When We Were Brilliant

1980

Flashbulbs popped, leaving bright blue holes in my vision. The museum hall seethed with elegant women pinching champagne flutes and men biting into savory pastries, crumbs from which were flaking onto their satin tuxedo lapels. The rustling of their finery, the jingling of their bracelets, and the snapping of their lighters made it hard for me to hear the famous television reporter. I leaned closer.

"What is your secret, Ms. Arnold?"

I glanced away as she tipped the mic toward me. Which one?

I nudged my French twist, stuck with bobby pins like one of the voodoo dolls I'd photographed in Haiti. I'd yearned for my own museum exhibition all these years, and now, finally, that I had one-a grand one, in Brooklyn of all places-I was clamming up. You once told a radio announcer that you wanted to live the rest of your life in Brooklyn, and he'd laughed at you. People rarely took you seriously. Their mistake. You were a master at handling most situations you found yourself in, finessing them so effortlessly that few suspected your terror. What I wouldn't give to have your charm. Looking out over the crowd, primed for something juicy, I wondered, What would Marilyn do?

The sequins on my gown winked as I swallowed a laugh.

My interviewer tilted her head, with its famous cascade of honey-brown swoops. "Miss Arnold?" It came out more like Miss Awnold. Being from Boston, she dropped her Rs when she spoke, as had JFK, whom I'd met while photographing Jackie at their house. JFK-now there was a secret.

I exhaled. "There's no mystery, really, about how I get people to open up to me. All I do is try to involve them in the photograph, to make them realize, without actually telling them, that it's up to them to give me whatever they want to give me."

"You're saying you empower your subjects to be themselves?"

"That's a way of putting it. If you're careful with people, and if you respect their privacy, they will offer you a part of themselves that you can use. It has more to do with the relationship of the photographer to the subject than it has to do with anything else that might be happening."

She hitched up one side of her mouth. "You get your subjects to offer a part of themselves 'that you can use.' Would you say that you use people, then?"

Is this how it is to be on top? People always trying to trip you up, trying to catch you at your worst, as if one's worst is truly who one is? You would have had a snappy comeback.

"Maybe people are using me."

Oy! What a crab! I didn't even feel that way! I never had the light touch you had.

My interviewer's smile went even more crooked. If she were ever to be my subject, it would be interesting to photograph her with someone she loved, to see if that downward corner could come up. "Your In China photos"-she waved her hand toward the exhibition room-"have obviously struck a chord. I understand this is just the first of many shows you're to have across the country. Your fellow photographers have inducted you into the Photography Institute Hall of Fame. You've been nominated for a National Book Award."

It was about goddamn time. I was sixty-eight. I'd been photographing since my twenties, competing with the big boys and learning from the best of them, tramping across the face of the earth and putting myself in harm's way in hopes of capturing the beauty and villainy and wonder of life in this world. My shots were on magazine covers everywhere.

I said into the mic, "I'm humbled by these unlooked-for honors."

"What is your next project?"

"Now that I'm back in the States, I think I'll have a look around. I'd like to have the country of my birth sit for my camera. Do its portrait, so to speak."

My interviewer laughed. "Just a little assignment."

"I enjoy a challenge."

My interviewer paused. "About your Marilyn Monroe photos . . ."

The crowd went silent.

I drew in a breath. Really? Here? Now? Eighteen years since you left us, eighteen years in which I'd scraped my way to the top, and still the conversation always came around to you. Wasn't it enough that I couldn't go anywhere without seeing your face on newsstands or on TV? A poster of you was in the bathroom of the restaurant where I'd had lunch.

My interrogator was watching me. "Other than the photos that your agency, Magnum, published in Marilyn's lifetime, we've seen nothing from you about her since her passing." She tilted the mic back toward me.

"That's right."

"Have you any other photos?"

"Yes."

Seeing that I was being a tough nut, she became chipper in the way one does when coaxing a toddler to wear her mittens. "Tell us about Marilyn. What was she like? Weren't you two friends?"

