Portraits and Observations (35 page)

The telephone was signaling. Its racket seemed to rouse him from a daze; he stared about, as though he’d wakened in an unknown room, then smiled wryly, then whispered, “Damn, damn, damn,” as his hand lurched toward the telephone. “Sorry,” he told Murray. “I was just going to call you … No, he’s leaving now. But look, man, let’s call it off tonight. It’s after one. It’s nearly two o’clock … Yeah … Sure thing. Tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, I’d put on my overcoat and was waiting to say goodnight. He walked me to the door, where I put on my shoes. “Well,
sayonara
,” he mockingly bade me. “Tell them at the desk to get you a taxi.” Then, as I walked down the corridor, he called, “And listen! Don’t pay too much attention to what I say. I don’t always feel the same way.”

In a sense, this was not my last sight of him that evening. Downstairs, the Miyako’s lobby was deserted. There was no one at the desk, nor, outside, were there any taxis in view. Even at high noon the fancy crochet of Kyoto’s streets had played me tricks; still, I set
off through the marrow-chilling drizzle in what I hoped was a homeward direction. I’d never before been abroad so late in the city. It was quite a contrast to daytime, when the central parts of the town, caroused by crowds of fiesta massiveness, jangle like the inside of a
pachinko
parlor, or to early evening—Kyoto’s most exotic hours, for then, like night flowers, lanterns wreathe the side streets, and resplendent geishas, with their white ceramic faces and their ballooning lacquered wigs strewn with silver bells, their hobbled wiggle-walk, hurry among the shadows toward meticulously tasteful revelries. But at two in the morning these exquisite grotesques are gone, the cabarets are shuttered; only cats remained to keep me company, and drunks and red-light ladies, the inevitable old beggar-bundles in doorways, and, briefly, a ragged street musician who followed me playing on a flute a medieval music. I had trudged far more than a mile when, at last, one of a hundred alleys led to familiar ground—the main-street district of department stores and cinemas. It was then that I saw Brando. Sixty feet tall, with a head as huge as the greatest Buddha’s, there he was, in comic-paper colors, on a sign above a theater that advertised
The Teahouse of the August Moon
. Rather Buddha-like, too, was his pose, for he was depicted in a squatting position, a serene smile on a face that glistened in the rain and the light of a street lamp. A deity, yes; but more than that, really, just a young man sitting on a pile of candy.

(with Richard Avedon)

Richard Avedon is a man with gifted eyes. An adequate description; to add is sheer flourish. His brown and deceivingly normal eyes, so energetic at seeing the concealed and seizing the spirit, pursuing the flight of a truth, a mood, a face, are the important features: those, and his born-to-be absorption in his craft, photography, without which the unusual eyes, and the nervously sensitive intelligence supplying their power, could not dispel what they distillingly imbibe. For the truth is, though loquacious, an unskimping conversationalist, the sort that zigzags like a bee ambitious to de-pollen a dozen blossoms simultaneously, Avedon is not, not very, articulate: he finds his proper tongue in silence, and while maneuvering a camera—his voice, the one that speaks with admirable clarity, is the soft sound of the shutter forever freezing a moment focused by his perception.

He was born in New York, and is thirty-six, though one would not think it: a skinny, radiant fellow who still hasn’t got his full growth, animated as a colt in Maytime, just a lad not long out of college. Except that he never went to college, never, for that matter, finished high school, even though he appears to have been rather a child prodigy, a poet of some talent, and already, from the time he was ten and the owner of a box camera, sincerely embarked on his life’s labor: the walls of his room were ceiling to floor papered with pictures torn from magazines, photographs by Muncaczi and Steichen and Man Ray. Such interests, special in a child, suggest that he was not only precocious but unhappy; quite happily he says he was: a veteran at running away from home. When he failed to gain a high-school diploma, his father, sensible man, told him to “Go ahead! Join the army of illiterates.” To be contrary, but not altogether disobedient, he instead joined the Merchant Marine. It was under the auspices of this organization that he encountered his first formal photographic training. Later, after the war, he studied at New York’s New School for Social Research, where Alexey Brodovitch, then Art Director of the magazine
Harper’s Bazaar
, conducted a renowned class in experimental photography. A conjunction of worthy teacher with worthy pupil: in 1945, by way of his editorial connection, Brodovitch arranged for the professional debut of his exceptional student. Within the year the novice was established; his work, now regularly appearing in
Harper’s Bazaar
and
Life
and
Theatre Arts
, as well as on the walls of exhibitions, was considerably discussed, praised for its inventive features, its tart insights, the youthful sense of movement and blood-coursing aliveness he could insert in so still an entity as a photograph: simply, no one had seen anything exactly comparable, and so, since he had staying power, was a hard worker, was, to sum it up, seriously gifted, very naturally he evolved to be, during the next decade, the most generously remunerated, by and large successful American photographer of his
generation, and the most, as the excessive number of Avedon imitators bears witness, aesthetically influential.

