Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Throughout the year, as she modeled and assisted in the darkroom and on the road as he went off to make new photographs for the upcoming shows, Patsy was paid, though not royally, and received an occasional print.
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Her favorite from the Stieglitz show was
The White Tombstone
; when Ansel discovered that this was Stieglitz’s preference as well, it only increased his estimation of Patsy.
Patsy was excited about life. She was young, smart, and lovely, and she looked great in jeans. Unlike Virginia, she took Ansel’s guidance as a gift rather than a wearisome improvement lecture. Although she found his face and body more than a bit reminiscent of Ichabod Crane’s, she grew enamored of Ansel—his vibrant personality, his great artistry, his patient teaching. (His most attractive physical feature, she thought, was his beautiful hands.) Possessed of sympathetic personalities, they agreed on most matters, including the importance of her establishing her own career.
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Ansel, for his part, fell head over heels in love. He believed it was Patsy’s presence that inspired him to make the prints for Stieglitz, prints that at last conveyed the intensity he had been seeking. With her spirit beside him, he could conquer the world. Forget Virginia, with her pedestrian, wifely demands, forget the children, whom he didn’t really relate to, forget the old folks in San Francisco, forget the trap he found himself in: Ansel decided that he must leave Virginia for Patsy.
On the evening of October 14, 1936, just three days after Ansel shipped his prints to Stieglitz for the show, Patsy attended a dinner party at Ansel and Virginia’s San Francisco home. Harry Cassie Best carried his seventeen-month-old granddaughter, Anne, upstairs, placed her in her crib, and then keeled over, dead of a heart attack. While Ansel saw to the children, Virginia called an ambulance and ordered Patsy to stand at the curb, wave it down when it arrived, and try to keep the emergency crew quiet to avoid waking Ansel’s parents, asleep next door. Virginia knew she had to remain strong, and the elder Adamses’ grief and shock would be unbearable.
An emotional wreck, Patsy stood sobbing by the side of the street. The ambulance crew came and made their way upstairs, out of sight of the guests in the living room, who had no idea what was going on and continued chatting. Patsy recalled that Virginia remained eerily calm throughout, almost stonily cold, though her neck was streaked bright red from the effort of containing her feelings.
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With her father’s death, Virginia inherited Best’s Studio. If he remained with Virginia, Ansel would now have his own photography gallery and house smack-dab in the middle of his treasured Yosemite. He loved and respected Virginia as the mother of his children, but his passion for Patsy was immense. This situation posed an impossible conundrum for Ansel.
To compound the problems, Virginia discovered that she was pregnant again. After much debate and open discussion at their home, she checked into the University of California Hospital in San Francisco for a quiet curettage (abortion), having concluded that it was difficult enough raising two children almost single-handedly;
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a third was out of the question.
Three weeks after Harry’s death, with the two women demanding that he choose between them, Ansel literally skipped town, determined to visit his Chicago and New York exhibitions. Letters poured from his trusty portable typewriter to the two women, neither of whom realized, until years later, that he was sending near duplicates to them both.
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Ansel returned to San Francisco on December 10 and immediately crash-landed in bed, under the spell of his catchall affliction, the flu.
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Rather than feeling ebullient about his successes in the East, he felt defeated by his personal life. Both Patsy and Virginia told him that his time was up. He and Virginia became embroiled in such a vehement argument that both collapsed and had to be hospitalized in separate rooms in Dante Hospital.
8
Emotionally drained and no longer able to run on empty, Ansel lay despondent in his hospital bed, unable to make a decision and unwilling to face either woman.
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He knew what his choices were—either start a new life with Patsy or hoist the burdens of family—but he was tempted just to light out in a simple escape. There was everything to lose either way: his soul or his honor. In the end, he did not have the strength for the struggle.
10
For Christmas, Ansel gave Patsy
The White Tombstone
. He inscribed the verso of the print with the title “
Early California Gravestone
, For Patsy, December 1936.” He also added a few poignant lines by Robinson Jeffers.
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Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.
Since Albert Bender had introduced Ansel to Jeffers in 1926, Ansel had grown to love Jeffers’s work, and it is likely that he had shared this poem with Patsy. To better understand Ansel’s profound sadness, it is helpful to read the entire poem because that was the communication he was sending to his impossible love. One should also look at Ansel’s photograph when reading this, a white marble headstone incised with the image of a disconsolate figure, mourning the too-early death of twenty-six-year-old Lucy Ellen Darcy in 1860.
“Rock and Hawk”
Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.
This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,
Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.
I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,
But his; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;
Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive
Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.
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For Ansel,
The White Tombstone
was no longer the emblem of his great New York success, but represented his unspeakable anguish at the loss of Patsy.
Patsy came to visit Ansel in the hospital, but as she climbed the stairs to his floor, she was met by his friend Ted Spencer, who delivered a verbal “Dear John” to her, explaining that Ansel had decided not to leave Virginia. Patsy continued on to Ansel’s room, where she found him subdued and a bit stuttery as he briefly informed her that he was staying with his wife, adding that he hoped they could still be friends.
