At the Strangers' Gate Page 13

  Then down the hall, toward the place where the garden would have been in a normal Upper East Side townhouse—I didn’t see the sanctum sanctorum on that first morning, but would be inside it many times after—was the studio itself, filled, somehow, with foggy gray light and a one-page “seamless” hung from the ceiling behind: the wide page of paper, neutral or pure white, that produced his signature pure white backgrounds. His usual camera was an old-fashioned twelve-by-eight—the camera that Mathew Brady had used to photograph Lincoln and the Civil War. Much had already been written, as much would be written later, about this choice—about the fine grain, and the antique referents, and the rest. But when I asked him about it, he said, with a look of wonder that smart people can be so stupid: “It’s so I’m not behind the camera. I can hold the release in my hand while I talk to whomever I’m photographing.” It was one more clue that the processes of art were less mediated metaphysically by formal tricks, and rested more obviously on human urgencies, than I had been taught at school. “To me Art’s subject is the human clay / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cézanne’s apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier,” I knew Auden had written, and I had memorized it. But what I hadn’t known, yet, was that even for Cézanne the apple would only matter if it called up a breast in the painter’s mind. Art’s subject was always the human clay; if it looked like anything else, it was always because you were missing the most obvious thing about it.

  He was a tiny man—but he didn’t seem tiny to me, because, being a short man myself, I was half a head shorter than he was, with the extra half-head being supplied by his thick and silvered and black hair, swept back, as Saul Steinberg would say, “like a circus pony.” He was a tiny man, though, where I was merely a small one. Tininess radiated through him, like a condition, instead of being compressed as an inadequacy. He had delicate features, delicate hands, thin legs, and quick-hitting feet, always ready to dance. I am peasant-built, short-legged and barrel-chested. Yet, at the time I met him, when I was twenty-five and he forty years older, we were somehow exactly the same size, so that, in years to come, when I had an interview to give or dinner to attend, I would borrow one of his beautiful linen suits—double-breasted but cut narrow, so that it had a nonvoluminous effect, cross-buttoned but still slim—and wear it. (“How do you keep it from becoming creased?” I asked once, a natural accumulator of grease stains and folds and lines. “You sit very, very still in the taxi,” he said sternly.)

  His voice had an authority and a depth that his delicate form belied. I found it thrilling, because it was the same educated Jewish voice that I recognized from Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts—the voice I had come to New York to hear. It was the sound of wise and educated but entirely cosmopolitan New Yorkers. Bernstein, of course, was only latterly a New Yorker, Bostonian really, but it was the accent of a coast and of a buoyant time, the forties, and you heard it still in the most unusual places, in interviews with Alan Jay Lerner or Arthur Laurents. It was, in plain English, the sound of educated Jewry born in the twenties, raised through the hard thirties—Dick, I would learn, as a boy still sneaked down every night to the basement to look at the stationery of his father’s bankrupt department store, Avedon’s Fifth Avenue—and flourishing in unimagined possibility and accomplishment in the forties and fifties.

  Then, striking the rocks in the sixties, some of its speakers foundered for good, and were left with bitterness and nostalgia, while a very few had made a new style and a new way in the midst of change. He had found that new style, but his voice hadn’t changed as he had. His was an “r”-less dialect—my wife’s name came out forever as “Maaahtha”—but it wasn’t the dropped “r” of “New Yawk” cab drivers and Ralph Kramden. For the absence of consonants in his voice was met by an overcharge of humming vowels, short vowels made long—it was not merely “Mahtha” but “Maaahtha”! It was a big voice, not “ringing,” as in a bad novel, but hoarse and resonant—it had all of the 1940s in it, a moment when artistic-minded American Jews suddenly found themselves not only unembarrassed but empowered. It was, in his mind, the Gershwin sound. (Dick grew up on East Eighty-sixth Street, around the corner from where we live now, and that name, “the Gershwins,” contained the whole of his aspiration. Not music alone but a whole way of life was entangled, in ways I still don’t entirely understand, in the name “Gershwin,” for him a sound as thrilling as the sound of “the Guermantes” and “Parma” were for Proust.)

