From the Vault of Art Shay: Animals
By Art Shay in News on Dec 7, 2011 8:00PM
These lovely, philanthropic Chicago society ladies gathered one day in the 60s so that I could photograph them for Life Magazine, which loved society ladies , dogs , cats, and Republican candidates for anything. But , except for bathing beauties and errant movie ladies, there had to be a gimmick. My gimmick was: these rich, attractive pet owners all had long hair and dogs with long hair, and Chicago\'s top hair-dressers, to boot. What would it take for the beauticians to sculpt each lady\'s head with the same hair-do they foisted on the four legged bitches? Proceeds to go to homeless pet shelters? Whatever it was it wasn\'t enough. The editors feared they\'d get tagged for starting a quixotic trend. Who knows what the gorgeous poodle (left) and the haughty Afghan (right) were thinking? My favorite was the second lady from the right and her hirsute schnauzer or whatever . She\'s become a big real estate power and is in fact a good friend\'s kindly studio landlady. (© Art Shay)
The Illinois State Fair in the 60s and 70s had myriad farm kids, farm parents and farm grandparents who came to the fair with well-tended heifers and foals, some of which appeared in my book, What Happens at a State Fair. I remember that my late V Day commander, from his Pennsylvania farm, sent a string of Black Angus to compete. They did very well, as did the husbands of the clowning farm wives from the Illinois boonies, who came to Springfield to root for their familiesâ entrants, two and four legged. Here they relax for the box camera of one of their sisters of the soil. (© Art Shay)
\"If you\'re elected to any office in Washington, and need a loyal friend.\" goes the aphorism,\" get a dog.\" He or she will await you by the door , jump all over you with joy, be thankful for being fed (even if it\'s garbage), and protect you from your enemies. He/she won\'t give a damn about your plurality, TV ads or declining social position or how many employees you bed. Which is more than you can say of most other associates in the capital. Or care what you try hair-wise as long as you provide good chow and a bit of warmth. (© Art Shay)
Animals aren\'t concerned about our religion and morality. They try to adapt to our customs and mimic some of them. I like to imagine this Jewish squirrel merely enjoying his matzoh, not making mother jokes if he becomes a stand-up comedian. I hope he lives at peace with his foreign neighbors. If not, not. (© Art Shay)
I wanted to stray from the obvious good Samaritan who fashioned a set of wheels for his paralyzed pet and open my didactic mind as I shot this picture. It took some contortion, but my idea, as always, was to create a visual pun from the materials at hand. As I tell my favorite photo studentsâthose who regard me as an opinionated guruâand now, unbidden, instruct you (from my mountain of 25,000 published pictures including 1100 covers) always search the scene for a way to enhance your picture, usually by happy accident. In a word, I meant to play off the stricken legs of this poor pooch with the healthy ones of his proud and kindly master who prolonged his pet\'s life and his own joy in his faithful friend, now supported by two paws and two wheels from a discarded toy. (© Art Shay)
The smell of this many confined catsâthere were 76 in allâaffected my breathing. I shot this selfless Indiana couple who loved and cared for them holding my breath. It is one of a handful of pictures of mine bought by the National Enquirer. I think they were charmed by the accurate sign on the building: Cat House. (© Art Shay)
My friend, the great writer Nelson Algren, liked to dine with his randy cat Doubleday, facetiously named after the publishing house he felt was screwing him one way or another. This was the main room of his 10 buck a month Chicago apartment at 1523 W. Wabansia in 1949. The bathless flat, into which the great Simone de Beauvoir moved, appears more or less as you see it in her lousy novel about her romance with Nelson, The Mandarins which, in a scandalous vote, won the Prix Goncourt for French literature. To foisted on a fictional doctor and his own Simone.To Nelson\'s hurt consternation. It was a, um, blow by blow account of their affair that Nelson reviewed as going down \"like eating cardboard.\" He also accused her (she was really Jean-Paul Sartre\'s lifetime lady) of invading her own privacy. He told me she phoned him in tears after reading his review in the Parisan Review as I recall, asking him, \"Didn\'t you love our love-making( etc.)?\" He said, \"I told her, over her sniffling, that I wasn\'t reviewing the fucking, which was great. I was reviewing the fucking book.\" She had, adding to his embarrassment, let it be known in haute Paris that he had given her her first orgasm. She was then pushing 40, so it passed as big Gallic news. (© Art Shay)
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his photography archives, Art takes a look back at some of his favorite photos of animals.)
The dashing poet Robert Browning, who helped dognap Fluff (who was a happy witness to his once-a-week dorking of the invalid Elizabeth Barrett at her London home before he made off with both females from Liz's cruel daddy's custody) dashed off a couplet beloved of non-atheistic pet lovers:
"God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here."
Florence and I have always agreed that our friends with pets go ga-ga when company comes. The pet, whatever its size, becomes the 800-pound gorilla in the room. A fellow Washington correspondent said it took him months to get invited to dinner at the Johnson White House and, when he finally did get invited, the President spent 15 minutes explaining why he liked to pick dogs up by their ears. "They love it," he said, aggressively defensive. My friend added, "as Johnson leaned over, I noticed he had these extraordinary large ears. I wondered..."
Doing a Life story on the golf comedian Johnny Revolta, I soft-heartedly agreed to save two ducks he sadly explained were doomed to be executed by the country club chef. We had a small house in flood-prone Des Plaines, IL and only three small kids at the time. What joy I brought home in that shoe box! The kids named them Lucky and Ducky and fed them crackers and greens and peanut butter. They doted on them and changed the crapped-up water in their blue plastic swimming pool.
Within two months, our clean little house was smelled of and was stippled with duck shit, and duckless visitors asked endless duck questions; two brought duck tape. We had a five foot basement flood and the first thing the plumbers saw was Lucky and Ducky floating over the furnace.
I returned them to their golf club, weathering charges of cruelty to children and base parenthood. It beat pellets of black duck shit everywhere, even in my 1954 yellow Hudson Jet.
This eventually led to Steve's skunk, Barney (a female); Lauren's skunk, Poppy (ditto); Steve's first dog, Zippy; and a succession of poodles under Jane's capacious LA roof — newsy Max, intemperate Dewey, then Jeep, who heartbreakingly kept looking for his pal, Jane's affable husband Eliot for years after he was gone. (Eliot wrote some of Richard Pryor's movies and Dunston Checks In, still viewable on all-night TV.
Like Jane, Eliot loved animals too.)
When Steve moved to Seattle, he wrote and photographed a series of articles for the Chicago Tribune on living on his 33-foot boat with his complacent labrador, Alice.
I suddenly remembered the provenance of a mysterious bill for $220 I paid some Chicago veterinarian. It was to splint the forelegs of Lauren's skunk, Poppy, that she kept too near her North Side window sill when she moved back here from NY. Poor thing fell out of the window. If you never saw a skunk with a limp, we had one in our extended family.
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, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.