“My first sitter,” so Avedon relates, “was Rachmaninoff. He had an apartment in the building where my grandparents lived. I was about ten, and I used to hide among the garbage cans on his back stairs, stay there hour after hour listening to him practice. One day I thought I must: must ring his bell. I asked could I take his picture with my box camera. In a way, that was the beginning of this book.”

Well, then, this book. It was intended to preserve the best of Avedon’s already accomplished work, his observations, along with a few of mine. A final selection of photographs seemed impossible, first because Avedon’s portfolio was too richly stocked, secondly because he kept burdening the problem of subtraction by incessantly thinking he must: must hurry off to ring the doorbell of latter-day Rachmaninoffs, persons of interest to him who had by farfetched mishap evaded his ubiquitous lens. Perhaps that implies a connective theme as regards the choice of personalities here included, some private laurel-awarding system based upon esteem for the subject’s ability or beauty; but no, in that sense the selection is arbitrary, on the whole the common thread is only that these are some of the people Avedon happens to have photographed, and about whom he has, according to his calculations, made valid comment.

However, he does appear to be attracted over and again by the mere condition of a face. It will be noticed, for it isn’t avoidable, how often he emphasizes the elderly; and, even among the just middle-aged, unrelentingly tracks down every hard-earned crow’s-foot. In consequence there have been occasional accusations of malice. But, “Youth never moves me,” Avedon explains. “I seldom see anything very beautiful in a young face. I do, though: in the downward curve of Maugham’s lips. In Isak Dinesen’s hands. So much has been written there, there is so much to be read, if one
could only read. I feel most of the people in this book are earthly saints. Because they are obsessed. Obsessed with work of one sort or another. To dance, to be beautiful, tell stories, solve riddles, perform in the street. Zavattini’s mouth and Escudero’s eyes, the smile of Marie-Louise Bousquet: they are sermons on bravado.”

One afternoon Avedon asked me to his studio, a place ordinarily humming with hot lights and humid models and harried assistants and haranguing telephones; but that afternoon, a winter Sunday, it was a spare and white and peaceful asylum, quiet as the snow-made marks settling like cat’s paws on the skylight.

Avedon was in his stocking-feet, wading through a shiny surf of faces, a few laughing and fairly afire with fun and devil-may-care, others straining to communicate the thunder of their interior selves, their art, their inhuman handsomeness, or faces plainly mankindish, or forsaken, or insane: a surfeit of countenances that collided with one’s vision and rather stunned it. Like immense playing cards, the faces were placed in rows that spread and filled the studio’s vast floor. It was the final collection of photographs for the book; and as we gingerly paraded through this orchard of prunings, warily walked up and down the rows (always, as though the persons underfoot were capable of crying out, careful not to step on a cheek or squash a nose), Avedon said: “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is, how would you say, well, the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may be simply my own.” He cupped his chin, his gaze darting from Dr. Oppenheimer to Father Darcy: “I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I just could work with my eyes alone!” Presently he pointed to three prints of the same photograph, a portrait of Louis Armstrong, and asked which I preferred; to me they were triplets until he demonstrated their differences, indicated how one was a degree darker than the other,
while from the third a shadow had been removed. “To get a satisfactory print,” he said, his voice tight with that intensity perfectionism induces, “one that contains all you intended, is very often more difficult and dangerous than the sitting itself. When I’m photographing, I immediately know when I’ve got the image I really want. But to get the image out of the camera and into the open is another matter. I make as many as sixty prints of a picture, would make a hundred if it would mean a fraction’s improvement, help show the invisible visible, the inside outside.”