  He was effortlessly elegant—and even as I write those words down, I see him grimace at them. Though a hero and an “icon” of fashion, he hated that kind of talk and called it, lovingly but lucidly, “Fash-wan.” He disliked both the camp world of fashion and the French emphasis on “chic.” His beloved French collaborator of many years, the editor Nicole Wisniak, he loved in part for her want of ordinary French chic and its replacement by French hyperbole. (A bad meal for her was a massacre, a bad play a catastrophe, a bad hour a nightmare. The hyperbole wasn’t hysterical. It made the ordinary seem amazing.) He loved fashion as a simple form of manners, a way of being courteous to others by being pleasing oneself, or else, as a form of adult dress-up, a way of aspiring to a more romantic way of living. He liked beautiful and strange objects because they expressed the strangeness of the human condition. All the usual “amusing” and “charming” and “elegant” crap he disliked.

  On that first afternoon, he showed Pope and me his new book, as he always showed everyone everything—not grand and distant, but intimate and peering, leering, right over your shoulder. As he turned the pages, he twitched nervously, waited for you to say the right thing. He smelled faintly, richly of limes.

  The pressure of his superintending presence was too much for poor Pope, who couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Trained in such performances, I pressed my MoMA lunchtime improvisational button.

  “It’s so much about…August Sander,” I tried, allusively.

  “Yes!” he said. It was, if not the secret woid of Groucho Marx, at least not the wrong thing said. “I love Sander—that Germanic, secretive, creepy thing. Sander is all over it.” This was encouraging, like playing a game of hot and cold and being told that you were getting warmer.

  The pages turned, stigmata of anxiety etched between the eyes of every one of his subjects—these drifters and slaughterhouse workers. The effect was ravishing, though I had my doubts—I have them still—whether the actual American West of the mid-eighties was not more truly composed of fast-food workers and Latina domestics and insurance brokers and assistant managers at rental-car dealers outside Phoenix than by these tragic Sam Shepard characters. But, beyond the unsmiling poise, the graphic authority and emotional vibration were overwhelming. It would be years before I fully understood that all of them were citizens of Avedonia, his own made-up land, created, like all artistic universes, from a handful of memories extended outward until they became the archetypes of his creation. It was a world as distinct as Francis Bacon’s, or Beatrix Potter’s, or William Faulkner’s, and as essentially mythological: the journalistic basis was barely nodded to, and then he was making up his characters.

  Encouraged by the Sander hit, I think I mentioned Shepard, and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, and I may have thrown in a reference to Goya, just for good measure. He started like a man with electrodes attached and activated at hidden spots of his torso—he twitched and reacted more actively than anyone I have ever seen. He seemed to risk a heart attack with every incoming allusion.

  His degree of awkwardness and elegance combined—the boyish and lopsided walk, the shy grin, the oscillation between severity and sweetness, his comically large glasses shrewdly recognized to be more becoming than more conventionally becoming ones—gave me some new idea of what real elegance was, not arid and classical, but a series of spontaneities. I felt all that within fifteen minutes.

  We chatted for a few minutes more, and I mentioned, in passing, the avant-garde director André Gregory, whom
I had worked with as a boy actor.

  “Oh, you know André,” he said, with careless, mischievous complicity. “He’ll call in the middle of a sitting, and you’re sure it’s about Chekhov, but it’s where had we gotten the William Greenberg’s coconut cake.” I didn’t know that, but I liked the note of familiarity, Chekhov sliding into coconut cake. (Greenberg’s, I would learn, was a not terribly good Upper East Side bakery around which Dick’s generation had an almost erotic fixation. Sinatra had sent a coconut cake from there once to Ava Gardner in Europe, and she had torn it apart, looking for the ring. Sinatra, Dick explained, intended only, good Hoboken boy that he was, for it to be eaten.)

  I went back to my office and worked. The phone rang.

  “Adam!” the voice rasped at the other end. “It’s Dick. Can you come for dinner tonight?”

