From the Vault of Art Shay: "I Did Not Have Sects With That Woman"

By Art Shay in News on Feb 1, 2012 7:00PM

I\'ve misplaced the captions for my 1964 Romney pictures for \<em\>Fortune\<\/em\> Magazine, so I imagined how my favorite faux historian, Newt (more faux than friend) would handle them. He asked me not to use his initials in the credit box. \"NG has come to have a different meaning than it had during my career,\" he expatiated before getting to work.\r\n\"This is obviously Mitt\'s father George Romney, faking both death and a Mormon burial, in the \<em\>tonneau\<\/em\> of a 1963 Rambler Station Wagon, getting a start on the Romney work ethic he would put to bad use as Governor of Michigan.\"

Although I write on Monday night, before the election, I can imagine Historian Newt Gingrich, with a plethora of time on his defeated hands, clarifying this Romney family picture for the history books: \" Here\'s Governor Romney, shown \<em\>en famille\<\/em\> in the State House in Lansing. His father and grandfather, by the way, had built it on company time, Michigander employees of his grossly inefficient auto company. He sits in the bosom of a family that would eventually include 67 grandchildren by 23 different wives. At the very least, although his \'church,\' so to speak, abandoned multi-marriage as official policy years before. (His own grandfather had four or five wives; par for people with a faint and faulty understanding of the power of divorce.) They migrated to Mexico thinking the government there would be more tolerant than that of their native sward - and couldn\'t have been more wrong. There\'s the Catholic church, and there\'s the Catholic Church in Mexico, you know what I\'m saying?\"\r\n\t\"You thought I\'d gloss over this picture that prominently features my nemesis, Mitt Romney at age 16, on the right. And I mean right. He is shown looming over his parents obviously in the direction of one of his sister sibs and her brood. I can\'t help thinking that when I was 16 I was dorking my geometry teacher, whom I would marry until I got my syllogisms right, and who would bear me my two useful daughters. Ask them if you want to pursue the timetable of my love life that\'s none of anyone\'s business, least of all the concern of a supposedly neutral TV debate arbiter.

\"Note how the Socialist-inclined senior Romney jogs the memory with that left foot poised to toe the Kremlin\'s mark.\"

\"Here the good Mormon Romney prays for guidance as he faces Utah and the grave of the not-for-prophet prophet Josiah Smith, who still has more charges pending than both of the Superbowl teams combined. He passed on to his son the Mormon practice of the throwing up of the hands. It still makes me throw up.\"

\"In the gubernatorial plane, George Romney holds Mitt\'s spotless juvenile record while his campaign manager thinks of how to answer the Grand Rapids Press\' main question about why Mitt at 16 pursues teenage girls, and not his busty math teacher like any normal youth.\"

I can imagine Newt writing, \"This reminds me of the candid shot in \<em\>Time\<\/em\> of Monica Lewinsky at the height of her internment, welcoming home a coldly impersonal President Bill Clinton at the DC airport. Absolute history repeats absolutely. \<em\>Mutatis mutandis\<\/em\>, of course.\" And what did George say to his orthodox Mormon counselor? \"I did not have sects with that woman?\"

(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 archives, Art shares photos of GOP Presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney's father George while imagining himself as Newt Gingrich.)

Long ago in the no longer existent Chicago I remember too well, one of the no longer existent newspapers had a no longer existent columnist—a giftless, genial, beer-swilling dolt named Tony Weitzel—who somehow had wormed his way into Nelson Algren's regard. Nelson phoned me one day to inform me that Tony had broken his own intellectual malfeasance record: he had committed six errors in a two line item about a celebrity, one being "spelling the sunavabitch's name wrong."

Nelson was a world-class holder of grudges and he may have still been sore that Tony had introduced him to a crowd of appreciative freeloaders at Chicago's Billy Goat Tavern under Michigan Avenue, as the author of "that poem about the city with a broad's shoulders." When he confusedly got his laugh, Tony added, " \Nelly-boy here also said she gave Chicago a broken nose." He was probably dimly referring to Algren's famous line:"Loving Chicago is like loving a lady with a broken nose."

Which brings me to Newt Gingrich, whose talk of moon bases and other assaults on reason and history, will no doubt add up later to a rickety endorsement by the bedeviled GOP chameleon Mitt Romney. So I'm out on a limb.

It's not a shaky limb, although all limbs are shaky in this area thanks to an earthquake the other night near Kenosha, WI, reported by my friends the Pat Wirtzes who thought a dozen snow plows had entered their street doing a Promenade Left.

Back to Newt. While campaigning for the Personal Responsibility Act, Newt asked his second wife, Marianne, for a divorce or a license to keep on keeping on with his six-year affair with Callista Bisek. Marianne had succeeded Jackie Battley, Newt's geometry teacher in high school whom he had been dorking since he was 16 and she was 23. How many times does 16 go into 23? Lots, if you wanted a passing grade in math down home and were looking for a hands-on substitute for masturbation.

Was this phenomenon overlooked? None of my fellow journalists have considered the weighing of the parts prior to Newt's parting of the ways. A New York Times picture page said it all:

Newt's weight (est.) in first marriage: 150, wife: 160. Second marriage: Newt;s weight 200, Marianne's 180. Third marriage: Newt- 250, Callista 115 .

Next time out it's easy to see Newt up there with the NFL guards at 275-300, and his next ex a delicate 100 or so.

The scale can be a big factor in politics. I mean politics has been shown to be affected by the length or position of women's skirts in various inner sancta. So why not, as the French say, avoirdupois?

Never mind poor Mitt Romney hammering home the moralizing news that in 1997 Newt's fellow House members on the Ethics Committee fined him $300,000 for various breeches, and Newt - unlike prudent Mitt in 1997- didn't have the dough. So they cancelled his Park Anywhere House sticker! Or something equally opprobrious.

Everyone agrees that Newt's self-ascribed smarts as an historian is as convincing as Mickey Mantle clownishly averring he was a pitcher when I was photographing him for his Post Cereal trading card. And he stank in geometry, too, it is said. (Especially before showering.)

So the worried aspect displayed by his father, George, in my 1963 picture of the adolescent Mitt, was misplaced. Even though he would one day wish aloud he had been born a Mexican for one reason or another, the chances of him becoming a campesino after his defeat by President Obama, are minimal. (Even though Mitt's great-grandfather took four or five wives with him to Mexico and back, not one for purposes of geometry across a national border. Could have been busted in Arizona for transporting his own electorate?)

As mah idol Studs Terkel said many a time, "It's all connected, ain't it?" If Kenosha, which had a Romney running American Motors, also had a recent earthquake, can the rest of the country be far behind? First rumble I hear, I pack my wives into my decade-old Lexus and head for Mexico where my geometry teacher retired despairing of finding a suitable Newt.

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.