From the Vault of Art Shay: Remembering Chuck Percy
By Art Shay in News on Sep 21, 2011 4:00PM
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Irv Kupcinet noted in the 80s that I shot my 500th cover when my Hollywood call came. It was from a high Sun-Times executive in charge of their Midwest magazine. He wanted me to do a sexy cover of a starlet who was a special friend of his. A Jewish actress, Kup filled me in, named Piper Laurie, daughter of a rabbi.
Thus, having done the cover, I found myself in a super chic restaurant on the night before the Oscars, sharing the tiny Chicagoan table up front. I sat between Kup and Senator Chuck Percy, two old friends. Three friends, Kup was at pains to point out who had each lost a child to an unsolved murder. Not an enviable bond, but a sobering one that took the glitzy wind out of the flapping sail of the pre-Oscar PR horseshit. Percy's hand tightened on mine in manly pain for a second and I hid my tears.
I had, of course, photographed actress Cookie Kupcinet who had been murdered in a Hollywood hotel. Sen. Percy lost his beautiful daughter Valerie, whose twin Sharon would go on to head NPR. I took the family's annual Christmas card pictures for a few years. They still have some of these, older son Roger assured me last year. (He had bumped into my photojournalist son Steve in Seattle.) Several years later there was a prison cell confession and another one reportedly by a burglar to his brother, asserting that each of these vermin had committed the murder. Sen. Percy chose not to re-open the case.
While I was covering the 1966 murder at the Percy's Kenilworth home -- the only photog admitted to the house -- Percy turned to me in tears at lunch. "All I know, Art," he said, "is that someone came in that door, walked up those stairs, went into Valerie's room - and Valerie unfortunately chose to fight him. Unspoken was the malicious rumor many years, pre-Facebook, that Percy's second wife Lorraine had murdered her own stepdaughter. I'm sure this added immeasurably to Chuck's pain. One publication self-righteously pointed out how much bigger Valerie was than her stepmother.
The day before the murder I had covered the Percy family near the Sunset Beach, way south, as Chuck participated in a long swim designed to get South siders interested in physical improvement.
The Percys were what newsrooms across the country, smirkingly and with latent envy of their looks, wealth, position and future, referred to as "all-American goys." Chuck was all-American goy: Frank Meriwell in the flesh, built like an Olympic gymnast and in line for an ultimate shot at the Presidency. I spare you the well-known details of his gubernatorial run and his three fruitful Senate terms. I spare you the Reader's Digest-y tales of his starting various businesses in college that earned him $150,000 by the time he was a junior. I also spare you his devastating 1976 attack on Reagan in his winning Presidential run against Ford. Said Percy: "A Reagan nomination and the crushing defeat likely to follow would signal the end of our party as an effective force in American life." He went on to describe the maverick Reagan as "far out of the centrist stream" of the GOP. How prescient from a man who would soon develop Alzheimer's. How ironically said of a man who, like Percy, would also eventually die of it.
Alas, in a few years, Senator Percy, in a rare political square-dance move, stepped back, and for political reasons, ate his words and reluctantly allowed that Reagan had, er, matured. Who knows the strange side effects of Alzheimer's with which unlucky Chuck Percy would live out his last decades? Or who knows the influence of ardent political advisers over a mentally sick man.
I voted for him in '56 - the first and last Republican I ever voted for. Why? A short brilliant lecture he gave me on the Federalist papers - some of the sturdiest founding rocks of our nation. A lecture he later gave to Eisenhower who, surprisingly, had not studied the papers at West Point. Ike, against whom even Jesus would have had a tough time in an election. Ike had everything: a brilliant military victory over Hitler, a wife with a drinking problem, a tall shapely Brit driver, Kay Summersby, who, around D-Day (according to her book) helped palliate Ike's on-and-off impotence.
Outside Ciro's Club one night around this time in London, I saw this resourceful chauffeur leave the driver's seat of their khaki 1941 Dodge and re-do the kindergarten-button job the Supreme Allied Commander had done in the blackout on his namesake jacket. Years later, photographing Ike getting a degree in Northwestern's sunken garden, I saluted and told him how proud I was to have served under him on D-Day, flying a B-24 bomber. He gave me a thumbs up and nodded, I think, in happy reminiscence.
Life assigned me to work with the great Eisenstaedt to cover the 1967 Percy-Rockefeller wedding at the Rockefeller Chapel of the University of Chicago, Chuck's beloved alma mater. Early on Eisie emerged to complain, "zee hat zee bride is wearing covers both sides of her face I can not shoot one single frame from the side." Her groom recognized the problem and graciously turned her from side to side. Thus a Boston Lifer, Stan Wayman, beat out Eisie and me for the cover. Chuck later asked for two of my Life pictures - the one of him car-side with Jay Rockefeller III, father of the groom, and a portrait I did of the youngest Percy daughter in the rear of the limo, looking like a tiny forlorn fairy tale princess. The light was so dim and I - along with Life - was so averse to flash, I used the .095 Canon lens, one of the fastest in the world that Chuck had given me to try. (The only other significant shot I made with this unique piece of glass was the picture of Liz Taylor I shared with you here some time ago.)
I remember quixotically that my lifelong competitor, Lee Balterman, had resourcefully climbed a tree to shoot from. Back on earth I facetiously complimented him on descending from the trees at last. He thanked me warmly and assured me his pictures were better than mine.
I had first met Percy shooting him for Fortune magazine when he took over Bell & Howell in 1949. He was an up and coming 29-year-old chief executive, the kind Fortune liked to latch onto early. We talked about the surging 1949 Bears who beat the Green Bay Packers 17-0 behind Sid Luckman and Johnny Lujack; the Cubs mired in last place despite getting Hank Sauer; the Sox stuck in 6th place despite having Smokey Burgess.
Bell & Howell's principal business was movie cameras for amateurs. Thus it was that Abraham Zapruder recorded JFK's assassination on 8mm film on the Bell & Howell 414 PD Zoomatic he had bought the previous year on Elm Street from the Peacock Jewelry Company a stone's throw from Dealey Plaza. Zapruder would eventually channel the money he got from Life for his film to various charities.
But the government Archives, always after historic American artifacts, would eventually pay him $16 million for his film and his B&H 414 PD camera that Chuck Percy had planned so well in the late forties up there in Lincolnwood.
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.