  I was startled, shocked now, too—and, God forgive me, a little suspicious. Gay pickups happened occasionally in my life—I was cute without being beautiful—and I had learned to deflect them, mostly by being doltishly unaware of their content. (I wasn’t feigning doltish unawareness; it had begun as genuine doltishness, and then itself became a manner and, I suppose, a mask. Curiously, the invitations never happened at the magazine, where I was respected as the house heterosexual. Or maybe it’s just that no one tries to convert the Shabbos goy.) Martha was out of town, up in Canada with her mother, working on a documentary. So I went up to Seventy-fifth Street for the second time that day. This time I rang the bell at the smaller door. It buzzed open, and I faced a high, steep staircase.

  I would climb those stairs, with wife and friends and, eventually, babies and then children, so many times in the next twenty years, that to try to recapture my first sense of it now is difficult. It beckoned you to ascend. There were beautiful white cards—his day and night schedule for the next day—placed on several steps, and at the top, barely visible, a pair of small feet in small boots (boots from John Lobb in London, I learned later, bought decades before, and kept in perfect polished shape).

  He embraced me, not awkwardly at all, and then he led me into the most beautiful room I had ever seen. Some rooms, like the Blue Room, we think of as beautiful, or I had been taught to think of as beautiful, because of their being well put together, a form of austerity perfectly arranged. This was a room devoted to overcharge and extravagance and personal iconography, private symbolism.

  Can I describe it adequately, or at all? Let me try. It became my favorite room, and the pattern of my own later organization of existence, my template of the best way to live. The walls were lined with soft white fabric, onto which you could pin up any image, a changing small circus of images that had snagged on his mind, and that he had torn or raggedly cut from magazines and newspapers and postcards. They were neither conventionally lovely nor tabloid-odd but informed by a distinct sensibility that knew exactly where the beautiful intersected the strange. There were his heroes. There was a torn-off cover of the Post, with Salinger bearing down on a photographer; Chaplin out of character, as romantic young poet, curly hair and open smile; an eerily vindictive and determined Van Gogh baby; Brodovitch, his mentor, elegantly sorting photographic prints on a tilted easel. Movement everywhere: a Minoan diver falling through air; a Remington chief pointing a bow and arrow; a Fra Angelico angel, as chromatically plumed as a peacock, rushing the news of the Annunciation to a still-startled Virgin, and then, among them, anonymous athletes caught sliding into second, or suspended over a balance beam and pinwheeling through space—or perhaps a dancer leaping from a found stage into unseen wings, or a fullback caught in full-frontal horizontality flying toward a first down, or a postcard of Astaire in air, knowing body and naïve smile. There was even a tabloid photograph of a bank robber, caught in a security camera’s gaze, striding balletically toward the exit, holding gun and hostage. A world turning and alight and alive. I peered discreetly and tried to find the line that connected them all—and the even more extravagant line that must connect these found images to the stoic and severe black-and-white portraiture of his own that lined the other side of the long room. It was as dense as a Victorian living room and its density seemed a reproach to modernist austerity. What did it mean?…

  Then, on the far wall, a long table, white Formica, with a forest of blooming foliage at one end, and steel shelves on the other, and these filled with bright ceramic plates from Siena. A sink and stove stood behind them, unashamedly busy. Silver candlesticks, Baroque and polished, clustered on the table. We lit them for dinner to beautiful and almost comically religious effect. I suppose I was still in the spell of my strange family, who imagined modernist severity to be the proper accompaniment to modernist accomplishment. In truth, I learned later, it was a design for living that he had absorbed from the studio arrangements of the great artists who had still lived in France in the 1940s. The neatly framed pictures and gray flokati rugs and Breuer and Mies chairs—that whole Bauhaus order—they regarded as hopelessly vulgar and bourgeois. Instead, there were books piled horizontally on books, pictures left in their frames on the floor leaning up against the wall, tiny bijoux placed on side tables, pictures hung asymmetrically up, one skiing above the other. The aristocratic and the absentminded, it seemed, went hand in hand in these rooms: if you showed too much pride in the beautiful things you owned, you must not have owned many for long.