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Remembered Patsy, “And that was that.”
14
Released from the hospital just before Christmas, Ansel only grew more depressed over the holidays. In despair, he wrote to Cedric that he wished he could somehow reclaim his lost happiness.
15
In the middle of January 1937, Virginia entered San Francisco’s Saint Francis Hospital to have her tonsils removed;
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shortly before her release, Ansel was admitted to the same hospital complaining of abdominal pains, thus deftly missing her return home.
17
He was diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis, a potent virus that plays havoc with the body’s immune system and left him even more exhausted physically and mentally than he had been in December.
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The only treatment was then, as it is now, rest, with recovery in two to three months.
When he was discharged, two weeks later, he had run out of time and excuses and had to act to save his marriage. Leaving the children with Charlie, Ollie, and Aunt Mary, Ansel and Virginia drove to Palm Springs for a week of sun and rest, in hopes of the honeymoon they had never had.
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Upon their return, convinced that the damp and foggy San Francisco climate was not helping—not to mention the lack of privacy, with his parents and aunt next door—Ansel and Virginia moved their young family of four to the sunnier clime of Berkeley.
20
Unfortunately, their rental house sat directly on the Hayward Fault; within days a tremor rumbled convincingly beneath them, shaking both the house and its occupants to their foundations.
21
In no time they were restored to the mixed comforts of 131 Twenty-fourth Avenue.
The doctor had ordered Ansel not to return to work yet, but the medical bills began arriving,
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and his immediate plunge back into the rat race of making a living in photography seemed their only financial hope. Life resumed as miserably as before.
Virginia, as was her wont, simmered and stewed for the next few years. She might not have turned out to be Ansel’s dream girl, but then, he was no longer the romantic poet and musician with whom she had fallen in love. Photography did not impress her; photographers had been employed by her father her whole life, and she had never seen much merit in what they did.
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In snapshots taken during these years, her mouth, so soft and shy in earlier photographs, has begun its downward journey, its corners set low in resignation. Virginia, who for years had patiently listened to Ansel’s admonishments, now could not stand to hear them.
24
The rumor mill busily continued to churn out stories of Ansel’s transgressions, not just with Patsy, but Virginia never took any of it seriously because in her experience he was not very good in bed and did not have much of a sexual appetite. She was quite certain that he had not consummated his relationship with Patsy. There was a part of Virginia that always loved Ansel, primarily for his mind, which she considered his best feature.
25
Patsy could not help but overhear various women at different social occasions discussing Ansel, whom they all agreed was notorious for his many liaisons; their gossip chilled her. It was her belief that Virginia condoned his wandering eye because he would stay in their marriage only if she allowed him this freedom.
26
By the time I began working for Ansel, in 1979, the quiet buzz was that Ansel had once had a torrid affair with one Patsy English. Mystery is best applied to fiction, so I asked her if she had slept with Ansel, and if so, whether she had become pregnant. I knew she was telling the truth when she responded with a quick laugh and said, “Well, if I did, it would have had to have been the Virgin birth!” Of Ansel’s decision to remain with Virginia, Patsy succinctly said, “Ansel did not have the courage to leave her.”
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Patsy still had
The White Tombstone
hanging on her living room wall when I visited in 1994.
Patsy met photographer Nathan Farbman in 1938, and they were married in November of that year. Her photography training served her well, as she first assisted “Farb” (her nickname for him) and then, when he went off to war, took his place for such clients as the Matson Line. In peacetime, Farb was hired full-time by
Life
, where his credit line read “Nat Farbman,” and Patsy was employed as a stringer. They had three sons and traveled widely, enjoying prolonged overseas assignments. Edward Steichen selected six of Nat’s images (five of them from the former Bechuanaland, now Botswana) for his landmark 1955 exhibition and book at MoMA,
The Family of Man
.
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About every ten years, Patsy Farbman would pay a visit to Ansel and Virginia, as they kept faint track of each other’s lives. She felt lucky to have wed Farb and not Ansel. It saddened her to find, when she visited Ansel in the 1960s, that his most graceful feature, his hands, were distorted by arthritis, the ends of his fingers bent almost perpendicular to their joints.
29
Ansel and Virginia’s marriage never truly healed. Ansel centered his life on his San Francisco house and studio, a distanced father to his son and daughter, who were raised by their mother in Yosemite. In early 1937, still struggling with the demons of family versus passion, Ansel was plagued by nightmares of desolate emptiness.
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The emotional and physical depression that had claimed him the previous December continued to hold him tightly in its cold grip for two years more. To top it off, financial ruin loomed as his important eight-year relationship with YP&CC, a critical source of income, came to an end.
If Albert Bender had given Ansel the fateful nudge toward a career in photography, during the years of the Great Depression it was YP&CC that kept his dream alive. In 1925, the feud between the two major Yosemite concessionaires (the Yosemite National Park Company and the Curry Company) had ended with their merger. While a handful of small businesses, such as Best’s Studio, managed to hang on, YP&CC established a near monopoly on tourist services in the park.
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