Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Next to viewing the sun setting over the western edge of America spread before his picture windows with martini in hand, Ansel’s most anticipated moment of each day was the arrival of the mailman in his little truck. This particular vehicle fortuitously possessed a set of squealing brakes that Ansel’s alert ears nearly always detected. If he was not in the darkroom, he would be out the door in a flash and hiking the short distance up the driveway to the huge mailbox, his treasure chest of news, offers, and enticements. Back in the house, protocol was observed: Ansel would hand everything over to Virginia, who would sort it on the coffee table into suitable piles, properly slit each envelope with an opener, and then pass each pile to its recipient.
A sucker for anything bearing a postage stamp, Ansel always entered the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes (although he never won) and once even filled out a very lengthy Scientology questionnaire that I begged him not to return. After he ignored my pleas, it took a few weeks and a number of firm answers to their dogged phone calls to convince the Scientologists that he did not want to become involved in their religion: he simply liked the process of answering questions.
The mail usually arrived shortly before lunch (punctually served between twelve and twelve-fifteen). On occasion, Ansel, newly sprung from a morning of darkroom duties, would stroll up to the mailbox on the off chance that the noisy brakes had finally been fixed on the mail truck. One such morning, Ansel discovered the mailbox empty save for a single slip of paper: a typewritten death threat warning him to stop his work to bring federal protection to Big Sur, or else!
Such ugly intimidation was entirely new to Ansel, and it sickened and also scared him. With this one, isolated incident, a central presumption of his life was destroyed; though he knew the world held evil people, they had never before entered his world. A modicum of the trust and innocence that had survived for all his eighty years evaporated through that one destructive gesture. Ansel turned the note over to the police, but they were never able to link it to anyone.
Although in the end nothing came of the threat, its effects nonetheless quickly reverberated throughout the household, which soon sprouted defenses familiar to many urban dwellers: every door and window was alarmed, with iron bars applied over the more vulnerable windows; pressure alarms were laid under rugs; and motion and infrared detectors blinked quietly from corners. But if the threat caused some changes in Ansel’s life, he never considered withdrawing from the fight for Big Sur; in fact, if anything, the episode only enforced his resolve.
Meanwhile, I kept plugging away at the autobiography. During my first years with Ansel, I spent all my spare time—which was not much, given the complicated circumstances—reading the thousands of letters accumulated by him, his parents, and Virginia. With amazing prescience, they had all saved everything he ever wrote, beginning with his first letters, at the age of twelve. Some were ordered neatly in files and others stashed in total chaos in a variety of boxes, including shoe; I learned to dig down to the very bottom of every closet. It took me more than a year to read through everything, but then I hit cruising speed: not only did I know what questions to ask Ansel, but I remembered enough of what had happened to jog his memory.
When the mounting pile of cassette tapes from our daily walks was transcribed by a typist, Ansel was not pleased with the results. He cared a great deal about the quality of the written word, and these spoken memoirs seemed too informal and offhand. But the making of the tapes did serve a purpose in convincing him that there could be no easy way out: he must indeed write his autobiography.
Most mornings when I arrived at work, a three-by-five card from Ansel would be waiting on my desk, often embellished with drawings and a variety of rubber-stamp imprints: a pig wearing Lolita-style sunglasses, a donkey braying, the nonsense term
Poot
, or PERSONAL in big red letters. As silly as their adornments appeared, the cards would concisely describe whatever was bothering him, whether it was his health, business, or his books. By nine, he had often already been at his desk and written for a while wrapped in a robe, and was now downstairs showering and dressing for the day. Without even seeing him, I could tell from the detailed cards on my desk what the day held in store. Picking up on his system, each night
I
began leaving
him
at least one three-by-five card inscribed with questions for the autobiography, which would provide a focus for his early thoughts.
Determined that writing must somehow be made less of a task for him, I convinced Ansel that we should buy two computer word processors, one for each of us. (This was in 1980, at the very beginning of the PC revolution.) Although Ansel was a gadget junkie, he was sure that he was too old a dog to learn such a new trick. Not so: he immediately took to his IBM Displaywriter, although he still used his typewriter for his steady stream of three-by-five cards.
Inevitably, there were repercussions. Ansel’s typewritten memos had become legendary at Polaroid, where they were regularly passed around, not only for the great ideas they sometimes contained but also for their ubiquitous and very funny typos. Correspondence produced on the new computer, with its built-in spelling checker, was met by long faces and yearning for Ansel’s messy, exuberant, error-filled missives of yore. At Polaroid, it was not seen as beneficial progress.
Ansel’s chosen title for the autobiography,
The Other Side of the Lens
, found no takers, as it had not in 1963 when he suggested it to Nancy Newhall for her biography of him. Playing with alliteration, a natural urge with the name Ansel Adams, I drew up a list of other possibilities. He finally gave me an “A” for
Ansel Adams: An Autobiography
, plain and simple.
As was expected by the AAPRT trustees, as well as by Little, Brown, I constructed an outline for the autobiography that was both simple and chronological (and that we rarely referred to or used). Since my outline was proving worthless, I quizzed Ansel further on how he conceived of the book’s structure. Time and again, he would only say, “Spokes of a wheel.” He could not verbalize more clearly what that meant; it was a question mark for him and for me.