  His motive for asking me up for dinner, I soon realized, couldn’t have been simpler—on the surface at least, where motives actually first move us—or more touching. He wanted a friend to talk with about books and pictures. The people who made books and pictures, whom he knew too well, wanted to talk about everything else except books and pictures—preferred to talk about real estate and advances and gallery owners’ and publishers’ perfidies. Twenty years later, I would have been in the same condition, but at that point I didn’t know enough not to know enough, hadn’t gotten enough experience to talk about my own experience in preference to other people’s versions of their experience that we call art. “Intellectuals don’t like to talk about ideas. And art historians never talk about art,” he said plaintively and openly. He had made his life among them, and it was true: the intellectuals gossiped, with a malicious voracity that Irish washerwomen would have regarded as unduly small-minded, while the art historians, who liked his company for the glamour of it, engaged in broad, airy generalities when they talked over dinner—his whiteness, they would tell him, was like the minimalist background in Robert Ryman’s paintings, which it wasn’t—as they patronized him genially over his own grilled swordfish.

  Instead, we talked about Cartier-Bresson (“He’s the Tolstoy of photography,” he said with the authority of one who can say things like that). Diane Arbus, he said, was sort of “spooky,” rather belying the notion that they had been particularly close. We talked about Velázquez’s popes looking like CEOs. “Aren’t masterpieces wonderful?” he burst out happily after a while. “Why don’t we go to the Frick this weekend. It’s been years since I’ve looked at those Whistlers. They changed my life when I was twelve. Whistler and Fred Astaire were the two greatest influences on my life.” It made instant sense: the dandified, nocturnal, high-minded elegance, mixed with an American nervosity and restlessness and lightning grace. A small boy seeing Whistler while trying to tap-dance. Perhaps his work was no more—or less—complicated than that. Judgments that were always original and occasionally profound—like the one about Cartier-Bresson, a perfect aphorism—mixed with boyish enthusiasm for the simple existence of art. This mix of awkward and elegant was, I suppose, the essence of his charm, for charm is always simply courtesy offered spontaneously, the gracious thing offered as though it were the obvious one. (Cary Grant is the most charming of actors because his wit is always offered as aplomb, simple and self-evident, imperturbable in the face of every incident.)

  So I witnessed that night a love of art, and a hatred of pretense, and I sensed another quality I could not yet quite name but was intuiting, and that I would later think of a
s “aristocratic,” although he was a Jewish kid whose father was a failed haberdasher. Its essence was an adaptation of manners to the moment for the emotional ease of those involved—a readiness to let oneself look silly in pursuit of a social occasion, a knowledge that the spontaneous adjustment of self to circumstances was what the good life meant. Middle-class people knew rules, but aristocratic ones grasped the spirit of generosity the rules had been meant to codify—they broke them in order to restore their true purpose.

  So, once, at a meaningless social occasion, I saw Dick, meeting an old hairdresser who had been with him on many shoots and who was clearly badly ill. “Ara,” he said. “How are you?” And then, after only a moment, “You look terrible!” The wrong thing to say was the right thing to express, and the friend broke down with a weak grateful smile for the awkward empathetic gesture. His favorite story—he told me that first night, and I would help him write it down for many staged purposes eventually—was about how horribly out of place he had felt as a young photographer at the table of Jean Renoir, the great French filmmaker, who had a long table where old friends gathered. Renoir took him aside and said, “It is not what is said that matters; it’s the feelings that cross the table.” The simple dictum seemed to Dick the essence of humanity. Brodovitch, he also told me that night, had given one last class and had said…nothing. I anticipated that this was to be taken as a great Zen gesture, and was already nodding in appreciation—but he made a disappointed face: it was rude, and showed a lack of feeling for the students. Aristocratic disdain for the fixed decorum of life was always essential; coldhearted contempt for other people’s feelings was always wrong. It was a complex formula, a practice that you had to practice.