Friends. I stared at the mic, fear boiling up through the cracks in my armor.

The crowd sensed my panic. They'd pounce if I didn't give them something. Got to throw the lions red meat, you used to say.

"I was always the camera, and she was always herself."

My inquisitor narrowed her eyes. Some red meat that was! But what was I supposed to say? How could one forced bleat begin to explain?

She kept up. "About those other photos of her . . . Are there many?"

Only hundreds. Everything about me, everything about you, had led up to and then flowed through them. "Next question," I said flatly.

No one ever said I had your grace.


I didn’t leave my party until close to midnight. As my taxi crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, I sank into my coat and looked out over the East River, where, in the glow of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, a tugboat pushed a barge heaped with coal. I’d just left the biggest event of my life, and my chest was roiling with loneliness. My family hadn’t come, for one, but it was more than that.

Why, after all this time, didn't I talk about you? I'd had good reason not to, once. But who was I keeping quiet for now?

Nearing the bridge, the barge glided with its burden of coal through the sparkling black water. It didn't even have an engine-the tug was doing all the work-but the barge, with its glittering mountain, was what one noticed. Yet only together could the two boats deliver the goods.

Your admirers, whose number only grew by the day-how you must love that!-were desperate for scraps of the girl they thought they knew. But they didn't know anything about you. Not like I did. The proof was in my photos-photos I'd kept buried away for such a long time.

My hair caught on my coat collar when I looked up at the blazing city. It illuminated the river-not with searchlights or floodlights but with the collected light of a million windows. To think that behind each one was someone with their own story of defeat or triumph or, likely, both. Our story began within that city, yours and mine, and there, after a decade, it ended, taking with it all its brilliance. Oh, to feel the warmth of that light again!

What would it hurt, really, to let myself remember?

1

1952

"Can you imagine?"

A girl's breathy voice sifted through the roar that was nearly levitating the drinks above the bar. Or maybe it was the cigarette smoke that almost held them aloft. The cloud of smoke and testosterone billowing through the 21 Club that night felt dense enough to stir the toy cars and planes that dangled from the ceiling like so many lost boyhoods.

The party was for the director John Huston, still sizzling after his success with The African Queen the previous year. It was being thrown by Robert Capa-Bob. My boss. No, my colleague. We were all equals at Magnum. . . . Oh, who was I kidding? I was a five-foot-zero newcomer with a three-year-old at home with an earache, and Bob was the most celebrated war photographer in the world. When he and his famous photographer friends Henri Cartier-Bresson, David "Chim" Seymour, and George Rodger formed a co-op to explore the postwar world, they needed a woman to appeal to "the females." Margaret Bourke-White was busy, Lee Miller had retired to the English countryside, and Dorothea Lange was running an art photography magazine. Hence me, with my single magazine credit, for my coverage of Black fashion shows in Harlem. The Magnum men were that hard up. Experienced photojournalists with two X chromosomes were as scarce as a girdle in a boardroom.

"Oh! It's going to be so creamy!"

Crushed together with Robert Capa-Bob-I was unable to turn to see the owner of the baby voice, let alone raise my camera. Bob's gaze wandered over my head, then stalled in the direction of a sweet scent infiltrating the haze: Chanel No. 5.

A hairy hand crowned with a gold signet ring extended past me to Capa. I was able to roll my gaze to its owner, Sam Shaw, as slick in his big-shouldered tweed sports coat with its white pocket square as the playboys in the movies for which he famously shot the stills. Rumpledly handsome Bob, on the other hand, wore a five-o'clock shadow and a borrowed suit coat that strained across his barrel chest. His battered bomber jacket from his war-correspondent years, if not his muddy helmet, hung in the cloakroom, a victim of the 21's dress code.

I looked down at my neat brown wool dress with its nice patent leather belt. What did my much-spot-cleaned, much-brushed, much-loved Saks Fifth Avenue dress-my only Saks Fifth Avenue dress, bought in the spirit of spending money to make money-say about me? I was a field mouse in a room of lions.

