” Dick inquired, in spite of himself.
The button man looked back up, warningly. Dick subdued himself.
“Let’s make it a really…natural, easy, candid snapshot,” he murmured. “No hysteria in the smiles. We’ll just make a nice…candid snapshot.” He sounded, though, a little dubious about the approach. Then he assumed his idea of a natural, easy, candid look, which was vaguely sinister in its guilty, not-quite-anything-ness—like the smile of a footman who has been caught in the hall closet with the second-best parlor maid.
The button man snapped the shutter, the flash went off in the middle of the park, and then he stepped back. “Let’s try again,” Dick said. Now he assumed another “candid” look: studied, severe, and unsmiling. The flash and shutter went off again in mid-expression.
“Okay,” the button man said wearily. Again the quick little tongue of the Polaroid darted out of the camera, and the button man carefully laid the second photograph on a nearby stone balustrade alongside the first.
We crowded around to watch the two images develop. Dick characteristically thrust his jaw out at the two pictures, as though willing them to become deep and human and extravagant. In fact, one made us look like a couple of nervous lounge lizards in mufti; the other, like a pair of Nebraska convicts caught after a father-and-son killing spree.
Dick looked the two possibilities over. “The second one, don’t you think,” he said at last. “It has a certain gloomy authority that may appeal to her. We look tragic and lost without her.” He handed the image back to the photo-button man, who expertly wrapped it around a blank tin button so that the two men’s heads, unsmiling, candid, were all that was visible, and trickily covered it with clear plastic, using a little hot iron extracted from the depths of his coat to seal it. Money was exchanged. Dick looked at the button happily, but a little dubiously. Then he shook hands with the button man again, and began to walk on, toward the bridge leading to the zoo.
“This is no good for Martha. It’s unthinkable that we send this to her!” he said at last. “We have to go back and make a real button.” He turned violently around and began to trot back toward the button man, I following at his heels.
When he got there, he shook hands once more with the still-bemused (and business-less) button man in his overcoat.
“Listen,” he said, “now, you and I are going to get to work. What you have here is something amazing. The possibilities of what you can do with this technique are endless. You haven’t begun to scratch the surface of everything that’s in this technique, and that’s in you to express. We’re going to work together and push the stick forward for your craft. Let’s make a button that’s a button.” The button man looked a little bewildered but game.
“We need models for the shot…” Dick said, and then stepped forward into the traffic of people coming up along the red stone walk. A stream of young women walked by: girls in bicycle shorts, girls with small children. Dick looked them over, his head bobbing back and forth like a wary boxer’s.
Two young black girls appeared, impressively cast in leopard-skin tops and tights. “Don’t you think?” he whispered. “Girls,” he said, stepping forward with a planted, man-at-work smile set on his lips, “I wonder if you could help us out…I’m…”
The two stepped a solid step out of the way, disdainfully, and walked on by. Then another two, and still two more. “Girls…could you…I wonder if you’d…” Dick sputtered a little as the stream of femininity rejected its interpreter.
Finally, Dick gathered himself together. Two rotund women, dressed oddly alike—white blouses, the kind of high-waisted pants that cry out to be called slacks, fastened with woven leather belts—were nearing. Both wore glasses in the shape of hearts—valentines, tinted pink. “Ladies,” Dick said, “I wonder if you’d work with me for five minutes.” He held out both hands pleadingly. “I’m working on a picture over here with a friend; we’re making a kind of comical button to send to his wife.” Dick put into “wife” a virtuous, hands-off, “no pickups around here” quality. The two women, a smaller and larger version of the same type—mother and daughter, clearly—looked at each other, giggling and shrugging.
“You must be sisters,” Dick said, throwing dignity and truth to the Central Park winds.
“No,” the mother, as she obviously was, said. “This is my daughter, Michelle, and I’m Shirley.”
Dick feigned elaborate disbelief, all the while stepping back with tiny steps, drawing his subjects into the little charmed circle where the button man in his studded overcoat and I waited. “That’s amazing. What brings you to New York? Is it a vacation?…”—keeping up a steady, innocuous patter as he drew them in. His body had taken on the shape of unthreatening virtue: eyebrows raised, arms close in to his side as though bound there, palms out; a man fastened by his own rectitude—unthreatening as a leprechaun.
At last, he had lured Michelle and Shirley, still giggling and shrugging, into the cameraman’s light. He looked around intently, judging angles and backgrounds. “Let’s use that as a background,” he said, pointing
to the back of a gray dumpster. It was, apparently, the nearest thing he could find to a white no-seam. “If we use that we can make it work.”
“I wouldn’t try it,” the button man said, professionally.
“Well, let’s experiment for a moment. We’ll set up over there, and then…we’ll see.” He began to block the positions of his little company. “Now, Michelle, dear, can you put your arm around Adam, and then, uh…let’s bring Shirley in….Right…Now, everybody…leer.” The three subjects, all intensely embarrassed, tried to leer.
“That’s not a leer,” Dick said. “We’ve been picked up! Leer.”
He clasped them in and stepped forward to demonstrate a leer—Groucho Marx come to life, bent over double with aching lechery and desire.
They tried again. Still, no leer. Now, instead of insisting, Dick dropped his voice, and, with the intimacy of a teenage boy making a picture of his girlfriend at a Fotomat, just repeated their names: “Shirley. Michelle.” The intimacy of the intonation worked, and their faces passed from self-consciously coy to high-heartedly seductive. Dick nodded violently to the button man, and he hit the shutter.
Dick, almost dancing with joy, took three quick tap-dance steps of pleasure. “Mmmm, I think this is going to be something,” he said, and he thrust his jaw out and looked at the picture. “Now, that’s a picture.” He held it in his palm and showed it to his company. Michelle and Shirley and me.
Michelle and Shirley, who were beginning to enjoy themselves, relaxed as the button man walked over to the balustrade and began to laminate the picture onto a button. He finished and handed it to Dick, who cupped it in his hand.
“You know,” Dick said, happy, and wanting, obviously, to enrich the experience for them—to make it into a moment—“it’s funny. This is my work,” he said conversationally. “I’m a photographer.”