I considered and reconsidered. He had taken part in many important events in both twentieth-century photography and the conservation movement, but he saw himself as having been only one player, and not necessarily the star, on a very large stage. He felt that it was essential to credit all of the others who he believed had contributed as substantially as he. Eureka! Although it now seems obvious, it was this realization that at last enabled me to see what he had in mind. This would not be a chronologically developed, traditional autobiography; instead, Ansel would be the hub of the story, with different events and people in his life being followed to their conclusion, their substance kept whole. We were both relieved at finally knowing where we were headed—now if only we could get there in time!
The maintenance of a routine was crucial to our chances of making any progress on the text, even though that routine was constantly being interrupted by Ansel’s other commitments. What with the Museum Sets and workshops and press interviews and Friends of Photography and Big Sur Foundation meetings and hospital stays, the autobiography was in limbo and then active and then in limbo again. It took all my determination to keep it alive and keep Ansel interested in it. He preferred projects that had a definite end in sight, normally completing books in a period of months; this one took much more sculpting, care, and time than had any before it.
Another major complication soon presented itself. As Robert Baker could have testified, there was no way to get Ansel to just sit down and write a chapter; he could produce only bits and pieces. With a measure of exasperation, his closest associates referred to his habit of “chasing rabbits”: one idea would prompt another and then another, and at the end the original question would remain unanswered. For the text of the autobiography, I had to get very specific with Ansel. I honed my daily questions to be answered in order—one, two, and three.
AA,
GROUP
f
.64—NEED MORE!
Members: Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, John Paul Edwards and You.
1. How was the name chosen?
2. Whose idea was it?
3. Who wrote the manifesto?
In the interest of science,
Me.
Sometimes the questions would provoke a torrent of words; at other times, as with the query about how the name Group
f
.64 had been chosen, Ansel’s memories were fuzzy. In such instances, I would dig up everything I could find on the subject, write it up, and place it on Ansel’s desk as a mini-refresher.
I learned, too, that some subjects normally considered essential to the telling of a life’s story were taboo. When it came to his personal life, Ansel had decided to take only the highest road; according to his autobiography, Dave Brower in retrospect was a swell guy, Virginia was his only romance, and his life had been one of total fulfillment.
An entire bonus book grew out of our work on the autobiography. Aware that people wanted to know the stories behind
Moonrise
,
Monolith
, and
Moon and Half Dome
, I outlined a description of the making of ten of his best-loved images for a chapter in the autobiography. Ansel found it easy to write and became so excited that he could not stop; what began as a chapter grew into
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs
, published in 1983. Since I was swamped as it was, Ansel brought in Robert, who had just finished the last book in the technical series,
The Print
, to pull things together. Voilà! We presented Little, Brown with an instant, unplanned book.
After a few years of our system of Q&A, I had a thick sheath of disconnected pages and paragraphs: the autobiography. I had previously disliked jigsaw puzzles, but it was obvious to me that I must now become accomplished at piecing together a multitude of segments into the whole of a written life. Ansel took heart as the book gained shape and substance, and the autobiography came to take priority over almost everything else. By the early spring of 1984, we had almost completed the manuscript.
Ansel had long observed the quitting time of five o’clock. As the hands of the old grandfather clock announced the hour, Virginia would begin setting up the bar. From the adjoining offices, we could hear the tinkle of ice as she filled the glass bucket and the thunk of the bottles as she laid out the usual libations: soft drinks, Scotch, bourbon (Jack Daniels), gin (Tanqueray), and vodka (a changing cast of characters as Ansel and I taste-tested our way through the world’s offerings). Formerly a Scotch and bourbon drinker, Ansel had now switched to vodka because it had less effect on his gout. Jim, a wine partisan, made sure that Ansel and Virginia were well supplied with an excellent selection of California chardonnays and cabernets.
Virginia preferred to mix her own gin-and-tonics, which consisted mostly of gin, diluted with only a thimble of tonic. Ansel loved vodka martinis, as did I. His treasured recipe came from the bartender at the Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he frequently stayed while working at Polaroid. Ansel took to carrying tiny cards with precise instructions printed on them that he presented to mixologists uninitiated in his drinking requirements: Drop broad strips of lemon peel into a glass of good vermouth and allow to marinate for a few days. Take a glass, fill with ice cubes, rub lemon peel about the rim and drop in. Pour vodka over all. The result: a very dry martini.
1
Decades earlier, Ansel had liked his martinis straight up, but more recently he had determined that a generous supply of ice prolonged his drinking pleasure.
The entire staff was welcome and usually expected to stay for a drink. Guests would soon begin arriving at the door to join the daily cocktail celebration. Ansel was always listed in the telephone book, but to avoid disturbing the workday, callers (both known and unknown) were generally asked to drop by at five.
Often the first visitor would be some young photographer, black portfolio box stuck under his or her arm, come to ask the great man for his blessing. Ansel would look at each print with measured care and offer praise wherever something praiseworthy could be found. He usually made only one stab at constructive criticism, knowing that any more than that would be too much.
Sometimes, however, Ansel’s humor would get the better of him, and pity the poor photographic supplicant who had to experience that. When Ted Orland was Ansel’s full-time photographic assistant, from 1972 to 1974, a wink from the boss during a print review was his clue to go into the workroom and return with an unmounted print of
Moonrise.
Following Ansel’s unwritten script, Ted would turn to the young photographer and exclaim, “Why, your photograph is much better than
Moonrise
!” And with that he would tear the
Moonrise
in half, stupefying the photographer. This trick never failed to elicit a huge belly laugh from Ansel, if usually just a nervous chuckle from his audience; of course, the ripped-up
Moonrise
had been a hopelessly damaged print.
2