From the Vault of Art Shay: Movies

By Art Shay in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 3, 2011 4:00PM

When we were both around 26 I photographed Marlon Brando for \<i\>Life\<\/i\> at his parents\' farm in Libertyville. We threw rocks at insulators high on power poles and discussed whether women put out for men they really liked or who could do something for their careers. The problem rarely came up for me in real life, but alas, the question flummoxed Marlon completely.

Judy Garland, early 60s -- between pills and drinks, backstage at the Arie Crown Theater before a concert. On the phone she was telling one daughter it was preferable to marry a divorced man than one who\'d never been married. \"He\'ll respect you more.\" Garland has many photo collectors and several of them regard this take as one of her late milestones. She is generally regarded as having had, as a teenager, the best voice ever given to a woman.

At the ill-fated debut of her late husband Mike Todd\'s Smell-O-Vision (\"ill-farted?\"), I fell in love with Liz Taylor for as day or so. Those violet eyes, that lapsing into a Yiddish accent, that flirty seeming availability to all men... star quality.

Andy Griffith\'s zenith was his 1957 masterpiece \<i\>A Face in the Crowd\<\/i\> - with Budd Schulberg (Algren\'s best pal and most admired screenwriter in Hollywood) doing the s\cript. It described the near-Presidential rise and sudden fall (by the Clintonian route) of a spell-binding Arkansas hobo \"Lonesome Rhodes.\" Better known for his sheriffery at Mayberry and his Mark Twain/Will Rogers cowshit wisdom and humor, I met Andy for the \<i\>Saturday Evening Post\<\/i\> who asked me in the early Sixties, to cover Andy\'s train tour of the south. At some small stops he would leave the train and plunk away at what he called his \"lonesome guitar- my real voice, don\'tchuknow Arty?\" \r\n\<i\>A Face in the Crowd\<\/i\> was one of the great movies of its age. It was redolent, say some of the deep critics, of Huey Long\'s rise and fall...

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became a zany couple with Jerry playing the real dummy and Dean the straight man. In dozens of pictures, they pleased millions of people all over the world, especially for some reason in France where Jerry Lewis\'s name ranks close that of Marcel Marceau and some of the other great French movie stars.

In an ill-fated movie called \<i\>F.I.S.T.\<\/i\>, an acronym for Jimmy Hoffa\'s union, Stallone postured around a small Iowa town that still looked like the thirties. He hated it when the crowd got too close and asked some 11-year-olds who wanted to make a snapshot of him, \"Go see my agent. She\'s in Hollywood... Ha Ha.\" Answering \<i\>Time\<\/i\>\'s tepid review, I wrote about the real Hoffa, describing how he drove his own pick-up truck downtown from his Michigan home, for carpenters to buy some wood. When I asked why he was driving them himself, Jimmy said ,\"I sent them by themselves- they stop off for beer on my clock.\" But Jimmy, I said, this is what you did for American labor. \"Yeah,\" he said, \"but not when they\'re working for me.\" His mother wrote a happy note to \<i\>Time\<\/i\>, saying, yeah, that was much closer to the real Jimmy than Stallone ever got.

Shirley MacLaine dancing in Chicago, was for a time the hottest of the hot young ladies circling the empty Marilyn Monroe throne. It was she who boasted to an embarrassed columnist that she had once enjoyed three men separately on the same afternoon. She was also a fine actress and superb dancer.

The great mime Marceau Marceau once told me that the thrill of his boyhood was meeting Charlie Chaplin. He then modeled his professional career on that of his idol. "I would observe how waiters carried their trays, how men would greet women, how women would respond to men, how people treated children, what made people laugh. Chaplin had done the entire roadmap of life for me." And for millions of others in theaters across the globe for whom Chaplin was the most recognized human on the planet.

In those halcyon years just pass the turn of that long ago century some of us still, if barely, remember as a succession of yesterdays in our lives, not the deep, irrecoverable past- the flickering image of a funny little man fighting the world with the inadequate tools of his puny body and chirpy mind - flickered across screens from tents in Zanzibar to the movie palaces of Broadway and our burgeoning nation. The movies helped us wipe out our buffalo, tell the story of the Civil War as a Tea Party zealot of the time would- guns, anonymous night-riders, sheets, canted logic and all.

I used to pay my dime at the Elsmere or Ward Theater in the Bronx, and lose myself of a Saturday afternoon with actors I admired or hated from another picture. I hissed the villains who twirled the tips of their mustaches while threatening helpless females with fates worse than death if they didn't come up with the rent- or a roll in the hay, or something in between.

When I was 17 in 1939, and shooting window displays for Hammond Organs on 57th Street in New York, there was real live Cary Grant in front of Tiffany's, looking at his watch that showed from under the sleeve of his houndstooth jacket. Ultimately I deduced he was waiting for heiress Barbara Hutton - but at the time I swung around my gigantic Graflex box and asked, "Are you Cary Grant?"

Cary Grant shook his half-Jewish head (the rumor of his having had a Jewish mother in Australia was rife) and said, "Oh no, my boy, I wish I werrre." In a few years I would learn to shoot first and ask for identities later - on perhaps 50 Time and Life stories. My favorite praise printed in Life by crime writer Sandy Smith: "Shay has the guts of a second-story man on the prowl." Before that smooth Italian picture-sneaker Sr. Paparazzi was born.

The great Walter Huston (of Dodsworth and Rain) bought 2 pictures I made of him bowling at the NY World's Fair of 1939. I had caught the glee of his making a strike on the linoleum paved outdoor alley. He was with his fortyish producer, redhead, Jessie Royce Landis, as she peeled off two fives for me. I was a handsome, athletic kid but it took years for me to understand what Jessie had said to Walter Huston's gorgeous starlet. Jessie touched my shoulder, winked, and asked the starlet, "How would you like some of this waiting for you at home when mother wasn't there?" It would be years before I learned what really lubricated the world of show biz.

Dealing largely through photo and art galleries, one occasionally hears about the afterlife of a favorite picture that has been sold. Daiter Gallery's manager told he that Jennifer Aniston summoned him to her hotel suite and ssat knee to knee with him on the floor discussing which two Chicago images her then boyfriend- who loved Chicago -she should purchase. "Sunday Morning on Madison Street", and "Algren Playing Poker")

David Mamet says he enjoys waking up to my picture of Dawn on Maxwell Street, where he grew up. He also likes "Welcome Democrats" because he was a young reporter on the scene in 1968.

Josh "Birdman" Murphy has just restored and hung my sneaky view of some Mafia guys playing poker in a New Jersey basement.

Actor John Cusack used to live with an early print of this same picture.

My son Richard, a fine fotog, hangs my picture of "Paul Revere and the Raiders". "Because,dad, I was 9 when you took me and my lifelong pal Aaron Katz along on the shoot for Time." About 50 years ago!

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Nelson Algren's Chicago, is also available at Amazon.