That had to change.

Capa-Bob-shook Sam's hand, his gaze still pinned behind me. "Sam." His smile was too wobbly to be meant for Sam-or any man, for that matter. I may have been serious about photographing people only for the past two years, but I could read faces. Maybe I had always been able to. The outsider's door prize.

"Miss Monroe, I presume?" Bob said. I twisted my neck to confirm: Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood's latest pinup girl, inflating out of her low-cut dress.

You.

"Oh yes!" you breathed. Your Crayola-blue eyes lit and widened, then melted into a smile.

Tough old Bob, he who had photographed the kinetic, watery hell of Omaha Beach on D-Day and the nightmare of the Battle of the Bulge, in which frozen men nestled like hatchlings in snowy foxholes, now squirmed and ducked before kissing your hand, which looked as plump and soft as a girl's. You were a girl, just twenty-five.

Sam Shaw's neat mustache skimmed his martini as he winked his hello to me, both acknowledging and dismissing me as a member of the brotherhood of the lens in a single twitch.

"Marilyn was telling me that Life plans a cover story," he said to Bob.

"Life magazine!" you cooed. "Can you imagine?"

I couldn't. Since when did minor starlets get Life covers? No offense, but somebody was sleeping with somebody.

"Congratulations," Bob said.

Sam splashed his drink on a guy's arm. Neither noticed. "She said that a Magnum man was going to shoot it."

"I wouldn't dream of anyone else," you cooed.

"Hey!" Sam cried. "I brought you to the party. What about me?"

"Oh, Samuel. You know I love you."

"So, who's the lucky guy?" he asked.

"Mr. Halsman," you breathed.

"Lucky dog," said Sam. "Feather in his cap."

A peacock plume on your bonnet, more like. Why were the studio stiffs pushing you so hard? As far as I knew, you'd had only minor roles since your big break in Huston's The Asphalt Jungle two years earlier. True, you'd burned like a single candle in that dark film noir, your presence jarringly bright in such a small part. It was strange how you alone glowed in the shadowy film. But snagging the cover of the biggest pictorial magazine in the country meant that you were someone. Or, as the studio boys well knew, it would make you someone if you weren't already. Same magic applied to the photographer who shot it, at least among editors. In an age in which magazines dictated what the public saw and believed, still photographers were to movie stars what honeybees were to flowers: symbiotic.

More men pushed into our circle. I found myself crowded to the outside, where I protected my camera from being crushed into my sternum. I gazed at the model train nearly grazing my boss's head. Why had I come to this party? Capa-Bob-knew this wasn't my scene. And though Dora, one of the Beat kids who lived in the apartment below mine, was as devoted a babysitter as she was a fan of jazz and stark poetry, my son had had a fever of 102 when I left. My husband had said he wouldn't be home until late-something about a business opportunity. I'd come only because Cap-Bob-insisted it would be good for me, as had my biggest fan, my husband, and, well, I admit, because I was curious about what made powerful people tick. What'd they have to do on their way up? What was so special about them?

Normally, I was more interested in people who lived outside the gaze of society-maybe because I'd grown up unseen, too. Knowing how being unvalued makes a person wary, I didn't take it for granted when the unseen let me in. I was honored, and grateful, when the designers and models in the Harlem shows allowed me backstage to photograph a realm that was invisible to those outside it. That was why I had become a photographer: to show the world something that it never would have seen had I not shot it.

But the thing about the unseen? No one wants to see them. I'd struggled to place the piece on the Harlem shows until, finally, a magazine in England took it, but its editors redid my captions, rewording my admiration into a racist screed. Thinking about it still makes me see red. I learned the hard way to insist upon approving the text that went with my pictures-not that editors would listen to a novice.

I freed my arm to signal to the bartender, a futile gesture from a minnow in a tank full of sharks. Two movie-studio-executive types elbowed in next to me. One jabbed his cigar toward you, right behind me, and growled to the other, in a smoker's ruined voice, "I want you to talk to this girl."