We came to the end of the last row, stopped, surveyed the gleaming field of black and white, a harvest fifteen years on the vine. Avedon shrugged. “That’s all. That’s it. The visual symbols of what I want to tell are in these faces. At least,” he added, beginning a genuine frown, the visual symbol of a nature too, in a fortunate sense, vain, too unrequited and questing to ever experience authentic satisfaction, “at least I hope so.”

Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors, some of whom, to be sure—for one, John Huston—served their apprenticeship as studio scribblers. Huston has said: “I became a director because I couldn’t watch any longer how my work as a writer was ruined.” Though that could not have been the only reason: this lanky, drawling dandy, who might be a cowboy as imagined by Aubrey Beardsley, has in abundance that desire to command Zavattini disavows.

Huston’s work and the manner of man he happens to be are inseparably related, his films silhouette the contours of his private
mindscape (as do Eisenstein’s, Ingmar Bergman’s, Jean Vigo’s) in a way not usual to the profession, movies being, the majority of them, objective operations unrevealing of their maker’s subjective preoccupations; therefore it is perhaps permissible to mention in personal style Huston’s stylized person—his riverboat-gambler’s suavity overlaid with roughneck buffooning, the hearty mirthless laughter that rises toward but never reaches his warmly crinkled and ungentle eyes, eyes bored as sunbathing lizards; the determined seduction of his confidential gazes and man’s man camaraderie, all intended as much for his own benefit as that of his audience, to camouflage a refrigerated void of active feeling, for, as is true of every classic seducer, or charmer if you prefer, the success of the seduction depends upon himself never feeling, never becoming emotionally inserted: to do so would mean forfeiting control of the situation, the “picture”; thus, he is a man of obsessions rather than passions, and a romantic cynic who believes that all endeavor, virtuous or evil or simply plodding, receives the same honorarium: a check in the amount of zero. What has this to do with his work? Something. Consider the plot of the first, still best, Huston-directed film,
The Maltese Falcon
, in which the motivation is contributed by a valuable bijou in the shape of a falcon, a treasure for which the principal participants betray each other and murder and die—only to discover the falcon not to be the jeweled and genuine item but a solid lead fake, a cheat. This happens to be the theme, the dénouement, of most of Huston’s films, of
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, in which the prospector’s hoard of killed-over gold is blown away by the wind, of
The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage, Beat the Devil
, and, of course, of
Moby-Dick
, that deadend statement on man’s defeat. Indeed, Huston seems seldom to have been attracted to material that did not accept human destiny as an unhappy joke, a confidence ploy with no pea under any pod; even the scripts he wrote
as a young man—by example,
High Sierra
and
Juarez
—confirm his predilection. Like much art, his art, and he can be an artist when he chooses, is in great degree the compensatory result of a flaw in the man: that emotional lacuna that causes him to see life as a cheat (because the cheater is cheated, too) is the irritant that births the pearl; and his payment has been to be, in human terms, himself something of a Maltese falcon.

Shortly before Chaplin departed from America in 1952, a leave-taking of deplorable permanence, he asked Avedon to make his passport portrait, a chore Chaplin proceeded, in the midst of the sitting, to satirize, and the product of his clowning, a horned Pan-sprite mocking the spoilsport universe of governmental borders (in territory and thought), is surely the sort of picture the lovable tramp would have pasted inside
his
passport: a nice eyebugger for boresome officials. It does amuse to remember the fadeout road of Chaplin’s silent days, the empty dusty vista down which, at the end of every adventure, the little bum recedingly sashayed, knapsack aboard: remember, and realize now where the road was awinding: of all places, to Switzerland! and that sorry knapsack, why, it was full of greenbacks! bullion to buy a marbled king-of-the-mountain abode above a lake blue as bluebirds, a Happy Ending bower where the revamped tramp, surrounded by the dotings of a beautiful waif-bride and seven beautiful waif-children, moseys about sniffing his beloved flowers. Which is as it should be (the person responsible for
City Lights, The Gold Rush, Modern Times
, creations final and perfect as a lion, as water, is perfectly final, deserves—on this earth here and now—bliss), and is almost, but isn’t: because, in recent years,
Chaplin has permitted petulance to absorb him—he believes himself, perhaps rightly, to have been maltreated by America, its press, State Department, and so paces his villa garrulously fuming: which is his privilege, still it is regrettable, for it is wasteful: his last film,
A King in New York
, an irritable poking at things U.S.A., was entirely waste-motion—was, unless it served to drain the gall out of his craw.