From the Vault of Art Shay: Chicago Winners

Fifteen minutes after we met, McDonald\'s founder, and Riverwoods neighbor, Ray Kroc, said. \"I like the way you dance around with that camera, Art. How\'d you like to make some real money - dancing around my new McDonald\'s on Waukegan Road north of Lake Cook- right near your home?\" Kroc offered me the franchise for - let\'s say $90,000 - for five years. \"You\'ll make your investment back the first year. Talk to your wife and call me tomorrow.\" I knew I wasn\'t cut out for business, and Florence agreed. I called Ray back the next day and he understood, but he also went for my pitch to do his annual report that year. (It became a collectible, rare collaboration. Norman Rockwell did the cover, I did the inside of the \"book\".) Kroc liked the way I used movement in his cooks to illustrate their speed and efficiency. The guy who did get the franchise did pay his loan off within the year and now owns 15 franchises. This copyrighted \<em\>Time\<\/em\> magazine picture of Kroc munching a Big Mac in front of his first McDonald\'s in Des Plaines has sold 3,277 times all over the world.\r\n

I had suggested a story to \<em\>Fortune Magazine\<\/em\> on Henry Crown, who built Material Services and at one point owned the Empire State Building all by himself. Following Crown around with my Leica, I found myself in the office of superbanker Edward Eagle Brown. \"Take it easy on this guy,\" Crown said out loud. \"I owe him 16 million dollars.\" At which point, while backing up to get both men into the wide angle frame, I accidentally kicked Brown\'s 100-year-old spittoon. Both men laughed as if they\'d seen a great comic bit. Luckily the saliva and disinfectant settled down and, from then on, each time I photographed Crown again, he told the spittoon story. \"If that spittoon could speak,\" Crown muttered as we crossed La Salle Street, it would tell the story of Chicago\'s finances better than \<i\>Fortune\<\/i\> could.\"\r\n

Actor, comedian, philosopher, jazz expert and world class interviewer and commentator. Talking of her interview with Studs Terkel, Simone de Beauvoir said, \"It is like being denuded by a man so expert, you do not mind it.\" When he was 92 I watched Studs vault in a single step the 18-inch Olympian height the Chicago Public Library placed in the path he had to climb to be interviewed by Garrison Keillor. It was a pleasant duel between Chicago and Minneapolis folksiness. Kitsch as kitsch can. Like me, Studs was not a good businessman. I had the idea of putting his 10AM-11 WFMT interviews on cassettes for Drivers. An idea that a few months later, in California hands and using classic texts rather than interviews, became the very successful \"Books on Tape.\" Alas, Studs couldn\'t get permission to use his own tapes from the couple named Jacobs who owned the station and my then-publisher didn\'t believe there were enough people in cars who would rather hear intelligent discourse with authors, actors and politicos, than pop music. Studs crowned his career as an actor playing a shrewd journalist in the movie about the Chicago Black Sox, \<i\>Eight Men Out\<\/i\>.\r\n

Hugh Hefner called me up in late 1952. He liked some of my pictures in \<i\>Life\<\/i\>, was starting a magazine about Chicago (working title: \<i\>Chi\<\/i\>), he didn\'t have much money, but would I shoot for him. You betcha. But suddenly an English professor put out a \<i\>gehackte\<\/i\> Chicago magazine, just good enough before it failed, to drive Hef to his second choice - girls. He once told this story to his daughter Christie and her politician husband in my presence, and it brought tears to my eyes. My debut in \<i\>Playboy\<\/i\> was a WW II picture I\'d made of Ernest Hemingway- another early winner idol of mine who ended badly.\r\n

The year was 1956, and \<i\>Fortune\<\/i\> magazine had me intercept the 46-year-old John Bardeen at Midway Airport, where the recent Nobelist (for helping invent the transistor) , was halfway between lectures at Princeton and the U. of California. When I confessed I knew nothing of his recent Nobel prize, he whipped out a radio as big as a matchbox and focused on Studs Terkel perorating on WFMT. \"Studs says you\'re the smartest guy he ever met,\" I said. Bardeen replied, \"I love Studs but he talks too much.\" But two or three scientists would tell \<i\>Fortune\<\/i\> the same thing of Bardeen. \"I built the small radio with something called a transistor I helped develop.\" he said. \"Lots of applications.\" Then he explained some of them to me. Duh. We shoulda bought stock in him, my wife suggested too late. \"We meet again,\" John said in 1972 when I photographed him once more for \<i\>Fortune\<\/i\>, for winning a second Nobel, this time for superconductivity of electronics in super-cool atmosphere. I thought of how invisible an achievement with the public is a second Nobel and the fuss we make when a hitter wins the MVP award a second time. I guess it\'s because everyone knows how hard it is to bat against big league pitching. And physics is-er- something like rocket science. Tough as brain surgery. Looking for his card so I could send him some pictures, Bardeen shuffled requests from China, Russia, England, India, Pakistan and Brazil for his work. He couldn\'t find the card, but I eventually reached him at the UIC campus, where an admiring student had presented him with a street sign bearing his name that she stole one dark 3a.m. of a budding physicist\'s morning.\r\n

I recently sent the amazing Roger Ebert a print of this frame that Jon and Abra Anderson used in their \<i\>Chicagoland\<\/i\> magazine. It was a story on \"The Unnockables.\" He loved it. Quite possibly one of the five top picture critics who ever lived, I take special pride in a blurb he wrote about several of my pictures: \"Art Shay\'s photography shakes you up, sets you down gently, pats you on the head, and then kicks you in the ass.\" No maker of pictures who has tried to go a step beyond the horde of picture maker, ever had a finer obituary-to-come. I once wrote him about a slight error he had made in a review of my old Flight Commander, actor Jimmy Stewart in \<i\>Rear Window\<\/i\>. \"The sunovabitch does everything with that 400mm lens on the reflex box except one - I think he only took one picture the whole time - of a dog being buried.\" Ebert called back to acknowledge that the great fictional photo-journalist in thrall to Grace Kelly had merely used his cumbersome rig as a spyglass. He\'d have been better off with binoculars.

I was an Oprah fan from the get-go, and for a while did most of her pictures because I was ABC-TV\'s still man in Chicago. Suddenly there was an assignment from \<i\>TV Guide\<\/i\> to cover her on a shopping trip on Michigan Avenue. Great story in the magazine. A month or so passed. I was in Europe shooting the annual report for 3M. I got a call in Germany from a seemingly respectable photo agency. They wanted secondary rights to my shopping pictures of Oprah. They\'d pay $1500. Seemed like a plan. \<b\>Until\<\/b\> I got a phone call from my son Richard, who had inherited my ABC account. He had just been bawled out in a series of shouts by Oprah\'s partner and lawyer. \"How could your father - a famous pro - let these pictures be published?\" He was right. Alas, the agency peddled the pictures to a publisher doing an unauthorized bio of Oprah. Naturally the book (which sold very few copies) printed all the bad, inaccurate rumors about Oprah\'s beginnings. My cheeks still blush when I think about it. A week or so later \<i\>TV Guide\<\/i\> called again. They wanted me to do a cover of Oprah. They\'d asked her for permission and she said, \"Any photographer except Art Shay.\" At parties I\'ve hinted how deep I was in Oprah\'s unforgiving doghouse, but never told the story until now. The moral: Most times winners like Oprah win out and they deserve to. As I approach 90 I still hope that Oprah will find it in her heart to forgive me. Winner or loser, alienating Oprah by sheer stupidity ain\'t a cool thing to do. I deserve her scorn- even after 25 or so years.\r\n